#violet

[sonokido]

💜✨

[ahedderick]

Foraging

Monday I picked dandelions and violets to experiment with flower-flavored syrups. It was time-consuming, but I just felt like trying something new. I have done violet jelly before, although the results were mediocre.

The first step after separating the petals from the greens was to pour boiling water over each kind and let them sit for a day. The violets had a greenish-blue extract by evening, and by morning it had settled into a deep blue. I tried adding a couple of drops of lemon juice, which shifted it to blue-purple. Violets have the same pigment, anthocyanin, as red cabbage, and it is pH sensitive. I am curious why my tap water (from a well) would have a pH of 9(ish), but I'll go ahead and blame limestone.

I cooked the dandelion first, adding sugar equal to the amount of liquid (1.25 cups). I cooked it for a while and then bottled it when it seemed like it had thickened up (the bubbles start to PLOP instead of 'pop', if that makes sense).

Here it is, compared with honey. The color is virtually the same!

Then I started with the violet. As I heated it, the color shifted BACK to greenish-blue. I added a little more lemon juice, and it ended up weirdly purple from some angles and blue from others, depending on how the light hit it. It's also DARK, too dark for me to photograph and show you much color. When it cooled down it a) turned a steely blue-grey and b) crystalized.

That. that is NOT what I was going for. It also doesn't really taste like anything. Just 'sweet'. Drat.

[lullabyes22-blog]

Snippet - The Void - Forward but Never Forget/XOXO

Jinx, what did you do now?

Forward but Never Forget/XOXO

tw: jumpscares, horror

Snippet:

"Faster," Silco says to Sevika

His profile is turned to the window. In the green-tinged reflection, his skin holds a jaundiced pallor. The bruises are blooming full-flower across his cheekbone. The cut, on his temple, is the exact color and shape of a rusted fishhook. The blood has clotted into a dark smear, same as the mess gluing Vi's hair to her brow.

Same as Vi, he’d refused Sevika's offer to tend to the injuries.

"We're going top speed, sir," Sevika says evenly. "Unless you want us to tip the whole thing on its side."

"Do what you must. Just get us there."

"Yes, sir."

The crawler slaloms a corner. The interior sways on its axles. But whatever else, Sevika is an efficient driver.  She takes the next bend like a knife slicing through butter. Zaun's tunnels, an intricate network of intersections, branch-offs, and switchbacks, seem as straightforward to her as a flat plain.

As the crawler speeds toward Entresol, the cityscape unrolls: the craggy outcroppings of cliffs and a ramshackle gridwork of industrial complexes.  There are narrow swathes of Zaun still luminous with neon. Others show dark patches, where the power has fritzed out. Smoke rises in a dozen spots, curling like ghost-fingers toward the sky. 

A diffuse blue haze floats like a halo above the rooftops. Here and there, Vi sees what Sevika was referring to: clusters of translucent blue specks dappling the gloom. Some as tiny as bubbles in a champagne glass, others the size of balloons. They float in midair, bobbing on an invisible current. Their edges shimmer like the afterglow of a flame.

Ghosts, Vi thinks again.

A childish terror squeezes the ventricles of her heart. Her eyes cannot peel away. They follow them, those little blue shapes, as they pirouette and pinwheel. She has the strangest sense that they can feel her scrutiny. That they are... teasing her.

Daring her to unroll the window, and reach out for them.

As she watches, a small clutch of them shape themselves into a playful O, rolling side to side like a pair of eyes. Then, in a flurry of winking sparks, they coalesce into two straight rows at intersecting angles: X marks the spot. The shapes become a disorienting repetition—XOXOXO—until Vi's head churns with vertigo.

She's seen that symbol before.

Scribbled in the margins of Jinx's journal. Notched on the maps scattered around the Aerie. Embroidered at the edges of Silco's handkerchief.

Slitting her eyes, Vi catches a sense of silhouettes at the granular margins of the light-show. The faintest impression of human dimensions: familiar, and yet alien, like a memory that isn't her own. Old friends from lives unlived. Lovers she's never met. Strangers whose faces are her own.

