#she used to collect little pig sculptures :)

[sillaygoofball]

Normalize making pmvs based off days you’ve had two years ago

[jackiezenauthor]

Maria's fairytale ending

Context that led to the creation of this story here

Thank you @laurasimonsdaughter for the inspiration and support.

Special thanks to my two fairy friends who endured through proofreading and editing with me, blessing us all with precious advice such as cutting off the suspension points that I so much love dropping everywhere in my writing.

Story and art by Jackie Zen (me)

Trigger warning:

people and a dragon getting very hurt at some point

no nsfw

magic and sorcery

author liberties (tried to stick to russian fairytale lore as much as possible but I'm not sure about the bird)

Maria’s fairytale ending

„This was the first completed sculpture that this artist ever made.” he explained, pointing at a crude representation of maybe a bear, maybe a pig? Maria walked around, trying to figure it out. „And the first piece of my own hoard” he said proudly. He went on explaining about the stone itself, the complicated nature of sculpting in it and how young and absolutely confused the artist was when he offered an entire silver coin for it.

She watched him over the little statue’s pedestal. He was just as handsome as the first day she’d seen him, across the fire lake conjured for her and her brother’s safety. Unlike the Bear King, this man could have easily flown over the flames on his own. She was certain now that he knew the fire was an illusion. But he hadn’t... he’d just kept showing up every time she’d walk around the banks, trying to strike up conversation from afar...

In truth, that had been the wiser choice. Aside from his dashing human looks, his true shape, and the one he could fly in, sported a rather intimidating bouquet of heads. Each overflowed with fangs and horns, each able to spit some terrifying element, from fire to what looked like acid... Her heart would have abdicated, no question, if he’d just plopped right there, on her side of the bank, from the very start.

„Am I going in too much detail?” he paused, noticing her glance.

She had indeed lost focus for a second, but that was because he’d mentioned minerals and tools that she’d never heard of before. She already had a mental note to hit his library and look them up later.

A man-sized statue with many hands framed him from behind, sculpted so skillfully that she found herself expecting it to come to life at any moment. The sculptor’s name under it was the same as for the little nondescript animal they had been looking at.

„No, just enjoying the view...” she smiled. „I knew that your kind loved collecting things, but I had no idea how much meaning each of them holds...”

„Let me know when you tire, however...” he grinned, his back just a bit straighter, reaching for her waist. „I hear that your kind is rather short on patience...”

„You’re one to talk...” she scoffed, playfully. „This would have been maybe a day’s wait, at most, if you just waited for my brother to return...” she brazenly moved her hand in his general direction.

If she were anywhere but here, it would have been seen as outrageously improper. Instead, as soon as she started acting and speaking appropriately for her upbringing and gender, he’d started fretting about her health, as if she was hallucinating thanks to some illness. She was getting used to speaking her mind clearly, as of late. Saved her from being fed all the questionably healthy concoctions he kept bringing in, and she was starting to enjoy it too. 

„I still don’t get why I’m supposed to ask anyone other than you...” he snorted, gently brushing the edge of her chin. “It’s not like I’m marrying your bother.” he rolled his eyes ever so slightly…

„Still not married...” she giggled, putting her palm between their lips, as he leaned over to steal a kiss.

He’d been growing rather impatient in the past few days. While he did put up with her human traditions, it wasn’t without grumbling. In truth, she was starting to have second thoughts about keeping up with this too. After all, even with Ivan’s blessing, what priest or church would even agree to marry her to a dragon to begin with? Would money really make a difference? Despite being the Tsar, not ever her uncle would be caught alive publicly blessing a union like theirs…

Her brother was supposed to have arrived by now, she’d even left him a note... a bit rushed, true, but still... What was he doing?

The dragon kissed the line between her fingers and her palm instead, his breath warming the little space between them, making her question all human rites and traditions, and her own sanity along with them, as their eyes inevitably met. Her heart challenged the spirits of thunder, deafening against her ears.

“You really should wear more rings…” he purred.

She found herself questioning whether that thing called ‘virtue’ was really worth keeping… it was becoming harder and harder to remember what that word even meant, lately…

A loud knock restored sovereignty to her head… not without her heart kicking and screaming about it first.

“What is it?” he asked, his voice oscillating between pleasant and annoyed.

“There is a matter requiring your attention, at the gates…” a servants voice broke through the closed doors, just as Maria slipped out of his arms, straightening her dress.

Nobody was allowed in his hoard room without explicit permission which, according to the maids, had never been given. Everyone was supposed to speak clearly too, however, which was a bigger challenge for the newest hires, of which, currently, there was just one.

“Dmitry?” he sighed, heading for the doors.

“My liege!” the soldier bowed as he stepped out.

“Speak!” he commanded. “Use all of your words!”

Dmitry dared a glance towards Maria, who was just about to reach the door as well: if this matter required him to leave the room, visiting was clearly done for today.

“It shouldn’t take long…” the dragon turned as he noticed her approach as well. “You can look around some more if you want, tell me if you have any favorites.” he smiled sweetly, trying her heart again. “Maria, my love, all that is mine, is also yours…” he added before she could argue, her name sounding magical in his voice.

“We’re not married yet…” Maria sighed, irked at how she still had no name to call him by. It was so odd, referring to him as ‘the dragon’, but it was impossible for her human throat and mouth to reproduce the sound that he declared as his name. Despite his excitement at having her choose a name herself, she just couldn’t think of any that did him justice… All the names she could think were simply… not good enough.

He grumbled something about human customs again. As far as he was concerned, the entire event had already happened, when he asked her for a bridge to reach and marry her, and she cast said bridge. He’d even brought up crossing that bridge on his own two human feet, as if the sturdiness of her magic hold somehow matched her resolve. And she had to admit, she’d never cast anything as sturdy in her life before.

For a construction cast entirely out of a towel, it not only held, but it could have easily been mistaken for something built under the Tsar’s architects. If only she could brag to anyone about it too… Other than her nanny, who had taught her the basics and was still at the Tsar’s castle, nobody cared to listen… especially not Ivan.

The dragon had been the first man in her life not needing to be babied about her magical abilities. Even with her own brother, she had to give a nearby ox a voice and make it claim to be doing all the saving and the conjuring. If he would have thought even for a second that it was her casting, he’d have just surrendered to the Bear King right away…

Ivan never saw her as anything but a dainty little sister who needed protection against the entire world. Had he not gone out to hunt every other day, she might have ended up locked in the hut in the middle of the lake for God knew how long… Every time, she’d wait until he left before unlocking her room and going out exploring, up until the dog started wagging its tail, anticipating his return… Heaven forbid, him ever catching her talking to a man, too, even with the acre of lake between them… She was grateful for the care, but it really was too much, sometimes… Maybe, now that she was marrying a dragon, he’d finally get the peace to focus on his own duties as a prince.

“There is a man at the gates.” the soldier spoke again as the dragon motioned him to. “He is rather angry about something, or someone, being stolen from him… He’s also rambling about some dog?”

Maria perked up. This had to be Ivan.

“About time!” the dragon cheered up as well! “Let him in, treat him with most care, make sure his room is cleaned again and have the cook fire up the ovens and crack open the barrels, he knows which! We’re celebrating tonight!”

“He looks rather… hostile…” the soldier said, conflicted.

“Ah, yes… I’ve left room for some misunderstandings, apparently…” the dragon laughed drily.

“Let me talk to him first…” Maria offered. “I’m sure that he’ll calm down once he knows I’m safe and well.”

“Of course, my love. I’m sure you’re eager to catch up with him too. I will apologize for the matter with the key myself, however. It had been rather unnecessary of me to do that, indeed…” he nodded, then paused for a second before turning to the guard again. “Did he bring the dog along?”

He hadn’t…

That made for one less thing to fret over as they headed for the castle yard, to greet their long-awaited guest. They started with almost a skip in their step, but it gradually wore off as the reality of the situation dawned on them… There was plenty to regret, on both ends, about how they’ve left that hut in the middle of the lake… Hopefully, Ivan would be willing to listen…

…

He wasn’t.

As they stepped outside, the atmosphere crashed hard on them. Not only was Ivan refusing all hospitality, but he kept his sword unsheathed, glaring at whomever would dare even shift their weight towards him. His expression only changed once he noticed Maria, but even then, it was short lived, as his eyes fell on the dragon.

He wasted no time before rushing him with his sword.

“I don’t think this is helping…” Maria held onto the dragon on pure instinct as he grabbed her and jumped away from Ivan’s slicing blade. “Let me go to him! He won’t harm me.”

“You go to him once his sword is sheathed and no earlier.” the dragon hissed, moving once again away from Ivan’s reach. “I have never seen a reasonable man behave this way, and I will not risk your life like that.”

The guards moved to block her brother, but he shook them off easily: he was a skilled swordsman, after all. It did give the dragon time to shift, however, and carry her to what he considered safety, which, in typical dragon fashion, was a tower… all the way in the southern garden.

“Throw this at him!” she handed him her handkerchief as he went to face her brother once more. She had no time to explain what it would do. A cry of pain let them know that Ivan had started hurting the people in his way, and the dragon took off in a rush.

She watched him fly away, his seven heads bumping into each other, as if having a disagreement, which they probably did… It was something that she had yet to wrap her only head around: how he could function as one person, in human shape, and seven minds, as a dragon. They all seemed to agree that they liked her, but she wasn’t sure if they also agreed on how to show it. How many of those minds were willing to capture Ivan unharmed? Could he even be captured when he became like this?

Ah, if only she could wield a sword!

‘Swords are men’s toys…’ her nanny used to laugh. ‘They go around, waving them around at the world, as if they bring anything but fear and pain…’

She could feel them both right now… the fear, and the pain… her heart ached as the dragon… her dragon roared and her brother bellowed. She couldn’t see a thing from the tower: the entire castle fenced her view like an overbearing mother hen. Here too…

Every single moment of her life, she’d been nothing but someone to protect, to care for, to keep away from any possible harm. Whether it was her brother, her cousins, her servants, and now, her dragon too…

Not even her nanny would leave her be, even when she’d insisted to learn at least protective spells… All she was willing to teach her was how to animate and change animals and objects, to various stages between illusion and reality.

When she’d summoned that lake, it had been the greatest day of her life, and it was still hard to remember how exactly had she done it, in fact… All she remembered was how tired and absolutely done with being chased around she was, especially as the ox under her spell started wearing thin, under the relentless Bear King’s pursuit.

Her dragon roared again. No, that was not a roar. He sounded hurt…

Of course, the fight was not fair. He was trying to capture Ivan without harming him, while Ivan had no reason to restrain himself, at all. There was no way that this would end up well… She had to go down there now!

The trap door under her feet unlocked easily enough, but it still took some time. It led into another room, closed with yet another trap door… if this was how this entire tower was, it would take too long to leave it. She had to find another way, and fast.

There was straw and rope in the second room… it would do. She grabbed a few handfuls of each and got to working as fast as her fingers could keep up. Blood stained the straw as she worked the ties tight and the rope cut through her skin, but she paid it no mind: if anything, it seemed to help the enchantment entwine faster along.

Another pained growl resonated through the castle yard…

“Come on…” she urged the little straw doll, blowing some of her own life into it. She’d have to slay a couple of rabbits to get it back later, but they had plenty of those around the place…

The enchantment caught and the doll flapped its straw and rope wings, pushing its head placeholder ahead, as if trying to screech. No sound came out, since there was no mouth, and the doll turned its faceless head towards her in a mute complaint.

“I’ll finish you later, with emeralds for eyes and steel for a beak!” she promised. “I’ll even make your wings out of leather and your feet of iron!” she added, as the doll seemed to consider her offer.

It accepted, flapping its wings and rising to the air outside the window. She had to climb the sill to reach it, but she was planning to leave that way all the same…

The distance to the ground seemed thrice as large, now that it was right under her feet. She took a deep breath.

“There’s nobody else who can finish you, so you better make sure I reach the ground unharmed!” she warned, before letting go of the windowsill and grabbing entirely on the doll.

A building crashed in the distance, horses neighing in distress…

She jumped, her fingers digging deep within the straw. She really, really, really should have thought about putting something sturdier in it and even some handles…

She cried in regret and terror as the doll threatened to come apart under her weight, way, way, way too high above the ground.

Flames burst alive under her fingers, setting the doll ablaze, and her hands with it. That was the last thing she needed right now. She prayed to any gods or spirits that might be listening, tears sizzling against the burning flesh, straw and rope, as she started plummeting towards the ground with increasing speed. Her fingers wanted to let go, but her mind forced them gripping for as long as possible, fighting for survival.

There was no telling, with the terror and pain, how long she’d been in the air, by the time her dragon slid backwards into view, avoiding a raging Ivan once more. She realized too late that she was screaming aloud, as her dragon turned all seven heads towards her, mirroring her despair.

He shouldn’t have. The cost for looking away from his opponent was too steep.

Seeing nothing but his target, Ivan closed the distance between them and sliced through the nearest head, cutting it clean off. It didn’t even have time to understand what was going on as it tumbled to the ground, under the horrified eyes of Maria and the six remaining heads. It tried to scream as pain registered at last, but there were no lungs to carry any sound.

“NO!” she yelled, but her voice didn’t carry either, a dull screech filling the air around her instead, fire licking at her face like flapping wings, as she found herself turned in the air and dropped right where she wanted: between her brother and her dragon.

The fire didn’t burn any longer. She barely had any time to register letting go of a flame shaped vaguely like a bird, before her eyes landed on her brother, who watched her, not with recognition, but measuring, as if assessing whether she was an obstacle or not.

“STOP THIS INSTANT, IVAN!” she yelled.

He barely spared her another glance before rushing her dragon once more… of course…

Cold realization dawned on her as she pulled off her one ring, waiting for him to stop in his track just for a moment. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust her abilities, or that he was protective of her. He didn’t listen nor see her… ever. Her voice carried, he always nodded when she spoke and seemed to hear her words, looked her way, but he never listened to her. Nobody did, not even her dragon… although at least he saw her.

“HALT!” she commanded, throwing her ring at him. It hit the ground instead of his body, but it was close enough for the enchantment to work anyway, wrapping around his legs and throwing him entirely off balance, a loud, bony sound telling of a chin hitting the ground and teeth crushing against each other.

“YOU TOO!” she barked as the dragon, who was coiling to strike, overcome with pain and anger. “Did you even TRY to use that handkerchief I gave you?” she glared, her arms to her hips. To his credit, all remaining heads froze in their track, looking sheepish. Half of them were still angry, the other half were throwing her bewildered glances. Neither dared say a thing. She didn’t risk looking at the seventh head, lest her anger gave way to sorrow.

She stomped to her brother before he could come out of the falling daze, stepping on his wrist as he was still gripping the sword, ready to swing it once more.

“It’s all about these blasted things with you, every time!” she pressed her weight on her foot until he finally let go and she could remove the cursed sword out of his reach. “Weapons, fighting, hunting… never talking, never listening… Here! All yours!” she threw it to the bird-shaped flame as it hovered nearby, faceless but eager, like a puppy waiting by their master’s table. “Steel for your beak and leather for your feathers.”

The bird caught the sword with its body and soon enough, it’s screech went sharp and painfully vibrant. She’d expected it to store it, but it could build itself up instead… That was unheard of, but she wasn’t going to complain now…

“Give me iron!” the bird spoke. “Give me emeralds! And more leather!”

“I will, as promised!” she nodded, stepping on Ivan’s back and reaching for the remainder of his weapons.

He tried to shake her off, as she used the dagger to cut off his sheathe belt and his quiver.

“Halt! Yee of ears that do not hear!” the bird screeched and Ivan moved to cover his ears instead of fighting her off. No… he touched them, as if trying to see if they were still there.

“Did you take it?” Maria glared at the bird. It was hard to say if it noticed anything other than her tone, with just a beak on its face. “His hearing?”

“What use does he make of it anyway?” the bird cawed coldly.

“Return it!” she commanded.

“As you wish…” the bird scoffed.

“Unhand me, wench! What have you done to my sister?” Ivan sneered from under her knee, as his hearing returned without a sign, not even a glimmer of magic.

“I have always been your sister, you oaf!” Maria pulled at the hair in the back of his head in anger, like she always did, since they were kids. Only now it wasn’t about a biscuit he wouldn’t share, so she pulled a lot harder, until some hair snapped under her grip.

“No… you can’t be!” he sounded outraged, but unsure.

“Here! A bonus! Use them for your nest or something…” she threw her earrings and the entire quiver, brimming with arrows, at the bird, watching its wings spread wider as it consumed everything. “That fence is made of iron. Take its gate…” she pointed. She’d handle the apologies later.

“My sister… she would never…” Ivan almost sounded as wailing.

“Right, your dainty and demure sister…” she hissed, stepping off him after making double sure that he had no more weapons. “Maybe you should have thought of me before trying to kill my boyfriend…”

She dared look at the fallen head at last, her heart breaking loudly in her ears.

“I can help, master!” the bird hopped by her, pushing its head under her arm, like a puppy, looking to comfort her, watching her with many eyes made of more gems than just the emeralds from her earrings. Ivan must have hidden his gem stash in the quiver again. “Give me one more part of you, and I will bring you the Water of Life and the Water of Death before you know it!”

She looked at the bird. It was smart… too smart for a doll made of straw and rope, even if she counted the blood too… Whatever was animating it, it was no longer her life behind it, but something old and knowledgeable… She wondered what the cost for its name would be…

“Would an arm do?” she asked, looking at her hands, deaf to the chorus of protests that the dragon’s heads broke into, at her words. Ugly scars stretched all across, halfway up to the elbows, as if she’d burned not just a few minutes, but many years ago. She didn’t need both of them to cast, and she could always build herself a replacement, with enough time and dedication…

“You already gave me your blood, flesh and tears…” the bird said. “And I have no need for your bones. Steel and iron are better.” it cackled proudly.

The dragon almost lost it when she moved the negotiation to her eyes, tongue, ears…

“You’d give your eyes for that?” Ivan was outraged.

“That is your brother-in-law, so I’d watch my tongue if I were you!” Maria was livid. “What were you even thinking? Coming into someone’s house and…” she swallowed, unable to finish the sentence. “If you were raised in a cave, you’d still have better manners than this!” she took her handkerchief as a concerned dragon head reached over her shoulder, gently.

“Give me your hair.” the bird said, its many eyes measuring her with sharp intelligence. “A strand is enough…”

“We’re fine…” the dragon head on her shoulder said carefully, swallowing often as to avoid blowing ice on her while it spoke. “There’s still six of us…”

“It must be a long journey, and I’d rather you return faster than later.” Maria ignored it, untying her hair. The iron pins, that the maids had so carefully put in it this morning, became food for the bird too, since she wouldn’t be needing any for a while ahead… “Take it…” she held most of it out for the bird to cut it, with its new sharp steel beak.

It didn’t wait for a second invitation, taking off with the hair without another word. Whatever she had brought to life, it knew what it was doing.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

“Are you both sure that this is enough?” she asked the bird as it returned with two heads on its body: one carrying the Water of Life in its beak, the other, the Water of Death.

“You just wait a little longer, master… It would have worked it I just brought a single drop, even.” the head who brought the Water of Death spoke proudly as the other one just nodded, focusing on not swallowing their delivery.

They had realigned the head to the neck, but it seemed to be taking forever. The other six heads dozed in a semblance of patience on the floor, his tail slapping against the ground like a mildly annoyed cat.

“Where is your belligerent sibling?” the idle head asked, looking around the hallway.

A couple of days had passed since the fight, and the place was going through repairs already. Her dragon was getting rather hissy about not being allowed to turn to human, but if he did, the now reattaching neck would have disappeared entirely, according to the head maid, who seemed more knowledgeable about dragons than even the dragon himself.

“On his way home.” she said, checking the head for the twentieth time. “I’ve had a talk with my uncle and we agreed that Ivan’s not to touch any weapons again until he learns manners.”

“The Tsar agreed?” the bird’s many eyes glinted with interest.

“Of course.” Maria stood tall. “Hard to disagree with a sorceress who can put a curse on your bloodline at any time, since she carries it around within herself… especially after she set fire to your entire garden from three kingdoms away.”

“But nobody can cast fire that far…” the bird leaned its head, looking intrigued.

“You know that, and I know that… my uncle doesn’t…” she winked. “Alright… bring the Water of Life!” she rushed the bird closer, the other heads popping up from the floor like flowers in spring.

“How will you know if the Tsar keeps his word?” the birds second head spoke as soon as the Water of Life spilled over the lifeless head.

“The same way that I set his garden on fire…” she grinned mysteriously, looking at the nearby mirror. Her nanny’s face reflected on its surface for just a moment, a proud smirk blooming in her cheeks as she went on with her daily royal servant chores.

The bird’s many eyes blinked, looking her over with growing amusement, a laughter erupting from its burning body as the two heads rejoined into one.  

“I answered you out of a whim.” it said, wiping at its many eyelids as if it had teared up. “But it looks like I’ll be having the time of my life, in your service, Sorceress Maria.” it leaned into a deep bow. Its iron feet clinked against the stone floor as it took off, cackling as it circled around the hall in merry acrobatics.

“That was quite a nap I took…” the head next to her spoke, blinking drowsily as it moved against her arm for the first time in days.

“You would have napped long and hard if my canary wasn’t here to help…” she kissed his forehead.

“Me next!” said one head.

“Me next!” the others echoed in turn.

“Hmm… Canary…” the bird mused, flying over the heads as Maria took turns, kissing each and every forehead. “I like that! I’ll be that!” it chirped right by her ear, landing as the cutest fire-orange Canary that she had ever seen.

It’s eyes were black and beady, like one of her nanny’s expertly made dolls, but if you didn’t look too closely, you could easily mistake it for a regular bird.

“Well, find yourself somewhere else to perch… This shoulder, along with its owner, has a lot of catching up to do with one, very impatient dragon…” her dashing human-shaped dragon chased it away, pulling Maria to his arms. He’d waited as much as his last dragon forehead getting kissed before turning, no more.

“Isn’t impatience something of my kind?” she teased, moving her arms around his neck. A thin line stretched right across his right collarbone, almost invisible.

“I can admit when I’m proven wrong…” he huffed against her lips, hovering, just about to touch them with his own, but not quite.

She closed the distance, their noses bumping into each other. She chuckled with him, but didn’t pull away, tilting her head just enough to avoid repeating the impact. His lips were just as soft as she’d imagined, and she indulged in exploring their every corner. She wasn’t sure what else to do, but by the amused look in his eyes, it was clear that it this wasn’t quite it.

“I didn’t get your brother’s blessing” he teased, pulling away.

“Ah, it’s not like you’re marrying my brother too…” she rolled her eyes, ever so slightly.

And they lived happily ever after…

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Thank you for reading all the way through my little story. I hope you enjoyed it!

This is the first story that I ever made public, so I am a little nervous.

