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ceescedasticity · 1 year

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ERIADOR

Why is the Lonely Land so lonely? There's been some discussion of this on the discord server and I thought I'd try to sum up my thoughts.

But first, ERIADOR:

Base map cropped from Christopher Tolkien's, overlay by me. Long Tolkien Gateway-based discussion follows!

The green area in the west is Second Age Lindon (except pre-downfall-of-Númenor there was at least some more land west of the mountains, thanks loads Eru). Any time in the Third Age elves are occupying much less of this, but we don't know how much less, and there's no indication it was ever formally claimed by anyone else.

Off-red area north of Lindon was Second Age dwarf territory — it's possible dwarves also controlled the actual mountains in what is marked Lindon, but it's not stated. The red dot is the approximate location of First Age Belegost. It should probably be more in the mountains proper. Third Age I would guess their territory extended farther south? There was a dwarven kingdom-in-exile somewhere around there T.A. 2802-2941, but presumably dwarves living there both before and after.

You can see the Shire in light blue — boundaries are kind of a guess. It was established T.A. 1601. And then 'suffered greatly' in 1636 from the Great Plague. Rough start!

Angmar is in gray in the northeast. It lasted T.A. 1300-1975. Angmar's borders other than the south one are not entirely clear. They Grey Mountains are mentioned as the eastern border, but that takes us across the Misty Mountains? Anyway Angmar's capital Carn Dûm is noted, at the end of the Mountains of Angmar. There were supposed to be evil Men living there. Its forces also included orcs.

It's generally unclear what the northern border of Arnor was — or the effective northern border. It never seems to be defined, but they clearly weren't doing much when you get up into the Forodwaith. Too cold. Which is kind of weird when you consider that Forochel is at approximately the same latitude as Dorthonion and the ocean is right there NO I SAID I WASN'T GOING TO CONSIDER CLIMATE/LATITUDE/CHANGING OF WORLD. Ahem. There were people minding their own business up there, especially towards the coast away from Angmar.

Apart from its fuzzy northern border, old Arnor was bordered in the west by (south to north) the Blue Mountains/Gulf of Lune/probably River Lhûn. Then its, uh, southwest border was the coast, and its southeast border was Rivers Gwathlo/Mitheithel/Bruinen (a.k.a. Greyflood/Hoarwell/Loudwater) up to the Misty Mountains. It's not clear whether Arnor included what later became Angmar.

Arnor split up in T.A. 861 into Arthedain (northwest), Cardolan (south), and Rhudaur (northeast). There was some dispute between the three over the part of Arthedain around Weathertop, where Arthedain had the watchtower of Amon Sûl and accompanying palantír and the other two kind of wanted it.

Arthedain had the cities Annúminas (the old capital of Arnor) and (its own capital) Fornost. It included what were supposed to be the most populous regions of Arnor. The Shire is in Arthedain, though it was apparently mostly unused by Men by the time the Shire was founded (even though the Baranduin was previously a locus of population — clearly things were already not so great). Northern Arthedain didn't get hit as hard by the Great Plague. It was at war with Angmar off and on from T.A. 1356 at the latest until its fall in T.A. 1974.

Cardolan had two towns on its borders — Bree and Tharbad — but if it had a capital or notable locations of its own they aren't recorded apparently. Its defenses were broken and its last prince killed in T.A. 1409. After this most of the remaining Dúnedain of Cardolan holed up in what became the Barrow-downs and Old Forest. (The Barrow-downs weren't haunted yet but they were a gravesite, and, like, in the Old Forest? How'd that work out for them? Yeeesh.) There were still non-Dúnedain living elsewhere in Cardolan, but most of them died in the Great Plague in 1636. It was after this that the Barrow-downs got haunted, so presumably the remaining Dúnedain were gone, too.

Rhudaur really seems to have gotten the short end of the stick in terms of both size and kind of territory. Yes, they get to be neighbors with Elrond, but does that really make up for it? The territory breakup would be somewhat more equitable if Rhudaur originally included what became Angmar, but that's not clear, and it's not like that's particularly nice territory. Anyway, Rhudaur allied with Angmar sometime before T.A. 1356. It sounds like they did so officially sometime after T.A. 1349, when the king of Arthedain decided to claim overlordship of the other two on the grounds that they didn't have Isildur descendants anymore, but there must have been some sort of relationship before that. According to Arthedain there were only evil men left in Rhudaur after 1409, and there was no one at all in Rhudaur after 1975; there was 'a shadow on the land'. —Okay apparently the etymology of Rhudaur is arguably 'troll forest' or 'evil forest', which, really? I'm going to say it started as the alternate possibility 'east forest', and the other is a later folk etymology.

The uncolored area between the rivers and the mountains used to be Eregion, and doesn't seem to have been claimed by Arnor at all. Imladris is up at its north end, which is probably why Arnor set the border there, but I don't think there's much evidence Imladris was governing the region in any way. Khazad-dum was still active until T.A. 1981, but there's no evidence they did any governing, either. Not clear if anyone lived there.

Dunland… is Dunland. Its western border is unclear because it's supposed to be a road which isn't fully drawn on the map, and also the road curves towards the Isen in a way which would seem to preclude Dunland's southern border being the Isen? Also, how is Dunland isolated enough to avoid the worst of the Great Plague when one of its borders is the main North-South road? Does Dunland have an effective border of some miles east of the road? Anyway the Dunlendings' ancestors were chased there in the Second Age by Númenóreans and they've been there ever since.

Then we have the nice empty space marked Enedwaith! (Technically includes Dunland.) Enedwaith was not part of Gondor or Arnor; they 'had a joint interest, but apparently the only part they actually cared about was maintaining the North-South Road (indicated by the long skinny thingy) and Tharbad. Most of Enedwaith's pre-Númenórean occupants got chased into Dunland by the Númenóreans, but then the Númenóreans didn't really settle there either even in the Third Age. There were some Drúedain in the marshes towards the coast. Both Enedwaith and Minhiriath in Cardolan suffered devastating deforestation in the Second Age, but in the Third Age were apparently perfectly good grassland. —Technically speaking Enedwaith is not considered Eriador apparently? But I'm not sure what it is.

Okay, what else… The town of Tharbad is on the map. It was founded in the Second Age as an Númenórean fort/river haven, and there was a battle there, but after that was ignored for a while until Arnor and Gondor needed a road and a place to cross the Gwathlo. The whole area around the river convergence was really marshy — it was called the Swanfleet — but it was extensively drained to enable building a proper fortified town, a bridge, and causeways for the road on either side. Tharbad hung on after the Great Plague. It did not hang on after Fell Winter-related floods in 2912, presumably because all the drainage systems, dikes, etc. were destroyed in the floods and the area returned to its natural state as a giant marsh. There was still sort of a ford in the ruins of the bridge, but it wasn't a very good ford.

Aaaaand Bree-land, which probably I should have marked but it's just a really small area around Bree. The Bree-men have been living there since the Second Age — their ancestors fled Númenóreans — and just… carried on, all through the rise and fall of the North-kingdom. (For non-Númenóreans carrying on through the rise may be the more impressive part.) Bree was an active trading town and in the late Third Age saw travelers from all sorts of places! Bree-land was occupied by Men and later hobbits. Noted to be most westerly settlement of Men. Hmmm. Not sure I believe that.

Okay. I may have to come back, but I think that covers it.

Stay tuned for (at some point) "why is the Lonely Land so lonely?"

#a tolkien tag #arda geography and demographics #ardanalysis #reckless application of spackle #only not yet this is the concrete part

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a-bit-of-japanology · 14 days

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Yoshitsune and Heike Goblins

Utagawa Kuniyoshi - 1853

After leading the Genji clan to victory over the Heike, Yoshitsune was held in considerable esteem by his generals and wielded significant political power.

His brother Yoritomo, the head of the Genji clan, feared Yoshitsune would lead a rebellion against him, and ordered him killed. Yoshitsune was forced to flee the capital in Kyoto with just a handful of retainers and seek shelter from loyal friends.

In the scene depicted here, Yoshitsune and his retainers try to flee from his brother's assassins by boat across the strait at Daimotsu no Ura near present-day Osaka, but are blocked by a fierce storm. Yoshitsune had won the final, decisive battle of the Genpei war in the strait of Dan no Ura, and many Heike warriors drowned in its waters. Now, as Yoshitsune tries to escape by boat, ghosts of the drowned Heike warriors try to take their revenge during the storm.

Benkei, who in many ways has become the central figure of the Yoshitsune story by this point, is able to draw on his training as a monk to say prayers that ward off the ghostly horde. Among Benkei's defining features are his quick wit and his mastery of many skills, military, religious and literary, which allow him to respond effectively to any situation, even when his master loses hope or is incapable of responding appropriately, as shown in this scene. He is often depicted with a multitude of tools on his back, symbolizing his numerous skills and tricks (see also Ushiwakamaru and Benkei on display nearby).

Some of the ghosts are depicted as crabs, a reference to a species of crab known as heikegani (Heikea japonica), which to this day live in the waters of Dan no Ura and have patterns on their shells resembling human faces. They are said to be reincarnations of the Heike warriors who died there. The use of black ink to depict the roiling, stormy sea is quite distinctive. Also of note is the wood grain, visible in the sky.

The 1185 Battle of Dannoura was the last battle of the Heike Monogatari (The Tale of the Heike) and takes place in the Straits of Shimonoseki, where the Heike (Taira) clan and the Minamoto (Genji) clan engage in a bitter battle. The Taira clan perishes in this dramatic finish in which everyone-men, women and children-dies.

Legend has it that the tragedy of their demise lingers, and the area is considered haunted by Heike crabs which have human faces on their backs and are thought to be the spirits of dead Heike warriors. Kuniyoshi makes every effort to depict the frightening crabs and haunted spirits of the deceased in his powerful image of this final battle.

Minamoto Yoshitsune, accompanied by his faithful retainer Benkei, conquers his enemies amid a roiling sea, an action which gives birth to numerous legends and tales. In Kuniyoshi's day, the sea, teeming with these crabs, was reputedly calmed by the erection of a Buddhist temple on the nearby shore, as well as by shrines to the deceased.

This imagery has inspired contemporary American tattoo and print artist Don Ed Hardy, among others. (Tattoo exhibition 2005)

#art #utagawa kuniyoshi #asian art #japan #japan art #japanese culture #japanese art #ukiyoe #woodblock #woodblock print #ukiyo e

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girlfriendsofthegalaxy · 1 year

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Day of Anger (1967) is still a tragedy after the credits stop bc there are LITERALLY no good options for Scott Mary. look. a movie with an ambiguous ending is a good thing, the movie ends there bc it's done telling its story at that point, and i think it's a good stopping point. however, im not going to shut up about it bc we so rarely get a spaghetti western that is an overt tragedy with a protagonist with a real character arc

i cannot imagine he'd stay in Clifton, even if the brothel madam Vivian Skill asks him to? he owes her so much. twenty years of being one of three people in Clifton who looked out for him, and she and the girls nursed him back to health after he got shot. it is fascinating that this is such a clean polished town, but it still has a brothel.

what does he do with Talby's saloon, the 45? burning it down would be such a lovely fuck-you to the town, unless he sells it to Vivian? i CANNOT imagine the judge (who survives) would let Scott get away with claiming the saloon without a real will, and i can't imagine Talby actually leaving Scott anything OR having a will.

so what the fuck is even an option for Scott? these are the options for Type of Guy in Clifton and they are all ill-fitting:

indigent, like Blind Bill and Murph

sheriff/deputy (both Nigel and Murph try to enact a specific and personally directed version of justice, and die. the deputies also try to kill him)

real piece of work gunslinger like Talby/Talby's men, or Wild Jack/Wild Jack's men, or Owen White the hired gun

regular townsperson (also pieces of work)

property owner/honorable professional like the judge and banker (submit him to twenty years of abuse, the rancher outside Clifton tries to kill him and Talby with a posse, the judge/banker coalition try to use him as a pawn and shuffle him off safely into a political marriage to the judge's daughter, and when that doesn't take they try to kill him)

storekeeper (the saloonkeeper and barber also submit him to twenty years of abuse, the general store clerk nearly kills him)

doctor (the most neutral townsperson, still has his hands tied within the power structure of Clifton, really isn't thrilled about treating him or Talby, i think there's a reading to be made that the doctor deliberately cut the muscle in his arm or at least told him he did)

we're ignoring the stagecoach/mail coach bc they're outside the power structure of the town, and the citizens of Bowie who he simply doesn't ever interact with.

interestingly, the only business owners who don't try to kill him are Vivian Skill the brothel madam and the unnamed tequila distiller in Bowie.

being a regular guy isn't even a possibility for Scott (at least not in Clifton). he made a name for himself as Talby's right hand, and even though he does throw the pistol away at the end, Talby formed him in his own image and kind of ruined him for any other job. killing Talby is going to haunt him forever, both by tales of his skill and speed in killing such a famous gunslinger and like, the CPTSD.

