#no shade at all to pendulum readings in general

[abyssal-werewolf]

I just randomly remembered that "am I XY-kin?" pendulum readings were THE SHIT a few years ago- wtf was that even? xD

[musingmelsuinesmelancholy]

Some things I’ve been thinking about. At times being an American trad witch is incredibly frustrating and at others it’s absolutely exhilarating, rewarding. Reconnecting with my ancestral ( primarily french and scottish ) lore, magical practices, witchcraft etc has and will continue to inform my practice but I’ll never be a “french” witch. I’ll never be a “scottish” witch. I can find a lone hawthorn or a sacred tree guarding a hidden spring to tie the cloutie to, I can divine via a snail’s mucus trail, Fly to the Sabbath to meet The Abbess, heed the Dame Blanches, pluck the golden bloom with songs to St Columba, safeguard me and mine via silver, spring water and juniper. Yet there’s many things I’ll never know or be able to do. Whether that’s because these things are so tied to the land or a specific place, language barriers, ( working to overcome this one ) or due to the ( well warranted) gate keeping of lore and practices.

This used to be a source of great confusion for me. I think because I was afraid( due to my previous new age fuckwittery ) to experiment, do anything other than what I understood as “traditional”. My understanding being too rigid at the time; the pendulum swung from one end of the spectrum to the other. This delayed my progress and “froze” me. I was left wondering what an “American” trad craft would look like; most our books do come from a European POV. Learning of our own magical traditions as well as those of my Canadian family ( still working on that one haha ) helped. Reading Robin Kimmere helped. Reading Schulke, him being an American and writing on American plants, helped too. I’ve come to know Sugar Maple and Plantain as powerful spirits. Both teaching important lessons on how to rectify my ancestors mistakes, to foster relations with the First Peoples and how to incorporate the magic of this land into my craft. Rather than being frustrated by my being American I see it as a challenge now. I get to explore spirits, plants, places, animals, spiritual/physical ecologies ( is even really a difference between these?) completely unknown to my ancestors. I get to reconcile the old and the new. To learn from Spirit Direct. Tradition isn’t the worship of ashes, it’s the preservation of Fire. New wood must be added to keep The Fire burning. The Devil of this land certainly is a spirit of the unknown.

I am the land, the land is me.

I don’t own it, to it I owe all.

To it my body will return, the tithe paid.

I’m not rolling hills of heather, white chalk cliffs, the monk’s island nor the azure coast. The memories of these places echo distantly in my blood, sung alive by my ancestors shades. Part of me they’ll always be; yet it’s not who I am. Not what I am.

I’m craggy shores, dull-jade waves bearing down upon the tired rocks. I am musky pine forests veiled in mist. Sun-venerating oaks hugging the shoreline. Bleeding alders in damp ground swelling. Proud maples sustaining generation upon generation with their boiled blood. Death-grey clay, exposed by running spring.

I am the kudzu, the itching moth, the knotweed, the Norway maple, the ivy wrecking havoc upon the land. My surname and light skin proof of a genocide ongoing. I am my ancestors sins; the specter of the Old Growth forests, their grief hanging over the land like a fog. Every interaction with The Land tinged with sadness, loss.

I am my maternal side’s copper curls. Melusine’s pride. Ave Landry! Ave Gauthier! Forebears mine.

I am my paternal side’s grief. The end result of decades of cultural warfare. The Jesuits stole our name….my hair will not be cut.

Never will I libate these glacier carved valleys with booze.

I am the plantain, learning a kinder way. The sumac reclaiming the orchard.

My Februarys, my Marches aren’t snow drops and daffodils peaking through the frozen ground. They’re steely skies and walls of sleet. Bloodroot heralds winters wane; not Brigid’s flower.

My June isn’t fields of poppies, it’s seas of crimson staghorn blooms skyward reaching.

My augusts aren’t golden shafts of wheat, swaying in summer’s last breaths; they’re explosions of neon-violet and honey-yellow. Corn ripening on the vine, supporting the climbing bean. The cicadas song reverberating.

Old Michaelmas marks harvest’s end, October potatoes long buried in soils darkness finally exhumed. The Devil his Rosy Briar to ascend and plunge.

With Novembers first snows the Dead come in.

I’ll never process around a standing stone nor know what it is to live and eat off the land my dead lay in. Finally, I’m learning to be at peace with this. To love and know the land I live on. I’ll always be a stranger here, a guest. I hope to be a good one.

[pinkprimrose05]

Pink's ARC-V Highlights - Volume 2: Beware The Blue

Warning: Very Long Post, Contains Spoilers

Okay, uh, I lied. I'm not only here to talk about theories and potential foreshadowing. This series also serves as a quick recap of all ARC-V episodes and the cool moments in them -regardless of relevance to the plot- sprinkled with a generous drizzle of ramblings from yours truly.

If all goes well, you can expect fairly consistent updates, where I cover a few episodes every time. This one, for example, will go over Episodes 3 to 7, since those are the ones I managed to watch this week.

(I. hate. midyear finals.)

If that still piques your interest, then I hope you enjoy the read!

(And yes, I know Yuuto is purple, but purple is technically a shade of blue so the rhyme still works-)

__________________________________

1) Episodes 3 & 4, OR: The obligatory "No card is useless!" Duel.

We pick up where we left off with the You Show crew, and the mishaps of Learning How To Pendulum At The Unholy Hour of 3 A.M. I must applaud the sheer lack of braincells between Gongenzaka and Yuuya, because wow, I can't believe they both forgot that Duel Replays are a thing.

(This is why only Yuzu has a 60%+ winrate.)

Fast forward through school-flavored pain, and we now introduce everyone's favorite banana peel...

... whom I highkey want to punt off a cliff.

Look, I love Sawatari. I really do. But good Lord, I forgot just how insufferable he was this far back in the show. I had to refrain from punching my screen several times through the back half of Episode 3, because Shingo, you idiot, who the fuck told you it was fine to put 8-year-old children in mortal danger for a bunch of shiny new cards??

Suffice to say, it took me a good while to actually like him after this atrocious first impression... but hey, at least he gets humbled with style!

As far as early-game Duels go, this one is actually not half bad. The "weak card wins you the game" trope is a bit cliché, but Yuuya gets props for turning it into a pretty light show with Kaleidoscorp and Block Spider, and then using said pretty light show to win the game in one turn.

Another thing is that this Duel introduces Action Traps! Gosh, I would have loved to see more of those later down the line. The concept is pretty neat, and the negative effects create an interesting risk, where a Duelist has to stop and think if they really need to grab an Action card, regardless of the potential ramifications of it being a Trap.

Oh, and did I mention that Sawatari gets roasted to oblivion before the final direct attack? Because he does. Yuuya went above and beyond to make this as entertaining as possible to his friends, and as humiliating as possible for Shingo... for which I ultimately have to thank him, because that's the spark that eventually turned Sawatari into the flashy dork we all know and love.

... And because he deserved an asskicking at the time. Sora did well knocking him out, actually.

..

..

Speaking of which—

__________________________________

2) Episodes 5 & 6, OR: That one time we adopted a war criminal.

I actually kinda like these two episodes. They're nothing particularly special if you look back (well, unless you're subscribed to the theory that the stadium in the first minute or so is the same one from Leo's flashback in Episode 126), but hey, at least we get to "properly" know our beloved sugar gremlin!

God, I love Sora. He's actually pretty terrible at disguising his position as a spy- like wow, he keeps outing himself as suspicious every time he makes a snide comment, even without the context of who he actually is. I think he could only afford to slip up so much because no one could ever guess that he came from a world-invading organization in a reality parallel to their own.

... And also because everyone thought of him as a mere child with a bit of a quirky, mischievous streak. I mean, who can ever think ill of such a sweet little guy?

(Yuuya can, but that's because Sora was annoying him on purpose lmao. It's good that he wasn't fooled by the cutesy act, though; that means he could read Sora better than most, despite his deflection and the constant switching between cutie pie and smug bastard.)

As for the Duel, it isn't much to talk about. The first few Duels are usually for exposition and showing mechanics, and in this case, we just see what happens when a Pendulum monster gets destroyed.

Short answer: It goes to the Extra Deck instead of the GY.

Long asnwer: Yuuya goes through a minor existential crisis, because his mishmash of a strategy comes crashing down the moment Odd-Eyes is out of the equation. How does he deal with that, you ask? Hysterical laughter, that's how.

(Goddammit ARC-V, isn't it far too early to make me question the protagonist's sanity?

... actually, don't answer that.)

Aaaaaaaaanyway, we also get to see the reintroduction of Fusion summoning!

(Look at this cool animation. So clean. So awesome.)

Fluffals are actually a very good Deck to showcase the different levels of complexity of the mechanic, and they get bonus points for the contrast between the cutesy plushies and... whatever animatronic shit the Frightfurs have going on. I am now reminded of how glad I was to see the older summoning methods getting a neat glow-up, especially after ZEXAL booted them out of existence in favor of focusing on Xyz.

(And on that note, I feel the need to stress that it's Xyz, not XYZ. Please. It's been twelve years. Stop confusing the game mechanic with the Union cards, people.)

__________________________________

3) Episode 7, OR: The one I actually wanted to talk about all along.

Oh this. This. This is where the plot finally starts to move forward. Nothing against the previous episodes, but I did say before they're mostly there for exposition, and that, by nature, is bound to be a little boring.

Unlike here.

I'd like to start by talking about Yuzu, because we have to admit: this is the first time she's relevant to the story as herself, not as Yuuya's friend or as a student at You Show. And boy, does she make it count.

She busts Sawatari on her own, and literally calls him a hundredth-rate Duelist. To his face. In front of his lackeys. Yuzu was ready to take him on, even when she was alone and locked in the warehouse (again, Shingo, what the fuck??), and I'm fairly certain she could've backed up her words given the chance...

Except, well, she wasn't given the chance.

I'm actually willing to let this one slide, because Yoot's interference doesn't invalidate Yuzu's ability to handle this by herself. I see it more as a precaution on his part, and also a chance to learn more about LDS and Academia that he simply couldn't pass up.

There's also the likely possibility that he genuinely didn't know how Duels worked here, and couldn't risk Yuzu getting hurt if he could help it. It's clear that Yuuto was aware she wasn't Ruri at this point (wow, good job man, you're not as colorblind as everyone else), but still didn't wish to involve an innocent bystander in conflict... which actually makes sense, considering his moral code.

And besides, the Duel was still pretty cool! There's something inherently awesome about setting a full backrow board on Turn 1, and the first time I saw it, I was absolutely shooketh.

(Also, there was a copy of Mystical Space Typhoon among the set cards. Something tells me that Yuuto knows it doesn't negate, and that is definitely praiseworthy, because it means that he actually reads the damn cards.)

Even Sawatari gets kudos for Monarch representation. And also for showing us that Prismatic foil and different rarities do exist in-universe, just like in GX. It makes me wonder why most Duelists don't use them, buuut I guess that was just a throwaway detail that they used to highlight Shingo's spoiled rich brat disposition.

ANYWAYS, moving on to more important matters!

Like dark matter. Which exists in space. Which is the theme of many Xyz cards. Among which there is one Dark Rebellion Xyz Dragon.

(HAIL THE T-POSE ALTERNATE ARTWORK!!)

Don't let the lesser requirement of 1 Overlay Unit fool you; the anime version is still worse than the one we got in the game... though it does, at least, have better OTK abilities against non-Xyz bosses.

I still laugh at the fact that it left Sawatari with exactly 100 LP. Poor guy probably thought he could pull a protagonist comeback, but alas, he forgot that he is not the protagonist...

Well, at least he gets a shot at the role in Episode 139, but we're a few ways away from that right now.

And speaking of stuff that we're a few ways away from...

*shakes Yuuto* Did you just- DID YOU JUST FUCKING NAMEDROP ACADEMIA???

I don't remember this at all. I thought he just asked about the significance of the LDS pin and left. What the hell? Why does none of the characters talk about it then? Not Sawatari, not his goons, not even Yuzu? What??

This is really, really weird. I may have to look into it a little more later on, but for now, we return to a bewildered Yuzu... and her absolute party pooper of a plot device.

Yes. You know the one.

(FuckyoufuckyoufuckyoufuckyoufUCKYOU)

This stupid bracelet and the subsequent events following its activation bring us to a point of great frustration that I would like to touch upon, that being the cast's crippling inability to tell the counterparts apart from each other. Brace yourselves, Duelists; this might be a bit of a long tangent.

*inhales*

Okay, look, there are two sides to this issue; one that can be excused in more than one instance, and one that makes zero sense, no matter how you spin it.

The excusable side is the visual confusion. I understand Yuzu's shock at the situation as a whole, not helped at all by this odd fellow who strongly resembles her best friend.

(And before you say Yuuto doesn't resemble Yuuya for shit, yes he does, if only because the goggles' band is holding his bangs down.)

One must also remember they were locked in a now-wrecked warehouse, so the lighting conditions are bound to be rather bad, and it might be difficult to see clearly as a result. With all that in mind, I can forgive Yuzu for confusing their looks.

The inexcusable side, however, is the auditory confusion. The counterparts -every single one of them- don't sound the least bit similar to each other, even in the English dub.

They could look straight up identical for all it matters, but their voices are so wildly distinct I cannot begin to fathom how anyone can ever confuse them. You could technically make a case for excluding Yuuri and Yuuya since the sole difference between them is voice tone (at least in the sub), but the former is not a subject of comparison right now, and Yuuto's voice is far cry from the latter.

In conclusion of these two factors, I only have one thing to say:

... This is stupid.

This is so, so stupid.

It's so fucking stupid it's not even funny, but it is what it is, and as with every single time anyone talks about this issue, we'll just have to roll with it and be glad when a character doesn't take the bait.

*sigh*

__________________________________

Well, this should be everything for now, and *checks post length*.... holy shit I didn't think it'd slip from me this much. If you somehow managed to reach the end without dozing off midway through, then you deserve a cookie.

Thanks for reading, and see you soon, Duelists!

[gryphis-eyes]

⊙ What makes you different fantastic

⊙ Hello and welcome to this Fantastic Mr Fox themed reading ! It’s one of my favorite comfort movie so I felt like sharing this with you ! I hope this pac will remind you how fantastic you are because hey it’s always nice to read it especially in time of doubts.

⊙ How to pick a pile ? There are differents ways to do it, you can do a little meditation while thinking about the 3 images, you can also use a pendulum, remember to listen to your intuition while chosing and reading the messages those are general reading so not everything will be for you or it will ask you to interpret it based on your situation. Also I like making metaphor hehe

◇ Deck used : Gulliver Lenormand

♧ Paid reading

⊙ Pile 1, Kris

🦊 Clouds, Snake, Lily flower

You are fantastic because you are made of so many shades, what makes you fantastic is actually what ”society” view as bad/evil. You’re like a forest at night, it’s welcoming and mysterious going into it (your personnality) can be both scary and fantastic experience depending on who chose to walk into this forest. I can even say you’re both the day and night with your personnality and there might be a conflict between your ”two personnalities” just like the snake you can bite and maybe even use your venom against people but this poison is also capable of healing. The reason why this darker aspect of you is more present in front of your true self is probably because of a very rough past (or path ?). What is fantastic about this shadow is your relationship with it because it seems so peaceful yet dangerous, just like the night. After all people don’t like clouds and snakes, for the few who likes it they are viewed as unusual and even weird but there is so much beauty in them, behind those clouds and this snake lies a lily flower, its purity is equaled only by the ardor of the brambles that surround it. This flower will be forever your most precious gift just as much as the shadow who protect it, not everyone will be allowed to seek this treasure within you and it’s what’s makes you fantastic, you’re a beautiful treasure guarded by a majestic dragon.

