#by rights they should belong to something more sensible

[queerfables]

I have this thought that's simmering in the back of my head, and there's some evidence for it, but I simply can't take myself seriously on it, because the idea hits my favourite tropes way too perfectly. I'm, like, 90% sure I should admit to myself that what I actually want is to write fic about this and skip the meta entirely. But apparently this is how I process things these days, so you get my wild projections masquerading as analysis first, and maybe if you're lucky some kind of story later.

So, Nina's partner, Lindsay. Not so much a person as an analogy, right? The consensus is that this relationship is a stand in for Aziraphale's relationship with Heaven, making Heaven the toxic partner holding Aziraphale back from finding real happiness. But the more I think about it, the more I feel like we've taken that assumption and worked backwards from it to prove that Nina is really Aziraphale's mirror and Maggie is really Crowley's.

Look, I realise that drawing the line from Nina to Crowley and Maggie to Aziraphale feels obnoxiously obvious. There are superficial similarities, but does it go any deeper than their general demeanour? When we look at how Nina describes Crowley and Aziraphale - the hard-bitten one who doesn't trust, the soft one who still believes in goodness - I think there's honestly a solid argument to be made that both descriptions could apply to either one of them. I don't think that's conclusive. The thing that's really giving me pause is that Crowley's car and Nina's shop both play Queen. It seems like such a clear signal that they're foils. There's also the fact that the partition around her shop has a very snake-like pattern embedded in it, quite similar in shape to Crowley's tattoo (a detail that pairs nicely with the apple-tree motif on the French restaurant next door).

If Nina is Crowley's mirror, does that mean that Crowley is the one trapped in a toxic relationship? And here's the part where I absolutely cannot trust my brain to give me sensible feedback, because the little gremlin who lives there immediately shuts off all higher functions at the first hint a character might be unwillingly beholden to a nefarious outside force. Especially if they are keeping it a secret.

Could Crowley have been blackmailed or coerced into working for Hell again, despite nominally being estranged from it? I literally could not tell you, because my brain is too busy yelling yes yes yes please oh my god yes. I just love the idea way too much to be rational about it.

I won't insult anyone by labeling this next section "supporting evidence", but here are some ways I think it could fit into canon as it's been established:

In light of my recent meta on how to think about Good Omen's twists, I've been ruminating on some of the big questions I have about season 2. And one of the ones that keeps jostling for my attention is, why are Crowley and Aziraphale not together yet? I don't mean that flippantly, what I mean is - I believe that Crowley and Aziraphale are both aware of the way they feel about each other, and have been for some time. If that's true, what's keeping them apart? Obviously there are quite a few potential answers to this, including the possibility that I'm wrong and they're not both consciously aware of their feelings for each other. But it's an idea I find compelling. They're not together because they're not free yet. And not just in a hypothetical looming threat kind of way.

When Beelzebub summons Crowley in 2x01, Crowley says "I thought we had a generalised understanding." Beelzebub replies, "We don't. You're still a traitor," and then goes on to threaten him with a bounty. The obvious implication is that the understanding they don't have is from the end of season one, that Hell will leave Crowley and Aziraphale alone. But what if it's a different kind of understanding? What if the subtext of Beelzebub's offer for whatever he wants is that he can have enough power to be free of whatever nasty little job he's supposed to be doing on the sly? (Not enough to break free of Hell entirely, though. Never enough for that.)

On the other hand, Crowley doesn't recognise Beelzebub's new face, but they must have been wearing it for a while given all their meetings with Gabriel. Is Crowley bound to the one demon higher than Beelzebub, then? Sorry, the gleeful brain gremlin is the only one available to take questions on this. It sure would be sexy, though, if both the power difference and the secrecy involved were as extreme as possible.

This is a weird little detail that probably doesn't mean anything, but when Aziraphale gets back from Edinburgh, it's early in the morning the day of the ball. The streets are mostly empty and Nina is just arriving for work. Aziraphale helps Crowley put the plants back in the Bentley, and at some point after this, Crowley takes the car and leaves. He must do, because we see him come back. Where did he go? He can't have been gone more than a couple of hours at most, because he arrives back in time to follow Aziraphale around convincing everyone to attend his ball. Okay, fine, maybe Crowley just needed to get away, relax somewhere there's no amnesiac archangel breathing down his neck. But the timeline is so short it seems like a strange detail. It makes me think that Crowley might actually have been hiding something, here. I don't know that this theory is the most likely explanation, but it sure could be an explanation.

And finally, for maximum angst potential, imagine Aziraphale finding out that after everything Crowley said about how toxic Heaven and Hell are, after all the grief he gave Aziraphale for returning to Heaven, that Crowley had been secretly working for Hell all along? WOOF.

[anxiousnerdwritings]

Yandere Jennifer Check and Anita “Needy” Lesnicki Sharing Darling!Reader Headcanons (romantic)

It's obvious right off the bat who the instigator is when it comes to the idea of sharing their obsession in the first place and surprise, surprise its Jennifer. Whether the darling was hers to begin with or Anita's, Jennifer doesn’t mind sharing. At least not too much. And besides, who better to share with other than her bestie? No one, that's who.

There would be quite a few distinctions between Jennifer and Needy sharing a darling before and after Jennifer’s transformation. In the very beginning, Jennifer and Needy can work pretty well together. Sure there’s disagreements about how things should be or what they should do revolving their darling in general but other than that it’s harmless fun for the most part. Things don’t get real intense until after everything happens.

The only big disagreement early on is that Anita wants to be much more lowkey about their obsession while Jennifer wants to show it and their darling off to the whole world. She wants everyone to see what belongs to her and Needy, and only them. Jennifer can certainly takes things too far even before she’s a man eating demon, but she always finds a way to either make up with Anita or get Anita to see her side of it. Jennifer is no stranger to getting what she wants and she’s damn good at it to even begin with. More times then not she gets away with her antics both with Anita and others. And their darling would be no exception to her manipulation and charm either. Whether the darling is susceptible to it or not is another thing.

As much as Needy feels awkward with this whole situation, Jennifer makes it seem like the most normal thing ever. Out of the two, Jennifer is the only one who doesn’t have a second thought about it, meanwhile Anita can’t help her mind racing with pros and cons, right and wrong, what would be acceptable and what would be deemed unacceptable. She can’t help but to worry and worry all the more. The social hierarchy is a real bitch, people talk and things get around, and Needy still can’t quite process everything happening but she knows that she needs you in her life and she wouldn’t want anything to ruin that or take it away from her.

Anita is the more sensible one, not to mention she takes your wants and feelings into account a hell of a lot more than Jennifer can even pretend to. As far as Needy’s concerned she genuinely cares for you. You’re not just some kind of possession or glorified pet like Jennifer makes you out to be, you’re your own person and Needy could never take that away from you. She wouldn’t want to anyway. All she wants is to be by your side, going through the experiences of life with you and just getting to be together but she could live with just keeping a close eye on you from a comfortable distant if that’s what came to be. It wasn’t really until Jennifer was very outwardly and vocally interested in you that Anita would feel overcome with the need to protect you to some degree given the newfound influx of attention sent your way from being even just acquainted with Jennifer, let alone being a romantic interest. And that need would only become all the more intense after Jennifer’s transformation. Needy just had to keep you safe, at all costs.

Jennifer utterly adores you, or rather she adores the idea of you. She likes what she likes and wants what she wants, and you are no exception. It’s one thing if you were her darling to begin with and she picked up on Needy’s interest in you too, but it’s an entirely other thing if you were Needy’s darling from the beginning.

If you were Needy’s darling to begin with than Jennifer would be insufferable to shake off. She would never say she was jealous of Needy or anything, that would be completely ridiculous, but she absolutely felt some type of way about Needy’s interest in you. At first, it started off as a harmless bit of wanting to take something that Needy had but then again how could Jennifer take something that didn’t even belong to Needy in the first place. At least, not yet anyway. Cause that was just so like Needy to not take what she wanted when she wanted, but Jennifer wasn’t like that. When she saw an opportunity she took it without question or she made her own.

Before shit hits the fan Jennifer would be more inclined to share with Anita, cause why not. They can be the best of both worlds, right? Sure there is some pretty heavy competitiveness on both sides that can either be a bit of fun to watch unfold or a pain in the ass to be stuck in the middle of. Either way it starts off pretty tame and slightly petty but still ‘good’ natured in a way. Jennifer and Needy were still very much able to put their competitiveness aside in order to work together for their darling. Especially when it came to one distracting them while the other took care of some unwanted obstacles. But any semblance of teamwork goes out the window after Jennifer’s transformation.

After everything happens, a drift would begin to form between Anita and Jennifer, especially when Jennifer starts full on killing. Particularly people who either gave too much attention to their darling or people who their darling didn’t care too much for, or the people who wronged their darling for any reason, even if it was the smallest thing. Honestly, no one would be safe from becoming a victim of Jennifer when it came to her obsession. And that’s when Anita comes to the realization that this is a whole lot of fucked up going on and she not only doesn’t want to be a part of it but she certainly can’t allow their darling to be involved with Jennifer either anymore. Both for their safety and Anita’s overwhelming anxiety.

It certainly wouldn’t help the situation when Jennifer brings the worst out of Needy’s insecurities as is, especially when it comes to you. But after everything, Jennifer would only be all the more vindictive. She feeds into Needy’s worries and doubts about not being good enough or deserving enough for you in any aspect. She truly is the devil on Needy’s shoulder and only wants to bring Anita to her side of the obsession, the more deplorable side. There are a handful of times that Needy catches herself very nearly giving in to what Jennifer is trying to do. And she feels absolutely ashamed and frustrated. Both with herself and with what Jennifer has become. She can’t just sit by with her thumb up her ass and let Jennifer do what she’s doing. Especially when her darling is stuck right in the middle of it all.

The confrontation would end up being a hell of a lot messier and all the more petty than originally. Anita has every intention of ensuring her darling doesn’t go to prom night, especially not alone with Jennifer. She knows Jennifer wouldn’t kill them, but she could very well still harm them especially when she’s in one of her moods or when she’s told ‘No’ for once. Jennifer isn’t stupid enough to do something as rash as killing their darling, she is extremely selfish after all and she very much wants her darling alive and well for the life she has in mind for the two of them after all of this.

Honestly, with how done Needy is and with what all she has to lose if she continues to let Jennifer go on without doing something she would act a hell of a lot sooner than canonly. Anita is by no means holding back when she comes face to face with Jennifer for the last time. She’s so over the bullshit and only has her darling’s safety in mind for what she intends to do. She doesn’t even hesitate when she finally has her chance, going in for the kill but Needy doesn’t want it to be quick she wants Jennifer to hurt for what she’s done and what she would have continued to do. She also wanted to get some stuff off her chest too and what better time than during Jennifer’s final moments? Needy throws Jennifer’s own insecurities in her face, her own jealousy and envy she very well had eating her up inside too. They weren’t so different in that regard after all. The whole ordeal is a roller-coaster of emotion but Anita doesn’t regret it. If anything she would gladly do it a thousand times over if it meant her darling would be safe.

Anita would still inevitably end up in the asylum after everything, especially after getting bitten by Jennifer. She feels this is where she needs to be to keep her darling safe from herself. And for a while it works, Anita is too overcome with the fear of becoming like Jennifer, she could never live with herself if she ever did. But eventually Needy gets to a point where she becomes restless thinking about you and whether you’re really safe without her around. If she’s away from you then that leaves you vulnerable to god knows who else and the thought alone makes her want to rip everyone apart piece by disgusting piece. Especially knowing that godforsaken band who destroyed Jennifer are still out there only has Anita even more on edge.

But she’ll protect you, she’ll always protect you, and nothing can keep her from doing so. Especially not now. Not even a high security asylum can keep her locked away from her darling. She’ll be out in no time and when she is she’ll come for you. It’ll give her even more of an excuse to take care of some unfinished business, all the more ensuring those creeps can’t get to you too or anyone else for that matter.

[rawmeknockout]

Can we have some command trine x minibot!reader? Please and thank you, king 💕💕💕

Dweeb is the most apt description for the whole lot of them.

It's almost funny; you used to be so terrified of them. They're still intimidating. The most skilled fliers to ever come from Cybertron, capable of razing down Autobot forces like they're insects. More than once you've been at the business end of their null rays, barely escaping being shot down (usually due to your miniscule size in comparison). You're clearly no match for them one-on-one, despite being able to escape being offlined by the Decepticon seeker forces more times than you care to count. You don't know how many more dogfights you've got left in you before you're a little energon smear on Earth's crust.

In comparison to the Decepticons, you're a clumsy, amateur flier. Forged for carrying cargo, as opposed to Starscream, Thundercracker and Skywarp who are the pinnacle of fighter build. The first image that comes to mind when mechs think Decepticon. They're elite soldiers with a tight formation and more combat experience than most mechs. Probably because most mechs can't survive as long. More than once Sunstreaker has compared Skywarp to an organic cockroach; the sort of mech that won't die no matter how many punches he takes. They have so much combat experience that the more you run into them, the more you learn as a result. That's perhaps the only good thing to come from having contact with them as a flight frame.

One of the things you've learned is that all three of them are absolute dorks. Thundercracker is the most tolerable, sensible and calm when the others are lost in their feelings and schemes. He would rather take atrocious orders than give them. You begrudgingly find him handsome, with a smile that belongs on an ad for denta scrub as opposed to getting knocked clean off from throwing servos with the likes of Brawn. His optics sparkle when he reaches down to hold your small digits, something that should NOT set your lines ablaze. The fluttering in your circuits makes you want to purge.

Skywarp is a plain nuisance, on the battlefield and in everyday life. When he's not warping in your way and playing stupid pranks, he's picking you up in his stupid big arms and warping off with you. He uses his ability to an obnoxious degree, irritating not only you but everyone around him. The zzZZ-VOP of him materializing from nothing haunts your deepest nightmares. He is irritatingly giddy around you, dementedly giggling right in your audial when he curls his large build around yours. But, just as you are forced to tolerate him, Skywarp is steadfastly tolerant of everything you do. Even the harshest insults you can levy are nothing more than water off an Earth duck's back. He might be actually nice to hang out with, you might be able to laugh off his antics, if he wasn't so insistent on banging pelvic armor.

But the one you least understand is Starscream. You've spent so long analyzing his flight patterns, copying the sharp way he dips and dives through the air, trying to morph your frame's movements to match his grace and deadly skill. And yet you're still no closer to understanding the mech himself. Not that you're exactly part of logistics and strategy, you would rather leave that to Prowl, but it would be nice to know what in the hell you did to attracted Starscream of all mechs. Thundercracker and Skywarp were easier to understand, more Cybertronian. They were deadly but noticeably more alive, Starscream is like a scheming, plotting machine with only torment on his mind. If it didn't hurt another mech, why would he care? But, as little as you understand it, when he's not shrieking at the top of his vocalizer at his brethren, he's trying to sneak his treasonous claws into your servo. You've learned it's best to ignore this, even let him do it, because if you question him he'll blow your audials out with how little he thinks of you screamed at the top of his voice like a hawk. You also blithely ignore the way he struts around like a peacock, flaring his wings in a blatant attempt to attract your attention.

Where once you felt fear, loathing, and reluctant respect for the elite trine, now you just feel weary. Perhaps it's the curse of being a mini flier. There aren't a whole lot of your kind left, and it's not exactly a popular frame for construction. It's got to be the novelty of it. That's all you can think. Why else would they be bickering with you trapped in the middle, Starscream's claws bearing down on your poor shoulder armor while Skywarp squeezes you a tad too hard. Thundercracker doesn't help much, more focused on shouting the others down than saving you.

A pack of sqwaking hens.

Maybe in this next battle you'll be shot down and you can take a nice long rest in Ratchet's medbay. That sounds nice.

[cloudcountry]

Ahhh i dont really know how Tumblr works (this is my first time requesting someone) but i see that ur request was open

i want to request an academic rivalry trope hcs with riddle or Azul or both (bcs i absolutely LOVE the way u write them 😞 it makes me giggle)

Thank u in advance and have a great day or night (⁠´⁠∩⁠｡⁠•⁠ ⁠ᵕ⁠ ⁠•⁠｡⁠∩⁠`⁠)

SUMMARY: Riddle & Azul with an academic rival!!

WARNINGS: None!!

COMMENTS: omg i love you for this!!! this is one of my favorite tropes ever and these two are so emotionally constipated they wouldn't know what to do with themselves. i hope you have a lovely day too anon <33 and im so glad you like how i write them hehe azul is the loml so it means a lot when people say that!!

Riddle doesn’t know what to do about you. He feels so incredibly frustrated every single time you score higher than him on a test because he should be better. How can he pride himself in being Heartslabyul’s Housewarden if he can’t even be at the top of his class?

So what does he do with that frustration? He studies harder and harder because clearly he isn’t trying hard enough. His health deteriorated, and if it wasn’t for Trey, Riddle would be even more of a wreck.

Then he finally does it. All of that work culminates into Riddle finally scoring a point higher than you on his Magical History exam. He stares at the board smugly, really admiring his name above yours (which is how it should be, in his mind.)

