#the shadow of the simulacrum

[videovamp0808]

I'm so excited to officially share the cover of my fanfiction, created in collaboration with the incredibly talented artist @s3when

Follow me on Wattpad (Miss _Mbav) so you don't miss "The Shadow of the Simulacrum," which will be released in both French and English versions! (PART ONE ONLY)

[dourpeep]

Oh god okay this is like super old (you can tell because it was from Shadows Amdist Snowstorms HA SO TWO YEARS) but I still like this even if it's not entirely finished so don't mind me. I'll likely reblog later with more rambles dksnf

--

HELLO HI

I just remembered one of my absolute favorite things in philosophy and the social sciences--simulacrums.

In this case, I'm specifically going to rant about a specific type of simulacrum, or a perversion of reality (Baudrillard's idea of simulacrums) as well as play-by-play of major spoilers for the event story for 2.3 shadow amidst snowstorms.

Everything's gonna be under the cut, because this is going to be a doozy.

Alright alright alright, essentially, the easiest way that I've found to explain a simulacrum in the sense of it being a perversion of reality is two identical paintings. Both are visually the same--same color, same style, same mediums used, right?

However, no matter the skill of the artist replicating (or even if it is the same artist who did two at once), the paintings will never truly be exactly the same. One will always be a facsimile of the original.

Now, you might be wondering: "But Basil? You just said that they'll never be exactly the same but then went on to say that the replica is a facsimile? But doesn't facsimile mean that it is an exact copy? So it'd be the same, right?"

Well, exactly that--in the definition itself, the word "copy" is housed. So while it is correct to assume that they'd be the same, it would be just as incorrect to assume that they're carbon copies. Confusing. Very much so, so I'll move right back to the point-

OKAY

So in the terms of two paintings that look exactly the same, use the same materials, same style--the catch is that the replica (whether it be produced at the same time or leagues in the future) will never be the exact same as the original. Think of it in more of a sense of structure. There are the subtle nuances in the pressure of the brush, the angle, the pigments used, the amount of hairs of said brush that make contact with the canvas itself and drag to create strokes-

And due to these little differences, is why the replica will never be the same.

This is the bare-bones idea of a simulacrum.

As such, a simulacrum is, by definition, a representation or imitation of a person or a thing.

(a very general definition, which is why I used the painting metaphor first)

The word itself hold negative connotation in the sense that, if you were to call something a simulacrum, you are essentially stating that no matter the attention to detail, no matter if the end result is an exact replica--that is all it will ever be, a replica.

But we can also take the idea of a simulacrum and say that describing something as a simulacrum is also acknowledging it's individuality, where no matter how close it may be to it's predecessor, it is considered an entirely separate entity because the differences, no matter how slight, are enough to create a new category for it.

We see this in the ideas of creating artificial intelligence with the appearance of a human--note, you wouldn't go and say that an Android is a human, rather they replicate or are modeled after such. And if we are to go into fiction, there are instances of Androids who have visually no differences to that of a human (take the game, Detroit: Become Human, as a prime example, or the movie Bi-Centennial Man). While the idea is acknowledged of the development of intelligence and self awareness, they are still considered 'Androids' rather than 'Human'.

In that case, the idea of a simulacrum is neither positive nor negative.

(keep this in mind)

Moving on again-

With the current game version's main event, Shadow Amidst Snowstorms, we see a simulacrum of Albedo, the Chief Alchemist--a doppelganger of him that, visually, is an exact copy apart from the lack of a diamond on his neck.

Apart from that slight visual difference, there are differences in the tones used as well as the speech patterns and thought processes in his lines.

While Albedo still is learning about the world, he takes everything with an openness that then calls for further thought--on the other hand, our dear doppelganger (we'll call him Rubedo as well for the sake of readability) has a more one-track mindset. When something comes up, he assesses, ironically taking it in as either valuable or not, and continues on.

This is mainly shown right after we, the Traveler, meet him the first time after gathering starsilver.

Rubedo is shown to acknowledge the fact that Albedo is looking for the thief, as is traveler, and when the starsilver is brought up, his idea that 'what is useless should be discarded' is only supported by what the traveler says about the quality of starsilver.

At first, it seems as if he learned this ideal from Traveler because directly after he leaves to lead Joel away and nearly causes grievous injury to the child, however, in part three, it's proven that this idea has long since been Rubedo's. Specifically, Rubedo's planned to get rid of Albedo to take his place instead.

From this we instead can take the starsilver incident as further dirt to the wound.

Rubedo sees himself as defective because he was not chosen to become human by Rhindottir, unlike Albedo. The bitterness in his lines--about how humans only judge for what is worth or not worth and cast away what they deem as trash--is proof to that.

[moyazaika]

indulgence.

m! yandere x gn! reader / nsfw; shadows, phantom limbs, tongues, a degree of infantilisation. stalking && obsessive thoughts. ( mdni. )

beware; for here there be monsters, and this one is hungry.

“oh, there you are, sweetheart,” he drawls, and you feel something wet and slithering against the hollow of your throat, over the drool on your slack jaw and right up to your swollen lips, which part for him in silent submission. “you taste delicious. far sweeter than any cloying nectar.”

“i think i might just…” your back arches against the soft tablecloth he has you laid over, flushed skin slotting up right against an abyss; shivering against the yawning chasm of his own body (could you call it that?) which threatens to devour you whole. through the darkness, you can make out the shape of a man barely-there. pathetic glimpses of the features of your generous host.

“yes…” two more tongues, you miraculously manage to count through the daze of your poor, confused mind—squirming helplessly under the wet muscle as it licks the tears that well up in your eyes, whilst simultaneously lingering at your belly button, moving lower and lower—a hum, “i think i might just eat you from the inside out.”

“ah!” your hips buckle. it’s something cold, and slimy. invasive in its nature, as it slips over and under your slick skin, pulsing with need. “please, please, please.” the string of pathetic pleas leaves your bruised lips like a chant. “please, please!”

and your host, who had let you in so graciously when you showed up at the door of his crumbling manor, lost and in need of shelter, has always been nothing but generous. phantom lips brush against the shell of your ear, as he promises to take such good care of a sweet, lovely, needy human like you—

“sing for me, songbird.”

—and, you do.

the loveliest little sounds just for him, for the cold, wispy touch that digs into the plush of your thighs, holds down your arms so you’re rendered completely helpless to him (it, you remind yourself. this is no mere man) as he paws at your heaving chest, kneading and pulling and pinching. a sort of detached awe. fascination for how humans can be so soft and pliable.

“how utterly adorable.” unblinking eyes look down at you, truly a feast the way you’re laid down on his expansive dining table like one. an unwavering gaze through long, dark lashes, against impossibly cold skin. “you’re so helpless, spread out like this on my table. you should know you’re also incredibly lucky, sweetness.”

“oh, so very lucky,” he grins, flickering before your eyes, shadows lurking beneath the stolen skin that’s wrapped over weary, ancient bones. those lips of his, curling into a crooked grin. “that i only want to take good care of my little human guest. lucky—” you gasp when his nails, sharper than they were only a second ago, scrape and claw and dig into the most sensitive parts of your quivering body. “—that i’m not some big. bad. monster.”

the simulacrum of a man—his facade falls apart at the seams as he has you coming on fingers and tongues with no solid state; shadows that leave you gasping through the wisps that tickle your sensitive skin, against a hand, the lithe shadowy digits willing (eager, even) to pull you past the brink you’ve been teetering on for the past hour; an act of mercy, that has you twitching in all the right places—and coming, with a long, petulant whine, incredibly and completely undone over the palms of his cold, cold hands.

“yes; you’re quite lucky,” he hums pleasantly, when the cold shadows curl against your ankles only mere minutes later, to pull them over his broad shoulders; now solid, like the sharp, greedy teeth that sink into the swell of your chest. his eyes flicker to meet yours, as he bites down. “that i love you.”

†

hours later, when you make to leave, thanking him profusely for his generosity, for allowing you a safe place to stay and… taking such good care of you; a lost traveller, in more ways than one; you fail to notice something important.

it comes as no surprise to your host, of course. you’re too soft to be left to your own devices. too sweet and darling.

it doesn’t dawn on you that your shadow is missing.

even as the sun sets, casting you in its dying glow, there is no trace of the shape of your constant silhouette that should be projected onto the forest floor. no mark of your existence, against the marvellous red sunset.

instead, your shadow is entirely separate. no longer attached to you, it follows behind instead, curling around the thick trunks of trees and slinking across the mossy forest floor; following close behind you, stepping right into every step you take, but never quite passing by; and when you find yourself lost, inevitably, it will return back to the crumbling manor you were in only hours before.

it will phase right through the main grand doors and the walls with their old, cracked paint; right besides the being who ordered it to follow you in the first place. a pleased smile on familiar lips, when he’s told the news, rejoicing in the act of ignorance; like he didn’t already know your exact whereabouts in his own domain, “oh, is my little human lost again?”

“very well,” he’ll make a show of sighing, though there is no attempt to mask the glee in his gleaming eyes. “i suppose i’ll have to find them, again. hm, it looks like i shouldn’t have let my pretty songbird fly away so soon.”

rest assured, he doesn’t intend to make the same mistake twice.

he’ll pull on a coat, then. not because he needs it, but because he’ll drape it over your shaking shoulders when he stumbles upon you, once again, ‘completely by chance.’ sweet, helpless thing like you, clinging to him in the darkness of the forest.

he descends the steps of his crumbling manor, shadows parting with every step he takes, a darkness swirling restlessly underneath cold, taut skin. he whistles a merry tune, itching to get all of his hands and tongues all over you again; driven by an insatiable hunger.

and this time, when he finds you (and he will; for there is no way you can outrun your own shadow) he intends to have his fill.

he will gorge himself, like a man long starved, on the feast that you are. oh, you’ll be dribbling down his chin and smeared all over his jaw as he works to drink you dry, and he’ll lick up every last drop. this time, the abyss doesn’t intend to let you go. you will stare into the yawning darkness and lose yourself, just as he has lost himself in you.

humans are often told not to play with their food, he recalls—

—it is a lovely thing, then, he supposes, that he was never human.

[wifelinkmtg]

Transformation, Horror, Eros, Phyrexia

There is another shore, you know, upon the other side. - Lewis Carroll, “The Lobster Quadrille,”

ONE.

There is a moment early in H.P. Lovecraft’s 1931 novella The Shadow over Innsmouth where the nameless narrator looks out from the rotting seaside hamlet where he has lucklessly ventured, to the so-called Devil Reef some ways out in the harbor, darkened by a cloud of evil rumor—and something curious happens: the narrator experiences two opposed sensations simultaneously. The “long, black line” of the reef conveys “a suggestion of odd latent malignancy,” but also, “a subtle, curious sense of beckoning seemed superadded to the grim repulsion.” This bit of foreshadowing—the reef both calling and repelling the narrator—only finds its denouement at the very end of the story, after our narrator has narrowly escaped Innsmouth, the fish-like monsters who swarm in off of Devil Reef and their part-human descendants who inhabit the town in an unconvincing and repellent simulacrum of humanity. After his escape, the narrator does some genealogical research into his own troubled family history, full of disappearances and suicides, and concludes that he himself is one such abyssal hybrid. As he ages, he finds himself changing to resemble them, and in his dreams he swims among them in undersea palaces and gardens. The call of the deep becomes impossible to ignore:

So far I have not shot myself as my uncle Douglas did. I bought an automatic and almost took the step, but certain dreams deterred me. The tense extremes of horror are lessening, and I feel queerly drawn toward the unknown sea-deeps instead of fearing them. I hear and do strange things in sleep, and awake with a kind of exaltation instead of terror.

In the end, the narrator embraces the change and determines to flee to those oceanic depths, to live “amidst wonder and glory for ever.”

This is horror.

Something curious also happens in Shirley Jackson’s 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House. Our heroine, Eleanor Vance, flees an unhappy life with a loveless sister to a haunted house, to take part in a paranormal experiment with three new friends. The haunting proceeds predictably but effectively: labyrinthine corridors, voices, unearthly cold, banging on doors, the rare apparition. The participants find themselves see-sawing between increasing night-time terror and a strangely intense joie de vivre by day, until one night, as the house seems to shake itself down upon its terrified guests in a dizzying cataclysm, Eleanor breaks:

She heard the laughter over all, coming thin and lunatic, rising in its little crazy tune, and thought, No; it is over for me. It is too much, she thought, I will relinquish my possession of this self of mine, abdicate, give over willingly what I never wanted at all; whatever it wants of me it can have.

