#i was a blind pitiable fool

[lullaebies]

summary:

It was not forced, and not offensive. Davos can be a terror, his hand choking any opponent in a spar; he’s not beyond such tactics at all, but then he held his nape, and dug his fingers onto his brown hair. They were mere seconds from a tussle over a misunderstanding, but their gazes met midway, green eyes to black ones and that had been the first time he felt understood.

And it was robbed of him, cruelly so, when Davos ran away the moment Aeron tried to reciprocate. He should’ve slapped himself, for being such a fool, and he should’ve killed Davos, for making him act like one.

Aeron finds himself with Davos once more after their first kiss cemented the distance between them. Blackwood and Bracken, push and pull — that distance never lasts long, and they wouldn't have it differently. aeron/davos fic | 3k words | smut | no warnings | read on ao3

“So you are afraid of me now, huh?” 

Davos’s grating voice came from the other side of the hallway. They were at Riverrun, for the annual tourney Lord Grover held. The old paramount lord had been blind as a bat in his elderly and ailing age, and Lord Elmo had been a rather stern host in his stead, but the streets of Riverrun had still held cheer worth visiting for. 

“I did not realize you would be here,” Aeron answers. He had paid for a private room for himself and his party. His older brother had said he and their cousins will join him soon. Raylon had been stuck on a gambling game in the streets, and after seeing his bastard brother lose thrice, Aeron opted for a reason to leave before Raylon asked for more coin from his pocket. “Fuck off.”

Davos flashes a grin at that. He looks somewhat inebriated, chuckling in a manner more laid-back than forcefully purposeful. “I paid to be here too, and before you,” he says and lifts a half done bottle of Arbor red, his fist clenched around the neck of it. “So I stay!”

Aeron exhales. Perhaps I should’ve stuck with Raylon instead.

“All by yourself?” he asks mockingly. He hadn’t seen any of his cousins or friends within the tavern, but he guesses it shouldn’t matter to him. He huffs and goes to the room he bought. If he wants to be a pitiable imbecile for all to see, he can be my guest.

“Only if you keep hiding,” Davos says, making long strides over to him. The Blackwood has the most audacious habit of coming up to his face, ever since they were children. The first time he ever talked to him almost resulted in headbutt, and then Davos had tried to be friendly. This time, he isn’t; but Davos’s forehead does end up touching his. “You’ve been running from me all day.”

Aeron pushes him back, frowning. “ You are the one that fled first,” he tells him, properly upset. Blackwoods are haughty and idiotic, but he had been special amongst his murder of crows; last time they met in such circumstances, Davos kissed him. Davos kissed him, and ignored him for the rest of the festivities. 

The most embarrassing part of it was how bothered Aeron had been about it. He hadn’t had anyone to tell of it; his half-brother and cousins always found his lack of care for women an odd point in him, and even if he did tell them a Blackwood had kissed him they’re likelier to assume it had been a perversion hailed from Raventree, forced upon him. 

It was not forced, and not offensive. Davos can be a terror, his hand choking any opponent in a spar; he’s not beyond such tactics at all, but then he held his nape, and dug his fingers onto his brown hair. They were mere seconds from a tussle over a misunderstanding, but their gazes met midway, green eyes to black ones and that had been the first time he felt understood . 

And it was robbed of him, cruelly so, when Davos ran away the moment Aeron tried to reciprocate. He should’ve slapped himself, for being such a fool, and he should’ve killed Davos, for making him act like one.

“I am here now,” Davos says in a whisper, his hand squeezing on his arm, the same time the tips of their noses touch. “Do it again.”

He breathes in deep, trying to control his beating heart. Fucker. Aeron knees his leg. 

“As if I should be grateful to have you come to me with a bottle in your hand and a stink from your throat,” he shoots back at him, and rips his arm from him. His hand is on the private’s room handle when Davos lifts the Dornish Arbor bottle and flings it across the hallway. It breaks loudly and shatters, shards of glass and splashes of red all over the wall and floor. Aeron is flabbergasted, turning to him with a frown. “Are you out of your fucking mind ?” 

“I don’t need that fucking bottle,” Davos tells him, seething. His dark eyes had a sheen of fear in them, of all things. “It didn’t help, not even a smidge. It should’ve, but it couldn’t drown a thing .”

Blackwoods act easily on emotions. An observed habit of all of those making up that wretched family. The way Davos stands in front of him, he thinks he is moments from bursting, but still, he waits, with his beggar’s eyes. Restraint is not his strong suit, not at all, but perhaps he had been trying.

Aeron had felt Davos’s eyes on him for the better of the day, after all.

“What was that noise?” a serving girl rushes over, only to stop in place when she sees them. She seems rather nervous at their sight. “Th-there is no fighting in the tavern,” she says meekly. She clearly already understood she stands before two lordlings.

Davos glares at her wordlessly. Aeron moves away from him, though he can feel his hand tug on his clothes. “It was an accident,” he tells the serving girl. “I apologize. My friend is drunk,” Aerons says, and reaches a resolution. “I’ll take care of him.” 

Relieved, the girl nods and rushes away to safety, but Davos releases his grip on Aeron’s clothes, rigidity in the squint of his eyes. “Friend, you say?”

Birdbrain. His focus is entirely wrong, and it’s positively infuriating. I said I’ll take care of you, can you not hear me? He wants to choose conflict, each time, and Aeron knows this; everything to deflect from the truth. Davos knows what he is, as Aeron knows what he is. 

It’s hard to accept, but it’s even more embarrassing to admit, that Aeron accepted it for him.

“I couldn’t say the pain in my arse, could I?” Aeron answers evenly. “You aren’t brave enough for that.”

Davos nails him against the wall again, eyes gleaming with rage. “And you are?”

Aeron swallows, uncomfortably vulnerable. No, not really. He likes to imagine himself brave, to be able to slay Blackwoods with no fear and and kiss whoever he’d like with no concern, but he finds himself unsure in most things in practice. His dreams make a concoction of those things, having Aeron kiss Davos and winning against him in this war of taboos. Steps beyond that seemed far-fetched, and even frightening. 

Yet still, he can’t help but imagine…

“I was brave enough to kiss you back.”

He looks down, embarrassed still. Davos brings a hand to his waist, squeezing it tight. They share that look again, and he can feel Davos’s lips on his even before they touch him. “Then do it again,” the Blackwood asks him, and the softness of his lips is a strike of lightning against Aeron’s. 

Aeron brings a hand to Davos’s shoulder. “Anyone can see us—” he says between the other’s fervent pecks. His heart is beating out of his chest; dreams are so easy to have, but reality is incomparable. This should be impossible, in every way, and he’s never been a pioneer in a thing. He’s not like Raylon, able to bet on things so easily; he wants, he needs to win. If he is to lose, why should he play at all?

It feels so easy now, but he doesn’t want this stolen away. 

“I don’t care,” Davos says plainly, leaving him no place to breathe. Davos brings a hand to his jaw, holding him to kiss his proper. After pressing a particularly hard kiss onto him, he breathes out. “I’ll kill anyone who interrupts.”

It sets him on fire. Aeron does not doubt that he would, even as Davos’s fingers thread themselves into his hair, parting it in slow wonder. Davos is smiling against him, as if every touch is a breath of clean air coming back to his lungs. The rigidity in black-haired boy’s muscles is all gone as he melts against him.

Davos is a free spirit; too much of one, at times. He has to take care of him, before he becomes too loose a canon. He finds his freedom in this, but Aeron needs control. He would not have anyone take it away from him.

He opens the door to the private room, dragging the black-haired idiot after him. Davos chuckles as the door shuts behind them, ready to pounce on him again, but Aeron pins him against the door himself, knee wedged between Davos’s legs. 

“If you want to keep going, don’t get us killed,” Aeron tells him. He doesn’t let him open his big mouth, shutting him up with a kiss the other can’t escape. Even if Davos tries to flee from the truth again, he will not let him forget.

Davos groans against his mouth. He has no sword on his being but he is clearly deep in his adrenaline, having to hold onto something and in particular, the braid that framed Aeron’s hair. One hand holding it, the other hand wedging under it, all for the sake of holding his head.

Aeron only realizes Davos hardly relinquished any control then; he holds his head to manuever him into his own kisses, and when he tires of that alone, the Blackwood boy bites his lower lip for the halt to take place. He doesn’t depart the lips without a proper suck to them, though.

Aeron breathes heavily from the parting, and Davos looks him up and down. Readjusting himself, he lowers one hand to hold Aeron’s clothed thigh, pressing against him further. “You are so pretty against me.”

Maybe his eyes widen a little, at that. Being named pretty has him provoked most times, but now it gives him the most unpredictable shivers. Inhaling sharply, he tries to dryly retort, flushed as he is. “Is that why you headbutt me all the time?”

“No,” he says, and picks him in his hands; Davos sits him down on the table behind them, the hand on the back of his thigh rises to where his trousers had become tight. “It’s because you are fucking infuriating , keeping your respectable distance.” 

He sighs out at the feeling. Davos’s hand is warm, he can feel it even beyond the fabric. This is exactly why; he feels mad when they’re too close. He wants more when they’re too close, and he knows Davos will be brave to take that step. Davos can’t help himself, and it is so much easier than admitting he himself can’t either. 

Aeron brings his hands to the metal raven clasp on Davos’s collar, all while wrapping his legs around his waist. I don’t give a fuck anymore.

Davos palms him while Aeron opens as much as he can of the Blackwood's shirt. He has tan skin; if Aeron had been sunkissed with freckles, Davos had been sunkissed with depth of color. His black hair is messy silk, but his chest is a sweatied field to feel. He kisses him on his bare throat first, shyer at the attempt. Davos responds to it well, sighing aloud while trying to keep being mindful at his own ministrations.

He hasn’t chosen to do this for Davos to have restraint now of all times, however.

“Undo the lacings already,” Aeron whispers as he lowers himself to kiss Davos’s chest. His hands come on top of Davos’s hand, caressing it in a tease. Aeron could swear he feels the other’s heartbeat against his lips. Davos halts as if nervous, and Aeron’s eyelashes lift from the half-lidded downturn they’ve been in, all to look at him. “Please.”

Davos doesn’t dare to refuse him. He does quick work the tyings of his pants, and soon has his cock in his grasp. Aeron tries to continue to kiss his chest, but Davos hold him firm, and then drags his grasp just right. 

“ Ah— Davos!” he sighs, feeling as if he might crumble any minute. Aeron holds the Blackwood’s wrist, just to give himself a breather. The anticipation alone is too much, the touch itself has his blood bubbling through his veins. He had never reached such a point, even in his mind, and he could never have expected it would have him so weak in Davos’s hold.

Davos presses his forehead to his again. “Do you know how many times I imagined this?” he asks in a whisper. “Holding myself, thinking of what I’d do if it were you..” he says, playing with the slit of his cockhead. Aeron gets teary at the feeling, and he leaks some seed below as well.

Davos swipes his thumb at the white substance, and leaves his cock to taste what his finger gathered, swallowing. He could see the gulp going down his throat, through the exact spots Aeron had previously kissed. 

Aeron thinks he is about to lose his mind. A hot flare of bashfulness runs through him. Knowing he is red as one of Davos’s capes, he exclaims, as compromised as he is. “You can’t— that’s disgusting —”

Davos’s shit eating grin is all he can see before the boy kisses him shut, tongue entering his mouth. He can taste himself on Davos; he can taste Davos’s pride and joy at their mix and match. He can feel his palm returning to stroke him, more languid, yet at a steady, intent pace.

His stomach is doing somersaults and his hands rush to the mop of Davos’s black hair. Aeron doesn’t care if any of it is disgusting, not at all. Even if he feels the filth of earth anywhere else, he feels just right here. Clutching onto raven locks, he kisses him back hard.

Davos quickens the pace of his strokes, and Aeron feels towards the end of his wits. He tries hard to keep himself from climaxing; he didn’t want to finish this so soon. He still wants him to touch more places, kiss him more; he hates it, but he knows it’s true, he will miss him. He will miss him so much when it is over. It feels like he is set to lose with Davos, it’s all about overpowering one another — but rather than winning, he realizes all ever wished for is a chance to play.

Davos stamps a prolonged kiss on his lips before he demands his victory. “ Yield ,” he says, voice low and steady. Aeron tugs at his hair, feeling Davos weasel his hand under his shirt, squeezing on skin there too. His dark eyes stare into his, swirling with need; a need only Aeron can satisfy. “Yield for me.” 

He climaxes, hot on Davos’s hand. He shudders all through it; he had never felt it so strongly. It feels as if the weight of stones dissipates from his muscles and he himself is no longer grounded in his place, having to hold Davos as he deals with the overwhelming feeling. 

Aeron refuses to let him go for a while, not realizing the desperate embrace he is maintaining. In truth, he does not even care; he just wants to melt into his hold. He yielded; he’s too easy to beat, but he just needs him to stay. 

He isn’t brave enough to speak. He’s only brave enough to reciprocate, kiss, and show Davos that he doesn’t wish for distance. A full kiss for Davos’s full lips. I can match you.

Davos, surprisingly enough, does not rush him to anything else when they part. Aeron realizes he still needs to take care of him, but Davos is in no hurry. He nuzzles his face against him like a pleased, black kitten, ever pleased with the proximity. 

He’s about to ask if he should do anything, when he hears something.

“Aeron?” Raylon’s voice from outside the room, as well as some of their cousins parroting him. “Are you here?”

Aeron freezes. “He’s here. My brother—” he says nervously, suddenly the whole world crashing on him. 

“The bastard?” Davos asks, and Aeron doesn’t even have the time to chastise him. Just slap his shoulder to move. 

“He’s here, and my cousins,” he says urgently. There’s a knock on the door, and he’s mortified to his core. He had been teary from the  touches, but now he feels like he could truly cry; they’d kill him. They’d kill Davos. “They’re here.”

“Aeron, are you here?”

He didn’t mean to play himself like this. He should’ve kept his distance, he knew they would be coming. And yet—

Davos, disheveled as he is, presses his thigh hard. “I’ll handle the horses’ horde,” he says— horses’ horde?! He should slap him— “just wait.”

Aeron swallows, and watches him turn, stepping towards the door. He only opens it enough to peer out of it. Aeron rushes to the side to not be seen, half considering killing him, but listening instead, as he hides on the sofa in the room. 

“Wrong stables, shitheads,” Davos says, with the brightest grin he can conjure. “No hay here.”

“Blackwood?” Raylon asks, and clearly very confused at the state of the man in front of him. “What are you doing here? The owner said a Bracken bought this room.”

Davos huffs. “And perhaps I stole it away from him.He’s not here. Blackwood lands, now.” 

“Huh? What did you do to my brother? ” Raylon exclaims in anger, trying to step in. Davos blocks him. “Seven hells, you smell like shit—”

“I said Blackwood lands ,” he says. “This room and everything in it is mine.”

“Are you fucking drunk?” Raylon asks, appalled.

“Even better,” Davos laughs. “Now fuck off.” 

Davos slams the door shut at Raylon’s face, and turns back towards Aeron with a big smile as cusses are heard from the other side of the door. Raylon and his cousins eventually do leave, and Aeron manages to breathe again.

Davos’s words are not lost on him, and he sinks against the sofa with warmth in his belly. Blackwood lands, his arse, but fuck — he said it. He’s his.

It’s all he truly needed to hear.

“See? Handled the horde.”

Davos is all too proud as he weasels back beside him. Aeron huffs.

“A group of horses is called a herd, you birdbrain,” he tells him. 

“Yeah?” Davos asks, chuckling. He clearly couldn’t leave less of shit.

“You are making it hard to want to help you…” Aeron says, his hand reaching Davos’s crotch, only to realize it was of moist fabric too. “You already?—”

“I told you you are fucking pretty against me,” Davos says, and pulls him on his lap. “I want to kiss you again.”

Holding back a smile, Aeron holds onto his arms. “As long as you know these are Bracken lands, and anything here is mine .”

Davos snickers. “Prove it.”

No separation stones will force them back into distance. Aeron lowers his face to kiss him again, he’ll mark them until it’s abundantly clear; Davos, all of this, is his. No one will rob this of me.

Davos grins against his lips, willing to take the challenge. They’ll have this dispute forevermore, but that is well and good — lay a claim on me, and I will lay claim on you. Bodies melting against one another, forever wrestling for touch—

This is just the right distance.

[adgp35]

Vive La Resistance! Part 5

“But Louise, ma cherie, how can you do this to me?” Hans asked his love sadly and in disbelief as she tightened his bonds. “Very easily, you dope!” the French woman laughed contemptuously. “We have been sending the secrets you and your officers give away when you are in your cups to the British and the Free French ever since the fall of Paris!” Poor lovelorn Hans gasped. “So none of it was true?” the German sailor almost choked. “None.”replied Louise definitively with a final yank of the ropes binding the man’s wrists behind his back. The rumbling noise of armour outside the window grew louder. Marie peeped through the closed blinds of her establishment. She turned back to look at her girls and their two prisoners. “Quickly, ladies, gag these fools.” she ordered. “Those are German tanks outside. I don’t think they are stopping, but we can’t be too careful!”

“So, Helmut,” cooed Gabrielle as she pressed some sticky but very strong masking tape over the mouth of the bound German soldier. “You must be one of the first men to be gagged by this new fangled duck tape!” Helmut “mmmphed” pitiably as his lips were sealed for him by the smiling woman. Marie Dubois laughed. “I knew that stuff we obtained from that dozy Kraut engineer would come in handy one day!” she grinned indicating the duck tape. “And now, ladies, let us break out the flags once the Gemans have gone, and let’s have some photographs of our unwilling guests too!”

Sources: Escape To Athena movie (1979) and FMConcepts.com

[snakesofindia-sursesaji]

en mel kuttram yaadhonrum illaye- new fic  परिचयः ( introduction)

padmini as sithara veeranarayanan iyer/darth veerabhadra            

                  of what use is a diamond to birds and  animals

                     of what use is delicious food for  donkeys?

                          what use is a lamp for a blind man 

                             and music for one who is  deaf?

                                                   similarly

                                of what use is knowledge to  fools?

                       tell me sheev what is the use of knowledge to you?

               *************************************************************************

hayden christensen as darth vader/ anakin skywalker

         you yearn for me, how  pitiable that you yearn for a corpse in a suit.

          ****************************************************************************

ian mcdiarmid as darth sidious

                            lest I remind you of who killed Darth plagueis

                                             it was you, Sithara.

                                                         not I

           ****************************************************************************

moses ingram as reva sevander

                  if you are the rightful heir to the Sith throne of exegol,

                                why do you not take it back from him

             ****************************************************************************

ewan mcgregor as obi wan kenobi

                                    then my friend is truly dead

                                             farewell darth

           ****************************************************************************

peter cushing as grand moff tarkin

                        Well, I am sad that you think that this lowly aasthika would flout your advice.

        ****************************************************************************

sadavarman d  banerji  as the force ghost of adi shankara - the first sith ( pls know i added him for fic purposes and that he is a real person and i slightly tweaked him for the fic and that i do’nt own this character. forgive me shankara bhagvadpadacharyaswaminaha i have sinned)

“ I only need to strike your chest once to cut off your air supply Vader, don't force me to do so.

 ****************************************************************************

vyjayanthimala as malavika veeranarayanan iyer/ darth vishwaksena

           the day Palpatine dies will be the day my rage subsides  sister.

                          for what he did to you was unforgiveable

                              he stole what was rightfully yours

       ****************************************************************************

vivien lyra blair as leia organa

               is it true that you call the inquisitors as donkeys?

                                        the droid told me.

         ****************************************************************************

natalie portman as padme amidala

                                          there is still good in  him.

       ***************************************************************************

and indira varma as tala 

                                            she ( sithara) is terrifying.

                                 more fearsome than Vader himself

   stay clear of her, if you land in her clutches consider yourself sent to Vader.

***************************************************************************

nadira as Raji Vinu Tharyn  / rvt-420 / Anuqia

do not assume, I will spare you, a threat to the Jagadguru is the threat to the entire matham.

***************************************************************************

[lilflowerpot]

What was Lotor’s relationship with his father like? He seems to be very set on there being a difference between Zarkon and who was his father. What is that difference? Lotor obviously revered his mother a lot, did he feel the same towards his dad or were their differences always a point of divide between them?

Love little blade sm!! I think I’ll be 30 and still waiting for updates (ouch didn’t mean to be backhanded with that. It works anyways)

Okay so I shan't go into //great// detail with this one, because Lotor's relationship with his father is very much crucial to the narrative in that it has a subconscious impact on,,, pretty much everything he does. That conversation—some iteration of which may occur sooner than you think—is one I have dwelled upon e x t e n s i v e l y but what I can tell you for now is this:

When Lotor briefly touches upon his childhood in chapter 12, he speaks of that particular point in time when he and his mother were both frail (Lotor due to his dual lineage, Honerva due to having barely survived being pregnant with a galra child, and the both of them as a result of having spent so much time in such close proximity to such vast quantities of raw quintessence) and Alfor begged Zarkon to close the rift, because the dangers of meddling with what they didn't fully understand were becoming apparent. The issue being, of course, that the rift held the answers to curing Lotor, and so neither of his parents were willing to simply let him die, Alfor be damned.

