#I went with ‘the forest again’ but this went through so many iterations that you can’t even tell lol

[theinternetisfulloftrash]

Entangled

Pairing: Dylan O'Brien x Reader (many forms) Synopsis: An exploration of soulmates and how energies become entangled with one another, and how that entanglement binds you with him. This was written for @angelofthetrenchcoats as a part of my 1000 Follower Celebration. Tags: Soulmates, Existentialism, Fluff, Grief. Rating: General Author’s Note: This is my mind trying to cope with the idea of a lack of randomness in the universe. While choices are our own, perhaps some things are more inevitable, or integral to our beings than others? Can we be bound to another in the way it is said soulmates are? This is how I interpret this concept. If soulmates are real, I hope it is as romantically tragic as this.

The first time your energies collided you were nothing more than that: energy. Pure and raw. Stardust. The first iterations of your souls meeting one another in the vastness of the expanding emptiness of an infant universe. Perhaps that’s how souls mate? Inexorably bound to the first other matter they touch for the rest of eternity? There’s no way to truly be certain. Perhaps the concept lies in a realm beyond understanding or reason—it’s certainly beyond the scope of any single iteration of you there’s ever been to even attempt to understand—and perhaps that’s as it should be. 

How many lifetimes had your soul lived residing in the body of a living thing? How many had it spent simply drifting? How many yous have there been? These are impossible questions to answer. There was only ever one thing that was certain: ‘them’. Each time you met, their essence became more familiar to you, more recognizable, you could sense it like a beacon calling out to ‘you’. But that didn’t mean you always found one another. 

There was a hollowness to the lives you lived without them, and even though your vessel could never fully comprehend the immensity of what it was missing—never knew what it felt to be complete—it wasn’t sadness. Because that you didn’t know ‘them’. Those lives were tarnished, but not unhappy, not always, simply dull. But when you met? You both gleamed with the luster of your bond.

You’d lived as saplings that spouted next to one another in the depths of a dark forest, swaying together in the breeze each spring when you went to leaf. You grew together until your canopies basked in sunlight, until many colourful autumns and hot summers aged your weakening branches, and you toppled together in the winds of a violent storm. 

You’d lived as lovebirds, deep in the jungles of central Africa. Chirping among the trees, flitting in the filtered sunlight that ventured down through the leaves. Nesting together, raising fledglings, and watching them grow and find loves of their own. You sat perched on the limb of an ebony tree next to one another watching the last sunset you shared before the jungle reclaimed you. 

You’d lived as green sea turtles swimming the ocean’s highways of warm currents, foraging sea grass from the white sand of the ocean bottom. The sea was home to you both for decades where it marred and battered you both, your collections of scars telling the story of your lives until the weakness of age stopped the final wounds that stole them from you from healing and scaring.  

You’d shared a few lifetimes with your souls harnessed in the bodies of humans. One as friends, platonic love that others didn’t seem to understand. Your closeness and candor were the envy of many. Your families were close—your children and their children—generations of love passed down by the special kind of magic that the improbability of the cosmos’ earliest self entangling once again. 

The next was so tragic it left a permanent mark. You watched them suffer in that life. It wasn’t peaceful. It wasn’t fair. It was a wicked illness that took them from you slowly and painfully. You watched them waste and dim. Watched the love in their eyes turn to grief in their final moments as they recognized the loss in your own. Some events can etch themselves so deeply on your being that the soul carries them forward into their next form. You’d gathered a few of these blemishes, these invisible tattoos over your lifetimes, each one shaping and molding the matter that made you, ‘you’. Each one tethered you more and more to ‘them’. 

Now, standing in the line of this small Café in New York City—your soul residing inside the body of a young woman who’d always felt a bit out of sync, one always criticized as a ‘head in the clouds’ kind of child, never satisfied, always searching—you met ‘them’ again. 

You looked up from your phone when he turned around after he’d gathered his order and your eyes met. There it was. That spark. That little electric jolt. That tug on your gut. This you didn’t know what it meant, how improbable and special it truly was, but ‘you’ did.

“Hi,” he said, smiling at you for the first time, the ‘you’ and the ‘them’ understanding the gravity of it, the weight. 

“Hi,” you smiled back, your eyes shifting down to the hand on his cup and the name written under the rim: ‘Dylan’.

#dylan o'brien #dylan o'brien x reader #dylan o'brien fanfiction #dylan o'brien concept #dylan o'brien imagine #soulmates #entangled fic #angelofthetrenchcoats #1000 follower celebration #I like the 'hi'.... 'hi'.... thing #if you've read any amount of my writing #this is a shameless pattern #;) #I hope you like this #I know it's not overly long #<3 #trashy writing

[salovie]

he walks the old path,

mournful steps in morning light—

a reconciled soul

#poetry #haiku #senryu #napowrimo #napowrimo 2021 #prompt #: write a poem inspired by a chapter title #I went with ‘the forest again’ but this went through so many iterations that you can’t even tell lol #inspired by hp

[sinsbymanka]

Rubatosis from fun word prompt for any Anders-centric ship of your choosing?

Hello! For the @dadrunkwriting challenge. I wanted to do a little bit more for this but I’m trying to stay short. I may come back and add to it. 

Rubatosis: The Unsettling Awareness of Your Own Heartbeat

Pairing: Anders & Merrill 

Rated: M to be safe 

CW: Blood Magic 

Two weeks passed since they left Kirkwall, and Anders still hadn’t gotten used to Merrill’s neverending chatter. 

Maybe it was because he, for the first time, found himself alone with the woman. There was no Hawke to redirect her inane questions to, no Varric to engage her in friendly banter. It was just two of them and Anders has never felt less talkative in his life. In fact, he could use some good, proper silence to plan. To think. To try and come to terms with his new life. 

“What do you think that cloud looks like?” Merrill asked. 

Anders looked up at the blue sky and the white, puffy clouds drifting lazily across it. He didn’t scream. Barely. 

“Hawke’s drooling mabari,” he answered sarcastically. “And a big, juicy steak.” 

“Really?” Merrill looked over her slim shoulder, eyes wide. “I thought it looked like a fennec myself.” 

She turned that bright gaze back to the sky and squinted into the clouds. “I suppose I could see the steak, though.” 

Anders barely repressed a hysterical laugh. How had he ended up trekking across the countryside with Merrill of all people? 

Easy question. He blew up the Chantry, and everyone that was unlucky enough to be in it, before Hawke sent him packing just before Templar reinforcements showed up. Anders was a fugitive now, and he couldn’t afford to be picky when Merrill was sent alongside him to help him get as far from Kirkwall as he could. One companion was about as good as any other. 

“I really don’t see the mabari at all. Are we looking at the same cloud?” Merrill asked. 

Maybe the Templars would have been preferable. 

Before he could summon the proper retort about Merrill and her ridiculous games, non stop talking, or any of the other things that had done nothing but annoy him since their escape from Kirkwall, he heard the clatter of hooves on the dirt road behind him. 

Merrill froze and Anders followed her lead. They both looked over their shoulders at the sound of thundering hooves just in time to hear the accompanying shouts of men and women. Angry men and women. 

“I knew that innkeeper was looking at us strangely,” Merrill murmured. 

Anders barely heard her over the roar of blood in his ears. The fear always came back like this, sudden and intense, causing his stomach to turn and bile to rise up his throat. The sound brought back memories, metal armor and stone walls too high to climb, a lake separating him from the world outside… 

“Run!” he yelled. 

Merrill didn’t need to be told twice. They both sprinted from the road just as the figures of men and horses came into view. Anders heard the triumphant shout as they were spotted, felt the sucking drain of their powers around him, the popping of his ears. 

“Duck!” 

Merrill hit the ground just in time as the smite flew over their heads. She scrambled up in a moment, staff in hand. Her eyes flashed, deadly and sharp as the blade at her hip. She hollered something in Elvhen as Anders shoved himself up off the ground before it burst into a tangled forest of thorns. 

Then her fingers closed around his arm and she pulled him onwards into the cover of the trees. He twisted around as a male scream pierced the air just in time to see a templar dragged to the dirt in his shiny armor. 

That meant he wasn’t looking forward when Merrill dragged him right into a low-hanging branch. It whacked against his head with a worryingly hollow hunk that almost drove a laugh from his lips. 

Irving always said his head was empty. 

“Ooops!” Merrill chirped. “Sorry! Humans are just so tall.” 

“I’ll be a lot shorter if you take my head off,” he huffed breathlessly as she dragged him onwards. Despite his height advantage, he very much felt like he needed to keep up with her as they raced into the forest. 

Branches hit unprotected skin with the same sharp bite as a whip, snagged at his cloak and shirt. He barely had time to regret the mending he was going to have to do before Merrill bit off a sharp Elvhen oath and skidded to a stop. 

The forest floor in front of them abruptly ended in the jagged edge of a cliff. Below them, nothing but a rocky ravine. Anders stood on the edge of the precipice, Merrill’s hand still latched on his arm, and the sound of clanking coming closer. 

“There’s a way around.” She sounded so determined, so sure. “We need to-” 

Her eyes blazed green as the ivy climbing up the ledges, reminded him of the brightness of the soft grass beneath his feet on the days they left Kirwall behind. The freedom of being out from behind the city walls, the blue sky above. Knowing he’d never be back in the circle again. There was some peace in that, even if the alternative was death for being an abomination. 

In the grim tip of her pink lips, Anders could see the same grim reality on Merrill’s face. No matter what happened, she’d not be taken alive either. No use for a blood mage in a proper, respectable circle. 

“No.” His tongue darted out to lick at his lips and he felt Justice’s power crackle beneath his skin. “I think we’re trapped like nugs in a sewer.” 

“I do like nugs,” Merrill murmured, already sliding into a stance prepared to attack and defend. “And you do like sewers.”

“I do not!” he protested quickly. 

It was the last thing he said before the templars burst into view and they had no choice but to fight for their lives. A blast of energy from him sent them skittering backwards like iron-clad beetles into Merrill’s vines, but they kept coming like roaches ready to feed on their corpses. 

Sweat dripped down his forehead and burned in his eyes. Lightning sizzled, ozone around him crackled. Beside him he heard Merrill’s staff thunk against metal, heard the distant scream of another templar being toppled over the cliff behind them. 

Then a blade appeared in the corner of his vision and he lashed out with his staff, catching it in the enchanted wood. He grunted, forcing the other man back with all his wiry strength. 

He never saw the silence coming.

It hit him like a fist, dropped him like a punch in the stomach. His vision swam, his ears popped. Anders scrambled to reach for the last vestiges of his mana, but it was gone, gone. Justice, his magic, the noise of battle, everything was fading. 

Above him a blade shimmered in the afternoon sun, piercing the clouds. Anders’ heartbeat thudded in his throat, his fingertips. He counted the remaining beats, wondered how long it would take to count the very last one. 

Would he even feel the very last one?

A shrill scream. Then something sizzling. The smell of iron and the splash of something warm against his face. 

Then screams. So many screams. His heart thudded uncomfortably and he looked around as men began to drop. They clawed at their eyes and began to utter prayers to Andraste, the Maker, anyone to save them. But their Maker went silent long ago and there’s nobody to save them from the blood bubbling over their lips. 

A blood mage, after all, can’t be silenced. Maybe that’s the real reason the templars killed them on sight. 

Merrill’s hand dug into his shoulder, pulling a fistful of feathers from his coat. “Anders! Anders get up!” 

He staggered to his feet and reached blindly for Merrill’s hand. Their fingers twisted together and she pulled him upwards. He caught sight of blood dripping down her pale skin, the bright fury of her gaze. 

And then they ran. 

xx

It took him far too long to realize there was too much blood. It slid down to where their fingers were entwined, dripped onto the ground. Merrill started to weave and stagger before she slumped against him. 

Only then did he notice the horrific gash in her thigh, through the thin leggings she wore. He caught her in his arms and held her to his chest as her eyes fluttered closed over her pale cheeks, vallaslin stark on her cheekbones. 

“Oh don’t you dare,” Anders rasped, slowly lowering her to the ground. “I swear on Andraste’s dirtiest knickers, if you make me go tell Hawke I got you killed…” 

“It… it’s not so bad,” Merrill insisted, a bold statement considering the sheer amount of blood soaking her clothes. Anders tried to summon mana to his fingertips, only to come up heart wrenchingly short. 

He had nothing. Nothing. And Merrill… Merrill needed healing. Merrill needed healing or else…

“Anders-” she whispered. 

He tugged his cloak from his shoulders. “Where’s your knife?” 

“Anders, it’s okay. Hardly hurts at all.” 

“That’s cause you’re going into shock.” He pried her blade from her hand and sliced a long strip from his cloak. “You’re not stupid enough to cut into your own artery are you?” 

“Templar,” she murmured quietly. 

A templar blade to her unguarded leg, probably at the same time he got hit with the silence. And yet she used that blood to bring them all to their knees. Anders didn’t know whether he really disapproved. 

Merrill’s eyes shut, her chest rose and fell shallowly. He quickly tied the makeshift tourniquet around her thigh, watching her face. “Merrill! Merrill, you gotta stay with me. Talk to me.” 

They fluttered open one last time, fixed on the clouds above them. A small, soft smile graced her lips just before unconsciousness claimed her. 

Anders thought he knew all the iterations of silence, the way it settled in your bones and drove you slowly insane. The way it haunted you, the way it comforted you. But he had never heard silence like this before. Silence so pristine he heard his own heart begin to fracture as his fingers flew to try and staunch the bleeding that continued with each faint beat of Merrill’s own. 

If she survived, he would never complain about her talking ever again.

#manka writes #dadrunkwriting #anders #merrill #templars #blood magic

[rosesmusicandaloeveraplants]

the golden ring of oracles

he found a motley crew who knows of magic, headed by a golem of diamonds

reunites with a childhood friend, a beaver possessing the gift of oracles

together they develops his magic over the span of years, finding missing tomes and practicing magic

his wings shone with iridescence again, light as air

until the kingdom raided their cottage on the kingdom's borders, and left more dead bodies in their wake

the beaver's dying breath, told him that it was foreseen that with his return, the beaver will die soon but is content, and asks him to fly away to protect the dragon borne

posted on ao3 or read below :D

TapL's wings carried him far far away from where he left. He journeyed through the night, until reaching the forested border of the kingdom. He perched on a tree to rest.

He skimmed through his satchel, to try and grab food, but realized as he left in a rush, he had very few rations. Instead he went through his mind's own inventory, a pocket dimension of sorts, and grabbed a baked potato he had stored. His eyes felt swollen, and his wings weary, so he cast a masking spell around him and fell asleep, hugging himself with his wings.

---

TapL woke up after hearing loud cheers. He became alert, but didn't move, as he surveyed his surroundings. A group of seven, cheering and laughing at one of their member's jokes. The auras of each were unique, a golem, a demon, a rosebush, a shapeshifter, a pug, an elk, and a beaver. They each have a bit of magic, the demon with powers of the abandoned realm, but something about the beaver felt peculiarly familiar to TapL. TapL saw the beaver raise his right hand to motion around while he speaks and then he notices the golden rings on his hand. Recognition struck:

Spifey would always wear many rings on his hands. He wore golden ones on his right, silver, purple, and black ones on his left, similar to how TapL's right eye was gold and left eye was purple when he uses magic. Spifey told TapL, a summer night a lifetime ago, that these were family heirlooms, and helped with guiding his magic.

TapL fell off the tree in shock, and hadn't retracted his wings yet. He winced in pain as he felt the group surround him.

"You okay there?" the demon asked. TapL nodded, dazed.

"You look like you took quite the fall there, you sure you're alright?" Spifey asked.

"Spifey, is that you?" TapL asked, eyes wide with disbelief.

"TapL? Oh my universe it is you!" his eyes shone with recognition. The others stood confused.

Spifey added, "this is one of the few other magic wielders I knew from childhood, TapL, who I believe I've mentioned before." The others nodded slowly.

"So you're a universe blessed eh?" The shapeshifter asked, "hope you don't mind us asking questions about magic?"

"Hope you guys don't mind me asking you about magic, I need to brush up on my own," he joked. The group laughed in good nature.

