#first time web weaving so this might suck but plan on making more

[klynnlastname]

What My Bones Know - Stephanie Foo / Dear Wormwood - The Oh Hellos / Alicent Hightower - Olivia Cooke / Letter to My Father - Franz Kafka / Ptolemaea - Ethel Cain / Lacrimosa - Nicola Samori / The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath - Sylvia Plath / The No You Never Listened To - Meggie C. Royer / The Reluctant Bride - Auguste Toulmouche / On Finding the Freedom to Rage Against Our Fathers - Minda Honey 

The Queen Who was Taken From

[handy-dandy-monster-candy]

Nymrius

Rating: NSFW Length: 1546 Pairing: Male Drider x Male Reader (both cis)

Pure filth. *Blows kiss* For the spider lovers out there.

xxx

Hanging upside down from a thread of silk wasn’t the first thing I thought would happen on a weekend evening, but I would be lying if I said it was my first time. This instance was significantly less sexy, however, and I was sure the kind of eating that was planned wasn’t the pleasurable sort. “Getting desperate?” I asked, trying to ignore the pressure of the blood rushing to my head in favour of looking up at my captor.

“Shut up,” said the young drider who was dragging me up into his web, thin arms struggling with my weight. Driders always were on the delicate side, and I was anything but; I’d make a few meals for him yet, I reckoned.

“I might have the right to remain silent, but I lack the capacity,” I said, struggling to get a better view of my soon-to-be-murderer. “Afraid for my life and all. You understand.”

“I said, ‘be quiet’!” the drider snapped, though his voice trembled.

“‘Shut up’, actually,” I quipped, letting out an embarrassing squeak when I was heaved the rest of the way up in one unceremonious yank.

“Are all humans this odious?” the drider muttered, chest heaving almost as much as mine was.

“Only the ones who don’t want to die.”

“Well, neither do I,” the drider quavered, stubbornly beginning to wind me up in his silk. “I’m sorry, but I have to feed.”

“Couldn’t hunt something smaller?”

Acid yellow eyes narrowed in my direction, gleaming in the twilight. “If you must know, no. They were too quick for me.”

“You look much too old to be a helpless spiderling. What’s the matter? New management saw you as a threat?”

The drider bristled, hissing at me. “I should bite you just to silence you.”

“But you won’t,” I reasoned, “because you don’t have the venom for it. You’re not a hunter. You’re a weaver.”

“And just what gave you that idea?”

“You’re wasting your silk on me and crying. You’re no hunter.”

Thin hands scrambled up to wipe beneath the drider’s wide, shimmering eyes, his breaths hiccuping sharply in shock. He scowled at me thunderously, and if he’d had the venom, I’m sure he would have bitten me just as he’d threatened.

“Now what?” I asked, looking up into his face from my odd, twisted angle. “You’ve either got to kill me or wait for me to die. Do you have the stomach for either?”

“I don’t have a choice now, do I?” he waspishly replied, crossing his arms over his lithe chest. “Seeing as ‘management’ saw me as a threat for their precious offspring, I now have to fend for myself.”

“And you’ve up and managed to hunt yourself a hunter,” I laughed, helplessly amused. “Let me free and I’ll hunt you all the food you can fit in that pretty belly.” The drider flushed red at my words, which was both exactly what I was expecting and a pleasant surprise. “Oh, so it wasn’t your weaving that was a threat, but your appetite.”

“Bite your tongue!” hissed the drider, jabbing me painfully with one of his hard, slender legs. “What would you know of my ‘appetite’?”

I coughed the air back into my lungs, grinning widely; perhaps the blood rushing to my head was making me more reckless, or maybe it was my own appetite rearing up for one last hoorah before I was put out to pasture for good. Either way, I found myself saying, “Put your sweet cock in my mouth and find out.”

The drider squeaked. Mortified, no doubt, and by the looks of his shimmying against his webbing, aroused. Of course out of all the driders that could have caught me, I’d been caught by a prim and proper little beast.

“Come on,” I wheedled, going breathless at the prospect of what I was suggesting. “Give a man his dying wish to make a pretty thing like you come in his mouth.”

“Oh, gods,” whispered the drider, hiding his face in his hands as his thorax quivered. “It’s a trick. You’ll bite me.”

“Only if you want me to, sweetheart,” I purred, and delighted in the way he shivered from head to spinneret. “What have you got to lose? I’m dead anyway. I might as well rub myself off against this silk of yours before I go.”

The drider swore, eyeing me venomously and shifting closer with something between wariness and anticipation. “I’ll make your death painful if you hurt me,” he warned, and I nodded as he climbed over me, revealing a silvery-pink prick almost as long as my arm. My mouth watered as he pressed the slender, tapered tip to my lips, slipping my tongue out to taste him and groaning as his slickness coated the inside of my mouth with a gentle bittersweetness. He swore again above me as I took him into my mouth, sucking gently and pushing him against the insides of my cheeks as best I could.

“So good,” I whispered when I came up for air, wriggling my own erection up against my bindings as much as possible. “Look at you, so hard for me. Having me all tied up get to you, pretty boy? Like having the power?”

“Oh, gods, shut up,” the drider groaned, though judging by the way his prick twitched and throbbed, I’d hit the nail right on the head. I slipped my tongue into the little opening at the head of his cock and swirled it about, trying to hide my surprise at the way he cried out and ground down against the roof of my mouth. The next time, I applied a touch of teeth, nibbling at the opening and being rewarded by a healthy spurt of pre over my hungry tongue. We both moaned when I slurped him back into my mouth and lifted my head to have him grind against the back of my throat, his long, slender fingers spearing into my hair as he slid further and deeper into me.

Watching him was a madman’s wet dream. He bit at his fingers to quiet himself and gyrated his hips, rocking himself into my throat and teasing his body with his small, dexterous hands. Figures that I’d find a new passion on my last night on earth, but I was determined to see this whole thing through to the end, whatever end that may be. I redoubled my efforts and relished in his twitches and moans, losing myself to the breathless rhythm of riding him with my throat until he pulled away, leaving a string of pre and saliva joining my lips with his cock.

“What’re you doing?” I slurred, but he didn’t answer, instead moving around me and shifting me around until I was on my front, knees glued to my chest with silk and ass in the air. I twitched when I felt him cut away the silk and fabric of my trousers covering my aforementioned ass, then squeaked in my own right when I felt his cock grinding against my taint and balls. “Easy,” I gasped, cheek stuck to the silk beneath me. “Easy, baby, you haven’t even—“

“Hush,” the drider hissed, pushing insistently against my entrance and making a high noise of triumph when he made his way in, slick and persistent.

“Fuck,” I wheezed, tightening around him reflexively and finding that the intrusion barely bothered me more than my own fingers.

“Oh, I intend to,” the drider purred, pushing into me with tight, shallow thrusts that slicked up my insides and eased more of his dick inside me as he went. It was tapered at the end but broadened considerably as the length trailed on, and it wasn’t long before I was sobbing for mercy beneath my unruly lover. I was going to be gaping if I survived this, and I must have said so, because he laughed above me, grinding his thorax against my back and making me moan pitifully. “I’ve changed my mind about killing you,” he whispered as he fucked me, speaking between my wanton groans and the lewd noises coming from our slippery union.

“You might kill me yet,” I managed to choke out, though my traitorous body was already starting to push back against his cock, greedy for the fullness he offered. “Oh, fuck, at least tell me your name.”

“Nymrius,” he answered, soft and sibilant, and dug his nails into my skin when I echoed it a moment later when he thrust deep into my ass.

“Nymrius,” I said over and again, a prayer and a plea all at once. “Nymrius! Fuck me. Please fuck me. Not going anywhere. I’m yours. Trapped. Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Nymrius snarled, pistoning his hips into me hard enough to make me see stars, over and over again until I came hard enough that I wasn’t sure he hadn’t bitten me to make my insides liquid in the first place. “I can’t believe I let you talk me into that,” he muttered somewhere above me after several moments spent catching our breaths, and I laughed.

“I’ll hunt you a damn bear if that’s what you want. Just don’t stop fucking me tonight.”

The drider sucked his teeth. “Are all humans this obnoxious?”

“Only the ones who want to live.”

[scorsoneamelia]

You may be able to write sth about link being sick or sth about then having a second child or amelia and link doing a research together

omg omg ok i like this!! it’s taken me a while to write because i’ve been out of town and i miss amelink :((( FLUFFY AMELINK!!! this sucks and i’ve been editing it for days but fluffy link isn’t my strongest pieces but i’m planning on doing better send me more inspiration too because writers block lmao also im so sorry it wouldn’t let me add a Keep Reading thingy so sorry that this takes up ur feed :(        Most would agree that Autumn was the best season of the year, trees changing colours from yellows to oranges before shredding their leaves onto the grass. People wearing sweaters and hoodies, tea and hot chocolate in their hands. Fall gave you a warm feeling, a season that everyone couldn’t wait for. It was October 31st--- Halloween. The evening was cool, a crisp breeze that was enough to make you want to wrap a blanket around yourself and drink a warm cup of hot chocolate. It wasn’t freezing out there, but it was definitely cool. The house was decorated with Halloween decorations; inside and outside. Link went all out this year, buying as many Halloween products he could get his hands onto. The entire front yard, and front of the house had skeletons, witches, spiders, spider webs, ghosts; literally everything and anything. He had spent an entire day climbing onto the roof, even using ladders to get up higher onto the trees and roof of the house so that he could make the house look as scary as possible. Amelia never got a decision in a Halloween costume for Scout, Link just showed up with a pumpkin costume and insisted that it was the costume.         Zola went as a doctor; neurosurgeon she specified. “Just like my dad.” It wasn’t even a tough choice for her, it was the first costume in mind and that’s what she wanted to go as all year. Bailey was a superhero---Spiderman. And Ellis; a princess. They all had the day off, all planning to go trick or treating with the kids-- at least that was the plan.         “It’s okay, just go.” Link insisted, he was curled up onto the couch, two thick blankets covering his body and he was sweating. “I’m not letting this be the reason you miss Scout’s first Halloween.” Link came down with a flu the night before, a slight fever and nausea. Although he’d never admit it, he was a baby and as much as he wanted Amelia to stay home with him, he’d never tell her that.         The wood burning in the fireplace was cracking, hot chocolate was being made, Halloween movies were playing on the television; a perfect night. Perfect aside from the fact Link was literally shivering while also having beads of sweat running down his forehead. “Link,” Amelia started. “You’re sick.”          “I’ll bring Scout out with us,” Meredith offered. “He’ll be back in an hour.” She stood at the front door, Scout already in his pumpkin costume in a secure stroller, Zola with a pillow case slung over her shoulder because she wanted to get as much candy as she could. Bailey already had one foot out of the door and Ellis’ hand was gripped onto Maggie’s and she was jumping on the balls of her feet.          “Can we go now? Can we go now?” Ellis begged, only tugging on Maggie’s hand towards the door. Amelia turned to Link, gave him a what should I do? face. She didn’t want to leave Link at the house by himself, and she most definitely didn’t want to miss Scout in a cute pumpkin costume on his first Halloween.           “Okay, wait,” Amelia reached for her cellphone, pulling open the camera app before making her way over to Scout. “I need pictures before you go.” His head was slightly titled to the side, his cheeks chubby and he was sleeping. A drop of drool sitting in the crease of his cheeks, and Amelia’s heart melted.           “You guys already have so many pictures.” Maggie laughed, remembering the night Link bought the costume and raced to put it on Scout to see if it fit, and when it was a perfect fit Link was taking hundreds of pictures and videos.            “There’s never enough pictures.” The smile on Amelia’s face was genuine, it reached her eyes, you could see the happiness in her blue eyes and she just loved him so much. She can’t remember the last time she was this happy, or when the last time she was living such a perfect moment.            “Let’s go! Can we go?” Bailey begged now, already grabbing onto the door knob and twisting it open. Zola followed, adjusting the fake stethoscope around her neck. Before Meredith could push Scout’s stroller through the front door, Amelia was leaning forward and planting a soft kiss on her sons face.           “Have fun, baby. Daddy and I love you so much.” Scout was still asleep, and the other kids were already out of the front door before Maggie was pulling it shut, giving Amelia a wave before it was just the two of them.            “You know you could have went with them.” Link said, his voice hoarse from getting sick and emptying out his stomach from earlier in the day. “I can take care of myself.” He was pulling the blanket up higher onto his body, as if the house was freezing even though it was warm, the fire burning in the fireplace.            “I’ll make you some tea,” she ignored his request. “Or would you rather hot chocolate?” She was already in the kitchen and before Link could answer she was pouring him a warm tea.           Minutes later she was making her way back, a hot chocolate for herself in one hand and a tea in the other. The Nightmare Before Christmas was playing on the television, a movie Zola picked for her and Uncle Link to watch while she was waiting for her siblings to get ready. Amelia was already sitting down on the couch beside Link, passing him his tea.          “Thank you,” he said softly and wrapping his hands around the warm cup. “Amelia, you really didn’t have to stay.”          “Well, it’s too late now. I’m here, I’m staying and we’ll watch movies, and hand out candy to trick or treaters,” she grabbed onto the end of the blanket Link was using to cover her legs up with it. “All while you rest. Sleep---get better.”           “Well, some cuddles from you might just do the trick.” And Link was resting his head in her lap, the blanket covering both of them while Amelia’s hands were running through his sandy blonde hair, in hopes to relax him.           The movie was only playing for ten minutes before she heard a soft snore come out of Link’s mouth, Amelia’s fingers still weaving through his hair, and he was sleeping. That was the goal, he needed to sleep. A new baby doesn’t exactly give them the most time throughout the night to get a full night’s rest, and Link being sick wasn’t helping. So she was going to let him sleep, even though she won’t be moving up from this spot on the couch until he wakes, and she didn’t really mind.          The popping off the fireplace, the television on, kids laughter coming from the streets, Link snoring softly in her lap, and Scout was cute. These are the moments people lived for, these moments--- are the reasons she’s happy that she’s sober and that she’s happy she’s alive. 

[kat0v01]

Their costumes at the palace spooky ball

**the palace is decorated regardless of the pairing**

Asra:

After some consideration, Asra emerges from the bedroom in a long, flowing (color) cape and matching suit. His hair is slick back and he has dabbed a little black makeup under his eyes for a sunken, tired effect. Little fangs stick out of the corners of his mouth and whenever he smiles, he reveals the shiny little teeth. Impressed with his vampire costume, you jokingly ask if he's going to suck your blood. He shakes his head and brings you taut against his body. With a sly smile, he says he doesn't feed off of blood, but kisses from you. Placing a chaste kiss along your neck, he hums to himself before pouting and saying that that wasn't nearly enough. You place a kiss against his lips and ask if that was any better. He replies that it was better, but he's nowhere close to satisfied. You spend most of the night at the palace with Asra's arms draped around your waist. When you both go to the ballroom to dance, he holds you close, placing kisses on your face and neck which keep you smiling the rest of the night.

Faust:

Even Faust wants to get dressed up for the occasion. You and Asra both decide the outfit cannot be too big or tight because it might constrict her movements. Together, you weave a little yellow flower ring which when placed on her head, made for a very cute sunflower costume. She flicked her tongue and swayed happily, repeating 'sunshine! sunshine!' which Asra affectionately called her.

Julian:

As a thespian, Julian needs little excuse to dress up, so of course, the one day of the year when it is totally normal and acceptable to dress weirdly, he's definitely going to take it. His words, not yours. You catch him in the early afternoon, thinking deeply in the bedroom. When you ask him what's wrong, thinking it's something serious, he turns to you with a woeful look and confesses that he doesn't know what to wear. Rolling your eyes at his dramatics, you ask him what he wants to dress up as, but never has the opportunity. He thinks on it before getting an idea and digging through the closet. He tells you to turn around and keep your eyes closed while he puts something together. You comply and listen to his loud rustling and excited murmuring until he tells you to turn back around. He quirks an eyebrow as you take in his outfit--the usual black pants he dons, a scraggly grey wig, long white coat and spectacles. You say that this is hardly a costume with a laugh and he chuckles. Getting another idea, he tells you to look away and with a few more rustles and clangs he tells you to look again. This time, he is dressed in black tights with a loose-fitting shirt tucked into the top, a fake wooden sword at his side and a skull in his hand. He poses dramatically for you and you clap appreciatively. He says that this time, he is going as a forlorn soldier who has lost the love of his life back home to invaders and he travels stormy seas seeking vengeance against those who wronged him. You nod approvingly at the backstory and curiously ask where he got the skull to which he hurriedly replies that you don't need to worry about that. When you both attend the ball later that evening, he drunkenly recites romantic sonnets to you, typically within earshot of whatever audience that might happen to be nearby and you spend a lot of the night dragging him away from large crowds.

