#god-eye galatea

[buriedknight]

God-Eye Galatea

slight revision of an old work of mine

[storekn1fe]

god-eye galatea [id in alt]

[wisteriamemory]

They're live on my shop now! One of my favourite series of all times. I'm still not over them, I love Claymore so much. Strong powerful women will always have my heart. Shop here: wisteriamemory.square.site

upcoming claymore charms

[stil-lindigo]

galamiria but as that one hunter schafer/emma d'arcy vampire tweet

[niromeva]

Miria Monroe

[claremikas]

Claymore + tumblr text posts pt 3

pt 1, pt 2

[rifulofthewest]

Galatea vs Albert drinking contest would slay

(She would have won; + we would have seen how much Albert could actually drink)

[haxo-wolfie]

some more silly doodles! needa reread the manga so i can draw more references

[thaisibir]

Claymore backstory headcanons

(Yagi has set up a compelling world and cast of characters in Claymore, but so many of them have unknown histories, so that leaves a lot of room for interpretation. I thought I try fleshing out some of my favorite characters with my own takes.)

Miria: She was the daughter of the most talented tracker and scout in their village. Her father would coordinate search parties and patrols, working well within groups. She learned about leadership from him and greatly admired him. In her warrior days, she strives to follow her father's example. One day her father returned as the only survivor of his search party from a yoma attack. A smart girl who knows him well, Miria caught on to his suspicious behavior and realized he must be a yoma in disguise himself. She'd refuse his orders to come home or stay home. As a child she enjoyed racing other children for fun, often coming out as the winner. From those races she knew the village like the back of her hand. She'd run around ducking into nooks and crannies beyond the yoma's sight and reach, sending him on a wild goose chase until the village had time to call in a warrior to kill him. The warrior's handler was so impressed by Miria's spirit and intelligence that he recruited her on the spot.

Galatea: Though born with a humble background of no distinguished class, she was famed for being the most beautiful girl in her village. She married a man and had a son in her late teens. Their happy life as a family was cut short when a yoma killed and took over her husband's body, and Galatea had to witness him devouring their son. Rafaela was the warrior who intervened and saved Galatea's life. Ermita, the man who found Galatea in exile from her village and would become her handler, is the only one in the organization who knows of her past life. She never speaks of her deceased spouse and son to anyone, preferring to keep memories of them locked deep in the back of her mind. Galatea joined the organization as the oldest among the trainees, though her maturity served her well as she quickly rose through the ranks to number 3. Despite herself, her strong maternal instinct and soft spot for children never went away. She sees Clare as a wild child who often needs a firm hold on the leash, and dotes on the orphans in Rabona.

Sophia: Born into a noble family as the only child of a powerful and wealthy lord. She was a sickly girl whom her father doted on. When she wasn't bedridden and sick, she enjoyed singing. She survived many bouts of life-threatening fever and a yoma attack that killed her father and decimated her estate. Fearing she was a yoma too, the surviving servants sold her to the organization and fetched a hefty sum for her noble status. Since warriors don't succumb to illness as humans do, and stinging from the servants' betrayal and the loss of her father and home, Sophia's inner strength manifested as extremely powerful physical strength that led to her high rank and moniker within Teresa's generation. Noble roots are behind her elegant demeanor and polite speech. Unlike her peers, she's great at exchanging pleasantries to put regular folks at ease while on the job. She can sweet talk her way to staying in nice inns at a discount, mostly because she loves a nice clean bed and hates sleeping outside in the dirt and cold like a vagrant. The one thing she enjoys while being on the road is singing and humming to herself. Underneath her lady-like aloofness is a persistent melancholy and the ultimate wish for a quick death in battle that would end her warrior life, so she can be reunited with her father. In the end, she got just that.

Noel: Born into a family of traveling performers, Noel can't sing to save her life, but her acrobatic talent and prowess was put to good use as she'd astound the audience with daring somersaults and jumps. She was the only girl amid four brothers, so verbal spars and rowdiness among them was commonplace. Her family was attacked by yoma on a path through the woods, on the way to their next performance at a nearby village. Noel ran as fast as she could to that village, leaving her the only survivor. As a warrior, she loves to put on a good show while slaying yoma, giving it a performer's spin. Sophia poking fun at her acrobatics is always a sore spot. Noel is secretly jealous of Sophia's talent for singing, though she smugly enjoys her rival's discomfort with the nomadic life she had known since birth. So used to having brothers and her family allowing free reign of her tomboyishness, Noel feels out of place surrounded by girls and women as a warrior. The power system of attaining ranks and numbers stirs her competitive streak. It's the only thing that gives her some sliver of purpose in what she believes is an otherwise bleak and pathetic existence. Deep down she misses her brothers and wants more than anything, even more than being a top warrior, to see them again. She ended up getting what she wanted.

