#emil retvenko

[stromuprisahat]

Anya

Six of Crows- Chapter 1

First chapter brings us one-sided longing. Young man’s crush on a pretty girl, who also happens to be virtually a slave in the house he’s guarding.

Or perhaps she doesn’t have many reasons to laugh.

Rules for Grisha indentures:

No walks allowed after dark.

You’re not entitled to any sort of explanation regarding your assignments. Neither are your colleagues.

No explanation’s required for sudden disappearance, be it due to death or unplanned reassignment.

What was happening for that hour between Anya’s and Joost’s arrival?

Is it only fear, or did they make her try something else before moving on to parem?

Yes, Grisha indentures aren’t merely servants, they’re slaves. Serfs that can be sold. According to wiki, normal indentures “could usually marry, move about locally as long as the work got done, read whatever they wanted, and take classes" .

I do so hate people- especially men- in power, touching others, when the situation doesn’t require it.

Of course. Healer = nice and gentle.

Oh! Poor, poor capitalistic pig!

How much of Healer’s healing is about habit, intention, and how much compulsion?

This isn’t simple “Preform the task!”, it’s psychological torture- the child was chosen deliberately- and non-consensual body modification. Perhaps not visible on the outside, but Grisha powers are their vital parts. Anya is expected to obey without questions, recieving mollifying half-truths alongside instructions.

Money, money, money...

They SO deserve to leave unharmed.

KARMA!!!

Six of Crows- Chapter 3

Let’s collectively pretend this never happened, Anya got away, got clean and lived!

[ven-brekker]

The dead man, the skeleton, and the boy

"'Whatever they made you do, that - thing - they made you take, we can fix it. I promise.' ... Anya nodded. 'But first, I fix you.'"

So as we all know, side characters are my beloved, so the prospect of a Joost/Anya fic spoke to me spiritually. The art is incredible and I was so lucky to work with such amazing artists!

Materialki: @sunshinesartisticquirk (here)

Full fic posted under the cut

Joost was twenty two when he died, and mere moments older than that when he was reborn.

The funny thing about death is that it is, wholly, not at all like one would expect it to be. Many such ideas come to mind: that it is survivable, for instance, but what Joost has most of all found is that he anticipated death to be lonely. This has not been the case.

For much of his life, Joost feared death, largely because of this assumption. He was always a social boy, chatting with the other children on the streets as they would kick balls about the alleyways. Loneliness was far more terrifying than the prospect of finite nothingness itself. He now often thinks how much of a waste it was that he spent his life in the service of a man who cared not for him, alone, and how now in death he has found a connection that surpasses mortality.

For a long time, he believed death to be a visible part of nature. Ketterdam, especially, fuelled these beliefs, for it knows death well. Death is said to hang over the city like a thick fog, graying its blue skies and blackening its light air. The city produced it, and it rose above it alongside the factory smoke and soot. It was as large a trade as cloth or machinery or grisha.

Now, a mere month and a half after his legal death, Joost has escaped the dark fog entirely. The skies seem clearer and bluer without it; the sun shines brighter and the air feels crisper. He is happier.

It could be said that that foul stench of his own mortality, the same one that he found a constant for the past twenty odd years, was not death, but rather the depressing smell of his own unbecomings and of the vileness of the city itself. He is glad to be rid of it. That odor has been replaced with a pleasant scent: of wild grass, baked goods, Anya’s sweet perfume.

He can remember the day he became free - and “dead” - clearer than the Shu waters. He remembers every detail. That day, and the following month, have been seated into his brain, branded like an indentured grisha.

He remembers the moon that night, how it sparkled in the same shimmer as Anya’s eyes. He remembers watching her moonlight eyes become swollen with the deep ink black of space. He remembers being flung back a hundred feet.

He loves sinking back into the past, into his memories. Often, Joost will find himself sat on the soft armchair by the windowsill, as golden light spills into the room, giving a warm glow to the deep oak floors and the painted walls. Through the walls, a whistling tune carries. His fingers comb his mustache, and he wistfully wonders how the moon shall look in the sky tonight.

