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cassiusbedah · 4 years

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Sacred Spider Rock, Canyon De Chelly, Navajo Nation

Spider Woman and Spider Rock

According to Navajo legend, Spider Woman lives at Spider Rock in Canyon De Chelly. She was first to weave the web of the universe. She taught the Navajo how to weave, how to create beauty in their own life and to spread the "Beauty Way" teaching of balance within the mind, body & soul. On the other hand Spider Woman has a bit of a dark side. But let's start off with the bright.

In the Navajo creation story, the first world was small and pitch black. There were four seas and an island. In the very middle of the island was a single pine tree. Ants, dragonflies, locusts and beetles lived there and made up the Air-Spirit People of the first world.

The second world was known as blue, where life was given to Spider Woman & Spider Man. Only their inner spirits or souls were made. Their physical bodies were made later to contain their spirits when they evolved into future worlds.

In the third world the holy ones advised Spider Woman that she had the capabilities of weaving a map of the universe and the geometrical patterns of the spirit beings in the night sky. At first she did not know what they meant, and was not told how it could be done. Curiosity became her energy and driving force to learn to weave as the holy ones instructed.

On a beautiful day when she was out on the land, exploring and gathering food, she came upon a small young tree. She touched it with her right hand and wrapped her fingers around one of its branches. As she was letting go, a string streamed out the center of her palm and wrapped around the tree branch. She was not quite sure what the string was. At first she shook her hand to release the string, but it would not break free. She thought if she kept wrapping the string around the branch it might let go.

Spider Woman started maneuvering and manipulating the string into various shapes. At this particular moment, she knew this was the weaving the holy people instructed her to do. Immediately she broke the string with her left hand without hesitation. She sat and thought carefully about how to use her new gift. For the rest of the day she sat close to the tree and wrapped the string into various patterns on other branches of the small tree.

The holy ones heard about Spider Woman's new talent and came to visit her. During the visit the holy ones instructed Spider Man to construct a weaving loom and also create the tools used in the various processes of weaving. At this time Spider Woman began to sing the weaving songs, given to her by the holy ones. The songs empower the weavings and the weaving tools.

Dine (Navajo) of today live in the fourth world, known as the "Glittering World". Young weavers are instructed to find a spider web in the early morning, glistening with sunlight and sparkles. They are told to place the palm of their right hand upon the spider's webbing without destroying or damaging the web. At that moment Spider Woman's gift of weaving enters the young weaver's spirit, where it lives forever.

Spider Woman's dark side. Navajo elders warn young children that Spider Woman is always on the look out for mischievous and disobedient children. When she finds them, she spins them tight with her web and takes them to the top of Spider Rock. There she boils and eats them. Their left over bones melt in the sun which create the white bands at the very top of Spider Rock. Yikes. Kids, be on your best behavior!

Neptune (Latin: Neptūnus) was the god of the sea in Roman mythology. He is most identifiable as a tall, white-bearded figure carrying a trident, a three pronged fisherman's spear. Fittingly, he is often pictured with fish, as well as with horses, another animal with which he is closely linked since he was also thought to oversee the sport of horse-racing. These horses drew the chariot in which he was said to travel over the sea. Like many of the figures of Roman mythology, Neptune was appropriated from the Greek tradition, and became analogous (but not identical) to Poseidon, the Greek god of the sea.

Contents

1 Origins

2 Mythology

3 Function

4 Worship

5 Legacy

6 Notes

7 References

8 External Links

9 Credits

The worship of Neptune, as the Roman version of Poseidon, is another example of cross-cultural assimilation in the ancient world where a great deal of dialogue and syncretism among different civilizations took place—not merely strife and warfare.

Origins

The theonym neptune seems to have derived from the Proto-Indo-European base *(e)nebh- meaning "moist", which forms the base for the Latin nebula, referring to "fog, mist, cloud."[1] Originally Neptune was a god of the ancient Italians, who did not identify him as a sea god, as they recognized no god of the sort. Rather, Neptune was said to rule exclusively over fresh water. Neptune is one of the earliest Roman gods to have been identified with a Greek deity. His connection with Poseidon was officially sanctioned in 399 B.C.E. when the sibylline books ordered a ceremonial meal (or lectisternium) in his honor to win his good favor, as well as that of a limited number of other Greek figures such as Apollo and Hercules.

It was once thought that the Roman conception of Neptune owed a great deal to the Etruscan god Nethuns, who held jurisdiction over wells and later on all bodies of water in that mythological system. However, more recent linguistic research has suggested this is not the case, as Neptune was already worshipped by Latins and Italians before the Etruscans had developed Nethuns; thus, it is more likely that Nethuns was influenced by Neptune.[2]

Abilities

He can withstand any amount of water pressure.

He can generate water from his body.

He can use sea waves as a form of teleportation.

He can breath underwater.

He can communicate with sea creatures.

How these two meant and had a son. It was most surprising. On the Navajo reservation the young braves enjoy racing their horses. Neptune, the God of freshwater is also God over Sport of Kings and was said to enjoy the horses. It was here he saw, Spider Woman. She was refreshing to him, Interesting. Unlike the females of his Pantheon she had morals. It took Neptune many moons to lay with her and when he did he swore he'd seen the stars and the moon move. It had been special and he'd wanted to stay with her. She'd disappeared after that night. It wasn't until sometime later he learned she'd birthed a Male Babe, named Cassius. Cassius was a brave male. He had the same abilities of his Father, and ingerited those of his Mother. For a long while he lived in the rocks on the nation nation until she booted him from the cave and made him go out into the world. Cassius is now in the world finding his own.

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flowerslightning · 4 years

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How does a character's death affect the hero

It's been bothering me for a while. Between Mr Strife, Claudia, Zack and Aerith, whose death gives the most impact in his life? The three of them die before his eyes, and we know nothing about Cloud's father but I believe they gave different blow to him

When Cloud says he feels guilty about the lost of his loved one, I strongly believe it is not about Aerith only.

Let's be specific. Pls dont get offensive, this is just my opinion. Hear me out and correct me if Im wrong

AERITH'S DEATH | ZACK'S DEATH

Alright, I'm gonna assume you guys had read both characters' death. Sorry, no Claudia post since we dont get to see much of her

Sooo long story short,

We hear nothing about Cloud's father, but his absent gives impact to Cloud's personality. Cloud grow up without a father figure making him to appear small, crybaby, low self confident, and had once developed anger prob

And there we have Claudia Strife, can I say she was the first person to die before Cloud's eyes?

Loosing a mother in such tragic way surely would give a deep scar in your memories and heart. How does this effects Cloud?

Let's say, you stab your chest with a 5kg knife (DONT DO THIS) and the depth of the wound is 10cm, sure it hurts like hell but it will heal. The wound will need to close with stitches and a small scar will be there. And what if there is noo stitches? Well, the skin has to close on its own

The same goes to Cloud, he had his first wound of losing someone dear infront of him but then he healed in times. The wound? Its there, scarred with small pain

4 years later, Zack died protecting him, right infront of Cloud's eyes. Stab again the chest with the 5kg knife, at the same place. The old wound will re-open and new wound formed, causing more damage to the cells and a lot painful than the previous stab and the wound is deeper

And how did it affect Cloud? He was in deeper pain now. The same place got attacked again, leaving the scar deeper, painful and unhealed.

A year later (or less?), Aerith died infront of him and he didnt do anything to stop Sephiroth. The previous wound with Zack has not healed yet, but the knife is already stabbing back the chest, at the same place with the same weight

And the result? You can hardly breath air. Your heart, your lung will loss their function, super painful, bleeding, deformity, you can barely feel the presence of your torso, the skin probably has tear off too, it feels like you wanna cut off the whole body but you cant.

And you have to drag the wound all around you. You probably will limp as well. Every steps you make, every breath you take, with the blood dripping down, the pain just keeps getting stronger and stronger. Hell you may get bacteria infection if its left untreated. But who’s going to treat you? (tifa..uhuk) The wound is invisible but its real

How comes the wound can gets serious even though you stab using a knife with the same weight and same place - bcause you stabbed the same unhealed wound continuously, without a rest.

Which event cause the most severe pain? - the third one ofc,

This is how Cloud feels when he lost Aerith. His already massively wounded heart has been continuously stabbed by the same event - the death of his loved ones before his eyes.

Learning that Aerith was related with Zack, and Zack died protecting Cloud then later Aerith died infront of him, the death of Aerith hit Cloud seriously

Soo, when the fans say Cloud suffers from depression and keeps talking about the death of his dear, I dont think Cloud refers this to Aerith only

He refers it to Zack and Aerith, (and probably Claudia too)

Im not trying to offend Clerith shippers. But its just that, try to fix your point of view. Zack is an important person to Cloud. And Aerith connects Zack with Cloud. Aerith is dear to Zack thus Cloud cares a lot about her. Losing Aerith from his hand feels the same weight as losing Zack infront of him.

Cloud is Zack's best buddy but his memory of Zack has lost. Cloud too has special bond with Aerith and the memories intact.

Since the memories of Aerith are there inside his mind, that is why he feels guilty as hell about loosing her. If his memories about Zack are still there, especially all those moments where Zack dragged Cloud with him for one whole year, Cloud probably would felt a lot lot lot guiltier even before he meet with Aerith

And that is why in Advent Children, both Zack and Aerith show up. They both are important for Cloud. Ofc while fighting the summon, Aerith gives the final boost to Cloud, cuz well.. Aerith is an ancient and she has some sort of power with the lifestream

Remember when Tifa fell down from the bridge and was in coma for 7 days, it wasnt his fault, but see how this event lead Cloud to suffer from anger problem?

I bet, if Tifa dies too, even if it isnt his fault and not infrnt of his eyes, Cloud will never be able to recover from her lost. He’ll probably become a breathing functionless pineapple for the rest of his life.

Cloud hardly loves people but once he does, he gives too much love for them, to the point he scares to loose them and too afraid to be happy

A hero with tragic adult life

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secret-engima · 4 years

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Fic title thing - heart held close to the moon and Neptune

...

...............

Neptune ... Neptune was the Roman god of the sea right? ... Just looked it up and yes he was so-

>:D

FF7

Mer

But rather than EVERYONE being mer or whatever, it’s ONLY the three Soldier Firsts of canon. Sephiroth, Genesis, and Angeal who have never met any other mer, because Shinra are immoral and terrible and use propaganda to promote the idea that Mer aren’t REALLY just like humans in intelligence and emotional range and soul, they just happen to look human-ish on the top half. And because Mer are seemingly extinct (read: in hiding), they have nobly “Resurrected” the lost line of the “most exotic creatures of the sea” in Sephiroth, Genesis, and Angeal and claim to be in the process of cloning female Mers to “reintroduce the species”.

Except mer are NOT animals.

Mer are the children of Gaia’s oceans, the pulse of her waves and tides, touched by her moon on high. Mer are MAGIC and they will not be contained.

They escape, by the skin of their teeth and with many bloody scars, helped by the last of descendant of the True Mer (Aerith) who can walk on two legs for a time because of her half-human blood. They flee, out into the wild waters, just the three of them as a pod, rapidly protective of their little Pod Queen Aerith, their little sister in their eyes for all it would doom mer to extinction again. So they swim, up river and through lake and through the sea, and sometimes Aerith stops to visit the human woman who cared for her as a child and to tend the garden on two legs while the other three lounge in the little pond and sing softly together, and it’s ... nice.

Then Aerith meets Zack. Zack who is a cheerful sellsword rather than a Shinra plaything, who still respect the Old Ways as best as an ignorant human can, and Aerith adores him and so despite what they want, Sephiroth, Genesis, and Angeal refrain from dragging him below the waves and eating him for trying to court their sister. But Zack is genuine and not cruel like the other humans they’ve met, he gets along with Elmyra and dotes on Aerith and Angeal ends up taking him under his fin after Zack nearly falls in and downs in the pond because surprise this idiot CAN’T SWIM, and really that is that. They have another human in the pod.

Zack tells them all sorts of stories, of the lands they’ve never seen. Jungles and deserts and icy mountains, and in those stories one name and description comes up a lot, the other, younger sellsword Cloud Strife. A fierce little mountain girl who still swears to the Old Spirits and avoids Fairy Circles and will not set foot on a boat until she’s made a sacrifice to the lost Children of the Sea. He describes his “little buddy” so often during his tales that really, it’s no wonder Sephiroth RECOGNIZES the woman while on a solo hunt, struggling in the water, bubbles escaping her mouth and nose, arms and legs bound from where she’s been THROWN OVERBOARD by pirates stealing the ship she had booked passage on.

Sephiroth screams and the storm screams back. The pirates stand no chance and Sephiroth pays them no more mind as he dives down for Cloud, ripping the ropes apart with his claws, swims her up to the surface and realizes that the storm he just summoned is a PROBLEM. The waves are too high for him to keep the human’s head above the water and she’s already NOT BREATHING and Sephiroth can’t just- UNSUMMON a storm, but this girl is Zack’s friend and Zack is pod which makes THIS ONE pod and Sephiroth-can’t-let-her-die-.

Sephiroth holds her close and sings-sings-sings, struggling against death, screaming to the moon to spare this human, to make her SURVIVE somehow, because Sephiroth has too few people in his life and he cannot afford to lose any of them, even one he has never met before.

And Sephiroth-

Sephiroth was Hojo’s finest creation. He was grown from the blood of the most Ancient mer. The Wild Kin even Aerith’s race of mer feared for their power, their savagery, their ability to wrap up the world in their voice and SHAPE it the way they wanted. Jenova is not an alien virus in this au, oh no, Jenova was The Sea Witch. The most feared and powerful and deadly o the Wild Kin, the last to fall in their war against the much more numerous humans and Cetra mer that had banded together against the Wild Kin and their Sea Witches. Jenova was the one who cursed the Cetra and decimated their numbers, she was the one to freeze the great northern sea mid-motion like a glacier around a great crater.

Jenova is, in a morbid, cloned sense, his mother.

Sephiroth sings.

The world obeys.

The body in his arms changes.

Cloud breathes in water and does not drown.

When Cloud groggily wakes up three days later, it’s to one very frantic Zack hovering over her face, the sky above her head, and the weird sensation of being submerged from the waist down. She remembers being knocked off the ship and sits up in confusion-

Looks down and doesn’t see legs.

The glittering tail of ink black and spiraling ice blue twitches spasmodically under her stare, responding to her desperate attempts to move legs that AREN’T THERE ANYMORE.

Cloud starts screaming and all the glass and quite a bit of nearby stone shatters.

While Zack and Aerith help deal with ... THAT whole mess, Sephiroth lurks guiltily in the nearby river, not daring to enter the pond while Genesis whimsically notes that aside from the ice blue swirls, her tail exact same shade of black as his, so does that mean she’s a full blooded Wild Kin now? Genesis and Angeal aren’t, because they have bright red and bright blue scales with black highlights respectively, sign of Wild Kin blood but not nearly as pure as Sephiroth’s jet black and trademark silver hair and slitted eyes. Angeal slaps Genesis over the head and says there are bigger things to worry about, because SINCE WHEN was any kind of magic strong enough to transform a human into an ACTUAL MER and what do they do now? Sephiroth already tried turning her back, but it didn’t work, because that kind of Song that remakes the world itself can only be used on a person on that large a scale ONCE, so now they’re stuck and how will they explain any of that to Zack’s formerly-human friend.

