#its purpose is not to teach objective truths

[write-to-tell-your-story]

Sometimes the point of a story is to be very realistic in its portrayals of people and/or the world it is set in.

Other times, the point of a story is to be a power fantasy, or a nice black & white escapist fantasy, or a horny fantasy, or all sorts of other fantasies that provide people with a fun and cathartic break from reality and all its gray areas and unfortunate truths and overwhelming systemic power structures that leave us feeling helpless against faceless enemies we don't always know how to fight.

Sometimes, "this story is unrealistic," is the point.

Seek realism when it serves the story. Throw "realism" out the window when something else will serve your story better.

[heartfullofleeches]

The Blacksmith

Yan Deity HCs [Request]

Tw: Self Harm

-

- Blacksmith isn't what most would gods would consider being one of their own. For the better part of its existence, The Blacksmith has functioned akin to a machine rather than his own individual self. Acting on orders given by those above him was all he knew until the punishment of gods through extensive torture was shunned upon by many. Blacksmith was free to do as they wished, but they're generally stumped to the workings of society outside of what their created purpose.

- Love as humans and even some gods express it is unfamiliar to the Blacksmith. Their creators greatest mistakes was teaching it the painful side of love without the innocence of something puee. He was instilled with the knowledge that any sign of weakness should not be allowed. That being said, a strange warm fills its chest whenever you treat it kindly. He does not deserve the gesture- Are you toying with it because you truly believe he is beneath you?

"My Lord.... I do not understand the purpose of this so called "hug" you have bestowed upon me.... I did not ask you to stop."

- There is no room for error in Blacksmith's eyes. As he adapts to the mortal understanding of affection, Blacksmith showers you with gifts and gestures to prove they are willing to even the playing field with you. If he brings you something you are allergic to or simply not a fan of its wise to keep sharp objects from him until you can calm him down and assure him it was a common mistake.

"May the spill of my blood grant me your forgiveness.. Had I heard you clearer I would not have made this mistake."

"It's cool, dude- Pizza is pizza."

- The Blacksmith is immortal and heals relatively quickly, which is why if you bother to patch them up when they do get hurt their brain just kinda shortcuts for a while. You are the mortal in the situation. Those supplies would be better saved for you. Is this what it means to care for another out of the generosity of one's heart(s)? Is this love? Logically, when you are injured they must return the sentiment.

"Please hold still, My Lord. The cast is almost complete."

"Isn't this a bit excessive? It was only a splinter."

"... Negative."

- The Blacksmith has a hidden profession of making music boxes. It is a tad embarrassed due to the macabre nature of the other objects it creates, but as they learn more if your world it develops a small obsession with the melodies they produce and their mechanisms. He leaves ones he is most proudest of in your bedroom - expecting you to somehow have no clue how it ended up there.

- Blacksmith can easily remove their helmet - they just don't want to. He has been described as beautiful by gods who have met it after the incident due to their eyes, but as for the appearance of its face as a whole no-one knows. It wears the iron maiden to atone for its sin of nearly condemning an innocent god, but it also believes those gods were liars and that its face will disgust you. If you argue back that are gorgeous regardless of if you've seen it or not, The Blacksmith has no choice but to take your word as truth since they trust you not to lie to them.

- Enjoys classical music. Cannot dance to save it's own skin, but would greatly admire your dancing no matter your skill level.

- One rule you must keep in mind is to not give Blacksmith access to the Internet. He will absorb modern lingo and relationship advice like a sponge. It confuses him greatly, but considering you are from this time it might be the key to winning your heart.

"Have a good day at work...Pookie."

[cmdrfupa]

Tend to me

Barkeep!Nanami x Salarywomxn!Reader

“That's what I do. I drink and I know things.”

a/n did this come from talking in a server about how post college Nanami needs a job and simping over how hot he’d be with his sleeves rolled up? You bet your ass it did. Thank you Court and Nana for your beautiful brains 🩵💜

MDNI +19

Five rejection emails, no callbacks, and his interview today turned into a scene from a novela after the receptionist barged into the boss's office, exclaiming that she was pregnant. All in the span of one week.

Kento pressed his forehead to the linoleum. table as he groaned.  

“Don't give up! It's like, 10,000 other bank jobs! You'll get one.” Haibara squeezed Kento’s shoulder as he watched his form slump into itself. 

"Yu, it seems like I’ve been turned down for 10,000 jobs. At this rate, I’ll have better luck getting a job as a cab driver.”

“But you don't have a car—”

“Shhhhhh.” Kento turned his head to the side, still keeping it on the table and looking at Yu. 

He knew Yu was trying to help, but it’d be more helpful if he didn't speak.

"Look, Ken. If nothing else comes up, I can talk to my boss to get you hired.” Yu stuffed the last of his tuna onigiri in his mouth, smiling as he attempted to cheer his roommate up. “You won't have my role as a trainer, but you could be one of the guys who clean off the sweaty machines! Pays pretty decent.” 

Clearing his throat, Kento sat up, eyes still closed before he spoke up. 

“Yu.”

“Yeah?” His big brown eyes were only filled with genuine care; Kento looked over at him and sighed.

“Thank you. I'll let you know if I need you to do that.

 Yu gave a toothy grin as he gave Kento a swift pat on the back. “It's all gonna be okay! Just breathe.”

Kento stood with a wry smile. “Thanks. I'm gonna go for a walk. Clear my mind a bit. See you tonight.”

The stroll served its purpose. It reminded Kento he wasn't a poor interviewer, nor did he lack the gusto. The job market was over-saturated and relied heavily on personal connections; Kento did not know a soul in the finance world. 

He stopped; a ‘Now hiring, Inquire within’ sign on a heavily tinted window caught his eye while Gojo watched him from the other end of the FaceTime call.

“Where does that leave you now?”

 “Well, I’ll get some experience in the meantime, become a math teacher or tutor while I look for something more sustainable.” 

"You? A teacher? Nanamin, don’t make me laugh.” Gojo propped his phone up, “You’ll have the students' brains bleeding out if you do that. Think of the children, Ken-doll.” 

Kento rolled his eyes and watched Gojo clean his desk. Literary motifs littered the wall behind Gojo. A large poster of Yevgeny Zamyatin hung in the center. “Math isn't supposed to be fun anyway. It's not teaching Dr. Seuss. It teaches objective truths and concepts.” 

Gojo feigned a yawn. “Wherever there is objective truth, there is satire.”

“That’s not how Wyndham Lewis meant it.”

“You don't know that! He's dead. It's all about interpretation.”

“I’m hanging up now. Gojo. Goodbye.”

Gojo smiled. “I can pull some strings and see if Yaga has a spot in the math department.” he nabbed his phone, seemingly prepping to leave his classroom. 

“And remember dinner this weekend! See you Nanamin!” he blew a kiss into the phone pushing Kento to immediately hang up. 

Kento looked back at the building. The 3-story building had hints of older Japanese architecture with European accents. 

"The Zenith" was carved into a wooden pillar adjacent to the entry, with a simple design. 

“I can just see what they're hiring for. No harm in that.”

The bar inside was the epitome of luxury and sophistication, designed to impress the city’s most discerning clientele. In the hotel's heart, Kento felt out of place. The floor-to-ceiling windows showed breathtaking views of the Tokyo skyline. He waited for the hiring manager to end her dumbfounded stare. 

“So no previous barkeeping history, no customer service work, and no idea how to run a till.” The dark-haired woman named Utahime looked up at Kento. “What qualifications do you have?” 

Smoothing his hair back to think of what he could say to seem qualified, he looked around the room. Older individuals who appear established. Business-minded. 

An older woman, in a meeting, smiling at the blonde-haired man. An older man was on a call. His younger companion crossed her legs and batted her lashes as Kento scanned. 

"I could boost revenue and upsell your best bottles to those who don't care about the price."

“Mr. Nanami. How could you do that? Most of our clientele just order one drink and maybe a listening ear.” 

There were a lot of things Kento lacked but looks were never one of them. The gift of having the perfect genetics made academics a breeze. But, it was now time to use his good looks and gift of gab, inherited from his grandfather. 

“I learn quick. Hire me today and I’ll have every stool filled and the register overfilled in 7 days. I guarantee.” 

Polished, calm, and precise. Nanami excelled behind the bar, his steady hands mixing drinks for the city’s elite. With his sleeves rolled, he perfected the craft of keeping up with mundane conversations mid-shake. His bulging veins, as he held the shaker, made every woman calculate their tip before he served their martinis.  Muscles flexed when he noticed some of the older men who could care less about the young women in cocktail dresses attempting to be mysterious and wanted to know if the blonde keep could do more than be heavy-handed on the gin. 

He was the bar's eye candy, something they should've thought about hiring months ago. 

It's a world where he realized he can control every variable, crafting experiences one cocktail at a time. 

After his first week, they offered him a permanent position. Working midday during the week to keep businessmen and women pleased and one Saturday evening shift a month to keep the younger crowd in.  

The low hum of conversation and soft jazz music filled the dimly lit bar as Kento worked behind the sleek marble counter, expertly mixing another round of drinks for the evening's guests. He wore his usual stoic expression, with the usual white button-down shirt and well-fitting slacks to match. 

He placed a completed cocktail on the bar top, and wiped his hands while checking what needed to be refilled. “Utahime? Could I get some more ice and a few more lowball glasses, please?” he spoke into the earpiece he donned on his left ear. “They seem to be disappearing, and Choso isn't back from his break."

"Yeah. Give me 20. I'm running tables for catering. I'll send it by Takuma.”

“Thanks.”

He wiped down the bar top; a figure slid onto one of the high-backed leather stools in his peripheral with an aura that turned heads without needing to demand attention. 

“What can I get started for you this afternoon?”

“I’ll have a French 75, please. Thank you.” Smooth and assured, your voice rang like a hymnal in his ears. 

Kento gave you a nod, his ability to indulge in small talk temporarily taken from him by your presence. He set to work, measuring gin and fresh lemon juice with his usual care, topped with a flourish of champagne. The drink landed before you in a delicate, chilled glass.

You took a sip, eyes never leaving his. Your nude-colored lips curved into a small but telling smile. "Not bad... but not quite perfect either."

Kento raised an eyebrow, subtly intrigued but keeping his expression neutral. “I take it you have high standards.” 

You chuckled, low and sultry. “I’m a person who knows what she wants, and I don’t settle for anything less.”

Nanami leaned in slightly, his tone dry yet teasing. “Perfection is subjective. Some people might call that 'almost' drinkable."

"Almost isn't in my vocabulary," you replied, eyes gleaming with challenge. You pursed your lips. “Not in business, not in life... and definitely not in drinks.”

He smirked, just enough for you to notice. “I’ll keep that in mind for your next order.”

You swirled the drink in your glass, the fizz of champagne catching the low light as you appraised him. “A man who can admit he’s not perfect? You must have been raised well. Refreshing.”

Nanami met your gaze, unruffled by your attempt to throw him off his game. “I prefer precision over perfection. Perfection tends to make people complacent.”

Your eyes narrowed but with a hint of amusement. “Interesting perspective, coming from someone who works behind a bar.”

He didn’t miss a beat. “Someone has to remind people that the best things in life have room for improvement. Even when they think they’ve already got it all.”

Tilting your head, glancing at the way the simple silver chain rested against his collar. You were impressed but clearly enjoying the game. “You might be onto something. What’s your name?”

“Nanami Kento,” he said simply, as he wiped down the bar.

“Well, Nanami,” your voice is softer but no less commanding, "next time, why don’t you make me a drink that I can’t critique?”

He gave you a rare, almost imperceptible smile. “Challenge accepted.”

Your eyes lingered on each other, the tension electric. You raised your glass, with a smile so poised and self-assured, before taking another sip.

