#a few more days and then I too can read the golden enclaves

[louwhose]

Lou!! Congrats on 100, friend!! It brings me so much joy to have a mutual that shares so many fandoms with me :’) we are the same kind of nerd

Can I request a doodle of Pattern being ridiculous, or of Orion giving his Scary Girlfriend some major heart eyes? Your pick!!

El was mad at Orion for doing something dangerous, and then got even madder when he made the heart eyes at her for being mad.

[sagevalleymusings]

A Caveat for my super long Scholomance Essay

I got a few new followers from a recent reblog of mine so as a thank you and definitely not secret plot to scare everyone away, I got the motivation to push through and finish my essay on relationships in the Scholomance series by Naomi Novik. It is, and this is not a joke, over five thousand words. I cite nearly a dozen sources and I have no apologies. Okay I have one apology. Sorry to the person who I will neither be tagging nor naming who said the thing about all the other Scholomance couples being monogamous that inspired me to write ten pages of literary analysis.

Anyway, continue on with your day, or maybe...?

The Scholomance through the Lens of Relationship Anarchy I’m gonna be honest. I was shy to talk about my love of Naomi Novik’s angry anti-capitalist response to Harry Potter. Shortly after I read A Deadly Education, I read a highly critical review which addressed Novik’s diversity and said that it felt more like 90s multiculturalism than 10s intersectionality. The passage about mal hiding in locs was… bad. And having the family that El was estranged from being the Indian half seemed like having your cake and eating it too - the appearance of diversity with none of the work. I’m not going to be able to find the original review now, but I think this article from Book Riot does a good job of addressing both the criticism and explaining a less critical interpretation.

So I was quiet. I could see where the criticism was coming from but appreciated a magic school that had a different interpretation than certain others which have already been named. I decided to wait until The Last Graduate to really make any judgment calls. 

In my extremely white opinion, Novik responds to criticism in both The Last Graduate and The Golden Enclaves in a way that recontextualizes the multiculturalism in A Deadly Education. This book isn’t just anti-capitalist. It’s anti-imperial. Places like New York and London are given more weight because the whole Scholomance is a metaphor for imperialism. The very foundation of the way they’re doing magic is imperialist and corrosive to the soul. But I don’t want to get into all of that until I can really chew on it, since my lack of personal experience as a person of color means I need to bring receipts and a body of research if I plan on speaking at length on that subject. 

I bring it up in context to say that Novik’s The Scholomance series has received valid criticism from various fronts throughout this series. But I think a deeper reading reveals that the thing which you are criticizing was part of the point the whole time. 

I feel similarly about “the cheating subplot” in The Golden Enclaves. 

“The Cheating Subplot” is not how I would categorize it. But I’m responding to this Goodreads review and a lot of interpretations which, as far as I can tell, were influenced by it. 

To summarize, because there’s no way to talk about this without spoilers for The Golden Enclaves, Orion has pushed El away only to, as far as she is aware, be eaten by a maw-mouth. Liesel shows up, and starts trying to actively seduce El. At some point, while processing her grief, she has sex with Liesel. Then, Orion comes back, very much alive. Then he leaves again. More El/Liesel bonding ensues in an airport loo, then Orion comes back, and El and Orion probably get back together.

This has been called a cheating subplot, partly for sleeping with Liesel the first time when she “knew he was probably alive.” And the second time when he was definitely alive and just not around. And at no point does El mention she’s slept with Liesel to Orion. I have a handful of issues with this, and I’m going to address the more minor issues before we get into the meat of it. 

Does El actually sleep with Liesel the second time?

This is splitting hairs, but when I read that section, I stopped, went, “wait they didn’t have sex though” and then read the passage again, and concluded that no, they had not in fact had sex. So when I saw people claiming on the internet that sure, he was dead the first time, but definitely not the second time, I was genuinely confused. There was no second time. So I’ve copied the entirety of what could be the description of El and Liesel having sex on the plane. And Liesel was right: it helped to feel good in my body, her hands and the water running over my skin reminding me that I was whole, even if I didn’t feel that way, telling me I was still all in one piece at least on the outside.

That’s it, that’s the whole description. You can infer that they had sex, but it isn’t stated. What if, instead, they just showered together? Is it still cheating then? Some people would say yes, because you’re naked and intimate with another person. But some people would say no, because that’s not sex.

Does El really not mention it to Orion?

One of the linchpins on this argument is, it’d be fine if El mentioned it to Orion, but she doesn’t. But… does she not? 

After all, we don’t hear every single conversation that people have - just the important ones. Or rather - just the ones that our unreliable and emotionally stunted narrator considers to be the important ones. This series is narrated by El to a mundane to describe how she became a maw-mouth hunter, essentially. Is “and then I told my boyfriend I slept with Liesel” really that important of a conversation to include in the text of the book? Couldn’t we just assume they had that conversation? After all, she does have that conversation with Liesel, in a way that makes plot-relevant sense. We could infer that she’s mentioning it to Orion in the same time frame (and if it seems like a stretch to infer that, see above inferred sex scene).

But I don’t think this is a likely place for this conversation to have occurred because Novik herself says that things were too busy and chaotic for most of the book for relationship negotiating to have been a priority.

The second place El could have mentioned it was in the epilogue, when El hand-waves away several weeks of serious emotional labor into a single paragraph. That would have been the place any rational person would have mentioned their fling to a partner.

We’ve been told in this book by El that she’s perfectly happy as a narrator to hand-wave away huge chunks of the story. I think it is plausible for these two to have had a conversation off screen and for El to just not feel the need to tell us that. This brings up one of the theory points which I’ll circle back to when I get to the theory part - it isn’t enough that it’s possible for those two to have had the conversation. The audience feels the need to have this relationship norm performed for them, so they can assuage their concerns that this might be cheating. But that brings me to a new question…

Assuming their relationship is exclusive, was El under any obligation to have mentioned it to Orion?

Okay, let’s assume that El and Orion are exclusive during the periods that they are dating, with the normal caveats that would apply to any relationship. 

The first time El has sex with Liesel, Orion is dead.

Or rater, El has been presented with a situation wherein the only possible outcome is eternal torture worse than death, and the person she loved is effectively dead because he cannot be brought out from that eternal torture except through death. Point being, it is not cheating to sleep with someone after your partner dies. 

Orion comes back, and El and Orion get back together, but is El under an obligation to tell him any and all people she’s slept with while they weren’t dating?

I would argue not, because it isn’t a parameter that’s applied consistently in monogamous relationships - in fact, if anything, we’re discouraged from telling our current partner our relationships before then. And what happens “on break” in my experience depends on the people involved - some people don’t want to know, some people do. But if it’s dependent on the people involved, the only time El would be obligated to tell Orion about the first time she had sex with Liesel would be if the words “did you have sex with anybody while we were on break” came out of Orion’s mouth.

So what about the second time (which again, I would argue is ambiguous)? Well, I think it’s pretty obvious that they’re on break. Orion leaves to join his mother, who El will have nothing to do with, and before he leaves, Orion tries to ask her to promise to kill him if his mom can’t fix him. They’re saying goodbye. It is unlikely these two will ever see each other again.

So if El and Orion are on break when she sleeps with Liesel the second time, why would she tell Orion about it? They weren’t dating at the time. 

And this is the stance Novik seems to come down on as well, because in her AMA on this question she says, “if El ever wanted to hook up with Liesel again, I think probably a conversation would happen at that point.”

Because it would be at that point that she would actually be dating Orion. 

But I also think we shouldn’t assume that their relationship follows the rules we’re expecting. After all, Novik also has this to say, “To me, it's just, people have different kinds of relationships with different people.” So… Do we know for sure whether or not El and Orion’s relationship is exclusive?

Actually, scratch that, and let’s dig into the meat. When I was arguing on the internet with someone about this, they said “the only other canon Scholomance couples we see are all monogamous.”

That’s already a pretty loaded statement, to be honest. We’re already pre-disposing ourselves to assume both that the people we’ve heard about relationships from are monogamous, and that the default state of Liesel and El and Alfie and Orion is that they are all supposed to be monogamous -this person doesn’t just say “the other relationships are monogamous”, they say couples specifically. But just because a relationship looks monogamous doesn’t mean that it is.

It’s probably for this reason that my irl partner is extremely careful to shoehorn in references to the other people he’s dating whenever the opportunity presents itself, because we live together, and people assume we are monogamous unless we state otherwise. 

I want to set aside this assumption, and look closely at the text to see what norms Novik is really setting for us. To that end, I’ve scoured all three books for every example of relationship drama, and I think Novik is inadvertently saying some rather profound things about the hegemony in monogamous heterosexual relationships in patriarchal post-imperial countries that doesn’t mesh with an anti-colonial anti-capitalist agenda. In simpler, but less accurate words, non-monogamy is anti-colonial. And I think Novik’s descriptions of relationships bear this out.

All of the parents that we see are a straight couple with biological children. No one has gay parents. No one is adopted. Even these cookie-cutter relationships still have a decent amount of variability. Gwen is raising a child on her own as a widow. Liesel’s father was having an affair. But heteronormative expectations for these two bear out. To our knowledge, Gwen never moves on. She is never described as having any intimate relationship with anyone else, despite living on the kind of neo-pagan commune which in my limited experience is absolutely rife with free-love types. Gwen is the textbook perfect example of a mourning widow. She has sex with her high school sweetheart, what, one time? Certainly a limited number of times if El’s statements on the lack of opportunity are to be believed. And loves him and only him for the rest of her life.

Meanwhile, Liesel’s mother is punished for sleeping with a married man - killed for it in fact. And her father is as distant as cheating husbands have ever been stereotyped to be.

So I would still argue that all four of these examples are a body of expectations - of amatonormativity - which is, at the end of the day, rooted in the same colonial, patriarchal mesh that had them building a school on the backs of dead children. 

Meanwhile, this new generation of children are doing something different. 

Rule one about whether or not something is a date or an alliance is if they do something with you and don’t ask for fair share in return. And that’s pretty much all we’re told about relationships for quite a while - El doesn’t even notice that Ibrahim and Yaakov are already dating. 

Our protagonist is willfully oblivious to most everyone around her, so we don’t know much about anyone really. The first hint of an inkling of anyone’s thoughts on relationships other than the one El’s only pretending to be in, really, is when a girl propositions her and Orion for a threesome in the library.

And that is literally the only two mentions of relationships of any kind in the entirety of A Deadly Education. I checked. 

During their senior year, more people are dating. Ibrahim and Yaakov are revealed to have been an item for an unspecified amount of time previously, Liesel starts pursuing Alfie, and Liu has her own fair share of relationship drama.

And don’t forget about Jermaine!

… Here’s the thing. I know for a fact that you forgot about Jermaine because it took me two solid weeks to find this passage again.

We knew that Jermaine from New York had spent the last year in a competitive love triangle with a boy from Atlanta over one of the top alchemists, and we all knew when in a perfect storm of gossipy delight it turned into a trio and an alliance, halfway through the first month of term.

This is in chapter 9 of The Last Graduate, right after El catches Ibrahim and Yaakov kissing, and she explains that there’s just not a lot of romance drama to be had when you’re fighting for your life every day, but that they chewed very thoroughly on the drama that they did have. Jamaal was courting a girl from Cairo “by the book,” and Jermaine had wound up in a triad.

And on that note, I want to come back to Liu’s relationships, because of a very specific line towards the end of the book.

“What was up with letting us hassle you about Zixuan all this time! Or were you trying to decide?”

Here’s the thing. There’s a strong implication in this one line that when Liu kisses Yuyan two days before graduation, she hasn’t severed her flirtation with Zixuan. That’s still on the table. She wants to want the right things. 

The Thesis

So when I say “how do we know for sure that El and Orion’s relationship is exclusive”, it is in the context of the kinds of relationships we’ve been presented with throughout the entire trilogy. And across the entire trilogy, rather than “the only other canon Scholomance couples we see are all monogamous,” of all the romances we see from the kids in the school during El’s tenure, less than half  of them are in completely exclusive monogamous relationships. And only one of the couples is heterosexual.

And I think it does bear noting that there are several hundred kids in each grade, and we don’t know the relationship status of most of them. But I want to circle back to the very first thing we learn about relationships, because I think it bears repeating. 

Rule one about whether or not something is a date or an alliance is if they do something with you and don’t ask for fair share in return. El is in an alliance with Liu and Aadhya. She winds up adding Chloe to the alliance. So… what about everyone else? El spends the entirety of Book 1 criticizing Orion for doing things for other people without asking for fair value, then spends the entirety of Book two doing things for other people without asking for fair value. 

It can be interpreted that this is a rule El made up in her head that doesn’t actually have any basis to the other Scholomance kids, but I think this is the more shallow reading. After all, if we compare it to El’s understanding of the Scholomance, she’s shown to have a better understanding of it than most throughout - even at the beginning. 

I think instead it is one of many examples of the layers that get peeled back across each book. There is the Scholomance as everyone else sees it, the Scholomance as it sees itself, and the Scholomance as it truly is. Each peeled-back layer reveals a truth about El too. In Book 1, the group’s understanding of El is one of grim prophecy - they all believe, even herself, that she has the power to undo them utterly. In Book 2, that force is used for good, and the El she strives to be shines. But in Book 3 we’re given the truth - that the El of grim prophecy and the El as a radical force for good are the same, and the system needed to be brought down.

Book 1 through the lens of El is largely devoid of romance or sexuality at all. She doesn’t see herself as capable of those kinds of feelings and therefore misses them in others. Book 2’s relationships are largely about expectations. Liu struggles with the expectation of choosing Zixuan, El struggles against her mother’s wishes, Liesel seeks an advantageous position, and Yaakov and Ibrahim are found out by accident. There’s a self-consciousness to the relationships in Book 2, an awareness of being observed. 

If Book 3 is how the relationships truly are, then the important takeaway from the addition of El/Liesel is that relationships are messy and undefinable. They happen or not, with societal expectations or not, and sometimes they’re happy and sometimes they end tragically and sometimes you do something stupid because you want to. 

And, I think critically and the reason I think there’s a deliberate amount of relationship anarchy in this book: romance is only one way of forming connections. In The Golden Enclaves, El is finally back with her Mum, previously the only person she could confide in, except this time, it feels  hollow and empty, because of all the things she’s learned and the person she’s lost. Liesel reaches out because London needs help. They meet up with Alfie there too of course, and then decide to talk to the New York Domina. Aadhya drives them there, and Chloe meets them outside to do introductions. El gets coordinates to the real entrance to the Scholomance and rescues Orion, both Aadhya and Liesel coming with. They go back to Mum’s commune and all five of them spend some quiet time together, Mum and Orion needing to heal. Then Liu calls, and the kids have to rush off to Beijing. They meet up with  Zheng, the younger cousin El has bonded with just a few months prior, and rescue Liu from a horrible fate. But in the meantime Orion can feel himself slipping away, and he leaves. Liu needs to heal, so Aadhya decides to stay with her, and Liesel and El go to Dubai - they’ve been told they’re next and want help from El.

They’re met at the entrance by Ibrahim and Jamaal. By the way, do y’all remember “by the book” Jamaal? I find it interesting that Novik mentions his grandfather has three wives (pg 308). And then we find out that Ibrahim and Yaakov, who’d had such a romance in school… couldn’t stay together. They’re from different enclaves. The systems in place tore them apart. But then, because more than just El needs to cast the spell, and the people chanting need to live there, the Dubai enclave guarantees that anyone who agrees to work on El’s golden enclave spell gets a spot in Dubai. And all of a sudden Cora and Yaakov are both with Ibrahim in Dubai now.

Afterwards El leaves for Mumbai to confront her past and it is the only time in the entire book that El is alone. And once she’s done some important self reflection, she goes to the gates of the Scholomance again, and meets up with Liesel and Alfie, Aadhya and Liu, Khamis, then most of the seniors there, and eventually Orion again, who has been in the book less than half the time and who, it is revealed, was literally dead the whole time. Orion as a living, autonomous person exists and is present in the book for seven pages.

Novik’s romances are some of my favorites, because they are always grounded in a person’s complexity. The women in her books don’t become mothers and vanish from the page the moment they find a man they like. They exist for themselves, and love incidentally to that. It’s something that feels unusual next to even feminist books like the Vorkosigan series. 

The Golden Enclaves seeks to break the systems of power that have held El et al captive through the first two books. That includes the expectation so ingrained in our society that most people don’t even know it’s there that a romance is the best and most important thing that can happen to someone.

Having said all that, I want to conclude with an additional side examination. I don’t think people are correct to interpret this as a cheating subplot, because of all the reasons outlined above, and because, like everything, the relationships in The Scholomance series are about so much more than simply X/Y. But even if the interpretation that it is a cheating subplot is correct…

Is The Cheating Subplot Really So Bad?

Young people forget what it’s like. But I’m like, five thousand in internet years, and I remember. The first girl I ever made out with had a boyfriend at the time. So did the second. And the third. 

I’m reminded of The Price of Salt AKA Carol. Or Fingersmith. Young people can call cheating a “bisexual stereotype.” But when I was younger, it was a survival tactic. 

I’m not saying that this is what Novik is trying to portray. But I can say that as someone who was part of a Star Trek mailing list back in the early days and founded AO3, Novik knows what it means to be queer. And relationships when you’re queer are messier. They’re freer. They’re defined by what you say and what you don’t say, which may seem obvious, but too many relationships are defined primarily by what a relationship should look like, and not at all by what you do or do not say.

El and Orion are dating for a year before she realizes it. That’s pretty queer. When El gets him back, there’s never an explicit conversation that they’re dating again. They have sex, but their relationship is fairly undefined. Novik has even explicitly said their relationship remains specifically undefined because El is unused to and uncomfortable with being intimate with people. And we see this, again, not just with Orion, but with every relationship, even the platonic ones. El doesn’t like so much as admitting to knowing someone’s name, because learning their name means caring about them as a person.

There’s never any discussion that El and Orion’s relationship is exclusive. That doesn’t mean that it is, but it doesn’t mean that it isn’t, either. One could see this as cheating, or you could not. But even if it was… why is that something to knock a series you love from five stars to two?

That feeling that you’re having right now? That discomfort? That says that this is running against a taboo that you have. And maybe it’s a taboo that you have for a very good reason. But my point is that you’re responding emotionally, not rationally. And rationally, there’s a lot of good reasons one might have a cheating subplot. Because it wasn’t acceptable at the time to date other women for example. Or to highlight that our characters are still just teenagers, and prone to making bad decisions. Or to draw attention to the messiness that comes even from protagonists, who are traumatized, and just need a little bit of human connection, even if they know it’s stupid, and will probably hurt them in the long run.

Cheating is an extremely human thing to do. Numbers on this are pretty hard to find, but studies estimate that around 1 in every 5 people admits to having cheated on a partner. How many partners have you had? Is it more than five?

I’ve been the person being cheated with, as I’ve already mentioned. But I’ve also been cheated on. Sometimes, authors say things that are true, and it isn’t acceptance of the thing, but merely a reflection of lived experience. These characters are teenagers. Teenagers make bad decisions with little forethought. Why can’t we simply have a messy character? Why does the existence of a cheating subplot have to be treated with such vitriol and hatred?

I think the problem is twofold. A, for lack of a better word, uwu-ification of media which encourages cutesy, shallow stories, and an expectation of conformity due to capitalist streamlining and fan pressure. Uwu-ification

The world has sucked for kind of a while. Things are improving in fits and starts, but in the meantime my generation has seen multiple unprecedented generation-defining tragedies. 9/11, the war on terror, the 2008 financial crisis, COVID, the first coup attempt in 300 years, the COVID recession on top of COVID, a massive uptick in mass shootings and in specific school shootings, just to name the most prominent ones. And the commodification of attention that blossomed with social media means that even what should be good things about this generation - the absolutely incredible technical advances - still sap away at our mental health. 

On top of that, you have the decimation of the long-form essay. I’ve been working on this essay for weeks, read two books and multiple articles, and right now, it’s nine pages long.

Who the fuck is going to read this? Why would anyone read this when they could just check Twitter for a bite-sized hot take instead?

This is starting to change. Podcasts are growing in popularity quickly, and you can also find a lot of long-form essays on youtube (though they’re all, they tell me, going to Nebula). But long form essays are a huge time commitment, and a niche interest, all things told. This is, I have no doubt, exacerbated by the crimes against education George Bush installed. No Child Left Behind was a fucking travesty and absolutely has eroded critical thinking skills substantially. Engaging in that type of deeply analytical pondering takes a lot more energy for someone who wasn’t taught how to do it as a child. So we all have PTSD or at the very least chronic anxiety and on top of that we don’t have the training necessary to unpack our own trauma. Millennials and younger really just want to relax. They want to sit on the couch and enjoy something charming, and cute, and not painful (that or like, deeply terrifying and gory horror, don’t understand that one). 

And I’ve absolutely been that person. Sometimes I just want something cute and charming and fun that I don’t have to think that hard about.

Fan Pressure

But… It seems like on top of this desire for everything to be only the happy parts of Hayao Miyazaki, there’s also this really aggressive push against anything that’s not. Internet collectivism can absolutely be a force for good. I think campaigns to draw attention to people like R Kelly are a good thing.

And also, special interest groups have realized that if they pool together their collective resources, they can campaign for change they want to see. Doesn’t mean they’ll always get it, but we know that if we just use the right hashtag, and just tag enough people, someone who matters will see my tweet about how Destiel should be canon. Even if they don’t listen, they can’t avoid hearing me.

And I bring up Destiel specifically because what we’re talking about is fandom and fan behavior as it pertains to creators and creations in general. Supernatural fans have done a lot of good (raising huge amounts of money for charity) and a lot of bad. But I’m not the only one who has wondered if maybe this ability to amplify one’s voice can be… kind of dangerous. Being able to leverage your voice to call for more representation is good. But that’s not the only thing that gets leveraged.

