#its not like there's not enough sand to also turn her into a centaur

[monty-glasses-roxy]

Jurassic Bark trio at the beach and Roxy buries Chica in the sand while Monty sculpts it to make her look like either a pretty mermaid or a really buff merman. Possibly one after the other.

[chironshorseass]

hello yes i’m OBSESSED with your writing so if you’re still taking prompts maybe “please look at me” bc i also have an unhealthy relationship with pre-tlo percabeth angst and live for pining percy

SYD U GAVE ME THIS AND I JUST HAD TO PUT ALL MY PROMPTS ASIDE!!! because how could i not!!!

for what i wrote, i kind of mention this clarisse one-shot.

anyway enjoy <3, since I sort of went crazy with percy being powerful :) like i always do :) and of course, pre-tlo percabeth :)

read on ao3

The waves had grown restless these past few days. Violent, brutal. The night was quiet, the moon hidden beneath darkened clouds, drenching the camp in heavy ink. Percy knew many demigods proclaimed it as the quiet before the storm. They couldn’t have been more wrong.

All he heard was noise.

He’d been like this—unsteady, overwhelmed—for some time, now. Everywhere he went, he felt like a ship sailing into giant waves, water crashing against his deck, threatening to bring him under.

Grover would’ve understood, maybe. But Grover, like the moon, had vanished. That only left a few of his other friends—and of course—Annabeth.

Percy couldn’t avoid her gaze, no matter how much he wanted to. She was always there, watching. Maybe she awaited the day when he’d sink to the power of those waves that plagued the beach, that plagued him. Maybe she anticipated with bated breath on the day when he’d turn sixteen and he’d have to make one decision that would change everything.

Nevertheless, she’d drift away from him. Then come back, again and again.

It drove him crazy, how much their relationship had changed with the times and circumstances. Only now, Annabeth wasn’t what bothered him.

His gut was.

It tightened and loosened, the same way the currents flowed to the rhythm of his rushing blood. He could hear that now, too.

His blood. The sea. The clashes against rock.

Everything was beating to a powerful symphony of drums.

But worst of all was his gut.

Something had gone terribly wrong.

Percy knew there was a war. He had nightmares about it, in fact. Nightmares leading to frantic waking-ups from the feeling of lava burning into his skin. But he hadn’t sensed the war’s presence so strongly in all his three years of attending camp as he did now—and he felt it, because the source of conflict had to do with the sea.

The shadows of cabin three clung to his skin in a comfortable blanket, but he couldn’t ignore this dread. It had trickled patiently into his system for a week now, culminating to this exact moment. He couldn’t sit still. He had to leave. Now.

Not long after stumbling outside while shoving his armor on did he hear the conch horn ringing as a warning. The lookouts had seen something. His legs moved faster.

Doors of other cabins began to smash open, and with it came the spilling of panicked campers. He was already way ahead of them, though.

“To the beach!” someone cried.

Percy arrived just in time to see Chiron assemble with Michael Yew and Austin Lake. The sons of Apollo. They’d apparently been the ones on night duty. The centaur saw Percy before the others made out his heavy footfalls.

“Percy,” Chiron said. “Thank the gods you’re here.”

“There’s something,” he gasped, doubling over once he’d reached them. “There’s something out there,” he finally managed to say, gulping mouthfuls of air. “The sea.”

They already knew, however. The conchorns were signal enough. But what was more obvious was the glimpse of the giant tail, jutting out of the water like a spear cutting through flesh.

The breath he’d managed to find from his mad dash was stolen away at the sight of the monster.

“Yeah,” Austin said, swallowing. “There’s something out there, alright.”

Chiron eyed Percy warily. “My boy. We are dealing here with something I fear that you are only capable of stopping.”

“Yeah, well...it looks like a pretty big fish. I—”

A howl punctured the atmosphere—probably the same sea monster he’d seen earlier. Percy gasped, feeling a stabbing jolt in his stomach. He didn’t know why this sudden change of the sea was affecting him so, but he had to stay strong. So he stood up straight and concentrated on his breathing.

“Are you alright?” Austin asked, studying him.

Percy looked at Chiron, who met his eyes as well. You have to be, his teacher seemed to say.

“I...I think so.”

Michael chose the moment to turn his back on the sea, blowing the conchorn once more. He shouted at the incoming campers, “Greek fire! We need Greek fire!”

The rest of the multitude showed up right away, Hephaestus kids priming canons while others exchanged weaponry. Through all of it, Percy’s gut became a pressure cooker, a fist closing around glass, about to break. He cried out in agony just as a tidal wave shook the world. Falling to his knees, his arms encircled his middle, muffling that pain. He wanted nothing but to make it stop.

He vaguely heard a sound of surprise, coming from someone nearby, then the rush of hands holding onto his shoulders. They helped somewhat, a comfort to the madness.

The hands were warm and soothing. The voice of the person became clearer. He knew that voice. He knew those hands.

Annabeth appeared in his vision, all worry lines and pinched eyebrows. She said something to him again, but the words might’ve been ghosts; the stampeding blood behind his ears was too thunderous to make out anything else.

He closed his eyes and concentrated like he had earlier.

Sharp as a blade, his senses switched to the outside world.

“Are—are you okay?” Annabeth was saying. “You doubled over, and I…”

“No.” He opened his eyes to meet hers. They matched the storm that raged across the sea. “I—I’m not okay. I need to stop this, I need—”

“We were just discussing strategy,” she said. He was glad for the distraction she’d offered. “The Scolopendra isn’t just any ordinary sea monster.”

“The Scolo what?”

She helped him stand up, steadying him with her arms.

“The Scolopendra,” she repeated. “A child of Keto. It’s one of the biggest sea monsters in existence, and it won’t leave the camp border.”

“No shit.”

Annabeth ignored him, glancing backwards at where the monster had last been seen. “There’s no telling what it can do. There’s barely any recordings of it.” She swiveled back to him. “Chiron says that it can control the tide. It might be capable of drowning the camp if we don’t kill it.”

“I won’t let that happen.”

“I told Chiron that we needed to try my strategy first. As in, bombing it with Greek fire before we go with the last approach.”

“And what would that last approach be?”

He had some idea, but before Annabeth could speak, the creature shot out of the water, faster than lightning. He only caught a glimpse of the crayfish-like tail and rows of webbed feet before it disappeared again.

“That looks like a giant shrimp,” he declared.

A giant shrimp that was probably capable of crushing a decently-sized trireme. Shrimpzilla, he was about to call it, as a way to lighten the mood. But he thought better of it, once he saw the hard line of Annabeth’s lips as she watched the campers rev up the Greek fire.

The Scolopendra dared to peek out of the waves for the third time, giving the chance for Beckendorf to yell out an order. Instantly, canyons discharged the green substance directly towards the monster.

It roared defiantly, maybe in pain, maybe in anger. No one was sure, because as soon as the night sky lit up with green flames, the Scolopendra crashed against the water like a wrecking ball. For a moment, all was silent.

No one dared breathe.

Annabeth squeezed Percy’s shoulder. She looked hopeful, as if relieved that she didn’t have to go with the second plan.

Chiron’s tail twitched. Beckendorf held out a hand, urging the campers to wait. Some stood anticipatedly, swords ready. He saw Clarisse in the front line, her electric spear aimed at the sea and crackling with energy.

Percy sensed what was about to happen next before he heard it.

“Annabeth,” he said frantically. “Annabeth, we have to go. Now.”

“What? But—”

“NOW!”

He’d already separated himself from her, yelling at the rest of the campers to leave. They didn’t have the chance; milliseconds later, the Scolopendra appeared. It bellowed with the power of a thousand hurricanes. Many campers covered their ears.

To everyone’s horror, it had closed in on the shore, its back legs likely reaching the sand floor as it rose to its full, terrifying height. Lightning crackled, and with it, came another roar.

“No,” he muttered. “No, everyone get out!”

Too late. The monster had already spit out a million gallons’ worth of salt water.

Instinctively, Percy let out a yell and threw his hands out.

The water halted in midair, rippling like a broken mirror. It was as if time had slowed down, as if Kronos himself had been the one to interfere. But Kronos wasn’t interfering. It was all Percy—with nothing but his willpower. A bead of sweat rolled down from his temple.

Annabeth reached him just as he cried out and threw the water back to the sea with everything he had, forcing the giant shrimp to hide as well.

He caught his breath while Annabeth looked back and forth. From him to the sea, from the sea to him.

She shook her head at no one in particular. “The plan didn’t work.”

“No shit.”

Then she gazed at him again. “Thank you for doing that, Perce.”

“Yeah,” he breathed. “No problem.”

“About the second plan...”

“I have to kill it, don’t I?”

“I...maybe. But we can help—”

“It isn’t a maybe. It is a certainty,” a voice said, strong and firm.

They both turned around.

“Chiron,” Annabeth said. “How can he possibly—”

“He’s the only one capable,” the horseman said. “You know that better than most.”

Her eyes flicked to Percy. Memories flashed through his mind. A quick, burning kiss. A promise. Then, the way fire engulfed him. The call of the sea. An explosion, strong enough to wake one of the most dangerous monsters of all.

When the bombard was over, he understood. He had to face this monster alone, like he had with the telkhines.

“Okay,” he finally said.

“Okay, what?”

Chiron nodded at him, ignoring Annabeth’s question. Without glancing back, he retreated to where the rest of the demigods were watching by the sand dunes as a precaution.

“I need to face him alone,” Percy told her, once Chiron was gone.

“No! Percy, that thing is bigger than—”

“I’m the only one that can’t drown, Annabeth!” He grasped her shoulders so that she was looking directly at him. “If anyone can do it, it’s me.”

“Don’t think I can’t see what’s going on with you,” she said, voice bitter and rough. “You’re distant, like, like the ocean is—”

“We’re both growing distant, ‘Beth. That’s not the problem right now.”

She pushed his hands away. “And that’s not what I’m talking about, and you fucking know that!”

Before he could reply, the monster's call came again. A reminder that this night wasn’t over.

“Please. Just trust me on this, Annabeth. I have to try. It’s our last option. You said so yourself: it may be capable of drowning the entire camp.”

She said nothing, not even sparing him a glance.

“And—and I don’t know why I’m like this! Maybe it’s because I can feel the ocean getting agitated, or because the war is getting worse, or—”

He realized it, then. Annabeth's tears. They were silent rivers, flowing gently down her cheeks and into her mouth. Flowing down to where everything ended up, to the sea.

“Hey,” he said, approaching her slowly. He took both of her hands in his, but she repelled away from his touch. “Please, ‘Beth.”

This time, he cupped her damp cheek, moving it in his direction. “Please look at me.”

And when she finally obliged, her gaze was fractured with glistening tears, like diamonds.

“I can’t lose you again,” she whispered.

Percy had yearned for too long; he let go of that rope tugging him in the opposite direction and instead let Annabeth in. They melted into each other, both shamelessly giving away the little warmth they preserved. It was the kind of hug that felt like a lifeline, the kind that made them both sway like the tide.

“I missed you,” he mumbled into her curls.

She held him tighter. “I missed you, too.”

“But I have to fight this one myself.”

Annabeth pulled away slightly—and when he saw the look on her face—he knew that she knew.

-

“HEY, SHRIMPZILLA!”

The Scolopendra reared its head, even uglier up close. Its nostrils flared with hairs, beady eyes staring down at him. When he charged, the monster bellowed and threw itself in the water, sending sprays taller than a house.

But none of it touched Percy.

He didn’t stop running, a plan in mind. Meanwhile, the sea churned around him in one giant mass of power, but it parted with each step he took, forming a trail of now exposed ocean floor. Water collided with the sky, flying with the salt in the air.

Hello, friend, it seemed to say. Or rather, hum. The sea was a song, and he was just there to dance to its melody.

The Scolopendra had disappeared again.

He didn’t look back, though he knew the entire camp was there, watching—maybe in awe, but he didn’t care enough to find out. He kept walking, alone, surrounded by a pool of green and blue. Was this how Moses felt, In those stories he’d heard? Bricks of ocean water, flinging up into the sky, just so that Percy could pass. The feeling distracted him from the objective.

That’s what he’d argue later, because Percy can’t explain how the monster managed to sneak up to him that easily.

The pool of green seemed endless. There was a moment where nothing moved, not even the water. But then something did tug him violently, up, up into the sky.

For a second, he couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t scream out, the breath stolen from his lungs and the icy rush of air when flung into the sky nauseating. The only feeling he knew was of the Scolopendra and its death grip on his entire body.

With each second, the roiling waters grew farther and farther away. The Scolopendra’s growl, however, couldn’t have sounded closer. Sharp claws sank into his chest and arms. If he didn’t react now, he’d be eaten before the next flash of lightning struck the sea.

Somehow, he managed to uncap Riptide.

And with a scream, he stabbed, as hard as he could.

-

“Hey. Want company?” A soft voice said.

He craned his neck around.

Annabeth subconsciously made the world easier to look at. Especially now, as she stood behind him in the pier with the last vestiges of harsh sun striking her back. Her stance was stiff, hesitant. He understood why.

So instead his eyes bored into his lap. He shrugged.

That was a sign enough for her. She crouched next to him, pulling her legs under herself and then flinging them out to where the wooden planks ended and the open air began, toes nearly kissing the placid lake.

She sat next to him, quiet as the wind. It took a few seconds or minutes or hours before she decided to speak.

“I’m sorry.”

From his peripheral vision, he could tell that she’d been studying him instead of watching the reflection of herons flying above the water. Something he’d thought she’d been doing. Apparently not.

It also took him seconds or minutes or hours before he could respond.

“What for?”

She exhaled, “Letting you go alone. Being a part of the campers who…”

She didn’t finish that sentence. He knew why.

Being a part of the campers who abandoned you alone after what you did.

“S’okay. I get it.”

A lie. He didn’t get it.

“Doesn’t make it right.”

He stared at his hands. “Guess not.”

The details of the fight were yet to go away. The memories were still fresh—like his mother’s batch of cookies whenever he came home from camp. Teeth were ever-present in his mind. And those webbed hands. Those twisted sounds as a monster choked on its own blood.

Afterward, everyone had taken a step back. Even Annabeth and Chiron seemed to contemplate him as though he were doomed. Maybe he was.

“I wish Grover were here.”

“Yeah,” Annabeth sighed. She kicked her leg up, swatting at some mosquitos. “Me too.”

“He’d pull our shit together, fix everything.” He found himself sounding wistful, longing for a missing piece of himself all of a sudden.

She didn’t reply to that. They both missed their best friend. Now, more than ever. Percy tried to not dwell too much on the fact that Grover hadn’t responded to his Iris Messages or to his calls from their shared empathy link.

“I’m sorry.”

“You already said that.”

“No, Percy. I’m serious.”

“I know.”

“Just look at me.”

He did the opposite, gazing at the trees to his left. They were a deep, mystical green. The colors looked like the ocean, where he’d displayed his powers for everyone to see. Worst mistake of his life. He realized that tears had begun to form in his eyes; he quickly blinked them away.

“Percy,” Annabeth insisted.

Her tone wasn’t hash or demanding—but rather, a light pink sky. A hand brushing his, sweet and tender. He noticed that it wasn’t just his imagination; glancing down, he found her fingers ghosting against his knuckles.

“Please look at me.”

This was eerily familiar. It hit him, then, that he’d said those exact words when she’d panicked about him going alone to fight the Scolopendra.

Hesitantly, his eyes focused on her face. Her freckles were there, golden like the rest of her. Only now, her eyes were rimmed with tears.

Something changed inside them both. She stared at him, he stared at her. Her face contorted, and the both broke down, crumbling like ruins with the slightest gust.

“I’m so sorry,” she sobbed, clinging to his shirt.

“Me too,” he murmured back.

He held unto her as if she were a life force, breathing in her lemony scent. Tears were exchanged, mingling in the other’s hair. They held each other, an embrace that didn’t deserve to end. It only made him cry harder, while Annabeth held him closer.

“Why are you sorry?”

He couldn’t say it out loud.

I’m sorry for why we’re like this. I’m sorry for scaring you. I’m sorry for leaving.

Instead, he pulled away. He studied her, every single feature, from those grey eyes and that upturned nose to those curls that no longer appeared to look like a princess.’ They were just Annabeth’s.

“I scared you,” he said.

His arms loosened around her, just now realizing how long they’d hugged, but their hands stayed interlocked—like some sort of middle ground.

She regarded him, eyebrows furrowed. “I can’t ever be scared of you,” she said matter-of-factly. “You’re my best friend, Perce.”

He looked away. “Everyone else was.”

“I should have gone to you after—I just...I thought you were angry at me.”

Their hands separated. “Why would I be angry at you?”

“Because I let you handle all of it alone. The monster, the campers—”

“‘Beth.” He took her hands again, cupping them with his. “I couldn’t ever be angry at you.”

“That’s not true,” she said wryly.

An observation, not an accusation. Still, that didn’t make it hurt any less. He recalled the shouting, the fights. The only thing they looked for in those moments was to hurt the other, twist and pull at any chink in the armor they could find.

She winced, remembering that, too. “Sorry.”

His mouth twitched. “You’ve said ‘sorry’ too many times. It’s getting repetitive.”

She hit his shoulder playfully. “Well, I mean it.”

He didn’t retort anything back. They found peace in this lake, once again gazing at the horizon.

“It’s not true what you said, either,” he said, his mind lingering on what she’d told him earlier. “You’re scared, as well.”

The sound of the incoming crickets carried on in Annabeth’s hesitation.

That is, until she said, “I am. Scared. I’m scared.” He glanced over. She was staring in his direction, but she wouldn’t meet his eyes. She cleared her throat. “I didn’t know you could do that.”

“Neither did I.”

She laughed, breathless. “See that’s what scares me. What else can you do? Honestly?”

He shrugged, turning away from her.

“How’d you do that, anyway?”

“I defeated it, didn’t I?” It was better to deflect than to answer her question.

Defeating the monster should’ve been what mattered, anyway.

“Percy.”

“Annabeth,” he said, in the same condescending tone.

“All I’m saying is that you could hurt yourself. You don’t know what you’re capable of. And then when your birthday happens—”

“You think I’m going to destroy Olympus or something?” He shook his head. “I should’ve known that you’d side with the gods on that, too. You think that they should kill me?”

“What? Percy, I’d never—”

He whirled, facing her, and finally let go of all those pent-up thoughts that just like the sea, wouldn’t leave him alone.

“Just admit it, Annabeth! Admit that it freaked you out that I blood bended or whatever the fuck Chiron called it! Admit, that it freaked you out how I killed that monster! That I’m fucking cursed!”

“Percy Jackson, you are not—”

“Yes, I am. Why would my dad give me powers like that? Huh? Just say it with me: you’re scared—of me.”

Her eyes were red, face hard as stone. Just like her voice when she said, “Look. I just wanted to help. But if you want to sit in your self pity, then go for it! You clearly don’t need me.”

She made no move to leave, however.

Their eyes held, until the anger from both of them melted. He huffed out a breath, shoulders hunching. “We can’t ever stop fighting, can we?”

She sighed.

“Guess not.”

“I won’t do that again.”

She lifted her chin. “Why?”

“Like you said. Scared you.”

That made her purse her lips.

“You’re not cursed, Percy. You know that, right?”

She reached for his hand. It was becoming a strange routine. Finding comfort in hand holding and then dismantling it as if it never happened.

“You’re mostly right all the time, so.” He squeezed her hand. “I s’pose I’m not cursed, then.”

“I’m right most of the time?” she said, eyes twinkling.

“Okay, fine,” he conceded. “You’re right only sometimes.”

She opened her mouth in mock-offense. “Percy Jackson—”

He cut her off with his laugh, a laugh that fit with the music of the crickets. She rolled her eyes, something that he’d missed achingly, now that he saw her do it for the first time in what seemed like forever.

Scooting closer, she nudged him. “I could help you. Alongside Clarisse.”

His eyes widened. “You knew about that?”

“She’s my friend, too.”

“Of course she is,” he muttered.

Him and Clarisse...they might’ve had a rocky relationship when he’d first arrived at camp, but now, he didn’t know what he’d do without her help—without her friendship. They both understood the other in a bizzare, not very common way. She’d helped him hone in his powers, but it had yet to be something he’d wanted to admit to Annabeth. To everyone else, for that matter.

“I get why you didn’t want to tell me,” she said. “But...I do want to help. You’re my best friend, and, and I also want to spend time with you. If...that’s alright.”

“It’s alright by me.”

Annabeth gave him a look.

“Yeah, yeah. I know.” He tried for a smile. “I guess you could come along, then.”

His grin was shared with her, though her eyes were serious. “You’ll see. We’ll figure out your powers. What you can do, why you can do it, why the sea is affecting you…”

“All of it?”

She nodded. “All of it.”

They left it at that, though what they didn’t leave was the canoe pier. Not until the sun hid under the trees, spilling its ink of reds and oranges across the horizon.

The golden of the sun was replaced by the silver of the moon for the night, then it rose again for the day.

And in between, the waves lapped against the shore, constant and content. The ocean had calmed. For now.

[johaerys-writes]

Fandom: The Song of Achilles

Pairing: Achilles/Patroclus

Summary:

Patroclus is a sailor, and Achilles a merman that saves his life when his ship is caught in a storm. The two end up on a deserted island, and the friendship that develops between them will change both of their lives for good.

Chapter 3: The Nymph Who Became Star, the penultimate chapter of my Merman AU Fall Into Your Tide is up! Art is by the wonderful @katartstrophe​ :)

Read on Ao3! Or read from the beginning

Once upon a time, deep in the Laconian mountains, there lived a nymph. The forest was her home; she walked the woods and swam in the streams, protected the animals that lived there and helped the trees and plants grow strong.

One day, she met a young man from a nearby village. He was a healer’s apprentice, and had ventured deep into the forest in search of medicinal plants. Touched by his gentle manners and dedication to his craft, the nymph decided to help him and share her knowledge with him. The man returned the next day, and the day after that, bringing her gifts of flowers and honeyed sweets. His visits became a regular occurrence; they would spend hours together, talking and gathering herbs, exploring the forest. It wasn’t long before the two fell in love.

Months passed in peaceful bliss. However, when the next summer came, a terrible war broke out with a neighbouring state, and the man was called away from his village and sent to battle.

Endless days rolled by without him. The nymph waited and waited, fearing the worst, for she knew well how fickle and short the lives of humans were, winked out in a fateful instant like the flame of a candle. Finally, after several months, the war came to an end. The men who had gone to battle returned— or what was left of them.

The young man did not come to her. Overcome by worry, the nymph decided to approach the village in hopes of seeing him, even though she had always kept her distance from humans and their settlements. When she finally found his house amidst the multitudes of others, she hid in the trees of the garden and peeked inside.

She was overjoyed to see that her love was still alive, but her relief was short-lived. He had been grievously wounded, and his life was hanging by a thread. The healers of the village had done what they could, and all that was left was prayer. Incense burned around him night and day, while he lay on the bed, pale and unmoving.

The nymph's heart ached with longing and grief, such that she had never known in her long life. Tearful and distraught, she returned to her forest, determined to find some way to help him.

She searched for the other nymphs, much older and more experienced than her in the art of healing. None knew of a way to bring back someone that was only a breath away from crossing Hades’ rivers.

“Death cannot be healed,” they admonished her, “and it should not.”

The nymph listened to no one. She kept asking, kept searching. Only a dryad, knowledgeable and wise and older than the forest itself, her skin tough and leathery like an oak tree’s bark, knew of an answer. She told her of a herb, one that grew on Olympus’ highest peak. It was the rarest plant there was, unmatched in its potency. It could mend the deepest wounds, cure the most severe of illnesses.

