#people are allowed to be pissed off that it steals from human artists.

[noonvoid]

ai art is art. i don’t like ai. but it’s still art. lots of things are art. the real issue is how ai is being used maliciously by people.

[sassypotatoe1]

This! I love tech, I love the potential of generative ai and language models, I love automation, I love innovation. What I hate is capitalism. Like what do you mean we can use 3d printers to recycle plastic packaging into toys and to make joint replacements from biomass, but instead we're making MORE PLASTIC for commercial 3d printing that will end up in the landfill anyway? We can 3d print houses but we're using it to build novelty million dollar mansions for rich people instead of building affordable housing for homeless people.

What do you mean ai models are trained on artists' work without their knowledge or consent and people are using it to cop out of paying actual artists to make the work but taking the amalgamation of stolen art and selling it as an original piece? We were supposed to use it to train ai models to complete damaged art of dead artists or recognize the difference between photos, paintings and generated images for intellectual property protection. Why are we stealing people's art instead?

Teslas piss me off the most we were supposed to switch to electric cars because the tech is more affordable and easier to maintain and overall has less emissions per car what do you mean only rich people can afford it and manufacturing shortcuts are being taken so steering wheels fall off or retractable handles get stuck? We were supposed to have self driving cars because it would remove human error from the equation decreasing accidents and allowing disabled people access to private personal transportation what do you mean none of it was safety tested and they keep getting into accidents and killing people?

We were supposed to have robots take over the production part of the industrial and agricultural sectors so it's more precise, efficient and less exploitative what do you mean they fired all the engineers, foremen and quality control officers because a machine can do it better and product design and food safety went down the drain because machines still need people to supervise them?

We were supposed to have affordable access to products from anywhere in the world so there are no shortages anywhere what do you mean 3 companies have a monopoly and they all use slave labor and refuse to ship to places that are the most needy?

The answer here is literally one word: profit. The reason that all the tech that could have saved humanity is going to end up meaning our end is because it's more profitable. People cut corners because it's more profitable. People make more waste because it's more profitable. People control access and monopolize markets because it's more profitable. Any corporation's entire business plan and investor support structure hinges on perpetual growth in profits. Board members are upset when a business' profit didn't grow with 10% from one quarter to the next, even if it didn't impact production costs and equity. You can not perpetually grow in a finite system. There are only so many resources. There is only so much time. There are only so many limits.

We need to be more sustainable and stop chasing profit. Profit growth isn't a marker of a good business, it's a marker of an unsustainable and exploitative business.

I’m not anti-technology, I just think there’s something deeply sick about a society where robots make art and children work in factories.

[thetwstwildcard]

https://twstbullshit.tumblr.com/post/691408290248359936/nukababe-professional-digital-artist

Hey Lizz, as an artist can you please please share this to spread awareness ?

Oh um... Wow... That's.. Disappointing??? I have no idea who they are(the tracer, apparently they're in twst but I don't see their stuff-) but I feel for the "base" artist... I'll tag this as discourse in case people want to ignore it but I'd be dishearted and hope you will never have to worry about stolen art. I'm gonna rant (as I often do) in an artist's view but I'll put it under the cut.

But important. Don't attack the tracer!!! Be decent human beings!!! But do tell them to not trace bases that need to be paid for. Using bases is fine but PLEASE only use free to use bases and/or credit the artist. Just follow artists wishes.

Also I generally hate "drama/discourse" but art theft is a serious issue in the art community so I have choice words. Especially with them apparently being big????? But this is more to all art thieves. Yes stealing a base is art theft (if against the artist's rules)

Let me make it clear that it is fine to use bases, hell I have used bases. However, it is only okay to use F2U bases. Please do not steal P2U bases. I know a lot of artists on here, I think we all would be devastated to see someone trace over our art and call it their own. Tracing art is a valid step of the art journey BUT say that you traced or used a base. Follow an artist's rules and respect their craft. If you use a base say that, or link it. There is no shame in it. But there is shame in stealing art and claiming it's yours. Those line up too well to simply be referencing. That's traced.

It's disheartening to see that apparently this has gone on for a while (art style changes) but no one has realized or if they have they kept silent. If I was the original artist I would feel betrayed. I have had ocs stolen before and I have friends who have gotten their art traced. It sucks!!!

Also apparently this person also copied raffle prizes, I get raffle prizes can be hard sometimes but for the sake of supporters please only use art you've made (or F2U bases if the artist allows) as your supporter can get in trouble for using traced art and you never want to harm people who support you. If you do, YOU AREN'T SOMEONE WORTH SUPPORTING. CARE ABOUT YOUR FOLLOWERS BEFORE YOU CARE ABOUT YOUR CLOUT!!! (sorry... It annoys me when people will put others in possible danger for self satisfaction).

Besides the tracing, the art has potential??? The person seems to have skill but stealing from others isn't okay!

Ugh, I'm so often disappointed in this fandom but this is something that genuinely pisses me off. Artists work hard and fans treat artists like shit. I reached out to the actual artist and they're looking into if they can see if the person paid for the bases to use (and if they paid then its fine. But if not, that is theft!!)

I won't say don't follow this person because that's rude and controlling. However, support them in changing. Don't support an art thief. They look like they have potential, but stealing art will stunt their artistic growth.

Bases are important to use, references are important to use, you can even use actual people as references for drawings. All that is part of making art. But say that you used a reference (if it's done by another person) or that you used a base (especially if that's all the original artist asked for)

And for heaven's sake, DON'T STEAL BASES OR ART!!! ARTISTS NEED TO SURVIVE!!

I feel even worse because the artist seems very nice and they are also from the Ukraine... They need the money and support. They don't deserve to have their hard work stolen only to have someone else get the attention.

Be a person worthy of a following. Set an example. Be a decent human being.

[365daysofsasuhina]

[ @sasuhinabigflash2020​​ || Day Twenty-Three: They’re Better Than That ] [ Uchiha Sasuke, Hyūga Hinata, Uzumaki Naruto ] [ SasuHina, vulgarity ] [ Verse: Of Monsters and Men ] [ AO3 Link ]

[ Previous ] [ Next ] [ This piece is a sequel to Days Fourteen and Eighteen ]

Well...Sasuke can say this is certainly a first. And hopefully a last, as far as his career is concerned. Because as a hunter of monsters...working with one is the last thing he should be doing.

Though if he thinks about it...this isn’t the first partnership between himself and this soft-spoken harpy. When he’d targeted her as a potential trophy to prove himself as a Hunter, he’d instead ended up saving her life, teaming up with her against a far more dangerous threat: a vampire.

That, of course, wasn’t exactly planned on either of their parts. Sasuke never intended to spare a monster, and Hinata the harpy never expected to be allowed to live by a Hunter. But the most irritating thing - from Sasuke’s stance, at least - was Hinata’s insistence in her debt to him.

As it turns out...her kind take debt very, very seriously. ‘To the grave’ sort of serious. And now, she owed him her life.

Or so she claimed.

And Sasuke was not happy about that. It was bad enough he let her go, worse still that he lied to his family and clan of Hunters about it. He’d planned on simply avoiding her from then on, but Fate had another idea: to put her in the range of his first official case, looking into an illegal gambling ring run by a kitsune...or werefox, as they’re more technically called.

As it so happens, Hinata seems to know the man in question: one named Naruto, according to her. He’s already had a run-in with monster law, or Nightwalkers as they all call themselves. You’d think that would be enough to send him running him with his tail tucked between his legs. But just in case...Sasuke decides to pay him a visit. See if he can end this without violence.

Oh, if his father could see him now...he’s likely exile him.

But Hinata has pleaded on this Naruto’s behalf. Sure, he’s been swindling humans and risking an exposure of the worlds to one another, but apparently he’s really not a bad guy.

Sasuke will believe that when he sees it. But he promised Hinata he’d do what he could to avoid bloodshed.

Why? He’s not even sure anymore. Maybe he’s too soft to be a Hunter as his father feared. But...too late now.

“How much further?”

“His scent is getting pretty strong,” Hinata assures him softly. “Likely within a block.”

“You can really smell him?”

She glances to him curiously. “Yes…?”

“...sorry. Guess it’s just...weird to realize. I mean I know you can. Just...weird to see it in practice.”

Staring at him for a moment, Hinata dares to ask, “Because you kill us before you can do so?”

In spite of himself, he flinches with a grimace. “...yeah.”

“...I understand. I’ve never seen one of you up close before. It’s...still a little unsettling, if...if I can be honest.”

“It’s a lot less insulting than us talking about me killing you,” Sasuke rebukes, expression still torn.

She doesn’t have a reply for that, and in fact motions for him to pause as she takes a lungful of air at a crossroads of alleyways. “...I think -”

“Whoa!”

Hinata shrinks back with an eep and a flurry of feathers, Sasuke squawking gracelessly as she hides behind him.

In front of them, leaning back and looking ready to bolt, is a man fitting Sasuke’s given description of the werefox: blond, blue-eyed, tanned...this has to be their guy.

“N...Naruto-kun!” Hinata then offers, her bird-like traits vanishing as she realizes who very nearly bumped into her.

“...oh! Uh...Hinata, right? Man, you almost gave me a heart attack!”

“S-sorry! I...I didn’t realize you were that close.”

The blond blinks. “You lookin’ for me?”

“Yes! Well...sort of…?” She gives Sasuke a wary, indicative glance. “I...I have someone here who needs to - to talk to you.”

“Uh...okay. Lookin’ to make some cash there, my dude? I’ve got a couple of really good -!”

“I’m not looking to gamble, let alone illegally,” Sasuke cuts in, already a bit annoyed by the man’s ‘too-cool’ attitude and slick way of speaking. The word ‘illegal’ makes Naruto shift his gears to a defensive posture. “I’ve been sent out by a local clan of Hunters to investigate your dealings and make sure they stop. Permanently.”

Panic laces Naruto’s face as he realizes just who and what Sasuke is. “W-whoa, wait - what? You’re a -? Aw shit, I already got lectured by that old wolf the other day, I don’t need this now, too!”

“Naruto-kun,” Hinata cuts in gently. “We...that is to say, I’m just w-worried about you. If both the Enforcers and the Hunters know about what you’ve been doing...you’re putting yourself in real danger by -!”

“No one’s seen me!” Naruto then cuts in, looking jittery. Sasuke subtly adjusts his posture, ready to give chase if he bolts. “I swear! Yeah I swindled a few Daywalkers but they’re dumb as a box of rocks! No one knows what I am, guarantee it!”

“Anyone come back angry after you swindled them?” Sasuke growls.

“No! Uh, well...okay, a few. But I can talk my way outta anything! Honest! They have no idea!”

“Your luck can’t last forever,” the Uchiha counters. “One of these days, you’re going to slip up and get caught. And if a human realizes what you are and their illusion is shattered, that’s going to make a really big mess. For me, and for your Enforcer friends. Surely you don’t want to piss us both off, right?”

Unbidden as his stress rises, a pair of golden, ink-tipped ears spring out of the man’s hair, pinned in worry. “Look, I-I don’t want any trouble, ‘ttebayo! I was just tryin’ to make a living! You know how hard it is to get a job around here?”

“I have some idea.”

“I got thrown out of the last three I had. They accused me of stealing! It wasn’t stealing, I just…” He gestures vaguely. “...it’s in my nature!”

“Wily foxes. Believe me, I know,” Sasuke mutters, arms crossing. “No-good thieves, swindlers, and con artists.”

“Hey!” Stepping between the two, Hinata puffs up, and despite them not being visible, Sasuke can still picture her feathers ruffling. “Naruto-kun isn’t a bad person - he’s better than that! Stereotypes like that hurt us a l-lot more than you know.”

“Yeah. Like birds being easily spooked and flighty?” Sasuke counters, seeing her wince. “He’s literally running an illegal gambling ring and ripping people off. He’s doing exactly what I said he’d do. And if he keeps doing it, he’s gonna lose a lot more than a job.”

“Please...there has to be s-something we can do…?”

“You, uh…” Naruto takes half a step back, hands lifted. “You’re not gonna kill me, are ya?”

“That depends entirely on what you do, fox,” Sasuke rebukes. “Because right now, I have orders to do just that to ensure you don’t stir up more trouble than you can handle and cause a major incident between humans and monsters.”

The blond pales, eyes widening.

After a pause, Sasuke sighs. “...but I’d rather not kill you. And the only way I can let that happen is if you swear that your swindling days are over. That you’re not gonna keep pulling these stunts and risk you, and a lot of other people, getting hurt because of the panic at a monster being seen. Quit the game altogether, go clean...and I can let you go.” He then steps forward, grabbing the front of the blond’s jacket and ignoring his yip of surprise. “But if I hear about any more werefoxes around here getting their paws dirty...I won’t be so merciful next time. Got it?”

Blanching, Naruto just gives several rapid nods, stumbling back as Sasuke releases his hold. “You...y-you got it, man. I-I’ll go clean! Never touch any cards or dice again, I s-swear it!”

“I’ll be holding you to that. Now get out of here and find something else to do than lurking around alleyways, huh?”

Not needing to be told twice, Naruto spins on a heel and - in a blink - shifts into a huge, two-tailed fox that bolts down the road and out of sight.

Sighing, Sasuke pinches the bridge of his nose. “...I’m gonna be in so much shit if anyone finds out about this…”

“You did the right thing,” Hinata murmurs, hands folded at her front. “I think you s-scared him straight. I’ll check in on him later and...make sure.”

He gives her an unreadable glance. “...thanks.”

Considering him, Hinata then hesitantly admits, “You’re...nothing like I thought you would be.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re...not just a killer. You think, and...you reason. I’ve always heard that Hunters are ruthless...heartless.”

Thinking of his family and their records, Sasuke barely withholds a grimace. “...I might just be an exception to the rule.”

“Well...I’m glad you are. We’re really not bad people, you know. We’re just...t-trying to survive, like everyone else. Sure, some of us stir up trouble...a-and hurt people. But then again...so do Daywalkers. Humans, I mean,” she adds after a pause. “I think maybe...you see that.”

“All I see is me failing to do my job twice now,” he sighs.

“Well...that failure meant two people are still alive,” Hinata replies softly. “...doesn’t that mean something?”

Contradictions running through his mind and giving him a headache, Sasuke waves her off. “...I dunno. But you better get home, and...I better get out of here. And you,” he adds, pointing at her, “are no longer indebted to me. You repaid me with your help tonight, so let it go.”

“But you helped my friend! If anything, I -!”

“Look, I told you: being in debt to me is dangerous for you! If anyone I know were to see me talking to you and not cutting off your head, we’d both be good as dead. You need to stay the hell away from me from now on.”

Not expecting his sharp tone, she retreats a step, eyes wide and tinged with fright. “...b-but...it was you who came looking for me -?”

“This time. And the last time. I thought this would get that debt idea out of your head, but it seems I was wrong.” Stepping up, he rests his finger against her collarbone, trying to look intimidating. “...for your own sake...never see me again.”

Unreadable flickers of emotions dart across her face. “...a-as you wish.”

Hoping he’s made his point, Sasuke stares at her a moment longer before backing away and heading back toward the main road. Why he bothered trying to warn her, he doesn’t understand. She’s a monster. His mortal enemy. What should he care if her actions get herself killed? It would just be one less of them to worry about!

...and yet...it’s getting awfully hard to draw a line between himself, and any other human he knows...and her. Sure, she can burst into feathers, but...her mannerisms, her behavior, her emotions...they’re all exactly like anyone else.

...they’re human.

Buried in his thoughts as he walks, Sasuke stands beside his bike for a long moment, not wanting to drive with his head in the clouds. Everything he’s been taught about monsters - about Nightwalkers - seems to be less and less meaningful the more he interacts with them. Decades, centuries of tradition...are they...wrong…?

Scowling to himself, Sasuke forces the dilemma aside - he needs to report back. He doesn’t have Naruto’s head to present them...and admitting he let the guy go isn’t an option. He can claim the fox escaped...but that won’t stop the hunt for him. Naruto will have to lay low for a good long while for his kin to give up the chase.

But hopefully he realizes that much.

Hoping astride his bike and kicking up the stand, Sasuke veers from the curb and turns around back toward home. He’s too tired and too frustrated to be thinking about all of this. It’s far too large a topic...and he doesn’t have all the answers. Nor can he ask anyone - questioning their oath to rid the world of monsters will surely just get him in trouble. He doesn’t even dare ask Itachi.

...so for now, he’ll just...try not to think about it.

     Woo, another piece done today! No idea if there’ll be a third, but we’ll see lol      Anywho, more of the new-plot monster verse! This one is growing on me, I’ll admit it. I wasn’t sure it would since I had another multi-part story in this verse with an alternate plot - I thought it’d bore me. But I’m pleasantly surprised lol - and hopefully you guys are enjoying it!      I always feel like I can’t write Naruto well. So hopefully I did a passable job with him, eh heh~      Otherwise, I...guess there’s not much to say? I’ve gotta run and get some irl things done, but we’ll see about another part today. We’re still five days behind, but...better than nothing xD Hope y’all enjoyed and I’ll see you in the next one!

[hobiwonder]

A vase of flowers | (m)

Genre: Smut, enemies to lovers.

Pairing: Wealthy art student!taehyung x art student!reader

Warnings: slight angst. language. foreplay, descriptions of unprotected sex, dirty talk. it’s pretty tame otherwise.

Words: 10k

Summary: Art prodigy Taehyung comes to your art store out of desperation   when he doesn’t have enough paint to finish his latest piece. That wouldn’t be a problem if you didn’t hate his elitist ass. 

a/n: this was just to get back in to writing. Its not edited and probably doesn't flow the best. But it did get me writing so here u go!! feedback is much appreciated :)

(he’s a work of art himself!!1!!!1!)

The hustle and bustle of students – females in particular – in the hall outside the lecture theatre was more infuriating than you had anticipated. What else did you expect though? The one day you don’t come late to the lecture is the day Kim Taehyung had decided to show up to class so the hallways outside the room being cramped like a chicken farm was inevitable. Even Minnie sitting beside you was craning her neck forward to catch a glimpse of the artistic prodigy – never mind his out of the ordinary good looks – before the class started. He was very much a superstar at your university but you will never understand why people were so obsessed with people who were not actually that great if you just looked past the good looks and the talent. Talent didn’t automatically make someone a good person and everyone’s obsession with the teal haired artist really pissed you off.

“Ugh, when will these bimbos shut up. He’s not a god!” Your words are muffled against your sweater clad forearm as you try and rest your head before class started. Having the closing shift the night before was one of the few things you despised when you had a class this early in the next morning. But you still showed up to every one of them. Unlike someone else.

“Well it doesn’t help that he looks like one.” Minnie is just shrugging while she continues to lean over her chair to watch the girls twirl their hair, throw back their heads in laughter whenever Kim Taehyung says something ‘funny’, nudging his shoulder with their own to show their frankness when really – none of these girls probably knew him past his bedroom since he rarely showed up to class. But news of him being a womanizer was common although slightly more hushed than that of the football team captain and co-caption Jeon Jungkook and Min Yoongi. Those boys were a headache for another day.

Kim Taehyung wasn’t anything special. In fact – he rarely showed up to class, was given special privileges you were sure of it because he was always in the top three students despite showing his face once in a blue moon, had every professor whipped for his pert ass because of how well connected he was in the industry as well as his family being one of the founding fathers of your current university.

Sure, someone like that is bound to be more popular than your regular high achiever or talented artist but the fact that he had everyone absolutely nuts about him was infuriating. On top of th-

“Are you done with your inner monologue? You’re blocking my way.” The unmistakably deep voice belongs to none other than the boy who you wanted to punch so very much. But that wouldn’t be wise given that most of the class was watching. His annoyingly attractive smirk was always there. Like it was just how his mouth was shaped but you knew that he always made the look a bit more condescending when speaking to you. Not that he would let anyone else know though. Bastard knew how to keep his persona up and you just wanted to smack him even more!

“Oh sorry. Forgot your name was on that seat since you barely come to class. I’ll remember for the next time when you make your monthly appearance.” Minnie is nudging you with her elbow no doubt to shut you up and it’s not the first time this exact scenario had taken place. But you wanted to keep yourself in check since no doubt the rest of your comrades would give Minnie a hard time since they didn’t have the balls to annoy you because of your obvious dislike of Kim Taehyung.

“Missed me, did you?” Your little victory smile is slipping off your face when his smirk deepens and you have to physically grab your desk and grit your teeth from snapping at him again while you move your feet out of the way so his smug ass can get to his stupid seat. Thankfully his seat was towards the end of the row so you didn’t have to catch glimpses of his pretentious face.

“You wish trust fund baby.” Alas, he isn’t affected. Not even a bit as he winks your way while walking to ‘his’ seat.

“Leave the pet names for people who actually get to be with me.” That’s it. Youj will break his stupid obnoxious snobby face!

“Calm down y/n. Everyone is watching.” She holding on to your arm while your eyeballs glare at Taehyung’s direction without even blinking.

“All the more satisfying when I kiss him with my fist! Minnie let me go you knob.” While you’re trying to wrestle your arm free; your professor has walked in looking pleasantly surprised with the semi-full lecture theatre. His gaze almost instantly goes directly to Taehyung because even he knows that most of these new faces that show up once in a while as well are because of Taehyung. They nod at each other before he starts the class and your mouth is agape that no one even questions the favouritism in this class. A bunch of ass kissers!

“Are you seeing this? His daddy probably plays golf with the prof. Jung Soo!”

“So what, y/n? You’re forgetting the rest of them also have parents who play golf with Taehyung’s dad. Most of these rats are rich as fuck. Not everyone comes from humbler beginnings.” Minnie is smiling hopefully as she watches you pout but her response only makes you snort.

“Are you forgetting you’re one of these ‘rats’?”

“Don’t remind me.” She falls back in her seat while hiding her face at the mention of her filthy rich parents being business partners with Kim Taehyung’s. When you’d first found out how well off your best friend was it only made you more enraged. If she could be a decent human being and not get any special treatment – despite being extremely talented as well – then why stupid Kim Taehyung? Minnie had a banging body and a face to match not that it should matter but you were so sick of the double standards. Your best friend also deserved special treatment dammit!

“Why? You shouldn’t be ashamed of being rich, hot AND a decent human being. I would so be one of those girls drooling after that canvas demon if I was gay.”

“Bitch I’m almost convinced you aregay but the way you’re ready to drop your panties for Min Yoongi tells me otherwise.” You only try to muffle your laughter while smacking Minnie’s knee, mumbling a ‘shut up’ before you both opt to pay attention to what your professor is going on about. Not before you catch Taehyung watching you like he was about to grade your upcoming assessment. You just send him another glare and try to ignore his overtly attractive physical presence. How could someone just sittingseem attractive, you will never get it. God really favoured some people more than others huh?

“Thanks for coming. Have a nice day!” The chime of the register as it slid closed was a sound you were starting to hate. The smile on your face was tired and probably was becoming very obviously fake. But that was just a typical day at the arts and crafts store – the only one in the near vicinity of the university hence the more than average traffic even close to 7pm at night on a weekday. Since the store was employed with almost entirely all students, it was able to stay open longer than the regular hours to allow the students with day classes to work during the night shifts. You were an exception though. Being on the lower end of the income spectrum among your peers, you needed as much work as you could get. Doing a bachelors in fine arts helped too as you used the tools that the store sold, on a regular basis. It definitely came in handy when assisting first years and some mature aged students who needed extra help in finding the right type of brushes or paints needed for their canvases.

“You good? You can take off for the rest of the night you know?” You know that Sungwoon is trying to sound helpful but you knew his real intentions. Scoffing in his direction you just grab your blue water bottle to take a good swig and wake you up.

“So you can steal my shift and work instead? Not today satan.”

“You’re literally so dramatic.” He says while heaving the biggest breath out like he was any better. “Maybe I genuinely just want you to rest and not have your face turn in to one of those creepy smiling masks from that one movie.” He’s clicking his fingers s if that’ll help him recall the name of the film any faster. Lucky for him, you knew what he was talking about.

“The Purge?”

“That’s it! See, you knew exactly what I was referring to. You need sleep.” Sungwoon is nodding while looking at you like you stank or something. Ugh screw boys.

“If I did, you’re the first person I’ll get rid off.” You deadpan and you can almost pinpoint when he starts to realise you may not be joking. But you were of course. He was a little shit but all in good fun.

“Well,” he’s picking up his bag and making sure to clock out from the app the store used to make sure everyone was getting to work on time, “I’ll be going then. Have fun scaring off rest of the customers and drowning the revenue for today.”

His squealing laughter is the last thing you hear before he’s scuttling out when you try and smack him across his bicep. Sungwoon was probably one of the few boys you could stand and were actually close enough with for them to joke around like that with you because apart from Minnie, there weren’t many people who really liked talking to you. That much was clear when you’d moved near the campus from your town when you’d been accepted to the rather elite Art University.

Coming from a small town – you’d think you were more friendly but that wasn’t the case with you. You’d grown up with a strict father that made sure to discipline you if you ever messed up your tasks at his workshop. Ever since you could remember how to read and write, you had been helping him out with the business as he could not. His own father – your grandfather – had been even more strict on him according to your mother so there was no changing him. You had never really minded in doing the book-keeping for him or making sure the small town client paid on time after having their cars tended to. That’s until you had started your Junior year in high school and had the choice of choosing between subjects now that you were to apply for universities after. Or that’s what the plan was for most children. You had taken Art as a spare since it was the easiest class at the time and you really didn’t need any complicated subjects to study for because you were having to work at the workshop with your dad even more as you were getting older.

Being an only child also meant that all the expectations your parents had fell upon you to see them through. It also meant that the only time you interacted with your fellow classmates was during class. Not even after because as soon as school would finish – you’d have to rush to the workshop to help your dad sign out cars from the shop to the owners on time. He specifically made appointments towards the end of your school day just so you could be there and help him make sure the checks he was given by the more wealthier customers – only a few – were not for an amount less than he’d quoted them with. Believe it or not, it had happened and every time it did you had to stop yourself from smacking the bastards who had tried to take advantage of your father just because he couldn’t read. Ant to make the matter even more ridiculous, most of the people who tried to scam your father had been those who could actually afford his services. Not Joe who had a farm and sold eggs locally as his main source of living, not Jihoon’s father who was a delivery man and needed his vehicle to keep working and provide for him family and certainly not the old lady who had her truck serviced by your father so she could get to her appointments to the doctor, on time despite her only income being what her son sent from the city where he worked as a chef and had his own family to feed.

The world was filled with unkind people and most of them were those who could afford most things but still tried to take the less fortunate’s share too. Your father was a calm man but all his frustrations were usually taken out on you whenever you would rightfully insult those who tried to seek discounts despite knowing that your father wouldn’t be able to afford the tools he needed to do a fair job on the vehicles if he didn’t get paid the amount he had set on the pricelist which was dismal compared the mechanics you have seen in the city.

But of course, he wouldn’t say much to those low-lives because at least he was getting business. And that was better than nothing. When you’d finally let him know at the end of your senior year that you’d applied to an arts university rather than the business school he had hoped you would go to – things had not gone well, to say the least. Of course all his anger would be directed at you that day from the shop as well as finding out that his only child was not interested in business at all. You had done it as much as you could for the sake of helping out and honestly? Just not knowing what was out there for you to study and do with your life. But If there was anything that working with your father had taught you was that if you didn’t take a chance sooner than later – you’d end up having to rely on someone else for the rest of your life. Just like your father relied on you for so long because he just never got around to even finish school because of doing exactly what you had been – helping out your granddad.

The day you had left for university had been hard and was the second time you had cried. Your father hadn’t even looked at you but your mother had clutched on to you until you had to physically pull her away when your taxi had arrived. Even after making sure there was someone to help out your father at the shop, there was still apprehension present in your gut. It had all felt wrong somehow even as you had been unpacking your stuff in your flat the next night. Thankfully, all the hesitancy, all the fights and the sleepless nights had been worth it when you’d gone in to your first class the next day. You’d been excited to meet new people, make friends, make memories you didn’t even knew you had the option to make. But what do you know, getting accepted in to an elite university meant there were more of the same people you had fought off and defended your father from.

Meeting Minnie was almost a miracle. She had been the only one to come up to you being desperate to find a buddy to get lost around the campus with and not like the rest who had taken one look at your jeans and plaid shirt and moved on to find others with the same clothing or designer bags. People were so materialistic in the city it was almost unbelievable. In your town you had been able to find others who were more so on your social and economic status and feel comfortable. But in the city you were outnumbered. Maybe that’s why people like Kim Taehyung got on your nerves even more than usual. You’d noticed his elitist behaviour when invitations had been sent to attend the commencing party at his house in the first week you’d been attending the university and instantly you knew you would never be able to stand him or people like him. Only a certain number and certain looking people – girls to be exact – had been invited to the famous Kim estate. You’d only found out when Minnie had asked what you were going to wear to the party. The look on your face had probably given away your lie that you weren’t actually invited when you’d made up some excuse of not wanting to go. Minnie being the good sport and the only decent person you had known, had made some excuse about not ‘feeling it’ and stayed in that night and watched all of Harry Potter series with you. With you watching them for the first time.

“Bugger.” Your thoughts are interrupted when you almost trip over the bucket of sale items Sungwoon forgot to move. Taking a deep breath, you pick up the relatively heavy bucket that contained tubes of oil paint in colours such as black, white and red that were bought the most and move it to the stock room so it can be displayed again the next morning. Your shift was going to end in another 2 hours so now most of the work included moving display stock to the back room and print out labels for the discounts that were going up tomorrow morning. This is probably why you didn’t completely hate night shifts because other than a few customers – it mostly involved you working silently and most times even able to use headphones without having to worry about missing anyone at the till waiting for you.

“Hello? You guys still open?” You’d just finished putting away the tubes and the paint brushes when the front door had opened – as signalled by the bell atop it – meaning there was a customer.

“Coming!” Quickly getting down from the ladder where you’d been putting the paint in their designated boxes, you rush outside. “Hi, how can I- Oh. It’s just you.”

Taehyung is scoffing towards you when you roll your eyes seeing as it’s not a real customer. It was true. The last few time she’d come in – he’d browsed for all of 5 minutes before making a weird face and leaving. Probably going to buy his pretentious paints from his pretentious shop. It was as if he only came to the store to make fun of all the products most students living on campus – or not filthy rich like him – used.

“Isn’t that against some customer service code? To have this sort of attitude?” His bright hair has somehow made the place look a little less mundane, you hate to admit it. His very clear skin and the various rings he wore didn’t help either in making you feel less than. You hated how much he actually affected your mood.

“For actual customers? Probably yeah.” This time, it’s him who’s rolling his eyes while his hands comes up to have a feel of a synthetic brush that was hanging in front of him.

