#i loved “all about elves” but now the lore has changed and it's no longer canon in the newest editions :(

[beatx-mavie-archangelx]

i love being a dnd lore fan because canon is all over the place and we're never actually talking about the same thing.

[aghostwithnoname]

Okay it's been about two weeks to cook on my initial reaction to finishing DATV, and I feel like, for the most part, it still stands?

Like smooches to all the companions - you're not really the problem in this. I also love my Rook. Adore you, Taash and Davrin extra special. Assan, my son, my beloved, you are perfect.

But aside from diehard DA fans either defending or detracting Veilguard within an inch of their lives, imo the defining problem of the game is sets up these interesting, compelling, and tasty conflicts we've come to expect with the franchise but instead of like, you know, delivering on that, playing out that tension, eking it out for angst, lols, rage, and tears, asking serious moral quandaries of the player... they just… resolve them? create false equivalencies? say "here is your choice - it will have consequences!" but really the outcome is mostly the same?

So yeah, it's really just a lack of stakes on anything and everything important. And I think that's a missed opportunity as a writer myself - bc while some people may see the removal of real world social ills in a fantasy setting as being more "inclusive" (a take I as a person with multiple marginalized identities don't really understand and frankly sounds to me like some corporate BS), what BioWare really is doing is attempting to rebrand its signature series into something it isn't : a world without complication or friction or messy realities.

The Bad Guys are literally straight up Evil - the Good Guys are So Good. Whether you choose to doom Treviso or Minrathous, the idea that the Crows are no longer being child-enslaving assassin mafia houses (Rip Zevran and your revenge), the fact BioWare completely avoided any depictions or barely mentioned the horrible mistreatment and enslavement of the elves in Tevinter, even going so far as to paint the elves as partially at fault for that bc of their shitty gods??? (good lord, there's too much to unpack there), nothing truly matters.

DA was never just simplistic, good vs evil fantasy, so why start now?

Like any good storyteller knows that stories are fundamentally about change whether that's changing a society or your own personal mindset. And more often than not, conflict is a result of that! Change is hard! Some people don't like change! That's not to say conflict must be physical or violent - sometimes the most interesting stories are ones where the hero is a different person that the one they started out as.

DATV literally changed so much about the lore and mechanics of the world (which okay fine), but everybody just rolled with the punches like it was nothing. Like, for ex, "The Maker doesn't exist and Andraste is Mythal"??? Damn son, you just got proof that literally thousands of years of abusive religious dogma that has been used to terrifying discriminatory ends in both the North and South of Thedas is a lie. And everyone just accepts that????

And for some of us who experience and live with discrimination every day, who come from abusive families, and are religious trauma survivors, part of the appeal of previous Dragon Age games, for me, is that it didn't run away from those issues. It made characters like me human and fallible where at the end of the day, yeah you can end the Fifth Blight but there is no right answer to who should rule Ferelden bc monarchy is a fucked up system that ruins everyone's lives - here is the quintessential "Chosen One" archetype who doesn't fucking want to be chosen (DAO); no you can't always save the world (re: Kirkwall) and those you love, and violent change of an abusive system can also blow up in your face (DA2), and no you're not in control of how other people perceive you, especially in how celebrity and status can dehumanize you to a point where you don't even recognize yourself (DAI). Like you could still be a hero in these games without being perfect. Whereas with DATV, I just felt... nothing. Like, it was a fun way (sometimes, not Weisshaupt jfc) to spend 80 hours. I learned that Solas and Mythal are even more horrible that I could possibly imagine.

but I didn't feel like Veilguard left me with anything like catharsis so I could go back and face the Merediths and Venatori and Loghains of the real world. it was just that - you defeated the Bad Guys! Game Over. Here's Varric Mufasa'ed in the sky (so very sad). Talk about a totally ridiculous misuse of the One Guy whose whole shtick is how you can use narrative as a weapon.

These are just my thoughts, and ofc everyone's allowed to like or dislike the game as they please, but I don't feel like it's appropriate to give Bioware (and their shitty treatment of their creative team) a free pass on a frankly subpar narrative ten years in the making that did not deliver the emotional beats it was meant to.

[meluiloth]

O-O I just watched the hobbit

do u perchance have any fic recommendations??

I'm so glad you're getting into the world of Middle-Earth and its stories!! It's always so wonderful to see a new fan, and I'm honored you came to me for recs!

For starters, I'd absolutely recommend that you read the original novel by J. R. R. Tolkien - it's an amazing story, and not overly long either, though you'll find it's quite different from the movies in some ways (and in my opinion, much better!)

As for fanfictions, here are a few that I really love!

Heart of a Dragon by Night Kite on Quotev. It's so incredibly well-written, follows the movies (mostly) and includes a lot of lore from the Tolkien canon, but in a way that's really understandable! All the characters are written accurately, and the protagonist is phenomenal. It's a completed fic! If you like it, the author has written a few oneshots about the main character, The Short Tales of Elerìna Angolwen. Here's the summary:

Elerìna Angolwen never wanted to join the Company of Thorin Taken Oakenshield. Unfortunately for her and them, she has a talent that no one else in Middle-Earth has the curse of possessing - but it comes at a dire price. Amongst the rabble of Dwarves, an unusual Hobbit and an extremely meddling Grey Wizard, the Captain of the Dúnedain Rangers is the only person standing between peace and the destruction of the world by the deadliest foe of all - a dragon.

Solitude of a Wanderer, also by Night Kite on Quotev (they're a wonderful author, I cannot recommend them enough). This story features an extremely interesting and layered main character, and there's also a completed sequel set in The Lord of the Rings, which actually brought me to tears. Both are completed.

Vanimóre has been wandering the wilds of Middle Earth for her whole life, patiently gathering knowledge and experience along the way. But as she befriends Elves, Men, and Wizards, she can no longer hide her dangerous secret, a secret that could change the rhythm of the world forever.

Spirits of Fire by Darth Fëanor on Quotev is another really good fic - it's incomplete as of now, but it's so worth reading! Another amazing author with a gift for writing - they have other fics that are completed, set in the story of The Lord of the Rings!

She has the spirit of a wildfire, the appearance of a Ranger, and the bearing of a queen. A young (well, by Dúnedain standards) with the dangerous gift of fire is unwillingly roped into Thorin Oakenshield's company by none other than Gandalf, the roper-of-the-unwilling. None of the Dwarves really trust her at first, which cannot be avoided as she tells nothing of herself, not even her real name. Can she gain their trust, even when forced to reveal who she truly is?

Unnecessary Guardian by @sotwk on tumblr! This is a one-shot, and a story involving the Elves of Mirkwood, but it's a delight to read and provides a realistic picture of what life in Mirkwood might look like!

I don't have a whole lot of fics to recommend (I don't read a whole lot to be honest, my focus is mainly in The Lord of the Rings), but I hope you like these! And, once again, do read Tolkien's works if you have the chance!

[thefallenangelsgang]

I'm working on a more elegant Meet the OCs page for all my stuff but for now I wanna share my BG3 baybeeessssss

Starting with Wynleth Reiden

A High Elf Paladin of Lathander (Oath of Redemption on paper but Devotion in BG3). She goes through some hair changes over the course of the story (Act 3 really got to her). Her Act 1 look is new to my second play through, I am still not happy with it but I don't care enough because this look isn't what I think about when I imagine her.

[ACT ONE]

[ACT TWO] (ignore the armor, we were experimenting with color pallets and this wasn't it lmao)

[ACT THREE]

She also has a war paint look I'm trying to figure out if I like or not.

Wynleth's Dream Guardian

The Emperor takes the vague form of one of Wynleth's ancestors, a Lathandite Martyr by the name of Tali (mentioned in passing in my Oneshot By Any Other Name) Wynleth doesn't recognize them until they get into Baldur's Gate, then she realizes The Emperor's whole ploy to get the party to trust it.

Rhett Atwater

Another one of my actual DnD PCs brought to life. A Half Wood Elf Fighter (she's an Arcane Archer on paper but Battle Master in BG3) and our ranged weapons expert.

My beef with Larian about the lack of POC and specifically Black features is immense. She has a High Elf face preset because there really are no presets for Half Elves but I doctored the photos so she could have half-elf ears as she should. Also not the style I would have given her, but the only one that resembled her locs. I am this close to learning how to use the mod manager just to get mods to fix these oversights.

Laertes Last-Name-is-TBD

A Mephistopheles Tiefling College of Lore Bard, and the only one who isn't a DnD PC of mine. He was born from me deciding to make Caprice from Legends of Avantris's Beneath Dark Wings (for the laughs and also because my only bard is literally impossible to make in BG3 (unavailable race and subclasses)) and then panicking because I actually had character ideas about him. So! Laertes! Who truly no longer has anything in common with his inspiration outside of vague visual similarities and their chosen College and instrument. (I love violins/fiddles, I want to talk about folk music, sue me Derek /j)

His hair is much curlier than pictured, and his mustache a bit more pompous. He's an instrument craftsman from Elturel who escaped with the refugees.

[multimask]

this might be a really silly question but i wanted to ask about the general setting of your campaign!!! do you have an overall summary you’d be willing to share?

!!! Not a silly question at all! I am always down to ramble about my campaign

I'll have to do a fuller rundown of our session shenanigans at some point

Tldr, my campaign setting is "Faerun but 800-900 years in the future". And also half-elves are now the "default"/most common race, not humans

We use a looot of official WotC Forgotten Realms lore, maps, etc. and then rearrange shit as we like. It's been over 800 years since "canon present", so a bunch of shit's happened!

One of the *big* changes is that the city of Calimport is now baaaasically Night City in a lot of ways. One of my players wanted to run some Cyberpunk stuff, so we found a city we hadn't visited yet and I handed it to them & said "go ham". They did so much lore work and civil engineering to explain the city growth and the reasons why Calimport is atlike Cyberpunk tech levels while the rest of the world isn't. We are currently having so much fun running our typical dnd party around "Night City". Our wizard has failed almost all his tech handling rolls *except* for a Natural 20 to figure out the electric kettle in the hotel room. It's great

But yeah, it's mostly official Forgotten Realms/Faerun & Sword Coast setting materials that we've twisted and reworked to our needs & desires

Oh! Other "big" change is that we keep fucking around with the Shadowfell and Feywild. So much fuckery. We have a large number of Archfey running around the party, which has had some crazy fun story shenanigans. Our campaign has officially visited only like... 3 ish Feywild locations? But will hit more before the end (We... May or may not be helping bring down the current Summer & Winter Courts... It's a whole thing. There's also a New Shadow Court, who just broke away from the god Mask)

Annnd last bullet point of the setting for now: speaking of, the god Mask, the Lord of Shadows, is back! He was dead as of... 1374 DR, so during the Era of Upheaval before the Spell Plague and like 900+ yrs ago (it's 2223 DR in our campaign, for anyone following FR timelines lol), but now he is no longer dead (still figuring out how he came back,or if I even want a solid answer for that lol) and he's causing trouble for the moon goddess Selûne, his rival in life, and it's causing problems for the party

If you (or anyone) wants to ask about more specifics of anything on the campaign, I'd love to talk more about stuff

[icharchivist]

ooh sorry i'm going to be a major bitch about d//a4, i've been mostly trying to word myself in a polite and kind analytic way so far but i think i'm shaking with rage

i'm reading a (good!) post that highlight stuff said in the AMAs, and already at the time the AMAs drove me to full rage. Like shaking with rage, to say that day was terrible is an understatement. But i also did the wise thing to not read the full AMAs. I read some screenshots here and there but i didn't read the full thing

but therefore the post is highlighting a post from the AMAs i did not see and a dev saying: "I'd love to look at taking it down from 'end of the world' to 'the world is changing, how do you adapt and react'."

On the specific game that ABSOLUTELY REFUSED TO ADDRESS ALL THE CHANGES THAT WERE SUPPOSED TO COME???

Mythal's waiting for a "reckoning to shake the very heavens" and who talked for THREE GAMES about how she has been brewing something this whole time?

(let's not even mention the horrendous retcon of her confrontation with Fen'Harel from the end of d//ai, which is ambiguous and quiet in the game, and in the gamefiles literally mention Mythal let Fen'Harel kill her ON PURPOSE SO HE COULD GET HER POWER TO FINISH THE JOB, and like, i understand, gamefile lore isn't canon, but that was the intention of that scene, only to retcon it with Mythal waving her finger telling Fen'Harel he should stop everything he's been trying to do to save the people because she came to care for them :( )

Or Sandal's prophecy, "One day the magic will come back. All of it. Everyone will be just like they were. The shadows will part and the skies will open wide. When he rises, everyone will see"?

(and calling the quest where Solas is STOPPED from RESTORING THE WHOLE MAGIC WORLD being called "THE DREAD WOLF RISES"??????)

Or Vow and Vengeance also having Solas say he is not planning to destroy the world, he wants "regeneration, in a reckoning"?

Or Morrigan's whole talk in Mythal's temple about the danger of the Mondain destroying a past that still has something to offer??? Also Morrigan's warnings in Witch Hunt while we're at it??

Or even just the FACT that when the Breach happened in DAI the WORLD started to change, Titans started to stir, because even if we fixed the Veil it still shook the world??

OR even that in Tevinter Nights there are MULTIPLE mysteries from the past crawling back into the world?

OR YOU KNOW THE FACT THE DRAGON AGE IS CALLED "THE DRAGON AGE" BECAUSE IT IS "THE TIME OF VIOLENT AND DRAMATIC CHANGE FOR ALL OF THEDAS???