Irene: Born as an orphan with no memory of any family. She scraped by stealing from vendors in the streets for food and clothes. A shrewd observer and gifted with tactical intelligence, she'd gauge her targets from afar and work together with other orphans on joint thieving operations. But outside this, she has zero people skills and has no idea how to go about socializing and making small talk. When Teresa's hit squad stormed the inn, Irene let Sophia handle the payment and apologies to the innkeeper. After Priscilla's awakening, Irene was perfectly content and good at living as a hermit with no civilization in sight.

Flora: Born to merchant parents who made a living of selling and arranging flowers. She got initiated into the family business at an early age, and found her talent in swiftly yet elegantly nicking off thorns and other undesirable parts of a flower with a small knife. She was always soft-spoken, though sharing her extensive knowledge of flowers would break the barrier of her shyness. When yoma invaded her village, they destroyed her family's establishment while slaughtering them. The sight of crushed flowers smothered in blood was seared into her mind like a hot brand, fueling her desire to later grow strong as a warrior so she can cut down the ugly stain of yoma in this world. Born and raised in the warmth of the southern region, she despises the cold because hardly anything colorful and beautiful grows there (which she hid very well during the mission in Pieta).

[light-wrath-paradise]

I love characters who are manipulative in one way or another but rarely or never lie.

Especially scrumptious when there IS a clear reason for them choosing this tactic.

In other words shout out to Solas Dragon Age and Henry Miller DSAF specifically. Trying to think of more hoes like that but the thing is that I mostly remember the ones I've analysed.

Or like I can think of two more characters but for them I believe it's just circumstantial? Like one of them seems to simply...not consider lying and he doesn't need to because 90 % of the time he frames what he's saying as a hypothetical. And now that I think about it he does lie sometimes. I think he just genuinely doesn't consider it as his go-to tactic, I don't think he avoids it on purpose. And the other guy lies like...twice and also doesn't seem directly opposed to it, it's just that most of the time it was enough for him not to tell the whole truth. And that's easier than making up a lie. I don't think he has a special reason either.

But yeah anyway shout out to characters who avoid lying on purpose. Show me more of these hoes immediately.

[mandalhoerian]

the shape of grief.

as far as rafayel is concerned, pygmalion's is a horror story, not a myth. guy decides all women are beneath him, quite literally designs and builds one for himself, and somehow his narcissistic prayers for her to live are granted. what humans define as love and the stories they tell about it are always so revealing of their selfish nature. he only ever gets the appeal of it when he looks at his faceless galatea unable to take shape in his clay-sodden hands, and thinks, what wouldn't i give for you to open your eyes so that i could remember their exact color.

♯ ⸻ pure angst, sfw, 3.7k, read on ao3

note: directly inspired by this post about rafayel trying to sculpt mc/reader but not remembering her face. a bit late to this but i was hit with the procrastination fairies LMAO . i wrote this in a feverish delirium without caring for any canon at all, i apologize if rafayel is ooc !! this work assumes he has his memories of his life as the god of tides, you can think it as an AU if you believe he has no memories of it in the main timeline (yet.) This also takes place before the Addictive Pain anectode (if you like nitpicking and think why he doesn't have a photo of her and that this could have been avoided HAHA)

but without further ado, i hope you enjoy, please let me know what you thought!

The gallery Thomas had to basically bribe him to attend was cold with intention. Whitewashed walls were almost blinding beneath the overhead lights, each fixture angled to make the sculptures glow faintly at the edges like relics, a violin track playing at a volume calibrated for reverent hush with the crowd adjusting its voice accordingly. Somehow, the worst of it was that they'd scented the room with something floral and expensive, and it was clinging so offensively to the back of Rafayel’s throat and wouldn't go away no matter how much he swallowed or sipped on the drink glued to his hand.  