“What makes you think I’m not a customer?”

“You really want me to answer that?”

“I actually am here to buy something this time.” His response only makes you smirk as you hum.

“So you do admit that you only come here to flaunt your wealth. That’s a good sign Taehyung.” But for some reason, the teasing that would usually make you feel better doesn’t feel as satisfying when Taehyung is just looking around like he’s in a pickle rather than through an insult back at you.

“Look, I need some paint and maybe a few natural hair brushes. I would go to-”

“Your overpriced and pretentious art store?”

“-my regular spot but I need to finish this painting tonight.” He completely ignores you when you cut in with a smirk and almost sounds like he is pleading. Wait. He was. The new found info perks you up more than you’d anticipated and it’s almost exciting knowing Kim Taehyung’s fate lies in yhour hands. Okay, maybe an exaggeration but still exviting. So you do what anyhone else in your position would – milk out the entire debacle.

“Well, well, well.” Leaning on your elbows on the counter, you can’t help but feel sort of like an evil villain finally with the perfect opportunity to strike. Except, you weren’t the villain really. You were the good guy!

“For fuck’s sake.” Taehyung mumbles lowly under his breath but you could hear him loud and clear. “How long are you going to make me wait?”

You wanted to be cruel, you really did. You wanted to tell him you had ran out of the supplies but you were too tired and honestly, he was probably going to buya  bunch of stuff and if you made a sale above 50,000 won in one transaction then you would make some sweet commission. So whatever.

“Luckily for you, I’m a decent human being so,” stepping out from behind the register, you just deadpan at him, “right this way.”

He seems surprised and so are you. At yourself. Because you’re not sure why you’re being this nice to him when he’s made fun of you on more than one occasion.

“I’m slightly scared you’re leading me somewhere quieter so you can murder me.” His voice is slightly meek and you’re thankful that he can’t see your face because you’re trying to hold in ugly laughter that Kim Taehyung is actually scared of you when alone despite acting like hot shit when surrounded by a herd of girls.

“A good, educated guess. But not today.”

“…. So there is a chance for that to happen another day?” Spinning around to face him abruptly – damn okay maybe you should major in acting because Taehyung flinches but tries to play it off by shrugging his broad shoulders.

“Maybe.” You’re slightly too close to him because you have to crane your neck up to meet his gaze. Just when his own slips down to your lips, you quickly gesture towards the aisle you’ve just stopped in front of. “Here you’ll find what you need. Brushes and paints.”

“Thanks.” You just shrug before turning around to go back to the cash register. That plan doesn’t go too well because a warm grip on your wrist stops you in your tracks and almost on instinct, you’re ripping out your hand from the grasp as soon as you feel it.

“Woah, sorry! I didn’t mean to-” You just cut him off to move past the subject before he even brings it up.

“What do you want now?” Taehyung pauses for a few seconds as if not ready to let your jumpy reaction go just yet but thankfully decides to drop it.

“Look, I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t desperate and rally needed the sup-”

“Taehyung, I’m not interested in hearing how you would never set foot in a place where peasants like us – or normal people really – shop so just get to it.”

He however is just biting on the inside of his cheeks as if to burry a smile before it breaks through. “You’re not very patient are you?”

“I haven’t been put in many situations that really require it, so.” You just shrug in his direction but the flash that goes through his eyes that resembled molten dark chocolate sends an involuntary shiver down your spine and thankfully the air con is on and you could blame your odd reaction on to that if he noticed. Why was he looking at you like that?

“That’s too bad. Sometimes the rewards for waiting are quite fulfilling at the end.” And somehow, you’re not sure if he just means that in general or…

His heavy gaze travelling down the length of your body only makes you more eager to move on before you lose all the good comebacks you had at the tip of your tongue just because his looks were making you weak in the knees.

“Whatever.” You turn to leave once again and again, Taehyung reaches out to grab your wrist but pulls himself back before he can. Thankfully, you have already seen him this time so you just cross your hands under your chest, tapping your foot while you wait for him to spit it out.

“Just help me okay? I’m not familiar with these… brands.”

“That’s because none of them are Gucci.” He just rolls his eyes but follows you down the asile anyway.

“You do know that Gucci doesn’t make paint right? If they did it would be amazing though. Maybe I should write to them about this. Hm.” He’s started talking to himself but you start pointing out the different types you had available because you don’t have time to have causal chats with him like you two were friends. Despite his weird behaviour before.

“If you’re looking for oil paints, these ones are smoother and the colour payoff is better than others and if you want buildable colours then go for… this.” You’re about to say they are cheaper than the first brand you had pointed out but then realise that he most likely doesn’t care about the price. Though he doesn’t seem to be looking at you at the moment but only paying attention to the paints just like he paid attention the content in the few lectures you’d seen him at.

“Do they not say the ingredient at the back? That’s peculiar.”

“What’s peculiar is you using the word ‘peculiar’.” You mumble while still watching him inspect the different tubes as if he was going to drink them or something.

“May I get the list of ingredients for these ones here? And the lightfastness rating please.”

“It’s literally at the bottom of the tube.” His eyebrows furrow as he looks back at the tube and looks at the bottom again.

“Oh. Isn’t there like a booklet or something that comes with this so I can check?”

You just continue to stare at him.

“Taehyung, this is a campus arts store and our most expensive paint is 55,000 won. So no, we don’t have fancy brands that make ‘booklets’ for every paint. But if you must know,” You sigh, rolling your eyes at how high maintenance he was with his paints, “I can have a look at the delivery boxed for the ingredients. I know that all of these paints of this brand have a lightfastness rating of II at least.”

“Excellent! And yes that would be great, y/n. I just prefer my oils to be made from pure Linseed is all.” He has a bright smile on his face while he shrugs like that’s just the way it is. But of course, you want to punch him once more for making your job harder than it needs to. He was a college student. What did he need such high quality paints for? Ugh.

So you grit your teeth and walk back to the storage room and fish for the delivery boxes of the brand that Taehyung was interested in. “Stupid rich boy. Used to always getting what he wants.” The mumbling continues on your part while you try to locate the box as quickly as possible so he can go away and stop making your shift harder than it needs to be at almost 8:30 PM at night.

“Aha!” You have finally spotted the boxes that were stacked way at the bottom. Quickly reading through the large ingredient list, you confirm that the paints are unfortunately not made purely from Linseed oil.

“I have some bad news.” When you walk back out to where Taehyung is testing a few brushes, you can see his face drop because you’re sure he can guess what you’re about to say. “The binder used for these paints is a mixture of Linseed and walnut oil as well as a few others.” You shrug but Taehyung seems to be losing it.

“God fucking damnit. I’m screwed.” He’s started to pace around the aisle, looking like his life has just ended and his dog has died. Did he have a dog? You loved dogs.

“Why are you freaking out so badly?” He looks at you like you’re the one who’s acting weird.

“Because I have an auction in three weeks and it usually takes me that long to even finish a painting.” Of course he had an auction. It was common knowledge around campus that he sold his paintings for quite a sum at a few well known auctions. But you couldn’t remember another one happening anytime soon though.

“What auction? There isn’t one scheduled for at least 3 months.” Taehyung is hesitating when you question him. He looks like he would rather not mention it but in the end, sighs and tells you anyway.

“It’s more of an exhibition. Just for my paintings.”

“Oh wow.” Your eyes have widened at the mention of his solo exhibition. He was rich enough to afford to hold one so it shouldn’t be that surprising. But it still was a big deal even for a privileged student like him because you need to have enough credibility and a loyal customer base to attract enough people to an exhibition that is solely filled with your own artwork and not a collection of artists. “ I didn’t know you had your own exhibitions.”

He scratches the back of his head as he shrugs nonchalantly but you see the nerves showing through with how his hands shake slightly. “It’s the first one.”

“Oh.”

“Whatever I’ll just look somewhere else.”

“I use a medium of stand oil, linseed and turpentine, a little wax and add a small amount of cobalt drier to control drying time for my paintings.” You have blurted out your little trick before you could stop yourself. In your defence, he just looked so pitiful. You had to help. He also seems just as surprised at you suggestion and even more surprised when you walk around gathering the supplies you’ve just mentioned.

“Oh… thanks for the tip. I never really thought about that since I never really needed to…”

He silently follows you to the register where you place all the items and scan them so he can pay. Whatever. Maybe you helping him will bring some good karma and give your career a break too and your painting will finally be displayed at the Montero Art Gallery. It was a local gallery but a lot of successful artists you admire had started out from there and you were hoping that your work could be good enough one day to be displayed there too.

“How did you go through all your paints by the way? Should you have a ton of them because you’re supposedly always painting.”

“Supposedly?” Taehyung is smirking while his eyebrows are raised in mock disbelief at your suspicion. “Well, I used up most of them when I had sex on a canvas with Jihyo. Made for a good painting though. Maybe I’ll display that one too.” He’s grinning from ear to ear and you’ve just halted while he pays on the eftpos machine. Okay you definitely regret telling him your trick when he put himself in this position by being a horndog.

“You’re literally so gross.”

“Hey, abstract art is also a thing you know?” He looks serious enough that if he hadn’t said ‘abstract art’ you would think you had actually offended him. You obviously hadn’t when he just winks in your direction while he gathers his items and leaves.

“Asshole.”

It’s been a week since you first saw The Kim Taehyung pop by the little arts store that had previously been too beneath him to even consider buying his supplies there. Though ever since you’d told him about your little trick, he’d been bugging you non-stop on writing tips and you’re almost sure he’s doing it to… well, bug you. It’s as if he isn’t even aware that he’s an artistic prodigy because you’ve seen his paintings yourself and they were hyped up for a reason. Even a bitter person like you could admit that.

So when you get a special request by your boss one Friday evening, you’re surprised to say the least when you figure why you’re even asked to deliver supplies in the first place.

“Are you serious?” Your boss being the sweet old lady she is, is just pushing up her glasses as she nods vigorously at you.

“Of course dear! Must be some poor student who really is in need of help. He sounded quite desperate on the phone.” The old woman was way too nice for her own good. And while you appreciated her big heart, if she says yes to one person that the supplies can be delivered to his house then then word will get around and sooner than later, you’ll have a flood of students ordering their supplies over the phone and wanting them to be delivered. If that was going to be the case then you’ll have to quit since you can’t deliver because you don’t have a car. You relied on public transport damnit!

“Or he’s just lazy Ma.” Yes. Everyone called her ma upon her request. Short for Marion. Not that you minded because she was sweet as honey and really did remind you of your own mother. And she treated you like one too. Especially right now when she just scowls at you and asks you to stop being lazy yourself and deliver the package she’s prepared.

“Ugh fine.” You whine until the very end and she’s just wishing you a safe journey. Thankfully she’d leant you her car for today – it was her idea after all – so you wouldn’t need to spend an hour trying to find the place. It seemed to be quite close to the shop surprisingly. And unsurprisingly, the apartment is in a trendy but expensive neighbourhood. Most kids who went to your school probably lived in these buildings. The one you were supposed to go at though was on the top floor and you’re already angry that this buttcrack insisted on delivery and manipulated poor Marion into having his stuff delivered to his door rather than being at the front reception so the exchange could be faster.

When you reach the top floor, you pull out the receipt to hand it to him first thing as he opens the door and don’t have to spend more time than necessary in this place that you felt so out-of-place in. You’ve already rung the doorbell while you read the receipt and that’s mistake number one that night. It dawns on you who this person must be when you’re reading the names of the exact items Taehyung had bought from you last week. You could turn around and go really. Only if you hadn’t already rang the doorbell and he hadn’t opened it right as you’re setting the heavy bag down.

“Well hello there.” His deep voice is an anchor itself as you stop your movements right then and look up at his smirking face that looking down at you. Ugh. Like always.

“Hi.” Slowly, you straighten yourself up, the bag still near your feet as you step away, trying not to gawk at his perfectly toned skin that is showing way too much from between his unbuttoned shirt. “Here’s your stuff. Goodbye.”

“Oh good. You can set it inside in the kitchen.” You’re gritting your teeth in order to stop yourself from slapping his cheery voice right out of his throat with a punch. Okay maybe that’ll be too much. Maybe. You won’t know until you try though.

“Come on.” He’s gesturing inside his expensive apartment that shinier and cleaner than any place you’ve ever seen. He probably has it professionally cleaned.

“I’m not coming inside you weirdo.”

“Don’t worry, you’re not my type.” Somehow that makes you even more mad and you hate that it does. Fuck him honestly. You knew you weren’t his ‘type’. His type included skinny, rich and bad artists. Just so he could get off on a power-control dynamic you’re guessing.

You just pick up the heavy package without breaking eye contact and step inside, walking straight to the kitchen and placing the materials on the counter. The inside décor is surprising when you take in the various canvases strewn about in the living room on different easels. But what really takes your breath away is the familiar artwork that you’d looked at time and time again when you’d been lacking inspiration. When you’d been in a rut and everything had been too much and all you would want to do is quit. But looking at the work that evoked emotions from a place inside that even you hadn’t still made sense of it was the only thing that had kept you going many times throughout the years you’d been at university.

But how was Taehyung interested in such underrated art? You’d never heard him mention Vincent Van Gogh before. And yet most of his paintings covered the walls of his apartment.

“You like Van Gogh?” Taehyung has gone back to his pallet as he mixes the various shades of reds and oranges together.

“Who doesn’t?”

“Like, all of our school?”

“Nah. They pretend that better artists exist.” His answer surprises you. You’d never pegged him as someone who appreciated the more sombre period of art. His paintings usually were a lot more cheery and sometimes rather complicated.

You’re kind of lost in the long hallway covered with several paintings. The tall ceilings and the dim lighting only making you more excited to take in such beautiful art in silence with the only sound being the bristles of Taehyung’s brushes across the canvas.

“You like his work too I assume?”

“Mhm.” You’re too lost in the various paintings to really properly answer him. You’ve almost forgotten where you are until Taehyung speaks again. But this time, from somewhere far closer as you can smell the musky scent that always accompanied him.

“This one is my favourite.” His voice startles you a little when he appears just behind you, slightly to the side so you can look to the side and watch his long neck fall back when he looks up at the painting.

“I like it too.” Your voice is quieter than before. Like neither of you want to disturb the air surrounding you. It’s probably the first time you haven’t felt instantly annoyed by Taehyung’s presence. When you look besides you again, you don’t realise it’s the second mistake you’ve made that night. Because Taehyung is staring right back at you and this time he doesn’t stop. Your breath hitches in your throat when you catch his dimly lit face staring intensely at you. Or maybe it was the lighting that amplified every look. Every gesture. Whatever it was, in that moment, you’d never felt more attracted to Kim Taehyung.

“I lied.” His whisper floats across your skin and the light breeze that comes with the breath from his words has your eyes closing for just a few seconds longer when they blink.

“A-About what?” Taehyung has somehow moved even closer because you could feel the heat from his chest seeping through your own shirt. It also didn’t help that his shirt was fully unbuttoned and the smooth expanse of his chest was absolutely bare for your traitorous eyes to feast on.

He brings up a hand, slowly as if not to startle you like he had last week, and tucked the stray strand of hair behind your ear. “About you not being my type.”

The only thing your body seems to be able to do at the moment is turn your face back towards the painting, heart thudding in your chest as you feel his hands move all of the hair from your neck out of the way to the other side. Exposing the sensitive flesh to the cool air inside his apartment. “You’re exactly my type and better.”

This time the words are whispered s close to your ear that you have to physically clutch tightly on to yourself so you don’t flinch from his breath tickling the flesh of your neck. You’re biting your lip, trying not make any sudden movements or noise because honestly, you didn’t trust yourself to not jump his bones. How was he this sexy and annoying at the same time?

“I kn-know.” You’re hoping that teasing is evident in your voice but that plan has gone down the gutter as soon as Taehyung presses his luscious lips in to an open mouthed kiss against the side of your throat. So instead, your response comes out way too breathy and you can’t stop the moan escaping you in the end.

“You’re just always looking for trouble aren’t you, y/n?” How is his voice perfectly steady? He doesn’t even sound remotely affected as he brings his arms around you from behind, fully moving behind you as well while he continues to undo the strings of control you had tied tightly around your brain. Because seems like you’re only thinking with your vagina at the moment.

His hand have slipped beneath your shirt after playing with the hem for a few seconds and testing the waters. When you don’t push his hands away – you could barely breath at the moment – he slips them inside your thin shirt, tracing circles across your torso and up until his warm, large – so fucking huge – hands are taking handfuls of your breasts before he’s gently squeezing the mounds.

“Oh.” You feel like you’re going boneless by the second as your head lolls back and on to his shoulder and you’re just praying that your brain shuts up and lets you enjoy these sensations without the red alarm bells going off in your head that you hated him!

You hit mute on said alarms as soon as you feel his index finger and thumbs rolling your puffy nipples through the fabric of your bra into hardened pointy tips and you’ve finally lost the filter on your mouth. “F-Fuck. Taehyung, ungh.”

“Look at you. Thought you hated me, huh?”

“I still, mh f-fuck, d-do.” Being a slave to your stubborn ways, you’re retaliating with your words before you can even keep yourself in check. Taehyung doesn’t seem to be bothered though. He’s just chuckling at your pathetic attempts at trying to hold on to some autonomy even if your body is betraying the fuck out of you. The constant squeezing, rolling and pinching of your nipples has you almost mindless, you’re not sure you can survive much more than this.

“Sure. At least your body doesn’t lie though.” He’s squeezing the mounds firmly this time before he’s slipping one of his hands downwards again. You’re aching and wet and aroused beyond words but finally you’re up to the point where you can easily ignore the rational side of your brain and let your body take control.

Breathing loudly, you’re almost panting with every inch that Taehyung’s hand moves closer to your underwear. You’re so soaked that you can feel your panties sticking to the contours of your pussy lewdly and knowing that Taehyung was about to touch you there had you dripping in more. You can’t remember the last time you were this horny from just foreplay.

Taehyung closes his lips around your pulse point before he sucks a punishing bruise in that patch of skin. “Spread your legs y/n. That’s it.”

He’s cooing at you when you instantly comply, whimpering his name when he presses his entire palm on your clit, rubbing the hard nub in gentle circles while you’re about to cum just from his words alone.

“Look at you. So wet and soaking. Have you always been this wet when you’ve been giving me nasty looks baby? Hm? Tell me.” His pace is increasing and the audible sound of your arousal coming through the layers of clothing makes you want to hide your face from the sheer embarrassment.

“T-Tae. Please.” You’re pleading sounds like you’re on the verge of tears and it’s not too far off from the truth. Your legs are spread but not enough for you to completely enjoy the feel of his hands. Not that he seems to be in any rush though.

“Please what y/n? Please use your pussy as your apology? Are you going to be a mouthy slut or let me use your cunt to milk my cock? It’s the least I deserve after the way you’ve treated me in every lecture.”

He’s pouting in mock hurt as he leans his head forward to look in to your eyes as if you’re not being destroyed by the fast paced circling of your clit under his palm. Your eyebrows are furrowed, eyes half shut as the mind blowing orgasm looms around the corner. You’re about to cry from happiness and relief when he slips your underwear to the side, sliding his middle and index finger in without a warning and without remorse. The force with which he’s pumped his long, thick digits inside jerking back against him. Which only makes matters worse when you can feel the evidence of his own arousal pressing against your back. You’re slightly terrified from the sheer bulk of his erection too because it sits hot and heavy behind you. You just know he isn’t the average size you’re used to and that excite and scares you at the same time.

“Would you listen to that? Your cunt is singing for me babe.” You’d smack him across his chest for being so dramatic and cheesy but the sounds of your excessive wetness just has you hiding your face in his neck. But Taehyung is having none of it when he’s harshly tugging back your head as he weaves his hand in your hair.

“I said listen. You slutty pussy is leaking for me y/n. And you pretend to not even be able to stand my existence.” His words are harsh and said from between his gritted teeth. The sounds of the inside of his palm slapping against your clit with every thrust is obscene and rude. Yet, you can’t seem to care. Only moaning loudly and in a higher pitch with every smack against your heated flesh. Arousal drips steadily around his fingers while your symphony of ‘ahs’ and ‘ohs’ continues – almost sounding like you were in pain.

His grip around your hair is harsh and his pace inside your pussy relentless. It’s like he’s angry. Angry that you’re this wet. Angry that you’re ready to cum around his fingers just like this. That makes the two of you.

“Come on baby. Cum around my fingers. I’ll need it to prep myself before I enter this pussy, hm? You’re too tight for me to just impale you on my cock right now like you want me to. Don’t you?” You’re nodding enthusiastically as your breath hitches with your orgasm ripping through you like a wildfire,

“Taehyung! Fuck I-I’m cumming. Oh god…” You’re heaving and hiccupping as his rigid fingers continue to brush against your sensitive insides until you’re jerking back with each thrust.

“There you go. Easy… easy, baby.” You’re panting like you’ve run a marathon and your neck aches from being bent that way while Taehyung had your head captive.

He doesn’t give you much time to recover as he’s turning you around to pick you up and take you back to the living room, dropping your body down on to the fuzzy carpeted floor. He makes quick work of his shirt and his pants, ridding himself of every item of clothing – not that he was wearing much – before he takes his soiled fingers and wraps them around his extremely intimidating girth. He doesn’t seem nearly as nervous as you but you still don’t stop him. “Take off your clothes for me baby. I want to see you.”

Your body is moving instantly like it was programmed to listen to Taehyung’s every command. Soon, you’re laying back down on the ground, watching him stroke his incredibly hard cock that stood rigid against his toned stomach. He looks like a wolf that’s about to devour you as his pokes out from between the corner of his lips, eyes neve wavering from your own. You’re biting your own lips and squirming on the soft carpet when he just keeps looking and makes no move.

“Spread your legs again baby. Let me see you pussy.” He hisses as soon as your legs fall open, your red, slightly swollen pussy coming in to full view as he finally kneels down to his knees, grabbing your thighs to pull you closer until you were flush against his cock. His hands gently massage the area between your thighs and pussy, needing the rosy flesh and effectively making you drip even more when he looks directly down at his hands that work your labia softly – keeping in mind how sensitive you were.

“Look at you. So puffy. So wet. So fucking beautiful.” He leans forward to look in to your eyes and you’re holding on to your breath when you finally see his face so up close for the first time this evening.

“Can I make you feel good, honey? Will you let my cock make you feel good?” There is no hesitancy in your reply because you’re fisting the soft rug besides you and arching your body in to his.

“Fuck,” it’s the first time you can hear Taehyung’s voice shake as he adjusts his hips and rubs he blunt head of his blood fattened cock against your swollen labia. “I’ve wanted you for so long, y/n. I can’t believe you’re here. Are you sure baby? Because I won’t be able to stop or go gentle once I s-start. Oh fuck.”

You can see how desperate he is for you to say yes but nonetheless, your heart still warms at his concern and even though you were slightly scared of his above average length – and girth – you were mostly excited as the anticipation had built steadily. So you give him the green light, nodding for him to continue.

He seems to be surprised too for some reason and you’re caught off gard when his mouth crashed down to your own. His kiss is ferocious and passionate, tilting his head every which way to capture every noise you make, tongue playing with your own. You’re just enjoying the out of the blue kiss until it all makes sense. Because when you break apart from the kiss to shout out your surprise, you can feel all of his hot length pressing the deepest corners inside your pussy. The kiss had been a perfect distraction and you hadn’t even felt the pain when he’d pushed in.

In fact, the slight burn that was present as he let you adjust around him was more arousing than anything. “T-Tae ungh. You’re s-so big. Oh god.”

He’s watching every facial expression you make and he doesn’t miss the almost drunk expression on your pretty face when he drags his length out slowly, only to slam back inside. Your breasts bounce with every thrust that pushes you further up the carpeted floor. It feels better than good. Better than amazing. You’d never thought you’d enjoy penetrative sex this much after having several mediocre experiences but at this moment, all you wanted to do was egg Taehyung on to go as fast as he could. So you do.

“Fuck y/n.” The seat of his lap slaps against your damp skin as he pounds his leaking cock in to you unremittingly. “You’re so t-tight. The tightest cunt I’ve ever been inside. You like it baby? Hm?”

Taehyung was definitely a dirty talker. All throughout this encounter. He hadn’t stayed quiet for longer than a minute. Always wanting to say what he was feeling, wanted to do to you or was going to do to you. And until today, you never realised how much of a sucker you were for verbal stimulation.

“Y-eh-ess. I lo-uh-ve it.” Your words bounce and hiccup out of you with the same rhythm as Taehyung’s dragging of his cock inside you. It’s like he’d grown even larger and you could cry from how good he felt inside. In fact, you were sure you probably were crying with how blurry your vision was getting.

Taehyung had fully covered your body with his own, pulling one of your legs over his shoulder now to split you open even more before he increased his pace until you felt like he was actually splitting you open.

“Tae! I’m going t-to c-cum again. Oh god.” He was breathing hard, sweat dripping down his temples as his gaze never left your face. You were actually crying now; clawing at his back as you held on while he parted you open every time he pushed the entire girth of his cock until the base so that with every thrust, his balls slapped against your ass obscenely.

“Let go baby. Cum all over my cock.” He could already see the white, translucid creaminess forming around the base of his cock as it continued to slam inside you, signalling how close he himself was with his cock leaking pre-cum profusely. “Fuck, you look so delectable darling. Look at how your pussy gapes around my cock every time, hm? Your pussy was made to fit around my cock. You’re m-mine now. Made j-just for my cock.”

You could tell how close he was since he’d seemed to lost all and every filter on his mouth. Pounding in to you while you clutch on to him for deer life and finally release around his cock that shows no sign of relenting until he reaches his own release. Thankfully, he’s not too far behind as he grabs your legs for the final round, pushing his hips in to the hilt before he’s shouting out his release. You can feel the warmth of his cum explode inside the walls of your pussy, filling you up to the brim until you could feel his spunk leak around you thoroughly abused lips. Taehyung lays his head in to the crook of your neck very much like how you had at the start.

It's peacefully silent as you both catch your breath, your fingers lazily massaging his scalp without even realising. You’re finally gathering your bearings and coming to terms with the fact that you just fucked each other’s brains out when you could barely stand each other before. And you absolutely do not know how to proceed from here. Not when his cock was still inside you. Thankfully, you don’t have to worry about that decision for too long because Taehyung is pulling back his face to stare in your eyes deeply as if he’s also at a loss for words.

You search his face for any disgust or any realisation that will make him pull away from you and you don’t know why you’re this nervous and worried about his reaction. You didn’t care before so why now? Why was your heart beating so fast that you felt like it was going to come out of your mouth?

“Y/N,” Taehyung post-sex, sexy voice breaks you out of your downward spiral as he brings his hand up to caress your cheek damp from the tears earlier. “I’m going to kiss you now.”

You watch him for a few seconds before nodding slowly and that’s all the confirmation Taehyung needs before taking your lips between his once again. And just like that, he kisses you lazily, tangling his hot, sweet tongue with your own for who knows how long. You two stay just like that for a long time, kissing ecahother with so much passion that it scares you how much the thought of breaking away from his lips gives you anxiety. It seems to be the same case for Taehyung because when you break apart to breathe in much needed air, he pulls you back in – mouth open and tongue seeking your own.

Sometime during the night, he’s started to harden inside you once again and rather than breaking away, he fucks you exactly the opposite way he had earlier. This time, it’s slow, even more sensual and the space between your body is almost non-existent. By the time your phone rings and breaks you both out of the haze that had you both intoxicated in the apartment, it’s sometime around midnight. Though Taehyung doesn’t stop even for a second until he’s made you cum once again and spilled himself inside you as well.

The night had definitely taken a turn as you both talk – for once without the intention of insulting each other – and fuck. Mostly fuck actually. Turns out Taehyung made you insatiable and his eagerness and fondness for cumming inside you didn’t exactly help. After replying to Minnie and sending Marion a message of apology, you’re both dozing off on the soft floor.

_________________________________________________________________________

“Come to my art exhibition with me? I want you by my side.” He asks you in the morning, slightly breathless as he grinds his erection – seriously, how often did this boy get hard? – against your damp, soiled pussy, awaking you from your sleep.

“O-Okay.” You can only moan in reply as he takes a nipple between his lips, sucking gently as he coaxes out another orgasm from you before carrying you off to the shower.

“You’re such a horn dog.” Splashing water at his face, you’re laughing as he attacks your sides, tickling you in revenge.

“A horn dog you slept like, a thousand times with.” Your mouth is falling open in mock disbelief but he just kisses your frown away.

“It will be zero times if I see that sex painting at your show!” Taehyung is giggling at your pout and the frown that creases your brows as he kisses it away, promising you that you can burn his ‘sex painting’ before the show.

Maybe he wasn’t so bad.

a/n: thoughts? :ooo

[killscreencinema]

Death Stranding (PS4)

The first week of quarantine, I lost my job.  It wasn’t COVID related, more like “I hated my job and my employers finally realized it” related.  So it was actually really good timing that I began this game while unemployed, as virtually delivering packages to people made me at least feel like I still had a job! 

Death Stranding, released by Hideo Kojima’s new independent studio in 2019, is set in a bleak, post-Apocalyptic future where the world of the living and the dead have converged in a catastrophic event called, well, the “death stranding”.  Dangerous phantoms, called “BTs”, roam the countryside, dragging anyone unlucky enough to encounter them into their world.  The only person who can stand up to them is a porter named Sam Bridges (Norman Reedus), who has a unique condition called DOOMS which allows him to sense a BTs presence (who are otherwise invisible to the naked eye).  Paired with a child bred to act as a link between the living and dead, called a  Bridge Baby, or BB, Sam can even see a BT, making him the only candidate who can possibly bring the world back together by traveling the wastelands of the former United States, delivering packages and connecting the surviving human cities via something called the “chiral network”.

So it’s basically a fucked up, but better, version of that Kevin Costner movie The Postman.

Also, if it seems like my story summary took longer than usual, welcome to the world of Hideo Kojima!  I tried my best to explain the story in a brief synopsis, but I still didn’t even scratch the surface of it.  For example, I didn’t even mention how Mads Mikkelson intermittently drags Sam to a battlefield-like purgatory so he can steal his BB; or how Sam’s mysterious connection to the BTs makes his bodily fluids deadly to them, so you will often use weaponry made from his piss, blood, and shit to fight them; or how his primary objective is to rescue an enigmatic woman named Amelie, who may or may not be the daughter of the recently deceased President of the United States, from terrorists who want to use Amelie to bring about the extinction of humanity.

This game is bananas, ya’ll... but in the best way.

