#is that they cannot bear to leave the west

[baejax-the-great]

Hello! It’s three days until a solar eclipse. Would Agua Caliente Pat and Achilles have plans?

The eclipse path of totality is nowhere near California, and I doubt they'd have much interest in traveling to Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, southern Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, or western New York in early April (or ever). West Coast people can be so attached to their precious coast.

However, the national park service does show which parks will be in the path of totality, and I guess I could see Patroclus using this as an excuse to visit one he hasn't seen before. The the Ozark riverway would be a good one, except it's not open yet. And if they did visit, it would be all mud. And ugly. So... scratch that. Why would they ever leave California? Do they even have smoothies in Missouri?

I think the better plan would be to wait for the eclipse in Spain in August 2026.

[meadow-of-daisies-and-lavender]

Summary: When the god of the Winter needed a messenger, he had chosen you. Yet your elders wanted you dead. But John Price, the god of the Winter, had other plans for his devotee. Eventual Poly 141.

A/N: Leaving this here, then backing away slowly. If you like, please comment and reblog. Special thanks to @itsagrimm for editing, even though you aren't into the type of writing. Thank you to @ethereal-night-fairy and @wildflower-and-honey for feeding my brain worms. I love you three and cannot thank y'all enough <3 Thank you, @saradika, for your beautiful dividers that I use in literally everything.

CW: (18+) Children begone! PIV smut, swearing, a Dyslexic wrote this, Religious Kinks, brief mention of suicide, brief mention of hypothetical pregnancy because what is John Price without a breeding kink? Voyeurism, exhibitionism, praise kink, elements of paranoia, and mindreader elements.

NO AI

Leave a comment and reblog!

You had been abandoned. Sent aimlessly into the east by your deceiving elders to find the oh-so-benevolent god of Winter. Your people had discarded you, and perhaps, you had now been forsaken by the Holy One. Under the new winter moon, you had no bearing in these strange woods. You were lost and without hope. Stumbling into a thicket, you paused, catching your breath. Once your village elders cut your binds and removed the blade from your still bleeding throat, you ran. You had three options now: find the Winter God John Price and beg for mercy, return home to your village to die by your elder’s blade, or finally, die by a frozen death.

 

Yanking down the sleeves of your dress, you shivered. Only a fool would think the thin lace would be enough to fight the cold. You hadn’t bothered to ask for a cape when you would be dead come dawn by the blade of your elders or the mercy of winter’s chill. Besides, if the elders thought it could help entice the winter god closer to you, you welcomed the possibility. The god liked fine things- the fragility of ice coating sleeping trees, the nuanced tendrils that composed a snowflake, the finespun embroidery on an altar cloth. Perhaps the gossamer lace of your gown would make you look as alluring as snow?

 

Your village worshiped the god of the East along with his three other seasonal counterparts. In the winter, the altar faced east for John. In the spring, it faced north for Kyle. In the summer, the altar faced west for Johnny, followed by facing south in the Autumn for the one they called Ghost. You traversed the mezzanine of the aged temple as if it was your birthing ground, dedicating yourself to the unknown and to what divine vexed within. 

 

A creature howled in the far distance, three more joining in the call. You wished you had a blade for protection, but the foolish  elders would not allow it after the last messenger sent to find the God of Winter killed himself. He died from fear of the gods with his body left for the animals starved for winter scraps according to the elders. The collapsed skull and bloodied rock meant otherwise. You would become like the warrior- murdered- if you didn’t keep moving.

 

At least you’d be dead if you stopped moving, and wasn’t that something to rejoice over for the elders? They wanted you gone the moment you opened your mouth, defending the holy temples in a burning righteousness against their infidelity. The elders mocked your faith, staging a spectacle to rejoice in their perceived standings with the holy gods, to enshroud their continued greed of village resources, and holy temple offerings while preventing you from stepping foot inside the sacred temple. 

 

All you wanted was to worship your gods in peace and for your village to know that peace. 

 

A branch snapped in the distance. Setting your foot down ever so quietly, you glared into the darkness of the night. In your chest, your lungs froze as if a tiny breath could lead starving beasts toward you, but your heart tapped a wild rhythm against your bones like a war drum urging warriors forward in battle. Between the bones of the trees, a figure raised from the ground. Dirt quaked in its path, fearing the disturbance as flashes of odd whites and black wove into a tall, hulking beast emerging like smoke. The vaporous monster inhaled. It was as if he sucked the forest in with his expanding breath, the conductor of the skeletal structure of the land. The one who assembled appendages of bone like armor and crown, marking his distinct otherness to any creature known before. Opening his eyes, bright gold light flared from its eye sockets, a perpetual fire, locked on burning you alive.

 

You ran. Barreling through the underbrush, thorns cut and tore at your dress, slowing you down. Pushing deeper into the woods, you dared not glimpse back at the monstrous shape. The gods, you prayed, would give one last indulgence by sparing your life. Dodging fallen trees and saplings, you heaved for a breath. Your toe caught on something sending you tumbling forward, down the hill, to be stopped by a mangled stump. There was little to be felt from the roar in your mind and blood careening to endure, to run, to survive.

 

Looking up, the terrifying haint peered down at you with its head tilted to the side, lazily biding his time hunting you. Fleeing, you made way towards the river that supplied the village with water. The monsters couldn’t cross the running water at the bottom of the ravine. Everybody knew that. Your breath created puffs of smoke with each gasp of air, streaming from your lips like a dragon’s purr.

 

Down at the river, you paused, cursing at your luck. The river was frozen over, but how deep the ice went was beyond you. You had to cross, fighting for a chance at life and to find John Price to appeal for assistance proving your claims. Taking a deep breath, you ventured on the ice, straining your ears for cracking and shifting sounds. Freedom sang like a siren from the other side of the waters with the promise of faith delivering you into her hands. On the other side was an assurance of one more day in your beloved temples with the beloved gods, of life, and of being free from the elders.

 

Without the freedom to roam the holy grounds of faith, what would be left for you?

 

You slipped with a screech, flailing until you caught your balance. Your hands trembled as breath fogged the air. Crossing was the only option, regardless of death prowling down to find you. The thought of the being sent shivers down your spine, and you squeezed your eyes shut as if it would banish the evil and push you across the waters.

 

“Stop!” A man bellowed like thunder echoing in the ravine. You jumped, slipping on the ice. With an assured crack, the ice broke, plunging you into the icy waters.

 

You gasped, choking on river water. Kicking to the surface, you were met with a ceiling of ice. You hit the ice with your hand to no prevail until the bubbles from your nose dissipated and a film of darkness descended upon your peripherals. In the gloom, eyes of golden fire shimmered at you, refracted by the ice, illuminated by the flash of lightning. 

It smelled like oak and spices as you inhaled. The bed you laid in was spacious, a soft luxury you sunk greedily into. Moments of time slowly returned to you as you stirred, until a tapestry unfolded, painting what had occurred in the woods to you. How you had survived drowning or hypothermia was beyond you, feeling none of it, now. Cocooned tightly in thick blankets, albeit naked as the day you were born, sleep still called in the comfort of the home. A warm crackle of a fireplace and the deep mutterings of men speaking filled your ears as you blinked. In your nest, you buried further in, savoring the needed heat with a sigh with your eyes peeking over the cover.

 

The two men, seated in the corner, had stopped conversing to stare at you. One was slim but muscular, with dark skin and shining brown eyes. He wore a grin both authentic and sly as if mischief personified, waiting for his time to strike and laugh at your mild misfortune. 

 

The other man was a bear. Thick, burly, legs with sizable thighs spread to consume room; it seemed all he did was call attention to himself. The cocky spread of his legs to the icy blues of his eyes; your neck burned as he smirked, having caught you staring.

 

“Hello, Fawn,” The bear rumbled, intentionally softening his voice and leaning down as if afraid to spook you like the little deer.

 

“Ghost found you,” injected the younger one. “It took him and Soap to pull you from the ice and bring you home. That was pretty stupid; getting on the ice like that. Haven’t people told you not to do that?”

 

Getting on the ice was stupid, but letting yourself get consumed and murdered by a beast was even worse. You had half a mind to tell the younger man your thoughts on the matter, but here you were, naked in a stranger's bed… alive. While grateful, you needed to leave. The task to find John and plead for his assistance in clearing the village of your awful elders still loomed, as did the precarious nature of being nude in a room of two strong men. 

 

“I’m looking for someone,” You mumbled. “I had no choice.”

 

“I know,” The older man hummed before speaking your name like a whisper of wind on your ear. 

 

The God of Winter . Your spine went straight before you bolted upright, clinging the blankets to your chest. These men were not men at all but your four holy gods. There was half a mind to shuck off the blankets and fall to your knees in reverence. You had offered prayers while bathing before; was this any different? As you shifted, apologized, and begged for pardons on the tip of your lips, John shook his head and stood.

 

“Gaz, go let Soap and Ghost know our fawn is all right,” John said, clasping Gaz on the shoulder. Gaz promptly left the room, closing the wooden door behind him, not before offering you one final comforting grin.

 

“I am sorry. I had to find you. The elders sent me to the woods to murder me. And… I didn’t know what else to do but to seek your help. I’m so sorry, please forgive me. The elders are murdering anyone who dares question them. Nobody believes me even though I have proof! The village will not survive the winter because of our elder’s theft from them and of the temple and I need your help. I have done nothing wrong except be loyal to you, John,” You rushed out in a single breath. “Please, help me. Help us .”

 

John set his hand on your cheek, running his thumb over your warming cheeks. A violent shiver sprung through your body, encouraging you closer to the god. You closed your eyes and nuzzled into his palm, lulled by the smell of spices and the alluringness of being physically held by him. Finally, you had removed the burden of secrecy and responsibility and John took it lightly with his hands soothing the ache from your skin with the glide of his fingers. 

 

“Love, you’re being too harsh. There is no reason to apologize,” He reassured you with a kiss on your forehead. “The fault lies with your elders. You have done all I have asked of you and more. Do not agonize yourself over the stubbornness of others. It will get you nowhere.”

 

You closed your mouth and held his wrist, keeping him to you. You thought of all your nights spent praying to the god of Winter when sleep evaded you. When you screamed or cried your prayers in agony, begging the divine god of winter to make himself known to you so that your faith was not in vain and your people could be free from the elders. 

 

But what of your people? What choice would they make? The old gods were worshiped only in tradition and the elders had slowly pushed your people further from the gods as the temple began to deteriorate. 

 

You were always dedicated to the divine in odd ways. Observant gifts of John’s favorite flowers and drinks were left on your homemade altar—prayers written on little papers in a box. Spare time spent tending to the aged temple and cleaning it, preparing it for worship. Devotion in wearing John’s favorite color as a ribbon around your wrist, bearing his color like a mark of ownership over you. 

 

It was… your stomach clenched as you remembered bathing in his favorite fragrances, the soap trailing between your breasts, water falling as gracefully as the curves of your skin, for his solstice day. Later that night, deciding to offer John an orgasm on a lust-induced whim. When you came down from your high, you swore you could feel the divine by your knees, looking down at the mess you had made, dribbling into the sheets. The idea of him voyeuring into your bedroom made you leak, reaching a bold hand down to part your lips for him to see your swollen clit.

 

“What you want from us, little Fawn,” John tilted his chin to look you in the eyes as his warm toned voice dipped between your thighs to make them clench. “Comes at a high cost for you.”

 

“And let my people suffer from the elder’s greed? Surely, you understand how harsh winter can be! And to let the gods lay waste when this is proof you still are near has to be blasphemy. I don’t want to die, but I’d rather try dying than be left bystanding in silence, rotting away-”

 

John took your neck in hand and hulled you to your feet. Your words died on your tongue as his nose pressed into your cheek. Chests pressed together, his human form radiated heat and softness protecting layers of muscle and power. You wondered briefly if his divine form would look more bear or beast, unleashing the thrum of calculated energy pulsing inside the god.

 

“Fawn, martyrdom is for suicidal fools. Not even the martyrs ask for their portion, they stumble upon it trying to uphold the will of the gods which threatens the portions and powers that be in your mortal world,” John shook your head ever so slightly, pressing closer until you gasped, looking up at him with wide eyes. Dark as ice, they pierced into you flickering from your eyes to your mouth, the urgency he held you with inching into territories you were unsure of but eager to explore. His eyes flickered down for a moment, and you shivered at your exposure, pressing your face into his neck as if to hide. “You will stay the night but come dawn, you must return home to live for us.” John instructed, pushing your hair from your neck. Leaning down, he nipped the bottom of your ear playfully, kissing along your neck.

 

You hummed, offering your neck to his lips. It didn’t matter if you had laid with a million other people before or none at all. You yearned for the assured solidity of the gods, and now you had it. They could have your body, the works of your hands, the words of your mouth, the paths of your feet. You only wanted to be near John, safe, nestled into his side, even if for a little while. To be welcomed into the god of winter’s bed for even a night? The idea made your thighs slickened with want, heat pooling in your stomach.

 

Everything in your bones wanted to please him, to let him have his fill of you, to honor him with the best of your skin and body. You’d get on your knees for him. Suck his cock until you are panting, with his cum on your tongue. You wanted to be good . You let out a little whine, a soft vibration in your throat. John chuckled, coming up from your throat to kiss you properly, all while moving you on the bed.

 

He kissed down your throat, gently touching your chest with the hints of friction making you squirm, tangling your fingers in his hair.

 

“I want you to soak my fingers and cock with this pretty cunt tonight, Fawn” John decidedly spoke. You eagerly nodded, humming as his hand squeezed the fat of your stomach. 

 

You opened your thighs as he descended between them, grinning as he knelt before you. You could have laughed at his eagerness if it wasn’t for the gentle, inquiring sweep of his finger through your folds, collecting your wetness. A sigh fell from your lips as he played with your cunt, a pleasant warmth filling your mind as your legs found a home on his shoulders, your hand on the back of his neck, scratching the short hairs there.

    

“Been thinkin’ about this pretty pussy since you showed her to me,” John growled, thumb swirling on your clit just as you had when you played yourself for him. Your knees bent, pushing your pelvis to catch the angle just right . “Offered me use of your body, a delicacy, to use as I please. Perfect little human for me to fuck whenever,” He growled before putting his mouth to work, sucking on your clit.

