#former cs

[sexygaywizard]

My coworker at my school is a compsci major and she doesn't know how to save a PDF 😭

[attex]

Hm, I would still hold ui.

How big are average sized puppets? I am a small person, and nsh looks very big.

I imagine the puppets to be usually human size adjacent with decent variety (Unlike their creators who are a lot larger than the average human, I think they'd be often around 2 meters and taller!!)

The average puppet size range is around 150-180cm. It varies between builds and models, the feet and leg arrangement factor into it as well.

Sliver has the smallest puppet out of all the ones I've drawn LOL. She has a really old puppet model, so it's janky and confusing regarding parts, as well as sizing. Also fun fact, she has the smallest but heaviest puppet.

SOS is 140 cm 4ft 7in

5P is 147 cm 4ft 10in

UI is 153 cm 5ft digitagrade, ~158 cm 5ft 2in unguligrade

LTTM is around 165 cm 5ft 6in with digitagrade, ~170 cm 5ft 7in unguligrade

NSH is around 173 cm 5ft 8in with digi, ~177 cm 5ft 10in unguligrade

SRS is 185 cm 6ft 1in

Note that the default stance pose for the digitagrade/unguligrade ones are always digitagrade, I'm just specifying the other for fun

[oreana-galena]

I think the most rewarding conversation I could have was two different store managers telling me that my store manager is overworking me and spreading me too thin.

[youreaspecialflower]

Arxiv of our own

[kingdom-falls]

Thinking of her (Colorado Spring's Simpich Showcase)

[pretzel-box]

Hihi! Would you be okay with doing a monster-masquerading-as-a-human read, who is a former researcher and like, is a little shit at first but grows attached to Sebastian? And for the scenerio can it be like reader reaffirming Sebby of his humanity, but really awkwardly cs they struggle with human emotions.

Sorry if this is too specific I think ALOT about Seb (⁠╥⁠﹏⁠╥⁠)

Tags: GN!reader, reader is an experiment but hides as human, sassy reader

Words: 1k

Sebastian had always been suspicious of you, from the moment you wandered into his shop with that too-easy smile and gleaming eyes that seemed to be hiding more than they let on. You were a former researcher, you had claimed, but something about you always felt off. It wasn't just the way you walked, too sure of yourself for someone in this hellish place, or how you seemed to know a little too much about the twisted layout of the Blackside and the lurking dangers within. It was the way you seemed to enjoy it all—thrived in it, even.

But despite his initial suspicions, Sebastian tolerated you. Maybe it was the way you could effortlessly talk your way out of trouble with some of the nastier entities, or how you seemed to know exactly where to find valuable items amidst the chaos. Whatever the reason, you’d become a fixture in his shop, hovering around and occasionally offering unsolicited advice.

For a while, it was a practical alliance. Sebastian didn’t trust you—he wasn’t stupid—but you were useful, and he was willing to play nice if it meant staying alive. You were, in all ways, a little shit. Always poking fun at him, always with a teasing remark on the tip of your tongue. But recently, something had shifted. You were around more often, lingering a little longer, your jabs softening into something that almost resembled… friendliness.

It was unnerving.

One evening, after a particularly rough encounter with one of the more violent entities, Sebastian was nursing a cut on his arm, a deep gash that stung worse than usual. He was sitting on a stool behind the table, his tail swishing in agitation as he tried to wrap a bandage around it. You leaned against the table, watching him struggle with a faint smirk on your lips.

“Need a hand, friend?” you offered, your tone mockingly sweet.

Sebastian shot you a glare. “Got enough hands, thanks,” he muttered, holding up his three arms pointedly.

You chuckled, not moving from your spot. “Doesn’t look like it from here.”

He rolled his eyes, huffing in frustration as the bandage slipped from his grasp again. “Fine,” he grumbled, finally conceding. “If you’re gonna be a pain, at least be a useful one.”

You grinned, stepping around the table to help him. Your touch was surprisingly gentle as you took the bandage from him, wrapping it around his arm with practiced ease. “You know, you’re not half-bad when you’re not being a grump,” you teased lightly.

Sebastian snorted, but there was no real heat behind it. “Yeah, well, you’re not half-bad when you’re not being a little shit,” he shot back, though his voice lacked its usual bite.

You worked in silence for a moment, the air between you oddly comfortable. As you finished tying off the bandage, you hesitated, your gaze lingering on the cut. “Why do you bother?” you asked suddenly, your voice quieter, more serious.

Sebastian frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Why do you bother trying to stay… human?” you clarified, your tone awkward as if you were unsure of your own words. “I mean, look at this place. Look at us. What’s the point?”

Sebastian was taken aback. You’d never asked anything like that before, never shown even the slightest hint of introspection. He studied your face, searching for the usual hint of a smirk or teasing glint in your eyes, but found none. You looked… confused. Almost vulnerable.

“I… I don’t know,” he admitted after a moment. “Maybe it’s just all I have left. My humanity. It’s… it’s who I am.”

You nodded slowly, as if digesting his words. “It’s… important, isn’t it? Being who you are.”

Sebastian nodded. “Yeah. It is.”

You were quiet for a long moment, and Sebastian could almost see the gears turning in your head, trying to process something that didn’t quite compute. “I think you’re doing okay,” you said finally, your voice awkward and halting. “With the whole… human thing.”

Sebastian blinked, surprised. “That… means a lot, coming from you,” he said slowly.

You shrugged, looking away. “Don’t get all mushy on me now,” you muttered, but there was a faint smile on your lips, and for a moment, Sebastian thought he saw something almost… soft in your eyes.

Sebastian chuckled, the sound low and warm. “Wouldn’t dream of it,” he said lightly. “But… thanks. Really.”

You nodded, still not looking at him. “Yeah, well… don’t make me regret saying it.”

Sebastian smiled, feeling a strange warmth in his chest that he hadn’t felt in a long time. Maybe you were still a little shit, but there was something… different about you now. Something he couldn’t quite put his finger on, but something he found himself oddly grateful for.

Maybe, just maybe, you weren’t so bad after all.

“You know, we are quite similar.” You nudged him gently with your arm, grinning at him with your signature smile. There was a spark of confusion in his eyes, trying to understand what exactly you refer to. But you simply stood up from your seat, wiping the imaginary dust of your palms and walking to the vent.

“It's not like I am fully human either, but Sebastian— we are still ourselfs. Nothing has changed but our appearance. Don't let the Blackside fool you.”

He was awfully touched by your words, feeling a bit reasurred, before his head shot up, realizing your reference.

“YOU'RE NOT HUMAN—?!”

But you were already gone.

You could hear him shout from the other side of the vent, the rushed movements and the noise of surprise and you couldn't help but giggle about his reaction.

Sebastian was truly amusing and you secretly hoped he valued your words, realizing he isn't alone with it all, knowing there is someone who will take some of his pain. After all, you took a liking to the usual moody shopkeeper and it would be a shame if he stops being the grumpy sunshine that he normally is.

[flopdriversenthusiast]

how likely i think the drivers would be to whore it out on the podium based largely on vibes and minimal knowledge. also organized within their tiers

explanations under cut extra empty category because i thought it was funny

dr: drinks from his fucking shoe i mean. if he won another race i think he would let someone pour champagne down him sebastian vettel style from that one wdc picture

cl: we couldve been a proper country again at the monaco gp this year but nooooo. he has it in him i know he does. cmon charles. please.

aa: i dunno i just think hes got that dog in him.

fa: hes done it before and he'll do it again. only that far down in the tier bc hes older but he also did post that thirsttrap yesterday so hes not in the second tier with lewis

cs: same as charles. i know you have it in you. please. we could be a proper country

lh: hes done it before but he needs the right person on the podium with him OR needs to win his like 8th wdc or smthn. hes got too much of a reputation to go slutting it around every other podium now

gr: HE COULD DO IT. I KNOW HE COULD. i know your reputation is cringefail radios and t-poses and crashing when carlos wins for some reason but i think he'd do it. someone has to initiate though

pg: hes got that slut energy someone just needs to push it out of him. and he also needs to get a podium again.

lsargeant: he just needs the chance to drink champagne somewhere other than his richboy yacht. your sad doomed by the narrative aura does not deter me i KNOW the slut is in you

op: listen. i know what you're thinking. i have no explanation.

nh: breaking his no podium streak would make him start acting up i know he can do it this man has no shame ive seen his old interviews

lstroll: idk vibes

eo: i dunno he also has like no shame but in the cringe way but not in the george way. hes strange to me.

vb: only this far down because he does his shenanigans for the giggles if someone initiated i think he could

sp: the catholic guilt man. he could!!!!!!! stop flopping checo and you could bring (yourself) this country back to its former glory please!!!!!!!!

mv: the catholic guilt man pt 2. he would though. if he got over it i know he would.

yt: wow all the rb drivers. he doesnt give as much slut energy tbh but i think he would!! he just needs to get over it first

zg: EYEEEEEEEE KNOW YOU HAVE THAT DOG IN YOU. just get on the podium and like get over the fact that all of china will be watching u slut it out and like he'd do it. i swear he would. if he managed to convince his parents not to disown him.

km: i dunno not the right vibes

ln: i dunno pt 2 i didnt really know where to put these two they werent like against it enough to be in the last tier but not slutty enough for the catholic guilt one

[heavenlybackside]

This Day In History May 8 1886 American pharmacist John S. Pemberton developed Coca-Cola, a drink he originally billed as a cure-all tonic.

