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blackswaneuroparedux · 2 years ago

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‘Pimpernel of the Hellenes’, ‘Major Paddy’, ‘Enchanted maniac’: Will the real Paddy Leigh Fermor please stand up?

Paradox reconciles all contradictions. - Patrick Leigh Fermor

So one evening I was baby sitting my nephews and nieces here in our family chalet in Verbier, high up in the Swiss Alps. It was my turn to baby sit as the rest of my family enjoyed the fantastic classical music concerts and events showcased at the two week long Verbier 30th Festival. The little scamps had gone to bed and my father and I watched an old British war movie on DVD, ‘Ill Met By Moonlight’ (1957). It was filmed by the legendary team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger based on the 1950 book ‘Ill Met by Moonlight: The Abduction of General Kreipe’ by W. Stanley Moss.

I’ve seen the film a couple of times before, but until now never really paid attention to where the title came from. My father said it was from Shakespeare’s ‘A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream’ And so it was. In the play, Oberon, the king of the fairies and the Queen are having a fairly bitter drawn-out fight over custody of a changeling Indian child, and this is how the pissed off king greets the queen when they run into each other, “Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania”. Oberon is basically saying "Oh Lord, it's you..." and Titania's response is basically a flippant middle finger. One of the best modern reasons to read Shakespeare: to throw playful erudite shade at others.

Anyway, the historical background of the film is the German invasion of Crete in May 1941. After an intense ten-day battle, Allied troops were driven back across the island, and many were evacuated from beaches along the southern coast. Some Cretans and British officers took to the mountains to organise resistance against the occupying forces. The German occupation that followed was especially brutal. Dreadful reprisals followed every act of resistance. The German commander, General Müller, insisted on taking 50 Cretan lives for every German soldier killed; he became known as ‘The Butcher of Crete’.

As a Classicist side note, there had been a close association between Britain and Crete since the early 20th century, when archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans had uncovered the sensational remains of a Minoan palace at Knossos. The headquarters of the British archaeological school in Crete was a large villa alongside the site, known as Villa Ariadne. Several archaeologists, who knew the island and its people well, went underground after the German occupation to aid the Cretan resistance. Continuing in this tradition, scholar and travel-writer Patrick Leigh Fermor, who had got to know Greece in the 1930s, joined the Special Operations Executive (SOE).

During the German occupation, Major Paddy Leigh Fermor travelled to Crete three times to help organise local resistance against the hated German occupation. On the third occasion, in February 1944, he was parachuted in with a specific mission to kidnap German commander General Müller, to boost morale on Crete along with his erstwhile SOE comrade Capt. W. Stanley Moss MC (aka Billy Moss) of the Coldstream Guards. However, just after they parachute in, General Müller was replaced by General Heinrich Kreipe, who transferred from the Russian Front. Thinking that capturing one general was as good as another, Fermor merrily go ahead with the daring kidnap operation.

It’s at this point that the narrative of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s ‘Ill Met by Moonlight’ (1957) picks up. Dirk Bogarde plays Paddy Leigh Fermor, David Oxley plays Moss, and Marius Goring plays the taciturn German paratroop general. Blink and you’ll miss the late great Christopher Lee making a cameo appearance as a German officer in the dentist’s room scene.

The film naturally takes some liberty with the facts but it’s a cracking yarn of high adventure and drama. Xan Fielding, a close friend of Leigh Fermor from the SOE in Cairo, was taken on as technical adviser. The fact the film was shot in in the Alpes-Maritimes in France and Italy, and on the Côte d'Azur in France, far away from the craggy valleys and mountains of Crete itself. The director Michael Powell spent some time walking in Crete to get to know the island, but decided that, with the confused and volatile state of Greek politics, it was not suitable to film there.

Looking back years after he had directed it Powell didn’t think much of his own film. By contrast, Paddy Leigh Fermor, who was on set throughout the film shoot, was very happy with Bogarde’s portrayal of him with Byronic glamour. Watching the movie again ‘Ill Met by Moonlight’ remains a classic and stands out from many British war films of the 1950s because of its realism. The British SOE men and the Cretan guerrillas look absolutely right for their parts. It is dramatic and full of suspense while filled with much boyish humour.

I was disappointed with one notable omission in the film that did happen in real life. According to Patrick Leigh Fermor, at dawn one day during the journey across the mountains, General Kreipe was looking at the mist rising from Mount Ida and began to recite, in Latin, the opening lines of Horace’s ninth ode:

Vides ut alta stet nive candidum Soracte nec iam sustineant onus silvae laborantes geluque flumina constiterint acuto?

Behold yon Mountains hoary height, Made higher with new Mounts of Snow; Again behold the Winters weight Oppress the lab’ring Woods below: And Streams, with Icy fetters bound, Benum’d and crampt to solid Ground

(John Dryden 1685)

Leigh Fermor picked up on the General, and recited the remaining stanzas of the Ode. ‘Ach so, Herr Major,’ said Kreipe when Leigh Fermor had finished. Both men were amazed to realise they shared a classical education and a love of ancient Latin poetry.

Leigh Fermor later wrote that it was as though the war had ceased to exist for a moment, as ‘We had both drunk from the same fountains before.’ It brought captor and captive together with a strange bond. The scene was not reproduced in the film, as Powell and Pressburger probably thought it would make the men sound too academic for a popular cinema audience.

Leigh Fermor and Kreipe met again in the early 1970s, on a Greek television show, and got on famously together. The General said Leigh Fermor had treated him chivalrously as a captive. They remained friends until Kreipe’s death.

After sharing a late night drink with my father after the film, I began to muse on the figure of Paddy Leigh Fermor, a family friend and someone I met along with his wife, Joan, as a little girl. My grandparents, and especially my grandmother, knew Paddy briefly from their days during and after the Second World War.

My father shared a few stories about him when he and my mother visited his beautiful home in Greece, where even at his advanced age he remained the most generous of hosts and the most outrageous flirt.

One of my memories was getting into his battered old Peugeot in the drive way and trying to drive it when my feet could barely touch the pedals. It wouldn’t have mattered in any case as the brakes didn’t work as he cheerfully said later as we careened around a dirt road to go around the mountains for a drive.

Many years later in April 2022, I tried to visit the home of the late Patrick and Joan Leigh Fermor - a sort of pristine shrine to their memory that one can also stay in any of the rooms as a vacation rental - in the coastal fishing village of Kadarmyli in the Peloponnese, as part of a hiking and mountaineering sojourn around Greece with ex-Army friends. We couldn’t stay there as it was already rented out to other guests, and so we stayed higher up the mountain in a villa, but we swam in front of the Fermor’s home which was on the water’s edge.

You could never put your finger on Paddy Leigh Fermor. He hid behind his gift for telling yarns, and pulling Ancient Greek verses out of the thin air, as well as boisterously singing local Greek songs with a drink in his hand.

Even after his death in 2011, the question keeps nagging as to who was Paddy Leigh Fermor?

The Dirk Bogarde film too seems to ask, who exactly is the ‘real’ Patrick Leigh Fermor - or the real anyone? Taking its title from a Shakespearian play concerned with dreams and disguises, magic and power, ‘Ill Met By Moonlight’ is all about questions of identity.

Under the film credits, we see Dirk Bogarde in uniform; then, unexpectedly, we see him in the flamboyant outfit of a Cretan hill-bandit. A title informs us that Major Leigh Fermor was also known by the Greek code-name “Philidem.” In other words, there are two of him (at least), and on one level the adventure the film is about to unfold reflects a conflict in his personality. It’s a conflict shared, unknowingly, by his Nazi opposite number, the fierce, arrogant General Kreipe (an unlikely “proud Titania,” but it’s true that he “with a monster is in love” – the monster of Nazism). Kreipe’s human side is so rigorously repressed by the demands of war and “glory” that he is genuinely unaware of it; ironically, this humanness, which constitutes the true manhood of this Teuton warrior, is revealed by a boy (equivalent to Shakespeare’s Indian Prince?) - who, in turn, is the most grown up person in the movie.

If “Philidem” appears under the credits, caped and open-shirted, a romantic dream-figure out of an operetta or a storybook, he is first seen in the film proper as a coarser, more down-to-earth version of the same thing – an ordinary Cretan peasant in a shabby suit, waiting for a bus. When he makes contact with the Resistance, his personality fragments further.

To some, he is the mystical Philidem, Pimpernel of the Hellenes and righter of wrongs. To others he is “Major Paddy,” the happy-go-lucky Englishman of popular movie myth conducting war as if it were a branch of amateur theatricals, a gentleman adventurer relying on breeding to get him through and making fun of the whole business. To Bill Moss (David Oxley), the newly arrived junior officer sent to assist him, he is the cool, fast-thinking professional soldier. And to himself? In his quietly passionate defence of Cretan life and culture, he seems someone else again: a scholar and aesthete outraged by the barbarism and folly of war, and by the moronic arrogance shown by his captive toward the Cretan people.

Whatever his persona, Leigh Fermor is a chameleon who never seems to change very radically in himself. Perhaps because he has this quality of seeming all things to all men – and being those things - he remains unfazed by the monolithic might of the German military machine. Fluent in Greek, he can also speak German like a German and is easily able to assume another disguise, that of a faceless Nazi officer. Although he and Moss make fun of themselves - “If only I had a monocle!” muses Moss when Leigh Fermor tells him he “looks like an Englishman dressed like a German, leaning against the Ritz bar” - they are able to effect the kidnapping with an ease that seems appropriately Puckish. General Kreipe is ignominiously thrust onto the floor of his own limousine, gagged, and sat upon by a couple of the peasants he so despises. Kreipe’s rage is compounded by his firm conviction that he has been snatched by “amateurs” - a belief Leigh Fermor and Moss slyly make no objection to, knowing how it will gnaw at his already shaky Master Race self-confidence.

Patrick Leigh Fermor, aka Major Paddy, aka Philidem, in the film’s closing moments, is far from being self-assured intellectual or dashing amateur adventurer or legendary outlaw of the hills. He’s just a tired man who wants to go home and rest up. “How do you feel?” asks Moss. “Flat” is the reply. “You look flat!” says Moss. “I know how I’d like to look …” murmurs Leigh-Fermor wistfully. Moss knows what he’s going to say, and joins in the litany: “Like an Englishman dressed like an Englishman – and leaning against the Ritz bar!” It’s easy to imagine them ordering drinks at that renowned watering-hole with all the suavity required by this little fantasy.

Still, the film’s last images of Crete receding in the distance, until all we can see is the sea, suggests that maybe Major Paddy’s heart is really back in those hills in the “fair and fertile” land that has become as much a Powellian landscape of the mind for us as the studio-built Himalayan convent of ‘Black Narcissus’ or the monochrome Heaven of ‘A Matter of Life and Death’. And, as the film POV closing shots departs both Crete and this film, I began to think that being “dressed like an Englishman and leaning against the Ritz bar” would, for Patrick Leigh Fermor constitute yet another disguise. After all, he said he was of Irish aristocratic stock.

Traveller and writer Paddy Leigh Fermor is best known for two events. He’s known for leading the commando group in occupied Crete to kidnap General Kreipe. But he is also known for the boy who, at a mere 18 years old, set off with little money and a lot of nerve in 1933 to walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople.

Patrick Leigh Fermor was, in the words of one of his obituaries, a cross between Indiana Jones, James Bond and Graham Greene. Self-reliance and derring-do were lessons learnt from the cradle. When Fermor’s geologist father was posted to India, he and his wife left the infant with family in Northamptonshire and did not return until his fourth birthday. In retrospect, he took great delight in being sent to a school for difficult children and getting himself expelled from the King’s School, Canterbury, when he was caught holding hands with a greengrocer’s daughter eight years his senior. His school report infamously judged him ‘a dangerous mix of sophistication and recklessness’.

Sharing a flat in Shepherd’s Market, one of Mayfair’s seedier corners, Leigh Fermor schooled himself in literature, history, Latin and Greek.

He honed his character with the company of extraordinary people and the words of great writers - he had a prodigious memory for prose as well as poetry. He befriended literary lions such as Sacheverell Sitwell, Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford. His travels began aged ‘eighteen-and-three-quarters’ when he rejected Sandhurst Royal Military College in order to walk the length of Europe from Hook of Holland to Constantinople. He took with him Horace’s Odes and the Oxford Book of Verse though Leigh Fermor could recite Shakespeare soliloquies, Marlowe speeches, Keats’s Odes and as he modestly put it ‘the usual pieces of Tennyson, Browning and Coleridge’ from memory.

Leigh Fermor was then a self-made man in the most literal sense.

Setting off from England in 1933, Fermor resolved to traverse Europe living like a hermit; sleeping in bars and begging for food. But his manly charms and boyish good looks found him being passed like a favourite godson from Schloss to palace by European nobility and he developed a lifelong penchant for aristocratic company. I his own words, ‘In Hungary, I borrowed a horse, then plunged into Transylvania; from Romania on into Bulgaria’. Having reached Constantinople in January 1935, Fermor continued to explore Greece where he fought on the royalist side in Macedonia quelling a republican revolution. In Athens Leigh Fermor met Balasha Cantacuzene, a Romanian countess with whom he fell in love. They were living together in a Moldovan castle when World War Two was declared.

