#cathedrals unbound

[thecheshirehouse]

Introducing…The Cheshire House!

This is our logo, drawn by the amazing @aristidetwain!

https://thecheshirehouse.wordpress.com/

The Cheshire House is a new website which will play host to stories from across the Third Universe and beyond — prepare for adventure, mystery, and weird alien shit! 

Featuring the activities of a wide range of characters across several different series, the website shall emerge with six all-new stories and one republished story. 

Founded by Ostara Gale (@a-wartime-paradox), the Cheshire House will feature stories from a wide range of authors, including: Ostara, Elodie Christian (@tvmigraine), Aristide Twain, Theta Mandel (@theangelshavethephonebox), Plum Pudding, Molly Warton (@aquanafrahudy), L. Alves (@drleevezan), Thien Valdram (@thienvaldram), Ryan Fogarty, Xavier Llewellyn, and more!

Above is a digital artwork of Abraytha, the Unbound Scavenger, drawn by the fabulous Holly!

And here is the cover for 'A World of Pure Unimagination', drawn by the awesome Aristide!

Our first seven stories...

The First Metamorphosis is a story of The Interstellar Sleuth, written by Elodie Christian and edited by Ostara Gale & Aristide Twain. The story follows an amnesiac patient’s attempt to escape the terrible Happiness Facility, with their only real clue to their identity a mysterious lottery ticket…

The Carnage of Urmafrae features Lotto and Mae as they investigate the disappearance of a village which has never existed, and learn to live with the consequences… The third story of The Interstellar Sleuth, this story was written by Ostara Gale and edited by Theta Mandel & Aristide Twain.

A Collision of Ships marks a crossover between The Castaways of Ishiok and Zadellin, written by Ostara Gale and edited by Theta Mandel & Aristide Twain. A multiversal traveller and three Archons run into each other —  literally. Their Ships collide. Unsurprisingly, tensions rise as they try to fix their respective Higher Dimensional Ships so they can continue on their adventures.

A Visit from Everywhere is a crossover story between The Castaways of Ishiok and the worlds of Jenny Everywhere, written by Ostara Gale and edited by Theta Mandel & Aristide Twain. When Jenny turns up in Katioka, Abraytha and Xiantio attempt to take her home.

My Name is SAM is a standalone sci-fi short story, penned by Elodie Christian and edited by Ostara Gale. SAM, a true AI based on Mars, sends a letter home. AI should not have a home, but SAM has memories that would beg to differ…

A World of Pure Unimagination by Xavier Llewellyn and edited by Aristide Twain follows Jenny Everywhere and her colossal chocolate craving. On the search for sweets, she finds an infamously awful Chocolate Factory knock-off. But is there something going on that’s more sinister than a simple scam? Jenny won’t leave without answers.

The Cathedral of Winter was originally published in The Book of the Snowstorm, and is Abraytha’s first story. Written by Ostara Gale and edited by Aristide Twain, this story is now available for free digitally in order to make the Unbound Scavenger’s story complete.

You can find us here on Tumblr, and also at CheshireHouseStories on Instagram, as well as Cheshire_House on X/Twitter. You can turn on notifications for this blog to always be notified when a major update occurs, or when new stories are released. We hope you enjoy our stories… Now, get to reading!

[utopiastrology]

Jupiter transits through the houses - part 1

For this series, look at the period of time when Jupiter is actually transiting that house in your chart, as opposed to just when it’s changing signs. 

These transits are meant to highlight areas of growth in your life, ways in which you can utilise Jupiter to bring forth opportunities, fortune and help, to find completion and fulfillment in life.

Jupiter transit 1st house: this is truly the time to reinvent yourself. You might feel like a bit of a newborn, new uncharted paths laid out before you, none of them necessarily easy or straightforward. You could be trying out multiple routines, hobbies, job paths, even friendship groups, whatever relates to how you define yourself is susceptible to be changed, thrown out, upgraded. It can be both fun and challenging, so now you must learn to embrace the discomfort and uncertainty of starting over and eventually find some discipline to ground you through it all. You could also be very focused on your head/face and changing your beauty regimen. It is a time to experiment, find out what you want, and what you will put your own spotlight on for the next cycle of Jupiter.

Jupiter transit 2nd house: get ready to find out new ways to make money, earn your place in the world and find your self worth. Whatever opportunity is the right size for how much you can handle and how you see yourself, Jupiter will provide it to you at this time. What you set your sight on during Jupiter in the 1st, will be granted during Jupiter in the 2nd - or at least, the first real, significant step towards those goals will come to pass. Your level of self esteem is the key to getting what you want. Put yourself in situations that give you a boost of confidence to bring forth those opportunities, and ask for help when you need it. You could be motivated to work extremely hard, and that will bear its fruits. 

Jupiter transit 3rd house: the world is asking you to communicate. Keepings things in and repressing who you are is just not the move. You will feel compelled to start letting people know what you truly think and feel, and the toothpaste just can’t go back into the tube - which does not mean communication has to be violent at all, just more honest, more adult. In this process, Jupiter will also gift you with diplomacy and encourage you to further grow your vocabulary and open your mind up to new ways of thinking and relating to people. You might want to take some short trips but it’s frankly not that relevant. 

Jupiter transit 4th house: one of my favorites, I must say. This Jupiter will want to give you building blocks of inner security, a foundation to your own personal cathedral if you will, the edifice of your future joy and success...by making you appreciate the present, and its unbound creative potential. The IC is a very underrated, complex and profound part of your chart. The 10th provides what you expected to get, what you consciously strive for and the persona you can use in front of the world; the 4th house gives you what you never even thought you were capable of, or even thought to desire in the first place. Thus the IC gives you back to yourself and the vastness that’s inside of you, not outside. The 4th house shows your Potential, and Jupiter loves being in that motivational speaker role. This is the placement that reminds you to no longer strive so hard; to listen to your inner voice and receive with ease, but without expectation. A lot of people going through this will see an improvement or a smoothing of their relationships with the people they see as a their innermost circle, be it close relatives or friends. For fewer people it also means an uptick in romantic action and prospects  - Cancer / 4th house energy is an emotionally magnetic energy and it works in harmony with Jupiter. 

[pattriciasims]

just me thinking about these songs (from Cathedrals' 2014 EP Cathedrals) for romancing the party in veilguard

im gonna play my rook as a bard i don't care how it's not an actual class/sepcialization–

fave lyrics below the cut!

"Harlem" - Cathedrals (bc mages amirite??)

"In the Dark" - Cathedrals (veiljumpers, eh?)

"Ooo Aaa" - Cathedrals (emmrich PLEASE)

"Unbound" - Cathedrals (jumping on the "lucanis has/is a pride demon" bandwagon)

"Want My Love" - Cathedrals (like… everyone in the party)

[laspocelliere]

Day Two: Bark

The trees had songs in their bones.

The young adventurer felt it almost immediately upon entering the Twelveswood, bid to wander and explore the great dappled canopy by those she’d met upon arrival. From the moment she’d set foot on the airship landing, she’d been ushered from one meeting to the next, each new face both eager and apprehensive to meet an adventurer who had already garnered such an eclectic reputation. She’d seen their sideways glances, and the distrustful curiosity in their eyes when they regarded her, and brushed it off as common. It would never be – could never be – anything otherwise.

But she still went to the forest when bid, rare in her genuine compliance. She’d never seen trees like this, and even a heart as stony as hers, despite its youth, felt like it could burst with the need to see as much as she could, while the opportunity yet beckoned.

Before it was taken away, as all things eventually were.

Still a young girl, all told, her legs still felt uncertain back on solid earth, and she’d privately determined that while the views made it worth it, a lifetime underground meant she wasn’t necessarily suited for air travel just yet. She’d stepped out of New Gridania alone in the midsummer sunlight, crossing bridge and brook until she found herself quite in the heart of the forest, with little but the chitterings of birdsong and small animals in the underbrush to break the wide, impressive silence.

Delicate as a doe, she picked her way through the summer grass, moving towards an oak that towered above her like the arches of a cathedral. Beneath her feet, the roots of these leaf-crowned trees pulsed with a life that she could nearly taste; something richer, and earthier than the mineral and steel tang of the unflinching pines of her homeland. Try as she might, it was impossible to deny the ancient history that soaked through the very trees around her, these silent sentinels who’d seen the conflicts and conversations that had long since faded into legend and lore, trickling down through the centuries to one day shape the life of a child who’d entered a world that never wanted her from the start.

The thought was a familiar one, a companionable ache that lived just behind her heart and had settled there, nettling sharp and uncomfortable since the day she was born. Since the first sound she’d likely ever heard was her own mother’s horrified gasp at the sight of her.

An omen. A curse. The traitor Greens come to haunt us in flesh, marking her for doom, and destruction, and death. 

Whispers. Promises. Disdain. Familiar enough that she’d never known anything else.

Threatening enough that she’d known to run, as fast and as far as her feet could take her. 