“He told me what had happened, told me of Alfor’s concerns, and then told me that if the whole damn universe had to burn for my sake, and the sake of my mother, then he’d set each and every planet aflame with his own hand.”

- Little Blade, chapter 12

This bit in particular illustrates the very beginnings of Zarkon's corruption, and isn't that sad? Because, yes, there's an undercurrent of violence there that we see tenfold in the present-day, but in this moment it stems from nothing less than love.

“He loved you,” Keith hears himself say, and can hardly reconcile this image of Zarkon as a devoted father, with the tyrant he’s become.

“Yes,” Lotor agrees, softly, “he did. He loved me, and he loved my mother, and the entire universe paid the price.”

There isn’t anything Keith can say to that.

- Little Blade, chapter 12

As a child, Lotor knew a Zarkon who was devoted beyond compare to his Empire and his family both; a Zarkon who loved his wife and child and was desperate to do right by them; a Zarkon who would have done anything—everything—to ensure the safety of those he held most dear (and ultimately, to his own detriment, did exactly that).

The creature that returned from the rift wearing his father's face was not that man.

And it's not even just Lotor! We see the same dissonance between who Zarkon once was and who he now is presented (though indirectly) by Allura.

She doesn’t breathe a word of Zarkon.

She doesn’t, but Keith hears it regardless, because there are gaping holes in the stories of Allura’s childhood that can only be filled by a great shadow—one that is powerful and disciplined and her uncle by everything but blood. Somehow, Keith never thought to connect Zarkon’s past as Alfor’s dearest friend to Allura in any way.

It seems like an obvious oversight.

- Little Blade, chapter 15

Because once upon a time, long before he was warped into an immortal monster, Emperor Zarkon was....just a man, and a good one at that. A paladin of Voltron, and everything that represents.

[lizardrosen]

National Theater Live King Lear

Hello, here is a ridiculously long review of this production! I just had a lot of feelings and thoughts!

Setting/Staging/Mood

I really loved the sound design for this one. It’s hard to describe, but the chords gave it a real presence and sense of motion. It was vaguely reminiscent of horror movie music in the way the chords lingered and didn’t blend in seamlessly, but I wouldn’t call it horror music exactly. The BELL tolling while Lear zips up his folder was such a good first image and bit of sound. And there were drinking songs, which I always love to see in a play. Put that Epic Theater technique straight in my mouth!

The circle in the middle that’s red in the first half and white in the second was a really creative detail, and the actors used that space effectively, especially with overlapping exits and entrances to make it feel that scenes happened in different locations while still being thematically connected.

The opulence and ceremony of the  first scene gradually gives way to the more sparse and modern staging of act five — formal military dress to fatigues

I love how Lear raises his hand in prayer and command, compelling everyone else to follow suit to show their devotion and allegiance (and is there a difference between their king and their gods in this world?) even when they’re unsure about whether he’s right to be so cruel to Cordelia.

The recurring imagery of money changing hands really fits in well with the theme of love as currency that’s already in the text!

The single tree in the background of act five gave me Waiting For Godot vibes, which works SO WELL with the absurdism and nihilism of Lear.

Thoughts about specific characters under the cut!

Edgar! My SON!!

Luke Thompson is the reason I’ve wanted so badly to watch this production; ever since I saw his standout performance as Laertes in the 2017 Almeida Theater production, and found out he’s also played Orestes and Edgar, I’ve just been rabid about it!

It’s neat to see him actually at the ceremony of the first scene, with Edmund already Literally in his shadow.

He’s a little less hapless and distracted than most of the Edgars I’ve seen, a little more watchful. In 1.2 he’s actually pushing back against Edmund’s insistence that he’s in danger, and then in 2.1 there’s a long moment of just Looking at Edmund’s knife before he flees.

Similarly, his decision to become Poor Tom felt a bit more calculated. It’s not that he isn’t scared and lost and desperate, because he definitely is, but the plan itself doesn’t seem to grow out of that feeling as much as he (sort of) calmly looked at his options.

Of course, he doesn’t stay calm; that agonized scream when he actually cuts himself, and later on when he sees his father blinded and screams “World, world, o world!” really feels like he’s letting something out, and more than usual he seems to have been holding this part of himself back for a long time.

The counterpart to that is the self that does the watching — it’s a part of all Edgars that makes him a really compelling character, with his self-aware asides, but it’s particularly pronounced here — there’s a moment where he says “Bless thy five wits!” in his normal voice, and then catches himself and has to reassert the role he’s playing for his own safety.

At times he’s very impatient and frustrated while leading Gloucester, but he also cares about him a lot and is so terrified that he’s actually died when he “fell” from the cliff, this poor boy’s entire body is trembling!

He instinctively moves to protect Gloucester from Lear when he gets more violent and unpredictable with “find these son-in-laws and KILL KILL KILL” and it was a good moment

Gives into his own viciousness in the fight with Oswald, and then, Hamlet-like, lugs the guts into the neighbor room.

Edgar doesn’t seem to know if he wants his dad to recognize him or not — he puts Gloucester’s hand on his face, but then as soon as he seems about to realize who he is he very quickly takes it away again and gets them moving

He’s even more desperate and reckless than Edmund in their duel, but then once Edmund is fatally injured, he’s right by his side, holding his hand, helping him through it!

He needs Lear to recognize Kent, he needs Lear to not be dying, he’s so sincere, but then he decides if he can’t save anyone here he can at least help Albany to help the country heal and pledges himself to the future.

Lear

Awful but also very pitiable, more like a human losing his grip and knowing it, than just a Vessel for themes that are echoed in other characters.

Lashes out at himself more than at other people, but he definitely still does both.

“But they shall be the terrors of the earth” is just a man who’s terrified to be losing his words.

He has bad knees and everyone knows it but he keeps trying to kneel, and sometimes it feels like he’s mocking his daughters — look how much I’m suffering for you even though you’re ungrateful — and sometimes it feels like he’s forgotten his own body’s limitations.

Spends a lot of time offering physical comfort to other characters, since he can’t be a dad for his real daughters.

His flower crown scene was Just ophelia, and I think that’s beautiful.

aaaaa, his helpless grief for Cordelia! He moves the noose from her neck to his!! and then he takes out a handgun and threatens everyone away from him, but he’s just so helpless and sad!

Edmund! my other son!

I was a little surprised to see that this actor is James Corrigan, because I recognized him as Roderigo in the RSC Othello, and he’s sort of the anti-Edmund, so I was excited to see the contrast, but honestly there wasn’t as much of a contrast as I expected. He had many of the same cringing appeasing mannerisms, but in a way that makes it clear that he’s aware of his unfair situation in a way his Roderigo really isn’t. Despite being a bastard he has a lot more social power and mobility than Roderigo so he doesn’t seem nearly as pathetic.

Other Edmunds are composed and precise in their soliloquies because this is the one place no one will see them planning things out, and this Edmund is babbling and overwhelmed because this is the one place no one will see him feeling things, because feeling things is dangerous.

He’s so! scared! of his dad! It’s painful to watch, and it’s almost as painful to watch how he’s still looking for approval and respect from Gloucester. Someone save this boy!

He gets in WAY over his head, and it feels like he’s scrambling at every turn, but then at some point he just levels up and strides with confidence, and it’s really good to see.

oh my god, oh my god, he saw everything that happened with Gloucester! After everyone else leaves he comes out from his hiding place looking just devastated. He hated his dad, but he never hated him that much, and by the time he couldn’t stomach it any longer there was no way for him to escape, and then he’s still processing it when he sees that the Fool was also there, and he has to kill him because no one can know he was there. I SCREAMED when this moment happened, it was so good!

WOW, he’s so smooth, it’s no wonder both the sisters want a piece of that! It’s more of a power play with Regan, and a little more courtly with Goneril, and he just knows what each of them want and need from him.

When Lear and Cordelia are captured, Lear says “As if we were God’s spies” and he’s still kingly enough that the soldiers drop to their knees and lift their hands in allegiance, and Edmund has to rush in to make one of them stand up while saying “Take them away” sort of impatiently, and then he immediately checks the order he’s written for their deaths, because he’s just seen how dangerous it is for these two to be kept alive. aaaaa, and then when the captain hesitates, he holds a gun to his temple on “Either say thou’lt do’t, or thrive by other means” !! I love that line and I love the sheer range of deliveries I’ve seen for it!

The wonder in his voice at “Yet Edmund was beloved.” is really good! He’s so desperate to do some good by the end, and I love! Edmund of Gloucester!

Kent

Having Kent played by a woman does some really neat things to the character, not least of which is crossdressing Caius! She sort of feels like she overperforms toxic masculinity to fit into the culture of Lear’s retinue. Other Kents seem to be allowing their latent desires and bluntness to emerge with this role, but this Kent isn’t suited to it, and sometimes she gets a little carried away or makes missteps like beating up Oswald, but she has to see it through, for Lear’s sake.

Kent also doesn’t feel Big In Love with Lear, but she’s definitely devoted to him — and even more than that, she’s devoted to the image of loyalty itself.

Her genuine affection for Cordelia, and pride to see how she’s doing as a queen, is really sweet and good!

After she’s been banished, she rushes out of the throne room as Burgundy and France enter, covering her face like she’s desperately trying to hold back her tears.

She’s with the French soldiers looking for Lear, and is the one who tells him “You shall have anything!”

At the end she’s not exactly surprised that Lear doesn’t connect her with Caius, and she’s not upset (about that part of it anyway, plenty of things in this scene are upsetting), but she’s definitely feeling something.

ahhhh, she picks up Lear’s handgun and sort of cradles it to her side when she prepares for her final journey! sweetheart!

Gloucester

he’s just! a terrible father!! simply the worst!

A lot of the time Gloucester isn’t a very good dad just because he’s friendly and careless and just not paying attention to how he’s treating his sons; this one is actively awful and I actively hate him!!

From the very first scene he’s so scornful and dismissive of Edmund and hitting him for no reason, and then turns around to show off photos of Edgar, and that doesn’t even really benefit Edgar either, because he’s held to an unfair standard he can never live up to.

It really shows in how both of them are touch starved but also extremely cautious about being touched. Someone save them!!

(In fact, in the serial killer Claudius AU, a certain Earl does get himself murdered when Edmund is sixteen)

Not a Bad Dad thing, but not really showing Gloucester in a good light: he does think Lear’s age and reverence should be respected, but his motivation seems to be a lot more based in his indignation that Regan and Cornwall have taken over his home and order him around. For this Gloucester it seemed to be less about feeling sorry for Lear, and more about reasserting his sovereignty.

But because this is Lear I don’t just hate him, and he’s not just a bad father, you also feel for him a lot after he’s been blinded and his legs are just trembling and he’s so scared and lost.

Even after he’s blinded he keeps turning to his photos of Edgar in his wallet, and it’s sad and regretful instead of showing off.

He had a really good cliff fall! He goes up to what he thinks is the edge, and then turns around and braces himself to fall backwards, and then Edgar has to rush to catch him, and lay him gently on the ground, and panic that maybe he’s actually died.

Lear Sisters

No one was prepared for Lear’s announcement and the way each of them responds informs so much of how they act through the rest of the play!

Goneril is startled and unsure and fumbling, and I really felt for her and her “hateful life”, and the way she’s stunned in the wake of Lear’s abuse, but then needs to pull herself together again when he returns. For so much of this play she feels small and adrift, but then she’s so happy for once whenever she’s with Edmund. Albany really does seem to care about her and he’s trying to be good for her, so he takes it when she yells at him, and then stays behind to pray for a bit. He’s a little less nice later on but to be fair she is cheating on him and not bothering to hide it very well.

Regan! With her fake tears and her constant flirtiness, and the way she’s always twirling and showing off! She is a hot mess, and she only gets hotter and messier as the play goes on, but she and Cornwall love each other a lot, and she wants to be suited to torture the way her husband is, but she gets into it by the end of that scene. And then!! her hand on Edmund’s throat! W o w

Cordelia is calm and sure and knows exactly what her sisters are, and in that first scene she comes so close to reaching her father and getting him to change his mind about disowning her. And that carries through to the rest of her performance — she’s competent and precise and loving, and France is smitten with her and listens to her and respects her. When she’s reunited with Lear she wants him to wake up, but also isn’t prepared for it to actually happen, and then she’s so surprised when they say she should be the one to address him first.

Cornwall

I first saw Daniel Rabin as Reynaldo in the Almeida Theater Hamlet (ask me about how Reynaldo and Laertes are half-dating whenever he follows Laertes to France, because I have Opinions), and his Cornwall is SO different

He’s not just manipulative, but violent and enjoying his violence, but he’s also sexy and possessive and commanding, and it’s no wonder Edmund falls for him as hard as he does!

TYING HIS SCARF around Edmund’s hand after he wounds himself for love and validation!? The soft tender look of surprise that Edmund gives him in response!? wow! wow, what a MOMENT!

And then he shoves Edmund into the room after he’s been shown Gloucester’s letter, he has to punish the messenger and assert his position. And after “Thou shalt find a dearer father in my love” Edmund HUGS him, and he’s startled at first but half-returns it (and probably thinking about how he can Use this) (and then cornwall/edmund/regan happens, shhh)

Like Daniel Rabin’s Reynaldo, his Cornwall is very Watchful, just stepping back to observe what’s going on, and then quietly making his judgment before he says anything — and when he does speak he absolutely has the other person’s number.

Good commanding headtilts!

Oh, the laugh right before he uses the hook from the slaughterhouse on Gloucester is just terrifying and compelling, and he’s so turned on by this. Good for him because then he gets to die, and he’s so disgusted and vicious when saying the first servant should be thrown onto the dunghill.

Miscellaneous Moments

Lear puts his jacket on Edgar, and Kent puts her jacket on Lear, and then he immediately takes it off and puts it around Edgar’s shoulders and ties the arms together, but while he’s trying to take off his shirt too, Edgar’s already getting on the ground and letting the jackets fall off of him. Just! Jackets and touch as a form of affection!!

When Gloucester comes out to find Lear, he and Edgar see each other, and there’s just a moment where they’re frozen, Edgar terrified that his father will recognize him, and Gloucester perhaps feeling there’s something familiar about this madman but having no idea what.

While Gloucester is telling Kent about how he had a son he loved who betrayed him, Lear and Edgar are in the background sharing a long hug that almost feels like a beautiful dance! It was such a striking moment, I loved it sooo much.

the HUG with Edmund and Cornwall!! Not over it, never over it.

when Cornwall tells Edmund to leave with Goneril, he gives Goneril his jacket and she’s just quietly surprised and pleased, and it’s cute, and I want her to be happy!!

[panspy]

Case #0181501

ARCHIVIST

Statement of Eide Burrows, regarding a man who may not have been her neighbor, and her hometown of Millport, Scotland. Original statement delivered through some folded sheets of notebook paper shoved under the office door while I was on a lunch break. Statement recorded January 15, 2018, audio recording by Jonathan Sims, the Archivist.

Statement begins.

ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)

In the end, we’re all just shapes. Figures, either soft, angled, flat, or dimensional, all floating through space with only the hint of a purpose. I’ve always thought this made us pitiable. Shapes don’t have a purpose, their only use is to simply be. What is the meaning of a triangle? Any color, it doesn’t matter. How about a square? A dodecahedron? Exactly. It has no right to have that many sides all to itself, but it exists simply because we willed it into being. Shapes thinking of shapes.

Lines connect shapes and connect people. We have no reason to be, other than to just… exist. We think of shapes. Who thought of us? God, you could argue and many do. Argue about God, argue with God, argue in defense of God, argue against God. Argue, argue, argue. Just shapes arguing with shapes.

For the longest time, as far as I was concerned, Millport was nothing but shapes. Old buildings with new paint, old billboards with flashy new signs, old families run by new blood. Old ways and new people. They tried to cover up the old, and bury it like bones in a landfill. Cover it up along with the potholes with new asphalt and cement. Make it shiny and new. They still crack, anyway.

Hundreds of years, that town stood sturdy on soft ground. Founded by confident men with high hopes, big dreams, bigger egos, and empty pockets. Dreams make you blind, but people like to invest in them. Dreams give shapes a purpose, don’t they? Confidence fools others, and eventually fools yourself. Have you ever gone unnoticed in a place you’re not meant to be? If you walk with your head held high and false arrogance, people will believe you belong with them. For either to believe this façade makes them a fool. Not that anyone really belongs anywhere, and we’re all just foolish enough to believe it. Foolish shapes believing other foolish shapes.

I’ve always reckoned that it’s easier to be confident on uncertain legs than to fear falling on steady ground. Watching a frightened child stepping along a wide, even plank at the park is more likely to fall than a tightrope walker on a flimsy wire. Tightrope walkers are triangles, balanced and perfect. Children are parallelograms. Misshapen. Lopsided.

All the children in Millport are parallelograms. Some are flat and one dimensional, others forever rotating on an axis to show off their sides. Never the same for more than a day- I kept track. The adults were a variety of evolved and ever-changing polygons. But for some reason when I was little, looking at all these shapes going about their pretend lives, I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t a polygon when the world seemed to be filled with them. When I looked at my skin, it was soft and squished under touch. My hair was coarse, dull, and brown, unlike my mothers which was static with energy and never quite the same after you blinked. My face was asymmetrical too, as many shapes are. Eyes that seemed to be too big, ears that poke out a bit too much, bags that never went away… well, I don’t think they did anyways. You have to understand, it’s been a while since I’ve seen it. After a childhood of feeling as though the world hadn’t been fair enough to make me a nice red square, I just accepted it. I learned not to mind my lack of shape, and felt content to be liminal.

The first time I decided to look further into what made the town fit together into the odd puzzle it was, was the Masonic Lodge on the empty lot of Seymour and Drummond. It was always changing, not that it mattered enough to give it a second thought. In the morning, it could be a red trapezoid but by noon it would shift into a cracked yellow octagon. Personally I always preferred the trapezoid. The men who entered in the evening but never seemed to exit in the morning were also known to change. Whether by name, appearance, age, or multitude… who went in did not dictate who went home. Not that anyone cared about that, either.

When I was feeling especially curious, I would watch them enter from the dim car park away from a flickering old street lamp. As nights went by and I felt brave enough to stand directly under it, I found it made no difference as they never even looked at my direction. By the morning, the cars would be gone and the men allegedly returned home to their spouses and families. And I would leave, deciding to return again at the next meeting whenever I felt the disturbing pull in my stomach beckoning me to witness it. The scheduled days varied, but was always twice a week starting at 8:12 pm and ending when the street light flickered, shrouding the building and parked vehicles in darkness, then flickering on again to show an empty lot. They never met on Tuesdays.

My mother worked down the street at the Birdie’s Bed & Breakfast to help Bertha Goodwin when the old woman needed assistance navigating the cottage she’d rented her whole life, it seemed like. Bertha, though we always called her Birdie, was in her late seventies when I was born, and she was in her late seventies when I left for college. She was still in her late seventies when I returned home the next fall with nothing to show for it and a mother who didn’t even acknowledge I had gone in the first place. Not that they even noticed when I was living with them as a child either. When they deemed me old enough to care for myself, Mum would leave in the mornings with a freshly ironed apron, cleaning supplies I never saw opened, and my Dad would leave to work on blueprints of buildings I never saw built. After staring at my ceiling for hours, distracting myself with faded stars stuck up with putty and cracks in the walls, I would leave my blue square of a house and wander the streets looking for a clue to a mystery I wasn’t quite sure existed.

I tried to be academic, I really did. I wanted to leave that old town and its jagged shapes and build something for myself, but the longer I spent away the pit in my stomach grew more and even looking in the mirror hurt my eyes. I couldn’t feel the softness of my skin anymore. It felt like plastic. The faces of my classmates were static and boring-- none of them pulsed with the same energy as the people back home and all sounded the same. After barely a year I couldn’t take it and moved back home. The school didn’t even call to finalize my resignation.

As a child who grew up with strange disappearances monthly (Birdie said Misses Morgan moved to the States, but her car still collected leaves in the drive), stores popping up that never seemed to stay, and the absence of new neighbors, nothing was too out of the ordinary for us. But I’ve read some of the other statements, Jon, and it seems nothing was quite ordinary at all. Construction workers would vanish and it would rarely make the papers. The opening of a new chip shop was a blessing, but no one would ever be able to go more than twice before it was on its way out of town and replaced with some new fad.

Until the year the cemetery flooded and the school gymnasium roof caved in, about 2006 (it’s hard to beep track of the years), I didn’t think extraordinary could exist. Or at least not in any way that mattered. That was the year the Abbott’s moved in to the house on Cowley Lane, a house I had only ever seen out of the corner of my eye. On a street filled with shapes, this was a straight line.

