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speechlessxx · 4 years

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Bring Him Light - Prologue (King!Steve Rogers x Reader)

Chapter Summary: The Princess of York is to be sent away to marry the Brooken King.

Warnings: Steve’s not in this chapter. Patriarchy. Tony’s not winning father of the year. Possible Dark Themes (in the future).

Word Count: 1.8k

This was gonna be longer, but I wanted y’alls opinion before I went ahead and made this a series.

Hope you guys enjoy! Let me know what y’all think.

Bring Him Light Masterlist

(The gif isn’t mine and it’s kinkier than i wanted it to be sorry... no bondage in this one)

Next Part ->

The coarse ropes dug into your skin as you twisted and turned your wrists in hopes to loosen the knot. You were sure they’d leave marks. You bit your lip to suppress the pained whimper that threatened to escape but paid no attention to the tears that rolled down your cheeks. It wasn’t as if your captor would’ve seen. The burlap sack over your head made sure of that.

Every time the cart jostled due to the uneven roads, you felt the crops – your travel companions as it seemed – roll around, often smacking against you. You tried to reach backwards with your bound wrists, searching for an arrow in your quiver. But it seemed as if your captor had rid you of them.

You felt the dirt on your skin. It was all over your legs and feet – you had forgone your shoes, the heels would’ve made your escape twice as difficult. The earth had settled itself into your pores and between your toes, leaving an uncomfortable feeling that made you cringe.

As the ride became smoother, you knew you were closer to the castle. You stopped fumbling with your bound wrists and rested your head against the back of the cart in defeat. There was no use in trying to escape. You lost your chance. No one would let you go now.

Soon the cart had stopped altogether and the rider – your captor – had retrieved you, carrying you in his arms. You were exhausted. All the fight in you had been extinguished in your attempt to flee. It had been at least two days since you’ve last eaten. You couldn’t even remember if you gave yourself an opportunity to fall asleep.

“Your majesty!” The man carrying you bellowed out as you heard doors open. “I’ve brought you a gift.” The man had put you down and though you couldn’t find the strength to stand, you tried your best to steady yourself. The bag had been removed from your head – you were sure your hair was a mess – but you kept your glare as you stood your ground. The man handed the king a broken piece of wood and you felt your stomach drop in realization. “I’ve broken her bow. My apologies.”

“Thank you, Thor,” the king nodded. His face was expressionless as he stared you down. “I’ll be sure to pay you well, huntsman, for bringing back my daughter.”

The huntsman grunted in response before he bowed. He left the throne room without another word. The councilmen stood beside your father, whispering to one another as they all took in your state.

Dirt pressed into your skin. The dress you wore was days old and torn from your tussle with the huntsman. Your hair – which was normally so clean and plaited elegantly – was in shambles and stood up in various spots. Your wrists were bound together, and a skinny strand of blood trickled down your arms due to the tight knot. If the men didn’t know any better, you looked like a common peasant – not a princess.

Your face was flushed as your rage boiled inside you. Your father quipped up an eyebrow as if expecting you to scream – to shout and curse at him – but all you did was glare in silence. And if looks could kill, he’d be dead three times over.

“You,” your father finally said as he narrowed his eyes, “sent the castle into a frenzy looking for you.” He walked towards you, disappointment and exhaustion written on his face. “That was incredibly reckless.”

“Little girls tend to be so, your grace,” one of the councilmen chided. The others at his side chuckled. “Which is why they become pretty accessories, not rulers.”

“They say men who are well endowed give their wives sons. I wonder, my lord, why you and your wife only have daughters,” you snapped. The chuckling immediately stopped.

The noble glared at you. He pointed his finger at you and yelled, “you little – “before being interrupted by a woman’s voice.

“My love, is it true–“ the throne room doors opened and you carefully turned to see your mother. Her smile quickly faded the moment she saw your condition – the tattered dress, dirty feet, messy hair, arms bound. A frown settled on her beautiful face before she dismissed her ladies. “Leave us,” she ordered. Her ladies rushed away, but the councilmen stayed. Your mother scowled at the men. “I said leave us.”

“Your grace,” they murmured. “Your highness,” they bowed to you. The man you insulted moments ago gave you one last glare before following the others.

“My sweet girl,” your mother sighed, rushing towards you. She cupped your face in her hands and wiped some of the grime from your cheeks. She tutted before grabbing your wrists. She winced when she saw the blood and the reddening skin underneath the tight knot. “I thought you told Thor to be gentle, Anthony.”

“I told him to do whatever was necessary,” your father shrugged, “to ensure our daughter’s safe return.”

Your mother scoffed as she tried to unravel the rope, but it wouldn’t budge. “She is a princess, and you paraded her in front of the nobles as if she’s some prisoner, tied up like an animal.”

“If she only acted like a princess, then none of this would be necessary,” your father rebutted.

“If you hadn’t sold me like a broodmare, then I wouldn’t have run!” You shot back. You pulled you away from your mother to walk towards your father, pointing a finger at him with your wrists still bound together. “I won’t go through with this. I swear it! I will not marry him!”

Your father curled his lip and he slapped your hand away from him. “You will because it is your duty!” he snapped. “A marriage alliance will unite the two great nations of the north! No one will ever dare go to war on the northern kingdoms – not when we stand together.”

“You were at war with him nearly three years ago!” You argued. “If you want an alliance, draw up a treaty! Better yet, ask the Brooken king to meet you for supper!” You felt tears prick in your eyes. You were frustrated and angry. You didn’t like to argue with your father. “He’ll kill me.”

“Then we will have another war.”

“At the cost of my life!”

“Tony, stop it,” your mother chirped. Her hands found your shoulders as she tried to calm your anger.

“Tell him no, mother, please.” If anyone could get through to your stubborn father and talk some sense into him, it would be your mother. You prayed that she’d be on your side – that she wouldn’t send off her eldest daughter to another kingdom just to be an accessory to a prideful king. She averted her eyes from you to look back at your father. “This isn’t a lesson you’re sending me off to. This is the rest of my life. I’ll be some man’s breeder. I’ll be his whore by law and if I try to run, he can kill me.”

“Then, don’t run,” your father sighed. He walked over to you and pulled a blade from his cloak. Your mother gave him a startled look and he responded with a shrug as if to say you never know when you need it. He carefully sawed through the knot, releasing you from your bindings. “This is for your own good. This is for the good of the two kingdoms.”

“if you need a treaty so badly, then send a bloody diplomat!” You screamed and rubbed at the wounded skin. “Why send a bride?”

“He needs a queen he can trust,” your father said.

“You’re condemning me to a loveless marriage!”

“That is not written in stone,” your mother reasoned. She reached for your father and he took her hand. You watched as their fingers intertwined.

“Your bond is different. He’s a different man than father.”

“If York falls, Brooken follows… But not if we stand together. Do you not understand the threat we are all under?” Your father frowned. “The Mad King Thanos is overthrowing monarch after monarch. His empire steadily grows and I’m afraid if we do not unite the north, then we will all perish. Think of your little brother, Harvey. If I die at the hands of Thanos, he’s too young to lead a kingdom – to lead our men into war and win it. Think of baby Morgan. Your little sister brought into the world only months ago. If Thanos comes tomorrow, do you think he’ll have mercy on her? I can assure you that he won’t. He’s killed men, women, and children alike. He’ll kill her without hesitation.

“Please, my daughter, my eldest. If you will not do this for me – for your country, do it for them.”

“If I die, my blood is not on his hands. It will be on yours.” You spat. “How will you live knowing that you’ve condemned your eldest child to her death?”

Your father sighed. There was no use in arguing anymore. You got your stubbornness from the Stark blood that flowed through your veins.

“Your things have been packed and loaded into a carriage. Your ladies have already begun their journey. You leave at nightfall.” Your father nodded with clenched teeth. He gave you one last look. “King Steven is eager to meet you.”

»»————-　⚜　————-««

King Steven was said to love art. They say he often painted in the courtyard or in the gardens. He collected paintings and sculptures. He’s fond of decorations, they tell you. His favorite decorum was said to be the corpses of his enemies, strung up along the castle walls. A reminder to those who wished for his demise and those who plotted against him that he was and would always be victorious.

He was said to be cruel. You heard stories that he was a ruthless killer on the battlefield – that he wouldn’t stop slashing at his foe until his sword and armor were coated in their blood. You were told he never smiled and from the portraits you’ve seen of the man, it seemed to be true. He was handsome in the pictures you’ve seen. Short blonde hair, strong jaw, blue eyes. But looks could only compensate for so much.

He was married twice before. Queen Margaret and Queen Sharon. Both from the now extinct House Carter. Both queens died before they could give King Steven a child – a son.

You didn’t know the circumstances of their deaths, but some say the king was cursed. How unfortunate and unlucky does a man have to be to lose both his wives? But others have told you a different story. A story that was far more twisted and frightening.

Others claim that King Steven killed his queens.

The servants couldn’t blame you when you snuck away, bow and quiver full of arrows in hand. They even covered for you when you left through the kitchen’s exit.

But they were just rumors… How true could they be?

#steve rogers x reader #steve rogers #king steve #king steve rogers #dad tony stark #king tony stark #avengers medieval #medieval au #imagine #chris evans x reader #chris evans imagine #chris evans #captain america imagine #captain america x reader #bring him light

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lone-flower · 3 years

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#FFXIVWrite2021 entry - prompt: “Debonair” ➤ 1640~ word count ➤ emet/wol established relationship, mid 5.0 spoilers/era

debonair /ˌdɛbəˈnɛː/ adjective • confident, stylish, and charming

It was the nightless eve prior to the Mt. Gulg operation, all their efforts converging into an allyship spanning Norvrandt, and the completion of the oversized Talos. All that remained was the task of imbuing the automaton with magic — with life — upon daybreak, and the campaign would begin.

In spite of the recent Sineater peril and subsequent overthrow of power within Eulmore, the pampered citizens oh so fond of their galas and get-togethers had all but demanded a fête be held in honour of their saviors and those who were lost, along with seeking to dispel tensions preceding tomorrow’s battle. All were invited, from the most opulent maiden to the most unscrupulous street urchin, with the slight ulterior motive of better integrating the new-found societal structure of Eulmore; no better way to relate to another than by brushing shoulders, after all. Food was promptly prepared (no meol in sight) and the festivities began in earnest as one and all flocked to the main hall.

The plaza was positively abuzz once Abarbluom had made his way from the powder room, the more spirited attendants transforming the court into a large ballroom while others opted to remain seated and eat. An impromptu musical band had formed near the storefronts, its members composed of men and women in various tiers of dress, a heartfelt tune teased from their instruments. Children weaved between the crowds while playfully chasing each other, almost certainly looking to eat more than twice their fill with sweets alone.

He looked over the crowds for a familiar face, linking eyes over bobbing heads and feathered hats with Thancred, who heartily waved back. Both Minfilia and the twins sat at his side, who rose a glass of water in his direction, rousing a smile to Abarbluom’s lips; he dared not envy Thancred’s evening charge as babysitter. He continued to scan about the hall and caught a glimpse of the Exarch himself, rushing out the corridor leading to the Beehive, cane in hand as he pulled his hood over his face in shame. Smoothing down his robes and composing himself, he strode into the main hall and took station beside Urianger, muttering something to him before he replied.

“The chaste Exarch, at the Beehive?” Y’shtola’s voice. “What will the people say?”

She had come to Abarbluom’s side without his knowing and gave him a friendly touch on the back, smiling up at him.

“We mustn’t tease him,” he responded, laced with sarcasm. “The poor man just had the shock of his life.”

“All in good spirits. An exposed thigh may temper the lad.”

The two shared a chuckle as they observed the crowds, now sharing a silence. Music and laughter mingled into a single sound that reverberated about the chamber, bringing a tap to Abarbluom’s foot.

“It’s blinding, you know,” Y’shtola spoke, almost to herself. “That Aether of yours.”

Abarbluom swallowed. “I almost want to apologise, but I understand that would be quite foolish of me.”

She turned to him, concern touching her face. “You will tell us when it’s too much, won’t you?”

“You have my word.” Reassuringly, having absolutely no intention of doing so, betraying the thrumming, encroaching pain at his core. “Care to dance?” he dodged.

She sighed, gesturing down. “I believe you already have a partner.”

He was jostled by a small hand tugging at his petticoat then, only to be met with the large pleading eyes of a young Mystal girl of no more than ten Summers, sporting a gown covered in mismatched patches.

“What a wonderful dress!” he remarked, kneeling to her height, confrontation with Y’shtola sufficiently avoided for now.

The girl beamed, emboldened. “My mum made it for me, she did, the other kids laugh at me for it but... she said I could wear it today because she says the night time will come again soon!”

She spoke in that excitable ramble-on way children were known to, performing a wobbly curtsey for Abarbluom who applauded in reply.

“Well, we’ll show them then, won’t we?” He offered his hand and she took a finger in hers. To Y’shtola, “Duty calls.”

The girl led him by hand amongst the twirling dancers, their faces a blur in motion. She was at most a third of his full height, but he tried his best to take her hands in his as she stood on his boots, her dress fluttering as they turned about. They fell into a very simple box waltz, the girl giggling and smiling all the while as he spun her round, pausing only to stick her tongue out at the boys who assumedly teased her.

With a rousing flurry the song ended, and the two parted to bow before honouring the band with a round of applause with the others. It was in the moment or two of silence before the band resumed that Abarbluom had bid farewell to the girl, sending her off with a raise of his hand —

crack

— vision clouded with pain, pleasant music transformed into discordant tones, the Mystel confused and anxious, inner voice screaming to get away from the crowds before he, before he —

Barely composing himself, Abarbluom gave her a gentle pat on the head before excusing himself to the fresh air of the balcony surrounding the plaza, scarcely aware of his own actions; he met with Y’shtola’s eyes wide across the hall, giving a weak smile.

Rounding the corner which led to the outer terrace, he exploded into a violent coughing fit, haggard breaths racking at his chest. A passing group of Eulmorans looked and laughed, thinking him yet another overindulgent party-goer, leaving to give him privacy. Shining white spattered about the top of his hand as Abarbluom fought to compose himself, fought back against the light inside him.

His vision clearing and breathlessness passing, he stared down at the slick of fluid as it glimmered, luminous even in the shade, as exhausted tears began to prick at his eyes. Shifting his weight to lean against the wall, he slowly drew a handkerchief from his inner pocket, listlessly cleaning his hands before taking it to his lips. The beams of light bared down on him harshly, assailed with its majesty inside and out.

“Are you alright?” A chair grated across the floor.

Abarbluom heard them approach, his vision bleary through tears, now desperate to recover and control himself in the presence of another. He combed fingers through his hair and wiped at his face before the stranger firmly took his wrist in a gloved hand.

“I’m sorry, it’s nothing —”

“Enough, quit it.” Commanding. “Calm down.”

He righted his spectacles suitably to see, finding Emet-Selch looking up at him with a furrowed brow; not in anger, but in genuine sympathy. Abarbluom sighed, arching down to take him into an embrace as Emet kept his hands at the Roegadyn’s waist. They parted, Emet taking a hand to Abarbluom’s cheek as he leaned into the touch, giving a single soothing rub.

“Come.”

Much like the Mystal earlier, he was led by hand to where Emet had been, promptly being seated himself as Emet kneeled by his side, their fingers linked together. The shaded terrace had been prepared with a handful of tables, each with a pair of chairs. It was common to enjoy lunch or breakfast out here, with the evening air often chasing patrons inside. Abarbluom shakily took a glass of water at the table to his lips before slumping in a sigh.

“I don’t think I can do it,” he choked, gazing out at the cliffed expanse of Kholusia and the radiant halo of Mt. Gulg. “Not again.”

There was a twinkle in Emet’s eye then, scarcely noticeable as he rose to his feet. “It’s too much, is it not?” He took the seated Abarbluom in his arms, pressing his head to his chest. “They ask far too much.”

“It has to be me,” Abarbluom mumured against the cloth of Emet’s sleeve, eyes fluttering closed. “I can’t fail them - my duty. I already owe so much.”

Emet paused his gentle ministrations at the words, a pang echoing about his core as he inwardly cringed. “Has the coughing passed?” he detracted, no longer interested in chasing his avenue of interest - for now. It could wait.

“I feel… a lot better.” Abarbluom replaced the glass on the table, giving him a tiny smile. “This isn’t the first time, I just - I will never get used to it.”

“Not much longer,” Emet cooed with a peck to Abarbluom’s brow. “A true hero worth his salt must be strong.”

“And you would know?”

Emet pulled a soured expression. “Would you dance with me?”

Abarbluom blinked at the query, the jubilant music from within the plaza finally audible to him once again. “I would like that a lot.”

He left his seat and pulled Emet into an intimate embrace (a sharp intake of breath), the two slipping into a slow dance. With his palm snugly at the ancient’s slim waist - a single hand almost wrapping entirely around - he dipped his head low, meeting the crown of Emet’s head. They stepped in rhythm to the muffled notes, Emet’s robes unfurling, Abarbluom tenderly dipping him low.

The song reached its crescendo, and they sealed it with a kiss.

“How debonair of you,” Emet chided, flustered despite himself. “I’m not some Spring maiden to be swept off her feet.”

“And I would’ve obliged you much sooner had you approached me,” Abarbluom countered, releasing Emet from his hold and watching him trail away. “Instead of gloomily sulking out here.”

He turned back to give a sly smile. “You forget, dear hero, how else would I get to be with you alone?”

Abarbluom would remain absent from the rest of the festivities, inviting all sorts of displeasure from the Scions following his reappearance the following morning, ready for duty.

#ffxivwrite2021 #ffxivwrite #;writing #ffxiv

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dicapriho · 5 years

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Important quotes to take from this article, that sums up perfectly why Daenarys’ treatment in season 8 was so heartbreaking..(long post with bullet points for easy reading):

Game of Thrones is "a world where women are often treated as disposable objects, Daenerys outwitted and overpowered her male enemies. As the sole protagonist in her own storyline, far from the rest of the characters, she was set up to be one of the few unambiguously [female] heroic figures in the series."

"in just a few episodes, she quickly transformed from a woman who has prided herself on saving the downtrodden to one who burns the innocent."

"[Daenerys’] treatment this season from the makeup of the writers’ room: The writers and directors on the show have always been overwhelmingly male, and women were shut out of both writing and directing jobs for every episode in season 8."

"Throughout her life, Daenerys has shown a commitment to justice...She freed the slaves in Meereen... When Drogon burned one child, she chained up her other two dragons, leaving herself more vulnerable...She put her fight for the Iron Throne on pause to fight in Jon’s war against the White Walkers [in the North where she knew she would feel unwelcome]."

"She was called the “Breaker of Chains” for a reason. When she misstepped, we forgave her, as we forgave, say, Tyrion for strangling Shae." [And Jon for killing a child for betraying him!]

“Daenerys has certainly used “Dracarys” to punish plenty of people during her reign... she always gave some compelling reason for doing so.”

