aliascanthrope

[bookshelf-in-progress]

Honors From the King: A Short Story

The sword felt strange in Mia's hand. It fit perfectly in her grasp, but it still seemed impossible that it was hers. A few days ago it had made her into a hero, but in the confusion of the battle, she barely remembered making the lucky blow that felled the giant who had terrorized the Southern Forest for ten years.

Now she, an ordinary eleven-year-old from Iowa, was the hero of a fantastical realm, waiting to receive honors from the king himself.

Elbera bustled around Mia in the antechamber-turned-dressing room of the village hall. The elf woman—barely taller than Mia—had served almost as a mother to her since the strange wind had left her in the elfin village. "Now, my dear, as you're being honored for valor in battle, it's right for you to carry the sword, but you must never put the point toward the king. If you're nervous about it, you'd best sheathe it."

Mia sheathed the sword before Elbera finished the sentence.

Elbera continued, "Since you've slain a well-known terror, it's customary for the king to offer a boon. If he offers up to half his kingdom, don't take it—it's only a polite phrase. Best to ask for something useful—perhaps a sum of gold to rebuild the bridge outside the village."

From what Mia had heard of the king, he'd do that anyway. No, if Mia was to get a boon, she would ask for only one thing.

She wanted to go home.

For nine long months, she'd been stuck in Athelor. The cheerful, dainty elves had been kind to her—sheltering, feeding and teaching her without complaint—but they weren't her family. Her parents had to be frantic about her. And her six siblings—what had they done when that strange summer wind took her away from them? An entire school year would be gone by now. If she stayed away much longer, she'd be so far behind, and it would be harder and harder to fit back into ordinary life.

The elves had been unable to provide any suggestions about how to get back home; they only told Mia to wait for the wind. But the elves had sung praises of King Edonniel's library, spoke with awe of his scholarly works about Athelor's history. If anyone knew how to get her home, the king would.

The door to the chamber opened, and a palace guard escorted Mia into sunlit wooden expanse of the main hall.

At the room's far end, the king stood among his guard. Though over fifty, he was tall and fit, with a reddish-gold beard and a noble bearing, resplendent in royal armor. He was like the good king in every fairy tale Mia had ever read, like her father, and she forgot to be afraid of him. The king was a great man—warrior, poet, scholar, diplomat—but Mia knew in an instant that he was kind enough to help a lost girl.

The assembled crowd—all the elves and talking beasts from the village—cheered as Mia approached the king. Mia tried to ignore them, instead focusing on the king’s kind face.

The king stared at her. He stood frozen for several moments, then stepped toward her. “Mia?”

Mia stumbled to a stop. "Yes?" This seemed an informal greeting from a great king.

In a blink, Mia found herself in the king's arms, crushed in a warm embrace.

"I can't believe it." The king's deep voice sounded right next to her ear. "I thought I'd never see any of you again, not here."

Mia tried to push him away. King or not, this was too weird to put up with. "Any of who? What are you doing?"

The king pulled away and looked into her face, drinking her in. "I'm sorry. Of course you don't know me. Mia, I’m Danny. Your brother."

*

In the privacy of Elbera’s good parlor, Mia sat alone with the king. Her brother. Her ten-year-old brother. Who she never in a million years would have connected with the great scholar, warrior, and king the elves, in their musical accents, called Edonniel.

She couldn’t doubt that he was Danny. He remembered their parents, their farm, all their family, even the dinosaur village she and he had created two summers ago. With only a year and a day between their ages, they had often been mistaken for twins, but Mia had always reveled in her superior age. Until now.

Danny seemed so dignified; he made Elbera’s soft chair look like a throne. His eyes had wrinkles around them. His red-gold beard hung down to his chest. He sat so steady, so still, gazing at her like she was his long-lost child—instead of the sister whose hair he pulled when she beat him at Mario Kart.

As Mia sat across from him on Elbera's other chair, the only thing she could think to say was, “You’re older than me.”

The king guffawed. “I’m older than Dad. But you—you don’t look a day older than when I last saw you. How long have you been here?”

“Nine months.”