I started this game with extremely low expectations, as it had been critically lambasted by most of the major gaming sites and YouTubers.  From the previews of the game I watched, it just seemed.... weird.  I didn’t understand what the hell I was looking at - Norman Reedus with a pod baby strapped to his chest, and a strange flappy doodad on his shoulder, while walking on a tar beach strewn about with dead whales?  What the fuck, Hideo?  Visually alone the game was such a stark (and I mean *stark*) departure from the Metal Gear games, so when I found out the gameplay was delivering packages, I became convinced that Hideo Kojima had done lost his goddamn mind. 

Turns out... and this should hardly come as a surprise... the man is a goddamn genius.

Truly brilliant art always offends and bewilders the senses at first because your mind doesn’t know how to cope with what its experiencing.  Watch any given David Lynch movie and you’ll see what I mean.  The human mind has trouble processing totally new information that has no frame of reference in memory or cultural awareness, which is why “weird” art initially repulses before it gains a following (and many great artists die in poverty before they are recognized for their genius).  Imagine introducing a peasant from the Middle Ages to a helicopter - they’d think it looks absolutely ridiculous, so when you tell them it can fly, just IMAGINE their incredulity. 

Anyway, I think that is why initial impressions of Death Stranding were so negative - it was a lot to take in for a lot of gamers used to being spoon fed repackaged versions of the same games but with different titles.  Even things that seem at first “original” have recognizable gaming mechanics that ease the player in.  I mean a game set in the apocalypse where the core gameplay is centralized on package delivery???   There’s nothing like this!  So your reaction is either going to be “This is brilliant” or, like the medieval peasant, “this is ridiculous”.

Mind you, I’m not saying if you don’t like this game, you’re as stupid as a medieval peasant.

I get why people would hate this game - it’s very different than a lot of games out there.  Death Stranding is bold and audacious in its storytelling and its gameplay.  It takes a lot of risks that most AAA publishers (like Konami for example) would balk at, which is why Kojima had to create his own company to make it.

The gameplay seems simplistic at first - deliver packages from point A to point B.  However, it’s a little more complicated than that.  For one, the key element of the game is item management and learning not to bite off more than you can chew.  Sam can only carry so many boxes, and the more you stack on top of him, the more difficult the journey will be, especially when crossing BT territory or bandits (called MULES) nipping at your heels.  You also have to take into account the rocky terrain, river crossings, and weather (oh, did I mention that rain in this game, referred to as “Time Fall”, can rapidly age items and people?).  The game is all about carefully choosing equipment you’ll think you will need, whether it be weapons, ladders (for climbing large cliff faces or crossing deep rivers or chasms), sprays for repairing damage to packages, or even a spare pair of boots in case the shoes you’re wearing wear out.  So to say that the game is “just delivering packages” greatly diminishes some of the nuance going on here.  Yes, there are lots of long stretches of just walking across a landscape to some of the most melancholy music ever assembled on a soundtrack, but I’d argue that having patience for those moments is part of the gameplay. 

The game can be frustrating, such as when Sam refuses to climb a ledge you KNOW is climbable, so he just trips and falls over instead.  The vehicles that you eventually unlock are some of the most goddamn frustrating vehicles in video game history.  At first, I figured it was because I would eventually unlock better modes of conveyance more adequately adapted to crossing rough terrain, but no - they all drive like shit.  Just getting the truck to drive up a hill without spinning out and rolling backwards can fray on one’s nerves.  It’s hard to discern how much of it is the vehicle and how much might be poor controls.

The story, as alluded to above, is ambitious at best and pretentiously bloated at worst.  However, if you’ve played any of the Metal Gear games, you know what you’re signing up for when it comes to high concept, over-indulgent story.  I would say that for the most part, Death Stranding’s story is coherent enough to enjoy, although there are long expository cut scenes that convolute the plot more than clear it up.  Fortunately, the characters are well developed enough, and are interesting enough, to keep you invested (a storytelling skill that is perhaps Kojima’s saving grace).  Also, the more dramatic beats of the story are impactful enough to still resonate, even if you’re not entirely sure what the fuck is going on.  It helps to have talent like Norman Reedus, Mads Mikkelson, and Lea Seydoux in the cast, whose performances bring the characters to life.  Sam in particular might have been an insufferable loner, were it not for Reedus’ gruff likeability that made him famous from Walking Dead. 

If you’ve avoided this game because, like me, you were convinced by bad reviews that it sucks, I would highly suggest that you reconsider.  It may not be as fun, or compelling, as a Metal Gear Solid game, but it’s an interesting departure and one worth experiencing.

[missilekidding]

☄ / 🔮 / 🌐 :)

Gah I had so much fun with these! Again, so sorry I didn’t get around to them sooner, but I hope they were worth waiting for!

☄ - NewsAGoGo

To begin with I need to say that my headcanons for this wonderful lesbian are HEAVILY influenced by @neon-rat‘s NewsAGoGo tag cause that shit is SO GOOD.

- So we got our lesbian scene queen here. She’s had about four thousand different hair cuts and colours and not a single one has ever looked good, but that’s sort of the point. She is CONSTANTLY shaving bits off her head and has most of her scalp tattooed. Frequently seen in a variety of extremely ugly green, yellow or orange trench coats and totally impractical knee length boots, and manages to pull off the ‘I literally wouldn’t recognise good fashion if it punched me in the face’ look brilliantly. This is mostly because of her charisma and confidence in personally loving her own look, and besides, she is a TERRIFYING motherfucker so most runners wouldn’t have the guts to tell her they don’t like her look anyway.

- When I say shes tattooed I mean she is TATTOOED. Most of her body is covered. They aren’t generally big pieces either - a large piece on her upper arm, chest and one thigh, but otherwise covered in tons of smaller pieces, individual from each other and symbolic of vastly different things. Her favourite is probably any of the pieces her girlfriend, DJ Hot Chimp, has given her, and even if Hot Chimp wasn’t genuinely one of the best tattoo artists in the zones she would adore the fact that it’s her girl’s iconic ocean patterns that rest across her rib cage.

- She can be pretty blunt, and it often comes across as rude - she will always speak her mind and totally tends to miss the changes in conversations when people are hurt. She can also get a little heated too when she’s passionate, but also very short when she doesn’t care, so she can be a little intense for many joys to deal with. That’s not, however, to say that she is unkind. If NewsAGoGo is anything, its a good fucking friend. She is fiercely loyal to Doctor Death Defying and her friends at the radio station, and to Hot Chimp, and she easily makes up for anything mean that she may accidentally say in the passion she shows to the people she trusts.

- Before they settled either with or near Doctor D in the radio station, News, Hot Chimp, Cherri and Pony all ran together - it only lasted for about six months once they escaped the City, but it was probably the most fun any of them had. They were some of the earliest killjoys to get out, so the rules of the Zones were much less defined, meaning that setting fire to buildings for the sake of it and driving fast enough to crash every single car they found was fine - the precious nature of these things really weren’t set out or apparent, and the desire for chaos which plagues any runner fresh out of the City went uncontrolled in them.

🔮 - The Phoenix Witch

AH! My absolutely favourite character in the universe! Resident Goth Deity!

- She isn’t called the Phoenix Witch for no reason. The woman has mad power. Raising the dead and making random shit vanish type power. Mostly she takes this very seriously - a nasty side effect of prophetic visions is that she can see the role she, and others, need to play in the big picture, and so her somewhat controversial choices to raise, or not raise joys from the dead plays on her conscience a lot. It’s not clear where she got her power from other than the fact that it took her years of practise to gain it, and that the more powerful she becomes the less she seems to actually be seen.

- This then means that very few living runners have actually seen her. In the earlier days it was more common - she seemed to actually conform to the idea that having a physical form means that you had to exist somewhere at all times, so seeing her around the zones was rare, but possible. Many of those ‘joys who did see her wandering across the land however were ghosted, and those who do claim to have seen her in the later years tend to say that she can just appear at will, and so this lack of knowledge and sightings of her, paired with the frequent stories of the impossible things she can just do really gained her her status as big fucking mythical cryptid across the zones.

- Know I included this in my last Phoenix Witch headcanon post but it’s a headcanon I am willing to Die for - She is Doctor Death Defying’s twin. They were raised together and although they don’t see each other very often cause like. crazy zone happenings. they are still incredibly close and look out for each other. They also fuck around and indirectly make each other’s lives extremely difficult on purpose to piss the other one off because even if your sister is essentially a deity you can still make sure that she wakes up to her least favourite song playing on the radio once every week, and even if your brother is the most revered killjoy in the zones you can give him weird fucking intense dreams that fully convince him that yes, he is in fact a large marsupial, at two in the morning.

- Her ability to shape shift was something that kind of just happened. very suddenly. She was kind of just sitting there one day, thinking about how inconvenient it was to be a human person with like arms and legs and a torso, when suddenly she just wasn’t anymore. It was pretty surprising to say the least, to no longer have to exist in corporeal form, but both personally and practically it was pretty awesome, and after some practise she worked out how to change into a raven, which while also looking totally rad allowed her to go and sit outside Doctor D’s radio station at ungodly hours of the morning and shriek really loud before making a quick get away.

🌐 - One of my OCs

Okay lets talk Grenade. My fucking weird dumbass bitch oc. Love her.

- She has never lived in the Battery - she’s originally from around London, but when shit Went Down in the UK her family moved as far as they could - into the area that later became the zones. Her mother moved into the City in the early days but Grenade’s apprehension to follow proved pretty fucking lucky after Better Living started dropping bombs on the zones and their true nature was revealed. During this time she spent a while running with this group of aggressive dudes and trying to convince herself that she was totally straight™, but she quickly realised that this group were actually pretty awful morally, and left, later realising that girls exist and reassessing her entire world view.

-  She is pretty covered in tattoos (notice the running theme in my headcanons for most female killjoys, I’m gay sue me), with her favourite being either the snake around her forearm or the large floral pieces over her hips and thighs. Her time being a general nuisance to Dracs has proved a little detrimental to the larger pieces on her body - a particularly violent run in left most of her chest piece totally unrecognisable, but the scarring itself still has meaning to her so it doesn’t bother her too much.

- She is often seen running around under the full moon, titties out, praising the Goddess. Just cause you live in the desert doesn’t mean you can’t still do your crazy witch shit and Grenade is definitely extremely spiritual. Due to this she also makes charms for runners she meets - getting her hands on actual supplies for spell bags is hard, but she makes do with what she can find and invests a lot of time into sigil magic to make up for it.

- Her and Lithium (@neon-rat’s OC) were the first members of their group, and met shortly after Better Living stopped dropping pig bombs when the two of them ended up trying to kill the same annoying SCARECROW agent together. They got on amazingly mostly because they are both fucking batshit crazy, so the idea of spending three weeks hiding in the City and just repetitively stealing all the fruit from the previously mentioned SCARECROW agent’s house before setting it on fire was one that made perfect sense to them both. They were originally gonna call their group Dykes! but realised that DOGS, or ‘Damn, Occult Girls are Sexy’ is funnier, and sounds like it should stand for something way cooler than it does.

[comicteaparty]

July 15th-July 21st, 2019 CTP Archive

The archive for the Comic Tea Party week long chat that occurred from July 15th, 2019 to July 21st, 2019.  The chat focused on Radioactive Underground by Ezra Rose.

Featured Comment:

Chat:

RebelVampire

COMIC TEA PARTY- WEEK LONG BOOK CLUB START!

Hello and welcome everyone to Comic Tea Party’s Week Long Book Club~! This week we’ll be focusing on Radioactive Underground by Ezra Rose~! (https://tapas.io/series/Radioactive-Underground)

You are free to read and comment about the comic all week at your own pace, so stop on by whenever it suits your schedule! Remember, though, that while we allow constructive criticism, our focus is to have fun and appreciate the comic. Below you will find four questions to get you started on the discussion. However, a new question will be posted and pinned everyday (between 12:01AM and 6AM PDT), so keep checking back for more! You have until July 21st to tell us all your wonderful thoughts! With that established, let’s get going on the reading and the chatting!

QUESTION 1. What has been your favorite scene in the comic so far? What specifically did you like about it?

QUESTION 2. What do you think caused Robbie’s scar that is briefly seen? Further, why is Robbie taking medicine? What might all this have to do with Griffin’s particular concern for how Robbie is doing?

ezzy

Wow what a wonderful comic surely who ever made this comic is very smart and also handsome

RebelVampire

QUESTION 3. At the moment, who is your favorite character? What about that character earns them this favor?

QUESTION 4. Which aspect of the world has caught your eye the most so far? Why does it interest you? Also, how do you think it will play a role in how the story unfolds?

RebelVampire

1) my favorite scene is probably the first scene we see robbie at maki's. i liked the little flirty dialogue and then the ultimate payoff with it at the end. like i really felt like i was in robbie's shoes during it cause i wasnt sure if there was chemistry and then the "robbie with an i e " thing really sold it for me. just a great banter setup i can really appreciate. 2) Given the opening scene, I gotta imagine Robbie was fighting monsters or w/e he fights in the underground and took on a challenge he wasnt ready for. And that probably nearly killed him and thus why the scar and medicine. Cause the medicine is probably keeping his heart going or something like that. As for Griffin's concern, Griffin gives off a kind of motherly feel to me despite the aggressive attitude. And it seems she and robbie have a sort of mother-son bond (at least a little bit). and ya know, mom's worry when their sons almost die.

3) my favorite character atm is probably robbie. While this could change as the characters become more familiar, I really just like Robbie's design. It feels edgy and relateable at the same time without being overboard. I also think it super suits his personality. 4) I'm really interested in the underground aspect of the comic. Cause it really doesn't feel like their underground, yet it's clearly a thing. And given robbie's crush isnt from the underground originally, itll be interesting to see how the cultures differ. Since there already seems to be some inequality going on. In terms of the story, I definitely think the underground's probably...status in society is probably a breeding ground for crime. hence robbie's entire life situation.

ezzy

>:3c

RebelVampire

QUESTION 5. What has been your favorite illustration in the comic so far? What specifically about it do you like?

QUESTION 6. Why do you think Yui was supposedly kicked out of the family business, and how do you think she got involved with Griffin? What theories do you have about the rest of Griffin’s crew? Alternatively, who do you most want to learn more about?

RebelVampire

QUESTION 7. Which characters do you enjoy seeing interact the most? What about their dynamic interests you?

QUESTION 8. What do you think the ultimate goal is for Griffin’s group as for why they steal? Is it just for money, or is there some larger picture? Further, what do you think Robbie’s personal investment is in the whole thing?

RebelVampire

5) My fave illustration...s is probably the ones of Griffin on this page. https://tapas.io/episode/1357536 Griffin looks so cool, and something about this up-close shot choices really made me appreciate her really cool, badass design. Instantly won my heart over as a top-contending chara for favorites. 6) Yui sort of strikes me as the type who rebels just to rebel. Like the teen who never got out of the rebellious phase because she's 2kool4skool. And from what we've seen with her relationship with her family, rebelliousness is not well-received. And I can see from her families perspective how it kind of just looks like Yui lazes around and then throws attitude. I don't really have theories about the rest of the crew, although I definitely do want to get to know the completely non-human world. They'd be a great insight into the rest of the non-humans that are in this world.

7) I probably enjoy seeing Robbie and crush chick the most. They've got really cute chemistry that just makes me squee on the inside. And I also hope he continues to be called Robbie with an i e for a while. 8) I think the answer to this question depends on perspective. Most of the crew, like Robbie and Yui, are probably just in it for the money. While I think Griffin is in it for the money, I also think she has a bigger picture idea. Like eventually aiming for the grand jewel and making people super pissed. Or more I should say, she's waiting till they can make the heist of a lifetime and retire on a beach in Hawaii. As for Robbie's personal investment, besides money, he kind of maybe just has nothing better to do? So far my impression of him is hes the type to think hes not good at a lot of stuff besides running and fighting. Thus morals be damned, lets steal things? XD Plus if he needs medicine, hes gotta pay for it somehow. So to summarize, his investment is needs money + belief in lack of job opportunities. I think if something better came along hed be heavily tempted.

RebelVampire

QUESTION 9. What sorts of art or story details have you noticed in the way the comic is crafted that you think deserves attention?

QUESTION 10. Who exactly do you think Griffin is? In other words, what’s Griffin’s backstory and why is Griffin invested in stealing? Further, why do you think Griffin keeps the group at arm’s length and has them drop her off at random locations?

RebelVampire

9) One deal I appreciate is the balance of Griffin's design. Like there's this right blend of human and non-human traits that you could even guess she was a half-breed before anybody even said anything. And being able to get that across immediately visually is really A+ work there. 10) I think Griffin was probably someone a lot like Robbie. Just in the underground, nothing to do, no opportunities, and so she took the easy route of theft. However, I think she was at least once part of a bigger organization (given the connections she has) and that she kind of betrayed them and ditched them. Like I said earlier, I think she's both in it for the money but kind of has some bigger idea picture about retiring in style or something like that. As for keeping the group at arm's length, I actually think it's to protect them. Cause she clearly seems to know dangerous folks who know her and have a bone to pick. So by not letting the others become too notorious, she keeps the heat on her.

ShaRose49

I started this one awhile ago and I thought it was very well-drawn(edited)

ezzy

Thank you i try very hard

RebelVampire

QUESTION 11. What do you think are this particular comic’s strengths? What do you think makes this comic unique? Please elaborate.

QUESTION 12. Why do you think the new girl working at Maki’s has come to the underground? What might it have to do with her relationship with her parents? Further, what role do you think she’ll play in the larger story?

spacerocketbunny

1. Favourite scene is probably the one where everyone is in the diner after the heist! The banter is fun and I like how the characters interact. Yui and Robbie are great, they act like siblings who can't stand each other but of course cover each other's asses if they get in trouble. Also the moment when Robbie meets Sky, she asks his name so she can label his food but then he asks for her name and she pauses like "why are you asking the server's name lol" 3. Ummmm Griffin because she's a mysterious babe?? Love me a stoic lady with questionable motives ;)) also Sky is so sweet, I love that she's an artist! 4. Love the demons and other folks that are integrated into the world, it's a lot of fun! I hope there'll be more interesting people to see :)

5. The latest pages with Griffin on the phone look great, great colours, nice backgrounds, I like how the colours are starting to become more dynamic! 6. Mmmm my guess is that she's a bit messy and callous and probably messed something up in the family business. Too early to make any hard speculation but if anything I think it was Yui's fault probably... I want to see more of what these heists are for, and how their group operates. I'd like to see more on Griffin and her origin since it was pointed out that she was a %100 human (I'm assuming the other half is demon?) 7. Right now Yui and Robbie because of the bickering they do, but now that I've seen Sky blush after interacting with Griffin I'm

9. I like the style of the comic, it's angular and sharp and I like the character designs! I feel like the comic's aesthetic and mood is still being realized but it's progressing with each page and I can't wait to see how it develops further! 11. Like previously mentioned I think the style is definitely a strength, it's fun and offbeat and I like that it's one that I'm not seeing in the comic scene right now. The character interaction is great too, even as early as it is I'm already invested in these characters and I want to know more about them, they're a fun lot and they all play off each other in a great way. I'm interested to see where this comic goes and how it'll develop, I'll definitely be checking back for updates

RebelVampire

QUESTION 13. What are you most looking forward to in the comic? Also, do you have any final thoughts to share overall?

QUESTION 14. Who do you think Solomon Reiki is, and what does they want with Griffin? What does this have to do with the guard who Griffin fought during the heist? What could this mean for Robbie and the rest of the crew?

RebelVampire

11) I think the comic's strength are definitely the character designs. There's a lot of personality packed into them. Not just the main characters we've seen so far but even the side characters as well. It makes for a really dynamic setting and cast that immediately catches your eye. Somehoe all the designs also really suit the tone of the story as well. 12) I feel there definitely has to have been a falling out with her parents. And she fled to the one place where she thought they would never look for her or something. Given she seems somehow hardcore herself, I could totally see her joining the crew and going on thieving adventures. Or at the very least being an informant of some sort. 13) I'm looking forward to learning more about the rest of the crew and seeing how they all play off each other. Cause that will definitely have a big impact in terms of how the heists go. 14) Given my previous theories, I think Solomon Reiki was Griffin's old boss who is super pissed at Griffin's betrayal of leaving. But until recently they havent been able to find Griffin so hence the guard. Heard some rumors and sent the guard to confirm whether its the traitor or not. Of course, this probably gonna put the rest of the crew square in sights and get them unwanted attention from bigger criminals or something like that.

RebelVampire

COMIC TEA PARTY- WEEK LONG BOOK CLUB END!

Thank you everyone so much for reading and chatting about Radioactive Underground this week! Please also give a special thank you to Ezra Rose for volunteering the comic and creating it! If you liked Radioactive Underground, make sure to continue to support it via some of the links below!

Read and Comment: https://tapas.io/series/Radioactive-Underground

Ezra’s Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/ezrarose

Ezra’s Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/ezzymourao

Ezra’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/SuperSonicSoda_

[beanmaster-pika]

I ended up getting encouraged to talk about my aus so thank you all for enabling my self-indulgence

Swan Prince AU

This one’s the first one? And it’s more of a royalty AU, actually. Licht vacations in the Servamp kingdom every summer but one day he gets cursed by an evil magician (Touma) to turn into a swan. Hyde, who’s the same age as him and therefore his designated playmate when they were kids, recognizes it’s him and freaks out because if the Jekylland kingdom finds out they let this happen then there could be a war and no one wants that thank you very much.

I’m actually more interested in worldbuilding than the plot so :/ For reasons I have not thought up, there’s the ‘older bunch’ of Servamps (Kuro to Freya) and the ‘younger bunch’ (Hyde to Lily) and there’s like a ten-year age gap between the olders and the youngers, and then there’s Tsubaki, who’s twelve and illegitimate. Kuro inherited the throne at 17 when their dad disappeared and by the time Tsubaki’s mother showed up a couple years after with a baby that had the last king’s eyes, the kingdom had stagnated. However, a baker named Mahiru starts showing up at the castle to petition the king, and he appears so frequently and his words are so sensible (”He’s got to have studied statecraft,” Hugh declared. “There’s no way he hasn’t.”) that Kuro’s siblings up and offer him a job as the king’s advisor. After many arguments and finally a heart-to-heart where Mahiru learns that the last king once allowed Kuro to make a decision that almost led the whole country to war, they start to work towards understanding each other and cooperating and it’s tough, but by the time the present story rolls around the kingdom is flourishing. 

The older bunch all hold a place in court; Hugh is a minister of internal affairs, and he, Kuro, and Mahiru are at the heart of the kingdom’s laws; Jeje is the most knowledgeable about magic, especially curses, and works as both a consultant and investigator, though he’s sent to the Alicein kingdom along with Lily (16 at the time of the story, two years younger than Hyde) to serve as ambassadors and tutors to the king’s sons; and Freya’s the head of the army and the most terrifying person in the kingdom. The people love her. There’s a more even distribution of power than there was before Kuro inherited the throne - Mahiru’s influence and Kuro’s reluctance to be in charge of literally everything see to that - and provincial courts have juries put in place so that people are no longer solely at the mercy of sometimes corrupt judges.

On a different note, Hyde starts out as a sweet kid, but when his friend-and-maybe-crush Princess Ophelia two kingdoms over dies when he’s sixteen he goes wild in his grief and takes up with a group of bandits and starts hurting people. When confronted by his siblings, he declares that if the world is so cruel as to take Ophelia’s life, then his actions are just a drop in the bucket. Now, this is very much wrong and a problem, so Kuro manages to seal him temporarily into hedgehog form for a month (EDIT: yes he can normally transform into a hedgehog, no Licht doesn’t know at first, yes animal transformation is a common ability in their kingdom, and no the sealing is not a common or easy practice. It’s legitimate grounds for Kuro to self-prescribe absolute bed rest in order to recover from the drain on his energy, and he’s stronger than normal mages and had assistance to boot; a month is the very limit he can achieve with that) saying that if he’s lost his grasp on his humanity, then perhaps he’ll find it again in an inhuman form, and then they drop him off at the summer villa reserved for Prince Licht with Guildenstern as a caretaker. Now, unbeknownst to everyone, Licht arrived for vacation even though it’s midwinter, and he is absolutely taken with the hedgehog that’s wandering through the villa (”Oh Shit,” Guildenstern said. Hyde agreed. This was very much an Oh Shit situation.). It turns out that while he hadn’t known Princess Ophelia personally, he’d had mad respect for her for stepping up to enact a change in her kingdom’s politics even though it had ended in her assassination. He and Hyde end up having furious arguments over ideology (Licht still doesn’t know that Hyde’s there, and he doesn’t connect the voice with the hedgehog) and in the end, he helps Hyde regain his humanity - to be human is to desire, to desire is to dream, and to dream is to push your imagination past its very limits and work for it. That ends up breaking the seal prematurely, much to everyone but Licht’s relief. Licht’s pissed that the hedgehog turned out to be Hyde. And when Licht is cursed to be a swan, well, Hyde’s worried about it affecting relations with the Jekylland kingdom, yeah, but he also wants to do for Licht what Licht did for him: make him human again.

ANYWAY HERE’S THE DOODLES

Teacher AU

Because now they’re teachers.

This one has basically nothing in it yet aside from it being fun to consider what subjects they’d teach (Mahiru’s home ec; Kuro’s phys ed; Hugh’s history; Jeje’s art; Freya’s a counselor; Hyde’s literature; World End’s either a history or foreign language teacher; Lily’s a student teacher; Licht’s a piano instructor now; Otogiri’s the school’s doctor) and what everyone else would be (Tsurugi and squad are bodyguards; Iduna’s an engineer; Tsuyuki’s with the government; Sham’s with the government; Higan’s a wandering artist; Sakuya’s a psychologist; Ryuusei and Koyuki haven’t factored in at all oops; everyone else either has their canon profession or they’re college or high school students). One of the tidbits I actually spared thought to is that Kuro took a couple gap years and ended up in the same freshman Psych 101 class as Sakuya (who at present shares an apartment with Mahiru) and they somehow bonded and even after the class ended they became texting buddies (usually of memes) and hung out from time to time, but then Mahiru (after getting fired from his first school for some sort of reckless behavior) gets hired to the school all the Servamps are gathered at and starts out pretty argumentative with Kuro but eventually they gain a mutual understanding and maybe the beginnings of a relationship and Sakuya puts two and two together from conversations with Mahiru and texting with Kuro that the man he’s in love with might be in love with his texting buddy and he doesn’t know how to deal with that and so stops texting Kuro, and Kuro finds out about it from talking to Mahiru and then this happens

Kuro, throwing a chicken nugget at Sakuya’s window: why are u ghosting me Sakuya, opening the window: can u throw another

And they talk and all is well again. A poly ending is absolutely in the stars because Mahiru loves them both and they agree to it.

Also the other thing is this

Pokemon AU

This is the one I like the most right now! I actually have a couple of chapters written for it that I haven’t posted yet but basically the whole Servamp thing remains, but the pokemon that they transform into actually have their own personalities - rather than a transformation, it’s a shared body thing, and the human form is a manifestation of the vampire (formerly human) soul. I haven’t ironed out all the details of why this is happening, but I like the idea of them never being alone, though I haven’t figured out quite how this will change them. Hyde’s gonna be fun and also painful to figure out.

Fate AU

LET’S GET THIS HOLY GRAIL BREAD

Mahiru’s uncle was going to take part in the holy grail war but Mahiru accidentally summoned instead and what he summoned was Kuro, a Lancer. Add to that that Sakuya is still his best friend, was meant to be a pawn of Touma’s but ended up being Master-napped by the Saber he summoned (Tsubaki), and Tsubaki wants vengeance on Kuro, and we’ve got another round of heartbreaks on our hands because Fate is nothing but heartbreaks. The Alicein brothers are also there, summoning the same Servants (Caster and Archer) that their grandfather and Mikuni’s mom summoned, and they know that the Grail is tainted so they’re out to destroy it. Their backstory is a little tweaked with Mikuni just stealing his mom’s command seals to protect Misono instead of killing her, and he grabs Misono and absconds to the Church where they stay until Mikage ensures that Mikuni’s mom can never hurt Misono again after the War. Misono goes home, but Mikuni goes to study at the Clock Tower and comes back just in time for the next war. (There’s more under the pictures)

Tetsu summons Rider, but his sisters are the masterminds of the operation; they’re doing their best to restore their family in an age of declining mana, and Tetsu’s got the best Magic Circuits among them so he’s tasked with summoning, but they’re operating under the strict principle that if any of their lives are endangered, especially Tetsu’s, then they halt the project immediately and seek refuge with the Church. Hugh’s hyped about the whole ‘restoring the family’s magic’ thing.

Licht, on the other hand, comes from a family that’s at the very height of their magical power. He doesn’t believe in an omnipotent wish granter because he feels that it’s cheating, but to win the Grail is the goal of every mage out there so he’s in it for the glory. For a summoning catalyst he uses a bracelet that was supposed to belong to a martyr princess of old (”She gave her life for her goals,” Licht said in awe. “Yep, it’s very impressive. Please do not do the same,” Licht’s mother said.), but it turned out to belong to the other person connected to her legend, a man who was terrible and cruel, uncaring of others after he was driven mad in grief, and so Licht summons a demon of an assassin and Crantz (regular human) is left babysitting these goons while Licht’s parents hold down the fort in Austria.

Now, the Berserker team. I just want you all to know that the ones I was most excited about is the Berserker team. Tsurugi carried out the summoning here, Touma’s other pawn, and he added a madness enhancement, changing Freya’s class from Shielder to Berserker. Tsurugi, unlike Sakuya, is a highly trained operative and adult and one of the Church’s Executors, and he’s also completely under Touma’s thumb so he’s an ideal proxy even though Touma couldn’t snatch Sakuya’s command seals like he intended to. Unfortunately, Freya’s madness has just released her inhibitions and she’s this fucking close to pulling a Tsubaki and Master-napping Tsurugi. She does her best - in her limited capacity - to get Tsurugi away from Touma and it all culminates in Touma deciding she’s too much of a loose cannon and trying to take Tsurugi’s command seals away, but the seals instead go to Iduna somehow (haven’t figured that out yet) and Iduna and Freya spirit Tsurugi away to help him recover. Shortly after Iduna develops a magic item that’ll dampen the effect of the madness enhancement, more or less reverting Freya to her original class.

Now, this Grail War is an absolute clusterfuck by this point, mostly because all the summoned Servants are siblings, so a Ruler comes in - drum roll please - World End! Because who better to solve a sibling squabble than another sibling, even if he is the third youngest. This is mostly because I want World End to be included in stuff. World End’s in my Pokemon AU. I failed to elaborate on that but since that’s the AU I’m actually writing it’s all good. Anyway they’re all gathered in a sort of war council at a family restaurant to work out their intense family issues and then World barges in ‘WHAT’S UP THIS IS A PRETTY AWKWARD REUNION.’

