#hwegh

[1ore]

Hrnrnhrghrnhrhnn. blighted au. fuck it we ball

by “blighted au” I really mean “boo boo the fool creates deranged plot-shaped puzzle box to get around minor inconveniences like death and dying.“ writers will close a door and i will stand in it like this guinea pig.

Anyway.

We start offroading at the, ahem, moment of truth. When Yuri realizes that killing Mordremoth means killing its shambling Trahearne-shaped vessel, he loses his last marble. He’s done. He’s tired of burying his friends. He Won’t Do It. Even when Mordremoth possesses Trahearne and tries to kill him, Yuri can’t bring himself to do the deed. Someone else tries to do it for him, and to this he says “nuh-uh.” In what I imagine as kind of a comical sequence, Yuri picks up Trahearne’s half-dead body and books it. Thus begins a number of empty years in which Yuri and Trahearne—with the help of the Lastborn— live on the run from every major authority in Tyria.

Most of the people who knew Yuri realized that this kind of short-sighted, sentimental impulsiveness is normal for him. The only surprise was that he succeeded in pulling it off. Still, others suspect that he got a case of the mords, what with the convenient timing of his outburst. Whether or not he was acting of his own sound mind, he is now Public Enemy Number 2, second only to Mr. Mordyboy himself.

(Meanwhile, the Lastborn is just happy to have competition for Tyria’s Most Wanted.)

How’s Mordremoth doing? Unclear. Definitely still “alive” and harbored in Trahearne, who feels Preddy Bad, physically and mentally. Trahearne is lucid while he recovers from his psychic imprisonment / fight to the death with an elder dragon, but he considers this a period of dormancy from which the dragon will inevitably recover and reassert control over him. The thought of this fills him with dread, and he cannot understand why Yuri or the Lastborn would choose to delay the inevitable and imperil the cosmos for, what, 2 more minutes in the ballpit? That will inevitably end with betrayal and heartbreak? And on an order of magnitude 1000 times worse than if you had just done your duty commander six-cants why can’t you just do this one thing??? Trahearne is sad and angry and stressed out of his mind, and generally not pleasant to be around during this time.

For his part, Yuri is definitely… Aware that he’s done something that’s going to have permanent, far-reaching consequences outside the scope of his understanding. But he refuses to think it through. He already did the deed by not doing the deed, and if he thinks about what that means for Trahearne or the rest of the world, he won’t be able to function. (And if they’re living on the run, he knows from experience that he’s going to have to be at least a little bit functional. He takes it one day at a time or not at all.)

Ironically, the Lastborn is more at peace with Yuri’s decision than he is. There’s something about that awful deadlock, Yuri’s stupid, sentimental lapse in judgement, and the ugly fallout that rhymes with his own experiences. It helps that seeing the Marshal brought to his knees isn’t really satisfying, or even morbidly funny, like he probably thought it would be back when he was a courtier. Besides, if Yuri thinks it’s worth it to gamble The Entire Livable Universe for an infinitesimal chance at saving his boycrush from an elder dragon, who is he to argue? He doesn’t understand what Yuri sees in the guy, but he took an arguably stupider gamble by trusting the Lastborn, so. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ love wins

In any case, the boys will be left waiting for a long time for the other shoe to drop. As usual, I’m interested in being very stupid and purposefully dense about monsters and plants, and especially monstrous plants.

The nature of Trahearne’s arrangement with his roomie Mordremoth is more complicated than they realize. I think it’s more like… while locked in their dying throes, the two of them narrowly survive as one entity what they couldn’t (and shouldn’t) have survived individually. So, two minds heal as one. We do Terry Pratchett’s dragon origami to fit what’s left inside a small space.

This is, as you can imagine, incomprehensible for both of them. Suddenly you’re a little guy with emotions. Suddenly you’re a force of nature that moves cosmos. Suddenly you’re a combination force-of-nature-little-guy. Folks initially mistake the changes in Trahearne’s personality for symptoms of being Stressed Out Of His Mind, interspersed with moments of possession, but they’re really more like the fringes where one entity has been visibly woven into the other.

So you get some more volatile, reactive behavior that comes from primordial self-preservation instincts, but they’re manifesting in a guy whose scope of existence is both bigger and smaller than what it used to be. Suddenly he has moments of heightened awareness, where he can hear the whole forest’s mycorrhizal conversation, but his forebrain isn’t prepared for that. So the felling of a single tree and the sound of a thousand other trees crying out in phytochemical distress overwhelms him, and kicks him into fight-or-flight mode. But now fight-or-flight mode is a little more like… black-out-and-magically-devastate-the-land and-everything-in-it-to-protect-yourself-or-flight mode. It’s disorienting and upsetting for a guy who fought so hard to be responsible with certain other powers he inherited against his will.