On May 8, 1886, Dr. John Stith Pemberton invented Coca-Cola, forever changing the history of eating habits around the world. The drink’s name refers to two of its original ingredients: coca leaves and kola nuts (a source of caffeine). Since he was a pharmacist from Atlanta he had access to a variety of chemicals and natural ingredients. One day, he prepared a dark coloured liquid and decided to take it to his shop, Jacobs' Pharmacy, to mix it with carbonated water. At this point, a test was needed. So he had the customers of the pharmacy taste it, who greatly appreciated the delicious and refreshing drink. From that day Pemberton put the forerunner of the current Coca-Cola on sale at five cents a glass as a takeaway drink.

The logo as we know it today was invented and designed by Frank M. Robinson, Dr. Pemberton's accountant, who thought that the two Cs would have made a nice advertising logo. The Coca-Cola brand - written in its famous italics font - was born with a first advertising campaign dedicated to the drink appeared in the newspaper The Atlanta Journal, inviting citizens to try this "popular new take-out drink". The advertising campaign for the product launch appeared on the first awnings of the shops, on which the words "Drink Coca-Cola" stood out. But the beginnings were not exciting: in the first year they sold just about nine glasses a day.

In 1887 John Pemberton registered the copyright of Coca-Cola Syrup and Extract with the US Patent Office. A year later, disheartened by the lack of success of his invention and never fully convinced - and aware - of the drink's potential, he gradually sold the company's shares to various partners. Shortly before his death, he sold the rest of Coca-Cola to Asa G. Candler who bought back the shares of other holders until he acquired complete control of the company.

Together with his brother - John S. Candler - Frank Robinson - John Pemberton's former partner - and two other partners, Mr. Candler opened The Coca-Cola Company, with a start-up capital of $100,000. They invested a lot in marketing with free coupons, promotions, souvenir fans, calendars, clocks, cup holders and so on. He did everything to advertise the brand and make it famous. In 1894 the first factory was born, in Dallas, Texas and a year later Candler made a famous announcement: "Today Coca-Cola is drunk in every state and territory of the United States". Under Candler’s leadership, sales rose from about 9,000 gallons of syrup in 1890 to 370,877 gallons in 1900.

[etirabys]

did you guys know about courtly love??? because I didn't

My introduction to courtly love was reading a Diana Wynne Jones novella that made no sense unless you know what courtly love is. After crawling confusedly through ancient Livejournal reviews to piece together what the story had been about, I took away that it was a weird medieval knight thing where you talk a lot of guff to a (married) woman without ever expecting it to turn into more than what it is.

The first chapter of CS Lewis's The Allegory of Love explains the concept much more thoroughly. His account is pleasantly bonkers. I now relay it to you. (Note: not only am I skeptical of parts of his account, I read it while sleep deprived, so salt liberally.)

First, a sketch of the relationship:

The lover is always abject. Obedience to his lady’s lightest wish, however whimsical, and silent acquiescence in her rebukes, however unjust, are the only virtues he dares to claim. There is a service of love closely modelled on the service which a feudal vassal owes to his lord. The lover is the lady’s ‘man’. He addresses her as midons, which etymologically represents not ‘my lady’ but ‘my lord’. The whole attitude has been rightly described as ‘a feudalisation of love’. This solemn amatory ritual is felt to be part and parcel of the courtly life.

This seems to have been both literary trope and a real-life interaction pattern (of which the former came first). A specific example in Arthuriana:

It is only later that [Lancelot] learns the cause of all this cruelty. The Queen has heard of his momentary hesitation in stepping on to the tumbril[, a humiliating cart he rode into the city where she was held captive, to rescue her], and this lukewarmness in the service of love has been held by her sufficient to annihilate all the merit of his subsequent labours and humiliations. Even when he is forgiven, his trials are not yet at an end. The tournament at the close of the poem gives Guinevere another opportunity of exercising her power. When he has already entered the lists, in disguise, and all, as usual, is going down before him, she sends him a message ordering him to do his poorest. Lancelot obediently lets himself be unhorsed by the next knight that comes against him, and then takes to his heels, feigning terror of every combatant that passes near him. The herald mocks him for a coward and the whole field takes up the laugh against him: the Queen looks on delighted. Next morning the same command is repeated, and he answers, ‘My thanks to her, if she will so’. This time, however, the restriction is withdrawn before the fighting actually begins.

So, huh. How did this cultural script come to be?

Courtly love as a literary trope began in 11th century Provence. Here's Lewis's sketch of that time and place:

We must picture a castle which is a little island of comparative leisure and luxury, and therefore at least of possible refinement, in a barbarous country-side. There are many men in it, and very few women—the lady, and her damsels. Around these throng the whole male meiny [i.e. attendants], the inferior nobles, the landless knights, the squires, and the pages—haughty creatures enough in relation to the peasantry beyond the walls, but feudally inferior to the lady as to her lord—her ‘men’ as feudal language had it. Whatever ‘courtesy’ is in the place flows from her: all female charm from her and her damsels. There is no question of marriage for most of the court. All these circumstances together come very near to being a ‘cause’; but they do not explain why very similar conditions elsewhere had to wait for Provençal example before they produced like results. Some part of the mystery remains inviolate.

So that's the material background – a lopsided gender balance. But more fascinating is the cultural background where the passion and devotion of romantic love – a passion/devotion Lewis claims simply did not exist as a mode for men to treat women in Europe before courtly love was invented – could not be channeled into marriage because such a stance is incompatible with the social role of a husband:

The same woman who was the lady and ‘the dearest dread’ of her vassals was often little better than a piece of property to her husband. He was master in his own house. So far from being a natural channel for the new kind of love, marriage was rather the drab background against which that love stood out in all the contrast of its new tenderness and delicacy. The situation is indeed a very simple one, and not peculiar to the Middle Ages. Any idealization of sexual love, in a society where marriage is purely utilitarian, must begin by being an idealization of adultery.

In fact, courtly love's rightful predecessor is not heterosexual love but the love of a vassal for his lord. (I am quite skeptical of this as a claim about reality, but less skeptical of it as a claim about literature.) Reiterating a sentence from the first quote in this post:

The whole attitude [of a knight in courtly love with his lady] has been rightly described as ‘a feudalisation of love’.

CS Lewis on that feudal relationship:

We shall never understand [the affection between vassal and lord], if we think of it in the light of our own moderated and impersonal loyalties. We must not think of officers drinking the king’s health: we must think rather of a small boy’s feeling for some hero in the sixth form. There is no harm in the analogy, for the good vassal is to the good citizen very much as a boy is to a man. ... He loves and reverences only what he can touch and see; but he loves it with an intensity which our tradition is loath to allow except to sexual love.

So it's that relationship that courtly love remixes into heterosexual romance. Courtly love ennobles the lover – there's a religious parallel here for sure. And it is necessarily adulterous because marriage is not a matter of personal passion, because distance is conducive to recreational idealization, because the lack of potential sexual consummation is pleasantly purity-coded in a Christian society, and because a wife, being a knight's inferior, cannot ennoble him. So, finally, Lewis says bluntly:

The love which is to be the source of all that is beautiful in life and manners must be the reward freely given by the lady, and only our superiors can reward. But a wife is not a superior.

Coming back briefly to Diana Wynne Jones's The True State of Affairs: I understand much better now the behavior of the protagonist's love interest. He's a bored would-be king in captivity who decides to make the other visible prisoner his midons. He expects her to understand the convention he's following. Why shouldn't he take her on as a concept like this? She, also bored and deprived, benefits from his gifts and minor heroics. He wants an ennobling influence. And besides, isn't idealizing a beautiful woman you never intend to make a move on fun?

[ldshadowdoodles]

[278] VILE Class of 201X!! Photo before their exams, hope it goes well (+ designs for the rest of the Cod Alliance in the CS AU; they get to be Lizzie’s former classmates!)

[chialebeauf]

Dispatch from Absurdist France

Just so you know we're still living in our own weird Kafka/Ionesco fusion timeline.

Macron's a pompous authoritarian dick and we hate him, so the good people of France started a little informal competition amongst ourselves to see which city or town can fuck his redemption tour of public appearances the most. Besides the usual booing, heckling (shoutout to the two old guys that called him a butthole to his face and called his government corrupt while shaking his hand on live TV yesterday, dudes rock!) etc, we've seen a revival of the ancestral tradition of the casserolade/cacerolazo. Which is basically bringing pots and pans and banging on them to make as much noise as you can to drown out government bullshit, thanks to our Latin brothers and sisters for keeping that one warm for us.

Since he's also very sensitive and his minions the préfets -kinda like a local police chief+mini-governor thing- are very attentive to his feelings, they're taking Measures. This morning he went on a visit in the beautiful, beautiful Languedoc backcountry, my only true love, and the local préfet wasn't about to be outdone in fascist shit by his colleagues.

He invaded the small town of Ganges (4000 souls) with 600 riot cops, not a typo, and illegally used an anti-terror law to forbid the carrying of various things in the municipality, including "portable sound devices".

WHICH, Y'ALL, APPARENTLY INCLUDES FUCKING POTS AND PANS!