This actually might be one of my favorites on account of being able to have them all be different physical ages but keeping their age hierarchy since Heroic Spirits can be summoned at whichever point of their lives was significant, and also this means that I can just make up lore for them. In ten, twenty years I’m probably going to look back on this and groan but for now I’m going to have fun with it.

For Kuro, he took down an entire army on his own at age eighteen and then retreated from the world. Hugh stopped a war when he was small (this threat of war surfaced again when he was older; this was when Kuro took down a whole army). Jeje became a famous outlaw. Freya overthrew a government in order to protect her soldiers. Hyde served a princess, but she gave her life for peace, and shortly afterwards his older brother killed their father; Hyde turned cold and cruel after that. World End inherited his sister’s kingdom after she died in battle and stood strong against threats from other kingdoms, displaying sharp wisdom despite his brash personality. Snow Lily used his illusions to carry out a large scale rescue operation on a child trafficking ring. And Tsubaki? Tsubaki was but a man who inherited a sword from his father, then vanished into the night when that same father was killed. He could have - should have - been summoned as an avenger, but for the sake of story convenience and keeping the war to the traditional seven classes, I chose saber for him.

[musicofthenightphantomoftheopera]

Dear Voltron Fandom (an open letter)

Dear Voltron Fandom,

You don’t know me, but I know you. Before I get into this, allow me to introduce myself so I’m not a stranger. My name is Paiton. I’m 19 years old, and I have high functioning autism, and the character I relate to and love the most is Pidge. I have traversed through many a fandom in my life so far. From Avatar:The Last Airbender, to Sailor Moon, Steven Universe, Disney, you name it! All of these fandoms are loving and wonderful in their own way. However, every fandom has a dark side; It’s just the nature of fandoms, unfortunately. Despite that, I was able to look past that, and be proud to be a part of them! But NEVER have I EVER been more ashamed of being in a fandom when I got dragged into Voltron. Before that, I heard rumors of how toxic the fandom was and all of the crazy stunts some fans tried to pull in order to get what they wanted into the show. So, I tried to avoid the show and its fandom like the plague at all costs.Two months went by and my curiosity got the best of me and I decided to check out the show just to see what all the fuss was about. Turns out I really liked the show and Pidge quickly became my favorite! Hell, I even started a Pidge Ita Bag; just added the first charm to it a couple of days ago! I started out just keeping to myself on my quiet little tumblr blog just reblogging fan art and fics as well as interesting theories and talking to my friends about it. And I can’t forget about buying Voltron fan swag! All was well, despite the occasional bits popping up about the latest fandom disasters. That is up until quite recently. I thought I had seen it all when I had to fight to defend Sailor Moon fans that were being bashed for liking Sailor Moon Crystal or for getting into Sailor Moon in general because of Crystal. I thought I had seen it all when I saw SOULESS Steven Universe “fans” telling an artist to kill herself for drawing Rose Quartz skinny. I thought I had seen it all when I saw the Brony fandom in general. But this....sending death threats to the voice actors and their families, blackmailing the creators in order yo make Klance canon, and a rumor that some antis were burning fanart?! This is absolutely UNACCEPTABLE! To those who participated in ANY of these horrible actions or any other crimes against the fandom, you ought to be ASHAMED of yourselves! Your actions are SHAMEFUL and you should /feel/ ASHAMED. People like you are a disgrace to this and every other fandom out there. You are the reason why the Voltron fandom has such a bad reputation. Now for the sake of this not being me dragging the voltron fandom for the entirety of however long this is going to be, I’m going to play devil’s advocate for a minute or two. I know that not everyone in the Voltron fandom is bad. Hell, my best friend is a Klance shipper and a Lance fangirl and she’s one of the chillest Voltron fans I know! And you want your ships to be canon, I get it. Every fan wants their ship to be canon, weather its a strait, or LGBTQ+ ship. We need more LGBTQ+ representation in...well, pretty much everything really. And it is coming. Its getting there, but  its gradual and you have to be patient! “Patience yields focus” , in the immortal words of our beloved Space Dad. But I also understand that fandoms can change things as well. The first example that comes to mind is Kim Possible if any of you reading this are old enough to remember. When Kim and Ron finally got together in the movie that was supposed to be the series finale, the fans flipped every last crumb of their shit and wrote in, demanding another season. And another season they got, ending with Kim and Ron graduating high school. So fandoms /can/ change things, but this.... Blackmail, death threats, is NOT the way to do it! If anything, stuff like that will steer people away from creating representation just because of the sheer mass hysteria it causes within fandoms! Its the toxic people in the Voltron fandom that pull this sort of stuff that steered me away from the show in the first place. To the toxic people in the Voltron fandom who call themselves proud members of the community. You know who you are. I am calling all of you out. You are not fans. You are bullies. Plain and simple. The kind that beat up the little kid with glasses and stuff them in a locker for being a nerd. The kind that steals lunch money in the cafeteria when the teacher isn’t looking. The kind that spread awful rumors about that shy little girl that likes anime, telling her that nobody would care if she died, only worse. You are the very same kind of bullies that I tried to get away from by joining fandoms (supposedly an accepting environment for people who are different and like the same stuff) in the first place. Now I am the kind of person that doesn’t have a temper. However, stuff like this is one of the very few things that get me righteously pissed off. But I don’t yell, or scream, or punch a wall. Instead, I channel that anger into fuel I can use for something else. Which is what made me write this open letter to you, the Voltron fandom. Like I said earlier, not everyone in the Voltron fandom is bad. To all of those that just enjoy the show and respect other people’s ships, or don’t give a dam about ships at all. thank you for being decent human beings and trying to clean up the mess these toxic, souless antis made of our fandom. After seeing all of this I can tell you that I am officially 1000% DONE with this bull. So I am calling the antis out. Consider this a reality check for ALL of you. This is a fucking CARTOON. The people you are shipping so feverishly together are fictional characters. Underline the word “Fictional” as in “not real”. At the end of the day, they are just a bunch of lines and colors moving frame by frame and voiced by real human beings with feelings. They are not above emotions like some of you idiots think they are. When are you going to get it through your tiny brain cases you call heads that how you are acting is childish, immature, and just plain sadistic?! I want to get something strait right now. I do not hate the voltron fandom, not at all. I hate what its become. These horrible antis and haters and toxic people are infecting the fandom like a deadly disease; like a fast spreading plague that causes the slow and painful death of its victum. However, unlike the real Black Plague, there is a cure! And a contagious one at that! So I’m sending out a call to action to every decent human being in the fandom! Those who are here just to enjoy the show for what it is with other people and have a good time, the older fans who got into Voltron: Legendary Defenders because they grew up with the older versions, the Multishippers, those who are respectful of other people’s ships,, or don’t give a dam about shipping at all, as well as those who keep their accounts as safe spaces for all fans. Do your girl a solid and help make the Voltron fandom a better place. Please, be a voice for good. If you see a fan getting harassed by an anti, just politely shut them down. Don’t go full on Leroy Jenkins and fight back, don’t feed the trolls, guys! Just politely tell them to back off and ignore them after that. Then, turn around and try to cheer up the person who got harassed! Share your favorite fan art pieces with them or give them fic recommendations! Who knows, you just might make a new friend! If you see someone you follow on any social media platform doing any of the bullshit I’ve previously mentioned earlier, unfollow them immediately. You don’t need that kind of negativity in your life and neither does anybody else. Let your followers know that your account is a safe space for all decent Voltron fans to geek out and that there is a ZERO TOLERANCE policy for antis. If someone disagrees with you on your ship or theory, politely ask them to explain their reasoning in a civil manner. Get a dialogue going so the whole thing doesn’t turn into an all out screaming match. It can be done, people! It is possible! It just takes a little effort. It may take some time, hard work, blood, sweat, and tears, but I beleive we can fix the fandom if we all work together.  Now I also want to take a moment to send a message. To the voice actors of Voltron; Bex taylor Klaus (My Queen), Jeremy Shada, Steven Yeun, Josh Keiton, Kimberly Brooks, Tyler Labine, Rhys Darby, and A.J. Locascio. To the Co-Creators of Voltron; Joaquim Dos Santos and Lauren Montgomery. I am not apologizing for the actions of the toxic part of the fandom (that’s a mess they gotta clean up themselves), but I am speaking for the good part of the fandom and myself when I say that we apologize for what these souless people have put you through. Nobody should ever have to go through that just some people want a small sense of validation in their ship being canon. We love all of you and we hope that you can find it in your hearts to give the fandom a chance to redeem itself. I wrote this in hopes of waking some people up and start to to change things for the better. At least that’s what I hope will come of this rant that I wrote all in one sitting at 4 am. Just know that we all love and respect you and I am going to try my hardest to help change this fandom for the better with the help of my friends and followers, as well as the rest of the fandom that actually has a soul and a conscience. We are going to try and remind everyone that we are all on the same side. We all love the same show and the same characters and the same story. After all, we’re all made up of the same cosmic dust.

signed,

Paiton

[xuune]

im getting pissed 24/7: my problem with instagram reposters

time after time i have to continuously go to people and tell them to take down their reposts of my art on ig when they dont ask me for permission. 

what are you actually accomplishing from just saying “credit to the artist uwu” or leaving out the credit entirely. you’re still stealing someone’s work at that point. even if you decide to credit, BUT DONT ASK, thats still disrespectful. its human decency, common sense, and manners, to ASK to repost especially on a place like ig. sure, some artists might allow others to repost only under the condition to credit them, but it is always good to ask in case they don’t want something to be reposted. most of the time, from what ive seen, artists (on tumblr) dont want their art to be reposted without their permission, or dont want their works to be reposted at all. 

but guess what happens to the work that either a) requires permission to be reposted, or b) doesnt want to be reposted. you guessed it: people will still continue to repost that work without asking, and frequently, without proper credit. and that starts a chain of reposts when the og repost caption doesnt say whether or not the artist wants proper crediting and, or, requires permission to repost. how amusing. do people just like being thieves? how cute.

theyre actually stealing people’s work, my work, stealing other’s efforts and im fucking pissed. if you actually appreciate people’s works, then ask for permission to repost it for fucking once. dont just share someone’s work without permission or crediting for the sake of the “activity” of your account. thats fucking selfish and disrespectful. 

if you don’t know whether or not the artist allows others to repost the work, should you repost it? fuck no. check their page and ask if you’re unsure. 

its not that hard to ask if you consider all possible options on where you can reach them and ask for permission. 

if it is somehow impossible for you to find a way to ask them, should you repost? no. leave the work alone and move along. 

if the artist chooses to decline your request, should you repost out of revenge and rage for not letting you? no. at that point youre just a  shit head. 

if you just dont feel like asking out of pure laziness or unwillingness to, congratulations, youre an asshole. 

its discouraging and outright disrespectful to the people who put their time and effort into making something only for someone else to take it and show it off without the creator’s permission 

this includes other sites like twitter/pixiv/deviantart/facebook, etc. its fucking annoying. 

to those that actually ask for permission, thank you and anyone could appreciate you for that B^). 

thank you for reading my lil rant filled anger that i needed to release. 

[wish-to-the-stars]

All relationship start with kisses, and the screams of his friends (4/??)

Dreamswap: @onebizarrekai

******

In a deserted, dusted, timeline genocide of a random universe, they had met, barely two months after their previous meeting. And the memory of the kiss still floated between them. As an indelible mark of their memory, like a brand in their memories.

A memory that was not going away so easily.

A memory mixing discovery and sweetness.

A memory that had electrified them.

The warmth of their magic that had mingled for a short time. Like a warm and reassuring hug.

The contact of their teeth.

A kiss at once tender and who was probably the first for the guardian (who was no longer doing his job, by the way. Thank to Dream.)

And Error also remembered the lost and confused look of his rival.

The lack of soul stopped Ink to fully understand.

Sadly.

As if he did not understand what had happened. As if he was looking for an answer to a question he could not formulate. As if he had never been kissed before and it probably was truth.

And Ink was visibly  angry at him . He was terribly aggressive and offensive.

As if he REALLY wanted to give him the humiliation of the century.  To beat him, to defeat him, to put him to the ground, to take revenge on the black skeleton who had taken advantage of a moment of weakness to touch him as no one had touched him.

And that was more than visible in his attitude.

His look and his grin....

What, did he steal her first kiss?

At his age?

He did not dare ask and play with Ink’s nerves. To make the artist even more angry was probably a bad idea. Even though he was convinced that this was the case here. With his little problem of soullessness, he had certainly never experienced it before, and this new thing had upset him on all levels, especially since he did not understand it.

He really hesitated to tease him about it. But that would probably be a VERY bad idea.

Ink seemed unusually aggressive, brush in hand. Error felt that the kiss of the last time was surely for something. He dodged a stream of paint. And then a brushstroke. Sending his blue sons that the other dodged.

A nice flip back,by the way

As he played with his brush for don't fall.

Error smiled and finally he allowed himself a little swipe : “How are you since the last time?” He smiled “Your face looks better anyway. All the better. ”

He avoided an attack. The snow beneath them was very colorful now. A true ephemeral work of art.

Yes, he was definitely pissed off.

REALLY.

And he was going to bite if it went on.

Error only wanted to play more.

“What, are you angry about the kiss?” He tried, throwing some threads that his opponent ducked “Do not play prude, Ink, I just brushed your teeth.” He winked “What, was it his first? It was time for that to happen, no?

The artist was too aggressive and too hasty. He seemed tired too. Error has heard about the increase of genocidal timelines into certain universes in recent times.

Obviously Justice Reign probably had a lot of work.

Like Nightmare who was trying to prevent his brother from going on a killing spree because of that (the god of positivity must also be on his nerves).

To help people, save others, and control monsters or dangerous humans.

And Ink was Dream’s right hand, he had a lot of work. Not as much as his superior but still.

Once again, he worried. “You should take a break, Ink” He flexibly avoided the new spray of paint, knowing that if a single line was drawn along the length of his clothes, he could find himself bound in a few seconds by the power of the creator.

“You should sit on your bed, with tacos and hot chocolate, and then read, paint or sleep. In short, to rest. And sleep a few hours, see a little day. ”

He heard Nightmare’s voice again “NO NO NO STOP BEING WORRIED ABOUT AN ENEMY.” He ignored him. (Why did his conscience have the voice of his friend? It was a little scary!) And he dodged a new attack, landing a few meters away with a certain elegance. “Still okay to keep going ?” The artist stopped, panting. His eyes shining with a mixture of fatigue, anger and annoyance. And something else, impossible to decipher.

The brush went down for a few seconds “I do not have the luxury of having fun, or sleep when I want during daytime, not like some of you” replied Ink. “I have a full time job myself! I do not have time to play video games or have fun times with friends …like you and…Nightmare and Cross.”

The black skeleton shrugged. “Fair enough.” He smiled full of yellow teeth “But you should, for your magic and health. Staying away from Dream for few days would be good for you ~

- Go fu … "He broke off, clutching his jaw. "And stop interfering with what’s none of your business …” His free hand was clenched in a fist.

Where were his allies? Where was Dream?

Error ignored him, just as he had lost sight of Nightmare and Cross, who were fighting further.

We went so far away? I don’t see anybody anymore … whatever, it’s our respective allies or the inhabitants of this universe.

With anyone else, he would have been on the defensive. But Ink? If he entertained him enough, the other would not deliver him to Dream. He had already let them go on the pretext that “it was his day off …” decided by himself alone. Cross hoped that it was by affection for him, Nightmare said that it was because he was a jerk, and Error hoped that Ink was not “bad” as Dream. Even if Dream was NOT SO bad, in a lot of things, even if he was also bad in some ways.

He assessed the distances between the artist and himself, and backed up to one side of the wall, waiting for the other to get close enough to him to throw his blue sons, tying the other skeleton’s ankles. “Caught you Inky ~”

With a gesture of the arm, he pulled on the ropes to make his opponent fall into a pile of snow, which was not colored by the paint. The artist collapsed into the white and cold substance. He had a colorful swearword that Dream would not have appreciated.

Error did not waste time to tie his arms and make him helpless. “That’s it? Have you calmed down? "He asked, raising an amused eyebrow.

Ink glared at him. "It’s a cowardly tactic. You are a coward!

- No! It’s my power, you should have known it, since it have been a while since we’ve  known each other anyway.”

The peaceful destroyer landed one knee n the snow, and touched gently the artist’s cheek. Ink turned his head away, closing his eyes tightly. Trembling slightly.

The black skeleton said, a little softer: “I’m not going to hurt you if that’s what you’re afraid of.

- I’m not afraid of you,” was the dry, quick, hesitant answer. “So if you hope …”

Error sighed and tugged at the strings, approaching his captive of him, “You are impossible. Really stubborn!

- So what are you waiting for? Bring me back to your stupid Nightmare and lock me in a cage, as you did with lots of evil creatures that Dream wanted to eliminate?

- So, first we do not put them in cages, they are in very comfortable cells.”

Ink laughed with a hoarsely and dryly voice.

As if he did not believe it.

“Then I’m not going to take you back there … even if I think it would be good for you to be away from Dream, because you’re totally drugged up with his positive aura all the time.

- Shut up.

- I do not want to hold you against your will or deprive you of your freedom. "He sighed,” And even if I think that you would have done it anyway!

- I have nothing against you in particular, “replied the other” Dream has nothing against you too … “

Error stared at the eyes of his captive, each one had a different shape and color. The crack in his skull had disappeared since the last time. He was fascinated by this lost and confused look, this look that sought for explanations, a look that opened to the pain of not feeling. To not understand. To be lost.

He did not think and kissed the artist for the second time. Another impulse, mixed with desire.

This time it is no longer the ghost of a kiss, it’s a real kiss, it crosses the barrier of the teeth, deepening the contacts, showing his blue tongues the hot den of his vis-à-vis let out a groan against his teeth.

One was not enough.

Then, clinging to him, he gave him another, then another, and another. He felt the trembling body of the painter in his arms, the heat in his bones, and his whimpering between each kisses and during each kiss.

It was difficult to break the contact. To stop. It was so hot and so good.

But Error did it, got up, and released Ink who stared at him, even more lost and confused, as if he did not understand. He thought he saw a spark in his adversary’s eyes, where something was shining and he did not understand it.

The destroyer disappeared.

[thornstocutyouwith]

—¤÷(`[¤*╟Meet The Muse╢*¤]´)÷¤— 𝓈𝒶𝑔𝑒 𝓂𝒶𝓁𝒶𝓀𝒶𝒾 𝓅𝒶𝓋𝓁𝑜𝓋 Theme Music Band Drummer

⎨ The Basics ⎬

➥Legal Name: Sage Malakai Pavlov ➥Nickname/Alias: Kai ➥Birthday: April 2, 1997 ➥Birthplace: Chelyabinsk, Russia ➥Sex: Male ➥Species: Human ➥Preferred Pronouns: He, him, ex. ➥Sexual Orientation: Bisexual ➥Spoken Languages: English, French ➥Faceclaim: Cameron Monaghan ➥Personality:

✔✔✔Positive:

➥ Fun-Loving: Light hearted and lively. ➥ Curious: Eager to know and learn something. ➥ Serious: Acting or speaking sincerely and in earnest, rather than in a joking or halfhearted manner. ➥ Reflective: Relating to or characterized by deep thought; thoughtful. ➥ Skillful: Having or showing skill. ➥ Observant: Quick to notice things. ➥ Humorous: Causing lighthearted laughter and amusement. Having or showing a sense of humor. ➥ Enthusiastic: Having or showing intense and eager enjoyment, interest, or approval. ➥ Creative: Relating to or involving the imagination or original ideas, especially in the production of an artistic work. ➥ Well-Read: Knowledgeable and informed as a result of extensive reading

✘✘✘ Negative:

➥ Sarcastic: Marked by or given to using irony in order to mock or convey contempt. ➥ Temperamental: Liable to unreasonable changes of mood. ➥ Callous: Showing or having an insensitive and cruel disregard for others. ➥ Offhand: Ungraciously or offensively nonchalant or cool in manner. ➥ Disorderly: Lacking organization; untidy. Involving or contributing to a breakdown of peaceful and law-abiding behavior. ➥ Complex: Someone who is difficult to understand/comprehend as an individual due to their personality or lifestyle. ➥ Crafty: Clever at achieving one's aims by indirect or deceitful methods. ➥ Unforgiving: Not willing to forgive or excuse people's faults or wrongdoings. ➥ Outspoken: Frank in stating one's opinions, especially if they are critical or controversial. ➥ Contradictory: Mutually opposed or inconsistent. Given to argument and contention. Unable both to be true or both to be false under the same circumstances

☠ ☠ ☠Fears: Drowning, The Unknown, Bad storms/Thunderstorms, Failure

⎨ A History Lesson ⎬

➥Backstory:

Sage had been originally born in Russia, to a television actor and his model girlfriend. While the family was away in America on a family vacation when Sage was about eight months old. During the incident, Sage received one of his first scars being hit by a stray bullet on the lower left side of his abdomen. This left Sage one of the very few survivors of the tragic ordeal. Despite the best efforts of child services getting him returned to his living family members were far too young to take the infant in. Eventually, he was put into the system, ending up in an orphanage in Africa. This is where he grew up over the course of four years of his life. Sage was often sickly while living in Africa. It was soon discovered that his apparent sick spells were caused by exposure to the sunlight.

When Sage had just turned six a family in Africa had been allowed to foster home. During his time with that family, they had moved to another country. Once there Sage was sold to another family and completely lost to the system at this point. By the time Sage had turned eight he had been moved from one place to another, for illegal services. Some of these services included drug peddling. Which is where Sage had learned his first craft, how to sell/move illegal goods. Thankfully outside of holding the drugs and being used to distract anyone who might grow suspicious he did not have to do anything else. As a drug peddler, Sage also picked up on how to make several drugs and grow. Even at a young age, it was clear that he was intelligent and more adult about things. But because of this, he would never have a proper childhood, or truly know what it would be like to have been a child, during this time.

As he was shifted from one household to another in trades, Sage was often physically abused by his mother and father figures. As well as emotionally abused. This lead to him easily shutting off his emotions in order to properly take in and deal with a situation, executing it precisely. When Sage was about to turn ten child services finally were able to track him down when one careless family had ended up being raided by the police. By this time Sage had been living in America and it was decided he was to be put into a foster home that had a history of taking care of other foster children.

While he was living with this foster family life appeared to settle down more for Sage and he began to be more of a normal child. The foster parents he had this second time around had treated him like their actual children and truly did love him, even as he grew older and started to become more reckless and cold. They never tried to be too harsh with him whenever he got a failing grade. This eventually lead to Sage trying his best in school. He wanted nothing more than to be more than just another lost cause in the foster system. As far as school goes he eventually had gone from failing to being at the top of his classes. Teachers would often praise his intelligence during Parents Teacher Meetings. Sage was never interested in this though, as he was only doing his best to make his foster parents proud. He felt that this would be the only time anyone would ever truly be proud of any sort of work he did.

By the time he was fifteen though things went downhill again, his academics did not suffer. But he started to branch out more into criminal activities. He was hanging out with what would be considered the 'bad kids' at school. Sage had picked up a bad habit of smoking around this time as well as sneaking into theaters to watch movies and stealing from gas stations mostly. A bad reputation began to form for him when he was arrested for stealing a store. This was the first time he had ever been caught and arrested. His bad reputation, as well as rumors people would start about him, made him out to be much more deadly than he actually ever was. But Sage never spoke up about any of these things, to explain or deny. He didn't care enough to argue his reputation openly. Sage was never much of a talker, which certainly never helped his case. Some classmates were afraid he would actually hurt them so they would try to avoid him or be overly nice if they couldn't do that.

After assaulting another classmate in school when he was sixteen Sage was suspended and sent to a juvenile detention center for several months. After his release, he had been involved with a few of the local drug dealers were just a few months later he was put back into juvie over drug possession. Once he was released the second time Sage decided to let things cool off for a while. During this time Sage's foster parents were no longer legally bound to keep track of him. He was emancipated and free from his parental guide. Though this did not stop the pair from keeping in contact with the other. Sage managed to eventually get a decent job and apartment in another part of California away from his old school. After settling in over the summer Sage went back to school for his last year, this time staying on a decent path away from drugs and other illegal activities.

Not long after starting school he started to make actual friends, though he still kept most of himself secret from these friends. Not wanting to talk about his past if he can help it.

Over the next few years until now Sage has been able to maintain his secrets and hide his past life successfully. He lives in a house now and has several pets that he's very close with. When he's not doing things along with the band he usually is making gaming videos for youtube/Twitch. Of which he has quite a following, even before that band started getting fame. His channel has been running successfully for years.

➥Education: Highschool ➥Who were they in school? (class clown, mean girl, etc.): Distant loner type, mostly. ➥Occupation: Musician, Drummer  ➥Occupation they wanted as a child: Violinist ➥Socioeconomic level growing up: Below Average ➥Socioeconomic level now: Average ➥Living conditions growing up: Somewhat harsh ➥Living conditions now: Well enough ➥Criminal Record: Arrested for theft when he was 15, Assaulting someone, Drug possession

⎨ Relationships ⎬

➥Parents: Sasha Pavlov ( Father ), Tatiana Razen ( Mother ), They are Dead ➥Siblings: None ➥Significant Others: ➥Best Friends: ➥Friends: ➥Rivals: ➥Enemies: ➥Pets: Socrates ( Cat ) Aristotle ( Hamster ) Artemis ( Hamster ) Caligula ( Dog ) Elagabalus ( Cat ) 

⎨ Let’s Get Physical ⎬

➥Character’s Build: Lean, Athletic

➥Height: 5'11" ➥Weight: 131 ➥Hair Colour: Dark red ➥Eye Colour: Greenish blue ➥Body Modifications: Piercings ➥Scars/Birthmarks: Bullet scar on abdomen, Vicious scar on left shoulder and partially on neck, Freckles ➥Tattoos: Right Arm, Front left shoulder area, Scarification along right left side of his body. ➥Restrictions: Can't eat blueberries ( allergic ), seasonal allergies, Sunlight ➥Physical or Mental Illnesses: Photodermatitis (Sun Poisoning)

➥Addictions:

⎨ The Juicy Stuff ⎬

➥Quirks/Other:

➥ Still sleeps with his favorite childhood stuffed animal ➥ Always seems to be injured in some way, whether it be a small paper cut or bruise, or something more significant ➥ Energy Drink obsessed ➥ Slightly Narcoleptic ➥ Watches old PBS/Nick Jr shows ➥ Plays with small random objects when concentrating ➥ Carries writing/reading items with him everywhere ➥ Can repeat scenes from Movies and Shows he's seen before, even if he hasn't seen them in a long time ➥ Almost always listening to music when not actively socializing with others ➥ Talks to Plants and Animals, jokingly seen as talking to these two things more than actual people ➥ Great with technology ➥ Mumbler ➥ Always has a book with him ➥ Fidgets when nervous ➥ Sings in the shower ➥ Owns every gaming system ➥ Collects random rocks he finds ➥ Will throw things if you piss him off ➥ Will play with children's toys if not given/having anything else to do ➥ Tells people he has killed another person before. But he hasn't. ➥ Doesn't know how to swim

➥Likes/Dislikes: ❤❤❤Likes: Roleplaying, Comic Books, Collecting actions figures, Animals, Zoo's, Museums, Fantasy, Science Fiction, Grapes, Peaches, The color black, Going on walks alone, Space, Peanuts, Walnuts, Pistachios, Cartoons/Anime, Video games, Marvin The Martian, Donald Duck, Aliens, Gushers ( Fruit Snack), Candy, Lemonade, Apple Juice, Root Beer, Boardgames, Insects, Mythology, Booty Call  ☣ ☣ ☣Dislikes: People who think they have him all figured out, Reptiles, Pushovers, Outright Liars, Religion, Politics, The Sun, People who limit their gaming experiences by arguing one side is better than the other, Getting dirty, Being sexualized, Constantly being hit on, Getting sick, Being cut off when talking, Social Media, Constantly being touched, Awkward moments, Having to do math, Being arrested, Overbearing Fangirls,

Extras:

➥Vice: Sloth, Wrath ➥Virtue: Chastity, Patience ➥MBTI/Enneagram: INTP-A / 8w7 ( 5 ) ➥Alignment: ➥Hogwarts/Ilvermorny House: ➥Element/Signs: Aries ➥Character Links: Aesthetics ➥Character Tropes: Kick Me Cute Kitten Oral Fixation Libation for the Dead Redhead In Green Smoking is GlamorousWhile Rome Burns All Drummers Are Animals Batter Up Blanket Fort Half-Identical Twins Good Old Fisticuffs Genre Savvy Beware The Quiet Ones Fight Clubbing My Fist Forgives You Sarcastic Clapping Guyliner Precious Puppy You Are Not Alone

Anthems

Why Worry

Sarcasm

In The City

We are Young

I'd Rather Drown

Never Surrender

Control(hehe)

[jadeimpression]

Criminal (Part 3)

Part Three

Reading List: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

Summary: AU where Bucky is part of the white collar crime division of the Brooklyn police and you're a well known thief that he's had in his sights for years but has never caught. What happens when you get in too deep and have to turn to the one person who's been longing to lock you away for as long as he's been after you?

Pairing: Bucky x Reader

Word Count: 2,107-ish Warning:  Angst, violence and language.

A/N: I decided to try a little something new with this chapter and toss in Bucky’s POV. Not sure if I’ll continue to that do that the chapters to come. Let me know what you think! Next chapter things will really start to heat up!

Previous tonight when you made an exodus from your loft you had been too worried about the fact that pissed off Irishmen were trying to break down your door then why they were there in the first place. You had done nothing to get on the wrong side of the Irish so why had they given you such a rude awakening? Going to one of the few places you trusted you sat in a booth at a local diner with the hood pulled up over your head to cover your hair and obscure your features. You knew it was unlikely they would look for you here but you weren’t that far from the loft so there was that small chance they would increase their search radius.

While in the diner having a cup of far too strong coffee was when you saw it. The news was showing a scene from a local card game, the door of the building was broken and there were bodies covered with black police tarps. It was the same card game Dimitri had wanted you to rob but you hadn’t been anywhere near that building, you had turned down the job. “We’ve gotten word that this is the work of a local thief known as The Phoenix. A calling card was left on the scene which is the same as what has been found at many other robberies but this is the first time there is a body count. We’re told the BPD will be releasing a sketch of the woman in question later today. If you have any information please call our toll free number listed at the bottom of the screen.” Your blood ran cold and time seemed to slow down as your brain fought to process the information which had just been placed before you.

