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chrancecriber · 1 year ago

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Chilltrax (June 16, 2023)

23:59 Sebastian Davidson - Nomads 23:55 Beacon - Until Next Time 23:49 Max Cooper - A Model Of Reality (Tor Remix) 23:49 C H I L L T R A X - Something I Should Tell You 23:46 Kx5 & Sofi Tukker - Sacrifice (St Mix) 23:40 Cubicolor - Wake Me Up 23:37 Aftruu - Falling Asleep 23:33 Sound Quelle Feat. Daniel Robinson - Tempest 23:28 Tosca - Swimswimswim 23:28 C H I L L T R A X - Chill Out Chilltrax 23:25 Rocket Empire - Lima 23:22 Elderbrook & Tourist - Howl (Chill Mix) 23:18 Kidnap - Start Again (Kidnap Piano Mix) 23:15 Attom - Where Are We Going 23:15 C H I L L T R A X - Toh Dzihan 23:11 Above & Beyond & Marty Longstaff - Gratitude (Aname Pm Mix) 23:08 Attlas & Jodie Knight - Used To The Silence 23:04 Tomb - Unbound 23:00 Henry Green - Shift (Edapollo Remix) 22:54 Eli & Fur - Better In The Dark 22:50 Nils Hoffmann Feat. Malou - About You 22:47 Two Lanes & Panama - Rolling Back 22:43 Flexible Fire - Amatista 22:38 Tycho Feat. Saint Sinner - Japan (Chilltrax Mix) 22:38 C H I L L T R A X - Glitchy Toh 22:35 Jan Blomqvist - Carry On (Earthlife Remix) 22:31 Fkj Feat. Little Dragon - Can't Stop 22:27 Shingo Nakamura - Falling Off 22:22 Alison Goldfrapp - The Beat Divine 22:18 Floa & Phonic Youth - Falling Away 22:18 C H I L L T R A X - The Chillout Channel Redux 22:15 Dreem - Miles Away 22:10 Royksopp - Beautiful Day Without You 22:06 Mozez & Tim Angrave - Head Full Of Dreams 22:02 Giants' Nest - Heart Void 21:59 Satin Jackets Feat. Ivy Falls - Different Directions 21:58 C H I L L T R A X - Toh Freesound 21:54 Marsh Feat. Leo Wood - Over And Over 21:49 Alex V - Cristal Shore 21:45 Kelela - Enough For Love 21:41 Alampa - Seesaw Season 21:36 Bronze Whale - Say It (Baile Remix) 21:36 C H I L L T R A X - Fresh And Fascinating 21:33 Afterlife - All I Wanted 21:28 Rodriguez Jr. Feat. Liset Alea - What Is Real (Deep In The Playa Mix) 21:23 Il:lo - Cynnes 21:18 Steven Weston Feat. Lapsley - Like I Used To 21:14 Kidnap & Pinkpirate - Things Change 21:14 C H I L L T R A X - Escape The Noise 21:09 Maya Jane Coles Feat .chelou - Never Asked For Much 21:04 Bonobo Feat. Jordan Rakei - Shadows 20:59 Cahelo - Bananaquit (Mass Digital Extended Remix) 20:56 Leisure Feat. Muroki - Summer Season 20:52 Everything But The Girl - Caution To The Wind 20:46 Valante - Eio 20:42 False Intentions - Good Liar 20:38 Mahalo - Nothing Matters (Lipless Remix) 20:34 Morcheeba - The Moon (Kutiman Remix - Version B) 20:30 Two Lanes - Movement 20:24 Nolan Feat. Amber Jolene - Go Slow 20:24 C H I L L T R A X - R.i.p. John Hurt 20:20 Monolink - Turning Away (Parra For Cuva Remix) 20:16 Baynk Feat. Drama - 1 Chance 20:11 Billion Watchers - Rainman 20:07 A.m.r - Sailor's Cry 20:07 C H I L L T R A X - Toh Cymbal Roll Bass 20:03 Phoenix & Dj Falcon - Winter Solstice (Braxe Falcon Remix) 20:00 Lar - Collide (Jody Wisternoff & James Grant Remix) 19:55 Royksopp - Me&youphoria 19:50 Nicholas Gunn Feat. Chris Howard - Thought Of You 19:46 Chris Malinchak - Control 19:46 C H I L L T R A X - Jimpster 1 19:41 Booka Shade & Satin Jackets - Fusion Royale 19:38 Feiertag Feat. Tessa Rose Jackson - Ambivalence 19:35 Melosense - Nous 19:31 Blonde Maze - Daydream (Otherwise Fine Remix) 19:26 London Grammar - Sights (Tourist Version) 19:26 C H I L L T R A X - World Comes To Chilltrax.com 19:22 Jones Meadow - Fences 19:18 Xixi Feat. Kwesi - Close To U 19:14 Faodail & Plya - Strangers Gone Missing 19:11 Sum Wave - It Feels Like Summer 19:11 C H I L L T R A X - Toh Moon Boots 19:07 Nils Hoffmann Feat. Gordi - No One Else 19:03 Chicane & The Mannequin - Summer In E Major 18:59 Il:lo - Ink 18:55 Kc Lights Feat. Leo Stannard - Cold Light (6am Remix) 18:49 Trilucid - Cheyenne (Extended Sunset Mix) 18:44 Christine And The Queens - Tilted (Paradis Remix) 18:40 Jean Vayat & Evelynka - My Soul 18:35 Zaven - Voliere Amplitude 18:31 Zero 7 Feat. Danny Pratt - 400 Blows 18:31 C H I L L T R A X - Slurry Toh 18:27 Morgin Madison & Ryan Lucian - From The Start (Mm Chill Remix) 18:21 Pilots Of Peace - Fallin 18:17 Shingo Nakamura - Focus 18:13 Lamorn - Olsen After Midnight 18:09 Everything But The Girl - Forever 18:09 C H I L L T R A X - Street Life Worlds Cc 18:06 Finding Mero - In Loving Memories 18:02 Kleerup Feat. Yuna - Break Down The Wall 17:58 Satin Jackets & Panama - Alive 17:55 Flexible Fire - Marea Turquesa 17:52 Tep No Feat. Starzun - Hold Me 17:52 C H I L L T R A X - Valante Io Toh 17:48 Aparde - Know You 17:45 Attom - Where Are We Going 17:41 Satin Jackets & Panama - The Future 17:38 Nuage Feat. Gus - The Place We Know 17:34 Session Victim - Isle Of Taste 17:34 C H I L L T R A X - Parents Magazine Seal 17:29 Heard Right & Oracle - There For You 17:25 Otr Feat. Au/ra - Broken (Rac Mix) 17:21 Fakear - Crystal 17:17 Blonde Maze - When You Move 17:14 Vandelux - All I've Ever Known 17:13 C H I L L T R A X - Chilltrax - Chill Out Piano 17:08 Braxe Falcon - Step By Step (Amtrac Remix) 17:04 Chris Malinchak - When The World Stops Turning (Quiet Mix) 17:00 Rocket Empire - Astoria 16:56 Vintage And Morelli Feat. Arielle Maren - The Light (Flexible Fire Remix) 16:53 Jones Meadow & Clara Mendes - Em Baixo 16:48 Logic1000 Feat. Big Ever - Natural 16:45 George Fitzgerald & Syml - Mother 16:40 Circle Sky - Your Name 16:37 Emmit Fenn - What Falling In Love Is For 16:34 Chill Cole - Liquid Life 16:30 Eli & Fur - Night Blooming Jasmine 16:30 C H I L L T R A X - Magnifyingglasssogood4u 16:26 Two Lanes - Searching (Exclusive Chilltrax Fixed It! Mix) 16:21 Odesza Feat. Olafur Arnalds - Light Of Day (Parra For Cuva Remix) 16:17 Leaving Laurel - The Family We Find 16:13 The Knocks Feat. Foster The People - All About You (Equal Remix) 16:13 C H I L L T R A X - Toh Dzihan 16:10 Attlas & Jodie Knight - Used To The Silence 16:07 Holen - Healing 16:03 Alampa - The One 16:00 Everything But The Girl - Run A Red Light 15:55 Sao Miguel Feat. Sebastian Reynoso - Hope In Balance (Wisternoff-grant Remix) 15:55 C H I L L T R A X - Trans Europe Vocoder 15:50 Elderbrook - Wasted On You 15:47 Kaskade - Where Did You Go 15:42 Duckmaw - Distant Worlds 15:37 Shingo Nakamura - Come Closer 15:32 Marsh Feat. Katherine Amy - Find Me 15:32 C H I L L T R A X - The Chillout Channel, Chilltrax 15:28 Woven - Brushes 15:24 Jan Blomqvist & Malou - Alone 15:21 Satin Jackets Feat. Tailor - Spell 15:18 Dreem - Miles Away 15:18 C H I L L T R A X - Glitchy Toh 15:12 Dom Dolla & Mansionair - Strangers (Flight Facilities Remix) 15:08 Mozez & Tim Angrave - Head Full Of Dreams 15:03 Ghenwa Nemnom - Story Of A Battle (Chris Zippel Remix) 14:59 Pines Feat. Akacia - History 14:53 Alex Lo Faro - Move With Me 14:48 Chris Malinchak, Kiesza, Malin - Tree 14:45 Feiertag Feat. Tessa Rose Jackson, Oli Hannaford - Yearn 14:41 Dex 1200 - Ongea Nami 14:37 Zimmer Feat. Fhin - Lost Your Mind 14:37 C H I L L T R A X - Toh Freesound 14:33 Cannons - Loving You 14:30 Forester - Saint (Shallou Remix) 14:27 Sum Wave - Evening Mood 14:24 Lp Giobbi Feat. Caroline Byrne - Another Life 14:19 Dj San & Sebastian Moore - In Your Eyes 14:19 C H I L L T R A X - Escape 2 Music 14:15 Dye O - Simply Be Here 14:11 Faodail & Kakadu - Painting In Shades (Edapollo Remix) 14:06 Maya Jane Coles Feat .chelou - Never Asked For Much 14:02 Heard Right & Fløa - Enough 13:59 Jimpster & Oliver Night - Ascension 13:58 C H I L L T R A X - Toh Cymbal Roll Bass 13:53 Royksopp Feat. Pixx - How The Flowers Grow 13:49 Jones Meadow - Shackles 13:46 Odesza Feat. Maro - Better Now 13:43 Alampa - Seesaw Season 13:38 Deep Lo - Lost In You (Soire Remix) 13:38 C H I L L T R A X - Retsyn 13:35 Fløa (Floa) - Pictures Of You 13:30 Tsha - I Know 13:25 Il:lo - Cynnes 13:20 Sons Of Maria - Always 13:16 Satin Jackets Feat. Mandy Jones - In This Life 13:16 C H I L L T R A X - Be Svendsen World Comes 13:11 Vincenzo - You Knew 13:07 Phoenix & Dj Falcon - Winter Solstice (Braxe Falcon Remix) 13:02 Joy Orbison Feat. Lea Sen - Better 12:58 Arto - Now You're Gone 12:53 Attlas Feat. Mango - Over The Water 12:47 Arley & Sirolf - One Day 12:43 Giants' Nest - Flower Burst 12:38 Alison Goldfrapp - The Beat Divine 12:35 Flight Facilities Feat. Your Smith - Heavy 12:31 Armin Van Buuren & Matoma Feat Teddy Swims - Easy To Love 12:28 Sebastian Davidson - Nomads 12:24 Shallou Feat.wales - Begin 12:24 C H I L L T R A X - R.i.p. John Hurt 12:20 Feiertag - Didn't Know Why (You Lost Your Soul) 12:15 Northern Form - Mend 12:11 Sum Wave - Milkyway 12:08 Ben Bohmer Feat. Jonah - Home 12:08 C H I L L T R A X - Toh Moon Boots 12:03 Chicane & The Mannequin - Summer In E Major 12:00 Lar - Collide (Jody Wisternoff & James Grant Remix) 11:56 Andre Aguado - Through The Night 11:52 Evelynka - Letting Go 11:47 Two Lanes - Reflections (Il Lo Remix) 11:46 C H I L L T R A X - Tcc Warm And Tender Ocean 11:43 Reel People & Paula - Vibe (Moods Remix) 11:39 Blonde Maze - Being Pulled (Polar Inc. Remix) 11:35 Flexible Fire - Amatista 11:31 Jos & Eli & Eli & Fur - Riffs Of The Night 11:28 Morcheeba - Even Though 11:28 C H I L L T R A X - Worldschilloutchannnel Orbit 11:22 Emi Ca - Just Breathe 11:17 Trilucid - Cheyenne (Extended Sunset Mix) 11:13 Harvey & Oscuro - You're All I Want 11:09 Alex V - Cristal Shore 11:09 C H I L L T R A X - Slurry Toh 11:05 Leisure - Take You Higher (Serebii & Arjuna Oakes Remix) 11:01 Satin Jackets & Panama - Alive 10:57 Sons Of Maria - Outbound 10:53 Little Dragon - Water 10:47 False Intentions - Good Liar (Dj T-is-toast Mix) 10:43 Fabio Vee & Mike D' Jais - Consolation 10:38 Monolink - Take Me Away 10:33 Blank & Jones - Floatation 10:28 Groove Armada - History (M3 And Bachelors Of Science Remix) 10:28 C H I L L T R A X - Valante Io Toh 10:24 Jan Blomqvist - Carry On (Earthlife Remix) 10:20 Gold Lounge - Higher 10:15 Lamorn - Olsen After Midnight 10:11 Jako Diaz & Leyet - Only You 10:11 C H I L L T R A X - E-chilled-music 10:08 Attom - Where Are We Going 10:05 London Grammar - Baby It's You 09:59 Braxe Falcon - Step By Step (Amtrac Remix) 09:56 Odsen - Retrospective 09:51 Royksopp Feat. Astrid S - Let's Get It Right 09:51 C H I L L T R A X - Toh Dzihan 09:46 Double Touch Feat. Reigan - All I Want 09:41 Two Lanes - Movement 09:37 Lp Giobbi Feat. Dj Tennis & Joseph Ashworth - All In A Dream 09:34 Elderbrook & Tourist - Howl (Chill Mix) 09:29 Heard Right, Oai - Hope 09:29 C H I L L T R A X - Cleanliness Don't You Agree 09:26 Kx5 & Sofi Tukker - Sacrifice (St Mix) 09:22 Westseven Feat. Angus Powell - Go Right Through (Sound Quelle Remix) 09:16 Volen Sentir & Makebo - Into The Stars 09:13 Olan - Wake And Return (Little Dragon Remix) 09:08 Max Cooper - A Model Of Reality (Tor Remix) 09:08 C H I L L T R A X - Ct The Backward Chillout Channel 09:04 Arto - Para Mi 09:00 Attlas & Jodie Knight - Used To The Silence 08:57 Diplo Feat. Rhye - Mmxx - Xii 08:53 Melosense - Nous 08:50 Tep No - Deep Sin 08:45 Sons Of Maria - It Takes So Long 08:40 Eric Hilton - Forming Star 08:36 George Fitzgerald & Syml - Mother 08:32 Avira & Nicholas Gunn - Sensing You 08:27 Nils Hoffmann Feat. Julia Church - 9 Days 08:24 Sum Wave - It Feels Like Summer 08:18 Rufus Du Sol - Like An Animal (Trinidad Remix) 08:18 C H I L L T R A X - Magnifyingglasssogood4u 08:14 Monolink - Turning Away (Parra For Cuva Remix) 08:09 Boehm - Who You Are 08:06 Sultan Shepard - Sirens 08:01 Eli & Fur - You And I 08:01 C H I L L T R A X - Glitchy Toh 07:57 Mozez & Tim Angrave - Head Full Of Dreams 07:54 Finding Mero - In Loving Memories 07:50 Boerd Feat. Stella Explorer - Another Life 07:45 Reel People & Muhsinah - Something New (Kraak & Smaak Remix) 07:41 Electronic Bodyguards - Stronger (Pete Herbert Remix) 07:41 C H I L L T R A X - Something I Should Tell You 07:37 Satin Jackets Feat. Tailor - Somewhere In Paradise 07:34 Cannons - Hurricane 07:31 Aftruu - Falling Asleep 07:27 Kelela - Contact 07:22 Massive Attack - Unfinished Sympathy (Oakenfold Remix) 07:22 C H I L L T R A X - Escape The Noise 07:18 Giants' Nest - Heart Void 07:15 Jan Blomqvist & Malou - Alone 07:11 Blonde Maze - Something Familiar 07:08 Holen - Healing 07:07 C H I L L T R A X - Toh Freesound 07:05 Lapsley - 32 Floors 06:59 Maya Jane Coles Feat .chelou - Never Asked For Much 06:56 Rocket Empire - Lima 06:52 Edapollo Feat. Akacia - Run 06:47 Alex Lo Faro - Move With Me 06:42 Sg Lewis - Lifetime 06:37 Baile & Haulm - Knows No End 06:32 Fakear - Crystal 06:28 Washed Out - Far Away 06:28 C H I L L T R A X - Toh Cymbal Roll Bass 06:23 Steven Weston Feat. Tae - Same Dream 06:20 Mansionair & Kim Tee - Next High 06:16 Alampa - Seesaw Season 06:11 Nicholas Gunn Feat. Chris Howard - Thought Of You 06:11 C H I L L T R A X - Comes To Chill Out 06:08 Chill Cole - Liquid Life 06:03 Ross Couch - On Fire (Downtempo Mix) 05:59 Phoenix & Dj Falcon - Winter Solstice (Braxe Falcon Remix) 05:55 Tomb - Unbound 05:51 Running Touch - Why Do I 05:51 C H I L L T R A X - Toh Moon Boots 05:47 Gareth Emery - St Mary's 05:44 Dye O - Simply Be Here 05:40 Royksopp Feat. Astrid S - Just Wanted To Know 05:35 Eli & Fur - Better In The Dark 05:30 Marsh - Black Mountain 05:30 C H I L L T R A X - Wonderful Tan! 05:27 Afterlife - All I Wanted 05:23 Catching Flies - Daymarks 05:20 Pableno - Heights 05:16 Cannons - Tunnel Of You 05:12 Floa & Phonic Youth - Falling Away 05:12 C H I L L T R A X - Worlds Chillout Channel (Chillout Channel) 05:07 Vincenzo - Chroma Rush 05:02 Chicane & The Mannequin - Summer In E Major 04:57 Morcheeba - Oh Oh Yeah 04:51 Il:lo - Cynnes 04:48 Che Jose Feat. Jodie Knight - Freedom (Mass Digital Remix Edit) 04:44 Vandelux - All I've Ever Known 04:38 Alison Goldfrapp - The Beat Divine 04:34 Billie Eilish - Everything I Wanted (Aquadrop Remix) 04:30 Andrew Nagy & Joel Winterflood - Little To None 04:26 Sebastian Davidson - Nomads 04:22 Lana Del Rey - Doin' Time (Chilltrax Yesterday/today Mix) 04:22 C H I L L T R A X - R.i.p. John Hurt 04:18 Xixi Feat. Kwesi - Close To U 04:14 Lapsley - Levitate 04:09 Billion Watchers - Rainman 04:05 Passenger 10 - Voices In Her Head 04:05 C H I L L T R A X - Slurry Toh 04:01 Satin Jackets & Panama - Alive 03:57 Jones Meadow - Shackles 03:53 Wassu & Mimi Page - Within Me 03:49 Elderbrook - The End 03:49 C H I L L T R A X - Jimpster 1 03:44 Above & Beyond - Believer (Marsh's Guatape Remix) 03:40 Morgin Madison & Ryan Lucian - From The Start (Mm Chill Remix) 03:36 Henry Green - Realign 03:31 Zaven - Voliere Amplitude 03:31 C H I L L T R A X - Worlds Chillout Channel (Chillout Channel) 03:27 Teemid - L.a. 03:23 Woven - Brushes 03:19 False Intentions - Good Liar (Dj T-is-toast Mix) 03:19 C H I L L T R A X - Toh Bassy Dr 03:15 Catz 'n Dogz Feat. Jaw - Time 03:12 Dreem - Miles Away 03:06 Blonde Maze - A Break In Continuity (Forty Cats Remix) 03:01 Braxe Falcon - Step By Step (Amtrac Remix) 02:58 Holen - Breathe 02:54 Eloi El - Stick Together (Blonde Maze Remix) 02:54 C H I L L T R A X - Toh Dzihan 02:49 Ry X & Olafur Arnalds - Colorblind (Whomadewho Remix) 02:46 Lp Giobbi Feat. Caroline Byrne - Another Life 02:40 Sumsuch Feat. Matty Eeles - Find Home (Vincenzo-chilltrax Sumdub Mix) 02:40 C H I L L T R A X - We Are The Music Makers 02:36 Two Lanes - Searching (Ct Fixup Mix) 02:32 Twoworldsapart & Panuma & Nina Carr - Slippin' 02:27 Cahelo - Bananaquit (Mass Digital Extended Remix) 02:24 Mango & Cloudcage - More Than This 02:20 Everything But The Girl - Forever 02:20 C H I L L T R A X - Escape 2 Music 02:16 West & Zander - Silfra 02:13 Attlas & Jodie Knight - Used To The Silence 02:09 Satin Jackets Feat. Tailor - Relapse 02:05 Duckmaw - Distant Worlds 02:01 Kx5 Feat. Hayla - Escape (Chill Mix) 01:57 Eli & Fur - Where I Find My Mind 01:51 Forty Cats & Arentis - Zen 01:48 Elderbrook & Tourist - Howl (Chill Mix) 01:43 A.m.r & Lumynesynth - Unfinished 01:39 Lipless & Blue Noir - Alone 01:37 Attom - Where Are We Going 01:33 Zimmer Feat. Panama - Wildflowers 01:33 C H I L L T R A X - Trans Europe Vocoder 01:28 Heard Right & Oracle - There For You 01:25 53 Thieves - Waves 01:21 Il:lo - Ink 01:17 Sumsuch Feat. Matty Eeles - Find Home (Vincenzo Remix) 01:17 C H I L L T R A X - Glitchy Toh 01:13 Mozez & Tim Angrave - Head Full Of Dreams 01:10 Sum Wave - It Feels Like Summer 01:06 Phello - Timelapse 01:01 Nicholas Gunn & Alina Renae - Angel Eyes 00:58 Ran The Man - Swimmingpool 00:58 C H I L L T R A X - Fresh And Fascinating 00:54 Reel People & Paula - Vibe (Moods Remix) 00:51 Otr Feat. Shallou - Heart 00:47 Rocket Empire - Astoria 00:42 Darius Feat. Benny Sings - Rise (Darius Remix) 00:36 Claptone Feat. Jaw - No Eyes 00:36 C H I L L T R A X - Backward Rvb Where World Comes 00:32 Jones Meadow - Fences 00:26 Trilucid - Cheyenne (Extended Sunset Mix) 00:22 Vok - Skin 00:19 Holen - Healing 00:19 C H I L L T R A X - Toh Freesound 00:15 Two Lanes - Never Enough 00:09 Maya Jane Coles Feat .chelou - Never Asked For Much 00:06 Flexible Fire - Marea Turquesa 00:03 Indigo Eyes Feat. Kehina - All Over Again (Remix) 00:03 C H I L L T R A X - R.i.p. John Hurt

#Chilltrax #Chillout #Lounge #Downtempo #Ambient #Trance #Deep House #2023 #June 2023

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harpyloon · 4 years ago

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i’ll catch you

Pairing: Charlie Weasley x fem!Reader

Summary: "Up close, Y/N could see the familiar freckles splattered all over his nose and cheeks. He was towering over her like he always did. She used to be the little second year Hufflepuff always idling by the entrance to the Great Hall hoping to bump into the famous Charlie Weasley. Studying on the Quidditch pitch, watching him behind her textbook, captaining the Gryffindor team. Climbing the beech tree by the lake again and again, hoping Charlie Weasley would somehow walk by once more to offer her a hand..."

☞ Curse Breaker reader x Dragon-tamer Charlie Weasley

Warnings: Fluff, sprinkles of angst, dragons (duh), mentions of a dead animal, mentions of dragon eating dead animal (lol), post-war timeline (although not that important)

WC: 4.5k+ , Part 2 coming soon!

Read on AO3

Beautiful rays of golden sunlight were peaking through the blinders of Y/N's cabin. It was going to be a lovely day with the perfect weather to seek out a bit of adventure, and although she was sure she had countless other affairs to address before kicking off with her assignment the next day, a blathering Bill Weasley was not one of them.

"Are you even listening?" his tone was way beyond impatient. "You know what? Don't answer that. I know for a fact that you never pick up anything I say. Ever."

Y/N rolled her eyes as she busied herself with stuffing her socked feet inside a pair of brown chunky hiking boots. She didn't plan on going very far. Her colleagues were currently lounging in the dining hall about five cabins down, sipping piping hot ciorbă, munching on breakfast toast, and relishing their only foreseeable off day before the start of the big dig tomorrow. Some were even dozing off still, earning as much sleep as they could to compensate for the long nights to come.

It's true what they say about grumpy Curse Breakers. But nobody realized that they just spent too much time with their eyes wide open.

"You know, Bill," Y/N mused, "you always call me the drama queen. What does that make you then?"

The floating head over the fire scoffed, "A concerned superior."

"Well, there's nothing to be concerned about."

"Where are you headed?"

"I'm going for a walk."

"No walks," ordered Bill, his face stern.

"Everyone's out and about today!"

"No walks for you."

Y/N laughed. "Oh yeah?"

Bill sighed. He knew trying to be hard-nosed was futile. "No walks alone at least."

"Are you sure there's no bun in Fleur's oven yet?" Y/N teased. "You're sounding more like a papa bear with each passing day."

She heard a soft melodic laugh within the fire where Bill's head was when suddenly, another floating head appeared right beside his. This time, all blonde and very French

"There iz no bun yet, mon cher. But I think he az been practicing fatherhood with you." Fleur gave Y/N a wink. "I 'eard zer are many 'andsome men in Romania. With a leetle beet of exzploring yo—"

"There will be no exploring," barked Bill, sending his wife a warning glance, which she ignored.

"—you might find someone az adventurous az you are," Fleur beamed, "And very macho."

"Darling," Bill sighed, "is this necessary?"

With a flying kiss to Y/N, Fleur was gone.

Shrugging on a light parka, Y/N gave Bill a knowing look, "You see? Your wife said I could use a macho man."

"Oh please. You're in a Curse Breaker camp."