"Let's get back to the cabin, I'm sure we have space!" the golem exclaimed.

"We barely have enough space to stop Vurb from getting our toes Skeppy!" the elk whined.

"I'm sure we can just, you know, magic up space, like reasonable people do," the rosebush suggested, "or people can learn to share a room while we figure out something."

They bickered on what to do as they headed back to their homely cottage, where TapL would call home for the next few years.

---

TapL got to know each of the members of this group, and how Skeppy was the one who founded the group, dubbed the IDots. He learned of Hannah's garden of roses and the delicate petals, Finn's seemingly infinite closet fitting their every whim and look, the story of how Bad and Skeppy met while wandering the universe and their frequent yet affectionate bicker, Zelk's silent care despite his nonchalant attitude, and Vurb's (hopefully joking) obsession with toes.

He learned of Spifey's sudden departure years ago having to do with a vision the beaver saw, but wouldn't share.

They spent the time practicing and teaching each other magic, reading and finding tomes in structures long abandoned, pranking each other, doing anything they can think of. They held a talent show, Hannah failed to bake, TapL cloned a parrot, and Skeppy and Zelk performed the worst possible iteration of Romeo and Juliet. They went to a beach through teleportation on a whim. They temporarily made the floor crafting benches for a week.

TapL felt like he found a family again, a close knit group that supported and built each other up, while still being silly enough to feel at ease. He examines his wings in the mirror, as they were no longer the tainted, rusted color of the past, as they start to regain their iridescence, feel lighter on his back.

Through the tomes he learned a way to listen to the universe, to potentially speak with his family, his brother, but he was too afraid. Would they support him despite his failure in his sacred duties? Would they still love him despite how much he failed? Would they still remember? Would they still be there with him?

He set the tome away, leaving that specific spell for another day.

---

The Kingdom found them, and brought all of their troops.

They looted and destroyed another home, took away his family again.

"All in the name of the King," the soldiers shout, "Magic shall not live!"

One by one, the group fell, until TapL was alone again. The troops retreated.

"TapL," Spifey exhaled, while gently caressing his largest wounds. He didn't try to heal them, there was no point. The curse of the black skull had already infected the wound.

TapL felt tears streaking down his face again. No, not again, he thought, I can't lose my family again. "The effect..."

"It's too late." He smiled weakly. "I know you felt the deaths of the others too. I'm sorry you had to feel that."

TapL gripped lightly at Spifey's hand. He can see the curse slowly flowing through Spifey's veins, crawling up his hands.

"I told you I left all those years ago, because of a vision I had."

TapL nodded.

"Well, I'm going to tell you what the vision told me. It told me, that when we see each other again, I will die in the near future."

TapL's breath hitched. His eyes widen in disbelief.

"I had already come to terms with it long ago, there's no need to feel sorry for me. You have come so far TapL, and together we've done so much. Don't let it be in vain. Find your living brother, the son of the ruler of the sacred realm, find Illumina, and protect him. I know you can do it, I believe in you. I'm sorry for leaving so suddenly those years ago, and I'm sorry for leaving you now. You were always like a brother to me. Stay safe."

Spifey's body, like the rest of the IDots, faded into the universe. TapL kneeled there, numb, and started to sob.

He left, wings heavy again but cloaked in invisibility, casting a barrier preserving the current state of the cottage's remains, and creating a plaque for another family he lost.

#i tried writing guys <3 #warning: just pain.png literally just pain.png

[alaraxia]

Process Breakdown: Starfall

Since I got some positive responses to my question on process stuff I’m gonna do a behind the scenes breakdown for my most recent piece to help people see the process I use and how I problem solve. I didn’t plan to do this initially so I won’t have a ton of process shots but I did save a handful. There’s a few scattered hyperlinks to other pieces I reference too. Just a warning this is mostly train of thought so it’s super verbose.  

So base sketches were mostly focused around me defining the shape of the girl since she was the focal point and building the environment around her. Going in the things I knew I wanted were a girl precariously balanced on top of a massive capybara catching a falling star, while surrounded by smaller sleeping capybaras on rocks. I layered out a general forest scene surrounding it but didn’t really commit to much in the sketches. Messed with the angles of the large capybara a few times to make it feel less flat and more 3D in the space, used a lot of reference photos of capybaras and sorta simplified them to what I thought was cute/ what stood out to me as their defining features.

Skipping ahead a solid amount is midway through the initial lineart, with some areas just colored in to define them as separate. Initially this piece was supposed to be in a similar style as my “Stratosphere Dreaming” art, with a single uniform line thickness, bright colors, and no gradient shading at all, but I realized pretty soon after I finished the lineart and started coloring that I had done what I tend to do a lot and made it too complex to pull off successfully in that style so I had to pivot to using gradient shading and other non-cell style techniques (though you can see a lot of those methods still in the coloring of the girl). This caused an even bigger challenge as I was drawing on a large canvas with high DPI in Procreate which resulted in me having a cumulative 50 layers to work with at any given time (hell).

Now once I made that rendering style pivot is when the really hard part began, and why on top of my persistent arm injuries this took me about two months to finally finish.

1.) I had an extremely difficult time trying to figure out the color pallet for the piece. I had an idea of the values and general colors I wanted (you can see some pallets and random base color tests in the image above) but I just couldn’t get them to look right and I became extremely more aggravated as I kept trying new and different things. My biggest mental block was feeling like I was stuck trying to make the initial pallet idea work, but eventually I was able to bump it to a slightly adjacent pallet and it worked far better. Essentially a lot of angry experimenting and testing.

2.) I made the piece too complex for its own good when it came to the foliage and scene. After finding success with a very specific way to render foliage in one of my favorite pieces I started to use it as my standard, but that standard started to show cracks when I had foliage heavy scenes like in my Hollow Knight piece from last year. The rendering style became insanely too time consuming, and incredibly distracting when used in abundance, taking away from the focal point. I knew this but I still attempted to use the same style to render the foreground foliage MULTIPLE times in increasing states of frustration until I stepped back, evaluated it wasn’t working, and tested out a very similar style with the same effect but that I could throw together twice as fast without the aggressive distraction and minuscule details that were irrelevant in the scheme of the art. This frustration in the rendering not working was only exacerbated by the color pallet indecision making a lot of the attempts just look bad both color and style wise.

Due to the limited layers I had to finish rendering out the girl very early and merge her together to free up layer space, and couldn’t keep my lineart layers as separate as I would have liked to allow for quick line color swaps. She ended up being a key point in defining the rest of the color pallet of the piece. The dress shape was indeed inspired by the Lirika Matoshi strawberry dress, but with my own twist.  

Once I got a more solid color pallet down the rest started to come a lot easier and I was able to begin filling stuff in and doing general color adjustments to make the backgrounds darker and give it more depth. I don’t have any more process shots beyond the initial color pallet exploration unfortunately, but the last hurdle I hit was at the very end once I was doing final touch ups. I found that with the only light source/ lighter color being the falling star that it washed out a lot of the rest of the pieces and made the details I spend so much time on feel unnoticed. I found though that adding the bright orange stardust specks into the trees, the girls hair, and falling from the star itself gave the last bit of color I think it needed without completely destroying the atmosphere. Originally (you may see it in some of the process shots) there were going to be jars with stars already in them illuminating the bottom of the piece, but after multiple trial and error iterations it just didn’t work out and ended up taking the focal point away from the girl and the star too much so I scrapped it.

Finally once I got everything done I made a copy of the entire art file to save as a backup, then with one of the copies merged all the layers together. Once all merged I made a copy of the fully merged layer, and went and adjusted the entire layer copy using a Gaussian Blur, reduced the opacity of the blurred layer to a super low percent, and put it on top of the original merged layer. This gave it that ethereal sort of feel that is difficult to notice unless you zoom in but really helps soften the piece and make it more dreamlike overall. Then I merged that blur layer down, and turned on about a 3% noise layer on it all to give it a bit of texture.

But that’s enough rambling from me, hope this helps give a bit of background to my process and decision making and it wasn’t just a wall of random musings. 

My last piece of advice is if you’re looking to do art professionally, do commissions, or make a lot of pieces in a short period of time I would highly advise against directly copying techniques I use. Because while I’m always working to improve I do only do this as a hobby rn so I have the luxury of being able to invest a lot of time, energy, and details into higher complexity pieces that would take way too long in a professional environment. I can put a lot of time into making a single piece exactly as I want it since I’m not reliant on art as my sole income. As I improve I can make things faster, but it’s still an overall slow process and I just end up moving my quality standards up with any level of improvement anyway. Use stuff I do as inspiration but I cannot stress enough to learn as many shortcuts as possible (I’m still struggling with this myself).

If y’all have any questions about bits feel free to dm, if I do something like this again I’ll try to get better screenshots during the process n try to be less verbose.

#tutorial #behind the scenes #alaraxia process #process breakdown #starfall

[oz-corp-uplink-t]

Good evening. I figured it would be a good idea to describe our area in detail, both the one we're in now and the one from whence we came. This will be in chronological order, from first discovered to most recently discovered. I hope you all don't mind the formality. This is simply how I normally converse, and I do not see any reason to be any more or less formal than normal.

--Homeworld: GemsGoldia--

Our Homeworld was a unique one, compared to the more Earthly planets of most other universes. It was an entire planet made of crystals and gems, and the general climate of an area depended on the gemstone that comprised the most of an area. Green Emerald areas were usually perfectly warm, red Ruby areas were much hotter and had a tendency to contain magma geysers, blue Sapphire areas were more or less frozen wastes, and a few other, more unnatural climates, such as constant lighting storms over yellow variants of gemstones, and complete and utter darkness in Obsidian areas.

When I first appeared here, I was the only one. I saw the Creator soon after, and he told me what I should do. The Creator's form in our worlds is quite odd, actually. He's two hands and a head, and he tends to change size often, though he's always bigger than me. His hands have white gloves, and I'm certain I've seen they are connected to his head by fishing line or puppet strings. His head is just a black sphere with extremely triangular teeth and large, red eyes. It's more intimidating than it sounds.

Anyway, the factory/research lab we started with was already built when I showed up, along with quite a few houses, all made of the Emerald the ground was made of, and there were exactly enough for those that would appear soon after. There was an unfathomably gigantic generator in a basement within the factory, which I was told created an artificial atmosphere around the entire planet. Evidently, this was true, as it was destroyed in the destruction of the planet, and we have recorded several corpses of beings that need an atmosphere to survive.

--A strange new land: Mirrold--

I had escaped the destruction of GemsGoldia, and I had to find my way back alone. I went through several places, most of which seemed familiar and sparked... Memories, of past versions of myself. My first iteration looked similar to the creator, but I had a pale skin tone, my eyes were humanoid, my hair was green, and I had some nasty claws. I was a throwaway, used to add plot to a normal 'roleplay' (Which, as he told me, simply describes writing a story with more than one person, which I find to be an interesting concept) between good friends. I was to stop a wedding by killing the bride or groom, the bride being an original creation, from his friend, and the groom being another one of those... Skeleton characters. I think they called them Blueberry. I mortally wounded them, and was destroyed in revenge.

My next iteration was similar to the 000 model. I can't remember what I did as them, but I do remember that the Creator and his friend made fictional children for fictional versions of themselves. Apparently, this was my longest running form.

Then, we're at what I am now. A product of His creativity, depression from a long-passed break-up, of which he has told me was his own doing, and fantasies of escaping His world, and coming to ours. His mental state has left our world in ruin, and it seems like he may want this one to have a similar fate...

...Oh, right. I need to be talking about Mirrold. Forgive me, I tend to get far off-topic if I think about our home...

Mirrold is a mirror world, which I found in an apparently magical mirror in the ruins of GemsGoldia, which acted as a portal to here. This place consists of four islands and a deep pit under them, which we call Lower Mirrold.

--The glass shatters: Shatternia--

Shatternia is the only entrance to Mirrold that we know of. After you enter the mirror, you come out onto a catwalk suspended above Lower Mirrold, which looks like pitch blackness. This catwalk ends at a concrete building, where the Brokem, Ozwald, and Cordial base models reside. This is at the southernmost area of the island. To the west of this, there is a thick forest with various weak monsters within. The foliage on this island is always colored in a mix of reds and blues instead of the normal green you'd expect. To the north of the building, there is a toxic lake, and a bridge leading to a canyon with a large gate at the end, leading to the only town in the area, Shardini. If you go east from the building, there is a tram station, which connects to the next island over, and allows for transport between them. North of this is a mansion under constant snowfall, which is reminiscent of the home the Creator had imagined being in when with their friend. The Creator put a copy of his past self, specifically from the period of major depression over his relationship, in Mirrold, and they occasionally show up at this mansion and cry to themselves. They are hostile to any trespassers, but reminders of this failed relationship will stop them in their tracks.

I do recall, now that I think of it, there was another skeleton who became partially Corrupt, but never fully turned, and who lived with the models in the concrete building. Actually, they may have been an alternate version of Blueberry. I think the models that live there called them "Grape".

--A major downgrade: Junkedville--

It's much larger than Shatternia, but it's mostly empty desert. There is an exception: Salvagius. This is the one town in Junkedville, near the northern edge. Our factory rests at the northernmost point, and the rest of the place is houses and establishments made of sheet metal. The pub here is highly popular, mainly because it's impossible to die from overdrinking, as they add special ingredients that prevent death or impairments from extreme amounts, without lessening the actual enjoyment of it, including the drunkenness. This isn't completely effective, unfortunately, as you can tell from my entire workforce being in alchohol comas.

I did say that Shatternia was the only entrance, but that isn't completely true. In the factory, we are very capable of transporting people using the multiversal portals we have. We also considered opening them up to other creations for this uplink, but we aren't sure if it matters much anyway.

--Eternal war: Magicant--

Magicant is a small place, and there's not much left by now. Mages populated this place quite heavily before the Corruption followed us here. They have allied with us for the destruction of the Corruption, but they have blown half their island out of the sky trying to fight. There isn't much left to speak of...

--Mixed up anomaly: Lower Mirrold--

Lower Mirrold is... Difficult to understand. It's split into five sectors. These five sectors change randomly into portions of different worlds, bringing buildings, landscapes, and people with them into our own. This has caused many visitors to suddenly show up without intending to, and many strange scenarios where multiple characters and worlds combine in strange ways, causing strange situations. One we have documented in particular is still in progress, and the events until now are as follows.

1: Subject A ( Short/overweight/male, generally known as a thief, wears yellow and purple clothes, a cap with his first initial on it, and cyan eyeliner) receives a message from Subject B (Literally a fucking sponge) that proposes an exchange for taking B's job for a day in exchange for a stockpile of treasure. Subject A accepts, drives into ocean and finds Subject B's workplace.

It should be noted these two should not have known each other at all.

2: Subject A falls asleep on the job, establishment burns down. Subject A flees and finds stockpile. Subject B fires a nuclear bomb at his neighbor to threaten the arsonist who burned down the establishment. Subject A is transported to an unknown location for approximately 7 hours, before Lower Mirrold shifts again and any further events cease.

We have reason to believe whatever's been happening here is still happening now, but we have been too occupied with everything else we can't be certain.

--Core of Corruption: Corrupti--

Not much is known of Corrupti, other than Sally currently resides there and controls the Corrupted from it's core. It rose from Lower Mirrold some time after the event above had ceased. We don't know what to do about it, all we know is that it's ruining everything we worked so hard to achieve, and that we must end it... But we do not know how.

------------------------------------------------------------

A few closing statements...

Firstly, I have been informed the Creator has documented the Lower Mirrold events mentioned above. I haven't been told where, though. Just that it's "On my tube", or something. If you happen to figure something out there, that would be helpful.

Second, I'm not completely certain the Creator has fully gotten over what happened with his relationship. I don't know if that's why he seems to be reluctant to help us, but either way I'm sure he'll figure himself out sooner or later. I hope, anyway.

Good night to you all. I hope you haven't forgotten us.

Oh, and to those of you in bad times, (lookingatyourox) just know your pain doesn't last forever, and all wounds can be healed with help and time. Also, do not try to end your pain early. It will only spreas your pain to others, and, if there is a place after life, give you a worse pain in your ghost.