She first used her dragon’s fire to kill a warlock who tried to imprison her, and again against a slaver who tried to cheat her...she crucified all the masters in retaliation for them having killed slave children — but they had killed children...She burned all the Khals who were threatening to keep her as a slave or rape her, or both."

Dany’s advisors gave awful advice:

"Daenerys agreed to make Tyrion her hand because Tyrion said he “knew things”...specifically, he claimed to know how to make alliances in Westeros and exploit people’s hate of Cersei in order to put Daenerys on the throne. Except, Tyrion did…none of that."

"...when did Tyrion convince a single lord that if they joined their side, they could get a new title and nice castle and see the land’s most hated woman [Cersei] burned to a crisp? Never."

"...what Tyrion did do: Try to cut a deal with slavers that would have kept slavery legal for a longer period of time, until Daenerys decided to burn their ships instead; convince Dany not to fly to King’s Landing and burn the Red Keep, which would have resulted in far fewer Kings Landing deaths; come up with the horrible plan to capture a wight that almost got Jon killed and lost Daenerys a dragon and still didn’t earn Cersei’s allegiance; convince Daenerys to trust Cersei, who has never proven herself to be trustworthy; forget to remind Daenerys that Euron and the Iron Fleet would almost certainly be waiting near Dragonstone, thus losing Daenerys another dragon; free Jaime from captivity in an effort to help both his brother and Cersei escape death at Daenerys’ hands..."

"Don’t even get me started on Varys, who didn’t write a single letter to a single lord to gain intel against Cersei or an ally for Dany but did find time to spread the word about Jon’s true parentage...”

“Tyrion and Varys were supposed to be her helpers. They failed her. Instead of owning up to this and realizing the part they have both played, Tyrion and Varys begin to worry that Daenerys is a flawed ruler exactly because she’s losing faith in them over their terrible decisions."

On the Sansa v Dany struggle:

"...The writers of the show cited much more petty reasons for their [Sansa and Dany's] conflict: “[Daenerys is] also very pretty, and how much does that factor in? Sansa starts off this season very suspicious and not at all friendly with Dany.”"

Her Isolation:

"In the last few episodes, Daenerys finds herself envying the love that Jon’s people feel for him...it’s destabilizing for her to arrive in Westeros and find that people are not eager to see her. Why, exactly, the Northerners don’t appreciate her dragons — without which they could not have defeated the Army of the Dead...."

"Daenerys rightfully glowers at Jon as his countrymen celebrate the fact that he mounted a dragon a couple of times when Dany has been riding one for years [Not to mention she is the first Targaryen in hundreds of years to have successfully mothered & raised/trained dragons]...In a mission to make Dany feel as isolated as possible, the show killed off her closest advisors, Jorah and Missendei."

"Daario is controlling Slaver’s Bay in her absence. Yara Greyjoy is sworn to her. In theory, the new Prince of Dorne would be allied with her since Daenerys struck a pact with Ellaria Sand. Daenerys could have called on any of these allies when she faced Cersei’s army but didn’t — simply because the show needed her to be alone ."

On Missandei:

"Game of Thrones fridged Missandei. There’s no other way to put it. Her capture and death happens just so Daenerys would feel isolated. The fact that the writers turned the only major black female character on the show into a device to motivate Daenerys feels even more cringeworthy."

"The fairly quick transition from complicated hero to totally mad villain leaned heavily on an oft-repeated line: “every time a Targaryen is born, the gods toss a coin”. But should Daenerys’ Targaryen blood necessarily doom her? After all, Jon is half Targaryen, too. So why does he get to sit comfortably on the other side of the coin?...The show has long been obsessed with various characters’ struggles to shake their family’s legacies. Tyrion killed his own father and joined Team Daenerys, only to betray Daenerys in order to help his family again."

"Daenerys has long tried to differentiate herself from her father, the Mad King, only to become her father’s daughter."

"...the show’s most recent plotting flaws was Varys’ rushed decision that Daenerys was a terrible enough queen that he would endeavor to poison her — quite a stretch for a man who served under King Joffrey...Remember that Varys once wanted to put Dany’s brother Viserys, a demonstrable megalomaniac, on the Iron Throne."

"...when Varys found out Jon was a Targaryen, he began openly conspiring to undermine and overthrow Daenerys...He accused her of being paranoid while simultaneously conspiring against her, which means she had every right to be suspicious...Again, it’s a failure of the show that the man who was once revered as Master of Whispers walked up to Jon in the middle of a crowded beach and suggested he usurp Daenerys."

"Other rulers we think of as heroes in this story have executed men for less than attempted murder: Robb Stark executed Rickard Karstark for killing the Lannister hostages, against Robb’s orders...Ned Stark executed someone for abandoning the Night’s Watch...Jon Snow executed the men who succeeded in murdering him (before he was resurrected) including Olly, a young boy."

"...Jon betrayed Daenerys’ trust by telling his family, and Tyrion betrayed her — twice. Davos also betrayed her too for totally inexplicable reasons by helping Tyrion smuggle Jaime to Cersei...Her advisor’s lie to her and gaslit her, plain and simple. And yet the way that Daenerys’ destruction of King’s Landing is shot, we are supposed to see her as the irrational one and Tyrion as one of the victims of her terror."

"...either due to time restrictions or lack of source material or just plain lack of creativity, the show took shortcuts this season...And those shortcuts tended to rely on the laziest of sexist stereotypes about crazed, power-hungry women."

"Maureen Ryan at the Hollywood Reporter put it best: “Inescapably, infuriatingly, what we’re left with is apparently the central message of Game of Thrones: Bitches are crazy.” "

"...Had [Dany's] paranoia been seeded many episodes ago and grown over the course of several seasons, it would be an epic Shakespearean tragedy. Instead we must infer this descent based on her frizzy hair."

"Worse, the moment when she seemingly decides to rule with fear, not love, comes after she’s romantically rejected by Jon...” [Suggestible that the lack of requited love is a strong enough reason for a level-minded strong woman to fall into a pit of craziness, despite all the good she has ever done and vows to continue doing..]

"Varys suggested that Jon would be a better ruler exactly because he did not want to rule. Figures in mythology and history ranging from Moses to George Washington to Harry Potter have been heralded as heroes because they came to power reluctantly. Those figures also tend to be male. How do our stories cast women eager for power? As evil queens. And now Daenerys is a cliché."

"There have been a lot of problematic characterizations of women this season, as revealed by the writers’ own commentary surrounding the episodes...Sansa essentially parroted what the writers have been saying for years about her rape by Ramsay Bolton — that it made her stronger...and the showrunners called Cersei, one of the smartest, most vicious characters on Thrones, “just a girl who needs the comfort of a man..”

"...in the end, Daenerys cycled through several tired stereotypes: Another evil, power-hungry queen literally shot with a dragon’s wings behind her; the crazy lady that a noble man has to heroically overcome..."

Like Cersei, Dany was a character introduced in the first episode, who ws incredible meaningful in the narrative of Game of Thrones. Instead of going out with a bang, Daenerys’ death wasn’t a bang like she truly deserved, but a whimper and forgotten to emphasise the man’s conquer and victory.

#game of thrones spoilers #anti got #daenerys targaryen #got spoilers #long post #sexism #anti d&d

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padme-amitabha · 4 years

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Kylo stans are really annoying. They treat him like he’s an innocent baby like he didn’t slaughter a bunch of people in cold blood. Anakin stans don’t whitewash him and Vader actually deserved redemption

The entire sequel trilogy is disjointed to the point each movie contradicts the next so I don’t expect anything else. Considering the audience isn’t provided with an actual reason as to why he fell to the dark side, he was hard to sympathize with from the start. I am not really a fan of the “pull to the light/dark” concept. Another post mentioned Star Wars is about choices. This is important. Kylo chose to reject the light side twice whereas Vader chose to embrace the light side when his son needed him the most.

I don’t really think Vader was “redeemed” in the end; he chose to accept his mistakes and forgive himself and in turn was forgiven. A single choice cannot redeem someone. He can be the most loving father to Luke but that hardly cancels out his slaughter of the children, the sand people. You’re right, most Anakin stans don’t whitewash him; Anakin was never heroic to me. He was an incredibly complex character and though he wants to do good in the galaxy, movie!Anakin still had his self interests at heart. Which is understandable considering his past as a slave. He longed for a life of significance and respect (which ironically, he got in the end but lost everything else he cared about). His story also explores the complexity of the human nature, that no one is born evil. Evil is a choice. Even when he has everything, Anakin is not content. He admits that he wants more. Being the Chosen One doesn’t make him immune to ambition, greed and corruption; in fact, Lucas shows it makes him even more susceptible. Anakin is the Walter White of Star Wars.

He personifies the dark side in the OT but that’s more symbolism than anything else. The Jedi are associated with good but they tried to manipulate Luke to fight/kill his father (and the flaws of the order are expressed in more detail in the prequels). Luke understood this in ROTJ and in the end, stayed true to himself and became his own kind of Jedi. He didn’t do what other heroes did in their similar stories; he forgave, accepted and loved the villain in his story. ROTJ proves Vader’s human just like everyone else when the other first two movies tried to show he’s “more machine than man”. That he is capable of committing atrocities without displaying any emotions. Only when Luke disregards the Jedi’s advice, he can feel his father is a deeply conflicted man. Kylo already had a family but still I don’t think it’s completely implausible for a next generation of Skywalker to turn to the Dark Side but it has to have a rational explanation, like it could be due to a disagreement with the new republic and it’s policies, or even to save a loved one in a different way. Why Kylo fell to the dark side is never fully explored.

Also, Kylo unapologetically slaughtered people like he immediately killed the old man in TFA. Which was probably the stupidest thing he has ever done because the old man had seen the map so why not interrogate him? Did Vader kill Leia in ANH because she dared talk back to him? He wanted the passengers alive so he could question them. His first priority was always his job. He didn’t care about blowing up Alderaan and he barely reacted to any of it. For most of ANH, he was an imperial doing his job and indifferent to any crime/atrocity around him. For the most part, Tarkin was the actual villain in ANH and the Emperor in ROTJ. The audience is led to believe that Vader must be the real villain because he looks the part and the mask conceals his emotions so we can’t see the depressed and broken man he is underneath. He doesn’t step in and do something heroic because he has no reason to. Kylo has not gone through any big loss in his life and he actively takes part in the crimes (to the point it jeopardizes his actual job) ; he’s not just indifferent or following orders. In ESB, Vader hunts down Luke but we also see shots of looking out into space, lost in thought. The only “evil” things he did in ESB was punishing/killing underlings who failed him and thus kept him from his goal of finding Luke and bringing him to the Emperor. The only time he acts of his own volition is when he offers Luke to rule with him and when he rejects that offer, he goes back to serving the Emperor. Him acting on his own where his son is concerned or his slight hesitance when the Emperor talks about Luke in ROTJ shows there’s always been good in him. Just like him shedding tears on Mustafar in ROTJ. These actions do not cancel out his crimes but it shows he’s not a complete monster. There’s so much more to him than that. In ROTS, he had no other choice and during OT, he had become like unfeeling after years of guilt and crippling depression. That and his backstory makes him a character who can earn the audience’s sympathy. In the first two movies, Vader appeared more machine-like and distant not reacting to any crime or injustice around him because he chose not to. He decided to step in for Luke. Now I doubt he would have done it for anyone else who wasn’t his child so I don’t think “redeemed” is the right word here.

But at the same time, he is conflicted about betraying Palpatine in ROTJ. It took Palpatine almost killing Luke for Vader to step in. I don’t think Vader would actively seek to overthrow Palpatine but he did once he found out he has a son. And since he is Anakin, he offers him the same choice he offered Padmé on Mustafar. All of these conflicts and self-contradicting qualities make him so interesting and even his unmasking scene has significance. It changes the audience’s notions about him and helps us see him in a new light - see past the black and white nature of the trilogy. Kylo takes off his mask while interrogating Rey (which takes away the intimidation factor) and none of his actions feel significant, really. Vader choked Admiral Motti because he disrespected him and was doubtful of his “religion” and abilities. He didn’t kill every other officer in the room and unlike Kylo he didn’t destroy things here and there and he didn’t complain about it. The difference between Anakin and Kylo is that Anakin grew up; Kylo did not. So Kylo Ren can never be as complex or well written as Darth Vader.

#ask #anakin skywalker #darth vader #kylo ren

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bma-2021 · 4 years

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SUCH A SHAME SHES FUCKED IN THE HEAD: THE MOUSE IN THE ASYLUM, PART ONE

NOTE: In no way is the Heart’s Asylum, at all, a representation of a true asylum. It is, quite literally, another prison owned by the Heart’s used for their catches that are too valuable to lose. They refer to it as an Asylum because they ‘rehabilitate’ their ‘patients’. This is also the part of Wonderland Angus Bumby has managed to slither his way into when he came part after Alice reset the world. The asylum is also where Hatter was sent to in the series, when he killed March again. At least with my canon, which is why he would have feasibly been able to find Mally after that.

Mally’s technically been in the asylum twice. Both times due to Jack Heart. It’s incredibly difficult to find the way into it, and is a heavily secured area. The Queen of Hearts does not go here, pretty much ever. She knows about it, but she doesn’t see a point in going. The King of Hearts is more likely to send people to the Asylum, but it’s Jack’s personal favorite.

I won’t go into the second time she was in the asylum here, as I’m only doing this now bc of a thread going into it. But this is details of the first time Mally was sent there.

Being fitted for a dress, people doting on her without any understanding as to why. Until Jack enters, after having successfully convinced his mother that marrying the dormouse would be the easiest way to control him. Beyond that, he wanted to be engaged to her, because he knows her true parentage. He knows her mother is the rightful heir, and therefore she has more claim to the throne than he does. Jack, working with the resistance, has spent much of his life working to overthrow his mother and take over himself. He wasn’t going to risk his throne or Wonderland’s future by letting the rightful heir have a chance at it.

Mally, naturally, being told why she was being fitted for a gown, being overwhelmed by all the information being dumped on her, and being told all choice was being ripped away from her again, obviously freaked the hell out. One of the tailors tried to grab her, but accidentally touched her skin. Being unable to let go right away, they had to lose their arm to frostbite, and Jack used that as an excuse to send his future bride to the Asylum. Have her rehabilitated until she calmed down, and endeared to the idea.

It wouldnt’ take anyone long to realize the fact the room was literally built for her, and her being trapped there was planned for awhile.

Cage practically set up like an aquarium, a few inches of water littering the ground where she’d been tossed in. Press of a button, and electricity would run through, something that does effect the dormouse excessively. Not even given a moment to realize what was happening before the electricity ran through her body. Clothing wet, forcing herself to stand, and attempting to break out of the room. All for nothing, as it only made them break her down worse. Stronger currents, her eyes would start glowing before she could try to think of a plan. Veins turning purple when the pain came to be too much.

By the time she would be unconscious from the currents, they’d tie her down, and Dr. Angus Bumby would get the center stage. His specialty is turning others into mindless servants, and he’d use various injections, hypnosis, continuedly trying to forcibly break her mind.

She’d be in the asylum weeks, if not months. Losing track of time’s easy when the pain gets to be too much. It’d be when Jack thought he won, that she was ready to do what he wanted and agree to his conditions, that she’d find a way out. The Jabberwock was kept inside the Asylum as well, and that’s when she broke away from those bringing her to Jack. And broke the Jabberwock free to destroy the Asylum.

It’d be rebuilt before she’d return, but she’d escape through the Jabberwock’s escape, and ultimately due to March betraying the Queen to help fake her death.

#a. about. ( DARED TO STEP OUTSIDE THE LINE. )#gore cw #ish #abuse cw #anyways hi what have you guys been up to #if you squint you can see i tried to make black look blacker to make her clothes look wet lmao

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unwoundvisions · 4 years

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Pirate Villains Tags + Info

I assumed we would want tags for them at some point so I went ahead made some. I used there last names because they just sound more intimating:

⇝ deadly chisaki

⤜ obsessive toga

✸ anarchic dabi

⥼ dastardly beck

⤷ wicked bolton

⤀ feral hargove

I also thought I’d post some information about the characters you aren’t familiar. I would have done this on the doc but it was giving me trouble so now we get a big post.

Let us begin with Kai Chisaki.

Simple summery: Germaphobe who sees super powers as a illness and wants to rid it from the world while also making the gang he was raised in super successful and respected again (funny how he wanted to do that but was somehow okay with getting to keep his own powers). He’s a truly vile piece of garbage. I’m still going to post some of the stuff about his personality from the Wiki here because it’s helpful:

“Overhaul is a mysophobic, antisocial sociopath obsessed with returning the world to the way it was before the Quirk phenomenon (aka super power phenomena). Due to a combination of an old theory claiming Quirks derived from rats and his own mysophobia, Overhaul believes that Quirks are actually a plague on humanity, having infected people with "syndromes" of heroism and villainy. He looks down upon those that use their abilities for either purpose, referring to acts of heroic sacrifice or petty crime as "sicknesses". Overhaul is extremely determined to his ambition of eradicating Quirks, not only due to his own personal phobias, but also because such a thing would allow the yakuza (his gang) to reclaim the power they once held over society. Overhaul has no moral compass and an enormous ego, viewing himself as the only person in the world that's enlightened to the "true nature" of Quirks and deserving of the spot as ruler of the underworld. As the leader of the Shie Hassaikai (that’s just the name of the gang) Overhaul is usually levelheaded, thinks strategically, and, according to a conversation with Twice, seems to be nice at first. Whether he is acting or behaving genuinely, Overhaul does possess polite mannerisms and can come off as very calm and classy even to people he considers potentially troublesome. If aggravated, however, he may end up displaying a powerful and visible killing intent, more fitting of his true character. Overhaul is very germophobic and hates anything he perceives as unsanitary, frequently remarking about the unclean appearances of certain people and locations. He refuses to be touched by others, or even breathe in the same air as theirs, which is one of the reasons he wears an air-filtering plague doctor mask and forces his subordinates to do the same while around him (don’t see a need for him to do that in our fic). If blood, dirt or some other unclean substance comes in contact with Overhaul's person, he will start developing hives and lose his usual composure, becoming increasingly unhinged as a result. In drastic circumstances though, Overhaul will let go of his aversions in order to crush an enemy that's standing on his way, either due to pragmatism or out of sheer hatred. Overhaul doesn’t value humans, viewing people as pawns for their utilitarian value and being willing to experiment on them to accomplish his objectives. He carries this sentiment even towards the other members of the organization he has dedicating himself to since childhood, treating them as expendable sacrifices for his well-being and having no qualms in killing them off for the smallest mistakes. The masks worn by his closest subordinates also serve as a reminder of this mindset; he doesn't view them as worthy of sharing the same air as his. Even Eri, the centerpiece of his operations, is not spared from this brutal way of thinking as he frequently shames and abuses her through threats and guilt trips, seemingly as a method to force subservience on her mind ((They really glossed over Eri here. She was a girl he abused since she was a baby until she was around like 7 years old. Literally, kept her locked up, called her cursed human, drained her blood all the time and he regularly killed and brought her back ((which is something he can do with his power)) to life just to keep getting fresh blood out of her. Of course, in the name of the “greater good.” I fucking hate him.) As a young yakuza, Kai was extremely ruthless and would kill anyone who didn't show the Shie Hassaikai the proper respect, constantly getting into fights with rival gangs. Kai's boss, who was growing aware of the violent, immoral path his underling was following to uphold the name of the Shie Hassaikai, attempted to sway him towards a more honorable course, but to no avail; Kai became more and more convinced that illegal, questionable dealings were the only way the yakuza could ever restore their former honor. In the end, Overhaul's failure to recognize others and his own obstinate nature result in his downfall. Despite his strong-willed attitude, he is capable of expressing true fear and shock, especially post-defeat..

