#shanmai

[coferstudio]

Dale una vista increíble a tus espacios con este magnífico tapiz Shanmai de la firma italiana @wallpeppergroup 🇮🇹✨

El diseño como muchos de la marca nos recuerda a las maravillas de la naturaleza como lo es un panorama montañoso entre un mar de nubes. Todo con un toque artístico, difuminado y sutil que nos brinda un aspecto relajante y tranquilo.

Este tapiz es ideal para vestir salas de estar o áreas comunes.

Inclúyelo en tus proyectos y pídelo desde México en Cofer Studio ⚓✨

[ayzrules-art]

written for @flashfictionfridayofficial​ ‘moon magic’ ! with @artless-whimsy . not edited so kinda rough sorry sorry !!

They were ten miles out from the Gate when they came across the angel-glass.

It was skidded in saw-toothed ribbons over the hills: ignited divinity and stinging sand, the glory-gleam of paradise melded with the harsh, smoldering heat of the Borderlands and fused into twinkling nuggets of pearlescent stone through the molten heat of an angel striking the earth. 

Under the ivory-frosted moonlight, the angel-glass was shimmering with star-shine, like veins of dew-fall weeping over the land. It glittered moon-pale and silver-searing into the darkness of the desert night; crystalline scars of luster and luminescence. The stuff was rare, and very precious to mortals, but demons tended to stay as far away from it as they could.

Holy things burned demons, after all, and angel-glass was no exception.

“Should we stop here?” Niklas called out, slowing his horse to a leisurely trot as the crickets and cicadas sang their vesper-melody, the wind adding its whispers to the chorus. There was nobody about, demon nor mortal, not that it would have mattered - in the windswept desert, where the deadly heat of the sun bled the land dry, the sovereign in the clouds was nothing but a faraway dream. The mortals who eked out a living in a place as wild and lawless as the Borderlands had more pressing worries than worshipping beings who probably didn’t even know that they existed, or picking fights with hell-born creatures that could decapitate a dozen humans at once in their sleep. 

Mai knew: there were no gods here, save for the rain.

Mai drew up alongside her husband as the rest of their entourage fell back, her gaze roving over the terrain. It had already been a week since the angel fell from the sky, but no mortals had found the angel-glass there just yet, it seemed. She had no doubt that they would come pouring in once they managed to locate a large enough vein to follow, like hounds winding their way upstream.

“I think this is a good place,” Mai answered neutrally, dismounting to take a closer look. She crouched down and closed gloved fingers around a small shard of angel-glass and ran her thumb over the surface, feeling all the layered ridges and the bubbles of trapped air: breaths of lightning-charged atmosphere fossilized into eternity.

Niklas was watching her, carefully. Mai held the angel-glass up to the light, an echo of smoke and ash ghosting at her nostrils. “I haven’t seen this much of the stuff since the war,” she admitted a long moment later, cutting her eyes toward him. “You must remember it, too. It’s different when it’s from angel-fire, isn’t it? But after every battle, it was all over the place. Just like this.”

 I killed my second husband with angel-glass, she didn’t say. I scraped the flakes off the ground and mixed poison into his drink every night, and he died from the inside out.

“I remember,” Niklas replied, his gaze like a spill of princess-cut diamonds - like all the life in them had been seared away by scorching heat and blasting pressure, transformed into something gleaming and hard. “It was a long time ago.” 

Mai shrugged. “Yes,” she said, slipping the angel-glass into her pocket. She glanced up at him. “Should we get on with it, then? Alejandro will join us before Korlin arrives.” 

Niklas inclined his head. “Of course,” he murmured, and then his magic was surging out between them.

It was brighter than anything Mai had ever encountered, brighter than the sun itself, and it was cold, crushing her chest between a ribcage of snowmelt and steel - as if her heart had been turned to hoarfrost. Mai drew a gasp of air into her mouth, and it was like breathing in a cloud of shattered glass, piercing through her blood and gouging her insides to ribbons. 

Mai had accidentally inhaled angel-glass before, too finely dispersed to be dangerous, and she remembered the burst and burn of it: incandescent divinity turning her lungs molten. But Niklas’ magic curling into the night, slashing over her tongue...it was like she’d swallowed entire daggers of angel-glass whole, shards of razor blades and lightning tearing at her flesh-stitched seams.

Moonglow lanced and ricocheted overhead. It haloed Niklas in silver-gleam until his pale hair and pale eyes were ablaze with it, ice-cold and blister-hot. The light coalescing between his palms thrummed and roiled, blinding and brilliant and sharp enough to burn, sharp enough to sear the afterimage of everything that this fourth husband of hers had taken into the hazy darkness behind her eyelids. Mai gritted her teeth and drew out her own magic - a swirl of shadow and mist, to fuse with Niklas’ power and twist them away-

-the last thing Mai saw was the glisten of angel-glass, lovely in a lonely sort of way: like closing your eyes and wishing for something that would never come true.

