#ilya serina project

[raymondshields]

i need to write three thousand more words tonight realization: if talwar had a baby with a homestuck troll the result would be tarim nakoshima

[pale-noel]

Title: awakening Fandom: ilya serina project Genre: edgy shit Content Tags: kharos; lusmos; bael; pantheon of the garden gods Summary: The gods wake up. Someone sets in the lullaby. Author's Notes: Old, no longer relevant ficlet. Still nice prose, though.

The multiverse was created, and one by one, the Gods woke up.

Lusmos felt his wings spread wide, and suddenly, he began to cry. Immaterial. Beyond comprehension. He was magic, he was energy. He did not truly have wings, for there was no mortal to see him. Even if there was, they would burn out beside his true form.

Kharos awoke from slumber, energy torn asunder, but held nigh by his power. The rifts around him collapsed and formed, blessed by destruction and chaos. He too spread his wings, nothing more than a twisted sense of energy forming together.

Baelynn amassed from the centre of the circle. If she were light, she would be violet. Soft, but incomprehensible. She did not cry.

One by one, the Gods were created from the gardens of creation. One by one, they formed.

Baelynn lead them, creation and destruction in her wake. She took not shape nor size, an amalgamation of energy, magic, and matter.

And so the lullaby began to play. Lusmos closed what eyes he might have had, if coporeal. He fell to his slumber. Kharos felt the same wave of sleep wash over him, the notes singing to him.

Yet the Gods wandered their path of creation and destruction, and none suspected their song.

The lullaby would imprison the demigods to never wake.

[raymondshields]

So Enishi hasn’t debuted in my novel yet, but I made her in recolor.me anyway.

Bonus:

[raymondshields]

📝!!

Let’s go with Enishi Youzuk, one of my main supporting characters this year! She’s one of Morcair’s love interests usually, but since in this version of the project Tarim takes that spot, I’ve decided to see where else Enishi can go.

Tara usually ends up with Jude during these so she’s gonna stay with him, but to keep things balanced we’re also adding Enishi in as the resident Kharosian loser. She’s helping with the plot.

Enishi’s a Child of the Storm / Atomic Voice, as well as a vampire. She was cured of her insanity about twenty years ago by Haridor’s Prince Terrance, and has been researching other planes in the meantime. Since in this version Tara and Tarim have never met, Enishi is Tara’s only starting connection to him; since Enishi and Tarim worked together once he returned to Ilya Ustuxi after a slightly altered version of the events in Starlight.

I’m not sure how she comes into the story, but she will fairly early on. She’s probably out in Ilya Terrana doing field work and checking things out, and probably joins in with Tara and Jude into Ilya Serina to go do... whatever it is they’re doing in the Serin, I dunno, people always end up in the Serin for wildly long periods of time.

She sees Ilya Serina in a perspective I haven’t yet written about, too. Tarim sees pastel crystal, Jude sees scrap metal, Tara and Naitofiara see a forest. Enishi sees an American-style desert: not vast dunes and full of stars, but with snakes and scorpions and rocks and a shit ton of plants. It’ll be interesting having her along, that’s for sure.

She’s dignified and quiet, all-judging and confident. She’s happier letting those alongside her run into walls they can’t see than trying to guide them, and is no way a leader. She’ll listen, but she’ll scoff at you and tell you you’re stupid even when you’re not.

She probably grows into a more understanding person, or at least a more useful one. Her saving grace is that she is very powerful and nigh-indestructible. She’ll fuck off for a bit and come back with everything solved already, because she’s just like that. Except the tropes are hungry so something else will probably go wrong.

I dunno. I like her.

[raymondshields]

Bloop!

In the local dorm room of College AU, The; it is largely believed that the inhabitants are in some sort of polyamorous queerplatonic relationship. It is true, mostly, because alterous attraction. The only one who isn’t at all romantically attracted to anyone else in the house is Ethan. He actually has a girlfriend. Nobody believes she’s real.

Except then Richie’s double, Terrance, found out that his sister works in the same royal court as Ethan’s girlfriend, who apparently is very real and none of her friends seem to think Ethan is real or that she’s actually dating him.

[raymondshields]

How does Jude act around Richie? Also, tell me about the furry scarves- I mean ferrets!

As serious as he usually is, honestly.

Jude is more developed than either Ethan and Richie; though not as much as Jules since he’s painfully obviously the protagonist. 

Jude doesn’t really like showing his emotions. He doesn’t come off stoic so much as he just seems disinterested. This is mostly because he prefers to stand by the sidelines and observe instead of getting involved, and really dislikes small talk. 

