#calamity-wrought

[dreadseadreams]

gwen tag drop

[darlingofvalyria]

❝I am the Heir's Wife. I bore the Heir his lineage. I will not be swept aside.❞

[ The Prince Jacaerys Velaryon should have known his wife better— or at least, her ire, for when his trysts with the bastard Snow reached the Spiders and soon, the ears of his Princess Consort, rage and war drummed for Winterfell, demanding heads.

—Maestre Kevan, Volume IV of The Bastard Eater, passage chapter under 'The Flame that Sung for the North'. ]

[ +18 MDNI ] [ 10,062 ] [ series masterlist ] | jacaerys velaryon x targaryen aunt!reader (aegon's twin sister), one-sided aegon ii x reader, jace x sara snow

contains— canon divergence - manipulative reader, targcest, smut, angst - post-vizzy t death, rhaenyra is queen - mentions of children, pregnancy, childbirth - allusions to infidelity & character death(s) - targaryen madness, revenge, domestic violence (not jace), unhinge behaviour, intense use of 'bastard', profanity, gaslighting, guilt-tripping - this is basically gone girl, you gone girl jace - dark fic - mentions of depression (aegon ii), allusions to suicide (not reader) - nsfw: oral (f receiving), breeding kink, creampie - no kings, no martyrs, no betas.

a/n— i didn't think i was going to do the sara snow thing, but herewe are. also i just wanted an excuse to go absolutely ape shit. reader gets very intense, like thoroughly unhinged. this is literally me supporting women's wrongs. it is also quite insane that this reached 10k and it's still just the first part lmaooo + comment, reblog & like at will!

"THAT FUCKING BASTARD! THAT GODSDAMNED, WHORE-FUCKING STRONG HALF BREED!"

Your shrieks echo stone and shadow, interrupted only by the things you pick up and hurl. Anything your hands grab, you throw and spit obscenities against, rage and tears ruin your pretty visage. The fury swept past your cherub features, a dragon breaking through the Hightower seams, upending fire and roar from the pits of your being.

"HOW DARE HE?! I GAVE HIM AN HEIR! I BROUGHT HIM PEACE! I BETRAYED—" you roar, pulling your pearl dagger— a gift from your Strong Bastard of a Husband — and throwing it to your vanity mirror, glass shards exploding. "— MY KIN!"

"DAUGHTER, PLEASE!"

Arms wound across your torso—hardened and chain-mail — as you fight against your bounds before a pain flashes to your cheek. Your rage quiets, hard breaths from your lungs. You turn your tear-stained anger to your mother and her palm, fright and terror on her regale visage.

Death of a spouse becomes the Queen Dowager in her pale blue robe and unbound spirals of auburn hair. Peace had begotten a realm that is balanced on the lineage you had produced for the Queen, her heir, and your own, as the new Princess of Dragonstone. With Otto Hightower for evermore banished to Oldtown, Kings Landing had been brought to a flowering kindness.

Queen Rhaenyra's ascension had been a wondrous affair, fit the for the first crowned Queen of the Seven Kingdoms. Not a Queen Consort, not a Queen Regent. An heir who rose for the crown always meant to be hers.

But the calamity that brewed in her ascension... no. You paved the peace. T'was you who wrangled the Great Houses that proved allyship to your twin brother's banner, you who blessed her with tranquility of a rule that will be known for ages that will precede you all.

And now her son... her son dared to destroy everything.

A conversation floats above your head, by your Queen Mother and her sworn shield, the Ser Cole, but you barely hear anything past the ringing in your head.

The Targaryen Madness the sheep so call it, an idle voice, faint and familiar, whispers in the niches of your brain. It has infected you so. It breathes, fuelled by the air wrought by your husband's betrayal. It sings, sweet love. It sings.

"—your grace, I urge to hold her—"

"—she is my daughter, Ser Cole, I am not in danger. Release her."

Justice, the voice shrieks? Screams? But it is so soft in your head, a wail of a memory, a woman or a man? must be had. No dragon falls in such disgrace.

The tight wound over your torso is unleashed but the knight is not far, tensed to cage you, when your mother grasps your elbows as you grab hers, nails digging into the thick fabric of her hem that she still winces, your grip steel-tight.

"My darling, please. I cannot help you if you do not speak what ails you." She brushes her hand desperately across your face, smearing your tears, trying to find the daughter she bore past the savagery and madness that beholds you now. "What has happened?"

You draw a tightened, harsh breath to your lungs, rattling your bones that you quiver in your attempt for sanity.

"I am being shamed, mother," you whisper. Stark, violet eyes meeting the worried round, brown of hers. "The Strong bastard is whoring himself to another, a Northern bastard."

A cackle falls your lips as alarmed gazes are exchanged above your head.

"Y-You cannot say such things aloud, sweet girl," your mother hushes your madness, pulling you close to her chest as she shoots a glance at the door.

Criston checks outside, but only your maids linger. Dyanna presses a finger against her lips, catching the knight's eye, and the rest scatter, surely to make sure that no one that need not know of their mistress' words is within reach. A shiver still runs his spine. He will never get used to the quiet, almost non-verbal way your connection worked and reached. Your Spiders weave webs all around, even as their mistress sunders with rage.

"Mayhaps you are mistaken, for sure the prince is loyal, and he adores you—"

You pull back against her, teeth bared. She flinches and Ser Cole steps forward, wary. "It is the third missive now that I have received. Did you think I would not have confirmed twice— thrice? I didn't believe it the first time! But three people have now confirmed that all this time, in the guise of rallying his mother's cause in the North, he is spending ample time with the Lord Stark's bastard sister. His bastard fucking sister!"

Your mother's horror catches that of Ser Criston's, but your fury is your own, you are a dragon trapped in the ruin of your own making, of the webs you had spun so cleverly to get to this point, and you cannot stop.

"I am the Heir's Wife. I bore the Heir his lineage, my blood spilled the birthing bed for it." A cry leaves your lips as your grief and rage pools like ichor from your chest to the floor. Alicent is torn away from you— your nails had gone through her robe and she had cried in pain, a mimick of your own, a mother to a daughter to a mother to a daughter, a cycle, an Ouroboros — and you fall to the floor, grasping at your chest.

"I will not be swept aside. I will not be ignored."

A gasp falls from your lips as your mind moves to a quiet, still place. The tremble fades, your rage and grief whirls, collects, as you push it all back inside your chest.

Your madness must be sharpened for it be used as a sword.

And you cannot let him be happy in another's arms.

If you cannot drag them to the Hells, sweet dragon, the idle voice hums, hisses? Screeches. Your ancestors— all of those who have succumbed to dreamy madness — appears in the corners of your vision like soldiers. Awaiting for you to join them. Awaiting the blood that you will spill.

Then you must raise the Hells unto Winterfell.

"...my daughter?" Alicent calls, hesitant. Cole hovers but does not approach, standing guard in protection of the Dowager. It breaks her heart to see you this way, a young woman still, much older than she was when she married but only because you had always sought your future. You had always had a hardened scale, far stronger than she.

Even when you made your entrance to the world— the unmeasurable pain of bringing not one, but two heirs into the world, her firstborns, all at once — you had never cried. The maestres, maids, they worried for you, as your twin brother had not stopped crying, so alive and red, raw from the wound of being fresh.

But you... you had not made a sound.

The entire weight of your being— your mind, your emotions — even then, you wrangled them close to your very centre, never letting them stray too far from the edges of your fingertips. As if any release must be made with a perused thought. An incentive of reason.

Even then, you plotted every step you took.

Now, Alicent watches as her firstborn daughter suctions all her emotions— that Targaryen madness that plagued the blood of her husband, his ancestors — and made her ploy.

Against the husband that dared make a fool of her.

The silence beckons nightmare. Old fear flickers inside the Queen Dowager.

"Where are my daughters?"

"What?"

"My daughters," you repeat, a hair's breadth louder than the first time you spoke. Your eyes flutter upward. The deadened gaze curled Alicent's heart in fear. "Where are they?"

"In the nursery, with the twins and Maelor. Helaena and Aegon are watching them."

You offer your hand up mutely, and Cole exchanges one last, lingering look with the Dowager, before offering his own. You stand up, thank him softly, and brush and clean up your face to the best of your ability. An utter calmness over your visage.

"Tell no one of what I had told you," you say, fixing your hair and rubbing the red from your cheeks. One minute there is madness, the next there is nothing. There is only a girl. A woman. A princess. "No one knows apart the three of us, and if you ever decide, Ser Criston, that nigh is the glorious time for you to betray my mother or I, know that the last thing thing oyu will fear is the Stranger's hand when I am through with you."

Your mother shouts your name, horrified. "What are you thinking? What are you plotting?"

You cup Alicent's face, smiling ever sweet. "Your innocence will keep you safe, mother. All I ask, for the heart you keep for your children, that you keep this between sealed lips and tilted chin. You know nothing, yes?"

"... Yes. Nothing."

You place a tender kiss on your mother's head. "Keep Daenera and Aemma safe for me. Aegon and I are flying to Dragonstone promptly. Sweet Helaena does ever so get overwhelmed by watching all of the children by herself."

"D-Dragonstone?"

Your sweet smile touched with poison, stretches. "It is high time I take a dragon for myself, don't you think so?"

While an insecure obsession had fraught your younger brother about claiming a dragon, you had met it with indifference.

For how can you not mourn the loss of Aemond's sight, staring in quiet horror the entire time as the maestre did his best to salvage the muck mess of blood and nerve endings, before the old man had shaken his head, and you turned to the small bowl that contained your brother's eye, unable to look at anything else.

Not even when your mother's rage was met with apathy and anger, her demands for justice nothing more than a woman's insanity, a mother's grief that must be swept away, tucked under a chin and a sadness she will never get rid of.

"Do not mourn me, mother. It was a fair exchange. I may have lost an eye, but I gained a dragon."

Your soft-hearted, darling, baby brother. None of his words had thawed the freezing of your heart, the grief under the swell of your breastbone.

Your own mourning was kept between teeth and tongue, as you had slept with your siblings that night. The four of you, tucked under the wing of the other, Aemond close to your chest as possible, as quiet, hot tears ran down your face. Every moan of pain or whimper he made in his sleep tore at each new vein inside of you.

"Dragons are the symbol of our House's power," Aegon had once said, windswept hair you tried to tame with your fingers, smelling fresh of Sunfyre and winds.

"And yet, there were no eggs in our child beds." He stiffened while you smiled sadly, curling your twin's hair away form his face, making him presentable and dusting the bout of sand that managed to find his leathers. You had been scolded long before by your grandsire of how you coddle Aegon, how you defend him, mother him more than your mother ever could, but you cannot stop. You were meant to care for him, tethered you once were inside your mother's womb together, you hold him steady now.

Whenever he was lost, whenever his sadness overtook him, wrung your brother dry of life, you bat the Stranger's hand and bring him back.

"But we have proved them wrong," he insisted. "All of us, even Aemond with Vhagar— the war queen, Visenya's dragon — we have claimed ours. Daeron all the way Oldtown has Tessarion, even Helaena has Dreamfyre. And yet you insist..."

You wound your arms over his torso, keeping him close in a silly hug where you sway and dance him around. A laugh escaped him while you inhaled the scent of smoke, soot, and that grime stench of beast.

Aegon on his good days lacked the bottle-edge of wine, of cheap salts from the waft of the soiled, Silk Streets.

This was your brother. No one else.

"I fare better without one," you whispered in his ear. "I appear innocent, sweet almost, without a beast in my command. They look at me with nothing but pity and the urge to protect me. Our father likes me like this, his poor, lovely daughter without a dragon of her own, listening so intently to his histories of Old Valyria. Our sister is eased, as one daughter is plagued by dreams and struggles with the real world, while the other cannot even claim a dragon of her own. Poor princess, Hightower blood must have thickened in her veins. She too, is no threat."

You pulled back, smiling at him. "They like me better like this. Pitiful, compliant, nothing but a sweet and pretty flower that sways in the Spring breeze. A beautiful decoration but no more."

He rubbed a thumb on your arm, a worry knot on his forehead. Aegon adored you but he struggled to piece together where your plot lies. You are a web-spinner, forever dancing out of reach, catching prey and lengthening your intricacies. "Is that why you hide your training with Aemond alone? Ser Criston is mother's sworn shield, he would not mind—"

"I will not place my secrecies to a knight with a soiled cloaked," you snorted. "No matter how tall he stands beside our mother. I trust no one but my kin. And I know that no matter how heavy you drink, sweet Aeg of mine, my secrets are your own."

He took your hand, kissing the back of it, stare impregnable. "As your blood is my own, our fire is one flame. I go where you tell me to."

You kissed his cheek, a reward, laughing. He smiles proudly at the sound. At this time, you dangled yourself to your brother as bait as the pressure from your grandsire to make him King started rising. You had been given notice that he had been talking to House Lannister, Wylde, even some Riverland lords.

You did not mind becoming Aegon's second wife. Just as his namesake, he will have his Rhaenys and Visenya. Unlike the Conqueror however, he would adore his Visenya more than a true flower. Helaena would enjoy that far better.

"And if I tell you to jump?" you half-purred.

"I will ask you how high."

Memories and choices break and tide as you scramble for hold on the rocky cliff face. Dragonmont in the dark is a behemoth beast, a screech or two breaking like lightning crackles, or the familiar drum beat of wings before the silence consumes once more. The stench of fire, of beasts and carcasses helps cloak the darkened night.

"Udligon ñuha brōzagon, Answer my call," you hiss into fraudulent emptiness, hands gripping rocky edges until your blood beads, "you fucking lizards."

"Have you gone mad!?"Aegon shouted, trying to pace with your run to the dragonpit.

A rocky laugh broke out from your being, not deigning that with a reply. Aegon huffed angrily.

"Alright, tell me this then. How are you so sure I'm not just about to put you on a bleeding volcano to die? We claim your dragon in the morn, sister. First thing before we break our fast. I'm sure by then, Vermithor or—"

You whipped your head around, pulling halt. "I leave tonight to claim my dragon. Whether it is you and Sunfyre who gets me there, or Aemond and Vhagar, is no matter to me. I will claim one tonight. It is up to you to decide now if we tell Aemond or not."

Aemond, whose anger is wounded tight, the barest excuse for war always at the edge of his hum. The misstep at Storm's End had cost him everything. Had cost your mother everything. Queen still, Alicent Hightower had bent the knee and offered her life in exchange for mercy. Before Rhaenyra passed judgement, Viserys I had passed.

It didn't matter that you had ensured a higher dosage from the Harrenhal witch in his usual milk of the poppy. Your spiders moving with ease through the silent channels you had established long before your own flowering.

The Red Keep had scrambled, the Heir with it. It was enough time for Lucerys to have come out of the red, confirmed to live through the worst of it without as much as a broken bone. Arrax however, had been badly maimed, and would no longer take flight. But he and his rider would live. Aemond would live. Alicent would have her son. Rhaenyea will have hers, and the crown.

Kevan had done his duty unto you while you settled the storms in Dragonstone. You rewarded him handsomely.

Aegon sighed. He too, would like your honour avenged, but not for the sake of war. "As you wish, sister. I hope you know what you're doing and I am not about to send you to your death."

Just like what you did to your mother, you reached forward and cupped his face. If before, your touch stills his heart and floods his cavities with warmth, a flash of fear strikes the twin son at the eerie smile on your face.

"Skoros morghot vestri? What do we say to the god of death?"

Aegon blinked. "Tubī daor. Not today."

You smiled. "Trust me, sweet Aeg. It is not my death the Stranger will take. Not until the fjords of the North are at my mercy."

"Iksan kesīr sir naejot māzigon ñuha sikagon pakto! I am here now to claim my birth right!" Your scream echoes and falls, repeating back to you. There is a hum, like an electric current that sizzles and pops inside your blood and marrow, and you scramble higher and higher on the rock. Your blood does not sing for the dragon lairs, but above. Up and up, jagged edges cut your skin and dress, the wind whipping with sea mist, but nothing, no one, can clamour you as you reach the peak.

At first you see nothing but darkness and hollow sounds. But you let your eyes adjust, a hiss breaking out of your dry lips as you stumble. You look down. What you first thought were rocks and wayward bones of cattle is bigger.

Whale? No.

Dragon. Dragon bone.