 

You keened, bucking your cunt into his face. John devoured you whole, feasted on you, your head in the clouds, floating with nothing to tether you but his mouth. The god of winter’s fingers prodded your entrance, slipping in with a slight stretch. His fucking hands, reaching depths you could never achieve on your own, made you moan, opening your eyes to watch him. From below your stomach, John was fully committed, eyes closed, grunting against your cunt.

 

John fought against your legs, drawing out the pulsing waves of pleasure until your ears were ringing, vision white, cresting into a beautiful brainless hum as your body went limp. 

 

“Fuck, John, I can’t,” You whimpered, pushing his forehead back. Your chest heaved, hands grasping for anything you could reach until he slid his hand in yours, anchoring you to him. He moved, and you closed your sticky thighs, clenching at the slick dribbling down. John reverently kissed your collarbone, hands brushing over your scalp, lulling you from the cloudy space.

 

His lips kissed along your neck and chest as his hands wandered along your hips and thighs, rough fingers tickling the sensitive skin of your ass. Your eyes opened, greeted by his gentle gaze as he hovered over you. His mouth had been pinkened by your cunt, hair mused by your thighs and hands. 

 

Grabbing his hand, you kissed his palm before licking the fingers that had been inside of you moments before. Something was intoxicating about the way you tasted, strong and delicious. Taking his fingers in your mouth, you hummed, thinking about how much thicker his cock would feel. John swore, pushing his fingers against your tongue, stilling your control. You moaned, letting your eyes close and legs fall open. Holding his arm, you could feel how your tits were pressed together by your biceps, making you not only a sight but a spectacle .

 

“Want my cock that bad, little fawn?” John teased. Opening your eyes, you nodded, nudging him closer with your foot. Removing his fingers, he drug his hand down your centerline, leaving a cold trail of your spit down your body. He slowly entered you, grunting with his eyes glued to the way you sucked him in.

 

“Fuck, John,” You whimpered, panting at the fullness pressing you open. His thumb rubbed your clit, lulling you back to another orgasm. Spreading your legs, he placed a knee on the bed as he began to thrust, covering his cock in your frothy slick.

 

It was hot and so, so full as he reached parts of you that had you gasping for air and tearing up. There was no pinch, only a subtle burn from the stretch, soothed by his cooing in your ear and thumb working wonders on your clit. Shifting his hips, he fed you more of his cock, making your vision go frayed around the edges. If your brain could leak away, it would slowly leak out with the wetness of your cunt.

 

“Just like that, fawn,” John encouraged, making you clench around him. “My little offering to take as I want, letting me use you like a good girl,” John grunted as you clenched around him, his hands falling to your stomach and hip, selfishly grasping at the plush skin to pull and drag you off his cock with.

 

“I’m,” You whined, clawing at the god’s massive arms, rippling with movement. “Please, John! Feels so good, filled up,” You babbled, trying to run closer and further with each thrust.

 

His other hand laid over the base of your throat, curling possessively around, forcing your eyes to his, forehead to forehead, as he pressed and pressed into your cunt, stretching you wide and filling you perfectly.

 

“Pretty wet cunt, dripping for me,” John’s lips brushed your ear, moaning into it. He reached a hand to gently pinch your nipple, making you gasp. “Rub yourself for me. Let me see you soak my cock.”

 

You slid a hand between your thighs and rubbed your clit, spreading your lips wider, feeling fully exposed, unable to help the moan and the chasing buck of your hips, humping the tight heat pooling in your stomach.

 

“Cum, love. Cum for me.”

 

You listened, you always did, a perfect little offering for him to use. You fought to keep your eyes open as you came, body convulsing, to show him what he had made you into. But when your fingers became too sharp, the pleasant hum of blood in your head turning into a sharp ringing, you went limp, thighs covered in slick cum as John took his final thrusts. Ropes filled you as his hand lovingly smoothed over your lower stomach. He rested his forehead on yours, panting as he lazily kissed you, his cock twitching as you warmed him. 

 

“You okay?” John whispered from his place between your breasts as you scratched the back of his head.

 

“Sore,” You hissed as he slipped from you but was quickly scooped into his arms and laid across his chest. “M’tired,” You confessed, closing your eyes with a soft sigh.

 

You would be content to lie on his chest for the rest of time, feeling the rise and fall of his breath, wrapped in the warmth of his broad arms. Everything about you felt small compared to him; the way his hands engulfed yours, the way your calves had laid over his shoulder, the ripple of muscles and fat as he had fucked you. 

 

“I need to clean up,” You mumbled, fingers following the lines of his pectorals. 

 

“In a moment, darling. We’ll both clean up.” John kissed the top of your head, reaching for a glass of water for you to drink from before he took a few sips.

 

The god of Winter leaned down and kissed you so gently, soothing the aches with gentle hands against your thighs. Though, you felt it was more an excuse to touch your thighs more, but you didn’t mind. After cleaning up, you fell asleep swiftly, draped over his chest as his fingers traced dainty traces of snowflakes along your spine, tended to and protected. 

In the morning, you woke in your own bed, dressed in the robes of a high priestess, as someone pounded on your door. As you rose, you felt the phantom aches of the previous night between your thighs. Quickly hiding the robes, you caught the white scars of John’s handprint over your womb, etched like silver ice into your skin.

 

“One second!” You yelled, dressing. Once you were decent, you threw open your door and gawked.

 

“There’s been a war party! They burnt the elder’s homes and the wheat stores! We need help!” The man took you by the arm and pulled you into the fray of dark smoke against the blooming pink winter sky. It was snowing, melting into water that slid down your arm and into the frosted grounds.

[cowboywithacunt]

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CONTENT WARNING ;

This blog is an 18+ only kink/nsfw blog. I'm going to be posting explicit text and images. Please be aware that some of my kinks may be triggering to others! A full list of my kinks and limits are under the cut.

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RULES BYF ;

🐄 DNI: Men DNI blogs, detrans/misgendering/trans fetishization blogs run by cis people, cishet men, weight loss/thinspo blogs, feederism blogs, MAPs, minors and ageless blogs

🐎 My asks and dms are open to anyone! Please respect my boundaries, and don't send me stuff that involves kinks I list as a limit. Also be aware that I might not always respond! Sometimes I just ain't got the energy, don't know what to say, am offline, or just aren't interested at the moment. I'm fine with sexting, pics, and roleplaying. Do not message me several more times if I don't respond to your first message.

🐄 I block liberally! It's nothing personal, just how I curate my experience. Please don't circumvent blocks for any reason.

🐎 Feel free to claim an emoji, but I will remove you from the claimed emojis list if you don't send anything for a long while. It's nothing personal, just a way of keeping organized! If you start sending asks again I'll put you right back on.

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INFO ABOUT ME ;

🐎 I'm Harvey! 22, transgender (FtM), he/him, bisexual, country boy who's learned to embrace it as a thing people are into lol. Currently living on the west coast, originally from Georgia. I'm fat and hairy and masc, take it or leave it. 5'5". Deer boy tbh 🦌

🐄 I'm strictly masc, have been on T for about 4 years, and I got top surgery done last summer. I don't have bottom surgery, and probably never will.

🐎 I'm happy to be a dom or sub for any and all genders! I enjoy both roles equally. Same goes for topping and bottoming. I'm about as versatile as a guy can get!

🐄 Asks and dms are open to anyone who's interested!

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KINKS, FETISHES, ETC ;

🐎 CNC; includes rape play, dubcon, somnophilia, intoxication, primal play, and kidnapping.

🐄 Fauxcest; may include some ageplay elements, such as MILFs/DILFs, cougars, etc.

🐎 Humiliation and degradation; includes exhibitionism, voyeurism, pet play, free use, force fem/masc, misgendering, and detrans.

🐄 Monster fucking; werewolves, vampires, tentacles, you get the picture. May include non-human genitalia references.

🐎 BDSM; mostly pertains to bondage, but some light impact play might also be present. Nothing beyond spanking or slapping!

🐄 Overstimulation and understimulation; too many orgasms and not enough orgasms. Edging included in this.

🐎 Breeding; including impregnation of others, not of myself.

🐄 Misc; wilderness sex, cowboys/rednecks, putting city assholes in their place, T4T, bears, butches, sex toys, fighting for dominance, light gun/knife play, medical settings, older men/women, trans supremacy, furries, leather. Open to trying new things!

🐎 I do not tag any of these on reblogs! If you genuinely cannot stomach one or more of these things, just do your mental health a favor and don't follow me. Keep yourself safe!

🐄 Please keep in mind that all fantasies I post about are in the context of consensual roleplay between adults.

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LIMITS ;

🐎 Heavy blood, gore, death, necrophilia.

🐄 Scat, watersports, emetophilia. Very light omorashi stuff is fine.

🐄 Choking, beating.

🐎 Detrans/misgendering directed at me.

🐎 DDLG and similar kinks that focus on infantalization.

🐄 Race play; if someone wants to call me a stupid little white boy or something, that's fine, but anything even edging towards white supremacy isn't cool with me

🐎 It's okay if you're into the above things! I won't yuck somebody's yum. You can follow and interact. Just please don't send me asks or dms involving those kinks, and be aware that I may not follow back if you post a lot of one of these.

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TERMINOLOGY FOR ME I'M OKAY WITH ;

🐎 Sir, mister, bitch, faggot, whore, slut, masc terms, sweetheart, darling, buck

🐄 Dick, cock, t-dick, clit, cunt, pussy, chest, hole(s)

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TERMINOLOGY FOR ME I'M NOT OKAY WITH ;

🐎 Daddy, puppy, fem terms

🐄 Tits, boobs, vagina, front hole

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If you're not sure about something, just ask! I don't bite!

[inexplicifics]

Love your writing, do you have any fic snippets you feel like sharing? Ideally more canon divergent than modern if possible?

Well, here's a bit from one where the divergence is that Geralt never got given to the witchers!

“There is a valley a long day’s hike west,” Geralt says. “It holds everything I need to gather; it usually takes me three or four days to collect what I need. As to the creatures -” he hesitates briefly, biting his lip. Eskel would like to take over that duty. Or possibly kiss the bitten lip to soothe it. Or both. “Natural animals,” Geralt says, and Eskel yanks his attention back where it’s supposed to be, “bears, or wolves, and so on, I can…convince to leave me be.” Eskel nods. That explains the faint thrumming of his medallion. “You’re a druid,” he guesses. Geralt shrugs, looking awkward. “Of druid stock, but…untrained,” he admits. Eskel blinks. Self-trained might be more accurate, he suspects, given that amazing garden and the ability to convince animals to leave him alone. “So you don’t need to worry about purely natural animals,” he says. “Which just leaves monsters.” Geralt nods. “Those, I cannot convince.” Eskel reaches up to touch the hilt of his silver sword. “Well, I can.”

[thesparklingwriter]

taking fate into one's own hands

06—understanding

Word count: 1.6k

navi | taglist | masterlist

“The harbour.” you say quickly. “I’d like to see the harbour.” 

Morax smiles tentatively and nods. “Alright. That can be arranged. I shall return in an hour.”

You nod and close the door behind you, breathing a sigh of relief. Your relief quickly dissipates as you look at the clothes in your hands. Surely, all these items can't just be for one outfit, right? You turn to Alanna, but she’s gone—she must have slipped out while you were talking to the king.

You lay each piece out on your bed and try to figure it out. It seems you have three pieces per outfit here, which is a relief, but even with that, you have no idea what goes where. Where on Teyvat did Alanna go?

You sigh at the colours on your bed, and instead of fretting over how to wear them, you decide to take a soak in your tub to ease your mounting nerves. Perhaps you are being a little stubborn. It’s frustrating, not knwoing exactly where you stand. Morax’s words must be true, for you do not have proof otherwise, but even so. This arrangement is confusing. But Alanna’s words ring out in your head, and if your being here is for your own good somehow, it would not hurt to make a friend out of the king.

You leave your bath, resolved to be cordial to the Morax, as he has been to you. Perhaps if you do not question him too much, he will naturally reveal the information you wish to know. Alanna has returned from her excursion, having discovered the secrets of traditional Liyuean dress on her travels. She explains each layer to you, even though she knows you will use it as an excuse to give her a break whenever you get dressed for an outing. With each word, she notices the way you visibly relax, and when you say you want to wear the brown set, a colour associated with not only Liyue, but the ruler himself, she does not flinch, nor question you. With a simple nod and barely leashed smile, she puts herself to work.

Morax, on the other hand, finds himself somewhat unsettled. During negotiations, he had been promised a placid and pleasant princess, and so far you had only proved one of those things to be true. Despite your stubbornness, you are pleasant to be around. Much more pleasant than most of the dignitaries he has found himself in company with recently. But he had not been informed of your intelligence, and he now realises that it may cause him some strife. Although he has finished all the tasks he planned for today, he finds himself at his desk once again, reading through requests from his people and noting down the things he finds most important in order to forget his future arrangements with you. 

“I am glad the two of you are getting along. It may do you well to have a friend.” Xiao says as he enters the room. 

Morax makes a sound that bears an uncanny resemblance to a snort. “I would suggest you wait before firing off the celebratory lights.”

“Always the pessimist.”

“I assume you mean realist. Be frank with me, Xiao. there’s no way that you truly believe she will not find fault in her parent’s reasoning.” Your parents had essentially resigned themselves to death in sending you here, and despite everything, morax can't bear to tell you the truth. 

“I believe she will appreciate your honesty.”

“Why do I continue to discuss this topic with you?”

“Why does the sun rise in the east and set in the west?”

