#anti wolf hall
Note
Hi! Hopre youre fine and all! Can you give me som military fics like Squared Away? Where no real countries are involve but they are fighting monsters or something? Thanks <3
Sure!
Squared Away by Suaine
(1/1 I 15,809 I Teen I Sterek)
Alpha LT Derek Hale gets a promotion, a pack, and a mission. Stiles is a complication.
***
We Fight Monsters Together by scarlettletterr
(1/1 I 11,555 I Explicit I Sterek)
Derek Hale doesn't trust humans anymore and is determined to pilot his family’s mecha alone. Too bad he doesn't get a choice when he's paired up with the brightest most sarcastic human mind to ever come out of Beacon Hills in the form of Stiles Stilinski.
Second Galaxy to the Right and Straight On Til Morning by spurklie
(1/1 I 16,679 I Explicit I Sterek)
Stiles is reading reports on his tablet and drinking from a bottle of water in the base mess hall when he realises there is someone standing at his table. Dragging his eyes up from the calculations, he chokes on his water and then spits some all over Derek, who barely flinches.
Ultra Violet by ElisAttack
(3/3 I 16,836 I Teen I Sterek)
"There's no way he's a quarian. Least of all the quarian prince we're supposed to be escorting." Erica whines, and Derek wonders why he named her his staff lieutenant, she has no tact whatsoever.
"I'm sorry, but you must be a level 4 friend to unlock my tragic back-story." The prince jokes. "And call me Stiles, even I can't pronounce my actual name."
Or the one where Derek and his crew are assigned to be the glorified babysitter of an alien prince, and everything is not as it seems.
Triton's Folly by Kaye_Fraser, S3anchaidh
(8/8 I 46,185 I Teen I Sterek)
As an officer in the United Earth Alliance, Major Derek Hale understands the order of things and his place in the world. Yet, a decade of war and a lifetime of dedicated service have taken its toll. The only thing that has kept him sane all these years is the video logs of a scientist he’d found years ago, buried in the rubble of a research station on Callisto. He knows that the man in the videos – Stiles – is long gone, lost to the vastness of space, but to Derek, he’s alive. In fact, he thinks he has fallen half in love with the boundless energy and bright-eyed optimism of the image he sees on his screen. Then, everything changes when a fateful mission strands him on the surface of a desolate moon … and brings him face-to-face with a man he had only ever dreamed of meeting.
Relationships That Start Under Intense Circumstances by seraphina_snape
(1/1 I 59,448 I Explicit I Sterek)
In a world where werewolves are a normal part of life and the Argents have turned from being hunters into leading one of the biggest pro-wolf organizations in the US, Stiles is the newly promoted assistant head of the Argent Weapons International R&D department. When he uncovers a conspiracy and finds evidence of an anti-werewolf movement that spreads into the highest positions at AWI, he knows he must do what he can to stop Kate and Gerard Argent from destroying what the rest of the Argents (and the rest of the world) have worked for so hard.
Things get a little complicated when Kate and Gerard turn the tables on Stiles and accuse him of treason and espionage. On the run and with killers on his tail to shut him up, Stiles has to find a way to stop the release of a dangerous product, prove his innocence and find a way to implicate Kate and Gerard in the conspiracy. With his dad, Scott and Allison in danger from Kate and Gerard, Stiles is incredibly grateful when he meets Derek Hale who promptly saves his life. But it soon becomes clear that Derek is hiding something that could be the undoing of Stiles and everything he's trying to do.
Specialized Technical Intelligence and Logistics for Earth and Space (S.T.I.L.E.S) by Yiichi
(10/10 I 73,419 I Not Rated I Sterek)
“What the hell kind of a name is Stiles?” he asked.
“You know, a series of sounds spoken in a particular sequence that represent my identity, primarily, referring to me?“ the AI – Stiles – answered cheekily, crossing his own arms in front of his chest, mirroring Derek’s position.
“Ooh, this one’s feisty,” Peter smirked.
War Crimes by loserchic
(69/69 I 81,840 I Mature I Sterek)
In a fantastical military state, Stiles, an orphaned nobody, street smart omega was rescued as a child by war hero alpha, Commander Derek Hale. Six years later, Stiles still maintains an obsession with taking care of himself and a blatant mistrust of alphas. Stiles becomes the first omega to be accepted into elite training with the Black Wolves, the military's special operations force. Derek has always intended to mate with Stiles and is furious at the idea of him entering training. However, Stiles' guardians only agree to allow Derek to mate with Stiles if he allows Stiles to attempt Black Wolves' training. Derek becomes Stiles' commanding officer and the war between them begins. Also a lot of fraternization.
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Room & Board - Part 11 (Vampire x Reader)
Anon submitted this prompt: For the prompt submissions a vampire that feels guilty after feeding/attacking someone so they leave obscenely valuable ancient artifacts as payment/an apology?
Part 1 | Previous | Masterlist | Next
x x x x x
Comments, tags, and reblogs are real motivators for me, too! (●ˇ∀ˇ●)
Also, my inbox is always open for asks, so don’t be shy!
x x x x x
The next day, Tabaeus doesn't greet you in the hall or the base of the stairs or in the kitchen. Between it being a new home and the tension the two of you suffered last night, you try not to look too closely into it. It's better if he's pouting or sleeping in his box in the basement. That gives you time to yourself.
And, more importantly, to study the journal.
After checking in on the sugar gliders, refreshing their water and available food as they slept in their little pouch, you retrieve the book from the anti-vampire box in your office. Settling on the couch, you run a finger over the cover. It's certainly an old book, bound in what you hope is animal leather. That finger traverses the edges of the papers, finding them thick and uneven.
It takes you a moment to steel yourself for what you'll find out. If you'll find out anything. You flip the cover open, carefully, and read the first page. Only a handful of words sit on the first page. A scrawling script, one that you can imagine was done by quill and ink, reads:
Property of Dr. Kieran Bennett.
1882
You press your lips together. Okay, so it wasn't Tabaeus's journal. Or was it and his name is actually Kieran Bennett? Your brain is already buzzing with thoughts and theories and questions as you turn to the next, thick page.
March 10, 1882
In the spirit of research, I - Dr. Kieran Bennett - will be keeping records of the creature found in a long abandoned shed owned by one Thaddeus Thatcher.
As the account has been told to me, the town of Thistle had been plagued with "wolf attacks" on their livestock for the last half-year. A creature, big and shaggy and dark, appeared multiple times from the forest but would soon flee back into her dark recesses.
When residents of Thistle began to go missing, the townspeople accused the creature and began a hunt for it.
Over the course of three days, the town managed to flush the creature out. First, from a cave system. Then, from the aforementioned Mr. Thatcher's abandoned shed, upon which they caught the creature in a net and managed to shackle it.
It now resides in the local undertaker's basement, due to its need for darkness, locked in a cage with a collar around its throat.
I have yet to interact with the creature. I shall update upon progress.
So far, it seems Dr. Bennett is not Tabaeus. Part of your mind files the name away for later research. Perhaps the library will have some information, you think, as you read further.
March 13, 1882
It is largely believed the creature is a vampyr of lore.
As such we keep it fed on animal blood, which seems to suffice for the most part. Its appearance has confirmed it was feeding upon humans.
When it feeds upon animals, its visage becomes more animalistic. Inky black sprouts across the expanse of its body' its ears grow, becoming more akin to a chiroptera's large ears; its teeth become so large, the maw barely contains them and its eyes glow with the embers of Hell.
Adversely, when it feeds upon humans, it has the appearance of a man.
Without thinking, you raise a hand to your throat. Your palm is warm against the side of your neck, where two little scabs have made semi-permanent residence. Faintly, you recall that first night. How Tabaeus appeared so fearsome, so animal.
Had they been sustaining themselves on animal blood, until that point? Had they suffered an injury, resulting in hunting you down? Or was it just that you smelled so good to Tabaeus, for whatever reason, they couldn't resist?
We have yet to test any further hypothesis on the creature, though it has yet to harm anyone. On occasion, it has startled anyone that passes its cage with a sudden charge, but beyond that, it is capable of sitting for hours, doing nothing.
March 28, 1882
Sun burns the creature.
Silver burns the creature.
Cloves and garlic have no reaction.
We cannot test the efficacy of wooden stakes until we feel we are done learning all we can.
It makes the worst howling shrieks of pain.
My heart aches with every test, but we must learn all we can for humankind.
Your brows furrow, considering the slight jump in time. A little over two weeks of no entries, only to have rather scant descriptions of what they had found. Your lips press together, puzzling on the thought.
What happened in that time? Had Dr. Bennett grown closer to Tabaeus, at all? It doesn't seem like it, with the continued usage of 'it,' but you continue on, keeping an eye on the dates.
April 3, 1882
Tabaeus. That is what the creature calls itself. Doubtful it is a God-given name, but one assigned to the creature by the Dark Prince himself.
Though I find it hard to believe such a soft-spoken creature could be from the bowels of hell. Father Bartholomew insists it is, since the holy water burned its flesh. The screams had been wrenching, as two men of the town held Tabaeus down as the priest dribbled water upon its form.
Tomorrow, a renowned surgeon will come to town. The town's council knows this may hamper - if not end - ongoing investigation, but they hope to cut Tabaeus open to understand its innerworkings.
Perhaps there is a cure to wrench the unholy creature away from the source of evil consuming it.
Surgery? Your eyebrows tick up, the picture of Tabaeus's scars flashing in your head.
April 8, 1882
Dr. Forsythe has had to put off the surgery, due to insufficient - and often missing - supplies. It will take him time to attain enough to thoroughly investigate Tabaeus's anatomy.
I took the quiet day to question Tabaeus myself. In the past month, I have gained a familiarity with the creature few other researchers here have. I asked it questions, pressing it for answers, for I may not get another chance.
I also told Tabaeus this. Which seemed to loosen their lips.
Tabaeus remembers little of its life. They are scraps, unhinged and untethered. At times, it seems what Tabaeus remembers belongs to another source. They speak of the memories in an almost unattached way, at times.
It remembers times in ancient Europe and ancient Rome. Of travel with Nordic races. Of long journeys through deserts in Africa. It appears to remember so much of human history, but is incapable of tying it together in a coherent fashion.
Where it was born, it does not know.
How it became a creature of the dark, it does not know.
How it even functions is a mystery to it.
I do not think the creature lies to me, but it is most boggling how its own memory fails to function.
Perhaps there is a connection between its alleged longevity and the breakdown of its memory.
I do not know and I fear we will not find out once Tabaeus undergoes surgery.
April 13, 1882
I have attached copies of Dr. Forsythe's findings.
Pausing from the entry, you flip through the book, seeking these mentioned findings. Nothing seems attached or hidden in the pages. Likely lost to time or, perhaps, an intentional hand. You try not to think of it as you read on.
As an observer, there was much screaming and struggling. Tabaeus was restrained on the table. No anesthetic was used, so the patient could be aware and discuss should questions arise.
Very little talk happened. To be frank, I believe the lack of anesthetic, sedative, or even simply being knocked out was from cruelty on Dr. Forsythe and the council's part.
I digress.
They shaved Tabaeus, much as one would an animal, and cut into his form. They cracked his ribs for a better view. Tabaeus's insides appeared no different than a human's.
Except his heart was blackened, though it still pumped blood as a human heart would. Other than the odd coloration, everything seemed in proper working order.
By God's providence or cruelty, Tabaeus did not pass out of shock nor pain. They were awake and conscious throughout, sobbing or screaming at intervals. They would test their shackles and straps, the restraints creaking awfully under the force.
I was relieved when Dr. Forsythe stitched the creature up, but it was short-lived as he hinted at a need to revisit the site again in the near future.
Once the endeavor completed, Tabaeus could not stand, let alone walk. Four men were enlisted to haul the vampy back to his cage in the undertaker's basement.
I sat with him, quiet for a long time. No questions felt important enough to ask of Tabaeus, in such a condition. Even wrapped in bandages, I could see the uneven stitches trailing down his front in my mind's eye.
Tabaeus confessed to needing sustenance, to heal appropriately.
I offered to retrieve fresh cow's or pig's blood for them, but they shook their head.
"Human blood," it said, voice raw and cracked from screaming. "I need human blood to heal quickly."
Once more, your hand finds your throat. You already suspect what is about to happen.
I offered my blood, to which Tabaeus appeared startled at the offer. Their red eyes, puffy and ugly from their ordeal, found mine.
Instead of allowing Tabaeus to feed from my neck, I offered my wrist. They took it in a gentle grip, such a strange juxtaposition to their long, clawed digits.
The sensation of fangs plunging into one's body is both disconcerting and oddly alluring. I had closed my eyes as Tabaeus supped and images flickered through my head.
Images wholly foreign to me. Perhaps memories.
Whether they were Tabaeus's own or that of their victims' or something else entirely, I cannot say.
I only spoke to tell Tabaeus to stop, when lightheadedness made my thoughts fuzzy.
They did so, without argument. As they settled back in their corner, they murmured a small gratitude. Their glowing red eyes still on me.
I left not long after that, woozy from the interaction and intent upon a nap.
"What are you reading?" Tabaeus's soft words slap you across the face, making you sit straighter on the couch.
They eye you from the door between the kitchen and living room - where the basement stairs come up - with confusion, head cocked at your reaction.
You swallow a lump in your throat, trying to clear the heaviness away with a cough. Briefly, you consider hiding what you're reading. Maybe lying and saying it's a silly romance novel or something boring and technical. The longer you stare up at Tabaeus, the more you realize how miserable they appear.
They're wearing the same jeans and t-shirt from yesterday. Their hair is a tangled mess. Their cheeks appear sunken and bags hang under their red-rimmed eyes. It reminds you of someone who spent the night crying and frustrated and arguing with oneself.
