#wicked deeds are widely known

[unusual-ly]

I almost forgot to post the last day of SunnyCon’s haul! Not much this time but I love them all~ I even have the all the artist names this time!

This badge that says “please don’t make me do things” by Cindacry to add to my con bag badge collection and a Heeler family print by Dommy Downs ^^~

And two CATS commissions!

Jemima by Becca Phant, singing her little heart out ^^

And Griddlebone by Liza Mac, based on my own interpretation of her for my film script project in which she is Macavity’s current mate and accomplice, living as a stray with him and her little pack of rat friends who just want to make life a bit easier for her /)*^*(\

[unusual-ly]

I had no idea this existed but that looks just like Griddlebone and I do in fact have them as a couple in the script I have planned

Actually I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s meant to be Griddlebone anyway, she is mentioned in the poem *^*

I think Cats the musical fans should incorporate stuff from the picture book adaptations of the original T.S. Eliot poems into their fanfics. Like the fact the Macavity picture book gave Macavity a girlfriend. I think people should invent a whole name and personality for her and include her in fic:

[junkyard-gifs]

And they say that all the cats whose wicked deeds are widely known...

I might mention... Mungojerrie? I might mention.. Griddlebone.

Are nothing more than agents for the cat who, all the time, just controls the operation...

This is your daily reminder to caress your wife's hindquarters when discussing your various crushes.

Jo Lucy Rackham covering Demeter and Birgit Arquin as Bombalurina. (All the background girls are first cast, except Denise Jastraunig covering Jennyand allowing for the fact that Anastasia Bertinshaw had taken over the role of Jemima by this point in the run.)

Vienna revival, 24/06/2022, filmed by @cryptidvoidwritings and @falasta.

[etruatcaelum]

On Ozlem.

This will be less a singular headcanon than a collection; my reading of the relationship is particular and on several key points, well off the beaten track from popular fanon. I thought it would be helpful to put it all in one place for ease of reference.

Salem’s Childhood.

Salem was the second-born child of a minor lord, born into the eighth generation of mankind since the creation of the world Arziant, in a kingdom called Pastoria. Her mother Salome had been the king’s only child, but not heir to the realm; Pastorian law and custom forbade women to leave their divine appointment within the home. In practice, a woman belonged to her father until she was given to her husband.

In that time, monolatrous worship of the God of Light was nigh-ubiquitous, and tradition held that no one who lived a virtuous life would die before their hundredth year, unless slain in battle or by some violent calamity brought about by the Darkness. To fall ill was proof in itself that one had committed some offense in the eyes of God. This was not mere superstition, for although natural sickness did exist, the God of Light gave healing to those he judged pure and inflicted disease as a punishment for sin.

Death in childbirth, although not (as Salem believes, even now) wholly unknown, was quite rare and supposed to be a punishment reserved only for the truly wicked. Both of Salem’s parents were well-known for their piety, and her father Lord Ithai was scrupulously devout; for his wife to sicken and die in the course of bearing their second child was shocking, not only to Ithai himself but to all of Pastoria. While he would have held the tragedy against her in any circumstance, his personal inclination to do so fed eagerly upon advice from religious advisors who, to preserve Salome’s good name in the eyes of the people, blamed her infant child. There had been, after all, prophecies foretelling the virtue and great deeds of heroes in the past; why not portents of a dire evil?

(In truth, Salome had made an error in a ritual entreating the God of Light to grant his blessings to her unborn child, and he intended to make an example of her carelessness.)

The modern fairytale The Girl in the Tower portrays the girl’s father as a paranoid, possessive tyrant who loves the girl as a miser loves his treasures, who becomes angry and violent when she asks to be set free; this characterization, though not an inaccurate portrait of Lord Ithai himself, elides the misogynistic norms and popular religious justification for Salem’s imprisonment. Simply put, she had no hope of rescue because most of Pastoria truly believed that she was an ill-omened child who needed to be locked away for the good of all.

Salem did not grow up in complete isolation, though she was alone far more often than not: she was raised by an ever-changing parade of servants, priests, and tutors. Her father visited her on occasion; her elder brother Kalev snuck in to see her with greater frequency.

The first twenty-one years of her life, she spent in locked in a single room—little more than a cell, ten paces wide and nine across—at the top of her father’s keep. Her singular window overlooked the block where Ithai executed those whom he suspected of treating her with undue kindness; from the time she was old enough to understand, Salem was made to watch these executions (and in time it became a compulsion to do so, one that still lingers; to this day Salem keeps obsessive count of the deaths she considers to be her fault).

