#the humanity and cleverness and beauty such as they are are on the surface

[iniziare]

Tag drop: Guizhong (don't mind me re-dropping this with the fixed ones, shh)

[theinnerunderrain]

Turmoil at Sea [Yan!Merman x Fem!Reader]

Warnings/tags: Yandere themes, description of violence, I saw a video of orcas hunting and wanted to write something abt it, disturbing content.

+

"Marlin."

With a shaky voice, you called out to the merman lurking beneath the dark depths of the water. Your eyes danced wildly along the watery surface, desperately seeking a glimpse of him.

"Please come out. You're scaring me."

On hands and knees, you clung to the meager wooden surface that barely qualified as a makeshift raft, the sole lifeline between you and the vast expanse of the ocean. The survival itself was a stroke of fortune, remnants of a shipwreck etching haunting memories – cannon balls piercing through ship walls, the frantic cries of the crew in a desperate quest for safety.

"Marlin!"

You attempt once more, your voice rising in volume and gaining a sharper edge. Splashes of water collide with the raft, showering your bare ankles. The once elegant gown, worn for your birthday celebration, now serves as your sole source of warmth. Your left thigh is wrapped in makeshift bandages fashioned from scattered scarves found amidst the vast sea. Slowly edging toward the raft's edge, you strained to peer through the dense water veil, only to be met with an impenetrable darkness that revealed nothing but a faint reflection of yourself. With eyes reddened, pallid skin, and hair beginning to knot after enduring two weeks adrift at sea, your physical state mirrored the harshness of your oceanic ordeal. The scent that clung to you was a noxious blend of fish and seaweed, the very sustenance provided by the merman. Surprisingly, you marveled at your resilience, having somehow endured the consumption of raw, uncooked meat without succumbing to its potentially fatal consequences.

Abruptly, a hand emerged from beneath the water, prompting you to swiftly retreat to the safety of the raft's center. The owner of the hand revealed himself to be none other than the merman, Merlin, whose expression conveyed clear disdain. His hand extended, torso flat against the raft's surface, and intense ocean eyes locked onto you.

"..M..Marlin."

He remains unresponsive to the sound of your name, his long blue tails faintly visible as they linger within the water. After a moment of uninterrupted gaze, he finally speaks, his voice flowing like a smooth seam of silk, captivating in its beauty. The sunlight above did little to forsake his beauty; instead, it gracefully highlighted his features, casting an enchanting aura that rendered him majestic, akin to a water nymph.

"Do you truly despise me that much?"

"What..?"

A bitter laugh escapes him as he withdraws his hand, crossing his elbow to rest his chin against his forearm. His dark hair cascades down, lightly sticking to his chin, a subtle dampness lingering. One can't help but marvel at how a being like him manages to thrive in the frigid waters, contemplating the preservation of his skin and hair—unchanged and undamaged, a testament to their enduring beauty.

"You've proven yourself quite clever, manipulating me into scavenging for food. Quite the strategist, aren't you?"

"I do not understand.."

Your brows furrow slightly at his words, perplexed by the notion that you might be using him to scavenge for food. After all, it was he who volunteered to assist you, the one who rescued you from the wreckage and gently placed your body onto the raft. During the night of the celebration, you discerned his presence beneath the water, catching a fleeting glimpse of his exquisite tail. Despite your observation, your crewmates dismissed him as a mere swordfish or dolphin, oblivious to the captivating mystery that lingered beneath the waves.

"You're exploiting me for your survival, only to abandon me once other humans come to your rescue, aren't you?"

"Certainly not! Once I set foot on solid ground, I am determined to find every possible way to express my gratitude for your kindness."

He scoffed at your words, finding your naivety simultaneously endearing and tinged with folly. Your captivating gaze drew him in, becoming the sole reason Marlin chose to rescue you amidst the entire ordeal. Although not inherently fond of humans, he found solace in the radiant brightness and warmth emanating from your eyes—a quality seldom witnessed through the eyes of pirates or the sailors he had encountered along his journey.

"Do you genuinely think fellow humans would permit such a scenario? If anything, they'll likely exploit that pretext as justification to pursue and hunt me down."

You dismiss his words with a subtle shake of your head, lips forming a tight line as you attempt to speak over him, any method to reason with him.

""Don't worry. I'll reassure them that you pose no threat. I can even persuade my father to consider implementing legislation concerning the pursuit of seamen!"

"My dearest human, it's not as straightforward as it may seem. Even if your father possessed the authority to enforce such a rule, do you believe those who exploit my kind for gain would genuinely adhere to it?"

"B..but it truly is!"

"It is not."

""Marlin, if you assist me in finding my way home, I am prepared to fulfill any wish or desire you may have forsaken. I give you my word—I am willing to do anything."

Marlin fixed his gaze upon you, his laughter crackling as if your words were nothing more than a comedic jest. Your face flushed with embarrassment, the dignity befitting a lady tarnished and mocked amidst the vastness of the ocean. After a few moments, Marlin succeeded in stifling his laughter, pressing his head onto the wooden surface of the raft. He pushed himself up, grinning at you once more.

"Given your persistent stance and reluctance to reconsider, it appears you are determined to return to your modest homeland."

He inhales deeply, then eases himself off the raft, submerging more than half of his body in the sea. His head emerges as the sole visible part, and his long, dark hair ripples in the water, reminiscent of the seaweed depicted in the textbooks you frequently borrowed from the library.

"Well. You leave me with no other choice."

He gracefully plunges back into the water, his form seamlessly vanishing into the azure depths. Your fist tightens as you attempt to fathom his intent, but before clarity settles, he emerges near you. His tail propels a considerable amount of water, conjuring a substantial wave that gracefully cascades onto the raft, drenching everything. A surprised yelp escapes you as the water meets your palm, and you swiftly realize you're gradually sliding toward the edge.

You successfully maintain composure for most of the ordeal, believing his juvenile outburst had concluded. However, your apprehensions materialize as you witness him rapidly approaching, his tail propelling him through the water with increased speed. The waves generated this time are more substantial, causing the raft to sway significantly. As the waves hit and water infiltrates beneath the raft, your last semblance of remaining afloat teeters.

It's over.

A second scream escapes your throat as the waves crash around you. The raft, teetering slowly, slips from your grasp, and you plummet into the cold embrace of the ocean. The frigid water engulfs your senses as you struggle to stay afloat, the taste of salt seeping into your mouth and nose, inducing a stinging sensation. Despite the pain, your eyes stay open, but water bubbles cloud your vision, leaving you disoriented in the underwater turmoil.

"[First Name]."

Even as the water filled your ears, a cold hand firmly gripped your torso, preventing you from descending deeper into the ocean's depths. Through your hazed vision, a pair of bright blue eyes and a mop of dark hair came into view, confirming that it was Marlin who held you.

"..N...No..!"

Your attempts to speak result in nothing but muffled cries, your struggle to wriggle free and rise toward the air and sunlight impeded by his unrelenting grip. Your body yielded to an inexplicable force, surrendering to his control like an underwater puppet. In a fleeting instant, a sensation of cold and softness grazed your lips. Uncertain in your disoriented state, you couldn't be sure if it was Marlin's lips pressing against yours, but the moment lingered in a haze of confusion.

As time slipped away, the diminishing air began to weigh on you, involuntarily coaxing your mouth open and allowing water to seep into your lungs. Your ears, now entirely filled with water, rendered Marlin's words muffled and distant.

Observing your distress, Marlin placed an additional hand on your stomach. His fingers, accompanied by sharp nails, delicately traced along your bare skin, adding an unsettling dimension to your already harrowing struggle. As the sands of time trickled away, you strained to discern the letters, your grasp on survival slipping through the narrowing hourglass.

The first letter being, "I". You could feel Marlin pulling you deeper into the ocean.

The second letter being, "L". The salt in your lungs were too much to bear.

The third letter being, "O". You can't see a single thing, your vision being nothing but complete darkness.

The fourth letter being "V". Oh God, you're going to die.

Before comprehension could settle, your body succumbed, surrendering to the relentless force of the deep. As your consciousness slipped away, the haunting echo of those unfinished letters lingered in the underwater silence.

[heartfullofleeches]

Oh god PLEASE do a short with creep reader giving horrible torture ideas to Host while the contestants look on in horror.

(sorta forgot the short in your ask, but I hope you enjoy)

You are in an office.

The wall directly to your south is missing, but you can't see that far behind you - and so it is still there. A man sits cross from you at the other end of the table. You sense the presence of others in chairs beside you, but trying to make out distinct features from their grainy silhouettes only worsened the dull throbbing in the back of your skull. The amount of attention should bother you, but the significance of that man and yourself overshadowed them like the phantoms they were. Besides you, he's the most important in the room. He's your boss afterall.

Bathed in grey from his suit to his slicked back hair to even his skin, the man nurses an equally monochrome mug branded with the cheeky title of "A Show Host." The only bout of color on him was his tie which was curiously the exact shade and hue as your favorite color, and the book he held in his free hand. A quaint little journal with its lock popped and the key still in your pocket. Your brain screams to steal it back, but same as you can't look anywhere except ahead your body has lost all control of the rest of its motor functions.

The man barks a chuckle at the twisted thoughts you've put to paper. He removes his tie and tucks it smoothly between the pages of your journal, folding his hands neatly on the table as he closes it shut. His excessively wide grin peaks further as your eyes meet where his should be.

"Before we begin our meeting I must say what an honor it is to have such a clever mind in our little studio. Been a big fan of your work for quite some time and I think it's time to put some of your works to action."

The man tilts his sightless gaze towards the table. There are three folders where blank space once preoccupied. You gain control of your limbs as your fingers wiggle in the direction of the one closest to you.

"Those folders contain everything you need to know about the lovely contestants joining us today. Hopes, fears, ambitions, regrets- All you need and more to cook up some delicious punishment for our losers. Anything and I do mean anything is on the table. Give us your deepest, darkest fantasies and we will be more than glad to make them reality. The ball's in your court, and the pen is in your hand."

You open the first folder - gripping the pen in your sweaty palm as you read. As told, the folder is chalk full of notes on some guy just a couple years your senior. Someone's entire life held within rubber bands and pages. You sit in silence for a while. Circling some pieces, crossing out others. The Host watches intently from his end of the table feeling the swell of pride and admiration towards your dedication in whatever part of him resembled a human heart. You set down your tool and gather your notes as you begin your speech.

"Contestant A has severe claustrophobia resulting from locked in a closet by siblings as a child and forgotten for several hours. They also have fears of the dark and needles which are mostly unrelated on the surface. A potential punishment is to lock them in a room with just enough space to move. The walls are covered in spikes, slowly closing on them as time passes. The walls move at different paces so they believe it's safer elsewhere when in reality there's nowhere for them to go."

Silence. The silhouettes turn face each other, muttering amongst themselves with words you can't quite make out before facing Host sitting patiently this whole time. One by one, the silhouettes rise - striking their palms together in a chorus of applause which reaches its peak as one final member joins the frey. Host wipes a fake tear of his cheek. It almost feels...pleasant to receive positive attention for once.

"Beautiful, just beautiful. Childhood trauma, the hopeless hope or escape. I knew there was nothing short of genius in you. Keep going."

Host returns to his chair, resting his chin on the ball of his palm as you reach for another folder. Your hand naturally falls on the next one in order, but upon picking it up the letter on its cover is C. Host picks up his cup and holds to his lips as you look up at him. Skimming through the pages a strange feeling settles in your stomach. The same that plagued when writing nearly every entry in your book. You set the folder down and pick up the third. Then the first. It all clicks.

"Contestant C.... Contestant C is someone who tried to make my life a living hell in the past. In spite of this, with your permission I'd like to make them an offer. The other contestants are close friends of theirs. Life long even. Contestant C is now both an star athlete and plays guitar on weekend. They are also selfish and care for no one but themselves. I would like to give them the opportunity to free themselves and their friends in exchange for their dominant arm. If they refuse they are free to leave, following immediate punishment, torture and killing of their allies they must sit through."

Host stares at you - least you assume so given his lack of eyes, for quite some time. So long whatever he was drinking had to be cold by now. His cup turns out to be empty as it rolls across the floor. Thand resting on his chin covers his entire face as he folds, head bouncing off the wooden as his body twitches and jerks with every giggle he stifles. His attempts are in vain as his laughter echoes through the shadows around you, and the unseen crowd behind you. They convulse in ways unnatural foe the human forms they mimic. The sound reverberates from every corner, drowning your thoughts. You pick up the mug at your feet, reading its message for a second of clarity.

"Reality's Greatest Co-Host."

Host gradually regains his composure. He cards a hand through his hair and fixes his collar as he lifts himself off the table. He shutters returning to focus to you having never known more love or appreciation for the human mind than what consumes him now.

"I... could honestly kiss you right now. Forgive me for my brashness, but you have proven yourself a second time as the perfect member of our team. I'd kill to have a look at your brain, but I much prefer it in that pretty head of yours. I simply can't wait to see what you have in store for future guests, but for now let's focus on the ones we have now. We've kept them waiting long enough..

Blinking once, Host stands over you, holding out his hand as bright light blinds your vision. You're no longer facing the table and now in view of the stage hidden behind that wall that never existed. Three people stand behind podiums, each expressing terror, dread, anger or a perfect mixture of the three. Your lips pull into a smile as you take Host's hand and step out onto the stage. The crowd's cheers pitch higher seeing their favorite hosts hand in hand. A whisper soft as a lover's embrace meets your ear as his lips meet your temple.

"In the impossible chance they agree, you don't plan on letting any of them go - do you?"

He knows you so well.

[artist-issues]

And another thing.

The original The Little Mermaid is about understanding. One of the main plot devices is that the witch takes what from Ariel, ladies and gentlemen?

Her voice.

Ariel did not leave the sea “for a boy.”

Ariel left the sea to be understood. Because for the whole first part of the movie, we’re shown hints of what her life is already like, and how she’s tried to be understood but nobody’s listening or communicating.

She’s introduced by describing a ship as amazing and wonderful, while her fish friend clearly does not understand and wants to get out of there.

Even her best friend doesn’t share her love for another world.

Her first interaction with her father, count how many times he’s speaking over her.

He has this prejudice against humans, and because she’s disobeyed him, he won’t listen to any of her evidence that they may not all be bad.

Even when she has a voice and a cavern full of proof that humans aren’t all barbarians, her father won’t listen to her, so he can’t understand.

And the truth is, she doesn’t have that much proof. She knows that humans are clever and make “wonderful things,” and that’s what she bases her belief in them on. But those beautiful objects, and her pretty ideals, are not enough to make her abandon her family and culture and world.

When she sings and talks about why she wants to be Part of That World, it’s because she wants to understand it. And, subconsciously, Ariel also hopes to be understood up there. Where they make cool devices, and maybe daughters can stand instead of being reprimanded. There’s this hope for freedom and being known associated with the surface.

But it’s not until she meets Eric that those ideals are really, actually, proven true.

Ariel sees Eric out on the sea exploring instead of staying in a palace on his birthday. He gets a gift from the closest person to him, and it’s clear that even the closest person to him doesn’t understand his tastes—he doesn’t want an over-dramatic statue of himself. He sticks to his ideals in an argument that somewhere out there, is the right girl for him. But he doesn’t have to leave the argument in frustrated tears. In the end, he risks his life to not only watch out for his friend, but nearly dies going back to a burning ship to save his dog.

Eric personifies everything Ariel has always idealized about the Human World—AND he might understand her.

In her one observation of him, she finds out that he, a human, is:

A Prince, but nobody can tell him what to do.

More interested in activity and exploration than palace ceremony.

Unable to relate to his closest companions.

Handsome—beautiful, not a savage.

Criticized for “silly, romantic notions” but sticks to the idea of something wonderful out there in the great beyond.

Brave, self-sacrificial, and compassionate to animals.

Eric is, all at once, everything Ariel always hoped a human could be, and yet still so like herself. They have twin souls.

