#one of a kind necklace

[katycreates]

[llutik]

her firstborn

..so ugh you know how once there's been only cat and robb in her scary and not very promising newly married life... and how robb was her whole world

and how he really is her whole world in death???

[checanty]

Spider’s Cradle (personal work) Prints | Twitter | Instagram | Portfolio

[thefreshprinceofjunes]

Naminé... It's you... It's really you. I've been through so much just to see you. --- Riku... It's Riku. Riku's here... I looked for you! I looked everywhere for you!

[brother-emperors]

‘Is there a point to any of this or do you just want to see how much more I can take?’ snaps Crassus. ‘Oh, I knew there was still some bite left in you,’ says Cethegus, thrilled. Cethegus teaches Crassus the art of politics and the ways of business. Sulla is not a fan.

Sulla: the Last Republican, Arthur Keaveney

Crassus, Catilina, and the Vestal Virgins, Ronald Syme

Sulla: the Last Republican, Arthur Keaveney

[unlicensedinvestigator]

[burning-sol]

i REALLY wanna make an updated ref for the albatrio, but my last attempt at updating it didn't pan out because there's so many details to keep track of. here is a jay ferin 4 u while i try to figure this stuff out.

[pickled-flowers]

Funny fact about me is I have very little dexterity in my hands actually which is apparently hard to believe because of my art?

[sracha]

strqrock qrow for the qrow enjoyers

[the-lark-ascending69]

I loove the android robin au it's really one of the most interesting au I have seen in a while.

I am always happy to see new post abt it

Also making my favourite characters go through hell and then receiving comfort from their people is like the best thing ever for me so every time I see a whump!Robin post I like automatically

People loving android!Robin makes me so happy anansnssndsnsns she's curious and excitable and full of wonder and the world keeps punishing her for simply being alive. Sometimes it's too painful even for me, big whump lover 😭😭 though seriously, there is not enough Robin whump, and while all the characters in the show are very whumpeable, hurting my little blorbo Robin feels special because... she's just so deeply lonely. She's lonely and she thinks she deserves to be because of something wrong with her (pulling this interpretation from Surviving Hawkins lore which is canon to me 😭). That was a big idea I had when I first came up with android!Robin... that there is something wrong with her. Broken. In this AU she's literally broken in a lot of way (battery and memory problems, weak joints in her lower half, etc), but that's all within the range of normal robot problems. The real issue with her is that she's sentient. It terrifies people because it really brings out the existencial horror of... well, existing. It terrifies Robin most of all. She is the problem. She is what's wrong with her. She shouldn't exist.

But at the same time, she loves being alive so much! She doesn't understand it and doesn't know how it happened, but it happened, and now she's real and wants to experience life and the world and know people like human beings do. So it's her constant battle to become human despite humans having hurt her so much in the past... only for Nancy to already see her as human. Just one made of metal and plastic, but human nonetheless. She's the first person to see her that way and maybe everyone else thinks she's crazy, but Nancy is used to that. She's so sure of this, though, of Robin's self-awareness. She trusts her so blindly. She doesn't even need proof. And not only does she believe her, but she defends her humanity in front of her friends and family so ardently, fighting so hard for Robin to be aknowledged by everyone else as human. Fighting so hard to give her a home and family for the first time in her life.

Nancy has it bad for Robin, really. She's just so in love, even if everyone else thinks she's crazy for falling in love with a machine (no one thinks she is, though, because they all know Robin, and once you know Robin, it's impossible not to love her).

[sonknuxadow]

an interesting thing about 90s sonic media thats only based on the original 2d games and nothing else is how they get certain character design elements or lore details wrong but theres not many games to go off of at this point and this was also in an era where sega didnt really take much control over non game media and just let those writers and artists do whatever . so you can kinda see where they would have gotten that idea from. like yeah sonics super form being a completely separate person who sometimes attacks his friends blatantly contradicts the games but back then the games hadnt really given us any reason to believe thats NOT what happens. so .

[otterlyotterott]

A cat sits alone in the cemetery

Inspired by @circuscountdowns's bishop death comic.

cw: grief, slow mental deterioration by way of immortality

Mortal minds were not meant to live forever. Not alone. 

It’s the middle of the night and they kneel before the grave. In one of their hands they grip a shovel that had been gifted to them a long time ago. At the base of the handle is an engraving that matches the stone crown on the gravestone.

There is a pendant on their chest, and it gleams gold in the moonlight.

