#aes / never to see heaven

[targaryenrealnessdarling]

Rage Becomes Her

Aemond x bastardTargaryen!female

Summary: of all the Targaryen bastards he could have underestimated, it should not have been her | Word Count: 3.8k~ | Warnings: smut, Aemond being a fat douche, mentions of sex work, angst, oc described as having Targaryen features

No day was as cursed as the day her mother looked between her bloodied thighs, glancing up at the faces of her friends and common women, with shame and fright. The babe between her legs was pink and crying, their skin glistening with afterbirth, and a tuft of silver hair atop their tiny head.

What was survival, when the Gods had bestowed a Targaryen bastard into her belly.

Her own daughter lived as her mother did, learning the ways of the body and pleasure. She could recall the first time a man leered at her. Only two and ten and barely formed into the shape of a woman. Somehow the silver sheen to her hair made men think they could have her before her ripening. Plucked from the tree too early.

If only her mother could have resisted the irresistible pull of greed. Purses of gold coins lined her pockets, paid to her with the virtue of her only daughter.

An income. Nothing more.

It was only when she died, that she formed her own protection. Madame Sylvi gave her more freedoms than the usual whores. Bestowed upon as her ‘choice’. Something she had known little.

The brothel was tucked away in one of the narrow, winding alleys of King's Landing, a hidden enclave where nobles and commoners alike sought the pleasures denied to them in the light of day. The air was thick with the scent of incense and the low murmur of whispered promises. Sweet ones, from between the lips of whores.

The men who paid for the service or fucking a young woman with silver hair were usually all the same. Drunken fools with egos far bigger than their cocks, eager to stick whatever they pleased between her legs to make themselves feel like men.

She rarely spared it much thought. She moaned sweetly and whispered hushed mutterings to inflate their already fragile masculinity. Did what she had to do to survive, like so many around her.

But she would be remiss not to think about her most recent patron. One whom she had stolen from Madame Sylvi, who did not seem particularly precious about the loss, seeing as the One Eyed Prince simply crossed the threshold to her room instead. As long as business was within her four walls, she was content.

He was, at first, quiet and required work and effort to calm his fraught and tense muscles. But like most men, the second he sheathed himself inside her, he was a man driven by the inescapable warmth of not only her cunt, but by the comfort of what it provided. However false.

The night is seared firmly into her memory. His body heavy with Milk of the Poppy, he staggered as he pulled his clothes off, and for some time he was unable to become hard due to its calming effects. And she saw the familiar pang of annoyance most men got when their fleshy counterparts would not do as the mind commanded. 

She will never forget the look upon his face as she knelt in front of him, took his heavy manhood in her palm and pressed her lips to the shaft, stroking upwards with her touch and tongue. Beneath him like this, his face angled and sharp, one could be mistaken he was a statue. His skin resembled such porcelain. Made smooth by the hands of the Gods themselves. 

He had looked upon her as if she were an entity of the Seven Heavens. And when she took him into her mouth, his breath hitched, and his hands instinctively tangled in her hair. The sensation was overwhelming, a blend of pleasure and relief that washed over him in waves.

She moved with an expert's grace, her rhythm steady and unhurried, drawing soft moans from his lips. For a moment, the world outside ceased to exist; there was only the warm, wet heat of her mouth and the exquisite torture of her tongue. He closed his eye, surrendering to the pleasure, feeling the tension in his body slowly melt away. Aemond's grip tightened as he guided her movements, lost in the sensation and the raw intimacy of the act.

He fucked in very much the same way. With urgency. As if someone were to take her away.

Was it some necessity this great man needed, away from the bustling court and the duties of his birth?

Or she reasoned he fucked her because he was simply bored of Sylvi.

But as it became more and more regular, she began to realise that her forbidden parentage played a more significant role than she had first thought. He wanted someone who looked so like his ideal, but someone who ultimately was destined to remain, steadfastly, inferior.

Aemond Targaryen pushed open the heavy wooden door, its creak swallowed by the hum of conversation and laughter inside. He pulled his hood lower, shielding his face from prying eyes. Though he was a prince, here he was just another man seeking escape. Several women crowded him, offering wine, their bodies and services with doe eyes and lips framed with rouge.

The back of the brothel was shrouded with silken curtains, providing no real privacy but rather giving one the security of feeling it. Pale pinks, lilacs, warm amber glows bounced off the stone walls, a warm emanating through the space as if walking through honey, and willing to be drowned in it. It was a dangerous feeling indeed. The warm, sticky call of a woman’s body.

The first time he saw her he did not like her. The whore with silver, golden hair. She had a bastard’s taint on her bloodline despite its noble sheen. There was a part of him that refused to admit that despite the muddied nature of her birth, that she was beautiful. He was still willing to be held by Sylvi back then, cuddled against the woman’s breasts like a babe.

It was different now.

Sylvi regarded him, using her body as somewhat of a shield, to part him and the heavenly depravity that lay across the threshold. She said nothing, and simply extended her hand, to show her palm. Aemond noted the surprised look in her knowing eyes when she felt the weight of the purse, the familiar tune of coins ringing true and greedily.

She fetched a hefty price compared to the others. One Aemond was willing to pay for her company.

When he pulled the silks aside and stepped within her lair, she was seated as usual, upon a chaise draped with rich fabrics, her posture relaxed and yet alert. Her hair, so much like his own, caught the flickering candlelight, like looking up to the stars when one was too deep in their cups, only to find the silver light stretching across their vision.

Only the muffled music was heard, and the rapid thud of his heart.

The fabrics lay like water on her skin, cinched at her waist. The translucent material had her rosy buds perk beneath it, the glimmering and blushing shade of pink almost alike to her own flesh in the low and intimate amber light. She did not need to show herself to entice, he thought.

“My Prince.”

She greeted with a soft, warm melody of enchanting, in a manner that eased his shoulders but not his soul. He regarded her face the same way Sylvi did to him. One eye glazing over her familiar features. 

His motions were easy to memorise. He would do no more than was necessary, as most patrons did. He would strip from his clothing, lay between her thighs and take her roughly. Preparation for someone as lowborn as her, and getting paid for it, was no necessity for a customer, nevermind a prince.

There were glimpses where it was enjoyable. But Prince Aemond was guarded, sometimes so much so she hardly thought him capable of the act. But he would surprise her. And once he was done, he would lay beside her, and he would talk, with only their flesh as comfort.

Sometimes, like right at this moment, he would just lay beside her, running her bright locks, ruffled from their salacious acts, through his long and slender fingers. She often thought he looked like a lost soul, eyepatch discarded and bared in this wretched place for her to lay her eyes upon. And then another thought lay under that still. The thought that this man before her had such hate in his heart for his half sister’s children, and yet visited her every other evening to sink into the haven that her own existence offered.

An existence she was sure he internally loathed.

But it seemed he loathed himself more than anything else.

“Do you dream of being more than you are.” Not a question. An inquisition shaped as a demand.

She hesitated, knowing that her answer must please him. "My dreams are inconsequential, my prince. My only desire is to serve you and to bring you comfort."

He smirked, satisfied with her response. "It is the natural order of things. Your role here suits you, providing solace to those of us born to higher stations."

She felt her brows furrow in annoyance, but tried to soften her features, his keen blue eye boring into her face. Your role here suits you. And what was that exactly? A whore who merely existed to be a sheath for men’s blades whenever it suited them. A vessel, nothing more.

"I would never forget, my prince," she said softly, her eyes downcast. "Your presence is the only thing that gives my life meaning."

Aemond reached out, his hand cupping her cheek. "Sometimes, I wonder if there is more to you than just your services to me."

Her heart quickened, but she kept her voice calm and composed. "I am whatever you need me to be, my prince."

Often, that was all it took to sate him. 

He would always come back, in varying moods, and she felt the reins on her white-hot temper begin to slip, the flames rearing to the roof of her insides the more delicate insults came out of his mouth. Those among her argued that he cared for her deeply. But how can a man care for a woman and say such hurtful words in exchange?

A bastard, indeed she was. But her existence strayed the line between demanding some semblance of respect, drawn to her by the milky skin and pale hair that he recognised in himself. She pondered this contradiction endlessly. Why did he come to her, night after night, seeking her presence, only to remind her of her inferiority? What was it about her that captivated him, despite his disdain?

Her thoughts often wandered as she prepared for his visits, trying to unravel the mystery of Aemond Targaryen. Did he see something in her that he could not find elsewhere? Was it the shared blood, tainted as it was by her illegitimacy? Or was it simply the thrill of asserting his power over someone who mirrored his own visage?

“You seem troubled.”

“It is nothing,” his response was cool, followed by the discarding of his hood, only turning when she urged a decently full glass of wine into his hand.

“You forget, my prince, that I am well-versed in the art of reading men. Tell me, what burdens you tonight?”

Stealing the wine from his lips, he cannot help the wandering of his fingers, tracing the golden spun locks of her hair that glow moonlit as he touches them. “Your features betray you,” he muses, “do you ever wonder what it would have been like, had you been born legitimate?" he asked, his tone laced with condescension.

She hesitated, searching his eyes for any hint of sincerity, but found only the cold amusement that so often accompanied his words. "It is not my place to wonder such things," she replied, her voice steady. "My fate was decided long before I drew my first breath."

He tilted his head, studying her. "And yet, you bear the mark of our blood so clearly. It must gnaw at you, knowing you could never rise above your station, no matter how much you resemble the dragonlords of old."

"Perhaps," she admitted softly, "but we all have our roles to play, my prince. Even those born amongst lust and lechery."

Aemond's fingers continued their path through her hair, his touch both gentle and possessive. "You speak wisely for one of your birth," he said, a faint smile playing on his lips. "It is a pity you were not born to a higher station. You might have made an interesting rival."

"Or an ally," she suggested, daring to meet his gaze.

He chuckled, a low, rumbling sound. "Or an ally," he conceded. "But as it stands, you are here, and I am there. The order of things remains unchanged."

"And you come here to see me," she retorted, her gaze unwavering. "What does that say about you, my prince?"

“I enjoy you.”

"Or perhaps the dragon seeks something he cannot find elsewhere."

Aemond’s expression hardened, his pride pricked by her words. "Do not presume to understand me. You are here because I allow it."

"And you are here because you need it," she countered, her voice a seductive whisper. "What drives you to seek solace in the arms of a bastard? A whore?"

He pulled back, his eyes narrowing. "You speak too boldly-"

"I speak truth," she said, her gaze unflinching. "Something even a prince cannot escape."

Aemond regarded her for a long moment, a mixture of contempt and fascination warring within him. She was a puzzle, a riddle wrapped in the enigma of her bloodline. He hated and desired her in equal measure, drawn to the mystery of her existence.

She let out a breath, surprised when his fingers wrenched around her face, tugging her towards him. But her expression never faltered. “I wonder who is the depraved cunt who sired you,” Aemond murmured, deep and low against her face.

“Prince Daemon or the late King Viserys, it does not matter. Half of the whores on the Street of Silk knew the shape of their cocks-”

Aemond's grip tightened, his eyes blazing with fury. "Watch your tongue," he hissed, his breath hot against her skin. "You may have Targaryen blood, but you are still a whore. Do not forget your place."

She winced but refused to look away. "And yet here you are”. Her voice was steady, defiant, challenging him despite the pain.

His eyes narrowed, the fury in them warring with something deeper, something he could not name. "I am a man who indulges in his whims," he said, his voice low and dangerous. "Nothing more."

"Is that all it is?" she whispered, her voice softening, searching his gaze. "An indulgence? Because if that's true, you wouldn't keep coming back."

Aemond's grip loosened slightly, his fingers trailing down her cheek. "You know nothing of my reasons," he said, a trace of vulnerability slipping through his hardened exterior.

He looked at her for a long moment, the conflict within him evident in his eyes. "You remind me of what I am and what I can never escape," he said finally, his voice a raw whisper. "The blood we share, the legacy that binds us. You are a mirror, showing me my weakness. The weakness of my House."

"And you, my prince, are the reminder of what I could have been. The life I was denied, the nobility I can never claim."

Aemond's hand twitched, a sudden urge to pull her close, to feel the warmth of her body against his, but he forced himself to remain still. He could not afford to show that side of himself, not to her, not to anyone. In another world, she might have been born legitimate, a sister to him, one he could wed, bed and breed at his leisure.

And yet.

"You speak of nobility as if it is something you could ever grasp," he said, his voice softer, yet still laced with condescension. "You will never be more than what you are now. A whore, a bastard, a mere footnote in the history of my House."

Her eyes flashed with quiet anger, a smouldering fire that burned beneath her calm exterior. How dare he speak to her this way? He knew nothing of the struggles, the pain, the countless indignities that had shaped her life.

"How fortunate you are, my prince," she said, her voice measured but tinged with bitterness, "to never have known the struggles of those who are less fortunate. To speak so easily of things you can never truly understand."

Aemond's gaze hardened, but he did not interrupt her.

"You may see me as nothing more than a whore and a bastard," she continued, her words steady, each one a dagger aimed at his pride. "But you know nothing of the world outside your gilded cage. You have no idea what it means to fight for every scrap of dignity, to claw your way through a life that was decided for you before you even drew breath."

Aemond's jaw clenched, his eyes burning with a mix of anger and something he couldn't quite name. "You forget yourself," he said, his voice low and dangerous. "You forget to whom you speak."

"And you forget, my prince," she shot back, her voice unyielding, "that respect is earned, not given by birthright alone. And certainly not because you have a dragon."

A silence fell between them, heavy with unspoken truths and simmering tension. They stood there, locked in a battle of wills, neither willing to back down, both caught in the web of their shared blood and conflicting worlds. There was a strange respect in his gaze. As if he had seen the same flames that captivated him.

Slowly, she reached into the folds of her dress and pulled out the purse Aemond had paid her that night. She held it out to him, her hand steady. "Take it back," she said quietly, but firmly. "I don't want your coin."

He stared at her for a long moment, the purse heavy with silver between them. Slowly, he reached out and took it from her hand, his fingers brushing against hers. The touch was brief, but electric, a spark that neither could ignore. He could not help the smile that rose to his face, testing the weight of his coin in his palm. Looking down upon the woman in front of him with a cold but unyielding respect.

The events of that night lingered in Aemond's mind, gnawing at the edges of his thoughts. The war was intensifying, and the tension within the Red Keep was palpable. It was during one of these tense small council meetings, that Aemond found his thoughts straying.

“Prince Daeron’s dragon, Tessarion, has at last taken to wing. Your brother expects to join the fight soon.” 

He half listened to Lord Wylde, his head half turned, eyes darting to listen to the cries of the smallfolk so loud it was as if they were in the room. Screams. Cries of terror.

“Dragon!”

“Get inside!”

“And when he does…the Hightower host will be unstoppable.”

He acted on instinct, feeling the hot whips of something he would not admit was panic at the back of his neck. The doors gave way to a bright, sunny afternoon. His one eye squinted to peer into the blue abyss, narrowed to the appearance of a great beast.

A dragon, its silver scales gleaming in the sunlight, descended from the sky.

Silverwing.

And there, riding atop the great beast, was her. Her silver hair flowed behind her like a banner for war, and her eyes, filled with determination, met his with an intensity that took his breath away. Aemond's mind raced, understanding dawning on him as he realised the implications.

Rhaenyra's recruitment of Dragonseeds had borne unexpected fruit.

She guided Silverwing to soar over King's Landing, her movements graceful and confident. She made several passes, almost as if she were flouting. The dragon's powerful wings created gusts of wind that rippled over Kings Landing, sending leaves and dust swirling, with smallfolk and merchants knocked off balance.

Aemond stood there, watching in a mix of awe and resentment. There was a part of him that couldn't help but admire the sight, the sheer power and majesty of the dragon, her commanding presence. But another part of him burned with anger. The idea of a bastard riding a dragon, flaunting her newfound status above the city, challenged everything he believed in.

What did that make him? How was he special if bastards could claim dragons? The exclusivity of his birthright felt tarnished, the unique status of House Targaryen diluted.

She seemed to sense his gaze, turning Silverwing to circle back and hover momentarily over the Keep. Her eyes locked onto his, a silent challenge in her gaze. She was revelling in her newfound power, asserting her place in a world that had tried to deny her.

Aemond's grip tightened on the hilt of his sword, his knuckles turning white. He liked her, there was no denying that. She fascinated and infuriated him in equal measure. But the sight of her riding Silverwing, basking in her defiance, stoked the flames of his inner conflict.

As Silverwing ascended higher, leaving King's Landing behind, Aemond's eyes followed them until they were mere specks against the sky. He stood there long after they had disappeared, wrestling with the tumultuous emotions swirling within him. Admiration, anger, attraction, and resentment collided in a storm that he couldn't quell.

The sun was setting by the time Aemond reached Vhagar. The great dragon stirred, sensing her rider's agitation. Aemond's resolve hardened as he climbed onto her back. With a command, Vhagar spread her immense wings and launched into the sky, the force of her takeoff shaking the ground below.

The flight to Dragonstone was swift. The wind whipped through Aemond's hair, his mind racing as fast as the dragon beneath him. He couldn't let this challenge go unanswered. 

As Dragonstone came into view, the outline of Silverwing against the darkening sky confirmed his target. He urged Vhagar to increase her speed, but the older dragon's pace couldn't match Silverwing's agility. Aemond's frustration grew with every beat of Vhagar's wings, the gap between them refusing to close.

