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#it actually made me like never enough
heartorbit · 2 months
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always by your side
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kyouka-supremacy · 3 months
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Okay about Beast sskk; because I realized I've got a very definite picture of what the Beast post-canon is like that is only in my mind and I never actually put down, so here we go. Very needed content warning of sickeningly fluff and Beast sskk being disgustingly in love with each other, I suppose.
After Dazai killed himself, Atsushi is reasonably tormented, and can't sleep at night. Roaming across Yokohama late at night, he always ends up at Akutagawa's– instinctively, unconsciously, to an extent even unwillingly. He doesn't choose to, it's more about countless nights unable to sleep spent wandering with no destination and still always finding himself in front of Akutagawa's place for some reason. Akutagawa somehow always knowing when it's going to happen so that he can face him before Atsushi has time to hesitate and run away. How they don't really need words or explanations most of the time, how for Atsushi knowing that there's another person who understands is enough, and everything he needs. How before Atsushi realizes it (and thus keeping him from trying and prevent it), Akutagawa's house has become the only place where he can fall asleep.
That's how they start living together before even being together. They might not even have an actual “getting together” moment, you know? The development of their relationship is so natural and spontaneous, it was meant to end that way from the beginning. Besides, Beast sskk don't really need words between them, so... I suppose an actual confession, albeit nice, would be almost superfluous.
Soon enough they move together to a small apartment near the ada (I'm assuming Atsushi has still enough money saved from his old job). Against popular belief, with time it kind of crystallized in me the idea that Atsushi wouldn't join the ada? His life to that point has constantly been doused by violence and pain and death, he deserves a long break to cope with all the trauma; throwing him right back to another environment where he's constantly pushed to fight and use his ability would not do any good to his mental health; especially when he's got such a conflictual and hating relationship with Byakko, even worse than it is in canon. I wasn't kidding about the house husband thing. Beast Atsushi stays home and chills down and is safe and away from all major sources of stress and triggering environments. Slowly, with time, he goes out more often, gradually relearns what normality is supposed to be like, and bit by bit all his traumatic experiences get more distant, and the nightmares more rare. Akutagawa follows up with his ada job– obviously! There's a whole deal in the end about how important it is for him to keep doing his job and trying to be good. I do believe the ada is the right place for Akutagawa. He returns home to Atsushi who always welcomes him with warmth and joy, and they cuddle a lot.
But I also believe that there would be times when Atsushi is required to go back to action and fight– he's not a member of the ada and he doesn't work for them, but it's obvious that when the ada is in danger and Yokohama is facing serious threats, the guild and the rats and ultimately the doa, the times will call for his intervention. He usually comes to help or rescue Akutagawa, a trump card of sorts. And it's endearing, how Akutagawa is always the one, even among the ada, most contrary on getting Atsushi involved, how he wants to protect him and keep him away, how more than anything he wants him to be safe. As for Atsushi, I really like the concept of this man who retired from action, that spends most of his time at home or chatting with the seniors in the neighborhood, who joins the fight only when the situation is most desperate and reveals himself to be the most powerful and destructive beast to have ever walked on earth. He reluctantly fights, and together with Akutagawa they end up saving the day for everyone, because as Dazai himself said nothing can stop the both of them together.
On the other hand, when the world isn't ending Atsushi solves that very specific role of crime drama protagonist's husband who's very supportive of their partner and listens to them ramble at home about their cases. He often offers useful insights on how criminal organizations work.
Atsushi didn't replace his collar after it broke. They're barely visible under his turtleneck, but he has now wrapped bandages in its place: to hide his scars, to keep the memory of Dazai with him everywhere he goes, to remember what he's lost but also what he's gained.
Ah, and when it comes to the fight against Fukuchi, Atsushi is the one to die for Akutagawa, of course.
Headcanons that directly contradict something stated above but that I still like:
Sskk get together after six months– it's got an ironic taste to it, the timestamp their canon counterparts set to kill each other now being the time they declared their love to each other. It's so soon, but also is it really? They immediately clicked the moment they met each other, and they were always destined to be. At that point, there's no one in the world they need more than they need each other.
In case of Atsushi still wearing the collar for some time after the canon events: sskk had their first kiss when Atsushi took the collar off for the first time. Ever since Dazai died, Atsushi is haunted and unstable; he's throughout scared of taking off the collar, terrified by the idea of hurting someone unintentionally, now that Dazai can't be there to controll him (both through his ability and by the general power he used to have over Atsushi's psyche). Akutagawa sees how much Atsushi is physically hurting, and insists on him taking the collar off; they fight over it for months (verbally, for the most part, except for a couple of times when the fights become physical– but without abilities), before Akutagawa finally manages to convince Atsushi to take it off for a few hours. When they're alone, because after months of being persuaded, Atsushi can trust Akutagawa to be able to defend himself; and also something about “you would never hurt me”. Thing is, when Atsushi finally takes it off, he quickly spirals into a HUGE panic attack, not able to trust himself not to harm the people he cares about; and the only person around is Akutagawa, and he cares about him deeply. The tiger is taking over, and Akutagawa is panicking, and he's desperately looking for a way to quickly ground Atsushi so he just. Kisses him. Which effectively works in the way it immediately distracts Atsushi, as well as causes him to zone out for several minutes. Akutagawa immediately apologizes, and then panics again when Atsushi doesn't answer for a while. It's kinda cute. After that, Atsushi gradually learns to take his collar off more and more often; this time, he can really trust that, if Akutagawa is with him, everything is going to be okay.
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iraprince · 1 month
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Hiii, i love your stuff and kinda from a distance really look up at you for, in my perception, being able to express yourself without giving a fuck. Thats sick dude, Im so so afraid, of absolutely everything, its nice to think like i might grow into someone less apologetic of my existence. Nice to see people just being yknow
hey, thank you, this is really really nice. the secret that is probably not a secret is that i am also deeply afraid a lot of the time lmao -- but less than i used to be, and in ways that feel less stifling and self-suffocating, if that makes sense.
like, it used to be "i'm scared that if i express myself the way i want to, everyone will find me obnoxious, so let's just sand those edges down to be safe" -- now my fears are more like "now that i'm expressing myself in a way that feels natural and real, i'm afraid that it's all stupid/vapid/not worthwhile or meaningful" (<- specifically abt my art) or "i'm happy that i talk and act the way i want to now, but what if it makes me impossible to befriend," etc etc etc. which still feels bad and puts me in a funk a lot of the time but at least it's a fear that comes After/in reaction to doing stuff, rather than a fear that STOPS me from doing stuff, you know? like, it's evolved into a kind of fear that's less in my way.
anyway. i believe you'll experience something like this, because wanting to grow is the first step of growing. the fact that u hope or wish for something different means you're already on your way. to fewer fucks!! or at least distributing the fucks u give in a way that serves u better
#stuff like accepting that i'm reserved and i'm not very accessible via messages.#or that my online tone isn't very bubbly and it's weird and uncomfortable to force it.#i stop letting fears about that shape my behavior ('i'll look mean or snotty so let's force markers of Friendliness to avoid that!!') -#- and instead act the way i want to and then trade it in for new fears that come After the action.#also a good reminder to give urself is that if ur fear is abt how other ppl perceive u (as 90% of mine is personally)#u really... can't actually control that. and being very very anxious abt it all the time is usually ur brain throwing a tantrum abt not--#--having that control. bc it is understandably very scary that u don't have that control#as much as it sucks + is terrifying the truth is the only thing u can do is ask urself 'am i behaving in a way that i'm proud of'#'am i behaving in a way that's in alignment w my values + what i think is important'#bc if the answer to that is yes and somebody hates u or is deeply offended by ur existence anyway. well. literally not ur problem#but obv being at peace w that is way way easier said than done + requires tons of practice and will take. probably. years. which is fine#i am stuck with myself. i can either contort myself forever trying to be someone everyone will like and find totally nonthreatening and-#inoffensive and in the process exhaust myself totally and never feel safe or natural myself. OR#i can say okay. so i am a kind of prickly guy with stern and drab speech patterns and close to no social energy. and i think i can still be#-sexy and fun this way. and it is up to other ppl to figure out if they can agree w me on that#ANYWAY enough rambling for now. just another one of those things i think abt a lot so i have a lot of ready-made sentences abt it in mind
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tianhai03 · 2 years
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guys wake up new C coloring pic just dropped <333 have some teefs i drew awhile ago that i probably never posted here
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lucy-lockwood · 11 months
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LOCKLYLE + "Don't blame me" by Taylor Swift (insp)
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carnivalcarrion · 5 months
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Bro I was reenacting the "Just So" clip while I was putting away the dishes and when Frank yelled at Barnaby I was gonna say "oi fuck you" y'know because I was being silly but what came out was an almost PERFECT imitation of Barnaby's voice- I couldn't even finish the "fuck you" because I broke down laughing
Btw the reason this is so funny is because I'm a 5'2" Latino AFAB with NO experience in voice acting whatsoever yet for some reason the spirit of Giant Blues Clues decided my vocal chords were the PERFECT place to set up real estate
Anyway peace and love
HAGHASBCAKJSCNAKLD I WHEEZED
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morgenstern16 · 6 months
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Man, I went into the Trails series with a WAY different idea of what they were like then what they actually were. Trails: "Welcome to Zemuria. Here, an industrial revolution based around the use of orbal energy is completely changing society. You can even use orbal energy to enhance your physical abilities via portable devices called orbments! They also allow you to use magical abilities called Arts." Me: "Oh, so this is how people are going to do crazy anime shit. Via fancy Arts and Orbments power. I can easily see how this system can be used for a clear and consistent power system, in an otherwise realistic and grounded setting." Trails: "Uhhhh" Me: "So this guy who uses the Shadow Clone no Jutsu is using a really fancy Art, right?" Trails: "No, he can just do that." Me: "Oh, o-okay" Trails: "One of your party members is a twelve-year-old girl with a gatling gun." Me: "What" Trails: "Your dad has a DBZ-esque power-up move and can go hand-to-hand with a giant robot. It's completely unrelated to any kind of Orbal enhancement." Me: "WHAT" Trails: "I haven't even mentioned the guy who's just The Joker With Superpowers yet"
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zukkaoru · 1 year
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[ID: three edits of Tsumiki Fushiguro and Kirara Hoshi from the Jujutsu Kaisen Manga. in the first, they are stand back to back with Kirara on the left and Tsumiki on the right. in the second, they both stand angled to the right with Kirara positioned slightly behind Tsumiki. in the third, they stand close beside each other with Tsumiki on the left and Kirara on the right. /End ID.]