"Hey, there are loads of macho men here."

"Macho enough for you?"

Y/N wrinkled her nose but ignored the question.

"Well, William," she said, emphasizing Bill's full name, "I, am a Curse Breaker in the middle of the Southern Carpathians." Stuffing her wand through her belt loop, she looked at him with finality. "And I am not passing up this opportunity."

"Remember when they assigned you to Egypt with me and you went on exploring? Your exploring is bad luck, Y/N, and I did not assign you to Romania to bring bad luck."

"Excuse you, the Egypt Goblins loved me."

"Goblins don't love wizards," retorted Bill.

"I think they were particularly fond of me."

"You Reductored an entire bloody Pyramid!"

Y/N was losing her patience. She wanted to sift through the mountains in the morning sunlight. Discover hidden caves and wade through cold springs. She had her breakfast way earlier than everyone else for this sole purpose.

"I promise I'll be good."

"Take Weiss with you."

Y/N glared. "Absolutely not."

"Take someone."

"I'm walking out on you right now. Don't forget to put out my fire."

"Y/N."

"I'll see you later!"

"I have to tell you—"

Without looking back, she waved at Bill and stepped out into the crisp Romanian morning.

The skies were bright and cloudless, the sun slowly rising up east. The Curse Breaker camp in the middle of the Transylvanian Alps was in for a late morning. It was quiet, apart from the whispers of the forest beside them; chirping birds, singing crickets, and the distant sound of a nearby stream.

Trudging up the rough pavement towards the foot of the nearest hill, Y/N felt an ounce of guilt seep through as she marveled at the scenery before her. Bill was the reason she got the Romania assignment. She wasn't half bad a Curse Breaker. From an outsider's perspective, some would even call her brilliant. She's aced all her missions in her first year on the job—way ahead of all the others in her year, and was even able to crackdown a dark magic-infested tomb in an assignment she co-lead in Egypt. She was quick, smart, and as brave as the career entailed.

Only one thing stood between her and a good reputation in Gringotts. Her impulsiveness.

She couldn't help it. Y/N's successes partnered with tragedies—accidents; her brilliance came with sheer will and almost violent haste. The problem is you can't think twice Bill would always say. Not everything is done in a snap, Y/N.

Bill Weasley was the only senior Curse Breaker with enough patience to supervise her. It must have been fate or a miracle that had him in temporary assignment at the London Gringotts when she graduated Hogwarts. If she were received by anyone else, or if he were back in Egypt instead, she didn't think she'd ever make it out into the field. Or worse, last a few months.

"I'll be good," she mumbled to no one in particular. Or maybe she hoped that Bill would hear. She'd floo him again later.

Trekking up the slope with hands snuggled warm inside her faux-fur-lined pockets, Y/N inhaled the fresh earth surrounding her. This was her calling. Nature. Adventure. The unknown. She was fantastic with spells and jinxes and once thought of becoming an Auror—but Aurors spent too much time indoors, on desks, drowning in paperwork and tailing dark wizards. She knew in her heart she wasn't born to enforce the law.

On the opposite side of the hill was a deep gorge between two towering mountains and a long serpentine stream. Elated at the sight, she followed the gentle flow of water over the rocks. Without thinking (because when does she ever), she slipped off her boots and socks, and despite the chilly morning, prepared to wade the ice-cold water. She dipped one toe in for good measure—a pause.

That couldn't be right.

Submerging one whole foot into the water confirmed her confusion. Strange. Almost all waterways in Romania led to the Black Sea, if not the Adriatic. Why was it warm?

This isn't the bathing stream she thought. The senior Curse Breakers back at camp had instructed them of assigned fresher areas where warming charms would be cast. She didn't remember this gorge being part of last night's tour.

Ankles deep in the water, Y/N trailed the soft currents. It was deliciously warm. A deliberate contrast to the icy breeze left by the trail ends of winter. It was supposedly mid-spring, but the winds still gave her the chills.

She took no notice of how far she was going, the water neither rising nor falling. If she were to guess it must've almost been half an hour given by the direction of the sun. The warm water and small pebbles were therapeutic beneath her feet. The walk didn't tire her at all.

Finally, the chasm's end came to view. Heart beating with excitement, she hastened her pace, dampening the legs of her trousers that she attempted to roll up. But just as her feet crossed the lip between the two mountains flanking her, she felt the oddest sensation: it began at the top of her head, traveling down her arms to her toes—as if a big fat raindrop landed on her scalp and entered her body.

She glanced at the clear blue sky. There was no cloud in sight for miles.

And then, it was suddenly very humid.

"What the..." she glanced back through the gorge. Nothing was out of order and nobody was in sight. Looking down at her feet, her surroundings were now as warm as the water she stood on. Her parka felt too thick.

Again, strange.

Trying to shake away her curiousness, Y/N trudged on.

All is well she chanted inside her head. All is well and the wind just blows differently on this side of the alps.

But no matter what she told herself, ripples of unease still disturbed Y/N. She was beginning to sweat and it wasn't just her nerves. The wind didn't blow differently on this side of the mountains because there was no wind. It was dry, dank, and very very warm.

To rattle her nerves even further, the water she was wading on was getting hotter as she went on that she had to leap on land once again. But as soon as her bare soles made contact with the grass, she yelped in pain.

"Merlin—OW."

The earth was burning. As if it bathed in the sun for too long. As if she were in the middle of a dry desert. She knew the feeling, she's been to Egypt. But why the bloody hell would Romanian soil feel this hot? Moreso in the heart of the Southern Carpathians?

Locating a jutted-out slab of rock, Y/N hopped over to sit and gather her bearings, drying her damp feet and staring at her boots and socks. She didn't want to slip them back on. The heat was intense. But it was either the boots or the sizzling soil.

She shrugged off her parka after lacing up her boots and was grateful for her reckless choice of wardrobe this morning. She opted for a ribbed shirt under her jacket—instead of a sweater—in urgent intention to get away from a nagging Bill. Now it served her well. It wasn't as thin as she would have deemed appropriate for the current temperature, but at least her neck and arms could breathe.

Gazing over the expanse of the clearing she emerged in, she suddenly became aware of the lack of green in the area. The grass was almost a withering brown—crunchy and dry. Trees weren't scattered about like the thick oaks all over the Curse Breaker camp; instead, they were clumped, almost systematically, in relatively rectangular patch formations. As if deliberately rooted as such.

Muggles Y/N thought. It was only them who had the peculiar habit of reorganizing nature.

Tying her parka around her waist, she treaded the clearing, the grass crisp beneath her boots, and approached the nearest cluster of trees. She wondered if this were one of the areas they'd be digging up. Senior Curse Breaker Digby Youssif oriented them of specific crackdown areas to look forward to in the next few months. Although almost all wizarding families were well-accounted for in Romania, there were still trifling amounts of intel on hidden vaults under protective spells cast by untraceable ancient tribes.

Y/N loved digging assignments. She was particularly fond of discovery. And if Ancient Runes was Hogwarts' least-loved lesson, she rather enjoyed Professor Babbling's classes. Well, most of the time. It was her pride and joy to have snagged an 'Outstanding' for her O.W.Ls—

Crack!

A sudden gust of wind whipped through the trees ahead of her. On instinct, Y/N drew her wand from her belt loop. Nothing was so dangerous about the wind. But it felt so...

The sound came out of nowhere, she thought it was imagining it. A steady drumming beat. Powerful and humming. An engine? she thought. But that was impossible. They were told that the area was blocked off from muggles for the duration of their stay. She paused in front of a towering ashtree. The sound was growing louder and louder. Nearer. She didn't know why but she was compelled with the need to hide.

Climb.

She felt ridiculous, clambering up an ashtree and settling on its thickest branch. Her superiors back at camp were clear that the mountains were safe, its perimeters were secured for their dig. Curse Breakers always made sure missions wouldn't come across outside interference.

Then why was her heart beating so fast?

The drumming sound was growing nearer. Behind her—above.

Peering at the sky through the leaves, a massive dark figure swooped overhead and landed with an earth-shaking thud on the clearing right in front of her tree.

Y/N felt like she was going to choke on her own spit when a deafening, earsplitting roar echoed through the mountains.

Dragon.

Fully grown, enormous, and vicious-looking, the beast had emerald scales that glinted in the morning sun. Its body was bulky, way stockier compared to the common dragons in textbooks. It had a massive head that seemed even larger than its body, and on it sprouted two long glittering golden horns. Its claws had the same golden color, and it was rearing onto its hind legs, hunching over a figure... chewing...

All the breakfast Y/N had only hours before felt like rising up her throat. An enormous dragon only meters in front of her was chewing on a dead animal, clearly having his own meal. And there she was, perched on an ashtree, ready for dessert.

Don't panic she told herself, but feeling green. She's never faced a dragon on a mission before. They tackled them in her first year on the job—Curse Breakers didn't really need training, the task calling for hands-on work—but never in her life did she ever think she'd have to face a real dragon.

I don't have to face it Y/N thought, I just have to stay here until it flies away, and run back to camp.

Wiggling up to a squat, she eyed the neighboring branch a few feet to her right which was higher up and positioned behind a thicker cluster of leaves. It didn't require a jump, but more of a really careful split; hugging the trunk tightly, she stretched her right foot across, shifting her weight to her right leg, her arms choking the tree trunk in a death grip, legs spread wide midair—

"Scuzati-ma?"

Y/N didn't fall. Thank Merlin she didn't fall. But she lost her momentum in surprise and panic, her left foot sliding from the previous branch, making her push off the trunk in haste, throwing her weight across completely. She grabs a dangling thin branch above her at the last minute, her body tilted towards the forest floor.

A forest floor where a man now stood, peering up at her curiously.

She was breathing hard, her heart thumping erratically, both from the fear of falling and being heard by the dragon so close by.

"Er—esti bine?" the man asked. Y/N saw that he had his arms out as if braced to catch her if she fell. When she didn't answer, the man spoke again, "Ai nevoie de ajutor?"

She blinked down at him. "What?"

He chuckled. She hated it. It hurt her pride. "I said, do you need any help?"

He was loud. Too loud. She righted herself on the branch, pulling to lean back on the trunk behind her. Then risking a peek, she checked on the dragon who was still munching on the dead cow with gusto.

She looked back down to find the man with his eyebrows raised at her, his face painting amusement. It was impossible not to take note of his red mane pulled into a low bun. He looked awfully familiar... and he was going to get them killed.

"Could you," she whispered as loudly as she could, "keep your voice down?"

The man snickered once more, showing no effort of lowering his tone. "Why?"

"Are you blind?" she wanted to strangle him. "There's a bloody dragon!"

The redhead glanced at the scaly beast and heaved out a sigh. "Okay. Yeah, you're right. It's way past breakfast. He's missing nap time."

Y/N looked at him incredulously. He shrugged, "But what can I do? He slept in this morning. Lazy beast." Looking back up, he asked, "Want to meet him?"

He's mental she thought. That had to be it.

But the redhead only laughed. He keeps laughing. He must've noticed the stupefied expression on her face because he simmered. "Give him a minute and you can come down. It's already his fifth haul so he's bound to get dozy and fly back to the nest." He started walking towards the clearing when he paused and turned back, "Although, you can come down now. I promise he won't eat you."

Y/N watched as the man walked up to the feasting dragon—she was peering behind the thick tree trunk, using it as a shield. He's insane. Drawing a wand from a sheath attached to his calf, the man aimed a stunning spell right by the beast's tail.

"Alright, Darius, I think you've had enough," he called. He kept his distance, a good few meters away, but his gait was calm, almost lazy.

The dragon glanced at the man, its fangs bloody. Y/N wanted to grab the redhead and run. But it was a crazy thought, and she was rooted on her spot on the tree branch, frozen in fear.

The man gave a sharp whistle and the dragon grunted, smoke coming out of its nostrils. It ignored him and continued to munch on the cow.

Another stunning spell was aimed right by its claws and the dragon emitted a low growl. Y/N didn't know if she was imagining it but the creature seemed sluggish on its feet, swaying... almost drowsy.

"Off you go," said the man, "up." He sent one more stunning spell right in front of its snout. It was a clear miss, purely intentional.

The dragon heaved a loud angry roar. But instead of diving for the man like she expected, it started flapping its wings, gaining momentum. Y/N held onto the tree trunk tighter so as not to be swayed by the sudden rush of winds the creature was yielding. And then with a strong push off the ground, up it soared, growling low in its throat, and was out of sight.

Y/N's legs felt like jelly slugs, but her arms refused to let go of the tree trunk. What in Merlin's name just happened?

"Y/N."

She gave a short yelp, coughing on her next breath. "Excuse me?"

The man was back, now by the foot of the tree once again. "Come down."

"How do you know my name?" she demanded.

He had a really handsome smile. A really familiar, handsome smile...

"I should be offended," said the man. "Come down." There it was again, that smile. "I'll catch you."

I'll catch you.

I'll catch you....

"Come on, Y/N, I'll catch you!"

"No you won't!" said Y/N. Her cheeks were wet with tears.

She was perched on the beech tree by the Black lake, her legs dangling above the shallow water. She had attempted to retrieve her Spellman's Syllabry textbook that Cassian Loxias chucked up the branches for fun.

"Yes I will, I promise," consoled Charlie. "I'm a prefect, remember?" he gestured to his badge, "I'll make sure you're safe."

Sniffing up snot that was escaping her nose, she hiccuped softly against the back of her hand. "Our prefect doesn't do that very much."

Charlie chuckled. "I'll make sure to have a word with Professor Sprout about her Hufflepuff prefects."

When he saw the horror on her face, he held up his hands, "It didn't come from you of course. Will you come down now? I swear I'll catch you."

Y/N looked into Charlie Weasley's eyes and saw nothing but pure candor. Biting her lip, she said, "Do cross your heart, or hope to die?"

He traced a cross right above his chest. "Cross my heart, or hope to die."

"Y/N. Y/N?"

Y/N blinked.

Charlie Weasley. Charlie dragon-tamer Weasley. Charlie the hot brother Weasley—

"Are you still breathing? Do you need me up there?"

Trying to gather her bearings, Y/N extracted herself from her hold on the tree trunk, went down onto a squat, and leaped off, landing on the crunchy grass with a thump.

Charlie raised an eyebrow at her as she dusted her trousers, "I see you don't need catching anymore."

She took in the man before her. "Charlie Weasley."

His grin was dazzling."Caught on, have you?

From up close, Y/N could now see the familiar freckles splattered all over his nose and cheeks. He was towering over her like he always did. She used to be the little second year Hufflepuff always idling by the entrance to the Great Hall hoping to bump into the famous Charlie Weasley. Studying on the Quidditch pitch, watching him behind her textbook, captaining the Gryffindor team. Climbing the beech tree by the lake again and again, hoping Charlie Weasley would somehow walk by once more to offer her a hand...

There were so many things she could've done, seeing him again for the first time after all these years. He was gone as soon as he graduated Hogwarts, flying to Romania to study dragons. Everyone always thought Charlie would be going Quidditch pro, being captain and seeker. He had the build, the skills, and the charm. Hogwarts alone had fan clubs in his name and rumor had it that the Falmouth Falcons were just waiting for him to finish seventh year.

But others didn't see Charlie as Y/N did. They didn't see him hoarding books on care of magical creatures in the library. They didn't notice him sneaking off to Hagrid's on the weekends, taking Fang for walks or feeding the Blast Ended Skrewts in the garden. Nobody paid attention to the copy of Fantastic Beasts And Where to Find Them that Charlie practically glued to his side. Only Y/N did. And now that she thought about it, she didn't like that she knew so much. It made her feel like a creep.

So instead of hugging him in delight like she actually wanted, she took a swipe at his shoulder.

"You git," she hissed. "You scared me to death! How did you do that? I thought taming dragons was impossible."

"It is. Most of the time," Charlie shrugged. "Darius is a Romanian Longhorn. Mostly harmless compared to the others especially when he's full. Not that difficult to send him back to the nest when he can barely stand on his feet."

"Harmless? I could've been dessert!"

Charlie laughed. He was still always laughing. "You look delicious, yes, but I'm not letting Darius have you."

What the fu—Y/N inhaled slowly, cautiously. Then exhaled through her nose. She didn't know how to respond. Seeing him again after so long, without warning or preparation, was messing with her senses

"It's good to see you, Y/N," he said and walked closer. Close enough to tugged at her braid. She didn't know why he did it, but he looked like he just had to. "You look good."

Y/N's heart was beating rapidly once more, but this time, for all the wrong reasons. "It's been a while, hasn't it?"

Charlie gazed back into her eyes as if seeing her for the first time.

"Too long."

Again, she didn't know how long it took her to reply, but she cleared her throat, "How—did you know it was me? The first time?"

Charlie's eyes were still roaming all over her face. "No. Not until you spoke."

Y/N must've held a questioning look because he added, "I'll never forget that voice."

He was saying such strange things. Were they strange? Or was it just because he affected her so?

"Then why didn't you say anything?"

"Well, you wouldn't come down, would you? I see you still have a thing for trees."

Y/N rolled her eyes.

"I didn't know the dragon reservation was in the alps," she said. "Do you know we're camping nearby?"

"'Course I do. You lot are beside dragon territory for a reason."

Excitement and fear raised Y/N's nerves. "What are you talking about?"

Charlie bit his lip. "You'll see."

"Are we digging in the reservation?"

He was walking out into the clearing now, beelining back towards the opening of the gorge.

"Charlie!" Y/N jogged to keep up. "Are we?"

He only smiled, "Patience, darling."

Darling. He used to call her that all the time even when they were back in Hogwarts. She always tried to ignore the fluttering feeling her chest made when he used the endearment, reminding herself that he must've used it on everyone else, not just her.

"Why did no one back at camp tell us anything?"

"I probably should've kept my mouth shut," was his only reply. They were crossing the two mountains flanking the stream, and as soon as they cut through the border, Y/N felt the same sensation she did when she went through the clearing. But this time in reverse, it was as if the raindrop was sucked back up.

She glanced up at the mountains. "Did you feel that?"

"Shield spells," explained Charlie. "To keep the muggles out. Temperature charms as well to regulate the reservation climate. Although the dragons do enough of their warming on their own, it's for precaution."

They walked up the stream, tracing back Y/N's previous path.

"Are you bringing me back to camp?" she asked.

"That, and I have to see Digby. Iron out tomorrow's schedule."

"So we are digging inside the reservation," Y/N didn't know if she was more thrilled or afraid.

Charlie glanced at her, "You heard nothing from me."

Studying his features as they strolled, Y/N couldn't help but admire how much Charlie Weasley grew up to be. He's always been lean and strong, especially with being an athlete back at Hogwarts, but now he seemed so much larger than life. Red tendrils were escaping his low bun and framing his chiseled face, there were a few scars on his nose and one under his lip. She shouldn't have been able to see it but she couldn't stop staring. He was big. Stockier than she'd ever seen him; hands wrapped in gauze and rope slung over a hook on his hip.

Charlie Weasley, dragon-tamer.

And he was staring right back at her.

"You have to take me to see more dragons," Y/N breathed. She didn't know where her voice went. It was all airy and she didn't like it. She hoped he would assume it was because of their walk.

Charlie stopped, deep brown eyes boring into her own. He was panting slightly too. Maybe it was the walk.

"Okay," he exhaled. "Promise."

"Cross your heart?" she almost whispered. Almost.

Two fingers traced a cross over Charlie's chest, his gaze not leaving hers, "Cross my heart."

#by gabi #charlie weasley #charlie weasley x reader #charlie weasley fluff #hp post war #charlie weasley x fem!reader #i have no idea where this idea came from but here it is #there will be a part 2!#part 2 coming soon

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thesunsetmeansgoodbye · 3 years ago

Text

Alcina Dimitrescu & Mother Miranda

For her, Mother is this scripture she meditate day and night even if she's no merely answer for her mother's kept prayers. Perhaps, almost..

Alcina silently watch Miranda read the files of her recent experiments, the priestess seem to frown inside the golden mask.

“Basically, some died and the rest turned into Moroaică”.

“Yes, Mother Miranda”. She droop her head aside, the hat hides the sight of her Mother.

“I should’ve known. Next time you waste my time, make sure it’s worthwhile. I had enough of your failures, when you supposed be not.” That's all she heard before the older woman takes its leave. And right now she needed a drink.

Another meeting takes over, Alcina sometimes would catch her mother's eyes closed and looking tired. When she open snap them there this no emotion holds it. Lips secretly pressed to each other, she listens to the discussion like an obedient daughter she always were unless Heisenberg nerved to piss her off.

She hates when Mother favors the other lords whom she considered below to her and Mother Miranda, she hates this unnecessary siblings, they barely interact with each other and she would rather it stay that way.

“I put end to this meeting now, all of you may take your leave.”

Every single one leaves the decrepitude church, Alcina caught the glimpse of her Mother and Donna. She looks like assigned to a task but why only give it when the meeting is done? Alcina could only groan. Mother did not assigned her to anything, did she not trust her anymore?

She follow her mother for everything she ordered her to, even in the things beyond her will. Her recognition means so much for her and from that she will do anything, giving all the colors for all the portraits she needed; a masterpiece to offer her Mother. Just, one perfect vessel.

Despite the devotion she holds to the older woman, there's this one exception, and she be willingly fight the world for her three daughters, just like her Mother.. and she hopes, the edge point will not reach where she needs to break an agreement to the priestess when its already her daughters involved.

“Mother?”.

She gently caress the hair of her youngest that was the head is on her lap, gentle smile formed from the ruddy lips of the countess once soon turn into frown, when the thought came of Mother Miranda doing the same thing on the countess like the daughter she always claim Alcina is to her. But it is a thought that is unlikely to happen.

When Miranda visits the castle once in a while, Alcina decorates the table with expensive fine china and foods all for her mother of course along with her famous wine. Even though Mother Miranda looks not to enjoy any of it more than the reports of experiments she overnight do in the dungeons that often ends to be just nothing but a defect.

When they were settled in their table, Alcina couldn’t stop talking like a child who keeps narrating of how great their day went to its parent. She even brought up some memories she cherished from her once human life, her being a singer and her passion for it but Mother just seems to tolerate of all her talks without uttering a single word back and only emptied her own glass of wine and after the feast the priestess would immediately takes its leave. On the other hand, Alcina only smiled helplessly.

Mother Miranda given her everything, the comfort and answers in life. Given the things her true mother couldn’t and her father would never granted. He never wanted a daughter anyway. She secretly suffered in her noble branch but it’s all over now.

And even Mother had given her all of this, she somehow long for an affection of a parent, something that her wine couldn’t remedy.

She tucked herself onto the large bed, as the same time, she murmured some words of comfort for herself some she could remember her true mother used to say to her, it was hesitant but soothing enough. Tears run from the golden sun eyes.

One meeting, she didn’t noticed any signs of its usual intimidating presence of her Mother, her aura seems to radiate happiness she never saw whenever she was with them. Happiness arouse in her too, she wonder what is the reason behind the bliss visage.

“I’m glad to inform all you that I found the perfect receptacle for our dear Eva,”

Eva. Her true child. Mother Miranda told them she have found the perfect vessel to resurrect her child, not to mention that fact its already dead over a century now. She dared not to speak and get any further in her Mother's bad side. She just sit and listen and only speak when ordered or allowed to.

“That's a very pleasant news, Mother Miranda.”

“Indeed, fiica mea.” She placidly smiled at her, and it warms Alcina's heart.

To every task she was assigned to, she do her best not want to dissapoint her Mother. There's no doubt she would do anything, remain to be her Mother's favorite even if she will have to fuel the fire of her mother roasting the other lords.

“B – but, Mother–“

“Stop the attempts to gloss over your failures Moreau, there's no merit it could do upon you, “ The fish man seems to crestfallen from the words but she just stared, after all, she have no care about them but Miranda and her daughters.

Meanwhile, she looked at Heisenberg who seem on other hand was close to scoffing.

“Hah, that really comes from the person who was also covering up his mistake.”

“Pardon?”.

He pinched his nose, before to speak

“You're just flawed as this grotesque freak! Even worse, so stop self-proclaming yourself to Miranda and keep referring us as a failure when it does also count you as one. Fucking accept it!”

“You– take that back you wrenched!”

“Silence!”.

Both of them retreat, but the palpable tension lingers.

“There's no better than another. You all disappoint me in all ways.”

Hate was born for her Mother's dead daughter, she thinks that this is all her fault and she question why the priestess couldn’t just, move on. Why was it always her? Why can’t Mother see her another daughter, that's right in front of her: alive and well, who would be willingly to fill the loss if needed. She often calls Alcina her child and daughter but neither the words felt like were stuffed. Now she sounded like a child, but she couldn’t resist no longer.

“Why isn’t always not enough?”. Her teeth gritted between the words of her misery.

After she had received her Cadou, Alcina's world began to only revolve of her Mother and following experiments in her dungeon. The cold wind and the flakes from the snow wrapped around her when loneliness and insecurity rose inside her well-being as if wants to make the situation for her worse. After all this time, it will always be Eva who occupied her Mother’s most chapters and she didn’t even bother to look over the pages were Alcina is in it, cursive beautifully written that soon tainted by her own sly tears.

For her, Mother is this scripture she meditate day and night even if she's no merely answer for her mother's kept prayers. Perhaps, almost..

She would sometimes pay a visit to her oldest sister Eve, when there's leisure time just to sit beside the grave without words store to utter for the tomb. Mother did not considered to forbid her adopted children to visit the grave, she even neither said anything about it so the other lords she assume didn’t know where it was in the first place.

But mother doesn’t have to know her visits or will she ever care?

She barely knew what would say to the dead, she did know no single prayer. She didn’t even met the child that was taken too early, was she anything like Mother? Is she like anything template of Mother? Or perhaps her father?

“You must had grown beautiful just like our Mother. C– could you tell Mother not to be too hard on me, when you resurrected again? Soră mai mare..” Because even, she could handle all the pain does not mean she deserves it, right?

She made her way to leave as she gets back to the castle.

Mother Miranda sends her a letter once in a while, when she was not able to come to the castle herself because of her research. The letter contain often of must attain task and criticization. She’d pick up some red pen, aimlessly drawing circles on the back of the letter; frowning. It took her some time before she full the entire back of the paper.

She stopped at the peak of the castle, above her was the sky painted in its greyest shade. She started to shred the paper, the pieces season on the white covered ground. She barely see it land because of the height.

“I've had enough of this".