This is no doubt exacerbated by the way mainstream media has become more and more algorithmically streamlined - catering to the widest audience means producing the same reliable and meaningless format over and over again. I could write another (whoops I’m up to ten now) pages on the finale of She Hulk and its manufactured consent to Disney-fied conformity all on its own.

So what does this mean for The Scholomance?

To bring this back around, because that was a lot of background that felt irrelevant: people want works that they consume in general to be less realistic. They want something cute and easy (or action-packed and easy, or gory and easy). They leverage this to actors and creators, who respond by providing that thing people want. This is all fine so far. But then you get this amplified by the tendency towards monopoly - stories whether they be books, movies, or tv shows, are published because they’re believed to be profitable, and something which is profitable right now is the most processed kind of junk food media you can make. 

But then you get someone like Novik who is portraying an imperialist system in her magic with the intent to destroy it, or who has time-period accurate relationships, including all the lack of consent, or who has messy romances that kind of feel like cheating, and it seems like suddenly, it doesn’t just feel like something different. It feels like a betrayal. Fans aren’t just surprised. They don’t say this one’s not for them. They say they’re disappointed, gutted, devastated. How could Novik have betrayed our trust by adding this kind of a story element… Reach out to Novik and make her change it!

And that’s… not really okay. And that’s the problem I have, ultimately. Because you don’t speak for 100% of fans. You don’t speak for me, certainly. And even if you did speak for all fans… is populism really the ultimate truth in our society? Do we only want things that appeal to the broadest group of people?

I don’t. 

[mooberryink]

// 𝑅𝑒𝑎𝑑𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑙𝑖𝑓𝑒 𝑢𝑝𝑑𝑎𝑡𝑒 What my week looks like. 𝑥𝑜 𝑁𝑜𝑒𝑙𝑎𝑛𝑖 #whatthisweek 𝑅𝑒𝑎𝑑𝑖𝑛𝑔 Despite my plans to start Babel, I picked up The Golden Enclaves, the finale to Naomi Novik’s Scholomance series; I was in the mood. Then I'm reading Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman with @hallyreads & the #superlowkeybookclub ♡ I’ve also been keeping The Lost Spells by Robert Macfarlane close by. #moodreader 𝑊𝑎𝑡𝑐ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑔 …The Muskox cam live from LARS at the University of Alaska Fairbanks via @exploreorg lol. I use it as ambience when I’ve got time to myself & need just enough quiet in the house, not so much that I feel too alone, you know? It’s so peaceful & you can even catch a glimpse of some reindeer in the adjacent pasture. There’s also a Kitten Rescue cam, but that one makes me sleepy. 𝐿𝑖𝑠𝑡𝑒𝑛𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑡𝑜 So, our new downstairs neighbors constantly blast house music at all hours of the night; it’s like living above a club that operates seven days a week. Seriously, it doesn’t matter that it’s a Monday night. We actually have no idea how these guys function because they start in the early afternoon & sometimes go on until well past 4 am. Like how do you live? This week, I started blasting Christmas music in the mornings. 😀 𝐿𝑜𝑜𝑘𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑓𝑜𝑟𝑤𝑎𝑟𝑑 𝑡𝑜... More rain! Also, we’re planning a few autumn walks & hikes this month & I am so eager to hit the trails. I’m hoping to take some time this week (or next week, weather-permitting) to have a fall picnic in our nearby city park; I just want to take a few hours to sit & read with my partner amidst all these red & golden hues. 𝑓𝑙𝑜𝑜𝑟 𝑖𝑠 𝑣𝑖𝑏𝑟𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑚𝑢𝑠𝑖𝑐 𝑖𝑛𝑣𝑎𝑑𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑚𝑦 𝑑𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑚𝑠 𝑗𝑖𝑛𝑔𝑙𝑒 𝑏𝑒𝑙𝑙𝑠 𝑗𝑖𝑛𝑔𝑙𝑒 https://www.instagram.com/p/CkywlhZyY9o/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[project-rebirth]

Prelude: The Face of the Fallen Church: Inquisition_start.

OST

Vatican City.

If one could ever think of a Magic Side equivalent to Academy City, one would think of the Vatican City State as an example of such.

Located within a walled enclave in the city of Rome, Italy, it is the central base of the Roman Catholic Church, the administration of which is also referred to as the Vatican.

And at its centre stood St. Peter's Basilica --- the worlds largest cathedral and the greatest Roman Catholic stronghold.

In mid-october of the previous year, it was utterly left in ruins thanks to a confrontation between one Fiamma of the Right and one of the former popes, Matthai Reese, which resulted in the defensive magical array for the city of the Vatican being severely weakened.

But that all seemed like a distant memory.

Vatican soldiers patrolled the city streets and the Basilica grounds, all of whom were magicians with formidable spells underneath their belts. They gave off an intimidating aura that made those in their presence want to turn away, lest they be threatened by them.

The damage caused by the confrontation last October had all been repaired, and its magical defense systems were up and running, almost as if the destruction had never occured.

It was all thanks to the efforts of the current Pope, Biscas T. Benedict. {1}

After the events with GREMLIN, Biscas had utilized the connections he had with the leader of a certain secret society and had manipulated events to have the second former Pope, Pietro Yogdis assassinated in his sleep. The second Pope's death was a surprise to everyone in Rome and around the world, and for a time, it worsened the divisions that were currently happening in the Church at the time.

However, Biscas had been chosen to become the Pope in the days to follow since there was not enough time for an election, along with the aid of those within the church that were loyal to him. And ever since becoming the Pope, Biscas would dedicate his effors to strengthening the Church, and making it stronger than when it had been in the hands of God's Right Seat.

the Grand Grimoire written by John Dee, the Frozen Sapphire of Arendelle, the Shard of Anubis, all of 30 Tyrian shekels, the Bell of Awakening and so on were among the many spiritual items and magical artifacts used to empower the Roman Catholic Church anew, giving it a new life that it had never been seen up until this point.

But with that new life, came a new darkness, something that was far ore insidious than anyone on the outside could imagine.

And that was that the Christian God had been substituted by an entity far outside of this realm known as The Fallen.

The Fallen was a being known as Gaelion, who was a demonic cosmic force that enslaved worlds with his own power, and influence. It was something that when looked in the lens of Christianity, was truly the embodiment of the Devil himself.

Yet members within the Roman Catholic Church were already worshiping such a being.

When they referred to God, it was this monster that they were referring to, to carry out horrific acts in the name of Gaelion, even though this entity probably would not care, or even know of their actions.

Hence, the church in secret, has been renamed as the Fallen Church of Rome.

The Fallen Church could be considered as a modern day incarnation of the Church from the dark ages as in the few months of their inception, they have committed several atrocities throughout the world. Magic Cabals from religions they deemed heretical were attacked, people deemed as enemies of the church were killed, tortured, or sacrificed in gruesome acts of worship, and the Church in general had been more militant than ever.

This showed in how they refused to acknowledge the Magic Association as a legitimate organization and has ignored them at large.

And it was all thanks to one man, and his connections.

But even so, one group of Magicians he formed a pact with, had also taken on the role of God's Right Seat. It was similar, yet entirely different when looked at closely.  

God's One Throne.

"Ah, I take it you have news for me."

The Pope said as he addressed the one who entered the papal throne room. Such was usually occupied by cardinals and advisers, however it was empty, only containing the Pope himself and the person who entered.

Yodion the Armoured.

A young man with neck length light purple hair, golden eyes, and clean white robes, Yodion the Armoured was a special type of Magician who was a member of God's One Throne.

As previously mentioned, God's One Throne was similar to God's Right Seat in that it was a political organization deeply active within the Roman Church, even run everything within it. They often advise the Pope on matters of the church and is more powerful than the actual clergy in general.

They were comprised of not four magicians, but 10, all of them aligned with angels in accordance with the Sephirot.

And the angel Yodion was aligned with was Chamuel.

"Yes. The assassination attempt on the traitor known as Agnese Sanctis has failed. The forces sent to deal with such has been defeated all by the hands of the God Hunter and..."

Yodion's face seemed to contort slightly in a look of displeasure, as if what he wanted to say truly disgusted him to his core.

"And?"

"...Imagine Breaker. The one known as Kamijou Touma."

Biscas sat in silence for a bit as he mulled over the information. He was familiar with the term Imagine Breaker, the name of its owner too.

This was the same boy that Former Pope Matthai Reese had deemed an enemy of God, and had sent out members of God's Right Seat to deal with him. Needless to say the attempts on the boy's life failed as both Vento of the Front and Aqua of the Rear suffered humiliating defeats at the time.

"I see. According to the information we have on record, Imagine Breaker is a reference point of the world, which means symbolically, it is our greatest obstacle. Perhaps more so than the God Hunter."

Given the plans that the Biscas and God's One Throne was working towards, the Imagine Breaker represented something that was to foil their goals of changing the world. If he so willed it, the owner of Imagine Breaker could undo everything that they would have worked to gain. But there was something else that couldn't be ignored.

And that was the boy himself.

Biscas had read the reports about how Kamijou had gotten involved in many Magic Side incidents, how he opposed the Church in the past and his involvement in the chaos surrounding Othinus. And then there was his reported involvement in the Holy Grail War in the East.

And in all of those incidents he had gathered many people around him, within the Magic Side, as well as the Science Side, although to what extent remained unknown to him. This gathering of forces from both sides proved to be an unstable element that could potentially throw the two sides into chaos, perhaps even more so than the God Hunter by herself.

The Kamijou Faction.

That was the name, given to a group without form consisting of all those who joined that boy and his right hand. Having various elements from his home turf on the science side, the magic side and other influential persons like the Royal Family and the President of the United States, as well as the God Hunter herself, the Kamijou Faction, if it ever took form, would be a formidable force, the likes of which has never been seen.

And that would ultimately bear its fangs toward the Fallen Church.

It seemed Yodion realized the clear threat that Kamijou Touma posed, and seemed more dangerous than Violent Violet, the Precure and other unbalanced elements could ever be on their own.

"I agree wholeheartedly your holiness. All of this time, we have been focusing on pointless things as potential threats when the true danger to our ideal has been in plain sight this entire time."

Yodion remarked, staring back at Pope Biscas with a determined look.

"Your holiness, allow me, Yodion the Armoured to lead an assault on Academy City. I swear to you that I will bring you the head of the beast known as Kamijou Touma. As someone who wants to see this world destroyed... with our utopia to rise from its ashes, I will not accept no for an answer. The holder of Imagine Breaker must be destroyed."

Biscas couldn't help but smile somewhat. In a way, the man reminded him of himself when he was young. Filled with determination and a drive to see the current world destroyed, and in its place a utopia where everyone can truly smile.

Perhaps this is why the relationship between Biscas and the members of God's One Throne were better than what previous Popes had with God's Right Seat. Unlike them, they all shared a singular goal, which is why Biscas had chosen to form a pact with them when they were introduced to him.

A simple traitor was of little concern.

The God Hunter was something to worry about, but not so much as the Kamijou Faction.

Formless or not, it had to be destroyed.

And what better way to destroy an organization, then executing its leader?

And so, the Pope gave his order.

"Very well. I hereby approve of the operation to attack Academy City. You will be leading the special division of the Ministry of Holy Affairs, the AX to engage and execute the one known as Kamijou Touma. Anyone who assists him will be considered part of the Kamijou Faction and an enemy of God as well. They are to be dealt with as you see fit."

"As you wish. I will carry out my orders faithfully and strongly. I shall show him, Academy City, and the Magic Association that they are to fear the blade of the Fallen Church and Yodion the Armoured."

Yodion the Armoured smiled maliciously as he gave a respectful bow before exiting the papal throne room to make the necessary arrangements to undertake such an operation.  

He knew that this move would not only make him a clear enemy of Academy City, but also the Magic Association which was also jointly working with Academy City.

But even so, it was irrelevant. Both of those institutions would be deemed irrelevant in his eyes.

And so, the Pope could only give a twisted smile himself as he sat in the throne room.

"Now then Aleister Crowley, Zelreich Kishur Von Schwarz. How will you react to my challenge? Sooner or later, your ambitions will be utterly crushed as I will lead this world to its salvation."

[believerindaydreams]

Okay I know there has to be a Boone/Arcade scene for pacing but this feels like treading water

Oh well, crossing at dawn 2.75 and then I'll be chronologically in order agsin

Boone

Don't know why now of all times, when we've finally sorted out our problems, I start having nightmares.

That time in the Legion, when I'm awake I hardly think about it. But when I sleep it grabs me, I'm wrapped in crimson that's starting to bleed and armed with a machete against men with grenade launchers and rockets.

Not that strange, it's what happened.

I get off the bunk, stealthy as I can manage; Manny's taken the top like always, he's out cold. My wife's fallen asleep on top of Veronica, hands entwined; I'd start wondering about that if the engineer wasn't so obsessed with this train. She's staying out, so the fling is a fling.

Can't complain, that's for sure.

Arcade's in the dining car, reading with his feet up; the place smells like frying fat and sugar.

"What's up?"

"Can't sleep. Didn't seem worth trying any longer."

"Well, I've got something cooking if you're sticking around. What would you normally do to unwind?"

"Practice my sniping."

"Ah. And you can hardly do that on a train, so no wonder you're stressed out."

Guess he has a point. Not many days I've spent without practicing with some kind of firearm or another. "What's cooking, then?"

"Fried Nuka-Cola balls." He's hiding behind his big book now, can't see him. "It's a classic recipe. I'm testing it."

"Can't get enough of the stuff, huh?"

"Followers," Arcade says, peeking over the top of the book, "are interested in all kinds of prewar experiences, valuable or not. Because it takes more than weapon schematics and vault doors to build a society- I think they started forgetting that, towards the end. How to live when your whole life isn't bent towards destruction. The more frivolous, silly, utterly human scraps we can salvage from the wreckage, the better off we all are."

"...so this isn't about your addiction then."

"Well, that too. Any Follower worth the lab coat can spout off nonsense to justify their actions, it's one of the first things you pick up at the Boneyard." He chuckles and tucks the book under his arm. Picks up a kind of metal net and shakes it out, then upends it over a plate. Golden balls spill out, like Manny's dumplings but smaller and less meaty. "Give those a while to cool."

"Guess I'm not going anywhere."

"Great," Arcade says, actually putting the book down. "Because I've- I have missed you, if that makes sense. Far be it from me to ever imply I miss the Sierra Madre, because I most definitely don't, but- you know what, there is absolutely no way of saying this without sounding terrible. That third rum was a mistake."

"With Nuka in it, I guess."

"...yes. Well. I could be even more drunk, but- you know what it is, I had approximately ten seconds to go from the idea of having finally, unbelievably, made a cautious attempt at opening up, to suddenly being the fifth wheel on a cart."

"There's only four of us."

"I'm talking metaphorically- Boone, it's been a lot to deal with. Manny was just that sniper in the dinosaur, Carla I didn't know at all, this is very much a case where I'm late to the party and I'm trying to get to terms with that by consuming junk food abominations and revisiting highlighted passages of the Wasteland Survival Guide. Please don't hate me for realising I'm not even the most important person in your life anymore."

The weird little fried balls are cooled off. I pop one in my mouth- kind of crispy on the outside, syrupy inside. It does taste like a soda, sort of.

"I'm not going to throw you over just because they came back."

Arcade stuffs a ball into his mouth, doesn't speak until he's done chewing. "Surviving the Enclave collapse did not, I'm afraid, do anything for my capacity to trust that a given situation will remain stable."

"...you want to fuck?"

"No. Yes. I would dearly enjoy a prolonged, imaginative and exhausting fuck, but right now I need to get to grips with this before I can get comfortable with you again. Boone, is any of this making sense?"

Wish Manny and Carla were awake, this is out of my depth. "They've told you they're glad to have you along. Don't know that me saying it helps you much."

We're getting through the balls at a fast clip. Saves looking at each other. "Is this because I shot those men at the Freeside gate? You look at me and wonder what other promises I'd break?"

Arcade blinks. Twice. "Not really where I was going with this, but carry on."

"Didn't kill 'em for my sake, when I could have turned myself in. Manny and Carla could have gone back to the Great Khans, they'd be glad to get a good soldier back and she'd stick with him if I vanished. But no way you could have gone with them, with that Legion alliance on the way. Had to make the choice, and I made it."

He slowly crushes a ball in his fingers, opens them up, looks at the dark liquid. "You're saying, cheer up, because I murdered some guards for you."

"Can't make you feel better about the others, because I'm not them. But you want to know if you matter to me? Damn straight you do."

"...I suppose that'll just have to suffice. For the moment."

Comes as a relief, when he quits talking and gets your hands and mouth sticky with soda syrup.

Action's a hell of a lot easier than words.

*****

Manny

Glory be, Veronica should have called it the Love Track. You can hardly move on this train without stumbling over somebody fucking or thinking about fucking or recuperating after the fact.

And I'm not planning to be left out altogether. Third day in I invite Arcade for a roll in the hay. Or maize husks, anyway.

"Why are we here? Cow won't need milking for at least two hours."

"Thought we could get to know each other a little better."

"Ooo-kay. Fine."

He's nervous. Forget the hay, then.

"See, I care about those two idiots out there, bless 'em, but Boone does not do feelings and Carla has been through so many kinds of hell since getting pregnant, I'm amazed she still gets up in the morning. So nobody else is going to ask this- are you feeling all right?"

"Good enough."

Wow. Boone's contagious. "Hey. If I can help, name it. I wouldn't be half as gracious about it if I was the one dumped into a three-way tangle."

"You could satisfy my incessant curiosity, I suppose." He picks up a brush and starts tending Cow; technique all wrong but they're patient animals. "How did you all agree to this, if I may ask?"

"Hmth. Sure you can ask, Boone proposed to her and she turned him down because she didn't believe that he wasn't sleeping with me. He came back to the barracks with a turquoise ring and a broken heart so bad he actually talked about it."

"Were you? Sleeping with him?"

"Not then. But we had done...so next leave, I went to Carla myself, told her it was killing my partner, that if it was me or caps or anything I had the power to change, name it and I'd do it. He'd been so happy with her...well. You met him before he got Carla back."

"I'm not sure I saw him at his worst, even so." Bless the man, Arcade's blushing.

"Could be, I wouldn't know. Well- she laughed and asked if I'd brought a ring too, and I said yes, just in case you wanted one. Nice bit of bone carving, you'd knock that off in a bored afternoon with the Khans. Anyway she suddenly took me seriously after that...she was in love, I was in love, Boone wanted both of us. And she felt better when she heard I didn't go for girls. So I went back, told Boone to try again...went storybook the second time, Carla said."

"Then you were always planning to make a life with them."

"Planning? No. I thought that she'd tell me to find my jollies somewhere else, I'd mope about it for a few months, and head back to the Khans- that was before Bitter Springs."

"So what made you stay?"

"You really don't let up with the questions, do you?" Arcade's not bad to look at, that's for damned sure. The distracted way he's brushing his hair back, for instance. But I'm not going to fuck him just because I'm here and he's here. "Cos I still wanted Boone. Because we were partnered and I couldn't have quit thinking about him if I tried. Because they were a couple of star-struck idiots and they were going to need help."

"I suppose you were right about that."

I'd just as soon forget the word Arizona, thanks. "Sure. Who else would have taught them a triple-step to dance at the Tops?"

"You know a triple-step? I thought that only- well, that only Enclave remembered that."

"Khans were from a vault, back in the day. Good exercise, and it's fun."

"Mmm. It shows."

There's a certain hunger the way Arcade says it, couldn't call it subtle. Suddenly I get to come to terms with just because I'm being polite and hands off, doesn't mean he is.

Well. I wouldn't mind being the one who gets chased, just for a change.

[zamancollective]

Sarchal: The Forgotten History of Tehran’s Jewish Ghetto

By Kyle Newman

To reminisce is to remember with pleasure, to recollect past events while indulging in the enjoyment of nostalgic return. It would be too simplistic to say that the Jews of Iran reminisce blissfully about their past in a country with a fraught history of antisemitism, yet too harsh to conclude that the calamities they endured ought to completely overshadow their 2500 years of rich history. Memories of Sarchal, the Jewish ghetto of Tehran, serve as living manifestations of this ambivalent train of thought. A dynamic community that was forced to adapt to the ebb and flow of life under monarchical Shi’a regimes, Sarchal was much more than a physical location that housed Iran’s urban Jews from the dawn of the Safavid dynasty through to the troughs of a new Islamic Republic. 

In 1588 CE, the Safavid Shah Abbas I revived the Persian empire after centuries of Mongol and Turkic governance. Fairly benign in policy during the first half of his rule, Shah Abbas I reversed his friendly attitude towards the Jewish population when a convert from the city of Lar impelled a royal edict that would force Jews to wear distinctive badges and headgear. Under this edict, Jews were now formally categorized as najjes (ritually impure) under the empire’s Shi’a theocratic law, and ghettoization would begin with the forced expulsion of Jews from Esfahan who refused to convert to Islam. Those who did convert were forced to practice Judaism secretly until 1661, when an edict would allow them to conditionally return to Judaism through payment of the jizya (a tax levied on religious minorities) and wearing their designated badge. 

Conditions worsened for Jews during the Safavid era until one of the last kings of the dynasty, Nadir Shah, came to power in 1736 and abolished Shi’ism as the empire’s official religion. This action enabled Jews in cities like Mashhad, who had previously been subject to forced conversion, to reestablish and regrow their communities. Still, neither prosperity nor persecution were experienced by Jews in a linear fashion: the rise of the Qajar dynasty in 1794 spelled the onset of tightening oppression. The Romanian Jewish traveler and historian J.J. Benjamin wrote about the horrid conditions of Jewish life in Qajar Iran in an account from the mid-19th century: 

“They are obliged to live in a separate part of town; for they are considered as unclean creatures… Under the pretext of their being unclean, they are treated with the greatest severity and should they enter a street, inhabited by Mussulmans, they are pelted by the boys and mobs with stones and dirt… For the same reason, they are prohibited to go out when it rains; for it is said the rain would wash dirt off them, which would sully the feet of the Mussulmans.”