[ayzrules]

Pick one important location in your story and write a longer description of it from one of your character’s perspectives. 

probably will be easier to read on my sideblog { here } due to font issues in my main. w/ @artless-whimsy​​

[THE BURNING PLAINS.]

“How does anything live here?" one of the angels asks, squinting up against cutting rays of harsh sunshine, golden and bright - so, so, bright, and burning jagged shards of glass-sharp light and smothering heat into every grain of sand, every molecule of air, coiling tightly into flesh and fur alike and choking out all the moisture.

“In the darkness," Mai says simply, recalling long-eared jackrabbits, burrowing kangaroo rats, cunning coyote kits; all the creatures that came out after nightfall, chittering and chattering and chirping. "And with the storms."

[SHADOW.] i. The sun hangs heavy in the sky, shining and still; the heat scorches and shimmers, slithers and simmers. There is no escape, save for the darkness.

ii. In the windswept desert, the golden light from above bleeds the earth dry and the sovereign in the clouds is nothing but a faraway dream. The creatures in this land of stinging sands and singed sunshine are wily and stubborn: they live, despite it all. 

iii. Some call the Borderlands a wasteland, barren desolation seared over with dust and sand, but Mai would beg to differ. The kingdom in the clouds is bright with glory, gleaming with pearls and moonstone and otherworldly in its perfection. It is a realm that is more dream than reality, a land of blinding, brilliant divinity that glitters hard and sharp, like gemstones shattering over silk. But the kingdom above is no more alive than the smooth marble statues standing vigil over their sacred temples; nothing dies and nothing changes and there is no life, not in any way that matters. 

Because: how can something have life, without death?

iv. Crawling centipedes and chuckling roadrunners and venom-dripped scorpions make a home in the Borderlands, where the light does nothing but burn, piercing straight to the bone. The flowers and birds and butterflies that meet the unforgiving heat and icy indifference of the desert with nothing but cleverness and cunning and an iron-forged determination to survive are more alive than anything from the kingdom above could ever hope to be.

v. Twilight falls over the hills, soft like ash; when the sun slips fully below the horizon, the night fills with chirps and cackles and snarls and screeches. Satin whispers and silken starlight murmur through the dust and shadows, and silvered moonglow shines out from behind the drifting clouds.

vi. In the Borderlands, the darkness is life. Anyone who does not know it now will come around, one way or another.

[SALVATION.] i. Dark clouds gather in the west, roiling and restless: they are bruises of dust and water vapor, blooming over the sky like deadly nightshade. Thunder growls over the land, a heaven-bound panther stalking its prey, and the mortals fear its wrath. Mai is not so foolish: in the desert, the swirling thunderclouds rumble with promises of rain and reprieve. It murmurs like a lullaby to her ears.

ii. The heat is stifling and silent. The air is dry as bone and poised like a hissing rattlesnake the moment before it strikes: all is quiet. All is still.

iii. The storm shatters the skies open as jagged daggers of lightning rend the world in two, furious and white-hot and roaring, incandescent like sunlight and starfire. Unrest rolls over the hills and chaos spirals across the desert. Mai feels it like singing steel piercing through velvet darkness, sending beams of silver-spun moonlight ricocheting into the night

iv. She breathes it in, lets it fill her veins. Chaos is power, and the demons are there when rain falls, when volcanoes erupt, when tectonic plates shift and collide. They bring the end of the world for an earthworm, a forest, an entire species, all so that angels can coax mud and mountain and life out of it all - because the angels are there when seedlings bloom into trees, when weeds and wildflowers wander into fire-struck desolation, when ash-green lichens and spring-soft mosses meander their way through the cracks and crevices of land scraped rock-barren by receding glaciers to begin anew. It’s a painstaking equilibrium between order and disorder, chaos and harmony, and the desert balances on the knife’s edge, dangling over the abyss. Here, the line between life and death is sharp and quick.

v. Sometimes, the storm-dark air is too dry, and the rain that glides downward with gravity mists away into nothingness before it ever has the chance to splatter clumsily across the ground. Lightning lances over the earth instead; it catches the tangled tinderbox of hardy desert shrubs on fire, and the blustery winds gusting across the hills only fan the flames higher.

vi. Other times, the rain falls doggedly toward the parched dirt, stubbornly defying the hissing heat and arid air and all the other forces of the universe that threaten to smother out every last bit of moisture. Then, all the desert rejoices.