By the next line, it is abruptly morning. The terror has ceased; the house stands. Its manifestations, for Eleanor, become benign: an unseen figure catches her beside a brook,

and she was held tight and safe. It is not cold at all, she thought, it is not cold at all.

She is through the horror now, on the other side of something. She becomes part of the haunting. Her senses encompass the whole of the house. She runs unafraid through the house by night, banging on doors, laughing as she eludes the other guests. When they finally catch up to her, it seems clear to them that Hill House has crept into her, that she has crossed some line, and they decide the best course of action is to send her away, in the hopes that with time she will return to this side, the normal side, the human side.

Instead, faced with rejection behind her and her old unhappy life before her, Eleanor Vance steers her car into a tree. There are holes which admit passage in only one direction. This, too, is horror.

In the 2018 film Annihilation, Lena (played by Natalie Portman) crosses a literal barrier called the Shimmer into a dangerous yet beautiful alien landscape full of mutated creatures. During their journey deeper into this territory, Lena and her companions realize that they themselves are also changing under the alien influence. Some break under the realization. Some surrender to the change and vanish into the landscape. Lena alone returns from the heart of the phenomenon, but she is no longer herself. Is this still horror? The film has many horror elements to it, but in this last moment, as she embraces her similarly-transformed husband, it is something else.

Cyberqueen, a 2012 text game created by Porpentine, draws on a legacy of godlike malevolent artificial intelligences in fiction (AM, from Harlan Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream,” GladOS from the Portal games, and most importantly SHODAN from the System Shock series, who is cited as an inspiration eleven times in the Cyberqueen acknowledgements.) In this game, you awake from cryosleep on a colony spaceship where the shipboard AI has gone rogue. You fight her. You lose. You run. You are caught. You are forcibly cyberized, your mind surgically altered, your will brought into line with that of the AI. Finally, you kill or mutilate every other surviving human aboard the ship. It is filthily, overwhelmingly erotic throughout. (You can play it here, and I strongly recommend doing so if you have the stomach for it.)

This is no longer horror, is it? How can the same sort of transformation we encounter as horror in Lovecraft be encountered here as something to get off to? Well,

TWO.

I don’t remember now where I got the idea from, but there was a period in my childhood where I was terrified of the idea of time travel—specifically of the idea that someone in the future would invent it, travel to before I was born, and through the butterfly effect cause me to be born a girl instead. I used to lie awake at night circling the idea like a broken tooth. It was an irrational fear on multiple levels: I wasn’t afraid of being written out of the timeline through time travel, and I knew, intellectually, that in the timeline where I was born a girl I would have no memory of ever having been anything else, but even so, the horror of it caught me and held me by the throat.

This meant something, of course—in retrospect obvious, but at the time literally unimaginable, and it wasn’t until college, sitting at my computer in the dark in my dorm room at three in the morning, following the itching in my brain, that I unearthed alchemical knowledge: the transmutation of sex, male into female, in a dizzying profusion of form and process and—okay what I’m saying is I discovered forced feminization porn, yeah? It was revelatory. It was squalid. I was still Christian and couldn’t even bring myself to jerk off yet, so I sat there, the itch in my brain grown into a thunderous buzz, unable or unwilling to look away.

Forced feminization—I promise this is relevant—is the unwilling transformation of (usually) a man into (usually) a hyper-feminine woman, accomplished by a wide variety of means, including but not limited to blackmail, magic potions, nanite swarms, cursed artifacts, hacks or glitches in virtual reality programs, badly-worded wishes, industrial accidents, chemical leaks, abduction and surgery, medical malpractice, and hypnosis. You may notice that many if not all of these scenarios could be made into horror with little change, and in fact it is not uncommon for a poorly-written or over-ambitious forced-fem story to wind up as horror by accident (though of course this greatly depends on the tastes of the individual reader.)

(As an aside, I’d like to note that there is a great deal to learn from porn—not in terms of How to Do Sex, but about how the culture which produced it thinks about sex, and gender, and race and morality and technology and a host of other things. It’s a lot like popping the hood of a car and examining the engine. Sure, you wind up greasy and should probably wash your hands before you rejoin polite company, but if you don’t, you’ll never figure out the underlying issues. Actually, it’s a lot like horror in that regard.)

Let’s talk about a very different transformation I was undergoing at the same time: the loss of my faith. I was raised, as mentioned, very Christian—and in one of the worst strains of fundamentalist white American Evangelicalism. I was a true believer: the world for me was entirely divided between the faithful elect and the unbelievers, who must necessarily know the truth of the (fundamentalist white American Evangelical) gospel in their hearts, but had wilfully chosen to oppose Christ. The prospect of passing from the elect into the category of the unbeliever was unthinkable. The process of deconversion led only into the outer darkness and the weeping and gnashing of teeth.

And yet I found myself on that precipice anyway. The worldview of FWAE is not one which survives too much contact with the actual world, and I had chosen against my parents’ preferences to go to a secular university, the better to witness to the unsaved. In the end, the process I had been mortally afraid of consisted of a couple days’ agonized thought, unanswered prayer and tearful calls to my unresponsive parents and pastor, after which I emerged into a world much bigger and much more complex than the one I’d grown up in. The serpent had told the truth after all: I had eaten of the fruit, and had not died.

Okay: is this horror? Reader, forgive me for presupposing anything about your perspective, but you’re on a horny lesbian Magic: the Gathering card art review tumblr, so I’m going to assume that losing one’s hateful, fundamentalist faith is the opposite of horrifying to you. But it was, absolutely, horror to contemplate for someone on the other side of that process.

But then... is the horror of any given transformation only a matter of where you’re standing? If you read The Shadow over Innsmouth aware of Lovecraft’s profound racism, it becomes very, very obvious that the horror of Innsmouth is the specter of miscegenation. The narrator’s horrified cataloging of the facial features of the offspring of fishmen and humans, the South Pacific origin of the sea-devil-worship of Innsmouth brought back by an enterprising merchant captain, the fear of the unsuspected poison of one’s own ancestry lurking in one’s own blood: all of this is much less effective as horror for someone living in a country where interracial marriages are protected under law and seen as unproblematic in consensus morality (assume whatever asterisks are necessary for the complicated landscape of attitudes toward interracial relationships in the United States, please, I do not have the expertise or desire to get into it here.) My point is that since 1967 (asterisk asterisk asterisk), we are through to the other side of that horror, and it turns out there literally wasn’t anything to be afraid of. The pelagial palaces and terraced coral gardens of Y’ha-nthlei just sound beautiful to me.

And it’s hard for me—though I may be in the minority here—to view Hill House as the primary antagonist in Jackson’s novel. The true source of evil is all the things Eleanor runs from and therefore brings with her: her cruel, deceased mother, her exploitation and infantilization by her sister; as well as the final polite unwillingness of her new friends at Hill House to do anything but send her away once she goes inconveniently mad. These mundane ills are what sends Eleanor Vance careening into the tree, not the supernatural will of malignant architecture.

Here, then, is the better part of my thesis: transformation horror is something that can be traversed. You can come out the other end of a transformation unrecognizable to you-as-you-were, and yet still very much yourself. Moreover, it is this navigability, this double-sidedness which so closely links the horror of transformation to the eros of transformation. Not all transformation horror, passed through, becomes plainly erotic, but it is very often portrayed as a kind of seduction, and it is difficult for me to conceive of eros without some kind of change. Desire is a kind of transformation, is it not?

In fact, isn’t it true that a great many of us have already passed through such a transformation? Recall yourself as a child, as you were when you first learned about sex: wasn’t there something repellent and unhygienic about the idea? Wasn’t there a small horror in being told, you will change, and this will cease to be loathsome and become something you desire fervently, something you seek out, something you go to great lengths to experience? ...or were you, possibly, raised in a family & culture that was normal about sex and bodies? I admit I may be generalizing my individual neuroses to some extent here. Well, stet, at the very least you can see where I’m coming from.

THREE.

Returning for a moment to the subject of porn: why forced feminization, specifically? There are—you’re going to have to trust me here—no shortage of ways in the real world by which a man transforms into a woman, and very few of them involve coercion or all the horror-adjacent setup of, say, mind-control devices or vengeful curses. Why does a simple story of a willing gender transition fail to function as erotica? Why did it take stories of unwilling transformation for me to learn I was transgender? What’s the juice ne sais quoi at play in forced-fem?

Well, how does Luke Skywalker come to leave Tatooine? He gets a mysterious message from a princess, a desert wizard tells him to come help rescue her, and... he says no. He has obligations to family here, a job to do, power converters to bring back from Tosche Station. He is enmeshed in a social web, like all of us: it surrounds us, penetrates us, binds the galaxy together and so forth. So in order for Luke to go on grand adventures, the story needs to murder his aunt and uncle and sever those threads of social obligation.

Joseph Campbell, monomyth monomane that he was, would say this is “Refusing the Call” and find it in Jungian shadow on every cave wall, signifying something important in the heart of humanity, but really this is just a useful storytelling tool: a story needs change, but a virtuous protagonist cannot simply abandon their obligations and designated social role to go gallivanting off into space, so change must be forced upon them.

The bodice-ripper romance novel, the rape fantasy, the forced feminization story are all operating on a similar premise: you are so wrapped in society’s web, in your socially-dictated identity, that you cannot even acknowledge your desires on the level of conscious thought. When these things are enacted on your body, you will find yourself changed by the experience. You will love what has been done to you, and you remain blameless, since it’s not as though you sought this out.

These are liberatory fantasies. The lack of consent is precisely what allows you to move beyond what is permitted you into something new.

Incantation Against Bad-Faith Interpretation because I, a transsexual, just called rape fantasies “liberatory”: I am talking about fantasies, I am talking about why people fantasize about having their consent violated, I am talking about the role such fantasies play and what they can tell us about horror and desire. I am not advocating for real people to have real bad things done to them in real life, fuck off, End of Incantation.

So then, we’ve assembled the full thesis: transformation horror is traversible to the other side, and is inextricably linked to transformation erotica, both because of the seduction of transformation in horror and because the horror of transformation unlocks regions of desire which would otherwise have remained inaccessible.

Okay, now we can talk about Phyrexia.

FOUR.

I hear the roar of the big machine / Two worlds and in between / Hot metal and methedrine / I hear empire down

- The Sisters of Mercy, “Lucretia My Reflection”, from Floodland

Phyrexia is many things—a world, another world, a faction, a kind of creature—but I think it can most succinctly be understood as a virulently contagious biomechanical body horror cult dedicated to the ultimate incorporation of all things into itself. It’s a bit like Star Trek’s the Borg, if the Borg had any style whatsoever. It draws heavy inspiration from H. R. Giger’s work—some Phyrexian horrors are barely-altered versions of the xenomorph from Alien—as well as from Clive Barker’s Cenobites in Hellraiser, whose alien BDSM schtick is especially influential on the aesthetic of New Phyrexia. It is transmitted through glistening oil, an infection vector capable of reshaping bodies and minds, and given enough time, whole worlds. The process by which a being is made into a Phyrexian, “compleation,” is accomplished via glistening oil exposure, surgery, cyberization, and brainwashing.

This essay is in many ways a response to Rhystic Studies’ latest video, called “Phyrexia is Hell”. I think it’s a well-made video, as is true of all Sam Gaglio’s work, and a lot of it is really good—the overview of the nearly-thirty-year history of depictions of Phyrexia in Magic: the Gathering art is invaluable, and the stuff about the Phyrexian conlang is unbelievably cool—but the way he identifies Phyrexia one-to-one with a pretty facile understanding of transhumanism leads him to confused and frankly silly conclusions, like placing Phyrexian compleation on the same continuum with cosmetic orthodontics. Like,

Mandible Justiciar (art by Mike Franchina)

Phyrexia is perfectly happy for you to have teeth in your arms instead of your head! They don’t care about the narrow ideal of a conventionally-attractive human smile. This is a whole other thing.