Muriel:

Muriel has no interest in going anywhere much less a palace full of people standing close together. You offered to make him a costume which he refused. Then you suggest a couple of other ideas and he asks if he can go as a ghost to which you refused. Stumped, you tell him he can keep his normal clothes if he lets you paint his face. His face twists up at the thought, but you stand there, arms crossed and resolute. Sighing, he nods defeatedly and you smile, excitedly getting your supplies ready. You still have to kneel in front of him to reach his face even though he is sitting on the floor. You add some black makeup lightly under his eyes for a dramatic, shadowy look and around other parts of his face where you see fit. He sits patiently as you work, watching you fish for more colors from your supplies. Soon, you're done and you pull his hood over his head and marvel at the spooky effect. You ask Inanna, who is laying down nearby, what she thinks. She sits up and walks over to Muriel and sniffs him before cocking her head to the side cutely. Muriel smiles and gives her a scratch behind the ears as you announce it's time to go. Muriel tells Inanna to watch the hut before leaving with you. It's as Muriel imagined: packed. You reach for his hand to reassure him and pull him towards a less crowded area. You spot Asra and wave him over. He comes up to you both with a smile and looks in awe at Muriel. He exclaims that he looks great as Muriel quietly says thank you. You both spend the night chatting with Asra, hand in hand.

Portia:

Portia is even more enthused about the party than you are. In her excitement, she spoils plans for some of the party rooms. Embarrassed, she asks you not to reveal anything she said to anyone and you laugh and agree to keep it a secret. You both decide it would be fun to invite over a few friends for a small day party before going out that evening to the palace. Julian, Mazelinka, Asra and Muriel come by in the afternoon. All of you have a nice lunch that you and Portia made and chat happily about the party later that night. In the early evening, everyone leaves to get dressed and you and Portia rush to get changed yourselves. Portia emerges in a pirate outfit, complete with an eyepatch she borrowed from Julian and an impressively large pirate hat. She claps approvingly at your costume, and you set out together. You arrive at the palace a little early and Portia takes you on a sneak preview of all the extravagant decorations and party rooms. After wandering around, you both stand at the balcony above the ballroom and watch the guests trickle in before deciding to go down there and join the festivities.

Nadia:

The responsibility to plan and organize all of the decorations and party rooms fall on Nadia's shoulders since Lucio can't be bothered to see it through. The courtiers don't offer much help either, you've heard from Portia, as they spend most of the time panicking about all the things that need to get done. You come down to the palace early in the day as servants fix the final touches on all of the decorations. You find Nadia rubbing her temple in her empty meeting room right after a conference with all of the other courtiers. You ask if she is okay and she replies that she just finished organizing everything and it will all be done by the time the party starts. You suggest she relax in her room for a while and she agrees, asking a servant outside to bring tea to her room. A couple hours later, you are summoned to her room where she has several costumes laid out for you to try. She tells you to pick whichever one you like as she goes to try on her own. All of the options look less like costumes and more like the elegant outfits people in the palace wear all the time. You pick one that suits your tastes and wait for Nadia to show you hers. She comes back to you in an elaborate chainmail dress that is reminiscent of a soldier's uniform complete with one of her real swords. You nervously ask her if that's safe and she laughs, replying that if need be, she can protect you. You blush at her affection and she interlocks arms with you and says it's time to enjoy the party. Funnily enough, the few people who come to greet her do so with apprehension, so in the end, she's able to spend more time with you.

Valerius:

Valerius already spends an annoyingly large amount of time around nobles and other dignitaries. He knows he can't get out of attending the palace party, but he refuses to dress up upon your request. He says something about it being ridiculous and a waste of time. You suggest he goes as a grape for obvious reasons and he glares at you, saying your joke isn't funny. Giving up, you ask him what he wants to do. A few minutes later, you're both leaning against the wall in the ballroom, sipping wine. You chat about the nobles who are attending, the different costumes on display, but soon start laughing instead at the ones whose outfits are too ridiculous. Occasionally, your jokes almost make Valerius snort his wine trying to contain giggles. When it becomes too much, you retreat to a balcony for some fresh air and a chance to release more giggles.

Lucio:

Lucio oversees the start of decorations for the party, but then loses interest. You ask him why he's not supervising and he replies that he trusts his people to do a good job and that planning is boring; he just wants to party. You roll your eyes at his dismissiveness, but know that there's no changing that distracted streak of his. The day of the party, the palace is decorated top to bottom and each room is a contest in excessiveness and grandeur: one room is a massive goat head ice sculpture with the featured blood red drink of the evening pouring out of the eyes. Clearly, that one was inspired. Another is a mess of spider webs covering the walls and floor where partygoers can bounce around. When most of the guests have arrived, Lucio comes down the grand ballroom staircase in a long, fur-trimmed golden cape and matching golden suit. Atop his head sits a golden crown with inlaid rubies and emeralds. Of course, Lucio would dress up as the king of his own party, but that's not very surprising to you. He initially wanted to go as the devil, but you quickly talked him out of it. He next suggested to go as a sexy gladiator which you also shot down. Lucio was a little disappointed at first, but then smiled coyly and winked, saying that he understood your meaning and that it'd be for your eyes only. You told him that's not what you meant, but it's too late. This was the story and he's sticking to it. At the party, Lucio walks you around to all the nobles and introduces you, very pleased that he has someone as wonderful as you by his side. Maybe he partly wants to show you off too. You are certain you catch him staring at you at different times throughout the night with a blush on his face. After the pleasantries, you both wander through the party rooms hand in hand, enjoying each other's company.

Devil:

You tell the Devil about the palace party and ask if he's going to dress up. He isn't interested at first, but since you are so enthusiastic about going, he decides he can make some time for it. You don't know exactly when he will show up. You told him the time, but you know the Devil runs on his own time. You wander around the palace rooms when you are alarmed by the shrill sound of screams from the ballroom. Cursing to yourself, you dart back to find the Devil standing in the middle of the room with a few partygoers passed out on the ground in front of him. You push past the crowd and grab his arm, pulling both of you out of there. In the corridor, you angrily ask him what he thinks he's doing. He smirks down at you and declares that he has the best spooky costume.

Magician:

The Magician is fascinated by this spooky holiday and is happy that you asked him to go. You tell him what time the party starts and he agrees to meet you. You wait outside the palace gates, not wanting to go in without him when you feel a tap on your shoulder. Whisking around, you giggle as you see it's the Magician with a black bandit mask tied around his eyes. You ask him what he is supposed to be and he recounts a time when he reminded you of something and you called him a sneaky fox and then another time you described the bandits you and Asra apprehended on the countess's request. Realizing he just put two and two together, you laugh and reply that it is a very unconventional costume choice, but you like it. You make a mental note to show him other costume ideas he might like instead. He beams proudly and extends an arm to you to lead you inside. Most people look on in awe. It's not so much the bandit "costume;" it's a really niche get-up after all. Partygoers come up to him frequently throughout the night, fascinated by his fur and tail. He swishes it excitedly at the attention and more people are drawn to him. Soon, there's a crowd and you have to maneuver both of you to a quieter area for a little reprieve. He nuzzles you and asks if everything's alright. You reply that it is and ask if he's okay. He chuckles and says he's having a wonderful time, but admits that he's hardly spent any time with you that evening. For the rest of the party, you both walk through the quieter wings of the palace chatting arm in arm.

[fictitious-whimsigot]

The Web, as an Issue

(TW: Spiders, Webs, Isolation and Manipulation, Loss of Free Will) Dreamwidth Link There is a thing that sits at the center of the world. It sits replete upon the wheel of destiny, and the laws of the world it weaves. A strand of that web has brushed on your life. A bit of the terror of dominance, power, of being controlled and used- of manipulation and lies and paranoia- it has touched you. How intermeshed will it become? You may pick up the Web issue by…

Loitering in abandoned places filled with cobwebs and hidden spiders.

Being affected by, or pursued by, one of the acolytes or monsters of the web.

Being so afraid of someone controlling or manipulating you that you become isolated and hostile.

Being in the wrong place at the wrong time, because the world is terribly unfair.

Web 1 Omens of encroaching strings Something skitters just outside of your line of sight. You feel like something far away is.. calling you. You feel an intention that is not your own. Your dreams are becoming strange. It’s probably nothing, though. Web 2 Signs and portents only you believe You see them now. You see.. Something. Maybe fleeting dreams fill you with an unsettling sense of déjà vu. Or, just for a second, you see thin grey strings wrapped around your friend’s arms, vanishing up into the sky. Or you wake up every morning with webs woven between your hands. Something is happening, you just can’t understand the pattern yet. ...but no one else sees it. No one else understands it. They can’t face the encroaching web. At this point, traditionally, you begin to experience supernatural changes to your being. This manifests as a level 1 Superior skill. Often this is Superior Affinity to Spiders, but it can be any Superior skill that conveys extrasensory awareness, mental control of others, precognitive powers, skittering movement, lying prowess or affinity for webs and silence. If this is the first time you are experiencing the Web issue, you may not manifest any power at all. This superior skill remains until the issue is resolved. Web 3 Establishing what’s controlling your life. You see it all the time now, inescapably. You find yourself doing things sometimes, things you don’t really want to do, or you didn’t plan to do. You make decisions and find they somehow get passed over. You see the lights in the sky that tell you what you are going to do in excruciating detail. You see the puppet strings that connect everyone and everything, winding into buildings and down streets. You see the men in black suits watching everyone and you see the people they take away. The web is all around you. At this point, you should establish what, specifically, is controlling your life. What has your fear writ wide across your world? Is it something like…

Premonitions that unfold in your waking dreams and extinguish any illusion you may have of your own free will?

A vast conspiracy that weaves through everyone and everything you know, revealing them all to be part of some organization or power that wishes you ill?

An unseen puppeteer that moves people by invisible strings, crouching like a vast spider in some unseen celestial web?

A vampiric cult that calls innocent people into the dark streets, only to suck them dry?

Something else?

This level of the issue intensifies your supernatural affinity with dark forces. You may raise the Superior skill granted by this issue to 2 and choose one of the following:

An affliction that revolves around destiny, your loss of control or the physical changes to your body and mind that are happening. It scales with the Web issue.

A bond representing your fear, fascination or desire for power and control. It scales with the Web issue.

If you choose to bear more of the power of the web, you may also complete the Acolyte’s quest to solidify your connection. The powers granted by this Issue typically vanish soon after it is resolved, but they may linger in much the same way you might keep a wound (Chuubo Core book, 129). Web 4 A final moment of freedom Despite the strangling cords of destiny. Despite the feelings of helplessness that wash into your soul- you have a moment, a chance to escape. Perhaps you fought and marshaled your will. Perhaps a friend came through when you least expected. Perhaps the web just loosened, unexpectedly. When your Issue reaches this level, you may make a choice to escape or to remain. If you choose to escape, you may close out this issue by...

Choosing a fiery baptism, immolation, and reconstruction from the ashes.

Choosing desperate, sudden violence against them. Turn the tables.

Choosing to run away from this life, abandon order, embrace chaos and live.

Choosing to accept help, to put yourself at another’s mercy, to trust again.

It is possible that your choice may embrace another power to escape this one. If, in this final moment, you falter and choose to remain, then your fate is sealed. It’s only a matter of time now. Web 5 Make peace with how your dark fate will manifest. The world seems so unreal. The world seems so gray. It wasn’t like this. It wasn’t like this. You are surrounded by it. Your body is not your own. Your mind is not your own. You do not control your thoughts, but- Mercilessly your feelings are still your own. They’re going to take you soon. They’re going to eat you. They’re going to render you down into whatever they wanted from you. And the worst is, you know that the entire course of your life has been leading up to this. Destiny is the tool of a dark and evil god, and you never had a choice to begin with. This issue is resolved when you are taken by dark powers. The character disappears for a time, at least a chapter or so. They may be dead, but they are always gone.  If they return, they are not the same. Their player may move points from mundane skills into a Superior skill representing these changes, or rewrite Bonds or Afflictions to suit this. These changes always mark their connection to dark and insidious forces, to spiders and to consumption. They typically interfere with the character’s free will. The Spider Acolyte’s Quest [30 XP] Bindings 1 This is a quest about cleaving to the dark powers. It is about becoming part of the spider, of the mother of puppets, of the web. It’s about giving in before you are eaten. It is about forging a bond of fearful reverence with something that controls the world. Major Goals The HG may reward you with 5 XP when…

You wield vicious lies, rumors, cruel jibes or similar horrible tricks to hurt or coerce someone, or when you bear through and accept the same as an inescapable part of life.

You are subject to some kind of terrible psychic or mental trauma associated with isolation, spiders, authority figures or distant gods.

You begin to act, physically or metaphorically, like a spider.

Your Web issue rises to 4 and you choose to embrace, rather than reject the Web.

You accept, in your heart, that even an evil god is better than none.

You can earn each bonus once, up to a maximum of 15 XP. Quest Flavor 1/chapter you may earn an XP towards this quest when:

[Green] You feel sick and terrible, and then see that it’s part of your metamorphosis. Describe the horrific changes in as much detail as you can bear.

[Green] You open a window or leave an external door uncracked so that spiders can enter.

[Blue] You experiment with wielding social conventions, power dynamics and lies to make your environment better for you.

[Gold/Green] You feel ecstatic joy at your body and mind doing things without your input or decision.

[Red/Gold] You flee from an alien being of burning hatred or ecstatic violence.

The reward for completing this quest is an Acolyte perk:

Acolyte Perk: You gain a Connection 1-2 for the Web as a concept. In addition, you are so deeply connected to it that you can never really escape- After resolving the Web Issue, you gain a point in it at the end of the current scene.

[c-is-for-circinate]

Who wants a little Cinderbrush AU on this quarantine evening?

A while ago, @brightandshinynewstories and I were chatting about what would happen if the Cinderbrush four lived in Exandria (and also relatedly, if the M9 were Monsterhearts characters, but that is a digression y’all should take up with her).  We figured it would start, at least, a little like this:

There’s a phrase Sasha's history tutor used once, when she was thirteen or fourteen and didn’t have a way to stop her parents hiring all her tutors and arranging her schedule for her.  Her history tutor was a stuttery little halfling man fresh out of Vasselheim, and half of what he said was deadly boring, but he was less brutally awful than her etiquette and protocol tutor, which was probably why he got fired before she turned fifteen.  That one conversation, though, has stuck with her for all these years.

“Everyone thinks they live at the end of history,” he’d said.  They’d been talking about the end of the reign of Uriel Tal’dorei at the time, how his decision to abdicate five minutes before he unexpectedly died in a massive dragon attack hadn’t accomplished much of anything except for making life massively difficult for his son fifteen years later.  “This is it, the final form of the world.  All the aeons of existence have led up to this moment right now, and finally we’re living in the future.”

“Isn’t everybody always living at the end of history, then?” Sasha had asked.  “If you look at it that way?”

“Not...not quite,” Kempler had stammered, a little off-balance the way he always was when she asked questions she actually wanted to know the answers to.  “Usually it means more like..the idea that everything, societal structures, social mores, everything has fallen into place in such a way that it doesn’t need to change any more.  Does that make sense?”

“Of course,” Sasha had said, and let him go on talking about dragons and heroes and the politics of non-existent emperors and kings.  She’d thought about it all afternoon.

This isn’t quite the end of history, Sasha figures now, half a dozen years later.  If it were, there’d be a better way to work her way up in the government of Emon besides playing personal aide to Arbiter Ethna for the next ten years in hopes of getting appointed to a magistrate’s position someday.  Some kind of school for barristers and politicians, at least, instead of everything coming down to her parents’ names and polite tolerance for her existence.  Her advancement wouldn’t depend so much on this awkward noble apprenticeship system where she’s more tied to Ethna’s reputation than her own skills.

It’s got to be getting pretty close, though.  It’s 853 PD.  Emon’s a miracle of government and engineering.  Uriel Tal’dorei’s been dead for forty years, there haven’t been dragons around to ravage anything since Sasha’s parents were children, and every day law, order, and the modern age prove a little more how they triumph over chaos.

It’s good to live at this end of history, Sasha tends to think.  There’s just enough still to do in the world to give her a chance to do something really special about it.  Just enough wiggle room left to let her...bend the rules.  Just a little.

Nobody says arbiters and politicians can’t have a little magic on their side to...smooth things along, just a little.  Nobody says aides like Sasha can’t spend their free time however they like.  Nobody tells Sir Murasaki’s daughter she can’t go where she wants, besides Sir Murasaki himself.  If she likes to sit auditing classes in the back of the room at the Alabaster Lyceum--if she happens to enjoy practicing classical violin or running vocal exercises in her tiny little office behind Arbiter Ethna’s courtroom--well.  The bardic arts might be a relic of the past, when people had to go out slaying monsters and dealing with dragons every other day, but history hasn’t quite left them useless yet.  Anything can be a tool if you’re clever and charming enough to use it right.

Living at very-nearly-the-end of history might be the best tool there is.  The best thing about it, Sasha thinks, is the chance to make sure she’s the one who decides how it ends.

.

