#being non-binary is a wilderness of its own

[deliciousdietdrpepper]

Lately I feel like I’m grieving the realization that I’m a lesbian even though I’m transmasc and those identities aren’t totally compatible. Like, I didn’t feel like I was myself in a lot of ways before T and now that I feel more centered in my body, I‘ve been looking back on my life and all the attraction to women and trying to make sense of it. There are some things that I miss about being a “woman,” but mostly I just miss the ability to have a relationship with a woman as a woman and have it be queer. I spent a very long time ashamed of that aspect of myself and not allowing myself to experience it, and now I don’t think I can. I can never go back to who I was and live myself differently.

[faefum]

haha jumpscare, a nerve exploded and then i had the idea to like revamp my twst OCs in a major and minor way, if there are typos I'm not sorry

I WANT ENGAGEMENT PLEASE SHARE TO ME YOUR OCS AND HOW THEY MIGHT INTERACT WITH MINE IM BEGGING

CHANGES:

- Carmin's a girl now (for nearly two years, i kept on switching between the character being a boy, girl, or straight up just being non-binary or genderfluid. after thinking about how i would want her character + story to develop as similarly as i can to Eilonwy's arc, i left her as a girl)

- Thora's still the same (i really should give him more attention bruh)

- their looks idk man

Thora Griffith (left) 🛡️

Erinne Pelagic (right) 🌘

Erinne Pelagic

Clothed in white, continuously shining, and the glowing pride of the Moonbrine, Erinne has no shortage of power that she uses well to her people's needs. Mostly the judge, but often the executioner.

BIRTHDAY: March 3rd (Pisces)

AGE: 18

HEIGHT: 179 cm (5'10" ft)

DOMINANT HAND: Left

HOMELAND: Moonbrine

SCHOOL: (was homeschooled, still)

HOBBIES: Signing documents

PET PEEVES: Mistreatment

FAVORITE FOOD: Aberffraw biscuits

LEAST FAVORITE FOOD: Escargot

TALENT: Bargaining

BASED ON: Eilonwy (The Black Cauldron, Chronicles of Prydain)

PERSONALITY

She is a level-headed, graceful, and stern individual who will not spend a single moment second-guessing her every move. As the Princess of the Moonbrine, Erinne is responsible for a shockingly vast majority of the kingdom's local and overseas politics, showing herself off as a worthy member of any court. Despite her rather daunting titles and positions—however vague those could often be, Erinne never lets the status get through her head, remaining humble yet mindful of what her mere presence could offer.

Knowledgeable of both traditions and laws, she is quick to correct those who break them but provide second chances when necessary. Erinne is open-minded to change and latter perspectives, acknowledging faults and differences in her or others' decisions and/or plans. Having been taught personally by the enigmatic Moonbrine Queen herself, Erinne is well-educated in nearly all matters of life. With this knowledge, she spoils her friends. "Not my money," she says. Technically.

But despite her amiable yet regal, external persona, Erinne is no doormat. Her hair looks like fire for a reason and controlled inside her head is an anger that very rarely explodes. While her patience often puts her as a saint, one might see a tiny slip in her expression—a twitch of the eye or a falter of her smile, and could only hope that the room has enough escape routes. Stay enough for longer, and one might even hear her curse. And also yell. Make sure to get a lobotomy right after for privacy's sake. Another part of her is that no matter how she is kept in the palace with duties and such, she makes time to roam around in the wilderness nearby. Often barefoot. It's a habit and a way of relaxation she still hasn't lost and wouldn't dream of losing it. Because who cares.

To whoever read the last post about these two with my Yuu in it, I mentioned something about the aunt—the name I haven't decided yet—not being an actual family member. Erinne is mighty suspicious of this but despite her own status, cannot do much about it because the queen is currently untouchable. Think of that as you will.

UNIQUE MAGIC - 'Luster Revelation'

Luster Revelation summons a glowing, golden bauble that Erinne could either hold or set flying in the air—she can control its direction. Whatever the light of the bauble touches reveals what she yearns to know; magical traces and their owners (who - the true name, what - the spell casted, when - the date).

It takes a bit of mana, but it's nothing Erinne can't handle.

TLDR: Erinne makes a floating scanner and fact checks you live. May or may not cause mental damage.

Thora Griffith

The stalwart vice-president of Royal Sword Academy's Fencing Club and a diligent second-year of the school. He co-leads his club and his class with a mild demeanor, a deadpanned expression, and a mysterious past. Mostly the executioner, but often the jury.

BIRTHDAY: October 27th (Scorpio)

AGE: 17

HEIGHT: 189 cm (6'2" ft)

DOMINANT HAND: Right

HOMELAND: Moonbrine

SCHOOL: Royal Sword Academy (Sophomore)

HOBBIES: Fencing

PET PEEVES: Laziness

FAVORITE FOOD: Pot roast

LEAST FAVORITE FOOD: Charred food

TALENT: Blastcycling

BASED ON: Taran (The Black Cauldron, Chronicles of Prydain)

PERSONALITY

Thora is as stoic as he looks, a well-put young man with a glare that could either send comfort or send folks running. To both teachers and peers alike, he is a responsible and reliable student who puts studies first and indulgences later. Saying that, he crams because he's often too busy playing with his cat. In the classroom, he'd be the type to let you sleep but wake you up when anything happens because, well, you're still in class. In the sparring field, he'd beat you ruthlessly and help patch up your wounds afterwards.

I would like to add that a lot of his personality, with a few add-ons and changes, he got from Erinne from basically sticking with her during their childhood. Their relationship is that they're both close childhood friends with sometimes way too much time on their hands that they end up making calls late at night just to trash other people. Thora's personality definitely helped simmer Erinne, but in turn she ignited a few un-gentlemanly parts of himself. For one, he is actually petty. Overall, Thora is a good person who would hold himself to his promises (he'd die if he won't /j), and respects and honors even his opponents. But by the Seven, you do something that even inconveniences him in the slightest, he'll do something about it. Hate is one thing but annoyance is another, and Thora's usually so easy-going that it's hard to get him to actually hate people. He can be mean, but make sure that it never happens. Thora feels low-key ashamed of it but he still acts like a hater.

He could be quite grateful to whoever helps him out and vows to be with them in their trying time, like Silver except if Silver had a mean bone in his body. Thora is fiercely loyal. He'd be an aggressive supporter and would definitely kill for his loved ones. Great! This goes the same for animals. Since he was a stable boy in the past, he would rather die than harm an animal, especially if they're fuzzy.

Thora doesn't talk much about his past, not that there's anything worth talking about, but because he just doesn't know the extent of his lore (and I'm still figuring it out). All he knows is that he was found as a baby, adopted, and goes to RSA. No information about his birth parents or anything. His adoptive father deflects his queries and Thora has learned to let it go, but of course, he still thinks about it.

UNIQUE MAGIC - 'Bladed Ambition'

Emitting bright energy from his person, Thora summons a massive white sword that he could control with a wave of his arm. The sword stays at a constant size of a two story building and destroys the space around it to make room for itself (when summoned). It lasts for roughly a minute before it dissipates, leaving only rubble. Rather simple.

Takes a HUGE amount of mana, so he's wary about using it because of the blot.

TLDR: Thora makes a giant blade Raiden Shogun style, and deletes your world.

TRIVIA

A few of Thora's close friends assume he has, like, a long-distance girlfriend or something. Thora only rolls his eyes but he thinks it's rather funny.

They're both very strong mages, like, very. In their lore, Thora mostly got his tutoring from Erinne herself who was getting tutored by the queen all the while (sharing the hack, basically). They learned both swordsmanship and magical techniques. Thora excelled more with swordsmanship and hand-to-hand, while Erinne excelled with magic. Ironically, Thora's UM is more destructive than hers.

Mentioned in the previous post some time before but I wanted to expand on this, Thora secretly keeps a small kitten within his dorm room, of which he shares the secret with his roommate. How he got the thing into his dorm was the most frazzled he got; Thora was nearly caught by his own housewarden when he snuck it in. Luckily, he's a swift runner. (I placed him in the hypothetical Alice dormitory until there's confirmation of the dorms in RSA.) More about the above, his housewarden eventually found out but didn't care enough to do anything about it just as long as the kitten was fine (and just as long as he could pet it when he wants). Erinne knows about this.

Despite not seeming like it, both use chronically online terms whenever they're chatting or alone together.

Erinne, when she was four, tried eating a snail and probably would have died if she hadn't slipped on the mud instead. She never shares this vivid memory to anyone.

Erinne is NOT a crowned princess.

I got tired of RSA's uniforms and decided to branch out entirely, barely keeping a few motifs but Thora's attire looks entirely new and might resemble RSA if you look hard enough.

Regarding Erinne's character history, she had many names starting with the oldest that I could remember; Elowyn, Elvira, Eiran, Eryl, Elias, Elissa, Adhika, Enlli, and Carmin. Each rendition alternated between boy and girl, the blue eyes staying consistent (with the exception of Carmin) while the hair ranged from being a light orange, blonde, black, white, pink, red, and red-golden. Her earliest concept was a Royal Sword Academy second-year with long, light orange hair.

About their hobbies; Thora is based on Taran, whose name might be based on the Celtic God of Thunder, Taranis, who was associated with the wheel. I decided to make the genius decision to have Thora be an absolute demon in doing crazy stunts with his blastcycle. He's a biker, basically. For Erinne, signing important things gives her a sense of power-tripping and it makes her feel happy and terrible at the same time.

A bit more of Thora's lore, Hen Wen from the movie and the books was supposed to be his adopted sister in her TWST form. That, or she is an orphan Yuu and the rest will meet during the Halloween event I'm still writing. This, or she becomes both Thora and Erinne's unofficial little sister who kicks off the events.

Erinne knows how to use a bow. She sucks at it, actually.

If in-game, Thora commonly uses fire attacks while Erinne does water ones. Both are heavy damage dealers.

In the original stories of both my sources (lol, click off if you haven't watched The Black Cauldron or read the Chronicles of Prydain and don't want spoilers), Taran and Eilonwy get together and even marry in the pentalogy.

[nicecream]

Hi this is the prev anon, I mixed up g1 and marvel somehow. I was asking if you had any headcanons about the marvel comic siren, nightbeat and hosehead! And also if you have any headcanons about hosehead in idw as well.

ah i assumed you meant them but i thought you might've meant like cancer wilder and bullhorn or something :p as for marvel… it's kind of weird that they're together so often when nightbeat clearly finds the other two annoying so i always pictured them as being assigned to him by autobot high command because nightbeat is too free of a spirit so they're there to keep an eye on him haha (obviously they still let him get into plenty of trouble. but i think they keep him from getting killed which is what command really cares about). despite that i think they formed a genuine bond over time… i mean they were playing chess or something in one panel and watching a mystery in another, so cute.

which makes hosehead dying to unicron and nightbeat dying in g2… really sad :'< (casually drops this fic). but that doesn't have to be the only ending. i really love what classicsverse did with them and the idea that after the war they were among the first to do their own thing and start an actual detective agency (its sad that hosehead isnt there though but at least his headmaster is) also the fact that nightbeat and muzzle apparently have one of the most seamless binary bonds but siren and quig are way more at odds with each other is interesting. i can see nightbeat giving them really condescending relationship advice lol

hosehead is such a non-entity in idw that it almost makes me think he's like rung. not that he's secretly important necessarily but just that they have similar personalities and temperaments. they always mean well but can't always pull it off. and not that its unique to crush on thunderclash but it definitely makes me think of him as a hopeless romatic. actually i ship that so hard lol

[queer-starwars-bracket]

Queer Star Wars Characters (Round 3): General Bracket Match 13

Reyé Hollis | Identity: mlm | Media: “Luke on the Bright Side”

Reyé Hollis was a Naboo Alliance Special Forces sergeant who worked with Luke Skywalker to help build Echo Base. At first he didn’t have a high opinion of Luke, seeing him as a dumb kid getting special treatment for being a “hero” and Jedi and the Force as worthless, due to their failure to prevent the rise of the Empire. Despite having a crush on Luke, he resented having to be his “babysitter”. When the two of them get lost in the tunnels of Echo Base, they have to work through their differences and come to understand each other's perspectives to get out. They also have to hold hands and connect to each other through the Force. After that…who knows.

An extra who appears in Empire Strikes Back was identified in Legends as Reyé Hollis. Sam Maggs says that she intended Reyé to be an extra that appears in the film, however his physical description in the short story doesn’t match the extra.

Custom minfig by u/JPme2187

Ashe Javi | Identity: non-binary | Media: Jedi Survivor

Ashe Javi was born on the industrial planet of Riosa. They started making music using samples from factory sounds, and was noticed by Max Rebo’s agent. To their surprise, they went straight to preforming in clubs on Coruscant, where they quickly gained in popularity. However, they came to hate the artificiality of Coruscant and eventually left it for Kuat. On Kuat, they met DD-EC who was making his own recordings in the shipyards. After some time together, they decided they want to start sampling natural sounds and departed for the planet Koboh. While in the wilderness, they were attacked by a Gorocco and were saved by Cal Kestis. Cal recruited them for Pyloon’s Saloon, where the duo set up shop by the disused DJ equipment. They preferred life on Koboh, for its working class audience and the sound samples they had access to. 

[passable-talent]

hi! may i request an alta scenario with zuko where the reader (female or non-binary, if that works) is an earth bender who was injured by the fire nation and is found by iroh and zuko in the woods, who helps them heal, and they begin to travel with iroh and zuko to ba sing se and zuko and the reader fall in love? i’m not being super specific so u can have creative freedom to do what u want, i can’t wait to see what you write :) thank you!

cute!!! their adventures through the earth kingdom always entertained me. esp Iroh and his need for tea

Zuko was growing more and more frustrated with his uncle’s complaisance. He just couldn’t understand it- they were royalty! Both he and Iroh had been raised as heirs to the throne of the Fire Lord, so if their current situation bothered Zuko, why didn’t it bother his uncle?

He took up the mask of the blue spirit once again to begin alleviating these troubles. They were getting food, they were regaining some of their luxury. Frequent firebending patrols, especially around villages, made things harder, but that had never stopped Zuko before. He left at night, when Iroh was fast asleep, and was usually back by midnight. Nothing could stop him- not firebending patrols, not walls, nothing.

Except when the ground moved under him and he lost his footing in the middle of the woods. That stopped him. He paused, and tried to get up, but felt the ground roll underneath him again. For a moment he resigned himself to the dirt, watching the dirt floor of the forest roll with the stones underneath as waves, radiating from one spot.

Through the trees, he caught a glimpse of a small, pointed rock structure. He narrowed his eyes and crawled backwards to put distance between himself and it, and went back to the camp he’d left his uncle in.

“Uncle,” he said the next morning, “I think there’s something I want you to see.” Iroh nodded and allowed Zuko to lead him back to the spot in the forest where he’d fallen last night, and as soon as their footsteps approached, the ground began tremoring again. Zuko pointed to the rock structure, which now it was clear to see had been made by an earth bender. It was a tent-like shape, with two diagonal roof pieces and triangular sides sealed up, all with stone.

There were scorch marks covering the rock, and all the grass around it was scarred with fire.

“What do you think it is?” Zuko asked, and Iroh studied the ground a bit more before leveling his gaze toward the stones.

“I think it’s a very scared earth bender.”

“Hello in there!” He called, and the tremors in the earth stopped. “My name is Mushi, I’m a refugee from the war heading to Ba Sing Se with my nephew. Do you need any help?” For a moment only silence answered him, until one of the triangular sides of the rock tent slid back into the earth.

Inside the tent you were buried up to your neck in dirt, using the cool soil to soothe your burns. You’d received some fierce ones on your shoulder and ribcage after you dared fight back against a firebending patrol, and when you tried to escape the battle, they’d cornered you. Your tent had been an effort to escape the skirmish by waiting it out, and it had worked, after a while. But for hours you merely sat inside your stone tent while they blasted it with flames, heating it up and nearly cooking you, if it hadnt been for the cool soil you submerged yourself in. At the very least, it made your burns much worse. At the worst, you scorched your leg when the flesh brushed too close to the heated rock.

“Are there any firebenders around?” You asked, voice quiet, and not quite timid. Zuko and Iroh shared a look for a brief moment.

“No,” Iroh answered. “Can I come closer?” You nodded and took your arm over your chest, trying to keep any of your body from touching the burns that were all too warm. You sat up slowly from the soil, revealing burnt and tattered clothes barely covering your three major burns. Iroh’s eyes widened and he stepped closer.

“You need help for those burns,” Iroh said, “we’ve got a camp we can take you back to, and help. Can you stand?”

“No,” you said, “it’ll hurt too much.” Iroh looked over his shoulder at Zuko, who was standing in shock, looking at you.

He’d been burnt, and it had left a scar. But at least it was only the one- you’d been treated so cruelly, and if all of your burns scarred, it would cover near a third of your body. He couldn’t stop the adrenaline coursing through him. It would’ve been so painful, and he couldn’t comprehend who would’ve been so cruel enough to do to you what had been done.

“Can you carry them?” Iroh asked Zuko, and he swallowed hard to break himself from his stare. He nodded slightly, hesitantly, and Iroh looked back to you.

“Just take down your shelter, and we’ll help you.” You lifted your right arm, the one whose shoulder hadn’t been burnt, and used it for a quick motion that sent the stone back into the ground. Zuko walked closer, and was about to kneel down, but paused.

If he picked you up on your left side, it would press your burnt shoulder and ribs into him. But if he did so on your left, it was your leg burn that would get too warm.

“Which side do you want me to lift you on?” He asked, and you took a moment to consider.

“Left,” you said, and he nodded. It was somber, as he lifted you up underneath your knees and shoulders. Upon Iroh’s instruction your threaded your fingers together behind Zuko’s neck, and tried to keep your leg extended so that it wouldn’t brush against Zuko’s clothes.

“As I said, I’m Mushi,” Iroh said, trying to make conversation through your light, subconscious whimpering. “My nephew is Lee. What’s your name?” You gave him a small smile, to show that you appreciated his kindness, even as it was tinged by your pain. You couldn’t help it- it had been days of boiling, sweltering flesh that you couldn’t get a reprieve from.

“Y/N,” you told him, and his bright smile answered you.

“What a lovely name.”

Iroh found a plant or two in the wilderness that helped with the burn, and slowly you began to heal. You were kept awake, though, sometimes, and watched as Lee left with nothing and came back with something. You knew something fishy was going on, but you didn’t push it, because you didn’t feel it was your place.

“Are you awake, Y/N?” Zuko asked one night when he returned. You grunted and affirmation and he sat down in front of where you were laying.

“I got this for you,” he said, and handed you a small tin. When you opened it, you found within it an artisan burn suave, made in the nearby earth kingdom village by one or two of the wives of soldiers.

“Thank you,” you said, giving him a smile in the dwindling firelight. He was a tough nut to crack, but you knew he cared for you- he showed his love through listening, and gifting. You noticed it first when he gave his uncle a teapot, and this gift to you only confirmed your suspicion.

Time went on, and they packed up camp to move closer to Ba Sing Se. You came with, holding tight to Zuko’s waist so that there was enough room for the three of you on the ostrich horse. You felt bad for the poor thing, carrying so much weight, but you were in pain and couldn’t walk for long periods of time. Even if you could, you likely wouldn’t have passed up and oppurtunity to hug Lee around the waist for hours while you travelled.

You knew that Mushi had figured you out- there was no way he hadn’t. You weren’t exactly very subtle as you tried to grab Lee’s attention with your laugh or a joke or an earthbending trick. He began doing his part to nudge Lee toward you, which you were appreciative of, especially since it worked.

Or so you thought.

Zuko had scooped you up one evening, when Iroh was already asleep. He hugged you tightly before setting you back down onto your feet, leaving you confused.

“What is it?” You asked, and he shook his head, brooding as always.

“Let me sleep beside you tonight?” He asked, and you were quick to accept, even if you were confused. You fell asleep that night with his arms wrapped around your waist and his nose pressed to the back of your head.

When you blinked your eyes open, you caught a glimpse of the ostrich horse riding away, Lee on its back.

“Mushi? What’s going on?” You asked, sitting up slowly.

“Lee’s got to find his own way. Come, help me pack. We’re going to move to the next village.”

Your alliance was to Mushi, but you did miss Lee. You wondered what he had been thinking that night, when he chose to lay with you before he left. The two of you had barely talked about romance or anything of the like, but he’d done this- how much had it meant to him?

“My nephew is a complicated man,” Mushi said, walking beside you. “Sometimes, his actions are quite peculiar. But he will find his destiny. And somehow, I believe it will lead him back to us.” You looked sideways at Mushi, and smiled.

“You think so?” He nod was all the affirmation you needed.

And he was right- Lee did come back. He came back to reveal himself as brother to the Fire Princess, which made him... the prince of the Fire Nation?

Now the whole ‘running from the fire nation at all costs’ thing made sense.

You didn’t really mind. You offered unconditional forgiveness to the prince, and showed the same medicinal care to Iroh’s wounds that he had once shown to yours.

Zuko was having a hard time, but you were fascinated in watching his training en route to Ba Sing Se. Just as Iroh wanted, the two of you learned from each other, and soon the style of earthbending you practiced looked similar in some aspects to firebending. He, through training with you, became more rooted, and his balance improved further.

But training aside, the two of you started talking. You sat under the stars and began to be honest with each other, now that he had nothing to hide. You shared what had happened to you in that forest for the first time, and he shared the story behind his scar.

Sleeping side by side became as common a practice as eating breakfast.

Iroh couldn’t have been happier, especially as you seemed to bring Zuko out of his shell. He smiled a slight bit more, and laughed a little easier. Even when the three of you made it to Ba Sing Se, Iroh could feel the difference in his nephew’s attitude.

You hated firebenders- they’d left you with course, scarred skin on the outside of your left calf, with dark scars under the skin of your shoulder and ribcage. You hated firebenders- all but two. One, who took you in, and the other, who you loved deeply.

Because someone who’d felt scar tissue for years wouldn’t hesitate to touch it when you wanted him to.

-🦌 Roe

[asleepinawell]

Book Recs

I was gonna do one of these at the end of the year, but I’ve somehow managed to read 26 books this year already (12 novellas, 14 novels), almost all featuring queer authors and/or characters so this is already a long list.

Note: There’s a few on here I was kind of meh about, but in most of those cases it was a ‘book might be good but it’s not for me so i’ll mention it to put it on people’s radar anyway’ type of thing. Insert the usual necessary tumblr disclaimer about all of this being only my opinion and your opinions are valid too etc etc.

