#this might be my favorite elias I’ve ever drawn

[lycanlovingvampyre]

MAG 158 Relisten

Activity on my first listen: baking something in the kitchen, most likely with apples...

This is one of my favorite episodes ever! There is just so much going on and every single bit is so exciting, it has me sitting at the edge of my seat. Plus big reveals of course. The panopticon, Elias etc. (And a bit of comedy.) Generally, I think the S4 finale, so MAG 158 to 160, might be the best fiction experience I've ever encountered.

MARTIN: "It’s fine. Don’t particularly like it down here." I mean, not to say that Jon wouldn't have every right to feel uncomfortable in the tunnels as well (e.g. his experiences in them in S2), but Martin also didn't have a good time down here. Wandering for hours and finding Gertrude's body + guilt of having left Jon and Tim behind, accidentally entering the Distortion's corridors only to be spat out in the Archives again (after spending 100 times more hours in there as in their real world) to the bloody mashed potato that is Leitner's head and on top of it we know that Martin is claustrophobic.

Peter just blatantly making uncomfortable small talk. Martin is already on his way to the panopticon with you, why torture him even more??

MARTIN: "Are you sure about that map? I’m pretty certain the tunnels change." PETER: "Oh, don’t worry about that. Ink’s practically still wet. Not to mention, if they do change, well… I happen to have something that will change them back." Hmmm, do the tunnel really change on their own? There is some kind of weirdness to them because of which you usually can't find the panopticon. But otherwise I thought this was just Leitner moving them around... also maps are a funny thing in TMA. There also was the map for Sannikov Land. We never learn where they're from and who made them. Would Elias really have drawn the map for Peter? If yes, he must have been pretty sure that he can prevent Martin from killing his body.

MARTIN: "That’s a Leitner." PETER: "It is!" MARTIN: "And the, um… the blood on it?" PETER: (cheerfully) "That’s Leitner too!" MARTIN: (apprehensively) "…Riiight." Peak comedy!

MARTIN: (wryly sarcastic) "Very impressive." PETER: "I’m reading. Shush." Jon was also like "I didn't hear you reading!" in MAG 80. All of the Archive crew are so used to read something out loud, they don't think it’s even possible to read quietly XD

NOT-SASHA: "So you finally decided to let me out, Jon? (calling) Jooooon?" Not gonna lie, I totally forgot about Not!Sasha on my first listen. So this did actually shock me.

BASIRA: "A couple of guards on duty vanished too." JON: (agitated) "Vanished. How?!" BASIRA: "Just left. Best we can tell, he had some dirt on them." Hmmm, if it wasn't for the "just left" and Peter later being a bit taken aback of Elias being also at the panopticon, the wording "vanish" does remind me an awful lot about Peter! And Peter just got a map to the panopticon... So did Peter get the map from Elias? His astonishment does contradict this... But also I guess Peter could have easily sneaked into prison (like, he can turn invisible, duh) and got that map from Elias! According to Jon, Basira and Daisy earlier it does seem like Elias got out because of his little deal.

Also, last episode Daisy and Basira weren't in the Institute. Maybe they were already out because that old friend from the prison called them. This could have given Elias time to get to the Institute and leave Dekkar's statement for Jon. I totally hadn't considered, that it could have been him as well, not just Annabelle.

MARTIN: "So that’s it. Both Lonely and Watching." PETER: "You must admit you’re the perfect candidate." And the panopticon is actually the perfect location for this.

MARTIN: (shaky breath) "Where are his eyes?" ELIAS: "Exactly where they’ve always been, Martin. Watching over my Institute." OMG, I was soooo blown away! This sentence of course made it very clear, what was going on. Buuuut we get a more direct reveal on that in just a minute, just for anyone still doubting this.

BASIRA: "It’s just that there’s a lot of tapes around." JON: "And I don’t keep any of them with the key to the tunnels. It’s been left for me." DAISY: "And it says ‘play me’. Kind of suspicious." This definitely was Elias.

GERTRUDE: "I’d rather hoped you’d still be hampered with all the Dark’s business. It’s their ‘Grand Eclipse’ at the moment, isn’t it?" So this means it's March!!!

GERTRUDE: "I’m not really in the mood for nostalgia, Elias. You might have noticed I’m rather busy so either shoot me or –" [A GUNSHOT RINGS OUT. GERTRUDE GASPS AND COLLAPSES.] GERTRUDE: (gasping) "Well… there it is. Thought it would hurt more." ELIAS: (sighs) "Pity." 1.) Elias never lets people finish their sentence when killing them. So rude... 2.) MAG 52 - Jon: "I know the secret to her death is on one of them. It must be. I just… I hope I don’t have to hear it firsthand." :/ 3.) I immediately noticed that this was only ONE gunshot, when Martin had explicitly stated that there were (as far as he could tell) THREE gunshots to the chest!!!

This tape was so cool!

JON: "Yes. And I’d wager that Elias’ body –" BASIRA: "Gotta be Jonah Magnus, right?" I mean... who else would it be, but at no point whatsoever does that name come up in the tape. We as audience know it's Jonah's body because we just heard Peter say it.

Ah man, these gunshots and screams are really unsettling...

MARTIN: "If I do kill you, will the others survive?" PETER: "Elias?" ELIAS (JONAH): "Come now, Peter, it’s a valid question. And you should have addressed it yourself, really. The short answer is, I don’t know, Martin. I guarantee it won’t be pleasant for them, but I honestly don’t know if their ties to the Institute are quite as strong as I may have implied. " So he did bluff!!! He genuinely didn't know (because no one knows how the Fears actually work...). If the Archivist dies, the others go free. Maybe it would have worked just like that with Jonah? Who knows!

ELIAS (JONAH): " Melanie’s well out of it, so that just leaves Basira and Daisy. And the rest of the Institute, of course, and you can’t tell me you care about them." But... but... the others can quit? This seems like they are not affected by these "ties" at all. Buuut, this is Elias saying it and he loves to manipulate...

Seriously, Ben's voice acting is phenomenal... He is so smug!

PETER: "Then do it. Kill him and help me save the world." If Martin still wasn't sure until now, this did the trick. Peter acting like Martin's the hero. Martin never believed that and this just was the final straw, if he hasn't made his choice already.

I said in MAG 154 that I think there are two points in the story of TMA, when a time travel fix-it reaaaally could work. This is the second one. I think killing Jonah could have pushed back a possible Fearpocalype for a looooooooong time. I don't know if Peter knows about Elias plan, like in detail (he knows, the wager was to get Jon marked by the Lonely and that he is relevant for the ritual), but perhaps he doesn't know the last step, how to... open the door^^ 

JON: "Do I, uh… do I get a gun?" BASIRA: "You’ve fired one?" JON: (indignant) "You never taught me!" Love comedy like this!

BASIRA: "You never asked. Besides, we’ve got problems enough without –" [A LOUD CRASH.] NOT-SASHA: "Hello, Jon." BASIRA: "Oh, shit." JON: "You’ve got to be fucking kidding –" Even more comedy!!!

DAISY: "Basira, promise me something." BASIRA: "What – no. Daisy, no." DAISY: "Basira, when this is over, you need to find me. And kill me. Promise me." BASIRA: "No. No, Daisy, we’ll figure something out." DAISY: "These last few months… it was always borrowed time, wasn’t it? Can’t outrun it forever." BASIRA: (desperately) "Daisy…" DAISY: "Promise me." BASIRA: "I promise." DAISY: "Thanks. Now run." BASIRA: "Daisy –" DAISY: (voice growling, distorted by the Hunt) "Run…" I FUCKING love Daisy! I love Fay's voice and zir accent! Also Daisy's character, like she won't submit to the Hunt until Basira promises her! T_T Also Monster Hunt Daisy is really cool!

ELIAS (JONAH): "It won’t be that bad, Peter. You’ll see. Now, he’ll be here soon, so you can leave or –" PETER: "Oh, no. No. I’m not gonna make it easy on him. You haven’t won yet." ELIAS (JONAH): "Your choice. Just make sure to leave the door open." This is so not good... (Also door motif!)

ELIAS (JONAH): "Ah, Jon. I was almost worried. You found your way all right?" JON: (out of breath) "Yes. Yes, I did. …how?" ELIAS (JONAH): "Suffice it to say I called you." I FUCKING hate Elias! (I mean, I love him as a character xD) But this grooming of Jon, argh!!

ELIAS (JONAH): "Not anymore. But not really," Aaaaahh, the "but" costs me an entry for the not really-counter!

JON: "You want me to follow him?" ELIAS (JONAH): "No, Jon. You want you to follow him." He's actually right this time...

ELIAS (JONAH): "Are you scared, Jon?" JON: (quietly) "Yes." ELIAS (JONAH): "Perfect." God, this is again such a good prelude to the next episode in the Lonely!!!

@a-mag-a-day

[charlie-artlie]

🎶 You’re a monster, Mr. Bouchard 🎶

Happy holidays, enjoy this low hanging fruit

[ID: a comic featuring characters from the magnus archives.

