#Mortality of mites

[shrub-jay]

Dan and Danny as the angel and the devil that sit on Batman’s shoulders.

[scriptorsapiens]

Classicstober Day 13: Arachne (𐀀𐀨𐀏𐀕)

Arachne was a mortal woman and a weaver beyond compare. She claimed that her skill surpassed even the gods'. An old woman warned her in a cracked voice:

"Be careful what you say, child; the gods loathe hybris."

"I'm not afraid of the gods. Even if Athena, goddess of weaving herself, appeared before me I know I can make a better tapestry than her!"

Arachne clearly had no idea she was living in Bronze Age Greece, because when an elder warns you about the ways of the divine it is ALWAYS a god in disguise.

Long story short, she is the reason spiders can weave so well.

Those of you who know me, and those of you who take the time to read these 'behind the scenes' things know that I do lots of research, but sometimes there just are no resources for me to draw on. Case in point, we know that the Mycenaeans had looms like the one I depict here, but as far as I know no Mycenaean tapestry has been preserved. This is not unexpected, since perishables like cloth can't really survive 3000 years without lots of luck and/or intentional preservation, but it also left me with a question of how Arachne's tapestries might have looked.

While we have some preserved Mycenaean and Minoan frescoes, I decided to not really draw from those for Arachne's tapestry. Her art was supposed to be breathtakingly realistic, so I opted from a more naturalistic, if a mite stylized, rendering of a woman. Perhaps a little anachronistic, but Arachne was a prodigy.

Speaking of which, Arachne is wearing a typical Mycenaean skirt and tunic but this piece finally gave me a good chance to show off Mycenaean makeup. Women, when depicted in Minoan and Mycenaean art, are often very pale and sometimes their faces are decorated with red florets on the forehead and cheeks. Arachne is not royal, but she is incredibly proud. Therefore I decided she would powder her face and rouge her lips, almost making herself look royal. The florets are just dots on her face, but the extras added to her forehead let me evoke the spider eyes she will bear in the near future.

Gods often take the appearance of the elderly (Zeus, Hera, and Athena all come to mind taking this disguise), and for whatever reason I have always had a vivid image of what Athena's mortal guise would look like. I know black was usually a very difficult color to dye, making it reserved for the wealthy, but maybe because of the old women in Portugal I grew up seeing the archetypal Old Woman is wearing black and using a shawl.

I would also like to formally apologize for not including the Linear B name for Athena, which is preserved: 𐀀𐀲𐀙

[gallusrostromegalus]

AEIWAM: Why DOES the God Machine decay, anyways? It's operating outside of time and space. For that matter, I have Other questions about it. Why does it generate existence in the first place? Does it change its composition over time? Does it communicate with others like it? Did someone make it?

Strictly speaking, there is no reason for life to exist, here or in the fic. This is all just a very fun accident. Life exists in the 4 dimensions we're familiar with not because there is a reason FOR life to exist, but because there is no particular reason for life to NOT exist. I think it's the same in twelve or two hundred forty-seven dimensions. There's no reason for life to NOT exist outside of our understanding of time and space, so there's not particular reason to think it does not exist.

So the life machine exists, not because it was made, but because there is no reason it should not exist.

One thing that does seem to be true across different dimensions (and by "dimensions" I mean "measurable spectrums in which reality can exist", not "Alternate universes") is that death, or at least, entropy *does* exist. The universe we live in will eventually experience heat death. Time unravels under specific conditions and indications are that those conditions will eventually become dominant. All things, even the laws of physics, eventually die.

So the Life Machine dies, because for some reason, all things do.

...But also Things are born for no particular reason.

The big bang happened for no particular reason other than nothing was stopping it (kind of literally). Some people think that the universe will not experience heat death at all, but a dimensional collapse that crushes it all back together, before it explodes again, like a cosmic inhale and exhale.

Perhaps the Life Machine is not dying at all, so much as this version of it is reaching the next phase of it's life cycle, and it departs it's mortal coil not for oblivion but it turns to goop to reform into a body measured in entirely different dimensions.

Which is a bit of an upheaval for its microflora.

The Life Machine generates life in the same way you and I 'generate' the conditions of our intestines that support bacteria. If you ask most people, they do not think their primary purpose in life is to play host to billions of microorganisms, but that is very much something we do, and depend on.

Likewise, the Life Machine is misnamed, because it's got purpose beyond human understanding, like how humans have purpose beyond the understanding of eyelash mites. It's doing it's own thing, we just live here. but if all our microflora and fauna were to leave, it'd be a major problem for us, and if all life were to stop, it'd be a problem for the Life Machine.

In the Tarot, "Death" symbolizes change, and the Life Machine is Dying in the sense that it's definitely changing. Whether that change is the change from caterpillar to butterfly or from whale to whalefall is beyond the comprehension of Mortals, or even things like The Soul King.

Soul King's job is to keep the souls alive through this, and they achieve this by exploiting the fact that this change is also when the Life Machine reproduces. Regardless if the current Life Machine becomes a butterfly or a corpse, it's offspring will have suitable conditions for life to continue. Maybe this is a gift form parent to child- the life machine passes her internal flora to her offspring like a mother transfers her own colonies and antibodies to her child via colostrum. Maybe the Life Machine isn't thinking of it's offspring at all and this is all just the machinations of the parasites to propagate themselves into a new host for the sake of future generations.

Either way, neither action is planned or designed, but are still acts of love from a parent to child. Woman and Nematode alike loves her daughter.

TL;DR: As Above, So below, in the gooeiest and most incomprehensible but deeply loving way possible.

[see-arcane]

Blood of My Blood: Never Loved

One more Blood of My Blood cinderblock for you @ibrithir-was-here and @animate-mush. Put on your most dramatic breakup song playlist.

Summary: Castle Dracula is abandoned. By son, by subjects, by its Master. The latter finds himself dwelling in the dirt and dark as he waits to strike the English shore once again. Thinking on traitors and thieves. And on his dear friend, who makes him bleed still into the grave earth.

Warnings for: Violence, coercion with and without hypnotism, and domestic abuse.

He woke with a draining ache behind his eyes. A worse one in his chest.

The surprise had gone out of this nights ago. Anger rushed over the sensation like a balm. More, he rushed toward anger. Spurred it, stretched it, wrapped it around himself like a gossamer membrane. It would thicken as the night wore on and his mind roamed its new gamut of bile and rage, snapping at itself until the sky overhead should have roiled in time with his internal tempest. But no. Only favorable winds here. Not that such winds were wholly necessary now. He and his grave earth rode a ship without sails. How fast the mortal mites and their innovations worked in this age.

Jonathan had spoken of traveling by one. An idle comment in their talks of England. One of many. The travel, the choice of estate, the precautions needed to counter the possibility of a second attempt to thwart the setting down of roots. Always in that measured way. Always with the mien of one laying out itinerary rather than laying the foundations of an invasion. Always looking his Master in the eye. Always with that sad grey shade in his pallor, the face of a man who hates his work and knows the alternative is worse.

Poor villain against his will. Poor martyr. Poor Jonathan.

Thunder grumbled high overhead. He heard voices through his box, warm bodies exclaiming and jumping. One of them was close. There was a spiced whiff of cigar smoke. A cheap odor.

Not like the ones you gave him. He dropped so many vices after the boy was born. Smoke and drink vanished from his lips overnight. Just in case they might have tainted him somehow. Spoiled the blood. You told him it was nonsense. Even she did. But he would not have it. Not until this year. He used his allowance for one single box of cigars; cheap, like the ones he’d had back in his shriveled nothing-life in Exeter. You caught him at it in January. Within the month he found the little box gone, replaced by a pack of Romeo y Julietas. One, maybe two a month since then. And what did he say when you asked him why? Why return to the habit now?

“Almost time,” he’d said. That’s all. “Almost time.”

He had pressed Jonathan on it. Oh, gently, gently. Barely a nudge of the mesmer; because he’d thought he already knew.

Jonathan had looked at him through the coiling smoke with those dead starlit eyes. The same glowing shade of the ghost-light on St. George’s Eve. And he had simply raised his hand to his chest, rubbing the place over his heart as if there were still a crucifix to wear there. Worry and sorrow had rolled off him like cologne.

“I may as well, Sir. I think I am saying good-bye to it this year. In whatever way.”

And oh! Oh, what an idiot child he had been in that instant! Later that night he had laughed aloud at himself. He had actually felt a pang of fear. Had even strained his ears to be sure of his friend’s heartbeat. It had drummed steadily enough, he thought. Mostly. Steady, but thin. Always thin, for the tide of his blood was necessarily fickle by his exsanguinations, but…

But you did not know for certain if there was some threshold near to being crossed. You’d never had a case like Jonathan Harker before you. Not even to experiment with. Why bother? You never thought in terms of keeping a single body as your reservoir when you were content to either starve or glut yourself at random. No one like Jonathan existed to you until he offered himself up as the living meal to you and two other hungry mouths for twenty years. And, childish thought, you’d wondered if he could do thirty. Longer. However long the charade could last before the inevitable came and you bled yourself back into him, feeding him from your heart’s blood to end the game of humanity and lock him in your thrall. And then, finally, you would get to see him drink. Master’s orders, my friend. Gorge yourself.

But that presupposed there would be no issue come the time of turning.

That this state, the ghoulish and gauntly haunting form that existed on the line between life and death, was not itself a spoiling factor in the process. Would the rules change if he died as this creature? Would he rise at all? If he did, would he be a Vampire or something else? Something still beholden to his Master only because he was chained by love and not the unshakable tether of being sired into undeath?

He did not know.

Having acknowledged that he did not know, he had almost ripped the cigar from his friend’s mouth so that he might force the man to drink from his veins that second.

Jonathan had seemed to read this in him. He tapped his ash into the tray with something very nearly like a smile.

“No, Sir. Not now. There is every chance I could be wrong. Perhaps it’s age alone whispering to me. Many men start to dwell on these things once they reach the 40-year mark. So I was always led to assume. For myself, I remain shocked that I have lived this long in the first place. I only feel as if there is now a clock ticking somewhere in all this. That it will end before the year is out because…”

He had paused to puff and shrug.

“…because it must end. Either because this state is finally preparing to collapse or because, with three adults to feed, I have begun to deplete too much to sustain the meals and myself.”

It was true. The boy was now a boy only in feeling. Somehow the calendars had piled up and the child was now a young man. Careful with his Papa—and no, even now he did not envy the boy learning his Lesson from his mother the night his adolescent hunger had slipped too far and left the man as pallid as his hair—but still taking more than he ever had in his boyhood. He and his mother had agreed in silence to feed a little less, alternating on their meals each feeding. Even he had stopped short of a full draught more than once. And it was not enough.

Still, Jonathan had been unperturbed. His Master had thought little of that calm. Time had not broken so much as smoothed him. An unfinished stone sanded and shined by a waterfall’s endless pressure until what had been his nightmare was reduced to mundanity. Ah, he woke to the New Year feeling that death was imminent? Hmm. A shame. May as well enjoy a smoke first.

Months passed since that scene. Though his blood did not change, his mien did. Each turn of the calendar’s pages brought some unknown weight down heavier and heavier on him. Distraction drew his attention away, his ghost-light eyes blazed like warning flares in the dark sockets, he lost himself for minutes or hours at a time at the desk, and once, in the far end of March, his Master had caught him weeping silently while eating. A tear would roll every few bites. Savoring and saying farewell at once.

Whether this unknown mortal clock really was ticking or not, his friend believed in it. Felt it was real enough to say his good-byes to human sensation. Such a fuss, his Master had thought. Tried to think.

You did try. Truly, painfully, you tried to make yourself laugh. Jeer. Hold to certainty and joy at the approaching finality. Humanity shed to give your friend his stalled eternity. Still, you caught yourself worrying. Wondering. What if something went wrong? What if something was wrong already? What if, ha, he was making plans to short you at the last? What if he had made plans with some conspirator in the towns to pierce his heart and take his head? What if the turning somehow did not take at all? What if, what if, what if?

What if indeed. You fretted so much over those months, old devil. You worried about every little thing that might go wrong before you made your move. Before you ended the game and took your prize and burned the nuisance of mortality on the pyre it deserved two decades ago. 

The prize you never thought was waiting at the end of someone else’s long game.

He made a noise into the soil. A coughing bark of a laugh. Out in the cargo hold, the smoker stirred.

“Hello? You down here, Mikhail?” He leaked himself out of the box. Fog to flesh. The smoker squinted in the half-gloom, coming closer. “Hello?”

“Hello,” he echoed. The smoker swung around to face him. There was not much to face, as he stood still in shadow. He watched the man’s brow furrow. Trying to squint his way toward recognition.

“Who are you? One of Arnold’s new boys?”

“No,” he answered, stepping into the glow of the man’s lighter. The squint turned to a gawking mask of horror bordering on disgust.

“Jesus,” came out in a gasp that reeked of cheap smoke. “What the hell happened to you?”

“Trouble at home,” he admitted with a flash of teeth. Within a blink, he was tearing into the man’s throat. He inhaled blood and cigar fumes until he was iron-grey, until he was at his prime, until he was a youth. Hating the taste with every gulp. Unable to glut himself further, he sighed and twisted the man’s head off. The heart he tore out with more relish than he preferred to admit. He crushed all three pieces of the body as if crumpling paper and did not rise to the deck until he sensed it was unoccupied. Up he went, tossing the balled up remains into the waves. “My thanks,” he whispered after it.

The corpse had provided him with something like a lackluster disguise. A jacket to match the rest of the seafarers.’ He hoped the sight of it might let him go unbothered on deck. Though it was an easier thing to simply slip back down to the cargo’s shade, he wanted the openness of the night and the sympathetic frown of the moon peeking through the clearing clouds. He looked up to it now the way a drunken man sulked up to his barman. A barman who had waned a few phases since he was last seen.

The moon had been so full the last time he saw Jonathan. Rather, times.

Once while alive. The other…

“Which one are you, then?” Swallowing a curse, he slid his gaze to his right. A man with a flask stood there, pausing mid-sip to scrutinize him. His lip curled as he gestured with the liquor. “Who said you could have hair like that and work a vessel, eh?” He did not pause for an answer before shaking his head and taking a full drink. “Arnold’s getting sloppy if he’s hiring from…from…” A cloud of hazy concentration came and went on the ruddy face. “What? The Nordics? The Slavs? One of those lots with hair to their knees.”

He did not answer. Only looked again to the moon. He imagined the wedge of it gazed back at him with apology. The man blundered forward a step, reaching to take him by the shoulder.

“I’m talking to you, boy—,” A callused hand passed through his shoulder like mist. For it was. The flask made a tinny sloshing sound as it struck the deck. “Oh.” It was a small sound. The frightened moan of a child in a rancid dream. Feeling the moment warranted it, he turned his young man’s head to fully face the man. Letting him see the maimed display of the left eye. The dried maroon crust that streaked his cheeks. The man made another noise, even reedier. “Oh, Christ. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Arnold never said anyone died on this one. It’s too new, he said.” His throat worked like a thin tangle of pulleys. Bloodshot eyes bulged. “The Persephone’s only been on the water three years and no one’s ever…”

“Newness is no guarantee against death any more than age is a guarantee against foolishness,” he grated out.

“Right. Right, of course, apologies. I’ll just—I’ll just—,” the man didn’t seem to know what he’d ‘just’ for several tediously agonized seconds. But, between the drink and the rarity of the moment—How often did one cross paths with a spirit, after all?—his feet remained anchored. Then, “…How did you die?”

Of idiocy. Here and now. Requiescat in pace.

“I was betrayed. Over a woman.” Sour needles pricked along his throat. “Over a child. The years made me blind. Soft. Comfortable. So certain that all was in order, that I held everything in my hands. But I lived among thieves without knowing it. I woke one night to find all that was mine was gone, stolen, and the one I had handed my heart threw it away as though it were the sole piece of filth that could not be bothered with. And then…” He gestured to the mark upon his face. His eye now a ball of blazing arterial red set in a spray of wild scarring from the lightning bolt. Even after a deep meal, he felt that the damage had scarcely receded. Had he not twisted in time, the blast would have struck him square through his skull.

The wretched woman had fine aim.

And that’s not all she has, is it?

“Sorry to hear it, son,” came from his right. The man had retrieved his flask again. It winked like tarnished silver in the moonlight. Though his face showed a bleary bafflement as to what exactly the manner of death could have been, he went on, “And here I figured the worst that could happen to a man at sea was drowning.”

“Terrible ends can happen anywhere. But if it saves you worry, I will not remain on this ship forever. I will disappear once it docks in England.”

“Reckon you’re off to haunt the bastard who did this to you?”

“Not yet. First I must go to my son, who they sent away all oblivious to their work. Then,” his hand drifted of its own accord to his chest, dipping under the hanging coat to feel at the lump in a high pocket. It sat cold and out of place there, like an elaborate little tumor. Touching it brought back the pain to his chest and eyes. “Then I shall see to the traitors.”

“Cannot say I envy them.” Another sip, nearing the bottom.

“Few would. They thought me a monster to slay together. But they have yet to meet the worst of me. For they grew comfortable too, seeing me docile, hospitable, giving them my home and my love and a thousand allowances that no other in my life has ever wrung from me. Yes, I will haunt them. I will hunt them. And I will deliver to them a recompense so much worse than death.” The man was trying again to drink from his flask and finding himself thwarted. “Empty?”