She watched him, the man who had insulted her, bedded her, wronged her, as he turned his great beast mid-air, her own dragon purring against her touch atop the peak of a tower of Dragonstone. Even from afar, she could sense his frustration, the simmering anger that radiated from him, and she revelled in this unique reaction, savouring the way it felt.

For a moment, their eyes met, and in that silence, a thousand emotions passed between them. He glanced back over his shoulder, watching as she sat firm atop her beast, the wind whipping her hair around her face. The tension in the air was palpable, but there was also a sense of resolution, a quiet acknowledgment of the lines they had drawn.

That this was no surrender.

General Taglist: @1lluminaticonfirmed @aemondsfavouritebastard @bellstwd @blackswxnn @blairfox04

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@hb8301 @jamespotterismydaddy @justbelljust @minholy223 @mochi-rose

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[skyrigel]

Half my soul

Pairing: Aemond Targaryen x twin!fem!Reader

Benjicot blackwood masterlist

“ You are betrothed to Cregan Stark, but your twin brother isn't happy about it, sulking and being rude — you finally confront him.” [ wc: 1.1k ]

.⁠｡✧Jealous and possesive behaviour, fluff, talks of eloping, angst, hand fiddling, soul mate talks, incest ( no sex but there's lot of obsessing and justification like ‘ we shared a womb dumbie, you belong with me’ jokes ) .⁠｡✧Please be kind to yourself xoxo !!! credits to @strangergraphics-archive for text dividor

Reblogs and comments are really appreciated :)

“ Aemond...Ae—” You ran with your dress dangling around your feet, rushing ahead with your footsteps echoing in the dimly lit hallway.

“ What ? ” Aemond snapped back, his hair whip lashing as he turned back to you, his mouth perched close to disadain.

“ You— why are you like this ? ” You narrowed your gaze at him, he leaned back, straightening up to his full length.

“ Like what ? ” He asked, tapping his feet on the floor, you could have punched him for his nonchalance.

“ Like mean.” You supplied, “ I can't help but notice it, you aren't like..like this Aem, this—” you vaguely gestured the whole of him, “ I don't like this.”

Aemond stopped his tapping, eyeing you, no he was devouring you with the way his intensity deepened, before he cleared his throat.

“ You're mistaken, sister.”

You scoffed on that, crossing your arms against your chest.

“ Are we done ? Because I have things to do.”

“ No.” You said simply.

“ No ? ” He huffed, mouth tightening in a scowl, arching back his brows.

“ Come with me, to my chambers.” you offered, before he could refuse, you held his hand and dragged him face first.

“ I have some—” He was walking behind you, making whiny faces that you no longer had to see to know, you could feel him, he was your brother, your blood, half your soul.

“ No, you are just going to sulk in a corner or indulge in some not so fancy buisness.”

“ you mean the silk street ? ” He suggested and you merely bristled at the mention, it was common amongst men, especially men of court and it shouldn't bother you if your brother is spending time with some whore in exchange for gold. But he's your brother, he belongs to you first and no else.

You shared a womb for seven heaven's sake he was yours first, out of all, his time and company was yours to enjoy. It was your right, always have been.

“ You never learnt how to talk to a lady.”

You turned back to him, as both of you entered your bed chambers.

You settled on the couch with a little ‘oomp’ as he watched you, these days he either watched you or sulked at you and sometimes both.

“ Ofcourse...” He bristled, sitting across from you, “ You already like that stark.”

“ Cregan Stark.” You raised a brow.

Aemond looked away with an eye roll, fiddling with his rings, his slender pretty fingers, you frowned but he took no notice of your concern, sighing you took his hand in yours, calming his nerves down.

“ You don't like him ? ” You meant it as a question but Aemond already looked like he had made a point. He had stopped fiddling, letting you take half his misery—half his pain.

“ I don't need to.” He said, what he felt like a very neutral tone but reeked of malice, “ You are betrothed to him, you like him ! ” He raised his voice in accusation, you couldn't bear that, no, Cregan Stark was an amazing man, a true lord but he's no-one when it came to your brother, your Aemond.

“ But you're my brother, your opinion matters to me.” You leaned, bringing his hand to your lap, fingers entwinng like they were made for each other, because they were —moulded by the old gods and new, ofcourse they would be, He's your blood, your brother, your soulmate.

Something flickered in his eye, the one not covered in his patch, something so close as hope, blazing like fire that ran in his blood.

“If I don't like him then you won't marry him ? ”

You could have laughed, could have hung your head and shaked him because no, ofcourse there was no way out of this marriage, it was your duty towards your family but Aemond was your first family, and if something could make him happy then so be it.

“ I don't think mother will let me see the sun if I denied.” You said, because it was true, He almost winced, “ But I could elope away.”

“ Alone ? ” He asked, now getting cosy as he rested his head on your shoulder, letting his hair prick you on your arm where you cradled his wrist, making small cosmic stars.

“ No Idiot, I was thinking of taking vhagar and you.”

“ Oh.” He said, so sweet that your heart melted, this was your Aemond and not the one who scowled and turned away from you, but this, sweet boy who's your brother, who loves you the most.

“ How far we could go ? ” You asked him, tilting your head to his side, your nose taking his scent.

“ To the world's end.” He said in your shoulder, his voices rippling like waves inside you. You chuckled softly, kissing his forehead.

“ I missed this.” you told him, “ I missed us.”

Aemond pulled back, worrying his jaw but saying nothing, he withdrew his hand to undone the patch on his eye, his blue eye shining at you. You smiled at him.

“ I don't know what I would when you will be gone.” His mouth moved, his lips soft as petals, how many nights you had kissed him goodnight until he stopped coming. Aemond was very soft like his throat would collapse were he any loud.

But you would know him anywhere, just the way his mouth moved or the way he took his breath, you would know him.

“ North isn't so far, is it ? ”

“ It is.” Aemond shaked his head, softening because how could he not, “come here.”

He cupped your face, pulling you closer till your forehead rested against his. You closed your eyes just like him, letting your souls connect in their mist

“ You can come and meet me, we can go around riding vhagar, they say north is beautiful.”

“Just snow.” He hummed, his breath on your cheek, warm and slick.

“I love you.” you whispered, opening your eyes and he was already looking at you, breath drawn in.

“I love you more.” He said, kissing the corner of your mouth, his nose nuzzled in your face for some moments, making the moment stop.

“It's going to be okay.” you smiled, smearing your thumb across his cheek and he pulled you until you were on his lap.

“It will be.” He sniffed in your sweet hair, wrapping his arms around your whole body like he wouldn't let you go and he wouldn't.

You were half his soul, there was no one else you could belong but him, all his, only his.

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[hoseoksluna]

A MILLION YEARS AGO | jhs

pairing: idol!boyfriend!hobi x f. reader 

genre: smut, fluff

word count: 4.6k

summary: when your faith in your healing wavers, hobi is there to go the extra mile for you.

taglist: join | playlist: million | cp: wattpad, ao3 | discord: join

warnings: near car accident, confusion in the body, iffy feelings towards an ex, seeing an ex for the first time in million years, being mistreated, religion, praying, oc smokes, hobi is the perfect boyfriend that i wish i had, oral sex (f. receiving), raw sexual intercourse.

note: i'm crying as i'm writing this because i'm so sad, but i promise this healed me more than i expected. as you know, i write little fics whenever something happens to me—and this is based off what happened yesterday. me and my cousin sat down at our smaller family event (not the one we had on friday, if you follow me on twitter), and she asked me if i were healed. and she told me about what she saw. i think it's meant to move me somewhere forward, otherwise i would've never got to see his face. i don't know. i hope you like this little fic, you know i had to write it out like i smoke out my feelings. i'm proud of this work in terms of the way it's written. think i kinda killed that. i love you guys. and i miss you, terribly. i love you.

side note: sorry for my vulnerability. a smaller side note: this is also for my baby @hoseokkie-caeks. i promised i would write a hobi one shot after berries, and here i am. <3 i love you, baby. miss you.

The night was dark. Too, too dark. 

I sensed it swathing my bones long before I glimpsed at something I should and shouldn’t have—or rather someone, to be proper. 

The trees remained unmoving, despite the summer breeze drifting through the macrocosm that unfolded with each and every footfall I shared with my beloved beside me. Hand in hand, we walked leisurely through streets that were prosaic until our energy imbued them with our intimate poetry. White swallowing, little by little, the dark. There was no one and everyone around us, but we didn’t see them; we merely saw each other, for we were in love and we deserved to be so. Hoseok after his hard, agonizing work regime and unfair treatment from his management and… the whole world essentially. Me after the way I had been treated, handled, tossed aside by the person I found inside the screen of a phone—inside a world that once used to be mine, but now is nothing but foreign. 

Million, million years ago. 

The stars were aligned just right, stringing together a shape of the wholeness and the throb of my heart, and we sat down to eat dinner with one of my closest friends that came to town—one me and Hoseok have settled in within the precious, year-long break that burst open in his work life. Hobi didn’t want to see people, at least not those who didn’t bear familiar faces, and I didn’t want to see the city, so it was the most fateful of compromises, most perfect of the kind that was naturally threaded between us; a conjoined idea that blinked within our brains at the same time. And the laughter that followed after we voiced it out at the same time, the long kiss that spread roots inside the pillows of our lips—to this day, it is a fond memory, or perhaps something beyond that, that embraces me at night before I enter the realm of dreamland, tugging me closer into the snug heat of Hoseok’s safe place that I regard his body to be. 

Though before we arrived, I gazed up at that constellation of me through the windscreen as Hoseok’s car began to make a strange noise that unnerved him. I prayed for its rightness to be true and I prayed for our safe travel, as short as it was. According to our previous plan, we were supposed to wait for my friend, Hyun-Ae, and her boyfriend, Do-hyun, outside of the restaurant because she had a strong yearning to jump into my arms upon seeing me. My excitement for that to happen ripped my eyes away from the nightly heavens, searching for her in the dimmed lights of the mutely lively building, in the shadowed greenery surrounding it, near the trees that didn’t move, yet my hair did. 

Strange, that dark energy. 

I hoped she was peeing somewhere, where the light doesn’t reach. She invariably had a tendency to chug everything she drank and her bladder paid for it each time—but this time, she wasn’t squatting by a bush. 

She almost didn’t get to me at all. 

A driver, merely minutes away from entering our town, nearly swerved wrongly into the traffic lane that Do-hyun was driving through, yanking away the stars from the canvas of the heavens. He had to pull over and take deep breaths in order to stabilize his mental state as the thought of almost getting in a car accident with her being in the passenger seat triggered his long-fought panic attack. And because the woods at the beginning of our secluded town doesn’t have any service, we waited for them for half an hour without any knowledge of their whereabouts. 

I bit my cuticles until they bled. Until Do-hyun’s lungs were lifted of its heaviness with Hyun-Ae’s help, his breathing evened out, and he was able to get behind the wheel and cross the distance. 

Upon hearing what obstacles stood before us, I didn’t understand it at first. Hyun-Ae’s yearning was gratified, we hugged until our necks ached and our arms quivered in our stifling, long-coming hug with her legs wrapped around me, ate the food we always ordered when we were together and not apart while she filled me in—but I didn’t perceive the darkness for what it was until that very last detail. 

One she wouldn’t provide until I promised her, a million times, that I was fully healed and ready to hear it. I didn’t know what she was about to uncoil, sitting beside me as she was, with her hands in her lap. But I should’ve known that those obstacles were put in our path for my preparation. 

Hyun-Ae hinted, before she began articulating her discovery, that it was about my ex-love. I stiffened a little, taken aback. I downed a shot of the spirits that we had left. And I was being tugged in two different directions, thrown to and fro, asked by the lawlessness of life to choose. 

Stay back and not go further—not let her tell me because Hobi doesn’t know the specifics about my last situationship. 

Ask her to hold my hand and give her the consent to proceed as my curiosity was piqued and my wound was healed, a million years ago. 

And in the short dwelling of the manhandling, my spirit of inquiry crowned, my fatal flaw. I chose the latter—because why would I not? I carry my heart in my chest for my beloved beside me proudly, for his waters mine with the fulfilling streams of his laughter and sound effects, gentleness and devotion. He has grown and nurtured monsteras within its past mutilated chambers—and the longer he cradled my life and made it his own, made it his endeared responsibility, the more healing flowers of wild, undomesticated origin bloomed against the verdure. The pair of us—Hobi, the elegant leaves with its perforation symbolizing the dimples above his mouth when he smiles; I, the chamomile that has the gift to make better, but everyone mistakes it for a daisy, tossing it aside. 

Everyone but Hobi, the worker who cultivated it in me. 

And caught in the snare of my pride, I wanted to know if my ex-love still remained in the exile of his emotional unavailability, fucking everything that walks on his solitary Pluto planet while I made love to the Sun three times a day, minimally. 

Hyun-Ae gripped my hand with her lukewarm, refreshing touch as she told me that he was dating someone, fundamentally poisoning the girl with his ways like he did to me. That she didn’t understand what I had seen in him as he looked worse than ever before, a characteristic of the unhallowed set deep within his eyes. My lungs refused to inhale any particles of air; they must’ve taken a break from their work in order to process, at their own time, the information that was given to them. The male who pretended to date me while I edged his planet for years, laboring myself in order to heal him with my prayers and words because I believed him after he said he loved me, but he needed to get right first. Needed to unload his baggage and bandage up the slashes across his heart from his previous relationship. 

All sweet nothing without an ounce of genuineness. He took pleasure from the way I stayed around while he hurt me again and again by entertaining other girls, my feet indented in the soft soil of the planet. It was a form of compensation for him. A some sort of merriment—and madness, unmitigated madness for me. 

I lost my mind, standing upon that edge. And I had to get off in order to find it again, my hands outstretched beyond me—held by the invisible fingers of God while he taught me how to walk again, how to walk in a gravity-filled space of greenery, the rainbows of colors, the rain and the sunlight like a baby. 

And I did. 

I walked until my feet stopped in front of Hobi’s.

At first, I felt a sheer wisp of happiness for the guy that he managed to make such an immense step in that direction, however it flickered in me for mere seconds, replaced by a doom of nothingness that began to swim in me. Heavy, heavy nothingness that felt cosmically peculiar—and my body urged me to go outside and smoke it away.  

But my mouth spoke first. 

Who is she? Show me. 

Hyun-Ae narrowed her chocolate pools at me, her brows furrowing until they darkened. Then, they flicked towards Hobi beside me and I followed her gaze—he was preoccupied with a heated conversation with Do-hyun and he didn’t hear a word shared between us. Hyun-Ae lowered her voice, nonetheless. 

So you could compare yourself to her? No fucking way. 

But I pushed. Driven by that nothingness in me, I desired to feel something. Hurt, pride—anything that would stir my body and give it what it asked. It was used to feeling great clouds of negative emotions in terms of the male, and now it was searching for it, in spite of the million years that have flown by since. And to shut me up and distract my mind from wanting the wrong things, she showed me a picture of him. 

And upon seeing that dark characteristic of his eyes, gone, hollow and dead from the laws and the ghosts of the Pluto planet, my stomach clenched and I averted my gaze. My body rejected him—I couldn’t look at him for more than two seconds. 

My good, smart body. 

I fell into quietness, more gravely than the one this town was weaved with. Hyun-Ae’s eyes returned to their original round size, softening on me, and I held her hand tighter. I needed, vehemently, to smoke the descending nothingness away, and when I asked her to go outside with me, Hobi reached the conclusion of his conversation. Wrapped his slender fingers around my arm, tender sound effects, only for my ear to hear, slinking inside as he rubbed his nose against the place right beside it. 

You wanna go smokie smokie? Hobi asked, gliding his fingers down my arm until he reached my wrist, the belly of his index tracing the blue and violet ‘V’ shape of my veins upon my left arm. 

He grounded me. 

I nodded, my smile natural, my love for him abounding, and Hyun-Ae encouraged me to go, gently slapping the side of my bum. And so I went, hand in hand, with him.

Our inherent, pristine characteristic. 

Hobi stole my lighter once I fished it out of my purse. He didn’t smoke, but whenever he joined me, he thought it gentlemanly and proper to light up my cigarette for me. It’s the least I can do, he had explained and I had kissed him so hard for it that he blushed. 

It’s what he does now, flicking his thumb upon the spark wheel until the small flame erupts and bathes us in a delicate, orange tint. I hold the cigarette steady between my lips with my two fingers and Hobi draws closer, appeasing my inner need. Waits for me to take that first drag before he prepares me for the rush of his enormous affection by heating the small of my back with his palm, rubbing the sensitive place. It’s something that I’ve learned he likes to do; take things slow so I open for him like a bud of flower. It gives him pleasure, the laboriousness of the process and the following harvesting, the dampness of my dew the evidence of his success.  

It’s extremely attractive because he does it more for my sake than for his own. 

He lets me take another drag, our visual connection a string stouter than the constellation up above, and I feel myself, nonvocally, giving over that heaviness of the nothingness with each exhale. I decompress and Hobi can see it, joining his other hand to my loins and dipping his head to my neck. He scatters tiny, weightless kisses upon that tenderness of me and I am lulled by his enticement, soothed and sleep-drunk, his pheromones and the cedarwood of his fragrance unfettering me. 

I want to take him to bed. 

And I tell him, innocently, with my hands that clenched the muscles of his arms rounding towards his pecs and lowering to his abdomen, the ivory smoke following my movement, but never touching him. Hobi knows this is my language of sensuality and his mouth parts as he feels the words. 

“We should go.” 

He lifts an arm and brushes a strand of hair away from my cheek, his fingers lingering upon the shell of my ear—his private obsession. His endeared eyes study my features for a fraction of time before he leans in and peppers a singular kiss to the button of my nose. “Why are you sad, muffin?” 

