#she.....

[moonhze]

[snoji]

most gorgeous goth wife in the universe 🖤

[earthgrudgefear]

konaaaannnn

[lionbearfox]

jung heewon i have feelings for you

[formulaonedirection]

Met a major New York celebrity today if you even care

[paperandpencilsandskips]

"Motion Distortion Reaction Redaction Infectious"

[sevikagf]

peace-bringer.

[swinging-stars-from-satellites]

Cassandra Cain Wayne × Mary Oliver, Dogfish

[cononeillbreastingboobily]

[laughingpinecone]

Firmament fanart under Firmament spoiler cut, for Mysterium's August prompt, "blazing"!

[thefinalwitness]

snapdragon and moss for the flower asks:3c

moss ; a flower for maternal love –

l'aiha, even with her profound amnesia, has always struggled with maternal figures. hydaelyn was perhaps the least complicated, but even that suffered from an old scar in the heart that l'aiha couldn't remember where came from.

she doesn't really LIKE to be mothered. it makes her start trying to prove she does not need to be worried about, an insecurity she struggles with anyway, but specifically when she feels mothered it gets much worse. she only learns why the notion of older feminine figures taking a vested interest in her wellbeing causes her so much stress and pain after 6.0, when finally reuniting with her actual mother triggers an echo vision of the day j'nhala, l'aiha's forgotten identity, told her parents she was going to eorzea with louisoix. nhala had felt suffocated by her mother for many years already, but this specific incident had j'nhako turn hostile with fear and preemptive grief, a reaction that, to be honest, traumatized nhala. she never stopped to process it; perhaps that's why, even with her memory loss, l'aiha still suffers so much from it.

to nhala, a mother's love was stifling and hypochondriatic in nature. to be loved by a mother was to be held back. this trauma lives on in l'aiha, and it's almost strange to see, because l'aiha can be and often is SO motherly, especially with very young scions like the twins. she is kind, supportive, and brave for her friends, and this coupled with her being comparatively older than many of them, it almost can't be helped. she'd be, and will be (she wants to adopt children) a wonderful mother. whether this was always an innate piece of herself, or something that bloomed from the scorched earth of her relationship with her own mother, it's difficult to say.

snapdragon ; a flower of deception –

for l'aiha to intentionally deceive someone for any reason other than pure necessity is exceptionally rare. first of all, she doesn't really believe in lying if she can help it, but perhaps very importantly, she's PRETTY BAD AT IT aside from, again, pure necessity. she's a very anxious little woman! her poker face is atrocious! and if there's anything that feels worse than lying, it's getting CAUGHT and CALLED OUT for lying.

yet despite all that, l'aiha actually lies a lot about a great many things. she's so used to these lies, in one way or another, that they don't really register AS such. she is actually an extremely distrustful person, and she'll say whatever she needs to to keep people at arm's length. she rarely is unkind or unhelpful, but many find that, if they know her long enough, they realize they don't actually know much of anything about her. where she's been, what she's done—even the benign stuff like how she used to work for the arcanists' guild or she enjoys tailoring. you can directly ask her, and she'll, so nicely you'll miss it if you're not looking for it, completely divert the topic.

as for more traditional deception... perhaps the most notable thing was her reason for abruptly disappearing on the scions after 5.4. this was very soon after azem's consciousness had been awakened via her memory crystal, and back then, azem TERRIFIED l'aiha. azem wanted to wrest control of l'aiha's body and "suffer the burden" in her stead. azem framed this as protecting l'aiha, as azem pitied the sundered in the same way emet-selch despised them: she believed they were weak, incomplete things, and while hers was a more sympathetic perspective, she didn't want to see them toil in vain against machinations that even she couldn't defeat when she was whole. she sees them as lambs to the slaughter, doomed by their own incompleteness to fail. they're broken and unfixable to her.

l'aiha deals with this pestering for months, in the form of nightmares and eventually hallucinations. she can't sleep, can't concentrate, doesn't eat enough—sooner or later, her friends will simply SEE the physical toll on her and know something is wrong. so she lies. she lies about why she needs to take some time away from everything. she claims it's for study and a fresh perspective, that she's looking for new ambitions in light of the averted crises between the source and the first.

many of her friends know this is not the truth. but l'aiha makes herself purposefully unreachable outside of her linkpearl. she disappears to one of the most remote places in eorzea, gets a house there, and locks herself away to fight azem's consciousness alone. she continues to deteriorate health wise. because she went to dravania specifically, she ends up scolded by matoya a lot—ironically, matoya is the most uncomplicated mother figure l'aiha has, in that matoya makes no attempt to justify her callousness AS motherliness. frankly, if someone told matoya they think of her as a mother, she'd turn them into a frog. yet her maternal impact on l'aiha is undeniable.

l'aiha lies to her too, of course, but less. in part because matoya sees straight through it, but also because l'aiha KNOWS matoya won't fuss at or coddle her. if anything, matoya will be purely objective and practical, and that's what l'aiha needs: someone whose emotions will not interfere with the problem or solving it.

ok i finally lost my own train of thought LMAO thank u so much!!!!!!

[richmond-rex]

📢 Elizabeth of York!

send me a 🔊 and a character and ill say a song that reminds me of them

For Elizabeth of York: Blood is Blue - Billie Marten

Immortal - Marina and the Diamonds

❤️x

[shiilelagh]

SIGHS. her eyes

[beetlebrownleaf]

just a random Beetle I found buried in my folders.

[sketchy-nick]

Moth of the moment, the moth of the now