She’d rather be exploring human ships, he’d rather be out exploring the sea. She believes the surface world is good and beautiful, he believes in the girl of his dreams, no matter what anyone says. She has nobody who gets excited about new adventures, and he has nobody who gets excited about new adventures.

When she sees him, she falls in love not just with his upstanding character, or even the human world he represents—she falls in love with the hope that he might understand her in away nobody under the sea does.

Then the ironic thing is, she’s got to make him understand who she is and what she should mean to him without a voice. And unfortunately, that’s really hard because he is suddenly associating his dream girl with a voice and a magical rescue.

As close as they may get when she finally does meet him face to face and gets herself human legs, Ariel and Eric can’t be together until he knows who she is, for real. After all, how can love be true without understanding?

And we’re not DONE with understanding. Because even after he learns what and who she is and still commits to her and saves her and loves her, Ariel’s back to having a tail. She’s back to being in a world where he can’t be.

Except now, Triton is the one who understands. He finally sees what they’ll do for each other—and that Eric, ”savage, spineless, harpooning fish eater with no regard” saved his daughter. He sees that they love each other and are each worthy of the other’s love.

It’s not until Triton understands what Ariel has known and felt all along that he gives her human legs the right way.

That’s the point of Disney’s The Little Mermaid. “True love is found in understanding and sacrificing for one another.”

Triton had the sacrificing idea down, but he didn’t have understanding. Eric had understanding, but he didn’t have the chance to sacrifice for it.

Ariel has both. She understands that Eric’s world is not only barbaric, but beautiful, and she’s willing to sacrifice her tail to be understood in that world.

That is what this movie is all about. And because they’re probably willing to sacrifice critical scenes, like the Prince saving the day (which is important because it provides Triton with a new understanding of humans) or the girl leaving the ocean to be with the boy (which is important because what she really wants is to be understood) the creators of the Live Action Little Mermaid are going to miss the point and ruin the movie.

[cobragardens]

Aziraphale's Ascot: An Analysis

What's most interesting to me about the ascot Aziraphale is wearing when he turns up in Crowley's car in 1967 is that it's very fashionable.

An ascot (American), or day cravat (British), is a band of material meant to be worn inside the shirt collar, terminated on each end with a long wide tongue of that same fabric.

The band goes around the back of the neck, and the tongues are tied in the front and tucked into the open neck of a collared shirt. An ascot displays a wide sweep of color just below the wearer's face to flatter their complexion and show their personality.

And the late 1960s was the ascot's peak of popularity. The Duke of Windsor wore them; the mods wore them; British Invasion bands wore them. Fred wears an ascot in the Scooby-Doo cartoons. Lance Corporal Shadwell wears one. They were a huge trend.

On the surface this doesn't seem like Aziraphale at all. His previous appearances indicate his stylishness in ancient Rome is merely serendipitous overlap of Roman fashion with his personal preferences for white robes, blond hair in a Brutus cut, and gold wing-themed jewellery. In 1601, 1793, 1941, and all contemporary scenes, his style is decades to more than a century off the fashion of its time. We know he's into bow ties by 1941, and he's hardly one to adopt a style merely because it's popular; so why the ascot in 1967?

One possible explanation is that Aziraphale misses the clothing of the Victorian period and leaps at the chance to wear something that harks back to a time when he felt at home, sartorially speaking.

I don't think that's it, though, at least not in Show Omens. For one thing, traditional ascot ties (what a British person would call an ascot or an ascot tie, rather than a day cravat) are not at all the same accessory as the ascots of the 1960s: they're formal rather than semi-casual daywear; they're made of thicker silk, often with a woven rather than printed pattern; and they're worn outside the shirt and collar. More importantly, we've got two scenes of Aziraphale in the Victorian period, and he's not wearing an ascot tie in either of them: he's wearing a long cravat tied in a wide bow, a precursor to his bow ties.

I therefore propose a different explanation for the ascot of 1967.

As Aziraphale has clearly never been anywhere near a polyester fibre in the whole of his celestial existence, and as he always affects an appearance of idle hereditary wealth, we must presume that this--

--is silk. (In fact in the 1960s, a silk ascot in light colors was a signal of upper-class status.)

And we know Aziraphale likes silk, because by 2023 he's been wearing a silk velvet waistcoat for 200 years.

I again advance the argument that, despite himself, Aziraphale is a voluptuary by nature: a person who directs their energies toward the pursuit and enjoyment of pleasure, especially (but not solely) sensual pleasure.

He can control his appearance at will, and yet he has a barber; that means he enjoys the pleasure of a haircut and maybe a hot shave. (I have similar suspicions about his manicured hands.) The barber has recommended new cologne, which means Aziraphale has an old cologne, which means he likes to smell beautiful scents. He eats for sensual pleasure. He drinks for sensual pleasure (much more so than Crowley, who drinks for the pleasure and escape of inebriation). He listens to music for sensual pleasure. He attends the theater for pleasure. Reading is as much a sensual pleasure inside your own head as it is intellectual self-stimulation (which is its own kind of pleasure in turn); and believe me, collecting books is as much a sensual pleasure as a logistical and a philosophical one.

Aziraphale even agrees to an Arrangement with a demon to give himself more spare time for his pursuit of human pleasures. And then he and the demon become friends, because what could be a greater pleasure than indulging yourself in the good company of someone clever and kind and beautiful, who flirts with you and tells wicked jokes you mustn't laugh at--except perhaps for the pleasure of making that person smile in return?

Fun fact: The silk of which casual ascots are made is finer than the silk of either traditional ascot ties or neckties, because ascots/day cravats are made to be worn inside rather than outside the collar.

In 1967, instead of his usual crisp bow tie around his usual tightly buttoned collar, Aziraphale wears an open collar and a day cravat because the fashion of the 1960s lets him keep silk against his skin.

And there's one other thing, too. Compare Aziraphale's ascot to Lance-Corporal Shadwell's, or to the standard ascot knot:

The edge of Azirapale's ascot sits below the edge of his shirt collar where it should sit above, and the cascade spills almost an inch in front of his Adam's apple instead of flush against his neck. Aziraphale has tied his ascot low and loose.

It allows him to bare more of his throat to Crowley than has been sanctioned by custom for 2,000 years.

How long after Aziraphale reverted to bow ties did Crowley think about that?

[writeouswriter]

pls no anti ai art demagogy on my dash, thx

(X) in reference to this reblog I assume.

This is the wildest ask I’ve ever gotten.

“Please no love for the humanity of creation on my dash, please. Please no acknowledgement that art and the human experience behind those making it is inherently and fundamentally intertwined. Please no shoving the fact in my face that art is meant to connect rather than consume.

And please no pointing out the basic truth that most AI engines are built off the stolen work of others.”

Demagogy, noun: political activity or practices that seek support by appealing to the desires and prejudices of ordinary people rather than by using rational argument.

You come into MY house, you tell me what not to reblog on MY blog, and you what? Call me “irrational” and insult my understanding of the topic in the process?

Political activity, political activity... fuck off. Actors, writers, artists, those most affected by this ARE the ordinary people, and their concerns and fears surrounding this are perfectly rational.

And you know, nothing hits it home more for me than when I thought about my favourite show at the moment, the one that makes me lose my mind a thousand times over, I thought about everything in it that makes me tick, thought about both strong points and weak points, because it is flawed, god, is it flawed because people inherently are, and that’s the beauty, but mostly, I thought about the sheer amount of care/thought and depth put into it in a way I've never really seen before and in a medium/genre/whatever you'd absolutely never expect to find that thought put into, especially if taken completely at a surface level. Thought about the levels of metaphor and symbolism layered in beneath the silliness, thought about the callbacks and clever timing, thought about the behind the scenes arguments about what direction worked best for the narrative and the audience, arguments that took place because of how much they cared not just about telling a good story, but about telling one that really means something to them.

Thought about the love, the time, the excitement and the flair and personality and background and intent of each and every person behind the team bleeding its way into the scripts, into the acting, into the heart of what makes it truly what it is, and how that love bleeds into the audience as well, how that love and human connection is what prompts people to write full page essays and analyses on it, draw fanart for it, create the most beautiful fics for it, that love is what prompts them to laugh and cry and vibrate at the speed of sound thinking about it, and what prompts thousands upon thousands to come together in their appreciation for and relation to it, rallying around it like a group of cavemen around a campfire when they had never before seen the flame.

And then.... then I thought about the idea of that same show being written by an AI and genuinely felt physically ill. Because no real care will have been put into that beyond "If it looks like a TV show, sounds like a TV show, it must be a TV show." And on the surface, maybe it’d look fine, I’m sure some people wouldn’t notice. But it’d not only be made without thought, but consumed without thought. And, sure, maybe that'll fill you up in the short term, but it's gonna leave you feeling hollow and sick eventually. Because stories are not a thing to be mass produced with a random assortment of the cheapest quality materials on a conveyor belt that shovels them directly into people's throats at the most efficient speed possible, stories are not a thing meant to just be consumed! They are a thing made with intent in every aspect, even when accidental because our lives shape it subconsciously, they are a thing made with love, a thing to be savoured! And yes, for that to happen, they will take a lot of time and hard work and dedication, all of which deserve fair compensation and respect, all of which cannot just be replaced by a sham amalgamation of these things, and they will be all the better for it.

And on some level, corporations know this, and they want you to blame their shortcomings on the writers, on the artists, they want you to look at things like the strikes and those rallying against AI and get mad that they’re keeping art from the common people, or forcing them to come to this, or they want you to think they’re simply trying to make art more accessible, all the while building their conveyor belts in the background with the blood of those they’re kicking down, taking away jobs and shoving the humanity out of the picture.

Art is made to communicate, and sometimes it’s frustrating when we can’t get that communication across, when the image we want to convey is out of our skill level, our capability, when our words get tangled up, jumbled together and we need a helping hand to find the right ones again, and on this level, maybe AI could be a useful supplemental tool, or a fun little thing to mess around with, if ethically sourced, if used for good, if taking into account and graciously acknowledging exactly how it’s being used as a tool, rather than trying to pass it off as something it’s not.

But is it political, is it irrational, to merely state that the human condition cannot be replaced?

——

The unfollow button is free, I don’t work for you.

[wind-to-your-sails]

The Man Named Winter, and What He Saw

A very fun realization… Peer Past the Veil is within Winter’s colors. The chaos of red magic lets him break down the order of the House, and the natural grounding of green magic lets him turn that breakdown into a revelation on the plane’s true nature. This does mean I am currently conjecturing that the maze of staircases seen on this card is normally invisible, which may yet prove false, but the nature of this card supports that conjecture for the moment.

So, what is the true nature of the House that is revealed by this card? Well, you see how the focal point of this image is a sphere? That isn’t random creepy eye imagery. That’s the planet of Duskmourn itself, where Valgavoth dwells, and has dwelt since time before time. The Below is the basement of the world, the focal point of the House, and as Zimone’s scans in this tangle of stairs confirm, the only place that Nashi could possibly be.

But look at it. Look at where the Below is in comparison to the isolated human figure. It is smaller in this image than the moon appears from most card art set on a planet’s surface. The opening to get there is the Quiescence, which has already begun and which can only last months at best, while the distance measured from this point is ten years of walking at the least. Our party teeters on the edge of utter despair, confronting the enormity of the impossibility of what they’re up against, when Winter reminds them about the first thing they learned about the House; it shifts.

Step back from this peek through the curtain, and then peek through the curtain again from the next room over, and you’re at a completely different point on the plane relative to the Below. Their destination is impossibly far away but simultaneously unknowably close. All they need is a guide. All they need is Winter.

But this isn’t just a cool moment. The fact that Winter can cast Peer Past the Veil is the reason that he is everything we know he is. The card says as much, that seeing the true nature of the House makes it impossible to ignore. Very few survivors in Duskmourn realize what the House is. Some think of it as a finite structure that can be escaped from as surely as it can be stumbled into, some acknowledge its warping of space but assume this is a very clever illusion and they’re still stuck in the same building where the door appeared, some have heard the stories about Valgavoth’s rise but assume they are merely dealing with a hollow world, like Ixalan. Winter is one of a very rare few who knows that the House is the entirety of the plane. And that isn’t something that’s easy to know.

What would you abandon, at such a revelation? Hope of escape is always the first thing to die here, but to have the very concept obliterated from your mind is not something that happens every day. Beholding the true scale of the House, what value remains in anything? Communities of survivors are grains of sand in the floorboards, moments of beauty are such tiny specks of light they cannot be seen through the ugliness. Everything is in the House, and the House is everything. To paraphrase Susanna Clarke, “The Horror of the House is immeasurable; its Cruelty infinite.”

No wonder Winter is Like That.

[violentvaleska]

𝑨𝒃𝒚𝒔𝒔 𝒐𝒇 𝑴𝒆𝒎𝒐𝒓𝒊𝒆𝒔

ғᴏᴜʀᴛᴇᴇɴ ᵈᵉᵃᵗʰ ᵐᵃʳᶜʰ

ᴘᴀɪʀɪɴɢ: ʟᴇᴠɪ ᴀᴄᴋᴇʀᴍᴀɴ x ғᴇᴍᴀʟᴇ!ʀᴇᴀᴅᴇʀ

sᴜᴍᴍᴀʀʏ: ᴛᴏ ʀᴇᴛᴀᴋᴇ ᴡᴀʟʟ ᴍᴀʀɪᴀ ᴛʜᴇ sᴄᴏᴜᴛs ʜᴀᴠᴇ ᴛᴏ ʙʀɪɴɢ ᴠɪᴄᴛɪᴍs. ʏᴇᴛ ʟᴇᴠɪ ᴀɴᴅ ʏᴏᴜ ʜᴀᴠᴇ ᴛᴏ ɢɪᴠᴇ sᴏ ᴍᴜᴄʜ ᴍᴏʀᴇ; ᴀ ʜᴇᴀʀᴛ ᴀɴᴅ ᴀ ʟɪғᴇ.

ᴡᴀʀɴɪɴɢ: ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ, ʙʟᴏᴏᴅ ᴀɴᴅ ɢᴏʀᴇ, ᴀɴɢsᴛ

ᴄʜᴀᴘᴛᴇʀs: ↫ ᴘʀᴇᴠɪᴏᴜs ɴᴇxᴛ ↬

ғᴀɴғɪᴄᴛɪᴏɴ ᴍᴀsᴛᴇʀʟɪsᴛ

ʀᴇᴀᴅ ᴏɴ ᴀᴏ3

ᴀ/ɴ: ʜᴇʏ ɢᴜʏs, ɪᴛ's ʙᴇᴇɴ ᴀ ᴡʜɪʟᴇ! ɪ ʜᴏᴘᴇ ʏᴏᴜ ᴅᴏɴ'ᴛ ᴍɪɴᴅ ᴛʜᴇ ʟᴏɴɢ ᴡᴀɪᴛ, ᴛʜɪs ᴄʜᴀᴘᴛᴇʀ ᴡɪʟʟ ʙᴇ ғᴜʟʟ ᴏғ ᴀɴɢsᴛ, ʙᴜᴛ ᴅᴏɴ'ᴛ ᴡᴏʀʀʏ, ᴛʜɪs ᴡᴏɴ'ᴛ ʙᴇ ᴛʜᴇ ᴇɴᴅ ;)

ᴛᴀɢɢɪɴɢ: @ajmiila02 @xiernia @sunniisyde @raginginferno267

Shiganshina could be so beautiful. There are wide lands, rivers and plenty of space for all the homeless refugees that currently either live in Rose, Sina or the underground city. You know it will spring back to life in just a year, you know that humanity will win today, but to what cost? Shiganshina is a forsaken hell, the souls of hundreds of soldiers will hound this district by the end of the day and yours might be part of it.

So far, everything has gone according to plan. Eren has successfully closed the outer gate and Armin has discovered something even you didn't see in your visions: Reiner and Bertolt are hiding inside the walls. A clever skit, you won't deny that. While most of the scouts check the surface of the wall, you stand at Levi's side and observe the situation.

