#Iskari

[depraved-love]

Fandom list:

Anime:

Attack on Titan

Black Butler

Bungo Stray Dogs

Death Note

Demon Slayer

My Hero Academia

Naruto

Series:

Castlevania

Dungeon Meshi

Sherlock

The Witcher

Wakfu

Movies:

The Rise of the Guardians

Into the Spider-Verse

Across the Spider-Verse

Books:

Folk of the air

Iskari

Games:

The Arcana

Cookie Run

John Doe

Your Boyfriend

[felfiramoondesigns]

CLEARANCE PIN SET!

Get the Iskari and Namsara pair of pins for £2!!!

Check out the clearance section on my st0re for even more bargains!!

[hiddenschools]

The Iskari welcome our squiddy mosaic overlords

Goofy Mosaic Wet Creatures Id like to share with the class

[mapas-fantasticos]

Map of the Embellished world from the Iskari trilogy by Kristen Ciccareli (map by Elsa Kroese).

[runicknight]

Another smooch!

[running-with-the-feels]

I read your fic that talks about the cryomancer culture and I was so fascinated with them if you can I need to know more!!

ahhhh I'm so glad you liked it!!

So, my version of Cryomancer culture is still evolving, so stuff might change but basically

They called themselves Ischeti, which translates literally to Snow Singers, and they had their own realm called Iskari which translates to Sleeping Snow, or Snow's Sleep, which was a very hostile place for any who were not cryomancers. Music was deeply important to them and they prayed primarily through song.

Dragons, called Tika were native to the realm and formed close bonds with the Ischeti quite frequently, to the point that many Ischeti were dragon riders, which when coupled with their abilities, made them a formidable military force. To be called Tikavox, meaning Dragon Child, was a great honor bestowed only to those who had proven themselves resilient, formidable, and kind in great measure.

As Iskari had many natural resources that were desired by other realms, such as a metal that could nullify all forms of magic as well as make a cryomancer more powerful when properly forged by a priest, and gemstones that could store memories to be viewed at a later date, as well as plants with potent medicinal properties and so on, Edenia tried to engage in trade with Iskari

However, the metal was sacred as it was known as Dragon's blood, or Tikarezo, and could only be found in places where dragons were buried or had fallen, forming from their veins and hearts, and it was used in religious ceremonies. To give it to an outsider was unthinkable, though the Ischeti were willing to trade the gems. Unfortunately the gems were very rare and so they did not have as many to trade as Edenia wanted.

Eventually, under Queen Sindel's reign, Edenia tried to conquer Iskari without mortal kombat, seeking to occupy the realm rather than absorb it. But no matter how many soldiers Sindel devoted to the task, for every Ischeti they killed, ten more Edenians would die. This went on for a thousand years before the queen tired of it, declaring Mortal Kombat.

I've been working on hammering out a set of rules for Mortal Kombat, since canon does not provide any, and one of those rules is that in order for the tournament to end, either the aggressor or the defender realm must win ten consecutive tournaments, and the Ischeti lasted for 32 tournaments before they fell, despite living only 500 years to the Edenian's 50,000 year life span. By contrast, Edenia lasted 27 tournaments against Outworld.

After that, Sindel outlawed cryomancy and the act of bonding with dragons, as well as the vast majority of the Ischeti's religious ceremonies and rituals, leading to them eventually leaving and moving to Outworld where Shao Khan proved an even crueller ruler. Before long, the Ischeti left for Earthrealm with the few dragons they had left, settling in Northern China in a region that resembled their former realm which they called Arctika, or Home of Dragons. Edenia still has possession of most of the Ischeti's sacred objects and artifacts, many of them made from the gems that hold memories (I haven't thought of a name for them yet) which contained memories of their many ceremonies and important days, such as the Etlara realm, the crowning of monarchs, etc

There, they founded the Lin Kuei, which was not a clan of assassins at the time. Instead, it was a refuge for any who sought it, be they Earthrealmer, Ischeti, Outworlder, etc. The name Lin Kuei was given to them by outsiders, and literally translates to Forest Demons (as far as I can find), with many thinking their powers and strange appearances meant they must be demons.

The Ischeti were formidable warriors and defended their new home as needed, eventually providing aid to others for similar ends when it was requested, which gradually lead to their becoming assassins.

The Ischeti naturally have bright blue or white eyes, with white hair being very common. They also tend to have fangs and dragon like pupils and an extra set of vocal cords which allows them to make similar sounds to the dragons they bond with.

Over the years, these traits began to fade and cryomancy became less common for reasons they do not know for certain, though they suspected it was because they no longer had access to Tikarezo, which was deeply embedded within their religion and day to day life. The only scrap of it they had left was the Dragon Medallion, a symbol of the Royal house which was to be held by the reigning monarch. The medallion was eventually co-opted by the Lin Kuei grandmasters as a symbol of their leadership.