His memories, of course, are his alone. But he has found that death and rebirth are no places for loneliness, and so he intends to share all that he can. Thus, perhaps more interesting than his recollection of events, is how he shares his stories. Luckily for him, his son always requests a bedtime story, and he has perfected the words over many nights.

Therefore, imagine the night, the moon. Imagine the enveloping darkness cut through by a small singular lamp at your bedside. Imagine being warm and safe and free, ready for a story. This is how Joost designed his to be told.

His story, as this one, begins with his death.

Before being reborn, there was nothing. He has memories of the before, but they pale in comparison to the after. Rebirth changed him. After he awoke from the nothingness, he rose to the darkness. He could not move nor speak, even breathing seemed an immense foreign struggle. It was as though he were in the grave - only, graves had long since gone out of fashion.

Over the deafening noise of ever-falling debris, he could hear the unmistakable rushing of Ketterdam’s coastal tides. The city was known for its allyship with the sea. If a war ever broke out between the two, Ketterdam would surely sink, left to rot under feet of cold water. However, there is an unspoken peace. The vastness of the sea splits into rivers that run through the streets, forming canals and bays of cobble. The rivers branch into streams, which run beneath the city’s foundations as roots to a tree, feeding it life and youth and joy. In the silence, though there was never much in Ketterdam, you could hear the faint trickle of water through layers of brick and stone.

Ketterdam’s streams were not the only waters that ran that night, for over the nearby crash of waves on the shore, Joost could hear the sound of sobs. His pain had subsided into a dull ache, and despite the screams from every muscle in his body, he was able to raise himself up slightly. Above him, a small slit in the rock and dust, just large enough for him to see through. Indeed, he was at the water’s edge. The rocky shore was sprayed with seawater in a routine swish, the pale moonlight casting idle glittering tracks over the inky surface as it drew in and out. The same moonlight illuminated a figure in the same ghostly glow.

Its back was to him, keeled over by the tide, huddling over something. It heaved, back rising as it cast out sobs. It seemed skeletal: the edge of its face carved to bone, the fabric of its dress hanging loose off its bony limbs. It wore a white bonnet, its chest covered in a gray vest and shawl, its arms adorned in blood-red from the garment underneath. It wailed with the passion of the universe behind it.

And Joost felt the overwhelming desire to help it.

He moved out the rubble. The stones scattered around him as he tried to right himself - the dust had caught in his chest, and he could not cough it out for fear of frightening the figure away. He behaved as one does when encountering a lone deer: only his prey was far more timid, and far more mesmerizing.

As quietly as he could, he exited his stone imprisonment. Indeed, “as quietly as he could” turned out to be “not quietly at all”, for when he stammered and hobbled to a pathetic stand, the debris crashed against the bay’s rocks in a loud crash. The figure did not startle.

He approached it, and still it did not seem to notice him: it only continued to whimper. Lost, delirious and consumed by a dull pain which was most certainly being inhibited by his own shock, Joost decided his best plan of action would be to crouch down next to the strange, thin skeleton. He, in truth, did not know why, other than that he felt called to it. It could have been a mermaid of northern legend, or a siren of an old kerch tale. Joost did not know what it was, only that in its decrepit body, the figure glowed as if lit from within by the moon itself, freckles on its frail skin evidence of planets and such.

He remained crouched for a moment, trying to gauge the danger of his situation. The figure remained huddled in on itself, its wails quieter now. It was only when Joost resigned himself to a seat that he realized three things: the figure was holding a child, he himself was almost certain that his wrist was fractured, and that the figure was indeed the love of his life.

“Anya,” he whispered, and she had turned then to face him. Her eyes swam the same inky black as the waves, and spilled tears of mountain blue. Her face was gaunt and sick with pallor, her lips cracked and stained orange. She raised a thin finger to them, then gestured down at the child.

“He needs sleep,” she croaked, her voice hoarse and barely scraping above a whisper. The boy could have been no older than ten, his head resting on Anya’s gray skirt, marking it with a spiral pattern of his deep brown curls. His thumb was in his mouth, and his face was calm with a sleeping peace only children can discover.

