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falderaletcetera · 10 months

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because I'm partway through a reread and queueing up a bunch of reblogs about it, and it seems only fair to recommend it first:

Jack Farris doesn’t want to save the world, just every person he knows, encounters, or hears of. It’s a bit of an issue. S. Grey doesn’t want to save anyone but himself. He wants to know everything and majoring in sagework at the Academy is the best way to do that. Laney Jones left her home to avoid the constraints there, only to find different barriers holding her back at the Academy. Eager to learn, to excel, to escape, she has far from given up. Rupert Willington Jons Hammerfeld the Seventh would just like everything to be orderly, thank you very much, but it seems the only way to make monsters and myths (and malicious but mundane men) stop rampaging through his world is to go out and do some hero-ing himself. They are put together as an unwilling study group, but they become something more.

this is Beanstalk. It's first in a trilogy, all self-published, all free on the author's website, and the series is one of my favourites. It has:

– found family, with platonic relationships front and centre

– an adventurer's academy with a complicated legacy, where "hero" means a coloured armband and a diploma

– worldbuilding (appreciative), featuring an interesting magic system and monsters of all kinds, many of them people

– a red-headed boy named Jack, seventh son of a seventh son, who left the forest and grew like a beanstalk. You may recognise parts of his story. You may recognise others down the line.

– there's a whole cast I don't want to spoil except to say I'm currently rereading the first book and really looking forward to reaching the rest.

– there's definitely casual queer rep though. what do you take me for.

– honestly the writer (hi @ink-splotch!) writes all these characters with a complexity and love that I really admire. Some of the chapters that affected me most aren't even about the main cast.

— you may know the writer from her fics, the interactive games Stay? and More a Haunting than a History, or the podcast Second Star to the Left which she co-created with Aysha Farah. I can highly recommend most of the above and will get around to MaHtaH eventually.

If anyone's interested, I'd advise you don't go looking for spoilers. There most definitely is angst, but less so in the first book - hit me up if you want content warnings!

#I'm also queueing up someone else's rec for this but I wanted to put the platonic relationships bit right at the top #for ''I'm aro and I'm feral about it'' reasons #beanstalk #leagues and legends #that second tag is the useful one but every now and then I forget the series name but still remember the first book so I try to use both #falderal speaks #when I say I admire inky's writing I mean i have done for years #it's probably influenced my writing style a fair bit and honestly I hope it has

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queer-book-character-tournament · 1 year

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#Lily Chen #the shadow hunter chronicles #cassandra clare #Rune Saint John #The Tarot Sequence #kd edwards #Red Uyeda #Leagues and Legends #e jade lomax #Simon Spier #simon vs the homosapiens agenda #becky albertalli #polls #lgbt books

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oflightningandstars · 10 months

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Feeling something about how when I first read Beanstalk Jack was older than me, 20 seemed so old (and even then I was still 16 or so when I read it) and he still seems so much older than me but he's not and aughhh (thinking about all the things between him leaving the Forest and arriving at the Academy)

#beanstalk #leagues and legends #jack farris

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badrockbookrecs · 8 months

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eyooo let's do this

I keep telling people to read a crapton of books/series so let's put em all in one place. Let me know if/when you read them and what you think!! Seriously, anytime.

Off the top of my head, to start:

Leagues And Legends by EJ Lomax (free as ebooks on the author's website!! Link goes to first book of 3). Genre-aware found family fantasy trilogy. Queer characters and side characters, no MC romances (which was refreshing to me).

Fire Logic + subsequent books by Laurie Marks. Exploration of colonialism through fantasy lens (?). Very interesting magic system. Disabled and queer main characters. I have... some opinions about how the series wrapped up but I'd love to talk about it, and I still recommend it!

Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky and the two follow-up books. Oh my GOSH please read them and any ROS fans let me know what you think of Children of Memory (3rd book). Arachnophobia warning for the first book lol.

Note: I'm linking bookshop.org for now, because f* that one rainforest conglomerate store, but lmk if you have suggestions as to how I should do that with these, what would make them easiest for you to find and read :)

I will probably also do reviews at some point? Idunno. LMK what you want me to do with this/what ur willing to listen to.

#book recs #leagues and legends #children of time #fire logic #elemental logic

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echoesofagiantkiller · 11 months

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But at the base of Jack’s ladder, the closest anyone would come to the scattered magic still hissing and dripping down, there was a girl with short gold curls and Jack knew every one of her names.

- Remember the Dust, by E. Jade Lomax

#rereading this series and oh boy #I love them so much #remember the dust #beanstalk #leagues and legends

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goonlalagoon · 1 year

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Like firewood burning bright || Leagues and Legends

Read on Ao3

When the barrier comes down and they’re left to pick up the pieces, victorious and exhausted, Grey wants to sleep for a week.