Morax stares at the prince blankly. The prince stares back. 

~~~

“Did you find the chance to read that letter from your parents?” Alanna asks you as she finishes tying a bow out of the ribbons on your clothes. You sigh as you glance over at your desk, the worn paper and the blue-green seal utterly out of place in the luxurious room. 

“I haven’t found the time to.” a lie so preposterous that you cannot even bring yourself to conceal it. You have all the time in the world, but looking at that letter would make it seem like it’s slipping from your fingers. It’s too much for you to face. “And I am afraid of what is inside.”

You look up from your nails as Alanna silently pushes the letter towards you, and you sigh. “Alright.”

Reading the letter fills you with questions, and you resolve to ask Morax about them. What is this hidden threat that your parents cannot talk about, but seem to be so afraid of? He will tell you whatever he knows, no matter what it takes. You will make sure of it.

“Your Highness,”

“I am fine, Alanna. I simply wish to go to the harbour already. This room is suddenly feeling cramped.”

“Understood.” Alanna says quietly. Even though she knows your wors weren’t a subtle hint of her to move—as many would interpret it as—she excuses herself anyway. To where? You do not know.

You read over your letter, once, twice, thrice, and no new discoveries come to light. You parents had become more secretive as time went on, but you never imagined they could reach these heights.

A knock on your door drags you out of these thoughts, and you pull yourself together as you approach the door. You expect to see a member of the palace help, but no, it is Morax, with his hair untied once again, thick silky ribbons of it falling over his shoulders. You can’t quite tell if you’re staring or not. On the other hand. Morax is acutely aware of the fact he’s staring at you. Maybe it's the determination in your eyes or the fact that you're wearing his colours… He never would have expected it to cause such a response in him.

He would never deny your beauty, but amidst the turbulence of your first few days here, he might have found himself too preoccupied with thoughts of frustration to really look at you properly. And now he has the chance to; he seems to be enjoying it more than he should reasonably allow himself to.

He clears his throat, and you jump ever so slightly, covering it up with a stubborn cough.

“I thought you might like a brief tour of the palace before we head toward the harbour. I am told you forewent the tour originally. I’m sure it is stifling, always being in your room.”

You want to scold him for making assumptions, but he is correct, and Alanna’s words ring through your head again. ‘It wouldn’t hurt to make a friend.’

So, you steel your face, and you smile. “Alright.”

Morax finds himself somewhat shocked at how easily you agreed. No contest, no look of exasperation… he’s about to question whether you’re feeling well before you speak up.

“I fear I might have been impolite,” You say as you walk down a particularly boring flight of stairs. Despite the fact it was his idea, the king has been relative vague in his descriptions of each room. He seems to only be showing you the things you might find interesting—the library, the gardens, the steam rooms and the pools. He walks at a steady pace, slow enough for you to take the time to take in each room, even though you can tell he normally walks faster. It's this steady pace that allows you to notice the slight stutter in his steps at your apology.

“That is alright. I understand the situation is tense for you. I do not begrudge you for it at all.”

This time, it's you who pauses.  “I don’t understand you.”

“You have made that point very clear. I appreciate your transparency.” You’re sure you're making it up, but there’s a slight tone of mirth in his voice. “I’m afraid there is nothing else of interest here. Shall we head to the harbour? Around this time of year, the clothing stalls get new fabrics, and jewellers receive the best stones. If you crave any foods from home, i’m sure we might find one or two.”

You exit the palace through the doors you came through when you first arrived. A soldier at the gates nods his head to the king, but otherwise, there isn’t much fanfare. How can a king roam his own nation without any guards? You fight the urge to question his newfound friendliness, as he hasn't questioned you on yours and strangely enough, you are enjoying this. Even if it is only a little bit. 

“You have sunsettias here?”

“Not that I know of. However, our harvest was bountiful this year and we often trade our surplus with other nations. I’m sure there will be vendors with sunsettias to spare.”

“I'm sure that when faced with their king, many vendors would find themselves stocking regional specialities from other nations.”

“I think you’ll find that a decent number of my people do not recognise the king when he is taking a casual stroll.”

“If I were to walk the street at home, I doubt my people would recognise me either,” you reply. It is only a passing comment, one that flies out of your mouth before you can stop it, but Morax seems to catch the melancholy undertones. The letter from your parents flashes in your mind, and instead of feeling frustrated, you just feel a little sad. Your parents clearly feel hopeless about something they cannot share with you, and it hurts.

“I am sorry you had to leave.” Morax replies quietly. “I do not know how I would fare away from home. You have my condolences.”

You nod in response. Silence falls between you as you continue your leisurely stroll to the harbour.

notes: reader losing her mind every time Zhongli has his hair down is my fave part of this series and DEFINITELY has nothing to do with me hahahahhaahahaha

anyway it's so nice to be back I missed it here

Taglist: @tartigglez @ainescribe @blue-sapphire-ink

[embracedbythesea]

I finally finish this game after a lot of years and I can say that RED DEAD REDEMPTION 2 is a story of survival in the midst of a wilderness that is giving way to urbanization, a glimpse of a future that is now crushing the past, a majestic and melancholic experience with a dense and articulate plot that masterfully blends into the changes in American society and away from the romantic and adventurous images of the Old West.

The atmospheres, the sounds, the noises, the causal events and all the technical details contribute to a deeper immersion in the setting created for this video game behemoth; a title that is "not for everyone" precisely because of its narrative and the rhythmic nature of the game itself, which cannot be experienced in bite-size. The beauty of the game lies in the fact that you can spend hours and hours enjoying the atmosphere of the West, going hunting, stopping somewhere to rest and seeing the interactions of the game itself, as you can encounter everything from the eagle swooping down on the river where you are fishing and stealing a fish, to the bear attacking a boar while you are hunting, or simply deer fighting each other, as if it were all so realistic that it would leave you stunned. You can't play this game and expect to finish it quickly, skip side quests, challenges, random interactions, or simply ride through the vast grasslands that are still standing, it's a game to be savored slowly and without rushing, enjoying every interaction between the protagonists and characters that populate the vast world of Red Dead Redemption.

It's a story of self-discovery, a total immersion in that West that is still trying to survive everything, fighting against moral but above all physical degradation; it was an attempt to make up for one's mistakes, to be a "good person" for those last moments, putting everything on the line and coming to the conclusion that what we thought was right, what always moved us, was actually a beautiful lie wrapped in a golden dream.

You arrive at the end of the game completely drained, with that feeling of abandonment and the desire to start all over again, to live this experience as if it were the first time, but knowing that it will not be, because the impact of the game will be too great, a real punch in the stomach that leaves you with a bitter taste in your mouth and just a hint of a sweet aftertaste, knowing that whatever choices we make in the course of a new adventure, we will come to the same conclusion.

And in the end, we will be there, in the shadow of what was once our trusty steed, watching the sun set over the prairies engulfed by civilization.

[jame7t]

My King, I write to you bearing ill news from the border.

Our enemies from the West are invading the realm. By the time this reaches you they will have reached the old town to the Northwest. They are slaying peasants and stealing winter stockpiles, leaving only destruction in their wake.

They have allied themselves with the horse-lords of the South and control the seas, but I believe our kinsmen to the East and the free cities of the North may still come to our aid with the right incentive.

You cannot delay, my lord. The Kingdom needs you.

[ crumples up the urgent missive ]

[ goes back to trying, and failing, to download a cracked version of premiere pro in order to make 90’s cartoons say rude words ]

[noirbriar]

Glorestor: 5 Times They Denied (Final)

+ 1 time They Did Not.

From the POVs of the various folks around the 2 elves who are convinced they are courting, or betrothed, even though they were told otherwise.

OOC as always is all on me and canon is super hazy now but ahhh I tried

The final part! Thank you esp @mae-it-be-an-evening-dhros @tamilhobbit @the-dreaming-plastic-dinosaur for following this indulgent writing of mine as part of me coping with things and being so kind to my first experiment writing based on Tolkien's works!

Sometimes, its the kindest ones who break the most.

---

6] Elrond Earendilion

Elrond is tired.

Here he sits on Celebrian's favourite bench in their balcony, watching the blazing crimson sun setting over the cliffs of his beloved Imladris. The light flooding the valley with endless red. Like fire, burning the skies, dripping into the water flowing endlessly, the life blood of all in this realm.A swallow chirps and lands on his shoulder, weightlessly and with ease.

Vilya pulses with every breath and each pulse of his fea as Elrond feels the fine well of power entangling around him. The Lord have been feeling the weariness of the ages sinking deep and clinging heavy on his bones.

The dull weight of it all drags on, settling on his spirit, plunging into depths unknown, rolling down and down, pulling into a deep, dark ocean beyond even Ulmo's reach.

Deeper.

And deeper.

And deep-

"-rond? Elrond!"

Elrond gets startled out of his darkening thoughts as the little swallow flutters off and faces the one face that he had always known.

One he and his brother have come to known as warmth and safety since they were but tiny elflings. Against the burning sky, Erestor stands before him, bent low with a gentle hand over his own, the one that bears the weight of power. The older ellon's cold hands cooling unlike the overbearing heat of his own skin. His slate green eyes dark, filled with a wide array of emotions unspoken, swirling in those orbs.

Right now, his Chief Councillor has forgone his usual heavy black robes, except for his elegant brocade robe of office over a tunic and leggings. The gold earcuff and feanorian earring shinning brightly.His twin blades strapped by his side and a crimson red scarf. No longer a mere advisor, Erestor and a select few of his staff have taken up the duty as the last means of defense of the Valley with the absence of Glorfindel and their troops.

Yet to Elrond, before him is not his Councillor and advisor, but one he and his brother have long recognised as another peredhel and claimed as kin of their own.

"Tor."

Elrond shifts and tugs Erestor down to sit beside him, the Lord of Imladris easing away the persona he carries.In his own private quarters, he cares not. The quiet guardian lets him, allowing Elrond to lean his head on his shoulder, his cold hand holding his own.The rare instance where Elrond feels the suppressed fea of the elder, the cold light bringing him familiar comfort. There was always something about the elder's fea he could never explain and he never knew why Erestor did so. Elrond never asked.

"You should not push yourself, Elrond." Erestor whispers.

"This land and many depend on me. As well as those further west. The darkness grows and without the strength of the land, it will be hard on our forces."

"Glorfindel and our warriors are more than capable of defending our borders against the wretched claws of evil and their ilk."Erestor admonishes gently, rubbing mindless circles on the peredhel's hand."You must rest, it will do us no good should you wear yourself thus. Arwen worries too."

"My precious daughter...always so sensitive and thoughtful. Even if I loathe to part from her, she has grown and found her own path. My sons, even if they have not made their choice to sail, they are finding their own place in this world. I cannot help but wonder...where does this leave me?"Elrond whispers his heartache in melancholy, closing his eyes and tries to ease the tension in him.

He is so, so tired. Like a thin piece of string, tattered and worn as time went on.

How he wished he could return to those innocent days! Safe and warm.There were days where he yearned for vague memories of the arms of nana, the hazy and distant gentleness of his adar's hand. Oh! How he longed for Celebrian's infectious joy and light. The ever smiling Celebrimbor's optimism. The ever practical Erenion and his laughter. In all that he had lost, he misses them the most. Dearest Elros by his side as they played with their strong Atto, with Atya singing enthralling songs and wonderous lullabies into the wild breeze.

His heart is so greedy and wants for them all. Fragments of light out of his grasp. Little fragments is all he craves.

"To be honest, when all is over, I had no desire to sail."

Erestor's words throws Elrond out of his maudlin thoughts like a broken glass, bringing everything to a standstill. The air freezes as Elrond's heart sinks, the younger elf turns harshly around as he hears the feanorian's proclamation.

"What?"

"I have long thought I shall fade here. On this very land where my Atar and my Amil have held me and my siblings in their embrace. " Erestor stares at the crimson dusk, "Where it all began, is where I will find my end. The only home I had. Where all my memories are, and have possessed all that I have ever known."

The string breaks.

"You can't!"

Elrond snarls, grabbing Erestor's arms, clinging almost like a desperate man reaching for a distant shore. The son of Earendil and Elwing feels that the abyss have finally caught him in its cold maw, the endless waves of loneliness and loss, regrets and sorrow that he have kept away for so long, now unchained in its fury. He had long known many of the old feanorians and the noldor have thought to remain in Middle Earth, with Imladris as their final Home. However, to hear those words from his longest friend, protector and kin-

The power beneath this land moans painfully with her master's sorrow, clinging to Elrond like a child seeking solace.

"Everyone I have known and love are lost and gone. Forsaken and abandoned! I cannot! I cannot lose you as well, Tor!"

Elrond gives in as he finally wails, wretched and tormented, ages of heartache and desires bursting forth. The remaining one finally starts to crumble under the weight he has borne.

Dear Erestor who watched over him and Elros, and sheltered them after Maedhros and Maglor were gone. The one they have taken as their older sibling. Who had held them in the cold, somber nights in Lindon, with battered bloodied hands and lustrous raven locks shorn from his head. Who mourned with him the death of their beloved Elros, and the fall of his legacy. The one built with him this haven and held his own children with the same gentle hands filled with scars. The one who kept him and his children going as Celebrain's ship sailed.

Elrond has had enough.

"I don't want to lose anyone anymore. Please, Tor. You are all I have left..." was all Elrond could plead with what selfishness he could find in him.

He is a healer, he has seen broken hurts and deep wounds buried in the soul, mending each unspoken pain little by little with what strength he carries.

But who would bear and heal the pain of the healer then?

"Oh, Elrond..."

The old feanorian caresses his face in tender hold, wiping away the tears he have not realised were there from his redden cheeks. Bathed in ephemeral crimson light, the two companions through the ages holds the other quietly.

"Do not weep." Erestor whispers into his ear as he embraces the younger peredhel in sorrow.

"I will not lie, that was my thought for the longest time, to remain in the land where my amil and my siblings have laid to rest before passing into the Halls. I am tired, truth be told. Yet with all that has happened recently... watching you, the young ones, even Bilbo and the Dwarrow and Edain, and all who have came to this haven we have forged...I find myself wondering, if I could find that courage that you all have shown to walk a different path?"