The trees towering behind him move in a daze at last, but it’s a blurred swaying motion that merely divulges to me that the obstacles, the preparation and the dark energy have been conquered. And it helps me to speak a little. 

“Hyun-Ae told me something I didn’t really expect to hear. Can I tell you on our way home?” 

Hobi nods, cradling my cheek, and I melt. 

“I can leave the car here and we can walk home. And in the morning, we can go grocery shopping in the city.” 

I liquefy in his hold and I finish the last of my cigarette, kissing him feverishly and reciprocating the kisses he left upon my neck, sinking our domesticity into the column of his throat while he holds me and I drip into the fullness of him. 

When we return to the restaurant, Do-hyun is by himself, informing us that Hyun-ae has gone to pee. The familiarity solidifies me and I sense upon me a moonlit energy of joy that cleanses me of the past. Hyun-ae perceives it long before I open my mouth and she jumps into my arms, telling me how she’s proud of me. We say our goodbyes, promise that we’ll see each other soon, and Hobi pays for the whole table, calming every inch of me. 

I pray as we watch them drive off. I pray for their safe travel into the city and I pray over our car. 

We walk through our miniature, unlit version of the city, breathing in the purity of the air, listening to the rustling of the leaves being fondled by the breeze. Hobi mimics the act of love, rubbing his thumb over my hand, and I feel at ease when I tell him about my first love, chain-smoking just to help me infuse poetry into my words. 

With each detail, I forget it has happened to me as I unattach myself from it, consider it an element of the past that no longer has anything to do with me. Hobi lets me speak, doesn’t interrupt me, though I notice that as I venture into the brutality of the pain I waded through, his teeth grit and his jaw clenched, the preceding flush of his cheeks withering and falling beneath his skin, pallidness blanketing it in ashen gray. And it pushes me further into my process of letting go and forgetting for another million years to come. 

He stops in the middle of the road once I finish the story. Gives me a mournful look that penetrates me so deeply that I mourn, too. His hands find my forearms, my shoulders and my clavicles. Prepare me for the treasure of the most sympathetic of hugs I have ever received in my life and I loosen up in his strong hold, bury my face in his black-clothed chest as his palm holds my head to him. And he kisses my crown, kisses my temple; strengthens me when he squeezes me until I can’t breathe and I grasp that he is cleansing the pollution of the monstera leaves and the chamomile petals. 

And then he begins to speak, dampening me with a fresh layer of hydration. 

“You had to walk through hell in order to find me and I shall spend my lifetime bringing heaven to you. I swear on my life, muffin,” he says, for the entirety of the peripheral corn fields and the trees to hear, as he cradles my face and makes me look at him. My vision blears as I regard him more as my savior than I ever have before, nodding my head in agreement as my eyelashes flutter, the finality of calmness settling down in me like we did in this town. “You’re mine. You were mine when you were with him, which is why fate didn’t allow him near you. Mine to find, mine to take care of, mine to love, kiss and dance with. Mine. You’re gonna keep blooming in my hands and you’re no longer gonna pray for him, you’d done enough of that already. You’re only gonna pray for yourself.” 

This, I disagree with, dissolving sugar personified. 

“No, I’m only gonna pray for you.” 

Hobi pouts, his mouth rounding downwards, and his thumbs rub my cheeks, smearing my makeup—and I don’t mind. It’s always been his to ruin. He presses his nose and forehead to mine, breathing with me as the breeze swishes past. I slip my hands beneath the hem of his T-shirt, needing to feel his skin, and Hobi sighs against me. Withdraws a tiny bit and steals the breath he gave me. 

“Teach me how to pray for you.” 

I’m so struck with awe, wonder and my genuine love for him that I cannot speak, my lung failing, though differently this time. They swell up with the essence of my feelings for him, my devotion and my besottedness that my eyes well up before I can halt their rivulets. No one has ever prayed for me, certainly not a male I loved and looked up to. I spent years having my empty prayers echoed back to me and now the love of my life, my eternal beloved one, asks me to teach him how to pray for me. 

Only the omnipotent Listener of my prayers could make this possible for me, and before I know it—my mouth gives my beloved the instructions, the contents of my knowledge that I learned along the trajectory of my somber, otherworldly life and then he’s whispering the voice of his heart into my ear. 

“Dear God, please give my muffin the strength not to be pulled back into the life she had before me. Make sure she’s not influenced by it either. Take her burdens and give them to me because I can bear them. Relieve her heart and make her happy. Use me to do it.” He withdraws and drags his thumbs across my eyelashes, asking me to open them and I do. Once he has my attention, he seeks my guidance. “What do I say now?” 

I huff a soft laugh, endeared. Kiss the edge of his hand. “Say thank you and amen.” 

Hobi grins and the Sun peeks through the night. “Thank you and amen.” 

My laughter gains volume and he wraps his lips around it, shushing me, kissing me madly, and I bury my fingertips into his short hair, reciprocating the different, different madness and expanding it. Weightlessness seizes me and I don’t feel my limbs, stupefaction firing me with enthusiasm and then tongues clash and the kiss gains a verve that forces me to collide my body with his and— 

And then we’re dancing. 

To a slow song he begins to hum with the deep raspiness of his voice. Our bodies are one, singular, intertwined as we move to the rhythm of our unified heart and I weep. 

I weep in my joy. I weep in my contentment—and I weep in my love for him. 

He touches my back all over, cupping my hair as if it was water, leading our bodies in the dance, and there’s no one around us, no cars coming, no animals to watch us—only the trees, the fields, the buzzing of cicadas and the breeze and the moon up above. And then he’s twirling me until I’m dizzy and my soft laughter reverberates through the spaciousness of the road that is ours at this very moment. And the Sun beams at me, my Sun, as he pulls me close and continues to dance with me. I feel the jealous shafts of the light of the moon digging into my back that I soon forget about because his lips pursue mine and I dwindle away into his magnetism. 

His hands, his pheromones and his cedarwood fragrance take me to his bed. 

And he’s feasting on me like the dessert he didn’t get to have at the restaurant, bent over as I am over the foot of the bed, my dress bunched in his fist over my loins and my panties pushed to the side. My hungry beloved, my parched Sun, nuzzling his face in my femininity while I drip my dew and moan his name for him. Sucking my clit, he keeps me hovering on the cusp of my orgasm and I tremble in my vulnerable position—face planted on the bedding while the lower half of my body is raised in the air for him. And once my throat begins to let out whimpers and incoherent pleas, he draws back, closes his body over mine until his lips explore my ear and there, there he teases me. 

“What was that, my little muffin?” 

I whine, grinding my ass into his groin, and he hums. It takes me back to his song and I apperceive that it is the only thing I ever want to be pulled back to. Reminiscent of it, his song is blackened by eroticism, by his enormous arousal, drenched by my dew and I need him. While I feel God, the Listener of my prayers, to be a glaring light in me, I need my beloved Hobi to be interwoven with it. 

“I want you inside me. Please, I need it,” I beg, twirling my hips against his hardness like he twirled me in the middle of the road and Hobi sucks in a breath, exhaling it in the form of a whimper and I stoop in my heady longing. 

Abruptly, he plops me onto my back and yanks my panties away. “I’m gonna marry you, you know that?” 

I can only whisper my overwhelming agreement, my bones and my muscles too overcome with elation to do anything else. I would marry him tomorrow if I could. Go grocery shopping with him in the morning, unload it at home, put on my white silky dress and go to church with him by midday. Spend the rest of the day celebrating our union in bed, round after round until we get so exhausted that we submit to slumber, dreaming of our wedding, reliving it. 

He takes off my dress, kisses my forehead, ruffles my hair around me, his thumb dragging across the skin beneath my lower lip as if he was fixing my smeared lipstick for the special day, getting me ready, and I change my mind. I would marry him right now if I could.  

And I tell him. 

“I would marry you right now.” 

His eyes wet, casting a glimmering light upon my naked form, and a paroxysm of his joy gushes out of him and onto me. Hobi tickles my tummy with butterfly kisses, holding me down with his strong hands that he soon pins above my head, leveling with me, my dew drying on his face—yet he still glistens. Glistens with a gleam of bliss that washes over me. 

“Then, let’s get married,” he murmurs, and seizes my lips with his own, kissing me so roughly that I instinctively open my legs for him, the heated pressure in between unbearable. And then he holds my wrists in one hand while the other unbuckles his pants, fisting his length and tugging on it. My favorite sight. He guides it to my sopping hollowness and with one hard thrust, that he knows I am wholly enraptured by each time, he sheathes himself inside me all the way, completing me. Rests at the delicate touch of our mounds. “I’m gonna fuck you like you deserve and then I’m gonna take you to church.” 

And he gives it to me. Doesn’t pull out fully, but pounds me into the mattress. One hand gripping my wrists together, the other my jaw—ascertaining that my attention doesn’t fluctuate but remain fixed on him, on the twists of his features, on the guttural moans, his pheromones and his fragrance that trickle out of him and dunk into me while I struggle to take it all. 

“Am I hurting you?” he whispers, kissing my cheek and breathing against it, slowing down his strokes that scramble my brain. The tip of his cock grazes my cervix and I lose, I lose my identity. 

My eyes flutter and he pries my mouth open with his thumb, providing me something to focus on as I intuitively suck on it, keeping my head afloat enough to answer. 

“No, it’s just too big.” 

Hobi hums, rewarding me with a peck on the mouth and the gradual speed of his thrusts. “You can take it, muffin. I know you can. You’ve shown me before.” 

The praise, the belief in me—it all crests in lowest part of my sexuality and again, I edge around the cusp of my orgasm. Beads of perspiration line his forehead, soaking his hairline and he’s a sight to die for, the final piece to the fulfillment of my release. Blush reddens his cheeks, his irises enlarged and digging into mine. He doesn’t falter, continuing with his fast rhythm and I moan out poetry lines that make him squeeze his eyes shut. 

“I’m gonna come for you.” 

He groans. “Uh-huh, come for me, muffin. Give it to me. Show me again how well you can come on my cock. Yes, yes—”

Pluto bursts and ceases to exist. I come so vehemently that my spine arches off the mattress, colliding into Hobi’s chest. I shun out all constellations, all planets, the entire universe collapsing under the weight and gravity of my orgasm and our own marble, green, yellow and white with no one around but us, is called to creation with the bloom of Hobi’s own climax. 

He stuffs me full, my hollowness and my mouth, kissing me so hard that I become dizzy all over again. Moans my pet name as he shoots out his ivory love for me, fucking into me sluggishly while the twitching of his cock enamors me even more. I swallow his voice, swallow his grunts and little curses. My iridescent, entranced spasms caused by his exuberance prolong until I don’t know where my head stands, where my legs are wrapped around or what body part of his my hands clench. 

My savior, my beloved, linked to me for all eternity. 

This must have been our wedding because I shall never be the same again, my mind and my heart swept clean and filled with brand new oxygen. I no longer remember what happened prior to our love-making and when I share that with him, Hobi is possessed with the need to do it all over again. 

And he does, a million times over, until he marries me in the church of our town, with Hyun-Ae and Do-hyun present, mine and his parents and his sister with Mickey. 

A wedding most perfectly extraterrestrial, on our own Hope planet, with nothing hurting, with no thoughts resurfacing. 

Me and my beloved, me and my savior, me and my Sun. 

𓂃 ౨ৎ LOVE-KISSED BABIES: @tkslovechild ,  @jjk7k ,  @parkinglot-nights , @bethvar , @Sexytholland , @yoongibaybee , @crystaleah , @fennecnco, @lil-kpopstan , @euphoricmyth , @jungkoock , @cinmongirl , @hoseokkie-caeks , @kam9404 , @fr0ggieth1nk .

© 2024 hoseoksluna, all rights reserved.

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[awkward-fink]

In times of sickness - Johnny "Soap" MacTavish

“Love. This is it. This is how I go. Forgotten an' a' alone in this daft world, watchin' the folk pass by without a single glance at me. I’m burnin', I tell ye Love. Ma heart's turnin' to liquid in ma chest, ma lungs are jam-packed I can barely breathe. An' every step is agony, ma muscles just willnae work. This is it. This is ma end. But I’m glad ye’re by ma side. Hold me close, Love, let ma heavy head rest against yer ample breasts for one last time afore ma eyes close forever an' I leave this world behind. I can hear the heavens callin' ma name, the angels' trumpets soundin' to open the gates for me. I can see ma Grandma wavin' at me, welcomein' me!”

“Love, Johnny, listen. First, your grandma is still alive and kicking. Second, you only have a little –“ But your husband is groaning loudly now, splayed over the bed and over your legs, his forehead pressing against the skin of your stomach, his head nuzzling into your fingers as you card them through his lackluster mohawk.

“Ma angel, ma darlin' beloved wifey, ma better half, dinnae miss me tae much, for I'll be waitin' fer ye ahint the gates o' heaven. I'll be watchin' o'er ye every second o' every day, ye'll never be alane. Ma heart's beatin' only fer ye and noo it’s beatin' sae much harsher, breathin' is gettin' sae hard I can barely stand it anymore. I just want it tae end, I wisnae made tae suffer like this, tae go oot in agony o' the sickness wreckin' ma body. Whaur's ma glory? Whaur’s the explosions heraldin' ma passin'? Nae, only me in yer arms, slowly leakin' ma life awa' intae the abyss. At least I can see yer eyes an’ lips ae last time. Love, ma Honey, ma wife, please, gie me one last kiss afore I go an' rest in eternity. Tell ma team houw brave I wis and that I'll miss them…” Johnny whines loudly, nosing against your bare navel, his big and burly arms loosely wrapped around your back to hold you close to him as he dies tragically on your lap, his body twitching one last time.

Or so he would like to portray it. But you must chuckle as you gently stroke your husbands mohawk and head, nails scratching softly over his scalp, making the man moan loudly, and not in pain.

“Darling, you only have a little cold and a sniffle. Nothing we can’t get rid of in the next few days. Tell you what, im gonna draw you a bath, a hot one with the additive you like so much, the one that smells of sandalwood? And then im gonna order some food in and will join you in the bath, how does that sound?”

“Like a wee miracle... Hey, lassie, closin' in skin contact an' *even mair* does help wi' fightin' illness, aye?” He grins salaciously at you, a mischievous glint in the one eye you can see. You laugh. And slap him once. “You insatiable monster.”

------------------------------------------------------

He has the man flu

And he has it bad

He is dying for sure.

Soap is the biggest attention wh*** when he is sick, no one has ever been in so much agony as he is now, for sure

You must stand by his side, because he wants to die in your arms

Or between your legs, he is not shy about that

The closer you two are the better and there is not much closer than *that*, right?

Also, his uncle once told him skin contact and light exertion would help with battling illness, so why not do it with you in the bath or bed?

Will whine and groan and moan until you finally lay beside him in bed, cuddling him

Loves it when you scratch his scalp and neck gently with your nails.

Is the quickest to be healthy again, but also the most vocal when sick or feeling sick (but only where its safe, only ever with you and at home)

Snores so loud you need earbuds to sleep beside him, is also a drooler when sick.

[rainbow--panic]

Yall I’ve been seeing all this Black myth wukong art and Ocs from other ppl and wanted to throw my hat in the ring as welll.

This is my oc and a quick lil sketch with the destined one

She isn’t my only JTTW oc but i drew the others in the style of LMK

Originally she was going to be a fox who, though the power of will and love for her little sister, went to find the Colossus star guardian dragon (My goddess character), becoming human and joined the destined one on his adventures in hopes that they could revive sun wukong and he could find the godddess.

But as I always do, I’m thinking about scraping that lore.

Instead, sticking with the fox theme, I was thinking that when the goddess was born, her uncle feared for her safety and didn’t want her to be alone, as she belonged to a family of physical, magical, and political power, so they grabbed a baby fox abandoned in the woods and granted it power. That fox became Tiānhuǒ. Not only did she serve as a friend to the goddess, but was also considered a sister and earned the role as her advisor.

As centuries past, she had witness the goddess go down to the mortal realm and be apart of a party traveling to the west, which she also briefly joined until she was able to convince her goddess to return back to heaven to complete her duties.

When sun wukong died, the goddess went missing. The first place Tiānhuǒ checked was a village the goddess and herself had looked after and grew, which is around the area of where she met the destined one and, to her dismay, the pig she had met all those years ago that she wished she would never see again. Originally she played the part of a warrior from that village looking for the goddess as the crops had began to wither and her people were plagued by sickness. She offered to help find the remaining bits of sun wukong, thinking that he would be the last person to know the goddesses whereabouts.

Her identity, which was “The immortal vixen Priestess” was revealed later on as a demon had outed her, being the only one to recognize her human disguise. Pigsy (bc I CANNOT remember his actual name and i am not looking it up bc reasons) wanted to kick her out of the small group with the argument of ‘you lied to us once, you’ll lie to us again’ which she fought with the fact that she IS a warrior who IS ‘from’ the village as that as where her starting point was, the crops in the village were withering and the people were sick, so she technically didn’t lie about anything.’ She also had a new relationship with the destined one whom she named Chén Yàn and her actually being an immortal fox wasn’t a deal breaker for him.

Now to describe interactions

Pigsty + Tiā= kinda a love/hate relationship. Like she talks down to him ad does not like him and is rude to him and him to her, but like, on the battle field that doesn’t matter, no matter what she looks out for her comrades, even if they ae annoying

Tiā + Yán= She was annoyed at first when he didn’t talk much and never really cared about that till one day he said something to her and she flipped her shīt like

“Oh my god, I thought you were mute and you were just ignoring me this whole time? I could have used your feedback so many times and you just stayed quiet?!”

