#the empire is now built

[mdemorita]

today, but in 2022, 2 years ago, Ghost released Impera, say “happy birthday” to Impera❕🎂

Impera is the band’s fifth studio album, which was released on March 11. The album was produced by Klas Åhlund, who also produced the album Meliora (2015). Before Impera, three singles were released; "Hunter’s Moon", was released on September 30, 2021, in support of the 2021 slasher movie Halloween Kills and appears as part of the movie’s soundtrack, "Call Me Little Sunshine", was released on January 20, 2022, and "Twenties", was released on March 2, 2022.

- Imperium

- Kaisarion

- Spillways

- Call Me Little Sunshine

- Hunter’s Moon

- Watcher in the Sky

- Dominion

- Twenties

- Darkness at the Heart of My Love

- Griftwood

- Bite of Passage

- Respite on the Spitalfields

[unopenablebox]

i admit that i find it a little bit frustrating how Wildly Astonished other antizionist jews act when i tell them my israeli jewish family have lived in the region since [some unknown length of time before 1800 when there start being records about it]

[missingjadesnake687]

The Orr Empire - As of Chapter 653

So I've read further, remembered a bit more, so an improved map be upon ye. I'll add the changes I've done and why, so again, SPOILERS AHEAD.

Capital - I've moved it a bit more north-west.

Hartan Village - About the same as before. Added a bit of forestry and mountains because I remembered they met Nahan in a forested area and saved people from a mountainous, cave like place.

Rik Mt Range - Spread it out a bit more. Brought it lower. Added a river because they stopped at one to rest on the mountain when they were on the Red Stone Mission and a Village that the Southern Army was staying at as protection for the stone. Yuder said the East has a lot of mountainous areas which make it hard to cultivate, so I brought it more eastwards.

Peletta Duchy - Took it a bit more northwards but still on the coast. I'm not sure if I'm remembering it right but Kishiar said he saw it the Red Stone make landfall from Peletta (please correct me if im wrong).

Tainu - Still the same.

Great Sarain Forest - Made it bigger.

Durban, Nelarn, Aeril and Hisnu - Changed the borders a bit.

Exita - Made it look like an actual winter island.

Now for new info

Odequia - Main city of the East and the Diarca Dukedom's main residence and stronghold.

Guanamar Mts - There's a hunters cabin here (iykyk) and a river flowing through the mountain, Kishiar caught fish for a meal. There is also a lake that's a bit of a tourist attraction.

Pofuan Village - Now this I'm a bit confused about. So there is a village IN and one AT THE BASE of the Mt, I'm not sure which one is Pofuan and which one is nameless.

Tyckenspail Region - A small region in the South-West of Orr. The unnamed village ruins that hid the First Duke of Tain's underground lab is here.

Star of Nagran Hidden Southern Base - Its hidden right on the edge of the desert but close enough that the people from the Western Base could evacuate to it pretty fast.

Charloin - Largest Trading City in the South. Port City that facilitates trade between the North and the South. Therefore the huge river connecting to the open ocean.

Mclara - A city further south that the Cavalry(?) Southern HQ was stationed in during the first game.

Southern Island - Apparently its a prison/exile island for criminals.

THAT'S IT.......for now. Its pretty fun doing this. But this is all my best estimates of everything. Maybe I'll do a map for the Capital and its 7 Walls. Been keeping track of those too.......

[emberwings-last-wish]

also on ao3: https://archiveofourown.org/works/60348928

Joel wakes up, and he can’t breathe, which isn’t supposed to happen to gods.

The sleeping thing, he thinks, technically shouldn’t need to happen. He’s a god. Not, like, a religion type of god – no one really goes around worshiping him, and he doesn’t really have the massive reality-altering powers that some of the old deities do. He’s just strong, and immortal, and awesome, and handsome, and very tall, and strong, and he’s way off topic now. What was he thinking about before?

Right. Waking up.

Anyway, he probably could go without sleep. But there’s a part of him that doesn’t know how to not get tired. It’s an annoyingly mortal part. He knows that there’s, like, a 99% chance that he was a mortal once, before godhood, since that’s how this usually works. He doesn’t remember anything about his hypothetical mortality, but he guesses he used to be… tired. Tired enough that even a thousand years of godhood isn’t enough to keep him from sleeping every now and then.

The problem with sleeping, and the thing that he’s not certain should be happening even if he does sleep, is dreaming. Specifically, the kind of dream that he jolts up from with a cut-off shout, with a searing pain in his chest, with a rush of memories that are gone before he can sort through them.