Irony and parody are dead, here's the video of popo opening people's bags and seizing saucepans. Also they got manhandeld by a buch of dads with an average of around 0,64 baldspots per scalp and then threw CS gas from 5m away while being downwind.

To top it off, the word for saucepan (casserole) is actually slang for a political scandal, which Macron and his gov are full of (2 or 3 ministers in exercice and his Chief of Staff currently under indictement and 4 or 5 former ones still under indictment or convicted, I lost count)

All of that happened before noon.

I'm done with this clown state, I'll start an Occitan independentist guerilla, this is too stupid.

[stxrslut]

i see stepbro!rafe n i was summoned!!!!!

stepbro!rafe WILL step up to be the man of the house and in ur life (considering ur former dad and ward definitely cant lol) he will do anything to protect u and u can only repay him so much :( so u end up doing anything he says cs ure js so thankful for him !! stepping up n all !!

stepbro!rafe is definitely another kind of manipulative. he just constantly drills it into you that he knows best and that you should always listen to him, these lectures are of course always accompanied with some very sweet touches.

eventually you just start operating like that by yourself, always doing as he says and turning to him with your problems, however small they are.

and he always fixes it, sometimes tsking at how simple the task at hand actually is, but he fixes it nonetheless. he’d do it every minute of every day if it meant he got to see you looking at him like he’s your own personal superhero. and his favourite time to see that look is when you’re on your knees, using his pre as lipgloss <3

[scipunk63]

Some old concepts from an old CS AU where Shadow-San and Coach Brunt decide to leave V.I.L.E with Carmen and end up adopting the rest of Team Red and hide out from their former colleagues while posing as a "normal" family.

[bestworstcase]

THE PEOPLE HAVE SPOKEN it's a draw let's talk about the principles.

In the rulebook for The Lady Afterwards, these are defined as "the most fundamental elements of reality; or, the various natures of the Hours; or, a post-facto invention of scholars of the invisible arts." Mark that third note in particular, because the aspects we discuss herein are—expressly—only an attempt to taxonomize the occult forces at work in the world and thus necessarily an imperfect and imprecise model thereof.

Keep this in mind. There are no clean dividing lines between the principles, and what we label (for example) 'Lantern' and 'Forge' are not, in reality, discrete individual forces but rather a cluster of interacting forces, patterns, rules et cetera which may be expressed or called upon in different ways at different times. Many seeming contradictions or inconsistencies are thus resolved.

With that out of the way:

The interaction most visible to the player is of course the Cultist Simulator 'subversion' mechanic, but I think it is also elucidating to consider 1. differing categorization of certain books shared between Cultist Simulator and Book of Hours, and 2. the principle aspects associated with each of the nine parts of the soul in the latter.

Before we dive into that, a note on 'Secret Histories' and 'Rose':

History is the scar on the world's skin. [Secret Histories describe the unknown complexities of the world, and its many pasts.] vs 'The rose which encompasseth all'. Nine directions to new horizons. [Exploration? Enlightenment? Hope?]

It is evident that Secret Histories and Rose have some relation and may even be synonymous to an extent—for instance, Dr. al-Adim is interested in the former in Cultist Simulator and the latter in Book of Hours—but Secret Histories notably isn't treated like a fully-realized principle in its own right, whereas Rose is mechanically indistinguishable from any other power. What's going on here?

Well, if Rose is the aspect 'which encompasseth all', then we might describe Rose as the skin; and therefore what we call Secret Histories are the scars or the flaws which inform the principle called Rose, in effect making Secret Histories not a principle in its own right, but rather an aspect of Rose.

So for the purpose of this discussion, I will refer only to 'Rose', even with regard to entities and things with Secret Histories aspect in Cultist Simulator. I believe the relation here is comparable to the relation between, for example, Heart and Dances.

Onward!

I have made a series of diagrams. First:

We begin with a wheel representing the order in which the Cultist may subvert lore and influences from one principle to the next, beginning with Lantern at the top and proceeding clockwise; into Forge, into Edge, into Winter, into Heart, into Grail, into Moth, into Lantern. Knock, placed at the wheel's center, cannot be subverted and subverts every other lore except Rose into itself.

Note the larger gap between Moth and Lantern. My reason for arranging the principles this way will become apparent shortly.

For ease of reference, here is a spreadsheet comparing the principles associated with every text that appears in both Cultist Simulator and Book of Hours. In cases where the text's mystery aspect does not match the lore fragment(s) it yields in the first game, I've noted the skill and memory as well.

This is a simple way to demonstrate the 'fuzziness' of the principles, noted at the beginning of this post.

In cases where the principle lore yielded by texts in Cultist Simulator differs from the text's mystery aspect in Book of Hours and the mystery aspect is not one of the newly-introduced aspects, generally speaking, the lessons the Librarian learns will match both; for example, 'The Six Letters on Memory' yields Forge lore in CS, but has Moth as its mystery in BoH, and the Librarian learns a lesson in Transformations & Liberations, a skill whose primary/secondary aspects are Forge and Moth.

The one notable exception is Sunset Passages. In Cultist Simulator, this text yields Winter lore; in Book of Hours, its mystery aspect is Forge, and it provides a lesson in Sacra Solis Invicti (Lantern/Sky). In order to understand the re-categorization of this text, we must consider its subject matter: it is a "miscellany of the funerary prayers, ceremonies, and hymns of the Church of the Unconquered Sun," which "schismed during the Intercalate, when the Sun was divided." It is thus concerned primarily with pre-Intercalate worship of the Madrugad, whose aspects are Winter and Forge, and the skill the Librarian learns from it pertains to those rituals.

Sunset Passages thus serves as a useful illustration of how and why certain texts may be categorized differently between the two games. It is not arbitrary. It's a mechanical representation of the taxonomic 'fuzziness' in that the Cultist can read a certain book and conclude that it's a volume of Winter lore whereas the Librarian can read the same book and categorize it as a book of mainly Forge lore with some relevance to Lantern and Sky, and both are correct, although the Librarian, being a scholar rather than an adept, takes a more nuanced view.

The point being that we can look at those texts which have been reassigned to one of the four/five aspects introduced in Book of Hours as a rough approximation of common relations between those aspects and the ones in the earlier game.

We'll use Moon as an example.

Kanishk at the Spider's Door — Edge lore -> Moon mystery — Lesson is Sharps (Edge/Moon) — Memory is A Stolen Secret (Moon/Knock)

Larquebine Codex — Heart lore -> Moon Mystery — Lesson is Sea Stories (Moon/Grail) — Memory is Gossip (Rose/Grail)

Morphy Codex — SH lore -> Moon mystery — Lesson is Tridesma Hiera (Moon/Grail) — Memory is Beguiling Melody (Grail/Sky)

Viennese Conundra — Moth lore -> Moon mystery — Lesson is Wolf Stories (Moon/Scale) — Memory is Fear (Scale/Edge)

Voyages of Ferninshun of Oreol — SH lore -> Moon mystery — Lesson is Sea Stories (Moon/Grail) — Memory is Salt (Knock/Moon/Winter)

Tally up the aspects associated with these texts: Grail: 5, Edge: 3, Rose: 3, Knock: 2, Scale: 2, 1 each Sky, Moth, Winter, Heart.

& secondary aspects for skills with primary Moon aspect: Grail: 2, Scale: 2, Edge: 1, Heart: 1

& primary aspects for skills with secondary Moon aspect: Winter: 5, Rose: 2, Edge: 2, 1 each Grail, Heart, Nectar, Sky, Scale.

& other aspects on Moon-aspected memories: 4 each Rose, Edge, Winter, Knock, 1 each Sky, Moth.

Keep in mind that this is only an approximation, because we're not taking into account any context for when, why, or how these conjunctions may occur. But we can identify certain patterns just by looking at the frequency; the two most common conjunctions are with Edge and Winter (10x), followed by Rose (9x), Grail (7x), Knock (6x), Scale (5x), Heart and Sky (3x), Moth (2x), and Nectar (1x).

Rose and Knock are both unusual in how they interact with other principles, with Rose being all-encompassing and Knock all-opening. So we're somewhat less interested in them for now. If we consider only the frequency of Moon's associations with the seven 'regular' principles present in Cultist Simulator, where might we position Moon in relation to the subversion wheel diagrammed above?

Well, the most intuitive way to decide its placement is to first put it in between Edge and Winter, then move it a bit clockwise to reflect its significant overlap with Grail and minor associations with Heart and Moth. Right?

In the interest of brevity I won't go through the tallies for the other three 'regular' aspects introduced in Book of Hours, but after going through this same process (and making some aesthetic adjustments, because this is only an approximate representation)...

What we have here is the Cultist Simulator order-of-subversion wheel with the four new aspects plotted onto it as the corners of a containing square; Sky in the juncture between Moth and Lantern, Scale between Lantern and Edge, Moon between Edge and Heart, and Nectar between Heart and Moth. I propose that:

These four principles subvert each other clockwise around the outer wheel, Sky into Scale into Moon into Nectar into Sky, and

The principles in Cultist Simulator, including Knock and Rose, all emerged through division of these older four during the striving and conflicts of the Lithomachy.