Killing people was never part of your MO and you always did your best to avoid unnecessary risks on a job. Every life mattered and no one should loss theirs over something someone wanted more than they did. On occasion you had to knock people out but never had you killed anyone, you might be a thief but you weren’t a murder, everyone knew that. Everyone other than the Irish and the BPD anyway. Pulling your cell phone from your pocket you hit redial on the number Dimitri had called you from the other day but your world came crashing down at the tone which came back to you, the automated voice informing you that your call could not be completed as dialed, please hang up, check the number and try again. If you were anyone else you would worry about someone tracking your phone but you were smarter than that and had a friend write a program to keep anyone from being able to track you.

The feeling of being numb quickly wore off as anger took over, you had refused to do a job and Dimitri had framed you for it anyway. He had to have known you would say no because the card game was a day earlier than he originally said and he had your calling card. Why would the Russian’s do something that could start a mob war? And then you realized the answer, if the blame fell on you there would be no war because the Irish would think you had acted alone. Though you always had a benefactor and everyone you worked with knew that, there were very few jobs you ever did for yourself and the one in question was not one of them.

“Can I get you anything else sweetie?” The grandma like waitress asked you as she stopped by your table. A small smile pulled at your lips for the first time tonight, you were grateful for her kindness and she seemed to radiate warmth.

“A slice of apple pie please and then I’ll get out of your hair.” The older woman patted you on the arm as if she knew that was something you needed right now and you were so appreciative for the small amount of human contact. As she walked away to get your pie you looked up the number for the BPD precinct knowing if it was a case involving you Detective Barnes was either at the scene or at the station and you hadn’t seen him in the short news clip so it was likely he was at the station. The Chief of Police was probably grilling him on how he allowed this to happen since he was the Detective assigned to your case.

As you wait for your pie you can’t help but drum your fingers against the vinyl covered table top, you weren’t impatient by any means you were just very nervous and wound up. The feeling of safety that the dinner possessed seemed to be slipping farther and farther away by the minute. There were very limited people you could turn to since most that ran in your circle wouldn’t hesitate to hand you over to the Irish no matter what you had done for them in the past, not that you could really blame them. Loyalty had it’s limits in this line of work.

The plate of pie was placed on your table and your waitress gave you another warm smile before she moved to check on another table. After a night like tonight you really needed a slice of pie and that sort of friendly smile because you weren’t sure when the next time you were going to see such a smile would be. Digging into the sugary concoction there was an explosion of flavor which came with your first bite. Not knowing when you next meal would be, you probably should have opted for something with more protein and sustenance but you needed comfort food right now.

It wasn’t long before the pie was completely devoured and you were staring at one contact in your phone. A contact you shouldn’t even have and yet you did. After Detective Barnes had so rudely began grilling people in your life, you had become snooping into his and gained his personal cell number thanks to a techy friend. Pressing the little phone button and initiating the call would change everything, were you ready for the fall out it could cause? What if didn’t believe you? Those were chances you were going to have to take because you had no other options and very few friends and alliances now. Licking the last bit of apple pie filling from the fork you finally bit the bullet and pressed the called button.

For a moment you don’t think he’s going to answer, it’s the early hours of the morning, he’s likely at work and it’s an unknown number but all you have left is hope.

Bucky’s POV

The precinct had been a mad house since the call came in. Patrol officers had been the first on the scene and the description they gave was one of vivid and gory detail before homicide had arrived. What he hadn’t expected was the calling card that was left at the scene. It didn’t make any scene but the moment that evidence had been logged and the chief was back at the station he and Steve were both called into the office the door being slammed closed and the blinds being pulled closed. “How did this happen? The two of you have been on this case for close to a year, no leads, no capture and now she’s not only stolen but killed many in the Irish mob! How the hell did you allow this to happen?”

The chief’s face was blood red a vein in his forehead pulsing under the skin as he glared at James and Steve from across the desk. The business like card with a single lipstick print was flung  across the desk in an evidence baggy, the wrinkles of the print making it look like the card was kissed by fire itself. It didn’t make any sense to him that The Phoenix would steal let alone kill someone of any mob, it wasn’t her MO and yet this was her calling card. Lifting the bag for a closer inspection something seemed a bit off with it, the lip marks were almost too perfect. “You told me that you were making head wave on this case! This is not what I call head wave!” Despite the chief’s words his eyes were glued to the evidence bag and the card within.

“You’ve seen her Barnes and  you’re going to meet with a sketch artist. I’ve allowed the two of you to make enough of a mess of this. Rogers, Barnes, you’re off the case since it seems the two of you had no idea what you were dealing with. It’s been handed off to homicide along with all your case files.” James’ eyes snapped up at those words, this couldn’t be happening? He was just getting a break in the case on The Phoenix and now it was being taken from him? Anger burned within him.

Steve put his hand on James’ arm trying to get him to calm down, “This has been my case from the start! I was the first person to even tie her robbers together before she started using a calling card! She might be brazen in what she takes but this isn’t her style, she avoids hurting people at all…”

“That’s enough Barnes!” The rage in his chief’s voice told him he had crossed a line, “One more word Barnes, just one and instead of being off the case, you’ll be suspended! You will not follow any leads, you will not look at any of the files or ask questions of those on the case, you’ll give a description for a sketch and that is it. Stay out of the way, both of you or I’ll have your badges. Dismissed.” His voice was final as both James and Steve left the office Steve looking defeated and James looked infuriated.

“Bucky I know you well enough to know you don’t want to drop this but you need to. This isn’t our case anymore, white collar crime is ours, homicide is a whole other department.” That gave James no reassurance as he moved to his desk and fell into the chair his metal fist slamming against the desk causing those around to look towards him.

It took him a few rings before he realized his cell phone was ringing. His brow furrowed not recognizing the number but he answered anyway, “James Barnes.”

There was a few seconds of silence on the other end until a feminine voice began to speak. The edge of sensuality still clung to it but there was fear as well, “I know what I’m being accused of and I didn’t do it. I don’t kill people, nothing is that important to me.” Her voice was low as if she were whispering as she spoke. There was such sincerity in her voice which he hadn’t expected.

Glacier like hues roamed over those nearby hoping no one suspected the phone call he had just entered into. Why would anyone suspect such a thing though? The idea of a criminal calling an officer for anything other than a taunt was unheard of. “Something is that important to someone doll and it’s important enough to drag you into it. I’ve been chasing you for a long time and in that time I’ve never seen a job you pulled where you hurt anyone and I’ve never known you to steal from the mob.” His voice was low keeping his conversation lowkey. “That doesn’t mean that people don’t change though and maybe this time it was important enough to kill over.”

Silence once more filled the line, he wanted to trust her but her life and how she lived was built on lies and misdirection. “Meet me tonight and I’ll explain everything I can. I know that you have no reason to trust me but you’re the only person who’s figured out jobs even I had forgotten that I’ve pulled. You know me better than you can imagine and I know despite your words, you don’t believe I did this. I’ll see you at Sin-Sation at nine o’clock. If I see any cops including your partner I’m gone. The people who are framing me, they have a far reach and even if they didn’t we both know the Irish have cops on their payroll and would love to get to me as soon as possible.” There was some sort of sound in the background that he couldn’t make out before the line went dead. Now he had a choice, he could trust a criminal or he could turn her in. Police custody wouldn’t save her from the Irish and regardless of if she did it or not they thought they did and they would find a way to kill her to send a message.

Tag List: @archerassassin @winter-in-wakanda @voltronmullet

A/N: I have the feeling I’m missing someone I was supposed to have tagged, I’m so sorry! Please message me and I’ll get you added to the tag list I promise!!! <3

[rhetoricandlogic]

The Pauper Prince and the Eucalyptus Jinn by Usman Malik

(Novella lenght = really long)

“When the Spirit World appears in a sensory Form, the Human Eye confines it. The Spiritual Entity cannot abandon that Form as long as Man continues to look at it in this special way. To escape, the Spiritual Entity manifests an Image it adopts for him, like a veil. It pretends the Image is moving in a certain direction so the Eye will follow it. At which point the Spiritual Entity escapes its confinement and disappears.

Whoever knows this and wishes to maintain perception of the Spiritual, must not let his Eye follow this illusion.

This is one of the Divine Secrets.”

The Meccan Revelations by Muhiyuddin Ibn Arabi

For fifteen years my grandfather lived next door to the Mughal princess Zeenat Begum. The princess ran a tea stall outside the walled city of Old Lahore in the shade of an ancient eucalyptus. Dozens of children from Bhati Model School rushed screaming down muddy lanes to gather at her shop, which was really just a roadside counter with a tin roof and a smattering of chairs and a table. On winter afternoons it was her steaming cardamom-and-honey tea the kids wanted; in summer it was the chilled Rooh Afza.

As Gramps talked, he smacked his lips and licked his fingers, remembering the sweet rosewater sharbat. He told me that the princess was so poor she had to recycle tea leaves and sharbat residue. Not from customers, of course, but from her own boiling pans—although who really knew, he said, and winked.

I didn’t believe a word of it.

“Where was her kingdom?” I said.

“Gone. Lost. Fallen to the British a hundred years ago,” Gramps said. “She never begged, though. Never asked anyone’s help, see?”

I was ten. We were sitting on the steps of our mobile home in Florida. It was a wet summer afternoon and rain hissed like diamondbacks in the grass and crackled in the gutters of the trailer park.

“And her family?”

“Dead. Her great-great-great grandfather, the exiled King Bahadur Shah Zafar, died in Rangoon and is buried there. Burmese Muslims make pilgrimages to his shrine and honor him as a saint.”

“Why was he buried there? Why couldn’t he go home?”

“He had no home anymore.”

For a while I stared, then surprised both him and myself by bursting into tears. Bewildered, Gramps took me in his arms and whispered comforting things, and gradually I quieted, letting his voice and the rain sounds lull me to sleep, the loamy smell of him and grass and damp earth becoming one in my sniffling nostrils.

I remember the night Gramps told me the rest of the story. I was twelve or thirteen. We were at this desi party in Windermere thrown by Baba’s friend Hanif Uncle, a posh affair with Italian leather sofas, crystal cutlery, and marble-topped tables. Someone broached a discussion about the pauper princess. Another person guffawed. The Mughal princess was an urban legend, this aunty said. Yes, yes, she too had heard stories about this so-called princess, but they were a hoax. The descendants of the Mughals left India and Pakistan decades ago. They are settled in London and Paris and Manhattan now, living postcolonial, extravagant lives after selling their estates in their native land.

Gramps disagreed vehemently. Not only was the princess real, she had given him free tea. She had told him stories of her forebears.

The desi aunty laughed. “Senility is known to create stories,” she said, tapping her manicured fingers on her wineglass.

Gramps bristled. A long heated argument followed and we ended up leaving the party early.

“Rafiq, tell your father to calm down,” Hanif Uncle said to my baba at the door. “He takes things too seriously.”

“He might be old and set in his ways, Doctor sahib,” Baba said, “but he’s sharp as a tack. Pardon my boldness but some of your friends in there . . .” Without looking at Hanif Uncle, Baba waved a palm at the open door from which blue light and Bollywood music spilled onto the driveway.

Hanif Uncle smiled. He was a gentle and quiet man who sometimes invited us over to his fancy parties where rich expatriates from the Indian subcontinent opined about politics, stocks, cricket, religious fundamentalism, and their successful Ivy League–attending progeny. The shyer the man the louder his feasts, Gramps was fond of saying.

“They’re a piece of work all right,” Hanif Uncle said. “Listen, bring your family over some weekend. I’d love to listen to that Mughal girl’s story.”

“Sure, Doctor sahib. Thank you.”

The three of us squatted into our listing truck and Baba yanked the gearshift forward, beginning the drive home.

“Abba-ji,” he said to Gramps. “You need to rein in your temper. You can’t pick a fight with these people. The doctor’s been very kind to me, but word of mouth’s how I get work and it’s exactly how I can lose it.”

“But that woman is wrong, Rafiq,” Gramps protested. “What she’s heard are rumors. I told them the truth. I lived in the time of the pauper princess. I lived through the horrors of the eucalyptus jinn.”

“Abba-ji, listen to what you’re saying! Please, I beg you, keep these stories to yourself. Last thing I want is people whispering the handyman has a crazy, quarrelsome father.” Baba wiped his forehead and rubbed his perpetually blistered thumb and index finger together.

Gramps stared at him, then whipped his face to the window and began to chew a candy wrapper (he was diabetic and wasn’t allowed sweets). We sat in hot, thorny silence the rest of the ride and when we got home Gramps marched straight to his room like a prisoner returning to his cell.

I followed him and plopped on his bed.

“Tell me about the princess and the jinn,” I said in Urdu.

Gramps grunted out of his compression stockings and kneaded his legs. They occasionally swelled with fluid. He needed water pills but they made him incontinent and smell like piss and he hated them. “The last time I told you her story you started crying. I don’t want your parents yelling at me. Especially tonight.”

“Oh, come on, they don’t yell at you. Plus I won’t tell them. Look, Gramps, think about it this way: I could write a story in my school paper about the princess. This could be my junior project.” I snuggled into his bedsheets. They smelled of sweat and medicine, but I didn’t mind.

“All right, but if your mother comes in here, complaining—”

“She won’t.”

He arched his back and shuffled to the armchair by the window. It was ten at night. Cicadas chirped their intermittent static outside, but I doubt Gramps heard them. He wore hearing aids and the ones we could afford crackled in his ears, so he refused to wear them at home.

Gramps opened his mouth, pinched the lower denture, and rocked it. Back and forth, back and forth. Loosening it from the socket. Pop! He removed the upper one similarly and dropped both in a bowl of warm water on the table by the armchair.

I slid off the bed. I went to him and sat on the floor by his spidery, white-haired feet. “Can you tell me the story, Gramps?”

Night stole in through the window blinds and settled around us, soft and warm. Gramps curled his toes and pressed them against the wooden leg of his armchair. His eyes drifted to the painting hanging above the door, a picture of a young woman turned ageless by the artist’s hand. Soft muddy eyes, a knowing smile, an orange dopatta framing her black hair. She sat on a brilliantly colored rug and held a silver goblet in an outstretched hand, as if offering it to the viewer.

The painting had hung in Gramps’s room for so long I’d stopped seeing it. When I was younger I’d once asked him if the woman was Grandma, and he’d looked at me. Grandma died when Baba was young, he said.

The cicadas burst into an electric row and I rapped the floorboards with my knuckles, fascinated by how I could keep time with their piping.

“I bet the pauper princess,” said Gramps quietly, “would be happy to have her story told.”

“Yes.”

“She would’ve wanted everyone to know how the greatest dynasty in history came to a ruinous end.”

“Yes.”

Gramps scooped up a two-sided brush and a bottle of cleaning solution from the table. Carefully, he began to brush his dentures. As he scrubbed, he talked, his deep-set watery eyes slowly brightening until it seemed he glowed with memory. I listened, and at one point Mama came to the door, peered in, and whispered something we both ignored. It was Saturday night so she left us alone, and Gramps and I sat there for the longest time I would ever spend with him.

This is how, that night, my gramps ended up telling me the story of the Pauper Princess and the Eucalyptus Jinn.

The princess, Gramps said, was a woman in her twenties with a touch of silver in her hair. She was lean as a sorghum broomstick, face dark and plain, but her eyes glittered as she hummed the Qaseeda Burdah Shareef and swept the wooden counter in her tea shop with a dustcloth. She had a gold nose stud that, she told her customers, was a family heirloom. Each evening after she was done serving she folded her aluminum chairs, upended the stools on the plywood table, and took a break. She’d sit down by the trunk of the towering eucalyptus outside Bhati Gate, pluck out the stud, and shine it with a mint-water-soaked rag until it gleamed like an eye.

It was tradition, she said.

“If it’s an heirloom, why do you wear it every day? What if you break it? What if someone sees it and decides to rob you?” Gramps asked her. He was about fourteen then and just that morning had gotten Juma pocket money and was feeling rich. He whistled as he sat sipping tea in the tree’s shade and watched steel workers, potters, calligraphers, and laborers carry their work outside their foundries and shops, grateful for the winter-softened sky.

Princess Zeenat smiled and her teeth shone at him. “Nah ji. No one can steal from us. My family is protected by a jinn, you know.”

This was something Gramps had heard before. A jinn protected the princess and her two sisters, a duty imposed by Akbar the Great five hundred years back. Guard and defend Mughal honor. Not a clichéd horned jinn, you understand, but a daunting, invisible entity that defied the laws of physics: it could slip in and out of time, could swap its senses, hear out of its nostrils, smell with its eyes. It could even fly like the tales of yore said.

Mostly amused but occasionally uneasy, Gramps laughed when the princess told these stories. He had never really questioned the reality of her existence; lots of nawabs and princes of pre-Partition India had offspring languishing in poverty these days. An impoverished Mughal princess was conceivable.

A custodian jinn, not so much.

Unconvinced thus, Gramps said:

“Where does he live?”

“What does he eat?”

And, “If he’s invisible, how does one know he’s real?”

The princess’s answers came back practiced and surreal:

The jinn lived in the eucalyptus tree above the tea stall.

He ate angel-bread.

He was as real as jasmine-touched breeze, as shifting temperatures, as the many spells of weather that alternately lull and shake humans in their variegated fists.

“Have you seen him?” Gramps fired.

“Such questions.” The Princess shook her head and laughed, her thick, long hair squirming out from under her chador. “Hai Allah, these kids.” Still tittering, she sauntered off to her counter, leaving a disgruntled Gramps scratching his head.

The existential ramifications of such a creature’s presence unsettled Gramps, but what could he do? Arguing about it was as useful as arguing about the wind jouncing the eucalyptus boughs. Especially when the neighborhood kids began to tell disturbing tales as well.

Of a gnarled bat-like creature that hung upside down from the warped branches, its shadow twined around the wicker chairs and table fronting the counter. If you looked up, you saw a bird nest—just another huddle of zoysia grass and bird feathers—but then you dropped your gaze and the creature’s malignant reflection juddered and swam in the tea inside the chipped china.

“Foul face,” said one boy. “Dark and ugly and wrinkled like a fruit.”

“Sharp, crooked fangs,” said another.

“No, no, he has razor blades planted in his jaws,” said the first one quickly. “My cousin told me. That’s how he flays the skin off little kids.”

The description of the eucalyptus jinn varied seasonally. In summertime, his cheeks were scorched, his eyes red rimmed like the midday sun. Come winter, his lips were blue and his eyes misty, his touch cold like damp roots. On one thing everyone agreed: if he laid eyes on you, you were a goner.

The lean, mean older kids nodded and shook their heads wisely.

A goner.

The mystery continued this way, deliciously gossiped and fervently argued, until one summer day a child of ten with wild eyes and a snot-covered chin rushed into the tea stall, gabbling and crying, blood trickling from the gash in his temple. Despite several attempts by the princess and her customers, he wouldn’t be induced to tell who or what had hurt him, but his older brother, who had followed the boy inside, face scrunched with delight, declared he had last been seen pissing at the bottom of the eucalyptus.

“The jinn. The jinn,” all the kids cried in unison. “A victim of the jinn’s malice.”

“No. He fell out of the tree,” a grownup said firmly. “The gash is from the fall.”

“The boy’s incurred the jinn’s wrath,” said the kids happily. “The jinn will flense the meat off his bones and crunch his marrow.”

“Oh shut up,” said Princess Zeenat, feeling the boy’s cheeks, “the eucalyptus jinn doesn’t harm innocents. He’s a defender of honor and dignity,” while all the time she fretted over the boy, dabbed at his forehead with a wet cloth, and poured him a hot cup of tea.

The princess’s sisters emerged from the doorway of their two-room shack twenty paces from the tea stall. They peered in, two teenage girls in flour-caked dopattas and rose-printed shalwar kameez, and the younger one stifled a cry when the boy turned to her, eyes shiny and vacuous with delirium, and whispered, “He says the lightning trees are dying.”

The princess gasped. The customers pressed in, awed and murmuring. An elderly man with betel-juice-stained teeth gripped the front of his own shirt with palsied hands and fanned his chest with it. “The jinn has overcome the child,” he said, looking profoundly at the sky beyond the stall, and chomped his tobacco paan faster.

The boy shuddered. He closed his eyes, breathed erratically, and behind him the shadow of the tree fell long and clawing at the ground.

The lightning trees are dying. The lightning trees are dying.

So spread the nonsensical words through the neighborhood. Zipping from bamboo door-to-door; blazing through dark lovers’ alleys; hopping from one beggar’s gleeful tongue to another’s, the prophecy became a proverb and the proverb a song.

A starving calligrapher-poet licked his reed quill and wrote an elegy for the lightning trees.

A courtesan from the Diamond Market sang it from her rooftop on a moonlit night.

Thus the walled city heard the story of the possessed boy and his curious proclamation and shivered with this message from realms unknown. Arthritic grandmothers and lithe young men rocked in their courtyards and lawns, nodding dreamily at the stars above, allowing themselves to remember secrets from childhood they hadn’t dared remember before.

Meanwhile word reached local families that a child had gotten hurt climbing the eucalyptus. Angry fathers, most of them laborers and shopkeepers with kids who rarely went home before nightfall, came barging into the Municipality’s lean-to, fists hammering on the sad-looking officer’s table, demanding that the tree be chopped down.

“It’s a menace,” they said.

“It’s hollow. Worm eaten.”

“It’s haunted!”

“Look, its gum’s flammable and therefore a fire hazard,” offered one versed in horticulture, “and the tree’s a pest. What’s a eucalyptus doing in the middle of a street anyway?”

So they argued and thundered until the officer came knocking at the princess’s door. “The tree,” said the sad-looking officer, twisting his squirrel-tail mustache, “needs to go.”

“Over my dead body,” said the princess. She threw down her polish rag and glared at the officer. “It was planted by my forefathers. It’s a relic, it’s history.”

“It’s a public menace. Look, bibi, we can do this the easy way or the hard way, but I’m telling you—”

“Try it. You just try it,” cried the princess. “I will take this matter to the highest authorities. I’ll go to the Supreme Court. That tree”—she jabbed a quivering finger at the monstrous thing—“gives us shade. A fakir told my grandfather never to move his business elsewhere. It’s blessed, he said.”

The sad-faced officer rolled up his sleeves. The princess eyed him with apprehension as he yanked one of her chairs back and lowered himself into it.

“Bibi,” he said not unkindly, “let me tell you something. The eucalyptus was brought here by the British to cure India’s salinity and flooding problems. Gora sahib hardly cared about our ecology.” His mustache drooped from his thin lips. The strawberry mole on his chin quivered. “It’s not indigenous, it’s a pest. It’s not a blessing, it repels other flora and fauna and guzzles groundwater by the tons. It’s not ours,” the officer said, not looking at the princess. “It’s alien.”

It was early afternoon and school hadn’t broken yet. The truant Gramps sat in a corner sucking on a cigarette he’d found in the trash can outside his school and watched the princess. Why wasn’t she telling the officer about the jinn? That the tree was its home? Her cheeks were puffed from clenching her jaws, the hollows under her eyes deeper and darker as she clapped a hand to her forehead.

“Look,” she said, her voice rising and falling like the wind stirring the tear-shaped eucalyptus leaves, “you take the tree, you take our good luck. My shop is all I have. The tree protects it. It protects us. It’s family.”

“Nothing I can do.” The officer scratched his birthmark. “Had there been no complaint . . . but now I have no choice. The Lahore Development Authority has been planning to remove the poplars and the eucalyptus for a while anyway. They want to bring back trees of Old Lahore. Neem, pipal, sukhchain, mulberry, mango. This foreigner”—he looked with distaste at the eucalyptus—“steals water from our land. It needs to go.”

Shaking his head, the officer left. The princess lurched to her stall and began to prepare Rooh Afza. She poured a glittering parabola of sharbat into a mug with trembling hands, staggered to the tree, and flung the liquid at its hoary, clawing roots.

“There,” she cried, her eyes reddened. “I can’t save you. You must go.”

Was she talking to the jinn? To the tree? Gramps felt his spine run cold as the blood-red libation sank into the ground, muddying the earth around the eucalyptus roots. Somewhere in the branches, a bird whistled.

The princess toed the roots for a moment longer, then trudged back to her counter.

Gramps left his teacup half-empty and went to the tree. He tilted his head to look at its top. It was so high. The branches squirmed and fled from the main trunk, reaching restlessly for the hot white clouds. A plump chukar with a crimson beak sat on a branch swaying gently. It stared back at Gramps, but no creature with razor-blade jaws and hollow dust-filled cheeks dangled from the tree.

As Gramps left, the shadows of the canopies and awnings of shops in the alley stretched toward the tree accusatorially.

That night Gramps dreamed of the eucalyptus jinn.

It was a red-snouted shape hurtling toward the heavens, its slipstream body glittering and dancing in the dark. Space and freedom rotated above it, but as it accelerated showers of golden meteors came bursting from the stars and slammed into it. The creature thinned and elongated until it looked like a reed pen trying to scribble a cryptic message between the stars, but the meteors wouldn’t stop.

Drop back, you blasphemer, whispered the heavens. You absconder, you vermin. The old world is gone. No place for your kind here now. Fall back and do your duty.

And eventually the jinn gave up and let go.

It plummeted: a fluttering, helpless, enflamed ball shooting to the earth. It shrieked as it dove, flickering rapidly in and out of space and time but bound by their quantum fetters. It wanted to rage but couldn’t. It wanted to save the lightning trees, to upchuck their tremulous shimmering roots and plant them somewhere the son of man wouldn’t find them. Instead it was imprisoned, captured by prehuman magic and trapped to do time for a sin so old it had forgotten what it was.

So now it tumbled and plunged, hated and hating. It changed colors like a fiendish rainbow: mid-flame blue, muscle red, terror green, until the force of its fall bleached all its hues away and it became a pale scorching bolt of fire.

Thus the eucalyptus jinn fell to its inevitable dissolution, even as Gramps woke up, his heart pounding, eyes fogged and aching from the dream. He groped in the dark, found the lantern, and lit it. He was still shaking. He got up, went to his narrow window that looked out at the moon-drenched Bhati Gate a hundred yards away. The eight arches of the Mughal structure were black and lonely above the central arch. Gramps listened. Someone was moving in the shack next door. In the princess’s home. He gazed at the mosque of Ghulam Rasool—a legendary mystic known as the Master of Cats—on its left.

And he looked at the eucalyptus tree.

It soared higher than the gate, its wild armature pawing at the night, the oily scent of its leaves potent even at this distance. Gramps shivered, although heat was swelling from the ground from the first patter of raindrops. More smells crept into the room: dust, trash, verdure.

He backed away from the window, slipped his sandals on, dashed out of the house. He ran toward the tea stall but, before he could as much as cross the chicken yard up front, lightning unzipped the dark and the sky roared.

The blast of its fall could be heard for miles.

The eucalyptus exploded into a thousand pieces, the burning limbs crackling and sputtering in the thunderstorm that followed. More lightning splintered the night sky. Children shrieked, dreaming of twisted corridors with shadows wending past one another. Adults moaned as timeless gulfs shrank and pulsed behind their eyelids. The walled city thrashed in sweat-soaked sheets until the mullah climbed the minaret and screamed his predawn call.

In the morning the smell of ash and eucalyptol hung around the crisped boughs. The princess sobbed as she gazed at her buckled tin roof and smashed stall. Shards of china, plywood, clay, and charred wicker twigs lay everywhere.

The laborers and steel workers rubbed their chins.

“Well, good riddance,” said Alamdin electrician, father of the injured boy whose possession had ultimately proved fleeting. Alamdin fingered a hole in his string vest. “Although I’m sorry for your loss, bibi. Perhaps the government will give you a monthly pension, being that you’re royal descent and all.”

Princess Zeenat’s nose stud looked dull in the gray after-storm light. Her shirt was torn at the back, where a fragment of wood had bitten her as she scoured the wreckage.

“He was supposed to protect us,” she murmured to the tree’s remains: a black stump that poked from the earth like a singed umbilicus, and the roots lapping madly at her feet. “To give us shade and blessed sanctuary.” Her grimed finger went for the nose stud and wrenched it out. “Instead—” She backpedaled and slumped at the foot of her shack’s door. “Oh, my sisters. My sisters.”

Tutting uncomfortably, the men drifted away, abandoning the pauper princess and her Mughal siblings. The women huddled together, a bevy of chukars stunned by a blood moon. Their shop was gone, the tree was gone. Princess Zeenat hugged her sisters and with a fierce light in her eyes whispered to them.

Over the next few days Gramps stood at Bhati Gate, watching the girls salvage timber, china, and clay. They washed and scrubbed their copper pots. Heaved out the tin sheet from the debris and dragged it to the foundries. Looped the remaining wicker into small bundles and sold it to basket weavers inside the walled city.

Gramps and a few past patrons offered to help. The Mughal women declined politely.

“But I can help, I really can,” Gramps said, but the princess merely knitted her eyebrows, cocked her head, and stared at Gramps until he turned and fled.

The Municipality officer tapped at their door one Friday after Juma prayers.

“Condolences, bibi,” he said. “My countless apologies. We should’ve cut it down before this happened.”

“It’s all right.” The princess rolled the gold stud tied in a hemp necklace around her neck between two fingers. Her face was tired but tranquil. “It was going to happen one way or the other.”

The officer picked at his red birthmark. “I meant your shop.”

“We had good times here”—she nodded—“but my family’s long overdue for a migration. We’re going to go live with my cousin. He has an orange-and-fig farm in Mansehra. We’ll find plenty to do.”

The man ran his fingernail down the edge of her door. For the first time Gramps saw how his eyes never stayed on the princess. They drifted toward her face, then darted away as if the flush of her skin would sear them if they lingered. Warmth slipped around Gramps’s neck, up his scalp, and across his face until his own flesh burned.

“Of course,” the officer said. “Of course,” and he turned and trudged to the skeletal stump. Already crows had marked the area with their pecking, busily creating a roost of the fallen tree. Soon they would be protected from horned owls and other birds of prey, they thought. But Gramps and Princess Zeenat knew better.

There was no protection here.

The officer cast one long look at the Mughal family, stepped around the stump, and walked away.

Later, the princess called to Gramps. He was sitting on the mosque’s steps, shaking a brass bowl, pretending to be a beggar. He ran over, the coins jingling in his pocket.

“I know you saw something,” she said once they were seated on the hemp charpoy in her shack. “I could see it in your face when you offered your help.”

Gramps stared at her.

“That night,” she persisted, “when the lightning hit the tree.” She leaned forward, her fragrance of tea leaves and ash and cardamom filling his nostrils. “What did you see?”

“Nothing,” he said and began to get up.

She grabbed his wrist. “Sit,” she said. Her left hand shot out and pressed something into his palm. Gramps leapt off the charpoy. There was an electric sensation in his flesh; his hair crackled. He opened his fist and looked at the object.

It was her nose stud. The freshly polished gold shimmered in the dingy shack.

Gramps touched the stud with his other hand and withdrew it. “It’s so cold.”

