#prose ramblings

[whitegoldtower]

Angry, pissed off Tam’lin below the break. This is how I think it would go down the first few hours of having Kar’niss in the camp. The szarkai isn’t pleased with the hypocrisy.

As a character, Tam’lin is usually the quiet one. He does what he needs to, he tends to avoid dialogue that could possibly upset the other party members, he’s generally a very relaxed person. Imagine the reaction, then, when he finally loses his shit.

He automatically rolls Nat 20s for insight, intimidation and persuasion on this one.

“Stand down! Stand down.” The szarkai snarled, at the group of people he called ‘friends’.

A group of misfits and outcasts, rough and disorganised, constantly warring, either with themselves or with him.

“Get back, now. All of you.” Tam’lin rarely showed such intensity, such fervour, nothing like the state he had worked himself into as he stood outside of his tent, defending the drider. Protection was a strong instinct he had cultivated and nurtured since he’d discovered his autonomy. He didn’t want to hurt his friends, but he would, if it came down to it.

And they must have known; Tam’lin saw the way Gale backed off immediately, the way Astarion defensively picked at the hilt of his dagger, anticipating a fight.

Tam’lin pointed at him.

“I’ll pretend I did not see that,” the ranger said, lowly, his white hair wild and messy, “I intend to hear him out. And you should, too. By the gods, hear him if nothing else, just as I heard you. We have all wrestled with ourselves and one another, unearthed secrets that should have been revealed upon our meeting. I remember you, in particular,” Tam’lin rounded on Astarion, “thanking me for looking past your condition and reassuring you that you were not a monster.”

He turned to Wyll, “I remember you, so fearful and vulnerable, ready to saw those horns right off your skull.”

Finally, he rounded on Lae’zel, “And you, how you advocated for the occasional ‘capricious murder’, as if that was not something of a monstrosity in itself.”

Perhaps he was going too far. Perhaps not.

“All of you have, in some way or another, fought with yourselves for a scrap of understanding, a glimmer of hope that you will not be seen as monsters. Why is he any different?” The szarkai eyed up his camp, “Is it because he looks less human than the rest of us? Is that it?”

Disappointment momentarily overtook his ire as he looked upon Karlach and Gale,

“You two, I expected better. Especially you, Karlach. Everyone thought you were a fucking cambion before learning the truth.”

The curling of Minthara’s lip, however, only threw oil on the fire, and Tam’lin met her gaze for the first time in his life, his gaze piercing right into her skull.

“Ilharess, my sweet dear cousin, this is the only time I will ever defer to you. Know this. This is not Menzoberranzan, here and now. I will speak to you on your own level, just this once. Put your pride aside for one small moment and consider; as a former pawn of the Absolute; is he not entitled to his revenge?”

Minthara’s visage hardened, a hot flush rising to her cheeks from her neck. Tempered rage. Perhaps the only reason she did not smite him, there and then, was because he was right.

“You, better than anyone else, should know how it feels to betray Lolth. To be used as a puppet. Does he not deserve better? Either one of us, both you and I, could have suffered this fate for our alleged sins against our people. And I count us lucky that we were not, although we still could be. His circumstances were a product of injustice.”

He tore his gaze away from her.

“I welcomed all of you as friends, despite your flaws. I intend to welcome Kar’niss in the same manner. Before you confront me in this manner again, like a pack of fucking wolves,” he spat, looking pointedly at Shadowheart, “Consider finding a shred of the decency within yourselves that I once showed you.”

There, then, was something akin to a silent respect in Lae’zel and Minthara’s auras; he was finally showing that authoritative streak. There was fire, there. Something that could be respected, even admired, by Astarion, too. The ambition impressed Gale, and the fierce passion tempered Karlach. Guilt crept in, somewhere along the lines, when he looked upon Shadowheart and Wyll, seeing perhaps just a hint of fear, but he did not back down. He was ready to defend Kar’niss, tooth and nail, and upon realising the fact that he was simply trying to protect a vulnerable being, Wyll’s posture relaxed.

The entire party was in shock. Perhaps it was for the best. Tam’lin resisted the urge to turn on Kar’niss, in that moment, to seethe that the drider had better not make him regret the decision to stick his neck out for him and possibly make an enemy of his friends. He slowed his thundering heart, bit at the inside of his cheeks.

He looked poised to chew off his own tongue. He’d won them over, for now, at least. He could see that much in their faces.

[petrichor-poet]

I wasn't made for flings or situationships. I was made for falling head over heels in love with someone who loves me.

[and-corn]

B I G N E W S !

I've made an art book and the Kickstarter is about to launch! It has writing, illustrations, and comics similar to this one! It's called Waving at Airplanes and it's probably the largest project I've ever done (I'm quite proud of it).

