#idk did I post these before ???

[ceilidho]

I’ve been watching Spartacus with my dad and I must share with you the vision I had.

Gladiator 141 and the sweet little thing they got as a reward after a fight well fought.

this is very old:

Sometimes he spends as much as an hour staring at you through the bars of your cell. 

You haven’t yet worked up the nerve to say something to him. Not while he still wears the silver-plated galea that obscures most of his face. You can still see thin lips through the middle slit of his helmet, where the cheek plates don’t meet and the thin strip running down the bridge of his nose gives way to his philtrum, and the barest slivers of dark eyes. 

Apart from his helmet, he wears little else—sometimes the customary leather pteruge around his waist or a simple tunic belted at the waist. Nothing that would hinder his movements. It keeps the bulk of him on display. A prized fighter then, you surmise, as if the helmet weren’t enough to make that known. 

He still gleams bronze from his fights under the sun. Perhaps he’s counted at least a full hand’s worth this week alone. He comes to you sometimes after those very fights, still dripping sweat and prowling the length of your cell like one of the lions kept beneath the arena. You never know what to say to him then. There’s little you can do apart from curl up into yourself in the far corner of this cell you’ve come to know as a temporary home and eye him warily. 

It’s hard to reckon with the size of him. That’s what keeps you wary, watchful of him when he comes to keep you company for reasons unbeknownst to you. He hasn’t made them known yet, in any case. 

There isn’t an augur to warn you the day he chooses to speak. 

“Where'd they take you from, pretty bird?”

You flinch at the sound of his voice. It comes from the pure depths of him, Tartarus deep. You think it would take nine days for it to reach you, like a bronze anvil falling alongside it. In the days that he’s spent at your side, haunting the length of your cell like a sentry bound to his post, you’ve never once heard so much as a whisper.

His words take a moment to register. Across from you, he sits back on his haunches, thick thighs bunched up under the fan of his pteruge. It’s hard to tell how long he’s been there—the hallway outside your cell is relatively dark, the only windows being on the leftmost side of the building, near the door where he must have quietly slipped in. 

“East of here,” you answer hesitantly.

He hums, nods his head. Ruminates on your words. 

In truth, you can only guess—the village where you grew up, where you suckled at your mother’s teat and played with the other children in the glen surrounded by mountains jutting up from the earth and ochre yellow and green wildgrass, the fog sometimes sitting so low in the valley that you could lose yourself in it, is far from here. At least a month’s walk, perhaps more (you lost time along the way). Your feet are still blistered from the march back to Rome, legs still covered in sores and bruises; even now your cell is a poor comfort, the dirt floors harsh on your knees and shins, abrasive to the partially healed skin of your feet. 

You’ve never been very worldly though, never known more than the four walls around your bed. Perhaps the walk wasn’t nearly as long, as treacherous; maybe you came from the west instead, or the south. You can only guess. 

“I came from the north,” he says, breaking the silence again. That startles you somehow. The thought of him under the thumb of another feels inexplicably gut-wrenching; if a man with a virile, sweat-laden chest like his, arms corded with muscle that yours will never see in a thousand years, has been yoked to Rome’s chariot, what hope do you have? 

You wonder for a moment if he’ll tell you more, but he falls silent after that simple revelation. The weight of his gaze still pins you in place.

“…You’re a prisoner then?” you ask, considering briefly whether to say like I, before discarding the thought. Like I, like me. Are you too in a cage, like me?

It’s difficult to suppress the urge to ask him more, but you do. It does you no good to endear yourself to men that move and stare like beasts. There’s something malignant in him, you think, a rot burrowed in deep. You can feel it stir in you too when your eyes dip too low, halted by the muscles of his thighs and the thick slabs packing his arms. You’ve seen beasts copulate; you imagine he’d be much the same. 

He tilts his head, considering your words. Wolf-like, and you’ve seen wolves before. Though the ever-present helmet obstructs most of his face, the sharpness of his eyes pierces through. “They don’t put me in a cage anymore. What would you call that?”