No! Her daughters.. now gone! That damn Winters! Those three bugs who keeps alive her barely beating heart, taken away from her! How!? How could Mother allowed this to happen? Where is she? The roars of the dragon in its hinted despair did she not heard!? Out of all men she's the only person who can understand, it hurts.. so much.

Yet, no presence of power from the Mother she knew stop the gravity of her downfall.

She is confident to think she's her mother’s favorite but she might hinted it wrong however, the proof of the blessing she casted upon her among the others. Castle, eternal life, obedient daughters did she not? How come she couldn’t accept the affection Alcina returned? Wasn't it enough to cease her mother's insurmountable grief? For a child that was no longer here, she barely tolerate all of it.

She sit and watch her.

“Remember from whence you came".

#alcina dimitrescu #mother miranda #donna beneviento #salvatore moreau #karl heisenberg #resident evil village #resident evil 8 #parental issues #a song fic I guess #Alcina being a desperately in need for affection of her mother #In the end she got canonically betrayed

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butterflies-dragons · 4 years ago

Note

Loved your post on the similarities between Jon and Waymar Royce and Sansa's preference in men. I would like to add something else on the table. The Royces have Stark blood through the maternal line. Catelyn even suggested to name them as a possible heir to Robb. So Sansa really has a thing for the Stark look. This might be incestuous in nature. But isn't there a phrase that women tend to fall for men who remind them of their father? In Sansa's case it's more literal than usual lmao

Hello there!

Thank you very much ♡

You know, when I was writing my meta, I was suggested by @lostlittlesatellites, to write about the Royces with Stark blood, but I decided not to bring the subject up because we don’t really know who they are.

I know about what Catelyn said to Robb regarding the Stark relatives in the Vale:

“Young, and a king,” he said. “A king must have an heir. If I should die in my next battle, the kingdom must not die with me. By law Sansa is next in line of succession, so Winterfell and the north would pass to her.” His mouth tightened. “To her, and her lord husband. Tyrion Lannister. I cannot allow that. I will not allow that. That dwarf must never have the north.”

“No,” Catelyn agreed. “You must name another heir, until such time as Jeyne gives you a son.” She considered a moment. “Your father’s father had no siblings, but his father had a sister who married a younger son of Lord Raymar Royce, of the junior branch. They had three daughters, all of whom wed Vale lordlings. A Waynwood and a Corbray, for certain. The youngest … it might have been a Templeton, but …”

“Mother.” There was a sharpness in Robb’s tone. “You forget. My father had four sons.”

She had not forgotten; she had not wanted to look at it, yet there it was. “A Snow is not a Stark.”

“Jon’s more a Stark than some lordlings from the Vale who have never so much as set eyes on Winterfell.”

“Jon is a brother of the Night’s Watch, sworn to take no wife and hold no lands. Those who take the black serve for life.”

“So do the knights of the Kingsguard. That did not stop the Lannisters from stripping the white cloaks from Ser Barristan Selmy and Ser Boros Blount when they had no more use for them. If I send the Watch a hundred men in Jon’s place, I’ll wager they find some way to release him from his vows.”

He is set on this. Catelyn knew how stubborn her son could be. “A bastard cannot inherit.”

“Not unless he’s legitimized by a royal decree,” said Robb. “There is more precedent for that than for releasing a Sworn Brother from his oath.”

“Precedent,” she said bitterly. “Yes, Aegon the Fourth legitimized all his bastards on his deathbed. And how much pain, grief, war, and murder grew from that? I know you trust Jon. But can you trust his sons? Or their sons? The Blackfyre pretenders troubled the Targaryens for five generations, until Barristan the Bold slew the last of them on the Stepstones. If you make Jon legitimate, there is no way to turn him bastard again. Should he wed and breed, any sons you may have by Jeyne will never be safe.”

“Jon would never harm a son of mine.”

“No more than Theon Greyjoy would harm Bran or Rickon?”

Grey Wind leapt up atop King Tristifer’s crypt, his teeth bared. Robb’s own face was cold. “That is as cruel as it is unfair. Jon is no Theon.”

“So you pray. Have you considered your sisters? What of their rights? I agree that the north must not be permitted to pass to the Imp, but what of Arya? By law, she comes after Sansa … your own sister, trueborn …”

“… and dead. No one has seen or heard of Arya since they cut Father’s head off. Why do you lie to yourself? Arya’s gone, the same as Bran and Rickon, and they’ll kill Sansa too once the dwarf gets a child from her. Jon is the only brother that remains to me. Should I die without issue, I want him to succeed me as King in the North. I had hoped you would support my choice.”

“I cannot,” she said. “In all else, Robb. In everything. But not in this … this folly. Do not ask it.”

“I don’t have to. I’m the king.” Robb turned and walked off, Grey Wind bounding down from the tomb and loping after him.

—A Storm of Swords - Catelyn V

This passage is very interesting because Robb said: By law Sansa is next in line of succession, so Winterfell and the north would pass to her. But since Sansa was married to Tyrion Lannister, Robb had to name another heir.

This is a contrast with Jon. Stannis use the same argument to convince Jon to accept his offer to be Lord of Winterfell, he called Sansa “Lady Lannister”, but no matter what, Jon didn’t accept it.

“But, instead of Tyrion, Willas or even Robert, who pursue Sansa’s claim over her, there is a man that has been offered Winterfell and choose her over it. Among all the high lords interested in becoming the Lord of Winterfell by marrying Sansa Stark, the bastard Jon Snow refused to despoil his sister Sansa of her rights, even if her claim is the one thing he has wanted as much as he had ever wanted anything.”

“By right Winterfell should go to my sister Sansa.”

—A Dance with Dragons - Jon I

Jon said, “Winterfell belongs to my sister Sansa.”

—A Dance with Dragons - Jon IV

Robb and Catelyn were both pushing to prevent Sansa and Jon to get Winterfell, and ironically enough, I think that Sansa and Jon will be the Starks that will retake Winterfell.

Now, about who may be the Royces with Stark blood...

“Your father’s father had no siblings, but his father had a sister who married a younger son of Lord Raymar Royce, of the junior branch. They had three daughters, all of whom wed Vale lordlings. A Waynwood and a Corbray, for certain. The youngest … it might have been a Templeton, but …”

This means: Ned Stark’s father Rickard had no siblings, but Rickard’s father Edwyle, had a sister Jocelyn who married a younger son of Lord Raymar Royce, of the junior branch, Benedict Royce.

Jocelyn Stark and Benedict Royce had three daughters:

Daughter 1 married an Unknown Waynwood

Daughter 2 married an Unknown Corbray

Daughter 3 might have married an Unknown Templeton

See? we really don’t know who the Royces with Stark blood are. We don’t even know if they have the Stark features. We don’t even know if they are still alive…

Also take note that Jocelyn Stark married a Royce from the junior branch, called House Royce of the Gates of the Moon. While Waymar Royce was from House Royce of Runestone.

So I addressed the subject only with this line:

The resemblance between the Starks and the Royces [of Runestone] maybe has to be with both houses being descendants of the First Men.

Now back to House Royce of the Gates of the Moon.

At this point in the books, the known Royces of the cadet branch are: Nestor Royce and his children: Albar and Myranda. Imagine Myranda having a claim to Winterfell, Alayne will hate it…

Also imagine Lyn Corbray having a claim to Winterfell, Alayne will hate it even more…

About the Templetons, we don’t even know for sure if the third daughter of Jocelyn Stark and Benedict Royce married into House Templeton…

Now, about the Waynwoods, this is exactly why @lostlittlesatellites suggested me to write about the Royces with Stark blood, because at this point at the Books, Alayne is very linked with the Waynwoods. And even Harrold Hardyn’s mother was a Waynwood! Imagine Harry the Heir having not only a claim to the Vale but also to Winterfell! Alayne will like this scenario a bit more… This is unlikely, but it was funny to think about it…

Harry the Heir doesn’t have the Stark Look tho. But his Waynwood cousins do. So they could be the descendants of Jocelyn Stark and Benedict Royce. Let see:

In the first Alayne chapter of the Winds of Winter, Sansa meets the Waynwoods and Harry the Heir:

“Lady Myranda. Lady Alayne.” Anya Waynwood inclined her head to each of them in turn. “It is good of you to greet us. Allow me to present my grandson, Ser Roland Waynwood.” She nodded at the knight who had spoken. “And this is my youngest son, Ser Wallace Waynwood. And of course my ward, Ser Harrold Hardyng.”

(…)

Ser Roland was the oldest of the three, though no more than five-and-twenty. He was taller and more muscular than Ser Wallace, but both were long-faced and lantern-jawed, with stringy brown hair and pinched noses. Horsefaced and homely, Alayne thought.

—The Winds of Winter - Alayne I

Ser Roland Waynwood and Ser Wallace Waynwood have three features that match the Stark Look:

Both long-faced

Both horsefaced

Both have [stringy] brown hair

Sansa/Alyane doesn’t find the Waynwoods attractive tho, not like she fancied Ser Waymar Royce. Maybe this have to be with their other features: lantern-jawed and pinched noses.

The lack of attraction to the Waynwoods was another reason why I didn’t bring this subject up in my meta.

In contrast, the Waynwoods seems pretty attracted to Sansa/Alayne:

“Had we known such beauty awaited us at the Gates, we would have flown,” Ser Roland said. Though his words were addressed to Myranda Royce, he smiled at Alayne as he said them.

“To fly you would need wings,” Randa replied, “and there are some knights here who might have a thing to say concerning that.”

“I look forward to a spirited discussion.” Ser Roland swung down from his horse, turned to Alayne, and smiled. “I had heard that Lord Littlefinger’s daughter was fair of face and full of grace, but no one ever told me that she was a thief.”

“You wrong me, ser. I am no thief!”

Ser Roland placed his hand over his heart. “Then how do you explain this hole in my chest, from where you stole my heart?”

“He is only t-teasing you, my lady,” stammered Ser Wallace. “My n-n-nephew never had a h-h-heart.”

“The Waynwood wheel has a broken spoke, and we have my nuncle here.” Ser Roland gave Wallace a whap behind the ear. “Squires should be quiet when knights are speaking.”

Ser Wallace reddened. “I am no more a s-squire, my lady. My n-nephew knows full well that I was k-k-kni-k-k-kni –“

“Dubbed?” Alayne suggested gently.

“Dubbed,” said Wallace Waynwood, gratefully.

Robb would be his age, if he were still alive, she could not help but think, but Robb died a king, and this is just a boy.

—The Winds of Winter - Alayne I

And about that phrase you mentioned: “women tend to fall for men who remind them of their father,” it is true that the Asoiaf Books have plenty of incestuous undertones with the Targaryens, Cersei and Jaime, Asha and Theon, Crater and his daughters, etc. But in the case of the Starks, GRRM uses the pseudo-incest trope. After all, Jon and Arya, that are lookalikes, were intended to be in love in the so called “original outline”.

We also have the issue of the First love’s Resemblance: Sansa fell wildly in love with Ser Waymar, and Jon fell in love with a wildling girl kissed by fire.

Waymar Royce looked like a Stark. Waymar Royce was Jon’s lookalike. And Jon is Ned lookalike:

Riding through the rainy night, Ned saw Jon Snow’s face in front of him, so like a younger version of his own.

—A Game of Thrones - Eddard IX

More about it here.

And Jon’s first love was Ygritte, a redhead, with blue-grey eyes, and to make the Tully look even more evident, Ygritte called herself half a fish:

“Ygritte punched his arm. “You know nothing, Jon Snow. I’m half a fish, I’ll have you know.”

—A Storm of Swords - Jon V

Sansa’s first crush having the Stark Look and Jon’s first lover having the Tully look, reminds me of Catelyn being first betrothed with Brandon Stark but marrying Eddard Stark instead. Brandon, died like Waymar. Ned said Jon’s is a younger version of himself. Ned never imagined marrying Catelyn, he had a young infatuation with Ashara Dayne, but he never acted on his feelings for her, and she died. Ned also killed Ashara’s brother Arthur.

Sansa fell wildly in love with Waymar, but she won’t marry him, he died. She will probably fall in love with Jon in a more mature and calmly way. Jon Snow, after a non-con beginning, ended loving Ygritte, not a lady, that offered him a “comfort level of femininity”, but he won’t marry her, she died. Jon will probably fell in love with Sansa, freely and willingly.

Thanks for your message.

#anon ask #jonsa #alayne stone #harrold hardyng #harry the heir #roland waynwood #wallace waynwood

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stedesbonnets · 3 years ago

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my five comfort characters 💞 thank you so much @void-star for tagging me!

this isn’t gonna be very interesting jakldglkg

abigail pent from the lock tomb series

abigail my beloved my wife girlfriend my everything that’s good in this world. i will say i liked magnus more than her when i first read gideon the ninth, but let’s be honest she’s barely there, but i completely fell for her the more i wrote and soo much while reading harrow the ninth. her kindness despite so much violence is astonishing, and i love how htn let her play a much bigger role because she absolutely deserved that. abby feels like a warm hug to me

magnus quinn from the lock tomb series

i did say this wasn’t going to be interesting. anyway magnus!! i starting loving him so fast into gtn, it’s embarrassing how hooked i was. should’ve seen it coming, he’s exactly my type to get attached to. his heart is so big and the way he cares about gideon just makes me wanna cry. i love him and his silly little jokes. i would like to make bread with him. magnus will always be the one when i think about who i loved first starting this series

janai from the dragon prince

i have nothing to say but beloved. i was intrigued by janai from the first episode. having written like 30 fics with her, i feel like i’ve come to know her in a very deep level. she’s Mine, in that sense. she has also brought me a lot of comfort during a really rough period of time. that could be just projecting, but i see a lot of myself in her and i wish i had her courage

brienne from a song of ice and fire

i’m in sure if “comfort” is the right word, since i’ve kinda fell away from the fandom and the winds of winter is nowhere in sight, but i love brienne, especially her version from the books, her inner voice is so beautiful and emphatic and kind, and i always love reading about her

po from the graceling series

i consider graceling the book that got me into reading, and therefore it holds an enormous special place in my heart. it’s been years and i don’t get tired of it no matter what, and it sweeps me off my feet every time. po is so clever and kind and funny, and Respects Women so much, really one of if not the best male character i’ve ever seen. plus he’s a snack so. an extremely honorable mention to katsa because if this was a comfort couples post she’d 100% be there, i just chose po because he’s hot and my heart is as weak as it was at 14

so this is it! i’m tagging (if you wanna do it): @theosrose @nightworldlove @cookiescr @ollie-ollie-oxenfreee and anyone who sees and wanna do this!

#tagged

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monstersandmaw · 5 years ago

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Orctober #11 ‘snow’ - male ice orc x female reader (nsfw)

Edit which I’m including in all my works after plagiarism and theft has taken place: I do not give my consent for my works to be used, copied, published, or posted anywhere. They are copyrighted and belong to me.

Despite me being 'on a break' from Patreon (ie. no one except for brand new subscribers was billed) for November while I work on my novel, here's a 7.7k word orc story. As always with me, it's a bit plotty and very fluffy, but I hope you enjoy it nonetheless. I said on Discord too that the reader's best friend is a yeti, and his design is based on the yeti from 'The Mummy: Tomb Of The Dragon Emperor' who are adorable fluffy goofballs.

So, here's my late Orctober offering for you, featuring one Giant Fluff, eight smaller fluffs (huskies), three bigger fluffs (snow-bears), fluffy cliches, fluffy snow, and one Big Gentle(tm)... The reader is female, but for ~90% of it gender isn’t mentioned. It’s really only in the nsfw bit at the end…

___

With a shiver you stepped outside, the snow squeaking and crunching eerily beneath your too-thin boots, and you drew the soft fur of your jacket up around your neck. Squinting through your clouding breath, you blinked, eyelashes icing up before you had gone more than three paces, and the inside of your nose was quite literally frozen, but it didn’t matter. Selkie Rock Point was one of the most northerly villages on the continent, and not counting the various nomadic peoples who lived even further north, it was one of the last places to find permanent shelter and warmth. It was also home.

Tradewatch sat a little further south along the coast, and in the winter the great ice-breaker ships with their dwarven-forged metal prows could still get through until relatively late in the year, but up here you were locked in by sea ice much earlier.

You’d grown up here, the middle child of one of a handful of human families in a village comprised mostly of selkies and white-furred bear-folk, centaurs, cervitaurs, werewolves and other shifters. Most of the people who lived up here had thick fur or a natural resistance to the cold. Your siblings had left to go to the larger towns further south, but you still bred sled dogs in the house where your parents and grandparents had done the same thing.

Now, as you trudged on foot down to the store to stock your nearly empty cupboards up on essentials, a fresh flurry of snow swirled around you and you narrowed your eyes. If you breathed too deeply, it bit into the back of your throat, but you were relatively used to the cold by now.

Out of the murk of the perpetual twilight that choked this part of the world in the winter, you began to make out the large, dark shape of perhaps a centaur. The closer they got, the more details you could pick out, until you finally figured out who it was and called out to them. “Linny! Hey!”

The huge, dapple grey centaur, swaddled up in layers of coats and fur too, startled a little, but laughed. She had a dark fur hat on over her ice blonde hair, and all you could see of her face was a pair of dark brown eyes, her lashes also rimed with ice. “Hey,” she laughed back once she’d recovered her composure. On her back, already covered in a layer of snow, were two large panniers, though they looked empty despite the fact that she was returning from the shop.

“Everything alright?” you asked. Something felt wrong about the way she moved, a strange tension seeping through the air, though you weren’t quite sure what it could be.

She shuffled. “Yeah, just… uh… there are some ice orcs at the general store… I… I didn’t get very close. I thought I’d come back later. From what I heard, they’re only passing through on their way south.”

“Oh.”

Ice orcs.

There were a number of clans of the grey-blue skinned orcs living this far north, and they had a reputation for being vicious, bloody-minded raiders, though not all of them were. A few of them were trappers and hunters by trade, earning their living by taking their sleds pulled by huge snow-bears down to Tradewatch and then across to Eyrie Point. Sometimes they passed through this little collection of houses on their way through, but they rarely stopped to talk or share the time of day with anyone.

“Fuck, it’s freezing,” you hissed as the wind bit at your exposed cheeks.

“Don’t let me keep you,” she said. “I’ll see you at the Whisky Tumbler tonight?” she added with a swish of her tail.

You nodded. “I’ll be there.”

As much as you were nervous of the orcs too, you really needed some more food, so you ploughed on through the deep snow, eventually arriving at the Selkie Rock general store. Outside it were three loaded sleds, and each one was hitched up to a colossal snow-bear. Muzzled, though not cruelly, the bears were either lounging around in the powder like a seal on a summer beach, or, in the case of the one at the front, sitting alertly, rounded ears pricked, nose snuffing at the scents on the wind.

Giving them a wide, cautious berth, you swallowed apprehensively and scuttled into the shop, glancing over your shoulder at them. As you yanked back the heavy door and stepped inside, you collided instantly with something as solid as an iceberg. As you bounced off and your arse hit the half frozen floorboards of the deck outside the shop, you gazed directly up into the face of a truly huge ice orc.

He didn't look amused.

Before you could process what had happened, a colossal hand reached down for you and grabbed the front of your jacket, and you were hoisted off the ground and set back on your feet. “You ok?” he rumbled, taking half a step back so that you weren’t cricking your neck so much. “Didn’t see you down there,” he laughed quietly. His stern expression melted a little under the gesture. “Did you hurt yourself?”

“Uh… No… No, I’m good,” you faltered, resisting the urge to rub your right arse-cheek which still smarted from your tumble.

Fuck, he was really big. And actually, as you looked more closely at him, really handsome.

“Well, that’s good,” he said and stepped back a little more, ushering you inside the store. “Come in before you let all the snow in then.”

“Right.”

As you moved into the relative warmth of the shop, you saw two more ice orcs behind him. The first - the one with which you’d just had your head-on collision - had long black hair, pulled off his face in a single braid that was studded with bone, ivory, and metal beads and hung down to the middle of his back. His animal skin and fur jacket was toggled up the front with more carved horn, and his boots were the soft, reindeer pelt ones traditional with the ice orcs who herded the reindeer a little further south. You assumed, from that and from the sleds outside with their burdens covered against the driving snow, that he was a trapper and trader himself.

The others were a little smaller than him in size, but no less intimidating. Where his skin was a stormy slate grey, the female’s was a shade or two darker, and the male beside her wasn’t an ice orc at all, but had the green skin of their much more southerly cousins. They were still impressive though, and as you let your gaze sweep over them for a couple of seconds, they grinned at you in a way that was surprisingly friendly. Ice orcs usually had an aura of menace to them, but these two seemed relaxed, and as the male looped his arm affectionately around her waist, you realised that they were together.

The female chuckled suddenly and you noticed that she was staring at the largest of the three of them, standing right next to you. “Hey, boss… are we gonna head off, or are you gonna stare at this little human some more…?”

Surprised, you glanced up at him and found that his warm, brown eyes were locked on your face. “Uh,” he grunted. “Yeah. Sure. We’ve got goods to deliver. Uh… take care, ok?” he added at you as he scratched the back of his head with his un-gloved right hand.

“You too,” you chirped with a smile and walked away towards the back of the shop, heart hammering.

When you reached the selkie standing at the back of the shop, he looked at you with wide blue eyes and puffed his cheeks out in relief. “You’ve got balls of permafrost, my friend. I thought they were never going to leave,” he said shakily.

“They cause any trouble?” you asked, puzzled.

“Oh no,” he said, flapping his hands and glancing at the closed door. “No, they were very polite. It’s just… you know… they’re ice orcs! I thought they’d skin me if the price was disagreeable or something… I’ve not seen these ones here before, you see?”

You’d been about to quip that he’d read too many tabloid papers about their kind, but then you recalled that his entire clan had been almost completely wiped out a couple of generations back by an ice orc summer raiding party, so you clamped your mouth shut quickly enough to make your teeth click and smiled awkwardly.

It was only then that you noticed how bare the shelves were.

“Aleq,” you asked softly, and when he saw where your eyes were directed, he sighed.

“Yeah,” he said. “I’m sorry. The delivery didn’t come this week, so we’re running out of stuff now. I was going to ask Linny if she’d mind helping me with the sled, but I haven’t seen her yet… She usually comes today.”

You nodded. You knew that there was the permafrost cavern at the other end of town which held emergency supplies, so folks weren’t in danger of starving just yet, but without the delivery, people would be going hungry. “She was intimidated by the orcs and decided to come back later,” you explained. “I met her on her way over here.”

“Damned orcs,” he cursed, though he slow to anger. “What am I going to do?” he asked, his huge dark eyes full of fear as he stared at you.

Aleq wasn’t very tall, perhaps in his late thirties, and he carried the usual soft layer around his belly and chin that most selkies did, and in that moment he looked more like a chubby, frightened puppy than an adult. “I’ll go,” you found yourself saying. “I’ve got the dogs. I can make it to Tradewatch before the light fails. I’ll arrange a new delivery and be back in the morning. Hopefully they’ll be coming with me…”

“Oh, bless you,” he said, and you had to go round the counter and hug him because he looked so relieved.

Once you emerged, you found that the ice orcs had departed, their bears and sleds leaving their tracks in the snow as they headed south out of the village. Having bought very little in the end at Aleq’s, you returned home and began to make preparations for your journey to Tradewatch.

It didn’t take you long to hitch up a team of your fastest and smartest dogs. As you patted the lead bitches and worked your way down the line to where the sled was tied to a peg driven deep into the snow - else they might have taken off without you in their enthusiasm - you gave each dog a cuddle before stepping onto the back and stamping down on the bar which served as a break. It had big metal teeth in it which bit down into the compacted snow under your bodyweight, and allowed you to unhitch the tether without flying off at a hundred miles an hour.

At your signal to get ready, the dogs began a chorus of yapping and barking in their excitement to get going. No matter that you’d done this your whole life, it still gave you a thrill when you said, “Ready? Let’s go!”

You’d modified the sled with a slot that would hold your compass, and as you ran your fur mitten over the domed surface to clear it of snow and fog, you called ‘haw’ for them to take the left of the two paths in the snow up ahead, and the lead girls nudged round to follow it. They wanted to run and since it was only perhaps thirty miles, you let them set their own pace to start with. Any further than twenty-five to thirty miles, and you’d have regulated their pace more strictly, slowing them to a steady, ground-chewing trot. But you knew your team, and they trusted you.

It took just over three hours to reach Tradewatch, and the light was fading. As you drew up alongside the large inn which sat right in the centre of the wide harbour, your dogs’ tongues lolled but they wagged and looked like they could easily have run another twenty miles. You took your time with them, making sure they were all comfortable, before lashing the sled to a specifically placed tether, and stumping inside the familiar inn.

The folks at Tradewatch knew most of those from Selkie Rock Point, and the big, looming, white-furred yeti behind the counter spread his arms and boomed a greeting at you as you entered, sliding your hood back off your wind-bitten face.

“It’s good to see you too, Hugo!” you chuckled as he shimmied out from behind the bar like an excited cub and strode across the nearly empty room to sweep you up into his fluffy arms.

“It’s been ages!” he said, and you wriggled wildly and squealed as he snuffled affectionately at your neck.

“Oh my god you’re such a beast!” you yelled at your childhood best friend. “Get off! Stop! Get off!!” and you smacked him on the arm.

Laughing, he set you back down and stood back, beaming. His short, almost feline muzzle was split into a warm grin, revealing his pronounced canines. His kind and intensely blue eyes bored into yours and he asked, “What brings you here?”

“We didn’t get our food delivery this week, so I came to see what’s going on and try and get something sent out soon.”

His fluffy brows knitted together and his pink, feline nose twitched. “Shit,” he said. And then he gasped, “Oh! Did you bring the doggos?!”

With a laugh, you nodded. “I wondered how long it’d take you to ask. Yes, they’re round the side. Any chance I can stay for the night, by the way?”

“Of course!” he said as he barrelled for the door without looking back. A second later a chorus of excited yipping and howling rose and you shook your head.

“Well, I know where I rank at least…” you said to yourself, looking around the bar for the first time since entering. There in the corner were the three ice orcs from the general store that morning. “Hi,” you said nervously when you realised they'd been watching the spectacle that you and Hugo had made of yourselves.

The big one smiled at you and raised his pewter tankard, while the female whispered something to the other that made him bark out a harsh, amused laugh, and the big one flashed them a look which they both ignored.

Deciding to leave, you found that Hugo had tangled himself and all the dogs up in the lines, and it took you nearly a quarter of an hour to extricate them all. Bashfully sitting in a paw-print patterned snow drift, Hugo looked up at you. “Sorry.”