In order of when I read them:

Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower by Tamsyn Muir - Fantasy novella from the author of gideon the ninth that’s a twist on the classic princess trapped in a tower waiting for a prince story. Quite fun. (novella)

The Monster of Elendhaven by Jennifer Giesbrecht - Dark fantasy about revenge and magic. m/m couple but like I said it’s pretty dark and twisted all around so definitely not a happy queer romantic story. My opinion was interesting premise that could have been executed better and probably should have been a full novel to embellish on the world building potential. (novella)

A Memory Called Empire & A Desolation Called Peace - Arkady Martine - Probably tied with murderbot as the best things I read this year. Scifi, f/f couple, wonderfully done exploration of what it means to fall in love with a culture that is destroying your own. More of the many queer anti-imperialist books that have come out recently and certainly some of the best. The second one is a direct continuation of the first. (2 novels)

The Tyrant Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson - This is the third in the Baru Cormorant series (The Masquerade) and was my favorite so far. The second and third book were originally one book that got split I believe and the second book didn’t stand alone as well (though was still great), but the third book really made up for that. Dark fantasy world starring a queer woc whose country and culture is destroyed by the imperial forces of that world colonizing and assimilating them. She vows revenge and decides to work her way up within her enemy’s ranks to enact it from within and bring an empire to ruins. Really really fascinating study of so many different aspects of our own world and the systems which enable and allow bigotry and how bigoted and violent narratives are used to control minorities. This is definitely a darker series and I was particularly impressed with some of the commentary on the racism prevalent in non-intersectional feminism as depicted through a fantasy world. Can’t wait for the last one to come out! (3 novels, 1 forthcoming)

The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells - There’s six of them--5 novella and a novel--and the first is All Systems Red. Told from the point of view of a self-aware droid/android that is rented out by a corporation to provide protection in a dystopian capitalist hellhole future that isn’t that unlike our current capitalist dystopia but is in space. Muderbot hacked the chip that controlled it and instead of going rogue just wants to be left alone to watch its favorite tv shows. Murderbot is painfully relatable and the books are both funny and poignant. Highly recommended. (5 novellas and a novel).

Winter’s Orbit - Everina Maxwell - This was a m/m romance novel with a scifi backdrop of royal intrigue. Generally I’m more into scifi with a queer relationship in the background than vice versa, so it wasn’t my favorite, BUT I think it was still well written and someone looking for more of the romance angle would enjoy it. Has all your favorite romance tropes in it, especially the yearning. (novel)

The Divine Cities - Robert Jackson Bennett - Three book series. I’m very conflicted about this one. Set in a fantasy world where an enslaved nation overthrew the country enslaving them and now rules over them. It’s a story of what happens after the triumphant victory and within that it’s also a murder mystery tied into the dying magic of the conquered nation. It also has a six foot something naked oily viking man fist fight a cthulhu in a frozen river. The second book was by far my favorite, mostly due to the main character being brilliant. My conflict comes from the fact I don’t feel like the story treated its women and queer characters well. Like it had really great characters but it didn’t do great by them overall. That and the third book didn’t live up to the first two. But still definitely worth a read, can’t stress enough how cool some of the world building was. (3 novels)

Into the Drowning Deep - Mira Grant - This might be the only one on here I disliked. It’s got a doomed boat voyage and creepy underwater terror and monsters and a super diverse cast of characters, but I just didn’t enjoy the writing style. While having a diverse cast is great, there were a lot of moments where it felt like characters were pausing to explain things about themselves that felt like a tumblr post rather than a normal conversation you might have while actively being hunted by monsters. I also bounced off all the characters. But a lot of people seem to have liked it so if you’re into horror and want a book with a f/f main couple then maybe you’ll enjoy it. (novel)

Dead Djinn Universe - P. Djèlí Clark - Around the early 1900′s, a man in Egypt discovers a way to access another world and bring Djinn and mysterious clockwork beings called Angels through. As a result, Egypt tells the British to get fucked and Cairo becomes one of the most powerful cities in the world. So Egypt, magic, djinn, a steampunk-ish vibe, oh and the main character is a butch queer woman who enjoys wearing dapper suits and looking fabulous while she investigates supernatural events. Her girlfriend is also mysterious and badass. And she has a cat. There’s three novella (one of which technically might be considered a short story) and then the first novel. You should absolutely read the novellas first (A Dead Djinn in Cairo, The Angel of Khan el-Khalili, The Haunting of Tram Car 015). Super fun and imaginative series. (3 novellas and a novel, more forthcoming)

River of Teeth & Taste of Marrow - Sarah Gailey - From the book description

“In the early 20th Century, the United States government concocted a plan to import hippopotamuses into the marshlands of Louisiana to be bred and slaughtered as an alternative meat source. This is true. Other true things about hippos: they are savage, they are fast, and their jaws can snap a man in two. This was a terrible plan.”

Queer hippo riders!!!! Very much a western but with hippos. Main couple included a non-binary character. Loved the first one. The second one I was more meh about due to one of the characters I was supposed to like having obnoxious man pain that a woman had to take the brunt of the whole time. Also there were less hippos. But queer hippo riders! Definitely read the first one, and they’re both novellas so no reason not to read the second as well. (2 novellas)

A Psalm for the Wild-Built - Becky Chambers - I may be the only person who hasn’t read the long way to a small angry planet at this point, but I did grab her new novella and I loved it. It made me want to go sit out in the woods and feel peaceful. The world it’s set in feels like a peaceful post-apocalypse...or diverted apocalypse maybe. Humans built robots and robots gained sentience, but instead of rebelling they just up and left and went into the wilderness with a promise that the humans wouldn’t follow them.The remaining human society reshaped itself into something new and peaceful. It’s the story of a monk who leaves their habitual monking duties to go be a tea monk and then later wanders into the wilderness and becomes the first human in ages to meet a robot. Very sad there’s no fan art yet. (novella, more forthcoming)

The March North - Graydon Saunders - This was such a weird book that I’m not sure how to explain it. The prose style is hard to get used to and I suspect a lot of people will bounce off it in the first chapter. There’s no third person pronouns used at all and important events get mentioned once in passing and if you blink you’ll miss them. Set on a world where magic is extremely common to the point that rivers sometimes run with blood or fire and the local weeds are something out of a horror movie and most of the world is run by powerful sorcerer dictators, one country banded together (with the help of a few powerful sorcerers who were tired of all the bullshit) to form a free country where powerful sorcerers wouldn’t rule and the small magics of every day folks could be combined to work together. The story revolves around a Captain of the military force on the border who one day has three very powerful sorcerers sent to them by the main government with the hint that just maybe there’s about to be a big invasion (there is) with the implication of take these guys and go deal with this. The world building is extremely complex and very cool...when you can actually understand what the fuck is going on. There is also a murder sheep named Eustace who breathes fire and eats just about everything and is a Very Good Boy and belongs to the most terrifying sorcerer in the world who appears as a little old grandma with knitting. It had one of the most epic badass and wonderfully grotesque battles I’ve ever read. But yeah, it is not what I would call easy reading. Opinions may vary wildly. I did also read the second one (A Succession of Bad Days) in the series which was easier to follow and had a lot more details about the world, but overall I was more meh about it despite some cool aspects. The chapters and chapters of the extreme details of building a house that made up half the novel just weren’t my thing. (novels).

The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson - In this world parallels universes exist and we’ve discovered how to travel between them, but the catch is you can only go to worlds where the ‘you’ there is already dead. This turns into an uncomfortable look at who would be the people most likely to have died on many worlds and how things like class and race would fit into that and what we would actually use this ability for (if you guessed stealing resources and the stock market you’d be correct). The main character is a queer woc who travels between worlds with the assistance of her handler (another queer woc) who she has the hots for. She accidentally stumbles on a whole lot of mess and conspiracy and gets swept up in that. Really enjoyed it. (novel)

Witchmark - C.L. Polk - Fantasy world reminiscent of Victorian England (I think?) where a young man with magical gifts runs away from his powerful family to avoid being exploited by them. He joins the army and fights in a war and comes home to try and live a quiet life as a doctor, but a murder pulls him into a larger mystery that upturns his life. Also he’s extremely gay and there’s a prevalent m/m romance. This one was a fun-but-not-mind-blowing one for me. (novel, 2 more in the series I haven’t read)

The Priory of the Orange Tree - Samantha Shannon - This was one of those that everyone loved but I couldn’t get into for some reason. I tried twice and only got about halfway through the second time. It’s got dragons and queer ladies and fantasy world and all the things I like, but I wasn’t that invested in the main story (which included the f/f couple) and was more interested in the smaller story about a woman trying to become a dragon rider. There are few things that beat out a lady and her dragon friend story for me and that was the storyline that felt neglected and took a different turn right when we got to the part I’d been waiting for. But, I know a lot of people whose reading opinions I respect who loved it, and if you like epic fantasy with dragons and queens and treachery and pirates and queer characters then I’d say you should definitely give it a try. (novel)

Bonus: I didn’t read these series this year, but if you haven’t read them yet, you should.

Imperial Radch (Ancillary Justice) - Ann Leckie - Spaceship AI stuck in a human body out for revenge for their former captain, but that summary does not come close to doing it justice. Another one examining imperialism and also gender and race.(3 novels)

Kushiel's Legacy Series - Jacqueline Carey - This is two series, six books total, and starts with Kushiel's Dart. Alternate universe Renaissance-y Europe in a fantastical world where sex isn't shameful and sex workers are respected and prized. Lots of political intrigue and mystery. A lot of BDSM and kinky stuff too (the main character is a sexual masochist, oh and also bi!). I first read this series when I was fifteen or sixteen and it definitely made a big impression on me. Same author also wrote the Santa Olivia series which I’d also recommend. (6 novels)

The Locked Tomb (Gideon the Ninth) - Tamsyn Muir - I mean, if you follow me, you know. If you don’t follow me you still probably know. I’d have felt remiss to have left them off though. Lesbian Necormancers in Space. Memes! Skeletons! Biceps! Go read them. (2 novels, 2 forthcoming, 1 short story)

Books On My To Read List:

Fireheart Tiger - Aliette de Bodard

The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water - Zen Cho

Black Sun - Rebecca Roanhorse

This Is How You Lose the TIme War - Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

Ninefox Gambit - Yoon Ha Lee

Also, if anyone has any recs for scifi/fantasy books starring queer men (not necessarily having to do with a queer relationship) and written by queer men I’d love them. There’s a lot written by women, and some of them are great, but I’d love to read a story about queer men from their own perspective.

[tanadrin]

What are your thoughts on people who just want to be left alone, and not just solitarily - they want to leave modern society and go live in the woods.

They should be permitted to. Modern liberal democracies are mostly OK with making deals with secessionist subcultures: enclaves of Mennonites, the Amish, ultra-orthodox Jews, and so forth are permitted form and mostly self-govern, and are occasionally even granted opt-outs from various forms of government interference, like certain taxes or insurance requirements, on the basis that they make much less use of government services. It's harder to carve out such exceptions for individuals, but we do have things like the concept of the conscientious objector that accommodate deviations from the usually expected set of rights and obligations for people with a commitment to alternate sets of values.

But these things exist on a spectrum; opting in or out of society isn't a binary choice. Also, except in the libertarian fantasy land, it's very hard even in North America these days to find trackless wilderness where you can live totally unconnected to the rest of humanity--and most of it is in Alaska and northern Canada, so bring a nice thick coat. Where I think this consideration, the concept of "atomic communitarianism" to borrow a phrase, is most interesting is in its more complicated real-world instantiations.

Anabaptist religious communities in the US, for instance, aren't really autarkic villages; they're socially segregated, but economically connected with the surrounding area. Ultra-orthodox Jewish groups, while endogamous, have historically always existed within larger urban communities, and could not function without them; many seem happy to rely on social support from the government, which given the emphasis they place on a particular kind of pious lifestyle makes sense.

Where indulging atomicity in society encounters tension, I think one of three things are at play. First, the atomic community is in conflict with the wider community over material interests. The fight over the distribution of public school funding in Ramapo, New York is a great example of this. I don't think these kinds of conflicts ever have easy solutions, especially when the atomic community in question doesn't or can't form a distinct separate unit of local self-government.

Second, an organization wants conditional status as an atomic community. Anabaptists generally refrain from participating in secular government as a fundamental tenet of their religion; contrast the Catholic church, which now that religiosity is declining in many of its former strongholds, often presents itself as merely wanting to govern its own affairs free from governmental interference; but as soon as they are in a position to influence policy and make political noise, they do so, and they have no doctrinal objection to being made the sole official church of a secular state. In other words, Catholics are not naturally an atomic community, and so shouldn't be treated as one. They shouldn't get special consideration in a pluralist society, and Catholic institutions should be subject to normal rule of law. The Catholic church hates this, and it's this loathing of being constrained by the same rules everyone else is, rather than a real ideological motive, that causes them to cover up child abuse and play the victim when their mass graves get dug up in Canada and Ireland.

Thirdly, an atomic community may be genuine in its aspiration to atomicity, and it may be tolerated implicitly or officially by the collective authorities; but there are obligations that the collective authorities have to individual members it is pledged to protect that supersede any deal made with the community as a whole. The most visible example of this in the present day is child abuse by religious authorities. Whether it's the FLDS, ultra-orthodox Jewish communities, or, yes, the Catholics, one of the few things our society absolutely refuses to condone in an atomic community or an aspiring one is the sexual abuse of children, and the obligation of the collective authorities to prevent that is considered so far-reaching that no exceptions for any self-governing community can be permitted. Sometimes these communities can stave off interference temporarily by capturing local authority in elections and flying under the radar of more remote authorities, but this seems to only work in rural areas and only for a limited amount of time. The only imperative to exercise state authority over atomic communities that I can think of that comes even close to this one regards, like, tax evasion, because states also have a strong incentive to make sure people know that independent parallel authorities aren't permitted to compete with the state, and tax collection is one of the very basic functions of government.

Now, all of the above examples are religious communities. That's not entirely a coincidence: religion is a powerful community-building force, and rising standards of living in the developed world have reduced the relevance of purely political or economic utopian projects. In countries like the US, where there is a strong tradition of religious freedom, federalism, and soft libertarianism, society can easily accommodate a large number of atomic communities, even highly insular religious ones. That is strong to America's credit; in almost every case, if people want to go off and do their own thing, they should be permitted to. Even fucked-up cults like the FLDS folks should get a strong benefit of the doubt, because pluralism is important, and state power is a crude bludgeon, and when that bludgeon goes awry you get shit like the Waco massacre. We can quibble on where exactly the line for outside interference should be drawn, but regardless of the criteria we use, sexual abuse of children seems like a reasonable criterion for interference.

Should lone individuals or tiny groups get carte blanche to fuck off into the woods and never contact human society again? Sure; but they effectively already have that, if they can find an empty patch of woods. And simply in terms of sheer numbers, the quantity of hermits and members of eremitical microcommunities will always be dwarfed by larger, more persistent atomic communities like those organized on religious lines. Religion is just a much stronger motivating factor for that kind of secessionism.

If a self-organized community of individualists did form in the wilderness, or on some vast expanse of privately owned land, and wanted to govern themselves free from interference--well, that's called "incorporating a municipality" and you can go through existing legal channels. Your new town won't be free of state or federal authority, depending on where it is; but if you're large enough to need a bona fide local government, I think there's a strong presumption that your community has a big enough impact on the surrounding areas and is populous enough that the collective authority takes a legitimate interest in how your community is run. But local governments are really important, and get a lot of shit done! Don't underrate their power.

If you really want more autonomy, you can always petition your state or national government for status as a separate state/territory/province/autonomous community/department (it worked for the Mormons!). You'd probably have to be fairly big; but I think your community would have to be very large in the first place to really get any benefit from that kind of larger local government. And, of course, there's always the Free State Project. In fact, I want to strongly encourage right-libertarians and anarcho-capitalists of every stripe, no matter where in the world they live, to move to New Hampshire and leave the rest of us alone. I think that's a really terrific idea (and more viable than seasteading).

One thing I didn't discuss is uncontacted peoples or native communities that preexist the communitarian authority. Especially with regard to the former, I don't trust state power to interfere in these communities in a non-destructive way; whatever the conditions the North Sentinelese are living in, the entire population being wiped out by measles carried over from the mainland would not be an improvement. And the excuse of legitimate state interest in protecting individuals has often been used to fuck with communities of racial undesirables--it is after all the reason the residential schools in Canada were built, and the Catholic church empowered to imprison children in them. This is part of the reason why even if you can prove an atomic community is a fucked up cult that treats its members horribly, I don't think it should be forcibly disbanded--the criteria for interference have to be extreme, because they have been so flagrantly abused in the past. Basically, the framework I'm using in the rest of this post doesn't apply here, because these native communities aren't secessionist for any meaningful use of the term. They function differently, they preexisted the authorities imposed on them, and that original imposition was a war of conquest.

[umbry-fic]

A Palette Full of You (3)

Summary: Glimpses into Colette and Lloyd’s lives as they grow up together, learn who they are, and fall in love with each other.

(Written for Colloyd Week 2021)

Fandom: Tales of Symphonia Characters: Colette Brunel, Lloyd Irving, Sheena Fujibayashi, Zelos Wilder Relationships: Colette Brunel/Lloyd Irving, Colette Brunel & Lloyd Irving & Sheena Fujibayashi & Zelos Wilder Rating: G Chapter: 3 of 6 Word Count: 6896 Mirror Link: AO3 Original Post Date: 11/06/2021

Chapter Title: Race Into the Night

Chapter Summary: Lloyd, Colette, Zelos and Sheena visit the carnival to have a night of fun after the end of exams. Lloyd and Colette end up riding the Ferris wheel alone, where...

(Colloyd Week Day 3: Confession/First Kiss)

Notes: Chapter 3 of my multi chapter Colloyd week fic! Featuring much fluff and sap. Zelos is non-binary in this and uses they/them pronouns.

Chapter title from Yoasobi's song.

