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Hey, do you know that feeling of hitching up a long skirt so you don’t fall on your face when walking upstairs, and then you immediately become a wretched yet resolute Jane Austen character? It’s a universal thing, right?

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[showing you pictures on my phone] so that's me in the corner haha. oh yeah and that's me in the spotlight losing my religion

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A selection of early 80's The Price Is Right "contestants not appearing on our show" parting gifts

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friendly reminder that Denethor, son of Ecthelion, Steward of Gondor, was driven to madness and despair because he spent too much time doomscrolling

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Happy birthday to My Melody!

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First off, spin this wheel.

You just landed on one of 200 fandoms that have been very popular somewhere on Tumblr over the years. Topics were chosen either from appearing on a @fandom end-of-year recap or from my own long (long, long) site memories before that.

also all of these fandoms are definitely things that really exist in the real world and none of them are Tumblr creations

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The X Files S01E01 - Pilot

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things fall apart the center cannot hold and me i feel also not so good

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ok no actually I do want to know your car's name if it has a name, and why. bikes and other vehicles also welcome! I had a bike named Mel after Mel Bush from Doctor Who, because it was red. I fell off and regenerated broke my arm

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Prom, 1987

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Wild roses

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The Star-Journal, Warrensburg, Missouri, December 30, 1924

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Homecoming

[the completion of my previously unfinished @inklings-challenge story | crossposted to AO3]

The third-class carriage was crowded, and Adrian a’Loretia sat less than comfortably beside a burly man chewing pepperleaf and a pair of chattering women. He at least had the place nearest the window, which let him forget his surroundings as best he could. Grey fields of stubble and groves of golden half-bare trees kept unwinding past him. Autumn was nearing its end, chill and damp, and his bad leg ached like a guilty conscience. Another glance at his watch showed that it was not quite three o’clock, with half an hour yet before they reached the station at Loretia. Only a moment, when compared to twenty years.

(He and his father were in the vestibule waiting to leave, waiting for the state police to arrive at the given time. There were voices outside; a heavy hand pounded on the door. “Let them in,” his father said.

Adrian opened the door, and they pushed into the house. Men in grey uniforms, men with ordinary faces that he might have passed by on the street. “Under the terms of the Appropriation Act,” the chief officer said, as if reciting a speech he had learned in school, “you are permitted to retain property the value of which is not more than sixty miré. We will perform an inspection to ensure compliance with such terms and escort you from these premises.”

The two of them watched while the officers began to search through the bags they had packed, unfolding shirts and riffling the pages of books. Adrian’s father stood tall and straight, unchangeably still the Prince a’Loretia. One of the men caught sight of the gold ring on his hand. “That ring. What’s it worth?” he demanded.

“It was a gift from my wife. It does not exceed the limit.”

“Surrender it,” the chief officer ordered, before the man who had spoken could reply.

The prince slowly took the ring from his finger and held it out on his palm.)

A sudden change of light brought Adrian out of memory. The train was passing through a tunnel in the side of a hill, and the window had become a dim mirror where his own pale face gazed back at him. It could no longer be called the face of a young man, with the first hints of grey in the dark hair, the fine lines drawn under the eyes. The years had run away from him into emptiness. His father had hoped that he would enter a profession; he had gone through a succession of petty clerkships. His father had hoped that he would marry and produce an heir; even if he’d felt any desire for marriage, he had nothing to give to a wife. He was the twelfth Prince a’Loretia, and he would be the last.

The outskirts of the town were coming into view, fields and woods stretched out beyond the tiled roofs. The train began to slow and stopped with a loud sigh of brakes. The carriage filled with a confusion of people balancing valises and bundles, shepherding children, jostling toward the doors. He waited until the crowd had thinned to take his bag and follow them onto the platform; the two women got off in front of him, still continuously talking. To be out of doors was a relief after two hours of stale air and the pungent smell of pepperleaf, and he breathed in deeply. Leafmould, woodsmoke, the last hay of the season.

He went to the window and found a bored-looking girl there. “A ticket to Seressa, please.” Saying even those few words, Adrian realized that he did not know how long it was since he’d spoken Atrurian, and it was strange to hear his own voice.

“One to Seressa,” the girl repeated. “That’s one and forty.” She watched him count out the coins. “You sound Loretian the way you talk, but you don’t look it,” she said idly.

“I’ve been abroad.” He took the ticket and thanked her, grateful that she didn’t care to ask where he’d been or why.

Adrian paced along the platform. It was nearly an hour until the next train, and the thought of spending so long in the cramped waiting room made him restless. Without knowing where he meant to go, he stepped down to follow the road that led eastward from the station into town. It was unpaved as he remembered, a stony dirt track. The last time he’d traveled that road, it had been in the opposite direction, sitting beside his father in the hired carriage while the police drove behind, on the way to board the train that would take the two of them over the border to Karlrecht. The trees along the roadside grew closer as he went farther, and the smell of damp earth and leaves grew stronger. A little fox, its coat turned grey for winter, ran across into a thicket, and the sight of it was like meeting an old friend. Adrian could almost imagine that he had never left Loretia, that he still belonged to the land.

Not far ahead, a narrower path ran away from the road, turning north. Adrian hesitated. His bag felt heavier, and the ache in his leg gripped tighter. It might as well have been a warning to turn back. Instead, he left the road and walked on half blindly, not allowing himself time to reconsider. The path was well kept, clear of brush and fallen branches. He began to recognize particular trees: the thick-trunked oak with squirrels’ nests in its boughs, the chestnuts that he would plunder in autumn. Around a last bend in the path, the trees gave way to open country. He stopped under the eaves of the wood.

The path became a drive that curved into a broad space of gravel, where a large black auto was parked. Behind, there was the house. The pale yellow stone of the walls was more weatherworn, the vines that climbed it were thicker, and yet it was the same house that he had returned to, night after night, in countless dreams. The garden spread around it, now faded and dormant with oncoming winter. Adrian wondered briefly if they had left his mother’s grave there, or if she had been displaced, buried like his father in a paupers’ field. Beyond the garden were the orchards, and farther off the farmland that had once been part of the estate, before it was sold away to pay the eighth prince’s debts.

(The two of them were walking together through the pear trees. A warm autumn sun, dappled with leaf-shadows, played across the prince’s stern face and softened it. “Three hundred years,” he said out of silence, thinking aloud. “Three hundred years. Long enough, in the end. All things pass.” He paused then and seemed to remember Adrian. “And that’s no comfort to a young man losing his birthright.”

Adrian had not heard his father speak that way before. “But I understand,” he faltered, unsure of what to say. “I’ll do what I must.”

His father looked at him for a long moment. “Yes,” he said quietly, “you will.”)

He stood still, half in the present and half in memory. His mind was becoming strangely clear. There was only a great calm, as if he had moved through pain and found release. He had seen it again, and now he could leave it. He could give what had been taken, and with that thought he was no longer a man in a worn overcoat, tired and homeless, but a prince, who could be generous. He had come into his inheritance. Adrian, twelfth in succession, by the grace of God and grant of the king the Prince a’Loretia, turned from surveying his lands, and the leaves rustled about him as he walked away.

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Wishing you all the best in 2025!