They arrived as most families do, escaping an unpleasant moment in time by “starting fresh” and “turning over a new leaf”. I never quite understood that expression, as turning over a new leaf does not negate the old one. By turning over a leaf with a sullied edge to admire the green underside, it still remains the same leaf. Turning over a new leaf simply means the old one is left to decompose while you find a crisp, untarnished leaf, while the other still has a perfectly acceptable side to be admired. And, as most families do, they leave the unsightly leaf to be buried with the hundreds of others they’ve “turned over” and promise to change. The promises stay, but are never quite redeemed. Sorry, I got carried away… it's hard to find things to be passionate about these days. I'll continue.

The Abbotts integrated as well as they could, two children ready to attend school no matter the construction work in the gym or the fact it was well into November, and a third to stay at home as infants are wont to do. They threw a barbecue to get to know the neighbors, and the whole village attended bringing their own family recipes and baked desserts. I stayed home.

The Abbott's father, Mark, gained a quick job as an iron-worker while his wife (I never knew her name) stayed indoors looking after the baby. I’d see him in the mine, hacking away at rusty cars and rail too old to use and loading the scraps to be taken away. Hours, I’d watch, as he compressed the piles and laid the new framework to keep unwanted visitors from being crushed to death by eroding stone walls. The day he was called to help install the new wrought iron fence where the cemetery flooded and washed away, I followed him there too. Wherever he went, the shapes that once filled the town lost their vibrancy. Instead of fluctuating between tetrahedrons and prisms, they became either stagnant or frantic. Everything at once, or nothing at all.

I watched him dig in the downtrodden soil, unearthing rectangular caskets and hexagonal coffins. The rain that year had brought landslides and sinkholes, most destructive in the cemetery just outside town and disturbing the dead where they slept. Headstones, monuments, and mementos washed away and sank into the soft dirt, the running fence encircling the land broken up and dragged along with it. Once an infinite circle that cut the burial grounds off from the rest of the puzzle, the shape was now distorted and wrong. Without gate to close and make it whole again, I felt the muted shape of the cemetery slip away and become a tangled mess of string.

He dug for hours until the orange circle of a sun lowered itself behind the branches of the forest and their quickly disappearing leaves. Moving from one plot to the other, from the pristine headstones of recent years down to the protruding stones with names barely legible beneath the moss and decades of wear. Digging, digging, digging, all the while the formless fence to-be remained untouched. When the sky turned dark and snow clouds threatened to shed their weight, I finally turned my back on Mark and left him alone with the dead for the first time all evening, the man seeming blissfully unaware he hadn’t been alone in the first place at all.

The next morning when I went to check on his new project, the buildings along the way had lost their shape. No longer were streets lined with sturdy trapezoids, rectangles, and prisms. The colors were off, like a child with a crayon who had not yet learned the concept of limitation. They bled into each other and polluted the air, cracked frames unable to hold them back. The air tasted like static and I couldn't feel the ground beneath my boots.

By the time I got to the clearing, the holes had been filled and the new fence had taken shape in towering columns that crawled and stretched like spider webs across the dying grass. It was the same dirt, the same stone, trees, and air, but it did not feel like the cemetery I had watched be torn away the night before. I felt a chill settle in my bones and leave as quickly as it came like waiting for pain after burning your finger on a hot mug. From all my observing of the town, never once has a feeling ever driven me to run far away until what I was seeing before me was but an afterthought.

I passed by the Abbotts house, static growing stronger until I could barely hear the crunch of leaves or gravel beneath my feet. Only the wife's car was in the drive and a fresh coat of snow indicated there had only been the one all night, and the black pick-up Mark drove was nowhere to be seen. The sign on their door was new, barely two months old, but as I looked at it, truly looked at it, did it appear to have aged to rot. Abbott’s House it said in curvy lettering (with all the determination of a line pretending to be something it’s not) with five handprints beneath for each family member. Five. Mother, three kids, and… now four. The longer I thought about it, the longer I stared, trying to blink away the dots that kept getting in the way of my vision, the more my eyes convinced me there had always been four. Never two cars, never five hands. Through my haze, I barely felt my feet take me home. Even when I layed down to rest in a foreign looking room, I decided that my childhood mystery, a fantasy I had grown to accept, had found another clue and a little bit more of the town chipped away. Mark didn’t show up for work anymore.

Little things were changing, it just took a trained eye to notice. You don’t have to be a detective to see the details, sometimes you just have to be very, very afraid. The sign for Birdies Bed & Breakfast was now spelled with a ‘y’ instead of an ‘i’, and the apron my mother wore was now a faded lilac instead of a robin’s egg blue. The oak tree that stood tall in our backyard, old as the town itself with a slow swinging hammock tied to the branches, was now a young birch. I likened it to two puzzles cut from the same machine. Different pictures with pieces that fit together only in the most literal sense. The longer I noticed, the more I wondered which puzzle was truly mine, and which one was slowly being replaced.

Each morning the static filled my nose, irritated my eyes, and clouded my ears with a soft dizzying hum that slowly drowned out my senses. The shapes that made up my entire world were broken, dull, and chipping away until everything I knew was muddled and loud.

It was only when I woke up in an empty room, no posters, cardboard boxes, or dirty clothes, I found my feet barely touched the floor. I felt weightless as I wandered down to the kitchen where Mum usually got ready, feeling as though the back of my eyes were filled with cotton. There were only two seats sat at the dining table, and when I tried to open my mouth to speak my tongue tasted like ash.

Before I could blink or even cry, suddenly I was in the street. Red shapes filled my periphery and everything between, and the town was gone. A red sky bled into the houses, cars, and potholes cremating them like the dead. I felt myself falling away from my body and I finally saw my shape. It was a shifting mass of angles and colors and somehow I just knew it was me. When I finally did cry, smaller shapes fell from her eyes copying the drops that fell from mine. Was it out of malice? Pity? Understanding? Was she crying because she shared my pain or was she just a cheap reflection of who I thought I was or simply longed to be?

It’s been a while since I’ve been here, in this black and red. She still mocks me. Radiant and pulsing with color while I exist with imitation soft skin and coarse hair. They’re the only things I can be sure of, as I haven’t seen my face in a long time. Only hers. Now I’m not sure who she is, but she’s the only company in this void. Until I saw your shape, Jon. Blue and black polygons blinking between colors with the beat of a foreign heart. You lead me here to a library of pain that reflected my own, a reprieve from the emptiness I’ve been floating in. Maybe if I tell you my story you can bring me back to the shape of your world? I suppose only time will tell, and I have an eternity to wait.

Waiting for someone to save the outline of a person who isn’t sure they ever existed at all.

[demytasse]

[Shinzaya] Hold Me Tight (Or Don’t) — Ch 3

Previous Chapters: Chapter 2 | All Chapters

—

   Morning rituals were only good for their reliability—not their interest. They might conform with the trends of time; transform into something novel with new means to set the mould, but they always wound up a formulaic bore and predictable as the people who accessorised the unremarkable event. They were a mere bringer of happenstance.

Which Izaya's present gift from his trusty schedule came in the form of his nag of a friend who melded with the shadow on his left and sought to initiate any kind of annoyance. At the moment it was Shinra's hope to converse with an added twine of their dominant fingers as they walked the halls. The contact wasn’t needed, the touch wouldn’t be sincere, and their frozen palms needn't chill the both of them.

His attempts didn’t work, though he did try—and kept on—despite how Izaya shooed them away.

Izaya knew the conversation Shinra insisted would be a nuisance by default, but a day later in retrospect he’d claim that he prophesied exactly how chaotic their morning would turn, and precisely knew that detrimental intel would be gained as a result.

And if he told a soul, he’d explain how the giveaway was the digging grip around his bicep that demanded Shinra be paid attention—a tad different than the normal ritual.

    “Come on, Izaya, listen! I have a brilliant scenario for club today!"     “Can I stop you there?”     “Just hear me out.” Izaya side-eyed his friend.     “It actually involves studying, you know.”     “That doesn’t instil me with confidence.”

    “If you let me talk you’ll see that it’ll accomplish the opposite.”

    “Ah, even more so I’m skeptical.”

Shinra huffed. It was fake.

Though Izaya could tell how patient Shinra tried to be as to not ruin what he’d undoubtedly planned in depth. Which meant he wouldn’t let up no matter how long the reveal was delayed or sidetracked—ignored with little success.

    “Do I have the floor now?”

Izaya sighed, rubbed at tired eyes; revolved his other hand to indicate that Shinra should just get on with it.

    “Splendid!” 

    He cleared his throat enthusiastically. “So like I’ve mentioned in the past, I’m aware of your proclivity to lust over my form while we change in the locker room.”     “Shinra, you’ve never mentioned that,” he rolled his eyes upon instinct.

    “I’ve never explained how obvious your voyeuristic tendencies are?”

    “Perhaps you’re confusing me for you since it seems you’re the one paying explicit attention.”

    “Well it doesn’t matter, you won’t have to rely on those stray glances and pitiably gazes after today.”

    “Enlighten me, vice club president, what’s this supposed bullet on our agenda?”

Unconsciously they’d trekked an optimal route that avoided extra eyes and additional foot traffic. Still, Izaya looked about to make sure no one followed close enough to make a rumour of whatever nonsense Shina was about to explain.

    “Well since you’re finally amenable I’ll cut to the chase. I've come up with a sort of team bonding exercise, a warm-up if you will, to ease ourselves into the ceremonious sex life we’ve yet to start. Thus, I propose that we entertain our teenage libidos with a rousing yet sensual strip teas—”

His perverse fantasy was cut with a solid body-check.

    "Shinra, for the love of whatever god... I want none of what I so kindly prevented you from further revealing."

    "You mean our bodies or the truth?"

    Izaya asked deadpan, "wait...the truth?"

    "Yes! Revealing the truth.”

    "Which is…?"

    "That you want me!"

    "Rather blunt, even for you."

    Shinra shrugged, "as if you don't know my spiel."

    "Ah, so I do. In that case, I'll skip my own to save me the trouble."

Startled—Izaya’s hand was taken into Shinra’s grasp who sparkled in spirit.

    "I was right then." 

    "Not even in the slightest!" He yanked his hand back, scowled while he rubbed the audacity off his skin, “don’t colour my response with your confirmation bias.”

    "You're so cruel, Izaya!" Each word was whined in woe. 

Stray students that Izaya feared would show up covered their ears while they searched for whom to grumble at, but only found a chilling threat. The few of them dispersed and abandoned the duo.

    "Indeed, I am."

    "At this rate, I'll grow old and undesirable before anything can happen."

    "That's not my problem."

    "Well I insist that you make it your problem! That way I can fix it just like I tend to your ailments and injuries. I won't be made a defeatist just because you adamantly deny the fact that you want me to touch you up—in more than one way." 

A chuckle hung up Izaya.

    "And what a touchy subject that you fail to drop. You know that I can turn you into the officials for your sexual advances and disrespect of my wishes at any time. Wouldn’t that solve my problems just as well?”

Izaya cocked his smirk and crossed his arms; expectant of Shinra’s surrender going without a hitch. In lieu of that, another form of hitch formed in Shinra’s breath as he remembered the time when Shizuo was turned-in for a dumb reason.

Still, his rebuttal was found after a shiver, hitched a ride from the relief, and realigned their pace.

    "Come on now, Izaya, you know we both ignore morality; at the very least I do and admit it. So rest assured, I'll hit you up again with the idea later on."

    "Oh, I hardly doubt that you will, my dear friend."

Shinra hummed—pat Izaya on the shoulder with a self-confident smile.

    "Okay!"

His peculiar response ended their conversation on an awkward note, it really didn't go along with what Izaya said prior and if that weren't normal he would have taken offence that he wasn’t listened to.

Thus it was thrown aside in favour of continuing their circuit of identical corners and walkways; intentionally without a care of how close it was until homeroom.

Though the energy from before died down quickly before they started down a new avenue of discussion.

    “But to be honest, I've thought about us more."

Curious of what necessitated a 'but' precursor and a drop in his tone—a mention of ‘us’—Izaya flipped attention towards his pensive friend. Whom was overly so and a little too unsure of himself.

    "We're friends...right?”

Izaya tripped over his footing as well his thoughts.

    “Dubiously so, but here we are." 

He swatted his...dubious friend as if the tease would kill the heavy air; out of habit Shinra didn’t flinch nor release the somber tilt from his lip.

    "Yeah...so,” he hesitated, “doesn't that mean you won't connect unnecessary feelings to us having sex?"

The mood dissolved into sickness as Izaya listened to the full reel.

    “That's a boon, right?”

    “A boon, hmm?'

    "Right. I mean, it should be…" he trailed off.

    "I suppose to you that’s all I am—” Izaya frowned, “rather, that’s what I am to you; a tool for your selfish whims."

Shinra readjusted the strap on his bag, further fidgeted to correct an uncomfortable hang that persisted its agitation.

    “Mmm, seems you remember what this whole plan is for: to prevent me from shamefully disappointing Celty, correct?"

    Is he questioning me with what he’s spouted to me?

    "Tch, how could I forget the disgusting mental image of you two going at it when you keep reminding me of it?"

It was strained, but Shinra managed to slip into the reminiscent smile he wore whenever his love interest was brought up.

    "How could you suggest that? Anything that involves Celty is purely beautiful. Which in respect of my angel I want to remain pure for her, despite my obviously tainted thoughts."

Once again he held some restraint and it seemed unbeknownst to the teen himself like he half-mindedly kept to an abused script rather than ad-libbing. Which Izaya decided to lean into the sudden turn as punishment or to defend his own feelings—both really.

    "You do realise your logic makes no sense? Having sex strips you of your virginity."

    "Naturally. Which is the exact reason that I’m purely opting for male relations, it's not quite the same as making love with a woman, but similar enough setups and motions. Therefore it keeps me a virgin in the important way.

    "Although, if I’m going after an older woman, that is quite the perversion. Un-pure, in fact. Oh. Oh no… Will that tamper with Celty's purity if she goes after me: a man centuries younger than herself…?”

His prior confliction seemed forgotten for a moment as he fell into his practised character.     “Get to your point, pervert.”

    "Err, right… perhaps you know this, but it's said that only fools will rush haphazardly into things without regard. Which, one and the same, I’m that fool whom the wise men speak of; hopelessly in love and blinded by it. Where do you think that puts me, Izaya? I’m at the precipice of doing whatever it takes to fulfil my goal.”

To this he performed a hard pause and stared beyond Izaya’s sight into his mind, both conscious and unconscious; it unnerved him, made him sweat.

    “I’m not the only one you could use. There are heartless bastards who are just as absent of a mind. Easier to puppeteer.”

    “I don’t particularly have a deathwish, I’d rather mess around with you than wrestle with a dimwit beast like Shizuo.”

Shinra flinched in preparation of being mauled by violent repercussion as if said beast was actually present. If it was a joke to lighten both their moods it went ignored.

While his friend comedically struggled with traumatic memories, Izaya explicitly worried about himself. How the previous implication deemed their friendly get-togethers more as a requirement of acquaintances to fulfil a specific purpose.

Izaya watched Shinra emote through a summoned monologue while stuck on mute. His mouth flapped silently, looked playful a few separate times while he nudged Izaya with a wry wink. His bright smile would immediately fall whenever he didn’t get a response before he'd continue—defeated. 

Whatever he rambled was in vain.

Though the absent audio made Izaya's internal voice scream.

Somewhere within him nagged a question of if he’d actually made up his mind—if he really wanted none of the sexual intimacy that Shinra kept offering, with or without either of them smitten. He didn’t and he wasn’t, he really wanted none of that baggage. 

Yet there was tension, and it’d been eating away at his brain; the swirls of muscle that had become a victim of jealousy, a parasite that started to take over his rationale, motor skills, and more.

    "...plus he's not as much my type aesthetically unlike y—"

Shinra turned mute for real as he went stiff —was killed on the spot, stood a corpse in rigour mortis.

At the changed demeanour Izaya scrunched his features to a focal point, that is until he looked down the hall. It appeared that the devil was summoned by his repeated mention—Shizuo, the dolt who'd surely wreck both of their mornings.

    Moderately, Shinra began to shake. "Oh god, he heard me."

Given the grim aura that surrounded Shizuo, Izaya gathered that he was one agitation away from ornery, which bode terribly.

    Izaya masked his nerves with a sigh, "Shinra that's improbable. Maybe not impossible, considering his inhuman hearing, but—"

    "The hell did you manipulative bastards do?!" 

As if to prove the hypothesis, Shizuo locked sight on them, his ornery scowl confirmed; with a chip on his shoulder, a prominent rip on his jacket’s shoulder.

Decidedly he must have read their racked nerves as damnation of some ploy that hadn’t been actioned, or maybe it had, Izaya wasn’t sure if Shinra had set up something fishy.

    "Surprising as it is for your amateur reasoning, Detective Gumshoe, we did nothing."

Shizuo looked between Izaya and Shinra in doubt and looped through his scrutiny again. Oddly enough he settled shifty eyes on the other teen though targeted both of them—just to be unfair.

    "Eep!!" Shinra weaved a hyperbolic squeal into his legitimate reason to falter.

Though there wasn’t an excuse for his dart around Izaya to create a safe base out of him, both slim and inefficient. Especially there wasn’t a good reason for Shinra to grasp onto his cover, nor was there to hold his waist fake means to stabilise himself before he wrapped them around front. It was too intimate a hold for the hostile setting, but the teen kept to his whim.

    Ah...perhaps this was planned...

Shinra perched his chin on Izaya's shoulder to keep watch of their enemy.

    "Prove I'm innocent, Izaya!"

    "Like hell he's innocent!" Shizuo yelled.

In one sense Shinra couldn’t be proven guilty, but he wasn’t innocent. He took advantage of Izaya’s skyrocketed endorphins as Shizuo trudged closer—he pilfered them, used them. Subtly nuzzled a spot behind his ear; continued his act, but seemed flustered as his breath was shallow from underlined fear, yet focused.

It was that manipulative sway Izaya swore he liked, but now he felt betrayed by his propensity to love anything off-kilter.

Anger ran up his spine and ended in a shudder around the spot Shinra laid his head. His pulse raced furthermore as a palm rolled discreetly under his jacket and flattened upon his heart to monitor its speed.

Shinra spoke. It was loud enough to combat the hallway chatter—clearly the beast as well—but went unheard by anyone other than his victim.

    “Interesting, fear really does bring you excitement. I should’ve known...” 

Shinra hummed uncharacteristically pleased for scientific discovery. That or Izaya's preference had grown askew over time and made a calculated tone of a scientist attractive, repulsive given the circumstances. Though that preference could possibly be tied to his personal inspector who tested his fortitude against prior jealousy.

For a second he swore he felt their pulse sync up with the heartbeat against his back. Enough to count for evidence that maybe… Shinra toyed with both their feelings.

Regardless of what he had done to invoke Shizuo's wrath as a trap, Izaya felt he was made a lab rat, a joke.

As Shizuo swiftly decreased the space between them, he turned against his friend.

    Two can play this game, asshole.

Within the last moment, Izaya overlapped their hands in tender opposition of the aggressive atmosphere, which shocked Shinra. Izaya used the opportunity to pry the leech from his back and shoved him into the battlefield.

    "W-woah!"

Shinra spun and tripped, and by the look of it, his fear shot up to one-hundred percent genuine.

    "Shizu-chan," Izaya smirked, "have at him."

    "Seriously?!" Shinra staggered off to evade—sounded a hair amused, but looked terrified as Shizuo picked up speed.

    "Don't start acting like that damn bastard, Shiiinrrraaa!"

In the distance, they were now a pair of ants.

Left on the sidelines, Izaya mused.

    "You know…”

His hands formed a frame out in front of him with an eye closed for better focus. 

    “I don't see how anyone could get tired of this show like they do with Shizu-chan and me.”

    He clicked a fake shutter, “they must have no appreciation for good humour." Izaya wished he had an actual camera to photograph his revenge—for precious school memories soon to end, not to mention good blackmail. In spite of that, he hoped Shinra would forget the discovery he made in the heat of the moment. Anything more discovered of him in that fashion would be worse than a public downfall, it would be a private tragedy. And really, it wasn’t just that he may get a bit…excited in dangerous situations; honestly, that should’ve been obvious and he knew Shinra knew that. It was probably an excuse for his shitty friend to associate sexual excitement with himself. It was a flimsy experiment with failed results, but only because Izaya already got that sort of reaction when it involved Shinra.

As his hands slid from the air into his pockets he willed his rampant pulse to normalise—much to his dismay, it didn't budge.

    “My, what a pickle he’s stuck me in.”

His mood soured just like vinegar and salt, with the purpose of the sexual endeavour fresh on his mind. What his fool reminded him of—rather not his, but it was easier to say and pleasant ring. 

Shinra played with his sweet spots and weaknesses; he did it too well like he paid unnecessary attention to someone who was just a target for his ploy. That in and of itself was trouble.

    Izaya skipped class and club alike—he lacked the energy to struggle through their time together alone. That and he couldn't stop focussing on the undeterminable expression Shinra wore while they exchanged souls…

    “...I’m at the precipice of doing whatever it takes to fulfil my goal…”

Correct him if that didn’t feel like a hint for him to pick up.

—

AN: What a slog writing this has been, ahaha...

