#sacrifice the maiden

[neverpathia]

Is the long quiet still British and is shifty still American in sactm?

Here's a thing I like to think about these two. The Long Quiet represents stagnation. Which means she also encapsulates inertia, and by extension, momentum.

I'll just share these quick doodles while I'm at it.

So the Shifting Mound undergoes numerous small but constant changes that make little difference as a whole, yet they perpetually occur nonetheless. Meanwhile, the Long Quiet experiences long stretches where she's essentially the very same thing, but when she does get changed, she changes hard.

Where was I going with that? Absolutely nowhere.

Quiet is British. All her incarnations. The Victim spits "blimey" and "bloody hell" at you. The Dame generously offers you tea and scones. Generally, the Maiden at least acts and sounds like a nice British girl.

The Mound is where things get interesting. He is the entire world map.

Yeah, the Voice of the Huntsman sounds American enough, but the other voices are more...diverse. Superior (Tower) talks like an Asian parent after you bring home a B in math. Revelation (Nightmare) has several different accents layered atop each other in some strange, clinking cacophony. Let's not mention Stranger.

As for the Narrator, he's still British. But not for the reasons you may think.

[sunderwight]

Bingqiu AU where Luo Binghe's the chosen village sacrifice to the evil deity who lives up the mountain.

Normally the village sends maidens, but they've more or less run out of expendable girls of the right age and, ahem, "virtues". So of course Luo Binghe's early life bad luck kicks in. In the wake of his mother's death there's no one to really care about what happens to him, he's fairly pretty, and the village leaders decide that if they dress him up like a girl the teenaged homeless kid should pass well enough. And hey, y'know, he's probably got a hard life ahead for him anyway -- dying in a brothel of some venereal disease or on the streets of exposure or starvation. At least as a sacrifice, everyone else gets to benefit from his loss! And the kid will get added to a shrine and be remembered as a hero! If anything, he should be happy about this!

Binghe is not happy about this.

But he's also a skinny underfed nobody who is easily overpowered, dressed up like a bride, and tied to a post. So. Not much he can do but wait for the evil deity to come and do whatever horrible thing he's gonna do to him.

Meanwhile, Shen Yuan is pretty sure he's been isekai'd into the over-powered hero of some kind of supernatural adventure story? He's not totally sure because he doesn't recognize the setting, but the signs are there. He's got a shrine-like base of operations (though it seems to have become corrupted/ruined, probably he has to restore it somehow), he has a very resilient and handsome new body with spiritual energy of some kind flowing through him, and a very clearly magical sword. Plus lots of neat starter powers! Though it feels like he has other abilities that have been blocked somehow? Probably he has to level up in order to access them.

When he treks out of his "base" and finds what seems to be a distressed maiden, he takes it for his beginner hero mission. The girl claims that she's been doomed to be sacrificed to an evil god. That sounds a little above Shen Yuan's pay grade for dealing with, so he unties her and decides that they had better just get out of the whole region altogether. He already packed up anything useful from his base, anticipating he might get caught up in an adventure once he left, so they follow the river away from the settlement until they reach another one.

While they travel, Luo Binghe tells Shen Yuan about the cursed deity, Shen Qingqiu, who was cast out of the heavens for slaughtering one of his brethren and has apparently being do-who-knows what to maidens from the local village in exchange for his "protection" ever since. Sounds like a real asshole! And also mid-level boss type bad guy at least. Shen Yuan hopes he doesn't have to fight him, but he probably will.

Thank goodness he found Binghe, though! Clearly the helpful little sister type! He's definitely going to require her assistance if he's going to figure out how to navigate this world and level up his skills enough to take on a god.

[bloodybosom]

[see-arcane]

Seward: Can you tell us what is this illness?

Van Helsing: Not unless everyone gets real cool about a bunch of stuff really quickly.

Sievers: Can you tell us what is this illness?

Von Franz: Well obviously the curse of a vampire. Duh.

Mina, freshly violated and cursed by the vampire: "Maybe I should do suicide about this."

Van Helsing: "How About We Try Killing the Vampire Instead."

