#one framed as a masterpiece who was built from nothing. who was forever but a resemblance of the elder's shadow

[infamous-empire]

So I watched The Sky Crawlers

Woo boy, this is gonna be a long one.

Alright, so I’ve been interested in Mamoru Oshi films for a long, long time. He’s one of the most acclaimed directors in the anime industry, and most of his films are highly-regarded masterpieces, so I’ve always had an interest in his work. Then I watched Ghost in the Shell and it didn’t do much for me, and I promptly lowered my expectations. Still, I was curious as to whether his other work was any better, and thankfully this one delivered

MASSIVE SPOILERS FOR THE ENTIRE MOVIE AHEAD

Firstly, there’s one thing I can’t help but talk about in regards to this film: the atmosphere. This film has one of the most immaculate vibes I’ve seen in anime, and that largely just comes down to how every single part of the film is built to convey it to near perfection. All of the characters, even the more lively ones, are more than a little apathetic with understated expressions, the sound design is subtle and tends to emphasize silence a lot of the time, Kenji Kawai’s musical score is just eerie & haunting.

Hell, even the shot composition supports this (and it should say something that this movie managed to make me catch on to something as subtle as shot composition), most of the scenes are framed in a way where the places they’re in feel empty and the characters seem utterly alone even when in places where there’s other people with them. And this is even further backed up by the fact that the film rarely, if ever, uses background extras, making even the more “crowded” scenes feel pretty empty compared to most anime.

All of this comes together to create a subtle feeling of haunting emptiness which permeates the entire film, a feeling which is perfectly complemented by the character writing. Now one of my biggest complaints with the last Oshii film I watched, Ghost in the Shell, was how barebones the character writing felt, making everyone feel so unenjoyably hollow, but Sky Crawlers manages to rectify this in two ways. The first being that it does feel like there’s a sense of personality to all the characters present, on the subtlest level, even the supporting characters have their own little quirks which set them apart, and the two main leads get some fantastic development, which I’ll get to in a moment.

The other thing I enjoyed about the character writing is how it took the dry hollowness of Oshii’s writing and actually made it a compelling part of the film. The main character, Kannami, is a bit bland on the surface, of the film’s primary characters, he’s by far the least emotive and expressive, always approaching everything with the same look of detached apathy and never seeming that interested even in the ongoing plot. However, this is all by design. He’s a Kildren, someone genetically engineered from birth to be eternally young and fight in this war forever. He has no past to speak of or future to look forward to, no loved ones to ground him or home to come back to, nothing to fight for or believe in. All he has is a robotic persistence to move forward in this war because that’s the only thing he’s ever known. And it’s that same hollowness which makes the film’s ending all the more poignant, he subtly grew to care and love over the course of the film, all climaxing when he finally had something to fight for and believe in at the very end. And even if he’s dead, his and what he fought for will continue forward through Kusanagi.

While I’m on the subject, I’mma also talk about the film’s other lead, Suito Kusanagi, since she’s by far the movie’s most interesting character. Throughout most of the film, she’s something of a mystery, she’s cold towards Kannami and we see bits & pieces of what she does without much understanding of her internal logic. We’re fed details about her one bit at a time and slowly come to understand her more and more in a way which is incredibly engaging for me. She’s a Kildren who’s survived longer than anyone could have predicted, driven to suicidal depression by the monotony of fighting a meaningless, repetitive war while living an empty, repetitive life. Despite her coldness, she’s the most emotional of the characters in the film, as it’s made clear she truly does care about those she fights with and has the most strong emotional moments of the film. And the ultimate resolution of her arc at the end, being inspired by Kannami’s drive to change things and seeing hope in the future for the first time in her life, is just beautiful.

One last thing about the character writing, having a strong backbone of characterization makes some of Oshii’s other writing quirks work a lot more for me, specifically the lengthy philosophical discussions. Mitsuya infodumping about the nature of the Kildren works really well since it also doubles as her having an existential crisis and being able to unload about it to someone for the first time to the point where she’s breaking down in tears by the end of it. Or Kannami philosophizing about the monotony of Kildren life near the end, which feels earned rather than forced since it followed up on almost two hours of him slowly coming to terms with the nature of his existence.

The fact that I’ve rambled about this film for paragraphs and paragraphs without even talking about the themes yet is a testament to its depth and attention to detail, but let's get on with it. Fundamentally, Sky Crawlers is a war film, but it’s also a commentary on the frustration of our generation and on the nature of war itself in relation to modern society. It’s about the monotony of living life in a world which increasingly drives you towards pessimism and depression. The Kildren are people who have no hope for the future, the overly commercialized society which created them to fight in their wars has stripped them of any chance of a life beyond war and exploitation by the megacorporations who built the infinite meat-grinder they have no choice but to fight in. And without anything to look forward to or dreams to strive for, how do you meaningfully mature and grow as a person? How do you meaningfully develop a sense of time or continuity when every day is the same and you can’t even form new memories because of that? And without memories of the past or dreams of the future, how do you even form a reliable sense of self? These questions are at the core of this film, and they make its ending all the more powerful to me: Kannami and Kusanagi do finally find some sense of resolution at the end of the road, when they each find hope that one day they’ll be able to change the system. It’s only when they find hope in tomorrow that they begin to truly move forward. And Kannami’s death only enhances this for me, an acknowledgement that trying to change the world and truly progress is nearly impossible, an insurmountable obstacle which few might ever be able to achieve, but it’s still worth trying, worth moving forward, regardless.

I’d also be remiss not to mention the tourist scene. A bunch of tourists come to the base and treat the war they’re fighting in like a team sport they use to entertain themselves from a distance, then proceed to offer shallow pity when one of the Kildren is shot down and dies in front of them, offering vague platitudes about “fighting for a peaceful world” that not even the Kildren believe in. It’s a truly biting commentary on the sensationalization of war in modern media and adds weight to Kusanagi’s words later when she talks about how War is necessary in society because the idea of ongoing conflict in the world makes people living in peace behind the lines feel good about themselves by emphasizing the importance of peace. Plus, the scene of Kusanagi calling out the tourists is a great moment for her

One last thing, I got a lot of enjoyment out of comparing this film to Eighty-Six, my second favorite anime, since there’s a lot of interesting similarities to dig into. Narratively speaking, both are about a class of people designated to fight in someone else’s war and how they cope with being born on the battlefield & having no future, as well as having one of the main characters being one of them who’s survived longer than everyone else. Both commentate on the relationship between war and peaceful society (hell, Kusanagi’s scene of calling out the tourists feels like something right out of 86), and both have some incredible CGI fight scenes.

Presentation-wise, the film was great. The 2D animation is masterfully crafted and brilliantly subtle, and the CGI, while PS2-tier, is honestly really well-integrated, so I didn’t get any uncanny valley feelings. The music is incredible, easily one of Kenji Kawai’s best soundtracks.

So, yeah, this film is a masterpiece and I loved every second of it

[datastate]

when the comfort characters kill each other </3

[szallejh]

First Steps

Blink of an Eye - Part 1

Took me quite a bit to update the next chapter, sorry for that! It’s not that it hasn’t been written yet - I simply wasn’t at home (:

I don’t even know if anyone wants to read this. Anyway! If you do, enjoy ~

-   -   -   -

I sat down on the grass to try and sort out the absolute mess in my head.

After I had closed my eyes and taken a few deep breaths, I realized that I had no other choice but to accept my current situation. Even if this did end up being a dream, or some kind of bad trip, I was at least safe for now. And on the off chance that this was now my new reality, I figured that I didn’t want to endanger my life any more than necessary.

I threw a glance down at my body. What I saw was the typical Asuran body structure: slim shoulders and nothing that appeared to be breasts. From the waist down, it looked to be all sorts of clumsy.

Perhaps it wasn't the most desirable-looking figure compared to human standards, but maybe the male Asura had different definitions of beauty instead?

The thought made me giggle aloud, the strange sound of my new voice catching me off-guard in the moment.

That’s still not my voice! I thought. But with each syllable, the voice grew to be more familiar.

A hum escaped my throat. It's the same as tiring your voice to where it sounds terribly hoarse. It'll reach a point where you can't even remember how your voice sounds in a healthy condition.

Eyes looked down to observe what I was now wearing.

My clothing was very simple. I wore a cream-colored shirt which was corded up to the top and was fitted with blue shoulder pads. The cloth was garnished with pastel blue and pink geometrical figures.

A skirt of similar color sat snug on my waist, the front of it opened to reveal a pair of dark brown pants underneath. The material was comfortable, and soft to the touch. Also sitting around my hips, was a dark wide belt which was equipped with a few smaller bags. Opening one of them had revealed some copper, silver and even a handful of gold pieces.

I lifted up a foot, looking down to see my shoes were made of dark leather and crafted in such a way that allowed my claw-like toes to be freed.

With a raised arm, I spread my digits outward to look at the gloves they were now sporting. The material was in the same color of my shirt, and decorated with blue cubes.

Well, not too bad for a start.

A backpack sat nestled in between my legs, its contents containing a few food supplies, a filled water pouch, and a map. There were also a bunch more items stuffed into it, but I had never seen them before so I had no clue of what each of their purposes could be.

In a side flap was an attached hammer, which was quite impressive and rather heavy. It had the typical-asuran designs too. I reached down to grab hold of it in my hands, figuring it to be a rather suitable fighting weapon.

Wait a moment!

While only virtual and with my keyboard, I had fought many times before. But I had never actually held a real weapon before, and my combat experience was practically non-existent.

This was the real world of Tyria though, and that meant I wouldn’t be able to skip fights completely.

The thought of potentially really hurting someone with this hammer made me feel fairly uncomfortable.

Or rather, I could get hurt in combat myself.

I shoved the thought away and hastily plugged the hammer back into its flap. The sun still stood high in the sky, but I figured that I couldn’t sit on this meadow forever.

First things first, I needed to search for an accommodation for the night. And then I would start working on gaining control of my new life.

With a sigh I stood up, and shouldered the backpack. I kept an eye out for a location that could be proven promising for a night quarter.

Just a few meters beside me was a winding path that led into the landscape. From what I could see, it was leading towards the direction to a few cubic buildings. With a nod, I followed the path, staying attentive and watching the nearby surroundings.

Who knew what dangers hung around this place, searching for prey?

Occasionally there would be bundles of trees outlining the area, the similar-looking foliage granting me some sense of familiarity to my previous world.

On the left side of the path I was walking on, I spotted a small platform hovering in the air. Stony footbridges led towards it, its construct sheltered by three pyramidal frames filled with glittering blue diaphragms in the center.

The closer I came to the platform, the louder I could hear a steady, humming and buzzing noise filling the air around me. I figured its source had to have been the structure's glittery blue middles.

Floating all around the platform were small cubes. Some of them were overgrown with pink and blue plants, a few even covered with vines that were wired to the ground.  

Although I had seen this more than once before in-game, it had never made such a majestic impression as much as it did right now.

Slowly I ascended one of the footbridges, unsure if the construction was truly as steady as it looked.

Above I could see two golems standing guard. "Whoa!" I muttered, not wanting to mess with them. Luckily for me, they seemed to be in some kind of standby-mode which was made apparent by their beeping and lack of obvious care when I walked by.

Curious as I was, I reached out to stroke one of the vines growing on the platform with my hand. Startled, I retracted my hand very quickly when it constricted under my touch.

You've never been the one for plants... I thought to myself. I carefully descended the platform, suddenly glad there hadn't been any rain recently to turn the mossy stones into a slippery trap.

To my right was a classic laboratory which appeared to be housing a brisk-looking business. Everywhere I looked were Asura. Their appearances were diverse, and they bustled around while calling numbers and random tidbits of information to each other. If not that, then they were cursing aloud or beckoning to some absurd thing.

I didn’t dare to disturb them in their work, and continued walking towards the center of the town. There was little chance that a lab such as the ones I just saw would offer hotel rooms, which meant I needed to find better options.

Along the way, a few stray Asura and their golems briskly walked past me in a hurry, but none of them seemed to pay much attention to the stranger walking through their settlement. Few gave much greeting, and I kept my head hanging while muttering the occasional 'excelsior'.

While walking along, I started to feel anxious about my ability to find a rightful place in this new world.

How am I going to earn money to live? I asked myself.

I didn’t have the faintest notion of how golems worked, nor did I understand the techniques of something similar. With that lack of knowledge, I assumed most were going to call me the biggest-Skritt brained idiot in all of Tyria.

I sighed.

Perhaps there could be some dirty work that wasn't already completed by the golems around here.

At least I hoped so.

I threw a glance down to the coin pouch around my waist from when I had dropped into this new world. I still had a few gold coins, which meant I could possibly manage to get by for a couple of days. Hopefully by then, a better path would have revealed itself for me.

After walking through the town some more, I finally arrived at the city entrance. It was a big triangle made of stone, its sides both flanked by pillars of light.

Soren Draa, I remembered. At least that meant I was near Rata Sum, the main city of the Asura. And my midsection suddenly felt like it was doing somersaults.

I liked Rata Sum the most out of all other Tyrian cities, thus I couldn’t wait to see this masterpiece of architecture. Not only that, but to see the everyday life of the Asura who lived there with my own eyes.

I just had to walk through a simple portal in Soren Draa and...

I swallowed. What would portal-travelling feel like? I just hoped it wouldn’t feel similar to my previous arrival here…

Awestruck, I passed the light pillars and went through the city gate. A comfy sound originated from the pillars, similar to that of a technical humming. It wasn't loud enough to cause a bother, but it lingered all around.

Soren Draa on its own was a real masterpiece. A city - half built in stone with towers and floating hammocks. There were even hovering cubes that seemed to be planted with trees! Blue lights surrounded me everywhere I looked, and the sounds from the nearby labs assaulted me on all sides.

It was a choir of cries, clanking, beeping, humming, and golem's heavy metal steps echoing loudly on the stone.

I assumed I must have looked quite silly then, standing there with my mouth open and looking around in sheer awe.

Another Asura who had been standing just a few feet away and watching my astonishment finally spoke. "Each time you come to the city, it's a treat to the eyes, isn't it?"

Startled, I forced myself to close my gaping mouth once I realized someone had been watching me.

"Eh... yes. Absolutely fantastic. It's just as amazing as the first time I saw it", I said, staring at the ground to hide the blush ascending my neck.

The Asura shook his head in amusement, and when I finally dared to lift my head, he had long since disappeared back into the bustle.

Huh. Maybe I shouldn’t behave so stupidly next time, if I don’t want to be the main attraction today, I thought, staring towards the area the curious stranger had just been.

I straightened myself out and continued along the street, now attempting to look as inconspicuous as possible. I climbed an impressive amount of stairs, quickly taking notice of a portal at the end of the street which I knew would lead me to Rata Sum.

But seeing the intimidating portal was more than enough to snap me back to the reality that evening was coming, and I still wanted to rest a night before I hurled myself into the next possible adventure.

I glanced up to the sky, noticing that the fair blue color from the afternoon had now been replaced by varying tints of yellows, violets and pinks. The colors painted the clouds in whimsical patterns, and it created a window to look upon the first shining stars of the night.

When did it get this dark?

With another quick look around the area, I observed a pyramidal entrance just to the right. Even from the sliver of a doorway, I could see quite a few tables and chairs littered around inside. Above the entrance was a sign, which tagged the location as a tavern.

I blinked at the words, surprised I was even able to read the Asuran writing. Perhaps I didn't know how to work a golem, but at least I could read a strange new alphabet.

Happy to have finally found a place to stay for the night, I veered to the right to enter the tavern. Compared to the outside, it was far more bustling and busy-looking on the inside. But there were still a few empty tables, which meant there was a very good possibility that there would also be some available rooms as well.

Single-mindedly, I walked straight towards the counter to see a slightly-miffed looking Asura standing behind it. From the glance she threw at me, I wasn't sure if it was unfriendly or just annoyed.

The Asura had brown hair that was tied to a simple knot above her head. Her eyes were a dull-blue color that seemed to lack much expression behind them. But her ears - they were gigantic!

I knew that most Asura had really big ears, but these particular specimens had surpassed anything that I had seen so far. If they didn't extend out as far as they did, then they likely would have reached all the way down to her midsection.

“Excelsior. So, what do you want?” she spoke, her voice far louder than what I had expected from such a tiny body.

What did you expect from someone who works inside a tavern? A place that is almost always incredibly noisy?

I then cleared my throat. “Eh, I... I am searching for an available room tonight. And if that's possible, then maybe something to eat and drink as well."

I was readily made aware of how impolite I must have just sounded, but the Asura behind the bar didn't seem to mind. She toddled over to the wall behind her and took a key from it which was carved with the number 13.

Always a good sign.

She handed me the key. “That'll be a room for one night and one meal, which makes your total three silver.”

Nervous, I fumbled around the inside of my pouch until I was able to find the correct amount of coins before handing them to the innkeeper. She nodded, appearing satisfied before pointing me towards the direction of one of the empty tables. I walked over and sat down, waiting for my meal to arrive. It felt good to be able to sit after all of the tedious walking from today, and I rested my head upon my arms and closed my eyes.

It seemed these upcoming days were going to be incredibly long and possibly just as tiring.

[tracybirds]

Virgil + Yesterday.

I did say I wanted to do a more Virgil focused piece for @gumnut-logic ‘s FABFiveFeb Week Virgil and then I got excited about the finale and started this yesterday (heh) and I’m STOKED that it kinda falls in line with it :DDDD 

So.... Virgil and Jeff talk after his return, no explicit spoilers bc hadn’t seen the episode, but does deal with the whole aftermath thing. Hence the cut.

More from FAB Five Feb: [Alan] | [Gordon] | [Virgil 1] | [John] | [Scott] | [Jeff]

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Small things built into large things. Virgil had seen it many times before.

A single brick, laid down over and over again, could build a city.

A single note, resonant before a hushed audience, could transform into a symphony.

A brushstroke, surrounded by an empty canvas, could grow into a masterpiece admired around the world.

A single answer to a cry for help could save a life.

A single life saved could develop into a global rescue organisation and an obsession with kindness and service to others could develop with it.

Small things built into large things and that was how the world worked. Virgil adjusted to the minute changes in his life and so he was never surprised at the realisation of organic growth that occurred.

But not all change happened slowly.

An avalanche.

An explosion.

A submarine torn to shreds.

And yesterday.

Yesterday, they travelled over a lightyear, there and back again, to the far reaches of the Solar System and retrieved a man Virgil knew instinctively. He should have grown, in small, minute ways that added up over the last eight years to form a new man sitting before them.

But Jeff Tracy still looked like their Dad, still acted like their Dad, smiling and laughing and loving as though the whole ordeal was the result of a mere joyride. As though nothing had changed.

Virgil was wary of the man Scott had brought home with them. He was too similar to the man whom they had grieved. He was a living ghost in their home.

It was 1 a.m. and the house was silent as Virgil walked through the halls. He knew he wasn’t the only one awake, could even see the light spilling out from Scott’s room. He resisted the urge to check in on him. He wouldn’t need to do that anymore, not like he used to. Another change.

The night was humid and the floorboards creaked as he walked across to the balcony, where a lone figure with a familiar silhouette was framed by the night sky.

“Hey,” came the whispered acknowledgement of his presence. “How’re you doing, kid?”

“I’m not a kid,” he mumbled, pulling up a chair to sit beside his father.

A sad smile flitted across Jeff’s face.

“No, I suppose you’re not.”

They sat together in silence, drinking in moonlight and the rhythmic crash of the waves below.

Virgil had never felt tongue-tied around his father before. His father had never come back from the dead before.

“How are you coping?” asked Jeff finally. “This must be a big adjustment for you.”

Virgil’s throat closed up and he swallowed back the tears. Eight years and his Dad really was exactly as he remembered him. It didn’t feel real.

“I’m fine,” he said, chest hitching a little as he spoke.

“You haven’t changed a bit,” he said quietly, confused and unsure of the truth in his statement.

“Oh, yes I have,” said Jeff quietly. He looked out at the stars above them. “Never understood how people could use the stars to tell stories before. Never really understood the point of stories at all neither. I do now.”

Virgil stayed quiet. Once upon a time he might have felt a flicker of triumph at the words, the battle between his father and him on the importance of music and art and stories was an old one. What his Dad had always shrugged off as hobbies, Virgil had known were what was keeping him alive in the cold, dark days following his mother’s death. Virgil didn’t like to think that this was something his father and him now had in common.

“They look almost the same,” Jeff mused aloud, eyes roaming the familiar patterns. “No Lucy though, she’ll be up in the morning.”

Virgil felt uncomfortable for a moment. This was John’s territory – or Alan’s – and he didn’t like to think he was taking away something precious from them.

“The stories I told myself,” he said, still lost in his thoughts. “They’re written in the stars forever now. I’ll tell them to you someday, and you can tell me which ones are real and which ones I made up.”

“I’d like to hear them Dad,” said Virgil, softly.

“Well, we can trade,” said Jeff jovially, and just like that he was a man unchanged once more, a father who could have stepped right out of Virgil’s memory.

Virgil said nothing, drinking in the sight of his father’s smile. There were cracks he could see, now that he knew what to look for. As he watched, the light behind his Dad’s eyes shifted as he sighed.

“You always saw a little too much, Virgil,” he said, gruffly.

“Will you be okay?”

“I will. I’ve got your Grandma and I’ve got you boys.”

“Will we be enough?”

“You’ve done enough, kid,” said Jeff firmly, and Virgil straightened in his seat as he heard the commanding tone, still familiar after all those years. “The rest is not for you to worry about. Just let me be your father, nothing more, nothing less.”

Eight years with Scott, with John, with Gordon and Alan, means his instincts are screaming at him to not let this go, to check in with his father, to find out what was wrong and to do his damnedest to fix it.

After all, he’s changed too.

But for tonight, he could meet his Dad where he is.

For tonight, he could pretend that nothing had changed.

“Love you, Dad.”

He captured his Dad in a tight hug, hands curling around familiar shoulders and nose buried in a scent that pulled him back into the past.

Nothing had changed.

[nightcoremoon]

everyone sucks dark souls' dick over how it's triumph over hardships and whatthefuckever

asylum demon is a little bitch.

taurus demon is a little bitch.

moonlight butterfly is a little bitch.

titanite demon is a little bitch.

capra demon is a little bitch.

havel the rock is a little bitch.

stray demon is a little bitch.

bell gargoyles are cheating little fuckers.

these fights aren't hard. they're not difficult. they're painfully easy. those first seven I beat without breaking a sweat, most of them on the first or second try. would've been the first for some but the game just loves artificial difficulty. what's that, you want strategy and tactics and reaction time? too bad, fuck you, have random ass bullshit, skewed numbers (enemies have fuckhuge hp and damage and you have wet paper), extra enemies on the side who fuckin teleport and ignore physics (oh right it's havok physics so fuck it who cares let's all teleport), oh yeah and your framerate is cut to ribbons because the game tries to render THE ENTIRE WORLD AT ONCE and when your framerate is low guess what YOURE LITERALLY NOT EVEN ALLOWED TO PLAY because it kicks you to the main title. oh and the bonewheels? yeah I made jokes about them before but jesus christ who fucking OK'd these? was there any QA at all? oh you rested at that bonfire, fuck you you're here forever now because you move at half speed and they move at double speed and they can pivot midair a full 360 and they instantly break your poise and do a hundred damage each hit oh yeah and they can all hit you at the same fucking time. there's a literal zero frame window whatsoever to roll out of the way. all you can do is pray to the RNG gods that it'll let you play. and that's bullshit.

this game

is fucking

TERRIBLE

every single complaint I've seen about the prequel- WHICH I LOVE- and the sequel- WHICH I USED TO HATE BUT NOW LOVE BECAUSE ITS SO MUCH FUCKING BETTER THAN THE TRASH HEAP OF THE FIRST GAME- can be levied tenfold against this game.

fuck this berserk fanfiction trash that namco bandai threw money at for the art department and level design crew. they got all the budget, leaving nothing for the fuckin nonexistent ai.

the bosses all suck too. yeah ds2 had shitty bosses and reskins too, but IT HAD TWICE AS MANY AS DS1 DID. it's allowed a couple of trash bosses. and it has some absolute gems. the last giant is a perfect first boss that will decimate you if you don't know what you're doing but if you understand it you can plow through it easily, but can't be complacent with.

flexile sentry is a cool design and has two different moveset to content with, AND a level timer. skeleton lords? good boss. executioner chariot? good boss. mytha? eh, decent boss. smelter demon? fucking amazing boss. old iron king? cheating bastard but hey just don't fall in the lava idiot. git gud. fume knight? *chef's kiss* sir allonne? *chef's kiss* rat vanguard? incredible puzzle. the rotten? it's ok I guess but it's still better than half the ds1 bosses. najka? quelaag reskin but still ok. rat authority? sif and capra had a baby. prowling magus? ...ok that one is just embarrassing, I'll give you that. freja? great. pursuer? he'll crush you if you don't know what you're doing but all of his attacks are unique and avoidable and he looks fucking cool. ruin sentinels? tough as hell and worth the struggle in learning them. gargoyles? it's not a reskin, it's the ds1 gargoyle fight but not a completely horrible steaming pile of shit that's just a worse version of maneaterds in the prequel. lost sinner? good boss. mirror knight? good boss. demon of song? good boss. velstadt? good boss. vendrick? holy shit is he the best character in the series or what? and his boss fight... everyone says lord gwyn is the saddest because of sakuraba-sama's amazing talents at musical composition (so uh tales of symphonia is the best video game soundtrack ever made hands down don't @ me I'm sorry metroid prime but you have too much ambient noise) and PLIN PLIN PLON but I guarantee you that PLIN PLIN PLON would work well against vendrick too. oh yeah then you have the fake dragons (ok), throne duo (mediocre version of ornstein & smough), nashandra (meh), and aldia (meh), and also the bosses of shulva (meh) and the dogs of eleum loyce (meh) and the burnt ivory king. who is the best boss in the series hands don't don't @ me I'm sorry soul of cinder but you rely too much on nostalgia.

dark souls 2 is a fucking masterpiece with a few hiccups that are all holdovers from the first game. standing alone, this is probably the best action rpg ever made, and what everything else should build itself off of.

ds1 has a bunch of copypasted enemies with the word "boss" slapped on them, shitty mechanics, and even shittier stages.

quelaag is good. four kings is good. nito is good. seathe is good. sif is good. o&s are good. the dlc bosses are good. every single other boss is fucking stupid or fucking terrible and either can be cheesed or REQUIRE cheese.

what I mentioned before are jokes. ceaseless is just a pathetic version of dragon god who was vastly improved when he became old iron king. centipede demon is fucking garbage. bed of chaos is worse than garbage. priscilla is a meme. gwyndolin is a hallway. demon firesage is a reskin. gaping dragon is a waste of a cool design. iron golem is a joke who can be 1v1'd by tarkus. pinwheel? shut the fuck up about the prowling magus and congregation, pinwheel is not a real boss. lord of cinder? he's the reason why I don't parry, because parrying is cheese and it's fully dependent on having a $1000 graphics card and a brain that's wired to look at 60 frames per second. "but the human eye can only see 26" yeah exactly. man that's a short list of shitty bosses though. you're right? it's because I've listed all the dark souls bosses. and I haven't even listed all of the ds2 bosses.