"The gods guard their home well," the dryad warned her, "and do not tolerate trespassers. No one dares enter the Olympians’ realm without their consent. Anyone who does, must pay the price.” T he nymph thanked the dryad for her help. There was nothing else for her to do other than to brave the long and arduous journey to Mount Olympus.

She was quick and silent as she travelled, yet her movements did not go unnoticed. Zeus' eyes were on her long before she'd reached the foot of the mountain. For an oread, a mountain nymph, to leave the safety of her forest and travel such great distances, to cross rivers and plains and deep ravines and pass so close by so many human settlements was unheard of. So he watched, curious, and waited.

When the nymph reached the middle of the mountain, he disguised himself as a centaur, and presented himself to her. When asked where she was going, the nymph told him the truth:

"I have come to gather a herb, to heal the one I love. It grows on Olympus' highest peak."

Zeus was angered by her boldness, but her earnestness intrigued him more. He warned her, not unkindly,“If you continue on your quest, you will make the gods angry. They do not take kindly to such insults.”

The nymph thanked him for the warning, and continued on her way.

Zeus kept following her, taking on many disguises: a deer, a hunter, a satyr. Each time, he told the nymph the same thing, and she responded in the same way: she thanked him warmly, and continued.

When she finally reached the peak, and her satchel was filled with the precious herb, Zeus presented himself to her. He thundered and shone, blindingly bright, in all his menacing godly glory. I nstead of cowering before him, the nymph stood tall.

“I am aware that this is your land,” she told him, “and this plant belongs to you. Whatever price you command for it, I will gladly pay it.”

Zeus thought long and hard. The nymph’s insolence was unparalleled, but he found her bravery refreshing. In the end, he decided to let her go, allowing her to take with her not only the rare plant she had gathered, but also enough provisions for her journey home to Taygetus’ misty peaks.

The nymph returned to the young man’s village as swiftly as she could. In a matter of days, he had regained his full strength; he was lively and healthy again, as bright and fair as he had been before he had left for the war. They were both so glad, that their love shone like a midsummer sun.

It was then that Zeus reached down and plucked the nymph from the earth and her lover’s embrace. He placed her among the stars and tasked her with guarding the very plant she had stolen, for all time. Before he left, he set one of his fearsome eagles upon her, to make sure she would never shirk her duty.

The price for saving her lover’s life had finally been paid.

The Guardian star shines in the midst of the constellation of Aquila, Zeus’ eagle. The star shines the brightest during the summer months, when the plant is in full bloom.

~

Achilles let out a sigh after I had finished. The sky had darkened while I recounted the story, and the stars were now twinkling above us. We were lying on our backs on the sand, still warm from the sun that had been beating upon it all day.

“Olympians,” he muttered darkly, “and their cruelty.”

Many times before had Achilles expressed his dislike of the Olympians. The nereids were Titan-born, and the Titans had not been on good terms with the powerful and arrogant sons and daughters of Cronus for millennia. By the way Achilles’ brow furrowed whenever I told him tales of their many transgressions or fierce punishments of those who displeased them, I could tell that this animosity between the old and newer gods was far from forgotten.

“Why did not Zeus simply let her take the plant?” he asked. “He didn’t need it. He wouldn’t miss it. What could one mortal’s life have meant to him, in the grand scheme of things?”

“In truth," I said, "I do not think it was about the plant at all."

“What was it about, then?”

“Perhaps it was because the nymph attempted to hold on to something she was never meant to have," I told him earnestly. "She wasn’t meant to have a long and happy life with that man; he was dying. Nothing could change that other than this plant, and it was forbidden. She wished to avoid the pain of losing him, therefore she was punished."

Achilles frowned. "Anyone would wish to avoid that. That doesn’t sound like that serious of a crime to me.”

I took a breath, letting my gaze drift over the dark sky above. Achilles’ scent of ocean currents, of salt and sand filled my lungs, warming me. His hand was so close to mine, I could feel the faint heat emanating from his skin, yet I did not dare close the distance between us. Something held me back. It always did.

"Pain is only a natural consequence of living,” I said, and the words sounded dry to my ears, harsh. “Death, separation; those are the rules. Life is the exception. This is how it’s always been, for humans. If the souls in Hades’ halls were released, they could fill the earth ten times over— there are so many more souls down there than up here, an infinite supply of them. The only certainty for any mortal is that, one day, they will die. For gods, it’s different. Life is guaranteed; death is but an improbable outcome. The nymph wished to defy this rule, to give her lover something that wasn't hers to give, or his to keep. In so doing, she would have challenged the order of the world itself. It could not happen. The gods could not allow it.”  

Achilles turned his head to look at me, his large, feline eyes piercing me to the core. The light brush of his breath against my shoulder sent a roll of warmth cascading through me.

“Do you think she shouldn’t have done it, then?”

I stayed silent for a moment, pondering his question. "That is not for me to say," I said after a short while. "I'm not sure it was a matter of choice for her. It is said that, when you love someone, you act to keep them with you for as long as you can." I shook my head lightly. "I have never loved someone like that before, the way the nymph loved this young man. But I think… I think I can imagine what it must have been like, for her.”

The truth was, I had never let anyone too close to me. I did not know what it was like, to care about someone deeply enough to risk everything to keep them by my side, the same way that no one had ever fought to keep me by theirs. My father had given me up when I was far too young to know the difference, and since then I'd had to largely rely on myself for my survival. I always tended to keep my distance from most people I met, and never lingered in any one place or ship for too long. Xanthos was my closest friend; we had known each other for years, but even he would go away for months at a time to return to his family, while I stayed at sea. I had always been alone, and I always told myself I preferred it that way.

I had thought my life peaceful, comfortable, even. A life of hard work and few luxuries, yet it was mine. I was a free man, depending on no one. I had thought myself content. It wasn’t until I had come close to losing my life in that storm, until I had found myself on this island, until I had met Achilles, that I realised how drab and colourless my life had truly been.

Achilles was looking up at the night sky now, his profile illuminated by starlight. The stars shone bright, like a multitude of silver pins on a dark blue canopy, keeping it in place. He lifted his arm, pointing at a cluster of stars right above us. "Is this the nymph's star?"

"No," I told him, "it's this one." I took his hand and moved it slightly to the left, until it was pointing right at the Guardian star, the smallest of the bunch.

He gazed at the star for a long moment. Then, he asked, "Whatever happened to the young man? The one she fell in love with?"

"I don't know," I replied. "That was where the story ended. I never learned the young man’s fate."

He sighed. “I would have liked to know what happened to him,” he said. “What his life was like, after the nymph was taken.”

“You would?”

"Yes." Achilles tilted his head to look at me. “It is the greater grief, after all, isn't it,” he said softly, “to be left behind when another is gone?"

The nightbirds cooed above us, and the chill breeze stirred the leaves of the cypress trees that lined the coast. The world was peaceful, and in the silence that lingered, I thought I could hear his heart beating, a quiet and steady thump between us. His skin reflected the pale moonlight, and in its feeble glow he looked very nearly transparent. When his eyes focused on me like this, soft and dreamy, almost wistful, I knew that I wanted nothing more than to be where they could see me.

I swallowed, willing myself to meet his gold-flecked gaze. Gods, I could drown in those eyes. I would gladly let their shifting currents swallow me whole.  

"It is," I whispered.  

Read the rest on Ao3!

[marlynnofmany]

Accidentally Human, Chapter 12

Remember this thread, about medusas as a species?  I figured out which version fits best in this world!  I’ve been waiting to share it. 

First chapter Previous chapter Next chapter The latest chapter is already up on Patreon!  

~~~

Chapter 12 1610 words

Windmane had never seen so much as a tailtip of a medusa, and she very much wanted to keep it that way. From what little she knew, they could usually be trusted not to murder anyone who offended them — usually! — but that was a lot to risk. They could kill with a look and a thought. The magic that turned their victims into stone was irreversible.

Windmane turned to Razorscale, the unofficial alpha of the group. She hoped that he would either say that they should leave, or that he had a some magical charm to keep them safe.

He said neither. The dragon was inspecting the moonlit beach in silence, looking at the the chunks of statues that Windmane was just now seeing. She wondered if his temporarily-human eyes were any better than hers.

“These are likely fake,” he said. “Meant to scare people off.”

“What if they’re not?” Windmane demanded, floating higher on the pixie dust.

“Stay close.” Razorscale muttered something to his young apprentice, then glided toward the forest. Silver obligingly took the lead.

Beak and Twig followed the two dragons, leaving Windmane alongside Stomp. Windmane cast an adrenaline-spiked glance at the minotaur, who looked just as wide-eyed as she felt.

Stomp silently held out a hand. Windmane took it.

Herd solidarity.

Together they drifted after the others, all of them gliding silently on pixie dust with varying levels of fear. Windmane knew Razorscale had been worried. He hadn’t hidden it quickly enough.

Anything that worried a dragon, even one so inconvenienced as this, was something that worried a centaur severely.

Windmane held Stomp’s hand tightly, eyes darting everywhere, and took deliberately deep breaths as the treeline approached. It was extremely dark between the trees.

It was also, Windmane was startled to discover, hot.

“I know,” Razorscale whispered at the chorus of surprised noises. “Hush. We’re inside the area of a spell. I thought it did something else, but … Hush.”

Windmane’s hand was already sweaty in Stomp’s. That alone wouldn’t have been reason to drop it, but the spaces between the trees were narrow. The centaur exchanged looks with the minotaur, then separated into single file.

Windmane went first, just so she didn’t have to be last. She silently apologized for putting Stomp at the back of the herd. She said nothing out loud.

Progress through the unexpectedly tropical forest was slow. Windmane didn’t object to the caution, but the suspense was agonizing. She realized at one point that there were no sounds of nighttime creatures — no birds or frogs or whatever else usually lived in this kind of terrain. Just breeze shifting the leaves, and the occasional noise she or her companions made. It was beyond eerie.

In the faint moonlight that filtered between the trees, Windmane watched the ground for more remains. That white sand was everywhere. At first it looked like the broken sculptures were only on the beach — a distraction, like Razorscale had said — but no, there was a bird. Mostly intact, its wings folded, laying on the ground where it had fallen from a branch at the moment it turned to stone.

Windmane shuddered and fought the urge to run.

Then came the tree heavy with fruit, a type Windmane was unfamiliar with. She smelled it before she saw it: a thick scent of fruit both ripe and rotting. When it finally came into view, Windmane stared at the dozens of fruits scattered around its base. Some had been eaten down to cores, then cast aside. Most hadn’t been touched. Fuzzy mold was rampant on the fruit along the ground.

Is this poisonous too? Windmane wondered, keeping a careful distance. Then she realized, No, there are just no scavengers alive to clean it up. That bird probably wanted some.

Ahead of her, Silver paused to pick something up and show it to Razorscale. The two said nothing. When Silver set it down to move on, Windmane floated over to have a look.

She expected remains, or a weapon. She didn’t expect art. Carved out of wood, sanded smooth but not varnished, it appeared to be a stylized figure of a medusa. Standard two-arm body, snake tail, many snakelets instead of hair. It was simplistic but lovely.

Why is this here? Windmane stared as Stomp moved forward to join her. Are those toothmarks??

With thoughts of breaking the silence to ask the dragons what they thought it meant, Windmane floated around the tree in pursuit. Razorscale was worming his way through a dense bush. Windmane didn’t catch him in time to ask, and had to follow. She kept the figure clenched in one fist. The rustle of leaves was far too loud. Something would hear.

On the other side of the bush, Windmane suddenly had new questions.

Bright moonlight shone down on a clearing full of nameless shapes — her first assumption was large statues that had once been flesh, but they were more amorphous than that. It was only when she saw the slide that it all clicked into place.

This was a playground. A playground with, she saw now, snake motifs carved into everything. Windmane spun to face the dragons, overshooting with the pixie dust and spending a panicked moment trying to orient herself while the rest of the group gathered in the clearing.

“What’s all this?” Beak whispered.

“Aggravating,” Razorscale snapped. Windmane settled to find the dragon visibly angry. He worked his fingers like they were still tipped with claws, ready to rend someone specific. “We are all in an immense, infuriating amount of danger.”

“What?” Windmane squeaked.

The dragon spoke in a hiss. “This island is a gorgon hatchery. I cannot believe those wizards had the audacity to build a safehouse under this.”

Twig floated over the slide. “Why is that so dangerous? Babies aren’t scary. I guess the adults are overprotective…”

“No, it’s the babies,” Razorscale interrupted. “They kill anything they see that isn’t their own species. They haven’t learned not to yet.”

“Oh,” Twig said. He drifted back from the slide. “Oh.”

Windmane again thought of all the white sand, this time imagining the number of generations that had passed while it built up. An untold number of animals and people rendered to dust.

She was shaking. It made her fly crooked. She realized she was still holding the wooden carving … which now appeared to be a teething toy. She dropped it and scrubbed her hands on her clothes.

Beak pointed back toward the beach. “Should we leave before they find us? Come back with some kind of protection?”

Razorscale shook his head. “No time. If we don’t find the wizards before they leave, we may never get them all in once place again. We’re lucky; the young gorgons should be asleep. We’ll just have to be stealthy. Speaking of which—” He turned to Silver. “I’m using one of the last invisibility charges. I’ll be watching you. If you sense anything, point it out to me and I’ll scout it. If they can’t see me, or hear any footsteps, I should be safe.”

Windmane whimpered. “Should be?”

He gave her a withering look. “It’s the best option we have. Now everyone be silent. Follow Silver toward the strongest source of magic.”

With a flare of blue lines, he winked from sight.

The small silver dragon pointed toward the exit from the clearing. Not waiting for confirmation, Silver undulated through the air, wings folded tight. They had clearly gotten the hang of the pixie dust.

Windmane wasn’t nearly as graceful as she exited the clearing, but at least she didn’t knock anyone into a bush. The constant fear-shivers didn’t help.

In as much silence as they could manage, the group glided down a well-trodden forest path, not touching a thing. Windmane didn’t like the idea of using actual paths, since that raised their odds of meeting someone, but it also lowered their chances of making noise. And theoretically the one dragon’s keen senses would spot any dangers, which the other would assess. Theoretically.

Windmane didn’t much care for “theoretically” right now.

But Silver did hear something — or see, or smell, Windmane couldn’t tell — and when that lithe silver form reared to backpedal, the rest of the group instantly shot back the way they had come. Silver hid behind a tree and pointed. Then they all waited for someone invisible and silent to tell them it was safe.

Windmane was huddled behind a different tree with Stomp when she heard the faintest of whispers. Her racing heart clenched in terror before she realized Silver was whispering back. Razorscale had done his scouting. She caught what sounded like “sleeping outside” and “go around.”

Silver swam back down the pathway in the opposite direction, waving the others along. A safer direction. Right.

The path did curve around the area that they were avoiding, and the trees above let in enough light to see well. Windmane’s heart rate showed signs of slowing just a hair.

Then they reached the crossroads, and something shrieked.

Windmane spun, trying to figure out which direction was safe to run. She saw them then: two small forms with wings — medusas didn’t fly; what was this?

Gargoyles, she realized. He said “gorgon hatchery.” These are gorgons too. They can’t do the stone magic?

But they could scream loud enough to rouse whoever had been sleeping outside. Children’s voices, then female, then male. Thunderous crashing through bushes.

Then Windmane was fleeing in terror, and knew nothing other than the speed and panic and trees flashing by. Cold air. Sand underneath. Water.

Speed. Panic. Run.

Run until limbs or lungs fail, whichever comes first.

~~~

The next chapter is here, and the latest is up on Patreon. It’ll be the pixie’s turn to react to alllll this.

[writing-the-end]

LoL Chapter 27- Hermits

Masterpost

A Wizard Hermits tale (AU, designs, ideas belongs to @theguardiansofredland)

Its not often the hermits get a chance to all be together. And while they know battles lie ahead of them, they take this moment to enjoy being a family again. 

______________________________________

Etho appears beside TFC, causing the mineral mage to sputter out the coffee he was sipping. “I caught sight of xB a few islands down!” 

The hermits murmur with excitement and follow Etho to the shoreline. Sure enough, xB is hauling Hypno and Beef onto the warm sand. Hypno thumps his hand against his head, an attempt to escape his clogged ears which only fails for him. “Can’t we take a sky turtle next time?” 

“But it’s more fun to swim!” xB chuckles, and with a flick of his finned ears and his grey tail he runs to hug the hermits. “It’s so good to be back, guys! I can’t remember the last time all of us were on the island together.”

“You guys said something about taking back Lairyon?” Beef raises an eyebrow, looking over at Doc. “This isn’t your rebellious phase coming back, is it?”

“We’ll explain everything on the way. TFC has a lot to tell.” Etho wraps his arms around Hypno and xB, before disappearing into their shared shadow. 

The kipling laughs, shaking his head and looking around the island. “Some things never change. I see you haven’t fixed the hole in False’s forge either.” 

The hermits laugh, the entire group filled with life as they return to the guild hall. Joe and Cleo regale the missing hermits with the story of their victory at the Chimaera’s Championship. Their battles and challenges in the arena, facing off against the best guilds and winning the cup. They also tell Hypno, xB, and Beef about the heist, the discovery. 

“Why am I not surprised?” Hypno hums, tapping his fingers against the wood of the table that he sits down at. TFC pats the boys on the head, grabbing at Beef’s face and tapping his finger on a scar he sees. Beef shrinks away, concerned for a second, but the guildmaster only chuckles in response.

“I can’t wait to hear that story. It’s good to have you guys back.” TFC pats him on the back. “Treat you to a pint of beer next time we go to town.” 

“Let’s hear about this big job you’ve got planned for us first.” xB raises an eyebrow. In response, TFC rolls out his map.

The paper has changed since they first decided to go after Dolios and his creepy crystals. If there’s one thing an outlaw guild knows how to do, it’s to find new jobs through the grapevine. “Dolios has these tales silenced. I’ve heard of at least six other guilds being attacked or wiped out by unknown magic. Unfortunately, we’re too late to help them.” Team ZIT glance at one another, but focus on the here and now. “But there are places we can make a difference, as well as get information and better ourselves as a group.”

TFC motions to the Evernight forest. “An old friend of mine said there has been stories of familiars and companion animals going missing. No trace of where they went, except for a few patches of charred grass.”

“Charred, or drained?” Mumbo muses. To anyone, that sounds like the signs of a dragon ravaging Foresta, but after Mumbo’s duel with a draconic mage he knows dragons aren’t that dastardly. Nothing is as dastardly as Dolios. 

TFC grins, the newest member and the guildmaster sharing a knowing glint. “There’s also Shellor- which, I believe one of our hermits here knows quite intimately.” Etho gives a two fingered salute, rocking on the back legs of his chair until they fall out from under him, dumping him on the floor. Doc, Beef, and BDubs laugh at him. “There’s a few spies who’ve seen things Dolios has done, but the hard part will be earning their trust.” 

“Hmm, yeah. I don’t think I really left Shellor on a good note.” Etho grimaces. 

“That’ll be you, Keralis, and Grian’s problem. Meanwhile, we also need some help in the magical beings department. And if there’s one group that has mysterious, arcane magic on lock, it’s-”

“The fae!” Stress slams down her hands, a bright smile on her face. Iskall jolts upright and nearly hits the table again on the way down. “But where will we go? The fjords? The mountains? Heartbreak Trench?” 

“The flowerfruit fields. While you’re there, you and BDubs can gather ingredients that we’ve been running low on.” TFC glances at the map, running a finger over the lime green patch on the map. “We do have two confirmed crystal sightings, as well as Gildara. Edenswell seems to be falling ill to dark magic, and there’s reasonable belief that Dolios isn’t getting these massive rocks from nowhere- he’s using gems from the mines.” 

Heads peek over one another in an attempt to see the map. The charcoal diamonds and swirls. Gildara still sits untouched, and every hermit looks at one another. Do any of them want to return to the beginning of this all? Even to put an end to the dark magic plaguing the land, the memories of what they saw, what they experienced, still remain. 

Except for those that weren’t there. “I don’t think I’d mind checking out this hokey little town you guys keep talking about.” Beef grins, glancing over at Hypno and Wels. “We’ll have that place brimming with flaxen fields and green gardens all over again.” 

TFC grins, dipping his head in thanks to the returning hermits. He leans back, looking at the filled guild hall. “It’s been so long since we’ve all been together. If only it were on good terms.” 

“It feels good to return home.” xB ruffles his hair with a scaled hand, looking around for a second, then returning to speaking. “Even if it’s just for a short time, we should enjoy everyone being together again.” 

“What I’m hearing is we need to have our signature hermit celebrations.” Tango’s face splits into a devious smile. All around him, other hermits get a similar smirk on their face. Before TFC can agree to the idea, the hermits are gone. Cleo rushes to her wrecked pirate ship, hefting kegs of ale with the aid of Stress. Wels commandeers False’s forge to begin baking his favorite sweets, while Mumbo, Grian, and Iskall work together to fix the pennants, lanterns, and flags that decorate the guild hall in a myriad of colors. 

Tango snaps his fingers, and a small flame dances at his fingertips, jumping from his nails to the wicks of the lanterns. He ducks out of the way just in time to avoid being smacked in the face by a massive fish, tossed from the sea by xB and grabbed by Grian midair. The whirlpool mage disappears back underwater, back to hunting in the realm he was born in. 

The sun begins to inch towards the western horizon, turning the sky ablaze in a mosaic of pinks, oranges, yellows, and reds. A blue flag flutters against the ancient oak tree, catching on a branch. BDubs reaches out from his seat near the food platters, hardly even glancing away from the fresh baked goods, and with a flick of his wrist the branch bends away and the flag flies free again. 

False appears beside Wels, grabbing a brownie from the hot pan and sticking her tongue out at him as she passes. When Wels objects she’s quick to retort. “You used my forge. It’s rental payment, paladin.” 

Beef sets out plates, which are promptly ignored once Impulse and Zedaph have finished cooking the tuna xB caught. Music swells from a music box the creation of Ren, with the help of Mumbo, the upbeat songs written and composed with Joe and requests from the other hermits for their favorite tunes. 

The music thrums against the low roar of talking, the sound only broken by the common lilt of laughter. Hermits tell their stories, whether they be heard for the thousandth time or a new tale to tell. Beef causes Hypno to flush as he recounts the prank he pulled on the dream mage. Hypno turns bright red, quiet voice cracking over the tale. “I smelled like centaur shit for a week! It was awful, I’ll tell you that.” 

A raucous laugh erupts from that table, overshadowing the story of Mumbo’s duel to xB. “I swear on my life, I thought she was gonna swallow me whole. Or burn me like coal.” Mumbo shakes his head. “I don’t think I ever want to go up against a draconic mage ever again in my life.” 

“I’m surprised a kipling, a draconic mage, and a desert wizard were one team. That’s a strange group. I don’t think I’ve even met each of the others.” xB takes a bite of his fish, marinated in fresh fruits that Cub plucked from nearby islands. “But I’m sure that kipling gave you guys a run for your money. That magic she had… it’s rare beyond imagination. In kipling legend, it means a legendary hero is about to arise.” 

“He definitely kicked Ren’s ass. I don’t think I ever saw so much water moved at once.” Mumbo shakes his head, and stuffs a red jelly tart into his mouth. 

Keralis stands, tossing his woven hat from the brown curls of his hair, and inviting himself onto the open floor. “I love this song! Come on, my wonderful friends, let’s dance!” 

The setting sun casts a golden glow, bouncing off verdant leaves, twisting along the waves of the Ashioll sea. Laughter and music dance in the gilded light, playing in the curls of Zedaph’s hair as he joins Keralis. The two bumble around, drunk from Cleo’s ale but enjoying themselves immensely. 

