#seirnarei

[garykingz]

Please tell me you have seen the george russell interview at Wimbledon where he talks about mowing grass

I DID !! He's such a weirdo, I need to study him like a bug fr 💀💀

[words-writ-in-starlight]

As someone who also grew up near Yellowstone, I am also terrified of bison. My most terrifying experience of my life was when my father and I were on a bike ride around the park and we got stuck in a bison heard crossing the road. We hung onto a car to get through, I don't think I breathed for the five minutes it took to get through. Also, rathorn give off the energy of moose who give a fuck.

Bison! Are! Terrifying!  

Every time I talk about living in Yellowstone, people go “oooh have you seen a bear” and like, yeah, one time a black bear sprinted across the road ten feet from me, sat its ass down in the ditch, and peeked over its shoulder every ten seconds to see if I was gone, until I realized that it was going to continue playing I Can’t See You So I’m Invisible until I left.  Grizzlies aren’t that harmless, they kill folks every year and if you try to hunt one, it will hunt you back, but they also don’t wander around in groups.  You are unlikely to encounter more than two grizzly bears, in my experience.  If one gets into town, that’s scary, but it’s probably one bear.

Bison?  Those fuckers will amble down the only street in your tiny little smudge mark of a town, in a herd 200 strong, moving an ambitious mile and a half per hour, and you can’t get around them in any respectable way, because if you blink at them wrong, they will introduce your ribcage to your eyeballs by way of your throat.  

One bear in your backyard is one bear in your backyard.  Bison will close down a whole stretch of road for As Long As They Feel Like It, and you just have to live with it, because what are you going to do?  Walk past them?  You and all your toothpick bones and as-yet-un-ground-hamburger meat?  Drive past them in your tin foil car?

Good luck with that.

[incorrectkencyrath]

Jame: It's one 12-hour shift, what are you afraid’s gonna happen? Brier: Injury, death, general calamity. Just don't burn the place down.

Source: Brooklyn Nine Nine

[words-writ-in-starlight]

Have you ever had fool’s toffee? As a fellow butter and sugar addict I can vouch for its goodness.

...oh this looks DELICIOUS.

[words-writ-in-starlight]

Tori as Cinders and Jame as Briar Rose. That, thats a great concept. Tori chasing after his sister for thirty years (unlike canon) just gets me.

RIGHT????

Okay, so, some other thoughts I’ve thunk about this.  Obviously I would call it “oh my love (as the cities you were razing)” because that line fucks.

Obviously Tori is both Cinders and Snow/General White--he blames himself for not saving Jame (as all versions of Tori must) and so on his mission to find her, he starts rallying the resistance.  He assumes Jame is dead, at first, while he and Burr and Rowan and Harn and Rose and a couple others escape on a sabotaged ship.  Rose bleeds out from her wounds while she’s pumping oxygen, but with one less person burdening the system means they live to make landfall.  They go into hiding briefly, but then...

Then the Banes start turning out, in huge numbers, slim and lethal soldiers with clawed hands and silver eyes, and black curls shorn down to their scalps.  Tori understands the very first time he sees one, looks into his sister’s eyes, his eyes, and doesn’t see a goddamn thing looking back.  The Bane hesitates, though--not a flinch, just.  An extra moment in raising its arm to shoot him.  Tori shuts his eyes and puts a bullet through its heart, and rips off his glove without thinking, to see the ring on his hand.  Its stone is as white as snow, and he breathes, and breathes, and breathes, and then he reloads his gun and starts shooting Banes.

They are not Jame.  They are not.  He repeats the words until he can shoot them with his eyes open, looking into those silver eyes as they go dim and still.

(Jame, dreaming, sees her own hand rise, holding a gun, pointed at the other half of her soul, and screams no, helpless in the grip of a nightmare, one of the thousands upon thousands of nightmares she sees in fragments, and the hand--hesitates.  And then Tori shoots her--it--them--and she’s gone, snatched away to the infinite mind of a Behemoth, rolling across a planet like a storm front.)

(Her body, the real one, frowns faintly in her glass coffin.)