Fluent in Greek, Leigh Fermor was posted as a liaison officer in Albania. Recruited as a Special Operations Executive (SOE), he was shipped from Cairo to German-occupied Crete where he lived disguised as a shepherd in the mountains for two years. On his third expedition to Crete in 1944, Leigh Fermor was parachuted alone onto the island and made connections in the Cretan resistance movement. While waiting for his compatriot Captain Bill Stanley Moss to land by water from Cairo, Leigh Fermor hatched a plot to kidnap German Commander General Heinrich Krieple. He liaised comfortably with Cretan partisans and bandits to pull off one of the war’s greatest coups de théâtre.

Disguised as German soldiers, Leigh Fermor and Moss stopped Krieple’s car at an improvised check point en route back to Nazi HQ in Knossos. Abandoning the General’s car after a two-hour drive, Leigh Fermor left a note indicating that the kidnappers were British so that there wouldn’t be reprisals against Cretan nationals. When the abduction of the unpopular commander was discovered, a German officer in Heraklion allegedly said ‘well, gentlemen, I think this calls for champagne’. It turns out that General Kreipe was despised by his own soldiers because, amongst other things, he objected to the stopping of his own vehicle for checking in compliance with his commands concerning approved travel orders. It’s why for instance the German troops, both in the film and in real life, dare not stop the General’s car as it drove through the check points at Heraklion.

Krieple was evacuated and taken to Cairo and Leigh Fermor entered the annals of World War Two’s most devil-may-care heroes. With characteristic panache, when he was demobbed Leigh Fermor moved into an attic room at the Ritz paying half a guinea a night. But his first travel book, ‘The Traveller’s Tree’, was not about the European odyssey or the Cretan escapades and centred on Leigh Fermor’s adventures in the Carribbean. Published in 1950, ‘The Traveller’s Tree’ was an inspiration for Ian Fleming’s second James Bond novel ‘Live and Let Die’ (1954).

As a host and house guest, Paddy Leigh Fermor was much sought-after. At one of his parties in Cairo, he counted nine crowned heads. He was a confirmed two-gin-and-tonics before lunch man and smoked eighty to 100 cigarettes a day. His party pieces included singing ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’ in Hindustani and reciting ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’ backwards. In Cyprus while staying with Laurence Durrell, Leigh Fermor apparently stunned crowds in Bella Pais into silence by singing folk songs in perfect Cretan dialect. As Durrell wrote in ‘Bitter Lemons’ (1957), ‘it is as if they want to embrace Paddy wherever he goes’.

He struck up a partiuclar friendship with the famous Mitford sisters, especially Deborah Mitford, later ‘Debo’, the Duchess of Devonshire. It was at the Devonshires’ Irish estate Lismore Castle that ‘Darling Debo’ and ‘Darling Pad’ met and began to correspond. A characteristic letter from the Duchess in 1962 reads ‘The dear old President (JFK) phoned the other day. First question was ‘Who’ve you got with you, Paddy?” He’s got you on the brain’ to which Fermor replies of a broken wrist ‘Balinese dancing’s out, for a start; so, should I ever succeed to a throne, is holding an orb. The other drawbacks will surface with time’.

After the war he travelled widely but was always drawn back to Greece. He built a house on the Mani peninsula - which had been, significantly, the only part of Magna Graecia to resist Ottoman colonisation since the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Before his death in 2011 at the age of 96, he wrote some of the most acclaimed travel books of the 20th century.

His books contain some of the finest prose writing of the past century and disprove Wilde's maxim that "it is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating".

Charm, self-taught knowledge and enthusiasm made up for the lack of a university degree or a private income. His teenage walk across Europe and subsequent romantic sojourn in Baleni, Romania, with Princess Balasha Cantacuzene are proof enough of that. But the difficulty of capturing such an unconventional and glamorous life is made harder by the certainty that Fermor was an unreliable narrator.

He was also an infuriatingly slow writer. Driven by a life-long passion for words yet hampered by anxiety about his abilities, Leigh Fermor published eight books over 41 years.

‘The Traveller's Tree’ describes his postwar journey through the Caribbean; ‘Mani‘ and ‘Roumeli’ (1958 and 1966) draw on his experiences in Greece, where he would live for much of the latter part of his life. But it is the books that came out of his trans-Europe walk that reveal both the brilliance and the flaws. ‘A Time of Gifts’ was published in 1977, 44 years after he set out on the journey. ‘Between the Woods and the Water’ appeared nine years later. Both describe a world of privilege and poverty, communism and the rising tide of Nazism, and end with the unequivocal words, "To be continued". Yet the third volume hung like an albatross around the author's neck. As the years passed, Fermor found it impossible to shape the last part of his story in the way he wanted.

Leigh Fermor was that rarest of men: a man determined to live on his own terms, if not his own means, and who mostly - and mostly magnificently - succeeded. Always popping off on a journey when he should have been writing about the last one, always ready to party, he was forever chasing beautiful, fascinating or powerful women, even when with his wife, Joan Raynor. She was the great facilitator who funded his passion for travel and writing, as well as women, from her trust fund. His love affairs were discreet but legendary.

Leigh Fermor was happiest among the rogues. Over a lifetime on the road, he sought them, and in turn they responded to his charm, nose for adventure, and his famous wit. He was a keenly-anticipated dinner guest - once outshining Richard Burton at a London society soirée, who he cut-off midway through a recital of ‘Hamlet’. As Richard Burton stormed out, the pleading society hostess said, “But Paddy’s a war hero!” to which Burton grouchily replied, “I don’t give a damn who he is!”

His partnership with and then marriage to Joan Raynor was an open relationship, at least on Leigh Fermor’s side. Paddy saw in Joan his kindred spirit. Like him, she spent much of her youth travelling to where she pleased; largely in France, where the photographer and literary critic Cyril Connolly became besotted by her. Joan was the daughter of Sir Bolton and Lady Eyres Monsell of Dumbleton Hall, Worcestershire. She was not only stunningly pretty but also 'a beautiful ideal, with the perfect bathing dress, the most lovely face, the most elaborate evening dress', as the Eton educated Connolly described her. Joan also stood out from the upper-class beauties of her day in that she supplemented her mean rich father's allowance by earning her living as a decent photographer.

In 1946, she met Leigh Fermor in Athens, while he was deputy director of the British Institute. Joan met him at a time when he was then in a relationship with a French woman called Denise, who was pregnant with his child, which she aborted. The pair would travel to the Caribbean together under the invitation of Greek photographer Costas, falling madly in love.

She was the only woman that - after decades of sexual scandals - matched his own erratic behaviour. Stories of how they dined fully-clothed in the Mediterranean, dragging a table into the sea, as well as their myriad cats and olive groves, paint a restless couple, who, when not out articulating the peoples of their adopted homeland, kept themselves very busy.

The attraction between Paddy and Joan was instant. So many love affairs that Paddy indulged in seemed about as brief as the flame from a burning envelope and you expected this one with Joan to be too. But somehow, miraculously, it lasts.

The two were apart a great deal, but in their case, absence did make the heart grow fonder. While Paddy was staying in a monastery in Normandy, supposed to be thinking monk-like thoughts that he would eventually put into his masterpiece A Time To Keep Silence, he was also writing sexy letters to Joan: 'At this distance you seem about as nearly perfect a human being as can be, my darling little wretch, so it's about time I was brought to my senses.' And: 'Don't run away with anyone or I'll come and cut your bloody throat.'

She tantalised him with descriptions of Cyril Connolly making passes at her; but she, like Denise, sounded a rather desperate note when she wrote: 'I got the curse so late this month I began to hope I was having a baby and that you would have to make it a legitimate little Fermor. All hopes ruined this morning.'

Fiercely independent - a trait that must have enamoured Paddy - they were best imagined as two pillars of a Greek temple, beside one-another but capable of holding up the roof of the world that they had built for themselves through the lens of ancient history and Hellenic culture. Indeed, it was said that they had a special ‘pact of liberty’. It is this unconquerable aura that led poet laureate John Betjeman to declare his love for her (he called her ‘Dotty’ and remarked that her eyes were as large as tennis balls). For Cyril Connolly, the photographer she shadowed, and with whom she had a scandalised affair during her first marriage, she was a “lovely boy-girl” and Laurence Durrell named her the ‘Corn Goddess’ because of her slender figure and short hair. But of all of these worthy candidates, it was the warrior-poet Patrick Leigh Fermor who finally won her heart.

To Joan, who described herself as a ‘lifelong loner’ in her diaries, her companionship with the uncomplicated Paddy was a relief. They had no children, nor did they want any - or so Paddy claimed. But those who knew Joan suspected she did want children but it never came to pass; and so she became a devoted aunt or dotted on other friends’ children. For both of them their dozens of cats gave them the next best thing to paternal satisfaction. Still, her morbid fascination with photographing cemeteries painted a much darker side.

Joan Raynor’s inheritance subsidised his peripatetic life at least until the enormous success of ‘A Time of Gifts’ in the late 1970s, which in turn created a new market for his previous volumes about Greece, ‘Mani’ and ‘Roumeli’.

With Joan’s tacit consent, Paddy enjoyed amorous flings, discrete sexual affairs with high society women and sampled the low delights of the brothel. This activity rarely made it into his private letters, but the exceptions could be piquant. Writing in 1958 from Cameroon, where he was on the set of a John Huston movie, he told a (male) friend: “ Errol Flynn and I . . . sally forth into dark lanes of the town together on guilty excursions that remind me rather of old Greek days with you.” In a 1961 letter to the film director John Huston’s wife, Ricki, with whom Leigh Fermor had been having sex with (and would die in a car crash in 1969). “I say,” the passage begins, “what gloomy tidings about the CRABS! Could it be me?” Riffing on pubic lice and their crafty ways, he conjectures that, during a recent romp with an “old pal” in Paris, a force “must have landed” on him “and then lain up, seeing me merely as a stepping stone or a springboard to better things” - to Mrs. Huston, that is. As comic apologies for venereal infection go, the passage is surely a classic.

Like most high flying lives, it was far from blameless. Wounded women were littered in his wake. Some British visitors to Athens were less than impressed by this Englishman who posed as “more Greek than the Greeks”.

Some Greeks shared their disdain. Revisionist historians criticised his role in wartime Crete, and warned their fellow Hellenes that for all his fluency and charm, Leigh Fermor was no latter day Byron. His unoccupied car was blown up outside his Mani house, probably by members of the Greek Communist Party which he had vocally opposed. The accidental fatal shooting of a partisan in Crete led to a long blood feud which made it difficult for Leigh Fermor to re-enter the island until the 1970s, and possibly explains why he chose to settle in the Peloponnese rather than among the hills and harbours of his dreams.

His own books had already eclipsed those incidents, not only among readers of English but also in Greece, where in 2007 the government of his adopted land made him a Commander of the Order of the Phoenix for services to literature.

Travel writers such as the great Jan Morris have described Leigh Fermor as the master of their trade and its greatest exponent in the 20th century.

When ‘A Time of Gifts’ was published in 1977, Frederick Raphael wrote: “One feels he could not cross Oxford Street in less than two volumes; but then what volumes they would be!”

They are not for everyone. Leigh Fermor wrote that written English is a language whose Latinates need pegging down with simple Anglo-Saxonisms, and some feel that he personally could have made more and better use of the mallet. His exuberance is either captivating or florid. It is certainly unique among English prose styles.

Artemis Cooper, his patient and careful biographer wrote that “Paddy had found a way of writing that could deploy a lifetime’s reading and experience, while never losing sight of his ebullient, well-meaning and occasionally clumsy 18-year-old self … this was a wonderful way of disarming his readers, who would then be willing to follow him into the wildest fantasies and digressions”.

Those fantasies and digressions took decades to express. ‘A Time of Gifts’ had arguably been 40 years in the making when it was published in 1977. Its sequel, ‘Between the Woods and the Water’, did not appear until 1986. The third and final volume has been awaited ever since. Following Leigh Fermor’s death, a foot-high manuscript was apparently found on his desk.

Once he knuckled down to it, Leigh Fermor loved playing around with words. He was one of our greatest stylists and he was devoted to producing un-improvable books. But writing did not come easily to him, at least partly because it was something of a distraction from the main event, which was living an un-improvable life of unrepentant gaiety and fun.

For forty odd years, a legion of friends and admirers would beat a path to Paddy and Joan’s door. Artists, poets, royalty and writers came, all taking inspiration from their erudite hosts. A visit was an act of communion, a sharing of ideas and stories.

Leigh Fermor influenced a generation of British travel writers, including Bruce Chatwin, Colin Thubron, Philip Marsden, Nicholas Crane, Rory Stewart, and William Dalrymple. Indeed when Bruce Chatwin died, it was Paddy who scattered Chatwin’s ashes near a church in the mountains in Kardamyli.

When I was there in April 2022, I went to that same church to pay my respects.

But some of Paddy’s life energy was sucked out of him when Joan died in Kardamyli in June 2003, aged 91. It was related that Joan said to her friend Olivia Stewart, who was visiting: 'I really would like to die but who'd look after Paddy?' Olivia said that she would. A few minutes later, Joan fell, hit her head - and died instantly of a brain haemorrhage. Joan had often quoted Rilke: 'The good marriage is one in which each appoints the other as guardian of his solitude.' Now Paddy Leigh Fermor was all alone.

Leigh Fermor was knighted in 2004, the day of his birthday which he delighted in like a giggling schoolboy. But he missed Joan terribly.