The exhibit was titled Breathed to Life: The Divine Muse in Modern Form. He’d read the placard twice, though once would’ve been enough. Wherever he looked, Rafayel couldn't escape from the oozed hauteur for the attempts at capturing a miracle, sculptures of taxidermied epiphanies resting under glass that was tempered with more care in Rafayel's opinion, preserved with just enough light to make the delusion shine. Words like transcendence, revelation, and worship had been worked into the catalog copy, and even the bubbles of champagne he was swirling in the flute glass was more interesting as he idly moved through the space.

He passed a piece labeled Galatea No. IV — a full-bodied woman in bronze, lips parted in awakening, arms half-lifted as if to greet the man who had imagined her, the texture of her skin smoothed to impossible precision, idealized down to the the pores with not a single wrinkle or mole.

One of the critics standing nearby called it sublime. Another said, "She looks so real I almost expect her to blink."

Rafayel said nothing. He kept walking.

A curator caught him between rooms. She was in something backless, dark green, dripping with confidence. “You must feel at home here,” she said, beaming. “Mr. Rafayel, you're the Pygmalion of our time."

He looked past her to one of his own works, mounted near the final archway. A man slouched on a low stone, arms folded, spine curved with a kind of refusal, turned away from something but looking up at it at the same time in criticism, his face gaunt with a pinch of displeasure, half-shielded by a fall of hair. No awe or supplication.

His was the only Pygmalion in the entire exhibit, and no one seemed to realize it. Rafayel had heard some talk about how progressive it was to genderbend Galatea for gay representation, or that this could be the moment Galatea came to life and rejected her maker in a plot twist. 

Rafayel had left it up to interpretation if his Pygmalion was looking at Galatea at all. He was staring past her — past all of them, really. Every woman he ever imagined beneath him, too dull or too much or too sharp to matter. A man convinced that the thing he made was a compromise, that he’d been forced to shape it because nothing real had measured up. Neither a lover, nor a muse. A reflection bent to fit him. And maybe resenting how much of himself had ended up in the marble anyway. Nothing of the yearning saint the myth preferred. 

The gallery had tried to soften this image of human ugliness within the divine benevolence of Galateas all around, projecting wind through bare branches beside the figure, trying to frame the posture as meditative. They titled the piece Invocation. Rafayel wasn't even asked before they changed the name and he was definitely having a talk about it with Thomas after.

He offered the curator a a dismissive hand. “A flattering comparison. Though I hear his success rate depended entirely on divine intervention.”

She laughed, unsure whether it was flirtation or rebuke. “Still, what an honor. So many of us see ourselves in the myth, don’t we? The ones who love so deeply we bring our muses to life.”

He excused himself with a nod that meant nothing. Her perfume followed him down the corridor.

The flowing hallway was a blur of marble, alabaster, glass, bronze, the women luminous and soft, the men always absent — except in the titles. The Sculptor’s Prayer. In the Hands of the Maker. Love Before Breath. One artist had suspended a torso in resin, veins threaded with copper, the heart cavity open and waiting with the accompanying quote that read: “She lives because I saw her clearly enough.”

Rafayel stopped in front of it. The figure inside was beautiful and fragile, designed to be admired.

He traced the edge of the plinth with one fingertip and thought: She lives because you needed her to. Not because she wanted to.

He left the gallery floor and stepped into the auxiliary corridor lined with donor plaques and black-and-white photographs. One showed a young couple posed beside a sculpture mid-process. The woman’s face was amicable, and the man looked directly into the camera, his hand on the small of her back. The caption read: The original Galatea — forever immortalized by love.

He looked at it until the focus dissolved, and the polished surface of the frame stopped reflecting anything but his own cold expression.

Pygmalion was granted his wish. That alone was enough to make Rafayel despise him. 

A man shapes greed with his hands, pulls at the skirts of heavens like a petulant child, and the gods — watching from a distance they rarely breach — clap their hands in glee and say yes.

The myth pretended that mercy could be earned by longing, that a body sculpted by a beholder who sees himself so above others is owed because he called it love. There was no weight in that kind of miracle, only cruelty dressed as grace, a prayer granted just to mock the millions that weren't. 

Pygmalion was the epitome of human selfishness, the final limit where want transformed into greed for more than the world could grant. Only his statue, made by his own greedy hands and given life through someone else's breath, was beautiful, because only she embodied perfection to him, not because she was worth desiring but because he desired her. Pygmalion's love didn't reach past his self, it served only to feed himself and satiate him with the sight of his narcissism, like any other creation brought to life by humans for their own benefit; machines built to kill, guns painted gold so they look like art when killing — all just tools made to feed men's hunger for more.