Instead, he trails after Jack and Rue, pouring golden fire into the injured, soothing pain and burning out infection. If this was something he was trained to he would be able to be more efficient about it, but the only thing Grey’s trained himself to do with his magic is hide it, so he settles for being a battery. Laney twists hanks of gold in her fingers, weaves it into neat spellwork and hastily shared hedgewitch tricks, and Grey watches out of the corner of his eye, fingers aching. He runs a thumb over the place an ink splatter should be, except that in the midst of a siege he hasn’t been burying himself in gleeful scholarship.

He grumbles, automatic and thoughtless, about how he may as well help out. Not like there’s anything better to do, he mutters as sweat trickles beneath his collar, heart racing like a rabbit’s as the Elsewhere twists at his bones, a storm of fire the drop of a hand away. If I don’t help you with this now, you’ll just wake me up on your way to bed at some awful time of the morning…excuses, excuses, excuses. Grey had never wanted anyone to look to him for help with anything other than, perhaps, obscure academic debate. The location of a book in the reference section of the library, maybe; grudgingly aware that working in the Archives would likely involve a certain amount of customer service.

But Sez turns to him with the faintest quirk of an eyebrow, in the wake of a report about broken wards and unsafe conditions. She wouldn’t say anything to name him: Sez, with her rotating cast of informants and helpers understood anonymity.

Sez turns to him, flicks an eyebrow up just enough for him to know there was a question, a request, if he wanted to answer it - Sez had asked him across the room if he could help, and he found himself reaching for ink and paper, the splatter of diagrams and suggestions for improvement. Something lights up warm in his chest when he sinks power into the first carefully written ward, hidden spell-fire wrapping around a bakery’s beams to prevent any fires from getting out of control. He’d been told all the years of his childhood that mages were selfish, had to be forced to share their wonderful power, had thought on guilty, sleepless nights of the unspoken power pooling at the tips of his brittle fingers - and all it took, in the end, was someone saying please.

Some days, it’s all too much - too many people, too many expectations, too many things twisting him in different directions. Some days he buries himself in books.

This is nothing new; Grey loves reading for many reasons, will lose himself in books and treatsies and journals for the love of studying, for all the fascinating doors it opens even if just in his own head, but sometimes he reads like it’s running away - pages flicking under frantic fingers, each another shield, another fragile skin between Grey and the world.

On bad days, curled in a chair by a mountain view, focusing on every word and tearing through pages as though it was a race, Grey had been able to feel it looming behind him - a father’s pride, a sister’s fear, the knowledge that one slip was all it would take for the world to burn to dust around him.

He feels it less, now, but it echoes through him still. He flicks globs of gold at the nearest wall for light without thinking and freezes, panic turning his brain to static, before rembembering that it’s okay. He’s allowed to be a mage, to call on the Elsewhere, to use every tool at his fingertips to defend himself. He traces blueprints and scribbles down numbers for Laney and George to pour over, and for a moment expects it to be his father leaning on the other side of the workbench. He sees a woman with dark hair out the corner of his eye and turns, frantic, a name caught in his throat - and she turns to speak to someone behind her, and he’s not sure if he’s hurt or relieved that the shape of her face is all wrong.

He doesn’t know where Sandry is, and he won’t unless she wants to tell him. It hurts, to know that she could just leave. It hurts, that he doesn’t quite know if he would have wanted her to stay. He misses his sister, her cool hands and tentative smile, but to everyone other than Rupert she was a monster, and he can’t quite blame them.

(Rupert wouldn’t find this a helpful statement: Sez told him once, pointed, to call her monster not non-human, because she’d rather be known as what she is than what she’s not. Rupert didn’t think it mattered, because what was important was that she was a person. Cassandra Graves had done terrible things, but he wasn’t her judge or jury, and they hadn’t been standing in a court of law. She had been a lab-rat prisoner too, and it hadn’t been because of any of the crimes laid at her feet)

On bad days, the spectres leaning over his shoulder sometimes have different voices, now. His father is gone and Sandry’s fear is unfounded, these days, but there are still so many ways he can see everything precious to him shattering in his hands.

But Jack will gently nudge his shoulder and chivvy him into putting the book aside to eat something, will slide a bookmark between pages and tuck a blanket over his sleeping shoulders. Laney drops new books on his desk and picks his brain on diagrams and plans, suggests gleeful experiments they should find the time for. Rupert sits in peaceful silence with him, the click of knitting needles and the rustle of pages the only sound for hours.

There’s a voice in the back of his head telling him to hide, but it gets easier every day to quiet it, to say from what? and listen to the echoing lack of an answer.

