darklina-week

[darklina-week]

Darklina Week Day 1 - Children and Childhood

Happy Darklina Week 2023 (@darklina-week!) (And happiest of birthdays to our favorite silly old man!)

You can read this piece on Twitter too!

When the palace announces that the tsaritsa is expecting a child, the people celebrate. After all, their beloved Santka Alina is the one who finally destroyed the Shadow Fold separating their country, while the Black Tsar wielded the remains of it against their enemies in Fjerda and Shu Han, who now fear Ravka even more than they did before. Any child born of their union will surely be blessed with the same strength of its parents, or perhaps an even greater power that Ravka has yet to see.

The Grisha are more nervous about the news, as Grisha women have a notoriously difficult time with their pregnancies. And this is no ordinary Grisha couple, and this will be no ordinary child. If something were to happen to the Sun Summoner, or the child, who knows what the Black Tsar would unleash upon the world in his grief?

But no one is more nervous than the tsar himself—as soon as the tsaritsa told him, in the privacy of the royal chambers one sunny morning, that he would become a father, he sends out previously-drafted missives out to the far reaches of Ravka, recalling as many Healers and medical attendants as can be spared back to Os Alta for his queen. 

At that point, there was no keeping the secret from anyone. The maids whisper amongst each other that the tsaritsa has terrible morning sickness that often stretches into the afternoon, but the Healers examine her thoroughly and proclaim that she’s healthy. The morning illness will pass as her body adjusts to the presence of the child inside of her, and she is in fine health otherwise.

But it’s rare for Aleksander to have a new experience, after four hundred years; even rarer for the two of them to have a new experience together, so Alina will allow him his anxieties just this once.

“Please stop your pacing,” she says, though, one stormy night when Aleksander is close to wearing a hole in the floor of the royal bedchamber. She’s exhausted from the long day they’ve had, entertaining the Kerch trade representatives, and would like to sleep. “I’m healthy and the baby is growing as it should. You heard the Healers today! Everything is fine.”

“The Healers said you were too thin!”

“It’s because I spent the last month unable to keep food down,” Alina points out wearily. What a miserable time. It’s only been in the last week that her light meals have started staying in her stomach again, which remains mostly flat for the time being. Perfectly normal, the Healers had told her. Her bump would start showing after the first three months, a little bit at a time. “Other women give birth every day in this country without the army of Healers we have stationed in the palace. I’ll eat more often and in smaller portions, just like they told me to, and have them write me a nutrition plan, will that make you feel better?”

She doesn’t actually care that much about a nutrition plan, but at least it’ll give Aleksander something to do. As she hoped, he finally douses the candles and comes to bed, mumbling about how they should meet again with the Chief Healer in the morning, just in case. Alina shakes her head, but lets Aleksander curl up behind her, hands cradling her stomach to protect their child from whatever threats he imagines are out there.

At this rate, she doesn’t know how her immortal husband will make it through the remaining months of her pregnancy without his dark hair turning silver at the roots.

[darklina-week]

Day One: Children and Childhood

visit our ao3 collection

[darklina-week]

There are only THREE DAYS LEFT before Darklina Week 2023 starts! Are YOU ready?

If you are a fic writer who plans on participating on ao3, please don't forget to add your works into our collection! It is open for submissions now and will be revealed on 20 August. Just search for darklinaweek2023 in the Collections area when you are tagging your fic! You can also find it at this link.

We can't wait to see what you all have to share with us!

[darklina-week]

Hello friends! We’ve received a few questions about the nature of Darklina Week, so here are some answers we hope help. If there’s any confusion, you are always welcome to send us an ask or DM us on tumblr/twitter, and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.

I already have a fic in progress that fits with one of the themes for this year. Can I share it as part of the event?

We prefer that fics be previously unpublished works, if you’re tagging them for Darklina Week or adding them into our collection. The spirit of this celebration is to create new things to share with the world! We especially encourage you to finish up that draft you’ve had in the back of your head for the past six months that you haven’t looked at but really want to finish.

What do you mean by “ao3 collection”? How does that work when I am posting a fic?

There is a feature that allows users to create collections on AO3. We previously used a collection in 2022 to centralize all of the fics that people posted, so that way they would be in one place for everyone to see! We plan on creating another collection for 2023. In short, when you are ready to post a fic on AO3, you can choose to add it into our collection and it will be automatically added there, as well as posted into the main media tag, ship tag, etc. It’s just another way to filter for fics.

The fics added into the collection will not be “revealed” (i.e., available to read) until the collection itself is shared. You can read more about collections here from AO3.

The Darklina Week 2023 AO3 Collection will open up sometime in early August, and it will be revealed on 20 August, the first day of publishing. 

Do I have to post to AO3 if I’m writing a fic? What if I plan to post on AO3 and social media?

You are not required to post on AO3 at all. If you’d rather do a thread on twitter or post on tumblr, you’re welcome to do so. Lots of participants from last year crossposted on twitter and AO3! As long as you follow our guidelines on not jumping ahead days, you can consider this business as usual and go about posting the way you normally would! If you’d like us to reblog or retweet it to our accounts, please ping us @darklina-week​/tag #darklina week 2023 here on tumblr or @/darklina_week/tag #Darklina2023 on twitter so we can find it!

[darklina-week]

Hello and welcome back to Darklina Fanworks Week! As is tradition, this week is held 20 August - 27 August, starting and ending with Ben and Jessie's birthdays.

The details: each day has a theme, submitted and voted on by the Darklina community. If you miss a day, no worries! You can always share it later on. The only rule is don't jump ahead, i.e., don't post something themed for Day 3 on Day 1.

If you miss a day, no worries! You are also absolutely welcome to post something you made for Day 1 on Day 2, Day 3, or even Day 7! The collection will remain open for the duration of the week (and for a little bit of a grace period after ;D).

This year's themes are as follows:

Day 1 | 20 Aug: Children & Childhood

Day 2 | 21 Aug: Historical AU

Day 3 | 22 Aug: Fake Dating/Marriage of Convenience

Day 4 | 23 Aug: Modern Canon

Day 5 | 24 Aug: Free Day

Day 6 | 25 Aug: Time Travel

Day 7 | 26 Aug: Rom-com Inspired

Day 8 | 27 Aug: Grishaverse Culture

Posting begins on 20 August 2023. You can tag us here on Tumblr @/darklina-week or find us on Twitter @/darklina_week! We check #darklina week 2023, #darklina week, and #Darklina2023.

An ao3 collection will be open for submissions in early August. We can't wait to see what you'll create!