"Tell me they will succeed." He speaks almost wearily, looking at you for the first time since last night. Your mood towards him is still sour, so you look at him sideways.

"I don't know. Though I've seen glimpses of this particular scenario. They'll attack soon." You explain, drawing the attention of Erwin, who exchanges a knowing look with Captain Levi. The smaller man nods his head curtly, watching the situation unfold before him as a smoke grenade fires into the air near him.

"Right here! This part of the wall is hollow!" The soldier closest to you shouts, catching Levi's attention as he draws his blade, ready to attack.

In a matter of seconds, everything collapses. Reiner appears out of nowhere and kills the soldier instantly. Next to you, the Captain jumps into action, using his ODM to fly down the wall. You gasp as his blade cuts into Reiner's neck and chest, causing his body to fall to the ground. But he's not dead, you don't know how, but it must be some kind of Titan ability. Levi notices too, cursing under his breath as he backs away from the spamming body on the ground. The strange situation comes to mind as you remember what's going to happen next.

"Behind us!" You scream at the same time as Commander Erwin tells his soldiers to keep their eyes open. Confused, Hange looks at you and opens her mouth to ask what you mean when golden lights blind you. Everyone turns their attention from the freshly-armoured titan in the direction of the source of the light, panic written on their faces.

You turn to face the Beast Titan and his army of what they call Abnormal Titans. There is nothing you can do but watch as the monkey grabs a large, round stone and swings it at the still-open inner gate.

"Incoming boulder! Get down!" The commander warns as his soldiers all drop to the ground except you. You know there's no need, as the beast wasn't aiming to kill, but to block the supply chains and eliminate the horses. Erwin seems to have read the idea of the intelligent titan as well, explaining to his soldiers the true purpose of his move.

"They have another intelligent titan. It's the quarterback type." Armin and Levi let out a sound of surprise at their commander's remark and looked at him with wide eyes.

"Though there may be others." He suspects as you step to his side and shake your head.

“Stop being a brat and get a grip of yourself.” Levi growls and takes your hand into his, surprising you and his Commander who is quietly watching the strange scenario unfold in front of him.

“Levi.” You say his name like it might be the last time you see him and right now you truly think it might be. Tightening your own grip on his hand you give him a small smile before you part away from him.

“I promise to bring as many of them back as possible.” You answer his first question saluting to him as sadness fills your eyes. You take a moment to observe him a last time, butterflies grazing your insides at the way he returns your longing look.

“I wish we had more time.” Is the last thing you say, as you strike into battle, using your gear to follow after your comrades.

You leave Levi feeling empty and perhaps he deserves it for doing the same thing yesterday. His eyes linger on the spot you just stood at, as he feels something strange pull on his heart. It feels like you just took a part of himself with you and he doesn't like that at all.

“I didn't know you two were involved. Honestly, I am surprised.” Erwin comments smiling at his friend warm heartedly.

“Tch. We weren't.” Is all Levi has to say before he leaves as well, into a different direction than you and he deeply hopes that you are wrong about your visions, because he won't be able to deal with another death otherwise.

Heavy breaths escape your lungs as you land on the ground, your eyes on the seemingly dead Reiner Braun. His nape is blown off and his body not moving as the thunder spears have done the trick to defeat him. You gape at the body you once thought to be a friend of yours until you predicted his betrayal to humanity. You wonder if he knew you before all of this, as he works closely with the beast titan. He might have, otherwise he would have killed you the moment he found out about your special gift. You appreciate the fact that he didn't though, which makes you now feel a little uneasy at the sight of his still armored titan. The others cheer, happy about the accomplishment of having defeated the traitor and enemy. But you know that it's not over yet, soon Bertolt will make his presence clear and as long as your visions hold truth it will take too many lives. Could you save them? Could you prevent it?

You look up into the sky, white clouds covering the endless blues as wind blows through your hair. But something breaks the picture; a round object cutting through the air at high speed, it's oddly shaped form spinning and swirly.

“What's that?” You hear a member of Hanges squad ask, perplexed as to why a barrel is thrown over Shiganshina.

“Not good.” You whisper as you notice something or rather someone crawl out of said wooden barrel, making you instantly look up to your squad which has taken its position on the rooftops.

"Hey! Go to Eren and stay with him. I don't want to see any of you running around freely.” You demand, sounding almost as harsh as Levi, but it has the desired effect as your friends quickly use their ODM to manoeuvre towards the attack titan. You, on the other hand, stay on the ground and walk towards the collapsed armoured titan. You need to make sure that Reiner is dead, because if he's not, you'll be in big trouble later on.

Hange leads her squad into the air, telling them to follow Bertolt's lead. Ignoring her, you take each step as you approach Reiner, your heart pounding. If he weren't already dead, you'd have to kill him now, and while you feel conflicted at the thought of having to face him and kill him, deep down you know it's the only way to save at least a few lives today. The moment you reach the titan's body, a yellow light colours your surroundings as your eyes widen in shock. Loud, electric thunders and explosions fill your eardrums and you twist your body at the same moment as the radius of the colossal Titan's transformation hits you, its wave whipping you back with such force that it takes your breath away.

Your body is a limb, ripped from the ground as the surrounding buildings shatter from the shockwave, its pieces colliding with your body, ripping your skin and breaking your leg as an ugly scream escapes your lips. There's barely time to register what's happening to you, yet it feels like time has been slowed down as you're hurled through the air in slow motion. Nothing is there, yet all at once your head is filled with memories of the past three years. But this time it's not a vision, no, this time it's your life passing by, showing you the last moments of your life. A few seconds later, you crash into a wall of rocks, stopping your body from spinning any further.

Your head hits the rock, and your shoulder blade and rib cage take most of the fall, fracturing them as well. It feels like the air is being forcefully squeezed out of your lungs as your body slowly slides down the wall, leaving a red trail of blood behind it. Your eyes slowly close as your head lolls forward, your limbs buckling as the right elbow of your arm sinks into a subluxation. "Is this it?" You wonder, coughing for air as the darkness swallows you into a deep hole.

"Is this the end?"

Levi is exhausted. He's covered in titan blood and he's damn tired. The hood's inhuman liquid slowly turns to smoke as he finishes off the last stupid humanoid creature that used to be human.

"Fuck." He curses as he realises that he doesn't even have time to take a break as the blonde lunatic who owns the Beast Titan has fled the scene with the help of the cart titan. With the last of his strength, he uses his equipment to climb the wall that stands between him and the last of the soldiers. He hopes at least some of them survived, after all he didn't quite have time to follow the events inside the walls.

He lands on the wall not as gracefully as he usually does, breathing heavily as he looks down at the roofs of the district, quickly noticing the strange image in front of him. There, not far from him, on one of the rooftops, are Eren Yeager and the traitor Bertolt Hoover, their bodies facing another building on which the enemy titan is hovering, carrying the bastard who killed his comrades. Exhausted, Levi lets himself slide over the edge, falling freely down the wall before activating the grapple and securing his fall on the nearest wall. His gas is low and his blades are basically useless at this point, while his body is severely weakened. He crashes to the roof where Eren is holding Bertolt, a heavy breath escaping his lungs as he turns to the boy, stressed. He could still make it.

"I've used the last of my gas. Quick, give me your equipment so I can go after him." He holds out his hand and at the same time notices another body behind Yeager. He can't make out who it is, it's badly burned and unrecognisable. But Levi doesn't have time to speculate now, his first priority is to finish off the ape like titan.

"Hurry!" He urges at the same time as a choked cough rings through the air and to his surprise the burnt body moves slightly, its chest heaving into the air as blood flies from its open mouth. Eren's eyes widen in sheer shock as he slowly turns to face the horrifying sight. The boy immediately jumps to his friend, screaming at him to keep going, to survive. The image is heartbreaking and sickening, it stinks in Levi's heart as he watches the scene, barely noticing that Mikasa has arrived at his side.

"Captain! Get the syringe!" Eren cries in panic, tears running down his cheeks in utter despair. Levi looks down, averting his eyes from his subordinate with a dark expression on his face. "Turn Armin into a titan, then we can let him eat Bertolt." He pleads with Captain Levi, clutching desperately at Hoover's unconscious body.

"Hurry up and inject him!" Ere's voice is high and full of sorrow as he can't understand why his role model isn't responding to his pleas. It takes Levi a moment to realise that the boy is right, and that Erwin would have wanted it this way, before he slips his hand under his coat and pulls out a small metal box from his inner pockets.

"Right." is all he dares to say as he offers it to Eren. He has to face the fact that there is no way he will be able to follow the wagon and the beast titan now, and it would at least be a victory if they got the colossal one in the process.

Another gasp makes the Captain pause and look to the side of the roof, where he notices a pair of hands appearing on the edge. This time, it's his turn to gulp down the body secured to Floch Forster's back.

"Levi, Captain," the new scout whispers, happiness colouring his features as he climbs up the roof with the last of his strength, the barely alive body of none other than Captain Erwin Smith slung over his shoulders.

“I finally found you. It's the Commander. He's hurt! His stomach is gouged and his insides are all torn to shreds. The blood just won't stop."

Erwin is terribly pale and there is hardly any sign of life in him. Still, Levi feels a knot in his stomach as he realises what this would mean for his dear friend and the scouts. He would be able to save the Commander, the man who has led the Scouts to greatness in recent years. It would mean that his dream would come true and that he would finally see the world out there, something he has been fighting for all these decades. He glances at Floch and the others for a moment, realising that his decision would determine their future. He needs your opinion now, otherwise this wont work out to humanities benefit.

"Where is Faye?" He asks aloud, glaring at Mikasa with a troubled look in his cold eyes.

"I need her to tell me the outcome of this." Levi immediately recognises the expression on his possible cousin's face, the way it trains from colour as she opens and closes her mouth. His heart ages at the realisation of what her silence means, and his body stiffens as another wave of sadness rises in his chest. Swallowing his inner torment and pain, Levi pulls back his still outstretched hand as he presses the box against the heavy pressure he feels on his chest. Trying to clear his mind of the outrageous images of the many ways your life could have ended, he turns his full attention to Private Forster, helping him lay Erwin down on the hard bricks of the roof.

"He's weak, but he's breathing." He announces, feeling a faint breath of air against his hand as he checks his status.

"Erwin, you are alive." Speaking the truth into the silence makes him feel the urge to seek you out, to see for himself if you're still alive. Maybe Mikasa was wrong and he could save you instead. But deep down, Levi knows that it would take too much time, and in the end, it would take away their chance to fully transform someone into the colossal titan.

"You know it has to happen. Erwin gets the shot." Levi finally says out loud what's been on everyone's mind as Eren growls in pure aggression and stands up to tower over Levi. Sadness consumes him, while Levi is filled with numbness. He lets Eren speak his mind, but doesn't break under the betrayal he's just slapped in the titan shifter's face.

"I will revive the person who can save humanity." His words cut deep, pushing Mikasa over the edge as she pulls her blade free and stares at her Captain with an emotion he's never seen before: fear.

He knew the two brats wouldn't be compliant, but he hadn't expected them to attack him in another argument about his decision. He is able to fend off Eren, hitting him on the cheek with the box as force and gravity play their part in knocking him down hard, but he isn't so lucky with Mikasa, as she throws his already strained body off and hovers over him with her blade at his blow. She cries in agony, fighting Levi with tears in her eyes that remind him far too much of the same pain he endured when he saw his friends die all those years ago. He feels their pain, but he can't help them and plays into their hands. Even now, when Eren begins to remind him of Armin Arlert's great spirit, he still can't give in, not when there is a chance to save his leader, his own friend.

But there is something Floch says that catches his attention. "If we're going to stand a chance against the Titans, we need a devil! I realised that's what Erwin is." Levi's eyes widen again at the realisation. Yes, Erwin is the devil and you were his pawn, his little ace to play when things didn't go as planned. You saw him die, Erwin knew he was going to die and yet he decided to go ahead with his plan to retake Wall Maria. Levi must accept the fact that Erwin came here to fight one last time, to bring victory to humanity at the cost of his own life. His death was written in faith, and who was Levi to question what was decided for Erwin in the first place?

With the appearance of Hange and the rest of his team, Levi is freed from the hysterical girl, now held back by his only other living friend. He prepares the syringe, looking between Armin and Erwin, teeth gnashing and a frown on his bloodied face. He blocks out Mikasa's sobs and Hange's loud, arguing voice to concentrate on his decision. His eyes dart from one to the other as he closes them for a second, trying to imagine what would happen if he used it on the wrong one. In the end, Levi makes up his mind, and much to everyone's surprise, it's not Erwin who gets the shot. It was a close call, but Levi remembered: Erwin has become the devil and led hundreds to their deaths to reach the cellar. He has chosen his own death, and Levi won't be the one to follow him back to hell.

Having discovered and secured the interior of Dr Yeager's cellar, they have decided to collect the bodies of the fallen in the hope of burying as many as possible. Hange's entire squad, including Moblit, have been decimated by the colossal titan's transformation, their bodies reduced to ashes. The majority of the dead are within Wall Maria, and they would certainly need help to bring them all back to their families.

"Mikasa. Where is her body?" Levi asks the black-haired soldier, his voice raspy and his body aching from the war. Mikasa and Jean exchange a look, as the taller one sights and gestures to the Captain to follow after him.

"She was about to kill Reiner when Bertolt transformed. The blast was too strong and she crashed into a wall. Before that she told us to stay with Eren to be safe." He informs Captain Levi, clear sadness breaking through his usually cocky voice.

After walking around the block, Levi stops and stares straight ahead, his eyes locked with a hunched figure lying in an unnatural crouch under a blood-spattered wall.

"I'll leave you alone." Jean offers in a hushed voice and slowly backs away, giving his captain the space he needs. None of his subordinates knows the nature of their relationship, although there have been quiet rumours since Eren's trial. The fact that Mikasa Ackerman saw them in the woods all those nights ago certainly didn't help their case. Levi slowly makes his way to your body, his heart pounding against his chest as he reaches you, the silence slowly becoming suffocating.

The first thing he notices is your dislocated leg and shoulder, then the many cuts and scratches all over your body. Your head and face are covered in your own blood from a severe head wound. Your skin underneath is pale and drained of all colour. He remembers how you blushed at him, making him feel even sicker. Levi slowly breaks down, falling to his knees as he closes his eyes, trying to keep the tears from breaking through his lids, but it's no use. When he opens them again, a few drops find their way out and roll down his cheeks as he finds it impossible to breathe.

Captain Levi leans down, devastated by the sight of your motionless body. You told him your visions would end today, and that you always suspected your end was near. He didn't believe you, or rather, he didn't want to. How could he?

"I'm sorry." He whispers as he leans down to hold you to him one last time. The first thing he notices is that your skin is warm, not cold like his dead mother's hand. The second thing he finds to be strange is that your fragile form has had the rigor mortis to set in just yet and it must have already been three hours since your passing.

But then he feels it, the faint breath leaving your lips, tingling his cheek and the barely perceptible rise and fall of your chest. At first Levi thought his mind was playing a morbid trick on him, but after checking again Evi is sure that's not the case.

"Faye!" He shouts, gripping your shoulder as if to shake you awake. But it's no use, because Levi is already thinking about his next move. He simply scoops you up in his arms and quickly makes his way to his comrades, a mixture of relief and a furry twist in his stomach.

Whoever confirmed your 'death' will have to face the consequences as the Captain sees fit.

[lazenby]

What does the myth of Medusa mean?

Medusa is not easy to talk about because she is not a single thing. Instead hers is a long, thin shape that worms its way through time. Once she was one thing, then this was repeatedly modulated by the various people to whom she has meant something.

The oldest form of the myth has her as one in a set of monstrous triplets, the product of incest between a titan and his sister. In this myth Medusa is virtually as old as the world itself and was born a monster to sea monster parents. Much, much later, in what they call the Archaic period of Greek history (800-480BCE) Medusa was promoted to having once been beautiful, but cursed by Athena for an unspecified insult. Eight years into the common era this strand was taken up in Rome by Ovid, just before his mysterious banishment to a town on the Black Sea.