“We need to get out of here.” Joost whispered. She nodded weakly, as though the weight of her own head would overtake her and snap her backwards.

“Take him.”

“I will, and I’ll take you too.”

She looked at him with her black eyes.

“I won’t make it far. They’re looking for me - what I did --” she gasped; talking seemed to take more air than crying did.

“That’s why we need to get away,” the sea crashed against the rocks. “Anya, they will kill you. We can leave and be safe. Whatever they made you do, that - thing - they made you take, we can fix it. I promise.”

And suddenly, the words he could not find for weeks upon weeks rose to his head. He could talk without stuttering, or blushing, or overthinking. Perhaps that was the fault of pure adrenalin, or perhaps he had killed the old him.

Anya nodded. “But first, I fix you.” His pain disappeared, and the dead man, the skeletal girl and the sleeping boy slunk into the shadows of the night.

Later, Anya would tell him that she has never been in so much pain. That she had carried herself and the boy to the shore’s edge because the waves were the only sound that drowned out the deafening beat of her own blood and heart. She would also say that she came very close to killing him that night, for the itching, grating noise of his body moving and working, the smell of his muscle and flesh and blood, made her irrevocably and irreparably furious. She will also say, when asked, that she is very glad she did not.

The three stayed together in the Ketterdam shadows for a month before they managed to get out. The boy, Piet, had a strong fighting spirit, and got through the most harrowing situations with the few single comforts of sucking on his thumb, cowering in Joost’s chest, and letting Anya squeeze his hand and pet his hair. He hardly panicked when the Shu men with wings attacked the city and they decided to leave that same evening, nor when Anya’s screams of greed for the substance they knew so little of were so loud that she had to bite her own bonnet to muffle them.

Anya, of course, had the strength of a million Stadwatch soldiers. Often, Joost would wake in the early hours of the morning and light a candle, the only source of illumination in the dingy basement of an abandoned factory that they had co opted as their own, to find her sprawled on her bed, auburn hair matted and tangled, cheeks wet from the tears of effort it took to keep her wails and pleads quiet. For that month, her face remained gaunt and her body thin. More than once, she would lead Joost to her under the guise of needing a cool towel to keep her fever down, and would grab him in an attempt to knock him to the floor so that she could escape and find her mystery drug. Her attempt left her entire arm bruised blue and yellow.

One night, one of the few calmer ones, she told him that the orange drug had spawned an irreversible love for Piet, but that the past few weeks had formed an irrevocable love for him. She had kissed him then, and Joost does not think he has ever flushed a brighter red in his life.

The morning after, they left for the rural side of Kerch. Hidden under the cloth covering of a wagon, they rode for days until they reached the farm. Joost has always been an honest man, but thinks it is amazing what a month or so of dishonest work can buy a man. This is often something he leaves out of his stories to Piet.

Their farmhouse sat in the western fields, secluded for miles all around. Piet and Anya had both decided on the area, for Piet grew up tending nearby lands before being forced to move to the more affordable Ketterdam streets, and Anya found the land similar to that of the Ravkan ones she, too, grew up on before her indenture.

Now, they live a pleasant secluded life. Joost has learnt to tend the fields, but mostly he spends his time baking and writing, so that he may never lose his words and that Anya may never lose her health again. She retains the glow of the sun now, rather than the pallor of the moon, and her dark eyes speak of coffee more than of night terror.

It is a simple life, though it is not as lonely as one may think. It is almost unbelievable how many names upon the coroners’ records have equally found themselves in Joost’s abode - how many indentures broken by death can become liberated living men. Many of Anya’s old Ketterdam friends and colleagues particularly like the peace.

In all, Joost finds himself dreaming, day and night, and writing. He sits by the window each dusk and each dawn, waiting for the soft waken footsteps of Mrs. Van Poel and the morning yawn of their son. Death has given him the most pleasant life a man could ask for. He is content as a dead man with his skeleton wife and his boy.