You had to laugh. “I missed you.”

He rose and helped you kennel the dogs, and once you were done, he said, “Come on, let’s get you inside and warmed up. I’ll bring out something for the dogs now that they’ve had a bit more of a rest.”

“Just add it to my overnight tab, Hugo,” you said firmly, knowing full well that the enormous fluffball was very likely to gift the meat to you and the dogs. He waved a huge hand and you followed him back inside, moving through the bar again on your way upstairs.

As he showed you up to your room, you asked, “The three ice orcs you’ve got downstairs… they were in Selkie Rock this morning.”

“Oh?” he said over his colossal shoulder, carrying your very modest overnight bag upstairs for you. “They cause any trouble?”

“No, none at all,” you said. “How long have they been here? They can’t have left much before I did.”

“An hour or so?” he said. “Why?”

You raised your eyebrows. “Those bears can really run…” you said.

He laughed. “They’ve ‘kennelled’ them - if that’s even the right word for something so big - in the big cages at the back. They’re very polite actually. The female loves to have her ears rubbed, apparently.”

“You’ve tried?” you asked, impressed.

Again, Hugo’s rumbling laugh filled the narrow corridor as he led you to the guest room in his own part of the building, instead of those on the ground floor for travellers. It had always been like this since he moved away from Selkie Rock Point, and you had never questioned it. “I asked them, and the big guy said it was fine to pet them while he was there, but if I valued my arm, I shouldn’t touch her otherwise.”

“Right…” you said rather shakily. Yeti weren’t exactly fragile either.

“Listen, why don’t you get settled in and then come down and grab some food and a drink and we can catch up?” he said, holding the door open for you.

You ducked under his muscular arm and he followed you inside stooping low so as not to scrape his head on the door frame and lingering just long enough to put your bag at the foot of the double bed.

“I have to go and talk to the supplier before they close for the day,” you said regretfully. “I’ll have time for that when I get back, ok?”

He smiled. “Sure.”

You hugged your oldest friend, burying your cheek against his soft stomach - he was nine feet tall after all - and heard him rumble something as he placed his big hands on your back. “I’ve missed you,” you said softly.

“Yeah, I’ve missed you too,” he said, ruffling your hair.

As you re-entered the bar, you caught the way the big orc scowled at you two, but you ignored it and said, “I’ll be back, hopefully in under an hour. I need to hear all about that human you told me you were dating…”

Hugo’s small, pointed ears pulled back against his head and he growled bashfully.

“You’re still together, right?” you asked.

He nodded. “Yeah,” he grinned, love-struck as a spring faun.

You punched him in the stomach, though it had no more effect on him than a light tap would have done to you, and said, “You’re such a dork. I’ll see you later.”

Casting one final look at the orcs, you smiled at the big handsome one and set about sorting out the delayed food order.

In the end, it turned out that their usual delivery driver had broken her leg and wasn’t able to make the journey, and that they didn’t have anyone else at the moment who could make the run. “Our other teams are all out at the moment on long-distance runs,” the fluffy satyr said, terribly embarrassed at the mix-up. “It’s all sitting in the warehouse ready to go, but I had no way of contacting you…”

With a sigh, you said, “Is there no other sled for hire at the moment?”

“Come back tomorrow morning and I’ll see who’s available then,” he said. “But I can’t make any promises. With the winter being as bad as it has been, and now with Fi off work…”

“I understand,” you said tightly. It really wasn’t his fault, but people were going to get hungry. “I’ll see you tomorrow at nine.”

Disheartened, you stumped back to the inn, and while you and Hugo shared drinks and the most amazing food, cooked by his business partner who ran the domestic side of the inn, you shared your worries about the supplies.

“What will you do?” he asked. “I mean, you’ve only got a team of eight dogs… you can’t take enough food for the rest of the winter back to Selkie Rock on your own…”

You shrugged. And then at the exact same time as heavy footfalls sounded behind you on the floorboards of the inn, an idea struck you. You turned around and there, approaching the pair of you with a shy expression on his face, was the big ice orc.

“So…” he said meekly. “I couldn’t help overhearing that you’re in a bit of a bind…?”

“You could say that again,” you said. “Would you and your friends be able to help us out?”

“Yeah,” he said. “We should be able to take it between the three of us,” he smiled. “If you’d like…?”

“My hero!” you grinned and he laughed. It wasn’t far off the depth of Hugo's deep rumble but the sound of it went straight through you and kindled a heat in you that you’d not felt in a long time.

“We’d be happy to help out. Shall we come with you to the warehouse tomorrow?”

“You’re sure?” you asked with a quick look at the other two in the corner. They grinned at you and both offered you a thumbs up, which you thought a bit odd, but at one glance from their leader, they stopped.

“Yeah. I’m Reshi by the way.”

“Nice to meet you, Reshi.”

He smiled again, his heavy-set jaw supporting truly massive tusks, and bobbed his head awkwardly before retreating. The other two thumped him on the arm and he swatted them away while you turned and caught Hugo’s eye.

“What?”

“No,” Hugo said firmly.

“No what?”

“No ice orc…” he growled. “I know you… and they’re… they’re not good…”

“You don’t even know them!” you hissed. “They seem alright…”

His scowl eased off a little bit and he said, “Just… be careful.”

You curled up that night in the familiar guest room while the dogs slept in the shelter outside, and snow-laden winds battered against the windows.

In the morning, you made your way down to the bar and found Hugo emerging through another door at the same time. You couldn't help the snicker that escaped you when you caught sight of him and when he flashed you a grumpy scowl, you said, “Your bed-head is worse than mine!”

It was true. His white fur was sticking up all over the place, but he just waved a hand mutely at you and stuck a mug under the coffee machine.

“Did the orcs stay here last night too?” you asked in a gruff whisper as you saw the now familiar trio in the corner of the bar, and he nodded. He’d never been particularly verbose in the morning, at least not until he was caffeinated.

“Mmm,” he added as the machine fired up and the smell of coffee pervaded the room.

The door to the kitchens opened and Perdi backed out, carrying three huge plates of cooked breakfast, carefully balanced. The mothfolk woman looked at you and fluttered her silvery wings a little as she saw you and started to laugh. “You two are as bad as each other,” she laughed. “Good to see you again, by the way,” she added. “I’ll bring you both something to eat in a bit… I’ll let your brains warm up a bit first though…”

“Thanks Perdi,” you smiled.

After you’d eaten, you approached the orcs who had also finished breakfast, and said, “Uh, so I’m almost ready to head over to the warehouse with you… I just have to take care of the dogs first.”

“Great,” Reshi said. “I’m good to go, so just come over when you’re ready and we can go together.”

You nodded, feeling a bit anxious at being alone with the colossal ice orc, particularly after Hugo’s warnings the previous night, but when you came back after feeding your team their breakfast, you found him on his own, crouched by the front door to the bar, petting the tiniest kitten you’d ever seen. He could have fitted it in the palm of his hand.

The strange noise that left your throat made the kitten look up, and as you bit your lips together to keep from making it again, he chuckled.

“I didn’t know the inn had a kitten…” you said, approaching. The little ginger nugget hissed fiercely at you and its tiny little tail puffed up. “I’m… more of a dog person…” you said without greeting it. “They always know.”

“I think he belongs to Perdi. Are you ready?” he said, straightening to his full height. Your mouth went dry and you simply nodded in response.

Outside, you huddled down into your jacket and tried not to keep looking up at him.

A snowy-coated minotaur snorted steam at him and growled as you passed, and you risked asking, “You get that a lot?”

Reshi shrugged. “Depends. Some folks don’t mind us, but others… well… I guess we don’t have the best reputation after all…” he cast his dark, friendly eyes down at you and added, “Honestly, I’m surprised you accepted our offer…”

It was your turn to lift a shoulder in an expressive shrug and you murmured, “We’ll go hungry if we can’t get food delivered… And anyway, you guys seem alright…?”

His laugh was rough but heartfelt and again, it kindled heat between your legs.

The satyr wasn’t all that keen to let his precious cargo leave the warehouse with three ice orcs and their snow-bears, but in the end you convinced him, saying that you’d accept full responsibility for the cargo during transit this one time, and that if anything went wrong, it wasn’t on him. “Please,” you said as he still faltered. “We need this food…”

“Alright then,” he said. “Here, sign this, and you can come and pick it up.”

Once that was done, Reshi looked at you and said, “You want to stay here while I head back and fetch the others? Save you getting all cold…”

“Thanks, but I can ready the dogs and come over with you. We can all leave together from here then, once your sleds are loaded.”

Saying goodbye to Hugo was painful as ever, but you promised to come and visit him again soon when the weather was a bit better. He nodded and hugged you close. “I don’t like the feel of the wind,” he murmured, casting his blue eyes towards the sky. “You make sure you’ve got enough protection for the way back in case it gets worse, alright?”

You nodded. “I’ve always got my emergency supplies and shelter with me, and the dogs are tough. They’ll be alright.”

“I know, I know,” he said. “I can’t help worrying about you. You’ve only got borrowed fur to keep you warm,” he added, tugging affectionately at the fur collar of your hood which you’d pulled down while you’d been inside.

“Thanks for taking care of me and the dogs,” you said as you headed outside.

Hugo eyed the three waiting orcs and pointed his clawed index finger at Reshi. “If she comes to any harm because of you…” he growled, showing all his very sharp teeth.

“She won’t,” Reshi said evenly. “I swear it. We’ll get her and the supplies safely back home.”

The yeti growled again and only shut up when you patted his furry chest. “See you soon,” you said and he nodded.

Reshi turned to the other two and said, “You two ready?”

They nodded, but the female didn’t budge and instead laughed, “You haven’t even introduced us, boss!”

“Shit,” he said, rubbing his chin. His hair was rimed with frost where the other two had covered their heads with deep hoods, but he didn’t seem in the slightest bit chilly. “Well, this is Tahira,” he said as he gestured to the female, who nodded. “And that’s Kushta,” he added at the southern orc, who raised his gloved hand in greeting. “Everyone ready?”

You nodded and said, “I’ll just bring the dogs round.” You’d harnessed them all up when you’d returned from your first trip to the warehouse, but had left them round the side of the inn while you went to say your goodbyes to Hugo.

The team yapped and barked all the way round and Tahira made a comment about hearing them a mile off. The bears snuffed disdainfully at the air as they appeared, but otherwise seemed to accept their new travelling companions easily enough.

With everything finally loaded, you set off for home just after midday. Tahira and Kushta took their two sleds in front of yours, and you slotted in between them and Reshi, who brought up the rear.

After only an hour of travelling, the weather closed in. The storm that Hugo had smelled on the air whipped up quickly, lashing the canvases of the sleds and battering you as you tried to stay astride the skids of your slid. In bitter, near white-out conditions, even the bears slowed to a trudge and the dogs kept their heads down, eyes squinting against the icy wind.

Reshi bellowed something from behind which you didn’t catch, and then he blew on a whistle, three short blasts. Kushta, who was in the lead, held up his right arm, fist balled, and the line drew to a halt.

Striding and plunging through the snow like a bison, Reshi caught up with you and put his hand on your back as he leaned down to yell in your ear, “We have to stop. If we keep going in this, we could get lost or the sleds could tip over.” He had drawn his fur hood up by now, and he lowered the piece of fabric which covered his mouth and nose. It had been cleverly hitched around the tips of his massive tusks.

You agreed. “Emergency shelters?”

He nodded. “They’re on Kush’s sled. We’ve got two. To save time, you could share with me?”

“Sure,” you said. You were hardly about to argue in conditions like these.

With a smile, he patted you once on the back and ploughed off through the snow, his thick thighs working to power him forwards. The packed snow of the track was alright, and the dogs weren’t all that bothered about the weather, other than that they couldn’t see very easily, but you knew that the moment you stepped off the sled you’d be struggling to move.

Reshi returned and said, “You stay on the path for now. We’ll set up the tents, and I’ll come back for you, alright?”

“I’m sure I could help…” you said, but he insisted.

“Thank you, but I think we’d probably be quicker… We’re used to doing this all the time. You just keep warm, ok?”

“Easier said than done…” you said with a hollow laugh. No matter how good the reindeer-fur mittens were, you were starting to get properly cold now.

You watched with avid interest as the orcs got to work. In fact, most of Kushta’s sled was taken up with their own gear, and it transpired that he was usually the support sled while the others carried the trade goods. It was hard to see exactly what they were doing, but their tents were made of tall, straight poles which they covered with a sheet of stitched-together animal pelts, and out of the top they poked a metal chimney. They had small, portable stoves which suddenly seemed like the most inviting thing in the world. Finally they piled and compacted drifts of snow down around the outside of the lower, sloping walls of the conical tents, partly to insulate and partly to anchor them. All in all, it took them fifteen minutes to put up two tents.

“You really have done that a few times…” you said, teeth chattering as Reshi returned to you. He just grinned lopsidedly at you.

Deciding that no one would be travelling along the trails in this weather, you unhitched the dogs and the bears and left the sleds in place. Surprisingly, the bears seemed to welcome your team, but the dogs were cautious. An idea struck you and you said, “Reshi, can I say hello to your bear?”

“You should get inside,” he warned. “You’re getting too cold.”

“Just quickly,” you said. “If I tether the dogs near the bears they’ll be more sheltered, and if they see me greeting the bears, they won’t be afraid - the bears won’t hurt them, right?”

“Oh, no,” he said. “They’ve grown up with dogs too. They’ll be fine.”

You struggled the short distance to where Tahira and Kushta had already settled the bears down, and you glanced up at Reshi. He simply jutted his chin out and you held out your hand for the bear to sniff. You wanted to ask him what her name was, but the wind stole every breath you had from you, so instead you showed the dogs that the bears were friends, settled them down in the middle of the small triangular arrangement of bears, and then allowed Reshi to lead you to his tent.

Tahira was already kindling a fire inside for him, and he smiled at her in thanks as you stepped inside. Instantly protected from the wind, you felt warmer already, and you took your boots off and shook the compacted snow off the soles before bringing them to the fire. Your socks were damp, which wasn’t great, but you had feeling in your toes still, and the fire would do its work to warm the tent up in no time.

“Thanks,” he murmured to Tahira and then spoke softly to her in his own language. For some reason you’d forgotten that he must be bilingual. The sound of his native tongue in his rumbling bass was deeply attractive, and you turned your face away, trying to pretend that the colour in your cheeks and the warmth in your face was from the strengthening fire.

Tahira slipped out and Reshi toggled the flap down securely before removing his jacket and hanging it on a peg that jutted out from one of the supporting poles. He turned and found you staring around at the tent and smiled. “It’s not much, but it’s home for now,” he said.

“It’s amazing. I know your people build homes out of snow in the winter, but I’ve never been inside a shelter like this one.” Actually it was difficult to focus on the neat economy of the shelter when he was standing there wearing a very tight-fitting under-shirt and equally figure-hugging black sealskin leggings. He was so powerful, with enormously muscular thighs and biceps that dipped down from his shoulders and then bulged in just the right way…

He grinned. “The snow houses are more permanent,” he said and you forced yourself to look at his face instead of his incredible body. “It takes time to cut the snow into blocks, and we didn’t have time for that today. These are for hunting trips and emergencies.” He approached and said, “You warming up a bit now?”

You nodded and shot a glance at the tiny wooden stove. “This is neat…” you commented.

“Mmm,” he smiled and then pointed at the matting on the floor beside you and added, “Mind if I sit?”

“What? Of course I don’t mind,” you gasped, still standing with your arms crossed, as close as you could get to the stove without singeing you clothes.

He smiled shyly and stared at the fire for a while, hugging his knees in close.

“Everything ok?” you ventured after a minute. His long hair hung down his back in a thick, black rope, and the flickering light danced on the metal beads braided into it. You resisted the urge to reach for it and test the weight of it.

Reshi swallowed thickly and as the storm raged outside, you barely heard his response. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s… It’s nice.”

“What is? This weather?”

With a look askance at you, he grinned wonkily again and your insides flipped over. “No. It’s nice to meet a human - anyone, actually - who’s not afraid of us.”

“Back in town… with the minotaur… you said it happens a lot?”

He sighed and turned his face away. “Yeah. Don’t get me wrong, a lot of my people are like that and deserve worse than a spat curse in passing, but it’s no different from orcs down south, or gnolls, or…” he trailed off with a sigh. “We’re not all like that. Everyone knows we sell the best quality furs and meat, so they tolerate us, but… it’s wearing after a while.”

You had been standing, trying to get the heat from the fire up the entirety of your front, but now that you were warming up, you took your own jacket and fur outer-trousers off and he stared openly at you for a moment before his skin darkened and he looked away, swallowing thickly.

Approaching him again after dumping them on the edge of the small shelter, you pulled a small storage crate over to him and sat close beside him. On a whim, you rested your head against his huge arm and said, “I don’t think you’re so bad…”

He laughed and you felt the tension wash out of him.

“You hungry?” he asked.

“Not yet, but I could do with something to drink.”

Reshi produced a bottle of thick, berry cordial which he mixed with hot water and produced the most delicious, warming drink you could have thought of. You nursed it in your hands and let him tell you about growing up in a clan that didn’t want to massacre the fuck out of everything within a fifty mile radius.

The wind eased off about an hour later, but he muttered that it probably wouldn’t last. From what you knew of storms in the area, you had to agree. He’d ducked outside and seen what was on the horizon and confirmed your suspicions. As he came back inside, however, you heard a very particular sound coming from the tent beside yours, and you froze, caught halfway between laughing and snorting and barely restraining yourself from either. You weren’t sure if you should be embarrassed or amused that Tahira and Kushta were in the throes of what sounded like particularly amazing sex, and when Reshi saw that you’d also heard, his ears pulled back just a little and he screwed his eyes shut.

“I… I’m sorry about them,” he said as he fastened the toggles of the tent up again behind him.

“Why?” you grinned, finally allowing yourself that giggle.

“They’re horny as rabbits all year round.”

“Must be tough being single while they’re at it…” you said, and then your face fell. “Unless you’re not actually single…” you added quickly. “I’m sorry. I just assumed… I mean… you could have someone waiting for you, right?”

He held up his big hand and laughed. “Relax,” he said. “I’m single. Very, very single.”

The tone of his voice caught you off guard and you frowned.

Reshi laughed but offered no comment.

“No one catch your eye back home?” you asked cautiously.

He shook his head. “I mean, I’ve had partners in the past, but… nothing’s really lasted. I guess it’s partly because I travel a lot, but mostly it’s just…” he shrugged. “No real connection, you know?”

“Tell me about it,” you snorted. “I mean, I love the people in Selkie Rock Point, but… well… there aren’t many of them…! If no one catches your eye, then… well… good luck!”

He grinned. “Try living in an ice orc clan where there are only four or five families, and every Spring Thaw at the festival, you risk being mated off to another clan at the drop of a hat…”

“That happens?”

“All the time.”

“It ever happen to you? I mean, did they ever try?”

“Yeah,” he snorted as he sat back down. “That’s how I met Tahira.”

“No way!” you gasped. “You mean, you and Tahira were…?” At that very moment, a long, satisfied bellow from Kushta sounded from the tent next door and you both snorted and cringed slightly.

Reshi leaned back on his hands in the pleasant warmth of the tent’s fire. “Seems like she’s happy though,” he grinned.

“How did they meet?” you asked. “Kushta doesn’t look like an ice orc?”

Reshi shook his head. “He’s not. He came north when he worked as a guide for people travelling up the coast. We met him in Tradewatch, actually, and they’ve…” Tahira obviously came with a broken cry and he waved his hands. “Well, they’ve never looked back.”

He rolled back onto the floor, his hands folded behind his head and stretched out across the entire diameter of the tent. His socks, you noticed, were rather adorably colourful, in a beautiful pattern of red and blue wool.

The storm picked up again, masking any further activity from next door, and you let Reshi introduce you to an orcish game that was similar to chequers. He was really good, and you were absolutely terrible, but it didn’t stop you having fun for a good couple of hours.

Eventually though, you shared a meal and lay back on the furs afterwards and he caught you staring at him. “What?” he asked in a gentle but definitely perplexed voice.

With a shy laugh, you said, “So… I mean… I’ve seen a few ice orcs before, from a distance…” you said, concentrating on the storm-grey of his skin and not on the warm light in his eyes, or the length of his thick eyelashes, or… Clearing your throat, you went on while he propped himself up on one elbow, face alight with interest, the rest of his body relaxed and easy despite the storm howling outside.

You had worried briefly about the dogs, and he’d even gone out to check on them and reported back that they were all curled up in the snow like little arctic foxes, sheltered by the bulwark that three snow-bears had formed around them. “All very cute,” he’d grinned.

Now, as he listened to you stammering awkwardly about having seen orcs before but never having had a conversation with one, his lips curled into a soft smile.

“And?” he asked coyly. “What’s your opinion of us?”

“Well,” you said, swallowing nervously. “The data set is rather limited, but… from what I know of you… you’re… you’re very lovely…” YOU’RE VERY LOVELY? You groaned. What the hell? Who says something like that? And to an eight and a half foot tower of slate grey skin and muscle and tusk.

To your surprise, he let out a slow, deep laugh. “You are too,” he said.

Something changed then and you smiled, hardly daring to believe that this was headed where you both knew it was.

He reached out for you and gently drew you down off the small box where you’d been sitting. “You know,” Reshi all but purred, “I think it’s very impressive that you volunteered to go and help your people. Acts like that amongst orcs are… highly thought of.”

“Really?” you smiled. “I mean…”

“You have the heart of an orc,” he laughed, and brought his rough hand to your chin, tilting it up. “And I’d very much like to kiss you…”

“Oh…” you breathed. “Sure… I’d… I’d like -” he cut you off with a kiss, his huge tusks nudging against your cheeks. His lips were surprisingly soft, the gesture gentle at first, but he deepened it and you felt the arousal spike in both of you.

His big hands moved over your body and he began to undress you slowly, never once breaking the kiss. Pliant and utterly willing, you let him, barely able to catch your breath. Naked and lying across his lap, you revelled in the way your skin tingled, your heart hammered, and your blood sang in your ears. His fingertips slid between your thighs and he nudged them apart with his knuckles. Carefully, respectfully, he dragged one fingertip slowly over your folds and you bucked in his grasp.

“You’re so wet,” he crooned, drawing back in surprise, and you laughed.

You shifted your hand from his chest - which was disappointingly still covered by his long-sleeved underlayer - and pressed your palm against his hard cock which at that moment was digging you in the hip. You weren’t the only one worked up.

He grinned lopsidedly and laid you down on the soft furs before ripping his top off over his head.

“Fuck, you’re so beautiful,” you cursed, staring openly at the expanse of bare chest as he loomed over you. He had a couple of scars, but mostly the canvas of his slate-grey skin was perfect and unmarred. His hard, darker nipples were pierced and you reached for the glinting metal of one of them, tugging gently until he groaned and then growled.

Reshi pounced, parting your legs and pulling you into his lap. He was rough as he moved you about, but always careful you realised somewhere through the haze of your lust.

Kneeling on the floor, he lifted you up and brought his mouth to your heat. With your back lying along his thighs, his hands on the curve of your arse, you writhed and gasped as he laved his dark tongue over your wet folds and groaned again. “You taste so good,” he rumbled between the movements. His fingers tightened almost painfully on your hips and he lifted you a few inches higher, and got to work.

His tongue tasted you, inside and out, circling, nudging, teasing, tasting, until you felt blinding white heat rolling up inside you.

“Reshi!” you gasped, but he was relentless now, devouring you hungrily, reverently; on his knees and worshipping your body; lost in the sounds you made for him. “Reshi!” you yelled, fingers grasping at nothing, and came hard against the pressure of his tongue. Your body shook and convulsed, but he did not release you until you fell back, limp and gasping.

Barely able to crack an eye open, you lay there as he set your body - still sporadically twitching in the aftermath of your blinding orgasm - down again, and fumbled to undo the laces at the top of his leggings. His hand tightened around his impressive cock, almost painfully hard and weeping, but you shook your head and hissed, “I want you…”

He raised an eyebrow. “You sure?” His tone was only that of concern, not arrogance. He was big though.

Your eyes sank back down to his cock and you grinned. “I’m sure.”

—

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chrysalispen · 4 years ago

Text

Prompt #18 - Panglossian

AO3 Link HERE

=====

The Yard of Saints was what people now called the high and lonely promontory that guarded the pass between old Ishgard and the crystalline wastes of Mor Dhona.

It once had another name, or so Biggs' father had once said, but most folk had long since forgotten it. The few souls who braved the Coerthan wilds, grown even colder and more inhospitable in the face of the Eighth Calamity, came no closer to the Yard than the ruins of old Dragonhead, and it was in the old camp that a man in patchwork armor -- some soul from a nearby settlement volunteering for the watch -- had watched him gearing up to head into the foothills with a squint and a cynical smile.

"Sure you ain't goin' up there alone, engineer?" the man asked. Biggs shrugged.

"I'm thinkin' there ain't much in these hills nowadays to kill a man," he said. "Other than the blizzards."

"You'd be thinkin' wrong. Even if there weren't wild aevis up there-- You ain't heard about him, I guess."

"Maybe. Who's 'him'?"

The man spat to one side and threw a piece of kindling onto the struggling campfire. "The chief says it's naught but old folk tales, but there's rumored to be a skinchanger who stalks them ruins up on the point. A giant that protects the Yard from intruders, or so the old folks' tales say."

Biggs knew the story. The Ironworks had not a few legends of their own passed down about the company's founders. Among them was a tale in which Cid Garlond and Nero tol Scaeva had been attacked by a pack of slavering beastkin while undertaking a mission in Coerthas, and would have died if not for the interference of a mysterious samurai. The story itself was constant enough that Biggs felt some of it must be true, though he rather doubted the descriptions of the founding fathers' timely saviour: those details seemed to be embellished with each telling.

Aloud he said, "There's plenty of folk tales about the land, aren't there?"

"Not many who've faced the blade of the Guardian and lived to tell the tale." The man coughed, fished around in his belt pouch, and produced a pipe which he began to tamp with moko leaf. "S'pose it's your funeral anyroad, mate."

He had, admittedly, almost turned back halfway up the slope. The ruins on the promontory had been ruins even in the Warrior's day, so it was said, and they were even more hazardous in the aftermath of the calamity: the aevis up here would eat anything, even each other, and it was as much as a man's life was worth to get caught up here after dark, especially with the snow that almost constantly fell in Coerthas.

