#you are not immune to WHALE.

[catilinas]

this double exposure is pretty cool also

[blood-orange-juice]

In all seriousness, while I'm fine with *joking* about Christian themes in Genshin (there are a lot of tongue-in-cheek references indeed, especially since we are now in the equivalent of France), seeing them presented as the main inspiration feels deeply uncomfortable. It takes the flavour out of the story and I don't even think it's correct.

@liminalpsych-in-teyvat summarised it beautifully:

Genshin is a beautiful mix of traditions blended into something unique and I prefer it that way.

I hope the story takes an unexpected turn and puts and end to these theories. If Hoyo are indeed working more with themes of illusions, ignorance and enlightenment rather than sin and redemption/retribution (in line with the Gnostic concepts of the world) this will happen eventually.

[pigeonpeach]

Traveler is a fucking coward! I would listen to cloud retainer for hours! Idc what she talks about i LOVE LISTENING! SHUT UP AND LET MOTHER speak!

[mrgladstonegander]

reading moby dick while having ducktales brainrot is fun because what is there saying scrooge didn't go on a three-year voyage with some crazy captain when he was just starting out

[bevebevo]

got everything here backed up a couple weeks ago so i should be good to post art again

[tripleinkstrke]

New Muse Incoming!

ORCA has remained largely the same over these 12000 years, sense of deadpan humor aside...

[cryptotheism]

A Review of The Way Of The Shadow Wolves: The Deep State And The Hijacking Of America by Steven Segal

Alleged rapist and human trafficker, cop groupie, washed-up action movie star, and personal friend to Vladimir Putin, the paradox of Steven Segal is how he manages to stick around despite being –by damn near every account– a universally unpleasant vacuum of charisma. I could go on, but I feel that no introduction of Steven would be complete without the tale of the headlock. Legends tell of Steven’s conflict with legendary martial artist and hollywood stunt coordinator “Judo” Gene Lebell. Allegedly, the two fell into an argument on the set of the film Out For Justice. The crux being Steven’s claim that he was “immune” to being choked unconscious. Allegedly, LeBell called his bluff, and put the actor in a headlock. A headlock that resulted in Steven losing consciousness, and control of his bowels. Steven denies the story. He also wrote a book.

The book is garbage, but garbage in a way that can be easily overstated. I wanted to take a page from other reviewers of this book, and call the text what it is; a fever dream of exhausting mediocrity, swaddled in delusions of grandeur. I wanted to whale on it. I wanted to denounce it like some ridiculous fire-and-brimstone preacher of internet literary criticism. But this does not capture the core, the essence of Way of the Shadow Wolves. There is a paradox at the heart of this text, a contradiction that even now I struggle to describe. Because despite everything, despite the balls-to-the-walls premise, the disastrous prose, and the buckwild plot, this book is deeply and powerfully boring. To call it a fever dream is to imply that it might be exciting. 

Some books are bad in a way that must be experienced firsthand. This is not one of those books. In a way, I feel that you’ve already read this book. You know Steven Segal. You met him in elementary school, when he told you he has “every black belt.” You met him in college when you tricked him into smoking a bag of oregano. You met him at your most recent family gathering, where you were trapped in an awkward one-sided conversation about “those people.” The bad-ness of Steven’s work is deeply familiar. 

We have our boots. We have our waders. We have our shovels. But, before we wade into the shit, there is one more thing we need to get out of the way: The Shadow Wolves are real. In 1972 the United States government agreed to the Tohono O'odham Nation’s demand that border enforcement agents patrolling their land have at least one quarter native ancestry. The result being the specialized unit of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers known as The Shadow Wolves. In the 2020 Sonic the Hedgehog film, Dr. Eggman states that they are who trained him in the art of tracking. 

WAY OF THE SHADOW WOLVES

Let us cook Way of the Shadow Wolves from scratch. Think of every dogshit C-list action movie you’ve ever seen. Ideally, you want the trash cuts of post-9/11 hysteria marbled with ex-cia heroes and vaguely arab villains. Drop it all into a stockpot. Next, roughly dice some comic books and kung-fu movies, the more racist the better. Now add some datura, it doesn't matter if it's edible or not, because you saw a native American in a movie make something like that once and you’re totally 1/64th Cherokee. Add a whole can of Qanon and a whole can of racism. Boil until you have pacing thicker than mud. 

Way of the Shadow Wolves is a police procedural meets a spy thriller, a fast-paced action drama about elite agents on the fringes of the law who have the huge sweaty meaty balls to do what needs to be done for our country. It is Steven's attempt at the action schlock he embodies as an actor. Our hero is John Gode: Shadow Wolf. Reservation-born native American tracker, ICE agent, and Kung-Fu master. I believe he might have been described at one point. If he was, I do not care. Steven does not care. It does not matter. John Gode is Steven, and he’s the most badass dude to ever not be gay. He is: Special Agent Shaman Cop. He’s gonna beat up the deep state. That’s all you need to really need to know. In fact, it is shocking just how little you need to know about this book. 

We begin in a movie theater, where our protagonist is alone, watching the end credits of a movie about the atrocious treatment of native Americans on behalf of the united states government. When the film finally ends, John says to himself “It’s about time.” He gets up to leave. The chapter immediately ends. My compliments to the chef. A delightfully bland apéritif of a character introduction. Steven uses the essential point of first contact with our protagonist to tell us vital information like “He doesn’t like it when movies are long.” or maybe “He didn’t like this movie about the trail of tears.” It is unclear. To quote English-Albanian philosopher Dua Lipa, “Go girl, give us nothing.”

