#and ive pretty much have a history of isolating myself and ghosting people which Was Really Bad and im scared with how conflict avoidant

[tvmblrsillyman]

.

[chiconzin]

The unbearable smell of oranges

This is a short story I did for an English asigment, however I’m not very confident in my grammar and the story itself so I would be very happy if you could help me out with some good ol’ criticism.

I

Maybe it was her ever untied black hair, maybe it was her strange demeanour, or the history of tragedy surrounding the house in which she lived. Or maybe it was something more apparent what caused repulsion in the small group of children whom we used to play: it was her smell. Eurydice constantly was surrounded by an unmistakable smell, no one could agree on what it was. It was like the smell of citrus, like the smell of rotten oranges.

It took me my whole life to identify the source of that smell; that’s what this story it’s about.

Eurydice belonged to one of the old wealthy families in town. She lived with her grandmother until one day she presumably died from tuberculosis. Who were Eurydice’s parents or their whereabouts, no one knew, and because of her strange characteristics and behaviour she remained an orphan, living in the same decaying old house.

Many of Eurydice’s life and origins details remain unknown because of her compulsive habit of lying. Lying was the thing she was best at, and through her life that allowed her to live relatively comfortably without any family. She had a talent with words; she could convince anyone the sky was green if she wanted. Eurydice had a gifted writer's soul; her stories were capable of stripping people of their most prized possessions.

It was a strange relationship between the town and Eurydice. They had a terrific pity for her but never enough to make a simple quick act of charity. She was an outcast, forever an outcast.

One day, while we were playing, the topic of reading and writing came up. We all were pretty amazed to discover Eurydice could. She said she formerly had a private tutor and that she had mastered the art of reading to perfection.

Not believing her, I asked Eurydice to give me reading lessons. Surprisingly she accepted and set a date to meet up at her house. I didn’t know what to make out of this in the beginning, but I ended up going. After all, what was the scheme in teaching someone to read?

II

It was one of the hottest days of the year, not a single soul, was on the streets, not even birds would sing.

It didn’t take me a lot to find where Eurydice’s home was, after all, it was one of the biggest in town. Like most old buildings it was made out of quarry and tezontle. It had two stories and what seemed like a thousand rooms. It almost looked like a cloister. Above the massive engraved wood door was a family shield so eroded it was unrecognizable.

A hot current of wind was flowing under the door and inside the building, like it was breathing very slowly. Fear travelled through my body as I felt I was in front of an enormous ancient beast.

After knocking several times and not receiving an answer, I entered. When I got to the courtyard, I finally saw her. She was laying on a hammock reading with that dirty nightgown she invariably displayed, under the most immense orange tree my eyes have ever laid upon. The tree branches grew and spread throughout the balconies without a care in the world and there were thousands of oranges laying on the floor everywhere.

The air was saturated by the orange’s scent, an unusual warm smell, maybe a little sweeter than the characteristic orange’s perfume.

This would be the end of the story if the orange tree was the reason behind Eurydice’s fragrance.

Although similar, the aroma and aura from the house and the one emanating from Eurydice couldn’t be more different. The house fragrance was old and nostalgic, Eurydice’s one was longing, but a yearning for something not yet experienced.

Eurydice gestured to me to come and join her, and so I did. She started by teaching me the alphabet and the sound of each letter, then she made me try to read some old children's rhymes. She was a completely different person inside that house. Her charismatic tales, her spillable tenderness, and her infinite patience allured me quickly, and soon enough we became good friends.

It wasn’t long before I started taking daily lessons with her. I enjoyed how weirdly affectionate she was towards me and her even stranger ways of showing it. She would do and undo my braid over and over sometimes, other times while we lied on the hammock she would curiously touch my face as I was the first human being she ever saw. I didn’t like when Eurydice did that. I was an insecure child growing up and my smallpox scars made me inhibited. But thanks to her tenderness as time went by I started cherishing more of those times of idleness.

III

When I reached my teenage years, I finally started reading my first novel, I was a quick learner after all. As there wasn’t much Eurydice could teach me any more, the moments of boredom and frivolity in the hammock during her lessons became more frequent.