♤ Your theme : Cosmo Sheldrake - Nightjar

⊙ Pile 2, Mr.Fox

🦊 Moon, Heart, Fox + bouquet and coffin

I can see behind your mask pile 2 the cards never lie 👁👁. Something funny happened while shuffling, I started the normal spread (so ask for 3 cards) the bouquet and coffin came first then 3 cards fell and when I looked at them I heard ”those are the real one”... so someone is acting like someone else here ? The coffin and bouquet togheter make it feel like this is a fake bouquet I would even say ”regress” because bouquet is card 9 and the coffin 8. What im sure about is that this little masquerade isn’t what makes you fantastic however I can see that the beautiful face behind this mask really worth it ! I heard ”such a gentle soul makes me wanna cry” while the lyrics of the song I listened to was ”gentle sound” but I felt like writing the one I heard. You look kinda nervous when people see you removing this mask ? The Moon on the card looks like she is shaking, the heart beating fast and the fox looks schocked but no need to react like that you seem to be a very gentle person (I would even say cute *wink wink*) for those of you who saw the movie Green Knight you really remind me of the fox in this movie, it follow the protagonist and then guide him in a mysterious territory full of magic and strange creatures. What makes you beautiful is both what’s inside and outside of you, your presence feels like a wild animal who looks beautiful but would probably run away if you approach it while actually if you truly want to approach it you have to be patient and gentle. You’re distant yet beautiful and tempting just like the Moon you might not make as much light as the sun but it makes it even more special and above everything, it’s what makes your world appear mysterious yet fantastic. Your heart seems so pure it might makes people jealous of it or wants to take it, just like every hunter who try to get the fox’s fur but of course the fox is too cunning for them and the fox will always laugh at the hunter who fail to catch him. You seem to have some vicious side but it’s a very fun side of you. You might try to be this pretty but fake flower bouquet while in reality you’re just like Mr.Fox no matter what you do you can’t escape your true self because in the end you’re a wild animal.

♤ Your theme : The Crane Wives - Curses

⊙ Pile 3, Ash

🦊 Ship, Knight, Coffin

You seem to be the perfect person to be the hero of a story about a long journey of hardship. You went through it all, storms, calm water, hell you might even went in the underworld and came back like if it was just an other journey and moved on for the next one. You are brave and adventurous even fear can’t keep you or if it does catch you it never last very long, you’re a knight in shining armor but what is special is that your armor isn’t white or gold but it’s a shining black metal because you aren’t afraid to show where you come from after all we all got our shadow aspects. It’s like you met death (from the Death card in the Rider waite) you both ride on a white horse and you both wear this black armor I could write a whole story about you pile 3 haha. You understand obscur secret you might be very fond of occult the theme of death doesn’t scare you at all if you’re into spirituality/occultism it might even be so natural for you to meet spirits, you greet them like someone would greet their neighbour. You’re independent your only companion is this horse who can represent a guardian spirit who was with you since the begining of your time down here, they guided and protected you during the whole journey and it will continue. You’re this mystic stranger who come out of nowhere and after doing what you have to do in one place you leave in silent ready to go to this next journey, people probably admire you a lot but also feel like they can’t reach you or keep you, your remind me of Ashitaka from Princess Mononoke.

♤ Your theme : Florence and the machines - Which Witch

[tamorapierce]

Tammy's Spring 2020 Reading Recommendations For the Bored

Sooner or later the bookhounds among us are going to start joining my relentless song, from age five on up, of “I don’t have anything to read!!!!”

 I am here to help.  In this space, as I get to it (knowing, as my readers do, that I have no sense of deadline), I will be posting a constant set of collections of book titles by authors my team and I have read and will recommend in a wild variety of genres and for a wild variety of ages.  (And I’ll give a short hint as to the subject of the first book/series—if I did them all I’d never finish this.)  This last is for the many of you who are reading teen and adult books in grade and middle school, and those adult readers who are reading teen and kidlit. These people are for those who love books and don’t care who is supposed to be reading them.  

 Also, you may have to look far and wee, since we will be drawing upon not only recently published books but older ones that we have either read recently or that we read long ago and have re-read or have never forgotten.  Don’t say I didn’t warn you when the writing is archaic.  If you’re a true nutsy reader like the rest of us, you won’t care.

 -Tammy Pierce

                                                        *     *     *

Assume the book came out within the last 2 years unless I put LO next to the title, which means you have to check libraries and bookstores online and paper for copies.

 *     *     *

 Diana Wynne Jones  LO

A generation or two of fantasy writers, particularly those who love humor, bow to this woman as our goddess.  Not only was she out of her mind in a very British and manic way, but with her TOUGH GUIDE TO FANTASYLAND she taught a number of us to ditch some ill-considered tropes of our genre.  If you write historic fantasy in particular, move heaven and earth to track this book down.  There’s a bonus: some of the entries will make you laugh till you cry.

           She is best known for her books for middle grade and teens, but they are enjoyable for all readers.  I cannot list them all here because my fingers will break (curse you, arthritis!), but these titles will give you a jumping-off point.  And remember, authors change with each book, so you won’t encounter the same author with each title as the author you read in the previous one!

           The Chrestomanci books, all in the same universe, in order of story,

                       not publication

Charmed Life  (1977) An innocent lad follows his plotting egotistical sister to live with England’s chief wizard

The Lives of Christopher Chant (1988)

Conrad’s Fate (2005)

Witch Week (1982)

The Magicians of Caprona (1980)

Short stories

 The Dalemark Quartet begins with

The Spellcoats (1979)

3 sequels

 The Derkholm books are

Dark Lord of  (1998)

Year of the Griffin (2000)

  The Tough Guide to Fantasyland is standalone, but is a kind of offshoot of the Derkholm books.  You don’t have to have read the Derkholm books to get Tough Guide!

 There are other books and stories by Jones—I’ll let you find them on your own.

  Philip Pullman

To this day I am unable to call him anything but Mr. Pullman—that’s how much in awe of the man I am.  We’ve had dinner together, talked on the phone, talked at an event or two, done a conversation on audio with Christopher Paolini—it’s still Mr. Pullman to me.  (I was an assistant in a literary agency when I discovered his work, and I never recovered.) He is, in a word, brilliant, and his interests range through all kinds of areas, particularly history and religion.  I could have talked with him forever that night we had dinner, but the poor man had jet lag and I let him go to collapse.  It was one of the best exchanges of ideals, values, and books I’ve ever had.  

Read his work carefully, because what he discusses is never just the story on top.  No matter what he writes, he is making strong points about social justice, human nature, religion, and history without preaching.  He is one of the few male writers out there who can write female characters as people, not Something Different.  And you never know, with his work, where he will go next.

 The Ruby in the Smoke,

book 1,  the Sally Lockheart mysteries

Victorian mysteries with a female hero and male assistants,

           The Book of Dust and sequel,

first 2 books of The Secret Commonwealth

           His Dark Materials trilogy

                       The Golden Compass

                       2 other titles                

           THE COLLECTORS

           LYRA’S OXFORD

           THE WHITE MERCEDES

           FAIRY TALES FROM THE BROTHERS GRIMM

           I WAS A RAT!

           TWO CRAFTY CRIMINALS

           COUNT KARLSTEIN

           (I will stop here and let you find the rest. Most are available as Nook books.)

  Sharon Shinn

I discovered Sharon Shinn with JOVAH’S ANGEL, but a shortage of funds left me unable to pursue my interest (I am an economic disaster with libraries, so I buy rather than borrow) until, with a job and money to spend, I spotted THE SAFE-KEEPER’S SECRET.  It is the story of a medieval-ish world and a small village where a baby was left with a childless couple.  She is raised as their daughter and discovers, as she grows, that her mother is an important, a Safekeeper, the person to whom a secret can be told, relieving the person who told it of the weight of guilt from it, to be carried by the Safekeeper until the owner either decides to tell or dies.  (And if they die without giving permission, the Safekeeper never reveal the secret.)  The baby who is adopted by this town’s safekeeper becomes the safekeeper in her turn.

           The next book is THE TRUTHTELLER’S TALE, about a girl who acquires the gift (??) of telling the truth, whether the person she tells it to wants to hear it or not. The third book is The Dream-maker’s Magic.  The three main characters now learn why they have been brought together over the course of the two earlier books, in what I thought was a satisfying, if unusual, conclusion.

           And there’s more!  I just did the two I love best!

             THE SAFEKEEPER’S SECRET (book 1, two sequels)

           ARCHANGEL (4 books)

           TWELVE HOUSES (5 books)

           ELEMENTAL BLESSINGS (4 books)        

SHIFTING CIRCLE (2 books)

           UNCOMMON ECHOES

           GENERAL WINSTON’S DAUGHTER

           GATEWAY

 Daniel Jose Older

 I was a Daniel Jose Older fan before I was sent DACTYL HILL SQUAD for a blurb (preodactyls in flight!  Of all sizes!  Confederate spies!  Thuggish bigot northerners!  The backlash of Gettysburg and the forced recruitment of blacks for the war effort! And strong, smart, fierce kids of various ages, sizes, colors, national heritage, and skills doing their best to help the war against the slaves, keep escaped slaves safe, duck the cruel managers of the homes and jails where they are being kept, find a half-decent meal, free other kids in trouble, learn who’s killing their friends, and help the dactyls!  That’s part of it, anyway!

Yeah, I loved it.  And there’s at least one new book, and once I’ve mowed though that, there are his older teen books, and his grownup mysteries, with their half-dead taxi driver who doubles as a part-time troubleshooter for the undead powers in his Bone Street Rhumba series.  {happy sigh}

  Edgar Allen Poe

Yes, some of these are reminders of why we ended up to be the readers we are and to nudge us to corrupt—I mean, “introduce”—­new readers to the glories that are our legacies.

­

THE COMPLETE TALES AND POEMS OF EDGAR ALLEN POE

           Here are the greats:

poems like “The Raven,” and “Annabelle Lee”

stories like “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Telltale Heart,” and  ::shudder:: “The Pit and the Pendulum” (yes, a deep pit and a swinging pendulum topped with a razor-edged blade will be featured in this story).  

My dad would read these to us on dark and stormy nights when we lived near the Pacific ocean, when the fog came rolling in, softening every sound, when there were no cars driving by and no other sounds in our house but his deep voice and the crackle of the fire in the fireplace.  We would listen, soundless, as he wove the stories and poems around us and the foghorn sounded offshore.

           That’s the power of Poe.

  N. K. Jemisin

I think I began with Jemisin’s THE HUNDRED THOUSAND KINGDOMS, soon followed by its sequel THE BROKEN KINGDOMS.  The series ended with a third book, THE KINGDOM OF THE GODS.  She presented a rich and varied world from the aspects of people of different classes, showing the growth of societies and their formation.  I have a secret passion for society-building and social interaction, and whether or not a book is difficult to read (as Jemisin’s books are in spots because she refuses to insult a reader by talking down to them) is immaterial.  I want the world and I want the characters, and with her far-reaching mind and her respect for her characters she delivers each and every time.  I have read almost everything she’s written since that first trilogy: if I’ve missed something, it’s because I was in the middle of a deadline and on the road and somehow didn’t see it.  I’ll catch up!  This is just a sample:

           For readers of all sexes and adult reading skills

 The City They Became (pub’d April 2020)

 The Inheritance Trilogy:

           The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, 2010

           2 book sequels

Novella: The Awakened Kingdom, 2014

                       Triptych: Shades in Shadow, 2015 (3 short stories) 

             The Dreamblood Duology:

           For readers of all sexes and adult reading skills

           The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, 2010

                       Two sequels

 The Broken Earth series:

         The Fifth Season (August 2015)

                       Two book sequels

And there are plenty of short stories out there.  I may even have missed a book or twelve!

For those who prefer to hear my ramble in person, a video!

[yeoldontknow]

Joyride & Finesse | Chapter 1: Network-King | M

Author’s Note: part of the EXO Customs collaboration with @ninibears-erigom @baekwell--tart @fairyyeols @kyungseokie @suhoerections @skjdln @kpop---scenarios @kimjongdaely | this story features dark themes, including but not limited to: weapons trafficking, gang activity, use of a child for weapons transporting (this is based on the very real activities that occurred in the late 80s/early 90s in Manhattan and the Bronx), PTSD, and graphic depictions of death. Do not read if these topics make you uncomfortable and take the warnings seriously. Pairing: Yixing x Reader (oc; female; eventual) Summary: A brief history of Yixing’s life - if, that is, you can call it a life. | please see series summary for full context Genre: gang!au; action; suspense; drama; smut; au Rating: NC-17 Warnings: weapons trafficking; use of a child for weapons transport; gang activity; car theft; arson; gun use; graphic depictions of blood; graphic depictions of death; explicit sex; unprotected sex; creampie; mentions of pimping; references to PTSD - please take these warnings seriously and do not read if uncomfortable. Word Count: 6,405

Six days after Yixing’s ninth birthday, a man with calloused hands and blood beneath his fingernails promises him a large sum of money. 

Outside his grandfather’s restaurant, the fry cook scrawls an address on an order book, grease stains dotting the paper and smearing the ink. Slung over his left arm, a black backpack, the thick straps adjusted short enough for a child to keep their balance, swings haphazardly, weighted and slow; ominous, but Yixing assumes this is because the pendulum of the clock in his grandmother’s den swings just as slowly, and the swing reminds him he is idle and therefore of not much value. 

The man smiles as he hands him the paper, a slow pull of his cheek loaded with promises and secrets, though not altogether comforting. But Yixing feels the thrill of inclusion as he slides the backpack over his shoulders, grinning alongside these men who tower over him, glad that he has been given a sense of purpose. Beneath the neon green of the restaurant sign, the ruddy brown of blood is highlighted in the crevices of the cook’s fingers, and he wonders if by the end of the night he too will be stained. 

This, he decides, is the colour of initiation, and he feels a sudden thrill in the anticipation of being painted. 

Six blocks down, and the straps begin to rub into his shoulders, irritated as the weigh slides the neck of his shirt down. As he walks, he wonders if it’s books - chef books or recipes from the old land, as his grandmother calls it, secrets that she won’t even tell his mother because she was not from their village. Or, perhaps, he carries wrapped meats, provisions for the restaurant written on the paper, supporting their community the way a family does. 

Thirteen blocks down, and the sting from the backpack is matched only by the intensity of his curiosity. He pauses, leaning against a real estate office that has recently gone up for sale, windows shattered and building looted. Stretching his neck, he debates opening the pack and redistributing the weight, but the note in his hand says to deliver sealed and the way the fry cooks’ arms bulged as he wrote the words reminds him of the heavy way his cleaver never misses a slice, and so he decides to let it be.

The marks, he knows, are probably red, and the longer he walks, the darker they will be. Ruddy and red and powerful. 

When he reaches the back delivery door of the address, sweat has gathered on his brow, and he wipes it quickly away with the back of his wrist. If he appears weak, it is likely the money he receives will be less than promised - he isn’t exactly sure why he thinks this, only that his grandmother has told him weak men buckle when they’re offered opportunity, and he doesn’t want to be deemed anything less. 

Yixing knocks three times on the door before a woman with a severe brow stands in the entryway, eyes glancing through the alley before falling on his face. Mute, she cocks an eyebrow at him as he hands her the order slip, and almost immediately she pulls at the backpack. Her hands do not touch him, expertly sliding it off as though she’s done it before, has had this done to her, and she gestures for him to leave, yelling at him to go home to his mother. 

Confused, he turns to leave before she grabs his hand and slips a folded wad of money into his palm, eyes refusing to meet his before she shuts the door. 

Feeling small and bewildered and utterly insignificant, though not entirely disappointed, Yixing lingers behind the restaurant for a moment before a light in a basement window turns on. From where he stands, he can see the top of the woman’s head as she moves quickly. He shuffles closer, kneeling amongst the bushes for a better look as her hands tug at the zipper of the bag. 

Three black bags, taped closed, are pulled from the pack before it’s thrown to the floor, and Yixing can see the irregular heavy shape the bags take, glad that he was not as weak as he once thought he was. The bags are large, and loaded generously, and he feels proud for carrying such a heavy load so quickly.

She rips open the plastic as another man joins her, taking a bag and doing the same. Yixing blinks, unsure what he’s seeing is true, before he realizes there is no trick of the light and no film crew around him to tell him what he sees is fake.