[dndeviants]

Battle with the Abbot

Strahd leaped from his seat and grabbed the Abbot’s hand, his face contorting into something inhuman as his eyes glowed red, his sclera turned black, his nose drew back from his face into the shape of a bat’s, his fangs extended from his mouth.

Strahd hissed, “Cease this! Don’t you dare lay a hand on her, nor my guests!”

Strahd’s hand burned, his flesh sizzled as he touched the holy creature, but he extended his claws, and held on tight. He wouldn’t show weakness now.

The Abbot looked to Strahd in disgust, “I had aims to help you, you unholy, pitiable mess! But I see now that some sinners cannot be saved.”

The Abbot glowed and his form shimmered. He began a transformation of his own... His skin paled to a glowing silver. His eyes turned pure white, as did his hair... He looked youthful and young. 

His drab vestments fell away, revealing a well muscled, but nude form, lacking any distinguishing characteristics of sex. 

Finally, his wings unfurled, showering those around the Abbot in a golden light. He pulled away from Strahd’s grasp and rose above everyone with a disapproving look.

“All of you sinners will receive judgment. I am the most trusted deva in the service of Lathander Morninglord... and now I will send you to him.“

Mina quickly loaded her crossbow, no longer content to wait. She fired one bolt at him, hitting him in the chest. 

He seemed unfazed. She reloaded, aimed and-

Tlik! She was too quick and not careful. Her crossbow jammed, “SHIT!” She cried out, fiddling with the loading mechanism.

The Abbot’s head snapped toward Mina, he raised his glowing hand...

“Language,“ he simply said as he hurled a ball of flaming gold at the woman. 

Mina ran from the flames, heat scorching her back.

Strahd drew his sword from his side and sliced upward at the angelic creature. The Abbot reeled back from the blow, and dodged narrowly as Strahd’s return swing aimed to cleave the creature’s head in half.

Ruki stood, brandishing her Ba’al Verzi daggers. She drew the Mark of Death on the Abbot, before launching herself headfirst at the deva. She infused her blades with mystic power, warping the air around her as she cut into the Abbot.

The Abbot’s form flickered, before settling back in. He looked to Ruki, “Fiendish filth. How dare you attack a servant of the Morninglord?”

The Abbot raised his hand to strike her down as a rapier slid through his back. 

Aric removed his rapier and rolled out of sight, doing his best to conceal his body.

The Abbot staggered and whirled around to look for his assailant. His eyes settled on Aric. Aric could feel his stomach churn with dread.

This isn’t good... thought Aric, grimly.

The Abbot’s eyes burned brightly as he commanded, "Vasilka, remove this pest..."

The golem that had previously been motionless, rose obediently, her eyes glazing over. She lumbered over to the rogue and raised her arms. She slammed Aric.

Aric flew threw the air, stunned. The golem looked like a small, frail woman. But her strength was incredible. He positioned himself to land on his feet, and just barely managed to keep himself from falling prone. His eyes watered, head pounded, and his lungs ached from having the wind knocked from them.

“Aric!“ Jeeves cried out, reaching for his crossbow. He fired a shot at the golem, the force of the blow staggered her. 

Victor Vallakovich held out his hands in front of him, summoning arcane power to fire magic missiles at Vasilka. They landed on her, throwing her away from Aric

Linda pulled out her revolver, determined to put down this fallen angel. Three shots rang out, and struck their target, but it didn’t seem to do much of anything.

She swore to herself. This wasn’t a kind of creature she was prepared to tussle with.

“Stop this, please!“ Sergei cried out, his hands alight with radiant light. 

The Abbot looked to his protegee, “Sergei, this is an unholy creature of the night and his allies... You know what has to be done.”

Sergei glowered, “I do,” his hands were aglow with holy energy as he squared on Strahd...

This is it. Fate’s recompense... My brother will kill me on this day, as I have killed him... So be it. Strahd faced his brother. 

Sergei hurled the holy energy. Like a lightning bolt it flew out of his hands, and passed by Strahd, striking the Abbot behind him.

The Abbot flew into a rage as Sergei chose his side, “You dare use my own spell against me?!”

Strahd was just as shocked as the Abbot.

Sergei’s face was stern with righteous fury, “The Morninglord I know wouldn’t condone this! Killing the innocent? Torturing those in your care? You are not the man I looked up to! You are the monster here!”

That was all the time Mina needed. She re-set her loading mechanism, fixing it.

“Back in the fight!“ she cried out as she loosed another bolt into the Abbot’s wing.

The Abbot’s wings fluttered as he was knocked off his balance. He landed and held out his hand... a golden mace manifested in the deva’s previously empty palm. He gripped it tight and launched himself at Strahd.

“You have corrupted my apprentice with your very presence!“ The Abbot cried.

He raised the mace high and brought it down. 

Strahd raised his sword in defense- a little too late. The mace slipped right past and buried itself in his shoulder. Despite his best efforts, he bellowed in pain as the blow broke bones, and the holy aura ate through his skin like acid... burning through his flesh, charring muscle, exposing bone...

“I was a fool to take pity on you. I should have destroyed you when I had the chance!“ The Abbot made a return swing with his mace.

Another hit. It seemed like he was taking the opportunity now.

Strahd staggered... his eyes bleary from the pain. He could feel that death was upon him... he tried to reach out to the Heart of Sorrow in Castle Ravenloft-

The connection was severed.

How? He thought, then realized with dread that Khazan’s spell drain had severed his connection to his shield... 

He cursed, thanking the powers that be that there was no sunlight to further his weaknesses. He raised his good arm and tried to blight the deva... Surely a creature of holiness would be susceptible to unholy power...

The Abbot still stood, angrily, and hardly effected by Strahd’s use of magic... He raised the mace again...

Tactical retreat. Strahd’s form wavered as he summoned a magical mist to take him outside of the Abbot’s melee range. He couldn’t afford to take another blow like that... not in this situation... 

He could feel his regeneration delayed... all he needed was time...  He tried not to focus on the pain that wracked his undead body as the holy energy continued to eat away at him.

“Lord Strahd!“ Ruki’s eyes flashed white with psionic energy as she struck at the deva. 

He dodged her advances. Fury fueled her as she slashed at him, forcing him to focus on her instead.

The Abbot raised his mace defensively, and warded off Aric as he came at him. He turned his focus on the two attacking him, and commanded Vasilka:

"Finish the vampire!"

Vasilka obediently rose and turned to face Strahd, her arms outstretched. She hobbled over to the weakened vampire and swung her arms...

Strahd flew backward... Vasilka pursued him, raised her arms...

Strahd rolled out of the way, ignoring the pain of his broken bones as he did so...  

She still pursued... Strahd summoned his will power to survive and moved quickly past the golem, slipping from her, and retreating behind Victor and Jeeves’ position.

Linda ran to a better position and took aim... One shot, two shots... three-

Tink! She pulled the trigger, and nothing happened. Dread gripped her. A jam. Now of all times?

“Fuck!“ she cried out. She fiddled with her repair kit, twisting... there. Fixed. 

She leveled her gun. Let’s try this again, shall we...

Three...

The shot rang out and hit the Abbot... this one actually seemed to do something. The Abbot’s form wavered, and began to show wounds... His skin turned dark gray...

But he still stood.

Vasilka mindlessly continued her pursuit of Strahd, barreling toward Victor and Jeeves. 

Victor released a fire bolt at the golem, panicking, “Stay away from me! ”

Jeeves braced himself for the attack...

Sergei turned to the golem, calling to everyone over there, “Watch out!”

He hurled that divine energy at the creature, staggering her.

Mina focused on the Abbot, loading her crossbow and hitting him. He was looking like he was starting to falter, and she wanted to finish him off...

The Abbot glowed with a radiant aura and placed his hands over his heart, “Morninglord... give me the strength to carry out your will...” His graying skin glowed golden, and a few of his wounds seemed to melt away... 

He raised his hands at Strahd, golden energy crackling as a bolt of holy light struck the vampire...

Strahd bared his fangs... no more chances, he didn’t care about the risks. Near delusional with pain, he raised his hands, summoning a wall of fire over the Abbot.

The Abbot tried to breach the wall, his feathered wings burning. He could not pass... 

Strahd willed the wall not to harm his allies... he had the Abbot trapped in the corner... there was no escape for him.

He watched, with no small amount of satisfaction as the creature tried and failed over and over to escape... until all that was left was a skeletal form...

The Abbot cried out, “Damn you! Damn you, Von Zarovich! May the Morninglord take my ash recreate me, so I can exact his vengeance! YOU WILL HAVE RETRIBUTION, VAMPIRE! AND IT WILL BE DIVINE!”

The skeletal form shrieked and then fell to ash... 

Strahd released his spell, and breathed to steady himself and ignore the pain he was in... he shuddered and took knee...

Barely alive.

Ruki ran over to her adoptive father to steady him. He was in very bad shape, his skin charred where the holy energy had hit him, his flesh eaten away in some places... His face gaunt and bestial... parts of his skull showed...

He looked as if he should be dead. 

She held on to him. The best she could do was wait... 

A few seconds passed... and then she could feel his wounds mend beneath her. 

Strahd raised a hand to Ruki, “Thank you...” he took in that small comfort as his body began to repair itself.

Linda jumped from her position and ran over to Strahd, overcome with fear for his well-being, "Are you okay?"

She watched in horrified fascination as the bones in his arm set themselves, sinew and muscle growing and weaving back into place... the skin returning to its pallor, burn marks fading away... 

He seemed like he was getting better, but he still looked worse for wear.

“I’m...“ his voice wavered. He took a moment for his strength to return to him before answering, “I’ll be fine.“

She lightly touched his shoulder that had been hit, before retreating her hand. She shook her head. She didn’t know what had come over her.

Aric rose from his hiding place and rushed over to the pile of ash. He searched through it, panicking, Please don’t be destroyed, please...please.... there! He pulled out the ring... it was still a bit hot, but it only made his hand slightly uncomfortable.

Annulus Qysaris Minor... a spell storing ring. It’s true power wouldn’t reveal itself until he had its partner, Annulus Qysaris Major.

But one more for me is one less for Mehmet. He put it on his hand.

Strahd recovered back to his normal appearance and Ruki let go of him. He worked on mending his clothes and noticed that Mina and Victor were staring at him with odd expressions on their faces...

No use hiding.

 "Great..." Strahd growled and made a flippant gesture, "Yes, I am Strahd.”

He began to answer their unspoken questions in quick succession:

“No, I am not going to drink from you. Yes, I know I'm not the typical vampire. No, I don't want you to treat me any differently. Yes, I understand if you no longer want to continue traveling with me. Yes, I expect you to keep this a secret. Does that about cover everything?"

"If it doesn't,” Linda stood up and turned to them, “ I'd be happy to answer any further questions."

Strahd looked to Linda, baffled at her support.

“Worry not my lord,” Ruki gripped her staff, “I can affix their memories if need be...”

"We'll see if it is necessary..." Strahd looked to Mina and Victor, an edge in his voice, "Is it?"

Mina simply shook her head. But Victor raised his hand, "Just out of curiosity... how does one affix memories?"

Ruki’s eyes flashed, “Oh? A demonstration, is it?”

Victor stammered holding out his hands,  "N-n-n-no! I was just asking theory!"

Ruki looked over to Jeeves. The loyal servant was busy collecting samples of the deva’s bone ash, and separating them into small vials, musing about how useful they could be. She walked over to him and reached out a hand...

Aric stood and warned,  "I wouldn't do that Ruki, could end badly for you."

Ruki did not heed Aric’s warning, and put Jeeves into a daze without his notice. Jeeves paused his collection and stared off, confused.

“What was I doing?“ he muttered.

“That is how, young Master Victor,“ Ruki smiled, satisfied.

Victor scratched his head in confusion.

Aric was less than pleased. He turned to Ruki, “Ruki, undo whatever it is you have done!”

“Fine,“ the mystic tapped her staff on Jeeves’ head.

Jeeves cried out, “Ow, hey!” and rubbed his head, “What the hell?”

"She put some kind of spell on you,” Aric explained, “and could have been nicer about removing it..."

Jeeves glared at Ruki and began to sweep up the deva ashes again, "I don't see why. I was just cleaning up here. Something needs to be clean in this place or I'm gonna go insane!"

“The other method would have taken longer...” Ruki simply replied.

Aric looked to Jeeves and whispered, “You know where she sleeps. Get her back then. Just nothing too extreme. Strahd seems attached to her.”

Strahd walked over to Sergei, who was silently, and numbly sitting at the table, staring at the scorching on the floors and walls. He looked to Strahd’s approach without fear...

Without memory...

Strahd felt something stir within him, but forced himself to remain calm, "I'm going to need you to take care of the creatures in this place. At least until we can get everything sorted out."

"Why me, Lord Strahd?" Sergei blinked up at him. 

Strahd sighed, "Because I don't trust anyone in the village to take kindly to them,” he explained, “Don't let them be seen. Not yet. But at least... unchain these... mongrelfolk. As for you... Vasilka...”

Vasilka cowered in fear at the vampire’s approach. 

Strahd paused, and moved no further, "You also stay out of sight.”

He shook his head in disgust, “Whatever you may have come from is an abominable act, but you are not responsible for your creation. Stay out of sight. Am I understood?"

Vasilka nodded slowly, to show she understood.

Ruki stepped forth, “My lord, if I may suggest... Shall we send her back to Castle Ravenloft under Ludmilla's care?”

Strahd pinched his brow. The last thing he wanted was this mockery of Tatayana in the castle, “I'll have to think on it."

Ruki was firm, “She will remain out of sight if she stays within the castle walls.”

And the castle was very large. He didn’t have to see her if he didn’t want to... he conceded, "Very well. We will arrange for transportation. But in the meantime, we have much larger things to worry about. Such as the defenses of Krezk.”

He turned to the bounty hunter, “Mina, a word with you, what you found at the walls..."

Mina nodded and stepped forth, "Yes, Vasili-I uh mean Strahd- erm... Lord Strahd-"

"The report," Strahd reminded her. He had little patience for this.

Mina grounded herself, "Bad shape. The walls are not holding up near Lake Baratok, and there is a gap where the Abbey overlooks the cliff. If they come in through that way, the town can be overrun very quickly."

Strahd nodded, "Then we need to set up defenses in those areas. Anything will do, even a palisade or pit trap. Something."

Ruki walked back to Aric. She had nearly seen Strahd fall due to holy energy. She didn’t want to see that happen again, and she went to the genasi with her hand outstretched.

It was her duty to protect her adoptive father from things that could subdue him.

“If I may have the symbol back in my possession please...” Ruki looked to him firmly.

Aric tilted his head, confused, “Symbol?"

“The Holy Symbol of Ravenkind,” she patiently clarified.

"Oh, I forgot i still had that..." he reached in his pack and carefully handed it to Ruki, not wanting to upset Strahd further.

Ruki nodded her appreciation, “Thank you Master Aric,” She put the symbol in her pack and walked back to Strahd.

Linda watched Strahd calculate and pace, thinking on different things to do to prepare for the werewolves. She stood, “We don’t wait for the attack.”

Strahd looked to her, tiredly,  "We aren't prepared, Linda...” 

He made a frustrated gesture,  “And from the sound of it, they've had months to prepare... I need to protect my people,” he looked to her, “whether or not they still accept me as their Lord and Protector. Rushing headlong into a den isn't going to solve anything."

Linda folded her arms, conceding, "Fine. But we still need to figure out why they are attacking."

Strahd blinked, realizing he hadn’t told her what he had learned. He held out his hand, "It's because the mate of the former leader of the pack is here. That is who I was talking to. Zuleika Toranescu...”

He folded his cloak around him, “The rest of the town doesn't know that she is here. She still expressed loyalty and gratitude to me, and was kind enough to not out me in public. I did the same for her. She told me that she would meet me by the Shrine at the next available opportunity."

Linda nodded, determined, "Then, let's go. No time to waste."

[vitavitale]

            drabble I             — Shadow ;

And there the lion’s ruddy eyes Shall flow with tears of gold, And pitying the tender cries, And walking round the fold, ...

The color of a starless night, devoid of any light; black as ink, a thing of shadow with a depth impenetrable and a nature inscrutable. If not for points of amaranth red breaking through the darkness, its form would have been indistinguishable. Brought forth from the infernal abyss was a beast both obscure and lethal. Man's folly ripped her from her land and she would have recompense. But it was not a man she beheld now, but a boy, and he'd dared to pull her through the art on the floor: an inverted pentagram he'd call it, but a thing nameless yet known to her and her kin. The audacity of that little fool would cost him his head.

She'd heard him speak as she was birthed into a world foreign. His intent vocalized through something she'd recognize as an incantation—but not one she'd heard before. His tongue was one she understood, learned from generations past. Her kind had been for many an age invoked by others of his kind; come into contact with them either above or below the dividing line laid between realms, and so the practice seemingly continued, however to humanity's error. A great many more of them had been slain by the beasts they hoped to subjugate than there'd been conjurers successful in their attempts. She appeared in full form, body and limbs, whiskers and all. In her eyes burned a fire demonic, a revulsion for this forced change and an enmity for the scrawny little creature in her sights.

In the room she blended almost perfectly, the space small and dim, though lit candles covering the demon's sides waved in greeting with their tiny orange flames, their shadows thrown upon the walls. New scents confused her, though few were familiar—the most notable of all belonging to the other demon in the room. Now, what sort of a hapless little fowl would stoop so low as to abide by a human equally pitiable? Insulting. These were the creatures who'd pulled her into their grasp. They reeked of apprehension, the avian one particularly of prey, and that of a kind she'd sunk her fangs into before.

Instincts pushed her to stalk toward the child who'd sought to tame her. His words made as much clear, and he'd not have her. In an act of defiance, fangs were flashed and a snarl was returned. She may have never once met a human, but she heard enough of them to know they were cowardly. She'd not been proven wrong: the boy backed away from her, urging her to submit, and that demon of his alliance had spoken in cautionary tones, warning of danger. How utterly appropriate. They'd not known her species, beasts born of shadow, stealth, and unrelenting aggression. Efficient, effective predators from birth to death. She would show them—and she backed the boy against the wall, heedless to his will, coiling her muscles to propel herself onto him and snap his little neck in one swift, simple motion. Misfortune lied in wait for her, however, and it had ultimately ruined her vision of retaliation when she found that she could not harm the boy, no matter her effort. Something stopped her, a power unknown to her and incomprehensible; a force effected by the tiny human before her, and it frustrated her all the more. She stilled before him, glaring her hatred into his bright eyes. She'd felt his anxiety, a fear that should have been too easily rent right when she willed it. With her will impeded, she had but to stand down. A hateful thing to a beast as proud as she, but all the same she sunk into shadow and parted from the conjurer's sight.

Liquid night melted into the darkness. A pair of rubies gleamed from the floor, slid backward toward the other end of the room, and ultimately vanished altogether. The room was her prison, its confines the space she'd been allowed to haunt, and she decided at once to exploit it; the dark, the trepidation she still could scent in the air were now hers to bend to her machinations.

It was the boy, she knew, who tied her to this space and kept her shackled. It was the boy in control, but the taste of such a privilege she'd ensure would be fleeting. In binding her to this place, he'd bound himself; and, thus, the two would enter a battle of wills. It was no question whose will would prevail, and the demon born of shadow needed only to wait. A mightier being than he, than even the raptor at his side: the perfect predator poised to kill when the moment was ripe. Brutal ferocity or refined stealth, she excelled at both. From the shadows she observed, blinking her blood-red eyes from the blackness surrounding. From the corners she'd gleamed; the middle of the floor; the wall beneath the window; the ceiling—and all the time the candles burned on. She dodged their light, keeping to the dark, vocalizing intermittently with an ominous hiss here, a resentful growl there. All to put the boy on edge, and there he went—he remained, closer and closer toward the brink he drew.

The first day saw no victory: both beast and boy persisted, strong and immovable, resolute. While free roam of the enclosed space was hers, he resigned himself to the wall she forced him unto. Sat on the floor, back to the plaster, his winged companion faithfully beside him. Death stalked him from where he could not see; the candles expired one by one, painfully dimming to welcome an utter blackout. All the more to her favor. The second day brought about the same result, and not once had the shadow taken form. Left the little sorcerer in anticipation; too effective. Peridots darted all around, she saw, no matter how much effort went into taming a quivering heart. That he'd lasted this long was singular. Not a thing to drag, thought the demon, noting how he'd begun to wear fatigue like a loose garment over a fragile frame. The anxiety on its own would be the death of him, but she had to worsen the tension—tighten the noose.