One of those days of sopor, Eurydice started touching my face again, caressing it rather, that’s when it happened. It was so faint and so light I didn’t read it as a kiss until she started engulfing me in them.

Without knowing what was happening and unsure of what to do next, I lowered my head and stayed very still. She took notice after a while of my reaction and then abruptly stopped. The air became heavy, the atmosphere unbearably unpleasant and uncomfortable so the lesson of the day was cut short. After that, I stopped hanging with her for a while.

I tried resuming my daily life, but something ensued after I left that decaying house. Slowly but surely I was being excluded from the local social activities, like the atmosphere Eurydice brought with her was always following.

My old-time friends started drifting away, and soon people began treating me as a foreign.

As more isolated became, I started perceiving it too: the smell of rotten oranges. Eurydice’s garden had followed me.

Initially, I thought it was in my hair, in the braid she often did and undid, so I cut it. Next, I thought the odour was emanating from the books she had gifted me throughout our lessons, so I burned them. I started getting rid of anything in my life that was associated with her in hopes the curse would stop.

The scent became unbearable; it wouldn’t go away no matter how many times I washed my clothes or myself. I couldn’t eat anything as everything tasted like those unduly sweet oranges, I couldn’t sleep at night as the warmth smell suffocated me and made me feel dizzy.

There was only one thing I could do: seek help with Eurydice.

IV

The day I returned to Eurydice’s house the smell stopped. When I entered, she was in crisis. The young girl told me horrible tales of what happened after I had left. Tales blurring the line between fiction and reality. She was delirious! All her charismatic lying started to flop as she would often confuse events described in the horror novels she often read with daily occurrences without order or logic.

I led her to the hammock and started reading to her as we would always do. I held her tight, as if I released her I would lose her forever. As the lecture continued, and we began to be absorbed in the dull descriptions of that bad written book, I finally found peace. The atmosphere didn’t smell like anything in particular, nor anything felt special in a singular way.

At that moment I felt like I could deal with Eurydice’s extravagances and daylight nightmares, I could even deal with being labelled as an outcast by the rest of the town just for little moments of peace like that.

After months of not seeing each other, I finally answered to the incident that made me run away from her and kissed her forehead as we lay under the orange tree.

As one often wishes while reminiscing of tales from the youth, I wish I could have made wiser decisions.

V

We would play pretend like when we were children, we would play to pretend to be in love with each other. Her particular talent in lying made her especially good at this. We would become the protagonist in her romantic novels to spend the infinite time that isolation offered us inside the house. The line between fiction and reality was non-existent in Eurydice’s rotten orange garden.

At first, it was fine when it was just Eurydice and me in the bliss of youth, until I had to coexist with the ghosts of her past and her made-up specters. The more open she became of her past and the enigmatic characters that were her violent parents and intrinsic family drama, the more confusing and inconsistent the overall narrative became.

On one thing she was saner than me: she wanted to abandon the house. But I wasn’t ready to confront the overwhelming smell of the outside world again. After all, wasn’t my fear of the aromatic curse the reason I bear with such a questionable character?

VI

As years passed by, Eurydice’s starchy whiteness started to become more spectral and her body acquired more translucid properties. Her coal-black hair had grown so much it dragged like the tail of a dress, and when she bent her head to kiss me I felt like a black rain poured on me.

Her sentences didn’t even make sense anymore, and sometimes she would call me by strangers’ names. She didn’t even remember who she was anymore. Sometimes Eurydice would stay still looking at something that didn’t quite exist. She was tired, a Quijote tired of hunting imaginary giants and offering love poems to Dulcineas.

And just like that, she stopped existing…

.... if she ever existed.

VII

When she was gone, I started reading over and over the bad written book that I read to her the day of my return to the house. Always the same story, always the same place.

And just like that, one day I felt again Eurydice’s scent now merged with the one of the house. I felt the weight of another person in the hammock, but I didn’t care to see who it was as it is useless to talk with those who have already left.

Just then I understood that Eurydice’s scent was the perfume that loneliness wears.