Vander.

Stunned, Vi blinks.

He is a hulking shape in the middle of the road, his outline diffused by the glow of headlamps. It is a Vander whom Vi has never known: brown as a bear from a lifetime of sun and soil, and broad as a mountain slope from decades of farm-fed decadence. His hair, the same dark mane, is clustered light-over-dark into the signature wolf-cut. Dressed in well-patched brown trousers and a threadbare cotton tunic, heavy-soled boots shod at his feet, he could be a farmer fresh off the Ionian wheat-fields.

But his face, the warm complexity of lines etched into a grin, is the same from Vi's memory.

The twin circles of the crawler's headlamps coalesce into a spotlight. Vander moves forward. There is no mistaking his gait. The same purposeful stride, shoulders rolling and fists cocked. The same head-tilted swagger of a man accustomed to toeing the scratch, and owning what's on either side. Vi sees his lips stir: words of welcome spoken like an incantation.

Violet.

Blut.

I’m here where you are.

Vi reaches, in a blind fugue, for the door handle.

In the rearview mirror, Silco's eyes snap to hers.

"Don't," he orders.

Vi freezes.

The phantom of Vander is suddenly eclipsed by the glare of the headlamps. His delineations flicker and fade, and in their place is a swirling angry blue, so bright it burns everything it touches: skin, eyes, teeth. Reflexively, Vi throws up an arm, the brightness solidifying into a pair of fists whooshing toward her at phenomenal speed—

Nothing.

The infernal phosphorescence is gone.

Only the crawler. The headlamps. The bare stretch of the empty street.

A hot wetness films Vi's eyes.

"Fuck," she breathes.

Sevika glances sidelong, from Vi to Silco. Twin coals of confusion—and low-key concern—are burning in her dark eyes.

"What?" she asks. "'Don't', what? What'd she do?"

 Vi drags in a spooked breath. "Didn't—didn't you see him?"

"See who?"

"Vander." She makes a frantic stab toward the windshield. "He was right there. He was standing there, just a second ago!"

Sevika's eyes flick back to the road, then reorient on Vi.

"I didn't see jack shit," she says flatly.

"Neither did I," the guard on Vi's left says.

"Me neither," grunts the one on her right.

Quietly, Silco says, "There's nothing to see."

Vi whirls on him. "Bullshit! You saw it, too! He was—"

"He wasn't." Silco half-turns to face her. His good eye is a chip of frozen sea-glass. "It's only a figment. An echo."

"An echo of what?"

"The Void."

The single word sucks the oxygen from the crawler: a deep peristaltic flex, like the darkness itself has gulped.

[allura-raine]

[uxbridge]

Spring wildflowers

[olath124]

Yeah, it wasn't only an image! I'm checking on them every ten years (and more often in the future when things get unpredictable).

Vio here's got her hair short and has her signature turquoise color. Long hair isn't the best thing if you want to pass unnoticed, in her opinion (Because turquoise is, isn't it?).

She just ran away from Vista del Rey to Heywood, and she's about to meet Jakie (who will gift her her first gun!).

Here's the signature song for her in this period: Little Bastards - Palaye Royale

In the meantime, the dude is climbing the military ladder XD

And here's his song: One More Flag in the Ground - Kamelot

As usual, the ink with my delirious comments...

[mysticdragon3md3]

Ngl i prefer the 2016 version purple on the right.

[grapeperfume]

[merukins]

[zegalba]

Hideaki Kawashima: 'Violet' (2008)

[annaxmalina]

{2023} untitled (prominences) lumen & chemigram

[theroadtofairyland]

Random Acts Of Violets

Watercolor On Black Cotton Paper

2023, 22"x 30"

Viola odorata, Sweet Violets

Private Collection

[nemirutami]

pon

[k-eke]

This

[color-palettes]

Freezing Ferocity - Submitted by fastman27

#4B2034 #5B3956 #528EBB #7CB7DE #ACCFEC #CFE3ED