Tori leads from the front, as General Black.  This is why it’s rather important that he wears all black, you see--the Banes are armored in steel grey with the red crest of the Master for an accent, and an apology wouldn’t bring their general back, if you shot him by accident.  He ignores the way his own people flinch, if he comes up on them too suddenly.  He’s not here to be their friend.  He’s here to be their fixed point, the star they all navigate by, and to follow his ring as it slowly, so slowly, tints darker with each inch the resistance creeps toward the heart of the Master’s power.

Torisen wears his ring on a chain around his neck, after the first time it’s nearly lost in a fight.  He can hide it, that way.  Not everyone is eager to know that their general is seeking the woman they’ve been killing all these years.

(The Banes don’t flinch from him, not quite.  It’s not enough to be noticed as anything more than good luck on his part.  But Tori doesn’t often get shot, either.)

Grimly goes by the name Red Hood and brands his virus the WOLF, and Gorbel and Lyra overthrow their planet’s Snow King and pick his Mirror chips out of their skulls to give the resistance a home base, and the fearless general Aerulan and her wife and guardian, nicknamed Brenwyr the Beast, become known for their gift for evacuating planets before the Master’s forces can hit.  Kindrie, the best healer in the resistance, always knows when someone is going to die, and he’s given the nickname Godfather Death for his talents and his bone-white hair.

The anthem of the resistance is written about Pereden, who slew a Bane Behemoth--except, of course, that he didn’t.  He ordered his people to fall back and then he was never seen again, and Tori didn’t argue when the resistance hailed him as a hero, dead of his wounds.  He needed the support of Pereden’s father, Ardeth, commonly called the Cat.  He kills Pereden quietly for his treason, orders Harn and Burr to burn the body in secret, and bites back the guilt when he replaces Pereden in Ardeth’s affections, as the new Marquis de Carabas.  The resistance needs the money.

(The boy who really did kill the Behemoth died without anyone seeing him, in that same battle, after he brought down the Behemoth through pure dumb luck.  A child, too young for war, really, mourned by only Torisen and his closest advisors, those who knew the truth of Pereden’s treason.  The only witness to Donkerri’s death is the Bane who kills him, and the sleeping soldier watching through its silver eyes.)

The first Bane, the Bane that went wrong and got wired into the Master’s defense grid, is also the Bane whose mind has touched Jame’s the most, in the thirty years of their dreaming.  She knows him inside out, knows that there’s a whole person in there, knows that he’s full of broken glass and hate and the need to kill.  He has some of her memories, some of his own.  She presses the face of her brother, their brother, Torisen, the other half of her soul, into his mind whenever she can, tells him I love him, lived for him, would die for him, protect him.  The Shadow Bane, as he’s been nicknamed by the resistance, coughs out stasis fluid on his knees as Tori’s soldiers pull wires and tubes from the ports on his spine, and then grins, through drenched black hair.

It’s Jame’s face, but she could never wear a smile like that, Tori thinks.  It’s been thirty years since he could feel sick, but he feels the memory of it as the Shadow Bane rises to its--his?--feet.

“So,” he says, standing on shaking legs and ripping the last of the wires away with his own hands.  “You’re the one she loves.”

“Sir?” Burr asks, casting a glance at Tori, as if to ask if they should, maybe, have just shot him.

The Shadow Bane steps forward, wavering, and his starved frame looks nothing like Jame, doesn’t even have her claws, but he has her bright silver eyes and Tori stands his ground.  One of the damp fingers raps him on the chest, where the scarlet glow of Tori’s ring can be seen through his shirt, and the Bane’s voice is low and rasping from disuse, utterly unfamiliar, but the laugh is still bright and cruel when he says, “You’re closer than you think, brother.”

“Take me to her,” Tori says, keeping his voice carefully even.

“She says it’s my choice,” the Bane drawls, tracing his hand up to Tori’s throat, as if considering trying to crush it in his hands.  Tori thinks he might be able to stop him, depending on how much of Jame’s strength is in those fragile-looking hands.

Then the Bane moves, lightning-quick, and Tori remembers that this was their first attempt, known for instability, who wiped out a moon, and then--

The kiss draws blood, maybe his, maybe the Bane’s, spilling iron and salt across his tongue, and their lips are both stained red with it, when the Bane pulls away, a feral light in his silver eyes.