Mild surprise welcomed the third day of battle. The boy sat awake, suffering clearly. His will had endured from dawn to dusk, dawn to dusk and outlived the flames and wax; the beast bathed in shadow endured with him. Haggard was he, standing on the brink of consciousness. Should his lids fall, the demon would snap! So close, her freedom, she'd have become restless if she were any lesser creature. From the depths of darkness her ruby reds gleamed, watching with keenest interest the child and his subordinate. Demons were hardier, she knew that for a fact. The raptor did not fare as badly as its master, and in fact chatted with mounting frequency. It appeared to anchor the boy to the world to which he'd so far belonged. A mind so battle worn could not survive the war, ultimately, and it was this inevitability that the demon anticipated. She knew weakened prey when she saw it, but there also surfaced an element of esteem throughout the wait, and perhaps that too was inevitable. The longer the boy willed his survival, the more remarkable it was to her. To think that her captor was worth anything beyond a meal—but she was a demon of age, of many ages, and of all the things she'd seen in her lifetime, she would admit that she'd met a human child with enough foolhardy daring to challenge her power of will. He sought to tame her, to claim her and use her—a very bold thing to attempt. It smacked of arrogance, and the beast black as night would not allow him the satisfaction. Four days, then, to see him closer to his end.

From the darkest corner of the room she watched, unbothered by the gray morning light splashed over closed blinds. A desperate clamor was all the blue-feathered fiend was good for, it seemed, blasting its criticisms and concerns without regard for its own master's state of mind. A change took place overnight, one the peering darkness had noted but left quite alone. The strings were pulled to their breaking point, but in quite a way she hadn't expected. Taut were the nerves for days, but now they'd gone slack. Snapped down the middle. The eyes were glazed with exhaustion, the heart weathered but the soul as yet lit aflame. Had terror run its course? What good was the hunt without the prey's distress? Reclined was the lean little sorcerer, motionless as he sat limply against the wall with his lids bravely forced open. Blood-eyed was the demon he pulled from the pattern on the floor; bright-eyed was she who'd studied him since, learning of her prey and knowing, at last, how and when he'd set her free. One little push to tip him off of the brink and the shackles would break. She might have done the pushing herself, but all throughout the wait she'd done little to nothing to ruin him. What were a few more hours to her? They passed as so many more prior. Morning light changed to afternoon, changed to evening, and the passage of another dusk would come with her still inside the room.

The boy looked as though he'd begun expiring. Sickly pale was his skin and his eyes distant. Nonetheless, the demon sensed the life in him—diminished, maybe, but enduring. For skin stretched over bones, he was strong. The wait doubled as a vigil. Eyes without desire, stomach without hunger, the killing instinct calmed. The longer the sorcerer battled her, the more she wanted to see it to the end—and not because she wanted him dead, but there bloomed a great, perhaps greater, fascination with the durability of his will. Curious was the beast, wondering what sort of a child he was. No, he was not all human and she'd scented that from the outset. The first day found her boiling, but on the second day her temper had cooled. She was prudent as she was demoniac, and had it not been for her age she may have continued to threaten her prey directly. Those in her sights neglected to take their notes: they'd been afraid of her while she, at most, uttered growls and blinked her blood-red eyes at them. The third day was silent, but only the avian demon filled the space with its noise. The Shadow held her tongue, did nothing but watch. Patience was her virtue. Silently she stalked all about the room, registering the changes in odors. The boy's being of most importance to her, she discerned his fading condition. From this she knew his hold over her would fail.

But he was not dying. Only tiring.

So came the final trial. Four nights in a row, now, and drive had met its end. Rather a disappointment, but inevitable: the boy was fallible after all. He'd survived remarkably this long, no achievable feat for another his age and breed. Stubbornly he fought her, for her, but she saw in him a resignation that eve. Surrender. The war was never his to win. Whatever force he'd employed to stave off her retaliation had fallen apart. Her opportunity at last at hand as the light faded. But the present hour brought with it a night sky, time having passed as she watched her captor. His lids had closed but the feathered hellion kept him conscious. Now was the time, she thought; no longer was there the need to prolong their fates.

Noiseless was her manifestation. She gathered mass as she rose from the floor, taking on her feline form as shadows congregated to rebuild her, nose to tail. Amid the dark her ruby reds blinked to sustained life. From the inverted pentagram she emerged as if the beginning of the conjuring all over again, only this time she'd no reins to subdue her. She ignored the demon at the boy's side when it noticed her; its frantic clamor was irritating to be sure, but such a lowly tool was far beneath her attention, undeserving of it. The noise was successful in forcing the child's eyes open, however, and into them the ruby reds stared. Panic renewed, the heart set on fire—he reacted accordingly, but his body was uncooperative and barred from escape. Beside him, the other demon poised itself defensively between its master and his death. Hackles raised and violet sparks danced all across, but the child's voice commanded attention—in itself, not a thing heard for some prolonged time. A gentle, feeble sound that meant to dissuade his protector. So willing to let go, was he?

What few words were spoken had moved his demon beside him again, but it was not without protestation. Through this, he bade her come, and so she approached him with eye contact enduring. Faint was he, she smelled it; she stopped before him, barely any space between the two, and regarded the human a moment—even as he lifted an arm and reached a hand out to her, palm forward and fingers weakly extended. His heart drummed in his chest; she could tell that easily. To contrast, she was utterly relaxed as she, no other, held his life. What had he offered, she had to wonder, by showing his hand? Surely it was no attempt at stopping her. He hadn't the will for that any longer. The demon at his side argued horribly against this, ever threatening with its stance and proposed electrical shocks. Empty promises: no harm came to her from the lowlife. The beast born of shadow instead gave her attention to the hand left oh-so close to her muzzle. Even if she'd known to fear no man, she exercised caution when she drew close enough to ghost his digits. Warm was her breath when she exhaled on pallid flesh, and she took in his scent keenly. No hostility in him, not as far as she could discern, and he was nothing more than a weak little boy besides. Even lost the will to live; she discerned that, too. For all of his pitiable existence, he was...rather a remarkable half-breed. None so like him from what the Shadow had known of his kind—and perhaps, perhaps, he deserved credit for having tamed and bound a demon, its nature and status notwithstanding.

Ambitious little sorcerer for attempting to do the same with her.

The hand trembled in the air, ready to fall limp. Her nose touched his palm, the hand collapsed and its fingers feebly held on to the demon's muzzle. A snap of the fangs was due for that, but he'd not see it from her. No skepticism, no aggression, not a growl to be heard. Cool was the feline in his presence, patient with his touch, and she dragged in a lungful of his scent through what meager contact was afforded them. She caught the sound of his breaths, agitated as if he were to speak, and she blinked into his eyes as consequence. It was fleeting, and again the hand had her attention—so much that it drew from her mouth her tongue and silently bade its warmth. Rough and damp; it swept skyward across the boy's palm, tasting for the first time his flesh and sweat and perceiving things that went unheard, unseen, not really felt until now. Only one lap and she was finished; the tongue withdrew behind flesh-rending fangs, leaving her contemplative the while she watched weary green eyes. In pause she stood motionless, silent as she listened to the pathetic whimper the boy had forced out of himself—and that only just so, for his strength had faded entirely by the time he'd finished and, to mark his descent into unconsciousness, his hand slipped from the demon's muzzle to fall by his flank. The lids sealed themselves, the raptor panicked and hurled accusations and obscenities at the beast born of shadow, but she sensed his heartbeat; the light hadn't yet gone. It wouldn't.

What he'd tried to say before he blacked out was, really, an unfinished thought. Nothing fully comprehensible. He spoke in the first person, he noted himself, and a word meant to follow but it collapsed in his mouth. So, he reclined against the wall wholly vulnerable to vengeance, solely dependent upon the protection of his familiar, as good as dead to the world around him and he would depart unfulfilled.

That did not come to pass. The day following would find him in repose upon the couch in another room. He awoke to find himself in company: Griffon, its name was learned, there to keep vigil, and the one left nameless seated on her haunches before the little sorcerer. How weary he, alive and conscious by some supernatural wonder. His fortitude entranced. That was why she was here. She'd decided some time ago, after all.

Lo, none were threatened by the other. None fearful, none disinclined (save for the raptor, tentatively observant). The child was calm, she sensed it now, and he gathered what little strength he had recuperated to voice a thought formerly left unfinished. “I need you,” was what she'd heard, and this she understood. From where he lay, he offered his hand to her, and again she responded with a touch. This time was different: with nose to palm, hearts aligned, the connection forged. A bond. With it came a name—one the raptor critiqued but she accepted—and, later, a master to protect. To join Griffon upon the human canvas was new, but she adapted as she'd done with all changes prior; and, like Griffon, Shadow would not waver in her duties.

‘And now beside thee, bleating lamb, I can lie down and sleep; ... '

[lostinlogicerror]

A fever dream or character-defining introspection?

The seemingly sensible and practical Ogata is probably the last person you'd expect to experience hallucinations in which he's being visited by the ghost from his past. But for the man who praises himself on having a firm grasp of reality he's actually quite a self-deceiver, when it comes to assigning the responsibility for his more questionable actions, at least. So it's somewhat fitting he'd embark on this journey of confronting the truth about himself in a form of a delirious dream.

The curiously faceless man, Yuusaku Hanazawa, at first glance appears to be an ideal man of strong convictions and backbone, contrary to the meek impression he gives off, a virtuous and charismatic individual everyone's looking up to, raising above any temptation, capable of always seeing the best in others, you name it, but more importantly, we're led to believe he actually lives up to that image.

There was a point where part of me wondered whether Ogata didn't subconsciously build Yuusaku to these impossible standards in his head, consequently turning him into a flawless if irritatingly naive and idealistic and the unreachable figure above reproach as a result of self-doubt perhaps? But then we have a peculiar case of Tsurumi and how Ogata's feverish mind allows for his involvement and actions to be interpreted in a favorable light despite being so predisposed against him, which is why I assume we're supposed to take this flashback at a face value. In this instance, Ogata had a perfect opportunity to deflect the blame to someone else, an easy scapegoat, as he's so wont to do, but instead this fever dream, his mind conjured, appears to be his moment of solid truth and self-reflection.

On the topic of our secondary character of this unfolding drama, Tsurumi, he's shown to be already preparing the groundwork for his future operation. It only makes sense why he'd want to secure Yuusaku as a potentially influential ally to his cause. Although it's rather interesting that, as far as we know, he wouldn't approach the man directly but opts to reach out to him through Ogata instead. Did he already have an inkling trying to persuade him to his side would turn out to be a fool's errand and thus didn't show more personal investment? But as good as he seems to be at reading people, he's not omniscient, and others do manage to mislead him about their true nature or lack of loyalty, as Ogata himself will prove to be one of these cases later on. Even his great insight has its limitations. Most likely he just assumed Yuusaku would be more open and responsive to his half-brother whose attention he was already seeking out. All to no avail.

However, what I'd like to bring attention to, is his response to this failure. Keeping in mind these events unfold from Ogata's point of view, and he's never the one to give another a benefit of a doubt, I'm not surprised Tsurumi's actual reasons are not elaborated on further. Still, from what we can infer, whatever nefarious plans were concocted behind the scenes regarding Yuusaku's fate, Tsurumi's putting them all to a halt. And what makes him change his mind? The sway and popularity a charming person like Yuusaku held among soldiers, and who in fact appeared to be really taken with him, could pose a challenge to Tsurumi's authority in the long run, yet it's that reason that factored into his decision of sparing his life.

Tsurumi was capable and willing to recognize the value in Yuusaku's ability to inspire and boost up the morale of the fellow soldiers. At that moment, choosing to put their wellbeing above his personal ambitions and objectives he's decided to devote his life to, he ultimately rises above his own selfishness for the sake of his subordinates.

Moreover, this is not the only instance of Tsurumi acting against his own best interests and choosing to keep someone alive despite his best judgment and their volatile potential to prove themselves detrimental eventually. Nikaidou comes to mind. You could argue he spared the traitor, in the first place, because he figured they could mutually use each other, and they did seem to come to that agreement at the time. Yet that doesn't explain his insistence on keeping him by his side and caring for him even when he's long since become a liability to him, a loose cannon you could say. He goes even further by making sure Nikaidou remains in his inner circle, in spite of danger he poses to him personally. When you think about it, the time and effort he's investing, the risks he's willing to take for Nikaidou's sake far more outweigh the benefits of still having him serve under him. Yet he's continuously the one refusing to give up on him, no matter how far gone Nikaidou is, be it mentally or physically.

People are too caught up in the idea of Tsurumi being utterly blinded by his grand goal, not even allowing for the possibility he's genuinely caring for his subordinates, why can't both of these facets of Tsurumi coexist?

Moving back to the matter of Yuusaku. I can't help but wonder, whether Tsurumi could have succeeded in swaying him to his side, in the course of time, by making him realize his own father's foolishness, considering his negative contributions and orders resulting in the loss of so many men during the Battle of Port Arthur. I suppose, Ogata deprived us of an opportunity to find that out.

Ogata has this fascinating habit of assuming the worst of everyone (and eventually being proven wrong, the same applies to Tsurumi, really) because he tends to judge others by his own measure. The blood bond they shared made Yuusaku automatically a very important and personal stake for his half-brother, it's no wonder he'd be very invested in revealing Yuusaku to be just a phony, to show in reality he's cut from the same cloth as him. Yuusaku turning out to be his antithesis and constantly disproving his beliefs about everyone just putting on the front must have really hit Ogata where it hurts. The final test he's prepared for Yuusaku, taunting him into needlessly killing a prisoner of war, came off as almost last desperate attempt of Ogata to validate his worldview and his own existence. If only he could prove his noble brother deep inside is just as flawed and vile as him... In a way it made me look at Ogata with a more benevolent eye, the flashback did serve its function of making Ogata if not sympathetic, then to a degree pitiable, while at the same time disabusing us of a notion Ogata's on his path to redemption. Until now he's been struggling with his inner demons and trying to achieve self-acceptance by bringing down others to his morality standards. Will reliving those memories put an end to that and help Ogata achieve some inner peace? That remains to be seen.

By the time of their last confrontation, Ogata has already proved to Yuusaku what kind of person he is, yet despite that he still insisted on seeing good in his brother and not giving up on him, even in such a twisted situation when fully confronted with how far his callousness and malice go.

These words of Yuusaku unwittingly implying there is no place in the world for people like Ogata pretty much sealed his fate.

[musicmushi]

Vent incoming feel free to read if you want but pass by it if you dont thats cool too

This is to feel like free-writing I suppose. I have been going through a lot in my head and it feels good sometimes to just get my fingers flowing and to type stuff out. I have been having mental breakdowns off and on for at least a week but most likely more. I have fought the urge to cut myself, resisted the temptation to get rid of some certain people.

I know that the mindset I have is unhealthy but that doesn't stop me from having it. Actually, I think to try to repress it just makes the mindset worse. I’m trying my best to not ignore myself but that sort of leaves the question “who am I?” or maybe “What?”. I feel like I’m supposed to just know what I’m all about just by trying things and doing what my gut feels is right. Seems simple, right? Just focus on what feels right for you and whatever that is speaks to who you are.

Well, the short of it is it's not. Plain and simple trying to decipher your persona so to speak from just what feels right and good is a perfect slope into confusion territory because humans, by default, are multifaceted beings with complex thoughts and contradictory interests. No one fits into one singular pretty little mold. There’s gonna be cracks and holes and dents that warp the overall product making each person imperfect and out of the ordinary. The ‘molds’ are stereotypes and stereotypes by and large are not true for everyone everywhere! There’s just way too many humans to make that a possibility. I have been trying to fit into mold, after mold, after mold my entire life and I can’t fit in anywhere. As ridiculous as this may sound to those who ‘get it’ it frustrates me that I have failed at being a perfect little human even though I know very well that perfection does not exist. The idea of perfection itself is flawed and thus becomes paradoxical.

Sometimes I wish I could reboot myself into something that's more cohesive and understandable because the need to explain myself time after time after time again gets annoying and tiresome yet there it is. I feel as though I need to explain myself in such detail that my ideas and motives should not be questioned. I need to have an irrefutable reason for anything and everything I do; “it makes me happy” never cut it and it never will even when I’m with the company where that answer would suffice. Nothing can just “make me happy” I’m left trying to explain WHY it makes me happy because I want people to understand that though I can be theatrical in my emotions and reactions; I am not a joke to be told and passed around amongst friends. I think about what I do and why I do it so often that it has given me premature stress among other things.

I know what some may think at that. And yes, being stuck trying to explain why I enjoy things and what happiness even is, leaves me depressed as fuck. I’ve seen that video! Everyone has seen that video by Scotch and yeah I related to it and all the amazing points he made. But I can’t just stop giving a fuck because I can’t think of an irrefutable reason to do so. Everything needs a reason. Because once I do something that lacks reason I’m being dubbed ‘silly’ or ‘ridiculous’ ‘a crazed fangirl’ ‘obsessed’…I’m made into a joke. People think that I’m just someone not to be taken seriously and that makes me mad but I can't blame anyone but myself because I have a natural tendency to act silly and be funny and there’s nothing wrong with that but when there’s a time to be serious suddenly people are caught off guard when I step up and be serious.

It’s almost as ridiculous as the people being blown away at the singing talent of Susan Boyle because she didn’t look like a diva or whatever. You can’t look at someone’s physical attributes and mannerisms and suddenly know what they have hiding under the hood. I act obsessed with the person that I love because I’m excited to be with them, I have never once taken that relationship for granted and I think about our future together because the happiness that comes with being tied together cosmically with this person is nice to think about. My feelings for them is not a joke or a phase or a simple crush…I’m not some crazed obsessed yandere waiting with a knife under my arm behind the door. Call me whatever you want but don’t you dare even try to write this off as anything less than real and serious.

I plan for my future because I want to make sure I have back up plans for my back up plans. Lord knows I have had enough go wrong in my life in so many ways that I think its completely reasonable to be cautious and plan around dangers. I’m not being dramatically paranoid. I make jokes a lot of the time and I love to laugh. But I, myself, am not a joke.

I’m aggressive yet non-confrontational, stubborn but I can go with the flow, emotionally unstable but when the time is right I’m sensible and have the right advice to give, I have inherited my mother's saint-like patience with others but I myself get antsy and jumpy very easily. I have every reason to hate the world and to give up on love but the very idea of doing so makes me feel brokenhearted and weep.

I have to keep caring and I have to keep believing in love because without love the world becomes even more unforgiving and a life without that hope isn't worth living. If I lose the passion and investment in these ideas that I have then I lose my irrefutable reason to live. My belief in love gives me a rock solid reason to not kill myself and that is not to be joked about or tossed in the trash. Love is not trash. If I stop giving a fuck, I’m afraid that will result in something truly drastic. If that’s deserving of not being taken seriously then I have already lined myself up for the Fool’s Pillory. If that truly is the case then so be it. But one cannot fault me for wanting to be taken seriously as a thinking adult.

I am in the process of accepting myself as trans and the process is making me impatient as I feel no one is taking that seriously. I either get suspicious looks from friends and colleagues thinking that I’m throwing my identity away for the sake of another or I get a barrage of pastel attitudes and flower crown treatment which feels very condescending and hand-holding which in turn pisses me off. I get people telling me that “if you wanna be a man you don't wear makeup” or “I’m not going to help you look more masculine because you’re only doing this for that girl you never shut up about” Everywhere I turn there’s a road bump or wall blocking my path and its making me hate myself and the world for making this process so god damned confusing. Here I am approaching 25 with years of stacked up gender issues and now that I’m trying to deal with them head on I got people trying to white knight me and tell me how I should present myself so that I can be a proper trans. Like there’s some sorta gender identity manual out there and I’m just…doing it wrong and I need some well-meaning person to come up and hold my hand and guide me to the other side like I’m not cognizant enough to figure it out for myself. I’m not a pathetic ridiculous laugh worthy little retarded delicate daisy.

I have years of abuse and reality slapping me in the face harder than anyone else in my personal circle and yet these personal friends of mine that I have grown with are the worst in roadblocking me like not even my dearest friends can take me seriously because when I do act serious about it they get thrown off their groove and they don’t know how to talk to me about it so they don't. I got one friend that knew I had fallen in love with my special someone and not two minutes later joked that he had a chance to sweep her off her feet. No one takes me seriously no matter what I’ve been trying and that seriously pisses me off.

I’m pissed, confused, stressed, fighting the urge to cut myself, and it seems that I’m the only one sometimes that knows I’m not joking when I say these things. I think through my actions and I do my research. Everything I do has a reason. But no one wants to believe that because I’m supposed to be the pitiable stupid one that’s mocked and laughed at and just lies in waiting for my mythical white knight to come in, sword swaying, and whisk me away so that I can live happily ever after or whatever. When I need help; I ask. Plain and simple if I think I can’t handle something I reach out. I’ll fully admit I’m bad at it but I’m not so bad as to miss the opportunity entirely like I’m slow. I’m not slow and I’m not worth your pity…If you pity me then you can escort yourself out before your shining armor blinds others to the reality of autonomy. You know who you are.