You look and will every sense that your eyes do not. The smell that is drowned— iron. Bones bigger than a person. Than cows and whales. Bones of fearsome beasts. Darkness moves, taking form, more than shadow. Scales hewn rough and jagged, as if stone themselves. Midnight black moving with the gentlest of sighs.

As soon as you realise what— or who — is in front of you, the eyes open with an intelligent gleam. Your heart jolts at the emerald irises that gaze back at you, slitting at the appearance of a human.

'The stench of death follows him', the voice of an old keeper hums into your ear. You no longer remember who told this to you, but the words ring true in your memory. 'Scales of midnight, as if hewn from darkness and death. A harbinger, your grace, an omen of the darkest nightmares.'

"Rytsas. Hello." You smile, ever sweet, ever charming.

This is a thread you had never felt before. Not one of your own making, but something older. A golden thread that led the eyes of Daenys the Dreamer. That spun the ties of Aegon the Conqueror. The voices that herded your madness had gone quiet in the mad rush to get here, but now their presence thickens. Words you cannot hear, nor understand, flood the silence as dragon met rider for the first time.

Keepers and historians have called him he, but every bone in your body tells you that the being before you is a she.

And wouldn't that make sense? A cannibalistic being is a woman?

She opens her maw, only ever slightly, smoke and fire crackling out of it. Molten lava in the belly of her insides tease the cool, night air and warms you.

Her version of a smile. Hello, she seem to say.

"Māzīs. Come," you say, giggling. "Dohaerās. Serve."

That night, you took your first flight.

That night, the Cannibal took her first flight with her first— and only — rider as well.

❝ . . . It is said that the formerly named "The Cannibal" had been entranced by the hunger of his new— first and evermore — rider. Prince Aegon the Elder who had escorted his twin sister that very night with Sunfyre, had looked up in alarm and fright to a maddened screech. Excitement and laughter pouring out from the newly bonded Dragon and Rider had soon turned fear into awe.

Gaelithox, she had been named as they had ridden until dawn broke by the rider who loved her 'till the end of their days, was said to have seen a mirror in Her Grace. The fathomless hunger for blood and organ from the same bodies of their kin. For Gaelithox ever hungers and satisfies for the same meat as her, at the height of her grief and ire that fuelled the Queen Consort to climb Dragonmont by hand, she too hungered for the throats of her traitorous blood.

Gaelithox will only have one rider in her whole life, as she found no same twin soul as akin in the Bastard Eater Queen. Their bond moved as if two bodies beheld one soul.

She shied from humans, and oft found too rough with other dragons. Vhagar was an exception, oft seen acting as an elder sister to the Queen's dragon when neither royal rode them and played in the skies. Smaller dragons were forbidden to approach her however, nor was she allowed in the dragonpit after almost devouring the flightless Arrax.

She died two moons after the Queen's death, delivering her final flames for her rider and would never more breathe her infamous green flames akin to Wildfire, ordered by the Crowned Heir, Princess Daenera Velaryon. It is said that the princess attempted to bond with the cannibalistic dragon but it refused.

The dragon spent her last moons in heartbreak, oft seen in Dragonstone and the Red Keep, circling her rider's most favourite places. Her final resting place is at the very top of Dragonmont from whence the Queen claimed her. It is said that the Queen's crown, the one the King Jacaerys had gifted her after the birth of their first sons, the Princes Laenor and Gaemon, is said to be placed there, as well as a portion of her ashes.

It is said that the King and the Queen's twin brother, the Prince Aegon, personally made the trek in remembrance.

It is widely suspected that Aelyx, Princess Daella's dragon, the youngest child of the King and Queen, may have been Gaelithox's only existing hatchling for he too is made of rough, midnight scales. The dragon that bred with her remains to be unknown. ❞

—Maestre Kevan Noratz, Volume X of The Life and Lies of the Emerald Flame, passage chapter under 'The Time of Hunger: Gaelithox'.

You leave Gaelithox to a mournful goodbye on Dragonstone, pressing your forehead against her hard, scaly head, promising to come back, of exchanging her diet for fat, juicy whales, for more wind-whipped rides, before riding back on Sunfyre with Aegon. The younger dragon would not rise from the beaches in fear of the cannibalistic elder, but you made ensuring promises to teach Gaelithox not to chew your dearest brother's dragon.

You had gone most of your life without the feeling of a bond beneath you, warm and alive and wild, and the roar and stench that though new, felt so familiar in your ribcage— you will fly again. And with your brothers beside you. With Helaena and her lovely Dreamfyre.

To think they had taken this from you too, to placate them. To play into their hands like a mewling kitten.

No more.

It is paces before fast is about to break when you both touch back down to Kings Landing. The Keep busying with its occupants, servants and maids bolstering with quickened feet to ensure the lords and royals are awakened with full, poached meals, dresses and coats readied for their lords and ladies, a new, glorious day under the Reign of the Black Queen.

"What now?" Aegon asks, trying to keep with your pace but he is fatigued, failing to stop his yawns. The excitement of last night had come upon him like a fog, and he is missing his bed. Hells, he is missing the bed he stays with his wife if it meant he would get a full night's sleep in the hours of the day.

"Now, we speak nothing of what happened."

He turns to you, frowning. "Just like that?"

"Just like that." You beam, nodding in favour of soldiers and maids who bow in reverence to the Crown Princess. You know you smell of dragon and night, and you need a bath. And to talk to Dyanna before you seek your daughters. "I will need time and people. The board must still be set for me to perfectly execute what I have in store."

"Alright." He yawns again. "I'll be in my quarters, passed out, if you need me. Please do not need me until sup."

You laugh breathlessly, grabbing his hand and giving it a wet kiss. "I will give you your rest, be assured. Kirimvose, dōna lēkia, Thank you, sweet brother."

The words are simple, said in a quiet murmur heavy with love and meaning. Aegon presses a loving kiss to your head, unable to stop himself winding an arm around you.

"Syt ao, va moriot, ñuha prūmia. For you, always, my heart."

As you break to each other's chambers— his, to sleep, you, already meeting Yna and requesting for a bath — you don't notice the lurker that watched the intimate moment between twins, humming in amusement before it moves to follow you.

Back in your quarters— your marriage quarters as Jacaerys had requested that you forgo having your own, not wishing to part with you — the maids are already busying themselves airing the room, moving to follow your usual routine. The only thing breaking it is the tub now in the centre.

"Thank you," you say to Yna as she picks out the pins from your hair, shrugging off your dress in the process as soon as the maids had untangled the lace behind you.

"Call for Dyanna," you tell them as they bow and leave, the door clicking softly behind them. Plans must be made. Bath for now.

With the world stifled for a second, left with only you and your thoughts, you plunge your body under too-hot water, sighing  against the aches and pains in your body. Dragon-riding is a new endeavour to your muscles, and though enjoyable, was still too new.

You sigh as tears fall from your eyes, blinking exhaustedly against soft, humming daylight. You had always known that love, as it is, is a maiden's folly. A foolish, hapless play meant to fool young girls into thinking the world is kind; a pretty place.

It was an even farther thought from you, a princess of the realm. At a young age, it has been drilled to you that your womb is a rare commodity. Your body has never been your own, a piece meant to be moved in a bigger game that you are used for, not play.

You weren't stupid.

If there's a few things Otto Hightower had ever granted you, apart from gifting you his keen prowess in moving power beneath your fingertips, in hungering for more, for better— it is understanding what each person is, who they can be, how you can move them. A flatter, a flair, a push. As a man, there is much to be desired about your grandsire; he used people, used family to pursue power, but you can't truly fault him for that as you were the same.

You just took better care of the people under your wing.

And for Jace, you had banished him.

The worst part, you knew there was a good, fat chance you would care for the princeling. He was a kind man, a sweet man, and with a guiding hand, you could forge yourself the best husband for yourself as much as you can mould a great king and a wonderful father. Women's hands are ever carved to mould and prod men. We stand behind, a presence or a hand, an echo of power.

But your Jace had surpassed it all, and in the moons leading up to your present day, to giving him his heirs, two beautiful daughters, the promised full Valyrian colouring in the silver hair in Daenera, your eldest, the wide, violet gaze in Aemma— the name of his mother's mother, a request of him that you had kindly, graciously fucking agreed to — of course there is a part of you, the girlish, tender heart that you long thought you had buried to get here, would fall for the brown-eyed, wondrous man.

You sink deeper into the tub, sighing as you let yourself unravel—

When you feel it. A presence in your room. It's soft. Silent. Not a lot would feel as such, but as paranoid as you are, as you keep your spiders clean and pretty with your dewy-eyed webs— you know better.

Your mind runs with ideas on who it might be, and come to a few people. No true name rises. The Red Keep is flooded with spies and traitors. You test your luck, sitting up on the tub, raising an arm over the lip of it and flicking water with your fingertips.

"If you are here to kill me, I'm afraid it will be a lost cause."

He laughs, sardonic and edged and familiar, jetting a tingle down your spine.

Well. There's getting a calm bath.

"Perceptive as always, niece," he says, heavy footfalls approaching now that he has been caught. "I'm just here to say hello."

You raise your eyes, mouth curled but unsmiling at the man who acts as the biggest thorn to your plots. Daemon Targaryen has never fallen through your webs, on guard against your flatter, your push, or your flair. Of course, taking the position of his daughter might have forever burnt that road, but you would think he'd ease up just a little bit when his wife, the Queen, had warmed to you considerably.

Unlike your mother, you had never been hostile to your bitch of an elder sister. Just like your plots for Aegon and Jacaerys, and nodding along to thread your father had started but abandoned, foolishly thinking the realm would follow without him fully ensuring your sister's claim to the throne— you carefully maintained a polite farce with Rhaenyra.

Ultimately, this became a boon to you, as she had responded positively to your abrupt marriage to her son, even reminding her deranged guard dog of their own marriage. The cream to your lemon cake had been when you birthed Aemma, the Queen's most favourite grandchild thus far. When she was a babe, Rhaenyra was never far; almost, always holding your daughter, cooing at her cheeks, remarking her likeness to her namesake with pure fondness.

But Daemon Targaryen knew, in the deepness of his marrow, that there is something wrong with you.

"Hello," you answer primly. He laughs, leaning against the passage to your open balcony. "We could have had this elating greeting at fast, if you wish to break it with me and my own."

He scoffs, unable to hide his disdain at the thought. It breaks his stare of your naked visage. Men. "I would rather jump to the fighting pits, good daughter."

"How rude. Is that all?" You meet his gaze steadily, tilting your head. "If it is not obvious yet, good father, I am bathing."

An amused smirk. "I can see that." Lecherous fucking geezer. "No matter. I just have a... curious thought, a wonder I suspect you may be able to answer. See. Truly odd it is, for the keepers to alert me this morning that Sunfyre had taken a ride past the Hour of Owl." Your heart thuds in your ribcage and you do your best to keep your expression mildly irritated. "Not with one, drunken rider, but with another. It had taken them hours, only coming back when morning had already presented in the air."

He steps forward, slow, menacing, until he reaches the edge of your tub and crouches. Your gazes are still unmatched in height, defiant as yours might be.

"The distinct smell wafts them, a Keeper said, and one suspects that though one dragon left last night, two might have come back this morning for he had seen another fly away." His fingers dips into the water, swirling the steam without breaking eye contact. "I wonder if you know anything about it, darling niece of mine."

The mocking emphasis is not lost on you. If the Queen is the Realm's Delight, you were Darling of the Realm. A sweet, merry girl, the secondborn daughter of Viserys I who frequently fought for the plight of the small folk, who gathered friends of all kinds of lords and ladies no matter the standing of their houses to her own, visiting far lands and charming every person in any room. Who made any feast brighter, always sparkling, always the darling.

Less of a dragon, more of a fairytale.

You sit up, leaning, baring your breasts completely to him as you pull yourself up on the ledge he is crouched from. He leans back, only slightly, as you smile demurely. Sweet. Tart. On the edge of pulling his head and hitting it against the copper tub.

"I am unsure of what you suspect, or is accusing me of, kepus, uncle," you purr and there's a twitch in his mouth, a widen in his irises— men are so fucking simple — "I had been feeling down last night, as my husband, as you know, is beyond my reach at the moment as he rallies alliances for the good of the realm. My brother had simply offered to take me out riding, trying to quell my loneliness with an excitable flight I had never been afforded."

You tilt your head. "Even if there had been a dragon binded to my own, why why would I not regale the realm with news of my success? I have longed for a dragon of my own, but alas, I have not quite succeeded where most of the family have." You pout. His eyes flicker. "Mayhaps I am more Hightower than I am Targaryen."

A huff leaves his lips, the amusement in his smile arching to his dark, dark gaze. Before you can react, his hand had comes forward to hold your chin in a tight grip, your jaw aching soon enough at the fingers that dig against your skin, wanting to bruise, to break.

Though a tremble passes your body, you keep his stare, gritting your teeth as the pad of his thumb brushes your lips. Moments and desires thrum between a charged hatred.

The lust is twisted from wanting to fuck you to wanting to kill you. The line is not simple. Maybe that is your fate together.

But he can't. You are well too ingrained in his family now, loved by the people he cared about. You are untouchable. For now. This is a warning, waiting for you to stutter, to show your hand. Any show of your true intentions... he is more than happy to swing Dark Sister across your throat.

He releases you without another word, standing up and leaving through the front door, the door clicking shut.

You sink back into the bath, letting the water engulf you.

Your daughters are moons apart in birth, and there are only a few differences between them that people oft remarked they could be twins. Daenera is taller, spindly. Built like Aemond when he was younger. Her hair is spun moon and eyes of mullish blue. It reminds you of Daeron's eyes. You had named Daenera yourself, a gruelling birth that took the entire night. You promised Jacaerys he could name the second. He had chosen Aemma for a girl, Laenor for a boy.

Not a few moons later, you were with child again. Your husband pinked at the cheeks at the chiding from his family. When she cried into the afternoon sun—Aemma was born mid day, during a council meeting — he pain did not stop the laugh that came out of your mouth from the horrified expression from the Master of Coin as your water broke.

Aemma had a sweetheart face, cheeks much fatter than her older sister's, with a yellowish tinge to her hair, curlier too, reminding you of Aegon. And Aemma laughed more, her deep, violet eyes always half closed as she exploded in giggles and bright, sunshine happiness.

Sons they might not be, but you had given heirs for the throne. And for them, you would do anything to keep their futures intact. Bond with a dragon, face the Rogue Prince, upheave Winterfell. Anything.

You flounce to the nursery where you know the two would be, smiling sweetly at every person you pass as they bow in reverence. Most wore sights of confusion, their greedy eyes and wagging tongues drinking in the deep, emerald glisten of your gown.

It's an old dress, one you keep in the corner of your collection. It isn't as if you had forgo the colours of your mother's house, but playing court meant every movement, even the clothes you wear, can be meaningful. And since your marriage, your Jace liked you in Velaryon colours.

"A goddess come to bless," he gasped against your collarbone, keeping your legs high on his waist as he rutted into you before his teeth sunk on your skin. As newlyweds go, there is not a lot of teasing to be had for your husband to curl against you in a darkened alcove. Merely wearing his favourite colour on your skin has him panting like a dog. His favourite dress is a seafoam blue that dragged longer against the ground in a soft, almost-gossamer material with a silver belt.

Enticing him never took long, but you enjoyed the dance presented. You enjoyed the dark hunger that filled him until he grabbed you to take you because he just had to take you.

The fresh wound slices deeper as you imagine all the things Jacaerys is doing to the so called Sara Snow. The emerald green of your gown shimmers with your anger.

"Fucking bastards," you can't help but say aloud, nodding at the guards posted on the nursery as you hear the squeals of your daughter and the calm, even voice of your brother.

"Muña! Mother!" Aemma squeals, untangling herself from being pressed against Aegon's side as the children— Daenera and Jaehaera — cuddle around him, before running to you. Helaena is on the floor, entertaining baby Maelor. Your mother, hands twisting against her own, stands vigil by the window, staring far ahead.

You catch your secondborn, giggling as you pressed kiss after kiss on her face.

"I see everyone has started without me. Where is Jaehaerys?"

"You were late, sodjisto, aunt," Jaehaera grins gummily. Jahaera is only a year older than Daenera. Your daughters, five and a half and five respectively. "Jaehaerys is with kepus, uncle. They are training."

"Smart girl." You meet your brother's gaze, whose eyes had notably been staring at your dress, mouth turned down. "Why don't you three play with Helaena? I shall speak about Name Day gifts for your Uncle Joffrey for a bit, hm?"