They close their eyes, and breathe. Out slow, in slow.  

Camellias smell like sugar and dirt, like three thousand years of longing. The flowers on this grave are always fresh. always redder than blood, even in the winter, when every other plant on cult grounds wilts and turns bare and hibernates. The camellias on his grave are always there, always beautiful. One might call them blessed.

They are not afraid of dying—they are devoted to Death. They simply cannot die yet. Their Gods and leaders need them. The rest of the flock needs their wisdom. Someone who can speak to them as an equal, but who knows more and has seen more than the rest. 

Mortal minds were not meant to live forever, but they’re still doing pretty well. They lose days or weeks sometimes, but it’s not a problem yet. They suspect it’ll take another five thousand or so before their mind becomes a problem, assuming something else doesn’t kill them first.

So, they cannot leave. Not of their own accord. They have no need to.

They want to stay, to be content with the impossible life they live, but something is missing. They’ve been missing the sandpaper edges of his voice for the last few centuries. They’ve been yearning for the feel of his fur on their own—green and yellow, a sunbeam shining over a bed of moss.

He left them. They agreed to it. He was tired. They understood, or thought they did. They were with him for the rest of his life, and they loved him, and he died, in the end, like a mortal, but his heart was full, and when he was gone for good, they realized that their heart had gone with him. Stolen in a final prank.

At first they figured the pain would lie in the loss itself, but true moments of pain were every time they would forget that he was gone. It was every time they would look beside them, to whisper to him something that he would yell aloud to embarrass them both, only to find no one was there. It was every odd hole in the ground that they would feel the urge to crouch down beside, to talk to him, coax him out, before someone would ask what they were doing and they would remember that he wasn't there. It was every time they remembered that holes in the ground were for plants, and not Gods.

He would be severely annoyed to see them do anything but smile, but it was getting hard to smile without him.

And, and he would want this, wouldn’t he? Even if getting woken back up annoyed him at first.

His After was probably boring without them.

He'd think it was funny.

He’d grin impossibly wide and say, “ABOUT TIME YOU DID SOMETHING SELFISH.”

They stare at the old stone. The crown of the God of Chaos stares back. It's only another life. He won't even have to put on a necklace this time around.

Mortal minds were not meant to live forever. Not alone.

So, they stand and lurch forward. They take the shovel into both their hands, and they drive it like a spear into the dirt, into Leshy's grave. 

They don’t know how the ritual works, but they know they’ll need his bones for it. They'll figure the rest out later.

[brittlebutch]

Katja Cleaver doesn't get enough attention for being the most 'poor little meow meow' character i've ever seen in my life. literally off the walls 'she was found in a wet cardboard box on the side of the road' energy

[baalzebufo]

and btw what if I made more dnd characters

so ah. this guy started as a joke character because I thought it'd be fun to have a silly little bard who is basically fantasy weird al but then I got attached to him because I am galactically incapable of making a joke character so now i unfortunately take him fairly seriously

hes a satyr from theros who was in the middle of a week-long bender and accidentally tripped into a planar portal. he got rocketed thru the far realm before faceplanting into kaladesh filled with a divine spark of inspiration and basically rampaged into some inventors studios looking for an instrument, pilfered a magic accordion, and proceeded to become a musical menace to the multiverse

the giant space hamster was just because I remembered those exist in canon and i cant think of anything more fitting for a mount and best friend than that for him

bonus lil wayne in the jacuzzi

[ehlnofay]

It’s not until she hears Sissel’s knees hit the floor that Efri is jolted back into her body.

She blinks, whipping her head around. Sissel is kneeling, bracing a palm on the ancient stone pavement, at the barrier – no, the barrier’s gone, it’s just Sissel on the floor. She lifts her head and meets Efri’s eyes; her hair is wispy and wild, the little plaits meant to keep it neat come loose and tumbling, her eyes wide. The barrier's gone, but still, her pale face is lit up blue.

“Are you okay?” she asks. She doesn’t speak loudly, but it echoes in the great stone chamber.

Nine, Efri doesn’t know.

She blinks again, looks down at her hands, clinging to the metal stick so fiercely that her joints ache. (Her own stick, her nice wooden one, is still on the floor somewhere, where it slipped out of her grasp when she hit the wall.) The lumpy heavy end of it, the clobbering end, is still resting on –

Not on. It’s in the thing’s head, fitted neatly in the opening of its dented helmet, the horns spiralling over the floor. There’s a tooth, perfectly preserved, by Efri’s foot.

