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desognthinking · 9 months ago

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WIP... Wednesday

Tagged by @willowedhepatica (thanks!) I'm so sorry that this comes so late 😭 life got in the way. Not sure who i can tag who has things in the works they can share, but please Please know if anyone has any snippets or sneak peaks I would love to see them and yell about them with you pleaseee

Not strictly a WIP but here’s just under 3.5k of an oldish experimental AU inspired by this post :’) in this one they’re… *checks notes*, ah, hmm. Chimerical tomb guardians carved from stone.

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It’s a wickedly stormy day when a procession scores up the hill through beating rain and blowing dust, but there’s no time to waste. The wedding will not wait, and on its occasion, as a symbol of the new ties between the families of the bride and the groom, there is a terrible, beautiful new guardian grotesque to be received by the Silva tombhouse from the Salviuses.

It is surely mounted on the property sometime during the silver-black onslaught of sky upon earth, but Beatrice cannot clearly see it through the rain and the maze of trees that still separates the Silvas from their neighbors. The families on this hill are not quite rich enough to expand at the pace of the wealthiest among them, who slice and raze to add to their already broad campuses of tombs. Instead, in this part of town, modest, often unmatching clusters dwell amongst the wildflowers and long-lived trees sprayed across the land.

Beatrice likes the nature. Her perch is kept cool by the damp and dewy mornings, birdsong flickering from above and around. In the filtered haze of heat and light there is some measure of peace too – here, there is less to fight over, and fewer lines of tension between the families. Hidden by farther slopes, there are fewer threats from beyond. And, overshadowed by the lower circuit of large gated tombhouses, there are far milder spoils for aspiring robbers.

It’s from one of these large inner-city tombhouses that the new stone protector is said to arrive. The Salviuses have money spilling out their hands and down their wrists. It’s said, it’s said, it’s said – it’s whispered in the wind that carries the falling leaves from vine to vane, so easy for Beatrice to stretch up and put an ear to. The pollen clouds dispersed over grass in shapes spelling disruption and newcomer. It’s gossiped over pages in the library, first with smug nods and just you wait and see, dear, we’re never wrong from the grandfathers and grandmothers as Beatrice pores through the volumes in the upper shelves, precious books pressed so high and so far back that they’re backed into both wall and ceiling.

Then, inevitably, it carries through the air in the giggles and hushed gasps of the living members of this family, hands curling over yarn and needle as the youngest children breathlessly run and hide behind the walls and in the shadowy pockets of the tombhouse. The Great-great-great Grandmother who had been the first to break the news is mollified by the confirmation, and generously refuses to gloat.

A Silva girl is marrying a Salvius boy, and the Salviuses are pledging a guardian – the spirits know they have too many anyway, but still, a Salvius guardian – to this hill.

“You’ve got to go over and see what’s going on,” Beatrice is instructed one morning, in no uncertain terms. They’re going over integration by partial fractions on the little platform at the back that looks down over the mills: her, Great-Grandfather, and Lilith, who’s slunk over yet again from the Villaumbrosias’ for some ‘peace and quiet’, and also because Beatrice’s family likes her for some mysterious reason. They pretend it’s because they need the extra pair – or, well, pairs, in Lilith’s case – of eyes. The massive, foreboding, Villaumbrosia affair the next hill over already boasts so many fearsome hands on deck, and they only have one Beatrice.

Great-grandfather is gentle and teasing about it; Beatrice (and Lilith, although she will never admit it) is his favorite captive audience.

Of course, it’s easy to treat her as one of their own on mornings like this — quiet summer days when she’s stripped of silica and scale, descended from her weatherworn perch. Devoid of the coarse matter of rock and metal twisted into hungry, flame-spitting fangs, and instead merely a soft-spoken spirit in a youthful skin. When the great grandfathers and mothers and their grandfathers and grandmothers look at her and see dark, almost-human eyes and loosely-bound hair in a bun above her shoulders.

And when Beatrice walks Lilith out and across the rocky way that leads home, it’s easy for them to wave the two of them off. After all, Lilith is just a young woman with black waves she tucks carefully behind her ears and a handsome, slanting jaw that could almost pass as being real; as being pressed and molded with muscle and mandible and a fragile, mycelial network of vasculature and nerves. Not another delicate illusion that would slip and shatter at the first sign of danger, revealing in a flash the grotesque ugliness within.

