#maker behold I may never be this successful again

[ghostymarni]

-we’re all deserters now.

[beemusik]

How David Bowie Invented Ziggy Stardust

Jason Heller’s book Strange Stars: David Bowie, Pop Music, and the Decade Sci-Fi Exploded is the story of how science fiction influenced the musicians of the Seventies. Out now in hardcover via Melville House, Strange Stars also examines how space exploration, futurism and emerging technology inspired the sometimes-cosmic, sometimes-mechanistic music the decade produced. In this section, Heller delves into the creation of Bowie’s most-famous alter ego, Ziggy Stardust.

A small crowd of sixty or so music fans stood in the dance hall of the Toby Jug pub in Tolworth, a suburban neighborhood in southwest London, on the night of February 10, 1972. The backs of their hands had been freshly stamped by the doorman. A DJ played records to warm up the crowd for the main act. The hall was nothing fancy, little more than “an ordinary function room.” The two-story brick building that housed it – “a gaunt fortress of a pub on the edge of an underpass” – had played host to numerous rock acts over the past few years, including Led Zeppelin, Jethro Tull, and Fleetwood Mac. Sci-fi music had even graced the otherwise earthy Toby Jug, thanks to recent headliners King Crimson and Hawkwind, and exactly one week earlier, on February 3, the band Stray performed, quite likely playing their sci-fi song “Time Machine.” The concertgoers on the tenth, however, had no idea that they would soon witness the most crucial event in the history of sci-fi music.

Most of them already knew who David Bowie was – the singer who, three years earlier, had sung “Space Oddity,” and who had appeared very seldom in public since, focusing instead on making records that barely dented the charts. His relatively low profile in recent years hadn’t helped his latest single, “Changes,” which had come out in January. Despite its soaring, anthemic sound, it failed to find immediate success in England. But the lyrics of the song seemed to signal an impending metamorphosis, hinted at again in late January when Bowie declared in a Melody Makerinterview, “I’m gay and always have been” and unabashedly predicted, “I’m going to be huge, and it’s quite frightening in a way.” Bowie clearly had a big plan up his immaculately tailored sleeve. But what could it be?

Before Bowie took the stage of the Toby Jug, an orchestral crescendo announced him. It was a recording of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, drawn from the soundtrack to A Clockwork Orange. To anyone who’d seen the film, the music carried a sinister feeling, superimposed as it was over Kubrick’s visions of grim dystopia and ultraviolence. Grandiloquence mixed with foreboding, shot through with sci-fi: it couldn’t have been a better backdrop for what the pint-clutching attendees of the Toby Jug were about to behold.

At around 9:00 p.m., the houselights were extinguished. A spotlight sliced the darkness. Bowie took the stage. But was it really him? In a strictly physical sense, it must have been. But this was Bowie as no one had seen him before. His hair – which appeared blond and flowing on the cover of Hunky Dory, released just three months earlier – was now chopped at severe angles and dyed bright orange, the color of a B-movie laser beam. His face was lavishly slathered with cosmetics. He wore a jumpsuit with a plunging neckline, revealing his delicate, bone-pale chest, and his knee-high wrestling boots were fire-engine red. Bowie had never been conservative in dress, but even for him, this was a quantum leap into the unknown.

Then he began to play. His band – dubbed the Spiders from Mars and comprising guitarist Mick Ronson, bassist Trevor Bolder, and drummer Woody Woodmansey – was lean, efficient, and powerful, clad in gleaming, metallic outfits that mimicked spacesuits, reminiscent of the costumes from the campy 1968 sci-fi romp Barbarella. The Jane Fonda vehicle had been a huge hit in England, and it became a cult film in the United States, thanks to its titillating portrayal of a future where sensuality is rediscovered after a lifetime of sterile, virtual sex.

In the same way, Bowie’s new incarnation was shocking, lurid, and supercharged with sexual energy. Combined with his recent admission of either homosexuality or bisexuality, as he was then married to his first wife, Angela, Bowie’s new persona oozed futuristic mystique, which Bowie biographer David Buckley described as “a blurring of ‘found’ symbols from science fiction – space-age high heels, glitter suits, and the like.”

But what bewitched the audience most was the music. Amid a set of established songs such as “Andy Warhol,” “Wild Eyed Boy from Freecloud,” and, naturally, “Space Oddity,” the Spiders from Mars injected a handful of new tunes, including “Hang On to Yourself” and “Suffragette City,” that had yet to appear on record. Propulsive, infectious, and awash in dizzying imagery, this was a new Bowie – cut less from the thoughtful, singer-songwriter mold and more from some new hybrid of thespian rocker and sci-fi myth. These songs bounced off the walls of the Toby Jug’s no-longer-ordinary function room. The audience, whistling and cheering, was entranced. A show eye-popping enough to dazzle an entire arena was being glimpsed in the most intimate of watering holes.

Although the crowd was sparse, people stood on tables and chairs to get the best possible view. The stage was only two feet high, but it may as well have been twenty, or two million – an elevator to outer space designed to launch Bowie into an orbit far more enduring than that of Major Tom in “Space Oddity.”

At some point, amid the swirl and spectacle of the two-hour set, Bowie announced from the stage the name of his new identity: Ziggy Stardust.

Like an artifact from some alien civilization, Bowie’s fifth album, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, was unveiled on June 16, 1972. By then, Ziggy had become a sensation. After the Toby Jug gig in February, concertgoers embraced Bowie’s new persona in music venues around the UK. Attendance swelled each night, as did a growing legion of followers who dressed themselves in homemade approximations of Bowie’s outlandish attire.

Just as the album was released, he and the Spiders appeared on the BBC’s revered Top of the Popsprogram, performing the record’s centerpiece: the song “Starman.” For many of a certain age, watching Bowie on their family’s television that evening was tantamount to the Beatles’ legendary spot on The Ed Sullivan Show in the United States eight years earlier. “He was so vivid. So luminous. So fluorescent. We had one of the first color TVs on our street, and David Bowie was the reason to have a color TV,” remembered Bono of U2, who was twelve at the time. “It was like a creature falling from the sky. Americans put a man on the moon. We had our own British guy from space.”

Musically, “Starman” was an exquisite and striking slice of pop songcraft, exactly what Bowie needed at that point in his career. Lyrically, he smuggled in a sci-fi story that centers around Ziggy Stardust, who was both Bowie’s alter ego and the fictional protagonist of the Rise and Fall concept album, as loose as it was in that regard – it is more a fugue of ideas that coalesce into a concept. Through the radio and TV, an alien announces his existence to Earth, which Bowie describes in lovingly rendered sci-fi verse: “A slow voice on a wave of phase.” The young people of the world become enchanted and hope to lure the alien down: “Look out your window, you can see his light /If we can sparkle, he may land tonight.” But that alien is reticent, and his shyness makes him all the more magnetic.

Bowie sang the song on Top of the Pops clad in a multicolored, reptilian-textured jumpsuit, which Melody Maker called, “Vogue’s idea of what the well-dressed astronaut should be wearing.” In that sense, “Starman” is a self-fulfilling prophecy: before he could truly know the impact the song would have, he used it to describe its effect on Great Britain’s young people in perfect detail. He was the starman waiting in the sky, and the kids who saw him on TV soon began to dress like him, hoping to sparkle so that he may land tonight.

If Bowie intended “Starman” to be an overt reference to [Robert A.] Heinlein’s Starman Jones, the book he loved as a kid, he never publicly confessed to it. But the admittedly sketchy story line of Rise and Fall parallels another Heinlein work: Stranger in a Strange Land, the novel that had influenced David Crosby in the ’60s and, later, many other sci-fi musicians of the ’70s. The book’s hero,Valentine Michael Smith, comes to Earth from Mars; in Rise and Fall, Mars is built into the title. And both Valentine and Ziggy become messiahs of a kind – androgynous, libertine heralds of a new age of human awareness. Bowie claimed he’d turned down offers to star in a film production of Stranger in a Strange Land and had few positive words to say about the book, calling it “staggeringly, awesomely trite.” Be that as it may, he clearly had read the book and developed a strong opinion of it – perhaps enough for some of its themes and iconography to seep into his own work.

The opening song of Rise and Fall, “Five Years,” elegiacally delivers a dystopian forecast: the world will end in five years due to a lack of resources, and society is disintegrating into a slow-motion parade of perversity and moral paralysis. It’s a countdown to doomsday, with the clock set at five years. The song’s ominous refrain, “We’ve got five years,” is sung by Bowie with increasing histrionics, his voice sounding more panicked and deranged as he repeats the phrase. “The whole thing was to try and get a mocking angle at the future,” Bowie said in 1972. “If I can mock something and deride it, one isn’t so scared of it” – with “it” being the apocalypse.

“Five Years” set a chilling tone, but Rise and Fall didn’t entirely wallow in it. The coming of an alien rock star named Ziggy Stardust is relayed in a multi-song story that’s equally melancholy and ecstatic, tragic and triumphant. On tracks such as “Moonage Daydream,” “Star,” and “Lady Stardust,” Bowie wields terms such as “ray gun” and “wild mutation.” He also claims, “I’m the space invader,” as though he were channeling the ideas of his sci-fi heroes Stanley Kubrick or William S. Burroughs, particularly the latter’s 1971 novel, The Wild Boys.

As Bowie explained, “It was a cross between [The Wild Boys] and A Clockwork Orange that really started to put together the shape and the look of what Ziggy and the Spiders were going to become. They were both powerful pieces of work, especially the marauding boy gangs of Burroughs’s Wild Boys with their bowie knives. I got straight on to that. I read everything into everything. Everything had to be infinitely symbolic.” The photos of the Spiders from Mars inside the album sleeve of Rise and Fall were even patterned after the gang of Droogs of A Clockwork Orange; Droogs are mentioned by name in the Rise and Fall song “Suffragette City.” Furthermore, Bowie posed on theback cover of the album, peering out of a phone booth – just as though he were that other cryptic British alien who regularly regenerates himself and is often seen in a phone booth (specifically a police call box), the Doctor from Doctor Who.

Bowie also drew from work of the Legendary Stardust Cowboy. Born Norman Carl Odam, the Texan rockabilly artist released a twangy, oddball 1968 single titled “I Took a Trip (On a Gemini Spaceship)” that Bowie wound up covering in 2002; it was from Odam that Bowie borrowed Ziggy’s surname. And after going on a record-buying spree while touring the United States in 1971, he bought Fun House by the Michigan proto-punk band the Stooges, whose outrageous lead singer was named Iggy Pop. He jotted down ideas on hotel stationary while traveling the States, resulting in a name that was a mash-up of Iggy Pop and the Legendary Stardust Cowboy. Ziggy Stardust was a fabricated rock star, one whose sleek facade flew in the face of the era’s reigning rock aesthetic of laid-back, unpretentious authenticity. Instead, Bowie wanted to puncture that illusion by taking rock showmanship to a previously unseen, self-referential extreme.

When it came to Bowie’s urge toward collage and deconstruction, Burroughs remained a prime inspiration. A pioneer of postmodern sci-fi pastiche as well as the literary cut-up technique, in which snippets of text were randomly rearranged to form a new syntax, Burroughs straddled both pulp sci-fi and the avant-garde, exactly the same liminal space Bowie now occupied. Rock critic Lester Bangs accused Bowie of “trying to be George Orwell and William Burroughs” while dismissing him as appearing to be “deposited onstage after seemingly being dipped in vats of green slime and pursued by Venusian crab boys” – a description that sounded like it could have been cribbed straight from a Burroughs book.

In 1973, Burroughs met Bowie in the latter’s London home. The meeting was arranged by A. Craig Copetas from Rolling Stone, and the resulting exchange was published in the magazine a few months later. In the article, Copetas observed that Bowie’s house was “decorated in a science-fiction mode,” and that Bowie greeted them “wearing three-tone NASA jodhpurs.” The ensuing conversation ranged across many topics, but it circled around science fiction – and in particular, the similarity Bowie saw between Rise and Fall and Burroughs’s 1964 novel Nova Express, a surreal sci-fi parable about mind control and the tyranny of language.

In an effort to convince Burroughs of the similarity, Bowie offered one of the most revealing analyses of Rise and Fall as a work of science fiction:

“The time is five years to go before the end of the Earth. It has been announced that the world will end because of a lack of natural resources. Ziggy is in a position where all the kids have access to things that they thought they wanted. The older people have all lost touch with reality, and the kids are left on their own to plunder anything. Ziggy was in a rock & roll band, and the kids no longer wanted to play rock & roll. There’s no electricity to play it.”

Bowie went on:

“[The environmental apocalypse] does not cause the end of the world for Ziggy. The end comes when the infinites arrive. They really are a black hole, but I’ve made them people because it would be very hard to explain a black hole onstage.”

Curiously, it took him another twenty-six years before casually revealing in an interview that a sci-fi song called “Black Hole Kids” was recorded as an outtake during the sessions for Rise and Fall. He called the song “fabulous,” adding, “I have no idea why it wasn’t on the original album. Maybe I forgot.”

But Bowie dropped the biggest revelation about Rise and Fallin the 1973 conversation with Burroughs. Ziggy Stardust, according to his creator, is not an alien himself; instead, he’s an earthling who makes contact with extra-dimensional beings, who then use him as a charismatic vessel for their own nefarious invasion plan. But like Frankenstein’s monster being erroneously called “Frankenstein” to the point where it seems senseless to quibble with that usage, Ziggy Stardust continues to be widely considered the alien entity of Rise and Fall. Considering the shifting identity and gender of Bowie’s most famous alter ego, that ambiguity may well have been his intention. Talking to Burroughs, he ultimately labels Rise and Fall “a science-fiction fantasy of today” before reiterating its similarity to Nova Express, to which Burroughs responds, “The parallels are definitely there.”

Rise and Fall has always been as fluid as Bowie’s facade itself. Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion cast a shadow over Ziggy Stardust, especially the glammy incarnation of the many-faced character known as Jerry Cornelius – who was adapted to the big screen in 1973 for the feature film The Final Programme. It coincided with Ziggy’s own ascendency, not to mention the New Wave of Science Fiction and its preference for fractured narratives and multiple interpretations over linear stories and pat endings.

During their mutual interview, Burroughs brought up the then-current rumor that Bowie might play Valentine Michael Smith in a film adaptation of Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. Bowie again dismissed it. “It seemed a bit too flower-powery, and that made me a bit wary.” For his part, Bowie’s fellow sci-fi musician Mick Farren of the Deviants later admitted he always thought Michael Valentine Smith was a major influence on Ziggy Stardust. “I was certain someone would call him out for plagiarism,” Farren said. “Nobody did.”

Bowie may have denied his affinity for Stranger in a Strange Land by his boyhood go-to author Heinlein, but he was not shy about professing his love for one of the authors Lester Bangs compared him to: George Orwell. Almost as a footnote, Bowie told Burroughs, “Now I’m doing Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four on television.” That project would never come to pass, but it would lay the groundwork for his next, less famous sci-fi concept album – a jagged, atmospheric song cycle that plunged Bowie into the darkest extremes of dystopia.

[81scorp]

Consctructive criticism: Man of steel

(Originally posted as an editorial on Deviantart May 1, 2015. It has not been changed from how I originally wrote it.)

With Superman Returns not being the success Warner Bros hoped for, no more sequels that take place in the Superman universe that Richard Donner created have been made since. But since a reboot worked for the old Dark Knight it could work just as well for the big, blue, flying boy scout.Superman`s movie franchise got a reboot in a movie directed by Zack Snyder and written by David S Goyer. The result was... a little bit divisive. Some loved it, some hated it but never the less it made money, enough to greenlight a sequel... or rather: a bigger, shared movie universe. Not unlike what they were doing over at Marvel.Personally I kinda, sorta liked it, at least more than Superman returns. But, like I mentioned in my "More thoughts on Frozen" Editorial where I briefly talked about Avatar, I can see it`s flaws. Otherwise it wouldn`t have ended up here.

Where did it go wrong and how could it have been better?

The S stands for SPOILERS

The colour saturation

With the failure of Green Lantern and the success of The Dark Knight trilogy, the film makers came to the conclusion that future DC movies has to be more "Dark and Serious". Just because it worked for Batman it doesn`t necessarily mean that it would work just as well for their other characters. The tone of the story differs a tiny bit from Batman`s because Superman`s image of a beacon of hope rather than justice lurking in the shadows is heavily ingrained in the public`s perception of him. That left the film makers with one thing left to "darkify": The colours of the movie. A little bit more colour wouldn`t have hurt.