Sasha told Cam about her end-of-history theory once, some starlit evening on the rooftop balcony of his parents’ townhouse, looking out over the sparkling lights of the Cloudtop District and enjoying the quiet.  He’s not sure he’s smart enough to really understand it, but that’s Sasha for you.  There’s a reason she’s going to be on the Tal’Dorei Council someday, while Cam’s going to be...whatever Cam’s going to be, by then.

Probably running the family business, one way or another, if his dad hasn’t actually killed him instead of letting him inherit.  It’s basically fine, as life plans go.  Parts of it don’t suck.  That’s something.

It’s why everyone was so in favor of him courting around with Sasha in the first place, anyway.  The Murasakis are nobility and all, but they’re from some island in the middle of the Lucidian Ocean on the other side of Exandria.  The Solomons were nobodies, until they just happened to own the only still-operating stone quarry in a hundred miles in the wake of the destruction of Emon forty years ago.  Sasha’s parents have influence, Cam’s have money.  Even Cam knows putting that combination together is a recipe for power.

Real power, probably, not the magic kind.  Fewer rules.  Fewer restrictions.  Fewer demons, whispering in the back of your ear when you’re trying to sleep.

If this is really the perfect future that everything’s always been trying to lead to, then shouldn’t they have wizard magic or some shit that would just get the stone out of the ground without needing miners and overseers and crap like that?  And then, like, nobody would send some stupid human kid with no darkvision into the back end of the quarry just because he’s the boss’s son and some fucker thinks he needs to be hazed for “company morale” or whatever.  Just for example.

So maybe the world’s not getting better, it’s just that the bullshit that piles up a little deeper every year has just about reached a critical maximum.  That’s fine.  No wonder Sasha’s looking forward to the future so much, gets along with the world so well.  He used to watch her weave her own web of total crap every time she worked a room, catching eyes and shaking hands and making everybody fall in love with her as soon as they met.  It’s kind of the most impressive thing Cam’s ever seen.  He kind of hates her for it, right at this moment.

Cam’s just not built for that much shit.  He's charming, sure, people trust him, people like him, but he can’t talk his way out of any- and everything like Sasha can.  Probably that’s a nobility thing.  The Solomons aren’t nobility, everybody knows that, especially Cam’s dad, and he’s never let Cam forget it for two seconds in a row his whole life, so right, no wonder Cam’s useless in Sasha’s kind of world.  No wonder he lets himself get into such shitty situations sometimes.  No wonder he can’t get Anukirai to leave him--to leave Sasha--alone.

If that’s what he wants.  Which--it is, of course, it should be, it has to be, it’s just.  Hard, sometimes, when Cam’s father decides if he can’t be the normal born kind of nobility, he’d better just prove he’s the High Lord of All Assholes.  When Cam’s trying not to be the kind of guy who just up and punches his problems in the face.  When Anukirai starts making promises, and Cam--when Cam can feel the power behind them, the weight of thousands of years of lurking underground, lying in wait, full of so much more patience than Cam’s ever had himself.

He’s pretty sure he could Command his dad to do just about anything, once.  Just once.  So far he hasn’t tried.

The worst thing about living this close to the end of history, Cam knows for damn sure, is feeling the weight of all of it crushing down on top of you all the time.

.

Jamie’s heard about it, too, somewhere along the way.  Lunch with Sasha at the Lyceum is always interesting, one way or another.

It’s bullshit, of course, but it’s the sort of bullshit that always appeals to people like Sasha.  As though there are other people in the world like Sasha Murasaki.  Things don’t end, they just die occasionally, and leave stinking corpses of whatever they used to be there to entertain passers-by.  Witness the inside of poor Cameron Solomon’s head these days after that particular breakup, case in point.

But of course it’s enticing to picture the world as just half a step short of perfection, all the for pretty, perfect people who think they might just be that last piece of perfection Exandria’s waiting for.  That, at least, isn’t exactly an uncommon attitude around the Alabaster Lyceum.  Everybody thinks they’re going to be the next Allura Vysoren, or whoever it is they’re all idolizing these days.  Everybody thinks they need just that little bit of extra edge to get there.

Jamie’s done with that particular race, which doesn’t mean they can’t enjoy spectating it.  There’s a lot of benefits that come from staying enrolled as a student of the arcane arts at the Alabaster Lyceum of Emon.  Greg Wrenly keeps paying tuition, room, and board, for one.  There’s a handful of cantrips and a couple of halfway decent wizard spells in Jamie’s back pocket now, too, which is never a bad thing.  It’s always good to have options.

For instance: now the desperate, overachieving would-be wizards of the Lyceum don’t have to fight their way through years of arduous study and spend enormous reserves of magical energy to cast True Seeing.  A little bit of druidcraft, a couple of exactly the right mushrooms, and for a handful of gold coins Jamie can provide a direct line of sight to the Ethereal Plane with negligible side effects to follow.  Options.  They’re practically a public service.

Jamie prefers to keep as many options open as possible; gods know nobody in this fucking city seem to realize they have any.  That’s what needing to be the best will do to you.  If a quarter of their classmates realized how much power the average archdruid has at their command, there’d be a mass exodus of ex-arcanists desperate to be the next fucking Voice of the Tempest, every one of them desperate to live up to thousands of years of legends and heroes and complete fairytales.  Every single one of them would miss the entire point.

Jamie doesn’t need to be the best.  They just need to maintain their own, extremely specific skill set, market it in the right way to the right people, and not get caught up in everyone else’s everything.  Stay a minimum safe distance away from Sasha.  Enjoy Cam’s company without getting too invested in the pretty and the trauma.  Enough wizardry to mess with peoples’ heads and not be too bound to the whims of nature, enough druidry to keep in good supply and not be too bound to some fucking hand-scribed spellbook.  Enough alchemy to keep in business.  Enough business to make sure they don’t completely lose touch with reality, the way so many mages tend to do.

Of course it’s not exactly traditional, or historical, or Respectful of the Great Arts, or whatever the fucking line is.  What the hell would be the point of that?

The best thing about living on this end of history, whatever the fuck that means to anyone, is getting to pick and choose exactly which parts of it you want to keep.

.

Aff gets the whole history thing in pieces, in passing at first, but it makes more sense the more they think about it.  You can learn a lot slinging pints of ale in your dad’s tavern on a regular old Grissen weeknight.

It’s not like they’re friends with Sasha Murasaki of all people.  Aff hadn’t even known who she was until Amanda from the livery stable down the street explained it, and apparently there’s an actual member of a titled noble family on her way up the ranks in the Watchful Hall who comes out to Aff’s dad’s tavern, like, a lot, which is just crazy.  It’s just that sometimes when Sasha’s waiting for somebody, or she and her trio of Emon’s Who’s Who are bored or whatever, they invite Aff to sit down and talk for a while.  Cameron Solomon’s... whatever, he’s cool, Aff’s mom doesn’t live too far from his dad’s mine these days, so maybe they’d helped him out while he was puking in an alleyway once or twice before even moving to Emon, out in the countryside where being a super-rich merchant prince didn’t matter that much.  And Jamie...Aff doesn’t really get Jamie, but they’re in here a lot, alone at a table where a whole rotation of people sit down to join them and then leave ten minutes later.  You learn a lot about someone when they drink by themselves while they’re doing some kind of weird shady business in your bar at least once a week.  That’s all.

Aff doesn’t even really think any of them are friends with each other, either, anyway.  Sasha and Cameron used to come in on dates, a couple of kids from the Cloudtop slumming it in Diamond Liquor out in the Central District, but they don’t really do that any more.  The one time Sasha showed up when Cam was already here, he got up and left.  Sometimes Sasha goes and sits at Jamie’s table in the corner, and she’s usually there for a lot longer than ten minutes when she does, but she still always goes back to the rest of her crew and Jamie goes back to drinking alone.  Jamie and Cam have come in together a couple of times, and it seems like Jamie doesn’t even do business on those nights, but like, who even knows what’s up with that, right?

Not that Aff’s being creepy or anything.  They’re the bar...not-maid.  Bartender?  No, that’s their dad, ruling over the land of kegs behind the actual physical bar.  Bar...server?  Is that a thing?  Whatever, it is now.  Aff’s the bar-server, they hear things.  They notice things.  That’s all.

Like Sasha talking about the end of history, which, it took Aff a couple of different conversations to realize she didn’t mean the end of the world, which is probably good.  Aff’s pretty sure she means the fact that they live now, in modern times, which don’t really have dragon attacks or cool heroes or crazy adventures any more, because all the cool heroes already went on all the crazy adventures and killed the dragons so that modern times could happen in the first place.  Which is great!  Right, that’s totally for the best, dragons are definitely bad news.  Aff’s seen a couple of places where Emon got rebuilt forty or fifty years ago after half the city...melted, they guess?  So like, it’s good that that’s not happening nowadays.  That’s a good thing.

It’s just...

Look, Aff’s a good bar-server, or whatever you want to call it, and they like living here with their dad, and Emon’s not a bad place to be, it’s just.  Hard, sometimes.  It’s hard, when they get so angry they just want to hit something, again.  Like, a lot.  Again.

If there were still adventurers and dragons and shit, then maybe Aff would have a use for all that pent-up aggression or whatever.  Maybe they could, y’know, kill monsters or whatever, and it would make them a hero instead of a fuckup.  If it were still the old days like that, maybe Aff would be good for something.

If this really is the end of history or whatever, Aff thinks that maybe the hardest part is feeling like they got smacked down in the wrong part of it.

.

The trouble, of course, is that history is nowhere near through with them.  Or with its own twists and turns, which is how history tends to work, really, even when you think it’s all just about settled down.

The third week of Fessuran is...confusing, more than anything.  Everything happens so fucking fast, in a blur of blood and fear and sleep-deprivation, washed over with a little extra haze from Jamie’s very good berries, and a couple of days go by in either about two hours or two weeks, and this is never going to make a good story to tell any kids they ever have, if they ever survive long enough to have kids.

Half a dozen people are very dead, that’s very clear, well beyond the help of any cleric or reasonably-ethical necromancer.  Amanda from the livery stable down the street from Diamond Liquor was pale and streaked in blood, breathing shallowly and barely alive, last time they saw her.  That might be worth something, if they could figure out or agree on what.

The four of them are not dead.  They are not under arrest.  They’re not in Emon any more, either, but since staying away might be the only chance they have to keep being not-dead and not-arrested, that’s probably a win, too.

They look at each other, hollow-eyed and dazed, across the table at the only inn in the tiny nowhere town of Cinder Hills, where they didn’t dare sleep last night and had better leave the minute they finish breakfast and also decide what the hell comes next.

“What,” Cam says, speaking for them all, “the fuck?”

.

“Look,” Sasha says.  “It’s fine.  We just…go to another city, and wait for things to die down.  Come back when it’s all over and pretend none of it ever happened.  Nothing to do with us at all.”

It’s fine.  It has to be fine, because if it’s not then Sasha’s lost everything.  Jail isn’t the only way to be trapped.  Freedom costs so much.

“You cannot possibly think that’s going to work,” Jamie says scathingly.  “You think there’s anybody in Emon who doesn’t know who the great Sasha Murasaki is?  We run, and we do not come back.”

Fuck Jamie, fuck them, just…fuck.

She’s spent years building herself a future in Emon.  Years, fighting to make herself a place in history.  Scrounging for every fucking scrap her parents would let her have, every fraction of respect or freedom that couldn’t just be taken away on a whim because she didn’t lower her eyes enough on any random night.  And now she’s going to lose it to this?

“Um,” Aff says.  “I have family in Emon?  I’m not just going to disappear on my dad.  And like, what about Cam’s dad, or Sasha’s family, or–”

“I can’t see my dad right now,” Cam interrupts quickly.  “Leaving actually maybe sounds good.”

“Oh, and leaving where, Jamie?” Sasha demands, because she’s ignoring Cameron right now until she can handle looking at him.  “Are we all going to stay with your little forest friends?  Sleep on leaf mattresses and learn to be druids, then?”

Jamie snorts.  “I’m not taking any of you within ten fucking miles of any druid circle I’ve ever met.  You, they’d eat alive,” and he gestures dismissively at Aff, “and you, they’d never forgive me for.  Luckily the world’s pretty fucking big.”

“So, what, you just want to–what, get on a ship and go to Wildemount?” Cam asks, interrupting Sasha again before she can get started on what even she knows is going to come out sharp and bitter and useless.  “Never come home?”

“You can do whatever the fuck you want.  I’m going to Kymal as soon as I can get on the fucking road, to see if I can rebuild even a third of what I just left behind.” Jamie says, like it’s just…that easy.  “Maybe Westruun, eventually, depending on how that goes.”

Sasha cannot start over in fucking Kymal.  She can’t.  She’s going home.  She’ll get this straightened out.

Everybody knows who her parents are.  They could smooth the whole thing over, probably, if she went down on her knees and begged hard enough.  If she agreed to let them ship her off to whatever cloister or rich husband they chose, and lost everything to spending the rest of her life under her mother’s thumb and her father’s commands anyway.

Fuck.  Fuck.  It feels like the walls of this tiny shitty tavern room are closing in on her already.  Sasha is so fucked.

It was supposed to be perfect.  She was almost done.  She was on her way.  It was going to be perfect.

“We should probably stay together,” Cameron says worriedly, looking between Sasha and his precious Aff and Jamie fucking Wrenly.

“Westruun,” Sasha says.  It’s too small to build anything worth having and it’s too far away from everything she’s ever built so far and it’s too big for her to matter at all and it’s too close for her to really be safe.  Westruun’s nothing.  But at least it’s better than fucking Kymal.  “We can go to Westruun.”

Or Vasselheim.  Or Rexxentrum.  Or Ank’harel.  Or Port Damali.  Sasha’s a little afraid to start running.  She’s a little afraid that once she gets going, she won’t be able to stop.

.

Notes on Level 2:

Sasha, human bard 2 Cantrips: Message, Prestidigitation L1 spells (3/day): Charm Person, Sense Emotions, Disguise Self, Comprehend Languages, Detect Magic

Cameron, human warlock 2 Patron: Fiend Cantrips: Mage Hand, Friends L1 spells (2/day): Command, Charm Person, Hex Invocations: Beguiling Influence, Devil’s Sight

Jamie, human wizard 1 druid 1 Cantrips: Friends, Mind Sliver, Minor Illusion, Druidcraft, Infestation L1 spells (3/day) : Cause Fear, Color Spray, Silent Image, Charm Person, Sleep, Identify, plus any druid spells prepared that day

Aff, human barbarian 2 Rage (2/day): +2 damage

[ceridwenofwales]

Random but remember the scene where Lagertha killed Aslaug she said that Aslaug bewitched Ragnar. Rewatching vikings & in S1 ep.9 Lagertha goes to the Seer to ask about the dreams she’s having. She fears for Ragnar’s life and the Seer tells her that the shadows are from Hel’s Hall, the shadows want to take something from her. He also tells her that Ragnar is in danger from the magical world. This is the episode where Gyda dies and Aslaug is introduced. She really did bewitch him. Thoughts?

I’m so sorry that took me this long to reply. I needed to watch two episodes of the first season and check it out some of my favorite sources to give you a more appropriate reply. I don’t think Aslaug bewitched Ragnar and I’ll explain why I think so.

I was writing a meta and Dumblr (how I lovingly refer to Tumblr when it sucks) erased my highly detailed post. ;(

Brace yourself, it’s a meta. Hahahahaha.

I think to answer this we have to go back to episode 8 from season one “Sacrifice”. Lagertha suffered a miscarriage and they are preparing to go to Uppsala to ask for the Gods’ favor.

Ragnar: “Of course I’m happy. Why should I not be happy? When we reach Uppsala, we shall ask the gods why they give with one hand, but take away with the other? Why they make me Earl, yet kill my son?”

Lagertha: “We can have more sons.”

Ragnar: “Have we not tried?”

When they reach Uppsala, Lagertha and Ragnar talk to the Gods:

Lagertha: “Freyr, lord, fill me with seed and give me a son. Do as you will with me, make me blind or deaf if you want to, but give me a son. Accept the sacrifices of blood we make to you, the honor we offer you. My lord, make me conceive again before it’s too late.”

Ragnar: “Lord of lords, father, hear my prayer. Let me understand your will. Is it true that I shall have more sons like the seer says? Accept the sacrifice I plan to offer you and then answer me. Who will bear me my son?”

Notice that Ragnar is already doubting Lagertha will bear him another child and searching for the fulfillment of his prophecy elsewhere. Aslaug was yet to be introduced at this point.

Seer: “Do you think your husband is in some kind of danger?”

Lagertha: “I’ve had strange and disturbing dreams.”

Seer: “What happens in your dreams?” 

Lagertha: “Dark shapes come to me at night. Monstrous forms. When I wake, they skulk in the shadows, shapeless, but no sooner am I asleep than they creep forward again.”

Seer: “Ah, yes. The shadows come from hell’s hall. No one can ensnare them, not even the gods.”

Lagertha: “What is it that they want?” 

Seer: “To take something from you.”

Lagertha: “My life?” 