You approach the board too, and he expects you to say something about how you’ll score higher than him next time or how you can’t believe he’s finally beaten you, but instead, you nod cheerfully and walk away.

You just walk away. You don't even look at him. You’re satisfied with yourself?! Riddle feels rage bubbling up in his chest, and he almost screams at you right there and then in the hallway. What is wrong with you?!

It doesn’t help matters when Crewel assigns a huge project that's to be completed by two people, and places you and Riddle together. He’s so hell-bent on avoiding you the entire time, even when your face grows annoyed at his inability to cooperate.

“This project is a long one, you know.” you tell him one day, staring daggers into the side of his skull, “It takes six months to complete. If you want to get a good grade you’ve got to lay down your pride and talk to me. I’m not put up with this for half a year.”

Riddle hates that you’re right. He hates it so much because he’s always supposed to be the sensible one. He’s studied the rules over and over and yet you stump him. You make him wrong.

Is he wrong to resent you for that? Is it wrong to want to destroy your pride? Is it wrong to hate that you seemingly get everything you’ve ever wanted so easily while he’s worked hard for it?

Is it wrong that he wants to cooperate so hard and so efficiently with you that you take back everything you said to him?

Azul wants to get you in his debt so BADLY. He isn’t at the very top of his class, no. That title belongs to Riddle, who has refused his offers for a contract time and time again. Maybe there’s something you want, though.

He will find it. He will examine you every day and pick apart every insecurity and moment of sadness. That smart little brain of yours may be good for tests, but when it comes to manipulation, you have nothing on Azul.

It’s a small comfort if nothing else. You may have the entire school wrapped around your finger and the Leech twins might be fascinated with you, but that doesn’t matter.

Well, it doesn’t matter until you show up at the Lounge of your own volition. Azul is shocked when he hears the twins call your name, and you enter his VIP Room looking far too calm.

Floyd almost hacks up a laugh from laughing too hard when you ask for tutoring. Azul is baffled as Jade snickers, wondering why the person who outscores Azul continuously would ask him for tutoring.

But this is his chance. And so he writes up a contract, asking for something vague because he doesn’t know what he’ll need from you yet but he’s certain you’ll come in handy in the future and suddenly—

You wrinkle your nose and hand the contract back to him, pointing at one of the conditions. “I don’t like that one. Change it.” you say, and Floyd starts cackling again because no one has ever read them that closely.

It’s a condition that states you will come to the Lounge whenever Azul summons you. It’s vague enough that the signer may not realize he truly means whenever, but outlined enough to make them assume that it only applies to the time frame in which the main part of the contract is in effect.

It’s sneaky, and you caught it. Azul’s eyebrow twitches as he stares at you, forcing a smile on his features. Why, of course he can change that for you! What would you like it to say instead? You should know that he’s on home turf right now, and he never loses in the comfort of his VIP Room.

[lavellenchanted]

The Courtship of Peggy Carter (fic coming soon)

When Steve returns to the 1940s, he knows he wants to be with Peggy, but he can't help but worry about how the years they have both lived through have changed them - so he proposes that they start dating and get to know each other again. But Peggy has her own ideas about how their courtship will go, and is a woman determined to get what she wants. Namely Steve. In her bed. Sooner than he seems to be planning to get there.

Happy holidays @margarethcarter! I'm your Secret Santa this year - I'm so sorry your gift is so ridiculously late, but this month has just been incredibly full on. I am hoping to get your gift finished and up soon, but I didn't want to end the year without you getting anything.

You said you prefer post-Endgame time period and mentioned Peggy finding out that Steve's acquired some game since she last saw him, which what inspired this fic, so I hope when it's finally finished you will enjoy it, but in the meantime here is a little preview for you!

***

“And this . . . you being here . . . is it for good? Or do you have to go back?”

Steve held her gaze, serious and steady, the way he always did whenever he wanted her to know that what he was about to say was something he had thought over carefully.

“I’d like it to be. I came back because this place, this time, is where I belong. I wanted to come home, to have the life I never got a chance to have. And I want, very much, for that life to be with you.” 

For a moment Peggy felt as if she had forgotten how to breathe, her chest tight and her heart beating painfully hard against her ribs. She opened her mouth to tell him yes, that she wanted a life with him as well, but before the words could form he had brought a finger to her lips to keep her from speaking.

“But,” he continued softly, a tenderness in his expression that made her glow with warmth, “I don’t think that’s a decision either of us should be making right now.”

A faint frown creased Peggy’s forehead. “Why not?”

“Because of how good this feels.”

She couldn’t help quirking an eyebrow, one corner of her mouth curling upwards. “That’s a bad thing, is it?”

Steve chuckled. “No. I just mean . . . I’ve dreamed about being here with you for so long, it would be easy to rush into this. To forget that . . . a lot of time has passed, for both of us. And that we’re probably both different people than we were when I went into the ice.”

Peggy let out a slow breath. Part of her - the part that for the last four years had been filled with grief, sorrow and longing whenever she thought of Steve - was afraid, terrified that this moment of joy in finding him again was going to be cut short, and leave her with nothing but echoing silence of his absence once more. She wanted to cling on to him as tightly as she could, to hold him to her so she didn’t have to face the pain of losing him again.

Another, regrettably more sensible part of her, recognised that what he was saying was true. The four years she had spent being overlooked at the SSR had left their mark as surely as the war had, and now she was reinventing herself again as the Director of SHIELD. She felt very far from the young agent that had worked on Project Rebirth. 

And Steve . . . right now she could only guess at the sort of things Steve had lived through, the reasons for the weariness that lurked at the back of his eyes, the sadness  that seemed etched into his face, mingling with his joy when he had asked her if he could finally claim his dance.

“So what are you suggesting?” she asked, forcing a calmness she didn’t entirely feel. 

But to her surprise - and a little to her relief - Steve smiled.

“I’m suggesting that we date. Like we would have - should have - if things had gone the way we planned. Get to know each other as we are now. And if after we’ve dated for a while, we’re both sure this is still something we want . . .  well, then we can talk about what’s next.” 

Peggy almost wanted to laugh. “Are you telling me you travelled back nearly a century in time just to ask me on a date?”

His smile widened to a grin. “To start with, anyway.”

[incorrect-ikevamp-quotes]

Oh we are so BACK

When I tell you I saw this and died. HELLO?????

I keep hiding my face lahshjsdhjgfsaf HE HAS NO RIGHT. NO RIGHT AT ALL BEING THAT SEXILY INTENSE AAAAAAAAAAA

Anyway, I should probably try to make some attempt at describing the event since. If I don't I'll just be barking/crying/hiding my face for the next twelve hours.

Basically--and I'm not sure this is going to be across the board, but it held true for Napoleon and Sebastian at least--each suitor has a birthday event this year instead of a separate story. Comte's won't be released until tomorrow, but they have posted a preview.

From what I gather, he talks a little bit about himself and reveals parts of his past that haven't come to light in the game yet. There wasn't really enough to convey a coherent narrative beyond attending a party, but the line displayed here does get across the larger theme:

Comte: (I don't need momentary pleasure or ephemeral affection any longer. Now that I know love, there's nothing but you.)

He talks about how the aristocracy have thrown parties and extravagant celebrations for his birthday for most of his life. But none of it has ever really made him happy, largely because he knows that they are attempts to strengthen and broadcast power relations within high society. While I don't think he means it's entirely devoid of well wishes, I do think he sees it as a nexus of influence--and thus, by nature, impersonal. And honestly, I don't think he's wrong about that; the higher the echelon in social standing, the more it requires performance to maintain the position.

That being said, there is a fascinating flashback where he remembers a pureblood telling him about how falling in love with a human is an experience of another caliber entirely. My understanding is that Comte was still a fairly young vampire at the time, so he didn't really understand what the person was getting at. It seems like the other pureblood was trying to convey the difference in feeling, perhaps the fact that humans are more grounded in accordance with how they live--the reality and necessity of change.

After reading this--and the recent 5th bday story--I can absolutely see how change is something Comte has a complicated relationship with. He's known a certain way of life for so long, has constructed a sensibility of distant, rational maturity. After all the heartbreak of his youth, and two very acute traumatic events in his life, I can see why he'd be so afraid of broaching any kind of proximity with another person. Because on some level it's so much easier not to put your feelings on the line, to never have to fear devastating loss. And that's to say nothing of the worry of being unable to measure up on behalf of another person, of letting them down.

I'm so excited to see the rest of the contents, but something about the preview made me equal parts giddy and enamored (all I do is kick my feet with excitement LOL). I think what gets to me with Comte is that he truly does love companionship as a place to rest, a place where he can be honest about himself and his feelings without fear of ridicule (and the same goes for MC). In a world increasingly obsessed with surface level performances of power, status, and emotion, it's hard not to feel his exhaustion to the core.

Also, because these lines at the end more or less destroyed me in the best possible way:

MC: ...The you who had nowhere to belong no longer exists. In much the same way...Abel, I belong to you. Comte: ... Comte: I wish I could say to myself all those years ago, the me who kept indulging in such paltry things. Comte: Until you meet MC, you will never know love... The warmth of MC in my arms filled me with such joy I was near tears. (I don't need momentary pleasure or ephemeral affection any longer. Now that I know love, there's nothing but you.) The moment my lips found hers, the sweetness lit a fire deep in my body. Comte: These cute lips that melt against mine, the heat of your skin, the love that envelops me in your embrace--always leaves me so deeply in love with you.

[unfortunatetheorist]

Is Klaus' legal logic of The Bad Beginning sensible?

* Joint Theory: @unfortunatetheorist with @snicketstrange *

Klaus's speech to the audience during the events of The Bad Beginning had a carefully thought-out structure, anchored in deeply rooted legal, but more so ethical, principles. In defence of his sister, who was forced into a marriage, Klaus appears to have adopted a multifaceted approach to challenge the marriage's validity.

Firstly, John Locke.

John Locke was one of the first people to suggest that humans have natural rights. He also wrote a book about this called the 'Two Treatises of Government'.

Klaus likely invoked John Locke's arguments on natural rights to contend that the marriage was not consensual and, therefore, violated his sister's fundamental rights to life and liberty. The idea that the bride must sign "with her own hand" is interpreted here not literally, but as an indicator of action "of her own free will," supported by Locke's principles.

Secondly, Thurgood Marshall.

Thurgood Marshall was the first black Supreme Court Justice of the USA, who fought for the rights of black citizens against Jim Crow's extremely racist ideologies.

His defence of the 14th Amendment may have been used by Klaus to argue that, in cases of ambiguity or doubt, the judge's decision should lean towards protecting the more vulnerable party. This point strengthens the point that, if there is doubt about the how valid Violet's consent is, the legal and ethical obligation is to invalidate the marriage. The 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution is crucial for establishing constitutional rights and consists of various clauses. The most relevant for Klaus's case is probably the Equal Protection Clause, which states that no state may "deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." Klaus may have leaned especially on this clause to argue that, in situations of uncertainty, i.e. his sister's forced marriage, the interpretation/application of the law should be done in a manner that protects (in this case) Violet. This would align with the principles of the 14th Amendment, using it for equal protection under the law to invalidate the marriage and protect his sister's rights.

Third, Ida B. Wells.

Ida B. Wells was, similar to Thurgood Marshall, an early civil rights campaigner, who campaigned for anti-lynching (a word which here means, opposing the brutally violent act known as lynching).

Klaus likely drew inspiration from Ida B. Wells to assert that everyone has the right to be heard and protected by authorities, regardless of their age or origin. This argument would serve to legitimize his own standing as his sister's defender in court, neutralizing any potential prejudice against him for being a child or, perhaps, belonging to a minority (he and his sisters are Jewish).

Moreover, the presence of a judge at the ceremony should not be viewed as merely a formality, but a control mechanism to ensure mutual consent, something that resonates strongly with Locke and Marshall's ideals about the role of government and law. Thus, if either of the spouses gave any evidence to the judge that the marriage was conducted under duress, the judge would be obligated to invalidate the marriage. Violet's chosen signal was to sign the document with her left hand instead of her right hand. As the judge explained, the marriage could be invalidated due to this discreet yet appropriate signal.

Lastly, the word "apocryphal" that Lemony uses to describe Klaus's argument suggests a non-conventional but insightful interpretation of the law, something that seems to echo Marshall's "doubtful insights" and Wells' "moral conviction." Instead of resorting to literalism ('literally' - with her own hand, i.e. Violet's dominant hand), Klaus's argument was much deeper and grounded, touching on the very essence of what legislation and the role of judges are. That's why Justice Strauss was so fascinated by the young boy's speech.

In summary, the historical references evidence that Klaus wove these diverse elements into a cohesive and compelling argument, utilising the legacy of these thinkers to question and, ideally, invalidate his sister Violet's forced marriage.

¬ Th3r3534rch1ngr4ph & @snicketstrange,

Unfortunate Theorists/Snicketologists

[dairy-farmer]

As soon as the news of King Bruce Wayne's death on the battlefield reached to the country, the advisory committee of kingdom decided to hold a meeting

Everyone knew that the person who would take the throne later had to be one of the children of the late king, because there were laws that prevented the rule of other distant relatives

And that was the problem. Bruce Wayne's only biological child was a girl. So the right to ascend the throne was out of the question. The only thing that could be done was to arrange a marriage with someone who might be worthy of the throne and whom the late king also trusted

Dick Grayson, the adopted son of Bruce Wayne, angrily objected to this idea. She wasn't going to let anyone force his baby sister, his beloved Timmy to marry a man she didn't want

The deconfliction between the two sides continued for weeks. Finally, the princess herself decided to make a proposal. Since the advisory council wanted someone her late father trusted, why wasn't she marrying Dick?

While Dick was busy kissing his younger sister's cheeks at this suggestion and thanking her for considering him a husband material, the council was talking about how sensible the decision actually was

Dick Grayson had already spent a long part of his childhood learning every information related to government administration, and since there were no blood ties between the two, there could be no objections from other countries. Also, anyone with an eye could have realized how much he loved the princess

It's the perfect solution...

The wedding was one of the biggest celebrations in the history of Gotham. Gifts from different countries had already filled the city square, everyone was singing songs for the happiness of the newly married couple accompanied by drinks in their hands

On the wedding night, Dick gave his baby sister the most romantic night. Kisses were placed on every point of her body, her little pussy is dripping from his touch, his cock is hard because of her little hands...

Everything feels so right...

During the first year of their marriage, Tim gave birth to twin children, one of whom was a girl and the other a boy. In order to be a gift to the spirit of the king's late biological parents, small babies with the names Mary and John were introduced to the public

That evening, Dick leaned her against his chest, planting kisses on his wife's hair, and told her how much he was burning with the dream of a big family

And Tim who loves his big brother so much just smiled at him saying they can make this dream to a reality

The married couple had two more children, whom they named Janet and Bruce, until Bruce came back from the grave with his adopted son, who was believed to have died in pursuit of him, and a teenager who shouted to people that the throne belonged to him because he was his father's biological son

The advisory council and the entire public just panicked again over this information

Bruce didn't care. After many years, he was able to return home, and all he wanted to do was to love his little girl and his grandchildren. Should something related to the country has to be signed, why don't you stop by Dick's office? Grandpa Bruce is very busy right now, isn't he, baby?

Jason was walking around with the same reckless attitude. He was not a biological child or anything like that, and he had no intention of remarrying someone who was already married. He was very pleased about hanging out as the cool uncle. He also wonder if Dick would kill him if he stole one of those babies? Was that a good reason to die a second time? Probably yes...

Damian definitely cared about this issue. He was his father's biological son, and yes, although not as much as he was, his half-sister's husband had a right to the throne.

So instead of killing him, he tried to use poisons that would leave him paralyzed.

Dick, on the other hand, just laughed at this situation and stated that the poisons he used were the old type, throwing teachers at him for a new lesson

And Tim, pregnant with her fifth child, just sighed for her family's antics

They are all idiots...