It’s not very obvious that he is in love with Richie, and his love comes across very quiet, in small gestures that are easy to miss for everyone but Lusmos, who likes to always know how his acolytes are doing and is more than aware of Jude’s romantic interest in Richie.

He seems pretty impersonal to most people, so it’s a bit of a surprise when visitors come over and find Jules and Jude asleep together on the couch with their homework on the table and neither have taken off their glasses. He doesn’t seem like the cuddly type, and he isn’t- he doesn’t make a big deal out of it, but he does enjoy physical contact with other people even if it’s just bumping into their shoulder when making dinner.

But he does show his love, even if it isn’t in a way most would expect from him. Which isn’t fair to him- it’s exactly how you would expect it, from someone like him: it’s just that most people don’t think of how he would act in a romantic sense, because it’s never been something anyone associated with him.

He’ll come home from work with pizza because nobody wanted to cook and will personally deliver Richie three slices of meatlover’s to his room because it’s a Thursday night and that means he’s livestreaming in Photoshop, and knows he can’t come out for dinner with everyone else.

If he isn’t going anywhere that day and Richie falls asleep on the couch, he’ll put his judge coat over him like a blanket since he knows Richie thinks it’s super warm.

If Richie’s having a hard time with his studies, Jude is usually the one to sit with him and try to help, despite being incredibly bad at fine arts. (He does this because if Richie can explain it to him, it will work like rubber duck programming, and Richie will figure out how to fix where he went wrong.) This is usually when he talks gentlest, since his voice is generally kind of gruff, even for an Englishman.

And of course, Richie can hold his ferrets. Nobody else is allowed to do that, not even Lusmos.

The ferrets themselves are kind of a background note and don’t really come into play, not even in Fall where their role is just to appear with an illusion of Jude and where they have inspired large creatures used to pull carriages in Ilya Taranisi.

Both are female and spayed, and he got female ferrets because they’re less fighty. (Disclaimer: I know nothing about ferrets.)

Usually when he takes them out with him, they rest with one on each shoulder. He has showed up to class and to court cases with his ferrets on his shoulders and they make for vindictive jurors. 

They also can tell if someone’s lying, and you will know because of the literal blood on their hands from getting bit by ferrets right in the fingers.

[raymondshields]

You mentioned Richie having the impulse to do dangerous things after Lusmos kisses his forehead because he's convinced nothing can hurt him. Has he ever managed to do or try to do any of these dangerous things and what was the result if so?

Tbh, I made that fact up while trying to think of more shit Richie does that isn’t about MLP. So let’s see what I can make up on the fly.

I know Jude is bad enough at recognizing danger that he’ll steal Jules’ katana (which is at this point a god-level weapon due to Lusmos) to go protect one of his roommates from something, but Richie’s a different story.

He isn’t like, “I’m gonna go tightrope walking while juggling chainsaws” attempted-invulnerability. He’s more like “I’m gonna go talk to the very angry and big looking biker over there and ask him about paint jobs on bikes” attempted-invulnerability. No social sense there whatsoever.

He’s managed a couple of things that aren’t likely to hurt him, like generally being obnoxious, but the only thing that he really would have managed would be winning a fistfight against a Nazi spouting bull at his college. (At this point, I think every college has Nazi problems but most people generally fight it.)

It’s ironic since had he ended up in an actual fraternity, he would’ve gotten sucked into it. But he ended up with the rest of the Boys and that changed his ideology a great deal. But he still definitely ends up punching Nazis because he thinks he can get away with it. Sometimes he can. Other times Jude or Jules has to stop him and fight Nazis off themselves. (They’re both big guys with training, so it isn’t too difficult for them, but Richie’s a fuckin baby.)

It ends up usually being Ethan to stop him, if not Lusmos himself. Though the latter has largely stopped doing such now that he knows it doesn’t usually end well.

[raymondshields]

genderqueeroperaghost replied to your post: What is your favorite...

Holy shit, Haridor sounds super cool! Although the words “centaur incident” intrigue me. :p

tl;dr the centaurs (then a power) kidnapped haridor's queen and would not listen to reason or accept ransom, so prius utterly annihilated the entire realm and glassed it, so it remains a wasteland 8500 some odd years later. he was Angry.

[raymondshields]

Coloured Terrance. What an asshole. Who gave him the right to be a godly vessel. He doesn’t deserve it.

[reblogs > likes]

[raymondshields]

Describe the fashion sense of whatever OC you want!