Well, he'd made a promise. He'd spend the night in the mausoleum if it came to that.

His feet crunched through hard-pack and grit; it was cold up here, much colder than Mor Dhona even in the dead of winter. Biggs shivered, tugging his worn scarf tighter about his cheeks and jaw, and leaned upon his walking-stick as he continued the ascent. The gunblade he carried on his back was surely covered in ice by now, the trigger frozen solid. He tried not to think about that as the sun began to sink beneath the outline of the peaks.

The brittle and over-bright sunlight turned orange, the shadows slanting deeper across the snow, and he knew he would not be able to finish his business and return to camp before night fell. Every small sound, no matter how insignificant, wore its warning into his limbs. The road was silent - or, he fancied, save for his footsteps, which every predator in Coerthas was like to hear as loud as they seemed in his ears. He forced himself to set his fear aside even as his mission took on an almost talismanic importance.

Press on, he told himself. It's not far. Press on. But the engineer's certainty that he was being watched- stalked- only grew, seemingly in proportion to his fatigue. Every minute seemed an hour, and he became quite certain that the man in the camp had been correct and he was walking to his death.

Thus he was not at all surprised when the enormous purple aevis appeared from behind the remains of an ancient stone wall with a grinding snarl that set his knees to trembling. Its jowls dripped with saliva and levinbolts gathered at its wing-tips, ready to fire. The three that he knew had been following him since he set foot in their territory had fanned out to cover his flanks, preventing any means of their prey's escape.

Mouth suddenly as dry as a cotton boll, Biggs slowly reached for the hilt of the antique gunblade he'd taken along, a gunblade that had once belonged to Nero tol Scaeva and more a visual deterrent these days than a proper weapon, waiting for one of them to break his guard and spill his innards to the snow with a single rake of its wicked-looking curved claws-

-and the keen whistle of steel cut through the air. The severed head fell to the snow with a dull thud and the rest of its body followed, limbs still twitching.

Its two companions attempted a pincer attack, claws flexing as they spewed flame- but it availed them nothing; their unseen assailant struck again and the creatures collapsed alongside their fellow. The snow before the crumbled outbuildings of the ruin was no longer blinding and pure white, but deep crimson and rusting brown. The pack leader bared its teeth in a threatening snarl, but it folded its wings and cringed in supplication as the swordsman took a step forward into the diminishing light of dusk: a great hulk of a man, taller even than Biggs himself.

"Pathetic," sighed a voice that was to his ears like gravel grinding beneath the heel of a boot. "I have no desire to toy with you, beast. Away."

The aevis fled.

Biggs could not make out the face in the dark, only a pair of eyes like chips of ice and a long mane of hair. The hand, snugly wrapped in layers of leather and cloth, rested upon the hilt of a long and curved blade whose like he had never seen before. He had the strangest feeling that he had not so much been rescued from certain death as he had simply watched one small pack of predators fall prey to a much more dangerous animal.

"And you," said the swordsman. "What do you here?"

Throat so constricted that he barely trusted himself to speak, he held his parcel skyward.

"I go to the Yard," he said hoarsely. "A gift, for the Warrior."

After a long and tense moment, the hand that lay ready to draw its weapon fell away.

"Go, then," spoke its owner. "The aevis will not give chase so long as the scent of fresh blood remains in the air."

"Thank---"

"Do not thank me. I do this for her," the giant said. Biggs could see nothing of the face, only the motion of hair flowing like the river under ice as the chin lowered. "Go do what you came to do and leave this place- before I decide a savage makes better sport than dragons."

He didn't need to be told twice. The gunblade remained untouched, its weight seemed to drag at his ankles as he all but scurried his way up the hill.

~*~

The Warrior's final resting place - an Ishgardian-style mausoleum within which also rested one of the Ironworks' founders - sat at the center of the Yard. The tomb was a very different place from her enshrined monument in Idyllshire; the latter was covered in detritus year-round, mostly the various hand-painted wooden icons with a likeness of her face. The Children of Light carried the pictures with them on their pilgrimages to the shrine, where they'd light candles and hold a vigil to pray to the Warrior for luck and protection.

From all G'raha Tia had said of her, it was a safe bet to assume the Warrior of Light would have been sorely grieved to know that in the tenebrous days of the Eighth Umbral Era, she was the subject of worship. It wasn't his place to gainsay them, though. There was hardly enough ambient aether to perform basic tasks still let alone summon the Warrior as a primal. And so long as it brought no harm to the land, far be it from him to deprive folk of whatever means they had to hold onto hope in this blighted world.

The mausoleum itself was devoid of such trinkets, save a fresh bouquet of Dravanian spotted orchid. There were always fresh flowers atop her tomb whenever anyone came by to care for it. Neither he nor anyone else in the Ironworks knew who kept bringing them, and they had long ago resigned themselves to the fact that there were some mysteries they might never solve.

Biggs collapsed against cold stone and half-melted ice with a deep sigh, placed a handful of kindling on the floor, and struck a flint until the sparks took. Wind was already whistling around the edges of the structure and he was very sure there would be more snow overnight. Best to stay here until morning light and make his way down the mountain while the dragons slept.

He didn't realize he had dozed until he heard the grinding of the hinges on the heavy door. Startled to full wakefulness, the president of the Garlond Ironworks reached for the gunblade and turned to face the interloper, thinking one of the dragons had followed him after all.

The Guardian of the Yard stood in the doorway, staring at him with bleak and empty eyes. His hand fell away from the hilt, trembling slightly.

"I only mean to stay until dawn," Biggs said, his voice steady. "Give me until then. You can share my fire if you like."

The man said nothing, but crossed his arms and leaned against the wall. Now that Biggs could see more clearly, no longer half-panicked and powered by adrenaline, he could see a face that was far younger than he would have expected. Even more surprisingly, the man appeared to be of a Spoken race that had not existed in this part of the star for so long most thought them to have vanished entirely: the pearlescent curve of a third eye gleamed from beneath the curtain of wind-tossed blonde.

"You said the Warrior was your friend?"

Biggs regretted his words almost instantly, spoken more to make conversation than out of any real curiosity. He was quite sure somehow that the man might have taken a notion to kill him, from the feral darkness that shifted behind those eyes.

But a strange smile curved his lips.

"My enemy," he said. "But also my friend."

"You knew the Warrior of Light personally? But that would imply you were alive when- I mean, surely that's-"

The smile faded and Biggs was more certain than ever he stood a chance of dying at this man's hands. "A lesser creature like yourself knows nothing of what is possible, and what is not, for one such as myself. Or her. Do not presume to speak of it."

His heart hammered in his ears as silence fell, save the crackling of the fire. He fought the urge to wipe his clammy palms on his snow-damp breeches, awaiting that whistling sound which he knew would presage his final moments.

It never came. A soft sigh echoed through the corners of the tomb: the sound of a sated predator deciding the hart that shared its lair was no longer tantalizing enough to devour.

"I have sought her return longer than you have lived."

He is mad, Biggs thought. He must be mad. To hold onto hope in the face of all that has happened, for two centuries, that the Warrior herself might still live. Even Master Scaeva didn't think-

"...You believe that she lives? That she will come back to Eorzea?"

"Mortal death means very little to those with the means to transcend the physical." A feverish, almost manic light danced in the man's eyes, or perhaps it was merely the flickering of the firelight reflected upon marble. "What is the body but a mere vessel?"

Uncertain what to say, the engineer could only nod. The motion went unnoticed.

"Yes, my friend will return to me when the time is right," the swordsman said. That unsettling smile returned, soft and joyful and utterly insane, and it was then Biggs saw that this fell and terrible creature loved the Warrior of Light as much as the founding fathers had loved her- in his own twisted and destructive fashion. "And when she does, I will be waiting to receive her with open arms. Thus our dance will resume: as timeless and eternal as our very souls."

At this declarative - and ominous - statement, silence reigned over the mausoleum and its inhabitants, both living and dead, once more. Biggs was certain he would not be able to find the wherewithal to sleep that night, but sleep he did: lulled into dreams by the hypnotic flicker of the light and his own fatigue from the climb.

And when he awakened at dawn to place his gifts upon each grave -- silk flowers, fashioned into the likeness of the Althyk lavender the Warrior was said to have loved -- he saw that the fire had burned to embers, and he was alone.

#ffxivwrite2020 #prompt 18: panglossian #zenos x wol

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the-fae-folk · 5 years ago

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Story Masterpost

Hey! This took a while to make. But here, as promised, is my story masterpost. I’ve organized some things so you can find them easier, though I’ll admit that “Beauty, Secrets, and Magic” is just the stuff I couldn’t really sort into a smaller category. Of the Fae Unaware Directions Come Running Water Distant Wars Wishes of the Sea In Order To See You Must... An Offer Those who say... Respect is Due An Exchange Cage Come to Us Ancient Wars The Age of Iron What are you? Immortal Hidden Among You First Music The Distant Days Count them with Letters Flower Wars Eyes? The Lost Ones We Fade Believing in Death Prices to pay Dance with the whole World Dreaming Lure *Click* Giants Asleep Fears of Darkness Bigger Problems Listen to the Giants Sweet Faerie Wine The Largest and Tiniest Decay and Dreaming Eyes and Earth Walking Mountains Battle Standard Gnaall Fictitious Dichotomy Faltering Heartbeats Among You Pixie Wings Unable to Perish Bridge trolls What is Fairy Ring? Terrible Wars Beautiful Dreams Kisses in the Night The Will of Trees Make no Mistake Have you Eaten? Beauty and Fashion Can you Calculate the Mind of the Fae The First Skies Do Fae Children Age at the Same Rate? A Dark Memory Black Dwarfs and Dark Futures The Conversation Vows of Love Ship of the Skies Reaching Hands The Little Folk The Prophet of Silvamune Damhán Alla Feasting Lost in the Deep Woods A way out? Faerie Dance Thrice Said is True Fools rush in The Deep Woods Welcome to the Deep Woods Places We Know Silence No Journey Will-o-the-Wisp Where are the Deep Woods? A Dreaming Memory Running Who Knows the Path? Unknown Footsteps Who Speaks? Go Home Whispers in the Mist Mossy Glades Old Gate An Echo of Footsteps Follow Me Tragic Ending The Way Forward is Still Barred Don’t Follow the Wisps Postern Never Know Waterfall When you Go Out Gold-Eyed Beast The Nightmare Step Lightly Bones Alone Golden Eyed Beast In Hiding Forget what comes Something Powerful Standstill Death Beware the Beast The Encounter Companion in the Cold Slumbering The Hunt Begins Again Well of Dreaming Light Screams in the Night Where is the Gold-Eyed Beast? Fear Something has Changed …3 …2 …1 The Crown of Shadow 7 Broken Mirrors Seven Seven Shattered Mirrors Places of Faerie A Faraway Place You The Places Between Distant Wars Buried beneath the Sand Wandering Blind The Lake A Flowered Ocean Exist? Or Not? Life’s Flow Door without a way Time Never Passes Here Only the Stories Remain Cracking Ice Fractal Prison Enough? All that remains is Dust Devastation of Dark Fire More of the Flowered Ocean Cliffs of Illithia and the Naiuruin Forests Beware the Wisps Stardew Deep Furnace Lanterns Lanterns On the River’s Edge The White Hound Do the Fae have Animals? An Old Lantern Lost Letters The Lament Fragment Silent Screams The Wait Together A Near Forgotten Letter Letter from a Brownie Tell a Story Lured Away From the Sea and Shore Warnings Never Free Don’t Stop Eat Not The Rule of Names Defiance Pretend Not To See Swamp Water Trust Me Do not Take Do Not I Seek A Warning

8 Tales at the Hearth’s Edge The Hill A tale of Three Gifts She and He A Chance Meeting The War (Coincidence?) The Girl and the Road Silver Charity A Tale of Autumn Strange Beings The One Who Grieves The Lady The Librarians Not Quite Human Dark Eyed Forge Fires Together the Light She danced upon the Earth Crows for Eyes Wings Aeon Circling A Laughing God Sssssss... Broken Tomb She danced in the Snow The Dragon in the Well What Became of Her... The Prisoner in the Dark She Knows Adventure A Firebird Imprisoned The Child Mine Spoken Before The Descent The Courts of Season The Autumn Days Great Sorrow In the darkest days of Winter The Winter Remains Awakening of Spring End of Summer Wine and Summertime Blustering Winds The Lord of Autumn The Winter Queen Frost The Autumn Court Winter Masque A Cold Truth The Winter Court Nearly Time The End of Winter The Lord of Springtime The Court of Spring Spring’s Song Lovers of Springtime Light after the Rain The Time you Need The Story of the One Who Grieves Nobody Answered ... It Comes Closer Before the Silver Blossoms A West Wind It is Time The End of Spring Other Courts A Courtly Vision A Constellation of Myth Court of Ashes Hosts of Myrkvatn Aiolion Tribes Court of Dawn Castle inside a Raindrop Order The Rivers of Athu The Sidhe The Valley of Ga’Maldor Empire of the Seven Blossoms Canyons of Mür ‘gra Crowns Long Ago Legends Key to Destiny The Second Key The Third Key Three KEYS? About the Cave Crown of Sunlight New Moon Summer’s End What do the Crowns look like? Court of Shadows Autumn to Winter Songs Seek Listen Unknown Follow A Dark Call Burning / Why is it burning? Forgotten Prisoner Chains Come to the Faeries Thorns and Dreaming I Dreamed I Walked Fernweh Stories Told Poetry Bluest Sky Blue Red Yellow Orange Loving Winter Fire and Bone Requiem of a Love Song Eye See You Green Sleep among the Bluebells Song of Stars Night Companion Dancing in the Forest Moon Waters Memory in Sepia Lilies Scream. Cry. Silence. Drifting Faerie Ring Count Them Carefully Fairy Ring Dance Other Tales The Pied Piper Apples for Eternity The Dam Is anyone there? Call to the Sea Warmth Midas Grove of Shadows Resting Place All Hallows Evening Tale The Great Tree Sister of Mine Wit and Words Bread and Circuses Forest and Sea in Sorrow Reflection of the Heart Part 1 The Boy, The Troll, and the Bridge Between Them. The Raven and the Stone Crow Houses and Homes Beauty, Secrets, and Magic Seed Rain Brings Life Such Dreams If Wishes The Ancient Magic Beginning or Ending? Dive Into Silent Unknowns Eternity Like Leaves Imagine you walk across the sand Power of the Moonlight Enchanted Trap Rage Confusion Gifts of Stone Longing for Other Selves Darkened Waves Hunt of the Owl Not You Forgotten. Fairy Tales Curse Ravens Come Look Sun Stars Autumn Reflections Drift Gold beneath Grey Union Incomparable Names Life’s Road Fire in the Heart A sort of Balance Beauty of a Rose Not what they seem Glamour Humanity’s Treasures Compliments Infinity Why must you reject happiness? A Sounding of Silence Winds of Change The Blessing of Indifference In Tears we Grow Beauty A Raindrop The Trouble With Masks Lunar Eclipse Fly Ahead Be Ready Ugliness and Beauty The Secret of Bridges Morning? Wasting Time Widdershins Equilibrium Snail at Home Is it enough? Seven Poisons A Nexus of Roads Silence with us In the Face of Silence Cycle of Burning A Sky full of Joy Cloistered Grove Choices Fly Butterfly Fly Blooming in Adversity Distant Endless Moors Sweet Berries A Dreaming Once Met Seas of Black Sky Heaven’s Peaks Together upon the Road Written in the Stars Stolen Wishes Anew Blooming to the Music Sing A New World Song of Stone Love is... Water to the Soul Eyes will Watch Sometimes its nice Explore Change in the Air Drowning in the Dark The Song Plays On Furnace of Creation A Gemstone Found Upon A Hill Have you? Sometimes the Tree Dies Hold my hand A Simple Magic Of Course New Fallen Snow Seedlings Sleeping Wheel Still Sleeping Snowdrops Enjoy the Spring Cloying Beauty Soft Silence Mystery of the Rose Just Be When We were Here Last Ship Swift River Broken Painful Awakenings The Story of a Butterfly Such Beauty Play On Strawberry Mother and Child Strange Places Beyond Black Suns The Shallow Sea A Foundation of Nothing Awake in the Darkness Endless Darkness Absolutus Infinitus Twilight to Dawn The Burning Light Ruins, Somewhere Quotes from the Writer Alpha Beta Gamma Delta Epsilon Zeta Eta Theta Iota Kappa Lambda Mu Nu Xi Omicron The Journey The Lonely Tree Consider the Stars First City Only the Future Left What makes a Monster? A Secret Place Not Far Off

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razieltwelve · 5 years ago

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The Queen of Winter (RWBY AU Snippet)

Note: This goes with Dragon.

X X X

For ten thousand years, or so it was said, Atlas stood unbroken, hidden behind its walls of ice and a storm that never ended. Safe in the eye of the storm, its people prospered, and any Grimm that ventured too close fell prey to the ice, the wind, and the snow.

But the storm weakened, for it was born from the blood of ancient dragons, and the dragons were all gone. Little by little, year by year, it weakened. And the walls of ice that never melted began to thaw one by one. Atlas had stood unbroken for ten thousand years, but nothing lasts forever.

X X X

Weiss dreamed of stormy skies and endless drifts snow. She dreamed of a land where it was always winter, and the sun gleamed off glaciers that had no end. She dreamed of wings that brought blizzards and of breath that froze oceans. She dreamed of fangs and claws and scales as white as freshly fallen snow.

Sometimes, when she closed her eyes, she could hear something beyond the howl of the wind. It sounded almost like a dragon’s roar.

X X X

When Weiss was four, she awakened her magic. Her father looked at the ice creeping across the floor and the frost on the windowpanes, and he shook his head.

“Not strong enough.”

And Weiss looked beyond him to the towering walls that had stood unchallenged for as long as anyone could remember, walls of ice as sure and certain as the dawn. The walls were melting, and what use was one child’s magic when the kingdom needed a dragon?

Not strong enough. The words echoed in her heart, and something burned in her chest, something cold and almost cruel. It felt like winter clawing through her veins.

X X X

Weiss became a prodigy. By the time she was twelve, she was the finest ice mage the kingdom had known in centuries. Day and night she laboured, searching for a way to strengthen the walls and the storm that protected her kingdom. Many were the nights she slept surrounded by open books and tattered scrolls, and always the answer was the same.

Not strong enough.

And yet, was her father any better?

She had delved deep into the history of her people, she had learned the stories of their greatest kings and queens. Her father was no great king, though he liked to style himself as one. He was quick to assign blame, but even quicker to take credit, and his magic was weak.

He was no caller of storms, no bringer of winter, no weaver of ice and snow and glacier.

And the stronger she grew, the angrier he became.

“Not strong enough,” he would growl. “Never strong enough.”

And for all that he was right - Weiss still wasn’t strong enough - he was hardly any better.

X X X

When Weiss was fifteen, her father sent her from the palace. The great walls of ice were still melting, and the storm was growing ever weaker. More and more Grimm dared to approach Atlas, and the people grew afraid. There were whispers of his weakness, of how his magic had not slowed the failing of the walls or the fading of the storm.

There were whispers too of Weiss, of how perhaps she might succeed where her father had failed. And so he sent her away, but he would soon regret it. For Weiss distinguished herself in battle against the Grimm.

Assigned to one of the kingdom’s outposts, Weiss and those she commanded won a great battle. The Grimm assailed them in great numbers, but Weiss called tearing winds and bitter cold, and the Grimm were driven back with heavy losses.

Queen of Winter they called her.

“No,” she replied. “I am only a princess.”

But still those she led merely smiled and shook their heads.

“Queen of Winter,” they insisted.

And the title spread throughout the land.

X X X

When Weiss was seventeen, she died.

Her father sent more men to the outpost, a blessing she’d thought at first, an acknowledgement of her good work. She should have known better. On a scouting trip that passed a lake, they planted a knife between her ribs and flung her into the icy waters.

She sank quickly, embraced by the cold and the long, lingering dark. Her last sight was of the black depths of the lake below her, and the trails of red spiralling up toward the surface and the cloud-strewn skies above.

An old prayer filled her mind even as water and blood filled her lungs.

X X X

My scales are white And my blood is ice My teeth are swords And my claws are spears My wings are the winter wind And my heart is the soul of the frozen north I was a dragon once And I will be a dragon again

X X X

Weiss died, and winter had its queen again.

X X X

“What have you done, father?” Winter hissed.

The king looked back at her, and she realised for the first time that the man she had called father had died long ago, slain by pride and jealousy. “What I had to.”

“To have Weiss - your own daughter - assassinated! Have you lost your mind?” Winter reached for the sword at her side, and the royal guard seemed torn between stopping her and merely standing aside.

“I am the king!” her father bellowed. “Your sister was going to usurp me! I know what they called her! Queen of Winter,” he sneered. “Queen of nothing! I am the king, and there will be no other ruler while I still -”

He stopped there, for throughout all of Atlas, bells had begun to ring. The Grimm had come.

“We will speak of this again,” Winter growled as she turned on her heel. “Someone has to defend this kingdom.” She snarled and tossed her last words over her shoulder. “Though I wonder if it is even worth defending if its king is so craven as to murder his own daughter and then huddle inside his palace while others, braver by far, fight and die.”

X X X

“The outer walls have fallen!” Winter cried as she rallied what soldiers she had left. “Retreat to the inner walls! Only death awaits us here.” Beneath them, the great wall of ice shuddered, and the chunks of it ripped loose and tumbled to the ground. The howl of the storm was little more than a whimper, and Winter blinked back tears as she looked upon the end of Atlas.

A black tide of Grimm marred the snow, and vivid splashes of red marked where the kingdom’s brave defenders had fallen. Like a verminous wave, they clambered over the cracked and breaking walls, and their cries of rage and hate filled the air with a symphony of malice. In the skies, winged Grimm shrieked and bayed, no longer kept back by the tearing winds of the storm. Now and then, they dove, tearing brave soldiers from the walls or spewing vile poison upon those unlucky enough to be caught out in the open.

For ten thousand years, Atlas had stood unbroken. No longer.

“Your Highness,” one of the soldiers said, all but dragging her clear as the wall began to collapse. “You must retreat to the palace. We cannot hold the outer walls, and the inner walls will not last much longer either. At least at the palace -”

“No!” She shook herself free of his grasp. “I am no coward. If I die, it will be on these walls defending my people. Let my father huddle in the palace. Once the walls fall, the palace will be little better than a tomb. A thousand years from now, if our people still endure, I will not have it said that I ran while my people died!”

But despite her brave words, Winter trembled. Death was close at hand now, and she could feel its icy touch upon her heart.

And then, when all seemed lost, a cry went up. A soldier on the southernmost section of the wall saw it first and then another and another, and their shouts spread over the din of battle and the wails of the dying.

“Dragon! A dragon has come!”

Winter turned her eyes to the south and saw they had spoken truly. A dragon had come, a dragon straight from the Old Days when a dragon in mortal form had founded Atlas and built the walls and birthed the storm.

Scales as white as fresh snow shone in the winter sun, and eyes like blue fire blazed with murderous intent. The dragon bellowed, and the sound of it tore the air. The dwindling storm roared in reply, and the weakening winds became a howl that threatened to wrench soldiers off the walls and tear buildings from the ground.

A wave of cold washed over them, so intense that it all but stole Winter’s breath away. Above them, the dragon opened its maw and let loose a blast of ice that would have shamed even the deepest of winters. The skies froze and the Grimm with them, and Grimm fell to shatter upon ground. With a sound like a hurricane, the dragon dove, and frost followed in its wake. The Grimm upon the walls and those pouring into the city were frozen where they stood, and the dragon rose once more.

Beneath them, the walls shook. Fresh ice restored them. Around them, the storm raged. The Grimm were slaughtered in droves as ice and hail rained down and snow swept them aside.

And then the dragon descended, and where a dragon had been, a princess now stood.

“Weiss!” Winter cried with joy in her heart.

Weiss turned to look at her, and for a moment there was something so ancient, so unspeakably old, in her gaze that Winter could barely move. But the moment passed, and Weiss’s gaze shifted to the palace at the centre of the city.

X X X

Jacques trembled as he looked upon the dragon that had once been his daughter.

“Seize her!” he ordered his royal guard.

Not one of them moved.

With each step Weiss took, the ground beneath her froze. Hoarfrost clung to the trees and the sculptures that dotted the courtyard. Gone were the mage’s robes she favoured. In their place was a mantle of frost and robes of woven snow. And upon her brow, gleaming like a star, was a crown of ice.

Weiss stopped not far from him and cast her gaze around the courtyard. One by one the royal guards knelt, not to him but to her.

“I am a dragon, father,” Weiss said, and her lips curled. “Perhaps I should thank you. A life for a life, father, isn’t that what the gods teach us? A princess died, so a dragon could be born.”

“I…”

“You know what this means, don’t you?” Weiss asked, and her smile was so cold it burned.

He did. Atlas had been founded by a dragon, and only a dragon could truly rule it. But all the dragons were gone… until now.

“I do.”

Weiss did not move, but her shadow stirred, and the vast, presence of a dragon filled the courtyard. “Then kneel.”

X X X

Author’s Notes

Weiss’s situation is somewhat different from Yang’s, which is fine. It lets her be an absolute badass.

If you’re interested in my thoughts on writing and other topics, you can find those here.

You can find my original fiction on Amazon here. In fact, I’ve just released a new story, Attempted Adventuring. If you like humour, action, and adventure, be sure to check it out.

#rwby #fanfiction #weiss schnee #winter schnee #jacques schnee

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mage-rites · 4 years ago

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Hey! I saw your tags on that Winds of Winter/GRRM post and I was wondering what other fantasy series & such you may love and like to pass along?

oh boy my time has finally come

Well So I do have the tendency to get obsessed with one series and not branch out from it for months, so this will be a short-ish list, of things that I’ve gotten into recently. Also, disclaimer that my tastes may be different than your own. And uh... I think this is going to be kind of long and mostly just me ranting about one series.