Ovid makes the version of the myth that has become canonical. Medusa was a beautiful woman with fair hair who had taken a vow of celibacy. This sexual unavailability attracted the sea god Poseidon, who rapes Medusa in a temple to the goddess of wisdom. The virgin Athena, no stranger to violence, is so horrified at the sight of her home being defiled that she actually covers her eyes. The goddess then punishes Medusa for Poseidon's crime by making her hair a nest of snakes and her gaze capable of turning flesh into stone.

At this point an illegitimate son of Zeus called Perseus enters the story. By a complicated chain of events Perseus and his mother Danaë are sealed in a box and tossed into the sea by her father, Akrisius, the king of Argos. Zeus asks Poseidon to save his lover and son, which Poseidon does by making the ocean as glass and gently delivering the box to Seriphos, a hundred miles away. Here Perseus is adopted by the local king, Polydektes, as an opening gambit in the king's designs on Perseus' mother. Danaë spurns the king. Perseus, being the son of Zeus, is not thrilled by the prospect of her marriage to a mortal stepfather either.

Polydektes hatches a plan to kill Perseus and marry his mother without offending Olympus. The king announces a fake marriage to a noblewoman as an excuse to extract congratulatory gifts from everyone he knows. In his attempt to be clever, Polydektes demands the head of Medusa from Perseus. In response, Zeus recruits most of the Olympic pantheon to equip Perseus with magical armament, including Athena's own shield. Perseus uses these advantages to find and behead Medusa, approaching her by watching her reflection in the polished inner surface of the goddess' shield. Perseus then defends his mother's right to choose a spouse by turning Polydektes and his entire court into stone after they ask to see Medusa's head.

Back at the stump of Medusa's neck two "grandchildren" of Poseidon wriggle out of her body and into the world. The first is the famous winged horse Pegasus and the second is a human infant called Khrysaor, born holding a golden sword in his hand. Reflecting Medusa's original purity as well her curse, these offspring lead radically different lives. Pegasus gives long and devoted service to Olympus while Khrysaor's fate is to be the progenitor of most of the monsters that populate Greek mythology.

According to Hesiod's Theogony, Khrysaor sleeps with a sea nymph who then gives birth to a three-headed son named Geryon and a daughter called Echidna. That daughter is "half a nymph with glancing eyes and fair cheeks, and half again a huge snake, great and awful, with speckled skin, eating raw flesh beneath the secret parts of the holy earth." Echidna in turn has children by "the terrible, outrageous and lawless" serpent called Typhon.

This union first produces a hound named Orthus for her uncle Geryon. Orthus is soon joined by another brother, also a dog, the fifty-headed Kerberus who ends up guarding Hades. The third child of Echidna, Hydra, also has a huge surplus of heads. The fourth is Chimera and the fifth is actually the product of Echidna having sex with her first son, Orthus. That incest creates the Sphinx, who takes the suppression of the city of Thebes as his life's purpose, as well as the Nemean Lion, who does something similar on the peninsula that would become Sparta.

In thinking about the rape of Medusa by the sea god and her punishment for his transgression it would be easy to rattle off things like,

"Don't rule out spite. Poseidon made it extremely personal when he forced Medusa in Athena's home—and not just home, the place where Athena is fed. You can imagine for yourself the additional layers of disgust and violation you might feel to find your home not just broken into and robbed but used to stage a sexual assault."

Or that,

"Medusa's particular curse makes sense to me as a punishment, but only as a punishment of Poseidon. It takes her off that god's roster for good, then mocks him by ensuring that Medusa is forever untouchable—forever "his", and never another's. If there is a rapist's punishment in the myth, this is where it is."

And then to remark, grimly,

"You get all too clear an image of Mycenaean Greece through this keyhole."

But there's a good deal to think through before I could take seriously anything this concrete. After all, what wisdom is being expressed when Athena punishes a woman for having been raped? And what does the first version of the myth mean, where Medusa is a survivor from an era of monsters?

There are endless ways to play cat's cradle with the Greek myths until they have whatever shape you like. In one sense that sort of constrained mental fiddling is the purpose of any comprehensive mythological system—To provide a brake on revolutionary thought by denying this thought the one thing it must have to proceed: a vantage point from without to properly view the social contradictions that give it rise. You could argue that having such a vantage was what made Jesus a revolutionary compared to say the Maccabees, whose vantage on Judea was firmly rooted in an imagined past.

This brake gives the society that labors under it a special intellectual and cultural stability, a stability for which we have no real reference nowadays. I think you can see it very hard at work in that letter Ptolemy wrote for his patron Syrus, with which he opens his astronomy textbook, the Almagest. The one where Ptolemy implies that astronomy is a tool of moral self-cultivation even more than it is an attempt to depict reality from an independent point of view. Even the most advanced astronomical textbook ever written could not then be completely separated from the ends of piety, or for that matter the requirement to flatter your patron. (It goes without saying that "exegetic meaning" and the rest of the Straussian decoder ring project stems from a craving for the various stabilities [political, cultural, intellectual] granted a society with such a mythological system at its core.) That is to say, when you're interested in an individual myth I think it's helpful to imagine the conditions under which its first patterns were woven.

It is extremely important to remember that the Greek myths—and even the religious pantheon itself—are a Bayeux Tapestry. I mean that they were made for one set of people by another, who had established themselves hierarchically above the first. If the Greek myths are a shared cultural heritage covering everyone from Thrace to Crete, then the real heritage is the slightly more ancient domination that united them all in the first place.

What we call Greek mythology and its pantheon date to a thousand formative years. These are the years between the Indo-European conquest of the Aegean and the beginning of a Mycenaean world, that is, 3000-2000BCE. This was the millennium when at least three waves of invaders on horseback permanently disrupted the Neolithic farmers who had occupied the Aegean.

The entry of the Indo-Europeans—and their decision to stay—set in motion a series of events that culminated for our purposes with horse-riding, Indo-European-speaking invaders from the North (the Greeks) storming the Aegean peninsula. Their invasions set off a thousand years of tribal warfare, and the final wave of Dorians triggered a cultural dark age that lasted another twelve hundred years, until 800BCE. These invasions shifted the egalitarian indigenous social arrangement into something far more hierarchical, and eventually centralized.

Greek mythology and its pantheon are processed remains. They're all that's left of the indigenous Neolithic culture. The Greeks later called the people they overran the Pelasgoi. The name has no known origin and if it comes from anywhere it's probably like Basque or Etruscan—a relict of the Neolithic Europe that was all but erased by the horsemen and their language in the 2000's BCE.

The actual Pelasgoi were an egalitarian (and probably matrilineal) group of agriculturalists. They lived on the Aegean peninsula as the Indo-European invasion reverberated through their corner of late-Neolithic Europe. They'd probably been thereabouts for 10,000 years. The Greeks conquered and then settled among (or rather, "above") the locals. This dominion created a successor culture to that of both the local Neolithic and the invasive, Indo-European-derived Greeks.

As far as the Greek pantheon and its myths are concerned, this successor culture was Mycenaean (c. 2600-1177BCE). You can think of it as a Neolithic culture that has been digested to suit the requirements of pacifying and administering a particular group of conquered people. This much goes a long way to explaining why Agamemnon (c. 1700BCE) was still notable as a giant prick for Homer one thousand years later.

You could go even further if you wanted to, and see the martial fate of the Peloponnesus itself as a kind of runaway-refinement of the obsessive hierarchy, domination and paranoia depended on by every conquerer. At the very least you should think of Classical slavery, and Spartan slavery in particular as direct consequences of the Indo-European invasion.

Slavery is something like the culture of conquest itself and is not attested in the Aegean by low-status burials before the Greeks invaded. Further, you don't have to be a sociologist to see Sparta's secret police (the Krypteia) and their annual war on the enslaved Helots as a kind of domestic, institutionalized conquest. I realize there are 2,300 years separating the Indo-European invasion of Greece from the reforms of Lycurgus in Sparta; I'm only noting that there was a 10,000 year old, egalitarian Neolithic social fabric, that it was utterly destroyed by the men on horses and then replaced in waves by something far more violent. A process that terminated, in the case of Sparta, with something you could call ur-fascism without the slightest fear of anachronism.

There is a quality of succession (as opposed to "fusion") in Greek mythology. This comes from its absorption of a previous vision of the world. The easiest way to see how Greek mythology is the result of one thing consuming another is the genealogical rat's nest of its early denizens. There are primordial versions for almost all of the Olympian gods. There are even duplicates of these primordial gods: two sea gods, Pontus and Poseidon, two sky gods, Ouranos and Aether, and so on. There's also an extremely unclear line of succession connecting them all to the Olympic pantheon—the foundation of which, we are told, hinges on Zeus' rebellion against his father, Kronos, himself a usurper of his own father. This is all very strange for someone used to the forever-supremacy of a Judeo-Christian deity. To me, it reflects a requirement to absorb an indigenous culture for the purpose of administering "civilization" to its members.

Succession is also a feature of the history internal to Greek myth. Overt fertility imagery, something that certainly animates indigenous Neolithic agriculturalists, is banished to a world that was ancient even to the people telling the myths. Among other things, this is why Ouranos gets to spray cum left, right and center as he populates the primordial world but the origins of Theban aristocracy lie in Kadmus sowing dragon's teeth.

Medusa and her sisters take part in this successional process too. Each, we are told, is descended from the titans whom Zeus overthrew. As everyone knows, all three sisters have euphemisms instead of proper names: the Greek name Medusa means "the Protector", Euryale is "the Far Ranger" and Stheno is "the Robust." These are probably the epithets of pre-Greek female deities, reused as euphemisms once the women they named were demonized in the strict sense.

This is something that also happened to Pazuzu, the Babylonian demon who was the ultimate antagonist of "The Exorcist." Pazuzu was probably a god of fair weather out of the Neolithic world that was overrun by the earliest civilizations of Mesopotamia. The mythology of that area is complex and successional in a way that recalls what I've been saying about the Greeks. Tellingly, Pazuzu is the brother of Humbaba (another demonizee) whom the notable avatar of civilization, Gilgamesh disposed of in the wilds of Lebanon. The upshot is that nobody knows what Pazuzu's real name is because he was so thoroughly euphemized by his culture's successor as to have been rechristened. This is likely also the case for many of the things that get called monsters in Greek mythology.

It seems important to note that the collective term for Medusa and her sisters, "Gorgons," is an Indo-European word meaning "those with grim gazes." This is to say that if Medusa and her sisters do represent pre-Greek deities then it was certainly the Greeks who renamed them. The use of gorgons as protective architectural features right up into the Classical period also strongly reflects the original and benevolent forms taken by Medusa and her sisters. Forms bent to Greek purposes after subjugation to the new, Olympian order.

It's also important not to go overboard when it comes to Medusa's original form. Trying to recover the original nature of feminine deities is an extremely large and sticky trap for modern people. Ever since the beginning of the Modern era there has been an intense desire to see prior societies as somehow antidotes to the way our own has developed. The prospect of ancient matriarchies excites this desire. For example JJ Bachofen and his Der Mutterrecht (1861), or Otto Gross and his idea that the Freudian superego is identical with patriarchy.

Gross said explicitly what many women (and a few men) still feel: that my self-consciousness, the means by which I regulate my desires and impulses by measuring them against what is "expected of me," is where patriarchy lives and my awareness of "what is expected" is the means of patriarchy's transmission through time. Gross thought the organization of the human mind not only changed though history but that its present organization recorded this history in the same way as ocean sediments. Gross believed that the unconscious was the psychological correlate to life under matriarchy and the superego its comparatively recent lid—a lid that covers our collective memory of what it was like to live in a society modeled on the benevolent dominion of child by mother. Gross' determination to remove this lid in himself through a rigorous program of polyamory and cocaine was a mixed success. The close association of patriarchy with a zealously applied, regulatory self-consciousness (the type required when one has a specified place in a male-dominated, urban hierarchy) is much more difficult to dismiss.

I said before that Medusa was probably a pre-Greek deity before she was "demonized in the strict sense," but this is not quite right. Greece didn't have demons, only monsters. I find this fascinating. I would never refer to the Gorgons, and much less Scylla or Charybdis or Python, as "demons," no matter how much their appearance or behavior fit the term. Why is this? Is it just because of the rehabilitation performed on ancient Greek culture by everything from the Renaissance to the D'Aulaires? Or is it a real distinction?

In Greek myth monsters seem to be checks on progress or development because they impede notable figures from completing their stories (Oedipus, Herakles, Kadmus etc.) On the face of it this is very different from a demon's purpose, which is to reassert the Natural or Divine order for the benefit of anyone foolish enough to challenge it. Is it just that monsters are alive, i.e., mortal, in a way demons are not? Is a monster just a demon who can be killed? Even if that's true (and mortality is a trait that basically every single monster in Greek mythology shares) what does it mean that creatures who would be eternal menaces in any other culture are, in Greek mythology, seemingly there to be vanquished?

Unlike demons, each monster in Greek myth is a holdover from the primordial world. Nobody says that Mephistopheles or an Oni is an isolated renegade from some prior era. Even if both are extremely ancient they each have an obvious and divinely ratified dominion over their corner of the present world: You see it in their respective licenses to tempt Faust and eat Buddhist pilgrims. But it is exactly a questionable dominion over the world and a loss of divine ratification that unite all the monsters of Greek myth.

One way to understand this is to say that a monster is a demon who has had its spiritual existence scraped out. The result is not just mortality but exile to the same plane of reality that humans inhabit. Monsters can be killed—and their deaths serve as capstones to heroic acts of faith—in a way that even the fight against a demon will never yield. Demons have an intact spiritual existence, granted them by divine ratification. This gives them the ability, or rather, the right to escape attack via their non-physical form (as Pazuzu does at the end of "The Exorcist.") That "right of spiritual escape" is the substance of a demon's immortality, and its loss in the case of monsters is sometimes the only obvious difference between the two. This is best seen in the fact that Greek monsters cease to exist once killed, and their shades are never encountered in Hades. When a monster loses the right to escape via a spiritual existence they acquire their other major distinction from demons: unnaturalness.

A demon can certainly be terrifying, but the terror it causes is embedded in, indeed terrifies on behalf of the Natural order. This is to say that demons terrify, but that this terror is not personal. Humans, the variety of soul indigenous to this plane of reality, are terrorized as a class by demons, not as individuals. In fact one could argue a direct connection between this and, for example, the millions of ticketholders who made "The Exorcist" such a fabulous box office success.

On this understanding, demonic terror is felt not by individuals but by their bodies, the thing all humans have in common with each other. This terror is each body reminding its occupant of the order of things. That's the nature of the enforcement performed by a demon's fearsomeness. This is easier to see in the pre-scientific account of altitude sickness: the way you feel the higher you climb is a direct experience of your assigned place in the hierarchy of Nature. Altitude sickness is your very body speaking to you, saying, in the voice of Nature, "You aren't supposed to be here dummy; This is for the gods." Every hair raised by a demon retrenches a hierarchy to remind humans that they are not at its summit.

When a demon (or for that matter a god) "loses its license" and must become a monster, unnaturalness and a type of criminality is what follows. The terror created by the Theban dragon or the Sphinx was chaotic. It served no purpose except to constrain human destiny, by keeping Kadmus from founding Thebes or Oedipus from ruling it. What does it mean that Ancient Greece had a disordered spiritual landscape filled with monsters who live only to thwart the aims of destiny and Nature?

It's very tempting to think that this is because the rule for what was 'Natural' and what went against 'Nature' had been recently changed—namely by the Greeks, their gods and the new order. You could call Greek monsters "heretics under polytheism"—recently-mortal refugees from a divine war, shorn of immortality but with their actual coups-de-grace left as tests of faith for the most pious and violent humans. The heroes (in Greek the word means the same thing as Medusa, "protector.") Hence the ensouled champions of Olympus slaughter the soul-less and unnatural monsters. This slaughter concludes a monster's demotion from the spiritual realm and it then enters the least permanent plane of existence, that of corpses and human memory. This is the fate of all casualties in a war of mythological succession.