"Looking forward to it," you murmured, low and teasing. Then, you stood and left a 50-dollar tip with your card. You walked away, your perfume lingering in the air.

Kento read your name on the card. His curiosity ran wild with every possible scenario as he watched your backend disappear into the lobby

_

A few days later, the bar's golden lights glowed softly. They reflected off the dark marble counter as Nanami wiped down glasses. His thoughts drifted to the usual routine. He’d swapped shifts, which resulted in watching the evening crowd trickle in, primarily corporate types and high-society guests, and Nanami managed the situation with his typical efficiency and calm demeanor.

But as he adjusted a bottle of whiskey on the back shelf, a familiar presence caught his eye.

You were back.

You entered with the same quiet confidence, this time fitted with a far more casual, sleek outfit paired with heels that clacked against the polished floor. 

Moving with ease, you slipped into the same seat as last time, your gaze meeting his immediately. Your lips curled into a slow smile, almost as if you knew he’d be expecting you. 

“Good evening," Kento greeted, his voice calm with a slight edge of anticipation. 

"Nanami," you replied, leaning forward. Your self-assured energy was hard to ignore. “It's a pleasure to see you tonight. I think I’m in the mood for something a bit more... complex.” 

“Is that so?” he asked, his tone dry but with an undertone of curiosity. “What are we talking about? A Negroni? Maybe a Vieux Carré?” 

You smiled a glint of challenge in your eye. “Surprise me.”

Kento studied you for a moment, then nodded and began his work. 

His movements were precise but fluid as he grabbed a bottle of mezcal and began crafting a Smoky Margarita, layering complex flavors—mezcal for smokiness, lime for sharpness, and a touch of agave to round it out, all topped off with a rim of chili salt. The drink was bold and nuanced, like the woman before him.

He placed the glass in front of you with hushed confidence, waiting for your reaction. 

With a slow sip, your lips brushed against the glass as your tongue sampled the salted rim. Eyes closed momentarily to savor the taste.

When you opened them, your gaze locked onto his. 

“Now this,” you leaned forward, "is much better.”

Kento leaned on the counter slightly, his smirk more visible this time. “Glad to hear it. Looks like I’m learning.”

“Seems like you’re a quick study.”

You held each other’s gaze, the air between thick with tension that had only grown since your last encounter. Your voice dropped to an intimate murmur, barely audible over the ambient music. “So, Nanami... what do you do when you’re not making perfect drinks?”

He raised an eyebrow, amused by the shift in your tone. “I don’t get much free time. I like structure with very little change. But I do have a break coming up.” 

Your smile widened, and there was a glint of mischief in your eyes. “Is that so? And what do you usually do on these breaks?” 

Kento straightened, glancing around the bar. The crowd was calm tonight, his usuals with a small group of beer drinkers. He certainly wasn’t going to be missed if he disappeared a little earlier than usual. “Not very much. But there’s a private spot upstairs. Quiet.” 

“Lead the way.”

Kento signaled for one of the other bartenders, wordlessly handing off duties as he made his way around the bar and approached you. You stood and walked alongside him through the bar.

Turning the corner without paying attention, an inattentive passerby bumped into Kento, a glass of what he could guess was whiskey now soaking the front of his shirt. “Holy shit, sorry.”

“It’s fine.” 

You pressed your lips together, smiling as Kento didn’t let the incident interrupt your determined ascent up the stairs. 

You didn’t speak as you made your way to a barrier, secluded alcove on the mezzanine floor—a quiet corner with a view of the city through tall windows, framed by rich drapes. The world outside was glittering and alive, but here, away from prying eyes, it felt like their own little escape.

Kento stopped near the window, turning to face you as the ambient glow of the city lights bathed them both in soft light. You stepped closer, the subtle scent of your perfume mixing with the full scent of whiskey that stuck to him. He unbuttoned his shirt, uncovering his lean torso and square pecs. 

“You have a talent for choosing the right spot.” You said, your voice lower now. 

“I don’t waste time.” He replied, his eyes locked on yours. 

You smirked, stepping even closer until the space between you was nearly nonexistent. “Efficient. I like that.”

Kento’s pulse quickened though his exterior remained composed. The heat of your presence never wavering as he watched your every move. 

You lightly brushed his arm, a deliberate move to see his reaction. 

“I knew you’d be interesting,” you uttered, your voice soft, teasing, but laced with something deeper. “I just didn’t know how interesting.”

Kento’s lips quirked into a small smile, one that carried more weight than any words he could say at that moment. “You’re not so predictable yourself.”

Your eyes locked. The city lights flickered around you, but neither of you noticed, too caught up in the magnetic pull of something new, something charged. 

You reached up, your hand brushing his collarbone. You licked his whiskey-flavored chest. You languidly licked up to his neck as he sucked in a sharp breath. "Hmm." You whispered while your lips hovered close to his. “I like a man who can keep up."

Nanami’s voice was steady, but there was a rough edge to it now. “I don’t plan on slowing down.”

With a final, knowing smile, he closed the gap between you. His lips brushed yours in a kiss more electric than the city lights below. 

“Nanami Kento.”

“Yes ma'am.”

“When you clock out, my room happens to be on the floor above this one.” You slid your room card into his pants pocket as his hand slid down, pressing you into him. 

Kento pushed you to the wall with a quick yet gentle motion, nudging his knee between your thighs. "You've surprised me."

“How so?" The sudden closeness brought a surge of anticipation bursting in your chest.

"I didn't take you for someone who would enjoy a bit of public play."

You rubbed your wetness on his knee, lost in thought. A simpering moan escaped you. "I don't know what you're talking about, Nanami."

Amused by your attempt to keep it together, he moved his knee forward to elicit another moan from you. "The dampness of my slacks says otherwise." He drowned out the sounds of the late-night rush with the pants he pulled from you.

"Tell me how to please you with precision and I'll follow every direction."

Thank you @/saradika-graphics for the dividers ✨

[moonlitstoriess]

The Hidden Legacy- A Ruhn Danaan x Rhysands sister series

Chapter 4: The Ties that Bind

Summary: Rhysand’s sister, Seraphis, long thought dead, was taken by the Asteri/Valgs, her memories erased and turned into a ruthless killer loyal to their cause. After Bryce kills the Asteri, Seraphis seeks vengeance on her and everyone else involved. As she hunts them down, Rhysand and the Inner Circle discover the shocking truth: she’s alive, and now their enemy.

See masterlist

Arcane: understood by few; mysterious or secret

Seraphis remained concealed in the shadows of the alley, her breath forming small clouds in the cool night air. The pendant, now firmly grasped in her hand, was a chilling reminder of the Asteri’s influence. It had been retrieved in a tense, fleeting moment, but she remained resolute. The brief encounter with Ruhn, while unsettling, did not deter her from her mission.

The city was unnervingly silent, the usual hum of activity stifled as if the night itself were holding its breath. Seraphis could feel the weight of the pendant, a symbol of her loyalty to the Asteri and the past they had shaped for her. This pendant was not merely an object; it was a piece of the narrative the Asteri had crafted—a narrative she had embraced without question. Which is why, when she found out that it was missing, Seraphis had to risk everything to bring it back.

Her training had made her adept at navigating such situations. The brief moment when time had seemed to freeze had been surprising, but she remained unshaken. The touch of Ruhn’s hand had been unexpected, sending a sharp jolt through her, but it was merely an interruption, not a threat to her mission. She was a soldier of the Asteri, molded by their teachings, and no single encounter would sway her.

Seraphis tightened her grip on the pendant. The Asteri had always assured her that this relic was crucial—an essential link to her past, a tangible connection to her origins. She had been taught that her family had rejected her, leaving her with nothing but this pendant to remember them by. She had been trained to see them as the source of her pain and to view the Asteri as her true family. This pendant would serve as a motivator, a driving force for Seraphis to work harder and belong somewhere. Within the Asteri. Beside Rigelus.

Despite the unsettling nature of the encounter, she could not afford to waver. For a fleeting moment, a whisper of doubt flickered in her mind—had she misjudged the situation? Was there more to this than she had been led to believe? But Seraphis quickly pushed the thought aside. Such doubts had no place in her mind. She was a loyal soldier, bound by her commitment to the Asteri and the mission they had set before her.

As she stepped away from the alley, her focus remained unwavering. The world was full of shadows and secrets, and she was determined to navigate them with precision. The pendant was a symbol of her duty, a constant reminder of the Asteri’s guidance and the purpose she had been given.

Seraphis moved with deliberate confidence, her senses sharp as she navigated the dimly lit streets. The city around her was a maze of hidden dangers, and she was prepared for whatever challenges lay ahead. Her loyalty to the Asteri was absolute, and she would not let any distractions or uncertainties interfere with her mission.

The night was dense with potential threats, but Seraphis was undeterred. She had faced countless trials before, and this encounter, while strange, was just another obstacle to overcome. Her resolve was steadfast, her mission clear. The Asteri’s truth was her reality, and she would face whatever came next with the strength and discipline that defined her.

She arrived at the motel and swiftly entered her room, closing the door behind her. The silence of the room offered a stark contrast to the chaos of the night. Her mind was still processing the intense encounter with Ruhn.

She placed the pendant on the table, its surface gleaming faintly under the dim light. The pendant was more than a relic to her; it was a symbol of her past and her loyalty to the Asteri.

Taking out her leather-bound journal, Seraphis began to jot down her observations. The encounter had been disconcerting, particularly the way she had used her time manipulation to freeze the world around her. It had been a necessary precaution, but the intensity of the moment lingered. This is why she would rarely freeze time. It always took away so much of her energy and the eerie stillness of everything--everyone--made her feel...shaken.

For a brief moment, she had questioned her unshakable loyalty. The way Ruhn had looked at her, the way her hand lingered on his for just a moment longer, and the haunting stillness of time, had unsettled her. But she quickly shoved the doubt aside. She was a soldier of the Asteri, and her mission was paramount. Her body was acting irrationally and it was time her brain completely took over.

There is no longer any place for mistakes or hesitations.

But being this close to Bryce and not killing her…that was something. Of course this whole pendant catastrophe wasn’t in her plans to begin with but Seraphis did consider that there would have been some miscalculations. Hopefully, the next time they will see her, it will be when she ends them.

With her resolve reestablished, Seraphis planned her next moves. She would need to investigate further, understand the significance of the figure she encountered, and continue her mission with unwavering dedication. She gathered her essential items: a map of the city, tools for intelligence gathering, and concealed weapons.

Before leaving, Seraphis cast one final look at the pendant. It remained a symbol of her duty and the Asteri’s promises. As she stepped out into the night, her purpose was clear. She would unravel the mysteries of the city, driven by her loyalty and the belief in the Asteri’s truth.

Seraphis stepped out into the bustling city, the neon lights casting an otherworldly glow on the pavement. The streets were alive with people, their movements and chatter creating a cacophony that Seraphis expertly navigated. Her senses were heightened, every sound and movement carefully cataloged as she made her way through the crowded thoroughfares.

She moved with purpose, her gaze scanning for anything out of the ordinary. Her first stop was a dimly lit tavern on the edge of town, a place known for its rough clientele and even rougher rumors. Inside, the air was thick with smoke and the scent of cheap alcohol. Seraphis slipped into a shadowed corner, her eyes never resting for long on any one person. She listened intently to the conversations around her, her sharp ears catching snippets of gossip that could be valuable.

From the tavern, she made her way to a small bookstore, its sign faded and barely noticeable. The store was cluttered with old tomes and ancient texts, the kind that might hold hidden knowledge. Seraphis moved stealthily through the narrow aisles, her fingers brushing over the spines of books as she searched for anything that might offer insight into the city’s hidden layers. She selected a few volumes that seemed promising, slipping them into her bag with practiced ease.