But he would have never cared about Pygmalion if it wasn't for the gods.

Because Rafayel envied those gods, all too human in their vanity, for the power and might they wielded to give so easily like that. Their ability to move mountains without ever being touched by grief, to pull strings that bind worlds without fearing losing something of theirs; it was unfathomable to someone so bound in mortal tethers such as he.

It must feel so freeing, living like that, he thought. Must feel so good, pulling at other lives like they are your playthings. So easy to get lost in those dreams.

The same way he did back then.

The disdain covering Rafayel in a second skin as if he was an oil-soaked seagull was fuel enough to get back to work after that travesty of a gallery.

He’d been developing a concept for a painting — a large-scale composition of a coral-devoured, bleeding cathedral submerged in the sea, its steeples fractured and stretching toward the surface in a gesture that evoked both surrender and yearning, an image meant to convey the contradictions of loss and reverence, a symbolic convergence of decay and devotion. At least that’s what the so-called critics were about to yammer on about. It in fact was the fate of a certain buyer Rafayel was targeting, and the message was meant for his people and his people only.

The draft lived on the sketchbook propped against his raised knees, his legs crossed on the high stool, charcoal gripped tightly in one hand and smudging downwards the length of a pillar as he added textures and shadows to create depth. It was a hasty thing, but effective at illustrating what he envisioned, complete with notes scribbled around the edges, jotted reminders for little details here and there he needed to add to truly flesh out the piece later on. Rafayel was so distracted by a couple more things to add to the sketch that the canvas already prepared beneath the dome skylight felt neglected despite the brushes sitting ready and dipped in paint atop a palette of bruised violet scraped from stormclouds, diluted ultramarine, blue fog, a soft grime green of oxidized copper, rotten ivory, a sliver of warm rust, a cold pink scraped from the underbelly of spent roses, and more.

And yet, when he finally got up to start for good, his gaze drifted elsewhere.

Toward the bust armature.

Rafayel stood beside it, hands in the pockets of his black suit pants, head tilted sideways with one hand playing with it in thought. He loosened the buttons of the white dress shirt he wore after flinging off that horrid tie, sleeves pushed to mid forearms as he dragged a stool and took a seat before the armature, right elbow propped atop the round table to the side holding supplies, chin resting on knuckles, now gazing up at the base of the clay cast while chewing the inside of his cheek.

He had always told himself he would return to it when he was ready, when time had softened the raw, exposed nerve endings of loss, when he could render your likeness with a steady hand instead of a shaking one.

But then months stretched into a year, days faded into seasons which blended together into a period of numbness broken occasionally by an intrusive thought here and there while he focused on Lemuria and Lemuria only, and then — nothing. Until it was easier not to think about it at all. He became absorbed in his mission, dedicated to getting revenge, and avoided thoughts of you, for all intents and purposes, until moments like these where he simply sat in silence looking up at a form without feature to remind him why exactly he did what he did.

Galatea, huh?

He crossed the room with the same distracted focus he used to summon bruyous, hands rummaging through the storage shelves until he found the sealed bag of clay, not expecting it to be heavier than he remembered, dense with neglect. Dumping it unceremoniously beside the armature, he sliced it open, letting the block fall onto the slab table with a dull, resistant thud, finding it cold to the touch, too stiff to yield immediately, so he pressed it between his palms, wetting them, working the material slowly until the top layer lost its brittleness.

He didn't sit right away, hovering over the lump with furrowed brows, kneading it down into something usable, folding in water from the bowl on the side, rotating it as he moved, pushing and turning until the tension bled out. Once softened, he dunked the mass onto the metal plate mounted over the dented and sluggish, old man of a banding wheel. Only then did he sit, lowering himself onto a battered wooden stool, one bare foot braced against the leg of the wheel’s base while the other nudged gently to angle it.

All done. He reached for the wire loop tool without thinking or looking over, fingers already coated in the dull slip of moisture and clay.

The first lines came quick and confident. Indents for the eyes. The line of a nose. Just scaffolding, clearing a space where you might return to him, the only sound in the room the soft grind of his tools and his breathing. 

He narrowed the chin, adjusted the brow. Then sat back, frowning.

Too young. This was closer to the child at the beach who had hooked pinkies with him. 