I have been dancing around the quality of the writing. It seems impossible to approach without the footing of a new paragraph, an opponent that requires full-focus, an all-out assault. It is nigh-incomprehensible. I hate comparing bad writing to drugs. It feels too easy. But there is a specific air to Way of the Shadow Wolves. There is a distinct cadence, simultaneously manic and lethargic, that comes from attempting to write while day drunk on over-prescribed amphetamines. And make no mistake, if Steven was not entranced by the muse of Too Many Uppers And Downers At The Same Time, if he wrote this thing stone sober, that is worse. Small quotes will not do the writing style justice, you must see for yourself how sentences flow into each other:

“The desperado’s mind went back in time to a small town in Mexico twelve years before, where he first met his two cohorts when they were thrown together by a tragic set of circumstances. Their parents had been gunned down by a cartel who was at war with a competing cartel for control of the area, which was a pathway to the American border near Nogales, Arizona. All three had been shepherded to a local mission where they were being cared for by the Franciscans, who were becoming overwhelmed by the growing number of children left homeless due to the rampant killings by the warring cartels . . .”

Labyrinthine. A paragraph structure that would feel more at home with Calvino, or Garcia Marquez at his most experimental, though stripped of its deft control and musicality. Segal will regularly change temporal perspective in the middle of sentences. A single run-on sentence will begin in the past, have a middle clause in the present, and then return to the past by the end. There is a downright massive cast of characters for a 200 page book. Damn near every chapter introduces three or four more names, and we are lucky if Steven describes them before discarding them entirely. This book is a slog. I find myself losing patience with Steven. 

—

Some time has passed since I began writing this review. Originally, my approach was surgical disassembly. I was going to go over the plot, summarize its anatomy, pick apart its flaws with surgical precision. But the more I cut, the more I felt as if I was the butt of a joke. I was performing an autopsy on a clown, pulling sheets of colorful rope from its gut, and the cadaver was laughing at me. 

There is a moment, about halfway through. A woman approaches John at a bar. An assassin, who later attacks John in the parking lot with karate. A furious series of crescent kicks, effortlessly blocked by John Gode, who punches her in the ribs and knocks her to the ground. Realizing that her martial arts are defeated, she draws her gun, but John Gode is too fast. He fires his own weapon before she can get the shot off, killing her instantly. “Her round went upward toward the sky as she fell backward with eyes wide open, seeing nothing.”

This scene stuck with me. It illustrates one of the critical flaws at the heart of Way of the Shadow Wolves. Nothing hurts John. Nothing even gets close. He does not struggle. He does not sweat. He does not bleed. Steven clearly intends this scene to be badass, a moment where his self-insert hero defeats a dangerous enemy without trying. This book is an action movie, but John’s untouchability makes every action scene read as a moment of profound and boring cruelty. This was not a contest of master martial artists. This was an adult kicking a child in the throat.

I find myself losing patience with Steven. I am running out of humorous ways to describe this vapid tripe. This is, in my mind, the greatest condemnation of bad writing. There is no hell lower than being boring to mock. I see myself as a sort of sommelier of the awkward and disastrous. I will be the first to tell you “Wait! Don’t throw that out! There are things to be learned!” But Steven repeatedly proves himself to be a sort of Alchemist of Shit, capable of transmuting theoretically interesting bullshit into just fucking nothing. If this book deserves credit for anything, it is its miraculous ability to squander its own premise. 

Why write this? Any of this? Steven clearly does not read. Or, if he does, he seems to subsist entirely on a diet of comic books about monkeys that do kung-fu. Why write this? At some level it all comes down to “because Steven wanted to” right? 

Right? 

But I cannot shake the feeling. To call this book masturbatory is to imply that Steven might have enjoyed it. There is a desperation to the power fantasy here. To be feared by men, desired by women, revered by all, yaddah yaddah yaddah, all the same trite excretions of blunt masculinity. But there is something else. Steven wants the same thing that every conspiracy theorist wants; a simple world. A world he can understand. Steven is exhausted, overwhelmed with a world he feels he can neither effect nor understand. I am exhausted. 

I fear my earlier allusions to expressionist novels may have been more spot on than I imagined. Way of the Shadow Wolves has a plot in the sense that Sunny-D contains fruit juice. Its presence is a formality, a ceremonial hat worn for tax purposes. The plot is there, but it is unimportant. This is not a text that can be debated with. Because within the world of the text, politics is not complex. It is not actually a web of interconnected groups, each with their own interests, rivalries, alliances, and historical contexts. Behind all of it is two things: Good guys, and bad guys. The good guys are all working together, and the bad guys are all working together. 

I find myself losing patience with Steven. I fear my earlier allusions to expressionist novels may have been more spot on than I imagined. Way of the Shadow Wolves has a plot.