The shaky cam

Usually I don`t care (much) about this, but in this case I noticed it while watching the movie for the first time and it bothered me a little. Less of the shaky cam please.

Johnathan Kent`s advice to young Clark

Young Clark: "What was I supposed to do? Just let them die?"

Jonathan Kent: "Maybe." He`s not saying "Yes! You should`ve let them die!" So he`s technically not giving him bad advice, but he`s technically not giving him good advice either.

He should have focused on teaching Clark to have a low profile. That doesn`t have to mean that he shouldn`t help. He can still help as long as he does it in secret. So instead he could have said."If you`re gonna keep doing this, try not to get seen. Think before you act."Then he could pause and then add: "But at least your heart was in the right place." If it was my hypothetical kid from another planet with great powers who did something good and heroic I`d want the discussion to end on a positive note to give him the feeling that technically he did not do a bad thing.

Johnathan Kent`s death

Yes, I get that he did not want Clark to expose himself, but still. He died not because Clark couldn`t save him but because he wouldn`t let him. How about: Jonathan dies from a sickness. Yes it is similar to the Donner version but the difference is that in this version it doesn`t happen as suddenly and Clark gets time to say goodbye to his dad on his death-bed. Jonathan can remind him about the "Think before you act" bit, and say something about how he will change the world.

Lois telling Superman about her mindprobing

Movies are a visual medium and there`s a rule called "show don`t tell". Telling through pictures is a more universal language. Instead of Lois telling Superman what she went through they could have showed it in some way. From what I remember we saw what was going on in Superman`s head when they probed him but not what was going on on the outside. Here`s what they could have done: After we have seen Superman`s little nightmare landscape we could see what is going on outside his body as Zod`s voice keeps talking about how he`s gonna revive Krypton. We see him lying in an alien chair with a mindprobing helmet on and his face twitches as if he`s having a nightmare. Move the camera a bit to the right and we see Lois lying in an alien chair going through the same thing. Cut to: close up of Lois`s face, then cut to: inside Lois`s mind: pretty much the same thing we saw in Superman`s head. Cut to: close up of Superman`s face, then we go back inside Superman`s mind.

Yes, I said "lying in a chair". The correct word is "sitting", but I imagine them as kind of like dentist chairs...evil dentist chairs.

Zod showing Superman all that nightmarish landscape

Besides that it would "look cool for the trailer", what reason is there for Zod to scare Superman with that nightmare-landscape? Shouldn`t he try to make Superman trust him and see him as a friend?

How about: Supes is shown what Krypton looked like before it blew up.

Zod: "Behold Kal-El, this what Krypton once was, and what it can be again." Clark wonders what would happen to the people of earth. Zod uses the cold, empathyless logic that "simpler civilizations will have to make way for the more advanced ones."

"Krypton had it`s chance"

I get where they were going with this but still, it sounded a bit too cruel. This would have sounded better: "Krypton should not live at the expense of Earth!"

Saying it like that would make it open for the interpretation that he does want to see Krypton resurrected, (just not at any cost).

The level of destruction

They could have toned it down a bit. Some say: "But this is what realistically would happen if someone with Superman`s powers were to have a big fight." Someone with Superman`s powers yes. But how about someone with Superman`s mentality?

Yes: most of the destruction was caused by the terraforming machine, but when that destruction was over and it was just Superman and Zod they still plowed through a few buildings.

Let`s forget that it`s Superman. Someone with concern for human life and the ability to strategize, at least a little bit (which Superman is fully capable of doing), should try to direct the fight away from heavily populated areas. Yes, Zod would try to use this weakness and direct the fight back to said populated areas, but Superman would still do his best to keep the fight in safe/safer places.

Plus: The "Think before you act" lesson from his father could come back to play a part here.

"But he was new at this, he was learning to be a Superhero." We saw earlier in the movie that he had been doing this for a couple of years, so he would have gotten the hang of (most of) it by the time he donned the cape." It`s the first time he fights other super-powered Kryptonians." I can`t argue that much with this statement, even Supes has limits. On this point the fault is not on Superman as a character but rather the filmmakers who wrote him into a corner and made sure that there was no other way out than to destroy almost more than half of Metropolis. They seem to suffer from a "darker-and-more-action-is-always-better" perception. Not all DCCU movies have to be the Dark Knight.

On the fence: Jenny

First I thought that she had a last name, and that it was Olsen. So I thought she was a genderbent Jimmy Olsen. But last time I checked (on imdb) she didn`t have a last name. Could she be an original character created for the movie? I`m OK with that. But I want to talk about what I feel about if they were to change Jimmy`s gender.

This makes me feel like the film makers haven`t bothered to check the comics that the movies are based on. Not because of the change, but some seem to think that there are only four people working on the Daily Planet: Clark, Lois, Perry and Jimmy. The majority of the people that I mentioned are male so I agree that there could be at least one more woman. But instead of changing one of the characters they could just pick one from the comics. How about Catherine Grant? Or Alice the intern? And if you`re looking for a black character, how about Ron Troupe?

Sorry for being a purist, but I feel that if you want to add a little diversity, look for a character that has what you are looking for in the source material before changing one or some of the other characters.

That`s why  I hope that we in future DCCU movies get to see Maggie Sawyer and/or Renee Montoya.How do I feel about Perry White? Well, he`s played by Laurence Fishburne. So I`m good.

On the fence: Superman killing Zod

When I heard about it at first I thought "Oh come on! Superman doesn`t kill!" But then again, he could be pushed to a point where he would have no other option. Then I thought "If he`s gonna kill someone he should at least feel bad about it." And he did, so I guess I`m OK with it. But still, the way they did that scene made me feel like there was more that could be done before they went in for the kill. Technically, Superman could have just knocked him unconscious. And then there`s the film makers`s explanation: "He needs to kill so he learns that it`s wrong to kill." I haven`t killed anyone and I know it`s wrong to kill.

I think the real explanation is: He needs to kill because the movie needs to be dark, because DCCU movies needs to be dark to be good, because it worked for the Batman reboot. The thing is: Nolan`s Batman had a little thought put into it. Man of Steel`s darkness didn`t have much thought behind it.

A light-hearted, silly and campy movie with a bad script is a movie with a bad script. A dark, gritty and serious movie with a bad script is still a movie with a bad script.

If I were to change this, here`s what I would do: Zod and Superman are flying around, fighting each other. The spaceship (that was sent far away thanks to Clark`s babyship`s warp drive) is still on earth. Superman punches Zod so hard that he is knocked back onboard his ship. The warp drive is activated and Zod and his friends are warped to God knows where.I also want to point out that I´m not too crazy about when they kill characters that have played an important part and/or has been in the comicbook  a long time. That`s why I`m a bit critical not only to Zod`s death but Prof: Emil Hamilton`s as well. (Though he may not be dead.)

Yes, there are other things wrong with this movie. But if you did the changes that are mentioned here, I personally wouldn`t care about those other things

I want to finish with two things that, while they aren`t constructive criticism, are at least Superman related.

Joe Quesada`s reason for not liking Man of Steel

“As a comic book fan, I wanted to love that movie so much,” said Quesada. “I wanted to love it so much, and I didn’t love it so much. Again, there are little things here and there that you could pick at and things like that, but I just think at the end of the day, Zod was the hero of the movie to me.”

Interesting defenition of a hero you have there.

“He wanted to save his race, and Superman didn’t let him."

Oh poor Zod, all he wanted to do was to rebuild his planet at the cost of billions of lives on an already inhabited one. It`s not like there were any other Earth-like planets in the solar system, suitable for terraforming, like Mars or Venus. No. Clearly Superman was the bigger badguy here.

“I was in the mood to watch that Superman movie, and afterwards I was just angry,” said Quesada.

Well, I, and many others, felt similar after reading One More Day so I guess that makes things even.

In defense of the Clark Kent disguise

I`m sure many of us has questioned that no one can recognize Superman in his Clark Kent disguise just because he wears a pair of glasses. However, here are some examples from real life:

An author who interviewed Marilyn Monroe later wrote of an incident that occurred when they were walking down the street talking. The author was confused that, although they were in plain sight, no one seemed to recognize her. Monroe then said, "Do you want to see her?" She changed her posture, walk and way she was speaking to what she used in the movies and suddenly people saw Marilyn Monroe, movie star and sex symbol, and reacted accordingly. Shakira, a famous singer, managed to spend an entire summer at UCLA posing as a normal person. She went by her middle name and dressed up in a cap and pants. The fact that it hit the news after she was done with the classes proved how effective her disguise was. Comedian Groucho Marx painted on his famous mustache with grease paint for most of his career. He was surprised to find a large crowd of fans who had gathered to see him at a train station completely ignored him when he got off the train. Realizing what had happened, he ducked into his car and smeared on a grease paint mustache, and was instantly recognized. So you see, real people are pretty stupid too. ^_^

[howaminotinthestrokesyet]

Behind The Album: And Justice For All

Metallica’s fourth studio album was released in September of 1988. This would be the first album without bassist Cliff Burton, while at the same time the first album using new member Jason Newsted. They had intended to record the album in 1987, but instead decided to play a large slate of European music festival dates that year. Another issue came up when James Hetfield broke his arm in a skateboarding accident. The record was done at One on One Studios in Los Angeles with Flemming Rasmussen between January and May 1980. Rasmussen had been brought in at the last minute because they initially started working with Mike Clink, who had produced Appetite for Destruction by Guns N’ Roses. After a month of working with him, the band realized that this collaboration simply would not work, so they contacted Rasmussen. He quickly agreed to work on the album, so they fired Clink.

And Justice For All saw the band taking their music in a completely progressive direction as each track on the album became very long, complex, fast, but with very few sing along choruses. For his part, James Hetfield seemed less inclined to sing on the album, but instead seemed more interested in seeing it filled with heavy sounds. Each song on the album contained multiple sections, a variety of guitar arpeggios, unconventional meter and time. Kirk Hammett would say that he actually needed to write down on a couple of pieces of paper a kind of roadmap to each song. Lars Ulrich gave this statement about the direction the band took on the album. “We took the Ride the Lightning and Master of Puppets concept as far as we could take it. There was no place else to go with the progressive, nutty, sideways side of Metallica, and I'm so proud of the fact that, in some way, that album is kind of the epitome of that progressive side of us up through the '80s.” James Hetfield would go on to say that they knowingly went a little crazy with trying to jam as many things as possible into each song. "Songwriting-wise, [the album] was just us really showing off and trying to show what we could do. 'We've jammed six riffs into one song? Let's make it eight. Let's go crazy with it.'” Another notable issue that immediately sprung up came in the way the album sounded. Many observed that it was a very “dry and sterile” mix, As well as the bass guitar being completely unable to be heard at all. For his part, Fleming Rasmussen said that he did this at the explicit instructions of Hetfield and Ulrich. In 2009, Hetfield said the decision was made to do this because the bass seemed to duplicate many of the same sounds of the rhythm guitar. Jason Newsted has always remained unhappy over the final mix of this album. "The Justice album wasn't something that really felt good for me, because you really can't hear the bass." Engineer Steve Thompson, who mixed the album, absolutely hated this decision blaming Lars Ulrich for it. He tried to quit the project but Metallica‘s management company blocked it. “I’m probably one of the only people in the world, including Jason and Toby Wright, the assistant engineer, who heard the bass tracks on And Justice for All, and they are fucking brilliant." In 2019, both Lars Ulrich and James Hetfield admitted that they never meant to minimize Newsted‘s playing, but instead the endless touring had damaged their hearing to a point where they could not listen to the mix correctly. A reissue of the album was released that same year, but the mix did not get adjusted as Lars would say the album needed to represent a snapshot from that particular place in time in the band’s history.

The lyrical themes on the record represented the band exploring political and environmental issues. This work stood out as one of the first times that a thrash metal band talked about ecological issues in the world. Lars Ulrich would refer to this time as the band’s CNN years as he and Hetfield would watch the channel for hours on end looking for song subjects. “Blackened” looked at the state of the environment. “And Justice For All” explored corruption. “The Shortest Straw” focused on black listing and discrimination. “Eye of the Beholder” represented a track looking at freedom of speech. The ballad on the album is the song “One,” which many have pointed to as an anti war song. The song “To Live Is To Die” emerged as a tribute to Cliff Burton as they included a medley of unused riffs written by him. He even received a songwriting credit for it. His words can also be heard in a spoken portion of the album, “All this I cannot bear to witness any longer. Cannot the kingdom of salvation take me home?" The title of the album as well as a track on it was named for the last three words of the Pledge of Allegiance keeping with the political tones of the record. The cover of the album originated from a design created by Ulrich and Hetfield illustrated a blindfolded statue of lady justice tied up.

Most critics applauded the band's efforts on And Justice For All. In more contemporary reviews, Rolling Stone and Spin noted the technical denseness of each song's arrangements as they were played precisely causing almost a sense of amazement at the intricate qualities of the release. Simon Reynolds of Melody Maker echoed that sentiment in his review at the time. “Other bands would give their eye teeth" for the songs' riffs and found the album's densely complicated style of metal to be distinct from the monotonous sound of contemporary rock music: "Everything depends on utter punctuality and supreme surgical finesse. It's probably the most incisive music I've ever heard, in the literal sense of the word." Once again, Robert Christgau found fault with the band’s work on this album. He would say that the songs needed to have more structure and went on endlessly without any need for it. Many years later Greg Kot would echo those same sentiments saying that the record should be lauded for the sheer ambition of the band, but they never quite pulled it off as it sounds incredibly flat. Colin Larkin wrote in the Encyclopedia of Popular Music that Metallica tried to jam way too many riffs into each song. Mick Wall mentioned a criticism that probably rang true with many diehard fans that And Justice For All spent too much time trying to be as progressive as possible, while ignoring their thrash metal roots. For his part, Ulrich would say years later that he believes that the album has aged well with time and stands up with any of their metal contemporaries. The release would go on to be nominated for a Grammy, and it would infamously lose to Jethro Tull. At the time, the music world reacted quite critically calling it a colossal failure on the part of the Grammys. Another development that came out as shocking to their fans represented the band’s first ever music video for the song “One.” This will be looked at further in the article on Metallica’s videography. The album in retrospect has made a few lists including best of Guitar World and Kerrang. Rolling Stone named it the number 17 metal album of all time. The record would also emerge as their highest selling album up to that point reaching number six on the Billboard chart. This was the first underground metal album to reach such mainstream success on the US charts. This fact can also be taken with a grain of salt as Metallica was far from underground by that point.

[dfroza]

they demanded a sign.

And resurrection is the sign.

(rebirth is vital)

Today’s reading of the New Testament from its first book:

[Matthew 16]

They came to Him together, a band of Pharisees and a band of Sadducees, trying to trick and trap Him.

They asked Him for a sign from heaven.

Jesus: At evening time, you read the sky as a sign—you say, “The weather will be fine because the sky is shading red,” and in the morning, you read the sky as a sign, saying, “The red, stormy sky tells me that today we will have storms.” So you are skilled at interpreting the sky, but you cannot interpret the signs of the times? Only a cheating and evil generation such as this would beg for a miraculous sign from heaven. The only sign you will get will be the sign of Jonah.

And then Jesus left them and went away.

When next the disciples crossed the Sea of Galilee, they forgot to bring any bread with them.

Jesus: Be careful; avoid the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees.

The disciples were not quite sure what Jesus meant, so they discussed His warning among themselves.

Disciples: He must mean not to buy any bread from a baker who associates with the Pharisees or Sadducees. He must have given us this warning because we showed up here without any bread.

Jesus knew what the disciples were saying among themselves, and He took them to task.

Jesus: You men of little faith, do you really think that I care which baker you patronize? After spending so much time with Me, do you still not understand what I mean? So you showed up without bread; why talk about it? Don’t you remember that we fed 5,000 men with five rounds of flatbread? Don’t you remember that we fed 4,000 men with seven rounds of bread? Don’t you remember what excess, what abundance there was—how many broken pieces and crusts you collected after everyone had eaten and was sated? So when I speak about leaven, I am not talking about what we will eat for dinner. I say again, avoid the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees.

And then the disciples understood: Jesus was not talking about the bread you eat, but about the food that feeds your soul. He was speaking in metaphor; He was warning them against imbibing the teachings of the Pharisees and Sadducees.

Jesus then went to Caesarea Philippi.

Jesus (to His disciples): Who do people say the Son of Man is?