“A blood price, then, for our sister,” the Bane says, bright and mad.

The Bane, mad and cruel and as dangerous to his allies as his enemies, lives three days in freedom, before he dies to save Jame, newly released from her glass prison, so that she can kill the Master.  Jame kneels over Torisen, holding his bloodied chest together as she shouts for the resistance, shouts for a medic, and gives the Bane a nod of gratitude as the light goes out of his silver eyes.  

It’s only her long hair, falling almost to her waist, that saves her from being shot on sight, when Kindrie and the survivors of Tori’s original seven storm into the throne room.

“Who are you?” Kindrie demands, holding up a hand.

“I’m--” Jame’s voice fails her, looking at the Banes dead around them, the one in black, the many in silver and red, her hands covered in gore with her ring ablaze on her finger, and then she says, “I’m Tori’s sister.  He needs help.”

Kindrie presses his lips together, hesitates, and then says, “Arrest her.  I’ll see to the General.”

Jame is still in chains, sitting at Tori’s bedside, when he finally wakes up nearly two weeks later.  No one can look at her.  Only a few can bear to speak to her.  Tori reaches blindly for a gun, when he comes around, and then he blinks and sees the long black hair bound back into a braid, the shackles around the slender wrists, and he says, “Don’t tell me they chained you up.”

“I’m afraid so,” Jame says with a wet laugh, and she shakes her wrists to make her chains clink.  “Hello, brother.”

[words-writ-in-starlight]

I second blue on the Kencyrath fics, and also every now and then I remember the line “It’s what Xue Yang does, apparently, is make other people do the hurting.” And it just takes me out at the knees.

Also, one more piece of writing that I adore from you is that one part of Worldwalker where Brenneth and Crispin attend his sisters funeral. It really displays your ability to do raw emotions.

That line from the Xue Yang/Song Lan fic may be literally one of the top five best lines I’ve ever written in my life so if there was gonna be one to absolutely haunt people, I would hope that was a contender.  Alsoooo THANK YOU, I love that funeral scene and it’s one of very few reasons I am Genuinely Sad that I made a hard commitment to not having any flashbacks in this novel.  I just.  Like to write my kids being sad.  My kids are good kids and they deserve to feel their feelings in a sincere way, and also every character I love must Suffer.

Except for Rada!  Rada is already dead and, as I have previously discussed, he is thus safe from my affections.

[words-writ-in-starlight]

ohh, angst asks! Gotta Stay Quiet To Avoid Discovery for songxiao and/or Desperate Hand-Holding for jame/tori. (also 98% of those prompts have happened onscreen or been heavily implied to have happened in the kencyrath and i've gotta say... it good, it very good) (but kindrie is not given enough emotional support in response for him having to deal with it)

THIS IS SO UNFAIR HOW CAN YOU MAKE ME CHOOSE BETWEEN THESE actually never mind I fixed it, I wrote both, the other one will go into the queue.  Have a much-compressed AU where Jame gets to be the rescued party for a change.  For this ask meme!

Jame doesn’t let her fingers shake as she braids bells into her horse’s mane.  She rides with the Hunt every year, and every year she hates it, hates the rising blood-song of the magic, hates the horses, hates the moment where she becomes the crest of the wave and brings the Master’s strength crashing down on anyone in their path, but that is what the Mortal Knight is for.  A focus.  A spearpoint.  Her mother was the Mortal Knight before her, until the power was too much and sent Jamethiel shattering, and now--

Now Jame is not letting her fingers shake, and it’s not out of dread.  Jame doesn’t believe in dread.  She hasn’t in a long time, not since she ran from her father’s hall straight into the arms of the Hunt as a child.  Dread is only a way to prolong the suffering of a bad moment, so Jame deals with bad moments as they come and tries to ride them out as best she can, and this Hunt will be another in a series, but there’s no point dreading it.

Jame is good at not feeling dread.  But hope--that’s another thing entirely.

“Still scared of horses, little dreamer?” Keral croons, and she snarls at him.  He reaches out to brush his fingers through her hair, where it’s loose around her masked face, tiny plaits woven with ribbons of silver and scarlet hidden in the curls.