Your chest collapses under his words. Hopes dashed. Does he go in the cage of his own accord then? Does he lock the door himself, deliver the key to the guard standing watch? You think people taken from their homes should see their plight in each other, but the gladiator before you doesn’t look at you like the two of you share a fate. 

“A slave?” you postulate, perhaps too boldly. Worry crawls inside the walls of your belly when his lips flatten, almost imperceptibly.

“Do I look like a slave to you?” he asks, and you can hear it this time. A gentle warning. A rebuke. A question that tells you all that you need to know about this man and how he sees the two of you. 

You remain silent, cowed under his stare and the tone of his voice. Perhaps he’s right, in a way; he’s not the one in the cage. He seems free to come and go as he pleases, his movements unrestricted. Unlike your own. You’ve hardly left this cell once since a faction of the legionaries left you at the gates of the city to be handled by those in charge, watching slave after slave made empticii, helpless, until finally you were dragged to the stand for viewing. 

You flinch when he grabs one of the bars of your cell, thick fingers coiling around the metal and overlapping easily. 

“What did they take you for, pretty bird?” His fingers tighten around the bar, knuckles whitening. “Every day I fight and yet they never offer you as a prize.”

The new scars on his body make sense then, fresh lacerations across his arms and legs that have multiplied by the days since he started visiting you. Why he gleams with fresh sweat every day, correlating with the fights you hear in the arena above you, the cacophonous chants and stamping feet. You can imagine him in front of a crowd frothing at the mouth for blood and gore. 

He comes stained in it sometimes. You hold your breath until he leaves on those days, reminded too much of your village in the aftermath of the plundering. 

“I don’t know,” you whisper, tucking your legs into your chest and trying to get as close to the wall behind you as possible. 

It’s the truth. No one tells you anything. No one told you what would happen when they ransacked your village and burnt it to ash, the bodies of everyone you’ve ever loved still burning char black in the tall grass, whittled down by the flames. No one told you what would happen after they dragged you back a thousand passus to a city scorched in white marble and stone and immaculate gold. They dragged you here and shut the door. 

He seems frustrated at your words, lips thinning like he has to hold back his rage.

“I’ll slaughter a hundred more if that’s your price,” he says, his helmet knocking into the bars with a rough clang and making you jump when he leans in. His chest lifts with his quickened breaths, working himself up at the thought of more bloodshed. “Then give you their hearts. No other man will take you. I’ll rend their limbs if another man tries. Make you taste their blood on my fingers and lap it up when I split you on my—”

Your heel skitters across the ground, digging a small groove into the dirt and scattering small rocks across the cell. “I don’t k-know what they intend—”

You stare at him when he rises back up to his feet, words dying on your tongue. Standing, he towers over you, shoulders rolling back to puff out his chest. 

“You wait, little bird. Flutter your wings. Soon you’ll see the sun.”

You can only imagine what he means. The thought of sunlight on your face fills you with dread for the first time in your life. 

He leaves without another word, heavy footsteps carrying him to the door until you hear him pry it open, sunlight streaming in for a second before it slams shut. The silence in the absence of him feels monstrous, gargantuan. 

All you can do is let out a shuddering breath.

[gregorovitch-adler]

Translation: Junior, I have told you several times that Lily prefers to be single, remember?

Lily is the new aroace icon. That's all.

[d-does-art]

Please consider

[chiigii]

— passing the baton to her is my job.

hoshina soushirou.

[nvoc]

SKYRIM ; scenery 43

[limeartichoke]

if you're wondering yes this does in fact happen AFTER tim punches skully in the jaw after introducing themselves with brian's face

unedited under cut!