[disworl]

Alive, indefinitely.

I.

So, since I’ve been dutifully informed that since this is my blog and I can post hwhatever I want, I thought I’d talk a little about my ‘fic ‘Alive, indefinitely’.

The ‘fic was birthed by me realizing the implications of Hussie’s revision that all burgundy bloods have the ability to commune with the dead. For the most part, I dislike his changes where the trolls from Homestuck proper become near stock representatives of their entire bloodcaste, but at least, this one has compelling subtext instead of just seeming lazy. And it is that the bloodcaste that has the ability to commune with the dead is also the bloodcaste that lives the shortest and is the most likely to have friends and acquaintences who die often.

And who better explore that topic than Aradia? So I wrote the ‘fic, and it did branch out to be about her, partially as her role as a rustblood on Alternia. And so it grew bigger than just exploring the subtext. I knew I wanted it in little numbered parts that made vignettes, as I’d been working on writing longer stories and was worried I was losing my edge in vignettes and short fiction. Though the resulting ‘fic ended up 1,677 words (I intended to keep it under 1,000, though I’m not disappointed!), I’m still very satisfied with it and think the vignettes work. With the numbering of the vignettes, I also wanted to do an sort of Epileptic Bicycle and start skipping around numbers, to show that there was different amounts of time passing, and that things were happening in between. And because I just thought it was neat. The idea of a story with missing numbered chapters is very compelling. And anyway, I did have a skip, with the penultimate vignette being 5, and the ultimate being 10 (which upon thought really does make the ‘a lifetime later’ after the 10 work out mathematically*), but it played nowhere near as a big role as I would want to. Maybe some other time.

*Which since all the numbers are roman numerals, 10 ends up being ‘x’, which as a symbol is associated with death. I planned none of that (or at least I don’t remember it consciously) but I will take credit, regardless.

II.

For a second I thought Tumblr was more competent than it is, so I tried to insert a line break, but Tumblr is not competent, so have a fancy second section with big roman numerals instead.

Anyway, I’m just going to note and comment on some specific parts of the passage, because I can.

The internet is wide and wonderful, and it is through there that she learns about archaeology, the wonders lying just beneath the ground and thinks, to be an archaeologist would be an awfully grand adventure.

What Aradia thinks is a fairly straightforward play on the phrase, ‘to die would be an awfully grand adventure’. It's a neat way to both tie back the theme, and it also spared me from figuring out exactly how to phrase it.

She finds especially good company with one boy, his troll tag resting at the top of her chumproll. He’s a rustblood like her, a bit reserved but passionate about the mystery book he’s writing. Occasionally he sends her snippets from it, and while it’s a bit clumsy, he is always eager to hear about her archaeological expeditions, so she never mentions it.

When I wrote this part, I suddenly realized I needed an unnamed rustblood to die. I also realized it would be a good idea to also characterize him a little bit before killing him off, so you get at least the idea of what his and Aradia’s relationship was like, so I decided to use one of my long-derelict fantrolls.

So she starts to rebel. She grows her hair out, longer than the modest shoulder-length cut she had before. She lets it become wild, a sign of her own spirit and power. She starts painting her lips and lining her eyes in burgundy, a mockery of the high bloods who wear their blue hues as a fashion statement.

This is a combination of two of my headcanons about Alternian society: that long, wild hair is seen as a sign of power and sexuality (as expressed by the Condesce and other highbloods), and that wearing hemo lipstick and eyeliner is a high blood fashion trend.

When she is five sweeps old, she makes another close friend. He’s a bit shy, but unapologetic about what he likes – his fiduspawn collection, pupa pan, FLARPing – and that, as much as she loves Sollux, is a breath of fresh air.

Tavros is often done dirty by fanfic and fan-interpretations of Homestuck, and it often intertwines with apologism for Vriska and her abuse of him. He’s treated as a perpetually and naturally weak and insignificant, when having a person who is abusive like Vriska will make anyone unsure and rattled like that. It takes some digging, as the majority of Homestuck takes after Vriska’s batted around Tavros for quite a while, but underneath her abuse (and the effects from that abuse at the hands of Alternian culture) it’s clear that he’s still that unapologetically dorky kid, and even cocky at times. In his trollhandle adiosToreador, he’s not the Toreador - he’s the bull. And hopefully I could express that well in the space that I could.