Scott is a victim of a nasty cycle of betrayal/greed and abuse/capitalism perpetuated by the town of Clifton AND Talby/Talby's rules of being a gunslinger, and these cycles and rules are their downfall as Scott shouts Talby's rules out while gunning down Talby's men. this is not a subtle movie.

even if you knock off the five richest guys in town, that doesn't break the cycle bc almost everyone in Clifton is still such a goddamn piece of work. and even though Scott throws away the gun at the end, i don't know if he can break that cycle for himself or the town either. nothing changes except for Scott, who now in theory has the backbone/freedom to go "fuck you", steal a horse, and leave for good.

does Scott go off and start a saloon/brothel/distillery somewhere that is not Clifton? what does this man become??? again, i think the fact that there are no good options for him is part of the tragedy-- losing his two father figures and his hometown in the span of like half an hour is brutal.

rotating this movie in my brain forever.

#day of anger #day of anger 1967 #cowboyblogging

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fatehbaz · 2 years

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Caribbean literature is permeated by submarine aesthetics registering the environmental histories of colonialism and capitalism. [...] Old Weird tales by authors such as William Hope Hodgson and, most famously, H.P. Lovecraft, [...] were [written] in the context of a world still dominated by European colonialism, but increasingly reshaped by an emergent US imperialism. [...] [T]hese tales are both ecophobic and racialized, teeming with fears of deep geological time and the alterity of both nonhuman life and non-European civilizations, and [...] they register the oil-fuelled, militarised emergence of US imperial naval dominance. [...]

Fundamental to the emergence of the capitalist world-ecology through the slave trade, [the Atlantic Ocean’s] violent history has haunted Caribbean imaginaries [...]. [T]wo tropes [...] flourished in an era when European and American powers competed for dominance in the Caribbean: monstrous octopi, which would metamorphose into the Lovecraftian anthropoid tentacular figure, and the Caribbean-centred myth of the Sargasso Sea as a “Weed World” [...].

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In legends of the weed-clogged Sargasso Sea, “ships became becalmed and trapped by the weed” in an area of the North Atlantic that would later be nicknamed the Bermuda triangle [...]. Several late nineteenth-century American and British writers “used the Sargasso as a setting for societies of people trapped there for generations” [...]. [O]ne of the most influential authors of Sargasso tales, English author William Hope Hodgson, describes it as a place of absolute loneliness, an “interminable waste of weed -- a treacherous, silent vastitude of slime and hideousness” (p. 4) that eclipses humanity and enlightened rationality. Hodgson’s “From the Tideless Sea” (1906) depicts monsters of the deep lurking beneath this stagnant surface: “some dread Thing hidden within the weed” devours almost all of the crew [...].” In his subsequently published Sargasso-themed horror novel, The Boats of the “Glen Carrig” (1907), the tentacled creature is joined “by giant crabs, octopodes, and tentacled devil-fish, [..] giant fungi [..] trees that howl [and] […] weed men” [...].

As Emily Alder observes, these “[a]nimal monsters” are so unsettling because they “reveal the limits to scientific mastery over the natural world” [...]. “They violate,” she continues, “existing norms and knowledge systems; they flourish in environments in which humans are unfit and cannot dominate” and disturb “a colonialist centrism structuring relationships between humans and the more-than-human world” (ibid.). The Atlantic Ocean and its Weird creatures mark the limits of capitalism’s attempts to control the submarine world.

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The Old Oceanic Weird imagines the Sargasso as a depository of a secreted, miserable history which invokes the temporality of the longue durée -- whether deep time provoking terror because it is seemingly beyond human conceptualization, or the catastrophic history of the four hundred preceding years of capitalist modernity. UK naval officer Frank H. Shaw’s “Held by the Sargasso Sea” (1908), which offers a paradigmatic condensation of imperialist tropes associated with the sea. mobilises both temporalities [...].

Shaw’s invocation of Columbus situates the Weird within a colonialist tradition that imagines the Caribbean both as site of triumphal European conquest and of fearfully insurgent natural alterity that might thwart or exceed European power and epistemes. At the same time, the passage offers a prescient, if unwitting, registration of capitalism’s transformation of the ocean into trash-heap and dumping-ground, full of derelict ships, but also the detritus of the Atlantic mercantile economy, trapped within a vortex that anticipates today’s garbage patch within the North Atlantic Gyre. The rampant seaweed reconfigures the ecophobic trope of monstrous tropical fecundity to imagine the loathsome vegetation as clogging and obstructing the technics and vehicles of maritime capitalism, thus resisting the rigid abstraction of nature.

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It is within Lovecraft’s sea horror that tentacular monsters and abyssal terrors achieve their most potent distillation, developed and refined throughout the Cthulhu mythos and its related tales of ancient underwater beings [...]. Critics have often noted that the horrors of the two world wars are central to the Old Weird, particularly in stories such as “Dagon” and “The Temple.” However, [...] the geopolitical environmental unconscious of Lovecraftian eco-racial-phobia [...] [also] registers, even if often in displaced form, the emergence of the US as the new global hegemon in the world-ecology.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the US aggressively expanded into the Caribbean and Latin America, establishing the ecological regime of the “American Sugar Kingdom,” increasing its control over commercial sea lanes, and justifying “dollar diplomacy” through patriarchal-racist ideology. [...] Furthermore, during the early twentieth century, tentacled figures were explicitly used to refer to Standard Oil. [...] More broadly, tentacled creatures were employed to critique new forms of imperialism. [...] Within [newer fiction from the Caribbean] [...], ecological crisis is often explicitly thematised, no longer mediating the imminent transition to a new oil-fuelled regime but rather the epochal exhaustion of the neoliberal ecological regime. [...] The uncanny totality of climate change is [...] refocusing “our attention on the localities within the totality of the global.” [...]. [T]he utopian trace [...] [in this newer fiction] lies in its intimation that prospects for [...] transformation lie in finding alternative, non-capitalist, ways of viewing the marine world, in restoring the numinosity of the oceans [...].

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All above text by: Sharae Deckard and Kerstin Oloff. “”The One Who Comes from the Sea”: Marine Crisis and the New Oceanic Weird in Rita Indiana’s La mucama de Omicunle (2015)”. Humanities [MDPI] Volume 9, Issue 3. 19 August 2020. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]

#ecology #abolition #haunted #landscape #caribbean #imperial #colonial #empire #ghost

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ausetkmt · 1 year

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As Vélina Élysée Charlier ventured on to the streets of her conflict-stricken city last week, she encountered scenes that will haunt her for many years to come.

Armed civilians dragging bodies through the streets. Smouldering corpses. Young men with machetes chasing suspected gangsters they planned to kill.

“I’ve seen enough dead people for many lifetimes,” said the Haitian human rights activist. “Since Monday, if you get killed, you get burned. It’s kill, burn, kill, burn … It’s nothing I would want anyone else to witness. It stays with you … It’s hell, you know?”

The nightmarish events unfolding in Haiti’s coastal capital, Port-au-Prince, began before dawn on Monday when members of one of its notorious gangs reportedly tried to seize control of the city’s Turgeau area.

“What they didn’t count on was the population striking back,” said Charlier, who works in the neighbourhood.

Over the coming hours, civilians brandishing knives, rocks and handguns rose up against the heavily armed criminals who control more than 80% of Haiti’s capital and whose activities have led the United Nations to compare the situation there to a war.

As the sun rose, the bloodshed spread. In the Canapé-Vert neighbourhood, 13 suspected gangsters were beaten, stoned to death and burned after their minibus was stopped by police. In Turgeau another six men were reportedly set on fire.

The violence continued on Tuesday as Canapé-Vert’s residents formed self-defence brigades and took to their barricaded streets with rocks and knives.

“We are planning to fight and keep our neighbourhood clean of these savages,” one vigilante, a 37-year-old called Jeff Ezequiel, told the Associated Press.

On Wednesday, as groups sprang up in other communities, another lynching was reported: this time, eight suspected criminalsin the community of Debussy.

“We’re already dead, so we might as well die fighting,” Charlier remembered one person in Turgeau telling her.

The lynchings have sparked a strange and disturbing mix of horror, fear and optimism in Haitian communities fed up with being terrorised by the gangs.

“Seeing the population fighting back – even though there are lots of human rights violations, even though justice by the people is never the way to go because it just spirals into a cycle of violence that never stops – gives you ... the sense that people are as mad as you are,” said Charlier. “What’s happening is giving hope to the population that they can fight back.”

“It is obscene,” the author and activist Monique Clesca said of the lynchings. “But that’s what these bandits have pushed us to.”

“It’s more than frustration ... [Rage] is the only word,” Clesca added, blaming the surge of mob justice on years of elite political corruption and connivance with organised crime.

Daniel Foote, the outspoken former US special envoy to the Caribbean country, said he was also unsurprised at the violence, given the police’s failure to bring the gangs to heel.

“At some point I thought they were going to start to take matters into their own hands because they’ve got no choice. They’ve got nothing else,” Foote said.

“The Haitians, like anybody, can only take so much. The gangs have stolen their lives from them,” Foote added, as a spokesperson for Haiti’s embattled and enfeebled national police force implored citizens to stop. “Do not take justice into your own hands,” Garry Desrosiers told reporters on Wednesday.

That plea looks likely to fall on deaf ears, given the scale of the security catastrophe facing one the Caribbean’s largest cities, which was levelled by an earthquake in 2010 and has been struggling to find its feet ever since.

As people in Port-au-Prince fought to reclaim their communities, the UN secretary general’s special envoy to Haiti offered a chilling overview of the country’s “rapidly deteriorating security situation” and the parallel humanitarian crisis that have left almost half of Haiti’s 11 million citizens going hungry.

María Isabel Salvador told the UN security council that March had seen Haiti’s highest number of reports of murders, rapes, kidnappings and lynchings since 2005. Children had been shot in classrooms and snatched at school gates. Snipers had indiscriminately targeted civilians. Women had been terrorised by “multiple-perpetrator” rape.

“Faced with these increasingly violent armed gangs vying for control of neighbourhoods of the capital, with limited or no police presence, some residents have begun to take matters into their own hands,” the Ecuadorian diplomat reported. “These dynamics lead unfailinglyto the breakdown of social fabric with unpredictable consequences for the entire region.”

The human rights activist Rosy Auguste Ducéna called the lynchings a “worrisome” development. Her group had been unable to calculate the exact death toll. But some suspect dozens, perhaps scores, have been killed in recent days.

Ducéna blamed the government of the prime minister, Ariel Henry – who took power after the 2021 assassination of the then president, Jovenel Moïse – for the uprising as it had failed to dismantle and prosecute gang members and surrendered many areas to their rule. “There is a certain complicity between [the gangs] and the state authorities,” Ducéna said, adding that “permanent calm” would only come if authorities stopped protecting criminal groups.

Clesca said it was hard to know where the nascent anti-gang insurrection would lead. “They are small [incidents], but they are significant. Will they multiply? What will happen? I think we have to watch and we have to be very sensitive to that,” she said, predicting the coming weeks would see “more people, cities and towns rising up and saying: ‘We are not taking this. Enough is enough.’”

Foote also wondered whether the rebellion might signal a new phase in Haiti’s political, humanitarian and security crises, “because this is the first time that people have really taken matters into their own hands, which is how the Haitians won independence [in 1804] and have kept their independence a number of times since then”.

The dire outlook has prompted calls for an international intervention – a call repeated by Salvador at the UN. “The Haitian people cannot wait. We need to act now,” she said, calling for the urgent deployment of “an international specialised force” to fight gangs.

Foote said he was “100% ideologically opposed” to another foreign intervention, given the miserable track record of previous efforts including the 2004-2017 UN stabilisation mission, whose peacekeepers brought cholera to Haiti and were accused of sexual abuse and exploitation.

“But I believe that they’re going to need an intervention. It’s just that bad, to be honest with you,” Foote said. “It’s not Haiti any more; it’s a prison … People stay in their houses and only leave if they absolutely have to … It is dangerous as fuck.”

Charlier rejected calls for a foreign intervention. “I recognise the police cannot deal with this alone,” the activist said, but nor did she want thousands of heavily armed foreign troops to return “to put a Band-Aid on a cancer”.