Seer: “No, something far more important to you than that.”

Lagertha: “My husband’s life? Tell me.”

Seer: “Why must you all force me up and unearth me to sorrows? Your husband is in danger, but not for his life. He is in danger from the magical world.”

Lagertha: “How? Answer me.”

Seer: “I was unwilling to speak and I will say no more now!”

The Seer is clearly disturbed by Lagertha’s insistence and dismisses her. 

In the following scene, Arne and Torstein see Aslaug bathing and she seems curious at the mention of his name. I think, as a Völva, she knew her destiny was with Ragnar and told his men that Ragnar should apologize to her on their behalf.

Ragnar: “Who is she, anyway, to put such a high price on her nakedness?”

Arne: “We didn’t ask.”

Ragnar: “I’m intrigued.”

Bjorn: “What’s so intriguing?" 

Ragnar: "Sometimes the gods put things like this in front of us as some kind of test.”

Ragnar then challenges Aslaug to join them neither dressed nor undressed.Neither hungry nor full, neither in company nor alone.

Siggy: “What did the Seer tell you?" 

Lagertha: "He said that it’s true; That Ragnar is in danger.”

Siggy: “From whom?" 

Lagertha: "I don’t know.”

Siggy: “Who do you think?" 

Lagertha: "I think he is in danger from himself.”

Lagertha knows Ragnar is ambitious and this scene is symbolic because as we talk about free will and fate, Lagertha is working on a loom. The Norse people believed the fate was woven by the Norns and so the female’s role of weaving, spinning, etc was related not only to the Norns but also to the practitioners of seiðr. 

Any kind of textile work, particularly weaving, was believed to be a way of exercising supernatural power. One enigmatic aspect of seiðr is that it was connected with ergi ‘unmanliness’. If seiðr was spinning, it would certainly be unmanly for men, because spinning was the most characteristic women’s work. The feminine character of spinning also fits with seiðr in other ways. Firstly, manipulation of other people’s lives was also done by other kinds of women’s work.

There’s another important scene that implies this symbolism: Floki and King Horik’s conversation happens as they see a spider’s web. Floki is saying that the wolf Fenrir couldn’t be constrained by any mean known to humans.

Floki: “I came to ask about Jarl Borg. He won’t sell. He wants to make a deal.”

King Horik: “I’m not interested in deals.”

Floki: “That would make it hard for Ragnar.”

King Horik: “Ragnar will come to the right conclusion, and make the right decision.”

Floki: “Don’t you care if the negotiations fail? 

King Horik: “Mm Look!" 

Horik shows Floki how the spider attacks the fly trapped in its web. The web here can represent more than fate. Horik sent Ragnar to a doomed mission in hope Borg and Ragnar would destroy themselves and he would be rid of two problems at once. Let’s remember Ragnar is getting more famous than the King himself. Jarl Borg tried to convince Ragnar to form an alliance against King Horik and then asked Rollo to join him against Ragnar. There are more threats to Ragnar than the arrival of Aslaug.

When Aslaug agrees to follow Ragnar and his companions to the Ash tree that is believed to be Yggdrasil, he asks her:

“Why did you come along with me?” 

Aslaug: “Because I had no choice.”

Ragnar kisses her for the first time and later on when Aslaug gives him the news she is pregnant, she says:

"I’m carrying your child. Did the Seer not promise you more sons?”

We might interpreter her words as a sign she knew of her role in Ragnar’s fate and that’s why she mentioned she had no choice earlier. Ragnar is conflicted because while he seems pleased his prophecy is being fulfilled, he knows Lagertha won’t take it lightly.  

Now we have to examine the reasons why Lagertha could be suspicious Aslaug bewitched Ragnar.

The vǫlur were referred to by many names. Old Norse völva means “wand carrier” or “carrier of a magic staff”, and it continues Proto-Germanic *walwōn, which is derived from a word for “wand”.

Historical and mythological depictions of vǫlur show that they were held in high esteem and believed to possess such powers that even Odin consulted a völva to learn what the future had in store for the gods. Such an account is preserved in the Völuspá, which roughly translates to “Prophecy of the Völva ”.

In addition to the unnamed seeress (possibly identical with Heiðr) in the Vǫluspá, other examples of vǫlur in Norse literature include Gróa in Svipdagsmál, Þórbjǫrgr in the Saga of Erik the Red and Huld in Ynglinga saga.

The vǫlur were not considered to be harmless. The goddess who was most skilled in magic was Freyja, and she was not only a goddess of love, but also a warlike divinity who caused screams of anguish, blood and death, and what Freyja performed in Asgard, the world of the gods, the vǫlur tried to perform in Midgard, the world of men. The weapon of the völva was not the spear, the axe or the sword, but instead, they were held to influence battles with different means, and one of them was the wand.

The vǫlur were known for their art of seduction, which was one of the reasons why they were considered dangerous. One of the stanzas in Hávamál warns against sexual intercourse with a woman who is skilled in magic, because the one who does so runs the risk of being caught in a magic bond and also risks getting ill. Freyja, who is the mistress of seiðr, has a free sexual life that gives her a bad reputation in certain myths.

One of the methods for seducing men may have been the use of drugs. In Fyrkat, the grave of a völva revealed the use of henbane, a drug which not only produces hallucinations but can also be a powerful aphrodisiac. If Freyja was the goddess of love in Asgard, the völva was her counterpart in Midgard.

There’s also an interesting post by @dyannehs that points out a new interpretation of the archaeological evidence of women being buried with weapons as being practitioners of seiðr and not female warriors/shieldmaidens.

This hypothesis doesn’t dismiss the shieldmaiden entirely. There’s room for a sword-wielding woman if we ever gather enough evidence to support it. But that would not have been the normal role for women in battle. This hypothesis states that if women went into battle (and if they did, then they would have been a very small minority on the field), then they were not warriors but sorceresses, who would literally be casting spells and reciting charms and curses left and right and practicing magic in an attempt to sway the outcome and protect their own men and homes.  

These women would have been in commune with the Valkyries and the gods, urging the fate of the battle in a certain direction. And the weapons found in their graves were not meant to be used but were symbolic of prowess in battle as something removed from warriors.  

After all, how else can you physically represent the power of magic in battle?

And we know that sorcery in battle was a legitimate thing. Practitioners of seiðr had a wide range of battle magic and could perform such feats as instilling fear into the enemy, hindering the enemy’s movements, strengthening armour and weapons, weakening armour and weapons, providing invulnerability, providing other protections from weapons and enemy sorcery, killing enemy soldiers, fighting and killing enemy seiðr practitioners, and breaking enemy curses. 

While a Völva was highly respected, there was also a reverential fear for the power they held. I don’t believe Aslaug manipulated or bewitched Ragnar. I think she only knew her destiny was entwined with his. I talked about Aslaug’s fate here as well.

Sources: 

Seiðr

Old Norse religion in long-term perspectives

Women and Magic in the Sagas

Völva: Sexual Rites and Drugs

Seiðr and Norse Shamanism

Spae-craft, Seiðr and Shamanism

Viking Women

Norns

[mutantsrisingrpg]

WHO

Name: Isaac Castilla  Dossier: Pandora Age: 19 Mutant Risk Level: Three Affiliation and Occupation: Blackburn Syndicate, Distraction Gender/Pronouns: Cismale, he/him Faceclaim: Benjamin Wadsworth

POWER

REPLICATION: The ability to create identical copies of oneself, often accompanied by the ability to vanish their existence at will. There is not a maximum number one can create at a time, but it is often dependent upon the control the user has (or lack thereof) and the energy they require to create and maintain their copies. These copies, which Isaac refers to as “clones,” share a sort of hive mind with the original user, and can do and say as the original wishes.

AESTHETIC

They are cracked sunglass lenses, clumsily splintering the light they were meant to filter through to your cheeks. They are the sky at dusk, the inky dark blue meeting vivid orange; not quite light enough to revel in the fleeting rays of sun and not quite dark enough to succumb to the shadows of night. They are the heat of a match wearing down close to the fingers that holds it and the brief flash of burning pain upon the skin when you’re too late to blow the flame out. They are in every wicked smile, in every ridiculous idea, in every joke that makes those who hear it groan. They are one, two, three, more. 

BIOGRAPHY

(TW: themes of abuse)

When Anita Castilla gave birth on the floor of a cold cell in Hornsbury Prison, a detention center for mutants, the guards came to find her cradling a pair of identical twin boys, clinging to the warmth of their mother and crying into her jumpsuit. When they’d returned moments later with a nurse to tend to the new mother and her children, they found one of the twins was missing, only to learn after a panic that the second child never existed. Isaac Castilla, how ever many there were of him at the time, was taken from his mother regardless. He couldn’t form memories despite being able to form copies of himself so young, so he couldn’t have known this was the only time he would ever see his mother.

There were times growing up where he thought he would have much rather had the prison cell as his home, as opposed to the place he was sent. With his mother in prison and his father’s identity unknown, Isaac was sent to a home for mutant children, a large drab building he would soon learn was more like punishment than the cell in which he was born. The prison, negligent in its research and uncaring about the mutants it was responsible for, had sent Isaac to the first home in the city that would take him, not knowing or perhaps just not caring that it was run by an anti-mutant organization. 

Growing up at St. Raphael’s taught him nothing but shame and fear – shame for who he was and fear for what he could become. Play time was productive, childhood was snatched from his hands as swiftly as a toy he’d found abandoned under a couch from years ago, and punishment was more than any child should bear. Needles containing something meant to extinguish his ability were more common than the vaccines most normal children received, marks on his wrists from holding him down to perform such frequent procedures did not fade in his mind once the redness faded from his skin. He’d never learned how to properly use his powers, let alone how to control them, for at St. Raph’s, the only proper way to use a power was to never use it at all. The only good mutant was one that didn’t exist.

By the time he was sixteen, Isaac was one of the most troublesome mutants at St. Raph’s, not one to take such punishment lying down the moment he decided he’d had enough, that such things were not normal or even humane in any sense of the word. Clones created accidentally aided in his mischief, whether it was taking food or just trying to mess with those who had banned his doppelgangers in the first place, and it was one day and one very, very lucky accident that brought him his freedom. With little control over his powers, Isaac couldn’t entirely predict when he would make a clone and where they would end up, and luck brought him an angel in the form of a replica of himself who had somehow materialized outside the walls of St. Raph’s. 

While Isaac would describe the story as some sort of Mission: Impossible-esque, action-packed breakout mission, it certainly didn’t look as cool as he claimed it to, mostly involving him squeezing himself out a broken window and ignoring the blood running down his arms as he sprinted away from the staff who chased after him. The taste of freedom mixed with adrenaline upon his tongue made for one hell of a dangerous drug, and Isaac was too addicted to quit seeking such a sensation.

While enjoying the wind in his hair and the sun upon a chipped-tooth grin was enough to keep his head up, crashing down from the high came with the reminder that he had nowhere to go and no clue where his next meal was coming from. He doesn’t often think about what his life would have been like if Isabel hadn’t taken him under her wing, but he doubts he would have made it as far as he has. She’d saved him from the world that did not care for a mutant freed, gave him a home and a bed and a family to call his own. She’d taught him what it was like to feel cared for, and now, he might believe he even has a purpose. Sure, it took him time to learn to control his powers after years of having them stifled, but he prides himself on being an asset to the Blackburn Syndicate and still having enough time to bring his mischief upon the city that once turned its back on him. He’ll make sure they recognize what a mistake they’d made.

CONNECTIONS

ISABEL ACOSTA & LUKE ESPINOSA, Family: Isaac genuinely wouldn’t know where he would be if not for Isabel and Luke, though he’s pretty sure he would still be on the streets or probably dead at this point. Isabel was the one who found him, his guardian angel in the form of a big-sister figure, and soon, Luke became his family, too. They put up with him and give him a bed, and truly, he doesn’t know what more he could ask for – except for someone to pass him the fire extinguisher when he’s in danger of burning down the apartment again.

JORDAN ROJAS, Enemy: There’s something about Jordan that rubs Isaac the wrong way. Maybe it’s their snide comments that almost always go over his head, or the way they seem to suck the fun out of literally everything (though, Isaac’s idea of fun is letting his clones cause mischief). Just ignore them, some might advise, but those people forget that Isaac’s absolute favorite past-time is getting under the skin of others. Any rise out of Jordan is a good one, and he’ll be wearing the biggest shit-eating grin knowing he’s the reason his enemy grits their teeth.

ANASTASIA AHN, Interest: It’s not rocket science to know that staring too long at Anastasia is like staring at the sun – bad for your health. Yet, Isaac can’t stop looking their way, not ignorant to these warnings but partially in spite of them. He never truly cared about what was good for him or not, and their sights set on him make it that much easier for him to be pulled into the web they plan to weave. At least it isn’t the worst way to go.

PANDORA is CLOSED for applications. He is taken by HAYLEY.

[anigrams-productions]

Anigrams 2019 Update

Hello, Tumblr. It’s been a while, hasn’t it?

It’s been 10 years since, inspired by Japanese visual novels and Winter Wolves’ games, I came up with the idea for the original Memoirs of an Angel - a visual novel (with mini-games) about a dethroned princess courting various handsome men in a fantasy setting while figuring out what to do next.

That quick, fun little game changed my life. I thought, “This is what I want to do. This is what I was meant to do.”

Ten years later, I still feel the same way. Even though my personal projects have taken a backseat to my full-time job as a software engineer and side gigs as a freelance web developer, I feel like now is the time to continue pursuing my passion for making games. I have the skills, I’m working on getting the knowledge, and all I need is more experience and confidence in my work.

Without further ado, let’s take stock of the current state of Anigrams Productions’ various projects...

Memoirs of an Angel: Legends

Status: Working on it

I have the basic storyboard for the Memoirs remake written out, which has gone through several revisions and will probably go through a few more before I’m satisfied. I’m deep enough into it, though, to know that I’m going to have to split it up into two games: the first focusing on Zuleika taking her throne back, and the second focusing on the conflict with Menorrhi (evil lady who created Chael to kill Zuleika).

I’m still trying to nail down a good gameplay system that not only makes sense for the story I’m trying to tell, but is simple enough that it won’t turn off VN players who enjoyed the original game, and also features strategic elements that make it challenging and give real weight to winning and losing. I’ve built several prototypes, but they’ve all been failures so far.

I’m also still trying to decide whether I want to allow the player to choose the protagonist’s gender or not. The only thing it would really add is the possibility for additional romances (like Duren, whose sexuality was only hinted at in the original game, with most players not even realizing he was meant to be gay). My current stance is that it would be better to add those things as a DLC - get the main game out first, then worry about extra additions that don’t really add anything to the plot.

W.I.S.H

Status: On hold (indefinitely)

W.I.S.H started as Starlit Dreams, a sci-fi themed business simulation about a bored librarian with a passion for inventing robotic prosthetics and her budding friendship with a paranormal investigator on the run from a secret evil organization. Yeah. What the hell was I thinking?

After getting some feedback on the prototype/tech demo I made, I realized that the concept just wasn’t that great. Not only was the story all over the place, but the gameplay (basically killing time by going around to different locations and hoping you ran into the person you needed to talk to) sucked.

Unfortunately, I’d already spent hundreds of dollars on art assets. W.I.S.H was my attempt to take all the same characters (so I could reuse the art) and throw them into a completely different situation, this time a Faustian tale about how the main character makes a deal with a demon and inadvertently breaks the fabric of reality (or something), causing all sorts of paranormal mayhem.

I thought I had a pretty decent plan of how all the characters would be involved in this new storyline and how each of their romantic routes would weave a larger story, but after sharing my outline with a friend, I realized there were a lot of plot holes and things that didn’t really make sense (like why would the main character even make a deal with a demon in the first place?), and I still didn’t know whether I wanted to do a straight visual novel or include some sort of battle system.

Since then, I’ve entertained a few different ideas of how to change up the story, including cutting out most of the cast and maybe even having a completely different protagonist, but nothing has really stood out as a good direction to go in.

For now, this game idea is stuck in limbo.

Memoirs of Genesis

Status: Planning to do someday

A prequel to Memoirs of an Angel, Memoirs of Genesis was originally going to be a kinetic novel (like a visual novel with no choices), but I ultimately decided that if there weren’t choices, it might as well just be a straight novel.

I had a full storyboard written out, but realized that the fragmented, un-chronological structure of the story was difficult to follow. It also didn’t tell much of a story - it was a biography that had no flow, no vision, no cohesion. The events of Genesis’ life are what they are. They had to happen in order for Memoirs of an Angel to happen. But Genesis’ story is one of tragedy and revenge, blurring the lines between good and evil, and that story needs to be told.

That said, I feel like Memoirs of Genesis will be so much more meaningful if you’ve already played the Memoirs of an Angel remake... which isn’t complete yet. So this one is on the back-burner until I complete the main game that it’s supposed to be a prequel to.