He helps Sez when she asks, is given the responsibility of setting up a library for anyone to use - "I didn't mean I should run it!" he tells Sez plaintively, and Sally laughs at him over her shoulder - and wanders home through streets he first learned under siege, familiar now in a patchwork of memories. There, the building Jack insisted on helping to paint until Rue dragged him away; here, the one Grey helped yank the fallen rubble of out of the way so they could rebuild the walls without waiting for enough people to shift it all by hand. He spends his evenings curled up in the corner of their flat with a book, comfortable and content, and calls gentle fire to his unshaking fingertips to read by when it gets dark.

#my writing #L&L fic #Leagues and Legends #Jack is a Beanstalk #I was rereading my Rupert post RtD piece and decided I wanted one for Grey as well #so here it goes #Sanders Grey

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thecatamaranlad · 9 months

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They’re HERE!!! *Finally* ordered print copies :D

#leagues and legends #beanstalk trilogy #book recommendation #BTW :) read it do it they’re free on the authors website as epubs

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lailedcat · 10 months

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audiobook of leagues and legends when

#does one exist already??? i remember whispers of a fan created one #leagues and legends #i miss the world and would love to listen to them since my brain is resistant to reading

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colloquialcolors · 2 years

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a compilation of some Leagues & Legends: Remember The Dust quotes, just so i can have them in one place for me to look at:

“Shay decided she didn’t like me on day one,” said Laney.

“You wouldn’t normally let that stop you,” said Jack. “You won Heads over, and the mage teachers, and Sarge, and all they saw when they met you was a little girl.”

“Well, she sees a threat and that’s a harder thing to deny,” said Laney.

“Lane,” said Jack, when her voice stuttered to a stop. “I’m sorry.”

She shrugged, a jerky motion, and then straightened her spine. “That doesn’t do anything useful.”

“I’m not trying to be useful,” said Jack. He took a small step towards her. She wavered and then buried her face in his shoulder.

Laney didn’t cry, just inhaled and exhaled sharply, her fingers pressing into Jack’s ribs. The dark loomed around them and Jack was grateful. If it had been broad daylight Laney would still be standing with that straight, careful spine, looking at that unmarked bulls-eye and forbidding her hands to shake.

Rupert had spent the truck ride back from Challenge mostly drugged, lunging for escapes and struggling in moments of lucidity.

Once deposited in the lab, he’d spent three days charging every time they opened a door, kicking at technicians and guards. This got him bruised, drugged again, and no closer to escape.

On day four he got up, changed into the civilian clothes he’d laid out the night before, and made up his bed in precise regulation folds. Head-on struggle was clearly ineffective. Rupert was a strategist at heart anyway. Time to go back to his roots.

People always asked her what she had done with her village. (She had buried them). They never asked about the dragon—she had killed him, yes. But she had also buried him. She was good with a shovel.

“This isn’t your business,” said Grey. “Laney, stop it.”

“What are you afraid of?” said George.

“It’s just not your business,” he said, trying for angry. “You left your war, okay? It’s not your fight anymore. There’s responsibility to be had here and you’ve had enough.”

George’s hackles rose and fell. Grey scowled but his hands scrambled over papers.

“You can’t sit with your back to a door,” he said. “I knock over my coffee and you go for a knife before you go to save your notes. You read about potatoes and you just keep getting happier.”

“Pip,” said Laney.

“You’re out. We’re not, and I’m not going to drag you back in.” He squeezed the rim of his chair with hands that looked like his sister’s.

“I’m not planning anything. My whole— everything just—”

“You’re planning to get into a research lab to get your practical skills better. You’re planning to delve more into material sciences, and the history of seacoast thespianism. You’re planning to keep an eye on Jack, to irritate Laney enough that she gets that edge in her voice that means she’s paying attention, that she’s present. You’re planning on using the remains of your father’s horrors to build something worthwhile.”

“I’m fine,” she said. “I am—I’m breathing: I’m walking; I developed a new spell knot last week; my reports are meticulous. I’m fine. I’m terrified that wherever Rupert is, he’s not. He’s not,” she said.

“I let him be,” said Rupert.

“That’s doing nothing,” she said, irritated.

“No,” said Rupert. “It’s not.”

It doesn’t matter what kind of power you carry in your pockets if you don’t know how to use it.

“So yes—I’m treating you like I treat people. That means when you’re hurting, if I can help I probably will. That means that if you’re hurting other people, I will stop you.”

“You’re yelling now.”

He smiled, a sliver of a thing. “I am not. You know I’m not. But you need to get that into your head—you don’t get to use me to make yourself feel better, and you don’t get to use me to make you feel worse either. You just get to be. Congrats. Welcome to the rest of the world, Miss Graves. You get to figure out how to live with yourself.”

