#graywall steelclaw

[riotrenegade]

3 and 6 for the aurene ask game pls <3

YAAAAY THANK U

3 was answered here!

Aurene & OC ask game by mistfallengw2!

6. Aurene kind of took a pinch of Graywall’s personality, which is. Not necessarily a good thing? Graywall is 50/50 Dignity/Ferocity when it comes down to it, basically. He’s charming in his own quirky way and quite handsome but like many of my characters, This Twink Will Break Your Bones.

He jumps to violent threats at a hair trigger and Aurene kind of took after him in that way. She’s had to learn to redirect/suppress that response because! Well!! She Is An Elder Dragon! And that’s not necessarily good for her reputation! It’s not a conscious thing on her part either, and neither of them do it maliciously. Gray’s had a rough run of it and picked it up from years of roughing around in the wilderness and fighting off various hostile factions. As much as he is a sort of light in the darkness in his canon, he is just kind of a grave individual at times. and Aurene just. In the way that any toddler would mimic a parent’s behaviour saw him act that way one too many times and now it’s just a habit for her too. It doesn’t help that this tendency bleeds into Gray’s sense of humor, so Aurene does it too. Lots of very casual “I’ll beat you to death with this [object i’m holding/nearby thing”] etc. Think violent tumblr humor but in person and with a little more “i could actually do this to you” weight behind it. Again, Very Distressing when said by a very large and powerful elder dragon.

She’s learning and does it less than she used to as an adolescent dragon, with lots of help from the rest of the Firewatch guild (Dragon’s Watch in Gray’s canon) [they wanted a more all-encompassing name than dragon’s watch since they kind of end up just. Being emergency responders to whatever world ending threat anyway] but it does still happen sometimes when she’s not paying attention to it. There’s been lots of panicked Caithe/Taimi/Gray/etc going “Ooooohokay she did NOT mean that please put the gun away” lmao

[riotrenegade]

janthir wilds spoilers ig, i’m just kind of stream-of-consciousness rambling about my commander

Gray is having a very interesting time in Janthir. With the dragons gone and his initial mission on Tyria complete he finally has the headspace to process the events that brought him to Tyria in the first place. He didn’t really do it during SoTO and didn’t really do it during Gyala and it’s finally hitting him here, because Janthir and the lowlanders are reminding him of home, of Earth. And it’s fucking killing him.

Nostalgia mixed with grief mixed with joy. The lowlanders look so much like the Ursine of Earth, and the wilds remind him so much of the wilderness, the Midlands and Grunes Tal and Swineland before the disaster. He finds himself sitting silently out in the wilderness, reliving memories of the people he’s lost and dealing with bursts of emotion at inopportune times. He refuses to explain to his peers and withdraws into himself until he can’t hold it in anymore.

Caithe doesn’t know the details of Gray’s past, nobody does really. He came through a portal at the Henge of Denravi, said he was a “Broccan from Earth” when asked, and refused to explain further. And that was that, for twelve years. He never really talked about the details, there was never time or space and he always changed the subject promptly when pressed. Until now. One evening at the homestead, after the first bout with the titans, Caithe finally catches Gray off his guard, sitting and staring at the fire in the hearth. Staring through it. She asks him what the hell is up with him, why he’s been acting so strange since coming to Janthir. And he finally tells her the details. About Earth. Djall. His friends. All of it. Years of adventures and joy and guilt and promises kept and broken, all consumed in an instant. All lost forever, beyond even the Mists.

He tells her how he still relives it all, how the memories are coming back stronger here. How the lowlanders remind him of the Ursine, how every time he looks at Poky, despite himself, he sees someone else in him. How he feels guilty about it, shameful. Poky isn’t him, now isn’t then. How he’s frustrated with himself; how he doesn’t want to keep living in the past but has to remember them, has to keep them in his heart so they aren’t forgotten completely. Not even the dust of the Earth remains. If he doesn’t keep the fire going, no one will. No one will remember them.

Caithe didn’t know any of this. Couldn’t fathom how deep Gray’s emotions ran. This is why he’s been so passionate about saving Tyria, stopping the Dragon Cycle. Because he had already failed once. He couldn’t let another world slip through his grasp, not after he watched the first one literally crumble in front of him.

This puts him into perspective for her. In the dim firelight, looking at his twisted and scarred face drawn into a pensive and sorrowful expression, she sees the weight of not one, but two worlds on this one small broccan’s shoulders. He suddenly looks very small to her. And for the first time since she met him, she sees him crumbling, breaking from the weight of everything he’s been through. He weeps openly, in front of another person, for the first time in twelve years.

[riotrenegade]

For Graywall: 1, 3 and 4!

THANK U FOR ASKING ABOUT MY BOY AAAAA

fair warning i am too excited to Talk About Badger to bother editing this or waiting until I’m not stuck in a freezing cold room to write this, so this’ll be very off-the-cuff stream-of-consciousness sort of answers djjfkfjfkg

Aurene & OC ask game by mistfallengw2!

