#especially actual greek-speakers!

[aflame4goinghome]

Part Of The Band

j.t.k x f.reader

part one

a/n: this is my first time writing Jake and I have to admit that it’s been so intimidating. he was the one I was soooo scared to write, since he’s my main lane. I plan to make this into a series, so I really hope you all enjoy it :)

word count: 5k

summary: your best friend asks you to come with her to a concert for a band that you’re unfamiliar with. your decision to go proves to have more repercussions than you thought when you run into the band at your favorite bar after the show. you never would have imagined the pull that you’d feel toward their guitarist, or that you would somehow manage to capture his attention…

warnings: yearning, some cussing, mentions of alcohol, smoking. some parts are slightly sexually implicit, including: light groping, kissing, and some sexual language. minors beware! the next part will definitely contain smut.

You’ve never been one to pass up on a night out, especially if it involves music. Music is something that you actively search for constantly, it defines you. You’d do anything to just be able to listen to live music, to close your eyes and just feel it flow through your body. Since you lack any actual musical talent besides half-decent singing, you just listen to it as much as you can.

So, when your roommate and best friend, Sophie, asked you to come with her to a concert tonight last minute, you could hardly just say no. Did you have a big midterm tomorrow afternoon that you needed to study for? Maybe. But live music always comes first. Sophie was always finding last-minute concerts for you to go to together- it was kind of your thing. This time, however, it was a band you didn’t really know.

You’re pretty sure you’ve heard one of their singles, Heat Above, online somewhere a few times but that was the most knowledge you had of Greta Van Fleet. You don’t know much about their background or their names, just that they make rock music and that’s all you need to be convinced to go. You and Sophie had always found yourselves at the Greek Theatre for just about any kind of concert, so this wasn’t a new thing for you.

The show is meant to start at 7:00 pm, but Sophie is always determined to be as close to the stage as possible, so you’re getting ready in the afternoon to get there around 2:30 or 3 o’clock. In the name of comfortability, you opt to wear ripped black skinny jeans, a white halter top, and your Doc Martens. You keep your hair down, wavy and lying right below your shoulders. You put on some simple makeup, just to cover up any blemishes you might have, do some tight-lined eyeliner, and put on a bit of your favorite silver eyeshadow. You take a deep breath. Okay, you’re ready.

─────── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ. ───────

Sophie calls your Uber over to the Greek and you both arrive there just in time. You see about 50 people there already, so you both know that you’ll have a great spot in the small pit. You guys sit down at the end of the line and make yourselves comfortable to wait in the line for several hours until you’re let into the venue. Late October in LA can be pretty comfortable, today is in the mid-70s, so it isn’t a terrible day to camp out. You and Sophie talk about schoolwork, gossip about your friends, and play various games until it’s suddenly 6 o’clock and it’s time to head into the venue.

The group walks down the steps of the Greek and security has the line start all the way to the left of the pit. You and Sophie end up standing toward the front of the right side of the stage, which you’re perfectly content with. It’s not long before the openers come on- they were all great. The energy in the theatre was amazing and the weather was beautiful, it was like a dream.

Next thing you know, the lights go out and it’s pitch black. The crowd goes wild, screaming for the band to come out. Ominous music starts to play over the speakers and a short video plays on the screens on the sides of the stage. You can tell that the band enjoyed building suspense and it certainly works.

Suddenly, you see a dark silhouette emerge from stage left and appear right in front of your gaze. He’s holding a guitar, stepping up to the front of the stage where you assume his pedals are, and strikes a loud chord, bringing everyone’s attention to him. The lights turn up, with a sole spotlight on him, as he starts to play a dark, hypnotizing melody that almost takes the air out of your lungs. You turn your focus to the drummer and keyboardist entering the stage now, adding to the mix and making the sound grow even larger and darker than before.

The crowd then screams as the singer walks out with an enormous smile on his face. You can immediately tell what fans would love about him, he exudes brightness and kindness from the second you look at him. He begins vocalizing and you’re taken aback by his singing abilities, his voice is truly amazing.

The first verse begins and you decide to turn your attention back to the guitarist. You study the way he moves on stage; how he walks upstage then downstage with this confident strut that you can’t help but feel mesmerized by. You notice a theme of blue in their outfits but are drawn specifically to the design on the guitarist’s suit, covered in stars and astrological symbols of the Taurus, paired with dark boots. It’s honestly beautiful.

As you’re admiring what he’s wearing, you take a moment to truly look at him. He has long brown hair with a slight wave to it, falling an inch or two below his collarbones. His eyebrows are dark and quite thick, knit tightly as he’s concentrating on what he’s playing. His eyes are equally as dark, though it's hard to tell their exact hue from this many feet away.

You catch yourself staring for too long and want to make the effort to shift your eyes elsewhere and as you do, his eyes meet yours. It’s a concert, of course the band is going to make eye contact with their fans, it’s a small pit. But he seems to hold his gaze for several seconds to the point where you think he might actually be looking at you specifically. You give him a shy smile, which he returns, and then moves on with the song.

The rest of the song continues and you think you’re really starting to like Greta Van Fleet, the music is truly fantastic. The singer’s voice is beautiful and like nothing you’ve ever heard before. Suddenly he stops and the guitarist approaches the end of the stage, seemingly for his guitar solo. It’s nothing short of amazing, the way that he plays the guitar is so captivating, it’s like your eyes can’t look away.

You hear the crowd go insane for it, screaming things like “Yeah Jake!” “Do it, Jakey!” “Fuck it up!!” and you’re sure that he’s eating it all up. Jake, you think to yourself. Interesting. It becomes clear that the girls go crazy for him and you know that must give him some sort of complex. He seems so confident and you can’t blame him, with all the praise that he’s receiving- praise that is very well-deserved.

─────── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ. ───────

All of the following songs go the same exact way. You can’t seem to take your eyes off of Jake. You’ve also deeply fallen in love with their music and the love that it emits. You feel very glad about your decision to go to the concert tonight- you can feel that this has changed the course of your life in some way. Throughout the show, you notice that sometimes Jake would catch you watching him, which you didn’t mind. Surely he was used to being watched on stage like that, in amazement and admiration. You truly do admire him and his talent, it’s something very special. All of his riffs are so satisfying to hear and the chords blend so perfectly.

Once the encore ends, the band goes to leave the stage. You watch Jake as he walks toward the end of the stage, which you assume is to hand out his guitar picks before leaving for the night. Much to your surprise, he looks right at you as he leans over and tosses it to you. Your cheeks turn a shade of pink and you look up at him, smiling and thanking him. What a night to remember. You think that this would be it, but you are dead wrong.

You and Sophie turn to exit the pit, which takes some time considering how close you are to the front. You’re eventually able to exit the theatre and wait on the sidewalk for a game plan. “So… you wanna go to the Tavern?” Sophie asks. The Tavern is your go-to bar in Beverly Hills; it has a good atmosphere, great cocktails, and isn’t too far from campus. You and Sophie go there at least once every weekend, they all know your names there. You glare at her with a concerned look, “Soph, I have such a big exam tomorrow, are you serious?” She rolls her eyes, “Come on! Live a little! You’re telling me you don’t wanna at least get a little drunk to take your mind off of it? We just saw an amazing show, let’s go celebrate!”

Sophie always knew how to convince you to do anything, no matter what it was. She knew your weaknesses every time. You groan, “Ugh, fine. But if you have to wake my ass up tomorrow at 2 pm for my exam because I’m too hungover, you'll have no one to blame but yourself.” She smiles wide and says “I know, I know. I’ve already called the Uber to take us there now.” Cheeky girl, she knew she’d convince you.

─────── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ. ───────

It's already midnight by the time you arrive at the Tavern. The last call is always at 1 am so you know that you won't be there too long. You both walk in and find your favorite booth in the back, placing your jackets down before going up to the bar to order your drinks. Sophie orders you both a shot of tequila, then gets herself a margarita. You order a bourbon punch and turn back to take a seat in your booth. You both take your shots when you sit down, then you debrief tonight’s events.

“So, what did you think of the band? Did you like them?” Sophie asks.

“Yeah, it was amazing actually. I don’t know how I hadn’t found them before now. The music that they make is extraordinary,” you reply with a smile. You do have some questions, though. “So what’s their deal? The lore?”

“Oh, well they’re from Michigan. They’re actually brothers, besides the drummer- though they all grew up together. Josh, the singer, and Jake, the guitarist, are twins.” You nod your head. I did think they looked alike, you think to yourself. “Sam is their younger brother, and Danny is his best friend. They’ve been making music for a while but they blew up a lot in like 2019 and then this new album skyrocketed their fame.”

“Well, that doesn’t surprise me. This album is absolutely breathtaking. From what I heard tonight, their music is so mind-blowing. It really took my breath away,” you explain.

“I knew you'd love it. I’m so glad that you’re into them now. Especially Jake, it seemed,” she smirked.

You reach over to smack her on the arm and exclaim, “Sophie! That’s crazy! I don’t know where you got that idea! I was not into him.” The blush that’s made its way to your face tells a different story, however.

“You so were! You couldn’t take your eyes off of him that entire show, I watched you. I think he might’ve been looking at you too, you know,” she jests. Just the thought that Jake might have been actually interested in you made your stomach turn. You shake your head.

“No, Soph. There’s no way. Sure, we might have locked eyes once or twice, but there were thousands of people there. I’m sure he looks at all of his fans like that…” you trail off, wanting to shut this conversation down as soon as possible to save yourself from any further embarrassment. You pick up your glass, which is half empty, then chug the whole thing. “Oh, look at that, my drink is gone. I’m gonna go get another, I’ll be back.” You smirk at her, successfully avoiding the conversation for now, and then get up from your seat to walk back to the bar.

As you approach the bar, there’s a group of men leaning against it, ordering drinks. You go to stand on the right of them to wait your turn and the man next to you senses your presence and turns to look at you. As he turns in your direction, you see the long chestnut hair and are met with dark chocolate eyes. You’re immediately hit with the realization: Oh my god. It’s Jake.

He looks at you and offers a soft smile as a greeting. “Hi…” you manage to let out, looking up at him. “Hey,” he replies. You glance behind him and see the rest of the band. Oh my GOD. Greta Van Fleet is at my bar. You just stand there leaning against the bar for a moment looking at him, unsure of what to say next. You find yourself looking him up and down, analyzing what he’s wearing off the stage.

He has on a different pair of boots now, a light brown color. He's wearing some tattered blue jeans and a navy blue, long-sleeved button-up shirt, of which the top four buttons are undone, leaving his upper chest partially exposed. The lighting in the Tavern reflects off of it in such a mesmerizing way. You realize that you’ve been staring for far too long and go to say something, but luckily he beats you to it.

“Were you at our show tonight? I think I remember your face…” Jake says, looking into your eyes as though he’s piercing right into your soul, studying you. You feel stuck, though you’re not sure why. Up until today, you weren’t a fan of theirs and you wouldn’t have thought anything about this interaction at all whatsoever. So why were you so flustered? You finally work up the courage to answer.

“Uh, yeah. Yeah, I was there. It was… spectacular,” you say with a shy smile, finally meeting his gaze. He smiles back at you when your attention is suddenly pulled away by the sound of a loud voice coming from behind him.

“You really liked it? I’m so glad. I get so in my head sometimes, y’know, I was so nervous. So it’s lovely to hear that I didn’t totally crash and burn.” The man that you now understand to be Jake’s curly-headed twin reaches over the bar past Jake and extends his hand out to you. “I’m Josh, by the way,” he adds with a wide smile. You reach your hand out to shake his, in total shock that this is actually happening.

“Hi, Josh. I’m Y/N, which I was just about to tell your brother here…” you joke, making him realize that he’d accidentally interrupted something. He makes an “oh that’s awkward” kind of face and pulls at his collar, causing you to laugh. Jake watches as you interact with his twin with a look on his face that you can’t quite place. Like he’s trying to figure you out.

“Sorry about him, Y/N, sometimes he just speaks first and then thinks after,” you hear from further down the bar. You look up to see that voice coming from Sam next to him, who gets a shove from his older brother and erupts into contagious laughter. You watch Danny shake his head, chuckling, and you laugh along with them. Jake looks over at you, smiling. You smile back at him and he speaks up, drawing your attention back to him and him alone.

“What are you drinking, Y/N?” he asks. “Oh, um, a bourbon punch,” you answer. “Another bourbon punch for this lovely lady here, please,” he says to the bartender, “You can put it on my tab.” You look at him in shock and try to protest but he sees it coming, saying “No, I insist. As a thank you, for your support and for making my brother happy for a moment there with your compliment- he’s easy to please.”

He leans one arm onto the counter and smirks at you as the bartender places your drink down in front of you. “Cheers, sweetheart,” Jake says, raising his glass to yours. You glance down at the glass to see what he’s drinking, which seems to be whisky, neat. It suits him. You smile at him and say “Cheers” and take a sip of your fresh drink. His eyes are looking into yours so intently that it almost feels like they’re burning into you. Something about him is so intriguing yet slightly intimidating that you want to learn more.

─────── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ. ───────

“Are you here alone?” he asks. “Oh, no, I’m here with a friend. She’s back there at our table.” Jake looks behind you to see Sophie, who has been intently watching this entire interaction unfold. He smiles and gives her a little wave to come over, so she stands up and comes up to the bar. “Would you both like to join us for a round? We have a larger booth upstairs with a few of our friends.” His eyes look down at you for an answer, waiting and hoping for a yes. Before you can answer, Sophie chimes in to answer for you, “We’d love to!” she says, elbowing your side to encourage you to agree and you nod along. “Yeah, sure, we can stay for a bit longer,” you reply, looking up at Jake, who seems satisfied with that answer.

The rest of the guys get their drinks and you follow them up the winding staircase to the large booth that they reserved. When you arrive at the table, you see a few other people waiting there whom you assume to be part of their management, security, and some personal friends. Danny and Sam slide in first to the left to join their friends and Josh goes for an open spot on the right side. Jake extends his hand out, offering for you to take a seat between them, and then slides in on the left next to you. Sophie opts to sit next to Sam on the end, across from you.

You both introduce yourselves to the rest of the group. Their friends seem unsurprised that they managed to make friends in the short time they’ve been in the bar. From the few minutes you’ve spent with them, you can tell that their social and charismatic tendencies would likely often lead to new friendships everywhere they go. It’s something you’re starting to admire about them.

As you’re getting to know the group, it’s impossible not to notice Jake’s eyes on you. He’s studying you as you speak, watching the way your lips move and admiring you. It’s difficult to ignore, though you try your best to. He starts speaking and you turn your head to look at him, taking the time to look him over as well. You look at his eyes, mostly, a mesmerizing dark chocolate color that turns into amber when the light touches them. His nose is straight and pointed, his lips look soft and full.

He catches you staring at him, just for a moment, and uses the opportunity to place his right hand on your knee, exposed by the large rips in your jeans, rubbing small circles on top of it. It makes you jump a little at first touch, startled by his actions. You couldn’t believe this was real life. You look up at him and you both lock eyes. It falls silent for a moment and Josh starts a conversation with Daniel across the table, everyone else engaging and chiming in. Jake takes this opportunity to lean into your ear a bit to talk to you on his own, which he’s been dying to do.

“I know you were watching me earlier, at the show…” he whispers in your ear, loud enough only for you to hear. Your heart nearly stops, but he continues. “It’s okay, you know, I don’t mind it. If anything, I kind of liked it,” he says, his breath feeling hot on your skin. “Maybe I was,” you answer shyly, turning your face toward him a bit so that he can hear you more clearly. Your eyes meet and you watch as his eyes quickly dart to your lips, then back up to look at you once more.

“I was watching you too,” he says, sliding his hand a bit higher above your knee, resting on your inner thigh, slightly gripping it. “Watching you study me… and how my fingers worshipped the strings…” he continues, leaning closer to your ear, his lips grazing lightly over it. Shivers run down your back and continue down toward your core, causing you to silently yearn for more. You inhale deeply, then ask “And what did you think about that, Jake?” saying his name in a honeyed tone, causing him to squeeze your thigh and look deep into your eyes, piercing through them. You knew exactly what he was thinking, but you wanted to hear him say it. You wanted to be absolutely sure that what you thought was about to happen was actually happening.

“Do you wanna go outside for a smoke, Y/N?” Jake asks, slightly loud enough so that the others can hear. Sophie looks at you, smirking; she clearly can tell exactly what’s going on. She nods at you, encouraging you to go. “Uh, yeah Jake, sure,” you mutter, a bit awkwardly. You weren’t expecting him to try and get you alone, you had felt all this time that he was just playing with you. It’s clear now, though, that this was not a game.

