#but like I'm here to post jewelry i made . not talk about the nuance of my gender

[alorz]

I been posting my jewelry on instagram and gained a huge following essentially overnight and am suddenly confronted with the reality of being an androgynous person in the eye of the Public and I'll just say. I have no idea how to do this

[fractured-shield]

Hiiiiii! I would like to request a rambling about your WIP. Anything you've been wanting to talk about?? Yeah, I want to hear about that!!

omg hi!!!! hm okay let me see. i've been in the middle of redrafting the entire thing for the past few months so i am full of a multitude of very disorganized thoughts. i think i'll talk about my mc's mother bc i recently had so many good ideas about her (you can see her here)

things to know about Leithe. she's 5'5". I've spelled her name about half a dozen different ways through my drafts. she's really bad at lying. she's pan. i associate her with sunflowers and yellow chrysanthemums.

she was the child of lesser nobles in Ngelorim (one of 3 kingdoms that was later abandoned) and despite socially really not needing to do anything of the sort, she was a very outspoken peace advocate and proponent of strengthening the Alliance to include non-elves. (in this setting, elves aren't really like...better in any way? they just live a long time, and humans think they're sort of cowards and unreliable, due to the whole "abandoning kingdoms after magic eco-warfare caused a mass soil degradation speedrun" thing, which is remembered with a lot less nuance by human oral retellings.)

she was coppersmith (?) by hobby. that's very specific so idk for sure but she made jewelry of some variety and was like. passably decent at it. just for fun. she was halfway decent with a sword, I'm thinking maybe like a light sabre/rapier, again just for fun and because she liked staying active and like. queer woman's fixation on swords and all that.

she met idhren at some stuffy social event, where she was speaking about a probably-unpopular political stance. at the time, he was serving on the council in Linador (one of the other 3 kingdoms) as a mediator, or...maybe he was already on the larger Alliance council I need to redo the timeline. and he was immediately just so impressed because, you know, she didn't have to be saying any of that, it wasn't popular, but she didn't care. so naturally he Did Not Fucking Talk To Her. at least not on purpose. later that night he went outside for some fresh air (introvert social battery on 0%) and ran into her. and they hit it off, kind of bonded over people seeing only surface-level things about them. she was pissed off about only being seen as a pretty face and nobody listening to her words, and he was uncomfortable with the unwanted attention of people always pointing out his foreign Fairalmin accent.

they eventually became pretty close friends. don't worry about the timeline. hundred years or so lmao. a very "he fell first, she fell harder" type thing: he kind of always saw her as like a safe person, someone he enjoyed being around and who was entirely captivating as an aside, but he was perfectly content to leave it at that and never mention it. she'd only seen him as like, very serious in a quiet melancholy sort of way, sort of demure and whatever, and vaguely knew he'd been a low-ranking military officer before a council mediator, but at some point saw him sparring and in armor and was just like. "oh. ok cool. im very normal about this. fuck." i made a post of her with the "babygirl your enormous eyebags and just barely noticeable tremor have captivated me" meme and like. yeah.

at that point he was on the Alliance war-council thing I mentioned, and in a...well I hesitate to call it a relationship, with the general/warmaster leading it all. worked closely under him, they'd both experienced similar losses they hadn't really healed from, the warmaster wanted a purely physical distraction from the stress of war/his partner's death. again, Idhren was perfectly content to ignore his own feelings of wanting something more, but finally he did have to break it off just for his own sanity. honestly, he and Leithe (who were sort of figuring out their feelings by then) would've been okay with a casual poly thing if it'd been on the table.

anyways, in the war's aftermath they became a couple in earnest. at some point Therien (my mc) was born. she's a weird little fucker lmao i love her dearly. when Therien was 12, Leithe was part of some peace convoy during a nearby kingdom's civil war, and was killed when they were attacked.

idhren was like "oh my god i am not mentally stable enough to be responsible for raising a child in a healthy environment she needs to stay with my friend for a few years while I get through this" which like, not a great option, but the guy had been launched full force back into half-healed trauma response suicidal ideation so I can't blame him. my first book begins 5 years later, when Therien meets her father again and gets the chance to come home, right on the edge of another war, and gets to learn a lot about her parents on top of the usual teenage uncertainties.

(also thank you for letting me ramble about this it was very fun lol, I'm going to spend time reading up on your wip posts so I can ask questions about them as soon as I have a chance <3)