Only one hermit wasn’t taking part in the festivities. Atop the canopy that protects the guild hall below, Xisuma watches as the stars appear in the sky. For a few moments in the day, the void and the sun share the space above. And he always thinks of the one person he knows he should forget by now. But he would’ve loved this, even if he’s constantly worrying about being caught doing something wrong. 

“Hey X, you gonna mope up there all day or join us?” Jevin grins below, one hand placed on his hip and the other waving Xisuma down. “Just because you’re a void mage doesn’t mean you have to a-void everything!” 

Xisuma rolls his eyes, but smiles beneath his mask. “After that terrible pun, how can I say no?”

[twitchesandstitches]

emergency digestion

(Commission for @heimkoheimkofan of my OC Odina getting vored by thier OC Sariel and my Tia to actually help her out!)

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A beach was a fine change of pace from the dangerous places Odina usually saw, but she wasn’t in much of a mood to appreciate it properly.

A beach sprawled about into the distance, as far as the eye could see. There was no horizon, just a faint curve of dim light that grew darker and then brighter in something like an alien imitation of a solar cycle. The sea went on, and subtle awareness of the geometries suggested that it just went on forever, a serene expanse of ocean and tides.

Probably, there were sea creatures there. She thought she’d seen a few of her friends, or teammates, bringing some back from a hunt, on the basis that a beach vacation demanded barbeque. She was in too much pain to notice.

Odina and the rest of the eccentric people she’d gotten stuck with had seen a lot of strange places over the past few years. She’d met a lot of strange people, and some of them were… friends, she supposed. A few were more intimate than that suggested, and she wasn’t comfortable enough with her feelings to acknowledge that directly. She’d been to many places, too, some of them were weird. Others were things she’d remember in twisting nightmares, brief memories scarred into her soul that reminded her of how small and brief she was.

A beach was a pretty nice change of pace. Even if they’d gotten there through a doorway and it had opened into a plane of existence that was a single continuous beachfront. Seemingly going on forever, as far as they could tell. Odina had been to many weird places, that defied all common sense and rationality; a perpetual beach, complete with days and nights despite there being no such thing as stars or a sun here, was a lot less awful than some other places she’d seen.

Odina sat huddled on the beach, looking as terrible as she felt, her squat body curled up like she was trying to compress herself into a living ball. She was a human woman of Algonquinian descent; her features were broad, her skin a deep brown, and her thick hair an earthy tone offset by a streak of red dye. Glasses covered her eyes, dipping slightly as she stared down. her toes wiggling into the sand. Her face twisted with pain, and a subtle sense that there was something horribly wrong with her.

She was not a large woman… at least as far as height was concerned. She was one of those humans whose ancestors had been mutated and bred true. She was one of those known as dwarves; a human’s full mass compressed into a squat form about half the size. She was barely four feet tall, but she was nearly six feet wide, particularly at her massive hips. She was a buxom woman, her huge breasts spilling all over her massive thighs, though her butt was probably the most impressive aspect of herself.

Magical energy, the availability of transformatives across most known worlds, and shape-changing abilities all meant that body types tended to get pretty extreme in the modern day. Odina’s body emphasized hips broad enough to wreck most doorways, her thighs wider across than most men’s whole bodies, but her butt in particular was incredibly huge. It squashed beneath her, apparently as big around as she was, and so soft, yet strong, that it was propping her several feet off the ground, a living couch she carried with her. If she stood up, the top of it would be level with her shoulders, her legs mostly swallowed up in its bulk; as it was, she was sandwiched by it as the two fatty masses swelled around her.

It was also glowing faintly, pulsing with random flows of magic. Each pulse made it grow visibly larger, both cheeks wobbling violently; so much that it was visibly hurting her. She winced, looking more ill as it kept growing.

She hugged herself. A modest top, emblazoned with her favorite crafting/sandbox game’s title, did its best to support breasts swelled to torso-obscuring size by her own particular magical abilities. Odina had the power to nullify magic in all its forms by directly absorbing it into her body, mainly her backside, and grew bigger by turning it into physical mass until she processed that energy.

She was so charged up, so full, that even her breasts were growing. Odina thought, in a bleak and intensely worried way, that his was an extremely bad sign.

Around the beach, others from her group had spread out to have fun or set up a small settlement. There were slime girls and robots, humans and beast-morphs, nagas and centaurs, fauns and angelic entities, and stranger creatures; all of them knew Odina, if only as the short human who yelled at them to focus and stay on task. She didn’t want any of them to see her, and she was a lot better at going unnoticed than might be expected.

Her discomfort and distress had not gone entirely unnoticed, though. There were two people watching her from a distance, debating about the matter.

“She’s sick! I’m sure of it!” This first speaker had a soft, gentle voice with a faint accent that was hard to place, but suggested an islander origin. The speaker was also abundantly female, and a testament to the power of what modding (or self-shaping powers) could accomplish.

Her name was Tiashar; her friends, including Odina, usually called her Tia. No one was quite sure what she was, Tia included. Many of the others around the island now were big people, ranging from human sized to larger; special powers, the luck of genetics, their species, or simply deliberate magical or biological modification allowed them to be as huge as they wanted. Tia was even larger than the biggest of them, freely changing her size as seemed warranted, and she didn’t just tower over her friend here: she would have towered over trucks and cars. Even now, her power deliberately reigned in and her body significantly downsized, she could have been mistaken for a hill, and crouched and almost laying on her enormous breasts, she was at least thirteen feet high.

She gleamed faintly, her thick skin a lustrous shade of pitch black and lubricated, like her body oiled itself up. She was vaguely humanoid in form, but she wasn’t human in the slightest; her skin was like a mix of a frog and a whale’s, and she crouched on two digitigrade legs, with broad three-toed feet like some primordial beast. Behind her, a massive tail curled and lashed about anxiously, various flapping bits smacking heavily against herself. Generally, she looked like some amphibious creature that was, bit by bit, adding in various other traits to herself.

Sensory organs running down her back her to her tail, nubby and resembling a kaiju dinosaur’s dorsal spikes, wobbled as she picked up on mysterious signals. Her neck was very long, almost serpentine, and bent slightly as she slowly raised up her solemn-looking face towards Odina. Massive flaps like huge bunny ears (though covered with the same sensory nubs) fell over her shoulders, and around her head a massive mane of pink tentacles swished about, rather like living hair.

Massive breasts spilled out before her; they were bigger than queen size beds, and likely made up a lot of her body mass; nearly as much as her butt, which rose behind her like a pair of matching hills about the base of her tail. It was an interesting dichotomy; she was definitely inhuman in appearance, but she was spectacularly curvaceous, even matronly.

“I mean, I suppose it makes sense,” said the other speaker. This one was even less human-like than Tia, and that was saying a lot. Her voice was musical; not just in the sense of having a pleasing voice, but with a reverb as though the sounds were made by ethereal instruments all playing in tune together. It also did not appear to be spoken; her voice welled up from around her, and her mouth did not move in any way. She simply willed the worlds in, or sung them in a deeper way.

Her body, coiled in a tense cone with her torso at the center, was vaguely serpentine. She had no legs, but a long curling trunk and tail, gently tapering to a tip, all a faintly luminous substance that appeared to be bluish-purple, shimmering like fire made into something solid. She rested on this, rising up so she was roughly the height of a human, but where it should have met her torso, the rest of her body simply detached from this tail. There was a green sphere, glowing like a small star, and above that, there was something like a human woman’s torso, made of the same substance. Two large breasts (roughly the size of her head; not so grand as Tia’s, or even Odina’s) hung suspended under their own power, and four arms branched off from her shoulders, claw-like digits anxiously wiggling together.

This being’s name was Sariel. She was not… from around there. She called herself an angel, and she certainly looked the part.

Six purple wings, similar to a dragonfly’s but fleshy, hung morosely down her back. And finally her head floated just above her shoulders, detached from her body and with no signs that it was meant to attach, a cloud of something like hair above several pairs of eyes and a human-like mouth.

The two of them watched Odina sadly. They knew she was sick; that she’d gotten sick.

They didn’t even know her powers could do that to her. Odina didn’t like talking about herself much; now both of them were very worried that they didn’t know what was wrong with her, exactly.

They did have theories, though.

“Do you remember that fiend berserker who came out of nowhere?” Sariel asked.

“Yeah,” Tia said, thinking about the size of a massive horned brute charging and screaming bloodthirsty war cries, just as Odina dropped on it’s head.

Everyone, in the magical transformations the mortal universe had experienced, had their own unique abilities. Odina was unexpectedly gifted with a singularly potent ability: she could drain magical energy. It was a simple sounding technique, but as everything was made of magic on some level, it translated into an ‘I win!’ skill if she’d bothered to work at it. As it was, she was well within her power to short-circuit spells, nullify magic-powered attacks sent her way, and in the case of purely mystical entities, absorb them entirely.

Case in point: the berserker had dwindled away, until he was dissipated. Nothing but essence on her butt, to respawn later on.

And she’d started looking queasy around them, Sariel thought.

She added, thoughtfully, “And then those… ghost things that tried to ambush us.”

Tia winced, remembering the wave of howling, grotesque things, bundles of raw emotion and the lust to kill, bound into an undead framework of bones and muscle. Odina had simply extended her absorbing field, and their frameworks had collapsed on the spot, the ghosts sucked right into her backside.

That was how they’d found the portal to the beach; the ghosts had been eying it, perhaps to build a nasty trap there. And then, with the rush to explore somewhere fun for once, Odina had been allowed to quietly suffer in silence.

“...She processes magic, doesn’t she?” Tia asked, giving Sariel a sidelong look. “Like… she gets all stacked for a while, but it dies away eventually. Like a short-term power boost.”

“I think so?” Sariel’s wings flapped like someone making an awkward gesture. “I’ve never seen her have problems, uh. ‘Digesting’, I think?”

“But… I guess it’s not a problem with most forms of magic, but she absorbed a big, strong demon and ghosts,” Tia pointed out.

Sariel’s color faded. Horror drew her face into something crumbled and ill. “And they’re made of evil and, and death, and she just took that into herself!”

Tia blinked. “Ohhh, that makes sense. No wonder she’s feeling ill!”

Sariel flapped around. “We have to do something! We have to get her to a doctor or, or something! We need to rip that bad stuff out of her! Ohhh, please don’t just sit there, we have to do something!”

Tia grabbed her with one massive, flipper-like hand. “Sari! This isn’t the time to panic!”

“This is exactly the time to panic!” Sariel wailed. “Our Odina is in danger!”

Tia gently pushed her face into the sand, muffling her. Briefly, she had considered pile driving her on the basis of it being totally awesome, but decided at the last second that it wasn’t the time for that. “Yelling and running around isn’t going to help! Helping will help! And I have an idea!”

Sariel made a vaguely interrogative mumble. Tia leaned down and whispered to her.

------

Odina was still clutching herself, whimpering faintly in pain, when she felt the sand shake, and a familiar ethereal presence wash over her. It honestly made her feel a little better, a thought so sappy she was instantly revolted at herself for it.

She glanced up, a shadow falling over her. Sariel hovered before her, her four hands grasped in a very prim way that Odina instantly knew was Sariel trying very hard to pretend she was composed. Behind her, so big that she practically was her own crowd, Tiashar loomed. Mostly Odina saw a pair of massive black breasts extending over the immediate skyview like a platform, wobbling faintly even though she was standing still, a sign of her exotic internal structure; she was built like a big mass of jelly, honestly. Curiously, though, she didn’t seem particularly sexual in a way that would normally make Odina uncomfortable or irritable.

Her outfit helped the part. Tia had a tendency to dress either like a mom-type figure with a punky flair, or she wore so little that she technically qualified as nude; she had a poor grasp on social norms, rather than being some kind of exhibitionist. The funny thing was that either way, she didn’t feel particularly sexual. Today, she was fairly primly dressed, with a massive white t-shirt and beach shorts that looked quite sensible. They were rather tight and the neckline was so low it nearly reach her belly, so much cleavage visible that the bottoms of her breasts were nearly on display, but that was down to her body sorely testing any confinements she found.

Tia leaned over. A thick mass of belly pushed over her waistline, while her tail looped overhead, making a sort of perimeter that made the whole scene feel a bit more private, or perhaps intimate. “Hey, hun,” she said, now so low that her massive breasts were pushed into the sand, but she appeared not to notice. “You’re not doing so great.”

Odina glanced above the massive valley of cleavage, unfazed. “I’m fine,” she said, and immediately rolled back into her own swollen backside. Dark flesh rolled around her, swelling and pulsing erratically with light; sharp pain struck out with each pulse, and in its wake, there was a nauseous bile, and a raw feeling like she’d been slashed with hooks, and something was leaking through the wounds.

She groaned, miserably.

Sariel eyed her, wings fluttering in distress. “You are not fine!”

Odina tried to speak, but groaned again, twisting with clear pain and holding onto her body. She flinched as her breasts visibly swelled larger, trying and failing to hold in a pained gasp.

Any kind of physical reaction from Odina was notable. And that kind of growth being painful? Tiashar and Sariel shared another worried look. That wasn’t normal at all.

The mechanics of the way bodies got bigger through power absorbing or the many ways superpowered digestion could empower you, they were not well understood. But it was almost always a pleasant thing; sometimes addictive. But it was never painful. It didn’t make people sound like their guts were being filled with acid.

Sariel fluttered down, her serpentine lower body curling gently around Odina. Though ODina was normally adverse to even friendly touches, needing to be leaned into it, now she leaned desperately against Sariel’s length. Her butt, improbably, was stiff to the touch, as if filled with sharp edges instead of fat.

Something very much like a hand pressed out, as if from somewhere else. Tia recoiled in horror and sudden awareness, and Sariel had to remain very still to repress the urge to pull away from the sudden surge of malice and inhuman ferocity welling up from… well, Odina’s hindquarters.

Her butt was full of evil. It’d be silly if Odina wasn’t whimpering in agony, and the presence of so much nasty energy enough to make her feel nauseous. Tia’s tentacles writhed and slapped against each other anxiously, and from the way her heavy legs shifted, Sariel got the impression that Tia was fighting the urge to simply lash out at what every instinct knew to be a threat.

Tia’s massive, floppy ear-like structures shifted. She’d grown those a while back, apparently just for the aesthetics, without them actually doing anything. Currently she’d adapted them into something like a cat’s whiskers, or the barbels of some fish; organs to form a new sense out of, sampling the etheric energies around her for total sensory awareness. Right now, they curled back as she flinched away, and the little nubs on them glowing erratically as her sensory powers went active… and then dimmed.

“Odina?” Tia said carefully. “Um. Not trying to be an alarmist buuuut…”

“Just say it, fuck!” Odina howled the last word out, a fresh stab of pain making it too hard to bother with the niceties.

“The energies you absorbed are still independent of you, but they’re interfering with your body! They’re spreading their bad energy through you, and it’s poisoning you!”

“Yeah, kinda figured,” Odina groused.

Tia nodded miserably. She was not a very serious person; she tended to speak in random, whimsical nonsense, and she preferred to not take things seriously if at all possible, and so it was a very bad sign when she spoke in a grim tone. “Odina, this is bad, this is really bad. Do you, um. Get it?”

“I think something I ate is disagreeing with me,” Odina managed, with a hint of her usual sarcasm. The skin on her backside, quite visibly with her very small swim trunks, again stretched from inside. There was no actual hand there; nothing there but fat. All the same, something there, a malign intelligence, was imposing itself and magically lashing out, and so her form was distorting around the… infection. “Oh, hey. A literal metaphor. Neat.”

“This isn’t funny!” Sariel yelled, wings flapping about and her hands struck out, finding Odina’s soft shoulders and squeezing. “You absorbed them but you can’t process that kind of magic!”

“They’re… dead, right?” Odina said hopelessly.

“I mena, kind of?” Tia said. She loomed above them both, and her presence was calming. “As dead as they could be. But their essence is still packed full of everything about who they were, and they were almost literally made of evil! I don’t think your body can just dissolve that kind of thing! Sariel and I can do it, but I really don’t think your body is adjusted for just… purifying the evil from demonic or these kinds of undead things!”

Odina’s eyes went wide. Her glasses dropped off. She didn’t even notice. “Oh no… oh noo…”

Sariel swallowed. “We can help.” Odina’s head tilted up sharply. “We can digest things like that. Easy! But… we can let you ‘borrow’ that sort of thing from us. No, I mean. We can digest them for you.”

Odina squirmed, looking uncomfortable and in pain at the same time. “Oh… ohhh…” She knew full well how their abilities worked. “That means you’re gonna have to… to…” She stopped, shutting her eyes tight, face twisting up in an expression best described as like a pear shoved through a grate. It was certainly an embarrassed look.

“Swallow you,” Tia said bluntly. “Yeah.”

Sariel nodded, holding her gently. “We won’t digest you. Just… be close enough so we can use our powers on you, dissolve that stuff right out of you. I can do it for you!”

Tia’s eyes widened behind her glasses. “Uh, hey! That’s not entirely true, this is a team effort-”

Unfortunately, at that moment, Odina’s distress gave her unwanted guests an opening. Her mind had to firm to keep them contained, and she was too worried and upset to do that properly; her body was a prison for what was left of their shattered essences and impulse to damage things, but in that moment, there was enough for one of them to lash out.

Power coiled around her. To the naked eye, it manifested as a faint discoloration of air, as if of the air freezing over and curdling at the same time, with a profoundly unpleasant aura around her, but to the magically perceptive, they might have seen the energy pulsing from her and concentrate into a large spike-like mass. It manifested in real-space, sand pulling around it and condensing into that pointed shape, transmuting into bone and metal as the magic poured their energy to it, and it did so violently, launching right into Tia like a cannon blasting off; it hit and then-

She was gone, flying away over the sea.

“Oh holy shit!” Odina shouted, throwing herself back into her butt, the twin masses around her writhing like a bundle of monsters. She pulled Sariel down, in a tangle of wings and arms. The tension keeping the spike held back by Odina’s will let go and fired; she wasn’t strong enough to keep it back.

Tia was mildly put out as the missile was deflected from her body in mid-air, though. It had rocketed off into Tia’s breast, with so much force that she was sent flying like she’d been punched by artillery. The missile did not damage her, though, sinking a little into her breast and then bouncing off, into the water. But Tia kept flying into the distance, skidding along the surface of the water. Her body twisted and morphed, her powers instinctively trying to find a configuration of the many traits she’d absorbed to something that would get her out of this mess.

By this point, she was already out of sight, and as far as they knew, had just had a giant spike launched into her; they did not get to be so lucky as to see her deflect it with her extreme bustiness. “Tia!” Sariel yelled, unfurling upwards, briefly forgetting about Odina’s own situation. She was reminded as Odina actively howled in pain, and Sariel turned back to her, freezing up as Odina’s backside turned knobbly and hard, dozens of gruesome shapes pushing against its insides.

“I, I don’t know how long I can hold them back!” Odina cried out, into the sand. “Whatever you’re going to do, do it now!”

Sariel hesitated. “I don’t know if I can! We need Tia here!”

“Do it now!” Odina screamed.

Sariel made her decision. Odina needed her unique help right here, and right now.

She held Odina’s hands, another pair of hands finding what remained of her hips beneath the swelling butt mass, and she leaned in. Her wings enfolded around her and Odina’s smaller body (at least the bit of it not swelled to the size of a full couch), and then her lips met Odina’s.

The kiss was soft, and those who did not know Odina well would have been shocked at the passion from her as she sank gratefully into it.

Sariel’s jaws widened. Her face shifted form as her mouth opened wide, her throat expanding to fit anything she might gulp down. Slowly, her lips spread over ODina’s face. First the whole of her mouth slipped into Sariel’s own, and her jaws opened more impossibly wide, the kiss going deeper. Odina’s entire face pressed into those lips, and then sank into her mouth, against her tongue.

Gently, Sariel leaned forward, pushing Odina’s head into her mouth, sliding her down into her throat and tongue. She felt Odina’s hair tickle the insides of her throat as Odina’s head, from the top all the way down to her chin, slid into her body.

---

(About a mile away, Tia poked her head out of the water like a very lost softshell turtle. The water churned with her tendrils, and water foamed into a geyser as her massive tail raised up and then smashed down with so much force that it propelled her towards the shore.

Racing like a living speedboat, she REALLY hoped that Sariel wasn’t about to panic, or go off the plan!)

---

Back on the shore, Sariel felt Odina’s body trembling. Waves of pain flowed through Odina to Sariel, and though it hurt to feel, Sariel forced herself to just let that pain pass through her. Without comment, or visible reaction.

Sariel had no throat; at least one in a conventional sense. She had no neck, her head simply floated at a fixed distance from the rest of her body. She formed one now, her head bobbing down and then back up, a slim neck connecting head to body.

Now Odina’s head moved down that throat; the passage was slick and glowing faintly, and where there was light, it was very easy for her to move downwards. It should have been uncomfortable; Odina’s hair was already drenched with saliva, the muscles of Sariel’s throat squeezed so hard on her that Odina’s feet left the ground, and Odina hated personal contact to begin with.

But some people have at least one exception to their ‘never touch me’ rules. Odina visibly relaxed, letting the soft warmth slide down her ears and hair. The sense of wrongness invading her body seemed distant, somehow. The remnants of the monsters she had absorbed snarled their wordless cries of mindless, in the back of her mind, but they were stifled.

Sariel gently lowered herself, pushing downwards. Odina’s head sunk further into her body, her shoulders sliding into her mouth. Odina wiggled, letting Sariel do her work and even grabbed her breasts, compressing them. It wouldn’t work much to make it easier on Sariel, who felt how large they were, pressing against her own stomach. They were bigger than Odina was.

Nevertheless, she did her best. Her jaws gaped even larger, the tops of Odina’s breasts bulging around Sariel’s lips. More spilled down, smacking into the sand, all the way to where Sariel’s serpentine body curled on the ground. Sariel’s lips had a very good grip on Odina’s body, though, and she smooched, or perhaps slurped, very hard, with a magical potency strong enough to overcome physical limits. Reality warped to accommodate her desire, like clay bending beneath a sculptor’s fingers.

Odina’s back slipped entirely into Sariel’s mouth, and her breasts dragged off the ground. Despite their sheer size, or the wriggling as the captive essences fought to make her body fight on her behalf, they were pulled in, Sariel’s mouth too powerful to be defied. Her throat bulged, swelling out with a massive pair of twin spheres that slid down as Odina traveled into her belly, and Sariel sighed with pleasure as Odina’s head settled into her belly, the comforting fullness growing more as her engorged breasts joined her, and then her back falling into position.

Odina was very short, as befit a dwarf-type human, and so her belly and waist were swallowed up all at once. Her hips and butt, though, loomed above Sariel, a daunting and terrible sight. Briefly, doubt crept across her mind: how was she supposed to engulf something as big as that?!

One cheek was close to her mouth, Odina leaning at a slight angle. All Sariel could see was a massive sphere of an enticing dark brown, contours that she knew intimately well… though the rigidity of them was an offense to her, and she felt the hateful attention of the monsters that were concentrated there, and she forced herself to think of Odina’s good. She had to do this.

Sariel inhaled. Odina’s waist slipped down into her, and Sariel’s mouth gaped into a massive ring as that butt came down.

It should have hurt, she thought distantly as the upper curve of them went into her. It was so big; each buttcheek more than twelve feet across and far higher than that, dwarfing her so imposingly. Yet, magic flowed into her body, giving her greater flexibility, and so her body simply expanded around it, growing wider to accommodate it.

Odina’s butt came down. Slowly, grindingly, with horrible slowness, but it was the kind of slowness that was also an inevitability. Soon the brown flesh was passing by her lips, and then a massive distortion in her throat. Sariel wobbled with the weight of it, wavering in place, her Odina-stuffed belly shaking in place, and then she gave one massive gulp-

And then it slipped down, and her belly filled, so violently that it knocked her over, and a huge swell of faint blue filled her vision. Odina’s legs and feet came with the butt, so comparatively tiny that Sariel honestly didn’t notice.