Chapter list Full fic Previous chapter Next chapter

~~~

18-years-old

"There is no way I'm ever going on that thing. You can't make me."

"Come on, you promised that if I scored better than you at darts you would ride the Riptide with me! Gonna go back on your word now, Sheena?"

"Stop smirking at me, Zelos! You clearly cheated! That game was rigged!"

"All carnival games are rigged. That's common knowledge."

"I don't care. You still cheated!"

"Cheated how? You were watching me the whole time!"

Colette giggled, watching her two friends have a go at each other as they inched closer to each other with each word they spoke. All three of them were leaning against the cold metal railing, though Colette was careful to keep a safe distance from Zelos and Sheena. When they were engrossed in arguing with each other, there was a safe zone, and a not-safe zone where one was liable to get smacked by a wildly gesturing arm or two.

Surrounding them were various stalls staffed by people who were enthusiastically calling out to potential customers, hoping to receive more coupons in the final hour before the carnival closed. There were pop-up game stalls featuring the classics like ring toss and soccer, food stands selling carnival staples like candy floss and popcorn, and even thrill rides like the aforementioned Riptide, a roller coaster that paled in comparison to USS' coasters but certainly had the most twists and turns of anything offered at the carnival. Adorning everything was bright neon lights and colourful decorations, and noise came from every angle, lending to a cheery atmosphere that could get a tad overwhelming at times.

Despite the late hour of 9 pm, there was still quite a crowd - mostly consisting of young adults like them, the majority of families having gone home for the night. She had bumped into quite a few classmates in the past three hours, who had come here with the same idea of having a fun night out with friends after the end of A-levels. A lot of pictures had been taken, until her cheeks hurt a bit from smiling so much, but it had been great fun.

She, Lloyd, Zelos and Sheena had managed to visit almost every booth, using up all of the coupons that they were sharing amongst each other. But even with their combined efforts, they had only managed to win one prize: the adorable Siberian Husky plush she was currently hugging. Though they'd certainly snacked on their share of popcorn, sharing one large carton between the four of them until their fingers were sticky with kernels.

"Colette, back me up!" Sheena begged, turning to face Colette. Despite the biting words that were leaving her mouth, her true emotions were betrayed by the smile playing at the corner of her lips. Sheena's hair was tied up into her trademark high ponytail, the ends of her hair swaying slightly in the weak wind.

"What, me?" Colette exclaimed, rather surprised she was being pulled into the conversation. Zelos and Sheena tended to retreat into their own world whenever they got into this state, forgetting anyone else existed.

"Uh, well..." Colette muttered, sheepishly smiling. "Sorry to disappoint, Sheena, but I have to give this one to Zelos."

"See? Even Colette agrees!" Zelos placed their elbow on the railing, leaning closer to Sheena, smirking.

Sheena didn't even spare Zelos a look, just shoved their face away with a hand, ignoring Zelos' sputters of protest. "How could you, Colette? How could you side with the idiot?" Sheena cried in mock betrayal.

"Well, I and Lloyd were both there, and we both saw Zelos win fair and square. And a deal's a deal," Colette replied, shrugging. Zelos did seem more insistent than usual, but she couldn't discern why.

"Just think of it as a date!" Zelos waved a nonchalant arm in the air, that smirk never fading as they took hold of Sheena's arm.

"Screaming in abject terror is not my idea of a date," Sheena hissed through gritted teeth, though she didn't free herself from Zelos' hold. "Besides, we're supposed to ride the Ferris wheel together once Lloyd comes back!"

"Eh, we won't make it before the carnival closes if we catch the Ferris wheel. Don't worry, I'll treat you to ice cream afterwards! And if that isn't enough to appease you, surely some Ajisen will." Zelos turned to Colette and winked, leaving Colette utterly confused. Was there an underlying meaning to all of this she was supposed to be catching?

"If you drag me on that damn thing, Zelos Wilder, I swear I will never forgive - GET YOUR HANDS OFF ME! STOP!" Sheena shrieked as Zelos began to drag her by brute force towards the snaking queue of the Riptide. Colette gaped, watching Sheena struggle wildly, digging her feet into the ground and hurling curses that got steadily fouler at Zelos, who didn't seem to be affected at all.

"I'm back with the drinks!" Lloyd's happy voice came from behind her as he walked up to her, holding two cups with steam venting from their tops, hair adorably ruffled from the day's hectic events, woefully unaware of everything that had occurred in the time he was gone. "Wait, what's... Happening...?" he asked, only now spotting the gradually diminishing silhouettes of Zelos and Sheena.

"I... Uh, Zelos and Sheena are going to ride the Riptide," Colette said, explaining the situation as succinctly as she could. How else could she word it, anyway? There was no explaining the antics of those two.

"Alright." Lloyd shrugged, accepted her explanation and passing one cup over to her. She pushed the plushy into the crook of her elbow, freeing up a hand to accept the cup and still managing to almost drop it. She closed her fingers around the plastic cup, soaking in the warmth it emanated.

"It's hot chocolate," Lloyd explained between gulps as he practically downed the whole cup in half a minute. "They're out of hot milo. Sorry."

"It's alright. Any hot drink would have done." Colette finally took a sip, feeling the sting from the heat and sticking out her tongue.

"Should we wait for them to come back or go queue for the Ferris wheel?"

Colette sighed. "We should just go. The queue for the Riptide is really long... They know to meet up back at the MRT at 10."

The original plan was to take a group photo at the peak of the revolution of the Ferris wheel, but that didn't look like it was going to happen now.

So it would just be her and Lloyd riding the Ferris wheel. An activity that could be seen as romantic. The pamphlet for the carnival had even advertised it as a ride of love. When they'd walked past it just now, she'd seen that the Ferris wheel was decked out with a ton of wire hearts that lit up in multiple colours.

It was just ten minutes. It would be over in the blink of an eye! Totally!

"Then, let's go," Lloyd said, grabbing her hand and giving her a minute heart attack, causing her bravado to crumble into dust.

Nope. There was no way this could end well.

The two of them joined the short queue for the Ferris wheel, having thrown their empty cups into a nearby dustbin. Only eight people were waiting for the next empty carriage to descend to ground level and open its doors. Five of them - three children and two adults - belonged to one family, while the rest were a group of three girls, enthusiastically talking to each other. It wouldn't take long for their turn.

A bout of shivers overcame her as the wind picked up, the warmth of the drink already a memory. She wrapped her free arm around herself, gaze dropping to the floor as she once again regretted forgetting to bring out her favourite dog-ear hoodie. It was always hanging on her clothes rack, and it would have been so easy to just reach out a hand and swipe it on her way out. But no, she just had to wake up late and stumble out of the house still half-asleep.

She'd forgotten how cold the nights could get. Especially for her, someone who couldn't even handle the lecture theatre air-conditioning. Forgoing a long-sleeved T-shirt for her kiwi bird-print tee was not helping matters.

"Here." Something warm and soft was draped around her shoulders, and she looked up to find herself draped in Lloyd's familiar jacket, his face hovering close to hers. "You should have told me you were cold," Lloyd muttered, his breath tickling her neck. "I would have given you my jacket earlier."

His jacket smelt like him, a safe, comforting blanket that reached to her thighs. It held his body heat, too, slowly seeping into her.

Colette flushed, turning her face away so she didn't have to look into those russet eyes. For there was concern there, as well as the ever-present kindness, but there was also more. There was no way to hide her blush, not when he was right here, but she still had to resist the urge to hide her face behind the plushy.

Why was she still trying so hard to hide, anyway? It's not like it was of any use. She was so obvious. As Zelos had told her, it had gone far past the point of being funny.

"Though I guess you're always cold," Lloyd said, tearing his gaze away from her and taking a hurried step back. Perhaps the words were meant to be teasing, but they fell flat with the out-of-place laughter attached to the end.

"I - I mean, it - it was my fault for not bringing a jacket in the first place," she stuttered, the words stumbling over each other in her mouth in her hurry to answer. Now Lloyd would know she was nervous too. She was doing really well, wasn't she? “But thank you.”

"The next carriage is here," the attendant called out, voice flat and expression terribly bored. He was staring at them with a barely veiled expression of disinterest, waving his arms to direct them into the next carriage, doors wide open.

"Come on." Lloyd grabbed her hand, the smile returning to his face. The Ferris wheel was lit up to the nines, throwing soft purple light onto everything around her and illuminating half of Lloyd's face. Beautiful. He was always so beautiful, but it was moments like these where it made her heart hurt, wanting so desperately to reach out and touch his face.

Heart pounding in her chest, she took her seat, Lloyd sitting directly on her left, their legs close enough to brush.

She placed the plushy in her lap, resting her chin on it and trying her best to slow her racing heart, knowing it would be of no use. Here, in this carriage that was slowly rising into the sky and gently rocking, it was just the two of them in this little space, cut off from the rest of the world.

It was hard to tell herself she was imagining the intense way Lloyd was staring at her, like she was the only thing worth looking at, even though the beautiful night scenery was right outside the glass. Nor was it possible to imagine the tension, sharp as a knife, that had arisen between them for the past half a year or so. Almost everything was the same: they were still incredibly close, but there was a hesitance there now - in the way Lloyd’s fingers sometimes curled away from hers, in the way she sometimes stopped before throwing an arm around his shoulder to embrace him.

Neither of them had spoken up about that tension, dancing around each other like fools. Even if he did return her feelings… Love wasn’t enough to bridge the impossible distance between them. She could never fully comprehend all that he felt, just as he could never fully comprehend the absence of what she felt. She could never give him what others could, not with her extreme revulsion towards anything sexual in nature. She’d be willing to try, for him, simply because her love for him knew no bounds, but… she couldn't say where her limits would be. Likely not very far from where she would start.

Even though Lloyd had been nothing but supportive of her, that didn’t mean he was willing to take a chance that could very well end in failure and heartbreak. She might not be enough for him when it came to a relationship. If that was the case, she could understand. Neither of them had done anything wrong. If they were incompatible from the start, then she could keep her silence. She’d be perfectly happy to remain as friends, even if these nebulous feelings would never leave her chest. She didn’t want to lose them.

"Um, do you, uh... like the plushy?" Lloyd asked, his voice cutting through her anxious thoughts. Awkwardness radiated off of him in spades as he shifted in the seat, turning his head away to stare down at the floor. At least she wasn't the only one that was nervous. He was repeating the exact question he’d asked her when he’d given her the plushy.

"I love it. It's soft, and it's cute. Thanks for giving it to me." The same answer she’d given him before.

Lloyd had been the one who won a carnival game - the ball toss, to be specific. He'd managed to down all the cans with a single ball and gotten the choice of any of the first-place prizes. Zelos had raised an eyebrow and asked him how he'd gotten past the unfair odds. Lloyd had sheepishly scratched the back of his head and said it was a lucky accident, one that he couldn’t repeat, which proved to be true in his later attempts.

Lloyd had taken one look at the prize pool, pointed out the Siberian Husky plush to the staff, and then stuffed it into her hands the moment he'd gotten it, proclaiming that it was a gift for her. Zelos had been outright snickering, while even Sheena had looked like she was holding back laughter, shoulders shaking.

Lloyd's hand found hers in the little space between them, his thumb rubbing the skin of her palm just below her fingers. It was a repetitive, soothing motion, helping to calm her down.

She hoped that, no matter what, they would always stay together. Whether as friends or more. Just the two of them.

"I'm glad you like it." Lloyd's voice was getting progressively quieter with each syllable his lips formed, slowly shifting right along the seat towards her.

“Can - can I…” Lloyd asked timidly, turning to face her and leaning closer. Her field of vision narrowed to just his face, barely lit by the scant light that reached them from the carnival grounds and the spokes of the Ferris wheel. Everything else was slowly turning into a blur. “Can I kiss you?”

The carriage had reached the top of its revolution. Through the window, she could see the sparkling lights of the high-rises in the distance. Silence suffused the air as no one spoke, the world itself seeming to hold its breath, neither she nor Lloyd moving a single part of their bodies as they stared at each other. His eyes were wide, filled with such incredible emotion, built up over years and spilling over at this very moment.

Her breath caught in her throat, a current of warmth making itself known in her heart at the fact that he’d actually bothered to ask. She’d expected Lloyd to - the kind, considerate soul that she’d come to know and love, but somewhere in the back of her mind was tucked the irrational fear that there would never be anyone who respected her boundaries, simply because she wasn't worth it.

She took a deep breath, preparing her answer. It wouldn’t be “normal”, that was for sure. It wasn’t a simple yes or no, but rather…

“Is it fine if it’s on the cheek?” were the quiet words that left her mouth, shattering the expectant silence as her grip tightened on the plushy. Maybe one day, she wouldn’t mind a kiss on the lips, but not today. She wasn’t up to it yet.

She doesn’t know what answer she expects. Probably a no. It’s perfectly understandable for Lloyd to just step away.

“Of course,” Lloyd replied instantly, the gentle smile on his face once again shattering all the preconceived notions she’d constructed in her head, absolutely terrified of rejection but huddling herself into a corner in the belief that that was all she could possibly receive. There had been no hesitation behind that statement, no hint of reproach or anger or irritation towards her.

“Yes.” The word slipped out without any thought, for she herself had yearned for so terribly long. The desire she had always held to love, and to be loved, despite everything - to experience it all with the boy that had always been part of her life and that she hoped could continue to be there for the rest of it.

She turned her head to the side, and it didn't take another moment longer before Lloyd pressed his lips against her cheek, one hand still holding hers while his other arm wrapped around her shoulder, the plushy trapped between them. He was nothing if not gentle, bringing up her earliest memories of being kissed on the cheek by her mother, before she had left her life forever. It was through that gentleness that the force of his love was truly impressed on her - for there was passion there, in the very act of holding himself back. Love, gentle like a warm flame, but not any lesser for it, for his love was just as impregnable as a brick wall, unyielding and unbreaking.

She could feel his warm breath against her cheek, his lips softer than she could have thought, his hair close enough to run her hands through as she’d always wanted. So she did, letting the strands fall through her fingers like melted chocolate.

Was he… smiling? It sure felt like it.

It wasn't a magical moment like people always said the first kiss would be like. After all, theirs was nowhere close to conventional, but it was an experience that belonged only to them. No sparks were flying in the air, nor did time stop. It was just the two of them, fitting together perfectly like puzzle pieces in the way they always had, and she couldn't ask for anything more.

Lloyd moved away, his arm dropping from her shoulder, hand joining the other to clasp her limp one. His eyes were shining with joy, the same joy that filled her heart and made it feel like it might take flight at any time. Everything had finally fallen into place.

Her whole face was now on fire as she turned away, leaning forward over her legs. Her hair fell by the side of her face like a veil, letting only tiny glimpses of Lloyd through.

“You’re sure?” she asked, knowing that she needed to clarify. Even if his actions had been the shining light that burned away most of her doubts, some still remained. Lloyd really, truly needed to understand what he was getting into. She would not let him mindlessly enter into a relationship with her without knowing about all the ups and downs, all the complications that would come with it. That would only end in them hurting each other, and then they might never be able to stand the sight of each other again. It was the dreaded future she never wanted to come to pass. “It’s not going to be easy."

“I know,” he replied, squeezing her hand, his russet eyes focussed on hers. “But all relationships have challenges, don't they? We'll figure it out together, just like always. And if it doesn’t work out, then we’ll stay as friends, forever. I just want you to know that I love you.”

There is nothing but burning conviction behind his words, and a determination that reached deep into her soul and lit a flame of hope.

There would be many more difficult conversations that needed to be had, candid discussions that would need to take place. But for now, she didn't say anything more, hoping the unspoken “I love you” from her side could be understood, clear as day. She still couldn’t make herself say it, the final lingering doubt that she suspected would never fully go away holding her back: that romantic love had to go hand in hand with sexual attraction, and that one could not exist without the other.

She simply closed her eyes, leaning against him and enjoying the gentle rocking of the carriage for the remainder of their time on the Ferris wheel.

~~~

25-years-old

"Remember this Ferris wheel?" Lloyd teased Colette, squeezing her hand as they stood in front of the Ferris wheel at the reopened carnival. It wasn't the exact same one they’d ridden at the age of 18, for that one had been deconstructed years ago. But it was a near-perfect replica, down to the purple lights that lit up the spokes, though the hearts were gone. Even the bored attendant who was barely paying attention to her duties was right!

"How could I forget?" Colette laughed, her trademark bright smile on her face. Even after knowing her for twenty years and dating her for seven of those years, the sight of her smile never failed to light a spark in his chest.

At least this time Colette was dressed appropriately for the colder night, in a pencil skirt and a long-sleeved collared blouse with a few frills. She looked a lot more put-together than him, who was just wearing plain old jeans. He had picked her straight up from work before driving them here, after all.

All that was missing was the staff pass that she’d removed from around her neck and left in the car. Her smart-casual image, however, was completely shattered by the pair of grey dog ears poking out of her hair, attached to the headband sitting behind her ears. They even felt furry to the touch, though it wasn’t real dog fur.

A pair of brown ears sat on his own head. Colette hadn’t managed to win a grand prize at the game stalls like he once had out of dumb luck, but she'd managed to do pretty well at the ring toss, scoring almost all of her tosses onto the red-rimmed bottles. That meant she could redeem a few mid-tier prizes, so she'd gotten two headbands with dog ears attached, one for her and one for him that he could wear if he wanted to. He'd put it on immediately. Now they matched! He needed to take a picture of them sometime - Sheena and Zelos would appreciate the cute image.

More like Sheena would strangle him over digital space if he didn't send cute photos.

The carnival had finally returned after four years of absence, and he and Colette had jointly decided to return almost immediately upon hearing the news. It was small and honestly not that impressive compared to other theme parks they’d been to, but it still held precious memories. And it would make for a fun date, which it certainly had so far!

They'd retraced their steps from years ago, though unfortunately, they were lacking Zelos and Sheena. First riding the pirate ship, Colette’s hair going wild in the air as the ship swung from side-to-side, then visiting the game stalls, laughing at each other’s absolutely horrendous attempts, then buying and sharing a stick of cotton candy between them, taking turns biting from the fluffy substance and having their tongues curl from the overload of sweetness, before finally arriving back here at the Ferris wheel.

"I know I've said this already, but thanks for planning this all out," Colette said, linking her arm with his and smiling up at him as they joined the queue. The queue was much longer today, amounting to more than 40 people, by his rough estimate. It was still quite early in the evening, half of the sun still peeking over the horizon, the sky painted in a pink that would soon be darkening to orange. It was just as noisy as in the past, perhaps even noisier, for the families hadn't gone home yet. "There were quite a few kerfuffles with the system at work today, and this really helped."

"That bad?"

"Mm. We had a new intern come in today, and then the old system just decided to crash. Not the intern's fault, she's the sweetest girl. But it was still a headache to deal with."

"Well, I'm glad it helped. Though I'm just happy to spend more time with you."

If everything went according to plan, then he'd be seeing a lot more of her in the future.

He shoved his hand into his pocket, checking that the all-important box was still there. It was the crux of this whole operation, and he could not lose it.

Colette laughed, a sound that inevitably made him smile. "I'm sorry I haven't been free for the past few weeks. It's a busy time for the company."

"It's alright. I'll be starting work soon too, after all. Besides, we still stay two floors apart. There's pretty much no way we don't see each other every week, silly."

"Sorry, sorry. Shouldn't be a downer; you're right. Anyway, since tomorrow’s a public holiday, want to spend it over at my place?”

“Netflix and chill?” Lloyd answered, well aware that he was probably getting some weird looks from people close enough to overhear him. He wasn’t even sure if Colette knew of its double meaning - she was generally completely clueless about the world of euphemisms. Over time, they’d just started co-opting the phrase. After all, their time together at each other’s place was mostly spent… watching shows while curled up together on the couch, creating dishes that were more like unrecognisable disasters in the kitchen while attempting not to set the whole place on fire, or Colette playing video games at the foot of the bed while he tickled her neck with his toes. In terms of risque activities, they so rarely happened - and only after he checked, double-checked and triple-checked that Colette was feeling up to it and not forcing herself for his sake.

“I don’t mind, but we haven’t finished that card game we started last month. The card piles are still sitting untouched on my bay window. Wanna do that instead?”

“Sure!” He replied enthusiastically. Board games or card games always promised a good time, if infuriating when nothing would line up and Lady Luck was decidedly not smiling on him. Colette seemed to get all the luck in these party games. Maybe it was consolation for tripping all the time.

“It’s such a shame that Zelos and Sheena aren’t here,” Colette said, pulling out her phone. “I know they went on the Ferris wheel the year after we did, but we still haven’t gotten that group photo we were supposed to.”

“One’s in Europe and one’s in Australia. There’s no way they could join us on such short notice.” The last he'd heard from them, both were doing well for themselves and very happy in their long-distance relationship.

“True. I guess I can add them to the photo afterwards with the power of Photoshop. Oh, and Zelos sent me this really weird message...” After a few swipes of her finger, Colette shoved the bright phone screen under his nose.

Zelos Wilder: Looking forward to the good news ;)

“Do you have any idea what they mean?” Colette asked, cocking her head to the side in confusion. “They haven’t been replying to my question!”

Lloyd could feel his fingers twitching. Zelos Wilder wasn’t here, but if they were, Lloyd would have strangled them already. Trying to spoil the surprise, were they?

“It’s probably nothing! You know how they are. Always trying to cause chaos.” Lloyd shrugged, hoping he wasn’t being too obvious, as he tended to be.

“I suppose that’s true… What good news?” Lloyd could hear Colette repeating that question to herself under her breath, not quite soft enough for it to escape his notice. She didn’t seem to have noticed that anything was up with him, thankfully.

“It’s our turn! Come on, let’s get on!” Lloyd declared, just loud enough to startle Colette and cause her to nearly drop her phone. She hurriedly stuffed it back into her pocket, following Lloyd to the open carriage. She hadn't realised the space before them had completely cleared.

The attendant lazily waved them onto the open carriage with barely a glance at them, a mumbled: “Have a nice ride” leaving her mouth.

Lloyd was the first to scramble on, turning around to give Colette a helping hand - only to find her falling straight into him, having tripped over the raised step. With a shocked “Oh!” falling from her lips, Colette crashed into him, nearly knocking him flat onto the carriage seat. With a shocked yelp, Lloyd braced himself against the glass window of the carriage, barely maintaining his balance. Years of practice at stopping Colette’s sometimes fantastical falls over obstacles that weren’t visible to him had honed his reaction times to near perfection, giving him ample preparation for this situation.

The attendant continued to ignore them, gaze fixed not so discreetly on the phone sitting in her lap. The doors of the carriage slid smoothly shut, and with a jolt that nearly knocked them off balance again, the carriage set off on its journey.

"Um, sorry..." Colette apologised from her position pressed flush against Lloyd's chest, arms entangled in his. She slowly extricated herself from the mess, stumbling a few times but managing not to fall again, even with the gentle swaying of the carriage floor. He tried his best to steady her without falling over himself. She sheepishly smiled. “Are you alright?”

“I’m fine.” Lloyd adjusted her headband, setting the ears that had been knocked crooked back into their rightful place. He’d told her multiple times that she didn’t need to apologise for tripping, but she still did, the habit too ingrained to break. It was endearing, though. “You?”

“I’m fine!” Colette smoothed out her skirt (though there weren’t any noticeable wrinkles in it from the fall,) and sat down to rest her weary feet, giving Lloyd the cue to sit down as well. “Thank goodness I wasn’t wearing heels…”

Lloyd did not want to imagine what would have happened if she was - she might have twisted her ankle, or worse. She rarely wore heels due to her clumsiness, but when she did, all sorts of accidents tended to happen.

He stuffed his hand into his pocket again, fingers feeling the velvet texture again.

It’s still here.

"What's still here?" Colette’s confused voice broke through his relieved thoughts. Her hands were resting in her lap and she was leaning forward, eyes shining with a curious light. The usual white lights of the new condominiums close to the carnival grounds shone, a few glimmers of pink visible as people celebrated Pink Dot. It was at this very moment that the Ferris wheel's lights turned from purple to pink, the spokes emanating soft pink light that washed over Colette, making her hair glisten - almost like an ethereal fairy with imaginary wings that shimmered, having come to visit him on this mortal plane. The dog ears only added to that image, somehow. Even now, the sight of her was enough to make him feel dizzy, both out of love and awe, even if he no longer blushed like an embarrassed schoolboy. Awe that she could get more beautiful every time his gaze landed on her. And awe that such an incredible person had chosen to trust him and stay with him.

He was so enraptured by the angel before him that it took a few seconds for her words to process in his mind, after which he froze in horror.

OH NO, HE’D SAID IT OUT LOUD. A thousand alarm bells were ringing in his head. Some days he was reminded that he was an adult now, and other days he was reminded that he was as much an idiot as he used to be. Some things just never changed.

“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,” Colette said, a teasing lilt to her voice as she rested her chin on her palm, an amused smile playing on her lips.

He could just play it off - he knew Colette wouldn’t pursue it any further if he gave off the signals to drop the topic. She was just like that: the most considerate person he knew.

But…

The original plan had been to do it on the Ferris wheel. It even had Zelos' approval. This, right now, was the perfect chance to just let the cat out of the bag. And he would grasp the opportunity in hand before it could escape him.

For he could think of no future happier than one spent Colette’s side.

Taking a deep breath, he pulled the purple box out of his pocket with a shaking hand, dropping to his knees on the surprisingly clean carriage floor, devoid of the usual spilt drinks and crumpled up tissues.

He could tell the exact moment Colette gleaned the true intent behind his actions, the blank, confused expression on her face morphing into one of shocked disbelief, eyes widening and hands flying up to cover her mouth.

Damn it, he’d completely forgotten the script he’d written with Zelos’ assistance in a back-and-forth over messages, Zelos alternating between giving actually good advice and being extremely annoying, though Lloyd had gotten them to shut up by asking them when they planned to propose. The two of them had both struggled to find the right words, since neither of them had done super well in English. But Lloyd had persevered, wanting to get his feelings across eloquently.

But now that he was staring into Colette’s blue eyes, all the words were sprouting wings and flying mockingly out of his head, leaving only blank space for him to reach uselessly for.

The one piece of advice Zelos had given him that continued to stick in his head was this: speak from the heart, and surely she would understand.

He couldn’t keep her waiting forever.

“I… ” He couldn’t help but start off slow, struggling against the block in his mind but determined to push past it. The words then seemed to just come to him, progressively faster as time went on, stumbling out of some unknown part of his mind - or perhaps it would be more accurate to say his heart. Somehow, throughout it all, he didn't drop the box despite his trembling hands. “Colette, you’re the most amazing person I know. Your compassion, your gentleness, even your clumsiness, they’re all vital parts of my life that I wouldn’t give up for anything. You are my shining star in the sky, the one that gives me hope, that inspires me to be the best version of myself. If I had the choice to relieve my life from the start, I wouldn't change a thing, because meeting you on that playground all those years ago was the best thing that has ever happened to me. All my years spent with you have been incredible, and I would like to spend many more by your side. So, just like years ago, Colette, I have something I need to ask you, right here and right now.”

“Will you… Will you marry me?” He finished, voice drifting off into silence as he flipped open the box to reveal the two plain, thin metal rings he’d bought. Colette wasn’t the type to go for flashy diamonds or colourful gems. She’d appreciate something simple like this.