Given the Jews’ status as a najjes group, the most straightforward way to limit physical contact between Muslims and Jews was to segregate them geographically. In Iranian cities with high Jewish populations like Esfahan, Kashan, Tehran, and Hamadan, Jews were segregated into designated neighborhoods, sometimes within the main city walls and sometimes outside of them. The internal layout of each mahaleh (ghetto) played an important role in distinguishing Jewish life in Iran from the history of other ethno-religious communities.  

One such mahaleh was Sarchal, the Jewish quarter of Tehran. Sarchal was different from other Jewish ghettos in Iran given its location in the nation’s capital city of Tehran, an especially volatile and ever-transforming urban enclave since its founding by Qajar King Agha Mohammad Khan in 1786. Unlike the ghettos of Esfahan and other cities, Sarchal was located within Tehran’s old city walls. It is also unique in its oxymoronic overlap with a network of mosques and its proximity to a center of commerce, Tehran’s grand bazaar. Jews and Muslims in Tehran therefore must have interacted very frequently despite the Qajar regime’s heavy-handed, active efforts to quarantine and suppress Jewish life under their rule. 

Sarchal is situated in the southeast corner of old Tehran, contemporarily known as the 12th district. It is directly west of Emamzadeh Yahya, or the birthplace of Imam Yahya, north of Tehran’s grand bazaar, east of Pamenar Bazaar, and south of the Qajar era Masoudieh palace (Map 1). I have also included below a map in Farsi created by Eshaq Shaoul that highlights landmarks, religious structures, and other important sites in the ghetto (Map 2). I have translated his map and included a key identifying the aforementioned sites in English (Map 3). 

Map 3 Key:

1. Tamadon School

2. House of Seyed

3. Pamenar Gym (zoorkhaneh)

4. Midwife Zivar’s house 

5. Mosque

6. Eshagh Bathhouse

7. Reza Goli Khan Mosque

8. Birthplace of Imam Yahya (Emamzadeh Yahya)

9. Mosque

10. Sepir Hospital

11. Midwife Sabia’s house

12. Mullah Haninah Synagogue

13. Aghajan Bakhshi’s house

14. Chaim Golabgir’s house

15. Ayatollah Behbahani’s house

16. Mosque

17. Ezra Mikhail Synagogue

18. Bookstore

19. Fereshteh Pharmacy

20. Seven Synagogue Alley

21. Eshagh’s second house

22. Sarchal Bathhouse

23. Sarchal Plaza

24. Mosque

25. Morteza Navi Butchershop

26. Hakim Moshiah Bathhouse

27. Hakim Synagogue

28. Torbati Pharmacy

29. Ezra Yaghoub Synagogue

30. Eshagh’s birthhouse

31. Dekhantal house

32. Dardashti’s house

33. Bakery

34. Yogurt Maker

35. Tekiyeh Mosque

36. Zoorkhaneh

Very few of Sarchal’s original structures remain intact today. The “Seven Synagogue Alley,” an alley literally surrounded by seven synagogues behind Sarchal’s main plaza, is now nowhere to be found. All the old Jewish hammams (bathhouses), which were built because Jews and Muslims were not allowed to use the same public baths, are gone, as are the Jewish butcher shops, bakeries, and zoorkhanehah (gymnasiums). The Ezra Yaghoub and Mullah Haninah synagogues are still standing, along with Sapir hospital, Pamenar Mosque (dating to the late Sasanian period), Abol Hassan Mosque, Haj Ali Khan Mosque, and Ayatollah Shah Abadi Mosque. 

Street names were also changed following the Islamic Republic regime’s campaign to erase historical and cultural remnants of the Pahlavi era, often replacing them with the names of Shi’a religious and revolutionary martyrs. Cheragh Bargh Street is now Amir Kabir Street, Siroos (Cyrus) Street is now Mostafa Khomeini Street (commemorating Khomeini’s son who died before the 1979 revolution), while Pamenar Bazaar street endured little change and is now Pamenar street (Map 4). 

Map 4 Key:

5. Ayatollah Shah Abadi Mosque

8. Birthplace of Imam Yahya (Emamzadeh Yahya)

10. Sepir Hospital

12. Mullah Haninah Synagogue

16. Abol Hassan Mosque

23. Sarchal Plaza

24. Pamenar Mosque

29. Ezra Yaghoub Synagogue

Sarchal originally included every necessity for Iranian Jews to conduct Jewish life in an incredibly small quarter with an area of less than one square mile. On an average day, one could stop by the bakery to pick up bread, visit the yogurt maker or butcher to prepare a meal, exercise at the zoorkhaneh, pray and study at one of nine synagogues, buy medication from either of two local pharmacies, and engage in scholarly life by buying a book from the bookstore. Reminders of a bygone era of Jewish life in the ghetto are echoed in prominent family names like Dardashti, Torbati, Elghanyan, and Hakim that originated in Sarchal, as well as the titles of surviving architectural spaces: “rag seller and tailor” alleyway, “welder’s bazaar,” and “cannonball storage facility.”

Slowly but surely, the massive discrimination of Iranian Jews that kept them ever close to one another in the confines of the mahaleh would reduce to subtlety after Reza Shah Pahlavi came to power in 1925. The official categorization of Jews and other religious minorities as najjes would be abolished, and the political power of the Shi’a clergy greatly weakened, ushering in a new zeitgeist marked by relative religious tolerance, which the Iranian Jewish historian Habib Levy would call “The Golden Age of Iranian Jewry.” Beginning in the 1940s and bleeding into the 1950s, the last remaining Jewish families of the mahalehs of many Iranian cities left their communities of origin for better jobs and assimilation in Northern Tehran. The Jewish communities of Iran-- and with them, Sarchal-- would eventually see their quasi-extinction after the 1979 Revolution, when the vast majority of Jews were compelled or forced to flee their home of 2500 years due to the new wave of institutionalized antisemitism established by the world’s first parliamentary theocracy, The Islamic Republic of Iran. 

Whether you read The Proverbs of John Heywood from 1562 or listened to Snoop Dogg’s album “I Wanna Thank Me” from 2019, we are all well aware of the phrase “let bygones be bygones,” but to what degree does this sentiment merit acceptance in the context of Iranian sociopolitical history? As far as Jewish Iranians like me are concerned, forgetting the past can be detrimental to the continuation of our existence. There is a stigma surrounding the word Sarchal; many Persian Jews are reluctant to admit our history of poverty and ghettoization. But anything short of active remembrance would serve as a disrespectful gesture to the rag sellers, fabric dealers, grocers, midwives, homemakers, rabbis, butchers, dairymen, and tailors that made life in ghettoes like Sarchal sustainable and even vibrant, not to mention the Muslim business owners and civilians who continued to associate with Jewish communities despite institutional restrictions that prohibited them from doing so. 

Jewish Iranians’ eventual outmigration from the mahalehs was surely a turning point that bolstered their financial success in later years and decades, but our escape from oppression should not negate our responsibility to honor our ancestors who built lives within its confines. In fact, we have much to learn from the Sarchalis who managed to raise families, provide for their community as a whole, and motivate Jewish life in less than one square mile-- with all the odds stacked against them.

References

Bentley, Jerry H, and Herbert F. Ziegler. Traditions & Encounters: A Global Perspective on the Past. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2011. Print.

Fischel, Walter J. “The Jews of Persia, 1795-1940.” Jewish Social Studies, vol. 12, no. 2, 1950, pp. 119–160. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4464868. Accessed 10 Jan. 2020.

Foltz, Richard (2015). Iran in World History. New York: Oxford University Press.

Levy, Habib (1999). Comprehensive History of the Jews of Iran. Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers.

Lewis, Bernard. The Jews of Islam: Updated Edition. REV - Revised ed., Princeton University Press, 1984. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt6wq0nq. Accessed 10 Jan. 2020.

Sanasarian, Eliz (2000). Religious Minorities in Iran. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Shaoul, Eshagh. “Sarechal.com.... Come Home to the Place You Came From.” Welcome to Sarechal, Eshagh Shaoul, http://sarechal.com/.

Tsadik, Daniel. “JUDEO-PERSIAN COMMUNITIES v. QAJAR PERIOD (1).” Encyclopædia Iranica, XV/1, pp. 108-112 and XV/2, pp. 113-117, available online at http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/judeo-persian-communities-v-qajar-period. Accessed 10 Jan. 2020.

Vladimir Minorsky. "The Turks, Iran and the Caucasus in the Middle Ages." Variorum Reprints, 1978.

Published on January 10th, 2020.

[paradife-loft]

moar Khisit and Rivka conversation; relatively early days during Khisit's time on Rivka's crew - another ~1k words or so

-----

Khisit plops down at the cramped galley table opposite Rivka, bearing a plate of sausages and hash browns, and a black mug of caf. They take a bite of sausage and chew thoughtfully, chin propped up on one hand as the other idly flicks their fork back and forth.

"So, question for you," they start, after a few moments' silence. "How come the really obvious limbs?"

[[MORE]]

Rivka blinks and looks up at Khisit with an expression of genuine surprise flickering across her face. Antagonism she'd expected, yes; but no one had ever brought up her prosthetics like that before. (Made leading comments, expressed undesired 'sympathy' - but never just bald-faced asked.)

"I mean, you'd figure the Council'd be willing to spring for the really nice ones with synthskin and all, since they've set you up with this rig," Khisit elaborates, shrugging and gesturing about at the ship. Their golden eyes pierce into Rivka - but she doesn't sense hostility, exactly, more just… testing? Evaluating?

A piece of her bristles instinctually at the idea, and the idea of being found wanting; but it's vestigial and weak enough that she can brush it away with little difficulty.

She sets her datapad down. "These are the sort of limbs I've always had, actually." Rivka meets Khisit's gaze for a moment before glancing off again in thought. "They offered to buy me more organic-looking ones when I joined the Order, yes. And whenever I need to upgrade to a newer model or get repairs done. But there's no real functional advantage to them, and in some cases the added cases just make fixing things harder."

From the corner of her eye, Rivka catches Khisit's brows raise a fraction, paired with a sense of familiarity, positive appraisal. Maybe thinking of an analogy with the work they do on computers?

"So it's just about utility? Don't want a pretty piece of dead weight to drag around in the field if something gets fucked up while you're on assignment? That's respectable."

And yet… incomplete? It's hard to tell what's her read from Khisit's presence and what's her own response, this close to another person. She's pretty sure the irritation is her own, though.

"There's a lot more that can go wrong, too, when you're building based on principles besides just functional efficiency," Rivka elaborates instead, frowning as she thinks of some of the repairs she's seen and heard about hanging around the maintenance enclave. "Is synthskin the most durable outside covering? No. Is it an extra challenge trying to add another layer of signal transfer systems for the tactile feedback impulses? Yes. And some of the compensation methods weigh more, so you're putting more strain on the rest of the body where it joins up… and they're harder to take off regularly, so you're wearing them more and that just compounds the stress, on top of how people wearing the fancy ones half the time want to feel as normal as possible and so again, aren't taking them off -"

She cuts off abruptly, aware of the heat in her face and how her voice has raised through the impromptu rant. Not to mention whether Khisit even cared for that much detail… she looks away briefly, twisting a lock of hair between her finger and thumb.

But Khisit is almost smiling when Rivka hazards a glance back - smirking, really - with their brow ridges raised at the edges. "Oh, no, don't stop on my account," they say, leaning back and crossing their arms. One grey-clad knee peeks over the edge of the table. "This is fascinating."

Giving her enough rope to hang herself with? But no. Khisit isn't… Master Kaedan. Or his ilk.

She sighs, and sets her hands down. "People put a lot of moral importance on… being purely organic. Or at least looking like it, if you can't have the real thing. If life creates the Force, what does it say if your body is too… infected by corruption, to accept the methods of healing that would reconnect you fully with the Force the way you should be? Never mind that there's no such thing as equal access to medical technology; and organic-looking prosthetics, full-term kolto treatments, happen to be what rich people in the Core can afford. Or that no between-group differences have been found in any empirical studies of Force potential in people with mechanical prosthetics versus not. So I just… yes, part of it is efficiency. But part of it is also…"

She trails off, drumming fingers against the table, not wanting to verbalise the words that come most readily to mind, that contain the honesty she wants to provide. But she isn't coming up with any more acceptable-sounding alternatives that aren't lies, either.

Part of it is anger. Spite. Not wanting to let the ignorant bastards who believe those things win.

Knowledge has always come easier than peace, and made peace even harder to achieve in turn. She still doesn't know what to do with that.

Khisit is still watching intently, but doesn't seem to give anything away in either their face or the Force. They shrug, casualness belied by the focus in their eyes. "Hey, you're not gonna get any argument from me." A hint of steel edges their voice. "Fuck them."

Rivka almost laughs, beset with memory. She'd said almost the same thing once, more than once, strained with tension and the heavy chain of awareness of the transgression in the statement. Calculated curses, carefully packaged and deployed as befit the only outlet of such power she could access. Khisit's presence, even for such a short time, has begun to desensitise her.

But then, she can't bring herself to see that as wholly a bad thing.

[twinflamable]

Rising Heat

((Od Dotharl. cw: sexy stuff, I guess. Nothing too explicit. Image credit, btw.))

Stone pillars cut long shadows out of the sun. The black lines pointed inward from the courtyard, becoming new roads that lead into the dark. The brightness of the sun made these alcoves all the darker, better to seek shelter in. Here, it was cool. The sound of trickling water echoes on invisible walls. It seemed less a building than a cavern, humid and cool, unknowably deep. Either exciting or terrifying to explore, depending on one’s courage. By how D’leyn crept forward, she felt some of both.

The sound of dark water moving, the glistening of black horns rising from the pool, the shine of blue reptilian eyes reflected just above the surface, turned D’leyn toward the darkest shadow. She flinched in instinctive fear, crossing her arms over her body. She was naked and wet, water brimming from the cups of her collarbones and drawing rivulets down her chest and stomach. Her gold-furred ears flicked and cast gleaming drops into the sunlight. “Nald forfend, Od! What are you doing in here?”

The bath-house was a broad complex, sparsely populated at the moment, and the most popular place for noon bathing was those sun-warmed pools that D’leyn now came from, where the heat soothed the aching bodies of the gladiators. This left Od alone in the dark and the cool. Stepping forward in the water, Od lifted her face just one more ilm to get her lips above the water and say, “The light hurts my eyes.” Od was black rising from black, two great horns pointed up and back, two more sloping forward into the pool, hair melting perfectly into the water, eyes glowing like discs of blue aether in the dark. If D’leyn looked closely enough, she’d be able to see how Od’s eyes strained to dilate, how she winced subtly from moment to moment. But Od knew there was no way to see the pain, how even the gleam of water on D’leyn’s body stung. Od strained to see D’leyn’s shape, her skin, her face, but the pain radiated and magnified by the second so that Od’s teeth and horns ached. “Come further in so I can look at you.”

The way D’leyn’s ears stood and her shoulders lifted, Od knew that her breath had faltered, and ever-attentive D’leyn had not only noticed it but read it perfectly: yes, D’leyn, you have my attention and I want to see you, to have you here now, to have you closer. D’leyn stood in place, eyes blinking, tip of her tail twitching, and then she came forward. She lowered her arms to her sides, further exposing herself.

But Od didn’t let her eyes roam. She held D’leyn’s gaze with all the focus of a beast at hunt, expression straight and unreadable. “Were you looking for me, D’leyn?”

They’d known each other for a week, having met on Od’s first day in Ul’dah. They’d first made eye contact at the coliseum, with a crowd between them, blood sport playing out below. Od was draped in dark cloth, her horns stabbing through a hood that kept her eyes shaded so the lights wouldn’t find her face. She caught D’leyn staring, distracted apparently from a conversation she was in the middle of with some Lalafel in rich attire. Od had at first felt nothing upon seeing D’leyn: she wore a transparent silk dress over a white slip, adorned in golden chains studded with various gems, a rich blond miqo’te who probably owned some of the gladiators. But something had happened in D’leyn’s eyes while Od watched: widening, focusing, like recognition and hunger, but impersonal.

D’leyn’s eyes did the same thing now when Od stepped to the edge of the pool, letting the water run down her body, naked but imperfectly revealed in the shadows. By then, D’leyn’s eyes had adjusted so that she could almost see, and she let her eyes fall to the black scales on Od’s sides, on her ribs and hips and her legs. Just like back then, Od felt nothing remarkable at being seen; oh, there was a heat on her skin where D’leyn’s gaze touched her, but Od’s heart beat no harder. The thing that thinned her breath was how D’leyn’s lips moved, gleaming brown and soft.

D’leyn took a step back as Od reached the edge of the pool, keeping a yalm between them. “Is everyone where you’re from…?”

“Dotharl Khaa,” Od reminded her. Of course Od was the first Au Ra that D’leyn had ever seen, and that lead to uncertainty: did D’leyn’s eyes gleam with lust or just curiosity? Od extended a hand, curling her fingers. “Come here. Trust me.”

D’leyn was a member of a wealthy tribe who owned an enclave inside Ul’dah, not something that Od would’ve thought possible before D’leyn told her about it. They invested in gladiators, and Od was interested in fighting. D’leyn had told her that entrance into the bloodsands was rare and difficult to achieve, but with nowhere else to go and no other ambitions, Od had accepted an invitation to D’leyn’s small roster of gladiators in training for minor bouts. Since then, D’leyn had been watching her spare against her Ul’dhan recruits, gold eyes reflecting sunlight, making Od’s head ache. The aches were worth it. There was no satisfaction in sparing Ul’dahns, and Od refused to be trained by the scarred-and-maimed roegadyn that D’leyn put in charge of the gladiators, but Od enjoyed D’leyn watching her.

D’leyn stepped forward when encouraged, lifting her hand with some hesitation. Od reached out and took hold of it, pulling it to her and putting it to one of the horns that extended forward from the side of her head. As D’leyn’s fingers touched the smooth horn, she froze and took a breath. Od’s lips, ever thin and closed, showed amusement by softening their pout and parting slightly to say, “Don’t worry. Go ahead and feel. I don’t have much sensation in my horns.”

“It’s warm.” D’leyn stepped forward, lifting her other hand to Od’s other horn. Thoughtlessly, Od closed her eyes. In the past months, she’d only been touched outside of combat once, and that was for a chirugeon’s examination when she’d joined D’leyn’s gladiators. As D’leyn moved her fingertips to the tips of the horns, and then slid them back toward Od’s face, Od’s heart finally began its pounding. She parted her eyes to see D’leyn’s distracted expression, lips open, eyes watching the sweep of her own hands in fascination as she drew near and reached for the horns behind Od’s head. She was like a girl that had just noticed the appeal of bodies, clumsily reaching out without understanding the implications of what she was doing. But she was smarter than that. She would have to know, wouldn’t she?

The corner of her lips twitching up in a playful smirk, Od bent her head forward so that D’leyn could reach the tips of her long horns. As heads were measured, D’leyn was taller, but Od’s horns were remarkably long even among her family back in Dotharl Khaa. As she leaned, Od reached behind D’leyn’s head and pressed her fingertips to the base of the miqo’te’s ears.

D’leyn froze, ears slamming down over Od’s fingers. “Hey.”

Od smirked, sly and small. “It’s only fair. I’ve never touched a miqo’te’s ears.”

Eyes narrowing as though to call some bluff, D’leyn eventually let Od run her fingers up the backs of her ears. Od noticed how D’leyn gasped at the sensation, features flush, so she pet them more gently. After a few moments, with an expression of resolve, D’leyn ran her hands back down Od’s horns to the scales on the side of her face, then her neck, along the tops of her shoulders. D’leyn said, “You feel this?”

Od nodded. “Yes, but it’s fine. I don’t mind.” Was that what D’leyn wanted? Od moved her fingers gently at the base of D’leyn’s ears, hearing the woman breathe deeply. Od realized they’d drawn closer because she could almost feel D’leyn’s chest expand with breath. Od let her forearms rest on D’leyn’s shoulders while she massaged D’leyn’s scalp and the miqo’te’s hands slid down the scales on her back. Od kept her gaze stubbornly on D’leyn’s eyes, but D’leyn made no effort to keep her eyes up. She looked down and bit her tongue, and Od felt heat rising in her body as D’leyn’s fingertips reached the long, rigid scales at the top of her tail.

The slightest touch of a fingertip to her tail was enough to stop Od’s breathing, and she felt her heart beating in her horns. Not without pain – oh, how her skull throbbed even now, heat like coals on the backs of her eyes throwing smoke over her senses – but Od wasn’t one to relent to pain. It was a feeling, and she replaced it with other feelings, particularly with the movement of D’leyn’s fingers on her tail. D’leyn ran her fingers down, pressed her palm to the top of Od’s tail, then to its side. As her fingers tested the softer scales on the underside of Od’s tail, her thumb moved in a slow circle on top, right at the base against Od’s back. The sensations of each touch, the heat of it, radiated through Od’s hips stomach, up her spine and into her chest. It pushed the pain to the tips of her horns and into her eyes, where Od could contain it by closing her eyes and bowing her head forward.

D’leyn leaned her face to the side, but didn’t back away. Face was an ilm from the wet, warm skin of D’leyn’s shoulder, Od put her hand against the small of D’leyn’s back and pulled them together.

D’leyn went rigid and froze. “Od.”

“You know what you’re doing, don’t you?” Od moved her hand to D’leyn’s tail, duplicating her movements: fingers curled underneath, thumb moving in a circle at the base of the tail. D’leyn exhaled a hot breath and Od felt her shivering where they touched at hip and stomach and chest. Od said, “Your tail’s as sensitive as mine is, isn’t it? You know what you’re doing.”