Memory festered bitter in the adventurer’s mind as she pressed her palm to the bark of the towering oak, feeling the roughness beneath the newly formed combat calluses that marred her once lily-soft hands. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see her hair, loose and unbound over her shoulder, meeting perfectly with the emerald greens of the forest around her and connecting in a seamless wash of coordinating colour.

And the familiar feeling of not belonging only grew stronger.

Since her birth, she’d been told – warned – about the Twelveswood. The betrayals her people had suffered, the sacrifices they’d made to keep to their roots and traditions, all brought to mocking naught by those who had indulged in the creature comforts offered by those who came to usurp what was rightfully theirs. She’d been told of her cursed connection to that fracture in history, and had it drilled, painfully and relentlessly into her mind, how she needed to fight against the stain of her birth, to rise above the prophecy of destruction that her very existence clearly brought. 

Standing now, in those long-warned grassy knolls, she could feel that connection whispering to her like ghosts. These ancient trees held an entire history in their rings, whispering songs and stories that she knew the words of, but still rang hollow and listless against the battered confines of her chest.

These trees didn’t recognize her, despite her always having been warned they would.

There were stories here, but they weren’t for her.

They never had been.

Neither disappointment nor regret filled the empty chasms of the young warrior’s heart as she stared, unseeing, at her own hand pressed firm against the tree bark. Bitterness and loneliness were her constant companions, and she knew how to arrange herself to accommodate them, despite them growing ever larger, and ever more demanding. She sought adventure and strife, searching for a reason for her being brought into this world, and despite having travelled further than she could ever thought possible from her small mountain home, there was still…nothing.

Nothing beyond that constant, pulsing heartbeat of nature around her, beckoning to seek out still more. To seek, unrelenting, until meaning found, or hopelessness confirmed.

Sharply, she curled her fingers against the surface of the tree, her nails scraping harshly into splinters and moss. For the briefest instant, she thought of flames licking at vulnerable roots, of the blade of her sword slicing into vulnerable green saplings, until this wordless monolith understood the suffering she’d endured in the name of its very presence.

Instead, she turned away, stone and steel and so very, very cold.

Not here, then. 

Onward.

[orfanmakr]

I think about these lyrics in Unbound by Cathedrals every time I see this part help

[atefirom]

interview

Lonely steps echo off stone. It is quiet in the lull of nightfall.

Boots come to a halt. Ceilings that seem to stretch to the heavens, the faint smell of candle wax as they slowly dwindle out, and a faint whistling knocking on the arched windows. Hands steeple together and the corners of her mouth turn up ever so slightly. This must be a sight in daylight, but even more so when naught but a stray cat wandered. If the stonework and moss between its cracks is anything to go by then surely some departed souls must dwell here.

Where her fascination with the occult began, she does not recall. Buried deep in her heart were faint memories of following the shadows and sinking into whatever could obscure her from the searing light of the cathedral. Maybe it had always been easier to follow the trails of ghosts than the humble beginnings of disaster. 

The deceased did not lie. 

“C’moooon, izs a party, everyone’s drinking.” 

The fate of those who no longer walked this land had always been sealed. Though, she supposed in a way hers had once too. 

“That doesn’t answer my question, father.” The word rippled through her as if she had seen the matted blood on the fur of a wolf. Though she knew from the stench alone of dried spit and stinging malt just how many he had already had. Panette winced through gritted teeth and narrowed eyes. “Oh, just forget it, you pathetic, washed-up excuse for a—” 

Glass shattered across the floor and it drew the eyes and silence of many, but only for a moment as the crowd soon resumed its prattle and she was long gone from the scene. 

She swore it was her best decision to run away. They didn't care about her, they wouldn't notice she was gone. To have the strength to remove herself from a toxic environment her brother had remarked.

Or maybe that was a pitfall of her own. Instead of lashing out at her father or silently cursing her mother, she should have gotten them help, should have attempted to put together those broken shards. Had she ever asked why her father felt the only spirit in his life was the one pawned in glass or why the only time life reflected in her mother's eyes was under the lights of a stranger's home?

Maybe if they were truly ghosts she could finally get her answers. Or maybe that's all they were, broken shards buried in the desert.

Panette recalled the last time she had prayed, the last argument she had, the first wind that swept her cheek as she crawled out the window, the first taste of freedom. 

As much as she would have liked to think she had unbound herself from the shackles veiled as rosaries and cassocks, she had found herself entangled in another where the only time a deity’s name was spoken was in vain only after pilfering some coin. One vice swapped for another.

Panette had no home to return to, no home to make. Only sour blows to give and foul-mouthed insults to deliver. 

“Hey pal, you gonna keep smackin’ your gums, or do I needta smack ‘em out of your mouth?”

“Stop starin’ or else I’ll give you somethin’ to stare at, your insides!”

But not all was war. Maybe that was why she befriended the stray wolves of Solm, despite their snarling and scratching in the beginning. Hostility bred from the environment they were most unfortunate to have landed themselves in. 

And one day, she would find someone who would show her scars and scrapes were not a cause of belligerence, but a souvenir of perseverance.

“Well Boss! I… suppose it is time we said our farewells.” Her eyes become downcast, but only for a moment lest her lady become forlorn along with her. “But not to worry, for I vow to return by your side to be a retainer… worthy of the next queen.”

She comes across a stained glass window in the center, the moon’s light peeking through the clouds and into the otherwise dark room. Panette stares up at it in awe. If walls could talk and wear their history upon themselves for everyone to see then maybe so could she.

“Welcome to Garreg Mach.”

[oldgcds]

for: @sunstrvck / beyla

Iskra was better suited to leathers and a cape of thick fur around her shoulders, but Beyla had chosen her dress well. The draping of the skirt and sleeve were so delicate they were nearly gossamer, thin and pale coloured, like the watery ice that skims the top of a lake the morning of the first frost. The bodice is constructed of metal, welded like a corset, fixed like the ribs of armour over her shoulders and slim hips. The design suited the War General, her white hair flowing down her back unbound, as wild as it would be on a battlefield. She did not much care for idleness, and had spent most of the celebration on her feet, wandering through the halls and grounds and avoiding the company of nobility and their flowery sentiments. Spying them standing apart, a goblet of wine clenched in a threatening grip, Iskra tilted her chin up in greeting. “Do you tire already of the festivities? Or have you not received enough compliments on your cathedral?” Her sibling’s expression bordered on grimace, an expression that she knew well enough, especially when it came from stomaching the presence of the High Lord in any long term capacity. “With any luck,” she muttered quietly, for it was treason should it be overheard, “Selin will send him to bed soon enough.”

[evocation-of-mystical-eidolons]