1. Gray definitely sees Aurene as a daughter first and foremost! His connection to her was stronger at the beginning than in canon due to his preexisting connection with Glint (being a Herald and also her having physically dragged him to Tyria via Gaia’s spell) so the second he laid eyes on that egg he knew it was going to become a huge part of his life. When she hatches he immediately understands her as someone he has to protect, then the trials bring him closer to her and he sort of begins to see her as like. Like if your best friend had a child and for some reason had to leave that child in your care for an extended period of time. Like that’s not Your Daughter but that’s like. Your daughter. By the way in-game those trials are a single instance, but in Gray’s canon it takes like a solid week.

3. Most of Gaia’s magic was lost when Djall consumed Her and the Earth, but a small amount was dragged to Tyria with Gray and persists like smoke in a room. Certain places on Tyria are havens of nature and healing magic all of a sudden, and the source is hard for Tyrians to pin down because the magic that’s causing it isn’t native to Tyria’s cosmic ecosystem. (This may or may not be causing Problems in certain places and certain people may or may not be associating these problems [kind of correctly kind of incorrectly] with Graywall)

In Gray’s canon, each time Aurene absorbs new magic, she absorbs some of Gaia’s lost magic as well. It doesn’t affect her appearance much, if anything she just looks a little bit more… Mordrem-y? Sort of? But her prismatic effects are a little bit color-shifted to the green side of the spectrum. Ever so slightly. She has memories of places she has never been, on a strange world with a shattered moon. Wherever her branded crystals grow, plant life flourishes. Like Zafirah seeing Balthazar in Aurene, Graywall sees a bit of Gaia, in some small way.

4. Gray has… Mixed Feelings on the Prophecy. In his canon, part of it specifically mentions the Earth being consumed for further events to even take place (him being spirited away to Tyria) so as you might expect he has negative feelings about that. But on the other hand he wouldn’t have wanted Tyria to be destroyed either. One world survives, the other crumbles. It’s an impossible choice to make, and one that he had no real say in at the end of the day. He did all he could to save his homeworld and failed, and as a result another world had the chance to thrive. He thinks about it every day, still, and still doesn’t know how to feel about it. There’s no one to blame for it, so it’s not like he could direct his emotions at a person. Even Glint isn’t responsible for the Prophecy itself, she was just a messenger and a tool by which the Prophecy was enacted. When I say Gray is dealing with a lot of difficult emotions, this is a huge part of what I mean. I cannot stress enough that on a cosmic level in his canon, his world had to die so Tyria could live.* And it fucks him up every day of his life.

As for Aurene, she struggles with anger and sadness. About those who had to sacrifice their lives, sometimes their whole worlds (physical and metaphorical), to fulfill it. Survivor’s guilt. The problem with a Prophecy woven into the fabric of reality is that there’s no one you can direct your emotions at. She’s glad that Tyria is safe, the only world she’s ever truly known, but every time she’s around Graywall she sees flashes of a different world, one that she knows had to be destroyed so that Tyria could flourish. She can explore these visions as completely as she would any other, and she sees Graywall and his friends fighting fate the same way that he did for Tyria. She sees him fail, completely and utterly. She sees herself, as Gaia, consumed by a world-ending darkness. The same kind of thing that threatened Tyria. And she knows that all of this had to transpire for her to even be alive. She’s grateful that the Prophecy is complete, but at what cost? She leaves at the end of EoD to rest, but also to process. Her whole life she’s been her mother’s pawn, for better or worse, regardless of what Glint or Gray or her or anyone else would have preferred. She’s an elder dragon, yes, but she’s also fucking 10 years old! She was forced to mature at a frankly dizzying pace and deal with things no ten year old should ever have to deal with. She needs time and space, to rest and to be her own person as much as she, as the last Elder Dragon, possibly can.

Both of them wonder how inevitable it was. If it had to be this way. If there was some way both worlds could have survived, thrived.

*Is the Prophecy really woven into the fabric of reality, or is that a story we tell ourselves to ease the pain of what we’ve been through? To make a narrative out of predicting people’s behaviour? Isn’t it easier, in a way, to say “It had to be this way”, rather than deal with the fact that it could have been different?

[riotrenegade]

quick graywall steelclaw sketch, gonna clean it up some more later hopefully. quick facts about him:

- his snout is in fact twisted, it’s a birth defect called wry nose. he kind of has a permanent sneer because of it. affects his speech to a degree.

- he’s intersex

- he has a scottish accent

- he’s 4’7”

- formerly a rogue, in Tyria he becomes a Herald! Still dual wields claws though, canon revenant weapon selection be damned

- he’s polydactyl on all four limbs, so kind of a thumb-and-a-half per hand or foot

- his tail’s a bit longer than expected for broccan

- most of his hair does have a gradient from black down to white at the tips

- big ol face scar is a remnant of The Departing, idk how well you can see it in this sketch. i think i accidentally shaded over part of it 😬

[riotrenegade]

listen i know everything ive been posting about Graywall is all angst and woe but i promise there’s a lot of hope and happiness in there too i cannot deal with an all-angst story and i specifically play guild wars 2 bc it’s so very hopecore i promise its not all sadness and despair i pr

[riotrenegade]

Hiiii My name’s Mithra! I’m an intersex trans man. Gay, polyam and loud about it. He/hymn/hys or it/its is preferred, no she/her or they/them please, ever. I’m chronically ill and deal with complex PTSD and everything that comes with that. Were it not for the laws of this land I would have stolen the orexins right out of a guy’s cerebrospinal fluid like some kind of ghastly narcoleptic vampire. I would have also stolen his blood, like a regular vampire.

