#and My Swordhand is Singing

[waterfishlol0]

Song of Destiny.

So sometimes i forget that Marcus Sedgwick died in November last year and when i remember i always make it a point to make something relating to his works. His book The Ghosts of Heaven is easily one of my top favorites. It helped me through rough times and i still read it over and over when I’m upset or bothered. This drawing focuses on the fourth quarter of The Ghosts of Heaven, The Song of Destiny. The idea of being lost in space for however long terrifies me and i felt the need to include everything i could remember in one page. The writing is the poem shown at the end and the first part of the same poem Charles Dexter recites to Bowman. I drew it without any sketch and a dip pen and ink on printer paper. (In my defense i had nothing else.)

Anyways i will forever love and adore Marcus’ works for however long i live.

1968 - 2022 ❤️

[remedyxtragedy]

Books I've really enjoyed reading in the past--

Good Omens (I Love Crowley and Aziraphale and the overarching theme, massive source of inspiration for how I'm writing Dragoslava and Chauncey's dynamic)

My Swordhand Is Singing (A fun and interesting read)

Animal Farm (really, really smart book in my opinion)

The Death of a Salesman (is a play but I read it class as though it were it a book so I'm including it anyways, beautifully deep and tragic though)

1984 (A bewildering story through and through, slight inspiration for some ideas I've incorporated in Idiosyncratic)

Fahrenheit 451 (very, very interesting and also a good source of inspiration for my book)

Of Mice and Men (easily one of the best heart-breaking stories I've ever read, haven't read a book that's made me emotional since, and the message is just brilliant)

Fun fact: I used to hate, hate reading and I've actually only recently started expanding my tastes, and now that I've finally discovered what genres interest me there are SOOOOO many more books I want to read and WILL read if its the last thing I do

[kayvsworld]

there is a book called My Swordhand Is Singing and its only when watching the witcher and wishing it had both more snow and more hurdy gurdy that i realize how deeply formative it was for me as a small child

boy have sword. winter is coming and it brings death with it. horse good

[emperorcrest-blog]

   on leaving, and never coming back.

 i . you leave on a cold night, while your father is asleep, with no indication and no letter and no nothing. perhaps he will think you have died. you almost long for it. the moon sits fat and pale overhead, and you turn your eyes up to it, look back at the fraldarius estate one more time, and leave. you shall not be coming back, you think. you have five years worth of time to kill. you know what the war will do to the nobility of faerghus and perhaps you’re a little selfish for wanting to run away from it, but meeting byleth made you realise more than anything else that what you really want is not a noble’s life, and never had been. the snow crunches beneath your boots, as you walk away, leaving your father alone in the mansion, with no one but the dust and the memories and your mother’s locked door. 

  your friends will fight this war until their lives are spent, and here you are, running away like a coward. you don’t want to think, you don’t want to breathe, you don’t want to look at it. 

 ( just a few weeks later, as you sit in a tavern, eighteen years old and surrounded by men a lot older than you with a lot more blood on their hands, you hear the news that the boar is dead. perhaps you should feel sadder than you do, but you squashed the guilt into a tiny part of your heart a long time ago. you would be the last person who could have done anything for him, anyway, right? you think of ingrid and sylvain, only the two of them left, and hope, more than anything, that they’re okay. )

  ii . killing stopped bothering you a while ago. some might call you a hypocrite, but it’s not so much the death that ever bothered you. it was the worship of it. martyrdom tastes bitter on the tongues of those who have to watch it being performed like some vile ritual, like some kind of holy act of violence. death is death. all things die. you, perhaps, once, as a small child, cried over a bird’s corpse, a rabbit with an arrow in its throat, screamed at some older children burning ants in the sun. you once, perhaps, shook with rage and fury at the concept of it. you pass corpses on the daily now. you cannot ride a horse ; they have never listened to you. glenn had one, all brown and wild who would roll her eyes at you and stomp your feet whenever you got too close. another mercenary, only a few years older than you, who introduces herself as beatrice, has a horse who tolerates you. you sit behind her, wrap your arms around her waist, and listen to the older mercenaries gossip. you really don’t care. bodies scatter the roads as you trot down. beatrice chats away as if nothing has happened, as though you aren’t at war, as though humans aren’t dead no matter where you go and as if the money you are earning isn’t stained in blood. you don’t mind it, though. she’s not ignoring anything. she’s just living her life. 