Tarathiel loves masculine clothes and owns like four chest binders because she things boobs are bullshit. However, she’s very detail oriented and can tell from minute things like the material of a suit jacket or the pattern on decorative armour what the mood and tone of the setting is. Doesn’t really obsess over fashion, but uses it to her advantage when she needs to.

She mostly prefers armor or loose robes, though. She’s very butch, and I love her.

[raymondshields]

What is the technology level of the "duct-tape realms" in Ilya Serina? (steampunk, high fantasy/LOTR-esque, more advanced than earth, etc?)

This is gonna be a long answer, mainly because in order to answer this, I have to explain how the Serin works. For the record, this is based off of how it works in Fall of Ilya Serina- I don’t know what’ll happen in Starlight so let’s work off the timeline I know.

The Serin is a world of pure creation. (Long ago, it was based off of Minecraft. Five or six or maybe even eight years ago. It also has a nod to CS Lewis’ Wood Between the Worlds- he should’ve done more with that and he didn’t so I’m taking the idea and fucking running with it.)

Nothing stays in the same place. You see mountains on the horizon, by the time you get there, it’s a fucking forest. Fuck you, fuck your “cartography”. Shit moves around and it’s the portals to the other realms that don’t. There are specific locations, of course, they just move the fuck around.

It’s like- you make a puzzle with a map image on it. But the puzzle pieces are squares. They can fit anywhere, in any combination. There are little lights, though, on the board that will glow through the puzzle no matter what piece is on top of it. There are locations on the pieces- civilization, certain mountain ranges, forests, lowlands- but the pieces themselves just fuckin move around.

In Fall, it is canon that locations wander in large, wobbly, looping paths in the daytime and move towards the centre of the Serin at night. The Serin itself is kind of shaped like a donut- the sun sets and rises in the center, and the moon circles the outskirts. For these reasons, eclipses are quite common.

It is also canon in Fall that the Serin is largely conscious, if not sentient. It is aware of its inhabitants and how they are different from world-travellers who are passing through. If there is something in the Serin that it doesn’t like, you will know. Because it will take the problem and put it in your way. As many times as it takes for you to fix it. (That actually happened in Fall, too- Lusmos, Jules, Kinefira, Ophi, and Tarathiel were getting to Ilya Katayona and it put a mountain in their way three times before they went and fixed the problem, which was Lillith was stealing all the dragons meant to protect that area of the Serin.)

The Serin is however, lazy as fuck. It will sometimes mess with you and shove a forest in your way every now and then. But it won’t shove a whole lot of objects, like a city, in your way more than once. It doesn’t like moving more than one thing at a time to fuck with just one person or group. If you see the same thing twice and you’ve already passed it once, it’s because the Serin wants you to check it out.

Hence, maps are virtually useless. But then, Pale, why the fuck does anyone live there, and how? Well, they make do. In the many languages of the many species found in the Serin, in Jules’ words, you are less likely to come across a word that means ‘tower’ than you are to find one that means roughly ‘tall thin structure’.

Because the Serin, on top of moving shit around and fucking with people and being awful to deal with, looks differently to different people. What one person sees as a crack-like ravine full of trees just in front of them will appear as a river to someone else. What one person views as using large crystal spires to walk across is what another might see as walkways between old buildings made out of steel and large wires.

Jules explained this neatly to Tarathiel like this: It’s like 3D modeling. The models themselves don’t change, but the painted textures sure do. 

So maps and most directions of any sort are nigh impossible to make. In Fall, Jules found the formula the Serin uses to move things and used that, plus a general location network and a few other things and actually made a smartphone app that can work as a navigational tool for the Serin. Tarathiel uses this app to get herself to Ilya Taranisi to go rescue Lusmos in Fall, which befits the following cut from the novel:

I pulled out my phone and opened up Jules’ map app, to see what it wanted me to do. Firstly it started searching for a signal. The tip below the searching icon said “Tip: Get somewhere high. It’s easier to catch a signal.” Well, I was up high, so there wasn’t much of an issue there. After about thirty seconds of a cheerful “Searching for signal...”, it displayed a quick “Signal found!” followed by a “Connecting to signal...” A few seconds after that, it told me that it had found a signal, and then the popup went away, followed by a very Google-Maps like display. I noticed a search icon, and just to see if I could, searched for Ilya Taranisi. Jules’ app would probably save my life, so going after his god first seemed like a good idea. The only search result was for Ilya Taranisi, with two options: About and Get Directions. Hell, let’s get directions to Ilya Taranisi.