“I’ll break your hand,” Jame says.  She could, too.  The Hunt is rising, the magic is boiling up, and she is the focus, the harbinger, and tonight she could break Keral’s laughing smile into pieces and scatter them at her feet.

“Keral,” Tyrandis interrupts, melting out of the shadows.  He’s like that.  “Go and prepare.”

Keral tugs on one of Jame’s plaits and smirks at his half-brother, but he goes.  Tyrandis watches him go, and then turns back to Jame, where she’s checking her saddle.  She hesitates over the buckles.  She could loosen them, just one notch, or try to hide some damage to the straps--but no.  They might come loose at the wrong moment, and her horse be traded out.

And she told Tori that she would be on the only white horse, is the thing.  She’s not allowing herself to count on him.  She won’t.  But by God, she’s going to start and end this Hunt on a white horse, one way or another.

“Jamie,” Tyrandis says.  She snaps around to look at him, and manages a small smile.  He knows how she feels about the Hunt, but he’s smiling back at her, although his eyes are sad and his fingers linger on her cheek when he brushes her hair out of her eyes.  “I’m proud of you, Jamie.  Keep it in mind, hm?”

Jame trusts Tyrandis implicitly.  She trusts that he loves her.  She trusts that he will always do his duty to his Master.  She trusts that he is smart enough to know something is amiss, and she trusts that he knows that asking any questions would force him to betray her.

“I will, Senethari.”

“Good.  Mount up, we’re riding out.”

The crossroads is glowing with moonlight when the Hunt sweeps down on it, and Jame’s heart would be in her mouth if not for the fact that all she can hear is hunting horns, all she can taste is foreign blood, thick and iron-bright.  Her hands are tangled in her horse’s mane, without reins, and she is at the head of the Hunt, a creature made for killing, glittering in silver and scarlet and black, and everything is wonderful.  This, this is how she should always be, magic flowing through her like blood, and she does not remember why she hated this, when it is so clearly all that she was born for.

They slow at the crossroads, the Hunt piling up behind Jame like a wave, calling out to each other like a pack of hounds belling in the dark, and she tips her head back to the moon and tries to remember why she has stopped.

The moonlight falls on her like wine and honey, sinking into her skin, and Jame opens her mouth, takes a breath to say onward, and--

The figure in black is slight-boned and as quick as a whip, and his hands are like iron when they close into her hunting coat and wrench her to the ground.

Jame hits the packed dirt hard, and the magic of the Hunt cracks like glass with the impact, leaving her shaking and weak and gasping.  The man--Tori, it’s Tori, he came for her, after all this fucking time he actually came for her--is above her, pinning her down, and he’s haloed in moonlight that glows on his silver-shot hair when he says, “Jame?”

“Yes,” Jame wheezes, breathless.  “Hold--hold me tight, brother.”

“I have you,” Tori says.  She thinks he says it, anyway.  She hopes so.  She told him not to be afraid, among the roses.

She hears the Master’s voice, distant and terrible, speak a word from amidst the Hunt.

The magic crashes back down onto her, the sky falling in shards and ripping into her fragile mortal skin, and she’s screaming, trying to fight her way out of her bones, out of Tori’s arms.  She claws at his hands, snaps at him with a wolf’s teeth, and he doesn’t let go.  Tori buries his face in her thick-furred ruff, where she can’t get purchase on him, and clings to her until Jame is panting and still underneath him, and then--

The magic surges, and another scream fights its way out of her throat, a hunting cat’s screech, and she twists like water until she can sink a paw full of lethal claws into Tori’s shoulder, through his coat and shirt and skin and muscle until she scrapes bone.  He doesn’t let go.  He fists his hands in her sleek short fur and presses himself close without regard for his blood coursing over her paw, and then--

A third rush of power and pain, and armor is growing from Jame’s skin, ivory-white and stronger than steel, barbed at her joints so that it tears into Tori’s coat as she fights to her feet, a half-grown rathorn colt screaming in the bone-shaking register of her kind.  Tori tightens both hands in her mane and twists, and brings her down.  She bites him--she can taste blood on her fangs, his blood, real and rich--and he doesn’t let go.  He doesn’t let go.  He doesn’t let go.