I nodded and started presently a phantasmal and grotesque appendage slipped into my view...calcinated by the purification of spectral larvae I dozed and was sent whirling down nether abysses of non individuated oneness as of Neoplatonists...my eyes wrenched toward acrid gaudy lights drunk as of tenuous shadows tenebrous litten by eld mothy moon eared excrescences protruding from the luminous aether in unbounded spaces my neck snapped under pressure of pachydermatous hands of ferruginous salts of ammonia my brain was ravaged and I sunk utterly...infinite revulsion of spirit anguish clad by raiment of oleaginous and unctuous agglutinations of loathsome putrescent slime of eggs of enormous Worms and toads of fungal larvae and maggot born exhalations as of ophiolatrous worshippers beating ponderous drums to the tattoo of infernal rhythms my heart was choked and withering to hoary greybeards in the Selene clad prognathous cerements palls blackened teeming with spermatozoa and oocytes alleles as of genetic abominations delivered to my knowledge through cacophonous dins of insensate pulsating horrors acrimonious and ragged drug through miry fens and bogs of abhorrent medieval sorcerers witches clad in starry lachrymose textiles wrought from the skin of wyverns...my mental proscenium was filled with visions miasmal and horrendous celestial and glacial primal and prehistoric teeming masses of ancient organisms the entire phylogeny tree bifurcation and budding in myriad efflorescence's and umbels roseate honied speech flowed from the lips of maidens defiling from an eld cathedral clad in lace dresses as of white snow tresses as of ravens a grand processional of mystic proportions these imidrizing visions gave way to a new tide of repulsive abnormities flowed in unending tortuous cascades grim spectres of deaths heads and a tide of seething masses of horrid bat deamons culled from nether acrid caves as of trolls and moss swords and castles crypts buried rotting spectres phantoms of nitre-encrusted toads lurking in swampy fens denizens of ancient eld dominions of wizened cronies Hyperborean mages of alchemical phantasies philtres of love potions...I wavered and faltered encumbered by noisome vapors beset my nocturnal owls of sulphur and bitumen my soul froze and I wearied agonized by tumultuous vast scurrying thoughts of anguished wails of frightful ogres and ghouls, spawn of Tartarus and the eternal limitless abyss of Nyx. Beaten goaded and sickened my spirit breaks and is tattered and ravaged by innumerable orcs Elven faeries capered to and fro in front of the darksome and brooding grotto they danced a merry and gay jig the Gladsome and light airy fays or the aerial and ethereal sylph of Paracelsus I was entranced and filled with myriad tender thoughts as I gazed at the joyous dance of the eld little folk yet I was as yet still beset by ravages of the mind...ineffably weary weltschmerz unspeakable existential dread the vast and sardonic derision of the evil propagator of the universe I was tossed tempestuously and rendered derelict and abandoned my body was benumbed by an ancient and terrible icy frost of Norse hells beset beleaguered and bombarded beaten and torn ripped limb from limb utterly extirpated my soul cried out in horrendous despair why ? And the silence mocked my personal credo quia absurdums of Thomas Browne formulated and expressed at my utter limit of anguish De Profundis Domine Lord of the depths I have cried to thee blot out my iniquities , lord have mercy my anguish is yet a species of pride to be simple and humble to be meek I will do penance and mortify my concupiscent desires of the flesh self flagellate and beat my breast have pity on a lost soul wandering in the barren and desolate desert of Nubia I execrate this paltry and puerile life it is devoid of any worth it is a vanity and a lie a profound dearth worthless and ragged and torn asunder...I was slightly taken aback by this sudden torrent of pious devotion which had sprang from my lips I gazed at a crucifix hanging on the wall and thought of the Spanish black Madonna's and the byzantine Christ Panocrator...newly inspired I quickly navigated to the yt channel poesie psychotique vaguely felt affinities to my own experiences a vindication a link to an artistic vision of chaotic and beautiful nay more basically rich vibey vague and various Imagos as of moths of aether and silken dreams wrought in batik Malayan textiles...next I gingerly lifted a mug of fortifying libation of rich earth mould acidulous coffee darker than black as of anime archetypes creating effectively infinite expansive legendariums I sipped and savoured the rich flavour, the inimitable beverage quaffed by decadent dandys nay that was the green fairy Absinthe...my thoughts wandered and new images wrought of psychobabble formed novel and magnificent malformations upon my mental proscenium I plodded along the circuitous and labyrinthine passage of an eld mouldering city of vast cyclopean edifices raised by some archaic prehistoric race who worshipped ithyphallic monolithic idols of rough hewn basaltic stone and porphyry...I glimpsed terrible and arcane carvings and hieroglyphs carven into the malevolent stone which forbode of unknown and arcane rituals of sacrifice to zoomorphic and amorphous god beings extraterrestrial eldritch abominations spawned in the further reaches of Saturn at the edges of the cosmos...they were fungoid beings born from aerial sporangia which traveled galactic distances and arrived on Saturn countless aeons ago they were the Old Ones the Elder Gods identified with all the primal earthly deities of El and Astarte the horned goddess who dances a gyrating and lascivious ritual before the Tetrarch incense laden an perfumed of rich and fragrant myrrh and balsam and also darker satanic perfumes of acontium and wolfsbane they were henna painted and curved voluptuously to the tattoo of a drum beaten incessantly a decadent femme fatale an intoxicating houri of Islamic paradise an exotic oriental goddess the avatar of the destroyer Kali of brooding Kolkata which birthed deafening and thunderous war metal pummeling in its torrent of audial sonic desecrating filth.

[alexandergreensymmetrylabs]

Alexander Green Symmetry Labs: Venture By A Physicist Turned Entrepreneur

Several innovations take place in the world of technology every single day. But if you truly want to stand out and prove that you have the skills required to succeed in the industry you are working in, you should be truly dedicated to achieving your goals. If you are a physicist and want to do great work in your field, you can take inspiration from Alexander Green Symmetry Labs, which Alexander Green started. He faced several challenges but has still succeeded in establishing himself as an entrepreneur through sheer hard work and perseverance. Let’s check out his journey.

How the Journey Began:

Alexander Green was working as a theoretical physicist in 2012 before he started Alexander Green Symmetry Labs. That’s when he got an exceptional idea of using visual technology. It worked by combining 3D modeling and mapping for lighting up cubic structures. These structures would be useful as they could be played just like a DJ plays music. Alexander Green immediately created a goal for himself. It was to complete the interactive installation art before the Burning Man festival in Nevada.

Overcoming Obstacles

The Burning Man festival in Nevada was going to take place just after 6 weeks. Alexander Green did not know how to code. He felt confused about how he could complete his interactive installation art before the festival. But this did not discourage him. Instead, he collaborated with his friends who knew coding and the installation, then became the first project of his company, which was started by the name of Alexander Green Symmetry Labs.

Achieving success

Alexander Green Symmetry Labs named the installation Sugar Cubes. It became quite popular at the festival even if he created it while relying on hot glue and other such materials. But he did not stop working on the project just after the festival. Instead, he kept working on improving it so that it turned into an exceptional light installation that is now featured in various locations. It is even seen in the Cathedrals music video for Unbound.

The Journey of Alexander Green

He understood how becoming an entrepreneur from a physicist is not easy but surely achievable. The work that Alexander Green Symmetry Labs did was a great example of a combination of art, science, math, and music. So, you can also create such outstanding work if you truly have the will to work on it, no matter how many challenges come your way.

Original Source: https://bit.ly/4b7Hqi3

[molags-balls]

Current mod list (highly recommend for best Skyrim experience)

SKSE

A Quality world map

Address Library for SKSE

Aetherius - Race Overhaul

Aetherius - Racial Passives Viewable

ALL Followers Uncapped

Arena - Encounter Zone Overhaul

Bed Head - Hair Retexture

Bandolier bags and pouches

Believable weapons

Belt fastened quivers

Better Jumping

Beyond Skyrim Bruma

Bond of Matrimony Left Hand

BOS HD

Castle Volkihar Rebuilt

Cathedral Weathers

Choose your own arch mage

College of Winterhold Quest Expansion

Cutting Room Floor

Change in Management

Display Enemy Level

eFPS

Enhanced Blood Textures

Enhanced Enemy AI

Faster Horses

Forceful Tongue - Shouts Overhaul

Feminine Chameleon and Lizard (Vanilla)

Feminine Grey Cat and Leopard (Vanilla)

HD Lods Textures SE

House Rule - Lawbringer for Solstheim

Human Enemies drop Hearts and Flesh

Ish’s Respec Mod

Kachunk - Creation Club Crossbow Distribution

Landscapes - Cathedral Concept

Lawbringer

Less Dragons (on AFK mods)

Less Visually Obtrusive Cloak Spell Effects

Locational Encounter Zones

Manbeast - a Werewolf Overhaul

Masculine Chameleon and Lizard (Vanilla)

Masculine Grey Cat and Lizard (Vanilla)

MCM Helper

Misc Dialogue Edits

Mundus - Standing Stone Overhaul

More Dialogue Options

More to Say

HD Tree Lods

My Home is Your Home

Nightingale Hall Restored

No Volkihar Outfits on Regular Vampires

No NPC Greetings

No Vampire Sun Damage in Soul Cairn

No to Nocturnal

Papyrus Extender *

Papyrus Scripting Utility Functions *

Path to Volkihar

PowerOfThree’s Tweaks

Realistic Dark Brotherhood Kidnapping

Realistic Night Eye and Vampire's Sight

Pilgrim - Religion Overhaul

SDA - Pilgrim Patch

Relationship Dialogue Overhaul (RDO)

RDO - Update and MCM

Remove Hanging Moss from Trees

Run for your Lives

Scarcity

Scrambled Bugs

Serana Dialogue Add-On

Simply Bigger Trees

Skyland Night Skies

Skyland Watercolour

Skyrim Unbound Redone

SMIM

Supreme and Volumetric Fog

The Paarthurnax Dilemma

Unequip Quiver

Unofficial Skyrim Creation Club Patch

USSEP

UV Tweaks

Vampire's Seduction Overhaul

Vampire Lord can go with Serana

Vampire Lords Can Activate

Vampire Feeding Tweaks

Vampire Royal Bloodline

Vampire Lord Real Flying

Vampire Lord Retextured

Vampire Underwater Suffocation Fix (oldrim but compatible)

Vitruvia

RS Children

College of Winterhold Quest Expansion RS Children Patch

RS Children Cutting Room Floor Patch

RSSE Children Oberhaul with Hotfix

The Brotherhood of Old RS Children Patch

Sky UI

Buttery Smooth Interface

Display Enemy Level

Wider Menu MCM

Extended Favourites

Remove Quicksave and Help Buttons

Apothecary

Bruma patch Apothecary

Fishing patch Apothecary

Food and Drink addition Apothecary

CC Goblins Patch Apothecary

USSEP Patch Apothecary

Rare Curios Patch Apothecary

Saints and Seducers Patch Apothecary

Missile’s Apothecary Patches - CC Forgotten Seasons Patch

Missile’s Apothecary Patches - Apothecary- CC Plague of the Dead Patch

Morrowloot Ultimate

MLU - Adamant

MLU - Anniversary Patch

Thaumaturgy - Morrowloot Ultimate Patch

Adamant - Perk Overhaul

Adamant - Saints and Seducers Mysticism Patch

Adamant - Smithing Addon

Arcane Accessories Rebalance Patch

Thaumaturgy

Patches for Thaumaturgy - MLU Patch

Thaumaturgy - Arcane Accessories Patch

Necromantic Grimoire - Thaumaturgy Robes

Mysticism - Magic Overhaul

CC Staves - Mysticism Consistency Patch

Saints and Seducers - Mysticism Rebalance

Necromantic Grimoire - Mysticism Rebalance

Plague of the Dead - Mysticism Rebalance

The Cause - Mysticism Rebalance

Serana Dialogue Addon - Mysticism Patch

Mysticism - Jump Addon

School Restricted Staves for Mysticism

quickly! recommend skyrim mods before I start my next play through in 10 minutes

[riverdamien]

Unbind and Let Go!