Sephiroth continues to lurk at the bottom of the river, feeling very guilty. He didn’t mean to do that. He meant to save her, not transform her, and the entire thing tastes too much of Hojo’s lab and his unwanted experiments and talk of using Sephiroth’s blood to create clones or hybrids.

Maybe once Zack and Aerith calm her down she won’t entirely hate him?

Who is he kidding, she’ll probably try to gut him with her bare claws.

(Anyway a sort of Modern-Fantasy AU where Mako is a thing but the SOLDIER program isn’t, Mer are a thing, and Fem!Cloud and Sephiroth end up doing an enemies to lovers slowburn but more in a you-transformed-me-against-my-will-so-I-HATE-YOU to friends to lovers way.)

(Also Hojo tries to do more evil shenanigans and Shinra hopes to conquer the world, but that all gets shut down by the Pod because fun fact you can’t run a wold spanning empire if all your ships keep mysteriously getting sunk. It’s not like you can helicopter EVERYTHING over the water, especially since all air traffic gets rapidly shut down by the mysterious super storms that blow in when they try. Reeve eventually gets accidentally kidnapped by the Pod and converted to their side so he starts looking into non-Lifestream power alternatives and Rufus is on board because honestly there’s nothing like a couple of mer arguing, IN YOUR LANGUAGE on whether they should eat you for your sins to make you rethink your life choices and by extension all your evil father’s life choices.)

(Also also Vincent and Felicia are both experiments by Hojo to see if he could create human-mer hybrids. Felicia is a sea serpent and Vincent sometimes forgets that Legs Are A Thing and so just sighs tiredly on Elmyra’s floor in all his red and black octopi glory. Veld is pulled on board the “lets kill Hojo and reform Shinra” boat after he nearly gets his throat torn out by his long lost daughter only for his long lost Turk partner to tackle her and talk her down from accidental patricide.)

(For reference, Sephiroth is a black beta fish with some silver edging on his fins, Genesis is a red with black stripes lionfish, and Angeal is a long-suffering blue and black lions fish. Aerith turns into a long-finned koi, and discovers quite by accident that if you kiss your human boyfriend enough times he gains the ability to breathe underwater and transform into a mer for a few hours before changing back into a human again.)

(And because I’m on a roll, Nanaki is still a cat-lion-thing, Cait Sith has underwater capabilities, Jesse, Wedge, and Biggs are all incredibly baffled humans who aren’t sure how this is their life now, Tifa would like to know when and how her best friend became a Mer (Cloud: It’s all catfish’s fault. Sephiroth: hey.) Barret is a monstrously overprotective dad and Marlene is the world’s cutest baby mer and Sephiroth would literally destroy the world for her if she asked him too. Genesis would help him. Angeal would just sigh and hold Marlene out of the danger zone.)

#SE asks #byakko4 asks #Secret Engima Rambles #title prompt #Mer!Seph verse

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chaoswillfallrpg · 3 years

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LAURENCE ABBOTT is TWENTY-SIX YEARS OLD and a MANAGER FOR THE WEIRD SISTERS & BOOK SELLER in FLOURISH AND BLOTT at DIAGON ALLEY. He looks remarkably like GIANCARLO COMMARE and considers himself NEUTRAL. He is currently OPEN.

→ OVERVIEW:

tw: anxiety, bullying, death, depression

Reserved and melancholy, Laurence Abbott is the comforting nostalgia held in old books, the dimly lit cobblestones of a long lost city and the quiet strum of a bass guitar echoing in a candlelit forgotten room. Born to THEODORA GREEN, a Muggle with a delicate sensibility, despite giving birth to him in heartbreak she promised to the stars to love him with everything she had. Living a quaint life together in a recluse cottage on the coast of The Isle of Wight, Laurie was loved as Dora’s greatest treasure. Bringing warmth and music into the world, they built forts out of twigs and escaped in tales of folklore told with toes dipped in gentle streams. A quiet and tentative soul, Laurie wondered the world in blues and soft greys on rainy days. Tending to lavender gardeners to ease his anxiety, Laurie’s time was spent singing along to Patsy Cline and Simon & Garfunkel with his mother and collecting ancient coins which he displayed proudly. A music teacher herself, Dora sung poetic lyrics to Laurie as lullabies; showing him beauty even in the saddest of moments. While content as a duo, with a curious mind that wandered into his past, Laurie couldn’t help the drifting questions he held; particularly surrounding the absence of a father figure. While his questions were met with masked sadness from his mother, still she explained his father was an adventurer; lost on a quest to find sunken treasure for Laurie’s collection of forgotten things. Despite accepting the words downheartedly, he continued to long for the person he’d fabricated in his imagination. Adamant that the greatest treasure would merely be to meet his father. Though the unfortunate reality of people was that they were always laced with disappointment and broken promises.

A rap at the door on a stormy night, Laurie’s rose tinted dreams soon faltered at the appearance of the very man he’d been longing to meet. ALBERT ABBOTT, lingered in the hallway like a mere dream with dark features and eyes drawn tired from duty. Tentative to make the acquaintance of a stranger and merely five, Laurie clung to the stair railing as he caught words he’d piece together over the years that followed. His father wasn’t an adventurer at all, but a wizard belonging to one of the most noteworthy families in the United Kingdom. And Laurence? The result of a stolen love affair outside of an arranged engagement. To his father, he was merely a son he’d never known, a mistake, who’s blood status and very existence could bring the Abbott name to ruin. ARTHER, Laurence’s grandfather, was a traditionalist and believed in the power and entitlement that came with being a Pure-Blood despite it’s twisted morality. As the result of his grandfather and uncle PHILIP’S views, his father arranged to keep Laurence and Dora a harboured secret. Safe from prying eyes hidden in the muggle world and more importantly from CAOIMHE Ó BEIRNE and AUGUSTUS ABBOTT; his other family residing in Godrick’s Hollow. Laurence grew to expect disappointment in his father’s frivolity quickly. Disappearing for days often weeks, Albert visited sporadically; with Laurie often merely catching a glimpse of his father’s shadow as he left early in the morning, unaware he’d been there at all. Laurie’s once glowing perspective of people vanished. Viewing the world as a glass half empty, he learned to expect the worst in a hope to preserve his heart from more disappointment.

Merely a year after his father ventured back into their lives, the family were welcoming another; GILFRED ABBOTT. With a brother like the shining sun, Gilfred was almost the opposite of Laurence who drifted like rain clouds. Extroverted, vibrant and with a keen aptitude for Quidditch; he was the perfect son in Albert’s eyes who worked within the Quidditch Head Quarters, overseeing the Abbott’s family sponsorship of The Wimborne Wasps. The neglect Laurie felt merely grew as he watched his brother illuminated in the light of their father’s love, diminishing him further as he longed for a moment of affection in the shadows. While their differences set them apart, the brothers held a close bond. Equally as protective of the other, they were linked in the commonality of their father’s ineptitude and in the knowledge that despite themselves, because of their Half-Blood status, they would always be a tarnish on the Abbott name. Overhearing hushed conversations exchanged at twilight, Laurence learned that the lack of affection his father expressed stemmed from the blinding similarities he shared with one he’d never met; his half brother Gus. His father’s guilt loomed heavily, harboured lies became unspoken secrets amongst Laurie and his mother as they watched him toy between love and a society that deemed them as undeserving. With fears of their existence being exposed, Albert pleaded the necessity that upon his attendance to Hogwarts, Laurence claim Muggle-Born status and his mother’s maiden name. Fawning the reasons as merely an effort to safeguard financial security for his own and Gilfred’s futures; Laurence accepted, longing to please.

Aware that risk of exposure came with the potential of being scorned from the Abbott legacy, while wanting to cast aside the burden, logically he knew that the truth squandered opportunity; for him, but more importantly for Gilfred. Seeing himself as, yet again, being deemed less than in his father’s and relatives eyes, Laurie grew paranoid in the belief that maybe after everything they were right in seeing him as unworthy. Sorted into Ravenclaw under the name Laurence Green, he became a wallflower. Lacking self confidence and courage, he found friends among books; reveling in historic tales of Arithmancy and advanced reading of Ancient Ruins; the Library became his sanctum of solace. It was there that he met fellow introvert and inevitable best friend IRMA PINCE. Though younger than him, the Slytherin was renowned around the school for their powerful and unpleasant jinxes; specifically on books. Unfortunately with his luck, Laurie found himself accidentally dripping an ink spot onto a copy of Theories of Transubstantial Transfiguration which proceeded to then hit him over the head several times. With a counter charm and sarcastic comment, she explained the trick was merely to stop the likes of NEPHTHYS NOTT from causing strife. Impressed by her intelligence and talent for non verbal magic, the pair were quick to form a close bond. Though their friendship was met with wondering jealous eyes from Irma’s close friends SEPTIMA VECTOR and AMETHYST CASTRO. Despite attempts to befriend them for Irma’s sake, the pair were inclusive and held Laurie in contempt for imposing. A keen observer, Laurie holds the suspicion that their envy however is rooted in love for Irma rather than his ineptitude.

Despite his quiet self-deprecating demeanour, his fake Muggle-Born status drew the attention of RABASTAN LESTRANGE who reveled in Laurie’s misery. Though as the scandal of his father’s affair unraveled, Gilfred and Laurence’s status as Albert’s sons were splashed across the pages of The Daily Prophet. Finding himself thrust upon a society he grew up despising for its blood prejudice, the days of sneered comments and upheld noses vanished as he was donned a member of The Sacred Twenty Eight. While those such as PERSEPHONE WILKES tried to find a new position in his good graces, his close knit group of friends - MARIANNE MACMILLAN, COINNEACH MCKINNON, FABIAN PREWETT, GIDEON PREWETT, CECELIA ABBOTT and BOOKER BAGNOLD -, held the same love for him as they always had. Expressing his heartache at catching glimpses of his half brother in hallways; Celia tried earnestly to ease the growing tensions between the brothers. Insecure after years of being held in contempt due to his lack of ‘purity’, Laurence held lingering jealousy and bitterness towards one he barely knew. Hurt that his father’s lack of acceptance stemmed from their similarities, he held Gus in disregard to save his own broken heart. While Gilfred was welcoming and open to the prospect of building bridges, Laurence refrained, instead finding solace in music. Participating in the frog choir and strumming chords on his bass guitar in the music room; it was there that he met close friend KIRLEY DUKE and the rest of The Weird Sisters.

While an unlikely friendship, the group bonded over their shared love for Muggle music - particularly upcoming band ‘The Smiths’-. While more reserved than the Sister’s wild antics, they welcomed him with open arms and a cigarette light. Filling in on base at the occasional practice, Laurence became the acting manager for the new and upcoming band; while just starting they still gathered attention from young sorcerers such as ORLAITH MACMILLAN and MARY MACDONALD. Taking a job at Flourish and Blott to help pay the bills of the apartment he shares with Coinneach, Fabian and Gideon; Laurence spends his days categorising books and logging sales. While almost the perfect job for a bookworm, with Laurence’s observant nature he’s noted his co-worker MADAM MIRIELLE’S frequent disappearances into the archives upon visits from STURGIS PODMORE. Though suspicious, after the death of Booker at All Hallows Eve 1982, Laurence has little time to dwell on uncertainty as he comforts Celia in her heartbreak. Spilling his sadness into songs and smoking one too many cigarettes donned in his washed blue denim jacket, a new acquaintance by the name of EVE DIGGORY, has become a small light of sunshine through his darkened clouds. While having only met the witch a few times over an exchanged book at Flourish and Blott; Laurence can’t help but feel the turmoil of waves in his chest ease in her presence. While he doesn’t believe himself worthy of being seen in a romantic light, the world still looks a little less painful with Eve and Irma’s smile captivating his attention; distracting him even for a moment from his solace of blues.

→ ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

Blood Status → Half-Blood

Pronouns → He/Him

Identification → Cis Male

Sexuality → Up To Roleplayer

Relationship Status → Single

Previous Education → Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry (Hufflepuff)

Family → Gilfred Abbott (brother), Cecelia Abbott (cousin/close friend), Augustus Abbott (half-brother) Albert Abbott (father), Arthur Abbott (grand-father), Theodora Green (mother)

Connections → Irma Pince (best friend/potential love interest), Fabian Prewett (best friend/room mate), Gideon Prewett (close friend/room mate), Coinneach McKinnon (close friend/room mate), Marianne MacMillan (close friend), Booker Bagnold (deceased close friend), Kirley Duke (close friend), Septima Vector (friend), Meghan McCormack (friend), Eve Diggory (aquaintance/potential love interest) Rabastan Lestrange (adversary), Amethyst Castro (acquaintance), Nephthys Nott (adversary)

Future Information → Husband of Eve Diggory (subject to change), Father of Hannah Abbott

LAURENCE ABBOTT IS A LEVEL 5 WIZARD.

#hannah abbott #marauders rp #harry potter rp #giancarlo commare #harry potter rpg #laurence abbott #open #open wizard #open neutral #neutral #alleys #flourish and blotts #magic

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vaguely-concerned · 5 years

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The Mandalorian Fic -- And we are kind to snails

Gen, 3700 words. Story time on the Razor Crest! It was obviously way too early to introduce the kid to combat training, but there were other ways to prepare a child for the world, surely.

If that meant Din was occasionally stuck trying to imitate animal calls for the enjoyment and edification of a delighted and indefatigable one-person audience, so be it.

Can also be found here on AO3

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Din had, he was slowly becoming aware, created a monster.

“Da-wah,” the baby announced, reaching his arms out to be picked up and dropping the holodisc next to him in Din’s lap once he was safely positioned.

“...oh,” Din said faintly, slumping back a little in the pilot’s chair as he kept the baby steady with one hand. “Again?”

The baby turned wide expectant eyes on him, and Din — who had in fact been planning to troubleshoot the concerning noise one of the engines had been making the last time they took off — sighed. Well, he supposed that would be easier to get done uninterrupted once the baby was asleep anyway.

“Right, again,” Din agreed, and went to activate the ship’s holoprojector on the dashboard before sliding the disc in for the second time that day.

The reading had been a bit of a shot in the dark. It was obviously way too early to introduce the kid to combat training and he may never be suited for it in a way Din would be able to teach him, even in maturity — and for all Din knew about the kid’s species that might not even be within his own lifetime, it didn’t seem worth holding his breath on this one. There were other ways to prepare a child for the world, though, surely. It was probably a bit on the premature side for engineering too, since the kid still had a marked tendency to put everything he could pick up into his mouth at least once, which ruled out most of Din’s own expertise.

He’d mulled it over for a few days until a half-buried memory of his parents reading to him had presented itself for consideration. He no longer recalled what exactly they’d read — only the feeling of sitting nestled between them, his mother’s fingers running through his hair, the way his father’s voice had taken on a specific cadence when he read aloud. That they would sometimes switch off doing the voices for the dialogue so it became almost like a real conversation.