And if you ever need to know like how he speaks and his mannerisms you can skip around this video. Totally don’t have to but I wanted to share it just in case it may be useful:

youtube

Now as for what I thought his motivates could be in our fic:

Since he obviously can’t be obsessed with getting rid of super power, we need to change his character a tiny bit. I thought that in our world he can have a big thing against pirates who don’t have ambitious goals. Let’s say a pirate want to evade authorities and maybe cause them some mild inconveniences. Chisaki would think you weren’t thinking big enough and say the authorities should be killed and everything that put them in place should be destroyed. If a pirate has average goals, he deems them sick and they need to be cured (killed). I just think in this world his big goal would to go after real power. I could see his goal being to like completely restructure society and eliminate pirates with average goals and ensure the only ones who remain are one who share his vision.

Not sure if we’ll even need his backstory but let’s say in our fic it goes like this:

He is orphaned at a very young age and tries to find for himself on the street. It’s miserable and he probably thought he was going to die. Then, he is found by an older pirate (like 60′s) who takes him in. This pirate and his crew used to be really respected back in the day when they were more traditional pirates who did all the pirate things ( rob, pillage, ect). However, in his older age the pirate has decided that pirates should care more about destroying high society (an understandable cause that some can get behind but simply don’t want to put in the work ). Because of this, his crew has gotten a lot smaller and the biggest disruption they’ve had on high society is destroying a few wealthy business. But it’s important to know this pirate was never extremely violent. Didn’t approve of vile crimes and genuinely wanted to bring a more positive change on society. He really wasn’t that bad (not an angel by any means but not as bad as most). It’s also important to note that he wouldn’t condemn other pirates for having simple goals like fame or adventure. Did he wish they had a drive for more? Yes, but he wouldn’t harm them. So, Chisaki grows up genuinely wanting the same change in the world but also wanting to ensure his caretaker’s crew became respected again so things slowly become more and more twisted as he gets older.

I figured that when Chisaki is around 12 is when he’s properly introduced to Katsuki. How this happens is that I could see Katsuki’s mother helping the caretaker’s crew by looting and destroy wealthy business (simply because it paints her as more threatening figure while also putting money into her pocket). On of these missions, Katsuki’s mother’s brought him along. That’s how Chisaki and Katsuki become friends. But as they both grow older, they drift a part a tiny bit. Chisaki becomes transfixed on ensuring his caretaker’s vision becomes a reailty. He thinks to ensure this happens, they need be more violent, more ambitious and kill those with true power. In Chisaki’s ideal world, average pirates would be put down, nobles would be put down and the only people left would be those who admired them or were willing to work with them. He kills easily, he starts brutal fights with other pirates and his caretaker can do nothing to make him see sense which is why he tells him that he is no longer member of the crew. Ultimately, Chisaki feels so betrayed that he kills the man. Tells the crew he was murdered (obviously they don’t believe him) and decide they would kill Chisaki for the betrayal. Chisaki genuinely tried to give them a chance to come to his side but he knew what their intentions were (because he’s genuinely really smart). He poisons them all in at a supposed peace dinner. Since no one really cared about this crew anymore, no one really noticed that they were dead. But still, Chisaki, feels a strange sense of loyalty to his caretaker and still wants to carry out his vision. This is why he goes looking for Katsuki, thinking he could rebuild his caretaker’s crew but he quickly realizes that his old friend already has a crew. Chisaki intended on joining the crew and persuading to strive for the same vision he did. Of course, Katsuki doesn’t mind letting Chisaki join because he wanted a familiar person on his crew. Chisaki geuinely figured it would be easy to get Katsuki on his side but it proved to be harder than he thought. Thankfully though, the rest of the crew admired his vision so it was easy to convince them all it was time to overthrow Katsuki. Chisaki simply planned on dropping Katsuki off on an island and letting him die but Beck convinced him to ask for ransom first because they were a brand new crew and would need money. So, they did just that. Katsuki’s mother refused and they abandoned Katsuki on an island with nothing but a gun to kill himself.

This leaves Chisaki with a loyal crew that sail under his old caretaker’s banner and on his ship the Kraken. Chisaki never expected Katsuki to escape so you can imagine how infuriated that Katsuki is still alive. They always planned on offing him for good but usually got distracted by more important matter like killing people who opposed them and important nobles.

Okay, I went into way too much detail there but he’s like the most important one so I’ll keep the others brief.

Now onto Dabi:

If a quote that could some up Dabi is, “ Some men aren't looking for anything logical, like money. They can't be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.” That’s Dabi. His chaotic, destructive and hates society. He’s really hot too but that’s beside the point lol (i may just have a thing for fire guys).

Here’s the important stuff from his Wiki:

“Dabi is a stoic, aloof, confident, and focused individual who rarely shows emotion. While rather crude and violent, he is actually cautious, choosing to retreat when needed. Overall, Dabi is a highly enigmatic individual who trusts no one, preferring to do things alone and in his own way. He also gives off the impression of knowing more about certain people than he lets on. Despite his usual expressionless behavior, Dabi finds joy in establishing himself as a villain fighting against what he believes to be false heroes, an ideology proposed by his apparent inspiration, Stain (just a guy who killed heroes because he thought they were hypocrites for getting paid). Dabi is dedicated to Stain's mission and desires to destroy superhuman society, sharing his belief that one person with the necessary conviction can do so. He appears to share Stain's sentiment that Heroes are hypocritical and unworthy of their title, but unlike Stain, he does not seem to seek a society with better heroes. Dabi takes pleasure in taunting heroic figures, students, and Pro Heroes alike, sadistically enjoying the pain he inflicts on others, including those he murders. Sometimes, Dabi engages in psychological warfare in order to unnerve whoever his opposition is (while also allowing himself to cool down from his own Quirk's effects). Very pragmatic in battle, he is rather savvy about how heroes operate and will exploit their natural tendency to rescue others. He's not afraid of causing collateral destruction, rarely holding back, even if it puts his allies at risk. Dabi is intolerant of most people and can be very derisive, being quite rude and condescending to essentially everybody he interacts with. He insulted Tomura Shigaraki immediately after meeting him and constantly does the same to both his allies and enemies. While the League would go on to develop a strong sense of camaraderie, Dabi has remained distant from them for the most part. He has admitted that he doesn't care for Tomura or the rest of the League and that the value he puts on them comes mostly from their ability to bring his ambitions into reality. This selfish way of thinking establishes Dabi as an extreme sociopath. However, Dabi appears to at least be capable of feeling remorse. While he had no problem killing a Pro Hero, their last words appear to have resonated with him, implying that Dabi has sympathy for those that have lost family due to villains.”

Again, here’s a video just for his speech and mannerism that may be helpful:

youtube

Okay and lastly, Himiko Toga

Overall, she’s fucking crazy and fun to watch but actually really scary. Her abilities we can’t include but their really cool. If she consumes someone’s blood, she can become their clone. Maybe in our fic we can just say she’s like really good at being sneaky and disguises. I’ll post the important Wiki stuff about her personality:

“Himiko is a very cheerful girl, to the point of smiling even after having presumably killed someone, displaying sadistic tendencies.This continues even when danger is imminent, but it tends to stop when she is bored or annoyed. Himiko is frequently seen blushing seemingly out of excitement rather than embarrassment, giving her a permanent look of what appears to be lovesickness on her face. However, she has shown that she can easily be embarrassed, such as when she thinks people are coming on to her. Himiko is obviously mentally unstable and has a very twisted perception of love and friendship. Proven when, despite wanting to kill Ochaco Uraraka and Tsuyu Asui, she still attempted to befriend the two girls as they fought, affectionately calling Tsuyu by her first name and describing the former as "lovely". When talking to Ochaco, she said that it was only natural to want to be like the one you love, to the point of literally becoming that person. Later she further explains and compares that like how "normal" people kiss the people they love as "normal", she sucks the blood of the people she loves as this is her "normal", further showing her twisted understanding of love, which thus justifies her carving up and butchering "guys who are tattered and reeking of blood", as they fit the description of her ideal lover. Himiko's interest isn't just superficial, as her questioning Izuku Midoriya about what his values and beliefs imply, showing that although twisted, she does indeed want to know more about the person she "loves". She also has shown a comedic and childlike demeanor when faced with different situations. Like most of her allies, Himiko has stated that she finds life to be difficult for the current world and wants to make it an easier place to live in. She looks up to Stain and sees him as her role model; declaring a desire to kill and "become" him. She has shown to care greatly about her comrades and was enraged by one of their deaths. So much so that she wanted to kill the one responsible and their men as payback. Himiko is also shown to be prone to mood swings when she finds a target of "affection" (often Izuku) she is loud and cheerful. However, when an obstacle gets in between her and her prey, she shows a very angered expression, instantly switching priorities to kill whoever the nuisance is. In the past, Himiko was noted by her family and former classmates to be, "a cheerful, reasonable, well-mannered girl" whose subsequent turn to a life of crime surprised everyone who knew her. However, her own recollections imply that this was merely an act she put on to try and fit in with what society deemed "normal." She believes the way she acts presently is her own normal.

Again here’s a video just for speech and mannerisms:

youtube

Okay, that’s everything I think. The only plot addtion for her is that we could potentially have her be interested in Laurie the same way she’s interested in Izuku on the show. We totally don’t have to but I thought it could potentially be interesting to have a really dangerous person for you to have to protect Laurie from. Of course, he can defend himself but she’s a little bit harder to deal with the average person. Again, we don’t have to do that at all, just an idea. :)

I’ve gone on for WAYYY too fucking long but I think I’ve covered the important things. :)

#⇝ deadly chisaki #⤜ obsessive toga #✸ anarchic dabi #⥼ dastardly beck #⤷ wicked bolton #⤀ feral hargove

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mst3kproject · 5 years

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1111: Wizards of the Lost Kingdom 2

You know how Joel said the part of the movie that was ‘spilled’, the bit with David Carradine fighting the monster called the Protector, could have saved the whole film? He lied. It’s just as dumb as the rest of the movie. In fact, this whole film is so stupid and predictable that I’m going to have a very hard time filling two pages with my thoughts on it. Apparently even Joel himself wished he’d found a different movie to use.

An age of darkness has fallen, and Caedmon of Nogg is the world’s last hope. The ghost of his father, I think, or maybe Obi-Wan Kenobi, appears in a bucket of coffee and charges him with finding the Chosen One, whose pure heart will re-unite the Three Powers. The Chosen One is a skinny, hormone-suffused teenage boy named Tyor who works on a stick farm somewhere, and Caedmon trains him in wizardry while seeking out three powerful warriors: the Dark One of Eedok, Prince Ermine of Valdar, and Amathea of Fennir. One by one, they defeat the evil wizards and gather the magical sword, chalice, and amulet that will bring peace to the world.

So, yeah, it’s less a ‘movie’ than it is a Dungeons and Dragons campaign, thrown together in five minutes after the original GM called from the side of the road with a flat tire.

It’s not at all apparent how this is a sequel to Wizards of the Lost Kingdom. Not only are the storylines unconnected, the whole aesthetic is totally different. Where the first movie was all bright colours and friendly forest creatures, this one is brown and gray, starving peasants and grubby heroes. It’s kind of the difference between Snow White and the Seven Dwarves and Game of Thrones, although infinitely worse than either. Still, if there’s any sort of connection to be found, I should be able to figure it out. After all, one of my running gags on this blog is The Movies Are All Coming Together, in which I find connections between unrelated films to assemble them into a single, great, incomprehensible movie.

For starters, Wizards of the Lost Kingdom 2 is definitely a sequel to The Undead. After Pendragon skooered Lydia the Witch, her insanity curse on Smolken wore off and he remembered he was actually Caedmon the Wizard. He was forced to run off to this distant land to escape all the medieval punk kids wanting him to autograph their copies of Digger Smolken’s Rottenest Hits. As for how this relates to Wizards of the Lost Kingdom, though? I don’t think this is a sequel at all. It’s actually a prequel. See if you can follow me here:

Remember, Tyor was not supposed to kill Zarz… by running him through at the end, he gave in to evil. So after a few years of putting up with Caedmon’s incompetence as a pupil, he got sick of him, turned him into a sparkly crab hat, and embraced the dark side. Meanwhile, Amathea was getting tired of Ermine’s philandering, so she and Tyor teamed up to kill him and seize the throne. The Dark One’s restaurant went under after he was caught selling chicken that turned back into stone when you bit into it. He tried to get money to pay off his small business loans by ditching Stripper Wife and wooing a wealthy cyclops so he could take her dowry and run. To avoid his jilted bride’s vengeful brother, he went on the run and returned to using his real name, Kor. Presto, you’ve got Wizards of the Lost Kingdom!

I have to take a break now. My brain hurts.

This movie wants so badly to be epic. The narration sounds like Achronus from Cave Dwellers telling us another story about Ator: and so, Cademon of Nogg set out across the land of Syn in search of the boy Tyor. And yet, every time something happens that should be epic, it’s just people standing around. The finale is a showdown between callow young Tyor and the two dark wizards Zarz and Donar, and they all just kind of mill around and bicker. The fight between the Dark One and the Protector is much closer to being a climactic battle than this is, but it’s just more obvious fake swordplay and disappointment, and David Carradine looks downright embarrassed about it. I’m not convinced that scene was actually intended for this movie, by the way. David Carradine made another stupid fantasy movie called The Warrior and the Sorceress, which I have not seen, and it might be from that.

One thing I can say for Wizards of the Lost Kingdom 2, though, is that the middle of the story has substantially more to do with the beginning and end than in its predecessor. Caedmon is given his task, which is to find Tyor and then help him get the sword, amulet, and chalice so he can overthrow the evil wizards and unite the three kingdoms. And the middle of the movie is spent doing exactly that. This does divide the whole narrative into three separate plots that are only barely related to each other, and because of the limited running time all three of them feel truncated. Tyor confronts Loki and turns him to stone and we’re like, that’s it? He hears the voice of Obi-Wan Kenobi and pulls a knife on Freyja, who agrees to take him to the sword and… that’s it? It feels like the movie ought to be twice as long as it is, except that we really wouldn’t want that.

In particular, the audience has no idea what the sword, the amulet, and the chalice really do. The fact that Tyor is able to overcome the amulet’s supposedly supreme power with some nonsense words really deflates the whole enterprise. The sword is supposed to be magical but all it gets used for is stabbing people. The chalice shows the truth except that Zarz can make it lie? And at the end Obi-Wan takes all three away instead of letting Ermine and Amathea use them to rule the three kingdoms? The three artefacts could not be more obviously plot contrivances, even if they were just boxes with the word macguffin written on them.

The Protector beast really ought to have been set up earlier, too, if it were going to deserve a setpiece fight. As it is, MST3K excised it with no plot consequences. Why didn’t we get to see Zarz feeding people to it?

Wizards of the Lost Kingdom 2 is grittier and less silly than its predecessor, which does allow the actors to escape with some tatters of their dignity, but in a way this is itself a weakness. The first movie kept me interested mostly by throwing random episodes of what the fuck at me. This one plods through its plotline without any lion-centaur beasts or random tricksy mermaids, although the impossibly bad werewolf-versus-pigwoman fight did make me look twice. At the same time, paradoxically enough, I think it’s fair to say that Wizards of the Lost Kingdom 2 also takes itself less seriously. The first movie did have a full-on wizards’ battle at the end, even if it sucked. The second one here has a whole lot of talking and Tyor turning the crystal ball into a roast chicken, which apparently incapacitates Zarz in some way but I’m damned if I know how. The roast chickens in the movie are clearly the ones you get out of the little warmer at the grocery store deli.

You know what? This movie should have ended with Tyor turning Zarz into a chicken! That would have allowed Tyor to win without killing anyone, and given a purpose to the weird ‘chicken’ motif that keeps happening. Why was I able to come up with that, and the movie wasn’t? The writers seem to think that chickens are somehow inherently funny, when really everybody knows that’s only true when they’re trying to cross the street.

These are not movies that really lend themselves to analysis but I guess there’s kind of a hint of theme, in that the Dark One would rather live quietly, running his pub with his wife, and only goes out to fight when he’s forced to do so? Although I’m not sure how we’re meant to interpret that. Is it about the benefits of a peaceful lifestyle (insofar as stabbing people when they don’t tip qualifies as ‘peaceful’)? Or are we supposed to think the Dark One should have gotten off his ass and answered the call of duty before it came to that? Maybe the chicken thing was meant to suggest that even a coward can save the world? I don’t know. I just work here.

So that’s my marathon of lame-ass wizard movies that made it to MST3K. Of the three, I think the first Wizards of the Lost Kingdom was easily my favourite. It was light and silly and it made no sense, but it kept me giggling, sometimes just out of sheer surprise. And I guess that means Quest of the Delta Knights would come in second, because Wizards of the Lost Kingdom 2 was definitely the worst. The other two movies at least looked like people were having a good time making them, while this one feels like it was probably as much a chore to be in as it is to watch. Even Sid Haig as Donar looks like he’d rather be anywhere else, and considering some of the crap Sid Haig seemed to have been enjoying himself in, that’s really saying something.

All the monster fights in the world couldn’t have saved this one. What it really needed was the Dark One fighting a giant chicken.

#mst3k #reviews #wizards of the lost kingdom 2 #80s

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kayasurin · 7 years

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A long-time lurker of @suzie-guru, I’m tossing this Strange Magic story idea under the cut. I blame (and thank) Suzie because I might not have found the fandom through her stories, but they are what kept me in the fandom (and inspired me to get the DVD as well as get ideas of my own).

Please find below 10 pages of notes for an idea I’m just calling the Accidental-Marriage-and-Pining AU. If someone decides they want to take it over, just give me a heads up. Otherwise, in my (non-existent) spare time I might take a swing at writing it myself.

· Instead of kidnapping Dawn when the love potion gets stolen, Bog King declares war. Still crashes the elf party, but only to yell at people and tell the king that hey, war.

· Roland is defeated & injured early on (shiny armour! No use! He looks very good in a parade but has never actually, y'know, fought before.) Not even by Bog, just some foot soldier goblin. Maybe Brutus with a backhand.

· Dawn's still hit with a love potion BTW, and falls for a married elf who is devoted to his life-partner and, uh, it's flattering but he likes... guys. (Dawn literally cannot understand the idea right now, when normally she's as passionate about people being able to marry the ones they love as Marianne is passionate for denouncing love, period.) Dawn is kept in her room.