(Tarathiel is somewhat tech savvy, being from Ilya Tirana and having some adventures in Ilya Karina, homeworld to Maria Leuite and the solarpunk-style theme of pure science.)

And that’s how the Serin works. That all being known now, what sort of tech do the different civilizations in the Serin have?

There is no good way to answer this- different civilizations will have different resources and abilities. I’d like to say nobody in the Serin has anything like steampower or higher, since if they did they’d know better than to stay there in the duct tape realm that quite literally makes a game out of trying to kill you.

Most of the Serin’s civilizations have few trade routes if any at all, so they’re largely isolated from each other. Nomadic species are very likely to get wiped out with little trace of having ever existed. The ones that survive, like Kinefira’s changeling hive and the Maybo, learned to do so by clinging to their roots and not moving very far from their headquarters and capitals. 

Those two are actually two of the few documented civilizations- I haven’t stuck my protagonists in the Serin much, and those two are the only ones that have cropped up except for the occasional village that has accepted their fate and relies mainly on trade and worship to survive. (The Serin is nicer to those who worship the gods, if only because getting the faithful killed isn’t usually wise.)

Kinefira’s changelings are largely militaristic, and have figured out metalworking and some agriculture, though they largely gather considering their area is generally a forest to people, and always bears edible things. Winter does not strike the area too often because of how deep the forest is. (It’s like a lake, but replace water with trees. Elk as big as whales and entire civilizations in certain divisions like the oceanic ones- like the bathypelagic division from 700-1000m deep in the ocean. Forests do this in our world to a point, with different lifeforms appearing at different depths of the forest depending on the height of the trees, but the Changeling Forest takes it to an extreme.) They live at the bottom centre of the forest at the deepest point, so it’s very humid and very hot and their metalworking underground, below their fortress, makes it no more bearable.

The Maybo, on the other hand, are a friendly bunch who don’t really disturb anyone and generally just harass each other when they feel like it. This is the description I wrote for them in Fall, and if you want to draw it, be my guest because I sure as hell can’t.

The city grew closer, and soon, I stopped at its edge, in awe of the movie-elf-like craftsmanship in everything. And then I caught sight of what must’ve been a Maybo: they were odd little creatures, actually. They were about as tall as most halflings and some gnomes, but incredibly thin and short-limbed. They were covered in fur for the most part: their forearms, heels, and around their eyes seemed to be scaled. Their fur was far longer on their back, giving off an interesting look when combined with long, faun-like ears. This Maybo’s longer fur was kept tied in what looked like a ponytail, just below their tailbone. They had an angelic looking tail, but with fur instead of feathers at the end. It was impossible to tell if they had a male-female system like humans, but they, like most ‘fantasy’ races, weren’t almost naked.

(Though I should mention that immediately after this, the Maybo in question grabs Tarathiel, takes her to the elder of the city to get a spell so she can understand their language, which I very cleverly named Meyh’ktaio and did not include a guide on how to pronounce. Then they ask her about the outside world and she just fuckin shows them her phone and Jules’ app and her selfies with all her friends. They are mystified and I had so much fun writing that scene.)

The Maybo are among some of my favourite to write for: they have absolutely no basis in anything except maybe a slight nod to RuneScape’s Naragi in appearance. I made them and their entire culture and language up on the fly. In Fall, after Tarathiel returns to them after freeing Lusmos and heading to Ilya Katayona, Lusmos’ gifts to them for helping him and his group out are a silver elk that calls to whoever is worthy that can call it, and turning their God of the Waterfall into a person again so they can act as a spiritual leader for their people. The Maybe don’t really work with the Aethelian gods, as they’ve got their waterfall guy, but the waterfall itself is made of Tomian magic and they do generally follow his creeds, so they are regarded as Tomian.

I really like the Maybo. I don’t know where they might crop up next, as they don’t generally leave their area, but I like to think there’s a few out there who might be more personable and in the spotlight than Renmi, Nmenra, and Aushla, our two background character Maybo. (I have no idea what the gender culture is like for the Maybo, but I like to think Renmi’s a trans guy. Aushla’s the elder so she’s just Old Sage Woman, but Renmi’s definitely a trans guy.)

So, all in all, it really depends on the civilization, but with limited resources and the lack of reliable trading routes for anyone, don’t expect too much in the way of advanced technology. Kinefira’s changelings are about the most high-tech you’ll be seeing for a while, if and when we ever take a thirty-thousand-word trip through the Serin again.