🥺🥺🥺dick marrying because that's his precious little brother and he's not going to make him marry a stranger. i can see after bruce and jason who went after him are both presumed dead that there's a lot of urgency to fill the throne.

tim would be the obvious choice as the only blood related child of the king...normally. king bruce had always liked to say that he had all boys, a father to all sons and for the most part people dismissed that as just one of the king's many eccentricities.

the court in gotham ignored how timothy drake was clearly, by all accounts, a maiden. despite the masculine name king bruce graced him with. but with king bruce gone princess tim was the last of the legitimate line. there had never been a time where a wayne hadn't been on the throne. the advisory council is incredibly stressed to ensure that someone is on the throne. if princess tim marries, his child would be the next in line for the throne and they would be a wayne.

but granting anyone the title of king is not an easy task. the discussion drags on and often king bruce's eldest son will grow furious with the discussion, accussing the advisory of treating his precious young sibling as cattle to be traded.

unsurprisingly it is princess tim that is the voice of reason. while he may never have taken to the other physically demanding activities of his brothers, it could not be denied that princess tim was a clever child. since he was young his father had sought his council much to the indignance to a few in the advisory council.

now his voice was proposing an overlooked marriage that solve their problems. one between himself and his eldest brother, dick.

they weren't blood siblings and even if they were it's not as if the wayne's had never dabbled in incest before. dick was already well suited, beloved by the people, and well informed in all manners of goverment regarding the kingdom. the transition would be an easy one. when the engagement was announced it was massively popular among the people.

the planning, the ceremonies, the day of the wedding all go off without a hitch. for the first time since news of king bruce's death arrived there was happiness and the somber cloud from not having the body of a monarch to bury was lightened with the news of this marriage.

dick, through the entire process, never once protested. he didn't attempt to squirm out and the only person he questioned about going forward with the marriage was sweet princess timothy who assured him that he would be happy to marry his big brother.

dick would treat him kindly and their children would be well loved and that's all princess tim wanted. was to be married to someone who would be nice to him and his children.

there are no witnesses in the room when the marriage is consummated but servants serving breakfast the morning after whispered and giggled about how princess timothy had been so lax and half asleep as he was held in the lap of king dick. how king dick had needed to prod him awake to get him to eat and pressed gentle kisses to the line of princess tim's neck and against his cupid bow lips.

in a matter of months after the wedding is when princess timothy begins showing a gentle swelling on his front. king dick almost faints when there is confirmation from the physician not that it was needed because with princess timothy's small frame it was obvious he was with child.

less than a year after the coronation of a new king and the marriage of princess timothy, gotham's streets are filled with celebration again at the news of the children- yes, children born to monarchs of gotham.

a boy and a girl. named mary and john. wonderful news to soothe the ached souls of the people in gotham.

the line is secure and the advisory council had never been pushed to make their planned hints about children within the first three years of dick's rule. nothing more is asked of the king and queen.

but king dick had always imagined a nice large family for himself. since he was never going to inherit the throne there'd been talks in his youth about marrying koriand'r from the distant islands of tameran. or of gordon's eldest child, barbara whom he was long aquainted with.

but with tim....dick always knew they'd demand children from tim. after that first night he'd refrained from touching his timmy. sure they shared a bed at night, snuggled up and curled around one another. but clothes had remained on except during tim's pregnancy when he'd squirm and tell dick about how he was too big to get relief from his fingers (and hadn't the knowledge that his baby timmy touched himself knock the wind out of dick).

he and tim have grown closer in their marriage and in having two sweet, round babies together. dick is happier than he thought he'd ever be but...he has to admit he wants more. he confesses it to tim because there are barely any secrets between them and that's when dick learns...he could have it.

tim loves his big brother so much and he knows they wouldn't be married if he hadn't proposed it...so he offers to make every one of dick's dreams come true.

when king dick returns along with his presumed dead son jason and another child claiming to be biologically related the advisory and kingdom is in an uproar. they grow tense, uncertain...afraid.

because there is already a king on the throne. a beloved one. and....monarchs have fought before for rights to the thone.

king dick could abdicate but the shame of such an act....

the advisory council is already splitting up, talking about declaring their allegance to one or the other. a few approach king bruce in his chambers about it but he disreguards them, ignoring them in favor of the news that his young son timothy had gotten married in his absecnse!! he'd had children as well!!! grandchildren!!!!

why would bruce want to fight his son or get into any kind of war since he just returned from battle when he has grandchildren who need their grandfather to coo over their little red cheeks????

jason is of the same opinion and damian has somehow deluded himself into entering a one man war against king richard for the throne.

the kingdom and advisory are almost...embarressed to have been so panicked and instead just watch with confused and stunned eyes as their thought dead king gives uppies to his grandchildren along with his presumed dead son who is conspiring about kidnapping one of his nephews or nieces to raise as his own little scout to accompany him on his outings as the eagle-eyed patrol of gotham. perhaps one with a different name. another smaller bird to fly with one. perhaps a chubby little one he could decorate in his colors of red so it could match their round infant bodies and flushed cheeks.

a robin.

[juniperss]

Band of brothers medieval au ,that's just a thought...

anon, your mind….lets take this a step further if you don’t mind me doing so:

knights of the round table au. Now I’ll be honest and admit that my knowledge on King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table is entirely sourced from BBC’s Merlin so you’ll have to bear with me BUTTTTTTTTTT

“We would fight a thousand armies with our bare hands for you. We are never alone. We stand together." -Elyan to Arthur

In this AU I clearly picture Richard as Arthur. Just as in Band of Brothers, we see how quickly Easy Company (led by Lipton and so on) admit they would rather be transferred (or even killed) than to have to serve under Sobel. It’s clear from the beginning who the loyalty of the Company belongs to and that is Winters.

Now there aren't enough Knights of the Round Table to have each member of Easy Company, so I'm going to divide Easy into the Archetypes of each Knight that they most reflect in either all or most aspects (in my opinion!) -Sir Gwaine Archetype: "I think we have no chance. But I wouldn't miss it for the world." Bold, seeing the best in others, flirtatious, confident, fiercely loyal, humorous, throw hands first and ask questions later, and believed that people should be defined by what they did rather than who they were [Guarnere, Toye, Speirs, Talbert] - Sir Lancelot Archetype: "It is not just his deeds that we'll never forget. It is his courage. It is his compassion. His unselfish heart." Kindhearted, compassionate, courageous, humble, loyal and self sacrificing. [Lipton, Roe, Malarkey] -The Sir Elyan Archetype: "He's [Elyan] just one of those types of people, never settles down, never thinks about the future. Just follows his heart wherever it takes him." Affectionate, adventurous, loyal, brave, kind to others, cunning and quick on their feet, giving. [Muck, Skip, Nixon, Liebgott, Luz] -The Sir Leon (THATS MY MAN!) Archetype: "I have fought alongside you [Arthur] so many times, there is no one else I would rather die for." Steadfast, loyal, sensible, knew the difference between courage and foolishness, outspoken, humorous, good natured, self sacrificing for the greater good [Martin, Buck, also Lipton] -The Sir Percival Archetype: "Your enemies are my enemies" Quiet, man of few words, skilled, brave, gentle and softhearted, decisive, mischievous in the right company. [Shifty, Bull, Babe, Skinny]

Prince Richard presents his plan to stop an evil that has grown so powerful and destructive that he isn't sure he can actually succeed but he vows that he will try anyway. He doesn't ask his friends for help, but one by one they pledge their aid to him.

The Knights that Richard chooses aren’t all nobility nor are they approved by the King. They are simply men who have shown unwavering loyalty and love to him, they are men he trusts. And they are there when he has no one else, and they commit themselves to his cause knowing full well that they might not survive. Their numbers aren't many (only 5 Knights with any skill in battle and 3 honorary members) but they are steadfast and skilled.

After Richard establishes the Knights of the Round table, he would later abolish The First Code of Camelot that states that only men of noble blood can be Knights. After all, blood does not make the man. It's his actions and loyalty that do.

I do absolutely adore the idea of the Knights (Easy) wearing red cloaks and armor like the Knights do in Merlin. It's so dramatic and I think it should be allowed *bangs gavel*

Something something the Knights were so deeply loyal to one another that it bordered on something more than platonic something something the dedication to one another that after the death of their leader there was too much grief to continue on something something.....

While the Knights are meant to be a symbol of the realm and its power, I also see them as representative of the common people, especially in the BBC Merlin version after the Round Table is established. These are men who have come from varied backgrounds and experiences and there's not a way that they wouldn't be seen as what could be for the future.

watch this video and tell me i'm wrong (pls don't tell me i'm wrong)

[kinnbig]

50 for KinnBig

50 - a goodbye kiss that says ''I don't love you the way you love me, and I'm setting you free''

When Porsche’s voice travels in from the hallway outside, Big pretends to be asleep.

His door crashes open a moment later, and then two sets of footsteps are approaching his bed. One set is slightly hesitant, awkward; belonging, Big assumes, to Porsche.

The other footsteps, Big would know anywhere.

“Oh,” Porsche is saying, “the nurse outside said he’d been awake today.”

“He’s just had major surgery,” Kinn says gently, “he’s going to need a lot of rest.”

His voice is low and contemplative, almost soft, and Big has to fight to keep his face still, force himself not to throw open his eyes and look, not to drink in every expression that crosses Kinn’s face, not to gasp his presence into his lungs like a man drowning.

It’s embarrassment that keeps his eyes firmly shut.

He doesn’t think he could look Porsche in the eye, look Kinn in the eye. Not now, not after what he said. After what he did.

It’s quiet for so long that Big wonders if he didn’t actually fall asleep and miss them both leaving.

Porsche breaks the silence with uncharacteristic uncertainty. “Why do you think he did it?”

Big suppresses a flinch.

Khun Kinn loves you so much.

Kinn sighs. “He’s an excellent bodyguard.”

Usually Big would be delighted with the praise. Today it sinks into his stomach, aching with something akin to grief.

Porsche doesn’t say anything to that. Big hears him scuffing his foot against the ground.

“Maybe we should come back later,” he says eventually, “when he’s awake.”

“Of course,” Kinn says, “you go ahead. I need to double check with the nurses about security.”

Big hears Porsche hum his agreement and shuffle to his feet, and then the door is swinging shut behind him and Big is alone in the room with Kinn.

The air feels thick with it; with Kinn; settling heavy on Big’s rib cage and making it hard to breathe.

Kinn’s hand settles on his shoulder. It burns like a brand.

“I wanted to say thank you,” Kinn says softly, “for what you did for Porsche.”

Big’s chest aches.

He doesn’t open his eyes.

It wasn’t for Porsche, he wants to shout, you know it wasn’t for Porsche.

Kinn squeezes his shoulder.

“You were right - I love him. I love him more than is sensible, and I - thank you.”

Kinn moves closer, and Big senses what’s about to happen milliseconds before it does. Kinn’s lips brush his cheek; light, chaste, gentle; and Big’s eyes flutter open involuntarily as Kinn pulls away.

He doesn’t look surprised to meet Big’s clearly conscious gaze. He just nods, formal and final, and collects his jacket from the arm of his chair.

“Take care of yourself, Big.”

He doesn’t say goodbye.

He doesn’t need to.

It was for you, Big lets himself admit into the emptiness he leaves behind, it’s always been for you.

kiss prompt ficlets 💖

[shortpplfedup]

Chapter 8: The Self-made House and Home

I'm struggling with this one because it was so perfect. For the second time in as many weeks, a GMMTV BL completely sticks the landing, in a gentle, satisfying conclusion to a story that felt so healing to me in a lot of ways. We don't often get stories about people out of the first flush of youth in BL, and we even less often get family dramas, generational stories. And we almost never get something this real, this grounded, this lived in. This show is going to stay with me, somewhere deep. In this final episode we say goodbye to the Moonlight Chicken Diner, and the denizens thereof, as life goes on without us.

I've been unsure about the signs that Heart and Li Ming were contemplating leaving together for the US, because it didn't feel like there was much of a plan for Heart, and it felt like a lot to put the responsibility for the accommodations Heart would need to thrive on Li Ming. I should have known Aof would ground this story like all the others in a reality that is more sensible. Li Ming in a sense following Heart instead of the other way around makes the plan work. Will they make it together? Who knows, but they're going to try, each walking their own path next to each other, which is the healthiest way when you're young. Heart hinting around the commitment he wants from Li Ming was adorably shy, and Li Ming's response was delightfully cheeky, completely their dynamic. So off the young lovers are going to America.

Alan and Gaipa making the decisions to firmly let go of Wen and Jim respectively is a new beginning for each of them. It still hurts though; Alan telling Wen he can walk on his own and leaving their photos behind when he moves out of their condo; Gaipa realising that Jim's smiles are for Wen and not him and declining the invitation to attend the diner's closing party. Sometimes the bone has to be broken cleanly to heal correctly. A few months later, when they see them again, Alan still feels awkward, but he can say Wen is his friend, and Gaipa can see Jim without awkwardness between them. The tentative first steps of Alan and Gaipa toward each other feels like the right way to leave both of those stories. Both of them are no longer reeling, but they're still grieving and healing from their losses. In the midst of all that, they've noticed each other over the two months that they've been meeting to settle Ms. Hong's affairs, to the point that Alan has started inventing reasons to extend the process, and to try moving their interactions out of the purely professional realm. Their little 'khrap'-off every time they meet is ADORABLE, perfect depiction of that initial awkward stage of 'I think I like this person, and I think this person likes me'. It may become nothing, may become something, but Ms. Hong was the kind of lady who'd brag about her cute, single, gay son to anybody who looked like a possible, so we leave them with hope.

I like the way Jim and Wen still don't rush into anything, despite knowing how they feel. Wen still buys his own place; even as he establishes his place in Jim's home, he also lets Jim know he belongs in Wen's home too. Wen helps out at the new Moonlight Chicken, but it's Jim's business, not a shared business. Wen keeps his day job, even as he turns down a promotion because he would have to move. They are together, they are home to each other, but they are still independent, still themselves. Given both of their histories, that feels right for their relationship. Maybe someday they will want to consolidate more, maybe they never will, but for now they are absolutely contented with the way things are, because they are 100% committed in love and partnership. Jim takes Wen to Sakhon Nakhon, to Jam's home with her new husband and his daughter, and introduces Wen as his boyfriend. And when Jam calls him 'brother in law' Wen demurs, 'I'm just his boyfriend'. They're perfectly content with what they are for now. When we see them in the epilogue, finally watching Jim's favourite movie, they're clearly still in the honeymoon phase of their relationship, the desire is there, but it feels settled, mellowed, lived in. It feels grown, and that's the thing I have loved most about Jim and Wen's path to get here, turbulent as it has been. These are two mature people with their own baggage, who found each other in the most unbelievable way, and walked an unconventional path to form a family that feels wholly and solely them. As much as I can't forgive Beam, Moonlight Chicken needed to exist for Wen to walk into it someday, and it would never have existed without Jim and Beam's love. And Wen needed to be dissatisfied with his life to embrace the magic of the night he and Jim met, and keep embracing it, and that wouldn't have happened without Alan either. They're not here despite their pasts, but because of them.

Li Ming is still not sure how he feels about his mother, whether he loves her or not, but he knows he bears her no ill will and he genuinely wants her to be happy. He sees her clearly, without any of the filters which usually sit on our gaze of our parents when we're young. The way he stares at her while she drinks the boba tea he bought her, almost as though he's searching her, searching himself about how he feels, tells me that these two may yet find their way to a closer relationship. Because Li Ming may not be sure he loves his mother, but the kind of relationship they have matters to him nonetheless, that's why he gives her his blessing to get married again, that's why he gives her his apron. Jam knows she's been a bad mother, and she is trying so hard, so desperately to be a better one. Buying Li Ming those cute, childish socks that he nevertheless accepts with a certain fondness, shows how she still sees him, and how far they have to go. But buying him the shoes he so clearly wanted after he rejects her own choice shows that she does acknowledge that he is grown now, and can decide what he wants. When he takes Heart to Sakhon Nakhon with him, to meet his mother's new family, his new family, they are much warmer than they have been. She listens to him quietly, not pushing, and accepts Heart as his person. And the way that she contrives to pay for his work/study programme in America, not offering the money to him outright which she knew he wouldn't feel comfortable with and wouldn't accept, but giving Jim the means to take a loan which she would pay off herself, shows that she understands the depth of the brokenness of their relationship, but she will do whatever she can to repair at least some of the damage.

Jim and Li Ming's loving, tumultuous relationship has been at the centre of this show for me. I'm Jim's age, so I know how he feels, what he worries about, his drive to protect Li Ming from the slings and arrows of the world the best way he knows how. But I remember what it felt like to be young and chomping at the bit to be released from the parental reins and take on life on my own terms. I also remember what it felt like when I was on the cusp of doing just that, and was suddenly hit with a wave of tenderness and compassion and just pure love for my parents. I wanted to leave them, but I also never wanted to leave them. Li Ming asking Jim 'are you tired?' and Jim's surprised response at being asked that question by Li Ming, quite likely for the first time felt so real. It's like now that Li Ming is an adult on the verge of forging his own path through life, he can see Jim as a person and not just a parent, a tired person who's doing their best, and who has loved and looked after him in the best way he knows how. Most of us, not all granted but most, forgive our parents for a lot as we grow older; it's part of the circle of life. Li Ming and Jim will fight again in life, a LOT, but that's because of the love, the bond, the expectations each has for the other. You can't fight the way those two do with somebody you don't love with all your heart. Jim responding to Li Ming's surprising question with a surprising question of his own 'when did you know yourself?' is acknowledging Li Ming as a person as well, not just as a child, his child. He's asking 'hey, when did you grow up huh?'. And god, I feel that so deeply as somebody whose own nephew who I'm helping raise walked for the first time yesterday. 'Wait, when did you get here?' is such a REAL sentiment from a parent to a child. The love between these two is overflowing, so Jim voices it in his own way. 'I'm glad you found what you like. Please know that you do nothing wrong.' This is on the surface about Li Ming's sexuality, but on a deeper level it's Jim telling Li Ming 'I love you, I'm happy for you, I'm in your corner, I have your back.' And then Li Ming also says I love you in his own way. 'Staying with you is the best. Thank you Uncle, for everything.' That's all you ever want to hear from your kid.