[STARFALL.] i. The angel falls down, down, down in a radiant burst of glory-golden light: like sun-charred lightning striking the ground, or a meteor hurtling through the sky, bright and incandescent with molten mesosphere. The horizon lights up like a comet, and the moon is haloed in singing embers.

ii. A shock of celestial fury tears over the hills, setting all the desert alight in a rain of starfire. The flames that scorch the land are dying stars, shimmering with divine wrath: blazing, brilliant, and burning themselves to dust. 

iii. The fire flashes and flickers over low-lying grasses and snarls of woody vegetation, devouring everything in its path as the air glimmers with heat and dances with ash. When it finally goes out, weeks later, there is angel-glass skidded in saw-toothed ribbons over the earth: ignited divinity and stinging sand fused into shimmering nuggets of pearlescent stone, the glory-gleam of paradise melded with the harsh, smoldering heat of the Borderlands. It glitters moon-pale and silver-searing under the darkness of the desert night

iv. Holy things burn demons, and angel-glass is no exception. Even so, Mai cannot bring herself to look away. She crouches down and closes gloved fingers around a small shard of the lustrous stone, running her thumb over the surface and feeling all the layered ridges and the bubbles of trapped air: breaths of lightning-charged atmosphere fossilized into eternity.

v. The wind swirls viciously around them, howling a sandstorm into ash-dark twilight. The angel’s eyes shine like falling stars under the scarlet-scorched light of the Gate; when she wraps an arm around Mai’s waist and presses a steadying hand into the bloodied shreds of ivory silk and ruffled star-shine clinging to her shoulders, Mai burns, molten divinity filling her veins and flooding through her un-beating heart. Wild desert marigolds and berry-sweet birds of paradise burst to life inside of her, drowning the hard steel and lancing moonlight of her ribcage in petaled brilliance. 

vi. When their lips come together for the first time, the air hisses and crackles and catches on fire all around them, soft like morning dew and bright like sunbeams flaring over the stratosphere, setting mud and mountain and sky and sea ablaze in sparking flashes of gleaming gold and liquid amber.

Mai has never felt more alive.

[kingdom-come-rpg]

Court & Casual wear for the Emperor and Empress of Shanmai, when the winters were kinder.

White hair is emblematic of the Song Dynasty, having run in each of its 5 generations. After an early Empress was (falsley) accused of infidelity for bearing a dark-haired child and summarily executed, it became customary to seek a white haired Empress to ensure the paternity of future heirs.

[brunoowens513]

Nyainqentanglha Shanmai 《秘境晨曦》 by Qiye 赣州柒爺 https://500px.com/photo/1027118034/Nyainqentanglha-Shanmai-秘境晨曦-by-Qiye-赣州柒爺

[toooooooop]

Nyainqentanglha Shanmai 《秘境晨曦》 by Qiye 赣州柒爺

[enews4]

Nyainqentanglha Shanmai 《秘境晨曦》 by Qiye 赣州柒爺 https://500px.com/photo/1027118034/Nyainqentanglha-Shanmai-秘境晨曦-by-Qiye-赣州柒爺

[yanshuchi-blog]

bbia, neulii

Cosmetic Brand Asks - accepting!

bbia: name 3 things in nature you find most beautiful.

“Just three things, from the endless wonders of nature? Let’s see here... I’d have to choose the tung blossoms in full bloom, the peaks of the Xueshan Shanmai, and, of course, the most beautiful creation of all, me~”

neulii: what soothes you after a hard day?

Answered here!

[coferstudio]

Dale una vista increíble a tus espacios con este magnífico tapiz Shanmai de la firma italiana Wallpepper Group 🇮🇹✨

El diseño como muchos de la marca nos recuerda a las maravillas de la naturaleza como lo es un panorama montañoso entre un mar de nubes. Todo con un toque artístico, difuminado y sutil que nos brinda un aspecto relajante y tranquilo ⛰️

Este tapiz es ideal para vestir salas de estar o áreas comunes 🛋️

Inclúyelo en tus proyectos y pídelo desde México en Cofer Studio ⚓

[ayzrules-art]

four times Mai got married, and one time she didn’t end up with a dead husband - aka 'hold me close’ from @flashfictionfridayofficial  ! w/ @artless-whimsy

I.

On their wedding night, her first husband held her as tenderly as a shepherd would a newborn lamb, as if she was something trembling and frail; as if she were still young and sweet like budding roses, nothing more than the first diaphanous exhale of a lilac, dew-misted daydream.

That suited Mai just fine. When she killed him with a spell murmured into the velvet darkness of their bedchamber, her words hyacinth-soft and her eyes drowned in shadow, his eyelids barely lifted at all - like the final breaths of a crushed butterfly, his lashes fluttered once, twice, and then it was over.