For the last few months of his life Leigh Fermor suffered from a cancerous tumour, and in early June 2011 he underwent a tracheotomy in Greece. As death was close, according to local Greek friends, he expressed a wish to visit England to bid goodbye to his friends, and then return to die in Kardamyli, though it is also stated that he actually wished to die in England and be buried next to his wife, Joan, in Dumbleton, Gloucestershire. He stayed on at Kardamyli until the 9th June 2011, when he left Greece for the last time. He died in England the following day, 10th June 2011, aged 96. It was reported that he had dined in full black tie on the evening of his death. Paddy had style even unto the end.

A Guard of Honour was formed by the Intelligence Corps and a bugler from his former regiment, the Irish Guards, delivered the ‘Last Post’ at Paddy’s funeral. As had been his wish, he was buried beside Joan. On his gravestone in Dumbleton cemetery is an inscription in Greek, a quote from Constantine Cavafy: “In addition, he was that best of all things, Hellenic.”

Although Joan had passed away at the age of ninety-one, after suffering a fall in the Mani. Her body was repatriated to Dumbleton, the place of her birth - ironic that her dream was to be as far as she could possibly go from the rolling humdrum Worcestershire hills. But perhaps she intended to return all along. When Paddy was buried beside her it seemed that the ‘pact of liberty’ that these two lonely souls had forged themselves could be tested in the great elsewhere. Joan was more than his muse (as many of her obituaries were at pains to declare) but his greatest adventure.

To come around full circle from the movie ‘Ill Met By Moonlight’ (1957) that I saw that night in Verbier, my father told me that rather poignantly, General Kreipe, the German commander Leigh Fermor had captured - once an enemy, and later a friend - left behind notes and photographs from across his life. On one of those notes, it was discovered, the following was scribbled from a brief visit to Greece: “Somewhere, amidst all the disarray, was the story of Joan and Paddy, and” it concluded, “…of their lives together.”

His life with Joan and all that she meant to him was one part of the mosaic of who Paddy Leigh Fermor was. But it’s incomplete.

Paddy didn’t like the idea of a biography, and neither did Joan when she was alive. But friends had persuaded them that unless Paddy appointed someone to write his life, he might find himself the subject of a book whether he liked it or not. In Artemis Cooper they couldn’t have chosen a better writer to chronicle Paddy’s life as a man of action and letters. Cooper, was the daughter of another accomplished diplomat and historian, John Julius Norwich, and grand-daughter of Duff and Diana Cooper. As the wife of the historian Antony Beevor, she became a trusted friend of the Leigh Fermors. Cooper was too good of a historian to let her friendship lead her astray from being a faithful but serious biographer. Knowing this, she was told she could go ahead, but she had to promise not to publish anything until after they were both dead.

Paddy did not like being interviewed, and would keep her questions at bay with a torrent of dazzling conversation. He was the master at deflecting discussions away from himself.

He was also very unwilling to let Cooper see many of his papers, though the refusal always couched in excuses. ‘Oh dear, the Diary…’ It was the only surviving one from his great walk across Europe, and I was aching to read it. ‘Well it’s in constant use, you see, as I plug away at Vol III,’ he would say. Or, ‘My mother’s letters? Ah yes, why not. But it’s too awful, I simply cannot remember where they’ve got to…’ It was quite obvious that he and Joan, while being unfailingly generous, welcoming and hospitable, were determined to reveal as little as possible of their private lives.

While they were more than happy to talk about books, travels, friends, Crete, Greece, the war, anything - they would not tell her any more than they would have told the average journalist. But she persisted and got closer than most. He showed particularly gallantry in not talking about his romantic entanglements. But she soon twigged that anytime he described a woman as ‘an old pal’ it was a sure bet that he had an affair with her.

Intriguingly, Paddy liked to claim he was descended from Counts of the Holy Roman Empire, who came to Austria from Sligo. Paddy could recite ‘The Dead at Clomacnoise’ (in translation) and perhaps did so during a handful of flying visits to Ireland in the 1950s and 1960s, partying hard at Luggala House or Lismore Castle, or making friends with Patrick Kavanagh and Sean O’Faolain in Dublin pubs. He once provoked a massive brawl at the Kildare Hunt Ball, and was rescued from a true pounding by Ricki Huston, a beautiful Italian-American dancer, John Huston’s fourth wife and Paddy’s lover not long afterwards.

And yet, a note of caution about Paddy’s Irish roots is sounded by his biographer, Artemis Cooper, who also co-edited ‘The Broken Road’, the final, posthumously published instalment of the trilogy. “I’m not a great believer in his Irish roots,” she said of Leigh Fermor in an interview, “His mother, who was a compulsive fantasist, liked to think that her family was related to the Viscount Taaffes, of Ballymote. Her father was apparently born in County Cork. But she was never what you might call a reliable witness. She was an extraordinary person, though. Imaginative, impulsive, impossible - just the way the Irish are supposed to be, come to think of it. She was also one of those sad women, who grew up at the turn of the last century, who never found an outlet for their talents and energies, nor the right man, come to that. All she had was Paddy, and she didn’t get much of him.”

And I think that’s the point, no one really got much of Paddy Leigh Fermor even as he only gave a crumb of himself to others but still most felt grateful that it was enough to fill one’s belly and still feel overfed by him.

Paddy never tried to get to the bottom of his Irish ancestry, afraid, no doubt, of disturbing the bloom that had grown on history and his past, a recurring trait. “His memory was extraordinary,” Artemis Cooper noted, “but it lay dangerously close to his imagination and it was a very porous border.”

Within the Greek imagination many Greeks saw in Paddy Leigh Fermor as the second coming of Lord Byron. It’s not a bad comparison.

Lord Byron claimed that swimming the Hellespont was his greatest achievement. 174 years or so later, another English writer, Patrick Leigh Fermor - also, like Byron, revered by many Greeks for his part in a war of liberation - repeated the feat. Leigh Fermor, however, was 69 when he did it and continued to do it into his 80s. Byron was a mere 22 years old lad. The Hellespont swim, with its mix of literature, adventure, travel, bravery, eccentricity and romance, is an apt metaphor for Leigh Fermor’s life. Paddy Leigh Fermor was the Byron of his time. Both men had an idealised vision of Greece, were scholars and men of action, could endure harsh conditions, fought for Greek freedom, were recklessly courageous, liked to dress up and displayed a panache that impressed their Greek comrades. Like a good magician it was also a way to misdirect and conceal one’s true self.

What or who was the true Paddy Leigh Fermor?

Like Byron, Leigh Fermor appeared as a charismatic and assured figure. He was a sightseer, consuming travel, culture, and history for pleasure. He was an aristocrat moving in the social circles of his time. He was a gifted amateur scholar, speculating on literary and historical sources. Leigh Fermor, Byron’s own identity, is subject to textual distortion; it emerges from a piece of occasional prose in his books and is shaped by the claims of correspondence on a peculiarly fluid consciousness.

There is no hard and fast distinction to be drawn here between real and imagined, only a continuity of relative fictions that lie between memory and imagination as his biographer asserted. If there is a will to assert identity here, to disentangle fact and fiction, to give things as they really are and nail down the real Leigh Fermor then it is somewhere between the two. This is where we will find Paddy.

For many his death marked the passing of an extraordinary man: soldier, writer, adventurer, a charmer, a gallant romantic. As a writer he discovered a knack for drawing people out and for stringing history, language, and observation into narrative, and his timing was perfect. Paddy often indulged in florid displays of classical erudition. His learned digressions and serpentine style, his mannered mandarin gestures, even baroque prose, which Lawrence Durrell called truffled and dense with plumage, were influenced by the work of Charles Doughty and T.E. Lawrence. But one can’t compare him. I agree with the acclaimed writer Colin Thurbon who said, “There is, in the end, nobody like him. A famous raconteur and polymath. Generous, life-loving and good-hearted to a fault. Enormously good company, but touched by well-camouflaged insecurities. I would rank him very highly. ‘The finest travel writer of his generation’ is a fair assessment.”

As a child I didn’t really know who Paddy Leigh Fermor was other than this very cheerful and charismatic old man was kind, attentive, and took a boyish delight in everything you were doing. Only later on in adulthood was it clear to that Paddy was not only among the outstanding writers of his time but one of its most remarkable characters, a perfect hybrid of the man of action and the man of letters. Equally comfortable with princes and peasants, in caves or châteaux, he had amassed an enviable rich experience of places and people. “Quite the most enchanting maniac I’ve ever met,” pronounced Lawrence Durrell, and nearly everyone who’d crossed paths with him had, it seemed, come away similarly dazzled.

I am equally dazzled - more smitten in retrospect - for alas they don’t make men like Paddy any more. But every time I dip back into his books I think I discover a little bit more of who Paddy Leigh Fermor was because I find him some where between my memory and my imagination.

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precedex-files · 1 year ago

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Alright, "Theef" 7x14, we gotta talk about this episode. Honestly, it's one that I remembered nothing about except that the title was familiar and I know I watched it during the show's original run because I was obsessed and never missed an episode. Watching it about 24 years later, now as a physician myself, and boy is it woefully underrated. Take out the Appalachian voodoo, and the story is a timeless moral dilemma, one that physicians and other healthcare workers face on a daily basis. The Hippocratic oath is widely known for its phrase "First do no harm", but is allowing ongoing suffering exactly that - harm? Many of us in modern medicine have seen it first hand - the desire to prolong life in spite of suffering and without regard to quality of life. Scully affirms that she would make the same decisions as Dr. Wieder did, opting to alleviate the suffering of a patient at the end of their life. A death with dignity. But it doesn't mean one isn't left to feel the gravity of that decision, grappling with the thought that the very medications given to lessen pain and suffering might also hasten death, and that one would never really know the truth. These are never decisions made lightly, but they are made with the patient's best interests at heart. To be clear, any such decisions involving end of life care would be made either with the patient themselves, or their next of kin/healthcare proxies if they are unable, unless in emergency situations where there might not be time. The show takes some liberties with the physician decision making, although the context is in an emergency scenario. Nevertheless, some family members and loved ones of the deceased may not agree with the course of action. Although one would hope none would act as brazenly as Orell Peattie, conjuring up violent deaths as revenge via hexcraft and poppets, it certainly does not mean hospitals are violence-free zones. More and more we are seeing disgruntled patients and family members bringing weapons into halls meant for healing and threatening hospital staff. The show isn't one to necessarily offer up solutions to the real-life monsters and dilemmas it reveals through its stories, but rather sets out to cast a light on them and let the audience do some thinking about them. Almost a quarter of a century later this particular one is still relevant. Orell Peattie is obviously wrong for inciting various gruesome deaths, but is he also not a victim? Losing his daughter in an accident, who he was convinced he could save with his Appalachian voodoo. What about Dr. Wieder? He took care of Lynette Peattie on the day of her accident giving her increasing doses of pain medications because she was screaming and had vital signs indicating an extreme level of pain. He felt she was beyond the help of modern medicine and did not want her to suffer. But does that mean his family should suffer the vengeance of Orell Peattie? Both men victims, both men with lost loved ones, and both men perpetrators. Even medical doctor Special Agent Dana Scully was questioning herself by the end. And that's why this is truly a gem of an episode. Deeper than it appears and the real mystery lies firmly in the realm of reality than fantasy.

#the x files #x files #dana scully #theef

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tessa-liam · 2 years ago

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Marabelle

-4- The Beaumont Bash

Book: Choices – The Royal Romance, an AU series

Series Premise: An American teenager from New York City is introduced to the world of a small European country and its society of royalty, nobles, and commoners. How will her life story be transformed? Will this new adventure bring her happiness...or regret?

Catch up: Masterlist

Main Pairing: Liam Rys x F!OC Sophia (Sophie)

Other Pairing: Maxwell Beaumont x M!OC Daniel (from NYC)

Drake Walker x F!OC Melanie Smithson

All characters belong to Pixelberry, except Sophia Taylor, Bethany Beaumont, Melanie Smithson, Tyler Gregson (Liam’s assistant), Elena (dress shop attendant)

Rating: M*🔞Warnings: this series will have NSFW material, crude language. Not Beta’d: Please excuse all errors.

Category: Alternate Universe/on-going series/angst/fluff

Words: 2173

-4- The Beaumont Bash

Chapter Summary: Sophie prepares for her first Beaumont Bash and is introduced to Bertrand’s love interest/Drake’s sister/future ally, Savannah Walker.

Music Inspiration: Just the Way You Are, Bruno Mars

Love Story, Taylor Swift

A/N1: This is my submission for Choices April Challenge @choicesmonthlychallenge @lovealexhunt @aprilchallenge prompts, love is in the air, dinner, flower crown #april challenge

A/N2: This is my submission for @choicesflashfics Week#30, Prompt3- “That’s how the story goes.”

A/N3: Bethany Beaumont, Maxwell’s mother, is originally from the US: is Barthelemy Beaumont’s 2nd wife. Annabelle Beaumont (deceased) was Bertrand’s mother.

A/N4: Social Season in this AU series refers to a traditional period in the spring/summer for royalty and members of the court to take part in balls, dinner parties and charity events.

A/N5: Thank you @peonierose for the inspirational quote!

Cordonian Capital...