“It’s been forty-eight years for me.”

Mia’s head spun at the idea. “How?”

“The wind that carried us into a different world carried us into different times. I landed on the shores of the Beryl Sea forty-eight years ago. Ever since I became king, I’ve made a study of Athelorian history, trying to find the rest of us.”

“Us?” Mia had been with her siblings when the wind had taken her, but she’d assumed they were back home in Iowa. “How many of us are in Athelor?”

“All of us,” Danny said with surprise. “Didn’t you know?”

Mia shook her head. “I couldn’t see much.”

“And when you landed here alone, you had no reason to guess that we weren’t all safely at home,” he said, understanding.

“Is anyone else here?” Mia asked, half-hoping another brother or sister would pop out from behind the furniture.

“I crossed paths with Thomas not long after I arrived, but you’re the only one I’ve met in person since. Everyone else, I’ve had to track down in history and legend.”

“You met Thomas?”

“He landed among the trolls of the northern mountains,” Danny explained. “Became a master smith—the greatest in Athelorian history. He forged that sword you carry. I have no idea how it got into the elves’ hands; I’ll bet there’s a story there.”

Danny never could stick to the point of a story. “Where is he?” Mia asked in frustration.

“He was a very old man when I met him,” Danny said. “A hundred and twenty-seven, by some counts. Some say his life was extended by working with the stones from the heart of the world.”

Was? Her little brother had been only six years old when she’d last seen him. He couldn’t be—

Mia sank back into her chair, stricken.

Danny, caught up in his story, didn’t seem to notice. “Jane lived among the centaurs and elves of the Skyveil Plains seven-hundred years ago. Became a legendary warrior and explorer, defender of the weak. Beloved by all the beasts. First to step foot on the Daybreak Isles and meet the talking mice.”

Seven-hundred years?

“Now Ben,” Danny said with a laugh, “has popped up all through history. Rarely seen for more than a day or two, but he always has some dramatic effect. Some scholars speculate he’s extraordinarily long-lived, but my theory is that time is playing with him in a different way than the rest of us.”

He said it all so calmly!

“Nora?” Mia dared to ask about their oldest sister.

Danny’s gaze turned dreamy, his voice hushed and reverent. “The legendary Queen Eleanor, present at the waking of the world.”

Danny was talking about Nora—bossy Nora!—like he was in awe of her.

Her sister—all her siblings—had become legends. They weren’t waiting for her at home. They were long dead, had been dead ever since she’d arrived, which meant they were gone forever, and there was no way home—

Mia burst into tears.

Danny reacted about like how she’d have expected him to react. He sprang up from his seat and hovered awkwardly over her chair. “Mia? What’s wrong?”

Through tears, despair, and frustration, Mia blubbered something that included the words, “They’re all dead!”

“Dead?” Danny asked. “Who said they were dead?”

Mia wiped her tears on her sleeve and glared up at him. “You did! You said Thomas was ancient, and Jane lived seven-hundred years ago, and Nora’s as old as the entire world!”

“That doesn’t mean they’re dead.”

“I’m not stupid! No one can live that long, not even here!”

Danny crouched down next to her chair. He placed both hands on her shoulders and looked straight into her eyes. “Mia, look at me. I’m telling you: they’re not dead.”

Before his fatherly gaze—even with the beard, he looked a lot like Dad—Mia’s sobs became mere sniffles. “Then where are they?”

“They’re home. Safe. I promise. The same wind that brought us here brought them back home after their adventures were over.”

Just like the elves had said. But when Mia had thought she’d have to wait to go home, she’d thought it would be a few years at most, not—

“You said Thomas was more than a hundred years old.”

Danny said, “I’ve done a lot of reading about people like us. We’re not the only people who’ve come here from Earth—or gone home. The stories all say the same thing. No matter how long we spend here, the wind takes us back home to a time only minutes after we left, and we’ll be just the same age we were then. Reunited from across history, as young we ever were. A foretaste of heaven.”

His voice had gone dreamy again. The elves had said he was a poet.

Mia dried her face and sat up straight. “We’ll all be together? At our normal ages? Like we never left?”