If you have any suggestions or know any guides that could help my writing improve, please feel free to let me know.

[ashintheairlikesnow]

For Vampire Chris! What if he and Jake went to a museum and came across some of Tooley's paintings? And Chris has a panic attack! We would finally get some Jake comfort. And maybe Chris would reveal more horrible things that Tooley had done to him.

CW: Discussion of death, blood, vampire whumpee, caretaker and whumpee

The sun sets early in the winter, and it's the only reason they can make this work.

Chris is barely awake even so, sipping from a coffee cup Jake filled with the contents of one of his blood packs, hoping he doesn't trip and spill and lead to Jake having some very awkward, panicked explanations to make to anyone nearby.

He'd slept in the truck Jake borrowed from Nat most of the way over here, curled in the passenger seat. He looks for all the world like any high schooler who stayed up too late the night before, dragged out by his family, forced to go learn when all he wants is rest.

Chris is draped in a hooded sweatshirt pulled on over his head, hair mussed from sleeping in the closet in the little nest-bed he made for himself in there. It sticks out like stray from beneath the hood he's pulled up, coppery strands occasionally covering his eyes and making him shove them out of the way with a snort that has no right to be as adorable as it is, considering the monster who makes the sound.

Not a monster, no. Not really.

Or his monster, anyway, the same way his mother is his mother. Jake is starting to understand the little vampire - more than three times his own age - has chosen him for family now.

The sweater he wears is kind of a joke, actually. Jake bought it weeks ago from a website that puts the covers of books on clothes, and it's an old cover image from Dracula.

Jake thought it was funny, anyway. Nat was less amused. Chris only smiled and said something about being happy the hairy palms thing isn't true.

The air is chilly, and Jake shivers a little as they head in from the parking lot across a small sidewalk next to a park and toward the museum itself, but of course Chris doesn't even notice. He seems to be enjoying it, the way it blows around his hair as they make their way slowly up the steps and past the row of Grecian-style columns that mark the entrance.

Jake has to visit for one of his classes, an extra-credit something-or-other, and Chris had asked to go along with him.

Jake had been hesitant, but seeing the way the vampire's green eyes sparkle as he moves around in public like any other person, well... he feels like he made the right choice to bring him along now.

"Finish up your drink, you can't take anything in once we pay and get past the lobby," Jake says, and Chris nods, gulping the last of the blood as fast as he can as they push through wide double-doors. Jake tries not to imagine how it must feel, swallowing thick congealing cooled blood. Someone's life, someone's heartbeat, down your throat...

Really, is he that much different? Jake has eaten a dozen cows' worth of beef in his life.

Does Chris see them all as just livestock? He doesn't act like it, but then, there are people who treat pigs or cows like pets and not like food...

His stomach flips a little and he forces himself to look around, up at the chandelier at the high ceiling, the heavy wooden desk they have to walk to off to the side to get their tickets. To stop trying to understand if Chris is a sort of stray they've adopted, or if he's a higher-level predator living with prey.

Once Chris drops the cup into a trash can, Jake throwing a couple wadded-up tissues on top so no one can accidentally see the smear of red around the edge of the lid, they buy their tickets, and wind their way through and past the little velvet ropes that mark off the entrance.

The museum opens before them into a grand hall, with paintings the size of two-story buildings on either side, permanent installations in the museum. Commissioned for its opening, sometime back in the 70's.

Jake picks up a brochure so they know which way to go - LGBTQ+ Art in Pre-War America is the temporary exhibit he's here to see, traveling work that is usually housed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

"Oh, nice, it's on the first floor. Looks like you go through a couple of 'specialty' rooms, just showing off stuff from the in-house collection. Sounds cool, right?"

Chris, looking from side to side at the gigantic paintings that hang on the walls in the opening hall, hums softly, a tuneless constant sound. He doesn't answer Jake's question. He hums often, and Jake barely notices any longer, but there's something edged to it, now. As if just being around the paintings is making him nervous.

"Okay, little man, let's go over here." He touches Chris's arm, lightly, through the thick fabric of his sweater. The vampire looks over at him, smiling with his lips pressed together to hide his teeth from any potential prying eyes.

He follows easily, but he sticks closer to Jake than he normally does, and his eyes are constantly roving. They move through an exhibit of Pre-Colombian pottery first, on their way to the room in the back where the temporary showcase is.

Jake watches Chris's fingers twitch with the urge to touch, to learn by feeling the bumps and ridges in the ancient clay, and how he holds back as best he can. His urge to lift the clear protective plastic boxes right off the pottery so he can get at it is nearly physically painful.

Jake pretends not to see it when Chris's fingers trail along a column, settling for the white-painted rectangle the pottery is balanced on, taking in the rough texture smoothed by the matte paint.

"Did you ever meet anyone like you that was old enough to have made stuff like this?" Jake asks, stopping in front of a water jug in the shape of a man playing a flute with a dog at his feet. The dog wears a carved smile marked with disturbingly human-looking teeth. The paint it must have been covered in is worn by time, leaving the reddish-brown of the clay behind, with the faintest streaks of white still in the crevices.

"No," Chris replies, tilting his head, making direct eye contact with the statue in a way he never quite can do with any real person. Not comfortably, anyway. Jake has seen him force it and shudder afterwards, overwhelmed. When he'd asked about it, Chris had said he never liked looking at anyone's eyes, even before, when he was alive. It's too much, was all he would say. It's always too much. "None, um, none of us live that long."

"Why not?" They're alone in the room. It's the only reason Jake feels safe asking.

Chris's tongue runs over the sharpening bumps of his growing-in fangs, pressing against them, easing the itch and the ache of their return. After a second, he pulls a plastic bat on a cord from inside his sweater and puts the bat into his mouth, chewing on it idly, jaw working. "I, I, I don't know. That's just what what what my, my, my pack told me."

"I thought vampires lived in covens."

"No." Chris doesn't elaborate on this one. He can be weirdly secretive about how he lived before he came to Nat's, before he was pulled out of a basement, a living drug for a wealthy asshole.

Secretive, or just forgetting whatever wasn't essential.

He moves away to another pedestal, a shard broken off of a larger vessel, marked with a deep white and intense black angular design. He hums again, and Jake takes the hint and leaves him alone.

They spend several more minutes looking over the pottery before they head through a second room full of what must just be the favorite pieces of museum employees, as there doesn't seem to be much rhyme or reason, and each little card with the name of the piece and its maker has a paper next to it with a note on why each employee loves this piece in particular. Chris lingers around older things, a woven tapestry from medieval England, landscapes from the 19th century. He stares for a while at a painting called The Country Path by Joseph Poole Addy, a pale watercolor of winter trees with bare branches breaking the line of sky and a woman bundled in a coat carrying a basket down an equally colorless road.

Chris's humming getting louder, and he rocks a little, forward and back, his eyes moving again and again through the lines of the painting.

Jake wonders what it is about this one specifically that catches Chris like that, and when the vampire finally moves on he checks the employee's statement. Joseph Poole Addy, Irish painter in the 19th and 20th centuries, blah blah, something something countryside... Jake frowns, and glances over at Chris, who isn't looking back. He's moved on to something else.

Jake decides to ask him later.

They make it to the exhibit they're here to see, and Jake whistles under his breath as he enters. There are vibrant, saturated paintings lining the walls, a couple of large sculptures on the floor that still are taller than he is, a few smaller ones on pedestals. The work is mostly figurative, although there's some early abstraction there, a hint of the contemporary push to take even figurative work out of simply being an echo of a real life thing.

Chris looks at a sculpture, his head cocked so far to the side it looks almost birdlike, not quite human. Jake thinks his own neck would ache for days if he tried to do that. "Must've been, um, later," He mumbles to himself.

Jake files that away in his mental list of things to talk to Chris about later.

He walks slowly along the line of paintings. The whole point of being here is that he's supposed to pick a specific piece and write a short essay about it and the artist who made it, prove he saw it in person.

The class itself is about how to encourage better outcomes for healthcare in marginalized populations - but if she's giving out extra-credit for looking at queer art, well, Jake is happy to spend an hour in a museum.

After his dismal performance on the last test, he could use whatever credit he can get. Besides, the exhibit is actually kind of cool with that in mind. Every one of these artists was in some way outside of the sort of het ideal, and Jake smiles a little as he catches the heaviness of a look between two men seated across a table from one another, looks over the clasped hands of women, sitting with everything from shoulder to hip touching, who are listed as 'friends visiting the riverbank'.

Art that celebrates, hidden in plain sight. Art that rebels by sliding details in under the surface where only those looking for them will find them.

Each piece has another little paper, although this just has details about the artist and their work, what they were known for. He can use it as a jumping-off point for his paper, anyway.

"You, you, you finished her," Chris whispers, standing in front of a sculpture of a woman with her head thrown back as if in uproarious laughter, a woman with curls expertly carved so that her hair seems to have been there before the stone it's made of somehow. "I wonder if she, um, if if if she saw it."

"What'd you say, Chris?" Jake blinks, pulled out of his own internal reverie.

"Nothing," Chris responds, and walks slowly around the statue. The woman's smile is a shining light in the room. No one could carve like that without being at least a little in love with the subject.

Jake wanders away and then comes to an abrupt stop before a large painting, probably taller than Chris is. The background is near-total darkness with only a suggestion of stone, a single beam of light shining down to illuminate the central figure.

A naked boy clothed only in scraps of torn cloth that only emphasize his nakedness everywhere else is crouched in terror. His knees are bent and his feet are on the floor, one hand holding his weight with fingers slightly curled, his spine bent and arched as if he is caught in the midst of turning to look up to find the direction of the light. His other hand is thrown out, as if trying to ward off an attack.

He bleeds from a dozen or more places, the blood curving perfectly around his form, giving it extra weight and heft that makes it seem like he'll step out of the canvas, grab Jake, and shake him.

Jake's heart starts to race as he stares.

There are bones littering the ground around the thin, wasted boy, not bleached but sort of yellowed, marked with little notches as if cut with a knife. There might still be bits of skin attached to some of them, a hint of muscle. The detail makes Jake sick, but his panic, that comes from something else entirely. Just behind the panicked boy there is a body, as if just fallen, the eyes still open in the final terrified throes of death. The body's fingers are still dug into the dirt floor as if the dead man had been trying to pull himself somewhere, to escape.

A skull watches with eerie cheer from one corner of the painting, a few teeth missing and knocked out from its garish grin.

Barely visible, a thin wash of grayish-white, there is a pale, gnarled hand near the bottom reaching out from the background as if to grab the boy's ankle and drag him into the darkness.

Count Ugolino's Last Son, oils, 1932, reads the little plaque beside the painting. Its faint brassy shine glints in the carefully calibrated light. Edward Tooley, 1907 - 1936.

Jake swallows, but the lump in his throat doesn't budge, and he swallows again. And again. He can't take his eyes off the boy's painted hair, a dirtied copper, strawberry-blond badly in need of a wash. The wide green eyes with their terror writ large and clear, painted with lovingly perfect detail.

The boy in the painting is the perfect identical twin of the vampire who is still staring at the sculpture on the other side of the room. The fear in his face is so expertly done as to seem more photographic than painted in oil. The blood that drips to the ground follows his anatomy with absolute perfection. The bones are not bleached by they so often are in paintings, no, these...

These...

Jake holds his phone up and takes a photo, and then another of the little plaque.

"Chris." His voice cracks and Jake clears his throat. His heart is still pounding. "Chris, come look at this."

"Yes, Jake," Chris answers, sounding a little faint, and then he seems to simply appear at Jake's elbow, the teenage boy who has seen two world wars and a half-dozen smaller, stupider ones.

He goes still at Jake's side when he looks up. Jake looks over, just slightly, glancing sidelong to see a look of something like... wistfulness on the vampire boy's face.

"Tooley," He breathes. His hand goes up, and out, and he would have touched the canvas if Jake hadn't reached out and grabbed on to stop him. Chris jumps a little and turns to meet Jake's gaze. His eyes are pink-tinged in the whites, as if he's holding back tears. "Is, is, is he famous?"

"I guess. He's... he's here, isn't he?"

"He always wanted to, um, to to to to be famous." Chris's eyes move over the details, but it's not with surprise, it's with easy familiarity. He's seen this painting before.

He's been this painting before.

"That's you, isn't it?" Jake asks in a hushed voice. "Like, that was really you."

Chris looks away again, a faint flush in his cheeks. He's full enough of blood for it to happen, and you'd never know he isn't alive if you didn't already. "Yes," He whispers, and wipes at the corner of his eye with one hand. "That, that, that's me."

"Were you his model?" Jake blinks, looking back over the painted twin of the vampire beside him. The fear in the boy's face, woven in with a kind of awful resignation. It's all so perfectly rendered.

"Yes. Sort, um. Sort of. He, he, he kept me in a room." Chris exhales, slowly, and his eyes shift over to the paper with the little bit of biographical information on it. Edward Tooley's early works focused on landscapes or retreads of common historical subjects, only to find greater excellence and focus when he began to paint, again and again, the same figure - a representation of the darkness of the human soul - he stated appeared to him and demanded to be portrayed... art historians believe Tooley was driven by the demons of the Great War that had taken his family from him one by one to seek out uncomfortable subjects that force viewers to see the damage humans do to one another...

Chris's nose wrinkles as he reads, his lips moving slightly with the words as he takes them in. "I never did that. Never, um, wanted to be painted. Also, um this, um. He was... wasn't... he wasn't... wasn't like the paper says."

Jake looks over, reads it himself. Gregarious, sociable, popular with the libertine art crowd... he frowns. "What part is wrong?"

"This." Chris points, this at least he can safely make contact with, and presses the pad of his finger under a sentence that reads took inspiration from the ugly side of the city hidden under its shining lights. "He, he, he he didn't care about anyone in the city. He thought everyone who, who who who who-who wasn't him was, um, was stupid."

"What did he care about?" Jake imagines telling his professor that instead of an essay, he's going to bring in a vampire who literally knew one of the artists in person. How she might react.

Probably call the cops and report an unsecured vampire loose on the streets. But maybe she'd listen to what Chris had to say first.

"Blood," Chris says, softly. His voice is getting lower and lower, until it's barely more than a whisper. "Pain. Fear. Being... being the the the the last person who, who saw someone. He, he, he, he liked to lay them out and paint them, liked me to, to, to... arrange them for him."

Jake's eyes go unwillingly back to the dead body behind the scared boy in the painting. The grasping fingers, the open eyes that look sightless, lifeless, at nothing at all. When he looks, he can see - more suggestion than made clear - that the body's throat is torn open, as if by an animal's teeth.

Now, only now that he's looking for it, does he realize there is the slightest hint of red tears on the cheeks of the painted boy, a sheen of pink on his teeth where he begs for mercy from the grasping singular hand coming out of the dark.

His stomach flips again. "Chris, are you saying-"

"His, his, his name was Ben." Chris nods at the dead body in the painting. "I asked. Before..." He gestures, a little vaguely. "That."

Jake feels a sudden, wild urge to look up missing persons cases from New York City in 1932. See if there's anyone named Ben on there. He knows without having to do so that there definitely will be.

"What happened to him... after?"

"I don't know. I, I, I was never let out when Tooley was gone. I... wonder how, how, how many of me there are." Chris looks up at the echo of his own face, his head tilting again. His lips tremble, just a little, and then part to show the hint of white teeth wet with pinkish saliva. "On walls, in houses, in... in places like, um. Like this. How many there are... is, is, is, is that what I still look like?"

Jake clears his throat again, looks down at his feet. This feels, suddenly, like he's walked in on someone looking down at his own dead body in a funeral home. Interrupting a moment so immensely private it shouldn't even exist.

"Yeah," he says, a little gruffly. "Yeah, that's it. More or less. Except I hope I scare you less than that. Also you wear a lot more clothes with us."

Chris laughs - it's a huff of sound, barely-there. Then he turns away from himself. "We, we, we can't see ourselves, in mirrors," He says, and he's got the little plastic bat back in his hand, rubbing his thumb over the carved silicone. "But I have mirrors everywhere. On these walls."

He goes suddenly terribly still. He isn't breathing.

He doesn't have to, but the realization that he isn't even pretending is a jolt of awareness of exactly how dead Chris is. He leaves the exhibit, and Jake is left to scramble after him, struggling to catch up to someone he should be able to easily outrun.

He breaks into a flat run when they get outside the double-doors, jumps the steps three at a time with grace, and runs across the grass and towards the stand of trees halfway across the park. Even Jake, who works out four days a week, is breathing hard and has a hitch in his rib by the time he catches up.

He finds Chris curled up under a tree in the evening dark, the stars starting to twinkle overhead as the sun finally allows them a clear night sky to shine in.

Jake drops to his knees, ignoring the damp that seeps into his jeans from soil that still hasn't dried since yesterday's rains, and he leans over, putting a warm hand to either side of the vampire's face.

Chris looks up, his eyes glinting like a cat's briefly in the dark, and there are trails down his cheeks, his lips pulled back from his teeth in a snarl that is anything but angry.

No, this is grief.

This is loss.

Jake knows the feeling.

"Talk to me," Jake says softly. "Tell me what it was like, what it's been like for you. Tell me about the life you've lived before I knew you."

"It, it, it hurt," Chris whispers, and his own hands cover Jake's. They're the same temperature as the air around them, and Jake shivers a little. It's almost a chill. "Every time. I, I, I try not to kill, Jake, I try so hard, but but but he would keep me so hungry and I couldn't-... stop..."

Jake thinks about the robbers Chris killed - for him, to save him from them - and how he'd locked himself in the closet afterward. Had he cried like this, over taking lives even when in defense?

"The museum thing said this guy Tooley died in 1936. He was only, what, twenty-nine? Did... did you-"

"Yes." Chris's voice is thick but it's not quite with regret. "I was hungry. He, he he he he didn't bring food. I was so hungry... then I was, um, was alone for a while... then, then, then, then then then I was taken for, for, for the, um, the trade, for my v-venom, and..."

"Got it. I got it, Chris. It's okay," Jake says, softly. "It's going to be okay. You're with us, now. And we'll never, ever make you hurt someone that way. We'll never make you go hungry. We'll never hurt you or use you."

Chris ducks his head, rocking forward until it knocks into Jake's shoulder, and Jake slides his arms around the vampire's shoulders, listening to his soft, muffled sobs, wondering how red his shirt will be stained by the time the vampire's tears have been cried out.

The same mouth that tore out the throat of a dead body that lays in a painting on the wall is so close to his neck it would take less than an inch for him to bite down. Even without fangs, he could lock his jaw and break the skin.

The same dangerous monster that has killed likely dozens to stay alive, the same stalking predator that has been the last sight of far too many, cries in his arms. Just a teenage boy who has been lonely, and terrified, and hurt for too long.

A teenager... and a monster that hunts prey after dark. Jake tightens his arms around Chris, holds him tighter.

It doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter how long he's been alive, not really.

He's just Chris.

That matters more.

-

@mylifeisonthebookshelf @insaneinthepaingame @keeper-of-all-the-random-things @burtlederp @finder-of-rings @newandfiguringitout @astrobly @endless-whump @pretty-face-breaker @gonna-feel-that-tomorrow @doveotions @boxboysandotherwhump @oops-its-whump @cubeswhump @whump-tr0pes @downriver914 @whumptywhumpdump @whumpiary @orchidscript @nonsensical-whump @outofangband @what-a-whump

[chayacat]

Devil’s Sweet Star (20)

Fandom: Dead by Daylight

Ghostface x Female Reader  

Rated M for Violence, Language and Smut  

***

All artists have a muse. An inspiration. Motivation, unwavering will. A signature of their own. It’s impossible to copy the work of an artist, because he always leaves a part of himself, a small detail, whether in the choice of shapes, lines, colors, etc., which allows us, little observers to recognize his work. We could take the example of Vincent Van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Sandro Botticelli, Michelangelo, Andy Warhol and finally Salvador Dali. All these artists had a particular signature, a little something that made their works unique, inimitable. Yet many have tried to reproduce them in order to make money. And even if some of them succeeded, they quickly found themselves behind bars.

But Danny is an... Particular artist. His works are particularly... Bloody. Certainly, he’s an assassin, but an assassin who wants to leave behind a trace of his passage, a piece of him in this vast world. Something that will remind everyone that he existed. At least Ghostface existed. But if every artist has a muse... What's Danny's muse? To tell the truth... He's got two. The first is simply envy. His insatiable urge for blood, to hear the gentle howls of his victims and to see the authorities tearing their hair out in the face of the lack of clues, is the reason he does this. As for his second muse...

Well, his second muse is you. For him, you are a precious jewel that he must protect at any price. No one should approach you and he won't let anyone near you. Of course, you will have the right to have friends, but don't plan to spend too much time without him. Besides, he feels frustrated that you prefer Jed to him. His alter ego is so boring compared to him! And yet how many times did he tell you? How many times did he tell you to think carefully?

And yet you chose Jed. But what happened that night ... He will remember it forever. Those little chills he felt on your skin when his tongue ran through your belly, your chest. And your little moans...A twisted smile appeared on his face just thinking about it. He's going to make you languish, but he's going to enjoy himself. And if you change your mind... it is beyond the seventh heaven that he will take you.

But for now, he has a more urgent matter to deal with. Because tonight is the big night. Everything was ready. Hoggins had brought charges to McKellan, who of course had retaliated strongly. How does Danny know? It's a journalist don't forget it. During one of his nightly visits, he had spied on a conversation between the two men and judging by McKellan's tone, the exchange was muscular.

“it's been so long that I've been waiting for this moment ... You dared to attack my angel in front of me. It's time for you to pay. I'm going to make you the best masterpiece ever created." He said, looking at McKellan house.

He had checked everything. He knew everything by heart. The round of the guards, the presence of the camera, McKellan's habits... absolutely everything. No surveillance camera.... humph, he thinks he's so untouchable that he doesn't feel the need to have security cameras. Poor fool. You're going to bitterly regret your arrogance. And Hoggins is going to pay the price.

It does not enchant Danny to attribute this murder to another, but if it is to see Wilhelm go round in circles, the game is worth it. He had parked his van in a place well out of sight. McKellan's villa is a staple, isolated from the city. No neighbourhood, no one to see or hear anything except the guards. Danny will never understand the rich and their desire to get away from people. Even if in a way, it feels good to have nothing around you, except the birdsong and the rustling of the leaves. But for these people, it's mostly a way not to mix with the "plebe".

He put on his mask and proceeded to the villa discreetly. It's time for the show. It's time for the massacre. From the bushes of the rear terrace, he watched the guards stationed. He knows that in a few minutes they will move to the sides and go around up to him. He must therefore move forward without being spotted to the building. And indeed after a few minutes, the guards moved. They always start at the inside of the terrace before returning from the outer sides. It was therefore cautiously but without concern that Danny advanced, not without paying attention to the flashlight that often came in his direction. Once near the walls, he glanced inside.  