[metaldragoon]

When I was younger, I was really excellent at most athletics.  Not the best sprinter, but I still represented my school in the 100M and was unbeatable at 400M, 800M, 1500M, and high jump.  I played on the best school for soccer and basketball, and while I would never say I was “sociable” I was still surrounded by friends.  That was only until I was 10, so you might attribute to physically maturing at a faster pace than most kids, since I was also the tallest to go along with the fastest and most athletic.  My parents were starting to split up, they never officially divorced until I was like 14 but at around 8 they started living separately with small stints of living together again, and so I was mostly a daycare kid but I was with one of my best friends there and the only kid as athletic as me, though fortunately for track day he was a year older than me so I never had to compete against him.   My mom decided to get back in to teaching once I turned 10, which she had stopped since she was pregnant with me to take care of me, which I feel like makes so little sense because she worked at casinos and stuff until like 2 AM so I never saw her anyways, but, digressing, she found a full-time position.  Some desolate northern town where it reaches -50 and it’s a 4 hour drive to the next town.  I honestly was quite okay with the idea of moving.  I feel like most of my friends had moved and i was like cool, sick of being the lame-o with 40 year old parents and only lived in one house.  Also, being in a tiny town with no competition and training for sports all my life, I was like a whale shark in a fish tank, destroying all school records for my track events, and I feel like success never really mattered even, it just felt nice.  But each year there, being that it’s winter for about 7 months a year, and, weird of an excuse as it may be, the bugs and mosquitoes there are... so aggressive, it’s either too cold or I’m going to be choking on bugs and scratching my self of all my bites or getting bitten by fruit flies.  The sun is so affected by seasons, it’s dark at 3 PM in winter and sunny until 2 AM in the summer.   The point of these excuses is just that I lost my athleticism.  I am still above average, I guess, but I was slower than the year previous each of my 3 years living there.  People never ragged on me about it, I guess they just assumed I didn’t care was the reason, but I knew I just wasn’t as good as people anymore.  Kids that didn’t even play sports could keep up with me.  This is not very pitiable, but after losing all my friends from moving away, to lose my athleticism took it’s toll. My dad moved away from that northern town as my parents were officially done trying to be together, and I moved with him because I don’t know, I guess again it just felt exciting to be somewhere new.  I feel like as a kid all those complaints still didn’t really bug me, this is just looking back at the things that made me.  We moved in to some apartments, and while I would say I really enjoyed my time there, I guess this would be when I started having “depression.”  I never really felt like that’s how I felt.  My dad would work 3PM until midnight, sometimes I’d see him before he’d go to work, he’d make me dinner for me to eat later, and then I’d be by myself, playing computer games and listening to music and talking to lots of people online.  I’d make sure to go to bed around 11 so he wouldn’t know I stayed up, maybe have a little cry some nights because I don’t know, that just felt relieving, which of course it is, but whatever.  I lived about 20 minutes from school, so I’d walk myself to and from basketball practice and soccer was on the weekends so my dad would drive me there, and outside of that that’d be the only time I left the house unless my dad wanted me to go grocery shopping or something.  Something about my dad is that he is... stoic? completely unemotional? I don’t know.  I love him, and think he’s great, but he is not one for talking to his son about anything at all.  He disciplines me on the important things of life and is very reliable, but I feel like there’s no joy in his life or joking around, which I guess I just felt was normal since he was my only real contact.  I guess that’s why I liked being online so much.  I could be emotional and talk about things and be silly without thinking I’m disappointing my father, since he has no idea what I’m doing. I started having a lot of ankle problems, which I feel like honestly didn’t really affect my life, it just meant I missed time in sports, and eventually in Gr. 10 my knees started to go, which came to me giving up sports in Gr. 11 because the pain of practices just became too much and coaches weren’t willing to let me just use that as an excuse to only play in games.  Gr. 11 I moved with my mother who once again moved to some tiny remote town and I followed her, this time definitely under the influence of her emotional instability and feeling guilted about that.  I feel I really hit my low there, as I talked about with my injuries.  The town didn’t even have a soccer team and our basketball team was a joke anyways before I quit.  I was weighing about 250, I still feel like I was pretty athletic, but my knees would give out on me even just walking.  I feel I’ve always had this “pushing my body to extremes” from childhood that I’ve never adjusted to, because in my head I know I can work harder than anyone and succeed because I’m more athletic, and eventually they’ll give up, but they don’t because I’m not more athletic and it just destroys my body.  Maybe my adrenaline rush is just stronger than others because I feel like coughing and being completely out of breath, knees stinging and it being hard to walk because my feet are throbbing was just regular after a game but looking at it now I’m like there’s no way other people dealt with that.  Anyways, I don’t know, I’m just trying to say it was a very low point.  Ever since I heard Caitlyn Jenner talk about how all she did was train for the decathlon and football and everything when she was younger as just being referred to the “great distraction” for her transgender thoughts, which she didn’t understand and just thought were wrong ro something, I’ve found that pretty relatable.  Sports to me were the same things, a way to not be thinking about everything shitty about life.  Without that it was pretty much thinking about is killing my self worth disappointing my parents and making them think they did such a shitty job of raising me? Because that’s not what my suicide is about, and I don’t want them to blame themself, but I know it’s impossible to not.  That was basically my saving grace.  I’d also become pretty infatuated with a girl who I’d been friends with for about 3 years or so.  I know she didn’t like me back, as I had told her my feelings and she told me hers, but there’s always hope that she just hasn’t noticed what there is to like about me yet.  Looking back I feel like a “white knight nice guy here’s my fedora” fucking loser, but I like to also think I was a lot better than that too.  We were best friends and basically all my life was just typing to her and attending school.  My general sadness became directed towards her not liking me, because I always felt that yeah I’m a loser but I know I’m just in a bad spot and I have a lot of potential to be great... and for the person closest to me not to see that or be attracted to it when everything about her is attractive to me was really like a crushing blow to any kind of comfort I would have found in her.  Of course, she still was a great comfort but y’know, you go to bed alone and have insomnia and it’s hard not to focus and drive yourself down this negative road of how pathetic you are. I don’t know, Gr. 12 got a lot better as I moved back with my dad and got in much better shape and actually wasn’t afraid to express myself in English and actually got above C-’s in class.  My dad was living with another woman who’s now my step-mother and her son, who served as a wonderful little brother for me.  I still was a shell hiding in my room at home, but at least I’d have someone in person to joke with instead of devoting it all to my best friend with whom I would throw my emotions up and down on the roller coaster of my mind.  The year went by fine, I played more basketball and soccer and football.   I wasn’t the best, but I was still good I guess My dad, cold as he can be, had no interest in taking care of me past school, so the day after I graduated I moved away to my mother, where I stayed for a few months before moving with my friend in Winnipeg.  I went thinking one, she’s the only good thing in my life so I’ll at least be happy there, and two, hey, most people online “overrate” them self so it can be hard to be attracted when there’s that doubt, maybe the in-person version of me is what she’s been missing out on and I can still make her love me! Naive, of course, but I lived there for a few months.  It was good, but unfortunately I just wasn’t able to get a job and frankly I don’t know how the fuck people figure it out at that young of an age where they just get good jobs or apply to all the right things for post-secondary.  I moved back to my mom’s place, but she had moved in with her then-boyfriend, so I lived in her house she owned as just like an actual tenant, alone in a basement suite.  Those were some very cathartic times, I had a job as a dishwasher with 4 days on 4 days off, 6 hour days, so it would just be me doing absolutely nothing for 4 days until I worked.  Art, or talking to my friend more, drawing a bunch and reading and stuff.  Forming an obsession with Depeche Mode and anime.   Anyways, after moving away from Winnipeg, you know, it was really clear she wasn’t ever going to love me, I mean, it was probably plenty clear objectively a long time ago, but to the blinded fool that is metaldragoon he still always had hope.  But you know, I tried my best, showed her everything I was, and all I would do is cry all the fucking time about it and be miserable so to me I just decided I can’t be friends with her, ‘cus this is killing me.  I don’t remember what I said, but basically just said I didn’t want to talk to her.  I feel cutting her out made everything grey in life, I honestly didn’t get sad anymore, sure I’d cry here and there, but for the most part I didn’t feel negative because I wasn’t trying and failing, but not trying didn’t bring much happiness either.  It was an interesting time in my life, maybe a couple years, where I just wanted to exist and do whatever I did with my life back then.  Playing old games. Eventually I moved out of my mom’s and in to my aunt’s, got a job and moved out there to a basement once again, and lived there for I guess about 6 years.  That’s when I got in to Tumblr, a nice grey place for my grey existence, mindlessly reblog and eventually I got in to GIF making and I got praise for work, even if it waesn’t really “praise” but let me tell you a fucking like or a reblog on a GIF is some real juice and I became pretty devoted to that.  I’d just come home from work, scroll through my entire dashboard, and watch anime just to make GIFs of it.  Fa’ years!  Eventually I started befriending fellow GIF-maker unit-02, dishing out hot GIF tips with her, but of course no one can dish hot GIF tips without getting to know eachother a little better.  Eventually we started really talking the way I hadn’t talked in a long time, and it really felt great to have someone like that in my life again, and it’s gone so much further than any kind of relationship I’ve ever had with anyone.  I told her once I’ve never felt like I was truly the single most important person to anyone before, and it’s true and really quite... I don’t know how to put it better than extremely lame, but, quite a good feeling. Anyways, that’s basically my life.  I wanted to explain all that just to kind of not find a good way to talk about what I wanted to.  Over the last four years, I’ve started working full-time, 40hr weeks.  I’m married now, for almost a full year, and doing okay in life.  I own a house that costs me a lot of money and I make more money than I was ever thinking I would.  But the problem is, work has robbed me of self-reflection, it takes up so much time, I just don’t have time to think of things, sad or otherwise.  I’m married now, I always have someone who wants to talk with me, so even on the free times I did have to think about things, there’s someone there “for me” which is, of course, good, but it prevents me from delving in to my true mind.  I just want more freedom in life again, and all that negative shit that comes with it, I want it back.

All the important years of my life I’ve been depressed, and it’s what makes me who I am.  I want happiness, but I want to be the real me, more.  A man of self-reflection and deep-thinking.  Instead I barely pay attention to conversations because I have too much other shit I have to deal with, and I don’t even have shit to deal with, but my mind is just melted or something with all the shit I have. For now I tell my self to keep grinding, and eventually I’ll have everything and I can stop and return to who I was, but that’s a lot of time and who knows if by then I’ll ever be able to recover who I was?

[deweyprada]

scales for eyes

Your rage has made the land that dare not be treaded on a river of waterlogged American dreams. 'Look at how strong we are,' we cried, 'how can we be moved from this rock?' In your frightening satire, you tore us from our foundation to show where our hopes were rooted all along. We believed in your blessings, but not in you. And when we stubbornly believed it to all be coincidence, you breathed your mighty violence at the belt we thought held us together; The belt that we trusted would save us. You declare in the anger of your eye we were no instrument of safety, no sanctuary of the few and faithful, but rather the proud and judgmental. We were no true reflection of you, just a damning multitude of Pharisaic hearts that yearned to hide our own wicked sins long enough to fool you. But you can be mocked no longer. Let your tears flood our cities. Let your breath strip us of our foundations. Rid us of our false security so we might finally beg for you. For we say we are rich, We say we have prospered, and need nothing, But we are in fact wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked. We are the whore, The Israel that treats your grace, your blessings, and you yourself as a prostitute. We use you when it's convenient and throw you away when we feel satisfied, all while we falsely pledge our hearts to you, and our nation under your guidance. Let us be destroyed, be it the fire of Hell from the depths of the core, the wrath of your tears or the fury in your eye that hails from your oceans. We deserve everything but your mercy, Because while your rage ruined the rest of this world we sat quiet. While your people were martyred in the jungles, underground, we continued to rebel. While your words were twisted and your face removed, we held the knife to your throat and slit it in the name of progression, in the name of freedom. 'God is dead!' we praised. And how we wished we were right. Crush our highest idols with your hands. Demolish our beloved possessions with your teeth. Castrate us, that we may be deprived of our unholiness. Sever us from the delusion we call reality, Erase us entirely, Because simply We hate you. And maybe in the time of our demise, In the last few seconds before our eradication, When we see your unhindered abhorrence, Maybe then we will be enticed to call on you For mercy For grace For repentance... But now? By no means. "I counsel you to buy from me gold refined by fire, so that you may be rich, And white garments So that you may clothe yourself And the shame of your nakedness may not be seen, And salve to anoint your eyes, So that you may see." God O God, Let us see. 09/05/17

[alexandriteobscuraarchive]

~Watch this mischievous Gelfling break something in Aughra's house, aha!

((You have a death wish concerning like….half of my muses lo l))

A hard, vise-like grip is quick to descend upon the rouge’s little hand and soon the Gelfling is yanked forward and her young—not to mention now tremendously frightened—face is brought horrendously close to the old hags’. She’d been caught red-handed.

“Think you break things, Gelfling!?” Aughra spat out, her angry words twisting out of broken mouth and disjointed teeth with ease. “You think to break things in Aughra’s house!? Hm?!”

The witch turns sharply and hauls the smaller one along with her with surprising strength towards the giant contraption eternally revolving in the center of the room. The Gelfling tried to protest, even tried to pull her slender hand free from the sharp, bony one that currently held it but to no avail. It seemed that it was too late to say sorry but now she wanted to anyways. She even went to, but one of the rotating spheres cracked into her shoulder with astonishing force and devolved her prepared words into a measly yelp. Aughra heard it and snorted, her solitary eye locked on whatever it was she was leading them towards.

“Hmph! Serves wretch Gelfling right! Crack head next time, hm!? Then no more ideas! No more thinking of breaking!” But despite her words when another orb made its way around again Aughra ducked smoothly—it was a motion that could even be considered beautiful, graceful even, if such descriptors could be applied to a creature such as she—and pulled her charge down with her. There’s a soft thump as the young one’s bottom connects with the cold stone floor and then her mouth is left agape as she watches the orb sail harmlessly over her head and away. That big old thing would’ve knocked her head off of her shoulders…wasn’t that what she’d just said she wanted?

Aughra wastes no time in advancing, resuming her dragging of the other and forcing her to get to her feet as fast as she can and muttering all the while.

“Fools! Sends Aughra a child. A worthless Gelfling, no brains!! Only a brain for trouble, pah! Bah!” Insistent yanks on the other’s arm punctuate these words until finally the large machine dominating nearly the whole of the room is a safe enough distance behind them—but only just enough. The Keeper eventually stops in front of a table and all but tosses the other onto a nearby wooden stool. The table is covered in smaller (but equally as strange) devices, illegible scribbles and carvings, bits and bobs and all sorts of things. A great number of these things seem to jump as Aughra brings out a rather hefty stick and whacks it on the table sending a pull of dust into the young Gelfling’s nose.

“Do! Not! Touch!” Each word in halting Gelfing—she had known their language for centuries upon centuries aye, was even considered a master of it—but trines of decay (not to mention the genocide of the Gelfling race aside from the pitiable thing sitting before her) had left her words slow to come to her lips. Aughra knew them very well but it took her a moment to form them with her mind and with her old, gnarled lips. To put it even more simply: if this one thought it fine to break such precious items wantonly they were rather stupid. “Touch and I throw you out window! Let Garthim eat you! Or I eat you! Bah!!”

With the threat delivered Aughra finally stamps away from the other and to an assortment of things nearby and begins rooting around. She grunts and mutters throughout leaving the Gelfling to watch her frazzled, gray mane of hair as it swishes over her hunched back. Digging for poison no doubt, or a larger stick to hit her with.Eventually—and much to the younger’s surprise—Aughra turns around and returns with a weathered tome which she promptly slaps onto the table in front of her and points to it with a bony finger.

“Gelfling read. Fill that head with useful things.” It was the closest she could come to something positive—a mere shade of the task which had been thrust upon her centuries old shoulders—a task she had failed once already. One that she hadn’t forgotten and had, perhaps, even begrudgingly held onto. And for what? Guilt? Acceptance? A primal need for redemption? What were those things with the whole of Thra at stake? How many Gelfling had there been just like this one those centuries past? Young and innocent and so blind to the world around them and its perils? Aughra couldn’t remember. Only that there were many. So it was a step, a least, as small as it was.

“Read!” She insisted, her tone losing what mote of kindness it’d had and becoming impatient.

[mellicose]

a clever man’s Lady

Although I am not able to go, I’ve been keeping abreast of the reviews of Marber’s production of Don Juan in Soho, and I’m puzzled. Even the dedicated DT fans of Tumblr have given it mixed reviews.

The play paints DJ as haveable but unattainable, supremely fuckable in every position. I won’t fault him for that. It happens, Some people are born with swag, and they ain’t afraid to use it.

His wife is painted into backdrop of the play, a woman who anyone with any compassion would, nay, should feel sorry for.

Of all the things to upset me in the text, that’s what does it.

She knows the beast she let into her bedroom. Could she possibly have been surprised when he craved fresh meat?

I’m thinking… no.

She’s painted a pitiable figure, when in the text she puts up with his caddishness because she feels she has reached the heights of physical pleasure with him: “He has spun me from fear to ferocity.”

Shrinking violets don’t speak like that. Not even after a good fuck or ten.

That innocent girl, pure and sweet and inexperienced - she wanted to be ripped apart by that whirlwind. Enough to say yes to his fervent yet obviously disingenuous pleas for marriage, to pretend she believed him when he declared that he would cleanse himself of the filth of a lifetime between her pristine thighs-

[this is what I imagine such a seasoned cad would say to a girl he thought a fool.]

I imagine her blushing, pushing him away as he caressed her when her chaperones weren’t looking, but flourishing under the intense, carnal gleam in his eye.

It wasn’t modesty made her flush. It was lust. But he was too blinded by his own brilliance to see.

She tempted him to the altar, to claim love and fidelity before a God he didn’t believe in, just to deflower her.

Who seduced who?

He took off her virginal garments only to expose ruddy, heated flesh. She didn’t smell of flowers, but of musk. She was slick and ready, even as she knelt in front of the priest surrounded by her family. She knew, and she didn’t care.

She was willing to fuck with her own reputation for a taste of him, knowing she had leeway because her brothers would defend her honor. And she thought it worth it, because even after he followed his nature and went off to taste new flesh, she still waited for him to come home, be smart and try her again, now that he had opened her up. What kind of woman was she, now that she was both emotionally and physically unchained?

It wasn’t explored.

So, who was the fool, really?

Who truly deserves pity?

How strange it would be the reprehensible DJ, the inveterate seducer, who was seduced by an unimportant virgin who, in this play, is the harbinger of his doom.

Who has the real power?

Think really hard.

A man who openly admitted that the most frightening word in the dictionary is ‘wife’, is now married.

Let’s be honest - he most probably did his fair share of deflowering outside of the auspices of matrimony. And I’m sure both the rich and the poor were burned by him, but he married this silly girl that is barely a blip in the text.

Only for the pussy, which he gets, in abundance.

Hmmm. [thinking man .jpg]

I know that Marber followed the text of the original pretty faithfully, and it’s a pity he did because he couldn’t mined a seam of purest gold by delving more into her.

It would’ve given the play substance, and balance.

DJ was a dog, who married a wolf, who didn’t have to dirty her own haunches to tear him to pieces for being a goddamned fool.

Now that’s a fucking story.

But, of course, we women are not complex, obvs. It only matters that we are quiet, and willing. Flesh is the most we have to offer, no? How authentic to the time period in which the play was written.

Men who think like that are missing out on a rich, exciting, sometimes frightening spectrum of female passion. Those are the ones who think us boring, yet they’re the close-minded, cowardly bores.

And it seems audiences are forced to watch a whole play about him.

Boo.

Photo: Helen Maybanks

[hak-7]

Finish the Job

A Message Of Concern

The Merciful Benefactor, The Merciful Redeemer

Out of Respect for Man’s Creator

A Message of Concern

By Imam W. Deen Mohammed 1982,

What would happen if people would sit in churches throughout the world for centuries with the image of an African American man as savior of the world before them?

What would this do to the mind of the world’s children?

What would happen to the world’s children put under a figure of a particular race presented, pitiable, and in pain “the Savior of all men”?

Qur’an, Surah 3, verse 64:

“Say, Oh people of the Book! Come to common terms as between us and you: that we worship none but G-d, that we associate no partner with Him, that we erect not from among ourselves lords and patrons other than G-d. If then they turn back, say ye ‘bear witness that we (at least) are Muslims (bowing to G-d’s Will).’”

Civilized nations should want that their religions be also civilized.

False worship is the worst form of oppression. We are no gods. We are only men, “mortals from the mortals, He (Allah) created.” (Qur’an)Happy Fathers Day weekend brother !

God bless all you do as a father! Send to all the great fathers you know !THE RED SEA

It's Parting

It is reported that God assigned Aaron as a helper to Moses because Moses felt that he could not express himself clearly. Before Moses went to Pharaoh, the Qur'an says, he and Aaron felt a sense of fear. "They (Moses and Aaron) said: Our Lord! We fear lest He hastens with insolence against us or lest he transgresses all bounds." In response, ALLAH not only told them not to fear Pharaoh and his hosts, but He instructed them on how to speak to Pharaoh. ALLAH said, "Fear not for I am with you: I hear and see (everything) ... But speak to him mildly, perchance he may take warning or fear ALLAH" (H.Q. 20:44-46).