The princess smiled, a bright thing that lit up the shack. Full of love, sorrow, and relief. But relief at what? Gramps sat back down, gripped the charpoy’s posts, and tugged its torn hemp strands nervously.

“My family will be gone by tonight,” the princess said.

And even though he’d been expecting this for days, it still came as a shock to Gramps. The imminence of her departure took his breath away. All he could do was wobble his head.

“Once we’ve left, the city might come to uproot that stump.” The princess glanced over her shoulder toward the back of the room where shadows lingered. “If they try, do you promise you’ll dig under it?” She rose and peered into the dimness, her eyes gleaming like jewels.

“Dig under the tree? Why?”

“Something lies there which, if you dig it up, you’ll keep to yourself.” Princess Zeenat swiveled on her heels. “Which you will hide in a safe place and never tell a soul about.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s what the fakir told my grandfather. Something old and secret rests under that tree and it’s not for human eyes.” She turned and walked to the door.

Gramps said, “Did you ever dig under it?”

She shook her head without looking back. “I didn’t need to. As long as the tree stood, there was no need for me to excavate secrets not meant for me.”

“And the gold stud? Why’re you giving it away?”

“It comes with the burden.”

“What burden? What is under that tree?”

The princess half turned. She stood in a nimbus of midday light, her long muscled arms hanging loosely, fingers playing with the place in the hemp necklace where once her family heirloom had been; and despite the worry lines and the callused hands and her uneven, grimy fingernails, she was beautiful.

Somewhere close, a brick truck unloaded its cargo and in its sudden thunder what the princess said was muffled and nearly inaudible. Gramps thought later it might have been, “The map to the memory of heaven.”

But that of course couldn’t be right.

“The princess and her family left Lahore that night,” said Gramps. “This was in the fifties and the country was too busy recovering from Partition and picking up its own pieces to worry about a Mughal princess disappearing from the pages of history. So no one cared. Except me.”

He sank back into the armchair and began to rock.

“She or her sisters ever come back?” I said, pushing myself off the floor with my knuckles. “What happened to them?”

Gramps shrugged. “What happens to all girls. Married their cousins in the north, I suppose. Had large families. They never returned to Lahore, see?”

“And the jinn?”

Gramps bent and poked his ankle with a finger. It left a shallow dimple. “I guess he died or flew away once the lightning felled the tree.”

“What was under the stump?”

“How should I know?”

“What do you mean?”

“I didn’t dig it up. No one came to remove the stump, so I never got a chance to take out whatever was there. Anyway, bache, you really should be going. It’s late.”

I glanced at my Star Wars watch. Luke’s saber shone fluorescent across the Roman numeral two. I was impressed Mama hadn’t returned to scold me to bed. I arched my back to ease the stiffness and looked at him with one eye closed. “You’re seriously telling me you didn’t dig up the secret?”

“I was scared,” said Gramps, and gummed a fiber bar. “Look, I was told not to remove it if I didn’t have to, so I didn’t. Those days we listened to our elders, see?” He grinned, delighted with this unexpected opportunity to rebuke.

“But that’s cheating,” I cried. “The gold stud. The jinn’s disappearance. You’ve explained nothing. That . . . that’s not a good story at all. It just leaves more questions.”

“All good stories leave questions. Now go on, get out of here. Before your mother yells at us both.”

He rose and waved me toward the door, grimacing and rubbing his belly—heartburn from Hanif Uncle’s party food? I slipped out and shut the door behind me. Already ghazal music was drifting out: Ranjish hi sahih dil hi dukhanay ke liye aa. Let it be heartbreak; come if just to hurt me again. I knew the song well. Gramps had worn out so many cassettes that Apna Bazaar ordered them in bulk just for him, Mama joked.

I went to my room, undressed, and for a long time tossed in the sheets, watching the moon outside my window. It was a supermoon kids at school had talked about, a magical golden egg floating near the horizon, and I wondered how many Mughal princes and princesses had gazed at it through the ages, holding hands with their lovers.

This is how the story of the Pauper Princess and the Eucalyptus Jinn comes to an end, I thought. In utter, infuriating oblivion.

I was wrong, of course.

In September 2013, Gramps had a sudden onset of chest pain and became short of breath. 911 was called, but by the time the medics came his heart had stopped and his extremities were mottled. Still they shocked him and injected him with epi-and-atropine and sped him to the hospital where he was pronounced dead on arrival.

Gramps had really needed those water pills he’d refused until the end.

I was at Tufts teaching a course in comparative mythology when Baba called. It was a difficult year. I’d been refused tenure and a close friend had been fired over department politics. But when Baba asked me if I could come, I said of course. Gramps and I hadn’t talked in years after I graduated from Florida State and moved to Massachusetts, but it didn’t matter. There would be a funeral and a burial and a reception for the smattering of relatives who lived within drivable distance. I, the only grandchild, must be there.

Sara wanted to go with me. It would be a good gesture, she said.

“No,” I said. “It would be a terrible gesture. Baba might not say anything, but the last person he’d want at Gramps’s funeral is my white girlfriend. Trust me.”

Sara didn’t let go of my hand. Her fingers weren’t dainty like some women’s— you’re afraid to squeeze them lest they shatter like glass—but they were soft and curled easily around mine. “You’ll come back soon, won’t you?”

“Of course. Why’d you ask?” I looked at her.

“Because,” she said kindly, “you’re going home.” Her other hand plucked at a hair on my knuckle. She smiled, but there was a ghost of worry pinching the corner of her lips. “Because sometimes I can’t read you.”

We stood in the kitchenette facing each other. I touched Sara’s chin. In the last few months there had been moments when things had been a bit hesitant, but nothing that jeopardized what we had.

“I’ll be back,” I said.

We hugged and kissed and whispered things I don’t remember now. Eventually we parted and I flew to Florida, watching the morning landscape tilt through the plane windows. Below, the Charles gleamed like steel, then fell away until it was a silver twig in a hard land; and I thought, The lightning trees are dying.

Then we were past the waters and up and away, and the thought receded like the river.

We buried Gramps in Orlando Memorial Gardens under a row of pines. He was pale and stiff limbed, nostrils stuffed with cotton, the white shroud rippling in the breeze. I wished, like all fools rattled by late epiphanies, that I’d had more time with him. I said as much to Baba, who nodded.

“He would have liked that,” Baba said. He stared at the gravestone with the epitaph I have glimpsed the truth of the Great Unseen that Gramps had insisted be written below his name. A verse from Rumi. “He would have liked that very much.”

We stood in silence and I thought of Gramps and the stories he took with him that would stay untold forever. There’s a funny thing about teaching myth and history: you realize in the deep of your bones that you’d be lucky to become a mote of dust, a speck on the bookshelf of human existence. The more tales you preserve, the more claims to immortality you can make.

After the burial we went home and Mama made us chicken karahi and basmati rice. It had been ages since I’d had home-cooked Pakistani food and the spice and garlicky taste knocked me back a bit. I downed half a bowl of fiery gravy and fled to Gramps’s room where I’d been put up. Where smells of his cologne and musty clothes and his comings and goings still hung like a memory of old days.

In the following week Baba and I talked. More than we had in ages. He asked me about Sara with a glint in his eyes. I said we were still together. He grunted.

“Thousands of suitable Pakistani girls,” he began to murmur, and Mama shushed him.

In Urdu half-butchered from years of disuse I told them about Tufts and New England. Boston Commons, the Freedom Trail with its dozen cemeteries and royal burial grounds, the extremities of weather; how fall spun gold and rubies and amethyst from its foliage. Baba listened, occasionally wincing, as he worked on a broken power drill from his toolbox. It had been six years since I’d seen him and Mama, and the reality of their aging was like a gut punch. Mama’s hair was silver, but at least her skin retained a youthful glow. Baba’s fistful of beard was completely white, the hollows of his eyes deeper and darker. His fingers were swollen from rheumatoid arthritis he’d let fester for years because he couldn’t afford insurance.

“You really need to see a doctor,” I said.

“I have one. I go to the community health center in Leesburg, you know.”

“Not a free clinic. You need to see a specialist.”

“I’m fifty-nine. Six more years and then.” He pressed the power button on the drill and it roared to life. “Things will change,” he said cheerfully.

I didn’t know what to say. I had offered to pay his bills before. The handyman’s son wasn’t exactly rich, but he was grown up now and could help his family out.

Baba would have none of it. I didn’t like it, but what could I do? He had pushed me away for years. Get out of here while you can, he’d say. He marched me to college the same way he would march me to Sunday classes at Clermont Islamic Center. Go on, he said outside the mosque, as I clutched the siparas to my chest. Memorize the Quran. If you don’t, who will?

Was that why I hadn’t returned home until Gramps’s death? Even then I knew there was more. Home was a morass where I would sink. I had tried one or two family holidays midway through college. They depressed me, my parents’ stagnation, their world where nothing changed. The trailer park, its tired residents, the dead-leaf-strewn grounds that always seemed to get muddy and wet and never clean. A strange lethargy would settle on me here, a leaden feeling that left me cold and shaken. Visiting home became an ordeal filled with guilt at my indifference. I was new to the cutthroat world of academia then and bouncing from one adjunct position to another was taking up all my time anyway.

I stopped going back. It was easier to call, make promises, talk about how bright my prospects were in the big cities. And with Gramps even phone talk was useless. He couldn’t hear me, and he wouldn’t put on those damn hearing aids.

So now I was living thousands of miles away with a girl Baba had never met.

I suppose I must’ve been hurt at his refusal of my help. The next few days were a blur between helping Mama with cleaning out Gramps’s room and keeping up with the assignments my undergrads were emailing me even though I was on leave. A trickle of relatives and friends came, but to my relief Baba took over the hosting duties and let me sort through the piles of journals and tomes Gramps had amassed.

It was an impressive collection. Dozens of Sufi texts and religious treatises in different languages: Arabic, Urdu, Farsi, Punjabi, Turkish. Margins covered with Gramps’s neat handwriting. I didn’t remember seeing so many books in his room when I used to live here.

I asked Baba. He nodded.

“Gramps collected most of these after you left.” He smiled. “I suppose he missed you.”

I showed him the books. “Didn’t you say he was having memory trouble? I remember Mama being worried about him getting dementia last time I talked. How could he learn new languages?”

“I didn’t know he knew half these languages. Urdu and Punjabi he spoke and read fluently, but the others—”  He shrugged.

Curious, I went through a few line notes. Thoughtful speculation on ontological and existential questions posed by the mystic texts. These were not the ramblings of a senile mind. Was Gramps’s forgetfulness mere aging? Or had he written most of these before he began losing his marbles?

“Well, he did have a few mini strokes,” Mama said when I asked. “Sometimes he’d forget where he was. Talk about Lahore, and oddly, Mansehra. It’s a small city in Northern Pakistan,” she added when I raised an eyebrow. “Perhaps he had friends there when he was young.”

I looked at the books, ran my finger along their spines. It would be fun, nostalgic, to go through them at leisure, read Rumi’s couplets and Hafiz’s Diwan. I resolved to take the books with me. Just rent a car and drive up north with my trunk rattling with a cardboard box full of Gramps’s manuscripts.

Then one drizzling morning I found a yellowed, dog-eared notebook under an old rug in his closet. Gramps’s journal.

Before I left Florida I went to Baba. He was crouched below the kitchen sink, twisting a long wrench back and forth between the pipes, grunting. I waited until he was done, looked him in the eye, and said, “Did Gramps ever mention a woman named Zeenat Begum?”

Baba tossed the wrench into the toolbox. “Isn’t that the woman in the fairy tale he used to tell? The pauper Mughal princess?”

“Yes.”

“Sure he mentioned her. About a million times.”

“But not as someone you might have known in real life?”

“No.”

Across the kitchen I watched the door of Gramps’s room. It was firmly closed. Within hung the portrait of the brown-eyed woman in the orange dopatta with her knowing half smile. She had gazed down at my family for decades, offering us that mysterious silver cup. There was a lump in my throat but I couldn’t tell if it was anger or sorrow.

Baba was watching me, his swollen fingers tapping at the corner of his mouth. “Are you all right?”

I smiled, feeling the artifice of it stretch my skin like a mask. “Have you ever been to Turkey?”

“Turkey?” He laughed. “Sure. Right after I won the lottery and took that magical tour in the Caribbean.”

I ignored the jest. “Does the phrase ‘Courtesan of the Mughals’ mean anything to you?”

He seemed startled. A smile of such beauty lit up his face that he looked ten years younger. “Ya Allah, I haven’t heard that in forty years. Where’d you read it?”

I shrugged.

“It’s Lahore. My city. That’s what they called it in those books I read as a kid. Because it went through so many royal hands.” He laughed, eyes gleaming with delight and mischief, and lowered his voice. “My friend Habib used to call it La-whore. The Mughal hooker. Now for Allah’s sake, don’t go telling your mother on me.” His gaze turned inward. “Habib. God, I haven’t thought of him in ages.”

“Baba.” I gripped the edge of the kitchen table. “Why don’t you ever go back to Pakistan?”

His smile disappeared. He turned around, slammed the lid of his toolbox, and hefted it up. “Don’t have time.”

“You spent your teenage years there, didn’t you? You obviously have some attachment to the city. Why didn’t you take us back for a visit?”

“What would we go back to? We have no family there. My old friends are probably dead.” He carried the toolbox out into the October sun, sweat gleaming on his forearms. He placed it in the back of his battered truck and climbed into the driver’s seat. “I’ll see you later.”

I looked at him turn the keys in the ignition with fingers that shook. He was off to hammer sparkling new shelves in other people’s garages, replace squirrel-rent screens on their lanais, plant magnolias and palms in their golfing communities, and I could say nothing. I thought I understood why he didn’t want to visit the town where he grew up.

I thought about Mansehra and Turkey. If Baba really didn’t know and Gramps had perfected the deception by concealing the truth within a lie, there was nothing I could do that wouldn’t change, and possibly wreck, my family.

All good stories leave questions, Gramps had said to me.

You bastard, I thought.

“Sure,” I said and watched my baba pull out and drive away, leaving a plumage of dust in his wake.

I called Sara when I got home. “Can I see you?” I said as soon as she picked up.

She smiled. I could hear her smile. “That bad, huh?”

“No, it was all right. I just really want to see you.”

“It’s one in the afternoon. I’m on campus.” She paused. In the background birds chittered along with students. Probably the courtyard. “You sure you’re okay?”

“Yes. Maybe.” I upended the cardboard box on the carpet. The tower of books stood tall and uneven like a dwarf tree. “Come soon as you can, okay?”

“Sure. Love you.”

“Love you too.”

We hung up. I went to the bathroom and washed my face. I rubbed my eyes and stared at my reflection. It bared its teeth.

“Shut up,” I whispered. “He was senile. Must have been completely insane. I don’t believe a word of it.”

But when Sara came that evening, her red hair streaming like fall leaves, her freckled cheeks dimpling when she saw me, I told her I believed, I really did. She sat and listened and stroked the back of my hand when it trembled as I lay in her lap and told her about Gramps and his journal.

It was an assortment of sketches and scribbling. A talented hand had drawn pastures, mountaintops, a walled city shown as a semicircle with half a dozen doors and hundreds of people bustling within, a farmhouse, and rows of fig and orange trees. Some of these were miniatures: images drawn as scenes witnessed by an omniscient eye above the landscape. Others were more conventional. All had one feature in common: a man and woman present in the center of the scenery going about the mundanities of their lives.

In one scene the man sat in a mosque’s courtyard, performing ablution by the wudu tap. He wore a kurta and shalwar and Peshawari sandals. He was in his early twenties, lean, thickly bearded, with deep-set eyes that watched you impassively. In his hands he held a squalling baby whose tiny wrinkled fist was clenched around a stream of water from the tap. In the background a female face, familiar but older than I remembered, loomed over the courtyard wall, smiling at the pair.

The man was unmistakably Gramps, and the woman . . .

“Are you kidding me?” Sara leaned over and stared at the picture. “That’s the woman in the portrait hanging in his room?”

“He lied to me. To us all. She was my grandma.”

“Who is she?”

“Princess Zeenat Begum,” I said quietly.

Gramps had narrated the story of his life in a series of sketches and notes. The writing was in third person, but it was clear that the protagonist was he.

I imagined him going about the daily rituals of his life in Lahore after Princess Zeenat left. Dropping out of school, going to his father’s shop in the Niche of Calligraphers near Bhati Gate, learning the art of khattati, painting billboards in red and yellow, fusing the ancient art with new slogans and advertisements. Now he’s a lanky brown teenager wetting the tip of his brush, pausing to look up into the sky with its sweeping blue secrets. Now he’s a tall man, yanking bird feathers and cobwebs away from a eucalyptus stump, digging under it in the deep of the night with a flashlight in his hand.

And now—he’s wiping his tears, filling his knapsack with necessaries, burying his newly discovered treasure under a scatter of clothes, hitching the bag up his shoulders, and heading out into the vast unseen. All this time, there’s only one image in his head and one desire.

“He was smitten with her. Probably had been for a long time without knowing it,” I said. “Ruthlessly marked. His youth never had a chance against the siren call of history.”

“Hold on a sec. What was under the tree again?” Sara said.

I shook my head. “He doesn’t say.”

“So he lied again? About not digging it up?”

“Yes.”

“Who was he looking for?”

I looked at her. “My grandmother and her sisters.”

We read his notes and envisioned Gramps’s journey. Abandoning his own family, wandering his way into the mountains, asking everyone he met about a fig-and-orange farm on a quiet fir-covered peak in the heart of Mansehra. He was magnetized to the displaced Mughal family not because of their royalty, but the lack thereof.

And eventually he found them.

“He stayed with them for years, helping the pauper princess’s uncle with farm work. In the summer he calligraphed Quranic verses on the minarets of local mosques. In wintertime he drew portraits for tourists and painted road signs. As years passed, he married Zeenat Begum—whose portrait one summer evening he drew and painted, carried with him, and lied about—and became one of them.”

I looked up at Sara, into her gentle green eyes glittering above me. She bent and kissed my nose.

“They were happy for a while, he and his new family,” I said, “but then, like in so many lives, tragedy came knocking at their door.”

Eyes closed, I pictured the fire: a glowering creature clawing at their windows and door, crisping their apples, billowing flames across the barn to set their hay bales ablaze. The whinnying of the horses, the frantic braying of cattle and, buried in the din, human screams.

“All three Mughal women died that night,” I murmured. “Gramps and his two-year-old son were the only survivors of the brushfire. Broken and bereft, Gramps left Mansehra with the infant and went to Karachi. There he boarded a freighter that took them to Iran, then Turkey, where a sympathetic shopkeeper hired him in his rug shop. Gramps and his son stayed there for four years.”

What a strange life, I thought. I hadn’t known my father had spent part of his childhood in Turkey and apparently neither had he. He remembered nothing. How old was he when they moved back? As I thought this, my heart constricted in my chest, filling my brain with the hum of my blood.

Sara’s face was unreadable when I opened my eyes. “Quite a story, eh?” I said uneasily.

She scratched the groove above her lips with a pink fingernail. “So he digs up whatever was under the tree and it decides him. He leaves everything and goes off to marry a stranger. This is romantic bullshit. You know that, right?”

“I don’t know anything.”

“Left everything,” she repeated. Her mouth was parted with wonder. “You think whatever he found under the stump survived the fire?”

“Presumably. But where he took it—who can say? Eventually, though, they returned home. To Lahore, when Gramps had recovered enough sanity, I guess. Where his father, now old, had closed shop. Gramps helped him reopen. Together they ran that design stall for years.”

It must have been a strange time for Gramps, I thought. He loved his parents, but he hated Bhati. Even as he dipped his pen in ink and drew spirals and curlicues, his thoughts drew phantom pictures of those he had lost. Over the years, he came to loathe this art that unlocked so many memories inside him. And after his parents died he had neither heart nor imperative to keep going.

“He was done with the place, the shop, and Lahore. So when a friend offered to help him and his teenage son move to the States, Gramps agreed.”

I turned my head and burrowed into Sara’s lap. Her smell filled my brain: apple blossom, lipstick, and Sara.

She nuzzled my neck. The tip of her nose was cold. “He never talked to you about it? Never said what happened?”

“No.”

“And you and your family had no idea about this artistic side of him? How’s that possible?”

“Don’t know,” I said. “He worked at a 7-Eleven in Houston when he and Baba first came here. Never did any painting or calligraphy, commissioned or otherwise. Maybe he just left all his talent, all his dreams in his hometown. Here, look at this.”

I showed her the phrase that spiraled across the edges of a couple dozen pages: My killer, my deceiver, the Courtesan of the Mughals. “It’s Lahore. He’s talking about the city betraying him.”

“How’s that?”

I shrugged.

“How weird,” Sara said. “Interesting how broken up his story is. As if he’s trying to piece together his own life.”

“Maybe that’s what he was doing. Maybe he forced himself to forget the most painful parts.”

“Lightning trees. Odd thing to say.” She looked at me thoughtfully and put the journal away. “So, you’re the last of the Mughals, huh?” She smiled to show she wasn’t laughing.

I chortled for her. “Seems like it. The Pauper Prince of New England.”

“Wow. You come with a certificate of authenticity?” She nudged her foot at the book tower. “Is it in there somewhere?”

It was getting late. Sara tugged at my shirt, and I got up and carried her to bed, where we celebrated my return with zest. Her face was beautiful in the snow shadows that crept in through the window.

“I love you, I love you,” we murmured, enchanted with each other, drunk with belief in some form of eternity. The dark lay quietly beside us, and, smoldering in its heart, a rotating image.

A dim idea of what was to come.

I went through Gramps’s notes. Many were in old Urdu, raikhta, which I wasn’t proficient in. But I got the gist: discourses and rumination on the otherworldly.

Gramps was especially obsessed with Ibn Arabi’s treatise on jinns in The Meccan Revelations. The Lofty Master Arabi says, wrote Gramps, that the meaning of the lexical root J-N-N in Arabic is ‘concealed.’ Jinn isn’t just another created being ontologically placed between man and angel; it is the entirety of the hidden world.

“Isn’t that fucking crazy?” I said to Sara. We were watching a rerun of Finding Neverland, my knuckles caked with butter and flakes of popcorn. On the screen J. M Barrie’s wife was beginning to be upset by the attention he lavished upon the children’s mother, Sylvia. “It kills the traditional narrative of jinns in A Thousand and One Nights. If one were to pursue this train of thought, it would mean relearning the symbolism in this text and virtually all others.”

Sara nodded, her gaze fixed on the TV. “Uh huh.”

“Consider this passage: ‘A thousand years before Darwin, Sufis described the evolution of man as rising from the inorganic state through plant and animal to human. But the mineral consciousness of man, that dim memory of being buried in the great stone mother, lives on.’”

Sara popped a handful of popcorn into her mouth. Munched.

I rubbed my hands together. “‘Jinns are carriers of that concealed memory, much like a firefly carries a memory of the primordial fire.’ It’s the oddest interpretation of jinns I’ve seen.”

“Yeah, it’s great.” Sara shifted on the couch. “But can we please watch the movie?”

“Uh-huh.”

I stared at the TV. Gramps thought jinns weren’t devil-horned creatures bound to a lamp or, for that matter, a tree.

They were flickers of cosmic consciousness.

I couldn’t get that image out of my head. Why was Gramps obsessed with this? How was this related to his life in Lahore? Something to do with the eucalyptus secret?

The next morning I went to Widener Library and dug up all I could about Arabi’s and Ibn Taymeeyah’s treatment of jinns. I read and pondered, went back to Gramps’s notebooks, underlined passages in The Meccan Revelations, and walked the campus with my hands in my pockets and my heart in a world long dissipated.

“Arabi’s cosmovision is staggering,” I told Sara. We were sitting in a coffee shop downtown during lunch break. It was drizzling, just a gentle stutter of gray upon gray outside the window, but it made the brick buildings blush.

Sara sipped her mocha and glanced at her watch. She had to leave soon for her class.

“Consider life as a spark of consciousness. In Islamic cosmology the jinn’s intrinsic nature is that of wind and fire. Adam’s—read, man’s—nature is water and clay, which are more resistant than fire to cold and dryness. As the universe changes, so do the requirements for life’s vehicle. Now it needs creatures more resistant and better adapted. Therefore, from the needs of sentient matter rose the invention that is us.”

I clenched my hand into a fist. “This interpretation is pretty fucking genius. I mean, is it possible Gramps was doing real academic work? For example, had he discovered something in those textbooks that could potentially produce a whole new ideology of creation? Why, it could be the scholarly discovery of the century.”

“Yes, it’s great.” She rapped her spoon against the edge of the table. Glanced at me, looked away.

“What?”

“Nothing. Listen, I gotta run, okay?” She gave me a quick peck on the cheek and slid out of her seat. At the door she hesitated, turned, and stood tapping her shoes, a waiting look in her eyes.

I dabbed pastry crumbs off my lips with a napkin. “Are you okay?”

Annoyance flashed in her face and vanished. “Never better.” She pulled her jacket’s hood over her head, yanked the door open, and strode out into the rain.

It wasn’t until later that evening, when I was finalizing the spring calendar for my freshman class, that I realized I had forgotten our first-date anniversary.

Sara hadn’t. There was a heart-shaped box with a pink bow sitting on the bed when I returned home. Inside was a note laying atop a box of Godiva Chocolates:

Happy Anniversary. May our next one be like your grandfather’s fairy tales.

My eyes burned with lack of sleep. It was one in the morning and I’d had a long day at the university. Also, the hour-long apology to Sara had drained me. She had shaken her head and tried to laugh it off, but I took my time, deeming it a wise investment for the future.

I went to the kitchen and poured myself a glass of ice water. Kicked off my slippers, returned to the desk, and continued reading.

I hadn’t lied to Sara. The implications of this new jinn mythology were tremendous. A new origin myth, a bastardized version of the Abrahamic creationist lore.  Trouble was these conclusions were tenuous. Gramps had speculated more than logically derived them. Arabi himself had touched on these themes in an abstract manner. To produce a viable theory of this alternate history of the universe, I needed more details, more sources.

Suppose there were other papers, hidden manuscripts. Was it possible that the treasure Gramps had found under the eucalyptus stump was truly ‘the map to the memory of heaven’? Ancient papers of cosmological importance never discovered?

“Shit, Gramps. Where’d you hide them?” I murmured.

His journal said he’d spent quite a bit of time in different places: Mansehra, Iran. Turkey, where he spent four years in a rug shop. The papers could really be anywhere.

My eyes were drawn to the phrase again: the Courtesan of the Mughals. I admired how beautiful the form and composition of the calligraphy was. Gramps had shaped the Urdu alphabet carefully into a flat design so that the conjoined words Mughal and Courtesanturned into an ornate rug. A calligram. The curves of the meem and ghain letters became the tassels and borders of the rug, the laam’s seductive curvature its rippling belly.

Such artistry. One shape discloses another. A secret, symbolic relationship.

There, I thought. The secret hides in the city. The clues to the riddle of the eucalyptus treasure are in Lahore.

I spent the next few days sorting out my finances. Once I was satisfied that the trip was feasible, I began to make arrangements.

Sara stared at me when I told her. “Lahore? You’re going to Lahore?”

“Yes.”

“To look for something your grandpa may or may not have left there fifty-some years ago?”

“Yes.”

“You’re crazy. I mean it’s one thing to talk about a journal.”

“I know. I still need to go.”

“So you’re telling me, not asking. Why? Why are you so fixed on this? You know that country isn’t safe these days. What if something happens?” She crossed her arms, lifted her feet off the floor, and tucked them under her on the couch. She was shivering a little.

“Nothing’s gonna happen. Look, whatever he left in Lahore, he wanted me to see it. Why else write about it and leave it in his journal which he knew would be found one day? Don’t you see? He was really writing to me.”

“Well, that sounds self-important. Why not your dad? Also, why drop hints then? Why not just tell you straight up what it is?”

“I don’t know.” I shrugged. “Maybe he didn’t want other people to find out.”

“Or maybe he was senile. Look, I’m sorry, but this is crazy. You can’t just fly off to the end of the world on a whim to look for a relic.” She rubbed her legs. “It could take you weeks. Months. How much vacation time do you have left?”

“I’ll take unpaid leave if I have to. Don’t you see? I need to do this.”

She opened her mouth, closed it. “Is this something you plan to keep doing?” she said quietly. “Run off each time anything bothers you.”

“What?” I quirked my eyebrows. “Nothing’s bothering me.”

“No?” She jumped up from the couch and glared at me. “You’ve met my mother and Fanny, but I’ve never met your parents. You didn’t take me to your grandfather’s funeral. And since your return you don’t seem interested in what we have, or once had. Are you trying to avoid talking about us? Are we still in love, Sal, or are we just getting by? Are we really together?”

“Of course we’re together. Don’t be ridiculous,” I mumbled, but there was a constriction in my stomach. It wouldn’t let me meet her eyes.

“Don’t patronize me. You’re obsessed with your own little world. Look, I have no problem with you giving time to your folks. Or your gramps’s work. But we’ve been together for three years and you still find excuses to steer me away from your family. This cultural thing that you claim to resent, you seem almost proud of it. Do you see what I mean?”

“No.” I was beginning to get a bit angry. “And I’m not sure you do either.”

“You’re lying. You know what I’m talking about.”

“Do I? Okay, lemme try to explain what my problem is. Look at me, Sara. What do you see?”

She stared at me, shook her head. “I see a man who doesn’t know he’s lost.”

“Wrong. You see a twenty-eight-year-old brown man living in a shitty apartment, doing a shitty job that doesn’t pay much and has no hope of tenure. You see a man who can’t fend for himself, let alone a wife and kids—”

“No one’s asking you to—”

“—if he doesn’t do something better with his life. But you go on believing all will be well if we trade families? Open your damn eyes.” I leaned against the TV cabinet, suddenly tired. “All my life I was prudent. I planned and planned and gave up one thing for another. Moved here. Never looked back. Did whatever I could to be what I thought I needed to be. The archetypal fucking immigrant in the land of opportunities. But after Gramps died . . .” I closed my eyes, breathed, opened them. “I realize some things are worth more than that. Some things are worth going after.”

“Some things, huh?” Sara half smiled, a trembling flicker that took me aback more than her words did. “Didn’t your grandfather give up everything—his life, his family, his country—for love? And you’re giving up . . . love for  . . . what exactly? Shame? Guilt? Identity? A fucking manventure in a foreign land?”

“You’re wrong,” I said. “I’m not—”

But she wasn’t listening. Her chest hitched. Sara turned, walked into the bedroom, and gently closed the door, leaving me standing alone.

I stomped down Highland Avenue. It was mid-October and the oaks and silver maples were burning with fall. They blazed yellow and crimson. They made me feel sadder and angrier and more confused.