Next, she visited a café known for its patrons’ tendency to speak freely. The café’s warm interior was a stark contrast to the cold night outside. She engaged in casual conversation with the staff, her charm and subtle probing eliciting useful information about recent unusual events and a secretive gathering of influential figures. The details were vague but hinted at something significant.

Her final stop was an alleyway rumored to be frequented by those with insider knowledge. Here, she encountered a streetwise informant, a wolf with a reputation for trading in secrets. Their exchange was terse but productive. He spoke of a clandestine meeting that was scheduled to take place soon, a gathering that could potentially be linked to the information she was seeking.

With her intel gathered, Seraphis retreated to a secluded rooftop, the city spread out before her. The cool breeze ruffled her hair as she reviewed her findings under the dim light of the streetlamps below. The pieces of the puzzle began to fit together, and she identified a lead on a location where the powerful figures were rumored to meet. The urgency of her mission became clear; she needed to infiltrate this meeting to gather more concrete information.

Her mind was sharp, focused, and unyielding. She meticulously organized her notes and ensured her gear was prepared for the next phase of her operation. As she finished her preparations, the weight of her responsibility settled on her shoulders, but she remained resolute. The city’s mysteries beckoned, and Seraphis was ready to confront whatever lay ahead.

She moved silently through the labyrinth of city streets, her senses finely attuned to every subtle shift in the atmosphere. The warehouse loomed ahead, its structure a dark monolith against the night sky. Her mission was clear: observe the meeting and determine the potential threat it posed.

She slipped through a side entrance, her movements as quiet as a whisper. Inside, the warehouse was a study in contrasts, a space where luxury met secrecy. The low hum of voices and occasional clink of glasses guided her to the meeting area.

Peering through the gaps in the partitions, Seraphis took in the scene: Bryce, Ruhn, and Declan among those gathered. Declan held up a photograph—the image of the pendant. Her pendant. Seeing it caused a flare of irritation within her. This wasn’t how things were supposed to go. The pendant was crucial, but it was her responsibility to handle it, not theirs.

Bryce’s voice cut through her thoughts. “Declan, show us the image again. This pendant… there’s something off about it. We need to understand why it was so crucial to that female.”

Declan nodded, holding the photograph aloft. Seraphis’s gaze locked onto the image, the details of the pendant glaringly familiar. It was an artifact she had been led to believe was essential for her survival. The very idea that others were now examining it, questioning its significance, was infuriating.

Seraphis’s thoughts were a storm of frustration. These people were stumbling around in ignorance, undermining her plan. They were fools, believing they could discern the pendant’s importance without knowing the truth. Her anger was palpable, her hand clenching into a fist as she watched.

Seraphis remained hidden, her sharp eyes focused on the meeting taking place in the warehouse. The dim light flickered over the gathered figures. The tension in the air was palpable, and she could sense the gravity of their discussion.

Declan was examining the photograph of the pendant, his voice cutting through the murmur of conversation. “We need to understand what this pendant truly represents. It’s been tied to a series of unusual events, and the woman we saw earlier was desperate to retrieve it.”

Bryce nodded, her expression serious. “We’ve come across mentions of similar artifacts in old texts, but nothing that directly connects them to this pendant. We need answers, and we need them quickly.”

Ruhn crossed his arms, his gaze intent on the photograph. “If this pendant is as important as it seems, we have to find out why. There’s a possibility it’s part of something larger, a threat we haven’t fully grasped yet.”

Seraphis’s frustration mounted. The conversation was drifting into territory she didn’t want them to explore. The pendant was vital, but their ignorance about its true nature only added to her irritation. These people were stumbling in the dark, and their misguided attempts to uncover its significance only made her more determined to maintain control over the situation.

As she listened, a sense of urgency grew. Her mission was to ensure that the pendant remained under her influence, and the longer she stayed, the greater the risk of exposure. She needed to act quickly.

The conversation continued, with Bryce’s connections discussing various theories and possible implications of the pendant. Their speculations were frustratingly off-mark, and Seraphis could feel her patience wearing thin.

Declan mentioned something about a potential lead they had on another piece of information related to the pendant. “We’re supposed to follow up on a few more details,” he said, “but there’s something about this pendant that feels like it’s part of a bigger puzzle.”

The room was abuzz with nods and murmurs of agreement, but Seraphis knew she couldn’t afford to stay any longer. She had overheard enough to know that their knowledge was fragmented and their conclusions misguided. Staying longer would only risk her cover.

A loud noise from outside—the sound of heavy footsteps and a scuffle—caught her attention. Seizing the opportunity, Seraphis moved quickly. Her heart pounded as she slipped out of the warehouse, her steps muffled against the cold concrete.

She navigated her way back to the motel, her mind racing. The snippets of conversation she had heard were enough to confirm that the group was on a misguided path. The pendant’s significance was still obscured to them, and that worked in her favor.

Entering her room, she locked the door behind her and took a deep breath. The meeting had been a mix of frustration and validation. She now had a clearer understanding of the obstacles she faced and the depth of the misinformation surrounding the pendant.

Seraphis paced the small room, her thoughts swirling. The Asteri’s orders were paramount, and she would not let these unworthy adversaries stand in her way. Her next steps would be calculated and decisive. She would continue to observe from the shadows, ensuring that her mission remained on track and that the Asteri’s plans were executed flawlessly.

As she prepared for the night ahead, Seraphis’s resolve hardened. The confrontation with Bryce and her allies was inevitable, but for now, she would remain hidden, allowing their ignorance to serve her purpose. The game was far from over, and she would be ready for whatever came next.

*****

Ruhn stood near the makeshift table, arms crossed, watching as Bryce’s connections continued their discussion. Declan was going through data on his device, the image of the pendant still projected in front of them.

“That’s it,” Declan said, shaking his head in frustration. “I’ve combed through every source I could find—nothing modern matches this symbol. No database, no house, no records. It’s like this thing doesn’t exist.”

One of the fae males, a scarred figure with silver tattoos curling up his neck, leaned in closer to the image. “It doesn’t match because it’s ancient. I’ve seen symbols like this before, in archives most wouldn’t even know to look at.”

Ruhn straightened at that. “How old are we talking?”

The male’s expression darkened as he glanced at his companions. “Older than any current court. Before the houses united, before the current system was in place. The symbol belongs to an old bloodline, one that no longer exists—at least not officially.”

Bryce’s eyes flashed with intrigue. “The Old Courts?”

Ruhn’s gut clenched. Whoever this woman was, she wasn’t just some random thief. She was connected to something much bigger—something they had no idea about. And if she was using that pendant for her own means, they were already behind.

Declan chimed in, his eyes on his device. “There’s still nothing in the modern archives, no mention of any family still active that could be tied to this symbol. But if it’s as old as we think, then it might not even be registered anymore.”

Ruhn rubbed a hand over his jaw, trying to piece it together. “So we’re dealing with someone who knows about the Old Courts, who has access to something none of us understand. But why show up now? What’s the motive?”

Another one of Bryce’s people, a female faun with pale blue hair nodded. “Whoever has this, they’re not just looking for power—they’re looking to shift the balance of it. And if they’re connected to the Old Courts, they could be planning something bigger than any of us are ready for.”

Ruhn swallowed down a wave of unease. The female he’d encountered might not be an enemy they could easily understand. If she was tied to an old bloodline—an old family from a forgotten era—then this fight was about more than just the pendant. It was about history, legacy, and powers they’d long thought lost to time.

Bryce, who had been quietly studying the image, suddenly stilled. Her mind was clearly lost in somewhere Ruhn had no idea. He saw how his sisters eyes widened just a fraction as a flicker of recognition passed through her.

She whispered, more to herself than to anyone else. "Could it be...?"

"What? Could it be what?" Ruhn's voice sounded urgent as he looked at his sister who was still clearly lost in a train of thoughts.

"So- um, we are talking ancient," She said, as if suddenly coming back to reality. "How old exactly?"

Ruhn's brows furrowed. Is she okay? "Bryce-"

She lifted up a hand to silence him as one of the faes replied. Ruhn got her hidden message, to shut the hel up until later.

"Old enough that the symbol no longer holds any modern power, but it's magic lingers. This pendant is tied to a family from that era, back when power wasn't centralized. If someone has this pendant now, they're not just tied to an ancient bloodline--they're tapping into old magic."

He cast a sideways look at his sister who kept silent, her thoughts spinning, her eyes narrowed in on one place.

Unbeknownst to them, Seraphis had already slipped into the shadows, her mission in motion, and the true weight of her heritage still hidden from them all, including herself.

As the meeting wrapped up, Bryce lingered behind the group, her eyes still distant, lost in thought. As they finally said their goodbyes, stepped out of the warehouse and into the cool night air, he finally decided to press her.

"Alright, Bryce. Spill," he said, keeping his voice low but firm. "What the Hel was that back there? You went pale for a second."

Bryce glanced at Declan, who was still scrolling through data on his phone. She seemed to be wishing her words carefully, deciding how much to share.

"I don't know for sure yet," she started, her voice tense, but steady. "But...that pendant. I've seen those kinds of carvings before and Marcus just saying that this belongs to an old court just- ugh," she sighed.

Declan stopped walking, his gaze shifted between Bryce and Ruhn. "Seen it where? The archives are empty on this. How could you-"

"I didn't say I saw it here," Bryce interrupted, shooting him a sharp look. She hesitated, taking a deep breath, her usual confidence slipping just a bit. "It wasn't here. It was....somewehere else."

Ruhn frowned, his stomach twisting. He'd never seen Bryce this unsettled. "Somewhere else? You mean--"

Bryce nodded, her eyes darkening with some unspoken memory. "When I was in that other world. When I was- when I was in the caves, in- Prythian."

Declan swore under his breath. "You think this pendant has a connection to that place?"

"I don't know," Bryce admitted, her voice tight. "But it's too close to ignore. When I was in those caves with Azriel and Nesta-"

"Who the Hel are Azriel and Nesta?!" Declan interrupted, earning himself a jab from Ruhn.

Bryce rolled her eyes. "The faes- or high faes, as they call themselves, of that place. It was when I was going through the caves with them that I saw similar patterns on the walls to the ones that the pendant contains."

Ruhn's jaw clenched. He hadn't been there when Bryce had fell into another world, but he knew enough about her experiences to understand the gravity of her words. If this pendant had ties to that world, they were dealing with something far more dangerous than just an ancient relic.

"Do you think that anyone from them know about this?" he asked.

"I don't know," his sister said, her tone flat. "But we need to find out. I'm going to try and find a way to reach out to Nesta--discreetly. We can't let this slip past us."

They walked in silence for a few moments, the weight of her words settling over them. Bryce wasn’t one to panic, but the edge in her voice was unmistakable.

“I’ll keep digging,” Declan finally said. “If there’s any other mention of that symbol, I’ll find it.”

Bryce nodded, her lips pressed into a tight line. “Good. Because whatever this thing is… it’s not just some lost piece of history. It’s connected to something bigger.”

Ruhn’s mind was racing. The mysterious female they were hunting had that pendant. And now it might be tied to another world entirely. He couldn’t shake the feeling that they were standing on the edge of something enormous, something that could change everything.

And whatever it was, it wasn’t good.

******

The quiet hum of the motel room couldn't drown out the noise in her head. Seraphis sat on the edge of the bed, her eyes drifting to the small window overlooking the city.

Lunathion was chaotic, loud, and bustling-but in here, it was too quiet.

Too still.

It felt wrong.

She had been fighting off the growing sense of unease for hours now, but the weight on her chest hadn't lifted.

Instead, it grew heavier, more insistent, as though something was building beneath the surface, waiting to break free.

Then it did.