“Afraid so. Do you ever miss that, being dead? Getting to drink?”

“No. I still drink. But I am full for the evening.” He bared his teeth in a gleaming crescent. Some of the man’s crewmate still stained his fangs. He watched the man’s face abruptly lose all its tint. “I am glad you got to enjoy your own. It is a rarity not to face this part sober.”

So saying, he plunged his hand into the man’s chest. He twisted out the heart with the ease of one plucking a ripe apple from its bough. The man croaked out only a small noise at this. Nothing more than a damp little bleat, smothered by the steady roll of the waves. He was still gawking at his heart in one clawed hand while the other snared him and hurled him overboard. The sound of the splash was nothing. Sighing, he shrugged off the apparently useless jacket and cradled the heart in it to prevent a drip. Back to the cargo hold it was. Down to the dark and the dirt and—

He left it waiting for you. Even in the midst of all the confusion, the haste needed to get out, to be gone, he made sure to leave it right there in the sow’s coffin.

The cold lump shifted in its pocket.

He bit down a curse as his eyes stung, burned, boiled.

A roost was made in the furthest corner of the hold. The heart sat in his hands. Huge and dense with old smoke and liquor and fatty seaside meals. He’d lied to Jonathan before, about how certain consumed vices changed the blood’s quality. There was no alteration in what it fed, but the taste shifted. Between the crewmate he’d siphoned and the swollen muscle in his fingers, he realized he was indulging in the nearest thing he had to slovenly eating after a hard day. He took an experimental taste of a ventricle.

Immediately acrid. A rich and awful tang that ran to the back of his throat.

Nothing like the spigot that had flowed for him like careful clockwork for two decades. So meticulously tended by diet, by caution, by the vessel it sprang from. Twenty years of ambrosia meted out in scheduled mouthfuls and the occasional drop snuck between meals, as was his right.

“No, my friend, not the wrist. The boy would know someone was taking extra. And from his own plate! So to speak. Undo your collar, you know she will not complain…”

And Jonathan had. The brilliant eyes sliding away from his Master as he stole one, two, three, four or more little tastes from neck and shoulder, collarbone and breast. A single sip from each bite. He had not even winced. Not until Jonathan’s Master brought his mouth up to his face. Printing the blood there like a girl with her kiss’ lacquer. It had taken his Master’s hand around his jaw to make Jonathan turn and face the second one, pressed into his own lips. Eyes shut against the threat of a trance, mind fluttering frantically out and away.

He had let him then, back in those early nights. Always so shy, his Jonathan. Even after the whirlwind of that long-ago summer, the thresholds crossed and barriers erased for the sake of playing his Scheherazade, still he quailed from the gentler edges of his better. Hiding up in his head or in his Master’s teeth or under the flimsy shelter of his duties whether they were self-assigned or not. Anything to not accept what lurked and grew under the veneer of mere surrender to an enemy.

Had that too been a trick? Laying bait the way his Master had once drawn the hunting dogs back to his genius loci with the woman already tainted?

A Wolf did not chase if the prey did not run. And he did love to chase. To play. Up to a point. He had tried more than once to smother the overgrowing feeling in him as the years marched and his friend continued to drop his eyes and tense away from tenderness. When that failed, he told himself it did not matter. He owned his friend through the woman and their son, and whatever performance he sought—the rent owed to many a charitable landlord, really—could be ordered from him.

And he had ordered it.

In specific, he had, on a particularly maudlin night, ordered his friend to kiss him as he would her. He would know the difference. He’d leeched through her senses on occasion when they were, quote, ‘alone’ together. Sometimes he thought Jonathan even saw him staring out of her eyes. Or else the woman simply gave him away by some private sign or other. Whatever the case, Jonathan had never once withheld his love with her.

So, the order. Out of curiosity. Out of boredom. An order given without even a trance to smooth the act, just to see how he would muscle past the walls of indignity and a lover’s loyalty as he had back when he thought he had been charming for his life in their supple sabbatical once upon a time.

Instead, a magic trick.

Between one blink and the next, Jonathan had been the self he reserved for the woman. Even the smile kept for her had been there. A necessary prelude to the hands that bookended his Master’s face and pulled him level. Just like that, there were their mouths together. Not the press of a patient doll’s lips as its owner mashed themselves there in pantomime of intimacy. If he had not known better—

But Jonathan made sure he did. As soon as the kiss elapsed, he’d receded into himself. Less a tortoise into his shell than a closing fist praying not to be pried open lest the treasure in it be snatched away again.

“Was there anything else, Sir?” asked in the rug’s direction. Shame and a miserable whiff of apology yet-to-be had stamped him. He would throw himself into making amends to the woman, of course. Whether or not he wounded her with tattling on this little service, he would meet her with whatever kindnesses he could muster that were not already given. It was one of many moments in which he was convinced that his friend would give of himself until he was down to bones and then try with his last breath to gift someone his ribs. “Sir? Am I dismissed?”

He was not. All at once, his Master had a list of tasks for him to perform over the course of days. Weeks. Months. A year and more. And was that not where the mistake of it all had begun? The willing leap at addiction? Commanding his friend, his immaculate actor, his Scheherazade, into a hundred little indulgences. And not just in matters of sampling each other. Sometimes he would wring whole nights out of the man, without even the boy to perform for, trapping him by the fire or in a moonlit room or down in that half-secret glade by the stream where they played hunter and hunted and hid together from the walls of domesticity, spurring his friend into the easy and smiling talk of companions, of intimates, of…

Go on, old devil. You can admit it. Why not? What point is there in pretending he did not perform so well as to leave you reduced to this?

Fine.

Talk of those in love.

Yes, he had used the exact word. More than once.

Do this, do that, do any and all these things as if you loved me. Just as you do her.

And Jonathan had. Always with the bracing misery before and the shuddering withdrawal after. But he served his Master’s wants. He did so with such an ease that his Master had invented half the trap himself; he had convinced himself somewhere that he was giving his friend permission to do what he truly wished to do, freed from the yoke of duty and fealty to the woman, to his morals, to his sanity. Yes, that was it. He was giving his friend release. Lifting away the leaden weight of his beloved martyrdom and letting him know, yes, it was alright, he could want something other than what was ‘right’ or ‘good.’ What had such scruples brought him besides pain? God and humanity no longer had a place for him or his family or his love; that bottomless fount that had more to give than his veins ever would.

Here, my friend, I will take it. I will catch it all as it spills. Love me. Love and be happy. It’s alright.

The cold lump in his pocket felt heavy and frigid as a glacier on his chest. Scrubbing his hand clean on the jacket, he fished the hateful treasure out of its home and glared at it in his fingers.

A brooch the size of a dove’s egg. Antique gold ringing a garnet of such brilliance it might have been frozen claret. Splitting it was an ornate dragon, rampant, seeming to cling to the stone like the mythic hoards of legend. One of few mementos kept in his bedchamber from mortal days and nascent immortal nights that had gone sour in recalling their joy. He had taken it from its hiding place of velvet, shined it until it glowed, and, at the end of another race through their wilds, another capture, another victory drunk from the won throat…

“You have been here five years. Yet still I get word that you are not always recognized as being in my service.” This was fractionally true. At least in the sense that he knew there was a certain level of laxness that existed between Jonathan and a handful of those he did business with in the towns. Little mistakes or a dragging of feet on assorted exchanges and services that his friend would try to paper over with excuses on their behalf.

Once, only once, he had even tried to get away with hiding a newcomer’s attempt to swindle him outright. He had only seen a tourist of means with an Englishman’s lilt and tried to rob him over a new toy for the child and a novel for the woman. Jonathan had not pushed back, only gutted his allowance while the seller’s neighbors threw their shocked and silent looks. Perhaps that would have been the end of it but for Jonathan idly mentioning the encounter to the woman as they shared his bed post-feeding, thinking little of it. His Master, listening through her, had thought otherwise. Enough to find and inform the seller of his misstep personally. The next time Jonathan went to town he came back somewhat shamefaced with a burden of extra wares given ‘as a courtesy.’ The peasants were careful to point him out to new citizens ever-after.

All this in mind, Jonathan had looked at him oddly over the excuse.

“If that is the case, it has not hindered me in any way. The people have been nothing but gracious when I come through.” Gracious and afraid, he knew not to say. His Master had shooed the words away like flies.

“You remain ever lenient, my friend. You would apologize to the wheels of a carriage as they ran you over. It is for your own good that you must wear this, lest you and your goodwill are trampled by the opportunists among the chattel.” Out had come the brooch. “You will have this visible at all times. Be it to clasp on your coat or wear at your throat. Do you understand?”

“Yes, S—,” A look was caught. No, no. He knew the rule out here. Away from mother and child. “Yes, balaurul meu, I understand.”

Not well enough, of course. Not even when he was made to sit still, his chin up so that his Master could pin the thing in place. No, he had not understood then. Not until the next night when he took his place in bed for the family meal. There he had sat, undoing his shirt collar—with the brooch nowhere in sight. Not before the feeding. Not after he buttoned himself up with strengthless fingers. Not even on his nightstand.

The boy and the woman had looked up with curiosity and ire respectively when Father hadn’t taken his usual leave for the saccharine post-bleeding period with Papa. Papa himself had looked concerned and lost. No one had made a mistake, had they?

“Father? Did you want to stay too?” from the boy. A thread of worry in his voice, as was natural whenever Father deviated from his routine, but far more of eagerness. Father so rarely lingered overlong with the entire family in the room. And, he would admit it, it stung to deflate the child’s hope.

“I am staying,” he’d said, “But you and your mother must go for a time. There is something important I must speak with Papa about.” There had been some bristling at that. But he had yanked the woman’s leash and the woman had taken the boy away by the hand, thinking soft assurances and lies at him until they were out of the tower. Jonathan, dear oblivious Jonathan, had peered at him with genuine confusion.

“What is it? Has something happen—,”

His Master had flung the full weight of the trance into him like a boulder. A boulder that became a crushing fist around the flailing mote that was Jonathan’s ostensibly free will. Having hold of it, he wrenched his friend up to his feet and prodded sharply at his mind until he turned to where he’d stored the brooch. There, the wardrobe. Go. Fetch.

Jonathan had managed two steps before the weakness of his emptied veins dropped him to hands and knees. He crawled the rest of the way. Staggered back upright. Worked the doors open and shuffled with trembling hands through the hanging clothes. Here was the coat. There, fastened at the chest, was the brooch. He fumbled at it with twice the difficulty of fastening his shirt. So much so that it pricked his thumb bloody and slipped through his fingers. He made a small despairing sound before falling back down on his knees, searching in the shadows and shoes for it. When his hand finally closed on it, his Master tugged again at his mind, ordering him back the way he’d come. Across the floor, up into the bed. Holding the brooch.

His Master tugged again. Jonathan held the brooch out on his palm. The one now striped and smeared from the bleeding thumb.

“What did I tell you to do with that, Jonathan Harker?”

“To—to wear it in town—,”

“No.” He’d paused to watch Jonathan’s face. The shift of expression that sketched such a perfect epitome of dread, especially in a bloodless face. “I said, You will have this visible at all times. And where was it instead? Thrown away, out of sight, out of mind. Is it not so?”

“N-No. No, I did not mean to—,”

“Must I make it simpler for you? The boy still has the collar he never bequeathed to the trapped wolf. I am certain it would fit you. The emblem would never be misplaced again.”

“Sir—,”

“Do you think I gave it to you as a whim? Another token to cast aside, to ignore like all the rest you are showered with all unconscious to, stewing in your precious stringency, self-deprived as a monk?”

“Please, I swear, I only thought—,”

“What? What did you think? Do tell.”

“I thought,” his voice caught and rasped, trying not to be a cough. “I thought it was meant for strangers. As something official, part of a uniform. I’m sorry, Sir, I didn’t know it was…” But here the words dried and his face showed again that crumpled confusion. The pain of a kicked dog unsure of what mistake he’d made, only knowing he had erred. Jonathan’s eyes had found his Master’s, as much plea as fear.

What? the look begged. What is this? What did I do wrong? I cannot act without my lines.

There was no questioning of his Master’s anger. Such storms were known to pass and one could only brace and weather them. This was all he knew.

But you knew better, didn’t you, old devil? It took you a moment to catch up to yourself. To truly admit it to your own mind, even knowing from what happy old era’s dust you fetched the thing from. You made no ceremony of it. You buried the giving of it in a disguise. But the meaning was there even as you fastened it to him without fanfare, without warning. All you did was stitch an importance to the ornament that was invisible to him. And look where it led.

Jonathan hadn’t blood enough in him to hold rigid as he usually did before his Master’s moods. He shuddered even as he fought to be still. Afraid. Cold. Eyes of pale blue glass pinned to his Master, searching desperately for a reason to it all, for the thing he must make amends for.

Still with his hand outstretched. The brooch in a bloodied palm.

Just as it is now. Here in the brine-scented shadows. It looked more precious in his.

It had.

Jonathan had kept the hand out even as his Master joined him on the bed. As his Master plucked the brooch up, tasting it clean of the red stain, then kissing away the same from the bleeding thumb. As his Master gently tilted the quivering chin up and fastened the emblem in its proper place. As his Master did not move except to close the last of the gap between them, stroking the white curtain of hair from his brow.

“I am sorry, draga mea. You did not know because I did not explain. It is too easy to forget you are the only one here who does not go walking into others’ minds. So often you fool us all into believing otherwise.” The stroking hand traveled down to trace Jonathan’s jaw. No longer shaking. Not as badly, anyway. “You did not recognize that it had a mate, did you?” Jonathan turned his head an inch, frowning. His Master tilted up his own chin. For a moment, more confusion. Then realization.

The stone worn at his Master’s throat had no beast stretched across the stone. His was a coil that encircled it entirely, an ouroboros of a dragon.

“I know that rings are the tradition. But you are a creature of loyalty and I did not wish to test my Harkers’ ire in demanding you remove the gold band for something of mine, be it a signet or a stone. This is as close as we can come the way we are. At least until the night of consummation. Baptism. Whatever you prefer.” He trapped Jonathan’s eyes with his. “When that time comes, we can talk of more classic rites, insofar as our arrangement allows for such things.”

Jonathan had nodded at this. Perhaps tried to speak. A ‘yes, Sir’ seemed to snag on his tongue. The shock was too much to work around on his own, so his Master hoisted him over it with a final hook of the mesmer and gave him words to say:

“Of course, balaurul meu. I look forward to it.” His mouth had snapped shut around the last word, pallid eyes huge and almost teetering in their sockets. He was shaking again. Ah, it was too much as he was, poor thing. His Master had left him swaddled in another blanket, asking if he was prepared to see mother and child now. Jonathan could only nod, his hand rising and falling away from the space before the brooch. As though he feared the thing would bite him.

Good.

Good enough, you reasoned. He would grow into it. He would accept it. He had accepted it already. Enough that you had to deal with a particularly entertaining round of aftermath from the woman’s mind. For all her collaring of herself when she had to grovel for something—and was her own peasant’s past not fine training there?—the Vampire of her could not be smothered when it came to theft. Not even sharing! This, when you could have ordered the ring off him. Could have had him write up divorce papers for the dead, if only as a prop to hang in the office. But then the boy would have questions. Perhaps even tears. Was Papa not allowed to love more than one parent? It would not do. To think you offered to let her be Maid of Honor.

Amusing fireworks had ensued.

They had cooled, he thought, as the years continued to stack. On and on until the end of their second decade made its way to them. Jonathan never misplaced the brooch again. The woman appeared resigned to joint custody of both her Loves in her sullen way. And the boy, his little diavol, barred from full knowledge and unhappiness, had grown to manhood under their care.

A fine excuse the latter had made.

He thought back to it now. That last scene with the grey and ghastly shape of his friend in his surreal mortality. Another cigar lit, the smoke curling out the library’s window. What a strange image he’d made. He had looked like…

A month or so ago he had found his friend thumbing through an American magazine of all things. Some publication or other that had made its way across the Atlantic and the Channel to join its English siblings. It had been one of his few vices over those latter years, catching up on the newsworthy pulses that beat outside their mountains. The American one had shown an advertisement at the back. A rather charming illustration of a man in what had to be a modern eveningwear suit. Arrow Collar and Shirts for Every Occasion the image declared.

Jonathan had seemed to be a macabre translation of the man posed in the picture.

Seeing this, an abrupt needle of mourning had pierced his heart. Twenty years of feeding had made his friend into this wasting enigma. Twenty years of allowing the arrangement to unspool on and on without end, simply for the fact of Jonathan continuing to breathe and bleed unimpeded, as if his will alone were enough to hold his half-life existence together. Twenty years of letting his friend’s incessant need to give of himself down to the marrow get in the way of sense. Of what was right. Of what was long past due.

How did you allow this? How did you agree to let this carry on so long? Look at him, look at the calendar. So many years lost in which he could have already been what he was meant to be. Why? For your agreement? For the charade of the bitter conqueror taking his consolation trophy? It made sense at the start, perhaps. Those early years of gloating. It was your due. But once the sting was gone, once it became clear what he was to you under the vitriol of old, what excuse was there to drag this on, to make a living ghost of him? What excuse is there now? Look at him, old devil. Look at him and think of what he could have been, should have been, for the last quarter of a century.