─────── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ. ───────

He stands up from the booth and offers his hand to help you up as well. Despite the dark aura that surrounds him, he still appears to be quite the gentleman. You stand up from the booth, shoot Sophie a nervous look, and then turn around to head back down the stairs. Jake follows closely behind you.

You get to the bottom of the stairs and head to the back of the Tavern to go out the back door, to the smoking area. It’s an outdoor patio behind the bar, illuminated with low-lit string lights and decorated with some picnic tables with a few ashtrays. You exit through the door and turn around to face him as the door closes silently behind him. His eyes are darker now, piercing into you as he approaches you. You back up slowly until the backs of your legs hit one of the tables and then sit on the edge of it while Jake takes out a pack of Marlboro Reds and a black lighter from his back pocket.

He pulls a cigarette out of the pack, places it between his lips, and then brings the lighter up to light it. He takes a long drag out of it and blows it to the side, avoiding blowing any smoke in your face, then steps closer to you until he’s standing between your legs, only inches away from you. He puts the cigarette down to sit on the ashtray for a moment and he finally speaks.

“Y/N/ I can’t seem to stop thinking about you. You’ve captivated me from the second the lights turned up on that stage tonight. I haven’t been able to take my eyes off you…” he says, bringing his hand up to your cheek and running his thumb along your cheek. He’s watching your eyes, how they look up at him with anticipation, waiting for him. He can feel the power that he has over you.

“I can’t stop thinking about you either… Seeing you for the first time on stage tonight has caused you to completely take over my thoughts ever since. No matter how hard I tried to watch the others, my eyes kept getting drawn right back to you. It was like I couldn’t control it,” you say, glancing down at his lips and then back to his eyes longingly. “I don’t feel like I can control myself around you, baby… I’m being tempted to throw out all of my rules for you,” Jake says in a low whisper, bringing his face closer to yours.

Your eyes look up at his, pleading. He can’t hold himself back anymore, finally closing the gap between you. He kisses you so deeply that it takes the air out of your lungs. He leans into you and his hand that was once on your cheek grasps the back of your neck tightly, causing you to let out a quiet whimper. Just the sound of it lights a fire within him, he takes his other hand to hold your hip in place and groans into your mouth. You place your hands around his neck and pull him closer to you, your bodies now flush together.

Jake pulls away, his face still only a few inches from yours, and tries to catch his breath. His left hand squeezes your hip as the other leaves your neck in order to reach behind you to grab his cigarette, still lit. He takes a drag from it blowing it to the side, but keeps his eyes locked on yours and watches as you stare at his lips when he blows the smoke out. He takes note of your interest in the way he’s blowing the smoke and says, “Open your mouth.”

You immediately obey, knowing you’d do anything he asks you to, and open your mouth. He takes another drag of the cigarette and kisses you again, blowing the smoke into your mouth and you breathe it in as you lean into the kiss. This elicits another moan from him, clearly turned on by the act. He leans into you harder and bucks his hips into you slightly, trying to release some tension. You moan quietly into his mouth at the sensation, your desire starting to pulsate between your legs.

His lips leave your mouth and place kisses along your jaw then down your neck, causing you to let out a small sigh. “You don’t even know what you do to me, sweetheart,” Jake mutters against your skin. He brings his mouth back to yours and kisses you once more, but you pull yourself away.

“Jake… I want this. I want you, but… not now.” He looks disappointed by your words but backs away slightly, sliding both of his hands down to your waist. “I’m sorry, I just- I have this big exam tomorrow and I’ve already stayed out so much later than I ever even intended to. I have to go home.”

He nods his head in understanding, then it seems like a lightbulb lights up in his head. He smiles and says, “Come to the show tomorrow night, then. Please… I need to see you again. I want to see you front and center when I play.” You’re taken aback completely at his kind offer. You know you need to see him again too, and you’d like nothing more than to watch them perform again. You nod your head, “Oh, Jake. I would love to go. That’s so sweet,” you say, smiling bashfully. Jake’s face lights up at your answer, “It’s gonna be a great show, baby. You won’t regret it. I’ll have Jenn email you the tickets as soon as we get back to our hotel, one for Sophie too.” You thank him and place a soft peck on his cheek, causing a hue of pink to form there. You both go back inside and return to your friends upstairs.

─────── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ. ───────

“Soph, you ready to go home?” you ask her. “I really gotta get up for this midterm tomorrow,” you explain to the others, who all nod and wish you luck. Sophie nods and says goodnight to everyone. Jake offers to walk you both out to the bus stop to wait for the bus to take you back to your apartment. Sophie goes to sit on the bench as you wait a bit behind with Jake.

He places a soft goodnight kiss on your lips and you hum into it and smile as he brings his hand up to cup your cheek. “Here, let me see your phone,” he says, taking it and typing in his phone number, putting his contact name as “Sir Jacob ⚔️”, which makes you giggle. “Text me when you make it home safe, sweetheart. I’ll see you tomorrow,” he says with a smirk. “See you tomorrow, Jake,” you reply as he turns back to the front door of the Tavern. He turns back around and gives you a soft smile, and you wave goodbye before he goes back inside.

You turn around and sit down on the bench next to Sophie, who finally wants to know all of the details. The bus arrives and you fill her in on everything on the ride home, causing her to laugh and scream in excitement, much to the dismay of the other exhausted people who are on the city bus at one o’clock in the morning. You tell her that he’s sending you tickets for both of you to go to the next show tomorrow night and that he’s asking security to put you in the front row, which she is so psyched about.

You both finally arrive home and you take your makeup off, put some comfier clothes on, and collapse into bed. What a night, you think to yourself. It was nothing like you ever could have imagined. You turn over and plug your phone in, then open up the messages app and type in “Sir Jacob ⚔️”.

You: home safe <3

Sir Jacob ⚔️: Good. Sweet dreams, beautiful.

You: goodnight, jake

You place your phone down on your bedside table and flop down on your back, letting out a long sigh. You think about your exam tomorrow and the excitement that will come thereafter. You wonder where tomorrow night will lead you as you close your eyes and try to fall asleep. God, what have I gotten myself into?

─────── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ. ───────

this story will be continued... comment to be added to the taglist! thank you so much for reading!

part two

[t1oui]

chaotic bcj headcanons bc i have brainrot about this man OFTEN

italian, greek (mum), british, and spanish (dad)

grew up in italy, it's his first language (he was invited to hogwarts bc his dad works for the ministry)

can learn a language in about 2 seconds

speaks italian, english, greek, and spanish (only learned it to spite his dad who can't speak spanish)

almost sorted into ravenclaw, he was nearly a hatstall

likes to spend his time pointing out all the reasons why english sucks (he is probably the best english speaker of all his friends and he wasn't fluent till he was 11 (they've been speaking english their entire lives))

very tall. it is literally impossible to lose this man in a crowd

loves to swim but gets pissy if the water's too warm

is a sub 100%. if evan is ace he's still a sub but in a nonsexual way

he's crazy in the way that all smart people are a lil crazy because nobody fully understands him (read: he's best friends with lily evans)

makes fun of jegulus for being jealous but will throw hands if someone smiles at evan from across the great hall

in constant need of piggyback rides but too tall to get them from anybody but remus

love language is physical touch, if he is not touching someone at all times he gets anxious

this usually means holding hands with his friends... and biting evan

worships the ground his bf walks on daily <3

never studies but has perfect grades

loves dying his hair, usually green but also random colors like red and purple and blue (pandora's favorite color)

once sirius dyed barty's hair hot pink to get back at him for who knows what it's barty but barty actually loved it (sirius was PISSED)

bisexual

happily asks evan to give him pictures to wank to (evan obliges)

have i mentioned he's a total fucking simp. yeah

was quidditch commentator for 2 seconds before mcgonagall fired him (he kept gossiping about the players)

actually loves people so deeply it hurts (james does the same thing but his love for people is on the surface while barty hides his most of the time)

hella adhd

insists on being the little spoon, can't sleep otherwise

has a ton of piercings and is completely COVERED in tattoos (at least half are dedicated to evan, the other half to the rest of his friends (including the gryffindors, especially lily!!))

mama's boy, like this man brings up his mom every 6 seconds, he thinks she's the smartest person on earth (other than evan ofc)

has a lot in common with james (as seen above), barty beefs with him for about a month and then realizes james is actually super chill (james and evan were already friends lol)

the biggest fuck you to his dad? not only does he hate politics, he wants to be an artist

likes painting just fine, and drawing is ok (he mostly just draws evan and the skittles, sometimes others like lily and james), but he LOVES ceramics

is an amazing cook, spends a lot of time in the kitchens with the house elves

(in a world without voldemort, he and hermione granger would get along very well)

favorite subjects are charms and defense against the dark arts (y'all remember when he was actually kind of a good dada professor in gof? yeah)

my computer's about to die so i'll leave it here, might add more later tho <3

[snow-lavender]

post-finale headcanons pt 3: snow is a linguist special edition

nightingale kingdom did a lot of trade with the nether (for example, for chilies and other spices, hence fenris' canonical high spice tolerance). at that point, overworld common had already become the lingua franca of the nether, so a pidgin never needed to develop, but there was still a lot of cross-linguistic exchange. sayings and words from the nightingale dialect of common made their way into the dialects of the piglin communities in the associated part of the nether, and vice versa. wanda gets very thrown off at the occasional piglin words that fenris uses like he was born speaking them.

piglin has templatic morphology!

branching off of that, like some of the semitic languages in the real world, ancient piglin writings have no vowels, just consonants. however, as the different cultures in the nether started interacting with each other more, piglin adopted putting vowels into writing from ghast, to make communication less of a hassle. it started with just trade documents and other things that would need to be read by outsiders, but eventually trickled down to all writing.

telchin don't need air to breathe underwater, but their voiceboxes are very similar to humans in that they need to expel air to create vibrations. so underwater, their lungs become solely used to hold reserve air for speech. thankfully most live near underwater vents, so there are plenty of places to refill their lungs (you figure out the science of how minecraft people gain air from underwater bubbles. i don't want to). it is a common trope in telchin live theatre, especially comedies, for a character to be arguing, suddenly stop, swim off a bit, and spend a moment glaring at their opponent from an underwater vent, before swimming back and picking up right where they left off.

spoken telchin's phonetic inventory is influenced by the environment in multiple ways. sounds that travel better in in water are used much more. even overworld common cognates that have sounds that are a part of the inventory may be adapted to travel better if they're used more often, or in high stress situations.

telchin has a lot* of vowels. so many.

*a lot of vowels is actually not as impressive to native english speakers, as i'm sure most of you reading this are. english has i think 12 vowels naturally occuring in it? but the average number for a language to have is somewhere around 6. for the hell of it, let's say telchin has between 16 and 20, to preserve that wow factor.

to further take advantage of the auditory qualities of vowels, spoken telchin has contrastive tone. with the huge number of possible vowels, then, a large percentage of telchin syllables are just V. they have CV and CVC syllables, but many words are just strings of Vs (or vowels and semivowels, i suppose, since they'd be kind of necessary to facilitate the flow of speech)

when telchin does make use of consonants, it's mostly fricatives and stops. again, because sound is dampened underwater, sounds that involve a pronounced cut off of airflow or a lot of vibration are preferable.

words that express a lot of emotion in telchin just happen to have a lot of fricatives. the turbulent airflow of those make for a lot of bubbles, so it's a joke in telchin that you see that someone's yelling at you before you hear it.

some explanations of terms below the cut-

pidgin: a "language" that's actually just a mashup of two languages to allow for communication between two groups. these happen when two groups first start interacting; once time goes on and it (possibly) develops its own syntax and processes, and begins to have native speakers, it's no longer a pidgin, it's a creole.

lingua franca: an existing language that two or more groups decide to have in common and speak as is to allow for communication and trade. in the modern western world, english serves this purpose, but in the early roman empire (at least for writing) it was greek, and a bunch of nations in western north america have a signed lingua franca, not a spoken one: Plains Indian Sign Language.

templatic morphology: an alternate way of adding meaning and inflecting words to affix morphology (where you add prefixes and suffixes (and also infixes and circumfixes). for example, adding the -s plural suffix to cat to get cats.) instead, under this system, root words are just chains of consonants, and which vowels you slot in determine how you're modifying the meaning. arabic is one language that does this!

phonetic inventory: the set of sounds that make up a specific languages, out of all sounds used in all language. that gutteral, back of the throat hiss you find in german and dutch is part of those languages' phonetic inventories, but not english's, so english speakers looking to learn those might struggle with that noise.

cognate: a word in one language that has been borrowed from another; your french teacher may have called them mots amis. english has a lot of cognates; from spanish, like tortilla, from french, like deja vu, from german, like kindergarten, and many more!

tone: how high or low you say a word, or how that changes. like how as you say a question your voice raises up. in some languages, like mandarin, this is part of the grammar instead of something that modifies fully made sentences.

contrastive: when the difference between two sounds can mean the difference between two words. for example, if you take the i in leek and change it to ɪ, you get a new word, lick. so i and ɪ are contrastive. which sounds are contrastive varies bewteen languages: ɹ and l are contrastive in english (lad and rad are two different words) but interchangeable in japanese.

syllables: V and C just mean vowel and consonant. so a V syllable is one vowel, and a CVC syllable is consonant-vowel-consonant.

semivowels: w as in wind or j as in yell. they share a lot more attributes with vowels than consonants, but they can't function as the nucleus of a syllable so they're classed as consonants.

fricatives: sounds like sh and f and h, that restrict airflow but don't stop it completely, making for really turbulent vibrations.

stops: sounds that stop airflow, then release it, like b, t, and k. very short bursts of air.

[clockwork-ashes]

The Wedding Date - Part II

Summary: Elain needs a date to her friend’s wedding, so when Lucien offers to help, she hopes to have fun with him on the Greek island of Mykonos and make her ex jealous.

Note: Posted the first chapter as part of elucien week, and will be continuing this as a multi-chapter!!! Thank you for reading <3

Elain grabs a strapless dress with a flower pattern from its hanger, holding it in front of her with an exaggerated air, modeling the clothing for her audience. She goes onto the tips of her toes to pretend she’s wearing heels, the nails already painted a pearly white to match the colour she’s chosen for her fingers.

Nesta shrugs from her place on the bed, the only part of the mattress not completely covered by the things Elain has thrown onto it. “You’re leaving for two weeks, right?” 

Elain kicks one of her shoes from where it lays on the floor, adding the strapless dress to a pile she’s still not sure about. “Yeah,” she replies, blowing a stray curl from where it’s fallen in front of her eyes. “Technically twelve days.” 

Nesta gestures to the mess of clothes and shoes. “How many dresses are you going to need?” 

Before Elain can respond, Feyre’s voice rings loud and clear from the speakers of Nesta’s phone. They’ve been on FaceTime for over an hour and the suitcase on Elain’s little rug is still painfully empty. “Whatever you think you need, pack about half.” She sounds entirely confident, used to the chaos of travelling before she settled into her role of working mom. Feyre is almost too busy with her career and raising Nyx to focus on much else, but she always has time for her sisters, especially when they’re having a crisis. 

Packing is totally a crisis, Elain thinks. 

She holds out her hand, wiggling her fingers so Nesta can pass her the phone. “Do you think my suitcase is too big?” She asks, angling the camera so Feyre can take a better look. 

“For two weeks,” there’s a smile in her little sister’s voice, “definitely.” 

Elain groans, tossing the phone back to Nesta who has begun organizing her pants and shorts into colour coordinated piles. Nesta raises both of her brows, her expression one that Elain is very familiar with. 

Told you so. 

“I’m going to bring stuff back,” she defends, hearing the buzz of her phone from where she’s left it on her dresser. She makes her way towards it when Nesta snorts. 

“You could fit a whole person in that suitcase.” 

Feyre laughs in response and Elain huffs a sigh. “I’m going to bring lots of stuff,” she mumbles, nearly tripping over the open-toed wedges she’s planning to wear for the wedding. Her outfit had been picked out a while ago, so at least there’s that, she tells herself. 

Elain has to bite her lip to hold back a grin when Lucien’s name pops up in her notifications. She shoots a quick look to where Nesta and Feyre have actually just begun selecting the clothes they like best before she opens the messages. 

what do you think? 