After navigating six vigilante roadblocks to reach work on Thursday morning, Charlier voiced despair at how the bloodshed would affect Haitian children. “Kids are going to school witnessing dead burning bodies on the side of the road … I cannot even think about the collective trauma we are going to have to deal with in a couple of years,” she said, comparing parts of her city to a war zone.

“Honestly, I don’t know [how I feel]. I just hope this is going to end very soon because I’m mentally drained and I’m exhausted,” Charlier said before concluding with a grim prophecy.

“What we are seeing in Haiti will end in blood and in ashes,” she warned. “In people being killed and in houses being burned.”

#haiti #violence in hatit #‘It’s hell’: vigilantes take to Haiti’s streets in bloody reprisals against gangs #gang violence in Haiti

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whitepolaris · 5 months

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The Lady in Gray

by Andrew Henderson

A melancholy ghost hunter the rows at Camp Chase Confederate Cemetery, on the wet side of Columbus, Ohio. Known as the Lady in Gray, she usually weeps quietly over the grave of one Benjamin F. Allen, a private in the 50th Tennessee Regiment, Company D. Allen's grave is number 233 out of 2,260 Confederate soldiers laid to rest in this two-acre plot in the capital city of a very North state.

The cemetery in Columbus's hilltop neighborhood marks the place where a prisoner of war camp stood more than 140 years ago, though at the time the location was well outside the city limits. In May 1861, a Union military training ground named Camp Jackson was established here. By July of that year, when the first prisoners were admitted, its name was changed to honor President Lincoln's Secretary of State (and later Chief Justice of the United States), Hamilton County native Salmon P. Chase.

At first, Camp Chase took only officers as prisoners, with enlisted men imprisoned at Fort Warren, near Boston Harbor. A large number of the officers were captured during 1862 Union victories at Fort Donelson, Tennessee and Mississippi Island No. 10. But by the beginnings of 1863, some 8,000 men of every rank were incarcerated behind the high staked walls of the camp, necessitating the building of a stockacde on Johnson's Island in Lake Erie. Most of the officers imprisoned at Camp Chase were transferred to Johnson's Island once the stockade was completed.

During the smallpox epidemic of 1863, some 500 of the imprisoned soldiers died in the month of February alone. Overcrowding forced two or three men sharing single bunks and led to severe shortages in food, medicine, clothing, and blankets. Malnourished and cold, the men were highly susceptible to disease.

Near the end of that deadly year, a cemetery was built at the camp. As a result, the Confederate dead who had been buried in the city cemetery were moved back to Camp Chase, buried under a cheap wooden markers in a plot surrounded by a low fence.

When the war ended in 1865, most of Camp Chase itself was dismantled. Some o the cabins where POWs had been housed were used as shanties for a few years; but for the most part, every trace of Camp Chase would soon be gone-except for the graveyard, which was left to deteriorate until it was restored in the 1890s.

Today the small cemetery is picturesque and well maintained, its wooden headstones replaced with granite. Its centerpiece is an arched constructed from granite blocks. Atop the arch stands the state of a Confederate soldier facing south, and on the keystones below the feet is engraved a single word: AMERICANS.

Who's That Lady?

So many men died miserably here at a young age that it's surprising the Lady in Gray is the only ghost who haunts the place. She is described by witnesses as wearing a flowing gray dress and a gray veiling hiding her face. Is she Benjamin Allen's Tennessee bride, weeping over the reunion that never happened?

Visitors to the cemetery and even those passing by the gates have reported seeing this woman walking among the seemingly endless line through the locked cemetery gates at night. But more often than not, she is spotted standing over two specific graves-that of Benjamin Allen and one of an unknown soldiers.

Researchers of the paranormal have yet to figure out who the ghostly woman is and why she chooses to mourn where she does. She doesn't appear to be the spirit of any known of Mr. Allen's, and her concern for an unknown soldier further compounds the mystery. Perhaps the Lady in Gray isn't connected to those graves at all but is simply eternally mourning the atrocities of war in general.

#weird ghosts #type read

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xtruss · 1 year

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Photographs © Evandro Teixeira/Instituto Moreira Salles, 2023

Photo Booth: The Photographer Who Saw the Brutality and the Fragility of Authoritarianism

Fifty years ago, Augusto Pinochet staged a violent coup in Chile. Evandro Teixeira went to the capital and captured startling images of soldiers, protesters, and the funeral procession of Pablo Neruda.

— By Alejandro Chacoff | March 14, 2023

In September, 1973, just a few days after General Augusto Pinochet staged a violent coup in Santiago, the photographer Evandro Teixeira, who had spent the previous decade covering the military regime in Brazil, was sent to Chile. “Of course, the hook was that bastard Pinochet, but otherwise we had to wing it, find our own way,” Teixeira, who’s now eighty-seven, told me recently. Teixeira, accompanied by a colleague from one of Brazil’s major daily papers at the time, the Jornal do Brasil, stayed at the old Hotel Carrera, right by the bombed Presidential palace, La Moneda. He ate and drank at the hotel bar after curfew, chatting with other guests and staying tuned to gossip and rumors, trying to get a sense of what was going on. The trip lasted only a few days, but it became one of the most important of his career.

One day, he went to the Estadio Nacional, a grand soccer stadium in Santiago. Pinochet’s newly installed government had quartered prisoners there, and was allowing members of the press to visit. The intention, according to Teixeira, was to show that the people detained were not being mistreated. Men sat in the stands, staring out at the field, surrounded by soldiers. “Those were some poor old souls,” Teixeira said. He had visited the same place roughly a decade before, in 1962, for the World Cup, and, based on a vague memory of the stadium’s architecture, he intuited that there were other detainees elsewhere. “I knew the important prisoners were being held in the basement,” he said. He took pictures of the men in the stands, but he also managed to find small cells, more like cages, where men were cramped together.

Top left: Political prisoners held by the military at the Estadio Nacional, Santiago, Chile, September 22, 1973. Top Right: Political prisoners incarcerated underground at the Estadio Nacional. This photo was published in the Jornal do Brasil, in 1973. Bottom: Estadio Nacional, Santiago, Chile, September 22, 1973.

Teixeira’s photos in Chile are the main subject of a retrospective at the Instituto Moreira Salles, in São Paulo, from March to July. They provide haunting depictions of the aftermath of a military coup, when quotidian life is assaulted by a new regime that has claimed for itself a right to extrajudicial violence. I recently met Teixeira at the institute’s offices in Rio de Janeiro, along with the organizers of the upcoming exhibition. Teixeira is burly, and spoke with a raspy drawl, partly a result of age and partly from a recent battle with covid. He described his Santiago trip with a mix of gravity and mischievousness that seemed typical of not only his personality but his style.

Teixeira’s pictures offer glimpses of both the brutality of illegitimate power and the fragility of it; he captures odd moments, when the absurdity of the regime’s claims—or the pathetic quality of its posturing—is laid bare. In one photo, detainees sit in the stands at the Estadio Nacional just below three soldiers keeping guard. One soldier is smiling, and the detainees look baffled and resigned; they stare out toward the field, not unlike soccer supporters watching a nil-nil draw. One senses that these men are accustomed to being jerked around by the state. In another photo, a car idles while an Army officer stands a few steps away from it. The officer’s clothes seem slightly too big, as though he were a child trying on his parent’s clothes. His posture is surprisingly unmenacing, as if he has no idea what to do.

Top: The Army on the streets, Santiago, Chile, September 21-30, 1973. Bottom left: A guard in front of La Moneda, the Presidential palace, Santiago, Chile, September 21-30, 1973. Bottom Right: Bayonets and dragonflies during the hundred-year celebration of the Battle of Tuyutí, Aterro do Flamengo, Rio de Janeiro, May, 1966.

These pictures evade the visual clichés of authoritarianism—masses hypnotized by the charismatic leader, for instance, or soldiers performing martial movements in synch. Such tropes echo the very sentiments a dictatorship aspires to instill, with their emphasis on fear and submission. Conversely, Teixeira’s images nudge the viewer to consider the inanity of those projecting power, and the humanity of those subject to it. Even his portrayals of mass protests are framed such that one can look closely at a wide array of faces. One of my favorites of the Santiago pictures shows a young guard in uniform standing half-heartedly in front of the rubble at La Moneda, machine gun in hand, guarding the building that the junta just sacked. It is a symbol of the paradox at the heart of tyrannies, with their claims to protect the very sense of order and stability that they destroy.

Teixeira was born in 1935, in Irajuba, a small town in the northeastern state of Bahia. He moved to Rio in his early twenties and started working at the newspaper Diário da Noite. In 1963, he was hired by the Jornal do Brasil, and worked there for the next forty-seven years, until the paper discontinued its print edition, in 2010. (It resumed the print edition in 2018.) In his second year at the paper, the military overthrew the government of leftist President João Goulart. A photograph that Teixeira took of the seizure of the Copacabana Fort, in April, 1964, hints at the ironic sensibility that he would develop throughout his career. We see a skinny soldier in the dark, during a torrential rainstorm, his silhouette framed by the blasted lights of what looks like a military jeep. The soldier’s posture is awkward, almost inattentive; the whole mood is one of melancholy, if not desolation. With its air of anticlimax, the picture brings to mind the protracted political process that led to the coup in the first place, its tragedy of errors.

One of Teixeira’s most famous photos, “Caça ao estudante. Sexta-feira Sangrenta,” was taken four years later, during a violently repressed student protest in Rio that became known in the country as Bloody Friday. Two officers carrying truncheons run after a protester, who appears to fall, his glasses caught by the camera in midair. The certainty that the student is about to take a beating is offset, somewhat, by the ridiculous postures of the officers. They seem to be panting, running awkwardly, whereas the student, whose identity or fate could not be confirmed after the incident, appears vigorous, his movements nimble. The photo became an emblem of the regime’s violence. With hindsight, it also subtly underlines the military’s inability to tame the forces that would eventually overthrow it.

Top: Political prisoners arrive at the Estadio Nacional, Santiago, Chile, September 22, 1973. Bottom: The hunt for the student during Bloody Friday (“Caça ao estudante. Sexta-Feira Sangrenta”), a protest against the Brazilian dictatorship which was heavily repressed by the regime, Rio de Janeiro, June 21, 1968.

At the Jornal do Brasil, Teixeira had to nurture his craft while remaining careful not to alarm government officials to the point that they prevented him from returning the following week to take pictures again. There were often censors at the Jornal do Brasil headquarters, checking on what the paper was publishing, and a more heavy-handed approach arguably could have landed him in trouble. His style, then, might have grown partly out of necessity. Still, some of his photographs mock alleged military might in a remarkably unabashed way, as in his image of a Brazilian Air Force officer falling from a motorcycle, a picture that now seems to foreshadow the far-right ex-President Jair Bolsonaro’s obsession with motorcades.

By the time he went to Chile, Teixeira had grown used to furtively taking the film out of his camera, and hiding his own political allegiances to avoid capture. One day in Santiago, a soldier caught him snapping a shot of a military truck unloading beef—Chile had been plagued with chronic food shortages—and took him to be interrogated by a colonel. When Teixeira was asked what he’d been doing, he cursed the “subversives,” and claimed that he worked for the “Condessa’s paper, a Catholic newspaper,” he told me. Condessa was the Countess Maurina Pereira Carneiro, a businesswoman and staunch Catholic who then owned the Jornal do Brasil. “I was always mentioning the Condessa,” Teixeira recalled, laughing. The paper, which became increasingly outspoken against the Brazilian government’s censorship, was not a Catholic paper. But the strategy worked that day. Even so, Teixeira was forced to spend the night away from his hotel. The colonel told him that he wasn’t detained, that they were just having coffee. “And so I stayed there having coffee for the whole night,” Teixeira said.

The March of the One Hundred Thousand (“Passeata dos Cem Mil”), in Cinelândia, Rio de Janeiro, June 26, 1968.

A stain made by tear gas, Rio de Janeiro, June 21, 1968.

There were other close calls. During a visit to a cemetery, Teixeira glimpsed corpses of young people arriving and being deposited in a room, the blood on their bodies still apparently fresh. Trying to evade the attention of guards, he managed to reach the room, but was pistol-whipped when he was about to click.

Such tenacity led to one of the biggest scoops of his career, early in that Santiago trip. In one of his post-curfew chats at the Hotel Carrera bar, the wife of a military attaché gave him a tip. There had been rumors, since the coup, about the health of Pablo Neruda, the great Chilean poet, who had prostate cancer; Teixeira’s contact told him that Neruda was very ill and had just been transferred from his house in Isla Negra to the Santa María Clinic, in Santiago. On September 23rd, Teixeira went to the hospital, but was denied access to Neruda; that same night, the poet was pronounced dead. The following morning, Teixeira returned to the hospital, and, although a crowd had already gathered around the building, he managed to sneak in through a side door.