Any serious discussion of the Lithomachy is well out of the scope of this post (BUT WE'LL GET TO IT SOONER OR LATER BECAUSE HOO BOY) so my argumentation on this second point will necessarily be rather thin. Sorry. The remainder of this post will concern how well the above diagram holds up to more substantive investigation, and to that end here are the definitions of each principle aspect as per Book of Hours, in order of subversion:

Rose. 'The rose which encompasseth all'. Nine directions to new horizons.[Exploration? Enlightenment? Hope?]

Sky. Wind, storm, echo, song; the intricacies of mathematics and the principles of flight. Law's touch is lighter than we sometimes think.[Matters of balance, harmony and necessity.]

Scale. Hard without, hard within, hard to rouse, harder to subdue. [What is left of the crude powers of the deep earth.]

Moon. Secrets are soft; night is softer still; the sea speaks. It is not always wise to listen. [The nocturnal, the forgotten.]

Nectar. The green wealth in the world's veins; the pulse of the seasons. [Long ago, some called this principle Blood.]

Lantern. 'Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible Sun within us.' - Thomas Browne [Lantern is the principle of the secret place sometimes called the House of the Sun, and of the light above it.]

Forge. 'Fire', I once read, 'is the winter that warms and the spring that consumes.' [The principle of the Forge transforms and destroys.]

Edge. All conquest occurs at the Edge. One who dwells there is blind, and cannot be wounded. Another is strong, and grows stronger. [Edge is the principle of battle and of struggle.]

Winter. ... [Winter is the principle of silence, of endings, and of those things that are not quite dead.]

Heart. The Heart Relentless beats to protect the skin of the world we understand. [The Heart is the principle that continues and preserves.]

Grail. Hunger, lust, the drowning waters. [The principle of the Grail honours both the birth and the feast.]

Moth. I knew a man who captured moths in a bell-jar. On nights like this, he would release them one by one to die in the candle. [Moth is the wild and perilous principle of chaos and yearning.]

& Knock. The Knock permits no seal and no isolation. It thrusts us gleefully out of the safety of ignorance. [The Knock is the principle that opens doors and unseams barriers.]

And while, as I said, we are not going to delve deeply into the subject of the Lithomachy in this post, I do want to make a brief note of the gods-from-stone and their probable aspects. The Horned-Axe, we know to be both Knock- [Liminal Evocation] and Winter-aspected [Winter veneration]. Her attestation in 'On the Winding Stair' is also quite interesting:

Gregory evidently succeeds in opening a way to something he calls the 'Moon-Hall', but here his account becomes erratic. He insists that in the Moon-Hall the Horned-Axe is still an Edge-power; he hopes for an 'eternal rival', but cannot find the one he needs. The narrative is increasingly interspersed with chess notations, and ends abruptly.

Here we have an implication that the Horned-Axe was and is no longer an Edge-power, but within the House of the Moon she still is Edge-aspected (or possibly a cross-gender mirror-twin of hers retains an Edge-aspect that she has lost or discarded). The similarity here to the recurring idea that the Wheel still turns in the House of the Moon is striking. Her altar beneath Hush House accepts Edge, Scale, Winter, and Knock aspect.

The Horned-Axe is one of the three Hours of the Chancel alongside the Meniscate and the Sister-and-Witch, of whom the former has obvious associations with the Moon and the latter with the Sea. I submit, then, that before the Lithomachy, the Horned-Axe's aspects were instead Moon and Scale, and that she was—in some way—divided or bifurcated in the course of the Lithomachy into two halves, both with Knock aspect, one Winter-aspected and the other an Edge-aspected reflection.

(<- I will note, as an observation, that there is a vague and rather tangential precedent for such an occurrence; the Wolf-Divided is the product of the division of an Hour, and likewise has Edge and Winter aspect. The common factor would seem to be the coincidence of an ending, hence Winter, with the emergence of an entity driven by an unfulfilled need, hence Edge.)

That is our only living god-from-stone. The others are the Wheel, the Flint, the Tide, the Seven-Coil, and the Egg Unhatching. We know that the Wheel was usurped by the Moth (and that its blood, shed on the roots of the Wood, birthed the Velvet); that the Flint was shattered by the Forge; that the Colonel and the Mother of Ants conspired to slay the Coil; and that the Egg Unhatching fled to the Glory by unknown means and with uncertain outcome.*

[*The Unwise Mortal brought it through the Tricuspid Gate and then it hatched into the Sun-in-Splendour. This is how he ascended to Hourhood as the Watchman. I can't get into it right now or we'll be here all day but: TRUST.]

So, the Wheel was replaced by the Moth and the Velvet (aspects: Moth, Heart—& I submit, also Moon). When the Medium paints the endless memory: "With each turn its cilia pulse and wriggle and its body flushes translucent to crimson. It might be ugly but it is beautiful like the withdrawing of blood from the labyrinths of glass. It does not cease and all its involutions are infinite." All of this locates us firmly in the neighborhood of Moth/Heart, emphasis on Heart given the imagery, and given that the aspect now called Nectar was once known as Blood, this one is easy.

The Wheel's first aspect was Blood. I believe it may also have been Scale-aspected, due to its association with serpents. (On this see Serpents & Venoms. Note that the Secret Histories wiki identifies the 'low red sun' as the Egg Unhatching mostly on the basis of the Medium's glorious memory, but this plainly incorrect. The 'low red sun' was the Wheel, and the Egg Unhatching was a moon, before it hatched. We'll talk about this in more detail in my next post.)

The Flint was 'eclipsed and then shattered' by the Forge. In nearly all of its attestations it's associated with the earth in some way. When painting the golden memory, the Flint is described thus: "This is only a stone, though it is smoothed and sharpened to a midnight point, but look closer. Each of its facets shows a single point of light. It might be the glint of firelight. It might be each a different Star."

As with the Wheel being a Blood-Hour, it seems quite straightforward that the Flint's aspect was Scale; and given its connection to the Wheel through the line of Antaios, an argument could be made that it had a minor Blood aspect as well, making the Wheel and the Flint reflections of each other (Blood/Scale | Scale/Blood).

Next, the Tide, which the Red Grail drowned and consumed. Its usurpation by the Grail and association with the Sea would suggest Blood (the primordial precursor to Grail) and, obviously, Moon. Painting the luxurious memory offers the description: "In a night-blue Mansus-haze swims a coral palace-crown. At its fore-edge it absorbs the lesser Names, coating them with its minerals and juices, and at its rear edge it expels some of them, polished like jewels. The others go to feed its thorny Tide-heart," which reinforces the 'Grail-precursor' angle pretty strongly.

Further, the Tide being Moon- and Blood-aspected offers an elegant explanation for the unusual frequency of Moon-Grail conjunctions in comparison to the other 'precursor' aspects (Heart-Sky is also a common conjunction but otherwise conjunctions with aspects outside the precursor 'quadrant' are quite rare); consider the Sea as the world's blood, an ever-churning life-giving liquid, and the Moon must figure as the world's heart, as the engine of the tidal forces which keep the waters circulating. Heart is the connection between the two, but Grail having supplanted Blood (now Nectar) as the principle most strongly associated with the Sea, it remains closely entangled with the Moon.

Like the Flint, it seems fairly straightforward that the Seven-Coil was Scale-aspected: its monstrous serpentine form and present associations with earthquakes both unambiguously point in this direction. Contra the Secret Histories wiki, I actually do not believe that the Seven-Coil had Rose aspect itself. The events leading up to its slaying are (notably) recounted in much greater detail than the death of any other god-from-stone, and unlike the others, its defeat came not at the hands of a god-from-blood but what seem to have been the first two human* gods-from-flesh; it follows that the death of the Seven-Coil occurred much later than the usurpation of the Wheel, the Flint, and the Tide...

[*I believe the Elegiast and the Beachcomber may be much older, but neither of them were mortal humans as the Colonel and the Mother of Ants seem to have been prior to their ascensions. Jury is out on when the Vagabond ascended to Hourhood exactly, but she's of the Cross. Probably.]

...and indeed, 'The Deeds of the Scarred Captain' places the slaying of the Seven-Coil immediately prior to the founding of Mycenae, which occurred around 1350-1200 BC—well into the Bronze Age and not remotely prehistorical.

The Coil itself wasn't Rose-aspected; I believe its slaying is the inciting incident for one of the Histories—most likely the Third. The massive proliferation of Worms in that History, the loose association between Worms and the Coil, the origin of the Seven-Coils' Temple in the Third History, Sparrow's paranoid conviction that this History is "overrun by Coils," and even the aspects of the Third History's encaustum Nillycant (Winter & Edge for the Colonel; Scale for the Coil) all seem to point in this direction.

That leaves only the Egg Unhatching, vexing little enigma that it is. In the Medium's painting it appears like this: "A faded pale white-gold seen in certain patches of the sky, when the mist is clearing but the sun might be mistaken for the moon. We hold our breath and watch it brighten, until each colour divides from the next like a new-minted alphabet." Despite its having been a moon, I'm not wholly convinced that it had Moon aspect; that it hatched into the Sun-in-Splendour (you'll have to trust me on this for now) might suggest it was Sky-aspected, although this doesn't feel quite right to me either.

