#xiaohu

[pin-yao]

[thanidiel]

Invisible

Recommended: 27- Benthos | 19 - Turn a Blind Eye

After all these turns, all these volatile to-and-fro’s that may only ever be credited to me, and the lapping currents in which, thankfully, madness lays dormant, there is one marid in the room still. It’s a true one; a real one. Not a shoddily applied half-metaphor. And I won’t speak so foolishly and redundantly at this point - dear mind of mine, you’ve been the abject audience to so many of my stories regarding why I don’t speak to her as she wishes with all the what’s, where’s, and how’s. At this point, I would spare us both of the impotent ravings of my rationalizations. I know I brought my marids into this marriage too, we all know it. I have a flock of them, even, flapping their pink floppy ears up and down around us both while we pretended, for a very long time, that they were more nuisances than anything else. 

I’m well-fucking-aware. I know she feels like sometimes she must be living with an utter stranger, and I know, I know, I know, I know‒ I know everything about the questions she holds back. And, fuck, by the very fucking blood of my Father and Mother which made me, I’m so fucking ashamed of myself some suns that I’ve created my own haunts in her mind; where she wanders the same chewing hallways I once walked with a babe’s eye, this incomprehensible horror that always ends in a confused focus of where is she? and what happened to her? I know I did that to her.

I know, I know, I know.

I know.

And that makes it all the more frustrating to me that I’ve never managed to find a way for her to ever just speak to me. And that‒ however hypocritical it may be ‒pains me, though I’ve never once told her. I’ve always been a good lover in that regard. I don’t ask questions, I never press, I never say my love, what the fuck is up with you? I don’t.

So she just never tells me.

I’m the bad person here, so I play my role accordingly. I take the heat for being so close-mouthed, even though I have told, and told, and told her so many things, so many feelings, from the very start. I accept that script, and I embrace that spotlight.

I let her bow out, every time. 

Because I know I wear it better.

But you know what? She isn’t here right now.

So I’m going to say it.

I feel like I know my fucking wife less than my wife thinks she does me. And believe me, I tried the same thing she did. I tried the kindness, the welcomeness, the looks and the gentle affections, I even did the good ol’ you can always share anything with me lines of bullshit conversation.

It didn’t work, so I fucking stopped. I thought she just needed time. But here we are, and I haven’t told her this either, and on the inside I am so fucking sick of the way my stomach twists every time she reminds me that I don’t know anything about her, after all.

It’s even worse in this last turn. Because now we’ve reached this point that we’ve grown older, and sometimes I feel like she earnestly grew up without me all this time. I make assumptions now of things shared between us before and she corrects me on how so much differently she feels, like the last time those ideas were even hinted to me were like some delusional mirage of our togetherness. How is that creeping up on me? I dine with her, I live with her, I sleep with her. I suppose I can’t honestly say we’ve made love all that much (though we have in this past moon, happily?), but I fuck her too.

And she just won’t tell me anything.

But she wonders why I’m not just content with what we have? Her fucking father died within a sennight of her meeting me, and in those three turns I’ve heard her talk a little about how complex it was for her, two turns ago. Maybe some moons sprinkled atop of that. Her mother? Her mother is in everything there is about Evilie, she misses her so much (or who knows how fucking wrong I am about that, too?). But I’ve spoken more of my Parents and how their respective absences affected my life than Evilie has her’s‒ and I was allocated a fraction of the exposure that my wife received in her own life. Let’s not (I say, rhetorically, as I absolutely want to fucking get into it for fucking once) even get into her sister. I’m the one that woke Evilie the fuck up in the first place. But I hear more from Abrielle, honestly, and we haven’t been able to sit down for those make-up talks before a night out since she moved out. I hear about how Abrielle feels about them, I hear what Abrielle regrets about them, I hear where it’s healing-but-complicated-or-maybe-weird from Abrielle.

What the fuck has my own gods-be-damned wife told me about any of this? Why won’t she? Why is it that I’ve had to stand so stagnantly, so still, in all my unknown, as I watch her just keep fucking going ahead of me? I can’t even give myself the luxury of saying that she’s just balling it all in. Because I’ve watched her mind change, palpably, on all of those. Because I act like I’m busy and go straight to the armory or our bedchambers when I see there’s candles lit in the kitchen. Because I see when that bit of hair near her ear looks a little stiff from the crying that happened earlier when she was alone.

It’s not as though I want my lover to be sad, and be comforted by me alone in that sadness. Rather, I want it to be understood right now that while I have lived such an odd and shoddy life, I at least know it’s not fucking normal that, since we’ve been together anyway, that I’ve never seen Evilie cry unless I’m sad or nearly killed myself. 