Her stomach squirmed. Odina moved around inside her, getting comfortable as divine fluids washed over her, and at once, Sariel felt the pain retreat from Odina. The demonic essence plaguing her recoiled form it at once, weakened by her digestive powers.

Sariel sighed in relief, and blinked up as a shadow loomed over her.

“Sariel! This wasn’t the plan!”

Sariel’s wings flapped weakly as she tried to shift her position, but it was too hard to move now; she’d expended a lot of power to swallow all of Odina, and just propping herself upright proved difficult. She managed it all the same, and tilted her head upwards to look at Tia, who was panting heavily. The green-feathered gills of Tia’s neck flapped in exhaustion, and she was almost walking on all fours from how tired she was. Her hair tentacles flopped down somewhere around her waist, one or two of them growing crude mouths just to wheeze pathetically.

Tia loomed over her now, even so; her massive breasts wobbled indignantly upon a chubby belly that Sariel was nearly eye-level with. Her legs could support her well enough, but her arms were drooping, almost jointless, and her tail flopped out behind her. “Whoo. Gimme a second…”

Sariel did so. “I, um. Already got Odina.”

Tia gave her belly an indignant hand wave. “I, uh! I noticed!.” She held up a wobbly tentacle; it extended a tiny pseudopod, as if to say ‘give me one second’. She panted and huffed for a while longer. Sariel obliged her.

Finally, Tia got back up, having recovered. “We were supposed to fuse and combine our powers! That’s the best way to fix Odina and pull those nasty monster essences out of her!”

Sariel coughed. “Um. I might have panicked a little bit?”

Tia gestured at her belly, full of Odina. It was an amazingly expressive gesture that conveyed ‘you call THIS just panicking?’

“She was crying! I had to do something! I thought they were about to take over! OR something even worse!”

Tia rolled a shoulder, half-shrugging. “Okay, okay, I understand. But it still takes two of us.” Sariel gave her a dubious look. “You can handle the demon-y guys! You’re an angel, I know. But what about the undead? I got my body adapted to digest them real good and prevent them from poisoning you with their soul-gunk. Do you?”

“Um. That can happen?!”

“Yeah! Their kind of undead is all about spreading rotting essence to poison the physical world! It is literally their thing!”

“Oh…”

Tia patted her on the head. “Not to worry. I did have a back up plan!”

Sariel smiled faintly. “Oh. That’s… good. Are you going to merge with me?”

Tia waved a hand. “Ehhh. From a certain point of view, I guess you could call it that?”

“You’re not going to swallow me, are you?”

Tia looked speculative at this. She put a stubby finger to her mouth and frowned, apparently mulling something over. “Uh. The answer there’s kinda complex, but I’m leaning towards ‘not technically’?”

And with that, Tia took a step forward. Without an explanation, or the slightest hint of propriety, she grabbed her shorts and pulled them down to her knees, completely exposing herself from the waist down.

Sariel squeaked and turned away sharply, blushing terribly. Her imagination reminded her of brief sights that involved very puffy, ample flesh, and little tendrils wiggling coyly.

“Right, this will take a bit!” Tia lowered herself, and it was a physical presence, her immense size growing closer to Sariel. It was not particularly threatening; someone of her size, particularly such a potent predator with a digestion so powerful, should have been fearsome, but being afraid of Tia would have been like being afraid of a plush toy. She was just too soft and pleasant.

She was also… well. Sariel had definitely harbored some kind of feelings for the monster heroine for a while, and this was brushing up against some intense emotions. From the stirrings in her, she suspected Odina had the same feelings.

Though she didn’t look, and thought that would be rather rude, she heard the gentle noises of Tia’s body transforming, the noise of thick fleshy lengths extending themselves.

The air above her went black; Tia’s legs lowered themselves around Sariel. Soft, damp coolness engulfed her, Tia’s thighs easily more than several feet across and big enough to cradle her whole body, and doing that very thing right now.

And, though she couldn’t see it, she felt several long tendrils extend from Tia’s sex; multi-colored and faintly glowing, and they curled around Sariel’s whole body.

“Um. There we go.” Tia murmured to herself as her tendrils went around Sariel’s arms and dipped down, to the base of her Odina-stuffed belly and her snakey lower body, wrapping around and securing her very tightly. The tendrils clasped on, and lifted her, all at once.

“Oh!” Sariel said, realizing what Tia meant to do, and blushed furiously.

Tia hummed softly to her, sing-song, perhaps trying to ease her. She was a good singer; her voice soothed Sariel, the lilting melody a sweet lullaby. Her tendrils were thick and muscular, and very soft despite their considerable strength. Sugary fluids dripped heavily off them, coating Sariel’s body in tingly raindrops that made her feel a bit lightheaded.

Up Sariel, and by extension Odina too, went. Many feet above the ground, past Tia’s knees, over her enormous bed-sized thighs… and then, Sariel felt her head slide into something soft, and now very slick. With a meek cry, she felt powerful muscles take hold of her as the tendrils pulled her into Tia’s body, and then all she saw was darkness.

Sariel’s shoulders were pulled into Tia next, the plump flesh of her sex locked around her and slowly sucking her in, very gently and taking care to not hurt her in any way. Glowing muscles, very much like a throat (given Tia’s mutant body, it was an apt comparison), pulled her up, towards Tia’s core. Sariel’s breasts came next, and then she felt those tendrils pulling her tail up ahead of her belly, and then that too was sucked into her.

Tia adjusted herself, an enormous and heavily distended gut hanging out from between her legs. She panted and made faint keening noises, pleasure pulsing throughout her lower body. Oh… this felt so good. She longed for this sense of fullness, and the sense of another inside her, her massive body protecting them, nourishing them…

Her body swelled, a big distension appearing there. It wasn’t exactly a massive belly, but it looked similar. It was where Sariel’s belly and Odina were pushing against her own body, and it was traveling upwards.

She moaned, face wrinkling in a very silly expression; there was little pride in the face of such pleasure, and a massive tongue drooped out of one side of her mouth as the belly was pulled into her too.

Slowly. Her hips widened, her body adjusted around its guest. Eventually, she gaped to a point that she thought sufficient. Her tendrils retracted, and her inner muscles pulled gently, but firmly.

The belly slid up her legs, and into her. Slowly, the whole massive bulk slipped inside her, wobbling all over with the bulky masses inside it. Tia softly cried out; waves of pleasure crashed hard in her, but she mastered the impulse to be loud. She was trying to be a courteous host! (At least that’s how she thought of this sort of thing.

And her entrance closed, as all of Sariel and Odina were pulled into her.

Tia trilled with happiness. She sat down, and her internal muscles pulled at Sariel, moving her upwards. Tia’s own body was a bit fluid or elastic even normally, and she was used to reshaping it to suit her needs. Or the needs of others, as in the here and now. Currently Sariel was in a sort of internal cavity; a storage section. But that was pushing her upwards, deeper into Tia’s body.

Tia’s belly twitched and swelled faintly. She formed a nice organic room for them inside herself; it was pretty much a womb.

And Sariel saw the inviting darkness around her, with its pulses of neon lights, give way to a sudden open space that she was squeezed to. There was more light there, blues and pinks mainly, and she was pushed into it. From head to toe, and belly too, she and Odina slid up, until they were pushed into it and their entrance there sealing itself.

Sariel felt fluid all about; warm and flush with magical energies, pulsing around them, and with each pulse, raw nutrition and healing energies were infused into her body. It went deeper; into her belly, and into Odina, and she felt something happening there, just as she felt Odina getting even calmer. The pain was gone from her.

Sariel relaxed, and allowed herself to recline in the womb Tia had made, just for them.

Tia’s belly swelled out; she looked pregnant, her belly slung out and with a distinctive projection to her belly too. It didn’t stand out that much, though, thanks to her sheer size. She lay on the ground for a while longer, eyes closed and mouth smiling faintly. She felt so occupied, so full with happy friends that needed her.

The moments went on, and they pulsed with a very particular happiness for her.

Inside her, Sariel curled up peacefully. Her wings framed her body, her arms cradled her belly (which was as close as she could get to holding Odina with more than just her guts), and her tail coiled around her. Tia’s body embraced her, and she slept in restorative fluids.

And the magic of those fluids seeped into her, magnified with both Tia’s own powers and now Sariel’s too. Their combined energy flowed into Odina, bolstering her body’s magical resistance, digestive powers all pooling against the remnants of the things she had absorbed.

Fiends and specters alike were corrosive and an existential terror to someone like Odina; alone, her body couldn’t process energy so based in pure malicious antagonism towards mortal life. They were anathema to her; no wonder she wasn’t able to absorb them fully into her. But Sariel and Tia were adapted to deal with them.

And so, they withered away, these shades and echoes. Their power waned; any influence they had left over Odina was sharply burned away, cornering them and leaving them to their doom. What little remaining of their willpower dissolved over the next few hours, and those hours stretched out into days.

For the moment, though, Tia simply reclined on the beach. Her body trembled with the movements of her passengers.

All three slept in the sunlight. There were no more thoughts of pain, now.

It would take a long time before Odina was fully recovered though. And all three of them thought that staying together, like this, was a very pleasant thought.

[mhdiaries]

Freaky Fusion Hybrids Avea Trotter Diary

6/14

I went for a gallop along the beach this morning for a couple of reasons. One, because I thought the sand might feel nice on my hooves, and two, a nice gallop always clears my head. There was a lovely tailwind, too, that caught my wings and helped carry me along. It was almost as if I were flying down the beach, almost. I passed a ghoul and a manster who looked like they were my age. The ghoul was trying to teach the manster how to surf, but he didn’t look scary comfortable.

I didn’t stop to watch, though, because I was just getting my second wind and was really starting to enjoy myself. I also saw Sirena bob up out of the water and then sink again beneath the waves. She didn’t see me, so I didn’t stop for her either, as there was no guarantee that Sirena was going to come back to the surface anyway. I love Sirena to undeath, but I can never make wings or tails out of what she’s about to do next. She tends to drift down her own path, and if it happens to cross the one you’re on, it’s always a treat. In fact, as flighty as she can be, Sirena is the reason Neighthan, Bonita and me all met and became friends. All of us were in middle school together, but we really didn’t know each other very well. I was standing by my locker one day when this vampire kid asked if I wanted to come to his little brother’s birthday party and give flying pony rides. I wanted to kick the unliving dayfrights out of him, when Neighthan and Bonita walked past. Neighthan and Bonita stopped to try and play peacemaker, but the kid’s friends ganged up on us, and pretty soon they were chasing us all down the hall. We turned a corner, and there was Sirena. “Follow me if you want to unlive!”, she said as she touched a brick in the wall that opened a secret passage. We all ran in, and she closed the door behind us. Bonita asked, “How’d you find this place?” Sirena just shrugged, “Sometimes not paying attention to where you’re going gets you to places you really want to be.” None of us understood what she was saying at the time, but we’ve all been beast friends ever since, and no matter how many schools we’ve bounced around to, we know we can always count on each other.

6/20

Every monster knows about Monster High, but not every monster wants to go there. I suppose there are different reasons for that. I’ve heard monsters say that the school isn’t old enough to have traditions, that it’s just a fad that will “run its course” and be replaced by some new creepy cool high school idea. I’ve also heard that the headmistress there is such a stickler for details and excellence that some members of the ghoul board think it’s making it too hard to attract new students. I don’t really know what to think, although it has some pretty passionate monsters that say it’s the beast school ever. I know mom and dad are hoping that they accept my application so I can start there in the fall. I doubt that I’ll get in, but I’m filling out the application anyway. Part of the application is a section where we’re supposed to give a brief history of our monster scaritage. I started to just write: Father – Centaur, Mother – Harpy, and leave it at that, but I’m proud of my parents, so I didn’t. Dad’s a scientist who specializes in researching monster remedies and medicine. Mom is, or I should say was, an aerial surveyor. Now she works with dad as his research assistant. He calls her “his ghoul frightday” and lays all his success at her feet. They met when they were working at a jungle research station with Dr. Boolittle. I don’t think mom and dad liked each other very much at first. Apparently, dad had a habit of getting lost in the jungle, and mom was always being sent out to find him. Dad says he never got lost – he just wanted to see what was over the next hill, even if that hill was 20 miles away. One day a monster storm was blowing in, and dad hadn’t returned to the research station, so mom flew out, again, to find him. Mom found him about the same time a powerful down draft from the storm sent her crashing into the trees. Dad found her, but mom’s wings and one ankle were so badly sprained that she could neither fly nor walk. Dad felt so bad about mom getting hurt because of him that he put her on his back and carried her out of the jungle. Mom said this act of kindness caused her heart to melt right out of her chest. Dad also said that on the trip back they found out they had a lot more in common than they both realized and that by the time they made it out of the jungle he felt like he’d found his best friend. Now mom says dad helps keep her grounded while dad says mom makes his heart soar. They’re the beast parents ever, and they make me proud of what and who I am.

7/2

I’ve been accused of being as stubborn as some four-legged normie animal that for some reason I can’t remember the name of right now. I’m not sure which side of the family that stubbornness comes from, but mom and dad both have their moments. Sometimes it’s a good trait to have, like when I’m out for a run and my mind says, “STOP!”, but I know my body can keep on going and sometimes not, like when I won’t back down after I’ve been insulted. For instance, one of the most insulting things you can say to a centaur is, “How about a ride?” Centaurs don’t give rides. Most monsters know this, but because I also have wings, they think it doesn’t apply to me. I know I should have thicker skin by now, but there are just some soft spots that certain barbs always seem to find. I guess that’s what makes me distrustful of other monsters. Yeah, yeah, I know; you can’t judge every monster by the words and actions of a few, but I’ve really gotten to the place where I assume any new monster I meet is one of the few until they prove they’re not. Mom always tells me that no monster can take my dignity, but I can give it away by the way I react towards those who are trying to steal it from me. My mom has a lot of dignity stored up, while I constantly feel like I’m dropping a single coin into a very large and very empty vault.

7/10

Neighthan, Bonita and me all went to the movies tonight. We invited Sirena, but she said she would see where the currents took her. At least she’s consistently inconsistent. The movie was the last one Veronica von Vamp made before she returned to her life as Elissabat and took the throne as the queen of the vampires. Of course, she could always make another one, after all, what’s the point of being the queen if you can’t do what you want every now and again. It was fun, and I liked the theater. It has a standing room only section for those monsters that don’t really fit into a standard size seat. After it was over we went to the Die-ner to grab a late fright snack, but I guess every other monster must have had the same idea, because we had to wait around a while for a table. While we were waiting, we heard two ghouls behind us talking about Monster High. They were exchange students of some sort, one was a lake monster from Rotland and the other was a bigfoot from Monster Picchu. They mostly were talking to Neighthan, which was fine, since he’s genuinely friendly, and ghouls seem to think he’s cute. I don’t see it myself, but that’s probably because I’ve known him for so long, he’s more like a brother to me. I was actually wishing we were closer to this Minotaur manster that was ahead of us in line. He really made my wings flutter, but he was also with this sweet little Cyclops ghoul, and you could tell they only had eye for each other. We finally got seated, though, and our waitress was this vampire ghoul that tried to give us the wrong food twice, but she was so funny and apologetic about it that we had a hard time getting irritated at her. Neighthan said she was the daughter of Dracula, how he knew that I’m not sure, but like I said, he’s much more friendly than the rest of us, and he probably just asked. Sirena finally came floating in after we were finished. She said that she had been exploring the catacombs and met another ghost named Spectra. “I totally lost track of time, and then I got distracted, and then I couldn’t remember where I was supposed to be, so I just came here,” she said. We all talked for a little while longer about our chances of being able to start at MH in the fall. “We’re going to get in,” Neighthan said, “I’m not worried at all.” Bonita was worried, though, and she started chewing on the sleeve of her shirt as we were talking about it. I’m not worried as much about getting in as I am about fitting in. what if it’s the same as every other school we’ve been to? I’m tired of being the odd-monster out, and if they don’t want us then they can just have their stupid school, I don’t care how great it is… deep breath Avea… deep breath. It might be the beast thing to ever happen… or possibly the worst. Maybe, I’ll just cross my fingers and hope for something in the middle.

7/30

I loped down to the mailbox today, hoping to find the new pair of gloves I ordered, palomino in color, velvet in material and just the right size to fit my hands. But what did I find instead? A letter embossed with the Monster High crest and a wax seal stamped with the initials HHB. This put a little giddy in my up, as it was certain to be a rejection letter. So I was all prepared for the thought of yet another year trying to find a school where we’d be welcome. I gave the letter to mom and trotted back to my room. After about a minute I heard her crying, “Yep, I thought, rejection.” Not that I’m cavalier about mom’s hurt feelings. But since I already knew what it was going to say, I guess I just wasn’t going to get all emotional about yet another high school that didn’t want me. I walked back to where mom was standing and gave her a big hug, “It’s okay, mom, we can always try again next year.” She didn’t say anything, she just smiled through the tears and held up the letter.

Miss Avea Trotter

Dear Avea,

We are delighted to inform you that your application for enrollment at Monster High has been accepted for the fall scaremester. We trust that you are as excited to become part of the student body at Monster High as we are to welcome you into it.

Sincerely,

Headless Headmistress Bloodgood

Then, just for a minute, I started crying, too – I’m not sure why, maybe, some part of me hopes this will be the one place where I’ll be accepted for who and what I am… now wouldn’t that be a real kick in the pants.

[piermanwalter]

Thief’s Apprentice: Facts About the Universe

The ancient people of Surenia kept detailed star charts and had precise calendars, but after the continent was overrun by revenants, all but the most basic knowledge was lost. Revenants can’t see light, so the sky is invisible and telescopes are useless to them. Revenants can see The Moon, for reasons I’ll explain later. Master Astronomer, Lensgrinding Astronomer, and Brownsmith Astronomer work closely with the living and have managed to put together a basic model of the known universe. Master Astronomer regularly destroys half of his soul by sending it up into space, aiming it at other planets to determine their sizes and compositions by how his soul breaks apart as it travels through them at constant speed. That’s right, revenants have SPACE TRAVEL (technically). He is totally helpless during his explorations and relies on his apprentices to time and record his observations. This usually takes 5 days, which is an optimal chance to loot the observatory. Master Astronomer would be a terrifying spy because he could see anywhere on The World but his interest is solely captured by space.

Because imaging technology is terrible but magic is superlative, Surenia has a very skewed understanding of the universe compared to other continents. It is known that space has no air, and most planets are composed of a hard stony layer on a core of metal. Since liquid hydrogen hasn’t been invented yet, there is nothing to compare the soul decay rate of farthest gas giants to, so Master Astronomer usually spends hours feeling his soul die in new and amazing ways, while struggling to explain how it feels. Soul sending is also literally hit-or-miss and oftentimes Master Astronomer reports nothing but vacuum. He is fairly sure planets orbit The Star, and believes that other stars are similar to The Star and only appear small because they are very far away, but has no way to prove this because his soul disappears completely after 50 billion miles, closer if it travelled through matter. The only thing preventing Master Astronomer from abandoning his body and sending his entire soul into space is inability to report his findings. Also the previous Master Astronomer sent her entire soul into The Star and the resulting explosion, the signal for confirming The Star is made of hot gas, caused a sunspot that lasted weeks. Even though his eye sockets are rotted out and empty, he is always looking up. 

Other countries know the planets by different names, but in Surenia, the observable planets, from closest to farthest from The Star are named Ash World, Silver World, Iron World, Sulfur World, The World (where everyone lives), Dark World, Dirt World, Ice World, Wood World, Beer World, and Storm World. Beyond that is a dense asteroid field, with more possible planets farther, as reported by the living looking through telescopes. The living and the dead don’t see the universe the same way, but they share their perceptions and knowledge expands. Master Astronomer is yet to confirm their existence, because he hasn’t timed his soul sending well enough to shoot between asteroids and hit a remote planet. His apprentices, who used to be the living working with his telescopes, are also training to send their souls. Lensgrinding Astronomer can send her soul as far as Ice World but the effort is so great that she can’t speak during the ordeal and for hours afterwards. Not very useful for reporting, but she is too stubborn to work less hard. Brownsmith Astronomer has given up on distance sending and instead devotes her soul to making a spectacularly detailed 3D map of the moons. Although all revenants instinctively know how to send their souls, the method for astronomy requires a single large piece of soul to be sustained for a long time outside the body. This is very unintuitive and most revenants see astronomers as great storytellers and/or insane. You can bribe the apprentice astronomers to use their soul sending to find buried objects and read letters without opening them.

Because The World is so far from The Star and has no seasons, the polar regions are gigantic in comparison to Earth. People tend to live near the equator, so the people near the poles must trade for food because their homeland can’t sustain agriculture, and people near Surenia can’t leave without starving. Reliance on trade for basic survival leads to rapid spread of plague. This climate is very good for revenants because those near the equator can dry out to become mummies and revenants near the poles can freeze solid and last forever that way. 

Humans did not evolve on The World naturally. Fossil records show the natural evolution of diverse magical creatures, such as dragons, gryphons, krakens, and unicorns. These are known to be magical because their fossils still hold power. The strata containing magical creature fossils stack normally, but then comes piles and piles of human-creature hybrids. Above this layer, there are no more magical creature fossils and human fossils start appearing. This pattern is consistent all across The World.

The most widely accepted hypothesis is The World used to be populated by magical creatures, but some kind of cataclysm caused them all to transform into humans in a short time frame, most dying from incomplete transformations. Some believe the cataclysm was a deity punishing magical creatures by trapping them in weak human bodies. Others believe the transformation was in response to a huge reduction in Ambient Magic: large powerful magical creatures were sustained by a combination of their own souls and Ambient Magic, and used the last of their magic to transform themselves into beings who could survive on their souls alone. This theory is supported by many magical creatures looking biologically impossible, the impossible creatures found in extremely rare areas of Ambient Magic today, and the sheer willpower of humans in comparison to most animals. In Surenia the most common belief is that a disease caused all the magical creatures to turn human, and people shouldn’t fear the plague because it’s another disease that brings them to an improved state of existence for better surviving on The World. Regardless, everywhere has rumors of angels, mermaids, centaurs, and other beings who survived their half-transformation, but there is no evidence they exist.

The World has two moons: The Moon and Flat Moon. The Moon is spherical, pale green, and perfect. Flat Moon has the dimensions of a sand dollar, is grey, and covered in dents. Flat Moon is also smaller than The Moon and orbits closer to The World. As Flat Moon spins, it and The World leave all sorts of interesting shadows on The Moon. Sometimes light hits Flat Moon head on and it shadows The Moon in a regular crescent. Sometimes both The World and Flat Moon shadow The Moon into an hourglass. Sometimes light hits the edge of Flat Moon and a line cuts The Moon in half. This a free method of timekeeping most revenants have access to, but the phases of the moon are so esoteric and unpredictable, especially since Flat Moon keeps getting hit by comets, most people only need to know if the moon change shape a lot it probably was a lot of time. 

