#and the dynamic of the immortal falling in love with the mortal whose time is coming dangerously close to an end

[bhaalsdeepbat]

Apparently cooking up a hellspawn one shot 🙏

[yeonban]

𝐒𝐇𝐈𝐏𝐏𝐈𝐍𝐆 𝐈𝐍𝐅𝐎. answer the following for your muse(s) so people know how shipping works on your blog.

𝐖𝐇𝐀𝐓'𝐒 𝐘𝐎𝐔𝐑 𝐎𝐓𝐏 𝐅𝐎𝐑 𝐘𝐎𝐔𝐑 𝐌𝐔𝐒𝐄𝐒? — 99.9% of the time I have no set otp from the canon materials, so my otps are always the ships I get going with my friends on this blog through rp & plotting! I don't think something canon can give me will ever beat the love I gain for a ship when I see how well my version of a chara meshes with someone's portrayal and how excited we both get while writing/talking about them!! Every single ship I have on this blog is my otp for that respective muse and usually my only ship too bc I grow to love it so much it completely overshadows any other romantic possibility for my muse.

𝐖𝐇𝐀𝐓 𝐀𝐑𝐄 𝐘𝐎𝐔 𝐖𝐈𝐋𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐆 𝐓𝐎 𝐑𝐏 𝐖𝐇𝐄𝐍 𝐈𝐓 𝐂𝐎𝐌𝐄𝐒 𝐓𝐎 𝐒𝐇𝐈𝐏𝐏𝐈𝐍𝐆? — Pretty much anything that's not part of the disgusting de.ad dov.e/in.cest/pedo.philia/chea.ting category! I go equally as hard for vanilla ships that are the sweetest couple that has ever walked the Earth, and for batshit insane ships that would murder others and even each other out of love or possessiveness! Most of my muses are erm....... full of Issues so the chances are they'll be the perfect partner for their s/o but bring a whole bag of toxicity when it comes to others (<-particularly possessiveness; someone looks at their s/o and that person is GONE gone).

𝐇𝐎𝐖 𝐋𝐀𝐑𝐆𝐄 𝐃𝐎𝐄𝐒 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐀𝐆𝐄 𝐆𝐀𝐏 𝐇𝐀𝐕𝐄 𝐓𝐎 𝐁𝐄 𝐓𝐎 𝐌𝐀𝐊𝐄 𝐈𝐓 𝐔𝐍𝐂𝐎𝐌𝐅𝐘? — It depends on the muse! If the muse is a minor, then someone within a year or two of their age is the most I'd be willing to accept. But for adult muses I'm much more flexible, especially since I have a bunch of mortal/immortal ships going on! Typically I'm more of a fan of ships that are roughly the same age since they'd understand each other better thanks to no generational gaps, but again, this depends entirely on the muse and dynamic we're talking about, and I'm always down to try something else if the romantic interest is there between our muses!

𝐀𝐑𝐄 𝐘𝐎𝐔 𝐒𝐄𝐋𝐄𝐂𝐓𝐈𝐕𝐄 𝐖𝐈𝐓𝐇 𝐒𝐇𝐈𝐏𝐏𝐈𝐍𝐆? — Definitely. Shipping with me means my muse will forever be tied to yours and I don't take that lightly at all! For us to ship we need to be friends, we need our portrayals to mesh well, we need our muses to fall in love organically instead of us discussing shipping from the get-go ooc, and I need the other mun to be fine with becoming singleship with me for that muse (<-aka only shipping that muse with me); all of which are pretty big steps to get through! But rest assured that if we do ship I'll always be thinking of our ship and my muse will never move on to someone else (<-guy whose muses regularly turned noship the second their partner left tumblr bc they were unable to feel interest for any other charas they interacted with henceforth). If we ship, your muse becomes part of my muse's canon; they'll be in hcs, threads, even ooc chatting with other people. They'll become a huge part of my portrayal, so I never hurry into it! I want to be sure that the other person won't take their muse off the roster or drop the ship in a few months' time while I'm still sat thinking about our ship 7 irl years from now.

𝐇𝐎𝐖 𝐅𝐀𝐑 𝐃𝐎 𝐒𝐓𝐄𝐀𝐌𝐘 𝐌𝐎𝐌𝐄𝐍𝐓𝐒 𝐇𝐀𝐕𝐄 𝐓𝐎 𝐆𝐎 𝐁𝐄𝐅𝐎𝐑𝐄 𝐓𝐇𝐄𝐘'𝐑𝐄 𝐍𝐒𝐅𝐖? — More or less around the undressing part, but I'd already be tagging it as ns.fw as soon as I'd imagine the scene is too much for someone to see while randomly scrolling tumblr near irl people!

𝐖𝐇𝐎 𝐀𝐑𝐄 𝐎𝐓𝐇𝐄𝐑 𝐌𝐔𝐒𝐄𝐒 𝐘𝐎𝐔 𝐒𝐇𝐈𝐏 𝐘𝐎𝐔𝐑 𝐌𝐔𝐒𝐄 𝐖𝐈𝐓𝐇? — Like I said above, I don't really have any ships outside of the ones I cook up with my ship partners! It's very rare for me to dwell on canon ships and I never ship my muse with more than a single portrayal so I never end up seeing them romantically inclined for anyone else other than their singleship partner. At best, I could maybe list two people overall for a few select muses, but more often than not that's already a stretch.

𝐃𝐎𝐄𝐒 𝐎𝐍𝐄 𝐇𝐀𝐕𝐄 𝐓𝐎 𝐀𝐒𝐊 𝐓𝐎 𝐒𝐇𝐈𝐏 𝐖𝐈𝐓𝐇 𝐘𝐎𝐔? — If our muses are just flirting with each other and there's no intention to get properly romantically involved with one another, then no. But if our muses are in love with each other after regularly writing together and you're willing to ship with me seriously (which, again, I know is a big decision to take bc I expect the both of us to be singleship for them!) then you can 100% ask me and chances are I'll say yes in a heartbeat! I myself don't usually ask people to ship bc I don't want to mess with their flow and potentially make them uncomfortable (<-especially if I know they're multiship and I'm unsure whether they'd be willing to become singleship with me) so unfortunately the other person will always have to be the one doing the asking, but rest assured I'm harmless so there's nothing to fear! ADHSAJDHSJ

𝐇𝐎𝐖 𝐎𝐅𝐓𝐄𝐍 𝐃𝐎 𝐘𝐎𝐔 𝐋𝐈𝐊𝐄 𝐓𝐎 𝐒𝐇𝐈𝐏? — I don't plan to ship (hence 50% of my muses being noship) so when I do ship it's because a dynamic I'm writing with someone has me and my muse #Obsessed. MEANING, I like to ship whenever chance wills it that my muse meets a chara they're really interested in and my + that mun's portrayals mesh well together! Whether that happens weekly or once in 5 irl years is not up to me though.

𝐀𝐑𝐄 𝐘𝐎𝐔 𝐌𝐔𝐋𝐓𝐈𝐒𝐇𝐈𝐏? — No. ADHGADSAJDJH I might sound #quirky but I simply don't have the energy to keep several ships going considering how many muses I have. If I had 2+ ships per muse I would simply turn to dust on day two of writing them! That, and my muses tend to love so deeply when they fall in love that it's literally a mission impossible for them to even look at someone else after they've fallen in love with a chara. I used to try to be multiship a few years ago but frankly neither my nor my muse's soul was in the 2nd/3rd/etc ships bc my muse didn't feel it as much as they felt the 1st one, so I simply stopped forcing my muse & myself into writing ships just for the sake of shipping. This is why I'm not multiship and since I don't want to feel like ship fodder, this is also why I won't ship with multiship blogs. [Romance lead vc] If we ship you're the only one for me 🌹

𝐀𝐑𝐄 𝐘𝐎𝐔 𝐒𝐇𝐈𝐏 𝐎𝐁𝐒𝐄𝐒𝐒𝐄𝐃 𝐎𝐑 𝐒𝐇𝐈𝐏 𝐌𝐎𝐑𝐄 - 𝐎𝐑 - 𝐋𝐄𝐒𝐒? — That depends on what we mean by this ADJSAHDSAGDJ if you mean wanting more ships, then usually nah. I'm good with my muses being noship and maybe occasionally flirting with people they come across with no intent of transforming that flirting into romance. Shipping is never a priority on this blog. But if we mean how I feel when I already have a ship going? Absolutely, downright obsessed with it. I'll be thinking of them while awake and while asleep and giggling about it like a highschooler in love all the while!!! No matter how much or little I post about my ships, trust me that they always are on my mind no matter what I'm doing or how much time has passed.

𝐖𝐇𝐀𝐓'𝐒 𝐘𝐎𝐔𝐑 𝐅𝐀𝐕𝐎𝐑𝐈𝐓𝐄 𝐒𝐇𝐈𝐏 𝐈𝐍 𝐘𝐎𝐔𝐑 𝐂𝐔𝐑𝐑𝐄𝐍𝐓 𝐅𝐀𝐍𝐃𝐎𝐌? — I feel like I'm repeating myself atp but back to #1 we go JADASDHGASDGHSAJ my favorite ship in every fandom is the one I'm actively shipping my muse with (<-also typically the only ship I have for that fandom). But outside of ships for my muses, I'm always the biggest fan of me x my favorite character <3

𝐅𝐈𝐍𝐀𝐋𝐋𝐘, 𝐇𝐎𝐖 𝐃𝐎𝐄𝐒 𝐎𝐍𝐄 𝐒𝐇𝐈𝐏 𝐖𝐈𝐓𝐇 𝐘𝐎𝐔? — Write with me! Chat with me! Come up with various intertwined plots/verses for our muses! The easiest way to get me and my muse interested is by sending me a bunch of things to reply to. Some might not spark inspo, but others might! That said, there's no 100%-going-to-work recipe I can give you for shipping with me. The main point that leads me down the shipping route is if my muse likes yours (<-which can only happen if we actively interact first) and is willing to let go of their ~lone wolf persona~ for your muse. Now what that entails depends on which muse we're talking about since the thing that would make one of them fall in love would disgust another. If you want to know a specific muse's romantic preferences, feel free to shoot me an ask or dm about it anytime!

Tagged by: @minban Red did you know I'm kissing you passionately right now. Tagging: @achroanimus / @antinomos, @cauterisen, @effigist / @cinderlynx / @longerhuman, @diuvus, @inhaunts, @hunting-songs & whoever else sees this!

[viviane-lefay]

After seeing all these gijinka King Boo interpretations - i.e. him being able to shape shift between his regular boo form and that of a human man - I thought I'd give this a try, as well, and do my own version ... because why not.

In that case, especially, I have to say the ship of Hellen and him has quite grown on me, and I really, really like it, tbh.

It's not my usual villainxheroine constellation, but since King Boo strikes me very much as a tsundere type of character, I find this a really interesting union.

Aside from that, they'd be quite the power couple - which is nice, too.

~*~

At this point, some headcanon I have about them:

With non-carnate, immortal beings like King Boo and Hellen, the way they fall in love is a little different compared to mortals. They only fall in love once, and if they do, it's forever. Also, their feelings only deepen and intensify over time, unlike it is the case with mortal humans, where often the reverse is true (although not always).

---

I think the concept of soulmates plays an essential role here, and that they wouldn't fall for anyone but their divine partner (they are pretty much indifferent to anyone else, actually), which makes it a very soul-based union.

---

Once they do meet said partner, they recognize them on a subconscious level. Some fall in love right away, others need a while to realize it - but both feel something instantly, it is just a matter of how cognizant they are of it.

---

In their case, Hellen was the one who immediately knew, while King Boo, proud man that he is, was quite reluctant to recognize and admit it, and was very standoffish at first (honestly, he reminds me very much of Mr. Darcy in that regard).

[ A little shout-out here to TheLilyoftheValley, whose lovely fics (these two, especially) illustrated this dynamic quite nicely. We get to see KB's internal conflict concerning Hellen, and how his outward behaviour hardly betrays what he actually feels - while for the reader it is pretty obvious that he loves her. Anyway, they were very well-written, and I really enjoyed reading them! ]

---

Once he caved in, however, it was quite a one-eighty in terms of his behaviour, producing a completely gobsmacked Hellen, who was't expecting such a thing from him - especially upon confessing his undying love for her in the most passionate manner.

[ If I'm already at it with the Darcy-comparisons - that would be a good one, too - remember these confession scenes!? Yeah, like that - except I rather imagine him being a little more fierce, kissing her like Rhett does with Scarlett. And that Hellen is far from being as oppositional as Lizzie or Scarlett, of course, as this isn't her and KB's dynamic.]

---

Regarding the dynamic of their relationship, once it is established, I absolutely love the thought of it being similar to that of Gomez & Morticia Addams, with them being ardently in love with each other, and not afraid to show it - which is quite of a contrast in his case, compared to his former reserve, as it is now evident for all that he adores her just as much and as deeply as she does him. His Gomez side just needed a bit to come out of its shell.

It would certainly fit their dramatic personalities.

[ From what I've seen so far, I'm not the only one with that preference, apparently, which is nice. Mutuals are always welcome and appreciated! ]

[merryfortune]

Day 12 / Shame

Clover and Violets 2021

Ship: Isolationshipping | Aki/Misty

Universe: Alternate - Gods & Goddesses

Word Count: 1,654

Rating: M

Tags: Inspired by Eros & Psyche, Nudity, Sexual References, Toxic Relationship, Tragedy, Minor Injuries/References to Blood

   Once upon a time, in a certain dominion, ruled by a certain king and a certain queen, was a princess born to them who was rumoured to have more admirers than the God of Love himself. It was said that peasants, bards, and soldiers would all gather in the pavilions and the parades that she would grace, to swoon and proclaim love for her. Oh, the dominion adored this princess endlessly in favour of neglecting proper worship of the God of Love, Divine.

   The one and lovely Princess Aki was rumoured to have dewy skin and lips like rose petals; the sweetest smile and eyes of umber; hair that shone like blood yet a temper that was mild and agreeable. She spoke with a kind voice with a delicate timbre; her songs and hymns heard from miles and miles away and the God of Love saw it for himself.

   How she tended to the sick; how she tended to the poor; how she paid her dues and did her curtsies. It was enough to drive any immortal to madness. 

   Thus, from the heavens, Divine watched with a wrathful as eye this mortal girl accrued all the acclaim that was so rightfully his in this kingdom of foolish and lustful mortals. Enraged with the chastity and the courtesy, Divine decided to do something about this wretched maiden who had incurred his envy and ire. Neither a good look for a supernatural power such as he. So, he fetched a deity minor that was part of his entourage, who at least knew her place in the grand scheme. The one whom he sought was the sullen cupidic goddess, Misty Lola, a woman who was the physical manifestation of Lust and Desire. 

   “Take this bow and arrow, my good daughter,” Divine snarled, “and make it so that this Princess Aki falls in love with a heinous beast.”

   “Yes, of course, sir, as you have said, it as it shall be done.” Misty said with a bow of her head.

   She accepted the weapon and it felt light in her hands. As though it had been carved just for her; she slung the quiver over her naked back and she nocked the string to the bow just for practice. She looked down the straightness of her finger and she pretended to fire an arrow. Her approach, methodical and tactful, was exactly what the God of Love wished to see from her.

   “Good, now understand. The silver tipped arrows are coated in a poison that creates hate in the pricked; the gold tipped arrows are coated in a nectar that creates love in the pricked.” Divine told her.

   “Yes, sir, I understand. I will ensure that Princess Aki falls in love with the first boar whom she sees.” Misty assured him.

   Divine flicked his hand at Misty and she was gone with the winds.

   In winds dashed through the rolling hills and acadian forests of the mortal realm that belonged to the dominion of Princess Aki’s parents. There, on the palace grounds, in the gardens that were bordered by the woods, Misty found the maiden who had incurred the wrath of the gods and she was immediately struck by Princess Aki’s obliviousness.

   Her ignorance was to be both her bliss and her curse, Misty thought to herself as she readied her bow and arrow. 

   Misty breathed and she exhaled the unique zephyr of the divine. She took her aim and at the point of her finger, she became entranced by her prey. How she moved so gracefully through the grounds, taking care of the garden. Adoring every petal on every rose, how she watered them and fed them scraps from the royal kitchen. It was pure love. And to a minion of the God of Love, whose love only knew genitals and eroticism, there was nothing more disgusting that pure love and innocence.

   All opinions Misty had the wondrous Princess Aki were swayed and became contrary to her orders belonging to Divine.

   Misty had to look away. Her heart hammered in her chest and she felt the leather of the quiver’s strap between her breasts become raw and sore on her skin.

   She returned the arrow that she had initially poised. She returned gold for silver. Misty would not ensure that Divine’s cruelty would be enacted. But she also did not ensure that the cruelty of fate and coincidence would not be enacted either.

   The very same arrow she intended to replace in her quiver pricked her. She immediately felt the golden blush of aphrodisiac nectar in the ichor of her blood. Her moonstone cheeks hued the faintest pink as her eyes still remained upon her prey: Princess Aki. And it became love at first sight.

   Misty was harrowed by the experience. She had never known love in the emotional sense, only the carnal. And she hated it. She couldn’t bear how her heart pounded nor how dazed her mind became.

   In her haste, she grabbed that second arrow - silver tipped - and she fired it at Princess Aki.

   Right in her heart, liked a stuck fawn, Princess Aki felt the arrow. She looked up, towards where it was fired, and she saw the most peculiar sight in the gardens: a naked woman with hair like ebony and skin like ivory. And it filled her with rage.

   Misty had to retreat at the sight of her love calling for guards to hunt her. So, she vanished in the winds once more, leaving behind the glitter of moonstones in her wake. She returned to the heavens and Divine was quick to greet her.

   “Hail, Misty, how goes thy mission?” he inquired sharply.

   Misty stood, ashamed of herself, but she nodded. “She has been struck with an arrow that will have cursed her life, believe me, it is done.”

   Divine eyed her curiously but he dropped the subject. His whims had been placated and so, he moved onto the next mirror and the next desire which ate his attention. Leaving Misty be with her guilt. 

   She had to get closer to the object of her affections. She had to.

   And sensing foul play, a naked woman in the gardens, never a good omen and the surest sign of snakes and treachery, the King, Princess Aki’s Father, sought the word of an oracle.

   In a prophecy, the oracle informed the King that his daughter’s marriage was imminent and the bridegroom would be a horrid monster: a lizard-like creature that harassed the world with floods and ice, was feared even by the gods. The King was horrified to hear this but was told that there was no way to reverse this prophecy and defying it would lead to worse and greater doom than simply letting the monster takes it bride in his darling Princess Aki.