...Sorry, if I'm being a bit too grim here. I'm in quite a grim mood, unfortunately. I think the Creator is, too.

[katlivesinthewoods]

To Live Will be an Awfully Big Adventure

The gang attempts to make Monster!Devon human again, and Noah is torn up about it.

Time Taken: ~1.5 hours

Word Count: 1243

---

Noah Marshall gripped tightly to his arms crossed over his chest, letting out a shaky breath. He met Devon's bright eyes, gleaming in the dim light of sunset. This was it. The moment she'd been waiting for.

He almost couldn't stand the sight of Devon's human body. It had been nearly completely restored after the four years she had been buried, all thanks to the spells within the ancient tome Ava Cunningham had found in the long-abandoned house in the woods. However, if one looked close enough, there were still some telltale signs that her body wasn't fully healed.

Devon, too, seemed distraught, even in her ghostly form. Noah couldn't imagine how mentally taxing it would be to see his own body lying dead on the forest floor, how utterly peculiar it would be to stand outside of himself like an onlooker as he was raised from the dead.

A hand clasped Noah's shoulder, startling him and grabbing his attention away from both of Devon's forms. The hand belonged to Lucas Thomas, standing beside him with a reassuring smile. Lily Ortiz stood on Lucas' other side, appearing more sure of herself than Noah had ever seen.

"It's going to work," she said, though Noah wasn't fully convinced. He nodded anyway before striding away so no one could see the tears growing in his eyes. What if the ritual didn't work? What if they went to all that trouble for nothing, and nothing changed? What if it did work and Devon was just a husk, a shell of who she once was? Or what if it backfired horribly, and both iterations were lost forever?

Noah willed away the tears in his eyes as he shoved his hands into his pockets. His chest tensed when he was met only by soft fabric rather than the hard plastic of his lighter and the box of cigarettes he was used to, but the anxiety quickly faded into a wistful smile. Devon insisted that she wouldn't go through with the ritual until he quit smoking.

The looked around the clearing as the full moon rose above the treetops - soon enough it would be midnight and the ritual could take place. All around the clearing, his old friend group was getting into position. Andy Kang, Dan Pierce, and Stacy Green were setting up the various artifacts they needed while Ava, Lily, and Lucas pored over the tome. Sure, Lily was clearly clenching her fists to avoid trembling, and Andy kept nervously glancing over his shoulder for any signs of malicious wildlife, but such was expected after all the trauma their group had faced four years prior.

It was so simultaneously strange yet heartwarming to see them all back together again, banding together to bring back the very person who'd brought them together in the first place. None of it would've happened without Harper Vance's encouragement the previous summer. If the ritual worked, Noah and Devon would have to go to Pine Springs together for real sometime. After the short adventure they'd had there, and his own cross-country - rather, cross-continent - adventure he'd had while he was on the run, Noah was itching to travel some more. He'd grown tired of racing from place to place in order to evade the police, but with his name cleared and Devon at his side, he couldn't really imagine doing anything else.

As the last few moments before the moon reached its apex dwindled, Noah approached Devon.

"No matter what happens, I love you," he said, looking directly into her glowing blue eyes. Devon seemed to brighten, smiling as best she could in her ghostly form.

"Love you... too..." she replied, and Noah nearly started crying again.

"Noah, it's time," Ava said, stepping forward with Lucas and Lily while the others all stood back. Nodding, Noah rubbed at his eyes, adjusted his beanie, and stood at the edge of the clearing with Stacy, Andy, and Dan. The former football player offered him a comforting smile and put a hand on his shoulder, not needing to say anything for the message to get across. Noah couldn't count the times since they'd started talking again that Dan had listened patiently to his worries while he broke down in his kitchen.

Midnight struck, and the ritual began. Noah couldn't bring himself to watch. It hurt too much. He turned and stormed off into the woods until he couldn't hear his friends' chanting voices, speaking in tongues about tethering body and soul. To his relief, no one followed him. They knew what he'd gone through to be there.

When he felt he was far enough away, Noah suck down against a large oak tree and broke down into sobs. He couldn't let himself wonder what would happen. He so desperately wanted the ritual to work, but there were s many odds against it - too many. It was pretty much impossible. Why had he been so insistent on trying? And why had Devon agreed?

It felt as though hours had passed by the time Noah finally stopped crying, not of his own volition but because he simply didn't have any tears left. He let his head fall back against the tree and breathed deeply, taking in the crisp nighttime air, silencing every noise around him and simply breathing. His moment of peace was disturbed when a voice from the depths of his memory broke the silence.

"Hey, there."

Noah scrambled to his feet, the tears he thought he'd run out of quickly replenishing. He took another deep breath before turning to see her. She looked worse for wear, but it was her, though through magic they'd managed to have her body reflect her spirit's age. Even though she appeared a bit older, her eyes still had that same glint of mischief, and her hair still appeared shiny in the moonlight despite the grime of the forest floor embedded in it. She stumbled toward him and he rushed to help her, though even though her steps were shaky she was still as confident as ever. As soon as he'd helped her stand against a study tree, he dared to touch her cheek, still unsure if she was just an illusion.

"Devon... I-I can't believe..."

He struggled to find the words. What could he even say? But Devon knew. She always did.

"Believe it, Noah."

And then Noah did what he'd been too stupid to do before it was too late and kissed her. It was quick but full of everything they weren't able to put into words. Once their lips parted they simply held each other in a bone-crushing embrace, doing little in the way of making up for the years of being unable to physically touch. After what felt like forever, they finally drew back, holding each other at arm's length.

"You can finally live again. We can travel the world together," Noah said after a long moment. Devon cracked a smile.

"I can help you open Baby Jane's."

Noah couldn't help but chuckle, releasing her and giving her a teasing punch. "I guess you can." Devon's smile grew brighter as she spoke again, taking his hand.

"To live will be an awfully big adventure."

Noah Marshall gripped tightly to the hand in his, letting out a shaky breath. He met Devon's bright eyes, gleaming in the dim light of sunrise. This was it. The moment he'd been waiting for.

#choices #play choices #choices it lives in the woods #it lives in the woods #ilitw #ilitw noah #noah marshall #my writing

[pooktales]

Greymane’s Garters

I made up a fake history because ‘Greymane’s Garters’ is so fun to say and imagine. Enjoy!

The Order of the Grey Garter, more popularly known as "Greymane's Garters", has origins comingled in Human myth and legend. It is now considered somewhat ridiculous, as it instantly conjures a mental image of the noble King Greymane of Gilneas, him covered head to toe in white fur as he is in Worgen form, but for some reason wearing a pink-and-gray frilly woman's garter strapped to his leg.

Image: from ebay (only 1 left!)

This, I assure you, Greymane's Garters are not! They are hardly a male Worgen lingerie trend, but an order of noble knights and also so much more. Firstly, female Worgen find themselves members of this ancient order as well. Secondly, the garter is only a symbol--today it is often worn around the arm at ceremony or as a badge, a flat pink-and-gray belt coiled in a hoop and showing its buckle, that it was once considered part of suit of armor to help keep plate buckled over the legs. Only attend a Greymane's Garters initiation and see for yourself and you can be assured of this. The members proudly wear very little but their fur, to show they have at least embraced their Worgen side (this is a subject of contention even within this royal order, but they at least agree fur is alright). So the wearing of yes, admittedly, skimpy clothing to show off fur and the traditional garter around the leg is a thing. But if it is not buckled around the leg, then it goes proudly on the arm above the bicep, or on a cape--it may look strange indeed to the unschooled, but it is an honorable form of dress. Greymane’s Garters are not 'furries in SM gear' whatever the modern youth mean by that. A Greymane's Garter would maw you and strap you to a pole or a bedframe or some other handy torture device if they ever heard you calling their order a low-key furry headcanon, never that.

Military History

The order was first formed in the Second War. Under pressure to conform to the standards and military norms of the Alliance of Lordaeron, Gilnean leadership made a pledge that they would stay a distinct force as far as they could, focused solely on the political advantage of their own kingdom. As such, they felt a need to distinguish their military leaders on the battlefield with a brand that could not be overtaken by the blue and gold Alliance regalia. Their other goal was to remind their soldiers that their home kingdom, Gilneas, should always be the priority. Of course, this manifested itself in only a token support force sent to aid the Alliance at that time, all of them good-looking men in excellent polished plate, saying things like 'What ho!' and also 'Get gabbin' or get goin!' which were practiced phrases to deflect accountability. They made it subtly clear that they were only interested in doing those tasks for the Alliance that would further Gilnean interests. And they defiantly wore their pink, gray and white garters high up their thighs. The grey garter became an emblem of their stalwart resistance to Alliance assimilation. The effort was a great success from the Gilnean perspective. Not long after the first Greymane's Garters arrived in Lordaeron, the Alliance despaired at them, actually, and didn't prod the Gilnean King for any more his "help". And then the Greymane’s Garters went back home after the conflict and eventually the Gilnean wall went up too, which certain Alliance leaders were pretty relieved for, even if they couldn’t say it. The wall also had the effect of ‘keeping it over on their side’.

Mythical Origins

The more mythical origins of the Greymane’s Garters involve a magical Grey Lady who walked out of the Emerald Dream one evening in the forests of Gilneas, accompanied by gray feydragons. Everything she touched turned into a gray mist. A knight set out to slay her, believing she was a witch, but instead, she mesmerized him and inspired him to gather his fellow knights to return to her and perform a great task that would, she said 'Make little sense now, but will mean everything to saving your kin' in the far future. They Great Grey Knight then returned to the mists as the Grey Lady bade him, with three axemen, five lancers, and twenty-six cavalry men. And then, standing in a circle, she gave them all the garters of their order to wear, attaching them to their legs and buckling each to cinch proud and tight. And then she showed them a traditional dance. It was the gray dance of death that much empahsized squats and lunges with the legs, later used to train King Greymane's personal guard for ages, who one day kept him alive during the conflict with Sylvanas.

Competing accounts say the first Greymane’s Garters never learned a fighting technique, but they did serve her special gray ritual wine made from special silver grapes. And she made them grill her delicious capon and venison for supper. In exchange for that, what she taught the knights was how to create a 'Grey Garter', a special kind of powdered sugar dough dessert that is made in loops of pastry. This sparkling gray dough dessert was passed down in the Gilnean court and would still be cooked today if not for the disruption, again, of Sylvanas laying waste to Gilneas.

Modern Findings

Today, historians cannot find any real evidence connecting the myth of the Grey Lady to the military dance of Greymane's personal guard. (If it can even be considered a dance.) Nor can they say with confidence that a legend of that era really would be an elaborate way to convey a few cooking recipes involving gray food. Most recent research makes a more practical suggestion as to the actual events concerning the Grey Lady. That is, the knights soon discovered the Grey Lady was in fact a witch, or at least a very strange woman with the skill of a pressure salesman and a lot of mist handy where she happened to live in the forest. She clearly had a thing for knights wearing garters so halfway through their weird dinner-date, the men who weren't drunk and drugged off their feet got together and slayed her. They vowed, there and then, to come up with a better story for what happened and be 'reborn in blood'. From there on, the 'grey garter' story became a joke among the Gilnean nobility descended from these surviving knights, and when an opportunity eventually came up during the Second War to give the Alliance of Lordaeron the proverbial middle finger for making them provide aid against the Orcs, the Gilnean nobility reached back for the 'grey garters' story, layered some more meaning in it, and then made it a part official military dress. As an in-joke among the Gilnean crusty uppercrust. The rest, as they say, is history.

Motto

The motto "reborn from blood" has passed into common parlance of course, though many Gilneans may not even realize it. One often meets a Gilnean or a Worgen who, thinking of the turmoil their people have endured, make the remark that Gilneas will be reborn from the blood of their enemies. This derives from none other than the Greymane’s Garters.

Source: wish.com

The Ribbon

As you can see, the ribbon itself has changed over time. First, in the era of the Grey Lady myth, it was a very tribal-looking chevron in white, pink and gray colors. Later, it was a bold pink-and-gray plaid. Even later, due to lack of resources and the loss of the kingdom to Sylvanas' forces, it was mainly the sort of spider's silk, large swaths of pink ribbon were easier to come by in Darnassus where most Gilnean refugees settled.

The pink color of the Darnassian iteration (also referred to as the Gilnean diaspora, so show some respect) isn't "girly" as some consider it. First of all, pink is a color, it doesn't “belong” to anyone. Second of all, the whole thing was going to be abandoned when the order was re-formed after the fall of Gilneas recently, but many of the prouder Worgen members insisted it was also the color of roses, or raw meat or flesh, which connects back to that side of the Gilnean experience. Gray connects back with Greymane and white is the color of a new moon, of hope, of Greymane's own fur hide. So they keep all the colors, pink, gray and white, intermingled whether in the traditional plaid pattern or the primal, very bold chevron that can be easily seen strapped to a Gilnean's leg across the battlefield. Or, yes. In frilly Darnassian pink if that's what's available.

Notable Members of Greymane's Garters

King Archibald Greymane

King Genn Greymane (current sovereign)

Princess Tess Greymane

Queen Mia Greymane

Lord Darius Crowley

Lorna Crowley

Lord Vincent Godfrey (posthumously stripped of rank due to treason)

Speculation

It is rumored that King Anduin Wrynn has been offered a place in the Greymane’s Garters (with a special exception made for his devotion to Stormwind of course). However, Greymane is most likely still awaiting confirmation that Anduin will accept. Undoubtedly he will, of course! Anduin’s biggest reservation is said to be ‘Wait, aren’t those guys a furry group that wears underwear on the outside? This is for real?’ Though SI: 7 refuses to comment on whether the the young king actually said this. It may be that Genn is waiting for Anduin to mature some more before offering Greymane’s Garter again. Or, it may be that other rumors are true, that Anduin is prepared to make his own royal order of garter-wearing knights if he has to, to get out of wearing fancy underwear given to him by Greymane.

Because, of course, two garters on both of Anduin’s legs, ontop of his armor? One leg pink and the other blue? That would look completely ridiculous and anyone would obviously agree.

Unless you are a proud member of Greymane’s Garters that is!!

-fin-

#warcraft #worgen #genn greymane #gilneas

[tom-at-the-farm]

@tomerkapon tagged me in the Top 7 Albums Nightmare Challenge, and I tried. Basically I love approximately 5 million albums across many languages, but I tried to pick the most representative ones? As best I could. In no order:

1. Nirvana, Nevermind - sure, there are other Nirvana albums that are great, but this one is significant because it’s the first one I encountered and Teenage Me was shook! Definitely the first album I ever heard where I didn’t want to skip a single song. Also, I know now everyone and their mother loves Kurt Cobain, but I want to put it out there that I loved him in the early aughts when it was no longer cool to love him, and way before it became cool to love him again. He was just really important to young girls who liked rock, and whose rock scene consisted of misogynist nu metal.

2. Hole, Live Through This - again, Hole and Courtney Love had many other bangers, but this was such an eye-opening album for angry teenage girls who were taught to hate themselves and to indulge the “Courtney killed Kurt” delusion. Oh, did she? Good for her. “What do you do with a revolutioooonnnnnn?!”

3. Kanye, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy - Too bad this dude went nuts in a really ugly way, right? His discography up to and including Yeezus was art, though, and this album is the highlight imo. Also, lest we forget, it gave the world Nicki’s verse on “Monster”

4. Orville Peck, Pony - this is the most recent entry on the list but obviously my gay cowboy boyfriend with a voice of angels, honey and sunshine had to be on it. Like Nevermind, first album in literal years that I listened to from start to finish, wanting to discard nothing. Also, not to make a thousand people unfollow me, but every time I see some child be like, “Oh I just listened to Orville Peck, I guess I no longer hate country,” my brain bleeds. I think what he does is very relevant to contemporary country and it’s a unique and skillful performance, but also he’s basically Lana del Rey in sexy leather chaps. I don’t love him because he did anything revolutionary to country music, certainly nothing that Brandi Carlile or Melissa Ethridge or even straight ol’ Johnny Cash didn’t already do. I love him because his songs are sad and sexy and sweet and his voice is smooth and beautiful, and also the gay theatrics of it all.