One by one, she unwraps her gloved fingers from the handle of the metal stick, letting it drop to the floor with a clang so loud it makes her wince. Kazari is nosing at her side. (When did they let go of it? When did they get so close? She must have missed that. She feels out of the loop. Her heart is juddering like fish on a line, battering like some frightened trapped thing at her ribcage, and her breath is coming fast and heavy.) Absentmindedly bringing up a hand to press over her sore shoulder, she says, “’M fine. Not too – barely touched me.”

Kazari turns and spits on the floor. Efri blinks. She does it again, tongue lolling out of her mouth, face very disgruntled – and oh, Efri gets it. She does not glance down at the thing at her feet; she doesn’t need to, she knows what its arm looks like, chewed almost to pieces even through its banded armour. (If she hadn’t been so busy being scared of it, that sight might have made her a bit scared of Kazari. But not now, when they’re trying to hack and spit the taste of dead man arm out of their mouth.)

Efri unclips her canteen from her belt and holds it out. “Here,” she says. Her voice is rough. Her heart is racing too much to let constructing sentences be easy. “Not much, but –”

Kazari stands still while Efri tips half of the remaining water onto her tongue, and then Efri watches her swilling it around in her mouth, trying to bathe all of her teeth in it, before she spits it again on the floor at the dead thing’s feet.

The water is still clear. That’s something, at least; the dead man was too old to still have blood in him. Or maybe he was embalmed, drained of it hundreds of years ago, thousands.

“Are you okay?” Efri asks Kazari when they’re done, because they were the one doing most of the fighting, who was closest. They tip their head, shift their weight – wince when they put weight on one foot. Their lips peel back from their teeth. Their clothes on that side are singed.

Efri points it out. “Your robe,” she says, which makes it sound much fancier than it is. She’s too tired to think of a better word. She rubs a hand over her face, pushing the hair back over her forehead, says, “I’ll reinforce it for you when we get out.”

Kazari noses at Efri’s shoulder – the shredded fabric of her dress, the fraying edges stained with blood. Efri says, “I know. I’ll have to sew that up too.” Over her shoulder, she calls, “Kazari’s leg’s hurt, I think.”

“There’s blood on you,” Sissel replies. She peels her hand off the floor and leans back on her heels.

Efri touches her shoulder again. “’S fine,” she says. “Just a scrape. The blood’s drying already.”

It’s really sore, actually – the flesh abraded and tender, an ache sinking deep into the muscle – but it’s normal sore, the kind of sore you really should be after being thrown into a wall. It doesn’t feel sprained or dislocated or anything like that.  Just like it will be bruised a whole rainbow of colours come tomorrow.

Kazari noses at it again. She leans too far forward and falters on her maybe-hurt leg – rights herself, wincing, and rolls her shoulder. It gleams, just for a moment, and she nearly stumbles again. Efri puts out a hand to steady her. (It doesn’t really accomplish anything – Efri’s strong, but she’s not that strong – but it’s the principle of it.) “What was that spell?”

“Pain relief,” Sissel says from behind her. “I think. Doesn’t actually fix anything, but.”

“You’ll be okay ‘til we find someone?” Efri asks, and Kazari nods. She presses a hand against their shoulder and nods back.

They both turn to look at Sissel, then, who’s just kneeling on the floor, sitting on her heels.

“You all right?” Efri asks her.

“All right,” Sissel confirms. She doesn’t look at them. “Didn’t even come near me.”

She’s staring.

Efri crosses the floor to stand with her. (She needs to lean on Kazari – her legs are too wobbly, and she doesn’t want to touch the dead thing’s stick, doesn’t want to look for her own. Kazari limps a little on their sore front leg.) There’s a moment of total, humming silence – all of them still and staring, necks craned back, looking up at the thing.

Whatever it is.

It’s a ball. Big and blue and shimmering, it floats above a wide crystalline dish set into the floor, spinning on an axis. Just spinning and spinning and spinning, endless motion. Its smooth surface is cut through with dark wavering lines, etched with lettering, and it doesn’t quite glow but it doesn’t not glow, either, the light moving across it silkily, like clouds in a blue sky. It looks like something that should be humming – a low pitch in their ears, an eerie shiver dancing over their skin – but it’s silent. Inert, maybe, but for the spinning.