Panel 1: elias Bouchard props his chin on a dangling wrist. He is thin with neat black hair and is wearing a green suit. Above him is the text “He sees you when you’re sleeping”

Panel 2: a close up of his eyes, the pupils red and green swirls. The text reads “he knows when you’re awake.”

Panel 3: a close up of his cartoony mouth, smiling wide. The text reads “he knows when you’ve been bad or good.”

Panel 4: zooms out to show a holiday party in the archives, conveyed with some red and green pennant banners. Jon is a thin man with neat black hair, glasses and a mustache, wearing a sweater vest. Jon is standing with tim and sasha, they’re all holding martini glasses. Tim and sasha are smiling but jon is casting a nervous look at a painting behind him, a landscape, which has two eye holes cut into it, which are staring directly and angrily at jon. Martin is standing partially off screen on the other side of the painting, giving it an unsure look. The text reads “…so be bad for fucking sake.”]

[drlissahawthorne]

you drew stars around my scars

Who: Clarissa Hawthorne & Elias Westwood

When:  Evening, Friday, December 4, 2020

Where: A dive bar in NYC

What: Clarissa runs into her ex-boyfriend and closure is found.

Warnings: Discussion of past abuse.

Word Count: 2392

Notes:  Part 1 of 3. Part 2. Part 3.

Clarissa was on her way home from work, just a normal Friday night in New York City. Busy, crowded, and full of life. The kind of night that made her miss her eyesight most. That made her miss the nights she'd go out for drinks with Jill at their favorite dive bar back in Pittsburgh. When she could go to a club and still be able to function by the end of the night. Before her eyes really started to give up on her.

Lost in her memories of better times, she almost thought she'd heard things. The curious, "Lissa?" that entered the air somewhere behind her. Then she heard it again.

"Lissa? Clarissa Hawthorne, is that you?" She knew that voice and it had her stopping dead in her tracks and turning to face  him.

"Elias." God, she hadn't seen him in near eight years. And he was still as unfairly attractive as he had been then. When she’d last seen him in public. Before their lives had fully split them apart for good.

"Been a long time." There was that smile. The one that was so charming it was disarming. The one that had kept her coming back until she didn't. Until she’d made the best choice for herself, no matter how much it had hurt.

"Yeah. What are you doing here?" She was doing the best she could to keep her guard up. The way he was smiling, as if he was far more excited to see her after all this time than she was to see him. Which she imagined was the case.

“Work. You?”

“Yeah, same.” She rubbed the back of her neck with a soft, awkward laugh. They’d always been bad at small talk, it’d been what had drawn her to him. He was good at making conversations mean something, provided they did something for him.

“Are you free right now? I- I feel like we need to talk.” He was insecure, that was the first thing Clarissa picked up on. He’d never really been the type. Honestly, he’d always been confident, cocky even, and there was something almost alarming at how genuinely insecure he seemed.

“Yeah, I am. Uh, there’s a dive bar near here, sells really good food, if that works?” She smiled softly at him, a little concerned at the way he seemed to tense up, get more nervous as she agreed. There were things they did need to talk about, closure that had never come of their relationship with how it’d ended, but she’d never really imagined he’d be the one initiating, nor did she ever imagine she’d ever see him again.

“Yeah, sounds great. Lead the way?” Clarissa nodded and turned around, waiting until he’d fallen into step beside her to actually start walking. “So, how… blind are you? Can I ask that? Is that weird?”

“Pretty blind. Like, legally and then some.” She laughed a little. “I’m not so blind I can’t work, though, so that’s nice. Not that I think I’d ever quit unless I absolutely had to.”

“You always were stubborn.” 

“Yeah, but would I be me if I wasn’t?” They laughed at that before falling into an awkward silence the rest of the way to the bar. He held the door open for her like the gentleman he’d always been and waited for him to join her, before moving further into the place, grabbing his arm out of habit as he led them to a booth near the back. It was one of those things they’d always done, even when she was dating him, despite her eyesight having been infinitely better back then, because it was easier than risking tripping.

They took a seat in the booth, Clarissa folding her cane up and putting it in her bag and pulling out her phone. Part of the reason she’d chosen this place, besides the fact it was close by, was because their menu was online and she could easily access it via her phone, making it much easier to decide on what she wanted to eat.

The pair sat in silence, waiting until after they’d ordered and their drinks had arrived, an Old Fashion for Clarissa and just a Coke for Elias, before they really decided to talk.

“I’m sober.” The words were the actual last thing that Clarissa ever imagined she’d hear from him. He’d never been particularly bad with his drinking, He hadn’t been great, and they’d definitely had more than one fight where the drinking had made it all worse, but she wouldn’t have it would be a reason. Then again, she hadn’t seen him in so long, there were likely other factors to it.

“You- That’s great, but we could have gone someplace else. I’d never-” He held up a hand to cut her off.

“It was a personal choice and this is fine. I don’t mind being around it, I just choose not to. And, I imagine, on some levels, you’d be more comfortable discussing things after a drink, than without it.” It was so odd, hearing him talk about putting her comfort first, but he definitely wasn’t wrong about her needing a drink.

“Right. So, what is there to talk about?” As much as Clarissa knew exactly what there was to talk about, she needed him to say it. 

“How I treated you, when we were dating.” He looked down at the table and sighed. “I was bad for you. I was bad to you, and I knew that. I knew what I was doing was wrong, but I liked it. I liked having that sort of power. But it wasn’t right. You deserved to be with someone who wanted you for you, and I made you think tat was me. I mean, I loved you, but I loved the power I had over you.” 

Clarissa listened to him speak and took a long sip of her drink. “Look at me, Elias.” He raised his head to look at her. “Now tell me that again. Look me in the eyes and tell me the truth.”

Elias swallowed. “I used you for my own personal, selfish gain. I used you and I made it so hard for you to leave, because I knew the moment you did, I’d lose all of that. I was selfish. I was possessive. I-” He took a deep breath. “I abused the trust you’d given me. I abused the love and affection and care. You wanted someone to look at you and not see a burden and instead of doing that, instead of being someone who loved you for you, I used that against you. I know that now. I knew it then, too, but- You leaving did things to me. Things I’m thankful for, sort of.” 

For a while, Clarissa just sat there in stunned silence. She’d never dreamed he’d ever admit to what he’d done to her. Hell, she wasn’t even sure he’d known, in the sense that some part of her had always chalked it up to her own overreactions. Which, admittedly, was probably exactly why he’d been able to get away with it for as long as he had. 

“What do you mean things happened?”

“I might have gone off the deep end a little. I lost my job because I was drinking and angry and I ended up getting help. I ended up in therapy and I got set straight and I got to the root of my issues. The reasons I’d done what I did to you. Why I wanted that kind of power. Why I took advantage of it, of you.” He fiddled with his hands and Clarissa took another long sip of her drink. She really didn’t know what to say or how to respond. It was so strange to her, to hear him say these things. That he was admitting to what he’d done to her.

“I’m glad you got help. I’m sorry it cost you your job, I know you’d been working hard for it.”

“It needed to happen. Besides, after I got help I got an even better job here in New York. I really am sorry, for everything I did to you. The way I treated you, the fact I made you choose between me and your work. I’m glad you got free of me, I really am. I can’t imagine what might have happened if things had kept going.”

Before Clarissa could reply, the waiter returned with their food and she sighed. She didn’t think that they’d been talking for that long. The place was relatively fast, but it still tended to take a good twenty or more minutes for a single order. She rubbed the back of her neck a little, waiting for the waiter to leave before she even thought of replying.

“I accept your apology, Elias. I never really imagined I’d hear you say any of that. I’d resigned myself to a reality where I was stuck living with what you’d done to me. Honestly, there were days, more often than not, that I was convinced I deserved it. That what you’d done was what I deserved, or… I don’t know.” She shrugged. 

“No, Lissa, you never deserved the way I treated you. You deserve so much better than me. I hope you’ve maybe found someone.” 

“No, I’ve been single ever since. Unless you count my cats.” She chuckled, taking a bite of a fry.

“Really?” 

“You sound surprised.”

“I am. A woman like you, you could probably get anyone you wanted. You deserve to find someone who loves and cares for you the way you deserve. Who can appreciate how sweet and funny and caring you are. Not to say your cats aren’t immensely lucky, but a person would be privileged to know you like that.” His smile was soft as he began to eat.

“I prefer working, honestly. If I had to pick between having a relationship and working just to come home to my cats, I’d choose work and cats. Even before you, and everything that happened between us, I was in a place where relationships were more work than they should have been. And I mean, my eyes have only gotten worse since then. I can only imagine that it’d be so much worse now.” She shrugged. 

“To the right person, your eyes wouldn’t matter, Lissa. You were an amazing person back then and I’m sure that hasn’t changed. And if it has, it’s only gotten better. I have no doubts that if you found the right person, all that would matter is that. That you’re an amazing person. Your disability, your eyes, to the right person are just going to be part of who you, part of what makes you who you are.” 