5. Florence + the Machine, Lungs - I mean, her voice sends chills down my spine and this was where it began. It’s peak Forest Hag aesthetic woven together with so much raw talent. Like what is even the point of Hozier’s entire discography when “Cosmic Love” already exists?

6. Sleater-Kinney, Dig Me Out - Whatever, so I saw them many, many times and I met them twice; big deal that Corin Tucker is the literal mother of my babies. Anyway, SK is the definition of riot grrrl. Imagine Dead Kennedys but all female and actually good? Fucking queens

7. I put down Johnny Cash’s American IV: The Man Comes Around because it’s the best of the American albums, and also the last one before he died. Do I have to explain Johnny Cash in any of his iterations? I’m not going to.

If this list went up to at least 9 I would have included Nick Cave and The Pogues, but this is a cruel, short list.

I’m tagging @hereisyourlove @tabitharuthwexler @ana-matopoeia @timotay-chalamet @chailame @mightiermarvel @helloblockbutton @riverofmolecules @brainsludgemissives @feu-follet @bakedbrielarson and anyone else who wants to do it

#music

[coffeeandcalligraphy]

Witness State & Coup de Grâce | Feeding Habits Update #3

Hey People of Earth!

Before we get into this update, TRIGGER WARNING that this chapter discusses attempted suicide, mental health issues, animal cruelty, toxic relationships, and some nods to starvation, so if these are topics you’re sensitive about, I would skip out on this update!

This chapter was a slight nightmare to draft as it went through many, many iterations due to a real struggle to attain the desired emotional arc, and also because of a few logistical problems. In total, it’s about two and a half months of work as it combines some scenes from the old chapter two while also patching areas I cut with new content. Despite the difficulties, I am so happy I pushed through because the final product is quite strong. Here’s a scene breakdown:

Scene A:

We start at the “beautiful place” AKA the cove Lonan and Eliza frequently visit. The last time we’ve seen Lonan was at the end of chapter two, when he had his mild “public freakout moment” on the steps of a cathedral. 

On the beach, he rests on the shoreline while reflecting on all the things he’s been tormented by since chapter two (wicked children, fathers, parenthood etc).

He sees an illusion of his father who is obviously not there (he’s very dead!) which propels him to converse about him with Eliza (remembering that Eliza and Lonan’s father were once romantically involved).

This conversation goes south as Lonan is able to unpiece some of Eliza’s mistruths until Lonan finally admits he wants to see his father again, insisting he’s still “alive” through the darkroom abandoned in Oregon him and Harrison failed to destroy in ch. 1 of Moth Work.

Scene B:

Lonan watches a moth through the window (that moth motif tho). Here he recounts what occurred at the hospital in ch. 2--the mother and her three kids taking him there, and then eventually being whisked away by Eliza.

Lonan heads to the kitchen to drink an acetaminophen but quickly realizes he’s not alone in the main apartment. His father sits on the couch looking over photo albums, each leaf holding the same photo: the postcard of Eliza that Harrison initially finds in chapter one of Moth Work. This vision obviously does not exist and is prompted by sleep deprivation but he doesn't know that lol.

Seeing this photo and his father prompt him to believe that he can only get away from this feeling of being haunted without Eliza in his life and further bad decisions ensue which I won’t get into!

I explained the meaning of the title HERE.

Excerpts:

Here’s the opening bit which is the most recent addition to the chapter:

The water is never murky, but today it doesn’t sparkle. Like it’s taken a low dose of cyan, it foams pale against the shore, an offering that wets the tips of Lonan’s shoes. He sits under the cove with one hand pressed into the current, each singular wave like a finger tottering over his veins. Today, their beautiful place is only an arched wall of stones and roily ocean.

Eliza is sunbathing. She lies on her back in the centre of the cove, where its mouth opens to a ceiling of sun. On the drive from the hospital, they both remained silent, Eliza’s hands taut like leather around the steering wheel, and Lonan’s head soldered to the cool window. Even when she pulled into the lot of a diner, named after a vague Canadian city or perennial flower, she said nothing, exiting the car to return to it with two crayon-coloured slushies, his red, hers orange. By the time she pulled up to the beach, her drink was half empty, his fully melted, urging against the brim of the cup. He followed her when she exited the car, parked against a row of pebbles, and placed his hand palm-first against the water the moment she lay against the sand and closed her eyes. Now, water puckers over the shoreline and between each of his fingers, a sort of absent massage. The water is a dull, vitamin-like blue. Warmer than he’s expected for the middle of February, pleasantly pruning his fingertips.

This is a direct continuation of that:

The sun has started to set. It flares against the horizon, its orange singeing the water’s blue. Like in front of the church, it fills him, its heat a comfortable grip around his throat. Though it should remind him to keep awake, its warmth lulls him closer to the sand until he rests his head just where the water laps. He knows it says nothing. He knows he has not slept in days. But to him, its rays nurse his skin like the loop of a nursery rhyme, and when he is parallel to the sky, he closes his eyes and welcomes the sun like it’s an infection. As colours pulse underneath his eyelids, water soaks the crown of his head, and it truly is like being buried at sea, just him, the sun, and the water at his perimeter.

The next chapter in this update is chapter four, aka Coup de Grace. This chapter was an absolute joy to write after struggling to get a handle on chapters two and three, and I’d consider writing this chapter to be, by far, the best writing sessions of my life. In this chapter I feel I really figured out the “crux” of Lonan’s character/his darkest secret, and that’s essentially that he believes all children are the wicked stems of adults, a belief he actually doesn't want to have, and actively combats until he sort of becomes absorbed by it. I learned a lot about my boy in this chapter and learning such important details about a character I’ve been writing for five years feels like a gift!

This chapter plays with form/the timeline a bit because we jump around on the timeline, almost like a movie that begins at the end. This was difficult to do in fiction, but I think I pulled it off, and am really happy with the chapter. Bear with me tho as this breakdown may be confusing:

Scene A:

We start with Lonan rapidly making his way to his father’s darkroom which sits in the middle of a forest. He’s brought supplies with him to destroy it.

The first line of this chapter mimics the first line of Moth Work, which you’ll see below.

Scene B:

We jump back in the fictive past to the morning that would’ve occurred right after the end of chapter three. Lonan goes about his morning routine but is disrupted by a loud thud from outside. Anya, the woman he’s befriended from chapter two, has jumped from the roof of the apartment complex. This attempt is unsuccessful.

His first reaction is to run to Anya’s apartment to see if her son, Joey, is okay. 

Scene C:

Less of a scene and more of an internal monologue of Lonan reflecting on Anya’s attempted suicide, and that he feels in some ways, she’s administered her own “death blow”.

Scene D:

Eliza takes Lonan to his father’s cabin to “get him away” from what’s happening at the apartment since he’s really taking the news badly.

Eliza tries to get Lonan to eat something because he hasn’t eaten much since Anya’s news, and they have a conversation about Eliza’s motives in volunteering Lonan to help Anya in the first place.

Scene E:

A flashback where 14-year-old Lonan and his father are at the cabin, about to kill a fish using the ikejime method. His father has informed him the fish is dead, but Lonan knows this is very much a lie.

Scene F:

The fictive present, where Lonan lies on a couch inside the cabin, Eliza tending to a fire. He has a bad feeling (he’s right about that lol)

Scene A2:

We continue the events from scene A as Lonan enters the darkroom, only to find out it’s been cleared out save for three pictures hanging that tell a story and reveals a lot of Eliza’s secrets.

All you need to know about these photos is that it makes their romance feel somewhat like a lie lol.

Eliza finds him at the darkroom despite telling him not to go alone, and Lonan tries to process the new info/secrets revealed.

Scene G:

In the fictive present, Eliza cuts off Lonan’s hair and together they burn each weft. They discuss a few things (his father, the women he’s befriended, future children, mating habits of the praying mantis)

Scene E2:

Back to the flashback where Lonan and his father have killed, cleaned, and eaten the fish. They rinse their hands off in the lake before his father knocks them both into the water.

Excerpts:

This is the opening, ft. the mirroring first line which makes me a lil too giddy:

The darkroom isn’t haunted, but a dead man owns it—and he knows exactly where to find him. Through the woods, Lonan brushes past bushes of gooseberries and wild rhubarb, a gas can sloshing rhythmically in his hands. In his teeth, he holds his flashlight so its beam brightens the pathway. It is not yet dawn.

This is a description of the darkroom that leads to the end of the scene:

He shouldn’t know where he’s going. The forest is so dense and unanimous, a duplication of itself, nothing more than repetitions of the same tree, same flower, same stream. But he doesn’t need to see to know where his feet take him—he doesn’t even need the flashlight. He’s memorized the direction to the darkroom like the pattern of veins on his own arm.

He is not surprised to see it still stands. As if protected from rain, thunderstorms, the fallen trees that crisscross at the walkway; it’s always been a divine place. The air is damp, and particles of mist cling to his throat.

He sets the gas can in front of the steel panelling that makes the door with urgency. He does not need to rush but cannot take his time.

Wildflowers burst from in between the cracks of concrete the shed sits on and he knows each species like they’ve been bred in his blood. Wax flowers, thistles, clusters of asters he’d sometimes gather as a boy and leave as offerings in the heart of the forest’s most prominent clearings, like an offering, or a ransom.

Lonan kneels once the first thread of sunlight leaks between the whisper of trees. He is familiar with this forest, the cabin not too far away, the messages the water speaks to him when he sits at its edge most nights, why the darkroom was his father’s favourite place and why it always will be. So when sunlight hits his eyes, he presses his fingertips against his lips, and looks to the sky for mercy.

Lonan watching his fave TV show that leads into Anya’s jump:

He turned the television onto its usual program while on his last three mandarin segments and looked on as a herd of caribou dotted a waterway. They moved like the current, pattering along the prairie, worriless. He should have heard the part where a wolf caught up to the herd, the same wolf that would later go on to single out a young fawn and silence it with two teeth in its throat like bullet wounds. He should have seen the part where the prey was consumed, its flesh a desperate shade of red. But the thud distracted him. Maybe not even a thud, more like a crash. A sound he felt in his temples, a ringing in his ear, like a chickadee. Lonan set the skin of the mandarin onto the coffee table and stood slowly. It’s his body that moved him, no force of the mind, toward the balcony. In one movement, he unlocked and shoved open the glass sliding door, rucking it forward with his body weight when it stuck. On his lip, he tasted citrus and salt, a mixture of fruit and sweat.

He heard death before he saw it. The way each identical sliding door of the apartment units around him shook open, just like his. What a woman on the sidewalk declared, her tone so shrill, he couldn’t tell if she was delighted or horrified, something like, “I thought she was a bird—I thought she was a gift from heaven.” The garbled sound of an infant, confused by the sound concrete makes when a human batters it.

We get Lonan’s first response and some Joey and *that stunning motif tho*:

Lonan did not deescalate the stairs to the ground floor to join the growing crowd. He did not call an ambulance or rush to perform CPR. He ran upward, scaling flights of stairs as if airborne, with little effort. Once he reached her unit, it was the tin of madeleines he noticed first, sitting unopened, untouched, dare he thought, neglected on her welcome mat. It’s this that lulled him, freezing him in place for a moment. He recollected nothing of bringing the madeleines to her the evening previous, of leaving them neatly tucked against her straw welcome mat. Innocently idle there, his gift unrecognized.

Joey sat on the couch. The television was on, projecting technicolor polygons onto the boy’s face. Lonan did not register what it was he watched, which animated shapes pounced and danced on screen. Joey did not cry at first. He sat, staring wondrously at the screen like it was a trap door to a different dimension. The socks secured around his miniature feet looked freshly ironed, and his hair smelled like his mother did when Lonan first met her—like coconuts.

The buzzing of onlookers and neighbours sounded like the caribou running. A constant drumming of a snare, a guttural kind of ambience. He thought of Anya the day previous, her desperate excitement to paint over the wall, the way she mixed that orange juice drink, incredulous, experienced. He thought of the sourdough he never picked up, and there on the counter they sat, one torn down the middle like it was ripped bare-handed, the other skewered with a chef’s knife. He thought of Anya’s hospitality, her coy excuses to help them both avoid embarrassment, the way each part of her apartment transformed into gold. He thought of their conversation, Anya’s initial instruction when she left him alone with her son. So when Joey cried, Lonan knew exactly to reach for the remote and tick the volume up until his sobbing quieted, like the last few minutes of a rainstorm, passionately loud, then stunningly silent.

Here we briefly reference 2 Kings 21:6: “And he burned his son as an offering and used fortune-telling and omens and dealt with mediums and with necromancers. He did much evil in the sight of the Lord, provoking him to anger.”

Anya will never be the mother she once was, in the capacity she longed to be. Joey will grow up without a father and with a mother who cannot mother him in the ways she’d always hoped; he’ll have no one to recreate. That is the real loss—what could have been. Anya burned herself into an offering, administered her own kill shot, provoked her own fate; either life or death, and her fate chose neither.

The following mirrors something Lonan’s sister, Reeve, says in Houses With Teeth about hunger:

The day Anya jumped from her balcony onto the sidewalk below, Eliza took Lonan to his father’s cabin. In a daze, he watched her pack a bag with enough things to tide them over for a month, and in that same daze, they reached the cabin before sunset. That night, Eliza rifled through the cabinets to put together a meal, and her findings assembled as a can of tuna topped with crumbles of saltines—cheap take on a deconstructed pâté.

She served him his dinner on a set of plates he vaguely recognized—terrazzo with a scalloped edge, maybe held a scrambled egg or halved tomato when he was a child. He stared through the French doors, down to the water that padded below. Even when she tried some for herself, putting on her enjoyment in exclamations like “It’s a culinary masterpiece. Refined. Daring. A little spectacular,” she couldn’t convince him to eat. His appetite disappeared when Anya fell from the sky; there would be no hunger as penance.

This is the fish flashback:

Lonan knows the fish is not dead. He is fourteen but not naïve. Sun warms the back of his neck; maggots shimmer over the gummy slick of the water’s surface. Today is what someone would describe as the perfect day. Trees whisper secrets amongst the spines of their leaves. Birds teeter on the neck of birch trees. A butterfly dusts its wings of the shore’s sand and nips at his childish knuckles.

The fish is not dead. This is fact. In his palm, it expands, its gills like the crescent cut of the moon. The fish is not dead. Its mouth kisses the air like it’s a divine thing, each blip of its lips greedy, like the air tastes of gold. The fish is not dead. Its scales grate against Lonan’s palms, shimmering, its prettiness its last defense mechanism. The fish is not dead.

More with this fish memory:

“It’s dead. It does not even know the taste of life. Why save it?”

“I don’t want to save it,” Lonan says. His father’s wedding band digs into his forehead. To an onlooker, it may look like he’s about to dip him forward into the water, not a drowning, but a baptism.

“What do you want to do with it?”

Mourn it, he wants to say. Pity it. Sacrifice it.

The water whistles ahead of them, all the uncaught sunfish gloriously slashing naively in the water. They are unaware of their future demise, and the current demise of their loved ones, bodies all piled into the net as if on display. Lonan’s eyes sting with lake water, a streak of it dripping onto his lip so when his father reaches over him and secures his hand like a marionette around the screwdriver, he tastes salt and doesn’t stop tasting it.

And the end of part A of the fish memory that gets a little gory:

“It dies for us,” his father says, his voice dampened, like the distant blip of the lake. “So we give it mercy in return.”

As the screwdriver’s tip lowers closer to the fish, Lonan licks his top lip and asks, “Why do we need to show it mercy if it’s already dead?”

“Le coup de grâce. A death blow. To end the suffering of the wounded.”

“But it’s already dead.”

“Even the dead still suffer.”

Lonan does not register when the screwdriver impales the fish’s brain. He does not register when his father uses both their hands to slit the fish’s gills with a hunting knife or register the warm spurting of its blood up their knuckles. He stares at the fish’s glasslike eye, and as he and his father gut and scale the fish, puppet and puppeteer, he imagines the way he’ll feel with its head in his mouth.

Here’s a section from the fictive present:

Seven days after Anya jumps off her apartment’s balcony, Lonan lies on a pig’s leather couch his father once towed in from the city, a damp washcloth doused in eucalyptus essential oil pressed to his forehead.