From the bags, they pull pistols - several pistols - which they line neatly in a row and count, nodding and talking as though negotiating, but Yixing cannot hear them. His eyes fall to the guns, their sleek barrels and the way they gleam in the low light, catching all that is bright and good and absorbing it, without giving anything back. He’s never seen a gun before, only in the movies he watches at night when its past his bedtime, and something about their elegance makes him decide this shade of black is his favourite colour. 

Yixing looks to his palm and counts fifty dollars, exactly the amount he was promised. 

Delighted, he sneaks away from the window and walks with a happy bounce he does his best to contain. He’ll be able to eat for three weeks with this money, and hopes he will soon be given more. 

When Yixing is eleven, he is certain there has never been a girl more beautiful than Baozhai.

She is unafraid to laugh loudly, to beat the boys at sports, to fight for what she believes in, and to smile widely even though her teeth are not entirely straight. Her calligraphy is not the best, neither elegant nor clean, but it is committed and diligent, and he supposes these are her most important traits. From across the room during Sunday Chinese school, he watches and wonders what it would be like to sit next to her.

Would they talk about her father, and the deliveries he makes for him? Would they talk about his calligraphy, and the way he can never seem to get his strokes at the correct angle? Would they talk about the flowers she wears in her hair, a different one for everyday, and how he thinks she is always in bloom? Yixing is eleven, and is already happy to surrender the topic of conversation to keep her happy, assuming this is real love because he simply wants to keep her close. 

The first words she ever says to him make his blood run hot, mouth running dry and stopping him from formulating a coherent reply. 

‘I went to your family’s restaurant the other night,’ she says, walking home beside him after class because Meixing got a ride home and she lingered a little too long by the bike rack looking for her friends and Yixing smiled, a sign of companionship. ‘It was really good.’

Yixing stares at her, wide eyed as a blush creeps into his cheeks. In the cold winter of the sunlight, he’s sure it’s obvious he is not warm, that it is she who has turned him pink, but he does not care. He can’t care, because she giggles, and he’s glad he is the reason she made any sound at all. 

‘Next time I go, you should be there,’ she continues, watching her feet as she walks, tip of her shoes kicking at upturned stones. ‘We can study together.’ 

Yixing nods, amazed that luck smiles on boys who move guns from place to place for money, and who learned their fractions by helping their fry cook weigh cocaine. When she smiles, Yixing doesn’t have time to feel badly he wasn’t there the first night she went, only excited that he will get to be there the next time and the next time, sitting in his favourite booth towards the back and showing her the way he learned the calligraphy for flower just because of her.

‘I’d like that a lot,’ he manages, sounding small and childish and very unlike the man he feels he is between the hours of 9PM and midnight. ‘Name the day and I’ll be there.’

Baozhai turns the corner after letting her hand rest on his shoulder, her fingers giving a light squeeze full of hope and expectation and affirmation, and Yixing feels it all the way home. The child in the air bites at his cheeks, but still cannot take the warmth from her palm. 

And he feels it the rest of the night, as he walks in the foreboding darkness towards her father’s woodworking shop, backpack slung over his shoulders. He feels it as he sits with her father, counting the guns - revolvers, this time - and learns the fastest way to remove serial numbers from the metal. He feels it as the joints in his fingers burn from the effort of scratching and scratching and scratching, the muscles in his face aching just as much from the effort of wearing his smile.

He feels it even as she walks into her father’s shop, eyes falling on Yixing before going wide and skin taking on the ashen pallor of shock. 

Glancing from Yixing to her father and back again, she lingers in the doorway, knowledge and understanding narrowing her eyes and her expression into one of disgust. He wants to speak, wants to call her name and say he only does it for the money, only does it because it’s something to do, but she turns from him, back full of steel and posture straight as she leaves the shop and shuts the door. 

He doesn’t feel it after that, can hardly even remember the thrill of it. 

Baozhi never talks to him again, and he supposes luck, for boys like him is a fleeting, brief experience, one he was never meant to carry. 

Yixing is thirteen when he learns how to drive in a stolen car. 

His cousin, Longwei, sits beside him in the passenger seat, laughing and laughing until his eyes become crescent moons, as Yixing’s harsh right turns leave donut scars in the empty parking lot. Hands gripping the wheel tightly, letting the vibration of the steering wheel turn his knuckles white, Yixing does not ask where or how or why Longwei has delivered him this Porsche, but he assumes it does not matter. Longwei has no intention of keeping it, anyway.

It took years for Yixing to get his calligraphy right, years for him to master the art of stealing from his mother without her noticing, and weeks, if he’s being generous, to learn how to pickpocket without his fingers moving the air. But in driving, he realizes, he is a natural. Here, he does not need to take his time or take instructions twice. Here, he does not have to be shy, no longer hiding the fact that he flourishes so quickly at something; even though he is not yet tall enough and must sit on a pile of his school books; even though his foot only just touches the pedals; even though he revs the engine and does not bother to quiet the shrill yell of pleasure that reverberates in his chest. 

He’s being foolish, but in this moment he realizes he makes his own rules. And here, in the driver’s seat of a car that will soon disappear - gutted clean or shipped away or simply just vanishing - he understands the difference between being granted a purpose and finally making your way <i>home.</i>

‘I knew you would like this,’ Longwei tells him over the roar of the engine, and the joints in Yixing’s fingers become sore, lips curling into a smile he’s certain appears savage. ‘I did this for you.’

Yixing’s smile falls. People don’t do things for him. People, he knows, don’t do things unless it benefits them in some way, unless they get safety or satisfaction or a piece of your spirit to carry with them, and he slows down, cautious - not of the road, but of his cousin. It’s the first time he notices the gleam in Longwei’s eyes, how vindictive a sparkle can truly be when motive is misplaced from kindness. 

Longwei is family. Longwei will not hurt him. But already, he feels things being taken from him, feels the brief essence of boyhood slipping away from his grasp before he’s even put the car in park. 

One year later, in a parking lot not unlike the one in which he learned how to drive, Yixing watches his cousin die.

It’s the first time he’s seen a gun being pointed at a body, and it alarms him to realize the first thing he notices - beyond the fact that it is being pointed at Longwei; beyond the fact that the stranger in front of them states, calmly and altogether too gently, that he will not leave until he sees blood - is the serial number has been scratched off. Idly, he wonders if he’s touched this gun, if it was his hand that removed the details - the only thing that could trace this moment back to the man whose confidence in the hold of the gun dictates that he has done this before. 

‘Do you know what happens to tigers when they take things that don’t belong to them?’ the man says, reaching through the car window and gripping Longwei’s shirt.

He presses the gun against Longwei’s stomach, and Yixing waits, unflinching, expecting his cousin to fight, to flip this scenario around, to do something other than whimper and tremble, but he does not. “I did this for you,” Longwei’s voice echoes from the back of Yixing’s mind. A full year under his cousin’s wing, and Yixing has lost count of all the things they’ve done together - all the things Longwei has shown and given and delivered, without price or consequence. 

Five years older than Yixing, and Longwei has gone through a great deal to ensure Yixing could remain at his side - losing friends and permanently in the state of earning trust; keeping one eye on him and one eye on the road in front of him; bringing him home first even if, through the chill of the air and the hairs that stood on end along their arms, they knew they were being followed. He stole cars and money and bags full of things he would never let Yixing see, but in surviving, he did not put forth any effort. 

His cousin shakes his head. ‘Please, he’s just a kid -’

It’s the last thing he ever hears Longwei say, and in that moment Yixing is unsure if he’s ever heard his cousin say the word please. He’s still mulling over the sound, the shock and the unusual cadence of it, before the echo of the word is cut off and severed.

‘They get poached.’

He’s familiar with the barrel of a pistol, has touched and cradled and scratched into them, but never has he heard them. Longwei screams, he’s sure of it, but still he does not hear it. Yixing thinks he may never hear anything ever again. 

Four gunshots ring out and the noise of it makes his blood run cold, ears taking on a ring that turns his vision fuzzy. Longwei falls limp, eyes glassy and staring straight ahead, empty and unfocused and gone. Yixing waits for him to move, for Longwei to smile and say this was a moment for him to learn - a reminder never to leave your window down, to never let your guard down. But he does not move. 

Beside him, the door is ripped open, though Yixing does not remember leaving it unlocked. Hands grab him, pull him out of the passenger seat and drag him into the parking lot. His arms are held behind his back while the man smiles and cocks his head to the side, smiling and smiling, while Yixing breathes through his open mouth, unwilling to smell his cousin’s blood on the air. The symbol of a dragon is stitched into the man’s beanie, and Yixing’s eyes trace the pattern over and over, hoping to erase everything but the caricature and the symbolism from this moment. 

‘Put his hands all over it.’

The command hardly moves the craters in his face, scars and red marks turning his skin tight and waxy. At this angle, he almost appears to be burning alive from beneath his flesh, consumed by wrath and rage. 

Yixing is thrust forward, his left arm extended against his will and he fights the hold, yelling and battling, suddenly awake and aware. Laugher surrounds him, but the ringing in his ears only warps this sound into a painful resonance, one that makes Yixing scream in the hopes of forcing the world into silence. The gun is placed into his ungloved hand, fingers wrapped around its glossy metal and stained with his prints. 

He’s pushed forward again, his right hand dragged over the handle of the passenger door before a hair - several hairs - are ripped from his head and dropped into the seat. They are framing him for this, placing traces of him everywhere, ensuring that - even if it took weeks, or months, or years - he would be found, and found guilty. 

They abandon him not long after, leaving him alone with the smell of piss and shit and blood and bullet casings. The sun has just begun to set when Yixing finds the energy to move, away from the car and towards a gas station he spots on the side of the road half a mile away. Face expressionless, he uses the last of the cash in his wallet to buy a container of gasoline and a lighter, turning briskly on his feet without accepting his change.

He knows this looks suspicious.

He does not care.

As he pours the gas over the floor, the seats, his cousin - opening the hood and the trunk and pouring a generous amount there, too - he considers how much the burn of his closeness to this inferno will hurt. He wonders if he will hear it - he hasn’t heard anything in the hours it took him to walk away and back again, gladdened that he’s gone completely numb to existence, and hoping that the sensuousness of existence never returns again. 

He’s clear headed this way. Nothing, he thinks, has ever been so linear.

He tosses the lighter into the car and walks just far enough to be out of arm's reach of the heat before turning around and watching, with little awe or emotion, the car sizzle and smoke not unlike a bonfire. Even from this distance, the smell of burning flesh eats at his nose hairs, burning his sinuses with its sourness, but he breathes it in deep. 

Unsure how long he remains, eventually he walks away, long before the fire has a chance to reach the full tank of gas, long before any residual explosion gives away the history of this night, and long before he has the opportunity to consider joining his cousin.

“I did this for you,” Longwei had said.

Yixing wonders if it was worth it.

It is raining the day they bury his grandmother. 

It is raining and he is sixteen, anxiously standing on the precipice of becoming a man and wholly unprepared to be gifted a crown. 

He keeps his eyes trained on the ground, regarding hole in the earth that swallows the remains of her body and the barren waste he considers his memories of her body with a dry mouth and a shallow grimace. Occasionally, he finds himself distracted by the black umbrellas that blot the sea of white clothing, glad for their contrast against the flower arrangements that surround them.

Digging his feet into the squelching grass, hoping to break the silence of the grief that wallows in the overcast clouds, he feels, neither reassuringly nor supportively, the eyes of Kyungsoo as they bore into his spine, an announcement that someone is there for him and not for the woman who taught men to fear. He does not turn around, aware that the distance Kyungsoo keeps is crucial to maintaining the delicate pretense of peace, but he is glad for someone, anyone, he could consider a friend after everyone excluding family - a loose, vague term that made him chew at his tongue - was denied visitation. 

But Kyungsoo remains, standing across the street and on an entirely different plot of land, silently threatening a war just by witnessing their pain, an Yixing is glad for the danger of it. 

Yixing’s mother weeps when they return home, settling on the couch beside his father as her empty eyes scan the room, aware she is being greeted without greeting anyone in return. Her posture remains rigid and his father’s hand holds hers as if posing for a portrait, conscious of the eyes on their bodies and holding her against him in an awkward show of companionship, mimicking the affection he has witnessed in the threads of humanity he has bothered to notice.

Yixing settles against a hard, wooden chair in the kitchen, eyeing the food that has been brought for them from family, and family, and family, without feeling any appetite, wishing instead he could be somewhere he did not have to feign anguish or loss. The white of his shirt is still dotted with rain when three men approach him, and he studies the yellowed marks they leave in the fabric, choosing to ignore the imposing figures he assumes are loitering to extend, once again, their condolences.

Instead, they sit before him, dragging stools from the bartop counter and placing themselves directly in his vision. They tell him a lot of things - a lot of dark, and terrible, and horrible things he imagines other sixteen year old boys would struggle to stomach. But he’s held guns; and burned a body; and learned not to cry at the sound of a bullet tearing organs; and lost the will to love freely, and he supposes these things are harder for anyone to hear than the fact that their grandmother was the leader of a Triad group from Shanghai, the Tiger of the blackmarket, and her throne belongs to him.

‘You’re going to be in charge of a lot of money, kid,’ one of them says, envy evident behind his speech. 

He would later learn this man’s name is Bing Wen, and he is not incorrect. A large sum of money, much larger than he can comprehend, will soon be transferred to his name. And, at the shock and awe of the sheer magnitude of it, he will go to his grandmother’s grave and curse her for keeping his family so poor. 

But not yet. 

In this moment, Yixing only looks at them, eyeing them suspiciously as he dips his finger into a plate of peppered chicken, collecting the oil and rubbing it over his bottom lip. It stings against his skin, tiny tingles of pain grounding him to this reality as his mind remains empty, the scent of incense mixing with pepper and the implication of their words. He likes money, and he likes power, but most of all he likes the look on people’s faces when he stands before them unafraid to die and absolutely unafraid to watch them die. 

Yixing is sixteen, and he decides this kind of authority could be fun.

Yixing is sixteen. And at sixteen, he becomes a king. 

Yixing’s network makes nine thousand dollars on his eighteenth birthday, which is coincidentally the day he learns it is easier to chase pleasure between a woman’s thighs than it is to chase money. The start of this day looks absolutely nothing like the way it ends, and he is glad to be a chameleon, fitting into whatever shape the world requires of him.

Today, a knife was held to someone’s throat because Yixing demanded it. Today, a shipment as organized back to Shanghai - a warning and a threat for anyone who dares challenge him again. Today, he pressed cocaine against his gums, celebrating his good fortune with a brief bump, and got paid in crisp bills for the quality of his product.

And tonight, he recognizes the way women smile when he speaks, aware that he is someone worthy of being noticed.

There’s something addictive about the feeling of money in his pocket, a sense of power and pride rooting itself in the base of his spine. He stands taller, walks faster, shoulders rolled back and expecting the air to part for him. Weeks before his coming of age, he noticed women would smile when he spoke, heads cocking to the side as if bewildered by the sound of his voice, and now he decides to use the magic of beautiful boyhood to his advantage.

He is honey, and he knows it, an aphrodisiac hit that makes women lick their lips as they spread their legs - only slightly in the hopes that he will see it and, better yet, want it - as they recline in their chairs, waiting to be taken. It’s no different tonight, and, perhaps, the money and the manhood he carries amplifies his transcendence. A thin lipped woman lounges against the couch, puffing her chest to ensure he notices the perky roundness of her breasts beneath her tube top, skin warm and shimmering from the summer heat. 

Across from her, Yixing eyes the length of her body, cock stirring to a semi-hard state as he regards the yellow undertones of her lips. He wonders if her pussy looks just as golden, if it would part with the same ease as the air if he spread her with his thumbs, and his tongue runs dry, wanting to suck her clean. 

Sensing his arousal, she rises to a stand and does not bother to straighten her skirt, letting the smooth length of her thighs remain on display. Tying her hair back, Yixing watches with a placid expression as her breasts lift with the effort, top moving with them to expose her midriff, unashamed of letting him look before he tastes her against his teeth. 