Every single players who called for change in Thedas in a way that would drastically change the setting have been cleared out of the board in order to restore the statusquo. What's left post Blight is technically the religious and social implications especially now that all of Thedas can blame the elves for the Blight, but that's not going to happen is it? the specific AMAs goes on on wanting to focus in The Dwarves and Qunari, which is fair in term of "the elves have been in focus in too long", but like this means the politics of this world means nothing when something that should clearly shake it is being brushed off entirely because the entire elven stuff were deemed too problematic to even talk about now

Sorry not to be a Veil Down truther but the return of magic could have given a radical approach to the return of magic on Thedas especially. How could the Southern Chantry react realizing they can no longer put it on a leash? how would Tevinter react when what made them so special isn't making them special anymore? what of all the tranquils who will find themselves back connected to the Fade? What about all of the people who would change from being this much closer to the Fade? What about the titans who stir when the Veil is thin, who still cause earthquake in their situation from ONE HOLE in the Veil?? What about the return of spirits??

OF COURSE people would have died in the process, i'm not saying this is the moral development of the story, but this would have been THE drastic way to change the world while actually challenging its universe.

But it was reduced too simply to "it's just another end of the world", the big changes were that now the South is destroyed so like. of course they're not going to CHALLENGE anything. There's nothing left to challenge! they just have to rebuild!

How is that interesting??? You missed your shot! you literally missed your shot!

And Da4 not taking any real time trying to think about what does change outside of the end of the world is a d//a4!! The game is so devoted of political talks especially if you didn't save Minrathous. The end of the world of all the others games have brought political and societal changes WHILE you were playing. d//a4 focusing entirely on the apocalypse and never on what the aftermath would look like is on the game! it shouldn't just be your plan for the sequel!

tears away my own hair.

Sorry but this is SO annoying to say that on the one game that was always set up to be a drastic change to thedas and instead just went "oops actually let's save the statusquo first, we'll see about change later" this is lame this is lame this is lame!!!!!

[bakafox]

Veilguard critical critical rant, be warned

TLDR:

For personal mental health's sake, and society's sake, and also if we even want some franchises to keep being franchises outside of fanfiction- I think it's a peace we have to all make with any media franchise we love that's going to last longer than a couple of years, that it is going to change, and not all the ideas and ideals whether story or based in the technology or (especially) the amount of work needed to pull them off will stick.

We're not going to like all the chapters the same way. We might even really dislike some chapters. And maybe we'll decide we don't even want to give certain chapters a chance because the vibe or early critiques of it are off- but it's something to maybe do without seeing it all or acting and speaking as if it is some kind of personal attack or personal affront, or by claiming the people who worked on the project were ignorant or didn't love it.

Mild VG general storyline spoilers are late in the rant.

I know that even though I love the game, others do not, and tastes vary so hey, it's cool. A mutual of mine thinks the combat is a slog, that's a totally fair opinion. An artist I started following for DAI stuff feels it's "MEH".

But I feel like a lot of the DAVG critical stuff I wind up seeing is from people looking at past games through rose-tinted glasses in terms of what sorts of choices there were or how things were integrated in from any previous game, which leaves me confused, maybe a bit salty because I am confused, but ok, not what super bothers me.

I'm equally baffled and so a bit salty about an expectation of more southern Thedas stuff being brought into northern Thedas when northern Thedas had so little to do with southern in previous games beyond, well, the cult and elves getting sold out of Denerim. Or how some criticisms seem to forget how much time has passed as well as geography between the different DA games. Still not my worst frustrations, though.

What super bothers me is I feel this sense of entitlement mixed with the worst-faith takes on why maybe Veilguard *is* more simple than previous games, and why they reneged on the idea that 'your choices matter'.

What I see in Youtube comments and so on are people talking about Bioware 'forgetting their lore' or 'deciding we don't matter', often because of that DAI era 'your choices matter' thing, and some just take the more reasonable view that it's frustrating, while others are acting like it's Bioware deliberately shitting on them in some way but like...

Devs have been very open about how hard they found it to keep that stuff up with the Mass Effect franchise at least that I am aware of, and I assume it's just as difficult to do it in Dragon Age. I think the idea was a fun one that they underestimated the difficulty of with the changing technologies and also just budgets and time tables game developers have to work with.

It isn't because the devs hate or don't know the franchise, or are dismissing fans and players, it's very likely because honestly, trying to fit in a lot more choices as cameo content would have just stretched things entirely too thin.

Just the choices leading to who would be the Warden you meet in DAI tripled their workload for that quest in certain areas- and yet also, it had no bearing on what happened in the quest beyond me feeling less guilty if it was Loghain being left in the Fade because I despise that toxic motherfucker. You still left either him or Hawke in it. It was a nice nod to player choice, but not an intrinsic part of game storyline. They could have thrown a dart at a dartboard with different possible wardens, gone with whatever it landed on, and it wouldn't have been as cool for them to announce some choice as canon, but it wouldn't have altered the outcome.

So now- how much work would it be for them to work in some quest where you get to see your Hawke if you spared them there, or one of the three Wardens if you didn't? Getting the voice actors back, and everything, on top of all the code or writing switcheroos?

I think they sadly overhyped the idea with DAI, before realizing they just could NOT keep it up on what is, to EA, a niche series with niche fans. Yeah it's a AAA game, but EA had to be convinced to let it ride as a single player RPG to begin with, because they'd been wanting the 'future' of multiplayer and online services. It isn't a game EA is counting on to keep their lights on, and certainly EA isn't going to hesitate to shut down Bioware and toss the DA IP into a closet forever if this game doesn't give enough profit margin.

Since I still like the game and franchise, that'd make me sad, but this is not me saying people who don't want it should buy it, or people who don't like it need to like it. But the enemy if there even IS one, when it comes to scaling back on ideal planning is the capitalism and the crunch, is not the developers who worked personally on the game and tried to incorporate things they definitely did love about previous DA games into it.

And the changes weren't made out of ignorance, much less malice. They're just... changes, and not signs that someone up there hates or scorns us or didn't do any homework before making the game.

And I think it's the kind of changes that fans of any franchise have to get used to happening, because they do happen in pretty much every franchise I know of, and in most of the ones I know of some people are constantly exploding about the changes in exactly the same ways. Treating whatever's disliked as if it's some manner of deliberate attack being made at worst, or still a bit meh, claiming that the people involved never loved the source material, never cared about the setting. (Which is true sometimes some showrunners outright say it! But not all the time, and there is no actual sign of this being a problem with any Dragon Age game to date.)

For personal mental health's sake, and society's sake, and also if we even want some franchises to keep being franchises outside of fanfiction- I think it's a peace we have to all make with any media franchise we love that's going to last longer than a couple of years, that it is going to change, and not all the ideas and ideals whether story or especially if based in the technology or amount of work needed to pull them off will stick.

We're not going to like all the chapters the same way. We might even really dislike some chapters. And maybe we'll decide we don't even want to give certain chapters a chance because the vibe or early critiques of it are off- but it's something to maybe do without seeing it all as some kind of personal attack or personal affront, or claiming the people who worked on it were ignorant or didn't love it.

[expended-sleeper]

Summerfest Day 2: The Final Words of the Urshilaku

@tes-summer-fest // Prompt: Storms

You want to hear how the world ended? Come, listen to the dying words of a dying people. Our task was always to keep the lore, among those who lived in the ash: our words united tribes that had little else in common. The Nerevarine, too, was meant to bring us together. How foolish we were! How gravely we misread the signs! Nibani Maesa is dead! Yes, I speak of our Farseer that set the cursed outlander down the path of Seven Trials. Do not judge us too harshly, young one. Prophecies can be misread.

We are all united, now, Velothi and city elves—we choke on the same ash. We all fear the Blight and fall together under its crimson winds. Legend says that the Sharmat promised mercy for his own kind, but Akulakhan's breath knows no distinction between n'wah and Resdayn's true children. Perhaps it is simply that Voryn Dagoth recognizes no kin, any longer. Perhaps there is no such thing as mercy, when you wield such godly powers. The false Tribunal certainly knew nothing of restraint.

Not much time, left. A storm is coming.

What happened to the rest of the tribe, you ask? Find our burial caverns, if you dare. Sul-Matuul is loyal to his people. He did not allow them to change, as many have. The winds took countless lives. All of our oldest, and wisest. The Urshilaku will not end up like so many of the city folk we saw stumbling towards the Mountain, their faces already cratering, their noses and mouths slipping inward—we will not join the cursed dream of the Sharmat!

Remember, young one, that there is always a choice. Sul-Matuul and his warriors brought peace to the last remnants of the true Velothi. I hope to join them soon, if you will help me. The Sharmat cannot touch us in our ancestral sleep. Not yet.

But enough about that. You want to hear how the world ended, yes? I will tell you: it was a matter of friendship.

Hold back your questions, and listen! The Nerevarine disguised herself as a pilgrim of the false gods. She went to the soul-built gate, that ancient barrier between the forces of the Enemy and the rest of Resdayn. So easy to judge, now. Shall I curse the name of Vivec's order, the Buoyant Armigers, for their lack of vigilance? We were all so blind.

The false pilgrim was let through, just as a messenger arrived from the city of Ald'Ruhn.

The false god Vivec, found dead! At any other time, this would have been cause for celebration among Velothi's people. Not so with the Nerevarine on the wrong side of the Ghostgate, with the cursed tools of the Dwemer in her grasp.

None of the Farseers ever imagined the Nerevarine might find common ground with the Sharmat. Yes, yes, call us fools. We have all been brought as low as the kwama foraging for scum.

You want to know why we are bound for death? They were friends. Voryn Dagoth, and Indoril Nerevar—they were friends! But now you turn away from me, in bitterness. That isn't what you wanted to hear, is it? You cannot accept that friendship doomed the world?

How can you deny it, when storms of magic are now spreading across Resdayn to turn us all into loyal monsters? Akulakhan walks, n'wah! The island is crumbling under the feet of a machine god, and yet you look on me with doubt.

Let me see that coin, yes. Your Imperial Septim. Soon there be no Empire, but no matter. You see, everything under the stars has two sides. Even something like friendship contains sinister depths in its most dire implications.

Would you die for your friends? Yes, many would. Would you kill for them? This is another treasured mark of loyalty.

Lord Dagoth died for his friend, more than once. The chains of friendship bound these two souls together. At the most critical moment, at the apex of their destiny, the Nerevarine found themselves unable to break these chains. Anyone can boast of their resistance to evil. Of course, evil is easy to resist when you can recognize it.

The Sharmat wrapped his gift of corruption in a shroud of love. Lord Nerevar wanted his friend back. He wanted it too much. Be careful with that scorn in your expression, outlander. The Nerevarine chose falsely, yes—but can any of us fathom the difficulty of the choice? You can stand here and claim you would have gladly slain your friend to save the world. Perhaps you have a stout heart, and you speak truly.

As for me...b'vek, I don't know. Your Empire's faithful speak of absolute virtues and certain sins. The people of Resdayn find ourselves engulfed in shades of gray, as always. Perhaps the next incarnation will know better than to trust the devil's words. Neither you or I will live to see such a day.

Yes, I see the signs of corruption in your face. The Sharmat and his minions would say you have been divinely blessed by Akulakhan. I say you are doomed.

Don't weep, now. This world is not ours to mourn, or to save. Lady Azura is ever watchful. My heart is at peace. Lord Nerevar will return again, you see? I hope he will be wiser, and that his heart will be made of stone. We will not survive his mistakes. Nonetheless, he has learned from them. Many will die before Nerevar faces his old friend again.

What are you babbling about, now? Stop with that drivel about Akatosh and Mara. Get up off your knees. In this land, we pray with our feet on the ground. Rub some ash on your hands, n'wah, and speak to Azura with me.

I pray that Nerevar will face his old companion once again, and that he will not turn his back to the devil. I pray that he will bury Voryn Dagoth deep enough, next time.

Outlander, wait! One last prayer, before you plunge your dagger into my heart. I find myself as weak as the Nerevarine, in the end.

Take my hand, n'wah, and make certain your aim is true. Hear the final words of the Urshilaku. Azura curse you, if you ever write them down.

I pray for the death of friendship.

[skyeventide]

my trsb fic has so many notes to the text that they didn’t fit within the ao3 notes’ section character limit lmao, so here is the lengthier version of it. you can consider it a teaser I guess? but either way, I need some place to store these and link them back in the fic.

contents here, cut for length

on the matter of the mother of Gil-Galad

Celebrimbor’s names

shibbolething all over Thauron’s name

actual quotes and canon

On the matter of the mother of Gil-Galad

Meril-i-Turinqi is a Book of Lost Tales character, lady of Tol Eressea, kin of In(g)we but also similar to the Solosimpi, which is to say the Teleri.

The character of "Meril" on the other hand, is a proto-Amarie, Finrod's love interest. In the early draft of Meril's appearance, Finrod is married and is father of Gil-Galad: this draft is obviously discarded and Finrod becomes childless, while Meril transforms into Amarie, who does not join the exile. Gil-Galad is instead transferred to Orodreth, which iirc is Tolkien's last word on the matter (I don't count the Fingon thing as even canon-adjacent, ChrisT was quite clear in admitting the mistake). Now I recall Orodreth is said to be married to a Sinda; why did I discard that? Cause I initally forgot it. Rip to me and Orodreth.