There is so much obfuscation in Tabaeus's life, not clearly communicating feels wrong. Even if they cannot - or will not - be upfront, you can be. There's a small part of you that intuits there's something deeper, something more complicated, going on than what appears on the surface.
With your finger marking the spot in the journal, you hold it up. "I am reading Dr. Kieran Bennett's journal. It was in the anti-vampire box you gave me."
"Kieran?" That name makes Tabaeus's eyes fly wide as they strides over the distance between the two of you.
Something prickly climbs up your spine, but you shove it away. "Yes, do you remember him?"
They kneel by your knee, attention on the book in your hand. Tabaeus almost puts their hands on your leg, but hesitates and lets them fall to the couch cushion beside your leg instead. Their lips press together in thought, before they answer, "It is muddy."
You can't determine whether that is better than foggy or not. At least muddy implies there's something there to grasp, you suppose. Tabaeus's red eyes flutter shut, trying to pull the memories forth. Their head dips forward, their forehead almost touching your thigh. "I remember he was sweet, in person. A kind soul, but invariably a coward."
Their hand rises from the couch, softly touching their own lips. "He tasted of coffee and smoke and chocolate."
Something in your chest twinged, hearing such soft words about someone else coming from Tabaeus's lips. It almost sounds as if they are speaking of an old lover. Perhaps they were, you realize. Maybe you haven't gotten to it yet, in the journal. Or maybe Kieran was careful and didn't detail it in writing, considering the time and who would be the object of the doctor's affection.
Despite yourself, you find the question lighting from your lips, "What happened to him?"
"I... I am not sure," Tabaeus admits, their red eyes opening, but still not focused as their brow knots. They were still searching their muddled, conflicting memories. You watch as they raise a hand to their chest, rubbing along the spot where the autopsy scar cleaved their chest.
Though your stomach drops as they press at their own scar, you're not satisfied with that answer. With pursed lips, you turn your eyes back to the journal, lest Tabaeus's large, allegedly innocent, gaze interrupts your almost-damning information. "You told Kieran you had problems with your memory, as well. In 1882. That's almost 140 years of you having issues with your memory, Tabaeus."
"What?" Tabaeus breathes and you hazard a glance at them. The furrow in their brow has deepened, as if this is genuinely news to them.
"What am I supposed to believe?" You press, shaking your head as your tone further solidifies. "That you haven't had consistent memory for that long? Or that this is some sort of trick you like to play on humans?"
Your words make Tabaeus's focus swing to your face, their eyes wide with shock and pain. As if you even suggesting something like that was a slap to their face.
"Please, believe me, amata." Their voice crackles with desperation. This time, their hand does land on your knee, squeezing it gently. "I swear to you, I am not playing a trick on you!"
"That's a tall order, all things considered," you say, your attention falling to where their hand touches you. Their gaze follows yours and, as if previously unaware of the contact, Tabaeus jerks their hand away. A small part of you aches as they do so.
Slowly, the vampire tilts their gaze back to you, searching for something. "You think I am tricking you?"
Your eyes are finally drawn to Tabaeus's gaze, the pain that crimps their features makes their already obvious exhaustion worse. Do you think Tabaeus is tricking you?
Something in you can't give a certain yes, just as you can't give a certain no. As you think, your teeth sink into your lower lip. Why would a vampire go to such ends, just to get blood? Especially since Tabaeus could easily enthrall you and essentially make you their unyielding bloodbag. They have relegated a good chunk of their fortune to you, allowed you to buy a house, and seem into it when you are more domineering over them.
Or was it all a joke? A prank? Something to amuse themselves. Get a caring human to give them blood, willingly, while never having to fess up to their murderous past? That doesn't seem like the Tabaeus you know. Though you can't be certain the Tabaeus you know isn't a farce, there's something in you that's more sure of the vampire than it was in earlier instances of your partnership.
"I don't know what to think," you softly admit, rubbing the bridge of your nose as you set the journal to the side. "After last night, how heatedly you talked about Ewan, or even just werewolves in general, you talked like someone I didn't know."
"I, too, felt disconcerted." Tabaeus doesn't even hesitate in the confession. They heave a heavy sigh, their fingers fidgeting with the fabric of the couch. "I apologize for my behavior. I do not know what happened."
Your lips press together at the admittance, wondering how genuine their words were. Or if they were looking for an easy out in the situation. Again, something in you believes them. Maybe it's better to say something in you wants to believe them. But skepticism keeps you a little wary.
"I didn't feel like myself. I felt strange." Tabaeus shook their head. Their hand rises to their temple, tapping there. "There were clashing thoughts in my head. Rage and fear and disgust and hate. All for a person I never met who was a species I don't recall interacting with."
How Tabaeus talks about their experiences makes you think about how Dr. Bennett described their memories. As something detached from Tabaeus. As things spanning across multiple time periods.
That, coupled with their out-of-character reaction, feels like hints. As if you're closer to unraveling what it is about Tabaeus that makes them a mystery.
Once more, it sounds as if Tabaeus's memories - or some of them - are not their own. More than ever, that feels like the correct answer, but not the entirety of it. There's something you're missing. Something that is tantamount to understanding Tabaeus.
Pain throbs at your temples as your stomach cramps. With a deep breath, you loosen the thoughts from the grip of your concentration. The journal revealed more than you were prepared for. You should have planned better and eaten something first.
"I need breakfast," you finally mumble, realizing you have left Tabaeus hanging. You offer them an awkward smile, just as your stomach grumbles.
"As do I," Tabaeus sighs, a small and fond smile tilting at their lips. "Do you trust me to drink from you? Or should I suffice with cereal?"
"You're making me breakfast if I'm making you breakfast." Your retort is more playful than you feel, but you still muster the energy to stick your tongue out at the vampire. A little tension in Tabaeus's shoulders eases, relieved at the return of a more joking element to your interactions. Just before they move to stand, and perhaps even lean over you to latch onto your neck, you put out your arm. "Let's try my inner elbow this time, though. I want to go places and having to bandage my neck is such a pain."
The vampire settles back on their heels again, accepting your arm in their cool fingers. They hold you gently, giving you ample freedom to pull away if you change your mind. There's half a beat, where Tabaeus seems to be testing the waters, before they whisper, "You are too kind, amata."
You're about to ask facetiously if you're also a coward, like Kieran, but Tabaeus sinks their teeth into the flesh of your inner elbow. A sharp gasp escapes your lips, the pain sudden and bright in your synapses. Your head falls back against the couch, as your eyes flutter shut. Tabaeus waits, seeing if you'll stop him, before they begin to suckle.
That odd sensation of the blood pulled from your veins courses through you, making your stomach somersault. Though your toes curl, in a confusing mixture of intimate enjoyment and excitement, your stomach lurches with faint nausea. It's probably not a good idea to do this on an empty stomach, you realize.
The seepage of memories, you find, is less than when Tabaeus is latched to your throat. They are mistier. As if they're projected onto a fog, instead of a solid surface. It reminds you of a laser light show caught by clouds.
Some are memories you have seen before, in your feeding sessions. But there's always a new one to view.
Tabaeus parts from your elbow sooner than you expect. Or maybe you're just a little dazed, you realize, as you blink and lift your head up. There's darkness at the corners of your vision, but you see Tabaeus rise to his feet. They stoop over you, pressing their forehead to yours. There's a distinct beat when you believe they'll continue leaning and catch your lips against theirs.
But they don't, leaving a mingling of disappointment and relief meshing in your head.
"What would you like for breakfast?" They merely ask and you faintly smell the copper-infused heat on their breath.
"Crepes with hazelnut spread and bananas," you say, mostly as a joke as your lips curve at the corners. You don't anticipate the thoughtful look that crosses Tabaeus's features.
They cock their head to the side as they straighten. "Is there a recipe available I may reference?"
For a second, you narrow your eyes up at them, wondering if they are fucking with you. Tabaeus doesn't appear to be joking. And, honestly, you cannot say no to crepes.
You really should get Tabaeus a phone, you realize, as you pull yours from your pocket. After a bit of searching and scrolling, you find an easy looking recipe and hold it out to them. Tabaeus graciously takes the phone with a nod.
"It will be available soon," Tabaeus murmurs and turns to head into the kitchen.
Settling back onto the couch, you sigh and consider the actual chances you'll get an unburnt breakfast. It was hard to argue against Tabaeus's quiet assuredness. As you sink further into the couch, your eye catches on the journal.
Your thoughts loll about Dr. Kieran Bennett's words, the way he phrased things, what his relationship to Tabaeus was. There's a part of you certain the doctor wasn't entirely truthful in his entries. Whether he was taking care due to the time period and homophobia or due to the subject matter involving a 'vampyr,' you're not sure.
Although, the mental trek makes your considerations turn to Tabaeus and the subject of their jealousy last night. You jerk upright as a sudden thought careens through your head. "Hey! Don't you think about deleting Ewan's number, either!"
The rummaging around in the kitchen quiets and there seems to be a thoughtful pause. "Well, I was not planning to, but if that is an option..."
"Tabaeus!" You warn, as you push yourself off the couch and head to the kitchen. There the vampire grins at you and holds your phone high, out of your reach. They wiggle it, in teasing taunt.
The sigh you heave is put-upon as your gaze flicks from your phone to Tabaeus's face. Crossing your arms and leaning your hip against the counter, you choose a smarter route than pouncing on the vampire. "I'm trusting you to not delete his number. Okay?"
"Okay," Tabaeus sighs, lowering the phone. There's clashing emotions on their face. A sense of pride fighting against a small temptation. They hold your phone so you can see the screen, which hasn't left the recipe. "You can trust me not to hurt you, amata."
"Holding you to it," is all you manage to say before Tabaeus turns back to the stove, cooking the breakfast you requested.
#exophilia#exo writing#vampires#vampire#vampire x human#vampire x reader#2nd person pov#second person pov#monster lover#monster boyfriend#monster love#monster romance#monster x human#tabaeus#reader#room & board#room and board#room & board part 11#room and board part 11#I don't have much to say here#just some fun revelations!#maybe we'll see Ewan next time ;)
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nine people you'd like to know better
tagged by @evilwomanenjoyer, @happywastedyears, @pontipines, @maddenedbythesstars, thank you all
last song listened to: obsessed by Olivia Rodrigo. the grip this Gen Z girl with early 00s nostalgia vibes has on me...
favourite colour: RED
currently watching: sports?? waiting for IWTV & HOTD season 2
sweet/savoury/spicy: savoury> sweet > spicy
relationship status: single
current obsession: tbh I need a new hyperfixation to consume me! I'm relatively un-obsessed right now. very dull place to be.
last thing you googled: the exact wording to Smash Mouth's comment about DJ Khaled's anti-pussy-eating ways just so I could make a half-funny crack in the tags of this post. just roll with it
ships you like: SO many. If there's antagonism and power dynamics I'm into it
first ship ever: Vegeta/Bulma from DBZ. obviously.
favourite childhood book: Probably Eragon. I can't stress enough how much better the Italian translation was than the original version
currently reading: Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel & Mademoiselle de Maupin by Theophile Gautier
currently craving: fresh oranges. Unfortunately I only have an apple in my bag
tagging @moscca, @diosapate, @monstrousgourmandizingcats, @lvsifer, @tony-buddenbrook, @regina-del-cielo, @ghibli, @highladyluck, @katakaluptastrophy only if you guys want to!!
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Intro post!!