It was… well. He still remembered some of it.

Recognizing in himself no great talent for acting Din had elected to aim for something more practical, at least to begin with. In the end he’d chosen something he hoped would be both suitable for a kid and something useful to teach him and gotten, among a few other things, a holodisc that included information on and pictures of a great variety of animals from around the galaxy. Despite the breezy assurances of some people who were born and raised in the tribe, Din suspected that there was such a thing as too early an age to be introduced to the bloodthirsty treatises of Mandalore the Conqueror.

As it turned out the kid had taken to the whole thing with so much gusto that getting him to go to bed without reading at least a little first was starting to become a minor diplomatic incident. It didn’t seem to matter so much what they actually looked at — Din sometimes wondered if he could have gotten away with reading the ship’s manual aloud every night and had the same entranced reception. But for that space of time every night and sometimes during the day, the kid was glued to Din’s lap and poured his full undivided attention into whatever was set before him, and filling that time with anything less than worthy of that attention felt unacceptable.

If that meant Din was occasionally stuck trying to imitate animal calls for the enjoyment and edification of a delighted and indefatigable one-person audience, so be it.

The holoprojector sprang sluggishly to life and the image flickered until Din leaned forward to give the dashboard a succinct and practiced thump. He really should open that up and take a proper look at it one of these days, it’d been acting up for years and the components were likely older than him. “There we go. Okay, then. What are we looking at today?”

In the flickering light of hyperspace illuminating the cockpit he squinted at the small hovering icons that served as previews for the full articles, looking for one that seemed interesting or failing that an old favorite. Before he could settle on something the kid leaned forward and pointed at one of the icons with an intent yelp, so Din opened that one and gave a surprised huff of laughter when the large four-legged bulk of the creature rose from the holoprojector, its horned head immediately familiar where it was lifted in a silent roar. He hadn’t realized the disc included extinct species. The kid glanced up at him, waiting for him to start the normal routine of saying the animal’s name.

“That’s a mythosaur,” Din said, unaccountably pleased the kid had zoomed right in on it. “Our people used to ride them, a long time ago.”

The kid made a long intrigued coo and reached out towards the hologram, moving his hand like he meant to stroke the mythosaur’s horned, ferocious head.

“Too bad they’re extinct or we could’ve gotten ourselves one,” Din said, genuinely a little wistful. “Wouldn’t that have been something?”

Apparently the kid got just enough of that to fix Din with a wide-eyed look, ears perking up in breathless expectation.

Regretful to burst his bubble Din was forced to clarify: “I don’t have one. They aren’t around anymore.”

After a moment’s pause the baby took this revelation with somber dignity, turning back to the mythosaur. “Bah-ta,” he intoned, waving his little hand at the hologram like he was bidding the creature a solemn farewell.

“You still got one here, though,” Din said, in the hopes of softening the blow, tugging gently on the mythosaur skull pendant the kid wore around his neck most waking hours. ”See how they’ve got the same horns?”

The baby grabbed the pendant and glanced down at it, then between it and the hologram a few times, before holding the pendant up for Din’s inspection with a triumphant happy cry.

“Yeah. We keep the important parts,” Din said, grinning a bit at the enthusiasm.

The baby absentmindedly stuck the pendant in his mouth, small toes wiggling in contentment as he turned back to the hologram, clearly awaiting what was next. Biting his lip Din added ‘toy mythosaur?’ to his inner list of things to look out for in markets when he went to resupply and then read off the sparse information the holodisc’s compilers had thought worthy of inclusion.

“Remind me to find a more exciting version of this for you one day,” Din said as he closed the article. “There’s gotta be some better stuff about them out there.”

The baby gave a garbled sound around the pendant, idly swinging his legs while Din picked a new article at random, coming up with something aquatic and vaguely frog-like from a planet covered almost entirely in shallow oceans. The kid’s eyes sparkled.

“I think you’ll find that’s a lunch buffet too big even for you, buddy,” Din told him, moving through the different pictures of the sort-of frogs flitting between corals and strange tentacle-like sea plants. “They’re at least twice your size and squirt poison. Which apparently has psychedelic effects for some species. Huh. Let’s definitely steer clear of that, then.”

Quite apart from anything else Din had no idea how much the baby’s inexplicable mind powers were controlled by conscious thought and how much was purely instinctual — Din already felt out of his depth enough as it was with this, he could only imagine with dread the results of any unforeseen variables. If Din had already wondered whether the kid could lift himself into the air as well as things around him, it was only a question of time before the baby’s inventive and ever-active brain came up with the same idea. Din tried to keep it out of his mind most of the time, outside of the involuntary planning for endless contingencies he engaged in when he couldn’t fall asleep at night. One particularly fevered evening he had, for a while, seriously considered padding the entire ceiling of the interior of the Razor Crest, just to be safe.

After the frogs were duly ‘ooh’ed and hungrily ‘aaah’d over they continued through a few types of bugs until Din used his veto by right of being the person in control of the holoprojector to get them over onto something else. He never knew the universe contained quite so many beetles or that they all looked basically the same. The Naboo guarlara got a raucous reception, though Din suspected this might have more to do with the fanciful and brightly coloured costumes of the royalty depicted riding on them than the animal itself.

Hm. Maybe hunting down a history book or two might be a good call, actually, and not just for the kid. Din had never had much of an interest in the subject himself — surely the world was bleak enough without going around dredging up the muds of ancient strife and suffering to cloud the waters even further. But these Jedi were currently the best lead he had on finding anyone like the baby out there, and if they had once been powerful enough to challenge a Mandalore… they had to have left tracks somewhere. He couldn’t imagine the Empire having tolerated information about formidable sorcerers, however ancient, being freely available, and sometimes knowledge faded surprisingly quickly if it was stamped out hard enough. Off the top of his head he was having a hard time coming up with anyone among his established contacts who might have an interest in banned literature on the side. People in his line of work did not tend towards bookishness, by and large. But then again they might have clients who did and who had the credits to back it up. It could be a useful trail to pursue, anyway, and less risky than trying to ask around about such a loaded subject in person.

What he’d do if he actually found these people was a bridge he’d have to cross — or burn behind him while fleeing blaster bolts, he could only wryly extrapolate from recent events — if he ever managed to get to it.

Still half-lost in thought Din switched to a new animal at the kid’s urging, then startled out of his distraction when the kid sat up straighter in his lap and gave a call of accusation and reproof that came straight from the depths of his little body.

“Huh? What’s wrong?” Din blinked at the hologram of the round-faced fuzzy creatures and tried to understand what was freaking the kid out about them.

“Eh!” the kid insisted, gesturing hotly at the hologram.

Realization finally dawned; Din had to push down a laugh. “Oh yeah, you had a little run-in with one of those on Sorgan, didn’t you. It’s called a Loth-cat, it’s a type of tooka. It’s not dangerous,” he added, chuckling a little despite himself when the small body in his lap remained rigid with outrage and resentment. He wrapped his arms more securely around the kid and stroked a calming hand over his side. “Some people keep them as pets.”

The kid still scowled distrustfully at the image of the Loth-cat like he found this very hard to believe, but burrowed closer against Din’s chest, tucking himself into the crook of his arm.

“See there,” Din said, pointing out the kittens cowering behind the bigger animal. “It has little ones to take care of. That’s why it’s hissing, it’s protecting them.”

Blinking slowly the kid seemed to consider this, his tiny hand wrapped around one of Din’s fingers. He gave a quizzical sound and looked up at Din, pointing at a kitten too.

“Uh-huh,” Din said. “It’s a baby. Like you.”

Softening slightly the kid lowered his hand again and tilted his head to one side.

“That’s the parent,” Din said, indicating the adult. “Buir. And they’re its children. Ade.”

He still couldn’t quite tell how much language the kid actually understood yet, but it felt like the right sort of thing to do, so he kept going.

“Together they’re a family. Aliit. I, uh. Don’t know if they really do clans, but it’s the same word.”

The kid gave a thoughtful sound and fumbled for a handhold on Din’s armor. Din gave him a squeeze, stroking his head when he butted his forehead against his palm to ask for it without taking his big dark eyes off the hologram.

“Every being gets scared and angry if its children are in danger,” Din said quietly, rocking the child gently on his lap. Since this one had sparked an interest, and to give the kid some time to get used to seeing the animal without fear, they read all the information provided, going through galactic prevalence, social structures, speculated planet of origin for the tooka, anatomy and behavioral patterns, history of domestication and hunting strategies. Din was almost sure most of it went right over the kid’s head, but the attentive tilt of his ears never wavered and he seemed to listen the whole way, even glancing questioningly up at Din when he fumbled a little in getting to the next page at one point and left a pause in the flow. Maybe the facts weren’t the most important part.

The last image of the article was of the Loth-cat asleep, its kittens tucked close all around it. Apparently reaching a place where he was ready to bury the hatchet and extend a gracious hand of peace the kid finally leaned forward and tried to pat the Loth-cat’s head like he’d done with the mythosaur, making a soothing sort of warbling sound.

“Yeah, we’re not gonna mess with its babies,” Din agreed. “It doesn’t need to be scared.”

“Nahwa-lah,” the baby babbled sagely, sitting back and leaning against Din’s side again.

“Well, while we’re on things you’ve already seen before...” Din did a quick search and found the large one-horned head he’d had the dubious pleasure of surveying from extremely up close several times.

The baby stilled in his arms, ears perking up.

“You remember this one too, huh. Guess it’d be hard to forget. Well, it’s called a mudhorn,” Din said. “In the capacity as your father, let me take the opportunity to advise you to learn from my mistakes and leave their eggs the hell alone. My vision still goes double sometimes if I turn my head too quickly.”

“Aaah,” the kid said, imperiously waving his hand in the way that meant he wanted the next page of the article, then let out a squeak when the next picture was a mudhorn contentedly grazing with its calf, plump and with a head nearly comically oversized, the horn only about the length of a human hand. The baby pointed to the calf, his excitement so radiant that Din had to smile.

“Yeah, that’s another baby. Actually...” Din knitted his brow as he scanned through the article until he found the section about anatomy and brought up a hologram of the mudhorn’s skull in profile. “Look familiar?”

The baby’s mouth turned into a little ‘o’ of surprise; he glanced up at Din, stretching up as far as he could to tentatively poke the edge of a shoulder pauldron.

“That’s right,” Din confirmed, twisting a little so the kid got a clearer view. “That’s our signet. Which you should rightfully get most of the honour for, honestly, I wasn’t doing so hot on my own.”

Running a three-fingered hand back and forth over the edge of the signet the baby babbled away, his free hand gesturing towards the hologram. Din nodded and ‘uh-huh’ed dutifully along until the kid’s story culminated in him throwing both his arms up with a shout and looking up at Din in a ‘can you believe it?’ sort of way.

“I did go flying a couple of times back there,” Din hazarded while sitting up straight again, and was rewarded with a firm nod. The kid chattered some more and patted Din’s breastplate as if in reassurance, pressing his small round cheek to the smooth metal and blinking cheerily up at him.

Din’s chest did some strange twisting things he didn’t quite understand.

“How could I be worried out there when I’ve got you watching my back, huh?” Din said thickly, cupping the back of the baby’s head in his hand and stroking his thumb along the downy crown of it, making his ears droop in contentment and his eyes slip closed as he craned into it.

Clearing his throat Din turned back to the hologram and indicated the bundle of nerves right behind the mudhorn’s jaw on the anatomy cross section. “Anyway, it went down so quickly because I managed to get it right here after you incapacitated it. Cut that connection and it’s lights out right away. Odd quirk of anatomy, but there you are. You’d do better to snipe it from a distance, though, under normal circumstances — if I didn’t have a set time I had to be back with the egg it probably would have been smarter to lie in wait until it emerged from the cave on its own, shoot it before it even knew we were there. Even tossing a few grenades into the cave would be a better choice than taking it on up close, if you don’t have to worry about the state of the egg. I’m sorry, I realize it is probably a bit on the early side for tactical reviews for you,” he added apologetically, as the baby blinked at him in what looked like well-meaning and attentive incomprehension. “...I’m not very used to having conversations about anything else. I’ll work on it.”

Thankfully the kid was already a far smoother conversationalist than Din and simply tugged on Din’s hand insistently until they could go back to the mudhorn calf, squealing happily as he spotted it again, so Din rather assumed he was forgiven.

The next animal was another bug, so Din quickly skipped it while the kid looked the other way. They detoured through the squills of Tatooine, who despite being largely composed of leathery skin, teeth, aggression and generalized malice got a much friendlier initial greeting than the small fuzzy Loth-cat had. Go figure.

Then they reached one that made Din trail off mid-sentence and grow quiet.

The creature itself was something small and pointy-faced and furry that lived in the high mountains of Alderaan — or at least it had, before, well. There was a twinge of something he couldn’t place in his gut; he’d heard about it, of course, since he hadn’t been actively living under a rock at the time and the destruction of an entire world is the sort of thing that fights itself to the front of people’s minds no matter where you go. It had seemed nearly absurd, though, hard to really imagine, enough so that he hadn’t thought much about it one way or another until he’d seen the look on Cara’s face when she heard the name of her homeplanet spoken by the wraith-like shade of the empire that destroyed it. She had looked the way Din felt hearing ’Mandalore’ from Gideon’s mouth.

This holodisc must have been put together a while ago. The creature wasn’t marked down as extinct yet.

Din glanced down at the kid, who was already looking up at him, getting a bit heavy-eyed but otherwise perfectly cheerful, not seeming to suspect anything was amiss. A collection of memories stirred in the depths of Din’s mind, though mercifully vague and transient — something about the beginning of the war, his parents’ voices, low and worried, conferring in the kitchen when they thought he’d fallen asleep, the slight brittleness to his father’s smile when he called him home from play in the evenings, just a bit earlier than he would have before. He wondered now if they’d been planning to leave or if they had surmised, probably correctly, that there would be nowhere truly safe to go and that the only thing they could do was to shield him from the worst of the fear.

He’d been frightened anyway, of course, but they’d tried. It seemed to him an ancient, unspoken sort of pact, that trying and that fear. A bittersweet creed all its own.

“Let’s skip this one for now,” Din said, as lightly as he could manage while he skipped the article and wrapped one arm more protectively around the baby. “Maybe another time.”

The kid didn’t seem to mind, only gave a contented yawn and turned towards Din’s chest in that way that meant drowsiness was finally catching up with him, his ears fluttering languidly. Din found a smile tugging at his mouth and started on the next animal anyway, in the knowledge that it would probably do the trick.

Din’s hunch was right; between the rdava-bird’s colouring and their mating calls the baby’s eyes were starting to slip closed every so often and he had curled himself up completely in the crook of Din’s arm, sucking absently on the pendant while he fiddled with the edge of the cloth of Din’s gambeson. Finally, in the middle of a description of the bird’s favoured habitat, his head drooped towards his chest and Din decided it might be time to call it.