Disciples: Some say John the Baptist. And some say Elijah. And some say Jeremiah or one of the other prophets.

Jesus: And you? Who do you say that I am?

Peter: You are the Anointed One. You are the Son of the living God.

Jesus: Simon, son of Jonah, your knowledge is a mark of blessing. For you didn’t learn this truth from your friends or from teachers or from sages you’ve met on the way. You learned it from My Father in heaven. This is why I have called you Peter (rock): for on this rock I will build My church. The church will reign triumphant even at the gates of hell. Peter, I give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven. Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.

And Jesus ordered His disciples to keep these teachings secret.

Jesus: You must tell no one that I am the Anointed.

Then Jesus began to tell the disciples about what would happen to Him. He said He would have to go to Jerusalem. There the elders, chief priests, and scribes would meet Him; He would suffer at their hands; and He would be killed. But three days later, He would be raised to new life.

As Jesus spoke of the things to come, Peter took Him aside. Sad and confused, and maybe a little bit prideful, Peter chastised Jesus.

Peter: No, Lord! Never! These things that You are saying—they will never happen to You!

Jesus (turning to Peter): Get away from Me, Satan!

You are a stumbling block before Me! You are not thinking about God’s story; you are thinking about some distorted story of fallen, broken people. (to His disciples) If you want to follow Me, you must deny yourself the things you think you want. You must pick up your cross and follow Me. The person who wants to save his life must lose it, and she who loses her life for Me will find it. Look, does it make sense to truly become successful, but then to hand over your very soul? What is your soul really worth? The Son of Man will come in His Father’s glory, with His heavenly messengers, and then He will reward each person for what has been done. I tell you this: some of you standing here, you will see the Son of Man come into His kingdom before you taste death.

The Book of Matthew, Chapter 16 (The Voice)

A set of posts by John Parsons of [Hebrew for Christians] to accompany Today’s reading:

Shalom toshavim. As believers in the LORD we must learn to see beyond the temporal to behold the eternal; we must look past the shadows to see the substance. In a sense we have to close our eyes and walk in the darkness of faith to see the supernal light which transcends the atmosphere of this world (2 Cor. 5:7). Faith separates us from the visible and temporal realm (i.e., chayei sha'ah: חיי שעה) before the invisible and eternal realm (i.e., chayei olam: חיי עולם); it hears (shema) the “yes” of the LORD in the midst of worldly dissipation and despair. Faith is the heartache, the groaning, and the yearning for undying love. “Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you. My flesh and my heart may be consumed, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever” (Psalm 73:25-26). This world appears to the eye of faith a strange place, and here we are no more than sojourners as we look for our heavenly habitation whose builder and maker is God (Heb. 11:10; John 14:1-3). Our hearts yearn for the unseen good, healing beyond death to life, the realm of promise and blessing and unending grace... (selah!)

The Torah begins: “In the beginning (בראשׁית) God created the heavens and the earth, and the earth was “tohu va’vohu v'choshekh” (תהו ובהו וחשׁך) - confusion and emptiness and darkness - which the sages interpret to mean that when we truly understand that God created the heavens and the earth, we will realize our earthy desires to be barren, empty and unreal. In their despair, Plato and the early Greek philosophers sought “timeless universals” which they believed disclosed the reality of an “upper world,” a heavenly realm of unchanging goodness, beauty, and truth. The world we experience with our senses is a shadowy place of change and decay; but the real world, discerned by clear thinking, is a place of permanence, goodness and illumination. Likewise the righteous soul trusts that despite this fleeting world that turns to dust, there is an eternal realm, a place of abiding love, and a heavenly home. “For here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city that is to come” (Heb. 13:14). Therefore “we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen; for the things that are seen are transient (πρόσκαιρος), but the things that are unseen are eternal. For we know that if the tent that is our earthly home is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens” (2 Cor. 4:18-5:1). In this world we suffer exile, groaning to be with our Savior, the Source of all blessing: “I say to the LORD, "You are my Lord; I have no good apart from you" (Psalm 16:2). [Hebrew for Christians]

6.30.20 • Facebook

“Everyone who is bitten, when he sees it, shall live" (Num. 21:8). The fiery serpent – the very sting of which brings death – is what must be looked upon, confronted, and confessed. We must look at that which kills us, and by seeing it, we can then see God’s miracle (נֵּס) that delivers us... Therefore we look to the cross – the place where Yeshua clothed himself with our sickness and sin – to realize God’s remedy for our eternal healing. As Yeshua explained to Nicodemus, "As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life" (John 3:14-15). Humanity as a whole has been "bitten by the snake" and needs to be delivered from its lethal venom. Just as the image made in the likeness of the destroying snake was lifted up for Israel's healing, so the One made in the likeness of sinful flesh (Rom. 8:3) was to be lifted up as the Healer of the world. In Yeshua the miraculous exchange takes place: “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor. 5:21). Bless His holy name! [Hebrew for Christians]

6.30.20 • Facebook

Today’s paired chapter of the Testaments is Deuteronomy 3 continuing with the words of Moses that documented their travels:

Moses: Then we left those conquered regions and continued up the road toward Bashan. Og, the king of Bashan, came out with his whole army to fight against us at Edrei. But the Eternal reassured me, “Don’t be afraid of him! I’m going to defeat him and his whole army for you, and I’ll give you his land. You’ll do the same thing to him that you did to Sihon, king of the Amorites, who ruled in Heshbon.” The Eternal, our True God, defeated Og, king of Bashan, for us. We destroyed his whole army—there were no survivors left to fight for him. We captured all 60 of his large cities and their surrounding villages at that time; there wasn’t a single one we didn’t take from them in the whole region of Argob (which was the kingdom of Og in Bashan) in spite of their strong defenses: high walls, fortified gates, and strong bars latching the gates’ doors, but we took them all, and a large number of villages. We killed all the men, women, and children in each one of them, just as we had done to Sihon, king of Heshbon. We kept only the cattle and the loot from the cities as our plunder.

This is how at that time we conquered the whole land east of the Jordan River. We captured it all from those two ruling Amorite kings, everything from the Arnon Valley all the way up to Mount Hermon: all the cities of the plateau, all of Gilead, and all of Bashan, right out to the cities of Salecah and Edrei (which were in King Og’s Bashan). From then on, all of that land belonged to us.

The Sidonians in the north call Mount Hermon “Sirion,” and the Amorites call it “Senir.” 11 King Og of Bashan was the last of the giant Rephaim. He had a bed made of iron; it was over thirteen feet long and six feet wide! You can still see it in the city of Rabbah in Ammon.

Moses: To the children of Reuben and Gad, I gave the kingdom of Sihon, the area north of Aroer on the edge of the Arnon Valley, including half the Gilead highlands and all the cities there. I gave the kingdom of Og to half of Joseph’s descendants in the tribe of Manasseh who settled east of the Jordan, including the rest of Gilead, the region of Argob, and Bashan.

All of Bashan is known as the “land of the Rephaim” because of the size of King Og and his ancestors. Jair, a leader of Manasseh, conquered the outlying areas in the whole region of Argob, as far as the border of the Geshurites and Maacathites. He named them after himself, so that portion of Bashan is now known as Havvoth-jair, which means “the villages of Jair.”

Moses: I gave the city of Gilead to Machir, another leader of Manasseh, because he conquered it. And I gave the children of Reuben and Gad the land from Gilead south to the middle of the Arnon Valley, north to the Jabbok River, east to the border with Ammon; and west to the Jordan River Valley, from the Sea of Galilee down to the Dead Sea, beneath where Mount Pisgah rises to the east. Do you remember what I commanded you at the time? I told the tribes of Reuben, Gad, and Manasseh, “The Eternal your God has given you this land, and now it belongs to you. I want all of your warriors to cross the Jordan, fully armed, ahead of your fellow Israelites. Only your wives and children and cattle (I know you have a lot of cattle thanks to the plunder you earned) will stay behind in the cities I’ve given you. When the Eternal your God has given the rest of the Israelites the land that will belong to them on the other side of the Jordan, when they are living in peace just as you are now, then each of you can come back here and live on your own land which I’ve given you.”

I told Joshua, “You’ve seen with your own eyes everything the Eternal your God has done to these two kings. He will do the same thing to the kingdoms you’re now going into. Don’t be afraid of them—any of you! The Eternal your God will do the fighting for you.”

Moses: Then I pleaded again and again with the Eternal on my own behalf. “Eternal Lord, You’ve only just begun to show me, Your servant, how very great and powerful You are. What other god in heaven or on earth can do the great and powerful things You do? Please let me cross the Jordan and see that good land and those beautiful highlands and Lebanon.” But the Eternal was angry with me because of you, and He wouldn’t listen to me.

Moses: The Eternal said to me, “That’s enough! Don’t ever bring this up to Me again! You can go up to the top of Mount Pisgah and look to the west and north and south and east to see the land from there. Take a good look, because you’re not going to cross the Jordan River. So instruct Joshua, and strengthen and encourage him, because he’s the one who will lead the people into the land you see and make it their territory. He will conquer it for them.” And that’s why we’ve stayed here in this valley by Beth-peor at the foot of Mount Pisgah.

The Book of Deuteronomy, Chapter 3 (The Voice)

my personal reading of the Scriptures for Wednesday, july 1 of 2020 with a paired chapter from each Testament along with Today’s Psalms and Proverbs

[silent-of-spirit]

For DWC! Venalya Mahariel/Cullen, "Please, please kiss me." And thanks for prompting me!

@dadrunkwriting​, @katalyna-rose​, @5ftgarden, @inner-muse, @ladydracarysao3 (I am trying to tag all the Cullenites I know but I AM SUDDENLY DRAWING A VERY LARGE BLANK PLEASE HELP ME)

hahahahahahahahah this got longer than intended but man I got INTO IT. Thank you so much!!! I hardly EVER get to write these two and that is a damn shame. Evil cliffhanger? Muahahaha perhaps I can be persuaded to write more of it if people want ;)

Distractions

Venalya x Cullen

She was wild in a way he had neverseen, a constant tempest of emotion and feeling, refusing to muteherself for the sake of propriety. She wielded her fury like a weapon– and it was much more dangerous to face than the magic she barelycontrolled. Passion seemed to control her. Passion for her people,for the children who swarmed her like ducklings, passion for the lifeshe seemed so sure would be snatched from her at any moment.

And ohthe passion in her anger, both beautiful and terrifying to behold.She was driven by it, never shying from confrontation, but embracingit. She was electrifying, infuriating, and... distracting.Cullen ran his hand through hishair for the sixteenth time in the last two hours, huffing infrustration.

“Maker's breath.”he muttered in irritation, trying again to focus on the reports thatwere haphazardly scattered across his desk. He didn't even likethe woman.

Liar.His brain helpfully supplied. He leaned back in his chair, rubbinghis temples. The truth of the matter was that he didn't know whyhe was so drawn to her. She was absolutely maddening. Her hobby ofchoice seemed to be picking fights with him – fights which, lately,seemed to carry the undercurrent of something else he couldn't quiteignore.

At thesame time, it was... refreshing to allow the rigid facade ofCommander fade away, to lose himself in the heat of her words and theever-present crackling of static on her skin when angry. Theirarguments were somehow a release he never knew he needed. Like astorm, she brought wrath and devastation, but always the world feltlighter after she had gone.

Yetwhen the door swung open, he nearly groaned.

“Iam trying to work.” he said, voice clipped.

“Likethat's ever stopped me before.” she stated, arms crossed in thedoorway.

Helooked at her curiously, ignoring her little quip.

“Areyou going to come in? You don't usually snipe at me from thebattlements.”

“No,”she said with a huff, pointedly looking away. He raised a brow, butelected to ignore her, selecting a report at random to peruse. “Yourescinded my templar guard?” she finally said, and he was glad ofit. He had just read the same sentence six times in his distraction.

“Itno longer seemed necessary,” he said, returning the paper to hisdesk. He leaned back and crossed his arms, waiting for theconfrontation he expected.

Hecould see her work her jaw through the curtain of wild curls,obviously uncomfortable.

“Thankyou,” she said at last, her face scrunched as though the words werebitter on her tongue. She spun and retreated, leaving him with anoddly satisfied smile.

~~

“Inquisitor,if I may have a moment of your time?” Venalya was with her, theirheads bowed low in some secret correspondence. He almost hated topull Liahra away – she seemed to be the only one around whomVenalya seemed content.

“Ofcourse, Cullen.” Liahra smiled and rose to meet him, but his gazewas drawn instead to the startling violet one of the woman being leftbehind. She narrowed her eyes, pressing her lips into a fine line asif to hold back from speaking.

Distracting.It was difficult to focus on the Inquisitor's words as she spoke, hiseyes fixed on Venalya as she played silly games with the gaggle ofchildren that often sought her company.

“Cullen?”Liahra's voice cut through the fog, an amused and knowing smile onher lips.

“A-apologies,Inquisitor.” he said sheepishly, rubbing the back of his neck. Hecould feel the flush creeping up his face, damning him further.

“Wecan go over this later if you prefer, Commander.” Her voice waslight, teasing, and he offered an embarrassed laugh. Liahra eyed himwith a raised brow.

“I'mfine. Please, continue.”

“Youknow, she appreciates the fact that you ordered the guard away,”she said instead, gauging his reaction, “Dorian says the power shewields is unlike anything he has ever known. Her control, thoughtenuous, is more than we could ever imagine.” She looked back toher friend at the words, voice softening. “There is nothing shefears more than losing control of that power – of hurting people.The templar was only a reminder of everything she has to lose.”

Venalya'slaughter carried over them, and he appreciated the sound. Herseverity was born of fear, her fury born of frustration, and hewondered how he never saw. He didn't look at her the same after that.

~~

“I'vebeen watching you.”

Cullenlooked up from the board, startled at the sound of her voice. Shecrossed her arms and, Maker's breath was she blushing?

“Notyou,” she corrected quickly, waving her hand dismissively at thechess board, “The game.”

Hetried not to smile,really, he did. He wasn't successful.

“Oh,don't look at me like that,” she snapped, flushing further, “Idon't need you making fun of me. Just forget it.”

Cullenswallowed a laugh and pushed himself to his feet, gesturing to theopposite chair.

“Wouldyou care for a game?” he asked gently, watching the way her facecontorted into immediate suspicion. She eyed him warily as he walkedaround the table, pulling the other chair out for her. Her eyesnarrowed, but she cautiously lowered herself into it. When hereturned to his own chair, there was something he couldn't quite readin her eyes, nearly hidden beneath dark curls.

“Everplayed?” He asked conversationally as he set up the board.

“No.But I think I know how.”

“Right,”he said with a smirk, “You watched.” She scowled.

He lether win.

“Asenticing as our usual rows are, I must say I prefer this.” Cullenwas positively smug when she huffed at his words. She couldn't hidethe redness of her cheeks as she stormed off, hastily enough that shenearly knocked over Mother Giselle.

~~

Distracting...

Maker,he couldn't get her out of his mind. His every thought was consumedby her. Scent, hair, eyes, the way her freckles danced on her facewhen she smiled, how frustrating she was and yet intoxicatingin the same breath. Whether intentional or by circumstance, hefrequently found himself in her company over the last few weeks.Liahra always gave him that knowing smile when she visited hisoffice, tossing casual remarks about Venalya that held seemingly nopurpose, but they did – and she knew.

Venalya'shand had lingered just a breath too long when she returned one of thebooks he lent her four days earlier, and something so simplekept playing on repeat in his mind. He spent entirelytoo much time wondering how it would have felt if he had taken offhis glove, though his fingers still burned from where she had brushedhim as though her touch yet lingered. It was driving him to madness.

Shewas driving him to madness.

Heleaned against the wall behind his desk, arm propped above his headas he stared out the window to the military camp below. The sun wassetting behind the mountains, bathing the tents in rosy gold, and allhe saw were her cheeks awash with color. He forced his eyes shut,taking a deep breath through his nose. He hardly noticed the sound ofa door swishing shut somewhere behind him.

“Whateverit is, it can wait,” he said, voice a little too sharp. He didn'twant to deal with scouts harrying him about information and reports.He wanted only respite.

“Likethat's ever stopped me before.” Her voice came, soft, hesitant -and he stiffened, turning to look over his shoulder.

“Ven-”

“Iwant to hate you,” she confessed, pushing the wild hair from herface as she looked everywhere but at him. “You're a shem, and atemplar, and those things are bad enough on their own – buttogether?” She trailed off, and he stepped back from the wall. “ButI don't... hate you that is... and it's confusing and I just -” Shemade a sound of frustration in the back of her throat, clenching herfists at her sides.