Inside the building, he found Matilde Urrutia, Neruda’s widow, by her husband’s corpse. While speaking with her, Teixeira dropped the name of the Brazilian novelist Jorge Amado, a friend of the couple who had been a Communist militant. Urrutia allowed Teixeira to stay and accompany her, first during the wake at La Chascona, the poet’s house in Santiago, and then throughout the funeral procession toward the city’s main cemetery. Teixeira’s first pictures that day show a desolate, narrow room, where Neruda lay in a cot, and later in a coffin, with his head wrapped in cloth. The procession grew spontaneously into an agglomeration, and then a kind of protest. The facial expressions in Teixeira’s photos are grave, but might betray a degree of apprehension, too—the military, after all, could intervene at any moment, which might have provoked a bloodbath. Participants chanted the “Internationale” and other leftist hymns as the poet was carried toward the cemetery. Teixeira still recalls the emotion of bearing witness to Neruda’s power as a cultural figure. “I was very moved but held the camera firmly in my hands and pressed it to my face,” he told me. “I had tears running in my eyes.”

The body of Pablo Neruda on its way to the General Cemetery of Santiago, Chile, September 25, 1973.

Left: A crowd follows the arrival of Pablo Neruda’s body at the General Cemetery of Santiago, Chile, September 25, 1973. Bottom: A huge gathering at the burial of Pablo Neruda. Outside the cemetery, heavy contingents of the junta’s troops stood on alert.

Neruda was a former Presidential candidate and Communist senator, and a close friend to the ousted President Salvador Allende, who had died by suicide while the Presidential palace was under siege. He was also a potential target of the junta. Not long before, the new junta had murdered Víctor Jara, a popular leftist singer. Just this year, after decades of suspicion surrounding the circumstances of Neruda’s death—and ten years after the exhumation of his body—one of the poet’s nephews, Rodolfo Reyes, claimed that there is now conclusive evidence of foul play. According to Reyes, a new report, by a panel of international scientists, confirmed the presence of a toxin linked to botulism in bone and teeth samples, pointing to a likely assassination. The Chilean courts have not yet pronounced any decision based on the findings.

During the funeral procession, fifty years ago, Pinochet did not order an intervention. As Teixeira remembers it, the general called a press conference, probably to stall the event’s momentum. I asked him whether any journalists there that day thought the press conference was more newsworthy than the procession. “Of course, some people scattered,” he said. “But I wasn’t going to leave his body to go see that bastard Pinochet.”

Student on the stairs of the Municipal Theatre, Rio de Janeiro, 1968.

— The New Yorker

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rockislandadultreads · 1 year

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Black History Month: Nonfiction

The 1619 Project edited by Nikole Hannah-Jones

In late August 1619, a ship arrived in the British colony of Virginia bearing a cargo of twenty to thirty enslaved people from Africa. Their arrival led to the barbaric and unprecedented system of American chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years. This is sometimes referred to as the country’s original sin, but it is more than that: It is the source of so much that still defines the United States.

The New York Times Magazine’s award-winning “1619 Project” issue reframed our understanding of American history by placing slavery and its continuing legacy at the center of our national narrative. This new book substantially expands on that work, weaving together eighteen essays that explore the legacy of slavery in present-day America with thirty-six poems and works of fiction that illuminate key moments of oppression, struggle, and resistance. The essays show how the inheritance of 1619 reaches into every part of contemporary American society, from politics, music, diet, traffic, and citizenship to capitalism, religion, and our democracy itself.

All That She Carried by Tiya Miles

In 1850s South Carolina, an enslaved woman named Rose faced a crisis, the imminent sale of her daughter Ashley. Thinking quickly, she packed a cotton bag with a few precious items as a token of love and to try to ensure Ashley's survival. Soon after, the nine-year-old girl was separated from her mother and sold.

Decades later, Ashley's granddaughter Ruth embroidered this family history on the bag in spare yet haunting language - including Rose's wish that "It be filled with my Love always." Ruth's sewn words, the reason we remember Ashley's sack today, evoke a sweeping family story of loss and of love passed down through generations. Now, in this illuminating, deeply moving book inspired by Rose's gift to Ashley, historian Tiya Miles carefully unearths these women's faint presence in archival records to follow the paths of their lives - and the lives of so many women like them - to write a singular and revelatory history of the experience of slavery, and the uncertain freedom afterward, in the United States.

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation’s history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of “race,” a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men - bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden?

Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son. Coates shares with his son - and readers - the story of his awakening to the truth about his place in the world through a series of revelatory experiences, from Howard University to Civil War battlefields, from the South Side of Chicago to Paris, from his childhood home to the living rooms of mothers whose children’s lives were taken as American plunder. Beautifully woven from personal narrative, reimagined history, and fresh, emotionally charged reportage, Between the World and Me clearly illuminates the past, bracingly confronts our present, and offers a transcendent vision for a way forward.

A Black Women’s History of the United States by Daina Ramey Berry & Kali Nicole Gross

In centering Black women’s stories, two award-winning historians seek both to empower African American women and to show their allies that Black women’s unique ability to make their own communities while combatting centuries of oppression is an essential component in our continued resistance to systemic racism and sexism. Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross offer an examination and celebration of Black womanhood, beginning with the first African women who arrived in what became the United States to African American women of today.

A Black Women’s History of the United States reaches far beyond a single narrative to showcase Black women’s lives in all their fraught complexities. Berry and Gross prioritize many voices: enslaved women, freedwomen, religious leaders, artists, queer women, activists, and women who lived outside the law. The result is a starting point for exploring Black women’s history and a testament to the beauty, richness, rhythm, tragedy, heartbreak, rage, and enduring love that abounds in the spirit of Black women in communities throughout the nation.

#black history month #black history #black authors #nonfiction #non-fiction books #nonfiction reads #library books #reading recommendations #book recommendations #reading recs #book recs #tbr #TBR pile #to read #booklr #book tumblr #book blog #library blog

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fallen029 · 2 years

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Kroto: Ava’s General Store.1

The old general store didn’t get many visitors.

The once popular area had seen a steady decline over the past few decades. As more and more businesses headed deeper into the forest, nearer the capital, those who lingered on the outer edges fought to remain afloat.

This was the exact position Ava’s General Store found itself.

Frequently, the oldest of the two boys that worked the shop, Rowan, would ask the owner, his adopted mother Ava, why they didn’t just shutter the old place. He and his brother were plenty old enough to provide for themselves, in a bigger city. She could retire to one of their homes and live out her days without worrying over her struggling business. He could meet a girl, get a real job, and start a life to match.

She always assured him that while he very well could do this, it would be a solo venture.

“I’m must stay,” she’d tell him simply. “For now.”

For now.

He learned to hate that phrase.

She used it frequently.

For now.

When he and his brother first found themselves, at all of eight and six, begging for food in the market of a nearby town, Ava had been quick to lead them along, back to her wagon and then her general store.

“You can stay with me,�� she’d promised that day and held true to it since. “For now.”

It was indefinite.

The term.

For now.

With Ava, it seemed to just mean forever.

A softer way of putting things, maybe.

Well over a decade had come to pass since he and his brother first came to stay (work) on the woman’s property and though it wasn’t all pleasant, he couldn’t say he could complain much. The general store needed to be swept daily and manned, but other than the regulars you could time down to the hour, not many visitors came strolling through. So unless you had a delivery of supplies to go into town and get, you just kinda had to linger about all day, awaiting nothing.

That’s what he thought of it.

The long wait for absolutely nothing.

An old inn was attached to the back of the general store and though Ava made them periodically dust all five rooms it contained, the most use the building ever got was when they were little boys and would play hide-in-seek within its halls. Before, you know, he lied to his younger brother that it was haunted, just for kicks.

Even now his brother wouldn’t go near the building.

Which meant that Rowan was stuck doing any and all dusting that Ava required of it, all these years out.

Fitting punishment…

Other than cleaning and keeping shop though, there was little else to do out in the forest. When they were younger, adventures were all the rage, but now two men on the cusp of their twenties, running over the same, tired ground had grown stale.

Sometimes it felt like they were just waiting for death.

In fact, he was pretty certain Ava was.

She’d been something of an important figure during the Great Wars.

Now she was a lowly shopkeeper.

Rowan didn’t envy where she found herself, but fuck, just to have a few of her memories for a day…

It was the sound of a carriage, horse hooves thudding, large wheels rattling, that caught Rowan’s attention that day. He was in the inn, doing that once a month dusting Ava required. He was up on the second floor, running a rag over the windowsill when, through it, he could see a rather expensive looking carriage pull onto the property. From his vantage point above, he couldn’t quite make out the driver, but the man wasn’t anyone he knew.

Rather, from the silver plated armor he wore and the insignia that was engraved upon it, Rowan could tell he was a part of the royal guard.

The guard jumped down, being sure to grab his helmet from the bench beside him on the way. His entire body was covered either by armor or chain mail, save his face, which while Rowan couldn’t quite make out his expression from such a distance, showcased a stubbly beard over his cool brown skin. After slipping the helmet over his head, the guard rushed to the door of the carriage, holding a hand out to help the first of two cloaked figures down. Each took his hand in their slender own, the cloaks and hoods they wore fluttered about as they leapt down from the carriage, but not enough to reveal anything more about them.

A third, uncloaked man was the last out. The guard didn’t offer his hand and the man didn’t seem to expect it, merely jumping down and looking about. He was Galian, Rowan was nearly certain, a combination of noting the decided point his ears came to and his similar complexion to the guard. He was talking to the others, or at least his mouth was moving, as he ran a hand through his coarse, tangled long black hair and began walking towards the store.

Up in the inn, Rowan’s brain began to melt.

Finn was alone in the general store.

Rowan, of course, had no way of knowing exactly who’d just rolled onto their property, but he knew who was about to be required to help them and, well…

His younger brother was a bit of a fuck up.

Massively.

Atop his klutzy behavior and immaturity, Finn also boasted an inability to shut the fuck up.

In any scenario.

He was a natural showman who, unfortunately, just lacked the charm. His smile was warm though and earnest, down in the general store, when he welcomed all four visitors. The store wasn’t very big, just two shelves lined with things and a larger back area, where Finn could pull anything not out on the floor. There wasn’t really much all to look at other than the eighteen year old boy behind the counter.

“Hi!” A bright smile lit up the teen’s features as he waved, unable to contain his glee. His olive, sun tanned skin had a red tint as he greeted, “Welcome to Ava’s General Store and Weaponry Depot. Plus inn. And dojo.”

Through the window down there, he too had seen the carriage arrive and the visitors step out. Though he didn’t immediately key in on the royal insignia that lay not only over the guard’s armor, but also the very cloaks the women wore, he seemed pleased just to have customers.

The women hung back some, by the door while their guard stood by. Finn was still all smiles as, slowly, the other man approached the counter.

“Good afternoon,” he greeted with a bow of his head. “We were just hoping to stop in for some supplies. My friends and I are journeying quite far and need much. We’ve also been stuck in our carriage for a few days with no place to stop off. Please, if there is a bathhouse or-”

“Of course!” Finn couldn’t let the man go on uninterrupted for much longer. Bouncing on his feet in his excitement, he said, “You can stay in our inn! This is going to be great!”

“W-Well,” the man was quick to say, glancing uncomfortably back at his associates. “We’re not really looking to stay, you see, just a quick washing up and then we’ll be out of your-”

“But it’s already so late in the day,” Finn argued. “And dinner is included! Err, well, our dinner’s almost done, anyways, probably, and it’s just stew, I think, so you can all have a bowl. And you can just give me that list of yours, huh? And I’ll get your carriage all filled up and ready to go for the for the morning.”

“While that is a very kind offer,” the man tried again, “we really should be on our way-”

“Where are you headed?” Finn wasn’t going to let this chance at a conversation with someone who wasn’t his older brother or mother slip through his fingers. Leaning forwards on the counter, he smiled warmly at the man. “I could give you directions.”

“It’s really not necessary.” The man in front of him was clearly growing annoyed. “Can you please just allow us to use the bathhouse? I’ll pay as if we stayed the full night, of course, if that’s the problem.”

“Awh, it’s no problem at all,” Finn assured him as his face fell a bit. “If you’re sure, I mean. Just thought we could all have some fun here, s’all.”

Looking past the man (now that he was peeved, he wasn’t so much fun to converse with), Finn waved again at the other three. One of the women had her back to him, but the other didn’t and, even though it was shadowed, he caught her gaze. Blue eyes peered nervously back at him as she raised a hand slightly to offer one in return.