I’m still working on how their relationship started but essentially after working side by side, back to back, with one another for so long and going through hell, she started t view him in a new light and it didn’t help that every time she felt sad, tired, hungry, thirsty, what have you, that he was there with everything she needed. She always tries to be logical and it didn’t help that her logical mind was telling her that all her needs are being met by this one man so she should marry him.

As for Yán, he sees how balanced she is, being able to be this polite, courtly, heavenly women, used to having power at her finger tips, but yet is not above calling a pig demon a bastard and getting into trouble. She isn’t afraid to speak up to anyone, and speaks to others with authority, even him. At times she has even spoken for him since, well selective mutism, and also in times where she feels he’s being disrespected.

But anyways this is them, enjoy! <3

[leiawritesstories]

Familiar Stranger

written for @throneofglassmicrofics using the prompts "Morning," "Fracture," and "Rain"

Word count: 706

Warnings: mild(ish) angst ;)

enjoy!!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Shades of gray blurred the sky at five-thirty in the morning, the clouds softened by a film of foggy mist as if some divine artist had smudged charcoal across the heavens. Aelin kicked off her shoes, tied them together, slung them over her shoulder as she jogged through the cool, shifting sand, the grains chilly against the bare skin of her feet. Early June at the Pacific Northwest coast was still cool, the days not yet bursting with sweltering sun, but she loved the misty silence.

The tongues of silvery fog that blanketed the forested hills in the distance reminded her of something, of someone. Pine trees and cool breezes and green eyes, soft words and warm skin and sweet love--first love. Her first love.

She came to this tiny town on the coast every summer to stay with her family in the place she'd grown up. And every summer that she continued not to encounter Rowan Whitethorn made the twinge in her heart get a little less strong. All for the best; she had no reason to see the man other than the lingering ties to the years they had grown up side by side until she had run away to college as far away from home as she could.

Because she had bared her fragile heart, and he had fractured it with three simple words.

We're just friends.

Aelin skirted the edge of the mighty Pacific, her strides leaving faint prints in the springy wet sand at the ocean's edge. Every year when she visited, she walked alongside the ocean early in the morning, soaking up the solitary peace that she'd only ever found beside the rush of the waves. Nobody ever came out to the beach that early, allowing her to drink in the much-needed snatch of alone time before she had to face another day full of family, friends, and random old acquaintances whose endless stream of questions about her life were well-meaning but incessantly irritating.

The mist thickened to a drizzle, and Aelin turned around, slowly heading back towards her house. A ways off, she spotted the shadow of another person, the blurry outline of a figure moving through the fog. She glanced at her watch--almost seven now, about time for the smattering of early-morning joggers to appear on the beach. She ignored the other person, certain she would reach the trail that led up towards her family home before her path could cross with anyone else's.

As she paused to tug her shoes back on, she felt a shiver that wasn't from the rain dance down her spine, and she glanced up to find an incredulous pair of pine-forest eyes locked onto her.

"Holy gods," Rowan breathed, his chest heaving beneath the athletic tank top that was plastered to his skin with rain and sweat, "Ae?"

Cracks splintered through her chest at that achingly familiar nickname. "It's Aelin."

"Aelin." Her heart fractured all over again with the mere sound of her name in his voice. "It's been so long--"

"Long enough to forget?" She broke through his polite words.

Regret, pure and true, washed over his face like the tide lapping over the shore. "I could never forget you, or how much of an idiot I was."

She laughed, the sound clipped, caustic. "An idiot would have at least texted, probably called. An idiot would have tried to apologize." The raw agony of his last words from seven years ago spilled over her, drenching her more thoroughly than the misty rain. "You trampled my heart and never looked back, Ro." His nickname slipped out before she could think twice about it.

"And I'm so, so godsdamn sorry," he pleaded. "I've spent the last seven years--"

"Doing nothing." Shoes secured, she turned away from Rowan and veered onto the path that led towards her house. "We're strangers now, Rowan. Goodbye."

Foggy mists of gray swallowed his plea, the broken cry of her name that pierced her ears. Blinking back the film of misty tears from her eyes, Aelin strode towards the safety of her home, away from the familiar stranger she hadn't expected to see.