“Exactly.”

“You and me and Thomas and Ben and Nora and—“ Mia realized something. “You never said where Claire was.”

“She’s the only one I haven’t found in history yet. That means her story’s probably still in the future. Maybe we’ll run into her someday.”

That did sound exciting, but Mia didn’t like the idea of waiting decades like Daniel had.

“How long do you think it will be? Before we go home?”

Danny stood and walked toward his chair. “I can’t say. Whenever the wind blow lately, I get the strangest feeling that I won’t be here long—maybe five years.”

Five years—half her life—not long?

“For you,” Danny continued as he sat down, “I can’t say. But I have a feeling that your adventures are just beginning.”

“I don’t want more adventures,” Mia said, as another tear dripped. “I want to go home.”

“I know,” Danny said, his voice husky with sympathy. “The first year is the hardest, and you’re so young.”

The idea of Danny—Danny!—treating her like a little kid! “I’m older than you!” Looking into his very-much-not-a-kid face, she amended, “Well, I should be.”

“You will be again, one day. But until then...“ Danny leaned forward, his hands on his knees, and suddenly sounded more like an American kid than he had all day. “This sounds so weird, but if you like, I can adopt you. You can live in the palace under my protection, and I can show you everything about Athelor. Maybe name you my heir if you like the whole royalty thing.”

He was planning a whole life for her. Plotting out a future. Here. Even without the weirdness of Danny acting like her dad, it was too much.

Danny noticed her hesitation. “You don’t have to, if you don’t want to. I know we’re all called here for different purposes, and I don’t want to keep you from your intended mission.”

“I thought the giant was my mission.” Mia had constructed such a tidy tale—and now it was unraveling. “I came here, I slayed the giant. The story should be over. I should get to go home.”

“It will always be waiting for you. Until then, you have Athelor.”

“Athelor isn’t home!”

“It can be,” Danny said. “It’s been a good home to me. It can be a better one, now that you’re here.”

Mia suddenly realized how old her little brother was. How long he’d been waiting, searching for his family through books. And now she was here, after all this time.

Maybe that was her mission. To help this great king while he was here caring for the people of Athelor.

“I guess I can try,” Mia said. Even if she had to stay a long time—well, Danny had managed to do some amazing things, and she couldn’t let her little brother outshine her. “When we do get back home, I don’t want you to have a better story than me.”

Danny grinned—and for just a second, he looked a little like the kid she remembered. “Mia,” he said, “I think you’re going to be fit for legend.”

[chadlesbianjasontodd]

Closely connected to the act of name signing was the act of writing poems on walls. As scholars have already pointed out, with beginnings traceable to the Six Dynasties, wall poems (tibishi) were already very widespread during the Tang. By Christopher Nugent's count, well over one thousand entries in the Complete Tang Poems had titles indicating that they began as inscriptions on some surface other than paper or scrolls. These surfaces included walls at places of gathering and transit, such as post stations, scenic sites, inns, and increasingly in the latter part of the Tang, Buddhist temples, which also served public roles for lay gatherings and performances. (100)

In one anecdote, a latecomer casts aspersions on a first writer's literary skills, comparing him to the general Xiang Yu (232-202 BCE), who was infamous for having learned just enough writing to manage his name: "Li Tang signed his name on a pavilion in Zhaoying County. When Wei Zhan [jinshi degree 865] saw it, he took a brush and dashed off a taunt: 'The rivers of Wei and Qin brighten the eyes, / but why is Xiren short on poetic spirit? / Perhaps he mastered only what Beauty Yu's husband could / learning to write just enough to put down his name.' " ... It would not be a stretch to imagine the sniggering of those who read this inscription in a frequented pavilion. (102)

For a degree seeker in Chang'an, these circuits of information and judgment received more discussion than the actual examination itself. Tang literati wrote copiously about activities such as name signing, public exposure, and triumph. It would not be an exaggeration to say that in ninth-century temples and popular recreation areas, the vertical spaces were teeming with verses that clamored for attention. (104)

selections on poetic graffiti from linda rui feng's city of marvel and transformation: chang'an and narratives of experience in tang dynasty china (university of hawaii press, 2015)

[moregraceful]

my hot take as a person with an english degree and a library degree is that some of the dorkiest fiction and poetry ever committed to paper in the english language came out of the iowa writer's workshop so it is at best goofy and at worst completely futile to argue that your average amazon unlimited writer is having a more deleterious effect on literacy and literature.