She was nearly always hungry. Of the one hundred forty-three people Ithai executed, in those twenty-one years, most were kitchen servants condemned on suspicion of bringing her too much food, or for lingering to speak with her while she ate; to bring the lord’s daughter a meal, it was well known among the kitchen staff, was to risk one’s life. Quite often, she went without food altogether, and seldom received more than one meal in a day. Salem grew up both hoarding food and feeling intense guilt around eating.

Ithai was, on the rare occasion of his visits, extremely abusive; Salem was so terrified of him that even now she feels on edge around men who remind her of him. (He was quite tall, broad-shouldered, with a full beard; his hair sandy-brown in his youth, half-grey by the time of Salem’s birth; a deep baritone.) She cannot handle being yelled at without shutting down. Her instinctive reaction to violence against herself—to simply take it, quietly, without resistance, and wait for it to be over—is a response she learned in childhood, and unless she is already quite angry, it’s one she finds difficult to overcome.

Escaping the Tower.

In the fairytale, at the age of sixteen, the girl asks her father for paper and pen. She uses these to write pleas for rescue, promising to marry anyone who can save her from her father, and throws them to the wind. Innumerable would-be saviors flock to answer, only to be slain by her father while the girl looks on in horror, until one day a true hero defeats her father in a duel and frees her at last.

This is not quite how it happened.

When Salem was sixteen, and Kalev eighteen, she put to her brother that he should find someone to marry her. She was reaching the proper age (indeed, their mother had been only a year older when the king married her to Ithai), and she could think of no other means to escape than by marriage, though the prospect filled her with dread. Kalev undertook this effort very reluctantly, fearing that anyone willing to marry a girl who’d spent her whole life locked away would undoubtedly be at least as awful as their father; but he did try, without success, for several years.

He was twenty-one, Salem nineteen, when he met Ozma: not an aristocrat but the wandering knight of a holy order who chanced to be nearby when Kalev’s retinue was set upon by the largest wyvern any of them had ever seen. Ozma leapt to Kalev’s aid and slew the grimm, and would have died of the injuries they sustained in doing so had Kalev been less skilled in healing. They talked, afterward, finding they had much in common; and before long, the conversation turned to the plight of Kalev’s sister.

Ozma had no interest in marriage—had sworn vows of chastity, in fact—but Kalev’s account of Salem’s treatment horrified them. They had heard tell of the ill-omened girl held safe within the lord’s keep, of course, but the rumors had given them the impression that she was sickly, too frail to leave her bed. Upon learning the truth, they became determined to help her. Together, the pair hatched a new plan: Ozma would pledge themself as Kalev’s vassal, ingratiate themself to Lord Ithai, and find some opportunity to free Salem in secret.

Two more years would pass before Ozma found their opportunity, for the magic Ithai had woven around her cell would not allow her to cross the threshold, even were the door torn from its hinges. During this time, Ozma stole up the tower whenever they could to visit Salem; they didn’t dare enter the room, for fear of being ensnared by the wards, but they could speak to her through the door.

Without fail, Salem would beg them not to come back; desperate though she was for escape, she did not believe this plan had any chance of working, and lived in terror of Ozma being found out and executed. Ozma, for their part, stayed resolute in their conviction that freeing her was a worthy cause to die for, which had—for as long as they could remember—been the only thing they really wanted.

In the end, what happened is this:

Lord Ithai came to Salem’s cell late one evening, on the same night Ozma risked ascending the tower to talk to her; and though they realized the danger halfway up the stairs, hearing echoes of her father’s tirade, before they turned back as they’d promised her to do if this should ever happen, they heard the unmistakable sound of a blow, a choked cry of pain, and could not find it in themself to leave.

Up they charged. Ithai had his back turned to the door, his hands around Salem’s neck, and Ozma gathered all the magic they knew to strike at him from behind; but Ithai was an experienced combatant. Though wounded, he was not bested, and he whirled around in a murderous fury to retaliate. The duel was swift and brutally decisive—within moments, Ithai shattered Ozma’s defenses and had them on disarmed on the floor.

Salem had collapsed when Ithai dropped her and remained cowering against the wall while the brief battle raged; but when her father raised his hand to strike Ozma dead, with the door open and someone who had been kind to her about to die because of her like so many others, she snapped. Her magic, never trained, and never very strong, exploded outward as she threw herself across the room.

She drove her hand into Ithai’s body as if his flesh were water and ripped his pulverized heart right out of his chest.

That was not what she meant to do, exactly. She had wanted only to make him stop, and twenty-one years of desperate fear crashed together in that moment to become a wild, boundless rage; but no sooner had his body crumpled than reality caught up with her, and then she was only a girl clutching the gory shreds of another person’s insides in her hands, whereupon she became hysterical.