There hasn’t been an attack in a while. When there hasn’t been an attack in a while Beatrice thinks the family tends to forget where exactly they hold court.

(Here, cradled close enough within these hills to walk back to where home once was. Children’s handprints on the threshold, coal scribbles on the floor. Walls still perfused with the fragrance and vapor of hot homemade stew.)

This is a graveyard. This is a necropolis, a city of the dead. It slithers amongst the roots of the living but does not make a home of it. In its palm lies the fragile in-between, the sickly sweet intersection where the living and the after-dead mingle like the meeting of two clouds. Within its grounds the family is wont to forget the ruthlessness that’s sometimes needed to keep it in balance.

Once they depart, Beatrice and Lilith’s guises fall away. Invisible to a still-beating heart, two terrible chimeras gouge skid-marks through the dirt to get to the Villaumbrosia citadel before its guests arrive at ten-thirty. Miraculously, only twice during the entire trip does Lilith half-heartedly threaten to snap Beatrice’s tail off.

They make it there just in time. Beatrice watches as Lilith sweeps her way up the manicured moss columns and melds, in a quick thrash, with the magnificent dark-gray creature of stone that lunges out from the south turret. Frozen like this: mouth curled in a snarl and sharp wings flung out – in mockery, in bombast, in warning; Lilith at her most vindictive and most frightening, the elaborate Villaumbrosia insignia branded hot and painful down her side.

Beatrice knows it hurts, of course. Perhaps less so like this but certainly in the flesh, where it is always red and raw like the day it was carved down Lilith’s ribs in the workshop. Preserved unchanging in the meat as it is preserved forever in the rock. Lilith winces, when she thinks the others aren’t looking, but Beatrice knows. Camila might say something – probably does say something, but Beatrice doesn’t. She understands too well, and after all, what can they do?

After all, this is their work. This is life: whatever is asked of them. For Lilith today, it is to be a showpiece for guests at a bloated, overwrought tea ceremony. Broadly, it is watchman, and protector, and advocate. And at times like these, when there is a stir in the tangled ecosystem of bloodlines and their guardian-creatures, Beatrice is called upon to be an ambassador.

So, the day after the storm, Beatrice leaves her perch to seek out the Silvas. She glides down from the still-slippery stone, and lands softly on the wet earth, scale meeting fur meeting soil and humid air.

In her hands – her metaphorical hands – she clasps fistfuls of string that stretch, infinitely thin, to every corner of her tombhouse. She flexes each one and puts it between her teeth as she steps over the threshold and into the trees, testing their elasticity and tensile strength. If there is to be a twang, however minute, she must feel it. There is only one of her at home.

As she approaches the Silva tombhouse the air around her shifts and seems to solidify into a medium both probing and warning. Beatrice stills, allowing the woods to see her and course through her calmness. They know her, of course, and she waits for them to pass on the message to the newest guardian, still incredibly sensitive to the prickle of unfamiliar movement and sound.

Presently, physically, the world exhales.

Beatrice cautiously continues forward, until the treeline peels away to reveal the Silva tombhouse.

Tombhouse, as it goes, is a misnomer – a tombhouse is a complex rather than a single shell. It is no single cell for a coffin, but a collection of connected mausoleums and courtyards and passageways and corners and gates, lifted high and tunneled low. And as befitting a clan of esteemed craftsmen, the Silva tombhouse is a harmonious set spiraling outwards in organic whorls. Its walls are scraped clean and brushed beige, curled and leafed and folded in at the edges. Delicate and pretty in its strength in a way Beatrice’s own plain, stoic little set of residences could never be.

At the top of the central mausoleum, bounded by a parapet, rests a flat platform. On that ledge sits the new grotesque.

Ink-black stone peeks curiously down at Beatrice.

Immediately it is clear that she is like nothing Beatrice has ever seen before. Yes, as is tradition she is joined and jawed together piecemeal from various symbolic beasts, but this composition and style is unique.