John Gode finds a human tooth in the desert. It belongs to a body, a body of a woman described in lurid detail. Nearby, he meets a young native American man, a man who calls himself Sweet Tooth. The body is missing teeth, missing hands, missing feet. A trademark cartel killing. A young native American man. “I’m gonna be like, your assistant right?” A buddy cop dynamic. Meeting the task force. Tailing an ICE van full of cartel soldiers. A hostage situation. A shootout in the desert. Far away, faceless men in suits with masonic ranks plan a mass killing. Some sounded like they had Arabic accents. Freemasonry. Interrogation with a snake. The corpse was a woman. The woman was a reporter. She had the evidence on a flash drive, evidence that proved the existence of the deep state. What if its all connected? A sex scene, or almost a sex scene. A sex scene interrupted. A shootout in the desert. Kung Fu assassins at a bar. A cartel defector. A shootout in the desert. What if its all connected. They’re working with the Jihadists. The USA is already “half latino.” The government is paying the cartels to ship Jihadists north across the border. They’re well-trained and well armed. You can’t trust anyone. A terrorist defector who hears the voice of the prophet. The ghost of John’s grandfather. The sun sets over the Sonora. A shootout in the desert. They kidnapped John’s mother. Bring them the flash drive. They’re planning to bomb the casino. A shootout in the desert. The police chief was a traitor. The Catholics are in on it. Its all connected. A shootout in the desert. Assault by night. Rescuing the hostage. A knife dipped in pigs blood. A pit of vipers in the sonora. 

Steven ends a chapter with the line. “They had functioned like a well-oiled machine that had just saved two innocent lives. All lives matter. Do they not?” 

I am tired. I find myself at a neighborhood block party, trapped in a conversation I’ve had a thousand times. This time the man on the other end is a sweaty divorcee in range glasses who looks like a sunburned thumb. Last week, it was a woman with a necklace of crystals and blonde hair bleached blonder. “Haha yeah” I say, looking down at my phone. “Burgers look good this year huh?”

Thank you to my Patreon supporters who made this review possible.

[ramons-elevator]

Bad mentioned on his stream that all the dead eggs lives impacted how different we treat the eggs on the server and I realized that EVERY egg death changed history on the server and how we treat the eggs.

Juanaflippa- Obviously her second death made everyone very weary with the beds (and the admins bc i believe they made the beds harder to break). But her third death with sweeping edge and how everyone needs to be careful around the eggs with swords.

Tilin - Their death kinda goes hand in Juanaflippa about how NOT TO USE SWORDS around the eggs. But also Charlie went into eggxcile because of Tilins death and that snowballed into Gegg. Also helped with Luzu’s character and how he switched to Arin and with the computer/Code.

Chayanne- Technically chayanne lost their first life to neglect BUT the nightmare Phil, chayanne, and Tallulah had i believe introduced ‘nightmares’. Also it made the admins disable some born in chaos mobs and made Philza even more paranoid about the island than he already was.

Bobby - his death was the first permadeath we had since the trio died. It hurt a lot and made Forever realize that his death could have been prevented. Thus making Forever build the Ninho and make everyone very cautious of everything.

Ramon - same with Chayanne’s were his first death was to a Blaze but his nightmare was significant. It made the admins make solid ground rules about certain things and make sure everyone knows the rules about reinforced bases.

Leo- Her death with whales made everyone realized how fucking beefy and super dangerous the whales are. Also that you shouldnt just AFK anywhere. That you should try to be in a safe place before AFKing.

Dapper - His first death was SUPER significant. It made people realize that the code is learning and adapting. Thus made Bad, Forever, Cellbit, and Etoiles go to Luzus computer and explode it. Which lead to Forever getting pieces of the computer and getting the motivation to try to bargain with it. Which lead to Cellbits betrayal and enderchests getting banned. It also gave the most insane book by Cucurcho which is “Perfect for you or for me?”

Richarlyson- His first day nightmare gave us that the eggs have first day immunity. Then his actual death showed us that uhh fuck bulls and that Mike blames himself for Richas death to this day. Also gave us Imortalyson and kinda Richarlyson’s mindset of ‘fuck it we ball’. All he has ever known is one life.

Trumpet - THE MOST IMPORTANT DEATH ON THE FUCKING SERVER HOLY SHIT. Yes Trumpet died from neglect but his death lead to the Theory Bros. For those who dont know, Bad went to Maxs house to comfort him about Trumpets death and one of the ways he tried to get Maxs mind off of Trumpets death is talk about how weird the island is. Thus Bad and Max theorizing about the island and the rest is history. Also it lead to Max and Bad interacting more and kinda making Max talk to more people around the island.

Tallulah - Her nightmare with Phil and Chayanne has significance as stated above. But her death with the Code is significant because it was the first time Forever saw an egg’s death. It deeply upset him and made him a lot more serious about the eggs. Also again made Philza more paranoid.

Pomme- She hasnt died yet but her nightmare I would say is pretty significant. Kinda with Ramons nightmare, it helped give the players, admins, and audience some more rules on things and what the admins can/cant do. It also made everyone realize “Holy shit theres a weapon that does 50000 damage and will one shot you and destroy your armor” which is terrifying on its own.

Everything is so significant on this fucking island and every egg is extra significant to this island. No death is taken in vain. They truly shaped the island and everything we know about it

[extrajigs]

MORE BEASTS OF THE BLOOD SEA. Well actually just whales, very pink ones to! The usual info dump is found below!

The Blushing Fluke is a large whale belonging to a larger group of baleenless baleen whales of the Atlantic. Flukes are divided into two main groups, which habit different areas of the Atlantic. Which by the by is divided in two by a scab field into the sunless Northern Atlantic Fester and the Eternal Hemorrhage, which is slowly diluting back into the global sea. These fellas inhabit the Fester! Here the air is frigid and the blood is hot! Being that these guys are huge they struggle with the problem of overheating in the 93 degree blood bath. Their solution is the ability to inflate and hold their tongues up and out of the sea. The blood engorged organ is chilled by the freezing air and they cool right on down. This solution helps them maintain their large size while subsisting off the blood around them, simply swimming along slurping up the cooler surface ichor as they go. The large size is moreso to ward off predators, the fester is home to the Atlantic's immune system, which does not take kindly to animals eating it. Their large size lets them take a bit of a beating before they outrun their attackers, the macro-macrophages if you would.