Salem does not, whatsoever, remember leaving the tower, nor anything else until dawn, when she regained her senses to find Ozma coaxing her to let them clean the blood off her hands. But after realizing what had happened, Ozma scrambled up, pried the gore out of her hands, swept a few valuable-looking trinkets into a satchel—they’d wanted her to have something to her name—thrown their cloak around her shoulders, and raced the both of them out of the keep at speed.

The image Jinn presents when Ruby asks her what Ozpin is hiding, of Salem and Ozma fighting their way out together, is a representation of how Ozpin would have told this story: distilled, softened, stripped of personal feeling… but that fight did happen, for the lord’s death and Salem’s passage through his unravelling wards awoke his retinue. Ozma fought; Salem was a storm of uncontrolled violence lashing out in blind panic.

Their First Relationship.

Although Ozma had, over the course of those two years spent whispering through her door, fallen quite hopelessly in love with her, it became clear to them within hours that Salem not feel the same. The satchel of minor valuables they’d hastily gathered for her, she tried to give to them, and their polite refusal to accept caused her to lapse into hollow silence for several minutes before she asked what they wanted from her instead—and only then had they realized how scared she felt that she might be no more to them than a prize.

The first lie Ozma ever told her was that they had never thought of anything but to set right the terrible injustice her father inflicted upon her, and they resolved to take the secret of their infatuation with her to the grave.

Still: she had nowhere else to go, and neither of them dared stay in Pastoria after murdering a nobleman. Ozma offered to take her wherever she liked, and Salem ventured that she had always wanted to see the ocean. In those days, the land formed a single continent, and Pastoria lay nestled at its heart, in the verdant foothills beneath the Light’s sacred mountain.

The long journey would be Ozma’s undoing, for the sea and the edges of the great continent belonged to the God of Darkness, and the vows Ozma had made to Light forbade them to enter Dark’s own country. But they thought nothing of it at the time; their whole life, they had scrupulously abided by the stern, unyielding tenets of their faith while privately yearning for death, only for Salem to ignite within them a ferocious desire to live.

So off they went.

For more than two years, the pair traveled further and further west. Salem grew easier around them, and as her wariness ebbed, true friendship rose to take its place—not the desolate, harrowing need which had bound them both together when they fled, but the simple sense of being kindred spirits. (It was during their travels together that Ozma first decided to worry less over fitting into either manhood or womanhood, and began—just between themself and Salem—to invent an un-gendered mode of address for themself; at the time, the phrase they’re still so fond of repeating in the present, that they are only a man, not even a very good one, was not self-deprecation but a private joke they shared with her at the world’s expense.)

With other people, however, Salem struggled: her speech was stilted and afflicted by a ruinous stutter, she was awkward, she was sometimes volatile and sometimes seemingly void of any emotion at all, she was painfully shy, she could not eat with anyone else looking at her, she sometimes lost the thread of conversations and simply lapsed into silent staring… every invisible scar her childhood left upon her marked her out as strange, as unnatural, perhaps even dangerous.

By the time she and Ozma reached the ocean, Salem felt utterly exhausted and half-certain her brother and Ozma were the only good people in the entire world; she found the desolation of the coast appealed to her, the wild emptiness, the sheer scale of the endless water.

She wanted to stay, and stay they did.

They built a little house upon cliffs overlooking the sea, a day’s walk from the closest village. Planted a garden. Lived. Grimm were far more numerous around the coast than in the heartland, and though the creatures proved to be less trouble than Ozma expected, they still insisted on teaching Salem how to fight, more than the basics she’d picked up along the journey. For a year, all seemed well.

However, though Ozma had long since forgotten their vows, the God of Light did not forgive, and seeing now that his wayward servant had no intention to repent, he at last struck Ozma down.

The sickness killed them slowly; it began with mere fatigue, headaches… mild at first, though they grew ever more severe and lingering until Ozma was left nearly insensate with agony for days at a time. Over the course of nine months, they slid piece by piece into a listless haze of pain and confusion—and though Salem tried everything she could think of to help, even leaving them in village and traveling alone to the nearest city to plead for medical aid or healing from the temple, they died just short of four years after her liberation.

Salem has always, deep down, believed she killed them, somehow.

In all that time, Ozma had never breathed a word to her of how they loved her or the depth of their feeling, still afraid to ask for anything she didn’t want to give; and Salem had only just begun to realize similar feelings for them when they fell ill. The thought that they had died not knowing she loved them was almost as unbearable a torment to her as grief itself.

Salem’s Petitions to the Brothers.

The journey back to the heartland took Salem just seven months. She had pushed herself extraordinarily hard to traverse such a vast distance in so little time, scarcely sleeping or eating and using magic to whip herself onward past the brink of collapse; she was deeply unwell, and her thin hope that the God of Light might take pity was all that kept her standing.