And he had. He’d stood in the doorway, staring, overlaying the haggard reality with what should have been. Here was Jonathan Harker, forever young, the flesh back on his bones, his eyes free of shadows and crimson as an opened throat. Jonathan Harker, still and strong, a beautiful killing thing like a spider waiting in its silk.

Instead, he was this. A ghoul waiting to find out the when and how of his death before the year concluded, seeming far deader than the thirsty revenants he called his family. The unfairness of it wrenched in his Master’s chest. Worse still was the hindsight of its pointlessness. As if this arrangement of the household had done anything but ruin his friend and cripple their son against the reality of the wider world waiting for them. He had even felt a twitch of pity for the woman, if briefly. She had lost her Love to the needs of their hunger and their Master’s whim, watching every year as that Love was shriveled and shifted into a wretched grotesquerie of what he ought to be. Her prized possession spoiled by mishandling and a refusal to simply tear their Jonathan free of his scruples and do what needed doing.

“Was there something you needed, Sir?” Jonathan had asked without turning. His eyes were on the moon. Full as a pearl.

“There was. Is.” His friend did not jump upon seeing him abruptly at his side. Nor did he turn his head. “You are almost replenished.” It wasn’t a question.

“I am.” A tap of ash. Still not taking his attention from the sky. “Did you wish to steal a drink ahead?”

“It is not stealing. Only taking what’s owed.” There was a soft sound of fabric pulling away. Jonathan had turned and froze. His Master had removed his own clasp and the cravat under it. Vest and shirt hung open. The skin above his heart was already cut open. “And giving what is long overdue.”

“Sir, that’s not necessary. Not already.”

“When, then? How much longer will you reduce yourself like this? They are beginning to go hungry even with your sacrifice, my friend. Mother and child both. But he is not a child anymore, is he? He is grown. He must feed as such. Yet he tries to feed only as a boy, just as his mother feeds in her little halved tastings. Even I have taken less than my share. All to bow to your craving for self-destruction. No more of it.”

“This seems somewhat—,” Jonathan first tried to sidle away from the sill, only to have himself caged back against the stonework by his Master’s arms, “—abrupt.”

“You have until you finish the cigar.”

“Case in point.” Another drag was taken, neither rushed nor prolonged. Jonathan blew his stream of smoke out into the breeze. Then, “Was that why you had so many of these on hand before? The food and drink and assorted sensory comforts?”

“Before?” Jonathan looked at him. Waiting for him to—, “Ah. Then. No, not precisely. There was an act to perform. Had it been Peter Hawkins there in your place, he would have had the same to consume before his��dismissal.”

“That’s what I mean. You were always planning to either ‘dismiss’ or ‘retain’ your solicitor of choice. You went out of your way to provide the equivalent cuisine and indulgences of a noble’s home, even when the reality of things had set in. I might have had, say, a week’s worth of fine dining and then bread and water from then on. But you kept at the kitchen regardless. Why was that?”

“To drop the quality would be to ruin the masquerade,” his Master said, wondering at the turned subject. Knowing not to be swayed. “Had you proven to be a lowly churl not worth my time beyond the completing of paperwork, you would not have eaten at all. The wolves would have had your bones for toys in the same week.”

“Mm,” another puff. Jonathan was halfway through. “My mistake, then. I had assumed you were interested in giving your pawn a long last meal before his life ended, permanently or otherwise. That or fattening the metaphorical calf. It was hard to imagine you enjoyed playing the role of host and staff without it being part of some standard habit.”

“So it might have been when you returned home.” Oh, only twenty short and endless years ago. Still with their enemies’ blood under his nails. Begging sanctuary for his Loves, bartering his own throat. Memories, memories. “For some reason, you seemed hesitant to trust my culinary skill a second time.”

“Yes, well. Blame that on a joke too many made about the wine and red meat on the menu. I’d not expected you to throw aside pretense to the point of…” Jonathan nodded at his Master’s bleeding chest. “…this.” More ash tapped over the stone sill. A third of the cigar was left. Jonathan’s eyes floated from the oozing cut to the moon. The effect erased all but the furthest edges of blue from his irises and made them into coins of silver. His brooch glowed like fire. “Do you know what I ate on my wedding night?”

Stop. Plug your ears. A trick. A trap. Laying bait again, old devil, do not listen, do not let him talk, do not hesitate, this is how he works, how he has always worked, how he has been the only one in all the infinite hell of your unlife able to steer the storm of you. In pain, in suffering, in servility or supplication, the silver of his tongue did more to tame you than any holy relic, and you knew it and you did not care, did not think to care, because he made himself satisfied with crumbs, with vapor, even when you tried to force bounty into his hands and down his throat, do not listen, do not wait, take him, own him, seize his mind and soul and senses now now now before it is too late—

But this was the bellowing of the present into the past.

All he could do in the ship’s dark was muffle his curses by biting into the bloated heart as the memory unfolded in all its hopeless reality.

“No,” he’d half-whispered to his friend. “You never said.”

“I had what I’d been having since I was taken in by the nuns. Broth and bread. Small simple soft things. I was half-dead then too, albeit in a different direction. Mina and I married and made love on my sickbed, in a rush of joy and tears and illness. I left our wedding venue with one hand in hers and another on a cane. Now I am here, twenty years on, with another marriage to begin in haste. The marriage that will also be my death knell. Lenore again, but without any hope of resting in peace.”

Jonathan watched his Master through his lashes.

“When I am drunk from a last time and I drink in turn, it will be the moment I say farewell to what is left of the good man who existed before I turned the kukri on those I trusted with my life and who I would have died to shield, had it not been for God putting my Loves on the same altar He set before Abraham. The last of that good man will die to the blood baptism, to an unbreakable chain of connection with what is reviled by the divine. Fickle thing that it is. But before I was a Christian, before I was taught the lie that God is absolute love, I already held Love as holy. I held kindness unto others as a mission. It hurt me then as it hurts me now to envision pain wrought on another without cause but profit or cruelty.

“But that feeling will be sunk into a spiritual chasm once I turn. Already I dropped a piece of it into the dark when I bloodied my hands. The rest will follow and I shall become a Judas not only to a select few, but to the whole of humanity. While I can see the logic in throwing myself into consummation for fear of turning back at the last second, I do not think I can stomach yet another threshold where I do not get to walk, but must hurl my way across. Another sprint, another crash into one world out of the last. I would ask—,” his throat had caught, eyes gleaming, “—I would like to have the day.” He cracked a sad smile. “St. George’s Day. A fitting hour to say good-bye to the good of me. And for our son’s birthnight, we shall have our last family meal. No meager shares. No restraint. I shall be too weak by then to hold off. And it will not be done behind closed doors. Behind my Loves’ backs, like another secret. Please.”

The eyes, the eyes, no power in them but what his Master put there, but they held and they drowned and pleaded for this, this last meal, this final allowance, and—

And you swallowed it. Inhaled it. Drank it from him like he’d slit himself open over your mouth. You did, old devil.

He had.

He’d looked his friend in the eye—eyes still vulnerable, still susceptible, still able to be hooked and pinned like the rest of him, ready to be stolen away into his thrall without another puff of the cigar left between them—and said, “Very well. But know that I will accept no hesitation tomorrow. No rescinding, no stalling, no last-minute dawdling. You make your good-byes to yourself tomorrow. Make your peace and apologies to the world if you must. But then I will eat the martyr out of your blood and fill the space with something better. Understood?”

“Yes, Sir.” This he said before taking his handkerchief from its pocket and wiping the dark smear from his Master’s heart. For almost a minute said Master held still enough to pass for a waxwork as Jonathan righted the shirt, the vest, the cravat. He took his Master’s brooch from a clawed hand that had turned suddenly feeble before pinning it to the silk. It wasn’t until Jonathan tried to pull his hands away that they were caught.  “Was there something else?”

“Yes. You finished,” he’d nodded to the smoldering nub of the Romeo y Julieta, “and I will not go without something for my patience.”

“I need my hands if I’m to open my collar.”

“Everything I want is above the neck.”

“As myself? Or is this a commission, balaurul meu?”

“Surprise me.”

“Only if you do not bite your tongue.”

He’d not understood. Not until his face was brought down and he had seen the flash of parting lips and teeth and then—

You should have bitten your tongue. Should have trapped his head in your hands as he played at catching yours, should have bitten and fed yourself into him while he was snared. If he would dare lie to your face your deserved to bleed yours into his. Bastard. Delilah.

He thought these and a thousand curses even as he warred with the recollection of that taste, that consumption in two directions. What he had thought was a mere prelude to all the ages yet to come for them. Never thinking for an instant that it was only the last helping of honeyed poison. Even the sheepish fraction of a laugh that had left his friend was another dose of venom to numb him with.

“Forgive me. I just now imagined how we must look. An old man preying on the youth.”

“Indeed. You are still all but a gamin, draga mea. In any case, this is hardly novel for us, is it? Merely a change of position. A slow dance.”

“We must all be cautious about said dancing in England, you know. The laws are still—,”

“I am aware. Just as I know what lawmaking parties are at the top of my list to be invited to dinner once we secure the new estates…”

And they had talked. And talked. On and on toward the sunrise. Jonathan had insisted on taking himself to sleep lest he spend his grand farewell to humanity passed out the whole day. Away, Master, away. Shoo.

Off he had gone. Dense and careless.

Did you smell coffee on the way down? Did you? If so, did you think it only imagination or just shrug it away? Your friend, ever disdainful of wasting an hour. Fine, fine, let him wring St. George’s out in his way. What did you care? Fool.

The boy had still been up with his books and, he saw, some his Papa’s magazines. Odd. No less odd than seeing him return to the coffin rather than exercise his ability to doze where he liked; his miracle of a child, born alive and undead at once, able to sleep without a grave earth as bedding. Odd, odd. But he had not cared, had he? What reason was there to care when he had tomorrow night already dangling before his eyes?

The woman was already in her coffin, either sleeping or feigning sleep. He had not bothered to check. Had not cared whether she knew of her husband activity or not. If she now mulled the vision of her Master tasting what was hers, his, theirs, making plans for the future while she gathered dust in the chapel. How pleased he’d been. How sure.

“Father? Are you alright?”

The boy, the child, the son. His son. A young man who’d looked now so agonizingly like his fathers it sent a shamefully fond dart through his chest. Bless the fluke of the woman’s own features, kin of his kin, blood of his blood, by design or accident. He had smiled. Not grinned, not leered, but smiled with an ease he had forgotten he was capable of for so long. The look had made the boy’s face go even slacker with wonder.

“Yes, I am. Why do you ask?”

“You look different.”

“Do I?”

“Yes. You look…I don’t know. Not younger, but,” the boy had fumbled for a word, “lighter, I guess. Did something happen?”

“No. But something will. Ah-ah, no prying,” when the boy perked up in his coffin, “Go back to your books. You will know more tomorrow.”

“Alright,” came the half-false sulk. “Good-day, Father.”

“Good-day, diavol.”

And he had gone to bed in his tomb fattened on bliss and craving more.

And then.

And then.

Bastard. Delilah. Thieving scheming viper of a traitor.

So much accomplished and destroyed within a day and night. Oh, his treacherous Harkers. Had they only been loyal, been wholly his in mind as much as will, he would have drowned them in praise and prizes for such work against a foe. The patience of it all. The skill. The performance. It surpassed the immaculate and made him ponder for one dumbstruck instant in the midst of his rage whether they had ever been human and not some stealthy pair of incubi come to prey on him.

Such a theory was only an excuse, he knew. It would not do to whittle down their ability to that of mere imps. No, they were but a man and a woman, however altered now, and they had proved themselves to be of such sterling cores of concentrated resolve that their Master had laid barely a scuff mark upon their joint machinations all these years. Their labors had born an unthinkable fruit; one it would have doubly shamed him to behold had he been victim to anyone less canny. But no, no. He had harbored his Harkers for a reason. They were uncommon creatures. Singular. Rare pets he’d thought he could tame. And given another century, perhaps he’d have managed it.

But like the fool who mistakes a tiger for a housecat, he had let his guard down too soon. Too quick. A mere two decades. And now his beasts had bitten and torn and robbed him.

His boy, his son, gone inside a day. Shipped away and on toward the teeming masses of England. This alone had been enough to spur him on. Or would have been.

If not for the impetus that the clever sow and her stolen Lessons from the Mountain had brought down on his head. He had fled before the next bolt could strike. Running, running. Just as he had been running since missing the boy’s departure, since realizing he was the only one left in the castle.

What had actually come first? His mind still spun when he tried to concentrate things into a clear order. The entirety of that period was still a swimming blur in the way the events of a nightmare will reach the waking mind as disjointed pieces.

He had awoken to the nettling pressure of the wild rose upon his coffin lid. The annoyance, the struggle, the hard toss and soul-deep agony that had come with booting the thing off. The blossom crushed. A resignation letter crumpled under the cracked ebony of the lid.

He had known his son was missing.

He had thrust his mind throughout the castle and known he was abandoned in full even before he tore away the lid of the woman’s box.

He had seen the glint of Jonathan’s brooch left on her pillow.

He remembered a vision. Sent from her. Brief. Teasing. Baiting.

Jonathan looking upon her with exhaustion and exultation, with relief, with want, with Love. Drinking from her like a man in the desert finding his oasis. Just the two of them in that boxed dark of her coffin. Mere hours before he found them gone. Eloped. So to speak.

She had left a message for him too, though it had come later. The one that came firing out of the roiling sky he’d thought was solely his. Once again the bait had been too much to ignore, even in his hunt.

It had been him.

How long had it been since he’d first tried to claw his way back into the woman’s mind, into her senses? He could not say. Only that he had been shocked to find himself barred except when the moon was high. She had been hardening herself up from within. There was more of a fortress around her will within two decades than his first trio of Loves had built up in centuries. She had been playing lame all this time. Preparing. Working in the shadows cast by her the distraction of her husband. Sharpening herself all along.

What irony, that they had left Jonathan’s old toy behind. The forgotten memento left in its hiding place in favor of being out and away before their Master fell upon them. Before he thought to whip them into the chase after their child. He’d had the kukri on his hip when he came upon the mist. A tell-tale wisp made visible only by the flash of lightning.

You recognized the essence in it. You knew it and you knew what it would lead to. And still, old devil. Still you threw yourself after him, maddened as a Wolf outran too long by his prey.

Only now it was not a Wolf and a hare, a Wolf and a hart. This was the bitch’s dog, her hunting hound, made to race and tear and follow commands—but not his. Not directly. No lashing of his will into Jonathan Harker’s mind would slow him. No order, no threat, no curse found traction upon the spectral rush of him. Cloud and man and spirit and beast flitting away, away, away, a parody of the hunts of old down their hill. It seemed his friend had been playing lame too.

He knew the speed of the Vampire, as was natural. Man or woman, fit or ill before their change, would have roughly the same gait.

But where he and the woman held that equal speed, Jonathan Harker was lightning on the ground. What had he truly been before he was turned? What blight or miracle had he kept hidden under a guise of constant frailness? He had not cared enough to mull it then. It was simply another frustration for the pile. Another nettle, another spur. The whole of it grated to the point of torture as, idle as a child at play, Jonathan had slowed long enough to throw a look back over his shoulder.

Grinning. Mocking. And there, at last, his own internal voice flying back into his ex-Master’s face:

Have you truly grown so slow, Count?

Through trees, over hills, onward, away, steering him off course, away from where the coast waited. The ships. The boy on the other side of the Channel.

Again, you did not care. Once in bliss, now in wrath. You went blindly after. Never learning your Lesson, old devil.

I see you wear my knife. Is it for my head? Or is it just to let you pretend something of me will still hold you against my will?

His own mind had leapt out after the fleeting shape, all champing teeth and thunder. Not in words. There was too much anger to fashion into coherence. Only the intent made its way out. Hate-fury-hate-fury-hunt-catch-punish—

Mine!

It had slipped from him. Flown. Bright and cutting and horribly naked in what was both a craving and a declaration. Had his eyes stung? It did not matter. The thought-snarl came again.

Mine mine mine mine mine mine you are Mine as the boy is Mine as the woman is Mine and you You YOU were Mine first by right by claim MINE and I will not be robbed by her by you thief traitor bastard Delilah—

Here came an echo from the deepness of the past, that cruel Lesson that Jonathan had once taught them all as his preying family warred over the greater claim to him, tugging at his mind like spoiled children over the same plaything, and Jonathan had thought those horrid sharp thoughts, the woman think-scream-ordering…

You can't, Darling, no, no, no, never. Don't you take yourself away, no one can steal my Jonathan, not even you.

But now here he was. Jonathan stealing himself out of reach. Just out of reach. His claws had scraped the back of his shirt, a lock of his hair. Close. So close.

Never yours, Jonathan had thought back. Never. You knew it then, you know it now. If you were ever so oblivious as to think otherwise, my Darling would have been slain the moment the Conqueror became the Coveter. When it stopped amusing you to see us huddled together and instead began to fester. Red eyes turning green. Because you knew. For all you made us do, all you ordered from me, it was only possible because I belonged to my Love. First, foremost, always. While you were only ever the thief stealing from her bed.

A thunderclap above. A pounce upon the quarry below. Just slow enough. Just as they made it to the clearing.