· Sunny gets hold of the love potion and hands it over, along with his guilt - he is able to say it's Roland's idea, since Roland went from "respected" to "ridiculed". The triplets come forward and admit that they may have suggested Roland use a love potion on Marianne (who is very scary and they're very sorry). People remember that Roland's been talking off and on about war with the Dark Forest for a long time.

· Bog is not about to stop the war now, even with the Fairies offering the potion back and they're really sorry - the Elders of the Forest would overthrow him in a heartbeat if he did.

· Sunny is punished, but not as harshly as if he were the sole cause of the war. Basically confined to his rooms helping with the routine paperwork everyone else is too busy with the war to deal with. He might have nightmares about being unable to tell Requisition Form A-7 from Requisition Form A-8.

· The Imp steals the love potion. It was well guarded but not well enough. Marianne hunts the Imp down (while everyone else is on the battlefield - her dad thought it'd be great for keeping her away from the fighting) but not before several fairies, elves, and a sparrow are dusted. Lizard/Lizzy still fixates on Sunny because he got dragged along with. (Everyone knows Marianne asking him what the hell he was thinking about a love potion and her little sister is more punishment than requisition forms.)

· (Sunny is really, really sorry. But at least the lizard fixated on him. Guy who had a sparrow fall in love with him got carried off. No one knows where he is. Everyone is varying degrees of worried)

· (He's okay and shows up later after escaping when the love potion wore off. Maybe, haven't decided yet.)

· The war, meanwhile, has lasted a month so far. The final battle happens.

· Bog goes after Dagda, has to fight his way through the battlefield.

· Marianne, who is not supposed to be there, gets between Bog and Dagda. She is a fresh fighter, compared to Bog who just spent a couple hours beating his way through elves and fairies and Dagda's guards. Also, Marianne is angry someone's threatening her dad. Also-also, there might be some high-pitched and painful-to-goblins screaming going on.

· Marianne wins. Bog's hurt, very badly. (I'm sorry boo!) He's mistaken for dead for a little bit, actually.

· Dagda, trying to signal to the goblins that their king is dead, please stop fighting and go have a civil war on your own side of the border, tries to pick up the Bog King's staff of office. He gets burned. It's wood (or... something?) but it just heated up like a sword fresh from the forge and not yet quenched. Marianne takes the staff, mostly because Dagda drops it, and is perfectly fine.

· Battlefield turns into a different sort of chaos, of course. It's sorted out that Marianne is now Queen of the Dark Forest by right of personal combat with the Bog King - who, it turns out, is still alive. Marianne orders he be taken care of immediately (Maybe she can give this stupid staff thing back? Seriously, it's twice her height or something and really heavy and also she doesn't want to rule the Dark Forest! Heal up so she can give it back, now!)

· Marianne, however, isn't going to be a bad ruler. She's got a bunch of terrified Goblins watching her and a bunch of scheming fairies too. She tells her dad to hand Roland over, since he was the real source of the conflict, but she'll be nice and accept him going to the Stone Reach * for investigation and trial.

· *I envision the Stone Reach to be this rocky outcrop on the south border between the fields and the forest and, possibly a swamp or something. Not associated with anyone, considered perfectly neutral and called on in cases where the royals might have a conflict in sentencing, ect. Since three generations back they've also dealt with passing messages across the field/forest border, because Bog's grandfather refused to talk to Marianne's great-grandfather, and no one's changed the status-quo since. They do other things too for both sides, but the main one is being neutral.

· They also run around fully cloaked, so no one can tell what species/race they are. Other than weird. The head of the group, AKA main investigator, I envision as something like Sam Vimes from Discworld, except covered head to toe so no one can actually see him. The right personality, though.

· Back to the story though - the goblins had expected Marianne to just kill Bog on the battlefield, but weren't complaining when she wanted him healed instead. He's moved to the castle, sort of a prisoner and sort of "the prison cell is the only other place in the castle with beds long enough for this guy, and the Queen's taken over the Royal bedroom, and someone this injured cannot sleep on the floor."

· Marianne also moves to the Dark Forest castle, immediately after telling the fairy council where they can stick their plans for the Dark Forest. (She's going to be a good queen and also hand this nonsense back to the Bog King once he's conscious. She can't hand the place back if the council gets their way.) The goblins are obedient, but not helpful. Griselda spends her entire time watching over Bog in the prison/sick room.

· Griselda and Marianne encounter each other whenever Marianne's down there interrogating Sugarplum about the love potion. Dawn's still dusted after all, never mind everyone else. (Griselda: not impressed with this fairy who nearly killed her baby boy.)

· Some of the goblins start actively plotting against Marianne. They're kinda bad at it because goblins go for "in your face" things like actual challenges, instead of backstabbing and what have you. Most of the plotting, therefore, is "who can we all agree to back and who has a chance of defeating our new Queen - shh she's coming" and not "let's poison her drink."

· Seriously, goblins have standards for overthrowing their monarchs and solving political problems. Who'd be low enough to resort to poison or stabbing someone in the back when these sorts of things are important and should be seen by everyone! (Fairies. Fairies are low enough. Marianne is aware of the plotting but is expecting them to rebel the way fairies would - AKA knives in the dark or poison in the food. The lack of action in that direction is confusing her.)

· The plotting goblins loosely fall into the following categories - those who want to back Bog in taking the throne back, those who want "new blood" on the throne (and if that blood happens to be related to them, so what?) and then there's a very small group of goblins who think Marianne's not the worst thing in the world, but only if she marries a goblin and has goblin babies.

· Around this point (approx 1 month after Marianne takes over) Bog wakes up. It takes him a little while, but he regains his health pretty quickly once he's conscious and isn't being force-fed (or unconscious-fed) broth. He sees Marianne when she visits Sugarplum and gets full reports of everything going on thanks to Griselda, Stuff, and Thang (as the ones most able to visit him without being noticed and what have you). He's annoyed at the plotters manoeuvring and spends his time thinking of how he can possibly get his throne back without relying on those plotters who back him.

· Seriously if he accepts help from any of the plotters he can say hello to a new life as a political puppet. As for anyone else ruling his forest, hah! He dealt with that fly-shit as a kid when someone stole his father's throne (from Griselda, Bog's regent, since Bog's dad kind of died when Bog was a newborn) and then Bog had to kick the imposter off the throne - and not doing that again, thanks.

· Between his informants and reports about captured goblin soldiers, Bog figures out that any rebellion will likely be met with fairy soldiers setting the forest on fire. It's the main stumbling block to his plan of "kill or kick the fairy out and take the throne back" and he and Griselda spend a long time trying to figure out how to prevent the fire happening. At the very least they're expecting Marianne to turn the Forest into a servant-state of the Fields.

· (The fairy council, despite her telling them what to do with their plans, expect the same. And are very annoyed that it hasn't happened yet. It's a temper tantrum, that's what it is. Sure.)

· (There's tension between Marianne and Dagda for this reason, among others, especially since Dagda only "let" Marianne go to the forest to try and get a cure for the love potion.)

· (Marianne is super unhappy at being in the forest, but as long as she doesn't go outside or look out a window she doesn't panic or anything, which is one way to avoid talking face-to-face with her dad.)

· After a while (couple weeks) Bog's judged as healed as he can get just lying around and to start getting up and moving to build his strength back. He and Griselda have no answer to the probable "fairies with fire" thing, so Griselda instead begs Bog to capitulate to Marianne, swear allegiance so she doesn't kill him to strengthen her rule. (They've figured that's why she's having him healed up, so she can execute him in front of the Elders and properly strengthen her claim.) Griselda: "I've buried my husband. Please don't make me bury my son."

· She doesn't fight fair. Bog, meanwhile, might not be king any more but the oaths he swore when taking the throne still count, okay. He still has a responsibility to protect and serve the goblins, and obviously a rebellion isn't the way to go (fairies with fire). If dying keeps them safe (or safer, anyways) he'll do it. He'd rather not, but he will.

· Marianne finally gets the story of Bog using the love potion, and what the antidote actually is, from Sugarplum. Bog is unaware of this, by the way. He is aware that Marianne's yelling at Sugarplum ("What, real love is the only cure? Are people aware that you're peddling something fake? Seriously, all you're doing is making longer-lasting BEER GOGGLES you fraud!") but can't make out the words. Probably for the best.

· Marianne contacts Dagda (those weekly messengers are finally good for something) with the cure - true love - and tells him Sunny can cure Dawn, now stop sending me constant messages telling me to come home, I'm BUSY ruling my new COUNTRY. Dagda obviously does what he's told re: Dawn and Sunny, and keeps sending Marianne messages asking her to come home, the forest is no place for a fairy, ect, ect. They'll set up a subsidiary of the council to take care of the day-to-day humdrum of ruling the forest. (HAH! No.)

· Sugarplum is shipped off to Stone Reach. Her actions are going to be evaluated for treason. No, Marianne's not being petty and it's not revenge for the whole "Dawn got love potioned and Roland was going to use the potion on Marianne" thing. And absolutely nothing about feeling sympathy for a young, love-lorn Bog King who then got his heart broken because Sugarplum was selling lies. No sympathy for the stick-insect-man at all.

· Bog requests an audience with Marianne during her next open court. Either his (horrible) plan will work, or it won't and he'll die. Either way, it'll be over with quick. And he's figuring on the "I'm going to die" side of things, because it's a terrible idea but no one can come up with anything better, and it will hopefully keep the plotting idiots from doing something to bring fire-and-fairies to the forest.

· Oh yeah, little tidbit that this story relies on - there's a second, smaller throne beside Marianne's. The goblins brought it in. When Marianne asked why it hadn't been there to start, they explain that Bog had it taken away, but she hasn't told them the policy about the second throne yet, ect. They do not explain who the second throne is for, figuring it's obvious. It is not. Marianne figures it's for - like in the fairy kingdom - the chief advisor/heir, depending on whether there's an heir or not. The goblins, meanwhile, know it's for the ruler's partner. Both sides think the other side "knows" what the second throne is for.

· Bog shows up in court looking like he's just barely mobile, because he is. He's got some fresh new scars showing. First time for the majority of the goblins to see his wounds. People are either impressed he survived or disappointed he survived. First time Marianne really sees his wounds - or him - as well.

· (This is a slow burn, people. They've finally met properly. That's not the end of it yet though.)

· (Bog's worst wound is, I'm envisioning, a cut high up on the inside of his thigh, in the small area between hip and leg not covered by chitin. Yes, there. A few others include healed cuts on his face and hands, and a crack on his chest, which has healed but won't go away until the next shed or two.)

· Bog explains to Marianne that the goblins don't want to accept her as Queen, that she will face challenges to her rule as long as he lives, even if he is not the one challenging her. (Simplification of all the nonsense the plotters are coming up with, of course.)

· Marianne challenges Bog that he wouldn't be saying that if there wasn't another way, unless he wanted a public execution. (Outwardly calm, inwardly panicked. She hasn't killed anyone yet, not even on the battlefield. She really doesn't want to start by chopping someone's head off.)

· Bog kneels and says he will swear to accept her as the rightful ruler and abide by her rules. He'll even live in the fields if she wants him out of the forest, ect. (Inwardly going "Oh hell no I do not want to live in that horrible place - but I will if I have to and that might help protect my people too, yes self you just volunteered to be a hostage but whatever.)

· After some back and forth, Marianne accepts Bog's oath. The goblin Elders are annoyed because they didn't factor this possibility into their plans at all. Griselda is resigned but relieved that Marianne's not going to kill Bog. The common goblins are confused, but relieved, ect.

· Marianne then announces she has made a decision about Bog. Bog is there expecting to be sent to the fields in exile, maybe with a few goblins. Instead, Marianne tells him to take the lesser throne. (The spouse seat. The Elders are freaking out. They REALLY weren't expecting THIS.)

· Goblins, shocked. Bog, shocked. Marianne, confused and hiding it. She just wants to keep the former ruler as her chief advisor. (Why didn't she just take the chance and shove the throne back at him and flee as fast as she could?! She could've done it but nooooooo...)

· The slow burn BEGINS, MWUAHAHAHAHAHAHA

· Bog is moved into the previously closed spouse-bedroom attached to the royal chambers through the washroom. He's constantly sitting to Marianne's right during dinners and things. He is very confused and bemused and worried, because now he's Marianne's husband? That's literally all it takes for the ruler to decide yup, this is my life-partner, just an announcement and the life-partner sitting in the lesser throne. (Most do throw parties of some sort or other, but that's not required.)

· Marianne does not help by having a discussion with Bog, immediatley after court, about what his duties will be, once he's healed. Advising her about goblin law and customs, primarily. Nothing "active" until he has a clean bill of health. (She's thinking sparring, maybe, or sending Bog out to be the royal face so she doesn't have to fly through the forest - no she's not getting better on her own. Bog's brain maybe shuts down a little, though, because married + active = error does not compute.)

· They set up a routine: breakfast together, usually with a group, very informal. Mornings are spent separate, Bog going to the healer, his mother, dealing with the guards and messengers, ect. Marianne reviews proposed laws/drafting proposals herself, dealing with household complaints, ect. (Marianne asks Bog why the hell he let things get so bad the linens were taken by field mice. Bog is confused they ever HAD linens. There's a reason why Marianne's the one in charge of the household. Mostly because Bog's pants at it.)

· They eat lunch together, then court if it's a court day. Or the library the rest of the time, for Marianne's "how to rule the Dark Forest" lessons. History, politics, who wants to kill who, how property rights are handled, inheritance law, ect.

· Dinner together, and then Bog gives lessons in staff fighting. At the start he gets to sit down and correct Marianne's stances, then as he gets better he starts moving around and eventually they begin, very carefully, sparring.

· Bog, during this part, transitions from hating Marianne with a passion (she beat him and stole his throne!) to respecting-but-disliking her (okay, she stole his throne, but she's not horrible, for a fairy) to respecting and liking her. It helps that she admits she didn't actually want to take his throne, he was going for her dad and she just reacted, and she's really sorry but she's determined to do a good job of it. (She may or may not have started to offer to give the throne back, but it won't work that way, because Bog lost and would need to win a serious fight to get it back. No-go right now, and depending on how that leg heals, maybe never.)

· Marianne, meanwhile, is also transitioning during this part, from distrusting everything and everyone (she's a fairy and fairies are good with backstabbing) to trusting that she's accepted, for now, as the ruler. The plotters have stopped their plotting until they figure out how to handle everything that's happened. She relaxes, trusts Bog but is feeling guilty over stealing his throne, even though she didn't mean to. She also finds herself, by the time they're sparring, admiring Bog's fighting ability (and absolutely not his body. Just the fighting ability. Juuuuuust the fighting ability. Not his hands, or the way he can twirl a staff with just his fingers, or the way his shoulders flex, or that smirk or - just the fighting abilities. Yup. That's her story and she's sticking to it.)

· By this point it's autumn and the harvest starts, so it's all hands on deck. Bog's delegated to the kitchen, because he can be trusted not to chop his own fingers off and he's still only allowed to be only so active. Marianne assists with winterizing the castle and the hidden outbuildings (archives, ect) because she might not know how to hunt and she can't tell the difference between a poisonous berry and a safe one, but by golly she can slap mud and moss over a crack in the wall like a champion.

· Word from the Stone Reach arrives. After the (date to be determined - probably hunter's moon, or maybe harvest moon, before the first frost but only just), Roland and Sugarplum's trials will be held. Marianne can't avoid it, Bog has to go too, ect.

· Marianne and Bog have had multiple personal conversations by this point, everything from brief, "this reminds me of" and in-depth, hours-long conversations. However Marianne stops sharing her personal history/views/values/experiences. They had stopped sparring because Super Busy for harvest, but they take it back up again. They still discuss laws and culture, but not as much. They're also still busy doing what they're allowed to do for harvest. (Marianne is too busy to get freaked out bringing stuff to people outside, and anyways everything's changing colours and she's not reminded of things that happened, so it's okay.)

· Harvest festival with the goblins - Dawn and Sunny visit. Most goblins are unaware Sunny was the elf that stole the love potion, so they treat him decently, and Dawn's okay because she's their Queen's sister. Dawn asks Marianne to come back for the fairy's harvest festival. Marianne tries to get out of it (she really doesn't want to talk to Dagda in person by now, she's been avoiding him for most of the year now - Primroses stop blooming around May) by telling Bog if she goes, he goes. By the end of the night Marianne and a small group of goblins, including Bog, have been selected. She's not sure how that happened.

· (Goblins, for the most part, wear jewellery and not clothes. For the most part they're all wildly different in shape anyways, but what one of them can wear as a necklace another can wear as a bracelet, ect. Tasteful bling happens.)

· Bog warns Marianne that he only has his traditional outfit and there's no time to get anything made for his new status. She tells him to wear the traditional. (She's expecting, like, maybe a crown, maybe some armlets or something.)

· Bog's outfit is a royal great kilt. (I put the Scottish-accented Bog in a great kilt, I'm so proud of myself.) Where fairies use magic on flower petals and leaves, goblins have weaving - which takes so much longer, since they spin cattail fluff and thistle-down or tufts of fur into yarn, and then have to do the weaving. Marianne's given a wrap with the same pattern as Bog's kilt and they started making it the moment she was officially Queen - so about the time she sat down on the throne for the first time.

· (Telling Bog to wear the great kilt provided to the forest's king - not the prince, not the consort, but the full king - reinforces the "married" thing. She doesn't know that. Bog assumes he hasn't been asked to 'perform' his 'marital duties' because Marianne doesn't find him attractive, and he is totally 100% relieved about this and not even slightly regretful someone he considers a friend thinks he's too hideous to touch. Yup.)

· (Marianne, meanwhile, is all but punching herself in the face because she's started humming, goddamn it, whenever she and Bog are alone or plausibly alone. She totally has feelings she refuses to examine, mostly because Bog's kind of like her employee now and he probably still hates her for the whole 'stealing the throne' thing.)

· (Bog may or may not have the odd wish that Marianne would sing to him, because fairies sing to the people they lo - like. Right? Right. Yes. Friendship songs, toooootally friendship songs. They'd be nice.)

· Then the fairy harvest festival. Marianne sees Bog in a kilt and nearly walks into a wall, because - clothing. She's seen him naked, technically, but hooooooh boy now that he's wearing clothes, of a sort, all the can think is getting him out of them and there may or may not be some (a lot) of blushing and mental beating herself up going on. (Marianne has read romance novels, of the sort that go into details a young and impressionable and curious thirteen year old was curious about.) (Bog, in contrast, is quite innocent, poor guy. Doesn't know what's going to hit him...)

· The entire festival basically goes as follows: Fairies are polite but condescending to the goblins. Fairies are polite but condescending to Marianne. Goblins get annoyed at the fairies being rude to their Queen - the group was chosen by Bog half because they'd be useful in a fight, half because they happen to genuinely like Marianne by this point. Marianne doesn't notice the fairies being condescending to her but she does notice them being rude to her goblins. Most fairies end up acting like catty brats.