 Later, Mai draped herself in ivory and moonglow, a veil like faint gossamer wing beats floating over her face. She stood by his coffin for the funeral rites, and when she brushed the veil aside for the gathered mourners, false, salt-shining tears cut over her face like trickles of star-gleam. They tasted like victory.

II. 

On their wedding night, her second husband held her like iron, his hands like manacles; as if she was something to be owned. As if she was a pretty bauble to show off, or an exotic bird that would prance and pirouette on command, jewel-bright wings clipped and chained.

That suited Mai just fine. Tropical birds grew large beaks for crushing their prey, after all, and Mai’s ribcage was forged from steel, for all that her wrists stung and roiled with bruises like thunderclouds. She killed her second husband from the inside out, slowly, poisoning him to death with flakes of the angel-glass that bled in jagging ribbons over the hills; it shimmered sharp and deadly and white as Mai dissolved it into a goblet of blood-black wine, like a shrill of sunshine sparking off lightning. She imagined that she was feeding him shards of starfire and supernovas and all the blazing, holy things that would lodge into his chest like splinters and scream his shriveled heart to dust.

III.

On their wedding night, her third husband held her like a porcelain doll, as if she was something delicate and precious; as if she would shatter into glittering pieces if he dropped her, reduced to nothing but tremors of silk and china. As if she would wilt like a rose, shedding tears like bloodied flower petals as she fluttered into a faint.

That suited Mai just fine. Her cousin had gone missing - murdered, really - and it was not the fault of her third husband. He was old, and he would die soon, with or without Mai’s help. 

And Devil help her, she was tired.

  IV.

On their wedding night, her fourth husband held her with hands of frost and sun-gleam, his touch like jagged whispers of winter and nightfall and scintillations of diamond-cut light. Mai bore it, and pretended that she did not know what he had done to her cousin.

Mai did not realize until he had killed her uncle, too, but - this fourth husband of hers was always cold. Even when they stood under the scarlet-scorched glow of the Gate they had created together, with the flicker-flash of flame and the ashen hiss of heat slithering over them and smothering all the moisture into mist, Niklas’ touch was silken and chilled, like fingers of ice alighting over her exposed throat. And when his power surged out of him in pale bursts of razor-edged brilliance, blazing and blinding and bright - it burned blisters of frostbite and incandescence into Mai’s flesh, like a frozen star had swallowed her heart whole. This cruel fourth husband of hers was shaped out of something holy and corrupted, and Mai knew: it would be nigh-on impossible to kill him.

Well, fine. That had never stopped her before. 

  V.

On their wedding night, Shannon holds her with hands like embers and marigolds, soft and radiant like a flowering, berry-sweet dawn. Mai can almost feel it, just from her touch: glowing veins of gold suffusing over the stratosphere and a rosy, violet-petaled halo blushing across the horizon as the desert comes to life.

It’s enough - much, much more than enough - for Mai’s heart to catch fire, drowning the hard steel and serrated moonlight of her ribcage in molten roars of sunshine and star-flame. Holy things burn demons, and Shannon burns the brightest; there’s a rippling gash of lightning and fury and teeth in her touch, too, bared at a moment’s notice. Danger, like a slumbering dragon.

And that, Mai thinks, suits her just fine.

[ayzrules-art]

｢ I N T R O D U C T I O N S ｣  ↪  your oc’s backstory 2k21:  e m o t i o n s  e d i t i o n  (1/???) 

｢ prompts from @yourocsbackstory​​ !! ｣

“Who are you?”

Mai was sitting on a bench under the shade of a willow tree. The sun was out, soft like morning dew; her husband was arranging for a carriage at the entrance to the park, and the air smelled of spring rain.

The child - the mortal child - was staring at her, wide-eyed with...well, it certainly wasn’t fear. Wonder, perhaps, or awe? Whatever it was, Mai felt a sliver of unease slither around her gut, apprehension hissing through her veins. Was this some far-fetched ploy of her husband’s, designed to catch her unawares? 

Mai reached out with her mind - carefully, carefully - and probed gently at the boy, her shadow-spun magic murmuring in time with the rustling grass and whispering breeze. There was no sign of her husband’s influence within the human; no sign of the silken cold that crept slowly under somebody’s skin, numbing everything that made them alive.

Mai exhaled. The child was still staring at her, and Mai offered him a warm, if insincere, smile. “My name is Mai,” she said. “Where are your parents?”

He blinked. “I don’t know,” he replied, furrowing his brow as he considered her. “Are you an angel?”

It was Mai’s turn to blink. Then she laughed, as soft and lilting as trilling birdsong. “Certainly not,” she demurred, smoothing a hand over the front of her skirts and adjusting the lace-trimmed capelet settled over her shoulders. “Wherever did you get that idea?”