He scraped the forehead flat again, thumb dragging clay down like peeling skin. The smoothed face stared up at him in blank reprieve, a temporary erasure before he tried again, less baby fat on the cheeks, sharper cheekbones this time, a more adult curve to the jaw, something more defined around the eyes, though he wasn’t sure what. A firmer mouth, perhaps. A stronger line. He reworked the nose — it ended up being too straight the first time and he chided himself for the mistake, then he decided it was too narrow, crooked it just slightly at the bridge, something he'd sworn felt right.

It wasn't long before the moment slipped from his fingers, and all the revisions felt more like mistakes than anything, tilting the whole balance of the face into something uncanny. He could pretend it was nearly familiar, but only in the way dreams pretended to be memory.

With an annoyed click of his tongue, Rafayel tilted the wheel. Leaning in with an emotion-tense strain in his spine, he angled the bust toward the overhead light until the shadows shifted and spilled away from the features he’d laid out like a confession.

He stood up for a burning stretch to contemplate, stepped back, squinted with his head tilted, and stepped forward again.

Was it just him? The angle? The lighting? The fatigue of the gallery distorting everything?

After he sat back down with more determination to get over whatever this slump was that made him get you wrong over and over again, one adjustment in the temple led to a collapse in the jawline, and the later correction to the mouth made the chin too long.

The realization that the eyes looked distant now and he couldn’t tell if it was him failing the depth or the absence of something deeper was particularly worrying. Rafayel had always trusted the process, but this didn’t feel like a detour into arriving at the same destination, the clay was actually resisting him in a non-art block way and it was starting to actually bother him. 

He scraped again, set the brow differently, ignoring the thing niggling at him at the back of his head and brushing against some the internal nerve. Was it ever really that shape? Or had he once wanted it to be, and kept telling you about how doing your brows that way would compliment your features better when Algie had sat you down before the vanity in your room to try out some dresses for the ceremony and work on make-up to go along with each one of them?

The clay warped gently beneath his fingers as he tried to trust the sensation, but every stroke seemed to subtract rather than add. The frustration Rafayel hadn't sensed had made its way into his hands like fire following the path of a wick, making the cheekbone dip under the tool, and he had to sit back straighter with a huff from his nose. 

His eyes flew all over the features of the bust, the whole incomplete face. Rafayel couldn't even call it yours. One mistake or two could be expected, even pictures could be unflattering. But it was worse than that — he couldn’t figure out where it had gone wrong. The structure was exactly the same, proportions were what he remembered. The surface was close to reality enough to breathe, but the person who would come to life if they did wasn’t you, and he didn't know where he had gone wrong. 

Rafayel stared longer. A pressure grew behind his ribs, and it was beginning to feel like trying to hum a melody he hadn’t heard in years. The more he reached for it, the more the silence beneath it yawned open.

He reached up and pressed his palm against the clay, not to shape, just to feel if it might suddenly remember for him.

It didn’t.

This was someone else. Too much of him.

He looked down at his hands, coated in slip and streaked with fine dust, and flexed the fingers slowly as though wondering how long they’d been disobeying him.

He pressed the backs of the base knuckles of his thumbs into the inner corners of his eyes. Into the tear ducts.

Where was the scar you used to trace absently while thinking? He tried to recall the way your mouth moved when you were amused but trying not to smile. Was it one side that curled first? Or both? He had drawn it once, years ago, sketched it from memory with absolute certainty. But when he reached for it now, he found only doubt.

The chair scraped backwards and nearly toppled as he sprang to his feet, crossing to the small cabinet beside the canvas where he kept what little he dared to revisit. He almost flung the drawer halfway through the room when he yanked it open, pulled the first sketchpad he could reach, pages flipping too and frenzied to register until he paused and kept going through them slower to make sense of it. 

Eyes, alone. Dozens of them. Glancing sideways, gazing directly, lowered in thought, every single one of them slightly different in expression, none of them quite right. A nose rendered in three-quarter view with a soft crease that might have been tension. The arch of a brow, mid-expression — concern, maybe? Hair texture studies in every style you wore it that he remembers. A mouth caught in a smile with no cause. Hands more frequently than anything else — folded gently, held in motion, reaching out. The gesture of a wrist mid-turn, the curve of a knuckle mid-thought. A sketch of a nape that vanished into the shadows of the page’s lower edge.