Anyways. my #1 reccomendation would be the Farseer Trilogy by Robin Hobb and (most of) the other series in the same universe. It’s pretty classic high fantasy but it’s got a lot more of a focus on the individual character than ASOIAF, and if this makes sense, it’s got a lot more humanity to it. The Farseer Trilogy follows Fitz, the bastard son of a prince, as he grows up, becoming an assassin in service to the king. It sounds like that could be the setup to a very boring male power fantasy type story, but it is absolutely Not. it deals very much with Fitz trying to navigate toxic masculinity in-universe, unraveling the ways that the different surrogate parent figures that raised him taught him about love and compassion but also taught him harmful things. There are two very interesting magic systems which are not fully explored in the first two books but get more fleshed out by the third book, and in the additional series. One character who I love is a genderqueer prophet, and their relationship with Fitz is a very important aspect of the series. Also, the world has not One, but Two very interesting takes on dragons. The series is written by a woman which is good. A warning that it still does deal with an amount of violence against women and sexual assault, moreso in one of the series that isn’t centered around Fitz, the Liveship Traders series, which I was not that much of a fan of. Beyond that though, it’s one of my favorite series and universes, and is in my opinions a far better choice than ASOIAF if you want something which has political intrigue and lots of lore/history.

OTHER FANTASY SERIES I HAVE LIKED: recently obsessed with Gideon the Ninth/the locked tomb trilogy which is absolutely nothing like GRRM/ASOIAF, and is instead a fun/horrifying/heartbreaking sci-fi/fantasy mashup with a delightful narrator with a very weird, dry sense of humor. Only the first book is out for now, but it was a great one. It’s got the tag line “lesbian neceomancers in space” which is accurate but does not begin to cover how incredibly weird and fun the tone of this book is. There is a good amount of body horror and really gross descriptions of things which I am generally not a fan of, but weirdly it was fine because of the tone of the narration.

Currently I haven’t had the time/brain for reading new series, but before quarantine I was trying to get through some classic, more YA focused series which I am enjoying but have not really gotten obsessed with yet- the Old Kingdom series by Garth Nix is very weird and also deals with necromancy, but has a really neat magic system and worldbuilding, and I finished A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Leguin which is a simple read and has a very nice, folkloric tone. I am hoping to read more things in the Earthsea series. Eventually. When things are less weird.

ANYWAYS. This has been my short essay of a few fantasy books that I would recommend over ASOIAF. Hope it helps!!

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weareallfallengods · 5 years ago

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LOTR Post-apocalyptic one shot

When Middle Earth gets to like- the idk, sixth or seventh age? would it be more of a futuristic setting but like with hobbits in space suits and dwarfs crafting radioactive machines and stuff.

(Shhhhh.... i know that like the elves disappear and man becomes really the only one that stays after awhile but I WANT A FANTASY FALLOUT SETTING!

From @pippinstook

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

The Endless Winter was the Elves' fault.

Like all the Great Calamities of Middle-Earth, the best and worst times were ushered in by Elves.

And they wonder why we hate them.

We Dwarves remember the Silmarils War. We stayed out of the War of Sauron's Return because the Elves created that mess to begin with, and it was theirs to clean up. We saw the Halflings get roped into it, and there were some who argued we should go to their aid, remembrance of a debt owed by our people to them. But there were only 4 of them, so we remained apart.

And so, when the Burning Wind, a storm of flame like a hundred score dragons scorching the land and sky came, we stayed underground. We saw it sweep in from the East, and we knew that once again, the Elves had doomed us all.

We stayed underground, our trading partners gone, our surface holdings buried under a white ash that burned and blinded as it rained from the sky. We delved deeper, broader, sealed all but a few entrances to the surface behind gold and lead. Entire boulevards bricked up in stacks of now useless gold.

They thought we were ostentatious with our wealth before. If they could only see us now. Admittedly, we flaunted our wealth in the 4th Age- and why wouldnt we? We worked and slaved and toiled for generations of men to build it. Of course we were going to enjoy the fruits of our labors.

Our grandfathers survived once the King discovered that only he, in his gold-covered armors, remained sunburnt by the Elven Ash. The King ordered the gates sealed, the treasury turned over to the armored and craftsmen as gold suddenly became not a luxury, but something necessary to protect our people from the folly of the Elves.

Our people still got ill, still died long before their time. Some had strange growths, babies were born with extra limbs, or none at all. Mothers wept at not being able to feed their newborns, and fathers felt tears dampen their beards as they carved tomb after tomb for children that should have been the ones to carve theirs instead.

But we survived.

We learned to cover every bit of clothing, every scrap of leather and cloth in gold. Every chamber, every street, every cavern lined in it. No longer was lead cast aside as nothing more than a tinker's tool. Now every drop of it was precious, beaten flat and covered in gold, used to line the halls of our kingdoms.

So my great-grandfather told my father, as he told me. As I will tell my sons and daughters, so they never forget.

It's truly amazing what we Dwarves will create when left to our own devices. Every hundred years or so, the King will send a group of volunteers to the surface, to see if the Endless Winter showed any signs of abating, if the burning ash burns less.

As the centuries passed, little changed on the surface. But there were many who grew tired of our isolation, and longed for the fresh wind and the companionship of our brothers in other kingdoms.

Rather than repress them, our king, in his wisdom, appointed those who still longed for the outside world to create ways to survive in the hellish land the Elves had rained down upon us.

And so our skills increased, our machines becoming ever more complex as our Creatives strive to find ways to lessen the impact of the Winter, and make our lives more comfortable and productive.

We discovered the expansive properties of steam, we harnessed the fires of the earth itself to warm our homes, and light our streets. We created artificial sun and starlight, not with the magic of the Elves, or the primitive tallow fires of men, but with ingenuity and clever machines. Balls of glass that glowed like the sun, and drops of sapphire that shone like stars.

We created lightning, and stored it in jars. We built the power of the ancient gods ourselves. Columns that shone bright to light the day, and tiny blue stars of light in the carven ceilings to make the night less black. We took those jars, and fashioned gears and wheels and wire to drive our mining carts and lifts. We created hammers driven by the heat of the earth and the explosive power of water. We made glass, coated in gold so fine you could see through it, and for the first time in a generation, had windows to bring sun and moonlight down to the kingdom. What little there was.

We made great mirrors, and reflected that light to our farms, and homes. The Creatives made giant mirrors and lenses, and used them to see great distances from the Sightglass they built on the top of our mountain. The first time they were able to look through it, and see for hundreds of leagues was looked forward too with such anticipation! And met with such bitter disappointment. For as far as the eye could see, even with the Sightglass, there was nothing but more of the burning ash blanketing the world.

So we stayed below, as we have always done. And another generation passed.

And the Creatives made another leap forward. They created glass that could be layered with transparent gold, and made helmets and armor and boots and gloves that were finally able to withstand the burning of the Winter on the surface. They created carts, driven by the heat of rocks they found on the surface, that when enclosed properly, and cooled with water, powered those carts, and enabled us to finally start exploring the surface again.

And so we finally emerged after all this time. Dwarves, covered in gold, driving carts that glowed and shone like the sun that could no longer be seen. Dwarves, with golden gears clicking about them, steam rising from their shoulders as the armor made by the Creatives did it's work of making the air breathable, and keeping out the ash and dust. Dwarves with golden-hued glass helms, leaving virgin footprints in the ashen plains around the mountain.

Dwarves, had finally managed to reclaim the earth.

And we explored. We searched for any sign that other life had returned to the surface. We traveled long and far, always finding nothing more than half-buried ruins of ancient civilizations; giant statues and crumbling walls, trees turned to stone, rivers nothing more than vast trenches filled with powdery ash that we sank in as if it was actually water, long petrified bones serving as the only memorial to those who once filled the cities of men.

More and more of us migrated to the surface, our new Technics affording us the same protections of our ancient caverns. We started to realize as a people that our love of caves stemmed primarily from a desire to be left alone as a people, a way to avoid being interfered with. And now that the surface was empty, there was nothing dissuading us from enjoying it.

And then the world as we had come to know it changed.

Reports from the Foragers came back that they had found a place untouched by the Endless Winter. A place where green still existed.

No one believed them at first, but then the silverplate images started coming back. Plates that showed trees. Rivers that held water. A deer. Things no one alive had ever seen with their own eyes. And most still didn't believe.

Until one day, the Foragers brought back an oak tree. A sapling, green and lithe, rooted in black earth, set in a pit of solid gold, a dome of golden glass shielding it from the ash.

Not long after that monumental revelation, our entire town mobilized. Great carts with wheels of chain to move entire houses were built. Flexible bridges covered in golden glass wove between them, domes of gold creating a sea of glittering bubbles that floated across the plains as an entire Dwarven city slowly crept across the fields and hills of ash.

Ten years it took for our city to make it to the eastern mountains. Ten years of waiting impatiently to see what the Foragers had been promising us.

And then we finally saw it with our own eyes. We saw the ash fade into brown grass and weeds, and those give way gradually to actual grasses, and bushes, and finally, a single tree at the top of the ridge.

But what we saw from that ridge left even our most effusive poets speechless.

Green. Nothing but green as far as we could see. An emerald jewel of a vale set apart from the ashen wasteland behind us. And birds. A young one claimed they spotted a deer. The sound of a small stream twinkled through the air like a long forgotten melody of hope. A single, thin spire hung in the air, and only the Eldest was able to remember what it was called or what it meant.

Smoke! Specifically, chimney smoke. It rose from the forest like a beacon, a sign that we may not be the only ones to have survived.

As we were debating the best way to approach whomever may be there, we were all shocked to the bone to hear a small voice right behind our Elder.

"'Ere! Wotcha 'bout then? Not from 'round 'here, are yous?"

Of all those who could have survived, of course it had to be the Hobbits.

===================================

Story tag list

@random-with-garlic @a-dinosaurs-left-phgkneecap @flower-in-the-ashes @nixabee @luvnaught @pens-swords-stuff @alice-and-cheshire-cat @humans-are-seriously-weird @flying-f1shsticks @Neil-gaiman @glumshoe @lykanyouko @kaylewiswrites @just-a-bit-paranoid @thatsmybluefondue @Alice-and-Cheshire-cat @violet-galaxies @biggest-gaidiest-patronuses @midnight-spectrum-again @slytherinlovespuff @friendofcybermen @hemi528i @mirbisduschoen @khelladon @walkin-in-the-cosmos

As always, if you want to be added to or removed from the tag list, just shoot me a message and your wish is my command.

#lotr au #fantasy #post apocalyptic #one shot #story

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cutesuki--bakugou · 5 years ago

Text

It’s War

@bnha-christmas2019 | Day 2: Snowball | Bakugou x Koge (OC) Fantasy AU | Teen | Cursing, sexually suggestive conversation

Based around my fic The Dragon Kings Treasure.

Koge knew very well that she was putting herself in danger. This task that she had settled on, this daunting and horrific action could very easily bring an end to life as she knew it. She could easily be defeated, smushed into the snowy earth and left to the mercy of the vicious beast she was up against. Death would surely be upon her, and she could feel its icy breath run down her spine, the crisp winter air warning her to not dare tempt fate. But how could she not? This was the perfect opportunity to challenge herself and get revenge on this creature who had been victorious against her one too many times. He was caught off guard, unaware of her plans, so she would have the upper hand, right?

Stealthily walking behind him, Koge watched for any sign of him turning around, seemingly unaware as she squatted down to scoop up a handful of snow. Well, it was more than a handful, as she rolled the icy ball into a decent size. Her keen eyes never left the back of the fluffy blonde head of her victim, her tail swaying about behind her to keep her balance. The quiver of arrows and bow strapped to her torso were ignored in favor of the natural weapon, slowly standing once she was sure that he was unaware. He had a bow in his hand, but the arrows on his back were untouched.

For the moment, she found herself a bit distracted by his back, unable to resist watching the way his muscles rolled with each movement he made. Even with the cold, he was content with just the grey long sleeve top he wore that stopped at his ribs, the fur around his waist, thick pants and boots enough to keep him warm. He was also lucky that his bloodline just happened to be fire born dragons, so his core temperature was always at a ridiculous level. She found herself craving his touch at the moment, especially as her hands gripped onto the snow. Unlike him, she was a cold natured dragon breed, thus got cold much easier. Over their years of being together, she had grown to depend on his warmth during the winter months, and he was always content to oblige.

Except for now. She had forgotten her warm cloak while they were out hunting, and what does he do? He shuns her away, scoffing and scolding her for being so forgetful while denying her his hand to hold. The betrayal was unforgivable, so Koge knew that she had to take her revenge on him, even if he was her lover and the great Dragon Lord Bakugou Katsuki. If he wouldn’t share his blessings with her, then he didn’t deserve them, either. Punishment with a snowball to the back of the head was necessary, and if she perished, then so be it.

With a deep and silent breath to steady herself, she waited for the right moment. Wound up her pitch--

“If you throw that at me, we’re going to have problems.”

And her throw fell short, landing behind him on the ground with a pathetic plop. Pouting, Koge huffed as he glowered down at her from over his shoulder, having somehow figured out her plans. “How did you know I was gonna throw it at you?!” Frustrated, her tail flicked about behind her, wiping the remaining snow off her hands.

“You’re not stealthy, Koge. You think I can’t tell the difference between footsteps in the snow and someone picking it up?” Bakugou continued walking through the woods, once again looking ahead of him as he tried to keep an eye out for any game. “And your breathing changed. I thought I taught you those things.”

Sighing, Koge followed him, trying to rethink her plans now that they had been foiled. “You didn’t teach me how to make a snowball without anyone noticing, Katsuki.” Feeling her tail scrape across the snow behind her, a thought crossed her mind, and she had to restrain the smirk from crossing her lips. “Besides, we’ve been walking through this forest for like two hours with no sign of anything. Let’s take a break.”

“No. It hasn’t been two hours, we’ve only been doing this for maybe half an hour. If you didn’t want to hunt, you could have just told me.”

“It’s not that,” Koge gave a small sigh, letting out an exaggerated grumble in hopes that it would shield the sound of the fin of her tail scooping up snow. “I just want to hold your hand and you won’t let me.”

“I can’t hold your hand while we’re out hunting!” Bakugou hissed at her in a hushed snap, not wanting his voice to boom all across the forest. “I told you! You forgot your cloak, you have to suffer!”

“But don’t you love me, Katsuki?”

“Love has nothing to do with this!”

“Then perish.”

“Wha--?” Before Bakugou could understand what she meant, he was smacked in the side of the head with a snowball Koge had created while they conversed. The entire world felt like it stopped, with Bakugou hunched over covering the hit side of his head. Prepping herself to run, Koge watched him closely, though there’s nothing she could have done to prepare herself for the retaliation.

With speed and skills Koge did not possess, because she lacked the use of magic, Bakugou shoved his hand into the snow with his palm facing her, setting off an explosion that was strong enough to send snow cascading over the little halfling like a wave. Squealing, all Koge could do was duck down, the snow covering her from head to toe as she was forced down to sit.

“Cheater!” She cried from within her tomb, pushing all the snow off of her the best she could. Once it fell away from her face, she looked around for her lover, only to find that she was alone. Confused, she paused, trying to listen for any signs of where he had run off to. His footsteps weren’t clear, and her smelling senses were thrown off by the snow that had covered her, so wherever he had gone, she couldn’t find him from where she sat.

Slowly standing, she tried to wipe the cold, wet snow from her clothes, mumbling in annoyance to herself. He had overpowered her so easily again, all because he could use magic and she couldn’t. It was unfair, and out of all the snowball fights they ever had, she hadn’t been able to win a single one. Bakugou always found some way to overpower or outshine her to the point that she had to give up, but she knew that eventually, he would fail.

With the sound of a cracking twig, Koge’s attention instantly snapped to look up and to her right. Sure enough, her lover was there, up on the lower branches of a tree with an assortment of snowballs in the crook of his arm. Before she could react again, she was pelted with them, making her squeal and try to escape, fumbling over her own feet in the uneven snow.

“I told you! If you throw shit at me, it’s war!”

“I threw one snowball!! OW! Only one! KATSUKI--!” Laughing now, Koge was able to find refuge behind a tree, panting as she tried to catch her breath. Biting her lip to quiet her giggles, she kept herself still, once again listening for any sign of movement. Any noises he may have been making were lost inside the creaking sound of the wind in the trees, so when he dropped down from the branches right in front of her, she couldn’t help but be startled. Before she could even let out a peep in surprise, he cupped his gloved left hand over her mouth, his bare fingertips hot against her flushed cheeks.

“Shh. If you scream like that, you’ll cause an avalanche.” The smirk that crossed his lips only made Koge’s cheeks grow hotter, especially as he kept his body close to hers to keep her pinned against the tree. His right forearm resting against the rough bark, he gripped the tip of one of her horns, playfully giving it a slight tug to make her head bob to the side. “Then you’ll really have something to complain about.”

Digging her ice-cold fingers into the fur that he had strapped around his hips, Koge narrowed her eyes at him, nibbling at the leather of his glove so that he would take his hand off her mouth. He did so, resting his left forearm against the tree as well, effectively trapping her from both sides. Once she could talk, Koge let her tail wrap around their legs, tapping against his thigh in annoyance. “You’re so mean. You never give me a chance to win.”

“Why would I do that? Then it would just be a false victory. You’d hate that.” Bakugou lightly flicked some snow off the top of her head, his crimson gaze focusing on that before returning to her face. “Stupid.”

“I would not hate it. I don’t want you to let me win completely, just give me a chance. A tiny bit of a chance.”

“No. Once you really win, it will feel better than if I just gave you the victory. You have to work for it.”

With a heavy sigh in defeat, Koge leaned her head back against the tree, unable to help a smile from crossing her lips. “Oh well. I got what I wanted from that loss, anyway.”

Bakugou cocked an eyebrow in confusion, giving a click of his tongue as she urged his body in closer with a tug to his clothing. “Tch, you sneaky brat.”

Smile turning sly, Koge slipped her arms around his torso, purring sweetly as she nuzzled up against his neck. “That’s right. I got your attention. Now you have to spend some time warming me up. You have no choice.”

“You want me to warm you up? Fine. You’ll be begging to sit in the snow by the time I’m done with you.”

“I’ll try not to scream. Don’t want to cause an avalanche.”

“Good luck.”

#bnha-christmas2019 #bnha imagines #bnha scenarios #bakugou x oc #bakugou #katsuki bakugou #bnha #boku no hero academia #my hero academia #oc #original character #koge #bakugou x koge #bnha fanfiction #fanfiction #bnha writing blog #cutesuki-oc

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bookofjin · 5 years ago

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Biography of He Ba

[From WS028. His Xianbei family name would have been Suhe.]

He Ba was a native of Dai, for generations [his ancestors] had led section groups as adherent subjects of the state. Ba knew fame due to his talent for debating. Taizu selected him to be Great Man of the Outer Court. He assisted the army with great plans, he was graceful and made wise calculations. He was again and again made to assess viewpoints, and was designated Dragon-Prancing General. Before long he was bestowed feudal rank of Duke of Rinan.

He accompanied when they pacified the Central Plains. Due to his merits he was advanced to Master of Writing, to garrison Ye. Murong De sent his elder brother's son He to defend Huatai. He's Senior Clerk Li Bian killed He, and sought aid from Ba. Ba led light cavalry to hurry to him. When he had arrived, Bian had regrets, and shut the gates to resist and defend. Ba sent Gentleman of the Masters of Writing, Deng Hui to persuade him. Bian therefore opened the gates. Ba entered, and gathered his office storehouses. De heard about it, and dispatched generals to led 3 000 cavalry and strike Ba.

Ba confronted, struck, and greatly routed them. He seized more than a thousand of their generals and soldiers, and turned back. Hence among the people of Chen and Ying, many came towards being brought around.

Changed his fief to Duke of Dingling. He and the King of Changshan, Zun, led a multitude of 50 000, they chastised Helan section's separate leader Muyi Qian, and routed him. He set out to be Grand Warden of Pingyuan.

Taizu's favouritism happened to fall on Ba, putting him ahead of the various generals. At the time the crowd of subjects esteemed above else respectfulness and restraint, yet Ba was fond of refinement and empty acclaim. He dazzled and sparkled in his times, and was especially extravagant and excessive. Taizu warned him, but he did not change. Later the Chariot Drove north for a winter hunt at Chai Mountain, gathered Ba, and punished him by the roadside. His wife, Ms. Liu, killed herself to accompany him.

Earlier, when he was about to punish Ba, Taizu instructed his various younger brothers, Pi and others, to look upon and bid farewell to him. Ba spoke to Pi, saying:

The land north of the Lei is barren, you can live south of the river, attend to ploughing good farm land, widely make a livelihood and legacy, everyone urging and encouraging each other, and do your utmost to continuously improve yourself.

He ordered them to turn their back to him, saying;

How could you all bear to look at my death!

Pi and others figured out his hidden meaning, and disingenuously claimed to be messengers. They absconded and fled to Chang'an, the pursuers did not catch up with them. Taizu was furious and thereupon executed their families.

Later Shizu toured west to Wuyuan, he turned around to favour Chai Mountain for a barricade hunt. Suddenly he came across a violent wind, with clouds and fog on all four sides. Shizu was curious and asked about it. The crowd of subordinates unanimously said Ba for generations had lived in this land, and his sacrifices and tombs were similarly there, perhaps he sometimes was able to cause these changes. The Emperor dispatched the Duke of Jianxing, Gu Bi, to worship using the three sacrificial animals. Later when Shizu searched for a day for the winter hunt, he always first worshipped him.

His youngest son Gui accompanied the campaigns against Helian Chang and had merit. He was designated General who Controls Ten Thousand, and bestowed feudal rank of Earl of Chenggao. He and the Duke of Xiping, An Jie, attack Hulao, and took it. He was advanced in feudal rank to Marquis of Gaoyang. Later, due to a crime he moved in banishment to Liang province to be a commoner. When Gai Wu made chaos Within the Passes, again designated Gui Dragon-Prancing General to depart and chastise him. He returend and was designated Envoy Holding the Tally, General of the Best of the Army, Chief Great Commander of the Yongcheng Garrison, and Marquis of Gaoyang. He passed on.

His son Du inherited the feudal title. He was Gentleman of the Capital Officials for the Masters of Writing and Grand Warden of Changping. He passed on.

Du's son Yanmu was a section commandery Assistant Officer in Si province, he passed on early.

His son An at the end of Wuding [543 – 550] was Serving Affairs at the Yellow Gates Attendant Gentleman.

#ws028

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orangeflavoryawp · 5 years ago

Text

Jonsa - “A Violence Done Most Kindly”, Part 8

See? I told you I wouldn’t leave you long without an update. ;)

“A Violence Done Most Kindly”

Chapter Eight: Sowing Seeds

“The road is too long. It winds too sharp. And Sansa cannot see the end from her vantage point, cannot calculate the curve. She discerns it through faith. She travels blind, but for her hand in Jon’s.” - Jon and Sansa. Stark is a house of many winters.

Read it on Ao3 here.

Part 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 fin

* * *

It’s a tomb, Sansa discovers. One long, torchlit, communal tomb.

She glances down the length of the crypt corridor where she sits and waits with the rest of the fear-rattled refugees, echoes of the battle raging above them, around them, resounding through the walls in an endless, harrowing nightmare. The ground shakes at their feet, the dirt rattling loose from the walls and ceiling with the thunder of thousands of undead feet barreling through the army above them.

At some point, Tyrion makes to reach for her hand, a measure of comfort – but for her or himself, she cannot tell. In the end, he never lights his touch. His hand stills mid-reach for her, fingers curling back into a loose fist that returns slowly to his side as he opens his mouth, voice a strangled hope. “We must take heart, Lady Sansa. Our loved ones will prevail. Have faith.”

“Your queen just tried to ransom all our lives – yours included – for a paltry, hollow crown,” she hisses, the terror making her voice tremble even as she glares. “Do not speak to me of faith when yours has been so misguided.” It’s a searing rebuke, her hands bundled tightly in her lap, the fabric of her dress clutched between white knuckles.

Tyrion blinks pained eyes at her, glancing down to his feet. He does not deny her – does not challenge her accusation. He simply hangs his head, a tremulous sigh leaving him.

She watches him quietly, a faint memory teasing the back of her mind – Jaime’s return to King’s Landing after his stay as Robb’s captive up North. She’d watched them from behind the door of her and Tyrion’s newly shared chambers, watched their embrace in his solar, Jaime kneeling down to one knee, Tyrion’s face buried in his shoulder, each of their hands (the ones left, at least) bunched in each other’s tunics, before they pulled back reluctantly, hesitant, shaking sighs racking both of them, Jaime’s good hand reaching up to trail the scar over Tyrion’s face, a question in his furrowed brow, an apology in his salt-tinged eyes.

But Tyrion had smiled at him, ruined face a mask of ill-kept pain. “Welcome home, brother,” he’d said, voice breaking.

Sansa had retreated before she could witness more, before the stain of Robb’s name could light her tongue in abject resentment.

Looking at him now, this wreckage of past mistakes made flesh, she remembers suddenly the pain of losing a brother.

The pain of losing many brothers.

Sansa swallows tightly, the anger bleeding out of her face, brow smoothing out, lips softening in their frown. She clears her throat gently, looking down to the bunched fists at his sides when she tells him, “Ser Jaime is like to survive the night. He’s a good fighter, after all.” She doesn’t know what compels her to say it.

“Was,” he corrects, a sad sort of humor coloring the words. He releases a wounded chuckle, eyes finally rising to meet hers.

They stare at each other for long moments.

He’d been kind to her, she knows, at a time when the world offered little kindness at all. But he’s been mistaken in his affections before, and now they host a dragon in their den, owing in no small part to his own imprudent devotion.

He was never meant to play the knight in her tale, like her favored songs had promised. She sees this now, in a way she hadn’t when she was still a child, looking for the best in people, holding their small mercies to her heart like precious gems, mistaking lions and hounds for men.

“But you’re very gracious, my lady,” he says finally, the gratitude choked off at the end, breath hitching with his dread. He offers her a tentative smile.

She finds it in herself to return it, in what small measure she can.

And then a crashing weight falls upon the ground above them, rattling the stone statues. The crypts go dead with silence.

Sansa glances up at the suddenly tranquil walls, her heart swallowed down instantly. Nothing breathes for what feels like an eon, the telltale sounds of battle ceased, the shaking of the corridors stilled. She does not chance a breath, a word, even a hope. She flits her gaze toward the heavy stone door they built to barricade the crypts, eyes unblinking in the shadowed hall, torchlight flickering about her like a threat.

Long minutes pass, almost an hour of suffocating, uninterrupted silence, and then something bangs at the door. A single, resounding clang.

Sansa jolts to her feet, chest heaving with her terror, hand already fumbling for the dragonglass dagger fixed to her belt.

Another clang. Heavy, terrible scratching. The slight push of the door in the sodden dirt.

Sansa’s breath comes quick and shallow, the uneven hilt of her dagger digging into her palm even through her glove, her fingers flexing in their hold, feet planted in readiness.