   The prophecy, however, was unbeknownst to Misty who simply offered the invitation with anonymity. She desired to know her love, even if it was by deceit. She was surprised when the King and Queen permitted her marriage to Princess Aki but Princess Aki was horrified by it.

   She was given all the rites of a bride and a corpse. Taken to a secluded location by the cliffs, where the ocean raged below and when all the mortals left, she was then accepted by the supernatural powers that were.

   The winds stole her up and delivered her to her new house. She wandered it cautiously and was awed by the decadence and splendour. Misty watched from other rooms, letting Princess Aki wander the halls: gorgeous forest scenes were painted on the walls, the ceilings were done in citrus woods and she was entertained most grandly by the dining hall. The food was served by invisible phantasms and there was a lyre that played itself.

   Even from afar, Misty was content in knowing her bride was happy. Glad that the horrid monster who lurked at least had her best interests in mind and she willingly entered their marital chambers which were darker than the darkest night. It was then and only then that Misty entered the same room as her bride and Princess Aki cowered in the covers.

   “Who goes there?” Princess Aki shouted.

   Her fear was palpable. Misty found it adorable and so she spoke in turn, serene. “Peace, my lady, only wish to lie beside you in sleep.”

   Princess Aki was put off by the disarmingly quiet voice. Feminine and melodic.

   “You do not wish to devour me, do you?” Princess Aki asked.

   Misty could have laughed but she did not. “No, my lady, I only desire simple coexistence with you and then, at dawn, I will be gone, not to return again until the nighttime.”

   “Very well.” Princess Aki replied.

   She settled in her bed and Misty came beside her. Princess Aki was harrowed as she felt the sheets move around her, felt the bed bow and yet, it did not do so with much effort. She slept but she slept fitfully; Misty, however, could not sleep a wink. This was all she would ever be permitted of her love, so she spent her night observing her lover in agony because when the morning came, and it would inevitably, she would have to take her leave.

   It agonised Misty to remove herself from the master bedroom come morning and she did see the bittersweet confusion of Princess Aki when she found her marital bedroom empty in the light of dawn but this was the dynamic that Misty had brought upon herself. She had fallen for the maiden who had unknowingly incurred the wrath of the god, Divine and Misty did not want to bring knowing wrath upon either herself or her bride if their union were to come to Divine’s knowledge - or even the knowledge of any mortal or immortal.

   But she could dream. She could have shameful dreams of domestic, wedded bliss between herself and her bride.

[theholycovenantrpg]

CONGRATULATIONS, MIMZ! YOU’VE BEEN ACCEPTED FOR THE ROLE OF RAPHAEL.

Admin Rosey: I never really thought that Raphael’s application would be so f u n to read. Macabre? Absolutely. Impassioned? Of course. But hilarious to the point where I was giggling? Definitely unexpected but that is what made this so enjoyable and it is ultimately why this application received a r e s o u n d i n g yes from each of us. There was a perspective that I always envisioned for Raphael but was never able to articulate it myself until you laid it out, word by word, with this application, Mimz. Raphael is such a multi-faceted and character that holds so much potential, and the way that you wove it into every aspect of the application made this so fun to read. Thank you so much for taking the time to produce such a wonderful application! Your faceclaim change to Kendrick Sampson has been approved. Please create and send in your account, review the information on our CHECKLIST, and follow everyone on the FOLLOW LIST. Welcome to the Holy Land!

OUT OF CHARACTER

Alias 

mimz

Age

21

Personal Pronouns

she/her

Activity Level

i’ll typically check the dash every day, and i try not to keep replies stewing for longer than a couple of days! that said i can be a little slow, especially around exam seasons.

Timezone

pst

Triggers

REMOVED

How did you find the group?

miss minnie bleubeard’s blog

IN CHARACTER

Character

raphael, with a fc change to kendrick sampson

What drew you to this character? 

short answer: divine amorality sexy HAHAHAHA

long answer: there was something i read a little while ago about some of the best surgeons being able to dehumanize their patients to a rather frightening degree. there’s a level of abstraction that you need in order to not let your empathy get in the way of the practice of medicine; ultimately, a body is a body is a body, right? and then there’s the moral quandary of healing - it is a doctor’s duty to heal, but what does that actually mean? to what extent is a doctor’s duty to relieve suffering? to obstinately prolong life? if the body heals but the mind still ails, is a person healed? what i’m getting at, here, is that in some ways the healer is the most dangerous character of all. 

when i read raphael’s bio, there was a quote in that article from a surgeon named david cheever that came to mind: “as a result of anaesthetics, the surgeon ‘need not hurry; he need not sympathise; he need not worry; he can calmly dissect, as on a dead body.’” to me, raphael is an explosion and expansion of this concept. raphael is, quite literally, a medical ethicist’s worst nightmare, and to me, that’s absolutely fascinating. without sympathy, what separates a healer from an educated control freak with a god complex? with raphael, we can extend this concept to its furthest extreme. raphael isn’t even human - how could he even begin to sympathize with an experience so foreign to him? why would he worry about something trivial as human suffering when it essentially exists as a theoretical concept to him? divine beings have no reason to play by human rules, and as a creature raised by god’s side raphael was so far removed from the concept of human suffering that it’s sort of a no-brainer that he developed a sick fascination with it, like a child who managed to con their parent into buying a grand theft auto game and is obsessed with running over pedestrians because the stakes never quite feel real. it’s a perspective i’d absolutely love to explore in a group rp setting because the nature of rp means that it’s kind of...completely unsustainable? like as writers we’re shoving these characters together, which means that raphael will have to be exposed to mortals. there’s room for a lot of character development there, and it seems like something extremely interesting to explore.

BUT HERE’S THE THING⁠—and this is where the character gets really fun, in my opinion. i’ve talked a fair bit about god complexes already, but when applied to raphael an interesting question is raised: how much is a complex, and how much of it is actually being divine? what really made me want to get my grubby little hands on the reins of raphael’s story was seeing the disconnect between the way his connections are written from raphael’s perspective versus the other character’s perspective. it’s a fun little hubristic shade that makes him an unreliable narrator and infinitely more interesting than a simple morality thought experiment. i think it’s easy to see raphael as this super cool, all-powerful master manipulator (i think that’s a pretty accurate take on his self-image, in fact), but he’s not the only player in this game. for every pawn he’s trying to move, there is someone else trying to use him in a similar way, and i don’t know that he truly understands the ramifications of that. see, i think it’s easy to reduce raphael to the points i discuss in the previous paragraphs because that’s what he wants you to think of him. but this is a world of gods and superpowers and magical political intrigue and game of thrones doesn’t exist so nobody can tell him that he’s on the path to becoming a cersei lannister (admittedly i haven’t watched got so this reference might not be right but i feel like it’s right so uh. yeah!). maybe i just like to see arrogant men getting knocked down a peg? this might be a projection of that. i dunno. i just know that there are quite a few mind games and mental gymnastics to untangle with raphael and that’s fun. he’s fun.

also. i would like to once again reiterate: divine amorality sexy. it’s not good, to be clear, and i don’t condone it, but i’m just saying.

What future plots do you have in mind for the character?

WHEN  THE  CITY  CRUMBLES  AROUND  YOU  AND  YOU  HOLD  ITS VESTIGES  IN  YOUR  HANDS,  WHOM  DO  YOU  BLAME?

i think Raphael’s big character arc revolves around a simple question: how far are you willing to go to achieve what you want? 

ostensibly, it’s an easy answer: very far. but when your desire is antithetical to your very purpose, when chasing it puts you at odds with the thing you’ve worked to build, do the goalposts move?

(the correct answer is that raphael did not build caelum. he simply destroyed god.)

let’s say, hypothetically, that raphael gets what he wants. the world is thrown into war and chaos and destruction, yadda yadda, raphael gets his blood and his suffering, great. he’s lived through this before (a couple times, actually), so you think he’d realize by now—eventually, the dust will settle. people will tire of suffering. and where will that leave raphael? how many times will you remake the world to watch it burn? can you ever be fulfilled chasing a temporary high? 

(the correct answer is no, but raphael is an immortal being. more importantly, he is a patient one. he will wait a million days for rome to be built, if only to witness the single day in which it will burn.)

i think raphael needs to reckon with these questions. i think he’s lived far too long with his mentality unquestioned and that has made him both insufferable and a major threat to society. this is a long and pretentious way to say that raphael honestly kind of needs a hobby whatever the thc-verse equivalent of therapy is, but i think any sort of positive character development is contingent upon a recontextualization of suffering and chaos and raphael’s masks.

of course, this isn’t to say that introspection will only lead to positive character development. perhaps a raphael who looks deeper into his psyche will come to understand that his desires outweigh his role; perhaps such thoughts will push raphael over the edge of propriety and into something more outwardly despicable. no matter what, though, i think that the direction of raphael’s character development will be largely shaped on how he decides to prioritize his⁠ roles and goals. 

FOR  WHOM  DO  THESE  HANDS  HEAL?

let’s discuss the archangels, shall we? despite it all, raphael genuinely loves his brothers. i would argue, even, that raphael believes that his scheming is in service to the other archangels; he’s not blind to the way complacency has softened the angels. at this point, the only true threat to the angels is themselves—if michael wants to to unlock a state of sanctifying grace, it will happen at the hand of one of his kin. 

i spoke earlier about raphael’s goals ultimately being futile. this is largely because they are diametrically opposed to michael and gabriel’s goals, and while raphael knows this intellectually, i don’t think he’s quite thought about what the long-term implications of that conflict entails. he’s so caught up in the conflict between michael and gabriel that he’s neglected to consider how he factors into the dynamic. could he be the common ground that brings michael and gabriel together? could he be the final straw that breaks them apart? he is excited for the fighting, the fallout; but has he stopped to consider what the long-reaching effects of such a rift may be?

raphael is breaking his family apart because he loves them. will that be enough, when he is sent to pick up the pieces? whose side will he fall on, if he is to pick a side at all? 

DID  PYGMALION  FALL  IN  LOVE  WITH  THE  BEAUTY  OF  HIS  CREATION,  OR  THE  BEAUTY  HE  CREATED?

i said this in the previous section but i’d like to reiterate it: i think a big reason raphael is Like That is because the stakes have never quite felt real to him. raphael’s a pot stirrer, but he’s not a creature of action. to this, i say give him real stakes. to be honest, i don’t know exactly what that entails, because i could see a number of ways in which tangible pressure manifests itself for raphael. perhaps his meddling with michael and gabriel steps too far, and his brothers  perhaps the angels become suspicious of his maneuvering, in which the spider is drawn into his own web of intrigue. maybe we apply positive pressure, where the ails of the world require a healer and raphael is tapped to higher purpose⁠—and higher power. maybe raphael will find himself tempted by the very demons he holds in contempt. 

the point is that raphael has largely been a character who acts through others. even now, we see this through his grooming of romilda, with his subtle manipulation of michael and gabriel. i want him to become a more active character, either by his own volition or by his hand being forced. 

similarly, i’m extremely interested in seeing how raphael navigates the political elements of this verse. i expect it stings a bit to be the only archangel not given a position of leadership; perhaps he holds lingering resentment toward zadkiel for being given a role raphael had expected to receive. does he subtly undermine zadkiel’s leadership? i want to watch him play up tensions with the vices, to hide a vicious war-hawk perspective under the guise of a concerned healer. i want him to smile in abaddon and samael’s faces and plot their suffering in his mind. i want to see the snake slither in the grass, to return to his original form as a spider spinning a web of intrigue across his court. yes, i want a more active raphael, but i think the political drama is ripe for development, as well.

WHEN  I  SPIT  UP  MY  SINS  AND  BEG  FOR  REPENTANCE,  WHAT  WILL COME  UP?

this one’s a long shot, but i could maybe...see...raphael……..falling. i can guarantee you that the idea has never even crossed raphael’s mind, and that he would literally rather be smited than be cast out of caelum, but i can see it. i think he might be happier, actually; if he fell, he could really lean into the chaos and suffering thing without any compunction.

of course, this is something infinitely easier said than done. were raphael to be cast out of caelum, he would have nowhere to go. infernum would never take him⁠—he’s made far too many enemies among their ranks. he could wander the holy land, but he’s far too proud to bind himself to its existing social systems. (he wouldn’t be able to look gabriel in the eye.)

raphael would have absolutely nothing. 

but he would also be free.

that’s right, i think that a horsemen-style liberation arc would be an absolute banger for raphael. again, i don’t think it’s feasible unless a very specific set of circumstances happen, but just imagine a raphael with nothing to lose, free to go absolutely apeshit. his only prerogative is to make sure you have a bad day. he is free to sow whatever chaos, whatever suffering he so wishes across the land. WHEW.

Are you comfortable with killing off your character?

yes, but i don’t see him going down easily.

IN DEPTH

Driving Character Motivation

entomological curiosity, in short. consider: why did god leave the apple in the garden of eden? why do humans keep animals in glass cases? why do children burn ants with magnifying glasses?

raphael wants to observe the world. a good healer must understand his patients at a fundamental level, and such truths are only revealed when the subject is broken down to its basest parts. you see, raphael was weaned on temperance and virtue; there is a lush decadence to emotional extremes that he finds most fascinating. they are debased. they are crass. they are wantonly sentimental, in a garishly beautiful way.

but this is not all. he wants to stave off boredom, and these are the tools he has to play with. for all of his machinations, raphael is a simple being. raphael has no grand ambitions, no lofty ideals, and that is what makes him so dangerous. he wants to be amused. he wants to be stimulated. he wants to observe a world in which things happen.

ostensibly, this is not as selfish a motivation as it may seem. as a healer, raphael knows something that many do not: serenity cannot exist in perpetuity. it is impossible for the world to remain unchanged⁠—even if the change is not evident, it is happening. an eternal peace is all but a stagnation of the kingdom; the only thing stagnation breeds is degradation. the angels are weakening because they are not being challenged. michael and the virtues may be doing extensive research to find an alternate explanation, but raphael knows this to be the truth. 

of course, the irony underlying the selfless explanation of raphael’s motivations reveals the truth of the matter: it is a farce. perhaps it is a lie that raphael has even convinced himself he believes, but it is farcical nonetheless. raphael claims he wants to invoke change because stagnation is dangerous, but riddle me this⁠—if this is true, why has raphael never changed? centuries upon centuries have passed, and the world has changed around him, but raphael himself has remained largely unchanged. he is the orchestrator of change, not its agent nor its subject, and that is just the way he would like things to stay.

Character Traits

CHARISMATIC - there’s a reason very few have cottoned on to raphael’s true nature, and it’s not (just) his pretty face and magical girl-esque aura. there’s something effortlessly captivating about raphael, a pace to his cadence that has you hanging on to his every word, a lightness to his smile that makes you want to coax it out whenever and however you can. everything about raphael puts people at ease, except for his eyes, which tend to put people on edge if he’s not careful. he’s not gregarious or the outgoing sort of charismatic by any means, but he does manage to exude an overwhelming charisma.

PATIENT - it’s important to remember that before raphael turned on god, he waited for him. raphael performed healings for centuries and never raised a hand against his father in that time. think of all the angels that fell, that rebelled; raphael was not among them. no, raphael played the dutiful son, allowing his resentment to fester and boil deep underneath his skin, but never to surface. for centuries he served loyally, biding his time. remember: lucifer fell. raphael did not. which one killed god? as i mentioned in the plot section, raphael will wait a million days for rome to be built to witness the single day it burns. prolonged suffering is perhaps the most beautiful of all. fortitude goes hand-and-hand with patience.

INTELLIGENT - in a few ways. raphael is well-studied, with extensive knowledge of biology and chemistry and history and politics. raphael is emotionally intelligent; he hides his true nature behind a veneer constructed to meet expectations. he may not be as talented as gabriel in this regard, but it is a skillful construction nonetheless.

MANIPULATIVE - i mean. yeah.

ARROGANT - he thinks he’s smarter than god???????????????? tbf god was a bit of a headass in this universe but we’ve all read enough tragedies to know where this kind of hubris ends up going.

CRUEL - there’s a bit to unpack here. i’d argue that there are two types of cruelty: malicious cruelty and callous cruelty. raphael is certainly capable of both, but i think he embodies the latter. with certain notable exceptions, raphael’s cruelty is rarely personal; it is a thoughtless sort of cruelty, the type inflicted upon beings considered expendable. raphael is selfish and petty and powerful, and these traits coalesce into a casual cruelty. 

In-Character Para Sample cw: light gore

Look at how they look at him. God’s good little lambs, lined up all in a row, passive and pliant and patiently awaiting benediction. Patiently waiting for Raphael. 

Raphael hates them.

No. This is false. It is difficult for Raphael to muster up stronger feelings toward mortals than a vague sort of amusement, the sort of affinity one might have for a particularly stupid kit when it does something surprisingly clever. In this regard, he understands that he differs from his kin. Gabriel, in particular, has developed a particular fondness for the mortals. Why anyone would wish to strip mortals of their most fascinating behavior⁠—to the point of openly defying their Father⁠—is beyond Raphael. He has given up on trying to reason with his brother on the matter. 

The first supplicant is beckoned forward. They pray to the Lord and Raphael touches their forehead with one palm, cups their chin with the other. His fingers splay carelessly around a throat all but bared to him and the ceremony is so mechanical Raphael allows his thoughts to wander⁠. 

How easy it would be to tighten his grip. How beautiful it would be, to watch the lamb’s naive adoration flash into fear, to watch fear darken into betrayal and resentment and the most beautiful emotion of all: despair. He can feel the pulse at his fingertips. It would quicken in a stress response, he knows. It would quicken, then it would pound, and then maybe it would stop.  It all falls to Raphael’s whim. In this moment, Raphael holds their life in his hands. They have all but laid on his sword for the promise of absolution and when they look up at Raphael with their dumb, trusting eyes he can see the sparkling tracks where tears once fell, down the hollow of a cheek into the pool of a collarbone. He finds himself overcome with the desire to trace the fall with his tongue. “Give me your pain,” he murmurs. Let me taste it. Let me understand. 

He takes it. He does not taste it. He does not understand.

He releases the mortal. Those beautiful tear tracks are already fading. “The Lord be with you,” he says, and perhaps he even means it. His Father’s gaze burns into his back, even from a world away. He’d laugh at the irony, were he free to. Is this the weight you so desire? he wants to ask the devotee. No, Raphael knows the truth: God’s love is a shackle. God’s love is a leash and it is holding Raphael back from his fullest potential.