Tonight was particularly bad, he thinks after a few minutes, when he can think about what just happened instead of tangentially rambling around the subject. He – he’s pretty sure he dreamed about dying. And other people dying. A lot of death, really. And he’s seen death, of course. He’s died a hundred times. But his chest is still seizing every now and then, and his heartbeat is much louder and faster than it should be, and there’s a very uncomfortable wetness in his eyes that is just embarrassing, really.

Honestly. Why would he cry about people dying? Respawn is a thing.

Stratos is beautiful, even at night. It’s a different kind of beauty than in the middle of the day, and Joel doesn’t like it as much – he prefers the brilliance, the way that sunlight highlights the gold and quartz, the way it blazes in the sky like a beacon. It’s more ethereal, under the moonlight; the gold is all but muted, blending eerily into the warped wood and terracotta, and the quartz has an almost ghostlike glow about it. Joel walks the floating islands, restless, and tries to put a name to what he’s feeling.

He finds himself stopping by Peril’s temple. The Sunflower Lady is not a god he’s ever met, so he’s not sure why he looks at the abstract statue inside and can picture her features so clearly. The nearly-full moon reflects around the temple in ways that he’s pretty sure light isn’t supposed to work.

“Sorry,” he says aloud, and then scrubs at his face in an attempt to bring himself back to his senses. Why is he apologizing to a statue for no reason?

He doesn’t feel like anything is watching him, as he walks on. He doesn’t know if that’s better or worse.

Being a god does have its perks. Wings spread behind Joel as he stops at the edge of Stratos, looking out over the quiet lands below. He doesn’t remember ever having to use the mechanical elytra many of the rulers employ, but he’s pretty sure it would be far inferior to having one’s own wings bound to soul and thought.

Flying usually makes him feel better. It doesn’t tonight. He doesn’t know why.

Joel circles toward Tumble Town on a whim, but as soon as its lights come into view, he pulls away sharply. It’s not because his inhumanly keen eyesight has caught the hunched figure of the sheriff sitting on the tavern steps, of course.

(Joel doesn’t want to think about why he really doesn’t want to talk to Jimmy, right now.)

He ends up in Animalia, which is weird. It’s not somewhere he goes often. Not that there’s anything wrong with it; it’s just… well, the Animalians are a bit freaky, even to a thousand-year-old god. And their mayor – well, she wears that mask presumably to make it a bit less weird that you’re talking to an anthropomorphic cat, but it just makes things worse. Why did she have to pick that particular mask? It’s horribly unsettling, and Joel doesn’t even know why because it’s just a fairly normal looking face, pale skin and pink hair and round eyes, but it has to be deeply creepy on an instinctive level because why else would he feel all twisty and weird and achy inside whenever he looked at it?

But he’s here, nonetheless, sitting at the edge of the fountain in the darkness before dawn, feeling all hollow and scooped-out inside for no good reason. And that’s how he is still, a few minutes later, when a door opens across the square and he looks up at none other than the startled mayor herself.

Joel’s chest aches for a moment when he sees her. He doesn’t know why. He doesn’t know why he’s here. He doesn’t know what he’s doing.

“Joel?” Lizzie says, and damn it, her voice is making him feel even weirder, why is this happening? “What are…”

“I don’t know,” he says, looking away. He wants… he wants her to leave, he wants her to stay, he wants to ask her something but he doesn’t know what. He hates this.

She crosses to the fountain, and sits beside him. He’s human size tonight, not even six feet tall, but she’s still very small next to him. It feels wrong in ways he doesn’t want to focus on.

“I had a bad dream,” she murmurs, into the quiet air. “I… don’t remember what it was about. Not exactly. But it was bad.”

Joel opens his mouth to say that gods don’t dream, but what came out is, “Yeah. Me too.”

“I knew you’d be here.” Lizzie says, hugging herself. Her voice is small, and oddly cracked along the edges. “I – I knew you’d be here, but I don’t know why.”

“Sorry,” Joel says. He feels stupid for saying it, and at the same time he knows it’s not enough. He doesn’t know what that means.

“It wasn’t your fault,” she murmurs, eyes oddly hazy.

Joel’s breath catches for a moment, on a wave of cresting guilt, and the words are pulled out of him without conscious thought. “It was,” he says, “you shouldn’t have died, I told you to do-”

“It wasn’t your fault,” she repeats dully. “Wasn’t even Scott’s fault. Just mine.”

The sane part of Joel’s brain is busy having an aneurysm, leaving whatever irrational dream-bit of Joel brain that is piloting to say, “Jimmy laughed, you know. And then he died. And Mumbo died. And you – I lost all of you, and no one seemed to care, and Jimmy laughed and then you were all dead-”

“No one ever cares,” Lizzie says, her words wobbly, and Joel knows she is crying even though he barely knows her, shouldn’t know that she always has that higher pitch to her voice whenever she is trying to pretend there aren’t tears on her cheeks. “I just – no one ever cares.”