Had our life together always been this fragile? I wondered if I had missed clues that Sara felt this way. She always was more aware of bumps in our relationship. I recalled watching her seated at the desk marking student papers once, her beautiful, freckled face scrunched in a frown, and thinking she would never really be welcome in my parents’ house. Mama would smile nervously if I brought her home and retreat into the kitchen. Baba wouldn’t say a word and somehow that would be worse than an outraged rejection. And what would Gramps have done? I didn’t know. My head was messed up. It had been since his death.

It was dusk when I returned home, the lights in our neighborhood floating dreamily like gold sequins in black velvet.

Sara wasn’t there.

The bed was made, the empty hangers in the closet pushed neatly together. On the coffee table in the living room under a Valentine mug was yet another note. She had become adept at writing me love letters.

I made myself a sandwich, sat in the dark, and picked at the bread. When I had mustered enough courage, I retrieved the note and began to read:

Salman,

I wrote tried to write this several times and each time my hand shook and made me write things I didn’t want to. It sucks that we’re such damn weaklings, the both of us. I’m stuck in love with you and you are with me. At least I hope so. At least that’s the way I feel read you. But then I think about my mother and my heart begins racing.

You’ve met my family. Mom likes you. Fanny too. They think you’re good for me. But you’ve never met my dad. You don’t know why we never don’t talk about him anymore.

He left Mom when Fanny and I were young. I don’t remember him, although sometimes I think I can. When I close my eyes, I see this big, bulky shadow overwhelm the doorway of my room. There’s this bittersweet smell, gin and sweat and tobacco. I remember not feeling afraid of him, for which I’m grateful.

But Dad left us Mom and he broke her. In especially bitter moments she would say it was another woman, but I don’t think so. At least I never saw any proof of that in my mother’s eyes when she talked about him. (In the beginning she talked a LOT about him.) I think he left her because he wanted more from life and Mom didn’t understand pick that up. I think she didn’t read his unhappiness in time. That’s the vibe I get.

Does that excuse what he did? I don’t think so. My mother’s spent all her life trying to put us back together and she’s done okay, but there are pieces of herself she wasn’t able to find. In either me, or Fanny, or in anyone else.

I don’t want that to happen to me.I don’t want to end up like my mother. That’s pretty much it. If you didn’t love me, I’d understand. I’d be hurt, but I could live with it. But living with this uncertainty, never knowing when you might get that wanderlust I’ve seen in your eyes lately, is impossible for me. There’s so much I want to say to you. Things you need to know if we’re to have a future together. But the last thing I want to do is force you.

So I’m leaving. I’m going to stay at Fanny’s. Think things through. It will be good for both of us. It will help me get my head straight and will let you do whatever you want to get your fucking demons out. So fly free. Go to Pakistan. Follow your goddamn heart or whatever. Just remember I won’t wait all my life.

You know where to find me.

Love,

Sara

I put down the letter and stared out the window. Night rain drummed on the glass. I tapped my finger to its tune, fascinated by how difficult it was to keep time with it. A weight had settled on my chest and I couldn’t push it off.

If an asshole weeps in the forest and no one is around to witness, is he still an asshole?

Nobody was there to answer.

For most of the fifteen-hour flight from New York to Lahore I was out. I hadn’t realized how tired I was until I slumped into the economy seat and woke up half-dazed when the flight attendant gently shook my shoulder.

“Lahore, sir.”  She smiled when I continued to stare at her. The lipstick smudge on her teeth glistened. “Allama Iqbal International Airport.”

“Yes,” I said, struggling up and out. The plane was empty, the seats gaping. “How’s the weather?”

“Cold. Bit misty. Fog bank’s coming, they said. Early this year.”

That didn’t sound promising. I thanked her and hurried out, my carry-on clattering against the aisle armrests.

I exited the airport into the arms of a mid-November day and the air was fresh but full of teeth. The pale sea-glass sky seemed to wrap around the airport. I hailed a cab and asked for Bhati Gate. As we sped out of the terminal, whiteness seethed on the runway and blanketed the horizon. The flight attendant was right. Fog was on the way.

At a busy traffic signal the cabbie took a right. Past army barracks, the redbrick Aitchison College, and colonial-era Jinnah Gardens we went, until the roads narrowed and we hiccuped through a sea of motorbikes, rickshaws, cars, and pedestrians. TERRORISTS ARE ENEMIES OF PEACE, said a large black placard on a wall that jutted out left of a fifty-foot high stone gate. The looming structure had a massive central arch with eight small arches above it. It had a painting of the Kaaba on the right and Prophet Muhammad’s shrine on the left with vermilion roses embossed in the middle. Another sign hung near it: WELCOME TO OLD LAHORE BY THE GRACE OF ALLAH.

We were at Bhati Gate.

The cab rolled to a stop in front of Kashi Manzil. A tall, narrow historical-home-turned-hotel with a facade made of ochre and azure faience tiles. A wide terrace ran around the second floor and a small black copper pot hung from a nail on the edge of the doorway awning.

I recognized the superstition. Black to ward off black. Protection against the evil eye.

Welcome to Gramps’s world, I thought.

I looked down the street. Roadside bakeries, paan-and-cigarette shops, pirated DVD stalls, a girls’ school with peeling walls, and dust, dust everywhere; but my gaze of course went to Bhati and its double row of arches.

This was the place my grandfather had once gazed at, lived by, walked through. Somewhere around here used to be a tea stall run by a Mughal princess. Someplace close had been a eucalyptus from which a kid had fallen and gashed his head. A secret that had traveled the globe had come here with Gramps and awaited me in some dingy old alcove.

That stupid wanderlust in your eyes.

Sara’s voice in my brain was a gentle rebuke.

Later, I thought fiercely. Later.

The next day I began my search.

I had planned to start with the tea stalls. Places like this have long memories. Old Lahore was more or less the city’s ancient downtown and people here wouldn’t forget much. Least of all a Mughal princess who ran a tea shop. Gramps’s journal didn’t much touch on his life in the walled city. I certainly couldn’t discern any clues about the location of the eucalyptus treasure.

Where did you hide it, old man? Your shack? A friend’s place? Under that fucking tree stump?

If Gramps was correct and the tree had fallen half a century ago, that landmark was probably irretrievable. Gramps’s house seemed the next logical place. Trouble was I didn’t know where Gramps had lived. Before I left, I’d called Baba and asked him. He wasn’t helpful.

“It’s been a long time, son. Fifty years. Don’t tax an old man’s memory. You’ll make me senile.”

When I pressed, he reluctantly gave me the street where they used to live and his childhood friend Habib’s last name.

“I don’t remember our address, but I remember the street. Ask anyone in Hakiman Bazaar for Khajoor Gali. They’ll know it.”

Encircled by a wall raised by Akbar the Great, Old Lahore was bustling and dense. Two hundred thousand people lived in an area less than one square mile. Breezes drunk with the odor of cardamom, grease, and tobacco. The place boggled my mind as I strolled around taking in the niche pharmacies, foundries, rug shops, kite shops, and baked mud eateries.

I talked to everyone I encountered. The tea stall owner who poured Peshawari kahva in my clay cup. The fruit seller who handed me sliced oranges and guavas and frowned when I mentioned the pauper princess. Rug merchants, cigarette vendors, knife sellers. No one had heard of Zeenat Begum. Nobody knew of a young man named Sharif or his father who ran a calligraphy-and-design stall.

“Not around my shop, sahib.” They shook their heads and turned away.

I located Khajoor Gali—a winding narrow alley once dotted by palm trees (or so the locals claimed) now home to dusty ramshackle buildings hunched behind open manholes—and went door to door, asking. No luck. An aged man with henna-dyed hair and a shishamwood cane stared at me when I mentioned Baba’s friend Habib Ataywala, and said, “Habib. Ah, he and his family moved to Karachi several years ago. No one knows where.”

“How about a eucalyptus tree?” I asked. “An ancient eucalyptus that used to stand next to Bhati Gate?”

Nope.

Listlessly I wandered, gazing at the mist lifting off the edges of the streets and billowing toward me. On the third day it was like slicing through a hundred rippling white shrouds. As night fell and fairy lights blinked on the minarets of Lahore’s patron saint Data Sahib’s shrine across the road from Bhati, I felt displaced. Depersonalized. I was a mote drifting in a slat of light surrounded by endless dark. Gramps was correct. Old Lahore had betrayed him. It was as if the city had deliberately rescinded all memory or trace of his family and the princess’s. Sara was right. Coming here was a mistake. My life since Gramps’s death was a mistake. Seeing this world as it was rather than through the fabular lens of Gramps’s stories was fucking enlightening.

In this fog, the city’s fresh anemia, I thought of things I hadn’t thought about in years. The time Gramps taught me to perform the salat. The first time he brought my palms together to form the supplicant’s cup. Be the beggar at Allah’s door, he told me gently. He loves humility. It’s in the mendicant’s bowl that the secrets of Self are revealed. In the tashahuud position Gramps’s index finger would shoot from a clenched fist and flutter up and down.

“This is how we beat the devil on the head,” he said.

But what devil was I trying to beat? I’d been following a ghost and hoping for recognition from the living.

By the fifth day I’d made up my mind. I sat shivering on a wooden bench and watched my breath flute its way across Khajoor Gali as my finger tapped my cell phone and thousands of miles away Sara’s phone rang.

She picked up almost immediately. Her voice was wary. “Sal?”

“Hey.”

“Are you all right?”

“Yes.”

A pause. “You didn’t call before you left.”

“I thought you didn’t want me to.”

“I was worried sick. One call after you landed would’ve been nice.”

I was surprised but pleased. After so much disappointment, her concern was welcome. “Sorry.”

“Jesus. I was . . .” She trailed off, her breath harsh and rapid in my ear. “Find the magic treasure yet?”

“No.”

“Pity.” She seemed distracted now. In the background water was running. “How long will you stay there?”

“I honest to God don’t know, but I’ll tell you this. I’m fucking exhausted.”

“I’m sorry.” She didn’t sound sorry. I smiled a little.

“Must be around five in the morning there. Why’re you up?” I said.

“I was . . . worried, I guess. Couldn’t sleep. Bad dreams.” She sighed. I imagined her rubbing her neck, her long fingers curling around the muscles, kneading them, and I wanted to touch her.

“I miss you,” I said.

Pause. “Yeah. Me too. It’s a mystery how much I’m used to you being around. And now that . . .” She stopped and exhaled. “Never mind.”

“What?”

“Nothing.” She grunted. “This damn weather. I think I’m coming down with something. Been headachy all day.”

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah. It’ll go away. Listen, I’m gonna go take a shower. You have fun.”

Was that reproach? “Yeah, you too. Be safe.”

“Sure.” She sounded as if she were pondering. “Hey, I discovered something. Been meaning to tell you, but . . . you know.”

“I’m all ears.”

“Remember what your gramps said in the story. Lightning trees?”

“Yes.”

“Well, lemme text it to you. I mentioned the term to a friend at school and turned out he recognized it too. From a lecture we both attended at MIT years ago about fractal similarities and diffusion-limited aggregation.”

“Fractal what?” My phone beeped. I removed it from my ear and looked at the screen. A high-definition picture of a man with what looked like a tree-shaped henna tattoo on his left shoulder branching all the way down his arm. Pretty.

I put her on speakerphone. “Why’re you sending me pictures of henna tattoos?”

She was quiet, then started laughing. “That didn’t even occur to me, but, yeah, it does look like henna art.”

“It isn’t?”

“Nope. What you’re seeing is a Lichtenberg figure created when branching electrical charges run through insulating material. Glass, resin, human skin—you name it. This man was hit by lightning and survived with this stamped on his flesh.”

“What?”

“Yup. It can be created in any modern lab using nonconducting plates. Called electric treeing. Or lightning trees.”

The lightning trees are dying.

“Holy shit,” I said softly.

“Yup.”

I tapped the touch screen to zoom in for a closer look. “How could Gramps know about this? If he made up the stories, how the fuck would he know something like this?”

“No idea. Maybe he knew someone who had this happen to them.”

“But what does it mean?”

“The heck should I know. Anyways, I gotta go. Figured it might help you with whatever you’re looking for.”

“Thanks.”

She hung up. I stared at the pattern on the man’s arm. It was reddish, fernlike, and quite detailed. The illusion was so perfect I could even see buds and leaves. A breathtaking electric foliage. A map of lightning.

A memory of heaven.

I went to sleep early that night.

At five in the morning the Fajar call to prayer woke me up. I lay in bed watching fog drift through the skylight window, listening to the mullah’s sonorous azaan, and suddenly I jolted upright.

The mosque of Ghulam Rasool, the Master of Cats.

Wasn’t that what Gramps had told me a million years ago? That there was a mosque near Bhati Gate that faced his house?

I hadn’t seen any mosques around.

I slipped on clothes and ran outside.

The morning smelled like burnished metal. The light was soft, the shape of early risers gentle in the mist-draped streets. A rooster crowed in the next alley. It had drizzled the night before and the ground was muddy. I half slipped, half leapt my way toward the mullah’s voice rising and falling like an ocean heard in one’s dream.

Wisps of white drifted around me like twilit angels. The azaan had stopped. I stared at the narrow doorway next to a rug merchant’s shop ten feet away. Its entrance nearly hidden by an apple tree growing in the middle of the sidewalk, the place was tucked well away from traffic. Green light spilled from it. Tiny replicas of the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina and Rumi’s shrine in Turkey were painted above the door.

Who would put Rumi here when Data Sahib’s shrine was just across the road?

I took off my shoes and entered the mosque.

A tiny room with a low ceiling set with zero-watt green bulbs. On reed mats the congregation stood shoulder to shoulder in two rows behind a smallish man in shalwar kameez and a turban. The Imam sahib clicked the mute button on the standing microphone in front, touched his earlobes, and Fajar began.

Feeling oddly guilty, I sat down in a corner. Looked around the room. Ninety-nine names of Allah and Muhammad, prayers and Quranic verses belching from the corners, twisting and pirouetting across the walls. Calligrams in the shape of a mynah bird, a charging lion, a man prostrate in sajdah, his hands out before him shaping a beggar’s bowl filled with alphabet vapors. Gorgeous work.

Salat was over. The namazis began to leave. Imam sahib turned. In his hands he held a tally counter for tasbih. Click click! Murmuring prayers, he rose and hobbled toward me.

“Assalam-o-alaikum. May I help you, son?” he said in Urdu.

“Wa Laikum Assalam. Yes,” I said. “Is this Masjid Ghulam Rasool?”

He shook his head. He was in his seventies at least, long noorani beard, white hair sticking out of his ears. His paunch bulged through the striped-flannel kameez flowing past his ankles. “No. That mosque was closed and martyred in the nineties. Sectarian attacks. Left a dozen men dead. Shia mosque, you know. Used to stand in Khajoor Gali, I believe.”

“Oh.” I told myself I’d been expecting this, but my voice was heavy with disappointment. “I’m sorry to bother you then. I’ll leave you to finish up.”

“You’re not local, son. Your salam has an accent,” he said. “Amreekan, I think. You look troubled. How can I help you?” He looked at me, took his turban off. He had a pale scar near his left temple shaped like a climbing vine.

I watched him. His hair was silver. His sharp eyes were blue, submerged in a sea of wrinkles. “I was looking for a house. My late grandfather’s. He lived close to the mosque, next door to a lady named Zeenat Begum. She used to run a tea stall.”

“Zeenat Begum.” His eyes narrowed, the blues receding into shadow. “And your grandfather’s name?” he asked, watching the last of the worshippers rise to his feet.

“Sharif. Muhammad Sharif.”

The oddest feeling, a sort of déjà vu, came over me. Something had changed in the air of the room. Even the last namazi felt it and glanced over his shoulder on his way out.

“Who did you say you were again?” Imam sahib said quietly.

“Salman Ali Zaidi.”

“I see. Yes, I do believe I can help you out. This way.”

He turned around, limping, and beckoned me to follow. We exited the mosque. He padlocked it, parted the bead curtain in the doorway of the rug shop next door, stepped in.

When I hesitated, he paused, the tasbih counter clicking in his hands. “Come in, son. My place is your place.”

I studied the rug shop. It was located between the mosque and a souvenir stall. The awning above the arched doorway was gray, the brick voussoirs and keystone of the arch faded and peeling. The plaque by the entrance said Karavan Kilim.

Kilim is a kind of Turkish carpet. What was a kilim shop doing in Old Lahore?

He led me through a narrow well-lit corridor into a hardwood-floored showroom. Mounds of neatly folded rugs sat next to walls covered in rectangles of rich tapestries, carpets, and pottery-filled shelves. Stunning illustrations and calligraphy swirled across the high wooden ceiling. Here an entranced dervish whirled in blue, one palm toward the sky and one to the ground. There a crowd haloed with golden light held out dozens of drinking goblets, an Urdu inscription spiraling into a vast cloud above their heads: They hear his hidden hand pour truth in the heavens.

A bald middle-aged man dressed in a checkered brown half-sleeve shirt sat behind a desk. Imam Sahib nodded at him. “My nephew Khalid.”

Khalid and I exchanged pleasantries. Imam sahib placed the tasbih counter and his turban on the desk. I gazed around me. “Imam sahib,” I said. “This is a Turkish carpet shop. You run an imported rug business in your spare time?”

“Turkish design, yes, but not imported. My apprentices make them right here in the walled city.” Without looking back, he began walking. “You can call me Bashir.”

We went to the back of the shop, weaving our way through rug piles into a storeroom lit by sunlight from a narrow window. Filled to the ceiling with mountains of fabric rolls and broken looms, the room smelled of damp, rotten wood, and tobacco. In a corner was a large box covered with a bedsheet. Bashir yanked the sheet away and a puff of dust bloomed and clouded the air.

“Sharif,” said the merchant Imam. “He’s dead, huh?”

“You knew him?”

“Of course. He was friends with the Mughal princess. The lady who used to give us tea.”

“How do you know that?” I stared at him. “Who are you?”

His eyes hung like sapphires in the dimness, gaze fixed on me, one hand resting atop the embossed six-foot-long metal trunk that had emerged. He tilted his head so the feeble light fell on his left temple. The twisted pale scar gleamed.

“The boy who fell from the eucalyptus tree,” I whispered. “He gashed his head and the princess bandaged it for him. You’re him.”

The old man smiled. “Who I am is not important, son. What’s important is this room where your grandfather worked for years.”

Speechless, I gaped at him. After days of frustration and disappointment, I was standing in the room Gramps had occupied decades ago, this dingy store with its decaying inhabitants. I looked around as if at any moment Gramps might step out from the shadows.

“He was the best teacher I ever had,” Bashir said. “We used to call him the Calligrapher Prince.”

He flashed a smile. It brightened Bashir the merchant’s tired, old face like a flame.

I watched this man with his wispy moonlight hair and that coiled scar who had kept my grandfather’s secret for half a century. We sat around a low circular table, dipping cake rusk into mugs of milk chai sweetened with brown sugar. It was eight in the morning.

Bashir gripped his cup with both hands and frowned into it.

“My father was an electrician,” he said. “By the time he was fifty he’d saved enough to buy a carpet shop. With lots of construction going on, he was able to get this shop dirt cheap.

“Rugs were an easy trade back in the seventies. You hired weavers, most of ’em immigrants from up north, and managed the product. We didn’t have good relations with neighboring countries, so high demand existed for local rugs and tapestries without us worrying about competition. After the dictator Zia came, all that changed. Our shop didn’t do well, what with rugs being imported cheap from the Middle East and Afghanistan. We began to get desperate.

“Right about then a stranger came to us.”

It began, Bashir said, the evening someone knocked on their door with a rosy-cheeked child by his side and told Bashir’s father he was looking for work. Bashir, then in his late teens, stood behind his baba, watching the visitor. Wary, the rug merchant asked where they hailed from. The man lifted his head and his face shone with the strangest light Bashir had seen on a human countenance.

“It swept across his cheeks, it flared in his eyes, it illuminated the cuts and angles of his bones,” said Bashir, mesmerized by memory. “It was as if he had been touched by an angel or a demon. I’ll never forget it.”

“From thousands of miles away,” said the man quietly. “From many years away.”

It was Gramps, of course.

Bashir’s father didn’t recognize him, but he knew the man’s family. Their only son, Muhammad Sharif, had been abroad for years, he’d heard. Lived in Iran, Turkey, Allah knew where else. Sharif’s aged father still lived on Khajoor Gali in Old Lahore, but he’d shut down his design stall in the Niche of Calligraphers years ago.

“Sharif had been back for a few months and he and his son were living with his father. Now they needed money to reopen their shop.” Bashir smiled. “Turned out your grandfather was an expert rug weaver. He said he learned it in Turkey near Maulana Rumi’s shrine. My father offered him a job and he accepted. He worked with us for three years while he taught kilim weaving to our apprentices.

“He was young, hardly a few years older than I, but when he showed me his notebook, I knew he was no ordinary artist. He had drawn mystical poetry in animal shapes. Taken the quill and created dazzling worlds. Later, when my father put him before the loom, Sharif produced wonders such as we’d never seen.”

Merchant Bashir got up and plodded to a pile of rugs. He grabbed a kilim and unrolled it across the floor. A mosaic of black, yellow, and maroon geometries glimmered.

“He taught me rug weaving. It’s a nomadic art, he said. Pattern making carries the past into the future.” Bashir pointed to a recurrent cross motif that ran down the kilim’s center. “The four corners of the cross are the four corners of the universe. The scorpion here”—he toed a many-legged symmetric creature woven in yellow—“represents freedom. Sharif taught me this and more. He was a natural at symbols. I asked him why he went to Turkey. He looked at me and said, ‘To learn to weave the best kilim in the world.’”

I cocked my head, rapt. I had believed it was grief that banished Gramps from Pakistan and love that bade him return. Now this man was telling me Gramps went to Turkey purposefully. How many other secrets had my grandfather left out?

“I didn’t know he was a rug weaver,” I said.

“Certainly was. One of the best we ever saw. He knew what silk on silk warping was. Don’t weave on a poor warp. Never work on a loom out of alignment. He knew all this. Yet, he didn’t consider himself a weaver. He learned the craft to carry out a duty, he said. His passion was calligraphy. All this you see”—Bashir waved a hand at the brilliant kilims and tapestries around us, at the twists and curlicues of the verses on the walls, the wondrous illustrations—“is his genius manifested. The Ottoman Turkish script, those calligrams in our mosque, the paintings. It’s all him and his obsession with the Turkish masters.”

“He ever say why he left Pakistan or why he returned?”

Bashir shrugged. “We never asked. As long as it wasn’t criminal, we didn’t care.”

“Why’d you call him the Calligrapher Prince?”

The old man laughed. “It was a nickname the apprentices gave him and it stuck. Seemed so fitting.” Bashir lifted his cup and swallowed the last mouthful of tea along with the grounds. I winced. “Sharif was courteous and diligent. Hardly went home before midnight and he helped the business run more smoothly than it had in years, but I knew he was waiting for something. His eyes were always restless. Inward.”

In the evenings when the shop had closed Sharif drew and carved keenly. For hours he engraved, his cotton swabs with lacquer thinner in one hand, his burin and flat gravers in the other. What he was making was no secret. Bashir watched the process and the product: a large brass trunk with a complex inlay in its lid. A labyrinthine repoussé network gouged into the metal, spiraling into itself. Such fine work it took one’s breath away.

“Never, never, never,” said Bashir, “have I seen such a thing of beauty evolve in a craftsman’s hand again.”

Sharif’s concentration was diabolical, his hands careful as nature’s might have been as it designed the ornate shells of certain mollusks or the divine geometry of certain leaves.

“What are you making and why?” Bashir had asked his master.

Sharif shrugged. “A nest for ages,” he said, and the rug merchant’s son had to be content with the baffling reply.

Two years passed. One evening Bashir’s father got drenched in a downpour and caught pneumonia, which turned aggressive. Despite rapid treatment, he passed away. Bashir took over the shop. In his father’s name, he turned their old house into a small Quran center (which would eventually become Bhati’s only mosque). He ran the rug shop honestly and with Sharif’s help was able to maintain business the way it had been.

At the end of his third year Sharif came to Bashir.

“My friend,” he said. “I came here for a purpose. Something precious was given to me that is not mine to keep. It must wait here in the protection of the tree, even as I go help my father reopen his calligraphy stall.”

The young rug merchant was not surprised. He had glimpsed his master’s departure in his face the night he arrived. But what was that about a tree?

Sharif saw his student’s face and smiled. “You don’t remember, do you? Where your shop is now the eucalyptus tree used to stand.”

Bashir was stunned. He had forgotten all about the tree and the incident with the jinn. It was as if a firm hand had descended and swept all memory of the incident from his brain, like a sand picture.

He waited for Sharif to go on, but the Calligrapher Prince rose, grasped Bashir’s hand, and thrust two heavy envelopes into it.

“The first one is for you. Enough money to rent space for my trunk.”

“You’re not taking it with you?” Bashir was dumbfounded. The trunk with its elaborate design was worth hundreds, maybe thousands of rupees.

“No. It must stay here.” Sharif looked his student in the eye. “And it must not be opened till a particular someone comes.”

“Who?” said Bashir, and wished he hadn’t. These were curious things and they made his spine tingle and his legs shake. A strange thought entered his head: A burden the mountains couldn’t bear settles on me tonight. It vanished quick as it had come.

Sharif’s voice was dry like swiftly turning thread when he said, “Look at the name on the second envelope.”

And his heart full of misgivings, fears, and wonder—most of all, wonder—Bashir did.

I give myself credit: I was calm. My hands were steady. I didn’t bat an eye when I took the yellowed envelope from Merchant Bashir’s hands.

“It is yours,” said Bashir. “The envelope, the secret, the burden.” He wiped his face with the hem of his kameez. “Fifty years I carried it. Allah be praised, today it’s passed on to you.”

A burden the mountains couldn’t bear settles on me tonight.

I shivered a little.

“It’s cold,” Bashir said. “I will turn the heat on and leave you to peruse the contents of the envelope alone. I’ll be in the tea stall two shops down. Take as long as you wish.”

“You kept your word,” I said softly. “You didn’t open the envelope.”

Bashir nodded. “I asked Sharif how in God’s name he could trust me with it when I didn’t trust myself. A secret is like a disease, I said. It begins with an itch in a corner of your flesh, then spreads like cancer, until you’re overcome and give in. He just smiled and said he knew I wouldn’t open it.” The rug weaver dabbed a kerchief at his grimy cheeks. “Maybe because he had such faith in me, it helped keep wicked desire at bay.”

Or maybe he knew you wouldn’t, I thought, holding the envelope, feeling my pulse beat in my fingertips. Just like he knew the name of the rightful owner decades before he was born.

My name.

Through the back window I watched Bashir tromp down the street. The mist had thickened and the alley was submerged in blue-white. A steady whine of wind and the occasional thump as pedestrians walked into trash cans and bicycle stands. A whorl of fog shimmered around the streetlight on the far corner.

I turned and went to the counter. Picked up the envelope. Sliced it open. Inside was a sheaf of blank papers. I pulled them out and a small object swept out and fell on the floor. I reached down and picked it up, its radiance casting a twitching halo on my palm.

It was a silver key with a grooved golden stud for a blade, dangling from a rusted hoop.

Impossible.

My gaze was riveted on the golden stud. It took a considerable amount of effort to force my eyes away, to pocket the key, rise, and shamble to the storeroom.

It was dark. Fog had weakened the daylight. Broken looms with their limp warp strings and tipping beams gaped. I crossed the room and stood in front of the brass trunk. The padlock was tarnished. Round keyhole. I retrieved the key and stared at it, this centuries-old gold stud—if one were to believe Gramps—fused to a silver handle.

The instruction was clear.

I brushed the dust away from the lid. A floral design was carved into it, wreathed with grime but still visible: a medallion motif in a gilt finish with a Quranic verse running through its heart like an artery.

“Those who believe in the Great Unseen,” I whispered. In my head Baba smiled and a row of pine trees cast a long shadow across Gramps’s tombstone where I had last read a similar epitaph.

I inserted the Mughal key into the padlock, turned it twice, and opened the trunk.

A rug. A rolled-up kilim, judging by its thinness.

I stared at it, at the lavish weave of its edges that shone from light within the rolled layers. Was there a flashlight inside? Ridiculous idea. I leaned in.

The kilim smelled of sunshine. Of leaves and earth and fresh rainfall. Scents that filled my nostrils and tapped my taste buds, flooded my mouth with a sweet tang, not unlike cardamom tea.

My palms were sweating despite the cold. I tugged at the fat end of the rug and it fell to the floor, unspooling. It was seven by five feet, its borders perfectly even, and as it raced across the room, the storeroom was inundated with colors: primrose yellow, iris white, smoke blue. A bright scarlet sparked in the air that reminded me of the sharbat Mama used to make during Ramadan.

I fell back. Awestruck, I watched this display of lights surging from the kilim. Thrashing and gusting and slamming into one another, spinning faster and faster until they became a dancing shadow with many rainbow arms, each pointing earthward to their source—the carpet.

The shadow pirouetted once more and began to sink. The myriad images in the carpet flashed as it dissolved into them, and within moments the room was dark. The only evidence of the specter’s presence was the afterglow on my retina.

I breathed. My knees were weak, the base of my spine thrummed with charge. A smell like burning refuse lingered in my nostrils.

What was that?

A miracle, Gramps spoke in my head softly.

I went to the carpet. It was gorgeous. Multitudes of figures ran in every shape around its edges. Flora and fauna. Grotesques and arabesques. They seethed over nomadic symbols. I traced my finger across the surface. Cabalistic squares, hexagrams, eight-pointed stars, a barb-tailed scorpion. A concoction of emblems swirled together by the artisan’s finger until it seemed the carpet crawled with arcana I’d seen in ancient texts used mostly for one purpose.

Traps, I thought. For what?

I peered closer. The central figures eddied to form the armature of a tower with four jagged limbs shot into the corners of the rug where they were pinned down with pieces of glass. Four curved symmetric pieces, clear with the slightest tinge of purple. Together these four quarter-circles stuck out from the corners of the kilim as if they had once belonged to a cup.

They shimmered.

“What are you,” I whispered. The carpet and the embedded glass said nothing. I hesitated, the soles of my feet tingling, then bent and looked inside the upper right shard.

A man looked back at me, his face expressionless, young, and not mine.

“Salam, beta,” Gramps said in Urdu, still smiling. “Welcome.”

The age of wonders shivered and died when the world changed.

In the summer of 1963, however, an eighteen-year-old boy named Sharif discovered a miracle as he panted and dug and heaved an earthen pot out from under a rotten eucalyptus stump.

It was night, there were no streetlamps, and, by all laws holy, the dark should have been supreme. Except a light emanated from the pot.