It was a cloudy Tuesday morning in the Capital, which meant it was a good day to spend shopping. Keeping her promise to take her niece to the shopping district, Bethany smiled watching Sophie's excitement as the driver turned the Escalade SUV into the parking lot of an upscale formal wear boutique and parked alongside the floor to ceiling display window.

“Duchess Bethany, good morning,” the elegant shop owner walked up to Sophie’s aunt in greeting as they entered the building. “This must be Lady Sophia, it’s a pleasure to meet you.”

Gazing at the display mannequins, Sophie turned and smiled, greeting the well-dressed woman.

“Hello, good morning; your dresses are gorgeous!”

“Thank you, I have taken the liberty of pre-selecting a sampling of the latest trending styles for you and placed them in the dressing room. My assistant is at your service this morning for whatever you need. I am sure that you will find the perfect dress for the occasion.”

A petite woman appeared alongside a Sophie. “Please follow me, my lady,” the shop tailer smiled. “My name is Elena.”

***

After trying on several styles and colors, the dress she fell in love with was a deep burgundy red, an A-line V-neck asymmetrical satin dress.

Standing on the pedestal inside the dressing room of the boutique, Sophie looked at her reflection in the three-way full length mirror, critically.

“Auntie, I found my dress! What do you think?”

Sophie took a selfie and sent it off to Daniel for his opinion.

“Oh, my dear, it’s lovely! That color flatters your complexion and hair color perfectly.”

“It is a pleasure fitting such a lovely figure...ahhh to be young again.” Elena tittered as she handed her a pair of gold heels to try.

“Lady Sophia, these stilettos will give you some added height.”

‘I feel like Cinderella!’ Sophie thought to herself as she slipped on the heels and stood up straight. Sending another picture to her best friend, she made sure to include the shoes.

Sophie’s phone instantly pinged with Daniel’s return message:

‘Girl, look at your killer legs! GET IT! 🔥🔥🔥’

Sophie giggled at his response, texting back, ‘OK, OK, don’t hold anything back, now🫡😁!'

Sophie clicked off her phone before reading Daniel's reply, 'can't wait to see you this weekend! 😘 '

***

The Beaumont Estate...

Maxwell browsed through the endless list of Netflix movies on his phone, looking for a movie line-up for tonight’s viewing. Tonight, being a Tuesday, was the weekly ‘Maxwell Movie Marathon’. Max was excited to introduce his cousin to her inaugural movie night, complete with New York style deep dish pizza and his infamous ‘Beaumont Brew’.

“Hey Maxxy,” Savannah Walker walked into the theatre room giving her friend a hug.

“Hi, Sav. What do you think of these movies for tonight?”

Glancing at his phone, “Oooooo, I love ‘Dirty Dancing’! Are you sure your brother will approve?”

Maxwell gave her a lopsided grin, “I’ve been telling him about my plans since my cousin arrived. You should have seen how much fun we had watching ‘Titanic’ together last Tuesday night.”

Savannah, Drake’s little sister, has a crush on Bertrand, still unbeknownst to Bertrand. Maxwell knew, however.

“Well, you are my guest tonight, so I will let you pick the second movie.”

Without hesitating, “‘Pretty Woman’”, Savannah announced.

“Ha, I see where you are going with that,” Maxwell cheekily replied.

She laughed as she pulled out a chair next to Maxwell, who had taken a seat on the sofa.

“You know what your brother is like. If he sees it being played out before him, he will see for himself, and then he will realize, 'that's how the story goes.’ Or at the very least, I hope so.”

Maxwell looked at Savannah, shaking his head. "Ahhh, 'love is in the air.' You are getting desperate Sav. I hope he gets the hint....maybe you should wear a flower crown.”

"Ha ha, Maxxy!" Savannah sighed, shaking her head.

***

Sophie walked through the estate doors, returning with her aunt, after spending the day shopping. Feeling the excitement building up within her, she went up the grand staircase quickly, turned to the right and sprinted to her bedroom, depositing her parcels on top of her bed.

After putting away her new shoes, and hanging the garment bag into her walk-in closet, Sophie looked at the gift she selected for Liam. The Swarovski crystal paperweight, with a gold inlay, was a miniature statue of liberty. Sophie thought back to the conversation she shared with him the day she was introduced to Marabelle. Liam was fascinated with the fact that Sophie had visited the monument many times. Even though the prince had visited New York City a handful of times, his advisors dictated that visiting the tourist attraction was a safety risk. With his security detail constantly ghosting his movements, this symbol of freedom was elusive for him.

Similar to Liam, Sophie shared a love of history and described her visits to the statue and to Ellis Island. Liam was entranced with her insights and her knowledge of the backstory and meaning of the monument.

The gold inlay was engraved with the inscription, ‘your breath of freedom.’ A moniker, Liam gave to Sophie that day.

***

Walking into the theatre room, the smell of pizza wafting through the air, Sophie spotted Maxwell sitting comfortably on the sofa. He waved her over to sit beside him, handing her a tall cocktail glass of a blue liquid.

“Okay, Max, I give up.”

Sophie smirked at her cousin, taking a whiff of the drink.

“Ohhh, this smells so good. What’s in it?”

“Rum, vodka, blue curacao, pineapple juice, lime juice and ice.”

“Don’t forget your secret ingredient.” Savannah giggled.

“Hence. Secret. Ingredient!” Maxwell retorted.

“Hi, it’s Sophie, right?” Savannah smiled at Sophie, and swatted Maxwell.

As Maxwell feigned an injury, his eyes went wide when he realized that he didn’t introduce his cousin.

“Yeah, Maxwell!” Sophie extended her hand in greeting and then poked Maxwell in the ribs.

“What would Bertrand think?” Sophie teased.

“I am certainly not impressed Maxwell.” Bertrand huffed and walked past his brother sitting on the wingback across from the sofa.

Maxwell felt his cheeks redden. “What’s wrong with me?” Maxwell asked. “I’m always nice to people.”

“You’re being sarcastic, aren’t you?” Sophie raised an eyebrow.

“Yes, yes I am.” Maxwell challenged his brother, staring him down.

Savannah stood up and motioned to Sophie to come with her to get pizza.

“Yes, I am starving, good idea.” Sophie stood up to also get pizza with Savannah.

“Wait! You didn’t select the movie you want to watch, Soph.” Maxwell bounded up following Sophie to the pizza.

“Umm, let’s see...I know! “How about...’The Conjuring’?” Sophie answered.

“Ooaa, scary! Love it!” Maxwell pulled out his phone to add it to the movie queue.

***

After the first movie ended, Savannah moved over to sit beside Sophie and grabbed a handful of jelly beans from the candy bowl.

“So how did you like the first movie?”

Sophie smiled. “Honestly? I have seen it now for the fourth time.” Savannah laughed, “for me, it’s the third time; I really wish they had that type of dance in the clubs here in Cordonia.”

“Savannah is originally from Texas and is still getting used to the slower pace of courtly life here.” Maxwell sighed.

“Really, now I am curious. What should I expect at the Bash on Saturday?” Sophie looked puzzled at Savannah and Maxwell.

“It’s a pretty informal event, but there’s also going to be formal dancing after dinner. It’s a tradition here, especially with both princes attending.” Maxwell explained.

“Prince Leo has a reputation for being a bit of a ladies' man, even though he is betrothed to Madeleine. So, I imagine you might see some interesting things happening.” Savannah added.

“Interesting how?” Sophie wondered aloud.

“Well, the last time he attended, one of the guests was Princess Marguerite. She was dressed in a very revealing outfit, and Prince Leo was seen dancing with her quite a few times throughout the evening,” Savannah explained.

“Madeleine was livid and threw her drink in his face.” Maxwell chuckled.

“It is very unbecoming to gossip about members of court.” Bertrand interjected. “Sophia, don’t let these comments discolor your opinion of the noble life here in Cordonia.”

Changing the subject, Savannah asked, “What types of music do you like to dance to, Sophie?”

“Oh, I love dancing! But I never went to any clubs; only at parties or school events.”

“What types of music will be played after dinner this Saturday?”

“Mostly current pop music with the exception of the first dance. That is the one dance you can count on to be played by the orchestra. The Cordonian Waltz.”

“It’s a tradition for the King to dance with the senior noble of the house to open the dance floor for the guests.”

“For this Beaumont Bash, Crown Prince Leo will dance with my mother,” Maxwell added.

“Which reminds me, Sophie, I need to teach you how to dance this waltz.”

“Me? Why me?” Sophie challenged her cousin.

Without giving anything away to Sophie about Saturday and the planned surprise birthday celebration, he explained, “just in case you are asked to dance by Prince Liam.”

***

As the evening winded down, Savannah prepared to go home.

“Hey Savvy,” Sophie called out to her new friend.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Sure,” Savannah smiled.

“Do you have any advice for me about how to fix my hair for the Bash?”

“Why are you asking me this? I mean, you have such beautiful hair!”

“Yeah, well...I was thinking of wearing a half up-do and I need someone to help me pin it. Auntie Beth will be busy preparing for the dinner.”

“I would love to, I will get Drake to drop me off here an hour early on Saturday.”

***

It was the evening of the Beaumont Bash and Sophie was brushing her long, auburn hair. Sophie stared at her reflection in the mirror of the bathroom vanity.

Savannah was coming upstairs to help with her hair in a few minutes, and she had just finished applying her makeup.

‘Okay, Soph... tonight is the Bash...why are you so nervous?’

After dabbing her perfume on her neck and wrists, she slid the gold upper arm bracelet cuff into place, followed by her mother’s gold locket necklace around her neck.

Savannah knocked lightly on her bedroom door and opened it slowly.

“Are you ready for me?”

“Almost, come in, Savannah,” Sophie called.

***

Bertrand walked toward Sophie as she stepped off the grand staircase.

Taking her hand, he moved her toward the ornate double doors of the ballroom.

"Are you ready, my dear?"

Taking a deep breath Sophie replied, "yes".

Offering his arm, she slipped her hand around his arm and together they moved forward.

"Presenting his grace, Duke Bertrand Beaumont of Ramsford escorting Lady Sophia Taylor of House Beaumont."

📌Tagging in the comments...

⚜️Please let me know if you want to be added or removed from tags ⚜️

#marabelle #the royal romance #liam rys #prince liam #trr liam #tessa liam writes #choices fic writers creations #choices flashfics #choices monthly challenge #choices April challenge

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reepiblog · 2 years ago

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Chat GPT couldn’t write My Immortal

So the fun thing about Chat GPT is that is the worst writer I have ever interacted with, but it is bad in a special unique way that a full decade of over-involvement on a bad fanfic forum could not have prepared me for. I legitimately think My Immortal is better written in most ways (except technically obvs). Maybe I just hate the feeling of getting thru several paragraphs and realizing I’ve read basically nothing, idk, but at least My Immortal is interesting and sometimes things happen in it. I can’t even prompt Chat GPT into giving me outfit descriptions that are as good as Tara’s! I’ve tried! So for shits and giggles I prompted Chat GPT to write like Tara. The best part was I phrased it like a question so it responded with “OMG!!111 I can totally do that for you!” But overall it did a pretty shitty job. I thought I would share anyway.

Part I

First I tried to get it to describe a character’s outfit, as mentioned. It started okish but without and of the characteristic bad grammar and spelling errors:

So, like, his outfit was, like, so edgy and gothic, it was like a total masterpiece of dark fashion. His go-to look was a black turtleneck, which hugged his rock-hard bod in all the right ways,

Chat GPT loves to just fixate on one aspect of the prompt you give it, so it couldn’t help but regurgitate a phrase I used in the most awkward way it could:

And OMG, let's talk about his pants, or should I say "pant-adjacent abomination"? LOL!

But eventually it became less Tara and more like a parody of gen Z:

The fabric, in all its darkness, flowed and draped in this super cool way, embracing the curves and angles of his legs. It was like fashion magic, I tell you!

But the best part? The lower part of the pants had all these intricate pleats and folds. They, like, embraced his leg structure and gave his outfit this rebellious and avant-garde vibe.

It was a fashion statement that screamed, "I'm unique, I'm fierce, and I'm ready to kick some serious ass!

The fabric had this rad texture, adding that extra touch of awesomeness to his ensemble. It was a fusion of practicality and personal style, showing the world that Gargoyle was not just a badass protector but a fashion icon in his own right.

As if Tara would ever use the word “avant-garde”. Or “vibe” for that matter.

It did end with my favorite touch tho:

It was a style statement that only a true goth queen like him could pull off with such dark grace.

OK Chat GPT, you got me there. It’s still wrong, but I like it.

Part II

Next I gave it a completely different prompt from something I’ve been working on. This one is like one of those Korean webtoons where people die and get reincarnated as their younger selves but Chat GPT took a couple creative liberties (surprisingly rare, but always a delight):

Wretch woke up, feeling soooo goffik and angsty. He sat up in his bed, his long, black hair cascading around his pale face. He looked around the room, which was still a dark and brooding place, just like he left it. But something was off. He felt strange, like he was trapped in a bad fanfiction crossover. He touched his long, silky hair, shocked to find it was no longer jet black but now a shimmering shade of silver. "What the hell?" he muttered to himself, his voice deep and mysterious.

He got out of bed and stood in front of the mirror, his black eyeliner perfectly applied. He gasped when he saw his reflection. Staring back at him was a much younger version of himself, no older than 10 years old. His face was chubby and innocent, so different from his usual brooding and menacing appearance. "How the f*** did this happen?" he mumbled, running his fingers through his hair, which was no longer slicked back but loose and flowing.