As expected, it was impossible to get in from the back as the number of guards was too large. But he knows where McKellan's office is, and he knows that in exactly 20 minutes, he's going to go to his office and lock himself in and listen to music. He always puts the volume to the fullest, a significant advantage since so no one will hear him scream. He will be the only one who has the privilege of hearing it. Perfect. Once he's dead, Danny will have exactly 1 hour to make his masterpiece and leave because the guards will start suspecting a problem because of the music. Obviously, their boss listens to it every day for the same time. So, if it goes beyond the usual time slot, it's not normal.

Danny passed on the right side of the villa, on the side of which McKellan's office should be. And indeed, the second window of the office is open, surely to ventilate the room. He climbed to the gutter and clung to the balcony to enter the room. And the least we can say, is that this was to be the richest room in the house. He had something in common with Hoggins.

The walls were white marble making the room brighter. The many decorations in gold and red, as well as carpet flooring of the same color, recalled the time of ancient Rome. The few sculptures also for that matter.

“A passionate man of Ancient Rome... that will make my pleasure even more... Living. He will not only be my best masterpiece... but also the masterpiece of this room. It would almost bother me to soil this place of his filthy carcass and pig's blood. But he has to pay for touching and insulting my little angel...my precious love.” He said looking all around the room.  

He saw multiple objects that could be used for him, including multiples knife that look much sharper than his own. He could steal them but Ghostface is not a thief. He had taken a rope that he had found in the garden shed a few nights earlier. Like all the strings he took... this one will help him keep his "work" still.

He had the diagram of his artistic project in mind, with every little detail, of what he was going to cut to what he was going to leave whole ... Nothing much. He looked where he could hide and wait to strike. The cabinet in front of the desk will be the ideal hiding place. As soon as he will be close enough... he will catch him. Suddenly he heard footsteps. McKellan is on his way. Danny hides in the cupboard and waited. McKellan entered, furious as ever.

“Hoggins asshole... after all the services I have rendered to you to enrich yourself like a fat pig, you dare to accuse me?? I should cut your balls off... And this little whore and her damn coffee... not only has it not closed but it also gains in reputation! I'm surrounded by fools.” He said heading to the CD player. “Maybe I should kidnap her and torture her...or sell her as a prostitute...I’m sure that she can make a lot of money...”

Danny's blood was boiling. How dare he imagine for a second making you a toy for filthy fat pigs???  For a bonus profit??? He wanted to jump on him now, he wanted to slit his throat, butcher him, tear him to pieces... But if he goes out now, the guards will hear him and his whole plan will fall apart. He's got to stay calm. He's got to stick to the plan. As soon as he's at the cabinet level... he can attack. McKellan set the music on and turned the sound loud enough for the guards outside the room to hear it. Either he's deaf or he's crazy. Or both.

He stood for a few minutes in front of the reader before starting to "waltz" with his eyes closed. He reached the level of the cabinet and once in his line of sight, Danny went out to knock him out with a blow. He used the rope to tie him to the chair. He knows that from now on, he has 1 hour to do what he has to do. And he intends to take advantage of it. McKellan awoke after five minutes, trying to get away. The music was too loud for anyone to hear, so he looked at the knives but was quickly attract by a sinister sneer.

“Well, well... You finally woke up. You have a beautiful office. In fact, you have a very nice house, I would almost be jealous if it were not yours. Such a beautiful home for a rotten man like you... It's a shame.” said Danny, playing with his knife.

“You...I should be honoured by your presence... but unfortunately, I'm not very friendly with psycho like you. Hoggins sent you, didn't he? he's just a bastard.” Said McKellan with disgust.

“Sorry to tell you, but I'm not a man you can hire... I am acting and I will always act on my own. See if I'm here... it's because you and I have to settle.” Replied Danny before sticking his knife in McKellan's leg, making him scream.  

“YOU LITTLE SHIT!!! I’M GONNA CUT YOU HEAD OUT!!!!

“You see... You attacked someone very precious to me... and if there is one thing, I hate more than anything in this world... is that a rotten man like you, touch on what belongs to me. I'm sure you're wondering who I'm talking about. The "whore" as you like to call her, the boss of the Nebula... No luck for you... She's mine. And I'm going to make you regret every word you say. I hope you enjoyed your last musical moments... But don't worry... I intend to make you the masterpiece of your collection. And my best signing. Let the show begin.  

He cut off the leg where he had planted the knife, with a dry blow, recovering it before it fell to the ground. He did the same with the second and put it all on the desk. He stopped for a few seconds to listen to McKellan's delicious screams about the "tragic" loss of both legs. What sweet music to his ears... But unfortunately, he can't enjoy it very long, he has a countdown to respect.

“Oh... It hurts? I'm really sorry... I should have gone more slowly to lengthen the pleasure. But don't worry... I still have material. And limbs to cut you up. It's too bad you can't see that.”

“Please please ! I... I will give much more If you kill Hoggins for me!  I can make you the richest and the happiest man in this pathetic city! All the women will fall at your feet! You don't need that little slut! She's good for nothing! Just a little whore who thinks she's going to make a career!”

" I don't think you understood. I'm going to tell you one last time. One...” Danny started, planting his knife in one of McKellan’s arms. “I don't work for ANYBODY. If you think I'm just a puppet, I want you to know that I'm just for myself. I'm only doing this for my one and only pleasure. Never, and I say NEVER, would I work for anyone, even less for a rotten man of your kind. But if it makes you feel any better, Hoggins is going to come and keep you company in hell. Two...”

He thrust his knife deep into MacKellan’s arm to keep him awake until he finished talking to him. He drew his face closer to his.

“I only need one woman and that's her. I won't let anyone.... ANYONE, treat her like a good-for-nothing. You threatened her, assaulted her, you even sent someone several times to kill her. She is mine and only MINE and I will not let anyone near my angel, you fat pig!”

Danny pulled his knife out of Mackellan’s arm before repeatedly stabbing McKellan's skull. He recoiled inwardly at the sight of this bloodied, lifeless skull. He cut off his arms, then cut off his tongue and cut off his belly like a pig. He took out all these innards, cut them to a certain length and used them to tie his victim once again, one end ending deep in the throat, like a snake coming out of his mouth. He made sure to hold his arms and legs on the top of the skull, like deer antlers. How can he do that? A magician never reveals his secrets. Once his work was finished, Danny took out his camera.

“Look at you, you’re a masterpiece....MY masterpiece! You get exactly what you deserve you Motherf*cker. Now my little angel is safe...Almost if we count me in the lot. Well! Smile for the camera!”  Danny said before taking a picture. “Oh, I almost forgot the message! It’s necessary to give a lead to this dear Wilhelm ... even a fake one. Hoggins... You might not like the next few days.”

He wrote a bloody message on one of the walls of the office, leaving the policeman and the guard thinking that Hoggins was the author. One way or another. Then he quickly but discreetly left the premises before the guards were alerted by the unusual extension of the music. He returned to his van, changed, put his Ghostface outfit and mask back in the bag before heading home. On the road, he couldn't help but stop and burst out laughing, a laugh as he thought about what he had just done. The adrenaline was still running through his veins, he could not calm down.

He took a few minutes to calm down, then take the road again and went home. He parked and looked at your window. Everything was off and given the time, it was normal. Everyone was asleep, no one to testify anything to the police. Everything is always perfect. He went up to his apartment, entered, closed the door and walked to his office with his bag in his hand. He put it all down on the couch and looked at his hunting board, a satisfied smile on his lips.

He took his red felt, which was still working despite the rage of the last time, and bared McKellan's face with a long cross. That's it. He's finally dead. And there's more to kill. Hoggins is next on the list. But Danny will let time pass before attacking him. For now, he's going to focus on you. His sweet little star, his precious love, his angel. He looked at his bag, perhaps a little visit is necessary? Anyway, you sleep then ... you're not likely to say much.

A light cool wind entered your room, but it didn't seem to bother you. You were warm in your duvet with a radiant smile on your lip. Danny, or rather Ghostface was above you, a big smile behind his mask. He stayed for a few minutes without moving before lifting his mask slightly to kiss your cheek delicately.

“You can finally sleep easy, my angel. That fat pig won't do anything to you anymore. But never forget that you belong to me. Sleep well my love, hoping I'll be in your dreams.” he whispered so you don't wake up.

He put a small piece of paper on your nightstand to warn you of McKellan's death. The word is simple: "He's dead." He knows you will understand who it is. He left as discreetly as he had come, to go to bed as well, despite the little adrenaline he had left. It's going to be a long night.

But Damn it was so delicious.

***

(I'm practically about to pass my code exam! I'm so happy! hoping we won't be confined to the date where I'll pass it. I want to thank you all as much as you are, you are almost 40 to follow the poor little French potato that I am! In the meantime, I hope you will love this chapter as much as the others! they all deserve to be appreciated so much! Have a great weekend to you all! See ya!)

[militant-holy-knight]

Persecution of Christians in Moorish Spain

Contrary to what scholar consensus teaches, the Iberian Peninsula occupied by Arabs and the Moors was not an paradise of coexistence between people of different faiths and multicultural equality. This is thoroughly debunked in the book The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise by Dario Fernandez-Morera using the Arabic sources (NOT propaganda written by the infidels) to expose the true picture of Islamic Spain, which (among other things) brags about the wholesale destruction of churches the slaughter of Christian prisoners, praise the crucifixion of apostates, and texts advising Muslims how to collect the tax from non-believers. (Make them stand before Muslims sitting on a raised platform, call them “enemy of Allah” and then push them around for the amusement of any Muslim “who want[s] to enjoy it”).

Christians and Jews were allowed to practice their religion in peace, but this condition came with several fine prints. Non-Muslims had to accept the status of dhimmis which made them effectively second-class citizens. This condition was known as the Pact of Umar and the restrictions imposed on Christians and Jews were as follows.

Prohibition against rebuilding destroyed churches, by day or night, in their own neighborhoods or those situated in the quarters of the Muslims.

Prohibition against hanging a cross on the Churches.

Muslims should be allowed to enter Churches (for shelter) in any time, both in day and night.

Obliging the call of prayer by a bell to be low in volume.

Prohibition of Christians and Jews against raising their voices at prayer times.

Christians were forbidden to show their religion in public, or to be seen with Christian books or symbols in public, on the roads or in the markets of the Muslims.

Palm Sunday and Easter parades were banned.

Funerals should be conducted quietly.

Prohibition against burying non-Muslim dead near Muslims.

Prohibition against raising a pig next to a Muslims neighbor.

Christian were forbidden to sell Muslims alcoholic beverage.

Christians were forbidden to provide cover or shelter for spies.

Prohibition against telling a lie about Muslims.

Obligation to show deference toward Muslims. If a Muslim wishes to sit, a non-Muslim should be rise from his seats and let the Muslim sit.

Prohibition against preaching to Muslims in an attempt to convert them from Islam.

Prohibition against preventing the conversion to Islam of some one who wants to convert.

The appearance of the non-Muslims has to be different from those of the Muslims: Christians had to wear blue belts while Jews yellow belts (Yep, nothing Nazi-like about that)

Prohibition against adopting a Muslim title of honor.

Prohibition against engraving Arabic inscriptions on signet seals.

Prohibition against any possession of weapons.

Non-Muslims must host a Muslim passerby for at least 3 days and feed him.

Non-Muslims prohibited from buying a Muslim prisoner.

Prohibition against taking slaves who have been allotted to Muslims.

Prohibition against non-Muslims to lead, govern or employ Muslims.

If a non-Muslim beats a Muslim, it’s permissible to kill them.

The worship places of non-Muslims must be lower in elevation than the lowest mosque in town.

The houses of non-Muslims must not be taller in elevation than the houses of Muslims.

As Fernandes-Morera quotes the following passage from another contemporary historian:

“It is important to understand that medieval Islamic civilization had a different attitude toward slavery than that seen in Western Europe. Slaves were much better treated and their status was quite honorable. Furthermore, there were many career opportunities open to a skillful mamluk (slave soldier), and the higher standards of living available in the Islamic Middle East, meant there was often little resistance to being taken (as a slave) in Central Asia and south-eastern Europe.”

One can certainly imagine the throngs of girls and boys in Greece, Serbia and Central Asia clamoring to be taken away from their families to be circumcised, to become sexual slaves, or to be castrated to guard harems as eunuchs, or, in other cases, to be raised in barracks with the sole purpose of becoming brainwashed slave-soldiers.

Islamic Spanish society was also heavily dependent on slaves. For example, Abd al-Rahman had 3,750 slaves in his court, 6,300 sexual slaves in his harem, and 13,750 slave soldiers. Furthermore, slaves were a major export of the kingdom, particularly eunuchs (castrated Christian males) since sex segregation is an important aspect in Islam, eunuchs were considered harmless to women and integral to interact with them. Racism was also heavily embedded in their society - Africans were described as fickle, foolish and ignorant and Arabs valued white slave girls at almost 15 times that of African slave girls.

In Moorish Spain, sharia law was the law of the land which the specific form was the Maliki school of Islamic jurisprudence (which is prominent in North Africa). The Maliki school, far from being particularly liberal and tolerant, is one of the more conservative schools though not the most conservative one (the dubious honor goes to the Hanbali school, predominant in the Arabian Peninsula). The Maliki school includes many niceties like female genital mutilation (even for adult sexual slaves) and banned musical instruments, singing, paintings and sculptures. The law even went so far as to order a man who bought a non-Muslim sex slave and discovered she was a singer to return her (WTF!). Obviously, as Fernandez-Morera admits, the elites in Islamic Spain (as all over the world) often ignored the law. Non-Muslim slave singers and dancers are tolerated and even coveted. However, he is right to remind his readers that lapses in the application of law do not constitute a positive culture–much less a shining example of “paradise.”

Even under such conditions, bloody persecutions still happened against non-Muslims minorities. In 1066, a Muslim mob massacred the Jewish community of Granada because their rabbi Joseph ibn Naghrella became the vizier to the emir Badis al-Muzzafar, crucifying him and killed over 4,000 people in one day. For Christians, there were the 48 Martyrs of Córdoba who were executed under sharia law for charges of blasphemy or apostasy.

Perfectus - April 18, 850. A priest in Córdoba beheaded for denouncing Islam.

Isaac - June 3, 851. Born to a wealthy Córdoban family, he was well educated and fluent in Arabic which helped him rise quickly to the position of exceptor rei publicae in the Moorish government. He resigned in order to become a monk at his family’s monastery of Tábanos, a few miles from Córdoba. One day he left his retreat and returned to the emir’s palace where he proclaimed his faith in Christ in front of the court. He was arrested and subsequently beheaded.

Sancho - (also known as Sanctius, Sancius) June 5, 851. Born in Albi in Septimania (modern-day France), he was taken to Córdoba in Al-Andalus as a prisoner of war, educated at the royal court, and enrolled in the guards of the Emir. He was executed by impalement for his refusal to embrace Islam.

Peter, Walabonsus, Sabinian, Wistremundus, Habentius and Jeremiah - June 7, 851. Peter was a priest; Walabonsus, a deacon; Sabinian and Wistremundus, monks of St Zoilus in Córdoba in Al-Andalus; Habentius, a monk of St Christopher’s; Jeremiah, a very old man, had founded the monastery of Tábanos, near Córdoba. For publicly denouncing Muhammad they were executed under Abderrahman in Córdoba. Jeremiah was scourged to death; the others were beheaded.

Sisenandus - July 16, 851. Born in Beja in Portugal, he became a deacon in the church of St Acisclus in Córdoba. He was beheaded under Abd ar-Rahman II.

Paul of St Zoilus - July 20, 851. A deacon in Córdoba who belonged to the monastery of St Zoilus and who ministered to Christians imprisoned by the Muslims. He was beheaded.

Theodemir - July 25, 851. A monk executed in Córdoba in Al-Andalus under Abd ar-Rahman II.

Flora and Maria - November 24, 851. These two women were both the offspring of marriages between a Christian and a Muslim. In addition, Maria was the sister of Walabonsus, who had been executed earlier. Flora’s father, who died when she was very young, was a Muslim, and so her Christianity was legally defined as apostasy. Although Maria and Flora denounced Islam and proclaimed their Christian faith in court together, Maria was executed for blasphemy and Flora for apostasy.

Gumesindus and Servusdei - January 13, 852. Gusemindus, a parish-priest, and Servusdei, a monk, were executed in Cordoba under Abd ar-Rahman II.

Leovigild and Christopher - August 20, 852. Leovigild was a monk and pastor in Córdoba and Christopher a monk of the monastery of St Martin de La Rojana near Córdoba. They were executed in Córdoba under Abd ar-Rahman II.

Emilas and Jeremiah - September 15, 852. Two young men, the former of whom was a deacon, imprisoned and beheaded in Cordoba under the Emir Abderrahman.

Rogellus and Servus-Dei - September 16, 852. A monk and his young disciple executed in Córdoba for publicly denouncing Islam inside a mosque. They were the first Christian martyrs executed under Muhammad I.

Fandilas - June 13, 853. A priest and Abbot of Peñamelaria near Córdoba. He was beheaded in Córdoba by order of Muhammad I.

Anastasius, Felix, and Digna - June 14, 853. Anastasius was a deacon of the church of St. Acisclus in Córdoba, who became a monk at nearby Tábanos. Felix was born in Alcalá of a Berber family, became a monk in Asturias but joined the monastery at Tábanos, hoping for martyrdom. Digna belonged to the convent there.

Benildis - June 15, 853. Anastasius’ execution inspired this woman of Cordoba to choose martyrdom herself the next day. Her ashes were thrown into the Guadalquivir.

Columba - September 17, 853. Born in Córdoba and a nun at Tábanos, she was detained with the rest of the nuns, to prevent them from giving themselves up to the courts, when the Emirate closed the monastery in 852. She escaped, openly denounced Muhammad and was beheaded.

Pomposa - September 19, 853. Another nun, from the monastery of San Salvador at Peñamelaria. She escaped the imprisonment of the nuns, went before the court and was executed, despite protests from her fellow nuns.

Abundius - July 11, 854. A parish priest in Ananelos, a village near Córdoba. He was arrested for having maligned Muhammad. Unlike most of the other martyrs, Abundius was betrayed by others and did not volunteer to face the Emir’s court. He was beheaded and his body was thrown to the dogs. His feast day is celebrated on July 11.

Amator, Peter and Louis - April 30, 855. Amator was born in Martos, near Córdoba, where he was an ordained priest. Together with a monk named Peter and a layman called Louis (Ludovicus), the brother of the previous martyr Paul, he was executed by the Emirate for blaspheming Islam.

Witesindus - (also known as Witesind) 855. A Christian layman from Cabra, who had converted to Islam but later recanted; he was executed for apostasy.

Elias, Paul and Isidore - April 17, 856. Elias, born in Beja in Portugal and a priest in Córdoba, was executed in his old age by the Moors, together with the young monks Paul and Isidore, two of his students.

Argymirus - (also known as Argimirus, Argimir) June 28, 856. Argimir, a nobleman from Cabra, was Emir Muhammad I’s censor. He was deprived of his office on account of his faith and became a monk. He was accused by others of having insulted the prophet Muhammad and publicly proclaimed the divinity of Jesus. Argimir was offered mercy if he renounced Christianity and professed Islam; he refused, and was executed.

George, Aurelius and Natalia; Sabigotho, Felix and Liliosa – July 27 c. 852. Martyrs in Córdoba under Emir Abd ar-Rahman II. Aurelius and Felix, with their wives, Natalia and Liliosa, were Iberians whose family backgrounds, although religiously mixed, legally required them to profess Islam. After given four days to recant, they were condemned as apostates for revealing their previously secret Christian faith. The deacon George was a monk from Palestine who was arrested along with the two couples. Though offered a pardon as a foreigner, he chose to denounce Islam again and die with the others.

Aurea (also known as Aura) – July 19, 856. Born in Córdoba in Al-Andalus and a daughter of Muslim parents. She witnesses the execution of her brothers, Adolphus and John on 27 September 822 (their feast day).In her widowhood she quietly became a Christian and a nun at Cuteclara, where she remained for more than twenty years. She was discovered by Muslim relatives, brought before a judge, and renounced her Christianity under duress. However, she regretted this, and continued to practice Christianity in secret. When her family discovered this, she was again brought before a court, refused to repent a second time, and was executed.

Rudericus (Roderick) and Salomon (Solomon) – March 13, 857. Roderick was a priest in Cabra who was betrayed by his Muslim brother, who falsely accused him of converting to Islam and then returning to Christianity (i.e. apostasy). In prison he met his fellow-martyr, Salomon. They were both executed in Córdoba.

Sandila (also known as Sandalus, Sandolus, Sandulf) – September 3 c. 855. Executed in Córdoba under the Emirate

Eulogius of Cordoba – March 11, 859. A prominent priest in Córdoba Al-Andalus during this period. Outstanding for his courage and learning, he encouraged some of the voluntary martyrs and wrote “The Memorial of the Saints” for their benefit. He himself was executed for aiding and abetting apostasy by hiding and protecting a young girl St. Leocritia that had converted from Islam.

Leocritia (also known as Lucretia) – March 15, 859. A young girl in Córdoba. Her parents were Muslims, but she was converted to Christianity by a relative. On Eulogius’s advice and with his aid, Leocritia escaped her home and went into hiding. Once found, both were arrested. Eulogius, after years of being in and out of prison and encouraging voluntary martyrdom, was executed for proselytization, and Leocritia for apostasy.

To quote one such poet of the time, Abu Ishaqa, about the massacres of infidels:

Do not consider it a breach of faith to kill them, the breach of faith would be to let them carry on. They have violated our covenant with them, so how can you be held guilty against the violators? How can they have any pact when we are obscure and they are prominent? Now we are humble, beside them, as if we were wrong and they were right!

The Consequences of these Persecutions

Because they were fighting a merciless enemy, the Iberian Christians had to adopt a “militant holy warrior” to counter this menace. It was best exemplified with Alonso Pérez de Guzman, an Spanish nobleman whose city was being besieged by Arabs. When they captured his son and threatened to kill him unless if he surrendered the city what did he do?

He threw them a knife so they could kill him with it.

"I did not beget a son to be made use of against my country, but that he should serve her against her foes. Should Don Juan put him to death, he will but confer honour on me, true life on my son, and on himself eternal shame in this world and everlasting wrath after death."