She befriends Karkat through Sollux, and Terezi through Karkat, and it’s through Terezi that she learns about Vriska.

This is one of several sentences in this ‘fic that employ a certain sense of repetition and rhythm. Part of that is because it gives a motif of time, which is tied to death and destruction in Homestuck, and the other half is because I just... really like writing ‘em.

She still talks with Tavros, however, but now he’s uncertain, hesitant and ashamed, and a fair number of times when she trolls him he doesn’t reply, and when he does more than anything he talks about the things he’s experienced in his dreams, and she knows exactly who has been trolling him even if he doesn’t say it and –

– and Aradia watches her friend become a living ghost, bit by bit.

This is place where I forwent canon the most, earning the ‘fic its ‘mild timeline fudgery’ tag. Throughout writing this ‘fic I constantly had a tab open to either a page in Homestuck or the wiki, or both, in order to make sure I stayed as accurate to Alternian culture that I could (at least, in Homestuck proper). While there were a lot of gaps that I got fill in for myself, it’s just plain canon that Aradia sends the ghosts after Vriska immediately after she knows that Tavros is likely going to be paraplegic for the rest of his life. But I had written the sentence already (one of my favourite lines, really), and it just makes for a better story, at least in this ‘fic. So I kept it like that. There’s also a sort of cut-and-paste fudge in that sentence, too. I remembered that Tavros spent most of his time dreaming on Prospit just so he didn’t have to deal with Vriska’s abuse, but as it turns out, it happens after she god-tiers. So I just turned it into regular dreaming and thereby folded into the above canon discrepancy. But it’s definitely based on that later detail.

iv.

The shock of seeing Sollux actually at her hive is quickly overtaken by the shock that courses through her veins right after she realizes what is about to happen, and far too late to do anything about it.

I knew pretty early that I wanted the vignette of her death to be one sentence long, though I certainly ended up stretching that one sentence fairly far. Either way, it’s very isolated from the rest of the ‘fic, which is fairly on-par for the ‘fic style where a particularly hard-hitting or important sentence gets its own paragraph. Anyway, everyone knows how the story ends, and it’s sudden for Aradia, so I think putting it in one sentence both works structurally and artistically.

She’s tired of temporal inevitability.

She’s free of the endless orders and voices of the dead.

She, for the first time in her life, feels truly alive.

Instead of the pale shadows that clung to her hive, the hollow ghosts that people left behind, the dream bubbles are filled with countless iterations of her friends, and numerous others.

But even then, dying and waking up in foreign surroundings is a shock.

And really, there’s no-one else who would be a better guide to greet the dead.

At this point, I feel again, that going into detail would be dragging things out. I also wanted it to feel significantly different from the rest. So, where the other parts of the story are told through a sort of rolling tone of voice, through ‘the lens of age old history’ the rather straightforward sentences here are meant to sound very present.

[shidiand]

How do you imagine Tenco's Story ending in your head?

that is a GREAT but UNEXPECTED QUESTION freshlybaked "spider" bread and i'm really happy to have the opportunity to try and answer this ageless question that has burned within all of us in the tenco's story iv waiting room community since 2013. it is an incredible coincidence (or is it? 👀) that i was just talking to Risa about tenco's this (edit: yesterday) morning so i am extra double super in the mood to talk about Tenco's Story today. so excellent of a coincidence is this that i am tempted to refer you to them in case you wanted to hear their thoughts on the matter that would probably turn out super cool, but that is neither here nor there; let us talk Tenco's Story.

i of course must mention my unadvertised and modestly detailed commentary on tenco's i-iii at https://shidiand.tumblr.com/tencos, presenting slightly interesting facts in an unwieldy and difficult-to-use format, but as it dates back to june 2017, i want to take some time to understand my feelings about the series once more.

tenco's story is a series that has a lot of meaning to me.