  iii . beatrice cuts her hair short in the middle of the night. you didn’t want to get attached to anyone, but the truth is the two of you work well together. she reminds you a lot of byleth in some ways, but also really doesn’t in a lot of others. thinking about byleth makes you sad and angry and something snarls deep inside your chest. they were your teacher, sure. and they died, sure. but why did their death affect you so much when people who you work with on the daily fall around you now and elicit nothing? you think it might be in the same way that your chest hurts when you imagine beatrice dying. you are tired of losing people. ( the boar’s face comes to mind, and you clutch your arms and rock, dig nails in. you feel nothing. he was no longer your friend. you feel nothing. ) 

 iv . ‘you’re a noble, aren’t you?’ a man sneers in a bar one night, catches your arm too tightly. beatrice sits forward, but you don’t look at her. you don’t need her help. ‘what’s a spoiled brat like you doing here, huh?’ you don’t bother to answer him, just drain your cup of beer and stand up to go. ‘hey, kid. i was talking to you.’ the phrase rubs you the wrong way ( glenn’s voice saying the same thing, but gentle and teasing, and glenn- ) and you stand suddenly, trying to push the arm off. 

  ‘he’s from faerghus, he’s not from round here, he’s a good mercenary-’ beatrice jumps in, but you snarl at her. she doesn’t need to fight your battles.

 ‘it doesn’t fucking matter where he’s from. they’re all the same.’ you sigh, make to walk towards the stairs and your room when you feel it: your hair is down, out of its ponytail, and he’s caught it in his fist, pulling you back by it and it hurts, not the worst you’ve ever had by a long shot but it hits something in your memory, a disappointed distant sigh and felix, you can do better than that. get up. you’re no use if you can’t swing that sword anymore, and your hair pulled taut, and after that you pulled it into a tight bun, and - 

  you spin, eyes flash blue with the crest of fraldarius, a disgusting woman’s disgusting blood setting you alight as you catch the man’s arm and spin him, throw him across the room, where he crashes through several tables and slams against the wall, and snarl, ‘touch me again and i’ll rip your fucking arm off.’ the entire inn is silent as you stomp upstairs, feeling your hair complain down to the roots. 

 in your room, under a shoddy concealing spell that annette taught you two years ago, and a few coverings, sits the aegis shield, glowing ugly gold in the darkness. you touch it, and it hums beneath you, warm and twitching slightly. you hate this thing, but under no circumstances can you loose it. your father probably regrets giving it to you. too bad his one surviving son is stricken and wayward. you don’t feel guilty at all.

 v . ‘i’m sorry.’ beatrice says the next day as you leave town, pressed to her back as she rides out of there as fast as she can. you don’t ask what for. you know. ‘i shouldn’t fight your battles for you.’ you still don’t answer. ‘i just… i don’t know. when i see you, i want to protect you.’ you don’t need protecting. ‘stupid, i know. you threw a man across an inn, and i want to protect you! stupid, right?’ she laughs, bitter. ‘you just… remind me of my brother. so much it hurts sometimes.’

‘stop.’ she does. you’ve heard enough. you hop off the horse. ‘goodbye, beatrice.’ you stare, hard, angry, cold. you do not think you shall see her again. 

 she smiles, sad and distant. ‘goodbye, felix. i don’t think i’ll ever forget you.’ and then she clicks her heels, and her horse runs down the road, leaving you there. 

 you walk until your feet ache. it takes you two days to reach the next town. you don’t regret a thing. 

 vi . you see terrible things in the four years you spend wandering fodlan. you see beautiful things. you see the ocean, you see the cities, forests and lakes and open skies. you see snow and sun, you see children in the markets and grandparents in the back streets. you see gold and silver and bronze, night and day, stars and storms. you loose your breath at it more than once.

 you see blood and gore and senseless slaughter. you see children die, and children kill. you see the world bare its teeth at you, and armies swallow the earth whole. you see so much in the next few years that it hurts. sometimes you forget who you are in the violence, in the swing of your sword, for single moments, before your crest sings through your swordhand again and you are reminded that your blood is disgusting and made for slaughter, and that you can never go home.

 you find her body a few years after you split ways. her eyes have wrinkles round their edges and her mouth is open in a final, desperate cry. you scoop up her body and dig until your hands bleed and put her in, heave a stone over the top. you have not the skill nor the energy to carve it, so you write beatrice in the dust with your finger. and then you turn away and never look back. 