She had always been fervently religious, in her way, although her imprisonment and the abuse she’d suffered and the estrangement she felt from the rest of mankind after her escape had all left her with idiosyncratic, at times nakedly heretical ideas about the Brothers. (For one, Salem had spent most of her life praying to the God of Darkness too, because it never made sense to her that only one of mankind’s creators should be worshipped; she believed, and still believes even today, that it was Darkness who freed her from the paralyzing terror on the night she killed her father.)

Salem had no intention of marching into the sacred domain of the Light to demand anything, nor did she truly expect him to give her what she asked; but she did feel certain there had been some mistake, because good people were not supposed to sicken and die, and she did believe, with all her heart, that the God of Light was just and kind.

When she climbed the marble steps, she imagined that she would kneel before the pool to pray, and perhaps the Light would offer her some sign of comfort, of sorrow, of understanding. For him to appear in front of her himself before she could even utter a word shocked her, and ignited a wild hope that he might actually grant her a miracle—hopes that he shattered by instead chiding her for making demands of him.

That was the first fracture in Salem’s faith. Light sent her out of his realm and left her reeling: he had not been kind. Why reveal himself to her at all, just to rebuke her prayers? It seemed—unfair, even cruel.

Of course she turned to the God of Darkness, then. If even the gods were cruel, Salem did not care to live in the world, and she had worshipped Darkness from afar all her life. Why not seek out kindness from him, or else find merciful death in the jaws of his monsters?

Perhaps, she thought, he was lonely too.

Finding his realm took some doing, for no one in living memory had dared go looking for it; in the end, Salem resorted to following the grimm until one led her to the proper place. By then she had lost all sense of time, exhausted and sick and starving as she was, but it was almost exactly a year since Ozma’s death when she stumbled wearily up the granite steps to visit the God of Darkness.

Though Ozma believes that she asked Darkness to bring them back to life, and lied to him about having gone first to his brother, this is not so. (Salem told them the truth, eons later, as well as she could: but by then she had been so long alone, and the events that had led to mankind’s destruction were so distant, that her account had been meandering and confused, difficult to follow. The answer Jinn gives Ruby is not absolute truth, only exactly what Ozpin believed to be true and chose to hide, and contains a great deal of guesswork on Ozma’s part, to make sense of it all.)

What she did do is tell Darkness of all her sorrow, vowing to revere him above his brother for the rest of her life if he ended her pain. Salem half-hoped he would unite her with Ozma in death—it seemed a fitting mercy, from the god of destruction—and half-feared he would answer by unburdening her of the capacity to feel at all. Until he did so, it never occurred to her to imagine that Darkness would grant her the favor his brother had coldly forbidden her to even want.

But he did, and during that brief moment before the God of Light appeared in all his icy wrath, Salem had every intention to uphold her end of the bargain. Light had treated her with cold disdain, but in Darkness she had found the kindness she had been taught to expect from his supposedly benevolent brother; she would never again worship the God of Light, and had Light not interfered then, she would have become a devoted, unendingly faithful disciple to the God of Darkness.

Instead, the Brothers twice incinerated Ozma in her arms and drowned her in the fountain of life to consign her to a deathless eternity alone, and that was the second fracture in her faith.

Her Rebellion.

When the Brothers cast her out of Light’s realm, they sent her home: to the cliffside by the sea where she and Ozma had lived.

The very first thing Salem did was hurl herself into the sea.

How long she spent drowning and drowning and unable to die beneath the waves, Salem did not know; by the time a (distraught) fisherman discovered her undying but horrifically broken body in his net, the little house on the cliff had fallen into ruin, and the village she remembered had grown into a large and prosperous town.

The fountain of life had poured into her soul—which left the physical pool in the Light’s domain a mere puddle of water with no magical properties at all—and remade her into the very wellspring of creation itself; the life-force humans would, much later, come to know as aura. No matter the severity of her injuries, she could not die, but healing serious injuries with aura requires training, focus.

Salem had healed imperfectly: the bones she had shattered when she plunged into the sea knitting back together at strange angles, her body bent and distorted by the uncontrolled and unchecked growth of masses that would have killed anyone mortal, her chest distended with seawater. She could barely move, let alone speak, and it was only good fortune that the fisherman who had found her overcame his panic before casting her overboard again.

He brought her to Light’s temple, in the town that had once been a village. The priests there were baffled, but they could see that she was in terrible pain, and they did what they could to help her. Mostly, this was miserable: a matter of breaking bones and carving out tumors, little by little pulling her body back into human shape.

She did not make it easy for them. The ruin of her physical body had not diminished her magical power, and as soon as Salem understood where she was she began to lash out, wanting nothing to do with the gods who had done this to her. Still, the priests felt sorry for her—and assumed that her violent reactions were motivated by pain, rather than hatred of the god they served—so they persisted.