The magic falls away like bursting out of ice-cold water, and Jame is left shivering on the ground, her brother’s blood and the dirt of the road on her skin, and Tori’s face is still pressed into her shoulder, his arms tight around her ribs and his chest pressed to hers.  

“Were you afraid?” Jame rasps, hugging him close and meeting Tyrandis’ eyes over his shoulder.  Tyrandis nods to her.

“Yes,” Tori says, raising his head to look at her.  He’s bruised, but his silver eyes are fierce, and when he unwinds his arms, he doesn’t pull away.  Instead, he pulls his torn coat off and drapes it over Jame’s naked shoulders, and puts his hand into hers, and doesn’t let go.  He pulls her to her feet without regard for the wound in his shoulder, the blood on his arm, and says, “Let’s go home.”

[words-writ-in-starlight]

Just a quick heads up, when you updated your bio the links for ao3 and the novel blog got deleted.

INDEED IT DID, thanks for the PSA!  I think it should be fixed now!

[words-writ-in-starlight]

I’m one and a half books into dfz and i’m in love with the spirt of dfz. Somebody gets my anger with gods who are restricted by their nature and gave me a god who is trying to change their nature. She’s trying to rules lawyer herself into what she wants to be! A god who just doesn’t accept her limitations! It’s great! (Also, in the dfz untamed au Wen Ning is basically Dr. Kowalski right. Wwx bargains with a... death god? That seems right. And wn is then the priest of a death god.

OH if you like the DFZ and the mechanics of gods and spirits deciding what they are, you should DEFINITELY read the Heartstriker books as well, which are about the Peacemaker and also the rise of gods and spirits in the DFZ!  It includes how the spirit of the DFZ was born and I love my rat daughter who throws skyscrapers when she gets angry so much!

I am NOT campaigning so hard for these books so that someone will read the fic I’m writing for them, and I don’t know how you could be so callous as to suggest that, by the way, my motives are pure.

But also has anyone read the Heartstriker books and if so, would either of the following be interesting to you:

The first time Chelsie and Xian have a fight after getting back together, featuring the fact that Xian’s luck is actually, if you think about it for five minutes, literally the shittiest hand ever dealt to a living being

Marci vs the Heartstriker Humans, round two billion, and the fact that she is, canonically, kind of gratified by being seen as Julius’ human as long as Julius doesn’t treat her that way--all I can think of is the scene where a bunch of humans condescend to her about belonging to a J, and how absolutely wildly different that must be when Julius is running the show in the DFZ

ALSO ALSO I still can’t decide whether a Heartstriker or a DFZ AU would be better for an Untamed mashup (on the one hand WWX as Opal is phenomenal but LWJ doesn’t really work as Nik? and on the other hand I could make the Jiangs the Heartstrikers, sort of...starring Madam Yu as Bethesda? and have the Lans be the Chinese gang? and have Wen Qing and Wen Ning sort of mutually be Marci?), but either way yeah absolutely, Wen Ning dies and WWX, in a moment of magically groundbreaking desperation, binds him to a death spirit then and there.

Is Wen Ning dead?  Yes, definitely, he is Legally Deceased.  Is he walking, talking, and doing magic?  Also yes.  Sometimes he gets possessed by the spirit of the Forgotten Dead.  Don’t ask questions and be nice to his cat.

[words-writ-in-starlight]

So seeing the extent that you were connecting the untamed to the Kencyrath convinced me to watch it. And wow, its so great and i’ll never be able to see Bane as anybody but Xue Yang. Ugg this show get villains so right, its all i’ve been able to think about.

I CANNOT BELIEVE THAT I ACTUALLY SOLD SOMEONE ON THIS SHOW BY HARPING ON THE MOST OBSCURE BOOK SERIES IN THE WORLD

YOU GET THE ONLY GOLD STAR I AM HANDING OUT ALL DAY

[words-writ-in-starlight]

So i’m hyper focused on something that doest exists and don’t have the brain power to write it myself and i’m gonna try and distract myself with the dfz books. How much of the first series is spoiled by reading them before the heartstriker books?