Buried

Status: Working on it

I’m not sure if I ever officially announced Buried except for a mention here and there, but it was originally conceived as an old-school text adventure dungeon-crawler. The goal was to practice programming while exploring one of the mysteries of the Memoirs universe: the disappearance of the djinn.

It turns out that building a fun, exciting dungeon-crawler with only text is really hard. I built out the whole dungeon in Minecraft just to be able to get my bearings, but I still couldn’t quite visualize it. So I made some adjustments and started building it in GameMaker using RPGMaker sprites as stand-ins, but it just felt way too generic. I figured there was no point in working on it anymore.

But now, as I work towards my goal of becoming a professional game designer, I find myself in need of a good portfolio piece. Memoirs is so big and dear to my heart that it may be another 10 years before I finish it, so it’s not a good candidate for fluffing up my portfolio. Buried, on the other hand, can be a short, fun little game that I can use to practice things like writing an official Game Design Document, iterating on a concept, building prototypes, etc.

So my plan is to pick it back up and use it as a portfolio piece that I can (hopefully) show off with pride.

The Memoirs Character Creator

Status: Done

Looking back through this blog, it looks like I never officially “released” the Memoirs Character Creator and had planned to add some additional features, like more color options and armor options. Honestly, the UI needs an update, too.

These improvements aren’t a priority, though. From my perspective, this project is done and I’ve been focusing my efforts on other projects instead. That said, I may push out some updates once I start updating my portfolio, but nothing is guaranteed.

Anigrams Language Generator

Status: Needs improvement

The Anigrams Language Generator is just something I did for fun and accidentally added to the website before it was ready.

My idea was to store phonetic symbols associated with specific languages, and create words by randomly alternating vowel and consonant symbols and adding a suffix common to that language (to make the word “masculine” or “feminine”).

In short, it doesn’t work very well. The system needs to be smarter about which vowel/consonant combinations work best together, maybe employing a machine learning algorithm to analyze a sample of text and spit out something instead of storing everything in a database.

It probably won’t get fixed any time soon, though, not with other projects being more of a priority.

[mysterioussinkhole]

Creature Feature

Statement Summary: Recorded by Archival Assistant Martin Blackwood. The statement giver is a cinematographer who often worked with a famous director named Dexter. She was responsible for making his movies look good. They first worked together on a movie called Red Ronan. She had been excited but she quickly realized that Dexter’s approach to film was to recreate things he vaguely remembered from the obscure Italian horror and martial arts movies he watched when he was young. He was utterly unoriginal. She’s good at her job, and specifically has a knack for giving the movies an older feel. Red Ronan got nominated for an Oscar. She found she was stuck with Dexter rather than moving forward with her own ambitions after being outed as trans and losing some connections. So it was all she had. He had this film he wanted to make, based around a Japanese movie he remembered with a gigantic spider that attacked an island. What struck him was the lack of a protagonist. It was told in vignettes where every victim eventually gave up and walk straight into the spider’s grasp. For the longest time it was a topic that only came up when he was drunk and no one could ever find the one he was talking about. That is, until she got the call to help him make it. He said he’d found the book it was based on. They called it Widow’s Weave and it was designed to be as close to his memory as possible. Casting was of only unknown actors. Dexter claimed to be working with a legend in practical effects to make the spider. During production the practical effects were kept separate from everyone else because the man they were working with had gotten “reclusive” over time. Shooting was a challenge. Dexter was temperamental. The cast was impressive, though. One of them, Brandon, did incredibly well with his role as a homeless ex-minister. Dexter always listened to Brandon with an odd attention. The director seemed like he wasn’t sleeping, always editing and preparing dailies. The only time she went into the editing room to talk to him the place was webbed through with film. Dexter was suspended by it as he moved to talk to her. He had an incorrect number of arms. Further into the project no one had seen the effects guy and they became convince he wasn’t even there. Dexter called them to see the spider one day. He took the cast into the workshop first. They waited half an hour until someone found an article online that the effects guy had just died after being bedridden for a year. She went in to see what the hell was going on. A massive web above her held several wriggling cocoons and a giant spider dripping venom onto Dexter. It was gone when the police arrived. She found the book he had been using and burned it.

Who Did It: The Web

Spooky Rating: 9/10, is there such a thing as method directing?

Archives Drama: This one doesn’t suck as much. The book sounds like a Leitner. Dexter and the cast are still missing, and the statement giver told the whole story to the press only to be shunned. Basira got some police files that show that every February a shriveled corpse washes up on a nearby beach that was associated with the movie. Later, it seems Basira got Melanie’s story and told Martin. They have a bit of a freak out over Elias’s powers. Basira seems determined to do something and even mocks Martin a bit for standing on the sidelines for so long. He’s hurt by this but she doesn’t care. Melanie comes in and they all agree to work together. Basira realizes that Elias can’t see everything else that happens when he uses his abilities like he did on Melanie, so if they distract him... They go down to the tunnels to talk more and Martin apologizes to Melanie.

Stray Thoughts: This is another one of my favorites because a) film industry stuff is so interesting b) awesome trans protagonist and c) there’s a heckin giant spider and that’s cool. I feel like Brandon may have some greater significance, like he might have given a statement at some point. Basira and Martin’s argument is difficult because they both are valid in the way they view the situation. Martin has dealt with people dying a lot recently and isn’t excited to see how Elias’s powers will affect them in the future but Basira’s emphasis on looking after Melanie now makes the thought seem selfish. I think that the two of them had a bad start with each other and has conflicting personalities so it’s not easy for them to deal with each other. I kinda feel like an idiot for not realizing the plan for Elias sooner my first time through. I must’ve zoned out.

[sanctumslider]

Fic: Vestiges

[A03] [ff.net] 

Season 5 Spoilers/Damocles Part 2 missing scenes between Nathan Miller and Harper McIntyre

Footsteps echoed in the long corridors, an oppressive weight hanging in the air as hushed words were exchanged and names were punched into monitors. No rush, no urgency, no adrenaline. Just a purposeful acceptance, a quiet after the storm.

Nathan couldn’t remember the last time it was quiet.

One by one, the last vestiges of humanity, be they Eligius, Wonkru, or the ones left behind, were going to sleep.

As if it would be magically better when they woke up again.

As if they could undo what they’d done.

As if they could be saved.

“You’ve cleaned up good.”

Nathan blinked, shaking himself out of his morbid reverie. He watched numbly as nimble fingers darted over the keypad to his cryo-chamber, checking details. “I’m waiting for Jackson,” he said, the pointless words falling like lead from his tongue.

“I figured,” Harper smiled softly, hopping up to sit on the biobed next to Nathan. Her every movement was fluid, easy… content.

Nathan felt a stab of irrational jealousy, felt his mouth twist sourly. He looked down to his hands, ran rough fingertips over the webs of scars that weaved over his skin. Indelible marks of a six years he could never, would never forget.

“He’s good for you,” Harper continued. “I’m glad you have him. I’m glad he was there.”

“I’m not,” Nathan murmured, squeezing his eyes shut involuntarily. He hadn’t meant to say that. You didn’t speak of it, that was the rule. You never spoke of it. You gritted your teeth, and you survived.

But this was Harper. This was his friend, his sister, his kin.

“I don’t need a thief to show me how to shoot a gun.”

“Yeah? And I don’t need a scrawny girl watching my back.”

“Well I need you both to stop with your pissing contest so I can actually listen for grounders, but you can’t always get what you want. Bellamy’s put us together, so suck it up. For the record Zoe, Miller is a way better shot than you-”

“Thank you!”

“And Miller if you call either of us scrawny girls again, I will watch while a grounder stabs you.”

“Ha! Now that would liven up the evening.”

“Whatever, Monroe. You want lively? I’ve got some of that stuff Monty and Jasper’ve been brewing.”

“You’re an idiot Miller.”

“But I am a great thief.”

“You’re both hopeless. What part of keeping watch do you not understand?”

“C’mon Harper, no grounder is gonna be out in this weather.”

“Fine, but if we go blind from this crap, I’m feeding your beanie to the two headed deer.”

Miller, McIntyre, and Monroe. They had been three of the best of Bellamy’s gunners. And they had trusted each other with their lives.

Zoe… it had been over seven years since they lost her, and it still felt raw.

All the lost souls lingered like festering wounds in the survivors’ souls, even when the Drop Ship graveyard was nothing more than radioactive dust.

Gentle fingers crept over his, entwining, squeezing, “You did as good as you could. You kept him alive, you kept yourself alive… and Octavia.”

Nathan flinched. He knew how Harper must feel about Octavia after everything that had happened. So what must she think of him? How could she understand why he did what he did, when Bellamy had only been able to look at him in disbelief and disgust? How could she understand why he kept standing by her, even after everything?

“So much for the 100…” Harper said softly, her words an echo of Bellamy’s. Nathan looked at her sharply, but all he saw was the same calm sadness. “I heard what Bellamy said to you. You know how heated he can get, how blinkered. He and Octavia are more alike than either would like to admit. But she was the last one left, right? I checked the manifests. It was only you, Octavia, Hallie and Rob who made it into the bunker. And then it was just you and Octavia. Then there were two.”

“Six years, Harper. It was six years,” Nathan said, not sure what he meant by that, but needing to say it.

“I know,” Harper said, squeezing his hand before resting her head on his shoulder to watch more people lying down into their pods. Monty and Jackson were over on the other side of the room, settling Murphy down. Emori was already asleep, but Jackson had wanted to double check on Murphy’s healing wounds to make sure the cryo freezing would go smoothly.

They sat there together, legs dangling like kids off the end of the bed, letting a soft silence fall between them as they watched the people they loved work. It was oddly comforting. Nathan couldn’t remember the last time he had felt like this.

And then the words started to fall from his lips, each one weighted with so many more words left unsaid, “Gunners at the Drop Ship… Mount Weather prisoners… rebels in Arkadia and then Skaikru loyalists. It was always the same path. We were always the 100. And then you went to the sky, and I went underground.”

“And then it was six years,” Harper finished for him sadly. “I’m sorry I couldn’t have your back.”

“I’m sorry I couldn’t have yours… even when the bunker opened, I should’ve-”

“Nate, stop,” Harper said sharply, raising her head from his shoulder to look him full in the eye. “It’s okay. Really. You’ve always been loyal. And we both had people to protect.”

An unbelievable weight seemed to lift from Nathan at his best friend’s words, like an iron band around his chest had finally snapped. His lips twitched in a ghost of his old smile, “Monroe would bang our heads together if she could see us now.”

Harper grinned, eyes slightly too bright in the half light, “Probably. But I reckon she’d be happy to know that we have Monty and Jackson to do it for her, if we ever need a reality check.”

“You think? I always thought she’d laugh that we managed to get the two biggest pacifists on Earth to love us,” Nathan grinned fondly.

“Being a pacifist is underrated,” Harper said pensively, and Nathan followed her loving gaze to where Monty and Jax were finishing up with Murphy’s pod. “You should give it a go sometime, you might find you like it.”

“Maybe when we get back down there, you never know,” Nathan said, still not sure if he believed that such a time or place could exist for him. “Guess it’s my turn next…”

“And then there were four,” Harper said quietly.

Nathan frowned. Four? Even if they didn’t count Bellamy and Raven in the original 100, there was still more of them left than that. Not many, but every person still alive was worth the world. “You mean six,” he corrected.

Harper hopped off the bed, stood to face him, and she didn’t even need to say anything. He knew.

“Shit, Harper…” Nathan murmured, suddenly terrified to let go of her hands. Because sure, everything could go smoothly, they could all wake up in ten years. Harper and Monty would just have taken the long road. But Nathan was one of the 100. He knew things never went smoothly, and definitely not as planned. He had learnt that the hard way, time and time again.

He pulled her towards him with a small jerk, and she slipped into his arms willingly, squeezing him tightly as she balanced on tiptoes to hug him as he stayed sitting on the biobed. Her hand curled to cup the back of his head as she whispered with tears in her voice, “I’ll finally be older than you. You won’t be able to boss me about.”

“Like that ever stopped you before.”

“Nate? You ready?” Jackson’s voice cut through the moment, and Harper’s warmth was gone as they parted. He felt hollow.

“No, but sure,” Nathan rubbed his hands together, clearing his throat to try and regain some balance. Jax frowned at him, an unspoken question flitting across his face, but he didn’t press.

He looked at Monty as Jackson fiddled with his cryochamber’s settings. Monty slipped an arm around Harper and smiled at him. Nathan nodded, trying to convey in barely a moment everything he wanted to say to his friend.

“All set,” Jackson’s voice was too confident, there was that note in it that Nathan had come to listen for, the undercurrent of uncertainty buried deep.

“Hey,” Nathan caught Jackson’s wrist lightly in his fingers, pulling him into a kiss that he wanted to last forever. When they broke apart, he rested their foreheads together, “I’ll see you on the other side. We’ll be good, you know we will.”

“I’ll be right beside you,” Jackson nodded, shored up by Nathan’s words. “I love you.”

“I love you too,” Nathan said, stealing one last kiss.

And as he lay down, he glanced past Jax to take one last look at Harper and Monty.

Frost, cold, silence, dark.

It really was like blinking.

125 years.

Things never go as planned.

Jackson was there, and Murphy, Clarke and Octavia. Bellamy and Raven.

But Monty and Harper were long gone.

The ghost-touch of her fingertips still lingered in his, just like Zoe’s laugh echoed in the back of his mind.

He had only been awake for ten minutes when he met Jordan, all smiles and awkwardness and light. He knew Nathan’s name, he knew his story. He knew about Miller, McIntyre and Monroe as he tripped over his words and guided Nathan and Jackson to where the rest of the 100 were waiting.

125 years, and they were careful who to wake up first. Because sleep had gone by in a blink of an eye, and nothing had changed.

But so had everything.

“Oh, and this is for you,” Jordan said, pulling a grubby little package from his pocket and handing it to Nathan.

He could hear Murphy around the corner, derisive tones oddly comforting. Jax was a steady presence at his elbow. “What is it?” Jackson asked.

“It’s from Mom,” Jordan shrugged.

Frowning, Nathan gently tore the package open. A black knitted bundle was inside, pinned with a note in familiar hand.

To keep you warm on the new world.

And then there were five.

Nathan unrolled the bundle and despite the tight lump in his throat, couldn’t help but smile. It was a beanie.

A hat, and barely a handful of words, but Harper’s message rang loud and clear.

Nathan wouldn’t disappoint her.

[qqueenofhades]

the tangled web of fate we weave: xvi

who has two thumbs and no self-control? there’s just gonna be... so much garcy fic this week, you guys. so much.

part xv/AO3.

April 15, 2013

It’s Monday, it’s tax day, and it’s the week that midterms start. If it was possible for a group of people’s collective moods to actually be little black stormclouds over their heads, the entire history department would be drenched, but they have mostly confined themselves to double doses of coffee and bitching about the IRS, as well as various passive-aggressive email chains to the idiots who thought it was a great idea to schedule three faculty-search-committee meetings this week. Lucy is sitting on two of those, was up until three AM last night reading the various CV submissions (besides, it’s hard for her to sleep for other reasons these days) and trying to draw up her shortlist of candidates for the new Assistant Professor of East Asian History that Stanford is preparing to hire. She is all for more diversity in the workplace and the academic realm, but as timing goes, this could be. . . greatly improved.

Still, she supposes, she can’t complain too much, and she’s about to be away from it for several months anyway. Her leave starts at the end of next week, and she won’t be returning until the start of the fall quarter, so there’s plenty of stuff that needs to be finished up before that. Her in-tray has been apparently cursed with a magical charm to never go down no matter how much Lucy works on it, but aside from one of said committee meetings in an hour, she is free to hack at it for the rest of the day. Flynn said he’d bring lunch over, too.

A faint smile curls up the corner of her mouth, and she decides that coffee (decaf, unavoidably) sounds like a good idea, even if she’ll have to fight through the zombified departmental hordes to get it. She submitted her taxes three weeks ago, so at least she doesn’t have to mess around with that last-minute headache, though she is sure that any number of replacement headaches will pop up in its place. She does feel bad for her colleagues, even if they did bring this upon themselves. You’d think academics would be more organized, but honestly, they really aren’t.

Lucy hauls herself to her feet, picks up her mug, and heads out of her office, down the hall to the staff kitchen. Her friend Eleanor and Paul from Late Antique and Byzantine History are leaning by the coffeemaker, having an involved argument about someone amusingly named King Boso, but while this is potentially a fascinating subject, Lucy definitely needs them to move. She clears her throat. “Hate to interrupt, but I have a need.”

“Good timing, you just missed the stampede.” Eleanor empties the grounds out of the percolator and reaches for a new pack. “Decaf, I assume?”

“Unfortunately, yes. I haven’t been properly awake in weeks.”

“I thought your leave started on Friday.” Eleanor puts in the capsule and presses the button to start the cycle. “Or is it this Friday?”

“This Friday. I have no idea how I’ll finish everything.”