The other Lantern-precursor it could have had is Scale, and I am fairly confident that the Egg Unhatching was Scale-aspected. The Seven-Coil is described as 'the nest' in a certain ending and there are some hints toward a connection between the Sun-in-Splendour and the Scīmafectra-kind of the Carapace Cross; it would not be unreasonable for the Egg Unhatching to have been laid or incubated in the Nest—that is, the Seven-Coil—during the era of the Carapace Cross, and thus to have Scale aspect. The Scale determination may loosely support this as well. Furthermore, the Unwise Mortal "learnt the shaping arts of the Flint" and later "ascended to the shadow of the Egg Unhatching," which is suggestive of some degree of similarity between the Flint and the Egg. So we'll put this one down as Scale and a 'maybe' on Moon/Sky.

...and that's my 'brief' note on the probable aspects of the gods-from-stone. TO RECAP:

Horned-Axe: Moon/Scale -> Knock/Winter + Knock/Edge

Wheel: Blood/Scale

Flint: Scale/Blood

Tide: Blood/Moon

Seven-Coil: Scale

Egg Unhatching: Scale + Moon/Sky (?)

Lastly—and this is more a footnote for a future post, really—notice the absence here of any gods-from-stone with clear, unambiguous signs of having been Sky-aspected. An argument can be made for the Wheel and the Flint to have had Sky aspect, the Wheel having been the old sun and the Flint being associated with starlight, but there is little in the way of supporting evidence (and neither Sky-Nectar nor Sky-Scale are common conjunctions, although Heart and Sky are frequently conjunct in matters of weather, so the argument for the Wheel to have been Blood / Scale / Sky is a bit stronger than the one for the Flint).

Right. So.

Let's talk about the nine elements of the soul.

Here, I've marked how different aspects are connected through, or by, each part of the soul. Where two aspects are not adjacent, the connection is represented passing through the simplest juncture, such that the aspects of Ereb, Wist, and Trist connect to each other through Knock; the Moth and Rose of Fet pass through Sky; and Moon is the joint between Health's Nectar/Heart and Scale.

Depicting the elements this way reveals some interesting patterns:

Other than Health, which is unusual in other ways, every non-adjacent pair here is joined through its juncture at a 135° angle (and if we were to route the connection from Heart to Scale through Knock rather than Moon, this would be true of Health too; however, I believe that Moon is the more appropriate juncture in this case for reasons I will outline in a bit.)

The two paired aspects that are adjacent around the inner wheel, Forge/Edge Mettle and Heart/Grail Chor, are stronger in the principle subverted when these aspects interact. In theory, this suggests that Sky may subvert Lantern—and this in turn would be a small point in favor of interpreting Sky / Scale / Moon / Nectar as precursor aspects whose division created the modern principles, on the grounds that Sky subverting Lantern then obeys the Sanguine Exception.

(which holds that every door must open both ways.)

Chor, "exuberance, rhythm, and instinct," has Heart aspect with a lesser power of Grail; when subverting Heart lore or influence into Grail, the project description is "what does not cease will succumb, at last, to temptation," and the action "all that moves must succumb to hunger." This conjunction is also reversed in Memory: Satisfaction, which has Grail aspect with a lesser power of Heart, so it doesn't seem like a stretch to conclude that Chor arises from hunger in moderation; that is, the need for sustenance and meaning in life, absent the wilder hedonism of Grail.

Chor's malady, Duendracy, is a lapse in concentration brought on by what is described as a quite pleasant but very distracting (or perhaps inspiring) "possessing presence from the Mansus." It has Heart aspect only; but notice how afflicted Chor seems to be stilled as the Grail aspect is lost to the pleasant distraction—even though Heart is defined as the principle of relentless motion! Similarly, that Duentratic Chor must be roused by a sufficient power of Moth, the "wild and perilous principle of yearning," suggests the best cure for Duendracy is a nameless dissatisfaction which reawakens the Heart to its hunger, and thus restores its balance with Grail.

Ereb is "pride, compassion, hatred, fear" and "the shadow in the soul's cellar." It has Grail aspect with a lesser amount of Edge; so, we might call it an expression of passionate desire bringing about, or brought about by, strife. And while Ereb itself lacks Knock aspect, the way its Grail-Edge conjunction is expressed does resonate with the principle of Knock for much the same reason that one facet of Knock is wounding.

What commonality unites the qualities of pride, compassion, hatred, fear?—here I will note that Book of Hours (and Cultist Simulator, in less unsubtle ways) incorporates a number of Jungian concepts into its storytelling; the Archaeologist in particular is more or less explicitly tormented by their projected Shadow, in Jungian terms. The Shadow is an unconscious aspect of the personality composed of traits that are unwanted, that do not align with the aspirational ideal image of oneself, and which are therefore both repressed and projected outward, driving conflict both within and without. Confrontation with the Shadow is inevitable and may lead to either possession by it (which produces confusion, distress, emotional paralysis) or assimilation of it (which acknowledges and integrates the Shadow into the conscious self, a spiritual awakening).

The word Ereb derives from ἔρεβος (érebos), the ancient Greek for the darkness of Hades; and it's "the shadow in the soul's cellar," the intersection of Grail's "drowning waters" with the conflict and conquests of Edge—it is the Shadow, and so it is hidden or buried but must, sooner or later, be encountered. And so we might say that the Shadow will eventually, inevitably, perhaps violently, Knock. Note, also, the descriptions when strengthening Ereb with either Bosk ("the Wood is filled with shadows") or Skolekosophy ("...will unchain my Ereb"), and more generally Ereb's association with the unwritten, instinctual lore of the primaeval wood and the study of things that should not be studied. The Shadow comes Knocking, etc.

(I find Ereb especially interesting in relation to both Calyptra and the Corrivality, and will get into a deeper dive about this at some point in the future. For now: Westengryre is the affliction incurred by provoking the Mare-in-the-Tree. Sleep softly!).

Fet is "that part of us which walks in dreams," and its first aspect is Rose, its second Moth; and, as noted, I propose that the juncture in this conjunction is Sky. Why?

Sky concerns "matters of balance, harmony, and necessity." Moth is an unpredictable, wandering principle of chaotic yearning; Rose is "exploration, enlightenment, hope." Now think about Fascination: 2 Moth, THE HIGHER I RISE THE MORE I SEE; and if the Cultist succumbs to visions with three Fascination, this is their ending: "First it was the dreams. Then it was the visions. Now it's everything. I no longer have any idea what is real, and what is not."

Fet, the part which walks in dreams, which traverses the Mansus, has Moth aspect commingled with the aspect of enlightenment and exploration. Its malady is Gisting, the Rose aspect absent the Moth, and described thus: "As my concentration fails, a part of my soul flutters away, drawn by a distant half-imaginary light. [...] My fet is gisting - too loosely tethered to me - so that I glimpse the Mansus even in daylight hours. [...] In dreams I have visited the House behind the world... and some part of me is trapped there now, even when I wake." Whence does the Cultist's Moth-aspected Fascination derive? From the unmooring of Moth from their Fet.

To maintain one's Fet in good health—to walk the Mansus in dreams with the dangerous impulse to wander tethered safely to the skin of the world and the ways beneath it—what is required most of all is balance; harmony between the peril of Moth and the Rose which anchors the dreamer to the Wake. This is a matter of Sky.

(& of course, Rose and Moth together represent the nine divisions of the wind itself: the eight winds of the compass rose and the directionless, chaotic ninth.)

Health—Health is unusual in several ways, the most obvious being that it has three aspects rather than two. It is not a part of the soul per se but rather the dwelling-place thereof; its aspects are Nectar, Heart, and Scale. I believe that the reason for this is relatively simple. The aspect now called Nectar was once instead named Blood, and so we might consider that the first aspect of Health, the body, is the Heart-Blood, or the Blood-in-the-Heart. Or we might conceptualize this combination of Nectar-Heart as within-without, the lifeblood moved by the heart beating to protect the skin.

Then why Scale?

Well... Scale is the aspect of what is left, of what remains, of the old forgotten songs asleep in the depths of the earth which might yet be roused; and the Cross died not but passed within. Health has Scale-aspect because that is the last trace of the Carapace Cross, long-buried and forgotten but never quite gone. Hence my choice to route Nectar-Heart's union to Scale through Moon, the secret and forgotten things, rather than through Knock and Forge. Either is cogent, but I think Moon is the better fit.

Next! Mettle. Mettle is easy. Mettle is the "will; self-discipline; that part of us which makes the right choice" and "the capacity for meaningful choice," and it has Forge aspect with a lesser power of Edge. When subverting Forge lore or influence into Edge, the Cultist invokes the Lionsmith's rebellion at Issus: "The Hour called Lionsmith shattered his own sword to escape his master's dominion. All things can be overcome, with sufficient force. [...] I've shattered what I believed before. Thus have I subverted my Forge lore to Edge."

A small—but important!—detail I want to underscore here. In shattering his sword at Issus, the Lionsmith enacted a teaching of the Forge of days, that "the artisan may achieve their highest goal only by destroying their most precious tool." That is to say, the method used here to subvert Forge into Edge is not to conquer the Forge with the Edge but instead to reforge the Edge using Forge-techniques. One principle subverting another doesn't necessarily imply an adversarial relationship to each other; they are instead complements, or united opposites, or both. Forge-into-Edge is the clearest demonstration of this.