Erestor then turns back towards Arien, watching the crimson setting sun. While Elrond stares up wonder at this Erestor who is still that calm and mighty guardian, yet different all the same. Within his eyes, they seem to hold a different light. A light that he feels in their shared bond of kinship in their fea, a burning ember chasing away the creeping darkness that have grown far and deep away inside.

And Elrond feels.

Things then swiftly happen in immediate succession, like something in the distance shattered and mended. A change in the air as that unseen miasma of dread it lifts as the birds cry. Vilya shudders, the elven ring trembling in resonance, before finally dimming itself into almost nothingness.

The horn of the Valley resounds.

An age ends. Another shall soon begin.

---

The residents of Imladris awaits at the square for the troops returning, bearing the wounded and the lost, but triumphant still with news of the destruction of Sauron and his Ring. Elrond bears his mantle once more with his circlet and heavy robes embroidered with patterns of gliding stars, hollow still but no longer in deep woe.

Vilya remains silent.

Their Lord descends to welcome their armies and the Edain back Home. Arwen remains close by his side, dressed in silver and silk. His daughter, ever empathic and sensitive. Her quiet presence a balm after that release of emotions welled up and sealed in him through the ages, bringing about much relief to his weary heart.

Bilbo Baggins, even with his body growing old and frail now that the final connection as Ringbearer is lost, hobbles slowly beside him in careful steps. The Hobbit probably hopeful for some news of his nephew and the fellowship.

A long welcoming horn sounds and there beyond the bridge, they see Glorfindel, glowing with the light of Aman, leading their victorious warriors and the last of their wounded home. Elrond's heart gladden to see them safe once more. As the Lord of Imladris, Elrond breathes in deeply the refreshing clean air, ready to give a speech to welcome them all home-

Right before he could get a word out, a blur of a shadow darts out, his Chief Councillor leaps elegantly past the many steps and simply crashes straight into his Captain dismounting Asfaloth. His favourite crimson scarf falling and lays forgotten in his wake.

The Golden Lord would have fallen over by the sudden unexpected impact from being pounced upon him if not for his unnatural strength. The Balrog-slayer dropping his helm and swiftly catching the dark haired elf with a hand on his back and another placed almost naturally on his assailant's bottom with no hesitation. The startled warrior's surprised noise also does not hinder Erestor in the slightest as he wraps his arms around the taller ellon and greets him.

Head on with a hard kiss.

Elrond nearly chokes.

The world seems to stop in that instant. Not a soul breathes. Not even as the caravan and wagons of the wounded behind holler at what was on with the hold up from behind. Asfaloth simply snorts in disbelief with a shake of his great head only a horse can, and wisely chooses to trot further away.

Everyone else remains still. Not even willing to move a muscle as the couple parted after a long heated kiss before a stunned audience, heaving with adrenaline and foreheads touching close.Unbothered and unconcerned.The silence is deafening, before someone finally speaks.

"Marry me, Laure." Erestor whispers, breathless.

Glorfindel gasps. His eyes bright with emotions, wild and free. The Hero of Gondolin could only gaze at his partner wordlessly filled with a fierce passion and endearing love.

"Eres? You are certain? You know we do not have to. I care not for oaths or promises or ceremonies, but only you by my side. My fea knows only you, forever and always. I am content!”

"No!"

Erestor's hands clutches into the white cape of their Captain, his eyes fierce with raw determination, their unbridled Tempest.

"No more I shall fear of the unknown. Neither of Oaths nor Doom. Even if I am damned to the Void, even if I must claw my way out of the abyss, I will find my way back to you! It is you, and only you that I will hold till the end of all of Eru's Songs! I want to be one with you meldanya*. I am ready."

If there was a tear from either of them, no one could say for they were so enthralled by the words they share.

“My brave Eres! Have I not told you before? May it be in the light of grace or endless Void, all I care is you as you are. It will never change! If it is what you desire, then let us become one! None will keep you from me, for what use is my poor existence if I cannot keep my heart by my side?" Glorfindel smiles, holding Erestor close with no concern to the travel-worn state he is in. With a lighter, softer peck upon the soft lips of his partner.

“You need not protect me. Just, stay beside me, as I face what is ahead, that is all I shall ask. ” Erestor whispers softly. It was plain for all to see, even with that cool mein, their ever stern Councillor was basking in the raw light of love.

“That I can do.”Glorfindel returns with a soft laugh, eager and proud in their joy.

"I am sorry. I am sorry it took so long."

"Nay, it matters not for we are here at last, and what do you know? I am ready too." Glorfindel then pulls Erestor into a deep embrace.

"Let us be bound, Eres, and never be apart."

"Aye."

Elrond does not know why or how but watching this all unfold before his eyes, his two friends finally answering to those unspoken feelings that they have all long known felt like a refreshing air of relief for himself. The Lord can only give a loud laugh at the incredulous timing in the whirlwind of it all. Like a chapter coming to an end on its own.

Their happiness is so infectious and warm, that it urges the half-elven on with an unexpected impulsiveness as he descends down the steps to meet the couple. His arms reaching out and pulling them into a hug with his dear friends. Which causes the trio of Lords to nearly fall over into an unseaming heap if not for Glorfindel and Erestor pulling Elrond and each other safe on their feet on the solid ground.

"Mellyn nin! Does this mean we can safely deem that you are both together? After so many years, we are to have a wedding in the Valley then?" The Lord of Imladris smiles, feeling lighter than ever.

The couple shares a an uncharacteristically shy look, probably realising their open affections have been on full on display. The two shuffling awkwardly, as Glorfindel pulls back his golden braid and Erestor straightening his robes. Even as their hands remain clasped together through the motions.

"Aye."

"We are."

With that the dam breaks and there are cheers and roars from all around. The felicitations and laughter blooming and loud, even out beyond the gates, voices echoing far across Imladris.

Elrond even spots several bags of coin being passed around. Looks like the age old wagers have ended, one that he was unfortunately unable to participate out of fairness and status. His foresight definitely did not foresee any of this, Elrond can be certain, despite whatever one may believe. There were some hands passing over even to a rather eager Bilbo and...Arwen!? Elrond gives his daughter a incredulous stare of dismay with a raise of his brow, but Arwen simply wiggles the bag and mouths, "Aragon's!"

Right.

"But we will not be having a wedding."

The sounds all come back to a halt, leaving the birds to continue with their delightful song.

"ABSOLUTELY NOT!"

Everyone gets startled by the suddden aggressive shout and turns to its unlikely source. The ever polite and dutiful Steward of the House, Head Minstral of the bards, Lindir, stands in utter dismay and fury. A look of disdain upon his face with a hand clutching his robes in great horror. Elrond is rather certain its overly dramatic and very much out of character for the usually placid minstrel.

"No! No! Absolutely no! I have waited for an age for this and I refuse to accept-Its not how things are done! I made plans! I drafted songs! I will be vindicated! I WILL SEE A WEDDING!" Lindir declares with a glorious wave of his sleeves. Some of the household staff can be seen nodding in agreement.

Alright, he stands corrected with further observation. The little sleeve sweep was so much that he is reminded of Atya. Lindir certainly has enough flair to match with the Noldor he admires.

The couple can only simply blink blankly in response.

"But, we do not have the resources allocated for it, Lindir. Besides, we are short on time, we must prepare for our Arwen's wedding and for our House to journey forth to Gondor. There is also our wounded and our dead to care for, either way, it is not feasible at all." Their ever calculating and planning Councillor explains calmly.

"I politely disagree, my Lord Erestor."

Everyone now turns to Saelbeth who is the one to interrupt his mentor with a bow. His hands tucked in his sleeves as he steps forward from the group of councillors gathered.

"We not only have an abundance of resources stored, our staff and soldiers are more than capable and equipped to run autonomously. In fact, much of the preparations have already begun. Our household is more than proficient to handling the arrangements should our Lords be amendable in our suggestion."

Erestor narrows his sharp eyes at his protege, who is undaunted by the fierce look. As if the feanorian did not expect the efficiency he has implemented in this House to choose now of all times to work against him of all things.

Glorfindel gives a slight cough which sounded suspiciously like a laugh.

"We are also, able to oversee the duties of our troops as needed, if necessary." Deputies Laica and Thandor concurred from behind without prompt.

Which only earns them a careful glance from their Commander, one that the soldiers have chosen to disregard. Glorfindel rolls his eyes with an unbelivable shake of his head, muttering something along the lines of 'insubordination'.

"To be honest, Eres and I, we have both desired to only be wed simply by bonding. For our kin and friends here in our beloved home to recognise it, is more than enough." Their Captain elaborates, although this answer just seem to infuriate the usually calm minstrel even more, that the sindar is made speechless as he tries to breathe with his staff supporting him behind.

Elrond is a little guilty to find the whole situation a tad comical in any other circumstances.

"You will both not grant me the chance to witness an elven Wedding in my Home before I leave?"

They all turn around and come face to face with his daughter. Their beloved princess, their Evenstar, reaching out to hold their hands in hers. She gazes at her mentors and guardians with those gentle eyes, glimmering and full of hope under the golden rays of a new age of peace.

"Arwen-" Erestor began but Arwen urges him to listen with a shake of her head.

"Uncle Erestor, Uncle Glorfindel. Long have I wished to see you joined and blessed in ceremony. Will you not grant me this? Please?"

With that, Elrond can see the couple's resolve fall. Which was not surprising. For the two loved his daughter as though his children were their own since they were born. Elrond remembers the nights he and Celebrian handed his children to the two, watching them care for the young little elflings with so much care and selfless love.

Although that little spark in Arwen eyes is a little too obvious. Elrond gives his daughter an exasperated but fond look for that. It is somewhat reassuring to know his children all have not lost all of their playful innocence after all they have experienced in life and will carry them forth in what lies ahead.

Erestor manages to resist for a good while before giving a resigned sigh. He shares a knowing look with Glorfindel who returned with a wistful shrug.

"We can compromise, I suppose. Who needs tradition anyway in our haven, a Home for all walks of life?"

And compromise they did.

After mourning for the ones that have passed and comfoting those who grieved, the rest of Imladris sang for all, for those who cry and those who are to heal, and for everlasting peace.

Until the voices cease and raises once more in the flurry of excitement and chaos. The whole of Imladris prepares for the journey to Gondor and Arwen's wedding. Here in Imladris, where all of the elves from every clan have settled and called home for more than an age all prepare in their strange mix of elven customs hashed together in celebration.

On the night before their departure and their supposed wedding ceremony, Glorfindel and Erestor disappears, while Imladris makes merry in the name of the married couple.

The duo only emerges once more at the break of dawn, with Arien's greeting upon them. Glorfindel and Erestor appear, walking down the path from the sea of beech trees serenely, dressed in beautiful robes that Elrond has vaguely remembered from years long ago on one autumn eve. Their hair braided in a mix of noldor and vanyar patterns. They bear no wedding rings, but upon their brow, rests the circlet of their mate, with golden flowers shining against raven dark hair, and an elaborate twisting weaves gleaming upon glowing gold locks. It was plain for all to see, the marriage bond is complete and proud.

They stand before The Lord of Imladris and Arwen by his side, Lindir standing nearby bearing the ceremonial water from the Bruinen with almost the entirety of the Last Homely House welcoming the newly bonded Lords back with flowers. With bended knee, they greeted him and presented each other as their rightfully bonded mate, awaiting for his blessing. One that Elrond is more than eager to give, as he holds their warm hands in his.

Warm?

Under all that happiness, Elrond suddenly senses a familiar light in Erestor as well. Elrond feels, and is surprised to find Erestor's fea dancing unbound, like a little ember on a quiet eve. With Glorfindel's powerful light mingling through like blooming vines, caressing across the shared connection. He simply cannot put a finger to no matter how he tried. Although he is unable to give much thought to it with most of his House eager to approach and congratulate the newly wedded couple until the time comes that they must leave for the long journey to Arwen's future.

Elrond watches it all, as he had done through the ages. A sense of acceptance settles within him as he urges his mount on, taking the first step out of Imladris with his daughter and friends by his side, and the elves of Imladris following behind.

Elrond turns to the boundless skies beyond.

Everyone is finding their own path, its probably time he walks down his own as well.

---

Flags flutter in the wind. Sails are prepared, and the ships are ready. Elrond observes as everyone else bid farewell to friends and kin. He has already made his goodbyes to his children but as a father, it is still difficult to part with them, forever his and Celebrian's treasured little ones. Bilbo and Frodo are huddling with their kin while Galadriel and Olorin speak with Cirdan in quiet voices.

It is hard to comprehend that he himself is finally leaving these shores for some place he has only heard and never seen. May it be from tales in the books or words of others. The unknown seems so difficult to grasp now that he is facing it.

"Elrond."

Elrond turns and sees Erestor and Glorfindel approaching, probably done with overseeing things.

"Tor." Elrond indulges a childish whim, greeting his advisor the nickname out in the open. Before he is pulled into a warm embrace by his old companion.

"Be safe. Be happy."

"I will."

A press of their foreheads, the two part, before Glorfindel hugs Elrond as well.The warrior's arms folding over his form, strong yet gentle. Oh Glorfindel! Fair and selfless, who protected him and his family since the days of old, always cheerful and supportive. The defender of Imladris who sang so beautifully and made the flowers dance. Who also have the terrible habit of enabling little elflings with too much sugar and making him laugh.

He will miss them both dearly. His precious friends who have walked by his side.

"Send my regards to Celebrian and everyone there, alright?"

"Are you both sure you are staying?" Elrond asks once more, just to be sure.

Now that Glorfindel's duty is done, he is to return to Valinor. Erestor, now his husband and mate meant that he too, will sail with his beloved. Yet, the couple has elected to remain in Middle Earth and Imladris for sometime yet.

"Someone has to watch over Elladan and Elrohir. As well as those who seek to sail in the coming years, who will need guidance as they pass through the Last Homely House. Celeborn alone would not be possible!" Glorfindel remarks lightly in jest.

"It would not be long." Erestor reassures.

A bell sounds, and Cirdan calls for those looking to sail to finally board the ship. In that moment, the reality of the situation finally sinks in for Elrond like a skipping pebble finally falling into the water.

He looks back at his friends, who returns with an encouraging nod and a wave.With a deep breath, Elrond steps forward and onwards.

As everyone boards, Elrond notices Galadriel turning pointedly towards Erestor without a word. Who simply gives a small nod in acknowledgement to the Lady while Glorfindel keeps a hand proudly on his mate's waist. Galadriel gives a cryptic nod in return, and turns to board the ship.