On the conclusion of Iberian victory over the Moors, the Iberian powers, Spain and Portugal didn't stop their warring against the Muslims solely in their homelands—they extended the conflict against Islam overseas. The Spanish under the Habsburg dynasty soon became the champions of Roman Catholicism in Europe and the Mediterranean against the encroaching threat of the Ottoman Empire. In a similar vein, the Portuguese also extended the Reconquista, this time against Muslim states overseas. The conquest of Ceuta marked the beginning of Portuguese expansion into Muslim Africa. Soon, the Portuguese also went into conflict with the Ottoman Caliphate in the Mediterranean, Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia as the Portuguese conquered the Ottomans' allies: the Sultanate of Adal in East Africa, the Sultanate of Delhi in South Asia and the Sultanate of Malacca in Southeast Asia. Meanwhile, the Spanish also went to war against the Sultanate of Brunei in Southeast Asia. The Spanish sent expeditions of Christianized Aztecs from Mexico to conquer and Christianize the Philippines, then a territory of the Sultanate of Brunei. Brunei itself was assaulted during the Castilian War. Spain also went to war against the Sultanates of Sulu, Maguindanao, and Lanao in the Spanish-Moro Conflict. The primary inspiration for these wars against Muslim states overseas was the Reconquista.

Now do you see why that had to happen?

[kronk-a-donk]

My MDZS Headcanons (Part 3)

Its all about the ladies this round! Wen Qing, Jiang YanLi, Madame Yu/Yu Ziyuan, and A-Qing! I'm gonna write most of these as if they are alive because I love them...

WQ

She loves to garden, growing everything from medicinal herbs to vegetables

Queen of debates, you will not meet a woman more capable of tearing your argument apart bit by bit

I feel like if things had gone differently and the YunmengJiang sect hadn't been destroyed she and Madame Yu would've have gotten along very well

She loves challenging herself to find new ways to do all sorts of things, but she tends to wary of challenges from others

Her family is the most important thing to her, anyone who hurts them better be ready to have hell rained down upon them

She would totally adopt a bunch of cats and dogs. They would be well cared for and each have their own unique names probably after plants that create a poison or antidote

This woman could easily drink WWX under the table and still be fine, but when she gets drunk she turns into the ultimate prankster. She wreaks absolute havoc on wherever she is.

She's always wanted to learn the dizi, she loves the sound of it

She loves chicken corn soup and herbal teas

She collects every book on medicine, chemistry, and biology she can

She makes the best soups, they are tasty and all of the ingredients compliment each other while their own flavours still shine

She doesn't care about romance, marriage or starting a family

YZ/Madame Yu

Very into domination

Has a soft spot for flowers, especially lilies, irises, violets, and bleeding hearts

She likes her tea strong, black no sugar or jasmine green tea with 3 cream and 2 sugar. There is not inbetween.

She loves her children and is fiercely protective

She herself is preferential towards dogs and was sad when JC's dogs were taken away because of WWX.

She wished her daughter could've been as strong and her, but she was still equally as proud of her

She playing board games, especially strategy heavy ones

She had a very love/hate with JFM because of the circumstances of their marriage and his passiveness, however she did care about him even if their opinions differed more often than not

She is cursed in the kitchen, burning everything she touches

She has an extremely high spice tolerance, rivaled only by WWX and JFM (headcanons coming soo)

She is woman of action

She is constantly working to improve her knowledge, strength and cultivation level

She doesn't hate WWX, she hates JFM preference for him over their own son

In her youth her temper was terrifying, most compared it to a raging forest fire. She was seemingly untamable

She tried her best to be patient and teach JYL how to fight and use as many cultivation techniques as her lower level of spiritual energy would allow

She hates winter snow and the summer heat preferring the late spring and early fall weather

JYL

She is actually physically very strong, especially after her mom started training/teaching her while her brothers studied in the cloud recesses

She really respects and looks up to her mother

She would do anything to make JC and WWX happy

She loves to cook, having learned this from her father and is absolutely amazing at it

She enjoys art and making things, jewelry, drawings, paintings, sculpture, and she wants to learn a little smithing too

She is actually extremely intelligent and has a near perfect memory

She takes a very long time to lose her cool, but when she does, she is more terrifying than JC and YZ combined

She loves small animals like hamsters, mice, rats, guinea pigs, geckos, frogs, ladybugs, butterflies, and such

She loves to eat fresh fruits

A-Qing

I feel like she would've grown up to be quite the amazing young woman

She would make a great actress

She loves trolling older people especially Xue Yang

She and WWX would make great friends and cause so much chaos with pranks and mischief. She would also be good friends with LJY for similar reasons

If she could make her own candy she would probably pass out from too much sugar and be sick

Her favourite colour is blue

Her physical strength more than what most people think it would be

She has really good vision, like better than normal

Her favourite food is sweet and sour pork

She would be really good at playing the paigu (a set of 3-7 specifically tuned drum made out of animal skin and wood)

She loves horses, how fast they go, and how much fun they can be to ride

She loves to swim and be in the water

She secretly wanted a dog, but was never able to get one

[annaalexiswrites]

Chasing Your Chances Prologue

On Bluebell Row in Ashwick Wharf, there are fifteen houses. On the outside, all the houses are exactly the same.

Two stories with a basement and a garage, made out of brick, with four windows on each floor, a brown driveway and a black mailbox.

Every single one of them.

But inside, with all the different people, no two houses are alike.

Number one belongs to Marianne Russel and Marianne Russel alone, at least for now.

She has one spare bedroom and one room that's supposed to be a spare bedroom but ended up becoming a shoe room, filled bottom to top with shoes and boots of all kinds and colors, straps and strapless, buttons and laces, anything and everything anyone could possibly imagine. And yet she manages to buy at least one new pair a month. Although her shoe room is her happy place, her kitchen is her home. She owns Bluehill Diner, her pride and joy, birthplace to the best baked goods in town, only serving the very best of her creations that have been through several dozen test runs and taste tests, both by her alone and with Addie Thomas, her best friend and designated guinea pig.

Number two is owned by Addie Thomas and Addie Thomas alone, but it's inhabited by not only Addie, but Winn Brooks and Clara Brown-Murphy. They each have their own room, Addie with her dance shoes hanging off her Tae Kwon Do belt holder that's surrounded by flowers and the centerpiece of a pristine room, Winn has a very neat, clean room, except for one corner that's covered in paper and pencils and paint and brushes and charcoal and any art tools he, or his parents, could get his, or their, hands on and Clara has a messily clean room, everything with a place and in its place, including her extensive collection of books sprawled across her floor and furniture, it just so happens that no one besides her can find anything.

Number three is owned by Lucy Carter's grandmother, but Lucy and her cousin, Adria, are staying in it during their gap year, with all the plans in the world to move out and either travel or go to college next year, but life has a funny way of changing plans. Like the rest of the Row Houses, there's three bedrooms on the second floor and one in the basement, but Adria and Lucy ended up sharing the master bedroom, anyways. It had the necessities, but the main decorations, the main spirit of the home, was in the kitchen. They weren't good at cooking, far from it actually. If Marianne and her culinary school, bakery-owning eyes ever saw one of their concoctions, she might just cry. Some of their concoctions made them cry. But some didn't. And those some were enough to keep trying, keep experimenting, keep staying up past midnight dancing in their underwear as they cook and bake and try to not burn the house down.

Number four is inhabited by Hetty, the police chief, her husband, Adam, the local doctor. Adam has a daughter and a son, Helaine and Elijah, from his first wife and Hetty has a daughter, Natalie, from her first husband. They lived in Ashwich their whole lives, but only moved to Bluebell Row when Hetty and Adam got married four years earlier. Elijah, the oldest at 22, has transformed the basement apartment to an attempt at a bachelor pad, but it ultimately failed and now he uses it to hide from Helaine and Natalie when they fight with each other or when they're actually getting along and decide to gang up on him. Hetty has her wooden sculptures decorating all the mantles, Adam has his decorative pillows covering every possible sitting surface, Elijah has his video games strewn across every floor, Helaine has her skateboard at the precisely worst spot at almost all times and Natalie has her collection of hair pins and scrunchies throughout the house, in every cushion and cabinet.

Number five is home to Elody Thomas, her boyfriend Jonas O'Sullivan, their five month and two week old baby Francesca and their beloved Spot the dog. Elody runs the local tea parlor so tea cups and pots and bags are in all the cabinets for practical reasons and around the living and family room as decoration. Jonas has one spot for his favorite DVD's, but besides that left everything else for Elody to decide and Francesca and Spot to destroy. By the time Francesca was three months old, and Spot almost three years, they had given up trying to tell the difference between dog and baby toys and just settled on not letting any of them go in the baby's mouth.

Number six is constantly occupied by Georgie Hermann and Fluffy the Bunny and occasionally occupied by Georgie's boyfriend, Conrad, who's often on the road due to his job at Purple Prime Trucking. Growing up in foster care with no constant home, Georgie finally found a home with Conrad, but quickly learned that you should never find a home in someone who can't have one. After many fights and accusations of Georgie cheating with her boss at Ashwick Wharf Law, Conrad surprised Georgie with not only a down payment on one of the Row Houses, but a promise to be there at least once a week and a bunny that will be there 24/7 for her. He was not, however, anticipating just how much of a mess a bunny can make when he made that particular purchase. Georgie's smile and knowing that she feels happy and content is enough for Conrad to part with his favorite pair of shoes and losing all hope of ever having any paper last more than five seconds in the house.

Number seven, much like number seven, has full-time and part-time residents. The full-time residents are Sadie Adams and her niece, Julia Adams. The part-time residents are Sadie's boyfriend, Axel, and his son, Lucas. Axel was another truck driver and Lucas lived with his mother most of the time, but recently decided to move in with his father for the school year. No one knows why, not even Lucas, but he wanted a change and this seemed like a good way to do it, even if he has to live with his father who he hates, his father's girlfriend who he hates by association, and his father's girlfriend's niece who got to be raised by his father when he didn't, which is also enough reason to hate her, at least in Lucas' opinion. Her incessant need to decorate the house with small and useless pillows didn't endear her to him in the least.

Number eight was previously unoccupied for several years, but just last week the Delgado family moved in. Mateo and Isabella are the parents who love their children more than anything. The oldest child is Maria, the oldest and only boy is Cristiano, the middle child is Astrid, the second youngest is Sofia and the very youngest is Valentina. The Delgado parents do their best to not favor any of their children and treat them all equally, but with Valentina being deaf, Maria being 27 and having no motivation or drive and Cristiano being the only boy, it's very hard to not leave Astrid and Sofia behind with less attention.

Number nine has the rest of the Thomas siblings, both Elody and Addie having moved out two and four years previously. Lucien is the oldest in the house but younger than Elody and Addie, and works as a computer programmer, making enough money to let Philippa, the next youngest, focus on college and not have to work. James, the next youngest, and the latest one to graduate college, was currently trying to find a way to tell his siblings he'll also be the latest to move out of the house and in with his boyfriend, Albert, made more difficult by Lucien being convinced that their lack of a sex life and plans to continue that absence negated their relationship being valid. Camille, the youngest and only one still in high school, was much more accepting of him and Albert, although she was far too busy being a senior and trying to find out what career she'd pursue after high school to get in the middle of his and Lucien's fights anymore. Still, they managed to add a little of themselves to their home, mainly with an abundance of posters and and wall hangings covering every wall in an effort to be the sibling with the most wall space.

Number ten, the Roberts, was the most conventionally decorated of the row houses. Jodie, the mother, is an interior decorator and refuses to have her house be anything less than the best. Jodie's husband, Nate, was a plumber who was perfectly fine with his wife taking over decorating as long as he got to keep his TV and watch games at least once a week. The children were all allowed to decorate their own rooms to their liking, which Albert, the oldest and James' boyfriend, used to his full advantage, picking decorations and furniture specifically chosen to piss off his mother, who did not take kindly to the fact that Albert not only came as asexual but also told the neighbors, seeing it as a personal insult to her and how hard she worked to build the perfect family. Molly, the middle child and ever her mother's little darling, struggled with both supporting her brother and not going against her mother. Jack, the youngest at only ten, was too young to fully understand why Albert would watch games with his dad and talk to him to no end but wouldn't say a word to his mother and was perfectly happy idolizing his brother without thinking about his mother at all.

Now number eleven was something different entirely. The rest of the row was, if not friends, friendly. But not number eleven. Number eleven was occupied by Gabrielle Smith, Edgar Martinez, Melitta Roy, Makenna Jenkins, Darlene and Noraly. No one ever asked Noraly or Darlene's last names, they were just the children of the Knockmore – the only house on the row with a name and so named because of the sign that was put up on the house long before the current residents moved in and will still be there long after they're gone. They went to a private school the next town over, rarely going into town themselves. The adults often went into town, always two or three of them at a time, never alone and never all four, and never saying more than they absolutely needed to. No one knew where they worked or what they did in the house, but it somehow seemed different than the rest of the houses, larger and more intimidating, even though it was as perfectly similar as the rest of them.

Number twelve was a much more welcoming place than number eleven, home to Emilie and Kenneth Wilson, married for 25 years and will be married for 25 more, as they're sure to tell you if you ask about how they met, at least until next year when they'll be married for 26 years and will be married for 26 more. No one knows why they always say that, except for their daughter, Andrea, a senior in high school and the only one with the knowledge that they started a bet when they were first married to always say how long they were married and say that they'll married for as many more whenever asked and whoever stops first has to dye their hair pink and, far worse, has to admit they lost. Their house is cluttered with knickknacks from different eras, Emilie being unable to resist a few trinkets every time she goes to an estate sale to get inventory for her antique store. Kenneth, a historian, and Andrea, who always feels out of place if everything is too new, both appreciate it every time something new shows up, seeing who can figure out what time period it is before the other.

Number thirteen, the most eclectically decorated of the row houses, a mixture of traditional and modern Korean décor as well as the occasional comic book trinket that Peter sneaked past his mother, belongs to the Park Family, who own and work at the local book store, Downtown Books. Jin-Hee, the father, bought it when he was just 19 years old, putting all of his savings into it. It was there he met Min-Jun, then his bookkeeper, now his bookkeeper, wife and mother of his three children. The youngest is Peter, a junior in high school and forever plagued that his name is Peter Park and not Peter Parker. The middle child and only girl is Esther, already graduated from getting an Associate's in Art and working at Downtown Books. The oldest, Daniel, both followed his father's footsteps and severely deviated from them. He met his one day wife, Jordan, at Downtown Books, instantly knowing that he would marry her as soon as he saw her, just like his father. However, his father, who had never touched a drop of alcohol, was far different than Daniel, who just got out of rehab less than a year ago. Jordan, not wanting to distract him from staying sober, refused to date him. She said when he was sober a year she would date him and he was planning on holding her to that, but just being her friend and coworker was enough for now. He could do without Peter and Esther's, and sometimes his father's, constant teasing and singing of Daniel and Jordan k-i-s-s-i-n-g, though.

Number fourteen is, like the Park home, very eclectic. Rosemary Miller and her daughter, Sarah, live there. It was a mixture of things they need, like Rosemary's wheelchair, and things they want, like the giant knitted blanket on the back of the couch that the two of them knitted together. It's nice and cozy and they're both so happy it made up for all the sneers and whispers Rosemary had to go through when she was pregnant with Sarah at just 18 and with no boyfriend or plans to get one. It made up for Rosemary finding out she has MS when Sarah was two years old and it made up for Sarah constantly being afraid of losing her mother. It made up for Sarah wanting to build her life around her mom's and it made up for Rosemary trying to convince her otherwise. It made up for the looks they got when Rosemary had to use her wheelchair and it made up for when Sarah was teased in school about it. It made up for Sarah getting into fights over the teasing and it made up for Rosemary coming down to the school to get into fights with teachers and principles. It made up for the hard life that they didn't deserve and it made them think it wasn't so bad afterall.

Number fifteen is inhabited by Jayne and Peter Brown-Murphy, mother and step father to Clara Brown-Murphy, as well as Jayne and Peter's twin daughters, Delilah and Natalia, currently 13 and in their final year of middle school and about as different in personality as they are similar in appearance, and twin sons, Elijah and Aiden, both currently 5 and about as similar in personality as they are different in appearance. Despite Clara moving out four months ago, her clothes and books still clutter the house, something new being left or picked up or both almost every time she comes over, which is still at least once a day. Peter's job as a lawyer has affected his style only in the sense that he's as bad with keeping his books in one place as his step daughter, which is fine with Jayne who could never decide on just one style so decorated with all of them, Peter and the children more than happy to deal with a little clashing as long as Jayne kept smiling and cooking their meals, both of which made all of their hearts melt.

That is, currently, all of the residents of Bluebell Row. Not all of their secrets or stories or past, all of which would take much longer to go through, although no doubt would be worth the time to read it all.

What do you think? Any constructive criticism or comments are very much appreciated!

Tag list: @drowsy-quill, @cjjameswriting, @katabasiss, @essenceofsunset .

[eddycurrents]

Strange Places: The Island

Words & Art: Mike Mignola | Colours: Dave Stewart | Letters: Clem Robins

Originally published by Dark Horse in Hellboy: The Island #1 & 2 | June & July 2005

Epilogue - Originally published by Dark Horse in Hellboy - Volume 6: Strange Places | April 2006

Collected in Hellboy - Volume 6: Strange Places | Hellboy Library Edition - Volume 3 | Hellboy Omnibus Volume 2: Strange Places

Plot Summary:

Hellboy emerges from the depths of the ocean to a crag of wrecked ships and navigates an island of ghosts, ruminating on who he is, who he was, and who he’s meant to be.

Reading Notes:

(Note: Pagination does not represent anything within the issue or collections themselves, it is solely in reference to the chapter.)

pg. 1 - The bleakness in these panels from the white skies, white water, the faded colour to the gulls and the ships, this feels like purgatory. In his introduction to this story, Mike Mignola said that he was inspired by William Hope Hodgson’s Sargasso Sea stories, which explains the setting, but this feels so much further removed from the world. That Hellboy has landed himself in a no man’s land.

Also, I think a potential interpretation of “The Third Wish” and “The Island” is to see them as two parts of the death and resurrection of Hellboy. Maybe not literally, maybe so, since everything here seems to be an existential exercise. In the former, you could see Hellboy going to a “hell” in the underworld of the sea and the final panels are vague enough that he could have drowned. Then in “The Island”, his soul is traversing this kind of purgatory, facing his demons and angels, while searching for a way to exist again.

pg. 3 - Absolutely stunning work from Mignola and Dave Stewart. The fading, distant sunset just adding to the feeling that wherever Hellboy is, there’s soon to be no light or warmth.

pg. 4 - This is a nice summary of the last story. The appearance of others is certainly strange.

pg. 5-6 - The sea shanty, what’s actually looking more like flaming mugs than just sloshing ale, and weird orange colour definitely give it a feel that something’s wrong here.

pg. 7 - And there’s the rub. You do wonder, though, if Hellboy’s drinking with ghosts or if his loneliness and drink have him hallucinating happier surroundings.

Also, I just love the presentation here. The layout for the page and bottom tier’s grid is just interesting.

pg. 8 - Hecate’s looking a bit different from her last appearance, but it’s interesting to see her here to lay claim on Hellboy. The moon in the background is a nice little hint to her identity, if anyone was confused at the onset before she’s explicitly named.

Also, like the monkey with a gun panel, this is probably one of the funniest sequences in a Hellboy comic.

pg. 9-11 - Hecate’s reasoning for Hellboy to join her is kind of weird, reiterating a binary choice that Hellboy himself has rejected the notion of before.

That’s also probably one of the creepiest, most terrifying “I want you inside of me” propositions from a woman...or iron maiden. Somebody should probably do a study of the sexual innuendo in Hellboy and how awkward and strange much of it happens to be.

pg. 11 - Hellboy atop the cliff, tossing away the rum bottle, discovery of another skeleton, and then fade to black is probably one of the scenes in this story that most reminds me of The Seventh Seal.

pg. 12 - And then things possibly get stranger. Being unfixed in time and place give you a lack of orientation literally, so the appearance of a castle randomly on this island is even an odder prospect.

pg. 13 - When has Hellboy ever done the “sane” thing?

pg. 14-15 - Like the castle, the appearance of the priest, knights, and the man they’re judging as a heretic is hard to place, unexplained, making you wonder if it’s something currently happening, something that has happened previously and we’re just getting a flashback, or what.

pg. 18 - Sudden monster appearance is sudden.

pg. 19-21 - Impressive battle, though there’s an interesting level of futility that Mignola introduces through referencing Moby Dick. That Hellboy is losing himself in continuing this battle.

pg. 22 - Yeah...grievous impalement probably isn’t good.

pg. 24-25 - I definitely seems more now that the bit with the priest is in the past. With the heretic telling the priest that he’ll rise again some time in the future.

pg. 26-27 - The juxtaposition of the heretic’s words in the past over the events in the present with Hellboy are well done. The art as well is just phenomenal. The darkness, the spot colours of red, the designs for the sculptures and decorations, the resuscitation of the old heart, you kind of just have to stare at these pages a few times to take it all in.

pg. 28 - Aside from just looking cool, there are also possibly some hints as to some of the story elements in what otherwise may just seem like random images.

pg. 30 - Mohlomi’s reappearance is certainly interesting. Especially serving as a kind of psychopomp for Hellboy. It makes you wonder if his role even in “The Third Wish” was merely a passive guide, ferrying Hellboy from one place to another.

pg. 31 - I absolutely love that the heretic has taken Hellboy’s colour scheme, along with his blood. It helps reinforce the idea that this is an assumption of Hellboy’s life and destiny, that he’s basically stolen everything of Hellboy’s existence to spur his own resurrection. And in doing so, Hellboy’s colour has faded and left him grey.

There’s also a visual similarity to the wound pattern and silhouette of Rasputin. From a conceptual standpoint, it sets up Hellboy against not just someone who has taken on his essential life spark to serve as a kind of doppelganger, but also a representation of his opposite.

pg. 32 - The heretic basically explaining it to us, and Hellboy just not having any of it is typical. Absolutely gorgeous art still from Mignola and Stewart.

pg. 34 - The legend of those gold tablets (alternately copper in some tellings, I think, but mostly gold) is real. Again, it’s a testament to how Mignola tells a story, weaving in bits of pre-existing folklore, urban legends, mythology, occult, and magick with his own inventions to tell a bigger story.

pg. 37 - I find it very interesting that as soon as Mignola goes into the creation story for Hellboy, the constrained layouts and grids ends. Suddenly we get a full bleed page, something we’ve not seen often in the series. Visually, it signifies that something bigger is being told here, even if you don’t necessarily comprehend that on a first reading.

pg. 39-40 - And that full-page storytelling continues through with the creation of the Ogdru Jahad and their offspring.

pg. 41 - And just weird happenings regarding the creator race of Watchers and the one who basically constructed their “devil” in Ogdru Jahad, and how his bits and pieces ultimately come down to Hellboy’s conception.

pg. 42 - This conception of the creation of gods and monsters, of mice and men, is interesting. Even if predicated on a faulty understanding from Blavatsky.

pg. 44 - Just stunning use of colour from Stewart.

pg. 46 - And it gets woven back into the narrative that started in Seed of Destruction and is currently running through this narrative movement in BPRD.

pg. 47 - It’s interesting that it always cycles back to the crazy. Delusions of grandeur and an attempt to run the world, to have it accept him as a saviour, anyone who disagrees be damned. It’s an interesting counterpoint to Hellboy, who doesn’t want to be a hero but tends to do the right thing just because it’s “right”.

pg. 50 - I love it when Hellboy provides his own sound effects.

pg. 51 - It always sucks when hurting the villain hurts you yourself. This mirror nature between the heretic and Hellboy is fascinating. It’s also interesting to see what effect Mohlomi’s trinkets are having.

pg. 52 - The heretic’s assumption of Hellboy’s “true” form, even as this nascent Anung Um Rama demon--though looking a wee bit more like Astaroth--is interesting. It’s a sign of a path not taken.

pg. 53 - Creepy worm is back.

pg. 54 - The heretic suffering as the worm creature thing dies is an interesting touch. Gorgeous artwork.

pg. 56 - After all that...

pg. 57 - Ominous hint of things to come.

pg. 60 - Love the use of the fairies and night creatures and whatnot again as a kind of Greek chorus for the epilogue.