She’s simultaneously entirely unlike both the typical statues produced by-the-dozen in the workshops, and the specially commissioned sculptures like Beatrice herself. This guardian is a patchwork of shapes and textures Beatrice has only ever seen in the watercolor sketches of her tombhouse’s own library as belonging to exotic creatures from faraway places. Still other elements escape her recognition and description, and everything meshes deftly at smooth, near-invisible seams.

Perhaps this isn’t surprising in a Salvius guardian – Jillian’s own commission too, it’s rumored. No less should be expected from someone the alchemists and scientists alike shy away from. Jillian Salvius considers herself a traveler, and a collector, and a dabbler, and Beatrice hears that the spokes of her gates are gnarled and carved in strange patterns from foreign lands.

The guardian shifts and cocks her head curiously, and Beatrice pulls herself together sharply.

“Hi,” the creature says. “You must be the neighbor from the east.”

Beatrice snaps back into polite, exceedingly proper posture. She nods, dipping forward in a movement resembling a bow. It makes the high-perched creature giggle, gauzy like air.

“Good morning,” she replies. “My name is Beatrice, and you’re right. How did you know?”

The guardian doesn’t answer. She separates from her stone in a miasma of color, swoops down noisily, and lands, a little clumsily, on a lower ledge. “Two heads, huh?” she says, thoughtfully. “Kinda perfect for the scholars.”

It’s not said judgmentally; more so with a further curious slant of her head, observational and light. Beatrice feels strange and semisolid all over.

She doesn’t correct the new guardian; tell her that no, she hadn’t actually been crafted or blessed for this bloodline, only gifted to them just one generation ago. And gifted rather carelessly, at that; an obligatory token presented upon the death of the benefactor’s tutor.

Before that her two heads were designed not as a tribute to wisdom or a paean to collaboration, but in order to stare proudly over an excessive estate, stretching out in opposite directions over land too vast for merely one head to behold. An arrogant symbol of not just physical, but political reach. She was a status symbol for powerful people – two-faced might be a better descriptor.

Beatrice has always considered this with some bitterness, but today, she oddly feels no urge to self-flagellate. She feels, suspiciously, nothing at all; a fuzzy blank.

Instead, in response to the guardian, Beatrice blinks. Both of her heads do. They crane and incline together, like long-necked birds bending to convene. She feels sharp ears on each one twitch and flutter.

The creature laughs again. She descends further to the porch, then approaches Beatrice slowly. “I’m Ava,” she introduces herself, finally. Shyly. “It’s nice to meet you.”

“Ava,” Beatrice repeats, careful and hushed. She parses it over and traces it as though threading a needle – how the strange, simple symmetry of the word, the hypnotic up-down-up of A-V-A, doesn't begin to encompass the entity approaching her. On cue, Ava does a funny, shuddery motion that cascades down her whole form.

Beatrice, leaning her heads over old tomes like water jugs tipped over a parched tongue, dreams of fantastical things, from places that often sound even more surreal. And yet before her now stands the most peculiar thing alive yet, that defies everything she’s known and seen.

Yes, clearer now before her eyes, Ava is a patchwork of impossible parts.

Up close Beatrice can see she’s also a riverbed of illusory things. Small divots seem to scoop themselves out, sink deep, and then ripple back up into the surface of her body. Bubbling, and collapsing, and reforming, like springs of molten mother-of-pearl. Each little cavity shimmers like roughened gemstones: a gasping, dark blue, like well water under the sun; or a moody green like the light-starved undershade in a storm; or a thawing amber that Beatrice cannot even describe except that it looks like the smell of hot bread with a sweet cream core, tempting and steaming.

“Beatrice,” Ava echoes, her eyes gleaming and dark. They bubble expressively and endlessly deep. Gazing at Beatrice, straight, still and pondering. Searching.

Silence stretches until it doesn’t.

Something snaps – a bird on a twig above – and Ava shakes herself awake. “Where’s my manners!” she exclaims suddenly. “Come on,” she swishes around gamely. Beatrice, bewildered, sneezes.

She’s learning quickly that when Ava laughs, the dense tassel-like feathers on the back rise in delighted reflex and splay apart.

The two of them slip between trees into a little glade, buoyed by her relentless charm and a thrumming current of something else, in the undertow.