“Balt, would you stop fucking playing with him?”

It was the woman that had her back to Finn though that said this.

She’d turned suddenly on her heel, hood falling back from her head some as she closed the short space between herself and the counter. Long, silvery white hair flowed freely down now, passed her shoulders, framing her round face. The pudge in her cheeks stood stark against her otherwise athletic build. The scowl etched into her golden light brown flesh was deep and, honestly, a little scary.

Finn could’ve sworn he felt the air in the room shift and become a bit stiffer as she spoke.

Her gaze intense, a new pair of blue eyes found the man’s, clashing heavily as the woman insisted, “We need to rent a room for a few hours. We won’t be staying for dinner. During that time, I need you to fill up our carriage with the list of items my friend here, Balt, gives you. You’re going to do this silently. My guard, Radic, will pay you twice the worth of the items in royal coin. You will never speak of this moment again. Understood?”

Finn only stood there for a moment, staring curiously at the woman’s face for a moment, before remarking, “I’ve seen you somewhere before.”

“Damn it, Toren,” Balt griped. “Why did you have to come over here? I was handling it.”

“Damn it me?” The woman scoffed and her hood fully fell from her head now, revealing her fully. “Damn it you! If you were handling it, Balt, I wouldn’t have-”

“Would the two of you,” came a growl from the front of the store where now, the guard was coming to break them apart, “stop using your real names? We already went over this!”

“Um, Radic?” Pushing her hood back as well, the last woman over by the door had a darker complexion than the other, but their matching white locks and deep blue irises gave away their connection. Softly, she called out to the guard, “Maybe you just should’ve not said it was their real names? Or-”

“Thank you, Lia,” Toren cut the other woman off. “This is ultimately all Radic’s fault, isn’t it?”

As both men took to frowning at Toren then, Finn only grinned over them all.

“Are you sure you guys can’t stay for dinner?” he asked with a snicker. They were already the most fun he’d had in awhile. “’cause-”

“Finn, what are you doing in here?”

Suddenly, the general store doors were thrown open once more, one nearly hitting poor Lia as she stood beside. It was Rowan, olive face flush as he’d only imagined all of the things his brother could possibly be fucking up. He’d rushed right down from the inn and panted a bit. While Finn grinned sheepishly over at him, Rowan merely glanced between the people amassed in the tiny shop. Subconsciously, he ran a hand through his short, layered brown hair while, across the store, his brother shook his similarly shaded, yet far longer and shaggier, hair literally in the faces of the customers.

Rowan almost died.

He’d known they would been important before he walked through the door, but face to face now, with the women’s hoods down, he felt like was going to pass out.

“What do you mean?” his brother carped back at him as Rowan stared with wide eyes at Toren. “I’m helping the customers!”

He’d expected nobility, Rowan had. Some sort of dignitary stopping in at the last general store before the Wasteland. Instead, he found himself staring into the glaring eyes of Princess Toren Aither with what he imagined to be her royal guard flanking her. A glance to his side would show that he’d just accidentally hit Princess Lia Aither with a door.

His heart was beating out of his chest.

Time felt like it had slowed and he was searching Toren’s face then, turning his gaze back to her just to see if he could spot it, if it existed. A faint flicker of recognition. After all these years.

But she gave none.

“We need to get out of here.” The guard noted the transfixed look on Rowan’s face. Taking a step closer to Toren, he grabbed her arm and began to walk her towards the door. “Princess-”

“Princess?” Finn questioned as Toren only shoved the guard off. “You don’t mean… Hey, are you guys-”

“I… I apologize, Princess!” Rowan yelled this, giving up on Toren recognizing him as he turned instead to look at Lia. “For striking you, with the door. I-”

“You hit her with the door?” his brother quipped with a snicker as, leaving Toren behind then, the guard came instead over to Lia. Rowan blushed as the man took a step between himself and the young woman.

“N-No, I… I mean, if I did, I’m sorry,” Rowan huffed. “But-”

“I,” Toren spoke up then, turning once more to face the counter and, by default, Finn, “need a room. Now.”

“O-Of course, Princess!” Rowan turned from the guard and Lia to look back over at Toren. Heading towards the counter, he assured, “Right away. Just let me get a key-”

“Toren, I don’t think we should stay here.” Balt glanced between the two brothers. “We really should just-”

“I am not,” she insisted as she turned her glare onto him, “getting back in that carriage until I’ve had a chance to bathe. If they already know who we are, what difference does it make?”

“Not to be rude or anything,” Finn intervened as, with Rowan there now to figure out where the stupid inn room keys were (they had the skeleton key, for themselves, but since no one ever used the inn, neither had any idea where Ava kept those), “but how come we weren’t supposed to know you were the princess, huh? I wouldda probably charged you for the rooms, had I not known.”

“Finn!” Rowan wanted to slam his head into the ground. He would be slamming Finn’s head into the ground. The very second their company left. “You’re speaking your princess. Stop-”

“I am not his princess. Nor yours either.” And Toren was the one eyeing them then as Rowan, bent down beneath the counter, searching the shelving there for a key, felt a cold sweat spread across his forehead as this was it, finally.

She was going to recognize him.

Or at least he thought.

Then, with no recognition in her tone, she declared quite plainly, “You’re not Galian.”

It was very evident by their feature. Galians were the specific race of elves that inhabited Kroto Forest. Though neither princess was Galian, they were what made up the majority of their vassals. Galians were denoted by their dark, course hair, specific twirl of their ears, light brown skin, and general ruggedness. They served under the Odon, the race of Toren and Lia’s father, King Torcan, and had for centuries.

They made up the majority of the Forest’s population.

The men before her, Toren knew with certainty, were not under her dominion. At least not by birth.

“No,” Finn agreed easily as Rowan was having a bit of a freak out it seemed, down on the ground, frantically tossing things in a fruitless attempt to find a key, the key, any key, anything, it didn’t matter anymore. “We’re not.”

“And you’re not Availian either,” she kept up, eyeing him closer now as Finn only beamed. “Or Harkai.”

“We’re not elves.” Finn even shoved up his hair some, proudly showing off to the woman his rounded ears. “No points.”

“We’re not from here.” Rowan shot up from beneath the counter then with a key in his sweaty palm. Frazzled now, his face was as bit red as he held it out to the princess with shaky hands. “Originally. But we have lived under your father’s rule for many years.”

She’d been smiling before, at Finn, but Toren’s grin fell at Rowan’s words. Reaching out to take the key, their hands brushed and he nearly passed out.

“Yeah, well,” she answered easily. “We all have, I guess.”

He should’ve bitten his tongue, Rowan should’ve, but as her hand fell away from him, all he could think about was it returning.

“Princess Toren,” he whispered as she’d taken to glancing over the heavy, old room key. She was turning it over in her hand, even, when he whispered, “Don’t you remember me?”

Her eyes raised, cold blues up to his soft brown, but as Toren peered closer, still no recognition flashed. At all.

“No,” she answered slowly as Balt sighed beside her.

“The princess is quite forgetful,” he took over with a frown at the woman. “Of course, she recalls meeting you when…you came to the capital? On a trip? Or something similar?”

But Rowan wouldn’t look at Balt.

He knew Balt.

Even if the other man didn’t know him.

While remembrance hadn’t hit Toren yet, over at the door, it was slowly falling over Lia.

Rowan and Finn weren’t exactly common names…

If Lia gave her a bit more prompting, she was certain even her sister could eventually place them.

Rowan and Finn were the adopted children of their mother’s friend, Ava Hamins, the woman known for her feats on the battle field, as well as humanitarian efforts. She’d helped bring an end to the Great Wars, acting as the human go between for the other races in the Forest and beyond, helping to broker the marriage between the freshly crowned King Torcan and Availian Princess Asaeria.

Father and mother to Toren and Lia.

Ava had journeyed to the capital for some reason or another once, when the girls were young. Her mother had made a big deal of her coming, as did most of the castle. There was a big feast and Lia could recall being given a nice, flowing blue dress to dawn for the occasion.

Accompanying the former warrior had been the two orphan boys she’d adopted.

Though Lia had been much too shy to interact with the other children (she mostly kept to herself at that age), Toren had enjoyed showing off her home to two new playmates. When they had to return home, the girls’ mother had suggested to Toren that perhaps she write to Rowan, to keep in touch.

“When I was a girl in Availia,” Asaeria had sighed something of the like, “having the furthest letter mate was all the rage.”

But she wasn’t a girl then and it wasn’t at the time, and by the second or third letter, Toren was done with the concept. Out of sight, out of mind. Rowan was too far away to play with; writing him felt more like a chore, something tacked on to all of the studying she was meant to be doing at that age, which did little to breed desire.

Lia liked Rowan’s letters though.

The concept of them.

Reading and writing were a breeze for both the Aither children, something their mother lauded her husband came from their Availian heritage. Lia found that she enjoyed both very much and getting long letters from a friend, with the one caveat being you had to also write your own, was the exact kind of busywork the younger princess enjoyed.

So she wrote him back.

In her sister’s place.

It was simple enough. Her mother had given both Toren and Rowan, before he left, their own magic envelope. A mystic concept as a child, Lia had been enraptured with how all she had to do was write something, anything, on a slip of parchment and then fold it and place it in the envelope. So long as Rowan held the corresponding one, any message she dropped in the envelope would appear in his own.

When they were younger, the letters were very basic.

Rowan would write her about his chores, about people who came into the shop.

She’d return with the boring goings on of daily palace life.

Gradually, they formed something of a friendship.

Other than his brother, Rowan didn’t have many playmates and spent a lot of time writing to who he assumed to be Toren, the prospected future queen. Got to know her. Shared things with her.

Time passed and he got older, it felt like, faster than Lia. He did have two or three years on her. And when he started writing about how he wanted to see Toren again, about how he might be, well...falling for her, around the summer he turned thirteen, Lia agonized for days about what to do.

Equally because she wasn’t interested and she just knew this somehow would work its way back to Toren.

She didn’t know what punishment her sister could think up for impersonating her for years to some boy, but somehow, Lia didn’t imagine she’d easily laugh it off.

The next letter she wrote him bluntly explained that, as the future queen, she couldn’t really say she felt such a way about anyone and Lia had been pretty proud of the diplomacy the letter contained, given she was only eleven or so, but then Rowan never responded.

Slowly, she’d forgotten about him.

For a little while anyways.

Being the younger sister to someone as outgoing as Toren could make it difficult to get to know people. Especially when you were already othered through hierarchy. Lia was a princess, but not the princess. Getting in good with Toren was something most everyone did; she was more of an afterthought.

So she wrote Rowan.

A short letter, when she felt at her lowest.

Not to say that she was in love with him (or was she saying that Toren wasn’t in love with him?), but rather, first to apologize for the time that came between them and second to see if there were a chance he might like to start writing one another again?

The speed of his response wasn’t anticipated.

Less than a day later, Rowan penned her multiple pages apologizing for his behavior before and explaining his embarrassment over the entire ordeal. It was isolating, he wrote, life at the general store was, and she’d been his only outward source of interaction. When she wrote back rejecting him, he’d been crushed and taken to sulking over it for so long that, by the time he wanted to write her, so much time had passed that it felt inappropriate.

Lia was just glad to once more have a letter mate.

Admittedly, they were coming back into fashion once more...

Still, she and Rowan were back together again then, as friends, of course, and it was nice.

Lia found life in the palace equally as isolating, regardless of the endless streams of people about, and spent many days locked away in her room, drafting letters to the other teen or awaiting his. Having something to look forward to once more made the dredge of castle life bearable.

She’d last sent him a letter three weeks ago and gotten a prompt reply that she’d been too busy to contend with.

Now she was standing in the same room as him and the only person he could look at was Toren.

Of course.

From behind Radic, Lia wasn’t sure if she should speak up or not in regards to at least helping Toren recall the brothers. All she could do was grab Radic’s arm, getting a glance from the man, but his gaze remained mainly on her sister.

“We met you at the Castle,” Finn spoke up then. “Princess. Our mother took us there, to meet with yours.”

“Your mother?” Balt repeated, glancing about again. He’d ignored all the hung frames on the walls before, but glancing about them now, he could place the common denominator in them. His stomach clenched as he asked, “Is your mother-”

“Ava Hamin,” Finn assured him and oh fuck.

Fuck.

Balt felt his heart begin to race as he glanced over at Radic, the pair sporting similar expressions.

Ava had connections to crown. Every crown, really, just about, if the stories were to be believed. Balt only knew her name in passing, but the recognition was enough to short circuit his brain.

How could they have led the girls right to this place?

For Toren though, this fear wasn’t the focus as, instead, she was relieved to recognize the person before her.