Thus, Mettle encompasses not just fortitude and conviction but specifically the will to change oneself—to break and be reforged—in pursuit of the highest goal. I would also submit that it is the part of the soul most in conflict with Ereb (the ego-ideal of the superego, if you want it in Jungian terms; that aspirational sense of self and identity which suppresses the Shadow). The drowning waters of Grail versus the consuming fire of Forge, the birth-and-death, end-and-beginning of Grail vs the metamorphosis and shaping arts of Forge; opposite and the same, passion striving against self-discipline, willpower striving to give form to unconscious desire, and so conflict arises from the Edge between them.

Phost is "the light within: sight, perception, inspiration" and "all the Glory's gifts." Its first aspect is Lantern, its second Sky. When afflicted, its malady is Fascinated: "My inner light gutters, then flares - I am snared in a dangerous fascination. [...] Phost is the brightest part of the soul - sometimes it can grow too bright for safety." Unlike the Cultist's Moth-y Fascination, Fascinated Phost has a small degree of Lantern aspect. It does, however, appear to be the same condition, hence "the HIGHER I RISE the MORE I SEE."

The discrepant aspect here may come down to a simple difference in temperament between the Cultist and the Librarian; one imagines that an adept must have a greater inclination toward Moth than a scholar—otherwise why seek what lies above and beyond the Stag Door? Thus Glory entices the adept but blinds the scholar. Or else, for the scholar, the danger of Fascination lies in what perilous yearnings might be enticed toward you, as Daymare insinuates, although whether the advice she offers Gwen is applicable generally or not is, given Gwen's particular circumstances, unclear.

In any case, Phost is the part of the soul afflicted by Fascination, and it seems reasonable to conceive of it as a counterpart or perhaps the fulcrum of Fet. Consider the Watchman's Paradoxes, a Lantern-Sky skill which can be committed either to Illumination or Nyctodromy:

From Light (Phost) Our dreams are shadows cast by the Watchman's light. So we perceive him even in our shadow. This is Illumination. From Change (Fet) We recognise the dream-places that the Watchman shows us, though we have never seen them before. Perhaps we were something else when we saw them. This paradox is fundamental to Nyctodromy.

If a dream is the shadow cast by the Watchman's light, or a place thereby illuminated, and Phost is "all the Glory's gifts," and the Fet is the part of the soul which walks in dreams, then it is—perhaps—Phost which illuminates the way, as an inner semblance of the Watchman's light, and keeps the balance between Rose and Moth.

Shapt is "eloquence and understanding; the door opens both ways." It has Knock aspect and a lesser power of Forge. It is words. It is speech: the first wound, the first sword, the first key. When afflicted, it develops the malady Acusis, "in which the door, Shapt, cannot be closed. [...] Every sound rings like a bell - every word scratches at my eyes or skin." Knock, absent Forge, soothed only by the silence of Winter. I get very excitable about Shapt and this is already a quite long post, so I will leave it at: Ebrehel is the Shapt of an Hour.

Trist is "the change and the longing," and its first aspect is Moth, its second Moon. Its affliction, Despairing, has Edge aspect instead: "Trist is already half a hand trailed in a river of deeper sadness. [...] Melancholy is the mist on the soul's waters. Despair is the wolf that prowls the water's edge." Trist is also implicated in the existence of what seems to be the most dangerous of the 'great shadows' that can be found in tombs—as described in 'The Barrowchild's Elegies':

The Barrowchild warns particularly of the 'avidity of trist', where a remnant-shadow's longing for change survives its sense of self and even devours its wist. That longing may draw the curious into the tomb, where the remnant-shadow changes so that it cannot be distinguished from its visitor - or that the reverse becomes true - and that it is never again possible to say whether it is the shadow or the visitor that exits the tomb.

ahem. Conceptually what this 'avidity of trist' describes is, in Jungian terms, possession by the Shadow. In Secret Histories terms, I believe that Ereb (fear) overtakes Trist, which turns to despair; the Mettle (will, choice, the determinants of self) is eroded or forsaken or otherwise lost, whereafter the despairing Trist provokes a complete obliteration of everything else that remains in a violent, agonized desperation to destroy the Ereb. & that's what a Wolf-Splinter is.

So the Moth aspect needs no explanation. Moon, however, is interesting, as is the juncture through Knock and Winter. Trist, the change and the longing, is melancholy... and Moon is the aspect of secrets, of nocturnal and forgotten things. Trist, I believe, is specifically the longing for what has been lost, after the changing, after something ends. Hence the danger of its avidity.

Last and not least, we have Wist; "the soul's memory, the true name scratched on its cornerstone, what remains after the rest has passed." It's the memory and the remnants. Its aspects are Winter and Lantern, and its malady, Shell-Crossed, has the aspect Scale, expressly because it's a surfacing remnant: "Memory crossed, hatched, lined, snapped. My thoughts are tangled and unfamiliar to me. Something of those who came before - the Carapace Cross - has always lingered in humankind. It's risen now in me."

The Winter-aspect is of course straightforward, given the Wist's role as memory-keeper for the soul. The Elegiast comes to mind, as does the nowhere-Hour called Snow (for death alters; Snow endures).

But why Lantern? Lantern is not an aspect frequently associated with preservation or endurance—quite the opposite, it purifies and it blinds. It begins to make sense if we consider this Lantern-aspect in relation to the Scale-aspect that emerges when Wist becomes Shell-Crossed, and that is, I think, the closest we have to a smoking gun in terms of Scale being a precursor to Lantern. What remains of the Carapace Cross now? Only light. This is why Shell-Crossed Wist is cured with Lantern; its Scale aspect is purified and therefore forgotten, all but the very last, inextinguishable trace.

(We'll discuss that more in another post.)

So!

All of these conjunctions of principles within the soul track quite well with the positioning of Sky / Scale / Moon / Nectar at the corners around the 'inner wheel.' I think the elements of the soul provide a more comprehensive look at the way the principles interact with each other than do Cultist Simulator's subversion projects, which we turn to now. Briefly. (she says, lying.)

Lantern into Forge: "The magus Julian Coseley claims the Forge of Days split the Sun. Perhaps he was right. [...] Light yields to Heat."

Something interesting to note is that there is a recurring if rather subtle motif of the Sun's light—the light of the Glory, Lantern—being cold. Or at least, not very warm. Besides the Meniscate, whose light is that of a reflection because her domain is the Moon, all of the extant Solar Hours have Winter aspect, which is not particularly unusual in and of itself given the influence of the Intercalate. But the Medium's splendid memory implies that the Sun-in-Splendour, although brighter than the Madrugad or the Sun-in-Rags, was likewise chilly: "The Sun was brighter once - no warmer, but its light held colours we no longer see."

This contrasts the Wheel, as described in, for example, the Inks of Revelation commitment to Hushery: "...since the dawn times when the sun hung red and low and we felt its warmth like autumn." But even that suggests only a little warmth.

Lantern and Forge are similar in myriad ways—light purifies, light blinds; fire gives light and consumes knowledge; one is unmerciful, the other inspires unmerciful change—but one key enduring difference does seem to be that Lantern-light is cold, unyielding, whereas Forge-light burns, desires, consumes, destroys. In this specific way Forge holds more similarity to Moth and Grail than it does to Lantern... and indeed we do see Forge-Moth or Forge-Grail conjunctions here and there. Notably, Transformations & Liberations (Forge-Moth) and Numen: A Merciless Alteration (Edge-Forge-Grail).

Forge into Edge, we've touched on already.

Edge into Winter: "I am acknowledging the victory of patience over strength. [...] Patience defeats strength."

Just as the method for subverting Forge into Edge recalls the Lionsmith, Edge into Winter may—arguably—call upon the Colonel's understanding of victory through the cunning borne of experience. Or we might interpret the operation from the perspective that even the fiercest conflict must end in time, whether in victory or defeat; that even the strongest warrior must fall. The White waits west of the world, but she will not wait forever. In all likelihood both are true, or at least can be true. I would imagine there are different techniques drawn from either viewpoint. (& this, too, is Edge.)

Winter into Heart: "Winter's coming must yield at last to spring."

This operation, I find most interesting in conjunction with the description of Forge as "the winter that warms and the spring that consumes." On its face, it is reasonable to interpret Winter and Heart as opposite forces—silence and stillness, striving against the drums and motion of life—but... but. Winter is the principle of endings, of silence, and of those things that are not quite dead.

Consider the Winter-Heart skill Quenchings & Quellings:

Arts which quench fires and bring solace to the troubled mind. 'A true adept is never troubled by fire, nor by fever, nor by restless spirit'. – Ambrose Westcott Safety in Silence (Trist) Unwise words are dangerous. Mourn them, remember them, speak them not. This is Hushery. Safety in Oblivion (Health) Let the flesh forget disease, let the smoke forget the flame, let the troubled mind forget its pain: Preservation.

Ambrose Westcott was a metallurgist, an alchemist, a pyrographer—his area of specialization pertained to Forge, not to Heart or Winter. But Quenchings & Quellings is first and foremost a skill interested in regret and forgetting, and therein lies the connection: Regret is a Winter-Forge memory. "Every choice has its shadow."