“Time to sleep?” Din asked, stroking his thumb over the kid’s forehead. The baby gave a weak cry of protest and struggled to sit up a bit, managing to keep his eyes open for all of five bleary seconds before they fell closed again. “Sssh. Don’t worry. I’m not going anywhere, you can sleep. I’ll be here.”

Whether because of the words or simply the cadence of his voice the baby relaxed, gazing up at Din with soft-eyed sleepiness and the perfect trust that still made Din feel a little dizzy if he let himself think about it too hard. He swallowed and stroked the baby’s ear, rocking him slightly when his eyes finally slipped all the way closed and stayed that way.

“I’ll be here,” he repeated quietly, holding the kid for longer than he probably needed to before getting up to place him in his seat and tuck him in.

You have no idea how desperately I NEED Mando having to actually tackle a children’s picture book about mythosaurs and being persuaded by big hopeful eyes to do the voices, I’m probably going to have to write it for the sake of my sanity if nothing else

Title is from Fleur Adcock's poem 'For a Five Year Old', because the combination of that poem and this show, what is the word... absolutely devastates me emotionally.

#star wars #the mandalorian #the mandalorian fic #baby yoda #my writing #here you go it's literally just 3 000+ words of baby and mando being adorable and no plot lol #plot? who's 'plot' never heard of her

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castellankurze · 4 years

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Too much rambling about au ra characters I’ll probably never play for a possible warring kingdoms AU, put behind a cut because I love you.

I: The Age of Twilight

Approximately four hundred years ago a volcanic eruption in the south seas cast much of the continent of Othard beneath a diffuse cloud of dust and ash. Several years of cold winters and poor crop yields followed, heralding an age of strife and hardship. Previously-peaceful nations and outlying factions began to buckle with unrest, and brushfire conflicts erupted along the various borders of Othard’s polities, threatening to boil over into an open age of war.

In the center of Othard, the reigning king of Doma awoke to find enemies at his every flank. To the south the nations of Dalmasca and Nagxia eyed their fertile farmlands, whilst to the east the piratical Confederacy raided their coastal villages for supplies and foodstuffs, and finally to the north the warlike xaela tribes sought precious iron and animals to slaughter for their meat and bones.

The king was faced with an impossible situation - with men and women already lean and hungry due to the hardness of the earth, his nation lay ripe to be picked apart by the various predators circling in the waters. So he put the question to his loyal lords and retainers: defend Doma on all sides, with one arm behind their backs. In these years, a quartet of warlords would rise to the occasion, their names committed to history as the heroes that shepherded the nation through the years of darkness. For many years afterwards, they would each be celebrated - though in the lands beyond Doma, their names would be whispered as objects of terror.

II: The Warlords of Dusk

Toshitada Koma (top left) became known as the Warlord of Spring, though to his enemies he was known more widely as the Warlord of Cruelty, or more simply as the Ogre. His solution to the king’s proposal was simple - strike fear into the hearts of Doma’s enemies, and make them quake to even consider battle with her armies. He fought his skirmishes with a bloodthirstiness that shocked his foes and left few alive in their wake. He pursued battle aggressively, favoring savage preemptive strikes that forced his opponents onto the back foot, and it was not unknown for enemy soldiers to desert upon finding his banner lifted in opposition. Despite his unimpeachable record, later in life Toshitada was said to have come to regret his reign of cruelty, and abandoned his wealth and holdings to live as a monk, bringing peace and comfort to the victims of war. He is believed to have been slain by the family of a Nagxian village headman he had killed, though the circumstances of his death are murky.

Classes: warrior, dragoon, white mage Goro Kurodajiro (top right) became the Warlord of Summer, known also as the Phantom Lord. He was a less frenetic, more calculating sort of warrior. He had gone blind in one eye early in life under mysterious circumstances, and often wore a patch over the sightless orb. Despite this, he was often said to see things no one else could. A masterful magician, he cast veils of illusion over individuals and armies alike, leading his foes astray so that they would walk into prepared traps or even come to blows with one another. Whatever was left, he would finish off with more direct spells of fire, ice, and thunder, and was said to turn the very land and laws of nature against his enemies. Xaela in particular called him ‘Maker of Webs’ and considered his tactics dishonorable. This would one day prove to be his downfall - as he spun his spells to frustrate an alliance of xaela tribes, a sniper of the Mol loosed an arrow that put out his remaining eye. Blinded, Goro began to lash out in every direction, slaying friend and foe alike in a panicked rage. The xaela warriors weathered the storm, however, and he fell beneath their gathered blades.

Classes: red mage, astrologian

Naotoki Yamanouchi (bottom left) would be known as the Warlord of Autumn, as well as the more sinister title the Demon of Venom. Born with a strange tongue shaped by two points and elongated eyeteeth, it was whispered the man’s lineage was tainted by that of a snake demon. Unsurprisingly, Naotoki’s solution to the king’s question was to make use of all manner of gathered venoms and poisons to level the battlefield against Doma’s foes. His blades coated with toxins, he could blind or incapacitate foes even without touching them as the substances dripped onto exposed flesh. Even far from the battlefield his foes were not safe from his debilitating touch, their very food and drink turned against them. It was said that he possessed the power to cure those he inflicted with his venoms, but if so it was a power he used sparingly, if ever. These heinous tactics would one day backfire, as his cavalier use of such weapons crept into the jungles of southern Dalmasca and attracted the ire of the viera who made their home there. Ambushed and pierced by many arrows, Naotoki’s last act was to throw himself into the Zeirchele River, his tainted blood fouling its waters for years afterwards.

Classes: samurai, summoner

Kuniko Sasaki (bottom right) was the Warlord of Winter, and her defense of Doma was a two-pronged approach. Said to have perfect vision even in total pitch-black, she and her chosen cohort of samurai and shinobi would attack in the dead of night, when the moon lay shadowed, and sow panic and confusion amongst the enemy. For this, she became known to Doma as the Blade of Darkness. However, open battle was of limited effect against foes like the Confederacy, who rode their ships to and fro across the Ruby Sea. Against such foes, Kuniko brokered deals under the table, promising to look the other way while such enemies plundered Doman lands...only for such raids to inevitably run afoul of sudden attacks in the night. For this dishonorable behavior she became known as the Jackal, and even some Domans termed her the Warlord of Corruption. One night her reputation caught up with her, and rather than raid the vulnerable coastal village offered to them, the Confederacy shelled it with unending volleys of catapult and ballista fire. When dawn rose, Kuniko and her cohort had been wiped out.

Classes: dark knight, ninja

III: The New Dawn

Doma survived the dark, savage years, and history rolled on for four hundred years. Until there came to Doma a new foe, one clad in steel and bearing weapons never before seen by the ancient nation. The Garlean Empire put the better part of Othard beneath its banner, bringing even Doma to heel. For twenty-five years the Empire’s VI Legion ruled Doma as a vassal state, exploiting its lands, its people, and even its legends.

Forever searching for ways to broaden their scientific understanding - no matter the cost - the scientific contingent that had accompanied the VI Legion carried out unspeakable experimentations on the people put under the rule of the Empire. When they learned of the ancient legends of the Warlords of Dusk, they sought out the ancient graves of the revered warriors and subjected them to the newly-termed process of ‘cloning.’ The intent was to parade Doma’s ancestral heroes before them as loyal servants of the Empire, and to this end they created living, breathing copies of the long-dead quartet.

Unfortunately, the Empire had overlooked a simple truth - great warlords are not wont to bend their knee to foreign rulers. And savage days in savage lands give rise to savage leaders. The quartet threw off the shackles of their captors and slaughtered many of their creators in one terrible blood-soaked night before retreating into the mountains of Othard. Before a response could be organized, the VI Legion was called away by the Emperor, and in the resulting confusion the newly-reborn warlords were overlooked. Soon enough, the Empire as a whole would be thrown out of Doma by the arrival of the Warrior of Light and the restoration of the Rijin line to the throne.

But there was yet unrest in the ancient kingdom. Not all were happy to return to life as it had been twenty-five years ago. Strong currents churned beneath the surface, and among the voices raised in anger echoed those of the distant past, the warlords returned to ancestral holdings and lands, sometimes at the point of a blade. The quartet seemed to have been reborn with much of their old personalities - and, more distressingly, their various abilities - intact. With Doman lands and Doman people depleted by the brutal Garlean rule, a set of warlords with experience from another time when the nation faced lean years would be fearsome foes indeed...

#FFXIV #au ra #raen #kurze writes #thinly veiled Ronin Warriors fanfic

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spookyspaghettisundae · 4 years

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Emily's Awakening, Part Five

The humongous demon raised its other gargantuan hand and pointed to the iron, gauntlet-shaped tower on the horizon, commenting on it no further. Emily instantly sensed that Catechism had issued a challenge. It was upon her to observe it—and embrace it.

“It’s now or never,” she said, not missing a beat.

The tower pulsed as if responding to her resolute comment. It throbbed. Or was it Emily herself, resonating with it? Her temples thrummed in unison with her own pulse, with the pulse she felt from the iron tower.

This whole world had a heartbeat. The volcanic eruptions all around matched its rhythm. Emily felt it mirrored in herself, like reflections of her own being. Was this where she came from? Where her soul truly belonged?

Just as she saw the tower, it saw her. Emily and the tower looked at each other. It had no eyes but it saw all. It understood her, and vice versa. Her vices, tempered through the trials of the maze. Her virtues, her own to hone for any purpose she decided on pursuing.

The moment she doubted any of this as reality, the moment she doubted herself, she sensed the oblivion behind her again. The padded cell. The demon she named “Stinky Jim” laughing at her while she rocked back and forth, alone in the psych ward, drooling. Helpless. Insane.

Turning back had ceased being an option. It ceased being that a while ago now, lost somewhere in the maze. She looked up at the horrendous face of Wise Man Catechism, feeling nothing but calm and thriving in the hellish melody, feeling a certain serenity in how her heartbeat matched the pulse of Pandemonium. He turned his head to look back at her through his one thousand eyes. They nodded at each other in silent agreement.

“I am ready,” she said. Her words a vow for the future, a pledge to brave any challenges ahead.

Just then, a tiny creature emerged from the mountains. Scrambling, running, hopping from shattered stone ruin to volcanic island to solid ground, braving the fires. A man in a black suit, with a long white coat draped over his shoulders.

Jones.

Here, a foreign presence. He did not belong. The frayed edges of his manifestation stood in contrast to the inferno all around him, like he had invaded this place and it threatened to eject him any moment now, like two realities clashing in paradox.

Jones yelled. His hollering echoed between the volcanic mountains where Catechism stood, and his shouts reached Emily’s ears despite the incredible distance, “No! Don’t let her do it!”

He jumped at Catechism’s spiked tail and grabbed hold of its end. Catechism turned his head and just glared at the intruder. Jones’ arm withered like a plant drying out on a video recording being fast-forwarded, until it shriveled away and turned into dust. Judging by the horrified expression on Jones’ face, he had expected as much, though it would not deter him.

Catechism’s presence surged with waves of raw power—an incomprehensible hatred. Emily felt the waves of contempt and rebellion pass through her as they emanated from the monolithic demon, but they had no effect on her. The magnitude of this aura expanded outwards and engulfed Jones, banishing him from the Pandemonium. Just winked out of existence. There in one moment, gone instantly in the next.

“This is my sacred world,” Catechism and Emily said in unison.

Though now she understood: they were not as one. Catechism was not an aspect of herself. This chthonian being was one of the masters of this realm.

Before she could dwell on this, the demon took flight, shooting into the skies. The winds turned into tempests and Emily held onto the fissures in the lines of the labyrinth upon Catechism’s palm. She held on for her dear life as the infernal wastelands flashed by, thousands of feet below.

Everywhere, beings of fire lurked. Vices manifest. She could not always make out their exact appearances or shapes, but she knew what they were. Fears, sins. Liars. Criminals. Fools. All of them here, suffering in eternal torment, left behind for their misdeeds and crushed under the weight of their personal burdens. Chained to burning stone, melting in pools of searing-hot blood.

As Catechism crossed over the Abyss of Wrath with a flap of his mighty wings, Emily caught a glimpse of the forces gathered there. Locked in an grueling war, battling eternally in continuous strife. The heartbeat she felt from this entire world beat the strongest here—it resonated the most with her here.

If she ever failed, if she ever gave in, then this is where she would end. And there would be no return from it. She felt the pull of this Abyss. Like she belonged here the most. Something like a sweet smell of peaches, the same sort of satisfaction Emily felt whenever she smoked a cigarette and sipped from a bottle of beer to celebrate work well done, but blending with the twisted delight in winning an argument or insulting a person who had it coming. Tempting her to let go, here and now. Just see if she could survive the fall, and see up close what forces roiled down there. To see what she could do. If she could emerge the victor with her new powers of the mind.

“When the universe was forged by the ancient dragons, that is where wrath itself was hammered into shape. You can return here, but only if there is truly no redemption left for you,” Catechism’s voice thundered through the sulfurous winds to her. “If you have more to fight for—if there is truly more to your will, then you must press on.”

It took little convincing for Emily to continue clinging onto Catechism’s palm. The fall still frightened her. Most of all, though, finding her inner demons down there in that Abyss horrified her the most. Part of her knew that she would never return from that battlefield. She pictured how the red hot fire inside of her—that cradle of rage—would just consume her, turn her into one of the awful creatures that dwelt in this world, consuming her life force until she too was nothing but a burnt out husk.

The iron gauntlet-shaped tower neared. Loomed. The acidic clouds parted. Each repeated flap of Catechism’s wings carried them closer, caused a mighty thunderclap to ripple through the skies, driving fiery tears into Emily’s iron eyes. The tower seemingly grew to ever greater heights: the closer they got, the bigger it appeared. Or it had been this mighty and majestic all along. Impenetrable, unfathomable, and insurmountable.

Yet as they neared, Emily felt a thirst for knowledge. Just like she always sought to reveal the truth to the world, she now felt the drive to explore this tower. To see what secrets awaited her at its top.

With a final flap of his wings, fueled by all the will she had channeled into his hand when she braved the maze of her madness, the gigantic demon hurtled towards the tower base, then arched his flight path upwards. They ascended until Catechism landed upon a platform, halfway up the entire height of this impossible structure.

The world shifted and turned again until Emily realized that the demon had knelt down, lowering his hand to the platform. With legs as shaky as rubber, she traversed his mighty palm and hopped down. The weight of her iron body clanked as she connected to the solid pitch-black iron grounds of the platform, causing the metals to ring in accordance with each other. Harmonizing like tuning forks.

Perched like a gargoyle on the platform, the tower dwarfed even the mighty chthonic Catechism. He pointed to the rest of the tower above them, reaching into the blackened churning vortex of clouds in the sky, roiling in a spiraling shape around the tip of the gauntlet.

“You belong there, but I cannot carry you any farther. You must take the final steps on your own,” said the demon. Instead of the booming voice, it was the voice of the Wise Man, riding on the resonance of the singing metals.

Fiery veins ran just underneath the surface of the tower, casting a faint glow through the fissures forged in its unnatural construction. Within those fissures, souls cooked; bubbling and boiling. They fed the heat here, flowing upwards. Souls of all those who had come this far—but failed to rise any higher.