Hestepped closer.

“And,look, you're infuriating, work-obsessed, rigid, smug, and... and...and every iteration of vexing that exists!” Her voice rose, but notin anger. It sounded more like desperation. “But – fenedhis– but Creators help me, I think I am falling for you and... and...”Her words grew softer as he stepped within her reach, head angleddown to where she stood. She looked nervous and vulnerable, fearlesseyes usually narrow, now wide and full of questions.

“And?”he murmured, heart pounding behind his breastplate. He had not beenthe only one consumed, and the knowledge of it sent a thrill throughhis bones.

“And,”she breathed, “Please, please will you kiss me?”

[nerdanel01]

The Lady of the Tower

There is Only Forward - Chapter 11

Trapped in a dream she cannot escape, Lavellan is forced to relive the years she spent in the Inquisition—the years she spent with Solas. But not all is as it should be, for the longer she lingers in the dream, the more it begins to diverge from memory and into something else. 

Excerpt: She turned back to the other elves at the sound of Solas’ voice behind her. His cool demeanor was gone, replaced by something vicious. 

“Do you think I am blind to what it is you carry with you, little rebel?” he asked, and though he spoke at a low volume there was a sharpness to his words. His mouth was twisted into an ugly sneer, at once threatening and condescending. “I do not ask for your help; I know you would not give it willingly. But if you interfere in my designs, I will rip your purpose from you like the teeth of the wolf tear at flesh. Then, friend, you will know what it is to be empty, as I am. Perhaps then you will judge me less harshly.”

The sound of his voice, the look on his face (a barely repressed snarl) nearly brought Thanduwen to tears. That cruelty and rage was something she had always suspected that he was capable of, simmering underneath the surface. But until now, she had never witnessed it herself. It was terrible to behold.

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“Heroes of the Inquisition! As Inquisitor. I pledge that I will do my best to honor this faith you have placed in me. That this title has been bestowed to not only a Dalish elf, but a mage, is a clear sign of the changing times. In the eyes of the Orlesian Chantry, I’m hard pressed to say which is the greater sin, and that I have won your trust and faith despite my identity moves me, even as it troubles me. For I wish not to be an exception. I long for the day when it is neither unexpected nor unorthodox, that someone who is not human, nor Andrastian, can be seen as a leader if that person possesses a strength of character and exercises a fairness in judgement.”

Thanduwen had known this was coming. She had confessed as much to Solas on one of those long days they’d spent in relative privacy, scouring the serrated peaks of the Frostbacks, scouting ahead of the Inquisition, seeking the fortress he’d seen in the Fade. “Bull thinks… we will need a leader after this. After all that singing…. it might be me.” And he had heard the apprehension in her voice, and looked at her warmly, pride and kindness written on his face. “I don’t want it,” she’d said. “And if you have no choice?” he’d asked in response, in that golden tone he used when they talked of such things: morals, obligations, fate. “Perhaps you cannot refuse the title. But once it is yours, only you can say what it means. Lead them to something better.” She did not know if she could. She did not know if she was strong enough to wield the power that had been thrust upon her and not be corrupted by it. And when it came to the deployment of troops and the tightrope walk of diplomacy, she would still allow herself to fear it; but not when it came to words. From her early days as a child, enamored with story, to the hours spent pouring over old Dalish texts, words had always been useful to her, a tool she wielded readily.

“To many of you, our arrival in Skyhold seems miraculous and ordained, proof that the Maker’s hand guides each of our actions. But is it any more miraculous than our escape from Haven, or our success in closing the Breach? Is it any more miraculous that we have overcome the odds that have always been against us, since the Chantry denounced us? Perhaps the Maker has revealed himself in these events, but not to me. For what I see when I look out at all of you is not the hand of the Maker but the sacrifice and dedication of every member of this Inquisition. Without the effort of all who have gathered here, we would have accomplished nothing, with or without the blessing of Maker and the nine Creators. This victory belongs to everyone; it did not come about by my actions alone. You have all demonstrated a sense of honor and duty that humbles me every day.”

“But that is not enough; we have more work to do still. Though we may feel safe within the heavy walls of this fortress, we cannot afford to rest.” 

Perhaps it had been inevitable; it certainly made her feel better to believe it had been. Inevitable since as Bull’s words on the way to the Breach, and Josephine’s thinly veiled hints about “the structure of the Inquisition.” Inevitable since Mother Giselle’s insistent words in the tent after Solas had left Thanduwen with the Chantry Mother, and the remains of the Inquisition holding their hands together in prayer and singing the Chant of Light to her in the Vir Vian, their voices lifted up and resounding in the mountains. Inevitable, perhaps, from the moment she had woken with the mark upon her hand. She had long anticipated this moment—feared it, dread it, wondered at it—but that anticipation still did not prepare her for the uproar that greeted her when the time came.

They had named her Inquisitor, and now she stood before a courtyard packed with upturned faces and rapturous cries. Cassandra had called it a holy war; perhaps it had not always been, but it felt that way, now. There was no denying it, no stopping it, the wheels already in motion, spinning madly. She had tried. But no matter how many times she had asserted she was not their Herald, Chosen One, Savior, they believed it. Those collected before her cheered with a religious fervor, a frenzy of faith. It terrified her, but there was no avoiding it now. There was only the indisputable fact of it, and what she would do about it. “And if you have no choice?”

“Though all present here have a right to be proud of what we have accomplished, special mention must be made of some of you. I speak now directly to the mages. When you joined our Inquisition, Ferelden had banished you; you had little choice but to follow us. And you had no reason to believe our promises that if you aided us, we would grant you the full freedom and respect that you deserve. Yet you made the long and arduous journey from the Hinterlands—some of you, from farther—to help us, an Inquisition tied inextricably to the Chantry, not by my hand nor by choice but by design. You fought for us. Some of your comrades have died for us. For that I am again humbled.”

She had prepared for this moment since she’d awoken in the Vir Vian. She had kept Solas’ words—only you can say what it means—and thought long and hard on what they meant, could mean. 

No matter what path she took, how careful she was, there was no guarantee she would not leave the world more divided and shattered than it had been before the Conclave. But she had to try. She would be damned if she did not try as best she could to change things while she had the power to do so, to pressure the right people in the right places. Months ago she had told Cullen that his world was not one she felt moved to save. Perhaps her greatest task was not to defeat Corypheus, but to make the world a little less cruel, a little less dark. A little more worthy of saving.

“Skyhold sits on the border between the Orlesian Empire and the Kingdom of the Ferelden. An apt location; the Inquisition, too, sits now at a crossroads. Now is when we will decide what we truly stand for: what we will become. Now is the hour for the designing of the deeds for which we will be remembered.”

(Tanaleth’s words on the path up the mountain: The Elder One is just the beginning. He will be but a footnote in the tale of your deeds when you are done.) 

“And so I take this opportunity to make a promise. Under my leadership, the Inquisition will continue to face the threat of Corypheus. By my life or my death, we will cast him back into the cursed Void that spat him out. But let that not be our only task.”

“It will be my chief goal, as Inquisitor, to restore balance to Thedas. I say balance, instead of peace; for while peace is a worthwhile goal, one might have described Kirkwall at peace before the Circle fell. Even as Dalish were hunted for sport in Orlais, one might have described that empire as at peace, before their Civil War. No, I speak not of peace, but of balance: that everyone—men, elves, dwarves; mages and nonmagical folk—will all have a voice, each with the freedom to live their life as they see fit so long as they do not bring harm to the lives of others. And until the Chantry is prepared to grant those rights to all, the Inquisition will stand to protect those whose rights the Chantry has denied for ages.”

As she spoke, she could sense Cassandra’s discomfort beside her on the platform. The Seeker had been effusive in her praise; she had handed over authority over a movement she had started without reservation or regret. But it was fair, Thanduwen thought, to say that neither Cassandra nor Josephine had expected the torrent of words she would unleash once the proclamation was made. But speaking in front of a large group, tapping into their emotional current and redirecting it to something useful, meaningful—that, at least, was something she was comfortable with.

Below, Cullen’s face had transformed, his brows knit together; not quite a scowl, but his expression troubled. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Leliana looking at her with something like fascination. Josephine held her writing tablet but she had stopped scribbling; her eyes had gone wide with shock. Terrified, Thanduwen supposed, about how she would have to spin this particular story so that it did not raise the ire of all the nobles and kingdoms the had supported them thus far.

Thanduwen did not care. She was prepared to make pledges that she could not retract. She was prepared to say things that would piss off the elite; too long, she thought, had they ruled without question, without adapting, without change. They had given this title to a Dalish Mage; it was best, she thought, to be upfront about what that was going to mean. 

“I seek not to destroy the Chantry, but to mend it, though I do not know yet what that will look like. In the coming months I will be working closely with Grand Enchanter Fiona and factions of both the loyalist mages and the rebels to decide what the most safe and respectable course of action will be, not just for the mages but the people of Thedas; when a decision is made, we will implement it. We were formed in response to the destruction of the Conclave, but that does not mean we need cast aside the ideals that brought together the many who gathered there. We will lay the groundwork for a world in which Mages can live freely, and in which they need not be feared.”

“To this I pledge my life.”

“The Inquisition will stand for all of us, not just a few of us; where for centuries the Chantry has divided through conquest and dogma, we will unite. People of all nations will be welcome here if they come with an open mind and a willingness to  contribute.”

“As I stand before you, for the first time since the death of Divine Victoria, I feel a profound sense of hope. The Inquisition will lead Thedas. We will teach them with the courage and the valor of our hearts, the wisdom of our spirit. Through the righteous path of our deeds we will show the continent how mighty and formidable we are when we stand side by side, undivided by our race or class or what Gods we beseech in our hour of need.”

Mother Giselle had overplayed her hand at the Vir Vian: she knew, now, the faith that they projected upon her, the myth they wanted her to be a part of. And though she did not in herself believe it, she knew the value in reflecting it back to them, as a mirror. How to distort that faith into something she could use. Try as she might, she could not cure them of their love for their Maker, or their believe that He acted through her. But she could redirect that love; she could repurpose it.

What she did, she knew, was, to some degree, monstrous. But they would say that of her anyway, she was sure. It was probable that in some corners of the continent they already were, whispered slander. Those who opposed her would seek to defame her, or diminish her. When the Chantry decided what this had all been about, when they wrote it down in their history books, they would call her a tyrant. But if through that monstrosity, through the forfeit of her own soul, her integrity, she could forge something beautiful and bright—the hope that Thedas could be redeemed—she would gladly make that bargain. Better to be a tyrant than a prop; better to be decried by the Chantry, she thought, than exalted by it.

“This is a task too great for one person—I cannot do it alone. I am relying on each and everyone of you to carry this message in your hearts. And when we all feel the truth of it—when our unity resounds through the mountains like the ringing of trumpets—then, I believe, we will be unstoppable. We will honor the sacrifice of the brave souls who died in Haven that we might escape; we will not allow that sacrifice to be in vain.”

“Commander Cullen asks if you will follow, fight, triumph; know that I ask nothing of you that I am not willing to give myself. I will fight alongside you. I will triumph or die alongside you. Our blood is one blood.  Let the blade pass through the flesh! Let my blood touch the ground! Let my cries touch their hearts! Let mine be the last sacrifice!”

For too long she had put to high a price on her self-respect. But she finally had something worth surrendering it to: the hope that, through this mutilation of herself, becoming something less that she wanted to be and more what they wanted her to be (never forgetting the distinction) she might make the world a tiny bit better for those who believed in her. She saw suddenly beyond the fog of grief that had fallen over her since all of this began. She had not wanted this, to be held aloft; but if she could not dissuade them from that, what could she do with that faith? How could she forge it into a tool?

“And if we remember these bonds that unite us, we will usher in a new age in Thedas. Corypheus has sought to divide us, but by his deeds we will stand stronger and more united than we have been since the first Exalted March on the Dales! We will unite together as Andraste led the continent against the tyranny Tevinter, and we will smite this false prophet! I stand before you as Inquisitor and make this promise: from Corypheus’ ruin we will sow the seeds of a new age, where none have cause to fear their fellow man! The Inquisition is for all! Thedas is for all! Balance for all!”

 The throne room was silent, but through the massive doors, they could still hear the cheering and shouting of those still collected in the courtyard. There was the sound of many voices lifted together in laughter and song. An impromptu celebration had begun outside following the announcement. For the moment, the shuffling of crates and barrels, the tasks that had begun to get Skyhold defensible and comfortable, had come to a pause.

But not for the Inquisition’s leaders. Outside, they shouted her name, and hailed their Inquisitor, but inside, neither Josephine nor Cullen nor Leliana seemed to know what to make of the display they’d just witnessed. Leliana seemed to be taking it best of all of them, but it was difficult to tell: she was wearing that small smile she bore when she was hiding her thoughts, an old trick from her bard days. Every so often, she would look at Thanduwen with admiration, though Thanduwen could not say if it was because of what she had said, or merely the fact that she had the gall to say it. 

Cullen, by contrast, was far more transparent; she could tell he was agitated simply by the angle of his shoulders and the pace of his steps. His feet were heavy on the broken cobbles of the floor, and each step echoed through that vast space.

Thanduwen did not let it bother her, not now. She was far too absorbed with the sight in front of her. “Skyhold,” Solas had called it, and she did not question how he knew its name. It was the fifteenth day of Firstfall when she had first laid eyes on it, and as her eyes took in the sight of the fortress front of her—perched on an outcropping of rock some several miles away—it had stolen her breath. She knew little of siege warfare or the commanding of armies, but upon first glance, the fortress had seemed to her so defendable, so safe. It was a surprise that it had laid unoccupied for so long. “Skyhold,” he’d called it, after weeks of searching for it, and she’d been mute, speechless, stumbling lamely towards the sight in front of her. 

Josephine had informed her that this was the throne room. It was in bad need of repair, but it had good bones. When the debris was cleared, when curtains were hung, when the mosaics were repaired (expenses she knew were trivial, just as she knew Josephine would insist upon them, to keep up appearances) it would be a striking space, as beautiful as it as imposing. 

Thanduwen could see doors leading off to passages blocked by fallen rubble and debris; she was eager to have them cleared so she might discover where they led. Ahead, the far wall was tiled with extravagant colored glass that scattered brightly colored light like gems across the surface of the rubble-strewn floor. Several of the panes had fallen from their frames and lay, now, shattered on the floor; the windows were no less beautiful for it. And over everything—the fallen planks of wood, the cracked cobbles of the floor—a fine dust had settled. As Thanduwen walked the hall with her advisors, their footsteps stirred it, and it rose in gentle dirty clouds around their heels.

Finally Josephine cleared her throat, spoke up. “Though it is currently unoccupied, the preliminary reports suggest this castle has been in use for many ages. The architectural style—or, rather, the diverse array of styles—suggests it has changed hands many time throughout the Ages. It may have even been a sacred site for the ancient elves, before they were conquered by the Imperium.”

Thanduwen sensed the truth in those words, though as yet she could not pinpoint the stylistic flourishes that gave away the fact that this entire fortress was built on a foundation laid by her people. Perhaps it was her own anticipation, a sense of giddiness, but she could feel some charge, here. Something ancient. She already felt far more at home within the fortress than she ever had in Haven, that site of Andraste’s final resting place. Here was something cobbled together, built on foundations laid by the elves and paved over ten times since, but now, she would sit in its center.

Cullen was fidgeting behind her; she cold hear the clanking of his gauntlets resounding as he did. “If you have something to say, Commander, you may speak.” There was a playfulness in her tone, but a barb, there, too. For the first time, she clearly outranked him. Despite their past disagreements, from now on, he would report to her.

“The speech you gave,” he said slowly, cautiously. “If those are your aims, I cannot say I fully support them.”

“Well, Commander,” Thanduwen drawled, looking at the punctured stained glass at the end of the hall, “if you find it too great a conflict of interest, I am always prepared to accept your resignation, should you feel yourself incapable of carrying out your duties.”

Her words had somehow ratcheted up the tension in the room, but not in a way she expected. Cullen had been silenced by them. She turned and looked at him more carefully. His eyes had turned away from her, and there was something ugly on his face: anger, but not at her. His reaction suggested that a resignation was already on his mind, although he had never hinted as much to her before. (In all fairness, perhaps he had thought she would be far too eager to encourage such a resignation.) All the same, her suggestion had wounded him far more than she expected; she filed the thought away for later.