i took on my current name of shidiand in november of 2013. i was still in 11th grade at the time, 4th year of high school, and a very socially isolated person. i should say i was introduced to touhou in 7th grade, 2010, so i was still working through a 3 years-strong phase of trying to simultaneously both find an outlet for and bottle up an endless wellspring of awkward weeaboo-gamer nerd energy at the time.

i had my first real foray onto the internet in 2010, tried out twitter, followed some RPers and other people who had Cool Touhou Usernames. didn't really go anywhere. i had maybe 50 followers, i dont really know the count but it was definitely a) double digits and b) pretty low. didn't know what to tweet about. didn't know how to hit it off with others. i think there was basically maybe only 3 other people i ever properly interacted with. oh shit i was playing league of legends at the time. oh my god. i really did play league of .. oh my god. let's move on.

aw shit im super digressing amn't i. well.

this is just how it goes when i write essays on tumblr.com.

i'm afraid you're just along for the ride at this point so please do your best to enjoy it.

i got kind of tired of twitter at the time because i didnt know what to do with it. didnt know how to interact with people and didnt find the people i was following interesting, so i ghosted on out of there by the end of 2012. didnt deactivate it until like 2015 but at that point that was just burning away my dark history. anyways. november 2013.

--im taking a lot of time here trawling through old files on my computer, my tumblr blog, notification emails still lying around in my gmail inbox from twitter, the dropbox i didn't actually use but it had several tenco's story pictures on it but i deleted them so this was useless, ... to trace the timeline of this story and im really seeing a lot of remnants of dark history here you know? did you know i wrote a letter to a girl i had a crush on valentine's day 2014, slipped it into her locker, and anxiously hung around nearby at lunchtime to see how she reacted at lunchtime? i certainly didn't, or at least i made darn ass sure to forget about this incredible virgin incident and not remember it, ever, until i came across the records of it that i thoughtfully preserved for the me of 5 years later today. ok well now i have to read the letter to see if it was as bad as it just sounded there brb

ok so the good news is that it was actually very focused on being positive and full of admiration for the cool things she did instead of being a confession letter so i am very glad i was able to be a respectful chad 5 years ago, but the bad news is that the jokes, the actual sentences i put together. oh my god. but i mean. well. at least i got the spirit. its certainly a step up from this other person in my grade, WEEABOO ANDREW, YOU MAY RECALL THIS STORY AND HIS NAME FROM PREVIOUS STORYTIMES, THE MAN THE MYTH THE LEGEND who came to school on halloween once cosplaying kirito from sword art online and got very possessive about people asking if they could hold his black replica plastic sword, and probably worse, dropped a "will you be my girlfriend" letter into the locker of my homie and fellow trombonist samantha, who was a little bit nerdy, hung out with the anime-likers who were actually sociable and fun to be around so you can imagine why weeaboo andrew was into her, which had i) a direct quotation from SAO chapter 16.5 (origin of the famous "glopping noise" line), and ii) a condom. jesus christ. i dont want to talk about this any more. next topic.

i also put this drawing of iku nagae and her skarmory (actually an albinoss from 18 DRAGONS) on the other side of the letter because it was the coolest thing i could think of drawing at the time. and i completely agree with 2014 me because it IS super fucking cool. hell fuckin yeah

https://shidiand.tumblr.com/post/76301993387/iku-nagae-ft-that-thing-that-supposedly-is-a

alright that was a fun little trip down memory lane but lets get back on track. november 2013. i started anew as shidiand. still awkward, still learning how to express myself and looking for my place among others. i followed some touhou bloggers, hung around r/touhou a lot as well. in december i got my first tablet for christmas, a wacom bamboo splash. i still use this thing! the usb cable disconnects if you bump it so i have to find just the perfect position to sit in whenever i want to draw, but its served me well. anyways. i was just starting to play around with digital art but i remember, probably just before new years, for some reason i wanted to find out more about tenshi hinanawi (i don't remember why. tenshi wasn't even one of my favourite characters at the time) so i went googling and right there on zerochan i found this:

https://www.pixiv.net/member_illust.php?mode=medium&illust_id=23525572

this was during my dark souls phase so i just went BANANAS at the sight of this. this was literally the coolest image i had ever seen in my internet life. That image alone made me want to draw in hopes that I could make something as cool as that someday.