As Aemma shrieks something about cakes, and Daenera dutifully kissing your cheek in greeting before she takes Jaehaera's hand, you turn to your brother and mother.

"Aemond?" you ask softly, keeping your voice out of earshot. Alicent shakes her head. You nod. "Good. We don't want him inciting a war before I have mine properly planned."

As the Dowager draws in a sharp inhale, Aegon grabs your hands, the worry pulled taunt in his eyebrows. "Are you seriously contemplating war, sister? Isn't there a better way to punish them?"

"What punishment does a man regale in?" you hiss, stepping close to him. "Or the Queen's heir for the bloody matter? When Aemond nearly killed Lucerys, and he confronted me as if I had ordered Vhagar to tear through his brother, I thought I had put to bed any doubts in our marriage. It seems that men stray, regardless. My daughters may be his heir now, but what is to say that bastard wildling he's found himself cock deep in produces a son? Will he shame me with a mistress? Or will he shame me with a second wife?"

Your mother's lips tightens, her fingers paling at how tight she is gripping her nerves.

"Bastard or not, if he takes her to wife, I will be nothing. Make that babe a son, and the realm will rally for it. Daenera is his heir. My daughters will not be forgone. I will not be pushed aside. This is mercy, brother," you say softly, tucking a stray curl behind his ear. "My last one. It requires time, moons, to unfurl. It requires seeding doubt and unfathomable inadequacy. Better if Aemond is none the wiser, Helaena the same. But I will need both of you for this to work. It is the only time I will ever ask. For me. For my daughters."

"And you will punish Winterfell with a war?" your mother asks, frown pulled deep. "That is the plan?"

"I will not. I won't do such a thing so blatant, mother, you know me better than that. But this is my last mercy, and it will be the last. For the next time he offends me so, I do not care if Rhaenyra feeds me to Syrax. I will put a dagger through his heart, heir or not."

The Prince Jacaerys comes back not a week later. Though he comes back to the same castle with the same occupants— your shiny new threads gleam. The stage has been set, a play ready to act. You had sent more spiders in the North, keeping a close eye to every blasphemy your husband has been enjoying in the absence of his duties, and as the rage in you quietly grew with each new whisper, your determination hardens.

You mark each indescretion. You keep a tally.

You count for each fall your blow will land on him.

Vermax lands with a screech and a heavy thump, your husband leaping off him with a grin on his face, matching the one you own, waving your arm joyously with Aemma in your arm and Daenera beside you, holding to your skirt as she grinned at her father.

Aemma wiggles under your hold, and you let Jace get close enough before you set her down, laughing, "Okay, okay!" Her laughter carries through as she scrambles like a bull to her father. A squeal peals out of her as Jace picks her up just in time and tosses her in the air.

"Want to meet kepa, father, sweet girl?" you whisper to Daenera, running a hand down her hair before she nods, breaking out into her own sprint, hugging her father as he greets them with laughter and kisses.

You let them have their time, and this, at least, eases your heart truthfully. A kind reminder that Jace adores his daughters.

You stay at the edge of the entrance, your too-wide grin softens into a smile. You were dramatic, nothing new about that, but even in the pale, pearl blue of your dress in silky, Myrish lace, the emeralds in your heavy, golden belt winks. Green ribbons twisted in your hair alongside fresh flowers. When the trio of your family treks toward you, silver-haired babes clinging to your dark haired prince, you serve a wink at the girls and they untangle themselves from their father while you stepped forward.

A choreographed dance, not giving him time to think. To pause.

Every step is calculated, every item on your body— the silk, the small seahorse that locks your dress behind you, the tint on your lips to the oil in your hair and body — is made to perform. You engulf him in you as if you want to suffocate his senses, your arms wrapping around him with sweet kisses pressing on his face, his neck.

Most in the dragonpit looked away, others, scandalously amazed and enchanted, watch as the princess is undeniably enthralled with her lord husband.

His laughter rumbles across his body, infecting your own, smelling of dragonback and crisp winds. You wonder if your nose is more heightened, you would be able to smell his whore in him, but you don't. It's just him. Your Jace.

Your body moulds against his as his arms tightens around you. When you lean back, you sweetly press a chaste kiss on his lips, grinning.

"What is this?" he huffs a laugh, meeting your doeful gaze. Your fingers curl around his chin, his cheek, idly tapping and touching as if you are committing so much newness to memory.

"Kostagon iā ābrazȳrys daor jaelagon zirȳla valzȳrys? Can a wife not want her husband?" you ask softly, pressing a few more kisses before sucking the last one just under his ear. His body shudders. You hide your smirk. "Skori ēza issare qrīdrughagon tolī bōsa? When he has been away too long?"

A yearning look tints your gaze from under your lashes, and you have to stifle the winning smirk as guilt pinches his face.

"My apologies, my wife. I did not mean to be away from you for long. From the girls." As his eyes flick to his daughters, your mask momentarily sharpens into clear distaste. The urge to dig your fingers into his eyes until he is bleeding and screaming under you is one you tamper with great distress.

Did not mean...

Did not mean to have a dalliance with another woman?

Did not mean to fall into bed with a fucking bastard, you insidious cunt, while I await here with your heirs?

Your anger thrums, nestled deep in your heart, it breathes. You school your face the moment he turns back to you, bringing your hands to his lips, kissing each finger with reverent tenderness. His brown eyes smoulder, rubbing your bare— irises widening — back.

"If you wish it, I can be on my knees for my apologies, my princess."

Your mouth curls. "I'm afraid that might have to be quite later, my prince."

"Huh?"

"The Dowager Queen hoped to congratulate you on your successful campaigning. Reaching as far as the North so frequently, we planned a feast for your return." Eyes shinning, you cup his face. You hope the guilt eats him raw from the inside out. Like worms. Like termites. Hungry, hungry, hungry. "We have never been more proud of you, I have never been more proud of you."

You laugh brightly, ignoring the way he squeezed you just a bit harder that mere second the same time his eyes tightened. "The moment I told the girls of it, they had begged to dance with you." Then you bit your lip, frowning slightly. "I... I understand if you are tired, 'tis a long journey after all, I did try to tell them you might want to rest, we can sneak you—"

"No, no, my heart, of course I would be happy to, I— I want nothing more." He brings you close, face disappearing into your neck. "Thank you. I love you."

You hum, carding your fingers through his hair. "As I love you."

For the rest of the feast, you dance just at the edges of his fingertips, ensuring that you permeated his sights and senses despite it. A game. A dance. When he thanks revelries who congratulate him, who ask him of his adventures, you proudly stand beside him, dutiful as the wife that you are, spearing him with compliments as much as you can. Hands squeezing his arm, your oils swallowing him with your smell.

When dinner came, you take chances massaging his thigh, sliding a salacious grin that had him blushing, ever so sweet, green— making you wonder what kind of fucking bastards do that he finds your attention so swallowing.

You don't let up.

Whenever he, in turn made a move, you sidestep, flutter a smirk, a wink; always escaping, letting him grow frustrated as the night went on.

Your one respite from taunting him had been when he danced with his daughters, making a gallant show of asking them, even Jaehaera. Giggles and spins, the ladies of the court fawn and coo.

Even now, you're making him to be the perfect man. The endearing husband, the wondrous father, the brilliant prince, the perfect lord.

To execute your plan, it must be made with a surgical precision. A slice that guts him to his knees, that breaks his spirit and quenches the whispering, wicked madness nestling with your ire. On another cheek, he must remain upright and upstanding, as to keep your daughters' future in perfect order.

You catch the domineering gaze of Daemon Targaryen, idle as he is, on the side of his distracted Queen, talking to a highborn lady. You don't look away as you toast him your cup of Arbour Red before you pucker your lips for a taste. Your eyes move to where your husband is already looking, flushed red and sweaty from all the dancing, your girls, preening and giggling around him.

You tilt your chin at him, a challenge in your gaze, before you slowly pull your lips away from your wine, stained red.

His throat bobs.

It will be a long, arduous game. Full of pitfalls and tightened webbing. One trip can kill you. But once the machinations are in order, once everything and everyone is in their proper places... oh, you cannot wait for the dance the dragons will make.

A flutter, a simpered footstep. Then a rustle of a dress as one bows.

"My lady," Dyanna greets behind you.

"Hm?"

"The spiders in the ice have met the pup in the snow."

"And?"

"The pup is not suspicious, in fact, they might go as far as to say that the pup is lonely. Though others largely understand her existence... no one likes a bastard."

You snort. "No, they don't, do they?"

"The wolf cares for the pup though, and is largely protective of his only sister."

"Hm. Complicated, but not impossible. Have Meera change the tone of my missive. A softer edge. Sweet but not overtly. Ensure the prerogative of politeness. Then have it sent to the Rookery. The proper channels."

You sigh, taking the edge of your braid and twisting through the ribbons your maid tangled between them. Tonight, you had elected Targaryen colours. A black dress akin to scales and a low, exposed back and dipping front, held together in red ribbons and silver chains. One that might be too on the nose, but the constant, feverish stares from your husband made it worth it.

"We have to ensure a good relationship with the Warden of the North, don't you think so?" You have not looked away from your husband since your maid came, and as he whispered something in Daenera's ear, nodding off to her grandmother with Aemma towed, he turned towards you, one stride after another.

"Precisely what I thought, milady."

"Go," you order her for the last time, giving her your cup, just before Jacaerys reaches you.

Game, set.

Worshipping you has always been something Jace excelled at. At the least, his cock was much larger than most, and without the preparation of his tongue and mouth, it burned. At most, he oft found himself holding your shaking thighs, your head and shoulders left on the bed as he feasted on you like a man starved, hungered for your nectar, the sounds you make, and the shaking of your body as you reached your peak on his tongue.

"J-Jace, please, I—" Your breath stutters, a hiccup escaping your mouth, but he is not letting up. On his knees as only a lordling can with his back straight, he is holding your thighs, your lower back, eating your cunny for the third time of the night.

As soon as he had reached you, he grasped your waist, whispering against your hair in a rumbled groan, "You are torturing me so, my wife. We leave. Now."

"Now?" you echoed, amused. "This is a feast in your honour."

"My honour is already hanging by a thread. The revelry will go on without us. I want to have my fill of you."

And fill he had. He didn't even wait to get you out of your dress before he had pushed your skirt upward, gone on his knees, and got his tongue inside of you.

Now, you are overwhelmed, overstimulated as you are hazy, gripping the wrecked sheets as your peak reached you once more. A strangled, breathy cry of his name falls between your lips as your back arched impossibly so, and instead of letting up, this seemed to fuel him harder, the muscle of his mouth working harder inside of your cunt, hands digging into your flesh to keep you steady.

It builds with a stimulation unending, and just as you're on the throes of your last high, it builds again, quick and fast this time, shuddering gasps of, "o-oh gods, g-gods, Jace!" is the last thing you are able to shout before your fourth peak breaks against the shudders of your last one, your wetness exploding, and you start crying before he lets up.

Your blubber becomes laughter, and he is soft as he lies you down, massaging your thighs as you twitched. He hovers above you, running gentle hands across your arms, kneading through skin, before he reaches your face. He's still in most of his clothes, his long white shirt and breeches, but his mouth is covered in your wetness before he wipes it, obscene in the prettiness of his face and messy locks from where you had tugged and grabbed.

He presses a gentle kiss to your cheek, so close to your body, all too tangled in your soul, and can feel his hard cock upright and wanting against your belly, but he pays it no mind. Concern mars his features as he brushes down your hair.

"Are you alright, my love? Too much?"

You shake your head, brushing your hand down his chest. "N-no, I am well. I just never did that before."

He smiles, kissing your closed eyelids before he brings you close to his chest, cuddling you deep. "You deserve all the pleasure I can give you," he says against your hair. "I have been gone far too long. Consider it my apology."

You hum, eyes open. "Apology for what? You were doing your duty, nothing more, ñuha zaldrīzes, my dragon." You feel him stiffen as you keep your voice soft, caring. "I understand duty far better than you. It is what I love most about you."

You look up, taking his chin between your fingertips as you stared at those warm, brown eyes. "You, who carries your honour like a shield and your duty like a sword. I feel as if the gods had blessed me a husband far better than I should have had for I know I do not deserve you."

"H-how can you say that? You are—" He swallows. "— You are the most excellent woman. The mother of my children. You... You are the one I do not deserve."

Your head falls back against his chest, gripping his shirt. Only by your teeth had you stop yourself from screaming.

You curdle, you keep, you poise.

"My love?"

But you pay him no mind, pushing him on his back as you straddle him, your hands working quick to unlace his breeches until his cock slaps against his stomach, end red and swollen. A sharp hiss falls from his lips as your hand tugs on it once. Twice.

He calls your name, spits it really, eyes blown with lust as he holds your waist, unsure if he should lift you off him or grind you against his aching cock.

"I want you inside me," you whimper, plead, feeling his cock twitch at your words, your false, yearning gaze. He mistakes the burned tears of anger in your eyes as unbridled want. "I have gone so long without your warmth, your cock, swelling inside me, your seed nestling deep, taking root—"

"Yes," he gasps, fingers digging into your doughy sides, pulling you up, moving you around whilst you grabbed his length and directed inside your wet, hot cunt inch by inch, filling you so thickly you can feel him in your throat. It takes time, patience and grit, but you're wet enough and you're determined. Once he's fully inside of you through a choked moan of your own, his neck arches, head thrown back. "Fuck! Yes, y-yes, there you are, my g-good fucking girl."

You move slow at first, taking him, bracing one hand on his knee, almost testing the feel him of back in the familiar contours of your cunt. Veins pop between each groan and choke that shudders through him whilst praise, your name, the possessive titles— my love, my wife, my princess — is spit in between.

When the heat tightens in your belly, you shift positions, placing both palms on his chest, and riding him without abandon, bouncing up and down as you watch with a sharp eye as his release builds. His hips move on their own, fucking up in you as you meet his thrusts with equal vigour, and it's delicious. It's heated. You grind your swollen folds against his mon and your cries make him thrust up harder into you, calling your name, denting your doughy hips.

You don't stop, your pleasure at the back of your mind, wanting him to unravel, to break— a final cry of your name dissolving into a choked moan, spilling his seed deep inside, the continuous snap of his hips digging it deeper into your womb.

But your last peak is still tightening, so you press a quick kiss on his chest, a bite really, before you continue to chase your own high, a hiss slipping his lips but moving your hips with his iron-grip, stutters of, "d-do it, reach your high, f-fuck! fuck!"— Your head throws back, nails digging his skin as your cunt clenches his cock in a vice grip, forcing his hips to snap up once more, twice, until you fall, slumping against him.

When he kisses the top of your head, murmuring words you ignore, you close your eyes.

Your plan is in motion. The missive will be sent to the Lord Stark, in pursuit of an innocent friendship. The spiders you have placed on the Northern bastard are set, and a dragon flies in Dragonstone with your bond in its blood.

Your Jace is home. He will fall in love with you all over again. His wonderful daughters and darling princess, he will regret the events that have transpired in the cold. In his head, he will make promises to do better, to be better, that whatever happened is a blip. A mistake that will not happen again. but you know, he will trip. He will wander once more.

But you will make sure that the next time he does so, he will regret it for the rest of his days.

Because it is not you who will burn Winterfell to the ground.

It will be him.

Your plan moves, your web is perfect.

Now, the spider waits for the idiot fucking flies to feed on.

TAGGED: @inkareds @marihoneywk @caterina-caterina @ahristata @xxvelvetxxxx @but-i-write-so-i-must-count @bunbunbl0gs @yazzzmints @bellstwd @hiraethrhapsody

[utilitycaster]

The thing that gets me abt the framework of downfall and the way Ludinus(and some ppl in the tags who seemingly are trying really hard to roleplay Ludinus) read it is that they're like "look at how the gods meddled and laid low to destroy this bastion of human achievement, they had no right and should have let themselves be systematically exterminated/have the world burn instead" when. Setting aside the revelation that the gods who struck down Aeor made themselves mortal to do it-- as in, they were on the exact playing fields of humans when they made their move and it wasn't some huge peacocking of power against upstart humans to strike them out of the sky-- the Divergence is going to happen. We KNOW the Divergence is going to happen. The gods are going to create the divine gate and remove any chance that they can ever do something like this again. "Blaugh, look at them meddle and plot-" and? Whatever they do, we know that the sun will shine once more. Melora, as brutal as she is as the starved Asha, will plant a tree of hope in the most destroyed wastes of Wildemount. And they will ensure that the suffering they wrought in the calamity, in Aeor, can never ever repeat the same way they had done it. Which is a HELL of a lot more than can be said for Ludinus who is actively reviving every cycle he can

first off "some ppl in the tags who seemingly are trying really hard to roleplay Ludinus" took me OUT so thank you for that.