Due to their lack of immunity to Earthrealm illnesses and the weakness that came with a lack of Tikarezo, Cryomancers began dying off alarmingly quickly until only a few bloodlines were left, most of whom had lost the ability entirely. The royal line was the only one to maintain the gift of cryomancy.

Sub-Zero and Tundra are actually bastardizations of the Chet words (Chet is their name for their language, meaning song) for Ruler and Heir respectively. Sub-Zero was originally Sut-Sawel and Tundra was originally Tondira (I will take criticism on that if anyone has criticism to offer), with Sawel being the name of the god most important to the cryomancer pantheon.

The royal house did not rule with absolute power but as part of a council who were primarily made up of those elected by the people as well as the head priests of each god.

That's about what I've got so far, let me know if anyone has any thoughts!

[literary-illuminati]

Book Review 56 – Three Parts Dead by Max Gladstone

I consider myself a pretty big fan of Gladstone’s, but until now I’d only ever touched his standalone works – I was previously a bit put off by the length of the Craft Sequence and so never actually tried it. So, thank you to the people who recommended I give it a try anyway! Despite being the first in a series, Three Parts Dead is a perfectly fine self-contained story and not relying on you reading the sequels to finish anything important. While it’s not the best thing of Gladstone’s I’ve read (Last Exit my beloved), it’s not the worst, either.

The book takes place in an industrial fantasy setting about a generation out from the apocalyptic, centuries-long war between the old gods and the ‘deathless kings’ – human sorcerers who had learned to master magic such that they could face them and tear the world apart in the crossfire. Tara, the hero, graduated from basically-Hogwarts entirely because there’s a binding preventing the school from doing bodily harm to its students – the next second they literally threw her out a window at 10,000 feet. The story follows her as she’s hired as a junior associate helping a world-famous lawyer/archmage as she’s hired by the church of Kas Everburning to investigate the sudden and mysterious death of their god. What follows are several hundred pages of convoluted scheming, legal proceedings, forensic accounting, and bloody magical duels and assassinations.

There are a few twists I genuinely didn’t see coming, the plot overall hangs together very well, and the pacing was just about perfect for the kind-of pulpy mystery/adventure story it was. Overall just a great time reading it.

That said, the setting’s probably the main thing to really sell people on this book. It’s just fun, and actually pretty damn original. The basic conceits are that a) magic is real, and b) so is capitalism. Kas Everburning is the beloved god and protector of the city, and also a highly leveraged legal entity loaning power across the globe whose death would catastrophically destabilize the global financial/metaphysical/political system. Mages can fly and raise zombies and enscroll people, but it’s all done in the idiom and with the vocabulary of contract law.

Beyond the basic conceit, Gladstone just clearly delights in layering weirdness on weirdness. Vitally, he does actually have a bit of restraint with the exposition – the book’s full of off-hand comments about different places and institutions that make you (me, anyway) incredibly curious about what the hell their deal is, but the actual explanations are restricted to what’s actually relevant to the plot and what the characters actually need to know. I still really want to know what’s up with King Clock or the Iskari or a half dozen other things, though. So, top-tier worldbuilding.

The themes are not exactly subtle, but I very appreciate that Gladstone lets them mostly remain as worldbuilding subtext and manages to make them feel like they emerge very naturally. I appreciate the slight restraint it takes to let the reader draw their own conclusions about the fact that the city’s police force is so empowered by strength and lack of need for doubt when on the clock that it’s literally addictive, or that one of the main antagonists is a brilliant older academic whose masterwork is a system where his star pupils (including a disproportionate number of attractive young women) are magically networked together to achieve incredible results he can take credit for while their lives and personalities are drained away to nothing. Being able to literalize the subtext a bit is half the fun of secondary wrld fantasy, after all.

Anyway, yes, very fun read. Four stars.

[hemerae-ramblings]

I was tagged by @humanbra (and as usual failed to answer in a decent amount of time)

Rules: Tag 10 people you’d like to get to know better!

Relationship status: single

Favorite colour: lilac

Song stuck in my head: Trio avec piano op 100 (schubert) or, if we're talking "song with words", Schön genug (Haller)

Dream trip: changes all the time, but right now, somewhere calm where I can basically be alone with my thoughts

Last googled: Uh...générateur de couvertures Martine 🤣

Anything I want now: a certain e-mail

Last song listened to: Reckoning song

Currently watching: L'Art du Crime

Currently reading: Iskari T2, and quite a lot of fanfics

Current obsession: L'Art du Crime (and i blame you @bourbon-ontherocks)

10 of your comfort shows: Doctor Who, One Day at a Time, HPI, OUAT, Vox Machina, She-ra, Heartland, Anne with an E, Lie to Me, Sherlock

tagging: @bourbon-ontherocks, @earanie, @pia-writes-things, @susanvstorm, @niimuue, @nike-sga

[hiddenschools]

“No,” she said, “this is not the dead city.”