They had tumbled and Jonathan had thrashed until he was pinned in the grass. His grin had curdled then, deforming into an expression barely an inch removed from that of a bat’s grimace. He did not look at his captor, but bared his teeth in feral loathing at the hands locked around his wrists. There was a hiss as the grips tightened; enough to have broken bones had he been human. Jonathan’s face contorted into a horror of twitching muscle, his fangs crowding with the spires of sharp neighbors that jutted out and snapped so close they might have torn a swatch of flesh from his ex-Master’s face.

“Off me,” came a glottal excuse for a voice. The quintessence of revulsion.“Off me get off me off OFF—,”

“No,” he’d grated back, daring the nearness of the rabid jaws simply to press himself nearer. The closeness itself seemed to repel another bite as Jonathan twisted under him. “I am Master of your Mistress, thief. I am lord of your lady. If she is above the Son, I am above All, and the moment I loop my thrall through her blighted skull, I shall make a noose of the collar your soul donned for her and drag you screaming by it.”

Thunder had rolled again. Louder, louder, until it had irritated. He could not hear himself aloud and was barely better in his mind.

Why so coy now, draga mea? You have missed the wedding night and your funeral! Not to worry. I have what you left for me. It will stick so prettily in your throat.

The sky roared. And its Master, its Weathermaker for over four-hundred years, puzzled at that. He was not ordering the tempest to make such a din. Under him, another change. Jonathan was still. The monstrous face smoothed. Still unhappy, but abruptly devoid of any emotion greater than disdain. Perhaps with a hint of disbelief.

“Even now you insist upon the act. I had thought you would finally drop your mask entirely for the sake of rage, but no. Still you insist on pretense as though sincerity were as great an anathema to you as Him.” The grimace shifted briefly to an upturned rictus. In a lilting voice, brittle and musical as tinkling glass, “You yourself never loved. You never love! Ha. Twenty years of playacting fooled me no more than it did them after half a millennium.” Jonathan’s face hardened again, the grin turned to a razor. “I will never return to your stage again, Dracula. No more acts. No more charades. No more using me and the imitation of affection as another thing to steal from her. We are all but finished with you.” His fangs bared to the gums with a smile. “Now comes the denouement, balaurul meu.”

Then, fired into his head:

This is the last time you will touch me.

And like that, Jonathan Harker was gone. Dissolved and slithered away with such speed he might have been a puff of smoke blown away by the storm. The thunder boomed again. Not by his will.

There was a sound almost lost under the noise. An animal’s cry. A bird?

He looked up, feeling the skim of something familiar—

Her, her, the woman, thief, wretched bi—

—and had only a heartbeat in which to notice first the silhouette of a great owl outlined against the clouds, then the bolt of lightning racing down to find him.

He had dodged. Not quite fast enough.

Not before the pain landed and made its home from face to neck to arm to everywhere, everything, every possible niche of being that could feel agony. A blast that would have killed a mortal man. Had it taken both eyes, the second bolt may have landed too. But he was not blind and so outpaced that one. And the next. The woman was trying to track his motion once again, the old reverse turned on her Master, but he threw up the wall of fire between them and shot away toward the waiting coast. Running from his own sky. His own creatures.

Now here he sat in the present. In the gloom and the sea-salt air, crammed hastily away with a bed of thin earth in a stolen crate, hunting after his own son while his subjects herded and hounded him, dancing through the gaps they had found in his grip upon them. The old tricks of his perished Loves who had known that his hold was not as complete upon a mass as he would have wished. Animal minds were simple to coerce. The Vampire was its wants before all else and that very nature could war with a Master or Mistress if the focus was split enough.

And his focus was in splinters now. 

You would have laughed to see another suffer it, wouldn’t you, old devil? You took all that was hers once upon a time. Now she takes away all that is yours. Even your storm. Even the shapes of the animals. And him, of course. But then, he gave himself away. Is it not so?

“Silence,” he hissed to the cold mound of the heart. The blood was already starting to congeal within it. “Silence, damn you.”

If you have resorted to talking to yourself, you may do well to keep a diary of your own. Record your last nights for posterity.

He sat up quick enough to crack his neck.

I do apologize for the interruption, Jonathan hummed on. I can only assume you are terribly preoccupied. Either trying to pry into her head or trying to keep her out of yours. Even now, I remain banished to the outskirts of the conversation.

He felt himself smile for the first time in too many nights.

Oh, dear. His poor unschooled friend, who had not had needs or means to build up the walls as his wife had. Well. Let this be a Lesson for him then.

His own mind sprang upon Jonathan’s like jaws snapping shut. He felt the younger psyche spasm and raise phantom hackles at the intrusion. Scrabbling with an unpracticed grip at the Presence that bulled its way in, clawing, breaking, crushing his way across the waters that he could not pass in flesh, and then they were—

How do you like flying now, my friend? Everything you hoped it would be?

In the theatre of the mindscape he was launching himself and his catch back across water and shore and hill and mountaintop, wind whistling around false bodies. He was the Bat, Jonathan pierced a dozen times in his teeth. They were—

This is enough for me.

In the snow, the sun frozen an inch from setting, dead men watching as Jonathan brought down the kukri. Head, heart, limbs, over and over, carving and splitting. There was no collapse into elemental dust here. Only the mincing of a carcass. Even here, even wearing the skin of the living man he’d been, his eyes ran red. They were—

Ah, for a thief, still you go after too little. Let us at least be comfortable.

In Jonathan’s bed, each bite into his throat another night, and all those nights were his ex-Master’s. Kissing, mauling, drinking, sinking teeth to the gums. Only now his friend fought in his jaws. Jonathan’s teeth and claws tore at him as if he meant to shred him out of existence. To no avail. He was the practiced mind, the greater mind, greater will, and in mind and flesh his will was Law. But now he heard the whistle of air overhead, metal and timber swinging down. They were—

You still feel this one, don’t you? Mina feels the one in her throat on the same day it cut her. Does yours come like a blow at the end of each June? Again, Count, my apologies. You’ll not suffer the headache of me once your head is gone.

In the morning of departure. The shovel was in Jonathan’s hands, the edge bloody. No basilisk gaze pinned him now and his ex-Master’s brow was not merely scratched, but cracked like a grisly egg. The spade came down again. His ex-Master’s hand came up. They were—

But my friend, you know from experience how much I love to suffer you. To suffer for you. Saving—

In the ladies’ chamber, Jonathan torn out of three different suckling jaws as the dead Loves of old shrilled and grasped at him—

and sheltering—

In the grim first night, the woman in a deathly Limbo in Jonathan’s arms, the boy barely more than a twitching thought in her belly, on his knees, knife cast aside, bartering and pleading for the safety of his Loves, thankless and ungrateful already in his traitor heart—

 and supporting you all this time. Even now! Do you think me angry for your little trick? Your theft? Your lies? Why, it is nothing but heartening! To think I ever worried you were too soft for the eternity ahead of you! You, so cunning and patient, laying your tripwire over twenty years’ worth of convincing me—me!—that you were a thing worth trusting. Once we clear up this mess with the boy and your pending penance, I could see you eating holes through whole countries with your sweet venom.

Jonathan was in his hand now. A cursing, struggling mote trapped in a fist the size of a small house. The hand tightened. Jonathan howled. Not with pain, for there was no real sensation here. But the revulsion was true enough. He fought and pried at the knuckles of his ex-Master’s grip as if trying to break free of a cesspit.

The fist broke into other hands. A hundred thousand flashes of as many memories, cold clawed touches finding him wherever they felt like landing. Not injuring, of course. Would he hurt his dear friend? No! Only come closer, draga mea, the better to see you, feel you, count your pulses, that is all.

Jonathan bayed and swung and shuddered in the flurry. Every forced turn of the head with a hand on his jaw. Every talon of a nail tickling along chin and throat. Every idle raking of hair or stroke of his shoulder. Every seized arm, caught hand, grabbed hip, rubbed back. All of these blasted Jonathan’s unvarnished hate and disgust through the shared plane of their mind. And the worst of them all had been—

There.

The window in the library.

Their last night as man and monster. When he had spoken his last lying promise and slipped it into his ex-Master’s mouth like candy. Only hate had been there. Hate, disgust, shame. The weight of it staggered.

He staggered.

Jonathan broke free, but did not run, pausing to bare psychic teeth.

I can feel your scandal from here, Count. Even had you been short all the hundred other evils I had to ignore, I think your hypocrisy alone would have nauseated me. How do you sit there stunned at the obvious? Did you seriously believe my mind so pliant a thing that it would ignore the cruelty you held over our heads at every hour and fool myself into think you capable of love? This, when we both know you only consented to the terms for the sake of my payment in pain. Another performance, meant to last all of eternity, as you reveled over how I sunk to nightly agony behind every measured word, every smile, every taste of me ‘freely given.’ Our precious little summer together made infinite.

Here was the crackling fireside, a client and his solicitor beside it, white hair and dark switched around again. One of the early nights to judge by the healing cut on Jonathan’s cheek, the newness of the shadows under his eyes. Eyes whose fear had been so carefully reined in as he’d goaded his host into talk of the land, of its history, of himself in the guise of ancestors. Rapt young thing. After, he had sat then as he sat now, trapped against the arm of the couch, his host almost crushing him into the tufting as the old devil purred incessant questions about what there was waiting for him in England. Were there others like Jonathan there? Ah, he should not build up his hopes too much, souls such as his young friend were a rarity in any place…

Now the pleasant-pleading eyes flamed. Running red again.

This here. Even before the Weird Sisters laughed the truth in your face and you insisted on a lie of a rebuttal. This game was the core of all the years to follow. And now you complain because I played it too well and ran away while you were having fun? Over four-hundred years old and still a petulant child throwing tantrums over a lost toy.

The castle fell away into the heart of a storm. Veins of lightning wound through the black of it as the ex-Master loomed over his subject, his vassal, his traitor, his—

A toy? This alone?

Jonathan was seized in thunderbolts. Marionette strings that burned scarlet.

This is what you think would earn my interest? My protection?

Jonathan bowed and danced and split his face with grinning as the strings pulled.

I could have that from anyone, Jonathan Harker. I could have had that from you for twenty years, no longer leaving the sword hanging above your head, but walking and talking you through every night while your mind sat bound and mute behind your eyes. I could have laughed in your face that November night after I had twisted your head off your shoulders and burned what was left of your wife on my fire. I would have too. If you were anyone other than yourself.

The strings were a net were a web. Jonathan strangled in it, unable to die, to move, to look away as the parade of that prelude to his life in Castle Dracula came and went before him. The deaths and undeaths, the pains and the promises. Mother and child, Master and vassal with the blood never clean from their hands.

 All of this, my friend. All of this is because of you. You, who came to make the sale of Carfax. You, who refused to stay in your proper place among my lost Loves, waiting for my return and all the future I would bring. You, who set the hunting dogs upon me and so forced my hand with the woman. You, who faced the consequences of going among good men, pretending you were a mere hound instead of a jackal, striking them down for a Love you put above their mandates and their cherished divinity. You, who brought that Love to my door, groveling for the sake of your selfish heart.

You, Jonathan Harker. You are my equal in this ‘game’ you say I played. It is one impossible to play alone. If you had not baited me, not teased and strung me along, not made yourself into a vital thing to my heart rather than a mere curiosity, all would have ended swiftly.

 Something shifted. He couldn’t say what. A tipping, a sliding. The fraying of some final tether left straining in his friend’s mind. Jonathan had despised his touch and shown it well enough. Jonathan had raged on behalf of his Loves and the slain and their life that would never be. Jonathan had even managed to offer wrath on his own behalf.

This was not that.

This was an incandescent, a righteous, a Holy conflagration of fury that turned the clinging threads to ash and boiled away the storm into a flaming void. For a moment, Jonathan was not Jonathan at all. He was only a blistering red light. The fire trailing behind him spread like wings, either those of Eros or one of the Fallen. Whichever he was, he seared in his ex-Master’s mind like a torch.

Your heart? YOUR HEART?

A hand of flame pierced him, cooking the centuries-old heart before it was torn out as a cinder.

Even now! Even in your own skull! Even with the stage forsaken and the audience of our son finally free, still you must shroud yourself in this act!? STILL YOU FEIGN KNOWLEDGE OF LOVE BEYOND USING IT AS COLLAR AND CUDGEL!?

Jonathan fractured then, an inferno of indignation and devotion, flaring with the memory of all he had cherished and loathed in his life. Mother and child for the former. His ex-Master for the latter. All smiled for, all made happy as he could endeavor. Yet only mother and child were given all of himself in earnest, their own love reflected back into him, keeping filaments of joy alive even as he brutalized himself with the conviction of his being a worse monster than they could ever be in potentia, deserving of nothing, of worse than nothing, of—

Flashes of his ex-Master, of his voice and embrace and the steady grinding away of his sanity and will and soul under the lord of the castle’s heel, crushed by the weight of self-loathing, dragged up and eaten again and again by the bottomless pit of his ex-Master’s want, of the threat that he must play the game or leave his family to suffer, of a conviction that all of this, every minute of every night, was no more than entertainment, a distraction to grow bored of and smash to pieces should he fail to cozen and serve and be a good Scheherazade ever-after. His penance for the dead men. For his wife. For their son.

That was all it was. All it ever was to Jonathan Harker.

The shock of it came on too quick and too heavy for its owner to catch before it tumbled into the mindscape. It shattered open as it fell and showed all that had been true behind its owner’s eyes. Twenty years’ worth of truth. What he had taken for truth.

The woman, no longer even dreamt of as a companion, but a brittle-bitter comfort. A sibling he had never asked for, but could not deny for her use in keeping his own barbs sharp and for the guarantee of what she anchored to him.

The boy, so suddenly grown, his love uncomplicated and real and awed, an experiment fostered and festering, burrowing into his Father’s heart as blithely as an insect left to gratefully build its nest in the home of a welcoming corpse.

Jonathan Harker.

Jonathan Harker.

Jonathan Harker.

The keystone against which the sheltering of mother and child, the performance played for the boy, the willingness even to entertain the farce in the first place, all leaned. Why? Why, when he would not have suffered any other victim, any other enemy, any other dear friend to wring such a feat from him like blood from a stone? Why, unless..?

He could not hide it. Could not bury it. Could not raze or deny or shred it into dust. It was too loud, too vivid, too strong. Too starved.

It lunged at Jonathan like its own living thing, an excited Wolf gone mad with hunger, seeing the only thing it wished to eat. Raced, leapt, pounced, dissolved into a frantically grasping wraith of red tears and a heart, unburned but hanging open and raw in its cleaved chest, coiling around Jonathan’s mind and forcing the reality of itself down his throat. Choking on it, the fire of Jonathan Harker went out. Only the man—what had been a man—was left. Staring.

Now would come the laughter. The insult. The dismay. The sour-mocking questions. Oh dear, old devil. Had he really tripped and fallen so? Had he really dared to think that the feeling was returned?

Jonathan, no longer flame or fury, only stood in the black of their shared mind. Still staring. Still…

The shock was not just his ex-Master’s.

The void cracked and splintered. Now. Now the laughter would come. Now another act. Now a sardonic bat of lashes, a false swoon, a coo of cloying flattery, or else the woman herself would dare to graze his mind with her own, the better to jeer alongside her Love, yes, yes, any moment now. Now. Now.

Count. I did not know.

The laughter did not come. No act. No sneer. Not even a ripple of disgust. Nothing. Nothing but—

I’m sorry.

The sentiment was attacked with a thousand tearing teeth. Shredded down to psychic atoms in the hunt for the disingenuous core, the hidden chuckle, the lie, the trick. But Jonathan was no less bare than himself in this space. There was no more to find in the sensation than the feeling itself. It repeated:

I’m sorry. And, just as sincere: I never intended to break your heart. Only to impale it.

The whole of it saturated with an honesty and apology that cut deeper than any bludgeoning of hate.

Sorry is not good enough, my friend. There is no taking it back.

Jonathan, a pillar against the abyss, nodded.

I know. Not for either side. I did tell you. This will end before the year is out. We shall kill you or you shall kill us. It is all that’s left.

Now came a laugh; a familiar hideous sound that unfolded into a trail of chuckling. Giddy, almost.

No, Jonathan Harker. You misunderstand once again. Yes, you and the woman mean to slay me at last. But I remain nothing but loving in my design. All that is left is that you kill me, or—

The void was gone.

They stood in the castle’s chapel. With the certainty of a dream, they knew that the boy was returned. Their only witness as he clung and wept over his mother’s coffin. She had been willed into paralysis by her Master, moving only to maim herself in the box or to gorge herself. Her meals’ dried carrion lay piled and broken around the coffin. The infants’ heads lined in rows while the tiny hearts were left to shrivel.

‘Please, Papa, you have to, please…’

And Papa was, of course. The woman’s Master had slipped the noose of himself through her at last, and now her orders were his orders, and the order was being carried smilingly out by their dear Jonathan. Pardon, his dear Jonathan. The picture of bliss despite his running eyes. Under his chin, the brooch shined. On his knuckle, the gold band had been replaced with a matching stone and clutching dragon. His vows, leaked through the permanent stamp of his grin:

‘I will never look at her again. I will never respond to any word from her. I will speak of her only as if she were dead. And I will love you as you are owed. I will be yours alone. Always. This I will do, or she shall never leave the box or know a moment without pain again. Te iubesc, balaurul meu.’