This account is for a system, current host is kazzo, everyone else is a headmate
Were chrono 17, but my age fluctuates and my pronouns are he/they/it/kit/vamp (+plus a bunch more but those are the main ones)
Posts made by kazzo will have the sign off tag ~-🐈
More general info on kazzo is on his strawpage
moral code explanation post (for those who wanna know, this is mostly kazzos moral code but it also kinda applies system wide)
I block freely but usually I’m not gonna block anyone other than antis
More under the cut (tag system and others who will be posting)
Other people who may post!!:
Nepeta: she/they/kit/mew, nepeta leijon (homestuck) fictive, age also fluctuates but she has a set range (5-17), age regressor, doesn’t use any typing quirk but does use her usual cat puns, same thing as eridan when it comes to memories and quadrants, sign off tag will be this ~-♌️
Eridan: he/they, eridan ampora (homestuck) fictive, 17 years old, polyamorous but in the context of quadrants, uses his typing quirk, has some memories of source and has a few “crushes” (for a lack of a better term coming to mind)in a different quadrants from memories, sign off tag will be this ~-♒️
Hunter: he/they/it/wolf, Hunter (the owl house) fictive, 17 years old as well, wolf therian, polyamorous, has full memories of source execept for the details of some more traumatic events, is in love with both gus and edric, sign off tag will be this ~-🐺
Maxx: he/they/fuzz/bun, max (sam and max) fictive, has full memories of source and is still in love with and married to sam (though only in memories… for now 😈), sign off tag will be this ~-🐰
Rob: he/they/it, rob cantor (tally hall) factive, sign off tag will be this ~-🟡
Joe: he/him, joe hawley from (tally hall) factive, sign off tag will be this ~-🔴
Tobias: he/they/it, songtive of the scarecrow in the song hymn for a scarecrow by tally hall, sign off tag will be this ~-🐦⬛ (there is unfortunately no scarecrow emoji so thats the closest were getting)
Tag system!!:
Kazzo’s tags
~The singular brain cell~ = random reblogs
~ask time~ = answering any asks I get
~Kazzos hoard~ = my ID hoard
~f/o rambles~ = rambles about my f/os in general
~me likey~ = specifically for reblogss, usually for random posts i enjoy
Nepetas tags:
♌️meow♌️ = nepetas random reblogs
♌️nepetas hoard♌️ = nepetas ID hoard
♌️for mew?♌️ = for any asks nepeta gets
♌️selfshipping is is more fun than plain shipping♌️ = posts relating nepetas quadrants and crushes or f/os
Eridans tags:
♒️Eridans corner of shame♒️ = eridans random reblogs
♒️eridans hoard♒️ = eridans ID hoard
♒️wwhatevver loser♒️ = for any asks eridan gets
♒️quadrants and crushes♒️ = as it says, eridan posting about his quadrants and crushes or f/os
Hunters tags:
🐺Hunters hideaway🐺 = hunters random reblogs
🐺hunters hoard🐺 = hunters ID hoard
🐺what, me?🐺 = for any asks hunter gets
🐺i.. love you <3🐺 = hunter posting about his crushes or f/os
Maxxs tags:
🐰annoying little lagomorph🐰 = maxs random reblogs
🐰maxxs hoard🐰 = maxxs id hoard
🐰my turn!!🐰 = for any asks maxx gets
🐰sammy boy <3🐰 = maxx posting about his husband
Robs tags
🟡yellow tie, this sauve fellow🟡 = robs random reblogs
🟡robs hoard🟡 = robs id hoard
🟡the fans🟡 = for any asks rob gets
🟡perfect in the way that you are🟡 = robs posting abot his crushes or f/os
Joes tags:
🔴red the proud, loud guy we adore🔴 = joes random reblogs
🔴Joesephs hoard🔴 = joes id hoard
🔴ask away🔴 = for any asks joe gets
🔴ill try to give you love until the day you drop🔴 = joe posting about his crushes or f/os
Tobias’s tags:
🐦⬛birds may believe at a distance🐦⬛ = tobias’s random reblogs
🐦⬛tobias’s hoard🐦⬛ = tobias’s id hoard
🐦⬛ever wonder🐦⬛ = any asks tobias gets
🐦⬛mother earths love whispered to me🐦⬛ = tobias posting about his crushes or f/os
Collective/random tags:
>collective hoard< = for anything we repost that is something we collectively identify with, might not use much but ive made it for if we do
>very much enjoy< = for collective reposts, something we all enjoy
>camp multii posting< = posting about my ocs and their info
>camp multii ids< = for if i find ids that fit my ocs
>education and information< = usually for reblogs, for informational or educational posts
>Let’s have a chat< = discourse of any kind
>stances< = what it says, our stances
#~-🐈#transid#radqueer#pro para#pro radqueer#pro rq 🌈🍓#rq 🌈🍓#rqc🌈🍓#transid safe#transid please interact#radqueer please interact#rq please interact#rq community#rq safe#🌈🍓#antis dni
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HEY I'M STILL ON A CALLIE AND ROSE KICK please enjoy this goofy lil' script I wrote for a scene I imagined about the Battlemoms:
Backing track is: Waltz of the Tornado
[0:00 to 0:33]
We open on a slow zoom into an austere northern european-style city at night, something like Paris or Barcelona. The central focus of the shot is a palatial hall, lit up in amber hues against the cold evening sky.
Callie: She wasn’t born into this, you know. Where she came from was… about as far as you could get from it.
[0:34 to 0:55]
The zoom continues, now through a dressing room. Centered in front of a mirror is Rose, but not as we know her. Her hair, white as snow, runs down her back, and she’s dressed in a beautiful ballgown, a member of some manner of nobility. As the pace picks up at 0:45, we cut to her walking across a ballroom, where other nobles are dancing and partying, not a care in the world. Rose’s head is bowed low.
[0:55 to 1:05]
Callie: She was a member of her country’s nobility. She could have just run like most of them did when things went sour- but…
As the music takes a dark turn at 0:55, Rose approaches a banner, which takes precedence over all other symbols in the ballroom. Below it stands a smiling, male wolf- her apparent partner. As the whine of an electric guitar enters the music, we cut to Rose’s face. She’s not smiling at all.
Callie: Something kept her there.
[1:06 to 1:32]
We cut to a different scene. It’s daylight in some ruined city. Starting at the boot-clad feet of a disheveled soldier- a rebel of some kind from the looks of them, we watch as the camera pulls back to reveal them racing to ready a rocket-propelled grenade launcher with their allies, pointing it down a roadway strewn with rubble- waiting, watching…
[1:33 to 1:45]
Suddenly, a tank explodes through the rubble of a nearby building and onto the street. The rebels fire, and there’s a deafening blast and a cloud of smoke… from which the tank emerges unharmed, the badge on its turret the same one as on the banner in the previous scene, and starts firing, cutting the team to ribbons.
Callie: There was a war. A rebellion, really. Her whole world crumbled around her.
[1:45 to 2:00]
Our rebel from before manages to take the RPG from one of their dead comrades, loads it, and fires- just as the tank rolls over their former position. There’s a moment of relief as it comes to a halt- but only a moment.
[2:00 to 2:12]
The rebel hears someone wordlessly yell a warning, the action drowned out by the music, but as the music swells with tension, we see what the rebel’s eyes are drawn to- other comrades in an anti-aircraft gun, who frantically start to swivel the weapon towards a new target… high above. We follow their gaze upwards and see… contrails. Dozens of them. Bombers.
[2:13 to 2:30]
We cut to two scenes, intercut. The same ballroom from before, shot from above. Nobles in finery dance to a waltz, all paired up. Rose is paired up with the male wolf, dancing the waltz elegantly, but expressionless. Contrasting this, the other scene is of the bombers, their bays opening silently, one by one by one… as a pilot thumbs the release on his control stick.
[2:31 to 2:50]
Devastation. The bombers drop their payload, and the city below, which we only now realize is the one from before, is bathed in fire and death, indiscriminate destruction.
[2:51 to 3:04]
Callie: Her whole life was in the nobility, the monarchy. The rebellion threatened it all. But you know what the funny thing was?
The bombers turn off target one by one. There’s no hope at all for the rebels below, it would seem. Our rebel, bloodied, dirty, covered in dust, tries in vain to pull their wounded- or dead- friend from the rubble, looking up to the skies as the bombers set up for another pass…
[3:05 to 3:22]
A sudden lull. We cut back to the lead bomber, to the pilot from before, who reaches for a switch… but hesitates. He looks up, and we see it’s the wolf Rose was dancing with. His eyes are transfixed on his aircraft’s heads up display… which has begun to flicker with electronic interference. He looks up, eyes widening. We see the bombers ahead of him in the formation, seemingly motionless in the air, unperturbed.
[3:22 to 3:30]
We cut to Rose in the dressing room, beautiful, noble… sad. She looks to the side… her expression changes, growing intense, furrowed, fiery… and then.Callie: ….She threw it all away anyways.
[3:31 to 3:43]
We cut back to the previous scene, and suddenly the bombers ahead of the male wolf EXPLODE violently. A figure cuts through the formation at incredible speed, a blur of metal and fury, throwing his bomber into a shuddering panic, like a startled buffalo.
[3:43 to 3:53 ]A wide shot of the formation of bombers as something cuts through them effortlessly- fighter aircraft. Their own escorts break off to chase these new interlopers, before more harm can be done. We see them pursue the apparent leader of the formation from the back, which we can’t quite make out… until it suddenly noses up, showing the whole cruciform of the aircraft, its wings… and the rose emblem on its roundels.
[3:53 to 4:14 ]This mystery pilot easily reverses the pursuit, gunning down the fighters on their tail, then cuts back towards the formation of bombers, heroically scattering them before more harm can be done to the rebels below. We cut back to them briefly, and they’re cheering, as we cut to the inside of this mystery fighter’s cockpit… and see Rose at the controls.
[4:14 to 4:27]
Callie: Rose follows her heart- no matter the odds. No amount of plush and luxury could take that out of her.
Rose sets her sights on the lead bomber as the rest of her wingmen fall into formation. We briefly cut to the ballroom, Rose miserable, the male wolf smiling. But when we cut back to the dogfight, now it’s Rose, fiery, confident, proud… and the male staring down the god of death herself.
Callie: She threw her lot into what she believed. She always has.
Rose fires her aircraft’s cannons, annihilating the bomber, then dives for the deck.
[4:27 to 4:38]
The rebels below cheer and hug one another, grateful to be alive as their saviors race overhead. We cut back to a wide shot as the formation of fighters pull up, clearing the grey, devastated city below to climb into the clear blue sky.
[4:39 to 4:53]
Callie: And no matter where that lead?
Once more we return to Rose in the dressing room. She pulls something from her dress, and places it gently on the table before her. As she rises to leave and the music swells one last time, we see her family crest- the same rose emblem on her aircraft’s wings.
Callie: I’ll always love her for it.
[FIN]
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Mun Comforts
Comfort food(s): Cheese, mac n cheese, mozzarella cheese sticks, pizza, croutons, gummies, starbursts, peas, corn, french toast.
Comfort drink(s): Grape drinks, energy drinks, grape and raspberry ICE, Fruit punch ICE, Fruit punch crystal light, grape crystal light, soda
Comfort movie(s): Bungou Stray Dogs Dead Apple, The Cat Returns, Spirited Away.
Comfort show(s): Bungou Stray Dogs, Bleach, My Hero Academia, Chowder, Rocko's Modern Life, Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy
Comfort clothing: Anything baggy
Comfort song(s): Bernadette by IAMX, Killer by The Hoosiers, Black Rover by Blinding Sunrise, Acid Rocket by DK-Zero, Get Jinxed (Russian) by Onsa Media, Happy by Secrets in Studio, Execution is Fun! by Tardigrade Inferno, Everyday is Halloween by Creature Feature, Misery Go Round by Night Club, Toy Soldiers by Marianas Trench, Burnt Babies Fear the Fire by Blaqk Audio, Simping for the Villian by Boy Jr., Lucifer by Elle Lexxa, Kinda Outta Luck by Medusa, Boy Jr., Heart Eater by Connie Glynn, Happy Face by Jagwar Twin, Better than Drugs by Skillet, Happy Face by Aesthetic Perfection, Summer Goth by Aesthetic Perfection, Clarity by ZEDD Foxes, BEELZEBUZ by Fake Type, Everyday Oblivion by 8Graves, Evil by 8Graves, Anti-Hero by Taylor Swift, Dead Air by Rufus Rex, Shallow Grave by The Birthday Massacre, Happy Birthday by The Birthday Massacre, Bones by Imagine Dragons, Wash it all away by Five Finger Death Punch, All Systems Go by Krypteria, I Idolize you by Massive Ego, Living Dead Girl by Rob Zombie, Merry Go Round by Man with a Mission, The Perfect World by Marty Friedman, Monkey Boy by Kontrust, Dried Moat by Stolen Babies, Oh Raven (Sing me your Happy Song) by Unlike Pluto, Rad Drugz by MISSIO, Can you Feel the Sun by MISSIO, Riptide by grandson, Toxicity by System of a Down, Kill Everyone by Hollywood Undead, The Underground by 8Graves and Unlike Pluto, Blood//Water by grandson, Villain of my Own Story by Unlike Pluto, Outrunning Karma by Alec Benjamin, Turn the Lights off by Tally Hall, Hit the Streets by Aesthetic Perfection, Oh! Gloria by Aesthetic Perfection, Big Bad Wolf by Aesthetic Perfection, Riot by Three Days Grace, Fly Home by The Living Tombstone, Can't Wait by The Living Tombstone, Not One Less by Ken Ashcorp, Alkatraz by Demon Dice, The Sky Will Turn by The Birthday Massacre, Touch Tone Telephone by Lemon Demon, Ghost by Mystery Skulls, Thnks fr th Mmrs by Fall Out Boys, Coin Operated Boy by The Dresden Dolls, Pyramid by Two Door Cinema Club, Stray Cat by Vicke Blanka, Kids by MGTM, Devil's Wedding by Fake Type, Back on Track by DJVI,
Comfort book(s): Bungou Stray Dogs, Guardians of Ga'Hoole, cat Warriors, The Sight, Wings of Fire
Comfort game(s): Hollow Knight, Okami, Pokemon, Disgaea, WoW, FFXIV, Guild Wars II, Wario Ware, Super Smash Bros.
Tagged by: @villains4hire (THANK YOU!)
Tagging: (You don't have to!): @kitxkatrp, @yoxngmadnxss, @giftandguile, @electricea, @swordduels, @pluviacuratio, and anyone else who wants to!
#about the mun#yes I went ham on the music section#I LOVE MUSIC#Music is my life man#if I am not playing something or listening to a show or talking to someone#Or working#I AM LISTENING TO MUSIC#long post
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Tagged by @nyctophilic0vitnir Tysm darling! 💖 Did this a few months ago and had trouble finding songs starting with E dhsbfsdjsj Let's see how it goes this time.
spell out your name or url with songs !!
F - Falling in love (McFly)
E - Evermore (Taylor Swift)
N - Negro Caravel (Rosa Cedron)
H - Human (Rag'n'Bone Man)
A - Ame to koigokoro (Little Black Dress)
R - Read your diary (Måneskin)
E - Enemy (Imagine Dragons)
L - La llorona (Chavela Vargas)
E - El lenguaje de los coleteros (Rayden)
N - Never Enough (Loren Allred)
A - Anti-Hero (Taylor Swift)
S - Starman (David Bowie)
T - The wolf (Foxworth Hall)
E - Everglow (Coldplay)
Tagging (no pressure) @queenmeriadoc @doublesunsets and @aeide 🩷🩷
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LONEL INTRODUCTION.
GENRE: Neo-Noir, Urban Fantasy, Thriller.
CONTENT: Best Friends to Lovers, Ancient Conflict, Vampires vs Werewolves, Lone Wolf, Anti-Hero Protag.
SETTING: State of Auris in the world of Aetherius. Decades before IQRUS happens.
STATUS: Worldbuilding | Outlining.