The way he spoke was genuine and something about that hurt Clarissa in a way she’d never imagined. Because he was someone who had loved her, whether she wanted to acknowledge that or not. He knew what she was like in the private moments that now only her cats were privy to. One of the only other people, outside of her own family, who was that familiar with how she was in those moments, was Jill, the woman she’d been roommates with until she’d left Pittsburgh. And Jill held a similar sentiment, that the right person wouldn’t even bat an eyelash at the kind of help and care that went into being with someone like Clarissa.

“You’re too kind, Elias,” she ducked her head, trying to hide the blush she knew was spreading across her cheeks and onto her ears. 

“Still can’t take a compliment, can you?” He teased, gently. “How is it possible that someone who has done everything you have, still can’t see how great you are?”

“Shut up, I’m not that great.”

“Bullshit, Lissa. You’re blind. You’re still working. You’re independent and sweet and the kind of humble other people wish they could be. You could have given up on life long before now, but you didn’t. That is amazing for anyone, but especially for someone with a disability. And yeah, we haven’t been around each other in years, but it’s not hard to see how great you still are.”

Clarissa rubbed the back of her neck and focused on her food instead of responding. Some part of her knew he was right, he wasn’t the only person who said it. So many people in her life said so, that she was too humble for her own good. That she let the good and the bad roll off her back. That she refused to admit how amazing she was. Not just because of being blind but just in general. Sure, she was a nerd, but she was also talented and skilled and had accomplished so much, even for someone who wasn’t blind.

Elias chose then to change the subject, realizing that Clarissa was obviously uncomfortable with it. The pair spent the rest of their meal discussing various ongoings in their lives since they’d last seen each other. The kind of work they’d both been doing. Personal relationships. Clarissa’s cats and the baking she did in her free time. How Elias was spending his time. The kinds of video games they were both playing at the time. The games they’d enjoyed since they’d last dated. It was nice conversation and was the kind of thing she’d missed. That reminded her of how good things had been when they’d been together, at least when things weren’t terrible. He’d been the kind of person who made her feel amazing and seen, and he still was. Which just made it hurt so much more, knowing that this is what they’d come to. Years later, sitting in a dive bar, miles and miles away from where they’d last seen each other, passing time like no time at all had actually passed.

After exchanging numbers and agreeing that they perhaps needed to do a bit more talking about what had happened between them, in a far more private setting, the two went separate ways. Honestly, Clarissa wasn’t sure how she was supposed to take everything that had happened, everything that she’d heard. The way things felt. It was all more than a bit much and she had a feeling she was in for a very long night.

[antiquery]

yuletide letter

hi! first of all, i want to thank you! i’ve been writing fic for years and watching yuletide from the sidelines (often being v impressed), and this is both my first yuletide and my first exchange, period. i’m really excited! 

general likes & dislikes

i’ll read just about anything if it’s well-written. some things i like, in general terms: power imbalances (healthy and not), complicated and ambiguous family (found or otherwise) dynamics, anything classically or literarily inspired, anything with religious overtones of any kind, unconventional governing metaphors (i once wrote 8k of lovecraft fic guided by the premise of thomas hobbes’ leviathan, ok), worldbuilding, negotiations of personhood, unexpected humanism, sharp interrogations of the world of the source material where necessary or interesting. things i dislike, in general: aus, unless very specific and near & dear to your heart, modern aus in particular, and almost nothing else? sex is fine, if it makes sense in the context of the story, just nothing too out there (though i have nothing against emotional and/or physical awfulness). rating isn’t an issue.

really i don’t have many hard & fast rules! i encourage you to be as out-of-the-box weird and creative as you like.

lovecraft mythos

characters requested: randolph carter, nyarlathotep

it is unfortunate but true that when i was 13 i saw the phantom of the opera in nyc, and it was profoundly formative, and ever since then the daemon lover has been one of my absolute favorite tropes. what can i say, i’m a sucker for the gothic. and this is a...very gothic ship, in the sense that it’s mostly about being pursued by the strange and terrifying, but also being drawn to that, against your better judgement and sometimes against your will. what i would love to see is a resolution of the problem the end of dream-quest poses in the context of the mythos: namely, why doesn’t carter end up dead? it’s kind of silly to propose that it’s really the thought of home that saves him, when you look at the fates of lovecraft’s other protagonists who run up against gods; ruthanna emrys argues in her article on the story that the end is nyarlathotep testing him, deliberately playing with him just for the fun of it. in that case, what is it about carter that draws nyarlathotep to him? why is this human in particular interesting enough to let live? and is that interest genuine curiosity, or bored cruelty, or something in between? for carter’s part, how does he feel about being pretty much completely at the mercy of something that thinks of him (from what he can tell) as a toy, and how does he reconcile the fact that he’s drawn to nyarlathotep in the sense that he’s been drawn to the otherworldly all his life with the very real possibility that he might meet a horrible fate at his hands? established relationship fic could be fun too, with both of them trying to deal with a. the massive power imbalance and b. the moral disparity, in that one party has morals and the other very much does not.

also, worldbuilding, if you like! the dreamlands are such a rich setting, at once very standard Portal-Fantasy-Land and incredibly not, strange and alien and wonderful in the way that only a place crafted out of dreams could be. how does that work, by the way— are certain regions representative of the dreams of certain people? what are the lives of the inhabitants like, the people who exist in a world created by the dreams of other people? how do they feel about gods, or dreamers, or both? how does magic work? government? society? technology? religion?

jonathan strange & mr norrell

characters requested: john childermass, john uskglass/the raven king, john segundus

this is less of a universe that i feel needs interrogating and expansion in the way that the dream cycle does, because clarke is so thorough, and there’s already such a developed world. instead, remember what i said about the gothic? yeah. jsamn has in common with the dream cycle that element and also a sense of profound individual insignificance— the scene at the end, with strange & norrell experiencing the effects of stephen’s and the king’s magic, sent chills down my spine. i’d love an exploration of who/what the raven king actually is, how he came to be as this strange embodiment of the fundamentally alien and wild element of both the northern english landscape and national character, and how childermass & segundus respectively relate to him. i could for sure go for a weird love triangle and/or triad— segundus and his wide-eyed fascination with magic, uncompromisingly wondering, that draws him to the king; childermass, who has to reconcile his almost feudal devotion to uskglass as king with the bone-deep terror that comes from being his harbinger. also, if you give me childermass/uskglass or segundus/uskglass or both at once as a kind of cathy/heathcliff type thing, with each in love with the other as a representation of the landscape, i will cry with joy.

the magnus archives

characters requested: jonathan sims, elias bouchard, “michael”

one of my absolute favorite things about this past season has been jon slowly becoming less and less human and more and more an avatar of the beholding, this terrified and unwilling vessel for something he doesn’t understand. i’d love to see a dissection of that fear in the context of his relationship with elias, or michael (yes i know he’s “dead” shut up), or both. how does jon feel about elias now— elias who got him into this in the first place, elias who represents the thing that’s slowly leaching away jon’s personhood and filling the space with something totally alien? how does elias feel about what’s happening to jon— how does elias feel about jon, more generally? and michael— does jon ever consider running to him, giving himself to the spiral instead of the beholding? (i’d love a fic where this actually happens, especially if it includes elias’s reaction.) how does michael think of jon, jon the human instead of jon the avatar? (see the lovecraft section above, actually.) what about him merits interest? and jon, how much of his being drawn to michael is a function of curiosity, how much a function of michael’s manipulation, how much the beholding pushing him to learn & experience & experiment? mostly, i just adore the complications of humanity that develop when a person is thrown to the eldritch wolves like jon’s been, and how the pushes & pulls of elias’s influence and michael’s influence act on him. 

(also, i’m not saying i’d love a terrified jon at the center of a weird incomprehensible eldritch love triangle, but i’m not saying i would not want that.)

that’s about it, i think! please feel free to drop by my inbox (on anon ofc, just tell me you’re my writer in the message) and ask if you need any clarification on anything. thank you again! i’m really excited to see what you write! 

[lissahawthorne]

you drew stars around my scars

Who: Clarissa Hawthorne & Elias Westwood

When:  Evening, Friday, December 4, 2020

Where: A dive bar in NYC

What: Clarissa runs into her ex-boyfriend and closure is found.

Warnings: Discussion of past abuse.

Word Count: 2392

Notes:  Part 1 of 3. Part 2. Part 3.

Clarissa was on her way home from work, just a normal Friday night in New York City. Busy, crowded, and full of life. The kind of night that made her miss her eyesight most. That made her miss the nights she’d go out for drinks with Jill at their favorite dive bar back in Pittsburgh. When she could go to a club and still be able to function by the end of the night. Before her eyes really started to give up on her.

Lost in her memories of better times, she almost thought she’d heard things. The curious, “Lissa?” that entered the air somewhere behind her. Then she heard it again.

“Lissa? Clarissa Hawthorne, is that you?” She knew that voice and it had her stopping dead in her tracks and turning to face  him.