“Mother says all angels are beautiful,” the boy said, eyeing her skeptically. “And you’re not from here.”

It was hard to argue with either of those points. Mai found her thoughts drifting - entirely against her will, mind you - to flaming red hair and blue eyes that burned like molten starshine, alight with something glittering and wild and so, so different from the golden, lifeless beauty of the kingdom in the clouds that it made Mai’s un-beating heart stop.

Figuratively, of course.

“No,” she agreed. “I’m not from here. Have you heard of the Borderlands?”

The boy’s face scrunched itself up into a contemplative frown. “Demons live there,” he pointed out, accusingly. “Are you human then? You don’t look like a demon.”

My husband doesn’t either, Mai mused to herself, her gaze flickering to where the slender king of the underworld was paying for a carriage to bring them to their house in town. And yet, here we both are.

She supposed that she couldn’t fault the boy: mortals tended to think of demons as hideous, grotesque beings with leathery wings and twisted joints and deadly-sharp talons, something that Mai Mei - with her ink-black tresses and walking dress of snow-white watered silk and fine satin gloves that shimmered like liquid moonlight - was very decidedly not.

“I’m a queen,” she murmured instead, tilting her head to the side and regarding the human boy. “But only because my husband is a king.”

“What about the rest of your family? Is your sister a princess?” asked the mortal, and Mai shook her head.

“My family is dead,” she found herself admitting, fingers clenched tight around the handle of her parasol. “I never met most of them. Only my uncle and cousin, but my husband killed them.”

She paused, delicately. “I suppose I’m no better, though. I killed my first three husbands, and I fully intend on killing this one too.”

The park was quiet. The boy seemed bewildered, and Mai ignored him for the time being, instead glancing back toward the king of the underworld. Her eyes flitted over summer-golden daffodils and wistful lavender wisteria trees and carefully trimmed rose bushes, the petals flushed with pink sunrise. There was not a single blossom out of place, not a single speck of soil spilling out into the meticulously-laid stone path. And Devil help her, it was suffocating. 

Mai stood abruptly, something in her chest tight and aching. She knew that mortals like this boy feared the windswept desert, where the deadly heat of the sun bled the land dry and the sovereign in the clouds was nothing but a faraway dream. But the long-eared jackrabbits and crawling centipedes and all the other creatures that made a life where the darkness was salvation were wily and stubborn and so much more alive than anything in this manicured garden of neat hedges and fluttering butterflies that hummed with springtime, trapped in this fanciful man-made paradise. It reminded her all too much of the glory-bright realm above.

“Mai, are you ready?”

Her fourth husband’s quiet, pleasant voice snapped Mai out of her reverie. His eyes glittered like icicles as they glided over Mai and the child, shining and sharp.

Mai nodded. “Of course,” she murmured, taking his arm. She turned back in the direction of the mortal boy, whose eyes were wide as saucers again - this time, though, Mai could feel his fear thrumming through the air, roiling like a gathering thunderstorm. 

The king of the underworld gave the boy a dazzling smile. “Where are your parents, young man?”

Mai shook her head. “He doesn’t know. I’ll help him along?”

Her fourth husband gave a nonchalant shrug. “Alright. Be quick about it - we should be going soon.”

Mai reached with her mind once again, letting tendrils of her whisper-silk magic spiral out of her. She planted the suggestions in his head: find your mother. Forget about us.

With that done, Mai let the man who murdered her family sweep her out of the flowering park and into the waiting carriage, leaving the human boy under the gently swaying branches of the willow tree.

[ayzrules-art]

shadow & starfire, for @flashfictionfridayofficial​ ‘stars & shadows’! also inspired by a challenge i saw to describe your characters without using color, though i maaaay have deviated from that a lil ahah. ~875 words, w/ @artless-whimsy​

[IVORY QUEEN, THORNED ROSE.]

i. Porcelain and shadow, silk and steel. The queen of the underworld is a morning glory twirled in iridescent taffeta, her lips bloodied with blossoming roses and her gown shot through with star-shine and moonglow, the skirts frothing with flouncing satin ruffles. There is a revolver sewn into the petticoats.

ii. Ivory queen, thorned rose. Her eyes glimmer with calculated warmth, and her twinkling laugh weaves illusions of lilting summer birdsong and blooming forget-me-nots. Her face is flushed with life–or maybe that’s just rogue. You’re not sure.

iii. The queen of the underworld is silent as shadow, balanced on a sliver of stone hanging over the yawning abyss. She’s the eerie calm before a raging storm, whispering spider-silk and murmuring clouds spiraling through silvered skies, soft as hyacinths and hushed like deadly nightshade. Her power is faint wisps of smoke swirling around you and settling into your pores, crushed over your jugular before you even realize that it’s there.

iv. In the burning plains, the sunlight cuts straight to the bone, piercing and blinding and bright, and the arid heat bleeds the land to dust, coils itself into your throat and chokes out all the moisture. The onset of dusk is hope, and roiling thunderstorms are promises of rain and reprieve: the darkness is life, and chaos is salvation. The queen of the underworld is that moment before the heavens shatter in two; the ashen penumbra of smoldering twilight.

v. For all that her heart is ribbed with hard steel and ricocheting moonlight, there is still a gentleness to her, soft like morning dew. She tells you that you have nothing to fear from her, and you believe her.