I do not think Winter and Heart are opposing forces at all, but rather two sides of a three-sided coin. (If you'll pardon the tortured metaphor.) Winter ends and Heart renews. Winter remembers and Heart preserves. What's missing from these pictures? Forge, which destroys; Forge, which transforms. Not for nothing are these the principles of Calyptra; the Black Flower's Heart-aspect, the White's Winter-aspect, the Red's Forge.

Heart into Grail, we've already discussed.

Grail into Moth: "Even the Red Grail falls prey to the buzzing in the brain."

Obviously, little daylight exists between hunger and yearning; both are a form of desire. Moth and Grail are similar in their hedonism, their wildness, their violence; the Moth flayed the Wheel and the Thunderskin was flayed at the Grail's behest. (Much is made of the confounding question of whether the Moth or the Grail came first, feasted first, arose first. There are no end of contradictory answers, but the truth is really very simple. They are twins—triplets actually but we don't have time for that—born together.)

But do note the specific phrasing used here—that the Red Grail falls prey to the Moth. The Hour called Moth is a hunter. This is described, for example, when committing Horns & Ivories to the Bosk. So the Red Grail is an Hour which hungers and consumes, presiding at births and deaths in equal measure, and sometimes she falls prey to the hunter-Moth; there is some notion here of reversals, of the hunter-becoming-hunted, of hunger being what is preyed upon.

Here I will draw your attention to the Moth-Grail skill Resurgences & Emergences: "Birth and death are only directions. Between the two we find a crossroads." When Grail is subverted into Moth, this is the crossroads they approach.

& into Knock: "Place pressure upon a weakness, and rend the skin of the world." Any aspect studied with Knock becomes Knock.

Knock is a power of opening, of wounding, of breaching; but I think it is also—perhaps even more importantly—a principle of intersection. It is the joining-together which dissolves all boundaries. The reason it subverts everything is less that it's a cosmic skeleton key and more a question of Knock being the principle that understands everything to be connected to everything else, because it is the principle which connects all things. Nothing is truly separate, and nothing can be divided unless it was first joined.

It's the aspect of the Mother of Ants, who encircles, who arises from wounds, who spares those who are already harmed. Knock is the principle that both wounds and heals by wounding, the venom that is also the antivenin. If you've ever wondered why Sacrament Ascite is brewed from Glassfinger Toxin, this is why.

Now—finally—let's discuss my proposed operations of Sky into Scale, into Moon, into Nectar, back into Sky.

Sky into Scale: This one is actually quite open-and-shut. We'll start with the Ithastry commitment for the language Kernewek Henevek:

The Stars (Wist) A smiths' proverb in Brancrug: 'What starts in the sky, ends in the earth.' A story goes with it, that the village smith's anvil in the time of the Dewulfs was hatched from a meteor stone, and so every plough in the village knows something of the stars. Not many remember the story, but everyone remembers the proverb. It would probably count as Ithastry.

From the sky to the earth; as above, so below. Sky is "wind, storm, echo, song... matters of balance, harmony, and necessity." Scale is "hard without, hard within, hard to rouse, harder to subdue; what remains of the old powers of the earth." What's an earthquake if not a storm within the stone? Or is it a song that still echoes beneath the earth?

Both are precursors to the modern principle of Lantern; Scale, the principle of the Flint, is very closely associated with Forge—and in Lightning we find the conjunction of Sky-Forge.

There is also a whole tangent we could go into here about the birds and the serpents and the birds-of-a-scale, worms-of-a-feather. But I won't belabor the point. Next!

Scale into Moon: One could make an argument, too, for Scale into Nectar, on the grounds of stone-and-soil, fossil-and-seed, antecedent for the Winter-Heart relationship. However, that becomes more difficult when the relationships between the precursors and the modern principles is taken into account, and I think the similarities between Scale-Nectar and Winter-Heart are more accurately represented in terms of Scale-Moon-Nectar preceding the triad of Forge-Winter-Heart.

The Scale-Moon subversion also has Hill & Hollow going for it, in particular the Preservation commitment:

The ways of the hill-children and the gods-from-stone. Old paths, old secrets, the songs that still echo beneath the earth. How They Endured (Health) In the beginning, the Carapace Cross served the first Hours, the gods born from stone. When the gods-from-stone were defeated, where could the Cross go? Into the hills; into the Bounds; and into us. This is how humankind came to be, and in our most secret hollows, the Cross endures. This is a matter of Preservation.

(Note that 'the Bounds' seems to also encompass the House of the Moon, as per the Nyctodromy commitment for Hyksos.)

Scale is what sleeps, remains, what might be roused, while Moon is what is secret, what is hidden, what is nocturnal, and what has been forgotten. Scale endures and fades from memory; Moon remembers what was forgotten. The old songs that echo under the earth become the secrets whispered by the waves beneath the moon.

Like Forge and Winter, Scale and Moon pair the violent destruction of Scale (as a shattering earthquake) with the softer, gentle endings presided over by Moon (as the sea erodes stone). Next!

Moon to Nectar: Here, of course, the dual nature of Grail—the drowning waters but also blood—is worth noting. Both Nectar and Moon are far more strongly tied to Grail than to Heart. And of course, the Wheel, the low red sun, once had the aspect Blood; and it still turns inside the House of the Moon.

Speaking of the Wheel, while Serpents & Venoms is a Scale-Moon skill, it undeniably concerns the Wheel (which may, as we discussed earlier, have also been Scale-aspected), and its Hushery commitment has some interesting implications regarding the relationship between the Wheel and dreams:

The Last Sun (Trist) In the dawn times the sun was lower, so we gave it our blood. From our blood it knew us, and so it was kinder. Its serpents brought us its poisons to drink, and so we died. But we only died a little, and so we dreamed, and returned the next day to give it our blood again. Those times of peace persist in the lessons of Hushery.

In the Mansus as it exists now, dreams are shadows cast by the Watchman's light, or else illuminated by his light, but of course this could not have been true in the dawn time when the Watchman didn't yet exist. The Moon-Knock memory A Stolen Secret, "Something I overheard in dreams?", together with Moon's associations with secrets and nocturnal things, at least circumstantially supports the conclusion that dawn-dreams were illuminated instead by the Moon.

Thus, this interplay between the blood-drinking Wheel whose serpents opened the way each night into dreams beneath the light of the Moon, speaks to the interaction of Moon with the old principle Blood, and what traces of that remain between Moon and Nectar.

Blood drinks of life and gives death and the Moon heals in dreams; Blood brings the dawn and Night yields to day. Nectar is the principle of germination and of poisoned thorns and of renewal, and the Moon still remembers what it was.

Also, the Velvet. Just... the Velvet. Next!

Nectar to Sky: We return to Kernawek Henavek, but this time it is the Bosk commitment that interests us...

The Roots (Health) A farmers' proverb in Brancrug: 'What starts in the roots, ends in the sky.' A superstition goes with it, that before a child's first birthday you should leave her for a summer night sleeping in the roots of an apple-tree, to make sure she grows tall and straight-backed. Not many pay heed to the superstition now, but everyone remembers the proverb. It would probably count as Bosk.

...along with the Birdsong commitment for Leaves & Thorns:

Looking Up (Chor) The gardener's first lesson is this: look up. What starts as weather ends in the world, what starts as sky ends in the soil. This is what the birds know, and the birds know most things first.

As beneath, so above. What is a tree but a throne to birds, and what is Sky but a crown for birds? What begins in sky ends in soil, and so the first lesson of the gardener is to look up.

Nectar is the pulse of the seasons, the ripening, the wild vigor of new life. Sky is the principle of balance and harmony, mathematics and law—moderation, but also music. The wind in the branches, the bird in the nest, the lightning-strike that fells the tree and lets in the sunlight so that new flowers can grow. I rest my case.

& Fin. (ominously) for now.

I would apologize for the sheer amount of things I've glossed over things to the tune of "but we don't have time for that now" but in my defense, 1. I'M FIGHTING FOR MY LIFE (this post is 8.2k words long) and 2. I have half of a far more comprehensive disquisition regarding the various shadows-under-the-boat we carefully ignored in this post sitting in my drafts; perhaps a quarter of it is complete; it is pushing forty thousand words in length, so 3. It Will Happen Again.

Tune in next time for: VAMPIRE SUN, EGG MOON, & ...THAT GUY.

[shady-swan-jones]

August Rec List!

So, it's August after April, right? RIGHT?

Today is Author Appreciation day so that ties in nicely, thank you @4getfulimaginator2022. Show your appreciation in the comments, it's mandatory. I have no way to enforce this but come on, spread the love!

She's Perfect But You're Mine (3/3) by me

Killian has a girlfriend. Emma handles it with the utmost maturity and grace. Or not.

Dark Swan Story by isaballerina89

What if Emma is pregnant as Dark Swan? Based in season 5 captain swan love story fanfic. It is different from the show.

What if... (Season 4) by Kml19

What if Captain Hook turned into the Dark One to get revenge on Rumplestiltskin? What if he only met the heroes in Neverland?

I can’t love you in the dark (oceans apart) by weareforeverstarlaced

Emma had long resigned her role as princess and Killian did the same, having left piracy. But now, as the mist covers their cliff side cottage, Emma and Killian say their final goodbyes when Rumplestiltskin steals the former pirates heart. And all they could do is wait it out until Rumplestiltskin’s torment was done and it’s crushed. Not knowing when it would happen. However, when morning comes and Killian is gone, Emma has one final idea to bring him back.