“Elias.” God, she hadn’t seen him in near eight years. And he was still as unfairly attractive as he had been then. When she’d last seen him in public. Before their lives had fully split them apart for good.

“Been a long time.” There was that smile. The one that was so charming it was disarming. The one that had kept her coming back until she didn’t. Until she’d made the best choice for herself, no matter how much it had hurt.

“Yeah. What are you doing here?” She was doing the best she could to keep her guard up. The way he was smiling, as if he was far more excited to see her after all this time than she was to see him. Which she imagined was the case.

“Work. You?”

“Yeah, same.” She rubbed the back of her neck with a soft, awkward laugh. They’d always been bad at small talk, it’d been what had drawn her to him. He was good at making conversations mean something, provided they did something for him.

“Are you free right now? I- I feel like we need to talk.” He was insecure, that was the first thing Clarissa picked up on. He’d never really been the type. Honestly, he’d always been confident, cocky even, and there was something almost alarming at how genuinely insecure he seemed.

“Yeah, I am. Uh, there’s a dive bar near here, sells really good food, if that works?” She smiled softly at him, a little concerned at the way he seemed to tense up, get more nervous as she agreed. There were things they did need to talk about, closure that had never come of their relationship with how it’d ended, but she’d never really imagined he’d be the one initiating, nor did she ever imagine she’d ever see him again.

“Yeah, sounds great. Lead the way?” Clarissa nodded and turned around, waiting until he’d fallen into step beside her to actually start walking. “So, how… blind are you? Can I ask that? Is that weird?”

“Pretty blind. Like, legally and then some.” She laughed a little. “I’m not so blind I can’t work, though, so that’s nice. Not that I think I’d ever quit unless I absolutely had to.”

“You always were stubborn.”

“Yeah, but would I be me if I wasn’t?” They laughed at that before falling into an awkward silence the rest of the way to the bar. He held the door open for her like the gentleman he’d always been and waited for him to join her, before moving further into the place, grabbing his arm out of habit as he led them to a booth near the back. It was one of those things they’d always done, even when she was dating him, despite her eyesight having been infinitely better back then, because it was easier than risking tripping.

They took a seat in the booth, Clarissa folding her cane up and putting it in her bag and pulling out her phone. Part of the reason she’d chosen this place, besides the fact it was close by, was because their menu was online and she could easily access it via her phone, making it much easier to decide on what she wanted to eat.

The pair sat in silence, waiting until after they’d ordered and their drinks had arrived, an Old Fashion for Clarissa and just a Coke for Elias, before they really decided to talk.

“I’m sober.” The words were the actual last thing that Clarissa ever imagined she’d hear from him. He’d never been particularly bad with his drinking, He hadn’t been great, and they’d definitely had more than one fight where the drinking had made it all worse, but she wouldn’t have it would be a reason. Then again, she hadn’t seen him in so long, there were likely other factors to it.

“You- That’s great, but we could have gone someplace else. I’d never-” He held up a hand to cut her off.

“It was a personal choice and this is fine. I don’t mind being around it, I just choose not to. And, I imagine, on some levels, you’d be more comfortable discussing things after a drink, than without it.” It was so odd, hearing him talk about putting her comfort first, but he definitely wasn’t wrong about her needing a drink.

“Right. So, what is there to talk about?” As much as Clarissa knew exactly what there was to talk about, she needed him to say it.

“How I treated you, when we were dating.” He looked down at the table and sighed. “I was bad for you. I was bad to you, and I knew that. I knew what I was doing was wrong, but I liked it. I liked having that sort of power. But it wasn’t right. You deserved to be with someone who wanted you for you, and I made you think tat was me. I mean, I loved you, but I loved the power I had over you.”

Clarissa listened to him speak and took a long sip of her drink. “Look at me, Elias.” He raised his head to look at her. “Now tell me that again. Look me in the eyes and tell me the truth.”

Elias swallowed. “I used you for my own personal, selfish gain. I used you and I made it so hard for you to leave, because I knew the moment you did, I’d lose all of that. I was selfish. I was possessive. I-” He took a deep breath. “I abused the trust you’d given me. I abused the love and affection and care. You wanted someone to look at you and not see a burden and instead of doing that, instead of being someone who loved you for you, I used that against you. I know that now. I knew it then, too, but- You leaving did things to me. Things I’m thankful for, sort of.”

For a while, Clarissa just sat there in stunned silence. She’d never dreamed he’d ever admit to what he’d done to her. Hell, she wasn’t even sure he’d known, in the sense that some part of her had always chalked it up to her own overreactions. Which, admittedly, was probably exactly why he’d been able to get away with it for as long as he had.

“What do you mean things happened?”

“I might have gone off the deep end a little. I lost my job because I was drinking and angry and I ended up getting help. I ended up in therapy and I got set straight and I got to the root of my issues. The reasons I’d done what I did to you. Why I wanted that kind of power. Why I took advantage of it, of you.” He fiddled with his hands and Clarissa took another long sip of her drink. She really didn’t know what to say or how to respond. It was so strange to her, to hear him say these things. That he was admitting to what he’d done to her.

“I’m glad you got help. I’m sorry it cost you your job, I know you’d been working hard for it.”

“It needed to happen. Besides, after I got help I got an even better job here in New York. I really am sorry, for everything I did to you. The way I treated you, the fact I made you choose between me and your work. I’m glad you got free of me, I really am. I can’t imagine what might have happened if things had kept going.”

Before Clarissa could reply, the waiter returned with their food and she sighed. She didn’t think that they’d been talking for that long. The place was relatively fast, but it still tended to take a good twenty or more minutes for a single order. She rubbed the back of her neck a little, waiting for the waiter to leave before she even thought of replying.

“I accept your apology, Elias. I never really imagined I’d hear you say any of that. I’d resigned myself to a reality where I was stuck living with what you’d done to me. Honestly, there were days, more often than not, that I was convinced I deserved it. That what you’d done was what I deserved, or… I don’t know.” She shrugged.

“No, Lissa, you never deserved the way I treated you. You deserve so much better than me. I hope you’ve maybe found someone.”

“No, I’ve been single ever since. Unless you count my cats.” She chuckled, taking a bite of a fry.

“Really?”

“You sound surprised.”

“I am. A woman like you, you could probably get anyone you wanted. You deserve to find someone who loves and cares for you the way you deserve. Who can appreciate how sweet and funny and caring you are. Not to say your cats aren’t immensely lucky, but a person would be privileged to know you like that.” His smile was soft as he began to eat.

“I prefer working, honestly. If I had to pick between having a relationship and working just to come home to my cats, I’d choose work and cats. Even before you, and everything that happened between us, I was in a place where relationships were more work than they should have been. And I mean, my eyes have only gotten worse since then. I can only imagine that it’d be so much worse now.” She shrugged.

“To the right person, your eyes wouldn’t matter, Lissa. You were an amazing person back then and I’m sure that hasn’t changed. And if it has, it’s only gotten better. I have no doubts that if you found the right person, all that would matter is that. That you’re an amazing person. Your disability, your eyes, to the right person are just going to be part of who you, part of what makes you who you are.”

The way he spoke was genuine and something about that hurt Clarissa in a way she’d never imagined. Because he was someone who had loved her, whether she wanted to acknowledge that or not. He knew what she was like in the private moments that now only her cats were privy to. One of the only other people, outside of her own family, who was that familiar with how she was in those moments, was Jill, the woman she’d been roommates with until she’d left Pittsburgh. And Jill held a similar sentiment, that the right person wouldn’t even bat an eyelash at the kind of help and care that went into being with someone like Clarissa.

“You’re too kind, Elias,” she ducked her head, trying to hide the blush she knew was spreading across her cheeks and onto her ears.

“Still can’t take a compliment, can you?” He teased, gently. “How is it possible that someone who has done everything you have, still can’t see how great you are?”

“Shut up, I’m not that great.”

“Bullshit, Lissa. You’re blind. You’re still working. You’re independent and sweet and the kind of humble other people wish they could be. You could have given up on life long before now, but you didn’t. That is amazing for anyone, but especially for someone with a disability. And yeah, we haven’t been around each other in years, but it’s not hard to see how great you still are.”

Clarissa rubbed the back of her neck and focused on her food instead of responding. Some part of her knew he was right, he wasn’t the only person who said it. So many people in her life said so, that she was too humble for her own good. That she let the good and the bad roll off her back. That she refused to admit how amazing she was. Not just because of being blind but just in general. Sure, she was a nerd, but she was also talented and skilled and had accomplished so much, even for someone who wasn’t blind.

Elias chose then to change the subject, realizing that Clarissa was obviously uncomfortable with it. The pair spent the rest of their meal discussing various ongoings in their lives since they’d last seen each other. The kind of work they’d both been doing. Personal relationships. Clarissa’s cats and the baking she did in her free time. How Elias was spending his time. The kinds of video games they were both playing at the time. The games they’d enjoyed since they’d last dated. It was nice conversation and was the kind of thing she’d missed. That reminded her of how good things had been when they’d been together, at least when things weren’t terrible. He’d been the kind of person who made her feel amazing and seen, and he still was. Which just made it hurt so much more, knowing that this is what they’d come to. Years later, sitting in a dive bar, miles and miles away from where they’d last seen each other, passing time like no time at all had actually passed.