Research from astronomers (not these ones, earlier ones) revealed the reason why revenants can see The Moon. Magical creatures once lived on The Moon, but as they turned into humans, they all suffocated and died. The residual souls left in the bones attract pieces of other souls like a black hole. Astronomers who sent large pieces of soul to the moon report the bones have melded into a single consciousness filled with hatred towards the beings that walk The World as it once did, devouring any souls that draw near to fuel its resurrection. Unfortunately, any astronomer souls powerful enough to reach the moon are also powerful enough to leave when they feel like, and the tiny fragments of souls sent up by regular revenants cost more energy to crush and control than gained from doing so. When this was first discovered, bones with souls littered the surface of the moon in an even layer, but by now the bones with souls have collected into one patch that always faces The World, rolling over thousands of miles as The Moon spins (The Moon is not tidally locked), ironing out any imperfections on the surface. The power of the bones steadily dissipates. You’d expect it to grow more powerful, since there are so many revenants sending their souls, but it costs too much energy to keep moving and draw in more soul fragments. It’s like eating pencil shavings while towering cakes float out of reach. It sucks to be The Moon bones. Some revenants petition feeding The Moon bones so they have enough energy to keep rolling and preserve The Moon’s beauty, but Veilheim legislature has more important things to worry about. You can leverage this non-issue to gain political clout.

Dark World has no mass or substance and a square orbit. This planet absorbs all forms of electromagnetic radiation, and when its orbit intersects with The World’s every 10 years or so, the planets are superimposed and The World goes dark. There is no light and radiant heat cannot be felt. Animals fly into blind panic and the living hide at home. Revenants carry on as usual because they don’t see and feel. This is a good time to steal animals that are usually too fast or aware to catch, and also to loot the living district without getting caught.

[obaewankenope]

If you want "Absconding with Harry" questions, talk to us about how time-turners compare to Crowley's ability to halt time. Like... compare and contrast.

I’m not going to lie, nonnie, I legit grinned in delight at this. Warning, incoming nerding.

.

Okay. This- this is interesting.

So, in order to answer thisquestion, we first must consider the nature of the time-turner in HPcanon. Looking it up on the HP wiki gives us a general run-down ofhow they work:

“...a magical device used for time travel… encased anHour-Reversal Charm in the time turners...for additional stability.The number of times one turned the hourglass corresponded to thenumber of hours one travelled back in time. However, they can onlystay in the past for five hours at a time, without the possibility ofserious harm to the traveller or to time itself.” -https://harrypotter.fandom.com/wiki/Time-Turner

So the time-turner is anHour-Reversal Charm placed on a magical artefact which can be used bya magical user to travel up to five hours back in time. We knowthat’s how they work courtesy of Harry Potter and thePrisoner of Azkaban whenHermione and Harry use her time-turner to rescue Sirius and Buckbeakfrom death and dementors. The movie gives us a sort of visual of howits conceptualised as working, with time happening in reverse aroundHarry and Hermione, whilst they are unaffected. Their present formsdisappear from Ron’s viewing before they return through the doorsof the infirmary. So they cease to exist in the present in order toexist in the past and continue from there.

Of course, they don’t return tothe future with the time-turnerwhich, it is implied, is possible. Whether this is just an issue withexplanations or how the wiki conveys it, it’s not all that relevantreally. There’s no actual evidence of how the time-turner worksbeyond what HP3 gives us—no, I don’t consider CursedChild to be canon, sod offlmao—so anything after this is supposition.

The Hour-Reversal Charm has alimited time before it becomes harmful to the person and to time atlarge. This is supported by the supplemental material JokeKRowling onPottermore:

“All attempts to travel back further than a few hours haveresulted in catastrophic harm to the witch or wizard involved. It wasnot realised for many years why time travellers over great distancesnever survived their journeys. All such experiments have beenabandoned since 1899, when Eloise Mintumble became trapped, for aperiod of five days, in the year 1402. Now we understand that herbody had aged five centuries in its return to the present and,irreparably damaged, she died in St Mungo’s Hospital for MagicalMaladies and Injuries shortly after we managed to retrieve her.”

This suggests that there is aphysical toll to time-travel through magical means. If we usemodern-science to try and explain it, I suppose you could argue it’sa fundamental breakdown of the traveller’s body from the exertionof time-travel. I would imagine it’s sort of like when you travel abit too fast to besafe for the body and it experiences trauma from the force exerted.Of course, this is more theoretical physics and I am not aphysicist. Just a nerd who spent four hours arguing about time-travelonce with her step-father. That was a fun time.

I suppose if you could be protectedfrom the harm of the force exerted to time-travel in all ways thenyou could, in theory, not be affected in the way Pottermorestates Eloise Mintumble was affected. This also, incidentally infersthat the time-turners used by the Ministry are not capable of thesort of protection needed to avoid the trauma of time-travel beyondthe five-hour mark.

So, moving on to the use oftime-turners in Harry Potter canon and why they’re not used for,say, really significant events.

(By the way, what Dumbledore tellsHarry and Hermione to do is, technically, really fucking dangerous ofhim to do. So the fact that he does it anyway really just is one moreexample of how little fucking respect he has for an organisedinstitution and the laws of magic. Arrogant sod.)

Pottermore gives us a little moreinformation about the damage of using time-turners in a long-term,significant, or dramatic manner. Say, by travelling 50 years in thepast, or for big events like preventing someone’s execution etc:

“Even the use of the very limited amount of Time-Turners at theMinistry’s disposal is hedged around with hundreds of laws. Whilenot as potentially dangerous as skipping five centuries, the re-useof a single hour can still have dramatic consequences and theMinistry of Magic seeks the strictest guarantees if it permits theuse of these rare and powerful objects. It would surprise most of themagical community to know that Time-Turners are generally only usedto solve the most trivial problems of time-management and never forgreater or more important purposes, because, as Saul Croaker tellsus, ‘Just as the human mind cannot comprehend time, so it cannotcomprehend the damage that will ensue if we presume to tamper withits laws.’”

Now, the reason I’m interested inthis last quote here is that last bit right there. That “justas the human mind cannot comprehend time, so it cannot comprehend thedamage that will ensue if we presume to tamper with its laws”.That bit.

That ties in, quite fantasticallyactually, with my own beliefs regarding Crowley and how he affectstime. Crowley is a demon, as we all know. He’s a demon that isolder than the Earth, same as Aziraphale is an angel older thanEarth. We don’t know how old they are exactly but they’redefinitely older than Earth and time and all that stuff.

Crowley Fell before Earth. He becamea demon out of curiositymore than anything else. He reveals  during the apocalypse that hecan create a time-bubble and pull two other beings into it withoutany harmful effects to them or time on a larger-scale.

That, in itself, shows an acuteawareness of what time is, what it isn’t, and how to perform somepretty epic damage control for anything time shenanigan-related.

Crowley isn’t a human, obviously,and thus doesn’t have a human conception of anything.He doesn’t have a mortal conceptioneither, so he’s set apart from the magical creatures that populatethe world of Harry Potter. He is sourced from the Divine. From thatwhich made everything.All the laws of the universe are laws he understands and can ignoreas and when he wishes so long as he is sufficiently strongenough to do so.

Does this mean Crowley could changeevents with time-travel that a magical being wouldn’t be able to dowith a time-turner? Probably, yeah. Does this mean Crowley wouldchange events however? Probably not, no.

Because Crowley understands, unlikea human, the nature of time as a fundamental attribute of theuniverse in which he functions within. He understands that justbecause he existed before it, because he can ignore it, doesn’tmean he won’t be affected in some way by it. Or that those affectsare worth the meddling.

If he’s sufficiently motivated by,say, avoiding Armageddon? Oh, he’ll do something,but not once does he go back in time and fix the fuck up at thenunnery. Not once does he even mention it. Why not? Well, obviouslybecause others may have noticed the sudden shift. But also, becausedoing that likely would have done more harm than good. So he rollswith it until such a point when he can use his powers in a way thatis of some degree of benefit.

That it means putting him,Aziraphale, and Adam in a little bubble of time that is eithercompletely outside of any rules of time or works on some rules thatthe rest of reality doesn’t. The result is that time is stillhappening outside the bubble, but that they’re inside the bubbletalking. Obviouslyit’s sort of a mental little bubble, one that takes theirconsciousness to a plane where time is more of just a concept than anactual thing that has a direction and flow, hence why the sand is allpiled up on itself.

So what does this mean in regards tousing a time-turner? Would Crowley be able to use one? Would heinstinctively compensate for one? Or would the poor thing short thefuck out and do the equivalent of hiding in the corner screaminginsensibly? Who knows.

The last one is an amusing mentalimage but generally, no clue.

I have, in Absconding withHarry, the idea that magic canbe affected by miracles. That it’s safer to use miracles on adultsthan on children unless you consider All The Variables. But thatthere’s also always the risk that the children’s magic will reactunexpectedly. This is why Crowley and Aziraphale don’t perform toomany miracles directly on Harry. They may do it on the space aroundthem, may alter it a bit to filter out this and that, but until he’san adult, direct and constant applications of miracles isn’tsomething either of them are willing to do.

Also, both of them have their ownmagic. Not human, but angelic and demonic. It’s the sort of thingthat is like them channelling their angelic and demonic essencesthrough a mortal form (granted they’re technically immortallymortal but eh), which presents as magic because it’s used on aphysical plane. But, in the end, it’s still inhuman magic.

Which, thinking about it, makes themsimilar to goblins, centaurs, Veela, and so on.

Huh. That’s interesting.

Might need to consider that a bitfurther for later things in Absconding with Harry.

[aweebwrites]

Trials of the Heart (H&F)

Warning: Blood, gore, dismemberment

___________

"It's finally spring!" Jay chirped flying out of the side of their cliff home, over the still iced over waters l along the fjord they called home.

"This winter was a little shorter than normal through." Cole says as he walked along the shore, finned tail flicking back and forth as he looked it over.

"By a few days." Kai agrees, perched on Cole's back. "Jay's happy about it so I am too." The Phoenix harpy grinned and Cole smiled a little.

"Alright. Off. I have to break up the ice for Nya then you do your thing." Cole told him and Kai nods, taking air and hovering there as he watched Cole rolled his shoulders.

He pushed himself up on his hind legs then slammed his front ones down, creating an earthquake to shatter the ice along the water.

"Show time." Kai grinned then flew over to Nya's side of the lake end of the fjord and gathered fire along his feathers and him his mouth, much like a dragon.

He then blew it out as he flew around, melting the ice on top and continuing still to warm the water up a bit.

"That should do it. She can swim out and about but the deeper portion of the water will be pretty cold." Kai says, coming to a hover over the water as Cole walked over to the iceless side of the lake area.

"It'll take a few weeks before it's warm enough for her. Skylor should be fine." Cole agrees. "Hey Jay, tell them the good news." He called out to the storm harpy that was doing loopty loops in the air.

"Gotcha!" Jay called out then pulled off a sharp dive then turned last minute, going into the side of the cliff.

"In the meantime, I'm gonna take a quick run to see if all the ice around the edges are broken up." Cole says, turning away.

"Alright." Kai says, watching him take off in a steady gallop.

"Kai!" Said Phoenix blinked at his name then looked towards the large chunks of ice on the colder side of the lake.

He spotted Zane once he raised a hand and waved. Kai chuckled as he flew over.

"Boy you really do blend in with the ice." Kai smiled as Zane slid up on a large chunk.

"Could you do me a favour?" Zane asked quickly and Kai frowned at his urgent tone.

"Sure. What is it?" Kai asked, flying closer to the mer, watching curiously as he held something to his chest then stretched his hand out to show Kai. "Oh. It's your gold. Do you need me to make it into something for you?" He asked, using his taloned foot to take it as he hovered still.

"Yeah. But it's something specific…" Zane says with a light blue flush in his cheeks that had Kai raising a brow.

"Well then… I'm all ears." Kai hummed, intrigued.

Cole on the other hand stood on the other side of the cliff facing, making it to the top rather easily. It gave him a higher view of the water below. It was all broken up. Much further down the channel still had ice but that would melt on its own soon. He turned around then galloped his way down the hill that made the cliff, enjoying the feeling of his hooves hitting the ground, the wind through his much longer hair. It's getting out of control. He should find some way to trim it but…

He thought back to all the times Zane kept running his class through the thick strands of his hair, an adoring look in his eyes. Well. If Zane liked it that much, he would keep it as is. He looked ahead curiously once he noticed Zane and Kai talking. They looked up to see him before Kai grinned and flew off.

"What's that all about?" Cole asked as he slowed to a trot.

"Nothing." Zane immediately dismissed then slid his way further on sure and Cole smiled, kneeling before him and cupping his cheeks.

"You're up to something. I can tell." Cole hummed and Zane only grinned, revealing sharp, pearly whites teeth.

"Maybe… But you're going to have to wait and see." Zane purrs, using his mate as support so he could reach his height.

"Ooooh. A surprise. I like the sound of that." Cole smiled, nuzzling his nose against Zane's as the mer purred happily.

"Good." Zane hummed before they both pressed their lips together, tongues coming into play right away.

Zane's black tongue slid against sharp fangs and further still to strong yet just as sharp molars that weren't that sharp before his change. While Cole had eaten other animals as a normal centaur, most of their diet was plants after all. Now, while Cole would enjoy kelp with him, he very much preferred meat and fish which made his newer, sharper teeth come in handy. On Cole's end, his light green tongue met rows of razor sharp teeth he had to be careful with. While Zane doesn't chew his food, he has this many teeth to allow him to latch on firmly to prey and puncture more lively fish and animals so thoroughly, if they somehow manage to get away, the bite alone is guaranteed to kill them. Their equally long tongues tangled together, their movements slow and savory. That is, until-

"Hey. It's too early for that." Nya called out and they pulled away from each other to blink at the warm water mer as she swum around stretching her fins.

"There's still a week tops before you two get rut brained." Skylor smirked as she allowed herself to float and both cold water mer and Kelpie flushed.

"You're one to talk." Cole huffed as Zane hid his face into his muscular chest, a low whine leaving him as he flicked his tail in embarrassment.

"Cool it. By then we're all slaves to instinct." Jay huffed as he arrived on scene, landing on the shore. "Really, if anyone should be making fun of anyone or complain, it's the Senseis and Lloyd." He says, sitting on the cold sand.

"Which is why we should make sure everything is in order for when they wake up." Kai says, arriving as well, perching next to his mate. "They can awaken at anytime during or after that time for us so let's start planning." He told them and they nodded.

"Alright. Anyone have any clue what waking dragons need?" Nya asked and there was all around silence.

"Boy do we have our work cut out for us…" Cole says drily.

___

"So food's obviously gonna be a thing on the list." Nya says, sitting on the shore with everyone else. "But we can't start stocking up too early and risk spoilage nor can we wait until it's too late and our instincts are mostly in control." She says, tapping a red claw against her arm.

"We start gathering in about 4 or 5 days instead then." Zane suggests and Nya nods.

"Fair enough. I'm just grasping at straws here but since the cold had put them to sleep to begin with, maybe some warmth will help them wake up." Cole suggested.

"So… We make them a fire?" Kai questions.

"That seems impractical since we don't know exactly when they're gonna wake up." Skylor pointed out.

"Well yeah, but they can all spark a fire on their own. Maybe we just leave them supplies to make it." Cole clarified and they paused to think on it.

"Not a bad idea." Jay nods, the others agreeing.

"Ok. Food and warmth. What else?" Nya asked them and they all paused to think.

"Oh! Water!" Jay spoke up with a grin.

"Of course." They huffed, facepalming.

"Alright. Food, warmth and water. Anything else they might need?" Cole listed off and they paused to think on it.

"No. I think that's about it." Kai says, crossing his singed arms.

"Alright. Then- huh?" Cole looked at Zane as he scented the air, eyes narrowed sharply.

Of all of them, Zane had the best sense of smell as he needed it for his time up north while hunting. He narrowed his eyes at the tree line, spines standing on edge along his back down his tail as a low hiss escaped him. That put all of them on guard. Zane's never reacted like this before, not even to the bear that attacked them during autumn. It must be an intruder.

"We'll take a look from above." Kai says seriously as Cole urged Zane in the water fully, just in case.

They took off once Nya nods, retreating to the water as well but still staying close to shore with Skylor. They had an advantage there after all. Soon, Cole could hear them approach and he snorts, dragging his hoof through the sand, ready to attack at any given time.

"I see them. it's just one creature." Jay says, sharp eyes spotting the figure as they keep coming directly towards them before his eyes widened once they walked through thinner coverage. "It's a-"

"Centaur?" Kai finished, surprised.

He wasn't the only one. Centaurs don't live this far up north naturally. Plus, there's a lot of hills and mountains rather than the plains centaurs prefer. Cole should know, he used to be one. That didn't make him any less wary though. Finally, they broke through the tree line and Cole blinked at the centaur that walked through. It wasn't anyone he's met before, that's for sure. She was a very light brown, almost blonde coloured centaur who's coat matched her wavy hair that spilled down her back. She looked around with wide hazel eyes then spotted Cole.

"Oh… You're a centaur…" She says, walking forwards slowly. "But also not?" She says, spotting his finned tail as it flicked back and forth warily.

"Who are you? Why are you here?" Cole asked, getting right to it.

"Oh. I'm Mariah. I…" Tears filled her eyes. "I got separated from my herd. We were escaping hunters…" She whispered as tears fell down her cheeks.

"You're a long way from any nearby plains though." Jay says suspiciously as he swooped down to land.

Apparently that was the wrong thing to do since she reared up with a startled whinny then galloped towards Cole. He tensed, ready for an attack- only to blink when she held onto his arm tightly, whimpering against the back of his shoulder from her shorter statue. Cole… Didn't know what to make of this.

Zane on the other hand… He watched with wide eyes from the water as she held onto his mate's arm, burying her face into his mate's skin. He stared for a moment longer before he released a series of warning clicks and trills under the water that mimicked growls, the broken up ice solidifying again as he glared at the imposing female with icy venom.

"Cold!" Nya's yelp startled him out of his challenging stance.

He watched as both she and Skylor dove under the water before the surface stilled, solidifying into clear ice. His ear fins flattened when he realised that he was the cause.

"What happened Zane?" Cole asked, green eyes focused on him, the worry in them thawing the icy bitterness that took him just now.

"Oh. Sorry. I wasn't paying attention." He apologised with a sheepish smile.

It wasn't a lie but it wasn't the whole truth. He just felt silly for reacting the way he has. Cole loves him and this outsider will be leaving anyways. Speaking of, she turned around to see him, seeing his intimidating teeth and claws then gave a shrieking whinny, shifting to bury her face into Cole's chest, trembling with her tail between her legs. Cole grimaced, looking down at the skittish girl then sighed. They couldn't just tell her to scram. It wasn't in their nature.

"Jay, could you and Kai look around to see if you can find any nearby centaurs?" Cole asked, looking across at him.

"Roger." Jay nods then took off, going after Kai who had remained hidden but only to ambush if necessary.

"You know that harpy?" Mariah asked, looking up at him with wide eyes.

'Isn't that obvious?' Cole thought dryly. "Yeah. He's a friend. Don't worry. We'll find your herd." He says aloud and Mariah smiled widely.

"Thank you for your help!" She says happily, nuzzling against him and Zane sneered, his sharp teeth glinting menacingly as he narrowed glowing arctic blue eyes at her from the water.

For her sake, Kai and Jay better find her herd quickly.

________

"This is bad." Nya says from inside her pool in the cave.

"Yeah. Mariah's presence means that hunters have already mobilised and are closing in." Skylor says with a frown, keeping her company, her sealskin wrapped around Nya's neck to help keep her warm.

"That's bad but it's not what I meant." Nya says, glancing towards the obscure exit onto the beach. "I meant Mariah all but clinging to Cole like that." She clarified.

"Huh? But it's obvious he isn't interested in her." Skylor says with a frown.

"Yeah that may be true but not only has Zane never experienced a challenger who obviously wants to stake a claim, it's really close to that time of the year. You should know. Jealousy and instincts aren't the best mix." Nya says pointedly and Skylor's purple serpentine tail swung from side to side.

"True. Do you think he'll attack?" Skylor asked, resting her chin in her clawed hand.

"Definitely if Mariah keeps clinging to Cole like a parasite. It's just a matter of when." Nya says, nuzzling the warm seal skin around her neck. "I've never seen a cold water mer before Zane and I certainly haven't seen them hostile. I've heard that's when they're most fearsome." She whispered.

"... I've seen cold water mers before him. They aren't as social as Zane is. They're intimidating, even while not paying any creature any mind." Skylor says, recalling a brief trip she had some time ago further up north.

They were all pretty gray scale, varying from dark gray to light with barely visible flecks of colour. They were all pretty big too, not to say Zane was small. He was much bigger than Nya and herself after all. It's just… She slipped into the water, using her legs to tread as she brushed Nya's hair back. They've gotten so used to Zane, to how soft and kind he was. This would be a reminder that Zane is capable of more than they ever thought. Nya looked up at her with her clear blue eyes and she smiled softly, her purple serpentine tail coming around to wrap around Nya's tail. It'll be unfortunate but it might also be a good thing.

_________

Cole sat, completely annoyed on the shore, a hand crafted fire before him… And Mariah glued to his side, preventing him from going in the water and cuddling Zane in his arms, preventing him from watching his relaxed face as he slept soundly, brushing his fingers against his pale cheek…

"It's a pretty cold tonight, isn't it?" Mariah asked with a shiver but Cole couldn't feel it.

The cold didn't bother him at all and as far as he knew, heat is the same.

"I suppose." Cole says, trying not to let his annoyance bleed through into his voice.

He knew it wasn't her fault but dammit he can't leave her out here alone. Centaurs separated from a tightly knit herd go through separation anxiety. It has them searching endlessly for their herd or latch onto a new one- or any creature close to a centaur. It's what helps his former kind integrate into new herds. He frowns, looking out at the iced over water, at the small hole there that was just about large enough for a head to poke through.

This'll be the first time in over a year Zane would sleep by himself. That realisation didn't bode well with him. He hopes Zane would have patience, until Mariah was gone…

Zane on the other hand tried to talk himself down just below the ice. He was just so used to sleeping next to Cole, his body can't even fathom such a feat tight now. At least his species could go days without sleep and still be unaffected but it was a routine he had come to treasure and she was ruining it with her presence! A low warning trill escaped him as his spines flared wider slowly darkening as more of his blue blood pumped through them. He shook his head, trying to shake it off. He knows Cole loves him and would never pick her over him. Knows this more than anything. But the problem lies with that mare touching his mate. A low trill escaped him as he looked up towards the surface with ominously glowing blue eyes. He doesn't share.

____________

Morning came with no signs from Kai and Jay, giving the odd family reason to worry.

"They never take this long to come back…" Cole whispered, looking to the sky. "How long have you been wandering?" He asked the mare who was glued to his side still.

"I've lost track. A few days at least…" Mariah says quietly, pressing even closer and Cole grimaced realising that this might actually take longer than he'd expected.

She's out of luck come a few days. Whether she likes it or not, he'll be returning to the water to mate with his mate. Speaking of, he hasn't been able to see him since she got here. It was time he changed that.

"Wait here." He told her, getting to his hooves and walking towards the water.

"You'll come back, right?" She asked, eyes wide and tear filled.

"Yeah. Don't worry. In just a sec." Cole says, glancing over his shoulder at her then stepped onto the iced over lake.

"Are you sure?" She called out, figuring nervously.

"Yeah. I'm sure." Cole says, irritation blooming.

He doesn't want to be angry at her but he hasn't been able to hold his mate since she got-

"I'll come with you." She says as she got up, trotting over.

"No. You can't. I'm-"

The ice breaking the moment she stepped on it cut off Cole's explanation and she rested back at the ice cold water that splashed against her legs.

"C-Cold!" Mariah stuttered, backing up and Cole facepalmed.

What was this situation even?

"I- I'm sorry. I just… I just wanted to stay with you a little. Just until I can find my pack and I… I'm already such a burden…" She whispered, wiping her tears with the back of her hands and Cole felt a twinge of guilt.

He looked out to the ice, seeing barely visible eyes of glowing blue there, watching their movements.

"Sorry Zane. Maybe later on." Cole says softly then walked out of the water, missing when it immediately froze over. "You're shivering. Let's head back. I'll build another fire." He says, reaching a hand down to help her up.