MASTERPOSTS: SNIPPET | CHARACTERS | WORLDBUILDING
SYNOPSIS
Lonel has two secrets. One, he is the last of his kind since his mother was killed. Two, he is certain a vampire is to blame. These, however, are secrets he can’t tell anyone about. Vampires do not exist, and he can't be sure if his mind could be trusted anyway.
Until one day, during his daily forensic cleaner job, he witnesses a scene that changes everything.
LOCATIONS - IMPORTANT ASPECTS
AURIS CITY ― The capital of Auris, where everything happens.
HALL OF ECHOES ― The national museum of Auris. It's a place where every historical knowledge is stored, including mythical legends, and possible artefacts.
THE CRIMSON SHADOW ― A famous club and bar for VIP members only. Only those can enter who were invited, and to get an invitation, you need to meet certain requirements. The regulars, however, can't say anything about it. They sometimes seem to not be able to. There are also rumours about occasional orgies, and that it's a strip club than anything else in actuality.
CHARACTERS
LONEL. A lone forensic cleaner who’s secretly helping the police while cleaning the crime scenes. He's a dangerous man with an obsession over his mother's death. Yet, for the things and people he cares, he cares deeply.
pinterest | playlist
SELYS DUMWERMER. Lonel's almost only friend, and superior as chief detective at the station. An eccentric gentleman with a mysterious, melancholic aura around him.
pinterest | playlist
ODENA SLYHER. A talented archaeologist, and member of the Hall of Echos. As much as she's interested in human history, she is still an expert on the subject of supernatural, and mythical beings. Lonel's childhood acquaintance as he would call her. She, however, rather prefers to be called a friend.
pinterest | playlist
LORD VOLERON DE NOMEUR. One of the richest men of Auris. He’s funding a lot of institutes and owns The Crimson Shadow as well. He’s not the governor, but some say he’s much more.
pinterest | playlist
AUTHOR'S NOTE | TAGS
Will edit this post as I go and share more stuff. Made this when I had the biggest urge to write some Lonel stuff eh. Everything is subject to change.
Thank you for checking it out, loves! ♡
TAG LIST: @bloodlessheirbyjacques, @the-void-writes, @circa-specturgia, @dyrewrites
#wip intro#ask to be added to the taglist#or i might just figure out a form of some sort#so you dont need to ask directly lol#Lonel#writebrl#writing community#urban fantasy wip#urban fantasy#thriller#neo noir#everything made with canva#bet i totally left out a lot of stuff#oh well#q
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As I’ve said before, the version of Cromwell in the filmed Wolf Hall adaptation is basically a 21st century guy in a 16th century character. It brought out a lot of the good qualities that Actual Historical Cromwell really had, but it also utterly refused to acknowledge the bad qualities and the concerning incidents about him. The man basically sits there, stunned, and asking the odd question as the Anne Boleyn prosecution just unfolds around him with a lot of spontaneous confessing. He was a pretty regular advocate and orderer of torture, so his role as Wolf Hall’s early anti torture activist also sits uneasily.
And I don’t like the casting. I think Mark Rylance’s, um hyper, hyper naturalistic, de-delivery (you know what I mean) is interesting and brings a lot to a lot of characters but I don’t think it works for Thomas Cromwell. He was a big man that could be physically intimidating, pretty damn confident in his abilities and his control of others and by the time of his rise he was surely a man that would have dominated any room he was in. It is certainly the way in which he is described by contemporaries.
And what Rylance gave us was like, light years away from that. I’m not saying it was bad acting. I think he was mis-cast. I know how popular that performance has been. It’s [just] not my Cromwell.
THE TUDORS RECAP – SEASON 3 EPISODE 8: THE UNDOING OF CROMWELL (PART 2), autocratonasofa
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L’aventure de Canmom à Annecy - Mardi
or, the real Annecy starts here.
Tuesday was nuts! I saw so much stuff. I have cracked the code.
So, if you wanna know what Annecy is like, I can’t possibly present it better than La Cachette, who made this sponsor intro that plays before every movie...
youtube
Imagine everyone shouts “lapin!!!” when the rabbit appears and also when the rabbit gets eaten by the T. rex. But yeah: the sudden rainfall, the paper planes flying around, pop pop pop.
Anyway, Tuesday was crazy, I saw so many great movies, with some real surprises too! I wrote about them all below~
It’s interesting to think about like. Annecy traditions are this sort of free floating wave. The cohort of people who go to Annecy each year is constantly rotating (as different students graduate etc.) but there’s enough overlap to pass on these traditions, much like at schools with the ‘cool S’ and paper fortune tellers and other parts of, you could say, ‘child culture’.
Anyway, the day began with an expensive hotel breakfast (food is so expensive in Annecy) followed by queuing up for another crack at The Concierge...
Despite arriving around 2 hours early, we never stood a chance. Also it started raining. I did nevertheless manage to draw the queue in front of me, but it was very rough.
Failing to get in to that, my friend decided to queue for Lonely Castle in the Mirror while I went off to the VR hall again to make some early registrations. This time I watched I Took A Lethal Dose of Herbs by Yvette Granata from the USA.
This one was made in Unity (I could tell because it didn’t load properly at first and I was clipped into the floor and saw the default Unity skybox lmao) running on a Quest 2 via Quest Link. It puts you in the body of an anti-abortion activist who goes through post-partum psychosis and then, becoming pregnant again, attempts suicide, before finally accepting an abortion.
The presentation is essentially a non-interactive VR horror game. At one point your legs get eaten by hallucinations of demon babies; another part sees a room gradually transform into a deep-dreamed variant. As a horror film, it was kinda neat. The credits announced “based on a true Reddit story” which kind of knocked me flat lmao. It was entertaining, but I don’t think it really hit the impact intended.
After that, with bookings locked in for two more VR films, I scooted back to join my friend in the queue for Lonely Castle in the Mirror directed by Keiichi Hara, who I wrote about a bit back on Animation Night 137. This time Hara has A1 Pictures rather than mighty Production I.G. behind him, but it’s still absolutely a nicely drawn movie; the composite is more restrained than the above image might make you think.
This turned out to be a screening with only French subtitles, so I got some unexpected Japanese listening practice. I definitely didn’t pick up every detail, but between the visuals, the Japanese audio and the subs I was pretty much able to follow the plot. And a good plot it was! An assortment of teenagers are transported each month through mirrors into a mysterious castle, overseen by a girl in a wolf mask, which provides them all a refuge from their various difficulties at home.
Our viewpoint character is a shy girl who has gone hikikomori after bullying by a group of schoolgirls, and is hurting from the lost connection to another girl. As the story unfolds, we learn more about what happened to her and the other characters; meanwhile the kids hang out in the castle, gradually forming connections.
The castle is like... well diegetically there’s no question it exists, but it’s the kind of magical thing that reflects the character’s emotional struggle. The climax of the film involves a wolf stalking the castle and devouring the children, which is basically a suicide metaphor, and Kokoro going into the castle to attempt to save everyone.
Even with French subs, I ended up enjoying this movie a lot.
Following this my brother came into town on his way to Portugal for a family holiday next week. I met up with him and we had some tasty noodles. We split up again, him going to check out some of the old buildings of Annecy, me going back to the VR room...
where I discovered that if an Annecy juror shows up to watch a VR film, your slot gets cancelled, so I didn’t get to see From The Main Square. But I did get to see Shadow by David Adler and Ole Bornedal from Denmark and the UK.
This one turned out to be really fucking good. It’s an incredibly intense semi-interactive movie in which you play the part of a bomber navigator on a morning raid. Your job is to confirm the target so the pilot can blow it up, but with the fog, the sea, the movement of the plane and battle outside, it’s a lot easier said than done.
This film does a fantastic job of building tension in the runup to the attack. The interactions between your character and the pilot are acted very well, and the sea and mist outside - rendered in Unreal - is properly sketchy to fly through. You confirm the target by using head tracking to look at a yes/no input, and I was fully caught up in trying to make sure we hit the right building and didn’t get shot. Such a tense film, and honestly kind of a vindication of the VR format. I hope there’s something else as good in there.
Following this I scooted over to see the short films collection 4. This turned out to be a great choice: there were very few misses and a lot of plain great films. Also I guess this was like where they put all the gore and nudity lmao, but who knows, I’ll have to see other short film selections.
Haljina za finale dir. Martina Mestrovic presented a sweet picture of the day in an old lady’s life, in which she dyes her dress black and reminisces about the past.
Salvation Has No Name dir. Joseph Wallace was a really cool stop-motion film, making really creative use of old woodcuts along with its puppets, about a refugee who washes up on the shore of a paranoid village and a prevaricating priest who tries to protect her, tries to have sex with her, and takes her newborn child and pushes her away; it’s all presented by a circus troupe who are also the villagers attempting to cover their ass for what they did. There’s some really neat devices of presentation - e.g. the refugee woman speaks English same as the villagers, but diegetically they’re speaking different languages. The metaphors are pretty on the nose, but it’s really nicely shot and tense.
L’Ombre des Papillons dir. Sofia El Khyari is a more abstract one, a very beautifully painted erotic dream with a lot of morphing and transformations (particularly things turning into butterflies). Really nice use of texture in this one.
Wild Summon dir. Saul Freed and Karni Arieli is where things got really nuts. This is like. The most photorealistic hard vore guro film I’ve ever seen lmao. So like the idea is it’s like, a nature documentary on the life cycle of salmon, with all the beautiful shots of landscapes and rivers you’d expect, but with the twist that all the salmon are anthropomorphised to humans in wetsuits and masks (as you see above). These anthro salmon then die horribly in all the ways salmon tend to, at the hands of both animals and humans.
Our main character is a salmon who gets tagged with a tracker by some scientists; this allows her to be thrown back in the water when caught by a fishing trawler for example. The voiceover is by Marianne Faithfull doing an effective old posh british lady voice (I sorta wondered if it was Judy Dench). If this was an actual nature documentary it would be a really beautiful one, but the anthro thing adds an amazing surreal edge.
This one was filmed in the UK, and it’s definitely leaning on the big VFX industry we have over here. Absolutely fascinating film honestly.
I’m Hip, solo animated by American John Musker and comped/edited by Talin Tanielian, was also a delight. Just four minutes of really strong lively traditional animation as a cat sings a self-aggrandising song before getting chased out of town; old-school in a good way.
Daug Geresnis dir. Skirmanta Jakait was the one that lost me, though I imagine if I saw it with English subs I might get more out of it (I saw it in Lithuanian with French subs). I really like the visual style, but the film was a sort of incomprehensible chain of surreal images and I didn’t really know how to put them together.
Drijf dir. Levi Stoops from Belgium wrapped up this collection. This one leans hard on the grossout humour - I’d compare it to something like Savage Death Valley or to a certain extent Lloyd’s Lunchbox. A man and woman are stranded on a calm sea, rowing around on a log, suffering a series of increasingly awful injuries in their misadventures. It’s definitely a ‘bodies, fucked up right?’ sorta movie, and it was a fun bit of black humour, hearing the audience go ‘ooooh’ when something nasty happens.
I had set my reservation today for ‘The Soldier’s Tale’ but I had planned things out really stupidly and had no time to say goodbye to my brother and see that film. Instead we went round the comic shop I talked about last time. It was good to see him and he seems to be having a good time on his trip across Europe.
Speaking of brothers...
I decided to take a chance on Four Souls of Coyote dir. Áron Gauder. I didn’t know much about this going in, but the brief description on the site made it sound a little preachy, so I didn’t set my hopes too high. I was so wrong, this movie was actually maybe the highlight of the day!
This is a Hungarian movie based on (nonspecifically...) Indigenous stories, with the framing device of the story being told by an old man at the Standing Rock pipeline protests. The bulk of the film is an origin story for the world: Old Man Creator - not the top god in this situation - creates Turtle Island and fills it with creatures. In a dream, he creates Coyote, and mistreats him at once; Coyote, an obligate carnivore in a world that does not yet know death, steals the creation mud and creates humans
So most of the film then tells how, through a series of events, Coyote ends up complicating the idyllic scenario by introducing death into the world, and sexual reproduction, and inspiring the creation of lightning and fire before being betrayed by the humans he created, eaten, and on his final life, driven away. It’s a really interesting sort of mythological schema: even Old Man Creator doesn’t know the why of it all, and there’s this kind of idea that a lot of the way things work happened not by design but by mistake (perhaps according to the ineffable design of , and once something is created it’s irrevocably part of the world, so we just have to make do.
I have no idea what’s based on mythology and what was created by the Hungarians, but what makes this all work is the incredible animation. This is just a really really strong work of traditional animation, with fantastic colour and compositing to boot. It might genuinely be the best looking film I’ve seen this whole festival so far, which is nuts. There are all sorts of characterful touches in every shot, the magic is presented in a really elegantly straightforward way, and the whole story unfolds with a compelling degree of intricacy and tension, setup and payoff.
Coyote, the famous trickster, is certainly the main character of this movie. He’s a fascinating character; arrogant, quick to lie and in love with his own cleverness but also we can see his pride comes from the rough circumstances of his creation, where he’s chewed out by his creator from the get go and everyone pushes him away.
The second act of the story sees Coyote free the imprisoned lightning (who’s like. a kind of dragon creature ig?) and go across the sea, discovering the Europeans, who in this story come from the discarded clay that Coyote used as a first attempt at humans; seeking revenge, Coyote invites the Europeans back to Turtle Island, not realising the level of destruction they will bring, or that they will chain him up and call him a dog. Spending the last of his four lives, Coyote has a final face turn where he tries to save the humans.
There’s a bunch to be said about this movie, and once it gets a release I am dying to show it on Animation Night. Its treatment of gender for example feels a bit too rigid and traditional, with the archetypal Man and Woman as the main human characters. The Europeans are presented as getting their power from enslaving Lightning, which is a neat way to make the story centre on what happens on Turtle Island; however, the parable-like telling kind of ends up feeling a bit too simplified where the Europeans show up and destroyed the single (kinda Plains in visual presentation) Indigenous society with overwhelming military force, which is like... not really how it all played out, but it works for the presentation of this movie, where the invasion is kind of a coda to the main story.