None of them carried your name. But they were you. Bits of you. Shards. And every one of them had been committed to the page when he hadn’t even meant to — absentminded, between tasks, in the margins of other projects. A fragmented archive of heartbreak he’d been too cowardly to complete. As if assembling you would demand an answer to where you had gone, as if seeing it finished would require confronting what it meant for him to have stayed, inviting something too vast and unhealed to fit back inside him without breaking something else a lie in full.

Rafayel had underestimated the sheer amount of notebooks he'd gone through for years now, like paper towels one would wipe away their tears with. The grudges he'd immortalized left to collect dust and avoided religiously.

He could only look through a draft of your eyes and hold on to the sketchbook for dear life when his vision blurred and something trickled down his cheek. One by one, the tears solidified into pearls, striking the floor and rolling away into obscurity among the chaos of his studio.

Dropped right into the throes of a realization far bigger than he could accept.

Like a dream that slipped away upon waking, your face had receded to the place where Lemuria had sunk — unable to be grasped fully or played back clearly unless he called them forth, the rest reduced to snippets and gestures instead, images that flickered through his mind like slides projected on a screen, ephemeral and fading faster the harder he fought to keep hold of them. What remained was abstraction — softness that used to be hair, the dimple of an incisor tooth, a tilt of the mouth that belonged to laughter. Those fragments still possessed color. What they lacked were definitions that would allow him to shape the clay in your image.

He went through more sketchbooks until the last of it joined the pile around him and he was left standing motionless in the wreckage of graphite and paper spilling open across the floor like overturned reliquaries, pages fluttering mockingly gentle under the breeze nudging through the half-cracked windows, reflecting back a half-you, or an almost-you. He stared at them for a long time without moving, eyes dragging from shape to shape, as if willing one to speak with your voice.

What answered was a notification pinging in his pocket, a sound so mundane amid the shambles of his misery. He pulled his phone out in a detached daze, swiping at it with no thought.

Thomas: Pygmalion and Galatea gallery photos are up on their page! Your attendance was well publicized and people are talking about your piece, so I expect requests for interviews soon. Just letting you know 😃

 His knees gave out before the grief did, he caught the armrest at the very last possible second, and slid down the length of the sofa's side.

She lives because I saw her clearly enough. Those words barricaded his mind like blood rushing to fill a bruise.

Rafayel was a creature built from ripples, shaped by a lineage of memory so ancient it existed without written record, a primordial awareness of past pains and future sufferings alike, generations upon generations worth of invisible scar tissues patching him up like a rag doll. Cities had fallen and crumbled behind him, yet he could name their street corners and the songs sung during their funerals.

So why — how — had you slipped from him this way?

The thought unspooled inside him slowly, a wet thread tugged from a wound so raw that Rafayel didn’t dare touch it. He had thought, in some arrogant, buried part of him, that if he ever tried, truly allowed himself to miss you more than he mourned his people, and stopped tormenting himself by creating puzzle pieces of you out of scraps in his refusal to obtain a photo of you living your new life, he would be able to rebuild you perfectly. Even the gods who breathed life into Galatea would turn green with envy.

His gaze crawled back to the Frankenstein's monster of a bust, all unrelated bits and pieces that had looked like you when isolated but made no sense when he put them together, taking the shape of grief itself.

She lives because I saw her clearly enough.

He tossed the phone aside without giving Thomas an answer, threw his head back to lean on the lip of the couch, and covered his face with a forearm.

And at last, bitterly, he realized he was no different than Pygmalion: longing for the memory of a woman to etch itself into life.

[nyctoseraph]

OH, GALATEA!

Yandere Sculptor/Artist! Rafayel x Muse/Childhood Friend! Reader

WARNINGS: mentions of blood, depictions of manipulation, obsessive behaviors. 491 words

Like a god, he crafted the world around you. The very buildings you look up to are a notion of his hand and the statues that look down to you are willed by his desire. Even the necklace that ever so subtly wraps around your neck is a product, a gift, of his own genius.

So like a devout follower, you'll walk along the grandeur he carved out for you, for everywhere you go there is only him. The voices around you all sing hymns and praise for him, and all the gigantic posters paint him to be this deity to be worshipped for all his brilliance. Every step you take in his world — of course there would be Rafayel.

You once remember the vibrant flame lilies in your childhood home. The one you shared with a blurry figure you couldn't pull out of the recesses of your memory. But he's there, caressing the flowers and tying them in between the strands of your hair.