She had gone completely still—a stone maiden. People talked about her like she was a medusa, but maybe she was just cold marble left behind in a monster’s garden. “I want to live,” she said. “I want out because I want to live, okay, is that enough for you? Have I earned it, then, bared my soul enough? Are you satisfied, with your checklists and your forms and all the little boxes to fill in about whether or not I’m worth saving? I want to live,” she said, “and I don’t even know what it means. But it’s not this and it’s not where I was, and I want...”

“Okay,” he said. If her chin was trembling (just a little), then her hands were folded gently in her lap, elegant long-fingeredthreats. “Okay,” said Rupert. “Me, too.”

“So if you do things on purpose, you think that makes it better?”

“Sometimes it makes it worse,” said Rupert. “That’s why you need to be careful what you do.”

Grey’s voice was small. “Are you?”

“Never enough,” Rupert said.

"Hey, no—I don’t care what it means here, I don’t care what it’s causing or not causing—you were a kid and you did something impossible because you wanted so badly to be something more than what you were told that you were. They said you couldn’t shoot and you did. You were the best at it, at all of it. You are the best, Lane, at what you do, and it doesn’t matter what you do.”

"Jack—he listens to people when he meets them. He learns their stories and the things they want. Rupert always found out what they needed. They’ve met so many more worlds—worlds, right? That’s what that is, people’s lives and all the things they know and think and have seen that I never have—Jack’s met so many more than me. I haven’t seen any life but mine. I haven’t been looking for any world but this one. I missed them. I’ve been collecting facts and little details, lists of things—because if I just swallow all those down maybe there won’t be room for—” He looked up at her. Ana was waiting, which she was so very good at. He wondered how many worlds she had met. He wondered how many had been stolen from her.

“Congratulations, new terrible things have happened to me. I’m still me. Different nightmares—but the nightmares aren’t true. The world was broke before all this happened, and it still is, but I still get to do more with my life than save it.”

“I feel safer when she’s here,” said Grey, almost spitting it. “She’s so many people’s nightmare. She’s got so many nightmares, but I sleep better when she’s in a room. She’d hurt anything, but not me—you know how many terrifying people I get to feel safe with? You’re all scarier than anything out to get me, and I get to feel safe, and everyone else gets to hide.”

“If you had really been gone, Rupe, we would never have gotten over it. We’d be okay, we’d be happy even, make new friends and new homes and new ambitions—but you would always matter. You would always be gone and we would always miss you.”

Rupert had his head ducked now. Jack pulled his hands from his pockets, letting them hang loose and open.

“And that’s okay, Rupe.”

“It’s not.”

“Take it up with whoever invented mortality,” said Jack. “One day one of us is gonna miss the other. You want me to hate myself, if I end up going first? You can live through losing people, Rupe. I don’t want to live through not having them.”

He looked at Laney and Rupert put a sticky date roll on one of her knees.

“You think I’d be used to missing him,” said Laney. Jack sat up and pressed close to one side, so she fit her head under his chin and exhaled out. Laney reached up to where Rupert was still half-crouching awkwardly within arm’s reach. She pulled him down and he dropped to his knees, then to sitting, his head falling gently to her shoulder. She took apart the roll and ate it piece by piece, then licked her fingers clean.

Laney closed her eyes and tried to pretend this was the whole world, right here. This was all. Rupert’s arm was warm on her side, his long fingers on her knee. Jack’s heartbeat and even breathing blocked out every noise leaking through the canvas walls, if she listened hard enough, so she did.

His hands were easy and familiar on the camels’ flanks. She had spent all her childhood watching these beasts of burden move and bicker around her. She had spent the last few years watching Rupert move this slow, this careful, and this kind, and here they both were.

Jack pulled back, smiling, and said, “Remember to fall down, now and again, alright?”

George snorted. “You know,” she said, “he never told me that?” She still had one hand fisted in the fabric of Jack’s shirt. “He never did. I think he thought—that I’d had enough bruises. That I might shatter. I think he realized it wasn’t advice for everybody, or that it was, and I just wasn’t everybody.”

The warehouse was vast and mostly dark around them. Gloria talked nonstop in the distance while Laney drew out protective circles on her knees.

“He told you,” George said, almost a whisper. “He told random kids. He told Bidi. Falling down, the bravest thing he knew.”

Jack said, “Maybe he thought you’d spat out enough bravery for other people. Or maybe he thought you already knew.”

She squeezed his arms and then stepped back. “Be good, Jackie.”

He was getting a good hold on the balance of this now. He was walking and it felt like walking, not like he was teetering, about to fall.

Jack went to sleep, and when he woke in the morning he was rested.

#whoops i should probably sleep now #lets see if the brainweasels will cooperate now. i probably should have started doing this with beanstalk but i just finished RTD and im.#FULL OF FEELINGS OKAY.#there isnt nearly enough grey in here but if i ever do Echoes he'll get plenty of it im just thinking about rupert. and george.#sysfandoming #leagues and legends #remember the dust #quote #l&l

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