At first, he fears the blinking comes from stars and that the cabin’s roof has been removed. But as he comes to, he smells it, the earthy crack of wood, the wisp of smoke, and he knows the light that pulses is a fire.

Lonan opens his eyes. As he’s thought, he lies on his father’s couch, essenced water dribbling down his temples from the washcloth. Eliza sits hunched on the stone of the fireplace’s ledge, her shoulders ripening under the orange heat. She’s burning something. The scent of scorched film is not unfamiliar to him. Like his mouth, it is dry and acrid, like the lick of a battery.

“You promised,” she says, as if sensing he’s awoken. Lonan does not move, even as the eucalyptus soak drizzles into his eyes.

Eliza no longer wears the parka. She’s stripped to a pearl-coloured camisole, her feet bare and propped flush against the brick. Glossy red lacquer colours her toenails, reflects the light in ovular patterns along its surface.

“A false witness shall be punished, and a liar shall be caught,” she says. “Proverbs.”

Going to leave this tea here casually:

The darkroom was misplaced. This was Lonan’s first thought when he yanked open its steel panel door and entered to reveal its contents. He did not need the glimmer of a flashlight to confirm his instinct. This was not the same darkroom he’d known as a child, or the darkroom he found his sister in, or the darkroom him and Harrison tried to destroy. Everything was slotted away, puzzled back into a configuration so unknown to him, so wrong to him, that the organization felt more like war.

Unlike when he and Harrison had last stepped foot inside of the darkroom, lugging the gas can along with them, not unlike what he did then, the photos that used to string clothespinned in no justifiable order were now taken down. The bricks of photo paper forming a maze around the developing tables, the amber bottles of chemicals—all of it, meticulously put back in places Lonan knew they never had. Under his boots, he did not feel the crunch of glass or slip of forgotten negatives. The darkroom had been swept clean.

Lonan dropped the gas can at the darkroom’s entrance, and removed the flashlight from between his teeth, thumbing it off. He worked his way around the shed like he’d been wounded, staggering, stopping to hold himself upright. Nothing was in its rightful chaos. Expired film lay stacked in a waste bin he’d never seen before. Bad paper cuts had been shredded. The photos he’d been so accustomed to not looking at, all gone, except for three, evenly clipped on the last three lines.

In the distance, an eagle cawed. The stream trilled. Tadpoles cricketed along the embankment.

Lonan approached the remaining photographs like they’d electrocute him. They were displayed one after the other, each on its own line. The first, a picture not unfamiliar to him. Eliza standing in front of a colourful street of vendors. Her loopy signature on the back a jagged indication of where she signed it, most likely wobbling on a train, or in the back of a taxi. He picked it off its clothespin and held it up to a hole in the roof where sun bled through. Nothing had changed from the photo since he’d taken it last year, and he was almost grateful she’d left it fossilized when she took it from his pocket. His gratitude did not last by the time he saw the second photo, so unexpected, he had to glance twice.

His father stood arced slightly behind him, his hands not visible. Lonan knew where they were—one secured around his forehead, the next urging a screwdriver up a stone. Sun scalded the water’s surface, wrinkled it with light. He remembered the song his father whistled as he fried the sunfish on a birch branch, truly less of a song and more of a reminder as he hummed up and down each minor scale, not once stopping to check his work, like he knew better than any instrument.

Lonan plucked the photograph off the line and held it closer. Though he was shaded mostly by his father’s back, he knew they were both in it. He shouldn’t have been surprised when he turned it over to find that same looping signature inked onto the back, smudged, like she’d forgotten to let the ink dry before handling.

It would’ve been easier to think about the second photo’s implications had he not seen the third. He could’ve excused it—a shot taken by a neighbour, though the cabin was remote. A shot that fired itself, the camera discarded on the ground, though it was taken at eye level. A shot signed with familiar initials E.L.K, as if those letters could stand for anything but Eliza Louise Kiang. It would’ve been easier to excuse her presence. To excuse her knowledge of him, to forget she’d ever told him she didn’t know his father had children, that she swore she’d never have been with him had someone informed her. It would’ve been so much easier.

The last photo was not a photo at all, not in the same capacity at least. The ink had gone purplish from the elements but swirled, almost horror-like around the photo’s frame. He could have pretended the white swishes of colour were strands of lace, or the awkward scratch of photo blur. He could’ve pretended to not understand. But there it was. The light funnelling down on the black and white shape so he understood it was not a photograph he looked at, but a child.

I have already shared this line a few times, but it’s my favourite thing I’ve ever written oops!:

When she looked at him, she grinned, and he turned his face to the ceiling where a hole in the roof caved around a branch. The sun’s eye disappeared behind the bullet of the wood, leaving only its outer edges to skirt the sky, a veiling that felt less like an eclipse, and more like evidence of an exit wound. 

Obligatory “I’m the grass” shoutout:

“All people are like grass, and all their faithfulness is like the flowers of the field,” he says without once reading what’s actually written on the page. “Isaiah.”

“Isaiah was onto something, don’t you think? Poor grass, poor flowers—they all die in the end, but they have their God. They have their saviour. Everything dying except for God and his word.”

Eliza cuts another clump of hair. The fire welcomes its feed with haste.

“What does this have to do with children?”

“Do you feel you’re the God of these women, Lonan? Are you their saviour?”

Lonan shakes his head. “I’m the grass.”

And to finish:

After they eat the fish, Lonan and his father rinse their hands in the lake. This is respect. This is self-ordinance. This is a holy act.

His father stoops farther into the stream than he does, water nipping his knees. The sun has disappeared beyond the horizon, the sky now coloured periwinkle, silvering his hair. The taste of sunfish coddles Lonan’s tongue, oiled and briny with saltwater. They share a bar of orange glycerin soap, its scent cloying, like a rotting fruit basket. His father peels the bar between his palms, scrubbing until his fingers disappear under suds.

That’s it for this update! Hope y’all enjoyed! :) I’ll be back soon to update on chapter 5!

--Rachel

#writing #amwriting #writeblr #writerblr #writingupdates #fostered #mothwork #feedinghabits

[0poole]

Bloons

Honestly the entire Bloons series has been some of my favorite flash/other-than-flash games out there, and I feel like it’s worth bringing it up since I just crossed the 365 day threshold for BTD6. Maybe in the past, but nowadays I definitely don’t feel like I ever play a game daily for a year straight. Chances are it was a little desperate when I first started playing, but as of now literally every single day I open the game up and play the daily challenge just for the sake of it. Plus, since the chest technically resets every 9 hours or so instead of 24, I could’ve cheesed it a bit, but I didn’t. That’s a pure 365 days of playing the game.

And even apart from that, the entire Bloons series has been in my mind since the first one and my middle/elementary school Coolmath Games days. Even though the puzzle, pure form of Bloons wasn’t as much in my interest, the staying power of the Tower Defense version is crazy. Flash Tower Defense games are plenty, and yet the one with the stupid monkeys throwing darts at balloons was the best.

I went back semi-recently and played a round of each BTD, and I gotta say, it was fun seeing where everything came from. 1 is absolute garbage, forcing you to just spam Super Monkeys if you want to get anywhere, but a good starting point obviously. I honestly know nothing about the people creating these games, but obviously it wasn’t made by a AAA crew, so you can’t expect everything to be put in place in the first iteration. 2 and 3 feel much better, but obviously not much after being so used to the modern stuff, and 4 and 5 are the ones that really shine the most, apart from 6 obviously.

I definitely was one of the types of people who initially reacted poorly to the artstyle change of 5 and 6, but I’ve definitely turned over. I don’t know if the whole BTD community rioted at that point, but I at least was like “ew, they’re cute now” when I first saw it. Thankfully I turned over, and realized the current designs are the absolute best out of the entire franchise. Also, I love their cuteness, as I love cuteness in general, so basically just call it character growth. Even though 2D art always is more interesting for games than 3D in general, the entire art direction of 6 is genuinely really good, being so bright and cartoony (at least before the fifth stages of upgrades) really fits the cartoony idea of monkeys popping bloons. 5, and the entire franchise before it, really is proof enough how horrible a pure top-down perspective is. On the title screen, you can see what the monkeys are supposed to look like, but in-game they literally look like weird blobby scorpions. Even though in the back of my mind I knew what they were supposed to look like, the pure top-down perspective completely ruined the image. Not to mention the OG designs for the monkeys was really weird and bad anyway. Even if you wanted a goofy fat kind of monkey, there are a million better ways to achieve that than how it used to be. Again, of course, they weren’t exactly AAA game-level quality, so you can’t expect such perfect character design.

But, oh my god. One of the things about this game that must’ve kept me through 6 was the character designs. If you know anything about me, it’s that I love a good character design, and 6 is full of them. It’s so interesting to see how they extrapolate the main concepts of each tower into their three different paths. The generic Superman-based monkey can turn into a Batman-based monkey, a Terminator-based monkey, and a fucking ancient god of the sun. The seemingly chill Druid can smite people with the power of Zeus, become the much more expected forest-based type, but also turn into this completely out-there being of pure wrath. I could go on and on about that, but needless to say for so many of them look and are designed so great. I think the tower with the coolest level 5s of the game is the Ninja. It’s hard to explain, but they all just look really cool while also not deviating too much from the cartoony-cute art style. I think my all-time favorite level 5 is the top path of the Wizard, mostly just because he looks really cool, but also because the parts of the path before it show him aging and growing out his beard. I also have to say the 2-0-3/4 Wizard also looks exactly my style, with the dark purply-ness and gold rims. Also, if you haven’t noticed, the Magic monkeys are my favorite type, and not just because their signature color is purple. That’s part of it though. Magic is also just cool in general. My main RPG-class of choice is almost always a mage/wizard.

Also, the heroes are also really fun. As someone who often creates species of aliens/monsters, I always feel like I want to create a dedicated character out of them no matter what, so I feel like the heroes are basically just that. And, of course they have good designs too, and of course as you can probably guess my favorite is Adora, basically being the same thing as the 5-0-0 Wizard with the Sun God aesthetic. Since she has her own stage and a special interaction with the True Sun God/Vengeful Monkey, I think she’s a pretty big deal anyway. I will say that I highly slept on Gwen, but then for Easter they gave her the Harlegwen skin and I fell in love. It’s insanely good stuff. Apart from looks, it does feel nice to have some sort of interchangeable tower that you basically just place and forget about, aside from using their powers. Plus, it makes a really easy type of thing to periodically add to the game to keep things fresh, even with the skins in general. It definitely is much better than the stuff they had in 5, where you had to use Monkey Money to buy each one, and you could only use them once per stage. Obviously 6 has the extra powers to help you out, but they feel much more optional and cheaper than the heroes of 5. Since I barely buy anything with Monkey Money to begin with, and since I’ve obviously had 365 chest openings, and AND since I barely use them to begin with, I’m completely stocked up. I only ever use the farmer and sometimes the tech bot if I get lazy. I did use the portable lake I got from my 365th chest opening after I got it, just for the sake of celebration. That’s literally how my mind goes.

6 does have the slight tinge of a mobile game artstyle, but in this case it’s really just better. I’m not into mobile games, and especially not the generic artstyle they have, but it is really pleasing to look at anyway. It did chase me off before I converted, though. That, and the fact you had to buy it now. Like a true gamer, I was put off by the fact that something that was once expected to be free now has to be paid for. But, then, I realized that the entire franchise has provided much more than 10$ worth of entertainment to me throughout time, so it was extremely fair to pay that. It is still kinda weird how 5 has to be paid for for mobile, when it is just free online, though. However, unlike a true gamer I think the microtransactions of the game are extremely fair. Considering they just give you things that you don’t need, and can get for free otherwise, I think it’s completely fine to have them. It sounds bad on the surface to have to pay for the game and have there still be microtransactions in it, but since they’re completely optional there’s no good reason to hate it. I think people assume that means that you have to pay for the game, and pay extra for different major parts of the game, and that sours their opinion on everything. Gamers are a strange, irrationally angry breed. I do hate using my phone for pretty much anything, though, so once I bought 6 on Steam I haven’t played it on my phone since. It’s just so much better in every single way...

I bought the game around the time of one of my family’s semi-annual trips to England because I thought it’d help when we were traveling between wi-fi spots, and it really did wonders for me then. Probably looked like some asshole teen to strangers who don’t know I barely ever use my phone for anything, since I was playing it so much. My sister even saw me playing it and bought it for herself, although I don’t know how much she’s played since then. 

For the sake of stats, I have 235 hours played of it on Steam alone, and in game I’m level 115. My most complete map is Monkey Meadow with all medals except CHIMPS, which I put the effort in because it’s the default map, and definitely not because it’s an easy/good map because it’s just kinda bad compared to so many other ones. My Dart monkey has a total of 4 million XP, and the only towers that haven’t crossed a million are the Ice, Heli, Alchemist, Druid, and Spike factory monkeys/tower. I think the farthest I’ve actually gotten round-wise is 200 once or twice, but I don’t remember if I’ve actually beaten that level and continued on or lost there. I think I might’ve gotten past it once, but just sort of lost interest in micro-managing my powers and let myself lose. I probably got there once after that and lost on it. As someone who didn’t look up the optimal strategies for things until very recently, I think that’s pretty good. It definitely feels like the kind of game where if you know the best strategies, you can literally just replicate that over and over and win really easily, but that just sounds kinda boring. Since I pretty much only do daily challenges nowadays, it forces me to use a limited amount of towers, so I either go much farther because it forces me to build up less towers more, or it makes sure I can’t even pass round 90 because it just was made to get you to round 40 and that’s it. When I have the full range of towers to use, I feel like I try to get the instant satisfaction of getting a new tower to increase DPS instead of making the few towers I have/need reach their full potential, which seems to be the better option. I also don’t really sell anything when I don’t have a limited number of monkeys to place, which I think is also a good strategy if you can eliminate the major money loss in it, since it can give you a massive boost in cash to get you the better upgrades quicker. I may or may not try to learn the strategies to wipe the rest of the game clean eventually, but right now I’m fine with just doing the dailies.

But yeah, that’s like the whole thing with Bloons Tower Defense and me. Something something reject modernity, embrace monke, or whatever the kids these days are saying.

I will say that if I didn’t have so many OCs to work with and could just pump out animated shorts on the reg, I’d love to do some sort of Bloons shorts. They’d all lean into the ridiculousness of it all. Like, the first one could do the 2001 thing with the monkeys learning to use sticks, and as the main one is bashing the ground with one or whatever and throws it up, an ancient, leathery patchwork bloon flies overhead and accidentally bumps the stick such that it lands back on the main monkey’s head, knocking him out. Cue the monkeys around him to go berserk and start throwing other sticks at the ancient bloon, and once they pop it using a sharp stick, they realize what they must do. Cue a long montage of the different stages of war and invention using the monkeys finding better ways to fend off the bloons, with the whole idea being that the monkeys are getting irrationally angry at the bloons, who are just sort of around and not actually sentient, even though they assume they’re malicious because of their history and upbringing. Absolutely no political message in there whatsoever. Just comedy.

Other short ideas could include, for the start of the modern time story, it could be the backstory of some sort of chiseled veteran main character, which would involve a bloon floating into his town, and from the people’s panic someone knocks over a lamp post that sets his town ablaze, only for him and his people to blame the carnage on the bloon, causing his classic edgy character motives for fighting against the bloons. Another, much more golden idea, would be an interrogation scene, where a bunch of monkeys capture a bunch of bloons for interrogation purposes. They’d obviously do the whole “Silent treatment, eh? Well, we have ways of making you talk...” thing, except the “way to make them talk” is to strap them to a wall with one dart guy on one side to systematically pop them to try and extract info. But, of course, it would look and play out exactly like the classic Bloons puzzle game. That’d be the fun part. If not that, then it could be like the classic carnival game that likely inspired the idea of using darts to pop balloons. I really just think this weird world of monkeys and bloons is perfect for some good comedic content. Watching the monkeys severely overreact to the bloons sounds extremely fun, and I’d love to see someone do something with it some day.

#bloons tower defense #btd #6 #poole #rant #rambling #opinions #bloons #ninja kiwi #nk #flash

[felassan]

Tevinter Nights

Major Plot Details & Story Summaries for stories 1, 3 and 5

There are no leaks, these are just available to see in previews.