Mariah sniffled then nodded, taking his hand, not letting it go as she followed alongside him. The temperatures took a steep dip then, frost building up along the bark of the trees. Cole turned back to the frozen body of water once he heard something. It was more like low vibrations coming from the water. He shook it off. He must have been hearing things.

_____

Zane decided the best way to push these feelings back was contact with his mate. A kiss even. Just the thought had him perking up as he used his claws to cut himself a hole so he could pop up through. He pulled himself out of the water partially, his tail still mostly in the hole as he looked around. He perked up even more seeing Cole return from a round of hunting.

"Cole!" Zane called out grinning once his Kelpie mate perked up at his voice and smiled widely, seeing him waiting for him.

He dropped the rabbits he caught and galloped towards the ice- but Zane just wasn't allowed to have good things while Mariah was around, was he?

"Oh? That's your name?" Mariah asked, intercepting his path to him. "I'm sorry. I should have asked earlier. I must seem so insensitive now." She apologized as Zane's happiness faded.

"It's fine. I just have to-"

"So rabbits co-" Mariah had cut Cole off, only to he cut off herself once she ends up tripping on something partially buried in the sand, leaving her to yelp and fall against Cole, both of them ending up on the ground, Mariah half across Cole. "I'm sorry! I'm so clumsy! Are you ok?!" She asked him, sitting in her haunches as Cole sat up, trying not to let his irritation show.

"I'm fine." Cole says quietly.

He looked at the ice once he heard a silent splash, only to find both Zane and the hole gone, as if they never were. Cole didn't like that. It didn't sit well with him how he just took off. He stood then paused once he realised something. Another breath out turned to fog as the temperature plummets further.

"W-w-wow. It g-g-got so c-c-cold all of a sudden." Mariah stuttered, getting to her hooves as she rubbed her bare arms. "It's snowing…" She whispered and Cole looked up seeing the snow drifting down from the pale blue sky.

This was… Abnormal. Cole looked to the frozen solid lake. Was this… Was this Zane's doing?

"Mariah. Head inside the cave." Cole told her and she looked at him wide eyed.

"B-b-"

"Would you rather freeze to death before you ever see your herd again?" Cole asked her, clipped and blunt, unphased as more tears filled her eyes.

"N-no…" She says, looking down then fiddling with her hands.. "It's just…"

Cole straightened, hearing something from the lake, calling him, beaconing him to come. No doubt it was Zane.

"Wait!" Mariah says, grabbing his arm and Cole turned around to finally snap at her, only to find her lips pressed against his.

Meanwhile, it was all Zane could do to control himself. His mind was filled with dark, gruesome things, claws ready to inflict critical damage, teeth itching to sink and rip into flesh. He tried breathing in slowly through his gills, trying to calm his rushing pulse, trying to grasp at control that was slipping through his webbed hands like sand. Logic knows what's best bit instincts are so much stronger, so much harder to fight. He knew if he let it take over, he would take a life. He didn't want to be that kind of mer, didn't want to prove the stereotypes of his kind right. He clenched his fists tightly, trying to prevent his body from preparing to fight, to maim. His mind was a mess. Emotions, logic and instincts all clashing, overlapping. He needed to calm down, needed to escape the source of his dilemma but he couldn't. He refused. He wouldn't leave Cole alone with her . He didn't trust her. Wouldn't trust her. Not with his mate.

He needed, he needed… He lowered his hands from his face, ignoring the blackness of his claws that now extended past his wrist, ignoring the blue of his fins filled with so much of his blue blood, they looked black ignoring the light blue specks of his body that also took on that same colour. He needed his mate. He needed Cole.

A reverberating croon left him as he called for his mate, calling him to come to him. He's the only one that can quiet the storm in his mind right now. It only occurred to him after a moment that it would be hard to hear under thick ice. He swam up then used his tail to break a large portion of the ice before pushing himself up, ready to restart his calls- only to see Mariah with her lips on his mate's.

That was the last straw. Emotions and mainly instincts won, the whites of Zane's eyes turning dark as he gave a hiss of outrage. They turned towards him but Zane was cutting through the ice like it wasn't there, eyes screaming murder as he locked onto the one who dare challenged him.

"Zane?" Cole whispered, stepping back without realising, getting whiplash from the constant flow of shock.

This Zane looks so different. So much wilder… Deadlier…

"Woah! Shit!" Mariah yelled once Zane ricocheted out of the water, coming directly at her.

She then did something that startled Cole: she teleported out of Zane's line of attack.

"That was close." She sighed once Zane collided with the beach but he still looked fearsome and clearly wasn't about to back down anytime soon.

"... How did you do that?" Cole asked quietly, eyes narrowed in suspicion and Mariah looked at him surprised, realising that she blew her cover before she huffed.

"Damn. Ah well. This was boring anyway." Mariah says and Cole's eyes widened as her centaur form faded away to a completely humane one.

But that along with her teleportation was a clear sign she wasn't a regular human. She was most likely a witch whom were worse than hunters. They hunted just like the humans did but they keep their catch for their essence, adding it to their spells and potions. Essence is the very source of what made a creature who the are and they use the essence from parts of whatever unfortunate creature they manage to capture until they have no more left, until they're nowhere close to the creature they used to be. Essence is strongest with intense feelings as well... Like pain. Death in the end is the only mercy they receive from their capture.

Considering this witch was able to shapeshift and teleport, it was unfortunate that Wu and Garmadon are asleep. Considering the fact that they are asleep and vulnerable, they had to protect them. But Nya and Skylor are too vulnerable to the cold. Kai and Jay are gone too. Zane is… Cole looked past her at his seething black and blue eyed mate. Zane… He spotted a flash of light then jumped back out of the way, Mariah holding a cruel smile on her face.

"Eyed on me loverboy. No more daydreaming." She smirked as her hands glowed. "And to think such a rare sight like you would be more than interested in a fair centaur maiden, just before breeding season, hmm? Though it's peculiar. My love spell hasn't been working at all, no matter how many times I've casted it though touch. I've even gone as far to actually kiss you. My spells always work. Explain this, creature." She sneered, raising a hand towards him threateningly.

"Love spell?" Cole whispered, eyes wide.

It must be because he's already in love with Zane! No time for that. He needed to get rid of her before she does something terrible. But how? His earth powers can only do so much!

"Nevertheless, Kelpie are a truly rare and powerful source of both spiritual and water essence and I plan on taking you with me." She grinned then yelled as she shot a beam of her magic at him and Cole three his hands up to block- but it never landed.

Cole blinked then looked over his arms, eyes wide to see a wall of ice it seems before him. But this ice was different, darker.

"You pesky fish!" Mariah yelled and Cole's eyes widened.

Zane!

Cole was quick to round the ice, seeing Mariah distracted with attacking Zane, his ice blocking her attacks.

"I'll slit your neck and bleed you dry when I'm done with you!" She yelled at him and Cole narrowed his eyes.

He turned around then put his weight on his front hooves and used his back legs to slam into her back, leaving her to tell as the momentum flung her onto the iced over lake, the impact of her landing cracking the ice. Zane moved like a viper in the grass, sliding back into the water quickly, the small hole in the ice freezing over instantly. Cole watched Mariah from the shore as she slowly got up with a groan, bracing himself for what was to come next. Then it happened. Mariah screamed as she found herself high in the air, ice, water and Zane trailing after her mid air from his jump. Cole didn't flinch seeing Zane's sharp teeth sink into her exposed neck, his claws digging into her flesh as he dropped back into the water with her, disappearing under the surface, ice immediately reforming afterwards.

Zane spun as he dragged her deeper into the water, then pulled away with the chunk of her neck he had bitten into. She immediately brought her hands to her heavily bleeding throat as she began to both drown and bleed to death but Zane wasn't done yet. Not even close. He hissed as he swam in, clamping on her arm, shaking her violently until it ripped off. He immediately closed his strong jaw around the other, digging his claws into her flesh to keep her steady as he ripped it off as well. He hissed at her pale, lifeless face then unhinged his jaw for the final blow. He closed his teeth around the entirety of her neck then ripped it free from her body, spitting it out in disgust then sneered at her remains. 

On shore, Cole saw nothing for a few seconds after Zane disappeared below but then the ice under the water began to turn red. He stood there as it sunk in.

Zane just killed someone.

Cole pressed his lips together before they stretched in a smile. He was oddly proud. He had concerns if Zane had enough of a heart to do it if his life was at risk. He forgot that Zane was perhaps the most deadly of them all. It made him even more proud to call Zane his mate.

"Cole!" The centaur looked up once Jay's voice caught his ears, sewing him a moment after flying quickly towards him.

He landed before him, sending icy sand kicking up in the air.

"Mariah is-"

"A witch?" Cole says, cutting him off and confusing Jay.

"Yeah! But how'd you know?" Jay asked, confused.

"She gave herself away. But we don't have to worry about her ever again." Cole says, smiling as he looked out to the lake.

"How come? Hey why is the lake re-"  Jay cut himself off when everything pieced together.

"Holy shit." Kai says, arriving then as well. "I mean, I should have known with Zane being a cold water mer but damn." He says, landing next to them, holding a large gold circlet in hand.

Cole looked at it confused.

"Hey, where'd you find that?" Cole asked him and Kai looked at the solid gold band in hand.

"Oh this? It's actually yours." Kai says, tossing it to him. "Zane asked me to make it for you. It's a permanent accessory so whenever you're ready, I'll melt the gold shut for good." He says with a smirk as Cole looked over the details in the circlet in awe.

That was clearly them along the middle. Zane on one side and him on the other, their tails laced together on the back and them sharing a kiss on the front. Cole's heart warmed as he smiled at it. It was gorgeous.

"Oh. We've brought company by the way." Kai added and Cole glanced over his shoulder, eyes widening to see two familiar figures.

"Where's the witch?" Ronin asked, glancing up at them from under his conical hat as he walked on shore.

"By now? The Departed Realm." Jay says, gesturing to the lake.

"Woah. Zane did that?" Dareth asked surprised, his head cocked to the side. "Jeeze. I didn't think he had it in him." He says with a grimace.

A section of the ice on the lake collapsed suddenly and the group blinked once a darker blue tail tossed out two arms, a torso and a head, all covered in frost. Kai whistled low.

"Remind me not to piss Zane off." Jay says with a grimace.

Cole was more focused on Zane, watching the mer watch him with only his hair and eyes visible. The cold water mer gave a beaconing croon and Cole gave the circlet back to Kai.

"Hold onto this for me." He humbled then walked towards the water, his eyes focused on his mate.

He didn't care about the lingering blood that gave the water a pink tinge. He only cared about Zane. Cole stood there, face to face with Zane, noticing that he still looked so wild, so dangerous with his gorgeous blues replaced with deadly blacks, his glowing eyes standing our even more when framed by black… But he didn't mind at all. He reached out and cupped Zane's cheek gently, stroking his thumb against his skin. Zane purred, leaning into his touch with closed eyes as Cole smiled softly. They both moved, their lips pressing together as they clutched at each other, missing this, missing each other. With a flick of Cole's tail, they both disappeared below the water.

"Awww. A happy ending." Jay cooed next to Kai as Ronin inspected the remains next to them.

"She mostly bled out but there should still be enough for a decent meal." He murmured to himself, ignoring the arms and head, going straight for the body.

"Are you gonna finish that?" Dareth asked eagerly as he watched his partner bare his fangs.

Ronin paused, glancing over at the half werewolf with wide brown eyes, watching his ears perk up as his tail wagged eagerly. Ronin only huffed and tossed him the closest arm, Dareth catching it in his mouth.

"Wouldn't want you to go hungry. You're annoying when you get all whiny." Ronin huffed with a small smirk, his red eyes glinting.

"While you guys do your thing, I'm gonna check up on Nya." Kai says, walking away.

"I'll come with!" Jay chirps, following after him.

The mercenary and his pet partner watched them go before returning their attention to the all expenses paid meal left for them.

"Well. Bon appétit." The vampire murmured then sank his fangs into the shoulder of the corpse, draining her until the raw wounds she had turned pink, unphased by the audible cracking of bone next to him.

Since they ran into them while tracking down that witch, he'll stick around… If only until after the full moon...

_____________

(Hey! Here we are! Zane is soft boi so it was time to shake things up a bit. Also! Next H&F piece will focus on Cole's powers! Because he does have them. It might take a few other elemental visitors for him to see it though. Who knows! CI is up next so see you when that's done!)

[nocte-argentea]

Stargazing

This is my contribution to @tyrias-library‘s Valentine’s event! The topic was a memorable date, so Altair took Vesper on a date to cheer her up after she had a really bad day! Cross-posted on Ao3.

Altair knew from the moment she walked in that Vesper had not had a great day.

It was late afternoon when she entered the guild’s tavern. He could see the bruises and dried blood on his girlfriend the second she came in. Was she limping as well? Concern immediately welled in his heart as he almost leaped off of his chair to go to her. A tired smile made its way to her lips as she saw him approach.

“Sorry it took me so long, darlin’. The job was...a little more taxing than I thought it’d be.” She said wearily as he took her into his arms, looking over her to make sure there were no serious injuries.

“I can see that. What happened, dear heart?” The sylvari vaguely remembered her talking about the job she took; something about bandits, he thought.

“Remember how I said bandits were the suspects of the attacks on the caravans?” Altair nodded. “Well, turns out it was bandits and centaurs and unchained.”

“Oh my.” Vesper cracked another smile at his simple joke. “They didn’t hurt you too badly, did they?”

“Nah, I’m tougher than I look. But with that being said…” she turned her head towards the direction of the infirmary. “I’m going to go get patched up and then head up to our room. I’ll see you in a little bit, alright?” Altair nodded as she leaned up to kiss his cheek, and then she was on her way. He watched her go with worry in his eyes. He knew her better than that. There was something else wrong.

“...You can tell too, huh?” Altair jumped a bit at the voice beside him. He turned to see Nocte leaning against the bar. When did she get there? “Before you ask, I stealthed my way here. Didn’t want to interrupt your moment. But more importantly, something is bugging her.”

“You’ve got that right. I wonder what’s up? I wonder if I could ease her mind…” The sylvari drifted into thought. “Maybe I could take her somewhere? We could get food or something…”

“Not sure if she’d be up for that, especially since she seems so tired. She probably doesn’t want to be around people, save you of course.” Altair couldn’t help but blush a bit. Vesper had said multiple times that he didn’t count as people. “Maybe you could take her somewhere secluded and you could get some alone time. And no, I don’t mean that in a lewd way.”

“I figured, it’s highly doubtful that’d make her feel better right now. Let’s see…” He took another moment to think, then snapped his fingers. “I think I’ve got just the place! It’s a bit of a trek, but I know it’s a place she loves.”

“Sounds good. I’ll leave you to it.” Nocte turned to the bartender to order a drink before looking over her shoulder at Altair. “Just make sure you two get back before dawn.”

“No guarantees, but I’ll try.” He shot her a friendly wink before heading out of the tavern in the direction of their room. As he got closer, he hoped dearly that she’d go with him. He wanted to help her, but he wouldn’t force her if she didn’t want to leave. He finally made it into the room to find Vesper laying on their bed, dressed in clean clothes and reading a book. She turned to him as he entered, growing a smile.

“Not going to party with the others tonight?” She placed a bookmark in her book and put it to the side as Altair sat on the edge of the bed.

“It’s no fun without you there, love. And actually, I wanted to ask you if you’d join me on a little adventure. Or a date, rather.”

“A little adventure date? I don’t know, mate, I’m still tired…”

“I’m aware. You don’t have to go, but I know something is bothering you.” She broke eye contact at that. That confirms it, at least. “I want to take you somewhere where you can take a bit to relax. Just you and me.”

“Hm...I like the idea, but I am still tired. Where are we going?”

“That’s a surprise. It is a bit of a trip, but we’ll be riding a jackal for most of it. I’ll even carry you if you don’t want to walk.” He winked at her and felt a small surge of pride as she blushed. 

“Well, alright.” Altair had to stop himself from making some gesture of victory. “I won’t have to grab anything other than the usual, right?”

“Right. I would like you to wear a blindfold, though.” Vesper gave him a weird look. “...To keep it a surprise, Vess. You know me better than that.” Her face instantly melted into a look of mirth.

“Aye, I do. I was messing with you. Give me a moment to get my dagger and pistol.” Once she was ready to go, Altair grabbed her scarf and tied it around her eyes. He made sure that she couldn’t see, then held her close as he brought out his portal stone.

“You know, we could’ve just used my two eyepatches instead of my scarf.”

“I am not letting you go out wearing two eyepatches. We have standards, Vess. Besides, at this time of day, it’s going to be chilly where we’re going.” He selected the proper waypoint, and in an instant, the two were in the Desert Highlands. Vesper shivered a bit at the cool air, as night had fallen at this point.

“You weren’t kidding. Where are we? Ascalon? Shiverpeaks?”

“If we were going to the Shiverpeaks, I’d’ve made you wear something warmer.”

“Fair enough.”

Altair summoned his jackal and helped Vesper onto it. Once she was settled, he climbed up and sat behind her and then the three were off to the western portion of the highlands. As the jackal ran, Altair figured now would probably be the best time to find out what was bothering her, so she wouldn’t be thinking about it while they were trying to relax.

“So, want to tell me what’s bothering you?” He heard her sigh in front of him. 

“Not really, but…” Vesper went quiet for a moment before leaning back into his chest, something she did often when she was upset. “I found where the majority of the attacks were coming from, and I was able to dispatch most of the culprits, but I...I was too late to rescue another caravan. It was a gruesome scene. So many bodies...”

“By the Pale Mother. I’m sorry, Vess.” He looped an arm around her waist and drew her closer. “It wasn’t your fault. You know that.”

“You’re right, I know you are. It just...doesn’t make it easier to forget a scene like that.” She placed her hand over the one on her stomach. “I may have been through a lot, but it doesn’t really get easier.”

“I know, sweetheart. I know.” Altair pressed a gentle kiss to her neck. Thankfully, they’d reached the sand portal to get to the place they were going. “We’re almost there. It won’t be long now.”

He had to brace himself for the next part. The sand portal took the three of them upon the sand paths high in the sky, and Altair was not a fan of heights. He was determined to go through with this, however. For Vesper.

“I feel like we’re getting higher up. It’s colder, too...you promise we aren’t in the Shiverpeaks?”

“I believe part of them is nearby, but no, where we’re going isn’t connected to them.”

Finally, they’d reached the platform high above the highlands, where the night sky shone brilliantly and the ghostly structures of a civilization passed were visible. Vesper loved it up here, so Altair dearly hoped this would lift her spirits at least a little. It also seemed like the ghosts that were usually up here weren’t present tonight, so they could get some alone time. He hopped off of the jackal and helped Vesper down.

“This feels like stone masonry. I thought this was just going to be you and me? That’s kinda hard to do in a town…”

“You’ll see, love.” He guided her towards the ghostly city, keeping her far enough away from the edge for him to feel they were safe from falling. He untied her scarf from around her eyes, letting it fall back around her neck. He moved beside her as she opened her eyes and gasped.

“Altair! You brought me all the way here!? No wonder it’s chilly, we’re so high up. But, you hate heights! Why-” Her mind seemed to be running a mile a minute, so he interrupted.

“Because I know you love it here. And I figured this would be the best way to help you relax.” He slung his arm around her back and pulled her into his chest. “I can deal with heights if it makes you happy. As long as I can’t see just how high up we are…” He glanced towards the edge and shivered. He’d endure it, but there was no way he was getting close to where the platform ended.

“Altair…” Vesper snuggled into his chest, which made his heart flutter. “You didn’t have to bring us all the way here just for me. But I’m glad you did. It means more to me than you’ll ever know.” She pulled away briefly to look him in the eye. “I love you so much.”

“I love you, too.” Altair put his other hand on the back of her neck to bring her face to his, capturing her lips in a sweet kiss. When they broke apart, he pulled her over to one of the pillars and sat against it. Vesper sat down and he pulled her into his lap, wrapping his arms around her once again. “We can stay as long as you like. I’m alright with taking a night off to stargaze together.”

“I’d like that.” She kissed his cheek and snuggled into him, and the two watched the stars for hours. Unfortunately, Nocte wasn’t kidding about being back before dawn and gave the two a dressing down when they returned to the guildhall. This didn’t stop them from going out to stargaze several more times, however.

[aion-rsa]

Mortal Kombat Sequel: What Should Happen Next

https://ift.tt/3sT79DK

IT HAS BEGUN!

Or it will. Mortal Kombat came out and did all right for itself. The reboot has its highs and its lows, but one thing I will say it does a better job at is setting up a sequel. The 1995 original had a decent enough cliffhanger with a kaiju-sized Shao Kahn popping in and everyone ready to just kick his ass, but at the time, there weren’t too many promising places to take the sequel.

The first movie was just so front-loaded that the second didn’t have enough to rope us in. That’s why it’s probably for the best that Johnny Cage is currently being treated purely as a sequel hook. He’s the carrot on the stick meant to keep us interested in keeping this franchise going.

Also there’s still a tournament. As someone who has seen every adaptation of Mortal Kombat (outside of the Live Tour, but once I get this time machine finished…), I can understand why they would want to try something new with the narrative. Treating everything as a big prelude to the sequel, which will actually do the tournament, is a fine enough option. Just as long as they deliver. Oh, and try to make the tournament make sense! Both the original and the Scorpion’s Revenge animated film just make up the rules as they go along. I want some goddamn brackets!

So here are some other things we’d like to see in the Mortal Kombat sequel.

A Johnny Cage Who Can Fight

Obviously. Johnny Cage is Warner Brothers’ chance to get a big name actor in there. Since he was so good in the animated movie, I thought about Joel McHale getting jacked up for the role, but he’d be in his 50s by then. I know WWE’s Miz is also campaigning for the role, but while that would be adorable, I simply want a Johnny Cage who not only has charisma, but can do some kind of martial arts.

Linden Ashby was able to pull it off, but the less our new Hollywood egomaniac has to be carried by editing and his opponents, the better. Really, just go with Scott Adkins.

Noob Saibot and Sub-Zero II

I know Cole Young isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but the sequel can completely redeem his existence by using the second Sub-Zero as his rival and counterpart. In the games, the Sub-Zero/Scorpion stuff happened in the present day, so Kuai Liang was Bi-Han’s brother and took up the Sub-Zero mantle in-between the first two entries. He ended up being a more honorable warrior and became one of the series’ main heroes.

Considering the new movie’s version of Bi-Han is—for an unexplained reason—borderline immortal, his successor wouldn’t be his brother but likely his descendant. Weirdly, it would be a descendant that he would have coexisted with, but sure. Therefore you get a new Sub-Zero who is to the original what Cole Young is to Scorpion.

Read more

Movies

Mortal Kombat (2021) vs. Mortal Kombat (1995): Which is Better?

By David Crow

Games

Mortal Kombat: 15 Most Powerful Characters

By Gavin Jasper

Shang Tsung hinted at bringing back some of his dead henchmen, so Bi-Han will likely return as the insidious Noob Saibot. On paper, that’s a tag team match of bloodline vs. bloodline. Except there’s some good drama in there if you have the new Sub-Zero stray from what the original wants him to do.

Kitana and Edenia

Probably one of the stranger choices in Mortal Kombat was to include Mileena as one of the flunkies and kill her off when there hasn’t been a single mention of Kitana. Having Mileena mean nothing is a mistake that both movie continuities have made.

We’re probably another movie away before Shao Kahn becomes a major player in this franchise. He might have as much a role in the sequel as Thanos does in the first Guardians of the Galaxy. Kitana can show up though, both as his assassin and/or his betrayer, giving us a better idea of what he’s all about without actually having him appear.