Ties That Bind (6/20) by Anonymous

When Killian Jones returns home after years away, it's not for a warm reunion—he’s there to confront his adoptive father, the powerful and rich politician Mr. Gold. Desperate to free Milah from his clutches, Killian finds himself ensnared in one of Gold’s infamous deals. In exchange for Milah’s freedom, Killian must carry out a dangerous mission that puts him on a collision course with Emma Swan, a sharp and determined agent for a secretive government force.

Into the Parallel by CSColifer

Emma and Killian are Travelers with and ability to travel through time and across parallel realms. A chance meeting will change their lives forever.

Cann I Be Your Werewolf? by @belovedcreation

After a particularly nasty encounter with a criminal, bounty hunter Emma Swan's friend convinces her to adopt a guard dog from the shelter. Little does she know that the massive dog she brings home is really the werewolf Killian Jones, who's laying low in wolf form to hide from danger.

Heart Bound by @4getfulimaginator2022

CS historical AU (mid-19th century), real world setting, teacher!Emma and artist!Killian. After years of private tutoring, Emma goes to teach in a village by the sea in a desperate bid to escape her heartbreak and the outside world. She thinks that she'll always be lonely and out of place, but the local lighthouse keeper, a fellow recluse and the town outcast, makes her see that she is right where she belongs.

Animal Instincts by @hookswench

Killian Jones noticed the moment Emma Nolan walked into the tavern. She was innocent... and she was trouble. As a lone wolf, he wanted no part of her pack politics. But when rival Neal Cassidy attacks, Killian can't just stand by. One quick escape later, and Killian finds himself alone with temptation. And Emma isn't one to back down from what she wants.

The Secret Romance by CaptainSwan02

Emma Swan and Killian Jones have been hiding their relationship for a while now, not wanting anyone to find out. The two have navigated treacherous waters and clandestine meetings, all to keep their love hidden from prying eyes. But as their feelings deepen and the challenges they face grow, the strain of their secret weighs heavily on them.

haunted by the ghost of you by @exhaustedpirate

Killian is cursed - cursed to lose Emma over and over again. He is doomed to live, to lose his love forever until he can break it.

For All Life and For All Time by @snowbellewells

Having lost her dearest friend and with her own life on the line, Emma Swan joins a noble band to face an ancient evil. Three of them stand by her in honor of the one they loved and lost. The other might be the first man she could love. He might love her as well - even more than life itself. Time will tell... if they both survive the fight against their immortal enemy.

Pan Says... (13/13) by @hollythecurious

After waking up in a strange room with a naked stranger, Emma and Killian must endure the twisted game their kidnapper insists they play in order to gain provisions and avoid punishments.

Flight 815 (3/?) by @honey77bun

Emma moved into a new, incomprehensible world for her, in 1986. What to do? Unclear. And in this chapter, she'll have to find the strength to figure out what the hell is going on.

Too Well Tangled (12/21) by @myfearless-love

Killian Jones, the enigmatic Marquess of Hookstone, has more than earned his sinister sobriquet, the "Prince of Darkness." His past, a stormy mosaic of rejection and rebellion, has forged a man both feared and revered. Yet, the indomitable Miss Nolan proves an unexpectedly formidable opponent for his infamous charm.

Dracula in Storybrooke (6/?) by @grimmswan

“You don’t seem to be a vampire like the ones Dracula made.” Emma said softly, tracing her fingertips along Killian’s jaw. They were laying in bed. Holding one another. Gazing at each other lovingly.

Yet another villain had tried to tear them apart. And had failed. 

Not Broken At All (17/?) by @donteattheappleshook

A season 1 Neverland AU. Emma is still trying to adjust to her new life as Sheriff of Storybrooke and mom to Henry, who still believes everyone in town is a fairytale creature. When she finds a badly beaten, one handed man while patrolling, she’s convinced he’s crazy. But when Henry is suddenly taken out the window of a house everyone believes is haunted, the madman in the hospital might be her only hope of getting her son back. Whether he likes it or not.

I’ll Wait a Lifetime or Two by @hookedonapirate

At forty, Emma Swan is living her best life. She's happily single and owns a thriving art gallery with her best friend Elsa. And of course, there's the love of her life, her teenage son, Henry. Since the divorce three years ago, her carefully curated life has been quiet, peaceful, ordinary. So why does the one guy she ends up falling for have to be the rockstar her son has a poster of on his bedroom wall, whose life is nothing short of extraordinary?

Independence Day by @whimsicallyenchantedrose

With the Black Fairy defeated and the final battle won, Storybrooke is enjoying it's happily ever after and trying to make new memories. Emma has some exciting news for Killian.

Timeless (4/?) by @killiansprincss

Season 3 divergence - When Zelenas time portal works, Henry wakes up alone in Storybrooke and must travel to the Enchanted Forest to get his family back. Only once he gets there he quickly realises its not like the one in his book, theres no Evil Queen and his mother Emma wasn't put through a wardrobe, theres even a poster inviting the entire kingdom to her engagement ball, to Hook. What will happen once Henry gets them to break this new curse and they get their memories back?

@caught-in-the-filter @allons-y-to-hogwarts-713 @the-darkdaughter-blog @teamhook @justanother-unluckysoul @karlyfr13s   @snowbellewells @xarandomdreamx @klynn-stormz @omninerdgirl   @facesiousbutton82 @finmnsoh56  @followbatb @killianxswan @booksteaandtoomuchtv @exhaustedpirate @anmylica @hollyethecurious @winterbaby89 @undercaffinatednightmare @resident-of-storybrooke @tiganasummertree @stahlords @darkshadow7 @fleurdepetite @captainswan-kellie @motherkatereloyshipper @soniccakes @jonesfandomfanatic @zaharadessert @bluewildcatfanatic @once-upon-a-happy-end @ultraluckycatnd @spartanguard

[aipilosse]

Why Pengolodh of all people is able to stoke such rage within me on his behalf is so bizarre. Like, he's a non-character, a name and some facts Tolkien came up with in his carousel of in-universe authors to keep the layers of narration he loved, but the way he is maligned in this fandom is tragic.

I've touched on before that treating the Silmarillion as if it were written and relayed by a single author is entirely incorrect so I won't go into that here, and honestly I'm sure I've said this all before BUT

The idea that Penny is for some reason *least* suited to write most of the events of the Silmarillion is PATENTLY ridiculous, and I would challenge anyone who says that to a duel, either intellectual or physical (even in my current weakened state... Tulkas is on my side I cannot fail). First of all, the one place where nobody else knows anything about what happened is GONDOLIN, so I think if anyone is going to be writing about most of the events of the Silm, they either need to be from Gondolin or need to live in Sirion with survivors.

OH WHAT'S THAT.... SIRION?!?

Yeah, Sirion! The place where not only are there survivors of Gondolin, but there are survivors of Doriath and Nargothrond AND any remnants of the Beorians, Hadorian, and Haladin. Like, I can think of no other place where the Mannish legends would be able to be recounted, and put on the same level, as the Elvish ones.

"But the Feanorians," you squall. "He's so *unfair* to them, and how could he know ANYTHING about them? That's why we know sooo little about the Feanorians and why they are soooo unjustly maligned."

Ok, first of all, ya basic. Second of all, HE HAS ACCESS TO FEANORIAN SOURCES TOO.

There is Celebrimbor, and all the other former followers of Curufin and Celegorm that could of course tell Penny what was up in Himlad and afterwards while he was in Gondolin. Also, there were probably Feanorians who lived after turning on Maedhros and Maglor during the sack of the Havens who could fill in what happened after The Luthien Incident. So, actually, Pengolodh had multiple sources to literally all of the essential events of the Silmarillion.

OH YEAH THE SACK OF THE HAVENS. Despite living through what is described as the worst atrocity of elf v elf, despite having people we KNOW were friends with him KILLED during that fight, despite having his home destroyed by fellow Noldor, he *really* gives Maglor and Maedhros every excuse. "they felt bad, they're so tired, love grew between them and their victims" etc etc. The Silm is sympathetic to the Feanorians and you can't convince me otherwise (you're not some crazy rebel because you like them!) (They are also Doomed by the narrative, but attributing that to an in-universe author requires getting into the territory of events that occurred not actually occurring and... what's the point if you're going to say that the things that the book is about didn't happen? why are you even here?)

I see people say that the bias is against the 3 Cs, Caranthir especially, which is an ABSURD statement to make in conjunction with the 'Pengolodh, sole conveyer of the Silm' theory. Like, Pengolodh most likely never met any of the 3 Cs or if he did he was very young -- why would he dislike them more than the brothers that massacred his friends? I think the theory here is that he's just such a huge Turgon fan and just absorbed Turgon's opinions on the 3 Cs, which is just conjecture on top of conjecture with no solid footing.

I think there is more credence to him being biased against Maeglin on account of the Fall of Gondolin. But, I ask you, is it really *bias* when the guy is partially responsible for the sack of the city you spent most of your life in and likely the deaths of most of your friends and relatives? And Maeglin too in the published Silm is not without his good qualities! If you hate someone, it can be very hard to admit they're handsome and smart, but Penny does not have that issue.

Anyway, justice for Pengolodh. You didn't write the whole thing, Penny, but what you did write was I'm sure fucking fantastic.