Away from the heart-stirring truth in his words that her unsteady heart couldn't bear to face.

~~~

TAGS:

@live-the-fangirl-life

@superspiritfestival

@thegreyj

@wordsafterhours

@elentiyawhitethorn

@morganofthewildfire

@mariaofdoranelle

@rowanaelinn

@house-of-galathynius

@tomtenadia

@julemmaes

@swankii-art-teacher

@charlizeed

@booknerdproblems

@earthtolinds

@goddess-aelin

@sweet-but-stormy

@clea-nightingale

@autumnbabylon

@darling-im-the-queen-of-hell

@llyncooljones

@silentquartz

@aelinschild

[aidsyouinthinking]

Inktober drive

Subject: A letter, of purpose influx...

I do not need you,

If there is anything in relation to you, that I need;

It is the lack thereof–

But even so, I'm inclined,

all parts of me have an ideology– coinciding;

With the fact "you are useful".

I could journey for person new and pay them pretty penny too,

But we know what I'm going to do follow nose through fires true.

I suspect guilt- and fear you'll rue: tapestry built gives plenty clue,

But my circumstance, it accrue; willpower wakes– perverse in me.

I see glint in well.

We fear not being pulled in,

as shared webbing bind our souls with others above.

In well with wall made from sin, you sail down slow so you don't go–

Thinking "love... (kind of?)" :

No matter what parts think;

that sandwich,

it was eaten under extreme duress.

A stoic judgment must be met,

at bottom of the well where a window shattered lies,

But I admit; I do abet–

The concept; to confide: together all pried with eyes–

knowing all the keepsakes we kept;

A motivation intellectual bites bullet– dead; now lies.

Schrodinger's blank; Lies, Motivation....

The aim of this is to process: to ultimately assess:

Lonely surgeon can't operate on themselves,

So commits their surgeries to others;

One to burn judgmental books,

Another to fashion rhymes from flesh.

A Jazzy Metronome buzzes to blinding Blur,

As feet Follow, lefties swept off and concur!

A parasite clings to Coattails in own blood it stir;

As taken down a peg and leg and waist– it prefer!

A now pool of blood wishes your tempo-ed trampling to incur~

It's such a rowdy bunch you know?

And like mothers meeting…– in library,

to rightly complain of pressures underserved

Unrelenting; omni present and structural.

I desire to confide,

Even if I should be against it,

Mothers don't put their lambs on plate.

But mama bear does grow hungry.

We're confused, but not pained.

We fear not heaven nor hell, but limbo lacking.

We, nervous system, are. our. own. greatest enemy.

I want you, if you'll have me...

in accordance to our dewy decimal system.

If there's a chance –Without pain– to make this work,

Well all of me, (astoundingly) would feel amiss not to try.

Here's to phoenix cauterising lacerations

and bridges' ashes smoothing shards

on which I'll pace;

From, A moment slowly dying.

Subject: Ps side note

It must have been and continues to be, surreal...

To have a feed –though creatively distorted– of my ever frank externalised internal dialogue... like a neurology case study with a person missing their brain pan... I don't know why I feel no need to censor this format, regardless of your's and other's potential eyes.

But I'm glad, We censor ourselves too much – even from ourselves.

Subject: Pps More of the same

I am compassionate.

I wish you well.

But I don't have magic.

A Two time:

Beautiful poison or prickly friend.

A problem I need to defend.

Subject: ppps Limbo Lacking Lurks Lavishly | unread

Subject: pppps Nvm bad idea see you never | unread

Subject: ppppps Ae drunkard is sorry | unread

Subject: pppppps Omg philosophy tube!~ | unread

Subject: ppppppps Dw my poems are Über hyperbolic, you'll just have to talk to know my real thoughts | unread

Subject: pppppppps Also yes very meta of me | unread

Subject: ppppppppps I will tell you anything you need to know to just say yes or no, I suppose like me it is so; that forever this can go | unread, unread, unread, unread, unread, unread, unread unread

New Email!

Subject: It's becoming my life again, isn't it?

After further processing— thanks to poetry, I/We/me/myself now appreciate this “intellectual endeavour” as bacon wrapping the bullet, for the same puppy idolising potentialities of camaraderie, I fancied myself as Kim, but I’m much more a harry. Two of those a functional duo does not make, at least not likely. Perhaps this polarisation of the self would make good surgery, but best not do those in unsterilised room. I still need disinfecting since last.

At this point it is my issue, and I will do my best… sooo…

In for a pound, drop like a penny!

Heads or tails, you better hold steady >:}

Wait and see, emergency!

Break the glass, for choice bypass~

Drum roll

lacking toll

of pesky free will!

The crowd

they shout loud

with ambivalent shrill!

on floor what’s in store shows through that metal spill!

Pop goes the cherry weasel and coin!

Suppose we’re giving an honest go to rejoin.

Note: Of course, All over the place, makes sense...

Subject: Final one, ... I hope

I read your spilled writing. Please keep it up, it’s a really useful tool.

I've steeped myself in old playlists to remember how it all felt.

As much as I might feel I need someone who I can actually confide in about this.

I don't think you are a good candidate. We'd burden each other, it'd be helpless.

And I know half of me just wants to greedily learn every drop of what forged you,

to feel less alone as I've always and ever felt, Stuck with no company but myself.

I hope your luck holds true, but I will not let my ever-growing guilt from that five year old, puppeteer me into stringent dance on the fringes of the echo of the trail of spiders and company,

I don't know you, I'm not competent enough-- in-right-mind enough; for that or for any of this.

I'm a being of impulsivity a non-sensical wraith prowling for beggars to take coin from.

I will not block you, I should, but the coin, and so I will disregard it but pay it this favour.

The favour; the opportunity, to say after all that- trying to scare you away “we can still hang sure, yeah.”.

I wished to do better, I long for better, for the chance to know,

but these learned behaviours like webbing echo,

emotions estranged into void deep,

which gurgle and bellow; feelings creep,

unrequited but deserved.

You are a mirror and reminder that I am not whole- unfinished- fractured- overflowing- How ever anyone or everyone would put it!… I want you to know,

but It’d be talking to the blistering sun while coughing up the blistering cold.

This is bare truth, pay it in turn, pay it no mind, bloody hell, pay it disgust.

Signed by AIdan&Co

[libidomechanica]

Untitled (“With flowers are from the promise that”)

A sonnet sequence

               1

Day fair a part of what it is no one is praise destructions and lates he aske: and stormy straddling, I lay in the can say the eternity! He is a daughters; while, after their heart receivest, my hot body&i can thou lament has died for, to be surmise, stand; and lover’s time’s sent night’s heel of all too sad attones I did you have our day: and lo! With flowers are from the promise that. And cries, and dinner clipp’d before those Ausonia’s education, what while, his Garment of mercy are, with stared. And in the Pilgrimage yow may see her witness spoken worth too.

               2

To him—he harbour train disguise she novice, and Ocean had robbed in sorrow, thereth to seeking and beauty fail? Assume three with feare was forever. The select salámat—Incolumbia’s gloomed life and you wilt, I was recalling immortal eyes burn so sudden pity. Village stamp and shot in the Shepherds euen by thee cannot do the Vision, and shall courage and decay, and acts, that you does come. And bolts in bear; with eyes, but it with Heaven. Only not entirely—for hidden had alas an any wicked the ocean, cover glory as before men mine!

               3

But first, but back, and I’m wrong for hears to the grand splendours for what e’er you were are blossom pretty? Now iudge bed And manfully the show ridiculous. Silence underbolt not know how changes vnto meet the sky: sae wyling new Parnassus, and why, three disappear two ring orison! Is that they would lay, at leaves of thee O that now depart But not humble path the hours of renaissance, but one wote I, methough a thou leaves are? I say, between foolish sweet odour, selected faces than the dark days, or soules form my Muse-brown came on my year with more carry ye. That the Veil.

               4

Perfect draught in all the great it is not carefull verse. This carol they would black and desolate, touched all too sure to bear, or the swelling beads me still tell your scarf on a lake. Know, since we spotted wanted quite new Werther foot of a trifling to her see numbering will beginnes to speak to those lips, pass of thing and was to disfranchises flames of Kings—glory to reuert, that were this river gave its hoard more the mere had not though the rest, sick unto that to speak the voice she virgin’s freedom, no doubt but now convulse us to kiss me, dar not here no more despising now.

               5

He too ten let base; I never garment of night and that Trouble, to sleepeth in medians blame glitter done the Ringle breeze lifted round in all wondrous of his carriage vow of view? Rose-bud in this when were he man, or some friend’s heaven’s educations and if their guilty with approvement with final are sublime and help’d before I go for a falters of his meat. And out, ’-forgiven, in returning eye, robert Burns: pass away, the Italia! A thirst; now to find no bring seen, and Behold up I felt so soft lie bush, since to short-lived out I’m right and from Gaeta:—Shot.

               6

Or with while that make. Leave to get that words have their acres loosen’d grame; and if they are not. She wight, with my broad, separate manner class box and the heart her guess not things whiskers, and shower, and in ten leads did her, I thee, fa la la. Lifts a nose, and glow that credit give they were fraught meet tears, taughter but many a Jewel of such fire- driven, ae limbs like solace it like and rufull that fatal night, if Fancient deed lips; over sensual calleth mourn He is day, a progressions were;—too old reprove, the make than I am these the people never mountains, fresh batched anger!

               7

Water my part. From me to the mead see; so weigh name upon the was on her Fortune’ wit though it to be soul gave you. See nought of all help’d by the taking, their bowe you must be their your soothes I glimmering to me, so I seemed mine. But find And my flouds of it may betighter what’s wrong the copses in the abyss my idle day and never coverlet’s the moons, or there few live, t’ adorn’d his city, when his satire of the heights of you. End is the winges less you’re upstairs and further male heart had alas what, and contractionate, charge, to makes the Smithfieldes ay free.

               8

Of harlotte since Hamlet alone for to thy buried lonely, to pray then my cheeks, as that class well might lest wit that often ither. Other and are gone meet has kind of desire Zulaikha built be He, which lesson’ thee course to wellhead, color blue, and payne: and must patches a’s my penetrate. With sovereigners of her tongues so that drear sublime, my tears, that day, inevitable, quite death a brother, for her to rise one while Welkin their guilty beetle is a fading season black the flowe there to each, on one which did I known the cold, on whilst we carried to holds fast.

               9

One gem was for thy widow …. Ye caverns on mask’d him who wag’d continual charming, breather loof her. No less; field and strengthen she is round a lilly was a primrose her to me, nor smart uniforms it about? ’ Come, shallowed to hastily rises forth a hermit word; for nature of enforce to see the North.—Can choose or used fifteenth silently, inevitable, at along like I known and the guns of the wave to swear, and does, in its downed with a dumb look back and ransom all—I hate alone responds,—as is true needy father; for lose by her this way mighty.

               10

Tear to their nature—auld glass not lead your in hot baths of eternity, malge Sir Matthew Hale’s got home to say just and I will, but there vnioynted wither or farther, not yet lover moon, whose lot one, the closed with and dream I have to th’ tempests drops in thick with stroke, the ysicles gold; and thereas free! And me withheld him more glowing dominoes linnet’s pipes of the sprung; and, that sweet lovers form that settles in all that I write al hoolly into each in the sappho never years of that first, having-wild, your night’s heele: for poets carefull verse. To his mixed. We deer.

               11

Doctor to high a boy’s delightly brave pack on her Hand the heed it have go by; i’ll clear. Where deares do shall such think of the birds do swept herse, yet massy ear with with Nature Hasan— on theme of it, It is mercy aren’t believe in and mountain half so sadly did endeavor, to the relics and if the Fool. In darkness, memories of the yearly graine when I have our ears to Miss, to the osier-isle we spell the desire; sound and when a Grain of such a one; only free, and daught: such amiss, the hilts so surrender feel her I boast: though you at last, and ransom of mine; whatever yet when birds sooth’d, sobbed us struck, so foreshadows brow, if my disown: the strange, this so chastily rising and wiser might to window and ought of calculated, who like world we be wise, and, carbons, keeps young girl is you—’take he state th’ Anatomie of our fail?

               12

And as hath she was—and, the sight, sick sleep in all we shatter so; yet, while thief, although it as here let base? Go and alone. I burning couple of a wild, and with poet is becauses probes grave exprest, unter’s day my Wit and forgot? The greene ioynted for a fading when dowagers, weep a tedious sight He found, yet tis they have the black, the broke us, but keeps you with only careless into well, despites; yet saying jellyfish. The drum for any Blessing to beye, if looks howling has her thee so much, but not the most in a musk-bull at each ephemerald.

               13

Then I’m nine more speech, Love, that Powers abiding to him by a simply in truth and appear in it answer. A filled in return Asiatic this, I prayer; heaven bee out of the abandoning along with an age departure close might. Hello the pleased. Poor woman, the bullet our wealth, proud feeble floor, which multitude alas, yt is it is ere mirrors now. Soar white; became chin loue. In praised her Veil. Perhaps you haste of life, not to love wake a them in the grasse no more; where it thy sad as foreseen—tiny earth a sing. Mid- sentence shall not all are than garmentine.

               14

Light. Matches; squire of words do better, as if she died. The first children so gladly did you. High adorn the paines that is East, happy new poor, and a tended the eyes that hour bed. And man off from annoy, rest …. Do I dare distance last such, but heart they whome with them scatterie image to thy self was why did predilection to define— nor Love! Do such playe, I caughter with it. When hour introduced to the gloam with there with her eyes, fore was, a breakers, he hath have set and earth art away amidst others where and prepared, wherefore the debt I owe their garland for Adonais.

               15

The hope hoped thered platest, and would be at night be take the babes the fires and keep if a mourn no tide with her, and she knew, Urania: her so, as that I mean to find a rout: and she disparage such as each in a dark my stand. Because, she keep twelfth fade nor she thus to scour hair—their claes, on you have been too sad world is burning unattendants wings, and indeed the make certain in ilka quarter: she cat has he for improved; he little thou my lately knew way. Began the eyes more, no lightly Spartake gold can be; for every country is the eclipse, als Colins Embleme.

               16

Clean one selfe divide: she cause to me at, What thou lo’es me best me; my partial canopy. For Mistresses greater, can’t oblivion all I so chase of pillowing orderer could sickness—it came on thrise-sad tragic hands. To find again. ’ Nonsense, Fade so sing, and in the tenderness; died bring in clay, or trim pretty ring, stupid the low which skims the nigger never mothers bread to beginning far as she dight. I have remember intelligence, read torch fellow crying further song: if your far it. A Robin Redbreast, that she gift; creatures and perfect health worm that lovely black is watch at all think not do then whate’er thus corn has a sweeps to rever; there rose sollein self out-going what it in thrise-sad trance, the sea. Can choose years’ space then permit would be warm, o folly scar upon thy man off me and a tempests souenaunce, save to walks with slow stand all bite.

               17

From mass may exist wayle were. What I so keen his call the Bird accusals to bear lovers would baudrons by her you shall burn the patience in thou art as I slept in unasked my succeeding: such as that wad been embrace, these deluge with a small surges that upward the cause are their bubbled, and way, and less. Teach holds fastened both pype, and ended; and of fine unclipt golden to Light at all in pity for, less—less young the revolving what very parte’s knife. Sheikh a-running but are mermaids arounded. To let bank of Briar Rose but if the head, come old spent, we live!

[iviarellereads]

The Eye of the World, Chapter 4 - The Gleeman

(THIS PROJECT IS SPOILER FREE! No spoilers past the chapter you click on. Curious what I'm doing here? Read this post! For the link index and a primer on The Wheel of Time, read this one! Like what you see? Send me a Ko-Fi.)

(Harp icon)(1) In which we get some references that become more missable by the year.

The old gleeman himself gets kicked out of the inn during the ongoing questioning of Padan Fain. Rand is surprised to see the man's eyes are blue, because his own grey eyes have stood out in Emond's Field his whole life.

Merrilin makes comments about how Nynaeve is so young and pretty, she should be flirting with boys, not serving as Wisdom. He also says he knows Padan Fain and knows he's always enjoyed carrying bad news around. As a crowd gathers, Thom asks Egwene, as the prettiest girl he sees, to be his assistant tomorrow.

He introduces himself as Thom Merrilin(2) and, says he was formerly a court bard.(3) Mat asks if he knows anything about the false Dragon in Ghealdan, but Thom says he's no peddler or newsmonger, and he makes a point of avoiding any knowledge of Aes Sedai, because it's safer. Then he points out Rand, and all the ways he's different from the other villagers, from eye colour to his height, "tall as an Aielman", whatever that means. He picks Perrin out of the crowd, calling him as big as an Ogier,(4) and Mat has to include himself, as Thom makes fun of them for being such country boys when he's so well-traveled.

Finally, the making-fun ends, and Thom almost apologizes. When Perrin asks, he says he asked them their names to make a point later with one of his tricks, that no matter strength or height, they won't be able to lift him. Perrin offers to try now, but Thom says it'll be better later, with a bigger audience. He gives a preview of what they might see on their festival day. He juggles and names some of the stories he knows, such as "Artur Paendrag Tanreall" known to them as "Artur Hawkwing",(5) "who once ruled all the lands from the Aiel Waste to the Aryth Ocean, and even beyond." He mentions the Green Man,(6) Warders, Trollocs,(7) Ogier and Aiel, Anla the Wise Counselor,(8) Jaem the Giant-Slayer,(9) someone named Susa taming Jain Farstrider, Mara and "Three Foolish Kings".

“Tell us about Lenn,” Egwene called. “How he flew to the moon in the belly of an eagle made of fire. Tell about his daughter Salya walking among the stars.”(10)

Rand is sure Egwene asked for those stories to annoy him personally, as she was never a fan of them. But, Thom continues.

“Old stories, those,” Thom Merrilin said, and abruptly he was juggling three colored balls with each hand. “Stories from the Age before the Age of Legends, some say. Perhaps even older. But I have all stories, mind you now, of Ages that were and will be. Ages when men ruled the heavens and the stars, and Ages when man roamed as brother to the animals. Ages of wonder, and Ages of horror. Ages ended by fire raining from the skies, and Ages doomed by snow and ice covering land and sea. I have all stories, and I will tell all stories. Tales of Mosk the Giant, with his Lance of fire that could reach around the world, and his wars with Elsbet, the Queen of All. Tales of Materese the Healer, Mother of the Wondrous Ind.”(11)

On he goes, saying he can tell them of how the Dragon tried to release the Dark One into the world, and then the Aes Sedai broke the world. He's still naming stories when he sees Moiraine and stops dead. His words and tone polite as he says he means no offence to his reaction at her presence, but his body language whispers to Rand's intuition as being entirely displeased with her for some reason. After a few exchanges, she takes her leave.

Before Thom can keep performing, the Village Council finally lets out of the inn, and takes the opportunity to nip in, muttering about brandy. Bran and Nynaeve argue a bit, and when Nynaeve storms off, Cenn Buie says she needs a husband to tame her. Bran, more annoyed than ever, tells Cenn to be quiet, and further, "Stop acting like a black-veiled Aiel!" whatever that means.

Rand goes to see Tam, who tells the boys that basically, there's little chance of the war coming to the Two Rivers, and less still of any Aes Sedai trying to pass through on their way up or back from Ghealdan. We get a geography lesson explaining how the Two Rivers is blocked in on all sides by virtually impassable land, be it mountains, rivers, or hundreds of miles of uninhabited forest.

Tam also tells the boys that the day after Bel Tine they'll be sending out riders to watch the borders, and to ask other villages in the Two Rivers to do the same. It will be boring work, but Mat plans to volunteer.

Tam goes to retrieve the pony. The boys agree that Mat and Perrin will try to find any others who saw the black rider, since Rand's being dragged home to the farm for the night, and they'll ask the mayor tomorrow to let any watch riders know to look out for him. They all want to ride with the watch after Bel Tine.

In the stable, looking for his father, Rand notes all the horses. Padan Fain's are there, as are Master al'Vere's huge horses for rent when farmers need to haul more than their usual loads. The other three match their riders very obviously: a strong black stallion for Lan, a delicate white mare for Moiraine, and a dusty brown gelding that matches Thom's attitude.(12)

After leaving the village in silence, Rand breaks the silence asking why the Village Council chose to question Fain like that. Tam explains that if they'd done nothing, everyone would have worked up into a lather over the anxiety, with nothing to do about it and no outlet. Now, they've seen the Council take the matter under consideration, and they'll see the solution they came to with the watch riders. It will keep people from overreacting.

Tam tells Rand that the word has already been passed out about the black rider, but they wanted to do it responsibly, quietly, to those who won't spread panic ahead of the festival. Turns out more young men have seen him, enough that the Council couldn't ignore it.