 vii . your name is felix hugo fraldarius, and you are tired of losing people. trying to forget who you are didn’t work, and now here you are, your name weighty on your back like a shackle, and a bloodied hand, and tired feet. your name is felix hugo fradarius, and if one more person you love dies, you might scream. death is natural and sad and ugly, but you’re a magnet for it, it seems. you take jobs, take the money, and go. no one else can see their brother in you again. you won’t allow that to happen. no one can worm their way into your heart again and then take a bit of it when they fucking die on you. humans are so weak, and you are so tired of it. it’s been almost five years since byleth died, fell into the ground, disappeared forever, since they took a part of your heart that had just grown back from losing glenn with them. your name is felix hugo fradlarius, and you don’t know who you’re meant to be anymore. 

 viii . you trek back to garreg mach for no reason other than you have nothing else to do. you won’t go home to your father. you won’t stop being a sellsword. faerghus is done for. you’re so tired. you do not believe in ghosts - the dead are dead, after all. but for one moment, you see the boar, older and as tired as you are, something wild in its eyes that makes you sick, and byleth, as strange and as empty eyed as ever, and you think perhaps you might. but they’re back from the dead, or neither of them were dead in the first place, and all you, ungrateful and furious can think is why them, why not glenn? why not glenn? why not glenn?

[joestrummen]

pensivepblossom replied to your post “aaa i cant choose which book(s) to take to my nana’s house for xmas....”

Gothic zombie. Also I need the title of that one

@pensivepblossom my swordhand is singing by marcus sedgwick ! 

[lloronista]

32 Things About Myself

Tagged by @tsukiko-hibiki (thank you!! :3)

1) Name: (rather not give my full name sorry) 2) Nickname: Di 3) Zodiac sign: capricorn 4) Height: 5′4″ 5) Ethnicity: Mexican/German 6) Birthplace: United States 7) Sexual orientation: lesbian 8) Favorite fruit(s): strawberry, apple, watermelon, mango, tomato, avocado 9) Favorite season(s): winter & autumn 10) Favorite song(s): pretty much anything by Mother Falcon tbh ^^ 11) Favorite flower(s): sunflowers, roses, chrysanthemums, red lilies 12) Favorite book(s): Oooohh okay -Tales of the Otori series by Lian Hearn (and pretty much anything by this author, i love her ;~;) -The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller -Dragon’s Winter series by Elizabeth A. Lynn -Itachi Shinden: Komyo-hen & Anya-hen by Takashi Yano -Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel -Dracula by Bram Stoker -My Swordhand is Singing by Marcus Sedgwick 13) Favorite animal(s): ducks :3 14) Favorite beverage(s): coffee, tea, chai lattes 15) Favorite fictional character(s): Shisui, Itachi, & Sasuke are my main three~ 16) Dream trip: I reeeally want to visit Japan someday, especially for one of the summer festivals 17) Killed people: no 18) Siblings: two younger brothers 19) Horror films?: I like tasteful horror, like Blood: the Last Vampire or Crimson Peak 20) Reason to smile: spring classes are over and I’m gonna go see a movie tomorrow ^^ 21) Questions you are always asked: about my age/ethnicity 22) Favorite food(s): sushi, cilantro, guacamole, cheeseburgers, fried rice, anything sweet really  23) A gift you currently want to receive: $1 million so i can finally quit my jobs lol 24) OTP: shiita ❤️ 👌👌 25) One thing that changed about you: recently got a haircut i guess  26) Your first ship: I think it was Robin/Starfire from Teen Titans tbh :O 27) NOTP: sasu/saku & ita/saku (or basically any sakura/uchiha pairing tbh) 28) Fear that you want to conquer: not a real fear, but I’d love to overcome a lot of my own insecurities and self doubts that keep me from enjoying or even pursuing things I care about 29) Favorite fanfiction(s):  -Unvollendete by Lullabyes (Blood+) -If I Wanted You To by DoodlesOfTheMind (ItaShi) -Heart Shaped Box by guardian of the nakano (ItaShi) -Breathing Glass by BlackMajjicDuchess (ItaShi) -Paddling Downstream by Metallic_Sweet (Shouwa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu) -The Night of Sevens by the_escapist (Tales of the Otori) 30) Favorite sport(s): soccer, martial arts, kendo 31) Birth of your blog: I think it’s been 3-3.5 years since i started this thing, I don’t really remember haha 32) Followers: not very many

Not tagging anyone (sorry!) but feel free to do it, anyone who wants to! 

