#lws4 spoilers

[lady-quen]

He's so pretty, and for what? Just to suffer?

[glitchgw2]

VERY messy/sketchy art for now, but!!!

Meet Paille (ze/hir), an asura mesmer who leads a cult disguised as a human named Salma.

Seeing an opportunity in Joko's demise, ze exploited vulnerable people and started a cult promising the god-king's return. But in actuality, ze's just studying the nature of bookah human brainwash and manipulation. How far can ze go and bend the minds of humans? Well... only cruel ways to find out. Ritualistic sacrifices and starvation deaths are daily occurrings in hir cult.

(The colors of hir clothes are WIP. Can't wait to make hir in gameeee. 😩)

[wyldblunt]

one day i'm gonna do these properly with armor changes and everything too but for now..... updated glyndwr hair timeline!!! + notes on what he was up to at the time

(this isn't necessarily an accurate way to plot-date my existing drawings of him, bc for example i only recently decided the smoky stylization was a canon thing connected to his death/mists-hopping etc... but from now on i'm gonna try to stick to this, at least roughly!)

[saladbarselectionmenu]

Caithe is actually such a compassionate character. She's so isolated and lonely and it's kind of heart breaking watching it but once you realise that she is constantly, consistently reaching out to people it's so much worse.

Caithe is the one who tried to repair Destiny's Edge, and thanks the commander constantly for being there for her during Dungeons, and she's the one who reaches out and worries if the commander is hurting over Aurenes loss too, but she's so alone for so much of the story despite the fact she is trying so hard to be a good friend. She's just so afraid at the same time.

[just-norn-things]

Yap away about all of them with 2, 5 and 14!

Ohhhhhhh honey strap yourself in!

Questions from this ask game:

Quick roll call for reference, left to right. Kara: Pact Commander, Soulbeast. Torvi: Warmaster, Scrapper. Aaria: Vindicator, typically Alliance stance, but Jormag often pops in for a chat.

2. How do they feel about norn society's expectations and traditions? Are they comfortable in norn society? Is there anything they wish was different?

Kara is the Norniest Norn who ever Norned, at least until around halfway through POF. Everything is about the legend, nothing is more important, and leaving a legacy is all that matters. Almorra teaches her the selfishness of this way of thinking early on in the PS, but it's only after The Incident that it really hits home for her. She comes back from the Domain of the Lost feeling like the things you do are far more important than being recognised for the things you do. Additionally, when she later has children, she hopes her generation brings in more of a balance of being there for your kids and building a legend, instead of letting others raise them while you get famous. Torvi is very comfortable in Norn society, but she does prefer the company of Charr in general. As an engineer, she feels like her ingenuity is more celebrated amongst those who value the machinery she is so good at fixing, and she is well suited to the Warband lifestyle. Whilst she's not really accepted in the Black Citadel, the Gear Warband thinks of her as one of their own. Aaria typically leads a nomadic lifestyle, but is comfortable among her peers when she returns home. However, she tends to converse openly with the Spirits inside her mind, and others aren't comfortable around her for this reason. She's not a shaman, and not often talking to one of the Spirits of the Wild, so the other Norn tend to give "the woman who talks to herself a lot" a wide berth.

5. Which Spirit of the Wild do they have a connection to? How was the connection forged? How does their Spirit influence them? What do they think of their Spirit? Do they revere any other Spirit?

All three have a connection to Jormag, as all three survived being abandoned at a shrine to Dragon as babies, which caused them to be exposed to Jormag's lingering magic. However, they all deal with this very differently, and were all raised amongst Norn who encouraged them to bond with the other Spirits instead. Until Jormag wakes during LWS3, none of them believed the connection was real at all. Kara is a staunch follower of Wolf, much like her adoptive parents. She lives and breathes Wolf's teachings all her life, even when her connection to Jormag becomes apparent. Wolf gifts her with the ability to become the Wolf when she is 14, just before the start of her PS. Torvi was raised as a ward of the Bear Lodge and reveres Bear in general for their strength. However, she has little connection to the Spirit, and cannot become the Bear. As a revenant, Aaria has a connection to many Spirits, and not just Spirits of the Wild. Because of this, she has little attachment to any of them. If you put a gun to her head and forced her to choose then she would choose Raven, and Raven does often speak to her, however when Jormag is active they tend to completely drown out any other Spirits in her mind. That said, she is fairly nonchalant about this. Another voice in her head is hardly new, and whilst she has no interest in doing the bidding of the ice dragon, they are a decent conversationalist.

14. Do they have any heirlooms? Are there legends behind them or do they only have sentimental value? Or did they earn/find someone else's?