Goodbye Moonlight Chicken, goodbye Pattaya, goodbye Jim and the family you built from nothing, and thank you Aof for giving us this story.

Side Dishes

I wanted to see Saleng and Praew's baby, but it was probably difficult to get a baby actor. Ah well. Saleng getting a stable, well-paying job and thriving at it, but still dreaming of one day running his own chicken rice diner like the man who became a father figure to him made me tear up.

Jim turning Moonlight Chicken into a food truck out in the open under the moon felt exactly right, the combination of letting go of the pain of the past while holding on to the good things it gave him, and giving him the freedom to up sticks and move if he ever wants to.

Heart giving Li Ming his name sign, and also vocalising his name because he knows Li Ming loves hearing his voice...crying in the club. Everybody in the little family unit learning sign, including Jam immediately giving it a try...BAWLING in the club.

'The right love consists of the right person, and the right time, at midnight, at a chicken rice diner.'

What on EARTH did Alan message Gaipa?!🤣

[toujokaname]

Game master / Episode 14

Author: Akira

Characters: Aira, Kohaku, HiMERU, Hiiro

"Of course, HiMERU doesn't have emotions such as fear."

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Season: Winter

Location: Mountain Hut

About an hour later. The second checkpoint in the test of courage showdown, an abandoned house.

Aira: Ahhh, no way no way no way.... I didn't become an idol to get scared like this!

I just wanna go home alreadyyy! Munch on some convenience store food, and catch up on idol livestreams from the safety of my couch!

Kohaku: Yeah... I was real excited 'bout the test of courage and feelin' pumped, but now that I'm settlin' down, it's gettin' kinda spooky...

Even though I've got good night vision, it's gettin' too dark to see anythin'.

HiMERU: Thankfully, the weather is good amidst the misfortune, but when you enter places where the starlight doesn't shine through, it's like blindly feeling your way through the dark.

Aira: This place really has those countryside vibes, with no artificial lights at all. It takes me back to visiting my grandma's place in the past.

Hiiro: Aira's grandmother was from a country called France, right?

Aira: Yeah... It's not as rural as the Amagi Village, but all we had around our house were vineyards for making wine.

I remember hearing what seemed like wolf howls back then, it was super scary.

Kohaku: Now that ya mention it, there ain't any signs of wild animals or insects in this Amagi Village.

Though there's a presence within the buildings, it's likely just the villagers.

Aira: The villagers are kinda creepy too...

It's typical of a backward village, but besides that Takashi-kun who's a Hiro-kun lookalike, everyone else is holed up indoors, not even peeking out.

Hiiro: I think everyone's just cautious because outsiders are rare.

But, I was also concerned about what Oukawa-san pointed out.

Kohaku: Bit late for this, but quit callin' me “Oukawa-san," like I'm some stranger. Kohaku's fine.

Hiiro: Umu. I was also concerned about what Kohakucchi—

Kohaku: I didn't allow ya to go that far?

Aira: Stop! Only I can use that nickname! No stealing!

HiMERU: Fufu. It's scarier when people are silent, so it's helpful to talk even about trivial topics.

Of course, HiMERU doesn't have emotions such as fear.

Kohaku: You some kinda robot or somethin', HiMERU-han?

Aira: I have a theory that HiMERU-senpai's the most scared out of all of us... For some reason, he always hangs back where he can use someone else as a shield, never in the front...

HiMERU: Isn't this the most sensible arrangement? Given that HiMERU lacks the night vision of Oukawa or Hiiro-san, wouldn't he be inadequate to lead the way?

Kohaku: You're always so quick to make excuses...

Hiiro: Hehe. Well, it might be that the lack of signs of wildlife is the villagers' consideration. Maybe they've already removed them so we won't get inadvertently attacked.

But what we should be concerned about more than such trivial discomfort is that the ghost story Mayoi-senpai told us is gradually becoming more believable.

Aira: Yeah... I wanted to believe it was just nonsense to freak us out, but...

We're following the exact route they told us to take.

And yet there are still traces of the staff from the paranormal show, who got caught up in the mysterious phenomena.

Though it's probably all set up by Rinne-senpai and the other scarers... Even at the last checkpoint, there was something like a staff member's notes placed there.

HiMERU: Just like the account told in the notes, we stumbled upon vinyl strings and carvings left by the staff as markers.

Aira: Carvings? Were there really?

HiMERU: There were scratches on a tree made with a knife or something similar. It had dates and names presumably belonging to the staff of the paranormal program carved into it.

Naturally, those dates and names matched the ones in the notes.

Since there's no internet connection in this village, we cannot be sure that people with those names were once real and are now missing.

—Along with other facts that cannot be verified.

Aira: S-So, those notes and everything, they're all just made up by the scarers, right?

HiMERU: Who knows... It seems too elaborate for that.

It's not something that can be done overnight, writing lengthy notes and leaving traces exactly as described.

And the scarers arrived in this Amagi Village at the same time as us. It's hard to believe they had time to prepare for such a test of courage.

Kohaku: Yeah... After arriving in the Amagi Village, Rinne-han and the others were with us the whole time.

Of course, given Rinne-han's status, he might've ordered these preparations from the villagers.

He's always dead serious 'bout havin' his fun, but why go through all this hassle? And even if he did, what'd be the point?

Aira: D-Did he really wanna freak us out this bad?

I bet Rinne-senpai's out there somewhere, laughing away from behind some bushes even now!

Kohaku: Hmm... Even Rinne-han ain't that nasty deep down— Mm?

Aira: W-What's wrong, Kohakucchi? Don't suddenly stop moving, or you'll startle me?!

Kohaku: My bad... Hmm~ Must've just been my imagination.

(I've been feeling strange gazes for a while now... Even if they're the guys tryna scare us, there's too many of them, no?)

(Maybe the bored villagers get a kick outta watchin' the dumbass idols from the city doin' dumbass things?)

Aira: Ugh~! Can we just get this over with already?

This test of courage showdown's just the fourth match, so Matrix isn't even halfway through, right?

It'd be stupid to use up all our energy and strength being scared here. I wanna wrap up the unpleasant work quickly!

Kohaku: Right. In fact, it'd ruin the atmosphere if it gets light in the mornin'. We gotta get through the checkpoints as soon as possible.

HiMERU: Yes. The Amagi Village is smaller than expected, so it's fortunate that there isn't much distance to cover.

HiMERU: (But even that feels slightly offputting.)

(Based on Rinne's previous remarks, HiMERU had predicted that his hometown would be much larger—the size of a nation, even.)

(Has he been carelessly trusting of Rinne's penchant for grandiosity, overestimating its authenticity?)

[ ☆ ]

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[weretoad-writer]

to begin another end

When one of his oldest friends is killed during the events in the Whitemarch, Adaryc must travel back to the village where they grew up to bury his remains, and in the process is forced to confront the realities of loss, identity and his own complicated relationship with his roots and his faith.

Content Advisory: religious trauma, attempted suicide, references to self-harm

.....................................................................................................................

Those first days after they returned from the Whitemarch were a blur of exhaustion. They dug graves, conducted services, redistributed belongings, held collections, Adaryc wrote letters – too many letters – to families. And even in the midst of death, the living could not be forgotten, Marwyd needed medical supplies urgently, the duty roster needed to be reorganized to account for their casualties, supply lines needed to be reopened in the surrounding area, new jobs lined up. Adaryc didn’t sleep for two days and there still weren’t enough hours.

There wasn’t time to grieve. Not even for Devet. It still hadn’t sunk in that he was gone. Even as they prepared his body for transport, it wasn’t him, it was was simply another task that needed to be done. 

Most of their dead were laid to rest in the hills outside Little Bend where the Iron Flail had a small, unofficial burial ground. But Adaryc had promised Devet, years ago, when they were both much younger, that he would take his body home to his family if it came to that.

Hel, scrape together some campfire ashes and tell them I got smoked by a spell-slinger.  I don’t care. Just – promise me you’ll give them something to bury. Maybe that will give them some peace. Gods know I never did. 

He remembered the crooked smile on his face when he’d said it. 

Kae, one of his sergeants and closest friends, a mountain of a man who was closing in on fifty winters, volunteered to go with him. Only seemed right, he’d said. They’d grown up in the same parish, Adaryc and Devet and Kae. Enlisted together, fought together, made it home together. It had been the three of them there at the beginning, and there had never been a version of events where they were all still standing at the end, not in their line of work, but – 

But. The words he couldn’t find ached like a hole in his chest. 

They had been on the road since before sunrise, taking it in turns to pull the small two-wheeled cart which held Devet’s coffin. It was Adaryc’s shift; the late morning sun was warm on his shoulders, but the air still had the bite of winter in it. The cart bumped over the ruts left by the spring runoff, loudly jostling the coffin. 

Adaryc caught himself grimacing at each impact. He had the absurd impulse to apologize, as though Devet’s corpse was still sensible to pain. His thoughts kept flashing back to the journey down from the mountains. To the wagon full of dead friends stacked like cordwood. To Devet huddled under blankets with the other wounded, with a ghost pale face and sweat beading on his brow, cracking jokes and stubbornly insisting that everything was fine. 

Another banging rattle as the cart bumped over a rough patch of road and Adaryc’s jaw tightened. The weight was all wrong. It should have been heavier. There should have been more of him to bury. 

He’d been getting better.

His thoughts kept tangling on that part. 

It was a childish thought; he had seen enough of war to know that things did not happen because they were supposed to, because they were fair, or because they were deserved; they merely happened. It was one of life’s simplest cruelties.

But the knowledge did nothing to ease the guilt that twisted around his insides like garrotte wire: that he had walked away from Cayron’s Scar with naught but a broken arm and an aching head and Devet had– 

He flinched away from the memory of those last hours. 

The wagon shuddered over another rut, jarring him back to the present. Haligford was their destination, the small farming village in the South Dales where they had grown up. A two and a half day journey, he thought, if they kept a steady pace. 

He shifted his grip on the harness strap. He hadn’t been — hadn’t been back — in almost fifteen years. 

........................................................................................................................

There is a surreal quality to the months leading up to the war. News trickles out to the rural parishes in piecemeal, often conflicting reports – days, even weeks, after the events have occurred. They are insulated from what is happening in the wider world, but there is no comfort in that insulation, no safety. It is the difference between cover and concealment. 

In a matter of months, the entire shape of the world has changed. Their god has taken a human avatar and chosen Readceras as his divine seat, he has expelled the Aedyran governor and declared the colony’s independence. And yet they still wake every morning to the same barren fields and empty bellies, the same crushing poverty, the same boot on their necks. Everything has changed and nothing has changed, and that dissonance hangs like a sword above their heads. The priests praise Eothas for his deliverance and no one dares ask what they are being delivered from.

When the blow finally comes, it is a perverse kind of relief. Waidwen’s gaze turns upon the Church, to root out corruption, or so it is said, but the watchword cried in every temple, is not ‘corruption’, but ‘heresy’. A small, but deft shift in rhetoric that removes the target from the backs of those in power and lays the blame and responsibility at the feet of the people. 

The vorlas crop is rotting in the fields, and the trade agreements Readceras has depended upon so heavily for grain and other supplies are void now that they are no longer an Aedyran colony. People are starving. And their leaders, the voices they trust, tell them that all they have to do to make it stop is to rid themselves of the rot in their midst. 

The purges hit the Waelites and Berathians first, the followers of Galawain and Ondra, the small sects dedicated to the other gods. Stories come from the cities of full scale proscriptions; in a village up river a family of Ondrites is burned alive in their house; in Haligford a crowd gathers outside the charcoal burner’s hut in the middle of the night, drags him into the street and chases him to the parish border. Adaryc remembers shouts in the the night and torchlight from the road. Wagons carrying frightened, hollow-eyed families pass through day after day fleeing south to the border.

And when they have driven out all those who follow other gods and their crops are still failing and their bellies still empty, they begin to look closer to home. To those at the edges of their communities, the outsiders, the misfits, anyone does not fit the shape that was prescribed for them. 

Adaryc knows it is only a matter of time. His family’s status in the parish is liminal at best. He has no friends. He has always been viewed as ‘troubled’, but ever since the incident with the brewer’s boy the villagers look at him like a gul in their midst. Each night he wakes from nightmares of torches outside their windows. He knows that he is running out of time, and he knows that when they come for him, his father will not be spared; guilty by association.  

But a holy crusade – no one could accuse him of faithlessness or heresy if he takes part in that,  if he is willing to die for his god. Readcerans revere their martyrs. The dead and the unborn are far easier to love than the living. For all that he cares deeply for his country, that is one of the qualities that he hates the most. 

He remembers sitting at the table with his father as the light fades. The hearth is cold; there is no food to cook and they can’t afford to waste fuel on warmth. As has been the case more and more since his brother Eadwyn’s death, talking only lead to arguments, and so they sit in silence, the only sounds the faint click and scrape of his father’s wooden needles. 

Adaryc stares at his hands, balled into fists on the table before him. “Osbeorn said there was a messenger at the temple today,” be blurts out at last.

There is a tired sigh from his father. A stop at the temple meant an official proclamation. 

“Waidwen is calling for volunteers for a divine crusade.”

The sound of the needles stop. 

Adaryc takes a breath and pulls himself up a little straighter. “I’ve decided. I’m going to join.” His attempt at confidence comes out stilted and awkward and it is all he can do not to cringe as his adolescent voice cracks. 

He waits, bracing himself. There is silence for several long moments, and then the soft clicking of the needes begins again. 

“I’ll have to notify the reeve.” The words are slow, but wearily matter-of-fact. “They were counting on all hands for the second sowing. But I suppose it can’t be helped.”

Adaryc stares at him. Waiting for him to say something – anything – else, but he never even looks up from his work. He has been dreading this confrontation, expecting his father to be angry, to argue, to forbid it; so why does this concession feel so much worse?

He finds himself wishing that he would argue, that he would push back, call him an idiot, gods – ANY reaction at all would be better than this. 

Adaryc opens his mouth to protest, to make him react. He is supposed to be furious, he is supposed to argue, to question him, or tell him what he ought to do instead, or – or —

All the words he wants to say tighten into a hard, painful lump in his throat. 

He is supposed to care. 

Adaryc does not wait for morning; he leaves in the middle of the night without a word to anyone. 

...........................................................................................................................

“Hey–” Kae’s hand smacked against his shoulder, pulling him back go the present. He looked at Adaryc sidelong, a concerned scowl knotting his brow, “Come up for air once in a while, yeah?”

(When it was just the two of them, the sergeant tended to dispense with the formalities of rank. )

Adaryc cast him a look of rueful gratitude. “Sorry.”

They were approaching a crossroads, coming up from the south and turning west deeper into the South Dales. A post stood at the center, marking the distance in leagues to various waypoints. One of the names caught Adaryc’s eye.

“Ashwyck,” he said aloud.

Kae looked up as though he had heard the name of an old friend. After a pause he said, half joking, “Could always make a detour. See if that old tavern is still standing.”

It would have been fitting, but they both knew that they could ill afford the delay. The Flail couldn’t spare them any longer than was necessary, and Devet’s body had already begun to fester. 

“He wanted to head west to the Bremen depot, you know?” Kae added suddenly, "When we enlisted, I mean. It being closer and all. At least until I pointed out our chances of getting ordered around by someone from home.”

“You’re right. That would be terrible,” Adaryc deadpanned. 

Kae chuckled. “Present company excepted.”

“Do you remember that first night in Ashwyck?”

“I remember Dev going up to the bar to get us drinks and coming back with a prickly, half-starved teenager instead.”

The tips of Adaryc’s ears turned pink, recalling that first meeting. “I owe you an apology for that.”

Kae made a dismissive sound. “You were a bit riled up, is all. Devet used to joke that you were the only person he’d ever met with a stick up his ass and a chip on his shoulder at the same time.”

Adaryc snorted. “So, more or less the same as now?”

He was rewarded with a bark of laughter from Kae. “Nah. You don’t get your hackles up near as easy now. As long as we’re not dealing with slavers or landlords.”

“Or delegates from Stalwart,” Adaryc added bitterly.

Kae looked at him sharply. “You still whipping yourself over that?” He gave Adaryc’s shoulder a gentle swat.

“What was that place called?” Kae continued, his thoughts turning back to the tavern in Ashwyck, “The Ploughman’s – no, Pilgrim’s Rest. That’s what it was. I remember because they tossed us out when we couldn’t afford to keep drinking.” He shook his head, “Feels like a lifetime ago.”

.........................................................................................................................

“Look who I found!”

Devet’s voice booms over the clamor around them as he propels Adaryc towards a table at the back of the tavern where another man is seated. 

“Another refugee!”

The choice of words sends alarm bells shrilling through him and Adaryc pulls away sharply.

“I’m no such thing! I came here to join the Divine Legion! To serve Eothas!”