it wasn't immediately after but i soon discovered tenco's story, and it was love. kannnu was my very first artistic inspiration, and for a long time, my only one. i absolutely idolized them at the time. since then, ive found other artists to look up to, in a more healthy manner, but to this day i still look up to kannnu, still admire their work a lot.

i played around with drawing, followed the lives of people on tumblr, started reading touhou fanfiction, made a new twitter. i met a lot of new people along the way. some people i havent stuck with, some i cut ties with, and some people i still keep in contact with today. over those long 5 years of being shidiand, i found a name (i used to use shidian and then shid, but someone called me shidi once and i realized that was a lot better), how to reach out to others, how to express myself, places that i could feel included in. this is why i owe a blood debt to evelyn, who permitted me to kneel at her throne and was like "yea ok you can join my discord server u seem cool". evelyn, if you were confused by me ominously mentioning this blood debt/blood oath in a tumblr reply 1-2 years ago, this is the context. those 5 years were like a coming of age of sorts, that i never had when i was in high school.

and my love for tenco's story, that inspired me to draw that day, has been with me since almost the very beginning of my time as shidiand. from the beginning, i have always encouraged people to READ TENCO'S STORY, like the kin of those who cry PLAY MELTY or WATCH SYMPHOGEAR. i think my very first sidebar description was something akin to a prayer, written in very choral language, hoping for the day tenco's story iv was completed, ..., "meanwhile, furious shitposting". kannnu's work, finding delight in whatever they chose to draw, has been at my side, all along. my true mentor, my guiding moonlight...

so that's why i still to this day love tenco's story so much.

let's talk about tenco's story.

tenco's story is a story told through single pictures. the plot is vague, and details are sparse. dialogue is rare. we only know what has happened; we seldom know why. furthermore, there are many gaps between scenes that the reader is left to fill in for themselves; we see only snapshots that form an hazy outline of the events that occurred, and must imagine the rest. motivations and explanations fail me. but even with a barebones plot, tenco's story has themes, and if nothing else, those have to be carried through.

the main theme, of course, is journey and travel, but there are also other ideas, too. i actually think they start to change as the series goes on:

book i, where tenshi runs away from home, is about striking out on your own. it's a very fun and unpredictable journey, together with a friend.

book ii, where tenshi and iku are separated, forces tenshi to find and rely on companions of her own even more. but they do so, and they are able overcome hardships, and there is food and festival.

book iii marks a climax, reasserting tenshi's goal of finding the sword of hisou. i feel like the journey shifts from a travel (visiting) to a path forwards (making your way through). perhaps this is just something i get from knowing the locations from dark souls (Anor Londo, New Londo Ruins, the Great Hollow), but the locations start to give more of a sense of verticality, like they're emphasizing tenshi's climb to the summit. the hardships and enemies are the greatest they've been yet, and right when they near the top, tenshi and iku start to bleed. the book ends on an uncertain note.

if i had to describe the type of journey and travel that tenshi and iku undertake, there's this sense of wonder at discovering new places, wandering from vista to vista in delight, but also a sense of conquering, making it through a difficult patch. the sequence from pages 2-44 to 2-51, taken together, convey this sense of overcoming the best. it's one of my favourite parts. again, although the tone definitely starts to lean towards struggle in book iii, i think tenco's sense of wonder really is the heart of the series. there's no map of the world, no predicting where tenshi and iku will end up next. and through their travels, though they come across many enemies, they also find friends -- places of refuge, places full of life, people who will look after them for a few days, companions who will stay with them for the rest of the journey. at the end of book iii, we see a long haired tenshi with purple hair being impaled by the sword of hisou (3-33, see also this extra illustration that risa pointed out to me http://sinnnkai.blog.fc2.com/blog-entry-195.html), and regular short haired tenshi continuing on her journey (3-42). if we ignore the out-of-story images where tenshi has the sword of hisou, tenshi has actually only ever used her sunlight blade (2-24, 3-26, etc), so i think that the long haired tenshi on 3-33 is a different person altogether. (if i had to guess, she might be the purple haired woman in the top left of https://www.pixiv.net/member_illust.php?mode=medium&illust_id=35443328 as we have never seen that woman appear anywhere.) she probably has something to do with the flashbacks at the end of book ii and she might somehow be short-haired tenshi at the same time, but this is just speculation.