[spoiler warning for all stories jic, obviously]

Three Trees To Midnight

The opening story is set about one week after the fall of Ventus in Tevinter to the invading Qunari in 9:44 Dragon. (This event was shown in the comic Dragon Age: Deception.) The Qunari invasion is progressing beyond Ventus and moving into Rivain. The Qunari Antaam have attacked the people of the south without the blessing of the other Qunari societal bodies. Consequently, their efforts are somewhat hampered as they are without their usual support-base of workers, healers, craftspeople, spies. Little things are not running as well as they should - supplies are late, ships are not in good repair. The absence of the Ben-Hassrath means that there is nobody to determine which captured bas mages should and should not be given the mind-altering substance qamek, or to measure out the correct doses. The Antaam are taking many prisoners as they go and enslaving them in work-gangs. They are also giving large, mentally-lethal doses of qamek to every single bas mage they capture. Small doses of qamek shackle the mind. Large doses completely break it and leave the recipient effectively lobotomized forever. 

Saarbrak of the Ben-Hassrath posed as a member of the Antaam and went to investigate the rumors he had heard of these actions. The Antaam who took Ventus were not acting in accordance with the Qun. Saarbrak knows that some of the bas now call Qunari monsters as a result. He is disappointed in the Antaam, and believes that it is their actions that truly threaten the Qun. He kills Bas-taar, keeper of bas slaves and work-camp overseer. Bas-taar was a leading figure in the conquering of Ventus.

A few Dalish elves snuck into Ventus as it was being sacked to get information about the Qunari invasion. They succeeded, stealing Qunari plans just as Ventus fell. One of them leaves to quickly get word to the Dalish clans before the Qunari land in Rivain.

We visit Arlathan Forest for the first time. The spirits in there are very old and powerful, remember what once was and can feel the moods and fears of those who enter. The woods are also home to rare entities known as forest guardians, which are large quadrupedal structures made out of wood, stone, runes and lyrium. They have two lethal blade arms which they swing around in combat and may be powered by magic, but it is not clear. They are not usually hostile to elves in the forest and in this story one responds aggressively to hostile intruding Qunari.

A City Elf who joined the Dalish and a human Tevinter mage (mlm) who originated from a slave family unwillingly join forces as they escape from an Antaam work-camp where they had been imprisoned and flee into the forest. Along the way they begrudgingly learn to work together and by the end they have developed a sort of mutual respect for one another, thanks to this trial by fire.

The Horror of Hormak

In a Nevarran forest, Wardens Ramesh (mlm) and Lesha are on a rescue mission to find a missing party of their colleagues. The lost group had been led by one Senior Warden Jovis (mlm). It is implied that Ramesh and Jovis were in love but Ramesh pulled away due to the trials of Warden life, leaving things between them unsaid and unfinished, many years ago. Everything about the woods they’re in feels wrong, bad, off. Lesha’s horse spooks and flees. There’s a weird briny smell and there seems to be something horrid and predatory and squishy-sounding lurking around; there’s a decidedly “DA:O build up to the Broodmother reveal” vibe going on through this whole short. They find one of the missing Wardens, Friedl. She’s raving mad, has snapped, and has gouged her own eyes out. She garbles creepily about something “down there, something bad”. Jovis’ party thought it was darkspawn, but it’s worse. Different. Not twisted, created. She says she escaped and pleads with them not to make her go back. “We must leave this place to her, to them.” She screams and sobs. “They build it for her! They wait for her!”

The Wardens make camp for the night, tieing Friedl up so she doesn’t harm herself. In the night she whispers and mutters. Friedl chews through her restraints and then her wrists and bleeds out. She trailed thin gray fluid behind her, and when they find her body gallons of the weird liquid pour out of her mouth, for a long time. Disgusted, they build a pyre for her and press on. The woods fall away and they reach a mountain. They find evidence of a large fight between the missing Wardens and darkspawn. There are dozens of darkspawn corpses, insane amounts of Warden blood, but no Warden bodies. Clearly something awful is going on. They notice the darkspawn bodies are different, mutated like no darkspawn has ever been known to be. Extra heads and limbs, genlock parts on hurlocks and such like. Ramesh and Lesha are disturbed but find a staircase down into a dwarven thaig called Hormok. They descend into the most decrepit thaig Ramesh has ever seen. Hormok fell centuries ago and it’s unexpectedly, oddly quiet. They find coded marks made by the missing Wardens which say they don’t plan to come back and warn others not to come after them. The two resolve firmly to go after them as Wardens leave nobody behind. At that moment, darkspawn appear. They are also changed, each in a different way. Scorpion tails, avian skulls, snake heads for fists, bat wings. And they’re strangely cunning.

The Wardens defeat them. They search and find a secret door, and descend further down a passageway. The stench of decay and brine is even stronger. They find a painting of three figures; a person/supplicant, a priestess/queen and a monster. The figures themselves look elven but the artistic style seems dwarven or like Avvar cave paintings. Further on the same painting repeats many times, but in each instance of it the person and monster change and change again. The priestess seems to look a little crueler in every iteration. This freaks them out but they press on. Further still they find a vast room which is clearly part of some elven ruins. Sometimes in the Deep Roads Wardens find elven architecture mixed in with dwarven, but this place is entirely elven, nearly pristine and ornate with carvings. The walls are covered in endlessly repeating bas-reliefs. On the top row, elven knights and queens hold court over respectful kneeling folk. On the middle row, elven mages heal patients and remove illness and injury from their bodies. On the bottom row, armies of halla pull elaborate aravels to distant mountains - one of which is the same mountain they’re beneath now. The more they stare, the more disquieting the carvings become. A halla horn symbol repeats on each column and seems to shift before their eyes. They look back at the bas-reliefs, which now seem all wrong. Prison-ship aravels, alien insectile halla with too many horns, mages forcing corruption into the infirm, contemptuous rulers and terrified subjects. 

They tear themselves away and find the final door. The smell is now overpowering. They slip through and find ranks of twisted grotesqueries, a menagerie of twisted body parts assembled at random. A halla with a snake’s maw and varterral legs. A spider with many serpents instead of many eyes. In the center, there’s a massive pool of the gross gray liquid. Above a huge lyrium crystal is suspended and growing sickly green. Streams of energy flow from it into the pool. Darkspawn walk in, the ‘water’ flows round them and when the ‘cocoon’ shatters, out comes another fucked up darkspawn. This is an army, but not of darkspawn, of something worse. The Wardens accidentally make a noise. The boulder they’re hiding behind isn’t a boulder. It’s a massive monstrous centipede. Each segment is the size of a horse, each leg a small tree. It screeches and surrounds them with all the grotesqueries baying in a cacophany. But the centipede’s head isn’t a head, it’s Senior Warden Jovis, twisted and broken. He’s fused to it, the flesh of his waist flowing into chitin, eyes unseeing, mouth stretched. The thing recognizes and talks to Ramesh. It’s clearly wrestling between being Jovis and being the creature. The Jovis-thing tells Ramesh his party of Wardens drank. Unlike darkspawn they can’t just touch the liquid, it needs to be inside, and it takes a while for the change to happen. “They turned us. Two halves, two wholes. Trying to be two ones. But I stayed me, and it hates that. And we waited for you! Oh, yes! Now you come.”

The monster begs Ramesh to “bury it, bury me”. “Can’t let this out. She cannot have it. Not again. Locked for a reason. Collapse the entrance. Stop me, stop us.” The remaining humanity in the thing is suddenly gone. The Wardens fight it and the other beasts. Lesha dies holding everything off so Ramesh can escape. He runs and runs and manages to bring the mountain down on the monstrosity before it can escape, using dwarven explosives they passed on their way in. Ramesh grieves and weeps, and goes to warn the other Wardens about the horror that lurks beneath Hormok, and probably elsewhere as well. He realizes with slow terror that in the bas-reliefs, the aravels brought their prey not only to the mountain he’d just brought down, but to eleven others. 

(yo I’m lookin at you Ghilan’nain)

Luck In The Gardens

In a tavern in Dairsmuid, Rivain, a Lord of Fortune (who is Rivaini and almost certainly genderfluid, non-binary, bigender or similar - “I’ve always just thought of myself a myself, and had fun in the bargain”), sits by a fire drinking with companions. They narrate to their audience a tale of something they recently got up to in good ol’ Minrathous. Lords of Fortune are new additions to the lore. This group is a multi-species, Rivaini guild of treasure-hunters and dungeoneers, where all members regardless of gender seem to be called Lords. In Minrathous, this Lord had been given a tip on where to find information for a job in the city. This individual is a master of disguise; clothes, wigs, makeup, vocal changes, across-gender presentations. They can even disguise themselves as some of the other races of Thedas (as in human, elf, dwarf, qunari).

So. Our LoF goes to the docks at night-time and sneaks into a building where a meeting is to take place. They secrete themselves in the rafters. A bunch of magisters come in and start playing cards, a secret game of Wicked Grace for the slumming elect. They chat away and the LoF listens in. Talk turns to what the LoF is there to hear. There are flyers plastered around town with a reward posted for someone to kill some kind of demon or monster that is plaguing the city. The LoF is there to listen into see what they know about the monster. A former Venatori dude says he’s heard it’s got something to do with the Venatori. A man with a curled mustache pipes up. Surprise, it’s Dorian Pavus! The group wonder if the monster is a Venatori abomination. It isn’t, they just encountered it during a search under the city for a cave. It’s not a demon and it killed all of them. The rafter cracks and our LoF falls, shocking everyone. Dorian acts quickly and is able to convince everyone he knows them and they are his lookout. LoF plays along. Maevaris is also there! Dorian and the LoF, who we’ll now call Hollix because that’s what Dorian randomly named them, take their leave, chat and become acquainted.

Dorian says Josie is his dear friend and she sends him gifts, a few choice bottles from her vineyards. His house no longer has slaves, only employs servants, a change he says he’s ashamed to have only made recently. Someone he met in the south, obviously Inky, changed his mind on the matter. Hollix has never met another mage of Dorian’s station who doesn’t keep slaves. Mae arrives. Dorian and Mae are on the outs with most of the rest of the Magisterium. The state of the Magisterium makes Dorian raggedly depressed. Mae calls him dearheart. Their duty to their country means they have to be well-informed about it. Dorian was the one who posted the flyer. The monster is killing people, Vints aren’t all heartless and he and Mae don’t like the idea of something like this in their city. But lately the political rumblings in the Magisterium mean they’ve had to spend all their time keeping their eyes on scoundrels, such as at the card game. They are trying to win a few of them over. It’s been slow but they’re giving them a chance to prove they’re not complete fools. This busyness is why they can’t hunt the monster themselves.

The three discuss the monster. It’s killed at least 9 people. Town criers dubbed it the Cekorax, “headsman”. Victims’ heads are never found. Hollix agrees to hunt it. Hollix eventually finds it in the sewers. It’s a Lovecraftian wormy bulk with a thrashing mass of tentacles that radiates joyful malice. Its voice is many voices speaking together and it calls Hollix “Visitor”. Some parts on its tentacles open to show real human eyes studded in there. Its voices urge Hollix “Stay with us. Come inside, where it’s warm. There is room in the crown of the blind. I am a sweeter ending than you know. Things are rising. Stay safe inside of me.” Hollix runs and escapes. Later Hollix is walking in the fancy gardens. The Cekorax taunts them and they realize it can come out of the sewers/water, since its coils run behind grass and under the base of trees. It’s the perfect predator, surrounding you, nestled everywhere. “No more false faces. No masks. There will be others. They will be joined in me.” Hollix eventually devises a cunning plan to kill the Cekorax. They convince it to show them “its whole”. It opens up like a lily and inside is a ring of severed heads, eyes gouged out but otherwise healthy, the source of the voices; the crown of the blind it refers to. Dorian, Mae and Hollix kill the monster using magic, gaatlok and a harpoon. It dissolves, the heads fall and blue-white liquid pours away.

Dorian escorts Hollix to the docks where they will leave, and Hollix gets their reward. The two wonder what the Cekorax was. Ancient breed of demon? Fiend brewed up by a magister? Dorian was at a party with a Mortalitasi a while ago. Five cups in, she went on about “things past the Veil of our world, neither demon nor spirit”. Perhaps it wasn’t the tipsy nonsense he assumed it to be.

Mae sends her regards but couldn’t see Hollix off due to intrigue striking in the Magisterium. Mae arranged for a ship to take Hollix home. Dorian says Hollix to consider this one last courtesy, as he and Mae would hate to leave Hollix with a bad impression of their fair city, although Hollix never wants to return. They part amicably.

#dragon age #bioware #video games #strife #tevinter nights #tevinter nights spoilers #tevinter nights spoiler #spoilers #spoiler

[maplewind-au]

Retrospective Author’s Notes

I just crossposted this note to the Wattpad and AO3 copies of Maplestar’s Light, but I’m going to post it here, too.

Hi there! My name is Razeru. First of all, thank you very much for reading my story!

I think, if you've read my story, you can surmise that I love Mapleshade. She's grown to be one of my favourite characters in Warrior Cats; her story, narratively, is written the best - in my opinion - out of most of the super editions and novellas.

Keep in mind, these words are coming from someone who grew up with these books, and also gets big mad about the things the Erins have pulled on other characters, like Squirrelflight (specifically Squilf, actually. They keep doing my girl dirty, and I'm so angry).

I took a read through my story again recently, and passed through the comments both on this Wattpad copy of the story, and the AO3 mirror. I really and truly appreciate all the love, but some people did seem to misunderstand the intention behind some things in my story, so I feel like I owe a bit of an explanation to you, my readers.

I offer this explanation because I've chosen to abandon the MapleWind AU entirely. There's too much in retrospect that I'm unhappy with, too many story ideas that don't connect narratively - it just makes a poor story. So, this is basically a big spoiler chapter for what would have happened, if I continued.

The remainder of this letter is just going to be me giving a word vomit about this story, so feel free to skip down to the bottom if you're only curious about closing remarks or projects surrounding other upcoming warriors works.

Alright. First and foremost, I want to address something specific. Mapleshade's story, as it was in canon, is a multidimensional story that a lot of people see as black-and-white. I, personally, see it as a fantastic narrative where not a single character is in the right, at least not in the context of the Clans - or morally, in some cases. This being said, a lot of the arguments about Mapleshade are usually "she's absolutely terrible and deserved what she got" / "she did absolutely nothing wrong and everyone else should be suffering" - both of which are... Very, very dangerous views to take on any person or character. When I wrote Maplestar's Light, my intention was to explore the idea where a few cats stepped out of the norm that seemed to affect this specific generation of the Clans and offered sanctuary.

WindClan has always felt like the most lax Clan out of the four, to me. With their history of welcoming in strangers and making kindly bargains with the other Clans in their times of need, it made sense to me that if a wandering cat passed out on their territory, they would reach out and help them. I chose Heatherstar specifically for this story because she was such a revolutionary, and wasn't afraid to shoot down any cat's words if she felt someone was going to get hurt.

Moreover, this AU explores the idea that instead of sleeping in Myler's barn and then going on her rampage, Mapleshade simply collapsed into grief - so Ravenwing, Frecklewish, and Appledusk all survive. Temporarily.

While Mapleshade is taken into WindClan, Mapleshade's kits are restless, and it's their turn to be angry - assuming StarClan spirits know everything (and it's heavily implied, in the first series, that they do), they pull strings just like the canonical iteration of their mother would. Ravenwing, Frecklewish, Appledusk, and - moreover - Oakstar, all suffer painful deaths as a result of the angry StarClan kits. To add insult to injury, all four lose their lives to the river while patrolling it - or are tricked into falling in. The kits drag them down until they drown.

Ravenwing and Oakstar are the only two who are able to make it to StarClan themselves, if only because of the good acts they've done to balance out the karma. The kits, however, are able to swing judgement on Frecklewish, who attacked their mother, insulted them, and was fine to watch them die, and Appledusk, who was willing to have them to begin with, who failed to save them.

This is unhealthy point of view, but they died as kits. All they know is the anger and betrayal.