As the hobbits follow along with Olorin, Erestor suddenly strides up, calling for Bilbo. The old hobbit and his nephew turns back towards the feanorian in wonder. It is then, Elrond sees Erestor removing his treasured earring bearing the feanorian star, bending down and handing it carefully into Bilbo's thin hands.

"I do not know what good this may do, but I hope it will aid you in what you seek in some way."

"And... should anyone ask?"

Erestor and Bilbo share a long moment in silence, before the old hobbit grips onto the gift with a new found strength in his old hands with grateful acceptance. Olorin watches on, curious and full of mirth, but wisely chooses not interfere as they move on.

The anchors are pulled. The wind picks up and the gulls sing an ode to bid them farewell.

Farewell to Middle Earth! Farewell to everything and all! As the Eldar and the ringbearers leave behind all they have known and onwards into another realm, into another journey unknown. The breeze grows strong and the waves rushes, pushing them on and into the light-

"Elrond!"

The Peredhel turns back and sees Erestor running upon the docks, robes in hand and shouting towards the ocean with little care for his usual decorum. Glorfindel following close behind, waving brightly and so enthusiastically, almost like a maniac should one stumble upon the sight.

"Go! My kin! We will be just right behind!"

"The journey will be awhile! Do not miss us! It will not be long and you shall have company to keep you busy, dear Elrond!"

Elrond blinks back a tear at his silly friends and laughs.

---

---

---

There was only so much one can do out in the vast and endless sea in close quarters with many others. However, Elrond has found comfort watching the stars and his Adar sail across the night skies, wondering in the quiet of his mind.

When the shores of the West are finally sighted, many are excited, though for a break in endless voyage or beauty of it, Elrond could not be certain. As they all clamouring and crowding on the bow for a glimpse of the blessed realm.

Yet the unexpected always happen when one least expects it.

With a loud cry resounding into the air breaking the peace, everyone on the ship are soon startled out of their watchful gaze of the their eternal home. Elrond jumps up, sprinting to the bottom of the deck to the storage where lies its source. Where a pale Frodo stares incredulously at an open box.

Galadriel arrives as well and they share a questioning look, leaving Olorin to quickly tend to the startled hobbit on the floor of the ship. Bilbo slowly joins in, offering a pat of comfort to his kin, though the old adventurer seems oddly calm by the chaos. Sounds of movement from the opened box increase with intensity, each rustling and rattling growing louder much like Elrond's own heartbeat. There is no foulness or evil in the air, but age old instincts has them on edge all the same.

With careful steps, Elrond approaches the crate first with Galadriel following close behind.

Cautiously, they all peer inside.

After all these years and in endless joys and unending sorrow, the half elven finds finally feels that burden upon him lifting, a light of hope and his being healing at long last. With quiet tears and a sob of delight, Elrond is finally able to smile again, full and free, as he dives in to embrace the beginnings of healing as his heart soared.

"Atya!"

---

*Quenya: my beloved

A/N: I probably could have polished things more but at this point, I think I shall leave it as it is. A rather odd final part I think but I tried? Thank you all for taking the time to read and comment and reblog, you all made my day with each one!

(Part 1) (Part 2) (Part 3) (Part 4) (Part 5) (Part 6)

[petriquors]

Maple & Steel

samurai!Iwaizumi x fem!reader angst

Pre-Edo Period royalty AU

The kami blessed you with a perfect day in your family’s garden, but you thank them with a restless heart. Seated under your favorite tree, a stunning maple with leaves as red as blood, your mind is anywhere but here.

You’ve read the same sentence in your book a dozen times, but you still can’t remember what it says. Every syllable drowns under the ominous swirl of your thoughts, so, with a sigh, you decide that reading is just as hopeless as you feel.

“What troubles you, my lady?”

When you look up, you see a man whose broad shoulders eclipse the low afternoon sun. The turquoise-and-white kamishimo he wears moves gently with every step, making him look like water flowing calmly over stones. 

On any other day, his presence would soothe you just as much as a walk by the river would. But today, Iwaizumi Hajime, the eldest son of his clan, is the last person you want to see.

The gentle breeze stills. Without it, the summer air hangs heavily around you, and silence buries the garden. 

Iwaizumi inclines his chin in your direction, peering down his nose at you. “Speak.”

“You would command me?” You smile through your threatening tone. You are the daimyo’s daughter, while he’s just a samurai’s son. If your father heard him speak to you that way, swift punishment would be in order.

If only your father knew about the romance you’ve been hiding from him.

You stand up, hiding your face in the shadows of the maple tree. Carefully, you eye Iwaizumi; watching, waiting for him to answer. On most days, he would respond to your coyness in kind, but today is not most days.

Today, a rift as wide as the sea lies between you, and you fear what you might find in his face when you cross the depths.

“Please,” he says gently, “tell me what’s on your mind.”

When Iwaizumi calls, you can’t help but answer. From the moment you met him as children, he’s known your heart well enough to see through lies and half-truths with frightening ease. “I heard your name on the war party roster. You’re going to travel at my father’s side.”

Though it was not a question, he still answers. “Yes.”

Your breath catches in your throat and tears sting your eyes. You knew it was true, but your heart still clenches when you hear it from his lips. “Congratulations.”

Riding with the daimyo is an incredible honor, but his eyes are full of dread. He looks away from you, searching for comforting words he cannot seem to find. “We ride west in the morning.”

“How far? How long?”

“Telling you might put you in danger,” he says.

“With whom?”

The stiffness of his upper lip is all the answer you’ll receive. You know that he’s right. He’s doing his best to protect you from the storm of war that gathers far to the west, but something more slices through your heart with a katana’s precision. 

You leave the maple tree’s shade and step into the sun, placing yourself within arm's reach of Iwaizumi. You watch his hands twitch at his side, see him internally weigh actions and consequences, duty and honor—and then, he seizes you by the hand.

You grip his arm. It’s sturdy, like a tree branch, so you wind your weak, vulnerable roots around him. In seconds, you’re captured in his embrace, planted firmly where your heart knows you belong.

When he grabs your face, neither the cool silk of his kimono nor the warmth of his fingertips can stop your tears. He holds you as gently as he would hold the head of a rose, with a touch so delicate that you barely feel him. You need more, you realize, as your longing overtakes you completely.

“I will not have you become a ghost,” you sob. 

A shaky breath flows from his lips, and you marvel at how well he manages to tame his emotions while yours are a raging ocean.

“I can’t protect you from this pain,” he whispers. You know his heart, too; he takes on your pain as if it’s his own, and counts every ounce of fear you feel as a personal failure.

You can't bear to look at him, so you let your tears soak his sleeve instead. A hum ripples from his chest and reaches your ears, shushing you as gently as a honed warrior possibly can.

With his free hand, he begins to stroke your hair. “Please, don’t cry for me. Sadness doesn’t suit your beauty.”

“But what if—”

“I would kill every cruel thought in your head if I could,” he interrupts. His voice has a sharp edge that makes you believe the threat wholeheartedly. “And then, I’d fill the space with sweet words instead.”

You sniffle. “Iwa—”

“I would write ten thousand songs for you. I would use ink and paper I made myself, so you can feel the patience of my love in every brush stroke. I would string together the words the kami whisper through the trees when I think of you. I would read them to you personally, reciting every word by your bedside until you grow sick of me.”

Finally, a smile tries to return to your face. You bite your lip, nuzzling his chest. “I could never grow sick of you.”

“Good,” he says. “Because I am nothing without your affection. When I ride west, when I raise my sword, I only do so to fight for a better future—one that you deserve.” 

The wind picks up, rustling the maple leaves and billowing through his kamishimo. You tilt your head to look at him, and you find red-rimmed eyes and a sad smile that’s full of love. Your heart beats like a butterfly’s wings.

“Wait for me,” he says

“Come home to me,” you reply.

“I will,” he says. “I promise, my love.”

[regexkind]

Since all you charlatans are completely devoid of courtesy, compassion, charity, et cetera—and cannot be persuaded to part with ten miniscule cents¹—I have no choice but to commence auctioning off my works, so as to provide myself with the bare necessities and basic comforts of decent living². I shall be drawing from the ouvre I produced during my voyages through the American West. These works, admittedly, were never intended for my personal consumption but were tawdrily earmarked for sale from the first. I had hoped to provide my little wants by purveying my wares to various saloonkeepers, barmen, et cetera. Those unfamiliar with the uncouth society of the distant West may not know that the keepers of these dens of iniquity tend, almost to a one, to decorate their places d'enterprise with rustic or sensual scenes depicting either the common lives or the heartfelt aspirations of their clientele. I have produced works in both genre with hopes they would find a ready market. Unfortunately and inscrutably, this has not been the case. Instead I have found myself rejected, laughed at, and, in several cases, outright ejected, pursued from the burb by a mob of riotous, unwashed cowpokes. I cannot understand the source of my failures. I have studied the rude illustrations in great detail and if anything, improved on the rough scenes hung over the rustic bars.

For example, my works include The Untamed, Two Botanic Nudes, and Cleaning His Gun. However, it is not on any of these unworthies that I today pin my hopes. Rather, I would like to direct the attention of prospective buyers to perhaps my best piece in the Western genre: Branding Day.

Branding Day describes that most quotidian of Western activities: the mutilation of cattle by the application of a hot iron to their flanks. The unlucky calf is the central focus of our scene. It is stretched out on the ground before the viewer. Every muscle, every ligament—which I have captured in exquisite detail—strains for freedom. But this prize is not to be earned, for both the forelegs and hind are restrained, bound into two neat bundles by coarse bristling ropes. The taut cords extend out of the frame as though the subduing cowboys stood somewhere in the saloon with the viewer. The calf's head and neck are also restrained, these by a boy of some sixteen years. The boy's posture is one of profound sympathy with the animal. Like the cow, every sinew is rigid. Despite being immobilized in paint, he seems to quiver with a sublime mixture of anticipation and dread. The fingers pressed into the calf's neck are white with tension. His head, like the calf's, is thrown back, the Adam's apple frozen halfway through its descent. The calf's eyes are wide and staring, rolling in terror, looking towards the descending point of the brand, which, like the ropes, enters the scene from a point near the viewer. The wielder's identity is nearly occult, save for his hands, clad in rawhide gloves, but unmistakably powerful and weathered. The boy's neck is thrust back at such an angle as to hide his face, leaving only his jutting jawline in stark relief, his teeth clenched, his posture tense as though he, not the calf, expects to receive the searing agony of that steely point.

This portrait inscrutably is among the number which resulted in me fleeing town posthaste, my bags and numerous stones being flung after me. I cannot to this day fathom this reaction, and hope that a more erudite audience will meet my work with more sympathy and understanding. Opening bid shall commence at 250 pounds stirling.

¹See also, my previous heartfelt plea

²Reasonable-quality brandy vis-a-vis European import; pomade that neither smells of nor contains 'bear grease'; silk cravats, lightly beaded and otherwise; the services of an able valet and the attentions of a kindly nurse after the effects of copious drink, to name just a few of the most commonplace essentials—O! How I have suffer'd!

[gnomescarfcomics]

The Balrogs were destroyed, save some few that fled and hid themselves in caverns inaccessible at the roots of the earth...

...and the uncounted legions of the Orcs perished like straw in a great fire, or were swept like shrivelled leaves before a burning wind. Few remained to trouble the world for long years after.

...a great part of the sons of Men, whether of the people of Uldor or others new-come out of the east, marched with the Enemy; and the Elves do not forget it.

...so great was the fury of those adversaries that the northern regions of the western world were rent asunder, and the sea roared in through many chasms...

In those days there was a great building of ships upon the shores of the Western Sea; and thence in many a fleet the Eldar set sail into the West, and came never back to the lands of weeping and of war.

Yet not all the Eldalie were willing to forsake the Hither Lands where they had long suffered and long dwelt; and some lingered many an age in Middle-earth.

Among these were Cirdan the Shipwright, and Celeborn of Doriath, with Galadriel his wife, who alone remained of those who led the Noldor to exile in Beleriand.

In Middle-earth dwelt also Gil-galad the High King, and with him Elrond Half-elven, who chose, as was granted to him, to be numbered among the Eldar...

...but Elros his brother chose to abide with Men.

But Morgoth himself the Valar thrust through the Door of Night beyond the Walls of the World, into the Timeless Void; and a guard is set for ever on those walls, and Earendil keeps watch upon the ramparts of the sky.

Yet the lies that Melkor, the mighty and accursed, Morgoth Bauglir, the Power of Terror and of Hate, sowed in the hearts of Elves and Men are a seed that does not die and cannot be destroyed; and ever and anon it sprouts anew, and will bear dark fruit even unto the latest days.

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

by Elise Cooper

Screams Before Silence: Bearing Witness to the Violence of October 7th is a must-watch documentary produced by Eytan Schwartz, Carol and Joey Low, and Meny Aviram, CEO of Kastina Communications. Sheryl Sandberg is the interviewer. The personal testimonies of victims, survivors and witnesses are clear and overpowering, as is the photographic evidence. The interview with Eytan is below.

It has first-hand accounts of those who survived and bore witness to the horrors of October 7th. For those who can no longer speak out, this documentary represents the voices of those who horrifically died. The attacks on Israeli towns and the Nova Music Festival included the rape of women and children, some of whom were also mutilated. It includes the burning of babies in ovens, the killings of men, women, and children, and even those held hostage revealed the sexual assault by their Hamas captives.

Even though there is indisputable evidence, these atrocities have basically been ignored by human rights groups, international organizations, and many figures in politics, academia, and the media. Yet, the hypocrisy and double standards are all too evident. It is mindboggling that there are feminists and those in the LGBTQ community calling for the annihilation of the Jews and protesting in support of Hamas.

Eytan noted, “In the first few weeks of the war, I volunteered to take hundreds of foreign journalists to the south to see the atrocities. Very early on it was clear that the issue of the sexual crimes committed by Hamas was met with skepticism and denial. I spoke with my friend and co-producer Meny Aviram and said that we absolutely had to produce a documentary about the topic, as it was clear that the denial would only get worse. Unfortunately, we were right. With the documentary out, and open for everyone to see on YouTube, we at least have a reference to show the world.”

Anti-Semitic protestors ignore the fact that under Islam, women have very little rights and are punished for not wearing the Hijab, not allowed to leave home, and cannot hold a job without the permission of a senior male family member. Those in the LGBTQ community are hanged on a regular basis in Muslim regions. Anyone living in Gaza or the West Bank and wants to criticize had better do it in Israel because being critical in Gaza will likely end with their throat slit, and in the West Bank they will be tortured or imprisoned.

