ubiquitous26

[ubiquitous26]

Obsessed with the idea of teenage Lucanis having a rounded hairline and a scumstache. And a perm

[ubiquitous26]

Rook going for the intimidation option: "I don't play rough, but I will if you want me to."

Lucanis, in his head/under his breath in the background: "I want you to i want you to MAKER I WANT YOU TO--"

[ubiquitous26]

a daily of them + colour 🐦‍⬛💜🐦‍⬛💋

[ubiquitous26]

📣 Let him speak 📣

[ubiquitous26]

Really is fortunate for the both of them that Spite happened to be forced upon one of the people in Thedas who agree with him that one of life's key principles is that you should stab first and talk later

[ubiquitous26]

first 3 days of alistair week

1- firsts: first encounter between Alistair and my warden Illythien

2- what might have been: a lost future where Alistair and Illythien live together with the Dalish

3- reunion: in the end, they reunite, to finally stay together, forever.

[ubiquitous26]

[ubiquitous26]

It’d be an awfully empty galaxy without you.

replaying ME3 and ugly crying over my favorite tragic romance

[ubiquitous26]

Chapter 2 of the super fluffy decadent and now spicier fic (mature audiences only) @rookanis-de-riva has written for me is now up. Lucanis gets a flower crown in this chapter💖 (that I forgot to draw). There's also this indulgent scene with a pretty little neck ribbon that I had to quickly sketch out. One more chapter left! it's been a very fun collab. Fic link again (Mature audiences? nsfw-ish?)

[ubiquitous26]

Just read "8 Little Talons", and I highly recommend you check it out!

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Wip Whenever

This is more sentences than required by the wip poll, but this is a little piece of the Possessed!Nadia fic I've started working on.

When she entered the Diamond, she immediately felt the heavy mood. People were whispering to each other with morose expressions on their faces. Nobody smiled at her—in fact, everyone who glanced in her direction had pity in their eyes. What’s going on? Has someone died?

She made her way to Teia’s private parlor, and found the First and Seventh Talons in deep, serious conversation. Caterina looked especially grim, like she was suddenly carrying a great weight on her shoulders. Both women turned to look at her when she entered.

Caterina looked her up and down. “It would be too much to hope my grandson left a child in your belly, wouldn’t it? We couldn’t be that lucky.”

Nadia’s stomach lurched. “Excuse me?”

“Lucanis is dead.”

Three simple words, but they landed like leaden arrows in her heart. Her knees buckled and she almost sank to the floor. “No,” Nadia whispered, “he can’t be.”

“His body lies in the Villa now,” Caterina said mercilessly. “He is dead, girl. Accept it.”

Nadia made a low sound of pain deep in her throat. She pressed her hand to her chest, feeling his ring on the chain beneath her shirt, feeling her heart break, feeling her soul rend itself to pieces in the madness of grief. Tears filled her eyes.

Teia rose from her chair and went to her friend. She knelt beside her and wrapped an arm around her shoulders. “I’m so sorry, Nadia. I know this is terrible for you.”

She shook as she wept, unable to stop herself. Her Lucanis was gone.

[ubiquitous26]

truly, I don’t know why I wrote this? except that i am full of feelings about lucanis dellamorte.

Rating: T Relationship: Rookanis, past unrequited Lucanis/Viago Words: 1.5k Summary: He knows how to smile, how to flatter, how to lie. The problem is... he doesn't want to. (He never does.)

He is sixteen years old when he discovers that he can fake it: brandy in one hand, bouquet of peonies in the other. Their worst plans always seem to be Illario’s idea. Lucanis barely knows the grocer’s girl from Andraste – but she is pretty, she is Lucanis’ age, and Illario has advised him that she smiles at him the way she does because she fancies you, cousin. (Lucanis fancies the idea of fancying someone, fancies the thought of wandering hand in hand along the rows of blush-hued peonies that run the length of the Chantry gardens in the springtime.)

The grocer’s daughter flushes prettily when Lucanis hands her the bouquet. She touches her hair when he tells her that he has been dreaming about her.

He hasn’t, though.

He never does.

Illario berates him afterwards – she wanted you to kiss her, idiot! – but Lucanis has work to do, and the heft of a blade helps to steady his stomach. He spends the evening amidst the corridors of oleander by the villa, practising the footwork that he should have practised earlier. Caterina watches from the balcone, although she likely thinks he cannot see her. (She is right. He can still smell her, though, even over the sweetly toxic blooms: linseed oil, and old blood rusted on.)

Lucanis is sixteen years old. He knows how to smile, how to flatter, how to lie. The problem is... he doesn't want to.

(He never does.)

His first kiss comes at seventeen. He tells no one this is what it is – especially not the Arainai fledgling with whom he has been paired to practise. She is elegant, beautiful (like leaves in autumn, like Arainai elves always are) and she kisses much less clumsily than he does.

But the kissing itself is ugly (uncomfortable, unpleasant), and so is everything that comes later; a performance by two people who would both rather be somewhere else. Usually, Lucanis enjoys being a Crow. (Usually, being a Crow doesn’t make him feel sick.)

Firsts are always special. In the stories.

He is twenty years old when a true first first strikes him. It is frightening, until it is embarrassing, and it doesn’t help that the man who makes Lucanis’ heart race and his cheeks flush could indeed simply be dosing his coffee. The feeling grows slowly (a creeping ache, a malady); nothing like blushing girls or peonies, nor Chantry bells in spring.