Nothing!  Well, except for the identity of the Peacemaker and...sort of the existence of what Opal’s generation calls the Second Mana Crash, but I don’t think that detracts from the experience of the Heartstriker series.  I myself read the first two DFZ books, the entire Heartstriker series, and the third DFZ book, in that order (the third book only came out VERY recently), and I had a great time all around.

[words-writ-in-starlight]

So I have notifications on for you, cause you consistently reblog the most interesting content. And so I saw the post about making your own face masks, I had also just listened to the most recent episode of your podcast. So naturally my first thought was “why in all hells would star want to make face masks? They had just spent nearly two hours talking about how that would be their own personal nightmare.” And then facepalmed at my own stupidity. Also i’m so excited you into seeker mask now.

This is the FUNNIEST thing I’ve seen in a goddamn minute, holy shit.  Also, you’re right, the irony is magnificent, because we’re going to be talking about the Women’s World for a while longer, featuring my ongoing discussion of how the drive to structure feminine emotion as something not only private but indecent is really...a symptom of some deeper issues in the Kencyrath--but also I ordered like a LOT of cotton fabric and I’m going to be making masks for everyone I live with and probably calling around to hospitals to see if they’re in need, too.

PANDEMICS, FOLKS.  Wash your hands and stay the hell inside.

[words-writ-in-starlight]

I finished the Kencyrath and I loved it! Thanks for having spent so long recing it. I reached the end of By Demons Possessed and had a near hysterical breakdown about both Bender and then sequentially Tirandys. I’m going to listen to your podcast now!

EVERY PERSON WHO READS THE KENCYRATH FEEDS MY POWER.

Episode 28 of the PBIPL (Chapter 11 of Dark of the Moon) is the one where we have basically an hour and a half meltdown about Tyrandis.

[words-writ-in-starlight]

@seirnarei replied to this post with:

This would make a great Jame/Tori AU

YEAH, IT ACTUALLY REALLY WOULD

I literally just said that I wasn't going to read this novel and you have severely damaged that resolve in one sentence. I should not read this novel purely to write a better Kencyrath AU. I am considering it intensely, though, because Torisen, twice-banished god of a long-dead culture, and Jame, Silver-Eyed Calamity who took over the ghost world almost by accident in her pursuit of having enough power to protect her brother, the only god worth her time, are now living rent-free in my frontal lobe.

Anyway, here are some loose Thoughts that are now clattering around my brain interrupting my workday.

Torisen ascends a third time entirely by accident, after eight hundred years of being a mercenary who's starving to death half the time because of his unfortunate tendency to give a shit. He's welcomed back to Heaven amidst a lot of chaos, a significant amount of mockery, and a general sense that he, dressed in worn black soldier's gear and stalked by bad luck, is only here for a matter of time before he gets banished again.

Torisen believes that his twin sister died as a child when she was cast out of his father's palace. Jame technically has a grave. Torisen is the only person who ever visited it. When he was bowing his head to Ganth and throwing himself into his duties as Crown Prince, Tori sometimes thought she got the better end of the deal. But even if he was trapped, at least he could do something for the common people. Like he couldn't for Jame.

The nameless ghost who fought at Tori's side and ultimately died for him was too old, too confident, too skilled, too everything, to be even under suspicion as being Tori's sister. He knows what happened to Jame, he knows what happens to little girls abandoned in the street, and he's just seeing things, in the long black hair this girl ties back into a braid, in the loud, easy way she laughs, in the way he can hear a smile under her mask when she calls him Your Highness. She tells him to call her Seeker, for the game children play with an eyeless mask, and he never sees her face, and then she's torn apart, Tori's last dedicate, his last worshipper, his last-- He seals up the grief in a corner of his heart next to Jame, next to his people, next to his failures, and keeps going.

The grey-eyed young thing who essentially moves into his life whether he wants her there or not, after he leaves Heaven to build his own temple (what else is he going to do, in this third and unwanted divinity--he's already wearing both punishments Heaven would normally dole out, and he hasn't been banished yet), tells him to call her B'tyrr, and he doesn't think anything of it. She answers his questions about Talisman, Jame, the Silver Calamity, with perfect ease; she repairs the temple door; she paints a portrait of His Highness Torisen, Crown Prince of Knorth; she--

She can't be Jame, because if she is, then Tori has been mourning her (or, rather, painstakingly not mourning her) for eight hundred years for nothing.

