#elwa

[criticalrolo]

short story for Hal, who is currently trapped in Lady Seryan's highly unethical Medical Experiment Basement while she tries to turn him into an angel

coping mechanisms || halion & elwa, 900 words

“You go away sometimes,” Elwa says.

Halion’s eyes are closed, but he knows she’s there, a few feet to his right. He can hear the lightest click of her fingernails on the tiled floor, her fingers drumming a nervous staccato against a beat he feels thumping in his chest. 

“You think I don’t notice, but I do.” Her voice is resonant and clear as a bell, breaking through the interminable sound of his own hesitant breathing. “You’ll slip away sometimes and be gone for hours.”

She smells like juniper, cool and woody. It cuts through the lemony smell of disinfectant and iodine that still hovers in the room. The combination makes him feel a bit dizzy. It’s not a scent she usually has, but it certainly is more striking than usual. He wonders where she picked it up. 

“Hal?”

“I can hear you.” 

There’s a shuffling of fabric as she scoots across the floor to get closer to him. He can feel the warmth of her bare arm just an inch away from his and the slightest puff of air as she breathes out against his skin. 

“Where do you go, when you leave?”

He hums noncommittally. “I don’t know if there’s a name for it.”

“Is it close?”

He thinks about it for a moment. “Maybe.”

Elwa settles back against the wall. Her circlet clinks against the hard metal, and he wonders if it will leave a mark on the soft gold of the band. He adjusts his shoulders while she shifts around, trying to get comfortable.

“There are so many things I want to ask you, but I don’t know if it’s a good idea.”

“I wouldn’t lie to you.”

“I know.”

He leans his head down towards hers, not quite touching her hair and keeping his eyes closed. “Where do you think I go? When I leave, I mean. In your words.”

Her breath stutters for a moment as she thinks. Hal doesn’t press her. He’s not really sure how to put it into words either. 

“I think,” she says slowly, “that you used to take out the solo ship whenever you had the chance. When the weather was good and you didn’t need me monitoring the atmosphere.”

“I loved flying with you, but sometimes I needed to go alone.”

“You would go to the meadow in the valley outside our base of operations.”

He can feel the warm metal of the handles of the steering wheel in his hands. The pulse of the ship’s arcane core hums through the hull, beating at a steady pace alongside the thrum in his chest and the clicking of Elwa’s nails. 

Elwa’s resonant voice is much less distinct when it burbles through the comm unit. “Oh… are you there now?”

“I’m here.” Sunlight filters in through the panels of the windows. Outside, it’s late evening, and the sky has turned from blue to orange, pink, and purple. Clouds hanging low in the atmosphere glow gold with the reflected rays of the setting sun, while the long blades of wild grass start to flicker with lights from the first fireflies. When Hal pushes the glass windows open, there’s a rush of warm, humid air into the cockpit. He can hear the cicadas and crickets chirping, and the far off songs of sparrows and meadowlarks settling down for the evening in the branches of the trees. 

“Did you come here often?” Elwa asks. 

“I came here when I needed to be reminded I was alive, and so was everything else.”

“How did you remember?”

“Like this.” Hal leaves the windows open, but shifts the engine of the ship from neutral into first gear. The ship takes off down the center of the valley, wind whipping at his hair and the shaved back of his head. His jacket snaps where it flutters at his back, and he can smell the old leather alongside the rich earthy scent of the valley rushing by and the oiled metal of the airship. Outside, the sounds of life crescendo as he soars past them. It rises with a swell, like the sound of the tide gathering before it crashes onto the sand. He is here, and the cicadas are alive, and the sparrows are alive, and he is alive…

Elwa’s voice is gentle in his ear. “Time to come home, I think.”

The steering wheel drops out of his hand as the ship slows to a stop. The sunlight streaming through the window shifts, until it’s not coming through a window at all. It’s light shining bright through the thin skin of his closed eyelids, turning the darkness red.

“Did you find what you were looking for?”

Hal nods. It makes his head ache and the cuts in his forehead and under his eyes twitch oddly. “It’s beautiful, whenever I can go.”

“You don’t think it’s beautiful here?” Elwa sounds thoughtful, and a bit sideways. She must have tilted her head to look at him straight on. 