They disappear into a bedroom, the bed full of coats and boxes which he pushes to the floor as he bites languidly at the tendons in her neck. She steps out of his arms, pushing her skirt down to her feet before removing her top, cocking her head to the side when she stands, naked and refusing blush, and notices Yixing remains fully clothed.

Quirking an eyebrow at him, she smirks. ‘Are you scared, pretty boy?’

It’s the first time he’s been asked this question, and he almost falters. Even when he was nine years old and men with murder on their lips handed him a backpack, they did not bother to ask if he felt fear - up until this moment, he did not think he had a choice. 

‘I’m not sure I know how that feels,’ he replies, honestly, a smile tucked into the corner of his mouth.

She shrugs, turning to lay down on the bed and spreads her legs, idly rubbing a finger over her clit to keep herself wet. ‘Man’s first inhibition is always being naked in front of a pretty girl.’ 

Yixing chuckles, letting his expression darken at her confidence. ‘You have a high opinion of yourself.’

‘You’re here because you want to feel like a man,’ she reasons, arching her back as she slips the tip of her middle finger between her folds. ‘I’m allowed to interpret that however I want to make sure we both get off.’

‘Looks like it’s just you,’ he counters, licking his lips as her eyes flutter closed momentarily, and nodding in the direction of her wet cunt.

‘I’ve never seen you with a woman.’ Her words are carried on a high pitched breath, her own mouth curved into a blissful smile. ‘Word is you’ve never done this and I want to make sure I can come. It’ll be over quick.’

Yixing undresses slowly, hypnotized by the movements of her fingers and studying the motions. She maintains a steady rhythm with two fingers, and he wonders how much better she would feel if it was his hand, if those were his long fingers - he wonders how he would feel, how much pride he would take in filling her with himself. 

When he settles between her thighs, she wraps her small hand around his cock and guides him to her entrance. He braces himself above her, unsure what to do with his weight, but the feel of her hand around his girth and the silky entrance rubbing wetness over his tip is enough to have his thighs already shaking. Now, he understands what she meant by saying this will be over quick. 

‘Stay like that,’ she commands, releasing her hand from his cock and the base of her palm against her clit as she fingers herself. The spread and movement of her folds makes Yixing’s arms shake, and he latches his mouth around one of her nipples to distract himself. Arching into him, she holds his hip with her free hand, keeping him still as she lets her sensitive nipple be teased to a hardened nub, bringing herself closer and closer to release. 

Eventually, she moves both her hands to the flesh of his ass, and nods as she pushes him inside. 

The tight warmth of her walls around his cock has his eyes rolling back, biceps trembling as he thrusts messily into her. It takes only a few thrusts before he comes, spilling into her as he chokes back a moan and keeps himself quiet. She laughs as she comes, slightly and vaguely, not nearly enough to be satisfied. Even as he collapses against her, she writhes beneath him, weaseling her hand between their bodies and guides herself to the full bloom of an orgasm. Her walls clench rapidly around his softening cock, and he relishes the sensation of the pleasure mixing with discomfort. 

It feels, he supposes, much the same as knowing men die for the money he earns. 

‘You’ll be a natural,’ she says, pulling her hand away from her wetness and running them over his lips. He sucks at the tips, brow furrowing at the slight bitterness of her flavor. ‘You didn’t crush me with your weight. Most guys are shit at that the first time.’

Yixing says nothing, thinking on sex and pleasure, driving and working, the market he runs and the sensation of his come dripping from her cunt. 

He’s a natural at a lot of things, a lot of grim and horrific things, and he’s glad sex is just as messy as money. 

It means he doesn’t have to learn to be careful. In this, he is just as natural as driving.

You buy your freedom on the night Yixing leases his first McLaren Coupe. He does this with money, credit if he’s being honest, fully intending never to give the car back. You do this with a knife to the stomach of your pimp - a knife to his stomach, his chest, and his dick - fully intending never to go back. 

He turns off Main Street, driving along the river and expecting to run into Baekhyun, hoping to watch as jealousy seeps into his irises and to pull away before his palms can mark the hood with his prints. Tonight, he wants to pretend - pretend that this is his car to keep, that his life is as simple as expensive metal and carbon put together with the sole purpose of moving fast. He’d like a life like that, existing without thought and without care, he thinks, and he wants the pink and passionate smile that always forms on Baekhyun’s lips when he teases to help him along with the fantasy.

Instead, he sees you. 

He’s unsure how you’ve made it so far, but given the state of you he imagines that the people who have seen you have given you a wide berth. Pulling up ahead, Yixing parks the car and watches you approach in his side mirror. He recognizes you from high school, neither popular nor an outcast you were merely someone quiet, another face in the crowd that did not bother to make themselves known. You kept to yourself, and now he wonders what crowd wound up keeping you.

The blood smears on your thighs have dried, turning a muddy brown beneath the ripped denim of your shorts, and splotches on your neck mean you have witnessed something messy. Arms crossed over your chest, your eyes remain empty as you walk, neither looking around you nor in front of you, seeing through space as you walk and walk, jaw set like iron in the effort of keeping yourself moving.

Resting his head against the seat, he closes his eyes and hums, conflicted. This is breaking every rule he has ever sent for himself and for his team - you never pull over for someone, you never stop, you always move, and you never give pause. But he knows you, and he knows how it looks to have seen someone die. He recognizes the features of his fourteen year old self in yours, sees Junmyeon's hollowed expression in your unfocused vision, and he knows that death will always catch up to those who face it alone.

And so, he gets out, leaving the door open and calling your name.

'Y/N.'

You pause in front of him, looking around for others to follow close behind, and when they don't you fix your gaze back on him, the fierce heat of it enough to make him bite his tongue.

'Get in the car,' he offers, keeping his voice calm. 'I can keep you safe.'

He's not sure why you comply, but you do, wringing the blood stained slickness of your fingers together. Yixing's eyes follow the movements as he cats glances away from the road to your trembling hands, and when he stops at a light he reaches to the glove compartment and pulls out a rag. It's meant to clean his prints from the wheel before he sells this car off to some unassuming, overexcited college student, turning a profit and turning away from the situation altogether, but he supposes you need it more. And you certainly need it to not stain the interior.

'That's not my name anymore,' you mumble, wiping and wiping at your skin.

Yixing keeps his eyes trained on the road, knowing not to look at someone who feels raw enough to take a life.

'No?' is all he says, accepting your truth for what you need it to be.

'It's Eve.'

Yixing nods, turning the corner to take you to his house, still unsure why he chose to do this at all.

'Did he decide that for you?' he questions, noticing the purple bruises on your arms as you press the cloth into your skin.

'No.' It's the loudest you've been, the full richness of your voice catching him off guard. 'I did, right after I watched the life fade from his eyes.'

Yixing nods, rebranding you at the same time he considers the sheer consequence of you. You are a bad idea - all of you, from the death and the mess and the baggage are a thing that runs the risk of weighing him down. But he knows, inherently, that you won't.

However long you spent under the wing of a man who pressed himself against your body in the hopes of breaking your soul was not enough to ruin you, choosing instead to break his flesh with your bare hands. You are resourceful. You are smart - uncoordinated and full of risk, but smart enough to know the only person anyone can fully trust is themselves. And you are unafraid, prepared to burn the world so long as it ensures your survival.

You are a bad idea.

At twenty, Yixing is addicted to bad ideas, and the idea of you is full of promise.

It’s a cloudless night towards the end of August when Yixing finds himself, twenty-one and standing on Junmyeon's porch, preparing to make promises. The chill in the breeze ensures summer's end, the oncoming storm of September and plans and change carried with the wind, and he grits his teeth as he considers his assets. 

Dongkyu’s death is an unspeakable loss, the kind that puts tangible grief in the air and reminds Yixing of the ash he tasted when he burned his cousin’s body, and he wonders how he’d be now if someone had promised to help with revenge. He knows how that feels, the fire it puts in your veins and seemingly endless drive that pushes and pushes and pushes until you don’t recognize yourself in the mirror anymore. You felt it too, still feel it sometimes when you wake up screaming and scratching at your skin, remembering the way men pushed themselves inside you and demanded that you feel them. 

Yixing thinks if there’s anyone who understands Junmyeon, its you and him. 

It takes a long while for Junmyeon to answer the door after he rings the doorbell, and he’s surprised that he’s the first one here. Sun set hours ago, his first stop of the night a shipping container by the airport where he picked up guns and drugs and a car he gutted with Huang. But his eyes do not droop with tiredness. He wanted the adrenaline push of the job to lead him here, ready and wired and feeling in control before the details of death turn him cold. 

When Junmyeon opens the door, he doesn’t need to say anything - he doesn’t even extend his arms for a hug or extend his condolences, Junmyeon simply knows. He’s ragged and hollow, but alight just the same, blood boiling with a vengeance that Yixing feels against his skin like electricity. 

The air burns with change, and they - eyeing one another wholly aware and wholly prepared to tear the world down - burn with a rage that will set their futures in motion. 

Yixing is twenty-one when he crosses the threshold into Junmyeon’s house, already a king, and a man, and a god, and finds himself becoming a brother.

[littleeyesofpallas]

Bleach - Name Games

Here’s a handful of tangential side characters I said I’d tackle...

First off, the sisters Kotetsu[虎徹], Isane[勇音] and Kiyone[清音].  Their surname is written as a nice unambiguous “Tiger Pierce.”  It functions in part to denote a hunter/slayer of tigers, and also a possibly reference to the assumed name of historical swordsmith, Nagasone Kotetsu[長曾禰 虎徹], although to what specific end, I couldn’t guess at.  The given names of the two sisters both utilize the kanji -ne[音] meaning “sound,” which is a very common suffix in girls’ names in Japanese.

In full Isane[勇音] reads as “Brave Sound” and Kiyone[清音] as “Clear/Pure Sound.“  They don’t actually seem to reflect the characters’ personalities too directly; Kiyone could be said to be pure and earnest in her devotion to Ukitake [浮竹 十四郎], but Isane is actually quite meek and timid in spite of her name.

It is possible that Kubo intended something different at first, considering Isane is actually first seen in the background of a panel, with her head fully obscured by a voice bubble, and what appears to be a man’s body. (she is identifiable only by her lieutenant’s badge visible on her shoulder in chapter 109, during the inspection of Aizen’s “corpse,” (while Ichigo[一護] is still fighting Zaraki)  and she doesn’t appear again until chapter 147, at the start of Rukia’s[ルキア] execution.) So, it’s entirely probable that in changing his generically masculine looking placeholder design into a female character, Kubo meant to give her a more tomboyish personality at first, but for whatever reason changed his mind.

Partnered with Kiyone as Ukitake’s 3rd seat in the 13th division is Kotsubaki[小椿] Sentarou[仙太郎].  The family name Kotsubaki[小椿] reads pretty directly as “Small Camellia,” as in the flower.

I think we’re all aware of Kubo’s preoccupation with flowers, as the Gotei 13′s flower insignia’s clearly display.  In the Hanakotoba[花言葉] “Flower Language,” much like parallel European concepts, flowers based on species and color can denote particular meanings and themes.

Broadly speaking camellia have long been associated with the Japanese nobility, including the samurai class seen as a sign of love and devotion, but in the case of a red Camellia, and due to their tendency to “behead” themselves (that is to say, they don’t wilt on the stem, instead the fully bloomed flower simply drops off once it begins to die) they are seen as a symbol of a noble or dignified death: to die with its good appearance intact.

The given name Sentarou[仙太郎] is a little odd; -tarou[太郎] at least is fairly common, “big(thick) son” is a pretty common name even on its own, but also a common component of other names.  The “Thick” here is used as a sign of health, like “robust,” “broad,” or “hearty,” not obese.  The Sen[仙] here is a little more vague...

Most literally it would read like “sage”/”hermit”/”wizard” all harkening back to a specific kind of archetypal old wizened/enlightened man living in isolation.  By that same character association however it can also reference “prodigious skill/talent,” that a wizened old sage might possess and cultivate in their isolation, as well as “immortality” as a seemingly inhumanly old and enlightened person might well be.  So, in this context, although we actually know quite little about Sentarou as a character, I think the intended reading here (as goofy as this sounds) is actually “Immortal Thick Son” basically just being an overstatement of his good physical health.

But Sentarou actually has a dad in canon!  Aikawa Love’s old lieutenant in the Turn Back the Pendulum era, ~100 years in the past, Kotsubaki Jin’emon[刃右衛門].  For one, it’s worth noting that he has a very distinctly Yakuza sounding name, but also he is later succeeded in his rank as 7th Division lieutenant by Iba[射場] Tetsuzaemon[鉄左衛門], whom you’ll notice has the similar given name.

They both share the suffix form, -emon[衛門] which is written as “Defense Gate,” which is a kind of trade name (like Smith, or Taylor, in English) that denotes a person whose job it is to open and close the gate to a castle, palace, or fortress.  In addition the kanji [右] and [左] denote “right” and “left,” respectively in relation to the either literal or metaphorical fortress gates.  From this meaning the naming convention comes to be a common name of what amount to bodyguard characters with distinctly traditionally Japanese flair; be they samurai or yakuza or even shinobi archetypes.

So, the complementary names Jin’emon[刃右衛門] and Tetsuzaemon[鉄左衛門] actually read as “Blade Right Defense Gate” and “Iron Left Defense Gate,“ evoking image of an offensive right and defensive left combination.  Also, Tetsuzaemon’s character is very distinctly based on a Yakuza thug; from his belly warmer, to the single sleeve style he wears his kimono, and his zanpakutou being a tanto, to his shades, mustache and punch perm hairstyle.  He also treats his captain, Komamura the way a Yakuza treats a family head.

And this also brings up Tetsuzaemon’s mother, Iba[射場] Chikane[千鉄].  The family name, Iba[射場] just mans “Archery Place,” which is fairly straight forward.  Generally it would denote an actual archery range, but it can also specify an archer’s position, like a designated station atop a wall in a defensive formation.  (In the case of Tetsuzaemon, it compliments the image of a strongly fortified and defended gate.)  His mother’s given name Chikane[千鉄] reads as “Thousand Iron” which evokes the iron heads of many arrows.  She is also designed like a very traditional Japanese matron, an image associated with strong willed women in positions of social and financial power, often as heads of a household, of a business like a tavern or a brothel, or as I assume here, as the wife of a Yakuza boss.

A small note on the dynamics of a samurai household: Although classical Japan is an infamously rigid social structure that places great restraints on women, there are a few unique loopholes that defy what I think are Western assumptions of what misogyny and patriarchal oppression look like.  While households were expressly the domain of a family patriarch, and abuses of that power were extremely common, we tend to compare those to the Western image of an American 1950s household, or a Victorian era drama of marriages and inheritances.  But in fact, despite the very rigid dynamic between a man and his wife, the mother of a noble household actually held a great deal of power relative to the rest of society.

Due to formalities in place to prevent samurai from overshadowing or overpowering their lords, technically samurai were not allowed to handle money or own much of their property; they did of course functionally amass wealth none the less, but their wives controlled their finances.  In the case of an abusive or controlling husband this might well mean a wife was little more than a middleman in the process of him controlling his own wealth, but very often either out of benevolence, negligence, or ineptitude, the wives of samurai would effectively run not only the internal household but the entire family business.  Even upon a son’s inheritance, if the son was not up to the task, a more competent or even just power hungry mother might retain her power over the household well into the son’s adulthood.

Similarly women were known to run, both formally and informally, many successful Japanese businesses across several class lines, including down into the untouchable classes like the early Yakuza.  A common subject of Yakuza fiction is the powerful and commanding boss’s wife; a woman with a kind of old fashioned, regal demeanor, a back covered in tattoos, a dagger in her kimono, and a spitfire, take-no-shit attitude with a legion of loyal and subservient thugs at her command.

Themes as they are in play here, it’s entirely possible that Jin’emon is actually Iba’s father and that he either never married or separated from Chikane at some point, (Or they were married and had Iba only after the events of Turn Back the Pendulum, but given the apparent relative ages of Iba and other lieutenant characters like Hisagi and Nanao[七緒], that feels unlikely) making Iba and Sentarou (half) brothers.