After exchanging numbers and agreeing that they perhaps needed to do a bit more talking about what had happened between them, in a far more private setting, the two went separate ways. Honestly, Clarissa wasn’t sure how she was supposed to take everything that had happened, everything that she’d heard. The way things felt. It was all more than a bit much and she had a feeling she was in for a very long night.

[yenneferw]

1, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10, 12, 15, 20, 27, 28, 30, 36, 39, 40, 42,46, 50, 51, 54 (sorry for all the questions 😓😓I'm just really curios about your writing!

woot no it’s okay i love talking about it!! also thank you so much!!!!! :-)

also i’ll just skip past the ones i’ve already answered 

1. Favorite place to write? 

this is a lame boring answer but just my desk. i’m very comfortable at it as long as my dog isn’t asking to be in my lap bc then i can’t focus

3. Least favorite part of writing?

the writing,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, but no probably writer’s block. like even when i’ve done other productive things i don’t feel productive unless i’ve written so i hate being writer’s block

4. Do you have writing habits or rituals? 

when i’m really really really stuck i’ll try to talk to my friend ash about the parts i’m most excited about to get myself pumped back up for it 

5. Books or authors that influenced your style the most?

i’m sure there are some bc i’m so easily influenced but i can’t pick them out necessarily. probably partly the song of achilles bc i loved that book so much and i loved the style but i can’t tell for sure

8. Favorite trope to write?

idk power couple? i love having natalia and rosie from my novel be equally badass together. also heterobaiting bc for a hot second i made it seem like it was gonna be natalia and their friend elias but haha nope. i don’t know tropes well enough to say for certain but these are some of the things i like about my own novel

10. Pick a writer to co-write a book with and tell us what you’d write about.

madeline miller and i are gonna write some more killer gay greek rewriters like a love story between icarus and apollo or some shit

12. How do you deal with self-doubts? 

i reread my favorite parts sometimes and i’m like wow,,,, goddamn,,, did i write that for real?? or i just say “fuck it fuck it FUCK IT i’ll rewrite it later” and try to power through 

15. Where does your inspiration come from?

it depends on what i’m writing. for things like fanfic it comes from the fact that i love hearing back from people like everybody does but genuinely i just love hearing that someone else’s day was made bc they read my work. i love hearing that they think i got the characterization of something right. it makes me so happy. for my novel i’m working on rn, it at first came from the fact that i love 3 things a lot: queer rep, magic, and knights. so i put all that in a book and rolled with it. now it’s because rosalind is my heart and soul and i love writing about her so much that i just wanna keep going

20. Post a snippet of a WIP you’re working on.

i already did this but fuck it i’ll do more of this one. i wanted to do a fic but i don’t have anything started on my fic sdjfsljdfl 

Rosalind woke up to Natalia crawling into her bed and planting herself on top of her legs, and then saying, “Rosieeeeeeeeeeee,” until Rosalind found the energy to swat at her. Her curtains were already drawn, and when she lifted her head to look around, she saw that breakfast was waiting for her at her table. She wondered where Jenna was and why she hadn’t woken her up. Natalia started her whining again, so she groaned and shoved her off of her legs. “Finally!”

“Where is Jenna?” she asked instead of answering Natalia’s impatience. “Why are you waking me up?”

“Why can’t I just wake up my best friend on this fine morning?” Natalia said, with no small amount of grandeur in a gesture toward the window. “The birds are singing, the sun is shining, there is a gentle breeze.”

(followed later by:)

She was holding her head up high like she knew what it was that she was doing out here, but really she was just desperate and scared. But the birds were singing, the sun was shining, and there was a gentle breeze. And above all else, Natalia was a spark of life all around her.

anyway i just love showcasing how much rosalind loves natalia

27. Do you share rough drafts or do you wait until it’s polished?

it really depends on the case but i share rough drafts sometimes

28. Who do you share them with?

well currently i have my doc shared with @the-voice-of-night-vale and @kiss-my-asthma-bitch

30. Favorite line you’ve ever written?

I can’t remember but I really fucking like “She had gone to everything that she had never thought of before except in passing, with a tightness in her chest and a voice screaming, Do not break this. Do not break something so priceless as us.”

36. A spoiler for story: 

well for my novel a spoiler is that rosalind defects from her country later on although no one but ash and sarah will get that

a spoiler for the fic i’m gonna write is idfk bc i haven’t planned it yet someone needs to hold me accountable for this shit asjdklfjd

39. Do you base your characters off real people or not? 

I don’t think I do really. I might because I’m like that but I don’t notice it if I do

40. Original fiction or fanfiction, and why?

a month ago i would have only said original fiction but i’ve gotten back into fanfiction recently. both have their perks i mean original fiction is completely mine and i can do with it what i want without worrying about canon or aus or characterization and i can be proud of every single aspect since it’s all original, but fanfiction is a lot more interactive and gives validation a lot easier and quicker, which i like lol but also it’s easier to get around to people and i like to see how my writing affects other people so that’s important to me

42. How do you figure out your character’s looks, personality, etc?

looks: i base them off of real people sort of bc i fucking suck at appearances (rosalind looks like janelle monae). personality: i fucking wing it. i do a skeleton of the character and let them figure out who they are themselves as i write it

46. What would your story ____ look like as a tv show or movie?

my novel would be hella fucking cool, it would look probably a bit like merlin bc it’s a castle with magic but it would be very colorful and a lot more diverse and everything is very aesthetic hopefully and janelle monae herself is my girl rosalind,,,,,,,,,,,, in a perfect world at least

51. Describe the aesthetic of your story __ in five sentences.

my novel is: pink flowers. bright flames. the top of a castle against a cloudy sky. the way brown eyes look golden in the sunshine. a sword surrounded by vines. 

that sounds really fucking extra but that’s how i think of it at least. with emphasis on the pink flowers bc that’s for rosalind and she’s the mc 

54. Any writing advice?

love your main character. whatever you do, fall in love with them. that’s what’s gotten me through. also OUTLINE!!!! but even with an outline, if you don’t love your main character i don’t think you can keep going. if they’re not a good person, love the idea of them. love writing them. i wouldn’t be able to keep writing if i didn’t have all these emotions about rosalind. and know them. even i, who is the shittiest character builder in the world, have found that writing is so much easier when i can spend hours pacing up and down my room thinking about who rosalind is on the inside, and what she would be in modern times (she’d own a lesbian blog, 10% bc she likes lesbian positivity and 90% bc she likes to gush about natalia) 

thank you for all these!!!! this is fun

send me sleepvoer asks?/asks to keep me motivated?

[olivereliott]

Traversing The Sangre de Cristo Range

[NOTE: 2020 is the tenth year of my blog at Semi-Rad.com, and since I started it, I’ve been fortunate to get to do some pretty wonderful adventures. Throughout this year, I’ll be writing about 12 favorite adventures I’ve had since I started writing about the outdoors, one per month. This is the second in the series. The other stories in the series are here.]

[All photos by Jim Harris/PerpetualWeekend.com]

It seems like the most obvious question when you look at Colorado’s Sangre de Cristo Range from the west side: I wonder if anyone’s walked across that from end to end?

I had first seen the mountains from the San Luis Valley in 2006, staring out the passenger-side window of my friend Nick’s pickup as we drove back to Denver from skiing at Wolf Creek. For an hour and fifteen minutes driving on CO-17 from Alamosa to Poncha Springs, you parallel the mountains, looking up at them from the valley floor at about 7600 feet, counting dozens of summits above 12,000 feet, all the way up to 14,345-foot Blanca Peak. And that’s what I thought: I wonder if there’s a way across those mountains?

So I went home to think about it for several years, every once in a while pulling out a map, the National Geographic Trails Illustrated Sangre De Cristo Mountains 1:75,000, running my finger along the spine and not seeing too many topo lines bunched up indicating steep ridges. Seemed like it might go on foot, maybe, without roped climbing. I spent some time poking around on the internet to see if there was any information about it, and couldn’t find anything. Maybe someday I’d give it a shot.

—

When Jim Harris and I walked out of a friend’s driveway in Salida, Colorado, in September 2013 to start trying to find a north-to-south route across the Sangre de Cristos, we had spent about eight hours together, total: One brief chat at a booth at the Outdoor Retailer trade show, two breakfasts at the Park Cafe in Salt Lake City, an hour and a half at a coffee shop near Park City planning this trip, and a couple hours assembling the gear and food the previous day. I didn’t know much about him, but I did know he had survived a 33-day backpacking trip in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, so he would probably not be too worried about a trip along the spine of a mountain range with multiple bailout points on either side to a highway less than 10 miles away.

We figured the trip would take somewhere from eight to 16 days: It looked to be about 100 miles, 50,000 feet of elevation gain (a ballpark guess based on a rough line I’d drawn on an online mapping program). We split the food in half, arranging with one of Jim’s friends to resupply us for our second half at the South Colony Lakes trailhead.