He smiles, a bit ruefully. “It’s hard for me to tell. Lady Seryan said you’d like the bright lights when you came, but I can’t really see in that spectrum of wavelengths.” 

“Can’t you?” Her voice has a note of pleading in it, like she’s lost and can’t find her way. 

Hal knows, on a conceptual level, that the room is flooded with ultraviolet light, and has been for what feels like a very long time. But Elwa sounds confused, and he is alive, and maybe he can help her. So Halion opens his eyes. 

And opens his eyes. And opens his eyes. 

[oatshow]

some of my many Star Wars OCs, they would never be in this situation (mall trip) but i mostly wanted to draw the tooka backpack and Nine with a little flag.

[fer3112]

Comphet is crazy because what do you mean I didn’t have to traumatize myself with a relationship with a guy I didn’t even want but my brain convinced me I did and how was I able to fool myself for so so many years and live in denial like that what was wrong with my brain

[elwaenergysaver]

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[westerndharm]

[toastmcroasty]

[chompinky]

Lowkey cleaning out my WIP folder so here's my naga oc, Elwa!

[lebojohnb]

Elwa S

[edith-is-a-cat]

guys im awake and took 30 minutes to drink an alani what i thought i elwas faster

[criticalrolo]

who wants to read about Hal having the worst day of his life! Arty and Halion's first meeing (Arty belongs to @actionsurges, thanks for letting me bounce my guy off of yours)

dissonance || Halion & Arty, 2.6K

Hal can’t see. 

That’s not exactly right – his eyes are open. All his eyes are open. The world is completely flooded with ultraviolet light that blocks out everything else around him. There must be something out there beyond the all-consuming radiant light, but it’s so bright that his head feels like someone has reached in and squeezed his brain in a vice-like grip that just won’t let go.

And then there’s the screaming.

It’s a constant, high-pitched shriek echoing in his mind. For a moment, he worries that it belongs to Elwa, that she’s being hurt somewhere. But as it goes on, it sounds closer to a child’s voice, desperate and terrified. The sound reverberates around him, pitching and rolling and coming from all directions, but always at that same agonized pitch. Covering his ears does nothing – it takes him a while to remember how to raise his hands up to find them, and when he finally does the screaming almost seems to intensify. 

He starts to wonder if it’s just one voice, and how it can go on for so long without stopping for air. The longer it stays at the same pitch, the less it sounds like screaming, and the more it sounds like singing. A chorus of voices, in perfect unison, tuned to the same piercing note forever. 

He’d try to fall to his knees, if he could remember how. He’s gone completely blank except for the constant, overwhelming need to make it stop.

Distantly, a handful of words trickle into his mind. Maybe their sound waves are just different enough to register underneath all the noise, he’s not exactly sure, but he thinks he hears the words “what did you do,” a laugh that sends a bolt of adrenaline through him, and “replacement.” The scream rolls on, and he wonders if his ears are bleeding. Or if he still has ears at all. 

Something shifts in the light. It’s not that he can make out any details – more like he can see a shadow where the light used to be more intense. It’s vaguely humanoid in shape, although it towers over him by a full foot at least. The light still blinds him, but he thinks something like an arm reaches out to touch him.

His mind locks onto the movement like a rabid dog clamping down on a limb and refusing to let go. Something instinctive at the base of his brain says that stopping the shadow goes hand in hand with escape, and before he has time to register what he’s doing, he’s lashed out at the shadow faster than even he thought possible.

He must be holding something in his left hand, because he rams it through the shadow with all the strength he can muster. 

Something beats underneath his breastbone, around the intersection point of the Y-shaped scar carved into his chest. He remembers – Lady Seryan pushing her hands into the incision, pulling at his bones from the inside out, and his own faint voice gasping out the oath she’d drilled into his memory while the room lit up with otherworldly light. Whatever lives inside his chest is thrashing wildly, spreading out beneath his skin, racing down his arm and driving into the shadow. It staggers backwards, giving Hal an opening to jam his right hand up as well to let even more energy pour out of him.

The shadow twists, in pain or in shock, and then brings its other limb around to smash into Hal’s torso like a hammer.