Dizziness caused Emily to sway as she looked up the height of the tower, clashing with her desire to climb it.

“Many children come here,” said Wise Man with the same resolution as he had spoken with on the night before Emily’s awakening. “But only few have the will to return and master this place.”

Unlike the rest of the hellscape, this iron tower had been built here. Effort manifest. Not anything animalistic or instinctual. Neither a relic ripped from other worlds and times and placed here in punishment.

No—the tower, ending in a massive iron gauntlet clenched into a fist—had been shaped by human consciousness; intellectual thought; and cold, hard logic. Every inch of it had been intricately designed by the minds of the many, coalescing into a collective product of human ingenuity.

The veins of molten souls looked like different metals—like brass and tin, woven into the iron body of the tower. The walls at the end of the platform shifted. Iron squealed and screeched as the walls parted like a sliding door, opening up a passageway that would lead Emily inside. Flames burst out from the tower’s depths, licking at the sulfurous air outside, both taunting and intimidating Emily with their animate audacity.

Now up close, Emily realized that strange symbols covered every surface of the tower. They were no language she knew. Something ancient, something she couldn’t understand, yet she comprehended it perfectly without knowing why. The glyphs spoke to her through her own mind. Like kindred spirits touching and becoming one.

“Enter if you dare, upon the threat of peril, oh, Warlock on the Path of the Scourging. Scion on the Watchtower of the Iron Gauntlet, in the Realm of Pandemonium, Kingdom of Nightmares, and abode of demons. Enter you may if your soul carries the spark of Gnosis. And from now on, bear the name of Mastigos—or perish in the Abyss,” read the ancient tongue engraved into the iron.

Without turning away from it, Emily felt the heat surge through her. Become part of her. Her iron body shone, reflecting the fires from inside the tower, and the words written upon it.

“How many failed before me?” she asked Catechism.

The demon waved the maze-hand upon which she had arrived in Pandemonium. Just like the lines of the maze upon his palm glowed, the brass veins of the tower flared up with orange light. The lava comprised of souls within them burst into flames, continuing to flow upwards, defying gravity as they matched the same pulse of the rest of this world, rising in zigzag patterns to the top of the tower, feeding its power.

With the glow of the brass veins, iron plates bolted onto the tower’s walls flared up, revealing themselves to be vignettes carrying the names of thousands. Millions.

Some names had been written comprehensibly, in alphabets and tongues that Emily recognized. Others took the appearance of hieroglyphs or unrecognizable, alien symbols. All of them had been marked in different fashions: in dark ink, engraved, etched, embossed, written in blood, brushed with excrement, anything she could imagine. Those names all glowed for a moment.

The world rumbled.

Emily’s gaze followed the length of the river of burning souls to the base of the tower and only now perceived how it all flowed together there. Rivers from all over the hellscape converged with the tower at their center—the brain—rivers coursing through Pandemonium like a nervous system running through the entire world. They reached so far into the horizon that the mists and mountains and ruins all swallowed their ends.

In those mists, she could see other monolithic creatures to match Catechism’s magnitude and foreboding presence. An entity wreathed in dark tempests, another swimming through molten steel, one that slept within jagged mountains and hungered as it devoured the edges of this world.

Thrumming to the same rhythm of her heartbeat, the veins of molten souls glowed for a few more seconds until Catechism lowered his hand, and their brightness died down to the soft glow they had displayed before.

Emily turned to see the names vanish from the iron vignettes making up the face of the tower’s walls. Their presence stayed palpable and their meaning became as crisp as the jagged edges of the ashen particles that wafted through the toxic air of Pandemonium.

She, too, would inscribe her name here. But how high would she get?

As if on cue, Catechism plucked the smallest spike from his tail—the one that Mister Jones had latched onto before the demon withered his arm and banished him from Pandemonium. Gingerly, the building-sized demon held out the tiny spike between two of its colossal claws, hovering just above Emily.

She held out her open palms. Catechism dropped the spike and she received it in her hands, holding onto it like a precious treasure, then gripping it like the tool and weapon that it simultaneously was.

With that, the demon flapped his wings. The ensuing gale swept over the platform with startling force, yet Emily stood her ground. That single flap carried him into the air by the tower’s side, and another took him farther away. Yielding no more words, Catechism flew off, heading towards the horizon, soaring back to the fiery mountains from which he had carried Emily.

She took a deep breath, tasting the toxic tinge of sin in the air of Pandemonium, and turned to face the burning portal that had opened for her. Emily entered, ignoring the flames that continued to flicker within.

Beyond the portal lay an infinite stairwell, spiraling both up and down and descending into festering, shadowy depths; as well as reaching dizzying heights. The awakened woman recognized it now: a place from her memories, her dreams and nightmares. She had been here before, somehow, although only partially. Where she had once stepped foot inside this tower in spirit, her entire being and consciousness had reached the tower now, in this hyperreality.

Mere moments after she dithered to marvel at this monument of honed madness, shouts began to echo from the depths.

“I hate you,” sneered the voice of Christine.

“Maybe you were worthless after all,” said Sean, her father.

“Our relationship was a mistake,” thought Julian.

A raging fire, red-hot and all-devouring, rose from the darkness below. It billowed forth, climbing upwards, in the shape of crimson smoke. Deadly fire pierced through its edges, threatening to melt Emily and pull her into the veins of molten souls.

And it quickly closed in on her.

Instead of returning outside through the portal, she dashed up the stairs with the dark fire right on her heels. Always taunting her with twisted thoughts, of words that came threateningly close to blackening her heart with despair. Transported by familiar voices, aimed at breaking her will.

“I told you to shut the fuck up because you have nothing worthwhile to say,” Chris said.

“I regret having any more kids after the first,” groaned her mother, Melissa.

“When I’m out, I’m going to kill you,” Kathryn said, cackling like the demon of madness, Stinky Jim.

But these were not just fears of Emily’s which the rising darkness threatened to make flesh. They were echoes from different times, different places—the results of different realities coalescing, coagulating—the aftermath of different decisions she could have made, of all the things she changed for the better all going wrong. The flames of that dark fire fed on that negativity, and her dread—for Emily’s legs buckled, she almost crumpled as she imagined that those things might all overwrite the reality she knew or believed to know.

The same despair that made her mind flash back to the padded cell. To that madness and surrendering. So enticing, all over again, to just turn around. And descend. Give up. No more pain, no more suffering. Why not let others bear the weight of the world?

While she could keep up the pace and the cloud of despair at a range, the malevolent whispers of its dark fire caught up to her. They sapped her of her strength, rendering her legs wearier under the weight of her iron body.

She focused on the gauntlet on her hand, manifest once more. She imagined the top of the tower, resolving to one day reach its impossible pinnacles. Emily mustered every last ounce of strength and will, ignoring how her body burnt with scorching heat and her lungs screamed for sweet reprieve.

“What if that creature was the one who did all the work for you?” asked Stinky Jim.

His laughter echoed from the cloud of darkness, bleeding into the voice of her dead colleague Hal saying, “What if the camera does all the work? You know, people don’t give a shit about the talking head or some faceless writer, only how cool or appalling shit looks on screen. Reporters like you are worthless. Just do us all a favor and finally drown yourself in your damned bottle, ‘kay?”

The cloud of dark fire consumed the doubts welling up inside of Emily and swelled to greater proportions, gaining more ground on her. The flames shot forth and ate away at the stairs. The iron steps melted away, exploding into puffs of smoke and ashes. The weariness of her legs overwhelmed her, a final step in her running stride cut short—and she fell. Plummeted. Resigned to the doom that awaited her.

“Fuck you. Fuck all of you. At least I fucking tried,” she muttered. Still, she defied it. She refused to accept her failure.

A freight train of pure force hit her and before she knew it, she was hurtling through the air again. Her cat, Charlotte—in her giant saber-toothed tiger form—had leapt from nothingness to rescue her from this doom.

Charlotte clutched Emily’s iron body between her deadly teeth. The giant cat jumped from one crumbling step to the next disintegrating step, crossing the growing gaps in leaps and bounds. The dark cloud devoured more of the infinite stairwell and Charlotte took a final leap.

With a sinking sense of dread, Emily knew her loyal companion would not make it. Charlotte hurled Emily away mid-air, causing her to land on a platform higher up. Emily screamed as she watched Charlotte’s arc curve down and the wildcat vanish as the cloud swallowed her whole, leaving only the shredded memory of a roar whose defiance matched the one in Emily’s soul.

In her heart of hearts, she knew, Charlotte was lost. Consumed by something eternal—something formless and voracious that consumed all things across all iterations of existence. Emily cried bloody tears but had no time to grieve. She swiveled to continue her flight up the stairs, escaping from the cloud of darkness as fast as she could.

She found the blue flame deep within her. She was not just Iron Emily. Not just a body with massive weight, resistant to the fires of hell, an unmoving rock. She was also Blue Flame Emily, the one who harnessed the fury, controlled it. Together, they sparked new fire onto the final kindling of her hopes and dreams.

Julian would be with her, always. Miranda and Samantha remained. Carlos would start a new life, far away from all this madness.

Emily believed: she would change the world.

And the world, here, now—it changed in kind. The walls shifted, forming new stairs where the cloud had demolished them, creating barriers behind her to shield her from the deathly flames, sliding to and fro to create new passageways for survival. The tower moved, adjusting continuously to help her ascend, countering whenever the dark cloud hindered her and made things harder.

All the while, the gauntlet encasing her hand throbbed. The entire tower thrummed to this primal tune, ever-shifting to match the rhythm of each heartbeat.

The tower wanted her to succeed.

The cloud of darkness billowed up; opened up behind her like a hungry mouth, lined with teeth made of dark red fire. In its nebulous and inconsistent shapes, Emily saw many faces rapidly surface and disappear; faces of the screaming, the crying, and the suffering. Faces both familiar and unknown. She saw her own fears and regrets bubbling to its surface, catching up to her. She even saw her own face in there.

Above and ahead, the murky twilight of Pandemonium shone through another open portal; the sweet promise of escape from the tower’s deadly interior and perhaps a place to rest and evade the cloud entirely, for it existed in this form only within the iron walls—a pool of lost souls that sought to fill its own void with the souls of those who still held hope in their hearts. Jumping, leaping, taking running steps in stride, Emily made her way closer and closer to this exit. The noxious clouds never looked so enticing.

The darkness sensed this—as her hope of escaping it flared up, so did its never-ending hunger. It shot forth and began to envelop Emily, with the field of her vision darkening as the cloud’s billowing form wrapped around. It chewed at the final footholds she would need to jump from to reach the portal leading outside the tower. Her mouth stayed shut but her soul screamed louder than anything that came from the cloud and she took one last leap of faith.

Screeching metal reflected the walls sliding shut behind her, sealing the portal and making return another impossibility. Emily tumbled onto the ground outside, where cold, unforgiving winds carrying ash and shattered memories swept across the plane. The tower sealed the cloud of darkness inside its bowels, keeping it where it belonged. Maintaining it as a trial to those who dared ascend, and culling those whose will could not be tempered.

Rising to her feet, Emily took in her environment and marveled how much higher she had gotten on the tower in such little time. None of that made sense, but this world obeyed different laws. She stood on the heel of the hand of the tower’s gauntlet, this clenched iron fist that stood as a monument to Pandemonium’s mysteries.

Still farther to go.

“Only you can go there, mom,” echoed the child-like voice in her mind. Tran’s kid, or one of Emily’s cats? It didn’t matter. Just a faint reminder that she had to take responsibility for losing Charlotte. She had to make her death count. She had to make all deaths count. Everybody had helped her get this far, and their efforts and losses would not be in vain.

The concept of time unraveled while Emily climbed the thumb of the gauntlet. Every single decision in her life returned to her. The memories did not always arrive in form of haunting regret, but when they did, Emily savored their taste—now understanding that they left scars, where the tissue of her spirit healed over and she became stronger for it. The memories did not always transport happiness, but when they did, Emily’s mind caressed them and kissed them goodbye—now understanding that she could not dwell in the past any longer, nor let any of it hold her back.

Perhaps she climbed for minutes, or perhaps for ten thousand years. She had to stop every now and then to catch her breath, to gather her strength once more. The tower sometimes ached and squealed to create holds that she could grasp in her ongoing ascent. The lifetime she looked back on, the life that might have ended in death at the hands of the human traffickers underneath the Estoria Pacific, or in a padded cell—it felt like a lifetime to look back upon every facet of it. And climbing the gauntlet forced her to interrogate each second of her life.

Infinity passed in the blink of an eye.

It took her hours or years to understand that no strength remained in her muscles. Her iron body defied gravity in strange ways, and the only thing that propelled her forth, allowing her to climb ever higher, was her own sheer force of will.

Emily climbed past rivers of lava flowing upwards, past hypnotic patterns of names written in foreign alphabets. The names and the plates they were inscribed upon kept shifting their placements to the tune of metal scraping upon metal. The arrangements directed her attention and kept pointing the way she needed to take in her ascent, for she could not climb in a straight line upwards to overcome this challenge. The names guided her.

She found it hard to believe when she reached the top of the gauntlet and collapsed. She fell to her knees and felt her willpower fading. Just a small flame left over, hidden deep inside, like freezing hands cupped around the tiny light on a candle. Blue, turning cold, almost fading away. Barely more than a spark. She gripped her chest with the gauntlet on her hand, much like a dying body attempting to hold onto the last leg of life left within it.

As the fingers of her gauntlet splayed, the tower moved, mirroring the exact motions. The walls groaned and ached. The brass veins of molten souls bubbled and gurgled. Metal scratched, scraped. The gauntlet shape of the tower transformed with unfathomable speed and precision.

Just in time, Emily dug the claws of the gauntlet on her hand into the gaps between the metal plates she knelt upon. The world spun, turned upside down, shifting, twisting, gyrating, turning the right side up again; orchestrated by the symphony of moving iron parts. Like a gigantic clockwork and its myriads of gears all interlocking, all working towards one concerted goal, fulfilling a singular purpose.

The clenched fist had unfurled, with all fingers pointing heavenwards.

Emily stood atop the gauntlet’s fingers, farthest above the hellscape of Pandemonium. The infinite climb had robbed her of everything save the last shred of will she still possessed. Now the incredible vista robbed her of her breath. The chthonic entities looming on the horizon all looked to the tower in unison. Creatures so vast and ancient that mortal minds could shatter in the effort of trying to comprehend their existence—they all looked at Emily. Where these beings had just lingered in Pandemonium when she first saw them, uncaring and unaware of her presence, they now stared at the tower. At her. Waiting. Anticipating. Catechism, among them, observed from so far away that she could not see his individual eyes, but she felt them transfixed upon her.

They knew what was to follow.

The metal shifted once more. A wall—the claw or nail of the gauntlet’s fingertip she stood upon—rose before her. Plates with names glowed, revealing a direct path to an altar that arose in front of that wall, presenting itself to Emily.

The maze and now the tower had stripped her of any vestiges of misplaced defiance. All that remained was her righteous fury and that last spark of blue fire, nestled deep within her soul. Not only had she come too far to turn back now, she now saw her own skeins of destiny and willingly—consciously—chose to embrace them.