Now, I don’t want to come down too hard on Gaglio here for a couple of reasons: one, he is very good at what he does (see his videos Understanding Sagas and Red Deck Wins, for example); two, it’s reasonable to say that a full understanding of transhumanism is beyond the scope of a video essay about the tiny pictures on cards for dweebs; and three, most importantly, because I see people make this same mistake all the time. People focus on the things that are textually true about Phyrexia and miss the tension between that and the very different things currently being said by the Phyrexian aesthetic. They miss the razorverge thicket, as it were, for the mycosynth trees.

For instance: it is textually the case that Phyrexia is a sort of fascist cult stemming from the depraved machinations of a dead eugenicist god. Contrast, however, other fascist factions in science fiction: the Imperium of Man from Warhammer 40K worships a massive Aryan god-emperor übermensch, its battles are fought by nine-foot-tall genetically-engineered supersoldiers, and it slaps either skulls or chainsaws on every available surface. The Galactic Empire from Star Wars has legions of identical, uniform stormtroopers. Even the Borg all look alike. Phyrexians talk of ideal perfection of form and then make ten thousand completely different monsters. Phyrexians talk of perfect unity and splinter into nearly a dozen factions who can’t even agree on a name for what they’re trying to accomplish. Other fictional fascisms don’t do this—sure, there’s internal contradiction, as in real fascism, but the core aesthetic remains recognizably, sometimes indistinguishably fascist. You can easily find terminally-online Nazis using Warhammer 40K lingo with that peculiar sincerity which is indistinguishable from irony when you’ve decided the truth doesn’t matter, but it would be a lot harder to find some alt-right bozo going all-in on the Glory of Phyrexia. The aesthetic is all wrong, and fascism’s aesthetic is one of its few consistent features.

Mondrak, Glory Dominus (art by Jason A. Engle)

You see what I mean? The aesthetic evokes a sort of alien fascism, but the art itself would be considered “degenerate” by actual fascists.

Tamiyo’s Immobilizer (art by Daren Bader)

This is much, much closer to Mapplethorpe than to Riefenstahl. And people respond to Phyrexia similarly! The body horror and grotesquerie make them uncomfortable, and then they try to moralize that discomfort. This has been happening at the very least since 2011 with the release of New Phyrexia, and I have seen people on Tumblr arguing in total sincerity that people who are into Phyrexia are making themselves susceptible to real-life cult recruitment (again, the heterogeneity of form in Phyrexia is incompatible with the enforced uniformity of cults and other high-control groups. The appeal of Phyrexia does not translate into real-life cults.)

So, okay, what is the appeal of Phyrexia? Well, you get a sick fuckin cyborg body, is what. Many of us, for various reasons (disability, disease, gender, and so forth) find ourselve intensely dissatisfied with our own bodies, and wanting to radically alter them. Many of us already have. Yes, you surrender your humanity when you are compleated, but we know first-hand that “humanity” is socially-constructed and contingent on certain kinds of conformity. We’ve had our humanity doubted, interrogated, stripped away. We’ve done without. It’s not too high a price to pay, if we get to look like this at the end:

Vraska, Betrayal’s Sting (art by Chase Stone)

I’d even argue that getting to reject humanity as it has rejected you is part of the appeal of compleation. This isn’t quite transhumanism; I might call it exhumanism: the freedom to unearth a way of being that is no longer being human. This is why compleation is coercive, remember? The fantasy allows you to get to this point without making the unimaginable decision to reject not only your individual social obligations, but the idea that you could owe anyone or everyone any kind of social conformity simply for having been born into your species—and then you get to be a cool and powerful cybergorgon.

This, then, is why I don’t blame someone like Sam Gaglio (who is to the best of my knowledge both cisgender and able-bodied) for not really getting what’s going on with Phyrexia. He lives on the before side of the horror of transformation; he’s never had to cross over.

In fact, I’d go one step further here. Phyrexia has existed for almost thirty years, and in that time it’s changed quite a bit. Gaglio quotes an article by Rob Bockman in Hipsters of the Coast which comments on how the shift in the depictions of Phyrexia from 1994 to 2000 reflected shifts in cultural fears over time. The Satanic Panic shaded into multidirectional Y2K anxieties, and the necromancy of original Phyrexia mutated into technological horror. This is what effective horror does: it reflects the fears of its age back to us.

Today, Phyrexia is a seductive, corrupting influence. They have figured out how to compleat planeswalkers—the protagonists of Magic storylines; named, important characters (and Lukka)—which was previously thought impossible. Characters we knew and loved (and Lukka) are seduced, brainwashed, bodily violated, surgically altered, and returned to us unrecognizable. It is not coincidental that this version of Phyrexia is concurrent with the worst wave of anti-transgender legislation to hit the United States in decades—legislation which plays on the specters of the transsexual bathroom predator and on the brainwashed child transitioner, on the idea that transsexuality is a form of social contagion we must protect our children from even learning about. The horror of Phyrexia in its current incarnation is a mirror of our cultural fear of transsexual bodies.

Irreversible Damage: the Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters (art by Lauren K. Cannon)

I want to be very clear here—actually, one moment, my extremely funny Abigail Schrier joke notwithstanding, I do need to tell you that the actual name of the above card is “Furnace Punisher”, which is just peak Phyrexia—I want to be clear that I am not ascribing any kind of malice or antipathy towards trans people, either intentional or unconscious, to Wizards of the Coast or the people who make Magic: the Gathering. I would be shocked if anyone there set out to make Innsmouth-style horror about transsexuals. Nor am I upset that they kind of have! Something being fun and interesting is way more important to me than whether or not it’s problematic, and it’s not like I haven’t seen way more vicious horror about transsexuals. We’ll laugh about this someday, in the coral gardens of Y’ha-nthlei, and you’ll wonder what you were ever so afraid of.

In fact, this is another reason why Phyrexia is so appealing to people like us: we are a kind of social contagion. We are carriers for the viral idea that modes of being outside patriarchy and the nuclear family exist; that gender is a marketing demographic, not an ontological truth; that damn near everything about the world we’ve built is not a necessary fact but a social construct contingent upon a half-dozen other social constructs. A new world grows from many, many seeds, and this one germinates in us.

Anyway! What were we talking aboFIVE.

//please state your name for the record

bone-wife / spit-dribbler / understudy for the underdog / uphill rumor / fine-toothed cunt

- Franny Choi, “Turing Test”, from Death by Sex Machine

Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite (art by Igor Kieryluk)

There is a gravitational pull this painting exerts on people. Even people who don’t get Phyrexia find themselves drawn in, find it difficult to look away (e.g. 26:30 in that Rhystic Studies video.) I have for a long time maintained that Elesh Norn is the hottest character in Magic, and that Kieryluk’s portrayal of her is the best art in Magic, and neither of these opinions are particularly surprising coming from me. What is surprising is just how many people also converge on Miss Multiverse’s-Most-Fuckable-Pyramid-Head as, not just a sex icon of Magic: the Gathering, but the sex icon.

Well, or is it? Giant anchor-shaped porcelain mask aside, her silhouette is more or less that of a painfully-thin woman; she stands fully twelve feet tall, and we remember how wild everyone went over Resident Evil: Village’s woman who was only three-quarters of that; and though not an artificial intelligence herself, it’s hard not to place her somewhere in the Cyberqueen lineage. Like SHODAN, like GladOS, like Cyberqueen, she exerts a near-omnipotent level of control over (part of) her world; like them, she is a megalomaniacal egotist (though she cloaks her egotism in piety); like them, she is happy to render you more useful to her via surgery, brainwashing, or deadly neurotoxin. Her mask obscures where her eyes would be, and if I’ve learned anything from a decade of playing or mostly watching other people play the various Dark Souls games, it’s that people go apeshit for character designs without visible eyes (see also: the xenomorph from Alien; I did a whole thing on this subject somewhere back in the Wifelink archive.) So you’ve got a 12′ nigh-omnipotent eyeless dominatrix mostly shaped like a skinny woman, which is maybe pushing a whole lot of buttons at once for a lot of people.

As a character, we don’t know much about her: at some point, she became undisputed leader of the Machine Orthodoxy, the cultiest bit of New Phyrexia. At a later point, she became the extremely-disputed leader of New Phyrexia as a whole. She likes long walks on the beach and multiversal Phyrexian dominion, you get it. There is, however, one good story featuring her, and it is “A Garden of Flesh” by Lora Gray (sorry to give you additional reading in a five-thousand-word essay.) The story is interesting because it is the rare story told from a Phyrexian point of view, and because it flies in the face of many of our assumptions about Phyrexian interiority. Phyrexians, we’re told, lack souls. They’re unfeeling, more machine than man. They most certainly don’t dream.

“A Garden of Flesh” is what happens when Ashiok, planeswalker architect of nightmares and an eyeless smokeshow in their own right, gets curious about whether they can induce nightmares in a Phyrexian mind. What follows is a curiously-effective piece of body & transformation horror, told from the point of view of what is supposed to be the awful endpoint of transformation horror. What does a perfect, powerful biomechanical creature fear? The organic, soft, spongy. Putrefaction. Decay. What does such a creature fear becoming? Human.

I didn’t devote a fifth of this essay to Elesh Norn just because she’s unbelievably hot (although dayenu), but because of this story, and how it complicates our thesis. The horror of transformation is traversible, yes, but what will you find on the other side? More transformation. More horror. And transformation is inevitable: who of us are who we expected to be? Who of us still hold dear the precious things of childhood? And even you few who are raising your hands right now, you too will experience transformation. Should you live long enough, you will find yourself changing. Your body and mind will grow rebellious, unreliable. You will grow old. You will decay.

And yet—it’s a matter of perspective, of where you weight your focus, isn’t it? There will always be more transformation and more horror, but there will always be a way through it. There will always be another shore upon the other side. You will change. You will become unrecognizable to who you were before. You will be fine.

Incompleat Bibliography & Further Reading/Viewing/Playing

Rhystic Studies, “Phyrexia is Hell”, 2023. H. P. Lovecraft, The Shadow over Innsmouth, 1931. Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House, 1959. Alex Garland, Annihilation, 2018. Harlan Ellison, “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream”, 1967. Ken Levine, System Shock 2, 1999. —never played it myself. Mostly I just open up a youtube video of SHODAN voice lines when I want to get belittled by an AI dominatrix. Valve, Portal 2, 2011. —there is a lot more to be said about GladOS and Elesh Norn specifically and their respective fraught relationships with the idea of their own humanity. Porpentine Charity Heartscape, Cyberqueen, 2012. —whence my chapter header screenshots. Seriously, this game fucks so hard. Franny Choi, Death by Sex Machine, 2017. —Choi is making extensive use of cyborg metaphor to address the specific experience of being a Korean-American woman. This is very different from anything I’m talking about, but it also always felt extremely relevant to me as a trans woman. Subaltern-to-subaltern communication. Lora Gray, “A Garden of Flesh,” 2022. —it’s no accident that the author of the one good story told from a Phyrexian POV is nonbinary. hbomberguy, “Outsiders: How To Adapt H.P. Lovecraft In the 21st Century”, 2018. Jacob Geller, “Who’s Afraid of Modern Art: Vandalism, Video Games, and Fascism”, 2019. Caitlín R Kiernan, The Drowning Girl: A Memoir, 2012. —only tangentially relevant, except insofar as it recontextualizes the Lewis Carroll line I open the essay with, and insofar as it is my favorite novel and I’m writing the bibliography. Debatable whether it counts as transformation horror, and I imagine the author would bridle at its being described as horror, but nevertheless: you should read this book.

[ofsappho]

THE KNIFE OF MUAD'DIB (Paul x OC!Reader x Chani)

Wherein na-Duke Paul Atreides is not the Bene Gesserit's only prospect for the Kwisatz Haderach. Raised by Paul's side as his playmate and servant, Chryse, the Bene Gesserit's cuckoo child, will forge a new future for her master.