Then the ones who had taken charge of her care began to sicken, and Salem realized two things: first, that they were not caring for her under Light’s auspices; and second, that he accounted the kindness they were trying to give her a sin deserving of punishment.

That was the third, and final, fracture in her faith. She stopped fighting her caretakers and bent every effort toward healing herself and trying to heal them; in this, she failed, and watched those who had aided her die one by one even as she was restored to perfect health.

She was outraged.

Yes, she had prayed for things she was not meant to have, and yes, she had sown discord between the Brothers by mistake, and yes, she had railed against them and called them monsters when they ripped her love away from her again. Perhaps that did make her selfish, arrogant, deserving of the torment they inflicted upon her—but these people had done nothing to deserve death.

It was an injustice.

It was worse than cruel; it was wrong.

Salem returned to Pastoria brimming with righteous fury. There, to her surprise, she found Kalev—an old man now, though she still looked not a day older than twenty-five.

The reunion was strange and bittersweet. Kalev had spent most of his life wondering what happened to her, praying to God to keep her safe and happy, and to learn that the Brothers had treated her with such brutality devastated him. From his devastation and her rage, the first spark of rebellion was struck.

When Salem set out to galvanize others to their cause, she told the truth: of the injustices and cruelty she had seen; of how the Brothers had made her immortal by throwing her into the fountain of life, and so revoked the promise of healing for the pure from the rest of the world; of the division she had seen between Light and Darkness; of her vision of a new world freed from the chains of their creators. The gory spectacle of her immortality and the fervent truth of her convictions overcame every obstacle that had always set her apart from the rest of her kind.

Though it was Salem who lit the match, the firestorm she unleashed surpassed her expectations, and when the rebellion stormed the marble steps to Light’s domain, the movement had long since grown beyond her, grown bigger than the faint hope she clung to that she might find a way to die after the Brothers were gone.

(She wouldn’t recognize it until eons later, but she had already begun, even then, to resign herself to the possibility of living forever.)

The Moonfall and the Making of Remnant.

See this post.

Upon climbing back out of the pool of grimm, Salem found that it, just as the fountain of life had done, had poured itself into her soul. The vast and infinite well over which Darkness once presided had diminished to mere scattered ponds of atrum, still capable of birthing grimm if given a spark of life yet no longer alive as the dark lake had been; and she felt that vast and infinite power churning within herself now, mixing together with the molten radiance of the fountain. She began to have an inkling, then, of what she had done.

Eons ago, the Brothers created mankind by the admixture of their two natures—so went the old stories—creation and destruction bound together in one. Salem had thought to do the same, when she bore the light into the pool, but instead… some intangible barrier had shattered, she thought, had fallen into dust and less than dust. The waters mingled: and here is fire.

She wandered away from the Dark’s onetime domain in a daze, unsure of what she would find in this new world but excited to meet it, and what she found was the first and second of Remnant’s peoples: the fauni, who were no more human than she, and the grimm, as fierce and wild as she remembered.

Humans would come later. Salem has… complicated feelings about mankind, these days, a mixture of admiration for their virtues—their strength, their wisdom, their resourcefulness, their passion, their ingenuity, their hope—and profound wariness. She has not thought of herself as human since that half-century beneath the waves, and even less since her transformation in the dark lake; she is grimm, she is the one called God of Animals, the fauni are her people, and she does not much care for the way humans treat those who are different from themselves.

The First Reunion.

Ozma knew nothing of this, when the God of Light sent them back into life. They knew only what Light told them: that Darkness had destroyed mankind for an offense he implied had something to do with Salem, that humanity would rise anew in desperate need of redemption lest they be condemned to obliteration, and that though Salem yet lived, she was no longer the woman they held dear.

When they agreed to return, Ozma did not give a damn about any of this. Salem lived. No matter how she’d changed, they felt certain beyond any doubt that they would love her still, and when the words I’ll do it left their mouth, they had every intention of finding her at once.

But nothing could have prepared them to wrench awake behind a stranger’s eyes, nor for the overwhelming flood of another’s mind shattering and bleeding into their own. Nothing could have prepared them to feel the like-minded soul die so that they could live.

Nothing prepared them for the horrors of this new world, where humans bereft of magic cowered in the shadows like rats among grimm who now seemed all but unstoppable. Nor could they fathom the scale of suffering they saw everywhere they went: the senseless ravages of disease, the brutal and desperate wars over resources that had once been abundant, the seemingly endless panoply of false gods and false creeds which served as pretext for yet more war, the almost-human creatures called faunus who—they were told—lived bestial lives in the wilderness, whom the grimm did not hunt because they had no souls, who hated humanity just as fiercely as did the grimm… who served and worshipped the malignant Witch of the Wastes.