however, in 3-43, tenshi's hair is rather blue, so i don't know if this is the purple haired woman or not. if it is, tenshi is probably still fine and closing in on the summit, but if it isn't, then it's very worrying to see a picture of tenshi without any of her companions. it's very ominous.

meanwhile, iku, while climbing the red carpeted corridor, is stabbed, and disappears for a few pages. there's a black page, a shot of a shrine that strongly resembles the hakurei shrine, and a picture of iku standing behind someone in a tux, with the line "In the past, I was saved by the lady I was serving, you see?". and then iku wakes up in a field of flowers.

i think what this scene makes clear is a theme that has continued to appear and reappear throughout every book of "being saved, being aided by someone's kindness".

i think another theme that is implied and has to be addressed by this story of running away from home is "return". something im imagining is that the reason tenshi makes finding the sword of hisou her goal is because she wants to have something to prove herself with, to vindicate her when she comes home. but i don't think she needs to prove anything, and i ultimately think that she would be happier spending the rest of her life exploring.

so i think this should be what happens in the ending.

open on iku's journey, and give her a long sequence of travel without seeing tenshi. underline her newfound resolve. she climbs to the summit with albinoss, and finds the rest of tenshi's companions fallen. and in the last room is sword of hisou tenshi, who has lost herself, and it comes down to iku to bring her back. after a difficult battle, when both of them are on their last legs, iku is unable to stand any longer. but at this moment tenshi sees her companions struggling to get back up and reach her, and that's what brings her to her senses. and iku gets to see how many friends tenshi's been able to make on her own, and they finally and properly reunite. together, tenshi and iku carry each other out of the last room.

i don't think it's necessary to return to heaven. as a conclusion, dedicate some time to tenshi and iku travelling together. they're on their way back, revisiting old friends who helped them along the way, enjoying the journey. their last stop is the house of the elderly nawis (1-42). tenshi shows off the sword of hisou; she decided to keep it not as a trophy to show her family but as proof of the bonds of her companions. surrounded by friends, tenshi and iku decide to part ways with each other, knowing that the other will be alright. iku drifts among the clouds once more, and tenshi sets off for the horizon.

that's the plot that i'd write/just wrote. i don't really expect tenco's story iv to ever come out, though. i mentioned my first sidebar description earlier in this essay, but of course, you can see that it's been changed. 2 years ago, i read my hopeful prayer once more and was struck with a terrible melancholy, so now it reads this: "having come to terms with the fact that tenco's story iv will never be released, i can still live, knowing that the spirit of the journey will live on through kannnu's original works [...] meanwhile, furious shitposting".

on one level, tenco's story is a story, but in the process of following it, i came to think of the work itself as a journey too. you can constantly see kannnu's improvement between and even within each book. they have always drawn whatever they liked; what plot matters in the face of "I wanted to draw a beautiful sky." "I wanted to draw a fantastic battle." "I wanted to draw Dark Souls and Monster Hunter and Pokemon and Brave Fencer Musashi and Bokura no Taiyou and Touhou."

its not really kannnu's style to go back and tie up old ends. they just draw whatever makes them happy. so as i watch them continue to draw beautiful places and fantastic creatures, new characters heading out on journeys of their own or just enjoying their everyday lives, it's as if tenco's story never ended. the limits and consistency of that world ignored, and a new one springs up; in a way, the world of tenco's, which had such thin boundaries, just gets bigger.

but even so, having said all that, i still see them draw that short-haired tenshi from time to time. it makes me happy to see them remember tenco's story with such fondness. often crossing over with orion or roar or elweiss, you can see tenshi on another journey.