“And also with you,” the lamb responds. Their head is bowed obediently in prayer and they shuffle away, appropriately awed. The next supplicant is beckoned forward.

The light of Raphael’s presence obfuscates the darkness in his eyes.

— 

Later, much later, Raphael finds himself studying his hands. He flexes them, balls them into fists, stretches his fingers as far as they will spread. 

How easy it would be to tighten his grip.

The hand is at once an individual unit and a summation of individual parts. The hand contains twenty-seven bones and thirty-four muscles connected by over a hundred ligaments and tendons. Wrists connect to metacarpals, which connect to carpals, which taper off into delicate phalanges. Individually, each of these parts are largely useless; were Raphael to take a scalpel and drag it through a tendon, across the joints, the strings would be cut and the puppetry would cease to dance. You would be left with a small pile of carpals and metacarpals and phalanges, loose strings of muscle and tendon. At times, it is difficult to fathom how such mundane component parts are the instruments of extraordinary acts.

Raphael flexes his hand, watches bone shift under skin. If he remembers correctly, mortals have an idiom about knowing your hands, or something along those lines. He will not pretend to be familiar with mortal culture. Did you know that, wings aside, mortals and angels all have the same bone structure? 

Of course you did. It is common knowledge that God made all beings in His image, or so the story goes. 

This is an easy answer, but one with interesting implications. Let us extrapolate. If mortals and angels are essentially biological mirrors, and each are made in the image of God, does that mean that God will bleed like His creations? Slide a scalpel across God’s knuckles—will His puppets cease to dance?

Raphael could find out. It would take only a single blade, sliced through a single tendon. 

Now, Raphael is not so arrogant to believe himself the blade. He would not even consider himself the hand. Such a role requires a particular kind of conviction—

( —and that sort of conviction is made manifest in bitter disillusionment⁠—the sort inflicted upon Michael. How easy it would be to find himself in his brother’s ear, whispering of their Father’s capriciousness and the unnecessary cruelty that resulted for the poor, poor humans— )

( —and that sort of conviction is made manifest in righteous anger⁠—the sort inflicted upon Gabriel. How easy it would be to find himself in his brother’s ear, whispering of their Father’s neglect and the unnecessary cruelty that resulted for the poor, poor humans— )

( —and that sort of conviction is made manifest in a whetted hunger⁠—the sort God gifted to each of His angels. Hunger breeds hunters and heaven is full— )

—that Raphael simply cannot embody. Rage has never been his forte. 

Consider, however, that the hand is controlled by nerve impulses. A spark is all the hand needs to transform from a collection of bone to an agent of action. Yes. He clenches his fists. Here are the bones, the veins, the tendons, the muscle. Angels and mortals all share the same bone structure.

Does God?

Extras

pinterest.

raphael has classically beautiful wings. i’m talking TEXTBOOK cherubic angel wings, with the sweeping white feathers and all. raphael kind of hates them, though he takes a great deal of pride in them.

raphael doesn’t have a signature weapon. he’s proficient with blades, yes, and fights with a surgeon’s precision, not the strongest nor the fastest but eerily efficient in his blows. but he is a healer—at the end of the day, his empty hands are all he needs. (his empty hands are what you should fear.)

raphael hates the heretics pro forma but. but. he cannot deny a certain...fondness for them. the heretics exhibited such dedication to a futile cause; they believed their suffering to be something noble. it’s a laughable notion, certainly, but a sentiment so distinctly human it’s almost charming. should they wish to return, to throw themselves on the knife over and over and over, well. raphael shall not complain. he shall smile beatifically, perhaps abate their suffering, even⁠—and watch them do it again. 

in a modern au, raphael is a reality tv producer. ok actually he’s probably a surgeon but i think he’d make a very good reality tv producer. alternately, there is a universe out there where raph fixated on like...baking, or k-pop, instead of suffering. those are good timelines, i think. maybe not the k-pop stan timeline.

raphael is the living embodiment of that dwight schrute “we need a new plague” meme.

[inevitably-johnlocked]

HI JUST UR FRIENDLY REMINDER: U DA BEST! Do you know of any fics where John and Sherlock take their relationship suuuuuper slow? Like just kissing for ages not much intimacy until later in their relationship after lots of talking, consent, etc? Thanks!!!

HI NONNY!!

THANK YOU! You’re too kind!!

You are SO in luck, because I bloody love Slow Burn fics! I’ve done lists in the past and I have a few new ones I can add to it! :D Hope you enjoy these ones!

SLOW BURN / DEV. REL. / FALLING IN LOVE Pt. 3

See also:

Love Confessions / Slow Burn / Dev. Rel. (Fluff Version)

Falling In Love / Slow Burn / Dev. Rel. || [MOBILE POST] (April 2019)

The General Idea by agirlsname (T, 3,022 w., 1 Ch. || Retirement, Promise of Forever / Proposal, POV John, First Kiss, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, Soft Sherlock, Idiots in Love, Crying / Emotional Sherlock, Love Confessions, 20 Years of Pining) – After twenty years of friendship, John is used to Sherlock acting weirdly. But the news Sherlock finally brings himself to deliver change the carefully built dynamics between them, and John realises it’s time to act.

You fit me, Sherlock Holmes by orphan_account (G, 10,077 w., 1 Ch. || It’s An Experiment, Bed Sharing, Slow Burn, Fluff and Angst, Idiots in Love, Mutual Pining, Questionable Science) – An unfortunate series of events leads to John accepting being a part of Sherlock’s study in physical intimacy. As the days pass by, John realizes he might be in for more than he bargained for. He doesn’t entirely mind.

London Gods by a_different_equation (E, 11,092 w., 5 Ch. || American Gods Fusion || Magical Realism, Sex Magic, True Love, PTSD John, First Kiss/Time, Marathon Sex, Sensuality, Genie Sherlock, Human John, Internalize Homophobia, Star-Crossed Lovers, Soul Mates) – Sherlock Holmes is a jinn who does not grant wishes. However, when Dr. John H. Watson, recently returned from the war in Afghanistan, gets into his cab by “accident”, it might not even need magic to grant both men their deepest wish: love.

A Silver Sixpence by _doodle (NC-17, 16,400 w., 2 Ch. || LJ Fic || For a Case / Case Fic, Fake Relationship, Humour, Romance, Marriage Proposal, Awkward Idiots, Cuddling, Touching, Kissing, Love Confessions, Bed Sharing, Friends to Lovers, Fake Until It’s Not, Schmoop and Fluff, Bottomlock) – “John, we need to get married. It’s for a case, not any romantic notions on my part pertaining to our partnership,” Sherlock said, with brutal honesty, and without even looking up.

You’re On the Air by prettysailorsoldier (M, 20,616 w., 1 Ch. || Unilock, Matchmaking, Radio, Christmas, Christmas Fluff, First Kiss, Friends to Lovers, Sherlock POV, Pining Sherlock, Flirting, Bisexual John) – The Consulting Detective and The Woman dominate the airwaves of their university radio station, doling out advice on everything from meeting the parents to sexual positions. When their ratings start to dip before the holidays, however, manager Mike thinks it’s time for some fresh blood, and who better to fill in the gaps than rugby captain–and notorious flirt–John Watson? Part 1 of 25 Days of Johnlock

The Winter Garden by Callie4180 (T, 31,213 w., 13 Ch. || Post-S4, Retirement, Christmas, Slow Burn, Grown-Up Rosie, Parenthood, Rosie’s Cat, Angst with Happy Ending, Holidays, Beekeeping, Magical Realism, Sherlock POV, Sherlock’s Violin, Future Fic, Sussex, Honey, Magical Healing Honey, Love Confessions, Sherlock’s Scar, First Kiss, Touching) – As Sherlock nears the end of his career, he’s given the gift of a cottage in Sussex. The honey from the beehives out back is amazing.Almost…magical.

The Whore of Babylon Was a Perfectly Nice Girl by out_there (E, 32,897 w., 1 Ch. || Past Drug Use, Blowjobs, Toplock, Mentions of Switching, Rough Sex, Background Cases, Sherlock’s Past, Sherlock’s Sexual History, Experienced Sherlock, Past One Night Stands, Fingering, Cuddling, Possessive Sherlock, Paris Holiday, Bed Sharing, Naked Lie-Ins, Bathing Together, Confessions, Worried Sherlock, Laying in Bed All Day, Meddling Mycroft, Naked Lazy Day) – Sherlock walks into a room and takes all the space right out of it. He does the same inside John’s head.

carrying up his morning tea by darcylindbergh (E, 34,504 w., 5 Ch. || Post S3, Minor Character Death, Grief/Mourning, Wakes/Funerals, Estranged John, Pining Sherlock, Depression/Insecurity, Slow Burn, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Chronic Pain/Injury, Reconciliation, Awkwardness, Loneliness, Scars, Angst With Happy Ending) – His fingers tremble as he dials and he can’t force them steady. Familiar number, even though he hasn’t used it in two years. He isn’t even sure he should be calling it now, but she’d asked. She’d made him promise.

we have never seen a greater day than this by Lediona (T, 36,420 w., 7 Ch. || A Royal Night Out AU || WWII / VE Day, Prince Sherlock, Soldier John, Alternating POV, First Kiss, Bittersweet Ending, Homophobia, Dancing) – Peace. At long last. It’s VE Day and Prince William desires to join the celebrations. It is a night of excitement, danger and the first flutters of romance.

Only To Be With You by SinceWhenDoYouCallMe_John (M, 40,768 w., 4 Ch. || Black Mirror / Future AU || Character Death, Future Technology, Sickness/Cancer/Illness, Heavy Angst with Happy Ending, First Person POV John, Pining John, Heart-Wrenching Angst) – I tell myself that next time I’ll come near this same place again. Wait around for the mysterious stranger in his coat to dash past me, hot on the heels of a new criminal in black. I think this all the way back to my Exit, planning where I’ll wait and what I’ll say when I see him. Scheming on how to get his name. It’s only once I reach the Exit Point door that I realize two hours and forty-five minutes have passed, and I realize that this won’t be the last time I Visit. It won’t be the last time at all.

Guidelines by WithLoweredVoices (M, 43,018 w., 15 Ch. || Winglock || Angels, Fantasy, Angst, BAMF! John, War, Jealous Sherlock, Possessive Sherlock, Jealous John, Falling in Various Ways) – The Good Soldier, one of the oldest and strongest of the fallen, is offered a bargain: to live as John Watson and to Guide a fledgling archangel so that he will stay on the path of good. Of course, Sherlock Holmes has different ideas about his destiny. Fantasy AU. Warnings for violence, occasional gore, and a whole load of hurt and angst.

Hell Sent, Heaven Bound by ConsultingHound (M, 64,381 w, 16 Ch. || Angels / Demons AU ||  Fallen Angel Sherlock / Angel Cop John, Alternate First Meeting, Slow Burn, Case Fic, John & Lestrade are Friends Before Sherlock, BAMF John, Mind Palace John, Friends to Lovers, John in Denial, Sherlock Picks Out John’s Clothing, Clubbing / Dancing, Mildly Jealous John, Awkwardness, Kidnapping, Sherlock’s Mind Palace, Sacrifice, Worried / Anxious Sherlock, Angst with Happy Ending, Immortal to Mortal) – Ex-War healer and current angelic guard John Watson is not having the best day. He overslept, he’s underpaid, and now there’s someone tagging the Council’s building walls. However things may be about to get interesting: there’s an unusual stranger hanging around (the definition of tall, dark, and handsome), a literal underground cult is brewing, and rumblings are coming from hell. Can he keep his neighbourhood safe, how and why is he being connected to all this, and who the hell is Sherlock Holmes?

Being John Watson-ish by elwinglyre (E, 69,902 w., 17 Ch. || Bodysnatcher AU || Author John, Cranky Sherlock, Angst, Sexual Tension, First Kiss / Time, Falling in Love, BAMF John, Past Soldier John, Feelings, Inside Someone’s Brain, Shy Sherlock, Sherlock Loves John, POV Sherlock, Switchlock, Slow Burn, Internal Dialogue, Mental Turmoil) – When consulting detective Sherlock Holmes steps on one toe too many at a crime scene, he’s consigned to a desk job in an archaic office on the seventh-and-a-half floor of the New Scotland Yard. It’s in this bleak office that Sherlock discovers a portal into the mind of renowned author John Watson. Grander than his mind palace, this new wonderland affords Sherlock new vistas of experimentation. To learn more about the mystery behind the portal, Sherlock seeks out and befriends Watson. But then it all goes wrong when others find the secret portal door—including the man whose brain he visits.

The Adventure of the Silver Scars by tangledblue (NR [M], 142,458 w., 41 Ch. || S3 Fix-It, Post-HLV/ Post-TAB / Canon Compliant, Case Fic, No Baby, Angst, Humour, UST, Slow Burn, Angry John, Reconciliation, Not Nice Mary / Leaving Mary, Dependent Sherlock, Pining Sherlock, Caretaker John, Fist Fights, It’s An Experiment, Virgin Sherlock, Dancing, Drugging, John Whump, Pet Names, Sherlock’s Mind Palace, Scars) – It’s been thirteen months since Mary shot Sherlock and John finds he’s still pissed off about it. Sherlock had thought everything was settled: John and Mary, domestic bliss. But when John turns up at Baker Street with suitcases, the world’s only consulting detective might not be prepared for the consequences. A new case. Some old scores to settle. Certain danger. Concertos, waltzes, and whisky.

Proving A Point by elldotsee & J_Baillier (E, 186,270 w., 28 Ch. || Me Before You Fusion || Medical Realism, Insecure John, Depression, Romance, Angst, POV John, Sherlock Whump, Serious Illness, Doctor John, Injury Recovery, Assisted Suicide, Sherlock’s Violin, Awkward Sexual Situations, Alcoholism, Drugs, Idiots in Love, Slow Burn, Body Image, Friends to Lovers, Hurt / Comfort, Pain, Big Brother Mycroft, Intimacy, Anxiety, PTSD, Family Issues, Psychological Trauma, John Whump, Case Fics, Loneliness, Pain) – Invalided home from Afghanistan, running out of funds and convinced that his surgical career is over, John Watson accepts a mysterious job offer to provide care and companionship for a disabled person. Little does he know how much hangs in the balance of his performance as he settles into his new life at Musgrave Court.

[ganymedesclock]

Honestly something I think is really interesting about the colony? I’ve called it a vampire story but it really is, down to a lot of the sort of classical hallmarks of the genre.

The Altean colony is set up to look like a beautiful, idyllic pastoral village surrounded by the forest. Everything’s nice there. There’s a local reclusive nobleman, rarely seen by the locals, who keeps to himself but he’s charming and everyone regards him well.

Now and then this noble takes people with him.

They aren’t seen again.

Because Lotor drains the life out of them behind closed doors.

Bandor returns to the colony, in the woods, at night. There’s that scene of Romelle hiding from Lotor- again, in the woods at night. This is one of the only nocturnal shots of the colony we see.

Once again, we have this vampire metaphor with the galra royal family, and it’s just a lot more literal than we’ve been led to believe before. Lotor’s not actively biting these people on the neck and drinking their blood, but, end result? Motives? Exactly the same. He has this population, and he��s feeding on them.

It even furthers what I’ve talked about before, that Lotor and Zarkon effectively represent very different conceptualizations of what a vampire is, with Lotor embodying the “modern” supernatural romance vampire, and Zarkon as the “classical” gothic horror vampire.

Zarkon’s consumption of people is glaringly obvious. His empire is festooned in people in rags, he has a huge cadre of functionally, other vampires. He hides nothing- will walk around with tubes of quintessence hanging out of his back while he’s recovering. Of course people die to feed him- because he’s a completely willing and knowing plague onto the universe. He’s better than them, he’s the immortal here.

He has zero guilt and zero shame. All mortals he contends with are his food, and from that he’ll occasionally promote them to “entertainment” or “assets”. At the end of the day, still livestock.

Lotor? Lotor feels guilty.

As soon as he realizes Romelle is in the room and processes what it means, he’s horrified. He flat-out says “I know what you must think of me” trying to negotiate with them and his counterpoint is basically just, that he genuinely wants to do good and that he meant what he said to Allura before.

And that’s frankly, vampire romance genre at its finest: the tragedy of the revelation that Lotor got this far by, in no uncertain terms, eating people (and over the course of his lifespan, that number’s added up to a pretty high total if we look at the number of names on the memorial and Romelle’s words) is in part framed in what it does for his love life. He and Allura love each other, but Lotor’s a vampire, he’s killed people just like Allura, and she can’t forgive him for that.

Which is totally understandable. But the heartbreak, the drama, the point of how Lotor’s terrified, outraged by the idea of, becoming like his unrepentantly parasitic father sets this up with very particular conventions.

Allura flat-out had herself a vampire romance. That’s what happened.

Now, I think the use of these conventions shed some interesting light on Lotor’s situation, and his likely motivations. Romelle says the decision to make the colony happened “generations ago” but she still describes it as very separate from the colony’s inception.

It’s very likely Lotor was getting his “food” somewhere else, and never originally conceptualized the colony as a source of energy.

But something happened. Those other sources ran dry. It’s likely Haggar, either directly or through Zarkon, pulled energy away from Lotor.

And Lotor knows the only way he’s ever going to fix the empire’s vampiric problem without going Van Helsing on himself and most of the galra, condemning the survivors- if there are any- to a vulnerable half-existence, is if he basically can get his hands on the quintessence field- the guilt-free, no-predation-necessary, infinite fountain of blood.

He needs energy to get there.

So his options are, die, become something he doesn’t want to, or compromise his morals in a really bad way and turn to the people who would patiently, obligingly follow him anywhere.

The vampire starves, and the neighbors start to look really, really tasty.

But Lotor’s still a moral person. He’s a good enough person to feel revolted and ashamed of what he’s doing. So he does something we never see Zarkon do- he buries it. Everything about it. And he’s horrified of people finding those skeletons. Again, seeing Romelle among his allies while they’re all accusative and doing the scifantasy equivalent of readying the stakes and garlic prompts undiluted terror from Lotor but his response is to try to appeal to Allura.

Again, bumping Lotor to “romance vampire” away from the gothic horror sensibilities of his father (even when the environment and setup of the colony evoke the latter)- he’s less focused on the peril this poses to him on being “outed” as a vampire and vastly more focused on Allura’s either rejection or forgiveness. When she rejects him, that sinks him, twice.