“It may have been a bit inflammatory,” Josephine interjected. “Certainly you have called out many of our closest allies. Orlais, the Chantry…”

“The Chantry was never our ally,” Leliana corrected, her stride easy as she walked forward to take a closer look at something ahead. “They merely tolerated us; they promised not to interfere. They would have remained decidedly neutral until all of this is over, and a new Divine is selected. But more the speech was more than inflammatory, I think; it was effective,” she said, turning her face to Thanduwen. “We can still hear theme cheering your name and drinking to your health in the courtyard. I did not know you were such a gifted orator, Inquisitor.”

“I had to lead many ceremonies as first,” Thanduwen responded, with a cautious smile. “I am no stranger to speaking in front of crowds.”

“You commanded their hearts in the courtyard,” Leliana said, raising an eyebrow. “It is a skill we could make much use of; though I might suggest, in the future, that you rely on your advisors to help you prepare a statement that will inspire a greater number and alienate fewer.”

“No,” Thanduwen replied firmly. “I want those who disagree to feel alienated. What will they have to disagree with? I have declared the Inquisition for all. That is the goal we will be working towards; if they disagree with that, they have no place here. I am in charge, now; a decision that you all made without consulting me, without asking me if I even wanted it, or what I might do with it. Now you know.”

“Indeed,” Leliana said, raising her eyebrow. “Though given how often you’ve denounced Andraste, I might not call your quoting of her Canticle honest, Inquisitor.”

It was a sly comment, not a quite a rebuke. She had known Josephine and Cullen would take her display badly; she had not been able to anticipate Leliana’s reaction, and being unable to read it now made her nervous.

But her words were not left to linger; there was too much to discuss. “So this is how it begins,” Cullen murmured, half sulking, kicking his boot against the ground and watching the way it stirred up the dust.

“It is long past begun, Commander,” Leliana replied. “But we have put off decisive action while we searched for a new home for the Inquisition; we can delay no longer. We must turn the Inquisitor’s promises into actions,” she said, passing a sly glance at Thanduwen and dipping her head ever so slightly in deference.

“But what do we do?” Josephine asked. “We know nothing about—”

But before she could finish the thought, Josephine froze. Thanduwen wondered, looking on strangely as she stood perfectly still. There was no trace of ice or frost on her limbs, but she appeared not to be moving a muscle; even the fabric of her dress had stopped its golden rustling, as if time itself had turned its eyes away from her.

“Ambassador?” Thanduwen asked, but Josephine did not stir. She turned to Leliana in alarm, only to find that Leliana and Cullen were just as still: Leliana with that appraising look on her face, and Cullen with his scar still twisted by the frown on his lips. 

And it was quiet—unnervingly so. Thanduwen turned her gaze to the great doors of the throne room, but outside, nothing moved. The sounds in the courtyard had been silenced. Silenced were the sounds of the Inquisition: orders shouted, blades on grindstones, repairs being made. 

There was nothing.

Something stirred behind her; in her peripheral vision, she caught the briefest flash of white, and turned towards it, just in time to catch one of the doors of the throne room clicking gently shut.

The door stood beside a great hearth. Mere moments ago it had been blocked by fallen rubble; even if she had been able to climb over it, she doubted she’d have been able to force it open. But now, the path before her was clear. Thanduwen watched the door cautiously, suspiciously. That flash of white… it enticed her. 

She knew she ought to stay behind. There was no telling whether or not some foul magic had befallen the advisors, and she owed it to them to help, though she hadn’t a clue how. But as she turned her gaze back to her advisors, she could have sworn she heard a noise behind the door, the patter of bare feet on paved stone.

With one last glance at her frozen advisors, she stepped quietly towards the door, careful to muffle the sound of her steps over the rubble. She ought to have felt frightened, but once her hand found the door’s knob she felt no hesitation, thrusting the door open to see what secrets it enclosed.

She was blinded by the blood red light of the setting sun; she held her hand over her eyes as the adjusted. 

But as she protected her eyes with her hands, she realized that wasn't quite right, couldn’t be. Firstly, there ought to have been more castle. She had seen the walls of the fortress, knew that beyond this door there must have been more rooms, even if they were crumbling. And should she (by some trick of perspective) have found herself staring at the sky, there were hours, yet, until sundown. 

When she lowered her hand to look around, she found herself at the mouth of a stone passageway. When she turned to peer behind her back into the throne room, she found that it was no longer there: in the place of the throne room there was a dimly lit staircase descending into darkness, deep into the base of the mountain. And before her…

Before her was a massive tower the likes of which she had never seen before—nothing she had seen in Skyhold came close to it. It was slender, and it rose so high into the sky it pierced the clouds. The tower was made of a stone she had no name for: it was like a milky sort of crystal, or marble, and in the light of sunset it shimmered blood red. The entire tower was, to her eyes, seamless: an art beyond the hands of masons. It inspired in her simultaneous feelings of awe and terror. 

There were neither windows, nor doors. 

But suddenly, from around the perimeter of the tower, she caught sight of a figure ascending the tower, draped in fine silks of the purest white. As she climbed the tower, the stairs slid neatly from the tower’s exterior wall, as if anticipating her steps, rising to meet her feet; behind her the treads of the stairs slid neatly back into the towers flesh without the slightest trace to suggest they had ever been there to begin with. Her step was fast and light over the treads—she had either made this climb frequently enough to have confidence in her steps, or she was privy to some secret magic of this place that made her confident she would not fall. 

As Thanduwen approached the tower, she kept her face turned upwards, watching the woman climb the tower above her. She would disappear around the corner, only to flash again around the other side, accompanied by the light pattering of her bare feet and the flash of the white silk of her dress which billowed behind her as she ascended, catching the breeze, rose-tinged in the light of the fading sun. 

When she reached the foot of the tower, Thanduwen paused. She did not know how to activate the stairs; she had not seen the woman begin her ascent. She had hoped—perhaps foolishly—that the tower would simply sense her presence and reveal the stairs to her. But as she stood before it, the tower was motionless; it’s surface remained smooth.

She placed the palm of her left hand on the milky surface; it flashed beneath her touch, illuminating briefly with a shuddering sort of light. It was warm. And it hummed, for a long time, as if indecisively. She was unwilling to tear her eyes from its surface as it rippled, but every so often she glanced overhead as the woman in white silk shrunk smaller and smaller, climbing farther above and away.

The anchor on Thanduwen’s left hand began to tingle. Then the tower growled.

She could feel the strange stone shuddering beneath the touch of the anchor on her palm. In a sudden shiver the tower turned from red to brilliant green, and it glowed, luminescent in the dim light of evening. Suddenly, like the turning over of a thousand dragon scales, the surface of the tower transformed itself to reveal a set of two large doors, overlaid with a mosaic of green and gold. Silently, they opened before her. 

Thanduwen frowned. She had sought to pursue the lady up the stairs; she did not like the idea of stepping blindly into this tower, the doors shutting behind her, swallowing her up inside the tower’s windowless dark. But she could not go backwards, not now. She had stepped through the door in the throne room into something else, something other, and now she had no idea how to return to Skyhold, even if she had wanted to. 

She crossed the threshold.

The interior space was covered with elegant, iridescent mosaics that shone brilliantly, even in the dim light permitted to pass through the open arms of the door. They were tiled in the style that could still be seen in the ruins of ancient Elvhenan, but unlike many of those, she was unfamiliar with the story they told. Typically the mosaics were devotional, portraits of the Creators; these were different. They were more akin to the paintings she would see in the wilderness, pigment left on rock by passing Dalish clans of ancient wars and battles long lost.

She stepped further into the space to admire the round room that held them. She stepped into the room’s very center, atop a mosaic of something that looked like the orb Corypheus had carried—it bore the same pattern of whorls and spirals on its surface. As she did, the doors behind her shut, so smoothly and quietly she barely noticed until she was enveloped in darkness.

But the darkness lingered only briefly before there appeared a tiny light at her side, suspended, bouncing in the air. She had seen some of the Circle mages summon such creatures: tiny wisps, supposedly without much will of their own (something she would have contested) that spirit mages often summoned to light their way, or carry out the most basic of tasks. But this one simply hovered at her side, bobbing in the air, a curious nature about it.

Then there was that growling sound again—the spirit at her side made an excited trilling sound, somewhere between a bird call and a bell. The floor lurched underneath her. The feeling of it nearly brought her to her knees, unprepared as she was for the sudden movement. In the dim light cast from the wisp at her side, she could see the mosaics lowering, then falling away beneath her; she was rising. The mosaic beneath her was acting as some sort of lift.

She wondered why the woman she had followed had not used the lift, but then she remembered that the doors had appeared and yielded to her at the press of the anchor. Could that have been the key? 

The lift rose through the ceiling of the first chamber and entered into a narrow column, a shaft at the center of the tower. As she rose, slowly, Thanduwen could see many doors at different levels falling away beneath her. She wondered what secrets they might contain, but knew not how to safely stop the lift so she could enter through them. 

Onward and upward the lift ascended, until, finally, it came to rest. When it did, she stood before an archway, not a door. Just as the lift halted, she caught sight of the woman in white silks pass by, climbing higher.

Thanduwen stepped off the lift and walked hurriedly through the arched tunnel to the exterior of the tower; she turned her head just in time to catch a flicker of the silks passing round the corner of the tower. Below her, a thick blanket of clouds stretched forward. She could see nothing beneath it, but around her, puncturing the cloudline in majestic peaks of purple capped with snow, were the utmost heights of the mountains. She was very high indeed.

As she stood on the precipice of the tower’s edge, a platform extended before her feet; a step. She looked down at it apprehensively, though she felt slightly silly for that apprehension. She had not hesitated to pass through the doors; she had surrendered to the motion of the lift that had carried her so high up. But she could not shake the dread, the feeling that as soon as she left the security of the tower’s interior, the step would fall out from beneath her and she would be left to plummet to the ground.

She took a deep breath; there seemed little sense in stopping now. 

Still clinging to what feeble purchase she could find on the tunnel’s edge, she placed her foot on the stair, testing it. It did not give way beneath her weight. It felt secure. And as her flesh met the cool stone of the first tread, a second slid neatly out in front of her, leading further upwards along the outside perimeter of the tower. 

She closed her eyes, took another deep breath. In her short time in the Inquisition she’d already tread across many a precarious precipice or bridge, not to mention the days of her youth clambering through ravines and across fallen trees, simply for the pleasure of it. But never before had she been quite so high. 

Curiosity compelled her as much as necessity; she had come too far, now, to go back. (She supposed she might succeed in commanding the lift to bring her back to the ground, but then what would she do, with no sight of Skyhold to guide her?) So she set her foot on the step in front of her, and—hugging the smooth wall of the tower, and with less than half the grace she’d seen in the woman whose footsteps she followed—she began her ascent.

Thankfully, there was not far left to climb. After a few steps she could see arches above her ringing the summit of the tower; a few steps later she could hear voices. 

“You abandon your people in their hour of need, to cower in this tower with your trinkets and schemes.” It was a feminine voice, a rolling contralto—perhaps the woman she’d followed up the stairs? The tone was accusatory, but there was pain in the voice, too, as if the abandonment she spoke of was personal. No matter how the woman tried to cloud her grief with anger, it was still there, detectable beneath the surface. 

She wondered at that voice, wondered at the woman’s identity. But the next voice she heard was unmistakeable, and as soon as she heard it she froze where she stood on the steps, the fingers of her hand clutching a bit tighter, seeking purchase on the tower that they did not find. She felt desperately the need to steady herself at the sound—the distinctly male voice, with words spoken in a peculiar and poetic cadence. She knew that voice. For how many months, nights, hours had she laid awake listening to it, recounting stories and visions, lost songs and old magicks? But where the woman’s voice had been passionate, this one was cold, empty of emotion—practically bored in comparison the woman’s passion.

“This is no mere trinket, Idrilla. It will end the war—perhaps, all wars. And those dogs that would call themselves Lords will suffer before it concludes, I promise you that. Justice will come to them.”

The voice twisting into something almost like a snarl in the end—those dogs that would call themselves Lords. But who was he talking about? Thanduwen quietly hastened up the last of the steps to the edge of the platform, peering over the tower’s edge.

The sight of him stole the breath from her lungs—shocked her into awareness, like the being submerged in a murky, dark lake, then piercing the still surface into a cool night filled with stars. The truth flashed brightly within her mind: she remembered; she was dreaming. Long years had passed since her arrival at Skyhold, her courtyard coronation. She felt the weight of the years upon her: new responsibilities and wounds. How long had she lingered here in this memory—this dream?

And he—Solas—looked just as he had the last time she’d seen him. The sight of him hurt her terribly. Tall and regal, bronze lacquered armor strapped over fine chainmail, draped in luxuriant furs. Only the expression he wore was different, unfamiliar. At the crossroads, among the ruins of a long-lost empire, he’d been melancholy and full of regret. Here, his features were set into hard lines: dispassionate and cold.

Thanduwen wanted to confront him. She would stride up to him yelling ancient profanities, pounding her fists on that silly armor of his. And she might have; but when he turned his eyes to where she stood, there wasn’t the faintest trace of recognition in his features. His eyes went straight through her. She frowned, padded further up the steps; but even as she reached the platform above, neither Solas nor Idrilla—he had called her by that name—took any notice of her.

It seemed as though they could not see her at all.

Idrilla scoffed. “This is vengeance, Fen’Harel, not justice! You must know this as well as I do.”

Idrilla was pleading with him, and it was difficult to hear: Thanduwen could hear herself in those words, even if she’d never spoken them. But she recognized the tone: the hope and the futility. Abandon this folly. Together we will find a better way. But just like her own, Idrilla’s pleas fell on deaf ears.

Solas did not even look at her, but his eyes flashed with the same bright blue she’d seen at the crossroads, just before he’d turned the Viddasala to stone with no more than a glance. Instinctively, Thanduwen flinched, closing her eyes: but when she opened them, Idrilla still stood before her, her silks blowing lazily in the wind.

His eyes were still aglow. But instead of directing his gaze at Idrilla, he was focused on an object set atop a stone pedestal before him. He held his hands in the air on either side of it, cupping the space, his fingers dancing in subtle but precise movements: little twitches, nudges, flicks. Those gentle movements commanded several tiny pieces of green crystal and fragments of ore, dancing in the space between his hands, tracing lazy arcs across the space. With a small twist of his wrist and a curl of his fingers, they came together, interlocking like the pieces of a puzzle box. Then with a small wave of his hands the pieces descended. 

They lowered towards the pedestal, before coming to rest in the hollow half of a silver sphere, one side of a globe. It was like the cracked halves of an egg, though the exterior was peppered with strange protrusions, shapes, and sigils. Then, with a cupping motion of his hands, the top half of the globe met the second, sealing it; Thanduwen cursed. She’d seen such an artifact many times before, scattered across Thedas in ruins and caves.

“I sense one of the artifacts of my people.”

“Teldirthalelan,” she whispered, cursing herself, keeping her voice quiet even though she knew by now she could neither be seen nor heard. She had always suspected there was more to the artifacts than Solas told her; she had never gone so far as to suspect he had created them himself. Then the glow of fade from Solas’ eyes, and he stepped away from the Elven Artifact. How many had he made by now, she wondered? Was this the first, or one of many? All those closed doors she had passed on the lift to the top of the tower—how many artifacts did those rooms contain, waiting to be placed and activated?

At once many remembered things surfaced in her mind: the mosaics of Fen’Harel raising the Veil at the crossroads, Tarasyl'an Te'las, Skyhold, the place where the sky was held back. Her eyes narrowed, and though she was unwilling to tear her eyes from the scene in front of her, she turned her gaze to the view from the top of the tower, staring out over the mountains below.

They, too, were familiar. To the northeast, she saw the same summits and ridges that she had memorized from the hours staring out at them on the balcony of her bedroom. There were subtle differences, no doubt markers of the passage of time, but these were the same peaks she’d lived among for years: she knew these mountains and each of their names. Or, at least, she knew the names they’d come to be known by in the Dragon Age; she knew not what name Solas or Idrilla might call them by.

She turned back to the other elves at the sound of Solas’ voice behind her. His cool demeanor was gone, replaced by something vicious. 