Ellen, has been violated and cursed by the horny abuser vampire since puberty: "I need to sacrifice my life to save everyone else."

Von Franz: "Absolutely. You would have been such a cool priestess. Anyway, good luck on the dying, I'll keep your husband from interfering bestie."

[weirdlookindog]

Dreaming of Maiden Sacrifice

source

[jedaos]

[bestworstcase]

“unreliable narrators” is not code for “arbitrarily cherry-pick what you believe to be true from the text based on vibes and what you want to happen, and ignore any textual evidence that contradicts your theory-fanfic on the grounds that narrators are unreliable” it means you have to be skeptical and think critically about what every character says. only by evaluating the text in a holistic manner is it possible to determine the narrative truth.

you cannot just say “well this character is just lying/wrong, because unreliable narrators” – you need to actually interrogate the context. are there discrepancies between what this character said and what has been said by other characters? what about things we’ve been shown, not recounted to us through the lens of a character’s dialogue? does this character have a motivation to lie? are there relevant facts of which this character is not aware that might change their view? is the character stating a conclusion based on logical reasoning from the information they have or are they speaking from emotion? does the character have any biases that might inform their interpretation of what they know or see?

[youssefguedira]

the thing is abt the joenicky wouldn't have stopped searching take is that like. they're not Better Than andy / quynh and they don't necessarily love each other More. i find it interesting to examine the idea that THEY think they couldn't have stopped but ultimately because it's not them i think they'd have no way of understanding andy's position + circumstance would've made them stop in the end. again like in my tag rant i think they're both too concerned with the greater good. they would not place each other over that. in the end.

[mari-lair]

Akane's Kannagi design

[aerithisms]

thinking about how "the moon will sadly watch the roses die in vain, lost no gain, but you're not taking me" was a lyric on sacrifice in 2014 and they've only just now paid it off by confirming that raven was there the night summer left. they've been playing an insane long game with this show

[roodllle]

I go back and forth on being understanding and upset that people don't know/forget that Melina's dagger (Blade of Calling) is found in a one-room, guarded, prison that was built inside the elevator lift that goes to a place no one is supposed to go to anymore (Consecrated Snowfields/Forbidden Lands SoG)

And there's this item on a corpse right outside the room

Official's Attire Grubby blue robe worn by magisterial officials to carry out their grim tasks. Surveillance, executions, gruesome rituals... The darkest duties drive the wheels of mankind.

And here's the description for the Blade of Calling

Blade of Calling Dagger given to one who set out on a journey to fulfill her duty long ago. The power of its former owner, the kindling maiden, is still apparent. The one who walks alongside flame, Shall one day meet the road of Destined Death.

We know that Melina was born at the base of the Erdtree, she was given her duty by Marika, and remembers quotes from her mother. And yet she doesn't remember what it's like to have a loving mother

Melina about Boc: "I think he misses his mother. He wants someone to tell him he's beautiful. Does being born of a mother... Mean one behaves in such a manner?"

I also find it interesting that Melina was given this purpose but now is not doing it for Marika, but for herself and she talks a lot about how she wants to see this world change for the better. Ex.:

Melina: However ruined this world has become, however mired in torment and despair, life endures. Births continue. There is beauty in that, is there not?

My own personal theory is that Marika knew that her first daughter was destined to burn the Erdtree and that scared Marika, so she locked her away and Melina died in that room. I know that doesn't explain the burn marks on her skin or why Melina has a claw/talon mark over her closed eye that goes away when we don't use Death/Giant's Flame but Frenzied Flame. And no I do not think Melina is/was the Gloam Eyed Queen.

[neverpathia]

HEAVY spoilers for sacrifice the maiden

I'm torturing a certain Hero so bad here.

The Voice of the Hero was forced to watch his fellow voices fall, bit by bit, to their own pure loathing in His New and Unending Dawn. They hated the Quiet. They worked to destroy Him, but in doing so, they forgot that they were Him.

So as Quiet's own fragments unwound the threads of His being, they lost themselves to this great unravelling as well. The voices were weakened. They splintered further and further and further; they widened their own cracks.

And Hero was part of them all.