I'm with hbomberguy here. ds2 gets more hate than it deserves. but I'll take it a step further.

dark souls 1 sucks.

it's not fun. it's not cool. it has a story ripped from a manga. its level design is a gimmick. the animations are shit. the hitboxes are shit. the physics are shit. the lighting and textures are still shit AFTER A REMASTER. the weapons and moveset variety is shit. the enemy design is shit. the locations all look exactly the same. the NPCs are boring and forgettable- I don't even know their fucking NAMES besides andre and gough (and gwyndolin but she's as real as her tits). it's built from salt and cyanide and broken glass rather than love for its roots. the music is the only part I can salvage without any buts. I can't even say that actually because THERE IS NONE EXCEPT DURING BOSSES WHEN YOU CANT LISTEN TO IT BECAUSE IT THINKS THAT DIFFICULTY IS SPEED AND SHEER NUMBERS.

it's a bad game.

you can like it. you can play it. you can love it.

but holy shit, shut the fuck about about it. I get it. I understand. I know. okay. got it. shut up.

I'll stop talking shit about your baby when you stop bitching and moaning and whining over how much you won't let yourself enjoy 2.

[faithambr]

House That Built Me

(Author’s Note: Based loosely on the song and my childhood memories of my grandparents’ house.) 

Here is the link to the song! 

Memories.

Those were the things that she had cherished over the years. The memories of her loved ones with such love in their eyes and laughter in their hearts. The memories of her cousins playing in the yard while the other relatives were too busy chatting up a storm on the front porch. The memories of her parents giving them all of the love and attention there. 

However those were only just a memory. A memory that would be in her heart forever.

“C’mon Anna,” a voice had interrupted her thoughts, causing the redhead to snap back into the present, “Grandma doesn’t want to let the cold in.”

“Coming Elsa.” she answers as she made her way through the garage.

Has it already been three years since she was the house? Three long years since her parents had died. Three years of feeling nothing but emptiness and heartache. Three years of feeling alone and abandoned by her sister.

But that had all changed with in this past summer. A rekindling relationship with her older sister, Elsa, and a new beau named Kristoff.

“Anna,” her elderly grandmother scolds her as she stood at the kitchen door, “get inside, before you catch yourself a cold.”

“Yes Grandma.” she lets out with a smile as she entered into the house.

Oh wow. she thought with her heart filled up with love and memories. I miss home. 

“Anna,” her grandmother had whispered into her ear, “I know that this maybe hard for you, but we need to figure out some things here.” 

“Right.”

But what do they need to figure out? Where do things need to go? Who’s going to take what? How are they going to go thru everything?

We’ll just have to take it step by step then. she thought as she was looking throughout the kitchen. That’s what Dad would say.

Her heart was pounding at the memories of her parents creating masterpieces in the kitchen. From the her father stirring the already delicious marinara sauce to her mother decorating the little snowflakes with bright colors and edible crystals.

“Hey sister.” a voice had interrupted her thoughts, causing Anna to snap back into reality.

“Oh hi, Elsa.” Anna smiles back at her older sister. “What are you holding there?”

“Mother’s shawl.” she answers while Anna was softly touching the purple pattern.

“I love it.”

“Me too.” Elsa continues. “I found it in her closet earlier this week.”

“Oh.” Anna had mouthed.” May I try it on? Just for old times.”

“Sure.” 

“Oh wow.” Anna’s eyes went wide with such memories. “Fits like a glove.”

“Except it’s not a glove.” her sister jokes causing Anna to giggle.

“I know.”

“I think Mother would want you to have it.” Elsa lets out with a smirk on her face.

“Really?” Anna’s eyes went wide as saucers as she held the shawl close to her heart.

“Yeah.” her sister nods. “I do remember you wanting to wear it every time Mother would bring it out.”

“And I remember her telling us stories about trolls and magical spirits.” Anna lets out with a smile as she continued into the formal living room.

“Right.” her sister nods just before she went upstairs to help their elderly grandmother. “Grandma and I are going to be upstairs for a bit. She needs me to go through some old files.” 

“Okay.” Anna replies back just before her older sister had made it up the stairs.

Her mother’s shawl was the only form of comfort to her as she sat down on the white chair. She knew that the formal living room was part of her home; yet it felt rather informal to her. It felt almost unnatural for her to be in there, no thanks to some of the rules that could have been established just for that room alone.

Growing up, her mother had kept the room as the oriental room. “As a room where I could keep my China set intact.” her mother would commonly say to their family and friends. Of course her mother would then go on and talk about how the China set was a gift from some royal ancestor in Norway. And yet we weren’t even allowed to touch them. Anna thought as she placed her hand delicately on the flowery, yet antique plate on the formal dining table. 

She smiled at the thought of her mother taking out the set for any formal gatherings at their home. She knew that all of the formal events were mostly for their family’s business, but yet they were definitely memorable. Maybe if things were different. she thought while she was examining the framed crocuses on the wall above the fireplace. Then we wouldn’t have to sell.

Her heart was beating at the thought of selling their home. She knew that both her and her sister wouldn’t be able to keep it. “But as long as I can keep my memories,” she whispered as she looked up at the family portrait, “then we should be fine.”

And she was right. As long as the memories are with her, the house should be fine without them.

At least it has good bones. she thought as she made her way on out of the formal living room. Good bones mean good structure.

She smiled at the thought of some family buying themselves this home, as she slowly made her way downstairs. She loved the fact that the home was built just for her and her family. It was her own father’s idea to add a second living space right next to her and her sister’s room. “So we can have our family and friends over for any event.” her father had always said before. Well he was right about that. she thought as she was making herself comfortable on the old tan leather lounge chair.

She marveled at the times where she would be watching the big game on TV with her father. She remembered all of those claims of bad calls coming from her father, while she was too busy tallying up the points on a spreadsheet along with Elsa. At least we had a great time. she thought as she leaned back into the chair. Ouch, what is that? 

“Chicken Noodle Soup for the...” she had read aloud while she was examining the book.

Her smile grew by the second as she continued on skimming and flipping through each page. She knew this book by heart and she loved every inch of it. This got me through the rough summer days. she thought with a warm smile on her face.

She knew that the books did keep her busy during the rough summer days, yet there were other things and people that did keep her occupied. She smirked at the thought of seeing all of their cousins come together for the annual family reunions during the summer. She loved the idea of having over after spending the day at the lake. Those were the nights. Anna thought as she was reliving the countless nights where she and their cousins would stay up and do whatever they wanted. From building blanket forts and watching VeggieTales to playing card games and telling dirty jokes. “And some of them were sure dirty.” she smirks as she got up from the large chair. “Even at a young age, Cousin Tom sure knew how to crack a dirty one.”

She continued on making her way through to the downstairs, until she stopped at the stairs to the basement. I wonder if it has already been cleared out. Anna thought while she was holding the shawl again for warmth and comfort. She knew that the basement probably hasn’t been cleared out in over ten years, no thanks to her family having the space to store anything and everything. Pretty much everything we have is probably in boxes. she thought as she slowly walked on down the wooden steps. Possibly from the business, too.

Her heart stopped at the basement door. She knew that anything could be possibly behind that door. It’s just a door. Anna had thought as she slowly pulled the basement door away. 

“Whoa.” she whispers aloud, seeing all of the vast emptiness before her. “It’s been cleaned out.”

She was right. The entire basement had been thoroughly cleaned out. The only remnants of the basement was their great grandmother’s big organ, her mother’s built-in sewing machine, and her father’s old office desk. Maybe Elsa’s planning on keeping them. she thought while she was inspecting the organ. Knowing her, she probably would.

“Hmmm,” Anna had continued on wondering aloud while she was looking around the basement, “I wonder if the hidey-ho is still around.”

As a young child, the hidey-ho was a place where her and Elsa would play in. From dressing up as princesses to creating some fake plastic food in the kitchen. Heck even the cousins were obsessed with playing in the hidey-ho. Oh how I wish that we could go back in time, just to enjoy those moments in there. Anna had thought as placed her hand against the wooden door. Even though she was only a young child, she will always remember being in there playing as a princesses in dress up with her cousins.

But I remember getting older, she thought as she left the treasured memory behind, and wishing just to come back down here.

But they couldn’t go back down there. The basement had grown over the years, even after their parents’ death. The basement became more of the clutter and stuff environment, rather than the extra space for more additions to the house. Maybe somebody could make it work again. she thought while she was making her way through the basement. Just like how Dad would’ve wanted it. 

Originally the basement was to be a space for storage, but then it was created as an office space/ family den area. A place where her parents were able to conduct business while keeping an eye on both Anna and her sister playing down in the hidey-ho. But it’s time to move on. she thought as she drew near the basement door. Time to move forward.

Her heart was aching  at the thought of leaving the basement behind, yet she knew that it was time to move on.

___________________________

She stood at the steps of the back porch, not knowing what else to expect. Maybe I should go down there. Anna thought as she adjusted her mother’s shawl on her slim shoulders. Just to see everything. She knew the backyard would always be the same, yet her heart was yearning for something more. More memories. she thought with a smile on her freckled face. 

She giggled at the thought of playing their own version of baseball, as she was strolling on down through the temporary makeshift baseball field.

“Play ball!” she could hear one of her uncles call out while she was walking on past the pitcher’s mound.

“Hey Batter, batter!” her father would chant as he stood nearby. “Swing!”  

The sound of bat and ball making contact made her laugh as she was standing at the edge of the field.

“I’ve got it!” she could hear her much younger self say followed by a crash into the bushes. “Ouch!”

“Ooooh yeah.” Anna had mouthed while she watched her much younger self slowly get up from the raspberry bushes. “That day was no fun.”

Of course after that she had somehow got into some poison ivy. “At least Mom knew what to do.” she whispered while she was walking on down the path. “Calamine lotion and special baths for a week.”

“Hmm,” Anna whispers as she stopped to take a look at an old car, “now this does look more familiar to me.”

She knew what it was, yet she couldn’t remember how it got there. Maybe Grandpa gave it to him as a trade. she thought with a curious look on her face. But for what exactly?

Then again it was more obvious to her than before.

“Oh wait duh,” Anna smirks, “it’s the old snow plow!”

How could she forget about the snow plow? Her father and grandfather were the ones in charge of plowing the snow off the roads in town. The snow plow was always my favorite. she thought while she was examining the plow. Only during the winter time. 

She remembered the early mornings of hearing her father pour his cup of coffee just for those long winters. Daddy loved those mornings. she thought as she continued on walking past the snow plow. But this was his little piece of heaven. 

And oh what a piece of heaven it was. From the old blue Vega sitting along the  rustic side of the pull barn to the scattered shrapnel of truck tossed to the opposite side of the path. The gravel on the path had made it more homely for her at the barn than at her own home.

Dad’s garage. she thought as she placed her hand on the door to the pull barn. His safe haven. 

Anna remembered all of the afternoons where she would be running down to the garage, telling her father that it was lunch time.

“Daddy, Daddy!” a faint voice of a child echoes through her mind as she pulled the metal door wide open. “Mommy say it’s lunch time!”

“Oh alright, freckles.” a huff voice had answered followed by a thunk. “Ouch!”

“Oh Daddy,” a little figure giggles making Anna smile, “what is Mommy going to do with you?”

At least Dad loved this place. she thought as she watched the memory of her father hug her all those years ago.

“Anna!” a voice called out, causing her to snap back into reality. “Where are you?”

“I’m in here!” she calls back not knowing whoever it was.

“Oh good.” her sister replies back as she stood at the door.

“You needed me?” Anna asks.

“Oh no,” Elsa smirks, making Anna feel right at home, “Grandma was worried about you. So she told me to go out and look for you.”

“Oh.”

“Well I’d figured that you would be here.” Elsa smiles at her sister.

“How so?” Anna gave her sister a confused look.

“Well,” Elsa began as she makes her way around Anna, “to say that this was Dad’s place is an understatement.” 

“Oh.”

“Yes Dad would stay in here and work on the cars,” Elsa continues as she sat herself down on a dusty stool, “but you would be here, talking his ear off about school and such.”

“Oh.” 

“So I think that this was your place, too.”

“You’re right Elsa.” Anna smiles warmly while she was glancing around the garage. “Hey look at this!”

“What” Elsa gave her sister a curious look, while Anna was pointing at something nearby.

“This.” Anna answers as she made her way to the shelving unit near her sister. “Remember this? Daddy used to wear these all the time.”

“Oh right,” her older sister smiled, “Mom hated it when he would wear this into the house.”

“Yeah well these were his favorite pair of coveralls.” Anna lets out with a giggle as she held up the dirty coveralls.

“And they sure do smell like him.” Elsa jokes.

“Yeah well,” Anna began as she folds the coveralls in her arms, “I miss him.”

“So do I.” Elsa whispers as she held her younger sister close. “He’d be so proud of you today.”

“What for?” Anna whispers.

“Well for one,” Elsa began, “ you came back from Hans, and two we are here because of you.”

“Oh.” 

“Plus,” Elsa continues  with tears in her eyes, “he would’ve loved to have Kristoff around more.”

“But he knew Kristoff.” Anna rolls her eyes at her sister.

“Yeah well,” Elsa shrugs her shoulders, “Dad and I had a placed a bet on you tow.”

“Oh really?” Anna cocks an eyebrow. “What was the wager?”

“Bragging rights.” Elsa had simply answered, making Anna smile.

“Well then who won?”

“Well who do you think?”

“I think,” Anna lets out with a smirk, “that you both have won.”

“You’re right.” Elsa giggles as she held her sister close. “Mom would’ve said ‘I told you so’.”

“Right.” Anna laughs while they were making their way on out of the pull barn. “Say does Grandma have the coffee going?”

“I thought that you didn’t like coffee? Elsa quirks an eyebrow at her younger sister.

“Yeah well,” Anna sighs dramatically, “I wouldn’t mind just enjoying our grandmother’s company.”

“Oh.” Elsa lets out with a smile.

“Now race ya back home!” Anna shouts in laughter as she ran on up the path.

“Oh Anna.” Elsa laughs as she was following her sister from behind.

“C’mon slowpoke!” Anna had shouted while she was keeping her eye on the prize.

“I’m coming!” a faint child-like voice had appeared, causing Anna to tear up.

“Hurry up!” a very much younger Anna had appeared right in front of her eyes. “Mom’s making some lemonade!” 

“Anna! Elsa!” their mother would have called out from the kitchen.

“Coming Mommy!” young Anna had replied as she disappeared into the abyss.

Memories. Anna had thought with her tears flowing freely.

“Anna,” her older sister gave Anna a concerned look as she stood at the edge of the driveway, “you okay?”

“Yeah,” Anna sniffs while she was wiping away her tears, “I’m okay.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah,” she answers, “I’ll be inside in a minute.”

“Okay.”

“Well,” Anna began as she looked down at the path, “Dad and Mom thank you for all of the memories here.”

“You’re welcome, my darling.” she could hear her mother say as she turned around and went inside. 

From then on, Anna would continue to treasure all of the memories there. For it was the house that had built her. 

[notveryglittery]

misc royality #1

summary: the sunshine ship gets the love they deserve.  words: 1,400 / ships: romantic royality <3  warnings: references to being touch starved. notes: i forgot i wrote this in early june. i think i was voice chatting with @do-your-socks-have-holes-in-them? anyway, there are prompts in our DMs so shout out to nick for, yet again, inspiring some royality fluff. a sequel of sorts to contact // read on ao3 

@fandersfic-royality @minshinxx @patchworkofstars @thesocialbookwormishere @wisepuma23 

Patton took a step back, admiring his hard work. He’d taken the last few hours to clean his room -- really, properly clean it -- so that he’d have more space for this project. All of the old yearbooks and sketches and journals were tucked away on shelves, the trophies were sat atop any flat surface that wasn’t already occupied, the plushies were spread so thoroughly over the bed that the sheets were hardly visible. The desk he liked to doodle at was shoved in a different corner, along with the chair, and it had left him with even more of an area to build his masterpiece.

A knock sounded at the door and Patton startled. His face lit up a moment later and he rushed to answer it. Giving his room one last glance, Patton deemed it acceptable, and opened the door. Roman stood there, his arms full of pillows and a number of blankets draped over his shoulders. He was dressed in his favorite pajamas (Patton knew they were his favorite because he was the one who had made them for him, a birthday gift two years prior) and…

“Roman, what’s wrong?”

The prince blinked at Patton, as if surprised to be asked such a question. “Nothing!” He answered and then winced at, not only the volume of which he’d spoke, but the strain in his voice as well. “Something…” He remedied, looking away guiltily.

Patton frowned and reached forward, gently taking Roman’s wrist in his hand. “That’s okay, sweetie,” he reassured, “that’s what tonight is for. Alright?” He pulled Roman into the room, taking care to make sure none of the pillows or blankets fell on the way. When Roman finally looked up, he gasped at the sight before him. Patton had made way for an extravagant pillow fort. It was easily, without a doubt in Roman’s mind, the most splendid one he’d ever seen built. Lacy curtains were pinned to the ceiling and stretched toward the walls, framing the entire thing in a soft white glow. Cushions and pillows were stacked four high and held steady by the backs of what looked to be chairs Patton had stolen from the kitchen. The entrance was guarded by two teddy bears, one wearing a cat onesie and the other with a sash and a crown.

“What do you think?” Patton asked, beaming at Roman with so much pride, it seemed like he was going to burst. He slowly picked the pillows out of Roman’s arms one by one while waiting for an answer and carefully tossed them inside the fort.

“Dearheart, it’s amazing,” Roman whispered, sounding awed. “You did this all by yourself?”

Patton squeaked at the praise and waved his hands, as if it weren’t a big deal. “Yeah, but it’s not that great!! I bet you make even more wonderful pillow forts all the time!”

Roman, whose arms were no longer occupied by extra pillows, swooped into Patton’s space, and cradled him against chest. “It’s perfect,” he promised, voice muffled as he pressed his face into Patton’s hair. “I love it.”

Patton giggled, arms squished to his sides by Roman’s enthusiastic embrace. “I’m glad. Wanna see inside?” While he was happy to stay in Roman’s arms forever like this, he had no doubt it’d be even more comfortable once they were settled.

Roman let Patton go, but not without first kissing him on the forehead, and gestured grandly towards the pillow fort. “After you, my darling,” he bowed low, itching already to take Patton in his arms again, to hold him, and kiss him, and never let him go. It’d been nearly a month since their trip to the Fantasy Realm, since Roman learned that he’d been touch starved and not just needlessly clingy, that he did deserve the affection and love of his dear ones. They’d done their best to help him in every way possible, whether it was just the brushing of fingers while passing dishes at dinner, or allowing him to sit as close as possible to them during movie nights. It was less jarring these days, for which Roman was ever grateful.

Patton wasted no time in falling to his knees and crawling into the fort. Roman was quick to follow, giving a most serious nod to each of the plush guards. Once inside, Patton reached over and tugged on a string, and a curtain fell shut over the door. The interior of the fort was bathed in warmth: fairy lights were strung up along the sides, an electric blanket was at the very base, buried underneath even more blankets. There were so many pillows, Roman couldn’t even begin to count them.

And in the middle of it all?

Patton, sat criss cross applesauce, with his hands folded in his lap, and smiling so prettily. He was in his comfiest pajamas, sky blue with clouds and stars printed along the fabric. His hair was already a mess of tangled, fluffy locks, and Roman wanted to run his hands through it desperately. He scooted closer, until their knees were touching.

“You look so comfy and cuddle-able,” he said, voice soft, as if speaking any louder would break the bubble of serenity surrounding them.

Patton’s cheeks went red but he took it in stride. “Cuddle-able,” he repeated, leaning towards Roman. “That’s a nice word. Would you like to find out?” His tone lilted up, the question teasing and inviting and so rare from Patton; it sent shivers down Roman’s spine.

It took a bit of shifting and shuffling until they were perfectly cozy, but they got there, eventually. Roman lay on his back, with Patton curled against his side, and half resting on his chest. An arm was wrapped around Patton’s waist, trying every minute or so to pull him closer closer closer, a feat not so easily achieved when they were already practically attached to each other. Patton held Roman’s free hand in one of his own while they other combed through his hair, twisting the locks ever so gently around his fingers.

With Patton’s tablet set up to play a variety of nature sound playlists, the atmosphere grew ever more hushed. Roman hummed to a song Patton wasn’t familiar with, but his voice was controlled and even, and it nearly lulled Patton to sleep. He might have if Roman didn’t clear his throat about half an hour later.

“Honey, do you mind if we move just a bit? My arm is cramping.”

Patton sat up and rubbed blearily at his eyes. He yawned, wrinkling his nose a little, and reached up to take his glasses off. If he was going to doze off, he didn’t want to worry about them getting in the way. However, he was distracted quite suddenly, by Roman pulling a blanket over his face, and whining into it.

“Ro?” Patton asked, leaning over him. “Are you okay?”

Roman answered with another long drawn out sigh before pulling the blanket down just enough to peer up at Patton from behind it. Despite his cheeks still being hidden, Patton could see just how red Roman’s face seemed to have gone suddenly. He grinned wide and laid the back of his hand against Roman’s forehead. “You’re hiding under the blanket because you’re blushing?"

Roman managed to look affronted for all of two seconds. He tugged the rest of the blanket away, his secret found out. His expression melted into something far more fond. “Fine, yes, I was,” he admitted. He took Patton’s hand in his and pressed a kiss to his knuckles. “It’s because you looked unfairly cute just now -- not that you don’t always -- but your nose was all scrunched up and your eyes squeezed shut and did you know you make the smallest noise when you yawn? You sounded like a kitten.”

It was Patton’s turn to blush. He allowed Roman time to roll onto his side before snuggling up against him again, relishing in the warmth and safety he felt from simply being in Roman’s presence. Roman began speaking, soft and slow, as he told Patton a story of one of his greatest adventures in the Fantasy Realm. His skin was buzzing at all of the prolonged contact, but in the most pleasant way, and so of course, he had to thank Patton in any and every way that he could. For the time being, a bedtime story would have to do. When they woke later on, he’d shower Patton in as much affection as he could, whether it was with promises to go on their own quests, or baking sprees in the kitchen, or movie nights with the others.

It was what they both deserved, after all.