Lucien’s question follows a picture of a shirt so hideous, Elain almost winces. The pattern is awful, the colours contrasting in a way she thinks has to be the lighting. For a man whose wardrobe mostly consists of black shirts and frayed jeans, Elain wonders where he keeps finding all the terrible clothes he sends her pictures of. 

Please tell me you’re not wearing that to the wedding. 

Lucien’s response is to send Elain a picture of another shirt folded and neatly placed on the foot of his bed. It’s equally as ugly, and Elain is too scared to ask whether he means to wear that to the reception. 

As Elain types out her reply, she takes a moment to imagine Lucien wearing either option. She can clearly see him in her mind’s eye, hair in a messy bun, a few of the buttons undone to reveal a triangle of skin. She knows the short sleeves will be tight around his arms, he’ll probably wear a watch. She deletes the words she was going to send, a blush making its way onto her cheeks. She’s pretty sure Lucien would look good in a burlap sack. Shaking her head, she writes back a text with a smiley face emoji attached to the end. 

I like the first shirt better. 

Feyre says something, her voice cutting off slightly, but Elain hears her name through the static. She hums, paying very little attention as she organizes two sets of sandals onto a square of clear space on the floor. 

She takes a picture, making sure that none of her mess can be seen in the background. 

Which ones???

Elain puts her phone into the back pocket of her shorts, and even though she feels the small vibration, she decides to check on what her sisters have been doing.

Nesta has already carefully folded a few of Elain’s favourite dresses and set them off to the side. She and Feyre seem to be arguing about how many pairs of pants are really necessary. 

“One black, one white, and those flowy light blue ones,” Feyre states. Elain can see her pointing on the screen. 

Nesta rolls her eyes, feeling the fabric of the tight black jeans with her fingers. “I’m telling you, this material is too thick. I’m sweating just thinking about wearing these in Mediterranean weather.” 

“Everyone needs a pair of black pants, Nes,” Feyre’s eyes widen as she spots something on the bed. “Wait, the black maxi skirt instead.” 

They both seem to agree, and as Elain goes over their choices, so does she. “If I had known how difficult packing was, I wouldn’t have left it so last minute.” She nods her head appreciatively as Nesta holds up a red shirt, watching as it gets folded and added to the neat stack she and Feyre have decided on. 

“You just need to practise,” Feyre offers. “Use up your vacation days more often,” she adds, a tiny hint of scolding within the tone she uses. Elain likes to call it her mom voice, it’s extremely effective. 

“Who were you texting?” Nesta asks, genuinely curious. 

Elain makes a big deal about being entirely present when she spends time with people, and barely checks her phone around others. 

“Lucien,” she says simply. “Maybe he can help me pack a bit more lightly.

“Doubt it,” Nesta mutters under her breath. Elain drops her mouth open in mock offence, but she kind of agrees.

“He used to live there, you know?” Feyre recalls, shaking her head at a band t-shirt Nesta holds in front of the camera. Lucien had bought it for her as a birthday gift ages ago, but Elain only ever wears it in the house. 

“In Mykonos?” Nesta asks absently, kicking at a pile of clothes that seems to be tickling her bare foot. 

“Athens,” Elain answers. Feyre might have been Lucien’s best friend in college, but she’s pretty confident her little sister knows less about him than she does. 

“Fun,” Nesta says, looking at Elain with her blue-grey eyes. “For how long?” 

“Two years.” Elain responds, finally taking some of the clothes her sisters have chosen and putting them carefully into her suitcase. She’d hate for any of them to wrinkle. 

“Wasn’t his dad an archaeologist or something?” It sounds more like Feyre is wondering out loud than actually asking. 

Elain shakes her head, even though she’s pretty sure Feyre can’t see her from the way Nesta has placed the phone. “He was researching Egyptian and Ptolemaic coinage,” Elain corrects. 

To Feyre, the words mean very little, but Nesta likes to read about these types of things. Her older sister hums, her interest piqued. Elain says nothing more on the subject, a little embarrassed to admit she doesn’t actually know a whole lot about what Helion studies. 

“You and Lucien must be pretty close, especially if he’s on board with going to a whole different country with you for a wedding.” Feyre is definitely the type to pry into other people’s business. Elain has to remind herself often that she only does that when she cares. 

Nesta interjects before Elain can respond. “He’s maybe the only thing she talks about.” 

Elain is almost too quick with her reply. “That’s not true, I talk about Vassa and Jurian, and Nuala and Cerridwen, and the ladies from work—”

“None of them look like Lucien,” Feyre interrupts. Nesta snorts in agreement, and Elain would have been just a little jealous if they weren’t both in extremely happy relationships with men they loved. 

Not that it matters, she reminds herself. 

“And I bet he likes you,” Nesta states confidently.

Elain pauses as her phone vibrates again, deciding now would be the perfect time to check her messages. Vassa is asking her whether she has a ride to the airport, and Lucien has replied to her about the shoes. She opens his first, her lips quirking up into a small smile. 

both are nice

which ones are better for walking?

Elain guesses that none of her sandals are particularly comfortable and makes a mental note to take runners with her on the plane. Before Elain can send her response, Nesta speaks. 

“You sure you don’t like him?” She hands Elain her wedges, perfectly wrapped in a plastic bag. 

“I don’t,” Elain reassures her. She’s thought about liking Lucien a million times, and she always comes to the same conclusion. 

Lucien is just a very good friend. 

There must have been a slight delay with the FaceTime, because in the short space of silence, Feyre snorts in a way that Elain can only describe as childlike. 

“I don’t,” Elain repeats, not really sure why she feels the need to so at all.

Elain is saved from having to answer any more questions when Rhysand’s deep voice rings loudly from Nesta’s phone. She goes and sits next to her sister, eager to catch a glimpse of her nephew. 

“Back from the park?” Feyre calls, grinning as Rhysand comes up behind her, Nyx in his arms. Elain watches as Nyx turns to his mom, clearly wanting to hug her. 

Feyre holds onto her son as Rhysand waves his hello, quick to leave them so that they can continue to talk without him hovering. 

Nyx giggles as Feyre prompts him to wave. “Hi aunt Elain, hi aunt Nes,” she coos as he laughs, still not able to speak just yet.  

They spend the next fifteen minutes fawning over Nyx, all three of them completely charmed by how cute he is. Elain can’t imagine having a kid of her own, but Feyre seems even happier now that she’s settled into her new life. 

When he starts to get cranky, Feyre sighs. “Guess I should go, I’ll call you though, before you leave.” Just as she finishes her promise, Nesta hangs up, and Elain knows Feyre will keep her word. 

“Shouldn’t you be going, too?” Elain places a hand on Nesta’s arm, grateful for all the help, but she feels a bit guilty after having seen the time. 

Nesta shakes her head. “Let’s finish, I probably won’t see you tomorrow,” she sets the dress for the wedding as neatly as possible into the suitcase while Elain gets all the smaller items she’ll be taking with her. 

Elain opens her phone, silently swearing that she won’t take a look again until Nesta leaves. Lucien has sent her another picture, but this time he’s in it. 

Russet eyes bright, a perfect smile on his handsome face, Lucien is wearing a white tank top. His red hair is tied back, loose strands falling to his shoulders and he’s giving the camera a thumbs up. There’s a closed suitcase on the floor by his bed. 

all packed :))

Elain can’t help but smile, until she remembers the disastrous state of her own room. She’ll send him a picture later she decides, when Nesta leaves and she throws everything she won’t be taking with her into the closet. 

Nesta nudges Elain with her foot, her brows raised. “You don’t?” 

“I don’t,” Elain says one last time, but the words sound empty even to her own ears.

[z-nightshade]

So then do you have a preference for type then?? But hmmm.

I’ve mentioned my thoughts and such about Devil Fruits and how they fit their users. Soo Imma tackle Cass then!

Cass is the Oracle here. Distinctly not a Prophet, and yes those are two very different things to those who don’t know. Oracle acts as a guide, an advisor, one who gives warnings but will not tell you truly one way or another. Prophets act with authority and become spokesperson for their gods or god. They become leaders more often than not.

While the Oracle of Delphi is the most popular Oracle the title is a bit different than the actual word. But Cass is not completely correct in their definition of Prophet and Oracle. Both are commonly seen to have visions or premonitions coming from gods or a single god. The difference lays that a Prophet speaks for a god while an Oracle is just the medium for the god to speak through. An Oracle is also normally connected to a god or place to be able to give premonitions.

Both Oracle and Prophet come from the root words meaning speak. Oracle from the Latin word Oraculum which comes from Orare: to speak. Not to mention Oraculum is also a musical conpositio with a solo percussion piece that acts as the “Oracle” to invite the listeners to listen.

Then Prophet comes from the Greek word Prophētēs coming from the words Pro meaning before and Phētēs meaning speaker coming from the Greek word Phēnai meaning speak.

And Cass noticeably does this a lot. Like a lot a lot. While they don’t ever outright lie. Not that I have read at least and I may be missing something but I think that that is accurate. But they speak and they share and others listen. They listen and that’s is so important because the difference between Cass and Kassandra of Troy is that one is being heard and the other is being listened to. And with that opens up a few ideas for Devil fruits.

Both Paramicia and Zoan ideas if those are your preferences. But I would think go the idea of a TRUTH based Devil fruit.

AHHHH!!! This is all so good.

The distinction between Oracle and Prophet is a very important one not just to Cass (even if they claim their feelings on the matter irrational) and the story at large. Their freedom to act as they please and their separation from any higher power (excluding Luffy, though that is because he is their Captain and not because he is a god) are extremely important to them. They don't exactly have positive views on god and religion due to multiple reasons.

You are correct, we have not seen Cass lie. They avoid lying whenever they can, especially to those they care about. They instead tend to withhold information or fall back on wordplay. When they feel telling the truth would be detrimental, they hide and obscure, it's an old habit.

They give exactly as much as they want to give and nothing more. This usually comes across as vague warnings as Cass would never truly command someone if they could help it. What people do with the information they hand out is not their responsibility, even if they have outcomes they want.

And they do talk, a lot. They ramble (usually about books) and their wordy, as they are an author. But they are also quiet due to their sensitive hearing. Yet they are always heard, usually because Luffy will always listen.

Cass is this mass of contradictions and oddities, which most humans tend to be.

I don't know about a truth based Devil Fruit exactly. For all Cass is honest, I wouldn't exactly call them truthful. But I do think what you've written can lend to the sound fruit, the Hecate fruit and perhaps even the Qilin fruit.

(I love that you noticed the fact that Cass doesn't lie. There are a bunch of little things I've sprinkled in with Cass that I never know if people notice because it's not super important but it's there. I wonder if you have any headcannons about Cass as well. Either regarding their life before or now)

[sleepless-in-southlands]

in a vision, your body told me it had always been afraid

Ao3

Summary: As far as Luke had ever been concerned, his power of prophecy had only ever been, and only ever would be, a curse. Knowing the future was useless and painful when he wasn't allowed to do anything about it, especially when the future shoved Inscryption into his hands, already bloodied. When he drops into Hermitcraft, however, things change. Maybe his curse can too. Content: AU (of an AU), hurt/comfort; prophets/prophecy, secret identity, mistaken identity, watchers, a luke who is both very on top of things And very oblivious, getting together Pairings: Lucky Jumbo (Luke Carder/Mumbo Jumbo), Luke Carder & Grian Notes: This is an AU of my AU, Lucky Jumbo, and is part of the MCU (Mumbo Carder Universe)! Knowledge of Inscryption, HC, and/or Lucky Jumbo isn't necessary to read this, but they may help. Spoilers for all three will be present to some degree, so reader beware

~

Knock, knock.

Luke glanced tiredly in the direction of his front door, well aware of who was knocking on it like it had offended them, well aware of what would happen when he went to answer it, well aware he couldn’t change any of it. Not for the first time (but likely the last), he wished he hadn’t dug up the damned game that had led him to his penultimate moment of regret.

Not that he really had any say in the matter. Luke was all too familiar with just how self-fulfilling his prophecies could be when he tried to avoid them. His sister’s death was as much his fault as it wasn’t, and neither interpretation brought him any relief.

Luke pushed himself to his feet, a choir of sirens singing a mourning song in a background only he could hear. He couldn’t actually wait as long as he wanted to face the reaper, nice as it would be. The reporter’s words, crackly and mumbled through his phone’s speaker, were echoing the ones he had heard barely a week before. He had hoped that particular vision had been another corrupted one- the madness of a prophet and the madness of Inscryption did not mix well- but deep down he had known otherwise. He always knew otherwise.

He hadn’t had a vision since, which had been the final nail in his pre-built coffin. His vision-self opened the door, and then all was dark, as he hoped it would be forever after. There were many myths about what became of prophets after death, few pleasant, and Luke… Luke was tired. He wanted rest, and with Inscryption dogging his feet, he knew that Amanda might be his only true chance for it.

Luke moved to his door almost on autopilot, pushing aside his thoughts as best he could. The more he thought of what was coming, the more his head hurt, and it was about to be doing enough of that all on its own. He paused for a single, final breath.

Luke opened the door.

Amanda shot him in the head.

Blood-red curtains spilled across the floor and ended the scene, and Luke knew nothing, not even peace.

~

Luke had to give it to the universe. It was the reason he was cursed, and yet it had still managed to deliver a twist he hadn’t seen coming.

Namely: life, continuing, but in some weird, alternate universe that somehow made less sense than Luke walking into his own elaborately planned death of arcing madness. Listen, knowing ahead of time that first person you met in your new world (a man with no visible mouth, a glorious moustache, and an extremely high tolerance for being fallen on top of from heights that should have killed both him and Luke) was going to start beating up a tree for its wood didn’t make it any less painful and perplexing to witness.

Because of course Luke’s curse had to follow him into his new life of cubes and code. It had adapted, even, his foresight shifting from overlapping voices that sung like a greek chorus and screamed like horror movie victims into floating, digital words, draping themselves over the edges of the world around him and sliding off his back like a cape of fortune. Quieter, but not silent, as evidenced by the warbled laughter that had come alongside the head’s-up that his attempt to fly would end in pyrotechnical disaster, the wind that cooed like a bird when he took Mumbo’s hand.

Presumably his visions had followed him as well, but they were more infrequent. Luke couldn’t be surprised he hadn’t had one after only a few weeks in Hermitcraft, even if he wished the reveal would get itself over with. Foresight was annoying, but Luke could tune it out, had spent a life perfecting how to do so. Visions were unpredictable. Visions were debilitating if they were severe enough. Luke needed to know if he was still going to have them so he could start preparing excuses for when a hermit inevitably caught him having one.

Which he hadn’t, at first, thought would be a problem. People had mixed feelings about prophets in his old world (his old life), including quite a bit of debate over whether or not they really existed, but they were generally accepted. Respected by some, dismissed by others, but treated within a fairly normal range. There were extremists groups, but Luke rarely felt like his life was more at threat from fellow people than it ever was from his curse. Amanda included.

But Hermitcraft…

(“Do you guys have prophets here?”

Luke’s fellow Boatem members looked at him with varying levels of confusion, conveyed to varying levels of accuracy via their varying levels of full facial structure. They were all sitting down together after one of Luke’s Boatem tours, having originally begun with only Mumbo and himself before the rest of the group slowly joined in on the wanderings and build-describings. They had finished at the Boatem hole, and Luke had opted to have the group seat themselves a healthy distance from it, doing his best to avoid having to tumble into the hole on his foresight’s command.

“...Profits?” Scar repeated, and Luke appreciated the way his newly visual foresight allowed him to pick up on the translation issue immediately. “In Boatem? I’m a little insulted you have to ask, Luke.”

“No, not diamond profits, I mean like oracles. Or seers?” Luke offered, frowning at the hermits’ continued confusion.

“I… don’t think so?” Pearl offered after a moment of consideration. “Are those villager classes?”

“Not exactly.” Luke answered, taking his own time to try and think of a minecraft-friendly description. “It’s… something a player can be. No one’s really sure how they work, uh, but they’re able to see the future. Predict something that’s going to happen, that sort of thing. I didn’t know if-”

Luke cut himself off. His foresight was humming, swirling past him, encircling Grian with predictions of what he would say next, what he would do, and Luke didn’t need the words to tell him how tense the mouthless hermit had gotten.

“Something a player could be?” Grian repeated. The question was rhetorical, but the words curling under Luke’s chin told him he nodded, so he did. “Were they… were they common?”

“...No.” Luke said slowly, because he felt like he should, because he knew he should. “They were rare. Not everyone agreed on if they even existed.”