[care666bear]

I don’t think I like these but wanted to post somethingggg

[cozylittleartblog]

a little Postlet. . because i Miss them

[lavenderstobins]

thinking abt steve having this shift from loving people so much that he’d die for them to loving people so much that he’d live for them. he makes robin laughs and he thinks that he wants to hear her laugh forever. dustin grins at him and he realises he never wants to see him sad

[st0rmyseas]

[kakyogay]

more shadow because the silly

[^context for that^] been reading a whole lotta post-movie fics and making up my own in my head. The regulator rings (if that's what they are idk I'm new to all this) are wrecked and chaos energy is just pouring outa the fella, making wounds worse and ruining any progress his accelerated healing could do (BECAUSE ANGST YOU FOOL).

oh and also a wee bit of a doodle for the fic I'll Be There With Lavenders by XenoCG because twas very cute and saw the outfit collage they posted (I already tagged them on insta I don't want to bother them again ouuuuhgh)

[jae-in-a-trenchcoat]

I think Darius finding ao3 on Brooklynn’s computer is gold (based on this)

[mohntilyet]

illario + lucanis growing up together means a lot for obvious reasons ofc like the fact they did not have to go through the dellamorte villa torment nexus alone really helps. immediately from the moment they are taken to that house, lucanis has had something to protect and love. the snark and jokes that they share in wigmaker job finally having a chance to shine outside of the only person lucanis is socialised with and he learns that wow, he's actually likable. because up until this point everyone around him calls him a demon and is freaked out by him but ofc the veilguard only know him as lucanis "he banished harding from the kitchen" dellamorte. sure he's a big bad crow assassin but his reputation simply does not carry that much weight with people who are just equally deranged (maybe a de riva rook but that's also a little different) . and then he's able to share and extend that love with his new friends, and able to try being something that he's not had the chance to before, and his goodness is actively encouraged rather than being an unfortunate sidequest that is tolerated. and i fondly think also of how much of that humor is copied and mirrored off illario ("shoulders....... feeling tight...... need a ..... MASSAGE!") and it's his best experiences with illario that turned him into the man he is. wish the game explored this just a little more because the betrayal would have been made a lot more intense if they had just bothered to show any of illario's redeeming qualities. he has them!!!!! nobody is just born a traitor. you have to love someone before they can become that.

[birdnaps]

Who's ready for Mastermind? Not me! Have a short fan animation of Stolas while you wait. EDIT: Gifset version in the read more.

I have been working on this fan animation on and off for months. It's the biggest animation project I have ever done, and it was never supposed to be as big as it got. And it's only seconds long jashdfgjhg. It was just supposed to be a quick sketch to try out animating in CSP for the first time. I wish I could give it some more work and add/fix some things, but I'm so tired and need other projects.

[teethkid67]

PAYDAY

aka a valentine for the lovely @itsnotmystic / @corvids-calling - fanart for stars fic of the same name, which you can read here !!! i really enjoyed this concept and wanted to do some art for it :3 hope you like it because i REALLY loved your work & i hope this shows that !!! HAPPY VALENTINES DAY !!!!

this is also a loose love-letter to the wonderful @arginnit 's crazy background-drawing-ability and style/skill at portraying environments . wadds your stuff is insane and i love it

happy @mcyt-valentines exchange !!!!

[missescalientee]

Finally revealing one of my other blorbos, Niccolo Sonata! A mixed genre troll who poses as a Pop Idol up until world tour

He's a complicated bag, he's half rock half classical, his mother kind of low-key hates him, and his dad does care but is kind of paralyzed with various anxieties that comes with the fact that Niccolo is half classical (worried about his constitution and his wings) and things related to his mother (she doesn't want Niccolo to become like his dad and puts a lot of restrictions on him)

Both of his parents don't really know what to do with him, and he doesn't know what to do with himself.

He has a lot of internalized hatred towards himself and the two sides of his musical families, plus he is a secret third genre (symphonic rock) which he doesn't fully understand. He got picked on a bit in Volcano Rock City, they're a lot rougher than he's used to so he just kind of took it, which is why he looks so roughed up in one pic and the other he says they hate him in VRC

Again he's really complicated even tho he doesn't look it, if you have questions about him lmk