Ever since the dawn of your relationship, he had his eyes on you, but you always looked at the flowers more than him. So he had decided that he'll shine brighter, be more vibrant than that of those red flora he'll soon grow to despise.

Red is what he is, like the flame lilies, like the crimson blood he felt like shedding when you decide to just leave the castle walls — the fences of your childhood suburbs. You ran away from your prince without sparing a glance and all he could see, all he could feel, was red.

You hadn't even seen him bloom, like those flowers you loved. All he could do was bleed red and hope you like the color. You walked away, so he'll run after you. You never saw him again since the day you looked back from the car and saw his small figure crying.

Since that day he's followed you, through giant billboards, through the humming of the radio, through the light of the television featuring his features once again. He follows you through memories and the I-wonder-how-he-is-now’s.

And soon you'll cross paths again, because to hell with star-crossed lovers if he can just rearrange the galaxies, he's an artist after all. He'll smile brightly, and you'll finally pull out the blurry face from the depths of your mind.

He crafted every single thing, your very own artist. Staging your meetings like a playwright and painting beautiful memories that he intends to burn into your mind so you'll never ever forget them again. He's a sculptor and he's shaping his own fairytale back to how it should be.

Pygmalion poured his heart and soul into creating the love of his life, so as a nod to a fellow artist he promises to perfect the world he created for the two of you. You might not be made of marble, but you are his very own masterpiece. 

His very own Galatea.

[seraph's notes]: might actually write something longer about this... after i find the motivation to do so ig-

want more? check out the [database.] for other content!

[niromeva]

pocky game

[claremikas]

thinking about the fact that yagi gave us muscular galatea just that one time and never again

[catcas22]

Regarding the Maedhros in Troy AU, consider: some literal translations regarding the "spirit of fire" and an offhand comment that his father never got along very well with the gods lead to the conclusion that his divine parent is not a god but a Titan. Specifically, Prometheus. Bonus points if some attempts to explain his mother's sculpting result in the Trojans getting the general idea of "a woman of clay and stone", and concluding that the mother in this scenario is Galatea.

Oh, I love this! I could see the story of the Silmarils, the light of the two trees, and the flight of the Noldor getting just garbled enough in translation for the Trojans to conclude that Maedhros's father stole fire from the gods. Even more so if his time on Thangorodrim gets brought up. And Prometheus's reputation as a friend of humanity would explain why this supposed demigod is going out of his way to help a bunch of mortals abandoned by practically every other god.

Maedhros being a titan (or the descendant of one) would also explain his complete lack of reverence for the Olympians. (Poor Andromache is going to have a heart attack once they establish enough common language for her to ask how Maedhros saved her son, and he casually admits to stabbing Zeus.) Come to think of it, the Greek gods are canonically a lot squishier than one would imagine. Just ask Diomedes. Ares once spent several months trapped inside a large urn. Thanatos once got slapped with his own handcuffs and locked in a mortal king's coat closet. Seems like every other week Zeus is getting tricked into swearing on the river Styx, despite the fact that it always ends up coming back to bite him.

It's less that they're invincible, and more that they'll always outlive you and they're extremely petty. It might not be advisable in the long run to fight with them, but it's certainly possible. But Maedhros doesn't know to fear them, and he probably wouldn't care even if he did.

Zeus: Pride is a damsel in distrAAAAAUGH!!!

Maedhros: *Calmly nocking an arrow and taking aim at his other eye.*

And the Trojans associating Nerdanel with Galatea is extremely funny. She was the only living soul Feanor would even consider taking advice from, while Pygmalion lost interest the moment Galatea gained the power of speech.

Unrelated to anything, but I could see Ares imposing himself as Maedhros's patron. As soon as the possibility of the stranger being an Ares/Aphrodite baby was raised, he latched onto the theory and never let go. He would really like it to be true. Half out of pure contrarianism towards Athena (she's been using her mom-voice trying to incite the other Olympians against the man who killed her friend champion, and Ares hates it when she does that), half to get back at Zeus for yelling at him all the time.

Thanks for the ask!

Original au by @sweetteaanddragons can be found here.

[bloodygnqv]

Oh Say Can You See

John Price x fem reader

cw: smut!! minors dni!, size difference (reader is described as small but dw there’s no infantilization), uuuh i think that’s it??