‘Te iubesc, draga mea.’

And then they were together, in the snug gloom of the great coffin that had been built and delivered in secret months before, undetected in the same chamber as the kukri. Two Grooms lay within it, one joyous and one merely smiling as he wept a stain into his Master’s breast and eternity finally began.

This is how our game ends and the next begins, draga mea. There are consequences to becoming what a monster loves, by accident or intention. He crushed Jonathan to him in their box, hissing. You stole our son. You stole my heart. You stole yourself. I will have all back in time. And you will never slip free again.

 For just a moment, he felt it. Fear breaking through Jonathan’s miasma of shocked anger and distaste. But it was not the whole of him. Horribly, cruelly, crawling up and out from the center of his friend, was that unbroken condolence.

Again. I am sorry, Dracula. This will not come to pass. And even in the dreams where you paint this future as reality, you will still have my sympathy in this single thing. Your love is only a chain. Never an embrace. Only a noose, not a held hand. Our son is perhaps the first and only soul to love you without coercion, and he does so only because we spent his life hiding the worst of you from him. You will shatter that illusion if you think to steal him back. And then what will be left? Only this?

Jonathan’s hand was on his cheek, sweeping away something damp.

I had thought your pretenses only another knife to twist in us. But the performance was for you as well, wasn’t it? It was as close as you could get.

Jonathan was crushed again. Tighter, closer. Enough to snap an ordinary man in half. The arms, illusory though they were, trembled.

 Do not dwell like this. You have your conquest to think of, don’t you? Your march on the Living? Return to that, if it helps. You are four centuries deep in this existence. Twenty years should be nothing to scrape aside. We were a distraction, all of us. Let us go. Let us be enemies. It will hurt less.

There was no need for breath here. No more than there had been a need for breath for anything but speech since the day he ceased to live as a man. Despite this, he buried his face in Jonathan’s neck, his mouth opened to bite, but releasing only a choked and shaking sound. It was followed by more. Then:

I will—I will conquer. I will slaughter. I will rule. But I will not be alone. If I must have you all on tethers, so it will have to be. You should not have made me happy, draga mea.

There was no true contact in the mindscape. No touch, no sense. He shivered just the same as Jonathan’s arms slipped around him.

I promise to make you very unhappy once we cross paths in person. My hate is rivaled only by my Love’s and her endings for you are as imaginative or worse than my own. In the interim, I shall do my best to gain your hate, Count. But that shall be another time.

There was a change. A softening in the phantasmagoria of the dark as the characters in it began to lose their edges. He grasped at Jonathan all the tighter.

I have not dismissed you. It is a long way to England yet. I hope the woman is satisfied with riding the rest of the way with you in a coma.

The thoughts leered, but the intent begged. It wound around Jonathan in a serpent’s coils, holding, clutching, trapping—

Let me go, Count.

No.

Tighter and tighter on the disintegrating form, becoming a cage, a coffin, a clutching fist, a dragon winding around and around its treasure, no no no, mine mine mine—

Before it’s too late.

No!

Within the mind and above the Persephone, thunder cracked and lightning struck. A great, blinding, devastating bolt. It had her voice and a single message to share.

MINE.

And with that, he was back in the cargo hold. The sailor’s heart had been crushed to pulp in his hands. His fingers and eyes ran with the same scarlet runnels. Above deck, he felt the riot of a storm that was not his battering the ship. He cursed and threw himself out to it, wrestling until dawn to hammer the weather smooth again.

In another patch of water, under the same voyeur moon, the Aurora cruised on under a starlit sky. A girl and her young man stood on the deck, her hand over his as he gripped the railing so hard it bent to the shape of his fingers. The young man’s eyes snapped open, lungs jerkily refilling with a gasp they’d not yet learned was reflex more than need.

 Jonathan?

“I’m fine. …How long was that?”

Less than two minutes.

“It felt longer.”

It’s like that. Even when conscious, it will try to drag things into dreaming. Ever a showman.

“Did you trace him? Do you know which ship?”

Yes. The Persephone. Our ports won’t be far apart.

Her smile curved, red as rose petals, thorn-sharp.

And I believe their vessel has hit some stormy weather just now. Though it is endeavoring to ease the worst of it.

“Do you need..?”

No, Darling. I only press when I feel it slacking. It will be wrung out by the time it reaches shore. I will merely be peckish. 

Her smile dimmed a shade as she searched her husband’s face.

Are you certain you’re alright?

“I am, Mina. Even if I weren’t, we could not risk it being you. Not while he’s still scrabbling to take your reins again.”

It showed you, didn’t it?

“Showed what?” Mina looked at him. Read him. Turned over the stone that her husband had freshly laid over the revelations bled out into his mind. “Ah. That.”

That. Was this what hurt you in there?

“I am not—,” Her hand went to his cheek. A rust-colored drop was swept away. “Oh. I thought I felt lightheaded.”

Do not distract. Was learning it what hurt you?

“It did not hurt. Only shamed me, somewhat. It casts a different light on his pending demise.”

A slaying made into euthanasia?

“…That is certainly a word for it.”

There are few others to choose from. Extermination. Justice. Recompense. Safety. But, in its thinnest terms, yes, euthanasia. I would not be surprised if he welcomed it in the end. I think I would.

His hand seized around hers.

“Why?”

She smiled back. The ghost of the living girl made its edges soft.

You would not understand. You do not know what it is to love and be loved by you, Jonathan. To imagine the latter was a lie? Worse, a lie you assumed was known by the one who loved you? I do not know if I could suffer it. More, you remain Love himself. Coveted and giving and, even for the Thing we hunt, pitying. For you champion the feeling in its own right, even as you did not guess that you were more to the Thing than a trophy.

They were silent for a time. Feeling the creep of dawn coming for the horizon. Jonathan looked to her again. Searching.

“Mina. Did you know?”

The possibility occurred to me. It did not mourn the Weird Sisters for more than a year, despite their time with it. Lucy it was bitter for losing only because she was the first conquest of a new land, slain before she could be enjoyed. I, the supposed new companion, was relegated within months to an afterthought. No more or less than a necessary evil in its mind—the hostage there to keep you there. With it. And it speaks volumes that it kept even a fraction of its word to you at all.

It could have taken you at any time, Jonathan. Pounced and bit and fed and turned, all with no one to stop it. But it didn’t. Not merely to see you suffer through the performance as you had before, but because it wanted to hide in the fact that you had free will. That you were immune to all but the most superficial pulls of the mesmer rather than the permanent leash upon my mind. It wanted you free and human and in its company, ‘of your own choosing.’ Or near enough. I can think of no reason for it beyond the Thing hoping for the act to become real.

“I cannot tell if that’s a mark of insanity or sadness.”

Perhaps both. And you do not have to cover yourself in barbs here, my Love. There are things we do not wish on enemies, even if they are deserved. That being said—,

“My plans have not changed, Darling.” He leaned his face into her palm, smiling. “We will dance on his ashes for what he’s done. For what he means to do.”

When we finish, we can pour what’s left of him upon a garden of wild roses. Perhaps it will carry some peace after him.

The rest of their conversation was not in words. It carried on even as they pressed their lips into the perfect mold of each other’s, the tableau of them spied only by another couple who thought they must be their elders as they went along to their own room.

“Now when was the last time you kissed me like that?”

“Oh, hush. I’m sure it was only yesterday I did. Sometime after the banquet, wasn’t it?”

“Mm.”

“And anyway, it’s not the sort of thing for our age, dear. These young people are growing ever brasher out in the open.”

“Yes, in public, on a boat. Most brazen. Lord knows there’s scads of witnesses…”

Daybreak came and the storm departed with it. The one in the sky, at least.

Down below, in the dark, in the dirt inside a box, a smaller tempest raged. Tried to rage. Tried to hold to thunder and lightning and hail. But the death-sleep melted it down into its truer shape, freed from the whipping of desperation in the guise of anger. The grave earth became rosy mud as new tears rolled. Between this and the toll of keeping back the storm, even nursing from the crushed heart had barely helped in stalling the change. Black hair had turned to iron, iron to ancient white.

Dreaming dragged him down and away from his own will. Through the foam of futures yet unborn, through the penalties and precautions yet to be inflicted, all the way to a moonlit window in the library. His friend stood before him. Alive and undead. Wasted and hale. Blue-eyed and red. Cold lips smiling and pressing into his. Joy frozen in place.

In the world outside his mind, the cadaver of an old man moved just enough in his bed of soil to hold the brooch tighter. Enough so that the clasp split his skin and poured ichor over the golden dragon and its treasure. He did not feel it.

But wept just the same. 

[fox-bright]

I'm playing TotK again, and wondering. After all is said and done, villain routed, battle won--do you think Zelda ever prays to Hylia again?

I mean, imagine being her.

You devote yourself with fervor to the worship of your grandmother goddess, she whose golden blood runs through you. You know, you know that she is real; her mark is visible everywhere on the face of the world. You meditate and you sacrifice and you pray, you pray so constantly that it comes and goes like breathing. Waiting for the still small voice your mother told you stories about, before she died; waiting for the touch of a golden hand. For comfort. For purpose. For peace.

And all you get, ever, is silence. Not even the quiet of a held breath, the hollow ears-ringing of an empty room.

And then Calamity comes. And you do everything you can, and it's laughable how quickly your defenses break. A straw against a sword. Your army dies, most of them in the first few minutes of the fight. And your family dies, your father, aunts and uncles, cousins every one destroyed inside the same forty-five minutes. And your friends die, everyone who pledged themselves to you--they die first, and in pain, in full view of their people.

(And then their souls are trapped for a century, waiting for you to finally fulfill your fucking promises.)

Your warrior, your most devoted, your silent watcher, dies in your arms.

And then She comes to you. A drop of Her spirit, too little, too late, only just enough to preserve your knight until his body could be healed. And you scrape together every other bit of power you can summon and every scrap of knowledge you've ever managed to learn about wards and magical defense, and you walk into hell, and you curl around the devil and you go to sleep for a century.

And you have some power, now! Enough to fight him when he wakes. Enough to put him down, for a little while. And you think, maybe it's over, you can gather up your scattered people and rebuild at long last. And you start, and you get five or seven years at it before the real enemy shows up.

And again, you do what you have to do.

And again, you sacrifice...everything. All you have. More than you knew you could, because at least when you petted the devil to sleep for a century you were still yourself. Now you have to lose even that, and for an unimaginable amount of time. What's a century next to a hundred millennia? What's the eyelid-flicker of your mortal life, that mere couple of decades--you don't even notice decades anymore. Centuries are seasons to you now.

And here's the real bitch of the problem, that could only become clear to you from this height; you could never get Her attention in that mortal lifetime because you'd already been in perfect communion with Her for scores of thousands of years before you were born. Because anyone who is Goddess-touched gets torn out of time, and good luck putting your feet squarely on any forward-stretching path ever again.

Because the Dragon of Light is never out of Her sight, not ever, not for an instant, and what does some bit of chaff, some mortal mite, have in comparison to that accord?

What do you think it's like, to realize that the reason everyone you ever cared about died, was because they already had? Because when you went back, the ever-watchful eyes of Hylia learned everything you knew, and would not act to change it?

What do you think it's like, to know that no matter how hard you struggled, every single bit of effort you ever put toward saving the world was wasted? That there was nothing, nothing you could have done? If you'd known, you could have told them all to get away from you, and that's the only way you could have saved them. But you didn't know, and She didn't warn you, did she. No matter how much you abased yourself, begging for knowledge or aid.

And now at the end of all of it, returned again for a second time to her little, mortal self, tiny body, tiny lifespan, how do you think Zelda feels? She's been Goddess-ridden for longer than every civilization on her planet has existed. She has had Hylia's voice in her ears for every moment of eons. She has access to knowledge now that not one of her line of Priestess Queens has ever imagined.

But I think. If I were Zelda. I'd get my feet squarely back on the ground, and I'd commune with Her one last time, and I'd tell Her. "You got what you needed from me. And I guess I got what I needed from you. So we can call it even; we're quits. I'm done. I'll leave the key under the mat."

[recitedemise]

𝗠𝗮𝗻𝘆 𝗼𝗳 𝗚𝗮𝗹𝗲'𝘀 𝘃𝘂𝗹𝗻𝗲𝗿𝗮𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗶𝘁𝗲𝘀 𝘄𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝗮𝗴𝗴𝗿𝗮𝘃𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗼 𝗱𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗹𝗼𝗽 𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗼 𝘁𝗿𝗮𝘂𝗺𝗮 𝗿𝗲𝘀��𝗼𝗻𝘀𝗲𝘀, 𝗿𝗲𝘀𝗽𝗼𝗻𝘀𝗲𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗠𝘆𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗮 𝗮𝗰𝗰𝗲𝗽𝘁𝘀 𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘁𝗹𝗲 𝗰𝘂𝗹𝗽𝗮𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗳𝗼𝗿. This lengthy headcanon will refer to canon dialogue from mostly Gale, sometimes others. Reader's discretion is advised. There will be in depth explorations into grooming, emotional abuse, heavy manipulation, and suicide.

First, let it be said that Gale, a mortal man, will always be the powerless one in his dynamic with Mystra. Of course, nearing forty years of age, he remains entirely responsible for his own actions, his own blunders and every hurt he'll cause, but it's important to remember who formed much of who he is: his goddess, his deity, and egregiously, his lover.

Mystra is power. Mystra is possibility. She knows what sway she holds over her Ioyal, vulnerable, and entirely mortal followers. In all ways that matter, they are but lambs she can steer and herd as she sees fit. She knows they can't deny her and knows they'll never want to. Gale's sheer servitude and complete devotion. Mystra, knowing that, used him to filth.

Gale: I was just... practising an incantation. Player Character: No, there's more to it than that. I know devotion when I see it. Gale: What can I say? She's—she's Mystra. I can't describe it, the need I sometimes feel to see her - to draw the filaments of fantasy into existence... Mystra is all magic. And as far as I'm concerned, she is all creation. Player Character: I didn't realize the depth of your devotion. Gale: Magic is... my life. I've been touched with the Weave for as long as I can remember. There's nothing like it.

Gale, orb in his chest, doomed to be eaten by the very thing he loves the most, still speaks so reverently of the goddess, of his lover that has left him to die. He conjures images of her memory—and she is all the while forgetting about his.

Minsc: Gale reminds me of vremyonni of my homeland. The man-mages of Rasheman. While the girl-folk go on to rule as wychlaran, Weave-touched boys were hidden away. Trained to work their craft in silence and secrecy. It is an old custom, not well-observed. In truth, I thought it born of caution after some catastrophe of wizardly men-folk of old. Now, I wonder if it was not done to hide them from Mystra, and the snares she sets for young and prideful boys, hm?

Tales of Mystra's treachery spreads far, leaving those familiar waters surrounding Gale's tower in Waterdeep. They whisper her name, afraid to utter it one time too many, suspecting, perhaps, that she'll show in their mirror like some Faerûnian Bloody Mary.

Talent rouses Mystra. She can see who uses the gift of the Weave and feel them, sampling whatever delight sings their veins as they pull from her domain. Not unlike a spider, she'll follows every tremor that strikes her as just a sliver more profound; and Gale, a prodigy, plucked the Weave's web to so garner her focus. And like some black widow scurrying, she surged down that ripple to prey on a boy. There, Gale, so impressionable, was just a mite older than twelve whole summers. He sat so stunned, beholding Mystra as she lured him into the cradle of her Astral domain. Bathed in her magic, pleasantly coddled within that glittering cosmos, Gale felt blessed in a way he'll struggle always to recount, no word, no language, fit to describe it. He felt chosen. He felt seen. And potently, to a child, he felt loved. Now, imagine a child experiencing something like that. Imagine what they'd think, how brilliant they must be when stood beside the rest. She told him he was gifted, made his heart swell not unlike a child's appetite for praise. She knew what she was doing by offering these morsels, by preying on a child's most delicate mind, and Gale, child prodigy, was already so awash in the idea that his value was in magic. Unfortunately, Gale, susceptible, had no way of squirming out of his goddess' grasp.

Reality: She's laid down the seeds to creep into his heart. When he's just old enough—seventeen's sufficient, she thinks—she stakes her claim and makes him hers.

Gale: My virtuosic talent once caught the eye of the goddess of magic herself, Mystra, who named me her chosen and her lover.

Gale is stunned when she takes him to bed the first time. (Is this really happening?) Mystra claims his mouth in a kiss, taking everything she knows he offers so willingly. Mystra, of course, is not so stunned.

Dream Visitor: An elder brain... one of the cruelest and most powerful creatures in existence, enslaved by mere mortals. Gale, tasked with Mystra's missive to sacrifice himself: This is it... I must do as Mystra commands.

Gale has worryingly low self-esteem beyond his magic. As already explored, his entire worth as a man hinged on and was built entirely off his talent as a wizard. He fought tooth and nail for any crumb of affection Mystra would offer his way, something she only gave him at all seeing his gift as a child. He wants her forgiveness. He desires it genuinely. He believes so firmly that he has wronged his goddess, buying into the idea that sacrificing himself will right his wrong. She holds such dominion over him, making him reduce his confidence in himself into a mere, trifling pittance; after all, she wasn't just his lover, but the patron deity he prays to. And regardless, Gale is a people pleaser, his initial acceptance of her missive coming as no surprise.