He waited, the few seconds of deafening silence seeming to stretch out into eternity, broken only by the sound of blood rushing past his ears. This wasn’t the first time he’d asked this very question, if in a different and less dramatic form. He’d already received her answer once. But he would respect whatever answer she gave now, and most of all, they would keep the promise they had made at this very place: that they would always remain friends, no matter what.

~~~

Colette still couldn’t quite believe her ears, gaze flitting between Lloyd’s face and the box he was holding up towards her, the two rings housed snugly within reflecting pink light.

Marriage had crossed her mind many times. She had learned over the years that it wasn’t a penultimate goal that had to be reached to prove her relationship successful, and she’d told Lloyd as much when he’d asked her two months ago if she’d be willing to get married.

But still, even if she had managed to break free from most of the notions the fairytales of old had implanted into her head, able to just enjoy them as sweet stories now, she couldn’t quite rid herself of the dream of having a fairytale wedding. One that was perfectly planned, with family and friends present to stand witness to their union.

She’d told him yes. That she would be willing to tie the knot with him, the one she loved. The expectation of a proposal had been simmering in the back of her mind ever since, often going forgotten. She had not expected the time would be now. Lloyd had been more fidgety than normal, constantly checking his pockets while disguising the action as keeping his hands in his pockets. She’d known something was up, but his true intentions had escaped her detection until just moments before, when she’d been taken off guard. All she’d thought when he’d pulled out the box was that it resembled the ring boxes in the dramas Sheena was always recommending to her, the ones that appeared in all the emotional proposal scenes, until the realisation had hit her in the chest like a truck.

Once again, like years ago, they’d reached the top of the revolution. The silence remained unbroken as Lloyd patiently awaited her answer, not pushing her towards one. And so events repeated, mirrored across time.

Colette slowly stretched out her arm, eyes shimmering with unshed tears as a smile graced her face. She nodded, her throat blocked by all the emotions that swirled in her chest, unable to say ‘yes’ out loud even as she screamed it over and over in her mind, the tears finally breaking free of whatever barrier was holding them back to spill down her face.

Lloyd broke out into the most beautiful smile she had ever seen, radiating pure joy as he slid one of the simple, elegant, silver bands onto her ring finger. It fit. Perfectly. When had he even learned her ring size?

She picked up the other ring that was meant for Lloyd, marvelling at how her hand could somehow remain stable as the rest of her body trembled in barely contained emotion. The ring was so tiny, held between her thumb and index finger, and yet it held such significant weight as she slid it onto his ring finger, the skin of his hand rough against hers and the metal cold.

Lloyd jumped to his feet, pulling her into an embrace and pressing a kiss to the top of her head (his nose bumping the dog ears), holding her close, his happy laughter rumbling through his chest. Even now, when he must have been bursting with joy, he was still mindful of her boundaries, refusing to do anything that would cross the line. Heart filled with warmth, she pressed herself impossibly closer, intending to just melt into his arms forever -

"Please get off the carriage."

The deadpan voice that belonged to neither her nor Lloyd broke through the peaceful bubble that had been constructed around the two of them. She froze, feeling Lloyd stiffen around her as well. Looking to the left yielded the view of solid ground, and the same uninterested attendant gesturing towards it.

Ah. They'd reached the bottom without even noticing. This was… embarrassing, to say the least.

Thankfully, no one seemed to be in the queue at the moment, allowing the two of them to escape from the Ferris wheel without much attention. It appeared that only the attendant had borne witness, and she couldn’t seem to care less, having returned to the booth.

Their interlocked hands swung in the air, the matching rings glinting under the bright neon lights of the carnival as she wiped away her happy tears, both of them grinning uncontrollably.

"I love you," Lloyd said, the words leaving his lips with ease, as they always had. "Shall we go home?” he asked.

Home was with friends and family and Lloyd, the one who held her heart.

Colette squeezed Lloyd’s hand. She felt light as a feather, like she could somehow fly with wings that she didn't have.

"I love you," she replied, the words coming so easily now. "Let’s.”

~~~

The attendant shook her head, scoffing as she returned to scrolling through Twitter.