However, what I had was: a proto-Amarie, who is a Vanya, and a BoLT character who is of the family of Ingwe (so a Vanya), but also like the Teleri (so of the third clan, even though not a Sinda). And so Meril-proto-Amarie became Meril-i-Turinqi, wife of Orodreth.

The full headcanon on Meril here would have her as daughter of a Vanya who is kin of Ingwe and of Telerin nobility (or royalty? they're all big on intermarrying between royal families), which fulfills both sides of the coin and also stays true to the statement that Elenwe is the sole full-Vanya to join the exile (I'm gonna assume this excludes any non-royalty followers). Now regarding the parentage of Orodreth, he is here son of Angrod, as I feel that is a better option in almost all respects. This poses some issues with regard to age, as I recall Orodreth-son-of-Angrod and Idril as being named the only two non-adults to do the journey to ME (again... this surely excludes any non-royalty youngsters, but nonetheless). Obviously these issues grow even further if one also includes the matter of Celebrimbor being Aman-born to a wife who doesn't follow Curufin (and therefore the matter of his age at the time of exile), but reconciling these versions is borderline impossible with how the origins of Celebrimbor keep changing throughout the conception of the legendarium.

Long story short, I up the age of Orodreth to be at least old enough to speak softly with Finarfin (here his grandfather) during the flight of the Noldor, but I have him already married though childless. Finduilas is born early into the exile and Gil-Galad is her younger brother.

Meril returns to Aman at the end of the First Age and rules Tol Eressea for the exiles who are stuck there until the Ban is fully lifted.

Celebrimbor's names

FN = father-name, MN = mother-name

I do not claim to have come up with "Tyelperinquar is an epesse", that headcanon, which nonetheless I'm sure happened separately for other people, is one I first read in a fic by Tyelperintal on AO3. That of course means that I could no longer go with the FN Curufinwe MN Tyelperinquar option, and needed another mother-name, which I also borrowed from the same story, and went for Ilvanon, "the perfect". It's pretty, and also speaks of a mix of high expectations and love.

What in this story made me accept the epesse headcanon is the matter of the origin of "T(y)elperinquar" as a name. Vinyar Tengwar (and most recently also NoME) explains how "silver fist" is a name common among the Teleri, famous for their ability to smith silver even among the Noldor, and it is also mentioned how other similar names, such as Tegilbor "calligrapher", are given to people based on their skill. This, however, directly contradicts the fact that elves don't give the same name to more than one person. That statement is problematic in itself (impossible that all elves across all time are aware of all names that ever have been used -- and also of course there's the usual royalty exceptions, that however may well be exceptions because they are royalty), but if it is a common name among the Teleri and we are to keep the duplicate names lore in mind... my only solution is that it's a coveted epesse, given to the very skilled.

Celebrimbor picks it as his chosen and preferred name over FN, already shared by two people and preferred as chosen name by his father, and the potential arrogance of picking his MN with its meaning.

This still led me to problems of both spelling and language choices.

As far as spelling goes, there's several variations. I'm marking with * the one that is not canonically attested, but can be inferred.

Pure Telerin: Telperimpar

Quenya-Telerin compound that maintains the Telerin spelling of silver: Telperinquar

As above, but shortened: Telpinquar

Pure Quenya: *Tyelperinquar

Pure Quenya, shortened: Tyelpinquar

I use all these except the last one at various stages: I decided (though I go back and forth on this) that his household might have used pure Quenya, and his mother sticks to it; the person in Tirion panicks and uses the shortened version Telpinquar, which together with Telperinquar (Telerin spelling maintained) was more common among the Noldor. The Tirion passage exemplifies the uses and applications of these names, how they were given and altered.

This leads me to problems of language and POV, Celebrimbor vs Tyelperinquar. His mother, in her POV, always uses the latter, but Celebrimbor himself uses the former. The true problem here was adapting my feeling that Celebrimbor would be far more used to thinking of himself as Celebrimbor (as opposed to the Quenya name) vs Tolkien's statement that elves do not use names in another language when speaking in X language. This doesn't stay wholly true through the legendarium and the texts, so it's something I've decided to partially ignore when it comes to POV, though I tend to stick to it in first person dialogue. Something that again I try to tackle in the text itself -- when Galadriel tells Celebrimbor which language to speak and which name to use for her.

I am not entirely satisfied with all my choices here and I might revisit them in the future, but for the moment, here we go.

Shibbolething all over Thauron's name

Another language and spelling headache. As I encountered the problem of Sauron, I encountered that of the spelling of his name: the eternal TH/S issue. Were I to have Celebrimbor's mother, and Celebrimbor himself, stick to the Shibboleth? I initially attempted to circumvent this by using Gorthaur, but the issue described just above, about mixing languages, yet again bit me in the ass.

Of course it comes down to characterisation: would Mrs Curufin stick to the Shibboleth, and would Celebrimbor? The matter with Celebrimbor was that I don't believe he spoke Quenya with any real frequency after the Nargothrond business, not as a choice but rather due to circumstances and preferences of those around him. With Ercasse, the conflict is part of the character, and that sadly meant that the TH/S choice became less of a personal choice and more of a political one, as usual.

That got me thinking about the circumstances around her and something interesting came to me: Finarfin spoke Quenya with the Shibboleth, because of the Teleri. And in the Darkening he becomes king in Tirion, and also has to adjust things with the Teleri -- not an easy task, imo, when he turns back only after the pronunciation of the Doom, and not just after the kinslaying occurred. Additionally, the Vanyar spoke preserving TH. Additionally x2, by the Fourth Age, Exilic Quenya (which uses S) is associated with those who rebelled and returned to Aman -- meanwhile any Sindar preserved TH naturally, as it's a sound that never went out of use in Sindarin.

So I chose to take these things and make something of it. If Finarfin maintains TH to keep the Telerin influence; if the Noldor who remain in Aman decide to step closer to the Vanyar in an anti-rebellion reactionary manner and to conform to the speech of the king; if Exilic Quenya gains the lower status of language of the exiles; and considering the canon fact that in later ages the elves are more likely to preserve language rather than change it -- what are our chances that Shibbolething gains opposite connotations as time passes? My conclusion was high chances. So I decided to implement it.

And so Ercasse doesn't have to think about her personal allegiances anymore and has a path built in for herself in these social changes. And Sauron is Thauron. (Unless Galadriel is talking: she doesn't Shibboleth, and uses “Sauron” and “Sindarin”.)

Quotes and canon

Many things I wrote are based on canon snippets. Here I tried to collect them.

On Celebrimbor and the mention of the bath of flames in his speech. It isn't, in fact, a corny lineage reference, but rather a metaphysical or pseudo-physical concept of purification from the Lost Tales:

Yet now the prayers of [their parents] came even to Manwe [the highest Valar], and the Gods had mercy on their unhappy fate, so that those twain Turin and Nienori entered into ... the bath of flame... and so were all their sorrows and stains washed away, and they dwelt as shining Valar among the blessed ones, and now the love of that brother and sister is very fair;

On the naming of Mithril (appears in the upcoming Nature of Middle Earth, as well as already published in Vinyar Tengwar):

[Celebrimbor] was a great silver-smith, and went to Eregion attracted by the rumours of the marvellous metal found in Moria, Moria-silver, to which he gave the name mithril.

On Celebrimbor's ambition and assorted choices, from Letter 131: 

In the first we see a sort of second fall or at least ‘error’ of the Elves. There was nothing wrong essentially in their lingering against counsel, still sadly with the mortal lands of their old heroic deeds. But they wanted to have their cake without eating it. They wanted the peace and bliss and perfect memory of ‘The West’, and yet to remain on the ordinary earth where their prestige as the highest people, above wild Elves, dwarves, and Men, was greater than at the bottom of the hierarchy of Valinor. They thus became obsessed with 'fading’, the mode in which the changes of time (the law of the world under the sun) was perceived by them. They became sad, and their art (shall we say) antiquarian, and their efforts all really a kind of embalming – even though they also retained the old motive of their kind, the adornment of earth, and the healing of its hurts. […] But many of me Elves listened to Sauron. He was still fair in that early time, and his motives and those of the Elves seemed to go partly together: the healing of the desolate lands. Sauron found their weak point in suggesting that, helping one another, they could make Western Middle-earth as beautiful as Valinor. It was really a veiled attack on the gods, an incitement to try and make a separate independent paradise.

Legolas and Aragorn and my choice to use the word love:

"[...]Yet whatever is still to do, I hope to have a part in it, for the honour of the folk of the Lonely Mountain." "And I for the folk of the Great Wood," said Legolas, "and for the love of the Lord of the White Tree [Aragorn]."

Celebrimbor and the Elessar. It must be noted that this Celebrimbor is not Celebrimbor son of Curufin, but I still liked the tidbit of lore. From there my choice to have three different Elessar stones, one made by Feanor, one by Enerdhil of Gondolin, one by Celebrimbor (in the fic redressed to Celebrimbor son of Curufin, and without the romantic love for Galadriel):

But he did not say to Galadriel that he himself was of Gondolin long ago. Therefore he took thought, and began a long delicate labour, and so for Galadriel he made the greatest of his works (save the Three Rings only).And it is said that more subtle and clear was the green gem that he made than that of Enerdhil, but yet its light had less power. For whereas that of Enerdhil was lit by the Sun in its youth, already many years had passed ere Celebrimbor began his work, and nowhere in Middle-earth was the light as clear as it had been, for though Morgoth had been thrust out into the Void and could not enter again, his far shadow lay upon it.Radiant nonetheless was the Elessar of Celebrimbor; and he set it within a great brooch of silver in the likeness of an eagle rising upon outspread wings.

On the vale and the stream where Formenos is located, I utilised this passage from Lost Tales:

[...] here the entire people of the Noldoli are ordered to leave Kor for the rugged dale northwards where the stream Híri plunged underground, and the command to do so seems to have been less a punishment meted out to them by Manwe than a pre-caution and a safeguard. In connection with the place of the banishment of the Noldoli, here called Sirnúmen ('Western Stream') [...]

Relevant LotR quotes about the Eregion passages, used for soil description extrapolations and other elements:

Suddenly Gimli, who had pressed on ahead, called back to them. He was standing on a knoll and pointing to the right. Hurrying up they saw below them a deep and narrow channel. It was empty and silent, and hardly a trickle of water flowed among the brown and redstained stones of its bed; but on the near side there was a path, much broken and decayed, that wound its way among the ruined walls and paving-stones of an ancient highroad. ‘Ah! Here it is at last!’ said Gandalf. ‘This is where the stream ran: Sirannon, the Gate-stream, they used to call it. But what has happened to the water, I cannot guess; it used to be swift and noisy. Come! We must hurry on. We are late.’ [...] "...there is a wholesome air about Hollin. Much evil must befall a country before it wholly forgets the elves, if once they dwelt there." "That is true", said Legolas. "But the Elves of this land were of a race strange to us of the silvan folk, and the trees and the grass do not now remember them: Only I hear the stones lament them: deep they delved us, fair they wrought us, high they builded us; but they are gone. They are gone. They sought the Havens long ago."

More TBA if anything comes to mind.

[doberbutts]

My parents are in their mid to late 40s who are big media geeks, took me to every LotR film premiere when I was a little tot etc. Not "puritan nerds", but somewhat concerned with faithful adaptions of books and comics (LOVED the Sandman despite having a few questions about how certain stories were changed). They're watching the rings of power as it comes out, and while they don't think it's AMAZING, they also don't think it's bad at all either and are curious to see how the story plays out before they pass any judgment on it. tl;dr show is fine to anyone other than raging gatekeepers and racists lol

I'm seeing a lot of Tolkien scholars that happen to also be people of color saying they're "cautiously optimistic" as it's really too early to tell, and that's about my view on it too. Nothing so terrible. Too early to tell really anything else. It's alright so far. There's some valid problems with it (stunt actors shouldn't be getting hurt, yes some of the lore is changed) and some things that I think would be difficult to improve (outside of telling the folks putting on offensive accents to just speak normally or to use a different accent- this would work seamlessly in the US because Americans largely can't tell the difference between the various UK accents anyway lmao) but I don't think any one work is without its flaws and tbf the PJ movies had their fair share as well.

I'm not seeing "bad costuming" - it looks somewhat lower budget than the LOTR films maybe which is a shame considering the higher production costs but it doesn't look objectively bad. The cast isn't going to look anything like the movies sorry Amazon does not own the rights to anything New Line Cinema put out so Elrond and Galadriel were never going to look like Weaving or Blanchett. I wish the male elves had longer hair but, again, it is technically "long" (except Finrod what did they do to you) (like it looks fine I just wish it was longer) (and our black elf Arondir has a buzz cut which I'm sad about bc there is so much POTENTIAL) and some do have longer hair like what we've come to expect. The CGI seems better than the Hobbit but it still doesn't come anywhere close to the practical effects of LOTR but I'm also a huge practical fanboy so there's that bias to consider. The stage seemed to be nicely set in the first episode and unfortunately due to the storm and my basement flooding and now a dog show in the morning I don't have time to watch the second but...

Yeah. I think "cautiously optimistic" is a good way of putting it.

[faejilly]

ohhhhh can i ask after the wing!fic (which is one of my FAV TROPES EVER)? what it's going to be/any lore you'd like to share?

SO YES

When trying to write magical wing-fic about people who are capable of going incognito, I had to decide how they’d hide them. (And how Clary could grow up without hers, because hiding a magical Shadow World would be entirely impossible if you had wings.)