After all, Gale, at times, goes to incredible lengths to appease his audience. This habit, compulsion, impulse, whatever you want to call it, is a quality that was relentlessly exacerbated in his relationship with his immortal paramour. He wanted to content her, felt all he did was never enough, for as a matter of principle, he was oceans, leagues, and entire galaxies beneath her. Gale figures: well, how can a short-lived dalliance satisfy a god? He had to make her happy. Indeed, he'd done everything she'd ask. He'd bedded her how she liked, kissed her how she wanted, and of course, even said those words she'd said tasted best. She was his lover, a lover that never tended to his own needs and pleasures, and he fooled himself into thinking that's enough. He won't bend backwards for everyone, mind you, but if you're of the ones he would, he would stop at nothing to make you happy. After all, people pleasing is a way to keep oneself safe, a trauma response to sidestep discomfort, and though it achieves only a direly tentative peace, when that is all you've been fed, you will pursue it.

Gale did not want to lose Mystra; he couldn't bare the sting of it. And so, when Elminster visited him, Mystra's call for his death offered oh so callously, Gale, heartbroken, felt that part of him kick up. He couldn't endure the guilt, was so hungry for a chance to let his weighty heart breathe, even if it meant dying in the process.

At least this way, he'll finally do something right. At least this way, Mystra will forgive him, and all his friends will survive.

Gale: After I was afflicted with my condition, I locked myself in my tower for an entire year. I was inconsolable, wallowing in my self-inflicted tragedy. I'd given up on myself.

As a byproduct of people pleasing, Gale, too, is all too quick to accept all guilt. He self-deprecates, gaslights himself to a venomous degree, and twists his reality in so cruel a way as to make him the villain Mystra'd led him to believe. He self-flagellates himself, the first one in the world who will throw Gale of Waterdeep a mental punishment. Mystra's a goddess, after all, seen as utterly faultless, and twined so tightly with a being so mighty in esteem, Gale slipped into the role of the guilty often. When tied with anyone with grandeur like this, so immeasurable in their own self worth, it's important to keep in mind this: you are nothing but a prop in which to fulfill their ego. Gale was not Mystra's, not by a long shot. Rather, Gale was a tool, simply her mortal extension.

And he took every blow meant for her... a common and terrible habit for many people in imbalanced, ego-fueled relationships.

Gale's life beyond her wasn't something that interested her. She took most of Gale's devotion, manipulated his life to be her sole mantle of attention, for Mystra is not a goddess that shares very happily.

Indeed, long before his self-imposed isolation, this jealous deity did well at keeping him isolated.

Player Character: Picture kissing him. With tenderness. Then, with passion. Gale: I... I didn't think— Narrator: You perceive quick-fire embarrassment, trepidation, and finally... elation.

And so, cheated out of love, so reduced in his value as a man and lover both, suffice to say, Gale's slow to believe he can ever be loved. That's what happens when you're with someone so cold, consistent only in their infinite lack of respect. Gale looks at fondness, and he feels—confounded, to be sure. He thinks, is this truly mine to have? He doesn't know what to do, is nearly forty in game, and despite having lived decades devoted to one relationship, he feels, at the same time, entirely out of depth. To be frank, he greets it with embarrassment, like he's been caught red handed with something not his at all. He's like a child caught rummaging with his hand in a cookie jar, all this isn't mine to enjoy, not mine to indulge in, but he thinks, startled, but god, do I want. He wars with disbelief, uncertainty, and need, and in so many ways feeling utterly starved, with just a glimmer of affection, he falls fast into love.

Scenario: (And if properly romanced, it changes his world.)

Gale: In her (Mystra's) likeness, I used to read a thousand stories. She was beauty, wisdom, elegance, power... she contained universes. But now... it is hard to see any redeeming qualities in a lover who condemned you to death. I'd much rather gaze into your eyes than hers. Yours are capable of tenderness and feeling... No god could ever compare.

He says it with sincerity. There is such wonder, such love, and such awe in his eyes. He makes the act of kissing him feel like you've just reached into the trenches to but pluck him soundly from his ruin and despair. You think, Gale Dekarios, how unloved have you been all this time?

Gale: To know you love me for the man I am, and not the magic I command… none have loved me so purely before.

The answer is: entirely.

For so long, Gale thought love was simply being chosen. He knew nothing of being favored for the quality of his character, to be cherished and accepted even in those ways he fumbles and lacks. Again, his needs were seldom met, often treated with utter indifference by Mystra herself, and to meet someone so eager to treasure him, dote on him in a way his heart, his body is somberly new to, raptures his spirit and captures his soul. He's seen for who he is. He's... loved, desired for his silly quips, his easy smiles, and his growing affections. He bares himself to them, and in turn, they cradle his heart like something entirely precious. Gale thinks this has to be dream. He says, at times, you are more than I deserve.

Scenario: (But sometimes, he hopes too strongly and loves too greatly. As it always does, then, like he's once more wanted too much, he watches something beautiful slip right through his fingers. Of course, Gale Dekarios. Of course it does.)

Player Character: I didn't know you felt so strongly, Gale. Gale: Perhaps I should have done more. Been more charming, more flattering, harder to reach... but I was only myself, and sometimes that isn't enough.

They don't love him anymore. It breaks his heart. He hurts so much, so profoundly and deeply, and he doesn't realize that he breaks their heart in turn.

Unable to ever voice his feelings with Mystra in any way that amounted to much, Gale's a tendency to wallow, expressions coming off as potentially 'guilt-tripping' and even, on occasion, passive aggressive. Firstly: Gale NEVER means to manipulate emotions, and he's no intention of twisting anyone's arm, either. Fact is, Gale, never taken seriously when he'd bared his vulnerabilities to the Mother of the Weave, can end up saying just a little too much. He feels very deeply, and for most his life, seldom had an outlet for these weeping sentiments. He sometimes lets slip raw words and oftentimes heart-wrenching expressions; all the same, it's not so pitiful as to shepherd an outcome, but rather, is a gesture taken by a man so desperate to be heard. It may feel like scheming, but the truth is far, far greyer: feeling as though he's no right to share the depth of his heart, Gale simply lets it geyser out in a way he can't cork up. In ways he doesn't realize, he's adapted to this ache, passively reacting so his feelings can at least be seen and recognized—no matter how pitifully unwhole. With someone who values so little his thoughts... well, when he slips into these moods, one can hardly feign shock.

Situation: (And if no one shows him trust and tenderness, any true care in his character or worth, Gale gets swallowed up by how wronged he was.

He thinks: Let me be a god. Let no one hurt like me anymore.)

Gale: They only want us to serve them, pray to them...and ultimately, to die for them. But what if we didn't need them? What if we wielded their power instead and helped ourselves in all the ways they refuse to? I could make that happen.

Gale is not above anger, and as stated, he is not above pettiness; however, more than that, he is not above righting himself whatever wound he was struck. Gale, if not offered much by ways of affection, understanding, is made to believe that one idea that's lived growing in his mind: Gale Dekarios is far from sufficient; he has to be more. He has to be better. Gale, in such an unkind ending for himself, sips too desperately—and perhaps greedily, too, but desperately serves as a far better word—at that idea that he needs power. And so, wresting the Crown of Karsus for himself, he spites Mystra in his own way, becoming a god he feels is leagues better than she will ever be. Damn her thoroughly. Damn her ego, her power, and her endless indifference. He will serve the people, protect them, and in ways Mystra never could, better the world.

Situation: But as a god, he loses all sense of his kindness. Humanity. All who loved him leave him, and even Tara spurns the image he's become. With power, he's gained the respect he thought he always wanted... but in turn, he lost in even greater measure all the love he's known.

Endnote: But healing, knowing to forgive himself and knowing he's deserving of care simply for being Gale Dekarios will remain, always, the best path for him.

[mystieris]

Urban Gods Worship System

(I'm terrible at posting information about this project xD; )

So in the world of Urban Gods, it's basically the world of the myths, they just have cars and Instagram (btw, I'm open to suggestions on how to make "Instagram" a Greek mythology pun xD), and I wanted to come up with a replacement for animal sacrifices since that's no longer really a thing in our modern day society. While it is common to use altar worship, item and food offerings and prayers of a lot of modern worshippers in our world, since this is a world where gods are also active members of society, there's another, far more popular method - patronizing establishments owned by the gods themselves.

Several major gods own restaurants, hotels, chain stores and other establishments, while more minor gods, as well as nymphs, satyrs, and other benign creatures, will often be employed there. The following is a master list of establishments I have plotted out so far, and who owns and works for them...

Hades - Inferis - A subterranian casino resort in Athens; Charon, the Furies and the Keres will cycle working the different security posts, Thanatos works as waitstaff in the bar/restaurant areas, Hypnos works the front desk on the hotel side, Hecate appears to work some sort of upper management position, and Minthe works as the casino host at the beginning of the story, eventually being replaced by Persephone. Hermes frequently works as a bartender, and all other positions are often filled by unnamed nymphs, gorgons, and other Underworld creatures.

Zeus - Vronti - A luxury hotel chain, with the flagship location in Athens, overlooking the Temple of Olympian Zeus. Thetis works as the concierge, Hermes will work odd jobs throughout the whole building, Hephaestus leads the maintenance crew, and Hera appears to have some sort of job there, but it's somewhat unclear exactly what as through most of the story she and Zeus are hovering between their good terms and their bad terms xD

Poseidon - Atlantis - A small chain of beach tiki bars with "hidden" drug den areas. I haven't quite worked out where the flagship location is, but most of the time the location seen is the one in Athens. And yes... Athena hates that he has a location in Athens, which Poseidon denies being because of his grudge. Claims, "Well, my brothers have their flagship locations here, mortals would ask questions if I didn't, too...!" Pretty much all positions are filled by different sea nymphs and creatures and aren't individually identified yet.

Demeter and Dionysus - A farm/vineyard in Sicily with a shop attached. Basically it's an enormous farm property that different parts are run by Demeter or Dionysus, Persephone basically runs the shop, Plutus offers financial consulting, Triptolemus cares for the animals on site, and various nymphs and satyrs assist in other areas. Additionally, Dionysus also works as the drink master for all three of the kings' establishments.

Athena - A university in Athens. Not much else is developed about it so far as the only scene written involving it is a brief shot of a classroom and just exposits how the gods are "technically not related" according to my world, but Athena is the dean as well as teaching classes.

Hephaestus - Has no direct stores or anything, but is basically the diving force behind mortals developing computers and robotics.

Ares - Basically runs the this world's equivalent to the UFC, which, because it's run by Ares is a mite more violent than in our world. He also has a gym he operates in Sparta that Phobos and Deimos can often be seen working as personal trainers ar.

Aphrodite - A chain of adult toy stores that are franchised to Eros and the rest of her and Ares' kids, while she'll also offer love advice for a fee at the flagship location in Sparta (somewhere within walking distance to Ares' gym).

Apollo - Works as a pop idol, beyond that I don't really have much developed.

Artemis - Like Apollo, not very developed yet, but the idea that she runs a popular hunting blog.

Hestia - Owns a spa resort known for its luxurious food and services.

More will be edited in as I develop more/remember things as I was sick from stress at the original time of posting this. Follow me for more updates on this project and incorrect quotes! :)

[verosvault]

🚨SPOILERS FOR FANTASY HIGH JUNIOR YEAR EPISODE 8🚨

Dimension20 "Fantasy High Junior Year"

Fracas at the Frostyfaire Folk Festival

Timestamp: 34:54

Video Length: 4min. & 45sec.

Research into Cassandra and Ruvina + Learning about Oblivati Mori (Pt.1 | ‣Pt.2 | Pt.3)

Fig: "Do you want a Bardic?"

Fabian: "I can... Hey, The Ball? Let me help."

Riz: : "Okay, yeah. It's just-"

Gorgug: "Can I have a Bardic?"

Riz: "It's just the dust mites."

Fig: "Do you want some help?"

Riz: "I'm a little worried about the dust mites!" 😭✋ (Murph's CONCERNED FACE! 😭✋)

Fig: "Here!" *starts to play* 😭✋

Riz: "Oh no! It's okay!" 😭✋

Emily: "If you see me wink, you get a Bardic." (😭😭😭😭✋✋✋✋)

Murph: Okay, okay. (*blocking Emily's winks with his hands*! 😭✋)

Lou: "Can my Bardic just be that I run screen?" 😭✋

Fabian: "No, no, look at me. No!"

Emily: "Don't you want it? Don't you want it?" (😭😭😭😭)

Murph: "Okay, right off the bat, dirty 20. Should I throw this on there and try to-"

Emily: "Yeah!"

Siobhan: "why not?!"

Lou: "Come on, baby. Let's cook."

Murph: "26."

Lou: "We stay eatin'!"

Brennan: "Hell yes."

Ally: "A feast."

Murph: "So afraid of dust mites. Are there..." 😭✋

Brennan: "So I think you're going through Rana's stuff, which is all the actual, the poetic... She was the cleric of the group, right? And you're going through Cormyr's stuff. Cormyr was a sorcerer, but you actually see, for someone that was innately magical, Cormyr had very meticulous notes, beautiful script, and has something written out which is a long... You can tell it's a copying of another text. As you arrive at it, it's basically, he wrote a glossary literally for the possibility that they would all die on this mission, and another group of adventurers would find this stuff and could pick up where they left off."

Emily: "We should remember to do that in the future." 😭😭😭✋✋✋

Siobhan: "Put it on the board. Put it on the board!"

Brennan: "You find-"

Gorgug: "A for Adaine."

Brennan: "You find-"

Adaine: "That's my name! What?"

Fig: "I think it's the information, not us." 😭✋

Gorgug: "Oh, well, how holistic is it?"

Adaine: "Catch up. Stop thinking about-[inaudible]"

Riz: "I texted you this stuff, man!" 😭✋

Gorgug: "Got it." 💀💀

Brennan: "What you see is, there is the beginning of a text that is written- and I think that... Adaine, go ahead and give me one more- give me actually, an Arcana, 'cause you rolled History. Give me an Arcana real quick."

Siobhan: "I did roll History...23."

Lou: "Sexy." 😂💀

Brennan: "You are able to point out- you know that what you're looking at is not a spell. But Adaine, you're familiar that there's lots of kinds of magical writing that are not spells. There's ways of annotating things that are magical laws or precepts, and what you are seeing here is a dually arcane and religious axiom of magical law of Spyre. And what you see is it says, "Obliviati Mori."

Emily: "Remember you will die? Or forget you will die?!" (👀👀)

Brennan: "Clerics call it Obliviati Mori, but you see that as an arcane rule, it is called the Law of Theothanatic Silence."

Siobhan: "So that's when a god dies, you forget their name."

Brennan: "Yes. But you see that he's writing down all the mortal stuff you already know. When a god dies, you forget their name. When a god dies, they're scrubbed from existence. When a god dies, da da da da da. But you guys also know that for all that being said, 'Yes!' is dead because nobody believes in it, but people remember 'Yes!', right?"

Siobhan: "Oh, we all remember 'Yes!'." 😭✋

Brennan: "You all remember 'Yes!'."

Zac: "I'll never forget that thing."

Siobhan: "They had a cogent philosophy that we comprehended deeply."

Ally: "Maybe we should forget, though." (😭😭✋✋)

Fig: "Just to be clear, when I was talking about becoming a paladin, it was for 'Yes!'." (😭😭✋✋)

Kristen: "Wait, what? No, no!" 😭✋

Adaine: "Wait, for 'Yes!' or for 'Yes??'" 💀💀💀

Zac: "I'll never forget that thing sliding out of-" 😭✋

Ally: "Yeah, sliding out of that hole." 😭✋

Siobhan: "Just so wet."

Murph: "That thing getting pooped out of space." 😭😭✋✋

Brennan: "Basically, there is an intense series of rules and restrictions, but you see this rule doesn't apply to mortals. It applies to the gods."

Siobhan: "Oh! So the gods also forget the name?!"

Brennan: "They do not."

Siobhan: "Oh! And that's why we remember Yes!, 'cause we're all gods!" (😂💀 IMAGINE! 😂💀)

Brennan: "You're all gods! Obliviati Mori is a precept that binds deities to not evangelize or even speak of fallen deities to mortals. In other words, it's written out as a precept of basically like, if a god succumbs to some form of death, they become archfey, they become a demon or a celestial rather than a full deity, if they only have a few dozen followers and another god kills them and they don't have the strength to withstand that, or if literally, in the most extreme cases, their name is fully forgotten, other deities are not allowed to effectively remind mortals of their existence."

Siobhan: "So does that mean that the person who wrote the note that is supposed to be from Lucy was actually a god?"

Brennan: "It makes it very unclear who could have written that. Because you're in this weird position where you guys can all write Yes!, you can write Cassandra. This god is one whose name has actually been forgotten or scrubbed by every single mortal."

[undeath1245]

How I think N and the Solver's battle will start off...

