#fleckers

[dottie-n-stripes]

do you know him???????

[nobeerreviews]

I have seen old ships sail like swans asleep.

-- James Elroy Flecker

(Malaga, Spain)

[petaltexturedskies]

James Elroy Flecker, from "Don Juan Declaims" in The Collected Poems

[apoemaday]

To a Poet a Thousand Years Hence

by James Elroy Flecker

I who am dead a thousand years, And wrote this sweet archaic song, Send you my words for messengers The way I shall not pass along. I care not if you bridge the seas, Or ride secure the cruel sky, Or build consummate palaces Of metal or of masonry. But have you wine and music still, And statues and a bright-eyed love, And foolish thoughts of good and ill, And prayers to them who sit above? How shall we conquer? Like a wind That falls at eve our fancies blow, And old Maeonides the blind Said it three thousand years ago. O friend unseen, unborn, unknown, Student of our sweet English tongue, Read out my words at night, alone: I was a poet, I was young. Since I can never see your face, And never shake you by the hand, I send my soul through time and space To greet you. You will understand.

[ispaceizz]

While we're on the topic of Pencil,

(2024 redraw of this meme):

(Original 2021 -> redraw 2022)

[addictedtowords16]

Between the Pedestals of Night and Morning  Between red death and radiant desire  With not one sound of triumph or of warning  Stands the great sentry on the Bridge of Fire.  O transient soul, thy thought with dreams adorning,  Cast down the laurel, and unstring the lyre:  the wheels of Time are turning, turning, turning,  The slow stream channels deep and doth not tire.  Gods on their bridge above  Whispering lies and love Shall mock your passage down the sunless river  Which, rolling all it streams, shall take you, king of dreams, --Unthroned and unapproachable for ever--  To where the kings who dreamed of old  Whiten in habitations monumental cold

James Elroy Flecker

[altariz]

One with my OC’s too okay I’ll stop posting now

Original art

[debsandshit]

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[105nt]

Can't settle so am multitasking. Reading Hassan by James Elroy Flecker, re-reading Clouds of Witness by Dorothy L Sayers and listening to The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins read by Peter Jeffrey on Audible.

[tritoch]

fuck it. have an enormous oc lore dump. this is the "canon" wol oc i conceived as part of my personal preferred approach in some games to take the game's text as presented, not headcanon away any elements, and, as much as possible, adhere to whatever "definitive" canon as best as can be discerned from what's given as an option. as a comedy bit, I also wanted to make a Warrior of Light who does everything you can do in canon, like an omnijob level 90 did all the raids did all the beast tribes caught every fish did all the relics did every hildi questline kind of WoL. Someone who really does mostly communicate through nods and punch gestures and only says the specific lines you can say in game (except for the scenes, increasingly common in later expacs, where they let you imagine a conversation). I just think it's funny to take an approach to the game that is at once fairly restrained (no elements beyond what is already presented in the lore) and extremely maximalist (yes, he one hundred percent did steal those pants). spoilers through stormblood under the break.

Wolund Anadezhda (not his real name) was born in Bozja in the year 1533 of the Sixth Astral Era to a young gunbreaker in Bozja's army and her husband, a foundling adept of the Verdant Path and fellow soldier. Resolving that their son would not grow up in the shadow of war, the Hrothgar couple resolved to have him sent out of the country shortly after his birth. He grew up instead under the care of his father's adoptive sister, a master of the Verdant Path in her own right, who left Bozja some years prior under uncertain circumstances after a serious injury left her unable to return to the front lines.

The sister (a Sea Wolf Roegadyn) had through various adventures found herself running a Dalmascan caravanserai, a walled inn a day's travel west of the city of Rabanastre. There, she raised Wolund both to run an inn and in the forms of the Verdant Path. Though not a warm woman, she did her best to raise Wolund carefully and lovingly, and honoring her brother and sister-in-law's wishes, tried to shelter him from the horrors of the world. He, in return, idolized her. He received sporadic letters from his parents, at least until Bozja fell. Their ultimate fates are unknown, though Wolund believes that even if they didn't die during the course of the war, they likely died as part of the resistance or in the Bozja Incident.