i'm declaring myself captain of the ship
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willowser · 7 months
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I wrote this on my blog but I was wondering how you feel about it, Bakugo and on only child. Do you think it would be intentional or due to circumstance how would he respond to others saying something about it, what kind of things does he do with his kid ect. I want to write more about this but never really see anyone else talking about it. 🥺
hello dear !! you know — i have never really...pictured him as having more than one actually !! that's not to say that i couldn't imagine him having a few little kiddos, but, typically, when i imagine dad bakugou in my head, it's just with one 😌 i don't really have a reason for it, i think, but if i had to guess why i usually go with that thought is because i do see him as being a little older by the time he's having a baby bean, and i do typically headcanon him as — struggling with being a father LOL so in my head, maybe i just see him as feeling like one is enough for him !
as far as him being asked about it, hmm 🤔 tbh, i — feel like a lot of his friends would be unsure if he's going to have kids at all, so if he were to have one, i can't imagine anyone really saying anything about it ?? anyone that is close to him at least; being asked about it in, like, the media or by the public or whatever, i don't think he'd even give them an answer LOL but if he was asked about it by someone — like maybe his mother, or something — i think his answer would be very: *shrug* "'s'wrong with what i got?" LOL i genuinely think he could be totally content with just one, so he sees no reason to alter that reality for himself because — he's happy !!
and with him having just one, i think he'd do everything with them ! put them in all the sports and encourage them to try all the things ! i don't think he's the kind to spoil his kid too much but — i think he also grew up fairly well off, so they're doted on in a way that he's taking them on trips for the summer and no expenses are really being spared for the things he thinks they need, because that's just what he's used to ! what his parents did for him !
that's his little pal 🥺 his bud 🥺 and i always think of bakugou as the kind of person that feels lucky to have whatever he has when it comes to romance and love and you and family and friends, that he wouldn't think to ask for more 🥺
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finniestoncrane · 9 months
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said to my counsellor that i wasnt built for friendship because everyone always eventually just. stops speaking to me and she went “ok why do you think that is?” and then when i finished my dumb sad list she went “ok so maybe you aren’t good at friendship” and i. have never regretted spending £50 more in my life lol
#A RANT IN THE TAGS MY GOD I DIDNT EVEN REALISE I AM WRITING THIS WARNING RETROSPECTIVELY#£50 to feel like never trying to speak to anyone again or forge any connections THANKS RUTH#Ruth remember when I said that every friendship I’ve had I’ve never truly known if it’s a friendship or if it’s one sided#remember when I told you that my friend groups always had people who had a favourite and I was never the favourite#remember when I told you that several friend groups have disbanded but not really they actually just made new spaces without me?#remember that? remember my trauma? remember?#because I DO!!!#I was not born to have friends I don’t think#I can’t even make friends with other autistic people or other weird people or other queer people#I don’t even think I could make friends with a clone of myself#this is so guy wrenchingly isolating lol#like girl what do you want from me? keep everyone at arms length like I used to?#try not to let myself get attached to people in case they decide they don’t want to be close to me anymore?#please it is not great advice Ruth#THE WORAT PART is that I literally was like ‘I don’t message too much because I’m overbearing’#and she asked where the proof was#and all I had was the complete dissolving of any relationship where I tried or tried too hard#so now I’m left in this confusing space of do I message too much or not enough because I have no happy medium#and she knows SHE KNOWS I also have energy issues and executive dysfunction stuff going on#and I know she is just trying to help and get me to think about this stuff#but it was just not the time lmao#finnie shouts into the void
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skunkes · 6 months
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Your post about loving to study the beauty of the human body as well as wanting to love someone male while also be them is something I've been feeling for the past few years tbh but I've never heard someone put it in the exact words I use before. I think it's also because when it comes to topics like that I also feel embarrassed trying to explain a melded and complicated but beautiful emotion that doesn't have a word for it other than imagery in my mind
Sorry for the random soul post in your inbox but I get you! And that makes me happy
Also you're art is very cool and holds the very idea of human warmth and love within keep it up
responding to the compliment first, thank you!!!
as for the rest, yes! In the past I've definitely understood "love someone so much you want to crawl into them because hugging and physical intimacy isn't enough" as well as the usual "do i wanna fuck them or be them 🤪" sentiment floating around,
but it's not until very recently that I pieced together the, "well, what would I do if I literally got my hands on another [human being]. I'm not sure it would be enough to just Behold a [beautiful human being], I also want to be a beautiful [human being], but in the way this [person] is, which is. Unlike the way I am. Different from how I am. (In the many ways that can be interpreted)."
Which is adjacent to the "crawling into them", and adjacent to wishing I could be desired in the same way that I desire, and then directly connected to the way I am being genuine and casual when I say I love looking at and am in awe of the human form, but it's so very easy for that genuine love to slip into that intense and strange enthusiasm to map out, touch, explore, examine, open, crawl, meld, Be. Be!
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peachyymomo · 2 months
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[AI Hop has no intention of battling!]
. . .
[AI Hop has initiated a battle!]
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spaceratprodigy · 1 month
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🎉 [ Art from 2022-2023 ] 🎉
Happy Birthday to my most favorite person in the world, the love of my life 🖤
I still can't believe this'll make our 10th year of being best friends and even more I can't believe we get to celebrate our 8th anniversary this summer 💖💕
Commission Info | Ko-Fi | My Links
#I was gonna type out more but I decided I didn't want to be too sappy and emotional on main#so much has happened in these past 10 years#I can't believe I made it this far I really did not think I was going to have a future#but I did and I do#I have the most wonderful partner who I connect with in a way I never thought was possible#I am capable of being loved I am capable of loving in return#I learned how to love myself and be unapologetically myself for myself#I lost a lot of people and some very much for the better#I've become so so much happier my god I never thought I'd ever know what this felt like#I'm still angry and numb and having to battle depression but I've grown I've finally become someone worth being proud of#I'm no longer letting that anger and grief and everything that comes with it take over#I can't believe I've actually become gentler and kinder#I can't believe I've actually made genuine friends with people who are nice and caring and supportive#and are actually happy to see me and not trying to take advantage of me at every opportunity I'm finally seen as a person#I can't believe I'm finally in a safe environment I don't have to be terrified anymore I'm not going to be hurt anymore#I can't believe how far I've come creatively bc of how much bf has supported my every passion wholeheartedly#he is the reason I have a drawing tablet he is the one who encourages me and cheers on everything I do#god I still don't know how I could ever in my life thank you enough for every goddamn wonderful thing you do for me#you have changed everything for the better none of this would have ever happened if it wasn't for you#it's always been you#I fucking love you#more than anything in this universe and the next#forever and always#my art#glad I listened to my first tag lmao
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lagosbratzdoll · 19 days
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I feel like I've said this before but I am not a fan of Rhaegar but the way antis talk about him in this fandom is so frustrating. It makes it so difficult to have a nuanced discussion about the man and his failings.
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icarusrex · 4 months
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What Guards the Gates (1-6/?)
(Sorry if this is very annoying to everyone who was already reading, but I started posting this story in pieces, then got far enough ahead in edits that it feels more organized to keep everything that's fully-rendered in one place. I kept the "chapter" numbers intact, if you started reading before and want to ctrl+f for what's new.) If you're starting here: this is a slow-burn coldfic (you may not be able to tell the whole time) and kind of a prequel to a little scene I wrote a long time ago called All Teeth, whose characters started as an exercise in playing around with the archetypal D&D party makeup/class-types—like, what are the stereotypical traits of each archetype, how far can individual personalities/histories stretch away from classical depiction while still hitting all the tropes, what could the relationships between party-members look like in practice? So, this is meant to just show more of that/more of them. It was supposed to be a sneeze kink scene/exercise in self-indulgent whumpistry, but it got out of hand and now it's about a lot of things (including: still that).
Content Advisory: fantasy violence, POV character ruminating on alienation/xenophobia in several forms; illness, injury, sneezing, pining. ... | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10
🌕🌖🌗🌘🌑🌒🌓🌔🌕 1.
The first shockwave passed over Ivan like a rising tide. Cool and slick. He staggered against the Earth as it seemed to slip momentarily out of place, but quickly found his footing. The wave flowed through him, indifferently, en route to its actual target.