[the-griffons-saddlebag]

🛡 𝗡𝗲𝘄 𝗶𝘁𝗲𝗺! Whalefall Armor
Armor (half plate), very rare (requires attunement) ___ This armor is made of repurposed whale bone and lashed together with salt-stained leather strips. While wearing it, you have resistance to poison damage and gain a swimming speed equal to your walking speed. If you're underwater, you also have advantage on any Wisdom (Animal Handling) or Charisma check you make to interact with beasts that have a swimming speed. 𝘾𝙝𝙖𝙧𝙜𝙚𝙨. The armor has 5 charges for the following properties. It regains 1d4 + 1 expended charges daily at dawn. 𝙎𝙥𝙚𝙡𝙡𝙨. While wearing this armor, you can use an action to cast one of the following spells (save DC 16): "false life" (2nd-level version, 1 charge), "insect plague" (4 charges; the insects appear as a massive swarm of rotting quippers), or "stinking cloud" (2 charges). 𝘽𝙖𝙠𝙚𝙠𝙪𝙟𝙞𝙧𝙖. While wearing the armor, you can use an action to speak its command word and expend any number of charges from the armor, including 0, to summon the spirit of the whale used to make its bone plates. The spirit appears in an unoccupied space that you can see within 30 feet of you. It uses the statistics for a killer whale, except that it's undead, is immune to poison damage and the poisoned condition, and has a flying speed equal to its swimming speed. It obeys your mental commands to the best of its ability (no action required by you), and takes its turn immediately after yours. If you don't issue any commands, the spirit defends itself from hostile creatures, but otherwise takes no actions. The spirit disappears in a cloud of marine snow after 1 minute. It disappears early if you use an action to dismiss it or if it's reduced to 0 hit points. When the spirit disappears, roll a d10. If the result is equal to or less than 5 + the number of charges you expended as part of the action to summon it, it disappears as normal, and the property can't be used again until the next dawn. If the result is higher than that number, the spirit becomes hostile to you; it remains for 1 additional minute, can't be dismissed, and immediately regains half its maximum number of... ... Continued in the comment below! ___ ✨ Patrons get huge perks! Access this and hundreds of other item cards, art files, and compendium entries when you support The Griffon's Saddlebag on Patreon for less than $10 a month!

[orcinus-veterinarius]

Hi! I’m currently working on a big, detailed Blackfish rebuttal, which means lots of rabbit holes. I recently started rereading John Hargrove’s book (ugh). He talks about how the original Shamu died of pyometra and septicemia, claiming that it was something that, apparently, would almost never happen in the wild. The obvious implication here is that captivity caused these conditions, and/or that such is common with captive orcas. However, obviously septicemia can be caused by a variety of things, wild or not. As for pyometra, he doesn’t provide other examples of captive orcas suffering pyometra, nor have I been able to find other examples described in peer reviewed literature. It seems that that isn’t particularly common in cetaceans period, whether they’re wild or not, but I’m also not a marine mammal veterinarian. Since you’d know better about cetacean medicine, I was wondering if you knew anything more about this.

Ooh, that'll be interesting! I'd love to read it!

You're correct that Shamu is the only reported case of pyometra in a killer whale, wild or captive. The CRC Handbook of Marine Mammal Medicine makes no mention of pyometra in cetaceans, although it does occur in both wild and captive pinnipeds and has been reported in sea otters and sirenians. Pyometra is typically the result of bacteria migrating up the vaginal tract into the uterus, which at certain times is more susceptible to infection due to normal hormonal fluctuations. Theoretically, anything with a uterus can get pyometra, though some species are more commonly affected than others.

I would hedge to bet that pyometra is rare in cetaceans because of their truly unusual reproductive anatomy. Females have a lot of redundant tissue in their vaginal tract, creating "false cervixes" and overall making it a lot more difficult for anything to reach the uterus.

See all those extra recesses around the cervix?

I did find this case report on a necropsy of a wild short-beaked common dolphin. Pyometra was one of many nasty issues afflicting the poor girl, so it can indeed occur in nature. Since this individual was suffering from co-infections of bacteria and cetacean morbillivirus, she was clearly immunocompromised. It's highly likely Shamu was as well.

Overall, pyometra of cetaceans (including orcas) appears to be quite rare in both the wild and managed care. Shamu was the very first orca intentionally captured for public display, nearly 60 years ago, and only survived six years in captivity before her death at approximately age 10. Virtually nothing was known about killer whale husbandry at the time, so it's not at all unreasonable to assume that poor husbandry, nutrition, and stress negatively impacted her immune function to the point she succumbed to pyometra.

However, it's a weak argument on Hargrove's part to compare the SeaWorld of today (with multiple orcas now in their 30s, 40s, and 50s) to the SeaWorld of the 1960s, and their very first whale at that. Especially using a condition that has not been reported in a captive orca since.

[fiddleabout]

(previously on the fabulous adventures of sun summoner ava and the druskelle who’s gonna fall in love with her)

It’s their third day of walking, from one whaling shelter to another, and so far Ava has learned that the druskelle is fastidious to the point of absurdity, that she sleeps on her left side-- potentially due to the cruel burn scar that Ava had seen on the first night, in spite of the way they had both burrowed deep under their respective bearskins until their clothes dried; it starts below her ribcage on her right side and snakes down past her hip, terminating in a splotchy discoloration halfway down her thigh-- that she sleeps light but pretends not to wake up when Ava wiggles closer in the middle of the night for warmth and starts each morning with a set of fifty pushups, and that she’s proven herself impressively immune to Ava’s charming habit of chattering to fill the silence.  