In the year 1547, 6th AE, Dalmasca is invaded by the IVth Legion. The caravanserai is close enough to the border for the Garlean line to advance past it fairly quickly, and Wolund chooses to remain with his aunt in order to protect her from the occupation as best he could. As Wolund has grown, his aunt has told him stories of the devastation war had wreaked in Bozja, and of the losses she still grieved. She explained to him that students of the Verdant Path such as herself had been targeted by the IVth Legion to be brought in dead or alive in a bid to control their knowledge and break Bozja's ability to resist, and that she had fled the country at her brother's behest to preserve the school's knowledge for future generations. Chafing under Imperial rule, Wolund aspired, at the time, to learn as best he could from her, follow in her footsteps, and do his part to maintain the lineage of the Verdant Path school.

In my conception, the Verdant Path, as a multidisciplinary school that teaches (at least) spear, greatsword, katana, and unarmed combat as part of its tradition, encompasses more of a martial philosophy, conceptual approach to space, and footwork system than a specific set of techniques for various weapons. This is a key element of why Wolund, in order to adhere as closely to the maximum extent of the available canon as possible, can pick up like 19 different martial disciplines, sweet Mary Sue that he is.

As he aged into his late teens and early twenties, Wolund was settling into his role as his aunt's chef, handyman, disciple, and likely future replacement innkeeper, as her war injury made physical labor increasingly difficult. Also around this time, Wolund has a brief engagement with a Keeper of the Moon Mi'qote merchant, part of a tribe of several Keeper families who operated a caravan which plied a route between Rabanastre and Martrvje in Bozja. At her behest, largely as a practical matter on her end though not without some romance, they had a child together, with the intent that, as in most Keeper families, she would raise the child herself, though he would, by grace of the caravan's route, have periodic contact with them both.

Before the child's birth, however, an imperial recruiter looking to fill a quota came through town. And so in the year 1556, 6th AE, at the age of 23, Wolund was conscripted and assigned to the VIth Legion, then a corrupt and disorderly force occupying the relatively peaceful southern coast of Ilsabard. A far cry from Emperor Solus's disciplined armies, the VIth Legion then was scarcely indistinguishable from a private mercenary group answering to local colonial governments.

Wolund struggled after his initial conscription, seething at the prospect of two decades under the Garlean Empire's yoke, fell into despair, and tried to emotionally withdraw. Since he was a quiet, disciplined conscript as well as a young and fairly imposing Hrothgar, his Garlean officers read in him the ready Garleanization that they wished to see. His practiced prowess in the training hall further contrasted his "bestial" appearance in the eyes of the bigoted Garlean officers. In Wolund, they saw a useful tool and status symbol for their occupation.

Consequently, while Wolund's time resembled the expected conscript experience in many respects, it was also marked by unexpected success in the unusual, corrupt environment of the VIth Legion. He spent plenty of time in his first couple of years on hard, undesirable labor, as any conscript would: digging ditches, building infrastructure, policing occupied populations, and, in the singular case of open conflict breaking out, serving on the front lines. However, he stood out from his peers, and he found himself frequently serving as a sort of exotic trophy or bodyguard for increasingly senior officers or local bigwigs. Eventually, he found himself attached to the staff of the legion's 10th Cohort as vexillarius, or standard-bearer, for the cohort's pilus prior. This turned out to be, given his centurion's corruption and close links to the local colonial government, merely a slightly more elevated form of his old work serving as muscle and an imposing presence behind preening dignitaries.

At this point, about six years into his two decades, Wolund's conscription seemed on a steady path to eventual citizenship. For his part, he remained as emotionally disengaged as he could manage, materially secure in his position in the 10th Cohort. The insulated world he built came crashing down in his sixteenth year of service, when crown prince Varis yae Galvus sent his close friend and confidant Regula van Hydrus to reform the corrupt VIth Legion. Many senior officers, including Wolund's centurion, were executed by firing squad for their abuses and indiscretions, with still more clapped in irons and hauled before military tribunals. Efforts to reform the legion's reputedly undisciplined soldiers saw Wolund, like many other conscripts, detached from the VIth in the hopes that reassignment to a more disciplined legion could salvage the conscripts that, in Regula's eyes, the VIth had nearly wrecked. Wolund found himself assigned to the VIIth Legion in 1572, on the eve of Carteneau.