Also a hint for what comes next in the main narrative, “Even now he is bound for England.” which I think picks up in Darkness Calls.

pg. 61 - I find it interesting that Hecate has apparently fallen silent, likely living by Hellboy’s wish for her to leave him alone (at least for the time being).

pg. 62-63 - Nice reiteration and reinterpretation of who Hellboy is.

pg. 63 - It’s also interesting as to just how much of Hellboy’s eventual fate is shaped just because this little hobgoblin, Gruagach, couldn’t handle his smackdown from being a jerk back in “The Corpse”.

pg. 65 - Just let it go, pig dude.

Final Thoughts:

So...if “The Third Wish” was a fairy tale, Mike Mignola’s tragic take on Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid, this is something else entirely as a follow-up, somewhere between The Seventh Seal and Black Narcissus. It’s bleak, distant, esoteric, and absolutely lush when it comes to its use of colour to set mood and atmosphere.

While it is a resumption of the origin cycle for Hellboy that has played out before in the narrative a few times now since Seed of Destruction, it’s also a bit of transference and confrontation of Hellboy’s destiny that plays out here. Where previous iterations may have been an emotional response and rejection, here we get a more measured physical and intellectual rejection.

This also feels kind of like a dry run for the storytelling approach that we’re going to eventually be seeing in parts of Hellboy in Hell. This story definitely takes us to some strange places.

d. emerson eddy is just a broken machine, with all the layers of dust some things have started to fail. Some things. Some.

[conartistnyc]

Meet the the All-Stars

New York City’s largest art collective brings its A-Game to 198 Allen Street this summer (August 6th - 12th) in an epic retrospective of long-time collaborators and studio members. Hand-selected from our rich eight-year history in the Lower East Side. Approaching the art world on their own terms, presenting artists embody the culture of Con Artist Collective. Join us for a public gallery reception Thursday, August 9th, 2018 7pm-11pm. 

Now we would like to introduce each featured artist:

Kayo Albert 

Kayo Albert was born in Hyogo, Japan. After graduating from college in Kyoto, she came to New York to study painting at Art Student League, New York Studio School, and School of Visual Arts. She is actively creating and exhibiting her work in New York. A member since 2014, Con Artist Collective has been her hub for collaboration, exchanging ideas, and inspiring with other fellow artists. Her work is abstract painting heavily combined with drawing on a surface called Mylar. Her use of paint rich in fluidity creates translucent layers, and gives depth and complexity. Mylar of which most of her paintings are done, also gives translucency, luminosity, and airlines. With strong interest in Carl Jung’s psychology, she takes references from nature, and memories perceived and stored in the unconscious, extracted in altered form. She expands her work in several projects: The Iceland Project explores the juxtaposition between abstract painting and landscape photography, which she took in Iceland. In The Pillar and Fault series, paintings are mounted on multi-dimensional planes of wooden board to cross the boundary of 2 dimensional surface.

Tomaso Albertini 

Artist Tomaso Albertini was born in Milan, Italy (1984) where he attended the La Scuola del fumetto di Milano. He lives and works in New York City. His first professional work of large format paintings concentrated on a serious investigation of color. Here he broke free from the confines of illustration, the subject emphasized in his academic training, and began to create emotional projections that served as the foundation of his further development. Guided by instinct, he mixed color on flat surfaces using abstract forms that ultimately revealed figures. After this initial period, there was a big change. Albertini began to experiment with new materials. He wanted the work to be more physical - more direct. He introduced the use of burned, melted plastic into the paintings. He has described the process as a defacement of the figure in an effort to dig into the life of the human form. One senses the physical presence of form conveyed by a willful act of transference. Albertini than started to create three-dimensional art using cardboard. It allowed him to accomplish the figure as if it were a sculpture and paint on it as if it were a canvas. This technique introduced dynamics approaching sculpture. It is, in fact, a hybrid manifestation.

Atomik

Atomik is a 100% Miami artist. Atomik, trained in graphic design, is a big name in the Miami art scene. The graffiti legend, part of the infamous MSG crew, a group of local graffiti heroes, has been painting the city for quite some time. While growing up in the emerging Miami graffiti scene of the 80’s, Atomik witnessed for himself at a young age what would later become his profession. Famous for his iconic orange character which emerged as a response to the demolition of the Miami Orange Bowl, the artists also marks the walls of Miami with his sleek hand-styles, graffiti and lettering.

Jaouad “The Jah” Bentama 

Jaouad Bentama is a French artist born and raised in Paris, France. As a kid from a non-artistic family, his passion was initiated by his neighbor who took him to his first museum trip, which exposed him to different art styles. Jaouad creates artwork that echoes deeply with the lightness, the happiness, and the innocence of childhood.

Ian Bertram 

Ian is an artist working in multiple drawing and painting disciplines. His large scale works have been shown in Paris (Gallerie Glenat), Sri Lanka (Barefoot Gallery), and New York (David Lewis, Lazy Susan, Society of Illustrators). He has worked for Marvel, DC comics, Image comics, and Glenat BD. His current project is a creator-owned title called Little Bird, being published by Glenat Bd in France the winter of 2019.

Andrea Cook 

Andrea Cook is an international artist dedicated to empowering women through her paintings on various mediums including the street. Her latest series, Pussy Power debuted at the Museum of Sex in 2015 in NYC. With over 1000 pieces, now in collector’s homes and on the streets in cities all over the world, this body of work continues to grow along with her role as an international artist and global activist. From a 20-year entrepreneurial career in technology and communications that began in Chicago, Cook evolved into a visual artist and has become purposeful and passionate about creating street art that empowers women that drives real social change. As a changeologist, Cook has a large body of work on change that has been showcased in hundreds of shows and venues throughout the country. Wallpaper Magazine "cherry-picked" Andrea Cook’s Pussy Power art as one of the “finest works” from the Art on Paper show during its Art Basel review in 2015.

Charlie Cunningham 

Charlie Cunningham’s artwork invokes the contradictions within subjects both dubiously humorous and revolting. Utilizing campy motifs and materials, he searches for humorous optimism in mortality and satirizes the perverse nature of our destruction, both at the hands of time and our fellow man. His artworks span figurative sculpture, installation, drawing and painting. Each work can incorporate a wide variety of mediums including, ceramic, silicone, found objects, charcoal, urethane foam, resin, acrylic, and human hair. Charlie has recently exhibited at the Governor’s Island Art Fair, Burlington City Arts, and The Delaware Contemporary Art Museum. He is also the recipient of several awards and honors including a Teton Artlab Residency, Rasquache Artist Residency, and the Penn State University Creative Achievement Award.

Hektad 

Hektad is a New York City graffiti pioneer. In 1982, at the age of 12, the Bronx native set out to compete with veteran bombers such as Mitch 77 and Chris 217. After an intense 12 year campaign on New York’s streets and transit system, Hektad took a well deserved break to focus on his family. In 2013, he returned with a vengeance. After jumping into what many consider a cluttered and undefined street art scene, Hektad clearly took the lead with his whimsical “Love Drunk” hearts and humorous anecdotes.

JCORP 

JCORP is an American artist based in New York City. Known for her bright, starry-eyed characters, she explores pop culture and contemporary romance through street art, murals, and illustrative painting. She studied Visual and Critical Studies at the School of Visual Art and earned her BFA in 2014.  Some of her clients include MTV, VICE, NBC Universal, Redbull TV, Creative Nail Design, Ricky's NYC, The Doughnut Project, Black Tree Brooklyn, and Little Skips; among other public art projects such as The 100 Gates Project, Centrefuge Public Art, Arts Org LIC, Welling Court Mural Project, Lower Manhattan Art Festival (L.I.S.A. Project), JMZ Walls, and many more.

Seunghwui Koo 

Seunghwui Koo creates her works drawing inspiration from the daily happenings and intricate moments of her life in NYC.  Her work is a commentary on the lives of New Yorkers as she has witnessed. She was born in South Korea, where she first had the idea of combining the pig’s head and human body. The significance of the pig’s head lies in the different symbolic meanings from the Eastern and Western cultures. Good fortune (Eastern) and greed (Western), two very different connotations of the pig, are themes that are a part of her works. She uses resin, acrylic, plaster, clay, and mixed media to create her works. She is one of the artists in the Chashama organization in NYC.

Joseph Meloy 

Joseph Meloy is a muralist and mixed media artist who creates electrifying images that trigger the senses. His art is more of a subconscious realization of an idea or thing, than it is a fully realized or recognizable concept, yet there is enough there to convey a purposeful message of emotion, movement or mechanization. He has a distinctive style – each painting is a little different, but it’s always abstract with a bright color palette. He calls his work “post graffiti” art and coined the term “vandal expressionism” to best describe what he does.

Dean Millien 

Millien is an NYC-based artist who creates sculptures out of aluminum foil. His first solo exhibition, “Curses, Foiled Again”, was debuted at Con Artist Collective. He has been commissioned by J.Crew for their “Crew Cuts” kids lines. His sculptures have also been featured in Macy’s window display.

John Raymond Mireles 

John Raymond Mireles began his artistic career in the mountains as a rock climber, photographically documenting the lives and exploits of his fellow vertically inspired athletes. Though a climbing rope is no longer part of his equipment list, Mireles continues in his photographic adventures. His most recent series consists of portraits of Americans from all 50 states. Entitled the Neighbors Project, it has been publicly installed in San Diego, Phoenix, Anchorage, and in New York City’s Lower East Side - where it was listed by the New York Times and The Guardian newspapers as one of the top public exhibitions of 2018. Solo shows of his work include the Anchorage Museum in Anchorage, Alaska, Bread and Salt gallery in San Diego, and Circuitous Succession in Memphis, among others. Mireles is a recent transplant to New York City from his hometown of San Diego, California. His first solo gallery show in New York City will take place in September 2018 at the Storefront Gallery in the Lower East Side.

MOR 

Mor is an artist and Brooklyn native. A daughter of storytellers and artists - her narrative originates from an inherent urge to express an inner landscape of dreams and symbols. Spirited forms of flora and fauna emerge from a delicate and meditative process of paper cutting. She utilizes both pencil and blade to create these multi-layer stencils and singular paper cuts.

Victor Joseph Ochoa 

Victor Joseph Ochoa (b. 1988) is an artist born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. After graduating from The Cooper Union in 2010, Victor began to pursue a career in graphic design within the publishing industry. He has worked for companies such as HarperCollins, Scholastic, and Simon and Schuster designing books for children of all ages. He has had books on the New York Times best sellers list and has worked with companies such as Nickelodeon, Lionsgate, Guinness World Records, Rovio, DC Comics, and more. He is a member of the Con Artist Collective in the Lower East Side of New York City. Here he creates, mentors, learns, and grows with a family of artists from around the world. Outside of his graphic design career Victor continues to pursue all aspects of creation. In 2010 he started the independent comic publisher DRAWMORE INC., where he self-publishes comics. He has exhibited at numerous local comic conventions, such as New York Comic Con, MoCCA Festival, and King Kong. He also ran a successful Kickstarter campaign for the comic anthology NOBODIES Volume 2. He previously worked as the Lead Publishing Designer at Marvel Entertainment. He currently is an Art Director at Ellation (Crunchyroll & VRV).

Cody Oyama 

Cooper Union alumni working with history, memory and the inability to touch either and the failures of both. Cody, along with Laura Tack (who now resides in Morocco) were two of the earliest artists to join the Collective and played a large role in the development of its culture.

RAD (Raddington Falls) 

RAD is an artist and art educator in New York City. Originally from Los Angeles, Cuban-American RAD has exhibited and sold artwork online, galleries and alternative spaces. He has taught in museums, public and independent schools and community centers. His artwork embraces the person we were as a child. Sometimes, his artwork is a harsh mirror of our society. Most of the time, it lives somewhere in the middle. And perhaps his work may allow people to tap into their own sense of wonder and the power somewhere inside of them.

RX Skulls 

Rx Skulls aka Arrex is a adhesively obsessed exterior decorator from Portland Oregon who’s street art revolves around a single skull photo taken in the Natural History Museum in London. The project began its evolution in 2010 after a series of medical hardships and a trip to Europe, which exposed Rx to the world of street art in person. Having already dabbled in screen printing, creating stickers and posters from scratch quickly became more of an addiction than a hobby. To this day, six years later, Rx travels the world sharing his skulls, tombstones, poison labels, and plethora of other morbid designs with the masses.

Audrey Ryan 

Audrey Ryan is a figure painter with a dark sense of humor, hailing from Binghamton, New York. She holds a BFA in Drawing & Painting and a BS in Visual Arts Education from SUNY New Paltz. She is prolific, producing a constant stream of of observational gesture drawings, usually in ink or charcoal as well as many large-scale oil paintings. Her work is regularly published by Endless Editions, and is distributed/exhibited internationally. She is informed by punk culture, and histories of disorder, addiction and recovery. While also making drawings, poems, prints, zines, videos, installations and tattoos, she aims to communicate the struggle to survive our human selves.

Rachael Senchoway 

Rachael Senchoway wishes to inhabit a space where her restless energy can channel itself into something that lives outside of her body. She takes in her environment and returns it to the world as characters that are ultimately stand-ins for herself, and people she knows in her dreams. She is able to exert control over this dimension and integrate the creatures into a system that allows them to escape, become heros, animals, lovers, and ghosts whom exist in an ongoing myth. Creating these places helps her to see where she’s been, and where she’s going. Each painting is treated as an individual meditation within a body of work. These ideas allow her to rediscover the complexities of her own human experience.

Katie Shima 

Katie Shima (BA Columbia University, MArch Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation) is an artist and architect based in Brooklyn. Katie has had exhibitions at BRIC, the Knockdown Center, Bridge Gallery, Mighty Tanaka Gallery, Devotion Gallery, Trestle Gallery, and others in New York City as well as the GWVA Museum in Springfield, MA, and D.A.K. in Aarhus, Denmark. Residencies include Trestle Art Space, Con Artist Collective, Clocktower Gallery, and Det Jyske Kunstakademie. Katie is also a founding member of the electronic noise art group Loud Objects and has taught as an instructor at Columbia University.

Brandon Sines 

Frank Ape is a Sasquatch who lives in New York City amongst the humans and is the creation of artist Brandon Sines. Frank can be seen all over the city on any given day and has been spotted on streets and in homes around the world. He embodies positivity and equality, and cares about all living things. Frank believes in "creating your own universe" and inspiring people and animals every day. Shortly after moving to New York City in 2010, Sines combined his use of mythological creatures, pop icons, and made up characters into a new character called Frank. Frank is an “ape” that often takes the form of a cartoon, but is no doubt a reference to Sines himself. Frank explores human conditions without human restrictions.

The Sucklord 

The Sucklord is a New York City Pop Artist and Television Personality known for his subversive Action Figure mashups and Reality TV Persona. Operating under the Brand SUCKADELIC, The Sucklord’s Line of self-manufactured Bootleg Toys steal shamelessly from STAR WARS, Vintage Advertising and All manner of Pop Culture Trash. Packaged in layers of ironic self-Mockery, His shoddy looking wares have inspired an entire secondary Art movement, with dozens of entrepreneurial Toy Bootleggers creating their own versions of highly referential, low-Rent interpretations of their favorite figures. Recently The Sucklord has increased the scale of his work, putting oversized Blister-carded figures in Tokyo Art Galleries, the homes of the famously wealthy, and the Walls of downtown New York City.

Laura Tack 

Born on 9 June in Belgium, Laura Tack works through images and materials in an attempt to connect with the vastness of time, using processes that emphasize the connection between creation and destruction. Laura, as a painter, depicts both the pains and joys of seeking out and growing closer to our roots. She is currently living and working in Marrakech, Morocco.

Sarah Wang  

Sarah is interested in people and the communities they represent. In her photography and films, she collaborates with her subjects to tell their stories. She is exploring new ways and mediums through which to tell these stories, working in collaboration with professionals in various creative fields along the way. A photographer, film-maker, and curator born in Harbin, China, Sarah grew up in the Bay Area from the age of six. She earned her BA in Art Education from San Francisco State University with an emphasis in drawing and painting as well as a CA Teaching Credential in K-12 Art Education. Sarah worked as an artist teacher with the Joan Mitchell Foundation during her first three years in New York. She then, along with fellow artist, Shaina Yang opened an alternative art space in the Lower East Side, called City Bird Gallery. They offered an experimental space for emerging & professional artists as well as student and community organizations to exhibit their work. Shaina and Sarah have since joined forces with a collective of women and gender non-binary artists and curators to create Disclaimer Gallery, an experimental installation space catered to showing queer, women of color and other marginalized groups.

Wizard Skull 

Wizard Skull is an artist living and working in Brooklyn NY. Early on he picked up skateboarding, and he immersed himself within the subculture. Designing T-shirts, skateboard graphics, and skateboarding in local shop videos, he eventually went on to design over 200+ board graphics for skateboard companies from Norway, Russia, England, and all over the US and rest of the world. His art as well as himself skateboarding appeared in numerous skateboard magazines including Thrasher. Adopting the moniker of Wizard Skull and abandoning freelance design work, he began wheat pasting his art all around New York. One of his most often wheat pastes was "Sexy Ronald", a buff version of Ronald McDonald wearing only underwear with fries popping out of them. People began photographing and sharing images of it on social media which led to the image going viral several times, being bootlegged and sold on T-shirts in Thailand. This also led to his art being exposed to a larger audience.

Shaina Yang 

Shaina​ ​Lee-Shuan Yang, often known as Aniahs Gnay or Moon Mansion, is a ​multidisciplinary visual​ ​artist​ ​and​ arts​ ​organizer​ ​based​ ​in​ ​NYC. Their work explores the relationships of the vessel body and its carried symbols, connectivity, and the space between it all. They are influenced by the​ ​superstitious nature of their ​Taiwanese​ ​family​ and ​life as first-generation queer American.

Be there for our biggest show to date!

[endeavorsreward]

Excerpt: Interlude (Two?)

700 OV / 60 BA

Mistleaf Huntmoon

In the southernmost reaches of the Kerwon continent, there lay within the Jagd Difohr an ancient wood; by geography, it was part of the Golmore to the north, but unlike those well-trod jungle paths, this was a place not even the Viera would tread. It was a naturalist’s dream, with thousand-year old trees beginning to petrify, and rare beasts stalking through the inch-tall layer of frost that coated much of the traversible paths: basilisks, golems, and holy elementals would appear and disappear from view as regular as breathing, but the Mu bunnies were much less cautious, sniffling about hume invaders to this land that was either sacred or profane but surely one.

The leader of this day’s expedition, however, was no naturalist but an engineer by trade. This accounted for the confusion amongst his coterie when he asked for one of the pale hares to be trapped and caged – and again when he retrieved an empty jar from his pack, and used it to collect a number of the floating white pinpricks of light that were on all sides of them, carefully sealing the jar shut before tucking the whole thing away again.

It was easier said than done, trapping the Mu bunny – like all dreamhares they were fast, but the worst of it was the “moondust,” a powder that coated its fur, some residue that remained after secretions like sweat, that at contact caused a bafflement of the mind. When Ioachim first got his hands on the animal, he got enough of the moondust beneath his nails that his next move was to turn in place and take a swing at D’ghoz, who had since been pouting about it in their shared tent for hours. For how often the hume race chose to characterize Seeq as brutish, in all of Dzul Zulejha’s years, she’d never known one who wasn’t at their core soft-hearted like a child.

In the end, though, the hunter Lev Almasa scooped the creature up in a net and hung it from the gray branch of the tree around which they’d made camp, where they could all watch it thrash about and  Dzul could wonder at whether they’d be tasked with feeding it for as long as they were to travel the Feywood.

The camp, their fourth in the Feywood so far, encircled the massive dead tree so that all sides could have their eyes on the shadows and the beasts that lay beyond. They’d already settled into the pattern of sleeping in three shifts of four awake at a time, so that there would be no blind spots. Eight of their number were hunters, pirates, guides, survivalists – these things were as natural as breathing. And three of the four others were used to nothing so much as following orders, and so they adapted just as quickly.

The last was the Engineer, who barely paid it mind, studying a notebook most day and night and hardly paying them any heed at all. The last time he’d spoken at all was a day earlier, where he mused aloud that in earlier generations, they’d called the Feywood “a forest of chaos,” which had done nothing to improve the mood after they’d slain a pack of wolves unlike any she’d seen before, with fur of mottled crimson and their horns aflame.

To think, on the maps this place was but a hand’s breadth from the Golmore. That jungle was not without its dangers – Dzul first faced a morbol in her nineteenth year, and for the next two she’d breathed with a rasp – but they were known dangers, and those without malicious intent oft had the Wood-Warders to watch over them from the branches. Here, though, was different: because the Mist was heavy in the Feywood, heavier than she’d ever seen it in all her life.

Ioachim and D’ghoz had never seen the Mist before with their own eyes. They were knowledgeable when it came to forestry, skilled trackers, and other things besides, but their partnership had been founded in the Salikawood far to the west, in safe Nabradia, and they were the rawest of the recruits assembled. Some of their number had been hired through intermediaries, some were respondents to notices posted in the major Clans, and in the case of Yulil Kline, roused from beneath a pile of straw in some cell in Old Archades – but this pair had come on recommendation, someone in the Thirty Houses who had become an investor, and found the group lacking in controllable assets.

“Cor,” Ioachim had finally said after his jaw had raised, “I’ve never seen fog like this.” And amidst a series of incredulous looks, the Engineer laughed, the first time his expression had changed from a sort of dead-eyed, detached interest in his surroundings since the group had set off from Balfonheim.

“This is no fog, my boy...” The Engineer had placed one hand on the young hume’s shoulder and stretched the other outward to encompass all of the Feywood, where the white haze trailed between the trees. “This is Mist, this is the source of all magick. A natural phenomena older than humes, older than even the Nu Mou, ‘tis a lifeblood of the earth that exists in all the air.”