Over the turns, I’ve told myself that she’ll reach out. I even made myself pretty optimistic for a while there, that maybe I could be there for her, and with her, if I just shook myself. If I got myself back into line with the sweet words, and sweet looks, and the conversations, and lovemaking, and that romance we knew we could feel, and started trying to show her that I’m not fucking sad about ‘us’, I’m fucking sad about how it’s all gotten to this point. I’m fucking sad enough to clamp my mouth closed and shut my eyes and just scream about how there was a place for me, and then suddenly I now find myself cold, in this awkward niche that isn’t as carved out as we imagined it to be; suddenly I now watch her at home in all of these spaces that either aren’t made for me, or apparently aren’t somewhere she wants me to be.

If that wasn’t the case, then why doesn’t she just talk to me?

Sometimes I feel like she’s made me into this hysterical thing, though I know well I would find a thousand other ways to serve out my usual regardless of where I am and who I walk with. Sometimes I feel like she’s written herself out of this relationship and there’s only ever me and how fucked up I am, and I’m trying to be relieved that I see her wanting to take up space now but that’s hard too. Sometimes I wonder why the fuck she keeps me around anyway, but there’s not really a nice counterpoint for that as I’ve done nothing someone else couldn’t do after I passed the reins off to Elise on the levies.

Sometimes, I feel like I’m so foolish that I wish someone with more wisdom than me‒ Severine, or Esen, or Kowa, or even fucking Elia‒ would just dress me down already for how stupid I look; vacillating, and vacillating, and vacillating, between ‘I’m fucking fed up and losing my mind!’ and ‘But actually I love her and I just need to keep trying’ with sometimes a splash of ‘look at how hard I’m trying with this metaphor that would make her scream’. Because I do look stupid. It even makes me look more fucking stupid than my other usual routine of trying to tell myself or other people, depending, that I’m actually not into Vander anymore every other moon.

It’s the two times in my fucking life that I wish I’d just stop talking with so much confidence.

Spirits, I can’t even tell you (as oxymoronic as that is to say to my autoaudientia), mind of mine, how easy it felt to love her this past sennight. It came so easily. I felt so enraptured with her, that awed interest on her face like she were enchanted by me, by us, all over again. And only because she was witnessing me love her purely, without anything else at all upon my mind - she was moved by that. It felt sweet, it felt like everything changed. And maybe some things changed, maybe I needed to be able to have enough space in my mind to just remember, genuinely, how much I love her in the grand scheme of the cosmos (versus the vaguely conformist pressure of maintaining the narrative of great love). Maybe it will be making things better for us now that we have (How I would suffer all I did twice over to just have this guarantee) stronger ground than we did before.

I pray for that; perhaps that will be the first thing I pray on when we’ve arranged where the shrine should go. I really do. I really do want to keep loving her, and I really do want it to all just be hot air and bullshit in the end on all of the meanness that wants to pass through my mind and into my feet, and I really do want to just be able to be content with where I am, and where we are.

And now‒

Now the marid’s back in the room.

And you don’t talk about the marid.

I try not to break the rule here, but I’m making myself nervous. I hate to even use the word, which makes the feeling worse, but I can feel this dread building up between my lungs because we’re back home and I swear to the fucking Fury I’ll kill myself if we just go back to how it was before our trip.

She’s taking off her gloves, and calling my name.

So I breathe in, and I look.

And the words fail me on how alive that smile looks on her face.

So I breathe out, and I smile back.

We don’t talk about Evilie.

[jackeylover]

✫ WEIBO GAMING ✫

SEMIFINALISTS WORLDS 2023

WeiWei - TheShy - Crisp - Light - XIaohu

bonus TheShy:

[jennylosesthejiggle]

I’m sorry tumblrverse for abandoning you for so long. But look what I made (granted he’s almost 5 months old now)

[alexmey-does-an-arts]

more of these guys (english translation under cut)

[shysheeperz]

[throughthemanorwindow]

19.

Prompt #19: Turn a Blind Eye OC: Evilie Voutellievre

I wake from a nightmare of crimson rivulets staining porcelain, a scalpel, a face suspended in the dark that remains silent no matter how much I plead and beg for it to answer me. I have many questions, some spoken, others that have never left my tongue and may never be heard. The waking world is far from a nightmare, but the lingering haunt clings to my mind. She is gone when my eyes open, the disarray of her pillow the only trace of her presence when I had drifted into sleep the night before. 

Morning light suits the manor. Its dourness is gone, replaced with the soft inhale, exhale of life that rouses weary bones. I too am changed, remodeled and remade in a different image than before. Like the manor itself more light filters through the windows of my soul, darkened recesses scattered. It is what I wanted all along, is it not, to live a life of my choosing? And I chose her. 

I chose her, and so too do I choose to ignore the obvious. My questions go unasked more often than not. It’s a morbid curiosity, I think, within me, this desire to both know and yet fear the answer. Where have you been? What have you been doing? You can tell me. If an answer was ever truly given I may not know what to do with it, and yet I still desire to know. Would it be so terrible as to shatter the world we’ve made? Reduce the manor we reside in to rubble, like fragile glass we had erected? I think not. Nothing, save something truly terrible, will make me desire the emptiness of not having her at my side. 