She had to be Salem. Ozma knew it from the moment they heard the first whisper of that name, for who else in this damned and desolate world could wield power of that kind?

Fear crept over them. Doubt. They remembered what she had done to her father, the spectacular violence in her fear; Ozma had never been blind to Salem’s wrath. What had happened to her, after they died? What had she done? What if—in the end it was this thought that overcame the rest of Ozma’s worries and brought them to her doorstep, heart in their mouth—what if the God of Darkness had laid a curse upon her?

(Might she still be saved, even now?)

Some of those fears melted away when Salem opened her door and Ozma looked into her eyes at long last: they knew at once that she was still herself, and for a while that was all that mattered.

For her part, Salem had long since made peace with never seeing Ozma again; she held on to a faint hope that their soul might be reborn, now that the gates of death had cracked, but she knew—thought she knew—that they would never return as themself, and she might never find their soul again. Her grief had become a deep ache, never quite fading but possible to live with, around, through. What else was there for her to do but keep living?

(Sometimes—now and then, when the anguish rose to the surface again—her mind did conjure echoes of them. She had spent countless nights of her interminable isolation huddling miserably in their arms, half-dreaming and half-believing they were really there. It comforted her sometimes to pretend not to know these were only hallucinations; she liked to imagine their spirit lingering with her, reaching out to soothe her when she could bear the pain no longer. But even that had not happened in a very long time, when Ozma found her.)

The first thought to arise from the searing, wordless shock of finding them before her once again was wonder at the recognition aglow in their eyes, the smile dawning upon their face as if no time had passed at all; the second, an overwhelming terror that this wasn’t real.

Both were cautious, in the beginning. Salem felt acutely aware of how much she had changed, how foolish it would be to expect everything to go back to the way it was in that little house by the sea; Ozma’s fear that she had been cursed by Darkness seemed all but confirmed by her grimm appearance and the bizarre, erratic tale she told of defying the Brothers and plunging into the divine wellsprings. She could do magic no longer, for the Brothers had torn their gifts from her soul, and the wild power she held now was unlike anything Ozma had seen.

Yet… even so.

Every troubling tale they’d heard of the Witch proved to have a reasonable explanation. Of course the fauni had souls (and Ozma has never quite lost their mortification for believing otherwise), and Salem’s careful observations of the grimm led her to believe they were drawn to powerful negative emotion: hatred, anger, misery, envy, fear, all feelings roused by the rampant persecution of faunuskind at human hands. She offered protection to those fauni who sought her out, and sometimes stole into settlements late at night to set captive fauni free. In the village nestled along the edge of her woods, she was well-regarded—if still a little feared, for she seldom left the woods unless someone came to ask for her help.

Those first few weeks together in her cottage were peculiar, thick with dread and uncertainty and the awkward feeling of the eons now lying between them; there had been missteps and hurtful misunderstandings aplenty, while they learnt each other again.

She was different: she had acquired a sardonic sense of humor which delighted them, an astounding depth of knowledge on the natural forces of the world, an alarming farrago of new gods, a vicious temper that often saw her storming out of their cottage to (she admitted to them once, rather sheepishly, when they asked) lurk at the bottom of a lake for hours to calm herself…

But though they looked, Ozma could find nothing in her to fear; she was still kind, still inquisitive, still terribly shy, still—true enough that Salem was no longer the awkward, volatile, passionate girl they’d held so dear, but that girl wasn’t gone. She had only grown into herself, and each day they loved her more.

Ozma didn’t exactly intend to lie to her.

For those first few weeks, they kept what the God of Light had told them to themself, wanting to hear Salem’s side of the story before they made any judgments; and as weeks turned to months, Ozma concluded that, cursed by the Brothers though she was, nothing was wrong with Salem, and they resolved to forget their task as they had once forgotten their vows to be with her.

They found that they could not. Even as the love they shared with Salem, never quite fully realized in their previous life, put down roots and blossomed in this one, the suffering they had seen—the promise of obliteration—the twisted, still-bleeding shrapnel of the boy they had overtaken—all of it still lurked in the back of their mind, impossible to forget and growing ever harder to ignore.

In the present, when Ruby asked Jinn her question, Ozpin did almost believe that Salem had lied to Ozma, used them, led them blind and infatuated to their ruin: but that is only the lie Ozma has clung to for centuries.

The truth, far more painful, is that Salem trusted them. In spite of everything she had suffered, despite her terror of rejection, of losing them again; despite the fact that they answered her eager questions about how they’d found their way back with naught but vague nothings, Salem chose to give them her trust and her love and her unwavering faith; and so, when they cautiously ventured to lament the division they saw tearing Remnant apart, she had looked at them with hope shining in her eyes and promised to help them heal the world of its wounds.