“Do you think I am blind to what it is you carry with you, little rebel?” he asked, and though he spoke at a low volume there was a sharpness to his words. His mouth was twisted into an ugly sneer, at once threatening and condescending. “I do not ask for your help; I know you would not give it willingly. But if you interfere in my designs, I will rip your purpose from you like the teeth of the wolf tear at flesh. Then, friend, you will know what it is to be empty, as I am. Perhaps then you will judge me less harshly.”

The sound of his voice, the look on his face (a barely repressed snarl) nearly brought Thanduwen to tears. That cruelty and rage was something she had always suspected that he was capable of, simmering underneath the surface. But until now, she had never witnessed it herself. It was terrible to behold.

She circled around the platform, possessed of the perverse desire to see the effect the display had on Idrilla. But that revelation was almost more horrifying than the tone of voice. The color had drained from Idrilla’s face, but her expression was resigned, stony; Idrilla knew the threat was not idle. But that he had threatened her, Thanduwen thought, was not unexpected. She seemed unsurprised by both his cruelty and his threats of violence. 

“Her death has made you cruel, Fen’Harel,” she said, quietly. “But worse, it has made you reckless. You cannot fully know the repercussions of the magic you would unleash in your grief.”

Solas raised an eyebrow and turned his eyes away from Idrilla, back to the artifact on the pedestal. His hand traced a slow arc around the perimeter; runes that Thanduwen could not read nor understand flickered briefly on the artifacts surface, then faded as the magic was absorbed into it. “You are wrong,” he said coolly, tracing another set of runes on the artifact’s surface. “I am now what I always was: Fen’Harel the Rebel. Mythal’s death did not make me into anything that I was not already. Instead it has freed me to do what I was always meant to, for it was she who kept me from walking down this path a long time ago.”

Idrilla looked calm, but Thanduwen could see that her fists were tightly clenched. It was difficult to tell if her breathing was more a sign that she was seething with rage or twisted with anxiety; perhaps it was both. “Many will die,” she said, quietly.

“Perhaps,” Solas said, and the casual tone he used chilled Thanduwen. “But many will live. And those that do will be free.” He turned to look at Idrilla again; for the first time, as he gazed at her, he looked somewhat apologetic. “Nothing comes without sacrifice.”

“That is not for you to decide!” Idrilla said emphatically, the passion back in her voice. And at that passion something shimmered about her: a white halo, barely there but visible in the way it electrified the air around her. 

Then, something seemed to distract her; she whirled and turned her gaze to Thanduwen. By the heat and directness of it, Thanduwen could tell that Idrilla could see her, though Solas took no notice of them.

Idrilla huffed, crossed her arms over her chest as she looked at Thanduwen, the look she gave her thick with disapproval. “Shouldn’t you be with Hawke by now?”

“Hawke…?” Thanduwen repeated.

The ground lurched beneath her. There was a snarling sound—like a predator on the hunt, leaping for the kill. The tower flickered, faded, greened—she was in a circle of silver birch trees, she could hear the gabbling of the Rush of Sighs—then as she turned, that vision, too, slipped away. Suddenly she found herself on a wall of stone, overlooking the Skyhold courtyard—

“His name is Alistair. He told me he’d be hiding in an old smuggler’s cave, in Crestwood.”

The vision spun. She was walking along the battlements to Cullen’s office in one of the high towers; from inside, she could hear raised voices. Through the opened door she saw Cullen arguing with Cassandra, gesturing emphatically, his voice saturated with emotion. She had come to—what? Apologize? Check on him, after her words had left such an effect on him in the hall, I am always prepared to accept your resignation—speak with him, but now seemed an inopportune time. Strange; she had never seen Cassandra and Cullen argue so heatedly before. Cassandra caught sight of her gawking through the doorway; closed the door pointedly to give the two more privacy—

With the slam of the door, slipping—

One moment she was standing beside Hawke on the battlements—the next she was standing beside a Grey Warden Crest as tall as she was, painted in delicate and detailed washes of pigment on the rotunda wall: above it, Adamant burned—

“This is your fortress. These are your deeds.” Solas, beside her, smiling; wiping the pigment from his hands with a rag, looking utterly different than he had in the tower. There was a faint smile pulling at the corners of his mouth: satisfaction, contentment. 

A voice—familiar? (Idrilla’s?)—“Atisha, da’erelan.”

Then was a dull, mounting sound; like the roar of the waves at the Storm Coast, and she felt something—the dream, the White Wolf, she no longer knew—pulling at her like the hands of children in the alienage at Halamshiral, like an undertow, tugging her back to underneath, a soft song and the bliss of ignorance, moving through the dreams without the pain of foresight to know what was coming next.  

She allowed it drag her under.

Translations: Teldirthalelan | One who will not learn. Atisha, da’erelan. | Peace, little dreamer.

Translations by fenxshrial’s Project Elvhen, which is full of lots of lovely and crass insults

[ofsilverevents-blog]

DATE: March 19th TIME: 1PM LOCATION: Palace Gathering Hall

No one sees it coming, the end of the world.

ORION CALORE stands before the crowd of people gathered once again to hear his voice cascade over the people of Norta. They’ve been waiting not for what feels like years, the women having been told from birth that this moment was to be the one they were raised for, the one moment in time that they had to shine, even if they spent the rest of their life in the shadows. They crowd together, shoulders knocking against shoulders as they all push and shove, desperate for a good view of the new Flame of the North.

“ People of Norta, I come before you today to announce what exactly it is that Crownstrial will consist of. ” There are murmurs, of course, little things spoken in hushed tones under a person’s breath; some that whisper devotion to the new king and some that whisper he’s filled with pure madness, a kind of idiocy that only a young man can have. “ There will be three trials that contestants must not only complete, but succeed in. They will fall under the categories of body, mind, and heart, none of which will be easy. Some contestants will win one category, while others may defeat them in another. Whoever does best in all three and also wins the hearts of the people will become my partner under the weight of the crown. ”

He pauses then, unsure of whether or not he has more than he wants to say. His half-sister, EVELINA NOR, gives him an encouraging smile from her place at the front of the crowd, one that says You’re doing great, Ri. Don’t worry. She’s always been a flower girl, nothing like the snake that surround her.

It’s glorious, for a few moments, a king taking in the gazes of his people. But then it is not.

He cuts his speech short, a man willing to leave his people playing more and more guessing games. ORION CALORE is just beginning to walk away from his podium when it happens. His back is turned, feet carrying him down the stairs and away from his people when two enormous flashes go off in quick succession, their timers just out of sync. He is surrounded on all sides by guards before he can even realize that they have been attacked. 

Suddenly EVELINA’S smile has faded from her face, the bomb hidden inside of the king’s podium having gone off only inches away from her. In an attempt to save their best friend. NARCISA WELLE dives towards the baseborn daughter, only to doom them both to a dark fate. 

ADELINE CALORE and her lady-in-waiting, ROMILLY GLIACON, are blown backwards from their place at the edge of the stage, the bomb having gone off a few feet in away from them. CALDER GLIACON sees the both of them fall from their place upon the stage, watches as each of them falls from grace backwards into some state of oblivion where he can see neither. There are too many faces between them for him to see where they’ve landed ( Damnit, he knew he should’ve been standing closer. ). Instead he finds the hands, usually so tender and full of a intentional kind of gentility, of NYSSA SAMOS wrapping around his own forearms like a vice grip.

JACALYN BLAKE and PORTIA BARNES stand behind the stage, watching in horror as those they serve are blown back by the impact. The impact strikes them too, but Portia is hit harder than Jack, her head knocking into the floor and her body limp. She is alive, but wounded, and Jack rushes to her side before a searing sensation stops her from helping further. Her back feels as though something is clawing its way out, and she screams, terrified and in pain. She falls to her knees, and the sight spurs GALEN DEAN from the fringes of the room, unharmed but concerned for her as most in the vicinity focus only on the royals. There is something strange about the bones around her spine, something unnatural, and it becomes apparent that the bomb is not the only unexpected event of the day.

None of them have ever know such terror.

MELODY WALSH had been bringing out more pastries to decorate the ever decadent tables when the flash of light came, followed by a deafening crack of red and yellow flame that seems to engulf the place the new king had once been standing. Perhaps by chance, or perhaps the fate’s have dug their hand’s into the situation and thrust like souls together, CALISTA EAGRIE finds herself in the arms of Melody, having been thrust into the other girl with the force of the blast. There is dust on her face and ash in her lungs and she is blinded by the smoke in the room.

THELONIOUS GRECO, half-deaf ( as, it would seem, are so many others ) from the blast, does not hear KASSIOPEA NOLLE shouting for him from across the gathering hall. They’re all desperate to know why this has happened, but the time for running was now, not for questioning, and so she runs from the room, plowing directly into AREUM MARINOS who has clearly by struck by the blast, her body covered in wounds from flying shrapnel. THELONIOUS, instead of searching for his comrades, finds himself preoccupied with saving everyone nearest to him. He happens upon a battered SURIEL ARVEN, who collapses into Theo’s arms, his leg unable to carry his weight any longer. They both are trying to make their way through the destruction when none other than NICOLAUS LARIS stumbles into them, desperate to grab onto Theo’s other side. He misses, however, and crumbles to the ground where he hits his head on a broken piece of cement. 

He was dead on impact. 

Meanwhile, OCTAVIAN RHAMBOS is drawn away from the crowds trampling and into a side hallway, one just adjacent to the gathering hall; he thinks it is meant for servants. Low and behold, he finds none other than DIEM HYNSON struggling to lift rubble off of a young red boy -- TATE WHITCOMB, whose pulse is slowly petering out into dead silence. There is a moment where he pauses -- does he run and save him self, or does he stay and potentially face the wrath of another bomb? In the end he resolves himself to step forward and help this red girl save her compatriot.

There’s slice cutting its way across EIRA JACOS’ clavicle, making its way from the base of her neck to her shoulder, as she goes in desperate search of her betrothed. In a rush to find him among the chaos, however, she runs right into the unwelcoming arms of RAHUL PROVOS. Gracelessly, they both fall to the ground, RAHUL crying out has their shoulder makes some kind of snapping noise when it hits the ground

In the end, there is only destruction. There, among the rubble and decay, sit three lost souls. EMORY and LEIRA OSANOS cradle their mother, still gasping for breath as wooden fragments ravage her abdomen, not a single blood healer in sight. It would seem they’ve all been whisked to the side of the king, who must be protected at all costs, apparently.

But perhaps the worst of all is MARIUS CALORE as they hold in their arms the weight of a soul who met its maker the moment the bomb went off, EVELINA CALORE, a flower trampled, never to grow back. First they lost a father, and now a sister. How were the people to take the Crown seriously when they kept dropping like flies?

In all the chaos, no one sees the little red girl with a can of red paint in her hands, staining her fingertips with crimson retribution. She pulls a paint brush from her smock and in huge letters upon the stage where Orion once stood, she paints these words:

                                                           WE ARE COMING.

A guard tackles the little thing just as she puts the final dot at the end -- a promise of worse to come. They’ll say it was the Scarlet Guard, this act of terrorism, a radical and callous act of bloodshed. If only they knew how wrong that was.

Everyone has scattered, it would seem, running through the castle like rabid mice, like the vermin their attackers know they are. There are countless wounded, so many that there is no way the skin healers will be able to get to them all in time, especially not as guards usher silvers into the bunkers beneath the castle; skin healers are in short supply, and they can only be in one place at a time. The dead are all around, mother’s and father’s, children, friends -- everyone has lost someone, something that binds them to happiness.

If someone would just squint through the smoke and the flames, they would see a smile, a devious, devastating little thing. They lurk in the shadows like the master puppeteers they are. While everyone runs around frantically, like birds with their heads cut off, the others standing outside in the gardens, safe from the flames in the warm embrace of sunlight.

A red boy runs up to his masters, his chest heavy with the weight of dead souls and falling ash.

“ Did the Flame survive? ” she questions, her head tilting downwards to meet the eyes of her servant. 

“ Yes, my Lady; he cut his speech short. ” 

“ No matter, ” she begins, the twist of her mouth saying she would have preferred him dead. There is nothing brash about the woman standing there now. She stands, spine straightened, her deception like poisonous belladonna in the hands of fate. 

“ The little king is rapidly running out of luck. ”

The event will be from March 19th to March 26th. 

It will begin at 1PM Eastern with the characters having just gathered in the hall.

Additional information can be found below the cut.

Hello members — As you have read above, this is an event that effects everyone. Anybody who liked this post should be mentioned somewhere above, as well as any New Bloods (who must be present for their abilities to trigger), but if not send the main a message and one of us admins will make sure to edit your character in. Additionally, if you did not like the post mentioned and you now want your character involved, send us a message and we’ll come up with something for you. A couple of things that need mentioning:

NEW BLOODS HAVE ALL BEEN TRIGGERED. A post with a list of those characters abilities will be posted separately later tonight.

There are many people who died during this attack, but in canon we’ve only killed LADY OSANOS, EVELINA CALORE, NICOLAUS LARIS, and NARCISA WELLE. If you would really like, you may message the main and ask permission for a parent and / or servant of your character to have undergone some serious injuries as well. 

Dates for this event may be tagged anytime from MARCH 19th to MARCH 25th. Flashback threads of course may occur, and threads may be played out from previous events, but any new starters should occur within these dates. 

Starters can be anything from your characters during Orion’s speech about Crownstrial, to the bomb itself, or your character in the bunkers below the castle where the guards have ushered (almost) everyone. 

This attack was not the work of the Scarlet Guard, but they are currently the most likely suspect. This should be a hot topic for discussion. 

If your character was mentioned as having injuries, the exact extent to which they are injured is entirely up to you as the mun. 

We’ve done our best to more or less place all of the characters into pairings for what is going on during the bomb, and therefore would love to see these interactions played out either on the dash, or your may do it in a chatzy if you wish -- we just ask that you post a final script to the dash so that we can read and enjoy! 

[zubelcas-blog]

Final reflection

Before I undertook any CAS activities, I had to become cognizant of my flaws and qualities, what lies ny my nature, and what kind of an action I would never have taken had it not been for CAS. As such, firstly I focused on my psyche. As identified my psychologists that I’m an antisocial type with adhd and a slight aspergers. Despite this, around my peers I always strive to be in the center of attention. After examining my conscience, I must say that out of my school experience, I don’t do my duties diligently, especially those towards others. Hence the biggest challenge for me, was doing service, where my actions are to be about them only. It is the case, because dealing with other people is my biggest weakness. As such I have taken up volunteering at a local allotment housing complex where I could help often elderly pensioners with their daily struggles.

 When it comes to Activity, I focused on myself, thus my choice was an individual sport that is running. The basis of such a choice being the ease of doing the activity itself, yet the challenge was in the planning and being thorough. Which was a new experience, as I had never imposed such a program on myself, I was both a coach and a contestant.

As part of Creativity, I explored my hitherto passion that is music, about which I had already written my Extended Essay, thus a natural flow of things would be to transition from merely listening to music, to making it myself.

               The biggest challenge, and as it soon turned out, the most gratifying, was working at the allotment housing. The gardening community, mainly comprised of elderly people, unbeknownst of my motivation, has given me a lot of trust. First two people who have responded to my initial ad in which I was offering free aid, had quite a bit of distrust and reserve heard in their voice. It was only after doing the first few works, getting to know me, that I was asked for noticeably more help. As a growing token of trust I was being given increasingly important jobs, and even keys to people’s gardens. In addition to these works, I got to talk to these people, who sometimes treated me a bit like they would their step grandson. As old people, they’d keep repeating the same tales, but it made me ever more patient. Initially it was a bit irritating, but I withheld my own need to talk, and for once I wasn’t the center of attention.

               Stories of this generation are completely alien to me. Their everyday issues, such as diseases, medication, pensions, are all problems that haven’t yet been relevant to my life. As time went on, with authentic attention I’d listen to what they had to say. I can safely state, that I found some kind of empathy in myself, not solely stemming from the fact that some of these people are not long for this world, but rooted in respect to their lives.

               From my observation it would seem that these elderly people are often poor and lonely. This loosely knit group is often the second, sometimes sadly the only family they have. There were also cases where I’d know from word of mouth that someone has been estranged by their family because of their own doing. It wasn’t my goal to actively seek into their past, but it got me thinking. If someone was a bad human being, are they now but an old bad human being, or just an old human being? Do they deserve help because they are lonely, even though they have deserved it? I had to cut out all this pondering and theory making, as I felt not competent enough to judge their life decisions, as such I

would help anyone no matter the gossip. But now it’s got me thinking, that I may have helped some people that I normally wouldn’t have helped had it not been for the fact that they’re old.