I’m not sure why getting younger changed his hair color, but ok. The My Immortal-ness of it is so obviously surface level tho. IDK if it is as clear when you ask it to pretend to be Stephan King or whatever, but here is it pretty clear it’s only picking up on a couple key traits.

The weird thing about this one is it must be getting some of its information about how to write this from parodies because the meta “jokes” don’t stop coming:

Was this some kind of twisted nightmare or a poorly written plot twist?

The realization hit him like a poorly spelled Avada Kedavra.

Umm, excuse me, but Tara would never. One thing I will give it tho, its extremely awkward use of swears, especially from adult figures, is very good:

Valorous turned to face Wretch, a look of confusion on his face. "Wretch? What's going on? Why do you look like a f***ing child?

Wretch scowled at Valorous, his dark eyes narrowing. "I don't know what the f*** is happening, but Verity's here, and I need to find her. This could be our chance to finally end this endless war and... maybe even find love or some s***," he said, his voice laced with a hint of doubt.

This also ends on a pretty good note:

But seriously, what the

Yeah, I agree.

#harry potter #my immortal #tara gilesbie #chat gpt #writing #creative stuff

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moonlight-translation-archive · 2 years ago

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A3! Chigasaki Itaru | N - Moon Traveler | Translation

Disclaimer: Neither English nor Japanese is my native language, but I did my best with the translation. I had fun translating this backstage so I took some liberties writing some lines. If you find any mistakes, feel free to tell me (´｡• ᵕ •｡`)

Role Study: Carlo

Itaru: … Itaru: …and done. An excellent work, if I do say so myself. Chikage: … Itaru: Anything you want to say, senpai? Chikage: No, nothing. Itaru: What a liar~. You’ve been looking at my hand movements with disgust in your face for some time now. Chikage: Really? Aren’t you just being too self-conscious? Itaru: Oh well, I should explain this to my curious senpai. Itaru: So, remember the thing about imagining how the moon dwellers look like from the last practice? Itaru: I was working hard to put all my thoughts together for it. Chikage: Heh. Itaru: Can’t you act a bit more interested not to kill this convo? You’re the lead in the play. Chikage: Sigh… Then, what did you draw? Itaru: I’m glad that you asked. Look at this! Chikage: …The illustration isn’t the best, but it doesn’t look bad either. Is it a dinosaur? Itaru: That’s not it. Itaru: Pay attention, senpai. If there are living creatures on the moon, that means there’s a food chain as well. Itaru: The creature you see had to go through a peculiar evolution from a herbivore to a carnivore. Itaru: Its four eyes are a feature it kept from its past as an herbivore, originally used to escape from its enemies. Itaru: It’s a lonesome one… Itaru: Everyone fears it because it’s now at the top of the food chain after its evolutionary adaptation... Chikage: I see. Chikage: However, its appearance might be grotesque for some people. Itaru: Yeah, I thought that as well. Now, I have to ask Kazunari to make it a reality. Chikage: Basically, you’ll make him do all the work. Itaru: Pardon you. I’m providing the setting and a sketch then asking a pro to complete it. Chikage: Seriously… you’re giving Kazunari unnecessary work. Itaru: I have the green light to do it. Itaru: I’m looking forward to your space aliens, senpai… And now, I’m off to place my request to Kazunari.

Kazunari: Ah, here he is. Itarun~! Kazunari: Thanks for summiting your setting the other day~. Here you go. I made the illustration! Kazunari: I tried to add Itarun’s suggestions as much as I could… Itaru: Ooh, this is…! Itaru: It's more simplified than my illustration, and its overall appearance looks cute now. Itaru: I mean, most of the details I drew are gone. Kazunari: Itarun’s setting is huge and great, but I think it’s easier to get it like this~! Itaru: … Kazunari: … Itaru: … Kazunari: So? Itaru: …Mhm, it’s not bad like this. It looks really good. Now I want goods of it. I couldn’t expect less of you, Kazunari. Kazunari: For real?! I’m glad~! Itaru: Leaving it to Kazunari was the best choice, after all.

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

Notes: Judging from Itaru and Chikage description of the moon dweller sketch, it seems like Kazunari's interpretation of Itaru's idea was used in the play at the end.

#a3! translation #itaru chigasaki #a3!#a3! itaru #a3! backstage story #a3! spring troupe 10th play

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kinnenvy · 2 years ago

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qaf drabble #1

early season 3 break up small little drabble that i need out of my drafts :) , brian centric

Brian is on his third cigarette and his second beer. It’s Wednesday and Woody's tightly packed, but Brian's head is too all over the place to truly pay attention to the crowd around him. Not about its quantity nor its quality.

Unfortunately, despite his inability to acknowledge his surroundings, all the whispering happening around him easily reaches his ears. He can't escape the judgment being directed his way. Callous words about how tired, how haggard he looks, how dispirited and pale. How the god of Liberty avenue has stumbled and fallen to the depths of the worst kind of hell. Lonely and apathetic and too tired to hide himself behind his shell of glamour and charm.

He lights a fourth cigarette and instead of a third beer he gets himself a glass of whisky.

"Hey… Brian." Someone sitting on his left strikes a conversation, or at least tries to. Brian glances at him and hums. "Do you remember me? We… Met at Babylon last Sunday."

Brian rarely remembers, but he looks back at him anyway. The mole on the skin beneath his eye vaguely reminds him of the backroom, of loud music filtering through the air and mingling with Justin's voice in Brian's ears.

He's the last guy they've had together and Brian is not sure whether he wants to fuck him or make sure to never see him again.

He doesn't try to do either, he just goes back to gazing into his drink and smoking his cigarette.

"We've been looking everywhere for you!" Ted and Emmett appear out of thin air and unknowingly save him from finally giving in and taking the guy home, just to hear his voice, look at his mole and pretend there's three of them in his bed.

"Yeah, it's pecs night at Babylon, what are you doing here?" Emmett sits beside him in a way that’s entirely too deliberate. He very openly reaches for Ted's hand, he glances at Brian in a way that he probably thinks must be subtle, and joins their fingers together, likely expecting Brian to point and sneer at them just to distract himself. Brian has to look away instead.

He picks at the damp label on one of his empty beer bottles, he stays there until it’s deep into the night and waits, he's not sure for what.

"This new account is bullshit." Brian groans in the agency corridors, Cynthia snickers and rolls her eyes as she walks next to him fidgeting with all the new documents they've acquired in the meeting.

"Why would they launch a new cassette player in 2003? And why do they expect them to sell?" She, as she often does, speaks out Brian's exact thoughts.

"I don't know and it's coming from one of our oldest accounts, so I can't even tell them to fuck off. They better pay me before they go bankrupt." He massages his temples and wipes off some of the tinted moisturizer he's started packing over his face. Wordlessly Cynthia helps him fix the patch of skin he's uncovered and Brian slams the door of his office harder than he should because of it.

Two days later a copy about nostalgia comes across his desk: You only know what you'll miss, once it's already gone. The accompanying images of Walkmans knockoffs and cassettes don't do much to divert his thoughts from blond hair and blue eyes.

When Brian comes home that afternoon he notices his wardrobe only has his clothes in it, he scans the loft and it takes him just a superficial glance to be able to tell that Justin sneaked in during his office hours and took away most of his things. His eyes linger on the computer and the graphics tablet he got him still sitting where he last left it.

There's a feeling he'd rather not describe sinking to the pit of his stomach, it reaches so low inside him that Brian convinces himself his only choice is to bounce back and start looking up again.

He cleans up and for the first night since the Rage party, he wears his best fuck clothes and skips Woody's to get himself right to the backrooms.

The next logical step is to steal Michael away from his quiet evenings with Ben and let him distract him from the turmoil inside him. Allow his company to patch him up and hold him together, like he used to do when his dad got too drunk and Brian had to wear bruises for weeks, when his mom was too distracted by her own listlessness, to realize Brian needed her comfort.

"We can't stay too long, Ben has to wake up early tomorrow." Michael shouts in Brian's ear so he can hear him over the music and the yelling happening on the Babylon dancefloor. From this close he can see he still has a dark spot around his left eye from the blow he delivered to his face, without thinking Brian traces it with the tips of his fingers.

"What? The professor's working on a Saturday morning?" He asks, mostly just to fill the silence that can't be hidden by the loud bass beating and pulsating in the air around them.

"He's got a check up at the hospital." Michael says it like it's nothing special, but Brian has always been able to see right through him with ease. They dance a little closer after that, their hands gripping tightly each other's clothes.

"You better take him home then. It's already time for my scheduled backroom appearance anyway." Brian pushes him away only a handful of minutes later, Michael looks up at him and pats his shoulder.

"Listen, I know I behaved like an ass… But be careful, okay? Don't let this whole thing drag you down." Michael says, but can't look directly into his eyes anymore. Brian knows his outburst during Linds and Mel's party is still haunting him, even though letting his emotions get the best of him is Michael's specialty, just like hiding them is Brian's.

"What thing?" Brian furrows his eyebrows and shrugs, feigning ignorance, "I've never felt better."

"...Right." Michael releases a sigh between exasperated and amused, then kisses Brian's cheek and walks back to the bar where Ben, Emmett and Ted are deep into conversation.

Brian watches until all four of them decide to leave and start moving towards the wardrobe. Emmett looks back into the crowd one last time and raises a hand to wave at him, Brian raises his chin to acknowledge him, then he turns on his heels and lets himself be dragged away by the first man who hits on him.

Things slowly start to settle again. Brian stops paying short, blond twinks to wear baggy clothes and lay flat on his bed, while he rams them from behind. Hopefully soon he'll also stop seeing Justin in every trick he brings home.

For now he's cursed to see his face every time someone begs for his cock. Also whenever he steps into the diner.

Brian is starting to question the amount of money he's spending to put him through school, considering how he seems to be working every shift from Monday through Friday. He doesn't comment on it though, or on anything else, and he purposely gives his order to another server.

He's started going to tanning salons again, he's cut his hair and he is generally looking much better than he did weeks ago. Despite all of that, he keeps his sunglasses on, not wanting Justin's furtive glances to see anything he isn't supposed to. Also to shield himself from seeing how little his own ailments seem to be reflected in his inquisitive blue gaze.

#fic #drabble #brian kinney #qaf #queer as folk #qaf us #timeline is a little weird

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nectardaddy · 10 months ago

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Thirteen Years [Porco Galliard x reader] 11

I've taken some creative liberties with the time skip, we know they were in a war but not the specifics of anything. I also just wanted to make their homecoming cuter.

Four Years Later - Present Day

Your stomach did turns and flips as your anticipation grew, turning into a feeling where you thought you would vomit. Nervous was not even the word. The heel of your old work boot clicked against the pavement as you repeatedly tapped against it. It was feeling that was growing stronger and stronger, gnawing and lashing to eagerly get out as you stood still. The gate that would soon connect you to your lover stood a few meters away, a crowd of people already gathering for the well awaited homecoming. Porco's mother stood beside you and noticed the anxiety that began to overtake you, gently placing her hand on your shoulder, she gave you a soft smile.

Mrs. Galliard need say nothing to you, her warm smile being enough to wash some aspects of fear away. But this was a fear you had never felt so intensely before, a fear that clawed at you from the inside and slowly made its way out. A fear that built stronger and sustained throughout the four long years. There were momentary days, maybe a week at best, he was able to come home. Only means of not breaking him down too much, he needed some sort of morale to fight in a war. But he would be whisked away once more, leaving you to be alone and afraid. However, there would be no more ventures out of the gate after today, not for a god forsaken war, your lover would be home for good.

Voices murmured around you until finally, a voice rang out from a child, perched atop his father's shoulders, near you, "there they are!" The child's scream was the catalyst of excitement and celebration between everyone around you. People gathered closer to the gate, only resulting in the Marleyan soldier that guarded it to yell to back up. A loud click followed by the scraping of metal against the pavement seemed to make everyone hold their breaths.

"We did it!" A small brunette girl, whom you knew as Gabi, screamed as she bolted through the gate. Falco and the other Warrior candidates following suit. Being children, they wooped and screamed, happy to be home and happy to have made a name for themselves already. Several Eldian soldiers walked through and one after another, you began to see the Warriors pass through. The gate was like that of a portal, connecting two vastly different societies, but each time it opened it brought your lover back to you. The background noises of cheering, crying, and sheer joy were now muffled as your eyes met that of yours. Porco. You watched silently as he scanned over the crowd before him, looking for his parents, looking for you.

You wanted to scream, a sensation bubbling over in your soul that made the air suddenly hot, but not a sound left you as his eyes finally met yours. You felt Mrs. Galliard's hand slowly slip away from your shoulder as you took a few hesitant steps in his direction. The crowd around the two of you was bustling, having little to no room to simply walk to each other. Your hesitant steps became quick as a euphoric feeling washed over you, dodging and weaving through any and all who got in your way. "Pock!" You yelled, an almost grin appearing on your features, causing the man to do the same in return as you quickly approached him.

You had no time to even think before the man swiftly took you in his arms, "(Y/n)," the blonde's voice was a whisper, closing his eyes is relishing in the fact he would never have to let you go anymore. The man's physique had changed quite a bit since he was away; he was stronger, his arms holding you as though he may crush you if held tighter, and his overall appearance was more toned and aged slightly. Four years could change a person, and it certainly did for Porco. "I missed you so much."