He was surprised to feel so little from it. Still, as someone who made a living out of always landing on his feet, stumbling remained one of the most disconcerting feelings he could imagine.
–which was perfect. As someone known, too, for being wholly insensitive to magic, if he could feel it, he hoped it would be enough.
A troop of living shadows turned their heads, one by one. Eyeless, faceless. Only the still-human stiffening of shoulders, the tangle of dozens of frantic limbs clamoring for weapons, signaled to Ivan that they were, in fact, seeing him–and seeing him as a threat. Some of the closest among them lifted silhouettes of broadswords, maces, polearms–their exact make and style eclipsed even as their bearers stepped into the shallow torchlight. Forms and shapes familiar enough, singing skyward into the ample headroom of hollow expanse, to inspire Ivan to run and keep running. 
The first encampment was behind him before the wave hit. He leapt over a second, felt the solid shock of stone all the way up his shins upon landing, his every step a fresh scoff from ancient inertia beating back against brittle bone. Some of these immaterial entities remained seated, turning their heads complacently as he passed before drifting right back to their fireside chat, as if he had sailed over their camp benignly as a flock of birds. Others shifted heavy iron pans over the fire, or stood in total stillness, foreheads pressed against the cavern walls, like Ivan and the other intruders were museum guests, unworthy of a single glance in the presence of this masterwork of blank stone. 
The rest scrambled to standing. And pursued him.
A second wave of energy rushed over him then. With it, the biting aroma of overgrown lichen and a rush of earthy humidity like the final sigh of an ancient, rotted-out tree collapsing, at last, in relief. He thought he could see the wave of earth magic this time as it rippled across the stone floor, over the shoulders of every sentient shadow, through his tender little heart, and onward–dipping into every fissure, rerouting the frigid draft that groaned up the hewn staircase from some even vaguer hell, grazing the greedy darkness of the looming vault, until it crashed against an invisible barrier at the far end of the cave, splashing high up the sides like troubled seafoam before dissipating into thin air.
He was still too far from it. A rune circle, gouged into the stone ahead like an angry wound. It pulsed an uneasy crimson in the low light that bent and breathed but never dimmed. Around its perimeter, long, tapered candles spilled wax upon the ragged earth. Even after the second spell struck the unseen wall they lined, they never toppled, never flickered.
At their center sat a man Ivan forced himself to sever all memory of in that moment. He had made it far enough in his mad dash across the cavern to snatch glimpses of man’s features illuminated by each inhale of the circle, but he pushed any thrill of recognition into the most blunted compartment of his brain. He did not know what would happen if he managed to close the gap between them and would not focus his eyes on the man again until or unless that moment arrived.
As he ran, a single hiss cut through the commotion behind him. Then another. Then more. Soon, a chorus filled the cavern with such rattling horror that Ivan risked a look over his shoulder as soon as he cleared the third cluster of guards. Standing at the full height and fury of an unmasked gorgon, Ansa drummed the earth with the butt of her staff, every serpent alive and spitting venom into the vague faces of the sentinels closing in on her. Without touching them, her assailants began to drop, dissolving instantly upon contact with the ground, falling soundless as the whisper of fine sand billowing little circles along the desert. Saplings and creeping vines sprung from each of their remains, tripping and ensnaring their fellows before they reached striking distance. Ansa had been Ivan’s newest acquaintance a few days ago. She was his only foolish hope now.
As this shield of organic matter grew denser, she reared back and threw her shoulder against nothing, as though trying to force entry through a locked door he could not see. A third shockwave coursed across the floor, leaving pale mushrooms and wisps of young ferns curling from every crack in the stone. It struck the barrier without a sound, but Ivan was close enough now to see the spell circle grey for a moment before gasping back to life. That was enough to keep running.
The precious seconds in which he could wear this calamity like a cloak had passed. The soldiers deeper into the cave may have been as surprised as their companions by an ambush this far underground, but, unlike them, had had ample time to orient themselves to the intrusion.
A soldier rushed Ivan straight-on and swung for his head with a heavy sword. Ivan ducked this easily, but failed to notice the subtler blade held low in their other hand. He snapped into a dodge that was more like whiplash, too late, and took a tertiary slash from the short blade across his thigh in the instant before plunging his own knife far deeper. He dragged the dagger upward through the attacker’s abdomen and was met with a puzzling resistance–gritty, identical to stabbing through a sack of animal feed. Like a prank. Sure enough, indistinct granules poured from the wound until the entire soldier gently dissolved like the last grains of sand slipping through an hourglass.
Ivan was bewildered; he had understood this as a side-effect of Ansa’s magic. Why the inanimate steel of his dagger yielded the same result as a druid in symbiosis with the destructive potential of nature was another question he would banish from his mind until an uncertain later. Now, he could only step over the mound of black sand that hunted him seconds ago. He was almost there, but clashing with one shadow had bought time for the nimblest among them to catch up with him from all directions.
Two assailants flanked him, wielding long spears. The dagger he flung with his dominant hand stuck first; he shielded his face with both forearms as the two of them crumbled into a curtain of silt. Suddenly, the brute impact of someone much heavier jumping on his back hit so hard it thumped aloud through the hollow of his chest. He halted immediately, trying to wield this entity’s inertia against itself, but the thick forearm clung tight around his neck, constricting. He feebly reached back and jabbed his knife deep into the attacker’s thigh, a vengeful echo of his own latest wound. The chokehold loosened momentarily, but not enough to slip from. 
Panic began to well.
Mere meters from the spell circle now, Ivan allowed himself to lock eyes with the man inside it. He saw a weariness and worry etched beneath them, and wanted nothing more than to uncurl his fist from the hilt of his dagger and dissolve into them infinitely. In that moment, as they truly saw each other for the first time after days inflamed with wondering, time suspended. If the faceless brawler choked him out, or held him steady for a savvier arrow to pierce any part of him, the sting of making it this far and no further would have been worth it. To see and be seen.
A heavy impact rocked the earth, pelting them both from behind with splinters of stone. The arm around Ivan’s neck released. His every blood cell animated with a rush of pounding fury, Ivan spun around and seized the dagger from his attacker’s leg. They both turned in time to see a gathering phalanx cleaved in half by one wild sweep of a bulky maul drawing a new horizon straight through them. With continuous momentum, its head gathered speed in a graceful arc, up, before driving down through the skull of Ivan’s attacker.
In the wake of the onslaught–the strange, dark sediment settling into the folds of their clothes–a young woman grinned up at Ivan, the tip of her tongue poking through two blunt, protruding fangs. She heaved her hammer from its crater with impossible ease and whipped back around, ruining another trio of attackers in a single rotation–just one twirl of a slick, dark ponytail and they were gone. The rubble rained thick around her. With each devastating blow, an eerie light gathered at the head of her hammer. It was subtle at first, but blazed brighter as each strike connected. Some of the shadows had begun to hesitate as the aura cocooned around her in a humanoid silhouette, twice her height, but aligned perfectly with her every gesture. She snarled aloud, plunging her hammer through the trunk of another soldier. A spectral trail chased the arc of motion, leaving a retinal afterimage that  burned like staring into the sun.
Meanwhile, the cadence of Ansa’s barrage had intensified, too.
The rune circle faltered visibly now. 
Ivan noticed, as he approached its border, 
the shadows stopped following him.
Some of the candles’ wicks had gone dark, delicate plumes of smoke wafting in perfect vertical. The runes themselves appeared blotchy, but still alive enough that he hesitated as the toe of his boot kissed their edge. Skepticism and survival instinct raged eternal within his very bloodstream. 
He stepped inside.
Awestruck by the absolute silence, 
again, he felt nothing. 
Nothing but the poison desperation of wanting to say everything to this person, to pluck him with his bare hands from this reality and drop them both gently into any other. Instead, Ivan fumbled hastily for a set of metal nails, varying in length and width, that hung concealed near his belt at all times. It felt comical, as he studied the simple bindings around the man’s wrists. Maybe crafting the first layer of containment had been so elaborate that his abductors rushed the second. Maybe they deemed it so impossible to bypass that even introducing handcuffs felt excessive. Ivan plucked a short, slender nail from his array and twisted it into the keyhole. Just one. He had been picking locks like this since he was a child. It seemed like a mistake.
The first pin plinked into place. He was negotiating with a second when the front wall of candles blasted apart. Some rolled away into the shadows, others collided with the cave walls and cracked into shards of brittle wax. For a moment, it seemed as though sound itself had been the blunt object to finally breach the altar; the cacophony of shouts and ringing steel burst painfully through the murky quiet inside. A spray of tiny fungi scampered along the circumference, where the candles had been. 
The circle was dark.
What remained of the guards watched. Then, awash with realization, sprinted for the expired circle in unison.
Drained of scoundrel’s arrogance, Ivan’s fingers worked frantically. Flashes like distant lightning lit the cavern walls as his companions attempted to beat them back, but the footfalls of soldiers pounded closer and closer, darkness piling up in his periphery. He clutched his own wrist, squeezing hard to stabilize the trembling in his dominant hand, willing it to outpace the soldiers and the stiffening chill of dripping stone bearing down from all directions.
Even now, he felt a sick satisfaction at the tweak and click of pins; a delicate maze he would never see, but could envision so vividly. As each piece sunk into its holster, he felt a little buzz of ecstasy. O, to die this way? Less satisfying than the last time he tried to settle with the thought.