The vehemence of his response startles a laugh from Devet who holds up his hands. “Take it easy, kid.”

“Take it easy?” Adaryc hurls the words back at him, the tension which has been building over the past weeks and months finally boiling over. “Tell that to the charcoal burner’s family! You think you can call me a heretic and just– “

“Hey!” The other man who has not spoken until now cuts Adaryc off sharply. “Sit down.”

Adaryc falters, blinking at him in surprise. The steady, even gaze holds his until he flinches away. And after a moment of sullen hesitation, he lowers himself onto the bench. 

“Alright, first off –” There is a weary authority in his voice. “No one is calling anyone a heretic. This isn’t a fucking inquisition. “Second – Bremen depot is a full day’s journey closer to Haligford. Only reason for you to be here in Ashwyck is if you’re trying to get away from something. Same as us.”

Adaryc’s hands ball into fists at his sides, eyes locked on the surface of the table. Shame at his outburst and at being caught out so easily colors his cheeks and fear twists in his stomach. This had been a mistake. 

“Point is –” Devet interjects, dropping down next to Adaryc on the bench and giving him a playful nudge in the ribs. “You can relax. You’re among friends.”

Adaryc freezes in surprise at the words. No one has spoken to him like that since his brother died, and to his horror he finds himself on the verge of bursting into tears. His eyes sting and his vision blurs. He hugs his arms across his chest not daring to look up again, afraid that a kind look might shatter him. 

“It’s Cendamyr, isn’t it?” asked the older of the two, who looked to be somewhere in his early thirties. 

Adaryc instinctively straightened up at the use of his surname, the fact that the other man was addressing him as a peer and not a child. He nodded, sniffing and swiping at his eyes. 

“I’m Kae. And this – well, guessing you already know Devet.”

Everyone knew the parish troublemaker. 

Devet grinned, leaning forward in a mock bow. “My reputation precedes me.”

They talk for a little while before Devet slides a half-finished plate of food in front of Adaryc. A thin potage of beans and corn, heavily watered down to make it stretch farther, but it looks more substantial than anything he’s had in weeks. 

Adaryc’s mouth waters and his head feels uncomfortably light – he hasn’t eaten since before he left home – but still he bristles, the offer touching the raw nerve of internalized shame that is his only inheritance from his father.

“I don’t need your handouts.”

Devet’s brows arch, his expression more amused than annoyed. “Is everything a fight with you?” he laughs, “Come on, you look like you’d blow away in a stiff breeze.”

Adary’s face flushes scarlet. “I – I thought –” he stammers miserably, wishing that he could sink straight through the floor. As indentured servants they had no income, subsisting on the meager rations provided by the estate. The temple’s charity always came with strings of guilt and shame attached and he had assumed this was no different. He is not used to people being kind for its own sake. 

“I’m sorry.”

Devet waives off the apology. “Can’t have you fainting in front of the enlistment officer, can we? Besides,” he adds, “I meant what I said before. You’re among friends.”

.........................................................................................................................

They stopped at sunset for evening prayer. Adaryc knelt in the pale, dead grass at the side of the road. Beneath his knees he could feel that the ground was starting to soften; in Haligford they would be tilling the winter cover crops into the soil to prepare for spring planting. 

He recited the familiar words, a prayer for protection and guidance, an affirmation of faith in the coming dawn; it was spoken twice, once for the living and once for the lost. 

Too late he realized that kneeling had been a mistake; his limbs were stiff with exhaustion and unfolded only with spiteful reluctance. 

“See what you have to look forward to?” Kae joked, offering him a hand up – at more than fifteen years his senior, the older soldier had had the sense to remain standing. 

Kae looked as tired as Adaryc felt, the skin under his eyes was smudged dark like an bruise, and there was a hitch in his gait that hadn’t been there when they set out that morning; old wounds making themselves known.

The sensible thing to do would be to camp for the night and start fresh tomorrow morning, but —

He felt a stab of guilt at his own hesitation. 

“We should stop while there’s still some daylight left,” he said at last, with more conviction than he felt. 

There was a heavy sigh from Kae. “If it’s all the same, I’d rather push on through. Get this over with.” 

“Your leg – “

“Will be fine. I’m old, not dead.” There was an edge to his voice, pain, weariness and tension all coming to a head, but his tone softened as he glanced sidelong at Adaryc’s bandaged arm. “If you need to rest–?”

Adaryc shook his head. He didn’t want to prolong this anymore than Kae did. They trundled the cart back onto the road and continued westward into the growing twilight. In the shallows of a nearby stream the frogs had begun to sing, their high-pitched chorus filling the air. 

“Never did understand why he was so set on this,” Kae said suddenly after they had walked in silence for a short while. “I remember his family. He didn’t owe them a damn thing after the way they treated him. Don’t seem right, leaving him like this.”

It was an odd relief to hear someone say the words out loud; Adaryc knew it was selfish to begrudge Devet his last wish, but he couldn’t find a way to make peace with it. 

“I gave him my word.”

“I know.” Kae was thoughtful for a little while, then he looked up, a fond smirk tugging at his mouth. “Were you there for — nah, you’d’ve been too young. The whole debacle with the honeyjack…. Gods, that must be what? Twenty-five years ago now?”

Adaryc shook his head. Devet had been in his mid teens at the time, so Adaryc wouldn’t have been more than six or seven. “It’s funny though – he told the story so many times, it feels like a memory. I can picture it clear as day.”

It had been a prank several months in the making. Devet and a friend had taken a small keg of wyrthoneg, the weak mead that was the only legal form of alcohol in Readceras, and over the course of a long winter cold snap, turned it into an ungodly strong honeyjack, which they had then used to spike the punch at the close of the midwinter holy days. They’d been caught, of course; Devet had spent a week in the stocks, nearly froze to death and was still considered lucky to avoid anything more serious, but even two and a half decades later, his eyes still lit up with mischief at each retelling. It was one of his proudest moments. 

“It’s how we became friends.”

Adaryc looked up curiously. He hadn’t heard this part before. 

“His family refused to bring him food while he was in the stocks. Too damn busy trying to distance themselves from the scandal, I reckon. So I started doing it. He was just a kid for fuck’s sake. Bit of an ass, sure, but who isn’t at that age. He was….” Kae was quiet for a moment. “He was alright. Haligford was just about bearable with him around.”

There was anther long pause and Kae added softly. “It ain’t right.”

<>

It was a few hours after dark when he heard the cries. It started with a single voice, calling out from the trees and Adaryc’s head snapped up, instinctively reaching for his sword. 

The sound came again, urgent but indistinct. His eyes searched the darkness of the treeline, but by long habit, a portion of his attention lingered on Kae, measuring the sergeant’s reaction – the slight delay before he stopped and turned, the feel of his gaze shifting back to Adaryc rather than remaining fixed on the direction of the sound. 

Adaryc let his hand drop to his side, but none of the tension left his body. The sound had been in his head: a spirit. In the early years this had caused no shortage of confusion and false alarms, but here, fifteen years later there was no need even for words. They read everything they needed from each other’s body language. 

Over time Adaryc had grown better at compartmentalizing these encounters, of assessing and moving on, but that night his consciousness snagged on the voices like a cloak on a nail, wrenching him off balance. 

Shame and self-loathing washed over him. To Readcerans, meddling with another’s soul was the ultimate act of blasphemy and hubris, and the ability to read souls was seen as a form of violation, on par with the more sinister abilities of cyphers. Such ‘gifts’ were considered a sign of a sick soul.

“Can you still see him?” The blunt urgency of the question startled Adaryc out of his own thoughts and he stiffened.

“What?”

“Devet,” Kae said simply. “Is he still… You know?”

“No.” It was more of a flinch than an answer, snapping out terse and defensive before he could stop himself. 

He tried again, dragging in a breath and letting it out. The topic was less of a boundary and more of an open wound, a sin to be confessed. He spoke carefully, moving from word to word like someone treading on too thin ice. 

“There were a few. On the way down from the mountains. But the burials put them to rest.” It wasn’t like after the war when the souls had clung to him for months, facing down specters of his dead friends every waking moment. 

“But Devet —” He’d felt him go; felt him slip through his fingers even as he held his hand. He swallowed past the painful catch in his throat and thrust the memory away. 

“He didn’t stay.” 

Kae nodded solemnly. “He never was one for keeping still.” Adaryc couldn’t tell if he was relieved or disappointed.

“I wouldn’t keep that from you. If he was still —” 

“I know. Just kept…. hoping, is all. He used to joke about it, remember? Coming back and haunting the parish.”

Adaryc cracked a weak smile, momentarily imagining Devet rustling pages and blowing out candles in the middle of a sermon. 

“Now he’s got us doing it for him, the bastard,” Kai grumbled. 

His tone was mild, joking even, but there was an edge of bitterness to the words as well.

The person Kae had lived as for thirty-five years was dead. He had buried them when he joined the war, and when he returned home with his head shaved and his breasts bound up, his family had thrown him out. As far as they — and much of the rest of Haligford — was concerned, Kae too was dead. 

Adaryc’s own katabasis had been shorter by comparison, but more gradual. A slow immurement, burying himself alive brick by brick. A corpse walled up inside an effigy of what he was expected to be; in that way, they were similar. And there was a small, painful sort of catharsis in Kae’s offhand acknowledgement of it. 

What was a haunting after all if not the dead returning?

They lapsed into silence for a time, following the road as it turned to run parallel with the river. The voices in his head had grown — not louder exactly, but sharper, harder to shut out. There were more of them now — it was always worse near bodies of water, worse too when he hadn’t slept — whispers pressing in from the periphery of his awareness. 

Adaryc grit his teeth, striving to focus his whole attention on the sounds of the physical world around him, the creak of the wheels, the soughing of the wind in the trees overhead, the scuff of their footsteps. 

The sound of running water. 

All at once he was back amidst the desperate scramble to escape the flooding caverns of Ionni Brathr, the roar of the water all around them, the deadly slick of stone and ice underfoot, the crash of falling rock as the caves began to collapse on top of them. And then staggering out onto the ice floes of Cayron’s Scar and seeing it — all that red. Blood on the snow. 

Beside him in the darkness, Kae began to hum and the memory drew back before the soft, offkey melody like shadows from candlelight. Adaryc recognized the tune, an old hymn that had been a marching song during the war. The memories it carried were bittersweet, but there was warmth and fellowship in them and the promise of morning no matter how long the night. 

It was a small, quietly intimate act of care and Adaryc felt his throat tighten. He did not deserve Kae’s kindness.

.......................................................................................................................

Kae finds him huddled amid the crates and barrels and oil cloth tarps behind the supply tent. He is still shaky with adrenaline. His thoughts keep replaying the same scene over and over again. The physical examination. Standing naked together with the other recruits, the tight grip of the medic’s hands on his wrists, twisting them palms-up to reveal the criss-crossing lines of scar tissue, some not yet fully healed. The disdain in the priest’s voice as he calls into doubt his mental fitness, his commitment, his faith. He had wanted to die of shame. He had wanted to die. He wants to —

Kae sinks down on the packed earth beside him and Adaryc stiffens. His hands tug compulsively at his sleeves and his cheeks burn. He waits for the inevitable questions, the lecture, the platitudes, hot angry tears welling up in his eyes. But Kae doesn’t say anything. And for the first time it occurs to Adaryc that he is not the only one for whom the physical examination had been a forced confession.  

For several long minutes they simply sit. Then, with a soft, deliberate exhale, Kae begins unlacing the cuff of his sleeve. 

At first Adaryc doesn’t understand; he watches in confusion as Kae rolls up his sleeve to reveal the bare, brown skin of his forearm. 

And then he sees them. Thin lines of slightly darker scar tissue, crosshatching the skin from his wrist almost to his elbow. The scars are old enough that they have begun to fade. They say, I understand. They say, it gets better.

.........................................................................................................................

They reached Haligford at dusk on the following day. Adaryc had sent a message ahead before they set out, though it could not have been much faster than they were. Still, some warning was better than none.

“Thought it would look different after all this time,” Kae remarked, the tension in his shoulders belying the evenness of his tone. 

He was right. The buildings lining the road through the village were just as Adaryc remembered them. As if he’d been gone a few months rather than fifteen years. It filled him with disoriented unease, the same sort of dissonance he’d felt returning home after the war; the sense that he’d never left, that the war – everything he’d experienced – had never happened. Those who returned were expected to simply pick up where they’d left off. 

Their somber procession drew no shortage of stares. But for the moment folk saw the weapons on their belts and steered clear. 

“Never thought I’d feel skylined in a valley,” Kae muttered under his breath. It was a joke, but Adaryc felt it too. It wasn’t just the sense of being watched, he felt exposed. 

It wasn’t until he heard the faint chuckle behind him that he realized he had instinctively quickened his stride to walk a few paces ahead of Kae.

“Taking point, Cendamyr?”

He let out a short exhale of a laugh at the kneejerk absurdity of it, but he didn’t drop back.  

The forge was quiet when they reached Devet’s family home, but smoke was rising from the kitchen chimney. Devet’s sister, Deorhtric, answered the door, still in her leather smith’s apron, smudges of soot on her face. She regarded Adaryc’s travel stained gambeson and the sword at his side with open suspicion and then her gaze moved past him to the cart and her eyes hardened. 

Without giving him a chance to speak, she turned and called two names into the house behind her and a moment later two men, whom Adaryc half recognized as husband and brother, joined them in front of the house. Behind them several younger, adolescent faces were just visible in the entryway.

“How did it happen?” Deorhtric managed to make the question sound like an accusation.

What could he tell her? They wouldn’t believe the truth — gods, he scarcely did and he’d been there. “A mercenary company from the Whitemarch was making trouble for villages along the border. We—”

“So my brother died so that you could have a dick measuring contest with another group of brigands,” she cut him off icily. 

Adaryc went rigid. He could accept the blame — he was the commander, it was his responsibility — but not the way she dismissed Devet’s death as meaningless. 

“He died protecting Readceras—”

She slapped him. The force of the blow snapping his head to the side.  “Don’t you dare try to sell me that horseshit. In my own house. Over my own brother’s body. Your lies may have fooled Jora, but I know exactly what you are.”

It took every ounce of self control he had to simply take it. He straightened up, glaring, but she wasn’t finished. Kae had taken a step forward and her gaze fixed on him with sudden recognition.

“You’re that Haglund —”

“Leave him out of this!” Adaryc bristled. She ignored him.

“To think we took you in when you were turned out. And this is how you repay us? Though I don’t know what else I expected from someone who abandoned their family to play lackey for this —”

Adaryc took a sharp step forward, eyes blazing. “Kae is my right hand and one of the best men I’ve ever had the privilege of serving with!” he declared fervently. 

“I think,” Kae interjected, calmly but with the finality of the Void, “Deorhrtic. You’ve forgotten who did the abandoning.”

And Deorhtric, to Adaryc’s surprise, stiffened, her face flushing at the quiet rebuke. But before any of them could say another word, another figure emerged from the doorway.

He had only ever known Devet’s mother from the occasional glimpse at the temple on holy days. She had always seemed stern and imposing. From the stories Devet told, she had been the very image of sober propriety; Devet had been her youngest and a perennial disappointment. 

It was difficult to reconcile that image with the old woman before him. She was smaller, frailer, and there was a softness to her that was entirely alien to the person she had once been. It was generally accepted that Berath granted kith the mercy of forgetting their past lives at each new turn of the Wheel, but some folk were cursed to begin before that. 

The son-in-law turned to her with a mixture of annoyance and concern, urging her to go back into the warmth of the house, but she was insistent.

“Who’s that?” she demanded peering at Adaryc and Kae before spotting the coffin and shrinking back a step, “What do they want?”

“They’ve brought Jora home, Mother.”

For a moment the old woman’s expression brightened, the thought of the coffin displaced by the familiar name. “He’s coming home?”

The husband made another attempt to coax her away, but the sister shook her head. “He’s dead, Mother. Jora is dead.”

Adaryc saw the horrible, frightened confusion on her face as the words slowly sank in. And then she began to weep, a quiet, shattered wailing as she sagged against her daughter. 

Deorhtric fumed, keenly aware of the faces that had begun to appear in the doorways and windows of their neighbors’ homes. “Didn’t even have he decency to bring him ‘round the back. Had to drag him through the street like a common criminal – Oh for gods’ sakes!” she rounded on the husband and brother who had begun to argue over where to put the coffin. “Put him in the foundry. It’ll keep until sunrise.”

The brother together with one of the adolescents loped off to prepare space, leaving them with nothing to do but wait.

The sister stood, still supporting her mother, her glare now fixed on the coffin itself. “You see children, this is what comes of foolishness. Folk who think only of themselves come to a bad end.”

A small crowd had begun to gather by this point and Adaryc could only stand there, anger choking in his throat. He planted himself in front of Kae — though his slight frame made for pitiful cover. Most of those gathered spared them only wary, disapproving glances, but one man kept looking at Kae, brow creased as though trying to place him. Adaryc turned toward him, meeting his surprised stare with such aggressive directness that the man turned away in discomfort. Behind him he heard a soft snort from Kae. 