“I suppose love does make the world go round.”

~~~

Next chapter

[nadiaportia]

Deirdra Margalit

art by my friend Ayla aka leatherandsaltybitters

The partisan with a fiery temper

Other bios:  Ximena | Sayelle | Heloisa | Cibela

Full name: Deirdra Margalit Araya

Meaning of name: Variant of Deirdre; “Wanderer” in Irish

Family:

Jaume Margalit (deceased): Deirdra’s younger brother by three years. They were as close as two siblings can be, and Deirdra often protected him from whoever dared to mock or try to hurt him. Just like his parents, Jaume had a strong sense for justice and was also a rebel that drove him to join the Nationalists in secret before his worried parents could keep him from it. His death at the hands of a Loyalist soldier was what drove Deirdra to leave their village as well to fight for a better future and back then, avenge their beloved brother.

Meritxell Araya (deceased): Deirdra’s mother, a seamstress. Their role model in their childhood, Meritxell was a pillar in the community and a woman with an iron will who stood up for those in need. The rupture of her family in the Civil War and having to let her oldest child go after her youngest one was murdered took a heavy toll on her but also saw her fervently supporting the Nationalists and housing them. She was killed by Loyalists and the Margalit Araya family home burnt to the ground as a warning to all those in Valanguer who dared to act against Queen Jacinta.

Daví Margalit: Deirdra’s father whose biggest hobby is reading and briefly was assistant to the owner of a book shop. He took on the role of teaching in the village school of Valanguer and gave his love for literature to his children as well. Daví wanted a better world for Jaume and Deirdra and supported the Nationalists who had taken up arms against the Queen Jacinta and her loyalists, which ultimately got him into prison. It’s Deirdra’s biggest wish to see their father be a free man again.

Enkidu: A beech marten and Deirdra’s animal companion and familiar. One night while some humans were camping in the woods, he was attracted by the warmth of the fire and the next morning Deirdra woke up to him being curled up next to them. Even though they can’t communicate that well with each other, they are inseparable.

Nicknames: Dee (basically used by everyone), Dida (exclusively family, especially their brother)

Favourite meal: Calçots with salvitxada

Favourite drink: Horxata de chufa

Favourite flower: Carnation

Favourite color: Poppy red

Birthday: 31st of January

Age: 29 during the events of the game

Zodiac: Aquarius

MBTI: ESFP

Patron Arcana: The Chariot and the Page of Cups

Upright: The Chariot is in complete control of its own destiny. It hurtles towards victory, unhindered by adversity. 

Reversed: The Chariot careens out of control, losing its way as it becomes stranded on the road.

Upright: The Page of Cups is a dreamer, always looking towards the future with bright eyes and full heart.

Reversed: The Page of Cups is self-centered and immature, struggling to get along with those around him.

Gender: Non-binary

Sexuality: Bisexual with a preference for women

Height: 1,80 m // 5′9″

Appearance:

Deirdra has a toned body with muscular arms and legs. They have light olive skin with a warm untertone and vitiligo on their forehead, shoulders and around their mouth. Their straight hair, originally dark blond, has been dyed dark blue, reaches their chin and is either in a short bun with a few loose strands or completely loose. Their eyebrows are thin and their original dark blond color while their eyes are light green. Their face is heart-shaped with a pointy chin. They have a slightly roman-shaped nose and thin lips as well as a tooth gap between their front teeth. 

Deirdra carries themself with a swagger and is very expressive when talking.

Visual inspirations: Alia Shawkat

Languages spoken: Durazà, Oriolà and the Common Tongue

Magical abilities:

Despite having some magical affinity, Deirdra prefers to not make use of them not because of a lack of belief in magic but because of difficulties of focusing on them

Illusion powers, such as being able to change the shape and appearance of people, creatures or items in the eyes of others or disguising them completely

Nature- and Earth-based powers

Love interests: 

Portia

Sayelle and Ximena: Either individually or as a polycule. 

In general, like with most of my characters; if they’re compatible sexuality-wise as well as personality-wise, feel free to ship them with your OCs or MCs. Hit me up with a message and we can discuss the details! 

Backstory:

Deirdra Margalit was born as the oldest child of Daví and Meritxell in the village of Valanguer in the countryside of Oriol. They grew up with not a lot of wealth, while not being the ones off the worst in their village, but learned to value even the small things and treasure a community in which everyone helped everyone - very true to the sentiment of “it takes a village to raise a child”. Their father was an intellectual within the community and their mother, who was seen by many as a leader in Valanguer, were very openly critical of the Oriolà monarchy when it took a more hostile turn towards its rural population and got involved in a war led by their bigger neighboring patron empire Calpacia to the point where young adults were forcibly drafted. The populace divided itself soon into  sympathizers of the Loyalists who supported the ongoing course led by the Oriolià Queen Jacinta and the Nationalists who were led by the Queen’s cousin, which meant that even in a small village acquaintances and even friends could become enemies. 

Their father was arrested and imprisoned as a political enemy when the political infighting divided the populace into . The point that pushed them to actually get involved in the Nationalist armed resistance was the death of Jaume. After an argument with their mother, Deirdra left as well without knowing it would be the last time they would ever see her. Meeting many other nationalists on their way to the capital, they soon found a home in the currently besieged capital and met the daughter of a butcher named Renée. Meeting a kindred spirit who had also recently lost family helped them adapt to this new living situation and they soon became comrades-in-arms and more. When the Nationalist leaders called for fighters to take the fighting outside of the city and into the rural areas where the Queen’s Men had taken refuge, they immediately volunteered. For a year, their life consisted of camping in the wilderness, awful food and fearing of getting shot at whenever they passed a hill. It was there when they met their familiar and gave them the name Enkidu after a character from a story their father used to love.

Three years after the first battle the Civil War ended with the Nationalists’ loss of the capital of Oriol and its siege led by the Loyalists. Queen Jacinta gave the choice to everyone who fought for the Nationalists to lay down their weapons and either leave the country as exiles or be put in prison for treason against the crown and receive a lighter sentence, most of Deirdra’s comrades made their choice, fully aware that the Queen’s word couldn’t be trusted and traitors would most likely get executed and thus continued the fight at home. Deirdra themself chose to leave with Renée as they were young and could still have a life together - and end up regretting it for a very long time, when Renée was unable to leave at the last minute.

The following years in exile Deirdra travelled the world with other Oriolà exiles, on one occasion even travelling to Nevivon, and developing a network all across the continent. Their travels led them to Vesuvia where they settled thanks to the help of an exiled politician and integrated them into the local Oriolà community. They met the magicians Asra and Ximena when wanting to progress in their magical studies and became good friends with Julian, often frequenting the Rowdy Raven with him. Their friendship with Sayelle, whom they met thanks to Asra, briefly became romantic and grew steadily until the plague hit Vesuvia and its inhabitants were overwhelmed by it. Deirdra’s instinct to leave the city and those infected behind was met by refusal by both Ximena and Sayelle, and the gap between Deirdra and Sayelle was only broadened when Deirdra decided to aid Asra in a ritual that would bring the Devil himself into the mortal world while it was actually intended to bring Ximena back to life. The fact that their resurrected friend was unable to recognize any of them and their presence actually caused her pain saw Deirdra cutting ties with Asra and almost exclusively being around their compatriots.

More art:

by @cherrygirl666​ | post 

feat. Sayelle by @missrabbitart​ | post

[tumlbrtumlbr]

Woman as alien: Angela Carter's Heroes and Villains.  

Link/Page Citation

 "Woman as an alien, the non-patriarchal alien in a patriarchal society, the patriarchal alien in a non-patriarchal society, the non-patriarchal alien experiencing the stress of positioning as a patriarchal subject - all are strategies used by feminist science fiction writers to deconstruct patriarchal ideology and its practice." (1) This quote taken from an essay by Anne Cranny-Francis is for me a very suitable starting point for a discussion of Angela Carter's Heroes and Villains (1969). Written from within the counter-culture of the 1960s, this novel is Carter's excursion into the disaster story convention, a literary sub-genre which was very popular during the period of the Cold War. (2)

 Heroes and Villains is a very interesting and unsettling early book, and yet, surprisingly, one that has received "far less critical attention than one might expect." (3) Apart from a few interesting essays, (4) the existing studies of the book (primarily sub-chapters of monographs devoted to Carter) focus almost exclusively on the way the novel reverses gender stereotypes and undermines cultural codings of female sexuality as passive and masochistic. My point is different: I would like to show how, by having a female protagonist (and focalizer) who revolts against cultural stereotypes, Carter revitalizes the disaster story convention that in the late sixties seemed an exhausted and repetitive sub-genre of pulp fiction.

 In order to do this I am going to briefly present the British disaster story tradition, place Carter within its context, and then discuss Heroes and Villains as an atypical disaster story that, thanks to a woman-alien who disrupts mythical frameworks that people are confined by, points to new ways of constructing narratives. I will show how the female protagonist of the novel matures and gradually learns that her post-holocaust society is based on a set of false binary oppositions it has inherited from pre-holocaust Western patriarchal society, and that her world is slowly giving way to entropy. I will then prove that Heroes and Villains indulges in descriptions of chaos and decay in order to show the deterioration of once potent symbols and thus of the mythical order which they represent. Only then, once the old order disappears, can the female mythmaker create a totally new civilization, one that does not repeat old and static social paradigms, but is dynamic and mutable. Similarly, Heroes and Villains shows that, in order not to degenerate into pulp disaster, the story should refrain from recreating already known historical epochs (for example, a new post-holocaust Middle Ages), opting instead to create radically new societies ruled by women-aliens.

 Though it is rather difficult to state exactly what disaster stories are, a fair working definition of the genre seems to be the one given in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction: "stories of vast biospheric change which drastically affect human life." (5) According to John Clute and Peter Nicholls, the British disaster story was born at the end of the nineteenth century when the first anti-civilization sentiments were being felt, and people began to mistrust the idea of the white man's Empire standing for reason, progress and science. In 1884 Richard Jefferies, a Victorian naturalist and journalist, published After London, a novel describing the ruins of the greatest city on Earth; in a post-cataclysmic future our civilization inevitably succumbs to nature, savagery and non-reason. In the following years such writers as H.G. Wells, Conan Doyle and Alun Llewellyn published numerous fantastic ac counts of natural- or human-provoked disasters, the retrogression of humankind, new ice ages, barbarian raids, the destruction of Europe, etc. (6)

 Though dating from the nineteenth century the genre did not flourish until the 1950s and early 1960s during the Cold War, when young British writers revived the old tradition by incorporating a new influence: that of American pulp magazines. American stories of the time were very pessimistic, as the recent war left many with a feeling of despair and fear of the nuclear bomb, political systems based on unlimited power and culture's imminent doom. In England there was a strong native tradition of gloomy fiction concerning authoritarian societies (George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Burgess), and thus the young authors of disaster stories belonging to the so-called "New Wave" of British speculative fiction (J.G. Ballard, Michael Moorcock, Brian Aldiss and others) had examples to follow. (7) Their older colleagues Walter Miller (in the United States) and John Wyndham (in Britain) were writing their post-holocaust bestsellers at that very time.

 Heroes and Villains seems to belong to the same tradition as the disaster story classics: Walter Miller's A Canticle for Leibovitz or John Wyndham's The Chrysalides. (8) Miller and Wyndham describe the beginnings of a new civilization; their prose demonstrates how the deadly heritage of our times (pollution, mutations, decline and chaos) serve as the basis for another better world. In A Canticle monks of a second Middle Ages try to gather and preserve the records of our knowledge by rewriting all kinds of texts (just like the caste of Professors). Though they no longer understand what they copy, still there is hope that one day civilization will be regained. Wyndham's post-catastrophic society, in turn, is obsessed with the idea of purity and the norm. His characters want to recreate civilization in such a way as to make it immune to self-destruction. In its fear of deviations and mutants (bringing to mind the Out People) Wyndham's society is cruel and fanatical, but his novel is, just like Miller's story, full of hope for the future. Human folly and cruelty evoke terror and pity in order to improve the reader's mind. Carter's procedure in composing Heroes and Villains is to allude to Wyndham and Miller's tradition. Both Heroes and Villains and her other post-holocaust novel The Passion of the New Eve show to what extant literature today is repeating already known tales. Yet disaster fiction, a very commercial genre, enables Carter to reuse the stock motifs and to create her own often times shocking pieces. Her disaster novels may therefore be read as modern Menippea: a mixture of heterogeneous literary material. According to Mikhail Bakhtin, Menippea was the genre which broke the demands of realism and probability: it conflated the past, present and future, states of hallucination, dream worlds, insanity, eccentric behaviour and speech and transformation. (9)

 Heroes and Villains juxtaposes overt allusions to nuclear fallout and mutations caused by the self-annihilation of technological society with counter-cultural poetics: subversion of the social order, new hippie-like aesthetics, alternate lifestyles, and concentration on entropy, decay and death. Carter is no longer interested in the bomb--she does not warn against the impending holocaust; but instead describes in detail the gradual dissolution of social, sexual and cultural groupings which follows the inevitable disaster and which makes room for a new female-governed future. Thus, she deconstructs the markedly masculine tradition of after-the-end-of-the-world fantasies which deal with the creation of a new order, strong leaders and outbursts of violence (as is the case in the above-mentioned novels by Miller and Wyndham). In stock disaster stories women are either commodities or breeders who are fought for and whose reproductive abilities are to amend r the drastic decrease of population.

 In Heroes and Villains the Cold War motif of a post-holocaust civilization allows Carter to create an exuberant world of ruin, lush vegetation and barbarism. Three groups of people live among the crumbling ruins of a pre-nuclear explosion past: the Professors, who live in concrete fortified villages and cultivate old science and ideology; the Barbarians, who attack them and lead nomadic lives in the forests; and the Out People, radiation mutants cast out by all communities.

 The Professors are the guardians of this order, and they try to uphold standards and attend to appearances such as dress and accent. Marianne, the novel's focalizer, is the daughter of a professor of history brought up to live in an ordered patriarchal society and to study old books in trying to preserve knowledge. The futility of the Professors' work - abstract research done in white concrete towers, editing what nobody would ever read - demonstrates the arbitrariness of post-apocalyptic social roles. The caste of Professors, in wanting to be different than the irrational Barbarians, must devise artificial attributes of its individuality.

 Unable to cope with an existence devoted to cultivation of the past and attracted by the colourful and seemingly romantic Barbarians, Marianne helps one of them--an attractive young Barbarian leader named Jewel. He is very beautiful and he wears an exuberant savage costume, making him look like a Hollywood film star who plays in a wilderness film. For Marianne he embodies her desire and fantasies --on one occasion she even calls him the "furious invention of my virgin nights." (10) Moreover, his name might be considered an allusion to the beautiful savage girl whom Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim made the queen of his little kingdom. (11) Marianne's name might well be read as an allusion to Jane Austen's too-romantic heroine of Sense and Sensibility. (12) This canonical echo is contrasted with the association with pulp fiction: Marianne, a professor's daughter lost in the wilderness, evokes the character of Jane in the Tarzan stories. (13) It is by such literary allusions that Carter constructs her self-conscious pastiche, thus demonstrating the whole range of possibilities offered to a female character by romance and, at the same time, she points out the exhaustion of these conventions. John Barth in his Literature of Exhaustion postulates that "exhausted" literature might be saved by coming back to well-known classics and by echoing their extracts in new shocking contexts. (14) In this way Carter mingles her generically heterogeneous "prior texts".

 Wounded in an attack, Jewel escapes from the village and is followed by Marianne. He then takes her to his tribe and, despite her protests, proclaims her his hostage. Marianne is a total stranger among the Barbarians; they find her repulsive and unbearably alien; like a creature from outer space in a B-grade science fiction movie she provokes fear and hostility. An educated and self-assured woman in a tribe "caught in the moment of transition from the needs of sheer survival to a myth-ruled society," (15) she is thus a woman-alien. Interestingly, as early as the 1960s Carter used a science fiction stock character to talk about women in a society that is undergoing changes: in the 1990s Donna Haraway, in her famous "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century", in a similar way makes use of the science fiction concept of a cyborg. (16) Haraway follows Carter's footsteps, and indeed makes her point even stronger, as her "cyborg" comes from the social outside and is alien to traditional gender structures. As Joan Gordon and Veronica Hollinger explain:

  Haraway develops her "Manifesto" around the cyborg--product of both   science fiction and the military-industrial complex--as an   imaginative figure generated outside the framework of the   Judeo-Christian history of fall and redemption, a history that   unfolds between the twin absolutes of Edenic origin and apocalyptic   Last Judgment. Like Derrida, Haraway warns that (nuclear)   apocalypse might, in fact, be the all-too-possible outcome of our   desire for the resolution of historical time. Haraway too is wary   of cultural discourses that privilege resolution, completion, and   totality. (17)

 Marianne is alien to the tribe as she refuses to adopt traditional female roles. Thus, Carter uses science fiction literary conventions to talk about gender as performance much in the same manner Judith Butler will some twenty years later. (18) Elisabeth Mahoney in her above-mentioned study of Heroes and Villains reads the novel in the context of Butler's thesis, that "fantasy is the terrain to be privileged in any contestation of conventional configurations of identity, gender and the representation of desire." (19) This is a very good starting point and an interesting comparison but, as Elaine Jordan notices, "Carter did this sort of thing before Butler, so her work could just as well be used to explicate Butler." (20) The same is true for Haraway, Gordon, Hollinger and a number of other feminist critics often referred to nowadays in order to validate Carter's argument. But Carter turning to science fiction for her metaphors predates them.

 The tribe (whose descriptions bring to mind a 1960s hippie commune) is apparently governed by Jewel and his brothers, but Marianne soon realizes that the real source of power is Donally, an escapee professor of sociology, Jewel's tutor, and the self-proclaimed shaman of the tribe. For Donally the tribe is a social laboratory where he tries to perform an experiment: to wit, to introduce a new mythology designed to be the founding stone of new type of post-holocaust society. (21)

  It seemed to me that the collapse of civilisation in the form that   intellectuals such as ourselves understood it might be as good a   time as any for crafting a new religion' he said modestly.   'Religion is a device for instituting the sense of a privileged   group; many are called but few are chosen and, coaxed from   incoherence, we shall leave the indecent condition of barbarism and   aspire towards that of the honest savage. (22)

 When Marianne meets Donally she immediately recognizes his professorial descent: "his voice was perfectly cultured, thin, high and soft ... He had a thin, mean and cultured face. Marianne had grown up among such voices and faces." (23) Seeing in his study books which she remembered from her childhood (Teilhard de Chardin, Levi-Strauss, Weber, Durkheim) Marianne discovers Donally's attempts to rule the Barbarians according to the outdated formulas written down by pre-apocalyptic sociologists.

 Disappointed by the tribe, Marianne runs away only to be recaptured by Jewel, who rapes her, brings her back, and then ceremoniously marries her according to a ritual devised by Donally. With the tribe again on the move, Donally quarrels with Jewel and has to leave. Marianne gradually learns how to manipulate Jewel, her quasi-royal power grows, especially once she becomes pregnant and is to be the mother of Jewel's heir. When Donally sends a message that he has been caught by the Professors, Jewel goes to rescue him and both are killed. In the novel's finale Marianne decides to become the new female leader of a new society.

 This brief summary reveals that, in parallel with the action-adventure narrative, the novel also depicts Marianne's gradual psychological change. She learns how to articulate her own fantasies and to objectify the man she desires: Jewel. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that when her romantic illusions disappear she discovers her own deeper motivating desire in her relationship with Jewel: it is her newly awakened sexuality that counts, not the male himself. Though a tribal leader and a future patriarch, Jewel is in fact a passive object both Marianne and Donally struggle to possess. Linden Peach writes:

  In the relationship between Marianne and Jewel, Carter also   rewrites a further traditional story, that of a demon-lover, of   whom Jewel has many characteristics--he is powerful, mysterious,   supernatural; and he can be cruel, vindictive and hostile. However,   in her description of him, Carter challenges the male-female   binarism which ascribes so-called masculine qualities to men and   feminine characteristics to women. In discovering the nature of her   own desire, Marianne finds that male-female attributes exist within   each individual. The demon-lover is also reconfigured as part of   her own eroticisation of the male other. (24)

 New ways of looking at herself and others set Marianne free and empower her. Towards the end of the book she feels ready to construct a new narrative for herself and make the world around believe in it. A woman-alien dissolves the tribe's patriarchal structure and commences a new phase in its history. The old order based on binary oppositions (hero/villain, passive/active, natural/civilized) and a number of taboos that originated in pre-holocaust times are abandoned. Carter does not do what a standard disaster story author does: she does not establish a rigid binarism between the Professors and the Barbarians, i.e., the civilized and the savage. The post-holocaust narrative is for her a space where she "explores the blurring of conventional boundaries and binarisms and the way in which such artificial boundaries are maintained." (25) She re-uses existing narrative patterns of disaster fiction in order to break the "Wyndhamesque" formula and instead create a new and radical vision of the end of the world.

 Moreover, these post-holocaust times are shown to be not a new version of the old order, but an unknown epoch typified not by stability but by creative chaos. Step by step, Marianne realizes that the entire distinction Professors\Barbarians is as false and naive as the children's role-playing game called "Soldiers and Villains". As a female child growing up in a Professors' village she always had to play the part of the Barbarian, the villain, the other, while the boy she played with, the son of a professor of mathematics, always wanted to be a male civilized hero who shoots her dead. As a small girl she was brave enough to refuse to play such a game; now as a young woman she realizes that in the real world the basis of the division between the Professors and the Barbarians is a set of myths and superstitions. (26)

 The stay in the Barbarians' camp proves to Marianne that there is no other difference but old wives' tales: to her surprise (and in opposition to what she was told in the Professors' village) the Barbarians do not represent instinct, folklore and savagery alone. They do have a lot of superstitions; they do sport ridiculous tattoos, hairdos and costumes and they do believe in folk cures--but at the same time they are very far from unreflective "nature". When Marianne first sees Jewel he seems the embodiment of the wilderness: a man fighting to survive among hostile wildlife. But he immediately destroys this impression by quoting to her a relevant bit of poetry: Tennyson's poem about Darwinism. (27) Jewel is very well-educated by Donally and likes to boast of his knowledge of philosophical theories and the Latin names of beasts, which seems as irrelevant in the dirty Barbarians' camps as the Professors' lore in their concrete towers.

 The Professors and the Barbarians need each other to define themselves. Both tribes work hard to impress the opponent (the Barbarians wear tattoos and facepaint, the Professors organize armies of specially-equipped soldiers to defend their villages). They also blame each other for the hardships of post-holocaust life. Marianne's father, in explaining to her the reasons of the war between the tribes, asks at one point: "if the Barbarians are destroyed who will we then be able to blame for the bad things?" (28) Aidan Day remarks:

  The Professors, failing to recognise their own repressions, have   sought to hound that which is not gentle and ordered outside   themselves. They have committed the crime of finding external   scapegoats for realities within their own hearts and minds that   they find problematical. (29)

 In a world where the Barbarians discuss philosophy and shamans comment on being shamans, even the seemingly biological distinction human\inhuman is not stable and fails to structure reality. While roaming the jungle Marianne encounters mutants whose bodies and minds transgress the human norm. What is worth noting is the origin of the Out People motif: mutants and deviations often populate the worlds of post-apocalyptic stories, the above-mentioned example of Wyndham's The Chrysalides being the best known; but the way they are described is usually quite different. By transgressing the norm Wyndham's mutants reinforce the notion of being human, of possessing some mysterious human factor along with all the rights and duties, while Carter's Out People are just strange, speechless bodies:

  Amongst the Out People, the human form has acquired fantastic   shapes. One man has furled ears like pale and delicate Arum Lilies.   Another was scaled all over, with webbed hands and feet. Few had   the conventional complement of limbs and features. (30)

 Their appearance shows that overwhelming entropy is not external scenery the human race has to live in, but that it touches and alters the very essence of humanness: what humans are and what humans create is falling apart. Carter is re-writing an iconic disaster story motif (that of humans genetically altered by radiation), but she gives it a new ideological meaning. In classic male post-holocaust narratives mutants are disfigured humans who suffer for the sins of the fathers: civilization should start anew, albeit preserving its essential features (humanism, liberalism, traditional family values and consequently, patriarchy). Carter's Marianne, in watching the Out People, does not believe in re-establishing the old social order with its norms and values. Heroes and Villains is not about the rebirth of humankind, but about apocalypse itself.

 In this chaotic world--where there are no more essential differences between phenomena, and the randomness of things does not allow for any conventional divisions--race, species, gender and even time cease to exist objectively. David Punter comments:

  The conflict ... is a multivalent parody: of class relations, of   relations between the sexes, of the battle between rational control   and desire.... There are, obviously, no heroes and no villains;   only a set of silly games which men play. (31)

 Each entity possesses its own characteristic features; but on their basis no classification can be made as, gradually, all the points of reference are destroyed. Such a process is particularly striking as far as temporality is concerned--in the world of the novel there is no objective measure of time; everybody lives in the temporal dimension of his biological rhythm without calendars or chronometers. In Heroes and Villains the flow of time is stopped forever, as shown by the beautiful though useless chronometers that for Marianne are merely souvenirs from the past, elements of pure decoration. The book starts with a description of her father's favourite heirloom:

  [A] clock which he wound every morning and kept in the family   dining room upon a sideboard full of heirlooms.... She concluded   the clock must be immortal but this did not impress her ... she   watched dispassionately as the hands of the clock went round but   she never felt the time was passing, for time was frozen around her   in this secluded place. (32)

 Time itself has become an heirloom, a peculiar reminder of bygone days. For Marianne the ticking of the clock has no relation to the rhythm of life. Its ticking proved to be the sound of her childhood and her father's old age. She left it behind without regret as it had never served for her any purpose. The next chronometers she saw (dead watches worn by the Barbarian women for decoration) were signs of an even greater degree of timelessness as nobody remembered their initial function. The last clock in the book, a gigantic and dead apparatus, welcomes Marianne in the ruins of the old city: (33)

  Prominent among the minarets, spires and helmets of wrought iron   which protruded from the waters was an enormous clock whose hands   stood still at the hour of ten, though it was, of course, no longer   possible to tell whether this signified ten in the morning or ten   at night. (34)

 The gigantic size of this clock and its absolute deadness create the image of the total arbitrariness of any measure of time. Exhaustion and entropy know no time but the vague "now" which for a fraction of a second can at best turn into "a totally durationless present, a moment of time sharply dividing past from future and utterly distinct from both." (35) The post-holocaust landscape of ruined cities near the seaside adorned with dead clocks brings to mind a visual intertext: Salvador Dali's The Persistence of Memory. (36) In this surreal painting, influenced by psychoanalysis, gigantic dead clocks are melting down, showing that clock time is no longer valid. Dali and Carter (who adored the Surrealists and often wrote about them in both her fiction and non-fiction) are both trying to recreate inner landscapes: their critique of the contemporary world takes forms of fantastic neverlands.