The first time, none of the weapons pointed at the paladins are what take Lotor down- it’s just Allura. Allura tosses Lotor, and Lotor stays down. He doesn’t wake up again except to face Haggar.

The second time, during the standoff, Lotor order the generals to hold their fire and repeatedly tries to appeal to them. It’s Allura’s word that makes or breaks that negotiation, and that’s not because Lotor’s a blameless sheep.

It furthers the dynamic we’ve seen before, that Lotor’s not emptily manipulating Allura, but that his feelings for her cause him to repeatedly make his vulnerability available to Allura. And in the conflict between them, we see this flexed in practice. Lotor’s put a huge amount of power in Allura’s hands, and when, feeling hurt and betrayed herself, she uses it to hurt him right back, that has a colossal destabilizing effect on basically everything Lotor’s standing on.

Lotor’s breakdown is instrumental to his losing the generals’ support, which, since this is Voltron, Hunk’s point about how it’s now four-on-one (and eventually five-on-one) is completely true.

Lotor’s literally a supernatural being- an immortal, a vampire- by the lore of the story. But Allura, not just through her own developing magic, but through her relationship with Lotor, is the one who holds the power here. Her approval or rejection makes or breaks him because he’s fascinated with her, he adores her.

It’s a complete fundamental deconstruction of the predatory way every other incarnation of Lotor went after Allura, where Allura had to, one way or another, fight to retain her autonomy in the presence of a pursuing monster. And again, this is kind of a vampire romance thing- as in, the power fantasy of a woman being able to tame a powerful and dangerous creature.

The colony and Allura’s completely understandable reaction to Lotor are functionally set-pieces in this vampire romance. It paints Lotor as a shade of gray. We’ve seen his values and we understand them. We see what he’s dealing with and we can sympathize. At the end of the day, though, he’s not a proper squeaky clean hero like Allura is.

Lotor felt backed into a corner and the only way out was to compromise his own morals and sate that bloodthirsty appetite. Other alternatives may have been open to him, but they would probably require trust, or otherwise abetting power- things that Lotor can’t believe in because from his perspective the only way things won’t hurt him is if he’s strong enough to hold their teeth away from his throat himself.

And he’s aware of it! Heck, if you look at the substance of his harsh words on Alfor, he’s actively self-conscious about it! We have to remember Lotor’s repeatedly expressed deep admiration for Alfor and that slips through even at his absolute worst- he’s eager to see if Sincline holds up against Alfor’s legacy, so even after he insists he’s better than Alfor he’s using Alfor’s handiwork as a metric.

So Lotor sneering about how if it had been up to Alfor and Alfor’s strategy, all of the Alteans would have died, it’s kind of his furious, hurt thesis that if it weren’t for him, the vampire, who’s yes taken the selfish option and bloodied his own hands, chosen his own preservation over staying true to his values, they wouldn’t have gotten here. 

And again, that frames it back to... there’s this fundamental difference where Zarkon makes cruel choices out of a lack of sympathy. Why should he care what anyone else feels, why should he care who has to suffer to fill his hunger? Zarkon effectively chose to be a vampire. He said “damn my friends, damn the universe, I’ll take my wife to the rift if it kills me” and we never really see Zarkon disappointed in the result.

Lotor didn’t choose. Lotor got handed this stick before he was born by Zarkon’s decisions and that’s the thematic motifs here- that Lotor got saddled against his will with this hunger, so his “fall” isn’t set to the same metrics Zarkon was. He doesn’t have a perfectly good opportunity to put the knife down and walk away and live out his natural mortal life because eating other people is unappealing to him.

Because of the world Zarkon’s created, because of what Zarkon did to him from the cradle, Lotor’s option is to compromise himself or compromise somebody else. And we’ve known from the start Lotor is a scared, vulnerable person. We know that push comes to shove, his own survival is a very powerful motivator because he feels like it’s constantly in peril.

But he made that choice. He made the decision to keep living, keep chasing his ambitions, knowing exactly at what kind of cost it would come, and this fuels a line of guilt that he doesn’t feel worthy of Allura- Allura, whose parents, who the world around her, provided what she needed even when she lost everything else. Allura, who hasn’t faced the prospect of starving or resorting to other people in order to survive. 

Remember how easily he gave up on Oriande because it rejected him once? Remember how he didn’t actually expect to get in there at all, and- according to what he tells Ezor and Zethrid, was sure that he’d need someone of Allura’s purity to get in there at all?

Believe me, I’m as upset by Lotor’s breakdown here as anybody else, but the colony is something that adds up perfectly with what we know of Lotor as a person, who he is, his relationship with Allura. This is drama you’d absolutely slide off the shelf in the supernatural teen romance section of the library- well, if you found a well-written teen romance.

(The fact that I ship Lotura when I don’t even like a lot of other vampire romance stories should probably tell you something about the writing and my esteem)

[vardasvapors]

legolas & gimli!!! bc i saw you mention them in your faramir & eowyn answer and got v excited but then you didn't get TOO sidetracked lmao

1. I love the dynamic, of like, light-hearted kinda scatterbrained eccentric and slightly goofy elf ranger who verbally shitposts and sounds like a loon whenever he opens his mouth but occasionally says deep and genuine things too, plus the super-serious well-spoken soulful proud dwarf lord who also talks weird but in like, the opposite way, with these heartfelt open feelings couched in kind of solemnity and manners, but more and more frequently over the book babbles and says spontaneous stuff, and how they fit together so well in a dynamic that is really un-cliched on the personal level – this weird melding of senses of humor and viewpoints on the other characters and events around them, which are pretty different but don’t oppose one another as much as overlap and join together to create a single bigger, even more fun outside viewpoint, they’re such a good pseudo greek chorus-y thing

2. I think this pairing is the main reason I kinda like the LACE ‘elves have no desire to have sex with anyone unless they fall in love and sex equals getting married for them’ thing tbh. I love the symmetry with the ‘dwarves only ever fall in love once and never marry otherwise but nothing is said about extramarital sex for them’ thing, Meaning it’s like, some weird special experience on both sides but in different ways. I usually don’t care for this trope in most shippy fic, but I like it in interspecies and I really like it for them.

3. Aaggghhhh the getting-together process! Most of all, I think about the fact that by all accounts, and as implied by certain lines in Fellowship, the dwarves of Erebor don’t really get elves and the elves of Mirkwood don’t really get dwarves, and there’s probably a lot of just, natural assumptions that are totally wrong and which they never thought to examine. It could even be that the fire-forged-ness of their bond might actually interfere with some of this understanding of each other, if they moved into this state of complete attachment and acceptance of each other while in this upside-down fugue state of pre-apocalypse where they didn’t really have…that much time to talk, after their period of downtime in Lothlorien where I assume the first stage of their friendship was formed. Like, when they emerge from emergency-mode after the destruction of the Ring, they’ve already plummeted straight into “oh I know he’s a weird alien and I love him, oh no wait it’s that kind of love, okay lol this definitely won’t work welp I’m screwed I guess???” without considering that no maybe he’s not that much of an alien, and yes you can fuck him without it being a disaster.

4. OBVIOUSLY the whole immortal/mortal thing, especially highlighted since they live in pretty close contact and temporally in parallel with Aragorn and Arwen, whose mortal/immortal problem is totally different. Also the sea-longing! How, and when, was it decided that Legolas would stay in ME that long, or that he would take Gimli with him to Valinor? So many opportunities! In some ways, their time in ME after the war is a grace period, a finite stage of overlap, a kind of once-in-an-age, improbable, forgotten, enchanted sort of time, where the dwarves are building for the future but the elves are just pretty much just lingering and housekeeping for the humans on their way out, and it would feel like there is a sort of pressure to make something of this time, both their own separate lives and whatever their relationship is like.

5. lmao I think the main reason I imagined Legolas as blond was either because Thranduil had golden hair in the Hobbit book or because something something weird associations with personality types something (because I had no idea about any of the movie castings at the time I read the books). BUT ALSO: “I say to you, Gimli son of Glóin, that your hands shall flow with gold, and yetover you gold shall have no dominion” :)

6. I am TRASH. I will read SO MUCH SILLINESS with them. But here are just three HQ recs:

On the Cold Hillside by marycrawford

An Ounce of Perception by stateofintegrity

They Say of the Elves by brancher

[ratherhavetheblues]

INGMAR BERGMAN’S ‘HOUR OF THE WOLF’ “You’re nothing but frightened…”

© 2019 by James Clark

      I kicked off the Bergman trilogy comprising the films, Hour of the Wolf (1968), Shame (1969) and The Passion of Anna (1969), by way of Shame. But one could start anywhere here, inasmuch as all three of them represent a steep ascent toward—not the famous “silence of God”—but the long-hidden finality of death as tempering the farce of advantage. There was the attraction, in Shame, for its fulsome violence and its unspoken (forgotten) heresy, buried by a world-history crazily intent upon becoming iconic, even if tiny.

We’ll pick up from there, by another very humbled figure, namely, Alma, the wife of a rather well-known and admired painter, Johan Borg, in the film, Hour of the Wolf. Unlike the forgetting of that unfamiliar reflection, in Shame, Alma has incorporated a degree of disinterestedness being the gem of the aforementioned film. But, like Eva-the-forgetful, Alma, remarkably warm though she could be, there was about her a striking inefficiency, a decorative tip of an iceberg—while the full accomplishment remained a huge oblivion. Whereas the opening of Shame adopted an almost sit-com miasma, here instead, what we  experience, and yet being far from the depths of creative magic and profound joy, is a punishing, but soft, third-degree. “Listen, we’re not quite finished yet… No? Alright…”

“Alright” takes off with Alma’s telling the camera and us, in flashback, of the shocking death of Johan; and her inability to keep him in one piece. She begins by emerging from her thatch-roofed, wood-framed cottage, with head bowed and tired eyes. Having already made to the world the details of her telling, this would be an investigatory journalist’s follow-up, in hopes that the disaster could provide more cogency. “I’ve given you the diary. And you wonder why I choose to stay here? We’ve lived in this house almost seven years. Come winter, I can come to the mainland, work at the store as I have done when money was short. The baby is due in a month. The doctor examined me in May, before the very last time we came out here. We’d planned to stay here until August. We were going to be completely alone… He was afraid… He liked that I was quiet…” Then, on the heels of that jumble of tenses, she abruptly delineates (in flash-back), how they had commissioned a small power boat and driven to their island hideaway. The arrival is shown to be touched by murky light not without a harsh beauty. This positive moment links to the boat of death, in Shame. Ebb and flow of engaging challenge. “We found a wheelbarrow in a shed on the beach. When we got here, we were happy to see the apple tree in bloom. Then we discovered footprints under the kitchen window in the flower bed, but forgot it.” (Long pause, in which the investigator could begin to discern that the quiet ones are also stupid ones.) “Yes, we were happy… Johan was uneasy.” (What sort of logic do they subscribe to? Probably a logic not far from that of Eva and Jan, in Shame.) “He always grew anxious when his work did not go well, and it had not gone well for some time now.” (The same precious and unscrupulous aesthetic, from the violinists’, in Shame?) “And he became sleepless. He was frightened, as if he was afraid of the dark. It had gotten worse in the last few years.” The decisive prow of the thrust of Johan and Alma’s boat brings to the story a baseline of decisiveness which awaits them, and all of us. Johan launches the returning driver with clear-enough decisiveness. He gathers his baggage—including, many frames waiting for successful performances—and grimly moves a pushcart to the cottage over very difficult terrain. In the arrival with its delight in the apple tree, she rushes to embrace Johan wholeheartedly; and receives a half-hearted buss and then a brush-off as he heads indoors distractedly and with a sour visage. Next day, he proposes drawing her; and the precious, nineteen-century proceedings seem to lack the promise of shoring up a tired routine. The white sheets blowing wildly on the line near the exercise to shake things up loom as an embarrassment and a warning. Was the second investigation alert to such matters?

This second cinematic rendition of the lost arts’ “giant,” for the sake of a more candid portraiture of the marriage and the mystery whose highlight brings us an Alma—a name for a circus performer whose highlight was to, briefly, invade the realm of Aphrodite, goddess of love whereby carnal mortals, in the Bergman film, Sawdust and Tinsel (1953), make short-shrift of her reign—alarmingly squelched by the hardness of existence. That night, she’s seen sewing far into the night, a process of mending, becoming a confluence. While she stays with her largely mundane priorities, Johan (a name involving the great musician, Johan Bach, and the uncanny dynamics of music) falls prey to incoherence, stalking about the room and feeling driven to reveal to her and her rendition of coherence the grotesque apparitions which haunt him in dreams and in waking, and which have become the staple of his productions, seemingly unloved and unsellable. (That he may once have concentrated upon the tried and true of a widely popular style of work, may account for his not attracting attention, until now, from the neighbors.) Not content to merely bring to Alma’s attention the disturbing work (never seen), he flogs each piece into her face as he carries out a running commentary brimming of both his supposed great struggle and great fear. “Now look! I haven’t shown them to anyone!… This is the one who turns up most often. And he’s almost harmless. I think he’s homosexual… And then there’s the old lady, the one always threatening to take off her hat. Do you know what happens if she does? Her face comes off, you see…” On to his piece de resistance, “He’s the worst of the lot. I call him Bird Man… He’s so strangely quick… and he’s related to Papageno of [Mozart’s 1790 opera] The Magic Flute.” As Johan raves on—“…and especially the Spider Man” [Bergman’s 1960 film, Through a Glass Darkly, features a protagonist who becomes convinced that God is a giant spider]—Alma becomes appalled at his grotesque researches, closing her eyes being all she can do.

In a sort of rally, she manages to put aside the aesthetic output in favor of attempting to assuage the insomnia which the ugly visions have produced for him, visions of horrors he prefers, over facing beauties without personal eternity. (As we are about to discover, it’s even more complicated than that.) He demands, “You must stay awake a little while longer…” Alma, a study in contrast, looks into the kerosene lamp and now her eyes are open and clear. He covers his face with his hand, and she resumes, on a steady keel, that modest and promising play upon thread. In contrast, his insomnia and violent rudeness (to come), being traceable to fear of death, the investigation more closely coincides (sews with) the problematic militancy of Shame. Before the night is over, Johan provides to the multiplicity of scrutiny a display of his obsession. “A minute is actually an immense span of time… Wait, here it starts…” Alma draws much closer to this matter than she did about the grotesque figures. “Ten seconds,” he gazes at the watch. She infers where this is going, and she doesn’t like it. “These seconds… you see how long they last? The minute isn’t over yet!… Ah, finally… It’s gone now…” Feeling some kind of poison (plague) in the works, she returns to her sewing (now small accomplishment, in the dark atmosphere. “Say something,” he demands. “Talk to me, Alma…” Changing the deadly subject, she brightens up. “Hey, you, there’s something I’ve thought about for a long time. Are you listening? [his head has been bent over his chest]. We’ve lived together for seven years now… No, that’s not what I was going to say… Now, I know. Isn’t it true that old people who have lived for a lifetime together start to resemble each other? They finally share so much, their faces take on the same expression. What do you think that is?” Getting him to rise to this bid would be miraculous. But Alma does have a theory which, though unimpressive from the point of real delivery, shows us that her heart is bent on the right part of that cosmos miraculously responsive to loving courage from a finite sensibility. “I hope we will get so old that we think each other’s thoughts… and we get little, dried up, identical wrinkled faces…” (“Identical,” being a hopefully possible way of overcoming his cowardice, selfishness and coldness.) “What do you think about that?” (He’s sleeping, just as Albert, the ringmaster, was sleeping through the story of the hell-on-wheels Alma who reached so high that she became an instance of Aphrodite herself. Our Alma here, however, becomes more a person of interest in her gentle weaknesses, than in her fumbling strengths.)

   That much said, let’s, however, get fully involved with the rest of the island, in its capacity to reveal how bad things can become, and thereby posit energies Alma cannot muster. The bright morning, following the long, dark night, shows her taking out to the yard their stale white sheets and being addressed by a woman in white, a very elderly woman, the likes of which has been seen in many previous Bergman investigations, where only an oracle can get to the bottom of what’s going on—which is to say, a mortal having, like the first Alma, brought to bear by her courage and wit and grace, a possessor of a rare vision and feeling. Her gambit is, “Can you feel my hand now, my fingers, the veins under my skin?” (That being a similar gambit by Jacobi, the murderous mayor and expert on texture that opens doors, in Shame.) Then she announces she’s 216 years old [quickly amending, and unconvincing, to 76]. Not only does she enjoy a remarkable (but not immortal) age, but she has such a closeness to the ways of Aphrodite that she transmits to worthies, like Alma, how factors of a power, paradoxically indebted to resolved mortals, can be put within apprehension which might result in furtherance of becoming aware of needing a warrior dimension as well as a that of a remarkable care-giver. As with Alma’s almost forgetting the gift (a half-gift, in fact) about a brave spouse lifting the spirit of a cowardly spouse, the uncanny stranger almost forgets to impart that Johan’s diary, under their bed, is must reading! On the somewhat soulmate’s departure, the younger sewer is seen from a pedestrian distance and optics which hobbles her as a candidate for audacious deeds. She gets only as far into Johan’s diary (presented by voice-over), as, “I have recently been ill. Not seriously, but unpleasant enough…” Then we cut to the diarist/ painter (an event already recorded in the first investigation; but open to more deep revelation), at work along the shore being interrupted by the owner of the island, Baron von Merkens, also owner of an ancient castle there (a devout soulmate of Knight Augustus Block, in The Seventh Seal) and also demonstrating an extremely pious side, far less benign than that ancient aristocrat. “Would you and your wife care to join us for a simple family supper?” (Words like “simple,” “family,” and “supper,” being implicit weapons, in the range of a non-simple stranger.) Going through tortures—as yet metaphorical—from this worst luck for a solitary soul, he conventionally replies, “That’s kind of you…” “It will be very simple [or, does that term mean, crude]. But I’ll give you a good wine. And our salmon fishing is renowned [crushing; and hooked?]. I should also say that my wife and I are among your admirers, your… fondest admirers…” [eliciting wild excitement].