Eyes turned away, D’leyn was still except for the heaviness of her breath, like she’d forgotten how to breathe and had to struggle to do so. She didn’t move the hand on Od’s tail, while her other hand rested on Od’s back.

“What’s next?” Od whispered, lips brushing D’leyn’s skin. “Should I guess?”

“D’aun will kill me if I start messing around with the gladiators.” But D’leyn didn’t move.

“You don’t have a merchant’s body. You have a fighter’s body. Do you train? I’ve never seen you train.” Od ran a hand up D’leyn’s back, pulling them tight against one another. “D’leyn, why are you training your gladiators to lose?”

D’leyn took a deep, fast breath, and took her hands away, leaning back. “What?”

“You know what you’re doing.” Od held fast, moving forward to keep their bodies together, D’leyn’s wet skin sliding over her scales, Od’s muscles pulling while D’leyn’s pushed away. “You know the techniques they’re being taught are flawed. And you’re watching everyone, making sure they’re vulnerable. Making sure they’ll lose.”

“Let go. This is a mistake.” D’leyn pushed against Od’s shoulders more powerfully than a rich merchant should’ve been able to, enough to hurt, maybe enough to bruise.

Od smiled and showed her teeth, pulling back just as hard, feeling the fire inside her burning all the hotter, the headache forgotten, the sensation of skin and breath and water replacing it completely. “Let’s just burn together for a moment.” Od suddenly dropped her weight and pitched backward. D’leyn’s hands slipped off Od’s shoulders and her weight pitched over Od’s head. They fell backward together, toward the water, the dark and the cool rushing up around them. Od closed her eyes and held her breath and pressed D’leyn’s writing body against her own.

D’leyn was not simply writhing, though. The pool wasn’t deep – maybe a yalm and a half – and D’leyn drove her feet to the bottom. With surprising strength, she lifted Od and turned her over her shoulder, all the momentum of their fall turned to throwing Od down and lifting D’leyn up. In an instant, Od hit the steps where the pool was shallow, laying on her back with the corners of the steps pressing into her and the water lapping at her sides. D’leyn was on top of her, haunches to Od’s stomach and legs wrapping Od’s torso, weight baring down, tail whipping in anger.

Od’s pained groan held a laugh. Her horns hurt, renewing the pain in her head and her eyes, and she could feel the press of stone at her back ready to well into ugly bruises, but she smiled and laughed, and grabbed D’leyn’s hips to pull her down.

D’leyn hissed, “What is wrong with you?” She grabbed Od’s hands and pulled them away, pushing them back.

Od strained against D’leyn’s pushing, instinctively testing her strength and leverage. “Why do you think I won’t let myself be trained? Out of pride? I can tell as easily as you can from watching that they’re not being taught how to fight properly. More when I’m sparring with them.”

“If you have a problem with how they’re being-“

“You’re doing it on purpose. I felt how your body moved just now. You know how to fight better than they do. Better than their trainer.” Od could’ve forced D’leyn off of her, used her legs to prise D’leyn away and throw her back into the water, pounce her and wrestle with her body again. All the fire in Od’s body desired it, but she stayed where she was, lips straight, voice sharp, all that heat pouring out of her eyes. “You know what you’re doing.”

The pressed her weight down on Od made it plain that she felt the rising heat, but she held it in check. “You’re seeing things, Od. There’s a brawl in a week. Six lesser gladiator schools like ours. One fighter wins. The prize is a berth in the bloodsands’ grand melee the week after. You don’t think I want one of my gladiators in the main event?”

“It doesn’t look like it.” Od strained against D’leyn’s strength again, forcing the miqo’te to press down all the more, to tense her powerful shoulders and arms, making the muscles stand out. Od wanted so badly to get her hands on D’leyn’s thighs, but she settled for this tension, the way that D’leyn’s legs held her.

“If you keep this up, I’m not going to let you into the brawl.” D’leyn grated. “You want a shot at the bloodsands, right? It’s what you came here for, right?”

When Od had arrived in Ul’dah, her first question to someone on the street had been, Where is the blood? Pressing her hips up against D’leyn’s body, Od said, “Yes.”

D’leyn bore her weight down against Od. “Then stop. Don’t ask questions like that. And let me go.”

Od narrowed her eyes. “You’re going to fire me up this much and then just try to put me out?”

“I can keep you pinned here all night if I need to.”

“No, you can’t.” Od lifted her knees and pressed them against D’leyn’s back. The feeling of D’leyn’s tail moving against her legs was welcome.

“Od,” D’leyn growled. “I will cut you out of the brawl if you don’t stop.”

“I don’t believe you.” Od’s plan was to cast D’leyn back into the water and turn this around, maybe pin D’leyn against the wall of the pool and hold her there, bite down on her neck, make her admit to whatever plan she had while collecting her thin breath, her shivering voice, tasting her body. Od thought this plan through and shook with the need of it, hoping that D’leyn could feel that shaking where her hips pressed down on her.

But Od exhaled that heat and let her head lay back in the water, relaxed her arms, let her legs fall. Because she didn’t know D’leyn, and she didn’t trust D’leyn. At the very least, D’leyn was a liar, someone with a plan she couldn’t admit to. And Od did want that fight, the brawl, the berth in the bloodsands. Eyes closing, tail churning slowly in the pool, Od muttered, “Fine. I’ll stop.”

D’leyn let go of Od’s arms, and Od left them limp at her sides. D’leyn lifted her hips, leaned forward, and put a finger to Od’s lips. When Od’s eyes opened, D’leyn’s shone gold down at her. “Od, I like you, but I own you. Let’s not mess that up yet.”

Od felt the throb of returning pain in her eyes and her head. Not returning: never absent, a permanent ache that could only be forgotten for moments at a time. “Yet?”

“Maybe after the brawl. If we don’t win, then what’s the point?”

“I’m going to win.” Od said this without thinking, lips against D’leyn’s finger. Daring to lift one hand, Od rested it over D’leyn’s, and the miqo’te didn’t pull away. “But I do like this.”

“Well one of those isn’t going to work. Now stay put.” D’leyn pulled her hand away and leaned back, untangling her legs, retreating into the pool.

Od lifted her head to watch D’leyn move away, toward the light. Then the sun was on D’leyn’s body again, shining bright from her hair, glistening in the drops of water on her skin, and every flash of it stung. Od lay her head back and closed her eyes, watching now the false light behind her eyelids brighten and ripple in time with the throb of the pain. She listened to D’leyn’s footsteps on wet stone, becoming quieter, and then gone.

Lifting herself up on her elbows, Od pushed herself back into the pool and sank slowly until her feet touched the bottom, bending her knees so her head submerged. The darkness, the coolness, the pressure on her skin and her face, eased the pain. Her skin was still sensitive from D’leyn’s touch, and the movement of the water as she sank into it excited every inch of her. Under the water, she pushed her back against the wall of the pool and crossed her arms over her body, feeling her skin and her scales, running her hands down her sides, her hips, behind her to press at her tail where D’leyn had touched. Od pulled up her legs and let her tail curl up between her thighs, drifting almost weightless. In cold and dark, she was still hot from the pain that throbbed in her head and her bones. But she hot on her skin from the thoughtless, remembered sensations of bodies tumbling in this water, from straining limbs, and from the way D’leyn looked at her: hungry, distant, but like she might rush close at any moment.

[whitefeather79]

THE DUPLEX PART 14: A KRISTANNA FANFIC

Two weeks had passed since Anna and Kristoff had visited The Broken Spoke. Since then, Anna had been even more determined to pass both the written and maneuverability tests to get that endorsement. Uncle Kai, Aunt Gerda and Elsa were none too pleased about Anna having a Harley. They told her that she'd hurt herself and that she should consider selling it. Kristoff had listened patiently to Anna's ramblings regarding her family and he'd told her that it should be up to her, not them. Anna had also casually asked Kristoff about his previous relationships: she'd only had Hans. Since he'd divorced Sara, Kristoff had only dated Kandi and one other girl; named Cheryl Haskins; for a month after he'd dumped Kandi. Cheryl had dumped him because she'd fallen in love...with another woman (Cheryl was bisexual). They'd parted on good terms though. He'd wondered why she'd asked but decided that, if they ever did wind up in a romantic relationship, honesty was always the best choice.

On a warm Thursday afternoon in mid October, Anna went to the DMV with her Harley. Just before she went in to take the written test, her smartphone had dinged. Kristoff had texted her. It read: "Good luck on your tests today. I believe in you." She smiled and texted back. It read: "Thanks. I'll make you proud." She went in and took the written test. She'd passed. During the maneuverability test, which was on a closed course behind the building, with a Florida Highway patrolman watching, she was careful and wore a helmet. She did so well, the patrolman was very impressed. She turned off the engine and removed her helmet. The patrolman came up to her. "Congratulations, Miss Nordegren," he said. "You passed." He handed her a slip of green paper. "Take this inside and they'll place the endorsement on your driver's license." She smiled. "Thank you, officer," she said. She ran back inside the DMV. Soon, everything was official. Anna decided to go and tell Kristoff the good news in person. She got onto her Harley, put her helmet on, started the engine and rode in the direction of North Mountain Motorworks.

Hans had been watching Anna for months. He never dared violating the restraining order but now, after seeing Anna spending more time with Kristoff and learning how to ride a motorcycle, Hans was beyond furious. (That's why she'd broken up with me...to become a Viking biker's whore! I'll show her) he fumed. He'd been living out of his Bentley for three months now, having finally lost his picturesque mansion to his creditors and his family turning their backs on him. He'd lost weight and now had a beard, his clothes tattered. He drove right behind Anna, waiting for the right time. Traffic at this time of day was getting heavy due to schools getting ready to end for the day. At the intersection of Duffer Drive and Sparta Street, he hit her motorcycle.

Anna had seen the car tailgating her then pulling back. She knew it was Hans's car (she'd bought the car for him) but didn't really see who was driving it. She sped up carefully, swerving in and out of traffic to avoid the car but the car followed. Soon, the car rammed into her motorcycle with force, she flying off of it. The motorcycle flipped and landed in the median, she falling into the street, rolling hard and hitting the median. The car sped off. A Buick Enclave stopped by her, putting the hazard lights on. A Ford Taurus stopped, too. They'd seen the entire thing and had taken pictures with their smartphones. Anna had been laying there, helmet broken (still having all of her teeth), crying in pain. The police and EMTs were called. The paramedics got Anna onto the gurney and into the ambulance. Once at the hospital, the nurse asked Anna, "Dear, who do you want us to contact?" Anna froze. She didn't want Uncle Kai, Aunt Gerda or Elsa to know: they'd get mad. "Call my friend and neighbor Kristoffer Bjorgman please," Anna said weakly. "He's working at North Mountain Motorworks." They called.

Bulda answered. "North Mountain Motorworks. This is Bulda Svensen. How may I help you," Bulda said. "Hello. I'm looking for a Kristoffer Bjorgman. Is he there," the nurse asked. "Yes. Just a minute." Bulda put the caller on hold, then went to get Kristoff. He was changing the spark plugs in an old pickup. "Krissy, honey," Bulda said. "The phone's for you." "Okay, Mom," Kristoff said. "It's probably Sven's vet, saying he's ready." Kristoff set his tools down, wiped his hands and went to the desk. He'd driven his truck today since he'd dropped Sven off at the veterinarian before coming to work. He picked up the phone. "Hello," Kristoff said. "Is this Kristoffer Bjorgman," the nurse asked. "This is he." "Sir, my name is Mary. I'm an emergency room nurse here at Heart of Florida Medical Center. Your neighbor Anna Nordegren had you as an emergency contact." "Is Anna okay?" "No. She was involved in a motorcycle accident. How soon can you get here?" "I'm on my way!" Kristoff quickly hung up and ran out of the garage. Bulda ran after him. "Hon, where are you going," she asked. "Anna was in an accident. I'm going to the hospital," he said, opening his truck door and getting in. "Tell Anna we're praying for her." "I will." He sped off to the hospital (lucky to not get a speeding ticket).

Kristoff got to the hospital; his stomach in knots, his heart racing and his mind fraught with worry. The nurse took him to Anna's room in the emergency ward. Anna looked rough. Dressed in a hospital gown, she was cut, bruised, scraped, covered in road rash and nursing four bruised ribs, a bruised tailbone and a dislocated left shoulder. He went to her bedside. Her eyes were closed. "Princess," Kristoff said gently, trying to hold back the tears that were threatening to fall. "It's me, Kristoff. I'm here." She opened her eyes, relief over seeing Kristoff there evident in their azure depths. She saw the worry and the glisten of unshed tears in the earthen depths of his eyes. "Hey, Kris," Anna said weakly. "Thank God you're here! I'd passed." "What happened?" "I was on my way to your garage to tell you I'd passed and someone ran me off the road. I think it was Hans cause the car was a blue Bentley. I don't remember much after that." "Have the cops come by yet?" "Yes. They left just before you got here. There were two eyewitnesses. I did show them my copy of the restraining order. They gave me a card and said the report will be ready soon." The doctor came in soon after. He handed Kristoff Anna's discharge information and four prescriptions for various painkillers and muscle relaxers, plus a card for her to come back in a week, along with a note for work. He soon left. "I'll wait outside for you to get dressed," Kristoff said. Anna nodded. Once she was dressed and her left arm in a sling, they left. After stops to Walgreens and to pick up Sven, they went home, he wanting to kill Hans.

Kristoff opened his garage door but he didn't park the truck in the garage just yet. It started to rain. He looked at Anna, tears running down his cheeks, where a faint hint of dark golden blond stubble rested. She looked at Kristoff, tears running down her bruised freckled cheeks. "Anna," Kristoff said, his voice thick from tears. "I'd almost lost you today. I don't know what I would've done if I'd lost you." "Kristoff," Anna said, her voice quiet and wavering from tears. "I was so scared that I'd die out on that road and the thought of not seeing you anymore was scarier than being thrown off of that motorcycle." He took her right hand in his left hand, lacing his fingers through hers, Sven laying in the backseat. "Anna, I've been wanting to tell you this for a while now but I was scared to." "Kristoff, you can tell me anything. I'd never judge." He swallowed hard. "Anna, I love you," he'd blurted. She looked at him. She smiled weakly. "I love you, too, Kristoff," she said. "I've been waiting for you to say it. I wanted to tell you, too but I didn't want to rush you." "I didn't think you were ready yet." They leaned forward.

Kristoff's lips soon covered Anna's lips in a gentle, sweet kiss. Anna kissed Kristoff back gently, they not daring to go any further due to her being in pain. They finally stopped after a few moments Firehouse singing "Love of a Lifetime" softly on the radio. "That was perfect," Anna said. "The best," Kristoff said. "Stay with me tonight please." "Certainly." They parked, he got a change of clothes and they went to her side of the duplex, where she had food and bowls for Sven. Kristoff took good care of Anna (he'd even used a couple of sick days, which he'd never did), making sure she ate, took her meds and went to see the doctor. Hans, thanks to the testimony from the two witnesses and photo evidence, was picked up by the sheriff in the nearby town of Lake Placid, arrested and put in jail. Hans, of course, had denied it but no one believed him. Anna had pressed charges. Hans was convicted of attempted murder, hit and run and violating a permanent restraining order and was sentenced to five years in prison up in Tallahassee with no possibility of parole. Anna's Harley, being under warranty, was sent to the dealership in Orlando for repair (otherwise, she would've let Kristoff fix it). Life soon got better.

THE END...FOR NOW...

[alleiradayne]

How to Have Fun For Dummies

Read it on AO3

For: Cullen Appreciation Week 2017 Day 5 - Friends Rating: SFW (Floofs) Word Count: 2,251

Cullen gets roped into a few drinks with his fellow advisers, Cassandra, and Amallia at the tavern in Haven.

Author’s Note: I took a little liberty with this one since it occurs early in the Inquisition timeline, prior to any relationship Amallia and Cullen develop. So technically, they’re friends here. Friends that want to bone each other.

“Commander!” a voice sang above the crowd. “Share a pint with us?”

Cullen scanned the tiny tavern to find Leliana waving to him, her table accompanied by Josephine and Cassandra. Not wanting to intrude on their free time, Cullen approached their table with a readied excuse for his quick departure.

“Lady Nightingale, I apologize, I must attend to the–”

“Nonsense,” Cassandra interrupted. “The bloody trebuchets won’t disappear overnight. Sit.”

She wasn’t wrong. And they had earned a moment’s respite, had they not? Lady Trevelyan had stopped the breach from growing, and at the very least, the rift was stable.

For now.

Against his better judgment, Cullen sat beside Cassandra and asked a serving girl for a tankard of ale. Beside him, Cassandra asked for a second as she wrapped an arm around his shoulder for a gentle embrace.

“Thank you, Cullen,” she started. “We thought you could use the break.”

A break. How glorious a gift, but he had far too much work ahead of him. With the constant stream of refugees, soldiers, and mages flowing into Haven, his night had no end in sight. Beds, shelter, food, clothing, his mental checklist remained incomplete and ever growing. Precious few people wore more than singed rags, their livelihoods decimated by the war ravaging the Hinterlands. And contemplating the war-torn region reminded him of yet another task on his list.

“Lady Montilyet,” he started, and the woman across from him brightened at the sound of her name. “Do you have a contact willing to travel to the Hinterlands? We need an Inquisition official to assist in wresting back control of the area. And protect the local common folk.”

“Commander,” Josephine began, “do you have any hobbies? What else do you do? Besides work.”

 Maker, not again. “I do,” he stated with a sardonic smile.

“Training doesn’t count,” Cassandra jested. “For instance, I enjoy reading.”

“As do I,” he added as their ale arrived. Taking a sip, he relished the flavor a moment before continuing. “I consider myself well read.”

Josephine’s laughter flitted through the tavern, a bright song that drew several eyes. “Alright, Ser Rutherford, name a fictional character.”

With three sets of eyes boring into him, Cullen opened his mouth to answer, but he balked as the door to the tavern swung wide in a gust of crisp mountain air. The Herald of Andraste crossed the threshold, wind swirling in her purple waves and fierce blue eyes searching the crowd. Thought fled, his reply to their teasing lost as his lips parted in a slight gape.

Following his blank stare, the three women turned to find the source of his distraction. Time stretched, slowing as Leliana stood and waved, her lilting call gaining the Herald’s attention with ease. A bright smile spread across her lips, and in the blink of an eye, Amallia Trevelyan joined their table.

Seated beside Josephine and across from him, a drink filled the Herald’s hands without her asking. From it she drew a long pull, swallowing several times before the tankard thumped on the table. Licking her lips clean of the heady foam, her eyes found his, wide and staring as if seeing him for the first time.

“Commander,” she stated, “it’s wonderful to see you taking a break. I believe tonight is the first I’ve seen you in a casual setting.”

Cassandra’s heavy boot connected with his beneath the table, shocking his senses into motion. “I… ah, yes, Herald. Since the enclave, I’ve slept little and kept busy.”

Maker’s breath, what had he said? He wished to take it back, whatever it was, to see her smile again, for she frowned a sympathetic pout with a furrowed brow. “I suppose that’s my fault.”

“Lady Trevelyan, no, that’s not what the Commander meant,” Cassandra covered for him. “We do not blame you in the least for what happened at the conclave. Not any longer, at least.”

Leliana leaned in besides Josephine, a small smile on her lips. “We’re happy to have you here with us, Amallia,” she started, eyes darting to his. “Smitten, even.”

Coughing into his ale, Cullen spluttered, stunned by Leliana’s perception, though he supposed he shouldn't be. Standing, he muttered an excuse to find an exit. “I’m sorry, ladies, I should attend—”

“Stay?”

Half out of his seat, Cullen froze, doubting his ears. Searching for a hint of reality, he looked to her to find her fiery blue eyes locked on his, piercing through to his soul. And there, buried so deep, lay the truth he was terrified she might learn.

“Please?”

The hopeful quirk of her brow slowed his racing heart, and her small smile eased him back into his seat. Maker’s breath, but she had a way of calming his nerves, easing his anxiety. No dose of lyrium sated him the way her presence did.

“There’s a good sport,” Amallia chimed with a smirk. “Another order of drinks? Get to know each other?”

“Oh, that sounds wonderful,” Leliana agreed. Josephine and Cassandra drained the rest of their mugs and handed them over to the serving girl as she returned for another order.

His own mug stood full but for a few sips, and he stared into its golden depths as he searched for a topic of discussion, something relatable. When nothing came to mind and another tankard plunked to the table before him, he drank, draining his first in a long, slow pull.

“Well done,” Amallia saluted as she lifted her mug. “To new friends?”

“To a new adventure,” Leliana added.

“To new opportunities,” Josephine declared.

Several sardonic responses came to mind, but he discarded them without a second thought. Whether it was the company, the ale, or both, Cullen hefted his fresh tankard and spoke.

“To new love.”

At the war room door, Amallia paused, her hand frozen on the latch. There, she heard it again, the distant, muted sound of a poor soul retching. But from where did it come?

Stepping back into the main hall of the chantry, she listened, straining for a hint of direction. Several seconds passed before she heard more, the distinct sound of vomiting emanating from the room in the west wing. Nearing the door, a familiar voice groaned in abject pain.

Knocking with a gentle touch, she spoke. “Cul–Commander? Are you alright?”

A muttered curse preceded his reply. “I’m… I will be fine, Herald—” he started, but another forceful heaving interrupted him, the metallic clang of a bucket on stone punctuating his misery.

Against her better judgment, Amallia scanned the chantry to find it empty before opening the door and darting into the small room. Three beds crowded the space, two lying empty and neatly made. In the far corner, a covered lump shifted, Cullen’s sunken eyes and unkempt hair peaking over his shoulder.

“Herald, please,” he begged. “I just need to sleep.”