On to the future.

Maplestar and Palebird have the three kits; Finchkit, Larkkit, and Firekit. Some people didn't seem to get it, and I thought I wrote it to be obvious, but Firekit is supposed to be THE Firestar in the future. With Maplestar at the helm of WindClan, ShadowClan is unable to drive them out. ThunderClan, however, is much weaker after their constant battles with RiverClan and the loss of not only Redtail, but many other great warriors. ThunderClan is driven out instead; WindClan, in their graciousness, would allow them to share the territory until something can be done about ShadowClan's terrible leader, and three Clans would unite against the one to protect their way of life.

During their time in WindClan's camp, Firepaw would grow close to the ThunderClan apprentices Ravenpaw, Graypaw and Sandpaw. Following the battle against Brokenstar, not only do Firepaw and his siblings get their warrior names, but so do the ThunderClan apprentices who participated (Sandstorm and Dustpelt included). Fireheart realizes during the night of his vigil that he doesn't want to lose his ThunderClan friends, and while meeting his family on the battlefield would be painful, he would feel worse fighting Graystripe or Ravenflight - the latter tom being the only cat Fireheart has met that makes his heart flutter.

The following day, as ThunderClan returns home, Fireheart goes with them. Yellowfang, in turn, has joined ThunderClan, having been a crucial asset to getting them in and out of ShadowClan. In return for the WindClan warrior, Spottedleaf stays; Spottedleaf had been attacked by a ShadowClan warrior the day before the battle, but Hawkheart protected her with his life. Feeling indebted, she swore to finish training Barkwing and serve WindClan just as she did ThunderClan.

The rest of the story would have gone similarly to canon, with a few minor changes; for one, WindClan and ThunderClan would forever have a close bond, not only through the blood of their Clanmates, but also through Bluestar and Maplestar, who exchanged each other's stories and bonded over how similar they were. Cinderpelt would have still gotten disabled, but through saving the ShadowClan apprentice Littlepaw from a monster; while she picks up healing from Yellowfang, she remains a warrior in spite of her leg. Swiftpaw narrowly survives, and Brightpaw lives with her scarring still, taking inspiration from Cinderpelt. Fireheart and Ravenflight become mates and have kits - Squirrelflight and Gingerpool.

I had further plans for TNP and PO3, but they're sort of lost to time at this point. The general ideas surrounded Brambleclaw - renamed Brambleflower - taking after his mother instead of his father, and being close friends with Squilf, but not mates. Gingerpool and Crowfeather do have kits, and Squilf does take them, but claims they were loner kits that she chose to raise. Bramble was their nursery parent, having chosen to be a queen instead of a warrior, and took care of them while Squilf went about being a warrior, only tuning in to feed them and sleep with them. Jay would have become a warrior named Jayclaw and Holly, an albino in this AU, would go on to be Gingerpool's apprentice and become Hollysnow. Jay is blind, and Holly is a selective mute. Lion would still have his powers of strength, but use them unwisely, and he would be the one to wind up having a crisis and revealing the secrets of his origin before disappearing into the caves.

The general idea for the OOTS arc of this AU was to give Ivy powers and still have her train in the Dark Forest, under Lionblaze - who is very much still alive, but misaligned. Dovewing would be given the opportunity as well, and only take it when she learns Tigerheart is also training there. Their struggles would surround a constant sibling rivalry, one that would deepen once Jay and Holly figure out Ivy is the third cat. I also threw around the idea of a deaf Ivypool, either from birth or caused by something much later - just to complete the "See/Speak/Hear No Evil".

The underlying, long plot to the AU was that Petalkit, Larchkit, and Patchkit effectively replaced Canon Mapleshade. Maplestar recovered, then seemingly forgot about her previous kits and replaced them with Fire, Finch and Lark. Petal, Larch and Patch want stupid, special Firestar and his bloodline to suffer for being their replacements. Technically, they were still spirits of StarClan, but pulled the strings in the Dark Forest.

Oh, boy. Those sure were a lot of words, huh.

I hope I'm not disappointing anyone by discontinuing this story. Again, looking back on it, I'm very unhappy with the way I was handling certain subjects and aspects of the story - and I'd rather kill it before I get carried away again. I've always held the belief that taking time and writing a more consise and well-placed narrative is much better than writing it quickly and breaking characters and morals. Mapleshade is a character I do want to do justice by, and Warrior Cats is a great sandbox to play in!

All that being said, I am still writing Warriors works. On AO3, I've published a couple smaller one-off stories that explore the idea of Tigerclaw not getting twisted up by Thistleclaw, and getting Scourge to join ThunderClan instead. You're welcome to read them if you haven't yet!

And I'm not done with Mapleshade, either. I'm currently working on a new, seperate Warriors rewrite based on the same time (with better allegiances); the working title for it, right now, is Falling Petals. I don't want to give too much away, but if there's enough interest, I might post a teaser excerpt to this story! There's no telling when I'll be finished with it, but I would much rather publish a finished work in full than post it by chapter and run the risk of losing interest or being unhappy with what I've put out.

A final project I'm working on is a personal Warrior Cats story called Rising Storm - it'll surround some OC Clans and Characters instead of rewriting canon material, and I'm looking for a main platform to post it on when I crack into it! If you're interested, I could use some beta readers when I start working on it, so please get in touch if you want to help out! If you know any non-Wattpad or AO3 websites I could publish the story on, please do let me know. I'll likely crosspost here, but I don't actively post on here too often, so I'd rather it not be the primary host.

I think that's everything I wanted to say! Again, thank you so much for your continued interest in my work. If you'd like to see more of what I do, look for the user 'ghastimafrix' on Tumblr, Twitter, YouTube, deviantART, AO3, and toyhou.se! I do a lot more than just write Warriors, and I'm always happy to chat.

Stay frosty, y'all!!

[smokeybrandreviews]

The King of Iron Fist

I don’t talk about this much but i am a massive, massive, fan of fighting games. I’ve been playing these things for decades, since all the way back in ‘92 with the release of the original Mortal Kombat. Watching the growth, decline, and then resurgence of the fighting game community has been a goddamn treat for me. Admittedly, i suck at the Capcom titles. Absolutely terrible. I do okay with the Rival Schools franchise, but outside of that, straight up balls, man. Never my forte. I’m pretty good with the original MK trilogy, the sprite based one, but absolutely awful with Deadly Alliance through Deception. I hated the fighting styles in those games. They were so goddamn awful, it was sickening. I do okay with the MKIX, MKX, and MKXI titles, though. They feel like the old games which lends itself to my old timey skill set. That said, my strength lies with the two Namco headliners; Tekken and Soul Calibur.

I mastered every Tekken title through 7, though, admittedly, I'm not so godly in the newest release, only great. Personally. For me, Tekken 5: Dark Resurrection is the title I'm best with. I love that game, man. I can use literally everyone in the roster to perfection. All of their moves. All of their ten-hits. I maxed out my rank in the Ghost Battles with several of the characters and ranked in the top-10, worldwide, leader boards when it was first released. I was feeling a bit nostalgic and wanted to revisit my favorite fighting franchise, giving a little love to my favorite fighters, kind of like how i did with my Persona 5 mains. They are ranked, top to bottom, in order of my skill with them. I even threw in the rank i reached in their respective Tekken games, just for good measure. Since 6 is the last one i really spent any time with and there might be a few characters introduced in 7 or, like, the Tag titles that I'm pretty good with but don’t really have a correlation in rank, I'll have to approximate my skill with a Tekken 6 rank, just to keep things equal.

1. Emilie De Rochefort - Tekken 5 - Tekken God

Lili is my main from 5 onward. Her speed, power, and cross-ups are ridiculous. There is a fluidity to her style that makes for an amazing number of possibilities. All of those flips, somersaults, and hopping knee pokes make for a varying arsenal of devastating stuns. If you can time your attacks right, you can string one, long ass, chain of hits that will deplete an enemy with a Perfect within seconds. Her strength carried over into Tekken 6, easily winning me over in that title, too. I haven’t played much of 7 but what i did get into, Lili feels a little nerfed. She just feels a bit slower than she should. That’s not a problem or whatever, but it is kind of annoying that have to have so many gaps in my assault.

2. Hwoarang - Tekken 3 - Tekken God

Hwoarang was my main for years. He was the very first character that i mastered in any Tekken title. See, my older brother would come over with his PlayStation and commence to beat my ass in Tekken 3 for hours. One day, he told me to actually get good and lent me his Sony for a week. Welp, i did just that. I got good. Real f*cking good. Hwoarang uses Tae Kwon Do, which is dope because it’s easy to combo with, but this dude’s strength is in his juggle potential. His kicks lack the power of his master, Baek Doo San, but they come out faster and in more numbers. Within that week, i was able to string together a flurry of devastating kicks that not even my big brother could counter. Twenty-three years later, he still hasn’t beat me in a single game. If Lili isn’t available, Hwoarang is my guy. Even so, i am probably equally skilled with both, i just prefer the stylish flourish my darling Emilie has with her style.

3. Steve Fox - Tekken 4 - Tekken God

Steve was a quandary when he first released. Dude has no kicks and it was ridiculous to see in a game with such an expansive roster of fighters like Tekken, especially in the fourth iteration. His addition was ridiculous to me. And then i tried him. My, god, was his speed stupid. See, in a fighter like this, speed kills. If you can bust a quick combo, maybe juggle a cat, maybe fired off a quick combo before retreating out of counter range, you can destroy an opponent in seconds. That’s why i love Lili. That’s why i love Hwoarang. Steve Fox has that same potential but it’s different. You can’t launch characters too easily and being a puncher, his reach is limited, but you can juggle the f*ck out of them if they end up airborne. Steve has a lot of weapons to f*ck you up in a near infinite juggle if you’re not careful and i know all of them. Interestingly enough, he’s gotten better with age. I prefer his 5 version but 6 and 7 are pretty beefy, too.

4. Kazuya Mishima - Tekken - Tekken Lord

Kazuya is my power hitter. I’m a speed guy, admittedly. I love the juggle. I love the chains. I love the artistry in forging a string of consecutive, devastating, combo hits. The issue is, there are motherf*ckers like Paul Phoenix who can punch a planet into retrograde in this game. Now, against a computer, I'm fine with my main three Tekken Gods. I’ll dog walk a computer, no matter how high the difficulty. Once you’ve beaten Jinpachi on the highest setting in Tekken 5, you are ready for anything. However, against a real person who knows how to use a power character like the f*cking bears or goddamn Jack? Nah. If they’re good with that heavy-hitter, i have to bring in my own and Kazuya is that ringer. Dude’s probably the second strongest character in the the game after his pops, Heihachi Mishima. The difference? Kazuya’s cross ups are f*cking ridiculous. All of that twirling and overhead kicks make for some confusing hurt when you know how to execute.

5. Eliza - Tekken 7 - Tekken Lord

Eliza was an interesting character for me to pick up. I was curious about her so i bought that money pit Tekken Revolution or whatever. I hated that game so much but i played enough Eliza to feel borderline conceited in my ability. Imagine my elation when my darling drowsy vampire made her cannon appearance in Tekken 7. Again, i didn’t play much, but i did find that my Revolution skills translated well and i was even able to pick up a few new tricks. Eliza, admittedly, is super wonky to master, she’s similar to Alisa Bosconovitch that way, but her mix ups are superb. If you put in the time, Eliza is a very rewarding character to play.

6. Marshall Law - Tekken - Tekken Lord

The elder Law is my guy. I’m a sucker for a Bruce Lee facsimile and Marshall is one of the best out there. He has a good combination of speed and power but it’s his mix ups that endear him to my heart. That and i learned how to play with him because Forest Law, Lee’s son, was the character my brother beat my ass so handily with for months in Tekken 3. I learned Forest out of spite but, when his pops returned in 4, i made sure to master that version, as well. Over time, i grew to love playing with Marshall. He has a very unique, very acrobatic and showy style, like his real life inspiration.

7.  Jun Kazama - Tekken - Tekken Lord

Jun ain’t no joke. That Kazama style martial art is something nasty. I could have probably put Asuka here, i am about as good with her as i am Jun considering how similar their styles are, but i have to give respect to the original tooth fairy. Jun Kazama is a f*cking problem, man, She’s deceptively powerful but quick with those hands. She will poke the f*ck out of you with such insidious precision, you won’t even realize you died even after the match is called. The way her blows flow make for some unwieldy mix ups and stupid juggle stuns. I hated fighting her in 2. I hated fighting her even more in the Tag titles. But i love fighting WITH her, especially if you can master that funky timing she has.

8. Lee Chaolan - Tekken 4 - Tekken Lord

Lee is bit of a detraction form my usual fighting fare. He’s kind of a gag character. A little effeminate and a little cruel, Lee’s kicks are the real deal. This cat sends those footsy out at blinding speed and you know how much i love my speed. The thing is, he lacks the power of, say, Hwoarang, Baek, or Bruce. I actually picked up Lee n 4, then Violet, on a whim because i thought it would be funny to beat someone with a character i had no idea how to play. After that first round, though, i was on it.Dude felt good in my hands. I knew Lee was something special and spent the rest of the night with his pokey kicks and flying drop kicks. It was f*cking incredible. I couldn’t believe i slept on such an amazing character for so long. I went back to Tekken 2 and spent weeks with him just to get a proper feel from start to finish. Now, he’s a staple of my rotation. Only when I'm feeling flamboyant, though.

9. Devil Kazuya - Tekken 2 - Dragon Lord

I picked up Devil Kazuya way back in Tekken 2 because i liked the design. Also, the face laser. That sh*t was stupid. As time went on, and the games advanced, i always went back to Tekken 2 in an effort to hone my skills with the original Devil. To my surprise, when Tekken 7 dropped, Devil Kazuya was playable once again and my skills translated perfectly. Dude has a few new tricks and i immediately ate those f*ckers up but it felt so good taking to the air once more. It sucks he only has two, official, appearances but this is one of those cats that i played a lot with in the Tag titles. Like, SO much. Devi was my second choice after Hwoarang in the original Tekken Tag and, like, my fourth in Tekken Tag 2. Obviously, I'm just as good with Angel, too. I mean, they’re the same f*cking character so i better be!

10. Anna Williams - Tekken 2 - Dragon Lord

Oh, the Williams sisters. Similar to the case of Jun and Asuka, I'm probably equally as good with both the Williams but Anna is my preferred character. I just like her design better. That and her deceptive ass sexuality. Anna is gorgeous but she will f*ck you the f*ck up. The Williams sisters are power characters and you can’t tell me otherwise. These chicks will ruin your life as a fast as Paul Phoenix if you’re facing off against someone who knows how to use them. I know how to use them very well. Again, Anna over Nina, but I'll mess you up regardless.

11. Zafina - Tekken 6 - Dragon Lord

Zafina was a surprise. Her style is all over the place. I read somewhere it was designed after a snake or something. That sh*t is fitting because she is a slippery motherf*cker, man. Zafina took me a while to master, kind of like Eliza, but once you understand her strengths, this chick can be a proper powerhouse. She’s quick, juggles well, but pokes like a f*cking champ. If your poke game is strong with her, there’s a good chance you can stun lock an opponent into a perfect or two.

12. Devil Jin - Tekken 5 - Dragon Lord

Admittedly, i wanted to put Jin from Tekken 3 on this list. His mixture of Kazama and Mishima style martial arts is mad potent. I love the way dude plays. It’s like fighting with Jun and Kazuya at the same time. However, with the release of Tekken 4, Jin unlearned literally everything about the Mishima style and decided to master normal karate. That sh*t was whack, man. I mean, it was fine, i learned the new Jin fine, but it wasn’t MY Jin. That said, my Jin was in the game, only he took the form of a devil. Devil Jin is f*cking ridiculous. I understood a lot of his abilities because of my mastery of Devil Kazuya but, with the addition of the Kazama style martial arts, Devil Jin was a f*cking beast in that game. He’s kind of a beast in every game he makes an appearance. between the two, i prefer Devil Kazuya, but I'll wreck a guy with Jin if necessary.