I had pitched the trip to a magazine, thinking it would make a good story, since we were making our own route across the Sangres. I think we could have argued that we were the “first” to do it, but I was pretty sure that somebody out there had to have done it already. I mean, it’s in Colorado, which is home to 5 million people, and the idea seemed so obvious and intriguing, it just had to have been done before. The fact that I’d been unable to find information on the internet was good for the adventure factor of our plan, but wasn’t irrefutable evidence that we were pioneers of any sort.

We hiked up a service road at the north end of the range, to the top of an unnamed 11,695-foot peak with communication towers on top, still below treeline. It was a mellow beginning to the traverse, which we knew from that point onward would be mostly trailless. For a minute, we discussed walking over to the summit of Methodist Mountain, the northernmost summit of the range, and then decided against it, as dark clouds started to build to the west. We headed south along the ridge and soon encountered an enormous maze of deadfall, requiring jungle-gym moves to get under, over, and around, with our packs at their heaviest. I joked, “I really thought it would take longer for this whole thing to feel like a bad idea,” as we crawled through the mess. Finally, the deadfall maze ended and we picked up a faint trail just below the ridge and walked it, stopping at about 6:30 p.m. at the two-inch deep water feature marked on the map as Salamander Lake. The rain picked up and thunder started to rumble.

We ate dinner, settled into our two-person tent, and I fell asleep with that not-quite-complete relief you have when the planning is over and you’ve finally started into the Big Thing, but you’ve only just started and don’t have any idea what the next days will bring, or how many of those days it will take you.

We had packed as light as possible: one sub-4-pound tent, ultralight sleeping pads, only one cell phone between us (to update our girlfriends every once in a while when we had cell service, and to text Max our ETA for the food resupply meet-up), one pair of pants each, bare minimum of everything else.

But for the magazine article, I was supposed to record a GPS track of the entire trip. I didn’t own a GPS, so the magazine sent me one, advising me that at the rate of recording every .01 mile, it would go through two AA batteries per day, so on top of all that ultralight strategy, I had 14 AA batteries in my pack, or about 12 ounces of batteries. Plus a battery pack, which weighed seven ounces, to keep our one cell phone charged but which also also could be recharged using a hand crank on the side of the battery. (Fully charged, it could re-up one iPhone to about 90 percent, and once I realized that five minutes of hand-cranking the battery produced approximately one percent of phone battery charge, I turned the phone off for the entire trip, only turning it on to text once a day on top of a peak where we had a signal.) Jim was carrying a Canon 5d Mark III with a couple lenses, so I didn’t complain.

—

We were up at 5:00 a.m. on the morning of Day 2, scarfing oatmeal and instant coffee by headlamp, and hiking again by 6:30. We tagged the summit of Simmons Peak (12,050 feet), then traced the ridge all day, alternately walking on alpine tundra and picking our way up and down talus, over the summits of an unnamed 12,401-foot peak, Hunts Peak (13,701 feet), and then Red Mountain (12,944 feet). I tried my best to keep up with Jim, who seemed to be neither sweating or out of breath as he chatted away, as if we were sitting across from each other in a coffee shop and not sucking wind at 13,000 feet.

By the time we hit the top of Red Mountain, clouds had been building for a couple hours, and by the time I signed the summit register, rain drops were pelting the page. I slipped into my rain shell, pulled my packback on and aimed toward Jim, who was already a few hundred feet down the east slope of the peak. Jim had a pair of legs built from long days of backcountry skiing, easily chugging up steep slopes and quickly bounding down them from the top. I did not. No matter what, I would be slower than him on whatever terrain we descended, spending a half-second more getting my footing on a piece of talus, a half-second more bending my knee to lunge down to plant my other foot on a different rock. A few dozen of those and Jim would be a hundred yards away and a couple inches tall in my view.

The low grumble of thunder, the first of the day, broke somewhere to the south, where all those clouds had been gathering. I scanned the clouds for a flash, then decided it might be better to use the precious seconds to drop down in elevation. It was 1,300 vertical feet down to West Creek Lake below. Jim would make his way down the steep slope in 15 minutes, and it took me at least 20.

Fifteen seconds after we had the tent set up, the rain got more ambitious and started to downpour, the kind of big drops that, even in the dry air of the Rocky Mountains, actually gets you wet and keeps you wet. We hustled to pop the rain fly on before the floor got soaked. We chucked packs inside and dove into the single door. I lay on the bare nylon floor with tundra underneath, content to be out of the rain and finally done moving after a seven-mile, 3,800-foot day. I devoured a Snickers bar at cartoon-character speed and listened as the rain got louder and louder, then turned to hail, piling up two inches deep on the only ground I could see just outside the tent fly.

Every day, we bit off a new chunk of terrain in the same routine: Wake up to watch alarm beeping at 5 a.m., find watch, turn off alarm. Unzip sleeping bag, pull puffy jacket from beneath head, put it on, deflate sleeping pad, become tiny bit sad at hiss of air signaling end of comfort, stuff sleeping bag in stuff sack. Slide feet into shoes, open tent door, light stove. Oatmeal. Coffee. Pack backpack. Repeat bad joke about going for a walk up on the ridge again today, heave backpack onto shoulders, start walking in the dark. Sunrise, tundra, talus, summit, talus, tundra, talus, summit, snacks. Look south, start to think about how far we’d get today. I look at the next peak thinking that would be a nice goal, say nothing, Jim looks two or three peaks beyond that, suggests we try to get there today. We do. Find an alpine lake on the map, navigate down to it, set up tent, eat dinner, sleep until 5 a.m., repeat.

It was monotonous, it was beautiful, it was one of the hardest things I’d ever done, and the simplicity of it was right in front of us every time we popped back onto the ridge: A mountain range, straight ahead, valleys on either side, just find a way across it and keep going.

Theoretically, the idea for a magazine feature was to find a cool, new thing to do and collect enough information to enable readers to do it themselves, if they wanted to. Quite early on, I wasn’t sure I’d recommend it to many people, unless they had a similar obsession with the range, always wondering what it’d be like to walk across it—and also had two weeks of vacation to find out, and also were masochists.

—

We agreed, at some point in our daily conversations, to make the goal a sort of “Haute Route,” or high route through the Sangres. Tagging every summit would be a great goal, but we’d skipped the very first peak on the ridge, Methodist Mountain, on the first day, and had skipped a couple other unnamed mountains before we started talking about it. We had to descend off the ridge every evening to a lake or creek to get water, and the idea of retracing our steps to get back on the ridge at the exact same point we’d left seemed contrived—the goal wasn’t to do a walking survey of the entire ridge, after all.

We got rained on every day but one, and could almost set our watches by the afternoon thunderstorms rolling in. We found faint trails sometimes, but mostly chose our own route across the tundra and talus. We made the occasional questionable decision to head up a gully full of sliding scree instead of a ridge that looked fifth-class from a half-mile away, or to bushwhack up a mountainside of neck-high willows because it looked shorter. We had glorious sunsets, wonderful and unexpected scrambles up peaks we might never have thought to climb if they weren’t in our way on this traverse, and had literally every campsite to ourselves, every single evening. Bighorn sheep sauntered through our campsite, rain hammered our tent, and we slowly built one of those friendships that survives for years after it’s been tested by being next to each other for 24 hours a day for a dozen straight days.

Several nights, I woke up from dreams and pre-sleep hypnic jerks from a lucid scene playing in my head: my foot, stepping on a two-foot-wide boulder, the boulder sliding away, and my leg flying out from underneath me. I’d jump out of my sleep, waking up from the fall, and realize I was still safe in my smelly sleeping bag.

On Day 8, we left the South Colony Lakes trailhead campground, having met Max for our resupply the previous afternoon and gratefully sent him down with some of our trash, spent batteries, and dirty socks. We climbed up talus on the north face of an unnamed 13,161-foot peak, then walked its east ridge to 13,266-foot Marble Mountain, and looked down Marble’s southeast ridge in the sunshine toward Music Pass—a bank of clouds had crept up the left-hand side of the ridge, obliterating the view of anything below the ridge proper. The clouds would morph throughout the day, rolling in and out of our path, finally closing in on us on our final summit of the day. We didn’t know it yet but we’d seen the sun for the last time for the rest of the trip.

The rain began that afternoon and would continue on and off every day for the rest of the traverse, as we walked through clouds that shrank our universe to a bubble, sometimes a quarter-mile, sometimes less than 100 feet ahead. About 150 miles north of us, torrential rain was flooding Boulder, Lyons, parts of Rocky Mountain National Park, and other areas. We slogged on through the rain, and on Day 9, as we navigated by GPS through visibility as low as 50 feet and mazes of deadfall in the lowest-altitude section of the ridge, it felt like our picturesque, ridgetop, views-in-every-direction, walking-across-the-skyline party had been dropped into a dark hole. Or at least a swamp.