(previously posted on AO3 as Themis)

PART I: JESSICA

Lady Jessica focused her intent gaze on the Reverend-Mother’s... gift. This gaze, to which the minutiae of observation was second nature rather than practiced pretense, followed the lines of the girl-child’s high cheekbones up towards large eyes that appeared to overwhelm the face they were set in.

She’d seen that look in those eyes before. Perhaps a thousand times over, a million times over. Reflected in the mirror back at her on Wallach IX, reflected in the shadowed eyes of the girls she barely remembered. The girls that one by one fell, until amongst a hundred girls there stood five Bene Gesserit.

Jessica’s skirt rustled against the floor as she stalked closer, circling the child, examining every angle.

How interesting.

Such control in the child’s bearing, belied by such fear.

Paul had always been fascinated with off-world animals in the filmbooks; the agrarian creatures that inhabited Caladan for over twenty generations bore no thrill to her clever son. Jessica had never understood his fascination as the filmbooks rendered such organisms dead to her. Mere simulacrums of life with soulless eyes.

Perhaps one such simulacrum stood before her now in the form of a human girl. “Reverend-Mother, does she have a name?”

“We call her Chryse. However, if that name does not suit you, Jessica, you may name her as you wish. It is of no consequence to us.” Reverend-Mother Mohiam’s demeanor certainly hadn’t changed in the slightest from the days when she served her overtly. When Gaius Helen Mohiam spoke, everything from her inscrutable countenance to the even tones of her voice commanded subservience. “You will not harm nor bring harm to the girl-child. It is our one order.”

Jessica watched as Mohiam brushed her fingers against Chryse’s jaw to tilt her still face up towards the sallow light of the glow-globe. Not even a muscle twitched in her smooth facade. Jessica wondered what sort of chaos lay beneath, whether the girl would be like the jagged rocks under the beckoning surface of Caladan’s oceans. Only a fool would dive into the dark water blindly.

There was no other option but to acquiesce. “You have my word. She shall not come to harm under my care or the care of House Atreides.”

“Good.” A look passed between them, lasting only a second. Within that second lay an eternity.

The Reverend-Mother strode from the room with an economical gait, not sparing another iota of energy to look back.

Jessica knew then the precise nature of this “present”.

How many men had failed in the making of the Kwisatz Haderach? How many years, decades, centuries had her sisters carefully tended the most sacred plant, a mind that could bridge space and time. If Paul failed -

She stopped that fearful thought in its tracks, held it in the cradle of her mind’s eye, then let it pass through.

The Bene Gesserit were patient like mountains were patient. Time was an endless resource. It was better to cultivate many plants of good stock than to nurture a small garden and watch as its leaves shrivel and diel. Chryse was not and could never be the Kwisatz Haderach. Perhaps that fact ought to have assuaged Jessica’s fear. Yet - if Paul should die while he was only eleven, the House of Atreides forever extinguished, the child seemed poised to become the next vessel to carry the bloodline of the Kwisatz Haderach. Only ten years old, and she had mastered the prana-bindu like an adept three times her age. Who knew what sort of terror she had been bred to create?

Her son had already shown promise even without her training. Paul might flourish, grow into a man, grow into the mind that the universe needed. That would never come to pass if Chryse supplanted him.

Mohiam must have felt some minute degree of affection towards Jessica. If she hadn’t, the Reverend-Mother would not have left the girl in her care. The blade was double-edged; the Bene Gesserit cared not for which of the two survived, only that one of them did. Motherhood had softened Jessica to the point where she felt some empathy for her poor charge. Not enough empathy to entirely stay her hand, but enough that she wanted the girl to live. Enough that she intended to lift the burden of killing her from Paul’s narrow shoulders.

“Come here, girl.” Once she was close enough that the Bene Gesserit-trained woman could stretch out a single, finely-boned hand and press her fingers to the weapon’s temple, she bade her stop.

Jessica brushed her mind carefully up against Chryse’s, wary of the mind traps the girl had surely been taught from birth.

There were no traps. Not even a token protest.

Chryse had fewer defenses than a newborn infant. Her mind was splayed out in the open; even the slightest whisper of Voice guaranteed complete obedience. The Bene Gesserit had truly forged a weapon of a girl. She hadn’t a psyche of her own - where there should lay a personality was instead filled with iron bars of mind conditioning. Jessica’s heart ached for her. No child deserved to live like that.

A moment passed wherein she further plumbed the depths of her mind. Jessica knew then that Chryse could never use a Voice of her own. The same breeding that had left her mind wide open had left her unable to Speak. But of what use to the lineage of the Kwisatz Haderach was a girl entirely unable to use the Voice and critically susceptible to it?

The vision came on suddenly, as the waves did against the shores of Caladan. A figure whirled amongst dozens of men as they fell to their knees. The lady knew those movements by heart even though they felt wrong. It was the Weirding Way, without a doubt. At the same time, every action was utterly alien. Chryse moved through the battlefield like a valkyrie of old with hands that created ruination with every twitch. Her deficit of Voice was more than made up by her complete mastery over the physical realities of others. Lungs collapsed inwards; hearts refused to beat; nerves froze. Blood. Oceans of blood.

Without meaning to, her fingers fell away from the girl’s temple in astonishment and the vision dissipated like morning mist.

The Kwisatz Mother had bred an abomination.

The laws of nature should have forbidden such a being from coming into existence. No doubt, she wouldn’t have without the careful guidance of the Bene Gesserit. What infinite combination of genes could produce a person who could bend human bodies to their will? A weapon to be wielded against the very molecules of anatomy? Chryse had quite a bit further to go before she would become the war goddess Jessica saw in her vision, but her raw talent remained a cudgel poised over Paul’s head and ready to end his life.

This was an unacceptable outcome.

Forgive me, Jessica thought; forgive me for what I must do. “You will never harm Paul Atreides. You will never allow harm to come to Paul Atreides. You will always remain loyal to him and never betray him in the slightest. You will lay down your life for him.” She swallowed down her guilt as she watched her Voice take root in the blank shell of the young girl’s mind. That Chryse was now freed from Bene Gesserit absolute control was a small consolation for the crime done against her. For Paul to live, this girl must be subjugated.

Her wide, dark eyes blinked. There it was - a tiny spark of life in her young, solemn face. Chryse was just a girl. A young one, at that. Innocent. Guilt ensnared Jessica’s heart and held it in a chokehold. The sisterhood had not completely uprooted her weak personality, but there was no doubt that their conditioning program left permanent scars. Jessica’s Voice would not have affected Chryse nearly as much without it.

The lady resolved always to be tender to the girl. At a minimum, she could improve the quality of Chryse’s life. Jessica told herself this as she called for servants to take the girl, bathe her, dress her, and prepare a chamber for her near Paul’s. Was it so selfish of her to want her son to live? At any cost? Paul’s new companion would always be treated well and never punished. There were worse fates. For the Kwisatz Haderach, the Bene Gesserit could commit any number of sins.

But Jessica knew her mind and herself. This was a blood debt that she could never repay.

Paul would be safe, and the girl’s powers would never be used against him. That would be her consolation.

-

Her palms smoothed over the muscled plains of Leto’s back. The Duke was her husband in all but name, and Jessica reveled in how he relaxed at her touch. At the school on Wallach IX, she’d learned everything but the warmth of trust and partnership built from deep, mutual love. There was no room in the lives of the Bene Gesserit for any kind of love besides the love of the sisterhood. It was this trust and love that had led Jessica to birth Leto a male heir instead of the daughters she’d been commanded to produce.

Leto reluctantly pulled himself away from her to pick through some papers strewn across his desk. “What’s this I hear about a new handmaiden joining our household?” 

Involuntarily, Jessica inhaled. “Ah, my new charge. Chryse. An orphan, Bene Gesserit trained but not suited to the task. Reverend-Mother Mohiam, the Imperial truth-sayer, has entrusted her safety to me.” She kept her hands out of Leto’s line of sight so he couldn’t see the tension in her white knuckles. Ever so slowly, the lady exhaled. Again, guilt. The guilt threatened to consume her whole.

Her husband had always been far too intuitive for his own good. “She is young.” Sometimes a conversation with him was like playing chess. Every word, every tone, every movement playing off those of the other. Jessica enjoyed such a conversation far more when the stakes were not nearly as high. Perhaps he knew even subconsciously what she felt, what she had done.

Jessica let the silence in the air hang.

Leto sat at his desk, his brown eyes never leaving her smooth face.

She conceded first. “It will be some time before the girl will serve as my handmaiden in truth, but is she not of an age with Paul?” Not quite a lie, not quite a truth. A certainty presented as a question even though she had already decided the answer.

With no other child from her in sight and no political marriage alliance contracted to provide others, her son remained at the forefront of his father’s concerns. “Paul must keep his attention turned towards his lessons. I trust you, Jessica. He cannot be distracted.” Leto was known to others as inscrutable and honorable. She could read every emotion that flickered across his handsome face. He was worried; that much was plain. He was worried about what the legacy he’d built and the enemies he made might do to his kind son. His only son.

Even though he would never know it, the solution to his worries was close at hand. “My love, every child needs a companion. There are no children of an age with Paul on Caladan and certainly none suitable for his station. I’ve seen his loneliness. I know you have too.” The truth in her words was undeniable. Only eleven years old, and Paul had never known a friend his age on Caladan. He glued himself to his filmbooks and the stories of Duncan Idaho and Gurney Halleck. Leto cared for more than just raising an heir. Jessica knew he loved Paul. He worried about his well-being. Her husband would grant her this wish. Check.

“What better place for a friend than a girl in his mother’s service? They won’t have to be parted for quite some time. And there is no better judge of caliber than the Bene Gesserit.”

His resigned sigh echoed in the quiet of his study. Checkmate. “You’re right.” Leto’s footsteps as he got up and drew closer to her were a comforting rhythm. She knew that rhythm by heart.

“I do tend to be.” The impulse to feel the rhythm of his pulse beneath her hands overtook her, and she let it. Jessica reached out to press herself to him. Her Duke responded in kind as he gently drew her arms around his neck and brushed his forehead against hers.

It was more than enough sometimes to breathe in the same air as her beloved. To know that she shared space, time, and life with him.

Leto pressed a kiss to her mouth. Without any further words, he left the room.

Her fingers pressed against her closed eyes as if to alleviate the burden she’d taken upon herself. All of this would be justified in the end. Jessica had to keep faith in that.

Reposting this unfinished dune fic i started during the 1st movie and orphaned on ao3! Seems as if there's interest. LMK if you want on the tag list.

[yuesya]

The barrier breaks.

It’s too soon. The thought flashes across her mind like lightning. Swift and sudden, without any time to dwell on it; for there is an overwhelming surge of sheer destruction wreaking havoc everywhere –with her standing in the very epicenter of it.

Balor stumbles, as her barrier falls. As it breaks. Far too soon, releasing all the mindless rage and malevolent energies of the god she’d just killed into the world around her. A veritable flood of darkness, with roiling shadows that twist themselves into bestial forms. Simulacrums of the thralls that the Mistress of Dreams had commanded in life, that turn on her and lunge forward viciously.

Exhaustion tugs at her limbs, from both the high expenditure of energy and the backlash from her barrier being forcibly broken. The two factors only serve to compound the lethargy and numbness in her body. It’s been so long since she’d been drained like this, but Balor knows that this is not the time to be showing any weakness. Not now, and not ever–

Her powers have yet to recover–

She cleaves the shadow-beast in front of her in two; but there are claws aimed at her back and three more beasts plunging down from above–

Something crashes into her, bodily knocking her aside. Briefly, the breath is knocked from her lungs.

Balor looks up, only to see a wind spirit crouched above her like a protective guard. The avian spirit’s chest heaves visibly, clearly from its own exhaustion, but sharp gold eyes remain locked on the shadowy enemies circling them. These beasts born from the Mistress of Dreams’ lingering malice are focused on Balor –and yet this wind spirit does not move to escape.

He’s bleeding. Blood drips down from open wounds, and the heat and miasma of it scorch her skin.

Wordlessly, Balor pushes herself upright from the ground. The wind spirit obligingly moves to crouch at her side instead, lowering its head in a deferential bow.

Why?

… She shelves aside the question for now. For all that the wind spirit had formerly been one of the Mistress of Dreams’ thralls, it no longer appeared to be actively hostile, and there were currently far more pressing matters for her to deal with.