Her vision blurred, and a cold gust of air slammed into her. The ground shifted beneath her feet, and suddenly, she no longer in the motel room. The scent of the city streets vanished, replaced by the sharp tang of blood, smoke, and death.

Seraphis blinked.

She was standing in the middle of a battlefield.

The air was thick with ash, and the sky above was a sickly shade of gray.

All around her, bodies lay strewn across the ground-warriors, soldiers, fae, and mortals alike, their lifeless forms broken and bloody. The city she had just been staring at from the window was in ruins, buildings collapsed into heaps of rubble, streets torn apart.

Lunathion had fallen.

Seraphis walked forward, her boots crunching against the debris and shattered remains of what had once been a thriving

The further she walked, the more the devastation unfolded before her eyes. Blood stained the ground, thick and dark, and bodies piled up, a grotesque reminder of what war could do.

And yet, this was a war she had helped orchestrate. If everything went as planned, this was the future she would create.

But as she walked among the fallen, something stirred within her. She stepped over bodies without a second thought, the carnage unfurling at her feet-until her gaze caught on a figure ahead.

A male. His body was sprawled across the ground, his familiar dark hair matted with blood, his face pale and unmoving.

Ruhn Danaan.

Seraphis stopped dead in her tracks, her breath catching in her throat. For a moment, she couldn't move, her chest tightening painfully as she stared at him. She had seen countless deaths, walked through the blood of her enemies without flinching. But this... something about this was different. Wrong.

She knelt down, her trembling fingers hovering just above his cheek, though she couldn't bring herself to touch him. His lifeless eyes were open, staring up at the sky, unseeing. And for reasons she couldn't explain, seeing him like this sent a shudder through her, as though something inside her was breaking apart.

She didn't understand why. She shouldn't care.

Yet her chest tightened, her heart pounding in her ears. She couldn't tear her gaze away from his face, the image of him lying there seared into her mind.

Then, from the corner of her eye, she caught movement.

She turned, her attention snapping to the source-a male groaning in pain a few feet away. He was still alive, barely, his body bloodied and battered. Her breath hitched as she took him in-tall, broad-shouldered, his features too familiar. His face was so similar to hers, it sent a chill down her spine.

The male looked a lot like her—a mirror image, his features sharp, dark, like a distorted reflection of herself, not to mention the same violet eyes. He groaned again, his body trembling as he tried to move.

Beside him was a female, her golden-brown hair wild and tangled, her eyes wide with desperation as she pressed her hands against his side, trying to stop the bleeding. Seraphis didn't know who she was, but the fierce look in her eyes was unmistakable.

The female would stop at nothing to keep the male alive.

Seraphis took it all in, her chest tightening as the weight of the scene pressed down on her. She stood frozen, torn between the cold, calculating part of her that told her this was a future of her own making and the strange, unfamiliar emotions clawing at the edges of her mind.

And then, just as suddenly, the world shifted again.

The battlefield, the bodies, Ruhn, the stranger whom she had never seen before, it all faded away in a flash of light, and she was back in the motel room. The harsh glow of the single bulb above her head felt like a slap to the face, the distant sounds of the city buzzing faintly outside the window.

But the weight on her chest remained. Seraphis stood there for a long moment, her breath shallow, her pulse racing as she tried to push the memory of the battlefield back into the recesses of her mind. She couldn't afford to dwell on it, couldn't afford to feel. Not now.

Not ever.

She took a deep breath, steadying herself, forcing the emotions down until they were buried deep where they couldn't reach her.

The hunt wasn't over yet. But that brief glimpse into the future was enough to remind her-there was more at stake than she had ever imagined.

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

Taglist:@annamariereads16 @tooexhaustedsstuff @a-frog-with-a-laptop @cassie-at-college-blog @itsinherited @anuttellaa

[sissa-arrows]

This tweet says it all… translation below.

(Repost because I wanted to make it into it’s own post instead of a reblog)

Banning the abaya is not a back-to-school "diversion". It is part of a plan.

Islamophobia is not an epiphenomenon. It is at the heart of a political project.

Racism is not an accident. It's a system.

There are absolutely no surprises in France.

The only "surprise" is that leftists and observers are still surprised by the repeated attacks against Black people, Arabs and Muslims in France.

No "red line has been crossed".

It's been going on like this for decades. It's just that depending on the mood or the privileges it touches, an opportunity arises where you "find out" what your fellow citizens are going through every day. It's there, too obvious for you to ignore, so you give it a tweet, an indignation, a passing concern. Then it goes back in the back of your mind filled with stuff that you don't live, while waiting for the next buzz that will occupy you.

The racist, sequenced, destructive and methodical harassment that targets Muslims in France varies only in its seasonality and its modalities of expression, but it is constant in its objectives as in its structures:

Muslim women are targeted in summer for the burkini, at the start of the school year for long dresses, on sports grounds because they want to play, all the rest of the year for their headscarves or their simple existence in public spaces. .

Muslim children are targeted at school for their beliefs, in the playground for their children's games (1), in the canteen for their "bismiLlah" and their diet.

Muslim men are targeted in their expression, treated as a security risk, criminalized in the public space.

Muslim associations and executives are targeted in their organizational methods, subject to political and ideological control by the prefectures.

And it just gets annoying to have to remind you of this with every controversy targeting Muslims, about twice a month.

The truth is simple:

France is filled by endemic Islamophobia. Racism is structural here. Antisemitism is structural here. Antiblack racism is structural here. The criminalization of migrants is structural here. Police violence is structural here.

And only racists deny racism.

Only those who don't experience it think it's a subject up to debate.

The "attacks on secularism" are as much shame on the French flag as the abusive reports that compose them, from the simple innocuous religious expression to the clothes police that are set up against young Muslim girls, as they are targeted with racial profiling to distinguish, by "use/purpose (2)" (the level of creative hypocrisy of racists) between the proselytizing use of a Zara dress (for Arabs and Blacks) and the admissible Republican use (for the others), while the handful of truly believable incidents are resolved with a simple warning and explanation.

The only attack on secularism is the establishment of a system of registration, denunciation and surveillance of Muslim students on a large scale. This is the count of students absent for Eid (3). It is the progressive decline of an educational institution which, since 2004, has gone from one moral panic to the next, with the same targets and the same results: the deterioration of teaching conditions and the systemic, slow and methodical stigmatization of some of the students. It is the silence that has become the choice of the majority of teachers and unions when their mission of inclusion and benevolent education of all children is ridiculed, that’s when they do not add their voice to the chorus of calls for the exclusion of students, calling for "clear rules" that invariably result in penalties and bans. It is the constant civilizing and post-colonial injunction to be free only according to modalities chosen by others than ourselves.

To people who still care about the fundamental freedoms of everyone (and in particular the young women targeted here for their clothing choices), I say: you are losing more than a battle, not to fight with all your might a fight which is already engaged, is tipping France into an authoritarian, racist and totally assumed oppressive posture.

To those Muslim men and women who minimize what is happening or blame young girls for their treatment, I say: you deserve what is happening to you. If you are humiliated in this way, it is because you allow it. To them their honor and to you your shame. They only wanted to study, without asking for the slightest preferential treatment or exceptional regime, while you found all the reasons in the world to defend their oppressors, out of unconsciousness if not out of cowardice. Those who already accepted the exclusion of young girls in 2004, those who looked elsewhere when imams were criminalized, those who believed in the promise of a state sanctioned Islam that would leave them safe if they remained docile to the exclusion of their brothers, those who allowed the associations which defended them to be dissolved and the mosques which welcomed them to be closed. If not out of modesty, at least for your own salvation, be silent and do not add your voice to those who make our children enemies of a republic which, rather than respecting them for what they do, chose to exclude them for who they are.

To my sisters, in skirts, dresses, jeans, sweatshirts or abayas, I want to (re)tell how proud we are of you. I don't know how to express the hope and sincere admiration I have for you when, in a toxic period like the one we are going through, I see the good you are doing, the projects you are planning, the enthusiasm and commitment that you display, in class, at home, on the soccer field or in associations, to respond to offenses with dignified words and smiles, to hold firm when we give up, to give us comfort in a world upside down, to pay the price for what is going wrong in our society and which should nevertheless concern us all. Rock in everything you do. Do not let yourself be locked into the image that some want to give of you, because you are not defined by any other voice than yours and by any other choice than yours. Please hold on tight. Be happy, make your plans and let others talk.

Maybe what angers them so much is to see you shine...

Notes:

1: Children love to see lay pretend and imitate adults. Some Muslim children (all below 10) pretended to pray at school. Some white kids eventually joined and instead of explaining to the kids to not play that way the teachers made a report. It ended on national news, they started acting as if it was super common and as if kids were forcing their non Muslim classmate to convert to Islam. It was a mess. To the point where the parents of the Muslim kids were so scared they pulled out their kids of all activities outside of schools… Some of the white parents actually had to get involved to ask people to calm the fuck down that it was just kids playing pretend. The end of the year school party was even canceled so no child would get attacked…

2: Teachers and schools were reporting and expelling Black and Arab girls for wearing long skirt or headbands. Those are obviously not religious clothes. People rightfully complained and said that it was racial profiling. Instead of telling schools and teachers to calm down the government changed the 2004 in 2022. Now clothes can become religious “par destination” so by purpose or use. Basically it means that depending on who (white or people of color) wears them clothes can become religious. If a white girl wears headbands very often that’s okay if a Black or North African girl does it then her headband is a symbolic hijab and she must remove it.

3: In the south west of France and in other regions the police asked schools to provide a list of all the children who did not come at school on Eid. For the record children are ALLOWED to miss school for religious holidays.

[middlenamesage]

What each sign teaches us plus some hard truths each might need to ask!

KEEP IN MIND we all have all the signs in our birth chart; whether those houses are “empty” or not, they still have influence. We also all experience transits through all the signs, and we even have progressed charts that account for the archetypes we get more into learning later on. So take WHATEVER resonates for you with any of this!

♈️🐏 Aries teaches us action and that action comes from us with the least resistance when we know and trust who we are as an individual.

Hard truth: Aries, have you been seeing yourself or living your life as though you’re a one-man island? You might think you’re stronger than others for your hyper-independence, but at times the greatest strength for YOU is recognizing and embracing what others have contributed to your life and to who you are. It could also behoove you to think of others or to think more carefully through potential outcomes before you act sometimes.

♉️🐂 Taurus teaches us personal peace by aligning our focus on what we need for material and psychological stability.

Hard truth: Taurus, have your values, personal preferences, or your attachment to possessions become overly rigid? While honoring our values and preferences and ensuring we have the necessary items for material security and comfort are an important part of the process in finding peace, total inflexibility about these things can end up sending you in the opposite direction of peace.

♊️🌬️ Gemini teaches us to gather objective information from the world around us, and how to communicate information.

Hard truth: Gemini, have you been looking down so many avenues of knowledge, that you haven’t allowed yourself the time and sustained focus to sort out your own philosophies, or go more into depth or meaning, around the subjects you’re learning? At times you should also strive to keep better track of what you’re communicating to people, and to focus on understanding the meaning you project with your words, not just the information provided by them.

♋️🦀 Cancer teaches us how to emotionally support ourselves and others (self nurturance is key for support of others to be most functionally helpful)

Hard truth: Cancer, have you become so focused on protecting yourself or others, that you’ve started to see danger where it doesn’t even exist? Careful, paranoia is not a good look for anyone, but especially not you. There’s a reason you have instincts to build walls around you, not unlike a crab retreating into its shell. 🦀 But if this becomes a default action and not just used when it’s actually needed to protect your space or safety, the function of your energy to support and nurture can not be as well realized.

♌️🦁 Leo teaches us confidence in authentic expression of self. Where the first fire sign teaches us confidence in establishing self, the next one teaches us how to implement authentic expression of oneself.