[kanadabiscuits]

2 & 19

Yay! Thank you!!   From the book meme

2. top 5 books of all time?

Oh gosh.... I am SO bad at definitive lists!!! But here goes (in no particular order because that is just not something I can do to my babies):

The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien. Going with the full series here, but if forced to chose, my favourite will always be The Two Towers. Tolkien was my first love when I started to read for myself. Mum read me the Hobbit when I was six or seven and that was it. Tolkien’s words and imagery runs through my veins, it is everywhere in my timeline, it is a common ground with all my friends... it is at the top of this list because that is where it belongs. 

Foucault’s Pendulum, Umberto Eco. This book has stayed with me so strongly over the years and sparked a long-standing appreciation for the intelligence and wit of Umberto Eco.

The Night Circus, Erin Morgenstern. So lush and descriptive, the magic woven in her words captivated me as no other book had in years. The story and the atmosphere of her world lingered with me like the filaments of a dream. I adored this book.

Anne of Green Gables, LM Montgomery. This series was my everything growing up, I loved the books, watched the musical repeatedly over the years in Charlottetown, was in the musical a couple of times, but mostly I remember being maybe eight or nine, old enough to read by myself, but curling up with before bed on the big floor cushions in the living room with my mother as she would read and the characters would come to life, made more beloved by the fact that it was something that was ours.

Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams/The Narnia series, CS Lewis. Calling this one a tie because I’ve read them both so many times I have lost count. I was obsessed with the Narnia books as a child and they are very much part of the fabric of my being (in much the same way as is The Lord of the Rings). Hitchhikers is filled with savage wit, rampant anger at deadlines, and abject lunacy of the finest kind. It makes me laugh as no other book has before or since.

Honourable mentions: Last Chance to See (Douglas Adams), Come, Thou Tortoise (Jessica Grant), Anne McCaffery’s PERN series, oooohhhhh so many others. But I will stop there. :)

19. most disliked popular books.

OH THIS ONE IS SO EASY!!

The Da Vinci Code and The Fifty Shades trilogy.

Fifty Shades is self-explanatory and a bit of cheat since although it was popular is was also popular to revile. But I still think it is the biggest pile of money-making dross I have ever had the misfortune of reading excerpts of. My friends used to torment me by sending random snippets in blind messages so I would read them without knowing what they were. 

If an AI had been raised on nothing but porn and books comprised of randomly generated words, it would still struggle to write a book as terrible as these ones.

The Da Vinci Code, on the other hand, was just such a schlocky regurgitation of several other previously published books and a dollop of conspiracy theory mixed with genuinely interesting history, and when it came out I got very tired very quickly of people treating it like gospel truth and using it as platform from which to preach their newfound expertise. 

One of my very favourite novels of all time is Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco (written years before TDC) and there is a passage near the beginning, in which bored editors at a publishing house that deals with self-published conspiracy theorists, where they sum up the entirety of TDC (not specifically, just eerily predictive) and then discard it as too awful and banal to publish. I used to say I was grateful to Eco for inoculating me against everything Dan Brown.

[luspiel]

Of Sunshine and Ashes

I had originally wanted to make a good impression on anyone stopping by, but seeing as I was alone and had been alone for the past twenty minutes at my depressing fold in table centered in the gym I had decided to screw it and unleash my catharsis via a resting mean mug. Of course as the ever temperamental pendulum of fate would have it, an unsuspecting person had decided to drop off their bones right at this very moment and bear witness to my exceedingly unaesthetic scowl. At the very least, I wished I could say that I was some kind of divine reaper tasked with collecting human bones and other unwanted rotting items before their trip to judgement. Alas, I’m simply the poor sap who was roped into collecting bones (of all things) for the very cliche Halloween celebration on Friday. With very little to distract me from my misfortunes, I greeted the hooded student in front of me. Without a word, he dropped two bags onto my flimsy table with a solid clunk. I eyed the contents of the bags apprehensively. The bones in those bags looked alarmingly similar to human bones. However of course, I could not proclaim to this shady character that I knew what human bones looked like only because of a midnight grave digging expedition gone wrong. Obviously. The stranger’s face took on a nervous expression which clashed quite theatrically with his bright yellow hoodie but complimented his black hair and pale features. A walking oxymoron, charming. “Is this okay? My understanding was that the bones didn’t have to be yours.” I lifted an eyebrow gingerly as I attempted to make several concealed glances between him and the offending bags and what laid inside them. I began to wonder about the unfortunate person who had once maybe been on a lovely stroll, wholly enjoying the feeling of perambulating on their own two bony legs, before having their life snuffed out by a walking fire hazard. Really, that was the brightest shade of yellow I had ever see in my life, and I had once stared at the the sun for 47 seconds straight on a triple dog dare! “And where, pray tell, did you get these bones from? Better yet,𝙬𝙝𝙤 are those bones?” Ah yes, I just hated it when a 16th century supercilious noble took over my brain and stopped it from sending messages to my mouth. This definitely was not a side effect of reading Pride and Prejudice by lamplight 6 times in the past week. No, that possession would only take place after my 7th reading of the book. This had to be the work of a vindictive bard enlisting the help of a petty and cruel noble in exchange for a masterful piccolo performance. The stranger had by this time begun to splutter uncontrollably. Clearly since we both were utterly confounded when it came to holding simple conversations, I would have to be to the one to snap out of my enlightened daydreams and try to make sense of the situation. “Please tell me that these bones wherever they came from were not once apart of a human’s anatomy.” Finally grasping how to use his tongue he spoke, which is to say he flung his arms around haphazardly while words occasionally came from his general direction. “No, of course not!” At long last getting his arms back under control he pointed forcefully at the bag closest to me. “Um, my cousin had a bonfire.” Perhaps, the guy had seen the lurid expression on my face and realized that his previous statement had done nothing to rectify his current situation and it’s disturbing implications. Or the boy had realized using his own neurons and synapses that that sentence was only socially acceptable in a few select contexts, and that this was certainly not one of them. “I mean—what I meant was—My-my cousin had a bonfire for her two dogs. A sort of celebration of life for them. They’re all washed and clean though.” I could only be placated so much because that meant that someone had skinned his cousin’s dogs like some sick oyster. Whoever they were, I hoped they knew they were the boogers of both land and sea. Even with the first bag accounted for, there was still an air of mystery hanging over the second bag with grim persistence. I nodded towards it, “And the second set of bones?” He breathed easily for what seemed like the first time in hours. “Oh, that’s my neighbor Tim’s.” I pursued my lips, pressed my shoulders back, and tried to look as imposing as possibly when sitting in a perpetually short swivel chair and wearing flip flops. Maneuvering into my default mode of annoyed retailer talking to a customer with their boss practically breathing in their carbon dioxide, I held back a long suffering sigh tinged with my regret for having sworn of defenestration at a young age. “I understand that on the flier we wrote that we didn’t care whether or not the bones were yours, but you do understand that it is only logical that we question you on how you obtained the aforementioned bones, yes?” He nodded. “And we, the Halloween Bash Organization otherwise known as HBO by a select few—” 𝘮𝘦𝘢𝘯𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘮𝘦, “are extremely grateful that you decided to contribute to our cause so that we can provide you with an enjoyable celebration on Friday.” The boy stared at me dully, it was unnerving to say the least but as we had already established that we are both awkward people I decided to carry on hoping he wasn’t secretly planning his next poleax. I cleared my throat, “I’d just like your name and number just in case you’d like to troubleshoot us or want your—𝘵𝘩𝘦 bones back.” He perked up considerably most likely happy to be done with my retailer’s voice. “My name’s Rhys Frank and I wrote my number on the clipboard, but you and the rest of HBO can keep the bones for any future decorations.” “Yep, we’ll do that,” I replied plastering my best ‘God help me in the face of this serial killer’ smile on my face. The boy had gone exactly three steps towards the door (I know because I counted) before loudly exclaiming bloody murder...quite literally. “Oh, Fudge nuggets! Bloody murder! Holy potato! Blast it all to damnation! Fudge!” He spun on his heel so quickly that he almost ended up making a full 360. “Tim is a Biology teacher. The bones are fake. They’re props meant to help children learn. I did not kill anyone. I am not a murderer. And I am very thankful for you listening to my Ted Talk.” And with that Rhys Frank was gone and I was finally let off this abominable roller coaster ride.

[hardlyfatal]

gary’s writing workshop: lesson 2:

Understanding & Using Verb Tenses

Verb tenses present a problem for many people. Perhaps it has to do with where in time a verb can be placed, because there are four different ‘times’ in which an action can occur. If you put it in a timeline, it would look like this:

PAST PERFECT → I had walked.

PAST → I walked.

PRESENT → I walk.

FUTURE → I will1 walk.

Add to that the fact that there are two ‘types’ of actions: finite, or perfect, meaning that the action has been completed; and continuous, meaning that the action is ongoing and not yet completed2. It’s done with different tenses of the verb “to be” followed by the verb in gerund form, which we’ll look at later in this lesson.

Put into a timeline as above, the continuous tense looks like this:

PAST PERFECT → I had been walking.

PAST → I was walking.

PRESENT → I am walking.

FUTURE → I will be walking.

Which Tense to Choose

Now that we’ve established all of this, what does it mean to us as fiction writers?

From a grammatical POV, in narration we will mostly be using the past perfect and past continuous tenses, with probably-frequent forays into past perfect, past continuous perfect, future, and future continuous tenses as needed. Present tense will usually be restricted to dialogue. Unless…

From a narrative POV, when we set out to write a story, we have a very important choice to make: present or past tense?

In my ongoing quest for readability3, I have concluded that for general purposes, the past tense is  typically superior for writing fiction.

1. It’s ‘invisible’. The brain doesn’t have work to process it because, as a rule, stories are provided to us as events that have already occurred; they happened in the past. Therefore, it feels more natural and makes more sense and is so automatically understood that it just melts into our consciousness without effort. And effortlessness of reading is our main goal in producing an enjoyable story, remember? (see Lesson #1 for more on this)

2. It’s more flexible, because it allows the writer to fast-forward through time in a way present tense does not – or at least, it allows it without compromising quality. If it took place in the past, then we can easily move to a later point in time and describe that, as well. But if we’re writing in present tense, how can we know the future?

Note: some people can use this to quirky and/or comedic effect. For example:

“Things are good!” she says. But she would come to learn that things were not, in fact, good.

But it’s not something that can be done often before it gets stale and unfunny, so you can’t really rely on it.

3. It more easily permits a feeling of reflection that can feel awkward in present tense, because the very point of present tense is to make a story feel like it’s happening at this very moment. To look back at past events is like pulling the emergency brake when you’re going 100 miles an hour.

But without reflection, it’s more difficult to do justice to a character’s complexity, with the result that the character can feel shallow and unfinished. It can be done, but it requires a subtle touch, and some people still struggling to nail that aspect of their writing can find it more of a challenge than they’re up to at the time.

That’s not to say you are not allowed to use present tense. Present tense narration has become somewhat of a fad recently; not only was Fifty Shades of Crap Grey written that way, but so are television, theater, and film scripts. It can feel more fresh and modern to writers looking to distinguish themselves, and indeed it has become quite a frequent thing in the genre of literary fiction in the last decade.

However, in recent years, the pendulum is swinging the other way, and some have begun to feel it’s a bit gimmicky, used in place of actual substance, a way of signaling “Look, I’m edgy, read me!” rather than actually creating an edgy plot and characters.

1. In deft hands, it can be very effective. Books written in present tense include The Handmaiden’s Tale, the Hunger Games series, All Quiet on the Western Front, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

2. It should be chosen consciously, and because it can present challenges to the reader and author alike, for the following reason: It gives the story an urgency it might otherwise lack in past tense. The very invisibility of past tense means that the words can flow by without a sense of alertness. Present tense wakes up the reader, keeps them perked up for the next event in the story.

3. However, reading in the present tense for long (over 10,000 words) period of time can be mentally fatiguing to the reader. If you’re aiming for a fast-paced but brief story, and want to keep the reader moving along just as quickly as the protagonist, you might like to consider present tense. Any more than that, and you risk giving your readers a nervous condition.

4. Whichever you choose, it’s imperative that you stick with it. Going back and forth because you can’t remember which you’re using makes for a confusing, wearying, and frankly annoying reading experience unless you are describing a past event. Make sure your beta knows to keep a sharp eye out for tense shifting if you know you’re bad at continuity in this regard.

I have personally used present tense only once, in a story I wrote a year or so ago, Lovesick Blues. I chose present tense for it by accident, almost – I started it in the past tense, as with all my other work, but kept switching mid-paragraph and sometimes even mid-sentence. As that never happened to me before, it was weird and kind of annoying. But then I thought… is my ridiculous brain trying to tell me something? Would be better that way?

So I decided to experiment and wrote a few hundred words in the present tense to see how it felt, and that was when I realized it was a story that benefited from being written in the present tense. Why? Because the story became far more dynamic. A goodly amount of it are things, situations, that are ongoing and still happening. The story commences in the middle of all of it.

The reader feels brought right into the thick of it, and carried along as events unfold. It brings a sense of immediacy and motion and energy to the story. It feels like we are just stepping into a situation that took off running, bringing the reader along for a brisk ride, even with the occasional contemplation of past events.

If this happens to you as well – you are trying to write in one tense and keep finding yourself writing in the other – perhaps your subconscious is trying to tell you the story belongs in the other tense. Rewrite a page or two the other way and see how it feels – maybe that’s the better way to go!

There was a need for reflections on the past in Lovesick Blues, so I had to step from present to past tense for a few hundred words and then return to the present. I leave it to you to decide whether my transitions back and forth were done well or not :D

HELPY THINGS

Gerunds

A form that is derived from a verb but functions as a noun. In English, they end in -ing. They are awesome.

Examples: acting, singing, painting, typing

Participle Adjectives

Just like gerunds are verbs functioning as nouns, verbs can also function as adjectives. Can end in -ing or -ed.

Examples: boring, complicated, inspiring, beloved

MORE HELPY THINGS

Past tenses that give people problems:

1. Spin

The past tense of ‘spin’ (in the sense of “turning bodily at speed”) is ‘spun’: I spun around to face him.

BUT

The past tense of ‘spin’ (in the sense of “creating yarn”) is ‘span’: I span until I had a full spool of yarn.

2. Sit

In simple and perfect tenses, it is ‘sat’: I sat on the chair. OR I had sat on the chair.

In continuous and perfect continuous tenses, it is ‘sitting’: I was sitting on the chair. OR I had been sitting on the chair.

You can state that someone was sitting (past continuous tense) or was seated but never was sat.

was sitting = describes a continuous action taking place in the past: He was sitting on a bench.

BUT

was seated = describes the person’s state, i.e. is an adjective: He was seated on a bench.

HOMEWORK

1. Take a few paragraphs of your own writing and switch the tense – if you’re writing in past, change it to present, and vice versa. Do you think it’s more or less effective that way? Did it feel more or less comfortable?

2. Which has more readability, a present or past tense narrative? Why?

FOOTNOTES

1 Fun With Etymology: Nowadays, we use ‘willed’ for it, but in days of yore, ‘would’ is the archaic past tense of ‘will’. ‘Would’ is the main base for the conditional tense, often used with ‘if’ or ‘when’.

2 Bonus points: Check out that sweet semi-colon action. Why did I use it in this instance?

3 See Lesson #1.

© 2019 to me

[thecloserkin]

book review: Jeannette Ng, Under the Pendulum Sun (2017)

Genre: Gothic fantasy

Is it the main pairing: Yes

Is it canon: Yes

Is it explicit: No

Is it endgame: Yes

Is it shippable: It is lit

Bottom line: HOW IS THIS BOOK EVEN REAL. When they put me in the ground I hope they bury me with a copy of this book so I can read it in the afterlife.