[rhetoricandlogic]

The Limitless Perspective of Master Peek, or, the Luminescence of Debauchery By Catherynne M. Valente

Issue #200, Special Double-Issue

, May 26, 2016

AUDIO PODCAST

EBOOK

(Finalist, Eugie Foster Memorial Award, 2017)

When my father, a glassblower of some modest fame, lay gasping on his deathbed, he offered, between bloody wheezings, a choice of inheritance to his three children: a chest of Greek pearls, a hectare of French land, or an iron punty. Impute no virtue to my performance in this little scene! I, being the youngest, chose last, which is to say I did not choose at all. The elder of us, my brother Prospero, seized the chest straightaway, having love in his heart for nothing but jewels and gold, the earth’s least interesting movements of the bowel which so excite, in turn, the innards of man. Pomposo, next of my blood, took up the deed of land, for he always fancied himself a lord, even in our childhood games, wherein he sold me in marriage to the fish in the lake, the grove of poplar trees, the sturdy stone wall, our father’s kiln and pools of molten glass, even the sun and the moon and the constellation of Taurus. The iron punty was left to me, my father’s only daughter, who could least wield it to any profit, being a girl and therefore no fit beast for commerce. All things settled to two-thirds satisfaction, our father bolted upright in his bed, cried out: Go I hence to God! then promptly fell back, perished, and proceeded directly to Hell.

The old man had hardly begun his long cuddle with the wormy ground before Prospero be-shipped himself with a galleon and sailed for the Dutch East Indies in search of a blacker, more fragrant pearl to spice his breakfast and his greed whilst Pomposo wifed himself a butter-haired miller’s daughter, planting his seed in both France and her with a quickness. And thus was I left, Perpetua alone and loudly complaining, in the quiet dark of my father’s glassworks, with no one willing to buy from my delicate and feminine hand, no matter how fine the goblet on the end of that long iron punty.

The solution seemed to me obvious. Henceforward, quite simply, I should never be a girl again. This marvelous transformation would require neither a witch’s spell nor an alchemist’s potion. From birth I possessed certain talents that would come to circumscribe my destiny, though I cursed them mightily until their use came clear: a deep and commanding voice, a masterful height, and a virile hirsuteness, owing to a certain unmentionable rootstock of our ancient family. Served as a refreshingly exotic accompaniment to these, some few of us are also born with one eye as good as any wrought by God, and one withered, hardened to little more than a misshapen pearl notched within a smooth and featureless socket, an affliction which, even if all else could be made fair between us, my brothers did not inherit, so curse them forever, say I. No surprise that no one wanted to marry the glassblower’s giant hairy one-eyed daughter!

Yet now my defects would bring to me, not a husband, but the world entire. I had only to cut my hair with my father’s shears, bind my breasts with my mother’s bridal veil, clothe myself in my brothers’ coats and hose, blow a glass bubble into a false eye, and think nothing more of Perpetua forever. My womandectomy caused me neither trouble nor grief—I whole-heartedly recommend it to everyone! But, since such a heroic act of theatre could hardly be accomplished in the place of my birth, I also traded two windows for a cart and an elderly but good-humored plough-horse, packed up tools and bread and slabs of unworked glass, and departed that time and place forever. London, after all, does not care one whit who you were. Or who you are. Or who you will become. Frankly, she barely cares for herself, and certainly cannot be bothered with your tawdry backstage changes of costume and comedies of mistaken identity.

That was long ago. So long that to say the numbers aloud would be an act of pure nihilism. Oh, but I am old, good sir, old as ale and twice as bitter, though I do not look it and never shall, so far as I can tell. I was old when you were weaned, squalling and farting, and I shall be old when your grandchildren annoy you with their hideous fashions and worse manners. Kings and queens and armadas and plagues have come and gone in my sight, ridiculous wars flowered and pruned, my brothers died, the scales balanced at last, for having not the malformed and singular eye, neither did they have the longevity that is our better inheritance, fashions swung from opulence to piousness and back to the ornate flamboyance that is their favored resting state once more.

And thus come I, Master Cornelius Peek, Glassmaker to the Rich and Redolent, only slightly dented, to the age which was the mate to my soul as glove to glove or slipper to slipper. Such an age exists for every man, but only a lucky few chance to be born alongside theirs. For myself, no more perfect era can ever grace the hourglass than the one that began in the Year of Our Lord 1660, in the festering scrotum of London, at the commencement of the long and groaning orgy of Charles II’s pretty, witty reign.

If you would know me, know my house. She is a slim, graceful affair built in a fashion somewhat later than the latest, much of brick and marble and, naturally, glass, three stories high, with the top two being the quarters I share with my servants, the maid-of-all-work Mrs. Matterfact and my valet, Mr. Suchandsuch (German, I believe, but I do respect the privacy of all persons), and my wigs, my wardrobe, and my lady wife, when I am in possession of such a creature, an occurrence more common and without complaint than you might assume, (of which much more, much later). I designed the edifice myself, with an eye to every detail, from the silver door-knocker carved in the image of a single, kindly eye whose eyelid must be whacked vigorously against the iris to gain ingress, to the several concealed chambers and passageways for my sole and secret use, all of which open at the pulling of a sconce or the adjusting of an oil painting, that sort of thing, to the smallest of rose motifs stenciled upon the wallpaper.

The land whereupon my lady house sits, however, represents a happy accident of real estate investment, as I purchased it a small eternity before the Earl of Bedford seized upon the desire to make of Covent Garden a stylish district for stylish people, and the Earl was forced to make significant accommodations and gratifications on my account. I am always delighted by accommodations and gratifications, particularly when they are forced, and most especially when they are on my account.

The lower floor, which opens most attractively onto the newly-christened and newly-worthwhile Drury Lane, serves as my showroom, and in through my tasteful door flow all the nobly whelped and ignobly wealthed and blind (both from birth and from happenstance, I do not discriminate) and wounded and syphilitic of England, along with not a few who made the journey from France, Italy, Denmark, even the Rus, to receive my peculiar attentions. With the most exquisite consideration, I appointed the walls of my little salon with ultramarine watered silk and discreet, gold-framed portraits of my most distinguished customers. In the northwest corner, you will find what I humbly allege to be the single most comfortable chair in all of Christendom, reclined at an, at first glance, radical angle, that nevertheless offers an extraordinary serenity of ease, stuffed with Arabian horsehair and Spanish barley, sheathed in supple leather the color of a rose just as the last sunlight vanishes behind the mountains. In the northeast corner, you will find, should you but recognize it, my father’s pitted and pitiful iron punty, braced above the hearth with all the honor the gentry grant to their tawdry ancestral swords. The ceiling boasts a fine fresco depicting that drunken uncle of Greek Literature, the Cyclops, trudging through a field of poppies and wheat with a ram under each arm, and the floor bears up beneath a deep blanket of choice carpets woven by divinely inspired and contented Safavids, so thick no cheeky draught even imagines it might invade my realm, and all four walls, from baseboard to the height of a man, are outfitted with a series of splendid drawers, in alternating gold and silver designs, presenting to the hands of my supplicants faceted knobs of sapphire, emerald, onyx, amethyst, and jasper. These drawers contain my treasures, my masterpieces, the objects of power with which I line my pockets and sauce my goose. Open one, any one, every one, and all will be revealed on plush velvet cushions, for there rest hundreds upon hundreds of the most beautiful eyes ever to open or close upon this fallen earth.

No fingers as discerning as mine could ever be content with the glazier’s endless workaday drudge through plate windows and wine bottles, vases and spectacles and spyglasses, hoping against hope for the occasional excitement of a goblet or a string of beads that might, if you did not look too closely, resemble, in the dark, real pearls. No, no, a thousand, million times no! Not for me that life of scarred knuckles whipped by white-molten strands of stray glass, of unbearable heat and even more unbearable contempt oozing from those very ones who needed me to keep the rain out of their parlors and their spirits off the table linen.

I will tell you how I made this daring escape from a life of silicate squalor, and trust you, as I suppose I already have done, to keep my secrets—for what is the worth of a secret if you never spill it? My deliverance came courtesy of a pot of pepper, a disfigured milkmaid, and the Dogaressa of Venice.

It would seem that my brothers were not quite so malevolently egomaniacal as they seemed on that distant, never-to-be-forgotten day when our father drooled his last. One of them was not, at least. Having vanished neatly into London and established myself, albeit in an appallingly meager situation consisting of little more than a single kiln stashed in the best beloved piss-corner of the Arsegate, marvering paltry, poignant cups against the stone steps of a whorehouse, sleeping between two rather unpleasantly amorous cows in a cheesemaker’s barn, I was neither happy nor quite wretched, for at least I had made a start. At least I was in the arms of the reeking city. At least I had escaped the trap laid by pearls and hectares and absconding brothers.

And then, as these things happen, one day, not different in any quality or deed from any other day, I received a parcel from an exhausted-looking young man dressed in the Florentine style. I remember him as well as my supper Thursday last—the supper was pigeon pie and fried eels with claret; the lad, a terrifically handsome black-haired trifle who went by the rather lofty name of Plutarch—and after wiping the road from his eyes and washing it from his throat with ale that hardly deserved the name, he presented me with a most curious item: a fat silver pot, inlaid with a lapis lazuli ship at full sail.

Inside found I a treasure beyond the sweat-drenched dreams of upwardly mobile men, which is to say, a handful of peppercorns and beans of vanil, those exotic, black and fragrant jewels for which the gluttonous world crosses itself three times in thanks. Plutarch explained, at some length, that my brother Prospero now dwelt permanently in the East Indies where he had massed a fabulous fortune, and wished to assure himself that his sister, the sweet, homely maid he abandoned, could make herself a good marriage after all. I begged the poor boy not to use any of those treacherous words again in my or anyone’s hearing: not marriage, not maid, and most of all not sister. Please and thank you for the pepper, on your way, tell no one my name nor how you found me and how did you find me by God and the Devil himself—no, don’t tell me, I shall locate this lost relative and deliver the goods to her with haste, though I could perhaps be persuaded to pass the night reading a bit of Plutarch before rustling up the wastrel in question, but, hold fast, my darling, I must insist you submit to my peculiar tastes and maintain both our clothing and cover of darkness throughout; I find it sharpens the pleasure of the thing, this is my, shall we say, firm requirement, and no argument shall move me.

Thus did I find myself a reasonably rich and well-read man. And that might have made a pleasant and satisfying enough end of it, if not for the milkmaid.

For, as these things happen, one day not long after, not different in any hour or act than any other day, a second parcel appeared upon my, now much finer, though not nearly so fine as my present, doorstep. Her name was Perdita, she was in possession of a complexion as pure as that of a white calf on the day of its birth, hair as red as a fresh wound, an almost offensively pregnant belly, and to crown off her beauty, it must be mentioned, both her eyes had been gouged from her pretty skull by means of, I was shortly to learn, a pair of puritanical ravens.

It would seem that my other brother, Pomposo—you remember him, yes? Paying attention, are we?—was still in the habit of marrying unsuspecting girls off to trees and fish and stones, provided that the trees were his encircling arms, the fish his ardent tongue, and the stones those terribly personal, perceptive, and pendulous seed-vaults of his ardor, and poor, luckless Perdita had taken quite the turn round the park. Perhaps we are not so divided by our shared blood as all that, Pomposo! Hats off, my good man, and everything else, too. Well, the delectably lovely and lamentable maid in question found herself afflicted both by Little Lord Pomposo and by that peculiar misfortune which bonds all men as one and makes them brothers: she had a bad father.

Perdita told me of her predicament over my generous table. She spoke with more haste than precision, tearing out morsels of Mrs. Matterfact’s incomparable baked capon in almond sauce with her grubby fingers and fumbling it into that plump face whilst she rummaged amongst her French pockets for English words to close in her tale like a green and garnishing parsley. As far as I could gather, her cowherding father had, in his youth, contracted the disease of religion, a most severe and acute strain. He took the local clergyman’s daughter to wife, promptly locked her in his granary to keep her safe from both sin and any amusement at all, and removed a child from her every year or so until she perished from, presumably, the piercing shame of having tripped and fallen into one of the more tiresome fairy tales.

Perdita’s father occupied the time he might have spent not slowly murdering his wife upon his one and only hobby: the keeping of birds of prey. Now, one cannot fault the man for that! But he loved no falcons nor hawks nor eagles, only a matched pair of black-hearted ravens he called by the names of Praisegod and Feargod (there really can be no accounting for, or excusing of, the tastes of Papists) which he had trained from the egg to hunt down the smallest traces of wickedness upon his estate and among his children. For this unlikely genius had taught his birds, painstakingly, to detect the delicate and complex scents of sexual congress, and the corvids twain became so adept that they were known to arrive at many a village window only moments after the culmination of the act.

Now you have taken up all the pieces of this none-too-sophisticated puzzle and can no doubt assume the rest. My brother conquered Perdita’s virtue with ease, for no such dour and draconian devoutness can raise much else but libertines, a fact which may yet save us from the vicious fate of a world redeemed, and put my niece (for indeed it proved to be a niece) in her with little enough care for anything but the trees and the fish and the stones of his own bucolic life. No sooner than he had rolled off of her but Praisegod and Feargod arrived, screeching to wake the glorious dead, the scent of coupling maddening their black brains, and devoured Perdita’s eyeballs in a hideous orgy of gore and terribly poor parenting. Pomposo, ever steadfast and humbly responsible for his own affairs, sent his distress directly to me and, I imagine, poured a brimming glass of wine with which to toast himself.

“My dear lady,” said I, gently prying a joint of Mrs. Matterfact’s brandied mutton from her fist, hoping to preserve at least something for myself, “I cannot imagine what you or my good brother mean me to do with a child. I am a bachelor, I wish devoutly to remain so, and my bachelorhood is only redoubled by my regrettable feelings toward children, which mirror the drunkard’s for a mug of clear water: well enough and wholesome for most, he supposes, but what can one do with one? But I am not pitiless. That, I am not, my dear. You may, of course, remain here until the child... occurs, and we shall endeavor to locate some suitable position in town for one of your talents.”

Ah, but I had played my hand and missed the trick! “You misunderstand, monsieur,” protested the comely Perdita. “Mister Pompy didn’t send me to you for your hospitalité. He said in London he had a brother who could make me eyes twice as pretty as they ever were and would only charge me the favor of not squeezing out my babe on his parlor floor.”

Even a thousand miles distant, my skinflint family could put the screws to me, turn them tight, and have themselves a nice giggle at my groans. But at least the old boy guessed my game of trousers and did not give me up, even to his paramour.

“They was green,” the milkmaid whispered, and the ruination of her eye sockets bled in place of weeping. “Like clover.”

Oh, very well! I am not a monster. In any event, I wasn’t then. At least the commission was an interesting enough challenge to my lately listless and undernourished intellect. So it came to pass that over the weeks remaining until the parturition of Perdita, I fashioned, out of crystal and ebony and chips of fine jade, twin organs of sight not the equal of mortal orbs but by far their superior, in clarity, in beauty, even in soulfulness. If you ask me how I accomplished it, I shall show you the door, for I am still a tradesman, however exalted, and tradesmen tell no tales. I sewed the spheres myself with thread of gold into her fair face, an operation which sounds elegant and difficult in the telling, but in the doing required rather more gin, profanity, and blows to the chin than any window did. When I had finished, she appeared, not healed, but more than healed—sublimated, rarefied, elevated above the ranks of human women with their filmy, vitreous eyes that could merely see.

I have heard good report that, under another name, and with her daughter quite grown and well-wed, Perdita now sits upon the throne of the Netherlands, her peerless eyes having captivated the heart of a certain prince before anyone could tie a rock round her feet and drop her into a canal. Well done, say all us graspers down here, reaching up toward Heaven’s sewers with a thousand million hands, well done.

Now, we arrive at the hairpin turn in the road of both my fortunes and my life, the skew of the thing, where the carriage of our tale may so easily overturn and send us flying into mud and thorns unknown. Brace your constitution and your credulity, for I am of a mind to whip the horses and take the bend at speed!

It is simply not possible to excel so surpassingly as I have done and remain anonymous. God in his perversity grants anonymity to the gifted and the industrious in equal and heartless measure, but never to the splendid. Word of the girl with the unearthly, alien, celestial eyes spread like a plague of delight in every direction, floating down the river, sweeping through the Continent, stowing away on ships at sea, until it arrived, much adorned with my Lady Rumor’s laurels, at the palazzo of the Doge in darling, dripping Venice.

Now, the Doge at that time had caused himself, God knows why or by dint of what wager, to be married to a woman by the name of Samaritiana. Do not allow yourselves to be duped by that name, you trusting fools! Samaritiana would not even stop along the side of the road to Hell to wrinkle her nose at the carcass of Our Lord Jesus Christ, though it save her immortal soul, unless He told her she was beautiful first. Oh, ’tis easy enough to hate a vain woman with warts and liver spots, to scorn her milk baths and philtres and exsanguinated Hungarian virgins, to mock her desperation to preserve a youth and beauty that was never much more enticing than the local sheep in the first place, but one had to look elsewhere for reasons to hate Samaritiana, for she truly was the singular beauty of her age. Black of hair, eye, and ambition was she, pale as a maiden drowned, buxom as Ceres (though she had yet no issue), intoxicating as the breath of Bacchus. Fortunately, my lady thoughtfully provided a bounty of other pantries in which to find that meat of hatred fit for the fires of any heart.

She was, quite simply, the worst person.

I do not mean by this to call the Dogaressa a murderess, nor an apostate, nor a despot, nor an embezzler, nor even a whore, for whores, at least, are kindly and useful, murderers must have some measure of cleverness if they mean to get away with it, apostates make for tremendous company at parties, despots have a positively devastating charisma, and, I am assured by the highest authority, which is to say, Lord Aphorism and his Merry Band of Proverbials, that there is some honor amongst thieves. No, Samaritiana was merely humorless, witless, provincial, petty, small of mind, parched of imagination, stingy of wallet and affection, morally conservative, and incapable, to the last drop of her ruby blood, of admitting that she did not know everything in all the starry spheres and wheeling orbits of existence, and this whilst believing herself to possess all of these that are virtues and eschew all that are sins. Can you envisage a more wretched and unloveable beast?

I married her, naturally.

The Dogaressa came to me in a black resin mask and emerald hooded cloak when the plague had only lately checked into its waterfront rooms, sent for a litter, and commenced seeing the sights of Venice with its traveling hat and trusted map.

Oh, no, no, you misapprehend my phraseology. Not that plague. Not that grave and gorgeous darkling shadow that falls over Europe once a century and reminds us that what dwells within our bodies is not a soul but a stinking ruin of fluid and marrow and bile. The other plague, the one that sneaks on nimbly putrefying feet from bedroom to bedroom, from dockside to dinner party, from brothel to marital bower, leaving chancres like kisses too long remembered. Yes, we would have to wait years yet before Baron von Bubœ mounted his much-anticipated revival on the stage, but never you fear, Dame Syphilis was dancing down the dawn, and in those days, her viols never stopped nor slowed.

That mysterious, morbid, nigh-monstrous and tangerine-scented creature called Samaritiana darkened my door one evening in April, bid me draw close all my curtains, light only a modest lantern upon a pretty lacquered table inlaid with mother of pearl which I still possess to this day, and stand some distance away while she removed her onyx mask to reveal a face of such surpassing radiance, such unparalleled winsomeness, that even the absence of the left eye, and the mass of scars and weals that had long since replaced it, could do no more than render her enchanting rather than perfect.

It would seem that the Dogaressa danced with the Dame some years past. Her husband, the Doge, brought her to the ball, she claimed, having learned the steps from his underaged Neapolitan mistress, though, as I became much acquainted with the lady in later years, I rather suspect she found her own way, arrived first, wore through three pairs of shoes, departed last, and ate all the cakes on the sideboard. But, as is far too often the case in this life ironical, that mean and miserly soul found itself in receipt of, not only the beauty of a better woman, but the good fortune of a better man. She contracted a high fever owing to her insistence upon hosting the Christmas feast out of doors that year, so that the gathered noblility could see how lovely she looked with a high winter’s blush on her cheeks, and this fever seemed to have driven, by some idiot insensate alchemy, the Dame from the halls of Samaritiana forever, leaving only her eye ravaged and boiled away by the waltz.

All was well in the world, then, save that she could not show herself in public without derision and her husband still rotted on his throne with a golden nose hung on his mouldering face like a door knocker, but she had not come for his sake, nor would she ever dream of fancying that it was possible to ask a boon of that oft-rumored wizard hiding in the sty of London for any single soul on earth other than herself.

“I have heard that you can make a new eye,” said she, in dulcet tones she did not deserve the ability to produce.

I could.

“Better than the old, brighter, of any color or shape?”

I could.

She licked her lily lips. “And install it so well none would suspect the exchange?”

Perhaps not quite, not entirely so well, but it never behooves one to admit weakness to a one-eyed queen.

“You have already done me this service,” said she to me, loftily, never asking once, only demanding, presuming, crushing all resistance, not to mention dignity, custom, the basest element of courtesy, beneath her silver-tooled heel. She waved her hand as though the motion of her fingers could destroy all protestation. The light of my lantern caught on a ring of peridot and tourmaline entwined into the shape of a rather maudlin-looking crocodile gnawing upon its own tail, for she claimed some murky Egyptian blood in the dregs of her familial cup, as though such little droplets could mark her as exceptional, when every dockside lady secretly fancies herself a Cleopatra of the Thames.

“Produce the results upon the morrow! I will pay you nothing, of course. A Dogaressa does not stoop to exchange currency for goods. But when two eyes look out from beneath my brow once more, I will present you with a gift, for no particular reason other than that I wish to bestow it.”

“And if I do not like your gift, Clarissima?”

Puzzlement contorted her exquisitely Cyclopean visage, causing a most unwelcome familial pang within my breast. “I do not take your meaning, Master Peek. How could such a thing possibly occur?”

There is, it seems, a glittering point beyond which egotism achieves such purity that it becomes innocence, and that was the country in which Samaritiana lived. In truth, had she revealed her gift to me then, or even promised payment in the usual manner, I might have refused her, just to experience the novel emotion of rejecting royalty—for I am interested in nothing so much as novelty, not love nor death nor glass nor gold. Something new! Something new! My kingdom for something new! But she caught me, the perfumed spider, wholly without knowing what she’d done. I did indeed take up her commission, and though you may conclude in advance that this recounting of the job will proceed according to the pattern of the last, I shall be disappointed if you do, for I have already told you most vividly that herein lies the skew of my tale.

For the sake of the beautiful Dogaressa, I took up my father’s battered old pipe and punty. I cannot now say why; for a certainty I owned better instruments by far, and had not touched the things in eons except to brush them daintily with a daily sneer. Perhaps a paroxysm of sentimentality seized me; perhaps I despised her too much even then to waste my finer appliances on her pox-punched face, in any event, I cannot even say positively that the result blossomed forth from the tools and not some other cause, and I fear to question it now. I sank into the rhythm of my father and grandfather and his before him: the dollop of liquid glass, the greatbreath of my own lungs expelled through the long, black pipe, the sweet pressure and rolling of the globule against the smooth marver stone, the uncommon light known only to workers of glass, that strange slick of marmalade-light afire within crystal that would soon ride a woman’s skull all the way through the days of her life and down into her tomb.

The work was done; I fashioned two, an exquisitely matched pair, in case the other organ required replacement in the unseen feverish future. Samaritiana, in, so far as I may know or tell, the sole creative decision of her existence, chose not one color for the iris but all of them, dozens of infinitesimal shards chipped from every jewel in my inventory: sapphire, jade, emerald, jasper, onyx, amethyst, ruby, topaz. The effect was a carnival wheel of deep, unsettling fascination, and when I sewed it into her flesh with my golden thread she did not wail or struggle but only sighed, as though lost in the act of love, and, though her faults were called Legion, they were as yet unknown to me, thus, as my needle entered her, so too did my fatal softening begin.

The Dogaressa departed with her stitching still fresh, leaving in her wake but three souvenirs of our intimate surgery: one gift she intended, one she did not, and her damnable scent, which neither Mrs. Matterfact nor Mr. Suchandsuch, no matter how they scrubbed and strove, could remove from the premises. I daresay, even this very night, should you venture to my old house on the High Street and press your nose to its sturdy bones, still yet you would snatch a whiff of tangerine and strangling ivy from the foundation stones.