[NIGHT KING, DIVINE DESTROYER.]

i. Velvet and midnight, starfall and steel. The king of the underworld has hair that shines moon-pale, like stars winking out from the abyss; his eyes glitter like princess-cut diamonds and jagged shards of ice. All the life in them has been transformed into something gleaming and hard through scorching heat, blasting pressure, searing frost. Still–he is a distant sun, charming everything that comes into his orbit.

ii. Night king, divine destroyer. The demon king has fine features and a smile that shimmers like spun silver; a laugh like the delicate, dazzling luminosity of gemstones spilling across the night sky, roiling clouds drifting away to reveal their brilliance. He is a silken cold that creeps into the edges of your senses and sinks itself into the crevices of your soul until you don’t remember a life without it; whispered suggestions and flickering glances, compelling without the victim ever realizing they are being compelled–numbing everything that makes them alive.

iii. The king of the underworld is tall and slender, with all the dainty grace of a ballerina, poised on the knife’s edge of rigid control and quicksilver fluidity. His gloved fingertips that flutter and flit like butterflies, and he wields his power like a dancer floating into a soaring grand jeté, with steps that are light as air and muscles and tendons pulled taut, hard as iron. There is a heartrendingly-thin boundary between stone-willed restraint and the flowing elegance of release, and the king of the underworld holds an arabesque en pointe between them.

iv. He is the rain that glides downward with gravity during a desert thunderstorm, following the forces of the universe and misting away into the hissing air before it ever has the chance to splatter clumsily across the ground. 

v. He tells you that there is nothing to be afraid of. You want to believe him.

[ANGEL OF FURY, KNIGHT OF JUSTICE.] i. Fire and fury, ichor and starfall. The fallen angel burns like scorching flame; the ashen skies are swirled with bruised thunderclouds, and she shines like a comet streaking across the horizon, setting the stratosphere alight with blinding brilliance. Her hair is suffused with radiant divinity, and her heart blooms with liquid amber into the darkness of night.

ii. Angel of fury, knight of justice. She is the storm that tears the world in half, the raging tempest that follows silken, shadow-spun calm, shattering the heavens in two: sun-charred lightning cast down to earth, incandescent with charged atmosphere. Blazing electricity crackles and dances at her fingertips, and she is more alive than anything you have ever seen.

iii. She is angel-glass, the pearlescent stone skidded over the hills like ricocheting moonlight in the half-dark of smoldering twilight. She’s burning divinity fused with earth and quartz: holy fire singed across dust-seared desolation, the glory-gleam of paradise and the harsh, bone-dry heat of the desert coming together in a burst of angel-kissed inferno. She’s fierce winds and piercing sand and blessed flame melded all into one, crowned with a halo of sun-scorched starlight.

iv. Her power is fury and it is life. She wields jagged shards of roaring lightning and molten starfire, and she is the rain that glides downward with gravity during a desert thunderstorm; she is all the forces of the universe that drive it to the parched ground, stubbornly defying the hissing heat that threatens to smother every last bit of moisture into mist.

v. Her eyes are glittering and alive, and you are afraid. You run, and she doesn’t try to stop you.

[ayzrules]

describe your character(s) without mentioning color

full text is also under the cut on my sideblog { here } , because my main blog’s font is not the most legible!

The king and queen of the underworld look nothing like the nightmarish images of winged monsters with knobby joints and twisted talons that the angels fed into the minds of the mortals, all those centuries ago. Niklas is tall and slender, extending his arm for his wife with the dainty grace of a ballerina, each movement–down to the flutters of his gloved fingertips–poised on the knife’s edge of rigid control and quicksilver fluidity.

  His hair shines moon-pale, like winter stars winking out from the abyss. His eyes are glittering princess-cut diamonds and jagged shards of ice, all the life in them transformed into something gleaming and hard through scorching heat and blasting pressure and searing frost. He’s a distant sun, charming everything that comes into his orbit: a smile spreads across his fine features, and it shimmers like spun silk. He laughs, and it’s the delicate, dazzling luminosity of gemstones spilling across the night sky as roiling clouds drift away to reveal their brilliance. And once you are there, once Niklas has you right where he wants you–then he’s softly falling snow, a numbing cold that creeps into the edges of your senses and sinks itself into the crevices of your soul until you don’t remember a life without it. 