Some of the tension seeped out of Grian, shoulders slumping incrementally, but not much. He stood up, Luke’s predictions rising with him, hanging like golden chains off his red sweater. “No. Hermitcraft doesn’t have them.”

Luke watched as Grian turned on his heel, then, walking away from the group, Luke’s foresight clinging until it faded into the sunlight.

Pearl sighed and stood up as well. “I’ll go talk to him.” She told the group, Mumbo and Scar more so than Luke, before going off as she said she would, as Luke’s foresight confirmed she would.

“I’m… sorry?” Luke said after a moment of silence. Occasionally, his foresight would tell him the why of something, but it wasn’t a guarantee. Grian walking off at the mention of oracles had been predicted, but not explained.

Mumbo bumped Luke’s shoulder from where he was sitting next to him. The words swirling there scattered at the point of contact, as though touching a non-prophet would be treasonous to their accursed seer. “Don’t be. Grian’s not upset, just…”

“I think we have a different word for your… prophets.” Scar finished for Mumbo, glancing in the direction Grian and Pearl had gone. “They can be a sore subject for some hermits.”

“Oh.” Luke pulled his arms closer to himself, tucking in his visual foresight as best he could, as if Mumbo and Scar would suddenly be able to see it if he didn’t. “I’ll avoid mentioning them, then.”

“That may be for the best.”)

Luke sighed at the memory. He couldn’t be too surprised that Hermitcraft, a place that was weird but ultimately wonderful, a server filled with kind hermits who took in a complete stranger like it was nothing, would just happen to be a world where prophets were… he didn’t even know what. Something bad. Something unspoken. It would have been too easy, too kind, of the universe to simply provide Luke with a perfect new life, no questions asked, no cost except a bullet through his skull he could taste in the back of his mouth on bad mornings.

Of course, if the universe had really wanted to be kind, it would have taken away his powers in the first place. If Luke had expected anything but tricks and hidden catches, it was his own fault for not reading the writing on his back.

But Luke would be fine. He knew how to react to his foresight without making it clear he had foresight. He hadn’t had a vision yet, and he trusted in his ability to make something up if he got caught having one. All Luke had to do was keep his predictions under wraps, and he would be fine.

Well, that and avoid hurting Mumbo, but Luke thought that had been an unnecessary demand to deliver to him via threatening circle. He didn’t think he gave the impression he wanted to hurt his first hermit friend. When Grian had first cornered Luke, he had thought his secret had been found out, that somehow Grian knew.

But no. What Grian ‘knew’ was something Luke didn’t understand, and vice versa. It hadn’t stopped Luke’s foresight from chittering at him like grinding metal, suggesting it too knew something Luke didn’t, which Luke didn’t think was technically possible.

Knock, knock.

Luke’s thoughts tore themselves up like tissue paper at the sound of someone knocking, his visual foresight briefly flashing red at him in an ironically too-late warning. He knew it wasn’t Amanda at the door, knew it wouldn’t matter if it was, but Hermitcraft still had headaches, and prophets weren’t immune to fear.

“Luke?” Mumbo called out after a minute of no answer. Luke huffed, both in relief and some minor level of self-abashment at letting the old prediction get to him.

“Come in!” Luke yelled back as he got up from where he had been sitting and contemplating at his kitchen table. He knew he needed to start adapting into his new life, spend his time learning things like ‘how to build architectural miracles’ and ‘what to do when you inevitably get lost in a mine,’ but he had yet to do much more than exist and wait to exist while doing something with other hermits. Mostly Mumbo.

Mumbo, as invited, let himself in, moustache-smiling at Luke when he saw him. “I hope I’m not interrupting anything.”

Luke waved off the thought, words of the future scattering honey-light only he could see on his fingers as he did so. “Not at all, I was just distracted. How can I help you?”

The words crawling the backs of Luke’s hands answered him before Mumbo did. “I was thinking about exploring some further out world generation, see if I could find a new village or a shipwreck, nothing too exciting. Wanted to know if you’d like to tag along.”

“How much flying will be involved?”

Mumbo laughed at Luke’s immediate off-the-bat question. It sounded much better coming from him than it did reading it. “A little, to get far enough out and to get back, but nothing else. And I promise I’ll guide you.”

“As long as I don’t have to handle the fireworks myself, I’m in.” Luke said, doing a quick check of his inventory to make sure he had his elytra and enough golden carrots to feed several armies. “Anything we should handle before leaving, or…?”

“I’m ready to go when you are.” Mumbo answered, still smiling at Luke in a way he couldn’t help but return.

“Then let’s go.”

The flight out was, thankfully, fairly unexciting. Luke didn’t entirely trust Mumbo’s ‘redstone-improved’ wings, but his foresight didn’t reveal them suddenly exploding mid-flight, so Luke was able to mostly put the concern to the back of his mind. Mumbo’s guiding help remained masterful, and although the flight was a bit longer than the one to Boatem had been, his grip on Luke’s hand never once faltered.

(Again, Luke’s foresight had murmured the nonsense of a whale song when Luke took Mumbo’s hand. Again, Luke couldn’t fathom as to why. His foresight seemed to be teasing him- which, was it even supposed to do that? was it allowed?- but Luke didn’t think it had any reason to be doing so. Holding Mumbo’s hand was nice, not funny.)

When they landed, it was on the edge of a forest, flowers of all kinds and colours dotting the land around and between the trees. Luke surveyed the area while Mumbo put away his wings, having started being more careful with how he tucked them in his pocket since he caught Luke’s wide-eyed stare at the way he usually shoved them into his inventory. Luke’s foresight told him Mumbo’s behaviour hadn’t changed in general, that it was an adjustment made specifically around him, which Luke greatly appreciated.

“This looks like a good place to start.” Mumbo said, slightly unnecessarily, as he finished his task.

Luke hummed his agreement, waiting for Mumbo to pick their starting direction before falling into line beside him. To Luke’s understanding, exploration so ‘late in the season’ (as Mumbo kept putting it) was more for enjoyment and adventure than it was any specific use, since the general ‘main area’ for the server had already been set up and developed by that point. A lack of importance came with a lack of pressure, and Luke enjoyed how simple and casual that allowed the trip to be.

“Did you have these flowers on your old server, too?” Mumbo asked once they were deeper into the forest, trees surrounding them. He had been naming some of the flowers for Luke, pointing them out in case he couldn’t match name to flora. A sweet, if unneeded, gesture when Luke’s arms dripped with honeyed predictive descriptions.

“We did.” Luke answered, watching the bulbs of a blue orchid sway like neon bells under its own weight. “They look different here, though.”

“Bad different?”

“No, not bad.” Luke reassured quickly. “These ones are incredible.”

“Aren’t they?” Mumbo mumbled, seemingly mostly to himself, tone slightly awed. Luke had moments of foresight often, but not always, and when he turned to look at Mumbo he did so with no glowing golden guidance. He found that he must have been blocking Mumbo’s view of one flower or another, the redstoner looking as though his focus was only on Luke.

Luke tried to take a small step back, hoping to get out of the way, but Mumbo’s gaze only followed his movement, laughing a little. Luke, caught off guard and not entirely sure what was happening, did nothing but watch as Mumbo bent down, picked the blue orchid nearest to him, and approached Luke.

“I know some servers have wilting mods,” Mumbo started as he began tucking the cerulean flower into the front pocket of Luke’s shirt, the same white collared one he had died in having followed him alongside his curse, “but we don’t. So this will stay perfectly lively even in your pocket.”

“Oh.” Luke said, in lieu of anything meaningful, tilting his head down to see the way Mumbo had arranged the naturally drooping flowers against his chest, their bright colour making it clear they were alive no matter what position they slumped into. Though he was done with the flowers, Mumbo continued adjusting Luke’s shirt, fixing his collar and tugging on the sleeves to straighten them. Which meant, of course, that when Luke looked up, Mumbo was right there, still looking at him and much closer than he had been before.

“How do you like it?” Mumbo asked, and while it could never be said that Luke ever wished for his curse to be on him, he could acknowledge that it wouldn’t have been the worst thing ever if his foresight had been active right then, feeding him answers he wasn’t entirely certain he had the wherewithal to produce on his own in that moment. Something about Mumbo being so close was throwing Luke off, disrupting his thoughts.

It wasn’t as unpleasant as it should have been, conceptually.

“It’s… nice.” Luke offered after too long. A point in his favour on the ‘hiding being a prophet’ front- no seer would have taken so long to give such a simple response. “I mean- they’re pretty. Especially if they won’t die.”

“So you like them?” Mumbo moustache-smiled again, and despite everything else he wasn’t following, Luke was capable of smiling back.

“Yeah, Mumbo, I like them. Thank you.”

Mumbo’s smile grew at that, and he looked as though he wanted to say something more but was hesitant, needed to be sure of it. Luke was happy to wait, would have been happy to wait, but it was at that moment his foresight decided to make a reappearance.

The bright yellow text, matching the orchid in intensity, trickled across the sky beside Mumbo’s head to provide Luke with a warning he couldn’t properly issue: a creeper, already visible over Mumbo’s shoulder, having successfully sidled up to them in their distraction. By the time Mumbo noticed it, it would be too late, and the blast would kill him and severely injure Luke. A tragic and sudden end to what had been a pleasant outing.

The prophecy didn’t have Luke saying anything, modeling him as having been too distracted to have noticed the oncoming threat, only doing so at all because of his curse. Luke however, admittedly somewhat mentally unbalanced, unthinkingly said, “Creeper.”

Not that it would matter. His prophecies could flex when necessary, to bend back into the path they were meant to follow. Mumbo would blow up slightly more aware of the creeper than he had been originally, but he would still blow up, and Luke would still end up stranded with a long walk home ahead of him.

Case in point: Mumbo’s eyes quickly widening, him turning around to spot the creeper, the creeper already beginning to flash white, Mumbo moving quicker than Luke had yet seen him do to grab Luke’s arm and pull them both out of the blast radius-

Wait.

What?

Luke blinked rapidly, as if that would cause his vision to change and clear, to reveal his prophecy having occurred as intended and letting him explain away hallucinating otherwise as a moment of madness. It didn’t, however; all it revealed was the creeper, having not exploded, approaching him and Mumbo once more, and Mumbo looking at Luke like his third eye had become visible.

“Luke? Luke, are you alright?” Mumbo asked him, sounding worried as he slowly kept pulling Luke backwards with him, keeping a safe distance between them and the creeper. He had pulled his sword, which Luke knew he didn’t want to use, but he looked like he might if Luke didn’t snap back into the conversation soon.

“You weren’t… you weren’t supposed to do that.” Luke murmured, not needing to see Mumbo’s face, not needing to read his foresight to know that was possibly the least comforting response he could have offered. He sounded dazed, half-there, which was accurate, but not exactly the image he needed to portray right then.

“Luke?” Mumbo repeated, softer, as if he wasn’t sure what to say in response to that. Around his wrists, Luke watched his foresight continue on, shaping itself to fit the new reality. Now, Mumbo, panicking about a mostly unresponsive Luke and having no other option, kills the creeper, breaking his no-kill streak so he could eliminate the threat and focus on properly assessing the situation.

Luke looked over at Mumbo, watched him glance rapidly between himself and the green mob, watched him tighten his grip on his sword. Something in Luke’s gut twisted painfully. He didn’t want to be the reason Mumbo lost his self-set challenge, even if he didn’t fully understand it, even aside from the fact Grian might then kill him for it, but it was foretold, it was prophesied, and Luke’s sight gave him the ability to know but never touch, never change, never alter.

Except… he had. Mumbo had. Luke had given a warning and Mumbo had saved them, had shifted what was supposed to happen, and his foresight had followed. In his old world, seers were powerless in face of their fortunes, meant to record and report and never rewrite. But here… here….

Before he could think it any further through, Luke dug his hand into his pocket, the handle of his own sword settling into his grasp with barely a thought. The sudden movement startled Mumbo, enough that Luke was able to pull his arm from Mumbo’s gasp with relative ease, moving quicker than his thoughts could follow as he took two running steps up to the creeper and slashed it across its chest.

Nothing exploded. No godly figure appeared in a blaze of terrifying glory to smite Luke for wrongdoing against the oath he had never signed up for. The creeper didn’t magically bounce off of Luke’s blade and onto Mumbo’s in a deadly strike.

Instead, the creeper fell back slightly, as was to be expected. Mumbo stayed back, sword at the ready but lowered. Luke’s foresight changed, shimmering as it looped itself around his arm, his hand, his sword and told him of the new future he was plunging into- Luke, victorious against the creeper, victorious against fate.

That prophecy Luke brought to fruition, swinging until the creeper was gone, leaving behind nothing but the smell of mulch and an oddly well-stacked pile of gunpowder.

Luke, for his part, stopped moving as soon as the creeper was dead, standing in place and letting the sharp edges of his sword droop into the grass and dirt. He was panting slightly, staring uncomprehendingly at the mob drop. Mumbo hadn’t died, hadn’t broken his no-kill streak. Luke hadn’t been severely injured. The creeper hadn’t detonated. His foresight, still yellow, still golden, still present, rustled like crystal leaves from where it pooled on the ground around his sword. Luke had changed his prophecy.

Luke had changed the future.

With loud, deliberate steps, Mumbo came to stand next to Luke, pausing for a moment before setting a hand on Luke’s shoulder, as if afraid anything too fast, too sudden, too much would scare him out of his skin. “Luke?”

Luke forced himself to take in a deep breath, hoping he only imagined it when yellow smoke tinged the following release of air. “Sorry, Mumbo, I don’t… I don’t know what happened there.”

“It’s alright, I just… want to make sure you’re alright.” Mumbo said, staring at the way Luke was still gripping his sword a little too tightly. “I take it you don’t fight much?”

“You can say that again.”

“I certainly understand that feeling.” Mumbo chuckled, putting his own sword away and shifting his grip to be around Luke’s upper arm, light and grounding. “Do you want to head back to Boatem? Since this d- trip hasn’t been quite as peaceful as I promised.”

Luke looked to his pocket, drawn by the shine of prophetic words outlining his blue orchid, telling him to say yes, to say let’s go back, to say we can continue another time.

Luke looked to Mumbo, expression sweet and worried, waiting patiently for Luke’s response, completely and blessedly unaware that it had already been decided upon.

“It was only one creeper.” Luke said, pocketing his sword before laying the newly freed hand over the orchid’s stem. He smiled at Mumbo, ignoring the rearrangements of his foresight. “If we see another huge spider though, I’m turning around and sprinting all the way back to Boatem.”

Mumbo laughed. “I’ll keep that in mind.” He responded, guiding Luke with a slight tug to continue on in the direction they had been going before the near-explosive interruption. Luke followed him easily, words more malleable than Luke had ever known trailing behind him like a cloak.

~

At first, outside of what had happened while he was out exploring with Mumbo, Luke avoided trying to alter his prophecies. It wasn’t something prophets were supposed to do- not that Luke had ever thought that was any fair, to hold prophets to promises none of them had chosen to make- and it wasn’t something that could be done. Prophecies, those of foresight and visions, were unchangeable because the future was unchangeable, set in stone, destined. Trying to avoid them only ever ended up bringing them about- Luke had read the Greek tragedies, the news, the obituaries. He knew better than to mess with the future, knew better than to try.

And yet… Luke couldn’t help but want to. It wasn’t a moment of hubris, the desire to escape the inescapable that nearly all oracles experienced at some point. It had happened. He had gone against one of his prophecies and it had worked- not just one, but three.

If prophets were treated differently in Hermitcraft than they were where Luke came from, why couldn’t the same be true for their prophecies? That might explain why seers were taboo. To predict an unchanging future was one thing, but to have the power to alter it, to shape it?

So, of course, Luke started going against his prophecies.

They were little changes, for the most part; a slightly different sentence, a step to the left instead of the right. Nothing that would seem out of place to the other hermits, especially given none of them knew what was ‘supposed’ to be happening. His visual foresight always changed to predict the new future, and Luke always eventually followed it, but the prophecies did change. Luke wasn’t trapped. For the first time in possibly his entire life (lives), Luke’s sight wasn’t a curse.

And because of it… Luke got sloppy. It was his fault. Hadn’t he already known, already told himself that the universe wouldn’t give him any free favours? That just because he couldn’t see it, didn’t mean there wasn’t a trick hiding in the background?

Luke’s foresight told him everything that was about to happen within his sphere of interaction, not everything that was happening at every given moment. It didn’t inform him of things going on around him unless he noticed- or was going to notice- them. It didn’t tell Luke about the way Grian had started to watch him, didn’t tell Luke about the growing suspicion in Grian’s eyes, didn’t tell Luke that Grian had noticed something.