Then: release. The click and crunch as he jerked the arm of the lock open, flung its components into the dirt. The brief bloom of body heat as their wrists grazed each others’ while he hastily unwound the cables and tossed them, too, into a coiled heap.
Amaranth did something strange. He raised both hands in front of his face, turning them over, and then back over again–with a heavy-lidded focus unbroken by the rallying screams or the rising tempo of bloodlust closing in–as if losing sight of his hands necessitated relearning their topography. As if he’d lost the anchor to this lucid dream. He flexed into a fist and then relaxed. Maybe it was nothing more than lost circulation; Ivan was not sure. Even with the horde upon them now, he felt the space to wonder return. The first groping hands tugged roughly at his limbs; he looked into their faces for something he wouldn't have sought any sooner, but found all emotion in their eyes still lost to the indelible umbra.
All of Amaranth’s rings were gone. Maybe that’s what it was about.
A sickening throb sucked the air pressure from the room, as if everything they had ever known was lost instantly, swallowed dry by one great gulp of the universe. In its place rose a hum so deep and dreadful it ached behind Ivan’s eyes, fell like night between his lungs. He clapped both hands over his ears to try to save them from the barometric crackle, but by then it was too late.
A heavy, violet stormcloud gathered overhead, eclipsing the vault in swelling violence. At the drone’s unbearable crest, it ruptured, destruction rolling like thunder to every corner of the room.
Then, a silence so swift and alien that it whined like tinnitus in the travelers’ ears.
The four of them stood in the ruins of the encampment, looking like children who just snapped out of a game of make-believe, called back to the world outside of the blackened sandbox in which they found themselves standing.
Dark shreds of smoldering ash drifted gently in the updraft.
Finally, Ivan looked at him again. Amaranth sighed into a rueful smile, his posture wilting, as if the return to being simply human were an inside joke between the two of them. The end of his exhale hung visible against the chill of the underground. Ivan approached, unbuckling the sheath at his waist, shedding every sharp object concealed on his body without slowing, treading on thick straps and his own weapons as they fell freely to the stone floor, struck with devotion and kaleidoscopic visions of everything he should do in that moment. Feeling, too, the eyes of his companions burning through his back, Ivan merely slipped his arms around Amaranth, and disappeared into a tight embrace.
Eventually, a voice behind him cut in. “So… are we gonna talk about it…?” she chirped tentatively. Muted, muffled, like she was standing at the edge of the ocean and calling down to the shipwreck of him.
Choking on all the emotion he had chased off during combat, Ivan tipped his forehead against Amaranth’s shoulder. Only this close could he feel Amaranth shivering, persistently. Shaken from his reverie, Ivan detached, and turned to face the others. He felt the knee below his wound threaten to buckle as he did. “No, we need to get out of here.”
Ansa hadn't spoken since strategizing with him in another chamber, an hour or a lifetime ago. At some point after the silt settled, she had replaced the wooden mask that concealed her face whenever she needed to move through civilian life. It was smooth, pale wood with narrow slits suggesting eyes. Pure utility but for the two short antlers curling from the top. Unreadable.
“I can’t take us to the surface now,” her voice was deep and measured, but some of her serpents flexed their jaws in obvious agitation. “We wait. Or we walk.”
It was clear that exhausting her reserve of magic was not an experience she’d repeated in recent memory.
Ivan glanced longingly at the ceiling, as if he could see straight through the layers and layers of elaborate tunnels to their destination. The dread that their mission was not yet successful, or even over, was crushing him as the last dregs of adrenaline drained from his system. Walking had taken days, the first time, and even that they’d cheated some of.
“I can.”
Met with dubious silence.
“I can take us to the surface,” Amaranth repeated, as though the added detail was the issue.
“... really?” Ivan had asked it delicately, trying to stamp out the seed of doubt before he did, but looking now at this man whose visage he’d tried hard to shake from his mind on many nights, he saw a looseness to his limbs that was never there before, like he was spending all his strength fighting the burden of gravity. How much was left for teleportation or confronting what would meet them on the other side of it, Ivan struggled to imagine, seeing the distance in his dark eyes.
“I miss the sun..." Amaranth murmured. "Maybe all of you can live without it for another day, but I am not as tough as you.” Irreverence creased the corners of his eyes, but there was such a mournful note of candor in his voice that, to him, maybe it was the truth.
Ansa watched him closely from behind her mask, saying nothing.
As the humid air grew thicker with the others’ doubts, Amaranth rounded an explanation. “There’s a conduit on the palace grounds.” Still, their skepticism hung heavy in the murky air. Heavy enough, in the end, to squeeze the confession from him. “--I can only take us there, right now." “But some of those guards definitely don’t know us,” truly on the come-down from the chaos preceding, Ivan was losing optimism and beginning to really feel the hot throb of the gash in his leg. “They’ll recognize YOU, but they’re gonna think we’re doing a coup or something if we just… step in. Don’t get me wrong–I like that better than finding out what’s between us and the door on a three-day nature hike, but what are we going to do if they all just attack? Jenny, you’ll do great–” he waved a hand at the young woman, deflating instantly when he noticed the concern in her eyes as they flicked back and forth to each speaker’s face. “–not a good look, wiping out the entire kingsguard, though. And, anyway, I can’t take another fight right now, if it comes to that.” Neither can you. Amaranth waited patiently for him to finish. “I wouldn’t drop you into danger like that, Ivan,” he said softly. “The port I know is hidden in the library. It will be far enough from–” he paused and glanced at Jenny, who had interrupted with a delighted stage-gasp that was not ending, only escalating.
“Oooh~” she jeered. “Maren’s going to be mad at you…”
“Yes," Amaranth’s voice lightened, bubbling with a barely-suppressed chuckle. “He is, most of the time.”
“He’s going to kick your ass one of these days. Like, you can tell he’s about to brawl out soon. Probably today!" She edited quickly, “Today’s the day; I can feel it.”
Amaranth cleared his throat behind the back of his hand. “You think he could?”
“OH yeah,” she waved her hand at him in a grand dismissive gesture. “They can call you the most powerful wizard in the world a million times, but he’s the one they should be worried about. He’s got that twink rage.”
Ivan recoiled, as mortified and intrigued as a parent hearing their child curse for the first time. “What do you know about twink rage..? No, no, NO. No. No--” As she opened her mouth, gleeful for the opportunity to forge on, he rebuffed, rhythmic as a hammer strike of his own, “No. Just do it. I’m not going to die hearing about this right now.” 🌕🌖🌗🌘🌑🌒🌓🌔🌕 2.
A burst of white light from the stained glass window startled the archivist so badly, his pen flew from his grasp and spattered a parabola of black spots from corner-to-corner of his manuscript. He leapt to his feet, unwinding a long string of wooden beads from his wrist with a grip that blanched every knuckle. “Maren. I need to ask you for a favor.”
He hadn’t the chance to even process the traveler’s entrance before the ask. The other three stepped through in a sequence of flashes. Familiarity set in; Maren’s eyebrows dropped in stony recognition.
“Well, two.”
Maren sat back down, slowly. Following the trail of ink, he leaned low, stretching an arm under the smooth, marble desk to retrieve his pen from the floor. He examined the metal nib for a moment before sullenly dropping it into a clear inkwell. Darkness billowed from the tip into little nebulas suspended in the liquid. He folded his hands rigidly on the desk. The two of them stared at each other, sharply, silently. Ivan felt the stubble that had regrown on the back of his head these past few days stand up, watching them.
“Go on.” Maren’s tone clipped curt, exasperated further by being pushed to prod, “What’s the first one?”
“A place to disappear perfectly...” Amaranth mused with a glancing grin. Despite a momentary hoarseness he couldn’t shake, his reply flowed like cool water over tumbled rocks. “A place to stay,” he clarified, clearing his throat behind the back of his hand. “For one night, two at most.”
A flurry of sparrows whirled past the vaulted windows–the only break in the pristine stream of sunlight pouring into the library. Their dappled shadows scattered along the floor like inkblots on a blank page. Then, only the stillness of white marble remained.
Ivan looked to his companions as if they were audience members at a melodrama. When he noticed neither Jenny nor Ansa reacting along with him to the scene unfolding, he schooled his expression back to stoic. By design, he could not see Ansa’s eyes, but the tension with which she watched Amaranth had only intensified since leaving the caves. Ivan realized his worry about this had a louder voice than Maren, who was halfway through answering by the time he realized he wasn't listening:
“–half an hour, maybe even less. How long doesn’t really matter; you just need to show, appease the royals, reassure the populace. You know your blessing would be meaningful to them–” the longer Maren’s list of justifications unfurled, the farther Amaranth tilted his head back, as if this suggestion were a strong gust of wind he was in danger of sailing out the door upon.
“Look–I could try to speak for you instead, but you’re not exactly in the king and queen’s best graces,” Maren leaned forward, his consonants staccato as if he were trying to stamp the final warning of many into stone. “Look repulsed about it, if you must, but I am confident this would invite you far enough back in to justify using their keep as an inn. And save my ass for enabling you to trespass. Without asking. Again.”
Amaranth smiled slyly. “You’ll make me homesick for being tortured by cultists." The room grew cold. The levity he had aimed for crystallized into an icy layer atop the most direct statement anyone had yet to make about the day.