The hero in the story of Medusa is successional in several ways. Perseus has a mandate to kill monsters from the ancient world, and so recreate (in acceptable miniature) his own father's rebellion against the titans. This may only be a fancier way of saying that Perseus is a minor son of Zeus and is assigned a mopping up operation at the tail-end of his dad's throne war.

But there's also a successional quality in the way Perseus is made heroic. Perseus is heroic because he is the very tip of Olympus' will: he is sired by them, clothed by them, armed by them and disguised by them. The hero is a human, composited into semidivinity by the gifts of the pantheon. Any which way Perseus presents himself, whether visibly or not, he's a reflection of Olympus. And this is to say nothing of his shield, whose literal reflection of Perseus is presumably the only place Medusa ever sees her killer's eyes.

Perseus is not only protected by Athena's shield: his face appears inside it. Medusa's head is later put on the outside of the shield. This is a little parable about fucking with Athena: "There are two sides to this goddess, an inside where you are defended from apparently invincible enemies and an outside, where Athena becomes an invincible enemy herself." That may be the the full extent of the "wisdom" on display in the Medusa myth, which is really an Athena myth: the wise live long because they don't screw with Athena. (The fact that Perseus defeats the barbaric Medusa through his powers of reflection, and in the name of the goddess of wisdom, is a cerebral valence the story probably acquired later on, in Roman times.)

You can also think of Medusa's death in the light of succession. The stump of her neck yields two "grandchildren" of Poseidon, Pegasus and Khrysaor. One is a giant man born holding a golden sword and the other is a domesticated animal who conquers the air. Pegasus becomes a kind of mercenary in Olympus' war against the primordial past, as when Athena lends Pegasus out to Bellerophon so they can wax Chimera (who is in fact the grand-nephew of the flying horse Bellerophon uses to kill him.) Khrysaor's real legacy is of course as donor of the human phenotypes that add another layer of monstrousness and perversity to the creatures Herakles must dispatch during his labors. It is intriguing that the human component of Medusa's existence finds expression in Khrysaor, progenitor of a dozen mythological monsters, while everything noble in her body comes out as a beast of fabulous utility.

In a word, the Olympian order mandates divine violence against the remaining chaos-monsters. Further, these monsters are refined by that violence into something that benefits mankind. Seen from this angle, Medusa's death at Perseus' hands (or the dragon's at those of Kadmus) is something close to a sales pitch for a Greek world: "We're getting rid of those monsters. We're harnessing their primordial energy for the benefit of the city-founding horse-lords!"

When you look at it this way the early version of the myth shows Medusa as a bridge to the chaotic, primordial world. In fact it is precisely her status as a monster of the ancient world that provokes Polydektes into selecting Medusa as a challenge. Polydektes thinks he's being extremely clever by asking Perseus for Medusa's head. He imagines he's dooming an irritating rival by telling him to go tete a tete with the daughter of a titan. But his turns out to be exactly the kind of backward, even heretical thinking that doesn't understand how overmatched the primordial, barbaric world is when it squares off against Olympus. It's worth remembering that by the end of the myth Polydektes and his entire court become all too firm believers in what can be achieved with Olympus' backing.

Like almost all the great monsters of Greek mythology Medusa's existence symbolized an intolerable check on the progress of Hellenization. Olympus therefore facilitates her murder. The easy answer as to why Medusa was the sister chosen for death is that she was, for some reason, the only mortal one among the three. But this seems extremely post-hoc to me, like the rest of the Ovidian interpretation. To my mind Medusa was always a gorgon, because she was always a Neolithic deity; Ovid was the person who could translate her Bronze Age fate into more urban, even modern terms.

I think you can see what I'm getting at here: the Medusa story is a single battle in a much longer-running war between what Olympus represented and the indigenous world of chaos-monsters it aimed to replace. This had enormous consequences for the Western world.

That replacement occurred along an axis which had never before existed in Mycenaean society: The axis with "Barbarian" at one end and "Greek" at the other. Their whole mythology is a snapshot of this process of replacement. This probably dates, as I said, to the beginning of the Mycenaean world. And as the Mycenaean world became more centralized and urban you can see something of the mechanism that produced this "successional" mythology:

The foundation of cities is a major consequence of killing monsters in Greek myths. Perseus founds Mycenae after killing Medusa. Agamemnon only has a city to lord over because Atreus inherited it from the line of Perseus, to say nothing of the case of Thebes, its dragon or the Sphinx.

This new axis was a force majeure opposition between Greek things and Barbarian things. When laid over the imperative to found cities, this axis set up a kind of cultural siphon. Under this mechanism all the things emphasizing order and what we would call centralized government eventually became "Greek" (whatever their actual origin). On the other hand, the uncivilizable elements of human life were mythologically deported to a barbaric past, the one that preceded the conquest and domination of "Greek" religion by Olympus.

It's important to point out that this was a synthetic process. I mean that the things which facilitated hierarchical, settled civilization were drawn from both Greek and "Pelasgian" sources, while those that did not became associated with a primordial world whose successor was at hand. This is how barbaric Greek raiders of the 2nd millennium BCE went from unwashed nomads of Thrace to the first word in philosophy. In fact it is one of the ways cultures do what they call "schismogenesis," the sociological equivalent of speciation.

Of course, human beings are not perfectly suited to civilization, and this mechanism could only proceed (indeed, has only proceeded) so far. Perhaps reflecting this, the Barbarian-Greek axis had become the Irrational-Rational axis by the time philosophy first got written down. Nevertheless, right into the Classical period it's easy to see an uncivilizable residue lending its ineradicable tint to Greek life. Sophocles' Bacchae is more or less solely concerned with this tint, and is one of the biggest milestones on the road to a Western idea of "humanity." That is, "humanity" as something not only shot thru with irrational, Bacchic chaos, but "humanity" as this way by nature. It can be a very crooked path to get to a concept as obvious to us as the "Natural."

Or at least this is one of journeys I take myself on to imagine the birth of our concept of "irrationality." To recap this journey's stages,

A. Settled Neolithic agriculturalists are dominated by barbaric horse-riding invaders & their patriarchal deities.

↓↓↓

B. Settled Greeks and their contempt for anything that stands in the way of centralized, hierarchical power.

↓↓↓

C. The mental tendencies of life under civil order gathered into a concept of 'rationality.'

↓↓↓

D. And finally the conversion of civil order's antagonist from 'barbarism,' the thing outside the city walls, to 'irrationality,' the barbaric element latent within each human.

(I should say that seeing the intellectual dynamism of Classical Greece as rooted in, or even kicked off by, an invader's mentality toward their conquered subjects is a whole other can of worms.)

Perhaps the idea that Medusa is "mainly" a casualty of Olympus' war on the barbaric past is disappointing to you. I would also like Greek mythology to have a level of internal consistency such that you can turn the crank of thought and arrive at an internally consistent explanation (a "lesson.") But Greek mythology is the collision of at least two cultural systems—a collision that reflects an agricultural, matriarchal, and egalitarian way of life complexly overlaid by another, whose sources lie with nomadic, horse-riding raiders from the North.

Medusa's story seems to me one that straddles the interface between those two, often-incompatible systems of cultural understanding. Hers is a story about how the fight for mythological supremacy takes place along the fault line separating—depending on which era of the myth's development (ABCD) you find most eyecatching—subject from master, heresy from piety, barbarians from Greeks, chaos from order and, in its final form, irrationality from thinking as we "ought to."

Many of the Greek myths are an account of cultural conflict transposed to a mythological plane. The ahistorical "moment" from which most of these stories are told dates to some point after the outcome of this conflict, and the victory of Olympus became a foregone conclusion. But the arrangement of forces in this conflict continued (continues!) to reflect something long, long after the thing it originally reflected—the conquest of Neolithic farmers by horse raiders from Asia—had passed from view. The Greek concept of irrationality is still utterly essential to us and still contains within it the coiled historical elements outlined above.

I realize that arguments from history are often only another kind of argument from myth, and sometimes even easier to puppeteer. Even so I think we all have to live in hope that Al Hirschman is right when he says the most we can expect from History, and from the History of Ideas in particular, is not the retirement of issues but only a raising of the level of debate.

Having thought through all of this, and with the qualification that I don't think any of what follows is historically justified, I do have a few thoughts about the particular myth of Medusa. These are what you might call literary observations on her story as we get it from Ovid and the Romans. Their version of the myth shifts focus away from the, by that point long-settled question of mythological supremacy. The Roman myth of Medusa is far more social, more urbane and even what I would call humanistic. It's about a particular woman being raped in a particular place and how these facts and their consequences dominate the rest of her life—indeed, collude to end it.

Medusa's petrifying gaze is much more complicated than I thought as a kid. For example, Medusa does not have the equivalent of laser beams shooting out of her eyes. That is, getting turned into stone by Medusa is something that occurs essentially by the victim's choice. In order to become a stone of yourself you must: 1) look directly at Medusa while 2) she directly meets your elective gaze. I think we can deduce this much from the story of the polished shield. In other words her "petrifying gaze" is really an automatic and unstoppable consequence of choosing to look at Medusa and of then receiving her eye contact. There is something close to a supercultural (that is, "humanistic") understanding of us at work here: we are the animal that can't not look.

Formerly, the beautiful Medusa was subjected to many more gazes than she could personally meet. That's what it is to be a beautiful person among others. In a certain type of society, which, for Ovid, Greek mythology was taken to represent, a woman's role among others is to be the object of those gazes. From a public perspective a woman is someone who cannot return every gaze that falls on her, in fact modesty decrees she shouldn't even try.

What would it mean to use this state of affairs as the basis for a curse? First, the obvious ironic reversals and perversions. Medusa goes from a woman (whose status as a woman—and again this is Ovid's world—is predicated on her inability to return every gaze that finds her) to a monster who compulsively seeks out the gaze of anyone she comes across. There's also an obvious gender reversal, whereby the cursed Medusa becomes both the pursuer in and the victor of non-consensual encounters with men. But also a more subtle reversal, aimed at somebody's idea of feminine pride, whereby once-beautiful Medusa becomes famous, indeed pursued, for her ugliness.

This gender reversal shades into the punitive "blessings" built into Medusa's curse. First among these is of course the petrifying gaze that "protects" Medusa from ever being raped again. (The snakes presumably defend against kisses from the blind.) Eye contact often betrays a man's intention towards a woman. This is one of the reasons modesty discourages it. And so what was once the place and moment where a woman understood her vulnerability, and a man his power, becomes an instant of unpleasant surprise for Medusa's victim.

You could go further with this and say that the rocks of men Medusa leaves behind are in fact statues. And that each models the same man in a parody of arousal. A parody of the moment when a man, and you have to imagine a Roman man here, first sees a gorgeous woman: wide eyes, slack jaw, ah-wooogacus forming on his lips and so on. The fact that the visage of lust is identical to that of terror probably says more than you'd like to know about Roman sexuality.

There is also a quality of being damned-to-fame in Medusa's curse. This goes beyond her famous ugliness. Medusa leaves a trail of sterile human pillars behind her. It mocks the way she once made men hard—an overtone I don't think would have been lost on a Roman audience. Medusa is the nightmare of a certain idea of female modesty.

In that vein, I think there is also a message about the Roman conception of men and women latent in Medusa's hideousness. This, Ovid is saying, this is what would be needed to protect a woman from the way men are. Only by permanently immobilizing him and covering your face with snake venom for good measure could any woman have stopped a man from raping her. The fact that Medusa's curse is presumably an effective defense against future encounters with Poseidon is probably beside the point. What matters is that Medusa's terrible, bestial appearance shows how much women would have to change to end the phenomenon of rape. There's a dark and inverted humanism at work here, one that is very much still with us. One that sees rape as a supercultural phenomenon descending from a male's presumed helplessness when it comes to looking at certain things.

This is to say that Medusa, by being presented as a woman who is finally safe from rape, telegraphs the inevitability of men raping any woman who is less ugly than the ugliest woman who has ever existed. In the world this myth was meant to service the kind of woman who won't get raped is the kind who can't even be looked at in the first place, let alone approached.

Living out this inversion of holiness is also part of Medusa's curse. As is her soullessness, and the mocking, second virginity Athena forces on her. Medusa being made too ugly to rape probably had ironic overtones to a Roman audience, who would have seen Athena as having metaphorically abducted Medusa to keep as a temple virgin ("raped" as in Sabines.)

In the way of all literary analysis you can keep cats-cradelling away with this myth and its history, but I am unsure as to how helpful these somewhat facile reflections are to a person trying to think deeply about Medusa and her story.

Gorgons were often carved on temples, where their petrifying gazes drove home a very practical theological doctrine: behave in this place or become part of it. The myth of Medusa explodes this arrangement with a floridness typical of pre-Christian ideas about divinity. Medusa walks the earth as Athena's involuntary virgin and leaves statues behind her everywhere she goes. Each pillar that used to be a person is another monument raised to Athena, or at least to the wisdom of not testing her where she eats.

[johaerys-writes]

Ch. 12: Tidings

Read on AO3 | Read from the beginning

Sunlight reflects on the surface of the sea, shimmering golden fractals bobbing with each wave. The wind whistles through the caverns and the hollows of the rocks, and mingles with the song the nereids sing as they work on a splendid veil, each of them holding one end of it.

Thetis’ needle of sturdy fish bone weaves swiftly in and out of the delicate fabric. She and her sisters have been working on it all winter: first, they gathered sea weed fine as silk and twisted it into thread; then, each nereid sat at her loom for months to weave the thread into fabric fine as mist yet sturdier than any armour; now, the time has come to embroider it.

Tiny pearls of every colour and glittering sea shells adorn the plumed edges of it, winking in the light with each movement, and along the back a marvelous scene is slowly coming to life, like a beautiful tapestry: fish and ocean plants and deep sea creatures of immense power known only in legend. It is for Astraia, daughter of Hippothoe, whose hand has been promised to Orsiphantes, one of the many offspring of Coeus, powerful Titan and god of the axis of heaven around which constellations revolve. After it is finished, no other work of mortal or divine hands will resemble it, a gift fit for a queen of water, earth and sky. The nymphs sing, and the ancient magic of that song is woven into the very threads they use.

One day, Thetis and her sisters will create such a work for her own son, her Achilles. A chiton to make gods blush, a cloak unlike any other, or a belt so fine and heavy with gems so rare that it will sparkle even in the night. Thetis smiles to herself, picturing the day when she might gift him those precious things. But, even as her soul rejoices at the thought, a thorn always lingers in her heart. Her sisters and brothers and cousins shall cherish their sons and daughters for all time, for they are all immortal. Her own son, her lovely child of summer, is minunthadios, his precious life lasting but for a short time; the blink of an eye for most gods.

Thetis has done, and will continue to do, all she can to keep him with her for as long as she can. As she works, her hope returns, however feebly, and she devotes herself anew to her weaving and her song.

“Who is that man there, he who walks along the shore?” Callianeira of the brilliant scales asks, disturbing the rhythm the nereids have found.

"He moves towards us with such purpose, his intent unwavering," Galene supplies, her silver skin and hair blazing in the afternoon sun, her voice high-pitched like a dolphin's. "Who might be bold enough to disturb the daughters of the Ocean while they work?"

Thetis lifts her head and peers down the length of the beach. This is a quiet shore, remote and unknown to most mortals that roam the land. Hidden between massive crags and hills, and with no footpath easily traversed, it has been the domain of the nymphs for ages beyond counting.

The nereids, one by one all stop their work to dubiously regard the man.

“A human?” Leucothoe asks, squinting at the lone, dark figure. Her bone white hair and translucent skin marks her as a nymph of the far deep, her eyes not seeing far in daylight but her senses nonetheless sharp. “His footsteps are too certain, his gait too wide yet light as a feather. He walks like no other mortal I’ve ever encountered.”