The gift she intended to leave was a lock of her raven hair, the skinflint bitch. The other, I did not perceive until some weeks later, when I adjourned to my smoking room with a bottle of brandy, a packet of snuff, and a rare contemplative mood which I intended to spend upon a rich, unfiltered melancholy as sweet as any Madeira—for it is a fact globally acknowledged that idle melancholy, like good wine, is the exclusive purview of the wealthy. To aid in my melancholy, I fingered in one hand the mate to the Dogaressa’s harlequin eye, rubbing my thumb over that strange, motley iris, marveling at the milky sheen of the sclera, admiring, unrepentant Narcissus that I am, my own skill and artistry. I removed my own, ordinary, unguessable, nearly flawless glass eye and held up the other to my empty socket like a spyglass, and a most thoroughly stupendous metamorphosis transpired: I could seethrough the jeweled lens of that artificial eye! Truly see, without cloud or glare or halo—ah, but what I saw was not the walls of my own smoking room, so tastefully lined with matching books chosen to neither excite nor bore any guest to extremes, but the long peach-cream and gold hall of the palazzo of the Doge in far-distant Venice! The chequered black and white marble floors flowed forth in my vision like a houndstooth river; the full and unforgiving moon streamed glaucous through tall slim windows; painted ceilings soared overhead, inlaid with pearl and carnelian and ever-so-slightly greyed with the smoke of a hundred thousand candles burnt over peerless years in that grand corridor. Women and men swept slowly up and down the squares like boats upon some fairy canal, swathed in gowns of viridescent green cross-hatched with silver and rose, armored in bodices of whalebone and opal, be-sailed in lacy gauze spun by Clotho herself upon the wheel of destiny, cloaked and hooded in vermillion damask, in aquamarine, in citron and puce, their clothing each so splendid I could scarce tell the maids from the swains—and thus looked I upon a personal paradise heretofore undreamt of.

But there were worms in paradise, for each and every beauty in the Doge’s palace was rotting in their finery like the fruit of sun-spoiled melons within their shells. Their flesh putrefied and dripped from their bones and what remained turned hideous, sickening colors, choleric, livid, cyanic, hoary, a moldering patina of death whose effusions stained those bodices black. Some stumbled noseless, others having replaced that appendage with nostrils of gold and silver and crystal and porcelain, and others, all hope lost, sunk their visages into masks, though they could not hide their chancred hands, the bleeding sores of their bosoms, the undead tatters of their throats.

Yet still they laughed, and spoke animatedly, one to the other, and blushed in virtuous fashion beneath their putridity. Such is the dance of the Dame, who enters through the essential act of life, yet leaves you thinking, breathing, walking whilst the depredations of the grave transact upon your still-sensate flesh, making of this world a single noisy tomb.

My breath would not obey me; my heart ricocheted amongst my ribs like a cannon misfired. Was it truly Italy I saw bounded in the tiny planet of a glass eye? Had I stumbled into a drunken sleep or gone mad so swiftly no asylum could hope to catch me? I shot to my feet, mashing the eye deeper into my socket until stars spattered my sight—closer, look closer! Could I hear as well? Smell? Taste the tallowed air of that far-off moonlit court?

I could not. I could not hear their footsteps nor inhale their perfume nor feel the fuzzed reek of the mildewed canals on my tongue nor move of my own volition. I apprehended a new truth, that even the impossible possesses laws of its own, and those unbendable. I could only observe. Observe—while my vision lurched forward, advancing quickly, rocking gently as with a woman’s sinuous gait. Graceful, slender arms extended as though from my own body, opening with infinite elegance to embrace a man whose head was that of a Titan cast down brutally into the pit of Tartarus, so wracked with growths and intuberances and pulsating polyps that the plates of his skull had cracked beneath the intolerable weight and shifted into a new pate so monstrous it could no longer bear the Doge’s crown, which hung pitifully instead from a ribbon slung round his grotesque neck. Those matchless arms which were not my own enfolded this hapless creature and, encircling the middle finger of the hand belonging to the right arm, I saw with my altered vision the twisted peridot and tourmaline crocodile ring of the Dogaressa Samaritiana.

I cast the glass eye away from me, sickened, thrilled, inflamed, ensorcelled, the fire in my midnight hearth as nothing beside the conflagration of curiosity, horror, and the beginnings of power that crackled within my brain-pan. In that first moment, standing among my books and my brandy drenched in the sweat of a new universe, an instinct, a whisper of Truth Profound, permeated my spirit like smoke exhaled, and, I confess to you now, all these many years hence, still I enshrine it as an article of faith, for it was with breath that God animated the dumb mud of Adam, breath that woke Pandora from stone, breath that demarcates the living and the dead, breath with which we speak and cry out and divide ourselves from the idiot kingdom of animals, and breath, by all the blasted saints and angels, with which the glassblower shapes his glass! The living breath of Cornelius Peek yet permeates every insignificant atom of his works; each object broken from his punty, be it window or goblet or cask or eye, hides the sacred exhalations of his spirit co-mingled with the crystal, and it is this, it is this, I tell you, that connects the jeweled eye of the Dogaressa with the jeweled eye in my hand! I dwell in the glass, it cannot dispense with me any further than it can dispense with translucency or mass, and therefore it carries the shard of Cornelius whithersoever it wanders.

Let us dispense with a few obnoxious but inevitable inquiries into the practicality of the matter, so that we may move along past the skew. How could this mystic connection have escaped my notice till now? It is only sensical: Perdita vanished away to the Netherlands with both marvelous eyes, and no window nor goblet nor cask is, in its inborn nature, that organ of sight which opens onto the infinite pit of the human soul. Would any eye manufactured in the same fashion result in such remote visions? They would indeed, my credulous friend. Does every glassblower possess the ability to produce such objects, should he but retain one eye whilst selling the other at a fair price? Ah, here I must admit my deficiency as a philosopher, for which I apologize most obsequiously. It cannot be breath alone, for I made subtle overtures toward the gentleman of the glassmen’s guild and I can say with a solemn certainty that none but Master Peek can perform this alchemy of sclera and pupil. Why should it be so? Perhaps I am a wizard, perhaps a saint, perhaps a demiurge, perhaps the Messiah returned at last, perhaps it owes only to that peculiar rootstock of my family which grants me my height, my baritone, the hairiness of my body. Grandfather Polyphemus’s last gift, lobbed down the ancestral highway, bashing horses as it comes. I am a man of art, not science. I ask why Mrs. Matterfact has not yet laid out my supper oftener than I ask after the workings of the uncluttered cosmos.

Thus did I enter the business of optometry.

When you have placed a mad rainbow jewel in the skull of a Dogaressa as though she were nothing but a golden ring, a jewel which drove the rotting men of Venice insane with the desire to tie her to a bridge-post and stare transported into the motley swirling colors of the eye of God, lately fallen to earth, they began to say, somewhere in Sicily, advertisement serves little purpose. I opened my door and received the flood. It is positively trivial to lose an eye in this wicked world, did you know? I accepted them warmly, with a bow and a kerchief fluttered to the mouth in acute compassion, a permanently sympathetic expression penciled onto my lips in primrose paint—for that moth-eaten scab Cromwell was finally in the grave, where everything is just as colorless and abstemious and black as he always wished it to be, so full of piss and vitriol that it poisoned him to the gills, and Our Chuck, the Merry Monarch, was dancing on his bones.

Fashion, ever my God and my mother, took pity upon her poor supplicant and caused a great miracle to take place for my sake—the world donned a dandy wig whilst I doffed my own, sporting my secret womanly hair as long and curled as any lord, soaking my face in the most masculine of pale powders, rouges, lacquers, and creams, encasing my figure, such as it ever was, in lime and coral brocade trimmed in frosty silver, concealing my gait with an ivory cane and foxfurred slippers, and rejoicing in the knowledge that, of all the men in London, I suddenly possessed the lowest voice of them all. So hidden, so revealed, I took all the one-eyed world into my parlor: the cancerous, the war-wounded, the horse-kicked, the husband-beaten, the inquisitor-inquisited, the lightning-struck, the unfortunately-born, the pox-blighted, and yes, the Dame’s erstwhile lovers, for she had made her way to our shores and had begun her ancient gambols in sight of St. Paul’s. And for each of these unfortunate angels of the ocular, I fashioned a second eye in secret, unknown entirely to my custom, twin to the one that repaired their befouled faces, with which I adjourned night by night to a series of successive smoking rooms, growing grander and finer with each year, holding those orbs to the light and looking unseen upon every city in Christendom, along with several in the Orient and one in the New World, though it could hardly be called a city, if I am to be honest. And Venice, always Venice, the first eye and only, her eye, gazing out on the water, the moonlight, the dead.

In this fashion, I came to know that the Doge had died, succumbed to the unbearable weight of his own head, long before Samaritiana appeared on my night-bestrewn doorstep, the saffron gown she wore in the moonlight, and every other in her trunk, torn violently, soaked with bodily fluids, rent by the overgrown nails of the frenzied rotting horde who had chased her from the palazzo through every desperate alleyway and canal of the city, across Switzerland and France, in their anguished longing to touch the Eye of God, still sewn into the ex-Dogaressa’s skull, to touch it but once and be healed forever.

But of course I aided the friendless and abandoned Good Samaritiana as she wept beside her monstrous road. Oh, Clarissima, how dreadful, how unspeakable, how worthy of Mr. Pepys’ vigilant pen! I shall have to make introductions when you are quite well again. I sent at once for a fine dressmaker of my acquaintance to construct a suitable costume for the lady and save her from the immodesty of those ragged silken remnants of her former life with which, even then, she attempted to cover her body with little enough success that, before the dressmaker could so much as cross the river, I learned something quite unexpected concerning the biography of Samaritiana, former queen of Venice.

She was quite male. Undeniably, conspicuously, astonishingly, fascinatingly so.

I called up to Mrs. Matterfact for cold oxtongue, a saucer of pineapple, and oysters stewed in Armagnac, down to Mr. Suchandsuch for carafes of hot claret mulled via the latest methods, and listened to the wondrous chimera in my parlor tell of how that famous Egyptian blood was not in the least of the Nile but of the Tiber, on whose Ostian banks a penniless but beautiful boy had been born in secret to one of the Pope’s mistresses and left to perish among the reed-gatherers and the amber-collectors and the diggers of molluscs.

But perish the lad did not, for even a grass-picker is thoroughly loused with the nits of compassion, and the women passed the babe one to the other and back again, like a cup of wine that drank, instead, from them. Now, it is well known to anyone with a single sopping slice of sense that the Pope’s enemies are rather like weevils, ever industrious, ever multiplying, ever rapacious, starving for the chaff of scandal with which to choke the Holy Father and watch him writhe. They roved over the city, overturning the very foundational stones of ancient Rome in search of the Infallible Bastards, in order, not to kill them like Herod, but to bring them before the Cardinals and etch their little faces upon the stained glass windows as evidence of sin. My little minx, having already long, lustrous hair and androgyne features more like to a seraph than a by-blow son, found it at first advantageous to effect the manners and dress of a girl, and then, when the danger had passed, more than that, agreeable, even preferable to her former existence. Having become a maid to save her life, she remained one in order to enjoy it. Owing to the meager diet of the Tiber’s tiniest fish, little Samaritiana never grew so tall nor so stout as other boys, she remained curiously hairless, and though she escaped the castrato’s fate, her voice never dipped beneath the pleasing alto with which she now spoke, nor did her organ of masculinity ever aspire to outdo the average Grecian statue, and so, when the Doge visited Ostia after the death of his first wife, he saw nothing unusual walking by the river except for the most beautiful woman in the Occident, balancing a basket of rushes on her hip with a few nuggets of amber rolling within the weave.

“But surely, Clarissima,” mused I, savoring the tart song of pineapple upon my tongue, “a bridegroom, however ardent, cannot be so easily duped as a vengeful Cardinal! Your deception cannot have survived the wedding bower!”

“It did not survive the engagement, my dear Master Peek,” Samaritiana replied without a wisp of blush upon her remarkable cheek. “Oh, mistake me not, I do so love to lie—I see no more purpose in pretending to be virtuous in your presence than I saw in pretending to be fertile in his. But there could be no delight in a deception so deep and vast. It would impair true marriage between us. I revealed myself at Pentecost, allowing him in the intensity of his ardor to unfasten my stays and loose my ribbons until I stood clad only in honesty before His Serenity and awaited what I presumed to be my doom and my death. But only kisses fell upon me in that moment, for the Doge had long suppressed his inborn nature, and suffered already to get upon his departed wife the heirs he owed to the canals, and though my masquerade, you will agree, outshines the impeccable, he would later say, on the night of which you so confidently speak, that some sinew of his heart must always have known, since first he beheld me with my basket of amber and sorrow.”

I did not exchange trust for trust that night among the oysters and the oxtongue. I have a viciously refined sense of theatre, after all. I made her wait, feigning religion, indigestion, the vicissitudes of work, gout, even virginity, until our wedding night, whereupon I allowed Samaritiana, in the intensity of her ardor, to unfasten my stays and loose my ribbons until at last all that stood between us was the tattered ruin of my mother’s ancient bridal veil, and then, not even that.

“Goodness, you don’t expect me to be surprised, do you?” laughed the ex-Dogaressa, the monster, the braying centaur, the miserly lamia who would not give me the satisfaction of scandalizing her! That eve, and only that eve, under the stars painted upon my ceiling, I applied all my cruellest and most unfair arts to compel my wife to admit, as a wedding present, that she had not known, she had never known, never even suspected, loved me as a man just as I loved her as a woman, and was besides a brutal little liar who deserved a lifetime of the most delectable punishment. We exchanged whispered, apocryphal, long-atrophied names beneath the coverlet: Perpetua. Proteo.

Samartiana treated me deplorably, broke my heart and my bank, laughed when she ought to have wept, drove Mrs. Matterfact to utter disintegration, kept lovers, schemed with minor nobles. We were just ferociously happy. Are you surprised? I, too, am humorless, witless, provincial, petty, small of mind, parched of imagination, stingy of wallet and affection, a liar and a cad. He was like me. I was like her. I had, after all, seen as she saw, from the very angle of her waking vision, which in some circles might be the definition of divine love. I have had wives before and will have again, far cleverer and braver and wilder than my Clarissima, but none I treasured half so well, nor came so near to telling the secret of my smoking room, of the chests full of eyes hidden beneath the floorboards. Samaritiana had her lovers; I had my eyes, the voyeur’s stealthy, soft and pregnant hours, a criminal sensorium I could not quit nor wished to.Yet still I would not share, I held it back from her, out of her reach, beyond her ken.

The plague took her in the spring. The Baron, not the Dame. The plague of long masks and onions and bodies stacked like fresh-laid bricks. I buried her in glass, in my incandescent fury at the kiln, for where else can a man lose his whole being but in a wife or in work? These are the twin barrels in which we drown ourselves forever.

It soon came to pass that wonderful eyes of Cornelius Peek were in such demand that the possession of one could catapult the owner into society, if only he could keep his head about him once he landed, and this was reason enough that, men being men and ambition being forever the most demanding of bedfellows, it became much the fashion in those years to sacrifice one eye to the teeth-grinding god of social mobility and replace it with something far more useful than depth perception. Natural colors fell by the wayside—they wanted an angel’s eye, now, a demon’s, a dryad’s, a goblin’s, more alien, more inhuman, less windows to the soul than windows to debauched and lawless Edens, and I, your servant, sir, a window-maker once more. I cannot say I approved of this self-deformation, but I certainly profited by the sudden proliferation of English Cyclopses, most especially by their dispersal through the halls of power, carrying the breath of Peek with them into every shadowy corner of the privileged and the perverse.

I strung their eyes on silver thread and lay in a torpor like unto the opium addict upon the lilac damask of my smoking room couch, draping them round and round my body like a strand of numberless pearls, lifting each crystal gem in turn to gaze upon Paris, Edinburgh, Madrid, Muscovy, Constantinople, Zurich—and Venice, always Venice, returning again and again, though I knew I would not find what I sought along those rippling canals traveled by the living dead. It became my obsession, this invasion of perspective, this theft of privacy, the luxurious passivity of the thing, watching without participating as the lives of others fluttered by like so many scarlet leaves, compelled to witness, but not to interfere, even if I wished to, even if I had liked the young Earl well enough when I installed his pigment-less diamond eye and longed to parry the assassin’s blade when I saw it flash in the Austrian sunset. I saw, with tremulous breath, as God saw, forced unwilling to allow the race of man to damn or redeem itself in a noxious fume of free will, forbidden by laws unwritten not to lift one hand, even if the baker’s boy had laughed when I offered him a big red eye or a cat-slit pupil or a shark’s unbroken onyx hue, any sort, free of charge, even the costliest, the most debonair, in honor of my late wife Samaritiana who in another lifetime paid me in hair, not because she would wish me to be generous but because she would mock me to the rafters and howl hazard down to Hell, begging the Devil to take me now rather than let one more pauper rob her purse, even if I saw, now, through his eye, saw the maidservant burning, burning in the bakery on Pudding Lane, burning and screaming in the midnight wind, and then the terrible, impossible leap of the flames to the adjoining houses, an orange tongue lasciviously working in the dark, not to lift one hand as what I saw in the glass eye and what I saw in the flesh became one, fusing and melding at last, reality and unreality, the sight I owned and the sight I stole, the conflagration devouring the city, the gardens, and my house around me, my lovely watered ultramarine silk, my supremely comfortable chair stuffed with Arabian horsehair, my darling gold and silver drawers, as I lay still and let it come for me and thee and all.

I did not die, for heaven’s sake. Perish the thought! Death is terrifically gauche, don’t you know, I should never be caught wearing it in public. I simply did not get up. Irony being the Lord of All Things, the smoking room survived the blaze and I inside it; though the rafters smoked and blackened and the walls swelled with heat like the head of a Doge, the secret chambers honeycombing the place contained the inferno, they did not stove in nor fall, save for one shelf of books, the bloody Romans, of all things, which, in toppling, quite snapped both my shinbones beneath a ponderous copy of Plutarch. Mrs. Matterfact and Mr. Suchandsuch fought valiantly and gave up only the better part of the roof, though we lost my lovely showroom, a tragedy from which I shall never fully recover, I assure you. And for a long while, I remained where the fire found me, on the long damask couch in my smoking room, wrapped in lengths of eyes like Odysseus lashed to the mast and listening to all the sirens’ mating bleats, still lifting each in turn and fixing it to my empty socket, one after the other after the other, and thus I stayed for years, years beyond years, beyond Matterfact and Suchandsuch and their replacements, beyond the intolerable plebians outside who wanted only humble, honest brown and blue eyes again, their own mortal eyes, having seen too much of wildness. And what, pray tell, did I do with my impossible sight, with my impossible span of time?

Why, I became the greatest spy the world has ever known. Would you have done otherwise?

Oh, I have sold crowns to kings and kings to executioners, positions to the enemy and ships to the storm, murderers to the avenging and perversities to the puritanical, I have caused ingenious devices to be built in England before the paint in Krakow finished drying, rescued aristocrats from the mob and mobs from the aristocracy by turns, bought and traded and brokered half of Europe to the other half and back again, dashed more sailors against the rocks than my promethean progenitor could have done in the throes of his most orgiastic fever-dream. I have smote the ground and summoned up wars from the deeps and I have called down the heavens to end them, all without moving one whisper from my house on Drury Lane, even as the laborers rebuilt it around me, even as the rains came, even as the lane around it became a writhing slum, a whore’s racetrack, a nursery rhyme.

Look around you and look well: this is the world I made. Isn’t it charming? Isn’t it terrible and exquisite and debased and tastefully appointed according to the very latest of styles? I have seen to every detail, every flourish—think nothing of it, it has been my great honor.

But the time has come to rouse myself, for my eyes have begun to grow dark, and of late I spy muchly upon the damp and wormy earth, for who would not beg to be buried with their precious Peek eye, bauble of a bygone—and better—age? No one, not even the baker’s boy. The workshop of Master Cornelius Peek will open doors once more, for I have centuries sprawled at my feet like Christmas tinsel, and I would not advance upon them blind. I have heard the strange mournful bovine lowing of what I am assured are called the proletariatoutside my window, the clack and clatter of progress to whose rhythm all men must waltz. There is much work to be done if I do not wish to have the next century decorated by some other, coarser, less splendid hand. I shall curl my hair and don the lime and coral coat, crack the ivory cane against the stones once more, and if the fashions have sped beyond me, so be it, I care nothing, I will stand for the best of us, for in the end, the world will always belong to dandies, who alone see the filigree upon the glass that is God’s signature upon his work.

After all, it is positively trivial to lose an eye in this midden of modernity, this precarious, perilous world, don’t you agree?

[realmofextremepossibility]

Alex Krycek’s Mechanical Sex Hand

Intentionally terrible, entirely indecent, and absolutely NSFW. You will definitely probably be scarred.

For @foolishheadstronggirl who requested another installment of this (god knows why…). It’s possible there might be two more of these, if there’s enough interest. Maybe.

The other fics in this series can be found here (though it’s not necessary to read them in order):

Polishing the Brass | Icing the Cake | Naughty or Nice | Alex Krycek’s Mechanical Sex Hand

Mobile, no cut, beware.

——————

Dana Scully was waiting in the basement office for her partner on the streets and between the sheets, Fox Mulder. She was impatiently horny. He was supposed to have been there an hour ago to flood her cavern with his spooky juice, but alas her lady cave was dry. She was not pleased. Suddenly, a skulking dark figure appeared in the doorway. She looked up to see sexylicious bad boy Alex Krycek leaning moodily against the door frame. Scully rolled her eyes.

“Ugh, what do you want?”

Krycek crossed the room to where Scully was perched on the edge of the desk. He swept his right hand over her jaw and brushed his thumb against her bottom lip, his lust darkened eyes smoldering into hers.

“You.”

Scully shoved him away from her. “Ew! Go away Krycek! Keep your rat paws off me.”

Krycek stepped toward her again, trapping her against the hard edge of the desk. If he had his way, it wouldn’t be the only hard edge against her for very long.

“Now now, Dana,” he chuckled chidingly. “I don’t think you really mean that. Not once you see what I have to show you…”

Krycek whipped open his long black trench coat to reveal himself.

Scully could not believe her eyes, beholding Krycek in all his bad boy glory. She gaped at him in stunned silence.

“Egads!” she finally gasped. “It’s glorious!”

“C’mon Dana,” Ratboy coaxed. “You know you want to touch it…”

Scully slowly reached out towards him, hand trembling, panties moistening. As a medical doctor, she had seen a lot of things, but she had never seen anything quite like this. She started at the top and began to trail her hand down the length of it.

After his left arm had been amputated by the Russians, Krycek had replaced it. But not just with some regular prosthetic like some kind of common peasant. No, no, no. Krycek had built himself a contraption that was making her restless sex throb helplessly just at the sight of it.

Where he should have had five fingers, he instead had five dildos of varying shapes and sizes. Scully examined each one with scientific aplomb, turning them over and running her fingers over their smooth shafts and knobby bumps and firm ridges. They looked so perfect for soothing the growing ache between her legs. It took all of her restraint not to grab his hand and shove it up her skirt right then and there.

Krycek smirked, “Like what you see, Dana?”

“Yes…” Scully breathed huskily. “Oh yes…”

“I made it just for you.”

Scully was taken aback by this declaration of love and devotion. Devilish ratboy Alex Krycek had feelings? For someone other than himself? For her?

“…you what?”

Those dark eyes burned into her icy blue orbs once again, setting her loins aflame. The dimly lit office was completely silent except for the sounds of their heaving breathing and her pussy drip drip dripping on the floor.

“Dana, I’ve wanted you since I laid eyes on you. Mulder doesn’t deserve a woman of your pulchritudinous magnificence. A woman like you needs a real man. One who can satisfy you in ways you never thought possible.”

Krycek flexed his middle and ring fingers into his palm, activating a squirt of lube from his wrist Spider-Man style. He reached over and pressed his elbow. The arm came to life, vibrations shaking down through the forearm and into the hand. He pressed again and the speed increased. A long press and the pulsation pattern changed. Suddenly, the fingers were snatched back from her, the arm whirring as they retracted into the palm.

Scully stared wide-eyed and captivated. In all her years as a scientist and on the X-Files, she had never seen anything like this! It was magical! A moan slipped from her mouth as her mind began processing all very naughty things that magical mechanical sex hand could do to her. How many empty holes it could fill. How good it would feel to grind on it. How fast it could make her come.

As if he could read her thoughts, Krycek smirked and leaned in to whisper in her ear, cheek to cheek. “I’m going to literally fuck you up.”

“Oh Alex, you really do know the way to a woman’s heart” Scully moaned, eyelashes fluttering as she hiked up her skirt and flung herself back over the desk. “I need your dildo fingers in my lonely holes so badly. Ravage me!”

Krycek growled and grabbed her hips roughly with his regular hand to hold her in place. He didn’t even have to touch her to see how wet she was. Which was very very wet. This pleased Krycek greatly. When he was finished with her, she wouldn’t even remember that spooky idiot Mulder’s name. He had heard the rumors of the Fox hung like a horse, but even the biggest of man dingles was no match for his mechanical sex hand.

His middle finger dildo extended from the palm. He didn’t even need the lube with how wet she was. It was like a Slip-n-Slide. Scully quivered beneath his hand and whimpered in anticipation with unabashed desire.