I just reblogged a post with a quote from Cooldown that I think is really relevant in understanding the whole story of the gods and how we got to this point but like, just to summarize (and debunk a few things, hopefully) from the beginning of the episode to the end re: the life of the gods:

Gods (possibly aspects of the Luxon?) crash-landed on Exandria BECAUSE of what is all but outright said to be Predathos.

As far as I can tell, no deals were made between the gods and the Titans. The only person who has said this from what I can tell is Asmodeus, who I would not consider a reliable source of truth. Or rather: one might have been made but there's no corroboration that I know of.

They created the people of Exandria and sealed away Predathos both prior to the Schism

The Schism occurred when the Titans decided to attack the people (which to be clear - the people had been there for long enough to build that weird ruin on Ruidus with a portal, like, I would love to know what prompted the fight of the Schism since it had pretty clearly been millennia of coexistence).

The Betrayers decided the move was to leave and start over, and the Primes felt that was a dereliction of duty to the people. That's what the quote is about - it's about the fact that Erathis's motivation for being a Prime Deity isn't "mortals are my blorbos!" it's "we have an obligation to our creations" and more generally that the Prime Deities are invested in their domains for the overall good of Exandria but not necessarily the specific good of Aeor. (Taliesin follows it up with (as Melora) "You'd have to tear me from this fucking planet" w/r/t the idea that you cannot, in fact, destroy your bad first draft simply because it would be more convenient to you.)

Betrayers get sealed, unsealed, events of EXU Calamity occur (notably: the titans are all dead. you can fight about whether this was just or right later but they're gone and killing other people won't bring them back; the titans are largely used as a pearl-clutching prop by people with no arguments that are perhaps actually relevant to the current situation), and perhaps 50 or 60 years into the conflict the gods call a truce re: Aeor's Obtenebrator and commit to decades of living as mortals (and therefore limiting themselves considerably)

And so here we are

And I think this really gets to the point. Because ultimately, the argument in favor of leaving Aeor be is "when someone points a gun at you, lay down and die" and the argument in favor of the Betrayers is "when someone tells you to abandon your (living) obligations for them, do so." The former is despairing and nihilistic and the latter selfish and, well, a betrayal.

There is something profoundly nihilistic about Ludinus, for all he talks about freeing people and a better world. He's destroyed a city of innocents. He's indoctrinated hundreds if not thousands of people and many of them have died in his service; he's the architect of an empire and many wars in its name and is actively working with a second one. He's been killing fey and he's even physically given himself over to the cause. There is no crime or sin people attribute to the gods that he has not done himself in measures beyond nearly every other mortal. Like, I really think he's at a point where he just is unwilling to "lose" even though he has a friendless life and a legacy of violence and has destabilized the entire world and the weave of magic itself. I think he has to believe there's something on this Occultus Thalamus for him because if there isn't, he, like the Prime Deities, probably can't just pick up and start over. All he has left is to give in to just letting the world burn in the hopes that at least he gets the satisfaction of what he hates burning with him.

Basically, sounds like a rough time to try to roleplay him in the tags.

Something else you (and others) bring up is that amid all the "history is written by the victors" the story of Aeor and of the gods has actually painted them as far harsher. The story doesn't say that they were first chased to Exandria unwillingly and did not come in conquest; the story, as this post notes, evokes vast divine might striking down a city from the heavens and not like, living in fragile mortal forms during one of the most dangerous times in history and arguing amongst each other over how they can save both themselves and Aeor and if that's even possible. Like, even if you see the gods as the victors of this story rather than simply the survivors, the "unedited" version of the story makes them far more sympathetic.

You also mention the Divine Gate and that's a really interesting thing to me because the existing status quo of Exandria is actually remarkably nascent if you think about it. The Founding had gods, titans, and mortals. Post Schism had the Prime deities and mortals (and it is worth noting this is when the people of Exandria became the most technologically advanced; you want to talk about the Titans and Betrayers, you need to cover that the price of the wonders of the Age of Arcanum was that they were not present). Calamity had all the gods and mortals again, and the current era is the first where the gods are behind the gate. It's kind of a compromise between all the things that have tried to destroy one another - Betrayers and Primes are separated but all are free within their realms and can indirectly contact mortals; technically, so can Predathos. None can directly be on Exandria. Is it ideal? No. It's a compromise, and the sealed can become unsealed (which, consistently, goes very badly) but it's the option that doesn't involve the total annihilation of anyone. Ludinus seeks, by setting off this horrible cycle again, to undo that fragile imperfect compromise with a goal of wholesale slaughter. He provides no option for the gods other than "die by my hand" when even some of the gods were desperately trying to find other options for Aeor as of a day prior to its destruction. He's simply wallowed in his trauma for centuries, becoming colder and more unfeeling and less empathetic and more arrogant than the gods he accuses of the same flaws.

[vvitchllng]

I think I would have more understanding for the people saying “the gods should die” and “maybe Ludinus has some points…” if this Exact Tragedy wasn’t the deciding factor for the gods moving beyond the divine gate

We saw how easily devastating the gods could be in that final battle and how they destroyed a city to keep themselves safe and we also saw how that was a Very Last Resort, how they over and over again wanted to save lives, and more importantly, in the Immediate aftermath of it they looked around at the horror they wrought and said Never Again. Never again will we allow this to be possible and to ensure it wouldn’t, they Left Their Home, left this sanctuary they found after their own calamity, left it so that mortals would be safe from them

And if that Still isn’t enough to be like maybe Ludinus’ plan is fucking stupid and even if he at one point maybe was righteous, the devastation he has wrought on Exandria can not be justified, DO YOU THINK THE ENTITY THAT ATTACKED THE GODS IN THEIR HOME WITH NO WARNING AND PURSUED THEM RELENTLESSLY, WHO IS VASTLY MORE POWERFUL WITH W A Y LESS MORALITY THAN THE GODS YOURE SO MAD AT WILL BE AN IMPROVEMENT FOR THE WORLD OF EXANDRIA?!?!?

[theworldwalkerswols]

(SITS BOLT UPRIGHT)

THE WoL WENT THROUGH A REJOINING ON A PERSONAL SCALE

The Exarch explains the mechanics behind the Rejoinings. That the balance of Aether in the Source versus the Shards is tipped until the Source is strained to the breaking point, and at last fractures in the fabric of reality allow the properly aspected Shard to join with the Source to rebalance the scales. That the overwhelming aetheric shift from the Shard being absorbed - Rejoined - is what causes the Calamities, and why each has a given aetheric aspect.

The WoL has been absorbing all the Primordial Light of the Lightwardens, and after Innocence, Ryne says that not only the WoL's body is breaking down. Their soul is fracturing. She uses the Blessing of Light to quell it and hold them together as much as she can, but the damage hasn't been undone.

That takes Ardbert. The WoL's shard, at the last, sees the WoL breaking, and rushes to fill in the cracks. To restore balance. And yes, the Primordial Light is spent - needs to spent - in defeating Hades, but it's Ardbert rushing in to fill in the gaps left in the WoL that mends them.

Y'shtola and Ryne note, after the fight, that WoL is mended. They doesn't understand how it happened, though they're relieved.

The WoL is the microcosmos in the macrocosmos. Mended just as the Source is with every Rejoining. And the devastation wrought on Hades their personal calamity.

The WoL went through a rejoining so the Source didn't have to.

[darkficsyouneveraskedfor]

Stricken 1

No tag lists. Do not send asks or DMs about updates. Review my pinned post for guidelines, masterlist, etc.

Warnings: this fic will include dark content such as noncon/dubcon, violence, ostricization,and possible untagged elements. My warnings are not exhaustive, enter at your own risk.

This is a dark!fic and explicit. 18+ only. Your media consumption is your own responsibility. Warnings have been given. DO NOT PROCEED if these matters upset you.

Summary: you were scarred by a storm years ago and its bringer has come to upheave your life once more.

Characters: God of War!Thor

Note: I did this finally.

As per usual, I humbly request your thoughts! Reblogs are always appreciated and welcomed, not only do I see them easier but it lets other people see my work. I will do my best to answer all I can. I’m trying to get better at keeping up so thanks everyone for staying with me.

Your feedback will help in this and future works (and WiPs, I haven’t forgotten those!) Please do not just put ‘more’. I will block you.

I love you all immensely. Take care. 💖

You always know when a storm's coming. The hairs on your arms stand and your skin burns hot. The smell of rain is tinted by another scent. That of burning flesh and ash. Your scars raze as if struck again and for a moment, you cannot hear or see. 

Slowly, the scent of rain returns to you and the noise of the patter, sometimes more a hammering, as if to remind you of its bearer. The thunder is his war cry. The lightning his wrath. You do wonder why then it should’ve come down on you. 

You keep your hood up, your chin low. Though you hide, the villagers know who you are, they know of your misfortune. The calamity wrought into your flesh in veined scars. Your face is marked with the storm, zigzagged with lines as your left eye is struck blind and white. 

Yet it isn’t your name they whisper as you stop at a stall to buy grain. It is his. The Prince of Asgard. The might God of Thunder. The monster who made you like this. 

The air is thick, roiling with unspent moisture, and the clouds threatening in a grey ripple. You should have come yesterday. You should not have waited so long.  

You trade your coin and move on, gathering the small rations you can afford. You’ll return to your hovel, gather what you can from the garden, and check the traps for rabbits. It should get you through, though the frost does eat away at your harvest.  

As you have it, between the chirping of your disfigurement, there is worse creeping from the north. The snows have fallen heavy and whole lakes have frozen to the silt. You do not believe all you hear but you know better than to disregard the nip in the air. 

Your basket remains like but you’ve spent your limit. Your cloak shifts with your movement and you shrink lower as you near the group of adolescents feigning at battle with sticks. Their audience glimpses your passing and you hear their voices mingle with laughter. 

“It’s that crone. The burnt one,” comes a bit louder than is meant. 

You don’t stop. You don’t show that you’ve heard it. There is nothing to be said.  

“Cursed, by Thor’s hammer,” another chortles, “it is said he was forging and struck the blade too hard. In his wrath, he sent a storm. A mongrel like her drew it upon herself, broken like the sword.” 

Certainly, that too is a story to be met with skepticism. One cannot guess at what the gods do in Asgard nor why they bring only misery and chaos to Midgard. You cannot disagree that the storm was no favour to you. A curse, certainly, though the meaning can never be known. 

You move along, leaving behind their whispers and their sneers. Off to your solace, to your safe. Out of the path of any wandering soul or any blowing storm.  

⛈

A storm rages without. Water swirls and batters your small abode, built against the wall of a cave on a carpet of peat. You cover your ears as the winds whistle and wail. You quake beneath your cloak, eyes locked shut as you cower away from the tempest so much as your own memories. 

The blinding white flash and the scalding hot pain. Your fingers creep up to your chin and feel the rigged scars. You can never forget, no matter how you try. You can never be as you were. You are marked, you are damaged, and as the villagers have it on their tongues, broken. 

Even your family would not have you. You remember your mother’s wail as your father drove you off like some beast. ‘The gods have smited you themselves. You cannot remain or you will wreck ruin upon us all.’ 

Days of walking and tears, like the very storm that scarred you, a haze through which you trod until you could go no more. Until your head would split and the burnt flesh began to weep. A woman found you on the forest floor, rotting away from the corruption spreading through you. 

You don’t remember much of her. Only her touch and how she healed you. She bid you off with the cloak you wear and some food for your travels. Then you were alone and thus you remain. Not even the thieves will steal from you, nor the criminals darken your door. A curse is worth no piece of gold, no drop of blood. 

The pounding of rain relents. A chill creeps beneath the slats of your door and seep into the walls. You fill the earth with what kindling you have, the clay chimney puffing smoke up through the center of the roof. You hold your hands out to warm but find little comfort. 

You settle on your side beneath your cloak and stare into the flames. You shiver. It’s cold. Very cold. Typically, the rain chases away the chill but this is different. You can feel it in the ground. You curl up tight, clinging to your warmth, let your eyes close. Sleep comes but for lack of and not peacefully. 

Your dreams are a maelstrom. There a flames and ice, one after the other, sometimes together. Sharp pointed shards frozen and hanging, then licking tendrils of heat from below. You are lost in the land of sleep, tortured by a world built of your own fears and follies. 

You wake stiff and frigid. The fire has gone out. Not even smoke remains in the pile of ash. You move carefully, bones aching, scars tingling. You touch the hard ridging along your cheek and your fingers pulse from the cold. You can see your breath. 

How can it be? It was sunny before the rain. You get your feet under you and stand with a groan. Near the door, a strange dusting of white powders around the door, flecking in from beneath and around the edges. Snow? 

Were the tales true after all? You wince as suddenly your scars singe and sting. Ow. You recoil and cover your face with your hands, hissing and wheezing through the pain. It hurts terribly. Worse than even the first strike.  

You pull your hands away as your eyes water and you blink through your tears. You can see, at least in your good eye. There is no lightning, it is only in your mind. You shakily turn and search around. You cry out again as the agony surges once more in your head. 

Why? 

Your legs quake. Something is amiss. The frost has come and this meagre hut cannot withstand it. You take your rucksack and put what you can carry into it. Your water skin is strung across your chest and your pack upon your back. You wrap your boots with rags and your hands too. You haven’t the clothing for the cold but you will need to find something. Perhaps skin a hare or two. 

The door blows inward almost as soon as you touch it, another gust nearly bowling you over. You sway with the wind and cling to the crooked doorframe. You shove yourself out, just as quickly flattened to the wall by a flurry of snow. It dusts your face coldly and you pull up your neck scarf over your nose and pull your hood into place. 

You set off, hunched, reaching with your arms as you lift your knees over the treacherous heaps. You keep close to the rock wall. The thought of turning back stops you but it seems as foolish an idea. The hovel cannot hold for much longer. You need to get to the mouth of the cave and chance a sleeping bear within. 

You sidle along, slowed by the snow and the wind, the former soaking through your clothing as the latter whips around your hood. Suddenly, a roll of thunder, like war drums, churns in the air. The word dims and the furor sounds again; louder, closer. 

You cry out and lift an arm to shield yourself instinctively. You curl your hand into the rockface and holler even louder, closing your eyes as your memory summons another storm. No, it cannot be. Not again.  

A deafening boom shakes the ground and knocks you to your knees. You crawl along, keeping low near the ragged stone, those hidden beneath the snow jabbing against your palms. You whimper and whine, blinded by the thickening curtain all around you. 

Yet you never heard of the god raining down snow upon the lands. Only the slaking rains and the hot violence of his bolts. Never this. What sword has he broken this time? Perhaps it was his very own hammer.

The thunder overhead continues its horrid thrum as more pulses in the earth. Boom, boom, boom. You feel it beneath your hands. Your knees come down clumsily as you scramble through the piling powder. You open your eyes and still cannot see. The world is smudge in gray white and black, the sky flashing and darkening from one moment to the next. 

You cry out again as your scars burn. You push yourself back on your heels and grasp your face as you shriek. It hurts! So bad! Your eyes well and flow over. Your body trembles and collapses. You writhe in the snow, contorting with the agony as your flesh feels as if it is splitting. 

Beneath the incessant pounding comes a rocky noise. Like laughter it curdles in the air and chases after you like the steady boom, boom, boom. Closer and closer, louder and louder, the earth quakes in tandem with the cacophony. 

“I’ve found another,” the deep voice scoffs and snickers, “ah, Heimdall, you must see this--” 

The craterous voice halts and the air still. The snow drifts but the wind stops and the thunder relents, the world seeming to hum. You scratch at your face as the flames grow unbearable. You must be alight. It can be the only reason for such pain. 

The large figure, a blurry silhouette in your skewed vision, looms like a mountain. He steps over you, sliding a foot between you and the cave wall and flips you onto your back. You stare up at the sky, rolling in sheets of grey and black, the dark figure standing above, blotting out the clouds. You sob and plead. 