The book will also include this comic, this one, plus this, and this - AND 6 additional, never-before-seen comics/illustrations! So if you happen to like those comics, it would mean a lot if you considered getting the book! You can check out the Kickstarter page here!

Since the artwork is already done, the Kickstarter is really just a pre-order (to cover the cost of having the books printed and shipped). It launches on 9/9/2024 and will last 4 weeks!

Thank you! These comics may not be my most popular, but they are the most personal to me, and the support for them is really special.

[lolipop1920art]

So this is something I found

twitter but for skaven

[musings-n-museums]

i miss you so much (i forget why)

clips of all too well: the short film directed by taylor swift \\ scared of my guitar by olivia rodrigo \\ anything (demo) by dodie \\ post by @inanotherunivrse \\ tiktok comments by harashsidhu and ashmanathletics \\ tonight i can write by pablo neruda \\ the glass essay by anne carson \\ i miss you, i'm sorry by gracie abrams

[gale-force-storm]

He refuses to fall for the first person to show him kindness. He may be feeling sorry for himself, but that's a bridge too far.

Even if they are beautiful. And kind to everyone, not just him. And brave. And clever. And strong. And they love animals, and reading. And they have a wry sense of humour that he adores.

He won't. He can't. Besides all else, this is decidedly not the time. A bomb in his chest and a worm in his head and a weight on his shoulders and a shame in his stomach and a shattered heart he's still trying to gather the pieces of. Desperately clinging to the cloak of his past, wrapping himself in his former confidence, pretending it hasn't been worn threadbare with time in isolation and eaten ragged by the moths of doubt and fear and past mistakes.

He fell from grace so far so fast, but he cannot beg affection off the first hand to offer him help up, even if it is the first time he's touched another person in months. Even if that hand did send a sudden warmth through him and feel so right in his own he could almost cry from it.

...This is getting out of hand.

He can just be friendly with them, surely. How does one make friends, again? Shared interests? He mostly just has the one, so he'll share what he can. They pick it up quickly, and the warm magic that surrounds them is a balm on his soul. Right up until they imagine kissing him, and his heart skips a beat. It can't be. It can't be. They can't want him back. It's not possible. And how, after it all, after everything, is he meant to resist the overwhelming temptation of being wanted?

They don't let up, either. Lingering glances. Warm smiles. All but propositioning him at the tiefling party. If there is a single positive thing to be said about his year of orb-imposed abstinence, it's that the willpower he had to build up and the practice denying himself were the only things that enabled him to decline their advances.

Well, that and the risk of blowing up the both of them, along with everyone else in or near the camp.

The warm smiles and lingering gazes and casual touches still continue, though.

This is fine. He's fine. He can't remember the last time he felt like this, someone cared for him like this, and he can't do a damn thing about it, but he's fine. Everything is fine. As fine as it can be, anyways, given everything else about the situation.

He supposes he should probably be more upset about Mystra's orders. At this point, though, it's hard to feel like it's anything besides a way out. A relief that he can be good for something. One more miserable experience, and then he's done with it, and all their problems are solved. There are worse things.

Except.

They're so angry about it. Everyone is, but them especially. Arguing with both him and Elminster the entire time, insisting there's another option. That they'll find or make one. Whatever they have to do to keep him around.

Gods help him, but he does want to stay with them. Stay for them.

He sleeps that night, and awakens with a jolt, a groan, and a realization. He's glad that prestidigitation exists to clean himself up without leaving his tent and risking the others' notice. His body had, apparently, caught up with certain implications before his brain. Though from what snippets of his dream he remembers, maybe it was only his waking mind that had been lagging behind.

He wants them, and he can finally have them. Can give them as much of himself as he's able, in the time he has left.

He had refused, at first, the idea of falling for the first person to show him kindness. And he hasn't. He's fallen for someone who is so much more that that. And he will not, cannot, die without letting them know. If he has to leave them, and he fears he will, then he will not leave them feeling unappreciated, or uncherished, or unloved. Not when he can finally embrace the full depth and breadth of what he feels for them. Has felt for them for what can't have been more than a tenday or two, but feels like a lifetime and a moment all at once.

He will not leave without showing them the full scope of his admiration and appreciation and sheer joy at their presence. The full scope of how impossibly deeply he already loves them. Not while he has any say in it.