“Please,” she begged. “Please fuck me up real good with your sex hand. I can’t wait any longer.”

And within that plea, Krycek thrust his hand forward and plunged into her treasure vault.

Scully moaned happily. The mechanical sex hand filled her up completely, the ridges scraping deliciously against her inner walls. Her moaning intensified when Krycek tipped his hand to press his vibrating palm against her pulsing clit. His middle finger retracted and extended in rhythm, jackhammering her faster than any flesh hand ever could. In and out and in and out and in and out and and in again.

“How does it feel, baby?”

“Mmmm good…so so good…” Scully breathed.

Krycek pulled out, drawing an unhappy whine from Scully. She reached to tug his hand back towards the swollen petals of her blooming flower.

“No…come back….”

Krycek bent over the desk to gather her in his arms and pressed his lips to her Titian hair.

“Shhh, don’t worry my precious. I’m not going anywhere.”

A flick of his middle and ring fingers to his palm shot a stream of lube onto her puckered love hole before retracting. His index dildinger with the bulbed head grew and dragged teasingly through her wetness before swiping back up to bury itself inside her Venus fly trap. Scully gasped as his pinky extended next and burst through her back door like an armed burglar. Finally, his thumb emerged to trap her love nubbin under pulsating vibrations that drove her mad. Krycek began a tridented thrust that soon had Scully crying out beneath him.

“Harder, ohhhh fuck me harder, Daddy!” she cried. “I’m so close…so close, Alex…oh, oh please make me come!”

Krycek tipped her up into a sitting position and she flung her arms around his neck, squirming and grinding to increase the blessed friction and get as close as she possibly could to this hand of god. She buried her face in his neck in satisfied relief that all her holes were finally so blissfully filled.

“SCULLY?!”

Scully lifted her head from Krycek’s neck to see Mulder standing in the doorway, shock etched on his face. She met his eyes with her Ice Queen gaze.

“Oh hi Mulder,” she said callously casual. “I thought you weren’t coming. So Alex and I are coming instead.”

She tossed back her head and closed her eyes, quivering as the throes of passion finally overtook her and she clamped tightly around Krycek’s dildingers with a squeal of pleasure.

Mulder dropped to knees in heartbroken agony, “Scullaaayyyy!”

That was where the Lone Gunmen found him six hours later, huddled in the corner, arms wrapped around his knees, rocking back and forth.

“Scullyyy…Scully…Scully…Scul…”

“I know, buddy, I know,” Byers sympathized.

“Women, man,” Langly chimed in. “They bring nothing but pain and misery.”

“How would you know?” Frohike laughed. “You’ve never had one!”

Langly elbowed his midget friend in the shoulder. “Shut it, Frohike!”

Frohike slapped back at Langly. “No, you shut it!”

Langly slapped Frohike. Frohike slapped Langly. Slap slap slap slap slap.

“Langly, Frohike, both of you shut it,” Byers chided. They ignored him. “HEY! Stop! This isn’t about you!”

Langly and Frohike looked guiltily down at the floor.

“Come on, Mulder,” Byers pulled Mulder to his feet, stumbling as he supported Mulder’s sobbing, blubbering mass. “Let’s go back to our place. You can stay with us for a while.”

Mulder spent the next two weeks huddled in a ball of snot and tears on the grungy couch in the Gunmen’s lair, cuddling Frohike’s suspiciously familiar redheaded Waifu pillow.

“Come on, man,” Byers grumbled as he stumbled over Mulder’s pyramid of beer cans. “You can’t sit around and mope like this forever.”

“Hey!” Mulder protested. “You ruined my masterpiece! I’ve been working on that for weeks! My life’s work, my magnum opus, the 8th wonder of the world.”

Frohike came up from behind and smacked him on the head with a rolled up copy of The Lone Gunman. “Get yourself together, Mulder! If you want Scully back, you have to show her who the real man is. Fight like a knight for your lady. Whip out your sword and challenge him to a duel.”

“He’s right,” Langly chimed in. “Bitches love a lovers duel.”

A burst of energy shot through Mulder as he jumped to his feet, the tattered couch blanket billowing behind him like a superhero cape. “I will be avenged!” he shouted. “Stand aside boys, I’m going to get my lady back.”

Mulder could hear her moans echoing down the hall before he even reached the door, anger flowing through him like hot lava. No one made his Scully make those noises but him. No one. He raised a well-muscled forearm and pounded on the door, sinews rippling with the force.

“Open up, Krycek! I know you’re in there!”

The door swung open to reveal a shirtless Krycek with a naked Scully wrapped around him like a spider monkey.

“What do you want, Mulder?” Krycek sneered.

Mulder pushed inside without an invitation. “I’m here for my woman.”

Scully dropped down from Krycek and stepped back to watch the two men square up. Mulder placed two large hands on Krycek’s bare muscular chest and shoved him backwards. Krycek stumbled and shoved Mulder back.

Scully gasped. She had never had two men physically fight over her before. It was hot. And now she was hot and bothered.

“I challenge you to a duel for the affections of this fair maiden, Ratboy!” Mulder declared. “Winner take all.”

“You’re on, Foxy.”

Krycek bared his teeth in a rodent screech and shot out all five dildingers. Mulder let out a feral growl and lunged at Krycek, knocking him to the ground. The two rolled around on the floor, clothes torn off, punches flying. Krycek five-star slapped Mulder across the face with his dildos. Mulder yanked a clump of hair from Krycek’s chest. They both ended up completely naked, oiled up and slipping in the lube from Krycek’s palm, circling the living room like crouched boxers in a ring.

Scully stood by, breathlessly aroused, watching the scene unfold before her. Her hand was buried between her legs, a plumber battling a leaky faucet. She slid her finger into her moist canal, bucking wildly like a bronco against her own wrist.

Krycek licked his index dildinger and mmm’ed in pleasure, meeting Mulder’s eyes with a lascivious smirk.

“Still tastes like her…”

Mulder launched himself at Krycek a final time, landing on his chest to pin him to the ground, and wrapped his hands around Krycek’s neck. Krycek flailed wildly, jabbing at Mulder’s face with his dildos and wet-willying him at full vibrator speed. Mulder squeezed harder and harder until Krycek’s face turned blue and his eyes popped out Iike grapes. Mulder shoved himself off Krycek’s lifeless body as his undulating dildos gave a sad final twitch.

“Huzzah! The enemy has been vanquished!” Mulder shouted, pumping his fist in the air. He ran over to Scully and gathered her naked body in his strong arms attached to his naked body, crushing her soft lips against his. He pulled away to press his forehead against hers and gaze lustily into her oceanic orbs.

“Scully, I missed you so much!” Mulder pleaded. “I can’t live without you. I can’t do this alone! Please say you’ll be mine again!”

“Oh my sweet spooky puppy,” Scully cried, threading her hands through his soft hair and smushing her cheek to his, the flowing tributaries of their tears combining into a river of pain and glorious reunion. “I’m so sorry! I don’t know how I let myself be distracted by his shiny baubles when you’re the one I truly love!”

All of the naked closeness was causing a spooky stirring. Scully smiled happily as his legendary sleeping dragon awoke and rose up to greet her.

“Look, he’s saying hello…he missed you so much!”

Scully leapt into his arms and wrapped her legs around his waist. Her wetness seeped from her slit and settled in the nest of his pubic hair. She was so ready to have him inside her again. As good as Alex Krycek’s mechanical sex hand was, it couldn’t compare to the feeling of Mulder alive and throbbing and pulsing inside her, shooting his spooky sauce into her barren womb like a fire hose. She needed him inside her so badly.

Mulder’s strong arms tightened around her as he lowered her to the floor, his plump bottom lip attached to her neck like a barnacle. He was going to stake his claim and plant his flag in her foxhole. She was his. HIS. No one else’s. No matter how many dildos their mechanical sex hand might have.

Scully moaned desperately as she reached for his throbbing member. “Even all five of his dildingers can’t compete with your foxy cock. He’s nowhere near as big as you are!”

Mulder sank his teeth into her neck and buried his hard log in her flowing flume with a single thrust.

“Oh Scully, how I’ve missed being inside you. My spooky sausage was so cold and lonely without your lady buns around it. You feel so fucking amazing baby!”

He thrust hot and deep inside her. She buried her face in his neck, freefalling in his arms off the Cliff of Orgasm into the Sea of Ecstasy. She shouted his name as she came and squirted like a geyser, erupting around him like Old Faithful. Mulder moaned as her warm fluids gushed everywhere. His dragon roared and released a fiery burst of cum inside her.

“It’s such a shame about the hand though,” Scully lamented with a sigh, as she lay against his muscled chest, slick with sweat and lube, basking in the afterglow. “It really was a masterpenis. Very handy.”

Mulder looked over at Krycek’s motionless corpse thoughtfully for a moment. “It’s battery powered, you say?”

Eight years later, on a mantel above a fireplace, in an unremarkable house, in rural Virginia, a mounted mechanical hand cast a spooky five-dildoed shadow over two naked bodies writhing orgasmically on a Reticulan-skin rug.

[planetcallisto]

— sculpted ice cream

pairing: jungkook x reader

genre: fluffy fluff

au: daddy!jungkook (but not the kinky kind), slight artist!jungkook

warnings: the softness of a domestic jungkook

word count: 1774

A/N: this was a request from @baekookieee =^^= I hope you enjoy it and I’m sorry it took forever

requests are open :D

“Hopefully Jaewon doesn't inherit that arrogance of yours.”

“But that's what made you fall in love with me.”

“DADDY!” the young boy shouted as his father walked into the apartment.

Jungkook quickly shut the door and kneeled to catch the boy who was running in his direction. You spent the day feeding him, cleaning him and making him laugh, but it was never the same when Jungkook wasn’t home.

The little brown haired boy was constantly asking, “Where’s daddy? When is daddy coming home?” Maybe it was the bond they had or the fact that Jungkook spoiled him rotten, but he was always looking forward to the day his dad would come home after months of work abroad.

“Jaewon-ah have you been taking care of your mommy?” His small, chubby cheeks puffed as he pouted and shook his head slightly

“Yeah, but mommy says she misses you too much.”

All the times you thought he was fast asleep after watching his fifth hour of spongebob reruns, the times where he sat in your lap as you finished that last few lines of your essay, he was listening to everything you said. All the, I miss him Jaewon,” or the “I love your daddy a lot,” and he was not the kind to keep those secrets from anyone.

“Really?” Smugness pulls at Jungkook's lips as he stands up with Jaewon’s tiny frame wrapped up in his arms, “is this what you’ve been telling our son while I’ve been gone?”

Immediately you turned away to hide the redness that climbed it's way up your cheeks.

A small pair of warm hands squished your already warm cheeks, “Mommy are you mad?”

The words came out as a soft plead and it pulled at your heart, “No baby, I’m not. Why don’t you go get the drawing you made for daddy?” He hiccuped and sprinted off the minute Jungkook set him down.

“So, you really missed me did you?” That oh-so familiar teasing expression graced his face as he ran his fingers down your arm and wrapping around the palm of your hand. His lips ghosted over yours before skimming past your cheek to the top of your neck.

“I missed you more, you know.”

To people who have never seen the two of you, they would have never thought that it’s been 6 years since the moment you finally decided to go up to him and stupidly  muster up a simple, “wow that’s a nice painting.”

“Relax romeo your son is about to run down the stairs with his next masterpiece.”

On cue, Jaewon flew down the steps and latched himself onto Jungkook’s leg, “Daddy! Daddy look! Look daddy, look!” he repeated over and over until Jungkook looked down at the white paper with all the colours of the rainbow.

Jungkook led his son to the couch and sat him on his lap. The little boy’s eyes grew wide as he enthusiastically pointed and gestured to all the shapes on the paper.

A faint smell ripped you from your thoughts and noticed that Jungkook smelled it too.

“Jaewon-ah, did you clean up after going to the park?” His tone was much more serious and it definitely did not go over your sons head.

“No daddy…”

“Come on let’s go then, daddy needs a bath too.”

Jaewon was never the one to enjoy being dragged up stairs and put under the stream of the shower, especially not when all he wanted was to go back outside and play. But of course, his father was the only person to make the experience that much more enjoyable.

It wouldn't have been a regular day if Jungkook didn’t look at you with a suggestive look in his eyes.

Jaewon didn't hesitate to tug at Jungkook's shirt and bringing him up the stairs to the bathroom, slowly, but surely.

You followed and made sure to bring Jaewon’s favourite batman towel, because there was no way he would get out of the bath without it.

Not even 5 minutes passed and you already found the two of them sitting in the tub surrounded by none other than a mountain high pile of bubbles, more specifically cherry scented. Jungkook’s hair was already sticking out in every direction; Jaewon was not going to rest until his hair was nothing less than a sculptured masterpiece. His tiny hands collected all the bubbles he could carry and dumped it into his father's head without any hesitation. It wasn't until he stepped back to admire his work of art when you realized how much he took after Jungkook. They both had the same haircut with bangs in the front and every strand always in place, though not at this moment.  Jungkook never settled until his works were perfect and that's what you loved about him. Luckily, Jaewon had taken the outgoing personality of his fathers; you we're terribly shy when it came to making friends, but of course turned out to be the loudest amongst them once the awkward phases past. Jaewon had the same cute lips as his dad and even pouted the exact same way. Though, Jungkook would always try to convince you that he'd taken more after you.

“He looks more like you thank you think.”

“You're just saying that.”

“No I swear, just look at his cute nose, that's definitely yours.”

Jungkooks eyes flickered back and forth between your features and those of the sleeping Jaewon. The tips of his fingers brushed over your cheeks, then lips and then nose before determining that in fact Jaewon had your nose.

“He's even an artist just like you.”

“Jungkook you dumbass you did art as well.”

“Hey, don't fucking swear in front of our child,” his lips pulled into a grin and he tried to hold back the laughter crawling up his throat.

The dark room was coated in silence and a faint snore from Jaewon, until Jungkook decided to speak again, “I just realized something.”

The expression he gave you was one you'd seen at least a million times before. It's that same ‘I'm about to make a slightly dirty joke’ face he'd make before saying something you wished you didn't even hear, but nonetheless you were curious.

“What is it?”

“Were both artists right?”

You nodded your head slowly unsure of where he was going to take this joke.

“And Jaewon is our son, right?”

“Jungkook-”

“That means we made art. Get it because we're artists and we made Jaewon who's like a work of art and-”

His own words were cut off by a snort and shameless laughter.

“Jungkook he's sleeping.”

Tears rolled down his cheeks as he calmed down and poked at your cheeks, “but it makes sense, you gotta admit it.”

“Why did I marry you again?”

“Because I was too irresistible to pass up?”

“Hopefully Jaewon doesn't inherit that arrogance of yours.”

“But that's what made you fall in love with me.”

And surely that's exactly who Jaewon turned out to be. Always proud of whatever he did and if he wasn't, then he'd keep going until it was, in your eyes, perfect. Just like his father, Jaewon was always set out on making you proud. You wouldn't be surprised if he turned out to be a musician like Jungkook.

“Okay Jaewon-ah let's get you out of the bath okay?” He pouted and crossed his arms but eventually stepped into his batman towel and marched into his room, clutching tightly onto his father's ring finger.

Of course, after all the times he’d be away, Jungkook always brought back extensive collection of the newest wear for not only himself, but for his fashionable son. Jaewon jumped into the light washed jeans and lifted his arms to let his dad pull a striped long sleeve over his tiny torso. He wouldn’t be jungkook's son without going to the mirror and looking at his new outfit, “Daddy, I look like you!”

The boy was overjoyed to see the resemblance he held of his father.

“Of course you do Jaewon-ah,” you smiled slowly ruffling his brown hair.

“But Jaewon, daddy is more handsome don’t you think?”

“Jungkook-”

The little boy violently shakes his head, taking his whole body in the process, “No you aren’t daddy.”

Amused chuckles fall from your lips watching the two argue about who the heck was more handsome.

Tears formed in the corners of Jaewon’s eyes the more he persisted and it took Jungkook about a minute to notice.

“Ah- Jae...I’m sorry. Ah don’t cry. Stop crying please, I’m sorry.”

Jungkooks pleads grew stronger as the boy cuddled into his large sweater, “I’m sorry Jaewon, do you want to go get ice-cream.”

There it was. Another thing Jaewon took from Jungkook, his over dramatic acting. The tears ceased and dried and were replaced with a snarky grin. He’d won and he knew it.

“Okay daddy let's go now.”

Jaewon skipped out of the room leaving the both of you speechless, trying to understand the situation.

“Did he just?”

“He’s more like you than I thought, this is bad.”

Jungkook lifts himself off the ground and steps directly in front of you. The amount of height he had on you was intimidating but you were never one to step down from a fight.

“But that just means he’ll get a lot of people to fall in love with him.” The warmth of his breath met the top of your neck for the second time today and this time his intent might be very, very, different. The tips of his long fingers grip tightly at your wrist the other hand finding it's home just below the middle of your back.

“Wow it’s that arrogance again, you really can’t control it can you?”

Your relationship was built on teasing and playful fighting and he was always sure to try and stay serious but would also be the first to laugh.

“If it wasn’t for that then we probably would’ve never even had-”

“Don’t finish that sentence Jeon.”

“We had Jaewon thanks to me.”

The boy either somehow heard his name all the way from downstairs or spoke at perfect timing calling, “Daddy hurry up!” as loud as his little lungs could.

“I’m coming Jaewon-ah!” Jungkook shouted after him. “And you, this isn’t over yet.”

“You should go before Jaewon gets on your case as well.”

This was when he broke his dark demeanor and broke into a soft smile. A soft kiss is pressed to your cheek and he brushes past you to go to his demanding son.

“Oh and Jungkook?”

The sparkles in his eyes wait for you to speak, though the words from your mouth aren’t ones he necessarily wanted to hear,

“Make sure mine is chocolate okay?”

[sprnklersplashes]

The Future is Forever (2/?)

They stepped out into the yard, Emma starting to get excited. She hadn't had a partner before. Maybe they'd be like Bonnie and Clyde, minus the killing. Instead of running towards Regina's gates, Killian dragged Emma over to her garage.

"Wait here," Killian whispered. 

"What are you doing?" she asked as his good hand twisted the latch on the door. Her head snapped up to the house, half expecting to see a light switch on.

"Regina took something of mine off me last week," he explained, pushing the door open so that it stood like a roof over them. "And I'd very much like it back. Can I borrow your torch?" She handed it over to him.

"What is this thing anyway?" she asked as she ran into the garage, shining the torch on every shelf. It was so dark that the small beam from the torch was the only light there was, giving brief glimpses of what was in the garage. He bent down and scanned along the very bottom of the walls before stopping at the far corner. "Killian."

She heard something scrape across the floor before he ran back out. He and Emma stretched up and closed the door, wincing as it slammed shut. No lights in the house turned on.

"Let's go." They raced to the heavy iron double gates, neatly avoiding damaging Regina's car. Emma knew better than to attempt to shake them; there was an electronic keypad keeping them shut.

"You go first," Killian said, offering to give her a boost. "Ever climbed one of these before?"

"I was climbing gates when you were still in diapers," she replied, taking his boost and wrapping her hands around the bars. She perched her toes on the bar below her. She reached up and grabbed another bar, pulling herself up. Despite the aches in her muscles she kept going until she was propped up on her arms and leaning over the top of the gate. With a grunt she heaved herself up so that one leg was swung over the top. Don't look down was the main thought running through her head. She swung her other leg over and carefully moved back down until she finally felt her feet touch the pavement and could take her shaking hands off the bars. Still slightly breathless, she gave Killian a thumbs up sign.

"Here," Killian whispered, passing the case he got from the garage through the bars and beginning to scale the gate himself, which took longer than Emma had with his one hand, but he managed. Emma drummed her fingers on the case as she watched him, constantly looking back at the house to see if someone was going to open a curtain and see them.

Killian jumped off the gate and landed roughly on his knees. Rolling her eyes, Emma helped him to his feet.

"A guitar?" she asked when he was upright. "For real?"

"What?" he asked. His eyes came to rest on the guitar case. "Oh yeah, that." "You hindered our mission for a guitar?"

"An important guitar," he told her, picking it up by the handle. "Come on, let's get away from here."

Emma had thought the streets at night would be scary. Full of dark alleyways and men with scarred faces and chainsaws for hands. But when she first ran away she found it wasn't like that. The streets had so many different colours in them for a start. Silver mixed with blue at one end while oranges and pinks collided at the other. It was a surreal feeling, even for a 14 year old. It made her breathe easier, she was brave, not scared. For a few fleeting moments, she felt like she could do anything.

"Are we going somewhere in particular?" Emma asked.

"Are you hungry?" Killian replied. Emma thought about it. The last thing she'd eaten was that cheesecake, which was a good while ago.

"I could eat." Killian smiled and picked up speed. She copied him. "I take it we're going to get food.”

"There's a diner just a bit of a walk from here," he explained. "As long as you're okay with a walk. They don't ask questions."

"And how would you know about this diner for teenage runaways?" she asked, nudging him. He scratched his ear. "I may have snuck out and popped down there for a burger once or twice."

"Do they know you?"

"Nah. They don't pay enough attention for that." 

The dinner was tucked amongst various other shops on the street and was the only one open. Inside were light brown wooden tables and steel chairs, dirty white walls (which sort of looked gray) and dull orange lights. Emma and Killian rushed to a table at the back.

"Not that good looking but it's good food and low princes," Killian said, draping his jacket over the back of the chair. "What more could you want?"

Soon Emma was devouring a basket of fries and a coke. 

"How are they?" Killian asked through a mouthful of his burger.

"Good and cheap," Emma said. "What more could a girl want?" Killian nodded and lifted two napkins out from the dispenser, sliding one across to Emma.

"Ever played this game before?" Emma shook her head. "Just tear the napkin up into as many pieces are you see fit." He demonstrated by tearing his napkin in half, then four, then eight. Emma nodded and tore hers into quarters then tore one quarter in half. "So you have six little pieces there. So you tell me six things about yourself. Then I tell you eight things about me."

Emma looked at the pieces of paper with uncertainty. Honestly she wasn't sure there was a lot to tell.

"Not anything major. Your favourite animal, for instance." Killian held up one of his pieces. "I'll go first. One, my middle name is Patrick." For every fact he said, he put a piece down. "Two, my favourite song is Love Shack by Cosmic Thing. Three, I really love burgers. Four, this is my second runaway attempt. Five, Who Framed Roger Rabbit is a cinematic masterpiece. Six, I was born in England. Seven, my family moved to the US when I was 8. And eight....." He paused, trying to find the perfect final fact. He nodded to himself. "8 is I'm glad I met you." Emma scoffed, ignoring the fluttering in her chest. "As a friend, I feel compelled to add. And partner in crime."

"You really know how to charm a girl," she remarked.

"Come on, exchange of information, Princess."

"Do you use the word 'Princess' on all the girls you run into or just me?" A cheeky smirk was her answer. "Okay so one..... my favourite movie is The Princess Bride. Two, I also happen to love burgers. Three, these boots happen to be my favourite boots." She was doing okay so far. He was hanging on to her every word. "Four..... I guess my favourite subject is art. Five.... um..... I've never been to Florida and it's the one place I want to go. And six...." She wants to say 'I'm glad I met you' but doesn't. She doesn't want to tell him that yet. "..... I think pineapple on pizza was a great invention." Killian's mouth fell open in mock shock.

"Wow. I am travelling with someone who geniunely likes Hawaiian pizza. That isn't a joke, you seriously think pineapple can belong on pizza."

"Yes. Yes I do." Killian rose and slowly backed away.

"You know, Swan I don't think this 'partners' thing will work out so I-" Emma rolled her eyes and he stepped towards her again. "Come on. Let's sail away."

"Do you have any idea where we're sailing to?" she asked. 

"We'll find somewhere," he said, waving his hand casually as if he could conjure up a five star hotel out of nowhere.

They kept going, the weather seeming to get colder with every step. They were both soon shivering. Emma curled her hands into fists and stuck them into her pockets to keep them warm. Killian was hunched over trying to keep himself warm. Her feet were worn out from walking too, her legs slowly turning to Jell-o. 

"Hey." Killian grabbed her arm and turned her slightly around. "Look." He pointed across the street where there was a large kid's playground, complete with slide, swingset, roundabout and big plastic castle.

"Yeah it's a park," she mumbled tiredly. "What about it?"

"I know it's not the best but it's shelter," he suggsted.

"What?" Emma asked, focussing on the park opposite them. "The castle?" Killian shrugged. He was right, even if she didn't want to admit it. It was late and that castle was better  than nothing. "Okay. Let's go."

They ran across the street, managed to jump over the gate and jogged to the castle. 