Laomedeia next to her, a stark opposite to her whiteness with rich black hair and reddish bronze scales like a surface-loving fish, shakes her head. “No human has stepped foot here in hundreds of years. This is no mortal.”

There is indeed something strange about the man. His steps swallow up the land as if he’s sprinting, but without appearing to run. As he draws closer, his flashing eyes catch the light, black yet shining like polished onyx. There is a clever smile on his lips, and one of his strong and shapely arms is raised in salute. The feather on the golden cap he wears winks with a strong gust of wind, and his golden sandals glimmer.

“Lord Hermes,” Thetis says. She sets her work down and stands to greet him, bowing her head in respect. “Son of Maia, immortal guide and keeper of the heavenly flocks. It is an honour to see you on our shore.”

Hermes smiles at each of the goddesses with a brief nod of his godly head. He is polite, yet his grace belies a touch of hastiness. “Ladies! A fine morning, wouldn’t you agree?”

The nereids agree in a sussurus of murmurs that, to an unfamiliar ear, is not much unlike the scrape of waves against the rocks. Not a few of them wrinkle their noses in distaste at Lord Hermes’ too-casual greeting; the Olympians are not known for the same adherence to courtesy and etiquette that the Titan-born pride themselves in.

“What brings you to these distant shores, Lord Hermes?” Thetis, as the first of the oceanids, asks. The messenger god never appears to anyone without purpose.

“Ah, glad that you asked!” he says cheerfully. “I bring tidings to you, fair ladies—in fact, to all the gods of this land. And I shall tell you them post haste, since time is more precious by far than gold, and I have precious little of it to spare.”

Read the rest on AO3

[itsagrimm]

Vodyanoy König ABC

From the series He who comes from under the water:

Animals

König likes them very much. Especially the frogs are his favourite due to their lovely singing voice. However the Fox and the Heron have grown on him too.

Baba Yaga

The one and only witch. Everyone else is but minor to her. She is dangerous and does as she pleases. She has no kingdom and knows no kings. Before her everyone is something between a nuisance and a mild entertainment.

Curses

Very simple but also very imprecise magic mostly done through word. Most curses happen accidentally when emotions run high. Most cruse attempts are ineffective. But some do work, wrecking massive havoc on the one cursed. Some curses just fly right back at the one who started the cursing. It is not required to be magically inclined to do an effective curse.

Dams

Those damn beavers keep building them, stopping the water from it's nice flow. König is not a fan. But at least they keep it minimal with the dams. Humans are worse.

Eyes

Don't look too long into a Vodyanoy's eyes. Otherwise there is a threat of drowning in them.

Floods

König was busy building the palace and keeping Bride alive so he had no time to cause one. But like floods that can change quicker than expected.

Grandfather

Old fishing companion and great source of stories about royal behaviour.

Hair

Always in the way! Glad the Bride knows how to braid hair. she is so wonderful, knowing all those fascinating practical human things and being so clever.

Ivar

A man from the village that keeps showing up and causing problems for Bride. One time he even tried to attack her. Ivar is the source of the rumor that Bride is cursed. For that alone König had contemplated visiting Ivar with his axe but held back so far to not endanger Bride by making her a revenge target for a feud.

Judgment

Lot's of judgment going on in Königs and Bride's life. König never cared much about other peoples opinions but he witnessed what the judgment of others did to Bride and now he thinks differently, paying much attention to rumours and whispers about himself and his future wife.

König

König is king of everything from under the water. He heard stories that kings require queens. So he is marrying to further his claim as king. And because it sounds fancy. Mostly it's fancy. Königin has quite ring to it and he used to think that the fancy ring was enough.

Love

A complicated topic for both König and the Bride. As far as they know their marriage will be a loveless one, both in the physical as in the psychological sense. Practically speaking König does know quite a bit about the lovemaking part yet very little about loving or being loved. Bride on the other hand never had the time or chance to experience much physical love, however she does know what it's like to be loved as a daughter, a sister, a friend. In very different ways they are very clueless.

Marriage

An older fisher once told him about the concept and then asked König to marry his granddaughter and take care of her.

Nudity

Clothes are to show off. A true Vodyanoy needs no clothes and only wears them bc the Bride or guests kept looking weird. König owns at least one fine coat. It's very drippy.

Owlet

They cry the death cry far too close to the Bride. She tries not to think about it for too much.

Palace

Since the Bride is human and cannot live under the water, König has taken it upon himself to build a palace he has named the Half-Palace. It's a beautiful building that if build on an island in the middle of a grand lake. The island is meant to be a garden for Bride once she moved there after their wedding. The Palace goes as high up as it goes down deep into the water so that bride can live in the Palace above the surface level while König can still reside under the water and reign over his underwater kingdom. The Palace required a lot of wood to be build.

Queen

One day König and Bride will marry, making her the Queen of everything from under the Water. It is unclear how she is supposed to reign over a kingdom she cannot enter.

Rain

More water. Big fan.

Siblings

A touchy subject as the family is in constant fight and turmoil. König and Simon used to be closer and spent much time as brothers but drifted apart. Graves is another brother with even less favourable memories for König.

Teacups

Great place to store things. Like souls and other miscellaneous things. You know, stuff.

Underwater

It scares the Bride. She nearly drowned a couple of times and since then she has done all her cleaning and washing in a bucket, carried into her kitchen by König.

Village

König has not wandered into the village. It's always so loud and busy. And now König has even less need to learn about those that harmed and shunned the Bride. Luckily the Bride's house is a bit off from the village with a grand garden around it.

Water

hmm, yes.

aXe (ahem)

A present from Ghost to König. Ghost likes to wander the forest and does not take likely to those who harm it and fell many trees. With this axe the trees fall swiftly and new tree shoots grow from the stumps. So Ghost bares the destruction with more tolerance than usual. However even König with his special axe does not dare to fell more trees than necessary. The axe has been used for fighting and killing as well.

You know..

...if you really read all that you must really like this series. Thank you very much for taking the time to read it. It means a lot to me.

Zauberei

Zauberei or magic is the things not understandable to humans like Bride. Which is surprising because humans do magic all the time. They stand in wonder of the beauty of the world. They love and hate. they create new things just from ideas springing out of their minds. König is always very impressed by these acts of magic.

[wilhelmsembrace]

Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die... ~*

Surface.

"A man of mystery, carrying a blade he never unsheathes, his clothes always layered and eyes so sharp that could cut through you if you dare lie on his presence. Some say he was once a brilliant Healer of Ceres, a prodigy amongst the prodigies; some would say he is cruel to those who break the law... What lies underneath that freezing stare? What kind of secrets does one hold so dearly?"

Biography.

( TW: Suicide; Violence; Death )

Love was a funny thing. From bards and dreamers, you’d hear about happiness, hope and devotion, but from real people with real lives, you’d hear about sorrow, tragedy and loss... This story was what happened when you decided to take the worst parts of each of those.

Once upon a time, there was a beautiful noble elvhen woman that would dare fall in love with a simple human man with no possessions to his name. There were many who desired the hand of such fair maiden, one that would put even Goddesses to shame with her light blue eyes and her charming smile, and yet she found herself falling for the one man she could never have.

Ehrhart Blackheart was a waiter at a restaurant by day and worked for a bookstore by night, a man of no wealth, simple, with nothing to his name except a dog and a dream of becoming a renown merchant. Helestina Silverflower was a noblewoman, highborn, pureblooded elvhen, she had everything and more, but never a smile upon her features.

They met, as cliche as it sounds, in a stormy night, when her carriage was forced to stop by the only place that was open so late in the night, a bookstore on the streets of Eterna. She instantly called it fate that she’d find a man so knowledgeable inside, telling her stories of dragons, princesses and knights in shiny armor, he, on the other hand, found in her an opportunity to leave that life of misery and tricked her into thinking he’d traveled the world when that bookstore was as far from home as he’d ever been.

When she got home, her parents were adamant in their decision, that man wasn’t good enough for her, he was a commoner, a nobody, and a human at that, he’d be gone before she’d notice. Their orders? She was to find a suitor by the fortnight so those thoughts would not corrupt her innocent mind. She didn’t listen. Instead, she found herself a solution in a merchant’s caravan, an odd one at that.

The man sold powerful artifacts as if they were simple kitchen tools, exchanged them for stories and other useless things, and yet he carried the one thing she trully wanted, ‘wishes come true’ in the shape of a blade. Helestina asked for a price, and there was one, but that was a price she could never pay. She was upset, frustrated and desperate, and the clever Genasi saw that and offered her another way of payment.

The exorbitant amount turned into a single story, the one she treasured the most. She had no stories of adventures or tales of bravery, so, thinking she’d trick him, she told him the story her loved one told her that night. Little did she know he wasn’t looking for a true story, but one that filled her heart with joy, and that one, although flawed and messy, was her most precious tale.

The merchant gave her the blade, three wishes it would bestow, and her happiness was unmatched as she met her lover the next day. The first wish was that he could be a noble like her, and as such one of the blade’s crystal was gone and he was now a nobleman of a powerful house. With great power, however, comes resposibility and stress, and a simple man who knew nothing was hardly able to manage everything he’d been bestowed upon from day to night.

Ehrhart grew paranoid and fearful of the fake smiles and elaborate phrases, but more than anything, he felt time slip away from him... What would he do if he didn’t have enough time to learn? So he told his lover his concern, but as a sly fox, he reimagined it to fit her innocence; he lied and she fell for it. As her second wish, she wished youth for her loved one, but her words were sever, she wished for him to be by her side forever. The second crystal disappeared.

At the wedding day, they were met with a splendid party, magic and money turning the whole event into something akin to dreams. Everyone celebrated and was happy, except for Ehrhart. He was worried, troubled, his paranoia now was turning into madness, bound to a life together with the woman he had only intended to use for his own selfish intentions. And there she was, having the time of her life, but not him.

Truth is, on the side he had another, a woman from the past, a childhood friend to whom his heart belonged to, Mariane Welsh, a commoner like him, daughter of a fisherman and a fishmonger herself. It was unfortunate how Helestina found out, in the forrest where they had their best moments, there he was with this woman, and in a thousand pieces did her heart break. On that same moment, feeling betrayed, she slid the blade she made him someone with through his heart, and in a single moment she was turned from a happily married woman to a grieving widow, in eternal sorrow and shame for trusting that man.

This would have been where the story ends, but it wasn’t. The man came back to haunt her as it was her wish that they would stay together forever, but she didn’t hear curses or shaming from that vengeful spirit, what she heard was even worse, he asked her to care for a son, one that she didn’t know of, one born of the betrayal that ruined her life. She didn’t listen, instead, as her last wish, what she wanted the most was to end her suffering.

The blade was not so kind, and, instead, it gave her something else, she watched her love die once again in front of her, flames burning his spirit into nothing, sending it to a place no one could ever summon him from. She was now free of the thing that made her suffer. Guilty, she cried for days on end, but after that, she went to meet with the other, Mariane; she brought her to live within her household together with her baby, and even put them in her will. A few days later, she jumped from the highest tower...

Wilhelm Blackheart was a boy born to a fishmonger and her noble lover. He would only hear from his father from stories his mother told him growing up, and Mariane made sure he knew he was also son to another, a mother that didn’t give him genes, but gifted him with the life he had. A life of comfort and plenty of possessions, one that his biological parents never really had when they were little.

The boy with big blue eyes would see his mother grow old with time and his grandparents, although they never allowed him to call them that, would stay the same. When he was old enough, another gift, the Gods gave him magic of his own, one that he could not control, but that spiked the interest of his grandfather. The tall evhen man would begin to tell him stories about the things witches like him would go through in other countries, but not to scare him, to guide him to become a person that would use that gift he had to something good.

As such, when he was old enough, they sent him to study under the Tower, to perfect his magic. Will was never a prodigy, but he was good at it, great even, better than most in his class, and that’s because he had a dream, one that he could be light to those who needed it, a breeze of fresh air in a room full of trouble. So he trained as hard as he could, studied for countless hours on end and even fell sick because of this, but he never gave up.

He found peace in following the School of Restoration because it brought him closer to people who could need his help, but he never saw death as a cruel end. His life was given to him through a tale of tragedy and demise, in his mind, death was just an outcome of living, and as such, it was needed. It was an end to a suffering, such as his other mother would have it. Bringing people back from the verge of dying was a call, and it was his, but one thing he could never do was bring those who’d already gone to a better place back to a world of sorrow, tragedy and loss.

So he became a Healer of Ceres, the youngest in a long time, a position where he could use his knowledge to the good of others, and in that he was best. Years passed by and he had many students learn under him, many prodigies unlike him, some would refuse his teaching because of his age, but the ones who trully listened became extraordinary. He thought that was his purpose, to teach others while doing what he loved, but soon his life would become another with the letter of invitation.

The Queendom needed his services, as it written on the letter, and as he arrived, instead of the Queen herself, he was met with The Speaker of The Elysian Throne of Lysara, she’d been looking for a person with a heart she could trust and that she found in him. From day to night he was Magistrate, a position of power, impartial and vigilant, working under her, and in that he saw a way of helping the people, more than just being blindly judged by a power hungry aristocrat, he could be the one to judge.

Personality.

Caring +++ || Just ++ || Altruistic + Distant +++ || Quiet ++ || impatient +

Status.

Currently working as a Magistrate in Lysara.

Headcanon.

When Will began to explore his magic, he send a bolt of magic flying across his room that, as he tried to control it, unfortunately turned in his direction and hit him in the arm, leaving a scar in the shape of a lightning bolt down his arm that he hides under layers and layers of clothing and a tatoo was made over the scar. He’s ashamed of his past foolishness and believes his past self to have been careless and ignorant. Later, when he entered the Tower, he finally learned the properties of magic and found in Restoration the path that would bring him satisfaction through taking the pain away from others. The path of Ceres wasn’t even a question, but and answer to his hopes.

Wilhem has always been the support type, but not one that would stay behind, one that would go forth and do what he must to keep his allies alive, fight creatures with his bare hands if needed. His goal in a battlefield is to end the battle as quickly as possible and keep as many allies as possible in good shape. The best version of himself would be a devout to the Goddess with a path focused on the cycle of life and the comfort of death with due aversion to undeath, and a warrior as a side, since he believes in fighting for what is right and would jump to action if his friends needed it.

As a student of the Tower, he didn’t wish only to help people with the powers he learned to harness from the veils of magic and under the protection of the Gods, he was devout to the thought of importance of the cycle of life for all creatures. That’s why when he found a hurt cat on the streets, he was quick to bring him to the Tower, where he could give him the best treatment possible, even at the cost of multiple scratches and bites. It was hard to treat every wound, but eventually they created a bond beyond anything he’d ever expected, they were friends. So he named the Cat Sith Scratch.

Will’s relationship with his mother is that of love and respect, he sees on his mother a person who never allows bad to be the main event of a situation, she finds a way to show a smile even when there’s nothing to be happy about. Even though she was strongly discriminated amongst the nobles and even the servants of the household they were brought to by Helestina, she never once showed sadness or uncertainty, always a kind soul, and a just one that would see through the eyes of order. She was his inspiration, his role model. His other two parents were only tales, and he wanted to hate them, but his mother never allowed it, she said they had their reasons for what they did, both of them died for love, and she was the one to teach him that death was just comfort for the hearts of those who suffered.

The merchant who once sold the blade his grandmother told him his elvhen mother had in her possessions was one called The Wandering Merchant of Tales, which he tried to find for a good while, traveling across Lysara in his free time and going as far as to other kingdoms, but, although he’d hear stories, he never really found that person to ask him which tale his mother traded for that thing. He inherited the blade when he was old enough, as a symbol of what blind love could do to a person, but now it is just a sword with missing gemstones that he carries always sheathed on his belt.