Kara isn't really one for sentimentality, however when Braham gifts her Eir's hairpin in the latter part of LWS4, she does get a rather foreign fuzzy feeling in her chest. Still, she makes him swear to take it back once his hair grows out, because Eir's stuff should be his, no matter how much Kara loved her too. "Yeah yeah, I'll take it back tomorrow." (he never does) Torvi is very attached to an old hunting knife that Forgal gave her when she joined the Vigil, since she broke hers. These days it's brittle and largely useless, but she keeps it in the best condition possible and never uses it, despite it being on her at all times. Aaria wields a hammer rumoured to have belonged to King Jalis. She is highly protective of this and will consider no other weapon, no matter how unsuitable the hammer may be in the moment. Any suggestion that the hammer is merely a replica is met with...well...the hammer.

[kerra-and-company]

I was going through my screenshots and found out that I'd taken a bunch of pictures of various loading screens in the game. This is far from all of the loading screens (and these aren't all my favorites!), but I figured I'd post my randomly discovered random assortment from the personal story and beyond, because why not :)

This game has really pretty art, guys!

[commander-gloryforge]

LWS4 SCREENSHOT DUMP!!! heavy spoilers get ready

"my eyes are up here joko"

astrid gets a 3 day break while i finish the skyscale. and then the horrors!

[brightwingedbat]

Hey Naz, what have you experienced so far that absolutely terrified you the most?

(LWS4 content) Nastazya's gaze lowers, a small grimace as she recalls a key moment. "...When I thought Aurene and I had finally taken down Kralkatorrik at Thunderhead Peaks. All the struggle, gone, just silence. And then he got back up."

Her tail fur spikes up slightly, curling a slight. "I saw that dragon's open maw, the magic forming in its throat. After all my fighting, I was going to end up like my mother. A piece of crystal, forced to kill those I knew, my cubs weren't even in fahrar yet and they were about to lose me... For the first time, I'd crawled backwards in fear until I felt the rock wall behind me. I couldn't do a thing but watch in horror... Felt like my heart was going to burst."

She sighs. "And then Aurene got in front of me, saved me. Got branded herself, any fear I had then turned into despair. I am... Just so thankful that it wasn't her end after those months of despair."

[silvesi]

LWS4 E6 was great and there were NO PROBLEMS at ALL and Fedsy was FINE AND GOOD by the way

[bioluminescent-obscurity]

thinking about these lines from lws4 and eod respectively

Glint: Welcome, Scion and Champion. If you're here, the final confrontation with Kralkatorrik is imminent. Glint: Hope can be powerful, but also dangerous. You must prove that you can strike as one. Glint: A better world is waiting to be born.

Soo-Won: You have a pained soul, tiny one. Do you believe I mean you harm? Ankka: The entirety of your existence is harm, Elder Dragon. Ankka: In this life, I'm only an ant. What I'm about to do, breaking the cycle—it's for a better world, I promise.

[mirage-of-the-virtuoso]

Right, so, now my brain has gone down the rabbit hole of "what are dangerous thing that Siren (NMC!AU Chrysallus for anyone unfamiliar) to be playing 'fuck around and find out' with?"

And, honestly? Quite a few things. Chrysallus in his canon story has always been one to toy with dangerous substances, either for experimentation or for use in personal life or combat missions. That's how he learns how things affect people.

Siren did that to himself to cope with a lot of things, and to try and find something to stabilize himself in the unhealthiest of methods.

For example: remember the auric dust found in Auric Basin? That are basically the remains of fallen Exalted? Siren fucked around with that. Still determining what the exact consequences would be, but consensus says "very badly".

Bloodstone dust has always been deemed very bad as a substance. He would also fuck around with that, see how it alters his mind. Bloodstone Fen made it much easier, given that they go straight into the heart of a bloodstone explosion.

He would later fuck around with Brand crystals from Kralky and his minions. It wouldn't be unusual for him to be experimenting with them, but there is massive concern over why his hands have burn marks suspiciously like electrical patterns on his skin.

IBS in particular is when he slips the furthest into identity crisis again, and what does he do? He experiments with shards of crystallized dragon blood, with Jormag's blood. Those who don't know what I'm talking about: I'm talking about these

Icebrood Corruption tonics. He discovers that dragon blood can be altered via ectoplasm in order to turn it into make it into a drinkable tonic. This should never have happened. But Siren's already too deep into a rabbit hole of insanity, hopelessness, and copium: of course he drinks it.

At first, it was harmless. At least, that's what he felt. Maybe he felt colder than usual, but nothing to do harm. And it allowed him to sleep for longer periods of time, get some much needed rest.

But once the effects wore off, he felt this need to drink it again, just to feel stable, to feel at peace within his own mind. And the more Siren drank the tonics, the more it began to change his body.

And soon after, one tonic wasn't enough to feel balanced anymore. The whispers were getting louder, were telling him to relapse, to give in to his darkness. After all this time, Siren couldn't afford to do that all over again. He can't allow history to repeat itself.