(

Gift from the Rev. Eric, Jessica, and Robby Metoyer) Thank you to all who have called, given gifts to Temenos, and provided me with a wonderful birthday! -------------------------------------------------------------- John 11:25ff

“Unbind him and    let him go". We see in John's account of the raising of Lazarus the    power of Christ to bring life out of death. It was Jesus who gave Lazarus    his life back, who created for his friend the possibility of a new    beginning. But it was not Jesus who unwrapped the shrouds of death from    Lazarus, it was instead Lazarus' friends, the members of his community, who    unbound him and let him go. Let me share with you a story.        One day, a man wanders into a Cathedral in LA. It is the middle of the    morning during the week, but the weekly celebration of the Eucharist is    taking place inside. Not quite knowing why, he sits down and begins to    listen to the liturgy unfolding around him. His  life is in shambles. He was kicked out of    church for being gay, became a prostituted.. Since that time, each day has    been a struggle. He stays through the entire service, not because he wants    to, but because this seems like a safe quiet place. After the service, as he    is leaving, a woman of the parish approaches him and invites him  to the weekly Bible study that follows the    service. Having a few free minutes, and glad to be able to spend some time    with people older, he agrees. During the Bible study, he meets other members    of the parish who show an interest in him and who seem pleased that he has    joined them.        This celebration of the Eucharist was for this man a kind of new beginning.    He returned to the  church and after    some time, he learned to like and eventually love this  parish and the people in it. They helped    Him to cope, they gave him their    love, and they shared with him their lives. Just as Jesus saved Lazarus and    gave him new life, I believe Jesus saved this man and gave him a new life. It was    Christ's redeeming grace that directed him to the church that morning. Grace    brought him to the church, but it was up to the members of the church, to    unwrap the shroud and the bandages from him so that he could live. It was    the men of the parish who first approached him, and the members of the    Bible study, who first began to unbind him. Christ made his new life    possible, but it was the people in the church.

to take off his    cord and unbind him.    The good news is that through Christ there is indeed always the reality of    new beginnings, of new life. Christ's own journey to the cross has made    that possible. But as members of Christ's body, we must take that new gift,    given to each of us, and unwrap its glory. Ask yourself this morning, how    do I need to be unwrapped? Moreover, what can I do to help another to    realize their new beginning, their new life. In Christ, everything is    possible, in Him life abounds. But it is only through our love for each other    that this gift of new life can be fully unwrapped and fully realized. Amen.

"Today I choose.

Today I bear witness to grace.

Today I practice kindness.

Today I choose love over fear.

Today I am not afraid to be generous.

Today I belong to the whole world, not merely a portion of it.

No matter what others around me choose, today I choose to live  in peace."

Steven Garnaas--Holmes

Fr. River Damien Sims sfw, D.Min, D.S.T,

P.O. Box 642656

San Francisco, CA 94164

www.temenos.org

415-305-2124

The Twenty Second Annual Stations of the Cross

"Our Haunting!"

April 7, 2023

Civic Center

Noon-2 p.m.

Food Provided By:

AUNT BARBARA’S KITCHEN

GOOD FRIDAY IRISH SODA BREAD BLITZ ON POLK STREET

in alliance with Fr. River Damien Sims of Temenos

https://www.temenos.org/

Please help support a Good Friday initiative. Fr. River Sims aims to serve 200 folks with Irish Soda

Bread, the food that supported many Irish during hard times. It’s in the spirit of community and

nurturing.

There’s a legend that when a cross is made in each loaf before baking, all the good fairies are released. We like to believe in that.

$15/loaf payable through www.temenos.org , pay pal, or Aunt Barbara’s Kitchen/Temenos Catholic Worker, P.O. Box 642656, San Francisco, CA 94164

Aunt Barbara’s Kitchen is a Cottage Food Operation from a home kitchen in Marin County.

The business started with $10 and Aunt Barbara’s great grandfather iron skillet with the intention to build

a business model that feeds the hungry and revenue that goes to youth in college. The owner volunteers

her time to this endeavor and takes no revenue for herself, at this time. She hopes to reshape the model

of what businesses can create for communities, especially our youth, to cultivate and showcase the

power of human investment. 415 717 0151 https://barbaramcveigh.com/aunt-barbaras-kitchen/

.

          Fr. River Sims, D.Min., D.S.T.

Temenos Catholic Worker

P.O. Box 642656

San Francisco, California 94164-2656

415-305-2124

"You can measure your worth by your dedication to your path, not by your successes or failures." Elizabeth Gilbert

Compassion is no

[spazmonkeydb]

Her Wicked Heart by stagking

She is a devil disguised as a flower. Her heart pounds for nothing but power and blood. A knife lies hidden in her corset that she waits to dig into any lover's back.

--

A playlist for an evil queen.

Victim of Ritual by Tarja || If I Had a Heart by Fever Ray || We Must Be Killers by Mikky Ekko || Trinity by James Michael Dooley || Empire by Aplines || Strong by London Grammar || Hurricane by MS MR || Body Electric by Lana Del Rey || Trouble by Natalia Kills || The Devil Within by Digital Daggers || Glory and Gore by Lorde || Unbound by Cathedrals || Once Upon a Dream by Lana Del Rey

[ftpmovement]

Julia Wright, daughter of literary icon Richard Wright on what the death of Queen Elizabeth II should mean to Africans worldwide.

MOURNING OUR OWN QUEENS...

"There will be many funerals..."

-George Jackson, shortly before his murder

As a veteran journalist, I watch the body language of thousands of mourners in live streaming, as I write, filing to pay their respects to their late monarch, Elizabeth the Second, in Saint Giles Cathedral, Edinburgh.

As a Black woman, this is what I see: a crowd of mostly shabby genteel, mostly white, vacant faced, subdued, awed, baffled, bewildered, tired, ordinary folk cut off by a cordon from the object of their mourning, unable to have a last look at the face of the person they grieve for because the casket is closed. Other folks chat while they watch virtually and vicariously and wonder if there is actually anybody in that pompously guarded coffin.

Very symbolic doubt... Will there come a time when they will wake up to a Santa Claus monarchy?

My sadness goes not to this privileged, imperially entitled Queen but to these masses amassed in their living dream as they file in front of empty and antiquated pageantry.

Words from one of my father's favorite poets, Vachel Lindsay, come back to me: "It is not that they die, it is that they die like sheep".

It is said that the late Queen had a minute hand in planning the details of her own funeral - at a cost of billions of taxpayers pounds.

Dr Janine Jones and Kalonji Changa - who defends the poor - agree to say: we need equality in the face of death.

I rewind to the footage of Emmett Till's funeral: his open casket by decision of his mother, Maimie Till Mobley, who brought his sealed lynched remains back from Mississippi at the cost of a full year of her own salary. The thousands who passed close to the open coffin were not cordoned off from History - in fact this absence of cordons, this transparency sparked the civil rights movement.

Maimie, our Black Queen, turned us towards the future with the decisions she took - not towards a stultified past.

And I rewind to Malcolm X's funeral and to the mourning crowds excluded from it, waiting cordoned off by hostile police behind barriers. And I pay tribute to the dignity of another Black Queen, the late Betty Shabazz I was years later to meet - and the talk we had.

And I rewind to the poignant footage of Martin Luther King's funeral and the humble pauper's cart that drew his coffin after the funeral service at Ebenezer Church. And my heart goes out to another Black Queen, the late Coretta Scott King, so full of courage surrounded by so many of her husband's assassins.

And I rewind to so many of our funerals - when we are fortunate to be given back the bodies of our lynched and to bury them.

I want to pause a moment on the soul-wrenching funeral of George Jackson who in his own "royal" way prepared his own funeral by writing:

"an empty bed

tears are shed

no more sun

after I'm gone

my family cries

their love has died

my friends are there

death's in the air

my chains unbound

I'm put in the ground

everybody's sad

but I'm glad

it's lucky me

because now I'm free"

I recognize as one of my Black Queens, his mother, Georgia Jackson who lost two sons, Jonathan and George to white supremacy and "did not sit in a corner and cry".