SKELETON

[halfyearsqueen]

VALYRIAN PANTHEON HEADCANONS.

the goddess tessarion is the ruling queen of the fourteen - ruling alongside balerion, her king. she’s the goddess of creation, family, rebirth, harmony and the first flame.

balerion is the god of divination, death, and warfare. together both deities are meant to represent balance, and the belief that fire can only truly forge when and as one masters its capability for creation, and destruction.

balerion’s twin sister is the goddess vhagar. she is the lady of the dead, goddess of the underworld, strife, discord, and vengeance. often seen accompanying balerion into battle in ancient legends.

meraxes was born to tessarion and balerion, and is the first of their four children. goddess of mischief, and the goddess of youth. she is described as more draconic in appearance then the rest of her kin. born with a dragon scale birthmark down the right side of her face - it’s alleged her interest in humans is what led to the first dragon bond with mortals.

arrax, the second eldest child. the clever one. and the herald and the god of travelers. he served his parents as a messenger. and was said to bless the ones who could figure out his identity.

tyraxes is the god of healers, and light and the elder twin to viserion. the goddess of the night and lady of the moon. she’s said to be more reserved then her brother, and who the old valyrians prayed to for safety when they couldn’t light a fire of their own.

syrax is the goddess of beauty, fertility, love and war. her domain is anything that might be prompted by passion, and by emotion. her eyes and hair are both golden. she’s who the valyrians prayed to when they needed help professing their love for another.

meleys is the goddess of strategy, the forge and crafts. and often patron of the scholarly arts. she was worshipped by the metalworkers who folded and unfolded the liquid metal to make valyrian steel.

vermax is the god of lighting, storms, and the winds. he is the father of daenys, and valarr. and credited as the protector of the stranger for the guiding hand stories claim he reaches out to those who are in unknown situations.

daenys is the goddess of the hearth, and is the one credited as being the creator of dragons in ancient valyrian mythos. she forged the bond between humans and the first dragon lords at the behest of her cousin meraxes, and is worshipped and revered by dragonlords in particular.

valarr is the god of orchards and vegetation, wine, and the patron of the theatre. he is the youngest of the fourteen and poets / creatives and farmers alike would pray to him for inspiration and fruitfulness.

vermithor is the god of the sea, oceans and rivers. and commander of all that lay beneath the surface. he is popular among sailors in particular, as they prayed to him often for safe travel on the waves.

caraxes is the god of single combat, justice, and heroic glory. another deity the dragonlords of old were especially fond of, he was the inspiration to many knights and warriors of the old freehold.

worship of the gods is primarily ? their temples were located in long since dormant volcanoes, though many would often pray over an open flame. this is because it’s said that the original six ( tessarion, balerion, vhagar, vermithor, daenys, and caraxes were all born fully grown from one )

upon the creation of the dragonlords a very ? important devotional act when it came to worship of these gods was to name your mounts after them.

the magic of the old freehold was primarily ? flame and blood based. as such the three goddesses most often worshipped by practitioners were tessarion , meleys, and daenys.

[holdmecloser-gandydancer]

@blupjeansweek May 30th: Bones

Note: please be aware this particular piece deals with character death and extended observations on human decomposition

Humidity hangs heavy in the air as the river lazily moseys by. The sky’s marred by a bloated cloud full of discontent. All life in the area seems to have better things to do than bask in the dark, sunless afternoon. Certainly, the lich floating by doesn’t help with their unease.

He’s been growing fonder and fonder of the slow life, living on the edges of civilization. Fewer people interrogating him on what kind of discord he plans to sow. (None. He’s just a lich. Leave him alone). However, he grows weary of seeing only the few hundred feet of the cave he’s taken to calling home. There’s only so long he can study his tomes; his whole life was devoted to the pursuit of knowledge, to becoming an accomplished wizard. The preeminent necromantic scholar. A lich.

What all the writings fail to mention is what you’re meant to do after. He was so consumed by seeing if he could do it that he failed to have a plan for when he did. He supposes he never really expected to succeed. He supposes now he ought to keep testing and honing his power.

He prefers taking walks in the sun-dappled woods.

On days like this, he can almost feel the wind on his skin.

What he can definitely feel is this odd pull downriver. It’s been creeping on him like kudzu all morning; gently at first, but now all encompassing. It’s hard to describe, this pull. The best he can liken it to is how the first tome that held information about becoming a lich felt in his hand. Like whatever it is he discovers at this source will fundamentally change his life.

Preposterous.

But can it really hurt to follow this pull? Not like his calendar is overflowing with appointments.

So he does. For some hours, it feels as though he’s just wandering aimlessly through the woods; maybe that’s what he’s doing, chasing some phantom sensation. But he has to believe that it’s something more than that. He’s got an awful lot staked on the strength of his belief now, might as well test it.

-

He becomes less sure of himself the closer he gets. If he were corporeal, he’s certain his feet wouldn’t let him go any further. There’s some kind of tangible pressure on his chest, as though some unseen force is trying to keep him at bay. The unseen force beckoning him forward is stronger.

And so he continues his pursuit of the unknown.

But as he comes upon a pond that the river feeds into, he’s convinced he was better off ignorant.

Back by the treeline, he sees something at the far end of the pond, floating on the glassy surface. His stomach twists; it looks like a dead swan. Beautiful creatures. He’s not sure that he’s ever seen one this close.

He’s at the edge of the pond when he realizes his mistake. Floating serenely on the pond’s surface is a pallid corpse.

If he doesn’t look too closely, it isn’t a corpse. Could just be a sunbather. But no. No.

He has half a mind to turn back immediately. But that damned force that has been dragging him here all day won’t let him leave that easy.

He can’t leave her there to the elements. Gods only know what kind of creatures lay below the surface, ready to make a meal out of her. He supposes that’s the circle of life, but he can’t be party to that. His mother raised him better than that.

It’s with a great deal of effort that he gets her to shore. Clever spellwork only slightly improves the ordeal; he’s trying to be delicate, as well. No, she can’t feel a bump or scrape now, but shouldn’t we all be given some softness in death?

Maybe becoming a lich has also turned him into a loon. But she’s out of the pond, laying waterlogged on the bank. After a moment’s hesitation, he gathers a handful of orange and blue and pink flowers growing in small clumps near the water and places them around her.

This whole thing feels perverse. He doesn’t know her. He knows nothing about her. But it feels important, not letting her go unacknowledged in death.

So he sits near the bank beside this unknown corpse. He makes several false starts at a speech, but decides that he ought not to.

He sits beside this unknown corpse for so long that time goes a little soupy. He’s not sure where this kind of unflinching duty to sit sentinel at her side has come from, but he’s hardly the type to question.

It’s after a few days that her hair appears to fall out in clumps.

And a few days more when she’s a myriad of colors not unlike the flowers Barry set beside her.

And more days and more days and more days until Barry is no longer sitting next to a pallid corpse or an exquisite garden or decay, but a collection of pale bones.

He’s staring again, he’s certain. The smattering of bones look like inkblots to him. A ladder here, still a damned swan there, a fiddle here still.

Because it’s remarkable how easy it is to go from breastbone to fiddle. Perhaps you’ve never considered.

Barry had certainly never considered that.

There’s a first time for everything, though.

-

There’s something to be said about wanting to remain a student forever. We all like to believe ourselves to be great students of the world, never tiring of learning.

That’s all well and good when learning botany or woodworking or poetry.

Less good when you're a student of death magic.

He likes to think he was normal once, though when you devote all your time to ghastly rituals with ghoulish components, you likely relinquish your right to normalcy.

However normal he was once doesn’t matter, now that he’s staring peculiar in the eye. Rather, the neck. And the body. And other fiddle pieces.

He’s crafted a fiddle from the hair and breastbone and other bones of that poor woman. Which sounds exquisitely bad just saying it outright. But it’s part of the bylaws of lichdom, collecting and creating macabre memorabilia.

He’s certain that this takes the cake and not just for the sheer fact of what it is.

This fiddle he has crafted is cursed.

That’s impolite. Cursed probably isn’t the correct adjective. Barry knows he’s no great violinist, however he doesn’t believe that a lack of skill is the source of his unease regarding the instrument he has created.

This fiddle he has crafted only plays a single song.

He’s tried little lullabies his mother used to sing to him, catchy earworms he’s heard bards perform in taverns, depressing funeral dirges. Nothing sticks. Everything is this dreadful song that sounds like the howling wind and pouring rain.

This fiddle he has crafted sings a mournful song of how she died.

The song is slow and haunting, it tells tale of a man she and her brother traveled with and trusted for over a year. Their trust was misplaced. They all worked odd jobs together. Evidently his plan was to poison them both and escape with all their money and belongings, but his plan didn’t quite work the way he planned.

This fiddle he has crafted was overcome with grief at the loss of her brother.

She did all she could to make him well. To bring him back. And it was all in vain. The traveling companion long gone, she simply wailed and wailed until her heart gave out. Her wail still rides the wind. Her tears fell like rain.

This fiddle he has crafted succumbed to a broken heart.

This fiddle he has crafted has unfinished business.

This fiddle he has crafted will only sing a single song.

-

It takes time to acquire all the necessary components.

Each night, before his facsimile of sleep, Barry plays the fiddle. And each night the fiddle repeats its mournful refrain of the dreadful wind and rain.

And one night, when each and every ritual requirement is met, his fiddle is no more.

On that night, he meets an elf named Lup.

He listens to her story, a reprise of a now familiar tune.

On this night, he makes a promise to her. A promise to help restore her brother.

And it is a promise he intends to keep.

[acertainmoshke]

Falling Petals

So. I am working on 4 projects right now, and I swore I wouldn't start another until one of them is done. So I won't. But I couldn't stop thinking about my next project, Falling Petals, a generational story about autism and trauma, and so I'm writing ABOUT it so I can move on and go back to actually writing a current project.

It takes place over 4 generations, and exactly 100 years.

We start with Ira, a Jewish boy born to immigrants right at the start of the Great War. A boy who sees the beauty and the poetry in the world around him, but not in the people. A clever boy who loves learning but has little use for school. Who doesn’t feel pain right and outwardly uses touching hot pots as a party trick to make the other boys admire him, but internally is always seeking sensation. Whose blunt honesty and humorous comments have a certain charm, who knows strange facts and can talk for hours about minute details until the people he initially had laughing and hanging on his words get bored and wander off.

Ira, a boy who came of age during the Great Depression and got left behind as friends went to college or got married. Who told himself he was happy to write poetry, take pictures, and read endless books while working in his father’s store. He charmed the girls who came in but never got past a first date. His few real friends were gone and the neighbors avoided him. He was really alone with only his books, camera, and mitzvot for company. Because, yes, he went to shul every week. He struggled to understand human reasoning, but the rules made sense to him and he followed them more stringently than his parents.

Ira, who his parents gave up on ever marrying until he started to spend time with Joy. She was from his synagogue and, unlike the other girls, she debated him back about philosophy. She wrote her own poetry and read enough to keep up with him. They were soon married, and Ira kept obliviously talking about his own interests and making jokes at her expense, not noticing as she got quieter.

Ira, who amidst the terror of World War II—which he was not drafted into—had four children, three boys and a girl. Ira, who adored the beauty and frozen moments of their lives but himself froze up when trying to connect to them, who wrote poetry and took pictures but then mocked them and criticized them if they ever showed the weaknesses that had failed to serve him.

Ira, who would one day be known as a crotchety old man for doing the same things he had always done.

And then there’s Daniel, born in the middle of the Shoah and always aware of that terror though an ocean separated them. A sensitive child who cried too much for a boy, whose first tormentor was his father trying to make him stronger and whose second was his older brother. A boy who longed to belong with other boys, but found no matter how he tried he didn’t. Who found solace in stories, who devoured comic books and looked forward to shul services every week in a way his siblings didn’t. The people in the stories there felt more like a family to him than his real one.

Daniel, who was eager to grow up but also smart. Who was able to learn and hide his less desirable traits. Who stopped crying and forced all his emotions down, until he began to feel low-level anger all day every day, made worse by loud noises and crowds and new situations. Who carefully watched and mimicked other people until he could come across as friendly and charming on a surface level. Who never let anyone get closer than that.

Daniel, who came of age amidst anti-war protests and the civil rights movement. Who wanted so badly to be involved but had learned never to shake things up. Who wanted to work in a library but became an architect because his father wanted it. Who wanted to be loved so badly he latched onto the first woman to show him affection, a teacher named Poppy, who buried himself even deeper than usual to earn her love, praying he would never blow up in uncontrollable anger this time.

Daniel, who swore he would be better than his father, and was. Who at least spent time with his daughters and never mocked them, but who had never learned to cope with noise and chaos and would unpredictably yell at them for it. Who always hated himself for that after but never told them that. He worked long hours because he had been taught that he could never assert himself for his needs, and this only made him less able to handle life at home. He rarely yelled at Poppy, but took it out on the girls. Especially Shoshanah, who he saw as giving in to the weakness and laziness he had always fought not to have.

Shoshanah, born amidst a time of change and reckoning and standing up for oneself. Who was a sensitive child, but that was allowed as a girl. Who was clever and full of imagination and struggled to make friends but successfully kept one school friend and played constantly and happily with her sister.

Shoshanah, who came of age in a new age of computers and arcades and neon lights. Who still seemed a child, still played with Barbies. Who read a lot and recited lists of facts but got poor grades in school, where she was overwhelmed and bullied. Whose one friend had abandoned her when their interests diverged and whose Wrongness was stark in comparison to her sister who wore hairspray and lipstick, read magazines, and went dancing with boys. Shoshanah, who still wanted to play games and make up stories and was too old to be this sensitive and hated going out in public and covered her ears at loud noises. Who found solace in novels, in writing stories, and in the familiar prayers at shul with the familiar tunes that made her feel safe and loved.

Shoshanah, who went to college all excited to learn about psychology because she didn’t understand people but was fascinated with them. Who dropped out in shame 3 years later because she couldn’t handle the social aspect or keep up with the homework. Who had to go to her sister’s law school graduation while she still lived at home and worked as a stocker at the grocery store. Who still collected Barbies and wrote novels on her grandfather’s old typewriter and spent her time alone. Whose clothes never quite matched and were always too loud.

Shoshanah, who discovered independence by living with a roommate at 30, found that she could handle responsibility when it was shared and friendship when it wasn’t teenage. Who got an entry-level position at the library and never wanted to leave. Who knew she could never handle having children, but eventually found herself love with someone who got her.

Shoshanah, who saw herself in her baby niece and swore she would never learn to hate herself for who she was.

Naomi, born into a world of rapidly changing technology where there was not even a family computer in the house the year she was born but by high school she would own her own laptop and iPod. Who never seemed able to keep up with the speed of things she wasn’t interested in, but argued rapid-fire when she understood the details. Who grew up too sensitive to sound, to light, to the way people looked at her when she didn’t know the right answer in conversation.

But also Naomi, who learned to wear headphones with no music so the world didn’t hurt. Who lived in pajama pants and long skirts and never jeans. Who cut her hair short at 12 and never went back. Who learned from her aunt that this was ok, that she was clever and beautiful. Who never felt so clever as when she went to Torah study and argued with grown adults about the finer details.

Naomi, who came of age in a world of smartphones and accommodations and who learned to advocate for herself, who got a degree in philosophy but became a book illustrator. Who shaved her head so she never had to touch her hair again, dated several women until she found one she never wanted to hide from. Who set reminders on her phone for every little part of her life, wore “actually autistic” pins in public, was never afraid to spin around when she was happy.

[missmeasured]

Happy Halloween!!!

Readers! It's time for the third SOTS bonus chapter. It's a little extra special! I saved the fullsized candy bar for last. For Halloween Day I give you Severus' POV for their first day together at Spinner's End.

Read it below the cut or on Ao3

Severus/Reader - Explicit

Spinner's Beginnings

Hanging halfway out of the back door of the kitchen I once more chide myself for being such a worrying mother hen. The owl she had sent me when she arrived home had stirred a complex mix of emotions in me I was still trying to sort out. She had informed me that she was going to go on some kind of excursion, seemingly outdoors in nature, with her friends for a week, and come to my place for our planned summer together at its conclusion. 