Also, with Kung Lao gone, Liu Kang is in desperate need of connecting to someone. Giving him a Juliet to his Romeo would be welcome.

Recognizable Backgrounds

The Mortal Kombat series is known for so many cool and unique places for the characters to fight. So it was a little disappointing that the new movie featured such locations as a sand pit, the insides of a crappy house, and a frozen-over locker room. Even the use of the Pit meant nothing as nobody got knocked into the spikes.

Give us the Dead Pool or the Living Forest. Or that one stage with the portals in the background while the shadow priests float around. Anything from Mortal Kombat II. Get some of that rad Outworld real estate.

We’re Going to Need a New Heavy

Throwing Goro in for the sake of having Goro was a ballsy move for the movie, and probably a foolish one. Goro is more than just a brick house of an enemy to go through. He’s the heart and soul of the first Mortal Kombat game and its tournament. He stopped mattering after the fact, but in the storyline of the first game and first movie adaptation, he was the gigantic threat. He was the irresistible force that everyone was too afraid to talk about because he might hear you.

The 2021 movie proceeded to use Goro for the sake of scaring Cole into growing his mutant power shirt before Cole brutally murdered him. Sure, he can come back in the sequel, but what’s the point? He’s lost all of his mystique. He’s no longer the scary giant.

There are options for replacements. They could use Kintaro, although he’d be more of the same. Perhaps Motaro? Eh, centaurs are too cumbersome to work. They might have to bring in someone like Moloch or even Blaze in just to give us the necessary moment of, “Whoa, what the HELL is that?!”

Bring Back Kano

Just… bring him back. If Sub-Zero #1 is obviously returning as Noob Saibot, then there’s no reason why Shang Tsung or the Black Dragon, or Quan Chi, or Shinnok can’t just resurrect Kano and put a metal plate where his wound was. The biggest mistake of Mortal Kombat: Annihilation was cheating us out of the best performances from the first movie. So please, Warner Bros., give us some more Josh Lawson.

A resurrected Kano would not only bring back the fantastic comic relief, but he’d be the ultimate wild card. Maybe he can find redemption? Maybe he’ll still be a total bastard and work for the villains. Maybe they could play up fellow Black Dragon member Jarek’s in-game storyline where he’s so freaked out by the threat of Shinnok (or whoever) that he knows that there is no monetary gain he can get out of the situation, and no reason to do anything but save his skin by helping save the world.

Or maybe Shang Tsung morphs into Kano and gets hit on the head so hard that he forgets how to turn back to normal and is stuck spending the rest of the movie as a wise-cracking Australian. I’m spit-balling here.

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

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[shardclan]

1, 2, 3, 4, 13, 17 (cough), 18, 42, 43, 44, 45, 74, 77, 78 :>

1. (Answered Here)

2. What kind of combatdoes your clan specialize in? Physical? Magical? Bit of both? Or are they morefond of subterfuge?

Magical combat is very much the order of the day, but justabout every dragon in the clan is more than capable of throwing a good punch.If they can fight in any capacity, you should be worried about them punchingyou in the throat once all their other options are exhausted.

Subterfuge is the domain of two dragons: Bestealcian, theUmbra Wolf and Actias, the Smoke Gyre. The fore only serves the Queen and thelatter has served the clan and its allies since the days of the old dynasty.Sometimes they are directly at odds in their goals, so it is very difficult forenemies or outsiders to keep up with whether the Smoke Gyre is even a real partof Clan Aphaster. Most of his clan mates don’t even know his real name.

3. What kinds of weaponsdo your dragons use? If your dragons use actual physical weapons how do theyhold them (assuming they don’t use claws/teeth)? If they use magic do they havesome sort of focus like a staff?

It varies from dragon to dragon and by their expertise.Aphaster dragons spend a significant amount of their time in humanoid shapesdue to an agreement with the local beastclans (in short: don’t trample theSummerlands; the Centaurs grow grain there and the Serthis hunt small game thatwould otherwise be pests).

Most physical fighters favor swords of some kind, whether it’sQueen Telos’ elegant saber, Arcanus’ unadorned broadsword, or Opalite’s saw-toothedcleaver. But there’s also a pretty lively sect of hand-to-hand fighters thateither use their fists or specialize in claw weapons. (Note: Queen Telostrained with Perilous, the best pugilist in the clan, and while she’s good atwielding her saber, she’s a demon at hook punches). Bestealcian and Actias arealmost never seen in humanoid form. The latter is a tooth and claw fighter whospecializes in quick death and incapacitation. The fore is a proper fighter andutilizes a variety of weapons, from an ice pick to arrows to a bladed alloy fanfrom the Blacksand Annex that also doubles as a shield.

Magic among my clan members is mostly for mundane purposes. Amongcombat magic users there’s Lutia, the aforementioned nuke, and she’s anArchmage so she doesn’t need anything but her will to cast magic. There’s Tawnywho isn’t an Archmage but is a high level pyrokinetic who can burn just aboutanything so long as it’s in his line of vision. Arcanus is a magic knight, hemostly uses enchantments and quick spells with his sword as a focus.

Then there are the witches, who are an entirely differentmatter but are next to harmless given they only use their powers for the spirittheir coven is serving at the time.

4. What or who would bemost likely to attack your clan at this point in time? Is your clan aware ofthis potential threat?

From above: An additional team exists solely to deal withThings trying to come through the place the Chalcedony Seat almost crackedthrough the veils, but they’re not strictly military.

Outsiders are the problem right now. Beings that don’t comefrom Sornieth being attracted to the rift . They don’t know about it yet, butit’s going to be factoring in veeery soon.

13. How “fairly” doesyour clan fight? Are they honorable even when things look grim? Are theywilling to get their hands a little dirty?

The clan is very multi-elemental and the members are allvery different. There’s no one who would say…use a meat shield in a fight. Butthey might throw some pocket sand at you and some of them firmly believe thatblackmail is a useful and perfectly reasonable tool against anyone who has madeit clear they intend to be a problem.

On the macro and in governmental affairs, the clan fightsfairly—very much lawful alignment—but they’re not above finding loopholes orabusing plausible deniability. Example: In the old clan, Actias prevented a warbetween the clan and oncoming harpies by snatching two males from their homeroost and threatening to kill them. This was framed as an independent action todefend his son, Iblis, but really it was so the clan could avoid war, scareaway the harpies, and not damage their reputation with other beastclans theywere friendly with.

Though it helps somewhat more now that unlike then, Telosreally doesn’t know what Actias is doing half the time and has been advised byActias himself to have Bestealcian hunt and kill him if it becomes politicallynecessary.

17. What sort of thingsdoes your clan look for in potential allies? In this case I mean generalattitude and moral code.

They prefer clans that don’t harbor shade creatures,emperors, demons, or more sinister forms of Outsider, but if enough trust isbuilt up it’s easy for them to overlook those things (see: Clan Feldspar).Really so long as your clan isn’t clearly evil or just more trouble than they’reworth, there’s not much in the way of central dogma that will see youautomatically turned away.

The only real dealbreaker is a clan whose overall philosophyinherently involves disharmony with the beastclans. Aphaster has greatrelations with most of the main beastclans save the corven and the harpies, andthey’re trying to keep it that way. A harpy runs the creamery, and she’s one ofthe most beloved members of the clan, local dragons won’t even let people lookat her funny. (This may or may not be because she’s the best friend of possibly the most overtly powerful witch in the Starwood coven)

18. What sort of services or exports does your clan need thatallies can/do provide? Why are they unable to do it/secure these items bythemselves?

Building materials are always going to be a big thing forthe clan. They’re Arcanites who previously lived as dragons with big FocalPoint lairs 100% of the time, they literally don’t trust enclosed structuresthat aren’t massive and made of familiar materials. But Crystalspine graniteonly comes from the Starfall Isles, and despite them having a literal portal tothe Isles they are very much on thin ice with the Arcanist right now. So theywill always need a supply chain from clans who live closer than they do.

For the same reason, they are also always willing to pay topdollar for any items from the Isles, especially Starfall Blossoms and variousfauna (bees from the Starwood Strand in particular are very important for HouseBetelgeuse)

Until previously they also needed quite a lot of Celestine tobe imported, but after the Celestial Vault was built and the Chalcedony Seatwas housed in it, they basically have the only self-replenishing source of highquality Celestine in the entire eastern half of Sornieth, and that’s become abig export.

42. What would most of your dragons say the biggest threat tothem is right now?

The Chalcedony Seat itself. It was basically meant to be theArcanist’s attempt at an artificial pillar piece, and the Shard Dynasty wasmeant to be its keepers. Only he never told any of them that, so when Lutiaactivated it and drove the old clan out of the territory, it was just out theregrowing increasingly radioactive and unstable. It became a huge problem andturned some non-beastclan creatures into dragons, it quite possibly led to theopal gene since the magical run off from it seeped into local leylines (they’renot hype to tell anyone about that hypothesis), and in the end, they had tobring it to the Sunbeam Ruins.

Despite Light element being highly susceptible to Arcane energy.

So, you know. They’re just…kind of waiting for it toexplode.

43. How competent wouldyour clan say your leader(s) is/are? How competent are they really?

“Extremely” and “she does her best”.

What makes Telos competent isn’t that she inherently knowswhat to do, it’s that she’s good at listening to people who have specializedexperience. Her choosing a council of Five Tribunes when she crowned herself is100% the best thing she could have done. Without them, Aphaster wouldn’t havemade it half so far and she knows it. Like, it’s fine she has about 85% of her ancestor’smemories for the past 5-6 generations of her family, but none of them wererulers. They were all scientists and alchemists from House Xanna. She knewenough to know that their memories wouldn’t help her with ruling a kingdom.

44. When dragons wish tobecome mates, how does that happen? Is there a ceremony? Do they just mutuallyagree to it? Is their mate already chosen for them?

Mate choosing is completely free form, and Clan Aphaster’sgovernment does not require a ceremony of any kind, or even any officialrecord. It used to be there was a Genealogist who handled that once, but shewent to the Arcanist’s service and no one has replaced her. It’s an entirelypersonal decision how or if any celebration or officiation will occur.

As a result, actual wedding ceremonies are major news in theclan and they tend to turn into massive to-dos that even some of the moreelusive members of the clan will turn up for. Without anything else in the wayof officiation or celebration, usually any pairs that have declared themselvesmarried will be mentioned in the local newspaper, the Sunbeam Sentinel.

45. Do the members ofyour clan more or less get along with each other? What would cause them toquarrel if so? Why do they if not?

More or less, yes. There’s a lot of little interconnectingcliques and it’s not necessarily that dragons that don’t hang out might hateeach other, they usually just don’t gravitate toward one another.

Personal beef can be normal, in the old clan Carnelianregular beat the shit out of a paparazzi coatl who caused him to lose the trailon a hatchling kidnapping.

Right now Estevao is largely considered a fool by any clanmember with good sense.

74. Is breeding done onlybetween mates? Freely? For the good of the clan?

All three.

Camellia is big into having kids but has never had a realmate a day in her life (literally her words after a male she had her mostrecent nest with also mated with another dragon from the clan and somebody gotnervous about it: “You know I’ve never kept the males as my own. I just likethe children.”; Haematica had her children because at the time she was the onlyplague dragon in the clan and they needed more; and there are several matedpairs who are exclusive.

77. How religious is thebulk of your clan?

They respect the gods, especially Lightweaver and theArcanist given the circumstances, but there are only a few who are genuinely religious.

Camellia was always very devout to the Arcanist, and afterthe events that destroyed their old dynasty, she was god-touched. She can’treally avoid being religious even if she wanted to.

Fletch is a forge priestess—meaning she’s a devout of theFlamecaller.This served quite well during the clan’s journey to the Sunbeam Ruins, when she pretty much called a lava-spewing fissure into the Carrion Canyon via prayer to escape a local bad news beastclan.

Turan is the Light Liaison, she has to be religious becauseif she isn’t Lightweaver will take it out of all their asses.

Azricai is surprisingly religious, but in a sort of…upsidedown tarot kind of way. She calls on the Windsinger in his capacity for stormsand destruction, protecting her clan by keeping them in the calm eye of thestorm she does her best to embody. It’s part of the reason dragons who know her well call her The Gale Wolf.

Penitence is religious, but it’s to the Icewarden, so. Heconsiders being the clan’s jailer and primary law enforcer a daily act ofworship.

Then there’s Lamium who will soon be in a very complicatedposition where he becomes the devout of the Veiled Moon (meaning the moon that isonly visible in Hewn City) basically under duress.

78. If your clan isreligious, how is worship done? Privately? Is there a large ceremony?

The devouts pray on their own. Ceremonies for the elementsusually only exist during elemental holidays.

[edenfalling]

For the DVD commentary meme - Chapter 7 of the Courting Dance (the wedding scene).

For @bluejayfic, forthe Fic DVD Commentary Meme (which is still open, fyi! just drop me an ask) 

TheCourting Dance: Marriage is a bit more complicated thanquarreling and making it up again, especially for the crown prince ofArchenland and an exiled Calormene Tarkheena. (21,000 words) 

Chapter7 - The Beating of Our Hearts: Running from your problems israrely a good long-term solution, but sometimes the change in environment canbe helpful – especially now that Aravis and Cor are on the same page. (1,600words) 

As @bluejayfic mentioned, this chapter is the one with the wedding scene. What was I thinking,putting the wedding halfway through the story? Well, I was thinking that theplot is as much about politics and worldbuilding as it is about romance, andthe wedding is a major symbol of Aravis and Cor deciding to commit to eachother despite various obstacles. Also, while it resolves their interpersonalproblems, it doesn’t resolve their external problems at all – in fact, itmakes some of them worse. So I figured it would make a good central turningpoint, where we switch from Aravis and Cor being pissed off at each other tostanding back-to-back against the world. 

———————————————Chapter 7 - TheBeating of Our Hearts, with commentary———————————————

Aravis disliked the journey into Narnia, though she had gonewillingly five times during her first year in the north, so that she mightspeak to Queen Lucy and spend a week or two in a place where her role wasclearly defined. The Narnians treated guests nobly and never begrudged herorigin, despite Queen Susan’s ordeal, whereas the Archens held ancient enmitywith Calormen and were rarely sure what to make of her status – somethingpartway between king’s ward, long-term guest, and unofficial hostage. 

This is a little repetitivein terms of story arc – we get it; Archenland has ISSUES with Calormen – butI needed to explicitly establish that Narnia, despite the Rabadash incident,doesn’t really share them. That will be important in future chapters. 

Even in the height of midsummer the mountain road was proneto enveloping fog, and the trees pressed thickly all around like disapprovingsentinels. Hwin and Bree passed the time trading gossip about their respectiveherds and territory negotiations with the centaurs and other grassland Beastsof Narnia. Cor rode silently, seemingly lost in thought. Aravis had nothing tocontribute to the Horses’ conversation and could not think of the right way tobreak into Cor’s reverie, not when they hadn’t spoken properly in so long. Sheheld her tongue until they were through the pass and safely down past thenarrow cliffside path, with the great valley of Narnia spread out before themlike a landscape on silk. 

She sat back in the saddle. Hwin took her suggestion andstopped. After a moment, Bree noticed he was walking alone and turned to eyethem questioningly, his nostrils flared to catch any strange scent on the wind. 

“We’ve crossed the border,” Aravis said. “Nowthat we’re nominally beyond Archenland’s reach, I want an explanation." 

Bree tossed his head. "An explanation of what? Youwanted to run away, Cor wanted to run away, Hwin and I offered to help, andhere we all are in Narnia. What could be simpler?" 

Bree is arefreshingly straightforward soul. *wry* 

Aravis ground her teeth. "I know why I wanted to leaveArchenland. I know why you and Hwin helped. Cor, on the other hand, has spentthe past two months treading dangerously close to denying me, which, after Iaccepted his courting gift, could well be considered grounds for blood feud. Iknow that you love your father and you wish to be worthy in his eyes,” sheadded directly to Cor. “I know why you were delaying, which is why I waswilling to take the dishonor of breaking the dance on myself. Yet here we are,fleeing Archenland as we once fled Calormen, with an even more uncertain futurebefore us. What changed your mind?" 

Context: culturallyspeaking, what Cor did was the equivalent of "it’s not you, it’s me”weaseling out of a betrothal, which is especially insulting after he’d put in afair amount of effort to buy some expensive and not-easily-acquired courting gifts,and by doing so had reinforced Aravis’s sense that he is the only other personin Archenland who shares her cultural background and perspective. Aravis hasevery right to be pissed off at him. 

Cor swung his left leg over the saddle and slid to theslanted ground. It was strange to look down on him from Hwin’s back. They hadbeen of a height as children, but he had three inches on her these days, justenough that she found herself tilting her chin when they spoke face to face. Itwas also fitting that he stand lower now, like a supplicant come to herfather’s court to beg her favor. There was no obligation to respond to theoverture of a dance, but Cor had met her, matched her, and then stepped back. 

“The king is under the law, for the law is what makeshim king,” Cor said slowly, stepping up the grassy hillside with his eyesraised to catch Aravis’s gaze. “Father said that to me on our first nightin Anvard – do you remember? A king in answerable to his country and hispeople. If he forgets that, he becomes a tyrant. I want to do right byArchenland. I wanted to make people see that you’re the best thing in my life,that you could never be a weakness. I wanted to obey the law, to work with theGreat Council rather than against it, and make Father proud." 

Hwin shivered and took a nervous step sideways. Aravisloosened the grip of her legs and held herself straight and strong under Cor’searnest gaze. "What changed your mind?” she repeated. 

“The law in Archenland isn’t the same as the law inCalormen,” Cor said. “It’s about personal honor as much as rules,just like debt and testimony – did you know that? What am I saying; of courseyou knew that. I should have known it, if I’d been thinking. The law is apromise between the people and the king.” He shrugged, a slightself-deprecating gesture. “How could anyone trust me to keep that promiseif I broke a more important one to you?" 

Cor’s reasoning hereis one of the major keys to the story. He is trying to balance two cultures,and realized he’d been swinging back and forth in response to each newstimulus, but really he needs to find his own synthesis and stand there. 

Or in slightly moreconcrete terms: when he accepted Aravis’s Calormene-style flirtation and madeher a Calormene proposal, he acted as if he were still in Calormen (whereAravis’s choice would have mattered a lot since she’s the daughter of a HighLord, and his would have been secondary at best since he was somewhere betweena peasant and a slave). 

Then he realized thatfrom an Archen perspective, he’d just made a huge decision of state withoutconsulting anyone, and that’s bad. (Slippery slope to tyranny.) Obviously theArchens have a bee in their collective bonnet about Calormen, because Aravis isobjectively a pretty good marriage prospect – she doesn’t have an inheritanceanymore, but she’s noble-born and grew up with court politics and such and cantherefore shore up Cor’s weak points, not to mention she and Cor are absolutelyunrelated which matters in the mountain kingdoms (I think their nobles are all cousinsof some sort at this point in history). 

But then Cor realizedthat Archen law is based on personal honor as much as an impersonal set ofrules, and if he broke his engagement to Aravis, he’d be breaking his honor andtherefore creating a hypocrisy at the heart of his kingship. (Plus he reallydoes think Archen prejudice against Calormen is wrong and wrong-headed.) So hefound the place where he said, "This is my line in the sand,” andrefused to be moved any farther. 

If Archenland won’thave him as he is, then they can’t have him at all. 

Aravis swung her leg over Hwin’s back and slid to the grassyearth. Cor stepped forward and took her hands. 

“Do you forgive me?” he asked. 

“We have two witnesses,” Aravis said rather thananswer directly. “Do you have objections?" 

Aravis understandsall the stuff I blathered about a couple paragraphs ago. She’s also bothCalormene (indirect verbal responses) and a fan of direct action, so herresponse is not to answer Cor’s question but to SHOW him the answer byessentially saying, "I not only forgive you, I want to make absolutelyclear that I stand with you, so let’s get married right here and now, and do itthe Calormene way to make an extra point.” 

For a moment Cor looked like the baffled boy she’d firstgrown to know on their journey. Then comprehension kindled a slow fire behindhis eyes, and his fingers tightened around hers. “Bree, Hwin,” hesaid, “will you stand witness to our marriage and attest its truth beforeany court?" 

Bree looked utterly confused, but he nodded his head. "Yes,of course, but don’t you need, oh, a dress, and some papers to sign, and anotherperson to say a bunch of nonsense to make it official? Possibly something withribbons or a fire?" 

The implication ofthe ribbons and fire, btw, is that northern marriages are not church weddingsas we know them; rather, they involve handfasting (tying ribbons around joinedhands) or jumping over a fire while holding hands. There’s probably also avariant where you jump over a broomstick, or just something to do with crossinga threshold, or crossing under an arch of flowering branches. Transitions andbinding, that sort of thing. 

"That’s only if they want to be grand,” Hwin saidfrom behind Aravis’s shoulder. “I saw humans do this in Calormen. All theyneed is themselves and a pair of friends to swear they said the words beforethey got down to mating." 

Horses, Aravis reflected, had a very earthy way of seeingthe world. She caught a blush rising in Cor’s cheeks and was grateful yet againthat her own slight embarrassment was not equally visible to him. "Wellthen,” she said, threading a note of challenge into her voice. “Willyou keep your promise?" 

Cor raised their joined hands to heart-height and said,"In the name of Soolyeh, I take you for my wife. May our marriage bewarm.” He stared into Aravis’s eyes, the slant of the hill putting themexactly on a level. 

Aravis held his gaze. “So may it be. In the name ofGarshomon, I take you for my husband. May our marriage be fruitful." 

The words were familiar. Aravis had heard them many times,for her father had been prone to grant the request of his slaves and thepeasants on his estate that he stand as their witness and thus bring greaterdignity to their unions. She had heard them again when Ilroozeh Tarkheena hadmarried her father, for though the trappings of the wedding might be grandbeyond belief, the rite itself was always the same. And she had been made toembroider them and paint them in calligraphy lessons as she grew to be ofmarriageable age, for no Tarkaan wished his daughter to embarrass him when sheleft his protection to join her new husband’s household. 

But this was a piece of Calormen, not of the north. To hearthese words, to speak the names of Calormene gods in the land of the Lionhimself, was vertiginously strange. 

Which is funnybecause Narnia is full of non-Christian gods and quasi-religious figures:Bacchus, Silenus, Pomona, all the various nature spirits, even FatherChristmas. And yet, it’s also a feeling I got while writing this, a sort ofnagging, "But is this really appropriate?” 

And that’s how I knewit was important to include this. Because religious pluralism is never inappropriate. (If Lewis just rolledover in his grave? GOOD.) 

“So may it be,” Cor said, his voice wavering as ifhe shared Aravis’s feeling of displacement. “In the name of your father, Itake you for my wife. May our marriage be honorable." 

Kidrash Tarkaan would approve of Cor, Aravis thought. "Somay it be. In the name of your mother” – whom she had never met, but KingLune had loved and respected her and therefore Aravis could but assume QueenElwen had been as bright and honorable as her sons – “I take you for myhusband. May our marriage be true." 

Someday I am going toget Queen Elwen textually into a story. Or else! 

"So may it be,” Cor said, and then paused, lettingsilence seep into the sunlit afternoon instead of continuing the last set ofpromises. 

“Is that it?” Bree asked. “Pretty enough, Isuppose, if you like that sort of thing. Only, don’t Calormene rituals go inthrees?" 

"They do,” Aravis said, knowing exactly why Corwas hesitating. She squeezed his hands, her sword calluses rubbing against his,and switched the lead. “In the name of Aslan, I take you for my husband. Mayour marriage be strong." 