The ending of the movie sees the workers, ordered to bulldoze a mountain for the sake of a pipeline, climb out of their bulldozers and join the protestors, with the CEO lady in charge impotent to stop them. In our more depressing reality reality the cops showed up and drove away the protestors by overwhelming force.
I have this much to say though because the movie was so good. But tbh this is just a British girl’s impression. I really want to get Araña’s opinion on this one.
Not done yet, I went to see the student films, block 2. This turned out to be another amazing time: at the big screen in Bonlieu, even this late, loads of people were there and it was the most Annecy showing yet; so many paper planes flying about. Most of the students who made the films were present in the audience and after each film stood up so we could applaud them.
The films were also really good! There are some crazy talented animation students in this world.
Havnesjefen dir. Mia L. Henriksen, Konrad Hjemli (Norway) told the story of a swan known as the Harbourmaster, known for attacking boats in the Norwegian town of Os, who was put down after he started putting humans at risk. It tried a number of ambitious things with the animation: Roger Rabbit-like compositing into live action backgrounds, and Creature Comforts-like animating characters based on real interviews with random people. The result was rough, but pretty cute and effective.
Ressources humaines dir. Titouan Tiller, Trinidad Plass, Isaac Wenzek (France) was a wonderfully dark stop motion film about a guy going to have his body recycled into a chair. It really plays up the awkward everydayness of the scenario, with the documentary camera wandering around and the cheerful patter of the receptionist; the result was great.
Makulatour dir. Tim Markgraf (Germany) was fascinating: a bunch of fluid motions filmed through a microscope (I think??) edited to music. Absolutely absorbing, I have no idea how he did it.
Deniska umřela dir. Philippe Kastner (Czech Republic) is an autobiographical story about a boy whose dog dies, and how he comes to terms with it through art. It’s got a really nice monochrome textured style that made me think of paint on velvet.
Bottled Insects dir. Yuxin Gao in Japan was where things got really nuts. This is traditional animation but not at all anime, incredibly textured and shaped creatures that sort of make me think Masaaki Yuasa and sort of make me think HYLICS. It portrays a girl who collects weird creatures, building up a massive wall of them in her room; it has an ambiguous mood (the blurb says it’s about her losing her sense of self) but a strong flow and just wild imagery. I loved this one.
Hobune dir. Jass Kaselaan (Estonia) was... I’m not entirely sure what the deal with this one was. Lots of odd military imagery and concrete housing blocks. A horse falls over and gets up. The drawing was very rough and line boil-y. But yeah idk I didn’t get it, it’s another one of those ‘disconnected surreal images’ type of ones.
La Nuit Blanche dir. Audrey Delepoulle was great though. Gorgeous paint-y textures and use of lighting, it shows people desperately trying to preserve their crops with burners as frost closes in. It made me think of Frostpunk, but much more grounded. Really tense and beautiful.
Passagers dir. Celia Hardy from Belgium used a similar technique to The Wolf House, animating by painting onto walls and painting over each previous frame, mixed with stop motion. There wasn’t a lot of narrative but there was definitely a lot of very inventive movement, and in general it was really fun to watch.
Priyo Ami dir. Suchana Saha (India) was an abstract one, heavily textured paint, lots of morphing shapes... I can’t remember a lot of what actually happened in it besides the cunnilingus lol. But it definitely felt very personal and sincere, and I respect putting such a film in front of everyone.
Sewing Love by Yuan Xu (Japan) took the metaphor of a partner filling a void in your life to a very literal sense. A boy meets a girl who fills the gap inside him, but when she leaves, he becomes desperate, and restrains her, eventually physically sewing her inside his body. But inside her body she retreats into a tiny ball where she grows new butterfly wings and eventually hatches out. Big metaphors! But the animation was completely wild, with all sorts of morphing and weird perspectives, I can’t even imagine what the process must have been like. I didn’t like this one as much as Bottled Insects because the metaphor felt a bit overbearing, but I was really impressed by the animation.
My last film of the night was Unique Time dir. Yu-Jin Oh (South Korea). This film was crazy technically good, like you could tell me that Studio Mir made this and I’d believe you. The scifi premise is that there are androids who holographically take on the appearance of someone, used for all sorts of purposes; our main character is an android who develops a glitch causing them to create a unique face and identity. A photographer jumps on this as a chance to become relevant again, and the android’s face is soon plastered all over the city... and inevitably a line of mass produced clones is produced. ‘Jay’ (the name assigned by the photographer) is deeply disturbed to realise they’re still just a product, and gets in a very public fight with the photographer; afterwards, they are factory reset, but the glitch still persists... It’s definitely well within the familiar territory of cyberpunk stories, but the execution carries it - it’s hard to believe this is a student film.
By the time all this was done I had to walk back because the buses had become very infrequent, but damn, so worth it. What an amazing day. It took me more than two hours to write all this up lol, between that and catching up on sleep I’ve missed the whole of Wednesday morning rip.
Time to get out there and see some more films!! Annecy is amazing I really wish I could take you all down here.
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Starchild || 17. Girlfriend (reprise)
(Disney Z-O-M-B-I-E-S)
—
All this hurt/comfort zeddison is for you @kokinu09! High five ✋!
—
GIF Credit!
—
(Yesterday)
Zed was laying across his bed staring at the cracks in his ceiling. Boxes of new clothes were piled in the corners of the room, waiting patiently to be unpacked. Night was already beginning to fall over Zombietown, casting everything in indigo shadows. Despite having showered and scrubbed himself raw, Zed could still smell the wolf Den on him. He hadn’t wanted to leave so soon; A-ddison wasn’t strong enough to travel. But with the thought of school looming over his head, Zed was forced to bring them back to civilization. He had to think about what Seabrook would think of his latest episode. Of course they had all seen Zombies in action, his Freshman year the Acey’s managed to hack all Zombie’s z-bands and send them rampaging.
But it had been years since then, and Zed was basically a superstar. Would people forgive him? Fear him? Maybe leave him alone for once? The outcome was uncertain for sure, and Zed hoped any negativity didn’t result in anti-monster laws and earlier curfews. So far none of that had happened yet, possibly due to the fact that the person with the most power in town was the Mother of his Alien girlfriend…friend…his alien friend.
Zed wanted to put his head in the toilet and flush it. They were still just friends…despite everything, the kiss, all of their moments together, they weren’t actually dating. Zed wished they were, but he wasn’t sure if taking that step was the right one. His dad’s words from almost two weeks ago still rang in his skull: “you leave that girls heart alone, Zed.”
And just last night, Willa had also made a point: “could you handle her leaving?“
Zed knew of course that it was the best thing to do. A-ddison was an Alien; she had family both on Earth and in the stars. But no matter how much he wished she was merely human, she wasn’t. It didn’t matter how well she could disguise herself as such. She was only half-human, and not the dominant half. Maybe if she had grown up on Earth with her mom, things could be different. Yeah a girl and a zombie would be kinda strange at first, but they could make it work. But a ‘basically fugitive’ alien with the most beautiful starry eyes? Not so easy.
Slamming both hands into his face and groaning, Zed felt his muscles flex inside his arms. The tank top was barely a shirt at all it was so shredded, but it was perfect for sleeping in. Normally he slept without one, but A-ddison was just down the hall in the shower, so his dad insisted he put more clothes on. So he sat in his room and waited, fearing the moment Mayor Wells pulled up in her nice blue sedan to pick A-ddison up and take her back across the fence.
“…Zed?”
Blinking out of his thoughts, Zed lifted his eyes. Zoey was peeking in through his doorway.
“Hey, lil’ Z. What’s up?”
“Addy needs your help,” Zoey said, causing Zed to jerk upright.
“What happened?”
“She’s hurting really bad…”
Zed didn’t need Zoey to say any more. He was on his feet in a second, not bothering to put on a sweatshirt as he ruffled his sisters hair, careful not to trip over the smaller girl as she darted between his legs and back towards the cracked bathroom door. Zoey entered first, allowing white light to spill into the dark hallway.
“…Zed’s here, Addy,” the little girl whispered, “he’ll know what to do.”
Hesitantly, Zed knocked his finger against the door before pushing it open. It was the first time he had actually seen all of A-ddison. Obviously she was still wearing her underthings, but it was more similar to what some of the cheerleaders wore to the beach. It revealed more skin than he had seen so far, and Zed’s first instinct was to turn away. After all, his Dad was just downstairs, and this was not a good situation to be caught in on accident.
“Don’t turn away,” Zoey chided him, “she needs your help.”
“Sorry…I just…” Zed sighed heavily past his hand, whacking his boyish nature down with a stick. Now wasn’t the time to be humble or modest. Turning back around, Zed stepped further into the bathroom as he used a foot to close the door a bit behind him. A-ddison was laying up against the side of their old, cracked bathtub. Her hair was still wet and glistening from being washed — Zoey had helped her with that. Similarly, water droplets sparkled across pale stripes and body markings like a thousand small diamonds from a sponge-bath. She was clean, but the skin under her wrappings was bright red.
“Zoey, go downstairs and grab the bag of peas from the freezer. Wrap it up in one of the washcloths.”
“Ok.”
“And Zoey,” Zed said, stopping his sister in order to speak directly to her face, “I don’t want you coming back in, ok? Just pass the peas through the door.”
“But I wanna help…”
“You‘ve been amazing. This just isn’t really something you need to see. Please?”
“Oh…alright,” Zoey pouted, “she’ll be ok though, right?” The girl wondered, furrowing her brows and frowning deeply. Zed pursed his lips and nodded hesitantly.
“Yeah. Now go on, I’ll take care of this.”
Zoey hesitated for a moment before exiting the bathroom, closing the door the rest of the way behind her till it clicked.
“…Zed…”
Turning, A-ddison’s eyes had opened and she was looking at him from under her dark lashes, “why’d you send her out?”
“I need to change your bandage. Willa gave me some instructions on how to do it. Zoey is too young still, she doesn’t need to see fresh stitches.”
“You’re such a good Older One to her,” Addy mused faintly, rolling her head on the towel pillow she was using to have a better look at him as he knelt down by her side. At once, her brows furrowed up into her hairline, “what’s that?”
“What’s what?” Zed wondered honestly, rolling up his pant legs as to not awkwardly sit on them.
“On your neck,” Addy said again, reaching out to grab his shirt with a hand and tugging on it, “come closer.”
“Oh,” Zed’s stomach lurched. He forgot about his serial number: Z-9291. Normally it was covered up by whatever jacket he was wearing. But, seeing as he wasn’t in anything but a tank top, the black, tattooed number was fully exposed for A-ddison to see, “it’s my serial number. I got it when I was ten.”
“Show me,” A-ddison practically ordered him, though it sounded very weak. Still, Zed obliged, leaning down further so her fingers could ghost across the marking. The feeling made him shiver; he could still remember how much it hurt to get it. He’d had a fear of needles ever since.
“It doesn’t hurt or anything,” Zed told her, seeing how…unnerved…she seemed to be at the marking, “it’s just to help z-patrol keep count.”
“Keep count?”
“Yep. All Zombies born get a number, which correlates to a file of information about them. Helps keep track of who’s trouble, and who’s not. It’s also linked up to our z-bands so they can always see if a Zombie is stable or not.”
“Does Zoey have one?” A-ddison wondered, “a number?”
“Yep, so does Dad, and Eliza, and Bonzo,” Zed shrugged, gently removing A-ddison’s hand from his cheek and squeezing it, “Zoey said you were in pain?”
“Just a bit,” A-ddison croaked, avoiding his gaze as her tail twitched under her legs, “Willa said it would be sore.”
“You’re pale,” Zed noted, using a hand to feel Addy’s forehead like his mom used to do to feel for a temperature, “not warm, though.”
“This thing you call shower is wonderful,” Addy croaked, “Zoey was very helpful.”
“I’m glad,” Zed nodded, happy that Zombies couldn’t actually blush. Thank god he hadn’t been called in any earlier or he’d be on the floor in a dead faint, “peeling this off might hurt? Please stop me if it gets to much.”
A-ddison nodded hesitantly, looking the opposite direction of her wound as Zed gently began to pull at the bandaging. He could tell that Addy was holding her tongue as best she could, but the sharp flex of her stomach against her ribs, and the clench of her fists gave away how much pain she was in. Slowly and steadily, Zed began to pull away the coverings, wincing at how red and sore the sutures were. As he pulled the last of the tape away, A-ddison opened her mouth to gasp, breathing heavily as though she’d been held underwater for a time.
Zed, to his curiosity, saw a new color begin to form in his friends hair. While the bottom was turquoise, with a majority being white, the roots began to turn brown. It was almost a natural chestnut color. Pain. The color meant pain — he just knew it. Allowing the girl to breathe freely for a moment, Zed sat on his knees at her side and stared. He stared at the four distinct, ragged lines up down her ribcage.
He did this to her.
This pain was all his fault. Zed lifted a hand, spreading his fingers and holding his palm above the gash marks. It was a perfect match; there was no doubt.