Tentative steps edged her to the side of his bed where she sat, careful not to disturb him. “I can help,” she muttered, “I want to help. If you’ll let me.”

With the linens tucked beneath his chin, Cullen curled into himself. It was then she wondered what kept him away from everyone around them, what caused him to retreat into himself so often. Completely unlike his past behavior she'd witnessed, he’d conversed with herself and the three other women well into the previous night, not an awkward moment shared the entire evening.  But that had been accomplished with copious amounts of ale.

At least she could cure her own hangover. And it appeared Leliana and Josephine had found their own remedies. Cassandra appeared fine, too, training in the yard near the soldiers’ tents as she had passed earlier that morning. But when Amallia had found Cullen’s usual post void of his presence, she assumed him to be at the war table, awaiting her arrival.

Another convulsion wracked his body, teeth gritting and eyes screwed shut against the pain. When the wave of nausea passed, she laid a gentle hand on his shoulder, thumb rasping over the linens. Much to her surprise, his hand enveloped hers, peaking out of the sheets to grasp tight. Reeling in the sudden sensation, Amallia remained silent, thought abandoning her in a wisp of smoke.

“What can you do?”

Unprepared, she stuttered. “The nausea. I can stop that. And the spinning room. You’ll fall sleep at least.”

Jaw clenched and narrowed eyes set, he nodded, agreeing. She adjusted her seat, turning to face him. “You’ll feel a slight chill at first, but that will pass. Other than that, please try to relax.”

Cullen nodded again. “Do it.”

Her fingers reached for him, but in the last inch, Amallia froze for a second that stretched an eternity. She knew nothing about the man that lay before her, but the thought of touching him, the proximity, the inherent intimacy of her fingers in his hair struck her like a bolt of lightning.

But he needed help. And she possessed the means. How immature of her to balk at such standard healing procedure? She was a grown woman, not a blushing young maid.

Except he blushes every time he sees you.

With an irritated scoff, she shoved her warring feelings aside as she cupped his temple. A slow trickle of her magic seeped into him, searching, feeling. Through his presence she wandered, discovering different hurts and hungers at each turn. Nothing concrete, it was not as if she could read minds. But simple desires, like water or food or…

Touch?

Ignoring the sting in her cheeks, Amallia continued working, searching until she stumbled across the cause of his hangover. With a mix of frost and spirit, she soothed his pains, then warmed him with a spot of fire to ward off the icy magic.

Andraste preserve me, but his hair is gorgeous.

Tensions oozed from his muscles as his breathing steady, deep and slow to cleanse his stressed body. His legs straightened as he rolled to his back and her hand slipped from him as he reached above his head. The sheet slid from his chin as he stretched, muscles pulled long and hard as he groaned his relief.

Though they were alone, the heat of embarrassment creeped along her neck as Amallia stared. Massive hands gave way to solid arms, heavy shoulders rolling away the lingering exhaustion. And as if to tease her, the sheet slipped another inch, uncovering his neck and shoulders such that she startled, eyes averting and heart thumping.

“I… I’ll leave you to sleep,” she stuttered as she stood.

His sudden grip at her wrist stopped her in her tracks, and for reasons unknown to her, the sensation conjured up an image so salacious in her mind, she whimpered in shock. Her free hand flew to her mouth though it was too late. He had heard it, and by the fierce blush across his nose and neck, she wondered if he, too, had imagined the same thing.

“Thank you, Herald,” he started as he rose to sit, and the sheet fell to his lap.

The urge to scream hit her first, followed by the need to escape, to tear her hand from his grasp and flee. And then the ache, the raw desire to touch him beset her better judgment.

Maker’s breath, what was wrong with her?

“You’re… you should sleep,” she whispered. “I’ll leave you be.”

“But... wait,” he stuttered as his fingers fell from her her wrist to rest in her palm. “I’m… I don’t… could you stay?”

Stay.

Her ask from last night echoed with stark clarity.

Amallia eased back to the edge of the bed, her eyes wandering, consuming, drinking in what she could see of him. When the silence dragged, she fidgeted, unable to keep her eyes averted, on the floor, on her hands, anywhere but him, and so she chose a spot between her toes and stared at it.

“Hangover aside, I enjoyed our time together last night,” Cullen started, elbows propped on raised knees. “I owe you for convincing me to stay. I’m glad I know you a bit better.”

The flutter in her chest caught her breath, the constriction seizing her unaware. Did decorum allow for such attraction? And how had she determined her myriad sensations to be attraction, let alone question the propriety of pining for her superior officer, a Templar to boot.

Ex-Templar.

His hand lingered in hers, gentle fingertips light as a feather against her skin. “Herald?”

“You can call me Amallia, you know,” she heard herself say, thought returning at last. “I’m not just the Herald. And I enjoyed the evening as well.”

Amber eyes flashed alight with a hope so profound, her doubt, her confusion over what she felt vanished.

“I should do that more often,” he muttered. “Except without the hangover.”

She barked a laugh, obnoxious and open-mouthed at that. “I’ll teach you. It’s—”

The door to the room burst open, admitting Josephine and Leliana talking of Inquisition matters. Amallia flew from the bed in a flash, flailing in her haste to avoid an awkward sight. But awkward it was with Josephine and Leliana froze in the doorway, eyes wide and mouths gaping as they stared between she and Cullen.

And out of the corner of her eye, she caught the embarrassed smile on Cullen’s blushing face, though he made no effort to hide it or his half-naked body. Stomping from the room, she said nothing, eager to escape the looming whirlwind of inevitable rumors.

Oh, he owed her, alright.

Two-fold.

[dngrs-untld-hrshps-unnmbrd]

Before the Fall (Pt 1)

Destiny fic. A Dead Orbit scavenger is resurrected as a Guardian hundreds of cycles after her death but can remember everything from her old life. While she struggles to understand why another new Guardian brings back memories of a time Zavala wishes he could forget.

Set in two time periods: during the events of Destiny pre-Red Legion and just before the Battle of Six Fronts. 

Drama/romance | slow burn | sexytimes at some point | Andara probably swears a lot | if you’re just meeting me hi this story will have a lot of Zavala | Shaxx, Ikora, Saladin and Osiris and Lyssa the Lighthearted feature too

Author’s Note

Bear with me, I know this first chapter and author’s note are long. Future installments will be pithier. 

This is a companion story to After the Fall but can be read as a standalone. It features my OCs Andara, an Awoken Voidwalker Warlock, and Piax, a human Sunbreaker Titan. It’s primarily Andara’s story but will feature chapters in Piax’s POV (point of view) exploring her early days of being a Guardian and why she’s so devoted to Zavala. It will also explore a lot of Zavala’s back story through his POV, including his romantic history. Because I’m allergic to stories without kissing.

OK, so, the lore. This is probably the longest Author’s Note I’ve ever written! Thanks Destiny for your confusing, vague lore XD For those interested, I’ll set out what we know that’s relevant to this story as well as the assumptions I’ve made.

You can totally skip this and start the story if you prefer. I’ll explain things in the story as I go along.

This fic is set during what I’ll call the Early City Age, just before the Battle of Six Fronts, and the Late City Age, just before the Red Legion Attack in D2. Six Fronts was the first big battle to defend the Last City and marked a turning point in the way the City was run. (In Zavala’s Origins trailer it’s the battle he, Shaxx and Saladin are street-fighting in.)

At the time of the Battle of Six Fronts, the Last City was at the mercy of the Faction Wars, there was no Consensus and it seems the Vanguard didn’t exist as it did today. The Wall had been built by the Titans. The Iron Lords were probably already dead so there was a power vacuum in the Last City.

One assumption I’m making is that the Exo Titan Saint-14 and Lord Saladin worked with the Speaker to govern the Last City, but in some sort of unofficial capacity. Saint-14 must have been in an important leadership role because after Six Fronts he vouches for the Warlock Osiris’s elevation to Vanguard Leader.

Another assumption is that because Saladin mentored Zavala and Shaxx and the early days of the Last City were kind of YAY TITANS, Saladin brought his boys into important discussions and decisions. This is long before the rift between Saladin and Shaxx, which happened after Twilight Gap.

The Crucible was founded after Twilight Gap but as Guardians love to fight each other I’ve made up a thing called Skirmishes. Shaxx runs these and they function in a similar but scaled down way to the Crucible.

Thank you to @littleshebear for letting me use her Zavala/Lyssa the Lighthearted relationship headcanons, and for all our endless discussions about lore and the Vanguard and Guardians. Lyssa is a real character in the grimoire, a Sunsinger Warlock like Osiris.

Tl;dr?

Early City Age = the City has a Wall and the Guardians are just starting to venture out beyond it

Late City Age = the setting of Destiny the game

Chapter One

Master Rahool, Late City Age

The little silver Ghost lay silently on the table where the Cryptarch had left it. A Hunter had brought it in a few hours earlier along with a stack of engrams that she’d found on Mercury. 

Couldn’t revive it. Looked like it had been there for years, almost buried by a broken Vex gateway. Think you can fix it?

Now he had a few minutes to spare Rahool picked up the Ghost and examined it. Could he? Sometimes he performed maintenance on Ghosts that had received knocks on the battlefield, but they were more cosmetic adjustments. This Ghost could be beyond help, drained of Light and unable to seek out the Guardian it had once belonged to. He or she could be long dead, or perhaps the Ghost had never even found them.

There was a lot of gunk in its seams and Rahool worked at them with a thin silver tool. The Ghost was starting to look clean, but still very dead, when suddenly it lit up and made a whirring noise.

‘Ah, so you’re not dead. How long have you been sleeping?’

The Ghost began spinning urgently and a moment later shot out of his hands. Rahool watched it zoom across the courtyard and then over the Tower railings and out of sight.

He laid down his silver tool and smiled to himself. ‘Goodbye, Little Light. Looks like you’ve got someplace to be.’

Zavala, Early City Age

Twilight was descending and the gates were being readied for closure. The Wall cast its long shadow over the Last City, a sprawling thing of low stone buildings and wooden huts. The Traveler hung in the sky, bright white and silent.

Zavala remembered when the Last City was merely a motley collection of tents and had no Wall to protect it. That they’d managed to cling on in those early days was a miracle. With the Wall to protect them and new Guardians arriving in the City almost every day they could only grow stronger. There was hard work ahead of them and there was hope, and he found himself welcoming both equally.

A pulse rifle in his hands and a stack of other weapons on a trestle table before him, Zavala watched the thin stream of Guardians returning from the Cosmodrome. Two Titans, laughing loudly with their helmets under their arms, greeted Zavala before heading for the Guardians’ Hall behind him.

He’d be out there himself tomorrow but today he had duties for Saint-14, attending to the stockpile of new weapons that the Faction scavengers had traded with them. In the last few years they’d begun venturing outside the Wall, the Guardians clearing out enclaves of Fallen while the Factions looked for supplies.

A slight figure in black armour streaked past Zavala, pulled one of the Titans round and punched him in the face. He reeled, and blood began pouring down his chin. The scavenger started screaming at both of them.

‘How could you? Do you even understand what you’ve done? We’ll never be able to replace the tech that you –’

The bigger Titan, the one who hadn’t been punched, narrowed his eyes and reached for his gun.

Zavala threw down the pulse rifle he was holding and lunged for the Guardian’s arm. He didn’t recognise this woman but she wore a Dead Orbit insignia on her chest plate. If they shot her she would stay fatally, permanently dead. There were already enough tensions between the Factions and the Guardians and the last thing the Speaker needed was a murdered scavenger.

‘Hey. Hey. That’s enough,’ he called, trying to be heard over her screaming. But she wasn’t listening to him and a crowd was gathering.

Turning to the bigger Titan he said, ‘Go and report in to Saint-14. Both of you. Now.’ The Titan with the bloodied lip needed some persuading but finally the two of them headed into the hall.

The woman tried to follow them, still shouting, but Zavala hooked an arm about her waist and pulled her back. ‘No you don’t. I want a word with you.’

She was like him, an Awoken, with knotted purple hair and dusty black armour. A bag was slung over her shoulders and inside he could see it was stuffed with Golden Age tech. Good tech. Things the City needed. There was an auto-rifle holstered on her back and a knife at her hip, though even in anger she hadn’t drawn them. She didn’t want to fight, she wanted to be heard.

‘Want to tell me what that was about?’ Over his shoulder he could sense onlookers, but ignored them.

The Awoken finally seemed to realise he was there and spoke in a tight voice, her fists clenching. ‘I spent two hours clearing all the Fallen off a Warsat and those … those knuckleheads jumped in and destroyed it. I want to fucking kill them.’

A Warsat. They were precious to Dead Orbit and their mission to get a fleet off the ground. The Guardians needed them too if they were ever to reconnect a communications network. At the moment they were living blind and that was dangerous.

‘It’s a terrible waste. But things happen in the field –’

‘They destroyed it on purpose.’

Zavala pressed his lips together. They wouldn’t have. Would they? ‘If that’s true then it’s unforgivable. I’m sorry.’

‘It is true.’

Then I’m going to need to talk to Saint-14 and Saladin about this. The chain of command between the Speaker and the Factions and Guardians was blurred with all groups feeling like they knew what was best for the City, but if Titans had screwed up then it was clear what needed to be done.

He reached for his datapad. ‘One of the Hunters came back to the City with a suspected Warsat sighting yesterday. I know it won’t make up for the time you spent on the other one, but it’s something.’ 

It was quite a lot, actually. They could have swapped this intel with the factions for more weapons or tech.

She examined the coordinates, her expression tight but mollified. ‘I know the place. Thank you.’

‘Be careful. That place is infested with Fallen.’

But the young woman was already striding away, her hand tight around her bag strap. ‘I can handle myself. You handle those numb-nuts.’

Zavala grimaced. Something to look forward to. If he had his way he’d send the two Titans who’d destroyed the Warsat with the scavenger to help her get the new one, but Saint-14 was wary of getting too involved with the Factions. They do their thing and we do ours, and keep our people strictly separate lest we start bleeding Guardians to their causes.

It was true that the Factions’ aims were vastly different theirs, and each others, but they had to think in terms of the next few hundred cycles. Pushing back the Fallen from the Cosmodrome, getting airborne again and protecting this City was going to take everyone’s efforts, no matter their loyalties.

He turned back to the pile of weapons and saw that the cluster of onlookers had dispersed except for an exceptionally large Titan and a Warlock in canary yellow robes. Shaxx and Lyssa the Lighthearted. Lyssa was looking at Zavala with the smallest of smiles on her lips.

Shaxx watched the scavenger disappear into a side street on the far side of the square. ‘That was a good punch she threw. Shame she’s fallen in with those scrounging bastards.’

Traveler’s light, he was getting sick of this sort of talk. ‘We need Dead Orbit. The supplies they bring in are helping the City get off the ground. We don’t have time to scavenge ourselves.’ And if the scavengers were willing to risk their one life in the Cosmodrome they deserved respect for that, at the very least.

‘Not far enough off the ground for them though, is it?’ Shaxx grunted. ‘You handled her well.’

‘I didn’t handle her. I just did what needed to be done.’ Zavala turned his attention back to the weapons. He’d finish up here and go and talk to Saint. No, he’d talk to Saladin first. His mentor always had something sensible to say. He wished the Iron Lord would lead the Titans instead of the Exo, but Saladin had said many times that he was an old wolf and didn’t have it in him. Not anymore.

‘I’m going to get something to eat if either of you need a break,’ Lyssa announced.

Zavala pushed the pile of weapons to one side, sorting through them. Only two auto rifles, and in terrible condition. Later tonight he’d strip them back and see whether he could fix them.

‘Zavala.’

There was an edge to Shaxx’s voice and he looked up. ‘What? Oh, goodbye Lyssa.’

The Sunsinger headed for the hall with a flick of her yellow robes, and Shaxx sighed. ‘You are an ass sometimes.’

Three pulse rifles. Five sidearms. ‘Am I?’

‘Lyssa. She wants to get to know you better.’

He’d heard that before. Guardians wanted to get to know him into order to grill him about his fighting techniques. Or at least that’s what it felt like. ‘She’s already bested me in the Skirmishes.’

The look of shock on the Titan’s face was comical. ‘She did? When?’

It had been about a year ago, and the Sunsinger had burned through him like he was nothing. When he finally felled her she’d leapt up again before he’d got his breath back and knocked his legs out from beneath him. Aiming an empty sidearm at his head she’d whispered ‘pew, pew,’ and he couldn’t help but grin up at her.

‘It didn’t show on the tally. She was out of bullets.’ But they knew, and ever since when she overheard him talking about the Skirmishes he thought he saw a secretive, pleased smile on her lips. But she hadn’t told anyone, so neither had he. ‘Shaxx, move. I want to get this finished.’

The larger Titan folded his arms and looked at his friend. ‘I wasn’t talking about the Skirmishes. Why is everything about fighting with you?’

‘That’s rich,’ Zavala murmured at his datapad.

Shaxx grinned. ‘I know how to have fun. And Lyssa wasn’t thinking about besting you. Not in the Skirmishes at least.’

Zavala finally looked up. ‘Then why did she …’ But the knowing grin on Shaxx’s face made him trail off. Oh, like that.

‘Bald, blue and apparently pretty thick. I don’t know why she’s interested either, but I’ve never wasted much energy trying to understand women.’ Shaxx clouted him on the shoulder and said as he walked away, ‘Go and talk to her.’

Finally distracted from the pile of weapons Zavala looked toward the hall. Was he hungry?

He could eat.

He was just putting down his datapad when Osiris appeared across the square, the Warlock’s long, thin figure upright and haughty. He walked past Zavala and entered the hall.

A cloud passed over Zavala’s good mood and he suddenly remembered why he didn’t see much of Lyssa. Everywhere she went her mentor seemed to be, crooning at her like she was a pet. Something about the man got Zavala’s hackles up and he turned back to the weapons with a frown, finding that he wasn’t hungry after all.

You made it to the end, thank you! I hope you’re enjoying it so far. Leave me a comments and let me know what you think. Huge thanks to @littleshebear for beta-ing and checking my lore.

[shalebridgecradle]

Re: our convo about Five's past from last night: I kinda want someone from Mullins showing up at Abel now. Someone eager to see the famous Runner 5, someone who gets utterly baffled and incredulous when they bring them the weird girl from the fort that no one liked or cared about. He thinks they're playing a joke on him, snarks that if she was that impressive they wouldn’t have let Abel keep her in the first place. And then pregnant Maxine hits him with a chair.

…oops, my hand slipped and I wrote a thing. Which was probably your intention all along, you horrible enabler. :P (Couldn’t arrange the chair hitting though. I tried, but it turns out there’s a short list of people Maxine would 100% flatten with a chair, and this dude’s not on it. …Yet.)

[2,869 words, ft. a mute, female Five. Spoilers through S4M4. Maybe a tiny warning for abuse if you read between the lines too hard.]

“Iredid most of Abel’s security after the unfortunate…incident thatwas Ms. Spens’s brief tenure,” Janine explained as they turnedthe corner from the armory. “You can see it surpasses even Ministrystandards.”

Theman walking at her side, one Captain Morden of Mullins Base, began tochuckle. “I never doubted it, ma’am. But it also never hurts tobe too careful when it comes to a visit from the Minister.”

“Ofcourse not.”

Thegate alarm sounded at that moment, pulling his attention away fromher. Morden shielded his eyes with a pale hand, squinting through thelate afternoon sunlight. “Is that one of your runners?” Heindicated a silhouette running across the gate threshold under theguards’ watchful eyes.

Janinechecked her watch. “That should be Runner Five, actually. Right onschedule.”

Morden’seyebrows shot up. “Oh? I’d been hoping to meet the famous RunnerFive on this trip.”

Ashints went, she thought that rather obvious. “Yes, there’s beenquite a demand for that of late. Since Five’s mission is completedI don’t see the harm, and we’ll need to coordinate with therunners for the Minister’s visit in any event.” She motioned himforward. “After you, Captain.”

Meanwhile, Runner Five foundherself preoccupied trying to brush all the dirt and dust off herclothes. She’d managed to trip into one of the outer trenches NewCanton had dug during their mind-controlled siege. They’d filledmost of them back in over the months, but this one had beenoverlooked—and was now overgrown with grass and weeds. Hence thetripping.

In her headset, Sam was telling herabout a massive DVD stockpile Cameo and Kytan had just stumbled overin between trying to fill out a work order to fix the trench. On topof that, the alarm still sounded as the gate slid shut and the guardswere all making idle small talk, both with her and around her. Itbordered on overwhelming and made it hard to focus on any one thingfor very long, which perhaps explained why she didn’t noticeJanine’s approach.

When she did finally look up,she took a sudden step backwards, almost into the gate.

A ghost out of her past stoodright there in front of her with that same old crooked smile.Lieutenant Morden. He didn’t look like he’d aged a day, save fora few new lines around the mouth. Maybe he’d lost a little weight.

It took him a moment torecognize her; when he did, his eyebrows shot up almost into his darkhair, but he said nothing. Just tilted his head to look at hersideways.

“Excellenttiming as usual, Runner Five,” Janine was saying. Five forcedherself to pay attention, hoping that if she ignored Morden he’ddisappear back into whateverhole he’d crawled out of.“This is Captain Morden from Mullins.” Apparently there’d beena promotion in her absence. “He’s here toreview our security ahead ofthe Minister’s visit, giventhat Mr. Sissay is occupied at New Canton.”

“RunnerFive,isit?”Something about the way he said her name made the hair on her armsstand on end. Heextendedhis hand,still smiling. Shedidn’t take it, and after an awkward moment he slid it into thepocket of his khakis instead.“Well.Pleasureto finallymeet you. Thewhole country’s singing your praises, you know.”