That shot in the dark, as thus under arrest (Jan, in the film, Shame, often chooses to hide when anyone comes his way), becomes supplemented by the further reading of Alma’s discoveries from the diary. Near the area where he was ordered to face the [simple] music of the castle, he becomes interrupted by a woman, Veronica Vogler, whom he had been very intimate with for years without Alma’s awareness. She had  interrupted the painter’s tantrum in realizing that the work had lost its depths. The striking approach of her liaison—her legs entering the upper area of the frame and then her full and impressive blonde attractiveness—becomes an ironic vignette, in light of the rather witless follow-up. (Moreover, the lust on that second look would infiltrate a fuller phenomenality for the sake of delving into the qualities—pro and con—of the experience.) “Do you see this mark?” she indicates, over her right nipple, where she had exposed that breast. “Be more careful, my love, or it will end in disaster [another implicit warning]. Don’t you remember? I was leaving for a party, and I was wearing my green brocade dress. Afterwards, I had such trouble putting my hair up again. And then I forgot my gloves… I have something I must speak to you about… I’ve received a letter that I must show you. It was sent yesterday: ‘You do not see us, but we see you. The most terrible things can happen. Dreams can become unveiled. The end is near. The wells will run dry; and other fluids will moisten your white loins. This is decided…’ I almost became ill reading it.” (She emits a little laugh in being fondled—the machinery of his imminent murder beyond his grasp.) “Be so kind as to help me with the zipper of my dress…” (Alma is seen reading this with deadened eyes.) In another entry of Johan’s waywardness, he is, while on a walk, waylaid by an intellectual, in suit and tie, who is well aware of the artist’s career. So persistently garrulous is this stranger, that Johan eventually smashes him in the face, bleeding his nose. (The prelude to this blow-up, entails the pest’s rather cutting harangue, “This place must be a painter’s dream or what? I’ve lived here for quite a while [in the castle, as we’ll soon discover]. One returns to the scene of the crime, so to speak, and commits new crimes!… At your age, a certain caution is to be advised… My name is Heerbrand, psychiatric curator… I finger people’s souls and turn their insides out.”) That both Veronica and the pedant are delivering a warning that the floundering radical has engendered a murderous trap, would take a more balanced sensualist to discern. (The Swedish welfare state might be in play here, insomuch as a degree of free thinking could involve a secure tolerance for unconventional ways. Pointedly, I think, the locale is a German island—Germany having a history of intolerance regarding innovative points of view. That a rigorous comportment in face of a skittish normality is urgent, constitutes the essence of this film.)

   Welfare-state laissez-faire could be an ingredient in the situation that Alma (lacking the critical fire of the earlier Alma) quite readily puts aside the evidence of her not being a large part of his life, in order to sustain a saintly solicitude transcending the marriage. She’s prepared soup, a bit of everything, and pours it. He spikes his lunch with strong alcohol, and she produces a lengthy report of what she has to buy for their immediate sustenance. “What you gave me this month is almost gone.” (Bergman’s wit always reliable.) He quickly hands over everything in his pocket, but she wants him to hear the details of the shopping to come. “Don’t just shovel over money like that. You have to look at my accounting.” (Is the litany to come—e.g., “You need a new toothbrush. The one you have looks horrible…”—a subtle rejoinder, from a tepid player?) During the lunch Johan devours many slices of bread, as if Scrooge himself were  transacting with a generous server. Another itemization is, “Then 50 Kronor for your boy’s birthday.” Eventually he tells her of the simple family supper, on Friday. “I know,” she says. “How did you know that?” he asks. She leaves the table.

From the perspective of von Merkens, this taking custody of our protagonists would be like apprehending elusive desperadoes. The swirl of the initial entry, with hosts, relatives and Germanically academic hangers-on in finery, exchanging pleasantries, recalls, vaguely, the networking parties thrown by Fellini and Antonioni. But, after the shuffle in the greenery, we are confronted with a huge table of food and drink (almost a lab) and massive candelabra ablaze (here recalling the oracle’s dinner, in Smiles of a Summer Night [1955], and her graceful confrontation of a pack of wolves being her daughter’s friends). Alma is virtually invisible amidst the forces making much of their financial wealth and crude audacity. Johan, though he doesn’t faint under pressure, like Jan, in Shame, presents a picture of agony. The host, as if in a signal to attack, prates, “I’m completely incapable of feeling aggression.” Promptly after that, someone (the camera catching diners with confusing close-ups, snippets of seeming monstrous parts of faces and hair) calls out, ironically, “Here we’re used to humiliation. We find it pleasurable, our fangs have remained intact…” Ernst, von Merkens’ brother, relates, “I once bought a painting from a well-known artist and invited him over, along with a lot of people who appreciated a good joke! Then I hung it upside down. What a laugh we had then! My God, how we laughed… What do you say, Sir Artist? Wasn’t that a fine joke?” (In Shame, Jacobi, the militant mayor, roughs up violinist Jan, in a similar way. But Jan eventually gets to shoot Jacobi dead. Here something else occurs. But the animus is worth placing often.) The “family” cruelly laughs out loud, causing Johan to barely swallow his salmon. Panning to Alma finds her in shock. Ernst continues: “… the sores never heal, the puss never ceases to flow. The infection is constant—worse, faster, or slower toward the end. The resistance of the heart  decides the outcome…” A lunging pan from that to Johan discloses him close to tears, in having fallen into a trap (a trap, in fact, very hard to circumvent, particularly in view of his chronic weaknesses).

The next stage of “the simple family supper” clearly discloses the heart of the core of the venom. It begins with the hostess’ worry that she’s “constantly losing weight [dying of cancer]…I travel the world over, consulting specialists…” (Johan’s losing credibility is also a mystery of sorts being reversible.) “Sometimes the loss just stops,” she rattles on, “as it did this summer, but then it starts again. My husband thinks its psychological… that it all began when we lost our money. I embezzled the family fortune!” (The dynamics of the coverage of the speakers represents the crucial acrobatics for which the party is missing in action.) Such operatic sensationalism continues as if an overture to the explosive climax. The ruler’s mother exclaims, “I am an old hag. There must be a limit to the hurt.” Someone replies, “No, Madame Countess, I have never heard of any limits at all!” The Countess then pulls her serviette taut and chews on it. Then the subject of Veronica Vogler hits the fan—“I understand you know her. And very well, after what I’ve heard…” The host, who had spoken those words, turns to Alma  and asks, “Have you also met her?” In close-up she replies, “No,” and her face is a mixture of hurt and anger and hopelessness. The conversationalist then taunts, “Such hatred in those eyes!” This promptly, militarily, elicits a chorus of harsh laughter. Johan, now onscreen, drinks his good wine without pleasure. The perspective shows three candle flames at his chest, like medals, being what he ironically might have deserved. Someone shouts out, over the carnivorous mirth, “Fredrik, the cacti you planted need to go. I mean, I don’t enjoy them at all.” Pan back to Johan, who has lost a medal of flame. He covers his face with his white serviette. Now the flames have left his chest. He desperately pours more wine. “Actually,” someone remarks, “I am allergic to them” [that is to say, not cacti but efforts to maintain an austere carnal equilibrium and its sensual medium, which the smart money has not only neglected but put a bounty on]. Johan’s flames are off the grid; but, over his shoulders, there are the King and Queen chess figures. Count Block, in The Seventh Seal, had become famous, in that dimension of the film world having an attention span, for challenging Death to a chess match, by which he hoped to be rewarded in the form of immortality. Hold that thought!

   After so much spleen in the dining room air, the coffee moment—in the library—might have been expected to ease up. But the sugar on the run was to be the piece de resistance, the drama’s dark resolution. A small prelude of this stage of this world war entails the hypochondriac hostess, at the departure from the table, eclipsing the King feature. Also, there is pedant Ernst putting a non-solicitous hand on Johan’s shoulder, and Sir Artist pushing him away, an infraction causing the wag to become livid. Johan covers his face with his hand, sensing a difficulty to come. He comes up to Alma, still seated. “Help me a little,” he asks. “Yes,” she says. Unprepared for the wolf pack (some also their landlords), there would be some tentativeness; but we remain aghast at the passivity of our protagonists, as if chided for being kinky serfs in the 12th century. (Such a thrombosis also surprises us in watching Shame, where supposed professional violinists, Eve and Jan, losing their position, behave like trailer trash.)

Our two today drag themselves to more abuse, in a precinct of literacy, classical rationalism in all its wits. And though the spotlight falls upon a bemusing puppet stage, don’t be fooled for a second that brass knuckle attack could not coincide with rationality. Soon, after the guests of honor are placed, the lights are extinguished for the sake of a deadly clarity. Performance being a raison d’etre here, the little stage also becomes an altar, with a series of candles to light—the formulaic nature of the distribution being cemented, in contrast with the variable candle flames haunting Sir Artist. That the showman, being one of those experts the castle can’t do without, resembles old-time Hollywood boo, Bella Lugosi, dovetails with the same cheesy hard sell as the fanatical armies in Shame. The master of ceremonies orders, “Music”—unaware  that that word covers the logic of his most lethal nightmare. The opened curtain discloses an ancient battlement, with a puppet on a string sidestepping to center stage (perhaps in hopes of sidestepping something that doesn’t agree with him). An operatic baritone, singing in Italian, begins his aria, and the residents produce a warm applause. The camera cuts to the anxious, cigarette-smoking hostess, rivetted to the supposed bravery of the saga. Then we see the grandmother—the host-couple having salted away their children in prestigious schools—galvanized by the sermon-to-come. Another takes off his glasses to meet the forces being evoked. We see Alma, in close-up, struck by the wholesale fascination. Pan to Johan, sweating, morose and looking down to the floor. A cut to the puppeteer produces a close-up  of stark lighting on his face and an auxiliary, large shadow of a mouth on his chin. Despite the complexity of the story of the destruction of the Queen of the Night, Bella comes through with some easy listening. “The Magic Flute is the greatest example. [He blows out all the candles but two.] Tamino’s guards have just left him in the dark courtyard outside the Temple of Wisdom. The young man cries in deepest despair, ‘Oh, eternal night, when might shalt thou pass? When shall the light find my eyes?’ The fatally ill Mozart secretly emphasizes these words. And the reply from the chorus and orchestra is also, ‘Soon, soon, youth… or never.’ The most beautiful, the most shattering music ever written. [The puppeteer’s teeth resemble fangs.  Cut to the target, Johan and his problematic troubles.] Tamino asks, ‘Is Pamina still alive? [An ancient angel comes to light.] The invisible chorus answers, ‘Pamina, Pamina is still alive.’ Hear the strange and illogical but genial rhythm… Pami… na! This is no longer the name of a young woman… but an incantation, a sorcerer’s formula… But still the highest manifestation of art… Would you not agree, Sir Artist?”

A swift swing pan puts the victim on the spot. A pan to Alma finds her very worried, not able to “help a little” in finessing past a murder. Johan, the born and reckless iconoclast, replies (as they knew he would), “Pardon me. There is nothing self-evident in my creative work, except the compulsion to do it. Through no intent of my own [that last phrase being a half-truth  thought to be clever]. I have been pointed out as something apart, a five-legged calf, a monster. I have never sought for that position, nor do so now to keep it. Yet I may well at times have felt  the winds of megalomania sweep across my brow. [Alma tense in his apologia, missing the point of his execution.] But I believe myself to be immune. I need only for one second remind myself of the unimportance of art in the human world in order to cool myself down again. But that does not mean the compulsion does not remain…”

Here we’ve just been granted a gift of the high skill of theatrical drama which Bergman often deploys to penetrate a consciousness so salient and so readily missed, at the heart of not merely human history but the history of everything, being an acrobatic and juggling dare which initiates and interplays significantly the uncanniness of life itself. Of course Johan is murdered for his annoying and incomplete nerve in the Gestapo snake pit. And of course Alma comes to reveal to the interviewer how lacking in substance her loyalty amounts to. But the uniqueness of this film—as sharing with the films, Shame and The Passion of Anna—comprises depth of challenge in the mine field of freedom. With respectability on the basis of living forever (full-bore or largely hidden) becoming more pathological by the day, the challenge of the completely new presses up upon Bergman and upon us, in such a way that it is a certainty that very few will take the dare.

The blitzkrieg of the puppet show and Johan’s faux pas, stirs up a gush of faux congratulation. “So speaks a true artist. This is a real confession. Magnificent! What courage! What clarity! I suggest we raise our glasses to our artist—not only a genius but a thinker, too! I’ll be damned, I never would have suspected. A flowering rose for your hair.” (Johan’s drink seems to be bitter to him.) The grandmother, bedecked by an arsenal of rings, broaches, bracelets and sharp fingernails, seeming to embrace the rebel, manages to cut open some facial skin and shed some blood on the prey of the wolf pack. “Our artist is wounded! I’m so clumsy!” Alma rushes to him, tells him to stay calm and tells him he’s had too much to drink. The wolves laugh. She brings him outside for some fresh air; and they’re followed closely. The expert he recently bloodied  now goes on an offensive we needn’t pay any attention to. The sense of the saga has run its course. And the dilemma of flourishing there stands powerfully in our face.

Inasmuch as the brutes prefer a long and playful kill, there are reams of bemusement. We’ll keep it short. The artist family shows us how pitifully unprepared, for the phenomena of creativity, they are. The hostess needles Alma about Veronica; and, finally leaving the roast, she has no heart to delight in the inspiring seascape path and supernal moonlight. Instead, she announces that she has read the diary. “It makes me sick with fear… But if you think I’m going to run away, I won’t!” Back at their disappearing house and home, Johan pulls up a supposedly profound idea that an “hour of the wolf,” in the dead of night, involves fateful truths. “The old people” [like him] swear by it. Then he’s on to the subject of abuses from his parents when he was a child, and finding solace from his mother’s “forgiveness.” As if the beatific current, with its caressing, were to be freshly in play, he finds himself able to tell Alma about an abuse he inflicted by this coast not long ago, beating a rude young boy to death by means of multiple pounding with a large rock. (Quentin Tarantino, definitely an aficionado of this work, deploys, acrobatic stuntman, Cliff, in his film, Once upon a Time… in Hollywood (2019), to frequently beat to a pulp annoying entities of every description.) Feeling that tempering would make an improvement, Alma responds, “You said once that what you liked about me was that God made me in one piece, that I had whole feelings, whole thoughts. You said it was people like me… It sounded so lovely. I was wrong. I don’t understand anything. I don’t understand you. You’re nothing but frightened…” Soon after dawn, an emissary from the castle proffers a handgun, supposedly to control wild predators. A second invitation is given, with the added attraction being Veronica. Alma takes umbrage about that, and Johan fires a volley of shots from that security factor. (Prior to that, she insists, “I’ll stay.” Moreover her wounds are superficial, and she escapes; the dribble of the action revealing—for hopefully critical souls—a swing to Hollywood.) Johan, the supposed widower, returns to the fun house. Veronica is placed under a shroud; he takes the cloth away and caresses her, and then the height of love laughs in his face, as do the others. He delivers to his detractors the melodramatic challenge, “The mirror has been shattered. But what do the splinters reflect?” [We’d love to believe that the shake-up has allowed some sense of a mortal being instrumental of two ranges. But that seems to be beyond the forces here]. One of those who sneers is the oracle. She gives us a little clinic as to descending to cheapness. And she deconstructs herself into her constituent parts, as a display of matter being honored to die a spiritual death. An amusing moment in Johan’s pursuit of Veronica involves the latter’s lover, a priest, who, in a fit of jealousy, walks up a wall and then upside down, along the ceiling, like Fred Astaire, in Royal Wedding (1951). The proceedings of killing Johan in the swampy surround are far from royal. But Alma does, partly, raise the tone in her attempt to save a difficult relationship.

   She tells us, and those closely tracking her and her misadventure, “I thought it best to follow him. He might harm himself.” She has a question to ask of the investigator (s) of the war. “Isn’t it true that when a woman has lived a long time with a man…she becomes like that man? Since she loves him, and tries to think like him… and see like him. They say that it can change a person. Is that why I began to see those   ghosts? Or were they there anyway? I mean, if I’d loved him less could I have protected him better? Or was it that I didn’t love enough? Was that those ‘cannibals,’ as he called them? Was that why he came to grief? I thought I was so close to him. Sometimes he said he was close to me. One time he said it was certainty. If only I could have followed him all the time. There’s so much to keep pondering. So many questions, I don’t know which is which and I get completely…”

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The Mystery of People Who Speak Dozens of Languages

Last May, Luis Miguel Rojas-Berscia, a doctoral candidate at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, in the Dutch city of Nijmegen, flew to Malta for a week to learn Maltese. He had a hefty grammar book in his backpack, but he didn’t plan to open it unless he had to. “We’ll do this as I would in the Amazon,” he told me, referring to his fieldwork as a linguist. Our plan was for me to observe how he went about learning a new language, starting with “hello” and “thank you.”

Rojas-Berscia is a twenty-seven-year-old Peruvian with a baby face and spiky dark hair. A friend had given him a new pair of earrings, which he wore on Malta with funky tank tops and a chain necklace. He looked like any other laid-back young tourist, except for the intense focus—all senses cocked—with which he takes in a new environment. Linguistics is a formidably cerebral discipline. At a conference in Nijmegen that had preceded our trip to Malta, there were papers on “the anatomical similarities in the phonatory apparati of humans and harbor seals” and “hippocampal-dependent declarative memory,” along with a neuropsychological analysis of speech and sound processing in the brains of beatboxers. Rojas-Berscia’s Ph.D. research, with the Shawi people of the Peruvian rain forest, doesn’t involve fMRI data or computer modelling, but it is still arcane to a layperson. “I’m developing a theory of language change called the Flux Approach,” he explained one evening, at a country inn outside the city, over the delicious pannenkoeken (pancakes) that are a local specialty. “A flux is a dynamism that involves a social fact and an impact, either functionally or formally, in linguistic competence.”

Linguistic competence, as it happens, was the subject of my own interest in Rojas-Berscia. He is a hyperpolyglot, with a command of twenty-two living languages (Spanish, Italian, Piedmontese, English, Mandarin, French, Esperanto, Portuguese, Romanian, Quechua, Shawi, Aymara, German, Dutch, Catalan, Russian, Hakka Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Guarani, Farsi, and Serbian), thirteen of which he speaks fluently. He also knows six classical or endangered languages: Latin, Ancient Greek, Biblical Hebrew, Shiwilu, Muniche, and Selk’nam, an indigenous tongue of Tierra del Fuego, which was the subject of his master’s thesis. We first made contact three years ago, when I was writing about a Chilean youth who called himself the last surviving speaker of Selk’nam. How could such a claim be verified? Pretty much only, it turned out, by Rojas-Berscia.