“What is it?” Efri asks. Her voice cracks as she speaks. She looks down at Sissel’s face, staring as though mesmerised, illuminated by the room’s dim lighting – the fires that should not still be burning down here, the luminous not-glow of the ball.

Sissel says, “I don’t know. Something important.”

Hovering above the dish, it spins, and spins, and spins.

“Is it what the ghost was talking about?” Efri asks. She tilts her head and squints at it. It doesn’t – well, it looks strange and unearthly and powerful, but it isn’t doing anything. And it hadn’t been clear what the ghost was talking about, exactly, according to Sissel, just that it was something important – but what else could it be?

Sissel, still watching it, shrugs. “I don’t know,” she says. “I think so.”

Efri watches it with her, brushing a bit more hair out of her face. It’s sticking to her sweaty forehead. She feels a drip of not-dry blood running down her arm under her sleeve.

Kazari is staring at it too – just as confounded as the rest of them. Efri sees the light in their irises shifting as the ball spins.

They’re not learning anything from staring, the ball staying strange and mysterious as ever, so Efri raps her knuckles against her sternum to steady her breathing (it’s slowed a bit – not normal, but closer to it) and climbs up onto the stone rimming of the dish. Kazari, behind her, lows in consternation; Sissel catches her breath, a noise like a creaking door. “Careful,” she says.

“Promise,” Efri replies, and places her feet very, very carefully on the glassy blue flooring. Nothing happens. She doesn’t step on the dark curved lines as she treads toward the ball in the centre, slow and wary as if she were approaching a skittish animal. Nothing happens.

She reaches out, and, with just the tips of her fingers, she grazes the ball’s surface.

Nothing happens.

It’s cool to the touch, and smooth, like polished metal or not-frozen ice or delicate glasswork. It continues to spin gently under her fingers, warming her glove with friction, no smudges left on its clouded face.

 It really feels like there should at least be a tingle running up her arm, a strange and unfamiliar current, a spark. But it’s just Efri, standing with an arm outstretched, pressing her hand to a ball.

“It’s not doing anything,” she reports, and Sissel clambers up onto the dish with her, fitting her palm to its gently hovering underside. Kazari balks, begins pacing agitatedly. Efri frowns. “Why isn’t it doing anything? Shouldn’t it be doing something?”

“It’s important,” Sissel says definitively. There’s ancient dust on her fingers, but none of it seems to transfer. “It’s something really special, I think.”

Efri shifts restlessly. She shifts her grip and tries to grab onto the dark ridged curves ringing its surface, but they slip easily away from her grasp as though her touch was no barrier at all. “But what does it do?”

Sissel shrugs.

Behind them, Kazari lows.

Efri drops her hand and grabs Sissel’s wrist. “C’mon,” she says, and when Sissel frowns at her, “We’re not going to learn anything about it this way. We have to look for clues!”

Kazari makes a more impatient noise. (Efri thinks she found a clue.)

Sissel gives the ball one last searching look and lets Efri tug her away, off the weird blue dish and down to where Kazari stands on the stone floor, at the head of the table where the dead man sat. Efri sniffs loudly and tries not to think about it too much. The table is smooth polished stone, worn a little away with time; Efri trails a gloved finger over the edge and directs her attention to where Kazari points with their chin.

There’s something carved into the surface, the edges blunted and shapes softened by however many years it must have been since it was put there. Efri squints, trying to make it out. She has to stand right up on her tiptoes to get the right angle to see much of it in full.

“That’s not letters,” she says eventually, frowning. She’s pretty sure she knows her alphabet well enough by now to know that. “Is it magic?”

Sissel shakes her head. “I don’t know what it is. It’s not like magical writing I’ve ever seen.”

Efri looks at Kazari, who also shakes her head. “Maybe it’s a different sort of lettering,” she theorises. It must have been written a long time ago, if it’s from back when the city had people. Onmund’s been reading all about it for ages, and he’s told her a bit – Saarthal was the city of Atmorans, populated by proto-Nordic people. All complicated history stuff. But they weren’t quite the same as Nords today, he said, so it stands to reason they had different writing, too. They’re supposed to be uncovering and cataloguing artifacts (at the thought, Efri glances back at the hovering ball and swallows an inane bubble of laughter) so she suggests, “Maybe you can copy it and we can show it to someone. I’m sure there’ll be someone at the College what knows what it is.”

Sissel, also standing on her toes, nods dutifully. “What will you do?”