Sharif wiped his forehead and removed the pot’s lid. Inside was a purple glass chalice glowing with brightness he couldn’t look upon. He had to carry it home and put on dark shades before he could peer in.

The chalice was empty and the light came from the glass itself.

Trembling with excitement, the boy wrapped it in a blanket and hid it under the bed. The next day when his parents were gone, he poured water into it and watched the liquid’s meniscus bubble and seethe on the kitchen table. The water was the light and the light all liquid.

The fakir had warned the Mughal princess that the secret was not for human eyes, but since that fateful night when the boy had first glimpsed the eucalyptus jinn, saw his fetters stretch from sky to earth, his dreams had been transformed. He saw nightscapes that he shouldn’t see. Found himself in places that shouldn’t exist. And now here was an enchanted cup frothing with liquid light on his kitchen table.

The boy looked at the chalice again. The churning motion of its contents hypnotized him. He raised it, and drank the light.

Such was how unfortunate, young Sharif discovered the secrets of Jaam-e-Jam.

The Cup of Heaven.

Legends of the Jaam have been passed down for generations in the Islamic world. Jamshed, the Zoroastrian emperor of Persia, was said to have possessed a seven-ringed scrying cup that revealed the mysteries of heaven to him. Persian mythmakers ascribed the centuries-long success of the empire to the magic of the Cup of Heaven.

And now it was in Sharif’s hand.

The Mother of Revelations. It swept across the boy’s body like a fever. It seeped inside his skin, blanched the marrow of his bones, until every last bit of him understood. He knew what he had to do next, and if he could he would destroy the cup, but that wasn’t his choice anymore. The cup gave him much, including foreknowledge with all the knots that weave the future. Everything from that moment on he remembered already.

And now he needed to conceal it.

So Sharif left for the rest of his life. He went to Mansehra. Found the Mughal princess. Married her. He made her very happy for the rest of her brief life, and on a sunny Friday afternoon he took his goggling, squalling son with him to pray Juma in a mosque in the mountains, where he would stay the night for worship and meditation.

Even though he knew it was the day appointed for his wife’s death.

There was no thought, no coercion, no struggle. Just the wisdom of extinction, the doggedness of destiny that steered his way. He and his son would return to find their family incinerated. Sharif and the villagers would carry out their charred corpses and he would weep; he was allowed that much.

After, he took his son to Turkey.

For years he learned rug weaving at a master weaver’s atelier. His newfound knowledge demanded he rein in the Cup of Heaven’s contents till the time for their disclosure returned. For that he must learn to prepare a special trap.

It took his fingers time to learn the trick even if his brain knew it. Years of mistakes and practice. Eventually he mastered the most sublime ways of weaving. He could apply them to create a trap so elegant, so fast and wise that nothing would escape it.

Sharif had learned how to weave the fabric of light itself.

Now he could return to his hometown, seek out the shadow of the eucalyptus tree, and prepare the device for imprisoning the cup.

First, he designed a kilim with the holy names of reality woven into it. Carefully, with a diamond-tipped glasscutter, he took the Jaam-e-Jam apart into four pieces and set them into the kilim. Next, he snared waves of light that fell in through the workshop window. He looped the peaks and troughs and braided them into a net. He stretched the net over the glass shards and warped them into place. He constructed a brass trunk and etched binding symbols on its lid, then rolled up the kilim and placed it inside.

Last, a special key was prepared. This part took some sorting out—he had to fetch certain particles farther along in time—but he succeeded; and finally he had the key. It was designed to talk to the blood-light in one person only, one descended from Sharif’s line and the Mughal princess’s.

Me.

Incredulous, I gazed at my dead grandfather as he told me his last story.

His cheeks glowed with youth, his eyes sharp and filled with truth. His hair was black, parted on the left. Maybe the glass shone, or his eyes, but the effect was the same: an incredible halo of light, near holy in its alienness, surrounded him. When he shook his head, the halo wobbled. When he spoke, the carpet’s fringe threads stirred as if a breeze moved them, but the voice was sourceless and everywhere.

“Today is the sixteenth of November, 2013,” he had said before launching into narration like a machine. “You’re twenty-eight. The woman you love will be twenty-five in three months. As for me”—he smiled—“I’m dead.”

He was telling me the future. Prescience, it seemed, had been his forte.

And now I knew how. The Cup of Heaven.

“Is it really you?” I said when he was done, my voice full of awe.

Gramps nodded. “More a portion of my punishment than me.”

“What does that mean? What other secrets were in the cup? Tell me everything, Gramps,” I said, “before I go crazy.”

“All good stories leave questions. Isn’t that what I will say?” He watched me, serious. “You should understand that I’m sorry. For bringing you here. For passing this on to you. I wish I’d never dug under that tree. But it is the way it is. I was handed a responsibility. I suppose we all get our burdens.”

The air in the room was thick and musty. Our eyes were locked together. He lured me here, I thought. My hands were shaking and this time it was with anger. Rage at being manipulated. All those stories of princesses and paupers, those lies he told for years while all the time he knew exactly what he was doing and how he was preparing me for this burden, whatever it was.

Gramps’s spirit, or whoever he was in this current state, watched me with eyes that had no room for empathy or guilt. Didn’t he care at all?

“I do, son,” he said gently. He was reading my mind or already knew it—I wasn’t clear which—and that angered me more. “I haven’t gotten to the most important part of the story.”

“I don’t care,” I said in a low voice. “Just tell me what was in the cup.”

“You need to know this.” His tone was mechanical, not my gramps’s voice. The person I knew and loved was not here. “The Jaam gave me much. Visions, power, perfect knowledge, but it cost me too. Quite a bit. You can’t stare into the heart of the Unseen and not have it stare back at you.”

He swept a hand around himself. For the first time I noticed the halo wasn’t just hovering behind his head; it was a luminescent ring blooming from his shoulders, encircling his neck, wrapping around his body.

“It wasn’t for me to decide the cup’s fate, so I hid it away. But because the Unseen’s presence ran like a torrent from it I paid more than a man should ever have to pay for a mistake. I was told to dig up the secret and hide it, not to gaze at its wonders or partake of its mysteries. My punishment hence was remembering the future and being powerless to prevent it. I would lose everything I remembered about the love of my life. Starting from the moment I dug under the eucalyptus, I would forget ever having been with your grandmother. My lovely, luckless Zeenat.

“Once the task was complete and I handed over the trunk to Bashir, my memories began to go. With time, my mind confabulated details to fill in the gaps and I told myself and everyone who’d ask that I had married a woman who died during childbirth. By the time we moved to America, all I remembered was this nostalgia and longing to discover a secret I thought I’d never pursued: the pauper princess and her magical jinn.”

When he stopped, the outline of his face wavered. It was the halo blazing. “What you see before you”—with a manicured finger Gramps made a circle around his face—“is an impression of those lost years. My love’s memory wrenched from me.”

He closed his eyes, letting me study the absence of age on his face. If he were telling the truth, he was a figment of his own imagination, and I . . . I was crazy to believe any of this. This room was a delusion and I was complicit in it, solidifying it.

Maybe that was why he forgot. Maybe the human mind couldn’t marry such unrealities and live with them.

“What about the journal? If you forgot everything, how could you draw? How could you write down details of your life?”

Gramps, his apparition, opened his eyes. “Senility. When my organic memory dissolved, fragments of my other life came seeping back in dreams.”

So he wrote the journal entries like someone else’s story. He had visions and dreams, but didn’t know whose life was flooding his head, filling it with devastating images, maybe even ushering in his death earlier than it otherwise might have come.

I leaned back and watched the threads of the carpet twist. The woven tower shot into the sky with hundreds of creatures gathered around it, looking at its top disappear into the heavens.

“I want to see the cup.” My voice rose like a razor in the dark, cutting through the awkwardness between us. “I want to see the contents.”

“I know.” He nodded. “Even such a warning as you see before you wouldn’t deter you.”

“If the cup’s real, I will take it with me to the States, where historians and mythologists will validate its authenticity and . . .”

And what? Truly believe it was a magical cup and place it in the Smithsonian? The cup’s secret isn’t for human eyes, Gramps had said. But what else are secrets for if not discovery? That is their nature. Only time stands between a mystery and its rightful master.

Gramps’s fingers played with the halo, twisting strands of luminosity like hair between his fingers. “You will have the secret, but before you drink from it, I want you to do something for me.”

He snapped his fingers and threads of light sprang from the halo, brightening as they came apart. Quickly he noosed them until he had a complicated knot with a glowing center and a string dangling at the end.

He offered it to me. “Pull.”

Warily, I looked at the phosphorescent string. “Why?”

“Before you gaze inside the cup, you will have a taste of my memories. After that you decide your own demons.”

I reached out a hand to the glass shard, withdrew, extended it again. When my fingers touched it, I flinched. It was warm. Slowly, I pushed my hand into the glass. It was like forcing it through tangles of leaves hot from the sun.

The string reddened. Its end whipped back and forth. I pinched it, pulled, and the light string rocketed toward me, the brilliant corpuscle at its center thrashing and unraveling into reality.

I gasped. A fat worm of peacock colors was climbing my hand, wrapping itself around my wrist.

“Gramps! What is this?” I shouted, twisting my arm, but the creature was already squirming its way up my arm, its grooves hot against my flesh, leaving shadows of crimson, mauve, azure, muddy green, and yellow on my skin. I could smell its colors. Farm odors. Damp foliage. Herbal teas. Baba’s truck with its ancient vomit-stained upholstery and greasy wheel covers. My mother’s hair. Sara’s embrace.

I shuddered. The worm’s body was taut across the bridge of my nose, its two ends poised like metal filings in front of my eyes.

“These,” Gramps said, “are the stingers of memory.”

The worm’s barbs were like boulders in my vision. As I watched them, terrified, they vibrated once.

Then plunged into my eyes.

In the cup was everything, Gramps said. He meant it.

What the teenage boy saw went back all the way until he was destroyed and remade from the complete memory of the universe. From the moment of its birth until the end. Free of space, time, and their building blocks, the boy experienced all at once: a mausoleum of reality that wrapped around him, plunged into which he floated through the Unseen.

And I, a blinking, tumbling speck, followed.

Gramps watched the concussion of first particles reverberate through infinity. He watched instantaneous being bloom from one edge of existence to the other; watched the triumph of fire and ejective forces that shook creation in their fists. He observed these phenomena and knew all the realms of the hidden by heart.

Matter has always been conscious. That was the secret. Sentience is as much its property as gravity and it is always striving toward a new form with better accommodation.

From the needs of sentient matter rose the invention that humans are.

Gramps gripped the darkness of prebeing and billowed inside the cracks of matter. When I tried to go after him, an awful black defied me. To me belonged just a fraction of his immersion.

I sat on a molten petal of creation as it solidified, and watched serpentine fractals of revelation slither toward me. Jinns are carrier particles of sentience, they murmured. Of the universe’s memory of the Great Migration.

My prehuman flesh sang on hearing these words. Truths it had once known made music in my body, even if I didn’t quite remember them.

The Great Migration?

The first fires and winds created many primordials, the fractals said.

You mean jinns?

Beings unfettered by the young principles of matter and energy. As the world began to cool, new rules kicked in. The primordials became obsolete. Now the selfish sentience needed resistant clay-and-water creatures to thrive upon. For humans to exist, the primordials had to migrate.

They complied?

They dug tunnels into space-time and left our corner of existence so it could evolve on its own. Before they departed, however, they caged the memory of their being here, for if such a memory were unleashed upon the world, matter would rescind its newest form and return to the essence. Things as we know them would cease to exist.

So they made the cup, I said. To imprison the memories of a bygone age.

Before they passed into shadow, whispered the fractals, they made sure the old ways would be available. In case the new ones proved fleeting.

An image came to me then: a dazzling array of fantastical creatures—made of light, shadow, earth, inferno, metal, space, and time—traveling across a brimming gray land, their plethora of heads bowed. As they plodded, revolved, and flew, the dimensions of the universe changed around them to accommodate this pilgrimage of the phantastique. Matter erupted into iridescent light. Flames and flagella bloomed and dissolved. Their chiaroscuric anatomies shuttered as the primordials made their way into the breath of the unknown.

The flimsy speck that was I trembled. I was witnessing a colossal sacrifice. A mother of migrations. What should a vehicle of sentience do except bow before its ageless saviors?

In the distance, over the cusp of the planets, a primordial paused, its mammoth body shimmering itself into perception. As I watched it, a dreadful certainty gripped me: this was how Gramps was trapped. If I didn’t look away immediately, I would be punished too, for when have human eyes glimpsed divinity without forsaking every sight they hold dear?

But I was rooted, stilled by the primordial’s composition. Strange minerals gleamed in its haunches. From head to tail, it was decorated with black-and-white orbs like eyes. They twitched like muscles and revolved around its flesh until their center, a gush of flame riding bony gears, was visible to me. Mirages and reveries danced in it, constellations of knowledge ripe for the taking. Twisted ropes of fire shot outward, probing for surface, oscillating up and down.

My gaze went to a peculiar vision bubbling inside the fiery center. I watched it churn inside the primordial, and in the briefest of instants I knew what I knew.

As if sensing my study, the creature began to turn. Fear whipped me forward, a reverential awe goading me closer to these wonders undiluted by human genes, unpolluted by flesh, unmade by sentience.

Sentience is everything, sentience the mystery and the master, I sighed as I drifted closer.

But then came a shock wave that pulsed in my ears like a million crickets chirping. I rode the blast force, grief stricken by this separation, spinning and flickering through string-shaped fractures in reality, like gigantic cracks in the surface of a frozen lake. Somewhere matter bellowed like a swamp gator and the wave rushed at the sound. Tassels of light stirred in the emptiness, sputtering and branching like gargantuan towers—

Lightning trees, I thought.

—and suddenly I was veering toward them, pitched up, tossed down, slung across them until there was a whipping sound like the breaking of a sound barrier, and I was slipping, sliding, and falling through.

My eyes felt raw and swollen. I was choking.

I gagged and squirmed up from the carpet as the light worm crawled up my throat and out my left nostril. It rushed out, its segments instantly melting and fading to roseate vapors. The vapors wafted in the darkness like Chinese lanterns, lighting up discarded looms and moth-eaten rug rolls before dissipating into nothing.

I stared around, fell back, and lay spread-eagled on the carpet. The nostril through which the worm had exited was bleeding. A heavy weight had settled on my chest.

A memory came to me. Of being young and very small, standing at the classroom door, nose pressed against the glass, waiting for Mama. She was running late and the terror in me was so powerful, so huge, that all I could do was cry. Only it wasn’t just terror, it was feeling abandoned, feeling insignificant, and knowing there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.

Footsteps. I forced myself through the lethargy to turn on my side. Bashir the rug merchant stood outlined against the rectangle of light beyond the doorway. His face was in shadow. The blue of his eyes glinted.

“You all right, son?”

My heart pounded so violently I could feel it in every inch of my body. As if I were a leather-taut drum with a kid hammering inside and screaming.

“I don’t know.” I tottered upright, breathed, and glanced at the carpet. The light was gone and it was ordinary. Gramps was gone too. The cup’s pieces in the corners were dull and empty.

Just glass.

I looked at Bashir. “I saw my grandfather.”

“Yes.” The rug merchant’s shadow was long and alien on the carpet. “What will you do now that he’s gone?”

I stared at him. His bright sapphire eyes, not old but ancient, watched me. He was so still. Not a hair stirred on his head. I wiped my mouth and finally understood.

“You’re not the boy who fell,” I said quietly. “The eucalyptus jinn. That’s you.”

He said nothing but his gaze followed me as I stepped away from the carpet, from this magical rectangle woven a half century ago. How long had he guarded the secret? Not the carpet, but the cup? How long since Bashir the rug merchant had died and the eucalyptus jinn had taken his form?

“A very long time,” Bashir said in a voice that gave away nothing.

Our eyes met and at last I knew burden. Left behind by the primordial titans, here was a messenger of times past, the last of his kind, who had kept this unwanted vigil for millennia. Carrying the responsibility of the cup, silently waiting for the end of days. Was there place in this new world for him or that damned chalice? Could there be a fate worse than death?

I stood before the caged shards of the Jaam. Gramps might have traversed the seven layers of heaven, but during my brief visit into the Unseen I’d seen enough to understand the pricelessness of this vehicle. Whatever magic the cup was, it transcended human logic. Were it destroyed, the last vestige of cosmic memory would vanish from our world.

“Whatever you decide,” the jinn said, “remember what you saw in the ideograms of the Eternum.”

For a moment I didn’t understand, then the vision returned to me. The mammoth primordial with its flaming core and the glimpse of what churned between its bonelike gears. My heartbeat quickened.

If what I saw was true, I’d do anything to protect it, even if it meant destroying the most glorious artifact the world would ever know.

The jinn’s face was kind. He knew what I was thinking.

“What about the shop?” I asked, my eyes on the damaged looms, the dead insects, the obsolete designs no one needed.

“Will go to my assistant,” he said. “Bashir’s nephew.”

I looked at him. In his eyes, blue as the deepest ocean’s memory, was a lifetime of waiting. No, several lifetimes.

Oblivion. The eucalyptus jinn courted oblivion. And I would give it to him.

“Thank you,” he said, smiling, and his voice was so full of warmth I wanted to cry.

“You miss the princess. You protected their family?”

“I protected only the cup. The Mughal lineage just happened to be the secret’s bearer,” said the eucalyptus jinn, but he wouldn’t meet my eyes.

Which was why he couldn’t follow them when they left, until Gramps went after them with the cup. Which was also why he couldn’t save them from the fire that killed them. Gramps knew it too, but he couldn’t or wouldn’t do anything to change the future.

Was Gramps’s then the worst burden of all? It made my heart ache to think of it.

We looked at each other. I stepped toward the brass trunk and retrieved the key with the gold stud from the padlock. Without looking at the jinn, I nodded.

He bowed his head, and left to fetch me the instruments of his destruction.

The city breathed fog when I left the rug shop. Clouds of white heaved from the ground, silencing the traffic and the streets. Men and women plodded in the alleys, their shadows quivering on dirt roads. I raised my head and imagined stars pricking the night sky, their light so puny, so distant, it made one wistful. Was it my imagination or could I smell them?

The odd notion refused to dissipate even after I returned to the inn and packed for the airport. The colors of the world were flimsy. Things skittered in the corners of my eyes. They vanished in the murmuring fog when I looked at them. Whatever this new state was, it wasn’t disconcerting. I felt warmer than I had in years.

The plane bucked as it lifted, startling the passengers. They looked at one another and laughed. They’d been worried about being grounded because of weather. I stared at the ground falling away, away, the white layers of Lahore undulating atop one another, like a pile of rugs.

My chin was scratchy, my flesh crept, as I brought the hammer down and smashed the pieces of the cup.

I leaned against the plane window. My forehead was hot. Was I coming down with something? Bereavement, PTSD, post-party blues? But I had been through hell. I should expect strange, melancholic moods.

The flame twitched in my hand. The smell of gasoline strong in my nose. At my feet the carpet lay limp like a terrified animal.

“Coffee, sir?” said the stewardess. She was young and had an angular face like a chalice. She smiled at me, flashing teeth that would look wonderful dangling from a hemp string.

“No,” I said, horrified by the idea, and my voice was harsher than I’d intended. Startled, she stepped back. I tried to smile, but she turned and hurried away.

I wiped my sweaty face with a paper napkin and breathed. Weird images, but I felt more in control, and the feeling that the world was losing shape had diminished. I unzipped my carry-on and pulled out Gramps’s journal. So strange he’d left without saying goodbye.

That ghost in the glass was just a fragment of Gramps’s memories, I told myself. It wasn’t him.

Wasn’t it? We are our memories. This mist that falls so vast and brooding can erase so much, but not the man. Will I remember Gramps? Will I remember me and what befell me in this strange land midway between the Old World and the New?

That is a question more difficult to answer, for, you see, about ten hours ago, when I changed planes in Manchester, I realized I am beginning to forget. Bits and pieces, but they are disappearing irrevocably. I have already forgotten the name of the street where Gramps and the princess once lived. I’ve even forgotten what the rug shop looked like. What was its name?

Karavan Kilim! An appropriate name, that. The word is the etymologic root for caravan. A convoy, or a party of pilgrims.

At first, it was terrifying, losing memories like that. But as I pondered the phenomenon, it occurred to me that the erasure of my journey to Old Lahore is so important the rest of my life likely depends on it. I have come to believe that the colorlessness of the world, the canting of things, the jagged movements of shadows is the peeling of the onionskin which separates men from the worlds of jinn. An unfractured reality from the Great Unseen. If the osmosis persisted, it would drive me mad, see?

That was when I decided I would write my testament while I could. I have been writing in this notebook for hours now and my fingers are hurting. The process has been cathartic. I feel more anchored to our world. Soon, I will stop writing and put a reminder in the notebook telling myself to seal it in an envelope along with Gramps’s journal when I get home. I will place them in a deposit box at my bank. I will also prepare a set of instructions for my lawyer that, upon my death, the envelope and its contents be delivered to my grandson who should then read it and decide accordingly.

Decide what? You might say. There’s no more choice to make. Didn’t I destroy the carpet and the cup and the jinn with my own hands? Those are about the few memories left in my head from this experience. I remember destroying the rug and its contents. So vivid those memories, as if someone painted them inside my head. I remember my conversation with the jinn; he was delighted to be banished forever.

Wasn’t he?

This is making me think of the vision I had in—what did the jinn call it?—the Eternum.

The root J-N-N has so many derivatives. Jannah, paradise, is the hidden garden. Majnoon is a crazy person whose intellect has been hidden. My favorite, though, is janin.

The embryo hidden inside the mother.

The jinn are not gone from our world, you see. They’ve just donned new clothes.

My beloved Terry, I saw your face printed in a primordial’s flesh. I know you, my grandson, before you will know yourself. I also saw your father, my son, in his mother’s womb. He is so beautiful. Sara doesn’t know yet, but Neil will be tall and black-haired like me. Even now, his peanut-sized mass is drinking his mother’s fluids. She will get migraines throughout the pregnancy, but that’s him borrowing from his mom. He will return the kindness when he’s all grown up. Sara’s kidneys will fail and my fine boy will give his mother one, smiling and saying she’ll never be able to tell him to piss off again because her piss will be formed through his gift.

My Mughal children, my pauper princes, you and your mother are why I made my decision. The Old World is gone, let it rest. The primordials and other denizens of the Unseen are obsolete. If memory of their days threatens the world, if mere mention of it upsets the order of creation, it’s too dangerous to be left to chance. For another to find.

So I destroyed it.

The historian and the bookkeeper in me wept, but I’d do it a thousand times again if it means the survival of our species. Our children. No use mourning what’s passed. We need to preserve our future.

Soon, I will land in the US of A. I will embrace the love of my life, kiss her, take her to meet my family. They’re wary, but such is the nature of love. It protects us from what is unseen. I will teach my parents to love my wife. They will come to know what I already know. That the new world is not hostile, just different. My parents are afraid and that is okay. Someday I too will despise your girlfriends (and fear them), for that’s how the song goes, doesn’t it?

Meanwhile, I’m grateful. I was witness to the passing of the Great Unseen. I saw the anatomy of the phantastique. I saw the pilgrimage of the primordials. Some of their magic still lingers in the corners of our lives, wrapped in breathless shadow, and that is enough. We shall glimpse it in our dreams, taste it in the occasional startling vision, hear it in a night bird’s song. And we will believe for a moment, even if we dismiss these fancies in the morning.

We will believe. And, just like this timeless gold stud that will soon adorn my wife’s nose, the glamour of such belief will endure forever.

“The Pauper Prince and the Eucalyptus Jinn” copyright © 2015 by Usman T. Malik

Art copyright © 2015 by Victo Ngai

[incursionofthedamnedrpg]

Name: Henrik Mikaelson Birthday: June 17th (24/1000+) Species: Warlock Lookalike: Dominic Sherwood  Availability: NPC

Personality

Henrik used to be a bubbly, happy boy. He loved purely, he was honest and loyal, just as you would imagine any young child. Time however, that’s something that can be a dangerous thing. After he had died a second time, Henrik was older and wiser, but it was not something to be admired, not when he was stuck on the other side. The centuries made him bitter, if not a little twisted. The kind soul is still there and he still finds that he enjoys certain things. Certain people he had met on the other side made him laugh, and he loves to tell a joke or twenty. He’s quite sarcastic and at times, rather boisterous. After all, he technically still is just 24 years old. Henrik’s entire soul was forged in a place where only dead things lay their head, and he’s made him sly, sceptical and smart. People are con artists, and he is no different. If you have something he wants, he will either charm it out of you, or steal it like a thief in the night. Henrik cares very little for whatever people may label him, so long as he’s being who he wants to be, that’s all that matters. Just like his family, his patience is testy, his anger can be un-controlled, and being surrounded by the darkness both thrills and displeases him. If he cares for you, there’s nothing he wouldn’t do - if he considers you a threat… Well, we all know how a Mikaelson handles those.

Past

Henrik was the youngest of the Mikaelson’s. He was the reason his mother made his siblings into the Original vampires. His death spared the war that still rages on between vampires and wolves, but can Henrik really take the blame? All he did was fall at the claws of a wolf, it was Esther who made the decision that she would not suffer the loss of another child. Little to anybodies knowledge, Henrik ended up on the other-side. He was human, but he was also a warlock. He was forced to watch his family destroy themselves. They couldn’t see him, or hear his pleas, Henrik was useless to stop his mother performing the spell that would set the course of history. When it all came out that Klaus was not Mikael’s son, Henrik was disappointed in his mother. Not because of her affair, but because she did not accept his brother for what he was. Not that he would admit it, his young soul would never speak out of term to his mother, but he was hurt that she would betray her son. And so, when he witness Klaus taking her life, he fled. He didn’t want to have to speak to her, he wasn’t ready. Though, the other-side can be a very small face and given his young age, he was only able to hide for so long, until he had to face her. It had been a century, or so? The amount of time that had passed had gave Henrik the space he needed. When his mother saw his face, he was also pleased to see hers. A hundred years with no love, no comfort, his mothers embrace was welcomed.

It was no secret, Henrik hated being alone. He didn’t want to be on the other-side any longer, not even with his mother. So when Esther told him she could help him come back to life, his little face lit up with happiness. The only condition was, Esther demanded he didn’t try to contact his siblings. How could she ask that of him? He agreed, he would not seek out his family and in return, he could walk amongst the living once more. That was all he wanted - to be a part of something real. Henrik was only young, it’s not like he truly understood what he was agreeing to, but once he was brought back, he found himself to be more alone than he was dead. No family, no friends… What was the boy to do? After a week of being alone, he met a family on his travels. They were kind and they welcomed him into their home. Gave him food, shelter, and even a place to call home. Henrik was more than grateful, especially since the family could barely spare anything, they still took him in with no expectation of anything in return. Just over a decade had went by, he had adapted, he considered the family who took him in, his family. He grew, he worked, earned his keep, he became like a child to them and he loved them dearly… But - there was a deep, empty hole inside Henrik’s heart. The burden he carried, he did so alone. Nobody knew who he really was, and he longed for his blood siblings. No longer a child. No longer afraid of his mothers influence, he decided to find his brothers and sister. He used his blood to locate them, said goodbye to his family and set off on his way. Though, the journey was long and rough, Henrik was weak with an illness he assumed he would overcome. However, fate had other plans and whilst he was on the boat to England, he grew more weak, his body was failing him and he passed away before he reached the shore. At 24 years old, he was back on the other side.

Henrik wasn’t the baby his mother longed for, not now he was a grown man. He had a voice of his own and Esther did not appreciate what he had to say. Though he was saddened and even bitter about how his family seemed to have moved on without him, he would protect them against Esther no matter what. Avoiding her as much as he could, Henrik spent the next centuries passing through, watching his family from the other-side. Klaus. and the way he would slaughter innocents with no care for the carnage he caused. Elijah, with his claim to nobility, even he shed blood when it suited him. Rebekah, and the way longed for love, but was always left in the cold. Kol, who disobeyed and ran around like a reckless infant. Finn, who lay in a coffin, forgotten just like he was. These people would be like strangers to him had he not kept a beady eye on their movements. The centuries were long, lonely, but Henrik would not be beaten. He encountered many witches on the other-side, befriended them. Though, his friendship would come at a cost once the right moment presented itself. It wasn’t that he used people, not entirely, the company was often quite a pleasant thing, but Henrik could not be truly happy. Not until he was back in the real world. Capable of speaking to his family and actually being heard. That’s why, when Kol’s little witch Hazel died, she became the first person he was truly happy to be around. She was the one. She would help him return, he would make sure of it.

The ancestors wanted Hazel’s neck in a noose and given that they were not fond of Henrik’s intentions either, he took it upon himself to protect the witch with everything he had. Whilst they were together, he protected her from the ancestors, all the while keeping his true identity a secret by telling her his name was ‘Rik’. Not a complete lie, really. Henrik could easily understand Kol’s infatuation, Hazel was one hell of a strong soul. When Hazel was brought back to life, it gave Henrik a stronger connection to the living. With the power he had collected over the years, he was able to whisper in Hazel’s head, contact her. He asked for her help, it was never a secret to her that he wanted to be alive, so he hoped she would not betray him. And to his pleasure, she did not. Henrik pushed from the other-side, with his power and with the power of some witches, and Hazel pulled from her side. The process was harsh, but ultimately, a success. After all these centuries, Henrik could finally say that he was truly breathing. His identity remains a secret, but he will reveal who he is once he has settled. After he has connected with his family.  

Present

Henrik has been in Mystic Falls for only two weeks, laying low, adjusting to his new lease of life. His family is a mess and he knows this, he also knows that his presence may not be welcomed. Not if he allows his bitterness to overcome his love. Henrik is angry that his family rarely, if ever, speak his name. Mad, that they never tried to bring him back… Pissed, that he was seemingly forgotten. He almost believes he would be un-wanted, but there is a tiny spark of hope that maybe, he will be proved wrong. Aware that he is not the child they remember, he knows it could prove difficult to get his family to believe he is who he says, so he has decided that if he has a say in it, he will introduce himself to Freya first. After all, the two never met, but she herself is in a similar position to him. With her being a witch, he hopes she will be able to sense it.

Connections

The Mikaelson’s

His family, Henrik is the youngest sibling, his death was the reason Esther made his siblings into vampires.

Hazel Prince

His saviour. He protected Hazel from the ancestors and formed a bond with her. In turn, she became the witch who helped him come back to life. He is in her debt and considers her to be a friend, not just a useful asset.

Aurora De’Martel

Curious of her, if not skeptical. Henrik is unsure if she is the person she says she is, or if her intentions with his brother are less than pure. They have not met, but he hopes to change that.