[daubigny-stan]

there's this fanfiction that I'm super obsessed over that will never be finished. it's Catch Perfect by the (in?)famous George Devalier. yes it's a Hetalia fanfic please shame me, it's probably my subconscious reason for taking geography in college. anyways this fic... god I would give the world to see it finished. many praise Devalier's veraverse fics as his finest works but this one for some reason is so special to me.

I think what's so special about this fic to me is how sincere it feels? how real it feels? the veraverse series was the author's interpretation, their assumption about how gay couples in europe would be like in WW2 - obviously they weren't there for the actual thing. but his modern AU fics feel... tangible. a real "write what you know" situation. the author was probably a young, gay man who was into romcom, you could really feel that he wrote from his own experiences, from people he knew (although he never explicitly said anything about himself, geogre devalier is notoriously mysterious even as one of the most fanous hetalia fandom figures).

and when you read this fic, analogizing it to let's say a half eaten corpse, only part of the body is whole. but you can see the bones of it! every chapter is titled after poker terminology and strategy, and they kind of link to each of the main character's personalities and you could guess that they potentially foreshadow something. you could tell which body part went where! and it kills you even more because you want to see so bad what the whole body looked like. you are able to tell where the arc is going, probably figure out that it'll have a happy, cheesy ending like his other modern AU fics but you want to hear geogre write about it so bad.

it's about human!Sweden, a tapped out poker player who is forced to move into a student sharehouse (with the rest of the Scandinavia gang) because he lost his entire everything on poker (he is also the age of a uni student, but he doesn't go to uni). and it's this fic about 5 gay guys (and 2 other guys) living in one house and hijinks ensue, mostly around their own crazy personalities. i love how gay it is, it isn't just some "they just happened to be gay" or being gay is just not a thing that's just there in the world. there's these hints of homophobia as experienced by these men in the 2000s (presumably), there's the gay culture written out, it's just a real treat to read. if i had the time and energy i would research poker just so i could finish the fic for myself even though that wouldn't be enough because i know anything i write will be leagues below devalier

[geryone]

131 BOOKS?

Yeah & about 15 of those books are Julia Quinn rereads so don’t be too impressed

[coquelicoq]

just had the thought "after i exhaust the french fiction, poetry, and textbooks i own, i could read the french dictionary cover to cover" and got, like, GENUINELY excited about it.

[simmyfrobby]

that last flower poem moved me to tears. wow. WOW.

that entire poem makes me feel so !!!!!!!

[familyabolisher]

2022 reading list >:)

fiction:

charlotte brontë, jane eyre

n.k. jemisin, the stone sky

victor hugo, les misérables

susanna clarke, piranesi

james baldwin, giovanni's room

tamsyn muir, gideon the ninth

tamsyn muir, harrow the ninth

emily brontë, wuthering heights

ursula k le guin, the left hand of darkness

oscar wilde, the picture of dorian gray

isaac fellman, dead collections

joan lindsay, picnic at hanging rock

shirley jackson, dark tales

gretchen felker-martin, manhunt

herman melville, moby dick

octavia butler, parable of the sower

shola von reinhold, lote

larissa lai, the tiger flu

alison rumfitt, tell me i'm worthless

julia armfield, our wives under the sea

shirley jackson, the haunting of hill house

miguel de cervantes, don quixote

toni morrison, the bluest eye

isaac babel, odessa stories

alexandre dumas, the count of monte cristo

daphne du maurier, rebecca

clark ashton smith, the dark eidolon and other fantasies

rivers solomon, the deep

akwaeke emezi, freshwater

e.m. forster, a room with a view

vladimir nabokov, lolita

ayse papatya bucak, the trojan war museum and other stories

sheridan le fanu, carmilla

e.m. forster, maurice

tamsyn muir, nona the ninth

vladimir nabokov, pale fire

shirley jackson, we have always lived in the castle

jorge luis borges, fictions

henry james, the turn of the screw

tamsyn muir, undercover

ling ma, severance

orhan pamuk, the museum of innocence

shirley jackson, hangsaman

nonfiction:

vijay prashad, no free left: the futures of indian communism

eduardo galeano, open veins of latin america

hakim adi, pan-africanism: a history

paulo freire, pedagogy of the oppressed

a rainbow thread: an anthology of queer jewish texts ed. noam sienna

kwame nkrumah, africa must unite

vijay prashad, red star over the third world

norm finkelstein, the holocaust industry

robin wall kimmerer, braiding sweetgrass

vladimir lenin, the state and revolution

saidiya hartman, wayward lives, beautiful experiments

john aberth, from the brink of the apocalypse

erik butler, metamorphoses of the vampire in literature and film

amin maalouf, the crusades through arab eyes

anandi ramamurthy, black star: britain's asian youth movements

christopher chitty, sexual hegemony

shakespearean gothic, ed. christy desmet and anne williams

cervantes' don quixote: a casebook, ed. roberto gonzález echevarria

edward said, culture and imperialism

emily hobson, lavender and red: liberation and solidarity in the gay and lesbian left

audre lorde, zami: a new spelling of my name

ghassan kanafani, on zionist literature

afsaneh najmabadi, women with moustaches and men without beards: gender and sexual anxieties of iranian modernity

jamie berrout, essays against publishing

beverley bryan, stella dadzie, suzanne scafe, heart of the race: black women's lives in britain

jamaica kincaid, a small place

friedrich engels, socialism: utopian and scientific

poetry:

trish salah, lyric sexology

melissa range, scriptorium

wendy trevino, cruel fiction

june jordan, selected poems

[discoidal]

i just finished penance by eliza clark and i have thoughts that can only be communicated out loud in person through speech with an accompanying slideshow of pics of me in maxi skirts from 5th to 10th grade

[possamble]

Question to a fanfic writer: do you think that, in Marcille’s research ways *And* her love for romance novels… would result in her writing some in-universe fanfics of her own? Like, maybe she hypes herself up on something and get disappointed, or maybe she finds some character decision isn’t as ideal as she thinks it could be? Or it’s as simple as she wants to play around with the characters and see what happens?

I can’t help but imagine a scenario where she’s struggling with some romantic trouble irl and she’s struggling with deciding on what to do, but then the answer slaps itself upside her head when she rediscovers her fanfics and how she LITERALLY made a character or two do the exact romantic decision she needs to do? It would so silly but yet I can’t help but find it so charming. Hell, just the imagery of her writing romance fanfics of her own At All is just… delightful to me hehehe.

you know I've been rotating this in my head since I saw it this morning and. I went through a wild journey of opinions before I realized... Marcille wouldn't think about fanfiction like we think about it. In the modern age, yeah, she'd be a complete tumblrina -- but we're talking about a 17th century-ish fantasy setting.

Writing before the digital age was a physical commitment to investing ink and paper into your thoughts -- and this is even before mass production can make pens and notebooks kind of whatever to buy and use on a regular basis. I'm sure the situation wasn't dire, but I really can't see Marcille, perfect honor student, using her allotted supply of stationery at the academy on super frivolous things.

Fanfiction has been normalized incredibly fast in the past few decades. Think about now normal and popular D&D is nowadays compared to how much people looked down on it 20-30 years ago. Fanfiction was a freakass nerd thing to do until relatively recent history, something that was even considered offensive to the original creators.

Remember, we've already seen Marcille react to adaptations with disgust. She's kind of a hater and an elitist fan. She also considers herself a Reputable Academic. In a setting where a digitized culture hasn't reframed fanfiction as an act of appreciation and creativity, she would absoluuuuuuuutely think that fanfiction was complete loser shit.