Integration of the whole allotment community that I participated in whilst organizing the community gardener’s day, is in my opinion a much needed thing, as it draws people closer, and above all, it is beneficial to the eldest, for whom this day is often more cherished than Christmas. As time went on, my computer skills have also proven useful, as it turned out, people who have lived through a world war and communism, have been beaten by technological progress. In cooperation with the administration, I created, and since manage the official e-mail of the complex. I send email to different institutions, download and print new acts and laws. I noticed that despite how tough it is already for these people, its them who are expected to adapt to the world, not the other way around. More and more services are only available online. When I first offered my help, as a child brought up in a digital world, I had wrongly presumed that they’d need only the power of my muscle. It hadn’t even crossed my mind that someone would be more able to burrow a garden than to “google” something.

                 I’m surprised that my work for the gardens whether taking the trash out or writing some mails, has been met with such appreciation, I got a lot of thanks, and even a postcard for Christmas. It was maybe 10% of my free time, and things that come naturally to me, but as it would seem, I have done 100% of what was expected of me. These two years have proven that when providing help, the thing of utmost importance, is to listen to the needs of the receiver.

               As Activity, I just ran, which wasn’t that easy in and of itself. Till then I’d only run only when I felt like it. Running comes naturally to me, but only on long distances, this being the case due to my thin posture -173 cm/53kg, practically the same as top Kenyan or Ethiopian marathon runners. This time in order to prepare for a run I had to create a training schedule. Above all I wanted to break my natural laziness and chaotic behavior. Get a grip on natural expression, and impose certain actions. Of course the plan was based on internet articles, it included running in set intervals, jog and sprint in turns. Planned running, required an insane amount of self-discipline, I’d practically run with a clock in my hand. Such running was void of romanticism, there was no time to put a foot after foot with no care in the world. I have verified my goals, and understood that it isn’t my intention to improve my running technique, maximize my efficiency, and minimize mistakes, but to run for pleasure – I do it because I like doing it. The point is to feel the bliss of it, fatigue and an imperfect technique are a part of my way to do it. I chose pleasure over a strict training, that, granted, would increase my performance, but this regime takes the fun away. Of course I haven’t ceased running, I also haven’t dragged myself into the mass culture of modern day running. Where image of a runner is more important than how far you are able to run, the big sports companies are actively fiending on amateur runners. Sports’ portals, companies, personal trainers keep telling you that to achieve success you need a certain pair of running shoes, breathing sweatshirts and accessories. And with all the ever present smartphone applications that deprive runners of liberty. They tell them when to stop, because they ran the daily quota, inform when to go for a run as you haven’t done that in x hours. Worst of all, they make some people run just for attention in the social media, by publishing screenshots with the amount of kilometers ran. Within the society of parrot-like dressed runners, wearing a plain white t shirt is viewed as lame. All in all, I have not revolutionized my running lifestyle, but I have seen the other side of the coin, and the culture of new age runners that I don’t want to have anything in common. That’s why I don’t partake in mass organized runs, I only run when I have free time and the will to do so. Changing my approach to running to that organized and scheduled one, was the hardest part of my activity experience. It required me to change my running habits, which I was able to do, but what I wasn’t able to change is my approach to running, for I see it as a goal, and these articles, as well as these afore criticized runners see it as a tool only.

 Since mid-2015, I’ve been producing some music, As I already established, for instance by writing an extended essay on the topic of AAVE, my music taste, especially at that time, consisted mostly of hip hop. So it was only natural, that by extension, I’d take up digital music production, given how most hip hop instrumentals are done this way. This is akin to someone who’s into rock music, starting to play guitar. Now initially, it really was just mindless tinkering, for the fact that the learning curve is very steep, what translates to the fact that just to get a grip of the basics on using a given program, one has to sink in tens of hours. People take literal courses just for that, I took the self-taught route, with my DAW (digital audio workstation) of choice being FL Studio. I had never really engaged myself in any downright and entirely creative activities. This took a toll on my judgment, taught me a lesson or two. I’ve had it happen to me again and again, where, having spent hours on a particular beat or just a sliver of a sound, I would go to sleep tired but satisfied, thinking that I’ve just made something of value, play it back the next day and drown in frustration. I’m fairly certain that any amateur producer has experienced this. But the lesson is broader, it above all was a humbling experience. I was taught that creative work is subjective in essence. Just as I’ve found out the hard way that creative processes need the maker to be “in the zone”. I can’t just sit to it on any given day. It has to be THAT day. I finally understood why in Hollywood movies, there’s a stereotype of a writer who rents a house on the countryside, often abroad, away from the noise and commotion. For that reason, filling an hour grid is impossible in nature. I was also taught that beauty indeed is in the “ear” of the beholder. As there have been times when I would send a piece to a friend, asking “how bad is it?”, only to have them reply “it’s fantastic”. Initially, my plan was to create a beat mixtape in a rather grimy boom bap style, but since then my overall direction has changed tides numerous times. When you produce something, you have to live it. The way I listen to the music itself has altered thanks to this venture. Weird as it may come off, I no longer do it for the pleasure only. It has become quite a grueling experience, that’s about deciphering a composition, the nitty-gritty of how something was made sound the way it does. It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that every time I listen to music I engage in a creative process, via reverse engineering so to speak. Ask me 5 years ago what’s a chord, I wouldn’t be able to tell. It’s a drastic statement, but it encapsulates the creative part of personal growth that I’ve gone through over the past three years. As such, I’ve undertaken a new challenge, and shown enough perseverance over the years to pull through and grow in the areas that I’ve always wanted to.

[spotlightsaga]

Kevin Cage of @spotlightsaga reviews… Fear The Walking Dead (S03E01) Eye of the Beholder Airdate: June 4, 2017 @amc @amc-walking-dead Ratings: 3.109 Million :: 1.18 18-49 Demo Share Score: 4.5/10

**********SPOILERS BELOW**********

FearTWD has always been a favorite of mine and a show I’ve always felt the need to defend time and time again. I’ll never understand how ‘The Walking Dead’ can rack up live viewers ranging from 17 to 11 Million an episode, that’s without DVR & Streaming Numbers (and possibly any clue as to how to reach those numbers since it is Nielsen we’re talking about), while FTWD has fallen from a starting point of 10 Million and opening up S3 to 3 Million. Let’s stress again how it doesn’t matter because AMC has their money maker and despite the drop 2-3 Million Live Viewers is still fantastic numbers for a cable show. The success of TWD is why AMC can experiment with different narrative styles and techniques, story delivery, and pacing… And it’s the very reason why Top Notch shows like 'Halt and Catch Fire’ & 'Turn’ can rack up so many seasons with such little viewers, that and Critical Acclaim, of course.

Unfortunately I’ve had to split up the 2-Hour premiere into two nights because I’m not the only member of Spotlight Saga who helps outline the reviews, and to be honest when you work with friends and family, if they say don’t watch a show without them… You don’t watch a show without them. I think all of us were a little confused at the start tho. We were left wondering how everyone arrived at the same place. I did attempt to watch that online special that racked up a bunch of singular clips to make up one story but I just couldn’t follow it and that many shorts to tell one story is simply unacceptable in my book. From what I understand, it had nothing to do with this though. By the time this first episode of the 2-Part premiere had finished we are all alone again left scratching our heads… It felt like we somehow missed a huge part of the show. However those diehard TWD fans who complained that there weren’t enough walkers should take note that there were plenty in this premiere… But therein lies one of the biggest problems of 'Eye of the Beholder’.

This premiere very much felt like 'The Walking Dead’ and that’s not what I want from this show. I enjoy exploring the psychological aspects and the sociological effects on groups that are starting to form… And I think we will definitely get back to that, maybe they just had to get this 'Big Bang’ of a premiere out of the way. Structurally, this episode was a complete mess and it pains me to say that. I am one of FTWD’s biggest cheerleaders… But since this is a 2-Parter, I’m going with an educated guess that this episode is simply setting the stage for Episode 2 and we’re in for a major tidal wave of a shake up. The whole bringing everyone together and then splitting them up again is a pretty damn good indication of that. The mood, the atmosphere, the action… This all feels like an earlier season of 'The Walking Dead’ and I’m going to need for that to change. Keeping these two shows as distinctly different as possible is key to keeping FTWD’s legacy intact.

The best thing that FTWD could do is start really focusing on the sociological aspects of these characters attempting to build some resemblance of a world back that was familiar to these people at one time. The further we get away from the starting point of all of this, the easier it will for the show to miss a really good chance to make a compelling season in this sort of vein. We’ve watched the psychology in the past two seasons of these characters broken down and made into fascinating characterizations, shifting into totally different human beings… Some still here and some lost, as main characters should always make an exit in a series like this to remind us of how serious things truly are from time to time. FTWD has proved they will do that without blinking so I’m sure that it’s coming, something feels off about this whole direction that Madison (Kim Dickens), who has taken over the Rick-like role in this show, and company are heading.

This may just be the perfect set-up, depending on which way they go from here, even though how they all got here remains a bit of a mystery… We also won’t mention the giant plotholes as to why no one patted down Alicia (Alycia Debnam-Carey), but I just did… So whoops. Usually psychopaths are extremely thorough, as per example we see in their counting of how many seconds from 'time of death’ to resurrection. Is it possible they were so caught up in the maniacal aspects of their behavior they forgot to check the women for giant shivs? I have to say 'No’. That is just as hard to defend as the casual mentioning of 'the dead tend to stay away from the other dead’, because we clearly see that they regularly travel in hordes. I don’t want to pick this apart too much, but COME ON… This is just lazy writing and there’s a better way to state what I know they were trying to say.

Personally I would definitely question the any members of the family of the psychopath that just separated my entire family and proceeded to conduct morbid experiments and put them through zombie gauntlets. I found it especially weird that Madison went rogue and stuck a sharp object in this guy’s eyeball and his brother was like, 'No Sweat, man, I get it!’ Travis does question Troy’s (Daniel Sharman) 'good guy’ brother, Jake (Sam Underwood), when he mentions his family’s offsite 'sanctuary’. “Yeah we’ve heard that before,’ Travis barks back, bringing some sense of reality back to this chaotic first hour. Troy and Jake do have an exchange where I do believe Jake when he explains his father sending Troy there was to 'cast one out to protect the many’, but Troy seems to think his dad 'gets it’. Time will tell.

Part 1 of 2 isn’t really a total loss, as I mentioned it sets up wherever we’re going nicely, despite the fragmented way it got us there. Even though he only lasted one episode, I’m always happy to see Shameless’ Noel Fisher. His 'Willy’ character met an extra special demise in possibly the most traditionally 'horror’ style sequence in the entire episode where he was drowned in rats and then pulled in through a vent (by an unusually strong walker) head first, breaking his back backwards in the process. I’m going to assume that some experiments made this style of ultra strong zombie, because it’s certainly one we haven’t seen yet… Or maybe it was just thrown in there for aesthetic sake. This horrific event lets the 'Wall Walkers’ loose and somehow they very quickly spread out and surround the entire area. Yeah, I’m not questioning this too much either. It would seem that Madison is distracting the zombies so that the others can make an escape, but it’s not like these 'Walkers’ are 'Runners’, pretty sure they could have all made it to the plane safely. The now 'One Eyed’ Troy has great vision with one eye and is shooting walkers down with remarkable accuracy. The recently reunited group is now separated once again but One Eyed Troy assures them that they are all going to the sane place. This is a messy episode, but it puts the chess pieces where they need to be and at least that’s something.

[araitsume]

Patriarchs and Prophets, pp. 331-342: Chapter (29) Satan's Enmity Against the Law

The very first effort of Satan to overthrow God's law—undertaken among the sinless inhabitants of heaven—seemed for a time to be crowned with success. A vast number of the angels were seduced; but Satan's apparent triumph resulted in defeat and loss, separation from God, and banishment from heaven.

When the conflict was renewed upon the earth, Satan again won a seeming advantage. By transgression, man became his captive, and man's kingdom also was betrayed into the hands of the archrebel. Now the way seemed open for Satan to establish an independent kingdom, and to defy the authority of God and His Son. But the plan of salvation made it possible for man again to be brought into harmony with God, and to render obedience to His law, and for both man and the earth to be finally redeemed from the power of the wicked one.

Again Satan was defeated, and again he resorted to deception, in the hope of converting his defeat into a victory. To stir up rebellion in the fallen race, he now represented God as unjust in having permitted man to transgress His law. “Why,” said the artful tempter, “when God knew what would be the result, did He permit man to be placed on trial, to sin, and bring in misery and death?” And the children of Adam, forgetful of the long-suffering mercy that had granted man another trial, regardless of the amazing, the awful sacrifice which his rebellion had cost the King of heaven, gave ear to the tempter, and murmured against the only Being who could save them from the destructive power of Satan.

There are thousands today echoing the same rebellious complaint against God. They do not see that to deprive man of the freedom of choice would be to rob him of his prerogative as an intelligent being, and make him a mere automaton. It is not God's purpose to coerce the will. Man was created a free moral agent. Like the inhabitants of all other worlds, he must be subjected to the test of obedience; but he is never brought into such a position that yielding to evil becomes a matter of necessity. No temptation or trial is permitted to come to him which he is unable to resist. God made such ample provision that man need never have been defeated in the conflict with Satan.

As men increased upon the earth, almost the whole world joined the ranks of rebellion. Once more Satan seemed to have gained the victory. But omnipotent power again cut short the working of iniquity, and the earth was cleansed by the Flood from its moral pollution.

Says the prophet, “When Thy judgments are in the earth, the inhabitants of the world will learn righteousness. Let favor be showed to the wicked, yet will he not learn righteousness, ... and will not behold the majesty of Jehovah.” Isaiah 26:9, 10. Thus it was after the Flood. Released from His judgments, the inhabitants of the earth again rebelled against the Lord. Twice God's covenant and His statutes had been rejected by the world. Both the people before the Flood and the descendants of Noah cast off the divine authority. Then God entered into covenant with Abraham, and took to Himself a people to become the depositaries of His law. To seduce and destroy this people, Satan began at once to lay his snares. The children of Jacob were tempted to contract marriages with the heathen and to worship their idols. But Joseph was faithful to God, and his fidelity was a constant testimony to the true faith. It was to quench this light that Satan worked through the envy of Joseph's brothers to cause him to be sold as a slave in a heathen land. God overruled events, however, so that the knowledge of Himself should be given to the people of Egypt. Both in the house of Potiphar and in the prison Joseph received an education and training that, with the fear of God, prepared him for his high position as prime minister of the nation. From the palace of the Pharaohs his influence was felt throughout the land, and the knowledge of God spread far and wide. The Israelites in Egypt also became prosperous and wealthy, and such as were true to God exerted a widespread influence. The idolatrous priests were filled with alarm as they saw the new religion finding favor. Inspired by Satan with his own enmity toward the God of heaven, they set themselves to quench the light. To the priests was committed the education of the heir to the throne, and it was this spirit of determined opposition to God and zeal for idolatry that molded the character of the future monarch, and led to cruelty and oppression toward the Hebrews.

During the forty years after the flight of Moses from Egypt, idolatry seemed to have conquered. Year by year the hopes of the Israelites grew fainter. Both king and people exulted in their power, and mocked the God of Israel. This grew until it culminated in the Pharaoh who was confronted by Moses. When the Hebrew leader came before the king with a message from “Jehovah, God of Israel,” it was not ignorance of the true God, but defiance of His power, that prompted the answer, “Who is Jehovah, that I should obey His voice? ... I know not Jehovah.” From first to last, Pharaoh's opposition to the divine command was not the result of ignorance, but of hatred and defiance.

Though the Egyptians had so long rejected the knowledge of God, the Lord still gave them opportunity for repentance. In the days of Joseph, Egypt had been an asylum for Israel; God had been honored in the kindness shown His people; and now the long-suffering One, slow to anger, and full of compassion, gave each judgment time to do its work; the Egyptians, cursed through the very objects they had worshiped, had evidence of the power of Jehovah, and all who would, might submit to God and escape His judgments. The bigotry and stubbornness of the king resulted in spreading the knowledge of God, and bringing many of the Egyptians to give themselves to His service.