And what about our other ancestral Queens: Harriet Tubman, Ida B. Wells, bell hooks to name only three.

And then we have the living who are not yet even elders: Assata Shakur, Pam Africa, Johanna Fernandez...

We are blessed with so many Black Queens, alive and dead - we are so rich.

Let's celebrate.

(c) Julia Wright September 13 2022

[books-of-the-great-leviathan]

Chapter 21- Azare

***

It had started with a bruise. A bruise, a fall, and he'd never stopped falling.

Daval had left his rooms, chamber doors thudding shut in his wake. He'd cast Azare a dark look. Azare had been waiting in the corridor, ready with a grin for his friend, but at sight of Daval's face it faltered.

"See if you can manage her," Daval said. He'd clapped Azare on the shoulder as he strode by. "Careful, Sev. You'll need a whip and bridle."

Daval was twenty-one and king, the ferocious young sovereign of Estara, determined to rebuild the sister isles after the Black Lung had ravaged them. He was quick to find a bride after his coronation, which itself had come on the heels of his father's death. King Etain Belmont was barely cold in his tomb, and Daval less than a month married.

Azare had stood at his right hand for the wedding, had watched the priest of Bellana carve a red line into first Daval's palm and then his veiled bride's, had bound their clasped hands with a fine golden chain and lowered them together into the cathedral font. Promises bound in blood and in seawater, salty as tears.

Azare heard their vows spoken, had seen the young queen at a distance, always surrounded by her ladies. She went veiled, hiding her face, as was custom for high-born noblewomen. He knew most everything about her, knew she was from the smallest island Belamere, knew she was the only daughter of Lord Hivern, a nobleman spice-trader of immense wealth. That wealth, given as dowry and taken as royal right, could salvage Estara and the Belmont crown alike from the ruin of plague, the ruin Lapide had turned its back on. He knew she had brought a conservatory's worth of her native plants along with her, establishing gardens inside the black walls of Pavaloir Tower. He knew she kept a caged bird in her chambers. He'd heard its sweet songs through the door.

But he didn't know the color of her eyes, or the shape of her face. That was the secret he, master of secrets, had no hold over.

He'd stepped in the echo of Daval's footsteps and caught the door before it shut. He'd heard a cry, cut off- a woman's cry- and Daval was already gone, summoned to his council of lords and generals. Azare should have been there too, as Witchhunter, but he didn't follow his king. Instead he slipped inside Daval's chambers and let the door close behind him.

She knelt on her hands and knees beside a table. She'd fallen against it; Azare saw the purpling arc of a bruise across her cheekbone, a cut that matched the table's edge. The tabletop was covered with documents. A dagger pinned down a stack of letters from the provincial lords of Estara, the desk's chair violently skewed aside, as if thrown. The queen's cheek glistened with blood, red as the fellfox banners hanging from the walls.

She looked up. She was unveiled, exposed, not dressed in the layers of a proper lady but in a light sapsilk robe tied loosely around her waist in the Lapidaean style. Her unbound hair fell in dark waves. Her face was not beautiful, not exactly, but striking all the same, with strong jaw and prominent nose. The light caught her eyes- amber as a fox's- and her first look to Azare was sharp.

"What are you doing here?" she spat. "Did the king order you to fetch me?"

He remembered himself and bowed his head. "No, my queen-"

"Then why? Surely you know it's unwise to enter a king's private chambers unasked for." Her accent was pure Belamere, the liquid vowels of a childhood fed by the island's rich summers, port cities fat with greenery, markets bursting with strange fruits and the calls of exotic animals waiting in cages to be bought. She gathered her robe around her as she rose. "Leave now, Captain Azare, and I won't tell the king about-"

"I protect our king," Azare said, a burst of feverish heat rising in him. "I swore an oath under Bellana's eyes to protect him." The blood, Daval, his back-cast words. A bridle. A whip. Had he pushed her? Struck her? She hadn't fallen on her own. "But I protect my queen, too."

Her eyes narrowed, knuckles white as she drew her robe more tightly around herself. She was young, Azare saw, younger than him or Daval, and so far from home. Azare was a son of Pavaloir as much as he was of his grim, austere father, who'd fought the old king's wars and sat at the old king's right hand much the same as Azare did for the old king's son. These hard black walls were of his childhood, and the flaying heat and red dust of the regimented city below had long forged him into a man who could not only survive its trials but serve Estara, and earn its respect in turn. Not so for Margaux. She had come here like another exotic animal, sold to a king. Now it seemed she'd also been struck by one.

"You need to go," the queen began, her voice tight.

"What did he do to you?" Azare said. He strode forward, crossing the room. Margaux jerked back and Azare stopped, heart pounding. He'd already crossed a line. He should have turned from her and left before he did any real damage. Any other man would be thrown to the bloodpits for what he'd done.

"What did Daval do?" Azare said, and this time his voice was iron. He was so close to her now, separated only by Daval's war table. He smelled her scent- bitter and sweet all at once. Snowbloom. He knew that scent, that flower. It grew thick in hollows and rain-green folds in Belamere's mountains, clouds of it white and dense. The sunlight caught in her lashes. He could not tear his eyes from her, and it was sickening, this loss of control, like plunging into dark water with no idea of its depth. Her mouth trembled. The table separated them, the knife stuck deep into its polished surface.

"He speaks of you often, and with great respect," the queen said, more softly. "He's your friend, isn't he?"

"Yes."

"You know him well?"

"As well as I know anyone."

"And are you the same sort of man as he is, Captain?" Margaux asked.

For all his words, all his secrets, he could only think of an honest answer. "I don't know, your majesty."

Again the sun was in her eyes. Azare felt a jolt to his heart, like she had wrenched the knife from the table and slid it in him to the hilt.

"No," Margaux said, "I don't think you are." She had smiled, and it transformed her face. How had Azare not thought she was beautiful before? She was now, a beauty like the subtle sunlight, like her scent, made for the secret hollows of the world. For a place kinder than this, for a life sweeter.

Azare wanted to follow Daval, to hunt him down and slam him to the wall like they were boys in the practice yard again, training to be soldiers under the stern eye of their fathers. Now, though, Azare would not call hold with his fist poised over his friend's face, the two of them grinning through the sweat and dust. Now he wanted to let his fist fall and pummel his king bloody. Blood paid for blood. It might well have been the Estaran motto.

But he hadn't. He had bowed and left the king's chambers. At the door he'd paused to look back. Margaux faced away from him. She stood at the open doors to the terrace, gilded in sunlight as she stared across Pavaloir, all the way to the sea.

A fall, and he was falling forever. He went to Daval's side that day and discussed with the lords of Estara the future of their foundering nation. All he could think of when silences fell, when talk turned from him and he stood alone, was the way the sunlight fell in her lashes, the transmutation of her smile.

What her hand might feel like, clasped in his.

He learned. Oh, he learned. Warm, and callused along the thumb and forefinger, where a slim snakeknife might press as it was held, poised over a pulse, delicate as a needle.

Later she told him of snakeknives, how ladies of Belamere were taught to wield them from girlhood. Once-

-she whispered, her lips inches from his-

-great venomous serpents had infested the island, and it was believed they preferred to bite beautiful women, to transform them with their venom into serpent-brides.

The bed-hangings had made a small world around them, an island of their own, drifting in a dark and stormstrewn sea. They found moments when Daval was away, when neither Azare nor Margaux would be missed. In court it was a desperate charade: to never meet eyes too long, to never speak in tones beyond formal courtesy. To not think of so many nights, and days, and scraps of afternoons stolen hungrily from duty.

Belamere's women, she'd continued, took to carrying slim knives- not to fight off their would-be suitors, jaws wide and fangs glistening, but to slip into their own hearts before the venom took hold. They kept them in their stays: knives as long as a hand and kept honed so sharp wounds inflicted with them forgot to bleed. Now, hundreds of years later, all the amorous snakes were gone, but the knives remained.

"That," Azare had murmured, stroking Margaux's lower lip with his thumb, "cannot be true."

"Of course it's true. You're just far too grim and dour to believe it."

"I am not grim."

"Just dour, then. You believe in holy dead men and a warrior goddess who rides down from the sky on lightning, with her sword all aflame. Are serpent-brides so much stranger?"

He pressed a kiss to the soft skin beneath her jaw. Her pulse fluttered under his mouth. "Blasphemous words."

"Mm. Punish me, then." Her eyes slid half-shut as her head tilted back and his kisses continued, trailing down the smooth brown column of her throat, brushing collarbone and shoulder and the curve of her breast. The world cooled, the hish of insects from the gardens below rising with the night, moonslight full and effulgent. It made lacework patterns through the bed-hangings, and they dappled Margaux's skin in silver.

The taste of warm night air, of snowbloom and salt, lingered on Azare's lips. They lay naked, rumpled and entwined, sheets strewn around them. Her fingers combed his hair, strands gleaming like copper against her dark skin.

"Do you think he's looking for us?" she said.