She still doesn’t know her name.

Ava’s halfway into a hilarious story-- in Fjerdan, just to irritate the druskelle-- about when she and Diego had managed to prank Frances at the orphanage with an elaborate plot involving a rabbit snare, a basket full of fresh mushrooms, and a piece of twine stolen from the kitchens.  She’s taken a detour in her rambling, away from Keramzin and towards her first and only experience in the unsea, stowing away on a skiff in a desperate attempt to keep her little brother safe, and has been on an impressively colorful five-minutes-and-building rant about how the First Army had treated the both of them after her powers became known.  She can feel her own frustration building, at the situation and at the druskelle and at the darkling, when the druskelle speaks for the first time in hours.

“--and then the lieutenant, that cunt--”

“Should you really refer to your commanding officer so crassly?”  

Ava nearly trips at the sound of her voice.  It’s melodious and soft, her accent rounded warmly.  The other druskelle on the ship had sharper accents, thinner edges to their vowels: a Djerholm accent, urban and rich, the accent of the children of nobility plucked for elite service.  This druskelle, though, has a quiet, rural accent that differentiates her from the rest of the druskelle as her dark hair and eyes had differentiated her from the rest of Fjerda.

“She speaks,” Ava manages to say after a split second.  “And here I was thinking that the druskelle had made you take a vow of silence.”

“I speak,” she echoes thinly.  “Only when there is something worth speaking to.  Such as insubordination.”

“Don’t tell me you’re concerned with me respecting a Ravkan lieutenant.”

“You are a soldier, even if you are a witch,’ she says.  She steps around a patch of snow that looks exactly like the rest, and Ava follows automatically.  “Soldiers should respect their commanding officers.”

“Well,” Ava says grandly.  “Forgive me for not agreeing to let my brother get sent to slaughter.  Some of us have beating hearts instead of unwavering obedience to work with.”

The druskelle doesn’t respond.  She continues hiking, and Ava nearly drops the bearskin she’d hauled with her for the last two days, wrapped around her shoulders like the druskelle’s cloak is wrapped around her own.  An irritation builds in her stomach, itching and impossible to ignore.  

“Hey,” she says sharply.  “What should I have done, then?  What would you have done if it was your brother?”

“I never had a brother,” the druskelle says without hesitation.

“Fine, play with semantics,” Ava says, unwilling to give up.  She hitches the bearskin higher around her shoulders and scrambles after her.  “Someone you love.  Your best friend.  Your mother--”

“My parents threw me out,” the druskelle says.  She turns abruptly, quick enough that Ava nearly falls on her ass trying to stop from barrelling into her.  “They took me on a carriage out into the wilderness and left me there.  When I tried to go home, my entire village had been destroyed by an inferni.  My parents burned in their beds.”

Ava stares at her, the bearskin heavy at her shoulders.  She’d grown up in Keramzin, meaningless and unimportant and dreaming like all orphans do about parents who loved her, a mother and a father who would love her if they were still alive.  It had never occurred to her, a war orphan whose only memory of her parents was them trying to protect her when the war spilled into their town, that there were parents who might cast their children aside.

“I am druskelle to protect Fjerda,” the druskelle says, fury snapping in her dark eyes.  “To protect other children from losing their families to witchcraft.  From people like you.”

“To protect people from me,” Ava says slowly.  “People like your parents, who threw you away?”

The druskelle’s jaw clenches, muscles in her neck working in stark lines, faint freckles dark against the flush of anger spreading across her cheeks.  “I became druskelle to honor them in their death as I should have when they lived,” she says, voice shaking with anger.  

“You hunt people who just want to exist so you can honor people who abandoned you in the woods?” Ava shoves at her shoulder.  It’s weak-- she’s exhausted, and hasn’t eaten in two days, and the druskelle has broad shoulders and powerful arms that Ava has become more familiar with than she’d ever want to, thanks to the Fjerdan cold and the unheated huts they’ve been forced to sleep in, and she barely flinches with the effort.  Ava slams a fist into her shoulder, stubborn and unwilling to give up.  “I never wanted to be grisha.  I didn’t ask to be this.  I just wanted to keep my brother safe and then--”

A groan snaps through the air, and she cuts off when the druskelle’s eyes go wide.  There’s a split second when she’s about to pick up her anger and keep ranting, and then the world cracks below her feet and she falls.

She slams into the side of the crevasse, her shoulder nearly dislocating and an aching pressure around her wrist.  Her face crashes into the ice of the ravine when her momentum stops, and she lets out a pained noise through gritted teeth before looking up.

Above her the druskelle is flat on her stomach, both hands closed tight around Ava’s wrist, and they both freeze.  Ava hangs from her grip, her entire body aching as it hangs from the druskelle’s hands.  She could drop Ava, could just let go and let her fall into the unending dark below her, leave her here to die alone and cold in the middle of the wilderness, and no one would ever find her.  The druskelle who killed the sun summoner, a hero to the Fjerdan people for killing the first hope the Ravkan people have had in four centuries..  

Ava hangs in her hands and finds the same desperate need to live, the one that had burst out of her when a volcra’s claws had latched onto her on the deck of the skiff and tried to pull her away from Diego, crawling up her throat.  Sunlight warms under her skin, but sunlight won’t save her here.