D’ghoz snorted and shook his head. The Seeq were rotund, even the strongest of them, and their porcine faces were quick to emote, but offered poor chance at pronunciation; Like many, he didn’t speak often unless it were truly necessary, communicating more with wheezes from his snout and a scorning sound that more resembled flatulence.

“Eh?” Ioachim scratched behind his ear. “How’ve we never espied such before now, then, if it’s in all the air?”

“Wasn’t aware you had to see it, to know.” Lev horked and spit a fat gob of something awful at his feet. Big, bearded, barely dressed – he’d run hunts out of Dalmasca, even after being drummed out of Clan Centurio for conduct unbecoming, but Dalmasca was racked with plague and had been for much of the year; he’d fled to Balfonheim rather than catch the sickness as his former countrymen had. He viewed most of the assembled group with disdain, most like for the very reason that even a comparative boy like Ioachim had better relations with his clients. To call D’ghoz a “pig” would be a slur – would mark any of them for Archadian at the least – but to call Lev the same was nothing.

They all watched the Mist swirl, then, saw mirages of their own selves dance and flicker in the unearthly light – no fog, this, that was reflective, prismatic, warm and cool at once to the touch in a way indescribable.

“Fool,” had said Yulil, twisting and tumbling a dagger ‘round his fingers. “We are in Jagd; how could you not know the very word?”

“The word Jagd comes from the Garif, where it meant ‘hunt’ only,” mumbled Haeva – then to her left, now asleep in a hammock strung between the dead branches, looking as though she’d been caught up in a net of her own... a female Bangaa Ruga who had known the Golmore, was on vaguely-friendly terms with the Viera that made it their home. The Mist settled on her yellow scales gave her the look of a sculpture carved in ice. “To say Jagd means ‘mist-choked’ only in the common tongue, but they named it such from the creatures the Mist spawned.”

The Engineer tolerated all of the cross-talk, though to Dzul’s eye it all appeared to bore him, or at least waste time spent thinking on whatever sad calculations hung behind his eyes. He was aristocratic in bearing, were it not given away by his fine white gloves, the embroidery in his crimson expeditioner’s jacket, and the expense of his glasses, the three men and one woman of his group who wore the polished plate armor of the Archadian military, the ones who’d come at his side and watched over his every stomp through the muck as though they expected him to fall into a frost-covered bog and vanish from sight completely.

He drew from his pocket a polished stone, dark in color but brightening in his hand. Ioachim had goggled over the sight; as though he’d never seen magicite, before.

“Attend here, now, and I’ll instruct you.” With the stone between two fingers, he held it up and outward, and the two Salikawood hunters watched in awe as the Mist was drawn around in in spiraling loops, like water in a drain. The stone’s glow increased as it swallowed the Mist, and Dzul knew that to hold it would be to feel it vibrate softly, like a harp-string.

Now, at the beginnings of nightfall, as Dzul inspected her crossbow, repacked her other gear, and watched Ioachim trail his hand through the Mist, she had to admit that the Engineer had a flair for rhetoric, that his lesson seemed to have taken hold in a boy barely-lettered. She hated Archades and she hated the nobility, but she wanted to know a bit more about this man, who had gathered them all together to hunt for a faerie tale.

“For Mist to be visible,” he’d explained, “It must needs be quite dense, quite full indeed... places like the Feywood, where most races daren’t settle. To breathe in so much Mist at a time can be dangerous to the body, you see, for our capacity for magick, our very souls, are fragile things.” It was little wonder the Viera stayed further north, that the Nu Mou and the Garif never came here. Those more in touch with the world of magick were all the more endangered. “Magicite, those stones we use to enable our technology, our great feats of engineering, are able to hold the Mist, the way air can be held within a balloon.”

“How can a stone hold Mist?” Ioachim had asked, which had been the wrong tactic, in terms of understanding, for the man’s other side slipped free from its tether.

“Crystals are formed due to uniquely geometric structures in their composition; magicite such as this become an aetheric lodestone precisely because of that geometry. For the harmonic resonance of  such structures allow the Mist to pass within, and then ‘tis stored because the space within, as with all such geometry, is larger than its volume without.”

Ioachim had looked stricken. Yulil and Lev had shaken their heads and stalked off to scout ahead, presumably hoping to inflict violence.

Now, Dzul came to stand next to the boy-hunter, crossbow returned to the thong tied ‘round one shoulder and over her back. Normally, Mist took years, decades, to accumulate in regular magicite. Only in a place like the Feywood could it be displayed so dramatically. Mist soaked into the land like dew, or collected underground as if a water table, and crystals leeched at it over the ages, waiting to be mined up and put to use. But here, in the Forest of Chaos, the air itself was made of volatile magick: they’d kept their spell uses to water and ice, worried that a spark or flame might spread through the Mist and torch them all alive. The camp was lit by electric lamps that ran on processed magicite stones, unfolded from packs hung over their chocobo’s back and placed around the camp in hopes of discouraging the nocturnal beasts.

It was quiet; the soft buzz of the maps, the rustling of the trapped bunny, and light snoring from Haeva, but you’d be forgiven for thinking they were alone there, in the Mist. Ioachim yawned, Dzul watched herself, an apparition in the Mist.

Dzul Zulejha was born to the northwest of Archades, in a small village in what was once called the Republic of Landis. Theirs was a small nation, but proud; they were predominantly hume, but lived in concert with the Bangaa minority and an encampment of Garif-miga that had assembled on the border almost a century ago. She used to play amongst the Garif-miga; her mother was a tradesman who would bring goods back and forth from the capital, and he was well-liked there. When the posting for this expedition came to her, she was amongst the Garif of Kerwon on the other side of the Ozmone Plain, men more proud and also more fragile than the families she’d known, but she knew their dances, and had been made well-welcome. Thirteen years ago, however, the Archadian Empire had come to claim Landis as their own. As the knights of Landis had broken and scattered into guerrilla groups, her mother had taken her on bocoback far from the land of her home, that she need never see it conquered.

Her mother would be shamed, that she’d taken the posting, but the Garif had a saying: to eat is the blood’s desire, and the heart needn’t pump without it.

She was twenty-four, her skin was darker than the earth, her hair lighter than a clear sky, her arms were wrapped to hide the scars, and they called her the Wolf-Slayer. She didn’t much recognize the girl from Landis in the woman who peered back from the Mist, but she also felt little shame in it.

Ioachim rubbed at the back of his head, looking to her. “Guessin’ I should apologize t’Go for boppin’ his snout, before.”

“You were hardly yourself,” she said to him with a half-smile. It was hard not to like Ioachim.

Behind them, Swati (pronounced like “Svati”) sneezed himself awake, grumbled, and rolled over in the dirt. A Bangaa Sanga who’d said little the entire trip; he wore a blindfold and was not allowed back to Nabradia and could shoot the wings from a fly with a Ras Algethi. He and Haeva had not exchanged a single look, less Dzul had missed it. She’d not expect the other races to need each other’s company, but when surrounded by Imperials who’d like as not use other words or worse, she’d think they’d find safety in numbers.

Ioachim shrugged. “Can’t say as I know who I was, then.” He walked off, and cleared her eyeline to see the Engineer sitting in a folding chair, one of his armored retinue standing at his side. He was taking notes and drinking an iced tea, as though he was on holiday along the Phon Coast. At his feet, the jar held those twinkling lights, orbiting each other lazily.

Before she’d known it was Imperials, she’d known it was to travel the Feywood, and she’d said yes. She’d said it because she hadn’t been, and because others would think she couldn’t. She’d said yes because the purse was good enough to send some along with a Kiltian missionary she knew, who made trips north to what remained of Landis, which wasn’t much. She said yes because most often when folly of this scale came well-funded, it collapsed early and you could walk away with the spoils for hardly an effort. Others had other reasons – Lev had the bloodlust, and Haeva through some complicated debt she felt she owed the Golmore Viera, Yulil fought for his freedom and Swati was making of it some elaborate suicide – most of all, Dzul wanted to see the truth of the stories.

The Nu Mou spoke of Giruvegan, and the Garif believed it; for a hume of the Empire to seek it out, he had to know something, that he believed it’d prove out.

And so she approached the man, and spoke the legend that she’d heard aloud.

“On the farthest shores of the river of time, shrouded deep in the roiling Mist, the Holy Land sleeps: Giruvegan.”

The Engineer did not look up from his notes. “A Viera song, that. ‘Who knows the paths? The way to its doors?’ I expect it’s more pleasant to the ear in the original tongue, more... lilting.”

She crossed her arms. “You think yourself the answer to its riddle?”

“This shroud roils well enough.” He slid his glasses back up his nose and looked up at her. And it was truth, that their camp looked like an island adrift in an abstract oil painting, some small broken chunk of the purvama if the skies were diseased. His pen made some long calligraphic flourish. “We shall see what we shall see.”

This answer wasn’t good enough by half. There was a rustle in the gnarled stalks a few yards away, and she unslung and fired; a small bipedal plant emerged with an arrow through its blossom head, not even yet a fruit; it spun around, clutching its chest and falling over like a stage performer. As it expired, a spare flew flickers of light, like the ones in The Engineer’s jar, drifted upwards from the body, seeming to dissipate into the Mist. The man in armor attending made a mildly satisfied noise.

“You rarely see it, save in places thick with Mist,” The Engineer mused. “Perhaps it would have served as visual aid for the boy, earlier.”

Dzul turned. “Why do we make for the city the Gods built?”

The man in the armor scoffed. “What need have Clansmen for reasons? The coin is good.”

“I’m of no Clan,” she said, betraying bitterness she’d thought behind her; this man raised an eyebrow, as though she’d not just shown her draw speed. He looked old, his silver hair in some ridiculous nobleman coif, but the muscles in his neck were as tight as the cabling inside an airship, and she suspected it for an even match. “You’d tell not the hunter of their prey?”

The Engineer snapped his notebook closed and eyed her over the rims of his glasses. “We seek the Eternal.”

She let a laugh slip out unbidden. “Is that all? Men of means have always sought wellsprings of youth; you hadn’t struck me as vain.”

“Vayne? Not I.” The Engineer smiled. It was a sad smile, hollow, and ghosts danced across his twitching cheeks, though if they were shadows in the Mist’s light she couldn’t say. “Though it’s true enough that Emperor Gramis himself would approve of our finding results, no, I alone am the fool whose errand we now pursue.”

“If you seek immortality, have an heir.” The mention of Gramis, despoiler of Landis, had soured her mood further. “That is what the gentry does, is it not?”

His eyes darkened, and for the first The Engineer lost the faculty of speech. But finally: “An heir I have; and no consolation prize he, though I’ve eyes set on more and greater.”

There was something there, an anger not at her, but something else, the anger her mother had tried to suppress as he’d explained their homeland was razed to dust. "Who watches your son now?"

He waved it off. “An apprentice, one of the shipwrights. Just above the age of reason, I think, in Moogle years.”

She could only imagine a boy raised by Moogles. The little creatures were collectors of family, mischievous at best, brilliant and insufferable. “Why?”

“Because he misaligned a glossair ring during an engine test and nearly exploded our entire laboratory,” The Engineer lied, and she turned away in disgust.

It was perhaps those moving lights, that this place was called the Feywood. They were everywhere, like stars that danced. Either the proximity to Mt. Bur-Omisace, or the image of them in the air like falling snowflakes frozen in time, suspended – they called them snowflies. It was said that their congregation confused the explorer, that those who saw them were forever lost. It was said that they were drawn to The Dark.

She wondered if she’d die here. If they all would, as Swati seemed to long for, if The Engineer’s boy would instead come of age upon an airship in flight.

She cast the man in the armor one last look before heading back towards her bedroll, noting tiredly his bemusement, and fished from her pack a bottle of Valendian wine, hard-bought, and as always a nostrum for the lost. She drank from it straight, looked at the label, decorated with a fine-penned image of Kali, though the old goddess was holding glasses in each of her hands. It tasted like her childhood smelled, the fields she’d run through, burnt by the men she brought to the Gods.

Yulil stirred, from his place on the ground beside her. He’d had no gil to buy creature comforts, but the years interred had left him inured to such, regardless. She offered him a pull of the bottle, and he lifted it to the sky, gulping greedily.

“You hate it like I do,” he said, hoarse, wiping his mouth the back of a fist.

“The Feywood?” She placed her crossbow on the ground before her so that she could lean back against the massive trunk. “I’ve seldom seen a Hell more beautiful.”

“Nay, the Imperials.” He cocked a head back towards where she’d stood moments before. “The hollow men.”

She sighed, drank. “To ignore them is to ignore half the world. In time they’ll own everything, or Rozarria will. I’ve not the luxury for pride.” The Garif west of Ozmone were proud, and they acted as if their land wasn’t shrinking by the year, claimed by Dalmascans or overrun with beasts even they couldn’t hunt.

He looked at her queerly, then, and took back the bottle. “...You don’t know.”

Dzul scowled. “What don’t I know, save why we were all fools enough to besiege God’s approach?”

Yulil glanced at the man in the armor, who stood rigid, hands clasped behind his back, as though The Engineer had flown a statue in from Bhujerba. “Him. Guess his face isn’t as known, as he’s not wearing that impractical helmet they gave him. He’s only Judge Magister Phansi.”

Above them, the Mu bunny screeched and cried, sending Haeva into a long moan.

Phansi, the butcher of Landis. Dzul Zulejha could feel her heart stop.

She didn’t know if any of them would leave the Feywood alive. But she was sure, in that moment, that one man would not.

[hysterialevi]

In the Smoke pt. 31 (Cobblebats)

From Bruce’s POV

THE CATACOMBS

Skulking my way through the dank tunnels, I searched every inch of the crumbling tomb for a certain sniper as my heart hammered in my chest, threatening to leap right out of my rib cage. It had been a long time since I felt this type of fear, and the latest memory I could recall where I experienced the same thing was way back during the debate.

I let out a sigh. Things were so much simpler for me then. I had a single goal in mind, I knew who my enemies were, and nothing was holding me back. For once in my life, I actually had a clear vision of where I was supposed to go. Now though, it was like trying to navigate a blizzard. I couldn’t see more than two steps ahead of me, my feet were stuck in the ground, and with every passing day, the bone-biting winds only grew stronger. Even if I did manage to kill Gideon, I didn’t know where the hell we would start cleaning up this mess.

Pushing my way through a thin layer of cobwebs, I eventually found myself standing in front of what looked like to be an underground chapel. There weren’t any seats in sight, but an ornate altar stood proudly on the other side of the room, dimly lit with a collection of tall candles. There were also a few, intricate stone sculptures watching over the secluded sanctuary, and in the center, I spotted Gideon himself, sitting against the altar while clutching a fresh wound. Blood stained his hands as well as the floor beneath him, and judging by his fading breath, I could tell he wasn’t going to last much longer. I guessed Vicki wasn’t the only one who got hurt during their fight. I carefully approached him.

“...Gideon...?” I softly called out, pointing my gun at him. He glared at me.

“...well, well,” he weakly coughed, straining in pain. “Look who it is. ...Bruce. Fuckin’. Wayne. You certainly got a habit of showin’ up where you’re not wanted.”

I gestured to his wound. “What happened to you? Did Lady Arkham do that?”

Gideon laughed, shaking his head. “She couldn’t do this to me if she tried, and she sure tried her damnedest not too long ago. No, it was the goddamn traps that got me. Opened a door when I wasn’t paying attention, and a spike went straight through me. I limped around for a while, hoping to find a way out, and ended up settling down here. Then you arrived.”

I stepped closer to him. “Why did you even come to the catacombs in the first place?”

Gideon peered at me with an expression that told me I should know. I remained silent, waiting for an explanation.

“...Mayor Hill and your father used to operate down here,” he said. “Always did the dirty work where no one could see them, and this place was perfect for that. It was secluded, away from everyone’s sight, and it blocked any signals trying to break through. No one ever suspected a thing.”

Gideon’s face drooped with sorrow and his eyes scanned the area, almost like he was re-watching an old memory play in front of him. He frowned. 

“...Do you have...any idea...how many people Hill killed in these catacombs? How many he tortured?” He scoffed, glancing at the ceiling. “And the GCPD were worried about the people upstairs.”

I was now only a few feet away from Gideon, and with my gun still in hand, I felt the urge to just finish him off right there, but a part of me wanted to know what else he had to say. I decided to hold off the execution for a little longer.

“That still doesn’t explain why you’re here.” I replied. Gideon paused for a moment, clearly reluctant to tell me his secrets. He pointed an almost lifeless finger at his scars.

“Eight years ago, I used to guard this place. That’s right. I was a damned security guard for that bloated pig, Hill, and my job was to watch the prisoners he locked up down here. It was my only option back then, and it paid enough to keep me and my family fed, so I never questioned it. No matter how many people begged me to let ‘em out, or give them some extra food, I just stood where you’re standing right now...all damn day...waiting to go back home to my wife and kid.”

“What changed?” I asked. A wave of bitterness spread across Gideon’s face.

“Hill kidnapped my wife -- that’s what. I dunno what I did to piss him off so much, but I clearly fucked up somehow. He suspected that I had told the GCPD about his secret prison, and as a result, dragged my wife down here as punishment. Threatened to use her for a number of their experiments.”

I lowered my head in sympathy, trying to avoid eye contact. “...I assume... she didn’t escape?”

Gideon’s nose crinkled in anger. “Nothing I said or did was able to convince Hill to let her go. So I finally gave up, and simply told him to take me instead. The last thing I wanted was for my wife to be alone, but there was nothing else I could do. He accepted the offer, and kept me in the catacombs as his personal lab rat for almost an entire year. I don’t know what happened to my wife after that. She was alive last I saw her, but that was ages ago. She could be dead now, for all I know.”

Gideon suddenly hissed in pain, still suffering from his injury. “I managed to escape after Hill injected me with this certain...chemical. I don’t know exactly what it was -- and I don’t think he knew either --but it made me resistant to a variety of things, which allowed me to break free. I immediately went straight home after that, and killed a lot of people in the process of doing so...only to find a new family living there. My wife and little girl were nowhere to be seen. I suspected he had taken them into the catacombs also, but I never got the chance to search for them. And now, seven years later, I’m finally back in this goddamn tomb, trying to find something that doesn’t even exist anymore...and you’re going to kill me.”

Gideon laughed in a dark tone, gritting his teeth at me. “Those are the type of men your father protects, Wayne. Those are the men controlling this city, and soon enough, you’ll become one of those men yourself. I hope you enjoy it while it lasts.”

Kneeling next to the dying sniper, I lowered my gun for a second and put a hand on his shoulder, a bit worried that he’d jump at me at any minute -- but nothing happened. I let out a breath.

“Gideon,” I nearly whispered, “I’m sorry you went through all of that, but it’s not over. Not yet. Your daughter...she’s still alive.”

His head perked up at me, instantly hooked with interest. He furrowed his brow. “What do you mean she’s still alive? How the hell do I know you’re not just bullshitting me?”

I looked him directly in the eye. “I wouldn’t lie about something like this, Gideon. Her name’s Eva, right? A nine-year-old girl who used to be kept prisoner by Hill’s men, and escaped recently. I did some research.”

Out of nowhere, the sniper grabbed me by the collar with an iron grip and yanked me forward until our noses were nearly touching. I could feel his hands shaking slightly.

“You know about Eva,” he growled. “Where is she!? What did Hill’s men do with her?”

I remained still in Gideon’s grasp, not wanting to provoke him.

“I don’t know,” I answered. “I just know that she’s still alive, and most-likely, probably looking for you. We don’t have to be enemies, Gideon. I can help you find her, if you’ll let me. I can’t guarantee that we’ll be able to get a hold of Eva, but I can at least try to figure out where she is.”

Releasing my collar, Gideon fell back against the altar once more, his body even weaker than before as he tried to stay conscious.

“There’s no point,” he sighed. “I’m gonna die today, and I accept that. I’m already half-dead thanks to this wound, and it’s only a matter of time before I bleed out -- or before you kill me. I was hoping I could lead the Children of Arkham in a better direction -- which is why I turned against Vicki -- but we lost this war ages ago.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Gideon’s hand inching towards Vicki’s staff.

“The best I can do now...” he groaned, “...is go down with a fight.”

Jumping backwards, I managed to dodge what would’ve been a fatal attack as the violent lightning crackled mere centimeters away from my face, practically lighting up the entire chapel single-handedly. Gideon was back on his feet again despite his severe injuries, and before I even had time to react, he was already swinging wildly at me, determined to take me down. 

Making my way around the chapel, I tried to distance myself as much as possible from the deranged sniper currently trying to kill me as bolts of energy singed into the walls around me, sending small rocks flying. There was no telling how old these catacombs were, and I had no doubt that if our fight carried on, we would soon be buried with it. 

If I wanted to get rid of Gideon, I would have to do it fast.

Adjusting my mask, I took out both of my weapons as Gideon charged towards me with his staff raised in the air, preparing to slam it directly onto my head. I had no idea how he was moving around so eloquently, considering his numerous wounds, but the man was a tank with feet. If I wasn’t careful, I’d be nothing more than a pile of ash before the end of the day.

Firing a few, carefully aimed bullets at Gideon, I quickly switched back and forth between my two main attack methods, swinging my axe anytime I saw an opening. It was difficult to get anywhere close to the man, what with all the lightning and electricity, but I decided to use the chapel’s crumbling state to my advantage and began baiting Gideon to damage certain weak points.

There were a couple times when Gideon’s lightning bolts nearly burned right through me, or a giant boulder almost crushed me, but after running a few laps around the chapel, I managed to send a number of small pillars toppling down towards him. Of course, with my luck, none of them actually landed on Gideon, but it was still enough to hinder him a bit. And myself, as well.

Hopping out of the way as another rock plummeted from the ceiling, Gideon prowled in my direction, staff still in hand while the rest of the chapel collapsed around us and the statues began to tilt.

Without much space left in the catacombs to run around, I had no choice but to stand my ground, and face Gideon one-on-one as the floor beneath my feet threatened to break apart at any second. The other man didn’t appear to be any more fatigued than before, and as our vicious battle carried on, I couldn’t help but wonder what type of drugs Hill had injected into him all those years ago. Was it possible that it was a modified version of the drug Lady Arkham used? Gideon certainly contained the superior strength that it came with, but unlike other victims, he was able to retain his own mind. That was the dangerous part.

Suddenly, before I could even stop it, Gideon had bludgeoned the staff directly into my face and sent my mask flying across the chapel, causing me to fall backwards. For a moment, the world spun around me like a whirlpool, and all the noises in my head echoed aggressively against the walls of my skull. By the time I was able to return to reality, Gideon had already grabbed my neck and lifted me up from the floor, strangling me mid-air. I could see his eyes piercing through mine.

“Your father did nothing to stop Hill when he took my child away,” Gideon snarled as the staff’s zapping tip got closer to me, “so now, I’m going to take his.”