"I can't believe you're home," you replied, "and you're safe." You pulled away only slightly to look at the man's face whom you hadn't seen in god knows how long. His grey eyes fluttered open again and met yours, only for a moment did they remain open before closing them again and catching his lips with yours. His kiss was needy but warm, the pent up need for you and you alone apparent in every fiber of his being. Your touch was that of a drug to him, he simply couldn't get enough no matter how hard he tried, and the soft touch of your hand on his cheek as you kissed was enough to bring the man to his knees. Pulling away slowly, his cheeks shifted from pale to light pink, having not displayed such an intimate affection in such a long time made him nervous.

"C'mon," you prompted, now pulling away but continued smiling. "Your parents want to see you." Your hand gently fell from his cheek and grabbed his wrist, pulling softly and giving him a grin. "Your mom and I have been talking about this day for years, Pock. She's so excited to see you." You once again dodged and maneuvered past the people around you, your lover now in tow before bringing him to his parents.

"Porco!" He heard his mother yell out, locking eyes with her as the older woman made her way to her son, her husband following suit. "Oh my sweet boy," his mother's voice had always been soothing to him and the embrace she gave even more so. He hugged her tightly as she finally stepped in front on him, "your father and I have missed you so much." He heard her whisper into his jacket. The four long years had put inches on Porco's stature, now inches taller than his mother as her head reached his shoulders.

"I missed you too, both of you," he replied, looking over at his father and giving him a smile as his mother continued to embrace him. They held a special bond with their son, especially his mother. Upon losing their eldest, they held Porco even closer - afraid of if they let go they would be left with no children at all. His mother didn't want to let go of her, now, only son; having years taken off of his life for such an asperation frightened her. "It's alright mom, I'm home. I'm safe." He reassured her as he felt her hug him a little tighter.

The Warriors and other Eldian soldiers returned home around midday, leaving the rest of the day to them and their families. It was an overwhelming feeling to have Porco return; however, it also frightened you. Such a long time apart puts strain on areas that one would think wouldn't feel strain, and readjusting to how things were before would be a near impossible feat. Nothing would go back to the way it was before, both of you had changed and grown in ways the other couldn't even begin to comprehend. Porco was still the same firecracker but more pensive, his mind now geared towards strategy and combat than that of making a home. You in turn were more independent and closed off, determined to do anything and everything without the help of others.

All things considered, the day ran smoothly. Although you feared you wouldn't know how to talk to the man after such a long time, all anxieties drifted away as you spent time with him. Four long years away though you both were still able to find things to share with each other, which he wholeheartedly shared stories about his time away at the dinner table. Though you knew some of which he embellished, quietly hiding your laughter at the fact that it was always Porco who seemed to be a hero after every story - no one else. And in his own words "Reiner didn't do a damn thing." His parents excused themselves a bit earlier from the table, old age slowly creeping up on them as they wished to say their goodbyes and fall into sleep. Leaving only you and Porco.

"You, sir, are quite the storyteller," you mused, standing up from the table that you occupied for what seemed like hours to stretch. The kitchen was cluttered, but not dirty, all dishes cleaned but stacked atop the counter to be put away in the morning. And the tabletop strewn about with cups and bottles. "You're also not a light weight anymore it seems," you spoke with a small laugh as you watched the man finish the contents of the bottle he had in his hand.

Porco chuckled and repeated just as you did, getting up from the table and stretching. But the man's bones and muscles ached, cracking and popping emitting from his body as he stretched his arms and back. Although the man had regenerative properties to himself, he couldn't escape the wear and tear that had become of him. You so eagerly wanted to speak to it, wanting nothing more than to express your feelings about his condition and how he wore himself down. Swallowing your words, you gave him a smile, thinking to yourself it may ruin a perfectly good evening to open your mouth about a topic such as aging. But it worried you more than you could ever express, giving you a sickly feeling you often pushed down. Only eight more years left.

"Hey," Porco's voice snapping you out of your thoughts. "What's wrong?" His question alone made you want to spill your guts, have everything you've ever worried about put in front of him. The worry in his voice gave you a nauseous feeling of guilt, wondering how you would lie to the man whom you loved before you. But his next words surprised you, "I'm getting a little older by Titan standards but I'm alive, dear. And I'm not going anywhere anytime soon." Scrunching your brows, you looked over at him in confusion. "It's been four years, sure, but you're still so easy to read," his clarification made you close your eyes and let out a small sigh.

With eyes still closed, you heard the screech of his chair being pushed in and his footsteps towards you. Feeling his finger tips brush against your cheek, you leaned into his touch. His hand was calloused but warm, a feeling you had longed for so long. Feeling his fingertips now trace down your cheek, your neck, your shoulder, then resting on your waist made you shiver; now opening your eyes to look at the blonde in front of you. Grey eyes were full of adoration and care, though worry still swirled within them - not bearing to see such worry that you caused, you looked away. "I worried and worried until I made myself sick, thinking that something happened to you, or worse you were dead. Then I would get a letter from you and my world be in working order again. But that cycle didn't stop one second. Every day I woke up wondering if you were alive, making myself so worried I would vomit on some days." You admitted, "and now you're home. And it's like I'm being slapped in the face by the inevitable that you will die."

Porco stayed quiet, letting your words flow freely and thinking before he spoke. "I live with the fact that one day I'll have to leave you behind," his voice was soft as he spoke. The topic at hand was one he was familiar with, one he grappled with often while he was away. "But I don't let it consume me because I know I'll have left you with the most fulfilled, loving, and safe life possible." The hand that rested on your waist pulled you into him, wrapping his other arm around you to embrace you. "Don't let those thoughts consume you, (Y/n), it stops you from enjoying the present. A present where I'm here, where I'm alive, and where I love you."

"I love you," you repeated softly. Wrapping your arms around him, you squeezed him tightly. Thinking to yourself if you let go he would slip through your fingers and be gone for good. You felt him pull away slightly, making you hold him even tighter.

"God damn you've gotten stronger," he mused with a small chuckle, hoping it would ease the morbidity in the room. Turning your gaze back to him, you couldn't help but crack a smile. "Come on, I wanted to do something with you, dear," he coaxed as he tried to pull away once more. "But we can't if you don't let go." With a small huff, you loosened your grip and allowed him to pull away. Simply rolling his eyes from your protest, he reached for your hand and intertwined your fingers. "It's a warm night, do you want to go to the roof?"

The roof. Where the man that stood before you finally became yours. It brought back memories you had misplaced in your mind. Memories that brought a smile to your face as you agreed.

#aot porco #attack on titan #porco x reader #shingeki no kyojin #snk #aot #aot x reader #porco galliard

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wishi-selfships · 2 years ago

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Hii I’d love to hear more about the nayuta plot point!!! I genuinely love ur self inserts lore 😭 I’m someone who also has plot points and very like detailed lore for my own s/i and I’m v interested in others’ as well :P

HAII AGAIN ANON ^^!!!!! WHEHE IM HAPPY U LIKE HER LORE !!! Even tho I have . Not really told much about it (because she has even MORE but I'm working on writing it all out coherently)

SO!! That Nayuta plot point :3c Well usually/canonically, since Gabi was in part 1 and stayed w// Denji at the end of Part 1, she met Nayuta w// Denji, so she and Nayuta bond ☆

In this case, then, Nayuta sees Gabi as like an older sister!!! But like that sort of older sister who's really more like a mom than anything (which also means she's fine w/ Gabi being affectionate with Denji :3c EVEN THO SOMETIMES SHE GETS JEALOUS OF DENJI [she wants Gabi hugs too >:/])

But in the case of Gabi only being present in part two (in that sort of AU), its.. a little more tricky. Because Nayuta is very protective and possessive over Denji so normally I feel like she wouldn't be cool with GabiDen :< So the only thing I could think of was giving Gabi and Nayuta a previous sort of connection, but how was I supposed to do that ??

Sooo I kindaaa,,, took some liberty with this AU and changed some things about the timing of Nayuta appearing on earth / where she appeared.

So for this AU, I wanna say the time between when Nayuta reincarnated on earth and when she was brought to Denji was maybe 4-5 months? Where she reincarnated sometime in April and Kishibe brought her to Denji in August/September. And instead of showing up in China, she shows up in America. I remember mentioning the whole thing with Gabi going back to America for a sort of "spin-off" (which isn't really a spin off but again that's a whole other can of worms) in the normal canon, but Part 2 Only!Gabi does that too. Difference is that because she's not involved in the part 1 plot, she does that a little earlier.

Which!!! Gives her the opportunity!!! To run into Nayuta during her time in America. She just runs into this homeless looking child and goes ○□○! And she takes her in!! Because why wouldn't she? And during the time they spend together in America, Nayuta gets a taste of love !!! Real familial love!!! The type that makes her feel all warm and safe and it makes her feel all at home when she's with Gabi.

Shenanigans ensue, and eventually Kishibe finds out that Nayuta is in America and is with Gabi, contacts her thru Yoshida (pretty sure I mentioned she and Yoshida are friends??), and takes Nayuta off Gabi's hands. Obviously it's a little more complicated because Gabi doesn't wanna give Nayuta up but she's eventually convinced. Mostly because Gabi's little adventure in America is starting to get kinda dangerous and she doesn't wanna put Nayuta in any danger.

But before Nayuta is taken to Japan Gabi promises her that they'll meet again!! And that she loves Nayuta and that she only wants what's best for her •×• Gives her a lil gift too but I haven't figured out what it was 💭

SO FAST FORWARD A LIL WHILE !!! Asa/Denji/Gabi "hangout" at Denji's place, that whole thing plays out and Yoru smooches Denji, Nayuta comes and does her little thing ☆ And she's about to shoot the chain thing through Gabi's head as well (cause she was nearby lmao) until she pauses and like. Takes a better look at her.

"... Gabi •^•?"

"...NAYUTA Ó□Ò💧!?!?"

And just like that Gabi gets a free pass from being turned into a dog. Well OBVIOSULY yk there's like... Some sort of explanation from Gabi (to Denji who is so confused because how does the cute girl from school know his little sister figure?) - and it definitely helps that Gabi wasn't the one to actually kiss Denji - but in the end Gabi sort of gets spared from that fate =×= although Nayuta gets like. Really super clingy and tells Gabi she can't leave but. That gets resolved and Gabi gets to leave.

Although even if Nayuta did do that funny little chain thing, it wouldn't actually work because of Gabi's "contract" she made with Wishi, which sort of makes her immune to mental devil attacks? Like she can totally be attacked physically but mental attacks just kinda bounce off. But do they know this? No !!! Not really !!!

... am I making sense? I feel like I've just been rambling all silly like 😵‍💫 BUT IM J REALLY PASSIONATE AND ALSO NOT GOOD AT EXPLAINING!... But I'm happy you like her lore anon 🫶🏽 Yk if you ever wanna share your inserts lore, well,,, I think I'd be really interested :0!!!

#self ship #selfship #you ask; wishi answers #self insert #HAIII AGAIN ANON THANK UUU FOR THE QUESTION ♡♡♡#always love talking about. LORE!!!!#I wrote this all out on tumblr but then had to copy and paste all of it individually bc i accidentally put a poll on the og and idk how to #delete it :((( SAD oh well #tbh now that i mentioned her here i might as well officially make her a plat/fam f/o right #⛓️🎯 nayuta [little sister f/o]#slayed☆

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talldarkandroguesome · 2 years ago

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22nd of First Seed, Middas

I have managed more than I had hoped. All of it is thanks to Zethith’s initiative.

With the excuse of an appointment I could not postpone, I sent the family along without me, promising I would be caught up before the celebrations began.

I made my way to the Cathedral of Webs, then, having left a cart with horses there already, was able to make it to Lilandril in less than half a day’s journey. I do not think the Daedra have tended to them as well as one might have liked, but they lived and were able to carry the cart. They were well pleased to arrive at the stable and I know I got rather a stern look from the stable hands for the state of the horses.

I ignored it all, my heavy veil over thickly caked pale golden makeup and Altmeri finery noted that I was someone important enough to be able to ignore such things. I felt awful personally, but I had no time to dwell.

Finding this historian of music was no small feat. It took up the better part of the afternoon. Yet as soon as I showed her the plans her entire face lit up. She talked excited on and on about the plans, mostly slipping into Altmeris. I had to interrupt her to remind her that I was raised off the Isles and my Atlmeris was rusty at best and if she would not use the more crash and common tongue whilst I was still re-acclimating to my mother language.

She was very obliging and asked about where I had been living. I told her that I was raised out east and my parents had thought it would be best for my acclimating to the culture that I focus on the language of where we were living, rather than on my native tongue. I said that as a child I was taught the basics but that I rarely was given opportunity to hearing it spoke, let alone speak myself. The words felt clumsy, foreign even, when I spoke them. I apologized that I was not in better practice.

I skirted most of her inquiries and continued to refocus her attention onto te subject of the glass armonica. It worked beautifully. She has a true passion and I was more than willing to have her excitement steer us clear of too many personal questions.

In the end, she agreed to put it together. She said it would take her a few weeks. I asked if I should have the parts commissioned separately for her assembly, citing my issues with having sought to have one made on my own. She said she had a team she trusted and that it would be best to leave it fully up to her. The mention of her apprentice certainly had her even more driven to get to work and she told me she was excited to compare the plans I provided with ones she already had to see the differences.