It was because the Israelites were so disposed to connect themselves with the heathen and imitate their idolatry that God had permitted them to go down into Egypt, where the influence of Joseph was widely felt, and where circumstances were favorable for them to remain a distinct people. Here also the gross idolatry of the Egyptians and their cruelty and oppression during the latter part of the Hebrew sojourn should have inspired in them an abhorrence of idolatry, and should have led them to flee for refuge to the God of their fathers. This very providence Satan made a means to serve his purpose, darkening the minds of the Israelites and leading them to imitate the practices of their heathen masters. On account of the superstitious veneration in which animals were held by the Egyptians, the Hebrews were not permitted, during their bondage, to present the sacrificial offerings. Thus their minds were not directed by this service to the great Sacrifice, and their faith was weakened. When the time came for Israel's deliverance, Satan set himself to resist the purposes of God. It was his determination that that great people, numbering more than two million souls, should be held in ignorance and superstition. The people whom God had promised to bless and multiply, to make a power in the earth, and through whom He was to reveal the knowledge of His will—the people whom He was to make the keepers of His law—this very people Satan was seeking to keep in obscurity and bondage, that he might obliterate from their minds the remembrance of God.

When the miracles were wrought before the king, Satan was on the ground to counteract their influence and prevent Pharaoh from acknowledging the supremacy of God and obeying His mandate. Satan wrought to the utmost of his power to counterfeit the work of God and resist His will. The only result was to prepare the way for greater exhibitions of the divine power and glory, and to make more apparent, both to the Israelites and to all Egypt, the existence and sovereignty of the true and living God.

God delivered Israel with the mighty manifestations of His power, and with judgments upon all the gods of Egypt. “He brought forth His people with joy, and His chosen with gladness: ... that they might observe His statutes, and keep His laws.” Psalm 105:43-45. He rescued them from their servile state, that He might bring them to a good land—a land which in His providence had been prepared for them as a refuge from their enemies, where they might dwell under the shadow of His wings. He would bring them to Himself, and encircle them in His everlasting arms; and in return for all His goodness and mercy to them they were required to have no other gods before Him, the living God, and to exalt His name and make it glorious in the earth.

During the bondage in Egypt many of the Israelites had, to a great extent, lost the knowledge of God's law, and had mingled its precepts with heathen customs and traditions. God brought them to Sinai, and there with His own voice declared His law.

Satan and evil angels were on the ground. Even while God was proclaiming His law to His people, Satan was plotting to tempt them to sin. This people whom God had chosen, he would wrench away, in the very face of Heaven. By leading them into idolatry, he would destroy the efficacy of all worship; for how can man be elevated by adoring what is no higher than himself and may be symbolized by his own handiwork? If men could become so blinded to the power, the majesty, and the glory of the infinite God as to represent Him by a graven image, or even by a beast or reptile; if they could so forget their own divine relationship, formed in the image of their Maker as to bow down to these revolting and senseless objects—then the way was open for foul license; the evil passions of the heart would be unrestrained, and Satan would have full sway.

At the very foot of Sinai, Satan began to execute his plans for overthrowing the law of God, thus carrying forward the same work he had begun in heaven. During the forty days while Moses was in the mount with God, Satan was busy exciting doubt, apostasy, and rebellion. While God was writing down His law, to be committed to His covenant people, the Israelites, denying their loyalty to Jehovah, were demanding gods of gold! When Moses came from the awful presence of the divine glory, with the precepts of the law which they had pledged themselves to obey, he found them, in open defiance of its commands, bowing in adoration before a golden image.

By leading Israel to this daring insult and blasphemy to Jehovah, Satan had planned to cause their ruin. Since they had proved themselves to be so utterly degraded, so lost to all sense of the privileges and blessings that God had offered them, and to their own solemn and repeated pledges of loyalty, the Lord would, he believed, divorce them from Himself and devote them to destruction. Thus would be secured the extinction of the seed of Abraham, that seed of promise that was to preserve the knowledge of the living God, and through whom He was to come—the true Seed, that was to conquer Satan. The great rebel had planned to destroy Israel, and thus thwart the purposes of God. But again he was defeated. Sinful as they were, the people of Israel were not destroyed. While those who stubbornly ranged themselves on the side of Satan were cut off, the people, humbled and repentant, were mercifully pardoned. The history of this sin was to stand as a perpetual testimony to the guilt and punishment of idolatry, and the justice and long-suffering mercy of God.

The whole universe had been witness to the scenes at Sinai. In the working out of the two administrations was seen the contrast between the government of God and that of Satan. Again the sinless inhabitants of other worlds beheld the results of Satan's apostasy, and the kind of government he would have established in heaven had he been permitted to bear sway.

By causing men to violate the second commandment, Satan aimed to degrade their conceptions of the Divine Being. By setting aside the fourth, he would cause them to forget God altogether. God's claim to reverence and worship, above the gods of the heathen, is based upon the fact that He is the Creator, and that to Him all other beings owe their existence. Thus it is presented in the Bible. Says the prophet Jeremiah: “The Lord is the true God, He is the living God, and an everlasting King.... The gods that have not made the heavens and the earth, even they shall perish from the earth, and from under these heavens. He hath made the earth by His power, He hath established the world by His wisdom, and hath stretched out the heavens by His discretion.” “Every man is brutish in his knowledge: every founder is confounded by the graven image: for his molten image is falsehood, and there is no breath in them. They are vanity, and the work of errors: in the time of their visitation they shall perish. The portion of Jacob is not like them: for He is the former of all things.” Jeremiah 10:10-12, 14-16. The Sabbath, as a memorial of God's creative power, points to Him as the maker of the heavens and the earth. Hence it is a constant witness to His existence and a reminder of His greatness, His wisdom, and His love. Had the Sabbath always been sacredly observed, there could never have been an atheist or an idolater.

The Sabbath institution, which originated in Eden, is as old as the world itself. It was observed by all the patriarchs, from creation down. During the bondage in Egypt, the Israelites were forced by their taskmasters to violate the Sabbath, and to a great extent they lost the knowledge of its sacredness. When the law was proclaimed at Sinai the very first words of the fourth commandment were, “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy”—showing that the Sabbath was not then instituted; we are pointed back for its origin to creation. In order to obliterate God from the minds of men, Satan aimed to tear down this great memorial. If men could be led to forget their Creator, they would make no effort to resist the power of evil, and Satan would be sure of his prey.

Satan's enmity against God's law had impelled him to war against every precept of the Decalogue. To the great principle of love and loyalty to God, the Father of all, the principle of filial love and obedience is closely related. Contempt for parental authority will soon lead to contempt for the authority of God. Hence Satan's efforts to lessen the obligation of the fifth commandment. Among heathen peoples the principle enjoined in this precept was little heeded. In many nations parents were abandoned or put to death as soon as age had rendered them incapable of providing for themselves. In the family the mother was treated with little respect, and upon the death of her husband she was required to submit to the authority of her eldest son. Filial obedience was enjoined by Moses; but as the Israelites departed from the Lord, the fifth commandment, with others, came to be disregarded.

Satan was “a murderer from the beginning” (John 8:44); and as soon as he had obtained power over the human race, he not only prompted them to hate and slay one another, but, the more boldly to defy the authority of God, he made the violation of the sixth commandment a part of their religion.

By perverted conceptions of divine attributes, heathen nations were led to believe human sacrifices necessary to secure the favor of their deities; and the most horrible cruelties have been perpetrated under the various forms of idolatry. Among these was the practice of causing their children to pass through the fire before their idols. When one of them came through this ordeal unharmed, the people believed that their offerings were accepted; the one thus delivered was regarded as specially favored by the gods, was loaded with benefits, and ever afterward held in high esteem; and however aggravated his crimes, he was never punished. But should one be burned in passing through the fire, his fate was sealed; it was believed that the anger of the gods could be appeased only by taking the life of the victim, and he was accordingly offered as a sacrifice. In times of great apostasy these abominations prevailed, to some extent, among the Israelites.

The violation of the seventh commandment also was early practiced in the name of religion. The most licentious and abominable rites were made a part of the heathen worship. The gods themselves were represented as impure, and their worshipers gave the rein to the baser passions. Unnatural vices prevailed and the religious festivals were characterized by universal and open impurity.

Polygamy was practiced at an early date. It was one of the sins that brought the wrath of God upon the antediluvian world. Yet after the Flood it again became widespread. It was Satan's studied effort to pervert the marriage institution, to weaken its obligations and lessen its sacredness; for in no surer way could he deface the image of God in man and open the door to misery and vice.

From the opening of the great controversy it has been Satan's purpose to misrepresent God's character and to excite rebellion against His law, and this work appears to be crowned with success. The multitudes give ear to Satan's deceptions and set themselves against God. But amid the working of evil, God's purposes move steadily forward to their accomplishment; to all created intelligences He is making manifest His justice and benevolence. Through Satan's temptations the whole human race have become transgressors of God's law, but by the sacrifice of His Son a way is opened whereby they may return to God. Through the grace of Christ they may be enabled to render obedience to the Father's law. Thus in every age, from the midst of apostasy and rebellion, God gathers out a people that are true to Him—a people “in whose heart is His law.” Isaiah 51:7.

It was by deception that Satan seduced angels; thus he has in all ages carried forward his work among men, and he will continue this policy to the last. Should he openly profess to be warring against God and His law, men would beware; but he disguises himself, and mixes truth with error. The most dangerous falsehoods are those that are mingled with truth. It is thus that errors are received that captivate and ruin the soul. By this means Satan carries the world with him. But a day is coming when his triumph will be forever ended.

God's dealings with rebellion will result in fully unmasking the work that has so long been carried on under cover. The results of Satan's rule, the fruits of setting aside the divine statutes, will be laid open to the view of all created intelligences. The law of God will stand fully vindicated. It will be seen that all the dealings of God have been conducted with reference to the eternal good of His people, and the good of all the worlds that He has created. Satan himself, in the presence of the witnessing universe, will confess the justice of God's government and the righteousness of His law.

The time is not far distant when God will arise to vindicate His insulted authority. “The Lord cometh out of His place to punish the inhabitants of the earth for their iniquity.” Isaiah 26:21. “But who may abide the day of His coming? and who shall stand when He appeareth?” Malachi 3:2. The people of Israel, because of their sinfulness, were forbidden to approach the mount when God was about to descend upon it to proclaim His law, lest they should be consumed by the burning glory of His presence. If such manifestations of His power marked the place chosen for the proclamation of God's law, how terrible must be His tribunal when He comes for the execution of these sacred statutes. How will those who have trampled upon His authority endure His glory in the great day of final retribution? The terrors of Sinai were to represent to the people the scenes of the judgment. The sound of a trumpet summoned Israel to meet with God. The voice of the Archangel and the trump of God shall summon, from the whole earth, both the living and the dead to the presence of their Judge. The Father and the Son, attended by a multitude of angels, were present upon the mount. At the great judgment day Christ will come “in the glory of His Father with His angels.” Matthew 16:27. He shall then sit upon the throne of His glory, and before Him shall be gathered all nations.

When the divine Presence was manifested upon Sinai, the glory of the Lord was like devouring fire in the sight of all Israel. But when Christ shall come in glory with His holy angels the whole earth shall be ablaze with the terrible light of His presence. “Our God shall come, and shall not keep silence: a fire shall devour before Him, and it shall be very tempestuous round about Him. He shall call to the heavens from above, and to the earth, that He may judge His people.” Psalm 50:3, 4. A fiery stream shall issue and come forth from before Him, which shall cause the elements to melt with fervent heat, the earth also, and the works that are therein shall be burned up. “The Lord Jesus shall be revealed from heaven with His mighty angels, in flaming fire taking vengeance on them that know not God, and that obey not the gospel.” 2 Thessalonians 1:7, 8.

Never since man was created had there been witnessed such a manifestation of divine power as when the law was proclaimed from Sinai. “The earth shook, the heavens also dropped at the presence of God: even Sinai itself was moved at the presence of God, the God of Israel.” Psalm 68:8. Amid the most terrific convulsions of nature the voice of God, like a trumpet, was heard from the cloud. The mountain was shaken from base to summit, and the hosts of Israel, pale and trembling with terror, lay upon their faces upon the earth. He whose voice then shook the earth has declared, “Yet once more I shake not the earth only, but also heaven.” Hebrews 12:26. Says the Scripture, “The Lord shall roar from on high, and utter His voice from His holy habitation;” “and the heavens and the earth shall shake.” Jeremiah 25:30; Joel 3:16. In that great coming day, the heaven itself shall depart “as a scroll when it is rolled together.”Revelation 6:14. And every mountain and island shall be moved out of its place. “The earth shall reel to and fro like a drunkard, and shall be removed like a cottage; and the transgression thereof shall be heavy upon it; and it shall fall, and not rise again.” Isaiah 24:20.

“Therefore shall all hands be faint,” all faces shall be “turned into paleness,” “and every man's heart shall melt. And they shall be afraid: pangs and sorrows shall take hold of them.” “And I will punish the world for their evil,” saith the Lord, “and I will cause the arrogancy of the proud to cease, and will lay low the haughtiness of the terrible.” Isaiah 13:7, 8, 11; Jeremiah 30:6.

When Moses came from the divine Presence in the mount, where he had received the tables of the testimony, guilty Israel could not endure the light that glorified his countenance. How much less can transgressors look upon the Son of God when He shall appear in the glory of His Father, surrounded by all the heavenly host, to execute judgment upon the transgressors of His law and the rejecters of His atonement. Those who have disregarded the law of God and trodden under foot the blood of Christ, “the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men, and the chief captains, and the mighty men,” shall hide themselves “in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains,” and they shall say to the mountains and rocks, “Fall on us, and hide us from the face of Him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb: for the great day of His wrath is come; and who shall be able to stand?” Revelation 6:15-17. “In that day a man shall cast his idols of silver, and his idols of gold, ... to the moles and to the bats; to go into the clefts of the rocks, and into the tops of the ragged rocks, for fear of the Lord, and for the glory of His majesty, when He ariseth to shake terribly the earth.” Isaiah 2:20, 21.

Then it will be seen that Satan's rebellion against God has resulted in ruin to himself and to all that chose to become his subjects. He has represented that great good would result from transgression; but it will be seen that “the wages of sin is death.” “For, behold, the day cometh, that shall burn as an oven; and all the proud, yea, and all that do wickedly, shall be stubble: and the day that cometh shall burn them up, saith the Lord of hosts, that it shall leave them neither root nor branch.” Malachi 4:1. Satan, the root of every sin, and all evil workers, who are his branches, shall be utterly cut off. An end will be made of sin, with all the woe and ruin that have resulted from it. Says the psalmist, “Thou hast destroyed the wicked, thou hast put out their name forever and ever. O thou enemy, destructions are come to a perpetual end.” Psalm 9:5, 6.

But amid the tempest of divine judgment the children of God will have no cause for fear. “The Lord will be the hope of His people, and the strength of the children of Israel.” Joel 3:16. The day that brings terror and destruction to the transgressors of God's law will bring to the obedient “joy unspeakable and full of glory” “Gather My saints together unto Me,” saith the Lord, “those that have made a covenant with Me by sacrifice. And the heavens shall declare His righteousness: for God is Judge Himself.”

“Then shall ye return, and discern between the righteous and the wicked, between him that serveth God and him that serveth Him not.” Malachi 3:18. “Hearken unto Me, ye that know righteousness, the people in whose heart is My law.” “Behold, I have taken out of thine hand the cup of trembling, ... thou shalt no more drink it again.” “I, even I, am He that comforteth you.” Isaiah 51:7, 22, 12. “For the mountains shall depart, and the hills be removed; but My kindness shall not depart from thee, neither shall the covenant of My peace be removed, saith the Lord that hath mercy on thee.” Isaiah 54:10.

The great plan of redemption results in fully bringing back the world into God's favor. All that was lost by sin is restored. Not only man but the earth is redeemed, to be the eternal abode of the obedient. For six thousand years Satan has struggled to maintain possession of the earth. Now God's original purpose in its creation is accomplished. “The saints of the Most High shall take the kingdom, and possess the kingdom forever, even forever and ever.” Daniel 7:18.

“From the rising of the sun unto the going down of the same the Lord's name is to be praised.” Psalm 113:3. “In that day shall there be one Lord, and His name one.” “And Jehovah shall be king over all the earth.” Zechariah 14:9. Says the Scripture, “Forever, O Lord, Thy word is settled in heaven.” “All His commandments are sure. They stand fast forever and ever.” Psalm 119:89; 111:7, 8. The sacred statutes which Satan has hated and sought to destroy, will be honored throughout a sinless universe. And “as the earth bringeth forth her bud, and as the garden causeth the things that are sown in it to spring forth; so the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise to spring forth before all nations.” Isaiah 61:11.