“I cared,” Joel says, fierce, because for some reason nothing is more important right now than making sure that Lizzie knows that he mourned. “I blumin’ cared. I cared too much. You know how much it hurt knowing you were dead? That my best friend laughed and celebrated that you died, and then he died too, and my other friend I was only learning to trust died, and then I had to keep going?”

Lizzie is silent, for a long moment. “Who won?” she asks, dully. “I don’t remember.”

“Me neither,” Joel says quietly. “Wasn’t me.”

Another long silence, in which the weird dream bits of Joel’s consciousness start to fade again, and he slowly realizes just how insane their conversation had been. What were they even talking about? Dying? Winning? Jimmy dying, apparently, and Lizzie, and for some reason that was a really big deal despite both of them clearly being alive, and, you know, Joel really not caring that much?

“Um,” Lizzie finally says. She sounds a lot less upset, and a lot more awkward. “I. I don’t. Um. Sorry, I – I don’t know what that was? I think I’m still a bit asleep, actually.”

“Yeah,” Joel says. He doesn’t know how to respond to what is, apparently, a collective exhaustion-induced hallucination of past experiences that clearly never happened. “I, uh. Sorry for waking you up, or whatever.”

“Oh, you didn’t,” she says, “I just, woke up on my own. It was a dream. A dream, and I woke up.”

“Yeah,” he says again.

The sky is starting to lighten; dawn is coming. A light flickers on in a window a few buildings down. The city is starting to wake up. It’ll be full dawn by the time Joel makes it back to Stratos, even if he leaves right now.

Lizzie is staring out across the square again. Joel looks at her out of the corner of his eye, and can almost imagine that the calico fur and pointy ears aren’t there, that the pink yarn and smooth birch are real. The splashing of the fountain is a nice backdrop, he thinks, but crashing waves would fit much better.

Lizzie turns her head suddenly, eyes meeting his, and for a moment that feels like eternity, Joel swears all he can see is the ocean.

“I’d better go,” she says, breaking whatever bizarre spell has fallen over Joel. “Things to do, you know. Might even get another few minutes of sleep.”

“Okay,” he says, standing. His wings flare behind him, gold-tipped white feathers spreading to catch the faint breeze drifting through the square. Through the eyeholes of the mask, her blue eyes track the wings as if she’s surprised to see them.

(It’s mutual. For a moment, he was surprised he had them. Blumin’ heck, Joel hates when his stupid aren’t-supposed-to-exist dreams mess with his head.)

“Well, see you around,” he says, a little awkwardly, and leaps into the air.

Stratos is a blazing beacon of gold and white, when he gets back to it, as early morning sunlight lights up the eastern faces of the floating build. It’s just the way Joel likes it. So he’s not sure why it’s too blinding, for a moment. Too aggravating.

Joel growls a noise of frustration in the back of his throat, and forces himself to grow as he comes in for a landing. He straightens up eleven feet tall, like he should be, and surveys his magnificent home, and pretends things are fine. He’s good at that.

[regretevator-headcanonss]

fleshcousin has an atrocious sense of rhythm, but a near-perfect pitch. they love human music and incorporate lyrics from songs they like into their speech all the time

FLESHCOUSIN LISTENS TO THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS!!!!

[omens-daughter]

just a lil reminder that Judicators and K'Nauth had a choice about defacing themselves and becoming vessels for their gods

the Ruidusborn Exaltants? who all felt fated to be in the Hellcatch? y'know, the ones like Imogen who are developing scars and physical disfigurement by just existing?

they didn't.

[megarywrites]

so i've been not-so-seriously considering doing a complete overhaul of the plot as is and having Solera return to the land with Thala and have them be all Bonnie and Clyde, just so I can write more about Solera because I love her. but as I get closer to the end of Solera's time above water, it's reminding me exactly why she so adamantly refuses to return to the shore with Thala. Even though I wasn't ever really truly considering changing that (it would be so so much work), it's now officially off the table, because it would be so incredibly out of character for her to even think about it, let alone do it

[fatehbaz]

Vidal [...] emphasizes the close relationship that existed between the Louisiana settlement [at New Orleans] and the Caribbean island [Haiti, the colony of Saint-Domingue] during the former’s French colonial period (1718-69). It has become a bit of a popular adage to describe New Orleans as the northernmost port of the Caribbean, but Vidal’s Caribbean New Orleans: Empire, Race, and the Making of a Slave Society demonstrates the substance behind these claims. [...] New Orleans is the missing link, a late-forming city that largely inherited its founding ideas, practices, peoples, plants, and laws from its longer-established imperial neighbors [France, Spain, Britain, and what would become the United States]. It thus offers the ideal case study in which to consider how colonies around the Americas developed in conversation with one another [...].

