#Like the rosetta stone of things wrong with WC

[bonefall]

NEVER STOP!!! everytime I get mad over DOTC I just come onto your page and read your Gray Wing slander and immediately feel better, thanks muchly! 😌✨️

I am but a humble DOTC Slander ranger, riding across the sunlit horizon with a big iron on my hip, putting every hater's formless frustration into the words you felt but did not realize how to say ✨️

#If there's anything positive to say about it #it's that it's at least a SPECTACULAR kind of bad #It's bad in the kind of way that makes you realize what is so bad about other entries in WC #Like the rosetta stone of things wrong with WC #In no other arc is the ableism misogyny and abuse apologia SO apparent. SO plain to see #And of course your mind's immediately drawn to Clear or Tom because they're so obviously awful as characters. #But even the characters they think are GOOD and frame as RIGHTEOUS are revealing!! #Sometimes even moreso!! #though to be clear I end up biting at Gray a lot more often than Clear because he's awful in a less immediately obvious way #but I think clear is literally THE worst character they have ever put in WC. It's not a contest. It's not even a consideration in my mind. #because at the end of the day. Clear is WHY the arc is so bad. #Gray is defending him and doing a shit ton of abuse apologia and generally being insufferable #but as a tool he is being used in the exact way they mean to use him. #And his USE is to SUPPORT CLEAR. #He may not be the main POV but the arc is ABOUT Clear. It's HIS story. EVERYTHING that happens is supposed to be for HIM. #I haven't gotten to Gray's death scene in my reread yet but I should actually reblog it over here on the main when I do #Because it says it. It says it explicitly. That Gray only ever did anything because Clear pushed or bullied him to action. #And the narrative tries to frame that like a sweet and sentimental thing #But it's actually fucking horrifying. That WAS the entire series. #Clear pushing and bullying others until life was worse for everyone. And then they thank him for it. #bone babble #dotc hate

[scaevolawrites]

FFF225 I Can't Tell

This was written for @flashfictionfridayofficial WC: 748 You thought that now - three weeks in - the nervousness would have subsided. But no, you still feel your hands clam up, and the weight on your back seemingly become heavier, even though you know damn well this book is a mere pound. Every time that you cross that threshold and enter the world of speakeasies, mobsters, and back alley deals, you feel the heat rise in your cheeks. You bless the Deities for giving you a poker face, otherwise, you would have ended up shanked in a dark corridor or drowned in the harbor the moment you had made the ill-minded decision to start playing this Game. …You should have stuck to the pickpocketing.

As you enter this Establishment, you’re struck by how ordinary it all seems, almost like any other watering hole or speakeasy this side of town. The air is smokey and you imagine you can taste the alcohol by just sticking out your tongue. (But this is not the time, nor the place to do such silly things, you remember, before giving in to the impulse). Whilst it isn’t happy hour just yet, plenty of patrons have already found themselves in a dark bottle or losing themselves to the delirium of Bismuth Seeds. Looking past the glow of purple Chemlights and the too-cramped spaces that speakeasies like these are known for, you realize what is wrong with this place. Whilst you haven’t been at this for such a long time that you can sniff out every false flag, you know enough when somebody is trying just a bit too hard to put up a convincing facade. And the spaces are indeed too cramped as if somebody is actively trying to make the interior of this place seem smaller than it is. This is not a good thing. You should fold your cards and step away from the table while you still can.

Before you can voice this sentiment, or try and smoothly talk your way out of whatever hellscape is awaiting you, the bodies that have escorted you in, start manhandling you towards the bar. A few customers look up at the sudden commotion, but they all seem too dazed or too drunk to care about it. One of the goons - who is built like a bear, and could easily pass for one, with the magnificent amount of facial hair he sports - rolls up his right sleeve and presses a lodestone into the runes inked on his arm. The Chemlights flicker, the air starts to smell of burnt hair and the portal is formed. You are pushed through the portal, and you make out the sickly green light of the sewer system that doubles as an underground network before a knapsack is put over your head and you lose any sense of how this last leg of the journey will go.

Your sense of smell is the first that returns to you, and you immediately know you’re in deep shit. There will be vengeance, and you will be the victim. It’s the smell of burnt hair again, but it’s stronger now, it’s the smell of static. It’s the smell of The Donna. When the knapsack is removed, you blink and see her blue owl mask looking down upon you. She sits on her throne, surrounded by floating columns of equally blue Chargestones.

“What do we have here?” Her normally cold and unfeeling voice, almost sounds giddy and excited, if you dared to call a ruthless mobster that. (You once did do that, and you still bear the scars from it). “My birdies have brought back the rat who took my Rosetta Stone from me”, she laughs, “now it is time to have fun”. You hear the scraping of metal on stone, as she sharpens her mechanical talons.

Everything would have been so much easier if you had known how the Magicks worked, then you would have never stolen that bloody pebble crackled with blue energy. But you had, and it had thrust you upon the path you now walked. A path where, somehow, you had become the Keeper of the Codex.

You just hope that Donna doesn’t believe in legends, that she will dismiss the paper book as just another possession of the poor and needy. That she has forgotten the lessons about the connection between paper and the Magicks that she herself now uses.

You just hope that her vengeance will be swift.

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#fff225 #flashfictionfriday #writeblr #scae.writes #wip; moonshine codices #it seems that I have yet another new wip #experimenting with second person perspective again #it kinda works here ngl