· At least one fairy accuses Marianne of having gone native to the forest. She does not deny it. At least one council member warns (threatens) her that her actions are risking her inheritance of the Fields. Bog overhears the threat, but not Marianne's response of "Dawn would be a good queen (and Sunny, you know, her elf fiancée? Would be king. Won't you enjoy that, you wrinkled old prune?)"

· The trial at Stone Reach is probably immediately after the party, so the goblins ride their dragonflies there and the fairies fly. Marianne spends the entire flight snubbing Dagda who probably spent the entire fairy party trying to ask her who she wants to take over the day-to-day ruling nonsense so she can come home, and also would she please reconsider any of these charming fairy bachelors (who were rude to her goblins so not just no, hell no.)

· (She might be a little a lot protective of the goblins, now. She really likes them and their way of life and sure it's different from what she's used to, but that's hardly a bad thing. Also, Bog. Who has nothing to do with her "hell no" about the fairy bachelors, of course.)

· The trial. Evidence is presented, including Roland cheating on Marianne and how often, her breaking up with him, all because it goes into his motivation for wanting a love potion. (Someone gets to observe if Roland had just kept it in his pants for one more day, he'd have been married and thus the next king... up until Marianne caught him cheating and killed him, anyways.)

· The Stone Reach provides it's judgement of Roland to be treason to the Fair Fields (knowingly and deliberately taking actions that led to the war) and conspiracy to act against the Dark Forest. Roland is sentenced to death.

· Plum is judged to not have committed treason by reason of mental instability. She is to stay at the reach until she is judged sane. Also she is to not make any more love potions, because the spell-masters at the Reach believe creating love potions did not help with the mental stability. (No, that's probably not an excuse to make her stop, they're from the Reach. They certainly wouldn't lie. Tell only part of the truth, sure, but out-and-out lie? Never.)

· Marianne does not stick around for Roland's execution, but instead leaves as soon as she can, taking the goblins with her. She remains distant to everyone - having her blindness to Roland's true character and the many times he cheated on her revealed to everyone hurt - but especially avoids Bog. She does her duties, but without her usual enthusiasm, and doesn't spar.

· Bog ends up confronting Marianne in her bedroom. They fight, both verbal and physical, though not much of the later. Marianne ends up threatening to send Bog to live in the fields if he can't keep his nose out of her business. He retreats after that.

· (I mentioned slow burn, right? Also, threat to the trust they've built up to this point, along with their friendship.)

· Bog goes around snarling at everyone, Marianne is upset with everyone, and it's just in time for the first snow to hit.

· Griselda tries to talk to Bog and gets nowhere, so she ends up confronting Marianne. "I'm a mother and you should fear love me" works where nothing else did, and Marianne ends up confessing about the fight and how bad she's felt since defeating Bog, and taking away his kingdom - and just everything, really. Up to and including how she has 'no right' to feel as she does for Bog, ect.

· Griselda does manage to direct Marianne to talk to Bog. Marianne does, and apologises for what she said, confirms that she'd never ask him to move to the fields, never mind order him there, and that she relies on him more than anyone, ect. Finishes by saying he's her best friend - and apart from Dawn, kind of her only one, really.

· This is the moment Bog falls head over heels out of friendship and into love. He's sunk.

· All the pining happens from this point on. Sparring resumes, the duo begin to notice (and admit) their physical attraction to each other, and their conversations become awkward (but so exhilarating). They have more personal conversations, including Marianne eventually discussing how she felt about Roland, how she felt about being cheated on, ect.

· (Marianne does say, in retrospect, she loved the idea of Roland more than the person, and her upset was as much for losing that 'idea' of him as being cheated on. Also, in hindsight, not that Marianne tells Bog this, but she didn't feel much for Roland, physically. He was too pretty to lust over, or something. She just figured she'd get the physical attraction once they were married.)

· (Of course, Marianne is comparing her memories of how she felt about Roland to how she feels about Bog now, and she is noticing Bog physically a whole lot. Primarily his eyes, hands, wings, that scar high up on his thigh, and how careful he is with his strength. She maybe wants to wreck his self control, which is not something good fairy girls are supposed to want.)

· (Bog, meanwhile, really wants to know what Marianne's hair feels like, and really likes her eyes, and her wings, and her neck keeps catching his attention, and she's so tiny but she's so strong and it's really impressive how she can just, like, go toe to toe with him and even overpower him at times. It gives him fluttery feelings inside.)

· With winter in place, Bog starts taking Marianne out on trips in the forest. Short trips because it's cold, but he gets the chance to show her places he feels are the most beautiful - things like waterfalls where the plants and rocks are coated in ice from the constant spray, or the glow cave, flying through the thorn bushes only this time it's daytime and they look like they're carved from crystal because there's just so much frost everywhere, ect.

· Mutual pining continues. The goblin midwinter ceremony happens - no set details right now, but probably something about staying up all night until dawn, dinner being 'starvation food' (like super-thin soups and salads made out of things you'd only eat if you had no other choice), putting all the fires out and lighting candles, then lighting the fires from the candles, ect. Marianne does the fairy tradition of giving gifts - those closest to her get personal gifts, everyone else gets generic gifts like sweats (or socks - goblins love the idea of socks). She ends up giving Bog a traditional engagement gift - possibly a wire and gemstone bracelet?

· During the first council meeting of the new year, the Elders of the Forest make preliminary noises about potential heirs and merging new Royal blood with the old. (They have finally decided how to handle Bog being married to Marianne.) Marianne finally discovers she and Bog are considered married. The goblins finally discover she had no freaking clue. The goblins are stunned. Bog's heartbroken, because of course there was no chance, Marianne's reaction just proves that out.

· (Bog assumed, his feelings for Marianne aside, she was just making the best of their marriage and doesn't feel anything more than friendship for him. He figures it's a one-sided situation again, only worse, because a) no way he'd ever consider using a love potion again and b) they're married.)

· (Marianne is heartbroken, as she figures this means Bog was just making the best of a bad situation and maybe they are friends, but how the hell can he love her? Not only did she steal his throne but she told him they were married the first day he was barely mobile... ect.)

· More pining! Not helped by the goblin Elders, who are pushing for a proper marriage that both sides know is a marriage.

· Griselda is just so done with everything, from the Elders to the mutually pining idiots giving each other sad, longing looks over the breakfast dishes (and not realizing the person they're sighing over is sighing over them right back. They're sitting right next to each other, how are they this dense?!) She sends messages to Dawn explaining EVERYTHING, especially about the mutually pining idiots. (Griselda may or may not have spent multiple hours with each idiot bemoaning their sad and sorry fate. At least Marianne's honest about wanting to shove Bog against a wall and oh yeah you're his mother, sorry...)

· Dawn sends a letter back saying she won't be much help until the snows help in spring, but be encouraging (and blunt) with the idiots.

· Griselda sets up the romantic dinner from the movie, only the song is "kiss the girl" from The Little Mermaid. The idiotic and pining duo get angry, tear up the decorations, and go off to spar (and pine.)

· After they spar, they go outside to stargaze a little. They grouse about the Elders and the romantic dinner (blaming the Elders, not Griselda). Someone slips - probably Bog - and probably along the lines of "after all, I know you wouldn't - well, I'm me (gestures at self) and you can do better."

· Whoever is self-deprecating is reassured and the initial confessions of feelings happens. They retreat to Marianne's private office to talk in the warm. Further confessions of feelings happens. Kissing happens. Someone (probably Bog) gets shoved against a wall and ravished. There is no complaining.

· Their relationship escalates quickly (probably same day, TBH) to sharing a bed, but no sex. They do end up with lots of heavy petting every night as they figure out what feels good, what doesn't, ect. Marianne discovers Bog's spine thing, Bog discovers Marianne's thing for necks (both hers and his - she's equally enthusiastic having her neck kissed (and nipped) as she is doing the kissing (and nipping) as well as Marianne's ear thing.

· They try to keep it secret from Griselda and the Elders. They are not subtle and they fool no one. The Elders, however, have to shut up about it because Marianne has a sword and tells them what she'll do with it if they don't move on to the next subject, NOW.

· Griselda sends Dawn an update with no reply, but isn't surprised.

· Marianne and Bog end up with smut. Bog is quite happy to be shoved around and Marianne is quite happy do shove him around. They take turns turning each other to mush. Marriage proposal once they're able to do words again afterwards.

· Close out with a wedding under the cut primroses, some combination of goblin and fairy traditions. (Okay, more fairy traditions than not, because fairies actually need a ceremony to be married and goblins don't, but details.)

#Strange Magic #fanfic #a wild plot appears #slow burn #misunderstandings

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impressivepress · 4 years

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Leon Trotsky in New York

New York City has seen its share of revolutionary figures. But some have been literally revolutionary, like Leon Trotsky, a major figure in the Russian Revolution who was exiled to the U.S. for a few months during which he lived in the Bronx and worked at a communist newspaper in the East Village.

Лев Троцкий в Нью-Йорке

Leon Trotsky, born in Ukraine, was one of the leaders of the Communist Revolution and the founder of the newspaper Pravda. The revolutionary life can be a difficult and even dangerous one. He was arrested and exiled into Siberia twice during Tsarist days. He was in western Europe working as a journalist when World War I broke out, going first to Switzerland to avoid arrest by Austria-Hungary. He moved on to France, which deported him to Spain because of his anti-war activities. Spain soon deported him to the U.S., where he lived and worked in New York for a few months. He returned to Russia after the February Revolution of 1917 overthrew Tsar Nicholas II.

By the end of 1917 he was second only to Lenin in the leadership of the Bolshevik Party, and so he was very influential in the newly formed Soviet Union. But in the power struggle after Lenin's death in 1924, Stalin portrayed Trotsky as an enemy of the party and sent him into exile. He spent a year in Kazakhstan, four years in İstanbul, two years in France, two years in Norway, and finally ended up in Mexico City where he lived with the painters Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo and then moved into a house of his own nearby. Just over a year later, one of Stalin's assassains killed him with an ice ax.

Trotsky was born Лев Давидович Бронштейн or Lev Davidovich Bronshtein in Yanivka, Ukraine, in 1879. He changed his name during Czarist days to Lev Trotsky, with Троцкий or Trotsky derived from Trotz,the German word for "defiance". For some reason we English speakers usually replace his native and actual name Lev or Лев with Leon.

Symbolic name changes were a big thing with the Bolshevik revolutionaries. Vladimir Lenin was originally Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov. In 1870 he attempted to illegally publish the newspaper The Workers Cause and the Tsar exiled him to Siberia, near the Lena River. Vladimir adopted the pseudonym Lenin,based on the river's name. Iosif Stalin or "Joe Steel" was born with the unwieldy Georgian name Ioseb Besarionis Dze Jugashvili.

Trotsky's father was a well-to-do farmer who sent his son at the age of nine in 1888 to Odessa for schooling. Odessa was a cosmopolitan port city, very atypical of the Russian Empire. The atmosphere of Odessa led Trotsky to adopt an international outlook.

In 1896, when he was just sixteen, Trotsky had moved from Odessa to Nikolayev and become involved in revolutionary activities. He was initially a народник or narodnik, a populist revolutionary. He was introduced to Marxism, a philosophy which he initially opposed but then gradually came to adopt.

Trotsky helped to organize the South Russian Workers' Union in Nikolayev in early 1897. Two hundred members of this union, including Trotsky, were arrested in January 1898. Trotsky was imprisoned for two years waiting for his trial. During this time the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party was formed. Trotsky became a member of this party, he married fellow Marxist Aleksandra Sokolovskaya, and he studied philosophy. He finally got his trial in 1900, at which he and his wife were sentenced to four years of exile in the Irkutsk region of Siberia.

Leon and Aleksandra had two daughters in Siberia, but they soon separated and divorced. Meanwhile the party was splitting into factions. One side argued that the party should concentrate on improving the lives of industrial workers. The other, which Trotsky sided with, said that the most important thing was forming a well-organized and disciplined revolutionary party with which to overthrow the monarchy.

Trotsky escaped from his exile in Siberia during the summer of 1902. He moved to London to join the editors of Искра or Iskra, the newspaper of the monarchy-overthrowing faction. Trotsky took the pen name Перо or Pero(meaning feather or pen), becoming one of the paper's leading editors along with Vladimir Lenin, Georgi Plekhanov and Julius Martov. Trotsky met Natalia Ivanovna Sedova in late 1902. She soon became his lover, and they married in 1903.

No one should ever claim that left-wing political movements are simple. They split and squabble in a fractal fashion. The six editors of Iskra were equally split between Plekhanov's "Old Guard" and Lenin and Martov's "New Guard". Lenin expected Trotsky to side with his "New Guard" and give it a majority. So, Plekhanov opposed making Trotsky a full member of the editorial board.

In 1903, Iskra convened the party's 2nd Congress in London. Soon after that the pro-Iskra group split into two factions. Lenin's Bolsheviks wanted a smaller but highly organized party, while Martov's Mensheviks wanted a larger and less organized one. In case you aren't confused yet, the namebolshevik or большевик refers to larger size while menshevik or меньшевик refers to smaller size — the opposite of those factions' desired party sizes! But the idea was that большевик or bolshevik referred to the "majority" and меньшевик or menshevik referred to the "minority". Meanwhile most of the Iskra editors (the majority!), including Trotsky, sided with the mensheviki. For a recent example of political abuse of language and logic, see the American right wing's confusing insistence that they're a Moral Majority.

Trotsky gave up on this confusing mess in September 1904 while the Mensheviks were insisting on an alliance with Russian liberals and opposing reconciliation with Lenin and his Bolsheviks. Trotsky described himself as a "non-factional social democrat" from 1904 until 1917, during which he spent most of his time trying to reconcile the various factions within the party. In his spare time he was developing his theory of Permanent Revolution.

In January 1905 a group of unarmed demonstrators were marching through Sankt-Peterburg to deliver a petition to Tsar Nicholas II. The petition called for improved working conditions, a reduction of the working day to eight hours, and increased wages, along with an end to the Russo-Japanese War and the introduction of a universal right to vote. They were approaching the Winter Palace from several directions when they were gunned down by the Imperial Guard in the Bloody Sunday massacre.

Maybe about 1,000 people were killed — the Tsar said just 96, anti-Tsarist sources said over 4,000 — and disorder and looting broke out. This led to the Revolution of 1905, which would in turn lead to the 1917 Revolution.

Trotsky returned to Russia in February, the month after Bloody Sunday, initially writing pamphlets for an underground press in Kiev but soon moving to Sankt-Peterburg. He worked there with both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. However, the Mensheviks were infiltrated by a secret police agent. This forced Trotsky to flee to rural Finland until a national strike in October 1905 allowed him to return.

The Mensheviks had come up with the same idea Trotsky had, a Soviet or Совет (or "Council") of Workers, an elected non-party revolutionary organization. The Sankt-Peterburg Soviet was up and running by the time Trotsky returned from Finland. Trotsky joined the Soviet and was elected its Vice-Chairman under yet another pseudonym, "Yanovsky". The chairman was arrested in November, and Trotsky took his place.

On December 2, 1905, the Sankt-Peterburg Soviet issued a proclamation criticizing the Tsarist government. To no one's surprise, the Soviet's office was promptly surrounded the next day by troops loyal to the Tsar's government. Trotsky and other leaders of the Soviet were arrested and then tried in 1906 on charges of supporting armed rebellion. Trotsky delivered what are considered to be some of his best speeches at his trial, but he was convicted and sentenced to deportation and exile in Obdorsk, Siberia.

While on the way to Siberia in January 1907, Trotsky once again escaped. He made his way to London, arriving in time to attend the 5th Congress of the RSDLP (or Russian Social Democratic Labor Party). In October he moved to Vienna for what ended up being seven years, an unusually long time of stability for Trotsky. While in Vienna he participated in both the Austrian Social Democratic Party and the German Social Democratic Party.

In October 1908 Trotsky founded the newspaper Правда (or Pravda), whose name meant Truth. Pravda became a party-financed "central organ" in 1910, and Trotsky kept publishing it until April 1912. The very same month, the Sankt-Peterburg Bolsheviks started a new labor-oriented newspaper and also called it Pravda. This co-opting of the name greatly upset Trotsky. He sent a letter to the Mensheviks denouncing the newspaper-title-stealing Bolsheviks in general and Lenin in particular. Unfortunately, the police intercepted the letter and kept a copy in their archive. The letter was found in the archive in 1924, soon after Lenin's death, and it was used to portray Trotsky as an enemy of Lenin.

Trotsky continued to write articles for radical Russian and Ukrainian papers. These included Kievskaya Mysl, which in 1912 sent him as their correspondent to cover the two Balkan Wars.

World War I broke out in late July of 1914 after the assassination in Sarajevo of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. This eventually globe-spanning conflict pitted Austria-Hungary against the Russian Empire, and so within a week Trotsky had to flee to neutral Switzerland to avoid arrest in Vienna as a Russian. Once there he worked with the Swiss Socialist Party and quickly cranked out an anti-war book, The War and the International.

He moved on to France in November 1914 as a war correspondent for the Kievskaya Mysl. In January 1915 he began editing Наше Слово or Nashe Slovo, "Our Word".

The French put up with Nashe Slovo and Trotsky's anti-war activities for just three months. At the end of March they deported Trotsky to Spain. The Spanish didn't want him either, although they let him stay for over a year and a half. Around Christmas of 1916 they deported Trotsky to the United States.

Trotsky in New York

Trotsky arrived in New York on January 13, 1917. He was there for not quite three months. He lived in the Bronx, at 1522 Vyse Avenue.

Take the #2 or #5 train to Freeman Street. Walk a block and a half east to Vyse. Turn south and walk two long blocks south to #1522, on the corner where Vyse crosses East 172nd Street.

This is a "site-of" now. The Mildred, the building you see today on the corner of Vyse Avenue and East 172nd Street, was constructed in 1931. It replaced whatever tenement Trotsky occupied during his New York exile in 1917.

Trotsky worked for Новый Міръ or Novy Mir (that's New World in English), where he worked alongside Nikolai Bukharin and Alexandra Kollontai. Bukharin went on to be a member of the Politboro and Central Committee of the Soviet Union, and editor in chief of Pravda (the post-revolution Soviet one), Bolshevik, Izvestia, and the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. Then he opposed a number of Stalin's policies and fell victim to the "Moscow Trials" and purges of the late 1930s.

Notice the spelling of the paper's name, it uses the pre-revolutionary Міръ instead of the sleek revolutionary Мир.

Trotsky also wrote articles that were translated into Yiddish for publication in Der Forverts, "The Forward", a Yiddish radical publication.

Novy Mir was published at #77 St Marks Place in what today is called the East Village. St Marks Place is east 8th Street, it's one of the small set of numbered streets with a name.

Trotsky Returns to Russia

Russia's February Revolution of 1917 overthrew Tsar Nicholas II, and Trotsky left New York by ship on March 27th. He reached Russia on May 4th and joined the Mezhraiontsy, a regional social democratic organization in Sankt-Peterburg. The city was also known as Petrograd around this time. He was elected a member of the first All-Russian Central Executive Committee (ВЦИК or VTsIK) at the First Congress of Soviets in June.

