#also they/them marella

[venomrot]

tyto forest

[miinteaa]

My kotlc Secret Santa gift for @xanadaus !!

Happy Holidays!

Gift exchange organized by @song-tam !

[krisalyce]

what if i said lights kamera action

[lezabeththetheodoraimposter]

who would the keeper crew have for godly parents

Greeks

Jensi (Hermes)

Dex (Hephaestus)

Marella (fire power Hephaestus (the only thing she’s engineering are vapes))

Maruca (Iris)

Keefe (Athena but one of the artsy ones not a strategy one)

Sophie (created by Hera (no mortal parent))

Romans

Biana & Fitz (Venus)

Tam & Linh (Luna)

Stina (Cupid)

I also made picrews for them bc i’m too tired to draw them rn

(order: sophie, keefe, dex, fitz, biana, tam, linh, marella, stina & maruca, jensi)

did i change almost all of their eye colors? yes. did i make dex brunette? yes. did i give the vackers and stina black hair? yes. did i accidentally give 3 of the boys the same hair? maybeeee.

picrew here

[the-way-astray]

hate it when people want a short story collection or a spin-off of a certain series and then want it to be all about the main couple of the original.

(ranting in the tags)

[camelspit]

Oooh why are you a Lava Cake hater? I’m so curious

😔😔😔 ive been discovered /j

I'm not even really a hater I'm just strongly. disinterested in it. It doesn't do anything for me, and I'm struggling to see how it got so popular (no hate to the shippers though lmao have fun!!!)

maybe this is gods revenge for the garvar era. punishing me for my crackship with another one. 😔

[autistic-daydreamer]

Yeah so you guys know that one post I made abt the foxfire gang and what godly parent they'd have? Yeah, it's consumed my brain for the last three-four days. I have dedicated three pages in my journal abt it, coming on four

[faggot-friday]

I did @an-ungraceful-swan’s dtiys thing. My phone’s almost dead but it was worth it LOOK AT THEM

More proof I can’t draw human anatomy or dreads but I’m actually quite proud of this like come on. COME ON. It’s about time we replaced the Mona Lisa innit

Original under the cut

[steal-nightmares-leave-dreams]

marella <3

[kotlclittlemeowmeowtournament]

Included Characters

Based on your submissions! I’ll pair them to face off in a hot minute, but right now here are the characters you’ll be voting for!! I will say that some characters on this list were not submitted but I have ruled that they deserve to be included.

For fun, I have ranked them based on how many submissions they received. Some of y’all simply do not know what a little meow meow is and it’s embarrassing.

Without further ado, all 32 competitors!

With 8 submissions:

Alvar Vacker

With 6 submissions:

Keefe Sencen (embarrassing for y’all that he got so many)

Fintan Pyren

With 5 submissions:

Councillor Bronte

Brant Alger (how did his ass get beat by a little Boy)

With 3 submissions:

Umber

Fitz Vacker

Quinlin Sonden (love wins)

Alden Vacker (love wins)

Sophie Foster

With 2 submissions:

Marella Redek

Cassius Sencen

Councillor Emery (shocked, I say)

Gethen Ondsinn

Kenric Fathdon

With 1 submission:

Prentice Endal

Dex Dizznee

Sandor

Stina Heks

Jurek

Ruy Ignis (I can’t believe he only got 1 I’m still in shock)

Rayni Aria

Former King Enki

Gisela Sencen (again, shocked she only got 1. it’s what I call misogyny)

Trix

Biana Vacker

With no submissions, but I was so angry they weren’t included that now they ARE included:

Councillor Alina (good god she has atrocities and defenders and is so pathetic she cannot pull a single hoe)

King Dimitar (it’s funny)

Mr. Forkle (there’s a lot that’s wrong)

Tiergan Alenefar (I was SHOCKED Prentice was submitted and not him and. I miss him.)

Luzia Vacker (have you seen her)

Fallon Vacker (have you seen him)

[lillibethnougatesquirethe3rd]

odd tags to find when I used them

[bookwyrminspiration]

in honor of its 2nd birthday here's the masterpost <3

shattered upside down masterpost

A KOTLC wings au

asks/other random posts can be found under the tag “kotlc wings au” or “shattered upside down”

fanart I am sent/reblog is under “shattered upside down fanart”

pinterest board

Spotify playlist

art of (some of) the revealed wings (second post)

ao3 link

The Descent: 7.3k words

The Shift: 7.8k

The Awakening: 8.7k

The Broken: 4.7k

The Hollow Echo: 7.6k

The Beasts: 6.1k

The Outside: 8.2k

The Regretted Reflection: 8.9k

The Little Reminders: 7.1k

The Reconnections: 8.6k

The Hints of Memories: 8.1k

The Cracked Facade: 8.2k

The Abandoned: 8.8k

The Sparks: 8.2k

The Burning Bridges: 7.9k

The Eye of the Storm: 8.3k

The Haunting Memories: 9.6k

The Midnights: 9k

The Past Reignited: 8.6k

The Altered: 7.7k

The Collision: 7.4k

The Protector: 9.6k

The Burned, Beloved, and Abandoned: 8.1k

The Walls Want to Love You: 8.0k

Their Bleeding Heart: 6.2k

Broken Chains and Blinding Flames: 8.1k

A Hint, a Secret, and a Warning: 8k

Love Me to Death: 8.1k

Remember-Me-Not: 6.6k

It Takes a Monster To Destroy a Monster: 7.6k

Love Me Like You Used To: 8.4k

Stitches and Open Wounds: 7.3k

Family: 8.5k

A Ghost Story: 6.1k

History Written in Fatality: 8.1k

Comfort and Contingency: 7.4k

Trust Me (I’m Lying): 7.8k

The Drowned City: 6.6k

Don’t Hold Your Breath: 5.7k

Half a Secret: 9.3k

Beginning Again: 5.1k

The Descent: 8.4k

Project Phoenix: 9.3k

The Ascent: 11.1k

Epilogue: WIP

10th Chapter Special: Deleted Scene; 1.1k words

[thatonesongyouretryingtoremember]

some crazy things Shannon put in KOTLC that I love

1. Marella gets vapes ("can of flavored air") from the school lunch line, she also bought some for Sophie as an exams present