Hard truth: Leo, have you been going out of your way to seek input from others that your self expression is valid? Well cut that out if so, because that would defeat the entire purpose of practicing YOUR expression. YOU decide if it’s valid. I could also advise something like “be less self centered!”… but honestly that’ll just start to happen naturally once you’re actually authentically relying on your own validation only. 🦁

♍️🌾 Virgo teaches us how to take care of things in the practical realm. We wouldn’t have a functioning world around us in this physical plane if it weren’t for Virgoan energy assessing all the details of structures, systems, and routines… makes sense I’ve read from at least one source that Virgo is the most common Sun sign!

Hard truth: Virgo, have you gotten so up in your head, Mercury style, about the details of your routines or the tasks you need to do, that it’s become challenging to actually successfully or efficiently attend to them? When Virgo energy gets dysfunctional like this it could really take a cue from Mars/Aries. “Just do it!” Also, whenever you start to find yourself being especially critical of yourself or others, you could stand to remind yourself of the big picture dynamics, concepts, or goals you have in mind.

♎️⚖️ Libra teaches us interpersonal peace by putting the focus on compromise and balance.

Hard truth: Libra, if you’ve been going out of your way to appease others, you might need to ask yourself if this is because you truly care about what’s best for them, or if it’s a behavior more connected to lack of rootedness in YOURSELF that makes you averse to conflict? It’s important for you to try to get to know and exercise your authentic individuality. The South Node currently in Libra with the North Node in Aries can help anyone who wants to make progress here.

♏️🦂 Scorpio teaches us how to face our shadows and ultimately how to integrate them so that we may transform.

Hard truth: Scorpio, have you been so obsessed on analyzing your past for answers to why you are as you are, that you’ve forgotten to just focus on finding some personal peace in the moment? You could take a cue from your opposite/sister sign Taurus if you find yourself in this position. 🖤 Also, when it comes to your trust issues, two big things will ultimately help: 1.) Build your SELF trust through giving yourself the opportunities to make and carry out your own decisions (Scorpio is Mars too and needs to act!) and 2.) Use/cultivate your deep instincts about people to ensure it’s supportive people you have most around you, while doing whatever you can to keep the toxic ones out.

♐️🏹 Sagittarius teaches us how to form our beliefs and find meaning however it encourages you to expand.

Hard truth: Sagittarius, have you fallen into the trap of thinking the philosophies that give YOUR life meaning are the same beliefs that others need to adopt? WHOA back up there buckaroo! It’d behoove you to remember that Sagittarius is a fire sign, so it deals with some personal aspects of our individuality. Not everyone will find inspiration to expand from the same designations of meaning as you, and you need to learn to not try to push your worldviews on anyone who isn’t receptive.

♑️🐐 Capricorn teaches us how to build structure and commit to a long term goal/vision/plan.

Hard truth: Capricorn, have you become so blinded by your personal standards for quality or by what it is you’re trying to build to be a certain way, that anyone or anything that does not fit neatly into your structure appears as a threat or a reason to give up hope to you? At times you could stand to gain a little more flexibility and optimism. Setbacks do not mean the end, and if you could fast forward over your life you would see this, so if you’re having trouble seeing it now, try to see if you can regain a bit of the hopeful outlook from the sign that came just before you. I promise the capacity is within you. 😉

♒️🏺 Aquarius teaches us the ins and outs of society so that we may reflect on what we as an individual can bring to it or help liberate it.

Hard truth: Aquarius, have you been viewing yourself so much as an outsider, that it’s tempting to see yourself as separate from the rest of society? Well I have a hard truth for you: You’re not separate from it and not above it; no one is. And it’s especially dysfunctional for YOU to see yourself as a distinct and separate entity not influenced by society, or as too different from everyone else to be able to relate to them- society needs your insightful contribution!

♓️🐟 Pisces teaches us empathy and fosters our imagination through the understanding that everything is connected.

Hard truth: Pisces, have you been seeing yourself as the victim? You really need to hear that if you would just cut that out and start seeing yourself instead as an empowered dreamer with strong intuition you can continually cultivate, your ability to manifest* would be arguably the most insane of all the signs. (*Not that I support the idea that everything can be attained through manifestation alone.) Take it from a Pisces rising who learned the hard way and is feeling inspired to expand on this one: victimhood is The most detrimental trap for Pisces. Not only because it keeps your reality feeling like that of a victim, but also because Pisces energy is nearly functionally useless if it’s too self absorbed to ever see or act according to the Piscean message of interconnectedness. Learning the right amount to give compassionately of yourself, with the appropriate boundaries, is a crucial part of the Piscean journey!

Thanks for reading, and happy astrological evolution! 🌻

[lxikobsd]

Maybe I'm just grasping at straws here being in denial about Kunikida's significance to the story of BSD, but I do believe the theories that he might have some connection to "The Book" hold a bit more weight than what I think most BSD fans realize. For two main reasons.

The first reason being the obvious, his ability functions incredibly similar to how we know "The Book" functions. Whatever is written down becomes reality.

of course if you want to get technical about translations, this is what they say in Japanese

Ranpo's English translation is fairly accurate, but what Katsura says is more like "You materialize objects you write in this notebook"

Small side tangent, when talking about "The Book" I often see the word 現実 (reality) being translated into meaning "truth" which is not entirely wrong but can be very misleading. I feel like most people see the word truth and think "truth/lies" when its not that kind of truth. Its more accurate to translate it as reality.

Actually if we're getting into it, another clear distinction to why this isn't "truth" as in "truth/lies", the inverse of 現実 is 理想 (Ideal)... which is interesting to say the least.

But back to the topic at hand, even if the two powers are described differently in Japanese its still a similarity that exists and even Japanese fans have noticed. There's a JP analysis that someone made in 2022 about Kunikida/The Book that I think is interesting, I'll link it here

From what I see, their main reason for thinking the two are different is that the power level is different, being Dazai can nullify objects created by The Matchless Poet, but nothing happened when he touched Sigma. However they do seem to say that the structural similarities between The Matchless Poet and "The Book" can't be ignored.

Now the regulations on Kunikida's ability vs "The Book" are distinct, however its hard to say how much of Kunikida's restrictions are caused by Fukuzawa. Fukuzawa's ability adjusts the power output of people's abilities and allows for them to change the activation requirements. For example, Kenji goes from being an unstoppable force of nature when he's angry, to being just superhuman levels of strong when he's hungry.

Its hard to estimate just how much restrictions Kunikida puts on his own ability, but considering he's one of the only characters who actively avoids relying on his ability, prefers to fight with martial arts, and even teaches Atsushi to fight without his ability, its easy to assume he could be purposely making his ability only mildly convenient in order to avoid over reliance on it. This also aligns with how his Ideals notebooks are limited edition with only 100 copies of it being made a year, he'd prefer to save them as much as possible.

I've seen one or two people claim on other sites that Kuni's ability likely isn't being suppressed by Fukuzawa, but this isn't true since there's evidence to support that he's the reason Fuku learned he had an ability in the first place.

We know this should be the time when Kunikida first joined because the outfit he's wearing is specific, he's only been shown wearing that black striped vest before Dazai joined. Also Ranpo and Yosano's outfits also line up.

I'm getting sidetracked, moving on.

The second reason I think that adds weight to Kunikida's ability likely being more significant than we realize is his ability name.

Kunikida is the only ability user so far who's ability name is not a reference to any work the IRL author wrote and instead taken from the IRL author himself, that being a pen name Kunikida used.

The only other "ability" that's not named in reference to real work the author wrote is Super Deduction, which we all know isn't an ability at all.

A decent amount of people are sometimes under the impression that his ability name is in reference to his works that are called "Doppo poetry", I'm just gonna dis-spell those ideas right now with this image of what the anime Guidebook says about his ability

"能力名の「独歩吟客」はいくつもある独歩のペンネームのーつ"

Rough translation: “The name of his ability “Doppo Ginkaku” comes from one of Doppo’s many pen names”

None of what I said is 100% hard proof of anything, its just something to think about.

While I don't believe in those theories that are like "what if this character IS THE BOOK", I don't think the topics I brought up should be ignored either, they feel too intentional to not be potentially significant, and Kunikida is looking to be the last character of the ADA we're gonna learn about his life pre-Agency since we only know he's been friend with Katai for 10 years.

I think his ability uniqueness, and how he actively doesn't want to talk about his past, would be a bigger topic of discussions and theories if he was a more popular character. Sadly we do not live in that timeline.

Also disclaimer, I am not fluent in Japanese, I did ask my friends who are actually decent in Japanese questions but if I mistranslated anything that is why. I also have not read every single piece of BSD content available, nor do I have access to all the raw Japanese content.

If I missed anything important, or said something wrong please let me know! Or if you have anything you want to add I'd absolutely love to read it and have a discussion.

[talonabraxas]

“Love is the strongest force in the universe.” — Frederick Lenz

The lover’s embrace kei @arrogantkei

Love

The path that is followed by most persons in the beginning of their spiritual search is the path of love. Love is the easiest and most effective way to begin our search for self-realization, for our selves. Love is the highest of all qualities that we can experience. The more we know about love, the more we experience love, the happier and more complete we are.

Love is, in its essence, a free, formless strand of luminosity. It is a light that uplifts our awareness, that transforms our consciousness, that kindles in us the flame of self-giving, knowledge and power. Love brings future into the present. It can cause us to take a quantum leap in our spiritual growth. It knits families together, friends, lovers, societies, nations and perhaps one day a world.

If we examine the essence of existence very closely, we’ll find that the essence of existence is love. There really is nothing that isn’t love. God is love. Truth is love. Beauty is love. Everything is a formation or an aggregate of love.

In more mature and advanced states of love, we love others, the world, God, eternity. In the most advanced state of love we don’t love for any reason or any purpose. We don’t even direct our love necessarily to an object. We just love for the sake of love. Love is beginningless and endless ecstasy. It’s an unfathomable mystery. It is the study of our lives.

In the fire of love we melt the ego down again and again and again. What is there when the ego is gone? Eternity, love…

If you love very, very deeply, if you love truth and God, your love will cause you to have a union. You’ll merge for a while, for a short time, with that truth. You’ll become it. Each time you merge with God in your meditation you’ll be freer and purer afterwards. It’s as if you’re going out into the sun, again and again.

So the light of eternity purifies, and it is only that real love of the infinite that will motivate you. Love is far superior as a spiritual device, as a spiritual vehicle, because when we follow the path of love we go higher and higher and higher. Our velocity actually increases as we go on, rather than decreases as with aversion, because our love grows and becomes more strong and more perfect.

Love is the strongest force in the universe. Once we harness ourselves to that force, it carries us to eternity. Yet at the same time, love is visceral and real. Love is physical. It embraces all things, all creatures and all beings. Love doesn’t space you out or take you out of this world, it makes you conscious of your own immortality. But love also teaches you to love your own mortality; to love this body that’s only here for a little while, just as we love the flowers that bloom for a short time and pass on; to love the skies and the scenes; to love all things in this world and all things beyond this world. As you do this more and more, you will move rapidly towards liberation.

Love leads us to ourselves – this is the mystery of love–what love does and why it does it. These questions can only be answered in your deep meditation.

Love is the shortcut to higher meditation. Above thought is love, and within and below thought is love. Love is a ladder that we can climb through thought. It’s very hard to stop thought. Try with your willpower – it’s very difficult. But if instead of trying to stop thought when you meditate you focus your attention on love – meditate on the heart center and just let that love grow and increase, more and more – then suddenly you’ll find, guess what? Your thoughts are slacking, you’re moving into a higher field of awareness, you’re feeling wonderful. Light is everywhere and suddenly there’s no thought. This is why love is said to be such an easy way to learn to meditate.