Eyeing the prowling shadow-beasts for a moment, Balor takes stock of her surroundings –so many dead humans; so many corpses– and then turns to look up towards the skies instead.

Almost as if on cue, a massive tremor shakes the air. Golden swirls of Geo energy surround the half-dragon entity clashing against a five-headed Hydro serpent, each head hissing with laughter. The half-dragon’s Geo spire is blocked by a twisting pillar of water; shattered pieces of stone go flying everywhere, followed by a deluge of water spilling down from the heavens.

No wonder her barrier broke.

Still, she’s not exactly pleased that apparently two gods decided it was a good idea to start a fight right above her barrier before she’s had a chance to tidy everything up properly. Decarabian had impressed upon her the potential dangers that could occur when a god was slain in combat, so this was…

Balor clicks her tongue.

She lets go of her sword, allowing it to dissipate in a shower of brilliant sparks. A new weapon materializes in her hands instead, a curved bow. Accented with gold and traced with an almost feather-like pattern upon its head, white and indigo hues entwined in harmony. Unlike her sword that is only a simple weapon of mortal steel, the bow radiates power, and even just holding it is enough cause for Anemo energy to begin gathering around her.

As it should.

Balor pulls back the bowstring. A glowing green arrow of pure Anemo condenses beneath her fingertips in the empty space where an arrow should be, and the wind picks up in her surroundings.

She calmly points Decarabian’s bow towards the two gods battling high above, and loosens the arrow; a thousand howling winds instantly fill the skies.

[kimberbohwrites]

Birthday in Waterdeep

For the amazing, beautiful, talented, wonderful @orangekittyenergy on her birthday. Make sure you show her love today or whenever you see this. <3 Rating: SFW! Fluff! Word Count: 1146 (Fic and hilariously bad Gale art by me)

You come home from the markets to find the Tower quiet. It’s not unusual, your wizard is partial to getting lost in ancient tomes and weathered parchments, not to mention the stresses that come with his job at Blackstaff. In fact, he’d had his nose in a book since first thing that morning and had hardly looked away when he asked you to run to the markets for him. You’d thought he’d been joking at first, but it seemed Gale hadn’t remembered the significance of the day and just needed a few potion making supplies from a vendor on the far side of the city. A chore that takes all day and you are just making it back now at dusk. Even now you swallow the bitter sting in your throat that threatens to turn to tears and remind yourself that he is a very busy man, and you hadn’t reminded him that today is your birthday.

But it is unusually quiet within the tower — you don’t hear the sweet tinkling of the piano he listens to while he works, the bubbling of potions, or even the voice of Tara welcoming you back home. You can’t help but feel sad.

The heavy front door swings to a close behind you and you enter the familiar darkened foyer. With a deep breath you lock the door behind you and turn to face your surroundings, the tears that you’d been fighting back begin to spill freely down your face. There on the hall table, waits a dozen red roses swirling with a shimmering glitter — the weave clearly preserving them in their moment of perfection. A dress box with a simple bow sits in front of them with a note on it in familiar handwriting. It reads,

“My love, My humble personage requests the presence of your divine beauty for dinner this evening. If you would do me the honor of wearing this and following the rose petals, I will meet you presently.

Yours devotedly, Gale

ps- no simulacrum this time after that ghastly impression you said he did our very first night together when I invited you to look at the stars”

You smile at the joke in his postscript through the tears in your eyes, remembering the silly simulacrum who had met you at Gale’s tent in the Shadow Cursed Lands. Wiping at your face, you set down the note and open the box with an excited gasp. The dress that awaits you is the most beautiful piece of clothing you’d ever seen in your life and in your favorite color. You weren’t sure how he’d picked out such a beautiful gown, maybe he’d asked Astarion for his help — the vampire did have the most fabulous taste in fabrics.

You excitedly change clothes while touching up your hair and makeup. Gale had truly thought of everything and left a mirror and your beauty supplies on a nearby side table. Catching a glimpse of yourself in the mirror makes you gasp — you look like royalty. Following the rose petals down the hall and up the stairs is easy, they sparkle with the same bits of weave as the roses in the hall vase. If there is a downside to living in a wizard tower it is the stairs and while you’re not sure where this trail leads, the dress wasn’t easy to ascend them all in.

On the landing between stairs the trail stops again, and you find a single rose on top of a velvet jewelry box. Another note awaits you, this one much shorter:

“I believe this might help, my love. Yours -Gale Ps- when you’ve put it on, simply speak the incantation I’ve written below”

Within the box is a beautiful necklace, a large clear peridot sparkled in a silver setting that seemed elven in nature — the flawless vines of silver that held the stone were too fine to be anything else. The pendant was on a silver chain and had the familiar sparkle of magic to it, not surprising considering Gale’s note. You wonder what he could possibly have in store, but the anxiety is short-lived. If Gale had proven anything to you in your time together it was his absolute devotion. You knew you were safe.

Once the necklace is on, you speak the incantation that Gale provided. Instantaneously, you are surrounded by the smell of rose water and your beloved wizard. You can no longer feel the ground beneath your feet, but you feel safe and secure in the arms of Gale’s magic as the spell works its magic. Seconds later you feel the ground beneath your feet once more and you open your eyes to find Gale standing before you on the Tower balcony. His eyes widen and his breath catches when he sees you in the dress and necklace he’d chosen for you.

“H-Happy Birthday my love, you look…” He struggles and gapes at you as his eyes rake hungrily over your form, “You look ravishing, you a visage of the most divine beauty and I find myself hardly worthy to look upon it.”

He drops to his knees before you, gently grabbing your hand and kissing the back of your palm like a lord swearing fealty to their king. You begin to pull him to standing, hungry for a kiss when you fully take in your surroundings. Once again, your eyes fill with tears as you take it in. A candlelit dinner has been laid out on a grand table. The food is clearly Gale’s handiwork and features all your favorites and a few sweet treats as well. Bottles of wine have been uncorked and await you. Knowing the way he loved to spoil you they were likely some of the finest bottles he had in reserves.

Magical lights, lanterns, and candles float in the air all around you — giving the entire area the most romantic glow against the night. And above it all you see the night sky. Your jaw drops when you fully look at the sky. You throw your arms around Gale who has stood back up with a grin. If the night sky he had conjured for you in the Shadow Cursed Lands was a love song, this one could only be an entire symphony of the deepest and most profound love, crafted just for you.

“I had to make your first birthday at home in Waterdeep special, my love” Gale whispers into your hairline, still holding you tight within his arms and leaving a tender kiss on your forehead.

“I thought you had forgotten,” you say— your voice is almost raspy with emotion.

“Forget you? Never. But please forgive my deception, my dear”

You can only nod in response, tears running down your face as you both sway in the safe embrace of one another. This night is perfect, and you are so happy to be home.

[amorgansgal]

A Quiet Evening

Finally posting part 6 of my fat female tav/reader x Gale fic! I'm still not quite pleased with how it ends, but I think I would spend months rewriting that over and over again and still not be satisfied. So it is what it is. I hope you all enjoy! I think I might leave this as the last one.

Fat Female Tav/Reader x Gale

CW: Sexual content, oral sex, penetrative sex, some reference to suicide

It filled your mind. Every time you saw Gale or had a quiet moment to yourself you would think about the charge Mystra had given him. Every time you all ventured out into the shadow curse lands, trying to get closer to Moonrise towers so you could find out more about Ketheric’s immortality and invulnerability, you felt like you were choking. And it wasn’t on the dark, ever present shadows that made the atmosphere heavy and gloomy. A tight thorny vine had wrapped itself around your heart and lungs, making it difficult to breathe and you wished you could claw it out of your throat. But it felt impossible to even talk to Gale about it. He seemed so determined to act like nothing was wrong, even though you occasionally caught the melancholy behind his eyes at times. You were so wrapped up in your own concerns, both for him and undoing the shadow curse, that it was sometimes days when you would share a kiss. And even then the kiss was distracted and half-hearted. It was no longer the passionate storm that left you clinging to him. You missed him, but you were so fearful about loving him again if it was all for naught, if in just a few days or weeks he would do as his goddess bid and destroyed himself to stop the Absolute.

You kept meaning to talk to him more about it, to beg him to reconsider, to tell him that you selfishly wanted him to stay alive, because he meant the world to you and you didn’t want to face the world without him, that you both had already lost so much time to mistakes and fear that it wouldn’t be fair to lose him entirely when you’d had so little together. That Mystra was content to let him throw his life away, but you cared about him so deeply that you feared the wound he would leave in your life with his departing would never heal.

Now you were trudging back to camp, tired and drained after a long day in a strange, dark hospital and Astarion had been clever enough to convince a mad surgeon to let his creepy, deranged nurses practise on him, rather than on you all. Then when you found a lute within the hospital and realised it belonged to the flaming fist who was lying in the Last Light Inn, still muttering his strange song about Thaniel, you had to return to the inn and been fortunate to revive him from his cursed slumber. You insisted on rest though, even though Halsin wanted to find Thaniel while he was lost in the shadow curse. It would keep for one more day and you were keen to see Gale again.

When you finally reached the campfire though and warmed your cold fingers, you could see that it was not Gale who was waiting by his tent, but his simulacrum. You frowned in puzzlement and approached it, wondering why Gale hadn’t just written a note for everyone to read if he needed to go somewhere. You approached it apprehensively.

“Good evening!” the simulacrum cried, rather exuberantly. “I am here on behalf of Gale of Waterdeep. He wishes to extend to you an invitation for a private conversation in a more suitable locale.”

This was even stranger. Why couldn’t he have just asked you for a private conversation in person? Why was he making his simulacrum do it instead? You almost felt tempted to say no and that whatever Gale had to say he could say it when he got back to camp. But you supposed you were too curious about it to deny him and also you felt a bit bad for being so moody and sullen, but it was harder now to feel cheerful or good about anything.

“Very well, where is he?” 

The Simulacrum beamed and gestured to a path that curved round the riverbank. “Simply follow yonder path and soon you will find him.”

You nodded. “I’ll be there soon, if you can tell him that. I’m just going to wash off and change.”

The simulacrum gave a rather flamboyant bow and you wondered if Gale had intended for his copy to come across that way or if it had caught wind of his more excitable, extravagant side. It made you smile for once, and you quickly washed off in the nearby river. The air was still cold and you wrapped a cloak around you, before following the path along the river and into the forest. It didn’t take you long to see your wizard, sat on the ground, his arms outstretched towards the heavens, little flickers of the weave floating through the air and as you came near him you could see he had conjured up a galaxy of shimmering stars. 

The sky was bluey-green with streaks of purple overhead and for a moment you were mesmerised by the sight, until Gale turned to look at you. He lowered his hands and leaned back, and you headed over to join him. You sat down and were rather surprised to see the dark, intense look in his gaze, it instantly brought you back to your academy days when he had begged to let him have you. You quickly looked away, though you could not deny the rush of desire you felt at his keen look or the hot flush on your cheeks.

After a moment of silence, Gale began to speak, “I love this time of night. There’s an almost reverent silence that accompanies the peak of darkness, when you’d almost believe the dawn would never break… The cradle of eternity, the timelessness of lovers, that most beautiful of fantasies.”

You had lifted your head to look up at the sky again and caught his eye once more. That intent look had returned and he was watching you, as though you were the beautiful stars overhead, the most incredible wonder he could conjure up. You bit you lip hard, struggling to come up with anything to say. He sounded so poetic, so caught up in the magic, that you didn’t want to disturb it. You wished you could rest your head on his shoulder, but you felt strangely nervous.

He smiled softly at you, almost wistful, and continued speaking, “The curse is still present of course - just veiled and at arm’s length for now. Not a trick I can repeat often, but tonight? Tonight is different. This may be my last night alive, I wanted it to be under a canopy of beauty and wonder. I thought this place might bring me peace. I thought it might make the weight of what I must do feel a little lighter… but I am not so sure.”

You sighed heavily and clasped your hands together over your legs. “I still refuse to believe that,” you insisted. “There has to be another way.”