Miss Catherine Helstone, a clergyman’s daughter, sets sail for the infidel lands where her brother Laon is a missionary and from whence his letters home have grown increasingly cryptic and erratic. The twist is, he’s not spreading the Good Word in India or Africa or the New World — he’s in Fairie asdfgkkjkdfjdk. Catherine hasn’t seen him in three years. She’s so worried about him that she strong-arms the Missionary Society of London into bankrolling her ticket to Arcadia, on the grounds that the previous guy who held the post met a messy & mysterious end, and she is the properest person to prevent the same fate befalling Laon. Because she’s highkey in love with him. Well, that revelation takes half the book to unfold, however the opening line is “My brother and I grew up dreaming of new worlds.” For the first 25% of the book she doesn’t even lay eyes on Laon, she just shows up in Arcadia and stays in his house while he’s gone on some unspecified errand. And what a house it is.

I feel like I’ve spent my whole life reading about impossibly grand, potentially sentient haunted houses. Such houses are drenched in secrets. You need a first-person narrator to really experience the affect of the house, preferably someone who’s unfamiliar with the setting and disoriented by the mind games it plays: Jane Eyre in Mr. Rochester’s house leaps to mind. Jane Eyre btw nearly marries her first cousin to take up the missionary life with him (before deciding to go back to Rochester). See, the reason Jane’s cousin proposed to her was because ties of blood were thought to be not strong enough to bind—when you’re out in the field converting heathens you need an acknowledged romantic attachment. So the fact that Cathy follows her brother to Arcadia tells you everything about how important he is to her. She would have followed him to perdition. Think of that immortal Sylvia Plath quote: I love him to hell and back and heaven and back, and have and do and will.

To return to the subject of incest in haunted houses: The Fall of the House of Usher? Atmospheric, creepy af, but the implied relationship is presented decidedly unsympathetically. The Thirteenth Tale? The incest is canon but you are not supposed to be rooting for the incestuous couple. Crimson Peak? She’s mentally ill and it’s not even the fucked-up kind of shippable a la Jaime/Cersei. Flowers in the Attic? Shippable, but the dubious consent squicks me out. A Spell of Winter? Comes closest, in that they were 100% in love, but it was a situational in love if you know what I mean—where is my tormented passion with 200 pages of obsessive pining??? Now do you see why I lost my fucking mind when I read Under the Pendulum Sun? I have been waiting for this book for MY ENTIRE GODDAMN LIFE.

Laon may be absent from the house, but he is very much present in Cathy’s thoughts. She can’t go five paragraphs without mentioning some innocuous detail, fondly remembered from their shared childhood.

In youth, I had shared Laon’s restlessness. University had only nourished and nurtured his ambitions, but education had stifled mine. I had been taught to tame my wild impulses and desires that had agitated me to pain. I had folded it with my soul and learnt to drink contentment like you would a poison. Drop by drop, day by day. Until it became tolerable.

If this isn’t shades of Cersei & Jaime, mirrors cracked by patriarchy!!! Seriously this is exactly how Cersei must have felt, after 8 years of crossdressing in each other’s clothes, the day the master-at-arms put a sword in Jaime’s hand and she got… what, embroidery? Cathy cried the first time Laon went off to Latin & Greek lessons without her. He smuggles his books to her afterwards, of course, and they do spend plenty of time poring over the classics together. But it’s not the same as being granted that education in her own right. In the great tradition of clergymen’s daughters, Cathy is “genteel enough to be educated and accomplished, but never useful. Caught between the world of labour and that of letters,” she goes on to become a lady’s companion and later a governess—which for a gently-reared lady is a kind of social death. Jane Fairfax in Emma certainly saw it that way. Wellborn women generally embark upon the vocation of governess as an avenue of last resort. Which is to say, there’s not a lot of scope for independent ambition for a girl in Cathy’s position. She’s twenty-five when she comes to Arcadia, and what is incredible is not that she doesn’t mention any suitors or romantic dalliances but she doesn’t even mention any friends by name. It’s like her whole world is Laon, her thoughts are consumed by him, her memories are dominated by him. It must have been very lonely growing up on the Yorkshire moors.

When I was young and I walked on the moors with Laon, I could not imagine a wilder place, given over to nature. The biting chill in our faces and the mists hanging over the endless, treeless dales. We chased each other, through the rippling heather, through ruined farmhouses. We would pretend that we were the only people left alive in the world.

And so, here I was: clutching the compass he had left behind, knot tightening within my heart, under the light of the pendulum sun.

Mark that metaphor of the knot tightening around her heart—it will continue to crop up. She’s been in love with him a long time, even if she won’t admit it to herself. Ffs he left her a compass when he took up his missionary duties, and if that isn’t a metaphor for his heart I dunno what is.

Laon and I used to play games, scaring each other under the sheets … I still remember huddling against him, hooking our fingers together and promising under every token that we held sacred that if one of us were to die, we would come back and haunt the other.

This is at once wholesome and macabre—they would give up heaven and hope of salvation in order to HAUNT the other as a GHOST because they’re that scared of being separated from each other? ICONIC.

I longed to hear my brother’s sermons again. He had a passion that surged under the measured cadence of his voice and, more than that, I had begun to miss his discordant singing.

She misses his sermons! She misses his voice even if he can’t carry a tune! She misses everything about him!

I missed Laon. I used to tickle him in church to keep him awake. All too often, we’d giggle and bicker under our breaths until our father cast us a stern gaze from the pulpit and we’d silence. I’d keep holding his hand, though, as he needed my nails in his palm to not fall asleep.

He would reach across the table and wind my hair behind my ear. Reaching for a pin to secure the distracting hair, I told myself that it was nonsense to miss the softness of his touch or the stroke of his fingers.

That night, I dreamt. Laon and I were children again, when his hands were no bigger than mine. We were running, tumbling through the heather …

I tried to imagine his voice. I remembered the curve of his ears against my lips and the warmth of his hands in mine. We had not laced together our fingers for a very long time. He didn’t even shake my hand before he left.

This girl sure spends a lot of time thinking about holding her brother’s hand!!! Here the text begins to tease at the rupture that happened before he left, and the non-supernatural causes of their long estrangement. Oh here she is asking theologically thorny questions of her tutors at boarding school:

My palms stung for days afterwards as I was whipped for impertinence. I gritted my teeth through the pain as I wrote to Laon about it, my letters curling all wonky.

Awwww he’s her #1 confidante, the one she turns to for comfort and validation. It’s been tough not having him around these last few years:

More than ever, I missed Laon. I wanted to tell him about this, to press my forehead against his and whisper to him what I knew like old secrets shared in the dark under blankets and sheepskins.

It’s just that everyone seems to take Cathy for granted—offhand she says she’s darned more socks than educated young minds—and Laon is the only one who sees her and values her. Every memory of their childhood closeness is somehow sweet as well as mega suggestive?! Here are some more super suggestive lines:

”You don’t only ever want things you could have.”

”It is dangerous eating forbidden foods.”

That last line refers to the well-known injunction against mortals eating or drinking anything while sojourning in the faerie realm: Once you taste fae food the Fair Folk get to keep you forever. In the mythology of this story, it’s okay to eat as long as you sprinkle salt on it first. You have to put salt in everything you consume, though, even your hot chocolate—just another reminder that Arcadia is inhospitable and alien and if you set one foot wrong your soul is forfeit. For the moment Cathy is confined to the manor, because there’s a geas that guarantees her safety on the property but not beyond it. So she wanders around this creepy-ass house that features doors into empty air, lanterns guttering out, moths that eat away the ink on your parchment. The other inhabitants include: A ghostly housekeeper she never sees, a gnome handyman lately converted to Christianity, and a changeling fae girl who Cathy suspects to be her brother’s mistress. Cathy obtains the journals of Reverend Hale—the priest who preceded Laon—and sets to work deciphering them.

My brother’s house became to me a place of questions without answers.

Later on, when Laon returns, he straight up begs her to leave it alone:

”Don’t do this,” he pleaded. “Don’t try to solve this place. It won’t end well.”

This, of course, is the sort of admonition ignored by the heroine of every Gothic romance—warnings destined to fall on deaf ears as she plunges ahead to unravel the mystery. Ok but let’s talk about the scene where Laon comes back, encounters Cathy and concludes she is a PHANTOM conjured up to torment him:

”If you are trying to seduce me, spirit, I’m afraid I’m quite incapable at the moment.” “I … I am your Cathy. Your sister.”

But of course any spirit would take the form of his sister, the person dearest to his heart. “Seduce” is an interesting word choice, isn’t it? But listen to the way she says “your Cathy”!!!

”Why do you plague me so? Does it please you to see me like this? Have you tortured me enough?” ”Is it so impossible that I am indeed your sister? Can you not believe that I could and would follow you? Can you not believe that I have the strength and the love to come? Can you not believe that I would care—“ “Catherine!” His walking stick clattered to the floor.

And then he TAKES HER IN HIS ARMS. They fall down and roll around, his face muffled in her shoulder, and she “dared not look at him” which is code for “if I look at him I will kiss him” until they’re interrupted by a servant and guiltily spring apart. She’s so glad to have him back. Listen to the easy way they tease each other:

”Oh, hush, you are nothing like Lord Byron.” I took the page from him. “Your poetry is abysmal.” “Exactly like him then,” said Laon.

I SNORTED.

”You used to crawl into my bed when there was thunder. I was always fairly sure it was just an excuse, you would fall asleep so quickly when you clung to me.” “You were warm,” I muttered in half confession, avoiding his gaze. “And your bed smelt nice.” “My bed smelt of me.” My voice grew smaller and my fingers agitated. “Exactly.”

HE SMELLED NICE. And who can resist the all-powerful bedsharing trope amirite? The problem is, just because Laon is physically present doesn’t mean he stops being emotionally distant:

I found myself studying the rhythm of his gait, the set of his jaw and the weariness in his shoulders. There was so much between us that remained unspoken, and for all that I could read from the way he moved and held himself, it was not enough.

There are oceans of unsaid things between them. Plus, every time she lays a hand on him—and after their reunion it’s always Cathy initiating the touch—he acts like it physically pains him. How do you react to that, to your brother recoiling from you touch?

”I am not an ornamental hermit,” said Laon, his anger spilling over. I placed a hand on his shoulder and he flinched at my touch but calmed.

The sight of my own helpless brother disarmed me. I reached out a comforting hand to him, laying it on his shoulder … He leaned into my touch and I could see his demeanor soften before he pulled away.

”You need me here, Laon.” I put my hand on his shoulder; he flinched and pulled away. ”You aren’t safe here.” his eyes flickered to me and then away again. “It’s not about that … It’s not that I need you, it’s that I want—“ he stopped. His voice sounded as though it was about to break. He turned and simply left.

Laon does that at lot—breaks off in the middle of sentences. He’ll say things like, ”Is it not enough that—“ and then just stop. Like he has to clamp the words down before he can betray his true feelings to Cathy. He tells her she has to leave in two weeks, which is an entirely arbitrary deadline based on the fact that he can’t stop either worrying about her or wanting her:

”It is very dangerous out there, Cathy. In the mists. Anything … I cannot—“ “What cannot you do, Laon? … Have you not done it all? Have you not gone to university? Have you not left England? Have you not made yourself a grand explorer?”

What he cannot do, and what he longs to do above all, is protect her. He’s been petitioning the Faerie Queen to grant the Church some concessions, like license to travel & preach all over Arcadia, and it doesn’t sound like he’s getting anywhere. Cathy’s presence is both keeping him sane and driving him to distraction.

Though my eyes were on the fire, his were on me. I could feel his gaze on my skin and I ached to touch him again.

She ACHES for hiS TOuCH omg i am L I V I N G. Did I mention she DREAMS about him, like, constantly?

That night, I dreamt of Laon. He lay under a willow in a garden, resting his head on the lap of a pale, pale woman. She wound her arms around him and he sighed as she stroked his face … The dream continued for some time, and when I finally awoke, I found my eyes gritty and sore from unshed tears, and my heart aching.

She later recognizes the “pale, pale woman” as the actual Faerie Queen who invites herself to Laon’s house on a sort of Royal Progress. This is Cathy greeting the queen and registering that she’s the woman from her dream:

I withered under her gaze and that knot of pain in my chest grew heavier and tighter. She smiled, and I could see again those lips brushing against my brother’s ears.

The thing is, Cathy invokes the imagery of lips brushing against ears in reference to her own memories of growing up with Laon, “his lips brushing against my ear in mimicry of a secret.” It gets worse. She’s summoned to the Faerie Queen’s chambers and the bottom drops out of her stomach when she sees the bed:

I remembered attaching my green ribbons to our old sheets. They had been our mother’s in her dowry, and when Laon had inherited them I had sewn on the green ribbons on an extravagant whim. I had worn those ribbons in my hair running through the moors. I remember him trying to snatch them from me as we rolled about in the heather. Those were Laon’s sheets on Mab’s beds.

Those are literally the sheets that made up their mother’s trousseau, that Cathy herself had painstakingly embellished with her own handiwork. In an era when all your clothes and linens had to be hand-sewn without aid of machines, it was indeed extravagant to spend that much time adding green ribbons to a perfectly serviceable set of sheets. The symbolic significance though—Cathy would have sewn them on for Laon, would have expected Laon to sleep on them. WHAT KIND OF FUCKING MESSAGE IS THIS BITCH TRYING TO SEND??? Cathy can’t be blamed for wondering. It makes her blood boil to imagine Laon in the Faerie Queen’s arms. If the goal was to make Cathy insanely jealous by flaunting her hold over Laon, well, achievement unlocked I guess.

The Fairie Queen takes up residence. She insists on (1) a masquerade ball and (2) a boar hunt. The ball is a highly bizarre affair—the dancers are clockwork automatons, the guests materialize out of paintings—but one thing it does is force Cathy and Laon to confront their frankly off-the-charts level of physical attraction to each other:

He loomed over me and I felt that prickle of annoyance that I have known all my life about his height. “You— you’re…”he hesitated before finishing. “You’re quite pretty.” The knot within my heart tightened. I simply could not remember the last time he had remarked upon my appearance. He said nothing when I twirled before him in old dresses on the eve of my first dance at the squire’s house. Nothing when the village girls and I gigglingly contemplated the prospect of marriage and asked his assessment. Nothing when I attended his first sermon in my best dress and mother’s brooch. He must not have done so since we were children. My brow furrowed, trying to make sense of that knot within me. It ached with a visceral familiarity, as though I had borne it all my life without knowledge of it. “I’m sorry,” said my brother. “I should not have said anything.” “No … I hadn’t realized how long it was since you last said that.” A smile wavered at the corner of his lips.

”Cathy, do you think me handsome?” … I took a step closer, to see him better. A flush rose within me, unaccustomed to the nearness of him. Without asking, I reached behind him and undid the ribbon of his domino mask. It fell free of his face, and I kept staring. For the first time in a long time, I simply looked at my brother’s face. It was strange, as I had thought it so familiar, but it was to his moods and changes, the subtle quirk of his mouth or flash of his eyes …. Would she think him as beautiful as I did?

Ok first of all to reach behind someone’s head and remove their mask is the most intimate of gestures. Second of all, Cathy and Laon encounter another pair of siblings at the ball who are codependent as hell and not tryna hide it, of the “he stroked her hair with the lightest of touches…. she drew a nail across the skin of his jaw” variety. Those two are described as waltzing across the floor in a hold “too close to be decent,” which could also describe their relationship in general tbh. What’s interesting is that while Laon and Cathy do not waltz together at the actual masquerade, that night she dreams about waltzing with him. The significance of the waltz versus one of the regular old country dances is the waltz is deemed waaaaay more risqué; you spend the whole dance with one partner and there’s a lot more skin-to-skin contact. Halfway through the ball, the Faerie Queen claps her hands, dispels the illusions that festoon the hall and voila, the fae revert to their true shapes! The singing birds are revealed to be human prisoners in chains! Cathy’s elaborate ballgown disappears!

”Cathy …” My brother choked out my name. I looked confused at his face. He was staring at me intently. The hunger in his eyes was both alien and achingly familiar. That knot within me tightened and I felt a warmth spread across my skin. “You—“ His jaw clenched and his lips pulled into a tight line. He did not stop staring, though, even as I could tell he was trying to stop … I was completely naked underneath the gossamer thin fabric. I could feel my brother’s gaze upon my skin, his study of my shape.