A/N: fuck the national anthem it’s a lana song. it’s been a while since i’ve written smut hope you enjoy anyway bless you all xx 🙏🏻

“Are you okay, love?” John asks you from where you’re laying on your side.

He’s all warmth and comfort, musk and tobacco and leather, a stark contrast between the feminine fruits and spring flowers and candy you enjoy wearing.

His voice is a quiet rumble, the crackle of a fireplace, the roar of an engine, the step on snow.

“Mhm, yeah,” you reply, sleepy and pliant, “Just really missed you.”

John lays on his side as well, cuddling you from behind. He’s always been the bigger spoon, arms and hands so large, so strong he can fully wrap them around your waist, cup your breasts in his palms, keep you to himself. His greed for you and your affection lodges in his throat.

You can feel him hardening against your back, and you stifle a small smile. “Go ahead, John, I’ve been waiting all day,” you whisper, your own desire sparkling in your belly, black milk and rose red and the veil of longing.

“God, you’re soaking. That needy pussy just needs some attention, huh?” His fingers slide against your slit gently as you whimper an affirmative and lift your leg a bit to give him access.

“I can take you, John, really, you can just slide in,” you mumble, stroking at his thigh greedily.

“Are you sure, sweetheart? You’re so small and I haven’t prepped you, you know it might hurt…”

Concern laces his voice like poison ivy. It almost makes you melt — he’s always been like this from the moment you two got together, soft care and love so strong it almost suffocates you.

“Yeah, I’m sure. I played with myself earlier..”

“Okay then,” he permits. He taps the head of his dick over your pussy, still not going in, syrupy whines escaping your throat.

And then his cock notches at your leaky entrance, slowly going in, and every little nag and annoying pesky thought hide somewhere in the back of your head.

“Oh,” you gasp and look down to where you two are connected.

John isn’t very long, but he’s thick, thick enough that you feel the stretch every single time you have sex. He carves out a place for himself in you, Galatea and Pygmalion, gentle marble across your legs (his large hands completely envelop the expanse of your thighs, leaving galaxy marks in his wake).

“Yeah,” John breathes, heavy, grunting out a response, “That’s it. Almost there, love, you can take it. Shit, you’re tight…”

You mewl, hands scraping for purchase against the duvet as he runs his fingers through your hair, his beard tickling your neck, whispering cotton candy filth in your ear. You know he’s already pushed in as you feel his heavy balls snug against your ass.

“There you go. Feels good, eh?”

“It does,” you whimper. There’s the slightest touch of too much, tiniest specks of pain, but they’re quickly chased away by the time John starts thrusting lazily. You’re not gonna last long, and if John’s satisfied grunts are anything to go by, he isn’t, either.

You grab his thick arm from where it’s perched over the gentle curve of your waist, delicate wrist teasing the underside of his palm and intertwining your fingers.

You’ve never felt more at home. You’re exactly where you need and want to be, ballad-like moans and late comfortable nights, devoted eyes and lust as a virtue. John’s filling you up just right, quenching the thirst that has simmered in you all day, pushing you off the edge.

John’s other hand reaches around and starts playing with your clit, just enough pressure in circles to bring you over the edge. He always goes the extra mile when it comes to expressing his love through pleasure, making your legs shake, newborn fawn, you are, seeing constellations and new planets beneath your eyelids.

“I’m gonna cum,” you murmur.

“Go ahead, baby. I missed you so, so much, my beautiful girl,” John rasps, peppering small kisses on the canvas of your neck.

There it is — the explosion of feeling and love and pleasure in your tummy, crawling down your legs and up your arms, making you moan and fist the sheet under your body.

Your orgasm pushes John to the edge, and you can feel his spend spilling in the crevice of your cunt, loud groans echoing in the corners of your ears, arms tightening around your small frame. That’s his favorite place to cum in, warm velvet around him, all that love that burns like a motor in his skin.

John pulls out slowly and lovingly cleans you up as your consciousness slips away from you. It’s been a long, long day, and the great sex is but your favorite way to release tension and put you in that space between wake and sleep.

The afterglow sneaks its way in your vein as you lay across John’s thick, hairy chest and close your eyes. This is your favorite time of day, all warm and snug and happy.

“Go to sleep, sweetheart.”

His caress always feels like a blanket, a balm to soothe your wounds, a hazy morning dream you don’t want to wake up. It makes you all the more grateful, lying with the man you love in a space you two made.