After N makes a deep, emotional "the reason you suck" speech at the Solver... Solver: "Are you done now, N? Seriously, you are so whiny, so dramatic, so depressing. You're really angry at me for causing so much trouble, killing so many people, tormenting all of your friends, and eating your precious girlfriend? My God, N, you should have known this by now. I am an all-powerful, apathetic eldritch entity. You cannot stop me. Your girlfriend can't stop me. No one can't stop me. You and everyone in the universe are but mere ants to me, mites even! You're all just food that I decide play with before I chow down on all of you like a hungry, manic dog. I honestly can't understand why you mortals would complain about me having my fun, and I honestly don't want to. You should already know what kind of story this series of events is, and here you are yelling at me because I killed and tormented your friends. Like, literally kill yourself before I kill you! God!" The camera switches to a tired, fed-up N as he does a deep sigh before readying his swords.

[ayyy-imma-ninja]

To the fairy boys, there's a dumb question that's been bugging me, do mosquitos, leeches, duck mites, ticks, fleas, and other such things bother you? Or do they leave you alone?

"They do not, fortunately!" "Those are pests for the mortals to deal with. Their business doesn't involve us." "Leeches are funky, though."

[jq37]

The Report Card – Fantasy High Junior Year Ep 8

Enter the Vultureverse

Welcome back to the Report Card where we are having a mini recap because my schedule has been off the wall bonkers! Luckily, this week we can split the episode pretty neatly into two sections: research and fighting. We’ll go more in depth on the research than the fighting because those are the bits that will be more long term plot relevant though I’m sure the fighting will be long term relevant to Gorgug and the therapist I hope he has because yikes gang!

First things first, we resolve stress tokens which the party has to use to nerf themselves and take disadvantage on the skills they choose. They are as follows: 

Fig: Insight and Religion. 

Gorgug: Initiative, Insight, Deception, and Charisma Saves. 

Adaine: Initiative, Intimidation and Persuasion. 

Fabian: Tool Proficiencies, History, Investigation, and Perception. 

Kristen: Initiative, Wisdom Saves, and Medicine

Riz: Perception, Survival, Athletics, and Deception.

When we left, Lydia had dropped off all the info from her old party mates and the Bad Kids were surprised to see that it was all written not in Infernal but in Giant. The whole gang (except Gorgug who’s still at home) circles up in Adaine’s tower to help and she casts Comprehend Languages so she can read the texts. Fig tosses Adaine a bardic to juice her History roll which prompts Brennan to have Siobhan roll on a d100. On a 91, Adaine’s stomach gurgles and a cloud of dust mites fly into her eyes, causing her to knock her head and pass out. 

Kristen rushes to her aid (with a medicine check rather than spells since she’s currently out) to stabilize her. Brennan asks if she rolled less than an 8 and even though she didn’t, her stomach also gurgles and she sees a vision of the food court: a flash of red, a familiar scream (not Cass), and then silence. In Adaine’s eyes, she sees splattered blood reflected. Ominous!

Everyone is freaked and they’re getting major shrimp vibes. Fig declares herself cursed and submits to arcana checks from everyone. With his angel-spy necktie, Riz casts Detect Good and Evil and finds a fiendish aura around her that’s different than her natural one. She is for sure cursed.

While this is going on, Gorgug is at home, watching Frostyfaire stuff get set up. His parents allude to some ~mysterious machines~ under tarps and promise not to embarrass him. That’s not oddly specific at all and it certainly won’t come back to bite him in this very same episode. He gets the text from the group that Adaine passed out and goes to meet up with them but, as he leaves, he sees electricity running through one of his parents many gadgets and has a moment of inspiration about how the pulse of the electricity and the pulse of his blood and heart when he’s raging might have some kind of synchronicity. He makes a note and saves it for later. 

OK! Now let’s round up all the new info the party learns from the notes Lydia provided:

There’s a record of Ruvina (Lucy’s god) giving Cass a wedding gift: a Bridle of Frost that would allow her to command a team of fiery horses. The fact that Cass was married is new info and Riz speculates whether she was being married to a giant/giant god.

Apparently, Cass, Galicaea (her sister), and Sol (her brother) were traveling together in the Mountains of Chaos.

(As an aside, we learn that Cass is more aligned with fae and Galicaea is with the elves–we knew that second part already. We also learn that Helio’s mom was a mortal woman.)

We learn of a law of magic called Obliviati Mori by Clerics and the Law of Theothanatic Silence by wizards. It basically means that even though gods can remember dead gods, they’re not allowed to revive them via worship by speaking their name and reminding mortals of them. Adaine gets the sense that if this is a law then it can be broken somehow and Brennan says yes, but there are likely hefty arcane penalties. 

Fabian wonders if Cass’s, “I thought you were dead” was referring to this dead god who is maybe her ex. Riz wonders if Lucy was possessed by a god and that’s how she was able to write down the name of the dead god–something that should have been impossible since no mortals know their name and no gods are allowed to speak or write it. 

Fig thinks the Ratgrinders are being mighty suspicious in their seeming lack of mourning for Lucy and especially in Ivy’s not shocked reaction to seeing her disguised as Lucy. 

(These next pieces of info we don’t get until after a short interlude but I’m gonna put it here to keep it neat.)

Riz thinks that it’s suspicious that Tracker’s church would suddenly be blowing up right when this dead god is coming back and wonders if there might be some shenanigans going on where their worship is somehow being siphoned off to power this other god (something gods are specifically not supposed to do). 

In one of the books, Kristen sees an illuminated page (illuminated as in illustrated–think Book of Kells) that is unfinished. It has an empty arch wreathed in flames and a design of red 24 point stars with sharp rays that are very similar looking to the shatter stars they encountered in the mall fight.

Fig wonders if a union of Doubt and Rage (Cass and this unknown god) was maybe too powerful so their marriage was sabotaged by another god.

After all the research, it’s almost time to go to Frostyfaire, but before they do, Kristen takes a leap of faith and (1) texts Tracker to see if they can meet up since her god is relevant to the investigation and (2) texts her parents to ask if they want to get coffee. Tracker says she’s busy the next few days but she’s free starting on Monday. Kristen's parents don’t text her back but her brother Bucky does and lets her know that her parents are debating it but it feels like they’re gonna say yes. Sibling loyalty! 

Adaine does a Detect Magic on the token Kristen’s teacher gave her and determines that it’s basically a deity-less Holy Symbol so she’s got something to tide her over while she works on getting Cass back. 

Fig, who you’ll recall is dabbling in paladin classes, decides to pray for the first time and attunes to a moment of doubt that’s sacred to her: when her horns first started growing in and it changed her whole life, ultimately for the better. The shards from Cass in Kristen’s pocket glows indigo and she decides to pray with Fig as well, gaining a 6th level spell slot back in the process. 

On to the fair!

When they arrive, Gorgug’s parents welcome them–incluing Fig’s alter-emo Wanda since she’s in disguise to mess with Ruben/hopefully get some info. Riz and Kristen are thinking that all the crunchy, granola kids here from Aguefort are a substantial voting block but, before they can do anything about that, an old druid shows up and offers them a toke of his pipe. 

Fool the Bad Kids once, shame on you, but they’re NOT getting trapped in a net like Max. They all immediately roll to check if something’s up and Adaine crits, clocking the druid as an illusion. Riz casually says, “No thanks Oisin,” as Adaine casts Dispel Magic, revealing not the Ratgrinder’s wizard but their bard, Ruben who sneers at them and then gets into an argument with Gorgug about whether he (Ruben) shits or not. Very normal teenager conversations. Fig has dipped at this point because she wants to debut as Wanda to Ruben at a strategic moment but she secretly hits him with a Hex to his Int to help guard against any rolls he might make to clock her disguise later. She also notices how mad Gorgug is getting at Ruben’s nonsense and texts Porter a list of things that piss Gorgug off, trying to help him out. 

Ruben’s band, My Clerical Gnomance (of course), of which Fabian is a big fan (sure) head to the stage and start playing their set but then, all of a sudden, thunder rumbles and a surge of electricity makes the stage lights go weird. In a flash, Grix appears, hovering above the crowd! He assesses the crowd and finds it full of rulebreakers and felonies so he decides to do his part in restoring “Perfect Order” by CASTING DISINTEGRATE ON RUBEN. Why is he even here? This is so outside of his jurisdiction! He says the school experience is best optimized by being omnipresent but COME ON man! This can’t be legal, even in Spyre!

Anyway, initiative! 

Like I said, we’re really gonna breeze through this fight because it’s mostly non-plot relevant but there are a few things I want to highlight:

Adaine right away burns a portent roll to save Ruben from the Disintegrate. I wonder if, in Ruben’s mind, that’s worth being a little softer towards the Bad Kids in the future. 

Grix uses a spell or ability to awaken all the nearby machines to fight by his side but…uh…the Thistlesprings were busy during the four months of night and they decided to retrofit some of their random appliances into very elaborate sex toys. Both Zac and Gorgug are mortified. 

Ruben curiously doesn’t just ditch when the going gets rough like you might expect someone who only grinds rats to do. He stays and does what you’d hope a bard would do: plays with this band to distribute bardics to everyone. Of course some of that is probably to impress “Wanda” who he spots in the crowd but you have to wonder how much his personal adventuring philosophy aligns with his party’s. Maybe not everything he’s done is logged on the official record. Also, he seems horrified by the situation so either (1) the RG’s aren’t somehow collaborating with Grix, (2) they are but only certain RG’s are in on it, or (3) he’s a great actor which he could be as a bard but I think that’s least likely. 

We learn that Gorgug in addition to his homunculus, Cloaca, now has a steel defender: a gecko named Clobica (a Battle Smith class feature). It’s kinda like a familiar that can attack.

The fight gets hairy fast with multiple Bad Kids getting stunned and Adaine going down. Kristen uses her one spell slot to cast Mass Cure Wounds but that still leaves Adaine, a squishy wizard, surrounded by enemies and a bunch of party members stunned and failing to snap out of it. 

Grix mentions that he was warned to expect tomfoolery in general but especially from the Bad Kids which of course begs the question, “By who?”

Grix is successfully able to cast Dominate Monster on Riz by appealing to his sense of order and visions of Lord Salazar Edge's College of Lone Adventurers dance in his head. He turns his attention to Adaine next (which makes me wonder if he was just consulting a dossier on the Bad Kids in that moment because Riz and Adaine are for sure the ones you’d target with this pitch). 

Now, this episode might be known as the one where they had to fight a sex toy lawnmower except for what happens next. Because, much like in the first fight this season, there is a vulture on this battle set. And our intrepid heroes noticed it immediately. So, back against the wall, party in dire straits, and out of spell slots, Kristen decides to interact with the vulture as the rest of the table give thumbs up, supporting the bit. 

She prays to Cass, asking for help in connecting with the vulture and then gives a now very familiar, “Heyyyyyy girlie.”

“WHAT DID YOU JUST CALL ME?” the vulture says to the surprise of the full table. Feathers whip around the dome and a graphic appears: YOU ARE ENTERING THE VULTURE DIMENSION. A new set is brought out. Everyone is losing their minds. I didn’t take a hit from Ruben's pipe but I feel high. And that’s where we end our episode!

No extras this week because I’m crunched for time but, don’t worry, I’ll roll that all into next recap since the fight continues in the next ep. Can’t wait to figure out what the hell the vulture dimension is tonight! 

[tk-duveraun]

17/? Luo Binghe is SO NORMAL about Shen Yuan

7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17 (here), 18

Read up through even numbered parts on Ao3

"Have you reported back to him?" Luo Binghe asked several days and a severed left arm later.

"Even this Venerable One has limits," Meng Mo replied.

Luo Binghe ate a piece Plucked Flaming-mingo meat raw as he mulled over that answer. He was finally used to neutralizing parasites and toxins in the things he ate, so no matter how unplesant it was, he at least wouldn't starve in the Abyss. Even though it looked like he had a left arm, the limb was completely useless, so he kept it strapped to his torso when not sleeping.

Without any knowledge of germ theory, Luo Baixiao must have struggled miserably in the original. Luo Binghe was trying not to think about it too hard. He was one more System revelation away from adopting the kid and he was already dead.

His primary concern was and would always be Shen Yuan. His words at the edge of the Abyss hadn't fully sunk in at the time, but now that he'd had several sleepless nights Luo Binghe couldn't stop turning them over in his head.

"Free us," he'd said. Us.

"Old Man, if you're really on my side tell me: what leverage does Linguang-jun have over Shen Yuan?"

"And here this Venerable One thought you'd never ask."

Luo Binghe snarled. It really had a nice feeling with the enlarged canines in his mouth. "Shen Yuan has some clever ideas on how to oust you permanently. Don't think I'll put up with this forever."

"Cheeky."

Luo Binghe would have called the threat a little more serious than cheeky, but he did want answers, so he said nothing.

"The Mobei clan is the only demonic family to never lose a technique once they create it. This gives them more room to experiment than, say, the Yangma clan."

Luo Binghe swallowed his last handful of 'mingo meat and stood. Meng Mo liked to wax poetic and show off his 'vast knowledge.' If his chosen form wasn't that of an old man, he definitely would have been one of Shen Yuan's most successful suitors. Unfortunately for the dream demon, Luo Binghe didn't care about any lessons not taught by his wife.

He was half way up a hill of black grass when the old demon got to the point.

"So in an attempt to copy the utility and terror of Heavenly Demon blood parasites, the Mobei clan bred a species of demonic ant, ant mind you, that was hatched only in a bath of ice demon blood. The ants, too small to be individually seen by mortal eyes, would then act as a surrogate threat."

"So Shen Yuan is infested by these demonic ants?"

Meng Mo audibly sniffed at being interrupted, but didn't complain. Likely because he'd already lectured for almost two hours about the Mobei clan's techniques. "They are called Frost-bound Mites, colloquially Ice Mites."

At the top of the hill, a massive creature attacked Luo Binghe. It was a cross between a hyena and a crab. It was slow enough that Luo Binghe decided to throw Meng Mo a bone. "Frost Mites, even though they're ants."

"Precisely! Children these days can't even name things properly. When I was friends with Mobei-jun, his clan would have been ashamed of such weak scholarship."

Luo Binghe tuned him out and focused on fighting. The exoskelleton was tough and resisted both his claws and fangs. His next strategy was a blast of demonic qi launched from his claws like a discount sword glare. Still no damage: that was promising; Luo Binghe had been looking for a sturdy-enough material to make a weapon from.

He tore his bottom lip with his fangs and manipulated both his qi and blood parasites to form a gruesome blade of blood. The creature fell easily to pointed strikes at its joints. At his tax bracket, Luo Binghe hadn't eaten a lot of crab, but he'd certainly cooked a lot of it. Actually, his butchering class was paying a lot of dividens in the Abyss.

Luo Binghe dragged the corpse down the hill and into a copse of trees with extremely phallic tentacles for leaves and aphrodisiac pollen. Thankfully both the pollen and the tentacles were repelled by a relatively weak demonic aura, while the trees remained a deterrant to most other things in the area.

The flesh, once Luo Binghe cracked open the creature, was a strangely slimey consistency and tasted like durian. Still full from the 'mingos, he was happy to toss it away.

That was when Meng Mo again got to the point. "Though this Venerable One was not in contact with Linguang-jun at the time, Shen Yuan came under Linguang-jun's influence and was infested with the Frost-blood Mites. Linguang-jun was likely using them to puppet your obsession when he attacked you at the conference."

That would explain a lot, actually. Luo Binghe erected enough of a mental barrier to keep his thoughts private, but not so thick as to prevent him from hearing if Meng Mo said anything else useful.

The Ice Mites would negate the various porn pa-pa-pollens, as fandom called them. Plus, Linguang-jun was probably trying to be discreet, hence Shen Yuan never going on missions alone. And it would explain the complex array under the Bamboo House. Linguang-jun probably had no idea how Shen Yuan was suppressing the Ice Mites and sent Luo Binghe to figure it out and or replace him as a spy.

The only problem with this new information is that it opened a world of new questions. Why did Luo Baixiao turn into an antagonist? Shen Yuan had clearly tried to help him despite the horrific seduction attempt. Sure, he hadn't managed by the time of Immortal Alliance Conference, but Shen Yuan probably still instructed him to enter the Abyss and find Xin Mo, so why?

Unfortunately, the System coudn't give Luo Binghe visions of things that happened to Luo Baixiao after he transmigrated. He would just have to hope there wasn't yet another plot twist waiting for him on the other end of the Abyss.

[leighsartworks216]

The Viper: Rewritten

Chapter 9

First Chapter - Previous Chapter

Jaskier x gn!Witcher!reader

Heyyyyy soooooo I'm alive. It just took me a while for the Witcher fixation to come back enough to motivate me to work on this again. I still have really cool plans further down the line, I just really struggled with this chapter a lot until I realized I didn't have to use what I'd written before as groundwork at all.

Jaskier may be out of character, idk. I only watched a couple of compilations to get him back in my head

Warnings: mentions of injuries, pain, intimate moments that are not portrayed as intimate, referenced nudity, swearing

Word Count: 2068

Masterlist

AO3

Tag List Form

The steaming water stung your wounds, just on the verge of being painful and pleasant. Slowly but surely, it eased your tense muscles, washing away the tension crying over your dead brethren brought. Sandalwood and vanilla wafted into your nose.