It didn’t tell Luke anything until Grian was pulling a sword on him.

The attack had come out of nowhere, Grian having originally pulled Luke into a discussion about block palettes that Luke had, truthfully, only been half-following. He had been distracted, autopiloting his half of the conversation, when there was suddenly a sharp, loud noise, like a bell being struck by lightning.

It had come from his foresight, a warning he could actually act on- Grian, drawing his sword with no preamble, stabbing Luke through the chest.

Luke’s eyes widened. Grian’s arm twitched. Without thinking, Luke stepped quickly to the side, and Grian’s blade cut through nothing but air.

Luke’s foresight dutifully began to change, rewriting itself alongside the new future, but Luke didn’t need to read it to know what it was going to tell him. Luke had avoided a surprise attack before it had begun. There was only one way he could have done that, and given the way Grian’s expression had hardened, they both knew exactly what way that was.

“I can explain.” Luke said immediately, aware he had no chance of maintaining a pretense. Grian’s initial response was to swing at him again, Luke dodging a second early.

“Do I look like I want to hear your explanation?” Grian’s tone was venomous, his diamond blade glinting in the sun as he continued going after Luke. In counter, Luke’s foresight had wrapped itself around the sword, bright yellow moving a breath before the blue beneath, showing Luke when and how to move even as each word wrote a story of being cut.

“It’s- it’s different where I’m from!” Wind against the back of Luke’s neck as he ducked a high swing. “I didn’t realize-”

“You didn’t realize?” Grian echoed, mocking, disbelieving. “You- what- you came to Hermitcraft by accident? You moved into Boatem without processing the player names there? You started flirting with Mumbo out of pointless happenstance?”

“Flirting?!”

Grian briefly abandoned trying to slice Luke up, instead ramming an arm in his direction. Luke dodged most of the hit, but he stumbled when Grian made contact with his shoulder, only barely missing the next swing. He could see the future, but that didn’t mean Luke had good reflexes. He couldn’t avoid Grian’s attacks forever.

“By Code, I should have never let you get this far.” Grian showed no signs of stopping soon, if ever. “I don’t know what your plans here were, and I don’t care. You’re not invulnerable. None of you are. If I have to be the first one to prove it, if that’s what it takes to get you all to leave me alone, I will.”

“Luke?! Grian?!”

Mumbo’s words were predicted, but Luke still swiveled his head hard in the direction of his voice. He had been walking, going about his day casually, but he had broken into a run at the sight of the in-process violent homicide.

Looking away proved to be a mistake within a second, however, Luke’s arm suddenly beginning to burn. Grian had finally landed a hit.

Instinctively, Luke slapped his hand over the wound, pain being overridden by terror when he realized the site of the injury was warm and sticky. He looked down, hoping that somehow both his intuition and foresight would be wrong.

He wasn’t. Beading from the cut, clogging under his hand, dripping down his arm was blood. Crimson, liquid blood.

(“Do hermits not… bleed?” Luke asked, tentative, as he watched Mumbo pull an arrow out of his arm with the same level of concern as Luke would treat a splinter with.

“Not naturally, no.” Mumbo answered in a way that felt much too normal. “Blood mods are pretty common, but Hermitcraft doesn’t have one. Did yours?”

“We did.” Luke confirmed, ignoring the copper-like taste coating his mouth. “I think I’ll enjoy not having it anymore, though.”

Mumbo chuckled. “It’s certainly less messy.”)

Grian had stopped actively slashing at Luke, eyes wide when Luke looked up. Mumbo, having reached the two of them, wore a similar expression of shock.

“Luke-” Grian started haltingly. Luke took a step back.

“I’m sorry.” Luke said as genuinely as he could manage before turning on his heel and sprinting in the opposite direction.

He heard someone call his name again as he ran, but he didn’t stop, hastily digging his hands into his pockets to grab his elytra and emergency fireworks. Luke’s foresight jumped ahead of him, caution signs keeping pace with him, telling him yes, this time you will fly, go, do it now.

Luke went airborne with only a little difficulty, wobbling in the air but managing to avoid crashing into anything as he went up. He didn’t hear any other rockets going off behind him, which meant he wasn’t being followed- good. He had no chance of out-flying any of the other hermits, especially Grian, who used his elytra like it was a pair of actual wings.

Granted, Luke hardly had any sort of plan, but step one of it whenever he figured it out was definitely ‘don’t get killed.’ Step two, he decided, mid-air and hurtling aimlessly off in one direction, was to find a chunk of land far enough away from the inhabited ones to hide away on and form the rest of his plan. Hermitcraft went as far as any player could go in every direction- it would take them a while to find Luke, unless they got truly lucky, and Luke would theoretically have foresight to protect him from their approach.

With that ‘plan’ in mind, Luke set off another firework, continuing until he was far, far past the point that he could see any hermit-built structures.

He didn’t decide upon a stopping point so much as it decided upon him, his foresight having scattered in the air and leaving him defenseless against dipping low at the exact wrong moment and accidentally slamming his leg into the edge of a hilltop. Sure, arguably, he should have been able to see it coming on his own but- well- he was distracted.

Luke rolled down the hill, elytra folding up and saving itself as he tumbled. By the time he came to a stop, he was sore all over, blood from his cut arm smeared across some of the grass. He pushed himself into a seated position, shucking off his elytra and banishing it into his inventory along with his remaining rockets. If he needed them, he would get them, but the wings were heavy on his aching back and the fireworks would never not be dangerous to Luke.

Luke exchanged the flying gear for one of his many golden carrots, nibbling on the metallic first-aid vegetable and returning to his barely-started plan. The most obvious next step was to get out of Hermitcraft, make it to the ‘server hub’ he had occasionally heard mentioned and disappear into a different world, but what was much less obvious was how, exactly, he could pull it off.

While Mumbo and some of the other hermits had asked Luke about his former server, tried to see if there was anywhere he needed or wanted to go back to, Luke had known there was no point in attempting to find a way back. Even if his old life really had been on some ‘heavily modded server,’ Luke knew his time on it had ended. Permanently. As long as the hermits had been happy to have Luke, Luke had been happy to stay in Hermitcraft.

Luke didn’t regret his decision, but it certainly was coming back to haunt him right then, sitting on a plain in the middle of generated nowhere with no way out. He might have had a chance to get a quick ticket out if he had gone directly from Hermitcraft to Xisuma and convinced voi to take him to the server hub, but he had lost too much time getting away. Grian had likely already told every other hermit what he had learned, Xisuma probably the first on the list after the already-present Mumbo. All the hermits were protective of their server and servermates, and Luke knew that went double for the admin. The chance that voi would want to help a prophet who had kept their identity a secret until a forced reveal? Zero. None. Nil. Luke was on his own, which narrowed his options significantly.

Then again, all the best oracles were cave-dwelling exiles, right? Luke could make that work, assuming the hermits would eventually get tired of looking for him, which… didn’t seem terribly likely.

Luke finished off his carrot. His cut had closed, and his bruises had abated, but the ache from all of them remained. Along with those pains, there was another building behind his temple, one that was awfully familiar in a way Luke had hoped he would never experience again.

And to top it all off- the universe once more reminding Luke that it wasn’t his friend in the slightest, not even a friendly acquaintance, despite all the wisdom it was constantly dumping directly into his skull- that was when Luke saw two figures gliding across the sky above him.

The plain offered Luke no place to hide, so he wasn’t too surprised when they immediately honed in on him, dropping a bit suddenly into a landing a short distance across from him. Luke shoved himself to his feet, hoping to use their landing time as a small headstart for himself, but the leg that had slammed into the hill protested his haste and brought him right back down to the ground. Now he wasn’t just a prophet, he was a clumsy prophet too. Great. Super. Was one death with dignity too much to ask for?

Escape foiled, Luke turned to face the hermits, unsurprised to find them to be Mumbo and Grian. Mumbo was closer to him, putting his elytra away (so carefully) but keeping his eyes on Luke, moustache frowning in what the distance had Luke mistaking for concern. Grian was to Mumbo’s side, several blocks behind him, glancing between Luke and his communicator in his hand.

“We’ve found him.” Grian said to his communicator which, wonderful, Luke hadn’t been gone an hour and the server was already on some sort of manhunt for him. “No, I think we- I think Mumbo has this. Yeah, we’ll let you know if we need help.”

Luke shifted his focus to Mumbo as Grian finished his call. He looked miserable. Grian sounded miserable. Luke felt miserable. A+ work, universe.

“You guys got here faster than I expected.” Luke said, shooting for a neutral, unaffected tone that he doubted he achieved.

“We asked Xisuma to find your coords.”

Luke swallowed, feeling nauseous in a way that didn’t entirely have to do with the fact that he was well and truly screwed, both unable to leave Hermitcraft and unable to hide from its inhabitants. He got to his feet, going slower, not missing the way both Mumbo and Grian tracked his movements, ready for him to try and run. “Listen, I- I don’t know how to leave servers, but if you show me how to, I promise, I’ll go. You don’t have to see me again. I won’t come back. You don’t- I’ll go, I’ll just go.”

Mumbo’s frown deepened. He took a step forward. Luke took a step back, and Mumbo stopped moving. Grian stayed motionless where he was.

“Luke.” Mumbo said his name placatingly, calmingly, worriedly, which was not the combination of emotions Luke was expecting to hear in any capacity. Anger, disgust, disappointment- those felt more appropriate for the situation. “There’s been a misunderstanding. We don’t want you to leave.”

Ah. That was it. Mumbo- sweet, friendly, first-hermit-to-befriend-Luke Mumbo- hadn’t believed Grian when he revealed that Luke was a prophet. He thought there was a misunderstanding. That’s why Grian hadn’t started attacking Luke on sight; he was waiting for Luke to play his hand, show his cards, to give Mumbo the proof that would validate Grian when he did go back to slashing and hacking.

Well, they had come at the perfect time for exactly that, if the ringing beginning to build in Luke’s ears was anything to go by. His foresight might have changed in the transition between worlds, but his visions seemingly had not. Luke had a minute or two, at best, before he would be too caught up in the vision to do anything in the line of covering it up or defending himself from swords.

“For the record, I didn’t… I didn’t mean to trick you all.” Luke said, voice getting tight as his headache worsened. Maybe, if he was pitiable enough, they wouldn’t kill him mid-vision. He wasn’t sure what that would look like, and he wasn’t particularly interested in finding out.

“You didn’t trick us.” Mumbo assured him, rocking on his feet as though he wanted to step forward again but was holding off. “Are you- are you okay?”

Luke raised a shaky hand to his head. The skin of his temple was burning, the world around him was beginning to spin, his throat was closing in on itself. Luke shut his eyes, and under his eyelids, everything was golden. “No.”

Presumably, that was the moment Luke collapsed, the strain of the vision disconnecting Luke from his body and leaving it to fend for itself as he learned its prophecy.

Unfettered from the demands of his physical body (free from ‘mortal needs,’ from his ‘human half’ as some people would put it, those who considered prophets to be the middlemen between humanity and divinity), Luke was able to receive the vision in its full form. Segments of time, glimpses of triple-digit dimensions, sensations that no language could describe bombarded him, a fortune so detailed it would take Luke four dictionaries worth of pages to write it all down, all overlaid with the only words Luke was allowed to speak, a single spec of sand out of a beach full of information. There was a reason all prophets went mad, and it was contained in the break-neck juxtaposition between the future they knew and the future they were permitted to speak.

Purple eyes surrounded Luke in the space of the vision, the space in his mind torn out to make room for his curse, all wide and watching and never blinking. The darkness swallowing them bent, distorted, claws forming to jump out at Luke, scratching and grasping, obsidian nails painting bloody divots across his chest. One hand held one purple eye, twisting and snarling, burning up mauve, magenta, merlot. Blood dripped from the corner of the eye, honey fed from Luke’s own wrists, scabbed over in useless words of gold. The captured eye turned to stare directly at Luke, and fearfully the other eyes closed out of existence. The captured eye said nothing. The captured eye said sorry. Luke, hand drenched in amber guilt, reached out towards it.

Luke opened his eyes.

Time was meaningless in the thralls of a vision. As far as Luke knew, it could have been a minute since it began, or it could have been hours. The sun was still in the sky, and Luke was still on the plain he had crashed into, but even those indicator variables felt useless. Luke could have been there, trapped in the vision, for days.

What didn’t feel useless, however, was Mumbo, sitting with Luke tucked against his side, an arm swung comfortingly across Luke’s shoulders while Luke’s head lolled on the top of his chest. He was warm.

Across from the two of them was Grian, standing up and squeezing his communicator so hard it seemed liable to crack and shatter in his grasp. He was closer than he had been earlier, before Luke’s vision, but not close. Looking at Grian, a sense of inhuman understanding settled in Luke’s gut, weighty and unignorable: the vision was for him.

Luke sat up, stiff and sudden, Mumbo’s arm falling off his shoulders in the process. He stared directly at Grian, whose eyes were wide in the face of Luke’s, blinding sunlight in perfect circles. Luke opened his mouth, smoke the colour of sulfur spilling out before he said a word.

“In three days time, a thousand eyes of violet violence shall descend upon you,” Luke intoned in a voice that was borrowed and stolen and entirely his, “lured by power they’ll seek to know but never will. Your server you will save, but not yourself, nor your false enemy of unmalleable gold.”

Prophecy delivered, Luke slumped back into the exact position he had been arranged in, exhaustion coursing through him like it had replaced his blood. Mumbo tucked his arm around Luke once more without question.

Grian, for his part, looked the same way most people did when they received one of Luke’s prophecies: angry and terrified.

“When you first came to Boatem, and you were asking us about prophets,” Mumbo was the first to break the silence that followed Luke’s prediction, his words half-rumble in Luke’s ears, “you asked because you’re one, didn’t you?”

Luke nodded, sliding his head against Mumbo’s chest. He had been long since found out; the vision was a last shovelful of dirt over an already buried coffin. Lying wouldn’t do him any good (telling the truth wouldn’t either but then, what did it matter? might as well go out honest). “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t- you don’t need to apologize.” Grian said, voice uncertain, as though he didn’t know if he was saying the right thing. “If anything, I’m the one who should be sorry. I am sorry. I shouldn’t have- well-”

Luke wondered, idly, what Grian’s intended end of sentence was supposed to be. ‘Sorry for not killing you fast enough?’ Luke would have accepted it. If he had died at Boatem, at least he would have done so without another vision under his belt.

Mumbo’s arm tightened around Luke. “No one’s killing you, Luke.”

Ah. Apparently those hadn’t been ‘idle wonderings,’ but rather ‘words he was saying aloud.’ A common mix-up.

“I can be ready to leave in five minutes.” Luke said, that time on purpose, mind jumping to what the other option must be if they weren’t going to kill him- they had accepted his plea. They were going to let him off with a promise to never return to Hermitcraft. It wouldn’t be pleasant, he knew, and saying he could be ready to travel in five minutes was stretching the truth to the point of poking holes in it, but he wasn’t going to risk trying their patience when he had already determined the ‘allowed to leave alive’ option to be so unlikely.

“You don’t- There’s been a misunderstanding.” Mumbo’s hold on Luke didn’t lessen, which Luke felt would make it hard for him to eventually get up and go. Both in a logistical sense (how could he get up when he was being held down?) and a more emotional/exhausted way (the closer he got to falling asleep on Mumbo, the less he wanted to get off of Mumbo). “We don’t have prophets here. We thought, based on your description, that you were talking about… something else. But we were wrong. We-”

“I was wrong.” Grian cut Mumbo off, crossing his arms and looking away from Luke. “I should have- I should have known you weren’t one of them. That you aren’t one of them.”

“We have a lot of names.” Luke made a vague motion with his hand. “Oracles, seers, fortune tellers, other things. I’m not surprised Hermitcraft would have a different one.”

Mumbo shook his head, a motion Luke more felt than saw. “It’s not just the name that’s different.”

Ahead of them, Grian sighed and sat down, still so far despite having moved onto Luke’s level. “Watchers don’t bleed, no matter what server they’re in.” Grian told him, the group’s name dripping with poison and sparking lightning in Luke’s mind. “And they certainly don’t do whatever that was.”

“Vision.” Luke said reflexively, unhelpfully, as he mentally skimmed through the aforementioned where it kept writhing in his brain. “A thousand eyes of violet violence…”

“That’s them.” Grain confirmed. He sounded furious. He sounded scared. He sounded tired. “I don’t know what your, uh, vision told you, but they’re bad news.”