[inejs-knife]

how are you going to ignore the guy who said "why does city smell so bad? like old soup?like sink full of dishes?"

lots of talk about joost not enough about emil retvenko

[same-crazy-art-girl34]

@kkanej I promised-

[grishaverseficlibrary]

The Wind Blows Cold by DreamsAtDusk

(Based on the first two chapters of Six of Crows.) Indentured to a mercher of Ketterdam, there is still much Retvenko does not regret.

[strangenoquestion]

The war had pitted Grisha against Grisha, and his side had been particularly brutal. He’d murdered former comrades, civilians, even children. But what was done could not be undone. King Nikolai needed soldiers, and Retvenko was a very good soldier.

Leigh Bardugo, Crooked Kingdom

[black-rose-writings]

Reading Crooked Kingdom because I need to know exactly how bad it gets - Chapter 1

Fuck it, I have free time, I’m gonna read like it’s 2012 and I’m being bullied in middle school.

POV Emil Retvenko

My boy Emil,

We love him, he deserves better.

And he has taste.

I know he’s going to be basically dead by the end of this chapter, but still. Man deserves better.

His side was brutal and the other one is incompetent.

Fuck capitalism? Fuck capitalism.

Come on, he’s fantasy-Russian. He can handle a few shots.

I’ve learned already that when a protagonist in LB’s work is making plans for the future, those plans are going to get trashed very soon. Because we don’t get happiness here.

Tea can be good without sugar. Coffee, not so much.

I’m not exactly sure just how much Retvenko’s broken “Kerch” bothers me, but it kinda does. I get that he’s supposed to have a bad russian accent, but still.

Wow, that guy is really slow, isn’t he?

I’ll just leave this here.

Oh no, Shu lady is not dead.

Emil is a badass and he’ll go down fighting.

What? What the fuck?

[ao3feed-grishaverse]

Summer Lovin’

read it on the AO3 at https://ift.tt/383hDI1

by EllaVanEck

The story of the Grishaverse’s greatest romance.

Words: 721, Chapters: 1/1, Language: English

Fandoms: Six of Crows Series - Leigh Bardugo

Rating: General Audiences

Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply

Categories: M/M

Characters: Joost Van Poel, Kuwei Yul-Bo, Anya (Six of Crows), The Apparat (The Grisha Trilogy), Nina Zenik, Emil Retvenko, Inej Ghafa, Kaz Brekker, Wylan Van Eck, Jesper Fahey, Adrik Zhabin, Leoni Hilli

Relationships: Joost Van Poel/Kuwei Yul-Bo, Jesper Fahey/Wylan Van Eck, (Minor)

Additional Tags: Wedding, Romance, crackship, Exes, First Meetings, Forbidden Love

read it on the AO3 at https://ift.tt/383hDI1

[stromuprisahat]

Anti-Grisha sentiments in Six of Crows duology, pt. 1

Six of Crows- Chapter 1

*exasperated Darkling voice*

It’s a Small SCIENCE!

Any property damage caused by indenture, will be paid by them.

Manners are not necessary, while dealing with indentures. They’re objects with function, not people.

Expensive objects with function.

Coveted expensive objects with function.

The most terrifying aspect of ongoing injustice is always indifference of some.

Anya, pt. 2, pt. 3

[inejs-knife]

lots of talk about joost not enough about emil retvenko

[pookaseraph]

I think the biggest wrench not mentioned here is: Bo Yul-Bayur. He invented parem around when the original trilogy was happening. He makes the astonishingly stupid decision to try to sell the product to the Kerch well after the revolution. Emil Retvenko has sold himself as an indenture to get out of Ravka by then.

Would Bo go to Ravka instead of Kerch? That is the question for me.

What changes would you give to the Six of Crow duology, to fit it into a continuity where Darklina reunited and ruled Ravka? Honestly, aside from Nina's backstory, and a few other little tweaks, I don't think the duology would have huge changes. After all, Darklina can't change society that fast. I also think Nikolai Zoya and Genya could have appeared just as well. Simply Nikolai wouldn't be the king, but that wouldn't stop him from working with/for Darklina. And honestly, I've always found it a bit stupid that the king of Ravka goes on the road himself with two grisha when he has his own country to take care of.