[altcvnningham]

adler can’t stop holding bell’s face when he kisses them.

and not gently, either, not the caress of a flower petal, delicate and sweet- bell’s barely a rose if not for all their thorns, and he wrings a hand round their jaw like one might wrench out a weed. rid and tossed to the dirt with all the rest. with all the red. with all that makes them wrong. with everything that came before.

if he can’t muzzle his dog, who can?

he bends their head upward in the interrogation chair, thumb dug into their cheek, squeezing the blood from their mouth into a sanguine rivulet between the web of his fingers; he jerks bell’s face toward the evidence board when their empty eyes fix on him a moment too long, enough to unsettle him; he stamps their chin under a hard thumb when he turns them to the light, soft pupils blown wide as he watches the sweet drug take hold; he digs his fingers into their jaw when they bark too loud at their duly master, shaking sense into his dumb mutt’s whistling hole of a head.

when he deigns to let them go, he makes a point to tear his hand away, sharp and spiteful, so even with the sting they still manage to find suffering in the loss. to yearn for the hand they bit back.

so the rest comes violent, too. the rest comes hungry. the rest comes when he wants it, and he wants bell, with such a blind fervour it drives him mad. where better men might leave, kick their losses to the curb and go elsewhere to get their fill, adler digs his heels deeper in the mud, the dirt where he buries all that red he carved out of them. if it’s tenderness he wants, he can take it for himself, and leave them with the hurt. it isn’t stooping to their level if he’s the one with the leash.

he kisses bell like he’s eating them from the inside. one hand squeezed tight around their flushed face, mouth forced open into an o-shaped pucker. he nicks their lip as smirking proof of his callousness, snags it on his sharpest canine. a peck that mocks affection. licks his way inside their mouth like it’s a threat, a proclamation. you let me do this to you. you let me in, bell. let me in, let me in. such a good dog when they do, loll their tongue out pathetic and starving. he drives his thumb inside, hot, wet, forces their mouth open by the hinge of their stiffened jaw- the last laughable vestiges of their reluctance, crumbling into dust fine enough to sift like sand between his fingers. guess science still has its limits, but so do you.

when he’s worked bell’s mouth nice and wide, he flattens their tongue with a thick finger, face clamped between the rest, and while they’re just about learning to make peace with it all- the humiliation, the degradation, submission made sanctification through the eager expectation of praise- he spits inside, and makes them swallow.

[fatimazainab]

i love coming home and being at home and sitting inside my home and staying home

[lilaccatholic]

Okay you need to explain the mafia thing without incriminating your family

Oh I so don't care about incriminating anyone lol everyone is either dead or the statute of limitations have passed. Family lore for a long time was that my great-grandfather came over from Italy just before World War I, met my great-grandmother, and raised a ton of kids on a farm.

Yeah, not what happened lol.

Turns out, he was *sent* over here by the mob (though the timeline was correct—it was still 1913 lol), got shoved into an arranged marriage (with a bride who was, oh, about 14 at the time and had her first child at 16), still had a ton of kids, and basically terrorized his little corner of the world so completely that the police force in the area where he lived was so in his pocket that they had to run new hires by him. His sons and cousins got involved in the, er, *family business*, and some of their sons did, too. My grandma's sister had an arranged marriage as well to the son of a mobster they were close to, and most of her brothers were involved in the mob, but God bless my firebrand of a grandmother who refused to marry someone she didn't know and snatched herself a former Coast Guardsman turned Ford plant manager and buzzed all the way off to Michigan. She put the literal fear of God in these people and demanded that they not only get rid of their more occult superstitions, but doggedly kept after her father until he repented of his past. She practically forced him to stay alive after he had a stroke until he got himself to confession. Somehow this woman survived being born premature in 1934 and decided to make it everyone else's problem until she got called home to glory in 2021. I miss her every day.

As for the rest of the family, there are probably some cousins still in Italy who are still "in", but everyone in the US has either died or left the business—in part because of said grandmother's crusading. As many of my fellow Italian-Americans know, there's nothing quite as terrifying as a tiny old woman with a rolling pin. She took after her mother in that way. Her mother, who had the unabashed temerity to tell her mafia boss husband that she had no intention of listening to him when he told her not to help nurse the sick during the Spanish Flu, and who used her husband’s ill-gotten gains to feed people during the Great Depression. She raised seven children to adulthood, lost a few others, and was basically such a force of nature that even 35 years after her death, she's still remembered with adoration as a great cook and helluva woman by all who knew her. I'm named for her and my grandmother—albeit the anglicized versions of their names—and somehow she managed to reach through time and give me her face. So, in a very special way, I carry these two incredible women with me at all times.

