#as for the chapter excerpt: I Wonder Where Elentari Is. I Wonder What She's Doing. I Wonder What Implications That Will Have. >:)

[illumiera]

WIP Wednesday

thank you so much for the tag, @theoneandonlysemla! 💖 I thought I'd join in on the WIP Wednesday train and share an excerpt from the in-progress ninth chapter of i fear no fate (for you are my fate), especially since said chapter made it to 1, 000 words yesterday! so, here's Miraak admiring his new manicure courtesy of Elentari:

Miraak blinks. He blinks once, twice, thrice. Then, so slowly he could still be wrapped up in the web of a dream, he turns his trembling hand over and over and over again, palm-back-palm-back in a blur of ink-stained fingertips and scarred, sun-starved skin. This time, his gaze is fixed, hunting for the tell-tale flicker of something that would break the spell and betray the illusion, because the part of him that has not yet escaped Apocrypha is certain that this must be one final trick of the mind from the Prince who’d sought to claim him forevermore. After all, he remembers it all too well, the way he’d once stood by and watched as those already half-maddened from decades lost pacing the same paths through Mora’s realm had exclaimed aloud and gripped a tome like a treasure, and the way their shouts of victory had sharpened to screams as the knowledge for which they’d damned themselves twisted before their scouring eyes. The way it must have felt almost like a relief after that, to give in to the inevitable. And still the sight before him refuses to alter. Still he remembers the warmth—the light—that had flooded him the moment his same-soul had granted him the sound of his truest name ringing from her lips like a golden bell hung in the very heart of her. His claws are gone. His claws are gone, and the woman whose healer’s touch had purged them from him— Elentari is still elsewhere, neither here with him nor lingering behind in their shared dream of his homeland. Her eyes are wide and unseeing, staring straight past him as though he truly has become the ghost the seer had foretold, and try as he might, he does not recognise the strange light within them. Her eyes are full of sunshine, he has always thought, sunshine on pine needles, on young spring leaves, on all the green growing things of the world—but they’re nothing like that now, not while they’re aglow with a sheen of unearthly silver like moonrays spilling into a forest pool.

and as a bonus, a very messy rough sketch WIP of my two silly dragons, because we all need to draw our OTP as a classic painting at least once:

now, I tag @bougainvillea-and-saltwater @kiir-do-faal-rahhe @bostoniangirl21 @madam-whim @pinessydr @lilarus and you, reader, if there's something you'd like to share, too! ✨