Well yes, Nina wouldn't be on the road, but there's very little Grisha after the war, so we can get her some speeded-up training outside of Little Palace. Not abroad, maybe some station nearer the borders, where she'd be able to practice her linguistic skills talking to refugees, or interrogating captives.

Suli was best for missions in the northwest. Shu meant you’d be stuck translating diplomatic papers.

Shadow and Bone- Chapter 9

As you said, even a couple of powerful Grisha won't make their enemies behave in a day. Raids are to be expected. She could've been captured on Ravkan soil.

When drüskelle almost killed Alina on her way from Kribirsk to Os Alta, Matthias could be in a group infiltrating Ravka near Ulensk for example. It's both near Fjerda and the (remains of the) Fold, but then again, unexpected shenanigans would have to ensure to get them to Ketterdam.

West Ravka would be an easier choice then. They're likely to be unhappy about re-connection with their poorer, differently-thinking sibling. Show had openly admitted Westerners are selling Grisha to their enemies. Nina could be among them, except this time she'd still be a hormonal teenager with unfinished education.

KoS MCs would be more complicated.

Genya is still a traitor, and Aleksander's hardly the forgiving type. A veeeery big AU I've been thinking about for a while would be faking her change of heart to double-cross Alina. Picture a politically-shrewd spy, bleaching her own face for years to help overthrow her rapist... only for the Coup to go to hell.

A new variable appears, putting a greater value on her own peace and quiet than necassary change, and force failed to make her co-oparate. Loyalists boarded ship captained by a suspicious character, likely with agenda of his own... so the spy comes up with a sneaky strategy as the plan B, should it be necessary. When it becomes obvious Alina will slip through their fingers once again, an order comes to "stop her".

... and once everything's ready to take the throne, the Darkling with his forces secures the capital and plants his spy once again. Alina has a knack for escaping after all and who would have suspected mutilated girl, cowering in shadows?

That's one way to give Genya the recognition she deserves. Enter Evgenia Safina, the spymaster and/or ruthless, cunning delegate she should have become.

Zoya doesn't have much to offer, but quite a beef with the Darkling. He'll be always the one, who "killed" her aunt. And she's still just a replacable Squaller. If I were the Darkling, I'd use her as deterrent example. Public trial and fitting punishment.

Nikolai... well, the wisest course of action would be killing him off too. He's a possible competitor for the Throne, and he IS ambitious by himself, not merely in love with Ravka like we're told by the narrative.

Even discredited, there would be those preferring a bastard with a crown to the Saint-enslaving Satan.

It's true Sturmhond was useful to Ravka once, and could be so again, but how would we ensure that's what he'll remain?

And honestly, I've always found it a bit stupid that the king of Ravka goes on the road himself with two grisha when he has his own country to take care of.

That's to show he's a man of people! The boring kingly stuff's being done by itself!

Back to the start- SoC plot could remain almost the same, although it would offer a new storyline about how is Ravka trying to deal with the threat of parem. Or a mention here and there. Or nothing at all, if we're sticking with Crows-only POV and all their info would be Kaz's deductions and hearsay.

The Ravkan delegates in CK would simply be lead by Genya (See: above), so Wylan would get his face back, and the rest was mostly about collecting points for "well-known character appearance" anyway.

[strangenoquestion]

In the arms of his captor, Emil Retvenko saw the shadow they made cast upon the glittering surface of the sea far below: two heads, two wings, four legs. He had become a great beast, and yet that beast would devour him. His prayers turned to screams, but both went unanswered.

Leigh Bardugo, Crooked Kingdom

[strangenoquestion]

The clerk reached for a shotgun Retvenko saw strapped beneath the desk. ‘They’ve come for the payroll!’ he shouted. ‘Ain’t no one taking the payroll.’ Retvenko watched in shock as the gangly clerk stood like some kind of avenging warrior and opened fire. By all that was holy, nothing could motivate the Kerch like cash.

Leigh Bardugo, Crooked Kingdom