Listening to those who condemn “both sides” are just emboldening the terrorists. He says, “It is shocking and saddening that there are people that forgot why this war began. On October 7th, thousands of Hamas terrorists attacked dozens of cities and communities, army bases and three parties in an unprecedented rampage of violence. They killed 1200 people, mutilated, injured, raped, and assaulted thousands, and kidnapped back to Gaza more than 250 babies, children, moms, pops, grandparents, people with disabilities and Holocaust survivors. Currently …there are still 132 hostages in Gaza. There is nothing more important than returning them back home now. An interviewee said in the documentary, ‘This should not be forgotten and what happened to them should be told.’ That is our motivation and that is why we created the film. There is nothing more important than making sure the world knows this story.”

[runawaymun]

please expand on elrond hating the sea🙏🙏

okay I'm more awake today so thank u for sending this in. Elrond hates the sea because the sea, since childhood, has taken everything he has ever loved. When he was five he and Elros used to ask Elwing where their father was and the answer was that Eärendil was away at sea, because sure he married Elwing but Eärendil is a mariner and the sea was always his first love. Elrond has very few memories of his father, except the taste of salt in his mouth and the crunch of it in his hair, and sail-rope calloused hands that held his face gently while he was kissed goodbye, because his father is leaving again, on another trip, and Elwing doesn't know when he will be back.

And then the Sack of Sirion happens and Elwing places the twins in a hiding spot she hopes will be safe (it isn't), and tells them she'll be back for them (she won't. She knows she won't. This is a little lie she tells them so they won't cry and give themselves away...hopefully), and then the sea takes her too.

Years later, the sea will claim a second father. Or at the very least a begrudging guardian, depending on how you look at it. Maglor will wander the shore forever, and no matter how hard Elrond searches the beach for him he can't be found.

Then Elros makes his choice and the sea takes him too, because he sails away and Elrond promises to visit, and he does. He does. He sails to Númenor as often as he can to visit Elros right up until Elros' final days on this earth, and then Elrond keeps sailing to visit his nieces and nephews and grandnieces and grandnephews until one day he sets sail only to find out that Elves Are No Longer Welcome, and then the sea once again becomes a Sundering Thing.

And then the sea takes Númenor. All of it.

Or, at least...most of it.

But Elrond doesn't get to meet what is left of his kin until they land on the shores of Middle Earth and that Damned Sea no longer divides them.

(And that's not to speak of the hundreds...thousands...of people who fall and are re-embodied in a place Across The Sea -- Gil-Galad, Celebrimbor, etc. etc...dear friends of his that he has to lose. And people try to comfort him by telling him about a land that was supposed to be his birthright, a land that he has never seen, stagnant and supposedly perfect and so, so far away and worst of all-- everyone else? Everyone else will get to see all of their loved ones if they sail. But for Elrond, Valinor will always be a little empty, because Elros and Elros' kin will never be there. The sea took them and there is no going back from that.)

For a while there is peace.

Elrond makes peace with the sea a little, too, because he marries and has children and his children like to travel every so often to the safe Westernmost Shores to build sandcastles, and for a while the salt-air doesn't sting quite so much.

But then Celebrían.

When he and the twins finally bring Celebrían back home from her torment, it's obvious it's a losing battle. He tries, he tries, to help. He stretches his art to its absolute limit because he cannot bear to lose someone else. Inevitably the suggestion comes: let her sail West. And he refuses. He refuses! The sea won't take her too!

But he fails to save her. Eventually he has to recognize it. Eventually Celebrían is begging let me go, please. And so he does. Because he loves her.

So the sea takes Celebrían too.

And worst of all, in the end it takes his children from him. Because in the end, when the Ring is destroyed at last and Sauron is vanquished and Elrond's own power is utterly spent, Elrond has to sail, and he leaves Arwen and Aragorn and their children, and Elladan and Elrohir and Celeborn, and Rivendell and his entire life's work and all that is left of Elros' kin behind, and I think it just kills him.

Like, sure, he will travel to the Undying Lands to heal and reunite with Celebrían. And sure, he'll get to reunite with Gil-Galad and Celebrimbor and Elwing and so many other people, and meet so many new family members that he never got the chance to be introduced to, but that doesn't change the fact that the Sea took them in the first place, and it has taken him from his children and his grandchildren and all that is left of Elros, and I don't think he ever quite gets over that...because how can you?

[thoughtportal]

smithsonianmag.com

How Recovering the History of a Little-Known Lakota Massacre Could Heal Generational Pain

Tim Madigan

46–59 minutes

To reach the place known as Mni Tho Wakpala, the Blue Water, you drive west from the Nebraska hamlet of Lewellen, turning from Highway 26 onto a gravel road and turning again through a gate that leads to fenced pastureland. The ancient cottonwood, now known by the Lakota Sioux as the Witness Tree, still towers above the grasslands. Blue Water Creek cuts a crooked path through a broad valley, its waters still pristine.

Then, just after sunrise on September 3, 1855, 600 U.S. Army soldiers commanded by Brigadier General William S. Harney surrounded and ambushed the village, the first time in the Indian wars of the Northern Plains that the military attacked a camp full of families. Today the attack is often known, to the extent it is known at all, as the Blue Water Massacre, but for more than a century it was remembered in a few conventional histories as a particularly ruthless U.S. military victory—the Army’s first major salvo in a 35-year campaign against the Lakota, lords of the Northern Plains, the people of Red Cloud, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, which ended finally with their subjugation at Wounded Knee in 1890. That episode, where as many as 300 Lakota were slaughtered, is widely known. 

The same cannot be said about Blue Water. 

The bloody chain of events had begun a year earlier, in mid-August 1854, when a lame-footed cow belonging to a Mormon settler wandered into the camp of the Brulé, also known as the Sicangu, one of seven bands that make up the Lakota nation. There, along the North Platte River in what is now Wyoming, the animal was felled by the arrow of a warrior named High Forehead, who may have been hungry.

The Brulé Lakota chief, Conquering Bear, hurried to nearby Fort Laramie and offered the Mormon a horse from his own herd as restitution. The matter might have ended there were it not for the ill-fated ambition of Lieutenant John Grattan, a 24-year-old Army officer a year out of West Point. Grattan was determined to personally arrest High Forehead and make his reputation in the process. On August 19, Grattan, with a drunken interpreter and a detachment of 29 soldiers, began a ten-mile march to the Lakota camp. Frontiersmen and other civilians they met along the way pleaded with the lieutenant to reconsider, as a small city of more than 4,000 Lakota had grown up by the North Platte. “I don’t care how many there are,” Grattan told them. “With 30 men I can whip all the Indians this side of the Missouri.” 

When Grattan and his men marched into the village, Conquering Bear tried to reason with him, but the young officer made clear he would not leave without his prisoner. “For all I tell you, you will not hear me,” Conquering Bear finally said. “Today you will meet something that will be very hard.” 

Surrounded by hundreds of Lakota warriors, a panicked U.S. Army soldier fired the first shot. Grattan and all but one of his men were swiftly killed. (The last soldier eventually succumbed to his injuries.) Grattan’s body was riddled by 24 arrows. Conquering Bear, one of three Lakota who were wounded, died from his injuries several days later.

News of the killings became an object of national outrage, though in the months to come congressional and Army reports placed the blame for what happened squarely on Grattan. That November, three Brulé Lakota warriors, later identified as Spotted Tail, Red Leaf and Long Chin, close relatives of the slain chief, attacked a mail coach traveling near Fort Laramie, killing three men, wounding a fourth, and reportedly making off with thousands of dollars in gold, an act of revenge per Lakota custom.

By then, President Franklin Pierce and his secretary of war, Jefferson Davis, had already endorsed a retributive expedition of their own against the Lakota. To lead it, Davis turned to Harney, an old friend who had experience fighting Native Americans in Florida and Wisconsin. In a White House meeting, Pierce gave Harney, a barrel-chested man with a long white beard, simple orders. “Whip the Indians for us,” the president said. 

In August 1855, Harney and his men, equipped with new, long-range Sharps rifles, set out from a frontier fort. “By God I am for battle,” Harney told a fur trapper as he departed. “No peace!” By September 2, the troops were camped along the North Platte near a place called Ash Hollow, a popular stopping point for westward-traveling emigrants on the Oregon Trail. Harney learned that Chief Little Thunder, who had succeeded Conquering Bear after his death, was camped about six miles north by Blue Water Creek, a tributary of the North Platte.  

As soon as the Brulé glimpsed Harney’s troops the women began to strike tepees, loading lodge poles, skins and other belongings onto travois, sledges drawn by horses and dogs. Seeing the people flee north, Harney feared his cavalry had insufficient time to set the ambush. To stall, he sent a guide to request a parley with Little Thunder. The chief quickly obliged, galloping toward the soldiers with two of his most renowned warriors, Spotted Tail and Iron Shell. According to one account, Little Thunder approached Harney holding an umbrella as a makeshift white flag.

The conversation took place over a distance of 30 to 40 feet. The general shouted his outrage for the killings of Grattan and his soldiers and the murders of the three men in the mail coach robbery. “The day of retribution had come,” Harney said.

Thirty minutes later, feeling delay was no longer necessary, the general sent Little Thunder back to his people. He gave his soldiers the order to open fire, then took up a viewing position atop a nearby hill.

What happened next was documented in Army after-action reports, in the private letters and journals of American soldiers, and in interviews they gave late in their lives. There was also one recorded account from the perspective of a Lakota survivor, a woman named Cokawin who was in her 40s at the time and gave her testimony many years later to another Lakota woman named Susan Bordeaux Bettelyoun. “The smoke of the battle blinded her,” Bettelyoun wrote in her own memoir, With My Own Eyes. “As she looked all around, she could see the soldiers galloping after groups of old men, women and children who were running for their lives. Some were running across the valley only to be met by soldiers and shot right down.”

As Cokawin tried to flee, a soldier shot her in the stomach. “The bullet ripped her open for about six inches, a glancing shot. … Her bowels protruded from the wound as she fell.” To hide, Cokawin covered herself in tumbleweed and tore off a piece of her sleeve to use as a bandage. “There she lay all day listening to guns roar and to the hoofbeats of the horses, the shouting and yelling of the soldiers who came so near at times that she thought she would be discovered. Once in a while she could hear a Sioux war cry. At these times, Cokawin said she felt like singing and giving the trill.”

Perhaps the most complete account of the massacre comes from the journal of a U.S. Army officer named Lieutenant Gouverneur K. Warren. The 25-year-old West Point graduate was a noncombatant, attached to Harney’s expedition as a mapmaker and topographer. Apparently appalled by the brutality he witnessed, he devoted several diary pages to describing the day’s horrors, particularly what he saw at bluff-side caves where many Lakota had sought safety. Soldiers, giving chase, fired indiscriminately into the caves, a barrage that went on until the cries of a child were heard from inside.

Warren wrote:

Wounded women and children crying and moaning, horribly mangled by the bullets … Two Indian men were killed in the hole … Seven women were killed … and three children, two of them in their mothers’ arms. One young woman was wounded in the left shoulder … Another handsome young squaw was badly wounded just above her left knee and the same ball wounded her baby in the right knee … I had a litter made and put her and her child upon it. I found another girl of about 12 years lying with her head down in a ravine and apparently dead. Observing her breath, I had a man take her in his arms. She was shot through both feet. I found a little boy shot through the calves of his legs and through his hams … He had enough strength left to hold me round the neck.

Warren described his attempts to minister to the wounded and his distress at the sounds of a Lakota mother wailing for her dead baby. “The feeling of sympathy for the wounded women and children and deep regret for their being so, I found universal,” Warren wrote. “It could not be helped.” 

The story of a dying grandmother and one little boy—the son of the chief—became something of a legend among the Brulé. In 2005, exactly 150 years later, that story was recounted near the site of the massacre by the boy’s great-granddaughter, a Lakota elder and activist named Rosalie Little Thunder. “His grandmother’s blood dripped on him, but he stayed still when he heard all the hoofbeats, gunshots, cries, shouts,” she said to a group of relatives and others who had gathered for a commemoration. “He finally emerged after some silence. The Army spotted him and gave chase. He ran until he got over a little hill and found a burrow surrounded by tall grass. He hid there and stayed there until just before daylight, when it’s coldest and the dew forms. He emerged from there and started his trek—200 miles north to Sicangu country—to take word of the massacre.”

When it was over, 86 Lakota had been killed, many of them women and children. Four U.S. soldiers died. Harney confiscated tepees and buffalo meat for his expedition. The rest of the Lakota belongings were plundered or burned. Then the general marched 70 survivors, mostly women and children, some 140 miles across the grasslands to Fort Laramie. There he insisted that the perpetrators of the mail coach attack surrender. If they did not, Harney threatened to turn his captives over to the Pawnee, the Lakota’s mortal enemy.

That was why the warriors Spotted Tail, Long Chin and Red Leaf trotted on their horses into Fort Laramie a few weeks later. They were dressed in their finest regalia and sang their death songs when they surrendered, expecting to die at the end of a wasichu rope. Instead, they were taken into custody and imprisoned at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. The next year, at the urging of the region’s Indian agent, President Pierce pardoned the Lakota warriors.

The bloody episode had divergent impacts on the Lakota. For some leaders it was a radicalizing event, evidence that the government could never be trusted—that violent resistance was the only path to meaningful tribal autonomy. One such leader was Crazy Horse, who was a teenager in the Oglala village a few miles north of the Brulé camp, and who, coming upon the massacre site, saw firsthand its terrible aftermath. “Scattered along the rocky slope were lodge rolls, parfleches, robes, cradleboards and many other village goods, all trampled and torn and burnt,” Crazy Horse’s biographer Mari Sandoz wrote in 1942, “and among these lay dark places that were blood and darker ones that were the dead of his people.” The Lakota historian Victor Douville has written that the memory never left Crazy Horse, and many say he thought of Blue Water while leading the rout of Lieutenant Colonel George Custer at Little Bighorn in 1876. 

For other Lakota leaders, such as Little Thunder and Spotted Tail, what they saw of the government’s cruelty and disproportionate firepower convinced them that their people’s best, or perhaps only, chance for survival was negotiation and eventual peace. Spotted Tail was sure the Lakota “could not win against the power of the Americans,” his biographer George E. Hyde wrote. Spotted Tail would become the chief lieutenant and eventual successor of Little Thunder, who was also wounded in the massacre but survived. Sensing the ultimate futility of resistance, the two men “prepared to lead their people down the path of peace and survival—a survival that included loss of their independence, and a forced residence on reservations,” the historian Paul N. Beck wrote in 2004. 