Maren looked at him, then at each of their faces in turn. Studying them in the broadest daylight, as if he were seeing them for the first time. His expression softened, then folded into worry. His hands unclasped and slid from the desk.
“What happened?” 🌕🌖🌗🌘🌑🌒🌓🌔🌕 3.
One month ago, Maren’s name had been stricken from the contract that brought them underground.
Two years before that, Jenny and Ivan were alone. 
Trying to achieve some convalescence between picking up petty bounties, they wandered into an open-air market–one they’d visited a few times in recent weeks. Ordinarily, they found themselves squeezing past throngs of people, shouting over rugged street musicians just to point out which of the lurid fruits heaped in high-stacked crates they recognized, and speculate about what the others might look like on the inside.
Today, the square was quiet. A few townspeople mulled around uneasily; many of the merchants had abandoned their sales personae and circled around to the fronts of their booths, leaning on counters or crates in serious conversation with the sparse passersby, their backs turned symbolically to their wares.
The murmurs throughout the market all carried the same story: a school of promising mages had disappeared overnight. The building where they had studied still stood, proud and geometric atop the grassy hillside to the west of town, but the apprentices were gone, as were their mentors. There was no sign of violence, no message, no trace of them.
Ivan found himself folded into the market gossip with incredible speed; some of the attendees suggested an accident like this was an inevitability of collecting inexperienced magic users, young and old, in one single location. Most insisted the school was struck for what it taught. They talked animatedly about a mysterious anti-magic gang; in some versions, it was an organized crime family determined to neutralize any means their enemies might find to overtake them, starting with the cheapest hires. In others, they were religious zealots, brainwashed in seclusion to believe stripping the world of magic was the only path to a clean, idyllic existence. Still others described less of a gang, more of a pack–supernatural beasts, visible only sometimes, only in the corner of your eye, apathetic to the lives and goals of the mages and simply devouring.
Back on the road, out of polite earshot of the villagers, Ivan and Jenny scoffed hard at their small-town paranoia. 
Ivan understood what they were doing–desperately attempting to reconcile a senseless tragedy, fulfilling their human need to explain the inexplicable. He could sympathize, but had also watched legends about the mages’ disappearance balloon into absurdity overnight. Whatever had happened was strange and terrible, yes, but he wondered what rendered the townsfolk incapable of entertaining the more practical, mundane explanation some of their neighbors had offered: an accident. A meltdown of inexperience; the misstep of someone with no innate talent for it, trying to harness the most volatile forces on earth.
He’d seen this sort of thing happen in his own hometown, many times.
Small-town paranoia was a tale as old as time, he’d told himself. He would continue telling himself that until they heard the same story in the next town. And the one after that.
They hadn’t all been classrooms; they had been a deserted temple, the vandalized homes of local witches, fires burning in enchanted woods.
🌕🌖🌗🌘🌑🌒🌓🌔🌕 4.
“They separated us,” Jenny was the one to say it. “They came out of nowhere and pulled us through the walls. Not like a normal teleportation, either; it didn’t hurt, but it was like… if you can imagine being crushed by boulders in a way that doesn’t hurt, it was like that.”
Maren’s eyebrows peaked, “Who’s ‘they’?”
“Shadows?” she said, one short tusk curling from her lower lip disparagingly. Visibly dissatisfied with the poetry of this answer, she scanned the others’ faces for a better one. Finding none, she added, “that’s what they looked like, I mean. But we could hit them, and they could hit us. Ghosts, maybe?”
“They were not ghosts,” Ansa’s voice reverberated through her mask, low and steady. “Decay would not have touched them, if they were.”
“Yeah, that’s what I mean,” Jenny reached back and tapped the grip of her hammer with a forefinger. “My mum’s the only one I know who can hit a ghost with this, but I was hitting those things the whole time down there.”
“They felt like they were made of sand,” Ivan’s voice sounded reedy in his own ear, especially when he found eye contact with Maren, who was looking increasingly haunted himself. “When I stabbed them, Maren, it was like–”
“Oh yeah!” Jenny pointed vigorously at Ivan, “They crumbled!”
Amaranth coughed lightly behind his sleeve. Ivan’s eyes darted to him, then back to Maren, who was now looking everywhere else, as if an explanation might be hidden somewhere in the room–a cipher written along the spines of books.
“You think they were golems?” Maren tried. “You know, some kind of puppet?”
“Without a puppeteer…” Ivan smoothed both hands over his scalp, dejectedly. “If I could’ve found just one mage running the whole thing, it would’ve been a lot easier. Even a few–”  Ivan was too aware of Amaranth coughing, increasingly, in his periphery. Surreptitiously enough that it was unlikely anyone but him would notice, let alone fixate to the point of distraction. “–but there weren’t any. Unless they were great at hiding.”
“So… you entered the cave system together, you were attacked by these entities…” Maren began slowly, trying to stitch a sequence from their patchwork explanation, “...who made a point of splitting you up so that each of you would have to fight them alone…”
“No,” Ivan was still lost in the soothing rasp, stroking the surface of his own skull. “They split us up–” he gestured loosely to himself, Ansa, Jenny, “–and then disappeared, for all we knew.”
Maren’s gaze fell on Amaranth. “And... where were you in all this?”
Ivan didn’t know whether she was suddenly struck with an inverted protectiveness or simply swept away in the thrill of a dangerous mystery, or a bit of both, but Jenny jumped in, swift and frantic, “They put him in an anti-magic bubble. Way farther down.”
Ivan felt a wave of panic wash over him, hearing it. Even though he’d been there. Even though he’d gone in, knowing.
Silence.
The utter blankness of marble, without even the pity of migrating birds to break it.
“...what?” Maren whispered, nearly a hiss of absolute bewilderment.
“Yeah, it was horrible! We were down there looking for days, man! With us, it seemed like they just–” Jenny parted the air with her hands, “–wanted to get us out of the way. We only found them when we found him.”
“Amaranth!” Maren’s voice cut through the air like a flying dagger, severe enough to make everyone but the gorgon jump. Amaranth himself visibly flinched before his expression opened, benign and attentive. “They stripped you of your magic?! How?! For how long?”
Amaranth sighed. Ivan felt the weight of an intense sadness beneath the superficial fatigue of it. “I wish I knew. If Jenny says it was days, then it must have been days.”
Whether deliberate or not, Maren had pivoted away, closed himself off enough to examine Amaranth sidelong, “But you… feel alright now?”
“‘Alright’ is a strong word for how I feel,” Amaranth huffed a shallow laugh, “but, yes, everything that was taken from me was returned when the barrier broke. As far as I know.”
“Yeah, uh, we sent Ivan through BEFORE we finished breaking it because we figured, well–” Jenny offered up a flash of fangs, amusement overlapping the anxiety of what they had done.
Ivan raised both palms, surrendering to the same. “Yeah, I have no magic to lose, so if it had been permanent–” he faltered, not wishing to even give voice to who or what any of them would be if it had. “I mean, it still could’ve peeled all of my skin off the second I touched it, for all we knew, but that’s a sacrifice Jenny is willing to make, right?” “Yeah, if there’s one thing you need to know about me, it’s that I love killing Ivan. Any chance I get.”
Amaranth suppressed another coughing fit, almost. This time, under far more scrutiny, for however hard he had tried to halt the need where it began. He rallied from it with unexpected solemnity; Ivan and Jenny had come to rely on his willingness to stoke the fires of their flippancy. They felt marooned without it. “I understand why you shouldn’t take my word for it,” he ignored them and spoke directly to Maren, “but I am not cursed. I’ll sit quietly under any counterspell you’d like to run, if you can’t believe me.”
“You said it was cultists who did this?”
“I said that, but it was only a guess. It seemed aligned with their favorite pastimes.” Maren slammed open the cover of his notebook, snatching a fresh pen from the corner of his desk. “We have NEVER seen anything like this, do you understand? Not ‘we’ as in the people in this room—I mean in the entirety of recorded history,” at some point he had become flustered enough to stand. He hunched over his desk now, scribbling a flurry of notes on a new page. “Do you have any idea how dangerous this is, if cultists have found some recipe to neutralize any magic user in the world, for any length of time? If anyone has found a way to do that?”
“Of course I do.” Amaranth smiled serenely. “That’s why I came to you about it.” The page filled in a frenzy of ink, Maren tossed his pen aside and tore the paper from its binding with a flourish. He folded it once, twice, and again into a small, tight square. Then, he gripped the high back of his plush desk chair and flung it around to face outward, the empty cushion confronting the group of them. He looked expectantly at Amaranth, who only blinked curiously.
“Sit quietly,” a wry smile curled at the corners of Maren’s mouth for the first time that day. “As you said.”
Amaranth crossed the room and sunk into the seat, the very hem of his cloak curling gracefully upon the floor beneath as he did, marred though it was with black silt and loose threads springing from gashes in fabric that had been silken and whole when they’d left town. He dropped his hands into his lap and peered up at Maren, who stood over him looking oddly flushed.