On Jame's side, she was tossed out of the palace and she doesn't want to talk about the next decade and change. The next thing she wants to talk about is her twin brother's ascension, about the knowledge that there was a god in Heaven who really, truly cared about people. She prayed at his temples and tried to find him in their kingdom and made offerings and defended his name and then--and then she found him. And he never spoke of his sister, never questioned their father when Ganth said he never had a daughter, and it hurt, it hurt, but Jame knows what Ganth's house was like and she doubts it's gotten better. So she starts looking for a way to be at Tori's side without being known, without being seen for what she is (princess, monster, killer, living curse--sometimes Jame can't keep straight the things her father called her and the things others have called her since). The war breaks out. She joins up as a nameless soldier. She puts on the mask. She dies for her brother, her soul, her god, without a moment of regret, and then--

Well, then she's dead, isn't she? But Torisen isn't, Tori is still alive and disgraced and she can't leave him, won't leave him, but she's too weak to be of any use to him--and, Jame thinks with the calm logic of a child who was chased out of her own home for being bad luck, of course she has to be able to be of use.

So Jame pours herself into the mold of a Ghost King, endures the trials and fights for the position and defeats all comers. Her bad luck died with her, it seems--now, when she puts her mind to something, the dice always fall in her favor. The world comes to be afraid of the youngest and most ruthless Supreme, with her silver eyes and white knife and tiny death-winged jeweljaws. The Talisman fights like a natural disaster and kills like an assassin and when she starts burning temples, even the gods are at a loss for what to do except damage control.

Jame builds first a library and an armory, and then a manor, something to replace the palace that was never a home, before Jame was tossed out and Tori survived inside. And then somehow it becomes a city, sprawling out around her like pooling blood and full of ghosts who need to be kept in line, and then she builds a temple because her brother is still out there somewhere, a god with one last worshipper, and gods need temples, and then when she turns around she's the lady of Ghost City, dressed in silver and black like a bad dream, armed with a cursed knife that holds a fragment of her soul, renowned among the gods for her ruthlessness and among the ghosts for her fairness and--and all she ever meant to do was to have somewhere to bring her brother, when she found him someday.

And then she gets word that His Highness, the Crown Prince of Knorth, the laughingstock of all the worlds, has ascended again, and Jame spins herself a new disguise, a skin close to her own but not nearly so identifiable, and goes to find him.

Finally and MOST IMPORTANTLY, I think Jame should be allowed to bully Torisen by calling him "gege." I just think she deserves that.

[words-writ-in-starlight]

@seirnarei​ suggested Songxiao “Gotta Stay Quiet To Avoid Discovery” along with that Kencyrath prompt so I did BOTH because I’m, like, living my bliss or something.

I don’t think this is what the prompt is supposed to mean, but how about some canon Songxiao sads?  For this ask meme!

It’s fortunate that Xiao Xingchen knows this place as well as he does—the wood wall paneling under his fingers is enough to tell him where he is, and shifu has been kind enough to move nothing. His hip brushes against the bookshelf, but doesn’t make a sound.  It’s easy to know when he passes the window from the warmth of the thin dawn sunlight, and where the bed is from the soft rustle of breathing, but Xingchen knows this room down to the grain of the floor.  Xingchen spent most of his life in this room, grew up here, studied and meditated here, kissed the doorframe in gratitude when he left to see the world.

He takes a step past the shelf and skirts the floorboard that some previous resident had pried up to hide contraband.  Xingchen never really used it, but he didn’t mention it to shifu, either, and so it remained loose, and creaked predictably when stepped upon.  Perhaps it’s been fixed, since, but probably not.  His room was empty when they came, after all.

Shifu never fills rooms until their occupant is dead.

Xingchen’s fingers find Shuanghua, alone in the sword stand, and lifts it carefully, so that the scabbard doesn’t even click against the stand.  Fuxue is laid across the low table, beside the black horsetail whisk and a folded set of black robes, clean and neat.  Xingchen put them there himself, before—before.  He lingered over the sword, traced his fingers over the characters on the sheath and memorized the clean lines, elegant and simple.  He can picture the table and its contents perfectly, even now, as he picks up Shuanghua and slips the strap over his shoulder.