His kisses paused, forehead pressed to the hollow of her clavicles. "Don't think about him."

"He's our king."

"He's not king here."

"Daval is always king," Margaux had said, and Azare looked up at her. "And he knows you too well."

"Don't be afraid," he murmured, and had taken her face in his hands and kissed her, like that would suffice.

Empty words, he knew. They would always be afraid. There was no resolution to this that did not end in tears.

"Give me your blasphemy," she'd whispered to him. "Give me everything." She drew against him again, sinuously, like the venom had begun to take hold of her, transforming her, not to snake or to woman, but some strange and deadly thing in between.

Her lips were warm as the night air. When he reached under and between them, slipping inside her again, and her gasp was trapped against his mouth, he forgot Daval. He forgot Estara, and his vows.

Vows and promises, sacred oaths spoken in the presence of his goddess. He would have cut them away if Margaux had asked him. He would have cut away his own name and forgotten it. He would have taken his knife and cut out his own heart, if that was what she wanted.

It was wrong. It more than wrong. It was madness, it was blindness, it was treason. Daval would give him worse than the bloodpits if he found out the truth. Daval would flay him alive, have him pulled apart by wild gholiants, strike off his head himself with a blunt axe, each blow deserved, each one his right. Azare knew what he had done, and some days standing at Daval's side the shame was almost too much to bear. But shame and love were twisted up in him, and he could not feel one without the other. Love, to drown Estara, to warm not like fire but like sunlight, to stand in and be exalted by it. And shame, devouring, dragging him down to the black pits beneath the sea, where all nameless traitor things crawled far from Bellana's light.

Not one without the other. No Margaux without betrayal. So both were necessary, and both remained in him, eating him away from the inside. He would have burned Estara then if that was what it took to keep holding onto her, to keep their fragile dream alive. He thought that was the meaning of sacrifice. How young he'd been.

Now, the light guttered and swung, skittering shadows across his charts as he worked their course. Not sunlight, but lamplight. Around him the Mistfox pitched and rolled on the restless sea. Tonight's storm was a grim one, full of lashing rain and the distant boom of thunder. Not even his thick fur mantle could keep the cold at bay.

Their course had carved north, far from Estara's dry, hot shores and into the icy gloom of the Ork Roads, the vast gray northern reaches of the Inner Sea. They'd dropped the Mistfox's anchor in Buyan, stopping only for supplies in the strange, frozen capital city of Kolyvka, where spires glittered like dagger points against the sky and its citizens walked masked alongside vast, shaggy hounds, all tufted ears and elongated snouts.

Walking its streets, out of uniform in case of Lapidaean sympathizers, Azare could not keep his eyes from the fabric of the city, from the narrow alleys and tattooed old women smoking long pipes in doorways, from the glimpses of fantastical enameled ceilings and the narrow, arched windows, the unfamiliar white pallor of the citizens, the displays of Buyan's famed blue porcelain in shops, each tiny cup its own work of art.

Margaux would have come alive here, would have bent to run her fingertip over that porcelain, would have lingered to watch a street performer's birds, each tethered by a string so the flock billowed and fluttered around him like a living painting. They'd be no one here, two more faces. Not Witchhunter, not queen, but a pair of strangers lost in a crowd.

He'd quickly quashed such dreams of treason. Margaux would never smile, or linger, or stand by his side, never again. Margaux was dead.

A knock came at the cabin door. Azare raised his head. "Yes?"

"Sir."

Ziva's voice. "Come in," Azare said, and she did, slipping through and closing the door behind her. Her hair sprang around her shoulders in wet black curls. Her face was ruddy, mantle matted with sleet.

"Shore's on the horizon," she said. "We'll make landfall by daybreak."

"And the nets?"

"Ready."

"Good."

She paused, eyes dipping. Azare set down his compass. "What is it, Lapin?"

"It's the crew. There's been whispers amongst them."

"What whispers?"

"They say these waters are cursed. Full of ghosts."

A thin smile tugged at Azare's mouth. "Did you ask them if they believed in the Deepmother, too?"

"Your assassin came from these islands, didn't she?"

Azare held Ziva's gaze. Her eyes were sharp and dark, lines forming in their corners. A strange shudder passed through Azare's heart. Her face was so different from Margaux's, round where Margaux's was sleek, scarred where Margaux's had been smooth, her brows heavy and drawn together in the middle, faint freckles spattered across her cheeks. Nevertheless, the details didn't matter. To be watched by her like this was too familiar by far.

"Yes," he said at last.

"You know what happened here."

"I have some idea."

"So you understand their fear." "Fear I understand," Azare said. "Superstition I won't tolerate."

She smirked. "Saints. Say what you really think, sir."

He tilted his head to the side. "What about you, Lapin? Do you believe in the Deepmother, in ghosts and ghouls and demons slithering from the dark?"

Ziva moved closer. The lanterns swung, glossing flashes of blue-black across her hair. She trailed her fingertips along his desk's edge, leaving streaks of damp on the wood. "We weren't afraid of the Deepmother in my town. We had more immediate fears. Starvation. Scorpions and snakebite and empty wells."

"Surely you had some bogey to haunt you in the night."

"What about you, Captain?" Ziva's fingertips stopped, poised at his. "What haunts you in the night?"

Azare watched her. The Mistfox groaned and rocked around them. The shadows rose, fell, rose again.

To reach for her, to touch her. Such a small sacrifice.

But he'd reached out before. To fall, to fall again. That was not the sacrifice he could afford to make, not even for her.

"You don't need my burdens, Lapin," he said, low in his throat. Ziva's fingers curled, the leather of her glove tightening over her knuckles.

"Sir," she said. "What if I want them?"

"It isn't about what we want," Azare snapped. Ziva went rigid. "None of this can be about what we want. We are soldiers and servants of Estara. Nothing more."

She wanted to fight him. He saw the glint of defiance in her eyes. It was the same glint she'd had the first time he saw her twenty years before, a refugee orphan of fourteen, one of hundreds of refugee orphans crowding Pavaloir's docks from the frontier wastelands of Ibaris. The Black Lung had hit them hard, and most of the survivors had been ghosts, emptied out by trauma. It had the opposite effect on Ziva Lapin- it was a whip, a lash driving her on. She would defy Estara's death on her knees, spitting blood onto the sand.

But she was a soldier. Though he half-wanted her to go on, half-wanted her defiance and damn what consequence came, she merely inclined her head. "Yes, Captain."

She turned and retreated.

"Lapin," Azare said.

She stopped at the door and looked back, over her shoulder.

"Make sure those nets are strong," Azare said. "What we're hunting won't be merciful if it gets free."

A second nod, and she was gone, back into the storm.

***

Dawn was a slash of pale light on the horizon. Clouds hung low, iron-gray and looming, nearly as dark as the sea. It shifted, whitecaps peaking, an unquiet expanse of dark water. Gray light leached across the tops of the waves, and frozen spray lashed Azare's face as he stood at the railing, staring out toward the approaching landmass through the mist.

"Not long now, sir," Ziva murmured.

The crew was quiet. No shouts rang through the dawn. There was a tense silence in the air broken only by the hish of wind and water, the creak and groan of the Mistfox's sails. The vessel was a lean schooner, deep gray and plain, made to be manned by a skeleton crew. The place on the mast where the Estaran flag usually snapped was empty. That wasn't what made the vessel feel so unfamiliar to Azare, though he'd captained it many times before. On the bow was mounted an enormous ballista, like some vast crossbow. Its double bow arc and flight groove glistened with rain, its frontplate molded in the shape of twin snarling fellfoxes. The piece of artillery stood sharp against the dawn, some six feet long and suffused with killing power.

A bolt cannon. Not just any bolt cannon. It was quiet now, coiled but not dormant. It seemed aimed at the approaching island, a constant reminder of Azare's mission, of what they had come to these frozen wilds to do. Its ammunition lay in the hold, Daval's star iron javelins strapped into place lest the bolts shift too much in a storm. They wouldn't be fired, not today. All the same the thought of them put Azare on edge, his hand never far from the hilt of his sword.

Becoming superstitious yourself, in your old age? Little chance of that. But there were few men alive who wouldn't feel a chill at the sight of the island fast approaching over the black sea. It towered through the mist, a dark broken double-crag. The island was a ridge, like the back of some vast surfacing deep-sea monster, green moss clinging to its lower slopes. Countless seabirds wheeled around its juts and crags. The air smelled sharp, stone and storm and cold, and Azare thought he tasted the tang of blood in the back of his mouth.

Alkona.

They dropped anchor some three hundred yards from the bay entrance and took a skiff in. The prisoner was dragged from his cell in the Mistfox's hold, a shivering, bent-backed man bound in chains, dressed in the prison grays of Orksmouth, and held between a pair of Witchhunter crewmen alongside the chests containing the nets, the spears. Currents churned; Azare felt them sucking at the skiff, but his rowers were strong, and the bow stayed on course.