He suffered through every single rip and tear. He begged and he pleaded. He tried his hardest to hold them all together, to intervene, to be at peace. He didn't want anyone to die. He wanted to believe that Quiet had done the right thing as He always had, and he sought to keep it in place amidst all this pain.

The shards succumbed to themselves. The Broken, the Smitten, the Opportunist. One by one they went, one by one they faded. The Paranoid. Even the Contrarian. Gone. Unwound and undone. And Hero would have faded away too, if not for one last act.

The one thing that he'd already done once and could do once more.

There were still remnants of the Shifting Mound within the falling Long Quiet. The black threads that once surrounded and wrapped about each of Her fragments now fell away and drifted to dust. The dormant multitudes rang clear and true. Needed. One last hope for the will of Hero's kin.

All he needed to do was believe that She could send them back to the beginning again, at the heart of it all.

A story. A goal. A blade. A heart.

The weakened Quiet and the last of the Mound fell separate once more. One torn apart into two, reduced into one, torn apart into two. The rift was unsteady, more than it should've been. She became Him. He became Her. The Hero and the Princess. The Maiden and the Huntsman.

A shard of glass lost its reflective sheen. Coated by stains and grime and dust. A Hero had to lose himself. A Hero of one story, the Narrator of another.

You're in the midst of a dungeon.

[alexanderwales]

Pitchposting: The Reused Maiden

(Pitchposting is a way to write up an idea that won't get the honor of becoming a story. Free to a good home.)

Like a lot of good ideas, this one was based on me misreading something. The actual thing was rescued maiden, but my brain doesn't read so well without context, so I read reused maiden, and it fired up some neurons.

Our protagonist is a fifth daughter, in a time when that means she would be a burden on her family. In other times, on other worlds, she might be sent off to become a nun or work as a governess in a socially ambiguous position, or maybe even be sent to an asylum if she was "difficult". In this world, there's always some demand for maidens, even if they're a low birth. When a dragon spews fire above a village in his third flyby that month, the village elders take stock of who might be able to allay the dragon's desire for "unspoilt" flesh.

Everyone agrees that it's best that a maiden goes willingly. There are always stories about what happens when a maiden gets taken by a dragon, and before a sacrifice, those stories become unaccountably upbeat. They pretend that no one really knows what a dragon does with a maiden, that perhaps it's not horrible, and sometimes, yes, the maidens do go to their fate willingly.

Our protagonist goes kicking, screaming, and biting. She vows revenge on her father, her mother, her sisters, and everyone in the village. She says, in a rage, that she will kill the fucking dragon herself if she has to. She has no means to get free of her chains, let alone to kill a dragon, but her anger is hot enough to sustain her even as the night grows cold. She howls as though trying to awaken something inside of her.

She doesn't end up saving herself. A knight in shining armor comes and slays the dragon in glorious battle, which our protagonist only learns about later. The knight is not even aware of her existence, only of the tradition, and anyway is mostly after the hoard.

When the death of the dragon is reported and confirmed, some very sheepish village elders come to where our protagonist is still chained to a rock. It would be possible, perhaps, for everyone to forget this whole awful thing had ever happened, but the protagonist's threats are echoing in everyone's ears, and her horrible howling could be heard through the night. There is some question about how much she meant it when she said that she would "fucking kill you bastards with my bare hands if I ever get free".

After some discussion, it is decided that the protagonist can have no place within the village, if only for the safety of the townsfolk. But there are other villages, and while there's no question about releasing her, those other villages have their own problems: sometimes dragons, sometimes spirits, sometimes ancient curses. Our protagonist has been spared a messy death at the talons of a dragon, but now she's in the position of being a commodity.

She's first sold to an intermediary, a mercenary group or a passing wizard or someone else that gets her onto the next place. If you wanted to write this story, here is where you could pivot into being a different sort of thing: maybe her captor only meant to free her, and this is the start of a romance, because every romance loves an inauspicious and problematic start. But if I were writing this story, she would be treated as the commodity that she is, only well enough that she can be sold as good stock to the next party.

And there would be a next party, someone who wants a sacrificial maiden for a different purpose: appeasing a volcano or calling on the power of the ancestors or something like that.