The door pushes further in on them, slow and grating, something grunting on the other side.

Several somethings.

More thuds against the door, more scratching, the sudden stream of light through a crack in the threshold, and then the muffled sound of a word.

A word.

A name.

“Sansa!” it calls, stifled by the cold stone between them.

She drops her dagger instantly at the recognition and it clatters to the floor, sharp and resounding in the still corridor. A small crowd gathers a few feet behind her, too frightened to follow further. She rushes to the door, gripping at the jarred open edge, sunlight striking her knuckles, a sob already raking through her, the tears sudden and hot on her lids, and she heaves.

The door breaks open to a blaring dawn, several men – living, breathing men – tumbling through the threshold when the door finally gives from their combined strength.

Sansa stumbles back, eyes wide, blinking back the blindness, adjusting to the light as she braces an arm over her eyes, searching, needing, frantic, and then –

“Sansa.”

That voice again.

She blinks against the harsh light, his silhouette coming into focus.

Edmure Tully hobbles through the threshold, one hand holding his side, his other arm lame and bloodied and likely lost, one eye swollen shut beneath a stream of blood.

She stares at him, mouth parting, lungs clenching.

A sigh of relief rushes from him, the pain of it clear when he winces.

It breaks from her like a flood. She launches herself at him, arms thrown about his shoulders, the sob dragging from her without restraint, and Edmure grunts from the assault, stumbling back from the weight of her, a cry of pain blunted at his lips just before the first wail breaks from her.

He stills in her embrace, blinking beneath the gush of blood from his temple, until he tentatively folds his good arm around her waist, holding her to him, a cough sounding at her ear, wavering beneath the force of her, weak and trembling and barely standing.

But alive.

Sansa whimpers against him, clutching at his soiled tunic, tears smearing into the blood along his neck, the shadow of the crypts at her back, the blinding breach of sunlight at his.

At the threshold between life and death, light and dark, day and night – they stand.

Dawn creeps slowly past their forms, illuminating the stifled corridor behind her.

Not a tomb, she realizes, but a sunlit garden, a place where the dead may offer new growth.

A place of promised life.

Winter has always been the herald of spring, after all.

* * *

They say the dead all dropped at once – an instant, resounding wave, the weight of so many corpses tumbling to the earth at once quite literally shaking Winterfell to its foundation.

The men keep fighting, swinging at air, even crossing blades themselves, feverish and feral and frenzied, their blood rioting in their veins, hardly noticing the fall of the dead, so lost in their own desperate will to survive, fighting, and panting, and fighting still, the smell of blood and shit all around them, shapes in the shadows, the frantic, blade-gripping, adrenaline-rushing fear still coursing through them, until gradually, man by man, breath by breath, a slow-dawning stillness overtakes them.

For every man standing, there is a litter of corpses at his feet.

An unearthly calm washes over Winterfell, the living barely that. And then –

And then.

A hesitant, slow rise of voices. A growing eddy of shouts. Triumphant. Glorious.

Crying, and laughing, and shouting. Hands over blood-drenched faces. Knees in the dirt. Heads thrown back. A quaking, resounding exhale. Blades falling from grimy palms. Boots squelching through the putrid mess. And still, a roar of exultation.

“The King in the North! The King in the North! The King in the North!”

Jon slips into a coma so deep, they’d thought him dead upon first entering the room.

Davos tells her that he and Jon’s personal guard were the ones to find him – laid out on the floor of her chambers, barely breathing, a pool of blood beneath him, her brother sitting calmly in his chair, blood-drenched dagger still held in his grip.

“Help him,” Bran had said, so quiet it was almost a whisper, almost never there at all.

It takes five men to hold Tormund back from lunging at Bran, shouting his vehemence so vile and hateful the spit flies from his mouth, even as he kicks out, foot catching the wheel of Bran’s chair, jostling him so hard he nearly tips over and crashes to the blood-soaked rug himself. Bran stares dumbly at the space Jon’s body once occupied, red-steeped palm now empty of the blade that pierced his flesh, hanging limp in his lap, hardly even acknowledging Tormund’s wrestling form inches from him, the wildling’s heated shouts filling the dawn-touched chamber.

Davos tells her that his guard has been sworn to secrecy after taking Jon from the room, only the most trusted of men – those of them left after the battle.

Bran retreats from her solar and into her bedchamber, closing the door behind him in silence once Tormund is dragged from the room.

She stands staring at the closed door, eyes blinking owlishly. Davos seems of a similar state beside her, perhaps still reeling from his own unexpected survival. Perhaps still trying to process the scene before them. Her eyes travel back down to the blood-stained rug that was once her parents’.

She’s going to be sick.

Sansa reaches a trembling hand for the table edge beside her when the vomit rises suddenly, without warning. She retches violently, bent double with the force of it, hand slipping against the table edge, trying to find purchase as she heaves and heaves, emptying herself out from the very pit of her. Her face bursts red with the effort of it, tears springing to her eyes, sickly bile streaming from her lips when she stumbles to her knees, legs finally giving out.

“My lady,” Davos cries, urgent at her side, his blood-slicked gloves slipping over her elbow when he tries to steady her.

She takes a breath, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, eyes flitting to his red-darkened gloves. She stares at them, eyes focusing and refocusing, throat raw and burning. “I have to find my sister,” she says blearily, a ragged whisper breaking across her chapped lips as she struggles to get to her feet.

It’s many hours before she finds Arya. Sansa walks through the halls in a faint stupor, having left the chamber without another word after Davos’s recounting, unable to look at the dark blossom of blood staining the rug, the bile still fresh in her throat, and she stumbles from the room, a hand steadying herself along the threshold, ignoring Davos’ concerned calls at her back, wondering from the room in a haze. She sifts through the corpse littered halls, the ends of her skirts dark with mud and blood and worse, tripping over cadavers, her low heels catching in cartilage, trembling hands gripping at the walls for balance, lungs heaving beneath the foul air.

Arya stands dazedly at the end of the corridor Sansa has made her way through. She blinks unsteadily up at Sansa, a dark bruise swelling up her right cheek, her eye nearly closed from the enflamed skin. Her tunic is torn at the shoulder, a garish wound stretching over the exposed flesh. She hardly seems to notice the bleeding. The fingers of her left hand are bent at an unhealthy angle, broken surely, and Needle shakes in the grip of her other palm.

Sansa stands staring at her, one hand gathered in her trailing skirts, mouth parted on a sharp inhale.

Arya swallows, eyes focusing in the filtering daylight through the hall’s sparse windows. She blinks. Blinks again. Seems to recognize her surroundings a moment before Sansa breathes her name.

“Arya.”

And then she’s sprinting, Needle dropped to the floor with a sharp clang, bounding over corpses, slipping along the blood-slick stone, steadying herself, never slowing, breathless, gasping – “Sansa!” – a whirl of soiled leather and crimson-stained skin slamming into her, bundling her in her fierce grip, arms tight around her waist, sob buried in her chest, broken fingers digging painfully into the back of Sansa’s dress, stumbling them back along the ruin-washed floor, breath ragged and worn and desolate when it leaves her small, battered form.

It takes hours to find her.

It takes hours still to let her go.

* * *

Sansa makes her way through the ruined halls of her home, passing straggling soldiers, weaving through the wreckage to the main square. She breaks into the harsh daylight, but it’s greyed since dawn, a haze of ash and snow blanketing Winterfell. Arya follows the trail of her soiled skirts as they pick their way around corpses, walking over limbs and debris.

The words she needs to tell Arya about Jon are still lost to her, a vacant, empty wandering having overtaken her instead. Arya keeps her always in sight, a silent shadow at her back.

A blood-curdling wail streaks through the air and Sansa stills, whipping her head to the sound, catching sight of Daenerys staggering across the courtyard toward something, arms outstretched, mouth tipped open in a harrowing, anguished scream. Missandei is steady at her side, an arm around her waist, holding her frail body up lest the winter wind take her and fling her about like this choking ash.

Distantly, she recalls Davos’ brief mention of the dragons’ fates.

She follows Daenerys’ tear-filled gaze across the courtyard, eyes landing on the form of a mortally wounded Grey Worm, dragging the dead body of Jorah Mormont over the stone and guts and toward his queen. His boot catches on a piece of debris, and he lurches forward, dropping to one knee, half sprawled over Jorah’s body. Daenerys makes it to them then, falling to the ground gracelessly, ignoring the putrid slush of human filth beneath her knees, eyes only for her bear, a desperate, bone-rattling cry ripping from her as she bundles his cold form in her hands, dragging him into her lap, rocking with him, sobbing, tear tracks etched across her ash-grey cheeks. Misssandei takes Grey Worm into her arms similarly and from where Sansa stands, she can see a handful of words tearfully exchanged between the two before Grey Worm convulses - once, twice, a last, jerky spasm – and then finally going still in Missandei’s arms. She bends her head low to touch her forehead to his and Sansa never hears what parting words she grants him, what farewell or peace.

Daenerys’ cries echo around the courtyard, and even still, exhausted, bloodied soldiers mill about as though she were just another corpse beneath their feet. They pass her like shadows, unbent to her anguish.

It is just another death, after all.

Sansa turns from the sight, the bile returning sharp and pungent along her tongue, but she swallows it back this time, braces a hand to her ribcage, as though to keep the sickness in, as though to anchor it there with her wrath and regret and remorse.

It festers quietly and unobtrusively, settling low in her stomach.

She turns from the sight of the grieving dragon queen, her pity too marred and eroded by a sharp resentment to taste like anything but ash on her tongue. Eyes narrowed, jaw tight, she continues on – aimless.

Somewhere between the eastern corridor and the ruined door to the Hall of Lords, Daenerys’ faraway wails finally peter out into silence. Sansa takes a deep breath in, pushing the broken door open with all her might, Arya pushing beside her, and the wood creaks open, splintered beneath the crush of a giant’s maul. More bodies flood the hall before them, but there are more living here than dead, and somewhere along the far wall, Sansa catches sight of Brienne seated along a step, elbows braced along her knees, her head in her hands, sword tarnished and copper-streaked on the floor beside her.

Sansa makes her way toward her sworn shield quietly, stopping before her and squatting down, braced on her haunches, hands anchored to her knees.

Brienne looks up then, face a ruin, hair matted and dark – no longer that brilliant, sun-lit blonde that had fascinated Sansa once upon a time.

Sansa offers an exhausted smile – half-formed and fleeting as it is – her hands going to Brienne’s cheeks, cradling her face in her palms.

“Jaime’s dead,” Brienne says evenly, without prompt.

Sansa blinks at her, nodding slowly, throat tight suddenly. She wants to say she’s sorry. She wants to say how she knows she cared for him, even against all reasoning. She wants to say at least he died with honor. She wants to say so many things, but she isn’t sure yet how much she means any of them. And so, she only has this:

“He kept his oath.” It’s a small comfort, she knows, but perhaps it’s the only kind of comfort they may have. The only kind Brienne would accept.

Brienne nods, sharp blue eyes blinking back the wetness. And then her eyes trail to Arya’s form, half hid in shadow at her sister’s back.

Sansa brushes her thumbs over Brienne’s cheeks, the weight a lighter load, instantly – the words easy on her tongue. “Thank you for keeping her safe,” she chokes out.

Brienne swings her gaze back to Sansa, the edges of a hesitant smile spreading beneath the pads of Sansa’s fingertips. “She is half your mother’s heart, after all,” she says in answer.

Sansa nods, mouth trembling when she whispers out, “And half mine.”

Brienne reaches up a hand to curl tenderly along Sansa’s wrist, the breath raking from her – exhausted and battered.

Sansa leans forward, bracing her forehead against her sworn shield’s, eyes fluttering closed at the contact.

It’s only once Sansa parts from Brienne, glancing about the hall, that Arya finally speaks.

“Where’s Jon?”

The answer lodges in her throat like a knife, splitting her from ear to ear, choking her beneath a rush of blood. Her heart hammers out a staccato of sour notes.

Arya stares up at her, just a girl. Just a lost, wounded girl. “Where’s Jon?” she asks again, voice infinitely small and hesitant.

Later, when Arya flees from the hall after Sansa tells her, she finds she cannot follow. She cannot go to him. She cannot look upon him.

Not yet.

“Stay with her,” Sansa commands Brienne, voice hollow. “Make sure she doesn’t kill Bran.”

Brienne looks up at her, horrified, standing swiftly. “She wouldn’t. My lady, she…”

Sansa swings a deadened gaze her way, lips pursed tight. “She would.” She swallows thickly, eyes drifting back toward the broken door of the hall. “That boy isn’t our brother anymore.”

Brienne only stares at her a moment longer, nodding without another word, picking her sword up off the stone and following her charge out the hall.

Sansa’s legs finally give out and she drops down to the step Brienne had previously occupied. She stays there for well on an hour, perhaps two, eyes unseeing. No one comes looking for the Lady of Winterfell. No one comes looking for the living.

She wonders if it will ever end, or if this is the disillusionment Jon spoke of once before – how war makes a home in your heart and never truly leaves. She wonders if her father hadn’t also known this.

She wonders if he would have taught her such, of if he’d have let her continue on in the sort of ignorance he never spared his sons.

Sansa sighs.

And so it goes.

So it goes for many hours that first night, soldiers falling where their exhaustion takes them, sleeping in thresholds and corridors and neighbor to corpses. At some point, Sansa passes the open door to the kitchens, three famished, too-young soldiers tearing into one of the store’s preserved hams. She hasn’t the heart to scold them. The moans of the survivors have turned into a low hum at the back of her mind, never truly reaching her.

In the end, she simply doesn’t know what to do.

It’s Missandei that jars her into movement, coming upon her with Grey Worm’s blood still warming her dress, dark circles already settling below her eyes. “I need bandages, cloth, clean water,” she says, voice even in a way that seems a disconnection to the tear-filled gaze she sets upon her or the trembling of her hands bunched together over her skirts.

Sansa stares at her, blinking when she recognizes Lord Varys standing just behind the other woman, face a haunt. “Lord Varys,” she says in surprise, not knowing what else to say.

“My lady, the wounded are many – too many,” he says, sorrow lining his words. “We need your help.”

Sansa opens her mouth, closes it just as slowly.

Missandei’s mouth trembles, tears brimming along her eyes, though they do not fall. “Please,” she croaks out.

Sansa blinks at the word, something filling her she hasn’t a name for, and it all comes barreling into her – Edmure’s bleak smile, Davos’ gaze on his boots, Arya’s stony silence –

Bran’s eerie calm – the way his hands hadn’t even shook when he wheeled himself into her bedchamber and closed the door.

She heaves a breath, a hand over her eyes, lungs quaking in her chest as she smothers the sob. “Yes,” she chokes out, shaking her head. “Yes, of course.” She sniffs back the tears, doesn’t let them fall. Her hand drops from her face and she squares her shoulders, nodding fervently at Missandei. “Of course, come with me.”

It was wrong of them to call it the Long Night, she finds, arms covered in blood up to her elbows by the time dawn breaks once more across Winterfell.

(Wrong, because it isn’t long – it’s endless.)

And so it goes and so it goes.

Jon is right – it never truly leaves them.

* * *

They never find the Blackfish’s body.

Sansa asks Edmure at some point, when she finds voice enough to ask the question. Edmure stares at her with heavy eyes, sitting still for her as she wraps the bandages around his waist. She stops at his silence, blinking up at him.

He cannot hold her gaze, turning to stare at the far wall instead. “Saved my life, the old bastard,” he gets out on a gruff exhale, eyes wetting instantly.

Sansa swallows, returning to her wrapping with a renewed focus.

Pack it away, bury it deep. Take a breath and hold it tight.

She does not cry, mutely winding the roll of bandage round and round his waist, staring at the fresh patch of blood already peeking through the white linen. Her brows furrow in frustration, the air scraping along her throat with her huff.

Later, she tells herself. She will grieve for him later.

There is work yet to be done, and Sansa means to do it.

“Your parents would be proud.”

She ties the bandage off with a tight knot.

They never find his body, but then, there are many bodies they never find – Alys Karstark, Lord Royce, Randyll Tarly, Podrick Payne, Edd Tollett. Sansa remembers each of them anyway.

Building the pyres is slow, agonizingly long work, and there are too many bodies mangled beyond recognition. The fires burn day and night, needing to be relit several times before the many bones are finally turned to ash. Smoke clogs her lungs, stains the grey walls with a permanent dark haze, the scent sinking into her flesh until she is rife with it – the dredges of their dead, come to live again in her skin.

Days pass in this manner, and Sansa forgets to sleep, too occupied with the running of a kingdom she never intended to inherit.

Jon remains unconscious, his body like ice to the touch, breath barely discernible. Ghost is found perpetually curled at the foot of his bed, whining long and low into the night. Sansa braces her hands to her ears and tries to drown it out.

Bran stays locked in her bedchamber, refusing food, and she has taken to sleeping with Arya when exhaustion finally takes her. Her sister spends that first day after the battle pacing the length of her solar, glaring at the closed door, never even bothering to bandage her wounded shoulder.

“Bran, get out here,” she seethes.

Silence.

She kicks at the door, howls her rage, sobs and sobs and sobs for her brother to just open the gods-damned door, Bran, how could you, how could you and Sansa flees the solar, braces herself back against the wall in the hallway and tries to breathe.

Arya keeps a steady vigil at Jon’s side while Sansa attends to the wounds of the North, finding much needed support in Lady Olenna and Lord Varys and, surprisingly, the young Lord Arryn. Daenerys keeps to her chamber, only ever retreating from its sanctuary to retrieve a flagon or two of wine from the kitchens, her salt-white, fire-dimmed silhouette casting lingering shadows in the corner of Sansa’s eye.

Davos is true to his word, the harrowing truth behind Jon’s condition never leaving that bloodied chamber. But word spreads of Jon’s true parentage. The wounded soldiers, in their beds of straw lining the corridors, whisper it through the halls.

A Targaryen. A trueborn one at that.

An imposter.

Sansa comes upon one such whispering horde of Northmen just when Lord Glover, with his one missing eye and half-burnt face, grabs a loose-lipped soldier by the collar and drags him up, snarling in his face. “And what Targaryen ever died for the North?” he bellows in the man’s sheet-pale face, shaking him. “What Targaryen ever bled for us the way Jon Snow has?”

The man splutters in his grasp, hands clawing at the fist at his throat.

“I know no king but King Jon of House Stark,” he roars, spit flying in his rage. “And I swear, on the old gods and the new, that I will gut the man who besmirches his name, do you understand me?”

The man in his grasp nods sharply, gulping his fear down, sighing in relief when Lord Glover drops him back to the floor.

Sansa stands at the end of the hall, watching with a lung-tingling fascination.

Lord Glover seems to notice her then, dipping into a slight bow at her presence, a hand at his chest. “My queen,” he says, and Sansa’s breath catches in her throat at the address.

She stares at him, eyes unblinking, hands bunching in her skirts.

He does not move until she nods her dismissal, and then he’s sweeping from the hall, his cloak billowing in his wake. She does not notice the curious stares of the soldiers. She watches the space he once occupied, heart thrumming in her chest, throat parched.

“My queen.”

Sansa retreats from the hall without further word.

A new whisper begins, this one voiced in reverence.

The White Wolf and the Red Queen.

It spills over the castle, past the walls, echoing from ear to ear – until they are lore, as entrenched in the Northern spirit as snow is to winter.

“I’m sorry he could not be laid to rest at sea,” Sansa tells Yara one morning, the faint pink of the sunrise casting slants of ghostly light across the pyres, now barely embers in the snow.

She holds tight to her chest the memory of Theon’s last embrace, that night before the end.

She holds tight.

Beside her, Yara digs her booted toe into the cinder-lined snow, watching it crest and break before her. “Still,” she says, voice hoarse, “he did not die away from home. For that, I am grateful.” She glances up at Sansa with the words.

She dares not speak, throat tight with unspoken yearning.

Yara nods at her, a hard smile breaking across her lips. “The Drowned God takes even his wayward sons, after all. Theon is at peace, perhaps for the first time in his miserable life.”

Sansa winces at the words, though not from offense. It’s a willowing regret, memory washing over her.

(His trembling hand in hers as they leapt from the height of Winterfell’s walls.)

Yes.

Peace.

Give him peace, gods, please, if you’ve any mercy left in you – give him peace.

Sansa’s eyes flutter shut, heart carving a hollow between her ribs.

“My brother respected you, cared for you in a way I may never understand, but – ”

Sansa opens her eyes to watch Yara in the slow-brimming light of dawn.

Yara swallows tightly, turning to her fully. “I wish to honor his faith,” she promises staunchly. “I swear to you now – queen to queen – the North will have the Iron Islands’ friendship, from now until the waves take us.”

Sansa stares at her, a visage of her lost Theon, in the lines of her nose and the clench of her jaw and the curl of hair sweeping across her brow. Something aches in Sansa that feels jarringly like the beginning of a long, quiet grief. She releases a shaky breath with her words. “I would gladly trade it to have him back – even for a day.”

Yara offers a tender smile, something like gratitude passing through her eyes. “I know. That’s why you shall always have it.”

Sansa nods, feeling the lingering heat of the spent pyres at her side. Like a promise.

“I would have died to get you there.”

Yara extends her hand, salt-grimed glove open and waiting.

Sansa does not let it stay empty for long. She reaches forward, clasping arms with her fellow queen. “Sail well,” she tells her, a gentle hope lining the words.

Yara smiles at her, fingers gripping at her forearm, head bowed in respect. “What is dead may never die.”

Perhaps such words might have been a haunt in moons past, the threat of the Night King still a visceral, immediate thing. But now, the words are heartening.

Now, they sound like a plea that’s been begging her lips for freedom.

Now, they are a promise.

(She doesn’t want to be a Red Queen if it’s only to a dead king.)

* * *

She visits Jon on the third day.

She finds Arya sitting outside his door, sharpening Needle. It seems a pointless task, but she does not tell her so, because then –

(Sansa ignores the quiet reminder at the back of her mind that whispers ‘Daenerys’ over and over, like a chant, a mantra. A dragon without wings is not without teeth, after all.)

She stares down at Arya, watching as her sister stills the whetstone over her blade, eyes a blank mask when she blinks up at her.

“Will you let me through?” she whispers with an exhaustion she has not let herself feel until now – until she is at his door, merely paces from him.

Arya cocks a brow her way, leaning back in her chair. “Took you long enough.” There’s a sharpness to the words – an accusation.

Sansa swallows tightly. She just wants to breathe.

(She’s been trying to catch her breath since she first saw the stain of his blood along her furs.)

She just wants to breathe.

“Will you let me through?” she asks again, the words a strangled whisper.

Arya narrows her eyes at her, jaw clenched tight. She nods finally, gaze drawn down. Sansa slips into the room beneath the whisper of her wool skirts.

The door slips shut behind her and she’s left staring at him as he lies there, tucked beneath furs, so peaceful she might have mistaken him for asleep any other time.

She takes a step closer, trembling. A short, stunted breath leaves her. Another step. She feels the horror branching through her lungs – slow and indelicate. She makes it all the way to the edge of his bed before she manages to breathe his name.

“Jon.”

He doesn’t answer.

“Jon,” she tries again, this time louder, this time with the irrational belief that were she only louder, he would hear her and wake.

He stays still atop the bed.

That slow-branching horror, it sinks its hooks, brittles her bones. It roots her there before him. She sinks to her knees mindlessly.

He’s so pale. So sickly pale his skin tints blue.

Sansa blinks, brows furrowing.

That blue…

It’s frost, she realizes, a trembling hand reaching out to brush against his temple, feeling the sheen of thin ice beneath her fingertips. She pulls her hand back instantly, a small gasp breaking over her parted lips.

There’s a winter in his veins, freezing him in this moment, keeping him suspended in this hopeless halfway point between life and death. She fumbles for his pulse, two fingers pressing into the cold flesh at his throat. His heartbeat wanes, sluggish and faint – barely even there at all.

She licks her lips, hand retracting. She takes a moment to look at him, eyes traveling over his scar-lined face, the unruly thatch of beard at his chin, the broad expanse of his chest when she pulls the furs down, riddled with the evidence of his betrayal – twice borne now. Beads of blood dot the edges of his never-closing wounds. Sansa frowns at the sight.

There’s a cloth and clean water at the bedside, and after several moments of staring at the gashes, of trying to discern the motion of his breath, she reaches for it and sets about cleaning him.

The blood will run again, she knows. It is a perpetual stain, a constant reminder. But there is something soothing about dragging the wet cloth across his flesh, wiping the filth from him. Her eyes catch along the tangle of his dark curls lining the pillow now, brows furrowing. She finds a brush and sets to work, moving on to his beard next, taking a delicate blade to the overgrown hair, cleaning him up as best she can. She tucks him beneath the furs once more, changes his woolen socks, calls for lukewarm broth from the attending servant girl that Arya sends in. When the woman returns, Sansa sends her out with an appreciative smile and gentle nod, setting the first spoonful to Jon’s mouth and dabbing up the lost broth that trickles over his chin with a fresh cloth beneath her steady, fine-boned fingers.

Arya does not come to collect her that evening, and Sansa wakes to find she has fallen asleep against the bed, knees still folded painfully stiff beneath her, Ghost nudging her to consciousness with a wet snout. She clenches a hand in his fur and buries her face in his neck, breathing him in.

He smells like Jon, she finds. Like soiled snow and leather and figs. She holds him to her for many long moments. And then she finds the will to face another day.

She returns after the work of tending the wounded and rebuilding Winterfell is done, after meeting with the remaining Northern lords as they try to contain the aftermath. They’ve taken to following her rule in Jon’s absence, an unspoken act, perhaps bolstered by such vocal allegiance as Lord Glover’s and Lady Lyanna’s. Jon’s lineage becomes the insignificance of yesterday, when there are too many walls to rebuild and too many mouths to feed and too many wounds to stich closed. After all, there is truth to Lord Glover’s words.

“What Targaryen ever died for the North?”

They still call him King Jon in their whispered tales, in their fervent pleas to the old gods to heal his ailing body, to halt his perishing. The stories are vague, blurred at the edges, no one truly knowing the way in which Jon Snow defeated the Night King, only knowing that he had.

And perhaps that is enough.

Sansa leaves a tray of food outside Bran’s door each morning and returns to it untouched each night.

She will not do more. She cannot do more.

Not when Jon’s hand sits like ice against her small palm and the bandaged linens round his chest stain with fresh blood each morning.