But the damage had been done: his skin took on a strange blue hue unlike his own, almost frost-like, barely reminiscent of the creatures he's fighting up in the Shiverpeaks. And withdrawal effects from cutting himself off of those tonics were like freezing hellfire in his body. He was sure that it would kill him if he didn't take another tonic soon.

Someone does notice, and others are compelled to intervene lest their greatest warrior turns his blade onto them, though this causes a lot of conflict within the ranks. It's only out of sheer determination that Siren's not killed outright for what he did.

The most they can do is treat the withdrawal effects until they bring him to Aurene. Maybe she knows how to help the wayward champion that felt so disconnected from the world around him that he resorted to drinking literal dragon blood liquified by ectoplasm in order to cope, even if it was slowly killing him from the inside.

[lady-quen]

Verse: The Hound, The Haggard, and the Haunted

Posting an initial version of the lore being cooked between myself, @rostomanologist and @commanderteag ! The context will pretty much be necessary to understand most of the humor oscillating between these chucklefucks :) Chaos plant trio is a thing now.

The Dawnborn Maelmordha and Duskborn Kimarse have known one another since approximately 1320 AE as saplings, at least until Mael's Wyld Hunt and Kima's run-in with the Inquest ensured no further contact. The two wouldn't properly meet again until sometime after 1330 AE, during Commander Maelmordha's Elonian campaigns.

Owing to his death at the hands of Balthazar, Mael, now a lich, struggles with controlling his Diabolist powers, opting to utilize sealing tattoos and enchanted chains to stall the demon essence from consuming his soul. It was after the conflict with the War God that Maelmordha and Kimarse met again, the latter traveling in the area out of curiosity about the Awakened Inquest rampaging in Tyria.

The so-called Thanatologist caught onto the "deal" with the Pact Commander rather quickly and, armed with potential blackmail material, figured it most beneficial for them both to engage in a contract. An undying subject for the death scholar and possible help with his condition for the Commander, especially with Kimarse's Revenant former acquaintance in the picture - Noereen, haunted by the spectre of a legendary White Mantle well-versed in bloodstone magics. A bloodstone collar could be forged to act as a magic buffer, but a sample was required, and, well, with most equipment simply dissolving within the Commander's chest portal and the man himself being unable to perform the procedure, Kimarse thought it best to ward her left hand, plunge it in and hope for the best. She managed to pull out the demon core now replacing the Commander's heart for study, but lost the appendage to extreme frostbite. A tradeoff, just like Tyr lost his hand in the jaws of Fenrir - in order to apply Gleipnir.

Enter Maolmuire, a formidable Mesmer with an unsettling connection to the Dream and the sword Caladbolg.

Maolmuire of the Noon, awakened approximately 1330 AE, is a member of a cycle which suffered malformations following the Pale Mother's injury at the claws of the Shadow of the Dragon. Born with a warped right arm and a pair of wings, he stands out from his fellow sylvari, but what happened to his corporeal form is scarcely his only affliction. His connection to the Dream far too strong to the point of being unable to separate his own memories from those of its denizens, Maol's waking and sleeping moments alike are dominated by the three Knights of the Thorn: the Valiant Riannoc, the Marshal Trahearne, and the Commander, Maelmordha. The three personalities blend within him, and a destiny laid out by the Astral Ward itself sends him on a quest into the desert to find the Commander. With expert mesmeric magic, he is able to infiltrate even the Order of Shadows until he eventually confronts the Commander, now a different beast altogether than the pre-death image which yet remained of him inside the Dream.

In spite of being walking reminders of one another's worst traumas, Maelmordha and Maolmuire work together, with the former's condition and ever-fresh grief for the Pact Marshal making the burden of the lich-slaying Caladbolg infinitely heavy. Following the campaign against Palawa Joko, he attempts to return the sword, only to be met with rejection - for now. Indeed, it isn't long before the Mother receives a mysterious vision and nominates the Fourth Knight, who happens to be none other than Maolmuire himself.

The three keep in contact and work together in the future, out of selfless and selfish reasons alike.

[herald-of-aurene]

i made the Caithe clone (copy? alt? idk the right word for it...) i was thinking about for quite a bit :D I decided to use the Equinox outfit till i get her to max bc it kinda resembles crystals on one side

[wyldblunt]

glyn's been doing cartwheels in my brain recently, i really wanna see him in in i want to eat space (68)!! (maybe some good good angst?)

also optionally best girl merritt in exact sciences (40)!

aftermath

[palette challenge] [my character list!]

[guildwarsgirl]

When your asura is so small, she doesn't even fit into the frame when being interrogated by Joko. JUST LOOK DOWN, MY DUDE!

[moth-tea-merchant]

Aurene in lws4

california girls we’re inconsolable

dreams of doom the visions wont stop