In the midst of it all, the old woman withdrew from her daughter and approached the cart. She pressed her trembling hands to the coffin, smoothing or wiping away something only she could see. Did he suffer? she wanted to know. And he did his best to answer. But she could not hold onto the words.  She would go back to fingering the coffin and a few moments later the same question again. How did it happen? Did he suffer? Was it painful? Each repetition felt like a knife twisting in his chest. 

After what felt like hours, the brother and apprentice returned, ready now to take charge of the body, and Adaryc and Kae were free to go.

Adaryc had had days on the road to brace himself for this, but it still hadn’t prepared him for how much it would hurt. The panicked sense of rage and desperation as the finality of the loss began to sink in. 

Grief snapped and snarled like a wounded animal inside his chest. He’s not yours!  He had the irrational impulse to grab hold of the cart, to drag Devet away, away from these people and this place that had never wanted any of them. But what he wanted didn’t matter. This wasn’t about him, it was about Devet, and he’d promised Devet he would return him to Haligford. 

They left the wagon with the family — the body still needed to be transported to the temple — and headed back the way they had come. The silence was so much emptier; it felt absurd to miss the rattle and jarring of the cart, but it had been almost like a third presence on the road. Now it was just the two of them. 

The quiet grew more strained with each step they took. The road seemed narrower, the buildings closer. 

Kae scrubbed a hand across his face, breathing out a long sigh once they passed the last house. “Well. That was shit.”

Adaryc exploded, “They had no right! They talked like he deserved it for fuck’s sake! He changed and left and now he’s dead because ‘that’s what happens’. As though this somehow puts things right! Puts everything back to ‘the way it should be’!”

It felt painfully familiar. He remembered the way some villagers had looked at them after the war, at their difficulty re-adjusting to life in the village, as though they were nothing but walking reminders of Readceras’ failure, as though it would have been more convenient – more comfortable – for everyone if they’d died with their god.

“All he’ll ever be to them, all they’ll allow him to be remembered for is a cautionary fucking tale about how you should never change and never leave and never question and just keep fucking pretending that everything around you isn’t on godsdamn fire —” He broke off breathless, so angry he was shaking. 

“They don’t matter,” Kae retorted with sudden vehemence. “They aren’t the only ones who will remember him. They got a body. That’s it. They got meat and bones. We got fifteen fucking years. We got him. We got first blood and last breath and everything in between. They don’t fucking matter.” 

Adaryc let out an unsteady breath. Kae was right, though in the moment it was small comfort. They walked in silence for a few heartbeats before Kae added. “And if you let my family anywhere near my remains, I will haunt you from Hel to breakfast.”

The remark startled a small, mirthless laugh from Adaryc, but he quickly sobered. “Your family – did you see them?”

“Not yet.”

“Is that better or worse?”

Kae sighed. “Bit of both? There’s a piece of me that gets to wondering sometimes if maybe they’ve changed. I know the answer, but I don’t know, you know?”

“Yeah,” Adaryc admitted quietly. He did. 

<>

The burial was set for sunrise the following morning, as was traditional for Eothasian rites. 

Adaryc and Kae camped at the edge of town. Darkness had begun to fall by then, softening the unsettling familiarity of their surroundings. In the dark, Haligford and its environs could have been almost any other farming village in Readceras. 

There was some comfort in the routine, in the physical acts of gathering water and wood, of scouting the perimeter, in preparing food, in pestering Kae into using the salve Marwyd had given him for his knee, and being nagged in return about his arm. A connection to their life outside of Haligford, to the Flail. 

It unnerved him how far away that life felt here and how little he felt like the person he had fought tooth and nail to become. It had been fifteen years; he was a grown man, the commander of a collective of soldiers; he’d survived a war, dozens of skirmishes with mercenaries and bandits, the Eyeless, he’d negotiated with Glanfathans, defied wealthy landowners, stood before the damned Morning Council…. And all it took was a name —  mentioned offhand by Devet’s brother arguing with Deorhtric over the funeral arrangements, and all the fear and anger and helplessness came flooding back as if he were a child again.

Homecoming was meant to be a consummation, a joining that made one whole again. But it wasn’t. The person who returned was never the same as the one who left, and there was no reconciling the two. There was just the struggle of one over the other and the slow annihilation of self. 

They ate in silence — journey cakes Kae had made with a mix of cornmeal, salt and water, cooked on a stone over the fire. The news that Brother Haemon would be presiding over the burial had them both on edge; Kae smoked and Adaryc fidgeted; nerves turned the food to ashes in his mouth and it was all he could do just to keep it down. 

When it came time to bed down, Adaryc took the first watch, staring into the shadows beyond the fire until the restless, skin-crawling sense of waiting grew too much to bear and he got up to walk the perimeter. 

“Seen you less on edge before a battle,” Kae remarked when Adaryc returned to stand by the fire for the dozenth time. 

Adaryc’s brows quirked upwards, glancing over at where Kai lounged, propped against a tree. “You’re one to talk. How many pipes has that been now?”

There was a low chuckle from Kae. He’d been smoking like a chimney since they’d made camp. 

“If I’m honest, a battle would be preferable,” Adaryc admitted, tugging compulsively at his sleeve with his good hand.

“Rymrgand’s frozen ass crack would be preferable.”

Adaryc choked on a laugh, shifting his weight from foot to foot. Despite the warmth of the fire, he couldn’t stop shivering. 

“Suppose it was too much to hope that old Haemon would have passed on,” Kae sighed. “Bastards like that are always the last to go. They’re like cockroaches. Kick over enough rubble in an abandoned temple and one of the fuckers would probably come skittering out.”

They had both been Haemon’s ‘favorites’ at different times. Though ‘projects’ might have been more accurate. The ones he took a special interest in. The troubled children who needed to be broken in order to ‘heal’ properly, like a mis-set fracture.

........................................................................................................................

“Your father tells me that you have been shirking your chores.”

The priest smells of tallow and incense. He towers over Adaryc’s eight year old frame where he stands in the flickering light of the altar candles with his hands clasped in front of him, his face hot with shame. 

It sounds so much worse, so deliberate when Brother Haemon says it. Adaryc wants to deny it, to explain —  He’s not lazy, it’s just…..he’s just….. but there’s no word for the emptiness that has displaced the person he used to be. He feels numb. He feels hollow. His brother has to drag him out of bed every morning. All he wants is to sleep. Tasks that he used to complete quickly now take him ages, if he remembers to do them at all. What is that if not laziness?

“He also tells me that you have not been eating.”

Adaryc’s shoulders hunch a little more. Laziness and ingratitude. 

“Is something troubling you, child?”

And because he trusts him — because he has been taught to trust him —  he tells him. Or tries to. Feeling clumsily for the words like someone groping for a path in the dark. 

Brother Haemon listens patiently. “You are unhappy,” he says at last and Adaryc feels a rush of relief, imagining in that brief moment that he understands.

“Unhappiness is selfish, Adaryc.” The words hit him like a physical blow. 

“Just like doubt. The more you indulge it, the more you give in to those feelings, the more you invite misfortune. Do you understand?”

He doesn’t understand. An apology, like a flinch, rises to his lips. I didn’t mean to. I didn’t want to.  I didn’t – And then his mind processes the rest of what the priest has said and he goes very still. 

“What – what kind of misfortune?”

“Do you think that is the question you should be asking?” The priest’s tone is indulgent, a threat concealed in an invitation, and Adaryc shrinks into himself a little more.

“No, but —” he stammers, pressing forward desperately, “But I mean – it wouldn’t be things like – like the vorlas? Would it? I mean, other people wouldn’t be — they wouldn’t be punished for something I did. Would they?”

Fear clamps around his chest. The words he doesn’t dare confess lodge in his throat until he feels like he might choke. The vorlas in the south fields is failing. They found the first sick plants shortly after his own troubles began. 

The priest places a hand on his shoulder, and for an instant the panic subsides. He looks up anxiously, seeking reassurance. And Haemon crushes him like a moth. “Misery begets misery,” he intones. “If a well is polluted, do not all who drink from it become ill? Do not the plants watered by it wither?”

Guilt floods Adaryc. The crops are dying, because of him. His father won’t be able to pay off his debts, because of him.

He feels hot and cold and dizzy at the same time. He feels like he’s going to be sick. If his father and brother find out…. If they knew it was his fault…. If they knew how wicked and lazy and ungrateful he has been…

“What cause do you have to be unhappy?” Haemon adds in the same honey-coated tone. “You have a roof over your head, a father who puts food on your table, you are healthy in body, as are your father and brother. You have much to be grateful for, child. Take joy in those things, repent your ingratitude, and all will be well.”

All will be well. Adaryc cleaves to those words with the desperation of someone drowning. There’s still a chance. He can still fix this. He can make it better.

When he returns home he greets his father with a smile; he completes his chores without prompting, and he eats his dinner with apparent enthusiasm. His brother, Eadwyn watches him, his face an open question, but Adaric doesn’t meet his eyes. 

<>

He tries so hard to be happy. He performs normalcy like a prayer — as if conviction alone can make it real. And when that only makes it worse, when the isolation and the fear are more than he can take, he turns his lies in on himself. The numbness, the exhausting heaviness, that is all normal, he tells himself. Everyone feels like this. He just needs to get used to it. He needs to be stronger. Doubtful thoughts clamor in his head and he tries to drown them out with other thoughts, better thoughts. He prays every night. 

But the harvest still fails, and guilt and fear take root in his soul like bittersweet vine. 

During the winter season, the children of the parish who can be spared from work attend lessons at the temple. One day he asks why Eothas doesn’t answer prayers. That is the wrong question. Brother Haemon makes him spend the rest of the lesson kneeling on the stone floor in view of the other children as punishment. 

After the lesson, the priest pulls him aside,  interrogating him on the reason why he would believe such a thing.  

Adaryc learns that this, too, is his fault. A lack of faith. A lack of sincerity. If he had faith, if he truly believed without any doubt that his prayers would be answered, then they would be. It is as simple as that. 

His prayers grow obsessive, lying awake at night repeating the same request over and over. There is always some imperfection. Nothing feels sincere enough, the smallest flicker of distraction or doubt poisons the whole attempt and he must begin again. 

It feels like praying to a wall. But he keeps trying. Again and again. And again.

He barely sleeps. His emotions begin to swing violently, often over the smallest things, and he feels less and less in control. 

Thoughts that seem to belong to someone else begin to thrust their way to the front of his consciousness; frightening and obscene, and the harder he tries to shut them out the louder and more persistent they become. They are there in every prayer, every sermon, every quiet moment. He begins to believe that his soul must be stained somehow. That he must have been a truly horrible person in a past life. And it is that person’s thoughts and impulses bleeding through into him. It explains everything –  the terrible thoughts, the violent outbursts, the periods of emptiness. 

It explains too why his god never answers. Why he never seems to be there in the ways that the sermons and prayers promise. If thou art broken, he shall make thee whole, they say. If thou art in darkness, he shall bring thee to the light. If thou art sinful, thou shalt be reborn. If thou art cold, his warmth shall bolster thee.

But they also say: If thine heart be black, if thine intention be impure, thy life is forfeit. For he hath seen, he can see, he will see. Nothing is hidden from his glory.

Eothas had seen his soul and what he saw there was so monstrous, so unforgivable, that even the god of redemption had turned away. It is the only explanation that makes sense.

.......................................................................................................................

It was still dark when they broke camp. Neither of them had gotten any sleep, but  propped against each other back to back by the fire they had managed something resembling rest.

Adaryc splashed water on his face, combed his fingers through his tangled mess of hair; he’d forgotten his razer and Kae didn’t own one. He turned instinctively to ask Devet — only to stand there, paralyzed for several heartbeats, staring at the empty space across the firepit. 

He hadn’t learned how to use a razer from his father. When his first beard started to come in during the war, it had been Devet who took pity on him and showed him how to shave without cutting up his face. He remembered his own clumsy embarrassment, Devet’s easy manner soothing his ruffled feathers, he remembered the intimacy of allowing another person to hold a blade to his skin, he remembered feeling safe. 

He tugged his rumpled clothes straight with his good hand – his left still hung useless in its dirty, makeshift sling – and straightened up, schooling his features into something he hoped to the gods passed for composure as he turned to Kae and nodded. 

They didn’t speak on the walk into the village, their breath forming clouds in the cold morning air. The fields on either side of the road were grown over with vetch and winter rye; a few had been freshly tilled. The spring planting would begin soon and he felt a familiar anxiety tighten in his chest.

Let it be a good year, let it be enough. He murmured the prayer out of habit, and guilt came back like an echo; the fight he’d had with his father on the night that he left for good – if he’d truly cared, then he would have stayed. Your brother would never have turned his back on us. Tired shadows skittered at the edges of his vision and he scrubbed his hand over his eyes, feeling angry and slightly sick. 

To the north, the silhouettes of large outbuildings began to rise out of the rolling hills and Adaryc’s jaw tightened. 

The Dal’geys estate was a large manor farm that grew larger with every bad harvest and increase in taxes, purchasing the land from the parish when the families that owned it could not pay their taxes, and then allowing them to continue working the land as tenants. The practice had been active under the Aedyran government, but had become increasingly common since the war. 

Dal’geys was, by all accounts, a deeply pious man. This meant that he gave generously to the temple with the gold he made off the backs of his slaves and tenants, and precious little else. 

In the early years of his marriage, Adaryc’s father had borrowed money from Dal’geys to save his farm, and indentured himself to pay it back. He still lost the farm, and in order to pay for rent and food, he’d had to borrow more. When the four year contract ended, he was more in debt than when he’d started, and the cycle began again. 

His father had never recovered from the loss, nor from the sense of failure and shame that accompanied it. In the social hierarchy, indentured laborers were only slightly higher than slaves; he had lost not just his land and independence, he had lost his place in the community. 

It ate away at him, but even in the days before Adaryc left, his father still never fully accepted it. The priests taught that patience and hard work would be rewarded, he simply had to have faith. 

Have faith. 

An old, bitter anger welled up in Adaryc, painful like a wound left to fester. It was convenient – the way poverty and bondage were framed as moral failings. His father had worked himself to death and died alone without a copper to his name, not because he had been conditioned and exploited all his life by those with more wealth and power, but because his faith was insufficient. 

What did they know of faith? To them it was nothing but a shell game to keep folk in their place. To blame the slave for his chains and the pauper for being poor. 

But Dal’geyss was a pious man. 

It was enough to drive a man to arson.

Out of habit Adaryc turned to look south across the fields on the other side of the road, his gaze finding the small smudge of a building more by memory than by sight. There was a light in one window. And for just a heartbeat his father was alive again. 

Adaryc froze, reeling from the whiplash of hope and loss. There was a new tenant. Of course there was. It was idiotic to think that — 

He swiped a sleeve across his face, furious with himself for the homesick grief strangling in his chest. That place had never been home. His father had been dead for three years and out of Adaryc’s life for even longer. They hadn’t spoken since he’d left Haligford. Adaryc had tried to write him, whenever he saved up enough to send home, but his father had never replied, and eventually the letters had become nothing more than receipts listing the amount of money contained within. Twelve years of silence. Twelve years. 

........................................................................................................................

There is no warning, just a road weary messenger appearing like a bolt from the blue with the news that his father has died. 

Adaryc is with a squad of his men, helping the villagers of Brightwell clear land for new fields, when the messenger arrives. He hears Devet’s bark of laughter and glances up to see him approaching with another man. 

“Messenger for you. Called me ‘Commander’,” Devet grins. “Better watch your back, Cendamyr, I might start getting ‘ambitions’.”

Adaryc’s mouth crooks. They’ve been serving together for twelve years and Devet has steadfastly refused every single promotion Adaryc has tried to offer him. 

He turns his attention to the messenger. 

“You are Adaryc Cendamyr?” he asks, eyeing Adaryc’s muddy, sweat-stained appearance with undisguised misgivings.

“I am.”

Adaryc takes the letter that the man hands to him and cracks the seal, his hands leaving smudges of dirt on the crisp, white paper. 

He stares at the two sparse sentences for a long time. 

‘It is with deep regret that I must inform you that your father, Meryc Cendamyr, after long struggle, has succumbed to his illness. May his soul return soon from the Wheel.’

He looks up, his shoulders straightening with a small jerk as he addresses the messenger; he tries to keep his voice neutral, but it comes out stiff and officious instead. “Was there anything else?”

The messenger shifts awkwardly. “The priest said you would cover the fee. That you were good for it, on account of some highborn patrons.”

Adaryc stares at him. Standing there, covered in sweat and mud, in his plain, much-mended clothes and travel worn boots, he feels the absurd, horrifying urge to laugh. The messenger, at least, has the good grace to look uncomfortable. 

It is true that they have a few supporters in high places, it is also true that that support is what allows them to continue working in a region where most folk are too poor to pay them. But of course the old priest assumes he’s lining his pockets with it.

It is a moment before he trusts himself to speak.