Paul, as if sensing that the conversation might devolve into girl talk (he’s a dazzling genius, but the kind with absolutely zero people skills who should just stay happily shut in a library learning dead languages), makes his excuses and scuttles out. Eleanor digs in the fridge. “The Huns just took the last of the half-and-half, but we have powdered creamer.”

“No, I’m fine. I’m drinking it black these days, anyway. Garcia’s rubbing off on me.”

Eleanor raises a slightly impish eyebrow. “Clearly.”

Lucy blushes, but can’t exactly deny it. She waits until the coffee has brewed, then tips it out into her mug. God, she can’t wait to drink the real stuff again (and see her feet, and walk without feeling like a lumbering juggernaut, and not have to pee every five minutes, and be woken up with auditions for the  Olympic gymnastics team, and all the rest, even if she will obviously then have different problems). She and Flynn were not exactly planning for her to get pregnant after six months of dating, but it happened, in the way that life tends to do, and they’re ready to make it work, as much as anyone can possibly be. Flynn is clearly beside himself with excitement and apprehension at the idea of becoming a father, and Lucy – well, she’s obviously had ambivalent feelings about kids in the past, to say the least. Felt it was something to do more to please her mom, rather than anything deeply desired. But dammit, something has changed. She’s thirty, she’s in a stable and loving relationship with a man who worships the ground she walks on, she has a good job, they’re financially stable (though again, better not to ask how exactly Flynn has chipped in), they’ve just bought a cute little bungalow/fixer-upper of a starter house, and there is the unspoken understanding that this summer, after the baby is born, they will probably get married. Lucy has grown up, or at least grown older. She’s ready for this. Their family. Them.

“You’re due the second week of May, right?” Eleanor asks, sitting down at the table across from her. “Picked out names yet?”

“We’re kind of waiting to see what feels right.” Lucy raises an eyebrow, as if to acknowledge that this is a very San Francisco thing to say, but while they know that the baby is a girl and that her middle name will be Maria, for Flynn’s mother, they still haven’t settled on a first name. “We have a couple ideas, but nothing’s stuck quite yet. Item number one on things not to screw up for your kid, huh?”

“You’ll be fine,” Eleanor says. “Garcia’s a little. . . rough around the edges, but anyone can see that he adores you. And he’s gorgeous, and a medieval history nut. Clear sign of good taste.”

Lucy snorts. “Hey now. He’s definitely taken.”

“Trust me, I know.” Eleanor raises both hands in mock surrender. “Honestly, though, you two are one of the best couples I know. Lucy Junior is going to be so lucky to have you as parents. But – ” She pauses, well aware it’s a delicate topic. “Your mom come around yet?”

Lucy grimaces. Amy is absolutely thrilled at the prospect of becoming a cool young aunt who can spoil the kid rotten, but her mother, well. . . let’s just say that Carol Preston looked at Flynn like he was a dead slug the first time she met him, and her reaction hasn’t gotten much warmer since. Flynn also clearly doesn’t like her; he’s coolly cordial to her for the sake of familial civility, but that’s it. Carol thinks that Noah was a far superior choice, that Lucy callously threw him away to get knocked up by some idiot ex-lawbreaking hooligan (Lucy loves him, but has to admit this is not an inaccurate description) and that while she’s prepared to have a relationship with her granddaughter, Flynn should definitely not think that applies to him. Lucy gets the feeling that Carol will just pretend Flynn does not exist, as if she closes her eyes and blinks hard, he might happily vanish. For his part, Flynn thinks it’s rich of Carol to assume that she gets to have a relationship with their daughter at all, given what she did to her own. As Lucy’s pregnancy has progressed, they seem to be getting farther apart, rather than closer. They haven’t been in the same room since Flynn and Lucy broke the news.

Eleanor can see the answer on her face, and winces in sympathy. “Shit,” she says. “I’m sorry, Lucy. Forget I asked. That sucks.”

“It’s what it is.” Lucy tries to keep her tone light. “Sometimes people don’t like each other. I’m sure Mom and Flynn will work it out.” She pauses. “Eventually.”

“They’re both very stubborn, bossy people with strong opinions,” Eleanor says. “Usually doesn’t mix well. But hey, sure, maybe they bury the hatchet when the kid arrives, let’s think positive. Anything else I can help you with?”

“No, Eleanor, thanks. I really need to get my stuff ready for this committee meeting. Then I can come back and tackle the In-Tray of Death.” Lucy finishes her fake coffee in a few more swallows, puts the mug in the sink (cheerily ignoring the “Wash Your Own Dishes Please!” sign taped above it) and waddles back to her office. She gets her dossier of papers together, winces as sharp heels trod her spleen, and gives her side a poke. Then, feeling like a barge needing a tugboat to reverse, she heads for the meeting. Since she’s a small woman, it feels like her belly precedes her everywhere by about two feet. Maybe they can tie on a flasher.

Once that’s done with, and they’ve narrowed the overall shortlist of candidates from twelve names to ten (so, a productive use of everyone’s time, then), Lucy chats with the department chair, accepts his congratulations on her impending arrival, and then makes her escape before Debbie from student services can bustle over with her latest round of well-meant advice about what Lucy should be doing at this stage. Once the morning sickness stopped, Lucy hasn’t minded it too much, but she is not a fan of the (in her opinion, frankly creepy) Mommy Culture that surrounds it. No, she is not going to eat her placenta, or take tasteful black-and-white bump pictures. You will not catch her dead at a gender reveal party, she accepted a baby shower but only a small one with a few women, and the “my labor was TEN HOURS with NO PAINKILLERS!” kind of talk makes her run for the hills. This is 2013. Lucy will have all the drugs, thank you, she doesn’t think a natural water birth is the only proper and fulfilling way for her child to enter the world, she isn’t going to start a blog detailing their toilet training milestones, and the breastfeeding wars make her wonder if these people have real hobbies. Not to bag on women who do it that way, of course, and there have been a few times (thanks to hormones) that Lucy has found herself genuinely weepy over the Miracle of Life. But still. She is, at heart, just too practical.

She rounds the corner into the department reception area, stops, and grins at the sight of Garcia Flynn holding a large and greasy bag from her favorite sandwich shop and looking too tall for the room. (Which, to be fair, is most rooms.) There is paint in his hair, so he’s probably been working on the house again. It’s livable, but they’re still trying to get the finishing touches out of the way before their time becomes unavoidably caught up in caring for a newborn. The nursery is mostly done, decorated in tasteful, gender-neutral colors (Lucy has nothing against pink, but she’s also not slapping it everywhere), and she clears her throat. “Hey, you.”

Flynn starts, nearly drops the sandwich bag, then comes over for a kiss, which is even more of a cumbersome business than usual. The other nice thing about this is that Lucy has not had to lift a finger at home for months; Flynn waits on her hand and foot. He hasn’t been patronizing about it, just that he seems to know what she will need before she does, and makes it available as swiftly and conveniently as possible. He does his best not to hover, fully aware that she is a grown woman and can handle this herself, and that he is decidedly of secondary importance in whose opinion matters the most. Still, he almost never is more than three feet from her side, is usually touching her even with just a finger or the back of his hand, and gets jumpy if she’s out of sight for too long and he doesn’t know why. It must be really hard to adjust from “permanent outlaw on the run from international terrorist organization” to “suburban dad-to-be in loving relationship and DIY home refurbisher,” so Lucy tries to be understanding.

“Hey,” Flynn says, when he’s straightened up. “Free for lunch?”

“Yeah.” Lucy links her arm in his, and they walk out to the foyer, down the stairs, and out into the sunny midmorning. Campus is busy with its usual commerce, and they walk until they find a shady spot under a tree. Sitting, especially on the ground, is a production, so Lucy takes Flynn’s hand and does so with care. Once he’s joined her, he opens the sandwich bag and offers hers, as she leans against the trunk with a groan. “Yep. Ready for this to be over.”

“Only what? Three more weeks?” Flynn says that as if he hasn’t been watching the calendar as anxiously as her, and Lucy gives him a tolerant my-husband-is-an-idiot look. Well, basically her husband. He’s had a bag packed and ready to go at a moment’s notice since month seven. “Your sister was over to drop off the last things from the shower. Helped with a bit of the painting. Oh, and she says your mother isn’t feeling as well again. Watch her announce that the cancer is returned on the very day you go into the hospital.”

Lucy glances at him sidelong. Flynn doesn’t make much of a secret that he can’t stand Carol, but for Lucy’s sake, he rarely speaks this angrily about her. “Garcia, if – if it does come back, she can’t control that. I know things between you two aren’t the best, but – ”

Flynn snorts, taking a bite of his sandwich and doing that head-turn thing he always does in crowded public places, scanning for threats. He still carries a gun, even if only a small one, and he has definitely terrified people he thinks are following them too carefully or staring too long. It’s that fine line between remaining vigilant for Rittenhouse, and turning into a full-on paranoid lunatic who rants at rosebushes. He’s mostly managing it, though as her due date gets closer, he seems to be more on edge. But they’ve bought a house under their real names, they’ve been a normal couple, they’ve opened bank accounts and phone plans and whatever else. There have been plenty of opportunities for Flynn to ping in the system, to draw the attention of the omniscient electronic overlords, but nothing. Smooth sailing.

Flynn himself is suspicious of this, thinks it’s too good to be true, but Lucy (if perhaps naively) is holding onto the hope that he just disguised his tracks well enough with all his false identities that nothing has managed to stick to his real one. It has been over a year of domestic bliss. They’re expecting a baby. Surely if Rittenhouse was going to strike by now, they would have done it. Wouldn’t they? They need to be smart about this, of course, and Lucy has battled the ever-present anxiety that they are doing a child a tremendous disservice by bringing it into the world with no sure guarantee of safety, but then, no parent can give that to any child. There could be a car accident, or some pedo at the playground, or falling out of a tree, or. . .or. . . (yes, Lucy has spent too much time aware of all the various things that could happen). How does anyone ever have children, to give them this world and let them go? Who knows. She still doesn’t.

“Hey,” Flynn says gruffly, drawn out of his anger at Carol by sensing her melancholy. He reaches out and takes her hand, squeezing it with both of his. “Lucy? Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.” Lucy musters a smile. “I just hope you’re wrong. She’s still my mother, I’m her daughter. I don’t want the day I have ours to be mixed up with losing her somehow.”

Flynn coughs, as if knowing that badmouthing your mother-in-law to your wife’s face never goes well, and changes the subject. Finally he says, “I should walk you back. You have a lot to finish. So do I.”

“Oh?” Lucy takes both his hands and allows him to winch her to her feet. “More than just the house?”

Flynn glances both ways and lowers his voice. “I promised Wyatt a name,” he says. “I still haven’t given it to him yet. And I’m quite sure we both remember that.”

Lucy starts to say something, then stops. Yes, she supposes, they do. Wyatt fulfilled his part of the bargain to the letter, took the fall for them, even if he got out of jail quickly. He’s stayed in the Bay Area, in fact – has become roommates with Rufus Carlin, the techie at Mason Industries who Flynn threatened for information. (Lucy does judge her beloved’s life choices, like most people, but there you have it.) He’s done this because there still has been no news whatsoever on his wife. Jessica Logan has been missing over a year, it’s clear she either ran off to start a new life in Rio or she’s dead in some drainage ditch, but either way, she’s not coming home. But without a body, without any firm closure, there must still be that awful, tiny itch of hope in the back of Wyatt’s mind. Maybe she is trapped somewhere, held in some lunatic’s basement. Maybe she’ll escape and come home.

Lucy isn’t sure if she should try to visit or not, drop in for casual catch-ups or what have you. Wyatt did them a major favor, she can understand why Flynn still feels obliged to come up with his end of the bargain. Still, the whole point is that they weren’t seen together, and. . . well. She isn’t sure if Wyatt wants to see her pink-cheeked, doe-eyed, and bulgingly pregnant, in the middle of the domestic life he himself has lost, with the guy he likewise still isn’t very fond of. It just seems like it might be insult to injury.

She and Flynn don’t talk much on the way back to her office, as Lucy eyes the stairs but decides that since she gets winded on flat surfaces, she can wait a little longer to be an exercise hero. But as he’s kissing her at her door, she grabs hold of his arm. “Whatever you’re digging up for Wyatt, however you’re going about it – you’re being careful?”

This is always a relative question with Flynn, and she is well aware that he’s not collecting evidence like a Boy Scout earning merit badges. Knows that he might be kicking tires and turning rocks, nicely or otherwise. She isn’t even asking for the full truth of what he’s doing. Just enough to put her mind at ease.

Flynn’s brow creases briefly, but he brushes a thumb across her chin in a quick, tender gesture. “Of course. I’ll see you later, hey?”

Lucy nods, bites her lip, then pulls his head down for one more kiss, just because. He lets go and blows her one last extra over his shoulder, because it turns out that this terrifying murder machine in love is the softest imaginable thing in the universe. Lucy watches him go, then takes a deep breath and squares her shoulders. Marches back into her office, and gets to work.

She manages to make at least some sort of dent in her in-tray, and is just wondering if she wants to go to a conference at the University of Virginia in August (it sounds really interesting, but Charlottesville in August is going to be unbearably hot, and the last time she stayed on the Lawn, there was no air conditioning) when there’s a rap on her door. Then, before she has answered – it’s  not her office hour, she wasn’t expecting anyone – it opens. “Lucy?”

It takes a moment for her brain to process this. Then it connects, it burns through her, and she leaps awkwardly to her feet, almost knocking over her office chair and looking around in search of something she can grab. Her heart is racing, pounding in her mouth, which is half-open as if to scream, and her chest seizes up. She backs away. “You!”

“Lucy, please.” Benjamin Cahill holds out both hands as if to pacify a wild animal. He’s casually dressed in jeans and blazer and plaid shirt, looks like he has just strolled down from another department for a professional chat. “Don’t be alarmed.”

“Don’t be alarmed?” Lucy eyes her phone, on the desk, and wonders if she can call Flynn in time, if he’s anywhere near here and can come racing back. If he discovers Cahill in here, it’s going to get messy, and she almost doesn’t care. “How dare you show your face.”

“Lucy.” Cahill looks pained. Almost genuinely. “I haven’t come to hurt you.”

“So you’ve come to deliver more veiled threats about Rittenhouse, or – or tell me that your offer stands, or – ” Lucy’s grip tightens on the back of her chair. “You have to understand there is absolutely no way in the world I am pleased to see you. Leave, or I’m calling campus security.”

“I’m sorry for causing you stress,” Cahill says. “I’m sure you don’t need it right now. I’ve heard about your happy news, on the grapevine.” He nods at her, as Lucy crosses her arms protectively over her swollen stomach. “I just wanted to let you know once and for all that you’re safe. I know things were. . . mismanaged, before. But that’s all been called off. A little present for my grandchild. Rittenhouse may do some things you don’t understand, but it’s about family. We’ve always believed that. A time for a fresh start, and mending fences.”

Grandchild. Lucy hates hearing that word in his mouth, a word to which he has no right. “So what? You have been spying on me this whole time, but you’ll stop because – what, only now that I’m procreating I have value as a woman to you people? The way men only care about rape because ‘I have a wife and daughter?’ Is that it?”

“No, no.” Cahill manages to keep smiling. It’s not at all comforting. “Honestly. I wanted to ease your mind. You’re in the clear. You’ve probably been wondering. If you really can’t forgive me, I’ll understand, but there you have it. Your whole life.”

Lucy keeps staring at him tensely, heart hammering in her mouth. “What do you really want from me?”

“Nothing. I don’t want anything. I just wanted to see how you were doing, if you were well. As I said.” Cahill shrugs. “It’s just a time for new beginnings all around. I’ll let you get on with your day, Lucy. Bye now.”

With that, he smiles and steps out of the room, leaving Lucy shaky-kneed, dry-mouthed, and still tempted to call campus security and order them not to let Cahill anywhere near the history department again. Was that supposed to be a warning, a veiled insinuation that he could return the surveillance or whatever else? Do she and Flynn owe their happy life thus far purely to the fact that Rittenhouse is letting them have it, was that the takeaway? Is there going to be a second part of this conversation later, where Cahill returns and lets her know what the price is, if she wants to keep this sweet little deal? Turning over new leaves, her ass. If that was supposed to reassure her, it has comprehensively done the opposite.

Lucy’s concentration is shot, she can’t focus for the rest of the day, and she locks up her office and jumps a foot when she sees the janitor at the end of the hall. She drives home in distraction, goes inside, and Flynn, who has been stirring something on the stove, drops the spoon with a clatter at the sight of her face. He almost rushes over and grabs both her hands. “Lucy? Lucy!”

“I’m all right,” Lucy says faintly, even as it is relatively apparent that she is not. “It’s – I’m just – ”

“Do we need to go to the hospital?” Flynn starts looking around for his bag. “Should I call the midwife?”

“No, it’s not that. It’s – ” Lucy inhales a rattling breath, and allows him to sit her down on the couch. “Benjamin Cahill came by campus this afternoon. After you left.”

Flynn’s face goes blank, then thunderous. “He what?”