Inside it was cool with no proper floor, only the tarmac of the playground and almost pitch black save the moonlight coming in through the roof. There were tiny benches built into the walls. Emma took her sweater out of her bag, folded it u and used it as a pillow. The ground was still cold but at that point Emma was done caring. She almost found herself relaxing into the ground. Killian lay on his stomach with his jacket as a pillow.

"Warm enough?" she asked quietly.

"Nice and toasty," he replied. "Good night, Princess." "Will you ever call me anything other than Princess or Swan?" she asked, through a yawn. She saw him chuckle.

"Maybe one day."                                                            ***** The chill in the air and rising sun woke Emma early the next morning. She rolled onto her stomach, despite the small sharp stones pricking her stomach, and stretched, arching her back like a cat. She wanted to bury her head and sleep some more, but unfortunately that wasn't in the cards for someone who had slept on the ground. With a sigh she pushed herself up and pressed her back against the wall.

Killian was already up; his hair was sticking in different directions and he rubbed sleep away from his eyes. Still, he managed a warm smile and a nod.

"Morning Swan," he said. "Sleep well?"

"Just dandy," she replied, rising to her feet. "Any idea what time it is?"

"Six thirty, or thereabouts," he answered, consulting his wristwatch. "Which means we'd better get a move on. I'd say we have about three hours before Regina notices we're missing. A further two hours before she calls the police." They strolled out of the park together and into the town. They slipped into an empty café and freshened up in the bathroom before continuing their walk to a bus station in the centre of town.

“Any place in particular?" Killian asked as they consulted a large map of the country hanging on the wall.

"Well we're here." Emma placed her finger over the dot that said 'Boston, Massachusetts'. "And we're on a budget." Between them ,they had $360, including food. "So we can't go too far yet......" Her eyes scanned the states surrounding Massachusetts. "New York?" Kilian nodded.

"All the great musicians go to New York. Come on." They purchased their tickets at $15 each and Emma sat at the terminal while Killian mumbled something about having to use the bathroom. 

When he didn't come back for a while, Emma started getting uncomfortable. What if he decided to ditch her? What if all this was an elaborate 'break in the new girl' prank and he'd gone to get Regina, who was hiding in the station? She didn't move but lifted her bag onto her shoulder and calculated this distance between herself and the door.

However she was proven wrong when Killian appeared only a few minutes later, carrying a brown paper bag. He plonked down beside her, grinning.

"There was a bakery," he explained. "And these were going cheap." He lifted out a chocolate covered pastry and handed it over to her. She accepted it with a smile, and oh god did it smell good, but she was wary.

"You shouldn't waste funds like that," she told him. He waved her concerns off. "They were a dollar each, Swan. Not exactly breaking the bank." 

Slightly more reassured, Emma bit into it. Chocolate exploded in her mouth. It was the best thing she'd had to eat in a while.

“Thank you.”

They boarded the bus a while later, nestling in two seats at the very back, which happened to be the most comfortable place Emma had rested since they began their journey. Emma sat by the window with the early morning sun warming her face. She pulled her jacket tighter around herself and placed her backpack on her lap. The excitement had finally caught up her with, as well as the sugar low following the high she'd gotten from her pastry, slowly pulling her into sleep.

When she woke, it was to Killian shaking her shoulder gently.

"Hey Princess," he whispered. "We're here." She opened her eyes, blinking in the sudden brightness. Once she had adjusted, she saw a parking lot filled with buses like the one they were on.

"Doesn't look like New York," she mumbled tiredly as Killian helped her to her feet. He laughed at that.

"Well that's because it's a bus station. Come on." 

They strolled out of the station and into the loud bustling streets of New York. There was a sweet mix of sounds going on; street performers, car horns, hot dogs on a street vender's grill, different conversations on around them.

"Okay, this is New York," Emma laughed. She and Killian ran along the street, taking in everything. New York was on a different scale from everything Emma had seen before, it was louder, brighter, more alive. She finally saw what the buzz about this city was. 

"So now what?" Emma asked as they sat on a bench in Central Park together. Normally she'd just spent her days strolling around shops and parks.

"We survive," Killian replied. "Take it day by day. Live. Explore. And I'm sure New York has no shortage of bus stations we can kip in." Emma nodded, taking in the view.

"Can we just stay here a bit?" she asked.

"Sure. I'm in no rush."

When the sky turned to pink, they agreed to start looking for shelter. As the walked the streets of New York together on the lookout for a bus station, Emma looked up at a looming red-brick, Victorian looking apartment building. No lights were on inside and from what she could tell it was deserted. 

"Hey, look," she said, grabbing Killian's jacket. She ran up and peeked in one of the windows. No one home.

"Lot of the windows are boarded up," Killian remarked, pointing up. Sure enough, the windows on the top floor were covered with wooden boards. Emma ran  down the side of the house to check the back. The back yard was cut off from the rest of the world by a wire fence with a gate, but she could see that the bacl wall was sprayed with graffiti and had more boarded up windows. "It's abandoned," Emma concluded. She turned to Killian and gave him a knowing smile. "Think we could move in?" Killian looked over the house.

"How?" he asked. "We can't just break a window in broad daylight." Emma looked around, noticing the run down parade of closed shops facing the back of the house.

"We can if no one's around. Cover me." She ran to the gate and inspected the lock. Nothing too complicated. "If you see someone, scream." She took her hairpin out of her hair and began fiddling with the lock. After a few years of breaking and entering, she was an expert at this.

"Emma what are you doing?" Killian whispered, shocked. When the lock opened and the gate, after a few touch pushes from Emma, creaked open. Emma laughed and stepped over the threshold, prompting Killian to follow. "I shouldn't underestimate you." She smirked and started picking the lock of the back door. It was slightly more difficult than the gate but it managed to give way and open. 

Inside was a long hallway practically covered in dust and dark. An old, broken chandelier hung from the ceiling. They didn't bother looking in the other rooms and raced up the grand staircase. There was another always upstairs, with doors on either side, some had dirty metal numbers on them, some had unpainted spots that showed the apartment number . Each apartment was the same; a small main room and what they assumed would have been a kitchen to the side, two smaller rooms and a deserted, half tiled bathroom. However, they varied in their levels of abandoned, some still had carpet or bits of furniture, some were stripped bare.

They settled in one on the second floor which had a couch in the main room and dragged in two relatively clean mattresses from the other apartments. "Well, not too bad then," Killian remarked. Emma nodded. Sure there was no electricity or running water but they didn't need that. It was shelter, it was a hideout and it was safe. Emma tested her mattress gingerly. It was soft enough and no springs poked out (yet).

"We should buy pillows or something," Emma said. "Just for comfort." "Oh look at the princess," Killian teased. "Needing her pillows. What next, having meals served to us on silver platters?" Emma gave him a mock glare. "You do have a point though." He lay back, staring at the ceiling. The silence stretched out between them; all Emma could hear was the beat of her heart and her own breathing. This was going better than her first attempt at being on her own. She wondered if that was the same for him. 

"Hey," she asked. "How old were you when you ran away?" The question caught him off guard. She began to wish she hadn't said it until he smiled.

"Would you believe me if I said I was nine?" Emma's mouth dropped open and she imagined a smaller version of Killian with plump cheeks and puppy eyes and dimples running the streets. "Although looking back on it I'm not sure if that counts as an attempt. I was only on my own for two and a half weeks." "No way," she said, sitting up. "What did you-"

"Okay." Killian sat up and turned to face her. "I'm about to tell you one of my biggest secrets. I need you to keep this."

"Take it to the grave," she swore.

"I was nine and in my first foster home. And I hated it. I missed my family, I hated the other kids. So after a few weeks I packed my backpack with candy bars and comics and left." He gave her a smile but it was pained. She didn't blame him. If anyone understood what it was like to be alone from a young age, it was her. She reached over and took his hand.

"Thanks for telling me," she said. 

Emma took a deep breath. If he shared his story, he no doubt wanted to know hers. And she was ready to tell it.

"I was fourteen," she confessed. "I'd been with this new forster mother and-" The words caught in her throat when she remembered Ingrid. That was one of the best places she'd been in, at least she thought it was. Ingrid took her seriously, bought her treats, let her watch TV, took her out to movies and amusement parks. She'd even bought her a little necklace for her 14th birthday; a snowflake. It was perfect.

"Are you okay?" Killian asked, crouching in front of her. "Emma it's okay...."

"No, it's fine," she said. "And um, this foster mom we were walking home and.... I don't know she starts talking about something and....." Emma swallowed the lump in her throat. "And put me in the path of a moving car." Killian stared at her, open mouthed and eyes wide. His hand slowly made its way to hers and linked their fingers. His touch made her feel calmer than she could remember and she didn't pull away. "So that's my sob story."

"Hey, look at us," he remarked. "A couple of sad loners with tragic stories." Emma laughed. "Thanks for telling me, Emma." Killian stood up and looked out the window. “Look at all the people.” Emma got up and joined him, perching on the windowsill.

“Where do you think they’re going?” she asked.

“Work, maybe. Or back to their homes.” They both cast a glance around their new home.

“Bet they don’t have something like this,” Emma said, feeling slightly down as she thought about how great a normal bed would be.

“Maybe not,” Killian agreed. “But I’d rather have this.”

“Really?” Emma asked. Killian raised his eyebrows and nodded.

“Seems you have a knack for finding hidden treasures, Swan.”

[williamlwolf89]

The Blogger’s Guide to Telling Stories That Win Hearts and Minds

Have you ever wondered if people even care about your writing?

You pour out your heart and soul, but sometimes that feels like shouting your words down a bottomless abyss.

You know you have a world of knowledge to pass on – but you have no idea how to wrap it into an exciting package your readers will love.

Could it be that … your writing just isn’t engaging enough?

After all, if even famous writers like Hemingway or Steinbeck took many, many years to excel in their craft, how are you supposed to instantly produce a moving masterpiece out of thin air?

You just feel overwhelmed.

And when the time comes to crank out another post for your blog or writing client, that huge blank space with the relentlessly blinking cursor … frankly, it’s terrifying. Because you fear the response to your efforts will be radio silence … once again.

Luckily, you have a fool-proof technique at your disposal that is guaranteed to make your readers long for every powerful word you write.

And it’s been around forever.

The Incredible Power of Stories to Win Hearts and Minds

As humans, words are perhaps our most powerful tools. Words have crushed souls and built empires. So let me tell you a little story about the true power of words.

It’s the story of Scheherazade, a young girl in ancient Persia, who was facing execution, scheduled for the next morning.

Curiously, she had brought herself into her situation on purpose. She had agreed to marry the king.

The king’s first wife cheated on him, and he felt so angry and bitter that he decided to make sure it never happened again: by bedding a new virgin wife every night and having her decapitated the next morning.

But Scheherazade wasn’t just stunningly beautiful; she was also extraordinarily smart. She had a plan to snap the king out of his bloodthirsty frenzy. Every night, she would tell him one of the most bewitching, mesmerizing stories he had ever heard and interrupt it right at its peak, promising to continue the next night.

And every night, the king spared her life for just one more day.

But for how long could she continue this dangerous game?

You’ll have to wait to find out. But first, let’s take a look at the powerful trick Scheherazade employed.

Why a 30,000-Year-Old Trick Still Works Today

As long as humans have existed, we have been hardwired to satisfy one urge. (No, it’s not what you think.) I’m talking about storytelling.

Some 30,000 years ago, when our ancestors carved the thrilling tale of their last mammoth hunt into rock walls, their scraggly-haired friends must have consumed these stories eagerly.

That’s because the need for stories is rooted deeply inside our brains.

It’s the reason you love watching movies or TV. The reason you exchange your latest personal adventures over a cup of coffee. The reason we tell bedtime stories to our kids and the reason you can’t help but check your Facebook page for updates from friends.

We’re addicted to stories because we get the thrill of a new experience without risking pain or hardship ourselves. And they’re a form of communication. We live and relive events through stories.

And our brains process stories differently. Stories engage a deeper part of our brains than any logical explanation ever could — it’s the emotional part, the “Ugh-I-once-felt-that-too” part. And we connect at a much deeper level than information delivered in the abstract.

Author David Mamet famously stated, “The audience will not tune in to watch information. You wouldn’t, I wouldn’t. No one would or will. The audience will only tune in and stay tuned in to watch drama.”

When you think about it, that’s exactly the reason we read the entertainment, sports, even politics section of the news.

Humans crave drama – so feed it to them like candy!

But how does this apply to you as a blogger?

How to Avoid Drowning in a Sea of Forgettable Bloggers

As stories connect so deeply with our emotions, content that uses storytelling is also more memorable than bare facts alone.

In fact, stories are 22 times more memorable than bare facts.

Pack any bit of information you want to pass on to your reader into a story, and it will stay with him. Stories mean emotion, and emotion means deeply engraving the lesson into your reader’s brain.

Here is a demonstration. Which advice would you have listened to more closely as a kid:

“Don’t feed the grizzly; it’s dangerous.”

or

“Little Charlie from across the street tried to feed the grizzly last week and got his arm torn into a bloody mash.”

Take your pick.

Because here is the harsh blogging truth: People forget the lessons they learn online, even the ones they absolutely love. Life gets in the way. But next time your reader is standing in her kitchen, wondering about what to bake, she might remember that funny story about the dog that stole the blueberry pie… and use exactly that recipe from your cooking blog.

Finally, if you do nothing else but inform your reader with your content, you are missing out on one of the main reasons he came to you in the first place: Entertainment.

Whether they know it or not, your readers are also surfing the Internet for distraction. And if you can include stories in your blog, you’ll make reading fun. And they’ll stick around.

But you might wonder if storytelling even applies to your blog. Storytelling is for novels and movies and TV shows, right? But blogging? How does that work?

Let’s find out …

Storytelling: The Swiss Army Knife for Self-Reliant Bloggers

You may not believe it yet, but you can use storytelling for virtually any blogging topic.

Writing a post for your car maintenance blog about how to change a fan belt? Tell a story about how many years ago, your uncle’s fan belt tore while he was on his way to a date. He tried changing it and arrived covered in engine oil.

Writing about how to calculate the centroid of a trapezium on your math blog? Tell them about your excitement for mathematical formulas and how your parents found out about it by observing you drawing geometrical figures in the sandbox all day long.

No topic is too abstract for a story, once you find a way to relate it to people.

It’s great for posts that already have a kind of narrative flow: ultimate guides, “How to” posts, bonding posts, case studies, or opinion pieces.

But you can also use storytelling for posts that just contain bare lists, like a list of resource links. Just put your story in the opening or the closing of the post.

Here is the basic rule: You can tell a story in any post that includes at least a little snippet of continuous text.

And your secret weapon of storytelling isn’t just limited to posts. You can use stories to sell products or to connect with your list as well.

The following are some examples of how to do it:

Roundup posts. Set the context with a story. If your post is about getting more followers on Facebook, tell the story of how you struggled to grow your following until you applied the advice of certain experts. You could also insert a story into the participants’ bios.

Interviews. Frame your questions with stories. For example: “Amanda, I know in your first two months of blogging your blog saw a whopping total of 23 visitors. Today, you have ramped it up to 40,000 visitors per month. Which tools most helped you to make your blog a success?”

Opinion pieces. Describe an experience that led you to form your opinion, and describe it in the form of a story. Look at the topic and find an association that holds a story. Make your opinion or attitude a story in itself by describing how it makes you behave.

“Wake-up call” posts. Paint the future story of the best case and worst case scenarios: What will happen if the reader doesn’t change their behavior? What will happen if they do? Show the domino effect of good or bad events. Once you have a chronological sequence, you have a story — things are happening one after the other.

“Cause” posts. Let’s say you decide to lead the fight against a new regulation your readers hate. Tell the story of that witty email you wrote to the bureau, starting with the hopeless quest to find the email of the right person. It’s David versus Goliath, and readers love to root for the underdog.

About Pages. Using personal stories on your “About” page helps you appear like a real human being – not a faceless digital ghost. Also, choose stories that make you stand out, even if it’s in an awkward way. Aaron Iba, in his “About” page, simply scanned a psychological evaluation from his childhood days. It diagnoses him as a highly intelligent kid … with ADD. And it definitely makes him look very human.

Product Reviews. Tell the story of how a time management product “saved your life” or a fertilizer killed your favorite plant. But be truthful – this is not the place for invented stories.

Sales Pages. If you have a product or service to sell (or from your affiliates) or you can make money with, write testimonials as success stories. Let a happy customer describe how your financial coaching paid for itself in a few weeks and left them with money in their pockets at the end of every month.

Email newsletters. Personal stories help subscribers identify with you, but writing about your grandma’s gum surgery will look odd without the relevant context, so link it to your blog topic. A photography blogger might tell the story of toppling over backwards trying to shoot a photo of the tip of the Eiffel Tower. And by the way, to achieve a pleasant contrast when shooting against a bright sky, this is what you have to do…

As you can see, bloggers can use stories just about anywhere.

But why are they so effective?

5 Ways Stories Can Supercharge Your Writing

Here are just a few of the ways stories can lend power to your writing.

1. Stories Add Clarity and Credibility

If you want to demonstrate a point, a story is ideal because it shows how your lesson played out in the real world. A story is like a testimonial for your tip.

In ancient times, when Uagh told Uggah (both conventional stone age names, I assume) how his mammoth hunting friend had broken through the ice layer never to be seen again, it wasn’t just to give Uggah the slight kick that he had outlived his friend. It also served as a testimonial, a warning of the precise spot of danger on the ice.

We trust the experience of others, that’s why testimonials work so well. And we pass our experiences on in the form of stories.

Anthony Metivier shows us how the mind can suppress memory and gives an example with a little story about his near-plane-crash-experience.

2. Stories Bond You to Your Readers

A Masai Warrior and a New York stockbroker live in totally different realities, but they both know the joys of a task well done or the fear of losing someone. The one thing they have in common are the same emotions.

If you tell your own story and share your emotions, you’ll bond the reader to you.

Sarah Peterson lays it all out about how she struggled in her relationship while becoming an entrepreneur. Sarah’s readers share the goal of leaving the 9-to-5 grind, so this is a courageous post that taps deeply into their fears and desires. It makes the reader feel understood.

In your bonding story, share your authentic feelings. Letting your most private feelings go public for the whole world to see can be scary. But these feelings are exactly what will make your story work so well.

3. Stories Provide Entertainment and Variety

People love to be entertained. So share something fun, outrageous, or surprising.

Chuck Wendig, in this example, shows off his radical and entertaining writing style. In an imaginary conversation about a figure his reader created, he writes:

When I talk to you about your character, and you start to tell me, “Well, she has to find the DONGLE OF MAGIC to fight the WIZARD OF BADNESS and then she tames HORBERT THE MANY-HEADED DRAGON,” I immediately start to cross my eyes. I emit drool. I have a small seizure and then fall into a torpid grief-coma. Grief over what you’ve done to the human condition.

The post wouldn’t have lost any information without this paragraph, but it’s fun and draws the reader in.

4. Stories Help You Win Your Reader’s Attention

The purpose of your opening is to catch the reader’s attention and draw them into your post. Stories do this naturally.

This post begins “Food changed my life,” and the phrase is strange enough to get readers curious. How could something as commonplace as food have changed the author’s life? What does he mean? Is it about losing weight? Or the hidden additives in our modern diet? Or the torturous taste of fried tarantula?

Reading on, the author talks of pushing his trolley among “soulless food” and of how he “hates food.” We all need food, so how can he possibly hate it? (And still, we might have secretly felt the same way some time after consuming too much McDonald’s food.)

Each new sentence seems to raise as many questions as it answers, and before the reader knows it, they’re drawn deeply into your post and train of thought.

So throw your reader a hook, let them bite, and reel them in on the fishing line of their own curiosity and appetite for drama.

5. Stories Inspire People to Take Action

One of the best ways to close your posts is with a call to arms – inviting your reader to act now.

So use a story to paint a vivid and inspiring future for your reader.

This Copyblogger post is about touching people with your writing. In its last paragraph, it tells the story of the future you, the heartfelt writer, affecting the lives of thousands of people with your writing:

Give them a reason to laugh. Give them a reason to cheer. Give them a reason to keep fighting, even when they feel like all hope is lost.

Do that, and you won’t have to search for readers. They’ll search for you. You’ll boot up your computer one morning to find thousands upon thousands of them waiting for you, ready to listen, ready to learn, ready to launch into action.

And that’s when you’ll realize: you’re not just a writer anymore. Word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, you’re changing the world.

Maybe you’re like Don [Draper, from ‘Mad Men’], lying on a couch, sipping a glass of bourbon, or maybe you’re not. Either way, you gotta admit…

It’s pretty freaking cool.

Jon Morrow skillfully fires up his reader’s emotions, and boy, do you want to go out and write after reading it.

How to Find the Perfect Story for Any Situation

Having been convinced of the universal power of storytelling – even for bloggers – you might be wondering where your stories come from.

How do you find that mesmerizing story idea that will bring life to your post?

In truth, all your idea needs is the secret ingredient we’ve already mentioned: strong emotions!

Turn on the TV, open a magazine – you will always see the same forms of drama. Nothing special about it, but people are eating it up like hot fudge.

How you present is much more important than what you present. So don’t panic because you think you need to rewrite Gone with the Wind.

Whether your story covers a single phrase, a whole section, or your entire post, first you should identify the point you want to make.

Then look for a story that expresses your point as neatly as possible.

Simple, right?

Well, just in case it doesn’t seem simple just yet, let’s look at a specific example.

Say you run a “home and garden” blog and want to write a post about buying furniture, in particular how to match colors and fabrics.

What type of stories could you use to enhance your post?

The following are a few different story types you could draw upon for your furniture post.

1. Stories Where You are the Main Character

The first option is to exploit your personal experiences. You already know that it makes for a strong connection with your reader.

In our example, if you ever worked in a store selling furniture, you should feel like you won the lottery.

Granted, that’s not very likely. But maybe you could draw a parallel with an experience you did have? What about that summer job in a clothing store you took in your teens? Clothes require careful combinations too. You could tell a story of your worst-dressed customer as an analogy for a room full of poorly coordinated furniture.

Remember, everybody, including you, has a myriad of stories to tell; most people just don’t dare to tell them publicly. Your life is an accumulation of stories. Draw from your wealth of experiences.

Societal norms have put filters into our heads. So go ahead and be the one who dares to shake people out of their fatigue by telling them something raw and authentic.

The more inner resistance you feel to telling your story, the better it is: You are involved emotionally. Transfer your emotions onto the page and the reader. He will love you for it.

2. Stories You Have Heard or Read

What did your ex-roommate once tell you about his Dad’s obsession with antique furniture? What about your cousin’s eccentric taste in pillow covers? And what did you learn from that documentary the other day about glassware?

We are constantly bombarded with an avalanche of stories from family, friends, acquaintances, and the media. Make mental notes. Use the boring small talk at the next garden party to extract interesting stories from strangers – you will also have a better time than asking how their kids are doing for the third time.

Draw upon these stories in your writing. There is a reason why you remember them; some piece of it connected with you. Find the part that got you interested in the first place, and parade it. It will also be the most interesting part for your reader.

3. Stories You Find on The Internet

One tool offers an inexhaustible supply of stories.

It’s your old friend Google. And while an unfocused Google search can be like diving down a rabbit hole, finding the right story is usually just a matter of using the right keywords.

History is an endless source of great stories. (The term even contains the word “story.”) Look how Mark Manson fills an entire 4,000-word post with countless historical mini-stories. Even the tabloid papers would have a hard time coming up with that much sex and personal drama.

For my furniture-related post, I Googled “Victorian furniture styles,” and found this Wikipedia link, which mentions how plaster was scored to look like stone and graining was used on woods to imitate higher quality. You could easily tell a story about how it was fashionable in Victorian times to fake surfaces to seem higher class.

I chose “Victorian” just as a random era to make my search more concrete — generic queries tended to produce generic results. If “Victorian” hadn’t worked, I’d have tried other eras such as “Renaissance.”

4. Stories From Your Reader’s Life

Try to put yourself in your reader’s shoes. Have you been where he is now? If not, give it your best guess. Which concerns could be on his mind right now?

Whoever your reader is, if he is reading a post about how to match furniture, he quite likely is in the process of furnishing his new house or apartment. So why not begin the post like this:

Is all of the planning and combining starting to annoy you?

Curtains here, rugs there. The couch finally fits with the cupboard, but now it doesn’t fit with the side table.

Furnishing an apartment can be a headache, especially when you are not sure how to combine all the different pieces.

And notice how most of the story is implied. The narrative isn’t explicit – this happened, then this happened – but it’s there behind the scenes. It’s implied by sentences like “The couch finally fits with the cupboard, but now it doesn’t fit with the side table.” We can imagine hours of trial and error trying to combine different items of furniture from a catalog or website.