In March 1856, Little Thunder was forced to shake hands with Harney, who had summoned leaders of the seven Lakota bands to Fort Pierre, in South Dakota, to dictate his terms for peace—essentially, obedience and docility. In return, Harney released the prisoners he had taken at Blue Water.

A period of relative quietude between the Lakota, some of their Native allies and the U.S. government ended in November 1864, when a U.S. military force attacked a Cheyenne and Arapaho camp near Sand Creek in Colorado, killing an estimated 230 people, most of them women and children. In the violent years to come, government promises to the Plains Indians were made and quickly broken. The Lakota and their allies won several military victories against the Army, most notably at the Little Bighorn, but as the years passed there was a sense of inevitability, culminating with the slaughter at Wounded Knee, which extinguished the last embers of armed Lakota resistance.

Little Thunder died in 1879, having handed over leadership of the Brulé to Spotted Tail in 1866, according to Douville. “He was shrewdly confident that his successor had the best qualification of securing his unfulfilled goal of accomplishing peace.”

I first came across the story of the Blue Water Massacre by accident, in early 2023, while researching a separate historical project about the American West. In the brutality of the violence and in the event’s bewildering obscurity, it immediately reminded me of another event, the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, when hundreds of African Americans were killed by a white mob in that city’s Greenwood community. 

In 2001, I published a book about the Tulsa massacre, at a time when few people apart from survivors or their descendants knew much about it. What happened in Tulsa, I learned, was not a historical anomaly. Immersing myself in that history not only inspired in me greater compassion for people from different backgrounds, with different histories, but also gave me a more fulsome understanding of the origins of our nation’s racial and social fissures. By the time I returned to the subject of the Tulsa massacre on its 100th anniversary for a story in Smithsonian, the atrocity had become broadly known—and, perhaps not coincidentally, hopeful signs of racial reconciliation in Tulsa and elsewhere had begun to take hold. 

Native American history has its own infamous gaps, but in recent generations many difficult truths have bubbled to the surface of the nation’s cultural awareness. Dee Brown’s 1970 landmark best seller, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, revealed for a broad audience the sanitized nature of mainstream Indigenous history. (Even still, the events at Blue Water received a single sentence.) The American Indian Movement, which flourished around the same time, fought publicly and militantly for unfulfilled treaty rights and the reclamation of tribal lands. In more recent decades, scholars, writers, filmmakers, artists, activists, political leaders and others, Native and non-Native, have filled in the picture more completely. They have highlighted the relatively overlooked history of the enslavement of Native Americans, for example, or challenged simplistic narratives about American colonial expansion to focus on the ways Indigenous people helped shape this country’s borders, history and culture. 

Some of this work has broken through into popular culture. In just the past decade, David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon, adapted into a movie by Martin Scorsese, publicized the true story of the Osage Nation’s extraordinary wealth after oil was found beneath tribal land—and the string of murders by white settlers intent on stealing that wealth. The Ken Burns documentary The American Buffalo traced how deliberate U.S. policy all but eradicated the once abundant animal, with disastrous effects on the Plains Indians. The theme was explored by the Ojibwe writer David Treuer in his 2019 counter-history, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America From 1890 to the Present. Without the buffalo, he wrote, the Plains tribes had little choice but to move onto reservations. “The reservations might have been designed as prisons, but now they became places of refuge.” In 2021, the Chippewa novelist Louise Erdrich was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for The Night Watchman, set on the Turtle Mountain Reservation in the 1950s, the latest of her celebrated books to draw from the realities of Native life and history. And the FX television series “Reservation Dogs” brought American viewers onto a reservation in the present day, following the sometimes comic, sometimes tragic travails of young Native Americans plotting their escape from reservation life for what they imagine is something better. 

The U.S. government, meanwhile, under the direction of Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Native cabinet secretary in U.S. history, has opened a federal investigation into the historical abuses of the Indian boarding school system. Haaland convened listening sessions across the country. She opened each session this way: “My ancestors endured the horrors of the Indian boarding school assimilation policies carried out by the same department that I now lead.”

In September 2023, in an effort to learn more about the massacre at Blue Water and its persistent impacts, I made the first of two long trips to the Rosebud Reservation, in south-central South Dakota, which has been a home for the Sicangu Oyate, as the Brulé now call themselves, since 1889. (Both the Lakota and French terms refer to “burnt thigh people,” a name apparently deriving from a terrible prairie fire long ago.) The reservation sprawls across more than 900,000 acres of grasslands, rolling hills and pine forests, and is dotted by small towns, smaller villages, and many ranches and farms. I met with Lakota residents carrying surnames like Little Thunder and Spotted Tail and with descendants of Iron Shell. They told me about their lives, introduced me to their songs, drums and prayers, and spoke about the importance of venerating their ancestors and keeping their ancient rituals and ceremonies. Not everybody was forthcoming. At one dinner, a Lakota elder named Phil Two Eagle, the executive director of Rosebud’s Sicangu Lakota Treaty Council, asked me succinctly: “Why are you here?” My answer had to do with an acquired belief that cultural healing is not possible without a full and honest accounting of the past. 

The past and its sometimes grim legacies were evident at Rosebud. About one-third of the Sicangu’s 30,000 or so enrolled members live on the reservation. Of those, more than half live below the poverty line. The life expectancy is a decade less than the national average, suicide rates dwarf national figures, and substance abuse is an epidemic. And yet, for many residents, leaving the reservation is close to unimaginable. “It’s hard for any of us to leave, because we’re just real social beings, and we’re grounded here with all of our family,” Gale Spotted Tail, Rosebud’s program director of child care services and the great-great-granddaughter of the chief, told me. “We don’t look through the eyes of being impoverished. We look more at the values you have as a person. We still have that kind of connection.” I learned that many Lakota weren’t aware of the history of the Blue Water Massacre or didn’t feel it was particularly relevant to their lives. Most are simply too preoccupied with the realities of getting by, Gale Spotted Tail told me. 

The first time I spoke with Karen Little Thunder, a great-great-granddaughter of the chief and the younger sister of Rosalie, who died in 2014, she explained that she saw in this effort a way to move beyond the interminable stasis of injustice. “They attacked in very early morning and just slaughtered us, and there was no time for anything except to survive,” she said. “Then the village was burned. Then the survivors were marched away to one of the forts and the women and children were taken and used as pawns. These traumas just kept happening and happening—and we’re still grieving. That’s the way it is, not just for Little Thunder relatives, but for our entire tribal people. We could not do anything except survive back then. Fast-forward 150 years, we’re still in survival mode.”

Karen Little Thunder, today a mother and grandmother at age 59, lives on the Rosebud Reservation in a white double-wide trailer on land that has been in her family for generations. She doesn’t remember hearing about Blue Water until her early 20s, when her father handed her a few photocopied pages from a book that described the massacre. At the time, as she struggled with alcohol addiction, the significance of what she read didn’t register. 

In 2004, after several years of sobriety, she enrolled at the tribal university, where a fellow student told her that a professor named Peter Gibbs was talking about the Little Thunder family in his lectures. One day, Karen Little Thunder ran into Gibbs in the school’s Lakota studies building. “We stood in the hallway for 10 or 15 minutes,” she recalled. The topic of his lectures had been the Blue Water Massacre. “He told me in a nutshell what he was talking about in his class. I remember going through the rest of my day, like—mind blown. I needed to do something with all this information. I took as many classes as I could in the Lakota studies department, and in doing so was able to do my own research about the massacre.” 

By chance, weeks later Karen Little Thunder received a letter from two sisters, Jean Jensen and Dianne Greenwald, who had grown up close to the Nebraska massacre site. As children they hunted for arrowheads while playing along Blue Water Creek. They had heard a battle had happened there but had only a vague sense of what that was. They finally learned about the atrocity as adults, after reading books about state and local history and talking to history buffs. Now they were writing blindly to any member of the Little Thunder family whose contact information they could find. With family members and local friends, the sisters decided to include the massacre in an event commemorating local history. In years past, the event usually focused on white pioneers on the Oregon Trail who traveled through that part of Nebraska. It was time, Jensen told me, “to tell the Lakota side of the story, to make it known.” 

Not long afterward, Karen came across a photograph on the internet—a tiny doll, taken from the massacre site. She was haunted by the image. As a child, she’d learned that, where her ancestors were concerned, moccasins were never just moccasins, buckskin pants and feather bonnets and war shirts were more than mere physical objects. “My uncle Albert White Hat used to talk about how the essence of the person becomes attached to their belongings,” she said. “They are almost like living things themselves.”

And she eventually learned that the doll was hardly the only object plundered that day. Gouverneur K. Warren, the young officer who recorded his horror at the massacre, had apparently collected dozens of Lakota belongings from the site. Karen found a semi-obscure book called Little Chief’s Gatherings, written by a historian of the frontier named James A. Hanson, which had been published in 1996. (The name “Little Chief” derived from a dismissive Lakota nickname for Warren, a reference to his short stature.) Hanson described how Warren transported the Lakota belongings to the East Coast and, the next year, in 1856, quietly donated them, more than 60 items, to the Smithsonian, then a fledgling cultural institution in the nation’s capital. 

Warren never spoke or wrote publicly about his contribution to the museum. “I believe he felt remorse and embarrassment for having looted the possessions of a vanquished foe, even though his motives were entirely for the good of science,” Hanson wrote. But the items made up “one of the most significant Plains Indians collections ever made,” Hanson noted, including “dozens of pony-beaded articles of clothing—dresses, leggings, a war shirt, a headdress, baby carriers and moccasins, as well as quilled robes, trade blankets, tepee bags, pipes, a bow case, a complete set of horse gear, a knife sheath, children’s toys including the earliest known Plains Indian doll.” 

When I spoke with Hanson recently, he said he had come upon the objects by accident, as a graduate student in the early 1970s researching Sioux trade artifacts. Flipping through the card catalog in the anthropology department of the National Museum of Natural History, he recognized Warren’s name from books and western atlases he read as a boy. “Here’s a whole section of the real early stuff”—Native American artifacts—“that says, ‘Collected by G.K. Warren,’” Hanson told me. “I said, ‘My God, this is something I would love to research.’” Hanson tracked down Warren artifacts that had been scattered among hundreds of thousands of other items in storage throughout the museum. He learned that about 20 of the Warren items had once been on display, labeled as “examples of Lakota life in the 1850s.” But other than the musty references in the card catalog, there was no other written record of the collection or its provenance.

When Hanson’s book was published, it included a formal description of the massacre, a transcript of Warren’s diary and 58 photographs, many in color, of Lakota belongings. The most heartrending image was the child’s doll. Fashioned from tanned animal hide, with seeds for eyes and flowing locks made from black horsehair, it wore tiny moccasins and a blue wool cloth dress.

In 2010, Karen Little Thunder contacted the museum and was granted permission to come see the items in person. The museum’s storage facility was located in a Virginia suburb of the nation’s capital. She and her then husband, Clayton Wright Jr., passed through security and were met by a museum official named Bill Billeck. “When we started going down to where the items are actually stored, that’s where it became dark,” she remembered. “The storage cabinets were like those red toolboxes with shallow drawers. I’m wearing these little cloth gloves. We were able to go through and find and view and hold several items.” A number of the belongings appeared to be stained with blood. “It was good until we came upon what looked like a baby blanket, a wrap made out of buffalo hide. You could see a little hood for the child’s head. When I put my hand on that little baby wrap, that’s when it hit me really hard. I could see, I could feel, I could imagine a child in that wrap. I mean, it just hit me so hard. This is real. This is what happened. There was a baby in this blanket. I had to turn around and walk away. I just felt like screaming and crying and beating on somebody. It made me angry and sad at the same time.”

She composed herself and returned to the belongings. Afterward, she felt affirmed. The experience was a sign “that I’m following the right path,” she said. “It’s like when I hear a coyote or I see a beautiful eagle. Those things are answers as well.”

In 1999, Paul Soderman and his family were sorting through the belongings of a recently deceased aunt at her home on Long Island, New York, when they came across a remarkable letter. The letter was written by Soderman’s great-great-grandfather, James Harney Stover, in 1934, when he was in his 80s. In it, he told the story of visiting the White House with his family in April 1861, when he was 12 years old. President Lincoln himself entered the East Room and greeted Stover’s father by name. It turned out the two men had practiced law together in Illinois years before. “The tall president who was 6 feet 4 and a half inches, stooped down and shook hands with me,” Stover wrote. During the visit, it came up that Stover’s mother’s maiden name was Harney. In fact, Stover’s mother told Lincoln, she was the cousin of an Army general named William S. Harney. “And the president said, ‘Well, he is my general in St. Louis, and he and I were in the Black Hawk War together,’” Stover wrote. 

During the next several years, he immersed himself in Lakota culture, history and language. By chance, he met another Boulder-area resident, a prominent jazz trumpeter named Brad Upton, who shared Soderman’s commitment to atonement. Upton was haunted by the fact that his great-great-grandfather, Colonel James W. Forsyth, had commanded the troops at Wounded Knee. 

Soderman first connected with Karen Little Thunder on an internet message board, and he met her in person in 2014. A short time later, Karen told her cousin, Phil, that a relative of Harney wanted to meet him. Phil Little Thunder, a short, soft-spoken man, saw it as an opportunity to “count coup” on an enemy, the ancient Native practice of getting close enough to touch an adversary. Phil remembers thinking, “I’m going to shake his hand, and hold it real tight—and then I’m going to give him a left hook, because his ancestor did my people that way.” Then they met. “When I shook hands with him, instead of whupping him, he hugged me.”