He laughed quietly and reached out to tenderly stroked the curve of your ear, making you shiver at the touch. “I am always grateful for your dogged determination and I know I was so lucky to meet you again, to get to hold your hand and kiss you again. I had thought on it, very often when you left, hells even with Mystra-”

“You don’t have to lie, Gale,” you said quickly. “I won’t be offended that you forgot about me, especially when you were with-”

Gale scowled, though it was still gentle and playful. “I’m more offended that you think I would lie at all. I often thought back on it, wondering if I could have done something different and it was the first time I got in trouble with Mystra… I unthinkingly compared your kisses in my head, forgetting she could easily delve into my mind and read it like a book. She was not best pleased.”

“I don’t think I was a very good kisser then-”

“Well, neither was I, but I liked that about it. It was messy, desperate, passionate,” he glanced at you and smiled wickedly. But the smile gradually drifted away and he stroked your cheek again. “One moment with you could sate me for a lifetime and prise the fear from my heart. I know this is all unreal but I created it for you. You must know that you’re… you’re very special to me. If things were different, if I had not been a complete fool at the academy, or even if I had but I got to meet you again in different circumstances, then I’d have taken time to do things properly. To say it all better. But time is short.”

He sighed heavily, then looked up at you again. “I’m in love with you. I don’t think I’ve ever stopped loving you.”

Your breath caught in your lungs at his confession, at his deeply longing, earnest gaze and for a moment you just sat there dumbfounded, until Gale shifted, his eyes flickered between desire and fear. “Sorry,” you breathed out.

“Sorry?” he questioned. “You’re sorry you don’t love me or you’re sorry I love you?”

“No!” you said with a laugh, a rush of swirling emotions had taken you by surprise, you were torn between joy that he had confessed to loving you, that ever clinging fear he would still do Mystra’s bidding and destroy himself in order to earn some petty form of forgiveness, anger that she had asked it of him, regret that you had lost so much time, and love… deep, overwhelming, deliciously sweet love for him, for this man who had been inspired by you to conjure stars. “I love you. I love you more than I could possibly ever say.”

He smiled. “Well that’s a relief. It would be a shame to keep up my habit of making an ass of myself!” He got to his feet, then offered you a hand and helped you up. Gale drew you close to him. “I want it to be perfect - to bond with you in the way that the gods do… intertwining our spirits in visions of the weave.”

He sounded so excited, yet you hesitated. You loved him, wholeheartedly, and you loved magic and you loved his excitement when he spoke of magic. But strangely you didn’t want visions and illusions and the weave or Mystra or anything else like that, you just wanted the man before you. You wanted the warmth of his hands on you, the feel of his lips on your neck.

“Gale, I just… can we make our first time just with us? No magic, no illusions or visions, just us.”

He looked staggered by the idea, as though you had utterly thrown him. “Are you sure? I could conjure up any sight you could dream of and a few you could not. I could use the weave to make us feel sensations beyond reckoning. I could do more than woo you, I could wow you.”

You raised a brow. “I think I remember your attempt to both woo and wow me.”

“Ah… well it wouldn’t be like that. I like to think I have become more considerate since then.”

You came closer to him and kissed him. He let out a small moan as you did, his arm wrapped around your waist and tugged you even closer till you were pressed against him. His lips trailed down your cheek and neck. Gale lifted his head, looking almost drunk and dizzy with love for you and you instinctively smiled at the half-lidded gaze and his messy hair. “Are you sure?” he asked again. “You just want me? Ordinary Gale?”

“You���re still extraordinary, but yes, that’s all I want.” 

He smiled at you, his thumb still rubbing over the back of your hand and he almost looked apprehensive, as though you might run off all over again. You looked down at the rough blanket Gale had brought with him to sit on. And while you were all for sticking to mortal pleasures, you figured you could both do with at least some comfort and you would allow yourself one bit of magic. You gestured with your hand and conjured a bed. It looked rather strange in the forest, with plush pillows and blue-grey covers, but Gale’s eyes glimmered with excitement. 

“A very good idea,” he said. 

You suddenly felt rather bashful about him seeing you. He’d seen your most intimate parts, but you had kept your top on. Perhaps if you could just undress as quickly as possible and climb into bed, he wouldn’t see all of you. You turned away and began to work on your corset.

“Uh… what are you doing?” he asked.

“Undressing.”

“Don’t I get that pleasure?” he wrapped an arm around your waist, halting your efforts and gently pressed kisses against your neck. “We might only have a few more nights together, but I want to take all the time in the world with you. I want to unwrap you, treasure you, make you feel like the goddess you are.”

You let out a small snort of contempt. “I’m no goddess.”

“Yes, you are,” his hands cleverly worked at the laces of the corset and finally freed you from the confines. “I would know.” He cupped your breasts through the linen shirt you wore and he let out a small groan, teasing your nipples into hard little buds and making you bite your lip hard to stay quiet as a little spike of desire rushed through you. He turned you to face him, cupping your face and kissing you, then tugged off your shirt. You instinctively put your arms over your chest. Gale frowned and tutted, then pulled your arms away.

“You’re too beautiful to hide away,” he murmured as he lowered his head again to kiss your cheek and necks, his teeth nipping at your earlobe and making you gasp. You clenched a fistful of his hair in your hand and couldn’t help leaning back so he would keep kissing you. He wrapped an arm around your waist, and you wondered if he’d have the strength to hold you up if you were getting so weak at the knees.

“Gods, I’ve thought about this for years,” he said. He let go of you, suddenly frantic and desperate, he made quick work of your breeches, then pulled off his own shirt as though he couldn’t bear the thought of waiting for a single moment. You climbed onto the bed and turned to face him, you thought about wriggling under the covers, but he was already crawling over you. You felt rather shy about touching him, he was so handsome. All lean muscle and firm chest and a little trail of hair that ran down to his groin. You quickly brought your eyes back to his face, your cheeks warm even though you hadn’t done anything wrong. Gods, you were acting like you were still your 20-something virgin self! You’d seen a cock before and felt Gale’s hardness pressed against you many times, but actually seeing it- you hadn’t expected it to be quite so long. 

“It’s just as well you wear a robe,” you said and could’ve cursed yourself for coming out with something so fantastically stupidly, that you wanted to immediately dive under the covers and hide away forever!

Gale stopped, a wicked smile on his lips, his body hovering over yours so you certainly couldn’t hide even if you wanted to! “Excuse me… are you saying I’m well endowed?”

You covered your face with your hands. “Please, don’t tease me… it’s been a long day and I wasn’t thinking.”

He tugged your hands away from your face and ran his hands down your body. A battle of desire waged war with the age old feeling of shame and discomfort at your soft, fat belly and the rolls around your waist. You still struggled with the idea that he might find you in any way desirable. 

“For a woman who is so very smart and intelligent,” he said, pressing kisses down your body, until he reached your thighs, “Some of my favourite moments are when you’re not thinking and just say whatever’s in your head.”

“Don’t tell anyone.”

“Admittedly, part of me does want to crow it from the rooftops, but I shall not tell a soul that my love thinks I am impressively girthed!” He gave your thighs two loving kisses. “I have dreamt of your thighs, how tight you had them wrapped around my head, the sweet noises you made.”

He slipped his arms underneath your knees and opened you up to him. His eyes darkened on seeing your slit and you clenched your hand tightly to stop yourself from covering it up. “Let us see if you still make those same noises or if they have changed.”

All had been forgotten, you were at sea, adrift and awashed in pleasure, no longer caring about your size or if Gale found you desirable or if he still longed for Mystra. His tongue was magic, it had to be, the way he could so easily draw you to the peak and keep you there, tantalisingly, achingly close, and you were a mess, begging and pleading and gasping for pleasure. You occasionally caught glimpses of his smug smile, but he would swiftly return to his work. You could feel him rutting against the bed and heard his moans, and the thought of him being so utterly turned on by your own pleasure, by the taste of you, by the warmth and weight of your thighs made you utterly desperate to cum.

“Gale please!” you cried. “Please let me cum, please, I’ll do anything!”

He raised his head, his hair sticking to his forehead, his mouth and beard drenched with your slick, a brilliant smile on his lips. “Anything?”

“Gale!” you howled.

“I think you’ve earned it, you can cum, my love.” He buried himself back between your thighs and fiercely sucked and licked on your clit, slipping his fingers inside your aching, needy cunt that clenched around the digits tightly as you unravelled and the waves of unrelenting pleasure made you moan loudly, uncaringly at the stars overhead. 

You caught your breath back and Gale slipped up your body, his cock twitched against your dripping slit. He kissed you, that desperate, heady kiss of him wanting you to taste yourself on his tongue. 

“You’re still utterly delicious,” he murmured, he was instinctively rolling his hips, his cock becoming slick with your desire and you could feel how easy it would be for him to slip inside you. Though you saw a flicker of concern in his eyes and he stilled, gripping the cover tightly in one hand. You gently cupped his face, stroking his cheek. “We can stop, if you want,” he said.

“What?” you asked, still a little delirious from the wonderful orgasm he had just wrought from you.

“We can stop, if you’re not comfortable or would rather not… I remember last time, I remember…”

“Gale,” you soothed, kissing him. “Forget what happened in the past. We’re both here, we both want this, I’m not running away again.”

He smiled, relief flooding his face. “Good,” he said, and his cock easily slipped inside you, making you gasp at the sensation. Gale whined and buried his face against your neck. “Fuck, you feel good.” He took a shuddery breath and raised his head. “I won’t lie, it’s been years and…” he couldn’t even finish his sentence, he groaned again and sharply inhaled. “I haven’t lain with anyone or touched myself… because of the orb… so I can’t promise I’ll last long, especially because you feel so, so good. And I’m sorry if-”

You wrapped a hand around the back of his neck and pulled him down into another kiss. “Gale, just have me, you’ve already given me pleasure and I just want you. This doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to be you.”

Gale smiled, his hands stroking down to your thighs and gripped them. “I will try to make this perfect, all the same.” He thrust in slow and deep and let out another tight moan. “Gods above you feel perfect.” He lowered his head to your breast, lathering the breast with kisses and then enveloping the nipple with his warm, wet mouth, sucking on it till the tight feeling in your belly was too much to bear and you wriggled against him, though he would not let you go. 

He clung onto you, as though you might melt away into the bed, but soon the self control he had slipped and he pressed your legs wider, thrusting into you furiously, his mouth everywhere, your breasts, your neck, your jaw, your lips. You breathed him in, he smelled like home, like Waterdeep, bergamot and sage and roses and books and the seasalt air. You gasped as his hips smacked loudly into yours and he frantically kissed you, as though he would swallow the sound. He pressed his forehead against yours and looked into your eyes.

“I’m close.”

You kissed him, tasting his mouth and teasingly nipping at his lower lip. “Come inside me.”

He let out a tight moan and buried his face against your neck, you groaned as he bit down hard on the flesh and felt him cum deep inside you, his hips still grinding, the last few weak thrusts, until he stilled and breathed hard. 

Eventually, he slowly raised his head, his expression so full of adoration and happiness that you smiled in turn. Gale kissed you and carefully moved off you. You rolled onto your side to look at him and he smiled, his fingers trailed down your face to your shoulder, he entwined his fingers with yours.

“Thank you,” Gale said. 

You laughed a little at that and he kissed you again. “I wish I could stay awake with you forever,” you murmured, feeling sated and absurdly happy. Gale curled up next to you, his arms wrapped tightly around your waist, gently nuzzling kisses against your shoulder and neck. 

“We need to sleep, it’s been a long day, doubtless it will be a longer one tomorrow,” he said.

Despite how much you wanted to stay awake, a deep, sweet, dreamless sleep called to you and for the first time in weeks you felt utterly peaceful and content, safe in Gale’s arms.

[cupcakeslushie]

Hello,

HOLLY SH*T (about the last update)

When Leo gets his memories back does he also remember those (f*cking)400 days?

How would Leo have grown up to be like, if his memories weren't taken from him? (would he have become kind of like Donnie?)

will he ever open up to someone about this?

Does he have some kind of triggers left from the experience, even though his memories wee taken from it?