 Carter's great admiration for the Surrealist movement results from the fact that, as she holds, theirs was the art of celebration and recreation. Their techniques haphazard and idiosyncratic, the Surrealists attempted to create combinations of words and images which by analogy and inspiration were supposed to evoke amazement; such art was based on a strong belief in humankind's ability to recreate itself. The world shown in their works is "deja vue", as in a nightmare we recognize separate elements which we have already seen as they date back to diverse moments of the past. It is a world deprived of time experienced in the mind. In surrealist art: "It is this world, there is no other but a world transformed by imagination and desire. You could say it is a dream made flesh." (37) In Heroes and Villains Carter attempts to use a similar technique to depict the post-apocalyptic world in which past, present and future intermingle.

 For Carter's characters the future offers no escape: they are doomed to inhabit the ruins and repeat social scenarios from the past. Living in such a world has the haunting quality of a nightmare: the self-conscious characters feel oppressed by the same surroundings, similar activities and repeated words. What is the worst is the fact that there is no escape in space either, as there cannot be anywhere to go: "There's nowhere to go, dear,' said the Doctor. 'If there was I would have found it". (38)

 Madness, drunkenness and paranoia seem to be the only ways out of the grotesque post-apocalyptic wilderness where everything is falling apart; indeed, the wild world Marianne enters (and finally renews) is entropy-ridden. The story's characters can hide only inside their troubled egos, as the outside reality is nothing but an everlasting nightmare. A stifling atmosphere of exhaustion and oppression is created by numerous images of overgrown vegetation, desolate ruins, half-destroyed houses full of fungi and rotting furniture, detailed descriptions of dirt and disease all in the atmosphere of sexual fantasy and paranoid visions. These images are too vivid and drastic to be mere scenery; it is the power of death and the different faces of decay that constitute Carter's style.

 Carter treats bits and pieces of old discourses (the above-mentioned allusions to Conrad and Austen, as well as to Edgar Rice Burroughs and John Wyndham) in the way the Barbarians use old garments and broken down pieces of machinery found in the ruins: apparently to adorn but, at the same time, to take delight in dissolution, destruction and death. Metatextually, Heroes and Villains depicts the de-composition of traditional modes of writing; Carter follows the example of such New Wave authors as Pamela Zoline (39) for whom the key narrative term is entropy. In the short story "The heat death of the universe" Zoline defines the entropy of a system as "a measure of its degree of disorder." (40) The "system" is post-capitalist affluent society, and in order to capture the experience of living within the contemporary mediascape she both depicts the chaos of her character's life and introduces chaos to her narrative.

 Zoline's "The Heat Death of the Universe" ends with the scene when the protagonist methodically smashes all pieces of equipment in her kitchen, thereby creating an irreversible mess of destruction; all forms give way to chaos. Carter's novel has a totally different post-apocalyptic setting, yet chaos and entropy are equally important. The narration of Heroes and Villains describes decay almost with pleasure and most certainly with great precision. The text changes into a study in decomposition, the anatomy of both our civilization and the disaster story genre: they both are killed in order to be examined. "For I am every dead thing"; (41) this quotation from John Donne would best summarize the world of the novel, which does not allow for any hope. The only emotion left is curiosity: Marianne the focalizer takes some pleasure in scientific observations of decay.

 Among the ruins and scattered heirlooms of the past a prominent place is given to old symbols, which at the moment of the world's death, change in significance. Deprived of their contextual power the symbols die, creating ephemeral constellations and gaining for a moment a certain new meaning. The anatomy of signification becomes a favourite pastime of Donally and, later, Marianne; but the way the two of them interpret signs differs. Donally seeks to maintain patriarchal mythical frameworks: the sharp unequal antagonism between male and female; civilized and uncivilized; reasonable and wild. Marianne tries to dismantle these oppositions: for her signs are reduced to aesthetics and the old signifying system dies. The moment she starts to observe signs for their own sake marks her growing understanding of the world around: she lives surrounded by the debris of a bygone civilization which one may study--but only for scientific purposes. New myths are yet to be created. The last conversation between her and Jewel best shows the difference between them. Jewel is still naive enough to believe in symbols, while Marianne analyzes them:

  But when he was near enough for her to see the blurred colours of   his face, she also saw he was making the gesture against the Evil   Eye. Suddenly she recognised it.   "They used to call that the sign of the Cross,' she said. 'It must   be handed down among the Old Believers."   "Did you call me back just to give me this piece of useless   information?" (42)

 The anatomy of symbolic meanings and their changes is best seen in the example of clothes. Both the dress and decoration worn by the Barbarians come either from the ruins (and thus from the past) or are stolen from the Professors' villages. Worn in new and shocking combinations, old garments gain new meanings. A similar process was described in one of Carter's fashion essays from the Nothing Sacred collection. The essay entitled "Notes for a Theory of the Sixties Style" analyzes the nature of apparel. According to Carter clothes are the best example of the decadent fashion of the sixties, as in those years they "become arbitrary and bizarre ... reveal a kind of logic of whizzing entropy. Mutability is having a field day." (43)

 The term mutability is the key notion for this essay, one written two years before the publication of Heroes and Villains. In this text Carter defines style as the presentation of the self as a three-dimensional object. Wearing eclectic fragments of different vestments "robbed of their symbolic content" (44) is a way of creating a new whole whose items are not in any imposed harmony. The theory formulated in the essay seems to be the key to understanding the symbolic meaning of clothes in Heroes and Villains, where mutability is not a matter of individual choice, but the condition of the whole dying civilization.

 In broader terms, symbols have meaning only in reference to the mythical structures behind them--and clothes are a perfect example of this process. In a patriarchal society, where the law of inheritance makes men value female chastity and pre-nuptial virginity, the wedding ritual has a deep mythical sense and the white wedding dress becomes a potent symbol. Donally makes Marianne wear an old deteriorating white robe during her marriage ceremony in a vain attempt to reestablish patriarchy in the tribe. For Marianne the dress is just an ugly relic of bygone epochs. Lost in the exhausted reality of dead symbols she feels she has to create their own future: first to escape the old symbolic order and then to devise a new mythology herself.

 Thus, paradoxically, the novel combines the symbols of entropy and mutability; it shows the world in the moment of its disintegration, and yet the disintegrating elements are constantly being re-used to create changeable structures. In one moment we read a "Wyndhamesque" end-of-the-world-fantasy, in another Carter deconstructs this tradition. Roz Kaveney writes:

  The formalist aspects of Carter's work--the extent to which she   combined stock motifs and made of them a collage that was entirely   her own--was bound to appeal; sections of the SF readership   discovered in the course of the 1970s and 1980s that they had been   talking postmodernism all their lives and not noticing it, and   Carter was part of that moment. (45)

 Kaveney reads Heroes and Villains in the context of the science fiction readership in the late 20th century, and discovers how Carter makes use of SF conventions. Eva Karpinski in her essay "Signifying Passion: Angela Carter's Heroes and Villains as a Dystopian Romance" refers in her reading of the book to the utopian tradition:

 The dystopian romance proves to be a suitable vehicle for Carter's didactic allegory of the relationship between the sexes, an allegory, one might add, that uses the utopian ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in order to re-write the myth of the Fall as it structures Western representations of the social and sexual difference. (46)

 Other critics, for example Elaine Jordan (47) use the label "speculative fiction," (48) and Carter herself in the famous interview given to John Haffenden calls her fiction "magic mannerism." (49) Thus, one can think of diverse generic formulas to describe the novel, although none of the labels is final, as the narrative itself is unstable and mutable.

 The novel also celebrates new feminist myths in order to playfully laugh at them on the next page. Having got rid of Donally and having won her mental struggle with Jewel, Marianne decides on a scenario that suits her best. She has found her identity and now wants to take control over the tribe and to become a post-apocalyptic leader, which she declares by paraphrasing the Bible: "I will be the tiger-lady and I will rule them with a rod of iron." (50) In this sentence she alludes to Donally's attempt to tattoo one of the tribe's children into a tiger-girl, something which ended tragically, as the baby died in the process. But the idea of the artificial creation of a "natural" tiger-human had some appeal to the Barbarians and thus Jewel wanted to get the tiger tattoo himself.

 When Jewel learned that at his age it was impossible, he planned to tattoo his and Marianne's baby. And now it is Marianne who is going to symbolically possess the tiger's strength and beauty: not by getting a tattoo, but by ruling "with a rod of iron" over the tribe. Her "rod" is probably going to be her knowledge and education, the love of reason her father taught her, combined with her ability to reconcile binary oppositions and blend nature with nurture, reason with instinct, the Barbarians and the Professors. Only a woman-alien can do this by creating a third, reconciliatory way between the two patriarchal societies. Marianne is aware that she is not yet living in the post-apocalyptic order, but still within the Apocalypse itself, that is, amidst the bits and pieces of the old world which is falling apart. Thus her declaration "I will rule them with a rod of iron" echoes Saint John's Revelation:

  and the dragon stood before the woman which was ready to be   delivered, for to devour her child as soon as it was born.   And she brought forth a man child, who was to rule all nations with   a rod of iron: and her child was caught up unto God, and to his   throne.   And the woman fled into the wilderness. (51)

 Marianne misquotes St John for a purpose: she aims to give old patriarchal texts a new meaning for new times. At the end of the book Marianne is, physically speaking, "ready to deliver", as her baby is to be born very soon. But here the similarities with St John end: who can be identified with the devouring dragon? Perhaps patriarchal attempts to remodel the child so that it serves a purpose? After all, Donally and Jewel wanted him tattooed and ruling the tribe according to the old pattern of power. Moreover, Marianne (in contrast to Donally and Jewel) is not so sure the baby is going to be "a man child", and so she plans the future regardless of its sex. Finally, her flight into the wilderness is in fact an act of usurping political power herself: it is she who is going to become a tiger-lady and to rule the new "wilderness", the world outside the villages of the Professors and the camps of the Barbarians.

 "People kept wild beasts such as lions and tigers in cages and looked at them for information. Who would have thought they would take to our climate so kindly, when the fire came and let them out?" (52) which is how Marianne's father once explained to her why the exotic beasts roam the countryside devouring smaller creatures. After the apocalypse carnivorous cats once again become the king of beasts; they are the only ones that gained power instead of losing it. Predators could survive and rule. As this is true of tigers, perhaps it can also be true of people?

 Tigers and lions are very prominent in the novel; we very soon learn that Jewel is attracted to wild cats, which is perhaps the effect of his own weakness. One of his most vivid memories is the scene when, as a teenager, he met a lion face to face and survived only because the beast ignored him. This story (which he told to Marianne) anticipates the end of the novel: when Jewel gives up and goes to seek his death he encounters another lion and again fails to attract its attention. Marianne sees the animal and cannot but admire its fearsome beauty:

  She had never seen a lion before. It looked exactly like pictures   of itself; though darkness washed its colours off, she saw its mane   and tasseled tail which flicked about as it moved out of the edge   of shadow on to the dune. (53)

 Marianne is not disappointed; the lion looks "like pictures of itself": the thing and its representation for once go together. The mythical meaning of wild cats is going to survive the end of civilization and shall remain a handy metaphor. Marianne decides to rule over the tribe as its tiger-lady not in an act of imitating a queen of the wilderness fairytale motif, but in an attempt to start a new epoch with its new myths. (54) As Margaret Atwood puts it in her essay on Carter's stories "Running with the Tigers", as the tiger will never lie down with the lamb, it is the lamb the powerless female--which should learn the tigers' ways. (55) By the same token, Marianne wants to create a new definition for a power system in which the oppositions male/female, intellect/desire or civilized/wild are of no importance. (56)

 When Marianne gets to the Barbarian camp for the first time she finds herself imprisoned by the patriarchal myth of a new Creation. Both Donally and Jewel want her to act out a new Eve role in order to secure a re-enactment of history which would result in a repetition of the old social and political order. Jewel advises her at the time of her trouble in adapting to the tribe to pretend to be Eve at the end of the world. The original patriarchal myth of Eden is re-enforced by a tattoo Jewel has on his back whereby Eve offers Adam an apple, and by a number of metaphors and allusions. This myth is thus very prominent in the novel and suggests the strength of patriarchal ideology--parallel to the strength of the tribe's male leaders (and also of the Professors' village: both societies are exclusively male-governed). The rival mythical intertext--the Revelation of Saint John--appears not until the end of Heroes and Villains and marks the beginning of a genuinely new epoch when Marianne, a woman-alien, takes power.

 A woman-alien sets out to create a genuinely new social order and the question is whether she is going to recreate the hegemonic power-relations of patriarchal order in both the Professors' villages and the Barbarians' camps. In science fiction narratives aliens often perceive human civilization in a new way, one that enables us to see "normal" social order in a defamiliarized manner; Marianne is a stranger to her own world, she is not interested in the reversal of binaries, but in their liquidation. Carter does not celebrate her political victory as a birth of a genuinely feminist paradise: the very concept of "tiger-lady" cannot be taken too seriously. Marianne the Queen is demythologized from the very start of a reign which is going to prefer mutability to stiff order.

 Marianne the tiger-lady has a long road to power behind her. Heroes and Villains tells a story of her maturation in a world full of bits and pieces of old symbols and power structures. Marianne learns to see that these binding discourses are giving way to entropy, and that in her world of total chaos new myths have to be created --and that a new, post-patriarchal epoch is yet to be commenced. Moreover, a similar procedure might well be applied to the old literary genre Heroes and Villains pertains to: the British disaster story. By having an atypical protagonist, a female-alien strong enough to destroy patriarchal social structure, Carter manages to revive the exhausted convention and to create a genuinely new story.

 (1.) Anne Cranny-Francis, "Feminist Futures: A Generic Study," in Alien Zone. Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema, ed. Annette Kuhn (London and New York: Verso, 2003), 219-228, p. 223.

 (2.) To call Carter a "feminist science fiction writer" would perhaps be an exaggeration (though the most influential science fiction lexicon, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction edited by Clute and Nicholls, does have an entry "Angela Carter"). Nonetheless, in some of her novels she purposefully uses fantastic literary conventions.

 (3.) Elisabeth Mahoney, "'But Elsewhere?' The future of fantasy in Heroes and Villains," in The Infernal Desires of Angela Carter, ed. Joseph Bristow and Trev Lynn Broughton (London and New York: Longman, 1997), 73-87, p. 73.

 (4.) One has to mention Eva C. Karpinski, "Signifying Passion: Angela Carter's Heroes and Villains as a Dystopian Romance," Utopian Studies 11.2 (2000) 137-51; and Roz Kaveney, "New New World Dreams: Angela Carter and Science Fiction," in Flesh and the Mirror. Essays on the Art of Angela Carter, ed. Lorna Sage (London: Virago, 1994), 171-88.

 (5.) John Clute and Peter Nicholls, ed., The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (London: Orbit, 1999), p. 338.

 (6.) Clute and Nicholls, pp. 337-339.

 (7.) For details concerning the New Wave of British speculative fiction, see Judith Merril, England Swings SF, Stories of Speculative Fiction (New York: Ace Books, 1968). The most important disaster novels written by the New Wave writers are J.G. Ballard, The Drowned World (Harmondsworth and Ringwood: Penguin Books, 1974) and J.G. Ballard The Wind from Nowhere (Harmondsworth and Ringwood: Penguin Books, 1974).

 (8.) Walter Miller, A Canticle for Leibovitz (Philadelphia, Lippincott and London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1960) and John Wyndham, The Chrysalides (London: Joseph, 1955).

 (9.) Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, tr. by R.W. Rotsel (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1973), p. 96.

 (10.) Angela Carter, Heroes and Villains (London: Virago, 1992), p. 137.

 (11.) Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

 (12.) Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility (Harmondsworth, New York, Ringwood and Auckland: Penguin Classics, 2007).

 (13.) Tarzan's adventures were originally created by Edgar Rice Burroughs and published in the years 1914-1950.

 (14.) John Barth, The Literature of Exhaustion and the Literature of Replenishment (Northridge: Lord John Press, 1982).

 (15.) Karpinski, p. 138.

 (16.) Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 149-181.

 (17.) Veronica Hollinger and Joan Gordon, ed., Edging into the Future. Science Fiction and Contemporary Cultural Transformation (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), p. 162.

 (18.) Butler talks about gender in terms of ritual practices, a role one adopts thus excluding other modes of behaviour. What is excluded forms the "constitutive outside" the zone of the suppressed from which gender roles can be challenged, much in the same way Marianne challenges social norms in the tribe. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of 'Sex' (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 23.

 (19.) Mahoney, p. 75.

 (20.) Elanie Jordan, "Afterword," in The Infernal Desires of Angela Carter, ed. Joseph Bristow and Trev Lynn Broughton (London and New York: Longman, 1997), 216-219, p. 219.

 (21.) Carter's numerous shamans, for example the character from Nights at the Circus, are usually totally different. They are given a role similar to that of a writer: they believe in the magic they perform, therefore what they do has the mystical quality of a true primary text. In their context the comments and analysis by Donally seem artificial and exhausted.

 (22.) Carter, Heroes and Villains, p. 63.

 (23.) Carter, Heroes and Villains, p. 49.

 (24.) Linden Peach, Angela Carter (Oxford: Macmillan, 1998), p. 96.

 (25.) Peach, p. 87.

 (26.) For example, according to these beliefs, the Barbarians sew up cats in the bellies of the Professors' women, while the Professors in turn bake Barbarians alive "like hedgehogs".

 (27.) Alfred Lord Tennyson, "In Memoriam A. H. H.," in Selected Poems (London: Penguin, 1992), Canto 56.

 (28.) Carter, Heroes and Villains, p. 11.

 (29.) Aidan Day, Angela Carter: The Rational Glass (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), p. 45.

 (30.) Carter, Heroes and Villains, p. 110.

 (31.) David Punter, The Literature of Terror--A History of Gothic Fiction from 1795 to the Present Day vol. II The Modern Gothic (London: Longman, 1996), p. 140.

 (32.) Carter, Heroes and Villains, p. 1.

 (33.) The city is probably London and the clock Big Ben; the tribe is traveling south to spend the winter at the seaside and finally reach the gigantic ruin. Descriptions of London after various cataclysms are very common in disaster stories; examples are: Jefferies' After London, J.G. Ballard's The Drowned World and The Wind from Nowhere and Wyndham's The Day of the Triffid. Once again Carter rewrites a canonical disaster fiction motif in a new way.

 (34.) Carter, Heroes and Villains, p. 138.

 (35.) Carter, Heroes and Villains, p. 148.

 (36.) Painting by Salvador Dali, The Persistence of Memory, 1931.

 (37.) Angela Carter, "The Alchemy of the Word," in Expletives Deleted: Selected Writings (London: Chatto and Windus, 1992), p. 70.

 (38.) Carter, Heroes and Villains, p. 95.

 (39.) Pamela Zoline, "The heat death of the universe," in England Swings SF, Stories of Speculative Fiction, ed. Judith Merril (New York: Ace Books, 1968), 313-328.

 (40.) Zoline, p. 316.

 (41.) John Donne, "A nocturnall upon S. Lucies day, Being the shortest day," in The Complete English Poems of John Donne, ed. C. A. Patrides (London and Melbourne: Dent, 1985), p. 90.

 (42.) Carter, Heroes and Villains, p. 148.

 (43.) Angela Carter, "Notes for a Theory of the Sixties Style," in Nothing Sacred (London: Virago, 1988), 85-89, p. 86.

 (44.) Carter, "Notes for a Theory of the Sixties Style," p. 86.

 (45.) Kaveney, 175.

 (46.) Karpinsky, 137.

 (47.) Elaine Jordan, "Enthrallment: Angela Carter's Speculative Fictions," in Plotting Change: Contemporary Women's Fiction, ed. Linda Anderson (London: Edward Arnold, 1990), 19-40.

 (48.) "A kind of sociological SF which concentrates on social change without necessarily any great emphasis on science or technology" (Clute and Nicholls, p. 1144).

 (49.) John Haffenden, "Angela Carter," in Novelists in Interview, (London: Methuen, 1985), p. 80.

 (50.) Carter, Heroes and Villains, p. 150. This is uttered in a conversation when Marianne describes her plans for the future of the tribe: " 'they'll do every single thing I say.' 'What, will you be Queen?' 'I'll be the tiger-lady and rule them with a rod of iron.'"

 (51.) St. John's Revelation 12:4-6 in The Holy Bible: Old and New Testament in the King James Version (Hazelwood: World Aflame Press, 1973).

 (52.) Carter, Heroes and Villains, p. 9.

 (53.) Carter, Heroes and Villains, p. 140.

 (54.) Sarah Gamble suggests that the moment Marianne becomes a tiger-lady symbolically "implies that Marianne has now broken free of the stereotyped roles--daughter, victim, wife and whore--in which she has been complicit from the text's beginning." Sarah Gamble, Angela Carter: Writing from the Front Line (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), p. 79.

 (55.) Margaret Atwood, "Running with the Tigers," in Flesh and the Mirror, ed. Lorna Sage (London: Virago, 1994), 117-136, p. 358.

 (56.) A. Day elaborates upon Marianne's future reign: "But while, as tiger-lady, she is going to draw on primordial Barbarian energy, Marianne, it must be noted, does not give up her purchase on reason. It is this emphasis on maintaining reason that separates her from the Donally-inspired Barbarian cult of the irrational. At the same time as Marianne stops being a stranger to her own id during her sojourn amongst the Barbarians, reason emerges as a cardinal feature of her discovery of herself.... In Marianne's case reason may order, like an iron rod, the inchoate energies of the id, while the energies of the id--the energies of the tiger-lady--may enrich reason. This synthetic model is identified as specifically feminine, in contrast with the masculine insistence on self-definition through opposition to an other" (Day, pp. 51-53).      COPYRIGHT 2010 Eotvos Lorand Tudomanyegyetem, Department of English Studies

 No portion of this article can be reproduced without the express written permission from the copyright holder.    Copyright 2010 Gale, Cengage Learning. All rights reserved.    

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[snowbreeze64]

i call this one: proof i’m going insane

anyways here’s a list of all times webs/and or spiders have been mentioned in 167 episodes of the magnus archives bc i haven’t listened to 168 yet.

spoilers through tma episode 167 because, yeah

UP TO DATE THROUGH EPISODE 167

CONFIRMED WEBISODES (Rusty Quill Youtube Playlist)

#8 Burned Out *

#16 Arachnophobia

#56 Children of the Night

#59 Recluse *

#67 Burning Desire *

#69 (nice) Thought for the Day

#81 A Guest For Mr. Spider

#100 I Guess You Had To Be There

#110 Creature Feature

#114 Cracked Foundation *

#123 Web Development

#136 The Puppeteer

#147 The Weaver

#167 Curiosity

* = Hill Top Road Related

And now, to channel my S2 Jon energy, which is also just BDG

ALL MENTIONS OF SPIDERS AND/OR WEBS IN NON-WEBISODES

#3 Across the Street - the Table is introduced

#9 A Father’s Love - “As far as I was concerned, the sturdy wooden structure was just the home of spiders’ nests and the rusted garden tools my parents would use once a year to attack the overgrown wilderness that was our back garden.” (Julia Montauk about their shed)

#11 Dreamer - “Looking down I could see a web of dark tendrils criss-crossing the streets and crawling up the buildings.” (Oliver Banks about the death tendril things)

#12 First Aid - Hill Top Road relation (Diego Molina)

#19 Confession/#20 Desecrated Host - Hill Top Road related

#22 Colony - Martin investigates Carlos Vittery’s house, finds lots of spiderwebs.

#32 Hive - “Was it the spiders? There were webs in the corners, around the entryway into the attic. I would watch them scurry and disappear in between the wooden boards. ‘Where are you going, little spiders?’ I would think. ‘What are you seeing in the dark? Is it food? Prey? Predators?’ I wondered if it was the spiders that made the gentle buzzing song. It was not. Webs have a song as well, of course, but it is not the song of the hive.” (Jane Prentiss)

#35 Old Passages - “I have the vaguest memories: flashes of a pile of paper, completely covered in cobweb…” (Harold Silvana about the tunnels)

#36 Taken Ill - “Just a sort of spider web design on the front.” (Jon about his lighter)

#37 Burnt Offering - Hill Top Road related

#38 Lost and Found - Jon attacks a spider and somehow makes a hole in the wall, and now there are worms

#39 Infestation - “No, no… it’s just that whatever web these statements have caught you in, well, I’m there too. We all are, I think.” (Martin)

#40 Human Remains - “Yes. She was sat in a wooden chair in the middle of the room. No worms. No cobwebs. Just… an old corpse.” (Martin about Gertrude’s corpse) (Does the sudden absence of spiders count as spiders?)

#43 Section 31 - “The most I could get out of her was that she was originally sectioned for something she referred to as “spider husks”.” (Basira about Daisy getting sectioned)

#44 Tightrope - “Why did she begin recording them? And why stop? If she’d been doing so right up until her death, she would’ve likely gotten through much of the archive, and… moreover I wouldn’t have had to find this tape player tucked away in the storage room, covered in dust and cobwebs.” (Jon about the tape player) (it’s covered in cobwebs! Suspicious! What do you mean old things get covered in cobwebs naturally?)

#46 Literary Heights - “I did go down there to see if I could find anything, but it seems much as it did last time. The only difference now is… all the spiderwebs. They seem to have spread down there. I think I saw some of the larger specimens actually eating the remains of the worms.” (Jon about the tunnels under the archives)

#51 High Pressure - “No… No, it isn’t. I’ve always seen it more like a web?” (Not!Sasha about the Table)

#63 The End of the Tunnel - “We’ve had something of a spectrum from him and his ilk: cobwebs entombing, difficulty in navigation, and now a violent, murderous dark.” (Jon about Robert Smirke)

#65 Binary - “Statement of Tessa Winters, regarding a strange computer program she downloaded from the Deep Web three months ago.” (What? It’s a web!)

#67 Burning Desire - “I looked up and noticed within the corner of the room, where there had been a spider’s web this morning, there was just a faint wisp of smoke.” and “Another held a bag that seemed to be full of candles, while a third had a clear plastic container filled with hundreds of tiny spiders.” (Jack Barnabas about his date with Agnes and the people in front of her flat) (this was already listed in webisodes but i just thought it was interesting)

#68 The Tale of a Field Hospital - “There were a couple of spiders, so I changed routes and found, I think it’s a gas main.” (Jon about exploring the tunnels) (also that gas main *eyes eyes eyes*)

#78 Distant Cousin - “Wrapped around it were thick strands of what I think was spider’s web, stretching back into the table, which I now saw pulsed along its carved channels with a sickly light.” (Laurence Moore about Adelard Dekker trapping the Not!Them in the table) and “Hollow. Just cobwebs and dust.” (Jon, breaking the table)

#79 Hide and Seek - “Of course the table was binding it. The table is webs and spiders. Spiders are something else. They don’t help each other, they oppose, they… they weaken. It was caught in a web, and I…” (Jon about the table...and perhaps Beholding something about the entities?)

#87 The Uncanny Valley - Jude Perry working with the Stranger, so Hill Top Road related?

#89 Twice as Bright - Statement of Jude Perry, Hill Top Road related

#90 Body Builder - “As you’d expect, most of the listings just pointed me towards the their websites, but I spotted a small, square ad box in the lower left corner.” (Ross Davenport, about finding his new gym) (yes i KNOW this is a stretch but the word website has the word web in it so…)

#91 The Coming Storm - “One lighter, gold, spiderweb design.” (Daisy going through Jon’s stuff)

#111 Family Business - Jon and Gerry discuss the entities, including the Web

#112 Thrill of the Chase - “We all met through one of those meetup websites, I-I forget which one.” (Lisa Carmel, about Murder Club) (listen it’s a WEBSITE so it has the word WEB in it and besides THE SPIDERS CONTROL THE WORLD WIDE WEB)

#114 Cracked Foundation - “It was warmer down there, warmer every step, and I found myself brushing cobwebs from my face as I got further down, until at last there I was - stood in the cellar of Hill Top Road.” (Anya Villette about Hill Top Road)

#117 Testament - “I know, I know it’s not exactly intricate, but it felt good leaving my own little web. Oh, oh, Christ, I hope John doesn’t actually listen to these. “Good lord, is Martin becoming some sort of spider person?” No, John, it’s an expression, chill out!” (Martin about his plan.) (also, I’ve been called out by Martin.)

#118 The Masquerade - “DAISY: Shut. Up. It’s just cobwebs. ARCHIVIST: There’s no such thing as just cobwebs.” (Jon walking into some cobwebs while planting C4) (also he’s RIGHT, DAISY)

#121 Far Away - “Just a second of them webbed over the face of a drunk old man stumbling into his car.” (Oliver about seeing the death tendrils in the waking world) and “Honestly, I’m still not exactly sure why I’m here. But you know better than anyone how the spiders can get into your head. Easier to just do what she asks.” (Oliver about why he’s visiting Jon)

#135 Civilian Casualties - “In the last week I’ve seen two different people wearing symbols for the People’s Church of the Divine Host, and it’s rare I go anywhere without cobwebs, anymore.” (Jon about the Institute being watched)

#128 Heavy Goods - “We had some luggage, once, a thrumming silk-wrapped thing of the spider, hiding away in an old steamer trunk.” and “The Spider’s always an easy job, no fuss, no complications, everything planned and prepared. It knows too much to truly be a stranger, but hides its knowing well enough to endure.” (Breekon about his and Hope’s deliveries)

#130 Meat - “I found this tape tucked in a corner of my desk drawer (sigh) covered in cobwebs. I suppose subtlety has gone out the window a bit, and the question is now simply… how much I trust the Spider to have my best interests at heart.” (Jon about the statement he just played. Also the Spider giving him the idea to use a flesh-anchor???)

#134 Time of Revelation - “There are two powers that, to my knowledge, have never attempted to fully manifest. Never had followers set them up for a ritual. Mother of Puppets, and Terminus. The Web and the End. The Web, I’ve never really been sure about. If I were to guess, I would say it actually prefers the world as is: playing everyone against each other. And so on.” (Peter Lukas about the entities)