I have this theory that part of the reason the Nephilim raise their children so quickly is that, when they’re young, full of angelic power and blood that they can’t yet control, they are especially tempting to demons, easier to sense (and obviously also easier to kill, if they’re caught). For all the Nephilim are terrible to their children, the show did a good job of showing that they love them, so they have to believe that raising generation after generation of child soldiers is necessary.

(This is emphasized by Maryse’s line in 3b, about how she raised her children to survive. She has no illusions now that she did it badly, but the only way she could have done what she did in the first place is if she truly believed they needed to be raised that way.)

So. Nephilim children are full of a wild, almost feral magic. Angels are eldritch, beyond comprehension, are so much more and other that it’s not easy to balance that and being human. Nephilim have to be trained, physically/mentally/emotionally to have control so that they can get that first rune as young as possible, because it is that enkeli rune that shapes their angelic heritage enough that they can survive it without losing themselves to it.

(This is also part of why I will never be on Team Immortal Husbands in terms of what I write; it’s important to me that Alec & Magnus choose to be human as much as possible rather than something other. I feel like that’s rather the whole point of Alec’s arc, that he truly believes he is not, cannot be better than the Down Worlders, that he’s forcing himself to admit that just because he defends Mundanes it doesn’t mean they’re lesser, just... different. Otherwise humans turn into pets rather than people, and how much easier is it then to believe Down Worlders are pets gone feral, wild animals that have to be put down? Each piece lends itself to each next one, enforcing the idea of Nephilim Superiority, when they’re still supposed to be human. They’re supposed to be protectors, not supremacists, that’s where the Clave goes wrong, where Valentine went wrong, that’s what he cannot ever let himself be.)

And that moment when they get their first rune is also when their wings manifest, that moment when they claim their power and their heritage, is the moment that they, idk, corral it to fit within their human frames and human desires. That is the moment that they become Shadowhunters, rather than demon prey.

That is ALSO why deruning is such a severe punishment, why it usually ends in death. It’s not just that they’re tempting prey for demons, (though that is how most of them die), it’s that they can no longer control themselves, their blood is as much of an enemy to them as the demons who crave it, without the power of the runes to balance it out.

Clary obviously doesn’t have an enkeli rune, and equally obviously hasn’t been eaten by demons or exploded from uncontrolled angelic magic despite her extra-potent blood, which means something else must have been done to suppress her power.

Not just that her memories are pulled out, the actual magic of her heritage has to have somehow been hidden away from her as well as everyone else.

And it can’t just be a glamour that someone else is maintaining, because the show’s pretty clear that stuff that’s glamoured is still there.

Though I have thoughts on that too! Because some warlock’s have wings or tails or horns or things that stick out and would hit people so their glamours couldn’t just be a visual illusion, they had to somehow... hide.

(SIDE REC: @ralfstrashcan��s lovely little bit of fic & meta about how the fuck does Alec always pull his bow & arrows out of nowhere. Possible magic options that aren’t glamours!)

Sometimes, glamours are just visual illusions. (See Alec’s quiver in the gifs in that meta post above.) Presumably, Magnus’ glamour over his eyes is just an illusion, because otherwise all that flickering and changing of his vision between normal eyes and cat eyes would give him a headache. :D

Cat’s glamour over her skin and hair is probably just a visual illusion as well, because it’s just color, but if you think Lorenzo Rey would let someone who brushed up against his arm feel scales if he didn’t want them to? Crazy-talk. He’s got to be able to hide the texture as well.

(I think Seelies can only cast the sort of glamours that are visual illusion, because anything else would be lying about what’s really there, and Seelies can’t lie. But that’s a whole separate post about fae and elves and folklore, so.)

Even if we assume there’s a second level of glamour which makes the thing not entirely there physically, it seems clear that it’s still kind of there to the person, that there’s some intangible feedback that must still happen, because otherwise it’s like disappearing body parts and that’s weird? And also it would need a different word than glamour, like, wtf, that’d be a dramatic difference.

SO, Nephilim can “glamour” their wings so they’re not there there, but they still get some physical/emotional feedback themselves, because they’re still winged people, their wings are part of their angelic heritage, they wouldn’t just deny them.

But if Clary knew she had weird powers and wings, again, the whole hiding from the Shadow World plan wouldn’t work.

So she’s got to be under like, a full-blown curse suppressing her everything. (A curse that was developed by warlocks for those few exiled Nephilim who managed to have the resources to pay for a way to survive? The way Max Trueblood’s still alive out there, so some day I can write a reunion between Maryse and her older brother.)

ANYWAYS

I forgot where I was going with all that, whoops.

TL;DR: Wings are neat, magic is weird, Nephilim are fucked up but it’s more interesting if there are reasons.

[kyogre-blue]

Insanely long, sorry to any fool caught up in it. 

List of Inazuma lore to look into later, since there’s so much new stuff and I can’t keep track. 

Viewpoints: 

Ritou: “Legend has it that hundreds of years ago, Lord Hiiragi Hiroshi of the Kanjou Commission miraculously built a prosperous trade center from a deserted island.” 

(This dude came up elsewhere too.) 

Tenryou, Inazuma City: “Under the eternal and silent gaze of Her Highness the Ogosho Shogun, the people living in the hustle and bustle of the city will finally be free from the worries of obsession, and move to a paradise where they no longer need to chase and compete for their aspirations.” 

(This Ogosho title is interesting. Also, note the “eternity”/euthymia goal that Yoimiya touched upon in her chapter 1.) 

Tatara Islands, Kannazuka: “The magnificent Blast Furnace here is used to produce a steady stream of high-quality Jade Steel for Inazuma. Recently, however, due to the war, the Mikage Furnace that drove the production has been damaged.”

Kujou Encampment: “Legend has it that during a disaster hundreds of years ago, Shigeyori Kujou, a mortal general whom Her Highness valued greatly, built a battlefront fortress in one night and fought valiantly against the forces of darkness.” 

(Another event from the Cataclysm.) 

Nazuchi Beach: “In the ancient language of the Inazuma ancestors, "Nazuchi" means "to be tenderly caressed by the hands of the gods." Ironically, Nazuchi Beach has been ravaged by war since a thousand years ago and has become a place for scavengers and pirates, with few inhabitants.” 

(“Ancient language of Inazuma” huh. This war from thousands of years ago... should bet the Archon Wars, I guess? Or it might be Abyss-related.) 

Yashiori Island, Musoujin Gorge: “According to the legend, the strike that brought and end to the serpent god was slashed right here. In this deep canyon that runs through Yashiori Island, the remnant reverberations of lightning bolts continue to this day, as if the thunder elves are still chattering about the legendary scene that tore through the sky and the earth thousands of years ago.”

(Hang on!! This serpent was killed thousands of years ago?! So then Ba’al wasn’t the one who did it? Or else, is she much older than her reign as Archon?) 

Serpent’s Head: “According to the legend, the giant serpent that once ventured into the deep sea was finally slain on Yashiori Island.”

(Interesting note about the deep sea. When hyping up a kaijuu’s credentials, you’d normally say they came from the deep sea, so this point about the serpent going there should be implying something about the... corruption and old gods lurking there?) 

Most notable part is the serpent killing, island splitting timeline. Is it really like that, or am I misunderstanding? 

--------------

Artifact sets: 

Shimenawa's Reminiscence

Belonged to a human shrine maiden named Kanade, who trained under the Kitsune Saiguu. 

Confirming that Lady Saiguu was a “mighty kitsune.” At the very least, she was not entirely human, perhaps not human at all. 

She had a tobacco pipe that she sometimes knocked people on the head with. 

“Everything in the world is entangled. Hence, illusory visions were born out of concrete reality. The so-called omamori cannot make one's wishes come true at all, but they can make them eternal through this entanglement." (vis a vis eternity and also her memories leaving such a deep impression on the land that Kazari was born.) 

Regarding people affected by Lady Saiguu’s passing: “The Great Tengu went into self-imposed exile, enraged at her own incompetence as the Lady Saiguu's protector, leaving Teruyo behind. Harunosuke left for another country amid the fury of his mourning, while Nagamasa joined the Shogunate to clear the Mikoshi name. As for the man who taught me archery in the sacred forest and patiently listened to my naÏve promise under the scarlet sakura boughs, he will eventually return to me, even if he were to be blinded by splattered blood, or turned into a fierce beast by that dark defilement...” 

Regarding the time while Kanade was at the shrine: During this time, even someone as inhuman as the mighty Yougou Tengu has gotten a daughter. Even that leatherhead Konbumaru has also become one of the Shogun's own Hatamoto, and shall soon marry the daughter of a high-ranking samurai. "Such a lovely kid. Even the great Yougou Tengu, who used to kill all day for fun, had the mother inside her brought out... just a little."

(Based on a later comment, Konbumaru had some kind romantic thing with Kanade?) 

About memories: "No... it means that the person you're missing will be lucky enough to become a part of your memories forever." That's why you have to be strong and must live on for a long, long time. Even if all the people you cherish are gone, as long as you are still alive, The time you spent with them will never perish...

About losing memories, per Lady Saiguu: "Life is full of uncertainty. Love is fleeting, and even lasting memories may be lost. Losing one's memory is no different from losing one's life. It is like death amidst darkness eternal."

Emblem of Severed Fate

About the last member of the Mikoshi oni clan, who became “Douin” Iwakura Doukei. 

"Mother had bared her fangs against the Shogun, who had been kind to her and who had given her a treasured sword. In the end, the only thing that was sent back to the Mikoshi Clan was the tsuba of that blade which she had loved so dearly.

“She would make such contributions as to make an eternal name for the ever-thinning blood of the war-oni. If she was engulfed by the pitch-black tiger-beast of sin itself, then she would tear it apart from the inside.“

“But it was stained black in the end, together with her fiercely beating heart...“

The eldest son (a mortal with oni-blood) met a Yougou Tengu girl, who gave him a new family name, Iwakura. 

Her name was Teruyo. His name was Doukei. 

"Thinking back, I changed your name in hopes that you might escape from the curse of the oni bloodline. With that war, non-human blood grows thinner and thinner. Ah well. We should not covet the happy endings that humans enjoy, after all. But you're different. You are now 'Iwakura.' You are no longer the 'Mikoshi' who shoulders the burden of oni blood."

“In the distant past, when Seirai Island had yet to be shrouded by storm clouds, memories would rise and fall like breaths. In the end, the elegant container that contained thunderstorms and tremors could not be handed over to the one to whom it was promised.”

(What’s this??) 

Doukei once repaired a “seal cage” (an inro, a kind of rigid pouch that hangs from the belt) for a Hatamoto. 

This Hatamoto was skilled with a sword but also learned archery from a Tengu. He was a gambler and also had a “sweet wife.” He was also a gambler. He had “terrifying nightmares, in which he cut off his own head...” 

“With his secret sword technique, Tengu Sweeper, Iwakura Doukei became the Kujou Clan's swordsmanship instructor. He also received the title of "Douin" and founded a successful sword school.” (He is then referred to as “Sir Douin.”)

He was contemporaries with the young Kanjou head, Hiiragi Hiroshi. 

"With your sword, even Ako Domeki of Seirai would be no match..."

(More people for the 500 years ago gang.) 

---------------

Weapon materials:

Coral Branch 

Watatsumi Island is the furthest from Narukami Island in the Inazuman island chain, and its name means "the god of the oceans" in the island's ancient tongue. Legend has it that when the great serpent first arose within the abyssal nation of ever-night, its fluorescent body was covered in myriad-colored coral.

This coral cannot be found anywhere in Teyvat, but was a gift that the great serpent obtained when it broke into the Dark Sea. 

Fleeing into the Dark Sea, the god that had lost everything met the abandoned people who had nothing within the ocean depths. Thus it elected to remain and become their "Orobashi no Mikoto," their "Watatsumi Omikami."

It is said that the great snake god once broke off all the coral branches on its body to give light to the children who were curled up in the darkness. They also say that it used these coral branches to create a huge ladder to allow those children to once again reach the surface and see the light of day.

And it was also because the serpent god now had people who worshiped it that it stayed in the world it should have long fled, breaking off the coral branches that adorned its body, treading upon land where it should not have, and facing a foe it could never hope to match — till at last, its divine form was sundered along with the mountains, its ichor turned into plasma, and its will and power became a curse that could never be extinguished: Tatarigami.

Lots of interesting points coming together here. The Tatarigami was previously the deity of Watatsumi “Orobashi no Mikoto.” Probably, the old tensions between Narukami and Sangonomiya that Ayaka mentioned are because the Electro Archon (based on Narukami) killed the Tatarigami. 

The Watatsumi gained power from the “Dark Sea” (probably the Abyss, or connected to it), but it willingly gave away that power for the sake of “abandoned people” in the ocean’s depths. This is probably Kokomi’s ancestors. 

Narukami tomoe 

Ba’al insights: 

In the past, the ancients would climb the peak now known as Mt. Yougou and bend wood that had been charred by lightning into a hook to offer as an effigy unto the thundering force that lit up the skies and shook the earth. This shape would eventually become the "Electro Mitsudomoe" symbol, symbolizing the favor, wisdom, and might of Electro, and also the people who represent these values.

In the monster-filled tales of the ancient past, those who were deeply trusted by the Shogun would bear talismans with this hooked design on their person, and just as the word "commission" means to "joyfully serve" in the old tongue, those who received her favor would return it with love and loyalty. Yet, after a certain point in time, nothing would be as it was before.