“Make it stop!” You beg as your hood falls back, “kill me! Kill me! It hurts.” 

He bends as your eyes roll back and he grabs your wrists, pulling your hands away from your face. He pulls you half off the ground, not a single grunt for the effort. You feel whoever, whatever it is, looking down at you; upon you. A rattle rises in his gritty throat. 

“And what are you?” He breathes. 

You feel another surge and babble, reining in your wild eyes as you quiver uncontrollably. You make yourself look at him. You shudder and shake your head. Shaggy red hair, a braided beard, and eyes so blue they jolt you. Ink marks one side of his broad face as he wears fur upon his soldiers beneath emblems of the godly lands. 

“It hurts...” you rasp, “I am dying.” 

“You...” he grabs your chin, holding you by your shoulder. His thumb extends up your face to touch the scars and you let out a shrill howl as the agony piques. You latch onto his thick arm and thrash. 

“It buuuuuuuurrnssssssssss,” you scream as your spine arches. 

“Hmm,” he hums and throws you into the snow. You continue your desperate wriggling, the fire softening but not leaving you completely, “Heimdall!” He calls out like a war horn, “get your skinny ass over here!” 

There’s a tinkle of coy laughter and lighter footsteps that land on the boulder above. Your eyes drift over and you see another shadow, this one hazier but smaller. A dusting of snow flies up beside you as the other man lands beside you. No, not a man. 

Heimdall? Son of Odin. 

“Oh, Thor, what trouble have you found--” 

“Another one,” the other growls. Not the other, Thor. The God of Thunder. The beast who marked you. “Father says they all must come.” 

“This one?” Heimdall muses as his voice spikes with humour, “why look at her. Pathetic—wait a moment... brother, is this your handiwork?” He squats to see you closer and snickers again, “why how very peculiar.” 

“Bring her,” Thor barks and spins on his heel, swinging his hammer, “we haven’t time--” 

“You bring her, brother. As you say, you are so much stronger--” 

“Just do it!” Thor snarls and a peel of thunder breaks through the clouds. “I need ale.” 

[skeine]

silaha's rebuke of the angel is such a perfect distillation of this whole tragedy. he, and the rest of gods, just don't understand the suffering they're putting everyone else through. how could they? they're immortal. vast. so far "above" such things.

even when they take mortal forms they're taking the easy, comfortable way through. sheltered in a community safe enough to raise happy, well fed children. protected by a champion. running with a pack of the most powerful, ruthless hunters. enjoying a life of sensuous indulgence. privileged with all the rights of the highest archmages. all because they can't risk dying before they complete their mission. even as mortals in the calamity they're living lives of relatively easy, privileged comfort.

so can they, even now, understand the suffering they're putting mortals through? how many did they watch starve while they protected themselves from the worst effects of what they'd wrought? did they feel for them? or did they tell themselves, like they did the angel, this is their place. this is their fate. it's their lot to suffer and die.

it's so easy to look down on those beneath you and justify their suffering. to refuse to confront your culpability. dismiss them while you worry about your petty squabbles.

"if you wanted to make us to serve the gods, you should not have made us good." such a fucking raw ass line.

[ievaxol]

Portrait of a woman, dated sometime during the 8th Umbral Calamity.

A half-finished charcoal sketch found amid the personal affects of one Alphinaud Leveilleur by looters. Through a series of events it eventually reached the hands of the New Dawn Order; a splinter off of Garlond Ironworks working to carry on the legacy of the late Scions of the Seventh Dawn.

The sketch depicts a Hyur woman suspected to be the Warrior of Light, famously known to travel by Alphinaud's side. The subject is sketched from the bust up, with the right half roughly outlined and the left half presumed complete with shading.

Wild, dark hair is laid down with thick strokes of charcoal; a contrast to the delicate lines Alphinaud chose to capture the facial features. The woman in the sketch is facing the viewer, brows furrowed and lips slightly pursed. She is depicted in armor typical of the Seventh Astral Era, with bruising across her cheek.

Though most known for his work as a Scion, Alphinaud became appreciated in his later years for his many works depicting Eorzea post the destruction wrought by Black Rose. Although not everything survived, the ones that did gives a valuable insight into the the events taking place after the battle of Ghimlyt Dark.

Among all of Alphinaud's art, Portrait of a woman is perhaps his most beloved, despite being unfinished. It stands out among his body of work because of the eyes; despite being known for his great attention to detail in all other things, the eyes in the sketch are a simple flat and dull black.

Many who visit our collection of Scion artifacts here at the Waking Sands Museum report feeling drawn in by the piercing gaze, unable to shake it even weeks afterward.

[yeyinde]

after dark

Keegan P. Russ x f!Reader

⟶ WARNINGS: 18+ SMUT; P-in-V sex; female reader, female gendered anatomy; gratuitous use of kid; slight body worship; established history/relationship; canon-compliant, takes place after Sin City; minor game spoilers; mentions of death (canon-compliant); war; fluff - this is honestly just gratuitous smut and my awful attempt at fluff ⟶ WORD COUNT: 9,7k ⟶ SUMMARY: you want to see him break. ⟶ NOTES: my first foray into Keegan! this took a bit of time since i wanted to include so much, and it ended up growing a little out of hand. i might expand on this/make it into a series potentially (just small drabbles). Keegan was so fun to write for!

Keegan looks good like this. Laid out, bare; skin stained with the bites of your nails, the nips of your teeth, nestled evenly amid the smattering of battle wounds and blemishes that colour him in a rich history wrought with gunfire and calamity. (You often tell him that the two of you are kismet. He says Momus just has a sick sense of humour.)

The milky white expanse of his torso is littered with scars, and you map them with your greedy eyes, drinking each bloom of imperfection that stains his ivory skin. Finding new ones that weren't there before. 

Blades, bullets, burns, pockmarks—many from weapons you can't even begin to name, to know—all etched into sinew. Into bone. 

They mar him in a brutal smear of varicoloured hurt. A mosaic of near–death laid out like Orion, curved like the tail of Sagittarius. It's spooled, knotted, in a way that makes you think of Lyra. Of the stars you can see so clearly now without any light pollution around to smog the indigo sky above. 

The scars are healed in uneven patches; some darker, uglier than others. Raised welts, bumps. Deep indents in his skin, cutting through muscle and tissue. 

There is no sense of structure in the gashes that line his body—silver, to red, to purple, to black—and you know they were collected over time. Over years, decades, before you ever met him. Knew him. 

(The only one that looks familiar is the jagged hole on his shoulder where he stepped, stupidly, in front of a bullet for you. 

Stupid, because no one, especially him, should risk themselves for you.)

They sit, carved in flesh, as a testament to his nomadic lifestyle, one drenched in danger, death, and calamity. Shadows moulded into man. Into ruined skin and jagged bone. Deadly forces of nature hidden in the craters where the earth split into twos, threes. Triplicated ravines clogged with the rubble of was once life. Peace. Home, maybe. 

A tenuous fallacy, now. 

But they risk everything—even themselves—for it, and the proof of their commitment, the dedication to the cause, is smattered across his torso for you to see. 

The exploratory tips of your fingers, dripping reverence and featherlight, ghost over his flesh, over the blemishes that decorate his body, taking them in, feeling them. 

Some are baby–hair soft, silky sateen; they sit in thick, raised welts of scar tissue clotted over each other. Others are rougher than sandpaper, gritty like stripped lath. They feel like tree bark under your fingers. Scabs. Fresh, new. 

You wonder if he remembers each one of them—how they happened, where, by who; which ones hurt the most, and which ones took longer to heal. He might, you think. 

(It's him, after all.)

Catalogued pain organised and filed away. Locked in a safe box inside the enigma of his head, and kept there for safekeeping. 

But it's not gone, not put away. 

(It's always within reach.)

Phantoms congeal in the corners of his eyes sometimes when you happen to touch one, to reach out and grab him by the arm, or the hand, the wrist, and you see the brief flash of recognition in cut slate. A distant fog simmers up from the depths; veiled blue. A past you're barred from touching, knowing. 

It's not pretty, kid, is what he told you when you asked. Not like you. No sense ruining something like you with all that ugly. 

It was the end of the conversation. Locked away for good, and brassbound with a warning sign, rusted and aged, that read: do not enter.

So, you don't. 

But sometimes, like now, you like to take them in. To see the contrast between your blemishless skin in comparison to his. Worlds apart. A cosmic chasm of experience and life needles between you, and yet—

You brush your fingers against the marks, and have never felt closer to him, despite everything inside that tells you you're wrong. 

You place your hand flat over a cut over his breastplate, right where his heart thuds against your palm, and wonder what near–miss he escaped from that caused this. The other slides to his stomach, his muscles flexing, rippling, under your touch, and you brush your thumb over a circular hole under his solar plexus. 

You think, then, of the years you spent underground, running through the barren safehouses that dotted the landscape, only to come away with minor cuts, abrasions. The worst of them all is a small scar near your wrist where you burned your skin with cooking oil. 

You've never met the end of the blade—not until him.  

"What are you thinking about, kid?" 

His hand lifts—skin littered with small knicks and cuts, a burn on the back of his hand that almost matches yours except his was caused by a Molotov cocktail and not youthful ignorance (a world of difference, a chasm)—fingers sliding over the curve of your cheek. His slate–blue gaze is fixed, unmoving, on you. 

It was those eyes—cenote blue—that drew you to him in the first place. Teal in tenebrous. They haunted you for months. Wordlessly following your every move, drinking in the expressions that flitted over your face. Taking stock of you. Measuring you. Your accomplishments. Your worth. Assets.

Survivability.

("Pretty low," Merrick says, plain and brutal, and the rawness of it rumbled through the hollow crevasse you found yourself in. Low. Lower than low. So low it was almost a miracle you survived as long as you had.)

Keegan said nothing at the time. He stood back, hand gripping the butt of the rifle, eyes fixed on you, unwavering. Unforgiving. 

It was easy to take his silence as cold. Distant. Bundled up in thick layers of muskeg, in icy separation. 

You did—at first. 

An active war zone was not a place for a civilian. Merrick told you as much when he found you, taking refuge in a dilapidated home split in two, and welding only a metal bat you'd grabbed on your travels. Your only protection against an enemy that has no qualms in murdering innocents. That uses guns and heavy artillery to decimate the soldiers, the allies who jumped oceans to fight alongside the troops. 

You lit a lantern one night after settling down in a broken home, and woke up to the barrel of a gun pressed to your temple. 

It was Ajax who saved you. 

"Hey, uh. You're American, right? What are you doing in a place like this?" 

You didn't trust them. 

Didn't trust anyone. 

You'd spent too long cutting through the thickets of the surrounding overgrowth, hopping from one ramshackle house to another to lay low, to hide from the people who wandered past, looking for survivors, hostages, to give into that part of yourself that longed for people. For normalcy. The road jaded you a little. Isolated you. 

It was safer. 

The people you stumbled across either tried to pick you bare, taking the meagre belongings you scrounged together until there was nothing left but the thin skin covering your body, and your will to live. 

Or they tried to kill you. To use you. 

Hostages. Civilians used against the threadbare resistance. Their safe return in exchange for more land, for surrender. 

So, you hid. Got good at it, too. 

("Too fuckin' good," Merrick hissed, shaking his head. 

The only one who was ever able to spot you was Riley. Keegan, sometimes, through the lens of his rifle.)

When they found you, you tried to run, to fight. Enemies. All of them. 

It was Ajax who stopped you, who talked you off the ledge. 

"Come on, we're not gonna hurt you."

"Heard those words before."

"How long you been out here for, anyway?"

"When did ODIN destroy New York?"

"Jesus, kid."

"Stupid," Merrick said. "That's what you are, Cali. Stupid as hell." 

And Keegan—

Said nothing. Nothing. 

He doesn't like you, was your first thought when it all added up, stacked together. The avoidance, the distance. He wasn't cold, but he didn't try to get close to you, to get to know you. He just—

Watched. Waiting, you thought, a touch bitter, for you to die. Like they all expected you to when you said you weren't going to the safe zone. That you were staying, and you were looking for them—your brother, your father. 

Then—

Stay behind me, always, kid. You got that? 

If you can't see my back, you wandered too far. 

Eat. You need it more than I do. 

Watch your step. You'll fall into a crevasse if you're not careful, kid. 

The second: he likes you too much. 

And now—

Your hips flex. A slow, teasing roll against his pelvis, and it's that indelible sight of sky blue eyes shuttering out of view when his lids lower, lashes fluttering, that nearly sets you on fire. 

The press of his cock makes your nails dig into the constellation of scars on his chest, clinging to him as licks of pleasure flicker up your spine. Nerves smouldering at the stretch, the feel of him seated so deeply within you. 

"Thinking about you," you murmur, breathless. Raw. 

You wonder if he remembers the rainy days in San Francisco, the sunrise in Los Angeles, huddled under the waterlogged crater of what once was Pacific Avenue and Venice Boulevard with the same touch of halcyon fondness as you do. 

You think, then, of the fusillade following you in the ruined husks of the streets, enemies on every corner, of the six-day hike between the cities to reconvene with the others, lost somewhere in the decimated coast. 

A little part of you still hopes he does despite the stress, the tension, the danger; the separation, the distance, that cracks between you, louder than a thunderclap. 

That he thinks back on that time when it was just you and him, and no food, no shelter, and feels something more than the gritty reality of everything falling apart around you. 

Of death, and the stench of rot, and decay, and the overgrowth of vegetation that sometimes felt like it was trying to reclaim you along with its land. The vines that curled around your ankles when you idled, or slept—shackles that refused to let go. Gunshots in the night. Predators roaming wild and free in what once was a metropolis. 

Then, softer, you add:

"Always." 

You speak it reverently, as if the word, the sincerity in your voice alone was enough to somehow shade the gossamer of calamity and horror you faced together into something pink, something roseate. Something fond, and wonderful, and good despite all of the ugly and the bad that stacks up, deeper than the hole punched through San Diego.

(Down so deep you sometimes think you can see the eerie glow of molten rock below.)

Keegan says nothing, gives nothing away, but you catch something in his gaze shift, relent.

Another inch off the thick veneer that keeps him from falling into you fully, that keeps him from letting you in. 

It's the slow erosion of his defences, the ones that make him say, yeah, kid, whatever you say when you bring up the smouldering ruins of Death Valley, when you slipped your finger in the cut of his mask, and tugged it down below his chin. Your nail caught on the bridge of his nose, but he didn't flinch at the thin white line you left behind, the sting. He didn't move. Didn't blink. 

Didn't push you away. 

He let you. Let you press your sun-chapped lips to his for the first time with nothing more than an easy, kid—don't start something you can't finish before he gives in. Kissed you against the grainy sand that scorched your skin. 

You used to think he was cold. Unfeeling. 

But now—

Shadows dance over his face when the clouds drift over the milky moon hung in the indigo aether, but you catch the rubicund smear over the bridge of his nose when they part. Pretty pink dusted in soot. An ethereal chiaroscuro etched into his flesh. 

You feel his chest shudder, expanding with his rippling inhale. 

—You know that, sometimes, he just feels too much. 

You hitch your hips again just to watch him flinch beneath you. The breath stutters out of his chest, lips parting on a grunt when you grind over him. The pinched knot between his brow is stained with bliss, and deep like the crevasses ripped through the earth. 

The hand on your cheek jerks, tenses. His fingers curl around the back of your skull as his eyes crack open once more when you settle. Heavy lidded, stained the residuum of soot and grease paint the lukewarm water wasn't able to scour off. 

You meet his cobalt stare, and feel the breath catch in your throat. 

Keegan looks good like this. Laid out, bare; skin stained with the bites of your nails, the nips of your teeth, nestled evenly amid the smattering of battle wounds and blemishes that colour him in a rich history wrought with gunfire and calamity.  

When you whisper this to him, his hips jerk again, flexing, under yours. 

"Fuck, kid. Don't go starting something you can't finish."

His words nudge something inside of you, and the slow simmer of competition roils through your chest. 

"Can't finish, huh?" You murmur, and keep your eyes fixed on his as you lift your hips. The drag of his hardened cock sliding against your walls has pleasure liquifying your core. 

When it's just the tip you clench around, you pause, a small smirk curling over your lips. You'll make him break. Make him eat those words. 

But Keegan can read you like an open book. 

His hand lifts from your hip bone, sliding up the flesh of your torso until his fingers are perched in the gaps between your ribs, holding you steady. 