“Indeed.”Thefaint flicker of irritation in Janine’s voice made Five smile.Neither of them had quite figured out how to deal with all the fameand praisethathad descended on them over the past months.Mostly they’d mutually agreed to ignore it and hope it went away sothey could work in peace. “Ifyou have a minute, Five, I’dlike you toaccompany us back to the farmhouse. We need to discuss who’llbe running interference for the convoy. The Ministry trucks are boundto attract undue attention from the zombies.”

“Andit’ll give us a chance to talk,” Morden added. There was anundercurrent of mockery in his voice that Janine seemed to miss. “Getto know each other better.”

I’dsooner kiss a zom, wasFive’s first panicked thought. She didn’t say it out loud; it’drequire too much explaining. Instead she latched onto the firstexcuse that popped into her head.

“Later?I need to head to the infirmary,” she signed. On seeing Janine’sfrown she was quick to add, “Ran across some zoms. Routinescreening.”

“Isee. I was under the impression the route between Abel and New Cantonwas free of hostiles for the time being. Clearly my information isout of date.”

“Itwas clear,” Samchimed in at her ear. She could picture his brow furrowing inconfusion. “I mean, there was that scarecrow that looked likea zom, and we really need to talk to that one New Canton enclaveabout leaving their art projects lying around like that, but—areyou sure you’re okay, Five?”

Fivedidn’t answer him. She handed her overloaded backpack off to one ofthe gate guards while she waited for Janine’s response.

“Protocolis protocol for a reason,”she agreed with a short nod.“Go, Five. We’ll meetwith you later.”

“Thankyou.” She didn’t wait another moment before taking offat a quick jog, weaving her way through the scant crowd.

Notmore than ten feet later, she heard a familiar shout behind her.“Runner Five! Wait up!” Morden.Shethought about speeding up—running pell-mell through Abel wasgenerally frowned on unless there was an emergency, but she couldprobably get away with it. Thenin the next breathshe paused at a corner,decidingshe could hear him out. If only for a minute. She was a far differentperson than she’d been at Mullins—several times over by thispoint. She could handle him.

Andif she couldn’t, she could always outrun him.

“Itis you, isn’t it?Little Mouse?”

Well,he hadn’t changed at all.

“Mouse?”Sam was trying not to snicker. Five meanwhile was trying very hardnot to grimace. “I know you’re quiet, Five, but come on. Wait—youknow him? From Mullins?”

Mordengrinned at her, all teeth. “I don’t believe it. Imean, we heard all sorts of rumors—yousurvived the crash, you were dead orgone grey, the Exmoor Militiawere trying to hold you for ransom, all sorts of things. Thebrass never got around to telling us the real story. Guessthey figured it wouldn’t matter.” He tilted his head, waiting tosee if she’d notice the sideways jab. She had, but she refused toreact and give him the satisfaction. “Anyway,it’sgood to see you, Mouse.We all missed you, you know?”

Shebit the inside of her cheekto stop herself from laughingin his face. “I doubt it,”she retorted.

Morden,as ever, didn’t understand. “Sure, sure. Hell of a way from CBlock, isn’t it? Guess you’re living the high life these days.Ministry loves this littlehole in the wall.”

Somehowthe slight against Abel was what offended her the most. She turnedand resumed her jog toward the hospital. If Morden couldn’t keepup, that was his problem.

“Hey!Come back!”

“I’mguessing he’s…not your long-lost best friend?” Sam asked at thesame time. She heard his chair creak as he shifted hisweight.

“Notexactly.” That was all she was able to explain to her headcambefore Morden caught up.

“You’refaster than I remember. Now,where’s Runner Five?”

Thatcaused her to slow her step. She turned to look back at him, hereyebrows arched as if to say,what? Even Mordencould figure out what she meant.

“They’reputting me on, yeah?” He’dstarted to laugh. “It’s alla prank, right? De Luca wasin on it the whole time. AndI heard she had no sense of humor.Come on. Where’s the real RunnerFive?”

“Thisis the ‘real’Runner Five, you—” Sam stopped short of actually swearing, optinginstead for a frustrated, inaudiblegrumble. “Is everyone at Mullins as thick as he is? No wonder youdidn’t want to go back, Five.”

Five,her face drawn and placid, indicated the armband on her bicep, whichonly made Mordenlaugh harder. “No, come on!You’re really sticking with this, Mouse?Bloody hell,I remember back when youcouldn’t take a joke, letalone pull one off.”

“What’she on about?”

Shedebated switching her headset off altogether butknew that would only serve to upset Sam. It wouldn’t stop him fromwatching on the nearest security camera, either.

Mordenmeanwhile insisted on carrying on. Hesounded less and less amused by the second.“All right, fine, you’vegot me! Ha-bloody-ha. Now we’re even, Mouse. Is that what you wantto hear?”

Youcan’t deck him, shethought, schooling her expression into one of steely indifference.It’d just causean incident.

Whenshe didn’t respond he reached out and grabbed her elbow, jerkingher backwards a step and forcingher to stop. Inher ear she heard a sharp intake of breath.

“D’youreally expect me tobelieve that you’re the hero of Comansys Tower? The Minister’sgolden child? You?”His voice had dropped to a low, harshwhisper. She shook his hand off, elbowing him in the side in theprocess.

“Five.I can have a guard there in tenseconds. Just say the word.”

Shesigned a quick no toherheadcam and keptmoving.

Mordeninsisted on following her. He made another grab for her elbow but sheanticipated it, dodging sideways out of his reach.

Still,as she pushed through the doors to the hospital, hefollowed right at her heels. She could hear him huffing and puffingfor breath as she sped upstill more. Apparentlyhe’d fallen out of shape since she’d seen him last, she notedwith some faint vindictive amusement. “Come on,” he cajoledbetween one breath and the next. “This is just getting sad now!”

Fiveignored him, winding her way through the crowded halls to Maxine’soffice. She knew the route by muscle memory alone now. That made iteasier to tune Morden out. Atleast until they reached the office door—wherehe put on a burst of speed and beat her there by seconds. He grabbedthe doorknob and held it tight, blocking her path.

Fivemet his icy stare without flinching.A white-hot anger had started to burn its way up her chest. “Move.”She finished with a shooing motion that he couldn’t possiblymisunderstand. Still, he didn’t move. She could feel thefrustration practically rolling off him. Anger management wasn’t arequirement for promotion at Mullins, shesupposed.

“Faceit, little Mouse. You were never that impressive. Youthink the higher-ups at Mullins would’ve left you out here in thebloody boonies if you werethat special? You remember CBlock, don’t you? ‘The C stands for cannon fodder.’Isn’t that what we used tosay? Nobody from there’sworth a scrap. Not me, andsure as hell not you.”

Well.He was half right. She flipped him off beforeshe elbowed him right in the stomach, forcing him tomove out of her way. He letgo of the door to rub his sternum, grimacing. “You and your damnsharp elbows—”

Sheturned the doorknob at the same time someone inside the room did.“Five,” Maxine murmured in quiet surprise. She had one hand onthe door, the other rubbing a sore spot on her lower back. Behindher, Dr. Lobatse waved tothem over a stack of filefolders. “Janine radioed tosay you’d be stopping in.” Hergaze fell on Morden next, her lips pursing into a frown. Fivewondered how much she’d overheard. Sam had gone oddly quiet too.

“CaptainMorden.” The ice in her voice told Five she’d overheard more thanenough. She stood aside, leaving just enough room betweenher growing stomach and the doorframe forFive to slip into the room sideways.

UnfortunatelyMorden didn’t get the subtle message that he wasn’t invited. WhenMaxine tried to close the door in his face he caught it, pushing hisway into the room after them. “So sorry to intrude, Dr. Myers. Dr.Lobatse,” he added, nodding to Kefilwe. “Yourrunner and I were just catching up on old times. Isn’tthat right, Runner Five?”As he said it he clapped Fiveacross the back. Five didn’t move.

Maxine,still frowning, glancedback and forth between the two of them. “Is that right? Ididn’t realize you two knew each other.”At the same time she signedto Five, “If you want himgone…”

“Oh,sure.” Morden carried on,all cheer, like he hadn’teven noticed her signing. Maybe he hadn’t.“Mullins is divided up into all those wards and blocks since wetook on so many refugees,you know?” When Maxinenodded, he continued, “Iused torun C Block back in the day,where our friend here used tolive. Guess you got tired of me bossing you around, eh, Mouse? Tookoff for greener pastures?”

Fivesigned something. She’dbarely finished before Mordenclapped her across the shoulders again, laughing.

“Yousee? Old pals.” Ashe said it she’d tensed her whole back, shrugging his hand off her.

“Oh,”Maxine began, deadpan, “so you must understand sign language,then.”

Morden,jamming his hands in his pockets now,shrugged and kept grinning. “Ofcourse! Might be a little rusty after all this time, but—”

“ThenI guess what Five just said about you and that goat must be true?”Behind her, Dr. Lobatse hadstarted to snicker into her hand. “Ifyou’re not going to dispute it, I mean.”

“I—”Morden’swhole face had begun to turn red, starting from the ears on down.Five made a quick sidewaysstep to get out of the inevitable blast radius as he continued tostammer. “Listen, this isall just some stupid bloody joke you lot have come up with—we allknow that’s not the real RunnerFive. It can’t be! I—”

Maxinelistened to him for a few moments before she turned to Five, archingan eyebrow.

“Throwhim out,” Fivesaid, pointing backto the door for emphasis.

Dr.Lobatse reacted before Maxine could, jumping to her feet. In a momentshe’d taken Morden’s arm, spinninghim around so fast Five almost made herself dizzy watching it. “Thisis a secure area, Captain,”she was saying as she steeredhim straight back out the door overhis protests.“We really can’t have youin here while we have a patient. And I’m sure you’ve kept Janinewaiting long enough as it is—” Kefilwehad them moving at double-time. They’d disappeared down the hall inthe next minute.

“Janine’sdefinitely going to hearabout this,” came the grumpy mutter from her headset. “They can’tjust waltz in here and treat our runners like that. Idon’t care who he works for. Youstay with Maxine, Five. I’m going to go talk to her.” Hisvoice had grown more distant as he talked, until sheheard the door to the comms shack click shut andthen nothing.

Whenthey were well and truly alone in the room, Maxine sighed,tight-lipped and tense. “Youreally knew him from Mullins?”

Fivenodded. “He was telling the truth about that much.”

“And…whatwas all that about you not being Runner Five?”

“It’sa long story.” She shrugged, holding her palms up. “Things weredifferent at Mullins. I wasn’t much use to anyone, and they didn’thave much use for me, either.”

Frowning,Maxine had just started to respond when the door opened again.

“Well!”Dr. Lobatsecame back in, dusting off herhands. “He seemedthoroughly unpleasant. Ithink Imight’ve strained his shoulder a little more than was necessary.”

“Oh.Too bad.” The sarcasm inMaxine’s voice was so thick it had a palpable presence in the room.

“Anyway,I was about to go put thekettle on. Five?”

Shenodded, slipping her headsetoff and setting it aside now that there was nothing therebesides empty air. Dr.Lobatse smiled and ducked into the next room to start on the tea.

Whenshe’d gone, Maxine called after her, “You’dbetter make mine decaf, Kefilwe.” Then, lowering her voice, “Areyou okay, Five?”

Sheconsidered her answer for a long moment, fingers twisting together.“I thinkso.” Morden might be asunpleasant as ever, but she could take some comfort in knowing shewasn’t his mute little Mouse anymore. If he didn’t want to seethat, that was his problem. Not hers.

“Younever talked much aboutMullins. I hope he didn’t bring up any bad memories for you.”

Asfar as she was concerned he was abad memory. Five shrugged again.

“Right,”Maxine sighed. “Well, if he has any sense he’ll apologize beforeJanine or Sam forces himto. Come have some tea in themeantime, Five. We can talkif you want.”

“I’dlike that.”

[ladydracarysao3]

In Love, Serenity  

Chapter Fifteen:  All that the Maker has Wrought is in His Hand

Chapter Summary Ser Barris confides in a friend about a certain woman infiltrating his thoughts. Then, he stumbles into an interesting scene at the tavern.

Note Title from Threnodies 12:5 If you'd like some background music for this chapter, may I suggest this song: Click here for Spotify -or- Click here for Youtube

[Read Chapter 15 on AO3]  or [Start from the Beginning]

-Ser Barris-

“You are far better at chess than you are at wicked grace, Cullen.” Delrin says with a smile as he contemplates his next move. It seems that the man has him in a few turns no matter what Delrin does. However, it won’t have been an easy victory. They have been battling in this single game for nearly the entirety of the evening.

Cullen chuckles through his breath, “Yes well, I am far better practiced in this realm than the realm of wicked grace. The dwarf always manages to wipe me out…” his thought trails off in pensive frustration.

“He cheats,” Delrin says plainly. He smiles into the fist that props up his head as he considers the options before him.

Shocked, Cullen’s mouth drops open, “What? He cheats?”

Low and quiet laughter rumbles in Delrin’s chest and he raises his eyes from the game to Cullen’s, “Yes. And terribly, I might add.”

Cullen’s mouth shuts, clenching tightly as he scowls. “That scheming little… he has taken more of my coin than I care to say.”

“Perhaps I will teach you his tactics, or at least what to watch for so he does not succeed again.” Delrin grins at his opponent. He decides to surrender in their current match as he makes one final move. Opening the game now for Cullen to have his victory. “Might as well get this over with,” he sighs and leans back in his chair.

Cullen’s face brightens again, “Ah yes, I believe this game is mine. Well played, Delrin.”

“Good game,” he smiles as he looks around the gardens of Skyhold and Cullen resets the board for a future match. There are Chantry sisters scattered around the grounds reciting the Chant of Light. The daylight dims, displaying beautiful purples, blues, and oranges while the night sky moves in. Scattered braziers burn a golden hue across the darkening space. The array of colors reminds him of the gilded beauty dressed in blue.

“Say Cullen…” Delrin begins musingly, “Are you acquainted with a mage named Aurora?”

Cullen pauses, directing his eyes from the chess board to Delrin’s. Tentatively he responds, “Yes…well, I know her from long ago.” He shrugs leaning back in his chair placing his elbows on the armrests, tenting his fingers. “A lifetime ago, really. How do you know Aurora?”

“I met her the other day, after my promotion. She is a curious woman.” He leans his elbow on an armrest of his chair, placing his chin on his fist again.

Cullen smirks a moment, “Ah… yes… after your promotion.”

“Yes?” Delrin lifts questioning brows.                                                                                  

Cullen runs his hands through his hair and smiles, “Don’t be surprised if women like Aurora start appearing more often. You have a position of rank now.” He sighs and rolls his eyes, “It is a highly effective aphrodisiac for some.”

What Cullen says is true, ever since rumor began that Delrin would be made Knight-Commander, women have been practically tripping over themselves to seek his attention. He politely staved them all off, but something about this particular woman was different.

Delrin hums with a nod, “Yes… and if that was all this was, I would have to agree to what you are alluding. But this was different.” He shifts his weight to the back of the chair and tents his own fingers. “Well, our first meeting was not,” he continues. Cullen grins a knowing smirk, his eyebrows swiftly rise. “But I saw her again. Actually, I played wicked grace with her and her companions. I watched how she interacted with her friends. She is quite fiery.”

Cullen chuckles, “I see. Yes, Aurora was never one to be timid.”

“That’s the thing,” Delrin leans forward, eyes glinting with a crinkle pinched between his brows. “She is timid with me - flinches when I speak to her. But when she first approached me, she was so brazen.” He rubs his hand over his head and continues, bewildered and fascinated, “I find her alluring, but she seems to have lost all interest… seems to prefer I keep my distance.”

Cullen shrugs, “Far be it from me to know anything about what lies within a woman’s mind, Delrin. I’m afraid I cannot aid you.”

Delrin says thoughtfully, “Perhaps I should let it go.”

“May not be a bad idea, if she has expressed a desire for distance. I’ve seen her eat lesser men alive… figuratively of course.” Cullen chuckles softly, “She is not a woman you want to annoy, that is for certain.”

Delrin stares into the ever darkening sky. The gardens have all but cleared. There is a peaceful, warm glow cascading through the air from its lit torches.

It is the way with which she carries herself with such purpose that draws Delrin to her. She seems fearless, when there is so much in this world to fear. Especially for a mage. And yet, she loses her defenses when he speaks to her. A fact that appears to bother her a great deal.

“Yes, I should let her be.” Delrin smiles and bows his head to Cullen as he rises from his seat. “Good game, Cullen. I look forward to a rematch.”

--

Delrin enters the Herald’s Rest. It is a lively scene, though he’s come to expect that in this tavern. Those in Skyhold work tirelessly day in and day out, but they enjoy themselves with just as much vigor. As well they should. No one knows what tomorrow will bring.

He purchases ale and surveys the room. He smiles at the joviality surrounding him. He hears a particularly blissful sound from across the room. Guttural booming laughter from group of familiar faces sitting at a table in a small enclave. A few of the folks he had spent the evening with other night, plus another man Delrin believes is the mage, Dorian Pavus. Attracted to the exuberance of the table, Delrin approaches.

As he advances, he notices that in the corner of the table’s enclave sits Aurora. He had not seen her there before. Delrin instantly reconsiders his decision, but Sera spots him before he can alter his course. “Oi! Look who it is!” Her eyes light up as she ribs Varric, who sits beside her.

Varric smirks at Delrin, stealing a quick glance across the table at Aurora before saying, “How’s it goin’ Knight-Commander?”

Aurora slams her hands flat on the table in front of her. Blurry eyed, she looks at Delrin. “Wut er you dune here?” she slurs. It appears she has imbibed quite a lot this evening.

“Oh, I was just passing by, don’t mind me. Glad to see you all are having a good time.” He smiles, raising his tankard, and bows his head before he turns to retreat.

“Ooooh no you dunt,” Aurora yells.

Varric hesitates, “Aurora what are you…” Delrin looks back over his shoulder to the table, seeing that she has hoisted her body upon it and is slithering to the end.

“Go get’im!” Sera cheers. Across from the elf and next to where Aurora once sat, Dorian grins at Delrin wickedly as he claps his hands.

Quickly, Delrin spins around. He shoves his tankard into Sera’s hands so that he is able to catch Aurora as she spills off of the table. The cotton of her simple, blue robes snag in the wood, causing her to trip-up, tumbling ungracefully into Delrin’s arms. He attempts to stand her straight and stabilize her shaky frame. He holds her bent elbows securely in his hands. He tries to look into her eyes, but they have the unfocused glaze of intoxication.

“Aurora, be careful,” he says. “You don’t want another ruined set of robes.”

Aurora flings her fingers around dismissively. “Ah piss, these er nuthin.” She smiles and stares back at him, eyes bleary and hooded. The corners of her mouth slide into a lazy curl. “Hi,” she says and slumps into his arms.

“Aurora, I think maybe you should sit.” He smiles at her, so not to upset her, but he worries for her current state. “Or perhaps I should take you to your bed.” As soon as the phrase spills from his lips, he regrets it. Delrin feels heat rise in his cheeks at his unfortunate choice in words.

“Uh-uh. You ain’t beddin’ me that easy…” she shoves a finger into Delrin’s breastplate, following it with a look of concern. “Ouch… yer chest bit me,” her frown spins back into a snickering grin, delightfully amused with herself.

Delrin attempts to place her in the nearest chair, but she quickly drapes her arms around his neck refusing to sit. “No! I wanna dance.” Her eyes light up, as if someone else suggested the idea. “Yis! Dance with me Ser Ber…bliss.” She hiccups.

“I don’t think that’s a…”

“Nonsenst!” She stands on her own for a moment and smooths out her robes. She squares her shoulders and tries to look down her nose at the Knight, even though she stands a bit shorter than him. It’s too endearing for Delrin not to smirk at her attempt to look so lofty, her body lightly swaying as she postures. “I order you to dance with…with me.”

Delrin smiles broadly at seeing her fiery nature brimming in his direction.

“If you dunt, I will force push you off the battle…mints!” Another hiccup interrupts her speech. Delrin laughs and raises his hands in surrender. Only to quickly bring them back to catch her as her body threatens to fall. She points at the minstrel behind him and beckons, “Play sum’in pretty!”

Does this woman truly want me to keep my distance? Delrin wonders as she nuzzles her head onto his shoulder. He can feel her breath on his neck as he slowly spins her around the room to the music. He feels tremendously guilty for enjoying her embrace considering her condition. He feels even guiltier for wishing he was not still in his armor, so that he could better feel her soft, curvy body pressed against his.

Delrin shakes those thoughts out of his head. He should be ashamed, the indecency.

Heat blooms and rises in his core however, as he feels her lips ghost on his neck. She is whispering something. It is barely audible, but he believes he catches, “I will always miss you, my darling.” Delrin has a strong feeling that she is not actually referring to him. At this point, the guilt festering within him knows no bounds.

A little louder, but still into the skin of his neck, she addresses him, “Barris…”

“Yes, my lady?”

She holds on to him with a tighter grip. “You make me…feel.”

Delrin pushes her away just enough to see her face. She has the most beautiful blue eyes, but they are glassy with unspent tears. She smiles at him briefly, then furrows her blonde brow, parting her full, pink lips. “The spirit, Barris…”

“What spirit?” He asks, holding her softly, but with support. Worry stretches in his gut. Knowing all too well the struggles mages have with spirits and demons across the veil.

"He said, I can love.” She smiles and rests her head upon his shoulder again. She whispers, “He told me not to hide from you.” The sudden clarity of her words is jarring, but Delrin cannot help himself from embracing the warmth that her words conjure within him. She continues her murmurs, “He meant for us to heal each other.”

Delrin indulges an impulse, turning to rest his mouth softly on the top of her head. “Who was this spirit, Aurora?” he whispers a smile into her blonde hair. He breathes her in, she smells warm, like spice, and comforting, like old books.