#137 Nemesis - “Still, the anticlimax is fascinating. I can only assume they were supposed to be bombed at the height of the ritual - maybe by Japanese aircraft, maybe Allied, maybe both. I wonder what stopped it. A Japanese radar filled with spiderwebs, a US destroyer finding itself suddenly alone in the open ocean? Heh. We’ll probably never know.” (Gertrude about the Slaughter’s failed dance party)

#139 Chosen - Statement about Agnes, Hill Top Road related

#145 Infectious Doubts - “Ah. That’s a fair enough question. It was the Web. I didn’t know it at the time, of course, and I would call it an accident, but it never is, with them. It’s only after the fact that you can see all the subtle manipulations.” (Gertrude about the ritual binding her and Agnes)

#146 Threshold - “There is something wrong with Hill Top Road. You know it as well as I do. Some strange scar on reality at the center of - whatever it is that the Spider is spinning.” (Helen about Hill Top Road) and “What a delightful thought. (short pause) I don’t believe so, no. But the Spider’s strings are subtle, so I suppose it’s not impossible. Why?” (Helen about being controlled by the web to eat Marcus McKenzie (door guy)) Also throughout this episode Jon is wondering whether Annabelle is controlling him

#148 Extended Surveillance - “Or that we were being stalked by some freaky spider woman? Don’t tell me you didn’t know about that.” (Basira while beating up Elias) “Look, look - I’ve been doing this a long time now, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned about the Web, it’s that it plays its own game. All you can really do is hope it doesn’t get in the way of whatever your plan is. Because the Spider usually wins.” (Elias about the Web)

#150 Cul-de-Sac - “The Lonely is possibly the most insidious of the powers, I believe. Certainly it is the one that most delights and having you do its work for it, even the spiders seem to have a hard time matching it for sheer seductiveness.” (Jon about the Lonely). Also during this episode he and Melanie argue about whether her therapist is Web.

#157 Rotten Core - “Or Annabelle Cane is trying to manipulate me into thinking it’s one of the other scenarios. Previously, the spiders have made their presence clear when they’ve sent me… hints… but I can’t take that for granted.” (Jon about the Adelard statement left on his desk) (hey wait a minute if the statements refuse to record digitally how did Adelard send his on an e-mail-)

#160 The Eye Opens - “I’ll admit, my options were somewhat limited, but My God, when you came to me already marked by the Web, I knew it had to be you. I even held out some small hope you had been sent by the Spider as some sort of implicit blessing on the whole project, and, do you know what, I think it was.” (Douchard about Jon)

#163 In the Trenches - Annabelle calls Martin, Martin doesn’t pick up

#164 The Sick Village - “That’s - weird; I - I know the Web was wrapped around that phone, but, but I can’t - see her. A, At all.” (Jon about Annabelle)

#166 The Worms - Annabelle calls Martin to neg him over the phone.

Why did I spend over an hour doing this? Hell if I know. Am I any closer to finding out what the spiders want? Nope. So they’ve been helping Jon figure stuff out and got him appointed to the Institute in the first place, presumably so Elias would carry out his ritual, but why if they’ve never attempted a ritual before? They can’t be happy being ruled over by the Eye. What does Annabelle want with Martin? What the hell is going on at Hill Top Road?? WHAT IS UP WITH JON’S LIGHTER?????

[womenintranslation]

Women in Amerindian Literature: an essay by Elisa Taber

(Image: armadillo carving, a handicraft of the Mbya Guaraní, the indigenous community the poet Alba Eiragi Duarte belongs to.)

Women writing in indigenous languages in Latin America are working to both decolonize hegemonic feminism and to counter systematic linguistic censorship. Their poetic discourse posits that women’s rights do not need to be individualistic but communal and that national identity needs to be multicultural. It is not why but how they write, and the range of languages they use, that makes their writings impossible to group together under the label “indigenous literature.” The Mixe writer and linguist Yasnaya Elena Aguilar Gil has rejected the standard binary imposed on literary production in indigenous languages in Mexico, “I have yet to find a common trait that justifies that a literature written in such distinct languages and that belongs to eleven disparate linguistic families shares any grammatical features or poetic devices that, together, can be contrasted to Spanish.” (“(Is There) An Indigenous Literature?”) The distinctiveness of each indigenous language and culture must be respected and the conception of a ‘minority’ literary category that homogenizes them must be questioned.

Those eager to discover linguistic, cosmological, and poetic diversity should read the work of the following contemporary women writers: Natalia Toledo and Irma Pineda, Zapotec poets; Ruperta Bautista Vázquez and Marga Beatriz Aguilar Montejo, Maya Tsotsil and Maya Yucatec poets, respectively; Liliana Ancalao and Faumelisa Manquepillán, Mapuche poets; Lucila Lema Otavalo and Eugenia Carlos Ríos, Quechua poets; Alba Eiragi Duarte and Susy Delgado, Mbya Guaraní and Jopara poets, respectively.

The community of Latin American writers and academics studying Amerindian poetry–especially Violeta Percia and Juan G. Sánchez Martínez–have generously shared with me the work of these contemporary women writers. I encourage readers to visit Sánchez Martínez’s multilingual digital collaborative anthology platform, Siwar Mayu. The digital nature of this anthology shows that, as Walter Ong posits, it is electronic, rather than print, media that makes visible the transgressions writing inflects on transcribed orality. The auditory and visual performance components of oral literature are rendered through multimedia; i.e. the translated text is accompanied by recordings and illustrations. A lyrical, fictional, or non-fictional piece is published in the original indigenous language as well as in Spanish and English, together with an illustration by an indigenous artist and an essay by an indigenous academic reflecting on the work’s literary value. The result, which is not simply the transcription but the multi-sequential and multisensory translation of oral literature, calls forth a secondary orality.

The poetry of these Zapotec, Maya, Mapuche, Quechua, and Guaraní poets present distinct modes of production, lyrical devices, and linguistic features that are jointly defiant of their Western counterparts. Their collections live between Spanish and an endangered indigenous language. They are crafted and distributed orally; transcription is a secondary and sometimes unnecessary step. Many are self-published in print or online, via social media. Language loses its weight this way; it becomes ephemeral, alterable, it ceases to belong to one person. However, the content is firmly rooted in the soil, sometimes focused on the quotidian–specifically, the act of boiling a potato–and other times on the metaphysical– specifically, the distance between life and death bridged by another conception of corporeality within time and space. I believe this poetry is excluded from the national canon of each country these poets belong to precisely because there is so much complexity encrypted in its apparent simplicity.

In this post I will introduce the poetry of the Paraguayan poet, Alba Eiragi Duarte, who writes in Mbya Guaraní (which is distinct from Jopara, a variant of Spanish-inflected Guaraní) and will discuss how her work is excluded by a definition of national literature so narrow that it has no place for indigenous poetries. Eiragi Duarte has introduced, illustrated, and self-published her collection Ñe'ẽ yvoty, ñe'e poty (Our Earth and Our Mother), writing bilingually in Spanish and Mbya Guaraní. The first section consists of sixteen of her own poems. The language and content are simple. The poems address ontological subjects: what it takes to survive, to cook, sleep, and work. Or what it means to be alive: the passing of the seasons, the transition from dawn to dusk, the birth and death of loved ones. The lines are short but read as sentences, almost like instructions. The language is formal and distant until speech erupts, In “Pore’ỹ” (The Absence), the third person narration shifts to the first with the lines

Che kérape rohecha,

che páype rohechase

che membymi porãite

I see you in my dreams and

when I wake, I wish to see you,

my daughter, my life.

Emotion is unmediated yet counters nostalgia with a sense of what is real now: her daughter is deceased and the narrator, alive. There is nothing mythical about these poems, if myth is defined as the attribution of human intentionality to the inexplicable or meaningless.

In her last poem, “Che Rata” (My Fire), day dawns, the narrator lights a fire and sets a sweet potato, a mandioca, and a kettle atop it. The poem ends with the lines, “che rata ikatupyry, / ombojy ha’uva’erã” (fire is vital, / it cooks food). Life appears to be as simple as waking. Regaining this clarity is a task that is as complex for the reader as it is for the author. The poet refuses to be distracted by the superfluous and encourages the reader to do the same. Alba Eiragi Duarte is, above all, an ethical poet. There is a circularity in each text that is intrinsic to the author’s conception of life and poetry: what is simple is complex and what is complex is simple. She has no need to resort to complex metafictional device to underscore this paradox.

In the second section, titled “Mombe’u añeteguaite Avá Ruguái rehegua” (The True Story of Avá Ruguái), Eiragi Duarte retells a religious myth. (In Guaraní Avá means man and ruguái, armadillo.) Avá Ruguái is like a man, but is more solitary, agile, and cruel. When men hunting in the jungle enter too deep to return before nightfall, he puts them to sleep and kills, quarters, and skins them. The poet recounts the story of the man who kills Avá Ruguái because Ruguái has killed his brother. In one scene, the narrator squats in the scrubland, watching Avá Ruguái lift his sleeping brother by the nape of his neck. There is something cinematic about the specificity with which corporeality in space is described. Time is ambiguous but the events that are recounted seem to occur in the span of one night.

The wilderness—its flora and fauna—is heightened by the descriptions and accompanying illustrations. It is as though the quebracho and palm trees witness the events as the readers do. Behind a low stand of thorn bushes, a man lies stiffly on the ground. The tips of his feet point right. He wears a dark shirt and light pants. His silhouette is delineated by the darkest line in the drawing. His eyes and mouth are lightly sketched, they fade into the white paper. He grips his hand over his abdomen. He seems dead, not asleep. Another man stands over him with a bow in his hands and a sack full of arrows on his back. Palm trees lean left and right in the background. The rigidity and lack of expression of the human figures is in stark contrast to the ornamentation and movement of the bushes and trees. The book’s illustrations underscore people’s inflexibility towards the elements of nature, which in turn adapt to them. The narrative shows the retribution of nature, embodied by Avá Ruguái, to the transgressions of humans.

Eiragi Duarte recites these poems and stories, transcribed on illustrated placards, to children in rural schools across Paraguay. This educational program counters the loss of knowledge of the Mbya Guaraní language and of sacred narratives. She comes from an oral or mnemonic tradition in which authorship is not individual but communal. The poet compensates for the transgressions writing inflects on transcribed orality by combining her poetry with stories that have been passed down to her and by illustrating both on the placards.

She aspires to create a national Paraguayan literature that is multilingual and multicultural. Yet her poetry is intrinsically untranslatable unless the conception of literature broadens to include her manifesto of social ecology. In the introduction to the book she not only posits an equality between genders but also between human beings and nature. By conceiving of human rights and authorship in a communal sense, and at the same time blurring the distinction between the social and ecological, she forces readers to regard the parts of a whole as distinct yet interconnected in new ways. Behind the apparent simplicity of these poems and stories lies a true reconception of reality and how it is rendered in fiction and poetry.

The term literature must be challenged because it reduces these verbally organized materials to a variant further developed by literate cultures. With respect to sacred narratives, the term authorship must shift from an individual to a communal definition. The narratives do not belong to the ones reciting them—they only author a version—but rather to the millenary indigenous cultures the reciters belong to. The history of the transcription and translation into Spanish of poetry from indigenous languages since the conquest has three stages. The first was carried out by missionaries; the second, by social scientists, specifically linguists and anthropologists; and the third, by writers.

I have featured the work of Alba Eiragi Duarte in this post because it speaks to the literary properties of the text, rather than exclusively to its cultural or linguistic aspects. She shows that the culture or language is not so much in danger of extinction as it is at risk of voluntarily subjugating itself through national aspirations to westernization. She also proposes that her translations are parallel versions of the original. It is only by challenging the terms “literature and authorship” that the national as well as the continental canon will be broadened to include indigenous poetry. Failing that, its lyrics will continue to circulate orally as common knowledge, but without validation as artistic works in their own right, not folkloric artifacts.

—Elisa Taber

Works Cited

Aguilar Gil, Yasnaya Elena. “(Is There) an Indigenous Literature?” Translated by Gloria E. Chacón. Diálogo, vol. 19, no. 1, Spring 2016, pp. 157-159. (Original article in Spanish published in March 2015 in Letras libres (https://www.letraslibres.com/mexico-espana/libros/literatura-indigena).

[lowkeyassgard]

Capture This Moment (OG TOM HIDDLESTON FIC)

Capture This Moment Chapter 1: Original Tom Hiddleston/ Non-binary character fic series.

(TOM HIDDLESTON X YOU, TOM HIDDLESTON X READER, TOM HIDDLESTON X OG CHARACTER)

Summary: Grey Anderson is a photographer in their last semester of college. They are assigned a final project to spend several weekends at a campground.

Tom Hiddleston is a former actor who is forced to run his father’s campground. He gives tours and hikes for extra cash to make use of his developed knowledge of the wilderness.

What will happen when their paths cross?

Word Count: 1,709

Authors Note: The OG character is non-binary and using they/them pronouns. Tom Hiddleston will be introduced in the next chapter and smut will come later.

Originally Posted: http://archiveofourown.org/works/22499770

If Grey Anderson had learned anything in their life it’s that every moment of the day was camera worthy. They carried their camera wherever they went for this purpose. Their favorite sound was the click of the camera. Life might be short but Grey would document every moment they could.

Grey had a rough childhood growing up. Their parents were divorced and constantly moved around. They were never in one spot for long. Originally from the cold and wet Washington, Grey had lived in 12 different states by the time they were 18. All of them offering a new set of challenges. None of them feeling like home.

Consumed and overwhelmed with this nomadic lifestyle; Grey started to take photos. Initially to document each new place they lived in but quickly turned into a passion. More then a passion. It was like an escape.

Grey with their fingers on a cold silvery camera with their attention focused on the perfect shot was the one time Grey felt like they were in control. It was like time slowed down and they could actually breathe. The power of the camera was in their hands.

When the opportunity arose to move to New York and study photography, Grey didn’t hesitate. Taking nothing but their clothes and camera they took a train from Boston to New York. Their parents were supportive but Grey knew their parents were just happy they were doing something with their life. Grey’s brother and sister were deadbeat and lived at home still.

New York was nothing like Grey had ever experienced. It was crowded and noisy but beautiful nonetheless. New York was the definition of camera worthy. Grey could just spend hours on a bench taking photos of people as they walked by or birds as they flown above. Grey weekly took walks through Central Park. It was everything they loved and their passion for photography grew.

It had been three years since Grey had left everything they knew behind. They were in their last semester of college and working part time at a café near their apartment. They lived with their best friend, Bentley, in the cheapest apartment they could afford with their combined savings. Life had been decent. Grey worked, studied, and went out on weekends. What more could they ask for?

Things were going better than Grey had expected. Way better to be honest. The thing is Grey hadn’t always been Grey. They were born as Grace. Grace wasn’t bad but it wasn’t who they were. They weren’t into all the girly stuff society tried to force and the more Grey talked about it the more they realized that gender was a social concept. A social concept that could choke on their camera strap. Grey just wanted to be themself. No gender. No label. Just who ever they were and would become.

After moving away from home and meeting Bentley, Grace became Grey. Grey was a nickname that Bentley gave them for the sole fact that they wore the same grey button up every day of the week. Just like their camera that grey button up brought them peace and security. So they wore it no matter if it was hot or cold or rainy or snowy. Would pair it with skirts, dresses, pants, whatever was in their closet. It wasn’t stylish but Grey didn’t care about fashion. Grey only cared about photography.

Speaking of photography, Grey was late to the first day of class back from spring break. They had a ten am photography class and the time on their phone shown they were 15 minutes late. Grey was never late. They had woke up early but got in a heated discussion with Bentley over which Jonas Brother would make the best model. Silly but provided for a good laugh.

Grey just prayed that the rest of the semester would fly by.

Grey opened the door to the classroom and felt the eyes of their fellow classmates upon them. Late on the first day. So embarrassing. Grey adjusted their book bag and quickly took a seat at the back of the classroom. This was the last photography class Grey needed to graduate and they couldn’t wait for it to be over.

Grey loved photography but the teacher was eccentric. Always assigned the weirdest projects that flared Grey’s anxiety. Grey liked to take photos of what they wanted not want they were required. Being required took the joy out of it. Especially when it wasn’t simple assignments like “take a photo of something that is blue.” But assignments like “ photograph something that reminds you of humanity”. It made Grey think and pushed them out of their boundaries. Which wasn’t a super bad thing but wasn’t want Grey wanted.

Grey loved photography that was mindless. That was in the moment. That you could feel and love.

They had over month left of school and Grey knew that their big final project would be assigned today. They hoped it would be simple but knew better.

“Earth to Grey?” Professor Alexander said from the front of the classroom.

Grey jumped aware that they had spaced out. Late and now not paying attention. This is what happens when you go out for drinks on a Sunday. Grey whispered a grievance toward the universe for letting themselves get persuaded by Bentley to meet up with friends at midnight.

“Sorry Professor. I’m just not all the way here today.” Grey apologetically said.

“Clearly.” Professor Alexander said toward Grey before resuming his initial conversation with the entire class.

“As I was saying. For the big project all of you will spend the remainder of the semester at a campground. Any campground of your choosing. “

“Sir, what about are other classes?” The student near the front asked.

“Ah. Yes I do suppose you have other priorities. Most of you in this class are graduating this spring so I see no reason why you shouldn’t be able to do it all. But if you must question it. Alright. You must spend the remainder of the semester weekends at a campground. Or at least a better part of them.”

“Why a campground and what will we do?” This time it was Grey that posed a question for the Professor. Grey had work and three other classes. Not difficult classes but there would be homework and tests for sure. Photography was their life but it couldn’t be their whole life.

“A campground is more then just a place to camp. It is nature. It is life. It is beauty. It is adventure.”

A student began to interrupt the professor but Alexander waved his hand as to silence the student. “You will go and document everything you see. Everything that defines life and adventure. Be a part of nature. “

“And to make sure you don’t just go the last day and take fifty photos. You must have photos from morning, afternoon, evening, and night. Photos when it’s raining, clear, and cloudy. Must take photos of at least 20 people. Photos from all parts of day, weather, and demonstrate diversity. You have 5 weeks.”

“Are we allowed to work together?” Grey heard someone ask.

God they hoped so. This project would be easier and more bearable if they could do it in groups. Walking around a campground by themselves sounded horrid and boring. Even with photography involved.

“No. Each of you must go to a different campground. You may take one person outside this class but no one can work together. I want to see your own personal experience with the exquisite campground. Class is dismissed but I have a list of campgrounds with me please come and select one before you leave.”

Has he lost his mind? An entire project over a campground. A campground? Grey had gone camping a few times as a kid but it wasn’t anything spectacular. At least nothing Grey remembered. Bentley for the last week had convinced Grey to go out to all these new clubs and Grey knew exactly how Bentley could repay them.

Grey slid out of their seat and moved to the front of the classroom. They hadn’t gone camping in New York and had no clue what the options could even intel.

“Ah. Mx. Anderson. You may pick but I think I have one that you would enjoy.”

“Which is it sir? I really have no preference.”

“Well. It’s this campground about 45 minutes away. Ran by a nice man and his boy. William Hiddleston and his boy Thomas. I heard you were big on scenery and this place would be perfect. Has this clearing that is opened up for miles.. “

“Sounds up by alley. What’s the name of it so I can sign my name by it?”

“Tsk. This one isn’t on the list. I wanted to offer it to you before anyone else.”

Grey found that a bit odd. This professor barely knew them and he was suggesting they go to a campground hand picked by them. Creepy but that clearing sounds amazing. Grey couldn’t pass this up.

“I am in. I would love to see it.”

Professor Alexander leaned over his desk and began to scribble on a sheet of paper. After a moment he ripped a section off and handed it to Grey.

“I can’t wait to see what you find and capture.” He said with a smile.

Grey took the paper from his hands and made their way out of the classroom. As they walked out they tried to read the scribbles on the paper.

“Camp Capturious” read the paper followed by its address.

Grey had never heard of it. Never even heard of the town it was in. Grey just hoped this wasn’t a plan by the professor to murder them.

Grey quickly walked back to their apartment. Mind full of ideas for this project and anxiety over the location. Grey didn’t know what this campground would hold but knew that Bentley was for sure going.

Grey knew this would be the opportunity to develop their portfolio to show clients once they graduated. As they walked they thought about what their mom would say when they told her.

In their mom’s voice they thought. “Ya da ya da capture this moment Grey.”

[trashassassin]

flare. Chapter 1: The Long Road Ahead (Ignis Scientia x Reader)

Here it is, ladies and gentlemen, and non-binary folks of all sorts. The introduction to the series I had begun working on so long ago, the inspiration for which popped into my head as I was walking home from Chipotle one chilly autumn night.

I’m not kidding. This shit comes to me at the weirdest times.

This does have a coherent story line, as well as a number of original supporting cast members, so this chapter exists mainly as an introduction to all of that so you won’t be confused when they’re brought up throughout the series. They won’t come up as much in later chapters, but will remain important to the story throughout.

Word Count: 3974

Warnings: mild violence, mild language

"We have to do something, Iggy!"

You watched in horror as the monster, a skeletal, wolf-like creature, which had somehow slipped past the Wall, was now attempting to devour a helpless baby chocobo.

"Hey!" your companion, Ignis Scientia, shouted with an almost palpable uncertainty.

He picked up a rock from the ground and hurled it against a nearby tree trunk, prompting the creature to go and investigate.

"Now's your chance!" he said, and you darted forward to wrap the bird in the sweater tied around your waist, lingering only as long as you had to before the two of you took off back in the direction of your clubhouse.

"Is it following us?" you asked. "I feel like it's following us."

Ignis looked back and shook his head.

"No sign of it," he said.

"You're sure?"

"Positive."

As soon as you reached the clubhouse, you dug around frantically for the potion you kept around in case of an emergency. You’d seen it around a hundred times; why did it evade you now?

You eventually found it hiding beneath a pile of books on the floor and wrenched off the lid as quickly as your 8-year-old strength would allow before dumping its contents onto the tiny bird's injured wing.

"Come on!" you said, as if willing the medicine to work faster.

It took what felt like an eternity until the wound finally started to diminish.

"How does it look?" Ignis asked as he peered over your shoulder, eyes wide with concern.

"Better," you replied. "You're gonna be okay."

You gave it a tentative pat on the head with only your pointer finger; you didn't want to risk injuring it further.

It was then that it let out a soft kweh that signaled to you that it was out of immediate danger.

"What now?" Ignis asked. "Shall we try to return it to its previous owner?"

"No way!" you replied. "Clearly they didn't care about it if they just left it to die in the middle of the woods. I say we keep it."

"Keep it? Your mother would never allow such a thing and you know as well as anyone that I'm certainly not allowed any pets."

"My mother doesn't have to know," you said. "I'll keep it out here in the clubhouse."

"What happens when it gets too big for that?"

"Well, we'll deal with that when the time comes." You rose to your feet, taking the bird with you, still wrapped tightly in your sweater. "I think I'm gonna name you… Goldy!"

"Goldy?" Ignis scoffed. "How very unoriginal."

"What, you got a better name? Tell me these feathers aren't the most beautiful golden color you've ever seen."

"Well, we haven't exactly seen many chocobos around here..."

"Oh, whatever." You emptied a nearby basket of its current contents, an assortment of toys, and placed Goldy inside. "See, it can sleep here! At least, until it gets bigger."

"What will you feed it? You must think this through."

"Vegetables from the grocery store. Mom is always telling me to eat my vegetables, so if I buy extra, she can't possibly get mad."

He shook his head.

"This is insane, you know?"

"I know!" You smiled. "Exciting, isn't it?"

The feeling was bittersweet as you packed the last of your things away in the brown boxes that now surrounded you.

This was it, the moment your entire life thus far had been building up to. So, why weren’t you happy about it?

You loaded them one-by-one into the trunk of your car and then led your chocobo, Goldy, into the trailer hitched to the back.

"Be safe," you told her. "You should have plenty of food for the journey and nice soft straw to sleep on if you get tired." You patted her neck one last time and said, "Good luck," before closing up the trailer.

Goldy was lucky in that way. She didn't understand that you were leaving your home, your friends, and your previous life behind that day. It was just another day for her, another relaxing ride in the trailer to an undisclosed location. She loved to travel; her eyes lit up every time she stepped out into a place she'd never been to before, even if it was only a short distance away from her usual lodgings.

She was most certainly excited for the journey ahead, so you supposed you should be too. And you were excited, in a nervous sort of way. Not once had you left the confines of Insomnia to experience the outside world. To leave Insomnia was to enter a foreign land with a new currency and its own set of rules and regulations.

This was the world that you were setting off to.

You took a deep breath to steady yourself as you entered your car, sitting in the driver's seat staring at your hands for a good few moments before coherent thought returned.

You would be recognized immediately by everyone who saw you as an outsider. Your clothes, your car, the way you spoke, everything about you would give you away immediately to any of your adversaries. Would you be forced to fight?

Ignis had tried to teach you many times, just basic self defense with the tiny knife he gifted you for your eighteenth birthday, but imagining actually having to use it, actually having to take a life…

You shuddered.

Most of them were just robots, but you could never shake your fear of them due to all the nightmares you had during your childhood of them crashing through your windows, red eyes blazing at you as they closed in for the kill. Sometimes they were on your ceiling, dropping from above and strangling you while you slept.

You shuddered again. Your imagination was clearly your greatest enemy here and yet, you just couldn't shake it.

After all, beyond the protective wall projected by King Regis, all bets were off. The outside world was a savage place, uncivilized, crawling with monsters at every turn. At least, that's what you'd been told.

You lifted your phone from its place in the handbag beside you and dialed Ignis's number.

Please don't be busy.

He picked up on the third ring and greeted you warmly, a mock scolding tone in his voice as he said, "You'd better not be driving. We talked about this, remember?"

"No, I'm not driving yet." Your voice broke. "God, Iggy, I'm scared!"

His joking tone disappeared as he responded.

"What's frightened you?" he asked.

"Leaving the city," you replied. "You think they're gonna come after me?"

"The Magitek troopers?" You nodded even though you knew he can't see. "Highly unlikely. You think they somehow have inside knowledge of your personal relationship with the King?"

"Maybe."

You shrugged.

"Realistically, it's next to impossible for them to have such knowledge," he said.

"Yeah, okay,” you said. “What about the monsters? Will they attack Goldy?"

"She's being sent to secure private property, yes?"

"Yes."

"Then you should have nothing to worry about. As for yourself, it's best not hang around outside after dark, as that's when they're most active."

"Okay." You blinked hard in an attempt to stave off the tears that threatened the corners of your eyes.

"What is it?"

"Uh…" Your aggressive blinking had no effect. "I'm gonna miss you. That's all."

"I'll miss you, too," he said. "In fact, I already miss you. I have since you left my apartment this morning. But it's alright because you're going out to fulfill a lifelong dream of yours and for that, I am very proud of you."

"Thanks."

"I must get back to work now, but feel free to contact me whenever you'd like and I'll get back to you as soon as I'm able, alright?"

"Alright."

"Have a safe journey. Goodbye."

"Bye."

The line went dead and you spent a few moments staring at the blank phone screen, allowing your tears to flow freely as you did.

Get it together, goddammit!

You wiped your eyes and turned the key in the ignition, prompting the car's engine to roar to life. There was no turning back now.

You were headed out to a tiny city in the Duscae region known as Caulden to begin your apprenticeship with world-renowned chocobo vet, Dr. Lyle Atkinson. He owned a large plot of land very near to there, the Willow Springs Farm, a chocobo farm that would provide boarding for Goldy as well as a bright future for you.

That was your goal, to become like Atkinson in learning to care for the animals forsaken by Insomnia's protective wall. Ever since you were a little girl holding the gravely injured Goldy in your arms for the first time, that had been your dream.

And now, it was becoming a reality. Or it would, at least, if you could get there in one piece.

The journey was a long one, the road containing bizarre twists and turns, taking you up to precarious cliff sides and various creature crossings deep in the wilderness, two things you'd never had to face before. You were a pretty confident driver, but you would’ve been lying if you’d said that your heart wasn't racing as you were presented with these new challenges.