"Easy now, kid," he whispers the words low, voice breathless, humid. "Don't bite off more than you chew."

In response, you sink down an inch. 

It makes him choke a little. A wet noise spills out from his mouth, teeth flashing when they burrow into the plush give of his full, pink lips. The tendons in his neck strain, pulse throbbing in tandem with your heartbeat. Linked, you think, a little delirious, even like this. 

(You often tell him that the two of you are kismet.

He says Momus just has a sick sense of humour.)

His fingers tighten on your ribs. The other hand falls, palm swallowing your breast, fingers digging into the flesh once before sliding down, pinching your nipple between his calloused thumb and forefinger. It sends shocks of pleasure ricocheting down your spine, and you arch into his grasp, eyes dropping. 

"That feels good—"

"Yeah?" He husks, lips curling into a rare smile, a grin. "Like that, huh, kid?"

The raw timbre of his voice coils over your flesh, and you shudder at the liquor-rich sound, eyes blinking open to drink him in. 

The spark of pleasure that glimmers over his expression, eyes dark, eclipsed, and saturated in bliss, makes something coil low inside of your belly. A molten heat that leaks into your bloodstream until it bubbles, froths. 

Keegan is a slow burn. A steady crescendo of pleasure that builds and builds in evenly spaced increments until your head is molasses-thick from the endorphins that saturate your synapses. 

Keegan is always so giving, so quiet with his affection; picturesque stoicism even when he has you bent over, battering his cock into you as you lose it amid the unrelenting waves of euphoria that bloom inside of you, singing hymns in his name, and only just lucid enough to round the vowels out. He rides you through it all without cracking. Without rupturing from the pleasure that thickens the air between you until it's syrupy and heady with the scent of sex. 

And it's good. Always. 

You love the way he handles you; love the way he splits you apart atom by atom until you're an impending explosion, leaking bliss into the warmth of his mouth when you breathe his name. Raw, exposed. Bare and flayed by his scorching hands, and hungry lips. 

Keegan touches you with the same delicacy as he does the rifles in his arsenal. A finely tuned weapon, honed and perfected in his hands. He drags only the best out of you, and knows where to press, to nip. He knows your body like he knows the inner workings of each gun he carries. 

He's adroit in combat, and it bleeds over into the soft, plush give of your body beneath him. 

It's often thoughtless—done purely on muscle memory, and instinct alone. A primal switch in the back of his head he commands at will, one now grounded and circuited into making you tremble, gasp, and moan his name the way you know he likes best. 

Keegan leeches his own release from the aftershocks of your pleasure, pounding desperately into you as you clench around him, back arched and toes curled. He fucks you through the remnants of your climax until his own takes hold, and spits his bliss into your body, groaning low in your ear. 

But everything—everything—is for you. 

He takes where he can as he fractures you into pieces, into fragments of yourself. Crumbling in ecstasy under his touch. Broken, shattered. Rendered into a trembling mess of pulp beneath the bulk of his body.

He's a lesson in patience, in tenacity. 

Usually.

But now—

You set the pace. Control the motions. 

(And you want to see him break in the same splintered pieces he leaves you in.)

"Just sit back, and let me make you feel good."

He draws a sharp breath, eyes fluttering, widening slightly at your base command. 

Something gnarls over his exposed face, a frisson of affection, and softer than anything you'd ever seen before. 

It's rare you get to see him so bare, so open. 

"You do," he rasps, words sticking between his teeth. "More than you know."

He swallows thick, eyes skirting away from you as if to gather himself together, to calm the racing of his pulse that beats against the pale skin of his throat. 

Comfort is taken in composure, in distance, and you can see him grasp for it, reaching for that same phlegmatic control even now. 

You don't let him find it. Won't. 

You take a quick breath to steady yourself, fingers sliding down his damp chest, nestling in the messy smear of hair that sticks to his skin, grainy and gritty from salt and dirt, and then you drop. 

The blunt head of his cock bludgeons into a fleshy spot behind your navel that has your ears ringing, head tipping back in pleasure. It's good—so, so good—and you can't stop the whine of his name, broken and fraying at the edges, when you sink down to the base, swallowing him whole in the right clutch of your cunt.

White noise, static, flashes behind your eyelids, catching in the pale moonlight. A slurry of soporific pleasure spools inside your head, saturated with bliss, and edging into that indelible equinox of pleasure and pain when his head kisses the seal of your womb. It flexes against your mettle, pushing the limits of what you can reasonably take, but you grit your teeth against the strain, and breathe. 

You won't break first. 

Not when his eyes roll back a little as you shift in his lap, brow furrowed into a deep ruck of pleasure at the feel of you around. 

The overwhelming feel of him buried deep behind your navel notches into too much, and the ache of it pulses like a heartbeat in your sternum, knocking the breath from your lungs, but you hold steady amid the waves that crash over you, that threaten to consume you. To drag you under. 

White-hot pleasure lashes at your spine. Congealing inside the pit of your lower belly. A molten puddle of nirvana that steadily thickens into a coiled knot, gnarling within you. A spool of bliss, slowly unravelling under the stretch of him, the grind of his pelvis against your throbbing clit..

It thrums in your veins, your bones. Madness bleeds in at the edges; blurred lines of so good and too much too full and you find the equilibrium, the perfect zenith, when he groans your moniker, Cali, out between gnashing teeth. 

The brassy rasp of his voice centres you. Grounds you. You inhale the tang of him until your lungs begin to burn, to ache. You feel them pressed taut to your ribs where his fingers sit, nestled between the gaps of your bones. Firm, steady. 

You exhale in slow, measured increments, feeling the way he throbs against your walls, in your throat. You take it all in, all of it. Him. The firm press of his body beneath yours, thighs spread to fit him in the seam, makes you relax, ease into the press of him. The fill. 

Keegan's hands twitch. His hips lift slightly, an unconscious movement. An accidental proxysm. His ironclad resolve, the honed stillness of an expert sniper in perfect control, command, of every limb, every muscle, every movement, and breath, crumbles like papier-mache with the tight clench of your pussy around him. 

It edges into delirium, into that burning sense of conquest when he grunts, and rubs a spot inside of you that feels like heaven itself is nestled behind your belly button. 

(A fissure. A crack.)

The steadying breath he takes draws your attention back to him, to the sheen of sweat drenching his brow, the smear of charcoal he couldn't scrub away. It stains his skin permanently, now. A tattoo of battle grease, war paint, that he can't be rid of. 

(You tell yourself it isn't jealousy that congeals at the base of your throat when you see the blemish on his skin, and wish, so desperately, that you could brand him the same way. Mark him, too. 

To crawl inside the brackets between his ribs, and suffuse your atoms to his until every pump of his heart sends blood roaring through your veins.

It sits there, bitter and acrid, when you try to swallow it down, refusing to budge. 

Stupid. Stupid—)

You take it all in. The racing of his pulse, the slow, deep inhales, and the way he reaches out, struggling to control the impulse, the instinct, the want, to greedily take more and more from you. 

"Keegan," his name falls between your teeth, breaking in the middle when you roll your hips, and catch the flash of gritted teeth. 

The thin strands of sangfroid he managed to snag in his grasp are released when your voice crests over his name, cracked open and wanting, and desperate. 

It tastes of victory when he groans yours in return—not kid, not Cali, but the one you whispered to him that first night he found you in a desolate husk of what was once someone's home—and bucks into you in a stutter. 

You meet him again, pelvis kissing his until it suctions the air from your heaving lungs, and you can feel him pulsing in your sternum. A red-hot blade snug against your jugular.

The thin skin of his eyelids crinkle when he squeezes them shut against the feeling, the overwhelming pleasure, of being buried balls deep inside of you. 

Your ribs ache. His fingers burrow into the flesh that separates each rung, clinging to you, and keeping you perched on his lap as he struggles to catch his breath. 

It rips open something inside of you—something deeper and fuller than sex, than shattering his ironclad resolve—and the sight of him, chest heaving, eyes heavy and black with desire, and the soft way he crumbles in your hands, makes you think of the morning rays of the sun brushing over the broken landscape. The moments of peace in the midst of war. 

You think of him, and the tick in his jaw, the gleam in his eyes, the same shade as crushed bluebonnets, and think of kismet once more as you pant out his name. 

"Ah, fuck—," sweat drips down his brow, and you follow the droplet until it falls, soaking the jaundiced pillow below. "You keep that up, kid, and you'll be tapping out soon enough."

It drags a huff from your chest. "It was once. And you made me run through San Diego for hours before, and—"

"It was fifteen minutes. We ran a block," his hand falls from your breast, palm swallowing the side of your thigh. "You lasted five minutes on top before you begged me fuck you instead. Said you were tired."

"I was," you whine, muscles flexing when you lift off of him again. You feel the ache in your muscles already, the burn of exertion from sitting atop of him like this, knees wrenched apart to accommodate his bulk between them. "But I wanna make you feel good, Keegan."

The sharp sting of his nails catching your flesh makes you gasp. "C'mon, kid. Easy now." 

The low commands roll off of his tongue with practised ease, and you slip a little further into that inky madness that smells of fir boughs, sticky spruce sap, and ripened satsumas. You breathe him in and taste dusty pomander balls, and pinyon in the back of your throat. 

"Keegan—"

His hips lift, pushing into the soft, wet clench of your cunt. "That's it. Nice and steady."

He guides you along—a maestro stroking the keys of a piano as he plays his grand requiem. You struggle to keep up with his pace, the way he pistons into you, notching his cock into that soft, sensitive place inside that makes your eyes brim with unshed tears of bliss. 

Each deep thrust makes the head of his cock kiss the plug of your womb—just a brush, just a tease—but the burning sensation of blistering pleasure and wisps pain, of too much and too full, have you spiralling down the precipice faster than you expected. 

It's a dizzying descent, but you match his tempo as best as you can, determined to ride the torrent of ecstasy that runs down your spine in a thick, dulcified rivulet. 

Still. Still. You can't help but bask in the way he melts in your hand, rendered into malleable polymer with just a twist of your hips, a clench of your cunt. It's electrifying. Addicting.  

The high of it all brims deep in your head, blooming like a sickness that clots along the seam, noxious and heady. 

You can't stop the satisfied curl of your lips from growing, slowly and languid, when you bear down on him, taking him to the root. 

His grunt reverberates through his chest with enough of a punch to rattle your bones. 

Seeing him desperate is intoxicating. 

"What happened to your composure, Keegan?" you mewl, heading rolling back. "My big, quiet soldier is so talkative now—"

Rough palms sear the flesh of your hips when he grabs you tight in his unyielding hold, keeping you fixed on him. 

You try to move, but he tightens his grasp, refusing to let you budge. 

Frustration curls inside of your chest, and you glower down at him through glassy eyes brimming with tears. "Keegan, I wanna—"

Your words dissolve into a low keen when his hips lift again, battering into your cunt in an unrelenting wave of thrusts that force the protests from your lips. 

"Talkative, huh?" He grinds the words out from between clenched molars. "That was your goal, eh, kid? Break me?" 

He punctuates each word with a brutal cant that feels like a battering ram to your skull until the weakened bone splinters, shatters, and he punches through. 

"Kee–ah, ah, fuck—!" 

"That's it," he husks, tone liquid. His fingers spear into your flesh, tight enough to bruise your bone. "Just like that, kid. You wanna see me break? Lose control?" 

Heart in your throat, all you can do is whimper around the pulse in your esophagus, and struggle to find purchase under his unrelenting onslaught. 

His hand lifts, falls to your shoulder when he stills, keeping you locked tight to his pelvis, cock jerking inside of you. His fingers curl over the ledge, gripping bone, and then he tugs, pulls. 

You fold easily in his grasp, lowering your chest until it rests over his, sweat-slicked and warm. The scrape of your sensitive nipples over his coarse, damp chest hair makes you moan, clenching desperately around him at the sparks of pleasure roiling through you. 

When you settle over him, his hand moves, slides to the back of your skull, and wrenches you even closer to him, until your forehead meets his, and the soft bump of your nose catches on the bridge of his, right over the thin line you left on his skin. Healed, now, but you wonder if this is intentional. If it's—

Keegan breathes heavily through his open mouth, breath mixing together with yours, a humid coagulation against your lips where condensation gathers on the dip of your chin. 

He says nothing, just stares. Bare-faced, naked. Still smeared in the residuum of his battle grease, the armour he wears to keep himself hidden from the Federation, from discovery, and the freckles of black on his ivory skin look like an inverted night; the endless yawn of the heavens above. You wonder if you can map a new constellation in the dirt left behind, but the notion is pushed down, dissolved, when your gaze lifts, finding his own. 

He hasn’t looked away from you at all, and the intensity of his gaze makes you dizzy, breathless. Too many emotions ripple through the mercury depths for you to grasp, but they're soft. Tender. Your heart thuds when you see the endless flicker of them hidden inside, tightly sealed under a rusted lock without a key. 

"Keegan—"

He doesn't let you finish. His chin lifts, mouth hooking on yours in a blistering kiss. His tongue slides between the gap of your parted lips, stealing the words that spool behind your teeth. 

Keegan kisses you with a deep, almost methodical precision. It's a contrast you can't keep up with; an ebb and flow. He starts fast, harsh. A demanding press of his mouth to yours, unrelenting and eager. It's all tongue, lips, the clash of teeth until yours are stinging and bruised, and then he pulls away until his are just a brush. A ghost of a touch, a whisper. 

He holds it there, teasing, taunting, until your lips bloom in a soft pout, eyes turning downward. 

"Keegan, please," you whimper into the firm seal of his mouth, so close and yet, so far away. Out of reach. Held there until whatever he wants, whatever he seeks, flashes in the glossy puddles of your eyes. 

And then, he gives. 

Gives, gives. His mouth devours yours with a steady ferocity like the howling winds echoing through the wizened fir boughs in the desolate forest. He holds you close, a hand fisted against your skull while the other plinths your jaw, thumb stroking the bubble of your cheek. 

The pressure of his hold, of his hands, oscillates between firm, unyielding, and keeping you afloat, soothing you. 

You need it, you think, when he kisses you like the sudden approach of an avalanche ripping through the thicket, and barrelling down the vertiginous mountain he keeps you locked on. 

An ebb and flow. 

When your head swims, dizzy with hypoxia that inks across your vision like a Rorschach, he pulls away. Peppers small kisses, nips, over your stringing, swollen flesh, and soothes the ache he left behind. 

"I know," is all he says to you before he starts to move. “I know, kid.”

Keegan keeps you locked to his chest, one hand bracketing your skull, kissing you in tandem with each roll of his hips. His other hand settles against the swell of your ass, holding you steady as he bucks into you, bludgeoning his cock into your cunt. 

Your hands drop to the pillow under his head to stabilise yourself, pushing firmly into the mattress in a futile effort to keep the brunt of your weight from pressing against him, but he notices. 

Always. 

His grunt of displeasure is barely heard over the roaring in your ear, the lewd slap of his wet skin on yours, the grind of his cock into your cunt, but you feel it rumble through his chest, reverberating over your lips. 

His hand trails up from the curve of your ass, and over your spine. 

"C'mon, kid," he murmurs, teeth scraping over your stinging bottom lip. "You're not gonna break me."

His sly words make you huff, and you clench your muscles around him in retribution. There is something blisteringly intoxicating in the low groan that leaves his chest, the pinch between his brow, the flutter of his lashes, lids cresting in pleasure. 

It's a small win, a minuscule victory despite losing the war. But it is a double-edged sword that leaves you just as breathless, just as aching, as he is. 

You acquiesce to his insistent prods, and slowly, hesitantly, melt into him. With your full weight settling on top of him, Keegan breathes in deep, and murmurs a quiet, hushed: that's it into your lips. 

His hands are on you, tugging and pulling until you're flush on his body with a muted groan. 

Your arms bend at the elbow, hands moving to cup his jaw in your palms, feeling the scratch of his rough stubble over your life line. 

Kismet, you think, and taste salt on your tongue, a humid breeze on your skin. It reminds you of Los Angeles, of the hole you sunk into with him. When you decided in the ramshackle remnants of what once was that, despite everything, all of it, you would follow him anywhere, everywhere. 

A confession in the shambles of normalcy, where the cracked Macy's sigh hung suspended on wires, and reinforced by nature. Thick webs of wisteria kept the relic from a bygone era arched over the collapsed ruins of the Beverly Centre. A macabre chandelier: a poignant piece of what is now history. Gone. Erased. Decimated by a weapon meant to protect. 