Lucy explains, feeling like she’s making a bad job of it, stumbling over her words. Flynn’s expression goes darker and darker, and she doesn’t need to ask to see that his conclusions over it are the same as hers. He gets to his feet and starts pacing as restlessly as a caged tiger, running both hands over his face and swearing. “It was a threat,” he says. “It was definitely a threat. He knew you were expecting a baby, someone told him, or they’ve been keeping an eye on us. They’re obsessed with bloodlines, they believe Rittenhouse has a right to pass on its superior genes, like any other creepy cult eugenics fanatics. Probably think you’re having some – some mongrel half-breed, and they have to – ”

“Garcia, stop.” Lucy reaches for his hand, trying to tow him back to the couch and next to her, but he doesn’t appear to notice. “Garcia, stop.”

She doesn’t know what she’s saying – stop with the pacing, stop with the paranoia, don’t stop because it’s not paranoia, stop and come back here and hold me – but it cuts through some of his mania. He halts in his tracks, looking at her with rumpled hair and anguished eyes, the thought vibrating in the air around him that he cannot protect her or their daughter, and this is exactly their worst fear coming true. There’s a long pause, and then he whirls on his heel. “I need to go out. Ask a few questions. See what I can turn up.”

“Now?” Lucy stands up with a grimace. “You’re really going to rush out and – look, I think it was a trick just as much as you do, but if you take the bait, if they can frame it as they’ve changed but you haven’t, they give you a fresh chance and you throw it away – ”

“They’re not really giving us a chance, now, are they?” Flynn doesn’t look at her as he answers, because he’s already halfway across the room, clearly heading upstairs to get his gun out of the safe. “It’s a carnival shell game, any way they set it up, we lose! And I’m not sitting and waiting for that to happen!”

“Garcia!” Lucy starts heaving herself up the stairs. She should have guessed he’d react like this, and she almost wonders if she should have told him, but obviously she never could (or would have) lied. “Garcia, please!”

She reaches their bedroom, which he is already tearing apart, pulling his gun and its holster out of the safe, slamming extra clips into his belt, looking wild-eyed and frightening. She grabs at his arms, wrestling him to a halt like a runaway bus, as she ends up with her back against the wall from the sheer force of his momentum. She grips his face in her hands, pulling him down to look at her. “Don’t,” she says, scared and small. “Don’t.”

He closes his eyes, shuddering out a deeply pained breath. He passes a hand over his face, trying to control himself, realizing that he’s scared her and clearly ashamed of it. “I’m sorry,” he says, struggling to modulate his tone. “I’m sorry, Lucy. I just – I have to go, I can’t just sit here and pretend it’ll be better in the morning. I’ve spent two years chasing these people, I know what they can do. I’m not – I’m not – letting that happen. Call Amy to come over and stay with you, turn on the house alarm, don’t let anyone in. I’ll be back in the morning.”

Lucy doesn’t answer at once. Her hands tighten on his face, even as she slowly forces them to let go. Then she stands on her tiptoes to kiss him, and he wraps his arm around her, pulling her as close as he can. “Please,” she says shakily. “Please be back in the morning.”

He nods, then lets go of her, striding down the hall to the stairs as if knowing it’ll be too hard for both of them if he looks back one more time. She stands at the top, watching him. Hears the door open, and shut, and hears his car start. Tires crunch in the driveway, headlights swing across the front foyer as he reverses, and then he’s gone.

Lucy presses her knuckles to her mouth, holding back a sob. Just for a moment. Then she shakes herself – I’m fine, I’m fine – and goes to get her phone.

Flynn’s head is a roaring, whirling maelstrom for at least the first twenty minutes out. He feels like he’s been electrified, he can’t stop or slow, he drives well past the speed limit, and he’s lucky not to be pulled over. He has a personal black site where he keeps his Rittenhouse materials, well away from the house, as he’s obviously not going to take any chances with that being raided. It’s north, up in the woods, and it has all the files he’s kept, the intel he’s collected – he’s not letting those two years go to waste, and he still adds to it where he can. He’s going to go up there and check all the things that might have pinged, run all the diagnostics and pull anything he can off whatever server he can think of. There has to be chatter, there has to be traffic. Some kind of reference to whatever covert surveillance operation that Rittenhouse has to have been running. He’s looked for everything, he’s never really stopped – how could they have fooled him?

The urge to drive to another location in Marin County – the Rittenhouse mansion in the woods where Cahill took Lucy the first time – and just go in guns blazing, try to take out anyone who’s up there for an evil retreat, is considerable. Flynn knows he can’t, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t want to. Every anxiety, every lurking terror from every time he’s woken up and looked at Lucy sleeping, the covers sloped over her stomach, has been triggered at once, and it’s a battle to keep his head clear enough as it is. He’s going to ask her to marry him. Should probably have done it before, but – well, one thing at a time. He knows he loves her with his entire mind and heart and soul, and if she came back to him from the future, well. Something must have happened there.

(But what if it doesn’t?)

(What if Rittenhouse takes his wife – well, soon, anyway – and his daughter away from him? What if he loves two people more than anything else on earth, and he loses them? After all this, after everything?)

(He’s not brave enough, he’s not strong enough, to stand that without going mad.)

Flynn’s hands are almost vibrating on the wheel, and he accelerates again. He’s on the Bayshore Freeway, as it happens, the stretch that runs right alongside the Bay between South San Fran and Little Hollywood. He saved Lucy not twenty miles from here, just over ten years ago. Strange that that was the moment that connected them so inextricably, that wound them up where they are, and –

He sees headlights too late. Just out of the corner of his eye.

Hears the screech, and the swerve. Then the crash.

Then there’s nothing but black water below him, and the car is falling.

[starsandpopcorn]

‘I See You’ Micro-Review: I have to give it to ‘I See You’ for being one of the most oddly original thrillers I’ve seen in a long time. It’s hard to really talk about this movie without including some minor spoilers. So, if you plan on watching it, you should stop reading this review now.⠀ ⠀ Okay, so there are a lot of moving parts when it comes to the plot of this film. This is especially refreshing because the first 30 minutes or so seem pretty straight forward. A family is going through a crisis that might tear them apart as the father hunts a serial child abductor tormenting their community. It seems like ‘I See You’ is setting itself up to be a final confrontation between the psycho and the cop as the family is drawn into their crossfire. That’s about as far from the case as you can get through. Weird stuff starts happening and a big reveal halfway through complicates everything. I’ll admit I was pretty bored during the first act, but as things escalated, I found myself becoming more and more sucked into the intricate web that film started to weave. ⠀ ⠀ ‘I See You’ goes from “ho-hum” to edge of your seat thriller over the span of about 10 minutes. It gets incredibly dark and pretty soon you have no idea who the good guys even are anymore. The film blindsided me, and because of that, it was a great movie to watch unfold. Just when you think the big reveal has come, something else comes up. Hats off to writer Devon Graye and director Adam Randall for pulling together one of the tightest thrillers I’ve seen in a long time. If you’re looking for a film that will keep you guessing and make your skin crawl with anticipation, you definitely need to check out ‘I See You.’ ⠀ ⠀ Read full reviews at starsandpopcorn.com!⠀ ⠀ #moviereview #moviecritic #movieblog #filmreview #filmreviews #movietalk #filmtalk #movielover #movieaddict #movienerd #moviereccomendation #movienight #instamovies #filmblog #moviereviews #movies #movie #film #moviegoers #moviefreak #movieblogger #movielove #movieworld #starsandpopcorn #ISeeYou #thriller https://ift.tt/33LIfeh

[nemrut]

Web-Series Novel: A Practical Guide to Evil by Erraticerrata

Title: A Practical Guide to Evil Author: Erraticerrata Status: Work in Progress 

Link: wordpress

Summary: The Empire stands triumphant.

For twenty years the Dread Empress has ruled over the lands that were once the Kingdom of Callow, but behind the scenes of this dawning golden age threats to the crown are rising. The nobles of the Wasteland, denied the power they crave, weave their plots behind pleasant smiles. In the north the Forever King eyes the ever-expanding borders of the Empire and ponders war. The greatest danger lies to the west, where the First Prince of Procer has finally claimed her throne: her people sundered, she wonders if a crusade might not be the way to secure her reign. Yet none of this matters, for in the heart of the conquered lands the most dangerous man alive sat across an orphan girl and offered her a knife.

Her name is Catherine Foundling, and she has a plan.

Words from the author: A Practical Guide to Evil is a YA fantasy novel about a young girl named Catherine Foundling making her way through the world – though, in a departure from the norm, not on the side of the heroes. Is there such a thing as doing bad things for good reasons, or is she just rationalizing her desire for control? Good and Evil are tricky concepts, and the more power you get the blurrier the lines between them become.

Updates every Monday and Wednesday, as of the latest Patreon goal.

So I burned through this in 4 days or so and yeah, there is a lot to love about it. Guess the initial similarities in its premise to Worm can't be denied, what with being a teenage girl who joins the villains in the hopes to do good and is pretty ruthless in order to reach her goal, while she befriends people on the side of the villains where some aren't that unreasonably while the people on the side of good aren't necessarily all nice or good either. Still, make no mistake, it very much does its own thing. The concept with the Names is just fascinating and really, really cool. The way the rules of storytelling influence the world and characters and the different ways the various characters have found to interact with them is really creative and interesting

I love the setting. It's a an awesome fantasy setting with the familiar faces that I want to see, like Roman legions, orcs, goblins, dwarves, gnomes and so on but also given a creative fresh spin that it doesn't feel like an unimaginative D&D or LotR rip-off. The fact that the dwarves and gnomes seem to be by all accounts the heavy hitters of the setting with whom no one dares to fuck with is a nice change, for example. The geopolitical snippets that we see where the different nations, cultures and coalitions clash and unfold has been one of the stories bigger strengths. The racial and cultural clashes between characters hailing from different nations and social classes has also been explored in a rather good manner. It also has a certain anime feel to it, in a good way, that just makes it even more enjoyable to be me. I also love the fact that gender barely plays a role in this. Whatever role, job, class or function, in all facets in nearly all cultures, everything basically has a roughly equal split in terms of genders, with the goblins being the sole exception with their matriarchal society, which in turn was already alien enough, being goblins and all. No token girl or token boy characters in anything and no "you can't because you're a girl" story line either, it's rare to see it like that. Just enjoyment of the journey the character is on. Same with sexuality, it doesn't matter to anyone in the setting which way you swing or if you swing at all, so various things can be explored without taking over the plot. The lead girl is bisexual, btw, with a leaning towards girls. One of my favorite things have got to be the quotes at the beginning of the chapters. They can be hilarious and many of them have this distinct Magic the gathering flavor text feeling to them. I love them. Quotes like   “Always mistrust these three: a battle that seems won, a chancellor who smiles and a ruler calling you friend.” – Extract from the personal journals of Dread Emperor Terribilis II

“I’ll be honest, Chancellor – revenge is the motivation for over half the decrees I’ve made.” – Dread Empress Sanguinia II, best known for outlawing cats and being taller than her”

or “Now kneel, fools, and witness my ascension to GODHOOD!” – Last words of Dread Empress Sinistra IV, the Erroneous

They generally crack me up and I am genuinely impressed that the author managed to come up with so many of them that are honestly lough out loud funny, well, at least to me. The dialog and witty banter has been consistently funny and energetic. I have laughed countless times and a lot of the side characters are lovable because of it. The good lines are not reserved for the main character alone but virtually everyone gets at least a few, it's rather balanced on that account. And it never becomes muddled enough that it makes the characters indistinguishable from each other, even if they share the same type of dark humor. By seeing when and on whose accounts they make the jokes, their characters still shine through. The fight scenes are decent, and the quirks and strengths of the setting and the dialog allow them to punch outside their weight-class. The meta aspects of the story itself are worked very well into the scenes and I believe that that is a very difficult thing to do. Here is a scene relatively early on: “We can get to that later,” I dismissed. “Evidently you’re the gritty type, but how far up the antihero scale are you?” 

“As far as I need to be,” he responded gravely. I pushed down my urge to make something out of that. Crossbow Tamika had already finished reloading, and the pair of them seemed to be considering their next target. I really wasn’t liking the way Spear Tamika was beginning to angle towards me.   “Are you the kind of gritty that works with enemies?” I probed. “You know, for the greater good and such.” A lesser author would have made me hate this but he pulled it off and made this fun.

More after the break but for anyone who wants to avoid even minor spoilers, give it a read, it’s awesome. Not perfect or anything as it does have its weaknesses but very well worth the read.

The side cast is funny and interesting. The 15th legion has some fun characters who are likable and enjoyable throughout. When talking about the Calamities and some others, things become downright amazing. The way they are introduced and then explored in their interludes on how they've built their legends meshes wonderfully with the more intimate and casual moments they share with each other when they just bicker and enjoy their company. I always hated the "if you lose you are dead to me" kinda villains and even though they are all very much villains, they also love and care for each other and generally having a personality allows for characters to have more depth, to have them care for more than just power. The Calamaties are larger than life, fun and epic. Which kinda flows into one of the not so much strengths of the story. Heiress is, as far as villains go...not exactly top notch. It doesn't help that while I do believe that she is a serious threat and annoyance, and that her plans are appropriately “oh shit” level, I still can't respect her because in her core, she is the stupid kind of villain, the short sighted backstabber who, as a character archetype, just isn’t that interesting, at least to me.     The clash of ideologies that very much defined books 1 and 2 between the Lone Swordsman, the Heiress and the Squire suffered under the fact that both the Lone Swordsman and the Heiress upheld positions that, well, sucked. It wasn't a matter of who was right because it was abundantly clear who was and that's the main character. The Lone Swordsman was a partly mindfucked/brainwashed zealot with few redeeming qualities and the Heiress just wants to be properly evil and hates all this efficiency, stability and success that the villain faction had for a while now. What is there to ponder? I guess I would have preferred antagonists who also had good paths/plans rather than just being flat-out wrong/evil. Heiress especially, who at all times has been the bigger danger simply because she cares only about being evil in the right way and is unable to prioritize anything else. Still, she isn’t terrible, she has interesting/fun aspects, it is fun to hate her even if I roll my eyes a lot and her dynamic with her father is fun, even if only for the inevitable scene where Cat will do something horrible to him in order to punish the Heiress. Catherine is a character who has some weaknesses but in general she is fun to follow, entertaining and someone who knows how to end a fight. She has good lines, one gets a good feel for her as the story goes along and it’s interesting if a bit frustrating when her own, culturally biased morals shine through. Like her inherent dislike and condemnation of human sacrifice despite the fact that she has about committed nearly every atrocity but since she is from Callow, that kinda thing is a no-no. It’s the arbitrary if not contradictory moral position of a true person.   I enjoy her journey and character and appreciate the way she deconstructs several conventions that are typical to the "want to save a society/nation/people" archetype. The story contained several digs at other stories, like this quote when they learn that the Heiress set her slave soldiers free.   Nominally granting the Stygian war-slaves their freedom meant absolutely nothing, when they’d been indoctrinated from birth to obey their orders of their owners without fail.