Let us understand that Moses was going to debate with the ruler of the greatest nation of that time. He along with Aaron was assigned to debate with the wisest people around. Moses had no army, he had no weapons. Pharaoh had an army, educational institutions, highly skilled and astute doctors of law; mathematicians, philosophers. Moses had to go up against a man who thought he was God. Moses had to confront the very people who built the great pyramids of Gizah, Masters of the physical and human sciences. Moses knew how Pharaoh and his people were; he was raised in Egypt, in the house of Pharaoh. Reflect! Think! Can you imagine what Moses must have felt? Imam W. Deen Muhammad stated in Dallas, Texas (1982)

" .... They (Egyptians) had one of the most elaborate religious orders that history has recorded. We are not talking about savage man. We are not talking about barbaric man. We are talking about an ancient kingdom that knew science, knew medicine, knew chemistry, knew physics. We are talking about the ancient kingdom that made the first dust pan, that made the first broom, that made the first modern furniture. Some of the modern furniture today does not look any more modern than the furniture that they have in the museum of Cairo, Egypt, (furniture) that those people made three and four thousand years ago .... So we are not talking about a shabby society, a shabby nation. We are talking about an advanced, well established nation; a nation that boasted in its material accomplishments, in its industry. A nation that boasted in its sciences, a nation from which we trace our own science which we call psychology."

According to the story, Moses went to Pharaoh and delivered the message. Pharaoh in turn became'very arrogant and said, "Who is the Lord, that I should obey his voice to let Israel go? I knew not the Lord, neither will I let Israel go." (Exodus 5: 2).

It is reported that Pharaoh made his slaves make bricks from straw and mud, which means that they had to develop or arrive at solid, biological, concrete truth, from hollow, unbalanced and unstabled concepts. The Qur'an says that Pharaoh became so arrogant and conceited until he told his builders to erect him a tower because he wanted to go up into the heaven and find the mystery God. "And Pharaoh said: 0 Chiefs! I know not that ye have a God other than me, so kindle for me (a fire) 0 Haman, to bake the mud; and set up for me a lofty tower in order that I may survey the God of Moses; and Lo! I deem him of the liars" (28:38). Pharaoh thought he was God in the flesh. He thought he was the owner, the maker, the cream of the planet earth, God of the universe. Pharaoh said to Moses, " .. .I consider thee, indeed to have been worked upon by sorcery!" "Then he (Pharaoh) collected his men and made a proclamation, saying "I am your Lord, Most High ." (H.Q.79: 23,24).

After Moses showed Pharaoh some of the knowledge he had received from God, Pharaoh claimed that Moses was well versed in magic and he said, "If indeed thou hast come with a sign, show it forth--if thou tellest the truth." Then (Moses) threw his rod, and behold! it was serpent plain (for all to see)! And he drew out his hand, and behold! It was white to all beholders! Said the Chiefs of the people of Pharaoh: "This is indeed a sorcerer well-versed." (H.Q.7:106-109).

It is further reported that Pharaoh sought advise and consultation (that is a sign of a wise man, not a fool). He said, "His (Moses') plan is to get you out of your land: then what is it ye counsel?" They said: "Keep him and his brother in suspense (for a while); and send to the cities men to collect--and bring up to thee all (our) sorcerers well-versed." (H.Q.7:110-112).

The story goes on to say that Moses and Aaron met in the court of Pharaoh's Kingdom. It is reported that Pharaoh had promised his Magicians, socerers, philosophers, wizards, etc. a better and closer place to him in the kingdom if they defeated him. In other words, instead of being in the fields they would be allowed in the house. Before the debate began the question was asked, "who shall go first?" Moses said: "ye be the first to go." So when Pharaoh's men threw their rods down, they began to move like serpents, too. When Aaron threw Moses' rod down it consumed Pharaoh's men's rods. The point here is that there was a strategy used by Moses: he allowed them to show off their knowledge first, and then he showed that the knowledge that he got from the Creator was superior. It has often been asked, "what was the debate concerning, knowledge of what?" An analysis of this event will reveal that they threw the rods down on the earth, which implies that it had to do with the material sciences, or the human sciences, as opposed to the spiritual sciences. A serpent moves on the earth. The Bible tells us that later he raised the rod to the sky or heaven; but in this particular event they cast it on the earth.

The Bible relays the event in these words: "And Moses and Aaron went in unto Pharaoh, and they did so as the lord had commanded: And Aaron cast down his rod before Pharaoh, and before his servants, and it became a serpent. Then Pharaoh also called the wise men, and the sorcerers: now the magicians of Egypt, they also did in like manner with their enchantments. For thy cast down every man his rod, and they become serpents,: but Aaron's rod swallowed up their rods." (Exodus 7: 10-12).

The Holy Qur'an explains: "So the sorcerers were got together for the appointment of a day well-known, and the people were told: "Are ye (now) assembled? - That we may follow the sorcerers (in religion) if they win?" So when the sorcerers arrived, they said to Pharaoh: "Of course - shall we have a (suitable) reward if we win? He said: "Yea, (and more), --for ye shall in that case be (raised to posts) nearest (to my person)." Moses said to them: "Throw ye - that which ye are about the throw!" So they threw their ropes and their rods, and said: "By the might of Pharaoh, it is we who will certainly win!" Then Moses threw his rod, when, behold it straightway swallows up all the falsehoods which they fake! Then did the sorcerers fall down prostrate in adoration, saying: "We believe in the Lord of the Worlds. The Lord of Moses and Aaron." (26:38-48).

According to the Scriptures Moses and his people eventually left Egypt and wandered in the wilderness in search of the promised land. Pharaoh and his army with chariots and horses had pursued them up to the Red Sea, where Moses raised his rod to the heaven and then pointed down to the water causing it to part for Moses and his people.

SYMBOLIC MEANING OF PARTING OF THE RED SEA

The Scripture says Pharaoh's army drowned in the red sea.

Symbolically the chariot represents a principle or method of controlling human drives and behavior (horses). The horses repre­sent human drives, human motivations and human behavior that are blind. Blinders are put over horses' eyes. Pharaoh was pursuing Moses and his people with human science, he was trying to control their behavior, their human drives and aspirations. Moses' raising the rod to heaven and stretching his hand over the red sea, refers to the great blessing that he received from on high. Raising the rod means that he was using the higher knowledge that he received from ALLAH (God) near the burning bush. Stretching out his hand over the red sea means he passed that knowledge on, he didn't keep it secret. He appealed to the people with higher knowledge of God.

According to Scripture Pharaoh had a small concept of the Creator. He thought he was God. Moses appealed to the red sea(the masses). Red symbolizes anger, activity and life. Blood is red and it is the life of the body. The sea or water alludes to morality and communication. Therefore, red sea symbolizes active, expressive moral life. Moses communicated to these morally active people and they allowed Moses and his people to walk across on dry ground, solid foundation. It is further reported that Pharaoh's army, because they did not have the higher knowledge, were drawn or overtaken by the people. Pharaoh's concept of God and human behavior could not be universally applied. It was too narrow. It was good for Egypt and some surrounding cities, but it was not accepted universally. It was part truth, not whole truth. Modern man should take a lesson from this great event. As long as the leaders of this world try to appeal to the world of man with narrow, extreme nationalist ideas they stand to be toppled. The universal appeal, respect for the Creator, high principles, and human worth can be accepted by all men.

Imam Mustafa El AminA BLACK & WHITE SKIN COLOR WAR

Seeing Black and White skin " knocks you out ."

A lecture with a lesson many need to heed, in 2020. Why ? There is a major attempt to manipulate African Americans into a Black, White skin color war !

Imam WD Mohammed Ramadan Session 2007 ( Just Seeing Black and White Skin Hurts Your Vision ) " Many of them did not even enjoy them because their mind was too small. Their brain was too much like a black-eyed pea. If you get a black eye it means some damage has come here. The blow came to close to the eye or came to the eye. Right? It is not Mohammad Ali. He did not throw that punch. You hit yourself with your ignorant controls. You blackened your own eye. Mr. Fard said don't eat black-eyed peas. I'm eating black-eyed peas. I love them. They taste good.Someone may say, "He's bragging that he does not follow the Nation of Islam's teacher." Yes, I do follow the Nation of Islam's teacher. It is to lead me beyond a black-eyed pea that you buy in a grocery store and see the black-eyed pea in the mind of the black man where his brain has turned out to be nothing but a little black-eyed pea. All his mind is black and white, the black man and the white man. He is nothing but a black-eyed pea in the brain and it hurts his vision. He has had a terrible blow. Now Mr. Fard did not tell you the extent of that black-eye we have. It is so bad it is like we got hit first by Sonny Listen, then by Joe Frazier, then by Muhammad Ali, and the members of the Nation of Islam.

First Posted By Mohammed HassanALL FROM FATHER ADAM

Allah says, in the Quran, that you all are descendants from Adam, and Adam was made from dust. What is Allah telling us this for? To let us know that no man, no race, no ethnic group has any grounds for boasting of a superiority over another. Maybe I could trace my history back to the great history or to the great life of Sinmutsin, the great architect, the great builder who built pyramids for Hatshepsut, the Egyptian queen in ancient Egypt, Maybe I can trace my history — my ancestry back to Mina, the great Pharaoh that started the pyramid building.

The first Bilalian (one of African descent) mentioned in American history is in the late centuries of the Egyptian dynasty. But, the Egyptians themselves say that Mina, the father of pyramid building, was a Bilalian. Why shouldn't he be? Isn't that the continent of Bilalian people? Why shouldn't he have been a Bilalian?

Dear beloved people, the Holy Quran lets us know that we're foolish trying to trace some superiority back in time. You might run into some greatness and superiority, but keep tracing and you're going to run into your inferiority, God shows us, He doesn't tell us. God never gives us the whole history of our existence to let us know how human beings came into existence. He shows us every time a child is born. That baby is born from a thick water—again, the teachings of the Quran— and from the matter that is in the ovaries of the mother. They come together and the baby begins to gradually evolve into human form. He takes on the physical human form in the womb of his mother. But he doesn't become a thinking, growing intelligent being until he's delivered out of his mother into the world of physical messages from God's physical environment and comes under the guidance of his mother and his father, and sisters and brothers of his community.

So, you want to know how you came about? God is showing you every time a baby is born. You want to see your origin? Look at the sperm, and if you can, look at the ovum. You'll find out where you came from.

How should we deal with the question of racism? Deal with it the same way we have to deal with the Bible—with a rational mind. Approach it rationally and scientifically. Treat it with knowledge, not with emotionalism, and explain it so that a child could understand his blackness if he's black or his whiteness if he's white. That's how we have to deal with it.

COLOR: SUPERIOR/INFERIOR?

In our textbooks now, we're trying to get rid of the racist feelings, or prevent racist feelings from coming into the children, by showing Bilalian and Caucasian children living together in peace, working in peace, and playing in peace. Will that do the job? No. Why? Because that's a picture of some people living together. If the racism is in the public that child is going to grow up to see that the book is a contradiction and not the reality. They go to school and the nice pictures are there. The child goes back home and hears the mother saying: "I hate them, honkeys, I hate them white pigs," and the little Caucasian child perhaps hears his old bigoted mother saying: "What they should do is send those niggers back to Africa; or enslave them all again." What effect can the book have when the real world is full of racism? No effect. And you can't change people by simply creating a picture of what you want.

The way to change it is to teach the people to follow truth, to obey truth, to respect truth and follow it. Teach them to interpret and understand problems of racism as a doctor of anthropology would understand it. The facts that speak to racism from anthropology, from our sciences, are not above the heads of the elementary child, or the high school student. We have to design textbooks that deal with racism in a scientific way. We have to tell children at a very early age the truth about the origin of their color, the texture of their hair, their features and everything. You might say, well, do we know anything about that? Yes, we do. Get a good book on anthropology. Study physiology, and you'll see that a lot of these explanations are given in the books that we have presently.

We know that the sun is the painter that paints the color of creation. The sun gives color to the flowers, to the plants, to the animals, even to stones, and the sun has given us our color. Your whole make-up-how you look, your colors, your features, the texture of your hair, and your skin, everything—is determined by your physical environment. What you eat, what you drink, the climate where you live, the temperature; the dryness of the air or the humidity in the air; the cold and the heat, the intensity of the sun—all of these things form color and shape, plus language.

Even your language gives shape or gives features to your face. If you speak a language that's greatly different, then you're going to look different even though you have the same climate. Everything else can be the same, but if the language is greatly different, then the people in time would have different features because the habit of using your mouth in a certain way is going to make your mouth grow in a certain way.

If you live in a hot climate that is humid, the volume of air, the unit of air has less oxygen in it than the same unit of air in a cold climate that is not as humid. The humidity takes up the space in the air, and the heat expands the molecules of air, and makes the volume have less oxygen in it. In a cold climate the air is condensed, and if it's dry too there is much more oxygen in the same volume of air.

So, the people who come from the tropics— from the humid and hot parts of what we call Africa and the whole tropical belt going around the earth —find those people in that zone and study their features. I've done it. I find that they have broad noses. The Filipinos, many of the Asiatics, Aborigines, and the Africans—broad noses. Occasionally, you will find a Caucasian with a broad nose.

But you'll find many of those people living in the hot and humid climates—the tropical belt—with broad noses. Why? They need a big opening to get enough air. You're hot, you need more air. The air is expanded so you need more volume. The humidity is in it, you'll need more volume. So, your nose, in time...don't think it will happen in one lifetime, but over a period of about a half-million years it can turn a razor sharp Caucasian nose into an Isaac Hayes nose.

All of this talk—"I'm a black man, he's a white man." What are you talking about? What kind of mind do you have? You might be a black man with a boy's mind, or a Caucasian, with a boy's mind, right? Or a dog's mind. That's nothing to brag about. And if I would take a sharp razor and hit your black skin real fast and hard with it, you'll see that you're a white nigger. That's right. If I hit you real hard and fast with a sharp razor and lay that meat open, you'll see white. Is that right? I've seen it happen. Not a razor, but I've seen a black person—more than one, I saw one get a bad wound, a quick wound, and the skin was—the meat was—white. So, he's a white man under that skin.

Imam W.D. Mohammed (raa)Wakiyl "TRUSTED FRIEND"( وَكِيۡلًا‏ )

رَبُّ الۡمَشۡرِقِ وَالۡمَغۡرِبِ لَاۤ اِلٰهَ اِلَّا هُوَ فَاتَّخِذۡهُ وَكِيۡلًا‏



(73:9) He is the Lord of the East and the West; there is no god but He. So take Him alone for your Guardian.

Wakil is a person in whom one has complete faith; so much so that one can entrust all his affairs to him with full satisfaction of the heart. Thus, the verse means: Do not feel distressed at the hardships that you are experiencing at the storm of opposition that has been provoked by your invitation to the faith.

Your Lord is He Who is the Owner of the East and the West, (of the whole universe) besides Whom no one else possesses the powers of Godhead. Entrust your affair to Him and be satisfied that He will fight your case, He will deal with your opponents, and He will look after all your interests well.

رَّبُّ

(The) Lord

ٱلْمَشْرِقِ

(of) the east

وَٱلْمَغْرِبِ

and the west;

لَآ

(there is) no

إِلَـٰهَ

god

إِلَّا

except

هُوَ

Him,

فَٱتَّخِذْهُ

so take Him

وَكِيلاً

(as) Disposer of Affairs.THE MEANING OF AR-RAHMAN

By Imam W. Deen Mohammed

(Editor's note: The following is excerpted from a Ta'lim lecture delivered December 15 in Chicago by Imam Muhammad.

Now we come to the names that are given in Qur'an that belong to Allah. The Qur'an says, "La-illaha-illalah, there is no God except Allah." and the Qur'an gives us names that belong to Allah. And the first one Ar-Rahman is given. Ar-Rahmanu means the Gracious. It's translated in different ways in English. Some translations say 'the Gracious,' some say, 'the kind.' If you look up 'kind' in the dictionary it doesn't only mean nice, it also means generous. So, 'kind' and 'generous.' the combination, means niceness and generosity, goodness and generosity.

Some translations have given it as 'beneficent,' which means 'befitting' out of His kindness and grace. That's correct, too. All of these English terms are correct. But understand that the term 'Rahman' means to show mercy. So whatever God does that's good to us is a help to us, is kindness to us, out of His graces. It comes from His mercy.

He's a merciful God. He doesn't like to see His Creatures suffer. He doesn't like to see His creatures experience bad times, and misery, so it is His way to extend mercy to them. He is Ar-Rahman.

THE NEXT NAME THAT is given is Ar-Raheem. These are the two most often repeated names in the Holy Qur'an. In fact; every chapter except the 9th Chapter begins like that.

Bismillah, With the Name of God. Ar-Rahman. Ar-Raheem. the Gracious, the Compassionate, or the Gracious, the Merciful, the Beneficent, the Merciful.

As I have explained, there are different English words and they all can be suitable for the names Ar-Rahman and Ar-Raheem. Ar-Raheem is translated as the Merciful, but some Arabs have translated it to mercy-giving. I hope with a few comments on this name I will be able to make clear to you why some of them feel that to say "the Merciful," is not good enough.

'Ra-hi-mah.' means to show mercy, or give mercy. And this word, 'ar-Rah-ma-nu.' means the one who gives out of His gracious gift, from His bounty, from His great and unlimited resources to His creatures, and He does it out of mercy.

AR-RAHEEM too, has a connection with this word: both have connection with this word.

THIS CONCEPT of God comes from the understanding that before the creature became conscious of its needs. God had already been merciful and kind to that creature.

The baby is in the womb of his or her mother for nine months. We don't believe that it's conscious of its needs. But look at the nice situation that God has put that baby in. It slept on a waterbed before we did. That's a nice situation for that baby. It's shockproof, so if anybody punched the mother's stomach, the water bag cushions it, right? Yes. So we believe that God, before we are even aware that we need something, has already been generous and kind to us.

We come into this world, and we say, 'oh, I'm poor. But it is you who's poor. The world is not poor, the world is rich.

Why are you poor? Either because you are not yet-aware, or you're not yet ready to change your situation and go after the riches, or there are overwhelming forces that are keeping you away from it.

BUT THE world is not poor, God is generous! He has filled the world with all that is rich, more than we can see, more than we consume.

God has already put it here. So He is Gracious. He is Gracious. Ar-Rahmanu, out of His mercy. He is Gracious. Then, Ar-Raheemu. The condition comes now, and God has provided, but His creatures can't see it. Then He comes and makes a way for His creatures to get it against those barriers, odds or obstructions. He comes and opens the way so he can get it. That's the ar-Rahman, ar-Raheem.THE ROBE

Lost Knowledge

Now, let’s continue here. What is the robe symbolic of? Do you recall? Symbolic of the way you use the knowledge, the dress, symbolic of the way you use the knowledge. The sheet is the knowledge, the pages, the script.Remember now, when Jesus was crucified, he lost his robe and they gambled to see who would possess his robe. Now if you understand the meaning of robe, then you should understand that this world doesn’t have the true knowledge, the true use of the knowledge that Jesus gave them.

The knowledge was lost from Jesus’ body and it fell in the hands of crooked sinners. They gambled for it. Not only that, the silver cup, the special cup, it was lost too. Which tells us not only the proper use of the knowledge was lost, but also the moral cleanliness was lost from the religion.Silver chalice I think they call it. Is that what they call it? I think it is called Silver chalice. It was lost from Christianity. So how would they explain this? Ask the preacher next Sunday morning at 11 o’clock. Ask him. Say preacher; please tell me what it means in Christianity when they say that they lost the Silver chalice, the silver cup. Ask the preacher, how they can have the shroud of Jesus, in this city that is called Turin.

When the Bible says that his robe fell into the hands of sinners and they gambled to see who would possess it. So how can they have his robe there? If they have it, sinners gave it to them and if the sinners gave it up, it wasn’t fit to wear. That’s right. That robe wasn’t fit to wear. After it fell into the hands of sinners, who would want to wear it?

What is sweeter than honey?

Let’s continue now, it says he gave them another riddle. And this riddle is: “What is sweeter than honey?” And “What is stronger than a lion?”So he gave two riddles. In fact four parts to it.Second one is, “What is sweeter than honey?What is stronger than a lion?” All right. You know honey means the beauty of pure scripture. How do we know this? We know it because in the Qur’an this word is used. Honey is a good word for scripture. The honey is the essence of the flower and flowers are symbolic of beautiful culture.What is sweeter than the beauty that G-d offers you? What is sweeter than the sweetness that you find in G-d’s pure scripture? That’s what he’s telling them. And what is stronger than a lion? What he’s telling them is that, the east has honey.

They have the beauty of G-d’s revelation. And you have the strength of a lion. I’ve got something that makes you stronger, and I’ve got something to give you to make your doctrine sweeter than their honey.You see this thing? Yes, it’s plain. So he gave them, the Gentile world, the doctrine of love, the love of Christ that was sweeter than the moral and spiritual teachings to weak people, than the pure teachings of the Prophet. It’s sweeter to them … that G-d loves you sinners so much, that he gave his only begotten son, that he should be scorned, mocked, spat on, tortured, crucified, and die and be buried for your sins. Oh that’s sweet to ignorant weak people, sweeter than the truth of G-d’s scripture. So he said what is sweeter than honey? This lie I am going to give you is sweeter than the pure honey of Scripture that the east has.