“I got that impression.” Luke admitted, claws of starless night flashing behind his eyes. “I have something else to apologize for, then.”

“What?”

“Lured by power they’ll seek to know but never will.” Luke repeated, shrugging helplessly at Grian’s confused eyes. For all that coming to Hermitcraft had changed about his curse, Luke could still feel a force as strong as diamond, as bedrock, as the universe itself digging into the base of his tongue, a harsh reminder that some things would never change. “I can’t speak past the bounds of the prophecy. I can’t- I can’t explain it to you. I can’t.”

Mumbo patted Luke’s arm. “That’s alright. You said we have three days, right? We can figure something out in three days.”

That’s what they all say, Luke thought but didn’t speak. He didn’t want to risk his tongue saying more than he was allowed. He didn’t want to explain the inevitability of a prophecy, the doom of self-fulfillment.

“I don’t- how could they get in? How will they get in?” Grian dragged his hand across his face. If it weren’t for the circumstances, Luke would have been touched at how readily his vision had been accepted. Dire prophecies especially usually took at least one day of denial-processing. “They couldn’t get in when I first moved here. Why would that change now? Sorry, Luke, I’m not- don’t say what you can’t.”

Luke watched Grian dissolve into muttering to himself, trying to make sense of Luke’s words, their meanings, their methods. It reminded him of El, sister of a prophet and doomed by her own blood, scrambling to find an escape to a fate Luke knew was unavoidable. Trying to help her had been the first and last time Luke had tried to interfere with his visions. Delivering a prophecy and fulfilling it were functionally the same thing, but the former had a layer of separation Luke could hide behind.

But this was Hermitcraft. If his foretellings could change- if the immediate future could change-

Luke closed his eyes. Walked himself back into the vision. Prophets weren’t allowed to speak, but they were allowed to know, if only they were willing to take the time necessary to hack their way through the vision and tear out its meat. After El, Luke had never bothered. It didn’t matter how much he knew. It didn’t matter what he did. The dominos always fell the same.

Luke curled his fingers tight around a special dagger and started slitting purple, taunting, visionary eyes.

In the unwanted space in his head, the unbleeding eyes bled the future, trails of understanding that soaked into the soles of Luke’s feet. The moment of arrival, the moment of leaving, gleeful wanting and taking and terrible, frustrating, razing anguish over the unknown. Luke waded through the future memories, unsatisfied. Grian had the right questions- Luke needed the how, the why now, not the terrible afterwards.

Two eyes, three eyes, four eyes and there was code dripping down Luke’s arms, a purple mockery of his visual foresight that burned into Luke with the importance of a sword cut. The words made no sense to him, but they sang with significance, twisted into the angles of a key.

Luke opened his eyes with a cough, more yellow smoke drifting out. Against him, Mumbo managed to shift in a way that felt concerned. “Is that… are you going to keep doing that?”

“It’s non-toxic.” Luke responded distractedly, looking again towards Grian, who also seemed less than satisfied with Luke’s smoke. “Come over here.”

Grian did not come over. “I- let’s- why?”

“Can’t say.” Luke twitched his foot at Grian. He felt stupid. The whole idea was stupid. Rule number one of being a prophet: give up on the idea that you have any control. You are never above fate. You are never above the future. But this wasn’t his old world. This wasn’t his old life, where fate killed his sister and he couldn’t do anything but watch, where the future had handed him Inscryption and laughed. This was minecraft, Hermitcraft, and Luke was so fucking tired of being destiny’s middleman. “I also can’t stand up without falling over. If you’re- you can take out your sword, or something, if you’re worried, just- just come here.”

“I wasn’t-” Grian cut off his own protest, hesitating for a moment before doing as requested, moving over to be sitting next to Luke and Mumbo. “I’m not pulling another sword on you.”

Luke hummed, more focused on finishing what he technically hadn’t yet started. He had never been a ‘prophet of the people,’ had never made a career out of giving fortunes, but he knew that oracles who did were able to provide visions for specific people by connecting to them. Some used objects or rituals, but most did so through touch, creating a direct livewire between the person and the prophet’s ability to reach for their future. The science behind it wasn’t well understood, but the best guesses all boiled down to something having to do with the core ‘essence’ of a person.

What, exactly, the ‘essence’ of a person was in Luke’s old world wasn’t clear. But in the new one, Luke knew code was- quite literally- everything. If Luke could connect to that… well, he could possibly mess up disastrously and cause the equivalent of taking scissors to someone’s nervous system. Or he could help fulfill the prophecy exactly as it was intended. Or he could possibly, possibly, flip fate the bird, redirect the prophecy, and give Grian an incredibly solid reason to continue with not-killing him.

“How badly do you want to stop it?” Luke asked, putting the decision he couldn’t explain out-loud into Grian’s hands.

Grian set his expression, an impressive display given it consisted only of two eyes. “I’ll do anything.”

“Great. I’m going to hold your hand.”

“What?”

“What?”

Luke ignored the confusion from both Grian and Mumbo. Surely his spitting up yellow smoke and predicting the terrifying future had to be more unnerving than him holding Grian’s hand. Mumbo put up with it no problem, and Luke hadn’t ever been trying to rearrange his code. Luke reached out, not so much ‘holding’ Grian’s hand as he was laying his over Grian’s. All he needed was the point of connection.

With both Mumbo and Grian doing their best to frown at him despite their lack of mouths, Luke closed his eyes again, pushing past the remnants of the vision and doing his best to channel his entire focus towards Grian, his code, the one line that was still wrapped around Luke’s metaphorical arm.

It took a few minutes for Luke to successfully shove the vision out of place, the bleeding eyes following him angrily until he managed to find the sliver between them leading out. The nightmare space faded into one of nothing but lines upon lines of blocky white code, all somehow compiling into Grian. The words scrolled past Luke in a rush, constantly moving and running and jumping around as they processed- presumably- the action of Grian sitting and judging Luke heavily.

Luke let it all pass him without trying to acknowledge them, focused single-mindedly on finding the line from his vision, the line that would lead the Watchers to them if Luke wasn’t able to do something about it. It was all a blur of white to Luke, theoretically useless, but Luke wasn’t looking with his actual, physical eyes.

The line he had been looking for appeared, and the code slammed to a stop like it had been frozen.

The string of code was isolated from the others, sitting plainly on its own line, self-contained. As code, Luke couldn’t understand it, but the matching words on his arm burned with cryptic explanation- a variable in waiting, a hidden backdoor, a trap waiting to be tripped. Luke’s vision, mostly but not perfectly contained to its own section, spliced itself with the code, overlaying the words with prophecy: Grian, trying to predict the tactics of the Watchers, accidentally letting them in all on his own, calling them not only to himself, but to an open Hermitcraft, to the newest hermit and his infinitely useful powers.

Luke scowled at the vision, scowled at the code, scowled at the promises they tried to make him, scowled at the way they tried to deter him. He was already so close. He was already so tired. If fate wanted to stop him, it was welcome to materialize and try.

Luke walked up to the line of code he needed, hefted his dagger, and started slashing.

When Luke opened his eyes next, the chunk of Grian’s code he had been looking for had been reduced to nothing, the letters having fritzed purple at Luke as he painstakingly tore each one out of place. Grian, for his part, didn’t look like Luke had accidentally killed him, which Luke took as a good sign in spite of the fact his entire body had shifted into feeling like it was made of lead.

Using much more effort than it reasonably should have taken, Luke pulled his hand back into his lap. “There.”

Grian pressed the hand Luke had ‘released’ against his chest, forehead furrowed. “I… feel different. What did you do?”

“Mm. Something. Should have helped. No more prophecy.” Luke answered without answering, less out of a caution for what he could-and-couldn’t say and more due to the mental fog that had settled over him alongside the weight in his limbs. Maybe… maybe he wasn’t made for messing with the pure essence of a player. Maybe that had been a ‘bit much’ for him in his already-drained state.

“You- you can do that?”

“I just did.” Luke tilted his face further into Mumbo’s chest. Remembered he wasn’t supposed to do that. Un-tilted his face using monumental effort. “I can… ten minutes? I can be gone in ten minutes.”

“You’re not leaving.” Mumbo said, firmly, at the same time Grian rudely reminded Luke, “You can’t even stand up.”

Luke frowned. Who said he couldn’t stand up? He could stand up. All it took was-

Mumbo pulled Luke back against his side before he could successfully face-plant into the grass. He sighed. “If you… if you don’t want to stay, we won’t force you to, but-”

“I can’t stay.” Luke interrupted. “Prophet.”

“Misunderstanding.” Mumbo countered. “Hermitcraft allows prophets, even if we don’t know what they are.”

“And I shouldn’t have attacked you.” Grian added, nudging Luke’s leg with his foot. “I did it because I thought you were one of them, not because you’re a prophet.”

“But… the blood? I shouldn’t… no blood in Hermitcraft.”

“If you had the mod in your old server, it might have carried over with you into this one.” Grian offered, sounding a touch guilty. In an attempt to convey he didn’t hold his blood against Grian, Luke thoughtfully bumped him with his foot.

Mumbo, clearly wanting to join in on the bumping-fun, bumped his leg against Luke’s. “Grian’s right. A rogue blood mod isn’t server-threatening.”

“It’s messy.”

Mumbo huffed, a sound that Luke’s severely exhausted mind chose to interpret as fond. The hand that had been resting on Luke’s further shoulder lifted as Mumbo started to comb his fingers through the hair at the base of Luke’s neck, an action that was both wonderful and not at all helping Luke’s already poor grasp on reality. “If it’s yours, I don’t mind.”

Grian, sounding slightly as if he were underwater, made an exasperated noise. “Get a room.”

“I think that’s the plan.” Mumbo joked. “Unless you think we should leave Luke to fall asleep out here.”

“You could.”

“We’re not.” Mumbo and Grian rebuked at more or less the same time.

Luke huffed. “You won’t let me stand up.”

“You would fall over.”

“Stop insulting me.”

Mumbo chuckled at Luke and Grian’s exchange. “Luke, do you want to fly right now?”

“...No.”

“Then we’re not going to make you fly.” Mumbo’s logic made sense to Luke. It was extremely considerate of him. Included no insults. “Do you want to go back to Boatem? Or someone else’s base?”

“Boatem.” Luke answered before Mumbo fully finished. “If. If I can.”

“You can.” Mumbo said softly, the response followed by the beeping of a communicator. Luke opened his eyes- when had he closed them?- and found it was Grian, typing something into his.

“Xisuma says voi can teleport us back.” Grian said after what had either been a minute or ten, Luke being too distracted trying to keep his eyes open to focus on the passage of time. “And that voi’s glad you’re ok, Luke.”

Luke hummed in acknowledgement. Briefly lost the battle against his eyelids. Started rapidly blinking in an attempt to beat back the urge to sleep.

Grian, who was not acting nearly grateful enough for someone who’s future Luke had helpfully changed, laughed at the display. “I don’t think he’s going to make it back to Boatem awake, Mumbo.”

Mumbo, secondary reason Luke was not going to make it back to Boatem awake and who was being forgiven on account of being so warm, also laughed. “It’s probably best he doesn’t. Teleporting when exhausted is quite, er, unpleasant.”

“I’m right here, you know.” Luke mumbled, fairly certain he had said at least half of the words out loud. His eyes had fallen shut again and seemed content to remain that way.

The arm around the back of Luke’s shoulders shifted, pulling Luke closer and allowing his head to rest more comfortably on the soft-warm-solid surface. “Go to sleep, Luke. I’ve got you.”

Luke, exhausted, happily listened to his pillow’s advice.

~

Four days later, Luke found himself sitting outside of his house, appreciating the beauty of a Hermitcraft that hadn’t been split open by false gods of wine-purple eyes.

Even with Luke feeling fairly certain he had circumvented his vision, the server had been tense for the three days after it. Luke’s foresight proved he wasn’t lying about his ability to predict the future, after all, and the mix of his inability to speak of the prophecy past its given lines and his uncertainty in whether or not avoiding it was even possible hadn’t exactly filled the hermits with hope. The three days of waiting had been filled with open-secret preparations, every hermit with admin knowledge helping Xisuma to run through the server’s protections with a fine-toothed comb, and a lot of anticipatory glancing at the sky.

(Admittedly, Luke had missed most of these things occurring during his nearly two day long recovery sleep. His visions were usually tiring in a way a long nap could fix, so Luke was forced to assume his exhaustion had come either from altering Grian’s code, interfering with the future of his prophecy, or both.)

But the third day had passed, free of any Watcher appearance, and Luke was left to conclude that he had truly done it. He had defied a vision. He had changed the future, short-term and long-term. For the first time in his lives, Luke was free of the prophet’s curse, even as golden words continued to wind themselves around him.

Luke turned his head a second early as those gold words told him of Mumbo’s approach, because he could, because the hermits didn’t care, because he wanted to revel in how he could know and alter. He did wait until Mumbo actually came around the corner of his house to speak, out of politeness. “Hey Mumbo.”

Mumbo, for his part, didn’t seem put off by Luke’s unnatural readiness. “Hello Luke. Might I join you?”

“Please do.”

Mumbo moustache-smiled as he took a seat in the grass next to Luke, sitting close enough their legs were touching. Luke didn’t mind. The proximity was nice. “How are you doing?”

“Better. Awake.” Luke answered, getting a chuckle out of Mumbo. “I think Phantoms fear me now. I might start chasing them around during the day.”

“I don’t think Phantoms exist during the daytime.”

“They will. That’s how afraid of me they are.”

Mumbo shook his head, but his smile remained. “Glad to see you’re in good spirits as well.”

“I’m a prophet who can defy the future and isn’t having to engage in any impromptu sword fights because of it.” Luke watched his foresight wiggle on the ground as he did just that, switching around the phrasing it had offered him solely because it couldn’t stop him. “My spirits have never been better.”

“You really weren’t joking when you said prophecy was a curse on your old server, huh?”

Mumbo’s tone was light, but Luke could make out the undercurrent of worry in it. Luke hadn’t had a chance to go too in-depth on all the details of being a prophet- he hadn’t yet had the time- but he had explained a few things to Mumbo, in between his naps and the Watcher watches. Unsurprisingly, Mumbo hadn’t liked much of it, biased by the fact that Luke didn’t like much of it either.

“For me at least, yeah.” Luke bumped his shoulder against Mumbo’s. “But I’m here now, remember? And it’s… it’s good here.”

Mumbo hummed, clear he still had something on his mind. Luke waited patiently for him to get to it, no creeper around to ruin the moment. In front of him, Luke watched his foresight turn into ellipses, blinking at him before draining into the grass, as if choosing to leave him and Mumbo alone.

“Your old server was a hardcore one, right?”

“Are those the one-life-only servers?”

“They are.”

“Then yeah, hardcore server.” Luke answered, not entirely untruthfully. His old life had been a one-chance set up, as far as he was aware.

Mumbo nodded, hesitating for a second before continuing on with his line of inquiry. “When you… did you know-”

“When I was going to die?” Luke finished for Mumbo, sighing and looking out over Boatem. Inscryption was an entire bundle of thoughts he had largely left untouched since coming to Hermitcraft, and while he knew he wouldn’t be able to ignore it forever, he had been doing his best to pretend that the only part of his death that mattered was that it had happened. “I did. Unfortunately.”

“Oh, that’s- I was going to ask if you knew you would end up here.” Luke turned back to Mumbo, finding him frowning in concern.

“Oh.” Not the question Luke had expected, but one that was much more preferable. “You know, I actually didn’t. Falling into Hermitcraft was a complete surprise to me.”

“A good surprise?”

Luke grinned at Mumbo. “The best.”

Mumbo returned the grin as best he could with only a moustache. He scooted a little bit closer to Luke. “Luke, there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you.”

“Is it something I said during my two day long nap? Or while I was pretending I wasn’t falling asleep on top of you?” Luke hazarded as guesses, aware that he had, at some point in his rests, sleep-talked some fairly odd things. Including, based on the various notes Boatem had kept while watching over him, some rather inspired Catch Monster teams. “Which, I did mean to apologize for at some point. I know you hadn’t planned on playing pillow to a half-mad prophet that day.”

“It’s alright.” Mumbo reassured Luke, waiting a beat before adding on, “You were cute.”

Despite being a prophet, Luke had not seen that coming.