The ongoing scream pulses, pounding in time to the beat of the thing crushing his heart. Hal’s head is spinning violently as he reels back, trying to duck when the shadow swings again and getting caught in the side for his trouble. He makes a sound halfway between a shout and a snarl, like a feral animal, and tries to go for the thing’s legs. He thinks he slashes it in the hip, sending out a surge of energy as he does his utmost to destroy this thing before it’s too late. 

Something whispers he’s done enough damage to kill most things in the universe, but… not enough for whatever this is. 

The shadow pulls itself free from where Hal tried to cut it in half, then grabs him around the middle. Hal jolts, terrified, as the shadow grapples him and pins his arms in a mockery of a bear hug. He writhes in the thing’s grip and grabs onto its thigh, trying one last time to smite it out of existence, but the shadow doesn’t even seem fazed. Hal tries to twist away, and it grabs the back of his skull. Before he can try anything else, it bashes his head into something solid with a sickening crack.

Hal goes limp in the shadow’s arms. Suddenly everything, even the cacophonous screaming and blinding white light, seems very far away. Underneath the screams he can hear enraged shouting that sends a shudder through him. The screaming twists and roils, coming at him from all sides, so he’s not quite sure he hears the quick “sorry!” before something smashes into his head one more time.

This time the world goes dark and still.

He wonders what Elwa would do if she was here. 

When he starts to come back around, the only high pitched ringing he hears feels natural instead of otherworldly. His eyes are closed. Just his two eyes. He spends a moment drifting in the comparable quiet before he realizes the ground is swaying beneath him because he’s being carried.

He jerks forward automatically, writhing and trying to escape.

“Woah – hey, stop, stop! You’re okay!” The arms holding him clutch him tighter.

He blinks, trying to clear his blurry vision enough to figure out what’s going on. A face swims into focus above him out of the dark. An absolute giant of a man has him hoisted in his arms, carrying him bridal style without breaking a sweat. He has shaggy brown hair, heavily scarred facial features, and green gold eyes that won’t quite meet his. Hal realizes it’s because the man is looking at the scars carved into his own face, like he’s searching for something. 

“What – ” Hal croaks, barely gasping out a sound before he’s doubling over again, choking on some strange dark fluid that bubbles up his throat and splatters out against the giant’s chest. It joins an assortment of deep red stains on the man’s coat, and Hal realizes that he is covered in blood. 

A foggy memory surfaces of an enormous shadow he’d repeatedly tried to hack to death. Hal feels the blood drain out of his face as guilt coils like a snake in his gut and starts to burn. 

“Did I hurt you?” he mumbles thickly, trying to figure out how the stranger holding him is still standing at all, and why he apparently didn’t finish the job killing Hal.

The stranger smiles, just faint enough to make the scar cutting through his top lip twitch. “Hey, it’ll take more than a few hits to kill me. I’m fine.”

He’s still coated in blood, sweat, and whatever black substance Hal just spit all over him. Hal sluggishly raises his hand and presses it over the man’s heart. Something tugs in his chest, and he feels the dredges of magical energy pass like sludge through his veins as he tries to heal the man up as much as he can in one burst.

“Oh, you don’t have to – you definitely should save that for yourself.” The man shifts to carrying him in one arm so he can pull Hal’s hand away. “You’re gonna need it if you’re gonna get out of here.”

Hal’s mind goes blank in a terrifyingly familiar way. “Get… out?” The words rattle around his skull and for a second he can’t even process what he means.

“Yeah, I’m getting you out of the Kennels. You do want to leave, right? You don’t want to stay here with Seryan, or whatever’s left over of her by the time we’re finished.” The man looks blatantly concerned, and his fingers flex tighter where they’re gripping his arms and legs.

Hal’s stomach spins like he’s in freefall, even as the stranger's arms stay locked tight around him. He hasn’t entertained the idea of leaving this place in what feels like years, but now that he’s heard the words it’s like he can’t parse anything else. He stares up at the man – his rescuer – with wide eyes and gives him a nod. He doesn’t trust his voice not to shake if he tries to speak as he’s seized by the almost physical presence of the idea of escaping. 