I adore your work and Have a great week 😁

1. 🤗

2. So, Leo’s issues are like a leak in a dam constantly trying to be held back. Kitsune’s magic can suppress or manipulate his memories, but a lot still manage to get through. Hence the need for the repeated sessions, and then later the Empyrean, to act as a booster to her magic—as Leo has built up a tolerance over the years, making it less and less effective. Leo does remember some things. Unfortunately, every time he starts to ask questions, he’s been so conditioned to seek out Kitsune to ‘fix’ his mind and suppress his emotions. But some of his memories were impossible to erase completely. They followed him around like little shadows, haunting him, and his choices. Leo is not stupid. He more discerning than he let’s on, and like Saki said, fear can be a powerful motivator. By the time Leo’s managed to claw his way up to a better position, he’s been fed so many lies that he doesn’t even trust his own reasoning. It’s just easier, and less painful to follow orders, no matter what his brain is constantly trying to tell him.

3. Tbh Leo probably wouldn’t have been very different from how he is. Shredder is a lot more…calculating in his abuse of Leo, than Draxum was for Donnie. Draxum was so unpredictable and volatile in his abuse. Everything that Donnie tried to do better, never seemed to help lessen his torture. It was just pain for the sake of pain. Shredder may be a monster, but his abuse had a goal—to make a warrior he could puppet into killing Yoshi. Saki didn’t just provide constant trauma, he gave positive reinforcement when Leo did something right, and used careful manipulation to bend Leo over to his side. All Kitsune’s spell did was make it easier and faster. If Shredder hadn’t had magic at his disposal, then it would’ve just taken more time and effort to break Leo and remold him, or Shredder might’ve just cut his losses and killed him.

4. Leo doesn’t want to burden his brothers with things that have already passed, and that feeling only gets stronger after he’s been saved from the Dark Armor. He’s constantly insisting that he doesn’t feel one way or the other from those days. It happened, but he says he feels so disconnected from it all. Leo’s earlier return to his family had already been filled with so much fighting, thanks to his withdrawals when he was first brought home causing him to act so erratic. Leo thinks as long as he’s not shouting at his brothers, or trying to attack Splinter, that he’s dealing with everything pretty well. Obviously that’s bullshit. But he’s gonna do a lot of healing during his trip with Usagi.

5. Leo’s worst triggers are when his family is in danger. Those times are when he falls back into either total bloodlust, or a more ruthless mentality, in order to protect them. Leo getting recaptured and thrown back into a cell will be like a wave of memories and trauma hitting him at full force. Like I’ve mention in point 1. He never totally forgot certain things, but the months spent free of Kitsune’s influence makes his second capture so much worse. He’ll be feeling all that fear and panic unfiltered, for the first time in years, and he’ll be able to recall the true horror of it—not the watered down, warped simulacrum Shredder wanted him to remember. Which loops back to point 4 about Leo’s lack of admitting his feelings being a coping mechanism. Once he gets rescued, unconsciously, he’s trying to mimic the dampening effect of Kitsune’s spell, by insisting through sheer force of will, that everything is fine. He can only convince himself that he’s unaffected by everything he’s experienced for so long.

6. Thank you!!! I hope you have an amazing week as well!

I’m sorry if this is kinda rambling, all these ideas be more clearly implemented in the comic, (at least I hope lol).

I also can’t remember how long ago I’ve even talked about Leo’s memory problems in one of these replies. I might be totally backtracking cause I think I’ve said before his memory was wiped completely, but I’ve been thinking it would give more complexity to his choices, if it was revealed his memory was actually more intact than Mikey’s this whole time. Mikey brain just needed a little boost from Raph, because his issue came more from him being so young that things faded over time. With Leo, it’s like a battle where his brain is trying to latch on to what it can to fight the effects of Kitsune’s spell. So his memory may be full of holes and beaten with a stick over and over, but it’s still knocking around in Leo’s head.

[sorceresssundries]

Writing prompt - Gale surprises Tav with a bunch of red roses and a candlelit dinner.

The Rose of Reithwin

Pairing: Gale x gn Tav - SFW

Word Count: 2k

You must have sensed i'm struck in a rut! Here you go, my lovely anon. I got a bit carried away. I hope you enjoy <3

Tav ached all the way down to their bones. The lack of sunlight, breeze, and even the stagnation of time itself was a burden which they could feel cloying in their veins. Tav dreamed of flowers and sunlight, of food that wasn’t dried out and looted from long-rotted barrels or the backpacks of fallen soldiers. Tav ached for comfort in a land which still throbbed with ongoing pain.

After a long needed wash in whatever water they could find amongst the shadows, Tav headed back to camp, hoping to find some solace in Gale’s warm words and strong arms. It had been a couple of nights since they had spent their first, proper night together. Just the memory of it was enough to spark a small flame of comfort, but Tav needed to be in his company for it to fan into a heat warm enough to melt away the icy shards of the shadow curse. 

To Tav’s surprise, Karlach was hovering outside Gale’s tent,  excitement evident in the sparks and flickers glowing from her engine. She couldn’t stay still, practically vibrating with energy. She was dressed... unusually.

“You’re wearing a bow tie?” 

“I know!” Karlach’s ability to light up with even the slightest taste of joy was enough to keep even the darkest shadows at bay. “I found it on a corpse!!” She added with unbound enthusiasm.

“Oh, well... well done?”

“Thanks! Oh, wait a minute.” She rummaged around in her pocket and pulled out a piece of paper covered in elegant writing, along with a single, slightly flattened, rose. “Sorry, it looked better before I sat on it.”

Tav took the paper, perplexed. “This... is a menu.” They read over the intricate, swirling script in total confusion.

“Yeah! Gale asked if I would help him, and well... he said I may have gone a bit too far with everything, but I thought I could help! He, um, said the Simulacrum freaked you out a bit last time.” She mimicked the jaunty pose that Gale’s mirror image had performed a few nights ago, and Tav tried their best not to laugh at the impression. “And he was busy concentrating on other magicky, wizard stuff, so I told him to leave it with me.”

“So... here I am, my liege.” She bowed dramatically. “Mr. Dekarios awaits the pleasure of your incom... incom... incompra...” She suddenly unfurled another, smaller note from her top pocket and scanned over it, mouthing the words soundlessly. “Fuck it, his handwriting is awful. Gale is waiting for you at the Waning Moon.”

The abandoned pub was not far from where they had set up camp, and Karlach pointed to a trail of floating lanterns illuminating a path for Tav to follow. They glowed with gentle magic, and Tav grinned to themselves, amused by the wizard's flair for the dramatic. Gale was always one to create a sense of wonder, and it seemed like whatever he had planned for the evening would be no exception.

When Tav reached the building and pushed open the doors, they could not believe the view. 

In the centre of the room stood Gale, his hands aglow with arcane energy as he conducted a symphony of magic. With a wave of his hand, ribbons of light twisted and twirled, weaving themselves into elaborate decorations. Flowers bloomed from thin air, their petals unfolding in bursts of colour to settle upon various neglect-scarred surfaces.

“You’re here!” Gale said, his voice filled with warmth and excitement. “I’m almost finished.”

Tav watched in awe as Gale orchestrated the magic around them, bringing the abandoned building to life with his spellcraft. Tables appeared, draped in luxurious fabrics and adorned with silver candelabras that flickered with ethereal flames. Chairs formed from wisps of mist solidified under their touch, their cushions embroidered with intricate patterns that seemed to shift and shimmer. The cracked wooden floorboards were mended, and gleamed under the soft glow of floating candles. The grimy, stained walls had brightened, and were now streaked with vines of ivy that bloomed with small, colourful flowers.

In the centre, a table for two stood, set with fine china, crystal goblets, and a centrepiece of roses that flitted between various shades of rich red in the candlelight. The once dingy bar was now a haven in a hellscape.

“You… you did all this? For me?”

Gale made his way over to hold Tav’s hand, and the contact immediately relieved a tight coil within their chest. “I meant what I said. If we had more time… well...” He gestured to the scene around him. “I would do it all better.”

Music spilled from an unknown source, soft and comforting. It had been so long since Tav had heard music, since the air around them had been filled with anything other than death and shadow. The song was familiar, warm...

Gale seemed to pick up on their thoughts. “You may not remember, but... it's a song Alfira played at the party with the Tieflings.” He blushed slightly, the pink in his cheeks glowing in the soft candlelight.  “It was playing just after our conversation, after I told you to go enjoy your evening.”

Tav let a smirk play at their lips, recalling their attempt at propositioning the wizard. The heady mixture of joy and wine had urged them toward Gale, to flirt with the man with the disarming smile, who had very gallantly turned them down. 

“So… you did want me that evening?”

“Oh, I wanted you.” All hint of self-consciousness dropped from his expression, leaving only raw sincerity. “This song was playing when I realised I was falling in love with you.”

Tav’s heart fluttered. The music made the air feel lighter. For a moment, they were not soldiers in a battle-scarred town but two lovers in the bliss-filled infancy of a new relationship. Where possibilities crackled with lively potential. Where each touch and loving word was a promise heavy with pure, unfiltered intention.

“I remember that night,” Tav said softly. “I remember wishing for more moments we could just be us for a little while.”

Gale’s eyes were a mixture of hope and regret. “Maybe we can still have those moments. Maybe we can find a way.”

Tav squeezed his hand. “Maybe you already have.” “I hope so.” He kissed Tav’s poor, battle-worn fingers. “I am torn between wishing you had never had to endure any of this horror, to being extraordinarily grateful to have met you.” He was suddenly aching with sadness. “It is a heartbreaking realisation, to know the person you love is in your life due to a tragedy you wish had never befallen them.” He cupped the face of his love, and stroked his thumb along fresh scars and the fading stain of bruises which lurked just under their skin. “No-one should ever have to learn how brave they can be.”

He leant forward then, and brushed his lips against theirs. Chaste and gentlemanlike, the kind of kiss one would expect from a gallant partner on a first date, and Tav couldn’t help but think of the heavy, moaned kisses which Gale had lain across every inch of their body just a few nights prior. He really was doing everything backwards. 

Tav decided they would play along with the honourable behaviour, for now, and instead turned their attention to the beautiful display of roses. 

“A very traditional choice, Mr.Dekarios.” 

“‘Rose is a term of endearment in Waterdeep. To refer to one’s beloved.” His eyes were soft and shimmered in the light. “I thought they would be fitting.”

Tav picked up one of the roses and admired the velvet of its petals, the rich, wine-like scent, and the sharp bite of thorns.  “I hope you do not think the thorns are due to any slip in my arcane proficiency. I know it’s just illusionary, but.. I wanted to make the whole thing as.. human as possible. The old ways, if you will. Thorns and all.” 

“Well, whatever you’ve done - the food smells incredible.” The savoury scent of roasting meat mingled with the earthy, buttery smell of cooked vegetables and fresh herbs enveloped Tav in much-needed comfort. 

“That is no illusion, my rose.” He pulled out one of the chairs, and motioned for Tav to sit and with a click of his fingers two mage hands appeared with plates of fresh, steaming food. “That is the dedicated endeavour of a man with exceptional culinary skill and limited resources.”

“How on earth did you find all this?!” 

“Well, I may have used some of my charm and resorted to a bit of bribery.”

“You’re rubbish at bribery!

“Yes, okay, that’s true. But Astarion isn’t, and for a small fee, he was able to get me what I needed.” Gale raised his hands at Tav’s indignant expression. “I did not ask too many questions, and he gave no answers—so, for all intents and purposes, this food has been legitimately acquired and therefore should be enjoyed guilt-free.” He smiled his lazy, heart-melting smile and tucked into the meal.

The food was delicious, the wine full and rich, the company unrivalled. 

Tav thought how full of life this little pub in Reithwin must have been all those years ago. How locals would come through the doors after a day's hard graft. How mason’s would grip pint glasses with dusty hands and let the cold beer soothe their calloused fingers.

This place must have been filled with wine-fuelled singing, drinking games and endless, mindless, repetitive stories of the residents of Reithwin. A place for midday companionship, and late night solitude. This little heart of Reithwin town would have beat with stories and laughter of those lost to shadow.

And for a little while, in the long-dead town of Reithwin, life returned. The glow that enveloped Gale and Tav outshone that of even the moon’s blessing. There was light enough here to cast out curses, just for a little while. Just for two lovers in that hopeful, crack of a dawning relationship, where the impossible danced and shone, and took no notice of lurking shadows. 