Your eyes were still raw. You scooped a handful of water and scrubbed at your face, working to remove the evidence of your emotions from recent memory. It was, well, unsettling how easy it was to be human again around the bard. Growing up, strong emotions, outside of pride and joy, were punished until it was beaten into you to conceal them or otherwise forget they existed at all. Of course, back then, you’d taken to hiding them rather than erasing them from your repertoire. Stuldweck had been the only one to keep your secret.

Perhaps it was for the simple fact that Jaskier understood the gruffness of Witchers better than any other mortal on the Continent. He’d never begrudge you that act of intimidation within towns and villages, and you’d dare to say he even welcomed the fact you weren’t as up your ass as Geralt had been.

Or maybe it was all you - the last vestiges of your humanity the mages hadn’t been able to strip away, reaching out with both hands to hold onto someone else.

You could remember the teachings of your mentors, telling you now to get it together, to stop being a fucking rat, and be a viper.

You dunked your head under the water.

These thoughts were bringing you in useless circles, and what did it matter anyhow? Even Geralt knew that to stand completely alone as a Witcher is a lost battle. There should be no need to fight yourself over this.

When you came up, your head felt a mite clearer. But your senses prickled with the sudden awareness of just how quiet the room was. You peeked over your shoulder. The screen divider had been moved just enough to give him some line-of-sight, in case you needed help with your injuries as they were. And just there, eyes affixed to your back, was just the bard that tormented your thoughts.

“I can feel you staring.”

He jolted out of his revelry, blinking and turning away, shaking his head of whatever thoughts were bugging him. You wondered briefly if he was going through a similar war as you; bugged by how fast he put his trust into another Witcher.

“Sorry. I wasn’t trying to,” he cleared his throat, “you know, sneak a peek, or anything.”

You hummed. A grin tugged at your lips, tempted to tease him about it. But the notes he began plucking on his lute as a distraction were an obvious insight into his mind. He’d only really played the old songs - those about Geralt, the incredible White Wolf - to make money, never to make anything new. But if he finally found the strength to scribble down some words and notes, it was better, then, to bite your tongue and give the bard the silence needed for his playing.

So you turned back around, and listened to the stuttered melody as you considered what comes next. Your path to Oxenfurt now that you’re in Tridam, the repairs needed to your armor and weapons, the potions you’d need to prepare for the road as well as provisions. As much as your body needed to rest to fully heal, bolstered by potions and mutations as it was, there would be no time for it, and resting would not grant you the coin needed to survive the trip.

If you could get to Crinfrid, you could cut through to Tretogor. It would bypass Vartburg and Drakenborg, towns you could rest and resupply in, but winter wouldn’t wait forever. Then, south west to Rdestowa Laka; it would put you just a few days out from Oxenfurt. Was it the best route? Perhaps not. It left you on the road more often than not, but the sooner you could reach Oxenfurt, the more time Jaskier would have to settle for the coming months.

And what would you do when you get there?

Visions of these moments, of times spent in inns with the bard, chatting and relaxed, flit by. Temptations to live like a human. To sit and watch the snow fall without the burden of wading through the snow to kill wraiths and rotfiends. Humans had holidays, too. Celebrations of winter and enchanting gifts.

Could you really experience that, too?

No, you think. You couldn’t.

Jaskier is humming under his breath as you resign to getting out of the bath. Whatever blood he’d missed while cleaning you in your unconsciousness was well and truly washed away by now, and moping in the steam could only serve you for so long.

You hissed as you pushed yourself forward, the stitches along your spine pulling taught at your skin. Jaskier was up on his feet in a moment.

“Let me help. We really don’t need you hurting yourself any more; my needlework isn’t quite up to snuff.” He appeared at your side, leaned down and guiding your good arm over his shoulders. With a hand at your side, he helped you get to your feet. As soon as you were standing, he grabbed the towel hanging on the room divider and handed it to you, eyes safely averted.

“You ever tried?”

He huffed a laugh as he sat back down on the bed, pointedly looking at the open journal next to him. “On one rather optimistic day, I’d had the brilliant idea of sewing the Countess de Stael a dress.”

You held the towel around you as you padded across the floor to your bags. Clean clothes were a luxury you couldn’t quite manage. The shirt you dragged out smelled like Bayard, and the pants were beginning to fray. But it was always better than marinating in dried blood, and you’re sure Jaskier would like his own clothes back.

“Of course, I had absolutely no idea how to go about making an entire dress, let alone how to sew fabric together.” You carried your clothes back by the tub and shifted the divider so you were hidden from view. He listened to the rustling of fabric, thumbing thoughtlessly at the strings of his lute once more. “By the time I’d ‘finished’, I had what was essentially a potato sack with frills.”

You snorted at the image. “So asking you to patch up my clothes is out of the question, then?”

“Ah, yeah, definitely.”

You push the screen to the side, fully dressed in your black garb, and drop your dirty clothes back in your bag. You begin to toss the white shirt on top of Jaskier’s things, until you remember his more refined tastes. You’d never really given any thought to the state of clothes aside from if they were wearable. Not even in Gorthur Gvaed, when you technically had your own room and clothes to tend to. It was better just to chuck them all somewhere the rats wouldn’t eat through them.

You did your damned best to fold it in a way that made sense. It was shit, you know that. You had no idea what to do with the sleeves. Jaskier chuckled behind you once he realized what you were doing.

“Don’t worry about that, Viper.”

You huffed, tossing the shirt with his stuff. “You can’t sew, and I can’t fold. Good thing we’re not launderers.”

You grabbed your bag off the floor and carried it to the bed. You should patch up your armor, at least. And you were running low on potions. And it’d be a good idea to sharpen your blades; bandits probably banged them up when they tossed all your shit around.

Jaskier sighed as he watched you begin pulling things out and laying them on the bed. “Gods, are all Witchers allergic to rest, or something?” He gestured incredulously to your arm. “You’re injured! Stop,” he pulled your sewing kit away, “pulling more stuff out! You should be resting, healing.”

“I told you, Jask, I don’t rest until a job is done. Now give it back.” You held your hand out for the kit.

That only seemed to spur him on more. “What job?! Taking me to Oxenfurt isn’t- isn’t a job! I’m not even paying you for it!”

You reached for the kit, despite the burning along your spine. “Until you’re there safe, it is a job! Coin or no coin!” He stretched his arm out further, lute and journal forgotten in favor of playing keep away. “Jaskier, give me back my shit!”

“Nah-ah-ah!” His lute slid aside as he climbed further on the bed to keep his hand out of your reach. “Not until you promise to rest!” His eyes lit up with an idea. “I’ll help, even! Just tell me what to do!”

Undeterred, you climbed after him. He knew, despite your wounds, it would not be difficult for you to manhandle him. You could easily grab his arm and wrench it back to you, drag him by an ankle back to your side of the bed. But you didn’t.

“You can’t sew!” You hissed as you climbed over him, straddling his waist and pressing his chest down, reaching over to try grabbing your kit, just inches still out of reach.

“No, but I can do something else! Anything! I’ll- I’ll sharpen your knives-”

“Daggers.”

“Mix potions, anything!” Your hand finally caught the kit and you met his eyes, breathing far heavier than you should be. You really were out of fighting form, no matter how much you hated to admit it. His big, blue eyes pleaded up at you. “Please? Let me be useful.”

You stared for a hard moment. Your eyes were orange around the edges. He’d never noticed before. You sighed. “Fine.” He lit up.

“Really?”

You tugged the kit out of his hand and began the effort of sitting up. Which, unsurprisingly, hurt far worse than crawling over him to begin with. You grit your teeth and forced yourself up anyway, Jaskier’s hands suddenly finding your waist to support you up.

“Shit. Probably not the best I could have done.” He grimaced apologetically as you rolled yourself off of him to sit on the edge of the bed.

“No, probably not,” you grunted. You carefully felt along your spine, testing the injury with featherlight touches. It was nowhere near as painful as it could be, but that wasn’t saying much when it already felt like some beast was trying to rip you open with a thousand needle-like talons.

He scootched to sit down beside you. He felt helpless in all this. Having to watch as you suffer through injuries gathered to save both your skins, when all he had to show for it was a healing scratch and immense guilt. “Would that flower mixture-thing, whatever it was, would that help?” He gestured holding the small container in his hand.

“A bit, but not enough to bother.” You sat still for another moment before you seemed to push it all back far enough to ignore, opening your eyes again and turning toward your bag. “I don’t have a whole lot you can do to help me; I’ve just gotten used to doing it all alone.”

“Hey, you promised.”

You waved his worry away. “I know.” You looked at all the jars and herbs crammed inside, at the whetstone in its own pocket. Did you trust Jaskier enough to properly sharpen your weapons?

…

Well…

No.

You turn toward him, leveling him with a serious look. “If I show you forbidden knowledge that would get me killed if any other Witchers found out I’d done so, do you swear on your life not to ever share that knowledge?”

He blinked at you. “Wha- Really? You want to give me forbidden knowledge?” He scoffed when you didn’t show any signs of this being a joke. “Are you sure that’s the best idea?”

“That depends. Would you keep it a secret?”

“Yeah, of course.”

“Really?”

“Yes!”

“Even if you were being tortured for it?”

“Ye- Tortured?! What kind of fucking information is this?!”

“Jaskier! Would you?”

“Yes, fine, alright! I won’t tell a bloody soul!”

“Good.” You turned back to your bag and began pulling out jars of all sorts of things. “I’m gonna teach you how to make Witcher potions.”

---

Tag List:

@writeawaythepain @sleepyqueerenergy @adozenforks @plaguedoctorsnake @solomonssimp @cool-ontherun-world @emiemiemiii @lynnlovesthestars @bongwaterflavoredgatorade @jlnoodles

[simplegenius042]

OCs as Tragic Love Archetypes

Tagged by @adelaidedrubman.

Tagging @socially-awkward-skeleton @direwombat @strangefable @josephslittledeputy @wrathfulrook @cassietrn @chazz-anova @shallow-gravy @g0dspeeed @inafieldofdaisies @derelictheretic @ec-10 @gaeadene @strafethesesinners @minilev @carlosoliveiraa @afarcryfrommymain @ladyoriza @a-rose-in-a-garden-of-weeds @voidika @onehornedbeast @deputy-morgan-malone @vampireninjabunnies-blog @neverthesameneveranother @snake-in-the-garden @henbased @nightbloodbix and @thewanderer-000

You can find the uqiz here.

Samuel Who (The UnTitledverse)

Lucifer's advisor in the Pride Ring of Hell and often balances the line between designated caretaker and younger brother figure. Samuel's soul was unfairly sent to Hell by a wicked man by the name of Edward Carmine, ending Samuel's existence on the mortal realm before it could progress further. Samuel has had time to adjust to Hell's rules and his position, and is on his way to opening up more to the lifestyle, the denizens and his companions.

Nadi Sinclair (Far Cry The Silver Chronicles)

After her childhood had been ripped away from her and later losing loved ones in Task Force 141 due to Shepard and Shadow Company's betrayal, Nadi had left the task force and proceeded to find a life off the grid, her distrust and disgust towards the greed and warmongering in the American Government eventually drawing her to the Project at Eden's Gate, where she meets the charming (if sometimes frustrating) John Seed. He brings forth feelings that she never got to feel as a child nor as a soldier, and yet, has a massive fear of losing him (whether to forces outside of her control or because of her own self-perceived vices and flaws), leading her to only adore from afar. This becomes ten-times worse when she meets a newly single Holly Pepper, a pragmatic and devoted, if sometimes snarky, member of Eden's Gate. This bisexual disaster has two free hands but can't grab for shit. I think this fits her perfectly.

Sonya, The Apex (Life, Despair & Monsters)

So I've decided to give Sonya mommy issues, which may or may not contribute in her attraction and her (initially unhealthy) relationship with Jennifer (granted, Jennifer is helping matters). Though both learn that, below their hard-shelled and rotten surfaces, are two people capable of loving each other beyond manipulation and usefulness. But that makes them an unholy matrimony obsessed with each other instead so there's no telling whether it has made them better or worse.

And lastly...

Azriel (Wings And Horns, Far Cry The Silver Chronicles)

Azriel has never really had a great experience with love. She is the reincarnation of Joseph Seed's daughter after all. A reincarnation she earned by serving the concept of Death itself for either one hundred or one thousand years. She came back into the world a decade after her original death, and was born into a home that didn't understand her, and the forced transition into Eden's Gate didn't make it any better. Even worse when her parents attempted to sacrifice her during the Reaping to show their devotion. Thankfully, she meets Silva, who shapes and mellows out the young girl into a brilliant young woman who would make Jannah proud. There's also her massive and obvious crush on Gavin's mite (re: a Tumultite word for "child"), Schrödinger Turquoise.

[cosmcther]

The benevolent and radiant Goddess of Light has unveiled the fabled realm of Skyworld to entities beyond the esteemed Olympian deities. A maiden of incomparable beauty gracefully roamed in the Palace of the Sky. She twinkled in stardust and danced with constellations; at least, that was what he comprehended in his mind. It became unmistakably clear that the esteemed Goddess Palutena endeavored to forge alliances with exceptional and promising allies.

"Thanks for your patience, Rosalina. Lady Palutena has been working tirelessly on matters regarding both mortals and gods. I'm sure she'll be here shortly."

Captain Pit exuded a warm and courteous aura as he led her on a leisurely detour from the corridor and into the gardens, a favored spot for Palutena and himself whenever downtime was available. The captivating splendor of the gardens unfurled around them, bedecked with a wide variety of blossoms, graceful ivory sculptures, and the melodious babbling of fountains scattered throughout the enchanting landscape. Each component flourished in the revitalizing embrace of the crisp air and sunlight, giving rise to an ethereal sanctuary of serenity and loveliness.

"I hope you don't mind my asking, but uh..."

"Is it true? Do you actually cradle the universe in your arms?"

Call it childish curiosity or an attempt to break the ice between them, but the words practically blurt out of the Captain of Angels.

     When debating the divine, it was a line most fine that the cosmic woman would ride. By technical standards, the word demigod would be the most applicable. But you would certainly be excused if the difference seemed hard to spot.

     Though it had been eons since, she started as a mortal woman no different than you nor I. Only through untimely death and sacrificial rebirth was the gift of reincarnation given. She was reborn with a might most divine indeed. And to this day, the radiance of the cosmos poured over her like a familiar coat. That air of infinite space, of sparkling stars shimmered in endless night. It followed her with each step taken... even amongst these castles in the clouds where the sun reigned supreme, the simple stars seemed to watch her every movement. Please, dear viewer. Remember this fact well: Stars do not depart during the day. They are merely outshined by the light of the sun against our atmosphere.

     Careful eyes can see that they will not go unmissed. Not here, not now. Stars will shine brighter out of respect for their protector's arrival. They are camera flashes cheering her name. They are spotlights bringing a guiding light to her pathway. They are her children. And she is their cosmic mother. Stars will shine even against the brightest of skies, for that is what she deserves.

     The very same stars flit inside her celestial sights. They paint a relaxing night sky behind the eyes as the sky's cherished captain speaks.

     "Of course, my dear. Please, there is no need to rush on my account. With a waiting room as grand as this, I'm sure I'll be plenty occupied until your Goddess's eventual arrival." A voice chuckles through her glossed smile. It is simple, it is easygoing. For she speaks the truth! She has seen every inch the cosmos have to offer, yet she had never quite witnessed a realm such as this.

     Truly, it was no wonder angels made this place their home. For every warm hearth and cozy leatherbound storybook the Comet Observatory held, the grandiose nature of Skyworld seemed to show the real breadth of a Goddess's domain. Steps followed behind her guide's pace lightly, a general ethereal hover cutting itself short to feel the path she walked upon. She wanted to hear just how specifically her heels clicked upon this perfectly cut stone. The scents of flowers abroad, the sunlight golden in both light and nature... her own Garden Dome at home was starting to feel a mite bit rural in lieu of all this!

     Ah... The very thought made her happy. Every day existence proves her wrong and gives her something new to gaze upon is a good day indeed.

     Alas, in the splendor of it all, she had been neglecting her duties as a good guest. Yes, she had been a touch on the quiet side for quite some time. A head shifted on a swivel, she gazed like a child taken to their first amusement park. Or perhaps someone traveling to the big city for the first time, then spying buildings that could poke the heavens in their height. The other's voice comes as a slight surprise, attention shifting suddenly as he starts.

     And again must a light chuckle be administered to the open air, gentle amusement playing at risen rosy cheeks. So, tales of her exploits have reached even the heavens?

     "My-my! I am ever impressed at how far word can spread~. Well... If you must know... In some ways, perhaps the stories are true. I am not akin to the fabled Atlas holding up the skies upon his back, but I have come quite far by bringing in those that make up the universe. There is much that I have done in my lifespan, and there is still much yet to do. But for wayward souls and wandering travelers... To the people near and far that I have met, quite like how I'm meeting you. I simply wish to help... simply.

     "To tell you the truth, I think I've grown weary of the grandiose in my years. It's lovely to escape to it here and there, but those simple gestures in which bounties of kindness are stowed are what have brought me the deepest satisfaction. To help where I can, as I can. So I roam. Drifting from star to star, from planet to planet. Helping as I please.

     "...To cradle is to hold gently and protectively. And there is much power a gentle hug carries, no matter how mundane it may seem on the surface. Dearest Captain, I pray you've kept your heart soft and tender for those who need not the coarse hand of warfare. It pays to be multifaceted, or so I've been told."