“Oh good, that’s going to make this way easier,” the man says, clearly relieved. He comes to a stop by a window. Glancing out through the frosted panes of glass, Hal can see it’s late at night, moonlight barely peeking through the heavy grey clouds of mist that cover Metrol. They are also somewhere close to the top of one of the remaining vermishards, several hundred feet high. 

Hal abruptly realizes he hasn’t seen the sky in years and barely stops himself from swaying as the man sets him down on his feet. His knees threaten to buckle, and fortunately the man grabs his shoulders to help him balance as he pulls himself together. 

“You all good?” he asks. Hal nods silently.

“Great. You were casting spells earlier – you have anything left in the tank that’ll get you down to the ground safely from here?”

Two nerve points on his back between his shoulder blades blaze hot at the idea of finally unfurling up high in the air like they were supposed to. He nods again.

The man unsheathes the weapon holstered at his side. Hal tamps down the instinctive urge to fight or run that flares to life and keeps himself stock still while the man shatters the window with his lance sword. 

“Once you get to the ground, keep yourself hidden while we finish this here, and then wait for me to come find you. We’ll be keeping everyone pretty distracted. If you need help, look out for members of the Unbroken. That’s the resistance movement I helped start in Metrol. You can tell them that Artorias sent you.” The man – Artorias – is searching his face for something. It takes him a moment to figure it out.

“...I’m Hal. Halion,” he says.

“Good to meet you, Hal. And…I’m sorry about this.” Artorias gives him a tired smile, and Hal wonders what on earth he thinks he has to be sorry for. “You should get out of here. I’ll see you on the other side!”

And then Artorias is running off, sprinting back towards the faint sounds of fighting drifting in from down the hallway, still only half healed and coated in blood.

The wind is howling through the broken window. Escape smells like smoke and iron from the fight behind him and the city below him.

Smoke, iron, and ozone as his wings flare to life with the sound of a thousand screaming (singing?) voices in his head and he leaps into the open air.

He’s never flown higher than ten or twenty feet. The ceilings in the basements of the Kennels weren’t high enough for Seryan to experiment with taller heights. Hurtling through wide open space is immediately far different, and for a heart-stopping second he can’t figure out how to angle his flight feathers to slow his fall at all. He whirls in the air, the wind blowing past him at a shrieking pitch, before he snaps his wings open wide and pulls himself out of free fall into a sharp descending glide. 

He’s done it. He’s out, he’s free, he –

The flash and shock wave of the explosion hit him before the sound, punching the breath out of his lungs and sending him careening wildly through the air again.

He gasps, struggling to flap hard enough to pull himself upright, but managing to twist back around to the vermishard, because he has to see what just happened. He turns just in time to see the billowing tower of smoke expelled from the gaping hole that used to be the top of the vermishard, and a tall figure in a long bloodied coat plummeting towards the ground with no way to slow his fall.

Hal lets out a choked moan as he realizes what’s happened, and blindly takes off after the figure, but without anything to slow him… Artorias drops out of sight towards the ground within a second. 

Hal can’t breathe. He’s hovering in the air, wings pumping hard to keep him in place, and he can’t breathe. If the sound of alarms from the ground and Queen’s Guard searchlights pointed up at the sky hadn’t shocked him into movement, he’s not sure he would have remembered how to move.

No one could have survived that fall. Certainly no one already battered half to death by a failed experiment lashing out blind against a hand that tried to help it.

Hal lands in a dark alley, touching the ground outside the Kennels for the first time in years.

“What did you do?” Elwa shrieks behind him. Her hands shove into the back of his neck, grabbing him and digging in her nails into his skin. He staggers, wanting nothing more than to sink to his knees and let the ground swallow him up.

“You killed him, you monster, you killed him,” she moans. “He gave you the chance to get out of hell and you killed him!”

“I know,” Hal says hoarsely. He spits out more of the black bile still coming up his throat. There’s no way he lived. He’s dead and it’s his fault. 

“You can’t go to the Unbroken now. You killed their leader. They’ll kill you too and you’ll deserve it.” Elwa’s nails are like claws, piercing through the skin of his back. 

“I know.”