  Niklas’ magic is the magic of whispered suggestions and flickering glances, of compelling without the victim ever realizing they are being compelled; it’s the rain that glides downward with gravity during a desert thunderstorm, following the forces of the universe and misting away into the hissing air before it ever has the chance to splatter clumsily across the ground. His power balances over the heartrendingly-thin boundary between stone-willed restraint and the flowing elegance of release, and Niklas holds an arabesque en pointe between them. He wields his magic like a dancer floating into a soaring grand jeté: his steps are light as air and his muscles and tendons are clenched tight, hard as iron.

  That, Alejandro thinks, is what makes him so terrifying. He’s as resplendent as ever as he steps away from the carriage, dressed in a frock coat of velvet and midnight, but Alejandro has seen what mortal ballerinas do to themselves to find the point between tight-tension-musclespulledtaut and spin-launch-let go. It’s bruised shins, torn muscles, bloodied feet, fractured bones. It’s bending a human body and then crushing downward despite the screams ripping through their tendons and the shaking in their lungs, the pain tearing them in two. And eventually, once one has repeated this enough times, for enough years, the brute force of it all blooms into those graceful leaps and endless whip-precise pirouettes that their wealthy patrons love so dearly, looking downward from their cushioned balconies. Niklas has put himself through this and more, to have what he does today.

  His wife, though, is more a force of nature than a mere ballerina–but one would not be able to tell just from looking at her. Alejandro watches from his post as Mai takes Niklas’ arm, smiles and thanks the coachman. The queen of the underworld is a dainty doll, her fine manners and demure bearing belying the thorns underneath. Her petaled lips are bloodied with blossoming roses, and her gown is shot through with star-shine and moonglow, the skirts frothing with flouncing satin ruffles. Alejandro knows: there is a revolver sewn into the petticoats.

  Mai’s complexion is pale as porcelain, her hair dark as night; under the warm glow of chatter and light radiating out from the manor, it gleams like the pearly veins of angel-glass skidded over the land and seared into the sand, burning divinity fused with the harsh, unforgiving desert. Like her husband, there is a fluid grace and pleasant charm to her movements: she’s a morning glory twirled in iridescent taffeta, greeting their host and exchanging all the polite pleasantries that the mortals expect from her. Mai’s eyes glimmer with calculated warmth and her twinkling laugh casts the illusion of lilting summer birdsong and blooming bluebells, giving all the appearance of a beating heart.

  Alejandro, though, has known Mai for long enough to see right past it. Mai’s magic is silent as shadow, balanced on a sliver of stone hanging over yawning nothingness. It’s the eerie calm before a raging storm, whispering spider-silk and murmuring clouds spiraling through silvered skies, soft as hyacinths and hushed like deadly nightshade. It’s faint wisps of smoke swirling around you and settling into your pores, crushed over your jugular before you even realize that it’s there.

  The mortals fear demons and the chaos and darkness they represent, but Alejandro knows that the darkness is life and chaos is salvation. In the Borderlands–the so-called ‘burning plains’–sunlight cuts straight to the bone, piercing and blinding and bright, and the arid heat bleeds the land to dust, coils itself into your throat and chokes out all the moisture. There, the onset of dusk is hope, and roiling thunderstorms are promises of rain and reprieve. Mai is that moment before the heavens shatter in two, the ashen penumbra of smoldering twilight.

  And, Alejandro thinks, for all that Mai’s un-beating heart is ribbed with hard steel and ricocheting moonlight, there is still a gentleness to her.

  His mind wanders to the grounded angel, the one that Mai saved from her husband’s men. It’s ironic, he thinks, that the two most powerful demons in existence both feel so quiet, while the angel is boiling fury and scorching flame; burning, burning, burning. Her eyes are glittering and wild, her hair suffused with radiant divinity, a bright, untamed torch of molten starfire. She’s the storm that comes after Mai’s silken, shadow-spun calm: she’s crashing thunder and sun-charred lightning and white-hot incandescence rending the world in two. The king and queen of the underworld dance across glittering glass, spinning their deadly pirouettes of court politics and bloody vengeance through the centuries, but the angel might just be the one who tears them apart, bringing their entire kingdom down with her. 

  She’s waiting at some indeterminate point outside of the manor–no doubt exactly where Mai had asked her to be–and Alejandro has a job to do. He shakes himself out of his thoughts and steps in line with Mai and her husband when they reach him, beaming at them both as all three of them make their way inside.