To create a paradise—without the Brothers.

Ozma should have told her then. In that moment, they had known she would never break from her hatred of the gods who had slain the last world and tortured her for so long, would never submit to them again, and that had been the right time to tell her.

But they’d looked into her eyes, and imagined that boundless admiration curdling in betrayal and disgust, and instead they had leaned closer to kiss her and said, let’s do it.

Lux Aeterna.

Every lie that followed came easier than the last. Salem balked at too grand ambitions, and it often seemed to Ozma that she would have preferred to stay in that cottage with them forever—it was plain to see she did not much like standing before crowds, let alone leading a country, for all that she could be a dazzling orator when she had time to prepare—but they found they could persuade her to agree to almost any course of action so long as they gave it to her piecemeal.

(There were some lines she would not cross: Salem flatly refused to even consider imposing prison sentences, no matter the crime, and she afforded no patience to those humans who protested bitterly at being treated as equals to faunuskind under Aeternian law. But Ozma considered that she was often on the right side of these lines, and did not trouble themself much over her stubbornness.)

The girls were a surprise bordering on miraculous. Salem and Ozma had talked about wanting to have children, raise a family, but neither believed Salem could bear her own. (Ozma could not help but see it as a good omen, a sign that they were on the right path, and all the more so each time their daughters came out human.) Mara, the eldest; the twins, Dana and Lital; and Esther, the baby.

For a time, all seemed well. Lux Aeterna soared to prominence in the region: a small but prosperous city-state ruled by fair-minded, if frightfully powerful, rulers, a place where all were welcome regardless of appearance or culture or creed.

The troubles started small.

Ozma, plagued by terrible nightmares of the final judgment and knowing that this harmonious medley of differences was not what the God of Light truly meant by unity, grew ever more nervous about their utter failure to nudge Salem toward adopting a unified state religion.

Many of their people did worship Salem and Ozma, of course, just as planned. However…

Salem had been the one who put forward the idea of claiming divinity, but it quickly became apparent that Salem meant something quite different than what Ozma had thought: they’d envisioned a stepping stone toward acting as heralds for the true God, condemning the worship of false idols. But to her, becoming gods meant little more than fulfilling a certain societal role, one which overcame every difficulty she found in connecting with other people by simply asking them to accept her as an inhuman being who acted in accordance with inhuman rules. She cared not at all for the trappings nor the power of godhood; she just liked the rules, the contractual nature of relationships built on ritual and reciprocal favors.

Thus the worship of other gods did not trouble her whatsoever; Ozma could not even persuade her to stop adopting more of the gods invented by Remnant’s people, let alone to condemn the worship of false idols. Nor could they explain why it troubled them so without revealing their deception, and so they fretted, and their occasional arguments on the subject never came to any satisfying conclusions.

Then came the intractable problem of what Salem looked like, and the stories told about her across the region.

Grimm did not trouble Lux Aeterna, but they did prey upon her neighbors—many of them ancient human city-states wherein fauni were still enslaved and viewed with deep suspicion; many of them envious and resentful of the way Lux Aeterna flourished. Rumors began to spread of dark rituals performed by the Grimm Queen in the wilderness at night; baseless accusations of human sacrifice, of secret cannibalism, of Aeternians driving grimm into other kingdoms in order to steal more land, and similar fare.

Ozma tried desperately to lower tensions through diplomatic appeasement, ignoring Salem’s blunt insistence that it wouldn’t work. (She had seen this play out many times, in many places, and her cynicism with regard to mankind’s fear of the unknown is boundless.)

It did not work.

Rumors became threats, threats turned to actual incursions against Lux Aeterna’s borders—and one gory assassination attempt against Salem herself, which shook Ozma very badly—and when a vigorous, decisive defense of the borders failed to put an end to all the saber-rattling, Lux Aeterna took the offensive.

With the onset of war, Ozma discovered a new side of Salem that they had never yet seen: she had a strategic brilliance that spoke to deep experience, and she was utterly, dispassionately ruthless. In swift succession, one after the next, each hostile city-state crumbled and bent the knee beneath the Aeternian banner.

Salem approached this conquest with an attitude of grim necessity: there could be no peace with these wolves snarling at the door, and so the wolves must be broken and brought to heel. To Ozma, the merciless expansion of their borders felt by turns intoxicating—for how simple it was after all, to bring people together by the sword—and horrifying.

The Shattering.