*Zed, it wasn’t your fault.*
The voice echoed in his mind, rather than his ears. Glancing at A-ddison, she was gripping his wrist just above his z-band. He could feel her ice in his blood; rushing through him like an avalanche. Her neon eyes glowed faintly like a pair of LED bulbs, while her antenna pulsed white. *Please stop blaming yourself*
*How can I?* he thought back to her, turning his arm to change their grip. He wanted to hold her hand; gripping her fingers in his as though she’d fade away if he let go. *What if I can’t ever be anything but a monster?*
*Your heart is far too big for that to be true* A-ddison told him, *monsters have no heart. My people. — mine who slaughtered thousands because of mere biological flaws — they are monsters. Those who look at you, or who look at Eliza, or Zoey, or your dad, and see only something to fear and hate?* A-ddison ran her thumb across his knuckles, feeling the hills and valleys with her soft skin, *they are monsters. You, Zed, are not like that. You see the world through your heart, and that’s not something a mere monster could do.*
*But I hurt you…*
Zed didn’t get to finish his thought. He was cut off by the feeling of an electric shock rocketing through him. A-ddison was kissing him, practically hanging from his threadbare tank top in order to reach his face. The kiss was just as electrifying as the first, but Zed wasn’t quite so shell shocked. He returned the affection willingly, taking his fingers though A-ddison’s hair as it quickly flashed from brown and white to a bright magenta. All the doubts and fears that she would hate him melted off into warm, staticky love.
Pure, honest, true love. And it was absolutely maddening. She was maddening.
“I…hate you…” Zed mumbled against her cheek as she pulled away from him, gently using his nose to tilt her chin up so he could kiss the skin on her neck. This caused her to shutter, and moan a bit in surprise.
“You just talk too much,” she rasped finally, running her own hand across his scalp, and feeling the lightning bolt scar next to his ear with the flat of her thumb, “hm, this is just another thing to discover about you, Zed,” she mused, settling back down on the floor with a wince as her bright hair faded back to its pale coloring.
“You’re super distracting,” Zed chided her, “you know that, right?”
“Well you wouldn’t stop talking,” A-ddison teased back, watching him lean over her to reach the cabinet under the sink to fetch a medical kit they kept on hand for emergencies, “my fondness for you is very empowering.”
“Fondness, huh?” Zed wondered, opening the kit and rifling through it.
“I’m not sure that’s the right word,” A-ddison admitted to him faintly, causing is hands to stop. He was an idiot.
“Love,” he told her, “is love the right word?”
“Love?” She wondered, lifting a brow and shifting on the floor to cradle her side, “we…don’t have that word in our language.”
“Love is…” Zed hesitated, “it’s complicated? And it’s a really big emotions with a lot of steps that can sometimes be hard to explain? But it’s a very intense affection for someone.”
“I see…” Addy mused, “this thing is quite intense,” she admitted, “but I’ve never felt love before. Not like this.”
“You don’t date aboard the Mothership?” Zed wondered curiously, beginning to shape out some new cotton to fit A-ddison’s wound.
“Our mates are picked for us,” Addy told him, “fondness and affection have nothing to do with it. The better A-Lurian genetics you have, the more likely you are to be mated.”
“So you don’t even know the person?”
“Sometimes we do. As big as the Mothership is, you’re bound to know everyone at least a little bit. But no, there is very little…uh, ‘getting to know you’ process involved.”
“So that kissing was just…?”
“Passion is something we have in our culture,” A-ddison said factually, “physical pleasure is quite common. It’s good and healthy for the body and mind. Although, I’ve never felt it before now.”
“I’m your first kiss, huh?” Zed chuckled, “how am I doing?”
“I have no standard to base that statistic,” Addy frowned, “maybe I should kiss more people just to check…”
“Absolutely not,” Zed insisted, leaning over his…girlfriend…his girlfriend, and staring her straight in the face, “you aren’t going to be kissing anyone else.”
“Oh?”
“You wont, because I loved you first and that’s not fair.”
“You…love me?” Addy wondered up at him, eyebrows rising up into her hairline as Zed swallowed thickly and nodded.
“Yeah, I do,” he sighed, feeling the relief of getting the admittance off his chest like an elephant had just stepped off him. Carefully, he pressed the cotton to Addy’s stitches, smiling in guilt as she hissed at the pressure, “sorry.”
“…fine…” she rasped, “and Zed?”
“Yeah?”
“I think I love you, too.”
Zed couldn’t keep the grin off his face. The breath that left him was clearer and longer than any he’d ever breathed in his life. Before either could say anything though, the sound of something dropping just outside the door caused both teens to glance at the door in surprise.
“Dad! Dad! Addy’s gonna be part of our family!”
Zoey’s voice faded off down the hall as Zed groaned in embarrassment, only to feel Addison’s fingers once again intertwine with his.
“I hope you’re ready to have a little sister, Addy,” he mused to her, leaning down to peck her lips again, “because she’s not going to leave you alone now.”
“I think I can manage,” she whispered back, “I love you, Zed.”
He smiled again, using a hand to gently caress the diamond shaped marking on his girlfriends forehead.
“Gar gar ga za,” he replied, “to the stars and back.”
—
Tag List:
@theredrenard
@disneyfan50
@rose-sparks13
@magical-ashley
@kokinu09
@octolingo-writes
@fantasticvoidnerdshoe
@sayorseee
@zeddisonss
@uglyduckling339
@descendantofthesparrow
@mbradshaw1997
@mmultifandommultishipper
#disney zombies#starchild au#alternate universe#zeddison#so much zeddison guys#zed necrodopolis#addison wells#zoey necrodopolis#hurt/comfort#z o m b i e s#z o m b i e s 2#z o m b i e s 3#fanfiction#disney#disney fanfiction#writing#angst#injury#soft af#confessions#dcom
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ivy spirit animals | RustyBoy44 (rusty/rustyself) [OP] | 2 May 2894 | 6 hours ago
OK SO i was talking to daedalus on grove and they were like. maeter is obv like a cat anf rusty is a wolf but what if maeter was a black panther. or a big cat os fome kind.
imagine: rusty is a lone greywolf stalking the forests, separated from his pack (snoid, froid, swoid, etc.) and then he meets the Black Panther in the woods whose like a lone hunter by nature. so rusty and maeterlinck join forces to not starve and she becomes his PACK. idk the a/b/o dynamics yet but i feel like theyd both be switches idkkkk btu ive been brainrotting about this all fuckign night daedalus is a genius
Re: ivy spirit animals | Gun-Safety (he/him) | 2 May 2894 | 6 hours ag
>more ivi shitposting
get this straightf*ggot shit out of here everyone knows rusty sucks penos like a normal person
Re: ivy spirit animals | ncconecAl | 2 May 2894 | 6 hours ago
>get this straightf*ggot shit out of here everyone knows rusty sucks penos like a normal person
kys
Recent threads on the Vespertine Halls forum, an in-universe website dedicated to Arquebus Vesper shipping, kinning, and stanning.
A combination of Reddit, Tumblr, and 4chan at their worst.
CW’s: R-slur, F-slur, a bunch of other slurs, racism, ableism, sexism, general terminally online rancidity, general terribleness, corporate bootlicking/capitalism/anti-communism. Written from experience, unfortunately. It should go without saying that the author does not support any of the views contained therein.
#armored core 6#armored core#fanfic#fanfiction#v.iv rusty#v.ii snail#v.viii pater#v.i freud#v.vii swinburne#v.vi maeterlinck
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Half-Rite - a Malevolent fic
Music rises.
Tension builds.
A masquerade. A confession. An altercation.
A night to remember.
Part of the Surrogate series. Written with @sepiabandensis.
AO3
———
Oh, he knew he looked damned good.
It wasn’t just about atmosphere, scents, wafting magic before the Rite. It wasn’t just about the build-up, or the excitement of the Composer’s music (blind now, according to public belief), or how the brand-new godling would react. It was about him . He set the tone, and appearance was all part of the performance.
Hastur leaned on the wall and cradled Gokar’luh’s crown, giving himself a few moments to cry before that damned performance had to resume.
They’d only been back for a few weeks; not enough time to… get over this , or whatever he was supposed to do. How the hell had Arthur done it? How had he gone on? He hadn’t even had another child who needed him. He hadn’t had anything .
What magic had Parker wrought?
Whatever it was, Hastur began to fear he needed to learn it soon, because this… this wasn’t getting better.
So this was grief? Fuck.
He put the crown back, sealed the little shrine, and took a moment to repair his appearance before checking his reflection via spell.
Yes. Perfect. Everyone would feel desire and enter into this joyful thing, this wild evening of madness in the name of Shub-Niggurath.
And he should be able to do what he needed to do without being seen.
Hastur stood tall, his outfit jingling with that particular ring of gold on gold, and stepped into the virtual spotlight.
#
This Rite was going to be absolutely legendary. All the wee mortals were hidden away, trembling under their protections; deific passion was never safe , and a night like this was even less so, and this —prepared, planned, delayed—had the potential to take as much life as it created.
Arthur wiped his face again. The sweat was really bothering him. At least his room was cool.
You look so good, crooned John.
“‘Kay,” said Arthur, who just wasn’t engaging with any of this.
John’s hand tried to wander again.
Arthur stopped it again.
Why won’t you let me touch you? John whined.
“Why won't… because , as I’ve already said a dozen times, this isn’t you! Gods. Next time, we need a… an anti-desire necklace, or something, to keep you sane!”
John sighed. His hand reached up instead of down this time and petted Arthur’s hair. So dumb about some things, he said, almost like a lullaby. Makes me want to touch you even more.
“Right, let’s just…” Arthur sighed, then muttered. “I swear I should ask for a raise for this.”
With impeccable timing, Hastur arrived. “If you were inclined to spend your money at all, I’d agree.”
“Well, I don’t exactly have a—”
Oh!
“What?” said Arthur, stiffening.
Nobody told you to look like that, said John, evidently offended.
Hastur ignored that. “Are you ready?”
“Sure,” said Arthur, then added in a whisper, “Look like what?”
He’s all…. John’s left hand waved. Tentacle… shiny… eyes! Gold!
“And this is different from usual, how?” Arthur muttered.
He’s even got golden sheen all over him, John complained.
“I would, if it’s all the same to you, like to get this over with,” said Hastur.
“Same. Let’s go.”
Hastur picked him up
“I can walk,” said Arthur, shoving.
“Not this year. Not this time. It is important.”
Ugh! Stop shimmering!
Arthur sighed. “You’ll just have to up your shimmer-resistance for now, all right? It’s nearly over.”
“For you .” Hastur carried them out into the hall.
#
Maybe John was right. There were comments. Flattering ones. Disgusting ones. Distinctly inappropriate ones. There was an actual wolf-whistle.
Oohs and aahs . Whatever Hastur had done to himself, it stood out, even before a Rite. “What the hell did you do?” Arthur murmured.
“What I had to,” Hastur murmured back, and the room changed.
Warm, too warm. Musky; so thick with odors both natural and not, so rich, that for one moment, Arthur couldn’t breathe. He closed his eyes and spent a moment being deeply grateful for all the events that ensured nothing was going to happen to him right now.
“He looks lovely tonight!” someone called, apparently about Arthur. “Which I’m sure you’ve noticed!”
He does look lovely! snarled John. Leave him alone!
Laughter.
“Oh, gods,” Arthur muttered, entire head feeling hot.
“You’re all right,” murmured Hastur, placing him at the bench. “Do you wish for calm?”
Through the mark. “Not yet. I can handle this.”
“Good. No introductions are needed. Play.”
Oh. He’d thought there would be some sort of banter, or presentation, or—
You’ve got this, Arthur, said John. Everyone is ready.
Arthur closed his eyes, took a slow, perfumed breath, and reminded himself how he wrote this piece in the first place.
Hastur’s hearts were always the base, of course, though he’d begun to think of them as John’s. That was important, because this piece wasn’t about Hastur at all.
It started spare and quiet, with chords like rustling leaves, with a hint of something too big just out of sight. It played with arpeggios like wind, light and cold or sudden and sharp or soft and secretive, and it took its time building.
Toward the moment. The moment he’d been dreaming, though he would not say.
The moment that stuck in his mind as if it had been branded there, perhaps at first without his permission, though he’d since mulled it over so many times that he’d made it his own.
He built, suddenly. Light burst through the upper registers, playful like sun through leaves—a thing he’d seen only once in more than ten years. Joy followed, and shock, and nervousness as he wordlessly asked his audience: what could one see, what could one find, what hunger might arise with sight come true?
When John appeared (in Arthur’s mind’s eye), Arthur moved to the middle of the keyboard, leading the rising strings and woodwinds, creating a sound unlike before. The drums continued Hastur’s heartbeats, but Arthur…
Arthur played trust .
Arthur played love, and surprised joy, and the shared things that a life together can bring; familiar tones and accessible tones and chords that felt like home, but still building (the brass joined now, soft, open fifths and somehow royal), and it seemed the closeness of his hands on the keys only mirrored the closeness of the feeling he brought back to mind.
Arthur smiled as he played, leaning in, hands crossing over each other, entangling with balanced ease, and the drumbeats began to pick up, and the hints of sunlight through impossible trees grew blazing, and the wind picked up.
He changed the rhythm just a touch, just a little, just enough to echo other pulsing sensations, persistent and peaking, and now —
When, in his mind, he hugged John, the music burst open like the birth of a phoenix.
It raced through chords and pounded bass and drum, howled with clashing strings and brass to become something so alien but true , something needed and starving and oh, so strange.
When, in Arthur’s mind, he clutched John’s form and was clutched back (so unfamiliar, and he hadn’t known where anything was apart from John’s mask-like face), he began to feel a feeling he hadn’t felt in so many years that he hadn’t recognized what it was in that place.
That tension, that trembling; that strange, warm want. A daring desire, sweet, tremulous, a new melodic thread raising tension through all the harmonic chaos to focus where need pointed, and (John’s tentacles on his legs) the brass broke off into waterfall cascades of notes and (sliding higher, illicit but welcome) the strings became one sawing, pulsing chord like the beautiful grunts of heaven’s angels, and (recognizing in that moment the strength of those limbs that were so gentle for him), he brought this piece to its climax, arms spread, taking up the breadth and depth of the keyboard, and then—
It stopped.