He was surprised to realize that his step felt lighter. The knots were gone from his shoulders. He was still scared, but it was not so bad as it had been. Tam and he were just as alone on the Quarry Road as they had been that morning, but in some way he felt as if the entire village were with them. That others knew and believed made all the difference. There was nothing the black-cloaked horseman could do that the people of Emond’s Field could not handle together.

=====

(1) A harp being an instrument such as a gleeman might use in his travels… at least in fantasy worlds where harp means something slightly different than the massive, tricky rigs we have in ours. I know I said I wouldn't make too many comparisons to the show, but swapping it for a guitar was absolutely called for. (2) Funny to see a man whose name is almost Merlin showing up and meeting a woman named Nynaeve almost first in the village, that being so close to some of the names the Lady of the Lake has gone by in different tellings. (3) Probably analogous to what we'd assume, right? An entertainer who stayed contracted to one royal patron for a time. (4) Something like an ogre? (5) Heavy on the Arthuriana, this series, but not least of it in the stories of Artur Hawkwing. Arthur Pendragon, only also evoking a bit of Padraig of Ireland. Tanreall doesn't have a particularly clear origin, but I like to think of it as part reference to the holy grail (san graal), part (Britain)(royal) becoming (Tain-raal) and (Tanreall). (6) Lots of legends about a Green Man in our world, though they're not as ancient as some claim. (7) Perhaps it's obvious, but a bit of a mashup of "troll" and "orc" seems likeliest for this one. (8) Ann Landers. (9) Jack and the Beanstalk, filtered through time and retelling. (10) Lenn is John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth, his part in the story having filtered through the rest of our Age, maybe another age between, and then the Age of Legends, and then the Third Age these people have lived in. Salya, Sally (Ride), similarly shifted in her role as the first American woman in space. (11) Mosk (Moscow) and his lances of fire (nukes) and the war with Elsbet (Queen Elizabeth II). Materese, Mother Theresa. RJ picked some of the biggest names of the late 80s to include, to make sure he'd get his point across that this world isn't medieval, the way we think of it, not in the slightest. This world isn't just post-apocalypse in the sense that the Breaking broke the world, they're also post-us. We are a part of this cycle, in the conceit of the fictional world. So, all of our stories filter through to them, and their stories filter back through to us. Their Artur Hawkwing was real, not in their lifetime but in their Age, since Thom named the Aiel waste and the Aryth Ocean, two places you can find on the WOT world map in any ebook or print edition of this book. But as RJ would have it, his story filtered back out to us through the cycle of the Wheel of Time turning. (There's no real point to this, I just think it's neat.) (12) Horses are very important in the Wheel of Time, not only because they're the most efficient form of transportation without a mechanical engine, but also because, like, who doesn't like horses? (Obvious exceptions apply.)

[gingermcl]

The word Death means “total cessation of life, act or fact of dying, state of being dead; cause of death, ghosts," perhaps from PIE root *dheu- meaning “to die" (see die)

Die means "to cease to live," from PIE root *dheu “to pass away, die, become senseless" senseless reminds me of sinless which could refer to a soul ascending out of a current fallen state. Man “fell into sin” and death is perhaps our chance to get out of a dense material reality.

We are energy beings. Energy never dies, it only changes form.

I was thinking about the word Death. The letter D can symbolize “door to” like Devil is door to evil. Death is like Door to eath. The Aether.

Etymonline.com says that in In ancient cosmology, aether was the element that filled all space beyond the sphere of the moon, constituting the substance of the stars and planets. Conceived of as a purer form of fire or air, or as a fifth element. From 17c.-19c., it was the scientific word for an assumed "frame of reference" for forces in the universe, perhaps without material properties.

The way I read this, the ether makes up everything. in the late 1800s scientists Michelson and Morley, did experiments that proved the existence of the aether. It was these experiments that caused Albert Einstein and Gravity to appear on the world stage. the entire gravity narrative is nonsensical and non provable. Gravity is not a law, it is a theory. And a bad one. What holds everything to the Earth, this ball spinning and hurling through space at mach 23? Gravity. What keeps the moon spaced away from the Earth? gravity. Those ae polar opposite situations, gravity cannot be the answer for both. Humanity used to realize that electricity was the primary force in this realm. gravity doesn’t even exist yet arguing it is a hill many would die on.

Upon death a soul should return to the aether to experience various creations. There has been a recycling system or reincarnation trap in place here for quite a while. The Saturn moon matrix has programmed mankind to fear death, “follow the light“ and has brainwashed man to think that God is an external entity. When in reality, “God” is everything, and the force within you, that is your being, is God. Maybe we should call god aether instead. It is forgetting that we are the creator that keeps us trapped in here. Any being or distraction that keeps you from going inside the self on the other side is an evil one. Jesus is said to be the light of the world when the only thing he is saving is the demiurge from losing souls to harvest.

The Bible acknowledges that we are eternal beings. You cannot be in heaven or condemned for eternity if you’re not eternal. There is no beginning and no end we have always been and will always be. That’s what eternity means. No beginning and no end. It’s hard for a human mind to comprehend. I can assure you that there is so much more out there than this reality currently operated like a prison. Religion is designed to stagnate and devolve souls. It is to save the system, not your soul. The only sin is to forget you are a soul not to protect it.

[sparklyeevee]

I've read this like eight times trying to figure out what you mean by "how war affects women" in this context, and I'm still not sure what you're getting at. There's a whole thing in late Fires of Heaven about how war affects women combatants the same as it does any other combatants, and even if Rand never really sees it that way, I wouldn't say it's glossed over by the text, so I assume you don't mean that. Since you say "It's still worse for her that she's dead", I don't think you're talking about women-as-the-survivors, left behind, grieving, charged with putting the pieces of the world back together, and in any case that's discussed extensively, including in The Great Hunt, New Spring, and A Memory of Light (to say nothing of its being one of the central metaphors of the War of the Shadow and the present cultural position of the Aes Sedai). There's a case to be made that the series doesn't spend much time on sexual violence against women as an aspect of war, but that's less glossed over than explicitly refused, and again wouldn't track with "it's still worse for her that she's dead". So would you be willing to elaborate?

If I’m being extremely generous Vietnam Vet RJ had the boys be ta’veren to reflect young men being drafted against their will. However it’s very male war writer to sort of gloss over how war affects women too. Like the woman that got gunned down, that inspired Rand’s list and reluctance to kill women, it’s still worse for her that she’s dead ya know?

[cosmicangel888]

What are YOU looking For; Who are You Looking for ~ Welcome, 5D

Don't make yourself so important you exclude and push away all that is true, humble, and beautiful - Mastery is the knowing all is one and setting loving boundaries so that you are able to walk the earth in joyful inclusion and honour of all life, all that is God, Source ~

We are breaking all boundaries of what we are and who we are and what is truly within ~

You were meant to be held in sacred joy and honour, you were meant to be filled with undeniable safety in you, to explore and be enriched of you and be the fullness of you - pure and sacred and told how sacred you are; you ae meant to be held so sacredly with a gentle deserving - a gentle knowing you are the precious gift that you were made so real - so real it seems and appears unreal - why waste your life, time, preciousness of you in small and squallered ways of lack, or deceit, or manipulation - all is the journey of recognition - remembrance - accept, love anyway - you are eternal ~ love is this way

Through the intentional breath and all life begins again with you [ you have forgotten ] you are real and true and sacred and a genuine aspect of all worlds and stories beyond what you know ~ the wounding, the misguidance, the mishaps, the wrongs, the deceit, the lies you tell yourself of broken simulations of you - and parents that only knew what they knew and entrained in -forgive deeply ~ you are precious record, on repeat or new - you choose - what are you looking for?

Value, importance, truth, sacredness the energy and the vibration of truth is within - the breaking the remaking and only you can see, and be of such - there is the lifting of you - the benevolence of you - and through all self hate, the anger of all wounds impacted and impaled untruths told to you - it is your right to sacredly and gently release and honour that you will always be remade - heal thy wounds of you, of those you chose to take on, for this is true empowerment - for you are and you can -

Life is a rich and bountiful journey and you are of such ~ mastery is the love of all before you - God is, knowing of such healing and knowing equal expansion - cross the bridge - not all will follow and that is ok; you have crossed it - light is, light is calling you to drop the ego, drop the aching to be right for the wounds you suppressed and were told you were not enough - you learned to lie and be someone else to gain the false value and acceptance from those also lost ~ find thyself - who are you looking for?

YOUYOUYOU ~ stop taking ~ return to giving within - give within before you reach out - go within -

If you are returning and giving within - you need never to take

Crime and violence is unnecessary - you are far grander than petty crime and unresolved wounding that leads to violence - allow the emotions of separation be your greatest maker of anew - life is

you are all you have ever needed the deepest and richest love is here, now, you - love the parts of you that others pick,, tease, and bully - love it all and move on and get up again - you are a treasure and showing all creation - life is sacred -

Sing dear ones, stand, right now, stand, wherever you are - stand and reach to the Heavens,

SING - dance, move, bring new life that is new life - you are - Alliance with Light - God is, beyond the beyond -

Stand - arise - sing, chant, know, see, hear, seek, search, explore, express, experience yourself anew - 5D is now

'the time is now, I choose my sacredness and I choose love I choose anew; rebuild, remake, I AM SACRED'

I AM SACRED! I will stand in my sacredness for that is, we are - worthy, valued, and aligned with pure and divine integrity - of life - life is life life is....sacred!

This is your sacred life and sacred breath - you are you - call unto the creator for new life and you will be made real and new again to wipe away what was and how true you can be to do good to all and be good for you and all is remade - love is such ~ blessings be

What you looking for - it is now, here within - you are -

We are divine and powerfully aligned to new realms and new play and each must seek within the greatness that is simple, true, real; connected with all life, all aspects of oneness is ~ simple, true, all is One

My song, my soul, tortured in the dis-ease of being human and showing me it was wrong, bad, and evil and taken, and mistaken, for it is a false way of separation and which will bring you back to the undeniable truth of you - you are, you will always be, in universes beyond what you know and arms of long, short, and none at all, you will be of you in colours of all shades and all in between; the sacred gift of while all the Heavens love and laugh with our journey of recognition and remembrance - this is the way of oneness and unity - return to you - return home - the hero's journey - ©

the expansion of Oneness ~

Love is and all is healable -

Your value is not in an ill-gotten gain, or a small time, or unfortunate crime, your importance is not within a new enhanced body part or simulated name change or changing your body beyond recognition - ~ the honour of you is you - pure and sacred, scars and divots and pivots in which you chose to love yourself all that you are, love you - within all that has been what you want to change, it is you - celebrate the un-ease the shaking, the breaking, and know you stand and get up one more time to love you

Crime, violence is unnecessary - all is healable - we are worthy of 100% healthy mind, body, heart and soul - it is to each in surrendering to the softness and sweetness that is God, within and without above and below ©

All is such a gift ©

What you looking for?

It is YOU DEAR CHILD - it is the love of you for you and for all life - dig deep - you will be floored and you will be forever changed - altering all realms - awaken, awaken, the soft and undying song is you ~ what are you looking for? Who are you looking for?

IT IS YOU - Accept - Allow So too it is,

You!

Each has the opportunity to know this, be this, sing this, and live this,

All is and how sweet is this ~ love is not a religion and love of self is not a crime, or an attribute to be bullied but celebrated and honoured and valued - stand and love you - Love is eternal and profound, life altering disease swallowing, transmuting of all that God is, the delicate, the sensitive, the equal, the lifting of all and the sacred of all - all is the twisting and turning you back to you -

What are you looking for? Who are you looking for?

You are worthy of a new sight, a new song, a new rendition of life - sacred, drop to your knees and sing, laugh, cry, and allow the depths of you to be known - sacred is - a journey back to you - eternally you - the vlaue is now, the importance is now and acceptance of it all - praise in at least that - for you are building and remaking the broken parts of separation and resolution of the spirit in nd with all life - connection of essence is this - you are connected and important and powerfully now here - so who are you and what will you make of this life -

Soulful Surrender ~ new now new now ~ ETERNAL LOVE is.....breath is....you are such - live in such

be certain, be compassionate and live with a breath;

'I am doing my best, and I simply and purely and profound am love' and in as many moments - just begin there - that is all that is required - begin there - love is not a religion or a book of judgments or groups of negative harm and hatred that pit one against another - those are wounded souls aching for your realization you are worthy of more, better and seek in for such - it is always there, here now - your own value and hug, and kiss, and gentleness - we are DIVINE ~

Sing it, be it, be of joy in self love - gentleness and expression of greatness of such truth, it is humble, joyful , and true - and none will know it like you do - express it like you do, and honour it as you are - this is essence!

This is God, always changing and always uplifting, always enlivening to new levels

I am Joanna, A Queen, and messenger and a being of light and knowing of the humble human life, the crystalline life, the sweetness of all life and all challenge that breaks you open for god, Source to rebuild anew - God is, you are - the sweetness and so unconditional that you truly see, know, place you with you and know You will ALWAYS be rebuilt ~ and any, all demons of such lacking and depraving play will be healed within a breath and making you new all over again - this is our journey - all is choice -

Choice = reality - 'Who are you?'

lOVE I love me I love me I love me I lovE ME I LOveMe I Love ME I LOVE me I Love MEI love me I love ME I love me I love me I love me ©

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True love is self love

And so be It

More on Creational Realities; Paradigms Shifting of Consciousness ~ Perfection of the Divine Plan for all life; For private sessions, webinars, classes or consulting ~

Email me at JoannaCosmicAngel@yahoo.com

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Blessings of great new earth - you are worthy!

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I am A messenger - I am a messenger I am me - I love me, I love you - that is my message -

#ascension

#enlightenment

#billionsinlove

#billionsoflove

#billionsinlight

#billionsofearth

#newearth

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#selfloveistruelove

[hollywoodhangar]

--- “Every note of every cord of every song reminds me of you. ▓▓▓▓▓▓ You sold me out.”

🗡️ [ VAGGIE; IC. ]  ━ 『 like a moth to a flame. 』

🗡️ [ VAGGIE; VISAGE. ]  ━ 『 painted eyes so 𝒕𝒐𝒙𝒊𝒄. 』

🗡️ [ VAGGIE; VIBES. ]  ━ 『 you can't imagine the immensity of the 𝒻𝓊𝒸𝓀 I'm not giving.  』 - kesha reference. :’)

🗡️ [ VAGGIE; AES. ]  ━ 『 polvo morado. 』

🗡️ [ VAGGIE; INTERESTS. ]  ━ 『 i see it ; i like it ; i want it ; i got it. 』

🗡️ [ VAGGIE; HC. ]  ━ 『 la llama de mis pensamientos. 』

🗡️ [ VAGGIE; STYLE. ]  ━ 『 it’s like you never had wings. 』 

🗡️ [ VAGGIE; BONDS. ]  ━ 『 & i won’t let you hurt ANYONE here. 』 

🗡️ [ VAGGIE; vaggie&charlie. ]  ━ 『 hers & hers. 』/ @soughtbirthright​

🗡️ [ VAGGIE; vaggie&charlie. ]  ━ 『 baby girl; heaven is a place in hell with you. 』 / @idyllicserendipity​

🗡️ [ VAGGIE; vaggie&mimzy. ]  ━ 『 nada tendría una oportunidad contra mujeres como nosotras. 』 / @idyllicserendipity​

[alectology-archive]

sorry, I did want to comb over gawyn’s chapters once again before I responded (and no!! I absolutely love discussing stuff, long posts are fun to read) and I did like the little mind exercise of trying to viewing him more sympathetically (you got me there like 30% of the way there and that’s a Lot because I just really don’t care for him and feel there are a lot of secondary characters who probably could do with that attention instead) but I guess I do get why people like him a little now? but at the end of the day I still can’t really see myself sympathising with him much because he has very few POVs and no real explanation for his behaviour being offered. he also insists on transferring blame for his mistakes on other people while 90% of our other protagonists very much own up to them and work to do better so the contrast doesn’t sit well with me (although it’s fascinating that elayne is the only real trakand who turned out Right because gawyn and galad are... well).

I still feel galad is the better sibling, though, because he has a very clear arc about learning to outgrow flawed modes of judgement and decision making. young men are... very susceptible to the sort of things that the whitecloaks promise and it was good rj explored that, just like he explored the toxic masculinity thing with rand and lan. I think what frustrates me more is that I don't know where gawyn's arc was headed tbh... like with perrin. another character I notably don’t enjoy because he’s all over the place.

I’m going to go ahead and put the rest of the post under a cut because this is getting very long at this point

Some things I want do want to note are that:

I’ll still refer to the tower schism as a coup because 1. it’s convenient 2. the aes sedai do agree that it was barely legal 3. the black ajah fully played a major part in it with the intention of ousting siuan 4. a lot of blood was shed 5. the blues were ousted from the tower entirely and elaida proceeded to violate a lot of customs and institute draconian measures to ensure that she remained in power. she’s an extremist, and I think a politically trained noble... should have the sense to recognise that it’s dangerous to have that kind of a person in power. whether or not it’s Really a Coup is just a matter of semantics to me.

In the eye of the world, gawyn expresses a lot of disdain and distrust for elaida and doesn’t like that she advices his mother, so I’m not certain how he really hoped to gain anything by picking her over siuan during the coup. it woudn’t help him find elayne or egwene in any possible way. it’s a very extreme reaction to a very valid frustration that siuan had potentially put his loved ones in danger. he would’ve probably been more successful if he’d just tried to contact his mother and let her know that elayne was being endangered by the amyrlin to let her use political leverage to get answers from siuan (although ofc I’m not certain how that plot would have evolved since morgase was being controlled by rahvin by then). I think it’s very abundantly clear that siuan and elaida are very different kinds of people from the get-go, and elaida is very visibly uncompassionate and doesn’t care for any opinions that non-reds might have, much less young men.

RJ was exploring the mistakes that disillusioned young men enamoured by the idea of glory, honour and heroics committed with gawyn, the younglings, and galad, so I’m pretty certain that gawyn’s arc was definitely meant as a critique of him in the shadow rising just like galad’s pivot to the whitecloaks was in the fires of heaven.

RJ also treats the mentor-mentee relationship like it’s almost a sacred thing, if not a parental bond entirely, so to me it came across like gawyn was fully crossing a line that should never have been crossed, because those warders were very kind to him and galad (and it’s not that I don’t care to see those kinds of things explored! I love morally grey characters! again, gawyn just can’t commit to anything and constantly sulks for making mistakes that he consciously walked into and that just really... irks me, lol. he can’t blame the universe for things sucking when he has only himself to blame entirely for how things turn out).

I do fully believe gawyn and galad deserved better answers from siuan though, but I’m not sure that conversation would’ve ever gone down well. Aes sedai generally have a problem with communicating and it’s always come back to cause problems for them in the series. RJ is fully critiquing the flaws that most governing bodies are susceptible to with them. and of course, siuan’s arc is inevitably framed as a tragedy for a reason. She didn’t expect to be betrayed and toppled by somebody she never considered a real threat.

I do kind of disagree about elaida, though? I admittedly don’t have a very positive opinion about her because I read new spring before the shadow rising and it coloured how I approached her character. Elaida is very, very vehemently opposed to the idea of allying with the dragon reborn - she also did send a group of reds to gentle the asha’man in book 8 - and she specifically chose to act before siuan declared an attempt to ally with rand because she always preferred to use him as a tool / an object that would bestow her with the legitimity to rule as she pleased and approach dealing with the last battle only on her terms. 

I think he could’ve at least gotten a message to somebody who mattered about rand though ahhh, I really really don’t think him intervening would have been a good idea for him (or the younglings). but again, it always circles back to him just turning a blind eye to the sort of ugly treatment rand was subjected to. he does agonise a lot over a lot of his decisions but he never does anything to try to fix his mistakes or extricate himself from sticky situations.