He can’t go to the Unbroken. But he can’t stay here, either. The sirens are starting to ring in this sector, and already he can see lights turning on inside windows as people start to investigate what’s going on outside. Soon this whole street will be swarming with Queen’s Guards, and no matter how heavy he feels inside, he will not be returning to the Kennels in any capacity whatsoever. 

He turns towards the maze of dark alleys behind him, and runs. 

[ithinkmyskullburns]

"That really scared me."

((From Dani - @saltandburnandwhiskey ))

"Afe you alright?" Johnny asked and looked into the rear mirror if another creature was following them. It elwas definitely the first time that a undead bear had attacked him. "Someone definitely doesn't want us to be here." He said while Dani was driving.

[alex99a]

The Far Side for Tuesday January 2.

-----------------------------------

"Cow..."

"I gotta go Julie, we got cows..."

"ANOTHER cow..."

"Actually I think that was the same one..."

-----------------------------------

From TWISTER, Bill Paxton, Helen Hunt, Cary Elwas and Jami Gertz as Melissa. Directed by Jan De Bont, Warner Brothers 1996.

BUT... Gary Larson thought of it first.

[elwaenergysaver]

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[professoroaksboytoy]

75%

75% Describe your most recent experience with buttsex.

From memory I topped him.i honestly don't really remember it elwas a while ago and obviously not memorable 😅

[breakfromwork]

June 6-July 6th, Washington

We wandered downtown Port Angeles on the June 6th, where we posed with one of the dozens of sculptures around town.

On the 7th, we headed up to Deer Park to take a spectacular view of Hurricane ridge we'd been told about... gorgeous as promised.

Gae was preparing for the upcoming Port Angeles Garden Club meeting, creating a hat with a bee on it (Bee in a Bonnet theme), arriving at this colorful display:-)

My buddy Mike came out to PA for a bike ride on the Adventure Trail portion of the Discovery trail... great ride with nice views. Now we just need to cover the remaining 25 miles!

My nephew Zach, his girlfriend Iris, and their new family addition, Joey came to visit on the 16th, where we wandered the Peabody Creek trail that runs by the end of our block.

Zach's Mom and Dad joined in the visit on the 18th, where we caught up since our last visit at Christmas. Three generations!

Gae and I attended the PA Garden Club luncheon on the 19th, for a nice lunch and live entertainment (member presentations).

Gae and I rode the Discovery Trail along the waterfront to check out the areas of her responsibility in her new role at the Garden Club. Thankfully a large volunteer group will spread the load maintaining the trail and garden beds downtown.

The neighbor's girlfriend stopped by with 9 German Shepherd puppies she was selling. I gotta say, timing is everything, as Gae happened to hear them yipping, checked out the noise and added another member to the family. Meet Raina:-) Kind of hard to see between the two white pups.

I got over to Seattle for a round of golf with Andy and Mike on the 29th, followed by a Mariners game on the 30th. The team started well, but was crushed by the end of the game... fun time in spite of the score.

July 2nd I joined our visitors Debb and Kipp for a tide-pooling session out at Salt Creek Rec Area in the perfect weather.

It was a great day for seeing some amazing creatures in the pools, like this purple Sea Urchin.

Gae skipped the tide pooling to join in on a church group hike to Madison Falls, near the Elwa River.

Rob and Ben joined us for the weekend of July 3rd, and were happy to get up to Deer Park to take in the views. Behind them is Port Angeles with the Ediz Hook and the Strait of Juan De Fuca.

We made another trip to Deer Park with Kipp and Deb on the 4th, where the haze from Canadian Fires shortened viewing distances.

We took the Blackball ferry to Victoria on the 6th to visit Butchart Gardens... another flawless day:-)

The gardens were as spectacular as we remembered from our last visit over 30 years ago.

Here's Deb and Kipp in a tunnel of roses.

Gae wanted to ride the carousel, but we limited her to the bronze stationary horse... chalk up another injury free outing!

We headed for Chinatown after the gardens for some food, where we had to travel the narrowest street in Victoria. Built originally to keep the police from approaching illicit business by horse, giving owners and patrons time to hide their dirty laundry. I would HIGHLY recommend the Fan Tan Cafe, and specifically Spicy Lo Wor Won Ton, unbelievable good!