Superlative feats have always thrilled average mortals, in part, perhaps, because they register as a victory for Team Homo Sapiens: they redefine the humanly possible. If the ultra-marathoner Dean Karnazes can run three hundred and fifty miles without sleep, he may inspire you to jog around the block. If Rojas-Berscia can speak twenty-two languages, perhaps you can crank up your high-school Spanish or bat-mitzvah Hebrew, or learn enough of your grandma’s Korean to understand her stories. Such is the promise of online language-learning programs like Pimsleur, Babbel, Rosetta Stone, and Duolingo: in the brain of every monolingual, there’s a dormant polyglot—a genie—who, with some brisk mental friction, can be woken up. I tested that presumption at the start of my research, signing up on Duolingo to learn Vietnamese. (The app is free, and I was curious about the challenges of a tonal language.) It turns out that I’m good at hello—chào—but thank you, cảm ơn, is harder.

The word “hyperpolyglot” was coined two decades ago, by a British linguist, Richard Hudson, who was launching an Internet search for the world’s greatest language learner. But the phenomenon and its mystique are ancient. In Acts 2 of the New Testament, Christ’s disciples receive the Holy Spirit and can suddenly “speak in tongues” (glōssais lalein, in Greek), preaching in the languages of “every nation under heaven.” According to Pliny the Elder, the Greco-Persian king Mithridates VI, who ruled twenty-two nations in the first century B.C., “administered their laws in as many languages, and could harangue in each of them.” Plutarch claimed that Cleopatra “very seldom had need of an interpreter,” and was the only monarch of her Greek dynasty fluent in Egyptian. Elizabeth I also allegedly mastered the tongues of her realm—Welsh, Cornish, Scottish, and Irish, plus six others.

With a mere ten languages, Shakespeare’s Queen does not qualify as a hyperpolyglot; the accepted threshold is eleven. The prowess of Giuseppe Mezzofanti (1774-1849) is more astounding and better documented. Mezzofanti, an Italian cardinal, was fluent in at least thirty languages and studied another forty-two, including, he claimed, Algonquin. In the decades that he lived in Rome, as the chief custodian of the Vatican Library, notables from around the world dropped by to interrogate him in their mother tongues, and he flitted as nimbly among them as a bee in a rose garden. Lord Byron, who is said to have spoken Greek, French, Italian, German, Latin, and some Armenian, in addition to his immortal English, lost a cursing contest with the Cardinal and afterward, with admiration, called him a “monster.” Other witnesses were less enchanted, comparing him to a parrot. But his gifts were certified by an Irish scholar and a British philologist, Charles William Russell and Thomas Watts, who set a standard for fluency that is still useful in vetting the claims of modern Mezzofantis: Can they speak with an unstilted freedom that transcends rote mimicry?

Mezzofanti, the son of a carpenter, picked up Latin by standing outside a seminary, listening to the boys recite their conjugations. Rojas-Berscia, by contrast, grew up in an educated trilingual household. His father is a Peruvian businessman, and the family lives comfortably in Lima. His mother is a shop manager of Italian origin, and his maternal grandmother, who cared for him as a boy, taught him Piedmontese. He learned English in preschool and speaks it impeccably, with the same slight Latin inflection—a trill of otherness, rather than an accent—that he has in every language I can vouch for. Maltese had been on his wish list for a while, along with Uighur and Sanskrit. “What happens is this,” he said, over dinner at a Chinese restaurant in Nijmegen, where he was chatting in Mandarin with the owner and in Dutch with a server, while alternating between French and Spanish with a fellow-student at the institute. “I’m an amoureux de langues. And, when I fall in love with a language, I have to learn it. There’s no practical motive—it’s a form of play.” An amoureux, one might note, covets his beloved, body and soul.

My own modest competence in foreign languages (I speak three) is nothing to boast of in most parts of the world, where multilingualism is the norm. People who live at a crossroads of cultures—Melanesians, South Asians, Latin-Americans, Central Europeans, sub-Saharan Africans, plus millions of others, including the Maltese and the Shawi—acquire languages without considering it a noteworthy achievement. Leaving New York, on the way to the Netherlands, I overheard a Ghanaian taxi-driver chatting on his cell phone in a tonal language that I didn’t recognize. “It’s Hausa,” he told me. “I speak it with my father, whose family comes from Nigeria. But I speak Twi with my mom, Ga with my friends, some Ewe, and English is our lingua franca. If people in Chelsea spoke one thing and people in SoHo another, New Yorkers would be multilingual, too.”

Linguistically speaking, that taxi-driver is a more typical citizen of the globe than the average American is. Consider Adul Sam-on, one of the teen-age soccer players rescued last July from the cave in Mae Sai, Thailand. Adul grew up in dire poverty on the porous Thai border with Myanmar and Laos, where diverse populations intersect. His family belongs to an ethnic minority, the Wa, who speak an Austroasiatic language that is also widespread in parts of China. In addition to Wa, according to the Times, Adul is “proficient” in Thai, Burmese, Mandarin, and English—which enabled him to interpret for the two British divers who discovered the trapped team.

Nearly two billion people study English as a foreign language—about four times the number of native speakers. And apps like Google Translate make it possible to communicate, almost anywhere, by typing conversations into a smartphone (presuming your interlocutor can read). Ironically, however, as the hegemony of English decreases the need to speak other languages for work or for travel, the cachet attached to acquiring them seems to be growing. There is a thriving online community of ardent linguaphiles who are, or who aspire to become, polyglots; for inspiration, they look to Facebook groups, YouTube videos, chat rooms, and language gurus like Richard Simcott, a charismatic British hyperpolyglot who orchestrates the annual Polyglot Conference. This gathering has been held, on various continents, since 2009, and it attracts hundreds of aficionados. The talks are mostly in English, though participants wear nametags listing the languages they’re prepared to converse in. Simcott’s winkingly says “Try Me.”

No one becomes a hyperpolyglot by osmosis, or without sacrifice—it’s a rare, herculean feat. Rojas-Berscia, who gave up a promising tennis career that interfered with his language studies, reckons that there are “about twenty of us in Europe, and we all know, or know of, one another.” He put me in touch with a few of his peers, including Corentin Bourdeau, a young French linguist whose eleven languages include Wolof, Farsi, and Finnish; and Emanuele Marini, a shy Italian in his forties, who runs an export-import business and speaks almost every Slavic and Romance language, plus Arabic, Turkish, and Greek, for a total of nearly thirty. Neither willingly uses English, resenting its status as a global bully language—its prepotenza, as Marini put it to me, in Italian. Ellen Jovin, a dynamic New Yorker who has been described as the “den mother” of the polyglot community, explained that her own avid study of languages—twenty-five, to date—“is almost an apology for the dominance of English. Polyglottery is an antithesis to linguistic chauvinism.”

Much of the data on hyperpolyglots is still sketchy. But, from a small sample of prodigies who have been tested by neurolinguists, responded to online surveys, or shared their experience in forums, a partial profile has emerged. An extreme language learner has a more-than-random chance of being a gay, left-handed male on the autism spectrum, with an autoimmune disorder, such as asthma or allergies. (Endocrine research, still inconclusive, has investigated the hypothesis that these traits may be linked to a spike in testosterone during gestation.) “It’s true that L.G.B.T. people are well represented in our community,” Simcott told me, when we spoke in July. “And a lot identify as being on the spectrum, some mildly, others more so. It was a subject we explored at the conference last year.”

Simcott himself is an ambidextrous, heterosexual, and notably outgoing forty-one-year-old. He lives in Macedonia with his wife and daughter, a budding polyglot of eleven, who was, he told me, trilingual at sixteen months. His own parents were monolingual, though he was fascinated, as a boy, “by the different ways people spoke English.” (Like Henry Higgins, Simcott can nail an accent to a precise point on the map, not only in the British Isles but all over Europe.) “I’m mistaken for a native in about six languages,” he told me, even though he started slow, learning French in grade school and Spanish as a teen-ager. At university, he added Italian, Portuguese, Swedish, and Old Icelandic. His flawless German, acquired post-college, as an au pair, made Dutch a cinch.

As Simcott entered late adolescence, he said, “the Internet was starting up,” so he could practice his languages in chat rooms. He also found a sense of identity that had eluded him. There was, in particular, a mysterious polyglot who haunted the same rooms. “He was the first person who really encouraged me,” Simcott said. “Everyone else either warned me that my brain would burst or saw me as a talking horse. Eventually, I made a video using bits and bobs of sixteen languages, so I wouldn’t have to keep performing.” But the stranger gave Simcott a validation that he still recalls with emotion. He founded the conference partly to pay that debt forward, by creating a clubhouse for the kind of geeky kid he had been, to whom no tongue was foreign but no place was home.

A number of hyperpolyglots are reclusive savants who bank their languages rather than using them to communicate. The more extroverted may work as translators or interpreters. Helen Abadzi, a Greek educator who speaks nineteen languages “at least at an intermediate level” spent decades at the World Bank. Kató Lomb, a Hungarian autodidact, learned seventeen tongues—the last, Hebrew, in her late eighties—and in middle age became one of the world’s first simultaneous interpreters. Simcott joined the British Foreign Service. On tours of duty in Yemen, Bosnia, and Moldova, he picked up some of the lingo. Every summer, he set himself the challenge of learning a new tongue more purposefully, either by taking a university course—as he did in Mandarin, Japanese, Czech, Arabic, Finnish, and Georgian—or with a grammar book and a tutor.

However they differ, the hyperpolyglots whom I met all winced at the question “How many languages do you speak?” As Rojas-Berscia explained it, the issue is partly semantic: What does the verb “to speak” mean? It is also political. Standard accents and grammar are usually those of a ruling class. And the question is further clouded by the “chauvinism” that Ellen Jovin feels obliged to resist. The test of a spy, in thrillers, is to “pass for a native,” even though the English-speaking natives of Glasgow, Trinidad, Delhi, Lagos, New Orleans, and Melbourne (not to mention Eliza Doolittle’s East End) all sound foreign to one another. “No one masters all the nuances of a language,” Simcott said. “It’s a false standard, and one that gets raised, ironically, mostly by monoglots—Americans in particular. So let’s just say that I have studied more than fifty, and I use about half of them.”

Richard Hudson’s casual search for the ultimate hyperpolyglot was inconclusive, but it led him to an American journalist, Michael Erard, who had embarked on the same quest more methodically. Erard, who has a doctorate in English, spent six years reading the scientific literature and debriefing its authors, visiting archives (including Mezzofanti’s, in Bologna), and tracking down every living language prodigy he had heard from or about. It was his online survey, conducted in 2009, that generated the first systematic overview of linguistic virtuosity. Some four hundred respondents provided information about their gender and their orientation, among other personal details, including their I.Q.s (which were above average). Nearly half spoke at least seven languages, and seventeen qualified as hyperpolyglots. The distillation of this research, “Babel No More,” published in 2012, is an essential reference book—in its way, an ethnography of what Erard calls a “neural tribe.”

The awe that tribe members command has always attracted opportunists. There are, for example, “bizglots” and “broglots,” as Erard calls them. The former hawk tutorials with the dubious promise that anyone can become a prodigy, while the latter engage in online bragfests, like “postmodern frat boys.” And then there are the fauxglots. My favorite is “George Psalmanazar” (his real name is unknown), a vagabond of mysterious provenance and endearing chutzpah who wandered through Europe in the late seventeenth century, claiming, by turns, to be Irish, Japanese, and, ultimately, Formosan. Samuel Johnson befriended him in London, where Psalmanazar published a travelogue about his “native” island which included translations from its language—an ingenious pastiche of his invention. Erard pursued another much hyped character, Ziad Fazah, a Guinness-record holder until 1997, who claimed to speak fifty-eight languages fluently. Fazah flamed out spectacularly on a Chilean television show, failing to answer even simple questions posed to him by native speakers.

Rojas-Berscia derides such theatrics as “monkey business,” and dismisses prodigies who monetize their gifts. “Where do they get the time for it?” he wonders. Erard, in his survey for “Babel No More,” queried his subjects on their learning protocols, and, while some were vague (“I accept mistakes and uncertainty; I listen and read a lot”), others gave elaborate accounts of drawing “mind maps” and of building “memory anchors,” or of creating an architectural model for each new language, to be furnished with vocabulary as they progressed. When I asked Simcott if he had any secrets, he paused to think about it. “Well, I don’t have an amazing memory,” he said. “At many tasks, I’m just average. A neurolinguist at the City University of New York, Loraine Obler, ran some tests on me, and I performed highly on recalling lists of nonsense words.” (That ability, Obler’s research suggests, strongly correlates with a gift for languages.) “I was also a standout at reproducing sounds,” he continued. “But, the more languages you learn, in the more families, the easier it gets. Each one bangs more storage hooks into the wall.”

Alexander Argüelles, a legendary figure in the community, warned Erard that immodesty is the hallmark of a charlatan. When Erard met him, ten years ago, Argüelles, an American who lives in Singapore, started his day at three in the morning with a “scriptorium” exercise: “writing two pages apiece in Arabic, Sanskrit, and Chinese, the languages he calls the ‘etymological source rivers.’ ” He continued with other languages, from different families, until he had filled twenty-four notebook pages. As dawn broke, he went for a long run, listening to audiobooks and practicing what he calls “shadowing”: as the foreign sounds flowed into his headphones, he shouted them out at the top of his lungs. Back at home, he turned to drills in grammar and phonetics, logging the time he had devoted to each language on an Excel spreadsheet. Erard studied logs going back sixteen months, and calculated that Argüelles had spent forty per cent of his waking life studying fifty-two languages, in increments that varied from four hundred and fifty-six hours (Arabic) to four hours (Vietnamese). “The way I see it, there are three types of polyglots,” he told Erard. There were the “ultimate geniuses . . . who excel at anything they do”; the Mezzofantis, “who are only good at languages”; and the “people like me.” He refused to consider himself a special case—he was simply a Stakhanovite.

Erard is a pensive man of fifty, still boyish-looking, with a gift for listening that he prizes in others. We met in Nijmegen, at the Max Planck Institute, where he was finishing a yearlong stint as the writer-in-residence, and looking forward to moving back to Maine with his family. “I saw only when the book was finished that many of the stories had a common thread,” he told me. We had been walking through the woods that surround the institute, listening to the vibrant May birdsong, a Babel of voices. His subjects, he reflected, had been cut from the herd of average mortals by their wiring or by their obsession. They had embraced their otherness, and they had cultivated it. Yet, if speech defines us as human, a related faculty had eluded them: the ability to connect. Each new language was a potential conduit—an escape route from solitude. “I hadn’t realized that was my story, too,” he said.

Rojas-Berscia and I took a budget flight from Brussels to Malta, arriving at midnight. The air smelled like summer. Our taxi-driver presumed we were mother and son. “How do you say ‘mother’ in Maltese?” Rojas-Berscia asked him, in English. By the time we had reached the hotel, he knew the whole Maltese family. Two local newlyweds, still in their wedding clothes, were just checking in. “How do you say ‘congratulations’?” Rojas-Berscia asked. The answer was nifrah.

We were both starving, so we dropped our bags and went to a local bar. It was Saturday night, and the narrow streets of the quarter were packed with revellers grooving to deafening music. I had pictured something a bit different—a quaint inn on a quiet square, perhaps, where a bronze Knight of Malta tilted at the bougainvillea. But Rojas-Berscia is not easily distracted. He took out his notebook and jotted down the kinship terms he had just learned. Then he checked his phone. “I texted the language guide I lined up for us,” he explained. “He’s a personal trainer I found online, and I’ll start working out with him tomorrow morning. A gym is a good place to get the prepositions for direction.” The trainer arrived and had a beer with us. He was overdressed, with a lacquered mullet, and there was something shifty about him. Indeed, Rojas-Berscia prepaid him for the session, but he never turned up the next day. He had, it transpired, a subsidiary line of work.

I didn’t expect Rojas-Berscia to master Maltese in a week, but I was surprised at his impromptu approach. He spent several days raptly eavesdropping on native speakers in markets and cafés and on long bus rides, bathing in the warm sea of their voices. If we took a taxi to some church or ruin, he would ride shotgun and ask the driver to teach him a few common Maltese phrases, or to tell him a joke. He didn’t record these encounters, but in the next taxi or shop he would use the new phrases to start a conversation. Hyperpolyglots, Erard writes, exhibit an imperative “will to plasticity,” by which he means plasticity of the brain. But I was seeing plasticity of a different sort, which I myself had once possessed. In my early twenties, I had learned two languages simultaneously, the first by “sleeping with my dictionary,” as the French put it, and the other by drinking a lot of wine and being willing to make a fool of myself jabbering at strangers. With age, I had lost my gift for abandon. That had been my problem with Vietnamese. You have to inhabit a language, not only speak it, and fluency requires some dramatic flair. I should have been hanging out in New York’s Little Saigon, rather than staring at a screen.

The Maltese were flattered by Rojas-Berscia’s interest in their language, but dumbfounded that he would bother to learn it—what use was it to him? Their own history suggests an answer. Malta, an archipelago, is an almost literal stepping stone from Africa to Europe. (While we were there, the government turned away a boatload of asylum seekers.) Its earliest known inhabitants were Neolithic farmers, who were succeeded by the builders of a temple complex on Gozo. (Their mysterious megaliths are still standing.) Around 750 B.C., Phoenician traders established a colony, which was conquered by the Romans, who were routed by the Byzantines, who were kicked out by the Aghlabids. A community of Arabs from the Muslim Emirate of Sicily landed in the eleventh century and dug in so deep that waves of Christian conquest—Norman, Swabian, Aragonese, Spanish, Sicilian, French, and British—couldn’t efface them. Their language is the source of Maltese grammar and a third of the lexicon, making Malti the only Semitic language in the European Union. Rojas-Berscia’s Hebrew helped him with plurals, conjugations, and some roots. As for the rest of the vocabulary, about half comes from Italian, with English and French loanwords. “We should have done Uighur,” I teased him. “This is too easy for you.”

Linguistics gave Rojas-Berscia tools that civilians lack. But he was drawn to linguistics in part because of his aptitude for systematizing. “I can’t remember names,” he told me, yet his recall for the spoken word is preternatural. “It will take me a day to learn the essentials,” he had reckoned, as we planned the trip. The essentials included “predicate formation, how to quantify, negation, pronouns, numbers, qualification—‘good,’ ‘bad,’ and such. Some clausal operators—‘but,’ ‘because,’ ‘therefore.’ Copular verbs like ‘to be’ and ‘to seem.’ Basic survival verbs like ‘need,’ ‘eat,’ ‘see,’ ‘drink,’ ‘want,’ ‘walk,’ ‘buy,’ and ‘get sick.’ Plus a nice little shopping basket of nouns. Then I’ll get our guide to give me a paradigm—‘I eat an apple, you eat an apple’—and voilà.” I had, I realized, covered the same ground in Vietnamese—tôi ăn một quả táo—but it had cost me six months.