The first step towards the altar was a wobbly one, a timid one. The steps that followed swelled with strength and vigor. That spark of blue fire was all it needed. All it took. Emily neared the altar, following the names upon the risen plates. They burned brightly whenever she neared and their glow died down as she left them behind her.

Some of the names on those plates caught her eye: Sigmund Freud, Dante Alighieri, Ricardo Gomez, Count Giovanni Angelo Braschi, Vladimir Bekhterev, Hippolyte Bernheim, Oliver Cromwell, Otto Eduard Leopold von Bismarck, Magus Bardiya Guamata, Darius the Great, Xerxes I, Pontius Pilate. Many of them unsettled her. Sowed doubt.

The moment she stepped foot before the altar, its individual pieces parted, allowing an empty vignette to rise to its surface, just in front of her.

An empty spot. Her vignette.

She wondered if she had dreamt this before, overcome by a sense of déjà vu.

As she unfolded the gauntlet on her hand, the demon spike from Catechism emerged from her palm until it came to gently rest there. Emily knew what to do.

She pierced her left arm with the demonic knife-like claw. The iron of her arm offered no resistance and the blackened spike just sank in like a needle piercing soft flesh. She withdrew it and fiery blood trickled out of her arm and onto the vignette.

Her blood glowed with fiery light and flowed with the viscosity of lava. Wherever it dripped onto the metal of the vignette, it sizzled and burned, searing shapes into the iron. Her own name took shape, cutting itself into its rightful place.

Emily Graves.

The tower rumbled. The chthonian creatures at the edge of Pandemonium’s inferno did not move, but the palpable presence of their watchful eyes grew in their intensity. The sensation of hearing feedback of a microphone flared up, a metallic screeching that cut through reality and into the back of Emily’s mind.

A darkness began to encroach from the edges of her field of vision once more.

The darkness itself was comforting, however.

It claimed her senses, shushing any protests she might have uttered, with the whispered promise of returning her in due time—gentle, like Julian’s kiss and breathed words that spelled out love without explicitly expressing it.

The nothingness that followed mimicked slumber. A short amount of time or a possible infinity. A dreamless state of mind, taken by the tides of sleep. Waves of a poisonous ocean lapping at the shores of distant realities, where worlds connected through the haze of memories.

Everything and nothing whatsoever until Emily woke up again.

The smell of sulfur was gone. She awoke to the smell of rubber, and plastic, and dust. And fouler smells yet; the smells of rotten meat, and smoke—from a fire. A sliver of light blinded her, above her, outlining the dark coffin she had woken up in.

She pawed at the light, grasping at the gap in between the metal walls around her with trembling fingers. Fingers made of flesh and blood, rather than living iron and animate fire.

Instead of howling winds and the screams of the damned, she heard the howling of sirens in the distance—of police cars, ambulances, and fire trucks. Shouts and yells of desperate people. And the roar of a tremendous fire.

As she pushed at the lid, metal hinges squeaked. Emily understood where she had awoken. Inside a dumpster. So hot from the blasting sunlight that dumpster’s insides cooked and the sweat erupted from her pores. The breath of fresh air from outside of it when she pushed the lid up high enough to spy on the world outside made her shiver—she was naked.

The building outside the dumpster was the apartment block she lived in. Her home was ablaze. Wherever her specific apartment once used to be located in within the structure was now just a gaping hole. An infernal fire burned there.

A stark contrast to everything she had witnessed. Landing here after her time in Pandemonium, overcoming her own rage and madness in the maze, and rising to the top of the iron tower.

Emily knew the events in these two distinct realities were connected. Everything was connected.

Mister Jones and his damned case filled with obscene amounts of cash. And a bomb that had obliterated her apartment.

A cut on her left arm reminded her of where she had pierced her own flesh to sign her name in the tower. Made it clear that everything in Pandemonium and everything here had truly happened. She had returned to the world she had lived in all her life, a world populated with people who would never understand what she had experienced; who would think she lost her mind if she told them about it. But it was all real.

If she had any last doubts to quash about that realization, she shifted uncomfortably as something pressed against her leg. Burrowing through the trash with her hand—the one that wore the gauntlet in Pandemonium—she found purchase. The object throbbed to the rhythm of her heartbeat.

She clutched the item, and raised it to eye level. To grasp how real everything was. In her fist, she held Catechism’s black demon spike. It thrummed in unison with her temples. It pulsed with purpose.

Mister Jones. He had his fingers in everything, involved in the transgressions she had witnessed and experienced in both worlds. He was going to pay.

The only problem Emily now faced was the mystery of how she was going to get across the city. First responders clustered around the burning city block, scrambling to quell the chaos.

Climbing out of the dumpster was one thing. But she was buck naked.

This was going to be a long day.

—Submitted by Wratts

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ellekandera · 5 years

Text

The Sunset at Dawn

Hey! So I don’t really post my writing on tumblr, or, like, anywhere at all, but I recently had a picture made of my Hexblade Warlock, Seraphine de LaLune, and it inspired me to write the story based behind it. I hope people enjoy it! :)

The link to the image is here, with the art by @looceyloo

https://looceyloo.tumblr.com/post/188682729398/human-hexblade-warlock-seraphine-de-lalune-a

Please look at the rest of her art because she’s amazing!

The poor young man, whose scars spoke of a lifetime of pain and strife, had only ever known darkness. There was the darkness of his first memories when he crawled his way through the dingy back-alleys of some backwater town only to fail; there were the shadows that clouded his mind when he tried to remember the faces of the mother who left him and the father who threw him away; there was the twilight of the night where he snuck away only to find himself hopelessly lost within the wilderness with not a chance of survival. It was not that troubling to him as much as it was to the others of the army to be traveling through the caves that ran beneath the mountains of the Giant’s Cradle with not an end in sight.

He picked at the worn fingertips of his gloves as he marched along with his group of comrades. Well, acquaintances would be more accurate. He knew their names, but not much else. He preferred it that way. Less chance of getting hurt in the end.

“How long is it going to be?” He heard one of them grumble, “It feels like we’ve been down her for ages!”

“Aye, it’s not right, them not telling us like this.” Another chimed in as he switched his torch between hands, the firelight dancing upon the strangely smooth stone walls. He looked towards the front of the long line of troops and frowned, deep folds appearing in his skin. “We didn’t volunteer for a walking crusade.”

The young man looked towards the same direction, watching the bobbing red hair of Captain Barkstrom from the front of the masses. It was true, none of them had been made aware of the current situation, and the troops were getting more restless. The infantry more so than anybody else, though it had been starting to creep into the archers as well. He tugged at the loose threads of his gloves and began to pull the stitching apart.

Then there was a sudden shudder that went through the ranks as Captain Barkstrom raised his massive, armored hand and yelled, “Hold!” It was a slow, but steady, stop as they all froze to their spots as if the ground suddenly swallowed their feet. The young man’s compatriots immediately grumbled as they began to shuffle their belongings and whisper their displeasure. “We’re taking an hour’s rest! Make the most of it, soldiers!” Captain Barkstrom cried once more, and there was a swift huff of affirmation before almost all the men collapsed to the ground.

The young man took a place beside a large stalagmite and watched the wall of people blocking his view of the leaders slowly lower. More of Captain Barkstrom’s form was revealed first, his chestpiece gleaming immaculately with the polish he constantly worked into it. Then there was Lady Vaya next to him, arms crossed and her usual semi-frown upon her lips as she quietly discussed something with her soldier counterpart. Master Weaving was also shown pacing back and forth beside them, knotting his fingers into his gray-scattered beard as he waved his other hand around as if he were on some big, silent speech.

The young man frowned. He couldn’t see Lady Seraphine. Of course, he’d never seen much of her before, but the fact she was out of his line of sight was aggravating. He tried to peer around the slight bend in the tunnel only to see the edges of her boot sneak into his vision. He was nearly at the point where the leather of his glove would come fully undone.

Lady Vaya suddenly turned and the young man stiffened. Her onyx eyes seemed darker than the shadows he could so confidently call familiar, and as she scanned the entirety of their forces her gaze shifted onto his small group. Then onto him. She raised an eyebrow, then pointed to him and beckoned him forward.

He heard a snicker from the other men in his group.

“Ah, you’ve done it now!” One chuckled as he pulled off his boot to reveal the blisters bulging from his heels, tossing it aside as though he’d never need it again. “Never meet eyes with Lady Vaya, that’s the first rule you’ll ever learn.”

“Lay off him, it’s not as if you’ve never been singled out.” Another chided, and the first man scoffed and went about massaging his toes. The second one looked to the young man and offered a small, but uncomforting, smile. “Better get going, she doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”

The young man stiffly nodded and strode forward, stepping through the throngs of soldiers and armor that blocked his way. No gazes followed him, the feeling of fatigue that pervaded the tunnel made sure of that, but he could still hear the whispers behind him.

“He’s a weird one, ain’t he? Wonder how he got those scars.”

“I don’t think it’s your place to ask.”

“If he’d talk once in a while then maybe I wouldn’t! But he doesn't say anything, he’s just… creepy.”

“And you’re just an asshole, so shut up.”

“Hey!”

The young man quickly found himself out of earshot as the chatter of the other soldiers began to rise, but he still felt the unwilling twinge that went through him. He had to stop his hand from raising to his face, stuffing it into his pockets, before continuing to move forward. He couldn’t help but feel, however, the small cramped quarters of the tunnel start to weigh in on him. It was familiar. Far too familiar for comfort.

Lady Vaya tapped her foot continuously on the ground as she waited for his approach, and it was then he realized the others beside her were also looking at him. The knot that curled in his stomach threatened to rise in his throat. When he found himself stepping before the Captain Barkstrom tsked.

“Really, Vaya? Him? He’s a scrawny thing.”

“And very resourceful.” She answered him in her calm, unwavering tone. “We need somebody who will scout on ahead without alerting anything. We don’t know if the trolls have set up any security measures.”

“Trolls? Thinking? Ha!” Captain Barkstrom laughed, his deep voice echoing off the ancient walls like some long forgotten sound of the depths. “I’d shave my beard before I’d say those beasts are thinking about anything, much less keeping alert for intruders!”

“That’s not a chance we should be willing to take.”

“She’s right, Barkstrom.” Master Weaving rumbled with his cracked, raspy words. He seemed to be flipping through some sort of tome, now, the bindings worn away from years of rough palms handling it. “We don’t know anything about these trolls, and they were smart enough to set up in a protected building rather than just some rotting cave. Means they might be led by one that’s smarter than the rest.”

Captain Barkstrom’s brows furrowed. “I seriously doubt that.”

“Doubt it all you want, doesn’t change the fact Lady Seraphine wants to be prepared for every outcome.” Master Weaving said with a shrug, and the young man’s eyes drifted to the boots he had seen before.

The Lady was turned away from them, her cloak of midnight blue shielding her from the torchlight that cast a dim glow around the caverns. She seemed to be looking out into the impossible darkness of the tunnel, for what reason he didn’t know. She couldn’t possibly see anything. Yet, he saw her hand continuously flexing at her side, a motion he knew well. Was it impatience, or was it… excitement?

Lady Vaya put a hand on his shoulder and he jumped, turning back to her. “Calm yourself. You’ll be no good if you’re not aware of your surroundings.” He could swear her lips turned up just for the faintest of moments, before Lady Vaya settled into her normal stony expression and pointed towards the end of the tunnel. “We haven’t heard back from our scout in a while, and I don’t expect he’s gotten himself caught. I need somebody to go provide support. Any information he may have gathered about the trolls’ movements will be invaluable to our plans, so make sure he gets back to us, understood?” The young man nodded and she took a step back towards the rank of leaders. “Move out.”

The young man took a deep breath and held it curling in his chest as he approached the shifting edge of the torchlight. For what seemed like must be miles there was nothing but darkness, not even a single glimmer to guide him through. His head suddenly began to swirl with images; visions of the only things he could remember. Jeering faces as he was thrown to the ground and kicked until his blood stained the ground red; screams as he had to leave others behind to a fate he knew would be worse than death; a knife grinning at him with a rusted blade that all he could do was stare at before it was brought slashing down towards him…

“Excuse me?”

He snapped from his trance, flicking his gaze around to the sudden intrusion into his thoughts. What he met, though, made him take a step back.

It was a single, glowing eye staring at him through the shadows.

His vision adjusted, and as he peered forward. The dim radiance of the fires just out of view cast enough light to show a woman, her skin a deep burnished copper and her hair a mass of dark brown curls pulled tightly behind her head. Her features were surprisingly soft in great contrast to the intense, unearthly eye that seemed to pierce through his very soul, but she rolled her bottom lip in on itself as she looked at him with strangely furrowed brows.

“Are you alright?” She asked, though the words seemed muddled when spoken through her thick accent. However, the words stuck in his head with the delicate trill of her tone, almost like a song just waiting to be sung. The young man bundled his hands into his shirt and swiftly nodded at her. The woman’s lip unrolled and released a relieved, gentle smile. “Good. Please don’t put yourself in harm’s way, alright? Your safety is important.”

“Lady Seraphine!” The woman turned back to Captain Barkstrom, tilting her head towards him. “We need to go over our tactics once we get to the gate!”

“Of course, Captain!” The woman answered, smiling once more to the young man as she gave him a slight bow. “Thank you for your service and I hope to see you return safely.” She spun on her heel and made her way back towards the others, and the young man could only stare as he recognized the midnight blue cloak flowing behind her. His gut twisted at the thought of not recognizing the lady, his lady, but… he could still see that glowing eye burned into his mind, simply waiting, watching…

Telling him to move.

The young man turned and began to sprint down the tunnel, feeling a tight grip on his heart as the light vanished behind him.

✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦

The shadows of the tunnel seemed to stretch on forever, far into the horizon where the young man now doubted the sun still existed. It was a straight shot, almost no twists or turns that would slip his footing and send him scattering to the ground, but his legs were starting to wear. He wished he’d taken part of the short rest, that he hadn’t met eyes with Lady Vaya. However, then he saw it.

Peeking out like a twinkling gem at the bottom of a dark riverbed was a single pinprick of light just barely out of reach.

The young man quickened his pace and rushed forward as though dogs were nipping at his heels. He could smell the hints of fresh air, feel the lightest of breezes, see the night sky as it blossomed through the ever-growing crack in the dark.

Then he burst through the tunnel entrance, and his eyes widened.

What waited before him was a crater. An enormous crater of such size he wasn’t sure what could have possibly made it. The ground was an odd grayish-white, the color of bone just before being fully bleached by the sun, and the coarse dirt rolled under his boots as he adjusted his footing to softer ground. He didn’t see much flora or fauna, small outcroppings here and there that didn’t matter much, with any other noticeable landmarks being the range of mountains lining the edge of the crater, their fingertips brushing the stars of the twilight sky. There was one thing, though.

A singular mountain in the middle of the crater. It didn’t even seem like a natural mountain, it was as though someone had carved it out of pure obsidian that now glimmered viciously against the ashy backdrop of the earth. As he peered towards it, slowly inching forward into this foreign world, he could trace the faint outline of their goal with his eyes. There, sitting in the gaping maw of the obsidian mountain, was the gate of Starfall.