Before Gideon could move a single muscle however, a Batarang hurled itself right into the sniper’s hand, causing him to drop me along with the deadly weapon. Though, as soon as I hit the ground, one of the toppling statues slammed on top of my lower body, trapping me in place as I desperately tried to crawl away from its restraints. I could hear Dad’s voice projecting throughout the chapel.

“Batman,” Gideon chuckled as he tore the Batarang out, “I knew I’d see you again. I just didn’t expect you’d choose now to show up.”

Batman stood protectively in front of me. 

“Leave him out of this.” He demanded.

The sniper shook his head. “You’re defending the wrong crowd, Batman. This...” he gestured at me, “...innocent boy you’re tryin’ to save...has probably taken more lives than Lady Arkham herself. You can’t be a hero if you protect villains.”

Batman took out a smoke grenade. “The only villain I see here is you.”

Not even a second later, the whole chapel had been shrouded by smoke, and the only things I could hear were the sounds of battle as sparks illuminated the thick fog, revealing both my father’s and Gideon’s silhouettes fighting behind the screen. In the midst of all this chaos, I patted my hands around the stone floor, frantically searching for something to grab onto that could possibly pull me out from under the statue. As soon as I reached my hand out however, another chunk of rock came raining downwards, causing me to retract my arm.

There was nothing around for me to use as leverage, but to my right, I spotted my gun resting not too far away from me, just within arm’s reach. Stretching my hand outwards, I practically dislocated my spine as I attempted to get a hold of the pistol, my fingers desperately straightening in hopes of extending my grasp. 

Just then, with a stroke of luck, the impact of a nearby falling boulder caused the gun to bounce off the floor and right into my hands. I hurriedly reloaded the firearm, and squinted my eyes as I peered through the smoke, trying to aim for Gideon’s head. It was tricky to get a clear shot with all the constant movement, but eventually, Batman managed to hold Gideon in place, allowing me to shoot directly at his forehead.

The bullet ended up hitting him a bit lower than I anticipated, but it still caused a great deal of damage and buried itself into his neck, causing blood to gush down his shoulder. For what felt like ages, Gideon stumbled around weakly on his feet, clutching the side of his neck as he gaped at Batman, his expression softening with relief once he realized he had been defeated. With one last wave of strength, he uttered out a series of final words, his breath faltering with every syllable.

“...Go ahead...and smile,” he wheezed out, collapsing to his knees. Both my father and I simply watched in shock, slightly in disbelief that we actually got him.

“...Your mask ain’t hiding shit...” Gideon was now on all fours, nearly face-down on the floor, “...Thomas...Wayne.”

And with that said, the sniper finally fell limp, his dead stare landing on me as the life drained out of them and they gradually rolled into the back of his head, leaving me and my father alone in the chapel.

He knew all along, I thought to myself. He knew who Batman was, and he knew that I was his son. Why did he wait until now to reveal it?

Oh, well. Those questions were for another time. At the moment, the catacombs were about ready to crumble right on top of us, and with this statue locking me in place, I wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon. My father rushed over to me.

“Bruce, grab my hand! We gotta get you out of there!”

I glanced at the ceiling, unsure of what to do. “I’m stuck, Dad,” I exclaimed. “If you wait for me to escape, we’ll both die! Just run while you still can!”

Thomas strengthened his hold on me. “You are not making me listen to this nonsense. Now, grab my hand and let me pull you out! We’re leaving this place. Together. I didn’t come down here just to have you die.”

Latching onto my father’s arms, the two of us used as much force as we could, but the bone-crushing weight of the statue proved to be incredibly adamant, and wouldn’t budge. 

And as if that wasn’t enough, I saw a particularly unstable boulder above my father getting ready to smash the floor beneath it. Judging by the way it trembled, we didn’t have long until we were both nothing but mush, but that didn’t stop Thomas. He only continued to tug at my arms, hopelessly trying to slide me out of the statue’s unrelenting grip. 

“I’ve almost got you,” he encouraged. “You’re gonna be all right.”

“Dad--”

“--I said you’ll be all right!”

The boulder was now dangling by a thread, and I could tell that it was about to drop at any moment. Out of fear, I pointlessly began pressing my hands against the statue in an attempt to push it off, but my energy was dwindling. Even with all the adrenaline rushing through my veins, and the anxiety pumping my heart, my body couldn’t keep up with its demands. Unless my father somehow got me out, I was stuck for good.

Just then however, as if by miracle, I suddenly felt myself crawling free from underneath the statue and into my father’s arms, but the relief didn’t last long. 

With one last look at the sky, Thomas saw the aforementioned boulder plummeting directly towards him, seconds away from mashing his entire body. Just before it was able to hit the ground though, he gave me one strong shove, throwing me out of harm’s way while he stayed behind to face his demise. 

“Dad!” I shouted, but it was too late. The boulder had already landed, and underneath it, I could see a morbid splatter of blood beginning to spread. He was gone. Just like that.

Quickly getting back onto my feet, I limped towards the chapel’s exit, desperately trying to find a way out as I leaned against the walls for support. Oz was nowhere to be seen, and thanks to the thick, stone walls of the catacombs, it was impossible for me to contact Alfred for help. My survival depended on no one but myself right now, and if I didn’t pick up the pace, I would soon be sharing my father’s fate.

Retracing my steps, I slithered my way through the narrow tunnels as the structure collapsed behind me, nearly catching up at several points. The entire escape probably only lasted several minutes, but to me, it seemed like an eternity. With all the dust, rocks, and cobwebs, my vision was more than impaired, and the fact that my legs had just been crushed certainly didn’t help matters. Thankfully though, I was able to find what looked like a ray of sunlight not too far in the distance. That was my way out.

Forcing myself to ignore the pain, I charged through the crumbling catacombs like a wild horse and squeezed through the shrinking walkways as rocks began to fill them up, threatening to trap me in here forever, but I wouldn’t let it. Instead, I took a leap of faith and reached for the exit, climbing out as fast as humanly possible.

I felt like I was moving at the speed of light, but the minute I set foot outside, the entirety of the catacombs had fallen apart within a heartbeat, sending a large cloud of dust through the air while I stood by, witnessing all this chaos.

Despite the happiness I felt over Gideon’s death, a part of me couldn’t help but feel regret for what happened to my father. He sacrificed himself to rescue me, even after all the horrible things I’d done -- and if that didn’t define what a true hero was, I didn’t know what would. But there would be time to mourn him later. 

Right now, I finally had a moment to take a breath, and just savor this short period of peace. The battle between the Children of Arkham and Gotham’s people was finished, and with the end of Lady Arkham came the end of the most difficult chapter in my life.

It was all over. 

It was all finally over. 

[papersandkeyboards]

5/9-15: Went Chicagoan Jewish for a Day (or not really) (aka ‘antek-antek Yahudi!’ as some jerk would say)

33rd WEEK, MAY 9-15, 2016.

Many exciting things happened this week.

But I have the right to prioritize which one deserves to be mentioned first.

This Thursday, I finally (finally) watched Captain America: Civil War.

And if you’re reading this blog for quite some time, it can be seen that I am sort of a hardcore MCU fangirl. At least compared to my friends.

I just died watching the movie. Imagine my heart is an egg and the movie screenwriters and actors were some extremely good scrambled egg makers.

I just can’t.

I cussed and swore so much during the movie, even though I was there by myself (actually—it’s because I was there by myself), and just being emotional in my own little world. By the time the movie was over entirely, I didn’t even have the mood for anything. I was either about to explode or just melt and let myself washed away to the drain and to the Puget Sound. And never come back again.

Huh. I wish my fangirl fellow Darin or Ica was here. They have been the only ones qualified enough to talk the shit out of any marvel movies with me. We can handle each other, and other people, apparently, just can’t handle or understand me being emotionally overwhelmed over some fictional stuff.

Anyway.

Summer is approaching, and on Wednesday the 11th the day hit the thermostat a good 26 Celcius, so after school I went to Capitol Hill and bought myself an unapologetic cup of frozen yogurt across the street from Seattle Central.

However, the highlight of the week, like with almost all cases, came on the weekend.

Karen’s nephew, Gabe, was having his bar mitzvah that weekend. Good news: his family, of course, invited Karen and her family over for it. Good news #2: Karen’s sister and her family lived in Chicago, IL.

Hell yeah! It’s not everyday you can go to big cities like Chicago (unless, well, you live in or nearby Chicago) AND go to a bar mitzvah (unless, well, you happen to have a lot of Jewish relative or friends).

For those who haven’t known, bar mitzvah (or bat mitzvah, for female) is a coming-of-age ritual, meaning a ritual that marks a young person’s transition from being a child to being an adult, that is practised by the Jews—

“Jews?!”

—is probably what your response would be if you’re a typical, religiously conservative Indonesian Muslim who credit most of your knowledge to controversial-titled articles on Facebook that are shared by friends from exclusively your own circle.

But I’m getting ahead of myself, and I’m not supposed to talk about my tolerant/intolerant country in this entry, so let’s get back to my main point.

Gabe here was 13 years old, so, in order to mark his coming to adulthood, a bar mitzvah was held. Let’s say... uhm, a bar mitzvah is an equivalent to Indonesian ‘khitanan’, a ritual after a boy’s circumcision to celebrate his first steps to adulthood.

Karen and Eric and I left Seattle in the afternoon, which means I had to leave school a couple hours earlier to catch the plane. After we arrived, we rented a car and drove to the hotel. Later at night, I finally met Ayesha, Karen’s mother, and us four spent some time talking.

Saturday morning, we went to Downtown Chicago to have breakfast and walk around. We crossed the Chicago River and passed by the Trump Tower. But our main destination was Millenium Park.

You see, when I thought of Chicago, I thought about this particular piece of art I wanted to see for myself. It was this sculpture, sitting right in the middle of the park. The sculpture has a power to amaze everyone who sees it, and at the same time providing a new perspective to see the Chicago skyline and the buildings surrounding it. Designed by an Indian-British artist Anish Kapoor in 2004, the stainless-steel sculpture was initially and officially named “Cloud Gate”. Thanks to public’s creativity and appreciation of its shape, the sculpture is more widely known as... The Bean.

To be fair, it DOES look like a bean. However, I felt somewhat sorry for the artist that had surely thought about the philosophy behind the name Cloud Gate and how the name will inspire people and all that. But I guess the first time people saw the sculpture, they went “oh, it looks like a giant bean!” hence the name.

Think about nicknames that you give to your friends or that have been given to you by your friends. It’s like how a person is named Richard, but everyone just end up calling him Dick. Or a name as pretty as Zahra but everyone end up calling her Ijah. Or something like that. There are indeed some people in my school who are so widely known by their nicknames, anyone hardly know what their real, birth names are.

However, in any way, The Bean (or Cloud Gate, whatever) is so pretty, no matter the weather. It can be sunny or cloudy and it still manages to reflect the whole scenery around it perfectly.

And right under the bean structure was ever crazier. The structure was bent and shaped in such a way that it provided multiple reflections of you in different forms, like a kaleidoscope. Looking at it was hypnotizing, and making me dizzy if I stared at it for too long.

Oh, and it’s cool that I could see the photographer in the picture because he was reflected by the bean behind me. Ehe.

Then we moved to the next block, the next cool thing about the city, the Art Institute of Chicago. (which is what we could cram in a day of Chicago) More than a place where people study—like the sound ‘Institute’ gives—it was more like a museum, like the Met. It had everything in there, for real.

I would say that the Met has more complete collection than Art Institute of Chicago just because the Met is more famous and the whole building is probably as vast as my neighborhood back home, but AIC contained a lot of artefacts and other kinds of old stuff from different times and places, like Ancient Greece and Roman Empire. There were also extensive collections from the Middle East during the rise of Islam, from India, Africa, China, and Europe, with artefacts related to their respective culture and certain religion the region was dominated by.

I’m a statue person, and most likely not a painting person. Seriously, though, my art senses are probably dull enough that I don’t enjoy paintings as much as people do in general (especially those of abstract paintings). Thus, what I did when Eric and Karen and pretty much everyone in the room were philosophically and emotionally connected to an acrylic representation of grass, I took pictures of them.

Alright. Time to bail as evening was approaching and we needed to be at Karen’s sister’s house for dinner before the ceremony. Karen told me to dress real formal—because maybe last time they took me to a formal event—that was a wedding—I wore a cardigan over a long-sleeved shirt and—wait for it—a pair of sneakers. Karen made sure I did NOT wear sneakers (or shirts) for the bar mitzvah, and thus, left me with the only acceptable shoes I had: a painful pair of high high heels. It was black and fancy and I looked good in it, but it was for sure after the event I decided to throw those elegant representation of hell.

When we got to the venue, it became clearer that it was indeed a black tie event. Good thing about having a dinner party with the Jews: kosher food! Kosher is like food guidelines for Jews, the same way us Muslims categorize food and beverages into halal or not halal. Now, I don’t know the full scope of what makes a food or beverage kosher, but I do know that both kosher and halal guidelines strictly and entirely prohibit swine (or any kind of pig product), and that is good enough for me in this kind of situation.

Quick tip: when you’re in the US and is really self-conscious about your belief in halal diet, if you can’t find a proven halal food, look for kosher ones. (especially for products in packaging like salt or biscuits and such kinds, finding a kosher mark in the packaging is good enough if you can’t find products with halal mark on it)

After dinner we moved with our respective vehicles to the synagogue for the ceremony. Synagogue is a Jewish house of prayer. Before we entered the main room, the men were given this small head covering—that was so small it didn’t really cover the whole head—that I’d later figured is called a kippah. Gabe, the man of the hour, besides wearing a kippah himself, also wore a kind of prayer shawl called tallit.

(illustration--photography was not allowed during the ceremony--at least the one i attended)

During the ceremony, there were chants and songs—in Hebrew—but the main event was the reading of the Torah—big rolls of Jewish scriptures. Presumably just about everyone in the room paid attention to the reading but me, but to be honest it’s not even easy for me to concentrate when an imaam—the leader of a Muslim prayer, when done collectively—recites long verses of the Quran during prayers (being able to read and write Arabic doesn’t help when you can’t understand the language itself), let alone a set of long verses in Hebrew. So what does a girl with zero understanding of the Torah and a quite short attention span do during this time?

She decided to open the holy book in front of her seat and tried to decipher the Hebrew alphabet.

Prepare for a quick elaboration on her observation regarding Hebrew and its comparison to Arabic. (<--calon judul skripsi S1 Sastra Arab/Ibrani)

I guess now I understood why people who don’t understand Arabic see nothing but unreadable wiggly lines—even I’ve heard people said to me that all the scribbles look the same. It took a while for me to figure out that Hebrew and Arabic have pretty much the same system. (uhhh I don’t know how to explain this. But like in Arabic a letter needs to have an accent that serves as a vowel, in order for the letter to be readable. So, for instance, if there is a certain accent above the Arabic letter ‘s’, that accent’ll give an ‘aah’ sound so the letter will be read as ‘saa’. Another accent gives the ‘ooh’ sound, hence ‘soo’, and another gives the ‘eeh’ sound, hence ‘see’) (why am I suddenly giving Arabic lessons)

Anyway, it’s not exactly the same, but some letters in Hebrew, if accompanied by certain accents or additional wiggly line, will be read differently than without accents.

(I can’t give you an example) (because by the time we all got home in Seattle I already forgot the whole thing) (not that you asked for one anyway right)

(well, I guess it would be kind of cool if I preserved on deciphering Hebrew. Albeit the language itself I can’t understand, at least I can write things I don’t want people around me to know in Hebrew letters)

After the whole ceremony ended, we moved to another room, which was a vast hall, where we had dinner (again) and heard speeches and overall celebrated Gabe’s first step into adulthood. Pictures would’ve been cool, but photography weren’t allowed during such ceremony.

The next day, on a nice Chicago Sunday morning, all the family members gathered in a cafe for brunch. Got into some more talking with Karen’s extended family members, since I didn’t do so much talking during dinner the previous day.

It was quite a small place for such a big family and it wasn’t as easy to move around, but I got to one point where I met one of Karen’s family members (I forgot who, sorry) who happened to be the heart surgeon for Indonesia’s back-in-the-day famous General A.H. Nasution. (General Nasution was a member of the military who was lucky to escape the terror attack from rogue members of Indonesian Communist Party in 1965) (it took a while for me to figure out when he was telling me he did a surgery for Nasution, because apparently if you pronounced the name ‘Nasution’ the English way it sounds waaaaaay different than the Indonesian way)

As if it weren’t enough, I met Karen’s brother-in-law and he told me he’d met Indonesian former president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. Give me a break. I technically live closer to President SBY and I’ve never seen the guy live, or even General Nasution.

(well, probably NOT General Nasution, as the guy had died long ago)

We went back to the hotel and took off to the airport right after, Karen’s mom Ayesha came with us to the airport so she could tell me about my personality and prospect for the future through my birth date and place and chakra flow. Accompanied by good thick Chicago pizza. Mmm.

It wasn’t exactly a trip to Chicago a tacky tourist like me would expect because we barely got around Chicago, because it really isn’t a tacky tourist kind of trip, but a family event. Nonetheless, if I think wide and positive enough, chances of me visiting Chicago as a tacky tourist is bigger than chances of me attending a bar mitzvah. Therefore, one shall not remorse on being unable to explore Chicago, because one can always come back.

(aamiin)

(brb melamar jadi buruh cuci tetangga)

And I shit you not, the experience of attending a bar mitzvah is one of the most impressive point in my exchange year I will always remember. Thinking about the time where I could casually walk into a synagogue without being questioned (maybe Karen gave a heads-up to the family, I assume?), and imagining how a Jew—or anyone else, for that matter—should always be treated the same way if the situation were to be reversed.

Peace out.

Salam dari yang baru pakai high heels dua kali langsung dibuang,

Nabila Safitri.

[twistednuns]

August 2019

India // It’s incredibly hard to sum up my feelings about India and Nepal. It was a truly incredible trip. And so exhausting. It was enriching, interesting, hard, disgusting, educational, everything. This is not the place to talk about my experience at length so I’ll just write down some nice moments I collected along the way //   

on the go // the huge corner toilet at MUC airport departures / Rischart coffee / the smell of the Emirates airline NOIR lotion they offer in their bathrooms / cherry-flavoured Skittles //    Delhi // brightly painted buses and tuk-tuks / eating at AB veg restaurant in Hauz Khas, inredibly delicious and cheap / being lucky enough to choose the hostel in Hauz Khas village; meeting Dominique, Christie, Ayush, Samar and Julia / all those talks we had about linguistics, education systems, the future, politics, travelling, home, friends, experiences with magic mushrooms, Hannah Arendt, travelling (…); talking to Christy about her past, family, criminal record / Mosambi juice / Nici constantly flirting with me, trying to seduce me. She told me I’m posh, assertive, regal and I know myself very well. Making out with her was fun but honestly… not worth the drama. / Mosambi juice / a consultation with a renowned Ayurveda doctor - I loved talking to her even though she wasn’t able to tell me anything I hadn’t known already; sometimes it’s nice to get the confirmation that what you found out on your own is exactly the right thing / eating momos and Kathi rolls, the best Thalis / parties on the rooftop until the sunrise interrupted us; grilling whole fish, saying goodbye to Julia, singing along to Louise Attaque and Cher songs / riding rickshaws through Delhi; extra fun: squeezing 5 people in and listening to club music / the sheets smelling chalky with a hint of grape sugar / dancing at Raasta / petting cute street doggies / a cooking class with Mansi and her family in North Delhi - delicious food and really nice people, I fell in love with the mum / eating at Social (that building is just amazing) and strolling through the little alleys and stores at Hauz Khas village with Christie; she showed me the place where she got her linnen dresses and we talked to a jewellery store owner for quite a while / the spice market, climbing up a building and watching the men flying their kites, tasting some street food and spices, realiszing that there is a market street dedicated to a single group of things like the shoe market, the jewellery market etc. / the Brit Brats sharing their joints; tripping to Bayonne / the hidden merchant streets with colourful wall art around the entrances / PANEER (!) / stand-up comedy with a female comedian / elevator selfies / learning about the development of Indian scripts and letters/characters in Sanskrit in the National Museum; erotic sculptures, very detailed paintings depicting badass, tiger-hunting ladies / I saw a peacock. Cows, chipmunks, pigs, horses, monkeys, goats, guinea pigs, bunnies, cats and dogs, bats, herons, boars, caterpillars, centipedes, horses, donkeys (…) / finding the perfect triangular earrings with gemstones at the Dilli Haat market; getting some nice dresses, too / living on water and mango juice, feeling very light and clean, having an empty stomach all the time / Gandhi Smriti, retracing Mahatma’s last steps before his assassination / feeling human again after a few days in bed - I love the power of make-up, bananas, fresh clothes and those pink little Pepto-Bismol pills the Canadian lady gave me / Delhi central station; just WOW. It’s places like that which make you realise just how many people there are in India. //   

Rishikesh // the man helping me with the bus to Rishikesh; the kindness of strangers / “I thank the Lord for the people I have found” (Elton John - Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters) / emotional bus rides: crying for no reason, letting go, for the first time in a very long time; emotional turmoil, softening up; leaving people and whole countries behind / seeing the huge Shiva ceremony at the Ganges from the bus / my yoga teacher training, getting to know the other students / learning about a magic trick against bad posture / instant karma / the view from the rooftop, watching the sunrise over the lower Himalaya mountains / the simple, vega, ayurvedic food they offered at the ashram / visiting the temples with the apprentice yogi and his scooter; walking up 13 stories in the blazing sun, receiving a blessing and some red string around my wrist; taking part in the Ganga ceremony at sunset / the Beatles Ashram; it’s just this amazing place with incredible street art, and those ruins, the meditation caves and eggs on the rooftop… climbing up there was one of my highlights in Rishikesh / close second: visiting a meditation cave at the Ganges, a bit further up in the mountains; a monk had spent 15 years in that cave practising meditation / all the beautiful shops around town focussing on yoga accessoires / putting my feet in the Ganges #blessed #moksha / learning about my aggression during silent yoga / all the animals around town: horses, donkeys, cows, monkeys and whatnot //   

Varanasi // taking the night train for the first time; I shared my little compartment with a family and three little children but they were surprisingly dramafree and actually quite cute / a sunset boat trip on the Ganges, seeing the ghats, the ceremonies, the moon rise / the little alleys behind the ghats; the stores, the surprises / Marnikarnika Ghat was really impressive; it’s the cremation place and I saw dead bodies for the first time / accidentally discovering the Dirty Chai Cafe (chocolate peanut butter shakes and fresh, cold mint lemonade), finding a Kamala Das poetry book on the shelf / spending an afternoon with the German journalist (so weird how the atmosphere shifts when you’re accompanied by a man there; also our dynamic made me feel so glad to be travelling alone, to only be responsible for myself, to be independent); sharing a banana and water surrounded by goats in Hanuman Ghat; the view over the river from his room; him gently stroking my cheekbone / buying two saris in a little corner shop / my jewellery quest (unsuccessful) / eating fresh fruit salad after hardly eating solid food for days / checking out that little park on my last day, the air buzzing with dragonflies / watching the sunset from the hostel’s rooftop, filming a slow motion video / India brings out trauma and deep emotions; the people kept staring at me for whatever reason; I kept having disturbing dreams about my dead father and grandmother; and the mob-video Christy showed me didn’t help either (the whole village carried a man through the streets, eventually beating him up because he couldn’t pay off his debts) //   

Nepal // the first view of Nepal from the bus windows - how much greener, how much emptier it is than India / meeting some nice people on the bus - an American, a Brit and two Frenchies; grabbing dinner in Kathmandu with the latter / watching the sunrise at the border between India and Nepal / sitting next to the mayor of small town council on the bus ride; communicating with hand and feet / the Kathmandu valley is such a gorgeous sight / I got lucky with my hostel; Yakety Yak was a really nice and quiet place to stay; they even had laundry service and a shelf with free books - I read two or three of them because I behaved like a good (home)sick German abroad: bed, Haribo, carbonated water, trashy literature / visiting Bhaktapur, a gorgeous small town in the Kathmandu valley / watching the latest Tarantino movie at the cinema; the tickets were incredibly cheap / walking up the hill to the temple and the monastery, enjoying the incredible view over the surrounding hills; meeting two ladies from Austria, they live close to my old university town; walking to the centre through back alleys, stopping at a rooftop cafe, ordering three drinks at once (liquid diet) / that one jewellery store near the Pokhara bus station - I found some gorgeous brass rings with precious stones for little money / the busy square, the markets / hanging out in the hammock in my hostel in Pokhara, overlooking the lake / watching the skydivers land / the ayurvedic cafe and the other place serving smoothie bowls by the lake - it’s such a fantastic moment when you finally feel hungry again and eat a little solid food after fasting/suffering for a few days / two incredibly weird guys from Latvia and Berlin who provided a nice, mellow ending for my shitty day and even made me survive the mosquito attacks / meeting my travel agent who actually took me out dancing and gave me a ride on his motorcycle to the bus stop; he even gave me some fruit for the ride / By the Way starting to play while waiting for Vietnamese food / hunting down a place that sells semi-precious stone columns in Kathmandu; negotiating with the old lady selling them; getting some brass souvenirs for my friends and family / the view from the airplane - seeing the Himalaya for the first time; I pity people who’ve stopped looking out of windows //   

Coming home. I’ve NEVER felt happier entering my apartment after a trip. Being alone. Truly alone. Silence. Three rooms just for me. My bed. Having all my stuff back. Toiletries! Nice body lotion. My favourite perfume. Going to the supermarket. Unpacking all the jewellery, clothes and knick-knacks I bought. Taking care of my plants.   