Trotsky was arrested, again, after an unsuccessful Bolshevik uprising in August. He was held for 40 days and then released. The Bolsheviks then gained the majority in the Petrograd Soviet, and Trotsky was elected the Bolshevik party chairman on October 8th.

By the end of 1917 Trotsky had clearly become second only to Lenin in the Bolshevik Party.

Stalin wrote a summary of Trotsky's role in the events of 1917. This piece was published in Pravda and included in Stalin's 1934 book The October Revolution, but then it was cut out of Stalin's Works of 1949:

All practical work in connection with the organization of the uprising was done under the immediate direction of Comrade Trotsky, the President of the Petrograd Soviet. It can be stated with certainty that the Party is indebted primarily and principally to Comrade Trotsky for the rapid going over of the garrison to the side of the Soviet and the efficient manner in which the work of the Military Revolutionary Committee was organized.

The Bronx Home News was more straightforward with their headline:

BRONX MAN LEADS RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

Trotsky was named the People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs. He resigned that position on March 13th, 1918, to become People's Commissar of Army and Navy Affairs and the chairman of the Supreme Military Council. The position of military commander-in-chief was abolished, granting Trotsky full control of the Red Army subject only to the oversight of the Communist Party leadership.

Trotsky was a party theorist and he seems to have been closer to the original intent of Marx than any other prominent Bolshevik figure. Lenin probably would have named Trotsky as his successor.

However, Lenin had three strokes between May 26th, 1922 and March 10th, 1923. These caused paralysis and loss of speech, denying him the ability to transfer leadership to Trotsky. Lenin died on January 21st, 1924. Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev formed a troika to make certain that Trotsky would not succeed Lenin, despite his official public position as second only to Lenin.

Then they pulled that unfortunate 1912 letter out of the archives. Trotsky lost all his official positions and political power in 1925. He was then expelled from the Central Committee in October, 1927, and soon after that, expelled from Russia.

Trotsky was initially exiled to Alma Ata in Kazakhstan on January 31st, 1928. Just over a year later, in February 1929, he was expelled from the Soviet Union to Turkey. Trotsky and his wife and son lived on the island of Büyükada near İstanbul for four years.

French Prime Minister Édouard Daladier offered Trotsky asylum in France in 1933. Trotsky moved there from Turkey and lived in Royan and Barbizon. But in 1935 the French authorities told him that he was no longer welcome in France. He lived near Oslo, Norway for two years, at which point he was put under house arrest. Norwegian officials arranged his transfer to Mexico by cargo ship.

Trotsky in Mexico

Mexican president Lázaro Cárdenas welcomed Trotsky when the cargo ship docked at Tampico. Cárdenas then arranged for a special train to carry Trotsky to Mexico City.

Trotsky initially lived at the home of the painter Diego Rivera and his wife Frida Kahlo. Trotsky had an affair with Kahlo, which led unsurprisingly to Rivera kicking Trotsky out of his house. Trotsky moved in May 1939 to a house a few blocks away on Avenida Viena.

Meanwhile, in 1936 the first "show trial" had been staged in Moscow. Zinoviev, Kamenev, and over a dozen others had "confessed" to having joined Trotsky in a plot to kill Stalin and other Soviet leaders. They were all found guilty and sentenced to death, the sentence was passed on Trotsky in absentia.

A second "show trial" in 1937 of seventeen others connected Trotsky to more supposed conspiracies and crimes. Trotsky was now under a death sentence.

In May of 1940 a group organized by NKVD deputy director Pavel Sudoplatov launched an assassination attempt. The group was led by GPU agent Iosif Grigulevich, the Mexican painter David Alfary Siqueros, and Vittorio Vidale. They disguised themselves as police officers and overpowered Trotsky's guards. They set up machine guns in the inner courtyard of the home and began firing. Everyone inside hid underneath bedroom furniture as the attackers fired into the various rooms of the house. Trotsky's grandson was shot in the foot, and Robert Sheldon Harte, one of Trotsky's assistants and bodyguards, was abducted and later killed. The other guards eventually repelled the attack.

Ramón Mercader, a Spanish-born NKVD agent of Stalin's, was living in Mexico City with a Canadian passport. He had gone through a series of identities including "Jacques Mornard", a Belgian; "Frank Jacson", a Canadian; and "Jacson Mornard", who may have been Belgo-Canadian for all I know. He had managed to become the lover of Sylvia Ageloff, Trotsky's personal secretary, living with her on and off over a period of two years and gaining access and trust within the Trotsky household.

Leonid Eitingon, a GPU agent who had operated in Spain, planned a second attack. Mercader, as either Frank Jacson or Jacson Mornard, started meeting with Trotsky in the guise of a sympathizer.

On August 20, 1940, Mercader showed up at Trotsky's house with a mountaineering ice axe hidden under his coat. Why an ice axe? Because you can casually walk around Mexico City carrying an ice axe and no one will notice? That can't be it. Because Mercader was an expert with ice axes? That doesn't seem to have been the case, either.

Eitingon and Mercader's mother, Caridad, were waiting outside behind the wheels of two getaway cars. Nothing like joining forces with your mother in an assassination.

Mercader went into Trotsky's study and asked him to read something that he had written. While Trotsky was reading, Mercader pulled the ice axe out from under his raincoat and hit Trotsky in the back of the head. Perhaps due to Mercader's lack of experience swinging ice axes, the blow did not kill Trotsky immediately.

There was a struggle. Trotsky's bodyguards nearly killed Mercader but Trotsky told them not to, saying that the assassin should be made to answer questions. Trotsky was taken to the hospital, where he died the next day from blood loss and shock. The getaway drivers had gotten away, and both fled the country.

Mercader was convicted of murder and spent twenty years in prison in Mexico. He and his mother were awarded the Order of Lenin in absentia by Stalin. Mercader was released from prison in 1960 and moved first to Havana, Cuba, and then moved on to the Soviet Union in 1961. He was then awarded the USSR's highest decoration, Hero of the Soviet Union.

As for the Trotsky family, his great-granddaughter Nora Volkow became the head of the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse. She grew up in the Trotsky house in Mexico City.

by Bob Cromwell · May 2020.

#history article #leon trotsky #cromwell-intl

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gracewithducks · 5 years

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“...but there are more of us.” - Faith at the Movies: Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (preached 1/12/20)

Warning: there are spoilers here for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. Continue at your own risk!

When we started this Faith at the Movies series, I promised that every Sunday in worship we would offer a summary of the movie’s plot for anyone who didn’t have a chance to see it. And I know we didn’t do that yet this morning, but the reason is – when I sat down and tried to figure out how to summarize what happened in The Rise of Skywalker, the main plot points came out sounding like just about every other Star Wars movie: There’s this unseen Force which connects everything in the universe, and which some people are more sensitive to and able to tap into in order to do seemingly impossible things. The main character, a nobody from nowhere, learns that they are descended from evil. The Empire – no matter what it’s called – the Empire is evil; those who hold all the power also control the army, the media, the money, the justice system, and they will abuse those powers in order to stay on top. Everybody in the movie has to wrestle with the fact that they have both good and evil inside of them, and must choose which will define them. There’s an unlikely redemption arc, an epic big-scale battle paralleling the battle happening inside the main character… and against all odds, good wins.

It’s the plot of every good Star Wars story arc – and I mean every good one, because the prequels got so bogged down in trade wars and political maneuvering and blood levels and prophecies and tariffs and suspicion that they lost the thread… the bigger story, about how love includes grief, and we must choose whether that grief will lead us to anger and hatred and fear, or whether we will continue to choose love anyway – that story gets drowned out entirely. It’s a shame; there could have been a great story there, but we don’t get to see it. Instead we find out that trade wars and politics make for pretty lousy movies – even if, truth be told, we’d all be much farther ahead if we learned how politics and economic disparity and abuses of power and prejudice and fear can lead us, as a whole society, down the path to the dark side. Temptation doesn’t always come with a mask and a cloak and a terrifying theme song; the most dangerous temptations are the ones that prey not just on our fears but on our hopes and dreams and best intentions. The devil tempted Jesus in the desert with the kind of power Jesus could use to feed every hungry person, and to end religious debates and persecutions, and to establish the kingdom of God on earth – all good things – but to get there, Jesus would have to betray and compromise the very essence of who he was. And this is the dilemma presented again and again in Star Wars: will we compromise, will we make deals with the devil – or will we choose the harder path, the narrower path; will we choose what is right, even if it means fighting a losing battle, even if it means losing our own lives along the way?

Friends, I grew up with Star Wars. My brother was born the year the original Star Wars film came out, and when the next movie came along three years later, I did, too. We always knew that Vader was Luke’s father, and Leia was Luke’s sister, and Han shot first, because even heroes aren’t perfect, and that’s okay. We grew up stealing the empty wrapping paper tubes every Christmastime so we could reenact our own epic lightsaber battles, and we learned that those cardboard tubes last longer if you wrap them with duct tape first. We grew up with “Luke, I am your father” and “I’ll never join you!” and believing that a few courageous rebels could overthrow an entire empire of violence and evil. Just like we grew up wearing bathrobes every Christmastime and finding our place in the nativity scene, we also kept finding our place in this epic story where good battles evil and good always wins.

When this new trilogy was released, fans like me – who grew up loving these stories and worlds – we were ambivalent. But these movies are smart; they return to the heart of the story, while introducing a new generation of heroes: an orphan girl, a redeemed storm trooper, and a criminal-turned-rebel make up the heart of this story.

And one of the great mysteries of the new trilogy has been: who is Rey? Who is this girl, this orphan from a desert planet, who discovers the Force and joins the resistance? Luke Skywalker started the same way, and he ended up being the son of Darth Vader, the biggest evil of them all. So speculations ran wild: who is Rey? And there were a million theories: perhaps she was a lost Skywalker, perhaps she was a granddaughter of Obi-Won Kenobi, perhaps she and Kylo Ren were siblings separated at birth, perhaps she was a Palpatine, hidden from the shame of her family’s name, perhaps she was another descendant of Shmi, the mother of Darth Vader way back in the prequels – who is Rey? Who could she be?

It’s a question which dominated a great many chatrooms and discussion boards, and a question which haunted Rey herself. But when the second film was released, Rey was taunted with the truth: that her parents were nobodies. Nobody special, nobody important; Rey doesn’t have a famous family, and she doesn’t have a powerful name.

It’s a heartbreaking moment – for all the fans who wanted a different story, but especially for this young woman who’s longed her whole life for a family and a history and a place to belong. But it’s such a powerful moment, too, because we find out that anybody can be the hero of the story. You don’t have to come from a famous family; you don’t have to be a long-lost princess or the daughter of a hero in order to be a hero yourself. Anyone can take up the mantle. Anyone can be a leader. Anyone can be the one who finds the courage to battle against the evil empire and change the universe.

But, sigh. The most recent movie completely undermines that message: and we find out that Rey is in fact – spoiler alert – the granddaughter of the evil emperor Palpatine. She does have a famous name, but it’s not the name she wanted; it’s not a hero’s name. She’s Rey Palpatine, descended from evil, the granddaughter of death, and she’s being tempted to take up his throne.

Rey has to come to terms with this new knowledge; she has to make peace with where she’s come from, and decide who she is going be.

Rey’s story is paralleled by the story of Ben Solo, better known as Kylo Ren, the villain of these films. Ben is the son of Princess - I mean, General Leia, and her husband Han Solo. He’s the son of heroes twice over; he’s the heir to the Skywalker name, and he trains under the great Luke Skywalker himself – but it’s Ben who chooses the dark side, Ben who is seduced by power, Ben who succumbs to the emperor’s temptations and commits unspeakable evils. Ben rejects his parents, violently; he changes his name to Kylo Ren, puts on a mask and a cloak and literally takes up the mantle of his grandfather Darth Vader.

And throughout the movies, Kylo Ren also wrestles to come to terms with himself. He seems to regret and grieve what he’s done, but he laments, “It’s too late for me to go home; I’ve done too many terrible things. I can’t choose good now; my choice is made, and I’m beyond redemption, beyond forgiveness.”

So these two, Rey and Kylo Ren, these are the key figures of the new saga: both trying to come to terms with their pasts, both faced with an opportunity to choose their future. Will they continue to act out the battles of their ancestors – will they make decisions out of their own pain and fear – or will they make a new path? And of course, as a preacher of grace, I can’t help but notice that new beginnings don’t come easily – it’s not a simple task to escape our family stories or our own bad choices – but we can choose a new start all the same. We don’t have to be defined by our parents or our ancestors or our own mistakes. We all have choices we get to make.

Early in the movie, there’s a little scene where Rey and her friends encounter a huge snarling serpent beast. Their first instinct is to fight, to shoot and destroy this terrifying creature – but then Rey notices that the beast is wounded. She puts aside her weapon, comes close, and heals him – and she discovers that this scary monster is in fact just in pain, and his anger comes from that pain, his violence comes from that pain. What Rey learns, when she puts her weapon down, is that healing and mercy and compassion can in fact be much more powerful than violence could ever be.

The story repeats itself later in the film when Rey and Kylo Ren battle one another. Rey tells Kylo, “I can see through the cracks in your mask; you’re haunted by what you’ve done” – she can see his grief and guilt, and she acknowledges his pain. When they fight, Rey fatally wounds Kylo – but then she chooses to heal him.

In the theater, when that moment came, when we realized Rey was going to heal Kylo Ren, there were audible gasps – my own husband even said, “No, don’t heal him!” My husband the pastor, my husband who believes in loving your enemies and blessing those who persecute you and turning the other cheek – my own husband wanted Rey to let her enemy die.

But she doesn’t. Because she’s learning that anger and fear and a thirst for revenge are in all of us, but they don’t have to control us. Rey is learning that mercy and compassion and forgiveness are the most powerful tools of all.

Rey shows mercy – and because she does, not only is Kylo changed, but Rey doesn’t have to face the Emperor alone. Alone, she would have fallen; alone, she would have given in or died… but because she’s not alone, because she spared an enemy and cared for him, together, they succeed where one alone never could.

And this perhaps is one of the other great themes of this movie – oh, I wish I could preach more than one sermon on it! – because early on, one character tells another, “The [Empire] wins by convincing us that we are alone.” Isn’t that the truth? It’s why so many people don’t vote, because we think one vote alone won’t matter; it’s why we don’t do the little things in our power, because little things can’t possibly make a difference; it’s why we give in to despair, why we give up, because we feel like we’re trying to go this thing alone. I am reminded of the prophet Elijah, who faces his own evil empire and ends up running away and moping in the mountains, because he thinks he’s the only faithful person left in the whole world. But God reminds Elijah that he’s not alone – and he finds strength in an apprentice and in a whole movement of faithful people. It’s why Jesus sends his disciples out two by two; it’s why he created a church, a community; it’s why the Teacher in Ecclesiastes says woe to the one who falls and is alone, but blessed are those who can share their strength; because a chord of three strands is not easily broken.

When we feel alone, it’s hard to keep standing. But we are not alone. And together, we are stronger; together we can stand. Star Wars tells us, “Evil wins by convincing us that we are alone. But we’re not alone. And there are more of us.”

When one of the members of this new generation wonders how the old heroes – Luke and Leia, Han and Chewie and Lando – how they defeated an empire with nothing, Lando just says, “We had each other.” And in her darkest hour, Rey hears the voices of those who’ve gone before, telling her: You are not alone. You never have been alone. We are with you.

When the battle seems to be lost, help appears – help appears in the voices of those who’ve gone before, and help appears in a multitude of ordinary people who claim their power, who stand together and refuse to let evil win.

Rey and Kylo are the heroes, but this isn’t just their story. This story, this battle, belongs to the nameless faceless workers, pilots and smugglers and mutinied storm troopers, who choose to reject the empire and take their power into their own hands. We don’t have to be heroes alone; our real power is when we stand together.

As they say in the movie, “Thousands of generations live in you now, but this is your battle, this is your moment… The things our fathers and mothers fought and died for will not die with us.” We are not alone, and never have been. We are the product of thousands of generations of prayer and longing; we are the hopes and dreams of our ancestors – and they live in us, and the choices we make will shape the universe for those who are yet to come.

We are not alone. But this is our moment, this is our time – our time to choose who we will be, to choose who we will serve, to choose whether our fear or our anger or our hatred or our mercy and compassion and love will win.

In the end, Rey chooses who she will be: she chooses her family, and she chooses her identity. She chooses grace. She chooses compassion. She chooses a new name: she chooses to be a Skywalker.

May we choose mercy. May we believe in forgiveness. May we choose to be known and named by the best parts of ourselves. And may we know that we are never alone.

God of light and darkness, God of love and pain, God of grief and joy, God of mercy and God of wrath, you know us as we are. You love us as we are, and you invite us to be something more. God, you know the struggles we face. You know the temptations within and without, which lure us into despair. You know how often we struggle under the weight of our family’s flaws and our own failures. You know the evil empires which overwhelm us, the evils we thought were defeated generations ago which have emerged again. You know how often we feel like we are alone. Remind us today that we are not alone, and we never have been – and give us the courage to choose to live with compassion and with grace. In the name of Jesus the Christ we pray; amen.

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jackofallworlds · 7 years

Text

Hunters in Samalta: Chapter 5

Chapter 5: Wanderers, Soldiers, Secrets

The Hunter sat; still shaken, still a little broken, the wary fear of a frightened animal peering out from eyes, far too hard for one so young. But there was steel now, newly tempered. She was getting answers, and that meant progress. That meant the whole mess they had fallen into was going to be alright.

Probably.

Across from her, sitting on a slightly higher grime-caked brick ledge, sat the old mage. Eyes twinkled like glittering crystals from a mess of hair and ragged eyebrows. Dirty robes kept the warmth in those thin shoulders. By the twitch of his age-blanched mane, Allcre could well see he was still wearing that nostalgic grin, remembering days of glory under the command of the man she had been led to know as the Red King.

“Well,” she started, “the Red King walked out of the woods without a sword and without injury. I’m guessing whatever it was that you were setting up, it required the sword (and that spirit) as a crucial part of the end result. I’m interested, actually, in what you know about the origins of the sword, as well as some more of the power behind it.”

Balthasar leaned back some, brows scrunching up slowly. “Now, that… that’s a whole different tack. I’m not really sure I should tell you that. Or that I can. Why do you need to know? You don’t seem to be overly concerned with picking it up, or finding it like some ancient queen’s jade broach in a dead man’s barrow.”

Allcre took a deep breath - once, twice, a third time, exhaling slowly to calm herself as much as possible. She checked her light, setting it down to one side. In a quiet monotone, dulled further by the brick sewer structure, she told Balthasar as clear a recounting of the events of the previous week as possible. She began with their first survey of the Cursed Zone; spoke briefly on the encounter with Balthasar in the sewer and how it figured into the rest of the tale; described their hurried days of preparation and the razor-thin margin of victory pulled out of their encounter with the necromancer; recounted the arcanologist’s findings; described, with a voice shaking involuntarily, the visions from the horrible, horrible book.

All the while, the old man went from being a crazy old hobo under the streets of Samalta to something akin to a concerned uncle. “So you need to know about the last days of the war.”