Everything was left to her, including a purse of coins to begin work. She was willing to take it on credit, but I would not have it, reminding her that I knew it was entirely possibly that with how fragile things were that she may have to worry about having things made more than once and I wanted to impress upon her my seriousness in the commission.

With that settled, I made my way through town, stocked up on some supplies, and then headed back to the Cathedral of Webs. It was already getting on in the day when I arrived back and I summoned Zethith for our usual talk about plans. I explained about how I wanted to continue to train my future death weavers and that I was hoping to get them here to the training grounds more often, when they led me into a room with a giant metal ring, inscriptions running around it. When I inquired about its purpose, they placed their hand upon a certain section and magicka caused the entire thing to light up before a center of red light appeared for a moment, dissolving into a familiar space, the top of the stairwell in the Harborage.

I was astonished and very much pleased to hear of such a thing and told them as much. Zethith told me that they had taken the liberty of installing it precisely so that the future death weavers might have daily access to the training chamber.

To be honest, I could have kissed Zethith then. How brilliant to have thought of it! And now it shall save me so much time in getting around. I can always get to the Harborage by simply going to the Cathedral of Webs, then activating the portal to walk through to the Harborage.

With this new information, I told Zethith that I may start training my Spiderlings in the Isles, where things might be easier. They can be across the globe from danger should anything happen at the Harborage. It is a fail safe. And it allows them to get different types of experiences.

Zethith did remind me that none of them has access to passing through the doors of the Cathedral of Webs, so that should they leave, they would not be able to get back in unless I have them given specific permissions. Zethith and I agreed that we should be careful about who we choose for such permissions and that we would continue to talk about it as I progress their training.

I asked Zethith for the favor of returning me to Deshaan once things were concluded with the Nest and they agree to drop me at a lay line not far from where the tribe makes their camp. Zethith takes such great care to nurture me. How lucky a mer I am to have someone so patient and willing to guide me. Praise to my Prince for such guidance!

I arrived to the Harborage through the portal, everyone already waiting excitedly to see who came through. They all greeted me very warmly, kissing me and telling me how they had missed me. My dear little Scuttlers, how proud they make me. How welcome I feel to return to the brood.

After a short while to change, lectures began. We went through some basics. There were practical demonstrations all around. I took my potential death weavers through and watched their training drills, observing their progress and providing them insight in improvements and complimenting their strengths. As predicted, Blaze and Effervescent competed. Honestly it is that spirit of competition that has fueled their progress. Prince is doing well, he had a higher starting place, but he has already begun to show signs of falling behind the other two. I tried to provide them all an incentive by saying it had been so long since I had trained but that I would do a timed run and that if any were to beat that time, a great honor would be provided to such a person.

The challenge set, it was clear that they were not only impressed, but determined. I did the run without any use of my shadow magicka. It meant it was far longer than normal, but it was important. I want to give them a goal that is obtainable. Difficult, yes, but something that they can see themselves getting close to. It is even possible for them to exceed the goal. When they are close or better, that is when we will go to the next physical training phase.

I also let them know that I believed they were soon to master this and that I would be moving them into the next training phase. That they were close to the strength and agility needed for heading into their next lessons. That made them all very excited.

In fact, I got everyone rather excited when, during the announcements for the month, I mentioned that now was a time of beginnings and renewal. That as life was beginning to stir, so too shall we. There was soon to be some new assignments handed out and with it tests of responsibility. Those that succeeded would prove that they were ready for more. Those that did not would get special instruction to try and get them to reach that point.

Tanur let me know that with the finances that they had raised, they had enough to rent a room for private use on a monthly basis for conducting what he liked to call, social outreach projects. I laughed at the turn of phrase, but I appreciated its humor. I looked over things with him and, sure enough, with the profits made from the produce that Black-Silk-Earth provided, combined with the admission fee he charged on the parties, there was nearly enough to purchase a room, not simply to rent.

I asked for the input of the others over their opinions on having a permanent place in which to hold their gatherings. I explained the positives of it and warned of the dangers as well. All in all, people seemed to be cautiously enthusiastic about it. I told Tanur to go ahead and to search for spaces he believed would not cause a stir.

The celebrations were held at the Cathedral of Webs with the splendor of fresh produce from the Isles. Many were amazed by what was available. Goat could not stop talking about how good the bread was. He was smitten with the lemon honey spread on warm herb bread. A man of refined tastes it seemed.

Arrow and Ebony were never far apart, even feeding one another by hand. I can see a romance already well underway. Good for them. If they have found love in one another, then they are far more likely to desire to remain with the group. And I am glad of Ebony finding her acceptance with the others, being that she joined the most recently.

I set them all to helping to clean the statue of our Prince, to decorate Her in red silk drapery and fresh flowers. We lit new incense and made offerings of libations and fornication beneath His watchful gaze.

Then, as a final offering, I had one of the spiders bring forth the last of that which I acquired in town. The large trunk was lowered before the altar and I slide my nude from from it and opened the lid.

Inside was a mer, the same as who had spat at the feet of a passing Khajiit and yelled the most uncouth obscenities. A mer who, in addition to his words, hurled stones at a Bosmer child who he called unclean. I had brought him to unconsciousness easily enough with a needle dipped in a sleeping drought.

I could see some hesitation from the others that there was a person within. I sang a song softly in Velothis, a children’s lullaby. It has a quality of soothing. I placed a hand upon the slumbering man’s forehead and projected his poor treatment of others in flames from the other.

Standing before my Spiderlings, I cited the man’s behavior. Said there was worse too, but I would not share that. I asked that our Prince accept his wretched soul as an offer and to cleanse the world from one more person who sought to bring hatred and despair to others.

Blaze and Prince both raised their voices to join me in prayer and Effervescent was immediately behind them.

I asked Tanur who had earned the honor of providing the soul to our Prince.

There was some tension between those gathered. Tanur said that from my training death weavers it was Effervescent who had earned the highest marks.

I smiled and called him forward. He stepped forward, but looked very nervous.

I pulled the ebony dagger of sacrifice from its place at my thigh and held it out to him. He glanced at it and then at me.

I asked him, would he accept the honor of being the one to send the soul on to our Prince.

He shifted uncomfortably, reaching towards the blade and then pulling his hand back.

As soon as he showed hesitation, Blaze said that she would do it if he could not. She is always eager to show her strength.

He looked to her and then at the blade. Then he lowered his head and said he was not ready.

I thanked him for his honesty and told him it was no shame. That it was best to know yourself and your abilities and that it would not keep him from that which he has already earned. The first time one stains their hands with the blood of another, without anyone else to assist them, is the one that counts most. It is the one that will give you pride or shame. It should be one that you are ready for.

He looked astonished at my words, but comforted. He thanked me and went to join the others. Prince clapped him on the shoulder and whispered some encouragement.

Blaze stepped forward, every ounce of her dripping with swagger.

I held out the blade to her and asked if she was ready to take the honor of sending the soul of this foul creature on to our Prince.

She smirked over her shoulder at Effervescent before she said she was and her hand shot out and took the handle of the blade. She looked at it hungrily, admiring the beauty of it, relishing in her being the first of the Nest to take the soul of a sacrifice all on her own.

I was proud of her as she stepped forward, her anxiousness barely visible in her movements.

I summoned my shades to lift the mer onto the altar. She took a deep breath and stood before him. I went stood on the other side of the altar, across from her, so that the other would see my face, one of confidence and pride and not be able to see any hesitation that she might show. That was just for me to gauge.

The knife raised up in the air and she cried out her prayer for our Prince.

As she went to plunge it into the mer, he awoke just long enough to see it coming and he rolled to the side, Blaze slicing his shoulder. She jumped back, surprised as the others looked alarmed.

He took the moment of confusion from Blaze to get off of the altar and start to run. I counted for thirteen seconds, gauging what any of them would do. Blaze chased after the man, Prince and Ebony rushed to block exits to the room, Effervescent pulled out a blade of his own and stood in front of the others in case something happened.

Not too bad of an option, but certainly not ideal.

With a teleport strike I landed in front of the mer and put a paralysis needle into his neck. It began to take affect not long after he started to scramble away, his body slowing. He yelled at us, dirt faces I believe he called us who were Dunmer. It was about the last thing he managed to do before his body locked up completely.

I shook my head as I looked down at him and his eyes were fixed upwards at me. I told him that we could not let him continue on in such a manner. It was simply unseemly. And we would not want that, would we?

Blaze was fuming and embarrassed when she came over and asked what to do now. I had her take him back over to the altar. Alone. She had allowed him the opportunity to run, so it was her responsibility to put him back.

He was tall, even for an Altmer, and she used all of her strength to drag him across the floor and back onto the altar. I told him that she could try again. That he would not be able to move for an hour, so she had plenty of time to correct her mistake this time.

In all her rage she screamed out her offering prayer and this time she did not miss. All her hatred of being seen weak and her anger, perhaps even at me for the embarrassment, all was channeled into her plunging the knife into him again and again. A strangled noise came from his throat with every strike.

When she seemed to come to herself, I stopped her and told her that we did not make our sacrifices out of anger. That led to selecting the wrong individual. We were not to be unduly cruel, either. Not unless it was part of a plan in specific. No. We were to be more humane, even for those that would not do the same to us.

I stood behind her and adjusted her grip on the handle, my hand over hers, I moved it to the positions to kill quick, to kill silently, to cause suffering. These were important to know for moving forward. Then I moved her blade to below the chin and showed the best way to slit the throat to prevent sound. It was relatively fast and showed how deep and where to place the blade in and pull out to make it silent.

She was panting, still catching her breath from her earlier attack, as she looked up at me, the bloody blade in her hand in mine. There was something of an awe in her expression like I had never seen. I cannot point to what it meant.

She kissed me and thanked me for the lesson. I told her there would be more soon enough.

I slipped the dagger from her hand and turn to the others, announcing that the soul was departing for the spiral skein. Blood burbled out of the gaping throat wound and the multiple holes in the Altmer’s chest, as the heart slowed. I called the death weavers forward and had them listen, showing them the exact moment that death had taken the mer.

Then we moved back and I signaled the hungrily waiting spiders to come and collect the body. Two fought over it a moment before tearing it in half. A third scrambled to get the bits and blood left behind.

I left the blood on the altar and resumed the prayer. There was a shift. A nervousness. The alcohol flowed freely. It seemed a bigger shock than I would have guessed for many of them. But with enough drinking and dancing and prayer, the usual atmosphere returned and the intimacies resumed. Blaze seemed particularly interested in engaging with me. I obliged, atop the altar, the cool blood sticky on my back as she showed that assertiveness once more. Effervescent joined in soon after and Prince not long after him. I do not know if they felt it necessary to progress or if they simply were enthralled by the sacrifice. Blaze definitely seemed to feel something special. I wonder if one of the mysteries of our Prince came to her in that moment. Did something get whispered in her ear? Did she feel something as I always do at those moments?

Arrow gave me a look. I worry that she does not like how I conducted things. Perhaps it was too visceral. I shall have to put more theater into the next one, less real death, more spiritual release. It was a learning experience for certain. Others seemed less shook.

I stayed the night, as is the usual way. We remained at the Cathedral of Webs. My death weavers did not wish to leave my side. They followed me into my chambers there and proceeded to keep me company all night. Tanur came in briefly. He had his share of fun, but there was something about the energy the other three were giving off that seemed to hurry him along and out. There was something almost magnetic about that and I was starting to feel it too. There was something very special about these three. They were going to play an important role for me and I was happy to encourage the behavior. Blaze seemed intoxicated with me. Effervescent not much less. Prince is fairly reserved in his expressions so harder to read on that front.

In the morning I made my prayers by my personal altar and as I went to make my morning offering, they all fought to support me with it. Even slumber did not break that strange spell. and yet I was starving for the attentions. Their desires becoming like a meal to the starved mer. I indulged, hearing whispers in my own ears to enjoy the rewards of my hard work.

Eventually I bid all a farewell. I summoned Zethith and was taken to the back of a hill just outside of the Mabrigash camp. I arrived just before dawn, Zethith clicking their tongue at me and changing me into more suitable attire. They are like an elder sibling, helping me to do my duties and be presentable. And so I entered to find only the first few Wisewomen and the guardian warriors stirring.

I gave proper greetings and gifts and helped the Wisewomen to prepare for the celebrations of the dawn.

Everything was so beautiful. I had brought roses as an offering to adorn the effigy of Azura with. Mother had done so as well and so we had a great offering of our Lady’s flowers and so many treats.

Kuna and Cariel were delighted by how different it all was even from their last celebration with the tribe. Cariel loved all the flowers and the flowing robes. Kuna loved the music and being allowed to stay up so late.

Sildras, nearing his twelfth year spent extra time with the Farseer to begin to learn new prayers of gratitude for life under his patron Goddess. I was proud of him. Mother was, too. More than I have seen her in some time.

Cariel tired out early, but tried to force herself to stay awake. Sildras had to tell her that sometimes you got visions, special messages from Azura while you slumbered that night. That got even Kuna to agree to go to bed.

I joined them, leaving Avon to enjoy the celebration of his patron through the night and staying with the children in his stead. He was surprised, but grateful. I know he needs it. And I want to show him my support.