On Day 10, we spent the entire day in undulating rain, buffeted from the east by a cold wind. We hiked up two unnamed 13ers, then to the summit of California Peak, 13,894 feet. The actual terminus of the Sangre de Cristo Range is Little Bear Peak, about 3.25 miles south as the crow flies, or arguably Hamilton Peak, a little south of that, and Jim and I had talked about where to properly end the trip. But after two and a half straight days of rain, and fourth-class and fifth-class terrain between us and Little Bear, we called it a day on California Peak, looking into a cloud, water squishing out of the toes of my trail running shoes.

We sent a text to arrange a rendezvous with Hilary, who would pick us up the next day after 10½ days of hiking, and bailed down wet scree into the drainage above North Zapata Creek. We set up our tent in one of the worst campsites of the trip, at 10,600 feet, hoping for a sunny morning the next day and a chance to possibly salvage a summit 14,042-foot Ellingwood Point and 14,345-foot Blanca Peak. But we awoke to a third straight day of steady rain and said fuck it, walking to the trailhead, where Zapata Creek was so swollen with rain we could hear boulders rolling underneath the water.

Our shoes, brand new at the start of the trip, were destroyed after 105 miles and 43,000 feet of elevation gain. We’d crossed 63 summits, and traversed 91 miles above 10,000 feet.

Some not-small part of me, I think, wanted at the beginning to map a route that other people might follow in the future. But at the end, I was sure we hadn’t done that. So I had to settle for what we had done, which was put to bed a years-long curiosity. Seeing that thing, wondering what was up there, and wandering around like a couple of idiots, in a long tradition of other idiots doing the same thing. Maybe I wanted the effort to be important, or at least more important than to just me. In the end, wonder is still a pretty good reason for a big adventure, I think.

Throughout our long days traversing the Sangres, I had the feeling that someone would come along and do a better traverse of the range, ticking all the summits, doing the whole trip faster, or both—if they hadn’t already. When the magazine posted our story online in 2015, one of the social media comments was from a guy who’d done the traverse with three friends back in 1977, finishing on Blanca Peak on Day 21, with four food drops and lots of stops to fish. Which a) proved someone had done it before and b) made me wonder how much fun it would be to take your time and do it over the span of three weeks.

More recent forays across the range included: In 2016, Cam Honan did a traverse of the Sangres, somehow going through Great Sand Dunes National Park before returning to the ridge and finishing on Blanca Peak. In 2018, Cam Cross and Nick Clark established the fastest known time of the traverse, going south to north in just under four and a half days (!), and in 2019, Justin Simoni did it solo in a little over six and a half days, south to north as well. And, in spring 2019, Josh Jespersen, Rick E. Schuler, and Isaiah Branch-Boyle spent 13 days doing the first ski traverse of the range. So it appears to have been done faster, and done with more summits, and even on skis and splitboards. But it still seems only to draw people who are curious enough to put in the effort to find their own way across, which may be the only sort of people who will ever take a whack at it. Seems like everyone hits the same two big sections of deadfall that are just heinous to navigate through, and is less than enthusiastic about those portions of the ridge. The route would be a little more accessible if a team of people armed with saws would go up there and cut a path through those sections, but you know, I think that would be a bit disingenuous. Just because it’s something you wouldn’t recommend to 99 out of 100 people, it doesn’t mean it isn’t a worthwhile adventure.

—Brendan

The post Traversing The Sangre de Cristo Range appeared first on semi-rad.com.

[thejustinmarshall]

Traversing The Sangre de Cristo Range

[NOTE: 2020 is the tenth year of my blog at Semi-Rad.com, and since I started it, I’ve been fortunate to get to do some pretty wonderful adventures. Throughout this year, I’ll be writing about 12 favorite adventures I’ve had since I started writing about the outdoors, one per month. This is the second in the series. The other stories in the series are here.]

[All photos by Jim Harris/PerpetualWeekend.com]

It seems like the most obvious question when you look at Colorado’s Sangre de Cristo Range from the west side: I wonder if anyone’s walked across that from end to end?

I had first seen the mountains from the San Luis Valley in 2006, staring out the passenger-side window of my friend Nick’s pickup as we drove back to Denver from skiing at Wolf Creek. For an hour and fifteen minutes driving on CO-17 from Alamosa to Poncha Springs, you parallel the mountains, looking up at them from the valley floor at about 7600 feet, counting dozens of summits above 12,000 feet, all the way up to 14,345-foot Blanca Peak. And that’s what I thought: I wonder if there’s a way across those mountains?

So I went home to think about it for several years, every once in a while pulling out a map, the National Geographic Trails Illustrated Sangre De Cristo Mountains 1:75,000, running my finger along the spine and not seeing too many topo lines bunched up indicating steep ridges. Seemed like it might go on foot, maybe, without roped climbing. I spent some time poking around on the internet to see if there was any information about it, and couldn’t find anything. Maybe someday I’d give it a shot.

—

When Jim Harris and I walked out of a friend’s driveway in Salida, Colorado, in September 2013 to start trying to find a north-to-south route across the Sangre de Cristos, we had spent about eight hours together, total: One brief chat at a booth at the Outdoor Retailer trade show, two breakfasts at the Park Cafe in Salt Lake City, an hour and a half at a coffee shop near Park City planning this trip, and a couple hours assembling the gear and food the previous day. I didn’t know much about him, but I did know he had survived a 33-day backpacking trip in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, so he would probably not be too worried about a trip along the spine of a mountain range with multiple bailout points on either side to a highway less than 10 miles away.

We figured the trip would take somewhere from eight to 16 days: It looked to be about 100 miles, 50,000 feet of elevation gain (a ballpark guess based on a rough line I’d drawn on an online mapping program). We split the food in half, arranging with one of Jim’s friends to resupply us for our second half at the South Colony Lakes trailhead.

I had pitched the trip to a magazine, thinking it would make a good story, since we were making our own route across the Sangres. I think we could have argued that we were the “first” to do it, but I was pretty sure that somebody out there had to have done it already. I mean, it’s in Colorado, which is home to 5 million people, and the idea seemed so obvious and intriguing, it just had to have been done before. The fact that I’d been unable to find information on the internet was good for the adventure factor of our plan, but wasn’t irrefutable evidence that we were pioneers of any sort.

We hiked up a service road at the north end of the range, to the top of an unnamed 11,695-foot peak with communication towers on top, still below treeline. It was a mellow beginning to the traverse, which we knew from that point onward would be mostly trailless. For a minute, we discussed walking over to the summit of Methodist Mountain, the northernmost summit of the range, and then decided against it, as dark clouds started to build to the west. We headed south along the ridge and soon encountered an enormous maze of deadfall, requiring jungle-gym moves to get under, over, and around, with our packs at their heaviest. I joked, “I really thought it would take longer for this whole thing to feel like a bad idea,” as we crawled through the mess. Finally, the deadfall maze ended and we picked up a faint trail just below the ridge and walked it, stopping at about 6:30 p.m. at the two-inch deep water feature marked on the map as Salamander Lake. The rain picked up and thunder started to rumble.

We ate dinner, settled into our two-person tent, and I fell asleep with that not-quite-complete relief you have when the planning is over and you’ve finally started into the Big Thing, but you’ve only just started and don’t have any idea what the next days will bring, or how many of those days it will take you.

We had packed as light as possible: one sub-4-pound tent, ultralight sleeping pads, only one cell phone between us (to update our girlfriends every once in a while when we had cell service, and to text Max our ETA for the food resupply meet-up), one pair of pants each, bare minimum of everything else.

But for the magazine article, I was supposed to record a GPS track of the entire trip. I didn’t own a GPS, so the magazine sent me one, advising me that at the rate of recording every .01 mile, it would go through two AA batteries per day, so on top of all that ultralight strategy, I had 14 AA batteries in my pack, or about 12 ounces of batteries. Plus a battery pack, which weighed seven ounces, to keep our one cell phone charged but which also also could be recharged using a hand crank on the side of the battery. (Fully charged, it could re-up one iPhone to about 90 percent, and once I realized that five minutes of hand-cranking the battery produced approximately one percent of phone battery charge, I turned the phone off for the entire trip, only turning it on to text once a day on top of a peak where we had a signal.) Jim was carrying a Canon 5d Mark III with a couple lenses, so I didn’t complain.

—

We were up at 5:00 a.m. on the morning of Day 2, scarfing oatmeal and instant coffee by headlamp, and hiking again by 6:30. We tagged the summit of Simmons Peak (12,050 feet), then traced the ridge all day, alternately walking on alpine tundra and picking our way up and down talus, over the summits of an unnamed 12,401-foot peak, Hunts Peak (13,701 feet), and then Red Mountain (12,944 feet). I tried my best to keep up with Jim, who seemed to be neither sweating or out of breath as he chatted away, as if we were sitting across from each other in a coffee shop and not sucking wind at 13,000 feet.