She picks her head up and smiles into his eyes again. The sincerity of her smile is overwhelming. Delrin should be far more concerned about her intoxication, however he cannot help but enjoy these moments of intimacy.

She stops their slow dancing and furrows her brow. A look of concern crosses her face, quickly replaced with surprise, followed speedily by a mad dash for an empty tankard on a nearby table.

Followed by the sounds of retching.

Reality sets in as he is reminded just how inebriated Aurora is. Delrin rushes to her side, pulling her long, softly curled hair out of the way as she voids her stomach into the tankard. Sera screeches behind them and runs to help.

“Ay, you ninny. Looks like you’ve had ‘nough, eh?” Sera coos into her friend’s ear and rubs her back.

“I’m so sorry,” Aurora coughs, hunched over and groaning.

When it seems she is spent, Sera looks up at Delrin and motions her head toward the stairs. “Help me get her upstairs, yeah?” she says. “She can sleep it off in my room.”

Effortlessly, Delrin lifts Aurora in his arms. He cradles her body snuggly against his while following Sera up to her room. Aurora peers up at him, cupping his cheek in her hand. “You’re such a good man, Delrin,” her strained throat whispers. “I don’t deserve you.” Her thumb gingerly traces his lips, down to his chin. “But I could love you.”

A slight upturn to his lips, he whispers back to her, “I estimate you will feel pretty dreadful tomorrow, my lady. I will bring you water after you are secured.”

Entering Sera’s small room in the tavern, he gently lays Aurora on a long, cushioned bench. Aurora grabs his hand, whimpering softly, as he pulls away. He squeezes it and smiles at her. “Rest now, Aurora,” he says softly.

Turning to the elf he declares, “Right. I will find her some water and a bucket, just in case any more sickness threatens to expel itself.” With Sera’s nod, Delrin jogs back down to the lower level of the tavern. A little spring in his step. A faint smile on his lips. A soft glow in his heart.

He thinks to himself about what she said. However drunk she may be, he can’t help but feel excitement. Nothing has been the same since Aurora came into his world. His stressful, torn asunder, dismal world.

He wasn’t sure if commanding the reconstruction of the Templar order was a blessing or a curse. But he was bound to it. Unwavering. The issues the Red Templars bring to the order weigh heavy on his mind, darkening his days. He began losing hope that the world would ever be safe and just. No matter what, something sinister always lurks in the shadows, waiting to weaken his spirit further. And the world is full of shadows.

And then Aurora.

Aurora.

He could say her name a thousand times and it would still bring him a blissful smile.

She has so much fire, so much spirit. Her light is making him feel things he never thought possible. He had reserved his life to one shrouded in death and decay. He dared not dream of anything better, until Aurora.

Her words tonight are a small, glimmering beacon. He wishes to race to it, even though it hides from him. While her confession is encouraging, she will likely not remember dropping her guard, and speaking to him so plainly. But however faint, he will follow the hope she gives him, little by little.

Delrin can sense that she is wounded. Scared. Trepidatious. But he is patient. In time, he will heal her as she is healing him.

[temptation-narnia-chronicles]

From Upon the Golden Thrones

Episode 11: The First Winter

      A brown blur scuttled through the wood, disturbing the blanket of red coating the ground. Cinnamon and nutmeg wafted from the chimneys, rotting pumpkins awaiting disposal outside front doors. Within one of the little cottages, a stout creature prodded at the fire and took a seat with a rather musty old tome. Dust particles swirled through the air as he propped it open, scanning the pages through thick glasses for wherever he left off. He hadn't read in quite a while but figured now was as good a time as any. Besides, he needed something to occupy his mind.