But there are times I want to ask more, to dig and uncover whatever truth lies hidden; a maid that was offered work at the manor. A night in Ul’dah that births nightmares when I allow myself to dwell on its terrors. A mention of things not going to plan, things that needed fixing and yet without detail. And so many others. I wonder if a day will come when I no longer worry over these things, either resigned to their presence or perhaps better yet, they no longer occur.

In a way I’m well suited to this life with her, my wife. It was never my place to ask too many questions. I was made to acquiesce in my youth, and now I live no differently even if circumstance dictates a better outcome for me. I avert my eyes, I pretend everything is well, and perhaps that is for the best. 

But I am a curious woman.

A sort of shared prompt with @thanidiel (at least we wrote them next to each other).

[kawaiistarfishbeliever]

[luckynightkryptonite]

[theacstories]

Chapter 26 of Jiangshi X by Norihiko Kurazono is just a flashback chapter. I talk about it out of obligation, but I really hoped it would not happen like this.

[pin-yao]

[thanidiel]

Containment

It never could have been peaceful. 

She could lie to herself, to Evilie, all she fucking wanted - but peace has never had a proper trajectory in her. If, for her lover, peace was like an arrow in which all she had to do was imagine where it would go, and it would simply go, clean and deliberate in its area of impact… then, for Xiaohu, peace was like a comet. It blared through the cosmos, violently. It sparked, blindingly, like a meteor hammer crushing metal and blood vessels. And it roared like the scrape of artillery’s monstrous joints as onagers fire. 

In other words; it was observably finite.

An arrow does its job, and it stays there until someone sees fit to cut it free. It’s a frank object that conveys everything about who loosed it.

But starlight burns, and it goes away. A con-artist that uses this singular moment of grandeur, of excellence, of good behavior, and stretches it out as this story of infinity. And every time you hit something hard (bone, metal, aether) with the same weapon - you are casting a spell that makes it fade away. Microshavings dispersed by the blow, wearing it down for brittleness’s eventual characterization; the snap at the moment you needed it to stay whole.

How much ash is in the wind you breath after flame and stone meld into one self-destructive bomb?

How sticky is it in her spouse’s lungs, this piecemeal and crumbling offering?

She’s tried to smile. She tried to smile across years (it’s been years now?).

It was new, she had to get used to it.

It was uncomfortable, but she liked it ultimately.

It was her responsibility to change her very nature yet again, for this.

It was a long road she had to walk, but you all would walk with it her, wouldn’t you?

Did anyone believe her in all of her half-negative, half-positive, confessions, her soft assurances, or did they all just learn from the very best on how to convince even yourself on how genuine that smile is?

When did she become so foolish again, so as to successfully brainwash herself until the fractures finally made her buckle?

She thought she would have known better by now on how to direct a life. Shouldn’t she know better than anyone, at that? On how to mould to the circumstance? To force oneself to bend and flex into the adequate vessel for the occasion? 

Why is it so hard? Why is it always so hard? 

Nothing should be hard for her, especially not of her vast mind.

But this is hard. 

This dormancy is hard.

And now what has been the occasional tremor, that hungry rumble, across the last moons makes her shake. It makes her restless. It is the constant rhythm of keratin clicking and sheathing, her tendons tight with urge. 

Sometimes, when Evilie isn’t looking, when she rests with the illusion of peace’s feather quivering just inches above her skin— Xiaohu is pacing back and forth in the study, her palms squeezing her temples like the action could pop the celestialness planted in her skull like the madness-rich tick that it was.

From discontent waxing, to explosions that rapped at her mind near-constantly and pressed upon what was hidden behind her outward delicacy. Her breathing burned with every ash-flecked swish of air, she could gag upon the fumes shed from this feeble attempt. She has gagged. She is gagging.

There, the smoke.

There, the bile.

There, the lunacy.

There, the infiniteness, the perplexity of her, that refuses to be contained by finite matter.

Crawling out, expansive like the cold emptiness of the forever room.

Lonely and dizzy; metamorphosis and menorrhoea—

“I’ll do it.”

[jamin-turganbaev]

League of Legends, Worlds 2023, squads

Weibo Gaming China #4

[therealsoulking]

Jiangshi X Chapter 11

Welp, there’s no coming home from this one...

Our villains have wiped out Xiaohu’s village, just leaving him and his partners alive. What, you didn’t think the protagonist’s dad with awesome, top-tier strength would survive, did you?

Of course not.

Anyways, no rest for the righteous, our young daoshi have a guest in tow, and hopefully lady Jiutan will stay relevant. We also got something that definitely won’t be useful later.

Xiaohu’s got a father to avenge and evil machinations to thwart, as well as a wise master to train under, so this series will keep moving forward.

[rongzhi]

Fully "I'm not trapped in here with you, you're trapped in here with ME"

[shysheeperz]