"Steady," he called to the crew. "Rocks under the waterline."

The skiff drew closer, waves thudding at the hull. They cruised between jagged sea-stacks and rocks like bared teeth, almost invisible amidst the waves. Any one of them would shred the skiff's hull like it was paper, leave them drowning and foundering as the strong current dragged them under, but they threaded through the rocks and toward the wide arc of beach ahead.

Alkona's sheer cliff walls grew closer, enfolding them like a pair of arms. These were spattered white with seabird spoor, niches and ripples in the dark rock serving well enough as nesting grounds. The waves hished across the beach, dissolving into foam. The sand was not the deep ochre red of Estara's beaches, but black, glistening as the surf receded, so dark it seemed to drink all light.

Ziva's face betrayed nothing, her chin nestled deep in her fur mantle, but her eyes were fixed high, on the taller of Alkona's peaks. Nothing moved through the mist but the endless drifts of seabirds, the shift of the water, the crag growing ever closer, silent and waiting.

How many had died here? Dozens upon dozens, Azare knew, and the slavers had burned what crops the people of Alkona had so tenuously coaxed into taking root, condemning the rest.

"I half-believe the ghost stories," Ziva murmured. "Place like this could make you believe near anything."

"Steady, Lapin," Azare said.

"You think anyone survived?"

Azare lifted his eyes to the sweep of rock and crag and patchy moss.

"No," he said. "I don't."

The skiff scraped sand minutes later, and Azare swung over the side and dropped into the surf. It coiled round his boots as he strode onto the beach. Further out he heard the thunder of breakers against the offshore rocks, but here, the mist dampened all sound to ringing echoes, to the hiss of wind over the sand, skimming fine black dust over its surface.

Azare bent and collected a handful of the sand, letting it sift between his fingers. He tilted his head and observed the highest peak, like Ziva had done. He felt the familiar pressure on his senses, the weight of the sky.

Another storm was coming.

"Drag the skiff far in, past the tidemark," he ordered. "We won't be leaving before high tide. Find a camp in sight of the beach. Ready the nets, and keep the prisoner shackled and lively."

He caught Ziva's eye. "Lapin. With me."

She hurried to his side as the others began dragging the skiff up the beach's slope. Azare climbed the loose rocks at the tidemark and pushed through a bank of mist, parting it. The cliff walls had looked impenetrable, but as the mist thinned steps appeared, shallow and flat, carved in wending staircases up the cliffs and higher onto the island.

Azare reached out and brushed his fingers along a rough stone obelisk marking the base of a stair. It was pitted with a trio of divots- not age-worn, but cratered by force. Bullets. Fifteen years hadn't been long enough to smooth them out again, not even by this wind.

"This way," Azare murmured.

Ziva followed him up, away from the shouts and orders of the crew on the beach, away from the sound of surf and crashing waves. Below, past the crescent of the bay, the Mistfox looked small as one of Daval's navy models. The sea was not black like he'd thought, but a deep green. At this height Azare felt a rush of vertigo, as if he was not looking out across its surface, but down and down to the sunless reaches of the ocean depths. The steps switchbacked and twisted, warped by time and made uneven by countless rainstorms, so steep and narrow they made for scarcely better climbing than the fall of jagged rocks down the cliffside.

All the world was gray and black and desaturated green, the sun a dim, pale circle hidden behind clouds. The tallest peak seemed to grow no closer the higher Azare and Ziva climbed, though the beach had long since fallen away; a few yards down, all seemed drowned in mist. This was a harsh place, a hard and grim place, storm-battered and lonely. Still, delicate things lingered in hollows hidden from the wind: tiny yellow flowers, each small and perfect as a star.

The top of the steps spilled onto a broad, flat shelf, a shoulder of the mountain. Low stacked stone walls surrounded it, built in terraces down the spill of the cliff. Mist drifted through them, through the complex of hive-like buildings built onto the shelf. A village. Tatters of fabric still fluttered from windows, and wind-dry wicker shutters lingered in doorways. No wood, in this treeless place. The people who'd once lived here had made do as best they could.

The skull of a goat with enormous, spiraling horns, each the lustrous black of polished obsidian, hung over the doorway to the largest building. This was grander than the rest, the top of its central dome fully twice the height of the others. Perhaps this was where some of the sacred texts of Alkona had been kept. Perhaps some had survived, hidden in a cave deep under the island's surface. Azare supposed there was only one alive who knew, and she wasn't much for talking.

He looked inside. Piles of wet ash, a few pieces of broken pottery scattered around the central hearth pit, and featherings of char on the walls. Nothing else would remain. This place, and the other places like it scattered across Alkona, had all been put to the torch.

The wind keened through empty windows. Folk had lived here, once, and they'd died here, too. Where were all the bones?

"Monsters," Ziva said, at his back.

He turned, still standing in the doorway. She looked far too alive for this place, her cloak stirred around her knees, glints of silver and red from her uniform visible beneath. The wind lifted strands of her hair. "Lapide did this, didn't they."

"Lapidaean slavers. Yes."

Her expression was dark. "If I'd got to them before the girl did, I'd have done what she did, too."

Azare had not seen the bodies of the dead men, the ones who'd bought and sold slaves, but he'd heard the reports of their condition. "They paid for their crimes."

"However much, it wasn't enough."

Azare closed his eyes. The breeze ruffled through his hair. He thought he heard the silvery sound of bells, but a moment later could not be sure.

"There was a ritual here," he murmured. "A bloodletting. And the means to do that bloodletting, whispered by an oracle's tongue. That was what my forebears wrote. The great Witchhunters of antiquity, when the name was more than a title."

He turned upslope, away from the silent village. On a crag stood a goat, cousin to whichever had produced the skull. The wind ruffled its shaggy gray coat as it stood motionless, then without warning wheeled and bounded away.

"I was wrong, Lapin," Azare said. "Something did survive here."

"I don't like this, sir."

"No. Nor do I." Nor must we. Isn't that right, Daval?

Ziva's hand was on her sword hilt, her step close behind his as they climbed up from the village and toward the peaks. Now the silence fell in, the distant sea a shifting plane of that deep glass green. The air felt heavier here, denser, like it had more substance to it. The steps narrowed and became steeper, nearly vertical. The crags were black shale now, crumbling in flakes thin and sharp as knives, a jagged garden surrounding them on all sides.

"Sir!"

The harsh rasp of a drawn blade echoed through the mist. Azare whirled as Ziva leveled her sword at a shape atop a crag. Azare put his hand over hers. The shape resolved into a trio of goats, stripping moss from the rocks. Horn clattered against horn, a dry bone sound, overloud against the wind and silence.

"I thought-" Ziva began.

"I know." His hand was still on hers, gripping her wrist. Through his glove he felt the jump of her pulse, the heat of her skin. Azare glanced sideways and found her eyes on him, dark and wide and vivid with fear.

His Ziva, afraid? He'd seen her face spellfire and not show a spark of fear, but this place had infected her with it, like it had infected his crew.

Ghosts in the water, ghosts in the air, whispering.  

He let her go and she sheathed her sword. More goats swam from the mist, golden-eyed with back-curved horns, wool muddied and knotted as if worked by small, strange fingers. A gust of sleet-filled wind whistled through the rocks, and far, far in the distance, Azare glimpsed the blue flicker of lightning on the horizon.

Ahead, a shape loomed. A crag, one of the lower ramparts of the peak, jutting like a ship's prow from the mountainside. Darkness yawned in its face, like a shadow, but as the mist cleared and Azare stood at its feet he saw it was no shadow, but a cave mouth. A rough maw twice his height gaped into nothingness. The air emanating from it was colder than the wind, a cold so deep Azare felt it in his bones like the heavy ache of dread.

Rough humanoid figures had been carved from the surrounding rocks, the size of children and featureless, given only the approximation of head and neck and shoulders to delineate form. Azare felt Ziva's tension behind him as they climbed amidst the statues.

"Sir," she said. "Do you hear that?"

"No."

"It's..." She raised her head, glancing behind her. In the rising mist the figures seemed half alive, the furthest ones turned to mere silhouettes. They seemed to be closing in. Stones crumbled, echoing off the mountainside. "I thought..."

She shook her head, still staring into the mist. "Never mind."

Azare's pulse beat in his wrists as he stopped beneath the cave mouth. The air breathed across him- still, and cold, and ancient, like the exhale of something vast sleeping for a long, long time. Bellana's light seemed very far away.

Bells again, chiming inside the cave. The thin daylight illuminated a scant few feet into its depths, but past it was darkness.

"Lapin," Azare said. He unbuckled his sword belt, unslinging blade and pistol, and set them on the stone. He wouldn't need weapons where he was going. Not that kind, anyway. "Go down to where the crew has made camp. Oversee preparations with them. Make sure all is made ready."

"Captain." Her voice was aghast. He turned to look back at her. "I'm not letting you go in alone. If you think-"

"Defying me, Lapin?"