“How much?” Moving mechanically, he pulls his purse from his belt and upends it into his hand. It is painfully obvious that the small handful of coppers isn’t enough. 

In the end he has to borrow the difference from Devet. 

“Bad news?” Devet has been watching him closely, but waits until the messenger is gone before speaking. 

Adaryc hands him the letter. 

The paper crackles as he unfolds it, then – “Effigy’s eyes…” Devet looks up, his normally merry face suddenly serious.

“I didn’t even know he was sick.” It feels like such a small, useless thing to say. 

“Adaryc–”

He almost never uses his given name. Always his surname or his rank. And somehow the small act of intimacy affects him more than the letter itself. 

“If you need to – “

“No.” It comes out harsher than Adaryc intended and he grimaces. “He’s beyond anyone’s help. This place isn’t.”

Devet looks as though he wants to protest, but instead he places a hand on Adaryc’s shoulder and turns to address the rest of their squad who have been staring curiously ever since the messenger arrived. 

“Alright, back to work. Ondra’s tits, I swear y’all are nosier than a village priest.” 

...........................................................................................................................

The roof of the parish temple rose into view above the trees, a great, dark shape crouched atop the nearby hill. Adaryc’s hand brushed his belt, feeling reflexively for Steadfast, but there was no comfort in the unfamiliar hilt that hung there now. 

As they neared the top of the hill, they skirted the perimeter, entering instead through the gate at the back of the cemetery. Little had changed in fifteen years, save for the new stones which always stood out with such stark nakedness from their lichen encrusted elders. Bright green growth was beginning to peak through the dead winter grass and thick beds of moss cushioned their steps.

They were early. The family wouldn’t be there for a little while yet. Enough time to pay his respects. 

He left Kae smoking his pipe in the lee of the transept and made his way into the churchyard. An uncomfortable resonance surrounded him the deeper he went, like a bass string so low and heavy that it no longer registered as sound; whispers tugged at the corners of his mind, echoes of souls still lingering. 

His family plot was small, tucked away beneath a whitethorn tree in the northwest corner. The stones were unmarked. Just small fieldstone cairns. Engraving had been far beyond the means of an indentured laborer. 

He knew them by memory. The long, low cairn now grown up with weeds was his mother’s, and the two smaller, but higher piles beside it, crusted with lichen and moss belonged to his brothers, little Inri and Eadwyn the eldest. There was a a fourth cairn now as well. Almost pristine in comparison to the others. 

He was not sure what he had hoped for, standing before his father’s grave. Some kind of closure, a place to set down the guilt he had carried for so long, for leaving, for not having been there. But the stones were as stubbornly silent as his father had been in life, and he found only questions with no hope of answer and the gnawing, helpless anger of old wounds. 

There had been a time before despair and loss and exhaustion had hollowed his father into the bitter, passive shell of a man that he became. In some ways that made it harder. The knowledge that none of it was set, that it might have turned out differently. After everyone he had buried over the past weeks, it felt absurd to grieve for that, for a version of events that had been just a little easier, a little kinder, when there were bodies in the ground, but — 

But. 

He just wished —  

Adaryc scrubbed a hand over his face. He did not doubt that his father had, in his own way, harbored some degree of attachment, perhaps even affection for him. But in the end, Kae was right: love was not a feeling, it was an act. 

He let out a long, slow breath. It wasn’t relief, or closure, he was not even sure it was acceptance, but it was an end, of sorts. An acknowledgement, however painful. He knelt on the cold ground, the morning dew soaking through his leggings, and with the little time he had left, he began to remove the worst of the dead grass and weeds from his mother and brothers’ cairns.

He had few memories of his mother. She had died of the same fever that took Inri when Adaryc was only two winters. Her name was Sigge. Eadwyn had sometimes shared stories about her when they were young, but his father scarcely spoke of her at all, except in censure, until Adaryc could no longer separate his memories of her from the sting of his father’s disappointment. 

Thank the gods your mother didn’t live to see this.

What would your mother say?

Taking out his knife, he began to scrape some of the lichen from Eadwyn’s cairn, murmuring a prayer that the gods might bless him in his next life. There wasn’t enough time to do it properly, but there was a ritual of care to the act which felt right. A reversal of sorts. Eadwyn had always been the one looking after him. 

........................................................................................................................

He is two winters, clinging tightly to Eadwyn’s hand as they stand in the small crowd gathered round an open grave. Something terrible has happened, he can absorb that much from the tearful adults around him, and it frightens him. He wants his mother, but his father gets upset when he asks for her now; he says that Mother and Inri are gone. Adaryc knows they are gone; he saw the man in the dark robes come and take them away. But he wants them to come back. 

He starts to cry and Eadwyn scoops him up and holds him against his chest. His brother is trying desperately not to cry, but his cheeks are wet when he pulls Adaryc close. Adaryc huddles into him, burying his face in the crook of his neck. His brother is warm and familiar, an island of safety amidst all the strangeness. 

<>

He is six winters, sitting at the table on a snowy night, the warmth of the hearth nearby and the chill of the draft at his back. He can just make out Eadwyn’s face in the glow of the reed light, twisting into silly expressions as they make a game out of trying to make the other laugh while their father’s head is bowed in prayer over their meal. He always catches them of course, that is part of the game, a faint glint of amusement in his eyes softening his censure. 

<>

He is ten winters and his world is falling apart. Two years of guilt and fear and secrets, two years of watching bad things happen to the people he loves and knowing that he is to blame. And now Eadwyn speaks of nothing but leaving, of apprenticeships, of jobs in the city, of far away places. Their father will hear none of it, so he confides in Adaryc when they are alone together, his eyes bright with eager determination. 

But Adaryc is too absorbed in his own troubles to see how unhappy his brother is, how heavily the burden of their father’s hope weighs on him, the pressure of being the eldest son and second parent, the ‘good child’. All he can see is that his brother wants to leave him. 

“But you’re coming back, right?” he asks him after Eadwyn has rambled excitedly about how much more money he thinks he could make from just one season of work in the city. 

Eadwyn shrugs a noncommittal affirmative. “You could always come with me!” he grins. 

And for an instant Adaryc believes it. But his mind is so deeply mired in old patterns of self-loathing and rejection, that hope just feels like another kind of fear and he shrinks from it, a knee-jerk objection springing to his lips. 

“What about the farm? And Father?”

He regrets it immediately, but it is too late. Eadwyn’s face closes off and with a frustrated sigh the conversation is over. 

In the end, Eadwyn doesn’t go. A new section of land needs clearing and all hands are needed if they’re to have it ready for planting in the spring. Next year, he swears, he’ll go next year, but there is always another catch, another disaster or delay that forces him to hold off for just one more season, just one more year. 

<>

He is twelve and he can’t do this anymore. One winter’s night, letting the bucket fall from his hands as he steps into the ice cold waters of the stream behind their cottage. The water is so dark that he imagines he could fall into it and disappear completely. Wiped from existence like ink spilled over a page.

The cold hurts at first. The shock of it against his chest makes his breath come in violent, spasming gasps. And then, gradually, the pain begins to fade, and his breathing slows. He isn’t shivering anymore. He isn’t even cold. His thoughts are sluggish and indistinct. He tries to imagine falling forward, it would be so easy to just slip beneath the surface.  

Vaguely, as from a great distance, he is aware of someone shouting, the sounds of splashing water, and then there are arms around him, and the last thing he is aware of before he loses consciousness is warmth. 

Warmth is how he remembers Eadwyn. Not the bright, sunny warmth of a summer’s day, but deep and quiet like a sun-warmed stone at evening. 

“I told Father it was an accident,” Eadwyn confesses the following night, whispering as they lay huddled under threadbare woolen blankets on a shared pallet, “That you were fetching water and fell in.”

Adaryc’s shoulders hunch guiltily and he murmurs a half-hearted thanks. In the dark, he can feel his brother’s eyes on him, the painful, searching question in them as the silence between them pulls taught.  

“I don’t understand. Why didn’t you tell me? We used to – we used to talk. And now…. I don’t know what happened, you’re so far away. I can’t help you if you don’t talk to me.”

In that moment Adaryc wants to tell him. He wants to believe that even after all the harm he has caused, all the poor harvests, the sick crops, the debt, the fights, Eadwyn’s own crushed dreams of escape, that his brother would forgive him. 

He wants to believe. But he can’t. Tears roll down his cheeks and with a soft sigh, Eadwyn pulls him close. They stay like that until morning. 

<>

He is fourteen winters, staring at the empty seat across the table. His father says the evening prayer as though nothing has changed, as though nothing is wrong, and he feels like he is drowning.  Because Eadwyn is dead and it is his fault. 

“Effigy’s eyes —” he blurts out angrily, interrupting the prayer. “He’s not listening! He doesn’t care!”

His father looks up, for a moment too startled by his outburst to even be angry. “Of course he does. But sometimes…..” He falters for a moment, his gaze not quite meeting Adaryc’s. “Sometimes Eothas sends us trials to temper our faith. To strengthen it.”

Adaryc stares at him in disbelief, angry tears welling in his eyes. “You don’t believe that – you don’t believe that Eadwyn died just so god could prove a fucking point!”

“Adaryc–”

“Everything is so hard all the time and you keep saying it makes us better but it doesn’t! It doesn’t! Look at you – all you’ve ever done is bowed your head and rolled over! To god, to the temple, to Dal’Geyss. That’s not faith, that’s – that’s — “

“Adaryc!”

“What is the point? To see how far he can push us before we break? Eothas sounds more like a landlord than a g–”

It is the first time his father has ever struck him in anger. 

He remembers the look of shock and regret on his father’s face, the struck-match, incandescent outrage in his own chest. In time, he might have forgiven him for that. But not for what came after. 

“Enough!” his father barks, retreating once more to his seat at the table. His voice is rough and fraying at the edges and he does not meet Adaryc’s eyes. “That’s enough. Now sit down and finish your dinner.”

Sit down and finish your dinner. Sit down and pretend that this never happened. Pretend that your grief isn’t eating you alive. Pretend that you accept it – Eadwyn’s death, the blight, the sickness, the hunger and exhaustion, the landlords and slaveholders with their soft hands and big houses. Pretend that you believe all that suffering makes people better. Pretend that the temple sermons fill you with certainty, and the hymns kindle your faith. Pretend that you believe your god answers prayers. Pretend that you aren’t a monster. Pretend that you aren’t hemorrhaging rage and doubt and pain and all the ugly, selfish emotions you’ve tried to pretend for years that you don’t feel. Pretend. Pretend. Pretend.

.......................................................................................................................

Adaryc heard a step behind him and looked up to see Kae approaching. The rite would be starting any moment. 

He pushed slowly to his feet, his gaze lingering on Eadwyn’s grave. He found himself wishing suddenly, painfully, that he could have told him. That night after Eadwyn pulled him from the stream, he wished he could have explained, could have trusted him. He thought — 

He thought that he might have understood. 

<>

The family were already gathered at the east side of the temple yard, a small crowd, maybe a dozen sober-faced scelterfolc, and a few children too young to have ever met Devet, looking bored or curious by turns. And slightly apart, standing over Devet’s coffin — 

It didn’t matter that he’d been bracing for it. Adaryc’s gait hitched as Brother Haemon looked up at their approach, and it was only Kae’s presence at his back that kept him from freezing up like an unblooded recruit. 

He steeled himself as the priest broke away from the family and began to approach the two newcomers. “Adaryc–” The use of his given name felt like a belt across his back and he hated himself for the reflexive obedience with which he responded, shoulders snapping straight as if he were still the same troubled child, being pulled aside after lessons for the hundredth time. 

“This is a surprise. I thought you’d become too grand for Haligford.” Adaryc’s face reddened at the familiar barb, but he bit his tongue, acknowledging Haemon with a stiff nod.

“Brother.”

“It’s good of you make the journey, this time.” Unlike when your father died, the implied censure was plain in his face and tone of voice, and Adaryc stiffened. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Kae shift, his hands in loose fists resting just below his breastbone. A simple change in posture, but he recognized the veiled aggression behind it and felt desperately grateful for the brief moment of catharsis. 

Haemon must have caught his glance because he turned to Kae, and Adaryc saw him pause, struggling to place him just like the man the day before. Adaryc opened his mouth to interject, but even Brother Haemon wasn’t immune to Kae’s ‘go ahead and try me’ stare; he turned away with a disdainful sniff and, taking his leave, returned to the graveside. 

They waited there, in the cold shadow of the temple, restless and silent save for the occasional murmur of the younger children. At last the first rays of sunlight could be spotted cresting the horizon and the priest began to recite the Eothasian blessing for the dead. A censer swung from his hand, burning incense to mask the smell of decay. It smelled like guilt and fear and Adaryc found himself caught in a visceral sense memory of kneeling before an altar bright with candles, whispering the same prayer over and over and over again, stumbling each time as a sliver of doubt or distraction found its way in, never quite right, never quite enough, like a nightmare where he keeps trying to run and his legs won’t work.

He dragged his eyes away from the censer, focusing instead on the coffin where Devet lay.

He had told Devet’s mother that he had died in battle, that it had happened so fast it would have been over before he knew what hit him. He hadn’t suffered. He’d assured her of that.

Lying was a terrible sin. But what possible peace could there be in knowing the truth? That her son had died of his wounds on the return journey, that it had been slow and lingering, that the first amputation hadn’t been enough, that the infection had come back, that by the time he died he was out of his skull with fever and sobbing like a child, begging someone to make the pain stop.

Adaryc had held his hand until he grew still, and he’d kept holding it long after that.

He blinked, swallowing past the tightness in his throat. As the blessing ended, Devet's sister guided her mother to the grave to lay a spray of bloodroot and anemone atop the coffin. That seemed to be the sign for the sexton and her assistant to lower the body into the grave, and Haemon began to recite the prayer of mourning. 

Adaryc closed his eyes. He’d said the same prayer over so many graves in the past days that he knew it by rote. He tried to take refuge in the familiarity of the devotion, but the words felt cold and distant, and for the first time in a long time, prayer felt like standing on the wrong side of a locked door.

“Is there anyone who would speak for Jora before he is laid to rest?”

Adaryc’s mouth felt suddenly dry. He should have been prepared for this. “Adaryc?” It was the same tone he had used when calling on wayward children during lessons, catching them out for not paying attention. 

It took all his nerve just to pry himself away from Kae’s reassuring proximity. He had the sudden, irrational impulse to ask the sergeant to come with him, like a child afraid of the dark. 

He drew himself up, standing parade-ground straight, painfully aware of how he must look with his travel stained clothes and cheeks rough with several days’ stubble.

Brother Haemon took a step back, beckoning Adaryc to stand beside him, not allowing him to keep his distance. His face a cooly benevolent mask as he reached out to rest a hand on Adaryc’s shoulder. 

Adaryc flinched, shoulders involuntarily twitching away from the touch, and his face went scarlet. Everyone had seen that. He could feel the familiar, disapproving weight of the priest’s gaze, and as he looked down at Devet’s coffin, he felt suddenly absurd, a toy soldier, as if the Iron Flail was nothing more than a story he’d made up about himself. 

“Devet was –” His mouth opened and shut; each word that he reached for felt more hollow than the last; a performance of respectability, of expectation. Devet wasn’t in those words. 

Devet wasn’t here. 

There hadn’t been time for mourning. There hadn’t been time, and now it was too late, Devet was in a box at the bottom of a hole; he would never see him again, never say goodbye. There hadn’t been time for mourning and now it hit him all at once. His throat tightened and tears spilled over, and all he could think of was those first few days after the amputation, how he’d seemed to recover. He had been getting better, he was supposed to get better, and then – 

Out of the corner of his eyes, he saw Brother Haemon step forward as though to usher him away, the words of the final benediction already on his lips, “Eothas, light of spring — “

“I wasn’t finished.” The words came out in a snarl, bristling like a wounded animal, old wounds torn open, flooding him with long festering anger. 

There was a reason that the only way Devet could come home was in a box. That was the only version of him, of any of them, that this place would accept. 

“I know you think Devet was wrong,” he choked the words out, his voice still rough with emotion. “That he strayed from the path – or was led astray. You think that the life he chose was a sin, a mistake. That he was selfish for choosing to leave.

“Which is pretty fucking rich coming from folk who expect their own children to break themselves into pieces just so the rest of you can feel comfortable! 

“There’s folk – a lot of folk – in this world who still have breath in their lungs and roofs over their heads because of Devet, because of what he did. Gods know I’m one of them, must have saved my skin a dozen times at least —

“He mattered. What he did – what he chose to do – mattered.”

For a moment he stood there defiantly, blazing like a torch, before the fire in his eyes guttered and he turned away. His heart was beating wild and erratically and all he could hear was the sound of blood rushing in his ears as his field of vision contracted to a narrow, distant sphere. His legs kept moving but they seemed to belong to someone else. 

He walked until Kae’s arm caught him across the chest, gently but firmly corralling him. 

“Slow down. You’re alright.” Kae’s hand shifted from his shoulder to the back of his neck, pulling him in. “You kicked a hornets’ nest there, boy,” he chuckled.