You could also tell your reader’s story indirectly by choosing a personal story they’ll relate to. Consider who your audience is – which stories from your life will they relate to best?

If you started a blog about parenting, that might be a story about a teething baby. Readers of a tattoo blog would be more interested in the story of the first time you were “inked.”

5. Stories You Just Made Up (It’s Okay)

The point of a great story is to draw your reader in, entertain them, and leave them with a message. And a story doesn’t have to be true to achieve these goals.

So if you don’t have a story, invent one.

Of course, there are limits. Never lie about your biography (education, career, big merits), never lie about another existing person, and don’t fake events to provoke opinions. Don’t explicitly claim your invented story is true either.

For the furniture blog post, you could make up a story of someone newly rich, with almost unlimited budget, whose expensive furniture was combined so badly that house guests laughed at his lack of taste. Your message? That a beautifully furnished room is not limited by budget.

Build a Devoted Following through the Magic of Storytelling

Armed to the teeth with storytelling tools, you can now engage your readers’ emotions like never before.

Remember, you’ve told hilarious stories during family holiday dinners or when you were alone with your best friend. Telling stories on your blog is easy too.

And Scheherazade?

With enormous courage and wit, she managed the unthinkable: After firing up the king’s passion night after night with her thrilling stories about wonders, love, and danger, he spared her life and made her his queen.

Scheherazade saved her own life, and thousands of others (the king’s future brides), with the mesmerizing power of storytelling.

Here is the point: We humans are raw and vulnerable. We want to see ourselves reflected in others and we want to experience truth (even if it’s not always fact) – which is why we love to immerse ourselves in the pain and the joy of a sweeping story.

Give people the stories they are so desperately longing for and they will strongly engage with your writing – as they will feel your message to the core.

You have magnificent, unbelievable stories, begging to be told.

The question is: do you have the courage to tap into your deepest emotions and share them with the world?

Because if you do, your readers will be your loyal audience forever.

The post The Blogger’s Guide to Telling Stories That Win Hearts and Minds appeared first on Smart Blogger.

from SEO and SM Tips https://smartblogger.com/storytelling/

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WordPress Themes for Artists | Templified

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WordPress Themes for Artists

If you’re an artist, surely you know the power the great online portfolio can have. Artists who care about visual presentation need a very specialized theme, one that does everything that it can to help promote your artwork and convey a message. You need a website that presents your portfolio in a stylish way that doesn’t detract from your own creativity. A great WordPress portfolio theme for artists strikes the perfect balance between customization features and functionality, style and performance. this will allow you to create a website that is perfectly designed to complement everything that you have created.

But it can be challenged locating such a WordPress theme, there are thousands to choose from and not all of them have the right features or functionality to frame your work the right way. we have sorted through thousands of different themes and come up with a list of the absolute best WordPress artist portfolio themes. If you see a theme in this collection, you’ll know that it is a very high-quality evening with great documentation and support, tons of customization options and the ability to showcase your hard work the right

Divi, Premium WordPress Artists Portfolio Theme

Divi is one of the best WordPress themes around.  Period.  Honestly, I could just end the review right there. If you’ve been around WordPress for more than a day or two, you’ll know Divi by name. This is elegant themes flagship WordPress theme and it is so incredibly powerful, flexible and dynamic, it’s absolutely worth consideration for any artist who wants to put together a fabulous online portfolio. The Divi WordPress theme is so flexible thanks in large part to the Divi page builder, one of the most powerful drag-and-drop page builder plugins around. With Divi, there’s absolutely nothing that you can’t achieve. Framing your work in any way you want it is quite simple to do. You can drag-and-drop elements where you want them, optimize and a customized styles, colors and fonts, add new content areas and make sure that everything perfectly fits with your brand.

Using a WordPress theme like Divi may sound a bit complicated at first, but this is a very user-friendly theme that I think is well worth considering for any artist who wants the best possible portfolio. It doesn’t really matter what type of work you create, this WordPress theme does the hard work of presenting your content properly and thanks to its responsive design, your hard work will look great on all devices. This is simply put one of the best WordPress artists portfolios themes around.

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Kalium, WordPress Artist’s Portfolio Theme

Kalium is another premium-quality WordPress theme that gives you a ton of flexibility. building an artistic portfolio shouldn’t take forever and a day and with Kalium, you get several different pre-made demo styles to give you a huge Head start. no matter what type of art you have created, Kalium does a wonderful job of framing it and presenting it in a stylish and interesting way. This theme is incredibly flexible, thanks to its full support for all of the most popular drag-and-drop page builders. It comes with one of the absolute best, WP Bakery page builder. Wpbakery page builder has dozens and dozens of different content modules that can be dragged and dropped anywhere you want them on the page.

Customizing your website is a snap, everything is done visually so you don’t need to be an expert with WordPress to take advantage of this page builder plugin. Kalium totally supports WooCommerce, that allows you to set up a stylish online shop to sell products or digitally downloadable files. Any artist who wants a high level of flexibility and several different options for starting points could you well by purchasing the Kalium WordPress theme.

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Amedeo, WordPress Artist Portfolio Theme

This Amedeo theme is an absolute masterpiece. It’s a creative artists dream come true. This is a multi-concept theme that was built for creative agencies and artists all like. with this theme, you get a remarkable collection of amazing layouts. Creating a compelling story line to present your work, that’s what this theme is all about. It’s ideal for creative studios and any sort of artist who wants over 20 different portfolio layouts to showcase your work the right way. if you’re looking for an intuitive theme that has a powerful set of short codes, this one is a great choice. For artists and designers, agencies and digital shops, you’ve got a lot to think about.

It’s true, some themes have a style that is just a little bit better than others. Personally, I find this particular designed to be one of the best. You got one click demos that you can import, multiple layouts for image galleries and landing pages, woocommerce support for building an online art shop and More. I think the color palette right out of the box is nice, it’s got distinct pastel color palette with trendy green highlights. Of course, it’s not just about looks. this is a theme that has enough functionality to keep anyone happy.

Looking for more themes that support WooCommerce? Check out our full WooCommerce WordPress themes collection. It’s a great resource for finding all the best themes for building online shop.

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A.R.T. WordPress Theme for Artist’s Portfolios

Many artists rightfully believe that their artwork should be the one to do the talking, not the theme. I happen to agree and if you want a very minimalist style theme that let’s your artwork take Center stage, this theme is a great choice. Every single one of the included demo designs is clean, modern and minimalist. Most of the demo pages include image galleries that take up most of the prime real estate, using plenty of white space to draw your eye where you want to be wrong.

Of course, there’s a lot more than just minimalist style going on here. This theme includes a powerful drag-and-drop page builder with several different pre-made galleries. There are loads of options that you can customize your website with, including color and typography. If you want a simple-looking website that has powerful features, this theme is a really nice blend and might be the theme for you.

Check out this collection for more minimalist WordPress themes.  I really clean presentation can be a great way to attract attention for your content. I think that grouping of themes offers a lot of different options for getting your website up and running quickly and presenting your content in an interesting way.

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Bolge, WordPress Artist Portfolio Theme

A large part of any artists online success can be due in part to a great-looking website. You want something that sets you apart from your competition and presents your art the right way. This theme does all of that and more. It’s true, not many creative agencies how boring websites. That’s no coincidence. making the right first impression to wow your visitors, that can be achieved through selecting a proper creative, artistic a theme. This is one such theme, it allows you to create a stylish creative agency homepage with any of the nearly 20 different unique homepage designs.

There are also over two dozen portfolio layouts and although each and every one of them is completely unique, they share the same beautiful, soft color palette. The typography is equal to the task and you’ll have several different places to create call to action sections. if you like drag-and-drop page builders, you’re in luck. This one comes bundled with WP Bakery Page builder and that means you can customize every page and every post within minutes. You can even cobble together different aspects of your favorite Mo styles to create something completely new. This is a really flexible theme that is fast living and highly legible for everyone who visits your site.

You may also want to have a look at our full collection of WordPress portfolio themes. We’ve assembled a large amount of the best portfolio themes around and hopefully in that collection, you’ll find plenty of different options to build a very successful portfolio for your creative work.

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Blaze

With all of the different WordPress themes out there for building an artistic portfolio, you’ll see a lot that are very much related. portfolio themes that are meant to appeal to a very small number of people with very specific needs. Of course, those little quirky and unique themes might be great for some agencies or freelance artists, they’re not going to be right for everyone. blaze is WordPress theme that is perfectly suited for a wide range of uses. This is a general-purpose artistic portfolio theme that I feel is a perfect fit for a lot of different categories of art.

First of all, you get over a dozen different demo layouts, each of them with a clean, minimal style. This is a black and white look that I feel is perfect for more formal creativity. Of course, everything in the theme can be adjusted to fit your needs using the built-in admin panel and wpbakery Page builder is included for deeper design changes. each and every one of the demo layouts can be installed with just a single click and each one is completely customizable.

thanks to the clean lines, the black and white style and ample use of white space, you are images are going to look very prominent on the page. That makes this a great portfolio theme for any sort of creative endeavor. These of typography is bold and clear, I think that just about any type of art is going to benefit from this theme. Give them the flexibility and full support for a wide array of plugins, there’s nothing you can’t achieve with the Blaze WordPress theme.

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Leedo, WordPress Artist Portfolio Theme

This is a very contemporary WordPress theme with a staggering amount of flexibility and functionality. If you want a very modern, creative and colorful artistic portfolio theme, this is an absolutely fabulous place to start. One of the highest rated themes in this collection, Leedo is perfect for artists, product developers, creative agencies, designers and more. Anyone who needs stunning portfolio that doesn’t sacrifice functionality for pure style, is going to have slowly adore this theme.   Of course, if you do love style, it’s pretty nice too!

Leedo perfectly balances the needs of you, the artist as well as every visitor to your website. It presents your content in a highly functional and attractive way and Leedo make sure to make everything very accessible. No matter what device your visitors arrive on, you are going to present your content in a spectacular way. Leedo is a WooCommerce ready theme with a spectacular, responsive layout and a clean, colorful design that I think will appeal to a huge audience.

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Red Art

Perfect for all sorts of portfolios, whether it’s personal artistic portfolios or small agency portfolios, red art he’s a gorgeous, finely crafted WordPress theme with all the features that you need to perfectly present your content. You get a responsive design, multiple blog layouts, effective timeline display and a unique full screen slider. that full screen slider is a really nice way to present large images they’re very impactful. You can get a lot of information across in a very short. Of time thanks to the clear-cut layout and the ample use of white space.

If you want a WordPress theme that is a great blend of functionality and style, modern features with classic artistic sensibilities, they WooCommerce ready theme so you can set up an online shop and you want the ultimate in flexible customization options, read art is a wonderful choice. considering how versatile this theme is, I think that it has the style and functionality to work for just about any sort of art. On top of all of that, you will get access to the powerful page builder call the wpbakery page builder. this allows you to really expand the functionality of your website with drag-and-drop page building fun. This is an all-around theme that I think is one of the highest rated I’ve ever seen.

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Skylab, WordPress Photo Artist Portfolio Theme

The Skylab WordPress theme is a photography portfolio that has an innovative touch screen navigation system, hardware-accelerated sliders and it presents all types of artistic portfolios in the right light. It may seem like that type of innovative technology is unnecessary in a purely artistic world like an online portfolio, but it can really make a big difference to these are experienced that you deliver.

This Skylab theme is great for showcasing design and photography projects, it has multiple page templates that can accommodate a wide variety of different image galleries. Each of those image galleries can hold as many images as you want to put in them. This is a fast loading theme, it’s completely responsive and as a lightweight build. For artists who want a flexible but technologically savvy WordPress theme, this Skylab template is a really wonderful combination of features.

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Smiltė, WordPress Artist Portfolio Theme

This WordPress theme goes out of its way to present your content in a really unique way. it’s true that many themes have quite similar designs and styles, it can be a bit of a challenge to find one that really does deliver on a unique look and feel for your site. These days, trends or what they are and flat themes are in right now. This particular theme takes that flat style and adds a few design touches of its own to create something completely different and unique.

Right after you install this theme, you can select from one of the dozens of different portfolio designs. Each of them can be set up with just a handful of clicks. Every design included in this theme is completely unique. However, they all share a single common thread, beautiful and stylish use of color. The color palette here is generally pastel, though the design default can be changed up to suit your needs. With this theme, you got WPBakery Page Builder, arguably the most powerful page building plug-in out there. This allows you to create custom designs that fit with what your website is all about. You also get advanced slider, allowing visitors with prominent placement of your best or most recent work. If you want a colorful, feature field theme that is and powerful, this theme should certainly be on your list of potential purchases.

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Werkstatt, Artist Portfolio WordPress Theme

The vast majority of artistic portfolio themes that you find online try to blend images with text, making sure that neither overwhelms the other. That’s certainly not the case with this bold, grid artistic portfolio theme. It’s all about the visuals. honestly, the front page has nearly no text at all. Other than the logo in the upper left corner, all you get to look at is beautiful, bold and interesting images. this thing might not be perfect for everyone, but if you have a need for highly visual presentation for your content, it could be the right choice.

However, many people will find that the blind link nature of these image blocks is not a good user experience. For some users, that’s not going to be an issue. For others, you’re going to want a theme that at least gives a little bit of a hint as to what continent lies ahead. Of course, if you choose the right images, you can have the best of both worlds. I unique portfolio that gets the message across did you leave, rather than relying on the written word.

Demo More Information Get Hosting

Stockholm, WordPress Artist’s Portfolio Theme

It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that a WordPress theme named after Stockholm, Sweden would have such a clean, minimalist style. It’s got a bit of a mid-century modern feel to it and I think that it makes for a wonderful presentation of any type of creative work. Artists who want to showcase their work with a lot of white space, focusing all the attention on the creativity, or going to love Stockholm.

There are a bountiful number of pre-made demo sites that are included with your download package. This best selling theme offers 40 of them. Not all of them are right for artistic portfolios, but quite a number of them are. Every demo is compatible with WooCommerce and WP Bakery Page Builder is included for deeper control over the look and the features of your website.

Making the right first impression is always important and thanks to a prominently placed slider, you can highlight your most important work, or your most recent artistic creations, at the top of any post or page. this allows you to make the most of the real estate that you have to offer, giving your readers a very interesting presentation for your work.

Demo More Information Get Hosting

Uncode, WordPress Artist Portfolio Theme

Uncode is a highly recommended, extremely popular WordPress theme for artists. When he said about creating a portfolio, flexibility is among the most important aspects. Uncode is highly flexible. This highly rated WordPress theme has dozens of different demo styles that are built to impress. Making the right first impression is critical to winning over new business and with the beautiful sliders that you have at your fingertips, you can present your most important and your best work right up front. uncovered is a perfect blend of image and text, the typography clearly outlines the topic of conversation and helps keep navigation very clear and straightforward.

Uncode includes WP Bakery page builder, a drag and drop plug-in that is tailor made to help you create a layout that you need, offering no options that you don’t. This Uncode theme is built to appeal to all sorts of creatives, artists who want a beautiful presentation, photographers, designers and even small agencies.  That can really help with your user experience. Delivering a fast loading, great looking website that has all the information necessary and nothing that is extraneous can really help keep people around and keep them looking for more. if you got a wide variety of great-looking images, this is the type of flexible theme that can do its best to make your content look fantastic.

Demo More Information Get Hosting

Weston, Artist Portfolio WordPress Theme

Weston is the name of this multi-purpose artistic or art portfolio theme. It has a wide variety of plugins that can help enhance your sights design and features. Weston focuses on Minimalist creativity. That’s something that a lot of artists love and speaking of love, I think you’ll find several different designs to love in the dozen demo concepts that are provided. You get clear, easy to read typography, plenty of white space and everything is understated. This is a great thing, it places all of the focus on your content, your artwork or your projects. That’s precisely the way it should be one creating a portfolio. some of the design features are built to enhance the user experience, slider revolution being chief among them.

Now, on to the portfolio style. You get two different options, a beautiful masonry layout and a 4 column design. This is one aspect that I think comes up a bit short with the Westin theme. Many of the themes in this collection offer you dozens of different portfolio styles. This, it just has the two. Of course, if what you want is a masonry layout, you’re in luck. Anyway, this minimalist theme has a lot of design style and a high amount of overall functionality, great for minimalist artists who want a homepage that has absolutely no distractions to be found.

Demo More Information Get Hosting

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Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans and the purity of Cinema

F W Murnau's 1927 classic Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans is a film about sex and love, about lust and family, about money and poverty. It is a paean of marriage, a film in which a man is torn between the seductive dreams that belong to the young and the comforting yet sometimes unappreciated familiarity of home.

Indeed, the film begins with a man for whom familiarity has bred contempt – or at least malcontent. He is a farmer with few pennies to rub together but with land and cattle. He is seduced by a vamp from the city. She is everything that he may once have dreamed of – she dances with energetic sexuality, her clothes are the finest satin, her hair bobbed in the latest fashion, she smokes cigarettes and conjures up images of nightclubs and the bright lights of the big city.

His wife has nothing on this woman. She works hard, dresses poorly, lives for her home, her child and her husband. She belongs to the very village that he dreams of leaving.

The man and the vamp (we are never told their names) hatch a plan to kill the wife, to sell the farm and escape into the city. Of course, we know that she will love him only for as long as the money lasts. After that he will be left with nothing. We know and so do the older members of the village - It doesn't take a sophisticate to see through her, just someone who hasn't been blinded by the frenzy of her shaking hips.

The story is extremely simple and has few surprises. The man and his wife do set off on a boat to the mainland, he does intend to kill her but at the last moment he realises that he can't do it. Once on the other side, having understood his intentions, she flees and he pursues her.

It's difficult to explain what happens next, not because its complicated but because it is the exact opposite. It is so straight forward, so sentimental, that to put it in words diminishes it. Sunrise is a visual experience, a perfect example of how Silent Cinema was able to break through the limits of its technology and become pure cinema.

Alfred Hitchcock, a man who understood the true nature and language of the cinema arts, said that silent pictures were the purest form of cinema. He told Francios Truffaut that this purity had been replaced with what he called 'Photographs of people talking.' If anyone wanted to understand why the great director held silent film to such esteem, they should look no further than Sunrise.

The film was made after producer William Fox (whose company later merged with 20th Century to create the juggernaut that is 20th Century Fox) brought German filmmaker F W Murnau to the US and gave him free rein to make whatever he wanted. He did this based on Murnau's excellent filmography which included Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, Faust and the great The Last Laugh. The final result, reportedly costing a whopping $1Million was released in 1927, the year that Warner Brothers gave the world The Jazz Singer and the history of film was forever changed. Murnau built huge sets, lit from every possible angle so the camera could move with a freedom that wouldn't be seen again for many years. At the first Academy Awards it won the prize for best Artistic film and it is easy to see why. You won't see it on any lists of Best Picture winners, however, as the Artistic Film award was never to be given again (the winner of best Entertainment Film – Wings – is officially listed as the first Oscar winner for best film).

The photography (Charles Rosher and Karl Struss are credited as the cinematographers) is truly a thing of beauty. It looks like an early Noir but has a lightness to the character that Noir would have cowered from. It is a romance with moments that would suit Wuthering Heights yet it is in no way gothic. It is just a simple, honest film.

Murnau wasn't a great lover of titles (The Last Laugh famously only has one intertitle in the whole film) but here he uses them ingeniously. A great example is when the man and the vamp are conspiring together. She says, referring to the wife, 'Couldn't she get drowned' the title of which seems to melt on the screen as if it too was being washed away with water.

The subtitle - A Song of Two Humans - sums up the film perfectly, capturing its lyrical, ephemeral quality.

Yet, despite the vastness of the sets and the beauty of the frames, the film is about just two people. Yes, we are introduced to the vamp early on but she is merely a plot point. Sunrise is about a relationship being reborn. From the moment the lovers step out of the church, where the man is confronted with the betrayal he had agreed to and the promise he had made when he said his vows is laid before him, the film is not concerned about anything else.

Murnau obviously had great affection the two main characters (played by George O'Brian and Janet Gaynor), making fun of their country-ness but never judging them. They are not sophisticated, they are in an environment which is quite alien to them, yet it doesn't matter. Even when the band leader chooses a peasant dance for them towards the end of their date, they care little about his condescension. They just want to have fun, that's all that matters.

I was first made aware of Sunrise many years ago when I saw one image of it in a book. I am not sure why but that one still, taken towards the end of the film when the husband is on a boat looking for his wife who, it seems, has been lost at sea, made an impression on me. The night is punctuated by the lights on the many lamps that the searchers are carrying. It is an image that stayed with me for many years and I became obsessed with finding and watching this film.

Sunrise is a magnificent movie. It is, in my opinion, the greatest of the silent era, which is high praise itself. It is, quite simply, a masterpiece. Warm, romantic, tense, comedic and terrific.

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WordPress Themes for Artists | Templified

New Post has been published on https://templified.com/wordpress-themes-for-artists/

WordPress Themes for Artists

If you’re an artist, surely you know the power the great online portfolio can have. Artists who care about visual presentation need a very specialized theme, one that does everything that it can to help promote your artwork and convey a message. You need a website that presents your portfolio in a stylish way that doesn’t detract from your own creativity. A great WordPress portfolio theme for artists strikes the perfect balance between customization features and functionality, style and performance. this will allow you to create a website that is perfectly designed to complement everything that you have created.

But it can be challenged locating such a WordPress theme, there are thousands to choose from and not all of them have the right features or functionality to frame your work the right way. we have sorted through thousands of different themes and come up with a list of the absolute best WordPress artist portfolio themes. If you see a theme in this collection, you’ll know that it is a very high-quality evening with great documentation and support, tons of customization options and the ability to showcase your hard work the right

Divi, Premium WordPress Artists Portfolio Theme

Divi is one of the best WordPress themes around.  Period.  Honestly, I could just end the review right there. If you’ve been around WordPress for more than a day or two, you’ll know Divi by name. This is elegant themes flagship WordPress theme and it is so incredibly powerful, flexible and dynamic, it’s absolutely worth consideration for any artist who wants to put together a fabulous online portfolio. The Divi WordPress theme is so flexible thanks in large part to the Divi page builder, one of the most powerful drag-and-drop page builder plugins around. With Divi, there’s absolutely nothing that you can’t achieve. Framing your work in any way you want it is quite simple to do. You can drag-and-drop elements where you want them, optimize and a customized styles, colors and fonts, add new content areas and make sure that everything perfectly fits with your brand.

Using a WordPress theme like Divi may sound a bit complicated at first, but this is a very user-friendly theme that I think is well worth considering for any artist who wants the best possible portfolio. It doesn’t really matter what type of work you create, this WordPress theme does the hard work of presenting your content properly and thanks to its responsive design, your hard work will look great on all devices. This is simply put one of the best WordPress artists portfolios themes around.

Demo More Information Get Hosting

Kalium, WordPress Artist’s Portfolio Theme

Kalium is another premium-quality WordPress theme that gives you a ton of flexibility. building an artistic portfolio shouldn’t take forever and a day and with Kalium, you get several different pre-made demo styles to give you a huge Head start. no matter what type of art you have created, Kalium does a wonderful job of framing it and presenting it in a stylish and interesting way. This theme is incredibly flexible, thanks to its full support for all of the most popular drag-and-drop page builders. It comes with one of the absolute best, WP Bakery page builder. Wpbakery page builder has dozens and dozens of different content modules that can be dragged and dropped anywhere you want them on the page.

Customizing your website is a snap, everything is done visually so you don’t need to be an expert with WordPress to take advantage of this page builder plugin. Kalium totally supports WooCommerce, that allows you to set up a stylish online shop to sell products or digitally downloadable files. Any artist who wants a high level of flexibility and several different options for starting points could you well by purchasing the Kalium WordPress theme.

Demo More Information Get Hosting

Amedeo, WordPress Artist Portfolio Theme

This Amedeo theme is an absolute masterpiece. It’s a creative artists dream come true. This is a multi-concept theme that was built for creative agencies and artists all like. with this theme, you get a remarkable collection of amazing layouts. Creating a compelling story line to present your work, that’s what this theme is all about. It’s ideal for creative studios and any sort of artist who wants over 20 different portfolio layouts to showcase your work the right way. if you’re looking for an intuitive theme that has a powerful set of short codes, this one is a great choice. For artists and designers, agencies and digital shops, you’ve got a lot to think about.

It’s true, some themes have a style that is just a little bit better than others. Personally, I find this particular designed to be one of the best. You got one click demos that you can import, multiple layouts for image galleries and landing pages, woocommerce support for building an online art shop and More. I think the color palette right out of the box is nice, it’s got distinct pastel color palette with trendy green highlights. Of course, it’s not just about looks. this is a theme that has enough functionality to keep anyone happy.