Once upon a time, this was a courtyard, although now that the Silva tombhouse has unfurled in the opposite direction it’s been allowed to tastefully overgrow into its former self, mossy and scruffy. Old pieces of wall and pillars still cordon off one side; Beatrice resists the temptation to bound about and explore, and instead parks herself primly at a corner, not fidgeting.

Ava has no such compunctions. She wriggles herself into a comfortable position on a large boulder. Her weapon of a tail dangles down and bats at the ground idly, uprooting chunks of grass.

“How are you finding it here?” Beatrice asks, trying very hard to be normal.

“Honestly? I don’t know yet,” Ava grins, “and you’re the first one of us I’ve met here.”

She pauses, cocks her head to one side so strikingly. The gesture almost looks human. “You know, my new folks think very highly of you,” She looks appraisingly over Beatrice with an indecipherable expression.

Beatrice feels quite hot. “Mine are curious about you.”

There is a shift in the air as Ava straightens abruptly. Her tail stills. “What will you tell them?”

Beatrice bites her tongues, undecided. She’d meant to think of it later, to phrase and rephrase and turn the words over and over in her mouth on the way back to get them right. It takes a while, usually, to distill her thoughts precisely into words that balance both insinuation and tone, and half the time it ends up all too stilted and formal anyway. How people seem to be able to do that, off the cuff – it’s confusing. Far easier, Beatrice thinks, to sit quietly beside and let such people do the talking.

Especially now that this seems, somehow, to be important to Ava. And especially now that she finds she doesn’t quite have any of the words.

If Beatrice had hands she would wring them. She thinks, distantly, of what someone else wiser than her might say. “They’ll agree with me that you’re certainly unique,” she starts, and it’s like Shannon’s talking through her, stately and gentle. Bold, like Mary.

She adds, in an abrupt impulse that’s, alarmingly, all Beatrice, “I do think you’ll fit in well here.”

“Oh,” Ava seems surprised. Her tail, heretofore curled tightly on the boulder, relaxes and turns a loose arc in the air, hacking at the grass. “Thanks,” she looks at Beatrice, and inhales sharply, although not unkindly.

Pauses. Sheepishly, she adds, “I’ve heard some people, uh, calling me devilish and other things, you see. But you know, it’s fine. Whatever.”

Beatrice grimaces involuntarily, then schools her expression back into an empathetic nod. It’s not unexpected. There’s bound to be a procession of curious gawkers and onlookers filing through to try and catch a glimpse of something hailing from the elusive Salviuses. Beartice knows the type: traditional, gossipy and busybodies.

They’ll take one look up the roof and gasp in disbelief or disgust, probably. Sneer up at the twisted, unnatural proportions, if they’re brave. Ava runs too close to the precipice of their diluted tolerance.

“The Silvas are good people. They’ll stand by you.” Beatrice isn’t sure if it helps, but it’s true. The households here are the little silver lining of this part of town, otherwise ragged and out of the way and a little discordant in its hues.

Ava exhales gently. Beatrice thinks there’s a small smile there. “I know.”

“It doesn’t make it easier.”

“Yeah. I know,” repeats Ava, her eyes shining, and it’s almost like she really does.

Beatrice understands. They did it to her, too, after all.

The people who commissioned her had made a puppet of her. They had demanded a departure from classical references and therefore affixed to her frame things like startling, swiveling joints and odd angles. Two heads, of course, among other modifications – all in an arrogant, ambitious drive to defy tradition and create a visionary symbol of fear and envy. Instead, the lay beholder glanced upon the warped anatomy and thought it blasphemy. And so, Beatrice rapidly became that to her own family too: acrid to the eyes, rotted in the soul, a disembowelment. Failure. An embarrassment.

The whispers billowed large like cotton sheets drying in the fields, caught and blown out in the wind.

It was a matter of time. Beatrice imagines the tiny family offspring being taught their true oral history in a sugary sick little chant, clapping their chubby hands cheerfully and squealing every grim word,

Then the old teacher died / and it was a great relief / The family rushed to ready / a token of public grief

Her, of course. Her, and not any of the cruder, more sedate, stone guardians that studded the estate. The small ones who, on a good day, sat patiently and circulated air and respired noisily, and who were not capable of thought or pain. The family had a lot of them lining their walls, not much more than large decorative lumps of dough programmed to trap, waylay, or bite at intruders.