Making a huge batch of my favourite ratatouille / pasta sauce.   

Visiting Manu in hospital. Cheering him up a little bit.   

Finally receiving my black and white analogue photos. I loved the shot of Andre looking like he’s being kissed by a dementor. And Lexi looking dead cool at ADBK.   

Pizza party at Grano with Lena. Eating sorbet out of a lemon.   

Riding my bike through the forest on a sunny morning. Stopping to take pictures of the beautiful light, the yellow flowers. Spending too much money at the garden center. Driving home, IKEA bags full of plants.  

 Inventing my signature manicure: a little black dot just above the nailbed.   

Having an evening beer outside at Sofa So Good with Andre.   

Stumbling upon Konsti. The one who ghosted me years ago after a beautiful summer spent kissing in lakes because his therapist had told him so. Well, we talked for a few days, but guess what - he just ghosted me for a second time. Fool me one - shame on you. Fool me twice - shame on me.

[rcultado]

The Philippine flag is raised in this famed Paris museum—all because of our anting-antings

The playwright and curator Floy Quintos has exposed part of our secret soul in the City of Light. At the Musée du Quai Branly along the banks of the Seine, the exposition he put together explores the story of our amulets and the complex, hybrid nature of the Filipino faith.

It was a windy Monday morning when the Musee du Quai Branly opened its doors to the press, collaborators, friends, and select patrons for the opening of two exhibitions for Spring. The buzzy Oceania assembles almost 200 archaeological objects and art pieces representative of the Pacific island cultures, while Anting-Anting—to which I was invited—is a more intimate installation telling the story of the historical and contemporary use of protective amulets, talismans, and charms in the Philippines.

“This feels like coming home,” I said, soliciting a genuine noddy smile from the docent as she ushered me into the exhibit space, an obscure area floating above the museum’s permanent collection. It was a half-lie. While the Santo Niño, the Nazareno handkerchiefs, and the odd bits of brass jewelry looked familiar, the whole ensemble felt very foreign to me. Eerie and ominous almost. A physical manifestation of things I have only heard of before.

The exposition entitled Anting-Anting: The Secret Soul of Filipinos explores and demystifies these “charged objects” utilized by a myriad of Filipinos to this very day, from policemen to cult members. An offshoot from a previous exhibit at the Yuchengco Museum in Manila, the collection was built and curated by playwright, director, and antique dealer Floy Quintos.

The invitation to show here in Paris came with challenges, mostly reworking the storytelling for a predominantly European audience. “My French colleagues would ask me, okay, how do the objects talk to me? How do we make them engage?” Quintos shares. He had to make the exhibit relatable and transportative even to people who have never been to our islands.

And transportative it was. Utilizing the Atelier Martine Aublet, a space designed to be a “contemporary cabinet of curiosities,” Quintos repackaged the exhibit into smaller pockets of stories. One corner shows Rizalista cult paraphernalia, another reveals blood-stained linen vests with pearl buttons believed to bestow protection against bullets.

On the other side, a wall glows with images from a Dino Dimar documentary following the journey of pilgrims to Mount Banahaw. The space is then infused with noises both familiar (the hypnotizing sound of a waterfall hitting the plunge, a solemn rendition of Ama Namin) and unfamiliar (orations in Pig Latin murmured from sacred booklets). One is given the impression of being in the caverns with the faithful as they pray, light candles, slither into crevices, and collect blessed water.

Some bearing iconographies from the Catholic religion, the anting-anting is one of the many portraits of Hispano-Filipino postcolonial hybridity. Did the Spanish try to make their Gospel more relatable, and the process of evangelization smoother, by incorporating bits and pieces from the native religion? Or did the Filipinos feign allegiance to the Catholic faith while discreetly continuing their animistic ritual under the nose of the colonizer? “That’s the question. It was the kind of dialogue we wanted to highlight,” says Quintos.

A special nook stripped of protective glass is transformed into a tienda of modern anting-anting, open for people to look closely and even touch. Here, they are less spiritual and somehow devoid of a deeper meaning. Quintos wanted to show how they are today more recognized as popular charms, tailored to augment the spirit or help fix daily woes. It is truly revelatory of the multiple ways we practice our faith in the present. I think of my mother, probably the most Catholic person I know, who keeps her Vatican rosaries next to a Buddha sculpture, or my peers who hear mass on Sundays but wander around with a rose quartz crystal in their coat pocket the rest of the week.

The show ends in a juxtaposition of cheap, commercially-made trinkets stacked in a pile under an ancient portable idol carved from stone by the Ifugaos. It shows that the need to always carry a tangible piece of the divine, be it for protection or for luck, is universal and distinctly Filipino. It transcends class, languages, and cultures, and reminds us that everyone, from lovestruck tweens to jittery dispatched soldiers, could use a little help from beyond. 

Originally published at https://news.abs-cbn.com/ancx

[thegnasticious]

Bavarian Car Key Party

When I was growing up, everyone in my family wanted to stay at Aunt May’s house. Even some of my friends would beg to stay the night at basically the biggest residence in town. Her house looked like The Munster’s mansion, filled with antiques and collectables both her and her husband collected over the years. One wing of the house was devoted solely to horse and circus sculptures, another part had old wax figures of Black and White actors. Many of the items held disputed values, but it was estimated her residence was in excess of millions of dollars in possessions.

The thing about Aunt May, was that she was peculiar. She tended to the wax figures as if they were real people, with little acknowledgment of piles of rotten food nearest them, insects beginning to feast of the morsels. She would disregard this, no matter the visitor and insist these messes were caused by an unborn child named Victor, who was also to be known to torment guests at night. When people would go off to sleep, they would wake up to their valuables missing, or put in strange places they never put it the night before. This was Victor’s way of reminding him that he was there and very likely when the guests were slipping into unconsciousness, that was the time he was becoming conscious. The steps and knocks of his feet would wind the dark halls at night, keeping any visitors in their rooms. Aunt May would often refer to Victor as ‘The Sandman’ and said if you were good that night he would sprinkle sleep dust over you throughout the night, keeping you shielded from his torment.

Apparently I was one of Victor’s favorites. Every time I stayed there I found no sleepless nights. It was as if someone snapped and the day turned to night instantaneously. All until one visit, when I showed up that day there was broken glass and a bit of blood on the floor, the front door was wide open. Aunt May labored to the mess, speaking to herself aggressively with each swipe of crimson red blood. 

“Are you alright Aunt May?”, I asked.

She looked down at the blood and back up at me and said

“Some things people, and places never change”, and started crying.

I tried to hug her but she pushed me away, very coldly.

I proceeded to try to help her clean the mess. She started shaking her head and said,

“Please go home now, I need some time by myself”.

When I returned home that day I decided to ask my Father, Lance, about what exactly was wrong with Aunt May.

He told me that in the years of the war she defended the house and it’s possessions from some sort of foreign occupant. he said that in many ways, the subsequent isolation and the absence of her husband was driving her near mad. This was where the collections of strange artifacts began to accumulate, as he remembered. 

I visited her mainly for my Father. He worried for her health and as these strange and basically unseen ‘belongings’ of hers started mounding up, the concern only grew stronger. 

The next visit was a bit stranger. about 3 days after I returned to see if she was doing any better, I was also quite sleep deprived. I don’t know what it was but since the last night at her mansion, something loud or extremely cold would shake me from even the deepest slumber. As if it was trying to return me there.

When I got to the big wooden doors, I used the knocker and waited for the footsteps I recollected so well. None came. I knocked again. Still no steps. On the third knock, the door opened itself, as if it was never shut at all. 

The house was completely dark, the usual candles were all blown out, and a strange hint of lilacs and lavender doused the air. I expected to hear the mad wailing of an old organ, or the shriek of a cat, but all that was found was impenetrable silence. Worried for Aunt May, I went to her room. There was a green glow emanating from her door. Sort of glowing and fading like a lantern.

I creeped to the door, and pushed it open slightly. As I peeked in, I saw a young boy dressed in old victorian clothes by the head of her bed. He held his hands above his head, and his eyes were stark white. Before him, lay Aunt May, suspended in the air, her arms and legs laying lifelessly. He chanted these words that seemed to have an innumerable volume and presence, sucking you in like a whirlpool. His voice was deep and not of someone that size. Behind him a dark shadow coursed so strong you couldn't see anything else. I held my mouth to keep from screaming, that was when my Aunt’s Black cat came up and purred right next to me. The boy then looked me dead in the eyes, and something took over me. I saw a vision of a room with white suited doctors rushing back and forth, on an operating table in the middle lies the boy. The doctors some how see me watching this and pull a curtain shut, when they do, I worry for the boy for some reason, though I’ve never known him. I see the shadows of the operation, and it looks like they are pulling confetti and boxes out of him. Finally at the end of the operation, they open the curtains, and on the table is what looks like 5 or so orders of prime rib, dripping with red blood. They close the curtains again then open them to darkness. A spot light shoots from above, and the boy is dropped down slowly. Wires come from the veins in his wrists, and nails through his ankles are secured to hooks behind him. I look to see what is doing this, and all I see is two giant red eyes above. Glowing like the rear car lights of a murderer. 

The dream faded to daylight and all of I found myself laying in the Mansion’s guest room. As usual with any dream I’ve ever had at my aunt’s I usually can’t recall how I got there, or if I was dreaming. The house had this odd effect over me. Nonetheless I could still see those glowing eyes above in my mind. 

Aunt May came into my room with tray of food,

“How was your sleep last night? Any bad dreams?”, she said and set bed tray down with eggs, bacon, and some bread.

“I had a dream I saw you, but you weren’t you”, I responded.

“Oh well, is that odd”, she said, putting some sort of powder into my drink.

“What is that?”, I asked.

“Oh just some sugar for your tea deary”, She said.

A few moments of silence passed and I nibbled at the food, not touching the drink. She seemed to be watching me and I had a feeling she wouldn't leave until she saw me drink the mixture.

“You know, I fought the Nazi’s in my day, every day they’d come in and out, looking for things or people. you know what kept me and the house so empty, even in foreign occupation?”, she asked.

“No”, I said.

“Hard work, every day, always doing something. No men, that’s the way the world ought to be. It makes it easier, to move on”,

She said.

“Are you sure that that, wasn’t what made the house so empty?”,

I inquired.

“Things got better once he was gone. Every day he would get more angry at the spirits here, taking it out on me and the family. The service was the only thing for George. And when George started seeing Victor, like you did yesterday, well, I had to do something. The Nazi’s had gotten to George at that point, and I had to do something. Thats how I found George’s weapon. One night he had a pile of this White substance on his desk, I assumed it was cocaine. He proceeded to say that it was the Fuhrer’s sugar and like you right now, I started realizing how George was keeping me trapped in this house”, she said and started coming towards me.

She grabbed my arms and held them down in the bed. A strength seemed to enter her, she pressed her faced to mine revealing all black eyes. She then took the drink and forced it into my mouth, hold my mouth shut after and not letting me open until I swallowed the substance.

I awoke to a strange place I had never been before. The temperature was warm, like that of the tropics. Outside the window, palms blew in the open air. I could hear people talking and eating in the other room. As I exited the room I entered an eating hall of sorts. Most of it’s occupants were my family, some alive, some I was sure were dead. At the head of the table was my father, Lance. 

“Take a seat”, he said and pulled out a chair beside him.

I did and looked around the table trying to place faces. I recognized my Aunt May, though supposedly widowed and single, was now sitting with a young boy and a nicely dressed older man, who I presume was George. 

George rose a glass of something Red to the ceiling and said,

“Tonight we dine and eat for John Dale!”, 

All sitting at the table cheered in agreement, raising their glasses high.

My Father then stood up and said,

“I’ve brought you all here tonight for a special reason. To show you all who John Dale really is and with your help, the last of the bloodline being our guest and main course”, he then patted me on the shoulder, “show you who will be the next John Dale after me”.

Everyone cheered again and as I looked at the meat on their plates, it deformed from prime rib to masses of human remains. Everyone started gorging on it like pigs, even my father. A feeling of terror overcame me, that this was all really happening, no longer a dream. I rushed to the front door and opened it. Outside was a camera crew about 7 feet from the door, just filming the house. I immediately threw up anything I ate, I could see the crew focusing their lighting and zoom right on the pile of red crimson vomit. 

I collapsed on the ground and a paramedics crew came up almost as if scripted. 

The next time I woke up, I woke up to a bunch of suited men in a hospital room. 

One of the men gripped the end of my hospital bed and looked me dead in the eyes. For a second I saw his eyes flick to the black like Aunt May’s.

“We want you to know that you have been brought to an institution, and we also want you to know that treatment can start and end today with one simple agreement. That you are John Dale. All of your previous possessions and identity, is to be erased entirely. If we hadn’t found you, your family was doing this anyways, albeit crudely and in some ways unprofessional. The Fisher institution which is in technicality where you’re being transferred from, is not fit for the powers you are about to possess. So all of this, though strange, is actually exactly as it was supposed to be. This transfer is more of an inheritance, but because of complications your still existing Father formed by pretending to be him, required you to sacrifice your life as you knew it.”

He then handed me a pen and I signed the paper,

John Dale

[caveartfair]

These Smithsonian Archival Photos Show Famous Artists with Their Cats

Portrait of Carl Fischer with cat. Photo by Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images.

If Instagram had been around during Henri Matisse’s lifetime, you can be sure his feed would have been filled with cat photos. His three cats—Minouche, Coussi, and La Puce—were never far from him while he painted. Likewise, Pablo Picasso kept his Siamese friend Minou close beside him, and Salvador Dalí famously owned a ocelot named Babou (both cats may well have become feline influencers like Maru or Lil’ Bub).

Indeed, many of art history’s famous artists have taken comfort in the companionship of cats; they, too, have abided by the demands of such charming yet fickle creatures.

In the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art—which houses documents, photographs, and diaries that paint a broader picture of the lives of artists—there are, unsurprisingly, a large number of cat photos. The curator of manuscripts, Mary Savig, recently dug deep into the Smithsonian’s vaults and published a compendium of these images in the book Artful Cats (2019).

But the project didn’t begin as a concerted effort to uncover the felines that influenced famous artists. In the foreword, Smithsonian Archives of American Art director Kate Haw writes that the book was “inevitable” based on the popularity of cats—not just on the internet (she points to Grumpy Cat’s 8.5 million followers), but in the Smithsonian’s own library, too. Based on its collection, artists seem to favor cats over other pets: While Jackson Pollock’s pet crow, Caw-Caw, makes an appearance, as does Andy Warhol’s daschund, Archie, it’s “cats that rule the Archives,” Haw notes. Here, we share excerpts from Artful Cats, highlighting 10 famous artists and their cats.

Hedda Sterne with Poussin

Hedda Sterne with Poussin. Image from Artful Cats by Mary Savig, published by the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, 2019. Courtesy of the publishers.

“Romanian-born Hedda Sterne (1910–2011) was a key figure (and one of the few women) in the legendary New York School ofabstractpainters. In this photograph, Sterne—in an elegant black dress—affectionately scratches the chin of her cat Poussin, in the courtyard of her home at 179 East Seventy-First Street, New York City. Poussin was the model of many sketches and a few paintings by Sterne. Her husband, New Yorker illustrator Saul Steinberg, drew a portrait of Poussin inside the cabinet under their kitchen sink; the idea was to keep away mice.”

Gertrude Abercrombie holding some cats

Gertrude Abercrombie holding some cats. Image from Artful Cats by Mary Savig, published by the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, 2019. Courtesy of the publishers.

“Again and again, painter Gertrude Abercrombie posed with her many cats, frequently holding up the feline like a prize.”

Berenice Abbott holding a cat

Berenice Abbott holding a cat. Image from Artful Cats by Mary Savig, published by the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, 2019. Courtesy of the publishers.

“Berenice Abbott took unforgettable photographs of New York City with her wide-format camera in the 1920s and ’30s. As she shaped how countless people saw the modernizing urban landscape, she also redefined gender roles. Abbott unapologetically wore ski pants rather than skirts and lived with her life partner, art critic Elizabeth McCausland, and their cats for decades. Here, we see Abbott on the other side of the camera. Fellow photographer Arnold Crane captured Abbott posing with a furry feline in Maine.”

Gathering at the Breuer I House

Gathering at the Breuer I House. Image from Artful Cats by Mary Savig, published by the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, 2019. Courtesy of the publishers.

“In 1947 prolific architect Marcel Breuer (1902–1981) designed his first home, known as Breuer I, in New Canaan, Connecticut. In this photograph, a group of Breuer’s friends gather in the living room around a playful kitten. Most of the guests are seated on the woven floor matting, while sculptor Alexander Calder—who lived just an hour north in Roxbury, Connecticut—leans against painted plywood shelves. Vibrant works of modern art, such as a mobile by Calder, punctuate the otherwise modest room.”

Frank Stella with Marisol

Frank Stella with Marisol. Image from Artful Cats by Mary Savig, published by the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, 2019. Courtesy of the publishers.

“Frank Stella (b. 1936) famously broke off from abstract expressionism on a jagged line toward minimalism. The painter was motivated by the process of art, not the outcome. ‘I don’t just live for the day when I paint that one fantastic painting.…I live to paint and deal with the problems of what painting is and what it’s all about,’ explained Stella in a 1969 oral history interview for the Archives of American Art. Stella grappled with the problems of painting in his New York studio, where his docile feline Marisol carried on with the complexities of being a cat. In this photograph, they take a break from their work to enjoy each other’s company.”

Jay DeFeo’s cat Pooh Bear

Jay DeFeo’s cat Pooh Bear. Image from Artful Cats by Mary Savig, published by the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, 2019. Courtesy of the publishers.

“Painter Jay DeFeo was a central figure in San Francisco’s Beat generation of artists, poets, and musicians in the 1950s and ’60s. She was known for her unorthodox use of materials that blurred distinctions between painting, collage, and sculpture. She also experimented with photography, often focusing her attention on her studio companion, a cat named Pooh Bear. Here, she documented the serious-looking feline absurdly posing on a box and in a box.”

Maria de Conceição (also known as Sao) in her studio

Maria de Conceição (also known as Sao) in her studio. Image from Artful Cats by Mary Savig, published by the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, 2019. Courtesy of the publishers.

“Textile and fashion designer Maria de Conceição (b. 1946) created a cozy studio for crafting her popular ‘wearable art’ garments. Surrounding de Conceição in her Washington, D.C., studio are spools of thread and piles of remnants for her artworks. Everything was at hand, including an amiable black cat.”

Beatrice Wood at her pottery wheel

Beatrice Wood at her pottery wheel. Image from Artful Cats by Mary Savig, published by the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, 2019. Courtesy of the publishers.

“Beatrice Wood (1893–1998) built a pink and blue home in the Ojai Valley of California around her pottery practice. In this photograph taken for the San Francisco Chronicle, Wood works at her wheel with one of her Manx cats looking on. At the time, Wood owned two Manxes named Miro and Matisse. Across the room is a shelf displaying jars of ingredients for her signature luster glazes.”

Emily Barto at work on her mural Animal Tales

Emily Barto at work on her mural ANIMAL TALES. Image from Artful Cats by Mary Savig, published by the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, 2019.

“As part of the New Deal’s Federal Art Project, painter Emily Barto (1896–1968) received a mural commission for the Fordham Hospital in New York City. A tame tabby cat served as Barto’s model as she brought to life the nursery rhyme ‘There Was a Crooked Man’:

‘There was a crooked man, and he walked a crooked mile, / He found a crooked sixpence against a crooked stile; / He bought a crooked cat which caught a crooked mouse, / And they all lived together in a little crooked house.’”

Anne Arnold and Christy

Anne Arnold and Christy. Image from Artful Cats by Mary Savig, published by the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, 2019.

“Sculptor Anne Arnold (1925–2014) owned a house with a barn in Montville, Maine, where she raised farm animals such as pigs, cows, and chickens, and kept many dogs, cats, and rabbits. Her own collection of cats inspired an entire exhibition in 1969 devoted to the subject at the Fischbach Gallery in New York City. ‘What made the show so extraordinary was that their cat-ness was neither parodied nor exaggerated but presented straight, so that one had a sense of form completely filled with content,’ noted one critic in a review for Art News.”

from Artsy News