It must have showed in his expression- or in the way he had frozen in surprise, or in the way he was speechless, or in anything, because Luke was pretty sure not a single cell of his being was currently behaving in a normal, unshocked way- because Mumbo laughed, smile softening.

“I didn’t think I was being subtle.” Mumbo told him, teasing but kind. “Especially for a prophet.”

“Prophets- I- we- I predict the future, Mumbo, that doesn’t make me observant!” Luke found enough of his voice to protest, although given the way his face felt like it was burning, he doubted it was a very effective one. He considered trying to hide his face in his hands, but he was fairly certain it would only make his embarrassment worse.

“And you didn’t see this coming? Even a little bit?”

“My foresight’s not here right now.” Luke defended, as if that explained him missing every other sign along the road to that exact moment.

At the mention of his briefly MIA foresight, however, Mumbo hesitated. “Do you… should I wait til it comes back?”

“Actually, Mumbo, I think- I think I can figure this one out from here.”

Another second of pause, and then Mumbo’s smile grew as he leaned into Luke’s side, getting as close as he had been the day he had given Luke the blue orchids that now lived in a flower pot on his bedside table. “Why don’t you tell me the future then, lucky prophet?”

If Luke’s face got any redder, it was liable to explode. “Yes. I see- I see the prophet saying yes.”

“You do?” Mumbo asked, and he was still teasing, still amused, but there was something so earnest and hopeful in his eyes Luke couldn’t help but wonder how the hell he hadn’t noticed anything before that exact moment.

“Yes.” Luke repeated, fulfilling his own prophecy, created just for him and Mumbo. “I do.”

And as Luke leaned in, surrounded by green grass and blue sky and not a single drop of spilled blood, he finally felt peace.

[jeannereames]

In some of your posts, you've said we can't believe the speeches in the original sources like Plutarch and Arrian. And I get it, that they wouldn't have ways to record exactly what people said, but wouldn't they try to get it at least close? Didn't orators publish their speeches, so they'd know what they said? Demosthenes published speeches about Philip, I know. And wouldn't readers back then get angry if they realized the writers were just making things up?

When it comes to ancient texts, particularly ancient historical texts, speeches, dialogue, and letters are especially problematic. Why? Authenticity.

As the asker indicated, a lack of recordings automatically problematizes this. But their memories were generally better. The real issue centers on ancient ideas of WHAT HISTORY WAS FOR.

Ancient historians were writing to entertain, as well as to educate, and promote their notions of how the past should be understood, often to school people in their present. “Cautionary tales,” if you will. Or models to emulate. When they do say where they got their information (frustratingly rarely), it’s as much to show off their education/how well-read they are, rather than to assure their readers they know what they’re talking about.

It’s critical to understand that ancient history was akin to modern creative nonfiction. I don’t say that to diss creative nonfiction (says the historian who also writes historical fiction). But it’s crucial to recognize it was nothing like modern academic history with footnotes, peer reviews, and fact-checks.*

In terms of preserved speeches (or orations), we have two types. The first (often forensic) were published after the fact by the orator himself.** Those are indeed their words, but their edited words. Unlike now, ancient speeches were typically composed aloud, not in writing. But at least speeches published by the orator are authentically their ideas, if not, perhaps, what was actually said (in court, the assembly, etc.). Nobody is putting words in their mouth.

By contrast, the orations and dialogue in our histories are the creations of the authors of those histories. Why goes back to the first (Greek) historians: Herodotos and Thucydides (and Xenophon). They set a pattern that later generations deliberately followed. All put speeches into the mouths of their major players. This is called oratio recta (direct speech), or what we’d call a quotation. Another form is oratio obliqua (indirect speech), or what we’d call a summary or a paraphrase. In general, the use of the former characterizes the Greek historians, while Roman historians preferred the latter. (There are any number of exceptions, however.)

Incidentally, these writers didn’t lie about it. Their readers/listeners realized it highly unlikely Herodotos knew what Darius or Xerxes said back in Susa or in the Persian camp, but they were there for the drama. Thucydides even admits (1.22.1) he has no clue what was said in the speeches he records from the Peloponnesian War, but he wrote what he thinks would have been proper for the situation.

Why make it up?

Orations were entertainment.

Just as modern fiction authors craft a story to forward themes and motifs, so also with ancient authors. When an author writes out a speech, PAY ATTENTION. It usually contains key points.

In our modern world with lowered attention spans, we can forget that people might listen to orations (especially longer ones) for fun.

Yet this is extraordinarily recent. For as long as we’ve been human, we’ve gathered to hear good storytellers and be inspired by good speakers. Sometimes the art of rhetoric is equated with intentional lying. That’s cynically silly. The art of rhetoric just means getting across your point clearly, and powerfully. A goodly chunk of Barack Obama’s appeal was his fine rhetoric. Ironically (and like it or not), the same can be said of Trump; the Maga crowd adores his word-salad “oration” style. Similarly, in some religious traditions, “good preachin’” is considered essential to good pastoring. And monologues, whether comedic, newsy, or folksy can develop cult followings, as The Rachel Maddow Show proves, or Stephen Colbert, or the much earlier “News from Lake Wobegon” from Prairie Home Companion (Garrison Keillor). You can probably name another half-dozen without breaking a sweat.

Because the oration was a form of entertainment in antiquity, many ancient authors sought to prove their own creative brilliance by writing speeches. That’s why you should never, ever, ever assume a verbatim speech in ANY Classical Greek or Roman text is what the speaker actually said. If you’re lucky, it may at least represent the gist. But it also might not. Dialogue is similar. They make it up.

With letters, one might think at least they could copy it—no need to remember. Like orations, letters were sometimes published by one of the authors, for posterity. (The letters of Cicero, or the Younger Pliny are good examples.) Yet the same principle applies. Letters were a way for an historian to display creative chops so “tweaked” letters were not uncommon, even if based on an original. And sometimes letters were invented whole-cloth, at need.

Yet there’s another issue with letters that moderns aren’t aware of: accidental forgeries.

How can a forgery be accidental?

It’s a rhetorical-school lesson that “escaped.”

A popular assignment for students was to write a letter (or oration) “in the style of ___ famous person,” or “as if from the point-of-view of ___ famous person.” Lessons weren’t just to learn how to turn a phrase, but also to instill proper morals. So, for instance, some ancient schoolboy’s essay prompt might be: “Illustrate pistos/fides (loyalty) in a letter from Alexander to his mother, Olympias.” To get a good grade, he had to show he knew something about Alexander, about proper pistos/fides, as well as how to write like a king.⸸

Some of these letters got confused later with the real thing. Remember, record-keeping was rather haphazard.

So…recorded speeches, dialogue, and letters in our ancient histories should be regarded much the same as you’d regard such in modern creative non-fiction: dramatization to increase reader interest.

——————————————-

* This isn’t to say ancient historians never critiqued each other; they most certainly did. Sometimes quite brutally—and from the beginning. Thucydides is our the second surviving Greek historian and he begins his history by, in his very first chapter, including an oblique criticism of Herodotos, who invented the discipline!

** Male gender used on purpose. Greek women weren’t allowed to make public speeches, and Hortensia was considered a weirdo who pissed off the Second Triumvirate. She certainly gave a speech, but Appian put words in her mouth—like most ancient writers.

⸸ Ironically, I do something very similar in my own classes on Alexander. We put him on trial for war crimes, and students write either as Alexander in his own defense, or as the prosecutor, whoever that might be (Demosthenes, the King of Tyre, a Persian noble, etc.). They must write their speech demonstrating the morals of the ancient world, not the modern, using the primary sources. To get a feel for it, they must read a couple Greek forensic speeches too, in order to understand how to properly frame their arguments. This allows them “to get into the heads” of the ancients themselves. It’s not only more fun, but more effective as a learning tool, imo.

[mcsiggy]

long reply alert:

wow, the previous anon overreacted, he shouldn't charge you that kind of thing since you're not a pagan. i'm also a pagan, and no we're not in a big LARP or whatev, is an actual religion. yeah, zeus is an amazing god, and yes i too am very upset about the hate he gets in and out of the pagan community, but then again anon shouldn't have brought this to you. but he has a valid point, the gods really are different from their myths, the myths are not literal or theological but symbolic and poetic, they are not the bible but rather they are like the divine comedy or paradise lost, both for the ancient greeks and for modern pagans. for example, zeus having many children with mortals, we pagans do not believe that after all, for us the gods are spiritual beings that do not exist in the physical plane so it is kind of the gods impregnating mortals or whatev, the stories of zeus or other gods having children with mortals they were created because royalty in ancient Greece justified their power by claiming divine ancestry. but you are under no obligation, you can keep doing what you do, and well if you want to be more respectful just make it clear that your interpretation of the gods is personal and you have no intention of spreading hatred towards pagans or the deities we worship, probably that anon went through a lot of shit to come here and pester you bc i've seen yes pagans being bullied for worshiping certain deities, especially zeus.

(Non native eng speaker, sorry any language mistake)

aaa yea, i'm just an artist who enjoys the mythology stories side a bit more than the religious side, so the ask was kind of weird and sudden for me to get.

but my response was a bit rude too, so im sorry if i accidentally offended any pagens u_u i never meant to be rude in that way.

[weeklypoetry]

Sappho, Fragment 34 Voigt

ἄστερες μὲν ἀμφὶ κάλαν σελάνναν

ἂψ ἀπυκρύπτοισι φάεννον εἶδος

ὄπποτα πλήθοισα μάλιστα λάμπη

γᾶν <ἐπὶ παῖσαν>

****

ἀργυρία

Poetic translation:

The gleaming stars all about the shining moon Hide their bright faces, when full-orbed and splendid In the sky she floats, flooding the shadowed earth ⁠with clear silver light.

Literal translation: The stars about the fair moon lose their bright beauty when she, almost full, shines [on all] earth with silver.

Free of any human interaction, somehow still full of Sappho's typical melanchony, it offers a personified view of the cosmos like embarassed little girls watching in awe as a woung woman shines bright with silver. Because the stars are clearly the focus, the first word we can see and what I think the reader should relate to; we all pale in comparison to bright, shiny full moon, so gracious to bathe of all us in her light - and the stars are, here, no less human.

For italian speakers, I higly recommend this analysis by the University of Bologna, that goes into finer detail than I ever could.

Certainly my very favorite of all of Sappho's work. I'm already a sucker for nocturnals - Sappho and Leopardi, long loves of mine, feed me well in that regard - and this one takes the cake. Also one of the firsts of hers I've ever had to translare, which doesn't helo lessen my enjoyment for sure. The beauty in her fragments is also in the unsaid, unseen; was the silver surely the light, or is there in the line we're missing, some other feminine noun to complete it? It also makes me kind of mad, solely because a lot of poetry sites out there dealing with ancient greek poetry conviniently forget to inform that we don't actually have the whole poem, a lot of it are just guesses (even if based on studies and evidences) and meaning isn't as clear as they make it seem. For example, almost none of the sites i've searched through for a translation mentioned that "on all" the earth isn't in the text, but was assumed through studies and is often marked as such in greek. Or that there's a whole missing line between that and "silver".

Regardless, I hope that this translitteration and translation can be of satisfaction, especially to those much more expert in this subject than little ol me.

↑ the analysis link again, for easier clicking.

[gemsofgreece]

I am starting reading the Iliad with the ancient and the modern text for leisure (and not for school) for the first time. I am so excited. And yet, I am 7 verses in and once more I am annoyed by the tendency of Greek linguists to give a liberal modern interpretation. Why is there a need for a liberal interpretation for the Greek speakers (and not only)? Why don’t you just modernise the text word after word? Wouldn’t it be cooler for Greek speakers to thus feel more connected with the ancient text than being presented with a liberal form that might make them (especially younger ones) assume the ancient text is more unfamiliar than it actually is? It’s Homer we want to read, not any random linguist’s prose, even if it's nice. It is very irritating to see myself - a very NON linguist - translate the text more faithfully than the interpreter on the next page. Below the example of how it is and how it could be in my opinion:

Regular text: Ancient Greek original Green text: how the Modern Greek version could be more faithful Orange text: the linguist's interpretation Red text: When I lack insight / knowledge so I keep the available interpetation too Purple text: exact translation in English

a) Μῆνιν ἄειδε θεά Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος οὐλομένην Την μήνη τραγούδησε, θεά, του Πηλιάδη Αχιλλέα την ολέθρια Τραγούδησε μου το θυμό, θεά, του Αχιλλέα εκείνον τον ολέθριο The destructive wrath, sing oh Goddess, of Achilleus son of Peleus

b) ἣ μυρί' Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγε' ἒθηκε η οποία σε μυριάδες τους Αχαιούς άλγη έθεσε που πίκρες στους Αργείους πολλές προκάλεσε that put the Achaeans in a lot of pains

c) πολλάς δ' ἰφθίμους ψυχὰς Ἂϊδι προΐαψεν ἡρώων πολλές δε αντρειωμένες ψυχές ηρώων στον Άδη ξαπόστειλε ψυχές ξαπόστειλε στον Άδη αντρειωμένων άπειρες and hurled many souls of valiant heroes to Hades

d) αὐτούς δὲ ἑλώρια τεῦχε κύνεσσιν οἰωνοισί τε πᾶσι αυτούς δε ως λεία έριξε σε κύνες και σ' όρνια άπαντα σε σκύλους τα κορμιά τους, σ'όρνια έριξε and made them prey to dogs and all the vultures

e) Διὸς δ' ἐτελείετο βουλή του Διός τελούταν η βουλή(ση) του Δία το θέλημα γινόταν it was Zeus' will that was being done

f) ἐξ οὗ δἡ τά πρῶτα διαστήτην ἐρίσαντε Ἀτρείδης τε ἂναξ ἀνδρῶν καὶ δῖος Ἀχιλλεύς. εξού πρώτα διίσταντο και έριζαν και ο Ατρείδης, ο άνακτας των ανδρών, και ο θείος Αχιλλέας. αφότου πρωτομάλωσαν και χώρισαν οι δυο τους, ο γιος του Ατρέα, στρατηγός, κι ο άξιος Αχιλλέας. since Atreides (the son of Atreus), the king of the men, and divine Achilles first fought and separated.

Fun fact: a teacher I had hated the word "θείος" because always Uncle Achilleus or Uncle Odysseus came to mind and yeah they had a point but that's the closest version what can I do lol

[unhonestlymirror]

I genuinely wonder how Himaruya managed to write Lithuania as both a pathetic trembling scared of russia creature and "a murder sword machine on the battlefield." Both are wrong; and since I already explained why the first image is wrong, then, I think, it's time to talk about the second.

Indigenous Lithuanian land or Lietuva, is actually not so big. In preGDL and GDL times, it was shifted more to the East (now those territories are mostly Belaruthian and a bit russian), so the sea coast was Baltic Prussian, Skalovian, Curonian, etc. Those people spoke very similar to modern Lithuanian languages (well, from my point of view as a non-native speaker) because they were all Baltics, but there weren't Lithuanian.

So, since there were not many Lithuanians, and no sea, therefore, no so big cultural and economic exchange with neighbours as in, e.g., Curonia - there was a delayed access to new technologies, including military. And of course, not a single nation is gonna give you their technologies for free. No new modern technologies or people - no superiority in pure military power. No superiority in pure military power - no victory in protecting your land or in colonisation... if you use the "murder machine" tactics. You're just gonna lose your people, and you can't afford that. Therefore, you have to develop in another direction.

I want to give an example from the history of my country. Hundreds of years ago, 513 BC, the Persian king Darius I, with a large army and fleet, began a campaign to conquer Scythia. Darius I Hystaspes sought to extend the Persian Empire to the entire cultural world of that time and, in particular, to subjugate the Black Sea colonies of the Greeks and thereby seize control over the Black Sea trade, especially over the arrival of the Scythian bread that Greece needed.

Darius had thousands of thousands of people; Herodotus reports the following about the size of the Persian army: "The army, without the navy, numbered 700,000 together with the cavalry, and six hundred ships were assembled". The Persians were blinded by their success - they had not known military failures.

Having learned about the thousands of Darius's army, which ended up in their territory, the Scythians held a military meeting - all the tribes were gathered, including their allied Sauromatians, Taury, Ahathirsy, Gelonians and Budyny. Some tribes, such as the Androphages, refused the Scythians' offer, feeling relatively safe. They blamed the Scythians for the campaign against Media and did not want to risk their own peace and well-being. Some historians believe that it is possible that Darius I tried to prevent the unification of the forces of the Scythians and their neighbors and previously sent a message to the kings of all the tribes neighboring Scythia that he was going to war only against the Scythians and was not going to conquer anyone else.