All demons who wander in the wilderness or live amongst mortals will be attracted by the sight of the Almighty Narukami Ogosho, represented by the Electro Mitsudomoe. Though their lives may be longer than any creature, they will at last come to their end. If those with limited lifespans hanker after eternity, then they can only pray that "Eternity" remembers them. And she did indeed answer their prayers, remembering them all, friend and foe alike, in her heart. No matter whether it was the demon owls who resided amidst the fog and ripped through the skies, the bake-danuki who dared to trespass her imperial gardens, or that female oni, lovely as the moon and mighty in battle, yet who would eventually come to blows with her... Whether it was the tengu who soared on dark wings or the Kitsune Saiguu who once walked by her side, but who eventually disappeared forever... These countless tales have come to rest within her heart, and someday, they will surely shine again in the eternal paradise of her dreams.

The treasure of the lord of thunder is her majesty, and that majesty is embodied in her valor and wrath. Her wrath comes from the love that persists in her heart, and her valor supports that anger. Thus, whomsoever should block the path towards eternity or lay a finger on Inazuma's people shall become her foe. They say that there were four great spirits, three divine foxes, and two great swords — but that the symbol of Her Excellency, the Almighty Narukami Ogosho, could only be a single strike, unsurpassed and brilliant as a meteor.

Oni mask

Holy shit, the rarest mask had like five paragraphs of lore alone. 

There was an oni named Torachiyo, who would eventually betray the Shogun and revolt, becoming shorn of an arm and a horn in the battle before fleeing and slaying itself in a fit of furious madness. He once shattered the Shogun’s naginata with a single bite.

The oni nursemaids tell is differently: "He was once a beloved lieutenant of the Shogun, and he followed her into the dark abyssal realms to repel the defiled ones, winning renown for the oni, whose blood thinned with each passing day.”

“Chiyo, a warrior of the oni tribe with the Electro Mitsudomoe emblem emblazoned on her back, was once swallowed whole by a beast from beyond this world that had a tiger's body and a serpent's tail while holding back the forces of darkness. At last, she tore the creature's innards apart from within, breaking free.”

OG Torachiyo was actually female: “This is the origin of the phrase "Chiyo the Tiger-Bite," and would be changed over many years to "Torachiyo."”

“But within the belly of the beast, she was stained by a deep sin and saw her comrades ripped to shreds by those blood-red teeth. Steeped in darkness as far as the eye could see, she would eventually draw her sword upon the Almighty Narukami Ogosho.” 

So this is Iwakura Doukei’s mother. She lost her sanity due to corruption from the Abyss. 

“Or perhaps she even met the oni-masked, sword-bearing doll near the corpse of the giant serpent, and there ended her life's journey.” (It’s Maguu Kenki! It’s older than 500 years.) 

“Few among those who fought against the abyss in those days were spared pitch-dark dreams. Those who slew monsters and then became them were hardly the minority. The border between worlds grows fragile, and corruption of this kind is perhaps not merely monodirectional.” 

---------

Weapons: 

Mistsplitter Reforged

"Arataki of the Front Gate, Iwakura the Successor, Kitain the Serpent, Takamine the Mistsplitter." 

Takamine was the user of this sword. 

He also learned archery from the Yougou Tengu, and passed that knowledge on to a person he loved. At the end of his life, he assumed the position of one of the Shogun's yoriki and fought against a dark army.

"Asase, our promise... No, say rather our great bet. I will not lose it, not for the world!"

The sword broke into a thousand pieces as he fought this battle. 

The yet unreleased bow Thundering Pulse also belonged to this guy. It confirms that Konbumaru is also his name. He was taken as a servant of the Tengu after a bet and learned archery from them then. 

This means he is the guy Iwakura Doukei mentions in the Emblem artifact set. This would also make him Kanade’s love interest. I suppose Asase would be her family name. 

(Also, Thundering Pulse’s last lines are brutal. Mistsplitter mentions how he clung to the wager to return, clutching at his broken sword’s hilt... “The lone returnee who came stumbling back from the abyss finally met the shrine maiden again, though by now she could no longer be called young. Dull eyes stained with dried blood and tears regained their radiance, but were pierced through by a barbed arrow glowing with power.” Bullshit!!! You can’t do this to me!) 

[fracturedmoonlight]

Lost Hood Pictures - Dragon Age II

So I like to model my hoods after beloved video games that I’ve beaten but want to either relive the magic with more lore or keep going where the game ends. Unfortunately this particular ‘hood based on Dragon Age II went kaboom...but I discovered I had some pictures. I’m also very proud of myself for these pictures...I can actually make nice ones when I try. I even have the text to go with them!

So here we go with the first one: Fenris’ (supposed) Origin.

Danarius has always favored Leto. Even in what elves consider the boy to be in rebellious teenage years, he's well trained and does what he is told and there is not much more one could ask of a slave. However, he could be better. One could always be better. There are magisters out there as powerful if not more so than Danarius and though the boy is strong, he could be stronger. And he still has flaws, like family ties.

But that would take time and effort. Things that Danarius has no patience for. That's why he does love magic so much, it fixes all of those little problems. This one is no different. This is nothing a little blood magic won't fix. Blood magic and threats. His mother and little sisters are Leto's weak spots. The one time he ever falters is when they could come to harm. Being empowered, he could protect them better too. Every slave has a sliver of rebellion tucked away, Danarius knows this and preys on it.

Of course he's such a grand magister it work's perfectly. He's not sure what he's done to the boy yet, a new technique he dug out of an old book, but he can feel the Lyrium now burned into the elf's skin singing to his mage's senses. A triumphant laugh at the Maker, the Templars, the Chantry and all others who look down on magic. Look what great things it can do.

Hadriana approves of the change. He was cute before, but now he's cute and useful in more ways than ever. What mage doesn't love a living source of lyrium? Even better that he doesn't remember a thing of his life prior. A perfect blank slate. Hadriana will take delight in making his life hell all over again.

His new powers are impressive, surpassing what Danarius had initially thought. He's made himself the perfect dog to put on a chain be it for protection, fuel, or whatever else the magister desires. In fact, he only cares what it is Danarus desires, no longer caring about those he called family. Easier to get rid of the both of them then.

Now he has the perfect being. One that does what it is told, when it is told. One that will kill on command and not be stopped until it was already too late. The perfect wolf to hunt down Danarius' prey and tear it apart. Hm, instead of Leto he was going to call him Fenris now. It was much more fitting.

[offtopicoverload]

alright, i was on the fence about the oc weekend idea, but fuck it i have a bunch of shit made why not? block “oc weekend” tag if you don’t care cuz same

so have some cleo (and nia) headcanons to kick whatever the fuck this is gonna be off

super long cuz i have a serious problem

So her starting skills were bow, charisma, and wildlife, then woods lore, then blade, medicine, deception, brawling, seduction

She made some money hunting, which is where the bow and animal skills came from

With being an elf, her and Kade were orphaned together in a massacre and taken in by a local farmer

Absolutely got into so much trouble, usually Cleo getting a bad idea and dragging Kade along, but could always talk her way out of it, hence the charisma

MC canonically has relationship experience, right? I think she had a short term partner, maybe some flings with travelers or something, but never really got invested in relationships, just wasn’t her thing

Especially in RIverbend, where everyone knows everyone and it’s awkward if you break up

She’s pretty similar to canon MC, wild and goofy and somewhat reckless

But also really determined and caring and sweet when she needs to be

I adore her if you can’t tell

The first time she saw Nia, totally tongue-tied and a flustered mess, she’s smooth when it’s a joke but incapable of any coherent words when it turns real

She’s pretty awkward, definitely stiff at first, but slowly loosens up as she gets closer to Nia, letting her goofy side show

She for sure pines and gets made fun of for it by Kade, then Mal and Imtura every time she gets flustered 

And Threep likes to rub it in too, occasionally threatening to say something unless he gets snacks he does the same to Nia askjksdf

I’m also in love with the idea of Mal and Imtura playing matchmaker and constantly trying to set them up in situations where they have to be close, and the two of them losing their minds when Cleo and Nia get stuck in that pit

The night at the cabin in the Deadwood was the first moment Cleo realised that there could be something real there, like it just never clicked until Nia was straight up telling her she liked her

From then on things definitely change, and Cleo starts being a lot softer, like at the masquerade and stuff

But the argument in the cabin always sticks out in her mind, she defended Nia’s right to spend her life as she chooses, but she doesn’t necessarily like it

She always tries to find work arounds for Nia using her light, like using her own before Nia can get the chance

She for sure nearly decked the High Priest, just for all his bullshit, and was very happy to get that tracking orb from him to make sure they would be safe she had some plans already

So I don’t accept MC being cool after Nia straight up gets yanked into the Shadow Realm, Cleo absolutely was about to jump in after her until Imtura grabbed her and jerked her back like “what the fuck are you doing”

Cleo was about to snap the entire time they were working their way through the Shadow Realm, definitely wrecked Vonstratz on Nia’s behalf

I also don’t accept the “single tear” line when MC fucking KILLS Nia, Cleo would be bawling her eyes out and refusing to let go of her when she dies

There not being an ily felt kinda weird to me, and cuz Cleo’s a sap, I feel like she’d either say it before stabbing Nia or during the diamond scene where they’re looking out at Whiterun

In the first instance, it’s more for her piece of mind, that Nia knows what her sacrifice means

When Nia comes back, Cleo whispers it a million times into her shoulder as she hugs her, until she sounds like a broken record

For the second one, it’d be a bit spur of the moment, she’d just be looking in Nia’s eyes as the words spill out, but she wouldn’t even care cuz it felt so right

And now I’m going to ignore book 2 and make up my own shit

So immediately after, Cleo and Kade go back to Riverbend to pack up their lives there, Kade in order to stay in Whiterun cuz King Arlan made him a librarian or something, idk but he’s in Whiterun at the royal library and archives

Cleo ends up running a few odd jobs out of Whiterun for a while, helping Mal out quite a bit as Nia ends up with a lot of responsibilities at the temple after the High Priest gets axed

Cleo ends up quite well known as a good adventurer/travel mate by the time Nia ends up quitting the temple

Before they leave on their first trip as just them, Cleo takes her up to that terrace overlooking Whiterun after taking her to the market

They stare out at the city for a while, until the sun’s setting along the horizon

Cleo pulls out a ring from her bag, fiddling with it as she shifts on her feet nervously. She’s wussed out like half a dozen times already, and this is her last chance to do it somewhere so special

Nia figures out something’s up and starts prodding to figure it out, poking her and stuff and laughing the whole time

Cleo’s kind of found out, and turns to her blushing the ring held between her thumbs and index fingers as she avoids eye contact, “So, um. You wanna get married?”

Not what Nia was expecting at all and she kind of just 👁👄👁 for a while, until Cleo starts trying to back out of it, thinking she fucked up

And then it’s Nia’s turn to stumble over her words something along the lines of, “No, wait! Okay, um, no, so - No, I don’t mean no, just - Yes! Of course!” 

The ring’s super basic, like plain silver without even a gem 

I feel like Cleo found it on a trip with Mal, and immediately thought of Nia and proposing and freaked herself out a bit, but that’s why she didn’t look for another cuz shes a sap

They travel around the realm a bit, stopping in Undermount so Cleo can look into House Nightbloom, and getting rides from Imtura when Mal gives them a tip on a relic or something

All the while Nia’s trying to spread the Light in small villages, using her magic for little things as Cleo works favours again

At some point they get a cottage a ways away from a village, I’d say not too far from the Deadwood and things slow down for the most part, only the occasional trip for the temple

It’s a really cute house, small and surrounded by flowers and huge trees, Cleo builds a swing on one

The others visit occasionally, Kade and Threep the most often, and I almost want to say they take in an orphan, but I can’t decide if Cleo would trust herself enough for that

Though I feel like Nia would love to have pets at the least cleo always compares threep to the cats to annoy him

Elves canonically have longer life spans than humans, and Nia’s is even shorter from using her Light, so I’m sure you can tell where I’m going with this

Nia passes in her sleep before anyone else in the gang and it really fucks up Cleo, like the way she wakes up to it and can’t even stop it

And the worst part is that she’s always hoping just a little bit in the back of her mind that it’s like the first time, and Nia’s just going to wake up or knock on the front door

The gang meet up all together for a funeral, and Cleo plants the flowers from the bouquet from the end of book diamond scene

She ditches the cottage cuz too much of it is Nia, and is just kind of aimless for a little bit, staying with Kade in Whiterun, but ultimately hates not having a purpose

She moves to the old elven cabin in the Deadwood cuz shes a sap cuz it’s one of her favourite places

She devotes herself to fixing it up and making it better, helping travelers through the Deadwood cuz I feel like Tyril would open Undermount up

Everyone’s stayed in relative contact and tend to invite Cleo on adventures if they don’t hear from her for a while, just to keep her from isolating herself in the woods

Mal works with the monarchy to make things better in the Nooks and Crannies while still thievin, and especially when he’s older settles down more

I feel like he lives pretty long, but ends up sick and passing away, second to go and he kinda laughs about it his mum was sick right? and he jokes about the irony to feel better?