His heart leaped in his chest, now free of the hand which had held it so tightly, and he began to move forward once more.

Every step he took crunched with dirt and rubble, it was so loud he could almost hear it echoing in the empty vastness of the crater. He wasn’t exactly sure what he was looking for. He could scan for every outcropping of rock or every group of trees for the scout, but in an area so massive it would take hours. Maybe even days.

He found himself edging even closer to the keep and his footfalls became more padded, and when he looked down he saw the paths of many feet stomped into the earth. They were massive and each footprint came with five indentations which he could only guess meant there were five curled claws to accompany them. He began to trace them with his own feet, moving forward unconsciously.

A hand grabbed him and pulled him to the side, but before he could shout a palm clapped over his mouth.

“You need to be more careful.” A voice whispered, deep like thunder right before a strike of lightning. “Unlike us, trolls can see in the dark.”

The young man turned his eyes to see the hard face of a surprisingly calm man, no more than five years his elder, his forest colored gaze flashing as he looked back towards the keep. The young man followed to see dancing shadows upon the inner face of the obsidian rocks, the shapes of massive forms lumbering between them. It was dim and barely noticeable, but it was enough. The hand slowly lowered from his mouth.

“Did Lady Vaya send you?” The young man nodded and the man seemed to take an unnervingly still breath. “A dozen trolls on the outside for hunting parties, at least two dozen more inside. Well fortified but they don’t know how to use the keep to their advantage. They don’t close the gates and they don’t have many patrols along the walls. We should take them when daybreak hits, then their only real advantage will be their size and numbers.” The man played with the feathers of an arrow, twisting it in the quiver kept tight against his hip. As he craned his neck the young man could see a golden tattoo curling across his dark skin. “I need to relay this information to Lady Vaya. Stay here and keep watch.”

The young man forced his way around and shook his head. The other man raised his brow.

“Somebody needs to stay on watch.”

Another shake of the head.

“This area is safe, the hunting parties haven’t come this way. They do not know about the tunnel yet.”

A firm, continuous shake.

“You just made the entire trip here, you’ll be too tired to be quick, and Lady Seraphine needs to be informed of the situation.”

The young man paused. Once more the glowing eye creeped into his thoughts. It blinked at him with a slitted iris blacker than ink, the green radiance it emitted seeming to not be of anything mortal. He began to pick at the frayed edges of his gloves again and nodded towards the other man.

“Good.” He rumbled, unhooking a bow from his shoulder and held an arrow gently against the string. “Stay out of sight.” The man crouched and snuck his way into a dense stretch of underbrush just past the worn footpath, then the young man blinked. The man was gone.

And he was alone.

He let out a soft sigh and leaned himself against the boulder shielding him from view of the keep. He could do it. He could wait here for the rest of the army. It wouldn’t be too hard, just staying here. By himself. For what could be hours.

Gods, what was he even doing here?

He didn’t even remember why he volunteered for this. Did he volunteer? It was all so fuzzy. One moment he was training in the courtyard of the de LaLune manor, still wondering about how he ended up there, then the next moment he was packing for a trip into the Wildlands. It all happened so fast he hadn’t had much time to process it. He wasn’t even sure how his life had taken him to this point.

He wasn’t made for this. He was nobody. He was nothing.

There was a thump.

The young man immediately sunk to the ground and took his dagger from his belt, twisting the grip in his hand before peering out above the boulder. He didn’t see much, daybreak was still a ways away even as the stars began to blink out from the sky. He didn’t need much, though, and from down the path he saw the massive forms of three, no, four hideous beasts. Four enormous, lurking trolls.

The young man felt his heart sink. They were terrifying. Their forms were tall and lurching, their arms twice the normal size of a human’s until they almost dragged across the ground with their clawed fingers carving cracks into the dirt. Their jaws jutted out at uncomfortable angles with gaping maws full of rotting, curled fangs that still seemed to have bits of gristle stuck in them. They were wearing almost nothing save for tatters of cloth and animal hide, but to compensate most carried large stones or massive clubs that could easily smash in a human’s head. Then there was the smell, damn Astraea the smell. A stench worse than a corpse rotting in sewage for weeks on end, it pervaded the air even with them still being a hundred feet away, and the closer they got the more the young man had to stop himself from vomiting. All he could do was pull his cloak over his nose and hide until they went by.

They were as close as eighty feet, then sixty, then forty, then they were so close he could see each greasy strand of hair that stuck to their scalps. They murmured in voices that sounded like the groaning of rocks grinding together, speaking in a language he didn’t even know existed. His fingers curled around his dagger until his knuckles were white as bone, and he watched as they lumbered by. One of them sniffed the air, then stopped.

The young man stiffened as he saw the troll’s eerie, pale yellow eyes turn from the path towards his hiding spot. Its snout crinkled and its lips curled back into a snarl that could curdle blood. It murmured to its group and they all began to look towards the young man’s location. He stopped breathing.

The trolls stepped forward. The young man pressed himself into the boulder until he felt his bones push against his skin. The one started to sniff more. He took his cloak and pulled it further around his head, so tight he thought he might suffocate on the spot. The trolls began to moan…

A rabbit jumped from the underbrush and darted past the trolls, and they immediately roared and went barreling off towards it. They swung their clubs and tossed their stones as it swiftly dodged every attack, and soon enough they were pursuing it off into the distance. The one troll glanced back to where the young man still tried to meld himself into the rock, but with another call from its brethren it joined the pursuit of their quick-footed prey.

The young man waited for them to fade into small dots in the distance before he released a relieved sigh. He let his limbs relax and turned his attention towards the keep. He could see the harsh shadows begin to vanish in the slow death of the night, yet he could still see the shifting forms move just beyond the gate. The young man caught another whiff of the horrible, rotting stench and heard the hunting cries echo across the crater.

He should move.

✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦

The young man had found himself hiding in the crook of a tree whose deep, sooty bark blended with waves of his somber cloak. It was an odd thing to grow in the middle of a barren wasteland, but somehow this lone tree had managed to dig its roots into the rocky ground and grow tall despite the world trying to beat it down. There were large gaping claw marks of beasts splintering the sides of the trunk, and the crooked branches looked like broken fingers desperately trying to crawl upon the soft, velvet cloth sky, but it was a proud figure standing amongst the crater. He hoped that if it had survived this long, perhaps it would one day blossom into something defiantly beautiful.

One could only hope.

The young man peered out from the small hollow nook he had sheltered himself in, glancing from the keep to the tunnel in the hopes of seeing something. Anything at all. He didn’t know how long he’d been there. Almost an hour, perhaps. So long that the deep color of the midnight sky had begun to shift to a softer shade, telling of the morning that was slowly rising east. The scout should have gotten back by now. Hopefully he did, but…

The trolls snarling, crooked fangs crossed his mind and the young man shuddered. How were they supposed to fight something like that? Something so… inhuman?

How could they possibly win?

There was the familiar crunching of coarse dirt and the young man snapped his head to attention. He pressed himself further into the rough embrace of the tree and watched for the beings that made the sound. At first it sounded just like one massive creature stomping in the cradle, and he could feel chills run down his spine. After a moment, though, he could hear the footsteps start to part into pieces, until he realized it was not just a singular footfall, it was a marching chorus.

His form relaxed and he rose up from his hiding place to see the armies of Lady Seraphine begin to approach from the distance. It was a mass of people that moved as one shadow in the faint dark of the night, only the slim strikes of light from the sliver of the moon still sinking in the sky reflecting off their armor. At the front he saw Lady Vaya and the scout from before scanning the crater as he pointed to various points, and beside them was Captain Barkstrom maneuvering his men into their battle formations. As the young man stepped from out from his tree and revealed himself to his fellow soldiers, he caught sight of what followed close behind them. It was that familiar eye, and the young man’s breath caught.

It fixated on him and he saw a smile spread across Lady Seraphine’s face, and she broke off from the rest of the group to approach him. There was a quick reaction from Lady Vaya and Barkstrom as they sent men rushing after her, but she was already so close he thought his soul would burn from that unearthly gaze.

“You made it alright!” She said, taking a heavy breath as he noticed the beads of sweat dotting her forehead. “I hope the mission didn’t give you too much trouble.” The young man shook his head and she gave a small laugh, one that reminded him of ringing silver bells he had once heard during a festival long ago. “Good, I’m glad. You’re help was invaluable. Oh…” He noticed her eye had shifted, and when he followed with his he noticed his gloves.

He had torn them apart. The leather curled away from the stitching to reveal his rough, coarse skin underneath. Strings fell out at odd angles and he could see the pale scratch marks he had made breaking the surface. He frowned and tried to hide it away, but she gently took his hand.

“You shouldn’t fight with these being so damaged.” She murmured, turning pushing on the split leather to try and make it whole again. She bit on her lip and fully enclosed his hand between both of hers, and he could see how small hers actually were. “Here.” She began to mumble strange words, so odd that he felt a cold chill slither across his neck. However, where her hands held his was warm. It was the warmest feeling he had known in a long time. It reminded him of… of something long forgotten. Of something that felt like it was biting at the back of his mind, but fell away when he tried to grab it.

Lady Seraphine pulled back her palms and the young man couldn’t help but stare at what was now a whole, clean gloves resting on his hands. It was like he had never worn them a day in his life, they were so… perfect.

She let her arms fall to her sides as she smiled once more, and he swore he saw faint dark lines appear on her cheeks before vanishing into nothing. “Take better care of them next time, okay?” She told him, and he slowly nodded before she turned away.

“My Lady.” Captain Barkstrom started as he walked up to her, pulling back his long red hair into a loose ponytail as he glanced at the moon now vanished in the horizon. “I think it’s time.”

The young man could see every muscle in Lady Seraphine’s body stiffen. She took in a long, sharp intake of breath, then released it as a long, drawn-out hiss. Her head turned to the keep, then back to her Captain, and she asked, “Should I… give a speech?”

“Of course! Good leaders always give speeches before a battle!”

“She might alert the trolls to our presence, Barkstrom.” Lady Vaya chimed in, crossing her arms and seeming on the verge of her dreaded foot tap. Captain Barkstrom scoffed.

“Please, it wouldn’t matter if a dragon dropped on top of us, those beasts are as dumb as bricks!” He placed a gentle hand on Lady Seraphine’s shoulder then turned her around. “It’ll be fine, my Lady. Go and inspire your men.”

The young man watched as she began to stride forward, and from where there was once nothing he suddenly saw her grip tighten around her gleaming trident. They all saw as she found her footing on the small rise of a hill overlooking the keep, placing her foot on a rock as she spun around to look over her armies. For one brief moment the young man could see everything revealed in her face: her fear, her worry, her anxiety, everything that threatened to make her run away and never return. It faded in the blink of an eye, though, and soon it was replaced by something the young man had rarely ever seen before.

A vision of hope.

“Men and women of Ygdram!” She cried, and all attention suddenly snapped to her. The sounds of the world seemed to quiet around them, as if everything was shushed by some unknown being so they could listen as the Lady’s voice sounded around them. “We have traveled long and hard to get here, standing in this crater no human has stepped in a thousand years! We have walked the paths of our ancestors through caves long since forgotten by time, and we have made our way to this spot! To the Giant’s Cradle! That on its own is an achievement, but we are far from done!”

She twisted her trident in her grip and pointed towards the obsidian mountain, its dark claw rising tall as though to pierce the heavens themselves. “Starfall Keep is occupied by creatures most foul, tainting this place which was once ours! They say we cannot take it back, that it is impossible, but I disagree! I know we will win! Do you know why?” There was a murmuring in response, and once more her voice rose to answer them, “Because of you! Because each and every one of you defied the odds, told those who said it was impossible that it was, indeed, possible, and now stand here with me! We will win because I believe in all of you, and I know that together we will take back what is ours!”

It was at her last word that the rising sun finally broke over the mountaintops, and the young man’s eyes widened.

Lady Seraphine was a celestial vision. The warm glow that bathed over her set her skin alight with brushes of liquid gold, her curls of dark hair turning to molten bronze that fluttered in the light breeze of the morning. Her colors of twilight blue shone with their silver filigree almost like starlight cushioned against a night sky. Held aloft by her hand was her trident shining like a pyre against the horizon, its prongs seeming to grin as the light was eaten by its teeth. What he couldn’t stop staring at, though, was her eye.

Her one, bright emerald eye which had once so unsettled him with its slitted iris and otherworldly view now shone brighter than any sun. In it held all the determination of the army which stood before her; it held her bravery, her kindness, and her unwavering belief that they would win. As the young man looked at it he gripped his daggers tighter.

They would win.

“Now, people of Ygdram!” She called to them, “Will you follow me into the breach?! Will you reclaim our home, our birthright, for honor and glory?! Will you, my Oathkeepers…” Her face split into a smile that would shame even the silver moon itself. “Will you fight with me to take back Starfall?!”

There was a resounding cry back to her, one that could deafen the world as swords crashed against shields and men stomped their feet. Even the young man’s voice, who he had thought was lost years ago, found itself tearing from his throat to join in the battle call of his comrades.

When in the face of the sunset at dawn, how could he not?

✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦

“Oh, so that’s how it happened?”

The young man nodded as he guzzled down his latest pint of ale, slamming it down to beam at the tiefling grinning at him from across the table.

“Yeah, she was amazing!” The young man proclaimed, cheeks flush from the alcohol. “Gods, I can still remember it like it was yesterday.”

“Of course he does!” One of his comrades, one of his friends, clapped him on the back with such force he thought he’d throw up his drink. “This guy took down three trolls all by himself! He dowsed his hands in oil and sat them on fire so he could stab their eyes into burnt mush!” There was a raucous cheer from the rest of his group and the young man lowered his head.

“I only killed one and a half, the other was mostly dead already, and it was just my daggers on fire…”

“Pft, you’re just being humble.” His friend turned to Athos with a laugh. “You know what we call him?”

“Do tell.”

“Sir Flameblade! We were thinking Firefingers first but we couldn’t stop laughing at that one!”

Athos chuckled and steepled his fingers. “So, Sir Flameblade, is there anything else that

happened?”

The young man shrugged his shoulders and lightly struck his palm against his tankard. “All I remember after that is Lady Seraphine charging into the keep to kill the trolls’ leader, then the trolls started to retreat when Master Weaving shot a flare out of the throne room window. The battle was pretty quick after that.”

“So you’re loyal to Seraphine because she killed a troll?”

“It’s more than that!” The young man sprang to his feet, slamming his hands onto the table as he stared Athos down with a gaze filled with the fire of his namesake. “She did what no one thought possible! She rallied an army, led us into the Wildlands, defeated an army of trolls and took back a keep that was abandoned over a thousand years ago! Everybody told her she couldn’t do it and she did it anyway! She… she…” His gaze flitted down to his glove, tracing the delicate stitching along the sides of the fingers that still felt warm against his skin. “She believed in us, like nobody else did, and for somebody like that… I’d follow her into the gates of the Hells themselves.”