Therefore, the Scythians decided not to engage in close combat with Darius, but to lure him as far as possible from the crossing into the boundless Scythian steppes by making periodic counter-attacks. They sent the women and children and all the livestock far ahead. The Scythians left with them only as much cattle as they needed to feed the detachment. The Scythians also filled up all the wells and springs, set fire to the steppe, and destroyed vegetation in order to deprive the enemy of any benefits and make it difficult for him to move. In history, this military tactic was called "Scorched Earth Tactics". And it fully justified itself. With such a large numerical superiority of the Persians, the Scythians could not afford to go into an open battle. And they completely exhausted the enemy - both psychologically and physically.

The Scythian troops carried out a "psychic attack" - constantly appearing and teasing the enemy, avoiding direct contact, staying at a distance of a day's march, luring the Persians to them, while leaving their livestock - not letting them die of starvation. Darius tried with all his might in his nerves to pursue them, leading the army as fast as possible, but the Scythians were out of reach. According to some researchers, the Scythians used stone mounds (tombs) with grottoes and caves as a shelter, which disoriented the enemy.

Constant active movements, lack of combat as such, depletion of provisions and supplies brought the Persians closer to defeat. Finally, the army of Darius, pursuing the Scythian horsemen, entered the territory of the same Androphages and other tribes who had previously refused to fight on the side of the Scythians. Seeing the advancing Scythians in their lands, some of them continued the tactics started by the Scythians, while others resorted to more radical actions, such as the Androphages, who were "famous" for cannibalism.

According to Herodotus, Darius finally decided to retreat after one significant incident. He sent a messenger to the Scythian general Idanfirs, conveying the following:

"Strange person, why do you run away like a hare, although you have the opportunity to do one of two things? After all, if you think that you yourself are capable of resisting my power, you should stop wandering, fight, and when you realize that you are weaker, then even then, cease to flee and carry land and water as a gift to your lord, come for negotiations".

In response, a messenger arrived to Darius with an unusual message:

My affairs, o Perses, are thus: I have never run in fear from any man before, and now I do not run from you, and I do nothing new now compared to what I used to do in peacetime.

I will also explain why I do not engage in battle with you immediately. We have no cities, no cultivated land, and no fear that they will be captured and ruined. Nothing compels us to enter into battle with you sooner.

I did not come to your land, but you to mine. When I want, then I will compete with you by force. Now, if you found and spat on the sacred graves of our ancestors, then you would see whether we are scary rabbits or not.

The stubborn Persian king did not stop there and answered:

Foolish Scythian! Who taught you to fight so stupidly? I already told you: if you feel courage in your heart, stop and let's measure strength. No one in the world has ever beaten me! If you do not have the strength and courage in your heart, send me, your Lord, the usual gifts in this case: water in a silver jar and land on a golden cape. And I will admit you to me and, as a sign of supreme favour to you, I will allow you to kiss the toe of my black royal boot. I was and will be your Master, and you were and will remain my faithful slave!

Such arrogance and limitation somewhat angered the Scythian king Idanfris, and he ordered to immediately send Darius "gifts" - a bird, a mouse, a frog, and five arrows:

Enough has been said about the battle.

I consider only Zeus, my ancestor, and Hestia, queen of the Scythians, to be my lords.

And instead of gifts of land and water, I will send you such gifts as you deserve to receive. For the fact that you declared yourself my lord, you will have to sob.

This is the answer of the Scythians.

The Persians asked the messenger about the meaning of these mysterious gifts. He said that he was only ordered to give "presents" and added that if the Persians are so wise, let them figure out for themselves what they mean. This once again puzzled the Persians, and they did not immediately understand what it all really meant. Herodotus conveys the expressed assumptions: "Darius thought that the Scythians would give him themselves, and land, and water. He assumed this on the grounds that the mouse lives in the earth, feeding on the same cereals as man, the frog in the water, the bird most closely resembles a horse; the arrows mean that the Scythians are surrendering their military power."

In fact, these "gifts" of the Scythians meant something else, and the Persian commander Gobrius was the first to correctly interpret them:

If you, Persians, do not fly into the sky like birds, burrow deep into the earth like mice, or jump into the swamp like frogs, you will be killed by these arrows and will not return home.

And the Scythians, having brought "gifts", in the meantime did not waste time and went to active actions. We learn from Herodotus: "Meanwhile, one part of the Scythians, who had first been ordered to guard near Lake Meotida, and now went to the Istra for negotiations with the Ionians (Greeks), having arrived at the bridge, announced the following: "Men of the Ionians, we bring you freedom, if only you are willing to obey. We know that Darius ordered you to guard the bridge for only sixty days, and if he does not appear within that time, to retire to your homeland. Now you will not be guilty either to him or to us, if you do this: stay the appointed number of days, and then immediately depart, rejoicing that you are free, and feeling grateful to the gods and the Scythians. And the one who was once your master, we will bring to such a state that he will no longer go to war against anyone." When the Ionians seemed to agree to do so, the Scythians immediately hurried back."

In conclusion, with the onset of night of many nights, taking a select part of the army, and leaving the others - exhausted, sick, wounded and less needed to die, Darius marched back to the Istra (Danube) by forced march. In fact, treacherously betraying his own army, which for him was nothing more than consumables and a way of aggrandizement, he still managed to mislead the Scythians and retreat to a considerable distance.

Unfortunately, the Greeks did not keep their word. The Athenian Miltiades, the general and tyrant of the Chersonese, those on the Hellespont, offered to obey the Scythians and try to liberate Ionia. The proposal of the Miletus Histiaeus was the opposite of this. He said that now, thanks to Darius, each of them is the tyrant of the city, and if the power of Darius is overthrown, he himself will not be able to rule the Milesians, and no one else will be able to rule anyone. When Histiaeus made this point, everyone immediately agreed with his opinion, even though they had previously agreed with Miltiades.

Thus, Darius was lucky: the Greeks did not destroy the bridge and, waiting for the return of their master, helped him and his army to cross the Istra and reach Chersonese of Thrace, and from there - Asia Minor. The Scythians believed the Ionians (Greeks), so the Persians simply slipped away. After this incident, the Scythians began to judge the Ionians as vile cowards and born slaves who love their master and are not in the least inclined to resist. (c)

***

The same tactic was used by Lithuanians, although they didn't have the steppe but impenetrable forests: and in such natural conditions, it is much more profitable to use bows or crossbows. Lithuanians climb trees a lot, and many Lithuanians, as well as Belaruthians, are very good snipers. Swordsmen were mostly mercenary warriors, and they created a reputation, but it doesn't mean that the whole nation was like this. Where do you think the tales about Laumė and "forest gods which will punish you" come from? If you want to learn more about someone's war tactics, go into their mythology. Lithuanians resisted Teutons using the "Scythian" tactic for a loooooong time, until Prussia and modern Latvia were completely captured and it was the time to change. In order not to become completely engrossed, they had to seek support from the South, and that's how Grand Dutchy of Lithuania was born. I am 100% sure that the Lithuanians were not happy about having to bravely risk their lives in an open field.

Some bonus facts:

A LOT of Lithuanians are fans of Tolkien and elves.

Gintaras Beresnevičius says that Lithuanian religion and culture exchanged influences with Scythians as well

All of Lithuania's neighbours describe them as very cunning. They're not like naive Belaruthians, they're not grandiose like Polish, they're not hot-heads like Ukrainians, and if course they are not stupid in their insolence and megalomania like russians. Latvians have a word for Lithuanians, which is "viltīgi" and means "cunning"... in a bit negative way. XD

[thesummerstorms]

I wonder if year-round Campers have their own slightly distinct... I guess the best word is "accent" though I feel like I mean something more mild than that.

Especially the kids who come very young, like Annabeth in the main series or Harley in HOO/TOA, and thus grow up from a fairly young age around a community of living speakers of Ancient Greek and older kids from all over the country who would have their own regional slang and accents.

I have not actually researched accent acquisition, but I don't feel like 7 (Annabeth) and 8 (Harley) is too young for there to be a noticeable impact?

[traumatizedbymay2016]

"Arguing with people about the meaning of the bible is annoying and stupid! Just tell them religion is a lie and move on with your life!"

Ok, sure. But consider:

Many religious texts, especially the bible, were translated from their original languages like Hebrew and Greek by western European countries during imperialist stages. Failing to call out the imperialism and cultural appropriation of intentional mistranslation and ensuing misinterpretation of translated texts, especially when original texts still exist and can be interpreted by native speakers to mean something wildly different, is enabling that imperialism to endure into the future.

I'm only familiar with Christian religious texts, but there are way more verses in those texts dedicated to telling you to mind your own damn business and be a good person than there are, say, condemning gay marriage. Isolation the handful of verses that enable specific points of bigotry in defiance of the overwhelming body of work that argues against it is a logical fallacy, and calling that out in a religious context is no less important than it would be if you were calling out a climate change denier who was citing one instance of an ice shelf getting larger while ignoring all other evidence of climate change.

Humanity uses written language to convey moral principles all the time. Even if you don't believe in god or prophesy, religious texts are moral and philosophical literature that can be learned from. Ignoring the academic aspect of the argument further enables bad faith and uninformed interpretation based on cherry-picked scripture on the part of bad-faith argument, while a fully contextualized and academic rebuttal might not persuade a bigot but is likely to cause a meltdown in their rhetoric.

And finally. Arguably most importantly. When you're arguing with a religious fundamentalist bigot, your goal is not to convince them of anything. They're not engaging in religion for the purpose of the religion, but because it gives them a backing for the conclusions they already had. You're arguing to the people who are siding with those bigots out of the misguided belief that the bigot is on their side; the proverbial jury of the debate. If you can demonstrate that the bigot's ideology is disingenuous, that it lacks a founding in a good faith reading of scriptural texts, and that it is intentionally constructed not to be a religious belief but to use religion as a crutch for secular arguments that are intrinsically at odds with the actual precepts of the religion, then you stand a chance at making very real headway with the people who actually believe that you should "Love thy neighbor as thyself." How do I know? That kind of argument is how I got out of Mormonism.

You are under no obligation to behave this way. You are under no obligation to agree with or even like people who do engage on a theological level with fundamentalist bigots and Christian nationalists. But stop behaving like you have an objective intellectual high ground over people who do when it takes literally no time at all to understand why people would see that type of engagement as worthwhile.

[oldfacesnewdawnoffical]

Sorry, asking a lot of Questions... how did you come up with words that don't exist. I've always been in awe of people that do that and you take it to a level beyond space itself! I guess my main question is how do you make up such amazing words?

Everybody who apologies for spamming my inbox with questions is getting bonked with a paper towel roll.

I’m assuming you’re talking about words like the ones used for the leadership’s titles :O (if there’s more or something specific you’re asking after, let me know; I’m a little slow lol)!! Fun fact: most of them aren’t actually fake words ;)

If you take a look at OFND’s dictionary, I’ve actually explained and broken down some of those words! For example:

An “orator” is someone who is “a public speaker, especially one who is eloquent or skilled.” This works perfectly for my purposes, as an orator within OFND is the head of their faction and the one who speaks on behalf of all their cats. The word itself descends from Latin, alongside Anglo-Norman French.

An orator’s title, “rhema”, is directly derived from the Ancient Greek word ῥῆμα (rhema), which translates to: “utterance, thing said”.

It also sounds like a sound a cat might make!! Rrrrrr-ehh-ma

My biggest advice for choosing words in this light? Pick an element. A substance. If it’s connected to a specific ideal within your story, break down that ideal to its most basic form and pick off pieces that could translate into a broader word!

Some resources I use to do this:

Glosbe - English to Old English Translator

Old English Translator

[silverturns-art]

FMP - evaluation

In general I am happy with the body of work I have produced for my final major project and I think that it stands well for my idea. Of course there are things that could have gone better and there is room for improvement. If I could continue this project further I’d make a working typeface out of it, so that it could be applied to more assets easier. I’d also like to explore the potential of it becoming an educational application or website going into further depth about Greek vocabulary, grammar and syntax. I really enjoyed working on my illustrations but I think that their style could be developed more in order to look more consistent with the vibe of the typography. Even though in the end I didn't use the colour filter idea I still see potential in it but it needs further exploration on where and how it can be applied. On the technical side of things on my final video I would like to re record my audio with professional equipment and maybe use another Greek speaker on the parts with the dialogue because it feels a bit monotonous. I would like to also explore the animation idea I experimented with because I feel that it would make the outcome a lot smoother and thus more pleasant to watch. Another thing that I would consider is making a small printed version of the project like booklet, that one can have with them. I could also experiment more with digital line drawing, maybe using an iPad or Wacom tablet. I would definitely like the AMFIVIO project to expand and I see a lot of possibility in it. Another thing that I would like to improve is getting the ideas earlier on when I start a project because I feel that if my idea hadn't changed that drastically I would have had more time to develop the new idea. During this project I definitely realised how important is planning things out before making work, especially when it came to choosing the words and phrases as well as making the final decks and the video. I would love to do a case study of someone who doesn't speak greek using the system and see if it would actually help them learn the basics. I think I would rework the video presentation of the project but overall I am happy with my work for now.

[jeannereames]

Cut the Old Queers Some Slack

This post brought to you by a review of Sandra Boehringer’s Female Homosexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome, which recent translation I posted about earlier with no little excitement. The BMCR review annoyed me for a couple reasons.

First was an assumption that when a book is translated, the author should retool it to modern terminology.* In the end, the reviewer said maybe just the forward from Boehringer should have addressed trans issues—which isn’t an invalid point—but other parts of the review seem to slam Boehringer for not doing more revisions for the new English translation (from a French original published in 2007). This leads me to….

Second issue: this assumes a uniquely Angliphone understanding, and even more, a British one (the reviewer teaches at Leeds), where the issue of TERFs is more pressing than in the US. Here, transphobia and transmisogyny is rooted more in religious objections than a subsect of radical feminists (who may not be religious at all). It’s not that the US has no TERFs, but it's not nearly the issue (ime) as in the UK.

Every country has its own quirks of bias. And the author is French. If I’ve learned anything about Queer culture in my almost 60 years on this planet, it’s that the pressing issues in one country are manifestly not the pressing issues in another—particularly across language lines. To assume they are (or should be) centers Angliphone culture in a way that annoys me.

OTOH, yes, especially US English-speakers have poor linguistic skills to read non-Anglophone scholarship as a result of bad public-school language education. But access to good language education is a matter of MONEY, which gets us into issues of social class, et al. That’s a different kettle of fish (which deserves its own post about wealth gate-keeping in academia).

But I do my best to remain cognizant that the ways we talk about queer culture and concerns differ even in Anglophone countries, never mind those of non-English speakers.

So that was my second big issue with this review.

The reviewer acknowledges that the original came out in 2007, and queer scholarship about the ancient world has moved on, particularly as regards recognition of non-binary ancient figures. But she can’t seem to keep from knocking Boehringer for not magically keeping up.

Folks, grant the Old Queers some slack here? When I was young, it was just LGB. Then LGBT. Now it’s an alphabet soup. I’m quite sure young queers who read “An Atypical Affair: Alexander the Great, Hephaistion Amyntoros, and the Nature of Their Relationship,” could take exception to my phrasing in places. Hell, I’ll revise portions of it for my bio on Hephaistion and Krateros.

But it was published in 1999! And I actually wrote the thing in 1996 as a class assignment, then revised it in 1998 for that 1999 publication date.

Remember, some of us have been in this fight a while. I do my best to keep up with current terminology—and do genuinely want to do so—but it’s kinda gauche to slam authors for material previously published, especially in such a rapidly changing field.

To expect an author to substantially retool a prior publication for a translation is uncool. Real revision takes a lot of time. Not something I think many people fully understand. It’s not a matter of a couple weeks’ tweaks. If she were to produce a revised/second edition, that might take years. I’d rather have the book translated than wait five years for Boehringer to revise it. I can take it in the spirit of its original publication date: 2007. Could she have been more straightforward in her new forward? Perhaps. But French concerns aren’t British ones.

——

*Let me also say—as someone whose work is currently being translated—we may not have as much control as readers assume. I sent a letter to the Italian publisher, all but begging them to PLEASE keep the Greek transliterations of names and Greek words with Dancing with the Lion. They said they would, but I can’t force them to do so. For all I know, the Italian translation could be a dumpster fire. I hope not, I trust not, but translations are dicey. And if academic translations are quite different from fiction, be aware of the limits original authors face with translations.