I doubt Imtura really accepts being a princess, I think she keeps captaining and fights it as long as she can until she really doesn’t have a choice

But she’s not like her mum, actually leaving Flotilla and like working with the guard and stuff

I think she’s third, dying in battle like a badass and saving her crew. She’s honored by the clans, and the monarchy and even Undermount declares her a hero or something idk how it works there

I feel like Kade would keep to stories, but maybe spend a while just moving about the realm, stay in Undermount to explore it and stuff, builds up his name as a bard

He dies in his sleep too cuz he deserves it, he passes when he’s visiting Riverbend again, he’s buried there and like the whole village shows up

I feel like Tyril’s significantly older than everyone else, but being an elf hides it

He always gives Cleo tips on artifacts, or asks her to escort travelers through the Deadwood or around the realm if they’re important to keep her busy

He’s not the head of House Starfury, but he’s still pretty involved in elven politics, mainly focused on opening up Undermount, educating people on the elven empire and spreading the wealth and stuff

He’d go before Cleo, just running out of life force after all his magic

After Tyril passes, Cleo’s just done, he was the only thing giving her purpose, and she’s spent decades cleaning up the Deadwood as best she can

Threep’s joined her after Tyril’s funeral, staying with her for a few days and how following her out into the forest

She walks out to the clearing they saw the unicorn at and stops right on the edge, sitting down and setting up a purification ritual

She’s known how for years, she learned after Nia passed so she could spend some of her life completing one of her dreams like a sap

She clears out the darkness from a lot of the Deadwood to drain the last of her life force, stumbling over to a tree and sliding down to the ground, her back pressed against the bark

Threep flutters into her lap, her nails scratching behind his ears as he licks her chin comfortingly, a final goodbye

Her breathing starts heavy, growing slow as her chest feels far more hollow than it did a moment ago, and her eyelids slowly grow heavy

A breeze brushes her hair, stirring her awake. The lake’s shimmering before her, bright and magical as she stumbles to her feet, Threep gone from her lap

The Deadwood’s healed, more than she could possibly have managed on her own, and she has so much more energy now than when she fell asleep

She trips through the trees, running for what feels like hours until she’s back at the cabin, the stone bright against the trees as it sits, whole again after all her effort

She shoulders the front door open, freezing when she sees the fireplace, or rather, what’s before the fireplace

Nia’s there, her back to the flickering flames as she smiles, cheeks redder than the curls falling down her shoulders

And Cleo doesn’t stop running, tackling Nia into a hug and squeezing with all she is, tears dripping down her chin as she laughs, carefree and disbelieving and happy. So, so happy, for the first time since she last saw that smile

[c-is-for-circinate]

The Three Dragons, or, Repentence, Revelry, and the Hero Resolve (a tale of Onde)

So when I offered to go telling stories from my D&D game the other, I got several votes for the elves, and I wrote that one out, but several people were also very interested in the dragons, and, well.  The Hero Resolve is one of my very favorite not-technically-a-god-but-honestly-might-as-well-be NPCs in this game, and making up folklore for a world that doesn’t exist is pretty damn awesome, so--

Once upon a time, there were three evil dragons.

.

Things tend to come in threes in stories.  On Nokomoris, where the entire eastern side of the continent has been settled for tens of thousands of years by dwarves, gnomes, and humans, tales of people-in-threes are everywhere.  This tale in particular, which has been told and retold so many times in a million forms that it’s barely recognizable, is sometimes told about a dwarf, a gnome, and a human villain, a trio of bandits or thieves or murderers or the like.  It’s also sometimes told about three trolls, or three vampires, or three unwary foxes, or anything at all that might bring harm to a small village in the middle of nowhere.

The way the story is most truthfully told, the way that matches up, more than it doesn’t, with the world that actually happened--begins with three dragons.  They were all of them adults but far from old yet, and they lived together in the mountains somewhere, in one lair shared between the three of them.

The largest and strongest and proudest of them all was the black dragon.  His very favorite thing was to come roaring in to a village or farm and strike terror into every heart, to ravage and ruin it and leave half of it to spoiling without even taking it for himself, and send the survivors terrified away to tell tales of his power and glory.  He was, he knew in his heart, the very very best; and he was full of violence and wrath, but his greatest sin was pride.

The fastest and cleverest and most joyfully cruel of them all was the green dragon.  Her very favorite thing to do was to catch just a scant clawful of little squishy two-legged people, and promise their survival if they’d play her game and could win it.  She never played fair but sometimes she let them go, if they’d entertained her just exactly the right amount to tickle her happy.  The world was, she knew in her heart, the most wonderful toy to be played; she knew vengeance and anger, but her greatest sin was cruelty.

The third dragon, the blue dragon, was the youngest and smallest of the three.  They were not as strong or as fast as their friends, though they were sturdy (and any dragon is strong and fast enough.)  They were not as clever or as vain, but they were wise (and every dragon is smart and beautiful enough.)  They were, in fact, very much the most practical dragon of the trio, and very much the most beloved.

(But C, you say, that’s not how dragon stats compare in 5e at all.  It’s blue dragons with the high str and cha, black dragons with the high dex.  The adult blue dragon CR is higher than the others!)

(But y’all, I say--this is a fairytale.  And also not all chromatic dragons exactly match their written stat blocks.)

(Yes.  I said “not all chromatic dragons”.  Back to the story.)

The third dragon was the practical one, as I said, and was very much the one who made it possible for three adult dragons to live and hunt and pillage the countryside together instead of fighting each other to miserable pieces.  The blue dragon had seen very easily how the three dragons might fight, and might destroy one another in the process, or might go their separate ways and each take his or her or their own small patch of territory, to defend from heroes and larger dragons alike--or they could band together and rule and ravage the skies. 

The blue dragon made sure that when they chose which village to attack, it would be large and mighty enough to satisfy the black dragon’s vanity, and that they didn’t accidentally step on anybody interesting enough to satisfy the green dragon’s need for a challenge.  They made sure that any survivors left to spread their tales could not raise an army against them, or find the secret trails up the mountainside to the dragons’ shared lair.  They ate nearly every two-legged victim the green dragon might have let go.  Their greatest sin was callousness, for they cared about no one at all besides their two dragon companions, and them only barely at that.

And so the three dragons fought, and flew, and thought themselves invincible for many years.

.

Now, there’s another figure that’s a cornerstone of folk tales throughout Nokomoris, and that, my friends, is the Pretty Witch.  Oh, she’s a princess sometimes, buckled under by the weight of trying to protect her kingdom, but on the whole, princess stories never really took off around here.  The great romantic heroine of the ages is the village witch.

Usually she’s a druid or a sorceress, to go by d&d terms.  Sometimes, in the stories, she summons a fae or a demon or a celestial or an elemental from another plane to help her against some great threat, and they fall in love; other times she captures an enemy and keeps them in her hut, and they fall in love as she nurses them to health and also interrogates them for their evil plan; in yet other stories, a brave hero faces all the witch’s challenges and proves they can protect her.  Some of the best stories, of course, combine all three.

Most real village witches never reach such a fairytale happily-ever-after, of course, or even get past casting second- and third-level spells.  The vast majority of village witches are either old enough to be someone’s (or everyone’s) mother or too busy to be interested in most offers of romance, and plenty of them are both.  That part’s true enough of the witch in this story, too.

Her power, on the other hand...

Well.  There are always exceptions.

.

The story says that one day as all three dragons swooped together onto a village on the edge of their territory, they watched a small woman step from a hut on the side of the village and raise a staff.  The story says that, mid-swoop, they began to feel themselves shrink--that the black dragon found his scales running together and turning soft and brown-pink-pale, and the green dragon found her claws growing short and weak and flat on her arms, and the blue dragon found their wings disappearing from their back even as they tried to pull up and fly away.

The story says that by the time the three dragons hit the ground, they were dragons no longer.  Every story argues, a bit, about what they were and which one was which, but--in every good bit of folklore about three people out in the world, there’s a dwarf, a gnome, and a human, so that must be what these three were here, right?

(It wasn’t, in reality--but it doesn’t really matter.   They were all people, soft and squishy two-leggers, and what does it change if all three were halflings or tieflings or even dragonborn, any more?)

They hit the ground on two legs each, naked and brown and pink and suddenly, for perhaps the first time in their long dragon lives, scared.  And all at once, they began to run.

(But C, you say--what about legendary resistances?  And anyway Polymorph is a concentration spell, one witch can’t cast it on three dragons at the same time anyway.  Hell, if they were swooping down on the village, fall damage alone should have knocked at least one of them out of it when they hit the--)

(Shhh, shh, I say.  It’s a story.  This isn’t how it really happened.  Of course it isn’t.  It really took days, or a team of adventurers, and probably both, and there were traps and wands and artifacts of all kinds that went into the doing.  This is only the version people tell each other--and it’s a better, shorter one, and lets us get to the rest of the story much quicker, usually.)

(But really, you say, even still, it’s just Polymorph--one good injury and they’d be right back to being themselves.  Surely three adult dragons would know enough about magic to realize that.  Surely one of them would be smart enough to try and injure themselves or one of the others to break it, right?  Maybe the blue one.)

(You have to let me get back to my story, for that.)

So--yes, yes, you’re right.  They all three of them hit the ground and fell immediately unconscious, how’s that?  Or perhaps only one of them did, but that was very much enough.  However it happened (and it must have been more than a thousand years ago, it must have been before Kera the Conqueror swept through the lands, must have been a thousand or two thousand years before your mother was born), however they fell, whatever they saw--the three ex-dragons did not become themselves again.  The spell did not break.

(Not even True Polymorph can do that, you say--

Yes, I say.  I know.)

(And why do we keep interrupting the story like this, anyway?)

(Well.  Because it’s a fairytale.  It’s the lore of legends.  This is a story to tell at bedtimes and campfires and long afternoons spent working with your hands while the children at your feet learn to spin yarn and shell beans and mend things.  This is the sort of story that’s meant to be told with interruptions.)

.

The man who had once been the black dragon woke up, and discovered that he was still a man, and he fled.

He had no direction in mind; his head was clouded, and his eyes were weak, and his feet were soft and clawless and he had no wings at all, and he had never run across ground like this before in all the many years of his life.  He had no thought save escape, and he ran without stopping except to fall to his knees and drink from a nearby stream like a dog before he forced himself up to run again.

He collapsed, eventually, outside a woodcutter’s hut.  He could not even bestir himself when the woodcutter and his wife brought him inside to nurse him back to health.

It took a full week before he could do more than stand and hobble, and in that time the woodcutter’s family nursed him with nothing but kindness, and man who had once been a black dragon found himself struck to the heart by it.  He had done so many things in his time as a dragon that he had been proud of, but now it seemed that he was a person, weak and desperate, and would be for the rest of his life.  It was unthinkable that a mere woodcutter like this should nurse a great black dragon back to health.

It was unthinkable for a person to have done the things the man had done, when he was a dragon.  How could a man live in this world of men, having done such things?  How could he be proud of who he was?  And so, faced with the kindness of the woodcutter’s family, the man who’d once been the black dragon began to feel the most tremendous guilt that has ever been felt in all the world for the things he’d done.

(Oh? Do you doubt him?  But man, or dragon, or dwarf, or tabaxi, whatever he was--he’d always been the best.  If he couldn’t be the very best killer, he could at least be the best at guilt.)

He would atone, he decided.  He would atone for the rest of his life.

When the man who’d once been a dragon could stand and walk without pain, dressed in the woodcutter’s old clothes and boots, the woodcutter finally asked what his name was.

“Repentance,” the man said, and went on his way to seek it, and that was the last anybody ever saw of the great black dragon.

.

(Oh, you think there’s more?  Of course there is.  A man appeared in the city to the south, and set himself to punishing every evil, including himself, however he could, and there are enough stories about him to last hours.  None of them are happy, of course--even when he found love, he could not allow it to bring him joy, because of course he deserved none.  And so the man Repentance found himself bringing sorrow even now to those who came to care about him most, caught in an endless loop of sin, and so he could never forgive himself or be redeemed, no matter what.  But at least he wasn’t a dragon.

Is that better?)

.

The woman who had once been the green dragon was even now a little cleverer than her first friend, and when she stood and realized that she was still a woman and not a dragon at all, she fled with a goal in mind.

It took days of careful, desperate travel, but she knew all the secret paths back to their lair in the mountains, where the three dragons had kept all the wealth and weapons they’d claimed as treasure over the years.  The woman draped herself in finery that seemed coarser and fouler-smelling now than it had when she was enormous and beautiful without it.  She put on the armor she’d plucked from the backs of knights, and then took it off again when it was too heavy, and eventually she had dressed and armed herself and filled a pack with as many riches as her new weak arms could carry, and set off again before anyone else could arrive to find her.

She found a port, and made her way onto a ship, bound over the sea to a land that had never known her as anything but this.  She sailed for days, and planned out her future.

She had lost her claws and so much of her power, but the world was still built of games, was it not?  And she could still play, with money and cleverness and secrets.  She was beautiful, apparently, by the standards of people, even if she was so much less awesome and terrible than she’d once been.  She could make claws out of daggers and a life out of this.  She could be a lady, a thief, a queen.  She could make do.

(You think she should be despairing, vengeful, angry?  Woman or dragon, gnome or goliath, no matter what--she was always ready to carve joy out of any chest she could find.  Why not find it again?)

When she disembarked in the new land, the guard at the port asked for her name.  “Revelry,” she said, and went off to seek it, and that was the last anybody ever saw of the great green dragon.

.

(Oh, it’s a parable now, is it?  Well.  What good folk story isn’t?

You want the rest?  She became a bandit queen and a baroness, and was feared and adored by many, and gathered riches and servants and lovers and secrets.  You could tell stories for days about the wicked and cruel exploits of the Baroness Revelry, and some of them would be sexy, and some of them would be fun, and some of them would leave you feeling queasy in the pit of your stomach afterwards, and in some of them, you’d be on her side.  After all, at least she wasn’t a dragon.