"No, sir, I-"

"You know how important it is that all is in order."

"Yes, sir, I know that." She moved closer. Again, that glint of defiance. "But I'm meant to protect you, too."

A jolt twisted through Azare. I protect my queen, too. Those words, his words, resurfacing from time. There were ghosts here.

"I know," he said. He felt his expression soften. "Wait here, then. If you must."

"As long as it takes, sir," she said.

Azare nodded, and turned from her, and stepped into the cave.

The darkness slipped over him like a thin curtain of water. His footsteps echoed above and ahead, ringing away and away. All seemed amplified- the echoes, the sound of his own breathing, even his heartbeat. The cave floor was irregular, scattered with slivers of flint broken from the walls, long and sharp.

The walls had been carved with niches, each no more than a foot tall, each occupied by human figures like the statues outside. These were the size of dolls and whittled from driftwood dried to a silvery sheen. Some had been bound with feathers, or sinew, or seaweed. Still others had been set with chips of shell in the place of eyes, flashing, watching him as he moved deeper into their midst.

Azare paused to look back. The cave mouth was a patch of pale gray behind him, Ziva a tiny silhouette against the light.

Bells, bells in the dark.

He turned from the light. The darkness rose, swirling like mist; he felt it against his skin, so cold that within minutes he was numb. He tasted ice, and stone, and something else, bitter on the back of his tongue.

A hiss, like an exhale, sliding around him as if circling him.

Chill coursed through his nerves. The cave mouth was a fleck of light behind him, and then all at once was gone, and he knew.

He was not alone here.

Severin.

The hiss became a voice, and he knew it, and craved it, even as a pang twisted in his heart.

You came for me.

She stepped from the darkness like she'd always been there, walking at his side. Her eyes were dark and sorrowful, her hair unbound. She looked like she had all those years ago, a girl sold to a king, save for the bundle in her arms.

A baby, newborn, sleeping.

Azare could not move, could not speak. All breath seemed gone from him. It felt like minutes before his voice returned. "Margaux?"

I knew you would. I think you would always find me. In any world. In death. Torn from the hands of the gods.

"This is a trick," Azare said. "A dream-"

Who are you to say a dream can't be real? We dreamed, you and I. Dreamed of a world we could meet, a world at the edge of the sky where the sun sets. Your dreams were so full of blood. You remember? Dreams of knives sunk deep in Daval's heart. Dreams of watching your brother in arms fall, and feeling nothing but relief.

The shame rose, a wave of it crashing down over him. Azare shuddered, bowing his head. "I would never have done it-"

Maybe not.

A cold hand touched his face and lifted it. Her eyes were inches from his. Her skin looked gray in this darkness.

But you wanted to, my love.

"No more," Azare said, ferocious. "Those dreams are dead, dead along with you, dead and buried deep."

Then why this fear, Severin? I would never tell.

Echoes surrounded him. Never tell, never tell. His head was full of memories- this place, perhaps, ghosts pulling them from him like an angler might hoist night-fish from the seafloor. Never tell. So many words, trapped inside him. Not trapped- locked, cages and cages of them, and as always he held the key. What would happen if he released them? What would happen not only to him, but to Estara? If their king was made a fool, and his lineage called into question? Estara would sunder. Estara would fall. And if Estara fell, if their way of life was broken, and broken forever-

Margaux had told him of volcanic places, Belamere's unquiet earth. How after an eruption the skies became black with ash, and it would settle, and the world would seem to end. But the ashes fed the soil, and the jungles grew back twice as strong. A better world, made so only by burning down the old one.

He could hardly believe his own naivety. That was a dream, as foolish as those they'd made together, seeing nothing but each other and their own selfish desires.

"I'm here for King Daval Belmont," Azare snarled. "Not for tricks and shadows. What ritual did the people of this island use to summon their witches?"

Rituals, rituals. All for more power, more understanding, more glory.

"Enough of this-"

What power do you seek, Severin? What glory? Or perhaps it's understanding you want most of all, understanding from this god you seek to kill. Why I had to die. Why you cannot forget me. Why I chain your heart, even now.

"Weakness. And weakness can be burnt out."

Why you still carry around a shred of your soul. What keeps you from becoming like Daval. Maybe it's your soft spot for the innocent.

The thing that wore Margaux's shape stroked the sleeping infant's head. Maybe it's your soft spot for Alois. He is your son, after all.

At once Azare was cold.

He closed his eyes, but the memories remained, stronger than this uncertain reality. Her chambers, twenty years ago. Screams, cries, Daval absent. Azare had come, had stayed, had pushed through the nurses when they tried to keep him out.

My queen, you are not strong enough-

All Hells with you, he's the Royal Witchhunter. Let him in.

Margaux lay on the bed, weak from childbirth, cradling the baby. His name is Alois, she said as nurses silently removed the bloodied linens. The entire room had smelled of blood, but all he could focus on was the baby in Margaux's arms.

Alois.

Azare had knelt by Margaux and smoothed aside the blanket from Alois's face. He was asleep, wrinkled and purple, curls of damp black hair clinging to his forehead.

He looks like you, he'd told her.

Her smile had been wry, even in her exhaustion. Oh, does he?

He's beautiful.

He's yours, Severin, Margaux had whispered. Her face crumpled. Your son.

Her eyes filled with tears. Alois woke and began to whimper. Azare had stroked his fragile head and his cries faded, and he snuffled, and he slept, so small and so perfect. Azare could not stop watching him, the rise and fall of his chest, his hands curled against the blanket. The wisp of hair on his head. Black, thank Bellana, and no sign of Azare in his features. Auburn hair, the shape of Azare's face or the tilt of his eyes- any such tells meant death.

One thing mattered now, one overwhelming need: to protect this boy from whatever came. From anything at all.

No, Azare had said. He's Daval's son.

And to all the world he was. The first and last gift Azare could give his son was a lie, maintained and believed. Necessary, as all things were, for Estara. For Estara. Always for Estara.

Now, the thing that looked like Margaux watched him, smiling her smile. But it was an empty thing, a mask hung on a corpse.

"I am here for my king," Azare said.

He caught the dead thing by the wrist. The darkness twisted and pulsed around him, whispers rising like wind. "I am here for Estara, not for your judgments and prophetic mutterings. Give me what I came here for, or I will burn your cave like it should have burned fifteen years ago. I know you remember the taste of fire."

The dead thing laughed. Now he didn't know how he'd ever thought it looked like Margaux. The echoes surrounded him, cascading and multiplying, until the dark seemed full of them.

I remember. And so do you, before Estara strangled you and whored you and turned you into its monster. Before your hands became so bloody you do not know where the red ends and you begin. Kill a god, kill your son, kill your heart. You might as soon kill the world for all you can break your own weakness.

Azare closed his eyes against the dead thing, against Margaux's face, against his own memories, but they would not leave him, they would not let him go.

Do you remember when you sent your son to die?

"For Estara," Azare whispered. He had failed Alois. So many times, and now for the last. "I had to choose. Him or Estara. And I chose."

You remember when you were innocent, when your loyalty was such a pure and shining thing, bright as Bellana's light.

He felt her by him, smelled her snowbloom scent, sweet and bitter all at once. Her cold lips brushed his ear.

And how we mock the innocent, Captain Azare.

***

He opened his eyes.

The dark was gone, the shadows gone. Weak light filtered past him, touching the back wall of the cave in a diffuse gray patch. Azare was on his knees. From the ache in his joints and shoulders, he guessed he'd been that way a long time. His breath was smoke in the air as he exhaled and lifted his head. A rough niche was carved into the back wall, around the level of his eyes. In it, surrounded by bundles of yellow rock-flowers dried fragile as paper, framed by a pair of goat horns, rested a human skull.

The bone was the color of tea, begrimed around the eye sockets. Its teeth had been replaced with chips of black flint. Its mouth was open, something wedged between its jaws like a tongue. A shard of crystal, Azare realized. No ordinary crystal. This glimmered like oil on water, like an aurora on the horizon. Whaleglass.

The tongue of the prophet. Now he understood. Not ghosts here, but gods, and those were far, far worse.

Azare stood, slowly. Something else waited in the niche: a long knife, carved from what looked like bone, grip bound in sinew. He drew it forth and tested the edge with his thumb. Still sharp.

Sharp enough.

The daylight seemed bright as an Estaran noon as Azare emerged from the cave mouth. The wind had grown stronger, freezing drops of rain soaking his hair. The sky churned like the underside of the ocean: the storm, coming in earnest.

Ziva sat on a rock some meters from the cave, huddled amidst the strange, childlike statues. She saw him, then sprang to her feet and ran to him.

"Sir," she said. Her eyes widened as she looked him over. "Saints, are you all right? You were gone for hours-"

Her words died as she saw the bone knife in his hand. "I know what we have to do," Azare said. "Gather the crew. Bring the prisoner."

He turned, lifting his gaze to the island's higher peak, towering broken against the sky. "I know how we hunt our witch."