The rest was felled into a deep cavern, karst, destroyed by the beams of inert energy that spliced the world you knew in half. Water leaked in—from the burst pipes, the broken aquifer at the bottom, rainwater, the ocean, and, you think, from when they razed the smouldering husk of the cities on fire with a deluge of water, back when everyone still clung to the belief that everything was going to be okay. It pools at the bottom, a murky abyss of cracked rock, steel beams, and dead wires. 

On the surface, something floated past. A bag, maybe. Waterlogged and aged. You fish it out despite the soft rumble from Keegan to stay away from the cenote. 

"Currents might sweep you under. Not a place you wanna fall in, kid." 

When you dragged it to the linoleum ledge you sat on, the broken logo made you snort. 

"Never could afford designer," you muttered and tossed the Balenciaga bag aside. 

It doesn't matter. Not anymore. Not here. 

You know it doesn't, feel it deep in your polluted bones, and yet—

You stared at the shattered heap of luxury, and couldn't help thinking about those days in the past when you'd wake up after a long trip on the road with your dad, your brother, and the world would feel so massive, so empty. It felt like you were the only ones left. The only survivors. 

It eats at you now. 

You cried that night. Broke for the first time in months, years. Sobbed into the corner of what was once Macy's or Gucci or some other relic you used to scorn in your youth, and the whole time, Keegan said nothing. Nothing at all. 

He just held you when you stumbled into him. Kept you tight to his body as your sobs echoed through the chamber. 

Through it all, it was Keegan who kept you grounded. Who stood in front of you, sniper ready, whenever the bushes around you rustled, or the ground trembled with the aftershocks of the lingering explosion that decimated your home. Your world. He was there, his hand on the small of your back, eyes sharp, wary. Kept you alive, fed. Safe. 

Safe.

You can only sleep when he’s around. Even when they left you in the safe zone you clawed out of, you couldn’t sleep. Nothing quelled the anxious needling in the back of your head but his presence—solid and steady. An unshakeable rock. Your foundation amid a shattered sense of security. 

You turned to him, then, when the moon drifted over the open crater punched through the earth, and whispered the words he refused to return. 

Even now.

But it doesn’t matter. None of it does. 

Not anymore. 

“Thinkin’ too much,” he husks, nails leaving trails of white when he scrapes them over your skin. “What happened to breaking me, kid? Give up already?”

There is no way for him to know you taste algae in the back of your throat from when he pushed you deeper into the cenote as you ran from the Federation soldiers. When they closed the gap, he shoved you into the murky blue of the grotto below, too quick for you to close your mouth, to not panic when you hit the pool with a splash that echoed on the slick, mossy walls. You breathed in the stagnant water filled with bioluminescent algae, and as gunshots bounced off the jagged limestone, and you drifted down below the buried rubble, you wondered if you’d glow so bright he could find you at the bottom of polluted blue. 

(He did. Always.)

Still. You swallow down the tang of salt, and breathe him in, saturating yourself in the loam scent of him—thick musk; burning lignin and scorched evergreen—and let it sit in your throat until all you can taste is him when you swallow. 

“Thinking about you,” you say. 

He says nothing, but you catch the shudder in his chest, the tremble in his hands, when he slides them over your flesh. Reverent. Halting. The fingerprints he leaves on your skin are stained in chiaroscuro. 

He grabs you tight enough to bruise sometimes; holds you so close that you often think he’s trying to absorb you into him. To keep you safe and secure in the bulk of his body where nothing can hurt you, touch you. 

Not even him.

So, he pulls away. It’s not distance that pitches itself in the recess of his piercing gaze, but something close to it. Kin. Fear, maybe.

Of this, of you.

The fear started when Ajax went missing, but it was Keegan who held you together.

("It's gonna be okay, kid. We'll get him back.”

Empty promises. Broken pinky fingers.)

You broke when they brought Ajax home and laid him to rest as best as they could, and the marker that signified his resting place—a coded message only they would ever know—was all that remained of the man he fought beside, the man who made a pinky promise to never leave you in a the empty shell of a Walmart parking lot when you told him about the camping trips.

A scrap of fabric. A blood-drenched mask. 

You held Keegan as he whispered sorry, kid. Sorry. We tried. We— 

Gone. Gone. You think of rubble and the scent of rock dust. The crushing weight of cinder blocks and beams, and what it feels like to stumble when the earth breaks into pieces beneath your feet.

Elias. 

And now—

All he has left is Merrick. Hesh. Riley. 

Logan—

(“Missing,” the radio crackled a few days ago. “Gone.”)

—and you. 

He holds you at arm's length, even now, after coming back to you, after finding you again, because what you offer is different, more dangerous, than theirs. 

And despite what they say, Keegan isn’t a man who feels nothing at all.

No. 

He’s a man who feels too much. 

And he knows this. Knows it like he knows the world is in shambles, knows what the Federation is capable of. 

What you're capable of. 

You wonder if he's thinking of that now, as the shadows leak back in. They flood the corners of his eyes when he gazes through you, lost in those lour thoughts that rush by in quick succession. Too fast for him to cling to any. 

They cut into the crease. The ones that make you think he’s somehow omnipotent, all-knowing. That he can chisel inside of your head, and read the want, the greed, that festers in the rucked divots. 

And he isn't sure how to handle it. What to do with the bold, bare-faced sincerity of what you offer him. What you want from him. 

Before, Keegan would get so lost inside the maze of his mind that you didn't know how to bring him back. He'd speak only when necessary—just short, clipped words, commands (over there, inside, stop, eat)—and the silence would grate at you. Somehow quieter than he usually was; oppressive. 

It lasted for days, sometimes. 

It never sullied his ability to aim, to shoot. Survive. Protect. 

It was just—

An introspective silence. A storm cloud over blue. 

He was thinking too much, and wasn't sure which option to pick, which outcome was best.

You never knew what to say to bring him back. To ground him. All you could do was wait it out until the gyre would fade from his eyes, and he'd turn to you again, clear blue. 

Now—

“—You’re thinking too much,” you murmur, mouth trailing loose kisses over his stubbled jaw. 

“Just waiting for you to come back to me,” he volleys back, eyes cresting. A tendril of that unknowable something snakes through the gloom of blue, and you reach for it with curious, wanting fingers. 

“I’d never leave you.” 

Keegan swallows, and you trace the bob of his Adam's apple. A part of you expects it to retreat, to flee back to the safety of its bivouac where nothing can get too close. Nothing can hurt. 

But it doesn’t.

He huffs, and the soft expel of his breath, the sinking of his chest, feels a little bit like victory. 

“Wouldn’t survive without me.”

It’s as close to a confession as he’ll offer, and you take it with eager, greedy hands, cupping it in the plinth of your palm where it sits, safe from harm, from the world that crumbles around you. 

“Neither would you.” 

It’s a lie, of course. Keegan is dampening his own chances at survival by keeping you close to him instead of doing what everyone said he ought to, what he tried to do: leaving you behind. 

He pushed you away once. You wonder if he thinks of the separation. The distance etched between the two of you. Slowly relearning each other in broken husks that were once homes.  

"Drop Cali off at a safe zone, and then come find us, Keegan."

The intention, you know, was to leave you behind permanently. To keep you locked in the safe confines of a safe zone in Oregon, where they pitched tents in an expansive field, and lived off of pipe dreams. Where they pretended they couldn't fear the gunfire in the distance, or smell artillery smoke in the air. 

Direct orders passed down through the chain of command, from Elias himself, and yet—

He came back.

("Just gonna do whatever you want, kid. We're headed the same way, anyway.")

“That so?”

"It is."

Keegan swallows. Something yields, breaks. 

His palms are balmy on your skin, firebrands. You stare into his eyes, counting the deep ravines of inky black cutting through sapphire blue, and the gyre of those hidden things, locked away and kept at a distance, seem to tremble. Wobble. The edges blur. 

A frisson passes over his face, illuminated only by the milky light spilling in from the tattered curtains, and something cracks. Splinters. The fracture makes him flinch, makes him heave under you, chest expanding with the deep drawl of his breath. 

With another sigh, his hand slides down the heated flesh of your back, spreading over the swell of your ass. Before you can say anything in response, his middle finger dips into the valley between each cheek, brushing over the skin of your perineum before dipping lower, brushing over the wetness gathered there. 

He drags his finger higher, brushing over the soft skin of your ass. The feeling of it, the red-hot heat of his flesh, makes you keen, tightening around him. 

He huffs into your neck, lashes fluttering over the soft skin of your throat when he blinks. "Like that, huh? Want me here, too, kid?"

You gasp when he presses against the rim. "K–Keegan—"

"Not ready yet," he murmurs, and you try to stifle a whimper when he pulls away, heart thudding in your chest at the thought alone. 

He catches it, anyway.

"Fuck, kid—," it's a jagged husk; ripped up and shredded under barbed wire. Raw, wanting, and dark. You'd never heard his voice so low, so gritty. When you peer down at him, all you see is the endless ocean in the blanket of night. Midnight blue. It makes you shiver. 

You feel feverish when he groans again, when he rasps your name in a way that sounds like it was wrenched up from the recesses of his chest. Buried under soot and ash. 

"Gonna take you there," he pants, and you know him. You know Keegan. It's not a suggestion. It's a promise. "Soon."

The thought of it makes something ugly gnarl inside your chest. A possessive thing, out of place in such a moment. Between you and him, and this awful, awful world, greed has no room to grow. To burrow its roots in deep, and yet—

Yet. 

You crave him in ways that are unattainable. That belongs to a world that no longer exists in the land you roam. 

His fingers pull away, and settle on the tight flesh of your raw cunt stretched around the thick of him. His thumb brushes over your chafed, red skin, eyes softening as he coos at you. A gentle tut when he feels how wrecked, swollen you are from the brutal pounding he's giving you. 

You think he might be lenient. Merciful. Might let you pretend you have control again. But when you lift your gaze to his, eyes blurry and lachrymose, all you see is a deep, unrelenting satisfaction cut into deep slate. His pupils ripple. Deep puddles trembling in pleasure. 

"Fuck, kid." 

He punctuates his words with a slow, full roll of his hips. Slick drenches the tips of his fingers as he feeds you the thick of his cock, feeling the way you swallow him down to the base. To the root. 

"Takin' me so good."

His words are slurred, drunk off the spread of you in his lap, taking him into your willing cunt. Eyes flashing with something that prickles across your skin. It should be a warning to you, a siren. You know him enough to tell what those little flickers in his eyes mean, the shadows hidden in the canyons of blue, but he moves before the thought can take root inside the syrupy haze that clots over your thoughts. 

His legs slide up, knees bending, spreading, as he plants his feet firmly into the mattress. 

"Hold on." 

It's all he gives before he pushes up into you, cock sliding in deeper than before. 

You gasp, eyes snapping shut when he cudgels against something inside of you that has pleasure blooming in your lower belly. 

The angle is different, deeper and fuller than anything you'd ever taken before. Even riding him, sitting flush against his hips, it didn't hit that soft bundle of nerves that has fire licking at the base of your spine. 

You moan his name again, low and broken, and Keegan responds with a sloppy snap of his hips that makes your back arch in his hold, toes curling as batters into that place that makes Nirvana bleed over your synapses. 

Keegan's hand settles on your thigh, holding you steady as he bucks into you. His other hand tangles in your hair, cupped on the nape of your neck. He tugs, his nose pressing into yours. 

"You feel so good, kid," he breathes, sliding his hand down to cup your jaw in his palm. "Squeezing me so tight. Missed your pretty pussy—"

"—Feels so good, Keegan, feels so—"

His lips steal over yours in a searing kiss. Biting, blistering. He devours you whole until nothing remains but the taste of him on your tongue, in the back of your throat. It clogs all of your senses—a brutal assault of Keegan: rich, earthy. 

Like this, locked to his chest as he pistons into you, you have very little choice but to take everything he gives you. All of it.

The sounds your bodies make when he's seated in deep, the slap of his pelvis, the wet squelch of your pussy, make you dizzy. Make you keen. Whine. Your mouth drops. Toes curl. Eyes roll into the back of your head. 

The cacophony of him fucking into you over and over again fills the empty space around you, sticking to the walls, and the moss-covered floor. It bounces against the lining of your head until it throbs, pulses, and threatens to split you in two. To halve you down the middle where Keegan presses taut to the seal of your womb. 

All you can do is cling to him, hands sliding to grasp his thick, rippling forearms as he batters into you. It's sloppy, unrefined, and you've never seen him lose it like this before. 

It edges into that precipice of pleasure and pain, both admixing into a heady cocktail of bliss that roils through you. 

He trails kisses across your blistering cheek, down your neck. His breath is warm over your skin. The flash of teeth makes you gasp. 

"You're gonna cum." 

It's not a demand, or a request. It isn't a plea, a bargain. He says the words like he's relaying the time, coordinates, his position. He isn't unaffected—his voice crumbles a little over the vowels, wobbles on the syllables—but this isn't him asking you. He's telling you. 

Keegan knows your body like he knows the intricacies of his rifles, his weapons, and he knows, knows, you're going to cum around his cock soon. Can feel it in the way your nails find purchase in the firm muscles of his shoulders, the way you tighten around him like a vice. The sound of your voice when you get closer to that looming precipice he holds you over. 

He knows. 

You moan his name as liquid pleasure leaks into your marrow, and that vertiginous edge grows closer and closer. You want to warn, to tell him, but Keegan knows. 

He hushes you, mouth moulding to yours, and devouring the whimpers that seep out. His hands tighten, holding you steady as he fucks you through it, slowing his pace to the easy grind of his cock against the seal of your womb, dragging over that soft spot inside of you that makes your head spin, and eyes cloud over with bliss. 

You moan weakly into the kiss when he slides his hand back, fingers pressing once more against the taut flesh stretched around him. It's too much—the added pressure, the feeling of him bucking into you, brushing over the seam where you swallow him down—and you tilt your head back with a whimper of his name. 

"I know, kid," he grunts, teeth catching on your chin. "Gonna cum for me, yeah?" 

You can't speak, can't talk over the rush in your head, the thick spool of pleasure clotting inside your head, behind your eyelids, in your veins. Molten, liquid. You fall into him as the world around you shatters once more, erupting into white noise, static. 

Everything that isn't him—the solid press of his body, unyielding and supine under you; the weight of his hands on your flesh; the painful crescent of his nails sinking into your skin; the stretch of his cock wrenching you open, and filling you deep, deeper than you'd thought possible; the burning heat, white-hot and balmy, that soaks your being from base to empty, empty skull—is sucked out through the broken shell, and into the vacuum of nothingness where it dissolves into embers, ashes. 

All you can think, feel, is Keegan. 

He works you through it, hand still pressed against the rim of your spasming cunt, feeling the way you pulse around him. 

He moans low in his throat, the noise cutting through the gossamer of pleasure liquifying your joints into sticky molasses, and you know he's close, too. 

You push back into him, into the sloppy cants of his hips as he leaches the lingering aftershocks of your climax for his own taking, his own rapture. 

His chest shudders. Fingers tremble when they run along your skin, grasping, clenching. Keeping you tight to his body where you fit like a puzzle, and he, in turn, fills all of the empty, barren cavities inside of you, leaving no crevasse, no fibril, untouched by him. 

You want to give him everything. Everything. 

You buck into his thrusts, meeting him in the middle where he sinks home with a grunt that echoes through the hollow spaces of your ribs, and you tremble with him. Satiate yourself on his scent, his taste, the noises he makes, the feeling of his body on yours. Sweat-slicked and fever hot. You douse the burn heat of his in the inferno of your own; incandescent with the molten press of him everywhere. 

Your head drops, nose pressed to his cheekbone as you breathe in him in greedy gulps that make your lungs quiver. Filled to the brim with him. Gorged on his taste. Saturated in his scent. 

It's good. You're delirious. Mad with it. Drunk on the elixir of his briny skin, and the way he leaks into your pores, into your being.

You push yourself tighter against him until you feel his heartbeat pulsing inside of your ribcage. 

His name is ripped from your throat in needy gasps drenched in the potency of your devotion. Shrill hymns that fans over his skin until it prickles, dampening with the humidity of your breath. Stained, then, with you. 

"God, Keegan, you feel so good inside of me—" 

Slurred words tumble from your sore lips, dipped in euphoria, in bliss, as he batters clumsily into you. 