Maren palmed the tightly-folded paper scrap, letting a few rows of beads fall slack around it before chattering tight against his hand. In a few long strides, he stood before a stained glass window–neighbor to the decoy the travelers had stepped through–tugging what looked to Ivan like a tiny, delicate magnifying glass from his breast pocket by a slender chain. None of them made a sound as they watched him angle it one way, then another, over his open palm, clearly seeking some perfect channel of psychedelic daylight pouring through the colored glass. It took a few minutes, but his fingers steadied, and Ivan could just barely see a sliver of light slowly singe a perfect circle into the center of the folded paper. The circle darkened slowly like a passing eclipse, until its edges curled away, leaving a little well in the middle where sunlight pooled viscous upon contact with his skin. He closed his hand around it and flicked the magnifier a few times in the air, as if extinguishing a stubborn match, before tucking it back into his pocket and sweeping back across the room.
Ivan felt an unanticipated pang of nostalgia. He was certain he was romanticizing it in hindsight, but the brief time they had spent as an intact team felt so much gentler than the present day.
Maren held his closed hand over the top of Amaranth’s head and tipped it deliberately, keeping his thumb and first two fingers tight while the others slowly unfurled. A trickle of white light seemed to drip from them. Ivan felt a fizz at the base of his skull as he watched, pleasant and languid like lying in the midsummer sun after a swim, feeling the droplets evaporate off his skin.
When Maren’s hand closed, the fine line of light cut. He stepped back and bent his knees slightly, hunched and scrutinizing something Ivan could not perceive. Whatever it was, he framed and re-framed it with his empty hand, as though trying to calculate, without tools, the exact point to strike a nail in order to hang a painting level.
“If you cough on me while I am doing this, I will kill you,” Maren mumbled this, but it multiplied preternaturally, as if hundreds of himself, from disparate planes of existence, tessellating immortal, slipped through the boundaries of time and space only to arrive perfectly united in both snideness and neuroses. As if no butterfly could flap its wings hard enough to change these aspects of his nature.
Amaranth smiled at this with a minute nod of recoil, as though he were expecting it, but not from this version of this man. “I’ve come to you as sterile as I ever could,” he said.
Ivan wondered for the rest of the spell what this meant, but a redness crept up from the collar of Maren’s shirt, climbing the sensitive skin from his neck to his earlobes, in a way that suggested he didn’t.
Whatever the thought was, he shed it quickly, finding the alignment he’d been reaching for with his free hand. He raised the other, extending the first two fingers until they were millimeters from Amaranth’s forehead, connecting another filament of white light to him. It flared overbright, rinsing the color from the room in a tight radius around them, bathing the others in a kind of soothing afterglow that felt like the first sincere relief after fighting, running, wondering for days.
The light dimmed and, gradually, the original colors of the space soaked back into it. Maren blinked rapidly a few times as he turned to the spectators, his eyes stark white and pupiless until the afterimage of it fully faded.
“It’s true,” he announced, “Nothing.” He paced back to his desk and unlocked the bottom drawer with a tiny key that dangled like a charm from his string of beads. He dropped the burnt paper into its recesses and relocked it. “No curse, no corruption. No one watching us through his eyes, no imposters, parasites. Nothing.”
Ivan felt himself sneak a glance at Ansa. She nodded incrementally; he hoped this meant she was satisfied. He hoped Maren was right about all of it, in a time when few of their hypotheses turned out to be.
“So. I’ll send word to the palace proper. Your rooms shouldn’t take long to prepare,” Maren tore another sheet from the same notebook and began writing, tamely this time. “Wait maybe ten minutes after I send this, then you can travel to the foyer using my conduit, to avoid the crowds–” He held the paper aloft. It fluttered from sight like a magician’s dove. “–not that you’ve waited for my permission before.”
“Crowds?” Ivan inquired. They’d spent enough time in this town before the ill-fated spelunk to know that it trended quiet this early in the afternoon. While it came alive on summer nights, lately a hush had descended over the nightlife in synchrony with the first falling leaves.
“You haven’t done your history homework?” Maren smiled with his eyes, no sardonic bite in the way he addressed Ivan. Still, the subject of uneducation tugged hard enough at Ivan's subconscious to bar him from admitting anything about how actively he hadn’t been listening earlier, or how much homework he may or may not have done in his life. “The end of the war coincided almost perfectly with the Harvest Moon Festival, so they’re sort of rolled into one holiday now. Though, most people skip the peace ceremony that kicks it off, unless they’re rich or blackmailed into attending by me, just now,” he laughed, airy and melodic. In the seconds since he’d named the moon festival, Jenny’s enthusiasm escalated from tugging at the hem of Ivan’s vest, to slapping his back and shoulder, alternately, as if beating a drum fanfare to accompany the announcement. Ivan swatted the air, trying to wave her off like an insect, eventually managing to evade her with an elbow and a sidestep. “So, the fun part doesn’t really start until sundown. Anyway, they’ve been setting up for the last few days; that’s the crowd I mean. I guess you have been out of town, so you wouldn’t have seen…” Maren’s demeanor had shifted entirely–whether effervescent from proximity to Jenny’s unchecked giddiness, or the palpable relief of confirming, with his own eyes, their safe and uncorrupted return. Ivan was struck in that moment by how lyrical his voice was when he allowed himself to relax–though that seemed like an unfair condition to place on it. Maybe he always sounded that way, and Ivan was only able to hear it now that the danger had lifted, and Maren’s absence from their party could be felt fondly. “As far as… the rest of this…” Maren pursed his lips, uncertainly. “I will look into it. That was the second favor, right?” he asked, rhetorically. “There is always the possibility this was a random event. I’ve heard all kinds of horror stories come out of those caves. I don’t want to get your hopes up, that it’s not about you, but there’s not much to be done about it until we know more. Certainly not in the state you’re in.” He shrugged, halfway. Defeated, but good-naturedly. “I won’t make myself hard to find, if you think of anything else, but until then? For gods’ sakes, feed yourselves. Relax. Have fun at the festival, if you’re feeling up to that sort of thing. You have a few nights–” he had already turned his back to them, stooping to pull the knob of a boundless-looking drawer of catalog cards. “Hell, just try to let yourselves enjoy something, alright? It sounds like that could be as important as any of this.”
Ivan was touched. When he first met Maren, it had been mere assignment. His first impression: absolute dread at the idea of needing to remain polite to the over-educated, under-humbled, second son of high-elf nobility, who earned nothing but had everything. Over time, he found Maren to be all of those things, but before any of it: a frustrated genius in his own right with a universal compassion for all living things that was certainly not part of his inheritance.
Of course there was a limit to how much work any of them could do, especially run ragged by the horrors of the past few days, but for someone so pathologically diligent to prescribe fun in the midst of trying to solve a potentially world-ending puzzle felt significant.
🌕🌖🌗🌘🌑🌒🌓🌔 5.
Ivan did not know what to do at this party.
He was accustomed to never being alone. Thrived, even, on the coursing energy of crowds, most of the time. Here, he felt a strangeness in his limbs, like there was a constant, indecipherable etiquette he broke every time he moved a muscle. There was a way the other guests looked him up and down from afar, then nearly fell over themselves in relief when someone unlike him pulled them in to talk.
He sat down on the ledge of an opulent indoor fountain. 
Ansa had returned to her sisters in the swamplands after debriefing in the library, more honest than himself about her disinterest in playing at diplomacy. There was a terseness to her nature that he both admired and found difficult to engage with, but the fact remained that escorting their party back to town had been well outside the bounds of her contract. She had chosen to stay with them until their safety was a certainty, unable or unwilling to allow the same thing that had happened to her home happen to theirs.
This wasn’t home to any of them, but still. The gesture was selfless, and Ivan appreciated it almost as deeply as he envied her capacity to fuck right off in the face of any pressure to make a good impression on the kinds of people who gathered to celebrate the six-year anniversary of the day they decided to stop killing each other, for now.
Jenny, he had turned loose on the festival grounds, not that he’d had much choice. He could feel two identical wooden tokens stamped with a row of royal seals burning a hole in his pocket—unique talismans, magically inert, but functioning as their tickets through the castle gates. Finding her, as the only one among them who had declined to rest in the hours before the festival began, was a task Ivan now had to fret about. He had yet to see another half-orc in Tetria to date, but found it effortless to imagine the average nightwatchman feigning ignorance in the face of her, should she return keyless and alone, no matter how clear a physical description he provided each and every one.
She was well beyond old enough to go out on her own now–however impervious his vision of her was to the passage of time–and, frankly, more of a danger to the world than it was to her, at least physically. Still, as he peered down through the bubbling depths at a blanket of coins lining the bottom of the pool—palace tourists’ every last sunken wish—Ivan wondered at what point in Jenny’s accidental wardhood he had developed this nigh-parental background-anxiety over not knowing exactly where she was, and through how many more stages of their respective lives it would carry.
Far above Ivan's head, tealights in glass orbs danced close to the high ceiling, bobbing like cheerful sprites over a midnight marsh. Behind him, a brass deer stood sentinel, clear water trickling gently from every tip of its antlers–an impossible array of a hundred prongs fanning high enough to pull some of the fairy lights into orbit.
Amaranth was here somewhere. As was always the case in settings like this, his attention was in high demand. Wondering who might have it now burned ulcerative in the deepest pit of Ivan’s stomach in a way he did not want to own or even name.
At the opposite end of the grand hall, over the guests’ own esteemed heads, loomed a map of the entire continent, embossed in metal and stone. In a playful way of co-signing the commitment to peace they were called to celebrate, the magic users in attendance had been casting little decorative charms over it all evening. One left periwinkle clouds swirling the peaks of the western mountains, another animated a flare of scarlet leaves perpetually falling from an ancient tree. Every so often, a herd of spectral antelope bounded across the equator of the entire world.