I, for once in a long while, did not suffer from any of the usual horrible visions. And just before dawn, I had what I know was my message from the Lady of Moon and Star. Dark clouds rolling into a clear sky. A sign of danger and troubles. Yet through it all the darkness never fully prevailed and subsided. A message came to me. I have the strength for what is to come. It will be tough, but I have the skills to overcome it. Hope is never truly lost.

At least, that is what the Farseer has clarified from my vision. I am on the right path. I have made good choices. I must now concentrate on sticking with my priorities.

It is very good advice. And only a fool would not listen to a God’s advice.

I look forward to hearing more of what the children dreamt of. I am hoping it was good news.

#ESO #TES #RP #Dunmer #Elder Scrolls Online #The Elder Scrolls

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alexsfictionaddiction · 1 year ago

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Review: The Bookbinder's Guide To Love by Katherine Garbera

Books, witchy vibes and a cute romance? Safe to say that this book was always going to be high on my list. I think I've only ever read one other Mills & Boon book before and I don't remember it being particularly spicy but for all I know, this level of spice could be par for their course.

Sera grew up as a lonely foster child, bouncing from home to home. That was until she found the wonders of bookbinding and set up a witchy store with her two best friends Liberty and Poppy. Sera's handmade journals are highly sought after and are thought to bring only good things to those who buy them. But when Sera's friend and mentor Ford, a wealthy bibliophile, dies and leaves a large box of rare books to her, she appears to have ruffled some feathers within Ford's family. So, when his angry yet handsome grandson Wes shows up at the store with plenty of suspicions about Sera and demands his grandfather's books back, she isn't giving in easily.

The bond between Sera, Poppy and Liberty was one of my favourite parts of the book. There is a real found family/sisterhood vibe between them and although they're not really witches, it's easy to see why so many of the town suspect that they're a coven. It was really lovely to spend time with the three of them in their cosy store and I honestly felt like I fitted in with them.

I would have really liked to have known more about Sera's journals. I wasn't entirely sure what gave them so much power, as I knew there was no real magic going into them. Perhaps it was just the power of belief in good things manifesting into those good things but it was all quite vague.

Sera is determined to channel main character energy, as she feels that she has always taken a back seat in her own life. I'm always really admirable of women who suddenly decide to do this and I can definitely relate, as I never feel like the main event myself. I think this is the first book in a series and I suspect that the subsequent books will follow Poppy and Liberty (just a guess!), so I like that Sera got to be the heroine first.

Wes starts with the horniness immediately and I was instantly turned off by it. I've realised that I like romantic heroes to be respectful and reserved, so that strong ick rears its head when they get sexual right away. I also totally get that it's probably a very realistic urge for a straight man but I hate being reminded of it.

I also thought having Sera resemble Hermione because she's bookish and witchy was really lazy. Why did she have to look like that? She could have had literally any other physical feature other than brown curls, delicate features, white skin and a slim body but she didn't because that's apparently not what bookish, witchy women look like.

Once Wes had calmed his hormones down, he actually started to fall for Sera. Wes is also a bookbinder and apparently saw her as an old book in need of repair, which is perhaps one of the least romantic similes I've ever read in a romance novel! However, I somehow didn't mind their relationship as it progressed. It just took quite a while for me to start shipping them.

I do think that Sera and Wes may have been better as friends. They could have helped each other through their shared grief of Ford just as well as friends as they did as a couple. I was never hugely excited about their romance but I did like and believe in their connection. I just wish it had contained a different energy.

The Bookbinder's Guide To Love is about finding joy in unexpected places and learning to put yourself first. It didn't quite land as a romance for me but I loved it as a celebration of women and friendship. It's witchy, bookish and spicy, so if those are your buzzwords, grab a copy!

#the bookbinders guide to love #katherine garbera #romance #book review #review #books #bookworm

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destinyimage · 1 year ago

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Breaking All Generational Curses Over Your Pregnancy & Decreeing 7 Generational Blessings

Generations of cultural traditions, family stories, personal beliefs, habitual patterns, and certain ways of doing things have been passed down to all of us through our generational family lines.

There are also personal welfare conditions and various health issues that have been shared through our common natural bloodlines. It is so easy to conform to the old familiar way of thinking and acting and accept these curses as “normal,” but this keeps us living in a broken cycle of continual torment, not even realizing that through Jesus we have the ability and freedom to put an end to it. There is a new way to live in the glory realm, and this happens as we put our complete trust in the power of Jesus Christ and the finished work of the cross. We no longer need to carry the pains of the past or be held in bondage moving forward into our future. Jesus came to set us free!

In your family, there may be a spirit of poverty. If so, get rid of it now! Break that scarcity mentality! Break that mindset of poverty! You need to take authority over that curse! You are not poor; you are blessed and highly favored, and in the glory there is no insufficiency of any kind. Begin focusing on God’s abundant supply and unlimited provision and receive it!

In your family, there may be present or past history of cancer, arthritis, diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, or other physical ailments. Make up your mind to get rid of them now. Break that sickly mindset! You can do this as you take your authority in the glory! Declare, “Not today, Satan, and not ever! I break all ungodly ties with the curse, and I refuse to accept anything but God’s very best for my life!” Remember, those diseases don’t belong to you—they are part of the curse and it was broken at the cross. Stop running to your medicine cabinet or calling your doctor as a first response. Train your mind to be directed toward accessing God’s healing virtue when ungodly symptoms appear. In the glory, you are whole! Receive your freedom!

When it comes to parenting, maybe you experienced toxic patterns in your childhood, and you are concerned about what will be passed down to your children. Stop thinking that way! God is able to break off those unhealthy thoughts, words, and patterns of behavior today if you’ll allow Him to make the necessary changes in you. In the glory, there is freedom and power to be all that God has created you to be. Receive it!

There are even some physical prophetic acts that you can do (beyond prayer) to break off generational curses from your baby, and I share this in my book, Childbirth in the Glory, more in-depth.

Glory Scriptures

But Christ has rescued us from the curse pronounced by the law. When he was hung on the cross, he took upon himself the curse for our wrongdoing. For it is written in the Scriptures, “Cursed is everyone who is hung on a tree.” Through Christ Jesus, God has blessed the Gentiles with the same blessing he promised to Abraham, so that we who are believers might receive the promised Holy Spirit through faith (Galatians 3:13-14, NLT).

We know that our old sinful selves were crucified with Christ so that sin might lose its power in our lives. We are no longer slaves to sin (Romans 6:6, NLT).

Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty (emancipation from bondage, freedom). And all of us, as with unveiled face, [because we] continued to behold [in the Word of God] as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are constantly being transfigured into His very own image in ever increasing splendor and from one degree of glory to another; [ for this comes] from the Lord [Who is] the Spirit (2 Corinthians 3:17-18, AMPC).

Therefore if any person is [ingrafted] in Christ (the Messiah) he is a new creation (a new creature altogether); the old [previous moral and spiritual condition] has passed away. Behold, the fresh and new has come! (2 Corinthians 5:17, AMPC)

But in that coming day no weapon turned against you will succeed. You will silence every voice raised up to accuse you. These benefits are enjoyed by the servants of the Lord; their vindication will come from me. I, the Lord, have spoken! (Isaiah 54:17, NLT)

Glory Prayer

Father, in the name of Jesus Christ, Your Word says that You give Your angels charge over us to guard us and protect us. I thank You right now for releasing angels of protection over my body and over this new life that You have created within me. I thank You that no weapon forged against us shall prosper, and every tongue that shall rise against us in judgement You shall condemn. This is our heritage as servants of the Lord.

I decree that no word curse, generational curse, witchcraft, or evil spirit shall touch me or my child, for we are covered by the blood of Jesus. Lord, You will deliver us from evil, for Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. I have made You my habitation, and I find my protection in the shadow of Your wings. Amen!

Glory Decrees

In the glory, I am the redeemed of the Lord!

In the glory, I am moving into the new!

In the glory, what runs in my family comes from the heavenlies!

In the glory, there is complete freedom for me and my family!

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Speaking Generational Blessings

The baby in your womb is a child of abundance (overflowing with abundant blessings in spirit, soul, and body).

You must truly believe this and speak this over your child. It’s going to take a spiritual boldness on your part, but you’re well equipped to do this. If you feel insecure in this regard, just begin to study God’s Word concerning His blessings. God has always desired to bless His children. The scriptures are filled with His promises of blessing, not only for your personal life but also for the lives of your children and the generations to come. Your legacy will be one of abundant generational blessings!

In the natural, you may come from a generational family line of non-believers, but that isn’t a problem for God because you’ve been grafted into the spiritual bloodline of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob through the finished work of Jesus Christ! The generational promises that God made to them are now available for you and your generations. The Lord, speaking to Abraham (then known as Abram) in Genesis 12:2-3, made a seven-fold promise that is for each of us who names Jesus as Lord:

1. I will make you into a great nation.

For you today, this speaks of divine multiplication and God’s greatness being revealed through your life and the life of your child as you choose to trust Him and be led by His Spirit. You and your generations will do great things to advance the Kingdom of God on earth. Take this time now to prophetically speak into your child’s life in the womb. Lay your hands on your stomach and allow the Spirit to prophesy through you regarding the anointing and ministry call on your precious child’s life. Speak to the greatness within them and set them apart for God’s service. (See Jeremiah 1:5.)

2. I will bless you.

This one is pretty clear—the blessing of the Lord will follow you and your lineage all of your days as you agree with the Word and partner with the Spirit of glory. With this blessing in mind, you may want to speak the following scriptural promise over your baby in the womb: “The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face shine on you and be gracious to you; the Lord turn his face toward you and give you peace” (Numbers 6:24-26, NIV).

3. I will make your name great.

It is God who promotes, advances, and blesses you with divine opportunities and connections, giving you a favorable reputation and name. He chooses to do this through those who posture themselves with humility so that He can be magnified on the earth. (See James 4:10; 1 Peter 5:6.) Instead of your family name bringing you feelings of shame or embarrassment, quite the opposite will happen. Through you and your child, your family name will be one of greatness, beyond reproach, and it will bring glory to God in the earth!

4. You will be a blessing.

Your child will not be a burden, a hindrance, or a distraction in your life. God has graced you with this child—that they might be a tremendous blessing to you and to all those they meet along life’s journey (See Psalm 127:3.) Speak to your baby right now and tell them how blessed you are to be carrying such a beautiful gift from God within your womb. It will also be important to habitually speak these blessings over your child throughout their formative years and beyond. Always remind them (and yourself) why God has brought them into this world—for such a time as this.

5. I will bless those who bless you.

This means you and your legacy will attract such blessings that it may seem almost impossible to contain! An overflow of abundance is the promise that God has for you! (See Ephesians 3:20.) Such favor rests upon your generational family line that your children and your grandchildren and your great-grandchildren will live their lives as a blessing magnet as they walk in the footsteps of salvation!

6. I will curse those who curse you.

This promise speaks of God providing a supernatural defense shield of protection around your family line. Every curse comes from the enemy, and those curses will not prosper in your life because they are being returned to hell (where they came from). Every curse is null and void because you choose to use your authority and live under the blood of Jesus Christ and within the finished work of the cross. (See Galatians 3:13.) All demonic witchcraft, hexes, spells, voodoo curses, familiar spirits, satanic sorcery, hypnosis, bewitchery, etc. are broken off your life and the life of your child. You are free to live in the fullness of God’s blessings. The curse has been reversed.

7. All peoples on the earth will be blessed through you.

As you choose to honor God’s covenant, His blessings flow with unlimited measure. Your family will be a blessing of light in a darkened world. (See Isaiah 60:1.) It’s time to arise and shine with the generational blessings of God!

I would highly recommend that you speak these individual blessings over your sweet baby as the Spirit brings them to your remembrance. Whether it’s morning, afternoon, or night, it doesn’t matter. When the Spirit quickens you to lay your hands on your stomach (anointing your baby in the womb), just do it and boldly speak these promises with a loud voice of authority. As you read this book and capture this revelation, your child is being set apart as a sign and a wonder. (See Isaiah 8:18.) God will do great and mighty things through their life because of your prayers and anointed intercession during this season of pregnancy. Your prayers are powerful—they are weapons against the enemy’s assignments, and they are re-enforcers of God’s promises for the generations to come!

Glory Scriptures

Know therefore that the Lord your God is God, the faithful God who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keep his commandments, to a thousand generations (Deuteronomy 7:9, ESV).

Their children will be mighty in the land; the generation of the upright will be blessed (Psalm 112:2, NIV).

This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live (Deuteronomy 30:19, NIV).

Let each generation tell its children of your mighty acts; let them proclaim your power (Psalm 145:4, NLT).

Glory Prayer

Father, in the name of Jesus, I thank You for Your glory that brings great blessing, miracles and abundance for all succeeding generations. I choose to stand in my authority as a believer, and I connect with each and every promise that You have provided for me and my children.

I thank You that my baby is being born for greatness! You will multiply Your blessings in their life! You are redeeming our family name for Your glory! I choose to receive every blessing that is overflowing from Heaven for me and my legacy so that Your Kingdom will be established on the earth in a greater way through us. I declare and step into the generational blessings of God. Amen!

Glory Decrees

In the glory, I am blessed, and all of my children are blessed too!

In the glory, I am favored by God in an extraordinary way!

In the glory, my children will be raised for supernatural success and prosperity!

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