Around that time, a Lakota elder and spiritual leader named Basil Brave Heart was leading a campaign to rename Harney Peak. As a seventh-generation descendant of Harney, Soderman publicly endorsed the effort. In August 2016, the U.S. Board on Geographic Names announced the Harney name would be removed, and the landmark would henceforth be known as Black Elk Peak, for the legendary Lakota warrior and holy man. “The initial emphasis was to get Harney Peak changed,” Soderman recalled. “When that was done, we started thinking, in collaboration with Karen and Phil, ‘What can we do now?’”

Not long afterward, the Little Thunders and their Nebraska friends gathered beneath the Witness Tree for a healing ceremony. When it was finished, Karen Little Thunder was approached by Shelie Hartman-Gibbs (no relation to Peter Gibbs), who had grown up near the Blue Water and remained active in historical commemoration there. The 150th anniversary of Nebraska’s statehood was approaching. Hartman-Gibbs and her sister had the idea of bringing part of the Warren collection back to Nebraska for a temporary exhibition. What did Karen think? “I only remember the overwhelming feeling that this was another piece of the puzzle,” Karen says.

After the women presented the plan to a large group of Little Thunder relatives, who endorsed the idea, the Smithsonian approved the loan of seven items from the Warren collection (deemed by curators as in the best condition to travel) for a three-day exhibition at the visitor center of the Ash Hollow State Historical Park. The center commemorates Ash Hollow’s significance to pioneers on the Oregon Trail, but it also sits atop a bluff overlooking Blue Water Creek and the valley where the massacre occurred. 

The belongings were flown to Denver and driven to Nebraska, arriving at Ash Hollow late on a Wednesday afternoon in July 2017. Phil Little Thunder told me that he felt a sadness and a restlessness, like a caged wolf, when he first saw the belongings, which included the doll from Hanson’s book, plus a ceremonial rattle, a decorated saddle, a bag of porcupine quills, a bow, an ammunition pouch and a powder horn. But he couldn’t help but think about the rest of the items, which remained in vaults on the East Coast. “It was like a halfway apology,” he said.

In mourning over the items, he had let out a plaintive cry. “I’ll never forget the sound,” Soderman told me. “He’s done it a few times at the Witness Tree. That’s the connection between now and then, the sound of his grief. It’s real. That’s what I try to explain to my family and others who ask, ‘Why are you digging up the past? That happened 160 years ago.’ For Phil, it might as well have happened last week. That’s how connected they are.”

Karen Little Thunder spent the night in her van at the massacre site. “And I woke up the next morning and was just so happy,” she told the Lakota Times. “I could have been dancing by myself. I felt happy. I felt laughter. I felt peaceful. That told me things were good.”

Afterward, Karen and Phil Little Thunder and another cousin, Harry Little Thunder, together with Soderman, began to discuss the possibility of getting the entire Warren collection returned to the Lakota for good. 

The timing for such an appeal felt right. Cultural institutions around the world have been reckoning, sometimes publicly, with the fact that many of their holdings were collected in ways that we now consider unethical. In the United States, federal agencies and many museums and institutions are already mandated by law to repatriate requested Native American human remains, burial artifacts and sacred objects held in their collections. The Warren collection objects don’t fall under these categories, but the Smithsonian has recently enacted a broader, Institution-wide policy called Shared Stewardship and Ethical Returns. Under the policy, which went into effect in 2022, artifacts of everyday life that Native groups deem of cultural importance may qualify to be returned. In certain cases, shared stewardship agreements allow the Institution to care for the items at the request of the original owners.

I spoke recently with Kevin Gover, the Smithsonian’s Under Secretary for museums and culture and a member of the Pawnee nation of Oklahoma, who served for 14 years as director of the National Museum of the American Indian. He was forthright about how much the Institution’s perspective has evolved. “Even if we have legal title for a given artifact, if it was acquired unethically, whether by us or whoever it was that acquired it originally, then we should give it back,” he said. He cited the Smithsonian’s recent return to Nigeria of 29 “Benin Bronzes” plundered by the British during an attack in 1897. “In our parlance, that was unethically acquired. That’s why we were not just willing but anxious to return those to Nigeria. I think the same would apply here,” he said, referring to the Warren collection. “If these artifacts were from a battlefield, even worse from a massacre, clearly they were unethically acquired, not necessarily by us, but by the U.S. Army and given to us. We have an obligation to return them.”

In August, the Little Thunder group formally applied under the new policy for the return of 69 items they believe came from the massacre site. Sarah Loudin, the National Museum of Natural History’s head registrar, told me that the process for reviewing the application will take time. As the museum gathers information, it will consider questions of standing, including, for example, whether the applicants are lineal descendants of the original owners of the belongings; are official representatives of the community where the items originated or are acting on its behalf; and whether there are competing requests for the objects. 

Billeck shared Henry’s letter by email with Karen Little Thunder and Paul Soderman, writing that the letter made clear that “Warren obtained the objects at the Smithsonian and that they are from Ash Hollow or Blue Water Creek.” The Little Thunders included the letter as a part of their application to the Smithsonian. 

The formal request is one step in an ongoing process of considerable cultural and spiritual complexity. For example, in the past, some Little Thunder family members expressed reservations about reclaiming the items, arguing that other Sicangu families descended from massacre survivors should be involved. There is also a question about what the Sicangu would do with the items if they are returned. Some Lakota elders would likely advocate ritual burning, per tradition, while others favor keeping them for educational and ceremonial purposes. That raises other practical considerations, such as where the Lakota would store the items and how they would pay for any associated costs. 

In recent months, Karen Little Thunder, her cousins Phil and Harry, and Paul Soderman have been busy gathering support back home. They found an ally in Phil Two Eagle, the Sicangu treaty council executive director, who last December placed the Blue Water Massacre on the agenda for the annual conference of treaty councils from all seven Lakota bands. 

In a hotel ballroom in Rapid City, South Dakota, the Little Thunders and Soderman appeared before the conference and spoke about what happened in 1855. Afterward, the elders stood and, singing an old Lakota honor song, shook their hands. 

The next day, Phil Little Thunder read a resolution that Phil Two Eagle had helped draft. In the name of the Sicangu Oyate and the Blue Water families, it called not only for the return of the Warren collection, but also for a geophysical survey of the massacre site to identify and recover any remains of victims, and for the establishment of a memorial and interpretative center at the site. The resolution, while nonbinding, was unanimously endorsed by representatives of the seven Lakota bands. 

Gale Spotted Tail, the descendant of the Sicangu chief, has become another important supporter. “I’m in favor of it, because it will bring attention to the Blue Water,” she told me. “A lot of people don’t know about it. Healing ceremonies would come with those belongings being returned. That kind of spiritual power will help our souls. It’s an opportunity for kids here to know their identity.”

Recently, the Rosebud Sicangu’s historic preservation office, along with representatives of the Little Thunder family, have been in discussions with Nebraska state officials about storing the items, should they be returned, at the Ash Hollow visitor center. Under the proposed agreement, the visitor center would host the items in a secure and managed environment for at least two years while the Sicangu work to decide on their final disposition. During that time, according to the proposal, descendants of massacre survivors and other Sicangu tribal members would have the right to privately view the collection.

Gover, when I spoke with him, recalled attending ceremonies as director of the National Museum of the American Indian when belongings were returned to their original owners. “People would just weep,” he said. “That made it a powerful experience for us as well. It’s not even making amends. In the Native view of the universe, that is a step toward restoring balance, just putting things right to return those things to the community where they originated. There is real power in that. There are a lot of these incidents from history that still need to be put right.”

The Blue Water valley has been in private hands for generations. Today it includes a patchwork of different owners, not all of them sympathetic to the Lakota or an organized effort to remember the massacre. A Nebraska rancher named Pat Gamet, who is 56, is an exception. He owns the acreage surrounding the Witness Tree and the area where the Lakota village once stood. He says he has kept the land as it was to protect it for the Lakota people and help honor their history there. “That’s my role in all of this. It’s a very humble one.”

On that hot afternoon last year, the 168th anniversary of the massacre, about 30 people gathered under the Witness Tree with the Little Thunders. Gamet was there, and the sisters, Jean Jensen and Dianne Greenwald, and their families. In the healing circle, Soderman and his wife, Cathie, who were ceremonially adopted into the Little Thunder family a few years ago, stood side by side with Brad Upton, all of them singing ancient Lakota healing songs. The echoes from Phil Little Thunder’s drum were carried off by the wind. Karen Little Thunder spoke up. “I would just like to say thank you to everybody for being here, for being here for us, for all of us,” she said. “You’re helping us to lighten this heavy load that we carry.” 

The scene called to mind a favorite phrase of Basil Brave Heart, the Lakota spiritual leader, that has become a mantra of sorts for the people beneath the Witness Tree. 

Taku wakan skan skan, the saying went. “Something sacred is in motion.” 

[aylen-san]

The fields of ravaged Angband are shrouded in mist, remnants of the War of Wrath lingering in the air. The army of the Valar has set up camp near Morgoth's defeated stronghold. Eonwe, clad in shining armor, watches as the captives and survivors approach him. Among them, with his head bowed, walks Maglor, the last of Feanor's sons, swaying with exhaustion and inner turmoil.

Eonwe: (calmly, but with a weight in his voice) You came of your own accord, son of Feanor. Does this mean you have finally decided to renounce your oath?

Maglor: (lifting his gaze, his eyes full of pain and unbearable weariness) I cannot renounce it... But I can no longer walk this path either. The Oath consumed us, like an abyss. Maedhros... he will not stop. But I... I cannot go on.

Eonwe: So, you have come seeking forgiveness?

Maglor: (bitterly smiles) Forgiveness... Perhaps it is beyond reach for me and my brothers. But I can no longer bear to fight. If the Valar wish to punish me—so be it. Better that than one more crime for the sake of a Silmaril.

Eonwe: (studying Maglor intently, as though looking into his soul) You see how the Oath has become chains. But isn’t it too late for such insight? Why now?

Maglor: (whispers, barely audible) I have lost everything. We betrayed our brothers and friends, destroyed our people. I have lived too long, Eonwe. This is no longer a life—just the shadow of who I once was. Only ashes remain.

A pause. Eonwe is silent, allowing Maglor to gather his thoughts.

Maglor: (struggling to speak) If I follow Maedhros, we will both die, and all that will remain of our names is the mark of a curse. But if I stay... Perhaps there is still a hope for redemption.

Eonwe: (gently but firmly) The judgment of the Valar is severe, but even for those bound by an oath, mercy is possible. Surrender, and they will decide your fate. And if you can atone for even a part of your guilt—let that be your path.

Maglor: (closes his eyes, as if weighing something one last time, then nods, making his decision) I am ready.

Eonwe: (inclines his head in acceptance) You will be brought to the shores, from where we will journey to the West. There, those who can judge you justly will meet you and your fate.

Eonwe turns, giving a quiet command to his warriors.

Maglor: (suddenly, in a trembling voice) Maedhros... What will become of him?

Eonwe: (with sympathy) His choice is his own. But if he comes here, as you have, we will receive him.

Maglor nods, understanding that he can no longer influence his brother. He slowly follows the guards, who lead him to Eonwe’s camp. At the edge of his consciousness, he feels the weight: his brother still calls to him, still draws him toward a final, mad dash for the accursed Silmarils. But Maglor does not look back.

Maglor: (whispering to himself like an incantation) Forgive me, Maedhros...

And so, under gray skies, Maglor goes to the judgment of the Valar, leaving behind a path he can never return to.

[kendrene]

For your mini fic: Ava and Beatrice, things you said in the grass and under the stars

Beatrice leaves Europe all-together, after.

She tries not to. Lingers for a while. Drifts from city to city, country to country, but the sun shines too brightly over Venice's canals and Paris - which Ava had said they should visit together after the war - well, Paris is a haunting.

An ocean later, another landmass crossing, Beatrice hits the West Coast, slowly working her way north where pliant sand gives way to a jagged coastline. Basalt cliffs against which the waves rage. Incessant. Hungry. The sea a low roar in her ears, never too far. Persevering even when she wanders inland, past jasper-studded beaches, and into the woods beyond.

The forests themselves are old, teeming with life both new and rotting. Fog never quite lifts off of the trees, a layer of it, gossamer-thin, persevering even on hotter days.

Beatrice settles down, and grief settles alongside her, the one companion she can tolerate in newfound solitude. It's a worn blanket. A beloved jacket she cannot bear to leave the house without. She grows new habits, easy when all of her days look the same.

She spends a lot of time hiking, getting a feel for the land. Brings books down to the beach to read; in the sun when she can, under a piece of tarpaulin hastily erected in between two trees if it rains.

It nearly always does.

Sometimes Beatrice reads aloud. Imagines it is Ava she is reading to, all the stories and facts about the cosmos Ava didn't have the chance to discover for herself. She reads until her throat is dry and sore. Reads until her voice is drenched in loss, and her heart bleeds for all the things she's lost.

Reads until daylight gives way to the first smattering of stars and the words on the page are blurred by lack of light, perhaps by tears, into a smudge.

The air is wet and salty, whips like the edge of a sharp knife against the soft skin of her cheek. Beatrice packs her book, rolls up the tarpaulin. Picks the now familiar way back in total dark.

She stumbles. Trips over something yielding. Something that snags at her ankles and brings her down to her knees, a rock catching the heel of the hand she throws out to steady herself, cutting open her palm.

It's debris, Beatrice thinks. A large piece of wood. Maybe seaweed.

It is not.

It's a body.

It's Ava. And she's not breathing.

"No. No. No.' Beatrice has prayed, she has begged for Ava to come back but not like this. Not to lose her right away again. "You can't die, please." A sob rips from her, unchecked, even as she turns her over. "I can't lose you again." Beatrice will not think of her as a corpse.

Ava's skin, her lips tinged blue by the frigid waters of the ocean and not divinium. Beatrice's mouth seeking. Ava's tasting of saltwater and the abyssal things that cannot stand to be brought into the light. Ocean waves crashing around them and over. The tide coming in - a bitter, a cold a cruel baptism. Her hands red with the cold and hurting flat to Ava's chest, pushing, pushing while her mind falls into mechanical routines.

"Breathe, goddammit." Bea's own lungs burning, alight with the effort of wrangling life back into another being. "Please Ava don't go."

"Not...going." A cough. Water sputtering down Ava's chin. Her own hand rises weakly, slick around the curve of Beatrice's cheek. Light, molten gold, shearing through the night to wash over them both. "Not going anywhere." Ava's other hand grips Beatrice by a shoulder, tugs her down to sprawl rather inelegantly over her chest. She's not exactly warm, but she's not cold anymore. The Halo brightens to a shine that makes a mockery of dawn. "I'm home."