He adjusts his sword on his back, and then, when it’s settled, he—stops.  Shuanghua is the last piece.  The last piece of Xiao Xingchen, wandering cultivator.  His pack is outside, assembled slowly and painstakingly to ensure that he knew the shapes of each item within.  His robes are clean and purely white—he asked that the black edgework be taken off, although he knows he must look severe and sad without it.  His eyes, with their stitched-shut lids, are covered with a securely tied strip of linen, and his own whisk is in the crook of his arm, and Shuanghua is across his back, and he is—he is ready to leave.  He has put together an entire person in silence, and now Xingchen stands in his childhood room and listens to the sound of Song Zichen’s breathing and wishes he had made noise.

If Zichen had woken—if Xingchen had forgotten where the corner of the shelf ended, or the exact place of the loose floorboard, or even if he had allowed Shuanghua to click against the stand—

Xingchen indulges himself in a fantasy, briefly, of everything being okay.  Of Zichen touching his face in that methodical way that Zichen does touching, as if weighing every moment of contact, and saying “Xingchen” in the disapproving tone he brings out whenever Xingchen is injured.  Of waiting until his eyes are healed and then handing him Fuxue and leaving together.  Of saying “I couldn’t let you be blinded for my actions” and having Zichen understand and accept and stay with him.

As long as Xingchen is wishing, he wishes he had killed Xue Yang himself, the very first time they met, or let Zichen do it. Zichen hated the man for the way he picked at Xingchen, and Xingchen has never truly wished death on another person before, but he thinks Baixue Temple might have finally taught him that lesson.

But.  Xingchen is not going to do that.  Xingchen is going to do the right thing, and leave, without stepping on the loose floorboard or bumping against the bookshelf, without making any noise.  He is not going to walk over to the bed and find Zichen’s face and kiss his temple, steal one more touch before he goes. He is not going to wake Zichen, because—

Because Xingchen is a believer in honesty, and he honestly knows that Zichen would try to stop him for all the wrong reasons.  Zichen wants to be free of Xingchen and Xingchen’s mistakes, he was very clear about that, consistently clear about it. He had allowed Xingchen to bring him here, on the chance that he might regain his sight, but if he knew—if he knew how shifu had performed that miracle, he would feel bound to Xingchen. He would feel guilty, as if Xingchen is not a grown man and a cultivator, more than capable of making his own choices, as if Xingchen would not have given anything to heal a fraction of the pain Zichen had so obviously been suffering.

Xingchen wants a lot of things from Zichen, including, selfishly, his loyalty.  But he doesn’t want it at that price.

He won’t wake Zichen because he can’t face Zichen’s rage again, or worse, the cold, detached hatred that Zichen had summoned up the last time Xingchen spoke to him.  But most of all he can’t face the idea of Zichen staying anyway, because he might feel unable to leave the side of a man he hates.

Something hot runs down Xingchen’s face, and he brushes at it absently with his fingertips.  It’s slick and warm, and a fresh spike of pain lances through his head as he shakes himself out of his thoughts.

There’s no point in wishing that things were different. They are what they are, and Xingchen has done what he can to fix what was broken, and that’s all there is to it. He uses the heel of his hand, carefully, to wipe the tears from his face and turns resolutely back toward the door. It’s as easy as ever, crossing the room in silence, and he doesn’t turn back.

Outside, he senses another presence, the familiar pillar of strength that even a blind stranger would have to know as an immortal, and he smiles politely at his shifu.

“Xingchen,” she says, in her cool, serene voice.  “I’ve come to see you to the road.”

“Thank you, shifu,” he says, and bows. She catches his arms with both hands, and when he straightens up, he feels a cloth touch his face, as if he’s a child, wiping at his cheeks.  “Shifu?”

“Blood,” she says quietly.  “It will probably run for some time.  Perhaps a long time, if you keep weeping.”

“I—will remember, shifu,” Xingchen says.  “I will weep less.”

“No,” Baoshan Sanren says, and she doesn’t often sound anything less than perfectly calm, entirely at ease in herself, but she sounds sad, now.  “I don’t believe you will.”