Err, well, at least recalled their connection.

“Rowan,” Toren whispered with a soft smile that the man in question returned easily. “Of course I remember you.”

He laughed some, uncomfortable, before saying, “I just thought… My last letter, you didn’t respond-”

“I got busy,” Toren lied with a frown as she remembered then, yes, the letters. That they’d exchange. She wrote him twice, she was pretty sure, and then moved on. Right. “With things.”

“N-No, of course,” Rowan agreed and it was crazy to Lia, that only two people in the room were privy to something and, for once, she was in the know. It also wasn’t lost on her that Toren and the guy were misunderstanding one another just enough to skate by in their coversation conversation. She was sure this luck wouldn’t hold. Especially as Rowan insisted, “I was just worried that something had happened-”

“For years?” Toren questioned back which made him frown and begin to question her again, but someone else beat him to it.

“You guys,” Balt asked with a frown, glancing between his princess and the other teen, “exchange letters?”

“We did,” Toren told him with a roll of her eyes and a passing toss of her hand. “Years ago.”

Rowan thought he was catching on then. In the letters, Lia had been sure to include her sister’s...whatever she had with Balt, if only in hopes of avoiding Rowan ever venturing another leap at romance. So he knew enough about the Princess’s relationship with the other guy to know she might not be falling over herself to tell Balt about the letters.

It made sense.

He’d long reconciled to just being the guy in the letters.

But now she was here…

Had she…

Had she planned to come?

No.

On both princesses.

Toren was only standing there, in that moment, due to events she never could have planned for.

Lia was there to suffer. She was pretty sure. On the planet in general just to suffer. Absolutely.

The awkwardness of the situation was punctuated by Ava choosing that moment to return from her daily stroll out in the woods. At the sight of a carriage outside, the woman had rushed right in, surprised at first to find so many patrons, but then by who she recognized them to be.

“P-Princess,” she breathed at the sight of Toren standing before her counter, conversing with her son. “W-What… I’m honored by your presence. I- Two.” She’d turned to her side and seen Lia standing there, behind the royal guard, and bowed her head to the younger. “Both princesses. Well. I….” And she did the only thing she could thing to do then, bowing deeply at the waist, assuring the two women, “I am forever at your service.”

Ava was a human woman who’s midlife was passing her by. For her storied past, her warm, sepia brown skin was blemished with fading, purple scars. Old cuts and wounds that lingered beyond their welcome. Her nose had gone from slightly crooked in one direction to another, back in her fighting days. Even down to the way she walked, with a slight limp favoring her right side, came from an incident out on the battlefield. She still wore a similar buzz cut to her glory days and, though age did show in her wrinkled face, it was hard to believe decades had past since her name was last relevant in the land.

Her deep set, sea-green eyes stayed alight, no matter what enemy she was facing, and it was true to that day, as they roamed across the faces before her.

Toren held up her hand, dangling the key from it as she said, “Finn helped us set up a room.”

Behind her, this caused Rowan to nearly crumple to the floor while Finn fist pumped the air and jumped.

“A single room for the four people?” Rather than be impressed, Ava seemed perturbed. As Finn’s grin fell and Rowan’s frown did the opposite, the woman added, “And where were you then, when he was making the mistake, Rowan? Help your brother fix it. There are enough rooms for them all.”

“Excuse me, I’m sorry, but I think there’s been a misunderstanding,” Balt spoke up, taking a step towards the former warrior. He bowed deeply when he came to a stop, even more so, maybe, than she had done for the Princesses, before saying, “We do not intend on remaining here for long. Only a quick rest and then-”

“And then back on the road? So late at night and with one guard?” Ava frowned, but it wasn’t at Balt. “I find that hard to believe.”

Though her boys had assumed him so, Ava was certain Balt was no guard. To be so relaxed, out of armor, so close to the boarder, with both princesses?

She was still recovering from finding that there truly was merely one.

Her eyes landed on Radic, eyeing him heavily through the grating over his helmet. “Well? What sort of business would lead you all the way out here?”

But Radic didn’t rattle as easily as she’d feared.

“Confidential,” was his stern, deep reply and all three of his travel companions were thankful for the man’s even manner.

Still, Ava frowned some before remarking, “I will not allow you to travel at night. Or, at least, Princess Toren, I implore and advise you otherwise. If something happened to you out on these roads… You know your mother and I once knew one another. Your father as well. No, if they were to find out that I allowed you… I will either accompany you until your next destination or-”

“We’ll stay the night,” Toren interrupted quickly.

Talk of her parents would have gotten her to agree to most anything, so long as they quit speaking.

Radic didn’t give off any obvious signs of displeasure, but from directly behind him, Lia could see how the man tensed. Balt wasn’t as stoic, eyeing the Toren openly, but not otherwise speaking.

“It’s settled then,” Ava decided and she nodded at each of them in turn before saying, “You’ll stay, for now. I must hurry and prepare dinner for our guest. Finn, Rowan, see them to their rooms, the bathhouse, and the river, if they wish, before it gets too late in the night. Dinner will be ready, oh, surely no more than two hours.”

Which felt like a lifetime of minutes, Toren reasoned, to figure a way out of staying the night.

#writing #fiction #original writing #original fiction #fantasy #elves

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star-puff · 3 years

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part i: 开花 (bloom)

☁︎ ᴘᴀɪʀɪɴɢ: ushijima w. x f!reader

☁︎ ᴡᴀʀɴɪɴɢs: themes of war, mentioning of death and things of that nature

☁︎ ᴡᴄ: 3.4k

m.list | next

There are two things of which Ushijima is certain: there is a war, and he must do what is necessary.

When the sky is painted the subdued orange-red of a bloody dawn, smoke still clinging to the air from last night’s battle, Ushijima is already standing on the training grounds, swinging his guandao with the ferocity of an eagle’s talons piercing its prey. His hands are long calloused, a childhood of combat training ingrained in his fingertips.

Ushijima ignores the dull ache in his arms as he swings his blade again. The training grounds are barren, his fellow soldiers still resting in their tents. An ordinary day would call for Ushijima waking everyone for morning training, but this was the morning after a battle. With grief still running high from lost lives, wounds in need of rest and healing, his soldiers are in no shape to spar in the dark, cold morning.

The gash stitched at his side is still secure, its seams not yet ripped open from his training. He estimates another minute before his bandages start bleeding through. A general must lead, he remembers his father saying, adjusting his grip on the wooden sword too big for his hands. Where your soldiers go, you must go first. Not quite a general, still just a captain, the memory holds true. Ushijima tries to block out his enemies’ screams and the memory of his comrades’ blood splattered on his cheeks.

The dummy is hit another fifteen times before he’s forced to stop.

It’s the next morning when the falcon comes with a message: the enemy has surrendered.

The news doesn’t come as a surprise in the slightest.

The enemy’s troops were on their last string of new recruits, their skilled fighters not enough to prevent the next battle from being complete and utter annihilation. Shiratorizawa may have had casualties, mourned for the lives taken too soon, but they were strong—stronger than most, strong enough to survive.

It’s why he’s sitting in the inn of a port town located closer to the capital than the front lines, a slight break from their thousand mile trek through woodlands and mountains back to the Imperial City. His men were tired, deserving of sleeping on warm beds in a candlelit room rather than lying on the ground, wrapped in thin cloths that did nothing to keep the night’s wind from blowing past their haunted figures. They’ve suffered enough.

The day is still young, the sun at its peak, when Tendou bursts into his room. Ushijima is sure he locked it the night before, but, after months spent with him, he’s learned not to be surprised by anything Tendou does anymore.

“Captain Wakatoshi-kun!”

Ushijima nods in greeting, the slightest movement. "Lieutenant."

“Tendou,” he corrects, strolling to the bed in the center of the room and plopping down comfortably. “I said to call me by my name when we weren’t on the job, didn’t I?”

“Lieutenant.” We are always on the job.

Tendou lets out a dramatic sigh. “One day.”

He looks around the room, leaning back. “Some of us are going to the festival in town, just so you know.”

“Oh.”

“You should come with,” Tendou presses, gazing intently at him. “It’s not like you’re doing much in this room by yourself anyway.”

“The report needs to be reviewed,” Ushijima says, papers aligned neatly on his desk. “We’re going back tomorrow, I don’t have time to waste, Lieutenant.”

Tendou rolls his eyes. “It’s because we’re going back tomorrow that you need to come with us! You’ve been cooped in this room since we arrived. We were all afraid we’d walk in and see a captain turned into stone.”

“That’s ridiculous.” One does not simply turn to stone, it would be impossible for a human to even do so. Ushijima is baffled at even the thought.

“A joke, Wakatoshi-kun. A joke.”

“Regardless,” Ushijima states, “I have matters to attend to.”

Tendou gives him a look. “I’m warning you, if you don’t come with us, I don’t know what I might do to Semi-Semi and Goshiki-kun while we’re away. “

And this is how Ushijima ends up walking around town with Tendou, Goshiki, and Semi in tow, a heavy sigh on the brink of escaping every time Tendou tries to tempt the younger soldiers with foods he knows are too spicy for their mild palate.

“Goshiki-kun, this special type of chili is actually sweet, did you know?” Tendou pulls the youngest towards the stall, giving the stall owner a secretive wink. “As sweet as sugar, they say!”

"Lieutenant," Ushijima warns. Goshiki's naive curiosity does not go unnoticed, and Ushijima knows it's only a matter of time before Tendou's trickery is successful.

His warning is waved off, a lax smile on the redhead's face. "Captain, this is a festival! We should enjoy ourselves, isn't that right?"

The woman behind the stall looks like she just wants them to buy the skewers and leave.

Tendou’s slow but steady sales pitch is interrupted by loud cheers erupting from behind them, a crowd forming in the town square. Intrigued, Ushijima nudges his way through the crowd, and he can't explain what he sees.

It's still early in the day, almost on the cusp of noon, heat bearing down on his cheeks, yet before him he sees you, laughing and smiling at your audience, glowing like you are the sun itself. Like the spotlight was meant for you and you alone.

In every sense of the word, you should be considered ordinary. No jewelry on your neck, your clothes free from the clinking metal decorations that commonly adorn the clothes of traveling street dancers. They're meant to attract attention, to draw the ears of those whose eyes cannot see. And yet, even in your plain clothes, your lack of gold and silver, Ushijima cannot look away.

His gaze lingers still, even as the music comes to a stop, the crowd’s applause roaring around him. The cheers are different from what he is used to, so unlike the roars of battle. Ushijima can hear it, even now, the clang of metal against metal, the crunch of dirt and gravel under his boots, orders shouted from hoarse throats buried beneath bloodshed.

You turn, shining even in dust, and your eyes meet his.

You observe him for a bit longer, how he stands immovable, and you begin to walk closer to him. Avoiding each passerby with the lightest of steps and a twirl of your body, you reach him before he can begin to escape.

“Hey soldier,” you tease, glancing up at him. “The dancing wasn’t enough of a show for you?”

Ushijima looks down at you stiffly, hands frozen at his side. “My apologies, I did not intend to make you uncomfortable.”

“From what, you looking? Never.” You wink before continuing on, a sparkle in your eyes. “I take it you don’t go to these sort of events often?”

He manages to shift his foot one step back; you move the same distance forward. The clouds shift, winds carrying them across the peeking sun.

“I,” Ushijima begins, then stops. He tries to wrap his tongue around his words to make them sound as he intends them to. ”I haven’t been to a festival like this in a long time.”

He remembers it, faintly, riding on the shoulders of his father underneath glowing lanterns on string, reaching out as if to touch the stars hidden behind the clouds. The memory is much too faded to remember much, with all that he’s seen. The noise of a festival is different from the ones of battle; here, he does not need to worry about the aching wound in his side, the weight of his armor on his shoulders, the lives of his men fighting beside him. It’s too foreign to him, Ushijima muses, but he supposes the comfort of the battlefield is something much too twisted to indulge himself in thinking.

Tilting your head, you stare at him for a second longer, something indiscernible in the way you look at him, and you smile. “I see.”

Ushijima thinks that is the end of it, that you will turn around and leave, nothing more than a second of your day. He readies himself to find Tendou and the others and usher them back to their quarters, or at the very least, notify them that he is ready to return to quiet solitude. Instead, your face brightens,

“Well,” you begin, grabbing his hand. “The day is still young! I’ve grown up here my whole life, so I know my way around.”

Ushijima begins to protest, but you barrel on, leaving no room for interruption. “I’ll take you to my favorite stalls, don’t worry! There’s no time like the present, right?”