Of Carteneau itself, there is little to say, and what few coherent memories Wolund may have had were taken by Louisoix's magic, along with Eorzea's Warriors of Light. Wolund crawled out of the catastrophe and butchery of the Seventh Umbral Calamity to find himself one of the VIIth's few survivors. Reassigned to the Vth, he served out the rest of his term quietly, though nightmares of Carteneau continued to plague him. While serving in the Vth Legion, he served as a quartermaster and honed his skill in both literacy and sums.

In year 4 of the Seventh Umbral Era, Wolund completed his term of conscription. Engraved and sealed legionary diploma in hand, he made his way to Garlemald itself, where his paperwork was verified and his name added to the citizen's registry. He returned to the caravanserai outside Rabanastre as Wolund pyr Anadezhda. There, he found his aunt, now some 20 years older, and her unexpected apprentice as innkeeper: his own daughter, now a 20-year-old woman and soon to be running the place herself.

For about four months, Wolund tenuously reinserted himself into the daily life of the inn while attempting to form a connection to his daughter and reconnect to his aunt and his daughter's mother. His efforts to begin his life again were cut short when soldiers came sniffing around the caravanserai on the order of a local magistrate, a former officer of the VIth Legion who sought to employ him as a trainer to his household guard. Recognizing that he would not be able to live a life free of the Garlean Empire's boot so long as he remained within their lands, and not wishing to endanger his daughter or aunt by enlisting them in his decision, Wolund simply skipped town one night. He left behind all his possessions except for enough money to see him safely overseas, as well as a letter that stated tersely that he did not wish to be followed. From the caravanserai he made his way by horse to Rabanastre and then to Valnain, where he caught a ride on a merchant ship bound for Hingashi, and from thence to Limsa Lominsa, where he arrived in year 5 of the Seventh Umbral Era.

Upon arriving in Eorzea, Wolund, leaning on his most recent skills in math and reading, as well as his admittedly rusty knowledge of trade goods from his time at the caravanserai, applies to work at the Arcanist's Guild. Everything proceeds as it does in the game from there.

All this is in service of a couple things. First of all, honestly, giving him a big backstory where various bad things happen to him over the course of a long time is primarily in service of dealing with what I think is one of the shakiest scenes in the game: the moment where Fordola accidentally uses the Echo on you and is shocked to her core by the scale of the tragedy you've overcome. I just don't think this makes a lot of sense for the WoL based just on what's depicted in-game, as sad as the events of the Banquet and Haurchefant's and Ysayle's deaths and Minfilia's sacrifice are. Giving him a comparable backstory to Fordola as a legion conscript does a lot, in my book, to smooth out that scene and make its emotional weight land better in my head, as do elements like the death and destruction he witnessed at Carteneau and the stuff about his daughter.

Secondly, in addition to that scene, this is just supposed to help set up a lot of stuff about the WoL I find a little clunky, particularly earlier on. Why does everyone in the Scions immediately glom on to you and decide you're their hero? Well, maybe the WoL is a stoic and outwardly emotionally reassuring older man who's conveniently older than the oldest of the Scions by more than a decade, and he can fill the Louisoix-shaped hole in their hearts that each of them except maybe Y'shtola very obviously has. How are you simultaneously everyone's favorite guy and also a story non-entity? Maybe he's nice and kind to people but very bad at handling and leading them initially (as evidenced by letting Alphinaud sleepwalk you all into a trap at the Banquet), in part because he spent the better part of two decades playing the part of mute imposing muscle for aristocratic officers. And maybe the fact he's consciously silenced himself for 20 years plays into the fact that the Warrior of Light becomes chattier throughout the expansions. Maybe he knows how to wear Garlean conscript armor and operate magitek because he was once a conscript himself. And so on and so forth.