Vidal convincingly argues that New Orleans was a “slave society,” or a settlement in which racialized slavery informed every part of everyday life from its inception, whose physical construction was done alongside the “construction of racial categories” (p. 1).

This is an important shift within Louisiana historiography, which has long stood by [...] [the] argument that early New Orleans offered the semi-unique example of a “slave society” devolving into a “society with slaves.” Abandoned by the French following the spectacular failure of the Compagnie des Indes, the standard story goes, New Orleans became an isolated backwater until the 1770s, struggling to survive and permitting, out of sheer need, less disciplined contact between residents of European, Indigenous, and African birth and descent. [But] Vidal, in contrast, shows that, while Louisiana struggled to create a full-fledged plantation economy during the French era, this did not prevent its capital from organizing itself along the highly stratified lines of the Caribbean islands.

---

Furthermore, she argues, because New Orleans did not see many new residents after 1731, free or enslaved, and because it was a smaller settlement, white inhabitants were able to build upon these ideas in a relatively stable environment - focusing much of their energies on surveilling, containing, and disciplining the enslaved and free persons of color (p. 26). [...]

Vidal especially points to the 1729 Natchez attack and ensuing Natchez Wars [against Indigenous peoples] as pivotal moments in the militarization of white New Orleanians [...].

Subsequently, a scrupulous supervision of racial boundaries became the norm for the rest of the French era and fostered “a sense of community among white urbanites” (p. 141). Chapter 3 takes readers to the streets, levees, and other public spaces of New Orleans, where whites sought to sculpt the privileges of “whiteness” against both residents of African birth and descent as well as one another. Elite men and their wives scuffled over the best seating at church in an effort to recreate France’s ancien régime culture; socially lower [...] nonslaveholders, meanwhile, carefully guarded their weaker claims at mastery through street violence [...]. Beginning with a careful reading of census categories, Vidal traces how distinctions between European settlers [...] were increasingly replaced with those centered exclusively on race by 1763. [...] [Vidal then] follows the ways in which the demographically diverse workforce of the early colony made up of white indentured servants, convicts, and soldiers in addition to enslaved Africans - gave way to associations of difficult and degrading labor limitedly with the enslaved. [...]

---

French Louisiana inherited racial categories from the Caribbean but adjusted them to fit local needs, experiencing “not so much a loosening, but a more complex transformation” of its racial regime, largely through violence (p. 371).

Vidal documents how the Superior Council utilized targeted prosecutions and punishments to increasingly “imprint terror and instill obedience” on the enslaved (p. 390). [...] [The book] thus details a society in which racial hierarchies were asserted and supported through both top-down and bottom-up policies and practices, as “no social institution or relationship was left untouched by race” (p. 504).

To this end, Vidal speaks to important conversations by historians of enslaved women in the British Caribbean, including Jennifer Morgan and Marissa Fuentes. These authors have used a similarly wide range of sources [...] [and] archives to underscore the invasive nature of colonial racism. [...] [I]n part [...] Vidal’s [chapters work] to decouple lower Louisiana history from the fur traders of New France [Ontario, Quebec, and the watershed of the Mississippi River] and to reattach it to the planters of Saint-Domingue [in Haiti and the Caribbean]. [...] Combing through administrative papers, censuses, laws, parish registers, correspondence, and judicial records from both sides of the Atlantic, readers will get a sense that there is little Cécile Vidal has not seen or considered. [...] Her book [...] hopefully will convince an even wider audience [...] [to engage with] comparative, cis-Atlantic, and transatlantic studies of imperialism, race, and slavery.

---

All text above by: Kristin C. Lee. "Review of Vidal, Cécile, Caribbean New Orleans: Empire, Race, and the Making of a Slave Society". H-Atlantic, H-Net Reviews. January 2022. URL at: h-net dot org/reviews/showrev.php?id=56913 [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]

[thelovebug1968]

Im well adjusted and have normal reactions to stimuli. Unrelated i might have to get off tumblr for a little or else ill tell people to kill themselves over their WRONG opinions on architecture

[estavionpira]

fellas, im starting to think that the world is screaming "kiss me, son of god" but im not sure can anyone back me up on this?

[anoras]

post game for sonnet & that man's relationship sees the power imbalance... even out? mind you they're still godawful ❤️ but now the toxicity can be aimed outward

[scalproie]

SMTH SMTH I WILL END THIS CURSED BLOODLINE

[weedsinavacantlot]

The we are so over to we are so back whiplash of grad school is fucking insane

[mars-ipan]

songs in my head (stuck)

[loremonster]

Writers and world building vs. Writing the story in the world

[neverendingford]

.