It didn’t finish. Or it did; but not with a climax. It ended with tension the size of the room, with teeth-clenching want that twisted in knots, with one huge sound more than big enough (Arthur thought) to please Hastur’s sense of grandeur, and it was a dissonance he refused to resolve, refused to take down to the tonic key, and instead left it there, high and sparkling and tense with, at last, one simple note doubled, far, far apart.
He finally realized he wasn’t breathing, and started again.
Behind him, Hastur made one, soft sound. It almost sounded like frustration.
There was a… rumble. As if immensely heavy things had moved, shifted, like the tide, in his direction.
Oh, Arthur , said John, and the way he said it—
A crashing sound like the ocean pouring into a bucket—
Arthur knew he was in danger. Panic spiked.
Hastur grabbed him.
Arthur reached for his room in a way he could not describe. There was no chant. There was no spell. He wanted to be in his room , and as Hastur threw him, something happened.
Arthur had been thrown through portals before. It was a regular event on a night like this, but it usually felt like the damn thing was fully open first.
The sizzle of conflicting magic burned him slightly, bit his skin under his clothes, startled him with the scent of singed fabric. John didn’t quite get his arm up in time, and they landed hard.
Shit! They rolled, Arthur making small pained sounds as his clothes burned him, and behind them came a sound he hadn’t expected: Dagon’s bellowing laugh.
“Well, ain’t that a spicy little fishstick?” he guffawed, and the portal cut off.
“What the fuck?” said Arthur, sitting up. “Ow. Ow! Fuck!” His clothing was hot , all buttons and ornaments painful, and he tugged at it fruitlessly.
John made it easier. Magic! Ready?
“Yes! Fucking ow!”
Ah'mgehye!
The clothing exploded, popping right off him and away from his grateful skin.
John moaned, somewhere between sensual and exhausted. That… felt… oh. Arthur, you’re really red. Everywhere.
“What just happened?” Arthur cried. “Bathroom. Shower. Now.”
Left. Little more. I don’t fucking know! I… I…
Arthur stood under cold water and moaned. He felt just slightly burned everywhere. None of it was bad, but it was uncomfortable. The cold water helped. “I think I fucked up his portal.”
Fuck yeah, you fucked up his portal! The whole thing blazed orange!
“Orange?”
All his fucking magic is gold.
“Yeah, that tracks,” Arthur muttered, finally cooled down enough to scrub the day’s sweat away.
Well, you made it orange. I don’t know what to tell you.
“Good for me.” Arthur sighed, then smacked at John’s hand. “Really?”
Really, John purred.
“No.”
John sighed. Why don’t you want this? Don’t you like being touched?
“Not when it’s practically drugged, ” Arthur snapped. “I…” He muttered something.
What?
“I don’t deserve it, anyway.” That had come quietly, almost hidden by the bang of soap bottles as Arthur slammed them onto their respective shelves, but John was sure he’d heard. What? What did you say?
“Nothing.” Arthur groaned. “What… did my buttons burn me?”
You said… oh! Yes! Fuck! Ugh. I’m still not good at… hold on. Ph’lloig.
The burning eased. “Thanks,” said Arthur and made his way to the bed, where he collapsed on his stomach and could not care less his hair was still wet.
John started doing things again, so Arthur rolled over on his left arm.
Hey!
“You probably won’t even remember this tomorrow,” Arthur murmured, exhausted. “I need to rest, John.”
Noooo…
“Hastur will be coming… I don’t know, eventually. I need to be able to sing when he does.”
A pause. I love you.
Arthur smiled, and John got to see it before his eyes finally closed. “I love you too, you whacko. Let me rest.”
John clung to what he thought Arthur had said in the shower. It was important. It mattered. But as the magic rose in the palace, pulling and pulsing, he lost that thought, and drifted away instead on waking dreams he lacked the courage to relay.
Arthur drifted to sleep.
Hastur didn’t come.
#
Outside the palace, all was quiet. Carcosa slept, or at least hid, gathering no attention, making no waves. Perhaps that’s why the heat’s approach seemed so wrong.
Grass made the softest sound, barely a sizzle, before wilting in a wide, straight line headed toward the palace. Panicked insects burrowed out of the ground too late, legs twitching as they died in heat that made their tiny bodies blacken and smoke.
Feet from the palace steps, the burning path stopped.
Soundless, Hastur touched down before it, tentacles gracefully spread, gold and jewels glinting in the double-full moonlight.
The ground trembled, almost subtly, and then it began to glow. A deep, terrible red, it moved like tar, like liquid, flowing away from the tentacular, eye-covered mound that displaced it. “ Hastuuur ,” it burbled in a voice of ancient soil and molten stone.
“Tokkaa,” said Hastur, his tentacles gently undulating. “Did you think I would not know?”
“ So you have spies among my people,” said the lava god.
“Of course,” said Hastur. “I also have great mercy. Leave now, and we will pretend you did not attempt an attack on the night my court performed the Rite.”
The lava bubbled a laugh, thick and gluey. “ I don’t want your mercy. All these allies you’re making, all these concessions… you think we don’t know? You have clearly been weakened… perhaps even more so now that you’ve spent yourself tonight.”
“Oh, have I?” said Hastur, rising off the ground, tentacles curling outward like dark flame. “You think I’m vulnerable?”
“ Let’s see if you taste as pretty as you look,” said Tokkaa as if promising a tryst, and lunged.
Which was a mistake.
#
Dagon found Hastur on the top of the tower.
The fishy scents were joined by many perfumes and incenses, and he grunted contentedly as he sat next to his host. “Nice wards down there.”
“Tell me you didn’t let them all out of the room,” rumbled Hastur, supine, gold gleaming in the moon.
“Naw,” said Dagon, leaning back on his massive, finned arms. “They’re all still busy, anyway. Not like you and me. Know how to satisfy our selfs, don’t we?” He laughed wetly.
“Something like that.”
“I couldn’t help but notice you didn’t bother doin’ that.”
Hastur looked at the sky. A drop of magma fell from one of his tentacles, sizzling pleasantly on the roof. “I had more urgent business.”
Dagon was silent for a moment. Then he went a new direction. “This ‘cause of Gokar’luh?”
Hastur jerked away, making a choked sound. “What?”
Dagon shrugged with shoulders broader than the whales he bred. “You always been weird about that guy. You’re even weirder about that girl. But anyhoo, it don’t take much to put together.”
Hastur was tired. He’d planned on what to do when the rumors circulated, but this was too soon , this was ahead of schedule. “My s… my…”
“I hear the Oracle’s dead. I hear it’s by your hand—when you wouldn’t even do more’n smack him on the ass when he fuckin’ betrayed you.” Dagon cracked his neck. “I’da killed him.”
Was that a threat? “Of course you would,” Hastur managed, mentally scrambling to rework his elaborate plan, and panicking at the thought of having to fight Dagon tonight. That wouldn’t go well. There was no guaranteed victor. He couldn’t afford that big a risk. “Your point?”
Dagon looked at him, then patted his nearest tentacle like trying to soothe a spooked squid. “Aw, take it easy, now,” he said. “I allied with you, didn’t I? Think I didn’t do my fuckin’ homework first? Woulda just bought your help if I didn’t want this whole thing to work.”
“Ah. Well. Ah.”
“I ain’t stupid,” said Dagon, sounding amused. “Figured it would take something real big for you to finally kill that ungrateful tadpole. Then saw the scar on the little girl’s neck. Figured that done it.”
It didn’t sound like blackmail. “How well-known is this?” Hastur said, low.
“It’s out there. Somebody saw something and blabbed. It ain’t so bad, big guy. Just thought you ought to know I get what’s goin’ on, and ain’t the only one.”
So Dagon was… being an ally. Properly. Relief filled Hastur’s mouths with a strange and unfamiliar flavor. Maybe gratitude. “Thank you.”
“You going back down?”
Taking care of Tokkaa had been quick, and this was an unscheduled void between actions. “No.”
“Mm.” Dagon studied him. Under the moonlight, his eyes were dark shadows, and the fins on his head fine as knives. “You do clean up real good… and sure as hell need some distraction, or I’m a horseshoe crab.”
Hastur snorted.
Dagon leaned in close, his shadow sliding over Hastur, heavy and shivering-cold and good. “When’s the last time you actually got fucked by an equal, not one’a them picayune little imps downstairs?”
And came a moment of breathless tension, of amplified resonance. It was tempting. It was even expected—a bestial time, wild and powerful and incredibly satisfying between Great Old Ones, without consequence.
But it wouldn’t be deserved .
“A while,” Hastur admitted, low. “And it must be a while more.”
“Gokar’luh?” said Dagon.
“Yes.” Even this simple moment wasn’t deserved, but he’d taken it anyway, selfish.
“Suit yourself,” said Dagon, unconcerned with delayed gratification, and looked back up at the moons. “Offer stands.”
“I appreciate that.” Hastur exhaled. He had a little more time before he had to go back downstairs and plan the next campaign—into Tokkaa’s kingdom, because they were now in need of a god.
Dagon shook his head. He sounded baffled but unjudgmental. “Don’t get it. Can just make another one.”
Oh, it hurt… “No.”
“Sure you can. It’s the nature of offspring; you make ‘em, they die, you make more.” Dagon paused. “They die so much easier than us. You gotta know that.” He almost sounded… gentle.
They sat in silence then for a while as Hastur’s golden tears glittered in the moonlight as brightly as his adornments.
Dagon didn’t point it out. “That false sun sure is beautiful.”
“It is.” Hastur’s voice was almost steady.
“Dunno who dreamed it up this time. Ain’t seen one for a couple hundred.”
“Same.” It burned out there like an ember on the sea. “Carcosa’s position in the mountains was perfect this night.”
“Come see it underwater some time. Pretty damned incredible.”
“Perhaps I shall.” And Hastur almost meant it.
#
Far in the outer ring of the palace, unaware of drama and tears, Parker lay on his bed, blissed out, naked and messy, about a minute away from sleep.
A large mirror stood by the bed, as did a wheeled cart of various chocolate confections which had been thoroughly ravaged. Parker’s eyes kept drifting shut, blinking hazily in the moments before sleep.
Despite everything, despite the deep and lingering satisfaction, Sunny still wanted to touch. You look so beautiful like this, Sunny murmured, letting Parker’s soft and unfocused gaze fix on the mirror. My partner… My Parker. You are truly magnificent.
Parker smiled, reaching up sleepily to brush his knuckles against their lips; Sunny took hold of their mouth for a moment, pressing a kiss to his partner’s fingers and smiling as Parker held them there. Parker let out a soft groan, then, settling into the sheets (they would have quite the cleanup tomorrow, but Sunny was not going to think about that). “Think I like this Rite stuff,” Parker mumbled, eyes drifting shut again. “You sure you’re good?”
Yes, Parker. If only I could see you like this all the time, Sunny said softly. The things I will do to you, when I have my own body…
“Mm,” said Parker, drifting.
I love you, Parker Yang, Sunny said. Sleep, now, my love. My Parker, mine, forever; this I swear to you.
Parker snored.
Mine, Sunny whispered, letting their shared breath ghost against Parker’s fingers where they lay, settling into the steady flow of his breathing. He truly had worn the poor man out, but for his demands to be heeded, to be obeyed… his sigh was involuntary, deep and blissful, echoed by Parker.
To be… kingly, after so many years.
It wasn’t enough. Not quite. But it was so much more, and what was a bit more waiting to reach out, to embrace, to hold Parker safe in his many arms and ensure his rest was truly as peaceful as he deserved? He could wait.
Sunny had learned patience.
He rested, content, and slipped into the gentle fantasies of the day where could hold Parker as his very own.
#Malevolent#malevolent podcast#malevolent fic#arthur lester#malevolent arthur#john doe malevolent#KIY malevolent#Hastur malevolent#surrogate series#malevolent fanfic
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Dame Hilary Mantel, who has died aged 70 after suffering a stroke, was the first female author to win the Booker prize twice, which she did for the first two volumes in her epic trilogy of the life of Thomas Cromwell, Wolf Hall (2010) and Bring Up the Bodies (2012). The novels, which collectively weigh in at about 2,000 pages, have sold 5m copies worldwide, were made into an acclaimed BBC series (2015) staring Mark Rylance, and adapted by Mantel herself for the RSC stage version (2014), a process that she loved. The trilogy culminated with The Mirror and the Light (2020) and the death of Cromwell; it turned out to be her final novel. All told in the present tense, the novels constitute a feat of immersive storytelling and a monumental landmark in contemporary fiction.
Before Cromwell, Mantel had written nine novels, including A Place of Greater Safety (1992), about the French Revolution; Beyond Black (2005), a characteristically dark and idiosyncratic tale of a medium in Aldershot; a memoir, Giving up the Ghost (2003); and three collections of short stories. Although she received good reviews, her sales were modest and none of her novels had even been longlisted for the Booker. “I felt very much like a niche product, very much a minority interest,” she said in an interview with the Guardian in 2020. But it was only with Cromwell and her decision “to march on to the middle ground of English history and plant a flag”, as she put it, that she found a huge readership. It was the novel she had been waiting all her career to write.
Born Hilary Thompson in Glossop, a village in Derbyshire, she was the daughter of working-class Catholic parents with Irish ancestry who had moved to Manchester; her mother, Margaret (nee Foster), like her mother before her, had left school to work in a mill when she was only 14. Hilary’s father was Henry Thompson, but she took her surname from her mother’s second husband, Jack Mantel.
Hers was not a happy childhood. “The story of my childhood is a complicated sentence that I’m always trying to finish, to finish and put behind me,” she wrote in Giving up the Ghost. If she were to give it a pigment, she continued, it would be “a faded, rain-drenched crimson, like stale and drying blood”.