Third, playing by my dumb "canon" rules, the WoL has to come from outside Eorzea. You're arriving by ship or cart and you're clearly unfamiliar with the city-states by the text. However, you also can't come from a lot of known places, since then you're bumping up against the issue that those places will also treat you like a stranger when you arrive in-game. There's no Bozja dialogue for being Hrothgar, but 1) to them it's not weird they'd have no reason to mention it and 2) this is why he isn't culturally Bozjan. Linking the WoL to Dalmasca solves this issue because the only Dalmascans you meet would have no reason to know a random Imperial conscript, you have no real time with them to shoot the shit about culture, we will not go to a functioning Rabanastre ever, and there is no reason you would have wanted to share all this with anyone on board the Prima Vista. Fourth, the WoL is a person of many talents and skills. Chalking up his weapon skills to the Verdant Path and his conscription, and linking his DoH/DoL skills to his upbringing, goes a long way towards helping ground some of that (as much as delightful nonsense can be grounded). Fifth, I think it's really funny to make the Warrior of Light a deadbeat dad. Final Fantasy is so full of bad sad dads already, WoL should get to be one. Lastly, I'm jealous that 1.0 players got to be at Carteneau and I want to bite their style but I refuse to break canon to do so, which means conscript it has to be (since being from a Free or Grand Company would contravene the earlier point about having to be new to Eorzea).

(A note on timelines: ARR begins in the year 5 of the Seventh Umbral Era, which would have been Year 1577 of the Sixth Astral Era. Per the wiki, Bozja is noted to have been invaded some fifty years ago, suggesting a war that begins in 1527 or so, but its conquest is described as happening "over thirty" years ago and multiple places note the campaign as grueling, so I think part of the idea (which gels with the trenches we see in the southern front) is supposed to be that the Bozjan campaign was a brutal and grinding one for the IVth Legion, or that after seizing Bozja proper it still took a long time to stamp out all resistance. Dalmasca was invaded 30 years ago in 1547, also by the IVth Legion, presumably fairly soon after stabilizing their grip on Bozja. I don't think there's any time given for when Regula goes to the VIth and reforms it, but since they only clear their tainted reputation in the succession war following Solus's death, I figure he can't have been there that long and he makes a convenient reason to move Wolund around, so five years approximately concurrent with the 1.0 to 2.0 timeskip seems like a decent timeline for his reform.)

[dottie-n-stripes]

decavitator

[ukdamo]

The Old Ships

James Elroy Flecker

I have seen old ships like swans asleep Beyond the village which men call Tyre, With leaden age o'ercargoed, dipping deep For Famagusta and the hidden sun That rings black Cyprus with a lake of fire; And all those ships were certainly so old Who knows how oft with squat and noisy gun, Questing brown slaves or Syrian oranges, The pirate Genoese Hell-raked them till they rolled Blood, water, fruit and corpses up the hold. But now through friendly seas they softly run, Painted the mid-sea blue or shore-sea green, Still patterned with the vine and grapes in gold.

But I have seen, Pointing her shapely shadows from the dawn And image tumbed on a rose-swept bay, A drowsy ship of some yet older day; And, wonder's breath indrawn, Thought I - who knows - who knows - but in that same (Fished up beyond Ææa, patched up new - Stern painted brighter blue -) That talkative, bald-headed seaman came (Twelve patient comrades sweating at the oar) From Troy's doom-crimson shore, And with great lies about his wooden horse Set the crew laughing, and forgot his course.

It was so old a ship - who knows, who knows? - And yet so beautiful, I watched in vain To see the mast burst open with a rose, And the whole deck put on its leaves again.

[petaltexturedskies]

I send my soul through time and space to greet you. You will understand.

James Elroy Flecker, To A Poet A Thousand Years Hence

[nixieofthenorth]

"I send my soul through time and space to greet you. You will understand." - James Elroy Flecker, from “To A Poet A Thousand Years Hence,” written c. October 1910

[debsandshit]

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[105nt]

I buy books second hand when I can, and sometimes they're scruffy paperbacks with the remains of someone's lunch on them, and sometimes they're not.