Which is basically the biggest "take that" I've seen in a while, directed at Dany's freeing of the Unsullied who in turn then moved by her actions chose to follow her nonetheless. And of course, Cat is absolutely correct. That one act of liberation probably didn't really mean that much to those who, in her words, had been indoctrinated from birth to obey and fight. Later on, when the Lone Swordsman comes upon them, he is also aware of this dilemma. His solution was to not ask them to fight, to give them that freedom but that more than anything was what convinced them to fight for him anyway, and thus he unwillingly manipulated them into doing it anyway. I really loved that touch, especially since it was a plot point that was well set up in advance, touched upon over several chapters and then had a rather satisfying resolution. Or the general theme of the shonen protag/hero of the story taking umbrage with the lesser methods of his enemies and saying that's not the right way because it's wrong. It's a conversation that that crops up all the time, and that the hero will find a better way, only never saying what that better way is, mainly because he hasn't one until he pulls unlimited power out of his ass.   Cat isn't like that and hates people like that and this inherent struggle against story conventions, especially with regards to the Black Knight is fascinating to me. Having the Calamaties and the Empress scheme and work around these inherent story elements is just cool. The romance in the story was rather lowkey which isn't bad per se,   but Killian didn't exactly leave a big impact so far but I'm hoping this will change with the recent developments. Either strike out with someone more interesting or have Killian become more interesting and defined. So far, it was pleasant and cute but not exactly much substance. One more minor point of complaint would be the relatively steady amount of typos, missing words and the like, which happen about once or twice per chapter. Nothing tragic but definitely noticeable. Author also uses adverbs a bit too much, especially the "-ly" modifiers for the verbs instead of showing it through action and dialog how they feel but it works for the most part.  Think that’s about it.  The writing is overall rather good and I enjoy the story format, what with the interludes and all. So yeah, really loving the story. Story got its hooks in me and I powered through and it was a blast from start to the latest available chapter. Supposed to be five books, and we're in the first third of the third one so, this story will be going on for a while and I'm looking forward to it.  4/5

[lightholme]

 Once upon a time,  A village burned.  Ever since Prometheus passed along the idea of making fire to a caveman somewhere at the dawn of civilization, human beings have enjoyed burning things. It started with wood, moved on to your neighbor’s wood, and then the natural progression was to set fire to your neighbor as well. Prometheus would have rolled in his grave if he’d ever been allowed to die. But this fairy tale takes place before the Catholic Church had gotten its world renowned reputation for burning people in all sorts of ingenious and incredibly creative ways, when the concept was still on the cutting edge of brutality and not something that happened on a day to day basis. Burning villages was still an avant-garde art-form that only the most cultured artists of the era had tried their hand at. The most talented among these was a man named Atilla the Hun, who had reached the forefront of his field slowly and methodically. Like most fools, what he lacked in talent he made up for with endless practice and quite admirable tenacity. Through sheer force of will a man who is inept at a task may slowly become a master.   But that is not the point of this fairy tale. This fairy tale follows in the same classical tradition as the immortal and universally hallowed morality tales of the great Greek storyteller Aesop. It is a homage, if you will. Which is to say that its message is about as subtle as a brick flying out of the back of a truck and near instantly pulverizing your skull so completely that when the paramedics finally show up to scrape your lifeless husk out of your 1973 Oldsmobile Omega, the grizzled 20-year veteran paramedic actually gags a little.  This is one of those kinds of fairy tales.  Once upon a time,  A village burned.  A young man stumbles from the ruins. He is covered in ash, and the softly moaning wind blows his soot stained shawl up against the side of his body, revealing his hollow chest and the bones of his rib-cage. If you’re having a hard time picturing this, imagine him looking a bit like like a certain coyote who’d blown himself up chasing a roadrunner, but admittedly it’s a lot less comedic considering the boy’s circumstances, which are as follows:  Two days before, he had gone out into the wilds alone on his first hunt. This was the right of passage into manhood for this particular village, in which when a boy reached the age of thirteen, all of the older men in the tribe forced him to go out into the nearby forest alone covered in nothing but what amounted to a tattered sack. Sometimes they gave them a stick, too. He had three days to kill an animal of some sort, preferably a big one that tasted good, then bring it back so the village could throw a big party and eat whatever the boy caught. After this set of arbitrary conditions had been met, the boy was thought to have become a man, and everyone congratulated him for slaughtering the animal and not getting killed after they had all abandoned him in the woods. It was a sort of proto college fraternity hazing ritual, basically. The French anthropologist who first studied this practice, Arnold van Gennep, christened it “rite de passage” and so ever since anthropologists have called this the “The Rites of Passage Tradition”, but everybody else calls it “Fucking Stupid.”   But it was tradition, and an important one at that, and as with so many traditions they only look silly from the outside. They are like dreams. For the duration of the dream, the fantastical becomes real. You fly, you read minds, your teeth fall out of your skull, your clothes fall off while giving a 4th grade book report, or you can suddenly freeze and reverse time to fix the errors of the past. Then you awaken, and you look back and see that all that you had seen was fantasy. And yet for a moment it felt real. When you look back upon these dreams, do they not have the same texture as real memories? They feel the same, and the only way to discern the dream from the real is by noticing that dreams do not follow the rules of the real world. People do not fly, you cannot read minds, you cannot freeze time or reverse the past. So the dream is easy to spot, the dream rules are different than those you have experienced for most of your life. Some men live whole lives in dreams, and culture is one of them, a kind of mass hallucination which follows our own invented dream rules, realities that we weave in careful needle strokes, webs of the mind to hide us from  the misguided terror that we live in a cold and uncaring universe. Which is a shame, really,  because the universe is full of wonders beyond imagining. Of all the creatures in the world, only mankind has invented “boring”. Reality is insufficient. We are made of stardust forged in fiery crucibles in the heart of stars, given life and consciousness by the unseen hand of a thousand thousand coincidences. Billions of past events stretching eons led you to this very moment, and had but one of them been changed, you would not be here at all. Yet you are, somehow, against all odds. Is that not enough, in and of itself? Life is miraculous enough as it is, grander than any dream we could ever build for ourselves. Go and dream other dreams, and better.   But if the boy realized this, there would be no story to tell. We should take care not to belittle or look down upon the the cultural dreams of others, no matter how silly they seem to us. They are real so long as there are those to dream them. And so,  On the second day of his rite de passage, the boy returned with a promising deer only to discover every single person that he had ever known was dead. If you actually took the time to trace the modern Gregorian calendar all the way back to when the boy came back to find that everybody and everything that he’d ever known was on fire, you would find that it in fact occurred on a Monday, which anybody probably could have guessed anyway, since it’s without a doubt the worst day of the entire week.  He did not stay in his village long after he returned. Ashes offer little solace to the living. He only stayed long enough to take a broken sword from what was left of his home. He didn’t bother gathering any food; he didn’t plan on traveling much. This was because the young man had decided to kill himself. The village had been his home his entire life. He was born there, and he had once expected to live a long life, start a family, and eventually die there surrounded by friends and loved ones. That was obviously off the table now.   So he walked away from the life he had dreamed of, and from all the people who he had loved who were now nothing more than ash billowing in the wind. Dust to dust. What were their names? What were their hopes, their dreams? Ask the nameless billions who passed from this world without anything in their wake but dust and echoes: what is your story? Their silence is your answer.  Like many suicidal people, the boy also developed a certain inexplicable taste for irony and the macabre. The shattered sword he carried had been passed down from father to son for generations. He supposed now that since his father and brothers were dead that it now belonged to him. His plan was to travel far enough away from his old home so that he could no longer see the flames and billowing smoke rising from what was left of the village, and then take his broken sword from its sheath and slit his throat. There was a cliff outside the village, and for a time he stumbled toward it slowly like a zombie from a bad horror film, but he never got there. He kept looking back on the life that was behind him, and each time the fires in the distance reflected in his eyes. Eventually he stopped and sat on a rock, and sadly watched as his future slowly turned to ash. It would be a disservice, I think, to call what he felt sadness. Nor would it be accurate to call it the mind-numbing torturous emptiness that sucks at a person’s chest like an open wound, which we name despair. It was a kind of peace, maybe, but not the kind which gives us grace in times of trouble. If there were any word to describe it, perhaps it would be resignation. Yet even that is a disservice to the countless millions that have died by their own hand. Who can say what is in the mind of a person who is about to take his own life? They silenced their own voices before they could tell us their stories– their thoughts, whatever they might have been— are gone now forever, hidden from us as though behind the reflective sheen of a darkly tinted two-way mirror: from the outside looking in, impossible to understand, and from the inside looking out, impossible to explain.  But don’t worry. The boy did not die. Well, he did eventually, of course, but not like that. This isn’t some horribly-ending German fairy tale, after all, but an American one. It’s right there in the title.  The sun would soon set in the west. The boy took his sword from its sheath and placed it alongside his throat. The steel was as cold as something that’s really cold, and a drip of blood slowly began to pool at its point.  “Evenin’, traveler. I think I know you.”    The young man spun wildly towards the source of the voice. He was especially quick to move the blade from his neck. Human beings still have a shred of modesty burned into them, even when they are about to kill themselves. The sword fell to the ground almost instantly in a quick jerking motion of his arm, a thoughtless reflex action, like the legs twitching on a dead cricket, and he assumed a position and posture that insisted wordlessly that “Oh. Hey. I had just been standing around with a sword next to my neck.” and that people doing this particular activity were as common as sneezing or starting inane  conversations about the weather. He’d just been thinking, that’s all. Sword? No, I hadn’t had a sword held to my neck. You must have seen me at a bad angle, and gee, isn’t it nice out today?  “It’s harder to kill yourself with someone watching, y'know. Makes people feel ashamed, because something in them knows it ain’t right.”   The young man stared at the the new arrival in disbelief. Anybody living today would have recognized what was standing before him as quickly as they would recognize the Coca Cola logo. Here is what the boy saw:  The stranger wore a white button up shirt, and a rugged brown leather vest, with a sort of cloak thrown over it to protect him from the elements. He wore blue denim jeans. His boots were of an odd design. They were tall, brown, the tips were pointed, and there were odd circular metal rings hanging off the back of them which were ringed with spikes. He wore a belt that had a sheathe for some kind of weapon on his right and left leg, but they were not swords. Instead of having a straight handle like that of a sword, these had a strange curved handle made out of wood. Behind the man, the sun setting in the west  gleamed off the blue steel of the two weapons he wore on either hip.  Most importantly, he wore a hat the likes of which the boy had never seen before. It had a wide brim that circled the man’s entire head.  “Howdy,” the mysterious stranger said. For some reason he was squinting so hard that he looked like somebody who was staring straight into the sun, even though the sun was at his back. It was the sort of weather-worn face you couldn’t ever imagine having smiled. "Who’re you?“  The squinting man shrugged casually, and a brown cylindrical object suddenly appeared in his hand.  He put it in the side of his mouth, and lazily walked over toward where the boy was sitting alone on the rock. The boy wasn’t frightened by this. He was in a place beyond fear now. He wasn’t even afraid when the mysterious stranger sat down next to him, reached into his pocket for a small box, made a quick flicking motion, and fire appeared in his hand as if by magic. He lit the tip of the thing in his mouth with his magic fire, took a deep breath. After a moment he breathed out a cloud of smoke with a sigh that sounded like it was weary with the weight of a thousand troubles and a long and profoundly annoying 62 year Hollywood career.  "Are you a god?” the boy asked.  The man sat there for a long while before replying, seeming to ponder this as he stared off into the distance. The sun was getting lower now.  “‘I 'aint no god. I only been here just as long as people have been around to think me.” His voice was as rough and gravelly as asphalt. He took another long drag of his cigar, exhaled. “Kid, y'know, each drag burns different, but in the final moment, they all become wind.”  The boy told him he didn’t understand.  The stranger nodded toward the broken sword on the ground, which had only so recently been up against the boy’s throat. “That 'aint no way to die.”  The boy shook his head. “I don’t have anything left. Why not do it?”  At this, the stranger took the cigar from his mouth and gestured toward the setting sun and the burning village in the distance.  “Kid, you been lookin’ at the wrong thing out there.”  The boy looked. He saw the life he had thought was his future burning. But then he saw something else, beyond, further in the distance. It was smoke, but not from the burning village. They were campfires, thousands and thousands of them.“  "That’s them,” said the stranger, “the ones that burned your village. They’re out there waiting for you to go fight them.”  The boy looked down at his scrawny body. “But if I do that, I’ll die.”  The stranger took another long drag from his cigar, exhaled, and watched the smoke as it billowed away into nothingness. “Like I said kid, in the final moment, they all become wind.”  This time the boy understood. He picked up his shattered sword and stood up. Before he could start walking toward the horde amassed on the horizon, the stranger put a hand on his shoulder. “Figure I’ll go out there with ya’, and besides, think you could use a horse.”   The stranger worked his magic again, and two horses were there so quickly it felt that they’d been there all along, just out of sight. He and the boy mounted up on the horses and turned them toward the fires of the army in the distance.  “Better to go out like this”, said the mysterious stranger to the boy, “and keep on fighting, for the rest of our lives.”  “For the rest of our lives,” the boy agreed.  And so they rode off into the sunset together, and they kept on fighting, for the rest of their lives.

[jfrrsp]

Getting Published is Hard

I got off to a somewhat atypical start in this writing business. My first collection of short stories was picked up by an independent publisher which then folded almost immediately. So in a sense, I'm a traditionally published author, but as the book is now out of print, I don't have much to show for it.

Luckily, I'm difficult to discourage. I've soldiered on, making a few measured forays into the self-publishing world, and having some moderate success. But because I'm not satisfied with anything less than the undying adoration of all of humanity, I've been trying to shop my stories around the world of traditional publishing. And so far, I have a 100% failure rate.

The traditional path for a fiction writer frequently involves writing short stories at first. It's a great way to cut your teeth as an author, and getting published is quicker than it is with novels, especially in the digital age. Writers submit short stories to print or online magazines, who then put those stories in front of their readership. Some magazines pay professional per-word rates, some pay semi-pro rates, some pay a nominal acceptance sum, and others don't pay at all.

Each genre has its big names. For Sci-fi, it's Asimov's Science Fiction, Analog Magazine, and several others. For Literary Fiction, The New Yorker is huge, as well as Glimmer Train, and dozens of others. But to get into those magazines, you have to be a) very lucky, b) a genius, or c) have experience publishing in smaller magazines.

These days, most publications are a mixture of print and online content. Some publish more online than they do in print, since it's cheaper. Web-only publications generally offer lower rates, and many offer nothing at all--and still turn hundreds of authors away. Given the proliferation of markets, and the difficulty of getting published, one might think the best strategy is to put one's stories out to as many publications as possible.

The problem with shopping stuff to multiple outlets is that the vast majority do not take simultaneous submissions, meaning if you submit something to one place, you can't submit it anywhere else until you get an acceptance or rejection letter. From an author's standpoint, that blows bigtime, because response rates run as long as six months. But from an editor's standpoint, I get it. I'd hate to write an author to accept their piece, only to find out it's already been accepted somewhere else, and I've wasted my time. If an author did that to me, I'd probably never read anything of theirs ever again. And that is, in fact, how it plays out. From what I'm told. So it's a long, arduous process. A lot of authors ignore the simultaneous subs rule, but at the risk of burning bridges. I try to be more patient and cautious.

As frustrating and outdated as this system sounds, I'm a big believer in it. Because the world needs gatekeepers. I mean, just look at all the garbage that gets self-published on Amazon. Trying to rise out of that scrap heap is like trying to weave a rope out of sand. Money helps, but unfortunately most authors don't have money to throw at an advertising budget.

Online-only publications have gate keepers that are as tough as any. Those editors reject the majority of the material they see, but since most of the magazines don't pay, getting published in one doesn't really earn you much respect as an author. Unless someone is willing to shell out hard cash for your writing, you're in the bottom 99%. If you want to be in the top 1% (actually, fiction writers who earn any money from their work probably make up less than that), your writing and self-marketing skills have to be good enough to get someone to pay you to write down junk from your imagination. As much as people love to read, there just isn't that big of a demand for authors in this world. We could probably get by with, what, fifty at any given time?

Networking is, of course, massively important. Once you get accepted to a particular publication, you form a relationship with that editor. The door to that publication typically remains open to you, and other doors open as well. If you're savvy, this is the time when self-promotion really matters. But until that point, passing muster with an editor is far more important than self-marketing.

There are other ways to get a break, but this is by far the most common path, and you can't count on being the exception. For my novel, I plan to seek representation from a literary agent, but agents get as many query letters as editors, and if you're the agent, you're gonna go for the author that has a solid resume in publishing, nine times out of ten. So aspiring authors are always on the lookout for ways to distinguish themselves, and one of the most popular is by blogging. Heck, that's part of why this blog exists.

Blogs are great. Social media makes it pretty easy to get noticed, and if nothing else, a blog keeps you writing. But the thing is, you generally won't see writers sharing fiction on a blog. You see them doing what I'm doing right now: writing nonfiction about the art of fiction. Which is good. It's a great way to stay immersed in the craft, and you'll wind up teaching yourself a lot. But at the end of the day, you're not really displaying your skills as a fiction writer. So why not just post your stories on a blog? Well...

The problem with posting fiction on a blog is that people read fiction and nonfiction differently. Blogs, news, Medium articles, and Buzzfeed posts can be read a few words at a time, on a commute, or even while doing something else. Heck I can carry on a conversation while reading and still get what I want from the average blog article.

Fiction is meant to be immersive, and it's difficult to enjoy and appreciate it without giving it your undivided attention. If I'm, say, in the bathroom for a while, I will typically read Reddit, or something like that--something I can take in small doses. If I don't finish a given article, I don't really care. I read fiction too, but chances are I'd never start a short story, even if I had time. I don't usually settle in to read fiction unless I know I've got time to really get into it. I have to be able to allow the possibility that it will suck me in and keep me glued to the spot for hours. If there's a chance I won't have time to read to a stopping point, I won't start. And that's pretty typical, from what I see. Fiction is probably the toughest sell when it comes to how people shell out their attention.

Therefore, the media that work for nonfiction don't work as well for fiction. I'm not saying it can't be done, but again, you can't count on being the exception. Fiction readers prefer fiction packaged in books and ebooks, just like they prefer music packaged in albums and streaming services. Putting fiction in a magazine is like getting a song on the radio. Putting fiction on your blog is about like broadcasting your song on a CB radio. It's going to have a lot harder time making an impact.

Editors like to see a history of effort, so self-publishing and blogging are great things to have on your resume, and if you can find some backdoor to build an audience (like publishing fiction on Medium), that's great. But it's about like having volunteer work on a traditional resume. All it really shows is that you're a go-getter. It doesn't necessarily prove you can do the job.

It's a tough path I've chosen, but it's the only thing I'm any good at, so here I am. No regrets.

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