Is that enough?)

.

When the person who had once been the blue dragon awoke, they saw the witch of the village.  They saw the look in her eyes.  They saw the deep forest, and their own new delicate feet and hands and bones, and the torches from the other villagers approaching.

They stayed put.

The witch stayed, too, and watched them, and when the townspeople arrived she sent them away.  The witch was a very long way from young, and not as beautiful as she should have been, for this to be a really good story, but--for all that, there was something of power in her eyes.

“What will you do now?” the witch asked of the person who had once been a blue dragon, who had not taken their own eyes from the witch’s face and her gnarled broomstick.

“I don’t know,” said the person who was not a dragon any longer, who did not see any benefit to lying.  “What would you have me do?”

They were both quiet for a long moment as the witch looked the ex-dragon over, with her thoughts as impenetrable as a witch’s mind ever are.  Then she said, “Come inside.  I have floors that need sweeping and wood that will need chopping for the winter.”

.

The person who’d been a blue dragon slept on a pile of blankets on the witch’s floor.  The witch gave them chores to do in return.  They fetched water from the well, and scrubbed and cleaned, and learned to cook and tend a garden.  It was not a thing like being a dragon, except for all the wrong reasons.  The witch was small, and kind, and old, and not a bit of her was weak.  The no-longer-dragon had never known anyone as relentlessly practical as themself before.

Nearly every day people from the village would come by.  Some would come begging for help with colds and children and cows, and the witch was always kind to them, while her new lodger watched from the corner with sharp dragon-gold eyes.  Others would come with gifts, a few eggs here or a sack of flour there.  Sometimes the villagers with gifts had asked for help in the days before, and sometimes they hadn’t.

The person who was no longer a dragon asked questions, sometimes, and the witch would answer them, sometimes.

“Why do they bring you tribute?  Do you require it of them?”

“No,” said the witch, and, “they do it because it is kind, and right, and makes their world better in the long run.  Now go tend to the garden.”

Or, “Why do you not take over this village and half the countryside?  You have the power for it.”

“Because I do not wish it,” said the witch, and, “because they do not need me to, and because they and I are all happier that I do not.  Now go and tend the garden.”

Or, “Why are you kind to the ones who do not bring you gifts or tribute?  They do nothing for you, but you are generous to them.”

“Because,” said the witch, “it is kind, and I am able, and they are not, and that is what it means to be a person.  Now go and tend to the garden.”

Every time she answered a question, the witch would send them out to tend the garden.  The ex-dragon was careful with every plant, because it was only foolish to be careless with a witch’s garden, and learned to water every one exactly as much as it needed.  They learned to harvest berries and vegetables and herbs, and tend to the flowers and shrubs that produced nothing of any value, but only grew.  And they began, little by little, to understand.

.

Eventually it was winter.  The witch showed the one-time blue dragon how to drag their blankets closer to the fire, and how to chop the firewood and bank it at night to keep it going so they would both stay warm, and all the other things that needed to be done with the world frozen in white.

There was no more work to do in the garden, but by then the no-longer-dragon’s questions had changed, too.

“Why did you turn me into this?”  The witch could have picked anything, after all--a rabbit or an insect or a stone, and never thought about it ever again.  But she had chosen a person, who could walk and talk and think and work.

“Because it would save this village,” the witch said.  “I had not a care for you at all.  Now come and learn this potion.”

Or, weeks later, “Why did the villagers forgive me?”  They still came every day, and nodded to the ex-dragon when they passed, and didn’t flinch to do it.  They were not witches.  They didn’t have her power.

“Because they don’t know who you are,” the witch said.  “Or because they know and don’t care, or because you have done them no harm since coming here, or because they are too dead to hold a grudge, or perhaps they haven’t forgiven you at all and are only pretending.  Now go and bring this amulet to the miller and his wife.”

Or, after even more weeks, when it was nearly spring--”Why did you let me stay?”

“You know the answer to that already,” said the witch.  The person who had once ravaged the entire countryside as a great evil blue dragon found that they did know, after all.  It was the same reason as the bushes with no berries and the amulet for the miller, and everything else, too.

“Is there a difference between a dragon and a person?” the dragon-who-wasn’t asked.  “Between a tiefling and an aasimar and a human?  Between anything at all?”

“You know the answer to that, too,” said the witch, and of course, of course they did, by now.  “Ask what you really want to know.”

“Do you care now?” the person asked.  “Do you care about me, even though you didn’t then?”

The witch’s hard face softened, then.  “Do you?” she asked in return.  “Have you learned to care, after all that?”

The person thought about needy bushes and hungry inchworms and a thousand trips to the well on foot, about tea with the miller’s wife and little brown eggs from the seamstress’s daughter.  They thought about whether they already knew the witch’s response to this question too, in their heart, and what it would mean if they were wrong.

“You know the answer to that,” the person who was a witch’s apprentice now said, because they had learned well, and because some things hurt too much to admit if they’re not returned.

Then the witch stepped forward, finally, and pulled them into her arms like a mother.  “You’re my own child, now,” she said.  “Everything changes.  The past only matters because it gave us what we have now.”

.

(Does it seem too easy?  It’s not.  Growth never, ever is.

It took more than a summer and a winter, when it really happened.  It took more pain and more yelling and more doubt to build that trust.  But it did grow.  And the story’s tidier, like this.)

(And if the forgiveness here surprises you on either side, or the willingness to try, well--)

(Witches are practical down to their bones, and whether they use it to be cruel or kind or selfish or saviors-of-all is down to them, but they all know there’s no sense in discarding an outstretched hand when it’s offered.  It worked, this time, for the right people with just the right amount of neediness and hope.  Sometimes the world does that.)

.

By the time summer came around again, the witch’s apprentice had had plenty of time to think and ponder and consider who they were to become.

The only difference between a dragon and a person was their shape, after all, so what was evil for a person must also be evil for a dragon.  What was wrong for a person must also be wrong for a dragon, and always had been, whether the dragon they’d been had known it or not.  So: they had done great evil, long ago and far away, and could not make it undone.  What next?

The witch, who was just as practical as her apprentice, sat and talked to them as they cooked and knit and worked potions and spells together in the hut all winter long, and by the time the world was warm again, the apprentice had made a decision.

“I can’t stay,” they said.  “I’ve done too much harm in the world.  I need to go out and do it good instead.”

“Because you think it will fix things?” the witch asked, to make sure, and also because she had grown to love her apprentice as her own child and did not want to see them leave, either.

“No,” said the apprentice, who had learned well.  “Because it’s kind and right and I’m able.”

“So be it,” said the witch, and hugged them close, and said, “Be Resolve, then, and return safe when you can.”

“Resolve,” the new druid said.  They went off not to seek it, for they’d already found it in their own heart, but to see it through.

And that was the last anybody ever saw of the blue dragon.

.

And that’s the end of the story.

.

(Well.  It’s an end.)

(Oh, you want to know about the Hero Resolve?  There are months‘ worth of stories about that, and you’d probably know a few dozen of them yourself already, if you lived in Nokomoris.  They all go more or less the same way, really.)

(The Hero Resolve arrives in a town, or a valley or kingdom or mountain or an island in the middle of the sea, and someone, somewhere, is suffering.  They find somebody with the power to do something about it.  It might be the sufferer themself, sometimes, but usually it’s not.  Maybe it’s the local lord who’s too distracted to notice the problem, or the local witch who’s too overwhelmed to cope.  Maybe the local bandits are too incompetent at stealing to provide for their children.  Resolve isn’t always picky in the way you’d expect, when they choose who to give advice.)

(The advice isn’t always easy to follow, mind you.  There’s hardly a good story in that.  But if they do follow Resolve’s suggestions--they’ll live happily ever after, eventually.)

(If not, Resolve will generally have to beat them up first, with shillelagh staff or beast form or just a bit of bare-handed cleverness, probably, depending on who’s telling the story.  But everyone else will live happily ever after anyway.)

(And that’s it.  That’s the Hero Resolve.  They roamed for years, back and forth across the continent, to every place you could ever name.  They fixed a lot of problems.  They probably took a couple levels in monk or something.  Every culture on Nokomoris has some variant on the Stubborn Hero stories if you ask.)

.

...

...

(Oh, you want more?)

.

(Well then.)

.

Once upon a time, as the Hero Resolve was out wandering the land, they came upon a rumor of a great evil on the other side of the sea.

(There, that’s how these stories are supposed to start, right?)

Since they had nothing else better to do that afternoon, they packed up their staff and their lunch and all their magic items, the bow with a string spun from spider-silk that could send an arrow through solid rock, the cloak that looked like a midsummer sky dyed with berries grown in water from the Spring of Life, and so on and so forth, as y’do.  They took a boat and sailed over to the kingdom on the other side of the sea and asked the crew and the passengers what they’d heard in these rumors about a cruel baroness who tormented the land with her powers, and pondered how they’d deal with the problem when they got there.

They had just about enough information to go looking for the Baroness’s castle when they disembarked in port, and found it in short enough order.  Some versions say they asked a magpie for help.  Other versions say the Baroness sent the magpie herself, to invite the renowned hero into her parlor, looking for another game or--

Or who knows what.  The important thing is that Resolve found themself ushered into a lavish entryway draped in silver and velvet, and from there into an even more lavish parlor draped in damask and gold, and then into an even more lavish dining room draped in platinum and silk.  They were still dressed in their sea-salt-stained traveling leathers, with their spidersilk bow and their sky blue cloak.  They had their iron knife at their belt, and their staff that had been a gift from the witch when they first left home, that looked like nothing so much as the gnarled stick of a broom with the bristles pulled off.  And there in the dining room of sumptuous luxury, they sat down to wait.

When the Baroness herself came in, she was--well, nobody is quite sure what she was, gnome or tiefling or even a tall graceful elf, in a world before elves.  She could have been dragonborn or human or one of the cat-people, bird-people, turtle-people from the south, who knows?  It’s different every time somebody tells the story.  Everybody agrees, though, on this: that she was as breathtakingly beautiful as a single moon on a pitch-dark night, and that her eyes glittered the color of gold.

Their eyes met, the Hero Resolve and the Baroness Revelry, two pairs of dragon-gold eyes in faces that should not have held them.  For one long, breathless moment, it was as though no time had passed at all, and then they fell into each others’ arms and hugged with arms they’d never had to put around each other before.

.

Resolve and Revelry slept that night curled up like lovers in Revelry’s enormous fur-draped bed.  They spoke, a little, about where and how and who they’d been in all the years since they’d seen each other.  They hid more.  The Great Hero Resolve had made a whole life out of seeing the end of the sort of deeds the Evil Baroness Revelry had made a life out of seeing done.  There was only so much they could admit to each other of themselves.

And yet...they were still both of them so very much themselves.  Revelry’s grin and sparkling wicked wit still brought Resolve to helpless laughter.  Resolve’s steadiness and dry understated insight warmed and calmed a thing in Revelry’s chest that had not been calm in so many years.  They had neither of them been quite this happy in all the time they’d been apart, and now, back with each other again, it seemed like the real loss hadn’t been their claws and fangs and wings at all.

Resolve was used to sleeping lightly and waking early.  The witch always rose with the sun, and it was only sensible for a hero on the road, whether they camped by the side of the road or in haylofts or let themself be made a guest of anywhere.  They opened their eyes with the first light of dawn, and looked down at the woman sleeping next to them, and thought about the sharp edge of their iron belt knife, which had killed fiends and monsters and people.

It would be simple, to do the job they’d come here to do.  They loved their oldest, dearest friend, of course they did, but--

How does an evil thing love?  It seemed impossible that Resolve could have ever really loved their dragon-companions, back when they were still a dragon, before they understood what love or evil or being a person even meant.  It seemed impossible for Resolve to still love her now, and if Revelry was still the same as she had been, how could she ever love anything at all in return?

The Hero Resolve felt the hilt of their knife on the floor beside the bed, and watched their long-lost heart’s companion sleep until Revelry opened her eyes, glinting golden in the morning sun.  And looking at those eyes, Resolve let the knife go, and promised themself that they would try again tomorrow.

That day they breakfasted together, and Revelry showed Resolve all the halls of her manor and all the gardens of her estate, and Resolve showed off some of their many shapes and forms, and they told longer and truer stories about their lives.  Resolve tried to grasp for their namesake every time they caught a glimpse of the evil in Revelry’s stories, again and again, all afternoon and all night.  They slept tangled together in the same bed again.

And so they lived for a week, with Resolve trying to find conviction within themself and failing, with Revelry discovering more joy in her long-lost friend than she’d felt in all the years in between, with Resolve’s iron knife tucked safely beneath their pillow in Revelry’s bed every night.

.

On the seventh morning, Resolve got as far as drawing the knife in hand.  They’d thought a million times this week about attacking their old friend in the middle of the day, and every time they caught sight of those old familiar eyes, they lost the nerve.  Murdering a sleeping lover in her very bed...it was cowardly and dishonorable, of course, but it would be effective.  Effective mattered more than honorable.  Resolve had learned that from the witch all those years ago.

Results mattered more than intentions.  Fine, Resolve loved Revelry with so much of their heart that this might break them forevermore.  So what?  Revelry was a monster, a scourge on the land around her, a murderer and worse.  That mattered.  Resolve’s own heart would heal, or wouldn’t.  They’d slaughtered too many people in their own time for their feelings to be worth more than the lives of Revelry’s future victims now.