“Where, then?”

“We are in my garden, in a city with a name we rarely whisper—a city that threads itself around the world of iron words the Iskari forged. We are not angels anymore. We do not take on shapes of righteous truth. But we build, though the Wreckers think our building a subversion.”

Ruin of Angels

[fantasybooktournament]

Send a Review!!

The first round of books was eliminated and I wanted some help talking about the book eliminated. There are so many amazing books that unfortunately were cut but still deserve their time to shine. I was hoping I could share people's reviews of the books eliminated, as I have not read them all.

I was hoping people would send asks with reviews or send me a review they had previously written to reblog. I'll post ones for the books I have read over the next week!

Not all reviews need to be glowing reviews, but if you didn't enjoy some of the books, also please feel free to send a review explaining why as well!

I'll use the tags of the eliminated works as well as "book reviews"

List of books under the cut!!

mercy thomas by patrica briggs

lightbringer by brent weeks

the golem and the jinni by helene wecker

prince of thorns by mark lawrence

chronicle of the unhewn throne by brian staveley

between earth and sky by rebecca roanhorse

criers war by nina varela

among others by jo walton

dead jinn universe by p. djeli clark

the raven tower by ann leckie

the grace of kings by ken liu

shades of milk and honey by mary roinette kowal

a land fit for heroes by richard k morgan

the stardust thief by chelsea abdullah

witchmark by cl polk

tailchasers song by tad williams

darkest powers by kelley armstrong

three dark crowns by kendare blake

the queen of tearling by erika johansen

mirror visitor by christelle dabos

we hunt the flame by hafsah faizal

the naming by allison crogan

iskari by kristen ciccarelli

kaikeyi by vaishnavi patel

a song of wraiths and ruin by roseanne a brown

book of tea by judy i lin

elatsoe by darcie little badger

blood heir by amelie wen zhao

labyrinth lost by zoraida cordova

girls made of snow and glass by melissa bashardoust

the reader by tracie chi

shadowshaper by daniel jose older

[soulsuckingisaacnewton]

Long rambling notes about different characters’ perspectives on the beginning of the God Wars in Ruin of Angels by Max Gladstone.

Zeddig: rose-colored glasses towards Old Alikand, inclined to gloss over any atrocities or strategic blunders on the part of the High Families

Tara: biased in favor of Gerhardt, admires Old Alikand as a godless society, “grand unforeseeable tragedy” arising from conflicting interest of two noble forces

Bescond: skewed towards justifying the Iskari occupation, emphasizes or possibly exaggerates Gerhardt as a monster to contrast with Iskari as saviors but also denigrates Old Alikand

I wish I could hear more of how Raymet understands the story. “some of us have theories” like what Raymet? probably something that makes Zeddig’s ancestors look bad

It is interesting to note that Ley's final summation of the story mentions “heroism”, but she doesn’t say who she regards as heroic.

(none of these biases necessarily represent malice or dishonesty on anyone’s part, they’ve all been taught about the events from different perspectives and have different priorities)

-

Zeddig locates responsibility for the Wars with Gerhardt’s decision to stay in Alikand, not the Families’ decision to attack him or the foreign gods’ involvement (which, I mean, this is probably fair but still it is a thing)

-

Here’s how Zeddig describes the origin of the Wastes:

“Drained of power, torn from their faithful, they hid in dumb matter. Desperate, they fused sand to glass and stranger forms, built labyrinths to hide within. Matter is not so comfortable as a mind, to a god. But they tried to take the story matter tells itself - I am a stone, I am sand, I am a river - and shelter there. So, in his rage, Gerhardt broke even those simpler stories. And here we are.”

In Zeddig’s narrative, Gerhardt’s enemies were already defeated and fleeing for their lives when he, motivated by rage, broke reality in order to kill them. Her telling encourages sympathy for the gods by placing emphasis on their suffering and presents Gerhardt's final attack upon them as a pointless, vindictive act of destruction.

Here’s how Tara describes the same events:

“These are... the nightmares of dying beings, feasting on one another, growing inside one another to burst from each other’s chests. They war against themselves, in this world Gerhardt wrecked. In his hunger, Gerhardt scraped away the [...] thingness [...] from the Wastes - and when he began to die, he lost control.”

Tara's use of the word hunger implies need, maybe even desperation, on Gerhardt’s part. She doesn’t totally exonerate him - this world Gerhardt wrecked is pretty blunt about the harm he caused and his responsibility for it - but she emphasizes that he was fighting for his life against powerful enemies. She also mentions that he lost control, possibly implying that he did not predict or intend the full extent of the damage he caused. Her description of the gods evokes pity and horror more than respect or compassion. 