Ivan caught a glimpse of Amaranth then, speaking to the local prince. The prince was the easier one to spot; he stood out from the crowd for his stark white suit that arced in crisp, sharp angles–smooth but for the texture of pearl accents dotted like scales along his shoulders and collar. To Ivan’s eye, however, standing beside the sterile, constructed precision of the prince’s finery, Amaranth appeared all the more vibrant–swathed in robes of a deep violet and crimson, their visceral richness so dark, the colors and winding patterns of intricate flora could only be seen when he moved and light flowed over them in a certain direction. His hair fell loose in great, dark waves, leonine in effortless elegance. The ease with which he held himself rang like arrogance when the light hit it a certain way, too–to appear so empty of anxiety in the face of a person every generation before and including him had been raised from birth to revere. To speak to everyone so gently, so much of the time, but with a sly spark of recognition that never left his eyes–of the parts of them that were afraid. Ivan watched his lips move, syllables spilling out with inimitable ease. He wondered: if Amaranth was so eloquent when the two of them spoke, who was he in his mother tongue?
The prince clasped his hands together, to the extent that he was able without abandoning the long-stemmed crystal goblet now balanced expertly between manicured fingers–a tense gesture of gratitude. Amaranth waved this off with a rakish grin, before folding his arms inside the billow of his draping sleeves. The prince’s eyebrows knit, heartfelt; he reached forward and gripped Amaranth’s shoulder momentarily. The conversation punctuated, the prince peeled away, scanning the crowd for his next. He tipped his glass in acknowledgement when he spotted Ivan, and began strutting briskly in his direction–much to Ivan’s shock. He had forgotten for a moment that anyone could see him.
“There he is! The clever rogue who is going to save the kingdom, I know it!” The prince sauntered merrily towards the edge of the fountain. He had impeccable posture, Ivan noticed–the schooled, aligned skeleton of a young man who had been taught all his life to hold his bones a certain way, who may never know back pain, even when his youth leaves him. Briefly, Ivan caught Amaranth’s eye over the prince’s shoulder and felt the earth invert. “I’m so glad you decided to celebrate with us, Ivan,” the prince continued, his voice ringing out with the volume and clarity of an orator. Amaranth winked, before turning away to acknowledge a tap on his shoulder.
As the prince closed the gap between them, Ivan rose from his seat. The prince shook his head modestly at this gesture, but Ivan hadn’t stood out of respect so much as to preempt being quite literally looked down upon by a member of the royal family. The prince halted before him; still standing almost a full head taller, as many men did.
“You have a good memory!” Ivan found the most polite alternative to ‘you remembered my name, but I don’t remember yours’ or ‘I know your parents’ names because they’ve been paying me, but not quite enough to remember anything about you’.
The prince laughed, more heartily than the moment called for. “Ah, well. I have to be good at something for them to keep me around, right?”
Untrue.
Maren had sent a cleric’s apprentice to Ivan’s temporary room, after they’d parted. Perhaps as a side-effect of the rejuvenation spell, Ivan felt a worrying rush of vitality now that made him wish he’d hung onto that damage until his trip into high society was done.
“I was just talking to your sorcerer friend over there and, you know, we can’t all have your talent for adventure,” the prince raised his goblet to his lips. Ivan wondered what this man was trying to transact.
The prince punctuated his sip with a terse hum, like he had just remembered something. “How has that been going? Your investigation.”
Ivan hesitated for a moment before finding a diagonal truth, “We met with your royal archivist this afternoon, who agreed to help with some research. I don’t want to say too much about it, you understand…”
“Ah, I understand completely. It is wise to keep these things classified while they’re still under investigation, but tell me–” the prince leaned in close, lowering his voice, “–do you think this cult stuff is really catching on? In the sense of active recruitment?”
Ivan frowned. “I couldn’t tell you how many members there are now, but… yes, people are definitely still joining. How many, how often…? I dunno.”
The prince’s face fell. “I just don’t understand the angle. Who would want to live in a world without magic? Less convenient, less safe…”
“Apparently more people than you or I know…” Ivan mumbled, glancing up at the vast, teeming map of the continent again, wondering exactly how many of them walked it at this very moment. His eyes drifted compulsively to the familiar shape of his hometown, squashed and nondescript at the bottom of the map. The Midlands stretched so disproportionately wide that they might snap, all of their landmarks tagged and fully illustrated. Amaranth’s point of origin would have fallen somewhere behind a regal dais far to the right of the map, had they chosen to render the rest of the world. Ivan wondered what sorts of plants and animals he might have decorated it with during the event, if it had been on the map at all, and felt a penetrating heartache at the thought.
The prince followed Ivan’s line of sight. “May I ask you a question? If you’ll forgive my ignorance on this…”
Ivan said nothing and braced himself, rifling through a mental list of all the questions that could possibly chase that disclaimer.
“I have seen other people from the Southern Wilds wear those,” the prince gestured to his own earlobes. From Ivan’s, three polished fish hooks dangled: one sunk into the cartilage of his left ear, two in the right. He had been overjoyed that afternoon when pushing them through without resistance; in his line of work, opportunities to wear anything that could be pulled or snagged were few and far between. He thought the holes had closed up by now, for sure.
“I’ve always wondered if they mean something,” the prince finished.
Ivan felt an unjust sort of embarrassment, mulling over what level of detail this man deserved from him. It only took a split second to follow a dozen spiteful fantasies in which he asked the prince if his white suit meant anything, if his white teeth meant anything. If he erased his pores by choice or by cultural imperative.
“Uh, kind of. They do. I mean, a lot of things have changed over the years–” Ivan opened his mouth before deciding how much to say. Saved by another stroke of strange luck, he never had to.
As difficult to sneak up on as he was to unbalance, even Ivan’s reflexes were outpaced by the sudden surge of light and color, the swooping feeling as both energy and arms grasped him without warning around the waist.
Scraps of dark residue smoldered, lingering in the air above the spot where he just stood. Soon those, too, vanished as if they never were.
A few nearby guests felt their ears pop and turned, startled, in time to see the dumbstruck prince, clutching his goblet with stiff, bejeweled knuckles, staring blankly at the open air.
🌕🌖🌗🌘🌑🌒🌓🌔 6. Ivan found his footing, awash in a new coolness. He bumped an opulent-looking floor vase with his shin and dropped hastily to one knee just in time to steady it. Amaranth had pushed off from him the moment they rematerialized and staggered several paces into the gloom. His back was turned, but Ivan could see tension shudder up the length of it, dire enough to drive him to his feet. Amaranth continued walking away from him, drawing ragged, incomplete breaths.
“What’s wrong?” Ivan gave chase for about a half-step, then halted, lowering his hands.
“huh–ihhD’SCHHHiuh…!”
Amaranth sneezed heavily against his forearm, though just barely. Gripped immediately by it again, his posture inflated with a stilted gasp, then collapsed into a choiceless heave of shoulders.
“--nN’DSCHhiuhh…! uh–EHD'ISSHHHUH!”
Twice more with rising urgency. Amaranth ducked deeper into the crook of his arm each time, the last and most terrible sneeze nearly smothered in the bend of his elbow. Still, it escaped with enough violence for an echo to cling momentarily to this new, empty space. As it faded, he straightened up, and sniffled unevenly a few times but did not turn around.
It wasn’t satisfied and had not let him go, but released him from the brink for the moment.
Ivan had taken a step back, not for himself. Now, he felt himself reject a thrill of heat that struck like lightning against his better nature, leaning instead into the starkness of silence that followed. He looked around the room, if only to spare Amaranth the indignity of being scrutinized as he collected himself.
In the last gasp of daylight leaking in from just one small window at the far end of the room, Ivan noticed shadows pooling beneath the heavy brushstrokes of an expansive oil painting in front of Amaranth. A life-sized marble statue of a nymph grinned wickedly beside that, swathed on either side by crushed velvet curtains. Closer, the waist-high urn he’d nearly shattered was stamped with a winding story, unfolding in a spiral from base to lip. At the bottom, a little mythical hero ran. By the next rung up, his forehead was kissed by the moon goddess. The full height of the vase was all it took for him to acquire a divine glow, surrounded by genuflecting devotees and enthralled animals, following him from far and wide, all the way around the rim. Ivan wasn’t up to date on his global mythology, as Maren had correctly pointed out, but he knew this story was relevant to the celebration unfolding outside. What was it doing here, gathering dust and shadows?
Amaranth caught his composure with a rueful sigh and faced Ivan at last. 
“Forgive me, Ivan. I couldn’t hold myself together any longer—” with one hand, he swept the hair that had fallen loose over his eyes back into place. “—or live with myself if I left you alone down there.”
Ivan’s eyes had adjusted enough to the low light to see him clearly, but not to read him.
“If you were having a good time, I couldn’t tell, but we are only two floors directly up if you’d like to return,” he added. “Oh, you’re leaving?” Ivan huffed an incredulous laugh, shoulders sagging in fond relief. “You could’ve just told me that.”