“Please,” she says, aching and scared.  The unwavering grip on her arm aches, radiating beautifully down her arm, the only thing keeping her alive.  “Please.”

The druskelle stares down at her, hands still tight around her wrist, and Ava watches her eyes narrow and shoulders somehow square even as she lays half-hanging over the edge of the ravine, and then, suddenly, she pulls.  

Ava’s shoulder screams, the joint protesting the tension it’s under, until she can get her other arm up and gripping at the druskelle’s wrist and square up her weight.  It’s only half a minute, maybe, before Ava is able to reach up and latch onto the druskelle’s arm to help pull herself the rest of the way up and crawl over the edge, sprawl onto the snow, but it feels like an eternity.  Her body aches with the effort, but she collapses onto her side next to the druskelle and then rolls onto her back, gasping and shaking and staring at the cold gray sky.  

Next to her, the druskelle flops onto her back as well, and Ava’s head rolls to the side to stare at her profile and the way her chest is heaving.

“Beatrice,” the druskelle says eventually.  “My name is Beatrice.”

Ava keeps staring at her, at the straight line of her nose and the arc of her cheekbone and the sweep of her jaw.  The druskelle who saved her life.  Beatrice.

“Beatrice,” she echoes after too long staring.  She speaks carefully, testing the way the name feels in her mouth.  “I’m Ava.”

Beatrice’s head tilts to the side, precise and meticulous, until she can look at Ava.  Her dark eyes are unreadable but her mouth is soft and uncertain, and Ava fights the urge to shift closer and curl herself into Beatrice’s side.

“Pleased to make your acquaintance.”  Beatrice drags one arm up and offers it awkwardly across the space between them, and Ava meets her in the middle without thinking about it.  Her hand is warm, somehow, despite the cold they’re lost in; her palm calloused and her thumb folding carefully over the back of Ava’s hand.

“Nice to meet you, Beatrice,” Ava finally says.

Ava means to let go, but her hand lingers.  Beatrice doesn’t let go either, and Ava can barely feel the cold seeping through her kefta-- the bearskin had fallen away, lost into the ravine-- for long seconds before Beatrice pulls her hand free and stands up, only to offer it back to Ava and pull her up to her feet.

Wordlessly, Beatrice strips her cloak off and wraps it around Ava’s shoulders.  She fastens the clasp and her knuckles brush against Ava’s throat, and a warmth that has nothing to do with her summoning spreads through Ava.

[swordsmans]

have any snippets you want to share from what you wrote last night? 👀

it took me a bit to figure out how you knew i’d been writing last night hahahahahaha. i’m finally settling back into working on the sequel to the poison immunity fic! progress is slow but steady, which has actually been quite nice. This takes place on Zou after the crew arrives from Dressrosa but before they split up again to go to Wano and WCI, respectively. Disclaimer, of course, that this is a draft :'3c

“A whale’s lifespan is rarely longer than, oh, seventy years,” Brook hums, tilting his head to the side, curling white-bone fingers through the darkness in a vague gesture out to sea. “I will cherish my time with Laboon, but in the grand scheme of an endless death, the years he has left are so very small.”

Zoro watches him, bleached body almost reflective even in the dim moonlight, and not for the first time (or the tenth time, or the hundredth time) Zoro is struck full-force with the incomprehensible horror of Brook’s strength. More than any of them, he is an immovable force. Untethered (and who could blame him) but still here. 

“Fifteen at most, then,” Zoro replies, “give or take,” and Brook tilts his head the opposite direction, a learned courtesy to show he’s listening. 

“Optimistically, yes,” Brook replies. His voice is light, carefree like always. “Whatever I am given, I will take. It’s more time than I spent half a century believing I had, after all.”

“We’ll all still be alive.”

“And quite spry, in fact.” Brook nods. “When Laboon passes, I will still have my crew. I won’t be alone—not again. Not yet.”

“Not yet,” Zoro grunts back, blunt as ever, and as he shrugs a wordless yohoho! floats up between them. He thinks of a span of time more than twice his age, so long he can’t wrap his head around the depth of it—and he thinks of sagged bodies decaying in sprawls across rotten wood, purple and bloated with a poison of their own. 

“I find it funny that people so rarely talk to me of death,” Brook hums, light and easy. 

Zoro snorts. “You’re always talking about death.”

“Oh, indeed. But one man does not a conversation make.” He chuckles, then—quick. Bright. “I would know!”

It’s hard not to feel his own mouth pull into some kind of involuntary smile, even as his brain processes what’s been said. Brook is just so—Brook. Not for the first time, Zoro marvels at him. 

Still, though—

“Maybe it’s ‘cause you do that,” Zoro says. “The jokes and shit.”

And Brook throws his head back—his arms out—and laughs. Laughs loud enough to wake Nami but doesn’t, somehow (which is a good thing and also a terrible thing, Zoro thinks—he wonders how long it’s been since she properly slept, waiting for them here, waiting for Luffy to come and fix things). Still, he mutters, Oi—and Brook twists his bony neck to look down at him—grinning. Always grinning. Physically incapable of anything else. 

“Oh, but that’s the point!” Brook says, absolutely delighted. “I’m a musician!”

Zoro feels his own eyebrows raise, but Brook is Brook is Brook—so he just grunts,“I don’t follow.”

And animated in his own strange, manic little moment of joy, Brook sways, spinning once across the grass and slipping out of his coat in the dance—before he folds smoothly into a crouch in front of them both. Without missing a beat, he gently, gently drapes his coat across Nami (and across Zoro’s legs, too) and says, “My job is joy.”