The secret of love is acceptance, acceptance of our finite self, of our life, our birth, our growth, our decay and our death; acceptance of the world around us, of eternity. The message of love is acceptance–self-acceptance in the smaller sense, of the individual personal self, and self-acceptance in the larger sense, of the self as eternity.

So practice love and self-acceptance and you’ll see you’ll have a beautiful life, an absolutely beautiful life.

[moontrinemars]

Tenth Lord in Jupiter Nakshatras

Thanks for your patience in waiting for the next part of the series - I’m glad you guys are interested. As always, recorded for my own benefit, published for yours. General disclaimer is in my bio. Credit to KRSchannel for inspiring this post.

Find your 10th lord here, and find your 10th lord’s nakshatra here.

The 10th house rules our life’s honor. It represents the services we perform for society as well as the reputation we earn as a result. It is associated with the father and the career because traditionally, this is where both our standing in society and the role we performed in society would come from - inherited through the father’s family line. However, in our contemporary world, this isn’t always the case, which is why it’s important to know the grander themes at play.

The three Jupiter-ruled nakshatras are Punarvasu, Vishakha, and Purva Bhadrapada.

Jupiter is a planetary object that represents ascension, expansion, and union. It is the aspiration that guides us to our greatest heights, and the intangible whole comprised of all pieces, parts, and individuals. Channeling Jupiter means to take the role of the collective in our capacity as an individual, such as sharing our experiences to better the understanding of others, or discovering, exploring, and sharing universal truths that connect everyone. This is why Jupiter is associated with the partner. Venus is like the practical partner, who represents our own earthly values, but Jupiter is the soulmate, who allows us to ascend beyond the self, uniting physical with spiritual. Jupiter obscures, elevates, and enlightens, offering both afterlife and a life purpose.

DO YOU HAVE YOUR 10TH LORD IN A JUPITER-RULED NAKSHATRA? THAT MEANS YOU…

Audrey Hepburn, Amelia Earhart, and Kendrick Lamar all have their tenth lords in Jupiter ruled nakshatras. Audrey’s is in Punarvasu, Anne’s is in Vishakha, and Kendrick’s is in Purva Bhadrapda.

… AND THE PUBLIC MUTUALLY TEACH, EVOLVE, AND MYTHOLOGIZE ONE ANOTHER.

This placement produces an individual who is not content to engage with either their vocation or their society as a means to an end. These natives rather prefer to approach their public life, and the concept of the public itself often enough, as deeply meaningful and containing a higher purpose. Here you find individuals who shake up their industry by introducing cultures of open-mindedness and experimentation, as often as you find those who pursue their far-flung, lofty legacies at the expense of their health, relationships, privacy, and even life.

Jupiter's fame is more particular to how its influence manifests than to the amount of or method by which it was accrued. Whether you're looking at canon-defining classics, the celebrity of subculture, or the first individual of a certain kind to succeed in this or that field, you're looking at a Jovian native whose legacy serves to teach the public, and expand how the public defines itself. Of course, anyone can push boundaries, but these natives are most likely to be remembered for the barriers they break, and the lessons they taught in the process.

MORE ON THE SPECIFICS OF PUNARVASU, VISHAKHA, AND PURVA BHADRAPADA BELOW!

IF PUNARVASU RULES THE TENTH LORD, YOU…

Sharon Tate, David Beckham, and Halle Berry all have their tenth lords in Punarvasu. Others with this placement are William Shakespeare, Aretha Franklin, Amy Adams, J. M. Barrie, Debbie Harry, Al Gore, Alannis Morisette, Naomi Judd, Stephen King, Tony Curtis, Eddie Murphy, Gisele Bündchen, Werner Herzog, and Courtney Love.

Take public responses to your behavior personally, even finding it difficult to separate your identity from your reputation at first.

Are likely to be known for your professional value on an individual level, as a matter of skill, rather than as a team member or leader.

May benefit from a mentor who takes you under their wing, or may play such a role to new incomers to your field or workplace.

Count on your inborn charm to buoy you through scandal.

Transform your persona with age to appeal to new expectations.

AND YOU MAY FIND…

Travel is an expected part of your job, and public service you perform in foreign places seems to leave a greater impact.

Early on in life, key marriages and romantic partnerships can interfere with your career and social status, or vice versa.

Engaging in social service, partaking in cultural traditions, and organizing society-wide events, is spiritually cleansing, and allows you to reintegrate your public persona and personal identity.

Others imbue you with moral authority you are not prepared to shoulder, potentially leading to unearned imposter syndrome.

A pattern of being publicly linked to 'someone else': a role you have played, a title you've been given, a superior who enhances your image, a teammate who steals your valor, etc.

PUNARVASU is the Star of Renewal. Industries and career types favored are those involving archetypes, exploration, drama, history, innovation, education, spirituality, relationships, care-taking, healing, delivery, narrative, articulation, influence, and transportation.

IF VISHAKHA RULES THE TENTH LORD, YOU…

Anne Hathaway, Usher, and Billy Idol all have their tenth lords in Vishakha. Others with this placement are Dodi Al Fayed, Steven Spielberg, Susan Sarandon, Winston Churchill, Giorgio Armani, Martin Luther, Patti Page, H. G. Wells, Martin Scorsese, Analeigh Tipton, Joel Coen, Megan Mullaly, Richard Strauss, CM Punk, Georgia O'Keefe, John Cleese, Monica Vitti, Ashanti, and Mary, Queen of Scots.

Naturally come to occupy positions of authority in the industries of your mastery, if not through literal rank than socially/morally.

May find yourself successfully introducing a new movement, genre, belief, or idea before it's celebrated by the mainstream.

Are generous in the world of public service, and will leave a legacy of having cared for and striven for the betterment of your society.

Know how to communicate your ideals and philosophies to a wide audience in a professional setting effectively, even artistically.

May be accused of elitism, pretentiousness, or arrogance, even when you try to cultivate an attitude of humility and modesty.

AND YOU MAY FIND…

Your early professional life is beset with competition, or your chosen industry is somehow affected by martial conflicts.

Members of the public will interpret you either as self-indulgent and petty, or as austere and enlightened, with no in-between.

Opportunities for romance are plentiful for you in social and legal settings, but resulting relationships must be extricated from those wider contexts to establish a happy and healthy marriage.

Your boss often partakes in social drinking with his subordinates.

Jealousy is a common theme, whether you have a reputation for being jealous, others are jealous of and threatened by you, etc.

VISHAKHA is the Star of Purpose. Industries and career types favored are those involving research, politics, competition, speech, ideology, agitation, immigration, criticism, trade, exchange, leisure, intoxicants, production, leadership, personal branding, and style.

IF PURVA BHADRAPADA RULES THE TENTH LORD, YOU…

Marilyn Monroe, Grace Kelly, and Sidney Poitier all have their tenth lords in Purva Bhadrapada. Others with this placement are Kurt Cobain, Laurence Olivier, Michael Jordan, Charles Dickens, Vincent Price, Armie Hammer, Franz Schubert, Gerard Way, John Steinbeck, Kurt Russell, Maya Angelou, Conan O'Brien, Bobby Driscoll, David Tennant, Jay Leno, Rik Mayall, Keri Russell, and OP.

Tempt others into rule-breaking and are tempted in turn by communities and livelihoods that circumvent or defy the law.

Signify a movement or change in social norms within your field.

Use your work to provoke others into changing their core beliefs.

Bring elements of the metaphysical, spiritual, transcendental, and philosophical into a more social and/or practical public setting.

Naturally uncover and grapple with a fundamentally darker side of public life and of the public in general, with too much exposure or attention more likely to pose a real, material risk to your health, security, or even life.

AND YOU MAY FIND…

Your look, attitude, and/or impulses are easily congealed into an image or symbol, one that is powerful but restrictive, and your depths may be shunned by the public or authorities as a result.

Anyone who tries to take a conflict with you public will suffer serious consequences as a result, from either your own ferocity when tested, or organized backlash from others on your behalf.

Introduction through the professional and public sphere makes others magnetically attracted to you; however, those who would already be attracted to you are at risk of becoming obsessive.

The pursuit of a specific career or end-goal, specifically through higher education or founding of a philosophy, actually puts you in contact with more opportunities and generates more success in a totally different field or toward a different goal than you plan for.

One of the most rewarding and effective means by which you can perform public service is through contributions to education and community outreach through mentorship.

PURVA BHADRAPADA is the Burning Pair. Industries and career types favored are those involving ideology, sensuality, speculative genres, music, investigation, nature, spirituality, research, administration, promotion, conflict, subcultures, rhetoric, death, and crime.

HOPE THIS IS HELPFUL. VARIATION IN REQUESTS MEANS WE’RE GOING OUT OF ORDER, BUT WE WILL RETURN TO THE OTHERS LATER. FEEL FREE TO MESSAGE WITH QUESTIONS, THOUGHTS, IDEAS, ETC. THANKS SO MUCH. PART 7 WILL BE FOCUSED ON MERCURY-RULED 10TH LORD NAKSHATRAS! ♡

[arcane-abomination]

I recommend reading my blog on Void Magick before this one. As it explains the basics of Void that will not be covered here. This may cause some readers to be a little lost.

Leviathan’s Guidance

This information on the void was presented to me when I descended into a deep gnosis to make contact with lord Leviathan. He taught me the construction of the void and helped me to understand its makeup a little better. This seemed to be the missing piece I’ve heard many people talk about when traversing the void. And while it still holds truth that the void’s appearance is reflected in the individuals own perspective, it’s still important to understand the general structure of this vastly mysterious space.

I have taken the liberty to attribute my own terminology to each part that was shown to me in an attempt to bring further understanding and much easier categorization to the plains themselves, but you’re free to disregard these terms if they don’t suit you. In all there are 3, categorized by the upper, middle and lower spaces represented by the colors White, Grey, and Black. Now, please take note that these colors are rather arbitrary in the long run as each level presents itself uniquely to the individual. These are simply the product of my own journey, what appeared to me and thus how I label and associate the structure of the void that I experienced.

The Atherial Plain

We begin in the upper level I call the Atherial plain. Aptly named because it’s associated with the color white. While in this plain it appeared to me as though I was walking in the sky. It was bright, with clouds beneath me and around me. And all manner of things hung in the air, moving and shining without constitution or purpose. At least none that I could see. Stars, planets, comets, orbs, and a multitude of other items and creatures to unique to accurately convey in words, shimmering and shifting endlessly. There was no rest here, no silence. There was noise, endless whispers in the wind, music in the distance, and the random bustle of the many object’s collisions with one another. It was beautiful but intense. An energy compelling me to take action, not to wait or calculate. Just simply do without thought or meaning. This is the realm of everything and all things. Of motion, sound & fullness.

The Abyssal Plain

Or next stop is the lowest level, I call the Abyssal plain. You descend downwards into this place, into the vastness of an empty space. The association here is the color black, and all manner of silence, quiet contemplation, and letting go completely hang in the air. Energy here compells you to empt yourself of all things, and simply wait. All around me was blackness, a deep black that went beyond the understanding of simple darkness. Beneath my feet was an ink-colored ocean. Still, and calm, but full of power and strength laying in wait. It was from this ocean that lord Leviathan arose and greeted me, teaching me of the void’s structure. You see, like most people, it was this realm I came to first, like most people do. In fact it was the only real I had ever come to, until my work with Leviathan began.

It seems most of us who work with the void descend down into the abyss and the reason for this is simple. As mortal beings our subconscious has been taught that when we go up we come down. Gravity is always pulling at us. So, when we enter into the void, we can unconsciously descend, especially when we are overwhelmed with the intensity the void can bring. Once inside that comfortable place of familiarity it can be hard to ascend, especially since naturally speaking, falling down is easier than climbing up.