Amaranth glanced at the ceiling, as though calculating the possibility. “I didn’t have much time to decide,” he admitted with a sheepishness so rare, Ivan felt it like a second lightning strike. “There are many people in that room who have waited a long time to catch me stumbling, or are comforted by nothing other than their belief that I never do…”
Ivan watched him, puzzled. Amaranth was beyond fluent in the common tongue–to a degree that embarrassed Ivan regularly, to be outpaced in his own first language–but sometimes his explanations came laced with a lyrical indirectness that not even crossing the sea dozens of times had washed out. Ivan, raised by sailors’ bluntness, felt as though he’d been asked to read tea leaves during such moments, and in the presence of one of the only people he’d ever truly longed to impress, felt stupid asking for clarity. Perhaps they had traveled together long enough now that Amaranth had learned to divine this from the look on Ivan’s face, because he added, unprompted: “I feel like I’m coming down with something terrible. I’d like to do it in private.” He smiled facetiously. “Maybe that is some great solipsism.”
“What? Are you sick?” What he’d witnessed spoke for itself, but somehow it was still hard to believe.
“I’d hoped not,” Amaranth sighed. “But I can’t hide it anymore. From them or from myself.”
“Well, I’m sure they’d understand if you just told them you weren’t up for entertaining tonight. I don’t think even the royals would kick us out for that.”
“It’s not that,” Amaranth’s expression darkened. “Someone wants something from me. This, we know.”
He was sidling up to the lingering dread that had stayed with Ivan long after their return to the surface. He had witnessed the ritual himself and Maren’s inner eye was keen and meticulous. Still, Amaranth was right. Someone had wanted something and let go of him a little too easily if they hadn’t gotten it.
“You think someone would try something if they knew you were…?” Feeling treacherous to his own nature, he couldn’t quite say it. In their time together, and in the tales he’d heard long before they met, Ivan had never once witnessed even a hairline crack in Amaranth’s composure. They’d fought alongside each other for the turn of two seasons now; rarely had he walked away with even superficial injuries, let alone fatigued. Never like this. Not once.
“Maybe,” Amaranth thumbed the side of his nose absently. Friction against transparent discomfort. “Either way, diplomats talk. I’d… rather they talk about something other than this.”
Ivan chewed the corner of his cuticle as an excuse to hide his mouth. He was too endeared not to smile at this version of Amaranth, who seemed to find the risk of his enemies taking advantage of his weakened state as threatening as suffering one second of gossip at his own expense. Luckily, Amaranth missed his reaction, having twisted fully away to cough sharply into the crook of his elbow.
Ivan’s eyebrows creased at the center. “Is this–? Whatever happened in the caves…” a few versions tumbled out of him before he distilled them into the purest and most agitated: “Are you okay?”
This earned a luminous chuckle from Amaranth, that cracked with the first static of congestion.
“Yes,” Amaranth cleared his throat behind a curled fist, wincing minutely as he did, “It’s sweet of you to say, but even I am not so dramatic to call this a curse. Just too much time in the dark and damp–” the last few words wavered and snagged on a shivering gasp, as if the mere mention of it forced him to feel it again. Hastily, he turned aside and pinched the bridge of his nose in time to suppress another volley of sneezes. He flinched once, twice, three times in succession. The ghost of a vocal moan slipped out on the heels of the deep exhale that followed. Annoyance, or the release of unspent pressure that wouldn’t have built had he permitted himself to sneeze fully. “I am a sunflower, after all,” he joked hazily from behind his hand. “I always find a way to take some part of it with me.” Finally trusting that it was over for another moment, he let his hand fall to his side and refocused to find Ivan’s sternness unmoved. He added, more soberly, “Send another cleric, if it helps. Just, please—not one longing for a life of politics.”
“I believe you,” Ivan said. Ultimately, he did, even though the small-town paranoia was getting harder to shake.
A stout, stringed instrument carved from a hearty gourd sat on a pedestal to Ivan’s right, near enough to his urn that he could’ve easily taken both out with that misstep. A creature’s horns formed the fretboard, delicate strings tautly framing either side of its face. It stuck a long, forked tongue out at him as he met its ruby eyes. “How did you know this room would be empty?”
“Just a guess,” Amaranth sniffled. “I’d guess most of these rooms are. Kings always keep beautiful objects in empty rooms for no one to see.” “You’re worried about what the people at that party will say if they so much as see you sneeze once,” Ivan plucked one whimsical note on the little monster, then silenced the string with his thumb, “but not about what you just did?” “No.” An impish grin flickered across his face. “Are you? It’s not as if they don’t talk about us anyway.”
Ivan discovered himself fiddling nervously with the leather joinings along his vest and plunged his hands into his pockets instead. “So, I really don’t want to go back down there—“ in pursuit of a reason to stay here instead, he felt the shape of two wooden tokens rattling between his fingers and launched into a string of curses so loud and sudden that Amaranth raised his eyebrows, startled and amused.
Ivan scrubbed his face with his palms so hard his features distorted momentarily into a mask of sheer melodrama. “I still have to go find your little sisterrrrr,” he groaned. She wasn’t that, but it had become a recurring joke for him to re-assign her kinship whenever she did something he didn’t like.
He marched all the way across the gallery to the little window and discovered he was peering down from a significant height at a lively pulse of bright colors: the rippling awnings of an alleyway of booths, the billow of slim flags thrust skyward, and throngs of people just as effervescent in dress and spirit.
Ivan yanked the curtain closed dourly. He was putting on a show, but it was a caricature of the truth. He spun to face Amaranth, whose features cut stark and somber against the only sliver of light now spilling in from the hallway behind him.
“Do you need anything before I go?” Ivan tried, tentatively.
Amaranth only smiled, sweet and utterly opaque. “You don’t need to worry about me, Ivan. You should let yourself have some fun, while you’re out there.” There was that wording again; a perfect echo of the way Maren had phrased it: “let yourself”, like he had been willfully denying himself something that both of them could see. Ivan lingered, staring into the faint glimmer of Amaranth’s eyes in the semidark for a moment before sighing, resigned, and brushing past him to the door. “Wouldn’t be the same...” he grumbled. He paused on the threshold. “I hope you feel better,” he said with as much tenderness as he could throw over his shoulder. “Please get some rest.”
🌕🌖🌗🌘🌑🌒🌓🌔
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#sorry to cut you off just as we get to the parts you actually came here for#the truth is: I needed to find a place to put a pin in it because I'm fiending out. I'm having too much fun.#the POV guy in this is more personal to me than probably anyone else in any fiction I've posted publicly kink or no kink#his hyperfixating tendencies are mine and while I have loved getting way too invested in this story#I have some bullshit I need to do instead of lore-building for a little while!! can you believe that?#I don't like it but that's the real reason I'm compiling#i know what's going to happen and i'm very excited about it but it's gonna be a minute#anyway i got really into this idea that all of the magic users in this world have a semi-unique fingerprint#like even when they do the same thing from a practical perspective it manifests completely differently in mood and appearance#i had so much fun with that shit. i fuck so hard with magic you guys :\ i don't know what to tell you#also the thing about favoring the “never gets sick” character is like... you only get one chance or the trope doesn't hold up right?#i know this is our world and we can bend the rules#but like i said felling the infallible is my no. 1 impulse in a kink context :\#whoever is the most overpowered character in any given universe#just absolutely terrifying in terms of power and/or talent but also flippant or playing around most of the time?#a laser beam shoots from my kink eye directly at that one#anyway enough. thanks for reading!!#we've made it far enough in that i'll actually tag#sneeze kink#sickfic#but not any of the others. we are taking things slow.#what guards the gates#spake:
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badolmen · 7 months
Text
I can fix him*
*bad writing, underutilized gameplay mechanics, characters with unfulfilled potential, funded by bootlickers
#ra speaks#personal#sorry I made dr phone calls and have like. ten minutes til I gotta get ready for first class of the semester. let me have this.#I think I should get every COD game ever for free. it’s MY tax dollars at work after all (actually anything produced w us military funding#should be free I think I can trap even my bootlicker tax hating dad into getting onboard w this one)#anyways. ghosts was…decent. but jfc if you give me a silent protag I expect SOME self awareness in the writing.#why are characters calling to him on comms when they know he won’t respond? why doesn’t he have an AAC device or something more futuristic?#I’m just saying if you explicitly limit a character you need to respect those limits in te writing. it’s not that hard.#like non of the characters even acknowledge that Logan never talks. esp weird when he first meets the ghosts#also. obv not a big fan of ‘all of South America has United into evil space terrorists’ but it was 2013 so ¯\ _(ツ)_/¯#wish we got to see some SDC civis y’know? get a bear on the average attitudes abt the whole. invading the US thing.#(jfc do not get me started on The Wall like this is a 2016 trump voter’s power fantasy)#also Riley was such an interesting mechanic why couldn’t they have at least substituted him w drones or something on the other missions??#you get him for like. two missions. and then he gets shot and you have to protect him (gosh I actually loved that section)#just. it was clear Logan was The Dog Guy with an aptitude for tech. honestly Hesh felt more like the MC than Logan.#and while Logan doesn’t have a ton of personality we can glean as a result of non speaking + ZERO communication at all ever#seriously he doesn’t even like. wave or give thumbs up to people wtf dude do ppl just assume he’s psychic or something???#I do LOVE the few scenes we get with him acting outside of player control/where he actually has agency (Elias’ death. the final cutscene)#and like it’s not much but it’s enough that I WANT to see what happens next#but alas. a decade old game without a true sequel (I think??? haven’t actually looked into it.)#my brother is making fun of me for being a COD gamer now like boy. I have no defense pls be nice to me T-T
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