And yet, as they sat poised with knife in hand, watching Revelry sleep...once more, they hesitated.  And this time, when Revelry opened her eyes, she saw the knife before Resolve could tuck it away.

“Are you going to kill me, my love?” Revelry asked, as calmly as a still summer morning.

“Yes,” said Resolve.  “Yes I am, because whatever you are to me, you bring so much suffering to the rest of the world.  It’s kind and right to do this, and I’m able, and whatever else I am or ever have been, I choose to be a person.”

Revelry nodded a long, slow nod in the quiet of the room’s dawn light.  Resolve waited for her to grab for a weapon or a spell or Resolve’s own staff, for the Baroness had become quite a wizard in her own right in the time since they’d known each other last.  And they waited, poised and frozen, until Revelry said,

“Then I’ll let you.”

Resolve drew back in shock and confusion, and Revelry continued, “I’ve felt more joy this week with you than from any thing I’ve seen or done in all the years we’ve been apart.  I’d rather you kill me than watch you leave again.  I’d rather know I could at least make you happy.”

“This won’t make me happy,” Resolve snapped, with tears in their eyes.  “It has to be done, even if it does ruin me to do it, but that doesn’t make me happy about it.”

Revelry frowned, then, and for the first time began to reach below her own pillow.  “Really?”

“You know I love you,” said Resolve, and all in a flurry their iron knife met the rod Revelry kept tucked safely to hand in bed every night, just in case--though this hadn’t been the way she’d expected to use it.

“Then I can’t let you kill me,” Revelry said, rolling to her feet and facing off against the great hero now, both of them barely armed and dressed in bedclothes, squaring off with the enormous fur-draped bed between them.  “I love you too much to let anything make you miserable, including yourself, whatever you think about your morals now.”  And then they fell to fighting.

It was a strange, furious half-battle, both of them trying too hard not to hurt the other in spite of themselves, desperately working to keep their voices down before the servants of the house could hear and came running.  They twisted and fought, arguing the whole time--

“I can’t just let you keep doing the things you’ve always done!  You were given a chance at a whole new life, and still you’ve chosen to be a monster!”

“Why do you care about them?  What are any of them worth that you care more about them than yourself?”

“Because they’re people!  And I’m a person!  And so are you, but you don’t want to be!”

“If I stop tricking idiots to their deaths, will that make you happy?  And keep you from trying to do something ridiculous and self-destructive like murdering your own lover in the name of honor?”

“It doesn’t count if you’re only doing it to please me!  I can’t be the only thing in the whole world you care about!  Your entire morality can’t just be me!”

“Well why not?”

And they fell back, both of them panting and bloodied, in now-ragged night gowns, staring at each other from opposite sides of a destroyed room.

“I don’t care about torturing them,” said Revelry.  “It’s fun.  I don’t care if it makes me evil, I don’t care about them or their feelings or their stupid little lives, but I care about you.  I’ll stop it all, if you ask me to.”

“This is a terrible foundation for a relationship,” Resolve said.  “But fine.”

.

(Yes, I’m taking liberties with the story.  Know your audience, they say.  Most of the time that bit’s just a lot of arguing, or more violent and less dramatic or romantic depending on who’s telling it, but who doesn’t love a good half-naked sword fight?  Why ruin the tattered nightgowns thinking about the fact that the two major participants are mainly caster-classes, anyway?)

(One of them is clearly an illogical idiot, you say.  Fair enough, but let’s table the discussion there before you and your neighbors get into your own virtual brawl over which one it is.  They’re both illogical idiots.  That’s how love--and fairytales-- work.)

(Want a life lesson from this one?  Don’t turn a single person into your entire moral compass and your whole world.  Also, don’t try to force yourself to stab the person you’re in love with for the Greater Good.  None of this exactly how it actually went, and it only worked out in the end with a whole lot of luck and a lot more hard work than we have time and space for here.  This is a fairytale.  It’s not meant to be exact history.)

(But yes, from me to you--it did really end happily-ever-after, even when it actually happened.  Or at least, as-happily-as-ever, which is about as good as real life ever gets.)

.

In the end, Resolve and Revelry slipped off in the middle of the afternoon, without a single word to the servants or any sign of their going.  Revelry brought a single small bag of tools and treasure, less even than she’d taken from her old hoard when she first began this life, and they boarded a boat back across the sea under fake names, with secret grins that threatened to burst out into laughter at every moment.

Resolve brought Revelry back to the home of the witch who they still called Mother, and introduced her by name, and did not explain the details of their past, although the witch was canny and clever and figured it out right away anyway.  Eventually, when Resolve ventured forth across the land once again, Revelry came with them, and together they learned to turn saving-the-world into a game interesting enough to keep Revelry’s attention even when Resolve wasn’t watching them at every moment.  She never did quite learn to embrace guilt or regret, but she grew to find a soft spot for scrappy, clever underdogs who just needed half a chance to learn to fight.

They did eventually come to the city where the man Repentance lived and worked, and met him and embraced him again, for a while.  He still remembered his love for the blue dragon, but he could not forgive his one-time companions for their pasts any more than he could forgive himself.  Revelry, at least, was easy for him to condemn and hate, but most especially he could not understand how Resolve might have come to see the evil of their past crimes and yet still willingly laugh and live and find joy in it all anyway.  In the end they parted ways quickly, for while they all three of them now sought to bring good to the world, Resolve and Revelry chose to pursue it through happiness and hope, and Repentence could only see regret.

And so they traveled on for many years, and lived very nearly happily for very nearly forever after, and that’s all there is to the story of the Hero Resolve and the Baroness Revelry.

.

The end.

.

(No, I mean it this time.)

.

(Look, that’s the end of the story!  There’s plenty of other little side-stories and folktales in there, but whenever anybody on Onde actually tells this story, this is where it ends.  That’s how it goes!)

(Yes, I mean it.)

(Yes, I realize I've said that these are two extremely high-level spellcasters, both of whom remember spending centuries of their lives as nigh-immortal dragons and one of whom has barely found enough of a sense of right and wrong to qualify as Chaotic Neutral.  And I’m suggesting they lived out the rest of their short natural lives as a couple of flightless humanoids and never found a way to correct their lives or forms.  And they never ran into any desperate tragedy of disparate species lifespans, or had to deal with archdruid timeless body, or--)

(Yes.  Yes, I did say at the beginning of the post that this was the story of my very favorite near-godlike NPC, but--)

.

(Okay.  Okay, fine.)

(There’s one more thing to know.)

(This isn’t part of the story, though, so don’t go spreading it around.  Nobody on Onde knows this part, except for those that do.  And that’s a story for a very different day.)

.

True Polymorph is a ninth-level spell.  It can transform any willing wizard or druid who’s already at a high enough level to cast it into a fully-grown adult green or blue dragon with ease.  It’s permanent, if you concentrate on it for a full hour.  And dragons can cast spells, even the sorts of spells that would let them turn back into an old humanoid form that’s gotten comfortable and familiar, and maybe they rarely learn to do much in the first thousand years or so of life, but most dragons aren’t forced to live as humanoids for a couple of decades or centuries to figure out how, so--

Well.  True Polymorph lasts without being concentrated on, anyway, once it sticks, but--even it doesn’t tend to hold up well to dropping to zero hit points or running afoul of a Dispel Magic, after a while.

(Yes, the RAW are ambiguous, here.  And?  This is Onde.  True Polymorph can guide the world into holding a new shape indefinitely, but it can’t rewrite the truth of existence.)

A fully-grown adult dragon may not find themself reduced to zero hit points all that often, but Resolve and Revelry weren’t about to give up adventuring just to return to their old forms forever.  Dispel could get...awkward.  There had to be a safer way, didn’t there?

“How did you make it stay?” Resolve asked the witch, so many years later that even an archdruid such as the witch had become old.  She shook her head.

“There’s a spell,” she said.  “With components I never saw in all my life before or since.  They’re long gone now.”

(Was it a spell?  Was it a one-use spell scroll, enchanted in centuries gone by and long forgotten?  Was it a magic item?)

(Does the nature of the MacGuffin matter, in the end, or just its effect?)

“But the spell exists” said Resolve--and, well, what are heroes for if not tracking down mysteries and finding components?  Plane-shifting to gather sap from the forests of the gods, or the bones of every material plane, or the dust from the plains below Sigil itself, or--well.  Does that matter, either, the how?

It’s very difficult to tell a legendary hero that there’s no way.

.

(They transformed the man Repentance back, too, when they changed themselves.  It took them two days to hunt him down and slaughter him, two dragons against one, when he decided that it was his duty as a dragon again to do exactly the thing that dragons were for.)

(It goes like that, sometimes.  Not every redemption arc quite works.  You can tell yourself that he let his oldest companions rip his throat out, in the end, out of the last shards of love for them or horror at what he’d become.  It might be true.)

(Everybody learns.  What they learn, on the other hand, is entirely up to them.)

.

There are people to the west of the Western Wall mountains, in the dragonlands where all colors of dragon are common, and known, and feared, who tell a story about a high valley in the dry lands of the peaks, surrounded by dense pine forests and bare dust-blasted stone and open sky.  If you need something--if you truly need something, and you’re desperate enough to do what it takes to get it, you can climb up there looking and ask.

You’ll get advice from somebody, if you’re lucky, if you can make it past the storms and the woods and the heights up the secret paths to get there.  Follow it no matter what, however hard it is, and things will turn out happily ever after for you in the end.  If you reject the advice, things will turn out happily ever after for someone, probably, but there’s a good chance you’ll get your ass kicked on top of the problems you already had, first.

It’s not a bad place to retire, when you’re old and enormous enough to call yourself truly Ancient.  Ruling the whole world is a nice idea to toss around every couple of decades, but really, it’s such a lot of work, and--really, it’s enough of a job just being your wife’s conscience (or letting your spouse be your conscience), let alone taking on an entire planet full of other people too.  Better, really, to let things go along on their own way.

It’s not a bad place to raise children up here, either.  Oh, there’s plenty of bloodlust and rage in most wyrmlings of any color, but--what’s bloodlust and rage got to do with anything?  How is anyone supposed to learn how to be a person, without somebody there to teach them that they are?

They go their own way, when they’re old enough, and some of them for the better and some of them for the worse, but--

Well.  That really is beyond the end of this story.  There’s no telling what hasn’t happened yet.

.

As to ‘happily-ever-after’...

That’s a fairytale ending, of course.  Resolve and Revelry have been to the feywild plenty enough times to know a fair few fairy tales direct from the source themselves, but at this point, we’re not really telling a campfire bedtime story any more, is it?  Now it’s just backstory for a couple of NPCs who are still alive.  They’re as happy as any old married couple who’s had centuries to grow into each other.

They’re not quite gods, because even an ancient dragon with an archwizard’s spellbook or an archdruid’s control is still a creature of flesh and blood and bone, and mortal in their own way.  Some villain or hero or furious ex-student, some god or quest or just old age and ennui will get them eventually.  No telling how, though, or when.  No telling what might happen in the mean time.

No telling when the Hero Resolve might pull on a different shape and go on walkabout for another few years once again, with or without their love at their side, and see what they’re able to do for the world.

[icharchivist]

Is there a deeper meaning to the wolf or does it just like watching people kiss?

oh yeah there's deeper meaning alright, but it's a massive spoiler to the game.

if you want to know here you go:

Short story: Solas is the wolf. He's not here as himself in the dreams but in his wolf form. They're not actually kissing in dreams also, he specifically only ever watches from a distance and disappears everytime his beloved tries to reach him.

Longer story: by the end of Inquisition, third game in the franchise mind you, we learn that the mythologies of the lore are in fact real. Or more like, the "Gods" existed and some of their stories are true but it's been distorted by the ages and now the real knowledge is lost. And we learn that by learning Solas, a companion who helped us the whole game and who was also a mentor figure, is revealed to be Fen'Harel: the Dread Wolf, the God of Misfortune, Chaos and Destruction in Elven Mythology.

I can't stress enough how we've been hearing of Fen'Harel's horrible crimes in mythos since the first game. The reveal is fucking huge and change everything with the way we approach the game and the lore.

Solas is an Ancient Elf, a Dreamer (ie, a mage who can travel into people's dreams), hell, i strongly suspect he was originally a Spirit before he was enslaved by Mythal, one of the Elven "Gods". But his position at Mythal's side made him a powerful ally and he was eventually elevated in the rank of God.

He was Solas first, Fen'Harel came later, the Wolf was the appearance he took - especially during the act of Rebellion Solas commited that, in an attempt to save his people, actually doomed them all. He woke up thousands of years later in a world that is post-apocalyptic to him, and he's been trying to fix his own mess, even if this new world has to burn for it.

So he's still the wolf. Wandering in dreams, like the Elves have been telling tales about. And yet here he is, with the woman he loved so much he almost gave up on his plan just so she could live a happy life, unable to let go of her, wandering in her dreams in his wolf form.

As an Elf my girl has heard all her life "May the Dread Wolf never catch your scent", a prayer to be protected from the way the wolf is said to prey in people's dreams. And she, instead, is haunted by the wolf she keeps chasing, unable to get him back.

and it's why those are the Tarot cards associated to Solas - the base card, the romance card, and the post-game card. He is the wolf. whether tamed by his love for the MC, or set on rampage as he's back bloodying his hands for what he considers to be the greater good.

He's neat i love him.