“She also fucked shit up!” His friend cackled as he raised his pint, rousing another cheer from their fellow soldiers as they gulped down their drinks. Athos chuckled and leaned back in his chair, nursing his own tankard in his hands.

“That’s quite a reason for such a young man.”

The young man smiled and carefully brushed his hair from the scar splitting his face. “It’s the best reason I’ve ever had.”

“To what?”

The young man beamed. “To live.”

#dungeons and dragons #dnd #story #fantasy #original story #hexblade #warlock #writing

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cateringisalie · 5 years

Text

Renegade Aeris x Cloud Week Day 2

Written for the prompt ‘Maps’. Another AU. Oddly enough...

Aeris Gainsborough considered herself the most knowledgeable person on the Planet where the Ancients, or rather, Cetra were know. She might be young, but she had spent long hours in the known ruins thanks to her (occasionally sinister) patron, the Shinra Electric Company. Quite what a power company with a sideline in weapons development wanted with a long dead culture was a mystery but every part of it was fascinating and enthralling and if the company was willing to pay for her findings – however meagre she was content.

She seemed to be lucky more than anything else. More papers, more books and more detail in the five years since had been undertaking the research project than anyone in a century prior. There was an almost instinctual way Aeris knew which ruins held something of interest, or that this wall blocked some interesting curios, or that barren patch of ground was the right elevation, positioning and proximity to other known ancient structures to be a likely location for a Cetra structure. Success could not last forever, and there remained an odd fear on every expedition that something would go wrong this time, that she would be absolutely certain as she always was – and find nothing. No hidden structure, no sealed up container with a dozen scrolls in difficult to parse glyphs in a language no one could speak or read. Occasionally the worry prevented her sleeping; she had succeeded so far, thrown away anything and everything else to focus so completely on this one skill of hers. What happened when, or perhaps more optimistically, if it ever abandoned her? No answers as yet. And the stranger challenged everything she knew or perhaps thought she knew. He arrived late at night when she was considering taking a break and vegging out at home. “Doctor Gainsborough?” A hooded figure peered into her office. “Yes?” “I wondered if I could beg a moment of your time. About the Cetra?” Curious already; few used the correct term even within her field. Fewer outside it – and the stranger was assuredly not someone from her incredibly narrow field. But it was a Friday, it was late and she was tired. “Can this wait?” The figure wilted. “Sorry, its just been a long day and I have a lot I still need to do.” Scattered papers, funding requests, inventories, speculative translations of glyphs, some questions for the next journal. The figure shook his head. “Fine.” The figure glanced back out the door. “I wasn’t sure I could trust you.” “Me?” Aeris sputtered. “I’m not sure why you’d worry.” “Shinra.” “My sponsor?” Ah. Potentially one of the protestors. This was a new one; harassing a researcher unconnected with admittedly dubious power-generation methods. “I do appreciate your concerns, sir, but I really don’t have any kind of influence over-“ The man removed his hand from under his cloak; he gripped a metallic circle unlike anything Aeris had seen. The glyphs upon it were familiar enough, if not their meaning. “Where…. Where did you find that.” She reached out with trembling hands. The man let her take it. “In Nibelheim.” Absurd. The Shinra company originated from that far-flung mountain town. Surely they would have found a promising Cetra dig-site years before given their interest. “It was uncovered during the reactor construction.” Aeris dragged her attention from the glyphs and the circle. It had been part of something larger. The glyphs repeated with a rapidity not seen elsewhere in Cetra glyphs. “What was that?” The man shrugged, the movement curious, a hint of a light under the hood. Implausible. “The record indicated that and similar pieces were found during the Nibelheim Mako reactor.” “That was fifty years ago!” Aeris couldn’t help her voice rising. The figure gestured at her frantically. “Sorry, this is an absurd story. Why would Shinra not have told me about these?” “Shinra keeps a lot to itself.” The figure paused and flung back his hood. Blond spikes and a handsome face. But that was secondary to the real curiosity he exhibited. Around each pupil was an unmistakable glowing ring. A SOLDIER. “This-“ he gestured at his eyes. “Was done to me.” “I thought they were clear what signing up would do.” Her voice came out in a murmur, certain that this assumption was far from correct. “I wouldn’t know. I never got a choice.” The man snorted. “Signed up, rejected and then they took me to operate on anyway.” He glanced away from her, face contorted. Something more there. Something worse. Aeris sat down heavily. She still held the metallic circle and struggled to find her voice. “Did- Did you see anything that might suggest what this was?” The man shook his head. “If they knew, they kept that more hidden. But, I think it has something to do with this. He fumbled in some pocket or container beneath this cloak. A larger, jagged chunk of metal was marked with larger glphys. No images. No. A map. A map. A number of the familiar ruins were picked out with other markings on the metal – in addition to Nibelheim. But most interesting was a larger marker as part of an island chain off the coast of the Western continent. Betrayal. Motivated betrayal. What was Shinra’s game? To have her roaming and digging up trinkets while something like this, an entire map lay who knew where? “Where in Nibelheim was this?” “Shinra mansion.” How arrogantly typical. “Thank you, Mr-?” “Strife.” “Strife.” The map was hard to look away from. “I will try and sort some compensation if you could see fit to leaving these with me-“ “Not letting them out of my sight.” He gripped the map tighter. “And I need to see whatever this is through.” “Do you have an archaeological experience?” Aeris doubted it, but coincidences were not unknown. Mr. Strife shook his head. “Then I can’t really take you with me.” “I can help keep you safe.” He looked determined. “And if you follow the map, I think you’ll need it.” Aeris raised her eyebrows. “I thought Nibelheim was quiet?” “It is. But it’d be pointless to go back now; Shinra sent three divisions to that island.” He gestured at the map. “Something’s happening and soon. And I’m certain you’re the only person who might be able to understand what.” No choice at all, but still an odd need to justify it. So many things to do here, mundane – if interesting – versus seeing these other sites. And uncovering the things Shinra saw fit to hide from her. The man seemed justly paranoid about the company. Might be an idea to adopt the same stance. “Very well, Mr. Strife. I think we can come to some arrangement.” That got a smile. “Thank you, Doctor Gainsborough.” “Aeris, please.” “Aeris,” he said. “I’m Cloud.”

#clerith #aerith gainsborough #cloud strife #final fantasy vii #final fantasy #my ffvii fanfic

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barid-bel-medar · 3 years

Note

Could you give us poetic Edda verse headcanons?

Yep! (wow this took longer than planned)

Because this is me, there is a Strife-Shinra connection. Shinra Sr. is married to Claudia’s aunt Renee, sister of Skye Strife (and yes you should think about how Renee sounds like ‘rain’). Strifes frequently end up with...interesting romantic partners (Skye and Claudia both slept with/married gods and there are Suspicions about the general even non-divine lineages of the Strifes [aka there’s also Ancient blood there]). Rufus is not allowed to wander the mountains without older Strife supervision because the Strifes appear to be divine catnip.

All the children are co-parented by the forces of Claudia, Vincent, Ifalna and Gillian. Honestly these are dramatically more stable kids than in canon and understand properly concepts like friendships, parents who love you and want the best for you. Oh and that it is acceptable to be alarmed when the youngest is of full opinion it’s perfectly acceptable to use Nibel wolves and dragons as things to nap on.

Claudia learns both the...weird and hard ways that that Jenovans will basically imprint on her and Cloud. Cloud with Sephiroth, and it becomes clear when their kids it’s never going to be completely platonic or familial, and surprises no one when they get together as adults. On the other hand, Claudia really, really could have done with Jenova herself not imprinting on her (and Vincent). She does not appreciate being groped by tentacles. But it does make a weird sort of sense since Sephiroth and Jenova have their own strange sort of calamitous divinity

In contrast to canon, Cloud never wields a Buster type weapon though both Angeal and Zack still do. Cloud wields duel swords like his mother. His are called Vanadis and Garm. Her’s are called Hati and Skoll. Kudos if you can guess why.

Brian Lockhart is perpetually furious with the Strifes, especially after Cloud helps Tifa run away from home and she ends up a Turk/Tseng’s partner/Rufus’s bodyguard.

(bonus) Everyone who has no clue about Cloud and the connection he has to the Shinras/First Class Trio are incredibly confused to see things like Rufus and Cloud randomly hanging out, Genesis picking Cloud up by the scruff of his neck, Sephiroth and Cloud being very affectionate towards each other, including Cloud’s personal view that Sephiroth is his seat.

#poetic edda verse #sephiroth #cloud strife #claudia strife #vincent valentine #ifalna faramis #gillina hewley #rufus shinra #final fantasy seven #ffvii #final fantasy vii #Anonymous

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pulaasul · 6 years

Text

Final Mix-esque DLC

So there's been talks about a very big paid DLC alongside small free ones. What do you want the paid DLC would contain?

Here's a small list for me.

Playable Guardian of Light.

I feel like we should have played as Ventus, Roxas, Riku, Mickey, Axel, Kairi, Xion and Aqua during their boss fights. For example, when playing as Ventus you need to defeat Vanitas all the while defending yourself from Terra's attacks. That's right, it relegates Sora as a party member this time around.

You have the option to play as Sora or play as any of the guardians of light.

Speaking of playability, I think there should be a situation command with Sora and every guardian of light like

Sora, Aqua and Ventus use a trinity limit in the same vein as the finisher for Mirage Staff

Sora and Riku using that Friendship KeyBlade they had in DDD and in the realm of darkness.

Sora and Mickey Having that Holy Burst ability

Sora and Axel using that fire wall sequence they have when they fought each other but now as allies?

Sora and Kairi using a Faith Move akin to Minnie using Light in KH2 or even akin to Ancient Light during that finisher for the Starlight Keyblade

Sora, Roxas and Xion using Zantetsuken on the enemy at the same time or that Duel Stance reaction command from KH2 with Roxas and the Samurai Nobodies.

Playable training sequence/Tournaments

Kairi vs. Axel fun.

I feel like this could replace the coliseum from Olympus with the added bonus of playable guardians of light ala 358/2 days where we had a playable Donald, Goofy, Mickey and the like.

The added bonus of having FF characters as opponents here. The Chocobros aren't much of an issue here as they already have models for them, same with other FF characters

To be able to visit the world as Sora, just talk to Merlin.

To be able to choose a playable character AFTER the Keyblade Graveyard.

Final Fantasy Opponents Include

Noctis, Ignis, Gladio, Prompto (its a long shot lol, considering Nomura's salty, or so I heard) (Lucii Keyblade)

Cloud Strife and Zack Fair (Shinra-themed keyblade)

Tidus and Jecht (redesigned to match KH Tidus)

Yuffie, Aerith and Tifa (Umbrella keyblade)

The Gullwings

Leon

Sephiroth (Party members are Zack and Cloud) (One Winged Angel)

Visiting the worlds of the links. (It should be noted that they could only make the parts their world where the minigame would be situated and not the other areas)

While obtaining the summon charms can be hard, I feel like there should have been a playable minigame at first to be able to summon the character. Like say earn that character's trust for example. The previous summons from previous games were from worlds that has fallen to darkness it made sense for Fairy Godmother to bring them to the light of sorts.

Wreck-it-Ralph - Sora could, let's say, defend Ralph from the things that were thrown at Ralph. After a set amount of time, the attacks stops and then Sora can summon Ralph.

Ariel - Considering how much Square has definitely improved in their rhythm game elements, I don't see how they couldn't incorporate that as a minigame to get Ariel to be summon-able character. Mer Sora would dance with Ariel using the same songs from KH2 BUT with new animations or animations from the Tangled Dancing sequence just made it okay when using Mer people.

Stitch - Help him escape from a Gantu-sized Heartless

Dream Eaters - Visit Traverse Town and talk to them. That's all

Simba - A race between cub Sora and Simba would be great.

Additional Summons would be great. If I remember right there were no additional summons in the first 2 Kingdom Hearts Final Mixes but since its DLC and they've done this for World of Final Fantasy lol. That's a flimsy excuse but I think a few more previous summons should work. Naturally, you need to complete a minigame to have him available as a Summon.

Genie - Considering that the summons this time are connected to one element. (Simba- Fire, Ariel- Water, Stitch- Thunder, Ralph- Thunder??? I think Genie should have two options. Final Form Genie from KH2 (ala Second Form) or Elemental Genie, I think he should be associated with the element Blizzard.

Genie - As for the mini game associated. I think finding Abu in the deserts of Agrabah should do the trick.

Peter Pan - I think he and Tinkerbell should be associated with the element of Space and cast either Zero Gravity or Magnet and have the option for attack.

Peter Pan - For the minigame, I think a race with Peter Pan around Neverland should do the trick or from the mainland to Skull Island

Zack Fair - A special summon when playing as Aqua and Ventus

Baymax - Considering Sora uses a charm when summoning people, he can summon Baymax from San Fransokyo and heal and deal damage. The attack could still be Interceptor Wing.

I only have 4 additional summons as the character models needed to be created alongside their minigames.

A Ventus vs. Vanitas fight in the Land of Departure adding another reason for playable Ventus.

The Barrier that Aqua put up shouldn't have fallen apart quickly.

First Form

They Kingdom Key and an additional keyblade should have the option to go into First Form. Its KH2's Limit Form, having KH1 Sora's fighting style and color scheme. So if the Situation command shows Second Form, it should also show First Form.

Additional Keyblades

I think a keyblade for completing the summons is a must to reward the player for the effort in getting them and completing all. The Form Change would be Second Form L/First Form L. The finisher would be every summon in the game dealing damage with their respective elements at the same time and having an AOE or Area of Effect.

Shin-ra themed Keyblade. Reward from defeating Zack and Cloud in Merlin's Training Area.

Lucii Keyblade. Reward from defeating the Chocobros. Form Changes: Shield's Guard and Glaive. Shield's guard fights like the shields in the game and the Glaive fights like Ultimate Form minus the floating and the light attacks. Shot lock is summoning different weapons and fling them to the enemy and. Finisher is Time Splicer.

Summer themed keyblade. Reward from defeating Aerith, Yuffie and Tifa. Form Change: Umbrella (Fights like Highwind) Finisher would be a wave of water coming in to drown the enemies. Shotlock is like Counter Shield's and Frying Pan's where Beach Balls fall from the sky and deal damage.

One Winged Angel. Reward for defeating Sephiroth in Merlin's training area. Form Change: Second Form W. Shotlock is FlagRampage, but its Sword Rampage. Finisher is One Slice sidewards.

Merlin themed Keyblade. Reward for completing everything Merlin dished at you in his training area. Form Change: Merlin's Magic. Shot lock: Mirage Shot. Finisher, same as Mirage Staff's finisher, only this time a silhouette of Merlin replaces Sora's silhouettes.

Post Game and New Game+ Keyblade... X-Blade. No Form Changes. But crazy high stats. (That drains a little bit HP and MP when used over time)

Explorable Destiny Islands

A meet up with Sora's friends in the Islands (Tidus, Wakka, Selphie)

A callback to the sparring between Sora and his friends, now grown up.

Tidus and Jecht spar with Sora and Riku.

What do you think?

#sora #kingdom hearts #kingdom hearts 3 #kh3 #kh

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