[flafflewaffles]

Tagged by @i-like-heda Thanks for tagging me! I have never done one of these before so yay fun! 

Rules: Answer 20 questions and tag 20 as many followers you would like to get to know better

Name: Sophia Nickname: My mum calls me various indian sweets and “lovely-jubly”  Zodiac Sign: Aries Height: 1.5m I think? So that’s like 5ft Ethnicity: Asian Indian  Orientation: I would say bisexual but I lean more towards girls, cause like, have you seen them?  Favourite Fruit(s): MANGOES Favourite Season: Spring Favourite Book(s): Impossible to choose one, some that come to mind are Skullduggery Pleasant, Shadow of the Wind, Dragon Keeper, Inheritance, My Swordhand is Singing, Pride and Prejudice, Diary of Anne Frank, Wonder Woman Rebirth, Supergirl Rebirth, The Dark Wife Favourite Flower(s): They are all so pretty though, I cannot commit to one.  Favourite Animal(s): Idk I like all kinds, they are so pretty to draw. But can I just go with dragons because dragons!!!  Favourite Beverage: Coca Cola Average Hours of Sleep: 6-8 hours Favourite Fictional Characters: I am definitely not going to remember them all but Korra, Asami, Kara Zor-El, Alex Danvers, Aloy, Commander Shepard, Liara T’Soni, Chrom, Lucina, Azura, Cinderella, Lexa, Rey the bae and I could honestly just keep going Number of Blankets You Sleep with: 1  Dream Trip: Can I pull a Titanic and say the stars Idk maybe Japan

Tagging some active followers @mere-cello, @quantumsapphic, @pandurs, @juraykings, @berrie33 and anyone that wants to do it for fun

[leffelovesdestrua]

What are your favorites books?

I’ve read hundreds of books and I have seriously loved at least 50 of them a whole lot but I’ll tell you some of the first ones that pop to mind :)

The Gargoyle is one of my favourite books of all time 

the City of Bones/Mortal Instruments was also really good. Any books she writes are awesome.

 I’m currently reading a series called the Fire Sermon trilogy, which is a post-apocalyptic series that is really different than most I’ve read. When I open up the book I can’t stop reading and finish it either in a day or in two.

I once read a novel called My Swordhand is Singing and it was AMAZING... any book by that author is so amazing. I bought so many after I read that first one.

In elementary school or early high school I loved the Ugly Pretty Specials Extras series and would recommend them to anyone. 

I really liked House of Leaves (I’m 50ish pages from finishing it) because it is probably the weirdest book I have ever gone through. It’s taken me a long time to get through it because of how bizarre the reading is. 

To be a little typical teenage girl (at the time) I really liked the Blue Bloods series. It wasn’t cheesy like typical vampire stories are and was actually really amazing. It didn’t focus on vampires but rather a secret society of people that have lived many, many lives. 

Uhm... any book by Ellen Hopkins is a MUST read. Her writing style is so interesting but somehow tells the story perfectly through the structure of her words.. idk how to explain it. 

I read this one really short book recently (only takes about 2 hours to read) called Wasteland by Francesca Lia Block and it was sooo, soo good. I didn’t expect the ending at all and I think I cried >

ENDER’S UNIVERSE !!!! 

A series of unfortunate events was my favourites in elementary school.

I’ll leave it at that for now ^-^; I could go on all day. 

[terrifictomholland]

📚 yeah so my swordhand is singing is the first book, then like 100 years later in Venice, the sequel the kiss of death happens

📚 recommend some books or even fics!

Oh okay! Thank you! 😅

Sleepover

[fanlit]

★★★★☆ My Swordhand is Singing: Refreshingly old-fashioned by @marcussedgwick @randomhousekids https://t.co/ZzdoqBDRwT  #SFF https://t.co/r2QV3E5cPX

[kayvsworld]

this just means the best way to protect ur house from vampires is to have an underground moat as a fence

please read My Swordhand Is Singing, an extremely formative book from when i was like 11 in which the main character’s family just fucking reroutes a river into a house moat in a stroke of genius for a vampire-free lifestyle 

they’d have to be able to walk over underground running water, though, because. plumming they’d be stuck it’d be bad

[fanlit]

★★★★☆ My Swordhand is Singing: Refreshingly old-fashioned by @marcussedgwick @randomhousekids https://t.co/ZzdoqBDRwT #SFF https://t.co/r2QV3E5cPX