Of course, this also means the distinction between being “some guy who is possessed by an elder dragon” and “some guy who accidentally fused with an elder dragon” is invisible for Trahearne. He just sees the introgression as proof that he’s slipping. He won’t hear any solution that isn’t “find a way to kill me” for a long, long time. Even partial measures, like learning to control the power he’s inherited, feel like empty gestures at best. It all seems very pointless and cruel to put him through this, and this mmmmight have some kind of effect on his relationship with the people who insist on keeping him alive. Maybe.

I think time is the only thing that really erodes this. It becomes harder and harder for him to ignore the fact that the worst won’t come to pass, no matter how bad it gets, no matter how extreme the episode or how many openings he thinks he’s giving the dragon. Whoever’s at the helm has to accept responsibility for the vessel, and that is, unfortunately, him. (Or some kind of amalgamation-continuation of him, anyway.)

From here? I have none clue what comes after Heart of Thorns LOL. But I think Yuri and Trahearne taking an early retirement from dragonslaying to become stressed-out has-beens / enemies of the state / An Actual Dragon is a funny launching point. (The Lastborn is already a stressed-out has-been / enemy of the state, so this is just enrichment for him. Tyria and all his friends might be going through an existential crisis, but at least someone’s self-actualizing.)

I do think those boys gotta go back to Orr to finish what they started, at some point. Maybe if they co-opted the dragon’s magic to do an environmental restoration they would feel better. Maybe if they did the quiet work of maintenance. Touch grass. Touch water .

god.

Etc:

@soulfullofold’s idea: a consequence of Yuri’s Episode ™ is that he accidentally brands his best friend Ximone as guilty by association, for abetting an international criminal. She has to put her budding political career on hold to clean up the mess he left behind ): (along with everyone else, lbr)

Since the interior world of Mordremoth itself is now also Trahearne’s interior world, there’s an additional layer of friction between him and Yuri, on top of all the other friction. As Trahearne starts to delve into the dragon’s memories, he is forced to reconcile these two very different perspectives of the Commander. On one hand, we have “(-: that’s my very good friend commander six-cants,” and on the other we have “AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH WHO LET THIS HUMAN IN HERE HE’S GNAWING ON MY ROOTS AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH HE’S SO SCARY!!!!!” Nobody really anticipates fear (in the form of plant survival instincts) to sit at the heart of the dragon’s motivations, but here we are. It wasn’t enough to reckon with the idea that someone might want you alive, whether or not you have an elder dragon inside of you. Now we reckon with the fear that Yuri would not hesitate to kill you if he could do so without killing his boy bestie. While this is all preddy intense in the moment, it’s also kind of

This would be a very funny place to resolve the beef that Trahearne and the Lastborn have with each other. My man you cannot pot-kettle-black your way out of this one. You have quite literally become the thing you sought to destroy.

[bobadiin]

im starving of a lack of autistic grantaire fics....

[sysig]

Editing takes forever and it's lonely and boring to do it for too long by myself, I'm gonna stream a session at some point

[eonars]

Felt fine omw to the train station and on the train this morning but for some reason when I got off and started walking towards the institute the smell after rain and sight of all the mashed up slugs and worms on the path got me sooooo bad I literally frew up in my mouth :/ hit a real violent closed mouth HWEGH but luckily there was no one around

[mischieviem]

Hwegh

[crabussy]

hwegh!

[anaelwings]

Hwegh

[moderndaymadscientist]

hey mutual

you're cool and i like you

do not forget to breathe please

HWEGH???? THANK YOU AGH?? THIS IS SO SWEET AND??? AAAGHGHGHG THANK YOU!!!! YOU TOO!! AAGHGHHH!!! ^^/pos

[noctude]

HWEGH…. good lord……. my brain is breaking. you’re freaking my bean. i’m falling down onto the floor and dying. thank you very much . for listening

[homeofthebasin]

Development of language can be amazing, insidious, or a secret third thing which is mostly “hwegh”

[inexplicably-spookified]

the sky's overcast and i'm sorry

[spiralxice]

Maybe its thewine but writing Dareth in this fic is just aaaaaa

Like hes not in it much at the start of the scene but he just asks lloyd 2 trust him and ist gonna be great

[punkcherries]

tfw the sketch is better than the full img 😔🤘

[krafterwrites]

Hwegh my stomach hurts

[magtitude]

oh worm i replied to two things in a timely-ish fashion today now it’s time to play some more

𝙎𝙄𝙈𝙎

[abra-ka-dammit]

hwegh my lower back and my neck are feeling SHIT today, i keep desperately trying to crack and stretch and do whatever tf i can to relieve it but thats not helping in the slightest, ofc

highkey just wanna sleep all day at this point