And so, without him knowing exactly how, Ushijima finds himself wandering around the festival stalls with a street dancer he just met, you chattering away as you comment on your favorite foods and festival games. There are stalls with candied fruit, others with steamed buns fresh out of bamboo baskets, and ones with kids flocking the owners, begging for another shot at winning prizes. It's the bustle of peace, Ushijima supposes, the type of ruckus that only comes from a place too slow to hold still. The eastern conflict had only been a mountain over from this town—if they had been too slow, too careless, had fallen to the hands of the enemy, all these civilians would have… He pushes the thought away.

“This is it!” you announce, stopping at a table outside a fairly large stall. It’s not much, a modest set up with a couple of tables and chairs with the makeshift kitchen in the middle of the area, but there is an immediate warmth that permeates through the air. “They sell the best lamb skewers; it’d be a shame for you to leave this town without trying them first.”

The look you give him is so insistent that he can’t help but silently sit at the stool across from yours. Not that Ushijima has been able to refuse your whims in the first place.

“Obaa-san!” you call, waving at the owner. “Two sets of lamb skewers please!”

The old woman waves back at you in response, her eyes catching on Ushijima as she glances over to your side. Still, she calls back to you. “Coming right up!”

Satisfied with the order, you turn back to Ushijima, elbow resting on the table as you lay your chin on your palm. “So, what brings you here? Been seeing a lot of your troops here these days.” A child walks by, tugging at the hem of his mother’s shirt in the direction of a stall. “More than usual.”

“We were just passing by on our way to the Imperial City,” Ushijima responds, his hands resting in his lap. The grill begins to sizzle, the aroma of barbequed meat wafting through the air. “We took advantage of the hospitality this town offered as a brief resting spot for many of our men.”

“The eastern conflict took quite a toll, then?”

Ushijima shrugs, the slightest movement of his shoulders. “It was a war.”

The rattling of rickshaws, the cloud of dust that trails after. You begin to say something, but the stall owner interrupts, bearing a giant platter of skewers.

“Two sets of lamb skewers for our darling regular customer and…” She trails off, the ceramic plate clattering against the aged wood of the table. “You’re a soldier, aren’t you?”

Ushijima nods, slowly. Your gaze darts back and forth between the two. “I am.”

She smiles, the lines in her face casting shadows under the afternoon sun. “You remind me of my son. He went to serve in the Emperor’s army as well.”

The far-off look in her eyes says more than her words ever could.

“I’m sorry,” he says, but Ushijima isn’t even sure if that’s what he should be saying to her. What is there even to say?

Ushijima has learned many things during his time in war, but most importantly, he has learned that grief is ever present. Time does not heal all wounds, nor does it erase the feelings of helplessness from those who the dead have left behind. Fields of makeshift graves will always remain lingering in Ushijima’s mind, what is left of the soldier’s blade pierced into mountain snow, pieces of tattered cloth tied to them blowing in the frigid wind. Frostbite threatening to seep into their bones, all that are left alive remain kneeling in the cold, an apology to those that were taken too soon—and maybe, a plea for forgiveness.

So it matters not how long ago the woman’s son has passed, nor how recently it has been since she’s stopped crying each time she burns incense for her son’s altar. A mother will always be grieving the loss of her child, and Ushijima will always be left without words to say to comfort those who need it the most.

“There’s no need to apologize,” the woman laughs, patting him on the hand. “My son was a foolish boy, but he was proud.” She gives him another smile, one that pulls at the corners. “That’s enough out of me, I hope you enjoy your meal.”

Both you and Ushijima nod your head in thanks, and the woman stares at Ushijima for a second longer before saying, “I’m glad you returned.”

And with that, she walks away.

A moment of silence passes, before you speak up again. "Alright, let's eat before the food gets cold, okay?"

Grabbing a skewer from the pile, you tear into it with no hesitation, letting out a noise of satisfaction as you chew.

“How did you both know I was a soldier?” Ushijima asks, following suit and picking up a skewer for himself. Biting into it, he can understand why you were so adamant in coming to this place. The perfect amount of tenderness to the lamb, it melts into his mouth, the chili flakes sprinkled on top adding the extra kick of spice that ties the flavors of the charcoal-roasted meat together.

“It’s easy to tell, once you see enough of them." You tap your shoulders. "It's the way you move."

Finishing the last piece of meat on the bamboo skewer, you place it on a spare plate and pick up another. “You soldiers move like there’s a constant weight on you. Each step is too heavy, as if you’re still trying to fall in line with your fellow comrade. To be honest, even if you were to just sit, we could tell from a mile away—your face tells all.”

The battlefield is not a place they can simply escape from. Ushijima knows this, and yet, the accuracy of your statement still comes as a surprise. He can only nod in confirmation.

Behind him, a child scuffles around in the dirt, bouncing a ball from one foot to the other. Ushijima watches as an attempted kick accidentally sends the ball forward, rolling directly beside him.

“I’m sorry!” the child calls, his straw shoes pattering in the dirt as he tries to catch up with his escaped ball.

Ushijima softens, picking up the toy with a gentle grasp. His fingers run over the colorful outer skin, a feather-light touch for a ball of glass rather than animal hide. It seems too delicate for him to be handling something so innocent as this. It rests in his palm, trembling.

Holding it out for the boy to reclaim, Ushijima gives him what resembles a smile, along with a “Here you go,” that is returned by a “Thank you, mister!”

His gaze lingers on the boy’s back for a brief second, following it to a stall beside them. The man running the stall opens a fresh batch of steamed buns, and even with two lamb skewers already devoured, Ushijima’s mouth begins to water.

“Do you want one?” you ask, and Ushijima startles.

He begins to shake his head, but you’re already on your feet, a bag of coins in hand. “Two sweet potato buns please!”

A few minutes later, you come back with a steaming bag, a bun in hand ready to give to him.

“Thank you,” he nods, taking it from your hand. “I’ll pay you back—”

You interrupt, waving a hand at him. “No, don’t worry about it! It’s the least I could do.” Taking a seat, you set the bag on the table. “Consider it a bonus of my tour around town.”

Ushijima supposes there’s no point in arguing with you further—even your short time together with him has taught him that. So instead, he thanks you again, biting into the soft pastry. The sweetness of the potato paste instantly fills his mouth, the texture of the dough the perfect amount of fluffiness. Ushijima has always found himself fond of this natural taste of sweetness, nothing like the red bean and black sesame pastes he finds overbearing. It’s just mild enough to taste the intricacies of the flavor, and he goes in for a second bite.

“Will you not have one as well?” he asks, swallowing. Compared to the enthusiasm you showed towards the meat skewers, your bun has gone untouched, still resting in the bag.

“Oh, well, I,” your hand stutters towards the bag, somewhat of a push-pull within yourself. “Sure, I’ll have one, too.”

Rustling open the bag, you take the remaining bun. “I haven’t had these for a long time, you know,” you begin, nibbling at an outer edge of the dough. “I think the last time I had it was before my parents��well.” You smile, bitter. Ushijima’s gut twists at the sight. “You know how the rest of that sentence goes.”

“How did they…” Ushijima trails off. “If you don’t mind me asking.”

You shake your head, taking a bigger bite. “It’s the classic sob story, I suppose. We had no money, I was a kid, they worked too hard trying to support us. Overworked themselves trying to use all that money and got sick. All the money they should have been using for medicine went to me instead. They were too selfless...those fools.”

It’s a story he is used to hearing. Ushijima knows that many less privileged than him were plagued with the never ending struggle of survival, even in the place they called home. The Ushijima clan has always been a noble one, their support of the throne blessing them with the luxury of riches at the cost of their loyalty. He was always taught that it was a small price to pay.

“Is it foolish to care?” Ushijima asks, the question flying out of his mouth before he can think. It surprises even himself. “They did what they had to in order to care for you—is that what constitutes foolishness in your mind?”

“No amount of caring should come at the cost of yourself.”

Your words are simply said; Ushijima is left without a response.

“I’ve learned a few things, you see, fending for myself,” you continue, leaning forward. “The finer things in life are meant to be enjoyed—no amount of self-perceived nobility is worth sacrificing your identity to achieve. I was born to live, to eat and drink and act how I want. It’s my life, after all, so I might as well live for myself.”

Finishing the last piece, you dust off your hands, a quirk of your lips. “That was better than I remember.”

Ushijima’s mind is left buzzing, millions of thoughts swirling inside. He wonders if this is what it feels like, to have been living all your life underground and then to see the open sky for the first time. It goes directly against what has been taught to him his entire life, to lead, to protect, to sacrifice. His father’s words echo in his ears, pounding. His tongue is wooden.

“Captain!” a voice cries in the distance. It’s Goshiki, judging by the way it cracks in the middle. “Captain, where are you?”

You look at him, cheekily. “I’m guessing that’s our cue for goodbye?”

Ushijima refrains from a sigh. “I’m afraid so.”

Goshiki calls again, his voice cracking twice this time, and Ushijima moves to get up, wood creaking from the chair. “Thank you for the meal…”

He never got your name.

You catch onto his little fumble, laughing. You hold out a hand for him to shake, along with a name to call you by. “I don’t think I ever got your name either, captain?”

“I,” he falters at your teasing, an eyebrow raised with a smile. He’s never been flustered enough to falter before. He reaches out to shake your hand. “I’m Ushijima. Ushijima Wakatoshi.”

“It was a pleasure to meet you, Ushijima-san.”

“And I, you.”

“I hope we meet again, someday.”

Ushijima doesn’t want to let go; he does so anyway.

#ushijima x reader #haikyuu x reader #ushijima wakatoshi #haikyuu imagines #haikyuu fanfiction #hq fanfic #hq imagines #ushijima x you #ushijima x y/n #haikyuu longfic #meg writes

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illumiru · 3 years

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hi cami!! based on literally everything because you have good taste I was wondering if u had any fic recs?? I am in like a good fic desert and if u have any good reads would love to read them! thank u!!

Thanks!! I have to be honest that I don't read a lot of dc fics lately bc a lot of what's posted on AO3 doesn't appeal to me tbh. But I do have some favorites that live rent-free in my head. I hope you enjoy!

baby, it's a sign of the times by danishsweethearts

Dick Grayson has a pretty bad day, but hey, he's coping.

let your love grow tall by danishsweethearts

In a move endearingly predictable and highly amusing, Dick Grayson buys a bunch of plants and proceeds to pack bond with all of them.

cold was the night and hard was the ground by danishsweethearts

Laundromats are save points.

i've been longing for silence by danishsweethearts

The Titans are Dick's family. Damian is also Dick's family. Cue the collision.

un haeng il chi by danishsweethearts

un haeng il chi (언행일치) | yán xíng yī zhì (言行一致) idiom 1. word and actions coincide; to live up to one's word 2. to match words with deeds 3. practice what you preach

The Cassandra Wayne guide to truth-telling, manifestation and prosperity.

big d stands for big (demon)or by danishsweethearts

The one where Titans Tower is haunted, and Dick Grayson, Boy Wonder, original Robin, one and only Nightwing, esteemed leader, part-time exorcist, un-haunts it.

young volcanoes by dottie_wan_kenobi

You should join the Justice League, Dick says when he’s ten years old and hopeful. No, Bruce says. You should join the Justice League, Dick says when he’s fourteen and realistic. No, Bruce says. I’m going to join the Justice League, Dick says when he’s seventeen and furious. No, Bruce says. No, you are not.

Dick is nineteen now. And he’s not joining the Justice League—he’s joining the Titans.

the last of the real ones by dottie_wan_kenobi

Gar is like a blessing. He doesn’t seem to notice the shiny parts of Vic, not until it really counts—when there’s wires sticking out, something shoved through Vic like it was nothing, when he’s in danger. And even then, he treats them like any other part of the body, like a wound is a wound and it doesn’t matter that it’s not flesh, but technology.

When he asks, Gar tells him about Cliff Steele, and shrugs like it’s nothing. “I’m just used to robot guys, I guess,” he says, flippant like he’s not the first person Vic has met who didn’t recoil at the sight of him.

Vic manages a laugh, his eye—his real eye, his human eye—stinging.

if you just call me by BeatriceEagle

“Dick.” She squeezed his shoulder. “Dick, look at me.”

Slowly, as if he were pushing against a terrible force, he lifted his head.

“I have known you since I was thirteen years old, and I have known you in a dozen other lifetimes, so I need you to believe me when I say that there is nothing you could do that would make me stop loving you.”

Dick held her gaze. He looked like he was searching for something in her eyes, so Donna held still and hoped he found it.

“Did you really know me in other lives?” he asked.

_____

Dick and Donna, after the action, through the years.

once upon a time... by Mayarene Rose (DickRoy)

The announcement is the talk of the kingdom. Men on horses, coming from the capital itself, shout it to every corner of the land to make sure everyone hears.