“Joy.” It’s a statement and a question in one. 

Brook simply nods, standing straight again. In the moonlight, his bones shine. “Death is an inevitable part of life, and if I can make you fear it just a bit less—make you laugh just a bit more when you think of it because you think of me, then I have served my purpose. We are surrounded by death—seeped in it—but death is proof we are alive. All things need an antithesis, a mirrored opposite such that its best qualities can shine against the juxtaposition. Without death, what is life! And what is life if not laughter and music and companionship! We must laugh at death to laugh in life!”

Zoro watches him, bursting forth with a half-coherent rambling into the night—and he doesn’t get it. But at the same time, he does. 

But— 

“Maybe it's good for the others, but I’m not afraid of dying,” Zoro bites, more defensive than he means. It has been—a day. “I’m not afraid of shit.”

With easy acquiescence, Brook nods. “Of course,” he says, still light and breezy. “I believe that’s part of what our dear Navigator has taken issue with—one could argue that’s part of the overall issue at hand. But, I must say—if anything, this is proof that you do still fear death. Fundamentally different.”

“Oi—”

“It’s not a weakness!” Brook says, shaking his head. “Or if it is, I’m quite spineless myself—oh, but I do have a spine! You can see it right here—” he poses, distracting himself, giggling against the sky as Zoro frowns. 

“Doesn’t seem any different to me. And also—I don’t.”

“Everyone has a spine, Zoro—even if you can’t—”

“That’s not what I meant and you know it,” Zoro grumbles—but it’s around the twitched lips of a suppressed laugh. Because of course—

And then Brook says, “You do indeed. You fear our Captain’s death more than anything, anything in the world, though you know better than anyone but me, perhaps, that it will come.”

[mage-ical-character-person]

This show is so educational I had no idea polar bears were immune to whale shark stomach acid. Thatse so cool. /j

Genuinely what the hell. Get out of there. Why are you doing this. If a whale shark eats a poisonous pufferfish that is simply the circle of life you don’t need to swim around in stomach acid about it.

Barnacles this is the second time you’ve gone inside a whale shark I am incredibly concerned

[lieslab]

The depths between: Prologue

Trigger warning: Reckless alcohol consumption and drowning.

Intro

꘎♡━━━━━♡꘎ ꘎♡━━━━━♡꘎ ꘎♡━━━━━♡꘎

The ocean isn’t much different from the land. Predators and prey all share the same space. The intelligent creatures overpower the smaller ones. The plankton is consumed by krill. Putting up little resistance, the krill is consumed via squid. 

There’s a filling snack of squid for the seals. The seals and sea lions are left alone for the larger sharks and whales. Some of them can be swallowed whole. There’s no forgiveness in the vortex created by whales sucking in and swallowing large amounts of water. 

The treacherous dark waters demand your caution. You’re either predator or prey. Even if you’re a human, you’re not immune to the murky depths of vast nothingness. There are things down there that humans have yet to fully understand. 

Thousands of feet below, there are creatures just out of reach. Some stay closer to the sunlight and others trail the murky darkness. Don’t ask how they find their way, it’s one of the many mysteries of evolution. 

They say that there are two types of humans. Good and evil tend to go hand and hand. You’re one or the other; there is no other choice. Are you full of resentment and wicked bitterness? Perhaps your blood is filled with something lighter and softer, something sickly sweet and pure. 

The concept of sirens isn’t much different. In the world of sirens, there’s good sirens and there are evil sirens. One cannot live without the other. Year after year after year, the siren world keeps growing. 

There are secrets hidden out of human sight. Things far beyond the realm of our understanding. At the top of the food chain, there are still things we should leave alone. There are things that aren’t quite right. 

There’s a reason why survivors in horror movies are the ones who don’t go searching. The ones who think intellectually and choose logic over basic curiosity. Curiosity has the potential to kill the cat. 

Go exploring and you might unearth something far out of grasp. You might find something that changes your life forever. If you’re not careful enough, it can and it will kill you without any hesitation. 

_ _ _ 

In the beginning, there was a deep darkness. You couldn’t see your hands in front of you. The whole earth was nothing, but a void, then came the existence of light. 

The humans bicker about the origins of earth. The creation of everything is constantly up for debate. It doesn’t matter what you believe because you’re here, aren’t you? You are here and the truth is that nobody knows. Nobody knows and that terrified people, so they came up with answers. They call those answers faith and to strengthen that faith, they created religion.

Since the beginning of whatever you believe, there’s one consistent theme; stories have been around since the origin. Parents pass them onto their kids and then their grandkids. Grandkids dish it out to their kids and their grandkids. Over and over again, the cycle repeats. 

Lee Felix knew about stories. He remembered learning about God and good and evil. To be good guaranteed your place in heaven. All you needed was some faith, a clear conscience, and a dash of kindness. 

He lived by the golden rule; treat others as you want to be treated. As a young man, he secured himself a job on a cruise ship. He loved that job more than life itself. 

He liked making small talk with the guests. Some were more kind than others. As the days passed by, he collected more and more stories from people. Stories from younger couples with newborns. Stories from grandparents who appeared on the cruises with their entire families. There were the tales of singles hoping to find a summer fling. 

There was something so joyous and vibrant about all of it. On the massive cruise ship, it was easy to forget that the vessel was floating on water. For months, Felix walked the upper deck and checked upon passengers down below. 

He went wherever management told him to. Some days he found himself cleaning restrooms and other days, he helped out down in the kitchen. Every few days, there was always something new to do. 