[ayzrules-art]

A YEAR OF WRITING — 2021.

shoutout to @ecwrenn​ for the idea!!! i’m not a writeblr, but i haven’t posted these covers on my back-up blog yet so i figured i’d make a short lil post to go along w it :D

RUN DEVIL RUN — JANUARY THROUGH AUGUST. ↳ SHELVED. wlw wild west blasphemy. fantasy, wild west-derivative aesthetic, angels vs demons, subversions of traditional light vs dark fantasy tropes.

↳ SYNOPSIS LINE. “Friendless, alone, and stranded in hostile territory, where nightfall is the only relief from the blazing sun and scorching heat, the fallen angel quickly learns that a thrice-widowed demon queen has run of the Borderlands...and a chance encounter amidst the harsh, piercing winds of the desert puts the angel directly in her clutches.”

↳ PROGRESS. 17064 words across misc snippets + actual body of text. w/ @artless-whimsy​

↳ HUMOROUS MOMENT. “Angels could never do anything without a certain degree of excessiveness, and that included casting out their own kind.”

graphics // flash fiction friday snippets

STARFALL — SEPTEMBER THROUGH NOVEMBER. ↳ BACKGURNER. fantasy magic war with light steampunk elements. magic that’s somewhat scientific & based off of natural laws, somewhat i-do-what-i-want, subversions and twists of traditional light vs dark fantasy tropes.

↳ SYNOPSIS LINE. “Springtime blooms with the slithering sweetness of hyacinths and larkspur, and war erupts over the sun-warm earth.”

↳ PROGRESS. 66927 words across planning/outlining and actual body of text, nanowrimo project!! w/ @clarienanaberry​ @artless-whimsy​ @morningstar1399​

↳ LAST WRITTEN LINE. “The sun spread wide palms of scarlet and gloaming over the dusk-aching clouds, striated like rock-dunes of amber stone and fiery clay. Gen watched Alejandro move across the lead-churned grass, red sky and red life smeared messily over his face and dried into his hair like rust. 

From afar, the gold of his hair gleamed like embers and filigree shot through with crimson, a halo of blood eclipsed over sunglow.”

graphics + snippets

ULTRAGLAM STUFF — DECEMBER THROUGH PRESENT. ↳ CURRENT FOCUS. glitzy glam space cyberpunk centered around corporate + political + royal court intrigue on the backdrop of robot unicorn racing and kpop-esque celeb culture. yeahhhh it’s a whole mess and i’m having a great time ;DDD

↳ PROGRESS. 12961 words in my doc, ~30k combined with others. w/ @scribeofred and my other bestie katie <3 !!!

↳ SETTING LINE. “Their transport skims upward, the razor-steel wingtips scything through the boundaries of the holographic cloud cover like a boning knife dragging across the thick molasses-syrup of melted sugar, spun over in all the colors of candy floss and Galaxy Cosmetics’ latest saccharine lipstick shade. In the warp beyond the wisping pink, there’s nothing but a storm-void of black tessellated in the fractaling outlines of distorted projections, and the blue-limned dark follows them like a dog with a bone snarled between its jaws.”

↳ HUMOROUS MOMENT. “Cycle One shows - or Spring/Summer, but that’s not politically correct - take place right when the fiscal year ends, silly. It’s perfect! If you’re in a fashion capital for bureaucracy business anyway, why not take advantage?”

LIKE BLOOD FOR ROSES — JUNE AND JULY. ↳ SHELVED. urban fantasy werewolves and vampire covens and dramaaaaa. mashup crossover w/ @bebemoon​​ @artless-whimsy​ @morningstar1399​

↳ SYNOPSIS LINE. “Underworlders have flocked to Los Santos like a murder of crows, embedding themselves deep within the flashing neon veins and smog-choked lungs of the city.

But still- 

-the Wolves are a problem.”

↳ PROGRESS. 11423 words, july camp nano project!​

↳ HUMOROUS MOMENT. “The least Zhang could have done was pay for all this shit. She was the one who insisted we hold a party for Gen anyway,” Alejandro muttered under his breath as he contemplated the invitations, twirling a strand of his long blond hair around his finger. In centuries past, an invitation to the celebration of a newly-turned fledgling was a curlicued, flourishingly elaborate thing, handwritten in swoops of ink (or blood, or flakes of gold, or whatever else the host thought would make an appropriately ostentatious impression) and delivered by a bespelled raven, only to dissolve into a fall of rose petals as soon as the invitee had read the message. Ravens were rare in Los Santos, though, and Alejandro didn’t have a functional printer.

graphics

[ayzrules]

holy fury // dark rose

[ayzrules]

｢ R U N   D E V I L   R U N . ｣ you better  r u n , run, run, run, run ‘cause there’s gonna be some  h e l l  to pay you better  r u n , run, run, run, run run  d e v i l  run, run,  d e v i l  run, run run devil, devil, run,  r u n