“Yes.”

“And that means you need to know about the Red General, his sword, the Fusiliers, the whole shebang.”

“Exactly.”

The old man paused a moment, looking inward. “Your friend - this Pitt - used the power of righteous might to destroy the dog construct. His being and his sword shone. The difference is that the sword of the Red General burned. Whole legions of undead caught in its holy flame were turned to ash, liches were slapped aside like children, cackling apprentice necromancers were turned to sniveling whelps in the glare of the greatsword, and that was just in the black forest on our drive to the tower. Where the Red General strode in camp, men lifted their heads high, horses stopped panicking, sick men suffering from the Grey Plague felt comfort. He was a leader worthy of the respect, adoration, and bravery of every man under his command. I figure that whatever magic was in him, or in the sword, that would go a long way to getting the monkey off your backs. The soldiers in the ward might be too far gone.” He shrugged, an apology in a gesture. “The best we could do for the victims of the Grey Plague was keep them comfortable. The darkness took them all, in the end.”

“But how does that fit in with the sword? Or, vice versa I suppose,” asked Allcre.

“Honestly? It’s beyond me. Sure, to you I’m melting faces down here in the holes, but I was basically just a footsoldier. This was a minor outbreak, according to the veterans in the company. Apparently your Red General was a bright boy with a great idea, and like I said, I was just left here to watch over the place after the rest of the company rolled out after the big spirit worked his way in.”

“So what’s your opinion on the sword? Any chance we could, I don’t know, make another one? Find the old one? It seems like its a great tool to use against the darkness, such as it seems.”

Balthasar leaned back, scratching the back of his head. “No, no, I think wherever it is, it’s serving its purpose. On top of that, what little knowledge I have of that particular type of sword means that there’s approximately no chance and no way you could re-make it.”

“Right, alright, that’s fair… I guess.” The Hunter pondered a moment; “Who are the Fusiliers, really? The Third Hadirion Fusiliers; is that a place? Some sigil you follow? And why were you required to help out where the Utulian casters couldn’t work the right magic?”

Drawing out the word in hesitation, he answered, “Well, that’s a bit more than I can just casually reveal. Hadirion is… a land apart, you can’t get there by most conventional methods. The Fusiliers, we’re sort of your equivalent of - sappers, I think the word is - military saboteurs, and we can move unconventially. We were summoned by the Red King, so we could show up more or less at his whim.”

“Are you, or I suppose were you, part of his retinue?”

“His retinue? Soldiers in his train? Oh, no no no, we’re contractors. After a sort. We, um… this is awkward… We have a different patron deity. Your Red General was, and is, close to the White Steward, all about finding the best in people. We follow one known as the Blackguard - actually, scratch that, call him the Nightguard, too many connotations otherwise - and we’re all about overthrowing tyrants and safeguarding rebellions. Lots of business for demolition experts in that field, let me tell you.” He stopped a sentence from leaving his lips, having a thought which seemed to amuse him quite a bit. “Seems like I’ve failed in that sense; you’ve got quite the bureaucracy going, here.”

“That we do. Utulia basks in the glory of the White Steward, blessed be his name. The Red King rules by the authority granted by the White Steward and by the righteousness he carries with him.” The steel in the spine of Hunter Verily grew, and the frayed-at-the-edge look was almost pushed to the back. “Again; why were you required in lieu of Utulian casters? What did you end up doing when you made the Cursed Zone? More importantly, why in the world did you attempt to trap a necromantic incursion?”

“Because we were needed,” he immediately countered. He produced a small badge from somewhere within his tatters; a sable sircle with an embossed crescent moon of silver. As he passed the badge (cool to the touch, oddly heavy) to Allcre, a shimmering effect rippled over his features. In the dim light of the sewers, darkness gathered more strongly in the corners of the catchbasin, and Allcre’s fears rose sharply.

Where a wrinkly old man with bushy hair had sat, an entirely different creature relaxed calmly, with the same wry smile defining his features, altogether too familiar to be comfortable with. Short black horns sprouted from his temples, sweeping back over a smooth blue-skinned scalp and framing a pair of yellow-green eyes. His teeth and claws (claws!) were the same ebon as the horns, and hoofed feet terminated a pair of spry legs. He extended his hand, and numbly was given back the badge, whereupon the old man returned.

Some part of Allcre’s training said tiefling, but the shock at having actually seen a child of human (maybe) and devil in the flesh was hard to overcome. “Hold on, you have to know exactly how xenophobic this country is. Why help in the first place, why stay?”

“You think we would have been accepted looking like that? Not hardly, kid. We had to scrounge up some energy projectors to make the locals feel comfortable, using the tried-and-true flame-whip show. Sure, we roped some native elves into the venture, but the big movers were clever little devil spawn like me. Some of us lost our fathers to the darkness, to the Outside, and we wanted all kinds of vengeance. Petty human bigotry was about as interesting as a fleabite.”

As he rested back upon his hands, Allcre noted that devils, creatures of cold and darkness, would naturally be more comfortable in the sewers underneath a city than in the sun-baked streets above; a night jaunt would be comfortable, but not much more. Then, a few questions started multiplying, and then the natural result happened. “Who’s your father? Is your tail prehensile? Are your horns based on heritage?”, Allcre blurted out.

Balthasar looked moderately uncomfortable as he described his complete lack of knowledge on the matter (despite the fact his tail was, in fact, prehensile). He hadn’t grown up around other devils, just other tieflings, and was unfamiliar with the slightest facets of the cultures of hell. He cleared his throat, and asked gently, “Would you like to know about the wards?”

The technical discussion that followed helped, quite a bit, for Allcre to overcome the shock and for Balthasar to get over his temporary awkwardness. Balthasar’s scratched drawings and diagrams in the silt of the tunnel (too narrow and fine a scratch for just a finger) were familiar in nature, and Allcre delved into understanding the nature of the Cursed Zone, what Balthasar was calling the Dark Ward. They had set up a resonator, a standing wave, a magical short-circuit waiting to happen that would interact negatively with anything, magic or antimagic, crossing its line. Inside the ward, funky stuff would happen to any active magic-users, but contingencies had been established, such as the magical extraction of wounded or vulnerable from inside the line.

As far as its purpose and execution went, they had crossed the river, slapping the undead about (for this was not the greatest threat the Outside had ever offered), slagged a hole through the ground into the heart of the temple, let the big man in, and set up the resonator as quickly as they could. Once the Red General had finished his work, he walked out with his priests (clearing the area as he went), and the Fusiliers left via the unconventional path. The recruited elves had gone back west to watch their side, and Balthasar had stayed behind to watch the eastern side. The tower was probably their idea of some subterfuge, and in his esteemed opinion was just them being lazy.

“And what of the necromancer’s stone? How does that figure in?”, a much more at-ease Allcre asked.

“Probably a shard of a stone we missed on our way in or out,” Balthasar replied, though not as nonchalantly as he meant to. “Maybe it fell in the dirt and we missed it in the big damn hurry we were in, and some poor soul wandered in by accident and found it. That said,” he sighed, “it’s rarely as easy as being unlucky when it comes to the Outside.”

“How big do stones get? What are they made of?” No, there were simply more questions. That was all she could expect; more mysteries and threads the further she went into this ball of tangled knots.

“I’ve heard of building-sized chunks, even things that were recognizably buildings, even some monument-sized ones with glyphs all over them like foul graffiti. As long as it exists, and has the right properties (mineral, chemical, whatever), it acts as a beachhead for the terrible powers it acts as a focus for. Most of the identification comes from observation of corrupted processes; green fire, funky shadows, incipient madness, reality warping, and the classic aura signature. You know it when you see it.”

Allcre raised a finger; “Wait. Aura - that reminds me - what’s your opinion on the walker, the creepy figure we came across when we first got here?” She quickly described it; not particularly good woodcraft, non-detectable aura, ease of passage through the wards.

For the first time since she laid eyes on him, Balthasar was speechless for a good two beats, then started thinking. He proceeded to have far too much fun stroking his beard, thinking out loud through muttering below her hearing, amused a little bit at her impatience. After a sufficient interim, Balthasar slapped his palms down on the brick ledge. “Either it’s a soulless construct of flesh with a full cancellation spectrum, or a standing null aura with field permutations. No idea how that would be remotely possible, but that’s my thinking outside of the box. Granted, there’s quite a few things neither you or I know about the high-level workings of the magic in the Dark Ward - sorry, Cursed Zone, I like that better - so we can assume that they’re related. Coincidence is merely the universe being lazy.”

Allcre thought on it all for a moment longer. Balthasar had been a great resource, seriously an excellent reference for what was going on and an unparalleled measure for exactly how bad it could get. She rose from her seat, crossing over to where the hidden tiefling was sitting, and clasped his hands in hers. There was a moment of vertigo; she could feel the hard, cold hands and the roughness of the claws, but she could see the soft eyes that had remembered pain and strife, that knew the necessities of hiding.

“Thank you. Thank you so much. You’ve been really helpful, and you really didn’t have to be. You didn’t just bail on me halfway through my pestering. May the White Steward, blessed be his name, watch over you and keep you safe.”

Balthasar smiled to hid the grim truth behind it. “I’ll see if there’s anything more I can think of. I might be able to piece together what’s going on over in those wards. If you need me, remember; nighttime is better, if there’s work in the offing after dark.” His breath rose and fell, once and twice, as he looked to form the right kind of sentence. “The dark is rising again, no matter what anybody in this little country has to say. We will all need to be as ready as we can.”

<><><>

The archivist and the two hunters rejoined at the entrance to the crypts. Allcre had been able to run to the sewers and meet with the old tiefling (and be shocked) and then return while the rest of the book’s knowledge ripped into the minds of the two men who had remained, and then confer with the arcanologist. As such, the archivist and the Red Hunter were far more shaken than Allcre, and were vocally disturbed by the fact that the old man who had saved them was anything but human. Mostly.

Pitt’s haggard look faded slowly as Allcre relayed the results of her interview with the old mage. A knotted collection of brows and lips arrayed itself on the archivist’s face, however, as a surge of more questions (seriously, it never would end) rose in his mind. After Allcre finished her summary, the archivist cleared his throat and added to her knowledge the interpretation of the Book of the Dead by the arcanologist.

The thin little man had explained that the apparent motive behind this dark power is the the destruction and consumption of life and matter for its own sake, not for control or power, purely antithetical to the will to live of creatures and beings that are alive. The stones, it seemed, had not been produced so much as found, or (accompanied by a shudder) sent. Therein lay the problem; the stones are not foci so much as conduits.

“Apparently,” Pitt added, “the stones themselves are dangerous to speak of, so the fact that we are in a crisis already allows us to speak in guarded tones of these things. The will from Outside looks for any wayward mind to corrupt.” Pitt folded his arms contemptuously across his chest. “I admit that it is serious, but that’s just superstition.”

The archivist continued; scant records of visions given by the Book of the Dead exist, or have been written down, apart from the rites and power-usage it aims to teach. Most of the known ones were relevant to the situation at hand. In this case, and under these circumstances, the Book appeared to reveal that the Red King, in all his power, is a member of some force (or a subject thereof) explicitly oriented against the rise and appearance of necromancy, its power, and all that comes with it. Including, it seemed, the entities beyond the walls of reality.

Pitt and the archivist had grilled the arcanologist rather aggressively. Like Allcre, they had come out of the Book of the Dead’s hateful aura and been filled with a panoply of questions.

At first, the arcanologist had weathered the storm of questions like a good little stone in the path of the wave. Once he had shaken himself free of his own minor fugue, he had turned to the two men, and professed his own ignorance on much of the matter. The three of them had proceeded to put together as much as they could. The arcanologist took one of his rings off and proceeded to communicate directly with some of his peers in the Archive, in order to get up-to-date information as rapidly as possible.

Necromancers, according to the records, could be destroyed. The downside to destroying a necromancer was that such dark power was playing some twisted game that derived from a notion of guerilla warfare. Their purpose was to be destroyed, and to soak up as much energy and resource as possible while doing so. They existed for destruction’s sake, and fought for conflict’s sake, the more perverted and deranged the better. Trapping one, then, at first seemed to be a bit of a paradox for both sides, as it removed the threat and interrupted the progress without actually nipping the necromancy in the bud. Why, or how the Red King engaged in experimentation with the stones in precisely unclear. Regardless, whatever he did left at least one free-roaming shard of a stone in an otherwise successful trap.

It had been important to note, during their hurried deliberation, that necromancy did not appear to be magic per se, but an utterly corrupted reflection of it. Stones, nodes, necromantic foci, dark power, etc. could only be destroyed by using an equal or over-estimated quantity of non-necromantic material and/or energy to cancel out the dark aura. The hypothesis had been put forward that the null aura was a result of that cancellation, and the subsequent destruction had been the root cause of all failures to observe directly the power of the stones.

And what of those poor souls who are twisted by this power, as revealed by the Book of the Dead? No known manuscripts of a conversation with a necromancer or a lich existed, but it appeared that taking on the mantle of the dark power creates a twisted and perverted reflection of the former being. In some cases, it was clear that the corruption was similar to a brain-washing and subsequent re-developing of the host mind. They had become slaves to their own power. The few power-hungry madmen who went looking for the stones become the worst and most terrible tools in the claw of the entities from the Outside.

To the knowledge of the three men, going over their collective memories of battles and strife in Utulia since the fall of the Mage-Lords and the defeat of Arkadi, there had been no necromantic activity in the last 300 years, either within the bounds of the country or anywhere else. The arcanologist, who had studied this particular phenomenon, had actually seen the scrying reports; the undead population is minimal and static, no advance or growth could be determined. Somehow, the trapping of the ward did more than just trap a few stones, it thoroughly interrupted the designs of the entities of the Outside.

There had been an interesting moment when the arcanologist had gaped a moment in the middle of a sentence, scratched out a note, and stuffed it through a ring, and then waited impatiently before, three seconds later, a note came back. The arcanologist reported that he had been given permission to relay an important state secret; a huge power flux existed running through Goldspire Island, the seat of power in Utulia, the home of the Archive, and the throne of the Red King, but that it was unknown from where the power comes or to where the power goes. It might be possible that the sword was acting as a relay for that power, driving either some part of the wards or whatever was going on in the heart of the Cursed Zone.

That had led (almost at the same time as Allcre’s questions to Balthasar) to a rapid investigation of the Red King and the Dark Wars. The archive maintained the only remaining records of the Dark Wars outside the government-approved texts disseminated to the general population. The Red General had appeared at the gates of the capital out of the night, carrying a greatsword in a burlap scabbard and clad in unmarked leather armor. That sword would stay by his side, sheathed, his whole life. He spoke the language fluently, and entered the Samorian Military Academy (now defunct) graduating with honors. His first service in war was against an incursion of troglodytes from the north-west, and he was instrumental in Utulian victory. He rose like a star through the ranks; charismatic, wise, and humbly brilliant. The opening words of the Codex of the Red King were his motto from his earliest days:

Never cruel or hateful, never cowardly or fearful, for those I must protect, in the name of those I cannot save.

Along the way, he had picked up a red banner, a long cloth of scarlet dyed wool that he had embossed with the sigil of the White Steward; in those days, a popular deity for travelers and the poor, and not the center of a state religion. He had begun to amass a bit of a cult following, who became his primary officer corps in the first days of the Dark War. He had never been one to go to a temple, but on the night before he left Samor for the western front, he spent the entire time until dawn in a silent vigil by the chief altar, emerging at sunrise with a sword shining with a beautiful inner light clasped, unsheathed, in his hand. The rest is military history; a slog of death and chaos all the way to the tower, with the shining sword of the Red General leading the way. Eventually, he gave up the sword, and had begun the Arcane Prohibition.

<><><>

Their conversation had led the three of them to a secluded parlor within the temple, and as it wound down, they found themselves quieted by what they had learned, what they had discovered, what they had found. The silence stretched on, each of them with their own thoughts. The day grew long outside. The shadows held more weight of malice than before, hidden secrets in lengthening darkness.

The Archivist broke the silence with a long release of breath, exasperated and trying for calm. “Just for the sake of clarity, let me summarize here. We show up because someone, somehow, sets off a massive necromantic spell right in the middle of a town that ate a few pairs of Hunters. We find that a plague is being set by a huge skull of nastiness hidden in the sewers, deal with it, arrest an upstanding member of the community because someone, we still don’t know who apparently, made him do it. We find a similar skull in the Cursed Zone, which sets off alarm bells throughout regional governments. Now, according to Utulia’s best and brightest, we’re dealing with a necromantic outburst because, the last time this happened, the set-up the Red King put together with some tiefling friends to trap an incursion from outside reality missed a spot. That failure apparently is threatening to overwhelm the wards because, eventually, the dark power will throw off the epic-level sword that, somehow, is crucial to the whole thing because it is relaying the massive power flow coming from our country’s seat of legal and religious authority. If that happens, it’s the Dark War all over again, without the Red King to head off the necromancers killing everybody.”

Pitt chimed in. “Don’t forget the impossible man walking into and out of the wards freely on the far side of the shore.”

Allcre added, “Oh, and sneaky elves are involved somehow.”

“Right, yes, of course. Can’t forget the more inexplicable stuff.” He sighed again, more explosively. “Is it just me, or are we in over our heads? I feel like I’m punching well above my weight here.” He cast a sardonic look over at the two Hunters. “Unless, of course, it is just me, and all of this is just another day on station for you two.”

Pitt and Allcre looked at each other, eyes meeting for a brief second. Pitt’s mouth twitched in what could have become a cynical grin of his own. Allcre looked back at the Archivist and offered an apologetic shrug. The Archivist groaned, and put his face in his hands, gripping the fringes of his hair.

“We are kind of the best of the best,” Pitt said, more matter-of-factly than anything else. “We were specifically called in to deal with this by the Samor office. Those other Hunters that disappeared here were good, sure, but we’re probably in the top ten Hunters currently working in Utulia. That said,” he added with a note of worry, “there’s only so much that three people can do. More than just skill, the scale of this problem might be out of our ability to handle.”

The Archivist’s hands fell into his lap, his face carefully neutral. “My job, literally my only job, even if things go completely sideways, is to watch, to observe, to report. That’s what the Archive does. We’re the information network in Utulia. We know stuff. I have the training to stay alive, not to throw down against damn fools, crazy people, or, fates forbid, necromancers.”

Allcre sat up, brows furrowed in sudden thought. She turned to Pitt, hand on his shoulder, and nearly shouted, “Aleph Order!”

Pitt facepalmed. “Of course!” He started rooting through his kit, hands frantically searching through pockets and pouches. As he did so, he explained Allcre’s outburst, as she was scratching out a note on a piece of paper at hand. “The Aleph Order is the core of large-scale necromancy response, and rarely used, if ever. Basically, Hunters are ordered to deal with any incursion or uprising, but if things are too big for two specialists to handle, we call in the really heavy hitters. Our superiors, and theirs – five levels up, Allcre?”

Allcre looked up, eyes unfocused for a second. “Oh, at least in the short term. If it doesn’t get up to Cardinal Allavan, I’d be surprised. Level One?”