Looking for more themes that support WooCommerce? Check out our full WooCommerce WordPress themes collection. It’s a great resource for finding all the best themes for building online shop.

Demo More Information Get Hosting

A.R.T. WordPress Theme for Artist’s Portfolios

Many artists rightfully believe that their artwork should be the one to do the talking, not the theme. I happen to agree and if you want a very minimalist style theme that let’s your artwork take Center stage, this theme is a great choice. Every single one of the included demo designs is clean, modern and minimalist. Most of the demo pages include image galleries that take up most of the prime real estate, using plenty of white space to draw your eye where you want to be wrong.

Of course, there’s a lot more than just minimalist style going on here. This theme includes a powerful drag-and-drop page builder with several different pre-made galleries. There are loads of options that you can customize your website with, including color and typography. If you want a simple-looking website that has powerful features, this theme is a really nice blend and might be the theme for you.

Check out this collection for more minimalist WordPress themes.  I really clean presentation can be a great way to attract attention for your content. I think that grouping of themes offers a lot of different options for getting your website up and running quickly and presenting your content in an interesting way.

Demo More Information Get Hosting

Bolge, WordPress Artist Portfolio Theme

A large part of any artists online success can be due in part to a great-looking website. You want something that sets you apart from your competition and presents your art the right way. This theme does all of that and more. It’s true, not many creative agencies how boring websites. That’s no coincidence. making the right first impression to wow your visitors, that can be achieved through selecting a proper creative, artistic a theme. This is one such theme, it allows you to create a stylish creative agency homepage with any of the nearly 20 different unique homepage designs.

There are also over two dozen portfolio layouts and although each and every one of them is completely unique, they share the same beautiful, soft color palette. The typography is equal to the task and you’ll have several different places to create call to action sections. if you like drag-and-drop page builders, you’re in luck. This one comes bundled with WP Bakery Page builder and that means you can customize every page and every post within minutes. You can even cobble together different aspects of your favorite Mo styles to create something completely new. This is a really flexible theme that is fast living and highly legible for everyone who visits your site.

You may also want to have a look at our full collection of WordPress portfolio themes. We’ve assembled a large amount of the best portfolio themes around and hopefully in that collection, you’ll find plenty of different options to build a very successful portfolio for your creative work.

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Blaze

With all of the different WordPress themes out there for building an artistic portfolio, you’ll see a lot that are very much related. portfolio themes that are meant to appeal to a very small number of people with very specific needs. Of course, those little quirky and unique themes might be great for some agencies or freelance artists, they’re not going to be right for everyone. blaze is WordPress theme that is perfectly suited for a wide range of uses. This is a general-purpose artistic portfolio theme that I feel is a perfect fit for a lot of different categories of art.

First of all, you get over a dozen different demo layouts, each of them with a clean, minimal style. This is a black and white look that I feel is perfect for more formal creativity. Of course, everything in the theme can be adjusted to fit your needs using the built-in admin panel and wpbakery Page builder is included for deeper design changes. each and every one of the demo layouts can be installed with just a single click and each one is completely customizable.

thanks to the clean lines, the black and white style and ample use of white space, you are images are going to look very prominent on the page. That makes this a great portfolio theme for any sort of creative endeavor. These of typography is bold and clear, I think that just about any type of art is going to benefit from this theme. Give them the flexibility and full support for a wide array of plugins, there’s nothing you can’t achieve with the Blaze WordPress theme.

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Leedo, WordPress Artist Portfolio Theme

This is a very contemporary WordPress theme with a staggering amount of flexibility and functionality. If you want a very modern, creative and colorful artistic portfolio theme, this is an absolutely fabulous place to start. One of the highest rated themes in this collection, Leedo is perfect for artists, product developers, creative agencies, designers and more. Anyone who needs stunning portfolio that doesn’t sacrifice functionality for pure style, is going to have slowly adore this theme.   Of course, if you do love style, it’s pretty nice too!

Leedo perfectly balances the needs of you, the artist as well as every visitor to your website. It presents your content in a highly functional and attractive way and Leedo make sure to make everything very accessible. No matter what device your visitors arrive on, you are going to present your content in a spectacular way. Leedo is a WooCommerce ready theme with a spectacular, responsive layout and a clean, colorful design that I think will appeal to a huge audience.

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Red Art

Perfect for all sorts of portfolios, whether it’s personal artistic portfolios or small agency portfolios, red art he’s a gorgeous, finely crafted WordPress theme with all the features that you need to perfectly present your content. You get a responsive design, multiple blog layouts, effective timeline display and a unique full screen slider. that full screen slider is a really nice way to present large images they’re very impactful. You can get a lot of information across in a very short. Of time thanks to the clear-cut layout and the ample use of white space.

If you want a WordPress theme that is a great blend of functionality and style, modern features with classic artistic sensibilities, they WooCommerce ready theme so you can set up an online shop and you want the ultimate in flexible customization options, read art is a wonderful choice. considering how versatile this theme is, I think that it has the style and functionality to work for just about any sort of art. On top of all of that, you will get access to the powerful page builder call the wpbakery page builder. this allows you to really expand the functionality of your website with drag-and-drop page building fun. This is an all-around theme that I think is one of the highest rated I’ve ever seen.

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Skylab, WordPress Photo Artist Portfolio Theme

The Skylab WordPress theme is a photography portfolio that has an innovative touch screen navigation system, hardware-accelerated sliders and it presents all types of artistic portfolios in the right light. It may seem like that type of innovative technology is unnecessary in a purely artistic world like an online portfolio, but it can really make a big difference to these are experienced that you deliver.

This Skylab theme is great for showcasing design and photography projects, it has multiple page templates that can accommodate a wide variety of different image galleries. Each of those image galleries can hold as many images as you want to put in them. This is a fast loading theme, it’s completely responsive and as a lightweight build. For artists who want a flexible but technologically savvy WordPress theme, this Skylab template is a really wonderful combination of features.

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Smiltė, WordPress Artist Portfolio Theme

This WordPress theme goes out of its way to present your content in a really unique way. it’s true that many themes have quite similar designs and styles, it can be a bit of a challenge to find one that really does deliver on a unique look and feel for your site. These days, trends or what they are and flat themes are in right now. This particular theme takes that flat style and adds a few design touches of its own to create something completely different and unique.

Right after you install this theme, you can select from one of the dozens of different portfolio designs. Each of them can be set up with just a handful of clicks. Every design included in this theme is completely unique. However, they all share a single common thread, beautiful and stylish use of color. The color palette here is generally pastel, though the design default can be changed up to suit your needs. With this theme, you got WPBakery Page Builder, arguably the most powerful page building plug-in out there. This allows you to create custom designs that fit with what your website is all about. You also get advanced slider, allowing visitors with prominent placement of your best or most recent work. If you want a colorful, feature field theme that is and powerful, this theme should certainly be on your list of potential purchases.

Demo More Information Get Hosting

Werkstatt, Artist Portfolio WordPress Theme

The vast majority of artistic portfolio themes that you find online try to blend images with text, making sure that neither overwhelms the other. That’s certainly not the case with this bold, grid artistic portfolio theme. It’s all about the visuals. honestly, the front page has nearly no text at all. Other than the logo in the upper left corner, all you get to look at is beautiful, bold and interesting images. this thing might not be perfect for everyone, but if you have a need for highly visual presentation for your content, it could be the right choice.

However, many people will find that the blind link nature of these image blocks is not a good user experience. For some users, that’s not going to be an issue. For others, you’re going to want a theme that at least gives a little bit of a hint as to what continent lies ahead. Of course, if you choose the right images, you can have the best of both worlds. I unique portfolio that gets the message across did you leave, rather than relying on the written word.

Demo More Information Get Hosting

Stockholm, WordPress Artist’s Portfolio Theme

It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that a WordPress theme named after Stockholm, Sweden would have such a clean, minimalist style. It’s got a bit of a mid-century modern feel to it and I think that it makes for a wonderful presentation of any type of creative work. Artists who want to showcase their work with a lot of white space, focusing all the attention on the creativity, or going to love Stockholm.

There are a bountiful number of pre-made demo sites that are included with your download package. This best selling theme offers 40 of them. Not all of them are right for artistic portfolios, but quite a number of them are. Every demo is compatible with WooCommerce and WP Bakery Page Builder is included for deeper control over the look and the features of your website.

Making the right first impression is always important and thanks to a prominently placed slider, you can highlight your most important work, or your most recent artistic creations, at the top of any post or page. this allows you to make the most of the real estate that you have to offer, giving your readers a very interesting presentation for your work.

Demo More Information Get Hosting

Uncode, WordPress Artist Portfolio Theme

Uncode is a highly recommended, extremely popular WordPress theme for artists. When he said about creating a portfolio, flexibility is among the most important aspects. Uncode is highly flexible. This highly rated WordPress theme has dozens of different demo styles that are built to impress. Making the right first impression is critical to winning over new business and with the beautiful sliders that you have at your fingertips, you can present your most important and your best work right up front. uncovered is a perfect blend of image and text, the typography clearly outlines the topic of conversation and helps keep navigation very clear and straightforward.

Uncode includes WP Bakery page builder, a drag and drop plug-in that is tailor made to help you create a layout that you need, offering no options that you don’t. This Uncode theme is built to appeal to all sorts of creatives, artists who want a beautiful presentation, photographers, designers and even small agencies.  That can really help with your user experience. Delivering a fast loading, great looking website that has all the information necessary and nothing that is extraneous can really help keep people around and keep them looking for more. if you got a wide variety of great-looking images, this is the type of flexible theme that can do its best to make your content look fantastic.

Demo More Information Get Hosting

Weston, Artist Portfolio WordPress Theme

Weston is the name of this multi-purpose artistic or art portfolio theme. It has a wide variety of plugins that can help enhance your sights design and features. Weston focuses on Minimalist creativity. That’s something that a lot of artists love and speaking of love, I think you’ll find several different designs to love in the dozen demo concepts that are provided. You get clear, easy to read typography, plenty of white space and everything is understated. This is a great thing, it places all of the focus on your content, your artwork or your projects. That’s precisely the way it should be one creating a portfolio. some of the design features are built to enhance the user experience, slider revolution being chief among them.

Now, on to the portfolio style. You get two different options, a beautiful masonry layout and a 4 column design. This is one aspect that I think comes up a bit short with the Westin theme. Many of the themes in this collection offer you dozens of different portfolio styles. This, it just has the two. Of course, if what you want is a masonry layout, you’re in luck. Anyway, this minimalist theme has a lot of design style and a high amount of overall functionality, great for minimalist artists who want a homepage that has absolutely no distractions to be found.

Demo More Information Get Hosting

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WordPress Themes for Artists | Templified

New Post has been published on https://templified.com/wordpress-themes-for-artists/

WordPress Themes for Artists

If you’re an artist, surely you know the power the great online portfolio can have. Artists who care about visual presentation need a very specialized theme, one that does everything that it can to help promote your artwork and convey a message. You need a website that presents your portfolio in a stylish way that doesn’t detract from your own creativity. A great WordPress portfolio theme for artists strikes the perfect balance between customization features and functionality, style and performance. this will allow you to create a website that is perfectly designed to complement everything that you have created.

But it can be challenged locating such a WordPress theme, there are thousands to choose from and not all of them have the right features or functionality to frame your work the right way. we have sorted through thousands of different themes and come up with a list of the absolute best WordPress artist portfolio themes. If you see a theme in this collection, you’ll know that it is a very high-quality evening with great documentation and support, tons of customization options and the ability to showcase your hard work the right

Divi, Premium WordPress Artists Portfolio Theme

Divi is one of the best WordPress themes around.  Period.  Honestly, I could just end the review right there. If you’ve been around WordPress for more than a day or two, you’ll know Divi by name. This is elegant themes flagship WordPress theme and it is so incredibly powerful, flexible and dynamic, it’s absolutely worth consideration for any artist who wants to put together a fabulous online portfolio. The Divi WordPress theme is so flexible thanks in large part to the Divi page builder, one of the most powerful drag-and-drop page builder plugins around. With Divi, there’s absolutely nothing that you can’t achieve. Framing your work in any way you want it is quite simple to do. You can drag-and-drop elements where you want them, optimize and a customized styles, colors and fonts, add new content areas and make sure that everything perfectly fits with your brand.

Using a WordPress theme like Divi may sound a bit complicated at first, but this is a very user-friendly theme that I think is well worth considering for any artist who wants the best possible portfolio. It doesn’t really matter what type of work you create, this WordPress theme does the hard work of presenting your content properly and thanks to its responsive design, your hard work will look great on all devices. This is simply put one of the best WordPress artists portfolios themes around.

Demo More Information Get Hosting

Kalium, WordPress Artist’s Portfolio Theme

Kalium is another premium-quality WordPress theme that gives you a ton of flexibility. building an artistic portfolio shouldn’t take forever and a day and with Kalium, you get several different pre-made demo styles to give you a huge Head start. no matter what type of art you have created, Kalium does a wonderful job of framing it and presenting it in a stylish and interesting way. This theme is incredibly flexible, thanks to its full support for all of the most popular drag-and-drop page builders. It comes with one of the absolute best, WP Bakery page builder. Wpbakery page builder has dozens and dozens of different content modules that can be dragged and dropped anywhere you want them on the page.

Customizing your website is a snap, everything is done visually so you don’t need to be an expert with WordPress to take advantage of this page builder plugin. Kalium totally supports WooCommerce, that allows you to set up a stylish online shop to sell products or digitally downloadable files. Any artist who wants a high level of flexibility and several different options for starting points could you well by purchasing the Kalium WordPress theme.

Demo More Information Get Hosting

Amedeo, WordPress Artist Portfolio Theme

This Amedeo theme is an absolute masterpiece. It’s a creative artists dream come true. This is a multi-concept theme that was built for creative agencies and artists all like. with this theme, you get a remarkable collection of amazing layouts. Creating a compelling story line to present your work, that’s what this theme is all about. It’s ideal for creative studios and any sort of artist who wants over 20 different portfolio layouts to showcase your work the right way. if you’re looking for an intuitive theme that has a powerful set of short codes, this one is a great choice. For artists and designers, agencies and digital shops, you’ve got a lot to think about.

It’s true, some themes have a style that is just a little bit better than others. Personally, I find this particular designed to be one of the best. You got one click demos that you can import, multiple layouts for image galleries and landing pages, woocommerce support for building an online art shop and More. I think the color palette right out of the box is nice, it’s got distinct pastel color palette with trendy green highlights. Of course, it’s not just about looks. this is a theme that has enough functionality to keep anyone happy.

Looking for more themes that support WooCommerce? Check out our full WooCommerce WordPress themes collection. It’s a great resource for finding all the best themes for building online shop.

Demo More Information Get Hosting

A.R.T. WordPress Theme for Artist’s Portfolios

Many artists rightfully believe that their artwork should be the one to do the talking, not the theme. I happen to agree and if you want a very minimalist style theme that let’s your artwork take Center stage, this theme is a great choice. Every single one of the included demo designs is clean, modern and minimalist. Most of the demo pages include image galleries that take up most of the prime real estate, using plenty of white space to draw your eye where you want to be wrong.

Of course, there’s a lot more than just minimalist style going on here. This theme includes a powerful drag-and-drop page builder with several different pre-made galleries. There are loads of options that you can customize your website with, including color and typography. If you want a simple-looking website that has powerful features, this theme is a really nice blend and might be the theme for you.

Check out this collection for more minimalist WordPress themes.  I really clean presentation can be a great way to attract attention for your content. I think that grouping of themes offers a lot of different options for getting your website up and running quickly and presenting your content in an interesting way.

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Bolge, WordPress Artist Portfolio Theme

A large part of any artists online success can be due in part to a great-looking website. You want something that sets you apart from your competition and presents your art the right way. This theme does all of that and more. It’s true, not many creative agencies how boring websites. That’s no coincidence. making the right first impression to wow your visitors, that can be achieved through selecting a proper creative, artistic a theme. This is one such theme, it allows you to create a stylish creative agency homepage with any of the nearly 20 different unique homepage designs.

There are also over two dozen portfolio layouts and although each and every one of them is completely unique, they share the same beautiful, soft color palette. The typography is equal to the task and you’ll have several different places to create call to action sections. if you like drag-and-drop page builders, you’re in luck. This one comes bundled with WP Bakery Page builder and that means you can customize every page and every post within minutes. You can even cobble together different aspects of your favorite Mo styles to create something completely new. This is a really flexible theme that is fast living and highly legible for everyone who visits your site.

You may also want to have a look at our full collection of WordPress portfolio themes. We’ve assembled a large amount of the best portfolio themes around and hopefully in that collection, you’ll find plenty of different options to build a very successful portfolio for your creative work.

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Blaze

With all of the different WordPress themes out there for building an artistic portfolio, you’ll see a lot that are very much related. portfolio themes that are meant to appeal to a very small number of people with very specific needs. Of course, those little quirky and unique themes might be great for some agencies or freelance artists, they’re not going to be right for everyone. blaze is WordPress theme that is perfectly suited for a wide range of uses. This is a general-purpose artistic portfolio theme that I feel is a perfect fit for a lot of different categories of art.

First of all, you get over a dozen different demo layouts, each of them with a clean, minimal style. This is a black and white look that I feel is perfect for more formal creativity. Of course, everything in the theme can be adjusted to fit your needs using the built-in admin panel and wpbakery Page builder is included for deeper design changes. each and every one of the demo layouts can be installed with just a single click and each one is completely customizable.

thanks to the clean lines, the black and white style and ample use of white space, you are images are going to look very prominent on the page. That makes this a great portfolio theme for any sort of creative endeavor. These of typography is bold and clear, I think that just about any type of art is going to benefit from this theme. Give them the flexibility and full support for a wide array of plugins, there’s nothing you can’t achieve with the Blaze WordPress theme.

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Leedo, WordPress Artist Portfolio Theme

This is a very contemporary WordPress theme with a staggering amount of flexibility and functionality. If you want a very modern, creative and colorful artistic portfolio theme, this is an absolutely fabulous place to start. One of the highest rated themes in this collection, Leedo is perfect for artists, product developers, creative agencies, designers and more. Anyone who needs stunning portfolio that doesn’t sacrifice functionality for pure style, is going to have slowly adore this theme.   Of course, if you do love style, it’s pretty nice too!

Leedo perfectly balances the needs of you, the artist as well as every visitor to your website. It presents your content in a highly functional and attractive way and Leedo make sure to make everything very accessible. No matter what device your visitors arrive on, you are going to present your content in a spectacular way. Leedo is a WooCommerce ready theme with a spectacular, responsive layout and a clean, colorful design that I think will appeal to a huge audience.

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Red Art

Perfect for all sorts of portfolios, whether it’s personal artistic portfolios or small agency portfolios, red art he’s a gorgeous, finely crafted WordPress theme with all the features that you need to perfectly present your content. You get a responsive design, multiple blog layouts, effective timeline display and a unique full screen slider. that full screen slider is a really nice way to present large images they’re very impactful. You can get a lot of information across in a very short. Of time thanks to the clear-cut layout and the ample use of white space.

If you want a WordPress theme that is a great blend of functionality and style, modern features with classic artistic sensibilities, they WooCommerce ready theme so you can set up an online shop and you want the ultimate in flexible customization options, read art is a wonderful choice. considering how versatile this theme is, I think that it has the style and functionality to work for just about any sort of art. On top of all of that, you will get access to the powerful page builder call the wpbakery page builder. this allows you to really expand the functionality of your website with drag-and-drop page building fun. This is an all-around theme that I think is one of the highest rated I’ve ever seen.

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Skylab, WordPress Photo Artist Portfolio Theme

The Skylab WordPress theme is a photography portfolio that has an innovative touch screen navigation system, hardware-accelerated sliders and it presents all types of artistic portfolios in the right light. It may seem like that type of innovative technology is unnecessary in a purely artistic world like an online portfolio, but it can really make a big difference to these are experienced that you deliver.

This Skylab theme is great for showcasing design and photography projects, it has multiple page templates that can accommodate a wide variety of different image galleries. Each of those image galleries can hold as many images as you want to put in them. This is a fast loading theme, it’s completely responsive and as a lightweight build. For artists who want a flexible but technologically savvy WordPress theme, this Skylab template is a really wonderful combination of features.

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Smiltė, WordPress Artist Portfolio Theme

This WordPress theme goes out of its way to present your content in a really unique way. it’s true that many themes have quite similar designs and styles, it can be a bit of a challenge to find one that really does deliver on a unique look and feel for your site. These days, trends or what they are and flat themes are in right now. This particular theme takes that flat style and adds a few design touches of its own to create something completely different and unique.

Right after you install this theme, you can select from one of the dozens of different portfolio designs. Each of them can be set up with just a handful of clicks. Every design included in this theme is completely unique. However, they all share a single common thread, beautiful and stylish use of color. The color palette here is generally pastel, though the design default can be changed up to suit your needs. With this theme, you got WPBakery Page Builder, arguably the most powerful page building plug-in out there. This allows you to create custom designs that fit with what your website is all about. You also get advanced slider, allowing visitors with prominent placement of your best or most recent work. If you want a colorful, feature field theme that is and powerful, this theme should certainly be on your list of potential purchases.

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Werkstatt, Artist Portfolio WordPress Theme

The vast majority of artistic portfolio themes that you find online try to blend images with text, making sure that neither overwhelms the other. That’s certainly not the case with this bold, grid artistic portfolio theme. It’s all about the visuals. honestly, the front page has nearly no text at all. Other than the logo in the upper left corner, all you get to look at is beautiful, bold and interesting images. this thing might not be perfect for everyone, but if you have a need for highly visual presentation for your content, it could be the right choice.

However, many people will find that the blind link nature of these image blocks is not a good user experience. For some users, that’s not going to be an issue. For others, you’re going to want a theme that at least gives a little bit of a hint as to what continent lies ahead. Of course, if you choose the right images, you can have the best of both worlds. I unique portfolio that gets the message across did you leave, rather than relying on the written word.

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Stockholm, WordPress Artist’s Portfolio Theme

It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that a WordPress theme named after Stockholm, Sweden would have such a clean, minimalist style. It’s got a bit of a mid-century modern feel to it and I think that it makes for a wonderful presentation of any type of creative work. Artists who want to showcase their work with a lot of white space, focusing all the attention on the creativity, or going to love Stockholm.

There are a bountiful number of pre-made demo sites that are included with your download package. This best selling theme offers 40 of them. Not all of them are right for artistic portfolios, but quite a number of them are. Every demo is compatible with WooCommerce and WP Bakery Page Builder is included for deeper control over the look and the features of your website.

Making the right first impression is always important and thanks to a prominently placed slider, you can highlight your most important work, or your most recent artistic creations, at the top of any post or page. this allows you to make the most of the real estate that you have to offer, giving your readers a very interesting presentation for your work.

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Uncode, WordPress Artist Portfolio Theme

Uncode is a highly recommended, extremely popular WordPress theme for artists. When he said about creating a portfolio, flexibility is among the most important aspects. Uncode is highly flexible. This highly rated WordPress theme has dozens of different demo styles that are built to impress. Making the right first impression is critical to winning over new business and with the beautiful sliders that you have at your fingertips, you can present your most important and your best work right up front. uncovered is a perfect blend of image and text, the typography clearly outlines the topic of conversation and helps keep navigation very clear and straightforward.

Uncode includes WP Bakery page builder, a drag and drop plug-in that is tailor made to help you create a layout that you need, offering no options that you don’t. This Uncode theme is built to appeal to all sorts of creatives, artists who want a beautiful presentation, photographers, designers and even small agencies.  That can really help with your user experience. Delivering a fast loading, great looking website that has all the information necessary and nothing that is extraneous can really help keep people around and keep them looking for more. if you got a wide variety of great-looking images, this is the type of flexible theme that can do its best to make your content look fantastic.

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Weston, Artist Portfolio WordPress Theme

Weston is the name of this multi-purpose artistic or art portfolio theme. It has a wide variety of plugins that can help enhance your sights design and features. Weston focuses on Minimalist creativity. That’s something that a lot of artists love and speaking of love, I think you’ll find several different designs to love in the dozen demo concepts that are provided. You get clear, easy to read typography, plenty of white space and everything is understated. This is a great thing, it places all of the focus on your content, your artwork or your projects. That’s precisely the way it should be one creating a portfolio. some of the design features are built to enhance the user experience, slider revolution being chief among them.

Now, on to the portfolio style. You get two different options, a beautiful masonry layout and a 4 column design. This is one aspect that I think comes up a bit short with the Westin theme. Many of the themes in this collection offer you dozens of different portfolio styles. This, it just has the two. Of course, if what you want is a masonry layout, you’re in luck. Anyway, this minimalist theme has a lot of design style and a high amount of overall functionality, great for minimalist artists who want a homepage that has absolutely no distractions to be found.

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