Along his time there, he got to know quite a bit of the crew and a variety of the guests. Since he worked there, he had his own room. Workers were granted the same things as first class passengers.

One of those things? Free unlimited alcoholic drinks. Not everyone could hold their liquor on the cruise ship. Perhaps it was a poor choice on behalf of the management, but it didn’t matter. It was already set in stone, everything was already done. 

When Felix’s birthday came around, some of his favorite co-workers celebrated his birthday together. They shooed away the last guest and closed up the bar. After Felix’s first drink, things got hazy. 

He knows that someone brought out a cake. He faintly remembers the artificial taste of chocolate. Everything was going great; people were laughing, alcohol was flowing, candles had been blown out and smoke lazily drifted into the air. 

Then came the party games. Nobody is in their right mind after countless shots. Cheers of joy and chugging the bitter taste of alcohol. He remembered the stinging sensation that crept up his throat and the burn that followed. 

The rest were muted voices and swirls of color. A bit of confusion here and there. The bright bar lights tilted and he couldn’t keep his balance. He stumbled, but nothing kept him upright. He was light as a feather and then there was darkness. 

He stumbled back, his back pressed into a rail, and then he fell. Down, down, down, into the warm waters below. Too drunk to understand what happened, he went beneath the waves. 

The salt water burned his nasal canal and then it filled his lungs. His arm shot out and brushed against something scaly. He shrieked silently. His voice blubbered and blew bubbles towards the surface. 

He squirmed weightless beneath the water, but it was just a void. No air to breathe and no light to see. Nobody to hear your screams, no person to depend on for help, not a single soul to save you. 

The warm water filled his lungs. The burning sensation was so raw that it struck something primal deep inside of him. His head dipped back and his fingers grasped nothingness, trying to find something to stop his descent into the dark waters below. 

The feeling was intense and it didn’t fade. The burning and the choking, the coughing and the sputtering. In his woozy thoughts, all he could think about was oxygen, but it never came. Instead, his body sank further and further into the darkness. 

Like the thousands before him, the clock struck out. There was too much water and not enough air. Humans aren’t equipped for billions of gallons of water. The darkened world stopped and so did his breathing. 

The whites of his eyes rolled back into his head. Long dark lashes closed for a final time. The frantic movements and sloshing around him went still. Down, down, down he free fell. 

The ocean swallowed his body whole. Another victim of the tides and another murder beneath the waves. Life is a tricky and funny thing. You can be a saint in this life, but death does not care. 

When your time is up, it is up. There is no forgiveness and no mercy. Your soul is sucked out and a hollowed shell is left behind. Where does it go? Nobody truly knows. Faith doesn’t save everyone from the unknown. 

Sometimes miracles happen, but unfortunately for Lee Felix, tragedy struck instead. 

| ♡.﹀﹀﹀﹀.♡ | ♡.﹀﹀﹀﹀.♡ | ♡.﹀﹀﹀﹀.♡ |

Next part: Chapter one

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[opal-owl-flight]

Aaand heres the complete visual guide for the Candlefolk variants!!

More abt them under the cut!

Candlefolk across the realms

A candlefolk’s appearance tends to change depending on the realm they were born from, as the ruins in each realm have materials and environments unique to their location. Whats shown are the common shapes, but Candlefolk can take on appearances different from what is presented (or look completely different from the appearance they took when they were born).

Isle: usually the same shade of bluish stone as the rocks found in the realm, or brown, like clay. Highly spiritual. Very serious about their purification duties.

Prairie: mossy folk with Manta features. Soft shape. Round. Many are born from large pots gaining sentience, though some are born from bells. Very in-tune with light creatures, and also plant life! Voices are like the tolling bells across the prairies.

Forest: Made from dark colored stone, metal, or fossilized wood (seems to be a light color, from what I can see in-game). Immune to rain (flame burns as strongly as a forge). Megatuna/whale features (like the one seen in the forest). Usually shy. Prefers the company of the forest/creatures rather than other sapients. Living forges that hide under their turtle-like shells to raise their temperatures high enough to melt all sorts of metals. Paddle-like feet to easily and quickly traverse and navigate the flooded woodland, and hammer out superheated metals. Surprisingly poetic...

Valley: Made of the russet stones, gold, stained glass, what have you. Have a more “carpe diem” lifestyle, compared to isle-borns. Have Racer manta features — long tail, helps steer. Quadwinged. They also have a fine mesh of "downy feathers" made of metal that help insulate them against the cold that would make their bodies too stiff to move. Movement makes these "feathers" clink and chime! It aids in their frequent dancing and performing...

Wasteland: made of the darkest stone or metal (helps blend in). Their fire burns lowly, but that grants them near- immunity from the dark creatures. Always on high alert towards the creatures that hunt them, helping other pilgrims find their way. Have dark creature features (horns, ridge, long tail); which usually helps them fight. Additionally, they tend to have long snouts like the krill to help them breathe the wasteland air.

Vault: made of that dark blue stone. Quiet and reserved, deep in study about the kingdom’s past. Have spirit manta features, made of decrepit memory cubes or the deep blue stones of the Vault. Tend to wear robes that cover most of their body.

Eden: the rarest kind, once upon a time. Only emerging when the other realms have been mostly healed and when new peoples returned to settle on them, establishing a new kingdom. Jointed limbs and features, like a mannequin, allow them to swap parts out easily and shake off most injuries (as the rock rain still happens occassionally.) Appearances vary wildly beyond that.