#xiaoli is definitely my favourite oc at the moment

[mercuriiarts]

Waking Nightmare

i really like doing these “screencaps” from moments in Killing Alice, and honestly this is one of my fave moments in the first act because it’s when you realise things are a lot more fucked up than they seem in Wunderland.

So yeah, this is when Xiaoli realises that his personal demon is far more than just a dream :) After waking up from a nightmare he goes to wash his face and stares into the face of death. literally.

Grim is my amalgamation of different myths around the embodiment of the cycle of death. They are a forgotten entity, a legendary dead king from the earliest days of the Fae Realm, soon replaced by the Holly and Oak kings, then the Red and White queens. In looks they take on the appearance of the Grim, a black dog that heralds impending doom, and the Grim reaper as a fleshless skeleton with a singular eye (boy who does that sound like?) Both of these have roots in the original meaning of Grim - the saxon god Grimr, also known later as Woden or Odin as the cultures merged due to their similar properties. Grimr is somewhat overshadowed by his later depictions and we don’t actually know how old Grimr is in terms of his religion, but he was a hunter and a king, wearing an iron battle mask (also known as a grimr, to mean fierce warrior, later understood as savage/sullen today) and he dictated the cycle of life into death. Not a god to be feared as it was seen as a necessary part of life, and a consequence of war, which he also stood for (or more specifically, leading the fallen into the next life). the sad thing is that we know very little about these old Briton mythologies due to the repeated colonisation in the early histories (saxons, angles, romans, vikings, normans, etc) so it’s interesting to find the old truths in what rewrites we have left.

hope you enjoyed my little lore dump ;)

we stan a polite death deity that addresses you correctly when threatening you <3