All in all, the energy of this realm beckoned me to listen, to wait, and patiently calculate my next move. It’s a plain completely opposite of its upper Aetherial counterpart. A realm of Stillness, Silence, and emptiness.

The Echo Plain

This was the final plain I visited, named the Echo plain, represented as the color Grey. It’s a special plain, a space full of liminal energy from the overlapping of the upper and lower plains. It was the most intense of the three, resembling a foggy wasteland with the faint light of the Atherial floating high above and the deep darkness of the abyss far below. The ground was as reflective as a mirror yet as clear as a window, that rippled like water wherever I took step. It was a confusing place, a space at which energy contradicted itself. It wanted me in motion and stillness, silent and loud, empty and full all at once. I felt like I was being pulled apart and smooshed together at the same time. It was confusing and overwhelming, but then…in a single moment, all the pieces fell into place.

Before me stood a group of creatures. Both beautiful and hideous all at once. I understood almost immediately what they were. Epithets…epithets of myself. Bits and pieces of who I was represented before me in kind. Some smiled warmly, some grimaced, and others showed no emotions at all. We did not speak to one another…we didn’t need to. But it was from that brief acknowledgment that I understood. This was the realm of reflection. A space where the conscious and subconscious became one, echos of one being existing in symbolic detachment from itself. None of us looked the same and yet we were. All knowing and understanding yet complete strangers to each other.

This is the space of contemplation and action. A realm in which one could truly reach into themselves and strengthen, build, heal, and empower in every way imaginable. A space not many seemed to know existed. Ascending and descending past it in their journeys through the void. It’s a testament to our need to learn quickly, and our unfocused and often misplaced goals. Sometimes we need to stop and look inward, to truly meet ourselves head on.

In Conclusion

The void is a wonderfully powerful and mysterious place. How these realms look to you and what you feel will ultimately be tied to your own perspective. How one sees the void isn’t always how another does. The lower realm may appear white to some instead of black. What makes it the abyss is not its color but it’s emptiness. How one acknowledges and uses that emptiness is always going to be unique to them.

[headspace-hotel]

Howdy! I've been following your discussions of ecology and spirituality and indigenous ways of knowing with interest! If it's alright I'd like to share some thoughts. A commonality I've noticed in a lot of the people who object to a lot of the things you're saying, and I think you've noticed as well, is that they seem to see science as a way of accessing reality without filtering by bias and belief. I think that idea comes from how we teach science in the US, and probably more broadly. We tend to teach science as a set of objective unchanging facts and truths without much detail or thought on how we came to know these things. My personal belief is that it would be far better to teach science as a process. Maybe have a class tracing the history of scientific ideas and understanding previous scientific or even pre-scientific thoughts and theories.

I've commented on your posts a few times and you may know I'm a geologist. As I've gotten further into my studies, I've had to change my idea of what science is. I now see it as a living process of making ever more useful simplifications about the world. The world itself is far too complex to understand even one aspect of it in its totality, so we observe patterns and try to simplify them to make models and rules out of them to understand behaviors of the world around us. Scientific models aren't always true in a simple direct way, but what they are is useful. If it isn't useful get rid of it and make a new hypothesis or conjecture or theory. I think one culture difference between different scientific disciplines is in how the subject matter confronts you with complexity. Much of the rigour that gives physics and chemistry their prestige for being able to explain so much stems from the fact that they remove as much complexity and impurity as possible. I think that baked into that sort of hierarchy of sciences is how close they are to pulling all of the different theories within the discipline under a universalizing theory (ie., quantum mechanics/relativity for physics being the best example) but I'm now off topic so I'll stop.

That turned into a bit of a stream of conscious mess, but I think I put down what I wanted to. I've been really enjoying your thoughts, and it's been (as you may be able to tell from the length of this) food for thought for myself in a similar way as reading Braiding Sweetgrass was for me. Keep it up!

basically, yes, correct. and also that, in times and places where "spirituality" and "science" are not culturally considered separate, you can't bring your "science is about the real world of real things, spirituality is about things that can't be measured or proven" framework because it Doesn't Work

The oldest mathematicians viewed mathematics as what we would today call "spiritual;" that doesn't make mathematics not real. Just because shamans with a framework that deals in the world of spirits use X plant for medicinal purposes, doesn't mean the plant doesn't have medicinal properties or that the shaman's usage isn't rooted in observations of what that plant does.

And if you went back in time to a Neolithic shaman with nothing in common with you and tried to explain the germ theory of disease to them, through a universal translator so both of you could understand, you could explain that mammoth pox isn't caused by a slight to the mammoth god by accidentally knocking over the mammoth god idol.

But you couldn't explain that mammoth pox isn't caused by evil spirits that leave the body of a mammoth when it is killed. It would be literally impossible to explain this. Because the Neolithic shaman's conceptual framework for "evil spirits" doesn't have a stipulation that it excludes microorganisms. It has no reason to.

And instead of trying to explain to the shaman THAT "demon=things that don't exist in physical reality" and THEN explain that demons (by this definition) aren't real, you would have to realize that you and the shaman are using different models for the same thing, and the shaman isn't fundamentally misattributing the cause of illness in any meaningful way, they just don't know exactly how it works.

[chloe-caulfield94]

It's time to forgive yourself

It’s time you finally forgive yourself. A decade ago you bought a cool new game that was the talk of the town. An indie adventure game that would finally let you live out all the adventures you hadn’t had the chance to experience during your predictably boring and uneventful stay in high school.

The game taught you its two core mechanics: interacting with objects and rewinding time. And then it stopped holding your hand and gave you the first task that could actually be failed. To hide in the closet in time. All you had to do was to rewind time once and interact with a single object. Hardly a difficult puzzle. Hardly a puzzle, to be frank.

Unfortunately, you failed the first task that could actually be failed in a game that is so mechanically uncomplicated and straightforward that it was at times described as a “walking simulator”.

As you would learn by watching the stats screen at the end of the episode, only 30% of players failed as you did. 70% of players succeeded where you did not.

Before you had the chance to process your utter failure you experienced the negative consequences of your inability to use the basic mechanics the game had attempted to teach you moments earlier. Because it is always the case in video games that when players succeed, they are rewarded and when they fail, they are humbled. In this case, your humbling was receiving an earful from a blue-haired teenage girl for failing to hide in her closet in time.

And then it happened. Your unconscious mind acted to save you. It reforged your wounded gamer pride into a fierce hatred of a fictional teenage girl. It’s not you who is at fault for failing to perform what was essentially a simplistic quick time event. No! It’s the mean blue-haired girl’s fault for giving you lip!

A fierce hatred indeed. So fierce that a decade later, you stay at your post, badmouthing a fictional teenage girl to anyone willing to listen. And a lot of those unwilling to listen but who’ve had the misfortune of frequenting the same websites as you, too. A decade. Even many fans of that mean blue-haired girl forgot about her. But you never will. You will forever feed the fire of that hatred. You will forever remain at your post. Because to abandon your mission of educating the world how a fictional teenage girl deserves to be murdered would mean to admit that you suck at video games. And that is something you can never, ever do. Your gamer pride would never suffer that.

I mean, it’s so easy to hide in Chloe’s closet. I only learnt it was even possible to fail that task after I had already finished the game, when a clip of it was recommended to me on YouTube.

And no, I’m not buying the “Oh, but I didn’t hide in the closet on purpose, because it felt wrong to hide from the man of the house” excuse. Yeah, sure. When you are given a task in a video game your first instinct is to fail it on purpose. And dude, you bought the game to experience all that high school drama you never got to experience in real life. If hiding in a closet is a bridge too far for you, what sort of adventures did you want Max to experience? Diligently doing her homework and going to bed at 9 p.m.?

Of course, this post is a humorous jab at the numerous and dedicated haters of Chloe Price. But there is a grain of truth to it. Have a look at this poll, which shows that players who failed to hide in Chloe’s closet in time were THREE TIMES more likely to dislike her in comparison to players who did manage to hide in time.

https://www.reddit.com/r/lifeisstrange/comments/12on3r8/s1_did_this_influence_your_opinion_of_chloe/

I know, it is by no means representative. But I don’t think it can be dismissed out of hand either, since it was conducted on a subreddit grouping some of the most loyal fans of the game, still willing to talk about it years later.

You might say: “You’re making fun of people hating on Chloe a decade later. But you’re a fan of hers a decade later”. I say apples and oranges. Being a fan of something many years later is normal. Being a hater of something many years later is weird. Because no healthy human being enjoys feeling hatred or outrage, even towards a fictional character. If you really dislike a story or a character, just forget about it, instead of subjecting yourself to the emotional trauma of seeing the mean blue-haired girl time and time again.

So in this moment I say to you. You are released form the spell put on you by the mean blue-haired girl a decade ago. You are forgiven for failing a quick time event a decade ago. You are healed, you are whole. Go play some video games.

[nerianasims]

The Root of All Cruelty? by Paul Bloom

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/11/27/the-root-of-all-cruelty

Opening in a private window works. But here are some excerpts:

"The thesis that viewing others as objects or animals enables our very worst conduct would seem to explain a great deal. Yet there’s reason to think that it’s almost the opposite of the truth.

At some European soccer games, fans make monkey noises at African players and throw bananas at them. Describing Africans as monkeys is a common racist trope, and might seem like yet another example of dehumanization. But plainly these fans don’t really think the players are monkeys; the whole point of their behavior is to disorient and humiliate. To believe that such taunts are effective is to assume that their targets would be ashamed to be thought of that way—which implies that, at some level, you think of them as people after all.

Consider what happened after Hitler annexed Austria, in 1938...

The Jews who were forced to scrub the streets—not to mention those subjected to far worse degradations—were not thought of as lacking human emotions. Indeed, if the Jews had been thought to be indifferent to their treatment, there would have been nothing to watch here; the crowd had gathered because it wanted to see them suffer. The logic of such brutality is the logic of metaphor: to assert a likeness between two different things holds power only in the light of that difference. The sadism of treating human beings like vermin lies precisely in the recognition that they are not.

What about violence more generally? Some evolutionary psychologists and economists explain assault, rape, and murder as rational actions, benefitting the perpetrator or the perpetrator’s genes. No doubt some violence—and a reputation for being willing and able to engage in violence—can serve a useful purpose, particularly in more brutal environments. On the other hand, much violent behavior can be seen as evidence of a loss of control. It’s Criminology 101 that many crimes are committed under the influence of drugs and alcohol, and that people who assault, rape, and murder show less impulse control in other aspects of their lives as well. In the heat of passion, the moral enormity of the violent action loses its purchase.

But “Virtuous Violence: Hurting and Killing to Create, Sustain, End, and Honor Social Relationships” (Cambridge), by the anthropologist Alan Fiske and the psychologist Tage Rai, argues that these standard accounts often have it backward. In many instances, violence is neither a cold-blooded solution to a problem nor a failure of inhibition; most of all, it doesn’t entail a blindness to moral considerations. On the contrary, morality is often a motivating force: “People are impelled to violence when they feel that to regulate certain social relationships, imposing suffering or death is necessary, natural, legitimate, desirable, condoned, admired, and ethically gratifying.” Obvious examples include suicide bombings, honor killings, and the torture of prisoners during war, but Fiske and Rai extend the list to gang fights and violence toward intimate partners. For Fiske and Rai, actions like these often reflect the desire to do the right thing, to exact just vengeance, or to teach someone a lesson. There’s a profound continuity between such acts and the punishments that—in the name of requital, deterrence, or discipline—the criminal-justice system lawfully imposes. Moral violence, whether reflected in legal sanctions, the killing of enemy soldiers in war, or punishing someone for an ethical transgression, is motivated by the recognition that its victim is a moral agent, someone fully human.