Sansa curls her vehemence back behind a still tongue, tasting its tartness with the kind of steely resignation that comes from having buried so many dead already.

The pyres never seem to stop burning, the sky a permanent grey haze. Sometimes she finds herself staring over the ramparts at the ash-covered hills, the tainted snow of her home. But yearning is not building, and she has grown used to busy hands. She does not stare long.

There is a kingdom to restore.

She says goodbye to Lady Olenna at the gate, after her half-moon stay in Winterfell following the battle. The older woman takes her hands in hers, a jarringly public and informal gesture of affection that makes Sansa’s chest grow warm with fondness, with the aching wonder of what might have been.

“Take care, dear girl. I fear this winter has only just begun.”

Sansa nods, eyes falling to their joined hands. “I think you might be right.” She doesn’t let the weary sigh leave her, but she thinks Olenna might have heard it anyway. She blinks back up at her, gaze sure. “But we are not alone anymore. Keep sending that grain up North, Lady Olenna, and we stand a far better chance.”

Olenna pats her hand, a wrinkled smile tugging at her lips. “Then I shall, Your Grace.”

Sansa opens her mouth to object to the address, unable to keep her features from showing her startle, but Olenna only shushes her, patting her hand one last time before withdrawing. She eyes the shadow that Daenerys casts from her perch atop the ramparts, watching the farewell in stiff, darkened silence. “Take heed, Your Grace,” Olenna whispers. “This world has not seen the last of dragons, it seems.” A glint passes through her eyes as they resettle on Sansa’s. “I wish you good fortune in the wars to come,” she says pointedly, head inclined toward her.

Sansa does not glance upward at the indication, already feeling the dragon queen’s presence like a hand at her throat, cinching ever tighter. But she nods her understanding, a faint smile pulling at the corners of her lips. “Thank you, my lady.”

Edmure Tully leaves but a few days later himself, his lame arm bandaged to his side, his Tully armor both a comfort and a haunt. His bow is reserved, the quirk of his smile an affectionate thing when he rises back to his full height, head high. “You know, you’re quite unlike her, in many ways, and yet, exactly like her in all the rest,” he says suddenly, a thoughtful expression gracing his features.

Sansa cocks a curious brow up at him, a startled laugh lining her lips with earnestness. “Oh?”

“Like Catelyn,” he says, as though it ever needed clarifying.

Sansa beams up at him, a hand braced to her chest as though to stem the warmth.

His face takes on a somberness, his eyes a soft-hued blue that makes her ache with memory. “I miss her, still. I miss her always.”

Her mother’s brother, she reminds herself. Her brother.

She thinks she knows a little something about brothers – the needing of them.

And the losing of them.

She reaches out to grasp his gloved hand in hers, a tender thumb running over his knuckles.

Edmure releases a soft laugh, a flicker of pain crossing his brow when he looks down at the motion, but then he’s smiling again, that Tully blue a familiar comfort now. “I’m glad I shall not have to miss you, niece,” he tells her.

Sansa reaches for him, and he goes to her. They hug in the snow-veiled courtyard, gently and ardently. She says goodbye to both her uncles, in the hollow of her heart, in the silence of prayers she has learned to always keep inward, in the kind of faith that has only ever been born of blood.

Her gods wear familiar faces now. She keeps them close to her heart.

(Family is the only faith that’s ever seen her through, after all.)

“I can’t say I’ll miss this dreadful cold, cousin,” Robin tells her upon his own farewell, shrugging his cloak tighter about his shoulders in a motion of discomfort.

Sansa takes pity on him, moving to adjust his furs with sure, practiced hands, tightening the cross-straps over his chest and smoothing her hands over his startlingly broad shoulders.

Not a child anymore, she finds. But then, none of them have had that luxury for quite some years now.

The recollection makes her softer, makes her worn heart clench just a touch tighter. “Then I shall have to make you a fine, new cloak when next you visit, my lord,” she says, her voice bright in a way it hasn’t been for far too long.

The excitement that lights his face could not be masked even if he’d tried.

It’s a small, endearing bit of honesty that brings a smile to her lips.

“Will you?”

Sansa nods fervently.

Robin beams at her, chin lifting, standing just a bit straighter than he had before. And then a touch of sadness wilts his smile. “I’m sorry Lord Baelish won’t be able to join me. I know how much he must have meant to you.” He worries his lip. “Arya told me he died in the battle.”

Sansa returns her hands to his shoulders, smoothing over the edges of his cloak with a motherly touch. “He died in service to the North. I could not ask for more,” she tells him, voice steady, not a quiver to be found.

Robin nods, brows furrowed, face caught somewhere between pride and regret. And then he offers a comforting smile, dipping into a slight bow in farewell, turning almost fully before –

He stops, glances back at her, opens his mouth with a line of hesitation worrying his brow. “Your Jon,” he begins, and Sansa blinks at him, breath tightening in her chest. “He’s a brave one, isn’t he?”

Sansa resists the urge to fold the young lord into her embrace, settling instead for a grateful smile and a soft sigh.

“I should like to get to know him better, when he wakes.”

Sansa lets the breath flutter from her, a catch to her voice. “I’ll see to it, my lord.” She watches the billowing of his cloak when he leaves then, the familiar banners of the Eyrie disappearing behind the main gate with the afternoon sun.

She returns to the council chambers that same day to find Tyrion waiting for her, standing swiftly from his chair at her presence.

Brienne eyes him disdainfully at her back, but Sansa only gives him a blank stare.

He worries a hand at the edge of the chair for a moment, seeming to contemplate his words. A stilted silence breathes between them, and then he takes a step toward her. “Your Grace,” he begins, and never gets to finish.

“’Your Grace’? Not ‘my lady’? Not ‘Sansa’?” She keeps the bite tame in her words, the snap of her jaw cushioned by restraint.

It is still strange and new, this quiet acceptance the Northerners have granted her, this title born of war and its necessities. Davos is as insightful and stalwart a Hand to her as he was to Jon, and none of the great houses seem eager to dispute her choice, or her rule. She wonders still, in the back of her mind, if they’d have chosen her in any other circumstance. Or if she is simply the default now, the only Stark left worth following, with Bran sequestered in her chambers as though in self-imprisonment, and Arya slinking through Winterfell’s shadows in a grief so furious she seems more wolf than human these days.

(Even still, she remembers the way Lord Glover had looked at her that first night in the hall, and the way Ser Davos inclines his head in deference, and the way silence blisters in the room upon her arrival, fierce and humble in equal measure.)

Tyrion clears his throat, gaze shifted toward the table so that he does not look at her when he says, “I think by now it’s rather clear you were never my lady. Especially now that you are…” He clears his throat again, eyes flicking back toward hers. “Now that you are his.”

She does not offer a rebuke, but neither does she offer confirmation. She simply stares at him. The room seems smaller suddenly, the air tight in her lungs.

Tyrion’s hand falls from the chair and he takes another step toward her, looking up at her with a plead in his eyes she cannot discern. “But that’s not why I’m here.”

“And why are you here, Lord Tyrion?” she manages through pursed lips, tongue sharp behind her teeth.

(She was there when they presented Jaime’s gold hand to him after the battle, in the filtering light of a red-hazed dawn. He’d stared at it with salt-tinged eyes, lips trembling as he bit his tongue to hold the curse, or perhaps the wail. Eyes fluttering closed, breath raking from him like a gale, he’d finally spoken.

“Melt it down,” he’d choked out, and then turned instantly, stalking away with a shake to his shoulders that had Sansa bracing a hand over her mouth, the sigh tumbling from her in its wounded release.)

“I’ve come to offer my services,” he says, fists bunching at his sides.

Sansa cocks her head at him, eyeing him carefully. “Has your queen finally decided to rejoin the council? To venture outside her self-imposed isolation? Tell me, is she tired of living like a mere guest in a castle that should be hers?”

Tyrion swallows tightly, his voice hoarse when he replies, “Daenerys is in mourning, but – ”

“And we are not?” she scoffs.

“But I am not here for her,” he finishes gruffly.

Another silence pricks at them, the air bristling with unease, and Sansa tries not to notice the trembling of his fists or the downward tilt of his mouth or the anguished, lonesome look in his eye.

The last of his name.

And yet he’s here –

(not for ‘her’).

Sansa will not turn away council for spite. She will not let her people suffer to keep her burning resentment alive. She will not place pride above peace.

“Please,” he tries again, blinking up at her with barely concealed tears, a face so instantly aged and worn she’s surprised she hadn’t seen it before. There’s a weariness to him that wasn’t there before. “May I – may I be of any help?”

“I won’t ever hurt you.”

Sansa has taken to distrusting such promises in her experience, but there’s the same earnestness in his words now, and she understands what it means to want to believe in simple sincerity – to need it even, especially in an insincere world.

Sansa finds herself nodding stiffly, just as the door behind her swings open. Lyanna Mormont stops in the threshold, eyeing the two of them in stilted concern. “Your Grace?” she asks cautiously, hand clenching on the door handle.

Sansa takes a deep breath, motioning toward a seat at the table. “Lord Tyrion will be joining us for a time,” she tells her.

Gratitude lights along the scar-addled lines of his face, a shaky smile pulling at his mouth.

She does not ask after his queen. She does not invite the dragon back to the table.

And he does not urge her to such.

* * *

Sansa consults with every healer and maester and wildling witch left in Winterfell. Nothing seems to affect Jon. No collection of herbs seems to make the right salve, no pressure of practiced hands seems to ease the bruising or the wounds, no incantation seems to invoke the gods’ mercy enough to wake him.

Sansa visits him daily, sleeping either at his side, or with Arya. She begins her day with him. She ends it with him, as well.

She enters the familiar chamber now to find Tormund standing in the middle of the room, staring down at Jon, still as the morning light.

“Tormund,” she greets, hesitant, making her way around the large man to stand at his side.

He grunts his acknowledgement of her, never taking his eyes from Jon.

She bundles her hands before her, fingers clenching and unclenching. She eyes the clean bowl of water at the bedside table. “Did you come to help me wash him?” she asks tentatively, needing to broach the silence and yet not knowing how.

He slides his intense gaze her way and she swallows back the words, unable to look away. He heaves a heavy sigh, a hand wiping down his mouth and along his rough beard. The motion is so reminiscent of Jon that she nearly takes a step back at the way it knocks the breath from her.

“Let him rest, little wolf,” he tells her.

She blinks at him, confusion marring her features. She glances back to Jon’s unmoving form, before returning her attention to Tormund. “I…”

“He deserves the mercy of a clean blade.”

The panic is instant – sharp at her throat. Her hand comes up to grab at the hook-and-needle chain lining her collar. “No,” she croaks out, breathless, staggering beneath the suggestion.

Tormund turns fully to her, eyes the darkest blue she’s ever seen from him. “He’s done his part. He’s won the fight. Now let him rest.”

“And were you not there when he rose from death the first time?”

Tormund grumbles, but doesn’t answer.

She takes a daring step closer to him. “Were you not there?” she asks harshly.

“Aye,” he grinds out. “I was there.”

Sansa stares at him balefully, her hand unclenching from her chain and sliding back to her side. “You didn’t let him rest then either.” It’s nearly an accusation.

“Things were different.”

“Yes, he wasn’t still alive.”

Tormund levels her with a frustrated glare.

“I can’t let him go. I can’t.” Her breath catches, her hands gripping at her skirts. “Not like this.”

Heaving a sigh, Tormund glances back to Jon’s still form along the bed. “You know he never was the same – after that death business.”

Sansa softens at the admission. She feels the unexplainable urge to rest her hand upon his wide arm. She resists it – just barely.

“He was never the same,” he breathes out.

“I know.”

“No,” he says, near on a growl. “You don’t.”

Sansa blinks at him, mouth pursed into a tight line. Something rattles in her chest she cannot recognize.

He turns back to her. “You can’t know that. No one can. He won’t talk about it – about wherever the fuck he went when those bastards closed his eyes for good. So, no – you can’t know that. You can’t know how he’s changed because you don’t know where he’s been. None of us do.”

She remembers Jon’s heavy breath pooling in the dip of her collar bone as he braces himself above her. She remembers the quiver that racks through him when she settles her touch at his chest. She remembers the mournful way he mouths her name as her fingertips graze his scars.

And she remembers how he takes her mouth with his before she can ever ask, his hand stilling her at the wrist.

The thing is, she’s done quite the same when he’s tried exploring her own scars.

Ramsay was a form of death himself, after all.

She’s never told Jon the depraved things Ramsay used to whisper in her ear when he took her like an animal, or how he brought her to begging by knife-point each night, or even how she miscarried during her escape to Castle Black – staining her saddle with blood, Brienne’s firm, mindful hands pulling her from the horse, cradling her in the snow as she cried out from the pain, a rending, terrible wail that shook the frost from the trees while Theon watched on with quiet, horror-filled eyes.

(No, never that.)

Something in her died on her way to him.

Something in her has been dying ever since.

Sansa gulps back the memory, frigid in her own skin, a winter’s gale passing through her like a howl.

She told him to come back – demanded it even – because she has had enough of dying.

Because a collar is just another kind of violence.

Because she has finally learned to bare her teeth.

(Because wolves were never meant to be tamed – even by death.)

“Maybe it’s selfish,” she says, chapped lips parting on the words. “But I won’t let him go,” she repeats. “Because I think he deserves to be fought for. I think he deserves it more than anyone.”

Tormund stares at her for a long time, just watching her, and she has to wonder what he sees. He’d been there, after all, the day she’d arrived at Castle Black. He’d been there – watched how she’d flown herself at Jon, arms going wide, sob raking from her instantly, trembling in his hold, face buried in his neck, rocking with him, back and forth and back and forth and –

He’d been there when she’d poured herself into him, never to return.

“Don’t take too long, little wolf,” he tells her finally, a gruff sigh leaving him as he turns for the door. “The dragon queen won’t sit still forever.”

Sansa watches him go, catching sight of Arya in the threshold as Tormund drifts past. They share a nod of familiarity, and Sansa is a sudden stranger, the show of acknowledgement a window into lives she’s closed herself off to – either willfully or not.

Have they shared a pint as easily as they’ve shared this nod? Have they shared stories or laughs or hands?

She wonders, suddenly, at all the moments she’s missed in her single-minded rule, at this life her sister has built for herself, this life that Jon has built for himself, all the people and all the trials and all the joys that they’ve known.

She’s never shared her darkest parts, no, but she wants to now, suddenly. She wants to know what it means to be seen – wholly and cleanly.

Arya stands before her. Jon lays behind her.

And she wants them to know. She wants them to know everything – all the horrid, rancid details, all the gruesome little workings of her insides – peeled back and emptied out.

(Perhaps this is what living means – perhaps this is what she demands of herself, as much as she demands it of Jon.)

She stares at Arya and her perpetual hold on Needle at her hip. She stares at Tormund’s back as he stalks from the room. She stares and stares and stares – vacant and longing.

(Tired of unkindness.)

Sansa makes her way from the room, silent and stiff. She finds herself at Bran’s door.

Before she can knock, the door swings wide – open for the first time since he’d retreated that bloody, unforgettable night, as though he’d been waiting for just this moment.

“Sansa,” he says, and he’s her little brother again – though his cheeks are gaunt and his eyes are hollow and there is nothing fond in his voice at all.

Her chest clenches from the harrowing sight of him. “Bran,” she exhales softly.

He sits staring up at her, hand still held at the door. And then he wheels back, inviting her into the darkness of the room, shadows playing on them like taunts.

She thinks of their trek south. She thinks of the summit. She thinks of the beat of dragon’s wings shadowing their journey home. She thinks of the dragon queen, her white-sheened brilliance like a threat, even now, her mourning a fire-brewed thing.

She thinks of the start of it all.

Sansa takes a seat before Bran, the fire crackling at her side. She licks her lips. She finds her words. (At the beginning.)

She will start at the beginning.

Sansa clears her throat, eyes a dark demand, breath rising like wind-swept embers in her chest. {“Why did you bring her here?” –

* * *

Daenerys becomes a haunt – a silver, shadowy thing Sansa hardly ever sees outside the dim veil of sundown. Sometimes, when she takes to the halls at night, she finds the dragon-less queen just lingering in a threshold, as though she has suddenly lurched to a stop, caught halfway between one place and the other, forgetting where it is she means to go.

The war has left widows of most of the North – wives who have outlasted their husbands.

But there is no such word for mothers who have outlasted their children.

Sansa knocks on Daenerys’ door just the once – short and solid.

“Come in,” Daenerys beckons with a voice like ash.

Sansa enters her chamber smoothly, offering a polite curtsy and closing the door behind her. She finds Daenerys lounging in a cushioned chair near the window, holding a near-empty wine glass loosely in her hand. She sneers at Sansa’s entrance, a jarring expression for a face otherwise perfectly poised, a model of regal disinterest when she turns back to the window. “And how is my nephew?” she asks coolly, fingers curling around her glass. At Sansa’s silence she turns a single, raised brow her way, looking at her out of the corner of her eye. “Come now, I know you’ve just come from his chambers. You practically live there now, don’t you?”

Sansa smooths her hands over her skirts. “He is much the same, Your Grace. Nothing we’ve attempted has yet to wake him.”

Daenerys scoffs, taking a swig of wine. “Such a doting sister.” She seems to catch herself, lip curling as she turns fully to her. “Or should I say cousin now?”

“Jon is…dear to me, Your Grace, no matter the relation you attach to it.”

“Yes,” she says, emptying her wine glass. “Dear enough to fuck, it seems.”

“Your Grace – ”

“Let’s not pretend, shall we? It’s a rather tedious affair at this point.” Daenerys arches a challenging brow at Sansa, tipping her empty glass back and forth.

“She burnt the Temple of the Dosh Khaleen when the khals refused her rule. She burnt the slaver ships when they denied her their fleet. She burnt Euron Greyjoy when he rescinded his allegiance.”

Sansa blinks, remembering Bran’s words.

“She destroys what she cannot have. House words have never rung so true. She will take what is hers, with fire and blood. Or fire and blood will take it instead.”

Sansa draws in a deep, steadying breath, lowering herself to the seat across from Daenerys. Her hands fold together over her lap with certainty.

Meereen will be the last city she lays ruin to.

Sansa catches sight of the flagon of wine on the side table.

(The last, she vows.)

Sansa grabs the flagon, offering it to Daenerys.

After a moment of contemplation, Daenerys extends her hand with the wine glass expectantly. Sansa begins to pour as she speaks, “If we’re not pretending anymore then I gather it’s safe to say you’re not particularly interested in Jon waking.”

Daenerys throws her head back with a stunted laugh and Sansa stops pouring, replacing the flagon, her hands shifting seamlessly back to her lap. Daenerys bites off an indignant scoff when she looks back to Sansa, eyes flashing. “You’re much too smart to think I’d ever cross an ocean with an army such as mine only to sit second seat at the table.”

Sansa doesn’t answer her, but she doesn’t need to.

Daenerys’ eyes harden on her, taking a sip of wine like a threat, never blinking from her when she swallows. “I did offer him an alternative. He refused.”

“It’s only an alternative when it’s a choice, not a threat.”

Daenerys purses her lips, the fingers of her free hand thrumming along the armrest. “I didn’t relish the idea of harming my own blood, no, but I’d have done it if it meant stability for the throne.”

“I believe that.”

Daenerys eyes her critically, shifting in her seat. “And you understand why I must.” A long sip of wine. A thrum of silence between them.

It is said like a statement, but even Sansa hears the question in it. She offers a perfunctory smile. “I understand why you believe you must.”

Daenerys’ cheeks tinge a harsh pink, her nostrils flaring. “It is not belief. It is fact.” She takes a large gulp of wine.

“You’ll pardon me, Your Grace, if I hold such a fact up to speculation. You did, after all, base your entire campaign for the throne on the misguided ‘fact’ that you were the last – and rightful – Targaryen.” Sansa cocks her head thoughtfully, reclining in her chair. “We’ve since seen the truth of that,” she finishes calmly, no hint of smugness to the words, though the boldness of such a sentiment is inherently unspoken.

Daenerys narrows her eyes, her jaw locking, a cold, even calm blanketing over her. And this is it. This is the dragon queen in all her bereaved splendor. This is grief made sharp – made fire-licked. “You would do well to hold that tongue, my lady, before I have it cut out.” It’s such a soft-spoken threat, her voice lilting as though it is a secret shared, a hidden joy. Daenerys’ lips curl with her dark smile, stained with wine.

Sansa glances to the slowly emptying glass in her hand.

“So eager to defy me,” Daenerys muses, all hint of grief gone. “Treason is an easy crime for you, isn’t it?” She is fire again – the small, blue flame at its origin. A quiet destruction. She looks off into the corner of the room, taking a drawn-out sip of wine, a needful distraction. A sigh leaves her when she finally lowers her glass – a sound not unlike the exhaustion of bruised hearts.

Sansa thinks of Jorah Mormont then. The quiet bear at Daenerys’ back, and the way she always inclined her head at his words, the way her smile seemed a tender, girlish thing in his presence, the way her hand reached for him in the end, with desperation and yearning and loneliness.

So much loneliness it was painful for Sansa to watch.

“You love him so? That you would risk such treason to speak to me thus? That you would give your life for his claim?” Her eyes slip back to Sansa like a demand.

“For his claim? No.” Sansa shakes her head softly, a sad sort of smile tugging at her lips, and she knows now that there is no keeping it any longer. There is no way to stop it spilling from her, in waves and waves and earnest, fierce waves. “But for him?”

There is no keeping this.

She imagines Daenerys sees the truth of it in her face, because she is nodding slightly, jaw quivering, a heavy breath drawn through her lungs. “And you think I haven’t loved like that myself?” Her eyes are wet suddenly – jarringly.

If Daenerys is trying to hide the regret, she’s doing a poor job of it. And for a moment, Sansa wonders what they might have been in another life. In another time.

(When they’d not crawled over leagues and leagues of heartache too ripe to ever call it finished –

Leagues and leagues of it and –

The road is too long. It winds too sharp. And Sansa cannot see the end from her vantage point, cannot calculate the curve. She discerns it through faith. She travels blind, but for her hand in Jon’s.)

What they might have been – Sansa wonders – in another life.

But they have only this life.

And she will not waste it.

“I think you’ve loved,” she answers her in a whisper, and it’s not a truth that’s hard to see.

Daenerys does not take her eyes from her, hand tightening over her forgotten wine glass. She is a haunt, yes – still a visage of mourning – but fire does not die so easy.

(Sansa reminds herself that fire sows no seeds.)

The words lodge in Sansa’s throat, scraping their way out – a wreckage of sorrow lighting her tongue. “I just don’t think you’ve ever loved anything so well as your throne – so well as yourself.”

Daenerys looks upon her with barely held contempt, her chin tilting high, eyes blinking back the wetness. “You’re treading on thin ice, Lady Sansa,” she warns.

“But it is my ice, and I will tread it how I will.”

Her North. Her home. Her Jon.

(Even if she burns for it – this she will not surrender.)

Daenerys takes a last, violent swig of wine, emptying her glass and nearly slamming it on the side table as she stands. “You would be dead without me,” she hisses, a harrowing glint of shadow lighting her pale features. It is almost a plea.

Sansa only shakes her head, her eyes sharp under the firelight, hands still held primly in her lap. “I would be dead without a great number of people – mainly Jon. And Arya, and Bran, and Theon. But not you.”

Daenerys blinks wildly at her, mouth parting with no words to follow.

Sansa stands as well, her height lending an air of assurance to the words. “We would be dead without your dragons, Your Grace, but hardly without you,” she corrects, something of compassion seeping into her tone, remembering –

There is no word for mothers who outlast their children.

Yes, she has loved. But so have they all.

“I’m sorry,” Sansa says.

(Daenerys will never know what for.)

A scoff leaves the queen’s lips. “Sorry?” She’s practically shaking with the indignation. “Sorry?” Her face twists into a mask of disdain. “You will be,” she promises, voice a tight whisper. “You will all be sorry.”

Sansa does not wilt in the face of her wrath. She simple waits. She simply watches.

“Father will know if you do.”

“My armies will sweep through this land and lay waste to all who defy me. I will retake that which is mine by right, and you will learn to properly cower before your queen,” she sneers, a shadow-crept wrath etching over her face. “You think you have won, because my dragons are dead. Because my children are dead. But I was a queen before I was ever a mother, and a queen I will stay. They heralded my name like prophecy, they knelt in reverence, they bled for me, because I demanded it, and because they knew it was right. Westeros will tremble before me, dragons or not, because I am the last true Targaryen. I am the fire, and I am the blood. And you will know my wrath. You will know that I carry the greatness of Old Valyria in my veins. You will know – ”

Daenerys chokes on her own vehemence, a cloud of blood spraying suddenly from her lips as she jolts to stillness, eyes wide.

(Words were not the only poison Baelish taught her.)

Sansa tucks her hand back into the folds of her dress, the powdered drug between her fingertips a weight she has learned years ago.

Daenerys snaps wild eyes to her emptied wine glass in recognition, lips flecked with blood. She stumbles, blinking furiously, hands grasping for air she hasn’t the lungs for.

Sansa does not turn away, even when the dragon queen collapses to the ground, gripping Sansa’s skirts between white knuckles, choking on her own blood.

“I would give my life for his, yes,” Sansa offers demurely, lowering herself to the floor, a tender hand on the dragon queen’s elbow just before she starts seizing. “But first, I would give yours.”

It’s an ugly, inglorious death that takes her – the blood seeping from her mouth like a wound, fingers gnarled into trembling, grasping claws, eyes red-rimmed and hateful when she finally gasps her last – small and infirm and less than a queen.

It is not a dragon’s death.

Daenerys’ eyes slip shut, and instantly – like a dark, thieving mirror – with Ghost’s distant howl breaking against the night, somewhere across the castle –

Jon finally wakes.

* * *

{“There is a price. Only death pays for life.”

It is an echo of years past. An echo that rings unfamiliar to Sansa’s ears, but in the dark hour, in the hollow of night, it comes to her –

“Some say the witch’s magic still lingers inside me.”

Sansa’s eyes go wide, her mouth parting. Bran offers what might have passed for a smile once on her lost brother’s face.

“Because she is needed.”

There is an old sort of magic to sacrifice, after all – a violence done most kindly.

And fire sows no seeds.

So Sansa will sow her own.}

#jonsa #a violence done most kindly #jon x sansa #jon and sansa #jon snow #sansa stark #arya stark #bran stark #starklings #house stark #game of thrones #got fanfic #my writing

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