Adaryc couldn’t stop shaking, but he let himself be held, leaning his head against Kae, breathing in the familiar scent of pipe tobacco, feeling the even rise and fall of his friend’s chest as his own ragged breathing began to slow. 

........................................................................................................................

There is a joke among some of the old soldiers – that no combat-ready company ever passed inspection, and no inspection-ready company ever survived combat. And it seems that a holy war is no exception. The closer they get to the front line, the less pretense and appearance seem to matter; no one in his company cares how he feels about standing watch or fighting or tending injuries, they only care that he does it, and does it competently. They care that he works hard and learns fast. No one asks him to pretend. 

Bit by bit his defenses lower and his shoulders come down from around his ears. He learns to stop looking for mockery and rejection in every face around him and, to his bewildered surprise, discovers that some of them actually like him, and he likes them. He has friends. 

At home, everything they did had an inherent futility and hopelessness to it, no matter how hard they worked, no matter what choices they made, every day was just another step deeper into debt. It was paralyzing. But here his actions matter. He has value. He can help. 

He throws himself into it with a conviction and energy he has never felt before. And it is in the slaughter and horror of his first battle that he first glimpses the face of his god. 

All his life he has looked for Eothas in the places he had been taught to seek him, and not finding him there believed himself abandoned. But the priests were wrong. God is not in the high walls of the temple, in the candle bright altar, in the stations of the sun; he is in the faith that came with standing shoulder to shoulder in a shield wall, the mutual trust and reliance of each on the other, he is in the friend that stands astride him when he falls, in the hands that pull him to his feet, he is in the bloodstained compassion and defiance of the healers after a battle, and in the communion of sitting watch all night at the bedside of a dying friend. 

He sees the face of god in the people around him, in all the many acts of fellowship and love and sacrifice; and he is seen in return, with all his soul’s ugliness and doubt, and Eothas does not turn away. 

Acceptance feels like an embrace; after a lifetime starved for connection, it is intoxicating. For the first time in his life, he belongs. 

..........................................................................................................................

He felt Kae tense and instinctively pulled away, turning to see Haemon storming towards them. 

“How dare you profane this holy place! Abusing a grieving family, taking advantage of a man’s death to spread your lies. As if you were not the one who enticed Jora onto the path of violence. You always were a little thug. Thank the gods your father didn’t live to see —”

Kae took a small, purposeful step forward, straightening to his full height, and it was like a mountain sitting up and taking notice. 

“Don’t you have a grieving family to take advantage — excuse me – to console, Brother?” Adaryc choked, but Haemon recoiled as if from a physical threat, the haughty anger of a moment ago blanching in alarm. 

The sergeant’s voice was calm and quiet and sharp as steel. “Might should see to that.”

Haemon drew himself up in a huff, clutching his remaining dignity like a string of pearls. “You are not welcome here!” he spat, loud enough for the others to hear, before turning and retreating to the remaining mourners. 

“You hear that, Cendamyr?” Kae drawled, “He finally said the quiet part out loud.”

The laugh that bubbled up in Adaryc’s throat was dangerously close to hysterics and he choked it back. When he could trust his voice again he said, quietly earnest, “Thanks for that.”

Kae shrugged it off with a soft snort. “Couldn’t go letting you have all the fun, now could I?”

<>

Slowly the graveyard emptied until it was just Adaryc and Kae. They stood over Devet’s grave and Adaryc repeated the prayer of mourning. It felt important that they said it, that the final prayer that sent him on his way should come from his chosen family and not someone like Haemon. 

As the prayer finished and silence fell over their small corner of the cemetery, Adaryc found his thoughts drifting back to the months after the war. Readceras had been on the brink of collapse, destabilized by the power vacuum created by the destruction of Eothas and his avatar, their economy devastated by the abrupt severance from Aedyr. Old taxes went up, new taxes appeared, rents went up, as did the price of basic necessities. The vorlas cough, the purges and then the war had hemorrhaged the country’s working population, there was more work and fewer bodies to do it, and still not enough food to go around. 

On the surface life in Haligford limped along much as it always had, but at the turn of every week, the temple was packed as though it were a holy day. He remembered standing in the packed throng of the sanctuary, seeing the fear in peoples’ eyes, in the way they stood and moved; he could hear it in their voices, in the timbre of their prayers. In the priest’s feeble attempts at reassurance. ‘Community’ was the watchword now. The importance of community. And standing at the back, in the section reserved for strangers, slaves and bonded laborers, Adaryc couldn’t help wondering where ‘community’ had been when the charcoal burner had been driven out. 

And all the while rumors of civil war, of retaliation from the Dyrwood spread like wildfire. Every other day there was some new tale of violence and disaster, attacks on the road, bandits overrunning a village, estates hiring mercenaries for security and extorting protection money from the surrounding parishes, or else attempting to forcibly carve out their own private fiefdoms. 

And there was nothing he could do.

After months of action, he felt paralyzed once more. Food supplies dwindled, outbreaks of illness and violence seemed to grow closer every day. His own mind betrayed him with visions and voices that weren’t there. It felt like standing in a flood with the water slowly rising, just…. waiting to drown.

And then, just as the water threatened to close over, there was a glimpse of hope. A neighbor of theirs was behind on his taxes; he needed to sell some livestock in the city to make up the shortfall, but the roads weren’t safe and he couldn’t afford an escort.

The cracks in their broken country were so much bigger than them; hunger and poverty could not be killed with a sword, one could not point to economic collapse on a map, nor skirmish with generations of Aedyran exploitation and their own passive complicity. But this — this one person in this one moment — this was something they could do. They could help.  

Adaryc had asked him for twenty-four hours, and that night he pitched the idea to Kae and Devet. They’d been just as eager as he was, and a few days later, for the price of a meal, they escorted the neighbor to Bremen and back without incident. 

Their first contract, and more soon followed. They almost never took jobs for coin in those early days; even if someone in Little Bend could have afforded it, that wasn’t the point. They patrolled the roads, escorted merchants and travelers, guarded tinkers and knife-sharpeners who had been forced to remain in the cities, enabling them to return to their circuits. They lived hand to mouth and frequently went hungry, they scrapped with bandits and profiteering mercenaries, they fought tooth and nail and bit by bit they carved out a space for themselves, a way of existing where they could belong again. 

<>

A rustle of movement drew Adaryc back to the present and he looked up to see Kae pull a flask from inside the breast of his gambeson. For several moments the sergeant simply regarded it, a sad, crooked smile on his face. Then, with a half-hearted ‘cheers’ gesture, he raised the flask to his lips. 

He took a long pull and then passed the flask to Adaryc. There was a sense of ritual about it. A wordless communion.

A last round. 

Adaryc took a drink, expecting the weak, familiar taste of wyrthoneg, and started in surprise, coughing –  half choking –  on the fiery burn and concentrated sweetness of —

The tears he had been fighting back spilled over all at once.

Honeyjack.  

He looked up at Kae in disbelief. “How —  Where did you —”

“Devet,” Kae admitted, his own voice starting to fray at the edges. “He distilled a batch while we were in the Whitemarch, said something good had to come from such shit weather. The company polished off most of it after Cayron’s Scar, but….”

He took the flask back from Adaryc with gentle reverence, “I kept a little in reserve.”

His cheeks were wet as he held it over the fresh turned earth of the grave and poured out the last of it to Devet. And in the quiet that followed, Adaryc stooped to touch the mounded earth, murmuring a last goodbye to the cold soil. Kae offered him a hand up and he took it, finding comfort in the gesture and the simple physical contact. Their eyes met and Adaryc felt a little of the weight slip from his shoulders. “Let’s go home.”

[terrence-silver]

what would terry's reaction be to beloved refusing to cry or be vulnerable with him? we know he lives by showing no weakness, even in front of beloved, but would it change if beloved also refused to? would it be different if beloved was a woman/man?

Ironically, he would feel bereft.

And make no mistake, beloved will cry.

Why? Because Terry will make them cry.

They won't even know he has an premeditated agenda as it happens.

He'll make them cry because he artificiated a situation that'll upset them so much they'll sob up and he can watch and then swoop in and be the big damn hero as he comforts them and fixes whatever it was he himself caused purely to see those beautiful, delectable tears. He'll make them cry as he fucks them because of how good and orgasmic it feels when he edges them and pounds into them while they beg him to cum and he denies them the release some more just on the off chance he gets to witness those shiny, sad, pleading eyes. He'll make them cry in sheer joy due to how happy he's made them about something and they get emotional, unable to contain themselves. He'll make them cry in every way possible and it will happen and he'll be there to relish every moment of it, because those tears? Much like everything else about beloved? Those tears, they belong to him. He feels entitled to seeing them. Experiencing them. Controlling the narrative of how and when they take place. Whenever and however he wants to. Drawing them out of beloved bit by bit whether they want to or not and whether they're even aware it is happening as it is happening. He feels it is his ultimate right to being the only one who causes them, sees them, wipes them away, savors them --- licks them. You name it. He might just say how they should be open with each other, always, giving beloved a sense of safety so they could laugh, giggle, scream or cry in front of him of their own volition without inhibitions, because he's here for them, for whatever they need. Oh, yes. Cry. How delightful. How perfect.

One set of rules for Terry, another set of rules for beloved entirely.

Because there's an explanation as to why Terry Silver lives by a 'no weakness, no mercy' mantra and he very firmly, to the very core of his being, believes he's justified in certain things the way others might not be. Life has taught him these lessons for a reason and then he taught himself how to embody them fully. He became hardened and tough for a reason as well. He didn't do it just for show. His reason is the war. Vietnam. His career in the military. His own personal worldviews. The martial arts style he lives by as a result of that, which is infinitely more than just a way of fighting --- it's a way of life. With an almost cult-like connotation. If he doesn't cry openly, it's because men, or rather, men like him in particular, don't cry. Not anymore anyway.

Again, he understands it's hypocritical and doesn't particularly care.

When beloved does the same, yeah, he feels he's denied a very crucial access to them and that won't do. That just won't do. He views it as direct challenge fuel. He feels he has to reprogram them until they're sobbing putty in his hands. He feels there's a wall up that he must demolish. Demolish it he does, brick by brick and nobody discovers just how sinister the connotation of what he's done really is; beloved might just be there, getting all misty eyed because Terry's bought and remembered some very special gift they've always said they wanted, not even realizing that the only gift Terry craves for here like a starving animal is the sight of their tears as they unbox the present. By the end of it all? Beloved will be so vulnerable in front of them they'll feel this is precisely the way things should be, feeling infinitely glad they've Terry there to understand their sensibilities (never opening their eyes to the fact he's caused, fueled and cultivated all of them).

[akallabeth-joie]

The Blue Castle, Chapter 42

Barney is BAAAAACK! Took him long enough

“Redfern had not said anything of the kind, but Uncle Benjamin thought he was that sort of a fellow. Valancy knew he was.” When you’re being a self-serving jerk and manipulating people, but inadvertently get something right and help people instead...

“Rubbing his hands and chuckling, he retreated to the kitchen...” Ok, Uncle Benjamin’s attempt to be a scheming mastermind is just hilarious. As his conundrums are not.

“She wore an ugly old brown-and-blue gingham, having left all her pretty dresses in the Blue Castle.” The same brown gingham she put on in chapter 2, or was this just her old wardrobe staple? Obviously the pretty dresses belong in the happier life of the blue castle and can have no place on Elm Street, but, what was Barney supposed to do with them? How did he find this apparent contradiction between her not packing (she means to come back? she’s not actually moving out?) with her note to the contrary? I’m also now reflecting on Valancy’s luggage. We know she took a trunk and satchel with her to Roaring Abel’s when she first left Elm Street. I can’t find that she explicitly packs or brings anything with her to the Blue Castle (and all her clothes mentioned thereafter, except perhaps for the pair of ‘sensible shoes’, are pretty new things she’s bought for herself), though it would seem out of character for her to just leave her old clothes for Abel to deal with. At the same time, she doesn’t want to clutter up her blue castle, so why would she bring things she doesn’t want there? Perhaps she discarded her unwanted old things after she married and started wearing pretty clothes (and/or the older things wore out over the course of the year). At any rate, she apparently left some old clothes at Elm Street. [Not sure where I was going with this ramble.]

I understand why Barney’s upset she was missing, but I will point out that he was the one who stayed away all day until midnight.

Shaking Valancy is just not cool, and this incident is the one problem I have with Barney.

“Valancy,” he said quietly, “Father couldn’t have told you everything because he didn’t know it. Will you let me tell you—everything?” More exposition time! I like how LMM gave Barney and his father such different perspectives that they can both tell the same story and Valancy gets completely opposite conclusions from it.

It’s sort of weird that everyone Barney meets seems to be determined to tease him for how he’s rich. He mentions the toadies (as well as Ethel), but I want there to be a group of social misfits he can band together with and make friends.

“ I had to believe you loved me—really loved me—not my father’s millions. There was no other reason why you should want to marry a penniless devil with my supposed record. And I was sorry for you. Oh, yes, I don’t deny I married you because I was sorry for you. And then—I found you the best and jolliest and dearest little pal and chum a fellow ever had. Witty—loyal—sweet. You made me believe again in the reality of friendship and love.“ I’m glad these two found eachother, but I also think they’d both benefit from some therapy.

Oof, the conflict between low-self-esteem and implicitly accusing someone of lying to you.

“You darling!” she said. “You do mean it! You do really love me! You wouldn’t be so enraged if you didn’t.” ....I guess? They sort of lost me here. Just kiss and make up already.

“Dear little Doss! He would send for his lawyer right away and alter his will again. Doss should be his sole heiress. To her that had should certainly be given. Mrs. Frederick, returning to her comfortable belief in an overruling Providence, got out the family Bible and made an entry under “Marriages.” Mrs. Stirling and Uncle Benjamin finally do something nice for Valancy, but I’m awarding no points since they’ve doing it for selfish reasons, and won’t actually help Valancy (she’s financially secure now and doesn’t need his money; she’s loved and accepted by Barney and doesn’t need her mother’s grudging approval for it).

No Stirling Scoreboard update, because I don’t think their actions here have any actual effect on Valancy, and are done for purely selfish reasons.

[princesscolumbia]

So as I write this it's the 22nd of July, and that means that I've lost nearly 2 weeks of quality writing time. My goal had been to get through a full month's worth of backlog for Code of Ethics on the Mon./Thurs. release schedule before switching over something else, probably knocking out a short story or two before turning the crank on Goldrush, CO.

That, obviously, isn't happening.

So as my hand is still feeling kinda burny if I hold it wrong and the pain slowly ratchets more and more if I type too much, it looks like I may have just enough time to finish one #AU Roulette 2024 entry before jumping into something else.

If you missed my post on #AU Roulette 2024, here's the story ideas I came up with based on the prompts I got for the event:

Divine Beans - Donut Joe is getting on in years and expanded his offerings from his beloved donuts to include coffee, and in the years since he's catered to many, many customers...but none quite so unusual as the two that showed up on the twentieth anniversary of Princess Twilight's coronation. Big Enough - Adora's retiring. After nearly a decade of hunting down rogues and outlaws, she did one too many jobs that made her feel dirtier than a pair of riding boots at the end of a long ride. She finds a small town that's not likely to have ever heard of her and moves out to live out the rest of her days...but doesn't expect one of the most notorious gang leaders she'd ever faced to be in the same little town. In Plain Sight - Sunset is the producer of the show 'Un/Known,' where the hosts seek to prove or disprove the existence of ghosts and cryptids. The hosts are the ever sensible Applejack, known for her down-to-earth attitude, skepticism of the supernatural, and methodical approach to their investigations and the wildcard Rainbow Dash, ever ready to charge right in and ready to believe in even the wildest supernatural stories. Behind the scenes, Rarity does their make-up and wardrobe. Fluttershy is the animal wrangler, often discovering that a 'haunting' was just a poor critter that wandered where it didn't belong. On both the technical advisory side and the in-field editor angle is Twilight Sparkle, also known to their fans as "SciTwi," who brings a level of lore knowledge and research that boggles even the most die-hard believers in their audience. Pinkie Pie is...there. Nobody's quite sure what she does or how she follows them from shoot to shoot, but she's not on the payroll and apparently is completely oblivious to the fact that she's on a show, she just insists on "hanging out with her friends." To everyone's frustration, she's not a cryptid. What none of the rest know is that Sunset is a cryptid. An alien to this universe, to be specific. She's been able to keep this a secret for years now...but there's a report of a new cryptid appearing in the form of a tall, willowy woman (with "Big Mom energy" according to a local witness) in exactly the small, suburban town she first arrived on this world in, and worse, she suspects she knows exactly who the new 'cryptid' is.

So which of these three short stories should I hammer out in the time between when my hand stops burninating and the end of the month? (I'm leaning toward "In Plain Sight," but you all probably know I'm a total slut for "Momlestia adopts Sunset")

Want to vote? Head on over to my Patreon and let me know in the members-only poll. It's in the free tier, so you don't have to drop any money to pitch in with your opinion.