#dONT LOOK AT ME!!!! !!!

[deacons-wig]

If It Be Your Will

Chapter 1 Teaser.....

Working on a freeform, E-rated fic with druid Tav and Gale. Here there be magic, Gods, secrets, and un-dooming themselves from the narrative. Coming soon to an AO3 near you.

“I hope this isn’t impertinent, but may I ask…”

“That’s often followed by an impertinent question.” Danae raises an eyebrow Gale and his gentle smile goes crooked and embarrassed. “But I’m curious, so go ahead. 

“Are you charting the heavens? You’ve been stargazing for white a while this evening.” He gestures to her journal, laying open for the world to see while the ink dries.

Danae wrinkles her nose at him. “Aye—in a manner. It’s a map. And a diary. Using Druidspeak. We call them story maps.”

Gale leans forward. Beneath strong brows his eyes are dark shadows, their color indistinguished in the gloom. “Fascinating. I know Druidspeak is a closed language, not one ever taught to outsiders, but I’ve read about these story maps—an ancient tradition, is it not?”

“I’m just mapping the ground we’ve covered,” Danae said, reaching for the journal and gazing down at the intricate diagrams. “Helps me…make sense of things.” 

“May I?” 

Ma and the Circle wouldn’t approve of showing an outsider.

They'd warned her of wizards, interested only in power and damn the world that hangs in balance. Wizards reap the wheat of hard-won knowledge and leave the chaff for common folk. They plunder ancient secrets. But Ma was long dead and Danae’s Circle was broken, leaving Danae alone in the world with a worm in her head and monsters at her heels. And besides, Gale won’t be able to read it. Nor has his telescope escaped her notice—perhaps he’d let her use it if she shared something that interested him.

“Only look at that page, please?” she says. “I don’t want it to smudge.”

He nods solemnly. “I understand the sanctity of one’s personal works. My old spellbook, before—” he bites back his words with a sharp breath, and waves as if swatting away the words he was about to say. “Before all of this…no mortal hand touched it but my own.”

“It’s just a diary,” Danae said, passing it to him. “No fancy spells or anything. Just the stars, and the land, and my thoughts.” She smiles, crooked. “The stars you can likely read. My thoughts, the maps…probably not.”

He gazes at the pages before him, eyes flicking from constellation to constellation. Above their heads, the same stars watch them, impassive and perfect. Her scribblings are but poor reflections.

“Oh, but these are quite perfect! You have the hand of an artist. There, our old friend Firbolg, coming up on the horizon there—the end of high summer… Oh...” His sigh hitches—like he’s been burnt, or stung. She studies him anew: a furrowed brow and the high bridge of his nose make him look as if he’s perpetually solving some difficult problem. His lips part slightly, eyes bright, his chestnut-colored hair doing its best to escape its tie.

“The Lady of Mystery,” he says at last. “I suppose it is Her time now that highsun has come and gone. One of my favorite constellations, you know.”

He hands the journal back back with the same solemnity, and there’s a curious look in his eyes, something haunting that Danae had never seen in him—not that a week is long to know someone--but there's some sorrow he must keep buried deep behind his cheerful, awkward verbosity. Her hand reaches for his arm but she drops it as he shakes off whatever gloom had struck him. Their eyes meet and though he smiles, it is the smile of a condemned man who has long accepted his fate.

“Gale? Are you—”

“Ah, a story for another time.” He gets to his feet with a groan. Danae does the same, collecting the dishes to wash. “Though quiet nights seem few and far between, when we find another you should come and use my telescope. The Tears of Selȗne are especially good viewing right now.” 

Danae’s heart leaps. “Really? Oh, that would be marvelous! If you’re sure…I promise I won’t break it or anything. I—”

“Pish posh,” Gale says. “A broken telescope is right twice a day, anyway—”

“I think that’s clocks, Gale.”

"Hm. I think you may be right. Perhaps I'm taking a funny turn, mixing up my colloquialisms. But! If playing the fool makes you crack a smile, who am I to deny you?"

Danae touches her fingers to her lips and find she's grinning at him. Her cheeks burn hot and pleasant as he takes his leave with a slight and silly.

"Good evening, Danae.”

"'night," she echoes.

She’s nearly asleep on her feet by the time the dishes are done. Danae dresses for sleep, cleans her teeth and dutifully braids and twists her mass of curs in a satin headscarf. At last, bed. She settles gratefully into her blankets just outside the shelter of her tent, gaze straying to the stars.