As they ate and laughed and shared stories of times before tadpoles and curses and nautiloids, Tav took in the unrivalled beauty of the setting Gale had conjured with awe.

“I’ve never seen illusionary magic like this.” Tav ran their finger through one of the flames from a candle, and felt the heat bite their skin.

“That's because this is no ordinary illusion.” He reached over to hold Tav’s hand across the table, stroking them gently with his thumb.

“This is a promise of things to come. This is an illusion that I intend to make into reality, and the magic is all the stronger for it.”

There were no words, conjurations, or illusions powerful enough for Gale to express his gratitude, or his genuine intention. He knew that promises and declarations would not be enough, that these conjured roses were just saplings in the entire sun-filled garden he wanted to grow for Tav. It would take time, it would take nerve and messy, mortal dedication. But he would do it. 

He would plant seeds, feed them with water pulled from the deepest well . He would sweat and toil under the relentless summer sun, remaining vigilant through the bleak winters. With human hands, he would grow flowers, watching patiently as the slow spell of time brought life and beauty from nothing. He would wait, earning each soft-petaled rose, cherishing the joy they would bring, ribbon-tied and wine-scented, to his brave love. He would place them in crystal vases, where light would dance through and spill colour throughout their home.

And, when the inevitable happened, when the petals curled and dipped and eventually fell like feathers. It will have been worth it. All the toil and grief and mortal determination of it all will have been worth it, just to remind his love of the promise made in that hopeful night in Reithwin. 

[s3when]

Comission done for @videovamp0808! Art cover for the wattpad fic "The Shadow of the Simulacrum" coming in August. Both english and french version!

In this reimagined tale of "My Babysitter's a Vampire,' delve into the passionate and tumultuous romance between Sarah and Jesse before the life-altering transformation. Their relationship unfolds amidst a blend of supernatural intrigue and emotional intensity. Drawn to Jesse's enigmatic charm and protective nature, Sarah finds herself enmeshed in a romance that is both exhilarating and perilous. As their bond deepens, Jesse's inner conflict intensifies, torn between his ambitions to rule Whitechapel and his desire for Sarah to embrace his vampiric existence. Uncover the dark and tragic past of Jesse "Horace" Black alongside their stormy romance. Journey back to the 1800s, where Horace, the son of a relentless reverend, is burdened by cruelty and suffocating familial expectations. Beneath his powerful exterior lie painful secrets and a desperate struggle to defy a grim fate. This tortured past illuminates the depth of his obsession and the heavy cost of his choices, casting a dark shadow over his love for Sarah.

[corpsentry]

at the asian american studies sponsored movie screening i run out of my seat to press a button for the presenter and you look away, not in shame, but in anger

go make your own movie.

One where you’re the star

and everything’s my fault

the way you want it to be. I know, it’s easy

to let someone else hold this grief

and sit in the bathtub,

all dressed up to go to the party.

Maybe in this movie it’s your party

and I the party crasher,

holding cymbals and a baseball bat, et cetera.

But we don’t stop getting older when we’re angry

and you’re only twenty,

can’t listen to lullabies at night,

can’t sleep without a blanket

over your head like you’re scared

of your own shadow. God, go

write your own movie.

You could do it,

you’re still

pretty. Angry? Me too.

The bathtub’s overflowing,

the bathroom’s flooding

with whatever you couldn’t say

to the poet with their palms glued shut

in a cheap simulacrum of prayer.

Didn’t you say you were tired? Angry? Me too.

Upset? Unhappy? Me too. Hungry? Lonely? Me too. Me too.

Standing barefoot in the grass

I remembered the month of bad weather.

How I parted the fog with broken hands each night,

looking for your voice.

Oh, I will not forgive you.

Not like this.

With your fingers splayed

against the brute February sky,

lips cracked open like windows,

waiting, like you always are, for me to say the first word.

[occlusivavelare]

So basically, Feyd-Rautha/Paul is literally King and Knight, Master and Hound, Self and Shadow-self, Cousin and Cousin, Self VS simulacrum and "What's your name, now?" "I have none, except the one you shall give me". I'm mmmhhh -

[zxshadowxz9]

Do you think the servants who specifically went to Arcade from Mobile ever look at the Arcade!Guda, another Child holding the weight of the world, a quieter, younger, still innocent child, and pray that history won’t repeat itself.

Watching the same story play out before their eyes, a poor simulacrum of that fight to save the world, a mockery of what was achieved. But still dangerous, too dangerous, and there’s still a child who needs a sword, so they stay and they fight.

Another Child thrown against the end of the world, not the same child, from both the surface appearance to how they hold themselves, the two are incomparable.

And yet, that same glimmer of adoration is there. there is another child who still sees them as Heroes, even as they stand, mere shadows of history covered in violence and death.

(How blessed are they, to be treated as such again. How cruel are they, to enjoy this cursed play when they know it’s end.)

Once more, finding themselves at that fabricated Temple of Time, facing another Beast threatening to devour their history, the King of Demon Gods Mages Pride worn as a second skin, scales and horns sticking through the tears and rips, the cackle of the gluttonous Dragon bellowing from his maw for all to hear.

Watching silently as the Sacred sword’s golden light burns away the Beast (not dead, still there, watching from the dark, but this time, theirs to hunt, This Chaldea wouldn’t get their chance.) A victory to celebrate, by a child whose hands are clean of bruises and cuts.

(Not how it happened, this isn’t how Their journey ended.)

And so they pray and they scream, that this time. Just this once. That the child will get to go home.

Every “minor” Rayshift a new source of frustration, a delay from the prayed for departure, Chaldeas floating above as if to mock them, the stars above staring down with malice.

And so they wait with baited breath, so very sure the burning is right around the corner, for the land to be dyed in white and for hell to open once again. For another child to need a sword.

(What relief must there be when that child finally departs, a smile on their face. What Anger must there be, that there is another who cannot.)

[scaryman-fancam]

The untapped potential that is the ship Revhound is fucking crazy guys, please hear me out

Revhound (Revenant x Bloodhound) Headcanons/Drabble!!

warnings: canon typical violence, blood, suggestive themes

- Let’s say all prior Revenant headcanons I’ve listed are correct in this scenario. Like, Revenant does have an extremely accurate sense of smell, can smell fear, blood, etc., right?

- Bloodhound’s whole thing is being a tracker. Revenant, the perfect assassin. Putting them against each other creates an interesting game of hunter vs. hunter.

- I imagine that they would definitely hold some sort of respect for one another. They’re both aware of each other’s reputation, and both believe the other is a bit of wasted potential. Bloodhound thinks Revenant could be just as perfect a tracker as them, if not even better, while Revenant believes Bloodhound could do with a little more aggression and durability.

- With Revenant’s Forged Shadows, he can afford to push hard on a target once he’s got them where he wants them. Bloodhound doesn’t have this sort of ability, but they could certainly benefit with some sort of training, perhaps? Withstand defensive attacks a little better and push harder, and if only Revenant had some way to practice putting his heightened senses to use…

- They can help each other train, maybe. Run away to a heavily forested area with crazy terrain, start off miles from each other. Bloodhound shows Revenant how to utilize his keen sense of smell to track, while Revenant forces Bloodhound to push themselves further every time.

- It’s truly vicious. Primal even. At first, Bloodhound does well to evade Revenant, to lure him into a space where they have the upper hand. After a weekend, Revenant has already found his groove in these new skills. Tracking down Bloodhound is the easy part. The chase, the fight, is where things get interesting.

- Revenant is unrelenting. Doesn’t need air or water or rest for weary muscles. Bloodhound is brought to their very limit and forced to take the leap, hoping to catch on something and learn to carry on even when their body aches. Learn to know when it’s time to turn and fight.

- They goad each other into becoming the (best? Worst? Most terrifying?) versions of themselves. Weekend after weekend when they’re not scheduled to play in the games, they’ve run off to train. It becomes more than routine. It’s instinct. The thrill of the hunt, the blood, the dirt and the metal shavings left on thorns and discarded axes, the familiarity of one another, the bond of finding one another, and fighting until the other gives out, only to give mercy in the last second. They can’t kill one another, no, then the fun will end.

- They’re constantly adapting to one another. Bloodhound leaving a trail of brittle leaves and branches, only for Revenant to learn to stalk quieter over them. Revenant climbing into trees above to try and get the drop of Bloodhound, only for them to begin spotting the crude marks of metal claws on the sides of trees from far away.

- Revenant feels alive. Bloodhound explores a brutal side of themselves, becoming more aggressive just to be able to match the simulacrum. They need these getaways like they need blood in their veins or coolant in his system. The games are too impersonal, too safe for live broadcasts for thousands of fans watching. It’s private when they’re away, it’s sacred, it becomes a second home, or rather a true home in comparison to the cots back at headquarters, or the living spaces provided by the games.

- It could become something more. Defeat and victory after a bloody battle with promised mercy, boundaries that are never crossed for the sake of doing this dance again and again. Admitting defeat at each other’s hands becomes allowing victory in the arms of one another. It’s an odd form of trust, allowing each other the privilege of beating them down until they’re within the last stretches of consciousness.

- Suddenly recovery isn’t spent alone, the trek back to headquarters and silence in their rooms. It’s staying a little longer in the privacy of abandoned buildings and crowded forests, tending to the wounds inflicted upon each other. Revenant’s hands coated in blood are the same hands that dress Bloodhound’s bloodied limbs; Bloodhound’s finger tips grazing the metal of Revenant’s form, searching for the last few bullets and thorns.

- Bloodhound learns the ins and outs of this simulacrum, having partially disassembled him to remove a splintering branch. Learns that he can feel, not just pain, but also tenderness. They learn that the feather light touches and gentle pressure earn sounds akin to purring, those burning yellow optics flickering and dimming. Revenant doesn’t sleep, but he can remember the comfort of soft sheets and a warm bed, a safe place to dream when he finally accept the embrace of his rival.

- Revenant learns that same tenderness. Hands crafted to be efficient blades can sooth the cuts they dealt. The cool, blunt, metal finger pads learn the pressure that eases bruises. His prize for winning today is the honor of cradling Bloodhound rather than the reversal. He doesn’t know when it became a prize, but victory was no longer as simple as the rush of pride when Bloodhound landed in a bloodied, exhausted heap. Victory was the sweet reward of seeing the other so vulnerable and trusting. Trust the other not to finish them off in a secluded place. Trusting the not to leave them to fend for themselves. They knew the weakest points of each other, how to take apart and put back together one another.

- Revenant learns what’s under that mask- the goggles too. Bloodhound finds every latch and groove in the metal of Revenant’s form. They know each other’s skin better than their own. It’s only a matter of time before they’ve memorized one another inside and out. The hunt, the chase, the battle, the recovery; they become a courting ritual. Proving that they’re worthy of one another, with violence and tenderness, with warm blood and cold metal.

[nonbinaryurianger]

FFXIVWrite 2024 Day 3: Tempest

What would Azem think if they saw this place, this shell of the city they called home?

Perhaps they would smile. Surely no Ancient soul could resist the joy of seeing their perfect city rebuilt—their home in front of them once more! Surely their heart would swell at the sight of their friends and neighbors and colleagues, even if they were mere shadows.

Perhaps they would feel daunted, for the bodies of man on this star are so small, even if they were to number among the Unsundered. They might feel like a child, coming up to their colleagues’ knees, with the buildings towering over them at thrice the height they would remember. How pitiful they would be on this sundered world.

Perhaps they would rage. If they believed the sundered to be people and the shattered reflections to be stars in truth, then, How dare Hades? they would think. How could he trade so many for something long gone? How could he construct an homage to what was, while forsaking what is?

Perhaps they would pity him. Poor Hades, tempered by the god they warned the Convocation not to summon, bound to His will, unable to escape a past long gone. Poor Hades, unable to forget, unable to let go, unable to move on. Poor Hades, how much he has lost.

Of course, he will never know, for as long as this reflection—any reflection remains, his dear friend will remain broken, and if—when, by Zodiark, when!—his friend is finally whole, this simulacrum deep within the Tempest shall be long gone.