Instead, they parted ways with the looming, ghastly and elaborate figure that guarded one of their main wings, and painted it as a great outpouring of sadness. Beatrice knew better.

The whole event was swift; almost planned in advance. She’d barely had time to send an urgent warning to Lilith before she was gone – a failed experiment in pomposity that took an unforeseen and regrettable turn into the profane.

In a matter of days she was transplanted from lush green gardens into dry hills bathed in reedy, half-obscured sunsets. The kind of neighborhood her old family would call avant-garde or ‘forward-thinking’, although with a scoff that betrayed what they really thought.

And at night, looking down to sleeping homes, Beatrice would hear in the nothingness the same whispers splashing down the stone like rain, all over again.

Mindlessly, now, she has the sudden urge to reach out and feel. Fluttering cells or hardened stone, it doesn’t matter. She wants to transmute a hand of tender human pulp and skin, and run fragile fingers softly over the strangest braided foldery and flattening of membrane, bumps and spindles until they catch, pierce and bleed.

And she so badly wants to tell Ava: I think you’re nightmarish and very beautiful. You would hold an army off this humble hill. like holding out a pathetic little bundle of flowers– but she doesn’t. It’s too long and too much; I’m here. is too short, and both are too naked. She’s not that kind of creature. She’s carved from solid rock and even when she sheds it it still feels like its weight chains her to the earth.

Her voices remain even and steady, somehow.

“I –This isn’t the customary welcome and introductory visit,” Beatrice confesses, in lieu of it all.

“Oh. It’s not?”

Beatrice shakes her heads. “There’ll need to be a more official one.”

The overlapping layers of spines along Ava’s limbs rise and then flatten, quickly. “So I’ll get to see you again soon?”

Feeling warm, or moist, or something like a pillar of pressurized foam, Beatrice clears her throats. “I suppose so. Yes.”

#“Ard wtf is this AU” 😭 listen. it was a strange and fun little thing/experiment to play around with #YEAH imagine a large town/small city that spills out over the hills in a labyrinthine necropolis of familial mausoleums / tomb complexes #pragmatic bulwarks of defence and important centers of social/intellectual/cultural life and death and the rich after-death #beatrice is the super serious guardian of a respectable but modest bloodline of teachers and scholars #when she's not staring moodily out into the distance she spends like all her free time in the library/underground heirloom chamber #and getting tutorials from fond but vaguely concerned ancestors #They love her unconditionally btw she’s just sometimes in her head too much to see it #the Silvas are renowned artisans! Jillian is jillian lol #If some of the words sound like they don’t exist it’s because they straight up don’t. I’ve no idea what old me was thinking.#hashtag avatrice hashtag meetcute hashtag wrarior nun hashtag mutually obsessed at first sight etc.

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ridreamir · 1 year ago

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Yiga, Assemble! Oh wait this is a semi-serious story ([-})=* (Yiga/Forgotten Noble Reader)

Continuation of:

I'd like to think that Kohga has no recollection of who you are, but decided to help anyway because he couldn't pass you by. They're all literal murderers and criminals, mind you, but even with thousands of years of outdated moral codes to abide by, he's not always the best at doing the whole 'what would Ganon do' thing. Ironic, since he's the head honcho of their little family of murder-y evil worshipping freaks.

The tragic part of that is that you do remember. That doesn't explain how he's lived for over 100 years or if he was even alive back then now that the timeline has changed, but you suppose his longevity could potentially be attributed to some long-held secret of his family, provided their origin as ex-sheikah.

Yes, he is literally a century-old man-child. No, seems to have not matured one bit.

...and all the sudden you're sitting on the prototype of a car as he tinkers on the wheels, or exchanging small talk that's gone from distant and cold to something possibly... pleasant. It's a startling realization to find that you've come to actually 'tolerate' your captivity. You know very little about him, about them all really, but you've caught small glimpses of who they might be, and that shatters your already broken perception of reality even more.

This man, who lights up at even the smallest of breakthroughs. This man who draws in the sand his ideas for schematics and muses about what the future might look like, as if he actually believes that future might happen. This man who delves deep into the abyss without a hint of fear for the benefit of the people he cares about. At some uncertain point, to your deeply unsettling discomfort, that started to include you, too.