She finds the familiar abstraction that training has taught her too see as the shape of a woman, eyes veiled and hands aloft. 

The Lady of Mystery. Mystra... Venerated goddess of arcane magic. The weave itself. A ripple of apprehension stirs in Danae’s core, just below her breastbone. She rolls over, curling in on herself until the ache soothes, and her mind turns to Gale and his condemned-man eyes, and she drifts to uneasy sleep. 

[churroach]

Full of Desires

[mydairpercabeth]

just saw the most heartbreaking annabeth take from ep 3

[nonebinary-leftbeef]

DEVASTATING the lyric you've been mishearing is better than the real one

[kanakori]

i had to

[cryptocism]

"just as I did, in 1983."

you'd never know my favourite parts of the show are the fucked up insane bits when my first instinct is to draw the cheesiest thing imaginable

[inkskinned]

because sometimes there are invisible tests and invisible rules and you're just supposed to ... know the rule. someone you thought of as a friend asks you for book recommendations, so you give her a list of like 30 books, each with a brief blurb and why you like it. later, you find out she screenshotted the list and send it out to a group chat with the note: what an absolute freak can you believe this. you saw the responses: emojis where people are rolling over laughing. too much and obsessive and actually kind of creepy in the comments. you thought you'd been doing the right thing. she'd asked, right? an invisible rule: this is what happens when you get too excited.

you aren't supposed to laugh at your own jokes, so you don't, but then you're too serious. you're not supposed to be too loud, but then people say you're too quiet. you aren't supposed to get passionate about things, but then you're shy, boring. you aren't supposed to talk too much, but then people are mad when you're not good at replying.

you fold yourself into a prettier paper crane. since you never know what is "selfish" and what is "charity," you give yourself over, fully. you'd rather be empty and over-generous - you'd rather eat your own boundaries than have even one person believe that you're mean. since you don't know what the thing is that will make them hate you, you simply scrub yourself clean of any form of roughness. if you are perfect and smiling and funny, they can love you. if you are always there for them and never admit what's happening and never mention your past and never make them uncomfortable - you can make up for it. you can earn it.

don't fuck up. they're all testing you, always. they're tolerating you. whatever secret club happened, over a summer somewhere - during some activity you didn't get to attend - everyone else just... figured it out. like they got some kind of award or examination that allowed them to know how-to-be-normal. how to fit. and for the rest of your life, you've been playing catch-up. you've been trying to prove that - haha! you get it! that the joke they're telling, the people they are, the manual they got- yeah, you've totally read it.

if you can just divide yourself in two - the lovable one, and the one that is you - you can do this. you can walk the line. they can laugh and accept you. if you are always-balanced, never burdensome, a delight to have in class, champagne and glittering and never gawky or florescent or god-forbid cringe: you can get away with it.

you stare at your therapist, whom you can make jokes with, and who laughs at your jokes, because you are so fucking good at people-pleasing. you smile at her, and she asks you how you're doing, and you automatically say i'm good, thanks, how are you? while the answer swims somewhere in your little lizard brain:

how long have you been doing this now? mastering the art of your body and mind like you're piloting a puppet. has it worked? what do you mean that all you feel is... just exhausted. pick yourself up, the tightrope has no net. after all, you're cheating, somehow, but nobody seems to know you actually flunked the test. it's working!

aren't you happy yet?

[novaneondream]

it’s our turn to make you smile

[caemidraws]

[Swan Song Dream 1/2]

[july-19th-club]

seriously have been thinking about this all night long. call me autistic but the fact that 90% of workplaces the point is not to get your work done and then be done doing it but to instead perform an elaborate social dance in which you find something to do even when you're done doing everything you need to do in order to show your fellow workers that you, too, are Working . because you are at Work . disgusting why cant we all agree that if there is no work immediately to be done. we just dont do anything

[bamsara]

Forgive. Forgive. Forgive.

[wild-moss-art]

I know they say amnesia is a bad trait in d&d/ttrpgs but in my most recent campaign I made a character who was voluntarily memory wiped for magical powers and gave my dm permission to make up a backstry that I don't even know. So we show up in this town and get intercepted by a bunch of gangsters who were like "heyyy there's our lawyer with no conscience!" and my character is like "well i still dont have a conscience, how hard can law be?" and that's how we started the ace attorney plotline

[joshuamj]

Hero.

[hinamie]

sympathy for cain

[howmanyholesinswisscheese]

Yes I was up till 2am last night writing a fic about exactly this.