By the time we hit the top of Red Mountain, clouds had been building for a couple hours, and by the time I signed the summit register, rain drops were pelting the page. I slipped into my rain shell, pulled my packback on and aimed toward Jim, who was already a few hundred feet down the east slope of the peak. Jim had a pair of legs built from long days of backcountry skiing, easily chugging up steep slopes and quickly bounding down them from the top. I did not. No matter what, I would be slower than him on whatever terrain we descended, spending a half-second more getting my footing on a piece of talus, a half-second more bending my knee to lunge down to plant my other foot on a different rock. A few dozen of those and Jim would be a hundred yards away and a couple inches tall in my view.

The low grumble of thunder, the first of the day, broke somewhere to the south, where all those clouds had been gathering. I scanned the clouds for a flash, then decided it might be better to use the precious seconds to drop down in elevation. It was 1,300 vertical feet down to West Creek Lake below. Jim would make his way down the steep slope in 15 minutes, and it took me at least 20.

Fifteen seconds after we had the tent set up, the rain got more ambitious and started to downpour, the kind of big drops that, even in the dry air of the Rocky Mountains, actually gets you wet and keeps you wet. We hustled to pop the rain fly on before the floor got soaked. We chucked packs inside and dove into the single door. I lay on the bare nylon floor with tundra underneath, content to be out of the rain and finally done moving after a seven-mile, 3,800-foot day. I devoured a Snickers bar at cartoon-character speed and listened as the rain got louder and louder, then turned to hail, piling up two inches deep on the only ground I could see just outside the tent fly.

Every day, we bit off a new chunk of terrain in the same routine: Wake up to watch alarm beeping at 5 a.m., find watch, turn off alarm. Unzip sleeping bag, pull puffy jacket from beneath head, put it on, deflate sleeping pad, become tiny bit sad at hiss of air signaling end of comfort, stuff sleeping bag in stuff sack. Slide feet into shoes, open tent door, light stove. Oatmeal. Coffee. Pack backpack. Repeat bad joke about going for a walk up on the ridge again today, heave backpack onto shoulders, start walking in the dark. Sunrise, tundra, talus, summit, talus, tundra, talus, summit, snacks. Look south, start to think about how far we’d get today. I look at the next peak thinking that would be a nice goal, say nothing, Jim looks two or three peaks beyond that, suggests we try to get there today. We do. Find an alpine lake on the map, navigate down to it, set up tent, eat dinner, sleep until 5 a.m., repeat.

It was monotonous, it was beautiful, it was one of the hardest things I’d ever done, and the simplicity of it was right in front of us every time we popped back onto the ridge: A mountain range, straight ahead, valleys on either side, just find a way across it and keep going.

Theoretically, the idea for a magazine feature was to find a cool, new thing to do and collect enough information to enable readers to do it themselves, if they wanted to. Quite early on, I wasn’t sure I’d recommend it to many people, unless they had a similar obsession with the range, always wondering what it’d be like to walk across it—and also had two weeks of vacation to find out, and also were masochists.

—

We agreed, at some point in our daily conversations, to make the goal a sort of “Haute Route,” or high route through the Sangres. Tagging every summit would be a great goal, but we’d skipped the very first peak on the ridge, Methodist Mountain, on the first day, and had skipped a couple other unnamed mountains before we started talking about it. We had to descend off the ridge every evening to a lake or creek to get water, and the idea of retracing our steps to get back on the ridge at the exact same point we’d left seemed contrived—the goal wasn’t to do a walking survey of the entire ridge, after all.

We got rained on every day but one, and could almost set our watches by the afternoon thunderstorms rolling in. We found faint trails sometimes, but mostly chose our own route across the tundra and talus. We made the occasional questionable decision to head up a gully full of sliding scree instead of a ridge that looked fifth-class from a half-mile away, or to bushwhack up a mountainside of neck-high willows because it looked shorter. We had glorious sunsets, wonderful and unexpected scrambles up peaks we might never have thought to climb if they weren’t in our way on this traverse, and had literally every campsite to ourselves, every single evening. Bighorn sheep sauntered through our campsite, rain hammered our tent, and we slowly built one of those friendships that survives for years after it’s been tested by being next to each other for 24 hours a day for a dozen straight days.

Several nights, I woke up from dreams and pre-sleep hypnic jerks from a lucid scene playing in my head: my foot, stepping on a two-foot-wide boulder, the boulder sliding away, and my leg flying out from underneath me. I’d jump out of my sleep, waking up from the fall, and realize I was still safe in my smelly sleeping bag.

On Day 8, we left the South Colony Lakes trailhead campground, having met Max for our resupply the previous afternoon and gratefully sent him down with some of our trash, spent batteries, and dirty socks. We climbed up talus on the north face of an unnamed 13,161-foot peak, then walked its east ridge to 13,266-foot Marble Mountain, and looked down Marble’s southeast ridge in the sunshine toward Music Pass—a bank of clouds had crept up the left-hand side of the ridge, obliterating the view of anything below the ridge proper. The clouds would morph throughout the day, rolling in and out of our path, finally closing in on us on our final summit of the day. We didn’t know it yet but we’d seen the sun for the last time for the rest of the trip.

The rain began that afternoon and would continue on and off every day for the rest of the traverse, as we walked through clouds that shrank our universe to a bubble, sometimes a quarter-mile, sometimes less than 100 feet ahead. About 150 miles north of us, torrential rain was flooding Boulder, Lyons, parts of Rocky Mountain National Park, and other areas. We slogged on through the rain, and on Day 9, as we navigated by GPS through visibility as low as 50 feet and mazes of deadfall in the lowest-altitude section of the ridge, it felt like our picturesque, ridgetop, views-in-every-direction, walking-across-the-skyline party had been dropped into a dark hole. Or at least a swamp.

On Day 10, we spent the entire day in undulating rain, buffeted from the east by a cold wind. We hiked up two unnamed 13ers, then to the summit of California Peak, 13,894 feet. The actual terminus of the Sangre de Cristo Range is Little Bear Peak, about 3.25 miles south as the crow flies, or arguably Hamilton Peak, a little south of that, and Jim and I had talked about where to properly end the trip. But after two and a half straight days of rain, and fourth-class and fifth-class terrain between us and Little Bear, we called it a day on California Peak, looking into a cloud, water squishing out of the toes of my trail running shoes.

We sent a text to arrange a rendezvous with Hilary, who would pick us up the next day after 10½ days of hiking, and bailed down wet scree into the drainage above North Zapata Creek. We set up our tent in one of the worst campsites of the trip, at 10,600 feet, hoping for a sunny morning the next day and a chance to possibly salvage a summit 14,042-foot Ellingwood Point and 14,345-foot Blanca Peak. But we awoke to a third straight day of steady rain and said fuck it, walking to the trailhead, where Zapata Creek was so swollen with rain we could hear boulders rolling underneath the water.

Our shoes, brand new at the start of the trip, were destroyed after 105 miles and 43,000 feet of elevation gain. We’d crossed 63 summits, and traversed 91 miles above 10,000 feet.

Some not-small part of me, I think, wanted at the beginning to map a route that other people might follow in the future. But at the end, I was sure we hadn’t done that. So I had to settle for what we had done, which was put to bed a years-long curiosity. Seeing that thing, wondering what was up there, and wandering around like a couple of idiots, in a long tradition of other idiots doing the same thing. Maybe I wanted the effort to be important, or at least more important than to just me. In the end, wonder is still a pretty good reason for a big adventure, I think.

Throughout our long days traversing the Sangres, I had the feeling that someone would come along and do a better traverse of the range, ticking all the summits, doing the whole trip faster, or both—if they hadn’t already. When the magazine posted our story online in 2015, one of the social media comments was from a guy who’d done the traverse with three friends back in 1977, finishing on Blanca Peak on Day 21, with four food drops and lots of stops to fish. Which a) proved someone had done it before and b) made me wonder how much fun it would be to take your time and do it over the span of three weeks.

More recent forays across the range included: In 2016, Cam Honan did a traverse of the Sangres, somehow going through Great Sand Dunes National Park before returning to the ridge and finishing on Blanca Peak. In 2018, Cam Cross and Nick Clark established the fastest known time of the traverse, going south to north in just under four and a half days (!), and in 2019, Justin Simoni did it solo in a little over six and a half days, south to north as well. And, in spring 2019, Josh Jespersen, Rick E. Schuler, and Isaiah Branch-Boyle spent 13 days doing the first ski traverse of the range. So it appears to have been done faster, and done with more summits, and even on skis and splitboards. But it still seems only to draw people who are curious enough to put in the effort to find their own way across, which may be the only sort of people who will ever take a whack at it. Seems like everyone hits the same two big sections of deadfall that are just heinous to navigate through, and is less than enthusiastic about those portions of the ridge. The route would be a little more accessible if a team of people armed with saws would go up there and cut a path through those sections, but you know, I think that would be a bit disingenuous. Just because it’s something you wouldn’t recommend to 99 out of 100 people, it doesn’t mean it isn’t a worthwhile adventure.

—Brendan

The post Traversing The Sangre de Cristo Range appeared first on semi-rad.com.

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