And again, fate conspires for the sacrifice to not go through, and our protagonist is shuttled off to another place where she's to be put to death for some reason or another.

Astute readers will have noticed that our protagonist has a distinct lack of agency here, and is essentially being manhandled from place to place. This is the wonderful thing about pitchposting: I'm not actually writing this story, so don't have to actually solve these problems. I think it's fine for a story to be about a character with no agency, who is constantly struggling and fighting and trying every trick and still winds up at the mercy of a knight in shining armor coming to rescue her for unrelated reasons. Maybe that says something, or maybe stories don't have to say something.

(And maybe she gets saved by the same knight in shining armor, who has been crossing paths with her while entirely ignorant that it's simply been the same maiden across different kingdoms and continents. This is one of those little nuggets that I think is almost worth writing a full book for, a scene where it's revealed that they have, impossibly, been entwined with each other this entire time. A mistreated, reused maiden and a knight so shiningly pure that he's been the lone driving force behind putting down thirteen different evils as he came across them? I think there's something there.)

But there's a different version where perhaps the maiden gets out of the jams on her own, using only her wits. Maybe she meets with the dragon and dupes him into going to the trap the knight in shining armor has set for him. Maybe she gets offered as a cultic sacrifice to a demon, but she'd dragged a toe across their waxen sigils and ruined the summoning to her benefit. She uses her wits, and her bag of tricks, and a few things she picks up along the way. The reused maiden, scraping by every time, narrowly dodging death but always with death on the horizon like an arctic sunset.

I guess my version of this story is about the rage, but it doesn't have to be that. Maybe it can be about sadder things, like being sad about the uses that a society has deemed you fit for, or the inhumanity of humans, or something like that. I don't know how many times you can reuse the same maiden for this story before it gets to be boring or unbelievable or you've just mined out the available space. My guess would be that five is stretching it, so long as they're varied enough, and one of them looks like one of those suspicious happily-ever-afters that seems to be coming two-thirds of the way through a book.

But as an ending, I like the idea that the maiden eventually gets thrust at the feet of an old crone, bound and gagged, but with blood around her mouth where she bit one of the guards (and she has, after all this time, become very good at biting guards). The witch waits until the guards have retreated, then cuts our protagonist free of her bindings, and our wily spitfire of a protagonist probably does attack immediately after that. But once the hostilities are over, the witch asks for the maiden's stories, how many times she escaped death and at whose hands, and they drink tea as they talk.

I mean, obviously the witch was once a maiden too, and she had her own trials and tribulations before making a successful transition to old crone. Maybe we reveal that the witch has been a guiding hand this whole time, except that seems needlessly cruel (but perhaps this works as just one more injustice inflicted on the maiden, another battle to fight). I tend to think endings are important and need to be considered, but they're also very hard. Maybe we can have some cosmic reveal about why this world seems to have endless uses for maidens, but that leans just a little too meta for my current tastes.

Look, I'm not going to write this story, even if this was a longer post than pitchposting is supposed to be. There's a lot to be said about the role of the virgin sacrifice, and there's a lot that's been said, with much of it clumsy. There are needles that I would be worried about threading, particularly with regards to sex and sexual violence, implied or otherwise. The obvious thing to do, if you're a virgin about to be sacrificed for the third time, is to just lose your virginity, which ... certainly is a plot beat, I guess. I'm not sure I'd want to go there, or how I would go there. It's hard not to think of the whole thing as social commentary, which makes it hard not to write it like that.

But I think it would be better being its own thing. I guess if you disagree, you could just write it some other way.

[toxicmetalzine]

Demon Sacrifice

DEMON SACRIFICE to release "UNDER THE BLACKLIGHT OF DIVINE" Get the details right here: https://toxicmetalzine.com/post/demon-sacrifice-to-release-under-the-blacklight-of-divine���

[jeweled-blue-eyes]

Joan of Arc isekai AU where after the real saintess was martyred, her twin appears and pretends she is her sister who was resurrected by the lord in order to get revenge on those who betrayed her

[lifehunted]

anyway one of these days i should draw darda eating varre. whatever

so funny to me that's basically his canon end here. ok freak