And....You were... Hopeless. For so many years. Wandering, aimless, uncertain of your purpose or why you were even there.

You were always forgotten, even before. You'd been forsaken by more than just the royal family, by more than the citizens of that accursed Kingdom of Hyrule, by more than the one person you thought you could consider a friend, a true friend.

Your life as it was before had meant nothing, and it ended without even a pitiful struggle at the hands of the very people who now kept you as one of their own...

Your last life spent as the discarded member of the royal family was ended at the behest of the Yiga. That likely meant that he himself had been the one to deliver the order to strike you down.

Stumbling upon the cobble roads of Castle Town, a paper bag filled with apples and trinkets... Your voice calling after him as you ran to catch up to him, waiting for him to spin around--

You both must've realized by now that you could have attempted to escape at any point, and yet you for some reason hadn't. Would he let you go? Would they spare your life this time? Were you ever really free to come and go in your own kingdom?

They were tragically misguided people.

...who came from broken families after your lineage had failed to protect them for eons.

..and in the end,

Not your death, nor the countless others, none of them meant anything. Not anything in the face of it all. At some point, realizing the fatal hubris of that wretched royal family, you came upon another startling realization.

Could you could have done something, had you not been so useless.

Had you found a place amongst the royal family, had you possessed grand powers like that of the crown princess Zelda, could the fathers and the grandfathers of these boys not been sent to die? Could that Calamity that you were no longer alive to witness have been halted had the country had one more leg to stand on? Could you have stepped up had you not been so weak by nature?

Could you have meant anything, after a life of living as if you weren't even there? Well, it seemed it really was true after all. Because now there was no one in this world who even knew you were there.

Dark eyes, that glinted faintly red if caught just right in the light of the setting sun. A curious look sent toward you from above the stone wall upon which he sat. A hand reaching out, waiting to pull you up.

"Jeez! That was one scary look you had just now. If looks could kill, I'd tell ya!" You snapped out of your thoughts, just to find a rag in your hand.... huh?

Oh, you were polishing dug-up Zonai relics. That made some sense. What didn't make sense was--

"Alright, you've been making weird faces for long enough." A hand reached out from over your shoulder and snatched the cloth from your hand. "Did you maybe wanna talk about it- Whoa, hey!!-" You jolted away and nearly knocked over the shelf of gadgets had it not been for his hands grabbing you and the symbol of his magic stabilizing it before it fell onto the both of you.

"Hey! Hey!!!-- What was that about?! You could've been smushed!! Splat!!!" He spun you around and shook you frantically, but you looked up at his stupid-masked face without fully processing the situation. "I didn't bring you in here to knock over all my stuff!!!"

He then stopped his panicked assault, but not without gripping your shoulders tighter and leaning closer, putting his face right in yours. That eye symbol stared at you, and in your state of mind you weren't sure what expression dashed upon your face as you focused on it.

But he did catch whatever expression you held and fell silent, casting his head down as he gently pulled his grip away.

"Well, whatever." He muttered, sounding more bitter than anything. "That's enough for today. Go do something somewhere else."

Wordlessly he pointed to the door, and as you came to your senses you looked down at your hands and then back at him. You didn't catch it, but as you turned to leave his raised hand faltered a little, before falling to his side.

Left alone, he couldn't hear your footsteps as you continued down the hall, and suddenly the room was heavy with silence.

Then, he clutched his fist and turned back to the workbench he'd been sitting at before. He shouldn't have kicked you out like he did. He should have just sat you down and had you rest for a moment. And as he felt his hands, he held them out before flipping them over and staring at his open palms. "Haah." He sighed, ungracefully plopping back down.

"...." "....rrg!" Aaah!!" He stomped his feet and threw his fists up in the air. He then threw his head down and crossed his arms, groaning against his work desk.

He didn't even do anything, but when you looked at him like that...

"Rrrrrg!!! I didn't even do anything!!!" He continued to bang his fists and stomp his feet before slumping down flat against the blueprints he'd been working on. "...I didn't even do anything, so why..." Why do I feel so guilty when I look at you?

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