I’m a spiritual otherkin, I don’t really talk about that much here but I do reblog community posts and very occasional discourse if it’s novel or otherwise important. You can ask me about it if you want, I’m open to talking about it I just don’t usually have much to say without prompting and I don’t want my personal posts about being a charr to show up in the main tag and bug people 🤷 I’m more than a charr but that’s mostly what I end up talking about or tagging for here, the other stuff is more personal and harder to relate to so it’s usually reserved for close friends etc.

I refuse to make sideblogs, this is my space for anything and everything. You can expect posts about Guild Wars 2, Mononoke, intersex struggles, monster hunter, zero escape, weird memes, and whatever else suits my fancy or catches my eye. If you play Guild Wars 2, feel free to hmu if you see me in-game, I’m FeralWanderer.2863 and usually play on Vaolthe Vexspectre or Vaolt Diamonddust, but I have a lot of other characters (LIKE MY BEAUTIFUL BROCCAN BOY 🦡)

I use tags liberally to keep up with all my crap, if you’re here for something specific or don’t want to see something specific here’s what’s frequently used:

Guild Wars 2 is tagged #gw2, #graywall steelclaw is my commander oc, other ocs will all be tagged #gw2 oc

Mononoke is tagged as such, I use #karakasa and #hinezumi for the new films and will tag spoilers as #[x] spoilers

Zero Escape is usually untagged but basically all of that content is shoved under #favourite characters tag. Spoilers are tagged per game, so #999 spoilers etc. Yes I’m still tagging those. I have mutuals who haven’t played the game yet and they cannot know

Monster Hunter is tagged #mh, #favourite monster is self explanatory and mostly Magnamalo/Scorned

#fave is self explanatory, #about me is also self explanatory, #insp is for art inspiration, #colours is colour inspiration, #arcadiart is my art, #speak is for music, and #charrcore is for stuff that I vibe with

#justified is for a horrible little vampire bl story i’m working on, #lucian fae and #draco dire are the main characters in that

#shattered stones and warped steel is an insp tag for a different story, centering around liminality, dissonance, and feeling at home in places not meant for humanity

[riotrenegade]

Finally wrote a little mini-fic about my commander, who isn’t Tyrian at all and is in fact a direct import of my fucking Earth Eternal character if anyone remembers that game. If you don’t know what I’m talking about it was a furry WOW clone, and it was objectively mediocre but is still very near and dear to my heart. I played a broccan (badger) rogue by the name of Graywall Gunmen, whose name is now Graywall Steelclaw. I was finally inspired to write this because a certain weapon in the new expansion reminded me of my boy’s penchant for only using claw weapons, hence the last name change. Also because there were never guns in EE. In my defence I got his name from a dream I had once— Anyway, this guy had to end up in Tyria somehow, and that’s what this is about. Sorry for the shameless crossover fanfic you can stone me to death if you want

You failed. And now you’re running for your life as the world crumbles around you and your heart crumbles in kind.

You wish you had been stronger. Braver. You wish the odds hadn’t been so heavily, so impossibly stacked against you.

But there’s only so much you can do against a God.

And now all you can do is survive. Save your own skin. And you feel like a coward for running, even though your friends picked you up and threw you off the battlefield and told you to go. You can’t help but feel like you’re betraying them, even when their last words still echo in your skull.

You look back as you sprint through the wilderness, and you see the shadows growing. You hear the groan and snap of trees ripped from the ground, you see boulders lifted from the earth and tossed into the growing darkness, and you turn your head forward and try to run faster. Ahead of you, the peak of a nearby mountain begins to crumble.

You can see the Henge just ahead, a small unassuming ring of stones in the middle of the deep tundra. Magic still pulses around them as you draw closer, but you can see it flickering. You hope you make it in time, hope you remember the spell your God taught you; a last resort if things didn’t pan out.

You reach the center of the stone ring and begin reciting the words, your hands glowing with familiar magic. You try your best to keep your concentration as you look on into the approaching darkness. Two of the pillars in the ring begin to shake, as though trying to hold on against the all-consuming power of the World-Eater.

Tears run down your face and your voice cracks but you know you cannot stop for even a moment. There will be time to mourn after, wherever this spell brings you. Your God never told you where it would take you, refused to answer your questions with anything other than a solemn shaking of the head. “Somewhere safer, is my hope,” is all she ever said. You had hoped you would never have to find out where that was.

As you speak the final words of the spell, the world winks out in front of you and you feel your body wrenched apart— Henge travel is a strange sensation, but this feels different. More intense. Nauseating— and then sudden darkness.

The next thing you remember is a voice. Strange, raspy, accompanied by something that sounds like ice— or a windchime,

“Welcome, child of Gaia. Welcome to Tyria.”