(I like to keep the Serin as far from coherent as possible- the less rules I put on it, the more I can stuff in there. It has some young gods in there too, but it doesn’t need to have any real requirements.)

Though I feel I should mention that Ilya Serina is the real base of the whole project- not Ilya Aethela or Haridor or even Tarathiel: the Serin is what ties the whole project together, just as it ties the realms together. No novel I have written concerning the project at all hasn’t had at least a brief trip through it. It’s my pride and joy.

And yes, at one point I really did call it Afiroja. What was wrong with past me.

[raymondshields]

“pale... your ocs live like this?” “yes”

anyway here’s the apartment I sketched out months ago for the College Boys, aka jude, jules, lusmos, ethan, and richie

red is doorways; blue is windows. they got a corner apartment. no basis in reality because this is just how I had it laid out in my head and that’s what we’re going with. 

the chair in the living room belongs to jules because ethan takes up the entire couch and jude+richie gay it up on the loveseat. the bedrooms are carpeted and both richie and jules sleep below the window like weird fucks

[raymondshields]

Can you tell me more about Laqir? His life philosophy sounds a lot like mine. :p

Laqir, dearest and one of my longest-living OCs.

Truth be told, his name isn’t actually Laqir at all. It’s Tarim. See, back in 2011-2012, I was big on Dragon Cave. So when I was writing my first NaNo novel, Vocal Paradise, Tarim required a name change halfway through to protect his identity. (He was in a tournament against his will- think slave gladiators.) So I hit up the Thuwed lineage and used an English-to-Saurian translator. A few dozen swaps later, I ended up with Laqir.

Now, in Starlight, Tarim is going to start out using his codename. I haven’t decided yet when he really starts using it, but I’m thinking he’ll be in his early 20s at the start of the novel, on Ilya Ustuxa.

Tarim uses a separate name and keeps with it mainly because he doesn’t feel like being tracked. 

So, with that out of the way.

Tarim is one of my longest, completely-original OCs. Wasn’t made for any sort of fanfiction at all. He was a little based off of Iban from @/khayr’s fic Dawn, but at the time, Iban was still a soulbond of mine and was overseeing my very first original works. So of course my protagonist was a little based off of him. Tarim later became more of his own person.

I don’t have any current drawings of him, but I do have a good description. A current one, dated about a fortnight ago. So:

-Thick eyebrows. Long nose. Sharp chin (anime bishounen sharp). Ashen skin (quite literally unsaturated silver with no sheen). Straw-like, dusty brown hair that falls around his face. Ear-length hair. Stormy, gray-blue eyes. Has tattoos that look almost like veins or tree branches on either side of his body: cyan on his right, blood red on his left. They glow and expand as he uses more and more magic, and fade to their normal, near-invisible form when he isn’t using magic.

Tarim is a Kaonai (kay-oh-naie (rhymes with pie).) They’re creatures that are related to dragons by way of the drakon (anthropomorphic dragons aka scalies) lineage; and related to the elves via the Silver Elves lineage. Kaonai usually have silver skin which are actually more along the lines of teeny ass lizard scales; but as Tarim has spent most of his life in Ilya Ustuxa, his scales don’t exactly shine.

His homeworld is Ilya Ustuxa, aka the New Moon World. Named such because vampires have ruled the kingdom for so long that when the Aethel shattered, they just kept ruling the place. Despite this, his birthworld is actually Ilya Loremmi - the Lorem. He comes from a civilization known as Isuparingu, which is the place’s original name and I’m not fucking changing that because that’s a badass name.

Canonically, Tarim’s godly side is more to that of Tom, god of time. 

(Side note- the gods Tom, Bene, and Alan; gods of time, space, and reality respectively, are named after Tom Hiddleston, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Alan Rickman. For 13yo me, it was fitting. I could change their names, but I like the familiarity. Despite this, Bene’s name is pronounced like bane, as in the spelling of the full name is the bane of my existence.)

Tarim is one of the few people who can navigate Ilya Serina in its shattered and unstable state, especially in the Fragment Zones (more on that later). That is actually how he got his tattoos- the Fragment Zones gave them to both him and Naitofiara, another acolyte of Tom, in order for the two to navigate through the Serin and eventually fix the problem that made the Aethel go boom. (What problem? I have no effing clue.)

He’s a decent mage as magic goes, though he operates more in passive magic than active magic- instead of firing off lightning from his hands, he’s more adept at our kind of traditional herbs-crystals-and-tarot-etc witchcraft as well as passively stabilizing the spacetime around him. 