Cheated Samson out of his heifer

And what is stronger than a lion? This subtle psychology…. (indiscernible) and he himself was going to destroy the Philistines. They have cheated him out of his heifer; I am talking about right now!The Christian Church that he thought would be his heifer betrayed him. Say oh, you can have business, you can have media, you can have this, but you are not going to run our churches. The Gentile doesn’t want any Jews over their churches. If you want to have something, you can have Peter. Go and tutor the Pope in secrecy. He’ll accept it. But these ordinary Gentiles are not going to accept that no Jew rule over them.So you mean to tell me you are not going to give me my heifer? So why don’t you, can’t you all do it through me, can’t you all carry out my orders?No we can’t do it. They are not going to listen to it. Well very good. Well then can I tell you what kind of doctrine you should give to the masses that won’t follow Peter?Yes it’s okay. All right. I’m going to make bread again. I’m going to get on a wheel. I’m going to make Marxism. I’m going to make Communism.I’m going to make the Age of Reason. I’m going to exalt logic. I’ll give them some new flour, is that okay? Well that’s okay. As long as you don’t take over the church. No, I won’t bother the church. Okay. Go on to the wheel again. It’s okay.

Bring society down on me and them

Now listen. After all that he still was not satisfied. Is that right? Yeah look at the story now, remember, he still is not satisfied. So he said, “I am blind, but I got something that they don’t know I’ve got. I got special power, in my arms.” “All I want to do is just have somebody show me to the pillars of the foundation of their society. And if I just can get to the two pillars that hold up the structure of their society, I’m going to bring it down on me and them.”So Samson goes and stands between the two pillars with the help of a little boy. He couldn’t see but he used the help of a little boy. What is the help of that little boy? Psychology. Psychology.

Don’t think it’s another person; he’s not even a person. Persons carry it out, but he’s a knowledge body. Then he goes and he used a little boy, psychology. Don’t human beings use psychology before they use intelligence?That’s why in psychology in this particular context it’s called a little boy. Your little children, before they are able to compete with you on an intelligence plane, they already using psychology on you. So psychology is an early development in the human being. That’s why the Jahcubite’s cousin, Fard Muhammad said Yakub conceived his idea at the age 6, as a little boy, a psychology. He’ll be surprised to know that I know that. I hope he gets this. I understand that he’s back home now. So he’ll get this message, Insha ‘Allah. Now, let me continue. With the help of psychology, he finds his way to the foundations of the new society. And when he gets to the foundation, what does he do? He forms a cross of himself and he begins pressing with all his might. That’s what the Scripture says. Said he pressed with all his might, with all his strength on the pillars, forming of himself a cross. What does this mean? This is more than Trinitarianism, this is the psychology of the mentality that Trinitarianism has produced.

Weaknesses in the mentality that trinitarianism has produced

He has now learned that there are certain weaknesses in the mentality that Trinitarianism has produced. And he knows that he can appeal to their emotions, and he can push in two directions at the same time.He didn’t pull the pillars, he pushed. He can push in opposite directions at the same time. Make one people give in to emotions, and the other people give in to logic. Push them. So that some will become highly emotional and some will become highly logical.And in doing this the logic will act against the emotions, and emotions will act against the logic. The emotional makeup will kill the logic, the logic will offend the emotions, the society will be divided against itself and the pillars will fall. Don’t you know that’s a strategy that is used in this Society? Whenever the hidden evil in the structure is about to be exposed they began firing the society with emotion, sentiment, flower children, love for everybody, crazy kind of sentimentality and emotionalism. They fire it up and build up strong emotions, this is depressing. Now when he does it it’s going to drop the whole thing. If he can be successful and bring in the sentimental and emotional elements against the logic, it’s going to destroy the whole thing.But look, he will certainly, he will be killed, as a knowledge body. He was already blind wasn’t he? What the hell has he lost? Nothing. Once he brings it down, he would start up all over again. Do, ra, mi, fa, sol, la, ti.

By the Grace of G-d, through IWDM, America was not destroyedJust in a few years that have passed us dear people, that scheme has tried to destroy America. But by the grace of G-d, through me, America was not destroyed. Why do I say through me? Because I was the only one that came out when the trend was to go in the form of the cross. When the trend was to become emotional, highly emotional and give one side to dry logic, I came up in the middle of that action and said there is a scheme going on, there is a trick going on.This whole thing is designed to fire up your sentiments, your emotions and topple the society. Somebody must have heard me and believed others who had been talking before I started, and all of it came together to save America. Yes.

See they didn’t believe others who were saying, there is a scheme, there is a hidden scheme. But when I began to speak, they say look, now we know this boy, we’ve been watching this boy since his father raised him up. We know that this boy is not a tool of outside influence. So if he says these things that ring a bell, where did he get it from? We believe maybe G-d is inspiring Wallace D. Mohammed. So they went back to the desk. And they begin to pull out things from the old file and they studied history all over again. And they said that Wallace D. Mohammed is an inspired man, he sees something. And what he is saying is what we’ve heard before. It might be something to it. How else could he get it?

Simple Simon met a pie man on the way to the square

Say oh no, let’s check this thing. Let’s check this thing. Said I’m sorry, you can’t get sixpence today, only one. Sorry, we aren’t buying pies today. We’re buying cakes. You heard that old story of Simple Simon … Simple Simon met a pie man on the way to the square. I think it goes,” … said Simple Simon to the pie man, would you have a sixpence to spare?” And I think he said, “If I was selling sixpence, I wouldn’t be selling pies!” Well, that’s another one of the conspirators’ riddles. And I will tell you what it means. Sixpence means the knowledge behind the scheme. It’s said the man was made on the 6th day. The sixpence is the knowledge behind the scheme. Simon was given seven (7), not six (6). He couldn’t see 6, six (6) was ruling seven (7). But he wanted the six (6).What is the secret in this? Will you tell me please, Mr. Pie man? You know what Pi is? 3.1416, I think it is. It’s a formula for finding the circumference of the earth. It’s a formula for world dominance. Now I’m not saying anything that I didn’t want to say, I know it’s a formula for finding the circumference of a circle. It’s a formula for world dominance.

If I was selling my own secrets you think I’d be selling pies And Peter, the Catholic Church wanted it. But the conspirator wouldn’t give it to them. Said if I was selling my own secrets you think I’d be selling pies? You think I’d be telling you how to get the world, if I was selling the secret to how to get it.I’ll just tell you how to get it; I’m not going to tell you my secret. You get it from me. Yes. All Peter got was some magic beans; he did manage to get those didn’t he? You remember that riddle? Nursery rhyme, whatever you want to call it. Jack and the beanstalk. Yeah. He had Jack, which is nothing again but Peter, or the Western society. Pardon me, I shouldn’t say Peter, not Peter, Jack is not the Catholic Church, it’s the Western society, Protestant society. Catholic Church headquarters is in Rome. This is typical American. Jack is talking about typical America. That’s why we call each other Jack. You know, hey jack, what’s happening Jack?

Yes, so, it was Peter, the Pope who asked them for his sixpence. But Jack, the American Christian society, they asked for magic beans. Well really they didn’t know what to ask for. All they wanted was really to be rescued, because their cow had got so lean, it was about to die.Everything was going bad. And they wanted to know how to bring back life. How can my cows get fat again? How can the society thrive again?So, while they were (wandering) wondering, this funny looking thing jumped out in the road. And he made himself visible and he said, “Magic beans want to buy some magic beans, like to buy some magic beans?” And Jack agreed to give his cow up for the magic beans. I’m showing you that this is not only in Scripture. If it is only in Scripture that means that what I’m talking about may not be existing in the world today. Or maybe it was just a story that was only in Scripture, maybe it was just fiction. But if it’s in the world too, we should listen.

What do the magic beans represent?

Now. Says this little funny thing, man, jumped out, and he talked Jack into giving up his cow for these magic beans. Right. Some of you remember it. He went away with his cow. What do the magic beans represent? A way to, again, to the secret knowledge in Christian religion. A way to the secret knowledge in Christian religion.And dumb Protestant society gave up their lean cow for this heavenly knowledge. What is the lean cow? The lean cow represents what they had before. What did they have before? They had rational growth. The Protestant movement began with an interest in rational growth. Is that right? Yes.

Our knowledge is weak, our cow is lean

They wanted to pursue knowledge. The Catholic Church had suppressed enlightenment, had suppressed education. The people weren’t allowed to learn. The masses couldn’t learn and educate themselves. So a thirst for knowledge came with Martin Luther. Right. And they began to want knowledge to develop their minds.Here comes Jake, Jack pardon me, feeling himself desperately in need of help. We have the interest in rational development of our society, but our knowledge is weak, our cow is lean. We haven’t yet produced anything. We need help. Who would help us?Oh Lord Jesus, help us. We got this logic. But Rome is powerful. We got this logic and Rome is powerful. G-d help us please! Ding, ding. Jahcubite conspirator. I will help you! Would you like to have some magic beans? If I give you my magic beans you’ll have to give me your lean cow. In effect he was saying the same thing that Samson said. I’m going to give you a new world, but you’re going to have to give me the one that you got now. And if you give him the one you got now, when it becomes fat, who does it belong to? Belong to him. He got it. He got it in exchange for the magic beans.

Over the heavenly kingdom was a mean old giant

So he (Jack) went home and planted. Went home and he didn’t know the value of them right? But I think accidentally one fell into the ground right? The thing grew up and it went up, up, up. He saw it going up past his window, he ran out and jumped on it, and the thing took him up into heaven. (It) took him up on the plane of clouds, into a castle that was in the clouds. Right. Yes.There he found a nice old woman that befriended him. But over that heavenly kingdom was a mean old giant. That right? Yes. He said fee, fi, fo, fom, I smell the blood of an Englishman, be he live or be he dead; I’ll grind his bones with my bread. With my bread. Remember bread is of two kinds. Leaven and unleavened. I’ll grind his bones with my bread.So, he managed to escape with the help of this woman up there, old woman who was nice. He managed to escape. Who is the old woman who was nice? Means people in the religious knowledge of the secrets of religion that weren’t corrupt. Didn’t have no evil designs on the world like the conspirators. They shared with him after he got up there. They shared with him some knowledge. Helped him to get the golden knowledge down from heaven.

The Golden knowledge it came from the hen right? The hen who laid golden eggs. But the hen couldn’t lay any golden eggs without music playing. When music played the hen would lay the eggs. The music stopped, the hen stop laying the golden eggs. Which means that the wisdom is tied to music? Do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti, do. Do, ra, mi, fa, sol, la, ti, do. Now when he got the musical scheme, he came back down with the hen and the music harp plus the knowledge, and he tied them together, then he had wisdom.He had wisdom to bring back down with the hen, and the music harp right, according to the story. From heaven, he brought back with him, they don’t say heaven, but it is the heaven of religious symbolism — Biblical symbolism. He came back down with the music maker and with the egg layer. You needed both in order to get the wisdom. The golden egg means wisdom. All right.

Giant’s fall from heaven left a big hole in the earth

The giant fell from heaven. Is that right? He was so big and heavy that when he fell he knocked a big hole in the earth, left there a big hole in the earth. The giant was finished. Who was finished? Who is the big giant that was finished? The people in the secret religion. The Pope.The Pope and certain others that I don’t care to name right now, that hoard the secrets of religion. When the Protestant was given the secret way to get it, and when Protestant leadership got it, got their share. Don’t think they got all, they got their share. Catholic got his share yes. Protestant got their share. The conspirators got the whole share.When they got it, the position of superiority of them over American Christian leadership fell. When it fell, it knocked a big hole in the ground. What is that symbolic of? Actually they were not spiritual people, they were material people.And when they fell a big part of the material that they had before was taken out. So much of the material wealth that was under Catholicism, and under other secret conspirators in religion, fell to Jack, to the American Christian Society. Is that right? Yes.Then they began to rise. But they only had magic beans. Magic beans is not knowledge. Magic. The only way you can get it is through magic. You have to have the knowledge of the magic to know how to work them. And, they were secret, so only a few of the Jack people can have them.

Jack: the American Christian society

Let me quickly tell you what Jack represents in the American Christian Society. It represents the intelligent leadership, Jack represents the intelligent leadership. Now Jack is not as long as Jacob. So their knowledge is shorter than Jacob, you see?Jack is a derivative of the word Jacob. Jacob is the origin, Jack is a derivative, derived from Jacob. So Jack is just a short …. they don’t have Jacob that’s long. But they do have enough to enable them to keep this same rhythm going.Rotating events, with a seven note scale, or is it eight. Yes, an eight note scale that goes to seven, and comes back to where it started. Right? Do, ra, mi, fa, sol, la, ti, do, come back to where it started. So they were given knowledge of how to keep society going through these changes, psychological changes.

So America unknowingly, has been going through these changes. Look at the trends, one fad behind another. Pretty soon you are wearing what you wore 20 years ago. Right. Pretty soon you’re dancing the way you danced 20 years ago. You are talking the way you talked 20 years ago. You are thinking the way you thought 20 years ago.So they keep rotating. They have the Jahcubite scheme, but they have only that pie that Jahcubite wanted them to have. Jahcubite sell pies all over the world Jahcubite sell pies all over the world. Sold the Pope a pie. Sold Protestant America a pie. Sold Communists East a pie, called it the red pie. Yes, the red pie. I’m getting ready to let you go now.

What does the red represent? What do they mean red? You say passions? That’s to trick you. Yes,Red means passions in the other octave. It has been played. It’s another octave. It takes on another color, it takes on another dress. It don’t keep the same dress, it says I will sell you changes. You see?Yes, it meant passions in one place, but not passions in Communist Russia, although passions are involved. It means the social life. Red means the social life. What ties me together with my brother? Blood. Blood is red. See. So people, as a social group are tied together first by blood. And they call each other brother, you see. So that’s blood.Red stands for blood. What blood? Human blood. Human blood, according to the Bible, New Testament in particular, should combine with water, which is human spirit, symbolic of human spirit.

Bring the social life too

So people should be spiritual, as well as social, according to the New Testament teaching. You shouldn’t just be blood. Christ Jesus says, “I come not of water only, but of blood also.”What does this mean? It means that before him, the people were all spiritual, but were neglecting the social development of society, the development of the relationship of person-to-person, people to people, communities to communities.He came to bring the blood, means to bring the social life up too, with the spiritual life. This is in the Scripture.So now, if the East has become red, it means that they now have gone to another … see the world was spiritual, and then it became religious.Now they are trying to get it to become all red. No spirituality, take the spirituality out of it. Make it all red, that we are social group and we are born out of materialism, so material concepts should govern us. We shouldn’t have spiritualism in our life. Give up; give out the water, only the red.

Imam W.D. Mohammed (raa)SEVEN LOCKS

The Jahcubite Conspiracy

Seven locks. L-O-C-K-S. You need a key to open a lock. His (Samson) strength was in this, that his knowledge was locked up. Seven locks of hair. His knowledge wasn’t exposed to other people. And the moment he exposed it to Delilah whom he trusted, he lost his strength. Is that right. Yes.All right let’s continue now. Seven locks. Yes. So the locks you understand is a secret knowledge, secret knowledge that runs the course, it’s a knowledge that runs the course and it’s to be repeated (. Do Re Mi Fa So La Ti Do...) Because once it runs a course, it can’t be…. can’t keep going, you have to start it back over again. You start with doe, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti. When you get to ti, that’s the cross, now you can’t keep going with the cross, you have to bring in doe again. So you bring in Communism, or something else and you start the world all over again — do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti and you bring them to worship the Jahcubite again. And when they caught him, when they catch up with him, can’t keep the tee going, got to stop the worship of the Jahcubite. But start the world all over again with a new knowledge, do, re, and all the way up to ti again. So you keep going from one knowledge that is invented by the Jahcubite conspirators that lead you to the worship of the Jahcubite. Once you catch onto them that you’re worshiping them, they create another knowledge that brings you right to the same place again. So this is the seven locks of Samson that was his strength.

Samson fell in love with the hell he created and got weak But he fell in love so much with Delilah, Delilah is sin and darkness. Samson got weak. He fell in love with the hell he had created for the Gentiles. Delilah wasn’t meant for him to fall in love with. He wasn’t supposed to love Delilah; he was supposed to marry a different girl.So he ends up falling in love with Delilah that he didn’t really want. He didn’t want Delilah. But Delilah kept putting herself in his way. Why because he was raising a whole lot of hell in the world, and hell got so thick in the world, that even Samson couldn’t escape it.So sin and corruption came even against Samson … and the Jewish boys starts getting in the filth and the Jewish girls start going astray, and pretty soon the Jewish community gets disordered. Oh yeah.In love with the corruption that they created for other people.So what they got to do now? Well. Too late. Once the Jewish conspirators get weak for the sins of the wicked environment that they themselves formed, then they began to let out secrets to the people in the sinful environment.

They become drunk with the corruption that they created. And they lose mental fortitude or composure, they lose the composure, they lose the ability to hold in, what they shouldn’t let out. And they began to let out, not by word all the time, by their actions, by the mannerisms. The dark society began to peep their hold card. Ooooh, I see something. Yes, you get too intimate; somebody is going to see something. You see? So the people see. When the people see, then they expose the Jahcubite scheme. When the Jahcubite scheme is exposed, they have no strength. They become like ordinary people. Have no supernatural strength anymore. And their knowledge then is just on a level with our knowledge. So they are in the dark with us. They see no more than we see. So he becomes blind. Samson became blind. He had no superior eyesight. It was no more than the blindness of the society, because they had gotten his special knowledge. You understand? All right.

Samson can produce more fine flour of enlightenment

He’s blind now, and the world begins to use him. Not because they forced it on him. It looks like Samson was forced to do this. That’s all tricks. No, he has no other recourse; he has no other way, no other alternative. They know my secret now. My secret wisdom is of no power to me. Now what I’ll do is show them that I am stronger than an ox. I can grind more corn than their ox.I am going to get at the wheels of their economy. I’m going to get at the wheels of their academic knowledge, schools of thought. I am going to show them,I can produce more fine flour of academic knowledge. I can produce more fine flour of enlightenment. I will show them that I can produce what they want, and they won’t kill me, they will keep me as their workhorse, their ox, to grind the fine flour.So he goes from one conspiracy to another one.He goes underground like the Mafia and the Ku Klux Klan sometimes. And you say, “Oh I don’t see him anymore, they must be gone”. He’s not gone. He’s just grinding flour; he’s going to make bread all over again. And when he makes his bread, he will start again with do and he will go to re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti.

So he can’t see any more than you, but he knows how to grind the flour and he has the strength of the ox. So he grinds the flour of knowledge and he works with you in your blind world, in the darkness, right with you. But in time, he rises to the superior position. He has made him some flour that is special. Oh yes. And he is going to make him some dough that is special. And pretty soon he’s going to have all the bread. And when he gets the bread, he’s going to have the power. And then he will bring in re. And then after he brings in re, the world will come back to him, he would have mi again, and he will bring it on back up to fa, sol, la, ti, and when he gets to ti, he’ll have the world worshiping the Jahcubite again. And this thing continues over and over again, an endless circle. This is the true knowledge of the secret Jahcubite conspiracy. Not from the protocols of Zion. This is straight from the horse’s mouth. And you will find four horses in the Bible.

Imam W.D. Mohammed (raa)THE MEANING OF AR-RAHMAN

By Imam W. Deen Mohammed

(Editor's note: The following is excerpted from a Ta'lim lecture delivered December 15 in Chicago by Imam Muhammad.

Now we come to the names that are given in Qur'an that belong to Allah. The Qur'an says, "La-illaha-illalah, there is no God except Allah." and the Qur'an gives us names that belong to Allah. And the first one Ar-Rahman is given. Ar-Rahmanu means the Gracious. It's translated in different ways in English. Some translations say 'the Gracious,' some say, 'the kind.' If you look up 'kind' in the dictionary it doesn't only mean nice, it also means generous. So, 'kind' and 'generous.' the combination, means niceness and generosity, goodness and generosity.

Some translations have given it as 'beneficent,' which means 'befitting' out of His kindness and grace. That's correct, too. All of these English terms are correct. But understand that the term 'Rahman' means to show mercy. So whatever God does that's good to us is a help to us, is kindness to us, out of His graces. It comes from His mercy.

He's a merciful God. He doesn't like to see His Creatures suffer. He doesn't like to see His creatures experience bad times, and misery, so it is His way to extend mercy to them. He is Ar-Rahman.

THE NEXT NAME THAT is given is Ar-Raheem. These are the two most often repeated names in the Holy Qur'an. In fact; every chapter except the 9th Chapter begins like that.

Bismillah, With the Name of God. Ar-Rahman. Ar-Raheem. the Gracious, the Compassionate, or the Gracious, the Merciful, the Beneficent, the Merciful.

As I have explained, there are different English words and they all can be suitable for the names Ar-Rahman and Ar-Raheem. Ar-Raheem is translated as the Merciful, but some Arabs have translated it to mercy-giving. I hope with a few comments on this name I will be able to make clear to you why some of them feel that to say "the Merciful," is not good enough.