The first leg of your journey was far too much to complete in a single day so, following Ignis's guidance, you checked yourself into a small motel for the night, called The Point or something equally mundane.

After you'd gotten a full night's rest (or at least tried to with your childhood nightmares resurfacing in your head), you set off bright and early so that you would hopefully make it all the way to Caulden before night fell once more.

Your arrival to the Duscae region was immediately apparent, the cracked, dusty roads of the nearby towns smoothing out and becoming surrounded by seemingly endless wilderness. The sight of it was enough to take your breath away. Insomnia was a beautiful city for sure, but it was highly industrialized, filled with skyscrapers and flashy billboards. Beautiful in its own right, but nothing at all like this.

You watched with awe as the creatures of the field roamed freely, making no effort whatsoever to attack you or your cargo. They were simply going about their business, grazing on grass or napping by the riverside, nothing at all like the vicious monster creatures you'd been envisioning in your head.

You immediately noted that the air streaming through the open top of your car was much fresher than that of the city, lightly seasoned with the scent of the nearby bodies of water and the towering trees.

In that instant, the majority of your fear had vanished; you were certain you were going to like it there, at least.

Your first stop was your new apartment located in a small complex off near one of the side streets. You took a quick peek into Goldy's trailer before unloading your things; she was fast asleep, just as you assumed she would be. She was very well tempered, something you were always grateful for.

Getting all your things inside would prove quite difficult seeing as some of the boxes contained very heavy things like your entire collection of hardcover books and a kitchen's worth of china dishes.

This would be a lot easier with two people.

The thought invaded your mind before your could stop it, and it caused your eyes to well with tears once again.

But you could manage just fine on your own, you resolved, taking the heavier things first by shoving them along the surrounding grass with the smaller things placed on top of them. Getting them up onto the porch would prove more difficult; lifting them proved impossible, so you sort of rolled them upward using the edge of the porch for leverage. Once all of the boxes were placed in a neat pile by the door, you took the shiny new key from your purse and unlocked it revealing the dark, empty interior.

It was very quiet, a little too quiet, you thought, so you switched on the light and jingled the keys on your keychain around a little bit in an attempt to still your rising heart rate.

The room immediately in front of the door appeared to be a living space with a tiny kitchenette off to the side, already furnished with a refrigerator, a stove, and a dishwasher along with a washer and dryer set near the back. Across the hall from these rooms were two more, both with the doors closed, which you found to be a bedroom and a bathroom. It was certainly no high-rise, but it was just the right size for you.

Your next task was actually bringing the boxes through the door, which proved much easier than getting them onto the porch seeing as you now only had to push them in a straight line to get them where you needed them.

Before you started unpacking, you decided it would be a good idea to get Goldy situated in her new place so she wouldn't have to spend another night in the trailer.

Willow Springs Farm was very near to the apartment complex, only a few miles away. As soon as you pulled up, you spotted an older woman, maybe in her late fifties or early sixties, tending a vegetable garden near a towering farmhouse.

It was in an older Victorian style, painted white with a dark blue roof and a porch swing beside the front door that swayed in the light wind.

The woman stopped her gardening once she spotted your car and called out your name, as if to confirm your identity before coming to greet you.

"That's me," you replied.

"Oh, we've been expecting you!" She took off her gloves and set them aside before exiting the gate leading to patch of dirt you were currently parked on. "I'm Liberty Atkinson, the doctor's wife, but you can call me Libby."

"Nice to meet you, Libby," you said.

You shook her hand and then her attention immediately switched to the trailer you had with you.

"And this must be Goldy."

"Yup."

You unlatched the trailer door and lowered it to the ground, which caused Goldy to stir, but not wake.

"We're here." You tapped her gently and her eyes blinked open. "You can sleep some more when you get settled in, okay?"

Her responding kweh was less than enthusiastic.

"Y'all had a long drive up here, I'll bet," Libby said. "All the way out from Insomnia."

She emphasized every syllable of the word and it made you cringe.

Here we go.

"What's that like?" Her eyes were wide with intrigue. "Livin’ in the Crown City. It must be very glamorous, huh?"

"Eh." You shrugged. "There's a lot of getting stuck in traffic jams on your way to work. It's not really all it's cracked up to be."

You could already predict her next question as her lips curled into a massive smile.

"What's he like? The King, up close and personal?"

"Now that's hard to say. I never actually got to meet him."

This was a lie, of course; you'd been in proximity to the King many times given your friendship with his son's royal adviser.

She frowned.

"Shame," she said. "It's always been my dream to visit, but they're so strict over there. Won't let just anyone through their gates, will they?"

"Definitely not," you replied.

A young man, presumably a farm hand by the way he was dressed, stepped between the two of you to grab Goldy's lead and guide her toward the stable, effectively ending that conversation, much to your relief.

"Well, lemme give you the grand tour," Libby said.

Her hand ghosted your shoulder as she lead you through the gate and to a dirt path that branched off in different directions, each corresponding to a location on the property.

"That there's the barn," she continued, pointing to the large white structure the farm hand was leading Goldy to. "And over there's the arena." She then pointed to a large field surrounded by a white fence which contained several chocobos and their riders, who were dressed in jockey uniforms. "We offer training for chocobo races Monday through Thursday if you happen to be interested in that."

"I'll keep that in mind," you said, even though you had no real intention of training Goldy to be a racing bird.

"And out here…” She lead you to the area behind the barn. "...is the pasture. Everybody needs a little fresh air and sunshine, and chocobos are no exception. They usually spend the daylight hours in the pasture unless it's rainin' or snowin', or we're havin' a particularly bad day with the daemons."

"Daemons?"

"The monsters," she said. "Come to think of it, you probably didn't have to deal with them much, did you city girl?"

She laughed.

"I can't say I did," you replied.

And you were very grateful for that.

"Anyhow, behind the pasture is the trail, which can be used by our boarders for ridin', provided it's safe to do so. You'll have to check with Clive before you head out."

"Who's Clive?" you asked.

"Clive Atkinson, our son," she replied. "The one who's leadin' Goldy. He's an expert when it comes to daemon slayin', so he usually keeps them off the trails. He'll let you know if it's too dangerous to head out there."

"Do you have a lot of trouble with these… daemons?"

"It generally gets a lot worse in the warmer months, but it's not as bad now that it's startin' to cool down a little. All the tasty critters they usually eat have gone into hibernation or are migratin' for the winter."

"Have any of your birds ever been attacked?"

"Not a one. Even if they were, we got the best chocobo vet in the entire world to look after them."

This set you at ease a little. Even if Goldy did get mauled by some creature, she would be in good hands. The best hands, in fact.

"She's all settled in," the man who you now knew as Clive said as he caught up with you once more.

"Oh, good," Libby said. "One more thing to note, the first floor of the farmhouse is sort of a gathering space for our boarders, so feel free to stop in there if you'd like. Snacks are on the table."

"Thanks for everything."

You were addressing both of them with this statement.

"Don't mention it," Libby said. "We're just doin' our jobs."

With that, the two of them wandered off to get back to whatever it was they were doing before you arrived, and you decided to head into the barn to visit Goldy. She was already asleep again by the time you reached her stall, likely glad to have somewhere proper to sleep.

If there was one thing Insomnia lacked, it was places like this, places with wide open fields for her to run around in. Sure, there were stables for boarding chocobos, but they were overly-sterile, their interior paved with stone instead of grass without much access to sunshine. Even if you wanted to keep Goldy in a place like that, you never could have afforded it.

Instead, she remained within you clubhouse, which you eventually fashioned into a sort of makeshift stall with a large pile of blankets for bedding and a pair of old plastic buckets for holding her food and water. Her diet consisted mainly of carrots and lettuce, only the finest smuggled out to you by Ignis, which she seemed to enjoy well enough. You would take her on rides when you had the chance between classes and the part-time job you held, using a length of rope from the hardware store as a bridle as, once again, you never could have afforded the real thing.

As you watched her sleeping on a bed of straw surrounded by others of her kind, you were happy that she finally had a proper place to stay.

You decided not to take the offer to mingle with the other boarders, promise of snacks aside, in favor of unpacking your things back at the apartment.

You started with the bigger things, a collapsible bookshelf, which you placed in the living room area, and your tiny flat screen television, which you placed on the floor in the bedroom. The largest items, like your mattress and sofa, were being shipped separately and weren't likely to arrive for another day yet.

That meant sleeping on the floor for a while.

You spent the rest of the afternoon organizing the smaller items, like the aforementioned books and dishes, before putting away your clothes and toiletries, which were stored in the duffel bag still waiting in the car.

Even after all of the boxes had been exhausted, one remained, a smaller, lighter box with a small note attached to it. It was the last thing Ignis sent you off with before you left his apartment.

You sat down on the sleeping bag you'd arranged on the floor of your bedroom, setting the box in your lap as you sliced through the tape with a small pair of scissors.

A few items stuck out immediately, a miniature coffee maker and a bag of Ebony coffee grounds, his favorite. Along with these, which would likely be an essential part of your new college life, was a thick knitted blanket, a collection of paperback books, and a bag of homemade chocolate chip cookies.

The last of its contents was the note, handwritten on a piece of premium stationery with a faux worn appearance, outlined on all sides with a minimalistic flower design.

Hello.

I hope my gifts prove useful in the coming days. I trust I thought of everything you'd need, some quality coffee to keep yourself awake for the inevitable sleepless nights, a blanket to keep you warm as the weather starts to chill, and a few of your favorite novels, to keep you entertained during your limited free time. And of the cookies, I hope that they will remind you of me, a little piece of home to comfort you during what is most certainly a stressful time.

Always looking out, Iggy

You tried your very best not to cry again—you'd cried enough already, surely—but to no avail.

You held the letter in your hands, reading through it at least once more before setting up the coffee maker in the kitchen in preparation for the coming morning. You then returned to your room, tucking the letter away into the bottom of the box where it would be safe for now, and grabbed one of the cookies from the bag as you began to look through the books he gave you. A smile spread across your face as soon as you read the first title.

Starlit Wonder, the story of a small town girl who got involved with a big time pop star, followed by another book from the same author, Everlast, the story of a humble hotel maid who got involved with some kind of dark, mysterious man.

What would he be this time? A vampire? An angel? The possibilities were endless.

The next two were a duology, Hope Beyond Hope and Lust at Sea, following the story of Maria McKellen and a tortured old sea captain, Benjamin Lake. And the last was a new release that you hadn't heard of before, Across the Stars, a sci-fi romance about a scientist who fell in love with the android in her crew.

These were perfect. He knew you so well.

You had a little time before it would be prudent to get to sleep, so you wrapped the blanket around yourself and began your foray into the world of Starlit Wonder.

[camwritesbooks]

Fictober Day #1:  “Can you feel this?”

OC: Avery Williamson (Valkrya, Deus)

Word count: 1259

About: When I read this prompt, the first thing I thought of was of course injury. It occurred to me that I never actually decided on a backstory for Avery, who I came up with randomly in chapter two of Valkrya when I needed a war official and has now become really important in Deus. Despite being human, Avery has a connection to magic and is the character who first becomes aware of the god Deus dying and that magic actually exists. Avery is also non-binary. 

This quick story is set around ten years before the beginning of Valkrya. The character referred to as ”Cassia” is the same Cassia from Cursed Queen. The country Greymark is on the Eastern Continents, just south of the unexplored lands beyond the mountains where faeries secretly live.

Two years ago, Avery Williamson never would’ve guessed they would soon be stumbling through the dense pine forests of Greymark, bullets hitting the ground around their feet and whistling past their ears. When they enlisted in the army at the age of twenty, this wasn’t exactly what they’d imagined. They’d just meant to spend some time in the army as a way of working up to a national security position, but Greymark’s humanitarian crisis had thrown their life plans all out of whack.

The attacks on farms and villages had started around two years ago. If Greymark had the resources to protect its own people from the marauders preying on towns in the northern reaches, they certainly weren’t using them. Perhaps they considered those far north places not worth saving, which was why a battalion of Palpryan combined forces had landed on the west coast of Greymark around three months ago with Avery on board. The mission was meant to be quick - take down the attacking group and put any captured criminals on a boat to the Greymarken capital - taking a month at the most. But here they all were, three times those days later, suffering in the inhospitable wilderness.

Avery threw themself onto the snow behind a ridge as the guns continued to fire. They weren’t sure where the rest of their team was, or if they were even alive. With a groan, they leaned back against the wall of dirt. The bullets had stopped flying - hopefully the marauders thought that they’d shot Avery and wouldn’t come looking for them. Which way was home base again? East, right? They glanced up to the sky, struggling to see the sun through the trees and clouds.

The soft sound of a bird’s call echoed through the forest. It was almost like a shrill beeping sound, one they instantly recognised as that of a bellbird. Or perhaps, more accurately, the sound of a person imitating a bellbird. There were no wild bellbirds in Greymark. Damien.

Avery was already heading towards the direction that the sound had come from when they heard it again. Damien’s well-practised bird calls were all designed to signal different things. An owl meant “safe” or “move forward”, a crow meant “danger” or “fall back” and a bellbird… a bellbird simply meant “help”.

They crept along the ditch, not wanting to risk running for another few minutes. If Damien’s call was close enough for them to hear it shouldn’t take too long to find him. Soon enough, they came upon a huge fallen tree lay across the path. As they came around the back of it, Avery saw him. Damien was kneeling in the snow next to a body, and Avery’s stomach dropped when they saw who it was. Another member of their team - Isla - was lying on her side, eyes closed. Damian looked up frantically when he heard them.

“I think she’s hurt,” he hissed, nodded towards Isla. “I found her like this.”

Avery stared at the wounded soldier. “Go find the others, you’re faster than I am,” they told him. “I’ll see what I can do.”

Damien glanced at Isla’s body fearfully, but nodded and headed off into the woods in the opposite direction to the sun.

Once he was gone, Avery crouched down beside Isla, brushing their friend’s hair from her face.

“Isla?” they asked softly, breathing a sigh of relief when they found her pulse. “Isla, can you hear me?”

Isla’s eyes opened groggily. “Ave…” she groaned softly, turning her head.

“Are you hurt?” they asked, scanning her olive green uniform for blood.

Isla blinked slowly. “Back,” she said, her voice barely more than a whisper.

Avery shuffled around to the other side of Isla, pushing away the snow so they could get a better look. To their horror, they saw a deep wound bleeding out through her friend’s uniform. Carefully, she reached out and pressed into Isla’s back below the wound. “Can you feel this?’

Isla gasped softly and nodded. Avery bit their lip. The issue here wasn’t permanent damage, at least, but if they weren’t able to fix up this wound in time Isla would definitely die of the blood loss. The snow beneath her body was already stained in red.

Avery removed their knife from their belt and cut away the fabric of Isla’s uniform around the wound. It was worse than they’d thought. Avery sliced away some material from their own jacket and pressed it onto Isla’s back, causing her to cry out in pain.

“I’m sorry,” they murmured, “I need to stop it from bleeding.”

Isla made no response, and Avery realised that she’d passed out. Their heart sunk. She was fading too fast.

“Your friend is hurt.”

Avery whipped around at the sound of the voice. A person - no, some sort of creature - was standing on the top of the ridge above them. She looked human, but she wasn’t. She had dark skin and long black hair, looked about thirty years old, and had… pointed ears? Her clothes were almost the strangest thing about her - dark green, flowing robes with a range of tools tied to a leather belt and a strange silver circlet on her head. A strange energy seemed to radiate off her and Avery felt the air change as she stepped closer. In her arms was a bundle, wrapped in dark grey fabric. A baby.

The creature came down the slope, staring at Isla. She looked to Avery. “I can help her.”

“Who are you?”

“My name is Caela,” she said quietly. “This is my daughter Cassia. Who is this?” She indicated towards Isla’s barely moving body.

“My friend, Isla. She hurt her back,” they said.

Caela nodded. She passed the baby to Avery, who took her in their arms. They looked down at the little girl, who seemed to be asleep. Caela dropped her bag on the snow next to them and knelt down right next to Isla, reaching out to touch her back. Avery caught a glimpse of the bag’s contents - a strange animal skin of some sort, neatly folded. They didn’t have time to dwell on it though, as something started to happen that they couldn’t quite understand.

A few times in their life, Avery had seen things they couldn’t quite explain. But never before had something so completely unbelievable yet undeniable happened right before their eyes. The skin around the wound on Isla’s back started to heal over, the raw flesh below disappearing, leaving behind nothing but a dark bruise where the horrible injury had been.

“How…?”

Caela stared at them. “You will tell no one of this, not until it is time.”

“Time for what?”

The strange not-quite-a-human took her baby girl back into her arms. “You will know when it happens. I can see it in your eyes.” She stood, brushing a wave of her black hair out of her face.

Avery shook their head. “I don’t understand.”

Caela paused at the top of the ridge, a small smile touching her face. “Everything is clearer in the eye of the storm,” she said simply.

Avery blinked, and in that split second Caela disappeared into the trees.

“Ave…?” murmured Isla, opening her eyes. “What’s…?”

They helped their friend to lean up against the fallen tree. “It’s okay, Isla. You were hurt, but you’re going to be okay,” they said softly. Avery stared at the place where Caela had stood only seconds ago. For years Avery had wondered, but now they knew for sure. Faeries were real, and they had magic.

[cargopantsman]

Rambling on About Liminal Spaces - a draft

A recent post triggered some embryonic thoughts on liminal spaces, and here’s where I’m going to try and get them to something of at least a stage of fetal thoughts.

The term “liminality” was coined in the field of anthropology by Arnold van Gennep back in 1909 while studying rites of passage in small, tribal communities. The term “liminal” stemming from the Latin for “threshold” or “entrance,” denotes that the experience of liminality is an in-between/transitional event. This is where we get our term “preliminary” and the less often used “postliminary.”

While the term may have been coined in relation to specific rites involving an individual, for instance, leaving childhood and being initiated into the society as an adult, or a rite for an active adult entering a stage of retirement, modern usage of the term is predominantly associated less with periods of change within one’s life stages and more with spaces where things feel “off.” The common examples typically involving big box mega-stores, particularly 24-hour facilities sometime around the “witching hour.” Being in a Wal-Mart at 2am is indeed an awkward experience. A Target, even in a busy afternoon, can feel like a different dimension. Other examples being lone gas stations in the middle of nowhere. Truck stops that are more like small villages dropped on an open stretch of expressway. The gigantic mall with only three small stores, one department store and a Taco John’s still operating. The second-run movie theatre on the outskirts of a college town.

The contrast brought up in the original post was that these are typically high-traffic areas that we stumble upon in empty situations, so that the lack of human activity would be what makes it seem off. While in many of these instances one could rest comfortably in that conclusion, there are enough outliers in things that count as liminal spaces that drove me to ponder on this a bit more. A gas station in the middle of the desert isn’t necessarily strange because we expect high activity and see none, rather the opposite that in a large expanse of nothing we have a little bit of “something.” It’s an oasis. Similarly would be the ramshackle motel with half functioning lights inviting you to rest from an encompassing dark emptiness.

Two things popped into my head within moments of recognizing these differences; wayside shrines and cathedrals.

First point is that irresponsible leap of logic to link an empty Home Depot to, say, Chartres Cathedral. Our civilized human brain decries a Wal-Mart as a bastion of corporate evil and greed, abusing workers from point of production all the way to point of sale. While valid from a moral/ethical judgment standpoint, there is something that I think resonates with us on a monkey-brain level. It would be a fair assessment to say that many of us live our day-to-day lives in rather confined conditions. Our homes, whether a house, condo, or apartment are made of small rooms each sectioned off and filled with clutter and knick-knacks of various purpose from utilitarian to aesthetic to “where did this even come from?”. Our jobs may well put us in cramped stores, cubicles, offices, or vehicles. But a big-box store late at night is wide open, with aisles stretching on, that lacking a rush of a crowd would seem like miles. The vaulted ceilings of a Gothic cathedral have taken on the form of corrugated steel roofs interspersed with, instead of chandeliers, fluorescent fixtures that hum and drone on like a choir chanting an infinite AUM. Our personal bubbles can relax. All objects are neatly arrayed and organized (within reason for any retail establishment). There is nothing pressing in on us physically. The cacophany of daily life is absent. There is a stillness that we do not experience very often in the outside world.

The monkey-brain, that psychological architecture with a foundation laid a million and a half years ago that was awestruck by vast chambers in caves that our ancestors sanctified with images of all sorts of beasts, responds to this. The random flickering of torches replaced by steady 60Hz pulses of light that we can sometimes see if we aren’t paying attention to it. The monkey-brain that was driven to erect stones in large circles to carve out a certain space in an even larger field responds to this, the columns of basalt replaced by a ring of clearance signage. The monkey-brain that crafted its mythology into stain-glass windows responds to this, the iconography of age now being displayed on a wall of flat-screen televisions.

While our civilized brains rebel at the forced participation in late-stage capitalist consumerism, a quiet mega-store gives us a sense of peace and our needs are fulfilled, at least on a material, practical level.

Similarly, the neon lit rest stop on a highway 100 miles from anything is a wayside shrine, a holy grotto. As we travel through the wilderness we find a place of respite, of recuperation. An oasis with some level of hospitality that you won’t find in the plains or steppes or mesas. Two fuel pumps and a shack with an assortment of snacks is the modern grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes. A resting point on a pilgrimage. A familiarity jutting out of a foreign world. A comforting reminder of what you are used to that makes you homesick. The cheap roadside motel that exists in an uncanny valley of imitating home, pantomiming domesticity. You can rest, but you are not home. In fact, you are only reminded of how far from home you are.

So I have compared Wal-Mart to a temple, rest stops to shrines. I have no doubt that anyone reading this could at this point discount me as a madman. But as I let these thoughts rattle and ramble around the neurons, I can vividly see these examples as sacred spaces, not by any innate virtue of the locales or management of these places, but merely by what they can represent to a generation that, on the whole is surviving in a world that is lacking in community driven social order, religion, and mythology. Based solely on casual observation, not necessarily ardent research, I see a world that is starving in spiritual terms. The past few generations, at least in America, have been failed by any given form of Christianity, which I will use as my example here based on the fact that it is supposed to be the dominant religion in the USA, and that I can’t in good faith try to account for how Judaism or Islam fares within their respective communities. (Though I would hazard they fare far better than Christianity given that they HAVE respective communities based both on matters of faith as well as cultural and ethnic commonalities among their members.)

The connotation, that Rorschach first response, that I think a lot of people have to the term Christianity is “straight whites.” And straight whites are starting to become the minority, insofar as more POC are starting to gain not just demographic prominence, but even prominence in media. And also that, as society starts to come to terms with non-binary and non-hetero genders and sexualities, the straight aspect is beginning to, publicly, decline. And Christianity, generally speaking, does not want to adapt to this at all. Many members of the Millennial generation and whatever arbitrary name for this newest generation has come up can very well be triggered by a church. That crucifix comes to mind and instead of any reflection on the sacrifice of a savior figure, all that can come to mind are recollections of discrimination, shame, punishment, etc., etc. I don’t think it a coincidence that since the days of Stonewall there has been marked increase in the interest of pagan studies (again, a conclusion based on casual observations, not ardent research. I work for a living, sadly). But it makes for this sound bite, that polytheism has grown along with polyamory. (I really do think it clever, let me have this.)

What do these conclusions sketch out? A people scrambling around, digging into ancient cultures and mythologies, some of which had been pronounced dead centuries ago, resurrecting deities in a hope that they’ll have power still. And many individuals find these deities and find they still have power. Others find not deities but practices, philosophies. Witchcraft, whether by Wicca or any other name, is ambiguous when it comes to naming any powers. The strength there is indeed in flexibility, in working with core concepts of mythological and spiritual thinking. Westerners still try to come to grips with Hindu and Buddhist philosophies, but that’s another can of worms. Short version being that there are individuals each finding their own sources of spiritual refreshment, but finding it very difficult to form communities. For the sake of an attempt at brevity I’ll just leave this point as no one in our generation(s) can just head down to the park district every Wednesday night and talk about how awesome Odin is. So while on an individual level we can survive spiritually, it is very difficult to get any kind of social validation of our spiritual accomplishments (which has historically been important for a society of individuals).

But what does this have to do with liminal spaces? What, pray tell CargoPantsMan, are you getting at?

Let’s go back to the anthropological use of liminality; a threshold, a ritual in-between experience. What is a ritual? It is a ceremony. It is a choreographed experience relating to a relevant myth. The purpose of a ritual being to put one in a mindset in accord with mythological thinking, with a mindset open to a transcendent experience. A ritual is meant to take you out of your day to day, domestic routines (rituals) and put you outside of all that “reality,” to put you in the company of your god(s)(esses)(ess). A ritual can be ecstatic, with the pounding of drums and yelling and singing and dancing and jumping, whether you’re on the savannah with the Massai or in an abandoned warehouse with ravers. A ritual can be boring, with sitting crossed-legged thinking about nothing or staring out on the ocean, where your daydreams spin out and in the complete absence of any outside stimuli you stumble upon god.

Our day-to-day lives, with their errands and economic concerns and social obligations and politics and so on are, in this sense preliminary. They are on this side of “the threshold.” A ritual is “liminary,” it is the threshold, the doorway to eternity, the gods, the powers. A ritual, and the temples and shrines and open air plains and stone circles which host rituals, are all doorways and pathways to a “postliminary” experience of the soul. To, for a moment, experience eternity, to realize and relive a spiritual slice of the infinite, the transcendent. To fast-charge our battery. Being human though, having a physical presence that needs to be fed, cleaned, cared for, we cannot stay there long. All rituals have a close, where we are to leave the way we came in and return to our “preliminary” lives, but changed! Having learned something, realized something, with new energy and fulfillment.

“When people sing, I dance. I enter the earth. I go in at a place like a place where people drink water. I travel a long way, very far. When I emerge, I am already climbing. I’m climbing threads. I climb one and leave it, then I climb another one. Then I leave it, and I climb another. When you arrive at God’s place, you make yourself small. You come in small to God’s place. You do what you have to do there. Then you return to where everyone is. You come and come and come and finally you enter your body again. All the people who have stayed behind are waiting for you. They fear you. You enter, enter the earth, and you return to enter the skin of your body. And you say A-a-i-i-e-e That is the sound of your return to your body. Then you begin to sing. The ntum-masters are there around. They take hold of your head and blow about the sides of your face. This is how you manage to be alive again. Friends, if they don’t do that to you, you die. You just die and are dead. Friends, this is what it does, this ntum that I do, this ntum here that I dance.” - From a description of a !Kung bushmen ceremony.

The liminal spaces that we experience these days. Those unsettling places and times where everything seems just a little off. The roadside diner, the dead mall, the quiet mega-store. These are places with heavy domestic associations of familiarity, safety, supplication of the means of our physical survival, yet they have tenuous similarities with sacred spaces from our collective past. Each has echoes that our primitive minds resonate with. Subtle aspects that bring about a “nostaglia of the soul.”

These liminal spaces ARE doorways, they ARE thresholds.

Except they open to a brick wall.

And that’s why we panic.