She should have said Tash, but while she would alwaysrespect the god of war and vengeance, she had lost his favor when she gaveallegiance to the lands of his enemies. Even if she had still held him as theking of all gods, it would feel wrong to swear by his power in Narnia, and theLion was equally strong and fierce, his power more than enough to hold as asupport. Aravis had taken Aslan for her liege in the wars of heaven and so shewould make her future in his name. She would marry Cor by the ways of Calormen,but they belonged to Archenland too, now. It was fitting that she acknowledgethat heritage in her vows. 

And here again wehave the theme of finding a personal synthesis or balance point between twocultures. 

Cor blinked, and then smiled, a small, private curl of hislips just for her. "So may it be,” he said. “In the names of all the gods, I take you for my wife. Mayour marriage be forever.” He raised their joined hands, sliding hisfingers around to turn her hands palms upward, and kissed the soft inner skinof Aravis’s wrists: a feather-brush of skin on skin, his breath to the pulse ofher blood. His beard tickled across her open palms as he looked up into hereyes. 

I find beards hot,okay? There is no deeper motivation here. 

Aravis swallowed. “So may it be,” she said. 

She pulled; Cor came willingly. She met his breath with herown. 

Which is a veryroundabout way of saying, “they kissed,” but I dunno, this phrasingfeels a lot more emotionally and erotically charged to me. 

—————————————————————————————— 

The post-chapternotes are as follows: 

Cor and Aravis use a tweaked version of the Calormenemarriage ritual. The traditional version goes like this: 

Man: In the name of Soolyeh, I take you for mywife. May our marriage be warm.Woman: So may it be. In the name of Garshomon, I take you for myhusband. May our marriage be fruitful.Man: So may it be. In the name of your father, I take you for mywife. May our marriage be honorable.Woman: So may it be. In the name of your mother, I take you for myhusband. May our marriage be true.Man: So may it be. In the name of Achadith, I take you for my wife.May our marriage be strong.Woman: So may it be. In the name of Tash, I take you for myhusband. May our marriage be forever.Man: So may it be. 

And then they are married. The traditional divorce ceremonygoes approximately the same way. Either the woman or the man can end themarriage at any time by saying, “In the name of Nazreen, I divorce you. Inthe name of Nur, I divorce you. In the name of Azaroth, I divorce you” –again, three times makes it true. It’s not done lightly, since the person whoinstigates a divorce may start a blood feud with that action, but it’s stillpretty simple and egalitarian. 

I guess this would bewhere I explain some stuff about my Calormene pantheon? Okay. There are ninedeities: four goddesses, four gods, and Azaroth who is usually male but thereare some people who say otherwise. (Azaroth’s domain is death. Boundaries getfuzzy there.) The official mythology and theology are those promoted by Tashbaan,but there are hundreds of regional variants. 

Generally, Soolyeh isthe goddess of the sun, of marriage, and fertility/agriculture. Garshomon, thegod of rivers, earth, and agriculture, is her husband. (Soolyeh’s symbol is asun-disk; Garshomon’s is a bull. A sun-disk surmounted by bull horns isfrequently used on their shared temples and as a marriage blessing. 

Tash is the god ofwar and vengeance and generally regarded as king of heaven. Achadith, thegoddess of change, of victory, and of things out of place, is generallyconsidered to be both the queen of heaven and Tash’s wife. 

So the marriageceremony calls upon the deities most associated with marriage, as a generalblessing and also an indirect request for children; calls upon theparticipants’ own families as a reminder that marriage is ultimately a socialinstitution; and calls upon the two most powerful deities to sort of tie themarriage into the legal fabric of the Calormene Empire and also remind theparticipants that there are consequences for breaking their vows. (Neither Tashnor Achadith is a comfortable sort ofdeity.) 

The divorce ceremonycalls upon Nazreen (goddess of wisdom, memory, regret, and liminal periods),Nur (god of education/educated professionals, disease, and medicine), andAzaroth (god of silence, darkness, and death). Nazreen and Nur are also said tobe married, but their domains are more shadowy and associated with endings. 

Sokda and Zardeenah,the remaining two deities, have nothing to do with either marriage or divorce. 

—————————————————————————————— 

And that is pretty much that. :)

[hoodoo12]

Festival (29/30)

@beejiesbitch @turtlepated @clairjohnson @go-commander-kim @memedemonhours @monsterlovinghours @yankyo @edosunshine @saucymangos @beetlebitchywitch

Dawn is on the horizon.

At the sound of approaching hoofbeats, Ollie scrambled to BJ’s ankle, hugging it. The brownie, pressed into service by holding the pilfered jelly cakes but ignored during the last bit of time, followed suit and snuck behind his foot as if to make sure he wasn’t trampled by the larger being approaching. Although distracted by Jessie’s return to his shoulder, he held her in place and stooped to pick up the leprechaun. The brownie gibbered something intelligible in a high pitched warble, and Ollie asked if he could be picked up too. Still riding high from vicarious pleasure provided by Jessie, BJ rolled his eyes but complied even as he groused, “I am not a taxi!” The flurry of kisses from Jessie and a for-his-ears-only tease that he was a big softie made him scowl but he couldn’t keep it up for long and the expression morphed into a half smile. Ollie’s kisses in thanks to his bare skin didn’t make as much impression on him, but his lover’s continued joy of her pet and now the brownie did sand down his prickly edges. “Almost dawn. No more Beltane,” Ollie told them, pointing towards the brightening sky.

“You gonna be able to get us home, or are you too exhausted from fucking the night away?” “Too tired. Big bastard do it himself,” the tiny fey replied, somehow finding a way to actually lay down. It took a second for BJ to realize the leprechaun was joking. Jessie laughed and hugged him, and the ugly little brownie too, who skipped in place while still managing to hold the jelly cakes steady. It pained him to admit it, even to himself, but he was glad Ollie had a good night. He also knew that there was a better than average chance that Jessie was going to say she wanted that brownie to come home with them, and he was personally so blissed out he wasn’t sure if he could deny her.

Carmen could barely keep her eyes open. Her entire body, not just her groin, felt sore. She trembled in random small jerks, her throat was raw from crying out, her eyes felt dry. Her lower belly, stretched with come, ached. As much deep desire as she’d had to be filled, that feeling was drifting away and it didn’t seem like such a substantial loss that Beej’s come was leaking out of her. She let him hold and pamper her, pressing a kiss to him and keeping hold on one of his hands, but did turn her head when she heard his clone’s voice.

She’d heard the hoofbeats but hadn’t expected to be greeted by an imposing centaur with a hide so glossy it shone even in the pale light of dawn. What drew her gaze more was the clone’s appearance, from her flower-studded locks to her distended belly; she gasped and held a hand out to her. “Oh my god--you’re gorgeous!” she exclaimed.

“A true representation of a fertility goddess,” Eve agreed. The witch had approached silently. BJ looked up to see this short newcomer, who seemed completely comfortable in the presence of not only fey and a centaur, but two specters as well. “That’s what I told her,” Kadus confirmed, drawing his hands over Pink’s skin from shoulder to heavy breasts, to her belly and thighs. “She says I’ve been kind, but no one else here was as attentive to my needs. I’ve been honored she chose me as a partner.” Carmen asked Beej to let her stand. He complied. The flood of come as he finally pulled out made her inner thighs slick and the ground below her wet--the last imps brave enough to try and beat the sun immediately lapped at the ground for a last taste. She held onto him to steady herself; her knees were weak as she reached for his female clone too. Her hands slid along her belly as well. The small pink flowers in her pubic hair trembled and lightly Carmen brushed over them too, although it was more in awe with no overt sexual undertone. She was finally able to drag her eyes back to the centaur who obviously was just as enthralled. “It’s nice to meet you, Kadus,” Carmen said. “Thank you for being so open to a lover who isn’t, well, alive.” It was hard to express how happy it made her that Beej’s clone, and essentially him, found acceptance and pleasure. “As I said, I was honored. I will admit I am not overly familiar with specters and their ilk, so I am grateful that she approached me. If she was ever permitted to come to visit me, she’d be treated as treasured guest.” He looked to Beej as he finished, with understanding he was her original and had the control. “Kadus. There isn’t much time left.” The minotaur who’d approached Carmen several times through the evening called from near the bonfire. The centaur raised a hand in acknowledgment and whispered to Pink, “I have to go. Thank you, ροζ goess μου, for tonight. You’ve fulfilled me and look as though you’re carrying my child, which makes this festival mean even more to me. I hope to see you again.”

Jessie looked over the massive centaur and the pink-haired ghost with all her flowers and vines, looking every bit like fertility personified. Her heart fluttered a little in her chest at how beautiful and different they were from everything else she had seen that night. She vaguely wondered if her touch was strong enough to get off a partner that large . . . she glanced at BJ and smirked. A mental image of him in that shape, though allowing him his black and white stripes along the lower torso and limbs.

She turned her attention back to Ollie and the little brownie who'd been so sweet as to help him bring the cakes she'd wanted. Sincerely hoping that they would affect BJ the way they had her and Ollie, she hugged both of the smaller creatures affectionately, enjoying being their size for the moment to show her appreciation in a way that soon she wouldn't be able to anymore. She had no qualms with hugging and holding Ollie's smaller form, but found full-body hugs far more satisfying.

"Thank you again, honey. Tonight was wonderful, and I'm glad you shared part of your life with us. I've never been anywhere like this before, done anything quite like this before."

She kissed his lips one more time, cupping his cheeks as she did so, though the kiss wasn't sloppy or impassioned, but soft and sweet.

"And thank you, too baby. For letting this night happen, for indulging and letting yourself unwind a little."

She leaned to kiss his skin, aching impatiently to be her usual size again if only to kiss him properly. Of course, the desire to give him sweet relief, to take him and be claimed again was the most engulfing of her urges. The desire to simply kiss and hold and touch him the way she was used to was equally potent, and she hoped he could feel the distinction between her yearning for him with her body and with her heart.

All at once, she recalled that Eve seemed to know the man who tried to capture Ollie - and Eve was present. She looked her way and with some concentration she spoke to her.

"Hello, again. Thank you so much for running off that asshole earlier- I was wondering if you could tell me generally where he stays? Just . . . worried about a recurrence."

Beej gave a soft hiss as his sensitive tip slipped from Carmen's tight heat, and quickly focused on returning his cock to its typical size and shape. As much as he was pleased to fuck his lover with any number of genitals, he knew he would be most comfortable with the body he was familiar with.

He held her steady as she reached out for his clone, who reached out to take her hand, smiling happily and blushing at being complimented so. Kadus' large, warm hands roaming her body so tenderly made her smile and blush more deeply, and the descriptions of her form made her giggle softly.

"Yer all too sweet," she murmured, feeling the color deepen in her face and hair. Having so many eyes on her was for once rather pleasant.

She looked palpably saddened when the minotaur reminded Kadus that their time to leave had come. His words about her being welcome made her heart ache, and Beej could see the expression on her face. He knew that feeling on sight, and immediately sought to offer some consolation.

With a snap of his fingers, one of his metallic pink beetles appeared. He looked at one of the larger flowers she'd sprouted and the plastic shifted shape to resemble the blossom instead. A soft black cord protruded from the plastic to allow the centaur to wear or hang it if he chose, and it floated to him.

He looked to Carmen and asked, "Are we riding with Eve to get home? Might be a little bit until we're back at the crypt . . . if you wanted to wait to put me away, she'd technically have as long as you allow before she'd be pulled back into me."

Pink looked startled and hopeful, glancing between Carmen and Kadus.

"You mean . . . I could walk him home, sorta?" she asked almost bashfully. "I'd be back the moment ya say the word three times... I'd like to see, if . . . if it's alright with you."

She looked between them, clearly addressing both.

Carmen was as surprised as Beej’s female clone looked; it hadn’t occurred to her that she had any power to dictate his clones. If it was something the clone, and essentially Beej, wanted, she wouldn’t deny the chance, but had no clue how any of that worked. She looked to her cousin for guidance.

Suddenly the center of attention by both the woman who somehow had made herself so small--a woman who’s aura was an odd and unsettling combination of dark sooty swirls that looked attached to her like tar, and an unearthly light that glimmered randomly and had a beckoning pull; Eve made a mental note to speak to her privately, but only after she’d meditated and wove protective spells around herself--asking her about Andy and her cousin’s unspoken but clear deference to Beej’s clone’s situation, Eve gave herself a shake to center herself.

She hoped Jessie understood the clone’s situation was more pressing. With a nod to Jessie that she’d heard the question, she turned her attention to Kadus, the clone he’d taken as a partner, and Beej. “I don’t know how crossing over into another plane would work, once dawn truly breaks,” she cautioned. “The doors are open because of the night, and seal afterward. Usually once they’re closed, they don’t open again until another night of power, which may be Samhain, or it may be a full year from now. “I have heard that some cross the barriers on their own, but it takes powerful magic or an intimate knowledge of where doors may be located to do so. Beej, you’re unique, so I’m not sure if your name . . . curse supercedes all that.” She took a breath before continuing. “Would you be prepared to accept that she would be missing from you if she doesn’t cross back?” The witch didn’t want to sound dire, but she wanted to impress that this was an unprecedented situation, and to understand what the consequences may be. As her cousin spoke, laying out that she simply didn’t know, Carmen’s hold on her lover tightened. Although she loved that clone, she realized it wasn’t truly her decision. She’d support Beej; if he didn’t want to risk losing that part of his personality, that was fine. If he wanted to let her try and let the chips fall where they may, that was fine too. Despite Kadus still holding her, Carmen reached forward to take her hand, squeezing it too.

While her cousin and Beej conferred with his clone and the centaur, Eve turned her attention to the taller specter and the little people hitching a ride on his shoulders. “I heard what you said,” he told her. “If we take this one home--” He jerked a thumb at the brownie that had taken a seat, holding two jelly cakes and watching everything with bright eyes, beside the leprechaun she recognized.

“--it ain’t gonna get back to where it’s supposed to be either, huh?” The mild resignation in his gravelly voice made her smile. “No, brownies have a little different kind of power. He can go where he wants, and there are ways to permanently banish him,” the witch answered truthfully. She reached upward and stroked the little being’s back. “I’d recommend just politely asking him to go, though. You don’t want bad luck.” The other specter made a noise halfway between a snort and a chuckle, and Eve saw the woman pinch him lightly as she whispered something to him.

“As for your question . . .” she said, addressing the woman directly, “Andy is . . . well, Andy. He has raw power and could be a pillar of strength in a coven, but he prefers to eskew tradition. That isn’t frowned upon--we don’t have hard and fast rules about what people must or must not do. He is not above reproach, however, and the little stunt he pulled earlier wasn’t unnoticed.”

BJ shifted his gaze between Jessie and this witch. “What little stunt? Is this what you were talking about earlier, beautiful, with some asshole grabbing Ollie? Who is this guy?” This ghost reminded her slightly of Beej, but gave off a darker vibe. Eve wasn’t sure if she liked his piqued, angrier interest. “Andy’s a solitary warlock with some superiority issues,” she clarified.

BJ lowered his head in thought for a moment. “There was a guy who saw me and Ollie once, and followed you in that store--remember, baby? He showed a little too much interest in Ollie--” Eve interrupted. “We’ll have a chat with him.” She tried to be forceful, but didn’t miss the look he and the woman shared. They’d obviously been partners for a while, well in tune with each other, trading unspoken thoughts like that. A ‘chat’ wasn’t what was going through their minds.

In an effort to shift the conversation, she gestured towards the branch outside the clearing that he’d draped his suit over and said, “That incubus is finally gone. You should get your clothes and have Ollie take you back home.”

tbc . . .

[mhdiaries]

Diary of Avea Trotter

You might get a kick out of reading my diary... seriously, you might.

6/14

I went for a gallop along the beach this morning for a couple of reasons. One, because I thought the sand might feel nice on my hooves, and two, a nice gallop always clears my head. There was a lovely tailwind, too, that caught my wings and helped carry me along. It was almost as if I were flying down the beach, almost. I passed a ghoul and a manster who looked like they were my age. The ghoul was trying to teach the manster how to surf, but he didn’t look scary comfortable.

I didn’t stop to watch, though, because I was just getting my second wind and was really starting to enjoy myself. I also saw Sirena bob up out of the water and then sink again beneath the waves. She didn’t see me, so I didn’t stop for her either, as there was no guarantee that Sirena was going to come back to the surface anyway. I love Sirena to undeath, but I can never make wings or tails out of what she’s about to do next. She tends to drift down her own path, and if it happens to cross the one you’re on, it’s always a treat. In fact, as flighty as she can be, Sirena is the reason Neighthan, Bonita and me all met and became friends. All of us were in middle school together, but we really didn’t know each other very well. I was standing by my locker one day when this vampire kid asked if I wanted to come to his little brother’s birthday party and give flying pony rides. I wanted to kick the unliving dayfrights out of him, when Neighthan and Bonita walked past. Neighthan and Bonita stopped to try and play peacemaker, but the kid’s friends ganged up on us, and pretty soon they were chasing us all down the hall. We turned a corner, and there was Sirena. “Follow me if you want to unlive!”, she said as she touched a brick in the wall that opened a secret passage. We all ran in, and she closed the door behind us. Bonita asked, “How’d you find this place?” Sirena just shrugged, “Sometimes not paying attention to where you’re going gets you to places you really want to be.” None of us understood what she was saying at the time, but we’ve all been beast friends ever since, and no matter how many schools we’ve bounced around to, we know we can always count on each other.

6/20

Every monster knows about Monster High, but not every monster wants to go there. I suppose there are different reasons for that. I’ve heard monsters say that the school isn’t old enough to have traditions, that it’s just a fad that will “run its course” and be replaced by some new creepy cool high school idea. I’ve also heard that the headmistress there is such a stickler for details and excellence that some members of the ghoul board think it’s making it too hard to attract new students. I don’t really know what to think, although it has some pretty passionate monsters that say it’s the beast school ever. I know mom and dad are hoping that they accept my application so I can start there in the fall. I doubt that I’ll get in, but I’m filling out the application anyway. Part of the application is a section where we’re supposed to give a brief history of our monster scaritage. I started to just write: Father – Centaur, Mother – Harpy, and leave it at that, but I’m proud of my parents, so I didn’t. Dad’s a scientist who specializes in researching monster remedies and medicine. Mom is, or I should say was, an aerial surveyor. Now she works with dad as his research assistant. He calls her “his ghoul frightday” and lays all his success at her feet. They met when they were working at a jungle research station with Dr. Boolittle. I don’t think mom and dad liked each other very much at first. Apparently, dad had a habit of getting lost in the jungle, and mom was always being sent out to find him. Dad says he never got lost – he just wanted to see what was over the next hill, even if that hill was 20 miles away. One day a monster storm was blowing in, and dad hadn’t returned to the research station, so mom flew out, again, to find him. Mom found him about the same time a powerful down draft from the storm sent her crashing into the trees. Dad found her, but mom’s wings and one ankle were so badly sprained that she could neither fly nor walk. Dad felt so bad about mom getting hurt because of him that he put her on his back and carried her out of the jungle. Mom said this act of kindness caused her heart to melt right out of her chest. Dad also said that on the trip back they found out they had a lot more in common than they both realized and that by the time they made it out of the jungle he felt like he’d found his best friend. Now mom says dad helps keep her grounded while dad says mom makes his heart soar. They’re the beast parents ever, and they make me proud of what and who I am.

7/2

I’ve been accused of being as stubborn as some four-legged normie animal that for some reason I can’t remember the name of right now. I’m not sure which side of the family that stubbornness comes from, but mom and dad both have their moments. Sometimes it’s a good trait to have, like when I’m out for a run and my mind says, “STOP!”, but I know my body can keep on going and sometimes not, like when I won’t back down after I’ve been insulted. For instance, one of the most insulting things you can say to a centaur is, “How about a ride?” Centaurs don’t give rides. Most monsters know this, but because I also have wings, they think it doesn’t apply to me. I know I should have thicker skin by now, but there are just some soft spots that certain barbs always seem to find. I guess that’s what makes me distrustful of other monsters. Yeah, yeah, I know; you can’t judge every monster by the words and actions of a few, but I’ve really gotten to the place where I assume any new monster I meet is one of the few until they prove they’re not. Mom always tells me that no monster can take my dignity, but I can give it away by the way I react towards those who are trying to steal it from me. My mom has a lot of dignity stored up, while I constantly feel like I’m dropping a single coin into a very large and very empty vault.

7/10

Neighthan, Bonita and me all went to the movies tonight. We invited Sirena, but she said she would see where the currents took her. At least she’s consistently inconsistent. The movie was the last one Veronica von Vamp made before she returned to her life as Elissabat and took the throne as the queen of the vampires. Of course, she could always make another one, after all, what’s the point of being the queen if you can’t do what you want every now and again. It was fun, and I liked the theater. It has a standing room only section for those monsters that don’t really fit into a standard size seat. After it was over we went to the Die-ner to grab a late fright snack, but I guess every other monster must have had the same idea, because we had to wait around a while for a table. While we were waiting, we heard two ghouls behind us talking about Monster High. They were exchange students of some sort, one was a lake monster from Rotland and the other was a bigfoot from Monster Picchu. They mostly were talking to Neighthan, which was fine, since he’s genuinely friendly, and ghouls seem to think he’s cute. I don’t see it myself, but that’s probably because I’ve known him for so long, he’s more like a brother to me. I was actually wishing we were closer to this Minotaur manster that was ahead of us in line. He really made my wings flutter, but he was also with this sweet little Cyclops ghoul, and you could tell they only had eye for each other. We finally got seated, though, and our waitress was this vampire ghoul that tried to give us the wrong food twice, but she was so funny and apologetic about it that we had a hard time getting irritated at her. Neighthan said she was the daughter of Dracula, how he knew that I’m not sure, but like I said, he’s much more friendly than the rest of us, and he probably just asked. Sirena finally came floating in after we were finished. She said that she had been exploring the catacombs and met another ghost named Spectra. “I totally lost track of time, and then I got distracted, and then I couldn’t remember where I was supposed to be, so I just came here,” she said. We all talked for a little while longer about our chances of being able to start at MH in the fall. “We’re going to get in,” Neighthan said, “I’m not worried at all.” Bonita was worried, though, and she started chewing on the sleeve of her shirt as we were talking about it. I’m not worried as much about getting in as I am about fitting in. what if it’s the same as every other school we’ve been to? I’m tired of being the odd-monster out, and if they don’t want us then they can just have their stupid school, I don’t care how great it is… deep breath Avea… deep breath. It might be the beast thing to ever happen… or possibly the worst. Maybe, I’ll just cross my fingers and hope for something in the middle.

7/30

I loped down to the mailbox today, hoping to find the new pair of gloves I ordered, palomino in color, velvet in material and just the right size to fit my hands. But what did I find instead? A letter embossed with the Monster High crest and a wax seal stamped with the initials HHB. This put a little giddy in my up, as it was certain to be a rejection letter. So I was all prepared for the thought of yet another year trying to find a school where we’d be welcome. I gave the letter to mom and trotted back to my room. After about a minute I heard her crying, “Yep, I thought, rejection.” Not that I’m cavalier about mom’s hurt feelings. But since I already knew what it was going to say, I guess I just wasn’t going to get all emotional about yet another high school that didn’t want me. I walked back to where mom was standing and gave her a big hug, “It’s okay, mom, we can always try again next year.” She didn’t say anything, she just smiled through the tears and held up the letter.

Miss Avea Trotter

Dear Avea,

We are delighted to inform you that your application for enrollment at Monster High has been accepted for the fall scaremester. We trust that you are as excited to become part of the student body at Monster High as we are to welcome you into it.

Sincerely,

Headless Headmistress Bloodgood

Then, just for a minute, I started crying, too – I’m not sure why, maybe, some part of me hopes this will be the one place where I’ll be accepted for who and what I am… now wouldn’t that be a real kick in the pants.