In the fiercely argued and timely study “Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny” (Oxford), the philosopher Kate Manne makes a consonant argument about sexual violence. “The idea of rapists as monsters exonerates by caricature,” she writes, urging us to recognize “the banality of misogyny,” the disturbing possibility that “people may know full well that those they treat in brutally degrading and inhuman ways are fellow human beings, underneath a more or less thin veneer of false consciousness.”...

If the worst acts of cruelty aren’t propelled by dehumanization, not all dehumanization is accompanied by cruelty. Manne points out that there’s nothing wrong with a surgeon viewing her patients as mere bodies when they’re on the operating table; in fact, it’s important for doctors not to have certain natural reactions—anger, moral disgust, sexual desire—when examining patients. The philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum has given the example of using your sleeping partner’s stomach as a pillow when lying in bed, and goes on to explore the more fraught case of objectification during sexual intercourse, suggesting that there’s nothing inherently wrong about this so long as it is consensual and restricted to the bedroom...

As a philosopher, Manne grounds her arguments in more technical literature, and at one point she emphasizes the connection between her position and the Oxford philosopher P. F. Strawson’s theory of “reactive attitudes.” Strawson argued that, when we’re dealing with another person as a person, we can’t help experiencing such attitudes as admiration and gratitude, resentment and blame. You generally don’t feel this way toward rocks or rodents. Acknowledging the humanity of another, then, has its risks, and these are neatly summarized by Manne, who notes that seeing someone as a person makes it possible for that person to be a true friend or beloved spouse, but it also makes it possible for people to be “an intelligible rival, enemy, usurper, insubordinate, betrayer, etc.”...

Certainly, Pitzer’s description of various concentration camps contains so many examples of cruelty and degradation that it’s impossible to see them as a mere failure to acknowledge the humanity of their victims. As the scholar of warfare Johannes Lang has observed of the Nazi death camps, “What might look like the dehumanization of the other is instead a way to exert power over another human.”

The limitations of the dehumanization thesis are hardly good news. There has always been something optimistic about the idea that our worst acts of inhumanity are based on confusion. It suggests that we could make the world better simply by having a clearer grasp of reality—by deactivating those brain implants, or their ideological equivalent. The truth may be harder to accept: that our best and our worst tendencies arise precisely from seeing others as human."

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Logan Lancing

Published: Feb 28, 2024

People who have escaped cults all tell a similar story. That story starts with a desire to belong, coupled with a desire for purpose. Strong familial and social bonds are generally preferable to shaky relationships, isolation, and the feeling of being an outcast. Likewise, feeling like one’s life lacks any meaning or purpose is a recipe for anxiety, depression, or even madness. If you talk to people who have escaped cults, they all tell you that they didn’t set out to join a cult—the cult set out to prey on them, offering to fill the voids that we must all grapple with, to varying degrees, throughout our lives. The cult offers inclusion, affirmation, and a secret cult knowledge of life’s purpose. All one must do is take the leap of faith.

Cults are incredibly effective for a variety of reasons, most of which is their ability to lead initiates deeper into the cult, even when those initiates start to sense that the “inclusion,” “affirmation,” and “purpose” offered to them comes with some very nasty conditions and ultimatums. Cult survivors describe how difficult it is to stop placing one foot in front of the other when the cult has total control of one’s physical, social, and emotional environments. Cults work tirelessly to control all information entering an initiate’s eyes and ears. Cults control the books you can read, the news you can watch, the organizations you can trust, the experts you must listen to, and the people you confide in. The cult environment is one of endless propaganda designed to be so effective that one loses control of their own thoughts; loses control over the voice in their head.

Once an initiate finds themselves in the cult’s totalizing environment (see Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism by Robert Jay Lifton) the cult lifts the veil of love, affirmation, and inclusion and reveals a cycle of psychological abuse designed to drag the initiate deeper into the cult’s doctrine. This abuse is justified through a language of purity—initiates must let go of all the bad influences and contamination of their former lives, revealing their deepest secrets through ritual confessions. The point is to strip the initiate down, leaving them totally vulnerable and exposed. Only then can the cult rebuild the initiate in the cult’s image.

Cult survivors will tell you that they often didn’t know they were in a cult until someone pierced the cult’s totalizing environment with a message from the outside; a tether to a long-lost reality; an invitation to step back into the real world. The Queering of the American Child is one such tether, and I hope parents nationwide will receive the message loud and clear: Education is in the grip of a religious cult—the Queer Cult.

Now, I don’t mean “queer” as in “gay” or “lesbian” or “bisexual.” I mean “queer” as it is defined in the academic literature of the Queer Cult’s doctrine: Queer Theory.

Unlike gay identity, which, though deliberately proclaimed in an act of affirmation, is nonetheless rooted in the positive fact of object-choice, queer identity need not be grounded in any positive truth or in any stable reality. As the very word implies, “queer” does not name some natural kind or refer to some determinate object; it acquires its meaning from its oppositional relation to the norm. Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence.[1] (Halperin, 1995, p. 62, italics in original)

Our children are “experiencing the queer,” as Queer Educational Activist Kevin Kumashiro explains in his 2009 book, Against Common Sense: Teaching and Learning Toward Social Justice (2nd edition). Specifically, our children are experiencing the “queer” because they have been purposefully placed in a state of psychological crisis. “Crisis,” Kumashiro says, “should be expected in the process of learning, by both the student and the teacher. Like queer activism, queer teaching always works through crisis…the goal is to continue teaching and learning through crisis—to continue experiencing the queer.”[2] (Kumashiro, 2009, p. 55)

The Queer Cult has total control of our national discourse as it relates to sex, “gender,” and sexuality. Our children are fed a steady diet of cult doctrine through mainstream media, social media, popular culture, the psychiatrists they consult, and the doctors their parents trust. Not least of which, our children attend schools that universally push the idea that children can be “born in the wrong body.” America’s children learn that they have “gender identities” that might not match their “sex assigned at birth.” A Medical Industrial Complex waits in the wings with irreversible puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and “gender affirming” surgeries.

The social and emotional pressures to conform to the Queer Cult’s corrupted understanding of reality are hard to bear. Most people know that “radical gender ideology” is insane, but they go along with it because they don’t want to be considered a “bad person,” “on the wrong side of history,” or worst of all, a “conservative.” The cult’s moral extortion racket is designed to drag us deeper into their agenda; deeper into what Queer Activist Michael Warner calls a “queer planet.”[3] However strong the pressure may be, we must remain tethered to reality—not only for ourselves, but especially for our children. As we say in the book,

[Queer Activists] believe they can arrest the steering wheel of History and drive us all off the ledge. Under normal circumstances, all of this nonsense would be cause for endless mockery and laughter. Unfortunately, Queer Activists have proved to be remarkably effective. Today, they already have one hand on the wheel, and our kids are in the car.[4]

In The Queering of the American Child you will learn what Queer Theory is, where it comes from, how it got into schools, and what it’s attempting to do with your children. You will learn that Queer Theory has nothing to do with helping gay kids, and nothing to do with helping troubled children feel “included” in a healthy set of societal norms. Letting the cultists speak for themselves, Dr. James Lindsay and I bring in hundreds of citations to lay bare the Queer Cult’s agenda. Our schools are initiating children into the Queer Cult through psychological manipulation and child abuse. What you read will shock you, and that’s a good thing. Welcome back to reality.

--

References

[1] Halperin, D. M. (1995). Saint Foucault: Towards a gay hagiography. Oxford University Press. (p. 61) [2] Kumashiro, K. K. (2009). Against Common Sense: Teaching and Learning Toward Social Justice (2nd ed.). Routledge. (p. 55) [3] Warner, M. (1991). Introduction: Fear of a queer planet. Social Text, (29), 3–17. [4] Lancing, L. and Lindsay, J (2024) The Queering of the American Child: How A New School Religious Cult Poisons the Minds and Bodies of Normal Kids. New Discourses. (p. 65)

[flagellant]

hey genuinely thank you for giving a fuck. many many people have simply stopped giving fucks for many reasons but you have not. plz don't let the shitbags get you down.

Something I've written about, in the past:

The past year has been about understanding who I am when my back isn’t against the wall. In some ways it’s more terrifying, having the responsibility of making a good life for myself from good foundations. But I remember with every second what it was like to live a life without the luck I’ve been given, and I see the people that get denied it every day. If anger is powerful, I want to use that anger. I want to wield it and make something so angry that everybody will be angry with me. An anger in a single direction, with one edge like a knife, to cut the world down the middle and into a better shape, and hand it to everyone like halves of an orange. I only have two hands to make any piece of art with, and I will only ever have (at most, at my most fortunate) two hands. But I don’t stand alone in being angry at this cruel, foolish world, the one which looks at children and teaches them “You are not worth anything, you have no value or sanctity just because you are human,” and laughs and calls us childish when we say we deserve better than that.

Because that’s the most formative thing about me of all. The selfish, bitter dregs of feeling hurt and betrayed by the world. The incredibly egotistical idea, “I deserved a better world”. Look at my past self and all of the cruel, flailing, foolish things I did–some on purpose, some not, all causing harm anyway–and think about what I could do about it.

I think that, on one hand, yes. I deserved better, objectively. There are things in my narrative that no one deserves the agony of. Beyond that, perhaps I deserved better circumstances.

But I think it doesn’t matter what I deserved in the past, good or bad. What matters more to me is not making the same mistakes in the future. I can’t allow myself to resent the people around me for being maybe a little bit more lucky than I was; there’s art to be made that could change the world. All of it is made out of anger. All of my past, all of my future, it can only ever be anger. Anger that creates, anger that cuts, anger that hardens, anger that stands in front of other people and walks the line for them.

Anger that stands in front of other people and walks the line for them. I’d almost like that to be the narrative I make for myself. To make a world in which I can say that the events that formed me most are not the ones which hardened me like lava to obsidian, proud like a boar. Instead, a world where I met its hard edges as gentle as I dared. You may have wondered why I sounded so different in the poems I write than the person I am, and the truth is almost simple.

I learned to write poetry to put to words all the things that I feel which I’m unable to understand or say. That’s the narrative I’ve been trying hard to tell you all, all this time, the one I want to write so badly and yet have no idea how to.

Writing about anger is so easy for me, except for that one kind, because I can never talk about it except in poems. It lives in me somewhere deeper than anything else, deeper than my heart, deeper than my soul. It can only come out in art, not in words. That anger lives in my belly and it growls like a great black dog every time it thinks it sees someone being hurt. I think that says the most about me that I’ll ever be able to say.

[statleragainstposers]

COMMANDMENTS OF RATIONAL THINKING: IV

Thou shalt appreciate the beauty of existence.

Perhaps the biggest thing that keeps a person from achieving true Rational Thought is a clouded mind, and in life, there is no greater fog than nihilism.

It is easy in this day and age to feel small and insignificant, buried beneath tales of grandeur and success that are televised directly to you through the very screens that I now write upon. But despite this all, there is still meaning behind all things. Everything you do has its purpose, and sometimes, that purpose does not serve a grander scheme, but still, it has purpose.

In a similar manner, you would be forgiven for thinking that Rational Thinking is a distinctly nihilistic ideology, teaching you to forsake contentment for true objectivity, but this is false. The goal of Rational Thinking has always been, and always will be, the pursuit of truth; and thus it is impossible to think Rationally without understanding the greatest truth: life is beautiful by nature of living. Losing sight of this fact can only lead one astray into irrationality, and so it is vital for you to remember it. Live your life with pride, perform your daily rituals, and never be led to think your actions are meaningless.

Remember: everything has purpose, and everything includes you.