Viago is older than Lucanis. (He is handsome. He is smart.) It makes Lucanis’ knees weak just to look at him, to smell the faint trace of angelica which lingers on his cuffs. Caterina says he is a bastard prince, and Lucanis fancies he can see it billowing around him like a cloak. (His hair curls gently at the ends, no matter what he does to it. The oil he uses smells of rosemary and lavender.)

Lucanis spends weeks brooding on what to do, on what to say, on what to wear if he should go to see him. But Viago would never eat or drink anything offered unexpectedly, and a private meeting would be looked on with suspicion. (Many a dead man’s last mistake has been to let Lucanis through the door.) In the end, Lucanis sends a gift: slim and understated, and perfectly sharp, wrapped carefully in silk scented with herbs as clean-smelling as Viago.

And there is no reply.

Lucanis is grateful, then, that he did not tell Illario. It is not that his cousin would laugh. (Although he would laugh, long and loud, and clap Lucanis on the shoulder. He would lament his cousin’s marriage to his work.) The problem is…

Lucanis cannot help but think this was his first chance and his last. And Illario will know it, because Illario always does. (Illario smells nothing more keenly than Lucanis’ blood in the water.)

Caterina sends him to Bastion shortly afterwards. The contract-bearing envelope arrives sprinkled with lavender.

Twenty-two: an invitation to a party from a beautiful Valisti… which can only be an amateurish trap.

Twenty-six: a kiss to dissuade a Neromenian bodyguard from challenging him. The man he grabbed invites him back to his apartment, which Lucanis awkwardly declines the moment the bodyguard has turned away.

Twenty-nine: an offer from Illario to set him up with an orlesian duchesse. I'm telling you, cousin, she is stunning. And rich. She has a thing for antivan men – and a longing for a husband without a title.

It is not the first of these offers Illario has made. (It is the first made with bloodshot eyes, with a tremble in the hand he repeatedly runs through his hair.)

Thirty-two… is a bad year.

Lucanis is not quite sure how old he is when he is returned to the world of the living. (With a vivid ghost lurking over his shoulder, a steady taptap that never goes away.) He falls in love so easily now: with twilight skies, with the babble of the market, with the aroma of freshly-brewed coffee. This kind of love is painless, and nothing like poison at all.

(He has forgotten how to hurt without breaking, he thinks. There are no cracks in his ossified tissue, no corners from which to peel it back.)

But sometimes, when Rook looks at him, it feels like he is made of nothing but cracks. His stomach twists whenever she smiles at him, and… it is not unpleasant. It is embarrassing, and then it is frightening. (Internal bleeding is the hardest to stop.)

She saved him. (She brought him back to life.) He is grateful (for twilight skies, for the market, for the aroma of freshly-brewed coffee). He…

He cannot admit it until it becomes inescapable. (Rook can’t be here, says the shade who understands nothing at all.) More than ten years since his only chance, and he has fallen in love with someone who deserves something magical, something like lavender cream and sunshine.

(All Lucanis can give her is death.)

But Rook defies his every expectation (defies good sense, spites what is reasonable). She wants the sweet things, she tells him over hazelnut torte, but she wants the bitter as well. Her fingertips trace his knuckles, gentle. Soft.

The first time is special, and so is every other. (Her hair smells like summer. Her lips taste like dessert.)

When the Dread Wolf takes her, it is as if every light in the world dies too.

Lucanis is thirty-three years old when he discovers that he cannot fake it. (He cannot go on. Not like this.) They have the fight, he tells the demon, tells the only one who can hope to understand. They have a contract to finish (and after that, they can be done). But he cannot see how to begin, any more than he could see the way before. Everywhere he looks, there is more darkness. (Everywhere he looks, he looks for her.)

And then…

The prison gate yawns wide.

For hours afterwards, Lucanis trembles. For hours afterwards, he fears that he might yet wake up from a dream. It doesn’t feel fair for one man to have been given so many chances (to have been restored to life not once but twice; for a soul this full of doubt to be so varnished in His mercy).

Mercy.

Lucanis has never thought much of Andraste (famous for failing, for dying unavenged), but her canticle soars over Treviso every springtime; a chorus to coax the blush-hued peonies into bloom. It spoke to him at sixteen, and it sings to him now:

In an ocean of sorrow

does nobody drown.

I think I’ve loved you since I met you, Rook murmurs much later (when the Blight has been broken, when the fighting is done).

Lucanis could lie to her, but he knows he doesn’t need to. I am not sure what that feels like (he says without fear).

You fall in love slowly. She smiles like that is something lovely; like this, to her, is sweeter than lavender cream. And you fall in love hard.

Lucanis takes a moment to consider.

I do, he agrees then, with his second chance, with his best chance; with the woman he will love forever (and once the last light in the world has gone out).

[ubiquitous26]

@wirls' de Riva Rook and Lucanis for Day 2 of DA Kiss Week. I bet a bunch of you will recognise the pose reference despite changes (oh joy). In the meantime, I'm Looking at all the wonderful art with my eyes peeled.

[ubiquitous26]

[ubiquitous26]

I got this while scrolling on instagram to try to convince me to join threads and I—

We did it. We finally saved her.

[ubiquitous26]

Concussion queen

[ubiquitous26]

И снова эта прекрасная пара, не перестаю любить их даже спустя месяцы🥹❤️