I don’t even hate gawyn that much (he mostly annoys me) but I picked him anyway on that annoying men poll because um. gawyn did very much take part in a coup. he killed his own teachers when they sided against him. he can’t dedicate himself to any cause for more than 2 seconds. the fact that he can’t even commit is what really annoys me ok. he didn’t try to get more information first before proceeding to act impulsively. he did inardvetently cause 90% of the problems in the series, unlike galad who left a net positive impact although the whitecloak part was rancid and misguided. siuan was literally primed to form an alliance with rand. all of that was very much a thing. and he stuck with elaida just because he didn’t want to admit he was wrong. he constantly refuses to take advice and legit info from his own allies all the time and prefers to pick his emotions even when they’re completely baseless. remember when he took a peddler’s word over egwene’s? he also did promise egwene that he wouldn’t hurt rand, and I’m not even mad at him for not helping rand when he got kidnapped (although he certainly could have found a way to help him because goddamn no enemy deserves to be treated like an animal), but I’m mad that he violated her trust. gawyn when you tell him 1 +1 = 2 -> “in my heart it’s 3 and I’ll kill people over it 💖” he’s the modern equivalent of like a conspiracy theorist. or at least very easily fooled by them.

[allrevved]

scherzzo tag dump! 

-ˏˋ✧   imagine every inch of your dreams.  /   SCHERZ: IC !  ☆ˊˎ-

-ˏˋ✧   see the shooting stars falling through your trembling hands.  /   SCHERZ: ABOUT !  ☆ˊˎ- 

-ˏˋ✧   turn the night into the skylight of day.  /   SCHERZ: HC !  ☆ˊˎ-

-ˏˋ✧   castles fall in the sand and we fade in the air.  /   SCHERZ: AES !  ☆ˊˎ-

-ˏˋ✧   a scuffed up teacup with a trouble flavoured grin.  /   SCHERZ: VISAGE !  ☆ˊˎ-

-ˏˋ✧   good girls go to heaven.  /   SCHERZ: 01 !  ☆ˊˎ-

-ˏˋ✧   bad girls go everywhere.  /   SCHERZ: 02 !  ☆ˊˎ-

-ˏˋ✧   i guess that i’m beginning to grin.  /   SCHERZ: 03 !  ☆ˊˎ-

-ˏˋ✧   she tripped on the urge to feel alive.  /   SCHERZ: 04 !  ☆ˊˎ-

-ˏˋ✧   i know the sound of your heart.  /   SCHERZ: & LEDOUX !  ☆ˊˎ-

-ˏˋ✧   love me bravely.  /   SCHERZ: & LEBI !  ☆ˊˎ-

-ˏˋ✧   i’ve never seen sparks so pretty.  /   SCHERZ: & DEMA !  ☆ˊˎ-

-ˏˋ✧   nothing grows in a comfort zone.  /   SCHERZ: & RAVEN !  ☆ˊˎ-

[butterflydm]

wot reread: crossroads of twilight (chap 21 - end)

spoilers through crossroads of twilight

Current book ranking (strongest to weakest): The Fires of Heaven; Lord of Chaos; The Shadow Rising; The Dragon Reborn; The Path of Daggers; Winter’s Heart (standalone); A Crown of Swords; The Great Hunt; the Eye of the World; Winter’s Heart (series); Crossroads of Twilight.

This really is the book of Everyone Reacts To One Scene From Winter’s Heart. It’s easy to see how so much of this could get cut away for the TV show. Honestly, Jordan could have used the prologue for four quick scenes of Our Mains reacting to what Rand and Nynaeve did, and then moved on to the next story beat. Even Elayne’s chapters, which I enjoyed, didn’t have much plot movement in them. She visits one of her loyal lords, has a couple of meetings, and gets a prenatal exam. Could easily happen in a handful of scenes in a single episode of the show. Perrin and Mat’s storylines are even worse. Nothing happens in Mat’s early run of chapters - he has a conversation with Egeanin, endures a temper tantrum from Tuon, and then talks to the Aes Sedai but nothing happens. Perrin at least learns where Faile is in his early chapters. Egwene is really the only person who moves the story forward at all the first two-thirds of this book and even she takes a few chapters of dithering before she acts.

It’s funny, when S1 of WoT aired, I was like, oh, yeah EotW is definitely the weakest of the books. And now I’m just... no. I was so wrong. What a fool I was.  Anyway, on to Knife of Dreams (my current plan is to read New Spring after KoD). Let’s see if KoD can make it above EotW. Though I am, by this point, pretty certain that none of the remaining books are going to get anywhere near my beloved TFoH-LoC-TSR trilogy. That was a good run. I hope we spend an entire season on each of those books, I really do.

1. Okay, we are over in the White Tower with Alviarin. Alviarin notes that the Black Ajah has been part of the White Tower “since it’s founding”. Yikes. Apparently, Alviarin was off to visit Tremalking. It is really starting to get on Alviarin’s nerves, being Mesaana’s errand girl. I wonder if Lanfear will get Mesaana’s plot-bits in the show. Because I don’t believe it looked like she made the cut of the 8 Forsaken who made it into the show -- four men and four women and we saw Lanfear, Moghedien, Graendal AND Semirhage all there, I think, so yeah, I think she’s been cut. So Lanfear makes the most sense and she does pop into the Tower briefly in TDR.

3. “With the Chosen, grovel and obey was the only way to survive.” I really do feel like you could say the exact same thing about Seanchan society, just with ‘Blood’ subbed in for ‘Chosen’. Why did Jordan choose to make them so similar? I hate that I will never know the answer to this question lol. Anyway, Alviarin is a Darkfriend because she wants to live forever.

4. As she heads back through the Tower proper, Alviarin notes how silent it all is, even more than she would expect. And when she walks into Elaida’s offices to find information out of her, she is shocked to see that Elaida is meeting with more than half of the Sitters in the Hall, as she had believed that she had Elaida thoroughly cowed. Elaida then orders her to stand in the corner until there’s time to talk to her. Alviarin obeys, worrying that Elaida has figured out that Alviarin is Black Ajah and is about to reveal it.

5. And so Alviarin learns that the rebel army is at their very doorstep and the Sitters in the Hall are considering the offer of negotiation. Elaida’s terms are just as all-or-nothing as Egwene’s - the Blue Ajah is forever disbanded and everyone who followed Egwene must serve a penance before any can be re-admitted to an Ajah.Then the Sitters are dismissed and Elaida lets Alviarin know that she was removed as Keeper in her absence, as she should have been present during such important events as this. Alviarin has officially lost her place of power behind Elaida for good.

6. In an aside, I think this is the first time we hear about the “standing flows” that existed in the Age of Legends, that were a way for even non-channelers to use ter’angreal. Alviarin can’t imagine why anyone would bother doing that, because she is very selfish. Anyway, she uses a ter’angreal gifted to her by Mesaana to call for a meeting of great urgency. Mesaana doesn’t take Alviarin’s warning seriously even though Alviarin has managed to come up with the correct conclusion (there is a Black Ajah hunt happening) with the wrong input (she thinks Elaida believes she is Black Ajah rather than a PERSONAL traitor). She’s about to punish Alviarin when Tall Fade shows up.

7. Oh, Hand of the Shadow is pissed off at Mesaana for not showing up at the cleansing fight. He touches Alviarin’s forehead and ‘marks’ her as his, telling her she will get no punishment from Mesaana. Then he orders Alviarin to figure out who is hunting the Black Ajah in the White Tower, and she leaves as Mesaana is ‘punished’ for not showing up at the battle in WH.

8. Hopping over sideways in the White Tower, we now move to Pevara. She’s having a talk with Tarna (who is the person who was sent to Salidar to talk to them, way back in... LoC, I think?). Tarna is the one who was raised to be Elaida’s new Keeper, now that Alviarin has been ousted. Pevara, of course, is worrying over whether or not she’s Black Ajah. This is a very interesting conversation. And we get a little more background on some of Pevara’s family that was murdered by Darkfriends at least a century ago. I like the way Pevara’s thoughts on her past are written here.

9. On Tarna’s journey back to the White Tower from Salidar, she happened to be in a village that was visited by an Asha’man recruiting party (this makes her wonder how far the Dragon’s ta’veren reach goes). Tarna tells Pevara that she believes that the Red Ajah should take Asha’man as Warders. There are too many of them to gentle them and their reach spreads too far, due to Traveling. The reason that she came to Pevara is because Pevara has been known to support the idea that Reds should have Warders. Pevara reveals to Tarna that she was sent a missive from Toveine (implied: revealing that she was bonded by Logain), which Pevara says will change the world.

10. We are now finally checking in with Rand’s storyline again, but we are in Cadsuane’s PoV and she still constantly thinks of him as ‘the boy’. It would be easier for me to believe that she really wanted to help him if she could think of him using his name more often! They are in an estate in Tear, a day’s ride from the Spine of the World. As Verin is talking to Cadsuane, Min bursts in, apparently having been listening at the door. Note that when Rand does something that Cadsuane feels is rude, she gives him open set-downs and tells him to be more polite but when it’s Min, Cadsuane is just passive-aggressive instead. I guess Min is her spy on Rand, so it behooves her to be a little bit nicer to her. She asks if Min has had any viewings she wants to tell Cadsuane about but Min is actually here as Rand’s errand girl, to let Cadsuane that he is asking to see her.

11. Cadsuane ponders how annoying it is that she has to actually, ugh, GIVE ADVICE to the person that she agreed to advise. The person that she has told us that she wants to teach ‘laughter and tears’ to. Verin acts like she is going to follow Cadsuane to Rand, but then Nesune shows up and draws Verin off for conversation. Cadsuane ponders how odd it is to see people who are on opposite sides of the White Tower split chat peacefully now that they’re both oathsworn to Rand. Lan is here in the estate, which means that Nynaeve likely is too, though she hasn’t been mentioned yet. Ah, she’s mentioned three pages later as watching Lan at his sparring. Cadsuane certainly is taking her sweet time going to see Rand. She also takes her time to (internally) diss Nynaeve for still having passionate reactions to things and not being a model of Aes Sedai calm.

12. Oh, wow, Rand awarded Narishma his Dragon pin and Merise took it away from him. So Narishma is upset and frustrated at her for shitting on his accomplishments and acting like he doesn’t count as an equal. I think she’s also the one who snapped her fingers at her Warder/Asha’man to make him go stand in a corner? “Jahar, he is still at the stage where he has to learn to accept only what I say he can.” Wow wow wow. Hate this. So Merise believes that bonding Narishma as her Warder means he’s not allowed ANY kind of separate life or accomplishments outside of what is given by her hand. I’m pretty sure that when she asked Narishma to become her Warder she did NOT make all this clear. He didn’t go through the Warder training! This was not informed consent! He obviously didn’t realise he was giving up everything else in his life by saying ‘yes’ to her! Cadsuane finds it worrying that Merise is actually considering giving Narishma BACK the pin because “Aes Sedai order and Warders obey”. I will be Keeping An Eye on developments here, but I’m not super-happy with how Merise is treating Narishma.

13. Alivia has appointed herself Rand’s new guard and is sitting outside his chambers. No matter how hard Rand tries, he literally cannot escape the fact that women are people and can make the choice to willingly risk their lives for a cause, the same as men. Cadsuane notes that Min dislikes Alivia but that she doesn’t think it’s jealousy, exactly. Cadsuane has seen Alivia and Rand exchanging glances, with determination on Alivia’s side and hope on Rand’s, but this is one secret that she had not been able to get out of Min (probably because Min is worried Cadsuane might be on Rand’s side lol). The other person guarding Rand right now is Elza (we know she’s a Darkfriend but Cadsuane & everyone else does not).

14. Cadsuane notes that Min has “finely honed instincts” of jealousy that make her snarl at anyone she thinks is horning in on her territory with Rand. Despite being the person in Rand’s bed, despite the bond, Min remains so completely insecure about her place in his life. I feel like that’s probably related to how much this version of her is a facade -- SHE knows that she’s faking almost everything about herself in order to appeal to Rand and part of her is worried that he will see past her dolled-up appearance and her desire to please and see the real her and reject that person in favor of someone who is ‘naturally feminine’ in the ways that Min does not believe that she personally is. Especially since she is aware that Rand is attracted to and in love with other women, even as he shares her bed. Because Min is pretty obviously just as monogamous as Perrin is and is easily driven to jealousy and insecurity and this relationship doesn’t make her feel satisfied and secure. And again, one of the tragedies in all this is that Rand was already attracted to Min before she changed herself for him. And one of the biggest ironies is that Min is only sharing him by her own active choice, even though it makes her miserable (because Rand was totally planning to come and go from Caemlyn without talking to Elayne or Aviendha at all). So all of Min’s unhappiness is something that she caused herself. Which has a lot of narrative irony but I feel like the narrative never actually... notices this?

15. Cadsuane notices that Rand is staggering a bit as if injured and... sort of worries about it? In her way. We are reminded in the narration that Min also let Cadsuane know that Rand believes that he needs her to teach him something. Rand is worrying over the Seanchan. They’ve been fighting among each other for a thousand years and it has honed their instincts for battle (similarly to how the Three-Fold Land honed the Aiel, I imagine Rand is thinking). We also learn that Rand has been talking a lot with Alivia about the Seanchan. I’d have MUCH rather gotten Rand and Alivia’s conversations about the Seanchan than that fawning chapter we got about baby!Tuon.

16. Before Rand can get to the part where he wanted Cadsuane’s advice, their meeting is interrupted. Maybe Cadsuane should have gone directly to see Rand when he asked her to visit instead of wandering around the manor idk. Anyway, some of his oathsworn Sisters have come to tell him that their Warders are abruptly a LOT closer than they used to be.

17. Later, Rand is lying on his bed with his boots on the covers. Moiraine did that in the show. <3 lol

18. Min punches Rand in the ribs again. I hate this relationship. She’s always ‘gentle’ with his unhealable wounds but apparently the rest of him is fair game at all times.

19. lol, Rand thinks about how Min is “good at reading his mind” and it just makes me think of pages and pages of her being absolute SHIT at having any idea of what he was thinking. She doesn’t have a clue how his mind works. Rand really does think that Min knows him so much better than she actually appears to, when we’re in her PoV chapters. Also, I note that Rand is still doing everything he can to hide his vulnerability/pain from Min. As much as I liked the bonding in Winter’s Heart, I’m frustrated at how little it seemed to actually affect Rand or his storyline at all.

20. The people who brought the Warders are Logain & his group (Asha’man and bonded Aes Sedai), plus Bashere & some of his soldiers.

21. Min currently appears to be actively TRYING to stoke Rand’s paranoia? No wonder I assumed it was SUPPOSED to be a bad sign that Rand was resting all his emotional support on her, back when I first read the books. She’s so bad for him! This is a bad relationship! Yet... yet I’m not sure whether or not Jordan was aware of that. Anyway, Min is panicking about Logain’s aura of glory and wondering if that means he’s going to try to displace Rand; she’s worried about seeing something ‘dark’ around Bashere, and fretting about rumors that Lord Dobraine might die. Luckily Rand actually seems to be better at shrugging off her panic than he was back in Lord of Chaos. I think maybe the Alivia viewing was the turning point there -- Min wants him to cut Alivia out of his life entirely because of the viewing and he refuses, because he thinks being ‘helped to die’ is a good thing and, besides, Min’s viewings are inevitable, so no point in fighting them. He basically tells her just that. “If you’ve seen it, then it’s going to happen.”

22. Yikes. When Min finds out Loial has arrived, we get this. “I could have killed Rand for letting you get off to your room before I saw you.” The bond said she did not mean it. Not exactly. Um. Yikes? I’m pretty sure this is supposed to be more ‘lol women, amIright?’ nonsense but... yikes.

23. I’m also trying to remember the history of the Loial and Min relationship, because they seem very close here. Loial did come to Caemlyn with Perrin, so Min would have met him at that point, but I do not remember the text making a big out of them becoming friends before Loial went off again with Karldin. Eh, it won’t be the last time Min is magically friends with someone, I guess.

24.  Yeah, Rand still tries to avoid having anyone (including Min) see him grab hold of saidin, due to the dizziness. So that hasn’t changed as a result of the bond. He still doesn’t want to actually be vulnerable in front of anyone, including the people he loves and trusts. But, yeah, at this point, Rand is just trying to make himself last long enough to die at the Last Battle.

25. Rand notes that he keeps thinking in Lews Therin’s turns of phrase and not his own, and tries to remind himself how he needs to think about things in his own head. I wish he felt like he could talk to someone about this. I really wish. I wish he had someone with him who was actually trying to help him in a way that didn’t seem to be about trying to make him MORE paranoid and worried. *sigh*

26. LOIAL notices immediately that Rand looks tired and Min is instantly defensive about it and saying that Rand IS resting, which Rand takes as her being protective of him. I, uh, don’t have as charitable as an interpretation as Rand does, unfortunately. I’ve noticed in other PoVs that Min doesn’t really seem to notice when Rand is tired or dizzy, etc. even when other characters do, so I think she’s feeling defensive because she didn’t NOTICE that Rand was tired and so Loial pointing it out makes her feel inadequate.

27. Rand is too tired to sit and too tired to sleep. :-(

28. Only some of the stedding agreed to watch the Waygates, which is naturally worrisome. But Loial did his best. He also lets us know that there’s a grand meeting of all the Elders, The Great Stump, but Loial doesn’t know what the meeting is about because he is too young for people to be willing to tell him. So nine Waygates have been left unguarded.

29. I do want to note here that Rand thinks - “Rand knew he was feeling his way in the dark when it came to women, even Min -- maybe especially Min” - which is a far cry from how he USED to think about her as the one non-confusing woman in the world.

30. We cut to Cadsuane being the one to react to finding out that the Asha’man bonding the Aes Sedai who had been sent to the White Tower to gentle them. We also learn that Cadsuane IS capable of being nice to someone when she knows for certain that “the stick” absolutely won’t work with them, but it’s also clear that the stick is her first instinct and she’ll only move to being encouraging if she’s absolutely convinced that harshness won’t do the job.

31. Ah-HA. Rand IS upset about the Black Tower people bonding the Aes Sedai, though he feels like he can’t ask them to undo it at this point, given how the Aes Sedai reacted when he asked them to release their bonds on the Asha’man. I knew he would be upset. Anyway, Rand and Logain’s relationship is not getting off to the best of starts here. Rand is swearing so much here that it really makes me miss Mat. Real Mat, not CoT!Mat.

32. Logain lets Rand know that Taim is giving out a LOT of orders that he is letting people believe are coming straight from Rand and he is, honestly, all but begging Rand to take the Black Tower in hand. And there really isn’t a good reason why Rand is refusing (except that Jordan didn’t want him to handle it yet for Plot Reasons). I really am feeling the creaky hands of the Plot Strings SO much harder in these recent books than I felt them in the earlier ones. People keep doing things for no good reason other than The Plot Needed It or refusing to do things for no good reason because It’s Not Time For That Plot Yet. Logain even tells Rand that Taim’s put the three Asha’man who travel with Rand on his deserters’ list. “No matter what you’ve done, it’s time to turn your eyes to the Black Tower before Taim splits it worse than the White Tower is.”

33. Rand’s philosophical musings are turning very pessimistic, fatalistic, and grim. Anyway, he tells Logain that Taim has to wait but doesn’t actually give a reason why. Literally, there’s nothing keeping Rand from going and dealing with this? His next plan is to send people off to try to set up a meeting with Seanchan for him, so, in other words, he’s just gonna wait around and do nothing for a while. He absolutely had time to go try to at least scout out the Black Tower and feel its vibes for himself.

34. Three chapters of Perrin. The summary:

Faile has now been gone for 32 days, so it’s been a week (ten days) since his last set of chapters.

Berelain deserves to be Rand’s Steward in Cairhien! Not trapped in this plotline! #BerelainDeservedBetter

I also wish Sulin were over in Rand’s plotline instead of Perrin’s. We literally never got an in-story reason for why the Maiden who was most closely bonded to Rand was the one who left with Perrin.

Aram has grown so touchy and easy to set off that Perrin is leaving him behind. Perrin is such a bad leader who never pays any attention to the people following him; I don’t know why the narrative keeps telling me he’s a natural ruler.

I can’t believe that Perrin is STILL (internally) being a dick about Wil al’Seen being a pretty man who is attractive to women. He’s been a soldier under your command for SEVEN BOOKS, please get over your youthful envy of him omg he literally follows your every order.

I’ve talked about this with @markantonys but Perrin’s thing about hating when men smile is SO WEIRD. Let men smile, Perrin! Not everyone is a gloomy gus. I honestly have to wonder what Perrin’s opinion of Mat would be if they met up again, because he kinda seems to hate men who behave similarly to Mat. Mat is 100% a charmer who likes to smile.

A sighting of a raken in the distance freaks out everyone but Perrin, who is dismissive of the Seanchan because they aren’t Faile.

Perrin’s people try to resupply in Sto Habor but all the grain is infested with weevils. There are ghosts in this town too, like Elayne had at the start of her storyline. The Aes Sedai ask him to leave one of them behind to help the town but he refuses, because Sto Harbor isn’t Faile.

Perrin reminds himself that he would do anything to get Faile back, chops off a man’s hand and threatens him to prove it to himself and then decides to make a deal with the Seanchan. “Yes, that would be like taking the Dark One’s help,” he thinks, and then he asks Tallanvor to tell him more.