2. There is a non-alcoholic carbonated(?) beverage that gets ppl drunk (we have no indication of minimum legal drinking age)

3. there is a holiday food that looks like those swamp hotdogs you can't eat

4. kelpie urine cures seasickness and yeti pee fixes burns

5. sasquatches exist, they are green, and they have beaks

6. el dorado is real and it's controlled by goblins, to get there you ride in an egg-shaped carriage pulled by a titanaboa through the earth's crust.

7. timezones are real, elves just don't subscribe to them. all elvin cities use the same time as London (I think, based on Legacy)

8. every elf speaks and reads their language instinctively from birth, but runes still evolve over time and the Vackers have a specific accent, which is considered aristocratic and correct.

9. dwarves have an underground tunnel that makes you hallucinate

10. two known monarchs of the intelligent species got their job by sabotaging their predecessor, one of them is friends with the main character.

11. Alicorns are still not considered an intelligent species, all legislation concerning them lacks their input.

12. trolls turn into babies when they get old, they finish gestation inside giant communal honeycombs, and newborns have a bloodthirsty stage.

13. Because of her genetics, Sophie can read any type of writing in existence EXCEPT for elvin government documents (and maybe dead languages)

please add on anything else you can think of!

[camelspit]

no but sopharella is so underrated. they are so. friends to strangers/enemies to friends to lovers. building up lost trust and learning to work together again. figuring out how to move on. learning about the other one again. god. i love them.

[mineralsrocksandfossiltalks]

Monday's Musings: The Development of Biomineralization

William Buckland first noted the seemingly rapid appearance f fossils in Cambrian strata in the 1840's.

And Charles Darwin discussed the then inexplicable lack of earlier fossils as one of the main difficulties for his theory of descent with slow modification (natural selection) in his 1859 book which you've probably heard of.

This seemingly sudden appearance of fauna raised three big questions: was there actually a mass diversification of complex organisms over a relatively short time during the early Cambrian? What caused such rapid change? What does it imply about the origin of early animal life?

Edward Lhuyd, the curator of Oxford Museum in 1698, first discovered Cambrian fossils in the forms of trilobites. From that point on, trilobites became some of the most important fossils for dating Paleozoic rocks (these are called index fossils). Buckland recognized that a dramatic step-change in fossils occurred near the base base of the Cambrian thanks to trilobites and Adam Sedgwick and Roderick Murchison used them for dating Cambrian and Silurian strata.

Charles Walcott suggested that there was an interval of time prior to the Cambrian fauna that did not preserve fossils or was simply not in the fossil record (maybe the rocks had eroded away before Cambrian deposition).

Today, we have fossil evidence that the earliest like goes back 3.8 billion years ago. Rocks of that age in Australia contain stromatolites,

colonies of microorganisms called cyanobacteria.

Fossils of more complex eukaryotic cells called Grypania have been found in China and Montana in rocks dating 2.1 billion years old.

Rocks from about 600-541 Ma have also been found to contain fossils that we now call the Ediacaran Biota but that deserves a post all on it's own.

A reevaluation of the Burgess Shale fauna in the 1970's sparked a renewed interest in the explosion.

Harry B. Whittington realized that many of the animals Walcott had found were just as complex as modern animals but they were also very different. He noted that Marella was clearly an arthropod but not a member of any known class.

He also noted that animals like Opabinia and Wiwaxia were so different than anything alive that they must belong to their own phyla.

Now, we know that there was complex life at the end of the Proterozoic Eon so the Cambrian is not the "beginning of life" like we used to believe. So, why is the Cambrian explosion still so important?

Biomineralization. This is the time period where hard parts began to develop. This is the process by which living organisms produce minerals often resulting in hardened or stiffened mineralized tissues. An example you probably don't think about is your own skeleton. Your skeletal tissues are made up of collagen and calcium phosphate. Other types of biomineralization include silicates in algae and diatoms (these often create chert in limestone) and carbonates (such as chalk) in invertebrates.

Why did hard parts start showing up in the early Cambrian and not before? One hypothesis is that atmospheric oxygen was finally high enough to allow metabolisms to work efficiently enough to create collagen, a protein made of amino acids that provides structural support in connective tissues.

Another hypothesis is an increase in the concentration of calcium in seawater. Animals that create hard parts from calcium carbonate do so in a very specific way. First, carbon dioxide gas must be dissolved in seawater. It then reacts with the water to create bicarbonate and hydrogen ions. That bicarbonate then reacts again with the water and creates carbonate and hydrogen ions.

Calcium is also an ion just floating about in the water column. Animals then absorb these ions.

The calcium ions bond with the carbonate ions to form calcium carbonate crystals inside the shell.

This increase in calcium could also have caused a high rate of erosion (a thought for another Monday).

A final hypothesis is that of predator-prey competition. There is evidence of predation in the Ediacaran fauna such as holes drilled into animals called Cloudina. While the appearance of predation wouldn't trigger hard part development, an increase in predators probably would. In the Burgess Shale alone there are dozens of carnivorous worms, anomalocarids and other arthropods, carnivorous molluscs, lobopods and early jellyfishes that would predate opportunistically.

Likely, it was a combination of all these things that led to the rapid development of hard parts. And hard parts stuck around too! Thank goodness or my job would be even harder than it already is.

Fossilize you later!