When she was six, a man called Jack had come for tea, she wrote. “One day Jack comes for tea and doesn’t go home again.” The neighbours gossiped and children at school teased her about their living arrangements.
They all lived together until her mother and two younger brothers moved to a semi-detached house in Romiley with Jack. She never saw her father again. “My childhood ended so, in the autumn of 1963, the past and the future equally obscured by the smoke from my mother’s burning boats,” she said. Until she was 12, she was a devout Catholic, and she went to Harrytown Convent school, Romiley.
She met her husband, Gerald McEwen, when they were 16, marrying in 1973, the year that she graduated from Sheffield University with a law degree. Instead of becoming a barrister as she had planned, she got a job in a department store and started reading about the French Revolution. She said she never thought of becoming a novelist until she “actually picked up a pen to become one” and even then it was only because she felt she had missed her chance to become a historian. She started her first novel, A Place of Greater Safety in, 1974, when she was 22. It would be two decades before it was published. In 1977 she and Gerald were sent to Botswana for his work as a geologist. She started teaching, but in her head she was always in 1790s France, writing whenever she could.
The impulse to write grew out of her sense that something was seriously wrong with her. While she was at university she started having terrible pains, but was told they were psychological and was prescribed antidepressants and anti-psychotic drugs. There followed years of pain, misdiagnosis and denial. It was only in a library in Botswana that she self-diagnosed severe endometriosis. When she was 27 and back in England over Christmas, she collapsed and underwent major surgery at St George’s hospital, which was then at Hyde Park Corner, central London, “having my fertility confiscated and my insides rearranged”, as she described it.
But it was recovering from the operation that cemented her determination to write. Unable to find a publisher for A Place of Greater Safety – it was not a great time to be trying to publish historical fiction – she shrewdly changed tack, forming what she called “a cunning plan”, and started on a contemporary novel, Every Day Is Mother’s Day, which was immediately snapped up in 1985, followed a year later by a sequel, Vacant Possession.
While her literary career was finally taking off, her marriage was foundering, and a year after her operation she and Gerald divorced, with Mantel returning to Britain. Gerald also came home, and barely two years later they remarried so that he could take up a job in Saudi Arabia. They moved to Jeddah in 1982, and this provided the inspiration for her fourth novel, Eight Months on Ghazzah Street (1988). A Place of Greater Safety was published four years later.
After returning to Britain, for many years she was a lead book reviewer for the Guardian, as well as film critic for the Spectator. Although sitting on various committees – the Royal Society of Literature, the Society of Authors and the Advisory Committee for Public Lending Right – and teaching, she never saw herself as part of any literary set, and was always slightly apart from her famous contemporaries such as Martin Amis, Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie. The publication of The Giant, O’Brien in 1998 and Beyond Black in 2005 saw her begin to break out of being “a literary novelist” – at least in terms of sales.
And then came Cromwell. It was no small irony that after years of not being able to publish her first historical novel, she found fame with a book set during the reign of Henry VIII. “It was as if after swimming and swimming you’ve suddenly found your feet are on ground that’s firm,” she said. “I knew from the first paragraph that this was going to be the best thing I’d ever done.”
The debilitating pain and periods of ill health of her early years never left her. And in 2010, shortly after winning the Booker prize for the first time, she was back in hospital for yet more operations, a period she chronicled in a diary for the London Review of Books. “Illness strips you back to an authentic self, but not one you need to meet. Too much is claimed for authenticity. Painfully we learn to live in the world, and to be false,” she wrote.
After the success of Wolf Hall, she and Gerald moved to the Devon seaside town of Budleigh Salterton, which she had visited when she was 16 and where she had promised herself she would one day live. Gerald became her manager and was always her first reader. Never afraid of long hours, she liked to write first thing in the morning, and when she was deeply immersed in a novel she often would write in bursts during the night. She still had many notebooks full of ideas and projects she wanted to begin.
In 2013 she caused a minor outcry in a speech at the British Museum in which she described Catherine Middleton as a personality-free “shop window mannequin”, drawn from her fascination with public perceptions of the female body, and she wrote a powerful essay for the Guardian to mark the 20th anniversary of the death of Princess Diana. She was made a dame in 2014.
As her agent of nearly 40 years, Bill Hamilton, said: “You always have to remember how much her background and ferocious intelligence made her an outsider, and how her chronic ill health made her a stranger even to her own body. In her writing she had to invent everything from scratch. She wrote eloquently about how hard it was to know what each new sentence had to contain, and what surprises lay just round the corner, like the presences that populate her books: ghosts, and the ghosts of what the future might hold.”
Mantel did much to encourage other writers, and was generous with her time for anyone she met professionally. Equally, Hamilton said: “When success arrived she enjoyed it gleefully, as she knew it was so hard-earned.”
Gerald survives her.
🔔 Hilary Mary Mantel, author, born 6 July 1952; died 22 September 2022
Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at http://justforbooks.tumblr.com
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Oooooh, that spotify wrapped thingy sounds like fun. How about 27 for it? -A
Dead Man Walking by City Wolf! A lovely, upbeat song! You all can thank a dear friend of mine for encouraging me to finish this instead of catching a quick nap before my research proposal is due. (/lh)
Warnings for minor character death. (Not any of the egos.)
--
He eyes the darkened windows with nothing short of scorn. Even from this distance, he can already smell the stench of the perfume that nobles seem to drown themselves in. Ostentatious, and fucking unnecessary, because it never seems to hide the rancid fear that lingers around them whenever they have to deign to contract with him.
Or his brothers, more rarely, but these days, it's well known that he takes to the coasts; if they don't have to cross paths, they won't, and so he's mostly left to take on the lion's share of the work that only a Cat or a Viper would dare to get their hands dirty with.
Not that it's stopped some of the Wolves. He's heard tell of a Witcher taking out one of the Cat bastards, though hadn't cared to look much further than that. Still: if even the Wolves are dropping their code, who knew what times they were coming to?
Anti looses a knife in its sheathe; checks that he's a Blizzard to fall back on, and circles around to the window he knows opens into the empty sitting room- conveniently connected to the chambers connected to the Duke's.
The wall is almost laughably easy to scale. He wouldn't put up a first year trainee on the gods-forsaken thing, overgrown with ivy clearly meant to be tasteful yet coming across more as unkempt. The window opens easily under his knife's careful encouragement, and he pauses, listening; there's not a single heartbeat in the room inside, and he lets himself through.
This late, nobody is fool enough to slip out of bed and crack their head open in the darkened halls. The thick carpets muffle his already-silent footfalls, and in general, he's left alone, not even having to still himself to slip into the breathless sort of silence that only a Witcher can seem to achieve.
His medallion pulses, faintly, against his chest; with each step closer to the Duke's chambers, it builds, buzzing insistently.
...Wards? There hadn't been wards the last time he'd come through under the name of some fucking Keracki noble who was about to be implicated in quite the godsdamned mess.
No, not wards. There's another heartbeat, beating a slow counterpoint to the rabbit-quick pulse of who he presumes is he Duke.
He forces himself to take a breath before he does something stupid like walk into what couldn't be anything else other than a set-up. Pauses. Takes in another slow breath of air, sifting through the scents hanging thicker than Velen's stench.
Lust hangs, thick as it ever is in a whorehouse, and underneath it, the familiar spice of cinnamon and mint.
He is going to kill that fucking mage.
The door opens without a single squeal, and he closes it just as silently, not taking his eyes off of the two figures who've frozen with his entrance. Well, one.
Marvin doesn't so much freeze as he does lounge, half draped over the ruddy-faced Duke. Anti doesn't spare him a second look, instead raising an eyebrow at the Duke.
"Scream," he murmurs, deadly soft, "and I will kill you where you lay. If you're quiet, I might let you live."
"You could say hello," points out Marvin, and Anti clears his throat, pointedly. There's a knife in his hand, and he hefts it, knowing full well that the Duke knows that he could bury it in his throat at several yard's pace, nothing to say of the length of a room.
"I don't say anything to contract-stealing whores," he says, at length, and Marvin makes a sound not unlike a cat being stepped on. It's an incongruous sound to his elegant appearance; lips painted a very rich shade of plum, and silken robe clinging to his slender frame.
There's purple paint up and down the Duke's neck, and chest. Marvin has a hand in his hair. It's not hard to guess what the hell he's doing there.
"That'd make you the contract-stealer," Marvin muses, still scratching his fingers against the Duke's scalp. "Maybe I should be the one to scream."
"If you scream," Anti says flatly, "I will send Jameson's caravan the location of your fucking workshop."
Marvin gasps, almost too affronted, but the way he sits upright is nothing short of gleeful. "You wouldn't."
"They will raid it," Anti promises, and allows himself a small, sharp smirk at the familiar banter. Underneath the frankly overwhelming stench of lust, he can begin to smell a thread of fear, sharp and electric, and it only makes him hum, cutting a sideways look to the Duke.
The man is eyeing them, horror evident in his expression, and is beginning to push himself away from Marvin, hands made shaky by the adrenaline that Anti can bet is hammering through his blood right about now.
Good.
Nobles could stand to feel a little fear, even if it's the last thing they felt.
"You're in league," the man says, faintly, and Anti raises an eyebrow, almost bored. Marvin only sighs, regretfully, as the Duke draws breath; in the next heartbeat, he's plunged a thin, gold hairpin into the man's neck.
For a moment, they stand- or in Marvin's case, lounge- in silence as the man chokes himself to death on his own blood, and then Anti clicks his tongue at Marvin, stepping around the mess carefully.
"Gonna get yourself run out of town like this, kitty-cat."
Marvin waves a hand dismissively. "As far as they know, I'm a visiting Keracki noble. Nothing to track back to me; the stiletto is hardly mine. Do you think I'm a novice?"
"Could've fooled me," Anti drawls. He crouches; the Duke's hand is splayed out, still pliant. It's child's play to sever the finger with the signet ring, and to tuck it away into a pouch. "Ban Ard send you?"
"I'd have to kill you if I told you, darling," Marvin murmurs; he flicks his hand, the blood on his robes whisked away like they'd never been soiled. He plays the part of a spoiled bratling well; well enough that some part of it has to be true. Anti's still well familiar with the venom that velvet voice hides. "Someone certainly wanted this quaint little town to cannibalize itself."
"Quaint, he says," Anti mutters under his breath, and stands, knife still in hand, warily watching Marvin. "If you knock me out like last time-"
Marvin waves a hand airily, but the way he watches Anti, eyes hooded, is anything but sweet. There's the faintest glint of canines, bone-white against his lips. "You'd be expecting it, and where's the fun? No, I had an offer. I can make the reward worth your time."
Anti pretends to consider this, tapping his fingers against a bedpost, leaving behind a sticky trail of red. It matches the mahogany, if he's honest.
"Worth my time," he echoes, running his tongue over his own teeth and watching Marvin track his movement. "Counter-offer. Make it worth my time, and I won't knife you for the balls to try and steal my contract."
Marvin's lips curl into a satisfied smile; he wraps a hand around Anti's wrist, and tugs the Viper in after him, drawing the curtains around him. A mage's strength is nothing compared to a Witcher's, but--
Anti--
He lets him. It's nothing more than business, he thinks, the only two parties able to stand each other servicing each other in the way a whorehouse would force them to pay out the nose for.
(It's also only business, he thinks, when he listens to Marvin's breaths even out in sleep.
Only business, he thinks, when he stands, quietly, pulling his armor back on- takes the proof of contract with him, as well as Marvin's coin-purse, and that one very expensive ruby ring he'd left on the nightstand.)
(Jameson is going to have a fit of laughter when he finds out.)
(They can never tell Brody.)
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+++
Moodboard: Honey cakes and bloody satin
(+ a little wip introduction)
Genres
Steampunk Fantasy, (Cozy?) Mystery, Romance
Characters
The main characters & narrators:
Rill (or Amaryllis), mechanic at a factory by day, involved in an illegal radical newspaper by night. Grew up and escaped an anti-progress-and-technology cult to follow her passion for mechanics. Got herself involved with a bit of a bad crowd and eventually got left out in the cold. Now a lone wolf and a bit of a cynical bitch (she likes to think).
Esther, an eccentric seamstress involved in the golems' rights movement. Came to the city as a girl, to support her impoverished family in the country. Used to work in a sweatshop but got fished out of it by the old lady she now works for. Has managed to hold onto some of her (possibly) naive idealism. Raising a golem child with her best friend.
Plot
Esther is working a side gig altering costumes for a small music hall. Rill's newspaper hides its printing press in the music hall's cellar. When a new actor dies during dress rehearsals under suspicious circumstances both of them desperately want to avoid the attention of the watch - to protect their own secrets and the music hall, which is already known as a meeting place for radicals. They not only need to make the corpse disappear without raising suspicion and figure out how/why he died, but also find his accomplices before more dangerous things start to happen.
Setting
Ersholn, formerly and in some places still called An Hol. A big harbor city on the northern continent, known for its fierce leviathan hunters. Built on and around the centuries old remains of a dead leviathan, though many have forgotten that fact. Currently involved in an industrial revolution surrounding fuel made out of leviathan blood.
For a few decades creatures dubbed 'golems' have been emerging from the depth of the city and been slowly integrating into society. They are often treated poorly and their personhood and even status as living beings are up for debate as far as officials are concerned. In scientific circles it is speculated that they are fueled by a substance called 'living metal'. It can be extracted from old mines leading deep into the leviathan's corpse, and is potentially extremely valuable. A golems' rights movement, in some quarters joining up with the workers' rights movement, threatens the status quo.
All in all, a political powder keg with weird steampunk vibes, people from all over the continent and a growing class divide.
#my writing#wip: honey cakes and bloody satin#wip intro#mood board#oc: rill#oc: esther#setting: ersholn#leviathan world
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