If she did write anything about her favourite books... She'd. She'd be one of those assholes who writes huge scathing reviews of Dal Clan translations into Common. She'd be the fantasy equivalent of those Weebs/Japanese elitists on twitter tearing through every single localization choice in anime and JRPGs and being so so annoying about it.

If we're being charitable, we could say she'd be able to appreciate non-faithful translation choices that still do a good job of carrying over the original spirit of what was said. But I think we also have to acknowledge the possibility that, at her worst, she'd really really be like those guys who were malding about the Unicorn Overlord localizations so hard the (correction: Final Fantasy Tactics Creator, not the Unicorn Overlord devs) had to step forward and ratio them. (The silver lining is that she'd never get published in the arts review newspapers/journals that she submits her essays to. those poor editors just have to deal with her being persistent.)

[tealfruit]

it's really a shame I have to sell 40+ of my life hours every week for poverty wages instead of spending all my time and energy on dozens of creative and technical pursuits with unlimited resources

[sforzesco]

I'm really curious about the process that goes on behind your art! Especially because you give so much importance to themes and it's like *chef's kiss*. It's always so well thought out and I find your references to all the snippets and readings really fascinating and very inspiring. How the heck do you organise your thoughts so well while reading ?

honestly organizing my thoughts. it takes. a while. to do it lmao

usually what happens is something like: I'll be reading a book on crassus, and the author refers to crassus as the leading domestic politician in rome while pompey was the leading military general. and this will set off bells in my head that go 'oh, roman household dynamics,' because the phrasing reminded me of a text describing the role of wives of roman politicians when their husbands were away (which I first came across in a text discussing octavia's role in her marriage with antony)

and while I'm doing all of this, I usually have a journal or sticky notes or literally any kind of scrap paper with me where I make short notes on what's interesting/what's connecting in my head/what would make an interesting subject to draw, no matter how unrelated it is, and then I'll look over everything once I've exhausted the train of thought like. man! this is borderline incomprehensible! let's make a comic about it.

then when I've done all that, I'll spend two or three days cutting down all the excess material and attempting to figure out the most direct way to convey what's going on in a scene so that someone unfamiliar with any of it might be able to follow along on vibes alone. sometimes it takes a week. sometimes I get stuck on something and I have to make a note to revisit it in a few months!

[spaciebabie]

god i hate class discussions b/c there's always a pressure for everyone ta say something but bro what if i have literally nothing ta say. what if i have no wisdom ta impart abt the text besides regurgitating what the author said. what if i have no special anecdotes. what if im sleepy tired. what if. ITS 9 AM IN THE FUCKING MORNING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[vulpinesaint]

are these characters really “hozier-coded” or do you just not listen to any other good music

[patchwork-crow-writes]

84 - Emptiness

I am hollow, an aching pit where a heart should be. A needy shell that feeds upon anything it can, whether food or favour, pain or pleasure. Grabbing hands reach greedily into the world, mucky fingerprints marking everything I touch... mine, I cry! Mine! Yet more do I crave, more than anyone could need... can nothing fulfill my insatiable greed?

It's clasping and clawing, The darkness is yawning, A fathomless yearning The beast hungers, roaring!

If you were to touch me, I would splinter and shatter. An egg with no yolk, an embryonic void. I take and take and take, and yet nothing ever satiates me! I cannot bear your sadness, so happy must you be! There can be no sorrow greater than my own; soon you shall leave, and I'll once more be alone.

My facade is cracking, My soul shivers, creaking, My black heart is quaking And my world is breaking!

Your kindness is the light that plays upon a mirrorlike sea, but which fears to venture to the darkness beneath. Won't you look upon me, my twinkling stars, reach out a hand into the abyss of my heart?! A walking black hole, a singularity of sorrow; ceaseless consumption and nothing but empty hands to show for it! Flee far from me, please, oh wondrous lights, ere I consume you too before long. I'll draw you in, drag you down like teeth from the deep, and I'll never let go until death set us free.

Thus I lay rejected, Unwanted, infected, Loneliness confected Hopelessness perfected.

______________________________

The Dark Menagerie No. 84

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[a-ramblinrose]

“For anyone who wondered where the other road led…”