This is not a Kaonai trait, it’s a Serin trait. Time and generally Tom’s alignments really don’t like being out of whack. Space, Bene’s side of things, loves being out of whack. Look at fuckin gravity. But time? Time is relative a little, yes, but generally it likes being linear. Time gets upsetti spaghetti if it isn’t linear. Hence, Tarim, who is blessed by Tom and the Serin, stabilizes the spacetime around him. 

Most wouldn’t call him a powerful mage because he can’t fire off active magic like it’s nothing for hours on end, but that’s because passive magics are very difficult to measure in the same way. But Tarim is indeed powerful. Few active-magic magi can do what he does.

And of course, personality. I’ll be honest, he needs an entire renovation on his personality. At least, so he isn’t identical to Thea and Tarathiel, my other two main protagonists. So: He’s a little shy and kind of unsure of himself the moment he leaves the Ustux. He knows the laws of the Ustux pretty well and that generally sums up to everything has a catch, and anything you take must be paid for in full, even if it’s meant to be a gift.

But his shyness only extends so far as small talk and being personable. If he’s got a mission to do and he needs answers, he’ll be just obnoxious about getting them. Hence his part of the quote- “That’s bullshit and you’re bullshit, so I’m going to ask someone who isn’t bullshit”. He does beat around the bush when he’s trying to be nice, but if shit needs to get done and you’re in his way, then get lost.

He and Tarathiel go back a few years, from her original trip to Ilya Aethela. Some point during Fall of Ilya Serina, Tarim arranges for a gift to Tarathiel that he promised and finally managed to get to her: a baby Vustrian wyvern that she happily named Ophiuchus and took with her during the events of the novel; which so far has been bitching at Kinefira and Jules and using the wyvern to steal Lusmos’ tea. How dare you, Tarathiel.

.... I’m off topic again.

As for his role in upcoming NaNo 2017 novel Starlight, I honestly have no idea. All I know about the novel is that the Aethel goes boom and shatters into all these new realms and Tarim has to help fix it but oh whoops now there’s two gods that are fucking shit up and somehow there’s a prophecy and shit needs to get fixed.

The prophecy in question is pretty simple, and it goes like this:

Two princes to tear the world asunder; five heroes to rise and quell the thunder.”

I for one think that’s a pretty sick couplet for my week-three delirium last year. (Week three of NaNo is hell and usually involves a depressive episode or two. Famously, it has also included a suicide attempt that lead to me not finishing the novel because of bad medication that killed my creativity and motivation.)

Now, Tarim is indeed one of the Heroes that has to fix the shit that the two Princes (Jules + Prius) pulled. Now, this prophecy means that somehow the Princes are why the Aethel does the thing. I actually don’t know how I’m going to do that yet, but it’ll happen at some point.

Next question!

[pale-noel]

Title: bloodshed requiem Fandom: ilya serina project Genre: exposition, drama. pg13 if you ignore he’s annihilating half a realm with magic Content Tags: terrance redface; naitofiara (hoshi akari); lautlos requiem; ilya katayona; kharos redface Summary: Terrance talks about the Lautlos and why being the Messiah of Destruction is fun and cool to a talking cat. Author's Notes: This isn’t very long. Also very old. One of his early motivations for doing what he does, though there’s more to him than just this.

“Some things, darling… Some things you never understand ‘til you’re in their shoes. Hoshi, you’re a faithful little feline, but you won’t understand it. I didn’t understand it until it happened to me.” “…” “When I left the Aethel, the magic I had left went out. It was like I died, the flame in me just sort of… went out. Comin’ home, well, it was like being reborn. I surrendered myself to Kharos not because Prius wanted to me, but because I wanted to come home. I wanted my life back, and you wouldn’t get that.” “Hoshi, the taste of destruction… Feels so good. I’ve made this place a desolate, burned, ash-filled wasteland.” “And I love it. Take a moment, and just listen.” “…” “You can’t hear anything at all but the wind. But if you listen, listen really hard, you’ll hear the winds. All of them. There’s a song there, a requiem. And Lusmos will be here soon, and in his path of creation he’ll destroy everything I’ve built. His aubade always drowns out my requiem. So I’ll move on, and I’ll destroy something else.”

“Terrance… You do it only to hear that song?”

“It’s one of the main perks, but not the only one. The requiem of destruction is just the winds singing. It heralds me. Destruction will give room for life and light, so we deal in death and darkness. As we must. Come now, Hoshi Akari. There is far left yet to clear out.”