There will be a three-day festival held in honor of the crown prince’s name day!

So of course, no one can shut up about it and everyone’s making plans to make their way to the capital, one way or another.

Gotham, after all, isn’t known for its decadence. Celebrations from the capital are few and far in between. But, it’s also well known that the king absolutely dotes on his children. The has the makings of being the biggest feast anyone has seen in their lifetime.

“Huh,” Roy says. He’s in a farming village when he hears, about five days ride from the capital if he had a horse, which he does not.

Or the one where Roy is a knight errant, Dick is the crown prince, and there is a three-day celebration.

Dr. Wilson, Will I Ever Play the Violin Again? by HoodEx (DickJoey)

1 Missed Call 1:12 PM TUES 9 MAY Frank Hardy

A fond smile spreads over his face. He remembers Dick writing that as his own contact name in Joey's communicator the first time he and Joey exchanged numbers. Joey knows it's an action influenced by paranoia rather than something meant as an inside joke between friends, but he likes to think of it as a mixture of both.

"Who are you mooning over?"

Lissa crosses her arms over her chest and cuts across the room to get closer to him. Joey tries not to instinctually jerk his communicator closer to his chest as she peers down at it with a curious glint in her eye.

"Frank Hardy," Joey spells out with his fingers. "He's a friend of mine."

Her brow furrows. "Frank? Have I met him?"

Joey shakes his head.

"What do you think he was calling for?"

Hopefully not to tell me that the world is on its way to ending, Joey thinks, worrying at his lip.

"Not sure," Joey signs. His thumb hovers over the call-back button. "I guess I'm about to find out."

Red Letter Day by silverwhittlingknife

Dick Grayson, stressed pseudo-parent to a preteen assassin, tries to solve the case of Damian’s Mysterious Wednesday.

He never expected it to help him fix his relationship with Tim, too.

(... Though only after everything fell apart first.)

Eventual fix-it for Dick & Tim’s Red Robin fight, but other rocky relationships - Dick & Jason, Tim & Damian, Damian & Bruce, Dick & Bruce - wow, this family is dysfunctional - might improve too. Eventually. They just have to, y’know, work through All of Their Issues first. XD

Two of Six by silverwhittlingknife

There’s nothing special about this kid, no reason to remember him. But Dick remembers. Because of the photo.

Dick and Tim’s pre-nu52 relationship, from the beginning all the way to the end.

or: how Dick acquired a stalker, attempted to make him go away, and failed so badly that he acquired a brother instead.

(So far: missing scenes from childhood, Lonely Place of Dying, Knightfall, and Knightsend. Current arc: Prodigal.)

In the Palm of Your Hand by lapsedpacifist

Dick was forced into becoming a host for an entity of unknown strength, unknown motive, and unknown reach. The only thing he did know? It needed him alive.

Neurodegenerative series by lapsedpacifist

The general premise: Bruce has completely forgotten about Dick, and Dick only. Now tension is high between them and the rest of the family as they attempt to resolve the memory problem -- while drawing battlelines and realising that Dick had always been much more than a brother to them all.

the primacy of personal conscience by birdsofthesoul

"WHAT MAKES IAGO EVIL? some people ask. I never ask."

— Joan Didion, Play It as It Lays

Or: Dick, his family, and the moral morass of a wishing well.

This is all I could think of at the moment! I'll add more once I read the ones I encountered while I made this list. Enjoy!!

#anon.txt #fic recs

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hachichimitsu2 · 3 years

Text

ABOUT ME

Hachi ✨ 20 ✨ She/Her ✨ 🇵🇭 ✨ INFJ 6w5

Hello, I’m Hachi! I'm a full-time freelance illustrator on Fiverr, and I hopefully plan to branch out in other artistic areas in my life! Expect me to dump all of my artistic interests over here : #hachichiart

I also have a children’s picture e-book that I self-published on Amazon. I made it as a requirement for my high school thesis, so while the art there is definitely a representation of my past, I still stand by the message I was trying to send. I hope to eventually branch out this series in a form of a webcomic of sorts, for people who can’t afford to purchase my e-book for financial reasons. These characters are extremely dear to me, and I can’t wait to expound on them when I have the time lmao. Here’s a tag regarding the series: #behindtheartistichand

Some note-worthy things to mention, this blog is generally 15+, but I do make sure to tag any NSFW content and general triggers out there. I often post and retweet adult animation, so I’d say tread carefully if you’re a minor. I’m also critical with the media I consume, but most of the time, I like to talk about why I like something rather than why I hate it. I just find it more fun to expound on the positives of my favorite things. I also don’t take everything seriously.

Please let me know privately if I did or say anything wrong. Sometimes I say things without meaning to, and I’m not the brightest crayon in the box, so constructive criticism is greatly appreciated. If you take offense with anything I posted, just send a polite DM and explain why it offended you so I can be educated regarding the subject. I’m also available for any questions, DMs and a genuine chit-chat.

MAIN INTERESTS

1. Character-Driven Storytelling

2. Adult Cartoons

3. CGDCT / Slice-of-Life Shows

4. Pastel Goth / Creepy Cute Fashion

5. Coming-of-Age Stories

6. Magical Girls

7. Psychological Horror

8. Well-Written Children’s Media

9. RPG Maker Horror Games

10. Video Essays & Film Studies

11. Speed Metal / Vaporwave / Shibuya-Kei

12. K-POP / J-POP Girl Groups (Serotonin Babey!)

13. 4LT (MBTI), Typology, Cognitive Functions

14. All Types of Artistic Endeavors (OCs, FanArt, Comics, Film, Music, Fanfiction, etc.)

TOP 5 ANIME SERIES (IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER)

1. K-ON!!

2. Hunter x Hunter

3. Neon Genesis Evangelion

4. Ojamajo Doremi

5. Ouran Highschool Host Club.

TOP 5 CARTOON SERIES (IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER)

1. South Park

2. Bojack Horseman

3. Moral Orel

4. Ed, Edd n Eddy

5. Infinity Train

FAVORITE MOVIES

1. Interstellar (Favorite Sci-Fi Movie of All Time)

2. Nacho Libre (Favorite Guilty Pleasure Movie)

3. Johnny Got His Gun (Scariest movie of all time due to the sheer existential dread)

4. Studio Ghibli Films (Particularly Ponyo, My Neighbor Totoro & Grave of the Fireflies)

5. Perfect Blue (Favorite Anime Movie)

6. One Cut of the Dead (It’s hard to recommend this movie without spoiling it, but it’s an absolute must that you finish it in its entirety before you proceed to make any further judgments)

7. Coraline (I know almost everyone loves Coraline at this point, but it’s genuinely good.)

8. Interview with the Vampire (Favorite Vampire movie of all time that doesn’t seem overdone or cliché. It’s also really gay)

9. Get Out (2017)

10. Us (2019)

11. Up (2009)

12. Toy Story (Movies 1 to 3)

13. Hereditary (2018)

14. The Shining (1980)

15. Audition (1999)

16. Misery (1990)

17. The Green Mile (1999)

18. Shawshank Redemption (1994)

19. Saving Private Ryan (1998)

20. Mommie Dearest (1981)

21. The Others (2001)

22. The Platform (2020)

23. The Lodge (2019)

OTHERS

1. Homestuck (It’s been a good while since I read Homestuck, so my memory of the general storyline is fuzzy. I’ll re-read it once I have the chance)

2. When They Cry (Currently up-to date with the Higurashi anime and watched the live-action movies. Finally started to tackle the sound novels. Have yet to encounter Umineko and Ciconia)

3. Age of Youth (Favorite K-drama of all time.)

4. Squid Game (Battle Royale-type thriller series that tackles capitalism and the illusion of choice and free will? Sign me the fuck up)

5. Majisuka Gakuen (Favorite J-drama of all time. Also, yes, I’m biased because of my love for AKB48.)

6. Flight of the Conchords (Favorite live-action series of all time.)

7. Adult Cartoons (The Boondocks, Camp Camp, Superjail, The Oblongs, Bob’s Burgers, The Simpsons, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Home Movies, Beavis & Butthead, Daria, Smiling Friends, Aggretsuko)

8. FilmCow (I absolutely love everything they put out. Currently up to date with VuloLives’s broadcasts)

9. The Eric Andre Show (A good friend recommended me this show, and I haven’t stopped since.)

10. Nathan for You (My humor condensed into one show)

11. CGDCT / Slice-of-Life Shows (Sweetness & Lightning, The Amazing World of Gumball, Spongebob Squarepants, Gakkou Gurashi, Lucky Star, Gakuen Utopia Manabi Straight, Koufuku Graffiti, Hidamari Sketch, Pita-Ten, A Little Snow Fairy Sugar, Di Gi Charat, Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid, Yama no Susume, Shirobako, Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei, Saint Young Men, Gunslinger Girl, Kareshi Kanojo no Jijou, Osomatsu-san, Hey Arnold, The Peanuts, Arthur, Hibike! Euphonium, Nichijou, Asobi Asobase, Azumanga Daioh, Codename: Kids Next Door, Chowder)

12. Idol Anime (Love Live! School Idol Project, Aikatsu, Revue Starlight, Full Moon wo Sagashite, Pretty Rhythm, AKB600SEC // Will get into IDOLMASTER eventually)

13. Undertale (Will pick up Earthbound and Omori eventually)

14. RPGMaker Horror Games (Mad Father, Misao, The Witch’s House, Ao Oni, etc. Hoping to get into newer released games!)

15. Fictional Children / Adolescents Getting Trapped in Dangerous Scenarios (Digimon Tamers, Made in Abyss, The Promised Neverland, Alice Academy, Code Lyoko, The World Ends with You, Total Drama Island, Danganronpa)

16. Weird, Experimental or Slightly Disturbing Series (Serial Experiments Lain, Kuchuu Buranko, Invader Zim, Flapjack, Salad Fingers)

17. Shounen Anime (Yu Yu Hakusho, Mob Psycho 100, Dragon Ball Z)

18. Magical Girl Anime (Sailor Moon, Cardcaptor Sakura, Tokyo Mew Mew, Mermaid Melody, Puella Magi Madoka Magica, RWBY, Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt, My Little Pony, Princess Tutu, Powerpuff Girls, My Life As A Teenage Robot, Bee and Puppycat, Star vs. The Forces of Evil, Steven Universe // Will pick up She-Ra & The Owl House Eventually)

19. The Haunting of Hill House / Bly Manor (Don’t let the jump-scares deceive you. It’s a genuinely good character-driven horror series)

20. Sci-Fi Cartoons (Rick & Morty, Solar Opposites, Futurama, Bravest Warriors)

ROLE MODELS / BIASES / OSHIMENS / BEST GIRLS

1. Trey Parker & Matt Stone

2. Gain & Narsha (BROWN EYED GIRLS)

3. Hyuna (SOLOIST)

4. Sooyoung (SNSD)

5. Gyuri (KARA)

6. Hani (EXID)

7. Seulgi & Yeri (RED VELVET)

8. Sana (TWICE)

9. Yves & Olivia Hye (LOONA)

10. Shuhua (G-IDLE)

11. Yena (IZ*ONE)

12. Winter (AESPA)

13. SUZUKA (ATARASHII GAKKOU)

14. Shiroma Miru (NMB48)

15. Yabuki Nako (HKT48)

16. Takahashi Minami (ex-AKB48)

17. Kojima Haruna (ex-AKB48)

18. Shinoda Mariko (ex-AKB48)

19. Sayaka Akimoto (ex-AKB48)

20. Watanabe Mayu (ex-AKB48)

21. Shimazaki Haruka (ex-AKB48)

22. Matsui Jurina (ex-SKE48)

23. Sakura Miko (HOLOLIVE)

24. Natsuiro Matsuri (HOLOLIVE)

25. Oozora Subaru (HOLOLIVE)

26. Inugami Korone (HOLOLIVE)

27. Houshou Marine (HOLOLIVE)

28. Kiryu Coco (ex-HOLOLIVE)

29. Momosuzu Nene (HOLOLIVE)

30. Kureiji Ollie (HOLOLIVE)

31. Takanashi Kiara (HOLOLIVE)

32. VuloLives (INDEPENDENT VTUBER)

CONTACTS

• Instagram: @Hachichimitsu

• Twitter: @Hachichimitsu

• I take art commissions on Fiverr: https://www.fiverr.com/hachichimitsu

• I have a children’s e-book on Amazon. Make sure to download the Amazon Kindle app to be able to read it on your smart device: https://www.amazon.com/Behind-Artistic-Erika-Marie-Vargas-ebook/dp/B08789CW3V

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