You'll ache tomorrow—already feel like one massive, liquified contusion. He might have to carry you from Yosemite to Coarsegold where Merrick and Hesh are waiting. 

They'll know, of course, when you can't stand properly without feeling the stretch of him anew. When your knees wobble and your legs shake. 

(But a part of you wants them to.)

"Gonna cum for me, Keegan?" You mewl, nails scratching at his shoulders when he grunts your name like it's salvation. Purpose. "Want you to, baby, want you to—"

His cock jerks, twitching within you, and with a choked, guttural moan, he cums inside of your fluttering pussy. Saturates you in his release that spits, plumes of warmth, against the battered, bruised seal of your womb. 

He rumbles your name again, a shattered husk of vowels, consonants, and the ecstasy that paints his timbre sends you spiralling down into an abyss of endless blue. 

Keegan's stomach flutters. The skin pulling taut as his muscles clench, seize. You feel the drag of his flesh over your quivering belly; the constellation of scars rubbing over your slick skin. Your hand falls to his shoulder, pressing against the bullet wound left behind when he perched himself in front of death for you. For you. 

His eyes slide open slowly, heavy-lidded and bone weary with the shuddering tremors of euphoria that dance between the rucked 

The tip of your nose slides over the bridge of his, and when his skin wrinkles at the featherlight touches, it feels a little bit like the scar over his heart. 

"Fuck, kid," he rasps, eyes misty and lidded. Heavy pools of mercury you could fall into if you tried hard enough. "You have no idea what you do to me."

He grabs your hand, fingers lacing through the empty brackets until every part of you is filled with him. 

Your nail catches the burn mark—a molotov cocktail when the world wasn't in shambles. His thumb brushes over yours—hot oil, perogies, back when your dad took you around America on grand adventures every weekend, and your brother would sneakily eat your fries from the McDonald's bag. 

The other snakes up your spine, tangling in your messy hair, and then his lips are on yours. Messy, wet. He gasps into your open mouth as you rock against him, working him through his undoing, his breaking. 

You hold his shattered pieces in your hands, clutched tight against your sternum, and wonder, once again, if this is what they mean when they talk about kismet. 

"Never gonna leave you again," he rasps, the words clawing up his throat. 

The raw, pulpy mess of them sits heavy between you. A promise. Promises. Broken, flayed. A crumpled heap of everything you once were in shambles. 

You think of the anger you felt before, when the heels of his palms dug into your shoulder, and he pushed. Pushed you out, away. The bitter resentment, the festering rage. 

The agony. The sorrow. 

You missed him. His stupid face. His stupid voice. Stupid hands. Stupid humour—soft, witty, and drier than Death Valley. His stupid touch, his kisses. Him. 

The loneliness carved a hole inside of you, a crater where only he could fit. 

(You sleep better when he's beside you, anyway.)

"I won't let you."

Your lips crook into a small smile, a dawning blitz over a ruined landscape, and you lean down, pressing your lips to his pulse, sliding up until you catch his lobe between the seam. 

"Still broke you," you murmur, skimming your teeth over the downy soft hairs that cover the shell of his ear. "Still won—"

His hand moves, braces against the back of your skull, the base of your spine, and then he flexes his hips beneath you. It's quick. A fluid motion. Keegan bucks you off, and rolls you under the bulk of his body within a blink. You barely have time to choke on your gasp when he's already nestled above you, eyes shining in the milky light spilling in from the moth-eaten curtains. 

"What—?"

His hips jerk into yours, cock sticky, tacky against your skin, but you feel him thicken with each slow roll he makes into you.  

He leans down, bracing his forearm on the flat pillow above your crown, eyes burning embers that spark in the dim light bleeding between the wisps of broken fog that shroud the moon. 

"My turn, kid." 

[edelgarfield]

god I'm sorry for being a bitch but I find the fandom's complete disdain & disregard for the people of Aeor genuinely upsetting and disturbing and every time I see a post justifying the gods' actions or damning Aeor I feel sick to my stomach. which I know isn't a healthy or normal reaction, but I think of all the innocent people throughout history that have survived under oppressive regimes, and I think about all the times that foreign powers have invaded other nations, including totalitarian ones, and destabilized its government, and how it's always always always the people that suffer, I think about all the people that have looked at an unfamiliar culture & deemed it inherently lesser, and all the times that outsiders have decided they know what's best and taken away people's agency & autonomy under the guise of help.

I don't understand how you can look at the gods & blindly accept that they're inherently smarter, wiser, more just than the whole of humanity, that they don't act in their own self-interest, that they know what's best for the world better than mortals, that what they've decided is best for the world is best for the people in it. I don't understand this pervasive belief that mortals deserve punishment for aspiring to wield power equivalent to the gods, and I especially don't understand this idea that the gods only ever wield that power responsibly while mortals are destined to abuse it. I don't understand why we blame mortals solely for allowing the Betrayer Gods into the material plane, but not the Betrayer Gods themselves for their cruelty. I don't understand how you can see the way Asmodeus manipulated Zerxus into doing what he wanted & not consider that Vespin Chloras may have fallen into a similar trap. I don't understand this belief that mortals should never question the status quo or the stories they've been told by the gods and that daring to do so deserves punishment, or why we think mortals should be grateful to the prime deities for protection they never asked for.

I don't understand the acceptance of the complete desolation of Exandria as a just punishment for one man's hubris, and the belief that mortals aren't justified in their anger and hatred towards the gods. I don't understand why people accept the gods' actions as self-defense, but attribute humanity's actions as arrogance, when mortals have been the sole victims in the Calamity. I don't understand why there's sympathy for the gods as refugees from Predathos, but not the people of Aeor as refugees from the Calamity. I don't understand how you can look at the gods, who are eternal and undying and wield an overwhelming amount of power & equate their fear & suffering to that of mortals, who until the creation of Aeor's weapon have been completely defenseless in the face of the destruction wrought by the gods. the gods have known the fear of death for a couple decades, mortals have been irrevocably shaped and scarred by that fear for a century. the gods have had so many tools & options & power at their disposal than mortals never did, they died & grieved & learned to live in a world ravaged by war & Aeor is the natural conclusion. mortals had to fight tooth & nail to survive in the wake of the gods' wrath and they have only just begun to even scratch the surface of having an equivalent amount of power, of being able to defend themselves & their homes, of not being at the complete mercy of the gods, of not being forced to just lay down and die, and seeing that the gods just snapped their fingers & put themselves in new bodies that can bypass Aeor's defenses. it took time, but they never had to work for that power. they didn't have to survive against overwhelming odds. they didn't have to lose their homes & families to a war they have no place in.

I don't understand how people can defend the gods or rationalize the destruction of Aeor when the gods are and have always been the aggressors where mortals are concerned, when even now, the gods have a thousand ways to kill mortals and destroy their lives, and mortals only have one way to kill a god.

[genshin-brained]

Genshin 1.0: you get to save and ride a huge dragon :]

Genshin 5.1: you arrive at yet another battlefield, only to find it littered with the corpses of the people you were supposed to protect. All that remains alive are otherworldly monstrosities, stalking around the havoc they've wrought. With every life lost, you can see the light of courage in the eyes of the warriors dim as hopelessness sets it. The calamity seems never-ending. All that remains certain is death

[mayapapaya33]

Hey, can we talk about how not wanting to kill someone who is committing terrible crimes is not the same as being complicit in their crimes? And also that it doesn't mean that you care more about the criminal than the victim(s)? Even if you care about the criminal still. It just feels really weird to me that a lot of people have jumped on the bandwagon of "The Prime deities are responsible for the destruction wrought during the calamity because they refuse to murder their siblings and instead keep on with their petty bickering" when the actual fight the Prime deities and the Betrayers are having is over whether Mortals matter at all and whether it's fine to just wipe us all out and start over. THAT is the "petty bickering" guys, whether mortals deserve to live lol.

The Primes want mortals to keep existing and care about them, we matter to them, whether you think they're condescending or not, they care, the Betrayers do not. They are fighting about it. There is collateral damage, it is horrific. But the Prime deities ARE trying (and had succeeded before Vespin accidentally released Asmodeus) to lock their more murder happy siblings in God jail.

You can make the argument that they have a responsibility to murder their siblings on our (mortal kind's) behalf if you wish. I won't because I personally don't think it's true, and sounds pretty entitled to me, though I'm willing to change my mind about it if presented with the right argument. Any way you slice it, it still doesn't make them responsible for the actions of the Betrayers just because they haven't killed them. The Betrayers make their own decisions and are responsible for them.

And I'll just add this in here, people are taking a lot of what Asmodeus said about the other God's thoughts about mortals at face value. Asmodeus, lord of lies, being who only ever tells the truth in a poisoned, slanted way, yeah sure, let's assume he's being totally sincere and nuanced about the Gods various thoughts and opinions of Mortals. It is both annoying and very funny that Brennan is so talented at being the devil that he's literally bamboozling the audience STILL.

[talesfromeorzea]

New Adventure

FFXIV Write 2024 Day 1 Prompt: Steer

Ruruma walked into the bustling evening of the Quicksand deftly weaving her way through the crowd gathered for the evening revelry. She made her way to the bar right in front of Momodi and sat down giving the busy Lalafell a quick wave as the woman was taking the orders of a rather large adventuring party. Momodi waved back and said quickly, "Just sit tight he will be here shortly then we'll both explain why we've asked you to make yer way back here to Ul'dah."

Ruru simply nodded and sat back to the bar watching the busy tavern with a measured gaze. It had been some time since she had set foot in this city and to most it would seem the same as it had been back then but Ruru knew better. The hustle of the crowd did not hide the apprehension that laid heavy in the air. People put on a good show of it but she could see clearly that many around still bore the scars of the Calamity.

Ruru herself had been lucky her little ranch at the edge of Thanalan and the Shroud had been spared any damage wrought by the dragon that burst from the red moon. She had done everything she could to help her neighbors who were not as lucky. Five years had done little to mend the damage wrought and it was telling here even as people caroused in the night there was still an air of tension.

"Ruru you are a sight for these old eyes how have you been lass?" a voice from her right stated and she turned to see Papashan striding up to her

She gave the elder Lalafell a smile and said, "Lass huh? Trying to butter me up before you and Momo give me some terrible news?"

"Most certainly not, I am truely glad to see you my dear it has been some time."

She chuckled and nodded, "Aye never really intended to set foot here again after I retired but you both sending a request for my aid told me it was something."

The old Lalafell nodded and took a seat beside her and both waited in silence as Momodi finished with the last of the adventurers and sent them to a nearby table to await their drinks and food. She then made her way over to the pair and stated, "It is, to be blunt Ruru we have a huge favor to ask of you."

Papashan nodded and added, "It will be a lot to ask but I believe it is well worth it in the long run given your habit of helping those in need,"

Ruru gave a huge sigh, "You both haven't forgotten that I have retired from the adventures life yes?"

They both nodded in response and Momodi stated, "Aye I am well aware but Ruru listen we have need of you again, now more than ever. There are more and more tasks for the guild to take on and to be blunt not enough adventurers with experience to take them on."

"There are plenty of young eager volunteers to take on the jobs but it soon is apparent that…." Papashan started then hesitated a moment

"They're too green and dying instead o getting the job done?" Ruru growled at him more than a little annoyed with the both of them because they knew her feelings when it came to young adventurers taking on too much.

Papashan nodded, "Yes, I know its a…delicate matter with you but it is also why I thought to ask for your aid. You of all people…"

"Am soft hearted enough to make sure the young fools don't get themselves killed!" she snapped back

He went silent clearly uncomfortable with pressing further a look of reget deep in his eyes which at least gave Ruru some sastifaction even as she was seething.

"They need someone with experience that can guide em Ruru, its why were asking you. I know you have been done with this buisness for some time and it pains me to have to ask but I'd rather try than see more youngbloods die." Momodi murmured

Ruru pinched her nose and then took a steadying breath, "Fine, I know if both of you are worried about it this is something incredibly needed. Wheres the damn book Momo I'll put my name on the roster once more."

Momodi didn't hesitate or question she simply slid the Adventure's Guild roster over to her along with a quill and Ruru scrawled her name down once more. She then glared at the other Lalafell and stated, "They'd better know to listen cause and they'd better not expect to be mollycoddled cause ye know that's not how I am."

Momodi nodded and closed the book stating, "Thank you Ruru and I will be sure any I send with you are well aware of that fact."

"Truly my dear we are grateful," Papashan added

"Save it, you both knew what my answer was gonna be with ye both hounding me on it." She gritted then softened as both seemed to flinch, "But, hells ye know full well Im not gonna let fools die for nothing."

She then hopped down and looked at Momodi, "Welp looks like I'm gonna need my old suite in the Hourglass unless ye've given it to someone else?"

"I'll get it arranged dear friend welcome back and once again thank you,"

Ruru just gave a wave as she made her way out of the Quicksand and into the busy evening streets she sighed. She was definetly angry at both of her old friends for playing upon old wounds like that to get their way but she also knew full well if she had refused they would have respected that.

But something is definetly happening, she thought to herself as she made her way to the stables at the edge of the city to get old Pumpkin her chocobo to return home to pack what she'd need to once again begin as an adventurer. Why else would I been having the strange dreams and hearing that voice since the damn moon fell.

As she took the reins from the stable hand and mounted the bird he chirped at her questionally sensing his mistress's mood. She patted him and stated, "Well old boy seems were dragged back into the adventurin business."

As Pumpkin took off he squawked his opinion of that comment and she chuckled letting her mood lighten as the bird took off. One thing she couldn't deny she did love adventuring.

[ozbian]

For reference, Ludinus' final words, Matt's description and Brennan's narration during The Nox Engine, right before the memories started playing

Welcome. Welcome to the Occultus Thalamus.

The high mages of the Age of Arcanum were the greatest minds of Exandrian history. The call to innovation created great societies of ingenuity, ambition and endless potential.

Using the gifts of the gods bestowed upon them, they began to unravel the great secrets of the universe. Prideful, perhaps, but beautiful.

And they feared it.

Once the child becomes the parent, often those in power can grow resentful, and they did.

And when more came crawling around, a war of omnipotent children bickering, these brilliant minds had to adapt, focus to implements of war beyond just implements of progress.

When the divine threatens your families, your children, the very future of life as you know it, they reveal themselves as the enemy.

I saw it. I was there in the final days of the Calamity. I watched mountains brought to dust, whole country set aflame, the tantrums of the gods wantonly murdering and massacring the majority of all civilization on Exandria.

When the dust had settled and their rivalry paused, the few of us that survived wallowed in the dust and ash and spent centuries trying to rebuild from what scraps we could find, while they vanished beyond their gate to protect us, or perhaps to hide from us once they saw what was capable.

I survived, watched as a child, acknowledged what they wrought as they fled to the mystical hideaways.

This world has been manipulated, duped in its opinion, its understanding of divinity. For those that write the history books are those in power and there is no power higher than them.

There's a reason they fear me.

Some of it's Predathos, yes, but I found something equally important here. Sometimes the most important weapon is information. And these mageocracies in many places had ways of recording things, knowledge, history, some lost to time, but Aeor created the Thalamus, a device that recorded the spiritual memory of all in the city, including those that brought it low.

I've spent a day or so studying this and I found something, something I think you want to see."

He reaches over to the cracked central dome and places his hands near it, and as it does, (cracking) begins to open up, mist (spurting) billows out and you watch as this light green orb emerges, an endlessly fractal network of threads of Arcane power, layered upon themselves over and over again, and it drifts beyond them.

Within here lies the memories of Aeor, fractured, but enough.

And what I will show you, I will show the rest of Exandria."

As he changes the hold on the sides of his hands, the orb begins to spin rapidly, whirs loudly. (spinning) It begins to brighten.

This light begins to burst and pulse. (light expanding)

All of you feel instinctively like you have to recoil as entirely the very space around you is filled with light.

Your spirit is filled with light. Your mind is filled with light. All there is is light.

LIGHT.

[endreal]

Final days? You're not going to go all Majora's Mask on us are you? 🌕😢

The final days of a questionably appropriately dressed comic store gal

[godfrey-industries]

"Calamity and Woe! Calamity and Woe!"

"I have made a horrible error! My beloved roomba, Gustaff has escaped through the front door and he is nowhere to be found!"

"What havoc have I wrought upon this world? What are the consequences of my carelessness?"

"He has no natural predators!"