I'm highlighting these two women in particular instead of all the sordid mafia details for a reason. Oh, I could tell you about the wire taps and the FBI files, the people killed, the drugs and liquor they ran, how my grandmother's sister had terrors about a field where the bodies were buried when she was dying of Alzheimer's. We're mentioned on podcasts and in forums of crime junkies, and yeah, some of the people we knew were probably the inspiration for some of your favorite mafia films. But the truth of it at the end of the day is this: they destroyed people. They used crime and terror to ruin lives, and left behind a legacy of trauma and despair. But my grandmother who did everything she could to get the family out? Who prayed about the evil that had been done in her family's name until her death? My great-grandmother, who made the best of a horrible situation and tried to do good with the hand she'd been dealt? Who opened restaurants and fed the homeless? Man, they're stars to me. Not perfect in any way, but they took steps forward that helped end centuries of a bloody family legacy.

And, well, I'm pretty darn glad they did.

[echoric]

they were never meant to last. not in this world, not in that time.

one was glacial ice carved by discipline and duty, the other was a flame of recklessness that never stopped long enough to see the embers settle in his wake. they met in the sky, where competition was another word for devotion, and every near miss, every quick save felt like a confession neither could make.

they call it rivalry. they call it respect.

but in the spaces between - the stolen glances, the lingering smirks, the heavy moments of silence - they built something fragile, something inevitable,

and yet love is not always a jet that is cleared to land.

not when the uniform stood for more than the body inside it. not when walls had ears and rumors could kill a career faster than a missile, not when the law turned silence into the only option for survival. a simple phrase, a loaded gun.

they never could speak of it. never dared to. because speaking would make it real - and real things had real consequences.

so they pushed it down.

turned feeling into friction, let the longing sharpen into a blade they wielded against each other because fighting is easier and safer than admitting what was beneath it. because it was easier to be enemies than lovers, safer to let the world believe it was about ego, not amity.

and maybe they could have lasted like that forever. maybe they could have stayed locked in a perfect tension, safe in silence.

but fire and ice were never meant to last. one had to let go, to move on.

because the thing about staying quiet? eventually, the silence becomes unbearable. and the thing about ice is that it doesn't just cool - it preserves. long after the fire has burned on to greater things, long after engines have gone silent, Ice remembers.

remembers the way it was to be seen, to be challenged, to be known in a way no one else dared to know him. remembers how they flew so closely to the edge, how they danced on a line that neither of them dared cross. how the air between them was always charged, always waiting for something that would never come.

but fate is cruel to those who burn. who melt and freeze with no return. no sky could ever be big enough to hold them both.

not then. not them.

one was ice, one was fire. one would always burn hotter, one would always stay frozen.

in the end, fire left first - because fire always does. but Ice stayed. because that's what ice does - it holds, it lingers, it keeps. and long after the embers had faded into the horizon, the echo of a laugh was carried on the wind.

love was never a fair thing. in the beginning, one of them was always going to have to leave.

[peachesofteal]

Who else looks at everything they’ve written and feels the urge to destroy it because it’s all terrible-

[dreamsy990]

hi i wanted to draw my own au so have a snippet of scene i rewrote like 12 times and will likely rewrite again

[nekofra]

Matching icons for you and your dumb friend

[ID: Matching icons of Vash and Wolfwood from Trigun 98 and Badlands Rumble

Vash screaming as Wolfwood traps him in a pseudo wrestling hold on the airship’s deck

Eriks!Vash and Wolfwood looking serious

Vash and Wolfwood both saluting and smiling nervously

Vash and Wolfwood laughing obnoxiously on the bus

Wolfwood and Vash looking up with concerned frowns. End ID]

[thelastwordsofashootingstarr]

there’s a pit in my stomach that’s calling out your name. a keen eye kept watching for any signs of discontent and shame. so much for first love and now i’m just empty. so much for forgetting, i find traces of you everywhere in my city.

they had to pry whatever was left of us from my tightly clenched hands. all that’s left is a streak of blood scarring my shaking palms. i hate myself for thinking our endings would be grand. would anyone believe me when i told them how this actually died a quiet death, in the corner of the room, choking on its own breath?

i want to scream why why why why why. like the broken record player next to your bed. but don’t we know that this is how it was always supposed to end? boy meets girl. boy loses girl. boy doesn’t find girl. she’s nowhere. reduced to ashes by the flames of her own despair. i could’ve survived on scraps of love while giving you all of me.

so what do you do? when the only one you trusted to call “home” doesn’t want this version of you? carved so carefully according to everyone’s whims. my heart is nothing but a mirrorball that i placed in your reckless hands. one that would’ve bled glass to reflect your dreams. i guess it doesn’t matter anymore, now my boy doesn’t like to do what he swears he means. // small cuts, big wound

[lolipop1920art]

A description of Gulliman's scar

[tenderflint]

someone who isn't me by geoff rickly