The chamber they’re in is cavernous, and about empty but for the ball in the dish, the altar and chair, the body on the ground. “I’ll check him,” she says, and points. “See if he has anything on him that’s special.”

Sissel follows her finger and grimaces.

She digs out her note-paper and her stick of char, and Efri assumes it’s clues time, but when she turns she feels a hand grip her elbow. She looks back over her tattered shoulder at Sissel’s face, her furrowed brow.

“Promise you’re really okay?” she says, voice anxious and solemn.

“Promise,” Efri says, twisting her arm to touch her friend’s hand. Sissel presses her lips together and lets go of her arm.

Kazari trails after Efri to look at the dead man.

First thing is the metal stick. It’s magic someway, Efri knows – he waved it and threw her into a wall, flung spells with it – but she’s not sure how. Doesn’t know enough about enchantments. Didn’t need to, to use it; when Kazari clamped down on his arm she just ripped it from his grasp and –

She doesn’t quite exactly remember, actually, except for the bitter tang of adrenaline in her mouth and nose, the horrible grunting and scuffling sounds, the heft of the stick in her hands. Impact, over and over and over, against something that had a little more give each time.

Efri scrubs a hand over her mouth and grips the handle of the stick. It takes effort to wrest it out of the thing’s face, caught as it is by the edges of the helmet, and when it’s finally yanked free it’s – actually not as bad as she might have expected. There’s no blood, and the corpse was so desiccated it already didn’t even really look like a person anymore, so it registers less as someone with horrible violence done to it and more as a really gross art piece. It’s not nice. She doesn’t like the twisted, gaping mouth, teeth embedded wrong-ways in its tissue and scattered like coins over the floor. And one of the eyes, which had glowed unearthly blue, is now a dull, rotten black, squished like a plum in its socket.

It's worse the more she looks. She sniffs and turns away.

“This is magic, right?” she asks Kazari, testing the weight of it in her hands, the cool surface of the metal, and they nod. “A good artifact?” she adds, and they nod again, emphatically. Efri sets the stick aside and kneels.

It wasn’t wearing any clothes, really – or if it was, they rotted away. She touches the rusted armour gingerly, tries to avoid brushing her gloves against the shrivelled skin at all. Whoever it was had expensive taste, it seems – there’s jewellery in a shockingly well-preserved beard, pendants around the neck, armbands. Efri asks Kazari if each thing is enchanted. No to the armbands, no to the beard-ring, and then, pressed against the wizened chest where the flesh contours to the ribs, she finds some kind of necklace, sharp-edged and thrumming. Kazari nods to that, and, face scrunched up like an old fruit, Efri reaches around the ancient neck to slip it off.

She tucks it into a belt pocket with the tripwire necklace they found at the weird wall.

“Done,” Sissel says. She folds her paper and slips it into her own pouch. Her footfalls on the echo-y stone floor as she approaches the body for the first time are almost silent. “Did you find anything?”

“Necklace,” Efri replies, watching Sissel’s face pinch at the sight of him. “And – stick.” She scoops up the metal stick and holds it out. “He did spells with it.”

Sissel looks at it warily. “Is he a draugr?” she asks, glancing back down at his mashed-up face.

“I mean,” Efri says, “he’s got to be, right?” She’s certainly never seen a draugr before, but what else could it be?

(Calling it a draugr makes her shiver, the set of her shoulders quaking. She’ll stick to dead man.)

Sissel shudders. She reaches out to grip the handle of the stick, and Efri’s not sure if she’s taking it or just trying to keep herself upright. “I can’t believe that happened,” she says. Her voice sounds, suddenly, fragile. “I can’t believe we’re alive.”

“Me neither,” Efri says. She presses the tip of the stick into the ground so Sissel can lean on it, stands a little unsteadily.

Kazari, with a hushed murmur, telegraphs something. Efri recognises the head incline of understanding – she’s familiar with that word, that idea – and, after a moment, the flickering ear of doubt.

“They’ll have to believe us,” she says with conviction, because she means it. “We’ll show them. They’ll see for themselves.”

Kazari presses their nose to her head.

Efri clasps her hands together. “We’ll go tell someone now,” she declares – though it’s easier said than done; they were lost in the ruins ages before they even found the crumbling wall, the halls, this horrible wonderful chamber. But they’ll get un-lost eventually. They’ll get out eventually. Surely. They have practice enough with walking. “But first – help me find my stick.”