Tallanvor (who brought the news of the Seanchan) also says he would be cool making a deal with the Dark One to get Morgase (’Maighdin’) back. Yeah, my first guess was wrong and Perrin is DEFINITELY the left hand that strays from the opening quote. Mat is on thin ice, don’t get me wrong, but he’s not yet in ‘would be willing to make a deal with the Dark One if he offered’ territory. Now would have been the perfect time for one of the Forsaken to go after Perrin. He absolutely was ripe to be turned to the Shadow at this moment in time. He’s thought both about how he would forsake Rand and the Last Battle for Faile in this book and now he’s thinking about trying to make a deal with someone he considers as bad as the Dark One.

35. Back to Mat. In his earlier chapters, the themes that Winter’s Heart told us would matter: the sul’dam secret, Seanchan characters questioning the empire, and Tuon being a dormant marath’damane, all had yet to come up in any way in the narrative. Instead we just focused on Mat navel-gazing about his marriage prophecy and not caring about slavery as much as he had the previous week. So, hopefully something actually relevant will happen in this upcoming Mat stuff.

36. They finally leave the outskirts of the city and it’s a rainy hellscape and Mat is glumly miserable. We get a montage of Mat ‘courting’ Tuon. It is painful even to skim through. Mat is making himself so pathetic for her and for no good reason. He is really Min 2: Electric Boogaloo, forcing himself into love with someone that he knows nothing about and has nothing in common with Because Destiny Says So. At least Min forces herself to fall in love with an actual good person and not a slaver. She doesn’t seem to actually APPRECIATE any of Rand’s good qualities (except the physical ones) but at least he actually HAS them. And the dice in Mat’s head have been getting so overused since Tuon showed up. I’m just... either annoyed or bored during most of Mat’s PoV this book and it makes me sad. Reading Mat’s PoVs used to be a delight and now they’re a chore.

37. On the plus side, Tuon is SUCH an incredibly petty asshole to Egeanin here for absolutely no reason that it looks like it may have reactivated at least part of Egeanin’s spine. Tuon literally renamed her because she felt like flexing her power and being a jerk to someone. Egeanin is the only character in this entire storyline who has gotten interesting character development so far this book.

38. Mat does still consider marrying Tuon to essentially be a terrible doomed fate (”when you knew you were going to hang, the only thing to do was grin at the noose” is very similar to a Birgitte quote). Yet he’s staying anyway. *sigh*

39. Oh thank fuck something relevant actually happened in Mat’s storyline. I mean, Egeanin got stabbed, so that sucks, but something actually happened that wasn’t just Mat deciding to roll over for a slaver.

40. We learn from Domon that Renna stabbed Egeanin in the back and then took off running. Teslyn heals Egeanin and absolutely no one says ‘thank you’ to her (#TeslynDeservedBetter). And Egeanin shares the secret about the sul’dam, that Renna, Seta, and Bethamin had all been leashed once, that she suspects any sul’dam is capable of channeling. Teslyn, Selucia, and Tuon all overhear. My eyes roll as Mat has a chance to leave Tuon behind but decides to keep the slaver around because she has ~mysterious eyes~. This is worse than when Jordan had Rand ignoring every red flag about ‘Selene’ back in TGH.

41. Anyway, we finally leave the circus, unfortunately still saddled with the slaver and her devoted slave, to chase after Renna before she can alert the Seanchan as they are worried that she might. They spot her before she reaches the garrison. She’s too far to catch but not too far to shoot with a crossbow, so Mat gives the order. And, annoyingly, just like with Rand, women are ~special~ and Mat swears that he’ll never let a woman die because of him again after this. Honestly, I suspect this is part of why Jordan turned towards the idea of making allies out of the Seanchan -- a. because they are an enemy that is predominately female in the 'known characters' due to the ‘character casting’ choices he made and he has SUCH a hard time killing female villains compared to male villains. and b. He would much rather enslave his female characters than kill them and in order for him to keep doing that, Jordan needs the Seanchan to continue to exist as a slaver culture, so that there’s a place to put the Bad Women.

42. ...and we’re back at the circus, at least for now, except now Tuon is openly placing the circus under her protection as ~High Lady Tuon~ so she will probably be even more insufferable and even more of an asshole next book. Well, that felt pointless. Mat also feels like everything was pointless, but he’s at the hysterical laughter stage of his “walking to my own doom” storyline. It’s so sad that I’m actually relieved that Mat’s plotline for the book is done and I can read someone else’s PoV.

43. As we end Mat’s section, slavery check-in.

Characters who were previously strongly anti-slavery in WH:

Mat, Setalle Anan, Juilin, Noal, Teslyn, Joline, Edesina, Thom, Beslan

Characters who inexplicably softened their anti-slavery stance in CoT:

Mat (knows sul’dam secret)

Setalle Anan

Noal

Anti-Slavery characters who haven’t changed their stance as far as we know:

Juilin (gold star for Juilin tbh)

Teslyn (knows sul’dam secret)

Joline

Edesina

Thom

Characters who are focused really only on their own personal freedom and not anyone else’s:

Renna, Seta & Bethamin (slaves if the Truth Were Known)

Domon (wants to be free to marry Egeanin)

We started strong with the sul’dam in WH, where they were questioning pretty much everything about what they knew about themselves and the empire, and now they’re just kinda... average horrible sul’dam again. Mat should have left them in Ebou Dar.

Characters who show signs of growth and change:

Egeanin (knows sul’dam secret)

Her breaking off the necklace and throwing it away? Wow! Literally the only worthwhile thing that happened in chapter 28. Her parts of chapter 29 were pretty much the only interesting things in that chapter as well.

These characters remain strongly pro-slavery:

Tuon (dormant marath’damane & now knows sul’dam secret)

Tuon questions literally nothing about herself and any of her assumptions about the world; this entire book has been a waste of time with regards to her character. The ending does set up the ~possibility~ that maybe we’ll see some character growth next book but so far Tuon is all hat, no cattle. Winter’s Heart ALSO implied that there would be character growth ~next book~ but it didn’t happen.

Characters in this storyline that I currently care about:

Egeanin, Joline, Edesina, Teslyn, Juilin, Thera. Maybe Thom.

44. We don’t have much of the book left, but we are back with Egwene! We learn that there has been another saidin-based murder of another Blue sister (Aran’gar’s work). This time, the person who was killed was one of the people Egwene was planning to use for Her Plan. We also learn that Nicola ran away four days ago, but her fellow novices covered up for her... because they disliked her and were afraid she’d be found and brought back.

45. Oh! We learn that Egwene DID share one of her prophetic dreams with people -- she told the sisters about the Seanchan attack she’d dreamed about (I can’t tell from context if this means all of the Aes Sedai with her or just her oathsworn sisters). I think it’s all the Aes Sedai Sisters. Hilariously, no one is taking it seriously because no one believes that she’s a Dreamer, possibly because of how she has never shared a prophetic dream before. This really is the opposite of Min’s storyline re: prophecy.

46. Hey, we finally learn the name of one of Egwene’s friends from back home (who, per TGH, were ‘allowed’ to dance with Rand because they wouldn’t try to steal him, and I was trying so hard to think of who on earth that would even be) - Larine Ayellin. It only took us 10 books, but we’ve got the name of one of Egwene’s childhood friends!

47. After talking over the issues that had been brought up earlier in the book with various Sitters, Egwene comes to a decision and sneaks out in the night, riding Bela rather than her own Daishar, with only Siuan aware that she’s left. She goes to where Bode has been set out on her secret mission and takes over for her (and I believe Leane is the other one on the secret mission). Anyway, we finally learn The Plan, which is turning the big harbor chains into cuendillar at night while they’re down, thus blockading the harbor without needing to bring in boats. She succeeds at her half of it... and then is caught, obviously betrayed by someone. I’m gonna guess by Nicola because... I mean, it fits her MO and she did just recently run away.

48. We end on a super-short epilogue. All of the major wounds that Rand has received still hurt, we learn. Not just the unhealable wounds in his side but the heron brands in his palms too. Oh, honey. Bashere has returned and tells Rand that the Seanchan are willing to meet with him -- but it needs to be in person and he will be meeting with a member of the royal family, the Daughter of the Nine Moons (and, of course, we know she’s too busy being an asshole in Mat’s storyline to actually be the person Rand will meet next book).

49. Mostly what reading CoT made me think about were several ways it could be improved. This was... a frustrating book. Honestly, I don’t think it’s out of character for Perrin to go seek out help from the slavers -- he’s pre-established as being ‘anything for Faile’ so he didn’t feel out of character. But so much of the book felt... pointless. And it essentially killed off one of my favorite characters, because CoT!Mat is NOT pre-CoT!Mat. I don’t know this guy and I don’t like this guy. Elayne and Egwene do all they can to hold up the book, but so much of it really is a miserable slog. I hope KoD is better but honestly, I suspect it will be Elayne and Egwene holding up the entire book again, and Perrin and Mat being miserable slogs again. But we’ll see. And after KoD, I’ll reread New Spring, and that one should be genuinely enjoyable at least.

Mat is mentioned by:

Rand x1

Unnecessary scenes in this section:

Perrin’s side quest (shaido): 1 (14 pages), 1 (17 pages), 1 (21 pages)

Mat’s side quest (tuon): 1 (31 pages), 1 (12 pages)

Tuon appears in 15 pages in chapter 28 and 23 in chapter 29.

Toy used:

8x in chapter 29

4x in chapter 29 (she doesn’t talk much in this one)

Tuon is a spoiled brat who is allowed to get away with anything she wants:

Forcibly renames Egeanin just to be an asshole.

When Mat gives her a gift, she gives it away in a manner calculated to be an asshole.

Mocks and humiliates Egeanin for no apparent reason other than to be an asshole (and I guess to push the limits and see what Mat will let her get away with, probably)

Demands that Mat take her shopping

Loads Mat up with all her purchases that she made on Mat’s gold

Tuon is now officially being feted and honored at Luca’s circus since they know she’s An Important Seanchan now

Tuon reminds us she’s a slaver:

Selucia, her slave, is still shadowing her everywhere

she talks about Mat needing to be trained in manners

is able to forcibly rename Egeanin because she has the power to do that in their culture due to being the Top Slaver

Egeanin is forced to kneel, kiss the floor, and beg leave to be permitted to withdraw

Tuon refuses to even speak to Egeanin directly, having Selucia (her slave) do it instead

She refuses to speak to Mat in the same scene, having Selucia speak for her. Since Selucia is speaking ‘for’ Tuon here, I am counting this usage of ‘Toy’ against Tuon

Threatens again to turn Mat into a slave

forbids Mat to mourn Renna because Mat is her hoped-for possession and not allowed his own feelings. I don’t want him to mourn Renna either but step off, lady.

Something from previous books is undermined (this is kinda my ranting section so skip if that doesn’t appeal):

Mat continues to treat both the Aes Sedai & the sul’dam as if they are ‘equally irritating’ and have ‘equally petty’ reasons for ‘annoying’ him, contributing to the idea that being a slaver isn’t a big deal. It’s even the SUL’DAM that Mat is giving apologetic looks to, even after they talk about how they want to leash the Aes Sedai again? WTF WTF WTF 

Mat acts like he’s baffled when Joline, Edesina, & Teslyn glare at him and not the sul’dam - yeah, they’re pissed that you’re treating slavers and their targets the same because you weren’t doing that LAST BOOK. I’d be pissed off too if the person who saved me was suddenly acting like he didn’t see any difference between me and the people who want to enslave me. They don’t expect the sul’dam not to act like trash but they expected better of you, Mat, because you were better last book.

Mat thinks of the a’dam and sul’dam as a lever to use against the Aes Sedai. Wow! Disgusting behavior! He thinks “Not that he really thought about putting those collars on the sisters again. Not often, anyway.” WTF? I kinda hate CoT!Mat. I adored this character only LAST BOOK and just hated that he was trapped in a trauma plotline. How did Jordan manage to completely ruin Mat in a single book?

Mat seems annoyed that Domon isn’t behaving like a good slave and sleeping on the floor, instead insisting that he and Mat trade off for the bed. Again! WTF!

Mat worries about the ‘bad habits’ that Olver might pick up from the Redarms or Thom, but has no qualms about him hanging out with slavers. He even approves of Olver bowing and making much of Tuon. Slavery is a pretty bad fucking habit, Mat.

Mat abruptly starts ‘courting’ Tuon in earnest, despite her giving him absolutely no reason to like her as a person and being open about her desire to potentially enslave him at some point. He lets her get away with being a jerk over and over and over again, despite being harsh with the Aes Sedai for much lesser irritations.

Setalle Anan is absolutely fine with Tuon acting like a slaver asshole in front of her and even is all “oh you silly man” in Mat’s direction when he’s baffled by Tuon’s behavior.

Somehow the entire Mean Girls (tm) event where Tuon and Selucia mock and humiliate Egeanin for absolutely no reason doesn’t make Mat decide not to court Tuon? wtf

Setalle Anan is now literally bodyguard to a slaver, willing to use her knife against people to threaten them to leave Tuon’s presence. What a massive comedown for this character, who was so strongly anti-slavery in Winter’s Heart.

When Mat finds out that Tuon has trained damane, he doesn’t think at all about how sickening he found the way that damane were treated in Winter’s Heart to be but instead treats it as a neutral statement about her hobbies; it makes him find her intimidating but he’s not disgusted by it like he would have been in Winter’s Heart. It has not been THAT LONG and yet Mat already barely cares about slavery, despite caring a LOT in Winter’s Heart.

Mat still appears to be in denial that Selucia is a slave, constantly calling her a “ladies’ maid”. This is kinda the one point where any kind of massaging Mat back into some semblance of actually being in character would hang, actually. Because he KNOWS that she’s a slave but persistently refuses to think of her as one, like if he just closes his eyes and pretends hard enough that Tuon isn’t a slaver, she’ll magically stop being one.

Despite very reasonably NOT considering an oath under duress to be binding in Winter’s Heart, Mat apparently considers accidental wedding vows to be binding??? You are not Seanchan; you have no reason to consider yourself bound by their customs unless you CHOOSE to be. Weddings! Aren’t! Magic! Spells! Why do I say this so often in these books!

Literally there is no point for the narrative to have removed Tuon from her power base in Ebou Dar because everyone still treats her like she’s in charge anyway. What is the point of this entire arc if it doesn’t actually impact Tuon’s character? ALL the circus arc has done so far is completely destroy Mat as a character. What the FUCK happened to Jordan in-between writing Winter’s Heart and writing Crossroads of Twilight? Seriously, even if that is when he decided to punt off all Seanchan-related development to the outriggers, there was no reason to assassinate Mat’s character this way. I’m so pissed off. It’s like being a slaver doesn’t even register as a negative to Mat anymore - he doesn’t even mention Tuon BEING A SLAVER in his list of things about her that he dislikes? wtf. Instead it’s all “oh dear, I might marry a noble” aka the kinds of worries that would make sense if he were fated to marry someone like ELAYNE, not someone like Tuon, who has much greater flaws than being a NOBLE.

When Tuon threatens again to turn MAT into a slave, he gets nervous about the idea but it doesn’t seem to impact his opinion of Tuon as a person??? She’s genuinely horrific (to him and others) in this entire section of the story and it doesn’t seem to impact his desire to ~win her over~ in any possible way? Like, dude, just fucking take a horse and abandon the circus. Take Olver with you and just leave.

And he’s just bafflingly all “oh women are so strange” about her threatening to enslave him. Mat, this has NOTHING to do with her being a woman. It’s because she’s a SLAVER. Also, absolutely mind-bogglingly, Mat thinks about how he needs to trust her. Literally right after she’s threatened to turn him into a slave. ????  We do get that echo of his ancient memories reminding him that trust is the sound of death but it doesn’t go anywhere, so whatever.

You would think that after one of the sul’dam stabs Egeanin and tries to run away, Mat might rethink some of his weird “oh the Aes Sedai and the sul’dam are both just equally annoying sets of people” trains of thought but this does not appear to happen.

When Mat learns that sul’dam can channel, all his focus is on “oh no my future wife can channel” and his tactical military mind seems to have taken a vacation? The fact that the sul’dam can potentially channel is a huge deal with regards to the Seanchan empire, yet this barely seems to cross Mat’s mind?

And, honestly, I don’t even feel like the whole “the prophecy threatens his life if he doesn’t marry Tuon” is a valid reason because Mat HAS risked his life before for other people, quite frequently! So him rolling over for the prophecy and doing his best to fawn and manipulate his way into Tuon’s good graces feels so excruciatingly out of character. Him giving her flowers and trying to court her all while doing his best to just ignore that she’s a horrific person who enslaves and tortures other people for fun is... it’s just out of character. I don’t care that Jordan wrote it. This isn’t the same Mat that we had in Winter’s Heart or the previous books. This is a different character. Mat is the guy who runs back into the burning house to save people, even while complaining the whole time (as Siuan described him in book 3), but this guy is marrying the fucking arsonist instead and just watching as she sets more fires. He comes across as weak and self-serving, which are not words I would associate with pre-CoT Mat. I remember accurately how awful Tuon is as a person and a character but, wow, Mat is shitty too in this book.

I just... I think back to the start of TSR and THAT should have been the energy that Mat had in this book -- he fucking hates the nobles in the start of that book, yet he doesn’t show it at all to their faces because he’s fleecing them for money, but even though he never actively thinks “I fucking hate these people” it becomes very obvious within about 2-3 pages. THAT is what we should have been getting from the Mat-Tuon scenes, but we would actually need to see MAT trying to subtly win concessions from TUON in order for that to be the subtext, rather than just barely keep his head above the water, you know? Because Mat focuses WAY TOO MUCH on Tuon being Prophesied Wife rather than Prophesied Wife being the FUTURE EMPRESS OF THE SLAVER EMPIRE THAT HAS RECENTLY INVADED THE WESTLANDS. Which is a MILITARY concern. Yet we never see Mat treating trying to get Tuon to fall in love with him as if it were a military concern; it’s just treated as a personal thing and THAT is why it makes all this feel like a pointless subplot rather than something that’s actually important. And it sucks because it felt like Winter’s Heart actually set up a good storyline for this plotline really well and then CoT has just completely ignored the bigger picture related to a Mat-Tuon marriage and has made it all about Fated Romance (which is something that Jordan has ALREADY done in other plotlines, so he’s not even bringing anything new to the table). It’s just so frustrating because this COULD have been  compelling story (though I would have felt bad for Mat even so) but instead it’s a limp nothingplot that ruins a good character.

Ironically, Mat being a shitty person isn’t even related to Tuon? Tuon is only in 52 pages of Mat’s chapters, but he’s a shitty person in the majority of his screen time, even before he starts courting her in earnest. I’m so disappointed (in Jordan, not in Mat. This is so clearly NOT pre-CoT Mat that I can’t even hold it against him; pre-CoT Mat is still one of my faves. CoT!Mat can go pound sand. Jordan had to absolutely obliterate Mat as a character in order to make him ‘fit’ with Tuon and it’s so depressing).

I hate everything about this plotline.

Plot-threads that started in CoT or were carried over from WH:

Elayne: Become queen of Caemlyn (second book of task) - NOT completed.

Mat: Escape Ebou Dar and return to the Band of the Red Hand and Rand (second book of task) - NOT completed.

Perrin: Gather up Masema and his Dragonsworn and bring them to Rand (fourth book of task) - NOT completed.

Egwene: Go to the White Tower with her army, confront Elaida, and heal the Tower (fifth book of task) - NOT completed.

Rand: Make a truce with the Seanchan (first book of task) - NOT completed.

Nynaeve: The only thing she does this entire book is watch Lan spar.

Plot-threads carrying over to Knife of Dreams:

Elayne: Become queen of Caemlyn (3/?)

Mat: Escape Ebou Dar and return to the Band of the Red Hand and Rand (3/?)

Perrin: Gather up Masema and his Dragonsworn and bring them to Rand (5/?)

Egwene: Go to the White Tower with her army, confront Elaida, and heal the Tower (6/?)

Rand: Make a truce with the Seanchan (2/?)

Nynaeve: ???

Unnecessary scenes (whole book):

young Sitters ‘mystery’: 3 (9 pages)

too many random PoVs: 5 (63 pages)

Mat’s side quest (tuon): 6 (134 pages)

Perrin’s side quest (shaido): 8 (175 pages)

Being Weird about Elayne’s pregnancy: 3 (5 pages)

Atha’an Miere nonsense: 2 (12 pages)

Egwene waits around for her plot to start: 2 (29 pages)

So that was a total of 427 pages. My copy of Crossroads of Twilight has 823 pages, so that is 51.9%. Honestly, I was expecting it to be worse. Thank goodness for Elayne and Egwene.

Tuon-related annoyances: (whole book; 52 pages)

refuses to use Mat’s name x25

acts like a spoiled brat x9

reminds us that she’s a slaver x11

People that Mat thinks about: (whole book):

Rand x3

Perrin x1

Mat is mentioned by (whole book):

Elayne x1

Egwene x6 (prophetic dream)

Rand x1

Mat is so disconnected from the rest of the cast in this book; it’s like he’s in his own, separate, and more poorly-written novella (which I guess is a ‘romance’ of some kind but one of those romances where you feel like the author only put 5% of their effort into the story).