I was glad to hear she was going to spend time with her friends. I did not want her to come running to me and neglect her relationships. Merlin knew I would be back at Hogwarts and unavailable to her soon enough. I had begun to worry I had made a mistake in inviting her to stay for so long. It might be too intimate, and lead only to difficulties when the fall semester began again. It would have been better to have sporadic visits, try to get used to not seeing each other as often. 

As soon as I had arrived at my home I knew I had underestimated how much I would miss her. In my mind I thought of our Friday nights as our singular weekly visit but that was laughably untrue. She had been under my nose every day at the school. In my class, offering secret smiles and shiny eyes, at her house table, day dreaming out loud to me as I passed by. 

Her imminent arrival seemed at once not soon enough, I craved her laugh terribly, and also too soon, the house seemed shabbier with the lens of future fresh eyes on it. 

In truth I had neglected the house, it was nothing to me except a place to lay my head for two months. A house without a human in it for most of the year decays a little faster than one with living beings in it. I took the opportunity to clean it with new eyes, and repair what was easily done with magic. Still it had an unoccupied smell, like the dust on surfaces over the years had seeped into the bones of the house. 

I paced around the kitchen once more, looking at the clock over the door to the sitting room. It was the appointed time, only just. I was behaving unlike I ever had before, the heart gripping worrying was not like me. I had given her a memory of  the space in the backyard so she knew where to pop up. There I had grown some careful shrubbery to hide comings and goings from neighbouring yards. It remained empty seven minutes after the time we had arranged.

She was new to apparating. Not that I doubted her abilities. She was very clever but it did not stop me from worrying that something had gone awry. Either with this apparition or the one before to get where she was going with her friends. Trying to put my worrying about her apparition from my mind I resumed my worries about what her coming to stay here meant about our relationship. 

It seems I am damned either way to worry over her. Am I really this kind of man? Even though she had aged by magic I felt sometimes still that I was a lecherous old bastard. Whenever I imagined the beautiful little thing flitting around the house I could not overcome the idea that I was thinking exclusively with my cock.

I had grown used to her being in my quarters at school more often than she ought towards the end of the year. I couldn’t help but think of all the positions I had guiltily enjoyed watching her in. Laid out on my sofa, curled in my reading chair like a little egg, even reading on my rug by the fire with her homework and being unaware that my eyes had strayed from my marking to examine how she kicked off her shoes and how with her feet up in the air while she lay on her stomach, they wiggled to the rhythm of the words she read.

I looked at my furniture and felt greedy to have memories of her all over these as well. The sick feeling of what I truly am washed over me once more. Her teacher. Her teacher, luring her to spend the summer locked away with him here. Not because this connection needed to be explored but because if I was being honest I burned for her. I wanted her in every way and every time she breathed one of those broken breaths of pleasure, gasps ragged at my touch I was helpless in wanting more of her. 

What pained me most was that I didn’t deserve her, this smiling, laughing, sweet thing. I didn’t deserve to have so much of her, yet I wanted and needed her like nothing I had ever known in my life. I should send her away as soon as she arrives for I am nothing good for her.

As I approached the back door for what felt like the 70th time in a ten minute duration. This time she appeared as if I had summoned her myself by stepping outside at the same time as she appeared. She smiled as she saw me and I felt that renewed grief that she was smiling at something that would gobble her up and leave nothing behind. What future was there for her with me? 

We looked at each other for a moment, the first time we had clapped eyes on each other outside of the school. She was wearing muggle clothes, her shorts showing off almost all of her thighs and something inside of me clenched at having those beautiful legs I have deposited so many kisses on out in plain view of the world. Her knees had dirt on them and she seemed like she had gotten almost too much sun. There was a kind of glow on her face mixed with a slight perspiration that I hadn’t seen before. 

“So you dress like that all the time then?” She asked with a cheeky smile.

“So you dress like a muggle in the summer?” I shoot back.

“I was near muggles. Aren’t you hot?” She asks, making no move toward my house. 

“Does the Vice President of Charms Club not know how to do a cooling charm?” 

My dirty knee’d, summer clothed nymph at last approaches my house. “Of course I do, you dick head. I just thought this was maybe your teaching armour and you might have something slightly less layered for the privacy of your own home.” She quipped. 

“I’ll take those bags.” I offer, reaching for the one over her shoulder and gesturing towards the one slung on her back. She shrugs out of it. We stand together on the threshold and and all at once I can smell her. Campfire and pine trees and sweat. I had never smelled her sweat before, our time as lovers was confined to fall and winter in a freezing cold dungeon. She stepped inside my back door and all my anxiety about having her, my plotting to send her away from me to prevent her from wasting her precious young life on me disappeared into the fog of lust that instantly curled inside me. As I closed the door behind us I knew I had no intention of letting her leave. No, she was mine until September. 

The narrow paths of my home meant that I was giving her a tour by herding her through the aisles afforded to walk between closely packed things. She had to look back at me as we entered each room for my summary explanations. As if she needed to be told that this was the sitting room or kitchen. I followed her up the narrow stairs and told her to turn into the bedroom on the right.

“I thought I would put your things in here. A space for you in case you want to be alone.” I offer by way of explanation. 

“Ah yes, I came here to be alone.” She answered sarcastically, staring at the twin bed. 

“We have never spent more than two nights together, perhaps you will feel differently.” I caution. 

“Sure.” She nods. There is a beat of silence as we both look at each other and the dawning realisation that we had planned to be together for a whole two months and we had no discernable plans other than to have sex swirled around us. The fact we had not yet touched steeped the room with an awkwardness. We had to find our new parts. She had known how to behave in my office, it had come to her easily. Here she looked at a loss. “Can I actually trouble you for a glass of water? I'm suddenly aware of how thirsty I am.” She asked.

“Of course.” I answer, setting down her bags and leading her back down the way we came. When I retrieve her some she drinks it down eagerly and takes another. “When did you last have water?” I wonder out loud. The way she looks up and to the right to scan through her memories tells me she does not know. 

“Not sure.” She answers, out of breath between gulps. She pulls out a kitchen chair and curls those bare legs up on it. 

“How was your camping trip?” I ask, taking a chair myself. 

“Fun! More fun than I thought!” She admitted.

“So much fun you forgot to drink water?” I sounded very un-fun. I had to nip that in the bud. It was good she had spent time acting like a teenager, I didn’t want her to miss those experiences just because those stars had stolen a decade from her. 

“I had some orange juice this morning!” She exclaimed as she remembered suddenly, as if she had made a point in an argument. Did she think I was going to take her over my knee if she didn’t produce a memory of liquid consumption? I looked over at her while she finished her glass of water. I saw for the first time how dirty the bottoms of her feet are. 

“Care to tell me how you’ve managed to get such dirty knees?” I asked. I know the question will make her blanche, the implication she was up to something naughty on them.

“Trying to light a fire the muggle way this morning!”

“Why?”

“Well after the party the boys brought back muggle girls and they slept over so we couldn’t risk doing it the other way.”

“Party?”

“A huge muggle party. Well a concert really, two days long and the music is horrible when you aren’t on something. It was Violet and Brody’s ideas. I’m beginning to think muggleborns are so wild.”

I hadn’t known about the presence of boys at all. I had stupidly assume female friends when her letter had said ‘friends’. Trying to appear unflustered I asked the more pressing question “On something?”  

The forthcoming explanation and subsequent stories washed over me, bringing various amounts of horror. Thank Merlin I had not known about the details of this trip sooner or I would have been worried sick all week. The story began with a mushroom tea made by Brody Macpherson of all people, an absolute dunderhead, who got a T on his O.W.L. potions. The idea that he was doing so much as frying an egg for my little nymph would have me concerned, let lone the idea he was mixing some kind of tea intended to lower one’s inhibitions and provide stimulation in order that the pounding music turned into mating signals, urging everyone to grind as one until one isolates one’s intended mate from the crowd of bodies. 

I had absolutely no right to be jealous. I was keenly aware I had never said I loved her, nor given her any reason to think I was to be thought of as her ‘boyfriend’. I cringed at the word even thinking it. Yet now as she told me all about her week in the woods I could not help but picture the scene. My bunny, my sweet little bunny in the woods surrounded by men on various intoxicants. Men and their wandering hands, and their bad intentions. I imagined her as she was after the Christmas party, though it was unlikely that anything these kids could lay their hands on was anything near as strong as Pomona’s punch, and yet I remembered how soft and pliable she was in my hands that night and the horror that someone could have taken advantage of her had me gripping my water glass tightly. 

“Severus? You are making a face.” She pulled me from my spiralling imaginations.

“A face?” I asked back, trying to deflect.

“A dad face. A worried face. Are you annoyed that I drank that tea…. Because-”

“No. Not at all. I’m glad you had fun.” I smile, it feels tight on my face though, because in my mind I’m still imagining her dancing and as Brody is the only boy she had given a name in her story I can’t help but picture his hands coming around her hips and pulling her against him. “So you were lighting a fire the muggle way because all the boys brought home muggle girls from this concert?” I tried, trying to sound interested in the story but really trying to verify that my stupid jealousy was unfounded. 

“Yes. Well, except Brody.” She answered.

“He was unlucky in love?” I risk prodding a little harder.

“Well he was sharing my tent so I told him I am not sleeping outside for him if he thinks he can get some.” She laughs and my heart hurts. He was sleeping beside her. Unbidden images of him rolling up close beside her and snaking his arm around her waist assault my senses. “There was one guy he was snogging a bit earlier in the day but we never did find him at the party so Brody is gonna have to wait to meet his Prince Charming at the next party.” She finishes and I am almost annoyed at the palpable relief that floods through me at this information. 

“Are you going to go to the next one? You can you know, I’m not going to lock you up.” I tell her, it’s important she goes if she wants to. Even if it kills me with worry. 

“Merlin no! Once was enough forever. Very much not my cup of tea but it was an interesting experience. A week is way too long to be in a tent. I feel so gross, and sweaty and dirty. I’m sorry I’ve come to you in such a mess. I’m afraid I’m gonna have to ask you if I can use your shower.”

We leave our drinking glasses on the table and I show her back upstairs to where we had abruptly stopped the tour on the first trip. I show her into the washroom. At this point my room is the only one she has not stepped foot in. I turn on the taps and while we wait for the water to run warmer I decide it's time to finally break that touch barrier. She is too on edge waiting for it. I want her to feel at home here. I hook my finger in the front of her shorts waistband and pull her closer. 

“I missed you.” I whisper into her hair which smells very strongly of campfire. 

“I thought about you the whole time.” she confesses. The admission arouses me to no end to think of my little nymph missing me. I undo the button of her shorts and open the front fastening. I reach down and cup her through her panties but it isn’t enough. The little moan that slips out of her mouth just makes me want more. I grab her by the waist and set her on the bathroom counter. My hand slides up her thigh and I get my fingers inside her very short inseam and hook around the edge of the cloth that covers her sex. 

I am not normally so hasty but when I part her I find her slick already. Not something that could have happened in the last few moments together but a wetness that was a while in the making. “Darling… you are very wet.’ I inform her as I slide my fingers up and down her slit circling her entrance and almost pressing in but then retreating to travel up to her clit again. She groans for me and I am hungry for her.

“I have been anticipating seeing you all morning. These shorts are quite tight when I sit down. The combination of them pressing into me while I was sitting around thinking about coming to see you has me pretty wound up.” She informs, gripping on my sleeves. I give her just the tip of my finger and instantly my cock is standing at attention from feeling the hot wetness of her. 

“Do you still want to shower first?” I inquire. She says yes but it’s heavy with sex as I had slid the rest of that finger inside of her while she answered. I loved to hear her words quiver. “Are you sure?” I’m trying to make it hard for her, I give her a second finger easily. She is so slick with need. My cock twitches at her open mouth as she takes it and her mind calculates the new and different pleasure. Still she insists she wants to shower, but the poor thing feels uncomfortably grimey I suppose. I tell her I would happily fuck her as is. Dirty feet and campfire hair and the musky smell of her underarms is all arousing to me. She giggles at this admission from me but insists that she would rather get clean. 

“Very well, my dirty little pet. You may wash your dirty little feet and these dirty little knees. But. You are not to wash away this slickness. You made this for me, and I want it. When you are done I’ll be waiting in my room with a towel for you.” I inform her and she smiles at my instructions while I kiss her neck and slip my fingers in and out of her. Finally I release her and she hops down from the counter as I leave the room. 

I go to my bedroom and start to remove my clothing. I don’t want to wait any longer than the duration of her shower to have her. I try to take my time undressing so I have something to occupy myself with while I listen to the water in the other room. Hearing its changing patterns of where it falls against the bathtub as she moves around to wash. I imagine the water running over her body and as if to torture myself further in this waiting I bring the fingers coated in her to my face so that I might smell her. My cock twitches in response. I have to wrap my hand around myself and give myself a few slow strokes. Easy now. She’ll be out in just a moment. It's only been a week after all since I had her in my bed at Hogwarts. 

The shower’s familiar creaking of the knob turning off sends excitement though me. I’m standing out of view of the doorway, towel in hand. She comes through the door, all covered in water droplets, arms nervously trying to cover herself up. I approach the side of the bed with her towel and motion for her to come, and my compliant little one does. She is not expecting me to push her down on the bed, soaking wet. Her surprised giggles multiply as I lick up her belly and between her breasts, lapping up water off her skin as if I had been the one with the interminable thirst. I could lap each and every drop off her body, the towel somewhere fallen by the wayside.

My little nymph moans for me as I lick each nipple, stopping to lavish attention on her neck before kissing my way down her. I kneel by the side of the bed and put her feet up on my shoulders. I want her fully spread open to me as I taste that slickness she made from missing me. She has followed instructions and not washed here. There is something about her taste that is muskier than usual and I adore that it's for me. As are these moans, these cries while she pushes her wet hair back into my bedspread. I lick her until I can’t handle hearing a single extra sound from her lips or I’m sure I will explode down here against the side of the bed. 

Rougher, more aggressively than I maybe ought to have, I am up and pressing into her. Her face as I fill her up almost undoes me. Thank goodness my bunny is almost there already, I can tell from her face as I begin fucking her hard, her hips in my hands off the side of the bed. I stop for one second as I grab her right hand and put it on her clit. I won’t outlast her unless she comes right away. Once again she is my compliant little pet and takes the direction. I wonder if I’ve missed her more than I realised as the sight of her touching herself while she is so full of me is too heady. 

At the next snap of my hips into hers I get a very satisfactory “Oh” from her mouth and the next one is higher pitched and they keep coming. I can’t help myself, if I come before her I will just have to finish her some other way. I fuck her hard as I speed towards my peak and with excellent luck as I am spilling my orgasm inside of her I feel her shudder around me. I’m sensitive but I can move enough to make sure her finish is fully felt, she is gripping my shoulders and making exquisite noises. 

While I’m still inside her I kiss her and when we have caught our breath I give her a confession of my own. “This morning I kept thinking about sending you away. That it would be wrong of me to have you here all summer when you should have fun with your friends. I think I understand now that it’s not in my power. I would have to come find you. I would need you too badly and then you would be the one kicking your friends out of the tent while I had my wicked way with you.”

“I could never!” 

“Kick your friends out of the tent?”

“No, I could never be quiet enough! All of my friends would know exactly how many times I came. No thank you, I would rather be here.” She laughed. 

“Shall we go finish your shower? I want to wash you.”

“It’s your house, you get to pick the activities.” 

“You have no idea what you’re in for now. I’m going to scrub those dirty little feet clean and then I’m going to put you in this bed and coat you with lotion and just when you start to relax you’ll find me seducing you again and you’ll be powerless to stop me.”

“Severus, I’m already powerless to stop you.”

“Good. So don’t fight me when I want to pamper you between round of fucking you senseless. My house, my rules.”

“Yes Sir. I thought you would be maybe less bossy when you aren’t in teacher mode.”

“Oh, did you think so? No my dear, all that attention is going to be focused on you now.”

“I can’t wait." She smiles, and oh that smile has the power to send away all my doubts about the summer.