[astridofraftel]

reading challenge #11 (wrap-up)

Just finished: The Mark of Athena by Rick Riordan

Currently reading: The House of Hades by Rick Riordan

Next on schedule: The Blood of Olympus by Rick Riordan

I just wanted to add for myself a little conclusion to the reading challenge I did last year! I went back to university, so I had a lot less time and motivation to read for the past six months. Because of that, I didn't achieve my goals in the end, but that's alright, I'm still very proud of all the dusting-off I did! My TBR pile is much more manageable now, so I will not be keeping up with this challenge in 2024 (I barely read anything not Percy Jackson-related since January, anyway).

So, if anyone is interested in random lists of books, in 2023 I checked off my program:

(FR) Le Prieuré de l'Oranger (The Priory of the Orange Tree) by Samantha Shannon

(FR) La voleuse de livres (The Book Thief) by Markus Zusak

(FR) L'École des femmes + Le Misanthrope by Molière

(EN) Babel, or the Necessity of Violence by R. F. Kuang

(EN) Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

(EN) Daughter of Smoke and Bone + Days of Blood and Starlight + Dreams of Gods and Monsters by Laini Taylor

(FR) Le Chien des Baskerville (The Hound of the Baskervilles) by Arthur Conan Doyle

(FR) Thérèse Raquin by Émile Zola

(FR) Le symbole perdu (The Lost Symbol) by Dan Brown

(FR) Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

(FR) Il était une fois dans le Nord (Once Upon A Time In The North) by Philip Pullman

(FR) Le Roi Lear (King Lear) by William Shakespeare

(EN) The Conqueror’s Saga (And I Darken + Now I Rise + Bright We Burn) by Kiersten White

(FR) Le Flambeau + Témoin à charge by Agatha Christie

(FR) Boudicca by Jean-Laurent Del Socorro

(FR) Fantômes et kimonos by Kidō Okamoto

(FR) Dans l'ombre de Paris by Morgan of Glencoe

For a total of 23 books out of my goal of 30 that I had owned for years and never read!

Which means that my TBR pile now amounts to these 12 books (I acquired the last 4 last year so they were not included in my program):

(FR) L'Ultime Expérience by Bruce Benamran

(FR) Cinna by Corneille

(FR) Othello by Shakespeare

(EN) Three Dark Crowns (re-read) + One Dark Throne by Kendare Blake

(EN) Iskari, the Last Namsara by Kristen Ciccarelli

(EN) The Merciful Crow by Margaret Owen

(FR) Le complot des corbeaux by Ariel Holzl

(FR) La mythologie viking (North Mythology) by Neil Gaiman

(FR) La métamorphose by Franz Kafka

(EN) A Day of Fallen Night by Samantha Shannon

(EN) The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

In addition to all that, although disregarding anything fanfictitious, last year...

(and because I barely have any self-control when it comes to books)

...I also read these, which were not initially included in my program:

(EN) And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie

(EN) Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

(FR) Le château de Hurle (Howl’s moving castle) by Diana Wynne Jones

(EN) The Princess Diaries vol. 1 by Meg Cabot

(EN) Strange the dreamer + Muse of Nightmares by Laini Taylor

(EN) Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

(EN) Divergent vol. 1 by Veronica Roth

(EN) Legendborn + Bloodmarked by Tracy Deonn

(FR) Comme un vol d'étourneaux by Giorgio Parisi

(FR) Le meilleur des mondes (Brave New World) by Aldous Huxley

(EN) I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy

(EN) Crooked House by Agatha Christie

(EN) Untethered Sky by Fonda Lee

(FR) La guerre des clans (Warriors) - cycle I vol. 1-6 by Erin Hunter

(EN) Tallstar’s Revenge by Erin Hunter

(FR) Le mystère de Listerdale by Agatha Christie

After all these gruesome lists, I can finally put to rest my 2023 reading challenge. Maybe one day I'll renew it, but I probably won't have the time nor the energy to schedule my readings so seriously for the next two years. It's been very fun though, also it had been the first year in quite some time that I read that much in French, and I think it did me good.

(prev)

[antrauma]

I want to let kirei loose on iskari or whatever in full blown troll mode to traumatize him forever

[caitsbooks]

“Once there was a girl who was drawn to wicked things. Things like forbidden, ancient stories.”  (The Last Namsara, Kristen Ciccarelli)

 (review, instagram)

[iumi-love]

"Solidão era um preço pequeno a pagar para permanecer viva."

"- Lealdade - resmungou Eris entre os dentes - é um luxo a que a maioria de nós não pode se dar.