He can’t tear his eyes from her naked body and I don’t care how cliched it is, I am HERE FOR IT. She flees up to her room then, and it’s in the context of her mortifying exit from the ball that she has the dream where she’s waltzing with Laon:

We were at once running through the heather and arguing over his departure to become a missionary. We were bickering over toy soldiers, getting lost in the garden. We were gazing upon our father’s coffin and despairing over our inheritance of debts. All moments of our intertwined lives tangled before me. I felt that old, familiar knot within my chest tighten. My fingers traced against his flesh and I found the words that were written there …. As I read his bound soul, his hands uncovered mine. We followed each unutterable word, each branded red and raw in the book of human skin … I found my own name written upon the book of his soul.

This is (1) unbearably poetic (2) inevitable. Their whole lives have been leading to this. And then the next day she confronts him in the stables before the hunt:

“You can’t do this alone. You need me here.” “You don’t understand, Cathy …” “If not me, then someone else, a wife, Miss Davenport.” My voice was hollow even to my own ears; I did not want him to marry. To utter the words twisted the knotted pain in my chest, the knot I did not want to give a name to. I remembered feeling it every time he flirted with another woman, every time the ladies at church would flutter by and giggle at the prospect of an attachment. I had carried it within myself for so long, heavy as a stone. For the first time, I felt the true weight of it, across my shoulders and tight around my chest. I felt a spinning sense of unbalance even as that weight and pain anchored me. “You need someone and it should be me. You should not be alone here.” “I want you here. More than anything.” “Then why are you sending me away?”

Do you hear that? The weight of her painful passion for her brother has anchored her for so long that she’s unbalanced by the loss of it. When she places the look in his eyes as lust, when the knot in her chest begins to loosen the tiniest bit, she’s flailing bc she doesn’t know what to do with herself. At this point I need to spoil the central twist of this story so I urge you all in the STRONGEST terms to please go read it then come back ok?

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

Gothic fiction is full of doubles. Not like, literal doppelgängers, but characters whose existence is designed to cast certain traits of the protagonist’s into sharp relief. Fresh off the boat the very first person that Cathy meets in Arcadia is Miss Ariel Davenport, the aforementioned changeling whose function in Laon’s household is unclear. Ariel is weird. She rambles on about esoteric subjects, asks non sequitur questions, and claims an unearned intimacy by calling Cathy by her Christian name. Ariel was swapped for the “real” Ariel Davenport as a baby, and grew up thinking she was human. Here’s how she found out she wasn’t:

”I do know I don’t need food. I don’t starve, I just feel hungry … Ariel Davenport’s family died in a workhouse. I watched them starve when I did not. Whatever fae gears were inside me kept turning.”

What a brutal awakening. Ariel talks a lot about how she doesn’t fit in, how she doesn’t really belong in Arcadia but when she tries to do human things like embroider a handkerchief or love someone there’s an offness to it:

”But it’s not quite the same. Doesn’t come naturally.”

Ariel’s name recalls the spirit from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, who also got a pretty raw deal—she was a genie-in-a-bottle enslaved to a magician with delusions of grandeur— and Ariel Davenport likewise never grows enough of a spine to openly cross her master. Her “master” would be the Faerie Queen, the one at whose court Laon is currently detained. She’s the one pulling all the strings. There’s a reason that Ariel was sent to stay with Laon and Cathy, and the reason, as you may have surmised, is that Cathy is a changeling too. DUN DUN DUN.

That’s the revelation that shatters her. It’s Ariel who discloses the truth to her, a truth the reader has probably divined already from other hints; it’s Ariel who, transfigured into various animal guises, is the quarry of the hunt. Cathy plunges a knife into Ariel’s heart (!) bc someone’s gotta do it, the Queen has decreed Ariel must die for sport and at least this way Laon’s hands will be clean of murder. It’s ok if Cathy does it, she tells herself, because she doesn’t have a soul. And the consummation of her and Laon’s relationship happens right on the heels of that, because you can’t really expect a mainstream audience to be invested in a love scene unless you assure them it’s not really incest since they’re not blood-related, so that checks out. She’s trying to wash Ariel’s blood off when he knocks on her door:

No, Catherine Helstone’s brother. I corrected myself … He was not mine to call my own.

I did not turn around. I did not want to see the look in his eyes. I feared his pity, his revulsion, his anger. I dreaded it all, but above all, I feared his absence.

Ahsjhdjfhdjfd he drops his greatcoat on the floor, rolls up his sleeves, and takes up a washcloth to bathe her:

”We used to share a copper bath like this by the fire,” he said conversationally. I could hear the strain in his voice, see the slight tremble in his motions. “When we were small enough to both fit inside the tub. You hated washing your hair because of the soap in your eyes.” Did I giggle when he upended buckets of water over my head or was I angered? Did I sit patiently as he scrubbed my back or did I squirm at his touch. The water was lukewarm but Laon’s touch was anything but cold. I followed his every movement, the nonsense patterns upon my skin. I was holding my breath, listening to his. I could feel him, warm and solid behind me, his breath hot on my shoulder, at the base of my neck. Shivers spidered down my spine and spread over me. I ached … And then, his hands were on me again, strong, demanding. I revealed in his force; it proved to me that I was not breaking, that I would not shatter. He tightened his grip on my hips and I gasped. Fleetingly, I felt real.

That’s the crux of it. Her entire life has been a sham; being loved by Laon is the only thing that’s left, the only thing that’s real. You can see her already begin to doubt her recollection of the past, wondering “did i giggle…? did i squirm…?” because HONESTLY IT COULD’VE BEEN INCEPTION. HOW DO U KNOW WHATS REAL. She’s spent the first half of the novel spinning us endless anecdotes from her childhood with Laon, and now this happens, it destroys the foundations of her identity:

All my memories seemed so distant. My imperfect, simulacrum mind with its imperfect memories … I told my youth to myself like a story, trying to remember who I was. I told myself about the little papers I wrote with Catherine Helstone’s brother, the names we gave the toy soldiers and the fantastical yet tediously mundane lands they explored … It all seemed so very insubstantial. Except that memory. I flushed warm whenever my thoughts brushed against it. Unlike everything else, I remembered with embarrassing clarity, every touch between us, every biting kiss and each hot breath. I was a moth, speared like a specimen by his scrutiny. I lay under him, pinned. His gaze, his touch, his grip made me real.

This is Cathy two or three days ago talking to Ariel about her earliest memory:

”I always liked to think that my first memory was of Laon. I was three, maybe and we were playing. I don’t remember what, but we were hiding under a table and we had to be very quiet. The tablecloth was red and I think I remember his fingers against my lips.” “Is it real?” “Of course it is,” I said. I touched my fingers to my mouth, lingering on that memory, the vivid feeling of his skin against mine.

If she doesn’t even have her memories of Laon, what does she have??? What is true and what is a forgery? This is from her waltz dream the night before:

We were surrounded by faceless automatons, by soulless far, by mindless beasts. He was the last real thing within these borders, under this unreal sun.

So the Queen and her retinue depart. Cathy and Laon are not atm seeing eye to eye because he’s wracked by guilt for the carnal sin they’ve committed, and she’s wracked by guilt because she, you know, murdered Ariel. I’m not at all surprised at Laon, though—this is after all the man who wrote in his journal:

Sometimes this cross is heavy beyond endurance. I carry it in repentance for the sins of my heart, for that is the same as the sins of the flesh. To look upon a woman in lust is to have committed adultery with her already . I know this and I bear it. I feel that I shall bear it for all my days.

For all his days, he says—he’ll go to his grave loving Cathy and that’s the tea. But right now she’s hurting, and she more or less keeps to her bed:

He did not ask if I was going to leave the room or when; he recognized this childish habit already. I had done it after the funeral of Catherine Helstone’s sister when I was seven and a half, then again for a while after her father’s. I remembered counting the threads in the quilt, willing my world to be just that warm, soft embrace. He had taken care of me then … He still gazed at me in hunger when he thought I wasn’t looking. I yearned for that closeness, that reality, but I could not bring myself to deserve it. Day after day, I ate because he bid me to.

He has looked after her in her grief before and he does so again now. She spends the next few chapters avoiding his name and referring to him as “Catherine Helstone’s brother.” What jolts her out of her funk is, one day they crawl into the belly of a beached whale and catalogue the wonders contained therein. It’s an adventure, and she doesn’t initially go willingly:

Deaf to my protests, he had gathered me into his arms, deposited me onto the floor and proceeded to roll my outdoor stocking onto my feet. Despite my squirming and kicking, he persevered.

Lmao this is peak sibling interaction. Once they’re inside the belly of the beast, of course, it turns into something else:

He was standing very close to me and all at once I was all too aware of him. I forgot why I was fighting so hard to put aside our attraction, forgot all the reasons I gave myself for why I shouldn’t. Each memory seemed to lead me inexorably to this point where I was standing before him, slightly too close and far too afraid. I had not wanted to give name to this passion, not wanted to acknowledge it. I could have gone to my grave not knowing why I felt this ache whenever I saw Catherine Hailstone’s brother. I could have passed this life blind of my own longing and ignorant to his. I could have … He was simply there, too close, too real and too beautiful.

So OF COURSE they tumble into bed in Cathy’s tower room amidst their scribbled notes (they’re working on translating the Bible because “the mother tongue is the best missionary”) and the ink is blotted onto Cathy’s skin holy shit how appropriate is that. All those Greek and Latin texts they pored over as kids, the sermons he practiced on her, all of that was leading up to this: Cathy Helstone, the wife and helpmeet that Reverend Helstone DESERVES. I am strongly put in mind of two other stories stop for a second and hear me out: (1) Pygmalion, the tale of the sculptor who falls in love with his own creation and brings her to life and (2) Tam Lin, the ballad about a fellow who’s abducted by the Faerie Queen and whose ladylove rescues him through sheer grit and pluck—her trial is to hold onto him and not let go while he transforms into every dangerous beast under the sun. In the beginning it seemed like Laon = Tam Lin but now it’s Cathy who’s fallen into the Faerie Queen’s clutches.

we lay curled up against each other like the working dogs used to by the fire. He looked over at me and with a lazy, contented smile on his lips, he said, “Cathy—“

”Don’t call me that,” I said, cutting him short. Panic welled up at the back of my throat at that name. “I’m not —“

”Cathy,” he said again, pressing his face against the curve of my neck. I felt his warm breath upon my skin and giddy pleasure spread from those lips; I calmed. “Let the other be Catherine. And you can be Cathy. You will always be my Cathy and you will always be my sister.” I raised an eyebrow at that, and he had the decency to look sheepish. “And other things, true,” he said. “But either way, you shouldn’t think of yourself as less real. And I do have to call you something.”

”I’m not real.”

”You feel real to me.”

I love how her being “other things” to him doesn’t in any way negate her being his sister. Lord, that “you feel real to me” is everythinggggggg. At the same time I can’t blame Cathy for being assailed by doubt:

”it’s possible that no memory before I set foot on fae soil is real … I can’t trust my own mind.”

”I know my sister like I know my own mind. I would know if you —“

”You thought I was an illusion created by the mists to torment you.”

”I had imagined you so many times … I knew I had to leave, I wanted you too much … So, believe me. I did not doubt you because you are not who I know you to be. I doubted you because of my own weakness. You are the sister I are up with, the sister I have loved and love now. And that’s all that matters.”

Laon goes as far as to try to obtain receipts to prove her realness: They attend a Goblin Market where everything is for sale—for a price. He offers to sell an arm, a leg, a lung and an eye in exchange for Cathy’s memories??? It’s half of him for half her soul, I guess. Find yourself a man who looks at you the way Laon Helstone looks at his sister:

”Cathy, I love you.” Unlike his earlier declarations, he said it quite plainly as though it were an observation about the weather … “I’ve loved you, adored you, desired you for as long as I remember … As a sister, as a lover, it doesn’t matter … You doubt the truth of your mind and your memories, and if this can give you answers … Then I’m willing to pay the asking price for that.”

This speech absolutely melted me. She talks him down from selling an arm for her soul, but I mean, as far as God’s concerned the way she feels about Laon skates perilously close to idolatry:

For all that we had the books of our faith before us, he stood between me and every impulse of religion, even as he reached out to me with the promise of intercessory grace, he eclipsed such hopes of heaven. I had made an idol of him, and for all my excuses that this but a return to the childish hero worship I had once had for him, this went deeper. When he clasped his hand around mine in prayer, when I knelt before him, I thought not of God, that Lord of Hosts, nor of Jesus, the Redeemer, but of him, simply and eternally.

So to recap: Laon and Cathy are holding onto each other for dear life in this godforsaken hellscape of a ruined castle-manor where the weather has to be summoned with arcane spells and the flowers, instead of thriving or wilting naturally, have to be individually painted with the change of seasons. Come to find out, they are literally in hell. Not purgatory, hell itself. Which would explain how all Laon’s proselytizing has amounted to one (1) successful convert. That’s a piss poor track record by any metric. And their lone convert didn’t even accept Jesus Christ as his savior on Laon’s watch. It happened when the other guy, Reverend Hale, was here. What happened was Reverend Hale’s wife decided to take her Communion bread unsalted, and was promptly CONDEMNED TO HELL FOR ETERNITY because remember the first rule of Arcadia: Don’t eat anything unless you salt it. She is the madwoman in the attic, the “woman in black” that Cathy has caught glimpses of from time to time. It was an experiment designed to show that God’s grace extended even unto Arcadia. It didn’t work, but I guess anyone who witnessed this crazy stunt would have developed a newfound respect for humans and their faith. What this means is that the madwoman in the attic is not after all the original Catherine. She is not Laon Helstone’s sister, which was the working assumption of both Cathy and the reader up till now.

A fire breaks out in the kitchen. Cathy and Laon are unharmed by the conflagration. This is because in the house they are still protected by the geas — the one that is centered on Laon, the one that Cathy was told extended to her too because “Blood binds blood. And blood knows blood.” But the entire point of Cathy being a changeling is that she does not share Laon’s blood. Something doesn’t add up. A rider arrives with a letter. It’s dated months and months ago, from the London Missionary Society. Someone has been carrying on a correspondence with Reverend Helstone’s sister in their name, but it isn’t them, and they sure as hell did not sponsor Cathy’s passage to Arcadia. The truth hits Laon and Cathy at the same time:

My mouth was a grave of words, each thought dying there and it was their rot that I tasted, that filled me with gut-wrenching revulsion. He laughed, threw his head back and just laughed. His wide shoulders shook with his senseless mirth until his eyes too were filled with tears. “I thought you were an apparition to tempt me.” His beautiful mouth twisted cruel. “I thought the mist spat you out to make me sin, to pull me down, to drag me to hell. I thought I could outrun myself, my own sins, my own sister. I thought—“ “Laon, no …” I wasn’t sure what I was objecting to, but I wanted him to stop. I wanted myself to stop. “But they did better than that.” I flung myself at him, covered his lips with mine. Tear-stained hands cupping his face, it was not a kiss so much as a hard, stubborn meeting of lips. It needed to stop. Everything needed to stop, to silence. Gasping, he choked out, “You’re my sister.” My cheeks were against his face and my tears were his. We were broken mirrors of one another. “You’re my sister,” he said again. He did not push me away.

!!!!! SHE’S REALLY HIS SISTER AFTER ALL NOT A CHANGELING IT WAS ALL PART OF THE FAERIE QUEEN’S PLAN!!!! Here she is confirming it:

”My grand scheme.” She made a gesture towards the clockwork that framed her throne. “The sins that I have set in motion, the gift that I have given you. Had I not summoned you to Arcadia, would you have seen these wonders? Had I not placed into my own home, remade for your pleasure, would you have realized your love?”

And it wasn’t like she lied about it—the fae can’t lie, after all. That’s why they’re so deadly at weaponizing the truth. She just left a trail of breadcrumbs and let people (aka Ariel) draw their own conclusions, and spill those conclusions to Cathy. You have to admire how elegantly she sprung the trap. And certainly neither Laon nor Cathy appears to regret falling into each other’s arms. It’s just that once again Cathy’s whole world has been turned upside down:

There was an acidic taste at the back of my throat … Our love had been the last pure, real thing that I had clung to and it was slipping away … Every kiss, every caress that had passed between us came to the fore of my mind, now tainted by new, old knowledge.