13. Bryan Fury - Tekken Tag Tournament - Dragon Lord

I love Bryan Fury. The design, the inspiration, the brutal fighting style, that ridiculously evil laugh; Dude is just amazing. I got pretty good with Bruce Irvin in Tekken 2 so when he wasn’t around in Tekken 3, i was a little bummed. It took awhile for me to pick of Fury, i actually first really got into the character in Tag but i did fool around with him in 3 a little bit. That was after i was surprised by how effortlessly powerful he was in Tag. Dude ain’t Bruce, but he’s still pretty dope.

Honorable Mentions: Unknown, Armor King, Ling Xiaoyu, Alisa Bosconovitch, Heihachi Mishima, Bruce Irvin, Kazumi Mishima, Miguel Caballero Rojo, Josie Rizal, Eddy Gordo

#Tekken #Mishima Zaibatsu #G Corporation

[smokeybrand]

The King of Iron Fist

I don’t talk about this much but i am a massive. massive fan of fighting games. I’ve been playing these things for decades, since all the way back in ‘92 with the release of the original Mortal Kombat. Watching the growth, decline, and then resurgence of the fighting game community has been a goddamn treat for me. Admittedly, i suck at the Capcom titles. Absolutely terrible. I do okay with the Rival Schools franchise, but outside of that, straight up balls, man. Never my forte. I’m pretty good with the original MK trilogy, the sprite based one, but absolutely awful with Deadly Alliance through Deception. I hated the fighting styles in those games. They were so goddamn awful, it was sickening. I do okay with the MKIX, MKX, and MKXI titles, though. They feel like the old games which lends itself to my old timey skill set. That said, my strength lies with the two Namco headliners; Tekken and Soul Calibur.

I mastered every Tekken title through 7, though, admittedly, I'm not so godly in the newest release, just great. Personally. For me, Tekken 5: Dark Resurrection is the title I'm best with. I love that game, man. I can use literally everyone in the roster to perfection. All of their moves. All of their ten-hits. I maxed out my rank in the Ghost Battles with several of the characters and ranked in the top-10, worldwide, leader boards when it was first released. I was feeling a bit nostalgic and wanted to revisit my favorite fighting franchise, giving a little love to my favorite fighters, kind of like how i did with my Persona 5 mains. They are ranked, top to bottom, in order of my skill with them. I even threw in the rank i reached in their respective Tekken games, just for good measure. Since 6 is the last one i really spent any time with and there might be a few characters introduced in 7 or, like, the Tag titles that I'm pretty good with but don’t really have a correlation in rank, I'll have to approximate my skill with a Tekken 6 rank, just to keep things equal.

Emilie De Rochefort - Tekken 5 Dark - Tekken God

Lili is my main from 5 onward. Her speed, power, and cross-ups are ridiculous. There is a fluidity to her style that makes for an amazing number of possibilities. All of those flips, somersaults, and hopping knee pokes make for a varying arsenal of devastating stuns. If you can time your attacks right, you can string one, long ass, chain of hits that will deplete an enemy with a perfect within seconds. Her strength carried over into Tekken 6, easily winning me over in that title, too. I haven’t played much of 7 but what i did get into, Lili feels a little nerfed. She just feels a bit slower than she should. That’s not a problem or whatever, but it is kind of annoying that have to have so many gaps in my assault.

Hwoarang - Tekken 3 - Tekken God

Hwoarang was my main for years. He was the very first character that i mastered in any Tekken title. See, my older brother would come over with his PlayStation and commence to beat my ass in Tekken 3 for hours. One day, he told me to actually get good and lent me his Sony for a week. Welp, i did just that. I got good. Real f*cking good. Hwoarang uses Tae Kwon Do, which is dope because it’s easy to combo with, but this dude’s strength is in his juggle potential. His kicks lack the power of his master, Baek Doo San, but they come out faster and in more numbers. Within that week, i was able to string together a flurry of devastating kicks that not even my bog brother could counter. Twenty-three years later, he still hasn’t beat me in a single game. If Lili isn’t available, Hwoarang is my guy. Even so, i am probably equally skilled with both, i just prefer the stylish flourish my darling Emilie has with her style.

Steve Fox - Tekken 4 - Tekken God

Steve was a quandary when he first released. Dude has no kicks and it was ridiculous to see in a game with such an expansive roster of fighters like Tekken, especially in the fourth iteration. His addition was ridiculous to me. And then i tried him. My, god, was his speed stupid. See, in a fighter like this, speed kills. If you can bust a quick combo, maybe juggle a cat, you can destroy an opponent in seconds. That’s why i love Lili. That’s why i love Hwoarang. Steve Fox has that same potential but it’s different. You can’t launch characters too easily but you can juggle the f*ck out of them if they end up airborne. Steve has a lot of weapons to f*ck you up in a near infinite juggle if you’re not careful and i know all of them. Interestingly enough, he’s gotten better with age. I prefer his 5 version but 6 and 7 are pretty beefy, too.

Kazuya Mishima - Tekken - Tekken Lord

Kazuya is my power hitter. I’m a speed guy, admittedly. I love the juggle. I love the chains. I love the artistry in forging a string of consecutive, devastating, combo hits. The issue is, there are motherf*ckers like Paul Phoenix who can punch a planet into retrograde in this game. Now, against a computer, I'm fine with my main three Tekken Gods. I’ll dog walk a computer, no matter how high the difficulty. Once you’ve beaten Jinpachi on the highest setting in Tekken 5, you are ready for anything. However, against a real person who knows how to used a power character like the f*cking bears or goddamn Jack? Nah. If they’re good with that heavy-hitter, i have to bring in my own and Kazuya is that ringer. Dude’s probably the second strongest character in the the game after his pops, Heihachi Mishima. The difference? Kazuya’s cross ups are f*cking ridiculous. All of that twirling and over head kicks make for some confusing hurt when you know how to execute.

Eliza - Tekken 7 - Tekken Lord

Eliza was an interesting character for me to pick up. I was curious about her so i bought that money pit Tekken Revolution or whatever. I hated that game so much but i played enough Eliza to fell borderline conceited in my ability. Imagine my elation when my darling drowsy vampire made her cannon appearance in Tekken 7. Again, i didn’t play much, but i did find that my Revolution skills translated well and i was even able to pick up a few new tricks. Eliza, admittedly, is super wonky to master, she’s similar to Alisa Bosconovitch that way, but her mix ups are superb. If you put in the time, Eliza is a very rewarding character to play.

Marshall Law - Tekken - Tekken Lord

The elder Law is my guy. I’m a sucker for a Bruce Lee facsimile and Marshall is one of the best out there. He has a good mix of speed and power but it’s his mix ups that endear him to my heart. That and i learned how to play with him because Forest Law, Lee’s son, was the character my brother beat my ass so handily with for months in Tekken 3. I learned Forest out of spite but, when his pops returned in 4, i made sure it master that version, as well. Over time, i grew to love playing with Marshall. He has a very unique, very acrobatic and showy style, like his real life inspiration.

Jun Kazama - Tekken - Tekken Lord

Jun ain’t no joke. That Kazama style martial art is something nasty. I could have probably put Asuka here, i am about as good with her as i am Jun considering how similar their styles are, but i have to give respect to the original tooth fairy. Jun Kazama is a f*cking problem, man, She’s deceptively powerful but quick with those hands. The way her blows flow make for some unwieldy mix ups and stupid juggle stuns. I hated fighting her in 2. I hated fighting her even more in the Tag titles. But i love fighting WITH her, especially if you can master that funky timing she has.

Lee Chaolan - Tekken 4 - Tekken Lord

Lee is bit of a detraction form my usual fighting fare. He’s kind of a gag character. A little effeminate and a little cruel, Lee’s kicks are the real deal. This cat send those footsy out at blinding speed and you know how much i love my speed. The thing is, he lacks the power of, say, Hwoarang, Baek, or Bruce. I actually picked up Lee n 4, then Violet, on a whim because i thought it would be funny to beat someone with a character i had n idea how to play. After that first round, though, i was on it. I knew Lee was something special and spent the rest of the night with his pokey kicks and flying drop kicks. It was f*cking incredible. I couldn’t believe i slept on such an amazing character for so long. I went back to Tekken 2 and spent weeks with the character just to get a proper feel with I'm from start to finish. Now, he’s one that’s in my rotation. When I'm feeling flamboyant.

Devil Kazuya - Tekken 2 - Dragon Lord

I picked up Devil Kazuya way back in Tekken 2 because i liked the design. Also, the face laser. That sh*t was stupid. As time went on, and the games advanced, i always went back to Tekken 2 in an effort to hone my skills with the original Devil. To my surprise, when Tekken 7 dropped, Devil Kazuya was playable once again and my skills translated perfectly. Due has a few new tricks and i immediately ate those f*cker up but it felt so good taking to the air once more. It sucks he only has two, official, appearances but this is one of those cats that i played a lot with in the Tag titles. Like, SO much. Devi was my second choice after Hwoarang in the original Tekken Tag and, like, my fourth in Tekken Tag 2. Obviously, I'm just as good with Angel, too. I mean, they’re the same f*cking character so i better be!

Anna Williams - Tekken 2 - Dragon Lord

Oh, the Williams sisters. Similar to the case of Jun and Asuka, I'm probably equally as good with both the Williams but Anna is my preferred character. I just like her design better. That and her deceptive ass sexuality. Anna is gorgeous but she will f*ck you the f*ck up. The Williams sisters are power characters and you can’t tell me otherwise. These chicks will ruin your life as a fast as Paul Phoenix if you’re facing off against someone who knows how to use them. I know how to use them very well. Again, Anna over Nina, but I'll mess you up regardless.

Zafina - Tekken 6 - Dragon Lord

Zafina was a surprise. Her style is all over the place. I read somewhere it was designed after a snake or something. That sh*t is fitting because she is a slippery motherf*cker, man. Zafina took me a while to master, kind of like Eliza, but once you understand her strengths, this chick can be a proper powerhouse. She’s quick, juggles well, but pokes like a f*cking champ. If your poke game is strong with her, there’s a good chance you can stun lock an opponent into a perfect or two.

Devil Jin - Tekken 5 - Dragon Lord

Admittedly, i wanted to put Jin from Tekken 3 on this list. His mixture of Kazama and Mishima style martial arts is mad potent. I love the way dude plays. It’s like fighting with Jun and Kazuya at the same time. However, with the release of Tekken 4, Jin unlearned literally everything about the Mishima style and decided to master normal karate. That sh*t was whack, man. I mean, it was fine, i learned the new Jin fine, but it was MY Jin. That said, my Jin was in the game, only he took the form of a devil. Devil Jin is f*cking ridiculous. I understood a lot of his abilities because of my mastery of Devil Kazuya but, with the addition of the Kazama style martial arts, Devil Jin was a f*cking beast in that game. He’s kind of a beast in every game he makes an appearance. between the two, i prefer Devil Kazuya, but I'll wreck a guy with Jin if necessary.

Bryan Fury - Tekken Tag Tournament - Dragon Lord

I love Bryan Fury. The design, the inspiration, the brutal fighting style, that ridiculously evil laugh; Dude is just amazing. I got pretty good with Bruce Irvin in Tekken 2 so when he wasn’t around in Tekken 3, i was a little bummed. It took awhile for me to pick of Fury, actually i first really got into the character in Tag. I fooled around with him in 3, sure, but that was after i was surprised by how effortlessly powerful he was in Tag. Dude ain’t Bruce, but he’s still pretty dope.

Honorable Mentions: Unknown, Armor King, Ling Xiaoyu, Alisa Bosconovitch, Heihachi Mishima, Bruce Irvin, Kazumi Mishima, Miguel Caballero Rojo, Josie Rizal, Eddy Gordo

[thesingingelves]

Galadriel and Lórien

@absynthe--minded, the whole “Galadriel is a colonizer thing” is probably derived from The Unfinished Tales, “History of Galadriel and Celeborn”

[ pg 236 ] “But in the meantime, the power of Galadriel and Celeborn had grown, and Galadriel, assisted in this by her friendship with the Dwarves of Moria, had come into contact with the Nandorin realm of Lórinand the other side of the Misty Mountains. This was peopled by those Elves who forsook the Great Journey from Cuiviénen and settled in the woods of the Vale of Anduin; and it extended into the forests on both sides of the Great River, including the region where afterwards was Dol Guldor. These Elves had no princes or ruler, and led their lives free of care while all Morgoth’s power was concentrated in the North-west of Middle Earth; ‘but many Sindar and Noldor came to dwell among them and their ‘Sindarizing’ under the impact of Beleriandic culture began.’ [It is not clear when this movement into Lórinand took place; it may be that they came from Eregion by way of Khazad-dûm and under the auspices of Galadriel.]”

[pg 243] it explicitly says, “The people of Lórien were even then [i.e. at the time of the loss of Amroth] much as they were at the end of the Third Age: Silvian Elves in origin, but ruled by princes of Sindarin descent.”

This is from “Concerning Galadriel and Celeborn”

 Galadriel establishes herself in Lórinand to counteract the mechanisms of Sauron

 After Celebrimbor's rebellion, Galadriel, Celebrían and Amroth (who in this iteration is their son) leave Eregion and Galadriel takes up rule in Lórinand. Celeborn would not enter Moria and thus stayed behind in Eregion.

 Due to her receiving Narya, Galadriel’s sea longing is increased.

 After the siege of Imladris, Galadriel could not stand the sea longing any more and went to Lindon to sate it, since she knew that Sauron was not vanquished. She left Lórinand to Amroth.

 After Amroth was lost in the Third Age, Galadriel returned to Lórinand to rule.

Amroth and Nimrodel

Amroth rules Lórien after his father Amdír’s death. 

Amroth is Sindarin in descent but lived “after the manner of Silvian Elves and housed in the tall trees of a great green mound, ever after called Cerin Amroth.”

Amroth loves Nimrodel. Nimrodel loves Amroth. The issue here is, is that Nimrodel, a Silvian elf, “regretted the incoming of the Elves from the West, who brought wars and destroyed the peace of old.” Even after the Silvian tongue had fallen out of common use, she spoke it. 

I don’t want to write the entirety of the tale Amroth and Nimrodel, but if you have a copy of Unfinished Tales, its pages 240-42, though there are some later writings after. 

After the death of Amroth, Galadriel and Celeborn returned to Lórien and were welcomed by the people.

Another reference to Galadriel and Celeborn's movements:

[pg 245] “To Lórien Celeborn and Galadriel returned twice before the Last Alliance and the end of the Second Age; and in the Third Age when the shadow of Sauron’s recovery arose, they dwelt there again for a long time. In her wisdom Galadriel saw that Lórien would be a stronghold and a point of power to prevent the Shadow from crossing the Anduin in the war that must inevitably come before it was once again defeated (if that were possible); but that it needed a rule of greater strength and wisdom than the Silvian folk possessed. Nevertheless, it was not until the disaster in Moria, when by means beyond the foresight of Galadriel Sauron’s power actually crossed the Anduin and Lórien was in great peril, its king lost, its people fleeing and likely to leave it deserted to be occupied by Orcs, that Galadriel and Celeborn took up their permanent abode in Lórien, and it’s government. But they took no title of King or Queen, and were guardians that in the event brought it unviolated through the War of the Ring.”

My Opinions:

“led their lives free of care while all Morgoth’s power was concentrated in the North-west of Middle Earth“ I don’t think they lived their lives free of care, because while Morgoth was definitely focused on the Noldor in Beleriand, he probably still had all sorts of evils wandering Arda, many of whom were scattered and likely did not join back up with the main force after Utunmo.

[scoffs] “were welcomed by the people”

“that it needed a rule of greater strength and wisdom than the Silvian folk possessed.” Self-important there, huh? 

“likely to leave it deserted to be occupied by Orcs” Why is written this way? I can guarantee you that when the Noldor fled their strongholds in the Silmarillion that it’s not written as if “hmm, can you believe these guys? Fleeing for their lives, and they don’t even have the decency (to set their forest on fire) to keep Orcs from occupying it, smh” I’m not bitter No one else is written like this! It is so unbelievingly irritating to me, and something I will definitely make a post on it

#Galadriel and Lórien #galadriel #lothlorien #tolkien #meta #my opinions #Amroth #Nimrodel #colonization #galadhrim #unfinished tales