      Before he could delve very far, however, a knock at the door disrupted the quiet. With a huff, the creature rose from his seat to see who could be visiting him.       "Badger! Badger! Oh, I have the most dreadful feeling!" the visitor exclaimed. He didn't even wait for an invitation inside, barrelling past his friend to pace the living room.       "What is it now, Mink?" Badger sighed, removing his glasses. Mink stared back at him blankly.       "Don't tell me you don't feel it, sir!" he replied incredulously. Badger already knew what his friend was referencing and quite frankly, he didn't want to talk about it. Mink didn't exactly catch on. "The wind currents, Badger! Haven't you felt the change in wind currents?"       "Mink, what is this insatiable obsession with wind currents?" Badger groaned.       "The temperature, sir! It's getting colder! Haven't you felt the temperature getting colder?" Mink rambled. "And the trees! Why, they're all bare! Don't you see how bare they've become? The leaves are just falling right off! Don't you have any idea what this means, sir?"       "It means that--" Badger began but again, his little friend interrupted.       "That winter is coming! Winter is back again!" Wringing his hands together, Mink paced the cottage in frantic thought. "What if we don't have enough food to survive? What if this means Jadis has returned? How long will this last? Oh, I can't bear the thought of it!"       "Mink, please calm yourself. I am sure everything will be perfectly fine. The great Aslan himself is said to have destroyed the White Witch in Beruna, so we have nothing more to fear" Badger assured.       The little creature wanted to believe his friend but truthfully, there were far too many voices in his head telling him otherwise. "But what if she does come back? She's a witch, she can do those things, you know! Or at least I assume she can. I wouldn't rule out the possibility!"       "My dear friend, you're about to give me a migraine" Badger muttered. Mink continued to ramble for a good fifteen minutes more about all the things that could happen until Badger had finally had enough. "Mink, you are hysterical! Please, do the entire Western Wood a favor and get some rest! Nurse your sanity and come back when you're feeling better, if you please." Before Mink could protest, Badger cast his friend out of his home and locked the door behind him with a relieved sigh.       Though Mink was gone, Badger's night was effectively ruined. No matter how hard he tried to refocus on his book, Mink's anxieties swirled through his head and planted some anxiety of his own. That was the one thing Badger really couldn't stand about Mink, the way he could get everyone all riled up with his own phobic antics. What if he was right? What if the White Witch had somehow returned? Badger could scarcely remember what winter before the curse was like, if he even had any memory of it at all. How long was winter? Will they be able to harvest enough food? How would they even manage? Defeated, Badger shelved his book and toddled into bed.       As night swept across the land, Eilonwy shuffled toward the great hall in hopes of finding Mr. and Mrs. Beaver. She prayed they weren't too busy, as she desperately needed to speak to at least one of them. Peering into the room, she caught sight of the he-beaver standing beside Susan and helping her sort out plans for her orphanage. Time was of the essence and they only had until spring to finalize the designs, but Susan wasn't as well-versed in architecture as her friend and therefore very much appreciated his help. Mrs. Beaver watched over her husband's shoulder, adding a few comments here and there. While she didn't have as much experience in the technical aspects, she did have a great knowledge of the many species in the wood and how to accomodate each. When she caught sight of a figure in her peripheral vision, however, she snuck over to the doorway to attend to their guest.       "Eilonwy, dear! I've missed you!" she exclaimed, motioning for Eilonwy to crouch for a hug. Despite the minimal time they had spent together in the past few months, Mrs. Beaver still considered Eilonwy the daughter she never had. She was proud to watch her blossom and adjust to life in the castle, even if only from the sidelines.       "I've missed you, too, mum" the huntress replied, kissing the creature on her cheek. "I was wondering, are you terribly busy? I was hoping I could speak with you about something. It'll only take a moment."       Mrs. Beaver wrung her paws and glanced back to the others. "I'm afraid I am a little busy, dear, but that's no trouble. If you'd like, Mr. Beaver and I are planning a little trip to the old neighborhood tomorrow to visit Badger and the others. You're certainly welcome to join us if you'd like!" The she-beaver gazed up at the huntress with a hopeful gleam in her eyes. It was an offer Eilonwy found hard to refuse.       "I would love to" she replied, taking Mrs. Beaver's paws in her hands. "I actually think that might be just what I need right now."       "Splendid! I'll come get you bright and early and we can head out!" Mrs. Beaver exclaimed. Planting a quick kiss on the girl's cheek, she then scurried back to her duties with a newfound energy. Eilonwy lingered a moment more, her heart warmed by Mrs. Beaver's care, before retreating back to her chambers. Though the sun had not yet fully set, she knew if she was to awake by dawn, she'd need all the sleep she could get. Plus, nobody can bother you when you're unconscious. There was one person in particular she desperately wanted to avoid and the promise of sleep filled her with the hope that he would not disturb her.       Come morning, Eilonwy rose quicker than she had in ages. She carelessly threw a handful of dresses into a knapsack, then snuck down into the kitchen for a simple breakfast of stale bread and jam. She didn't quite care what she ate so long as she got something in her stomach, and the rest she would save for later. The moment she heard footsteps nearing, she disappeared behind the back door and rushed out to the stables. Everlast whinnied happily, nibbling a the handful of oats her girl had brought her, before the Beavers approached with wide smiles upon their faces.       "Mornin', Eilonwy!" Mr. Beaver greeted. "So nice of you to join us. Feels like the old days, eh, love?" he added, nudging his wife.       "It does, a bit!" she giggled. "Like a sweet little reunion!"       Eilonwy nodded. "I've missed you both terribly. It seems like ever since we came here, we've been running ourselves ragged and haven't had a spare second to spend with each other. I'm grateful for the getaway." The hint of a sad smile flashed upon her lips, long enough for Mrs. Beaver to notice and grow mildly concerned. Before she could question it, Eilonwy mounted her mare and urged them to start their journey.       There was something intrinsically refreshing about returning to the woods. The crunch of the leaves, the bite of the air, the nakedness of the trees. All that was missing was a thick blanket of snow and she would feel right at home. Inhaling deeply, Eilonwy closed her eyes and let the breeze carry her away. I wonder what would happen if I released my inhibitions and simply floated along the air currents? Where shall I arrive? she thought to herself. If only things were that simple. If only things were like they once were.       Mrs. Beaver could sense the change in Eilonwy's attitude the further they ventured. The tension melted from her muscles and her worries seemed to shrink. The fresh air and distance did her well, apparently. However, that didn't stop the she-beaver from wondering. "Ellie, dear, what was it that you wanted to speak with me about last night?" she asked, voice breaking the quiet.       Eilonwy snapped back to reality, taking a moment to process the question. "Oh...oh! That. I, uh...I'd rather not think about it right now. Might we talk about it later, instead?" she replied. A wide, desperate grin spread across her lips. Mrs. Beaver was certain something was wrong but knew better than to pry. Instead, she gave a simple nod and that was the end of that.       A harsh pang of nostalgia struck the huntress the moment they stepped foot in Allies Enclave. Everything was exactly as she remembered with little makeshift houses in close quarters. So simple and plain. She nearly burst into tears at the sight of it.       "Beavers!" a voice then called. A door swung open and Badger stepped into the afternoon air, arms spread wide open in welcome. "So nice to see you again!"       "Great to be back!" Mr. Beaver chuckled, returning a hearty hug to his friend.       "Oh, how we've missed it here!" Mrs. Beaver cooed, absorbing the scene. She was relieved to see everyone had gotten on so well since they left. Damaged homes had been rebuilt and so had damaged lives. There was truly a sense of quiet rejuvenation here, the kind of warm refreshment that comes with hot chocolate after playing in the snow or reliving your childhood after you've grown old.       "Fancy seeing you here, as well, Miss Eilonwy" Badger then said, turning his attention to the girl. Her cheeks blushed momentarily as he continued. "I've heard a great many things about you and your involvement with the revolution."       "Oh, yes! We're very proud of her, aren't we Beaver?" Mrs. Beaver grinned, locking her arm with that of her husband. He nodded.       "I would love to hear all about it, perhaps over supper?" Badger offered.       "We would love to!" Mrs. Beaver exclaimed. A warm smile spread across their friend's face as he abruptly remembered his manners and invited everyone inside. It had been so long since Eilonwy last visited that the moment she stepped inside, a swell of memories flooded her to the point where she was almost dizzy. Sinking into the nearest chair, she struggled to catch her breath. A tingling sensation erupted from inside her chest and radiated across her entire body until she felt like gelatin. Only when Badger spoke to her did she snap from her trance.       "Wait, what was that? Sorry" she replied absently.       "I said, dear, why don't you tell us of your feats in battle and thereafter?" Badger repeated, paws folded across the table. He seemed very interested in her tales of triumph and treachery, just as your grandfather takes interest in your first day of preschool.       "Oh..." Eilonwy replied. She sucked in a deep breath and brushed a stray strand of hair from her face before beginning her story. She relayed, to the best of her ability, her journey alongside the kings and queens to Aslan's camp, what it was like meeting the great lion himself, her time spent training alongside her new friends, and the terror of battle.       Badger grinned proudly. "I'm certain I speak for the entire wood, nay the country, when I say we are so grateful for all the hard work you all have done. Sometimes it is still hard to believe that the long winter has come to an end" he said, rising from his seat. He poked at dinner on the fire, then glanced out the window sadly. "As far as we know."       "Whatever do you mean, Badger?" Mrs. Beaver asked, concerned. Their friend sighed and shook his head.       "Oh, nothing too important. Just that...well, it's come to my attention that winter is starting it's annual return and...let's just say the season is not exactly met with open arms" Badger explained.       Eilonwy cocked a brow and snorted. "What? You don't mean to tell me you all think the White Witch has risen from her grave or something, do you?" Badger stared back at her with a deadpan expression. "Oh my god, you do!" the huntress exclaimed.       "Not so much myself, no, but others have expressed some very severe concern" he stated, shaking his head as he returned to his seat. "Mink stopped by the other night and--"       "Badger, please tell me you're too smart to believe Mink of all creatures!" Eilonwy said. The little beast raised his gaze to hers in mild embarrassment. The huntress fumed. "Mink is...I just...he's absolutely bonkers! You can't possibly tell me you believe a word he says!"       "He does have a rather pesky way of spreading hysteria" Badger remarked. "And besides, he was right the last time."       "That doesn't...I mean...that just..." Eilonwy stammered but by now had grown incapable of forming sentences. Badger had a point. The last time Mink went ranting and raving about seasonal changes, four kids stumbled out of a wardrobe and took over the country. Not that this was anywhere near the same thing. It wasn't the same thing at all. Yet Eilonwy couldn't help but ponder...       Mr. Beaver could sense the distress washing over his daughter. Clearing his throat, he quickly broke the silence. "So, Ellie, why don't you tell Badger all about your job at Cair Paravel? Hmm?"       "Oh, hrmm, yes! Must be a mighty fine job you have there" Badger commented, grateful for the change of subject.       "Yes, sir. Very fine, indeed. I suppose you could say I'm sort of an...advisor to the kings and queens" the huntress explained.       Badger smiled dreamily. "Splendid, dear. Just splendid. And what are they like? The kings and queens, I mean. Are they really as wonderful as they say?"      Eilonwy bit her lip and nodded slowly. "I'd say so, yeah. I mean, I'm not sure what kinds of things are said about them but I can assume the majority is true" she replied. "Lucy is as brave as can be, and Edmund is highly intelligent. Susan cares very deeply for her country. She's an ideal queen. Did you hear of her plans for the orphanage? I'm sure you have. They're breaking ground come springtime."       "Aye, I have" Badger replied. "They all sound like they're doing a rather grand job. And what about the High King Peter? Is he truly as magnificent as they say?"       Here, Eilonwy paused a moment. Something strange and discomforting spread across her stomach, as if she was about to be sick. She shoved her hands beneath her in an effort to quiet their trembling. "Peter is...Peter is great" she finally croaked. "An incredible king, and...and a very dear friend." The creatures could tell there was a definite shift in her mood as she spoke of the king. Her face had grown rather pale and within a matter of seconds, she hasily excused herself for a breath of fresh air.       The moment she was outside, she rushed to the nearby river and dunked her head beneath the surface. The frigid water pricked at her skin and invigorated her, bringing her back to center. She gasped for breath upon surfacing, letting the excess liquid cascade down her face before collapsing to the ground in defeat. Heavy clouds hung overhead, drenching everything in a dull, gray light. The smell of snow lingered in the air. Damn it all.       No matter what she did, nothing would ever be the same again. She couldn't avoid hurting someone regardless of which way she turned. I suppose it doesn't really matter which road I take then, she thought to herself. She slammed her fist into the dirt with a groan, cursing the complications these godforsaken humans had imposed upon her. She just wanted to be free. Burying her face in her hands, she sucked in a deep breath before a drop of something cold and wet fell upon her forehead. She furrowed her brows, heart racing, before slowly peeking through her fingers up at the sky. Another, and another, and then another fell upon her head until soon a steady stream was raining from the skies. Snow.       Sitting up, Eilonwy extended a hand so as to catch the flakes as they landed, nearly brimming with tears. Finally, she felt as if she was home. She watched them disintegrate into her palm with hysterical happiness, something within her beginning to shift. It was a gradual, haunting realization that she both welcomed and feared. She stood up, brushed the dirt off of her dress, and slowly made her way back inside.       "Mrs. Beaver? I think I'm ready t speak with you now" she murmured. She glanced to Mr. Beaver and Badger in the den, reliving the glory days of weekly poker nights. The she-beaver was just tending to a whistling pot of tea, pouring two cups and seating herself on the opposite side of the table.       "Alright, what seems to be the matter?" she asked. Eilonwy took a cautious sip as she tried to figure out how to accurately word her feelings. They were so complex and tangled, she wasn't even sure it could be done but she would try her best all the same.       Sucking in a deep breath, she locked her eyes onto the grain of the wood and clutched her cup tightly. "I think..." she stammered. I can't fucking do this. She raised her eyes to her adoptive mother, terrified. "I think I want to go home."       Mrs. Beaver raised a paw to her mouth, shocked and confused. She wasn't quite sure she understood. Her other paw reached across the table to take Eilonwy's trembling hand, the girl's eyes growing glassy. It was obvious she was rather distraught, though about what in particular Mrs. Beaver hadn't the faintest idea. With great tenderness, she urged her to elaborate with the promise of gentle understanding.       Peter stared off into the distance, watching as the light snowfall covered the wood. He wasn't thinking about winter, though. Rather, his mind was locked on Eilonwy. He hadn't seen her in over 24 hours and was beginning to worry. Impatient fingers drummed against the marble rail of the balcony, praying that she was alright. He envisioned sweeping her off her feet in a monstrous embrace, kissing her hard, kneeling before her, asking her to spend the rest of her life with him. She'd shriek, overjoyed, reply with a resounding yes, leap into his arms. The beginning of their happily ever after.       "Susan? Can I speak with you for a moment?" he called into the great hall. His sister glanced up from her work, blueprints and legal documents scattering the table, before ushering him inside. "Susan, I need your advice."       There was a particular chaos emanating from the High King's eyes, as if his mind was on overdrive. She set down her pen and immediately pressed the back of her hand to his forehead. She assumed he wouldn't have a fever but knew it was always worthwhile to check anyways. She assumed correctly. "What's wrong?"       "I'm a little...apprehensive about something" he said slowly. Susan grimaced at his vague response.       "About...?" she urged with a cyclical motion of her hand.       Panic engulfed him. He couldn't understand why he was so nervous but he knew he couldn't possibly do this without help. Inhaling deeply, Peter blurted out, "I'm going to ask Eilonwy to marry me."       Susan's eyes widened in shock. "Peter, that's...that's...a little hasty, don't you think?" she stammered. Her brother groaned and buried his face in his hands.       "That's what everyone keeps saying" he replied, voice muffled.       "What do you mean 'everyone'? Who else knows about this?" she asked.       "Just Ed. I told him the moment I knew, when we were in Galma" he replied.       Susan leaned back in her seat, a part of her offended that she was not the first to know, but knew that was the least of her concerns right now and redirected her thoughts. "Well, did you ever stop to consider maybe we're right?" she asked. "Are you even certain she feels the same way? That this is what she wants? With all the work that running this country requires, I'm surprised you even have time for romance."       "I'll always have time for Eilonwy, Su" Peter said with utmost confidence, uncovering his face. "This is exactly what I want. And I know Eilonwy feels the same way, she told me so. So if I love her and she loves me, why wait? There's no point in putting things off! I just have no idea how to do it. I don't have a plan. I don't have a speech. I don't even have a ring!"       Though skeptical, it was obvious to Susan how much this meant to her brother. He had fallen drastically, intensely, passionately in love with someone and wanted to commit the rest of his life to her. Even if Susan and Eilonwy didn't always get along, she very obviously made her brother happy. Whatever differences they had, they could put them aside. Reaching across the table, Susan took Peter's hand in hers, a soft smile touching her lips. "Alright, Pete. If this is what you want, who am I stand in your way? I'm sure I could make the time to help."       A wild grin spread across Peter's face as he leapt forward to wrap his sister in a tight embrace. "Thank you, Su. You're a real lifesaver!" he whispered into her hair, planting a kiss on her cheek. Susan rolled her eyes.       "It's no trouble at all, Pete" she replied. Before she could say more, however, the criers in the watch tower blared their trumpets to signify an arrival. Peter darted out of the room, down the stairs, and to the front gates of the castle to find Mr. and Mrs. Beaver approaching paw in paw.       "Good morning, Peter!" they greeted with smiles. Peter nodded his head to each of them, frantic.       "Have either of you seen Eilonwy? I haven't been able to find her anywhere" he asked.       "Oh, yeah! She came with us to Allies Enclave. Went down to the stables to put Everlast up. She should be back in--" Mr. Beaver began but Peter sprinted out of the scene before he could finish.       Just as the he-beaver said, the High King found his friend in Everlast's pen with her feet propped up, picking at a small loaf of bread from her mare's saddlebag. "Where have you been?!" he asked a little more harshly than he intended.       Eilonwy immediately sat up straight, setting her snack down. "Around" she replied bluntly.       "Why didn't you tell me you were joining the Beavers? I've been worried sick about you!" he scolded.       "I didn't think I needed to! Since when are you my keeper?" she glared.       "I'm not, but I would like to know when you leave and where you're going so I'm not terrified something terrible has happened to you!" said Peter.       "Pete, I've said it before and I'll say it again: it's not your job to protect me. I'm a big girl. I can put my breeches on all by myself" she fired back. "Now, if you're finished yelling at me, I have something far more important I need to speak with you about."       The magnificent opened his mouth to protest but then thought better of himself. Eilonwy went on to explain the fear she saw in Badger and tha which she heard him speak of in others, of how greatly the impending winter terrified them.       "They've even gone so far as to think Jadis had risen from her grave" she scoffed. "They've gone absolutely mad. We need to do something about this and fast. I doubt they'll keep their cool-- or whatever's left of it-- the further the snow falls."       Peter paused to let her words sink in. He hadn't ever considered such a problem but now that it was real, it made quite a bit of sense. Of course a nation of creatures who had never experienced a natural winter would be terrified of it's return. The High King remained silent for a few minutes, prompting Eilonwy to ask him if he was alright and what he planned to do. His mind swirled with thoughts until finally, the perfect idea sprouted in his mind. Gripping her hand tightly, he rushed back to the great hall with the huntres in tow.       "Marco!" he shouted the moment he stepped inside. A symphony of "Polo"s answered his call. Within minutes, his siblings had gathered in the great hall with immense curiosity. Peter situated himself at the head of the table, commanding everyone's attention as he explained all that Eilonwy had told him. "I think it would be in our best interest to make some wellness checks. Nothing too fancy, just a handful of people to venture out and reassure everyone that we are taking as many measures as possible to show them all that winter-- a true winter-- can offer."       "Oh, I'll go!" Lucy exclaimed, raising her hand high over her head. As much as she loved Cair Paravel, she deeply missed the rugged forests and all the kind creatures that lived within it.       "Alright, Lucy. You and Tumnus can pair up and cover the Dancing Lawn. Is that alright?" he offered. The valiant nodded, turning to her dear friend standing in the doorway. Tumnus brimmed with joy at the thought of spending some much needed quality time with the little queen. He missed those quiet afternoons spent sipping tea together. She had so little free time these days, and he desperately missed her company. "Beavers" Peter continued, turning to the couple. "Would you mind covering the Western Wood? You certainly know your way around Allies Enclave better than any of us do." The pair nodded eagerly.       "I'll volunteer, too" Edmund offered.       "I was hoping you would, Ed" Peter replied, the hint of a smile touching his lips. "I'd like for you and Eilonwy to survey the Shuddering Wood, ensure that anyone who lives there is well taken care of."       Eilonwy's back shot ramrod straight at the mention of her name, engulfed in a mixture of relief and pure disdain. "Pete, are you sure?" she inquired. The High King nodded knowingly.       "I'm positive. You know this country like the back of your hand, I'm sure you'll manage just fine" he replied. There was something about the way he spoke, the chipper tone in his voice, that raised Eilonwy's suspicion.       As the meeting adjourned, Eilonwy caught sight of Peter clutch Edmund by the forearm and draw him back into the room. Yet another act to arouse her suspicion. She was certain he was up to something but what, exactly, she couldn't be sure. Either way, if leaving Cair Paravel was part of the plan, then who was she to refuse? Especially if it meant avoiding him and potential disaster. She was desperate for an escape anyways.       "Pete, what the hell is this all about?" Edmund asked, glancing to his two older siblings.       "Ed, I need to ask a massive favor of you" Peter murmured, eyeing the doorway. The just king cocked a brow in confusion, fearing what his brother was about to ask of him. When all traces of potential eavesdroppers had disappeared, Peter looked upon the just with intense purpose. "I need you to spy on Eilonwy for me."       "You want me to do what?" Edmund asked incredulously. "Peter, you know I love you but I'm afraid I can't do that."       "Why not? You said you’d help me." Peter argued.       "Because the last time I tried spying on her, I swear, she was this close to chopping my head off!" the younger explained.       “Wait, when on earth was this?!" Susan jumped in.       "A month or so ago, before the whole parlor incident."       "Ed, why the hell were you spying on her?" Peter asked.       "I was worried! Obviously she wasn't going to tell us what the hell was going on, so I had Sallowpad keep an eye on her while she trained so I could sneak into her room and try to find anything that might give me the slightest clue about what her problem was" Edmund explained. "A good job that bird did, though. I didn't get very far before Eilonwy barged into the room and kicked me out."       "Ed, you know not to snoop through other people's private property" Susan scolded, but Peter held up a hand to halt her stirring argument. Now was not the time nor place to passionately discuss morals. The High King had more important things in mind.       "It's no trouble now, Ed, because I'm going to need you to do it again but with Eilonwy herself rather than her things" Peter explained.       "How the devil am I supposed to do that?" Edmund countered.       "When you and Ellie go out for those wellness checks, just make conversation with her. Try and feel her out about her opinions on the whole marriage and proposal front" he explained. The minute he mentioned the word "marriage", Edmund immediately planted his face on the tabletop with a groan.       "Ugh, Peter, why?" the just complained. "I told you, you're being too hasty! I don't want to do your dirty work for you. Have you even talked to her yet about any of this? If she's not ready, she's not ready! There's not much you can do about it."       "That's not my concern, Ed. I know if I ask her to marry me, she'll say yes. There's no reason why she should decline. It's just a matter of how and when that I'm not sure about. That's why I need you to figure it out for me! Try and get a taste for what she would want so I know how to make this the best possible proposal I can" Peter begged. "This is really important to me, Ed. Please."       Edmund sighed. "Why can't you just go with her on this wellness thing and do it yourself?"       "Because" Peter said matter-of-factly. "I will be here with Susan taking advantage of everyone being gone to plan out what I can."       "You agreed to this?" the just asked, turning to Susan. His sister averted her eyes.       "Peter was very convincing and I mean, if the feelings are mutual then who am I to stand in the way of their happiness?" she replied. Again, another face-plant and sigh from the younger king.       The room went silent for a few long moments as Edmund tried to sort out the tangle of thoughts in his head. Finally, he rubbed his face and replied in defeat, "Fine! Fine, I'll do it. But only because you're horridly convincing, Pete."       Peter grinned like an innocent puppy, looking back and forth between his brother and sister with sparkling eyes. The pair were almost certain he was going to leap straight out of his skin and squeeze the just until he could no longer breathe. Instead, he simply wrapped his arms around his brother and replied, "Thank you, Ed. Thank you so, so much. You have no idea how much this means to me."       "I think I have a pretty a good guess" Edmund jested, rolling his eyes. "My only question now, though" he continued, "is why is Lucy the only one of us who isn't here? Shouldn't she be a part of this, as well?"       Peter and Susan glanced to each other in silent communication. Averting his eyes, the High King dug the toe of his boot into the marble flooring before responding. "I love Lucy and all but...she's not exactly the best at keeping secrets. Believe me, I feel terrible and I wish I could include her in this but it's far too risky. I cannot have Eilonwy find out about this under any circumstances whatsoever. I'm scared that if I told Lucy about this, too, she would spill the beans and the entire plan would be ruined. I just...I can't risk that, Ed."       Edmund nodded slowly, understanding Peter's perspective but still not entirely fond of the exclusion. He had harbored a rather strong distaste for lying to his sister, the way her face contorted when she cried and the absolute betrayal enveloping her entire body. With that said, however, he needed to respect Peter's wishes. After all, it wasn't lying if Lucy didn't ask about it.       By the next morning, everyone had packed their bags and prepared for the long journey ahead. Edmund trudged tiredly to the stables to retrieve Phillip, the sun's rays just stretching across the horizon, when he spotted Eilonwy with her own mare in the pen.       "Good morning" Edmund yawned.       "Mustn't be all that good if you're still half asleep" she commented, mounting Everlast in one smooth motion.       "How are you so awake this early?" he asked, petting his own horse before climbing atop.       "Because she never sleeps" Phillip replied with a neighing chuckle.       "That's not true, Phil. I sleep. It's just when I sleep that's questionable" Eilonwy said back, harsh tones mixing with joking ones. The bitter tinge in her voice instantly woke the young king. He had no idea how her attitude could be so sour this early in the morning but since it was, he knew he needed to be on guard. This was going to make his job all the more difficult.       Peter and Susan watched from Cair Paravel's gate as, two by two, each of their volunteers left the safety of the castle walls.       "Are you sure this is going to work?" Susan asked through a forced smile. She watched her brother and somewhat-friend depart together with nervous hands and a racing heart.       "I'm sure everything will be fine, Su. Eilonwy may be rough around the edges but I have a hunch Ed's job won't be very difficult. Besides, I don't see any reason why she should say no, anyways, so we have nothing to fear" Peter replied. He hoped he sounded convincing. It wasn't Eilonwy's answer he was worried about so much as her response to Edmund's prying. Regardless, it was out of their hands now. Edmund had a job to fulfill and the High King had utmost confidence that he could succeed flawlessly.       Edmund and Eilonwy traveled in silence for quite some time. Though they were technically alone, they weren't exactly all alone. The others were all going in the same direction and therefore remained within five feet of each other. The just king did not feel comfortable enough to bring up such intense topics so soon. No, he would wait until they were deeper into the woods, when everyone had branched off toward their respective destinations, and then he would begin his round of discrete questioning. If he even had the nerve. He knew he had made a promise to his brother but now that he was here, standing on the threshold of his mission, he was unsure if he could follow through. Eilonwy was so harsh and intimidating for someone so physically diminutive. Edmund knew the implications of doing wrong toward her and did not want to run the risk if he could help it. He was tiptoeing through fields of broken glass by now.       "I love this weather" Eilonwy said after hours of pure silence. She tossed her head back and spread her arms with a small smile upon her face, absorbing the chill of the snow as it fell upon her. It was perhaps the most approachable and enchanting Edmund had ever seen her. It was clear how much she loved the winter. The snow brought out a quality in her that softened her sharp edges, if only slightly, and accentuated a sort of radiance of attitude.       "If only the Narnians felt the same way" Edmund replied softly. Eilonwy laughed, hearty and full of life, with a shake of her head.       "You'd think they'd welcome this sort of stuff after all the time they spent stuck in it" she replied, motioning to the bare trees and light snowfall.       "I guess they're scared winter means the White Witch, right?" the just asked.       Eilonwy nodded in exaggeration with a roll of her eyes. "Ridiculous, isn't it? Winter is so much more than a stupid curse. Even if a curse is all they've ever known."       "Well, that's why Peter had us do this, right? To show them how much more winter can be?" he asked.       "In a way, I suppose" the huntress replied. She waited a few moments before adding scandalously, "But I think he's just trying to get rid of us for a while. He's been acting rather strange lately. I fear he's got something up his sleeve."       Edmund's spine shot up straight, his legs tightening their grip on Phillip. The horse narrowed his eyes back at the boy, asking him to relax a bit unless he waned to suffocate him. The young king knew Eilonwy was smart but he hoped to Aslan she was stupid enough not to unravel Peter's plan. A nervous chuckle escaped his lips before he replied, "Well, you know Peter. He's always working on something!"       "It's just the what that's got me paranoid" Eilonwy replied. She never took her eyes off the trail ahead as she spoke. "Peter's got all these pie in the sky ideas that sound great in theory but may not exactly be the best thing in reality. He's great, don't get me wrong, but I just...sometimes I fear he's not thinking clearly."       "I know exactly what you mean" Edmund said with utmost ingenuity. "He's impulsive and over-confident. He doesn't really like to think things through, or listen to other people. I said he should ask first before he-- well, nevermind..."       Eilonwy cocked a brow, glancing to the young king beside her. A surge of panic coursed through her veins at Edmund's broken sentence. Ask before doing what? she thought to herself. She feared she already knew the answer.       A few more hours passed in silence before the pair reached their destination. All was quiet as they circled the forest, searching for anyone who might need their assistance. "This is fucking ridiculous" Eilonwy groaned, voice shuddering what few leaves were left on the trees. "Why would Peter send us to the Shuddering Wood of all places, anyways? Nobody even lives here. Does Peter not know his own country?"       Edmund blinked a few times, unsure of how to react. Deep down, he knew his brother knew exactly what he was doing. He sent them someplace completely pointless on purpose. He never wanted them to perform wellness checks. He wanted them to talk.       "Maybe he just wanted to make sure, you know, in case anyone was here kind of...living off the grid, so to speak" Edmund murmured.       "But that's the thing, Ed: I know this country like the back of my hand and nobody has ever lived here. They don't call it the Shuddering Wood for nothing" she replied. After a few beats of silence, she jumped from her mare's back with a thud and kicked at the snow furiously. Edmund watched in terror, feeling as if he was very out of place in a very private moment. When she had finished her tantrum, she fell backwards into the snow and covered her face in her hands, groaning.       For a long few minutes-- or perhaps it was more like an hour? It's easy to lose track of time in the woods-- nothing was said. Edmund looked around at the trees and the sky, trying to think of something, absolutely anything, to say but the words refused to come to him. Eilonwy laid in the snow for a long while before finally uncovering her face. There was a glazed look in her eyes that made Edmund, for a split second, fear she was dead, but when she spoke he knew that couldn't be true.       "Edmund, do you ever look back at your short, undoubtedly dull life and miss certain parts of it?" she asked quietly.       The young king through a moment before responding, "I guess I miss the old days before Dad went to war..."       "Yeah..." she replied, more to herself than to him. "Do you ever miss your dad?"       Edmund nodded. "All the time." He didn't expect such a deep conversation to suddenly spring forth but now that it had, she was beginning to slowly stir up a vast collection of long-lost feelings. It had been so long snce he thought of his father, of the war, of home.       "Was your father a good man, Ed?" she asked. Again, Edmund nodded.       "Was yours...?" he asked hesitantly. Eilonwy sighed.       "The best man. He taught me everything I know. Gave me my sword, too. I named it Beowulf" she explained, patting the blade at her side. "None of that's to say my father and I always got along, though. Sometimes we'd butt heads. In fact...I never...well, I never had a chance to apologize to him..."       "For what...?"       "My father and I, we sort of left things on bad terms the last time we saw each other. I wanted to accompany him to war but he strongly refused me. Said battles were no place for a lady or some bull like that. That was the last time I saw him before...well, you know" she replied, motioning to the snowy scene surrounding.       "Oh..." was all Edmund could say, voice soft and hollow. He pictured the statue in the garden, the vision of a man painted in the parlor with strong, broad shoulders and a stern gaze. He was beginning to gain a deeper understanding of the man behind the face, of those who ruled before him. But more importantly, he was beginning to gain a deeper understanding of the girl standing before his eyes.       "Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to come back to all of this" she replied softly, fanning her arms in the snow to make an angel. "I never thought I'd miss winter so much. But now that it's back, I don't think I ever want it to end."       "I'm sure the Narnians would have a very different opinion on that" said Edmund.       "Yeah, I'm sure they would" Eilonwy said with disgust. Before the young king could speak again, the huntress continued. "Makes sense. They fear returning to something that for so long held such a negative connotation for them. They never thought they'd have to deal with this ever again but now that they do, it scares them. They don't want to be trapped in this forever."       She spoke with such understanding, so soft and vulnerable, that Edmund knew there must be something deeper brewing. "But winter isn't going to stick around forever. It's only temporary."       "I know that" she replied. "At least for them it won't."       "What do you mean?"       Eilonwy remained silent for a few moments, her heart pumping anxiety through her body just the same as if it was blood. When she finally spoke, she sounded like a completely different person. "Sometimes I wonder if this is all that's ever going to happen. That this is the end of the road. That the adventures are over. That I'm going to stay fixed in one place for the rest of my life. What if all of this was a mistake? What if I never should've gotten involved with this whole prophecy nonsense in the first place? I never would've fought in a war. I never would've gotten my ass whipped and an 'I told you so' about Aslan. I never would've returned to the Cair. I never in a million years thought I'd come back, but now I can't help but wonder if I should've just kept my distance and stayed away for good. A hundred years and I still feel like I don't belong."       "Why do you say that?" Edmund inquired. "I think you belong just fine."       "If you haven't noticed, Ed, I'm not exactly made of the same material my sisters were. I'm not poised and proper. I don't speak eloquently and I can't make a speech to a crowd. I'm too hotheaded for alliances. I get into far too much trouble. Every dress I own is dirty and torn. I'm not cut out for castle life" she explained.       Edmund let her words sink into his brain for a moment. She made a good point: she was the most unorthodox princess he had ever met. Not that he had ever actually met a princess before her but of all the ones he had imagined meeting, she certainly was in a league of her own. However, he still didn't find that a valid enough excuse. What he did find valid was her fear of returning home. It made sense to be terrified of spending the rest of your life in a place filled with such tragedy. Though his better judgment told him not to, he asked the question anyways. "Do you think you'd ever actually leave?"       Taken aback by the question, Eilonwy sat up and stared at the just for a moment, blinking. She hadn't expected an inquiry so blunt and straightforward but now that it was floating over their heads like it was, she was obligated to answer.       "I don't know" she spoke. "I can honestly say I don't know. Perhaps if something drastic were to happen, something life-altering, my perception would change but for now, I can't say what the future holds. All I'm sure of is that I can't envision myself staying forever, but envisioning and guaranteeing are two completely different things."       A hard lump situated itself in the pit of Edmund's stomach. He knew for certain in that moment that Eilonwy and his brother both had very different expectations for the future, and that if Peter fulfilled his plan, he would surely drive his beloved straight into the ground. She didn't want this. Or at least he assumed she didn't. But maybe, just maybe, this proposal wasn't a massive mistake. After all, she did say something life-altering might change her mind. She never said which way it would change. If Petr got down on one knee and pledged his love to her, then she might just decide to stay. Or she might not. It was all very risky and Edmund feared for his brother's dignity. He tossed and turned that night after they set up camp, unable to sleep knowing that right that very moment, his brother and sister were probably picking out rings together. He remained silent nearly the entire trip back, Phillip taking charge of the conversation in his rider's stead. He excused the boy as just being tired, which wasn't entirely true. Eilonwy could tell, however, that this kid was seriously shaken. The sickly taste of knowing began to coat the back of her throat.       The nearer they came to Cair Paravel, the closer the others grew until they had all reunited and completed their journeys as one large party. Lucy rambled incessantly the entire time about all the fun her and Tumnus had had at the Dancing Lawn. The whole place was inhabited with mystical little creatures like fae and nymphs among rather mundane beasts like squirrels and rabbits. Being the extroverted young queen she is, Lucy undoubtedly made everyone feel warm and comforted in winter's embrace. She even uttered a softspoken prayer for the dryads as they retreated into their trees for a seasonal slumber.       The Beavers seemed to rather enjoy their trip, as well, visiting with old friends and telling them great stories of Aslan and Beruna to ease their minds. Badger and Mr. Beaver played poker all night while Mrs. Beaver joined the other wives to help tend to the children, snuggling them to sleep and assuring those without homes of Queen Susan's plans.       "I taught them all about snowball fights and ice skating. Oh! And Christmas!" Lucy rambled as they reached the castle's gates. Her eyes sparkled with the promise of the holiday season.       Peter and Susan stood by excitedly, prepared to welcome their family back home. The moment her eyes landed on the High King, Eilonwy's stomach flipped as her mind replayed her and Edmund's conversation. There was something noticeably different about him that was severely unsettling. Whatever quality he had when she left, it seemed to only intensify.       "I'll take Phillip to the stables with Everlast, if you'd like" she offered to Edmund, dismounting. The young king nodded and watched as she departed. Truthfully, he was grateful she had excused herself. He wasn't sure how many more chances he'd have to speak with Peter in private, which made his case all the more urgent.       "Pete, I think we have a slight problem" Edmund murmured, watching everyone filter inside. He could already tell Peter was barely paying attention.       "Ed, I'm so glad you all had such a great time! We can talk later, alright? I have some business I need to take care of before dinner" he replied absentmindedly. Before his brother could protest, he ducked into the crowd and disappeared inside. Something told Edmund this wasn't going to be easy.       Lucy continued to ramble about her trip throughout the entirety of dinner, mainly speaking of Christmas related things. It was as if she had completely forgotten the holiday existed until now but upon remembering, was more excited than ever. "...and while I was there, I had this brilliant idea that we should do something special when the time comes! Something huge and wonderful to celebrate our first Christmas as kings and queens!"       "You know, Lucy, I was thinking we were due for a something special and Christmas is the perfect excuse" Peter agreed. Susan nodded, a soft smile touching her lips.       "Maybe we should hold a ball? We could invite everyone-- the Narnians, King Lune, the duke from Galma" she suggested.       "That sounds perfect! Oh, say we can do that, Peter! Pretty please?" Lucy exclaimed.       "I think that's a great idea" Peter replied confidently. "Say, Ed, what do you think?"       The just had a pretty good idea of where things were headed and he began to fear the worst. He had gradually sunk further and further into his seat during the course of their discussion so that by the time Peter turned his attention toward him, only his eyes and the top of his head were visible from behind the table.       "Oh, I don't know, Pete, I mean...we've been doing so much already. Don't you think a quiet Christmas would be better? Something a bit more, you know...relaxed?" he offered.       "Ed, that's pointless!" Lucy replied. "Christmas is special and deserves to be treated so! Especially this year!" Peter and Susan nodded in agreement.       "Well, then that settles it. A Christmas ball it is!" the High King announced. The majority of the council in attendance all clapped and cheered at this decision, seemingly delighted at the promise of a formal party. In all the commotion, Edmund glanced down the table to peek at Eilonwy's reaction, expecting the worst. Much to his surprise, however, the hint of a smile teased at her lips as she lightly clapped along with everyone else. Perhaps I've underestimated the power of a positive change, Edmund thought to himself. With something uplifting to look forward to, it seemed as though the whole of Narnia had been entrenched in Christmas lights. The world seemed to shine a little brighter and everyone's smiles grew a little bit wider. For the first time in quite a while, there was hardly any fear. Hardly.