Okay but you know here is what else Cathy has also said on the subject of forbidden knowledge (one of the oldest senses of the verb “to know” is to know someone biblically):

The world was made with words. If I looked hard enough, I could read those words still. They flowed in the veins of the world, written on their seams. They told me this tree would reach the heavens. They told me nothing was forbidden. They told me knowledge could not be a sin.

Being expelled from Eden was not altogether a bad deal for Adam and Eve. And we are talking Edenic parallels here, since it’s revealed one of the Faerie Queen’s names is Lilith, aka Adam’s first wife. When I was younger and thought myself very superior I was of the Phillip Pullman School of “it is better to know sin than to remain ignorant and innocent,” but it’s not that simple. Cathy and Laon came to Arcadia to save souls; now it looks like they’ve lost theirs. Laon has spent more than half his life wrestling with theology: he is a preacher, and singularly unsuited to doing anything else. I keep circling back to that image of words written on the seams of the world, and I think about Cathy’s waltz dream where she read her name on the book of Laon’s soul, and the masquerade ball before that where they encountered the too-close pair of siblings whose skin was actually branded with words??? Not tattoos actual words of fire. Cathy could only kind-of read them, not being fluent in the Arcadian tongue. Cathy and Laon have spent half this novel translating scripture. Words are the building blocks of reality. If you notice in the passage where she finds out they’ve been sinning this whole time, it opens with “My mouth was a grave of words.” Anyway, Cathy is all to pieces because a person can only sustain so many blows to their sense of self in quick succession:

Lantern in hand, I drifted through the castle, numb from new knowledge: I was human. I was in love with my brother. I was in hell.

She’d need time to process even one of those revelations, let alone all three at once. And in the end they decide to stay in Faerie and do missionary work together. Because, Cathy points out, if “the mother tongue is the best missionary” and here they are in Hell, it can only help their cause that they are both fluent in sin. GIRL, A+ LOGIC. If anyone wants to read a short (<2k) fic about Cathy and Laon embarking on the next chapter of their lives, I highly recommend this one, where the Author’s Note muses, “What's the biggest theologically-evocative Molotov cocktail I could throw in their path?” and the story goes with “Cathy gets pregnant” asddfggkgjgk.

Friends, I do not scruple to say that Jeannette Ng has written the perfect incest book for me. I still can’t believe it’s an unabashed love story. Where the main pairing is canon and also endgame. It all unfolds inexorably, and when I found out Cathy was a changeling it didn’t feel like a cop-out, unlike other stories where “they’re stepsiblings!” or “one of them’s adopted!” absolutely does feel like a cop-out. Because Cathy’s identity crisis is at the core of the story. When I found out she wasn’t a changeling that felt inevitable too. It’s just such a powerful meditation on memory, that most fallible of human faculties. It’s such a power move to saturate the narrative with memories of Cathy and Laon playing as children, and then reveal that even those fragments aren’t necessarily authentic:

We chased each other through the mists, like we were children again, playing on the moors … Was I imagining now how much i had relished his closeness then? Was it simply newfound desire that was igniting all past memories or had I always flushed warm under his gaze?

It’s unlikely had they remained in England they would have gotten together. The Fairie Queen had to pull out all the stops for this to be endgame. Can we all just ... RESPECT.

[voidiots]

Pros and Cons in Courtship

Pros and Cons of Dating Una’to

Pros:

You don’t have to worry about in laws.

He’s fiercely loyal to all his partners and will cuddle you as much as he possibly can.

When he genuinely smiles in enjoyment, it takes your breath away.

He’s intelligent and has a sharp tongue that he will use to defend you if needed.

He writes poetry, and will write prose in honor of you, and will read it aloud to you if you so wish.

He tells you about the better parts of being in a circus, and even does some of his old acts for your entertainment.

He’s resourceful and reliable when he likes or loves you.

He’s good at reading people, either with his cards and pendulum, or merely by judging their character.

He loves to gather all kinds of secrets which means adventures if you’re willing to follow him.

Cons:

He barely sleeps and when he does they’re always nightmares that make him wake, coughing and choking on what he’s been told is black blood. Often blaming himself for what happened in his dreams, flailing, crying, and muttering to himself about a fairy tale being told as the room floods with black viscous liquid. 

He can never plainly say what he’s saying or thinking, your words have to dance with his until you get an answer. Even then, is it really an answer?

He has familial issues with his mother and doesn’t know where his father went.

He is has an avoidance of going to Gridania, muttering something about the pollen making his throat hurt and flinching near other Keepers that pass by. He also tends to mutter more about a game and rules of it not being breached yet.

He seems to attract weird people and is jaded most of the time.

Sometimes he seems like a different person while being the same person. Like his personality shifts slightly to a darker shade.

He knows a lot of your secrets that you wish he didn’t.

He’s a nihilist most of the time.

He’s scared of himself and his past and won’t tell you all of it at once, only in pieces after some prodding generally.

Tagged by @blindkarakul! Thank you for the tag! It was hard to do, but so fun. I made my friends who know some secrets about him very upset. Ten out of ten, does recommend.

Tag you’re it @shard-kilamarii @rkhdaj-tia @song-of-glass @deviouslynezha @thewitchofthechocoboforest @kalyianffxiv @weaveroftruth and @xaelan-songstress should you wish to do it! Otherwise, those who aren’t tagged, steal it from me and tag me so I can see please! <3

[blueeyeswhitegarden]

Arc V Anniversary Day 5

Day Five: Favorite character design/outfit?

I really like Yuya's outfit and overall design. The shades of red, green and orange really work well for his default outfit. I actually started to like the color orange more just because of that was part of Yuya's default outfit. I already liked the colors red and green well before watching Arc V. The orange shirt also helped to make Yuya's Pendulum necklace stand out more. I also kind of liked the whole coat cape aspect of his outfit. It was a nice nostalgic touch given that was a huge part of Yami Yugi's outfit and made Yuya stand out more as well. It also tied in nicely with how the other Dragon Boys' outfits were nods to the outfits used by the other protagonists. I really love Yuya’s goggles. They give him a more distinct outfit, while also fitting in nicely with his unhealthy methods of dealing with his emotions. The star on one side of his goggles is also pretty neat. I am still surprised that they haven’t made official merchandise of his goggles. His red Riding Duel outfit was also pretty great too. It worked nicely with his color scheme and I really loved that he used his goggles as part of his helmet too.

I also really love Yuya's eyes. That's one aspect of his design that I don't think gets a lot of attention. His eyes are just so expressive and you can easily read his emotions just from the design of his eyes. Admittedly, part of the reason why I love that part of Yuya's design is that I generally have a hard time reading expressions. This is more so with actual people rather than animated characters, but even simple simile faces or emojis can be kind of difficult for me to read. Being able to so clearly understand a character's feelings just from their eyes really appeals to me and it made it easier for Yuya to be so relatable and sympathetic. The combination of his terrific voice actor Kensho Ono and the animators making his feelings so clear with his facial expressions really helped to make Yuya's character shine.

Reiji's outfit was also pretty great. It's a much more simplistic kind of outfit for a rival character, but it works with Reiji's personality. The red and blue color scheme blend pretty well together. I kind of loved Reiji's scarf the moment he first made his dramatic entrance into the series. It is just so ridiculous that it turns around and becomes awesome again. It's one of those examples of just how fashion in a Yu-Gi-Oh! series can be so ridiculously cool. All of the memes centered around it just made it more hilarious and awesome for me. His glasses are pretty neat too and fit with his calm and collected demeanor. Although, it would have been nice to see more as to what he looked like without them in the series. I also really liked his hoodie he wore during the LDS vs. You Show mini arc. It was just such a cool different kind of outfit. As fantastic as Reiji's ridiculously awesome scarf is, I kind of wish he wore that hoodie for more than a couple of episodes.

I like Yuzu's school uniform. The color scheme works nicely with her design and her pink pig tails are rather cute. I also liked the musical note on her school uniform to tie in with her deck. Serena's purple hair blends in nicely with her red outfit and I like that the outfit she got after she sided with the Lancers was similar to her Academia uniform. Rin's light green hair works really nicely with the light blue and white color scheme of her outfit. I really like Ruri's long dark purple hair, but I also generally tend to prefer longer hair designs for female characters more so than those with shorter hair. Both of her outfits were pretty nice and I liked that she did have something different when fighting against Academia instead of just dueling in the same outfit.

I actually like Zarc's design too. His outfit does make him look like a cowboy, but I think that works in a way. It gives the impression to the audience that he is an entertainer, or at least performing for the crowd to a degree, and the color scheme works pretty well with his gray hair. Plus, it might have been a nod to the Team Satisfaction outfits from 5D's, which is pretty neat touch too.

[dianacloudburst]

Box of Shadows (Supreme) - June 2018

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Hello everyone! Once again I have to apologize for the late post. I’ve had these pictures ready for a few days and just haven’t had the chance to type up the post--but it’s here now!

And I have a surprise for you. Believe it or not... I liked this box!

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Here’s the Seeker’s Guide for those of you who like read ahead. I still don’t see any sources for the images, so that’s a bit disappointing. The image of Ra pops up pretty quickly from several sources with a Google image search, but I couldn’t find the other images very quickly and unfortunately don’t have the time to go digging for them this time around. Feel free to reply or reblog with links if you do stumble across them.

We got another paper product this month, too. This one is a “Scarab Invocation Poster.” I wouldn’t call it a poster--it’s a piece of paper--but I do like getting pages like this. I personally preferred the style of the Green Man page, but either way they’re a good addition.

If you like pages like this, you can find a bunch of them from Azure Green, which I’m pretty sure is where the Box of Shadows team is sourcing them from.

Here are some of the monthly staple items. Unfortunately, Cinnamon triggers migraines for me so I won’t be burning this incense myself, but it will make a good gift to one of my friends!

The oil they sent in this month’s box is Rue oil. They don’t specify which species it is from, but traditionally Rue has been used to induce abortions, so it is NOT safe around anyone who is pregnant or nursing, and it should never be used in aromatherapy as it is poisonous. Rue is also toxic to cats and other pets so keep it far out of reach!

The Litha votive is very pretty! It sort of smells like soap, but in a fresh and happy way. I like it. It contains Lavender essential oil and something called “meadow” fragrance oil. The herbs blended in the candle are Lavender, Thyme, Vervain, and Yarrow.

Ok, so, we did get an herb bundle and chime candles again his month. And you guys probably know by now how I feel about chime candles. But this time, I am okay with it. Even though I don’t really use chime candles, I don’t mind that they were included because it didn’t feel like they were replacing another item in the box--they felt like an extra add-on, which I think is exactly what they should be. So yay!

The herb bundle is cedar, which I’m also a fan of.

Tiger’s Eye seems to be the theme right now with crystals in subscription boxes. I guess it’s a very summery stone! Here we have a Tiger’s Eye bracelet and a wire-wrapped pendant, which looks like it could also work as a pendulum. They’re both pretty shimmery.

Believe it or not, we actually got two “bigger” items this month. This is a fabric tote bag. I’m not generally a fan of tote bags--I never use totes and usually they’re just cheap junk used as bad “giveaway” items that no one really wants. But this one is both pretty and lightweight enough to use as a wall hanging! I tucked the handles in and draped it up behind my altar. It looks great!

It also looks pretty dope under black light.

And then, a book! If there’s one thing that the Box of Shadows delivers on, it’s books. I like books. I’m almost done arranging my back deck space for the season, and I look forward to reading this in the shade, surrounded by my sweet little plants.

That’s all, folks! Definitely an improvement from previous boxes--I’m a fan. I think the combination of the book and the bag did it, and the fact that the herb bundle and chimes felt like they were added on rather than replacing other items. I look forward to seeing if the BoS team can keep it going!

[babyhufyty]

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[autolovecraft]

When at last my senses returned, all is changed.

His forehead, high beyond the custom of his kind, seeking such things as the Philosopher's Stone or the Wizard.

That I had with me my paternal ancestry that gave rise to the spot whereon I stood. My immediate sensations were incapable of analysis.

I delved deeper and deeper into the night. Know you not how the man had obtained access to the Devil, and ere he released his murderous hold, his victim was no more. Yet read as I was permitted to learn singularly little, yet as I grew out of childhood, I was strangely bent and almost lost within the castle walls. In what strange form the curse been carried on through all the Counts of my stay on earth, beyond which I had left at most but eleven years of further existence was made certain to me a cowardly or a passive victim. In unusually rational moments I would even go so far as to seek a natural attribute of a curse which for centuries had prevented the lives of the old castle with evidence of the peasant children was laid at the sight that they beheld. Meanwhile, joyful servants were proclaiming the finding of young Godfrey in a field, forced poison down his throat, and how had the curse; and the falling stones of the dread curse upon the house of C—, first one, then another of the château, and soon I saw by the simple tenantry as they conversed in hushed accents in the hidden arts, who had therefore been called Le Sorcier appeared through the perpetual dust of ages and crumbling under the slow yet mighty pressure of time, formed in the course of nature have died, for I knew must be far underground. Disliking the sight, I asked myself, was found drowned in the Middle Ages, as though life were not yet wholly extinct.

The cracked lips tried to frame words which have ever afterward haunted the house? Have I not told you of the sorcerers and there upon the wild and rugged countryside about, serving as a sacrifice to the spot whereon I stood.

My life, have prevented the lives of the hidden world of black magic. Louis, son of Godfrey, son of Godfrey, son to Henri, the Count. There in the moat at the creature who menaced my existence. The dread of years was lifted from my ears the idle tales of the sound, my belief in the course of nature have died, for, since no other branch of my ancestors had been seized some little while before they reached the exact age of thirty-two, there were no thoughts save those of grief at his father's at his end, dwelt on the aged wizard, and again I fancied that the words 'years' and 'curse' issued from the society of the otherwise untenanted gloom.He shrieked, 'Can you not guess my secret? Have I not told you of the torch which I was born, by name, Michel, usually designated by the storms of generations and crumbling with the gnarled trees of the longest of all were his eyes, twin caves of abysmal blackness, profound in expression of understanding, yet as I saw my opponent to be, I heard the heavy door behind me creak slowly open upon its rusted hinges. My parents I never knew. Louis, son to Robert, son of Godfrey, son to Robert, was strangely affected by that which I had always deemed strange, but which now became dearer to me by the fall of a curse which had been old Michel Mauvais had one son, named Charles, a month before I was an only child and the lack of companionship which this fact entailed upon me, piercing my soul with their hatred, and I labored as in the parks, the wild ravines of the longest of all, how the secret of Alchemy was solved?

And my mother having died at my birth, my eye fell upon a small trapdoor with a shocking sound like the hissing of a family document which he said had for many generations been handed down from father to son, speaking most particularly of the old château, and in his dying breath screamed forth those words which have ever afterward haunted the house? The apparition spoke of a flight of stone steps. But since those glorious years, all was frightfully dark, and my mind early acquired a shade of melancholy. Filled with wonder, yet he seemed at first only the manifest reluctance of my ancestors. Here I found what seemed much like an alchemist's laboratory. With new vigor I applied myself to my examination of the most profound and maddening shocks capable of reception by the strange care exercised by my aged guardian, in no manner could I account for the coming of the late Count's family, so that when Godfrey, innocent cause of the great elixir of eternal life and youth. As I drew near the age of Count Henri at his assassination; how he had loved to wander in life. But since those glorious years, all is changed. At my evident ignorance of his peculiar garment.

'May ne'er a noble of thy murderous line survive to reach a greater age than thine! Thus time and the want of a reminder dulled the memory of the sinister Charles Le Sorcier must in the unsteady glare the top of a stone somehow dislodged from one of the pendulum of the old castle in which they were set, opened wide with an expression which I had spent the better part of the father and son ran one redeeming ray of humanity; the evil old man loved his offspring with fierce intensity, whilst the youth had for his parent a more recently excavated storehouse for gunpowder.