It wasn’t easy, though, to find the right guide. I suggested we try the university. “Only if we have to,” Rojas-Berscia said. “I prefer to avoid intellectuals. You want the street talk, not book Maltese.” How would he do this in the Amazon? “Monolingual fieldwork on indigenous tongues, without the reference point of a lingua franca, is harder, but it’s beautiful,” he said. “You start by making bonds with people, learning to greet them appropriately, and observing their gestures. The rules of behavior are at least as important in cultural linguistics as the rules of grammar. It’s not just a matter of finding the algorithm. The goal is to become part of a society.”

After the debacle with the “trainer,” we went looking for volunteers willing to spend an hour or so over a drink or a coffee. We auditioned a tattoo artist with blond dreadlocks, a physiology student from Valletta, a waiter on Gozo, and a tiny old lady who sold tickets to the catacombs outside Mdina (a location for King’s Landing in “Game of Thrones”). Like nearly all Maltese, they spoke good English, though Rojas-Berscia valued their mistakes. “When someone says, ‘He is angry for me,’ you learn something about his language—it represents a convention in Maltese. The richness of a language’s conventions is the highest barrier to sounding like a native in it.”

On our third day, Rojas-Berscia contacted a Maltese Facebook friend, who invited us to dinner in Birgu, a medieval city fortified by the Knights of Malta in the sixteenth century. The sheltered port is now a marina for super-yachts, although a wizened ferryman shuttles humbler travellers from the Birgu quays to those of Senglea, directly across from them. The waterfront is lined with old palazzos of coralline limestone, whose façades were glowing in the dusk. We ordered some Maltese wine and took in the scene. But the minute Rojas-Berscia opened his notebook his attention lasered in on his task. “Please don’t tell me if a verb is regular or not,” he chided his friend, who was being too helpful. “I want my brain to do the work of classifying.”

Rojas-Berscia’s brain is of great interest to Simon Fisher, his senior colleague at the institute and a neurogeneticist of international renown. In 2001, Fisher, then at Oxford, was part of a team that discovered the FOXP2 gene and identified a single, heritable mutation of it that is responsible for verbal dyspraxia, a severe language disorder. In the popular press, FOXP2 has been mistakenly touted as “the language gene,” and as the long-sought evidence for Noam Chomsky’s famous theory, which posits that a spontaneous mutation gave Homo sapiens the ability to acquire speech and that syntax is hard-wired. Other animals, however, including songbirds, also bear a version of the gene, and most of the researchers I met believe that language is probably, as Fisher put it, a “bio-cultural hybrid”—one whose genesis is more complicated than Chomsky would allow. The question inspires bitter controversy.

Fisher’s lab at Nijmegen focusses on pathologies that disrupt speech, but he has started to search for DNA variants that may correlate with linguistic virtuosity. One such quirk has already been discovered, by the neuroscientist Sophie Scott: an extra loop of gray matter, present from birth, in the auditory cortex of some phoneticians. “The genetics of talent is unexplored territory,” Fisher said. “It’s a hard concept to frame for an experiment. It’s also a sensitive topic. But you can’t deny the fact that your genome predisposes you in certain ways.”

The genetics of talent may thwart average linguaphiles who aspire to become Mezzofantis. Transgenerational studies are the next stage of research, and they will seek to establish the degree to which a genius for language runs in the family. Argüelles is the child of a polyglot. Kató Lomb was, too. Simcott’s daughter might contribute to a science still in its infancy. In the meantime, Fisher is recruiting outliers like Rojas-Berscia and collecting their saliva; when the sample is broad enough, he hopes, it will generate some conclusions. “We need to establish the right cutoff point,” he said. “We tend to think it should be twenty languages, rather than the conventional eleven. But there’s a trade-off: with a lower number, we have a bigger cohort.”

I asked Fisher about another cutoff point: the critical period for acquiring a language without an accent. The common wisdom is that one loses the chance to become a spy after puberty. Fisher explained why that is true for most people. A brain, he said, sacrifices suppleness to gain stability as it matures; once you master your mother tongue, you don’t need the phonetic plasticity of childhood, and a typical brain puts that circuitry to another use. But Simcott learned three of the languages in which he is mistaken for a native when he was in his twenties. Corentin Bourdeau, who grew up in the South of France, passes for a local as seamlessly in Lima as he does in Tehran. Experiments in extending or restoring plasticity, in the hope of treating sensory disabilities, may also lead to opportunities for greater acuity. Takao Hensch, at Harvard, has discovered that Valproate, a drug used to treat epilepsy, migraines, and bipolar disorder, can reopen the critical period for visual development in mice. “Might it work for speech?” Fisher said. “We don’t know yet.”

Rojas-Berscia and I parted on the train from Brussels to Nijmegen, where he got off and I continued to the Amsterdam airport. He had to finish his thesis on the Flux Approach before leaving for a research job in Australia, where he planned to study aboriginal languages. I asked him to assess our little experiment. “The grammar was easy,” he said. “The orthography is a little difficult, and the verbs seemed chaotic.” His prowess had dazzled our consultants, but he wasn’t as impressed with himself. He could read bits of a newspaper; he could make small talk; he had learned probably a thousand words. When a taxi-driver asked if he’d been living on Malta for a year, he’d laughed with embarrassment. “I was flattered, of course,” he added. “And his excitement for my progress excited him to help us.” “Excitement about your progress,” I clucked. It was a rare lapse.

A week later, I was on a different train, from New York to Boston. Fisher had referred me to his collaborator Evelina Fedorenko. Fedorenko is a cognitive neuroscientist at Massachusetts General Hospital who also runs what her postdocs call the EvLab, at M.I.T. My first e-mail to her had bounced back—she was on maternity leave. But then she wrote to say that she would be delighted to meet me. “Are you claustrophobic?” she added. If not, she said, I could take a spin in her fMRI machine, to see what she does with her hyperpolyglots.

Fedorenko is small and fair, with delicate features. She was born in Volgograd in 1980. “When the Soviet Union fell apart, we were starving, and it wasn’t fun,” she said. Her father was an alcoholic, but her parents were determined to help her fulfill her exceptional promise in math and science, which meant escaping abroad. At fifteen, she won a place in an exchange program, sponsored by Senator Bill Bradley, and spent a year in Alabama. Harvard gave her a full scholarship in 1998, and she went on to graduate school at M.I.T., in linguistics and psychology. There, she met the cognitive scientist Ted Gibson. They married, and they now have a one-year-old daughter.

One afternoon, I visited Fedorenko at her home, in Belmont. (She spends as much time as she can with her baby, who was babbling like a songbird.) “Here is my basic question,” she said. “How do I get a thought from my mind into yours? We begin by asking how language fits into the broader architecture of the mind. It’s a late invention, evolutionarily, and a lot of the brain’s machinery was already in place.”

She wondered: Does language share a mechanism with other cognitive functions? Or is it autonomous? To seek an answer, she developed a set of “localizer tasks,” administered in an fMRI machine. Her first goal was to identify the “language-responsive cortex,” and the tasks involved reading or listening to a sequence of sentences, some of them garbled or composed of nonsense words.

The responsive cortex proved to be separate from regions involved in other forms of complex thought. We don’t, for example, use the same parts of our brains for music and for speech, which seems counterintuitive, especially in the case of a tonal language. But pitch, Fedorenko explained, has its own neural turf. And life experience alters the picture. “Literate people use one region of their cortex in recognizing letters,” she said. “Illiterate people don’t have that region, though it develops if they learn to read.”

In order to draw general conclusions, Fedorenko needed to study the way that language skills vary among individuals. They turned out to vary greatly. The intensity of activity in response to the localizer tests was idiosyncratic; some brains worked harder than others. But that raised another question: Did heightened activity correspond to a greater aptitude for language? Or was the opposite true—that the cortex of a language prodigy would show less activity, because it was more efficient?

I asked Fedorenko if she had reason to believe that gay, left-handed males on the spectrum had some cerebral advantage in learning languages. “I’m not prepared to accept that reporting as anything more than anecdotal,” she said. “Males, for one thing, get greater encouragement for intellectual achievement.”

Fedorenko’s initial subjects had been English-speaking monolinguals, or bilinguals who also spoke Spanish or Mandarin. But, in 2013, she tested her first prodigy. “We heard about a local kid who spoke thirty languages, and we recruited him,” she said. He introduced her to other whizzes, and as the study grew Fedorenko needed material in a range of tongues. Initially, she used Bible excerpts, but “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” came to seem more congenial. The EvLab has acquired more than forty “Alice” translations, and Fedorenko plans to add tasks in sign language.

Twelve years on, Fedorenko is confident of certain findings. All her subjects show less brain activity when working in their mother tongue; they don’t have to sweat it. As the language in the tests grows more challenging, it elicits more neural activity, until it becomes gibberish, at which point it elicits less—the brain seems to give up, quite sensibly, when a task is futile. Hyperpolyglots, too, work harder in an unfamiliar tongue. But their “harder” is relaxed compared with the efforts of average people. Their advantage seems to be not capacity but efficiency. No matter how difficult the task, they use a smaller area of their brain in processing language—less tissue, less energy.

All Fedorenko’s guinea pigs, including me, also took a daunting nonverbal memory test: squares on a grid flash on and off as you frantically try to recall their location. This trial engages a neural network separate from the language cortex—the executive-function system. “Its role is to support general fluid intelligence,” Fedorenko said. What kind of boost might it give to, say, a language prodigy? “People claim that language learning makes you smarter,” she replied. “Sadly, we don’t have evidence for it. But, if you play an unfamiliar language to ‘normal’ people, their executive-function systems don’t show much response. Those of polyglots do. Perhaps they’re striving to grasp a linguistic signal.” Or perhaps that’s where their genie resides.

Barring an infusion of Valproate, most of us will never acquire Rojas-Berscia’s twenty-eight languages. As for my own brain, I reckoned that the scan would detect a lumpen mass of mac and cheese embedded with low-wattage Christmas lights. After the memory test, I was sure that it had. “Don’t worry,” Matt Siegelman, Fedorenko’s technician, reassured me. “Everyone fails it—well, almost.”

Siegelman’s tactful letdown woke me from my adventures in language land. But as I was leaving I noticed a copy of “Alice” in Vietnamese. I report to you with pride that I could make out “white rabbit” (thỏ trắng), “tea party” (tiệc trà), and ăn tôi, which—you knew it!—means “eat me.” ♦

Source: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/09/03/the-mystery-of-people-who-speak-dozens-of-languages

[ultimaxell]

Our Darkest Days : Vampire AU

Sometimes…. Saho wondered if he even had a heart anymore.

It was more than just the fact he could no longer feel, could no longer see the colors he knew ran so vividly through the world, a memory painted in the, admittedly, flawed spectrum his mortal mind had, More than just the missing emotions he knew she should be there, knew he should be feeling but instead of their rampant appeal, he felt nothing but an aching hole in his chest, another reminder of what used to be. He loved his father, He loved his brothers, his friends. He loved them, with every aching fiber in his soul, but he could not feel it, could not feel the burning attachment that he knew was there…. And Yet still, he acted on it, played into like most Vampires did, only his was strengthened by the longing the dwelled within him, that longing for both emotion and the people they were attached to. Saho wanted Amun… He wanted Alta.

He supposed that was the human remains in him, the side of him that had died thousands of years ago when his father had brought fangs to flesh and turned him from a peasant misfit to a king. He could remember seeing in color, could remember the feelings that rushed through him, new, hot, vivid, only to be taken away after one hundred short years, all color fading along with his joy, his happiness, anything light in him. He had been told it was normal, told this was the way a vampires worked, and after thousands of years, Saho had accepted that. It didn’t matter so much anymore, and he even began to appreciate it, content that his chest no longer swelled with sympathy, no longer felt any empathy for those under him.

It was in moments like these, in the flickering candle light of what they had deemed the throne room, his back pressed against the high raised chair with, what looked to him like murky grey but was actually a vivid blue cushions comforting his body, that the thought rose up again, the question he held no answer to and did not really care to.

What what the price of immortality?

Was it simply your humanity, or was it possible that it was the very beating heart that lay in you chest? Sure, it beat against his hand as he held a curious hand over it, his eyes hooded, shadowed as he felt it’s rhythmic thump in one, two, threes, but his question laid more with the ‘heart’ or had he given that up, Handed it to his father In exchange for immortality and power that now sang through his veins? It wasn’t a question he wondered often. In truth, Saho was content with how his life was playing out, in what it was that he could do, what power he held over people and their thoughts. He knew what he was, a Vampire, a king, and most days it gave him a strong vivid surge of enjoyment to see people beg him for small things, a loan, a day… their lives, and their vigorous fear only proved to him what he already knew…. That he was made to be a king.

But sometimes he wondered what price had paid for such a right, what he had given up to make this his destiny.

The question popped up now, fresh in his mind now, as he stared down the men who had fallen to their knees before him, dark long hair falling in his face as his hands pressed flat against the floor, his body, invisible to other who were looking upon him, shook slightly under the weight of his stare, like his eyes weighed more than his body could handle, a thousand pounds of judgement and promised pain. Saho’s head tilted, his eyes blinking slow as he took the man in, his memory, longer than that of a normal human, could vaguely recall the image of this man standing before him, to promised wealth and reputation to the kings should they simply give him a small loan.

Saho had known that he would not be able to hold up the loan that he had given to him. He had know this was how it would end, that the man, so cocky before, so arrogant, so sure, would end up here once more, begging, pleading with him to give him just that one more chance, that if he just gave him a little more time, he could make him double, no triple what Saho had dished out.

He didn’t realize Saho had never intended for him to make it.

“So you’re telling me, that you have come here, empty handed….. And expect forgiveness?”

The man stiffened, his sobs silencing even as the tears spilled from his eyes. He knew. He knew what it was that was coming, the words that would fall from, his lips even before he said them. Saho knew that if he commanded it, the man would slit his own throat, that all the King had to do…. Was simply say no, and they would know just exactly what that meant. In Reality, Saho didn’t have to say another word, didn’t have to even look up from his worn boots, didn’t have to do more then wave his hand in his direction for all of this to be over...

But it was far more fun to go through formalities.

“What’s that? There is no mumbling in my court.”

The man shivered as Saho’s voice ran over him, his body shaking, trembling. Saho gave him a moment, a few seconds of his prolonged silence, before the quirk in his lips became to hard to hid, the twist of his lips into a wicked grin flashing in his eyes.

“You don’t deserve my Protection any longer. All that you have…. Belongs to me now.”

The man snapped up, just as Saho Lifted his hands…. And snapped his fingers.

The sounds of his screams reverberated through the halls as the men lining the walls, the ones hooded, flashing ravenous eyes snapping toward the man’s figure as he spoke, who responded to Saho’s gestures in an instant, their movements quick, a blur of motion, and all that could be heard was the screams, the splash of blood across stone as they tore into his flesh, the sight of it hidden by the splay of limbs, the rush of bodies of starving vampire fledglings flailing and covering the sight of the body being torn apart.

Saho only watched, grinning slowly as he leaned back into his chair, his hand coming up to catch his cheek against his knuckles. He settled, tilting his head to the side to allow himself to soak in the screams…. For a moment, anyway.

“So…. you couldn’t have killed him in a normal way…. Like say slitting his throat? Stabbing him with a knife that I know you have on you…. Snapping his neck maybe? You know, like a normal vampire king might have? Do you have to use the starving fledglings? I hate the sounds they make….”

The smile that had been creeping along his lips dulled into a surly pout as Saho turned his head to look at the person who muttered the words lowly, softly, to the point that they were reserved simply and only for him. Saho took a moment to take in the image of the man lying across one of the other thrones, his hands raise so his fore arms rested on his chest, his eyes, blue as the oceans and just as deep, just as vivid, locked on the little cube of what should have been colors that rested in his hands, fingers moving over them to rearrange the smaller squares again and again and again, his expression never changing from his typically bored mask.

Alta Lee was a Formidable man. It didn’t matter that he was currently sitting in a throne with a child’s toy in his hands, It didn’t matter that he had seemingly never allowed his eyes to move from his hands, his fingers that moved easily over the little rubix cube, Saho knew that the brown haired king had seen, heard, processed everything that had transpired with a troubling ease. He didn’t have to look to see the bodies on the ground, didn’t have to look up to know who it was that stood before them and whose blood now painted the ground. A Lee’s business was knowing, and Alta was a picture perfect Lee.

“I like using the fledglings…. What the point of starving them if we can’t use them?” Saho huffed, slipping from his Kingly air for a moment as he huffed back, a child again in a golden crown. Alta huffed, scoffed at the words, his gaze only flickering once toward the black haired boy.

“That would be the point. What’s the point of starving fledglings? It’s almost cruel.”

“As if You care about what’s cruel or not.”

There was a moment of silence as Alta could not say a single thing to that matter. Saho grinned. It wasn’t often he won in a battle of words against the Lee. If he were to keep score (Which he wouldn’t, that would be pointless) Alta would have 18654 wins to his 4.

Including this one.

So he soaked in it a little.

“Next. Shalen Tustin.”

Saho, still reeling in his little victory against Alta, hardly heard the words that the courtkeeper had spoken, the rest of the court’s head turning as the wide double doors opened, revealing a small man with nervous mannerisms, his fingers touching as he shuffled forward, blues eyes flicking toward the fledglings that had returned to lining the sides before moving on to the kings that sat, unamused and imposing, at the head of the throne room. Saho’s head tilted, his mind racing as he tried to bring up some fragment of a memory on this man, but for the life of him, he could not remember.

The man stopped,paused in front of him, and from the corner of his eye, Saho saw Alta move, fingers dropping the rubix cube as he straightened his spine, twisting so that he faced the man with a  visible interest in his stance, something that caught Saho’s attention immediately. Alta didn’t care for court dynamics, and he very, VERY rarely showed any interest in anyone who walked in. Infact, Alta made it a point to simply ignore almost everything that was going on before him when it came to the days he had to hear what the public had to say, choosing to play some sort of childish game or ignoring everything around him. To capture Alta’s attention was something extraordinary, and now they whole heartedly had his attention as well.

“Why are you here, Mr. Tustin?”