Pitt nodded. “Level One.” He turned back to the Archivist, whose shoulders had relaxed, knowing that someone, somewhere, could help. “Confirmed necromancy, multiple active constructs, high level of danger. We almost got killed and converted, so this is the next step in escalation.” He pulled a small amulet, a copper circle with a rotating outer ring, from the depths of a large pouch. “Or, at least, it was in our training. We almost forgot because you never expect to deal with this stuff.”

Allcre, having finished her short-form report, passed it to Pitt, who rotated the dial to the numeral one. A small aperture opened in the middle of the dial, and closed behind the slip of paper shoved through. The three leaned back in their chairs, a sudden tense silence rising like the tide.

“Now what?”

“Might take a while. We have plenty of work ahead of us.”

The Archivist raised a finger, cold eyes fixed on the Hunters. “We tell the townsfolk. If they ask, we must be honest. They are going to be right in the path of the hammer-blow, when it comes. They have earned the truth.”

<><><>

Pitt stood under a gray sky. Shield on his back, sword in his hand with tip just on the road, he could have been a statue if not for his sleeves and robe ruffling around his dark skin. He surveyed the small crowd in front of him, boys and young men backed by older fathers, with a few mothers and daughters worried in the back. He took a deep breath, and surveyed the troop.

A half-dozen young volunteers, glowing with pride they hadn’t yet earned, stood in front of a contingent of older guardsmen. Just looking at them, Pitt saw morale ready to break. Most of these men probably had friends currently withering away in the Plague Ward. They looked like someone they trusted, someone they believed in, was asking them to jump off the tallest building in town.

One of the old gaffers stood forward and cleared his throat. “Sir,” he asked respectfully, the way old noncoms talk to young officers, “no offense, but are there actually necromancers out there? Is that why we’re building up the walls? Is that why you – I mean – all those men ended up in the hospital?”

Pitt met his eyes, held them. "Any necromantic powers are being contained by the wards that the Red King himself erected. They are currently unable to break out from their cage, but that may not remain so. The only necromantic activity that has been found outside the containment zone is those injured in the assault, and they are being treated in the infirmary. We do not yet know the full strength of the threat. We are fortifying the town in advance of the arrival of more forces.

The Hunter looked out to the gathered troop, raising his voice. "We are not crossing the river to fight necromancers or their dark constructs. There is a camp, reported as being close to the other side of the river, may be in danger once the battle starts in earnest, so we are going to relocate them to our side of the border. There is a chance that this group may be sympathizers. We may need to subdue a threat to our security, which is why you are accompanying me.

"Let me make this clear, though. We do not know who is in that camp. Murder, even of someone not a citizen, is a crime punishable by death. I am authorized to pass judgement on all citizens of this nation. No one is to attack unless I give the order, and failure to abide by that order will meet no mercy. You are to be vigilant, though. Even if the camp is not hostile, you are still near enemy territory. Be prepared for anything that might happen. You are to protect the city, and the encampment. We will meet at the north gate at dawn.”

Pitt’s speech was a comfort to the would-be guardsmen, who started to filter out to the jobs they had been assigned earlier that day. To them, it made sense. Protection of citizens; circling the wagons; building up the walls. All the good stuff associated with the duties which they swore to follow. As speeches went, one of the better. One, still holding onto concern, raised his voice, telling his compatriots that he was going to ask a priest he knew to come anyway, “just in case.”

The younglings, on the other hand, positively swelled with pride as the speech went on. Pitt saw in them a shadow of someone he had been; full of the glory and vigor of a newly-ordained Hunter, missing the cynicism and jadedness that comes with experience. A couple of them started planning amongst themselves to bring some more friends; blacksmith's boys with arms like cord, tracker's sons with eyes and bows that could clip a hawk on a dive, carpenter's apprentices who were familiar with the woods on the far side of the Zedac. At the last, Pitt kept a chuckle to himself, thinking that the carpenter’s boys would have some sharp words for would-be heroes.

As the troop fell out, after a fashion, a worried father-looking guard came up to Pitt. “If you would be so kind, my good sir Hunter, could you keep the boys to the rear, if at all possible, where you can?” He wrung his hands nervously, and Pitt recognized one of the few guardsmen to survive the dreadful night in the Cursed Zone. “There are mothers in Samalta who would go to their grave in a week from the grief of having lost sons and husbands, sir; there are more than a few.”

He withered a bit under Pitt’s cold gaze. Pitt knew the regulations. The service required of all guards asked them to give their life for Steward, country, and King. There was room in the guard for neither weakness nor favoritism. The guard made his apologies, thanking Pitt somewhat incoherently for helping them in such a dark time, and went to join what few of his friends remained.

Pitt watched them go, eventually left alone in the open pavilion at the foot of the temple. It was all the more silent for the sounds of deconstruction happening out of sight, around corners in the town. He hoped, desperately hoped, that this would be a milk run, a simple escort mission. Samalta was a small town, made smaller by the plethora of empty houses. It might not be able to take another botched foray into the woods beyond the river. He might not be able to.

He squinted, watching the sun lower in the sky, start to dim behind the smoke still rising beyond the walls. He knew, like he could see into the quiet spaces of the night ahead, that sleep would evade him, that he would pore over maps and records for the entire night, trying to prepare as much as he could, trying to keep the nightmares away.

Pitt sighed, and slowly climbed the temple steps. Best to get started.

<><><>

Allcre walked down a narrow alley, following a middle-aged priest whose hands were dark against the sunbaked brick of the buildings to either side. They stopped at an intersection, as a wagon team took bricks and old lumber to the northern gate. The priest poked his head out, looking left, then right. He turned back to her, a smile below worried eyes on his face. “Just another block or so.”

The Hunter was led to the house of one Gaffer Harvod, a rotund man with skin midnight-black from field labor and hair cloud-white from age, who shared his house with the unofficial center of the rumor mill, his partner and the town midwife Rose Harvod. It was Rose that she wanted to talk to. The priest had made it clear that, while he wasn’t sure, just by dint of her knowing enough information about people in general, she would know some specific answers to Allcre’s questions. At the last corner, he turned to the Hunter with a bashful look on his face.

“Look,” he started, “this is actually sort of an embarrassing place to be for a priest. It would be unbecoming for someone of my position to stoop to asking a gossip such as she for help.”

Allcre raised an eyebrow at him. “Afraid of a woman?”

The priest winced, hard. “She’s vindictive and vengeful. She’s had no problem cutting ties with the religious community. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t mention to any of my superiors that I took you here.” For good measure, he looked around, checking the street. “Best to get you inside so some questions can get answered.”

The door was guarded by the eminent Gaffer Harvod, lounging on a chair made from what looks like the better parts of a wine tun, a wagon, and a floor covering. At the approach of the Hunter and the priest, the assembly groaned as he stood in greeting. “Father Myur! It’s been too long, my friend.” His voice rumbled like distant thunder, full of laughter and peace.

“Too long, indeed.” The priest offered a hand in shake, and was clearly dwarfed.

Harvod turned to the Hunter, and bowed as deep as his frame could handle. “It is an honor,” he intoned, “to be visited by one so honored as yourself.” Despite folding almost in half, his head was almost level with Allcre’s.

“A pleasure,” Allcre replied, “and I’m sure the same with your wife.”

Harvod straightened up, smiling. His massive hand pushed open a door, and a bellow for Rose was answered by an unintelligible yell from somewhere in the house. Some few children come tumbling out the door, and are kept penned by the Gaffer’s huge hands. Eventually, the town gossip herself came out. Before greeting Allcre, she glared briefly at the priest, who tried his best to ignore it.

Rose, all lean muscle and grey edges, offered a hand still wet from the washing. “Sorry about the little ones, ma’am,” she commented. “Odd kids from around the town end up here. Can’t keep track of ‘em all, so I just try to give ‘em a roof as I can.” Her eyes softened looking at the Gaffer playing with the kids, no older than eight. “Come on inside, then. Tea’s on.”

The tea came in mugs, thick raw ceramic, with a powerful scent that cleared out the head in a way Allcre was unfamiliar with. “Grow the herbs ourselves!” Rose called over, obviously proud of the handiwork. The Hunter took a draft, closing her eyes in pleasure. Rose was fussing about in the other room, talking to the Gaffer and herding the kids. The outer door clapped shut, and Rose rejoined the Hunter, nervously wiping her hands again on her apron.

“Sorry about all that,” she murmured, taking a quick sip of her own tea. “Have to make a space for company.”

“Don’t worry about it,”Allcre replied. “You said those children were wanderers, orphans in the town?”

“Something like that, but never orphans. Helped half their mothers give birth to ‘em. Feel like my responsibility doesn’t end there.” Rose took another sip of the tea, deeper this time. “Now, what did that stuck-up young priest want, bringing you all the way down here to this side of town?”

Not wanting to waste any time, and as Rose clearly was interested in getting down to business, Allcre focused on Rose, midwife, gossip, mother. “Tell me about the Wanderers. What do you know, what have you heard, what have you seen?”

Rose looked shocked. “Those old nomads? Why in the world do you want to know about them?”

Allce let a pause draw out somewhat dramatically, watching Rose’s eyes draw slightly wider. “We are all threatened by what lies across the river. Samalta may be the only safe place for anyone outside the walls. We may be safer inside if there are less people outside to be … taken.”

Rose drew in a sharp breath at the implication. She knew her history. She knew exactly what the Hunter was referring to. After a bracing drink from the mug, Rose began.

In a word, the result of Allcre’s examination of Rose’s knowledge revealed that the Wanderers are perfectly strange. They roamed all over the frontier, occasionally making it as far south as Depool, but only rarely, as their real home was the broad plains under the stars. They had never respected the hard border of the Zedac between the territories of the elves and of Utulia. Rose thought that by way of the Wanderers, agents of the Elven Kingdoms crossed the border, using their glammer and magic to pass unseen among crowds. Again, for the second time that week, the memories of a certain wary and silent gentleman in a crowded bar popped into Allcre’s mind. It made sense; using neutral-party, yet friendly, primitives to sneak into hostile nations.

“Proper pagans” is one of the less invective phrases Rose used to describe their level of primitiveness; apparently, they held to the old and more barbaric ways of worshiping the spirits of the land and the air and watching the stars for signs, dotting the plains with well-hidden shrines to local spirits. Apparently, to Rose’s own dramatic emphasis, the Wanderers were even guilty of breeding with elves, producing lamp-eyed young brats, smooth-skinned with pointy ears and penchants for things like music and history, none of which a strapping young lad should be caught studying.

That said, Rose concluded three cups of tea later, the Wanderers were mostly harmless. Occasionally, a few of the nomads would wander into town, barter a few trinkets for the odd tool, bit of supplies, or piece of news, and then dodge back into the grass with nary a coin flipped to the bartender. They never seemed hostile, just curious, almost like children gawping at things like walls and cobblestones and fountains. Rose herself had traded a few bundles of her own tea-leaves for necklaces of beads. She showed Allcre with a little shame; it was an exquisite piece, done in polished stone and bone and made of braided hair (Allcre’s guess was yak, but it had been a while). Unfortunately, Rose didn’t have any information as to the layout, population, or manners of the Wanderers. If anybody in town would have known, it would have been her, but, no dice.

Rose stopped for a minute. The Gaffer had drawn himself a stein of beer from some homebrewed stock, after offering some to the Hunter (who politely declined). She looked carefully for some sign at Allcre, who was steadily gazing back.

“Could I,” she started hesitantly, “go with you?” The Gaffer, mid-swig, frowned deeply, but said nothing. Rose flushed, almost afraid of what the answer would be.

Allcre did not immediately respond. She considered what Rose was, more than her function in this town. She was a natural gossip, already on tenterhooks with the community. She was smart, interested, curious, but clearly lacked the tact to handle what she herself had described as “dirty bastard-sons”. Speed was the essence of what needed to happen now, and having a potentially offensive guest would hamper her efforts entirely.

So, the Hunter leaned forward, placing a hand over Rose’s. “It might not be best,” Allcre said. “We need everyone to stay safe.” It was as good a lie as she could tell. The Gaffer looked enormously relieved, but said nothing.

Rose nodded, silently. Not having any more questions, the stay didn’t last too much longer, and Allcre found herself back in the street. It smelled hot, dusty, baked, so different from the herbal and fragrant coolness of Rose’s house. She had her heart in the right place, the Hunter thought. Just not her experience.

Allcre walked slowly back to the temple, having waved on the priest who accompanied her, then waited outside with the gaffer. She had so many questions. Questions about the nature of their enemies, questions about the nature of their allies, about the history of the place, about people, about things, about everything related to this inexplicable centuries-old undead-trap that seemed to be the central object of this whole damned mess. Her feet took her back to the temple, up the same steps at the same rate that Pitt had followed some time earlier. She found her quarters quiet, empty, though with the volume of thoughts rolling through her head it was barely registered. Allcre went through the motions of preparing for bed, still absorbed in the torrent of unknowns, evidence, and hunches that had started to barely precipitate out over the last few (horrible) days. Her lamp blown out, she climbed onto her cot and laid back.

Somewhere deep in her mind, she knew that sleep would not be forthcoming. There were too many questions to gnaw on, too many small pieces of information that could point one way or another, entire magical operations to consider and figure out. Perhaps it was for the best; with no sleep came no nightmares.

Night found Allcre staring at her ceiling through half-lidded eyes, watching, waiting, for answers, for the morning.

<><><>

The Archivist took a moment on the wall, looking around, looking north. The work on the walls had started in earnest. Honestly, he hadn’t expected the town to lean into their circumstance so readily, if with a grim set to their jaw. Dust hung thick in the air over places where abandoned buildings were being torn down to make Samalta safe. If it could be torn down, it was. If the walls could be built higher, they were. The Archivist scratched his beard pensively, absentmindedly. The real question was this: would it help? Would it even slow them down?

Haldaan, a shimmering mirage in the dim light of the summer evening, lay as it had for generations along the bank of the Zedac. The Archivist, in his mind’s eye, imagined the camp of the Red King’s army stretched between the walls of Samalta and that larger city beyond, river embankments piled higher to form defenses, barricades and earthworks stretching for miles. Allcre had told him about the chance encounter in a tavern en route, a strange man who pointed them towards the citadel which, even now, stood firm against time and circumstance. He dropped down onto scaffolds erected that afternoon, and disappeared from the sight of Samalta as soon as he hit the grass.

The road to Haldaan had been, and remained, an arrow-straight line from the waystation that Samalta had started out as. The sun-baked dust, every so often, didn’t quite cover the paving stones that had been carefully laid out by the Mage-Lords, and even the span of years since Haldaan had been abandoned to its ghosts had not yet erased the wagon tracks. The Archivist could also see, to his relief, no fresh or strange tracks on that path. His footsteps grew more confident, relatively; his passage might go unnoticed by wary hunters in the tall, dead grass.

His path stopped, briefly, as he came to the old canal entry. A barge-path had been laid into the plains, water diverted from the mountains and sent flowing down towards the frontier. A bridge crossed that canal just as it reached the Zedac, giving it more weight and wider banks than could be cut by the river in its current state. That bridge had been thrown down by the Red King. The path now forded the old canal, damming it entirely. At some point, the Archivist figured, there must have been a foul and stagnant lake that was a dream for irrigation, but there was only a light depression now. No tracks in the silty, open flat. More relief. He took note of a few loose stones, some larger blocks he could hide or rest under, and moved on.

Haldaan was close enough to be more easily examined now. The woods on the other side of the border had thinned out, with some of the trees even containing leaves, broad and green. They grew right up to the moat of the dusty city, and the Archivist smiled thinly, without mirth. Hiding places would need to be that much better if there was a wealth of them just around the city. He could see the thickness of the reinforced north-western walls, the broken road-gate, the fallen canal-gate. Through walls leaning precariously, he could see buildings in their last stages of total collapse. The years had not been kind to the urban center of the frontier.

The evening drew long shadows in its train. Broken foundations which had served mills, farmhouses, odd stables and taverns, stood like scattered teeth in the plain, more visible in the low light. The sun, now a dull red disc slipping towards the horizon, spent its light in the remains of the smoke from the trees had burned. The brick of the city proper took on a rusty hue, but the darker stone of the citadel went almost blood red.

In a flash, the Archivist looked back up to the top of the citadel. He had seen a flicker, a reflection perhaps, something metal. His powers of observation were excellent, and well-honed, but at this distance even he could only pick out –

Movement. Faint, and barely a guess, but his instincts (and mild paranoia) had served him well. There were people, definitely in the city, definitely in the citadel. He felt comfortable working in the dark, but so did practically anyone that could possibly be spending their summers in the wreck of a city.

Considering the angle of the light, the possible options for finding a safe refuge within Haldaan’s walls, and his general unease with the whole damn situation, the Archivist decided to stay outside the walls that night. He found a mill’s base to be suitable; from the city, he would be nearly impossible to see, but with the cracks and flaws in the old brick-work he had a vantage point on any approach to his safe spot.

Settling into a corner, where he could fail to get sleep like every other night that week, the Archivist looked out on that city. How it figured into their future, he wasn’t sure. He was going off of the word and tale of two Hunters, into a place that almost guaranteed contained enemies of the Utulian state, where safety could not be ensured.

The night fell uneasily, quickly. The stars came out, and their light was thin. A silence lay on the plains that was entirely unnatural. The Archivist waited, watching, bracing for the morning.

<><><>

A tense hour had followed the initial Aleph Level One report. Allcre and Pitt sent out some very simple orders to the effect that masons, carpenters, and any able hands available should get to work tearing down the abandoned and disused buildings that littered Samalta like sores. The walls, in such a state of disrepair as to be nearly useless, were to be repaired with the materials scavenged and recycled. The rest of the hour was spent planning between the three of them; where they should go, who they needed to pull behind the walls, further ideas and possibilities.

Messages started coming in a trickle, then a torrent. Authority was granted to Governor-Priest Hammaran to oversee the defense organization, with automatic deputization of the Hunters and station Archivist. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of troops were being drawn away from stations to Samalta; the Fourth Sappers had been mobilized, the Fifth and Eighth Infantry Divisions of the Second Legion were being re-directed off the northern front, the hitherto rumored Archivist Security Force would be brought in, all on top of fully twelve pairs of experienced Hunters. It would be a month at least for the disparate forces to arrive, so any preparations possible were ordered to happen.

The most chilling missive came late, direct from the Archive.

Based on the available information and the confirmed Aleph Level 1 situation, we have found it highly probable that the missing Hunters were lost to the powers of necromancy. Whether they have been sacrificed or converted remains unknown without further direct observation. By any means necessary, keep the situation contained until help arrives in force.

<><><>

The first suicides were found that night.

<><><>

And lo His burning sword banished night, driving back the lich and the risen and the foul necromancer. Sacrificing a great part of His power to destroy the enemy, He safeguarded all of Utulia, and by His watch we are kept safe to this day, never to see that dark foe rise out of the dark once more.

-Conclusion to the Cardinate-sanctioned account of the Dark War

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