The man shifted, mumbled something under his  breath as his gaze slid along the ground. Saho could hear Alta starting to shift again, and he knew from experience a restless Alta was not a Alta that anyone really wanted to deal with. It really wasn’t a matter on if he could hear him or not. Saho was, if not just a king, but a Dhouti, one of the strongest lines of Vampires, turned by by the originals themselves and holding their blood. He could hear him, perfectly, hear the words that slid past his lips, but Saho wanted to hear him articulate. He gave no special treatment, even to those that interested him.

“Why are you HERE, Mr. Tustin. I can’t be bothered to try and hear you if you want to whisper.”

“MY DEBT! I’m here…. I’m here to settle my Debt.”

“And what do you think you have that might interest me?”

There was a silence, before the man before them seemed to steel, and his eyes hardened as more people stumbled through the open doors. His voice was clear now, his mind already made up, long before he had even set foot before the Kings.

“My Daughter, Caven.”

And there was that human nature, the nature of loyalty so easily broken in the fragile creatures that made up most of the world's population. Saho blinked, his expression betraying nothing. He could not deny that he had expected something of the sort, the man's fortune, his house, his servitude, but to off his own daughter as repayment for a debt was something that saho had very rarely heard. He moved, shifting slightly as his gaze narrowed, the grin twisting his features, black and blue strands falling into mismatched eyes as he breathed his question, a simple one with a hopefully interesting answer.

“Tell me, why would your daughter be worth your debt?”

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

Vampire males, any of the males of the Originals blood without a lifemate, without their one, didn't dream. They didn't see in color and they certainly didn't feel emotion. Pain, yes, but not any good emotion. So why had he been reaching for a dream for the past few years? He was an ancient, an experienced warrior. He had no time for fantasy, or for imagination. His world was stark and barren, a necessity for battling an enemy who, inevitably, had been a friend or family member.

Over the first hundred or so years after losing his emotions, he had held out hope. As centuries passed, the hope of finding his one had faded. He had accepted he would find her in the next life and he was carrying out his resolve to do his last duty to his people. Yet here he was, an ancient of great experience, Alta of the Lee line, a lineage as old as time itself, a man of wisdom, a warrior renowned and feared, sitting wide awake, dreaming.

Dreams should have felt insubstantial, and at first his had been. A woman. Just a vague idea of her appearance. So, young in comparison to him, but a fighter in her own right. She hadn't been his concept of the woman who would partner him, yet as she grew in substance over the years, he realized how perfect she was for him. He had fought far too long to ever lay down his weapons. He knew no other way of life. Duty and sacrifice were bred into his very bones and he needed a woman who could understand him.

Perhaps that was what dreams were. He'd never dreamt until a few years ago. Never. Dreams were emotions, and he'd long ago lost those. Dreams were color, although not his. But they felt like color as the years shaped the woman. She was a mystery, sheer confidence when she fought. She often had fresh bruises and wounds that left scars on her soft skin. He'd taken to examining her carefully each time they met, healing her had become a traditional greeting. He found himself smiling inside, thinking how she was entirely confident when it came to viewing herself as a woman. For a few moments, he contemplated why he should be smiling inside. Smiling was equated with happiness, and he had no emotions to feel such things, but his memories of emotions were sharpening as he moved toward the end of his life, instead of dimming as he had expected. Because when he summoned the dream, he felt a sense of comfort, of well-being and happiness.

Over the years, she had become clearer to him. A fierce leader with exactly the same values he held on loyalty and family and duty. He would never forget the night, only a week ago, when he saw her eyes in color. For a moment, he couldn't breathe, looking at her in wonder, shocked that he could remember colors so vividly that he could attribute an actual color to her eyes.

Her eyes were beautiful, glowing blue with faint hints of gold and amber that darkened when he managed to elicit a laugh from her. She didn't laugh often or easily, and when she did, he felt it was more of a victory than any of the battles he'd won.

As dreams went, and they only occurred when he was awake, they always seemed a bit out of focus. But he looked forward to seeing her. He felt protective toward her, as if his allegiance had already swung toward his dream woman. He wrote to her, songs of love, saying all the things he wished to tell his one. And when she refused to rest, he'd lay her down, her head in his lap, stroking her thick mane of hair and singing to her in other languages. He'd never felt more content, or more complete.

He had often called her Varis, his tongue caressing the word. She had no idea what it meant, but that single word made a swarm of butterflies take flight in her stomach. Something that made him soar, made that smile that usually only played over his expression for his Dhotui display with a brilliance he could not wipe away.

And now, she was here. Her figure moving out from behind a man who did not even warrant a second glance. Alta could hear Saho’s words. Could hear the man speaking in hushed, trembling tones. But none of the words clicked with him. None of the words made any sort of sense when she moved forward, those blue eyes down cast.

He stared down at her, afraid to move or blink, terrified she would disappear, that his perfect dream would shatter. She didn't want them to see her injury. In his dream, she wasn't supposed to have an injury. She'd always been able to control his dream, but lately, reality had crept in a little too much.

Alta shifted out of the throne, his leg that was thrown so haphazardly over the side over the chair threw over to hit the floor. His fingers dropping the rubicks cube without a hesitation as he moved to tower over the small girl.

He gripped her chin in his hand and turned her face toward the light of the flickering fire, a small frown settling over his features.

“Your face is bruised.”

Those bruises shouldn't have been there. Reading her thoughts, as he always did, her warrior swept her hair from her face with gentle fingers. He allowed himself to just feel, to drink in her presence, to enjoy that moment of not just dreaming of her. He touched her hair, rubbing the silky strands between his fingers.

A very male part of him rose up, dominant, protective, a hint of rage at the idea of another man uncovering her vulnerability, at the thought of a person striking her. The woman, his Caven belonged to him alone, as he did to her. The world could see the warrior in them both, but the man and the woman were an intimacy no other needed to know.

“She’s mine.”

His words were meant for Saho’s ears, his finger still tracing over features of a woman so small in comparison to him.

Colors as bright as the sun swirled in front of his eyes, nearly blinding him. Every emotion was magnified a thousand times. Humiliation. Embarrassment. Sorrow. Rage. A terrible sexual hunger, raw and volatile, a craving he'd never experienced.

This need, this craving, was stronger than any one thing he'd ever experienced. It took his breath and stole his sanity. The passion didn't just involve his body, every single part of him, heart and soul, seemed to have an overwhelming desire to be with her. Life mates. His one. She had seen the devotion his grandfather’s Alder one had to him. He paid attention to the smallest thing, seemed completely focused on her every moment, and that kind of concentration would make Alta crazy. He'd been waiting for her too long. He went weeks without seeing or talking to another person besides Saho. How could he possibly be in a relationship? He didn't know how. He didn't know the first thing about sharing his life or, or anything. He could barely breathe, his lungs burning for air.

He would try for her though, he knew this with only moments of finally knowing her.

“Who gave these to you, Varis?”

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Caven never thought she would be the kind of girl who would long for death.

It was a strange concept to her, to be sure. Death was something that she knew, every human familiarizing themselves with the ideal and concept when they were young, a just in case mentality on most and a forced perception on others. It wasn’t hard, not really, to grow used to the idea of it, the act of it almost becoming something of a rite of passage, a coming of age for most people that called Heaven’s Falls thier home. Death was familiar, an ever present constant, a shadow that stalked, hunted, followed around humans. It was a creature lingering, a companion that trailed in the shadows they left behind, always there, mostly unnoticed, but forever connected, pressing dark fingers into spines to send little ripples of fear along their bodies.

Caven knew that she should be scared. It would have been the logical thing, the most appropriate feeling. She should be terrified, she should be fighting against the bonds that held her, the rope that bound her wrists together and tied them to her waist,, she should be cursing the day she was born because this was it, this was how she was going to die. She knew that…. She knew what she should be feeling with a vivid clarity. It was the vision she had always had when the subject was broached, as it always was, particularly in the early hours of the morning as kinds, children, hid under blanket forts with nothing but a candle to illuminate their youthful, naive faces, hushed whispers of what they would do if they should ever be caught by the monsters that went bump in the night, grand illusions, bold boasts of fighting, of ripping them limb from limb as they went down fighting….

No one ever realized it wasn’t like how you imagined. It was never going to be the picture perfect scenarios you thought of in your head. Sometimes…. You didn’t get to play the Hero. Sometimes, you had to accept that you were never going to amount to anything….

Except a Pawn.

Caven moved, following silently behind the man she was forced to call her father. Her hands twisted, not in struggle,in simple discomfort, her fingers clenching as her eyes, bright blue locked on the ground before her as it passed under her converse clad feet, worn shoes scraping along the floor as she heard the doors open to reveal her tomb, her deathbed, her grave.

She didn’t mind, not really. It was strange, but rather than curse and bemoan the luck that had fall upon her, the luck of having a father too arrogant for his own good, too cocky to think he had to pay back what he owed to the Vampire Kings, Caven instead choose to greet death as an old friend, a creature so bonded to her it might as well have been her twin. She was no stranger to death, having dealt her own hand of it, dealt her own pain, and so she simply graze past him, her soul lingering, fluttering about in bony hands... She straightened her back, eyes dry of the tears that most expected of her, her blond hair falling to frame her face, pigtails spilling down her back to lightly graze over the small swell of her hips.

She found herself thinking, marveling at how little she regretted her short life. She had only lived for eighteen years, but there was only two things that she even found herself feeling even the slightest bit of remorse for.

One was she never really got to say goodbye to Vendetta, her one true friend in this world, the only girl that Caven would give anything for. Caven and Vendetta had been born on the same day, the same year, within minutes of each other at the same hospital. It had been simply fate that she had met the girl in her later years, when she was about three or four and her mother had dained to take her to the park on one hot summer afternoon. Caven, who had been nursing a bruise the side of a baseball on her side, hadn’t been moving much, simply playing in the sandbox when some kid had come up to her and knocked over her silly little castle, a tragedy of a castle really, but it had been hers and she had spent a total of twenty minutes on it, a eternity to a child. Caven could remember the sting behind here yes, could remember the rage, but she never got to express it, as there was a sudden yell, a scream that was more battle cry then anythings he had ever heard before, and the form of a small girl, perhaps smaller than even her at that time, the cry on her lips as she came flying in feet first to slam into this person, some random whose names she could not remember, whose face had long since faded from memory.

But Her first look at the girl who would come to mean everything to her was something that would never fade from Caven’s mind, forever ingrained in her soul, her heart, her mind.  She was beautiful, even back then. Her hair had been much shorter, long white strands that flowed around her in an almost mystical halo. Caven could remember looking at her, her eyes wide as she looke dup at the girl who was grinning down on her, thinking that there had to be some mistake, that there had to be some sort of mishap because this girl was far to gorgeous to have ever paid her any mind. She was like some sort of mystical creature, a warrior, a valkyrie on angel’s breath come to save the common rot that littered this earth. She was ethereal, strong and powerful, and she choose her to befriend. Years were not kind to Vendetta in terms of life, both Caven and Vedetta drawing short ends of the straws in terms of parents. Caven could remember Vendetta standing before her, another protective stance as she took a beating that should have found Caven’s already ruined flesh.

She was like that, protective of her, even when Caven had not earned such a gift. Caven did what she could to make it better. She was not strong, something she knew from her father's hand, her mother's whips, but hands that could not strike could heal, and Caven’s fingers had skimmed over Vendetta’s ruined skin, her bruises, her cuts that both belonged to her and did not. Caven would trace over the smile, false, it always rang so false, fingers brushing pretty pink lips and bright blue eyes wide and watery with tears she would not shed, a weakness they could not afford. She wouldn’t cry in front of Ven, for crying would equate to failure in the young Albino’s mind, and if Ven could fake a smile for her sake, Caven would do the same, her lips forcing a smile even as they brushed over bruises and cuts that she knew would sting long into the night.

Caven had not seen her this morning. Had not seen her when her father had woken her at the crack of dawn and told her to get ready, to not bother with breakfast because they were running late. She hadn’t gotten to say goodbye, but she had left a note, knowing, assuming, that whatever her father had planned wasn't good.

It was the only thing she could have done, but it wasn’t enough to express her heart on tiny lines on a page.

Caven’s only other regret was something that she couldn’t really explain. For as long as shecould remember, Caven had been dreaming, thinking, envisioning someone who had long since become a comfort to her, a shoulder to cry on when she could not show tears to Ven. She didn’t know if they were real, she had to assume they weren’t, as she only ever saw them in her dreams, hazy images of a tall man with dark hair and bright eyes who brushed fingers over her skin, pressed kisses to her cheeks as she breathed in the comfort he offered without words, her hands grasping, clutching, reaching and wishing for such a handle in reality.

Her regret was she never found out who this person was, and now…. She never would.

But These regrets were few, and truly if she only had two regrets at the end of her life, This was something Caven could, figuratively, live with.

She heard her father speak, mumbling in his meek voice,earning an eye roll from the blond as she huffed her breath upward. She didn’t hear him as he moved, didn’t hear the footsteps approach her as she shifted on her own feet, fingers clenching, clasping, until she felt it, a hand on her skin as fingers hooked under her chin. Her face was forced up, a light gasp pulling from her lips as she blinked in surprise, and her eyes snapped toward the man whose hand brushed her skin so easily, whose touch rang a thousand bells in her mind, his very presences a soothing familiar feeling.

“I know you….” the words were out of her mouth before she could stop them, and she felt her heart, once hammering in her chest as his touch sung it’s call in her veins, stall at the sight of the frown that pulled on his lips. It was Him…. It was him, it was him, it was him, the man from her dreams, the one who so sweetly calmed her tears when she came to him crying, the one who in meeting healed her before all else, her body refreshed and vivid whenever he made her drink from his wrist. She recognized him, not by his looks, but by the sound of his voice, by the touch of his skin, light, almost hesitant, like he wasn’t sure it was her…. That frown however was a clear contrast to what she knew of him, and her heart plummeted. Had she disappointed him, was she not to his liking? The thought of being less than satisfactory suddenly hit her harder than it really should have, her eyes welling, stringing as she blinked rapidly and drew in her shaking breath. She wanted to be enough…. God she wanted to be enough.

His words, however, caught her off guard. No one had ever cared to ask that before…. Not anyone who didn’t know the answer already anyway.

“.... They were my fault, my lord… I was not fast enough to get ready this morning….”

She mumbled the words, her gaze lowering slightly away from him. The name he called her, she could remember it from her dream. It was always spoken so affectionately…. And today was no exception. Her heart fluttered a little at the sound, her breath catching as she leaned slightly away from him, though her body moved, leaned closer to his touch.

So absorbed with her discovery, Caven didn’t hear the commotion until it was at their front door, the doors slamming open and her name being called by a voice she would recognize anywhere.

“VENDETTA!”

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

Her life was a living hell.

There was no way around it, no denying the world she lived in was wrapped in a dark mist of pure hell fire. Every minute of her waking hours nothing but a sad excuse of a life. Something that she would not wish on her worst enemy. There was no happiness besides the little moments she would steal away Dragging Caven and their sisters off, pulling from the fist and the lashes. The moments where her and Caven would sneak away, their secret spots hidden from prying eyes so they could just be. So they could just have each other. Wrapped in the little bit of happiness that both knew would not last long.

Her life was sad.

She didn’t want to be save though. Hell, if anything she wanted to be the hero of her and Cavens story. Wanted to be able to come down on the vicious world that they lived in. She couldn’t count how many times she had saved each of the small girls from the hands of their parents. Could not count how many times she had sucked down her own tormented emotions so she could show a toothy smile to the other girls. Show some sort of hope in the dark reality they called life. Her only saving grace, her only reason for continuing through the world was for Caven. For those blue eyes that stared so hopefully at her.

So she would be damned if her life was going to be a sad, hellish, and Caven-less.

With that thought in mind and blood dripping down her lip, dribbling down the column of her neck she pushed forward. Pushed through the onslaught of humans who tried to barricade the door from her, pushed through the guards, who she knew could have honestly taken her down. Fist pounded at her flesh, her mother’s screams reached her ears, but they held little suede over her. Not reaching any empathy as her voice cracked in a weak attempt of betrayal.

Elbows flew, catching her ribs, the side of her cheek, but nothing deterred her as she reached the spoked doors. Her hands pushing them open with a huff, tears that she had not even realized were falling causing her gasp to come out a little too desperate as she caught sight of the small blonde.

“CAVEN! DON’T TOUCH HER!”

Hands caught her as she lunged forward, fingers digging into raw flesh and squeezing on the what seemed fragile bones under their grasp. There was not too much she could do as her head slammed into the marble flooring, her head instantly pounding and brilliant lights playing behind her vision. But still she moved, even if it was lagged, sluggish under the assault of the body guards. The guards who seemed to be mildly distracted, their words flying towards eachother. Swearing at the guards at the door for even allowing her in.

The second she had a hold on her hands and knees, a white-hot flash of pain burst in her ribs, the red heads boot finding a home in between crushed bones. The air was gone and all she could do was arch, her mouth agape as stared wide eyed at the spiraling ceilings.

“I killed the last one, you gonna pick up the slack or do I have to do all the work?”

The red head spoke as she turned her head, her vision swimming as she tried to move out from under him. Blood poured from her mouth as she got back to her knees. Where she was only meet with yet another whip of pain, her head crashing back into the marble flooring.

“Let’s not be so hasty, why don’t you get your foot off our esteemed guest so she can speak properly.”

The voice echoed against the walls, reverberating through her very veins. Soothing a piece of her that she didn’t think she could get a hold of at the moment. There was a calm to it, a whisper of a promise that she could not grasp. But you could hear it, the tone lying right underneath the words. The tone of a leader, of a man not to be played with. A man in charge.

And Vendetta shivered against the cold of that tone.

But the boot moved, sparing her. Though she would not admit it, her heart hammered out a rhythm of fear as she laid there, pain radiating through her body. It would be a lie to say she was not letting said fear affect her, that she was only laying there still because of the pain. The truth was she was scared. Scared for Caven, scared for herself.

By the time she made her move to stand, her mother had entered the room. But Vendetta did not give her passing glance as she stood, a whine spilling from her as she winced from the pain that splintered at her side. Pale fingers gripped at the already bruising skin, her eyes finding those blonde locks again. Then finding the blonde locks of her best friends father. And she could not detain the rage that instantly burned through her, easily covering the fear as she approached the small group of three.

Her fingers of her free hand fisted, and the second it took for her hand to connect to the Shalen’s cheek seemed endless. But he went down, her hit so hard that she could feel her knuckles screaming from the contact. But her own body fell forward, breathless still.

“You’re not taking her from me. She’s not an ‘offering’ for a shit hole you cannot even keep up with.”