One of the many things Ozma reflected upon, during their protracted withdrawal after Jinn caused them to relive all this, is whether Salem had begun to suspect the truth, near the end. Throughout the last few of the thirteen years they shared, she developed a habit of making disquietingly blunt remarks about what they were doing; about the necessity of conquest, if Ozma truly wished to unite the world behind their banner.

Salem did not have any idea what Ozma was hiding from her, but she did know that there was something they would not tell her; and as the war raged on, she grew ever more impatient with Ozma’s—as she saw it—willful blindness to the cost of their grand ambition. To bring freedom and peace to a small portion of the world, that could be done with ease: one needed only to give people something true, a common cause to strive for, and then shepherd it from one generation to the next. Lasting change did not dawn quickly.

(They were still, she often reminded herself, so young. She had been impatient once, too.)

Lux Aeterna had always seemed to her far more precarious than Ozma believed, an idealistic, fragile experiment surrounded on all sides by adversaries who would like nothing better than to tear it to shreds; years before the possibility of war even crossed Ozma’s mind, Salem had deemed it inevitable and made quiet preparations to insure that the outcome fell in their favor. (Her web of spies was vast, intricate, and wholly invisible to Ozma.)

One thing to prepare for war; another to wage it and hear her partner speak dreamily of bringing the whole world together and in the same breath recoil from the bloodshed.

It vexed her that they couldn’t seem to grasp that one implied the other. More than that, it crushed her to think that they were not satisfied with the life they had built with her, even more than it hurt when she realized they wanted more than a simple life together in her cottage. Salem had grown to like Lux Aeterna, despite her misgivings. She cared for its people; she loved her own daughters to bits; she loved Ozma. She was not… exactly… unhappy.

But she was not exactly happy, either. She felt inadequate, and taken for granted, and with ever-growing frequency in those last few years, like everything she did was wrong somehow. Whatever Ozma refused to tell her was plainly tearing them apart, and they seemed to always be further out of reach.

By the end, Salem had begun to question whether they even loved her anymore, or if all that really bound them together was inertia, or tired habit, or some misguided sense of obligation to her and their daughters.

The truth was worse, and far more horrible than Salem could ever have guessed: that the Brothers she’d thought long gone were trying to claw their way back was awful enough, that they wanted to butcher this world too a nightmare almost beyond comprehension, but the depth of Ozma’s betrayal in serving those monsters for all this time, in manipulating her into enacting their design, was beyond her ability to fathom. She could not understand it. (She still cannot understand it.)

There is a very old story faunuskind used to tell about where they came from, called The Shallow Sea: in it, the God of Animals gathers all the unhappy misfits and outcasts of the world and brings them to a certain island—a harsh new world where they can make their own home, if they choose. All they need to do is leap into the magical waters of the sea and swim ashore, shedding their old human skins to become something new.

Most choose to embrace the change, the chance for freedom given to them; but a small handful refuse, spitting accusations at the god and their chosen people, so the god sends them back home to their old lives, and for the rest of time, the ones who refused to change and all their descendants hate and fear the fauni, for reminding them of what they are not and never can be.

This is the myth Salem quoted to Ozma when she refused to go along with the divine plan for Remnant’s future, and this is what she meant: that the Brothers are of a kind with the resentful humans in the story, seething impotently that the world has outgrown them, and they deserve nothing but scorn; that humanity cannot be saved because there is nothing to redeem, and the only course is to press onward; that the world will never again be what it was.

Both she and Ozma understood her meaning perfectly. (No one else who witnessed Jinn’s answer did, a fact Ozma has not actually realized yet. When they tell Hazel that Salem is cursed to live for as long as the world turns and that she craves only death, they are—as they so often do—lying through their teeth.)

Salem does not remember anymore what she said, exactly, for she’s torn and twisted the memory so badly in desperation to make sense of it that the only thing she remembers is the emotion, and the way Ozma glared at her before they stormed out of the study.

Nearly four hours elapsed between that moment and Salem catching Ozma leaving with the girls. Most of that time, Ozma spent at war with themself, torn between their desperation to stay with Salem and their terror of what punishment the Light would inflict upon her, upon their daughters, upon the whole world if Ozma defied him. Salem, meanwhile, was sitting where Ozma had left her in a state of abject shock and horror.

Both were so on edge by the time they came face-to-face in the corridor that they broke at almost exactly the same time, and both remember seeing the other move to attack first. (In The Lost Fable, there is a very brief shot in which Ozma tightens their grip on their staff—bracing themself—and then Salem visibly startles at that movement the instant before she snaps.) Both were caught up in an overwhelming tide of desperate fury and years of pent-up resentment and distrust that had long since eroded the foundation of their relationship, and both were one hundred percent focused on trying to kill the other.

Neither of them knows exactly what happened to their daughters.

& The Rest.

Since that night, Salem and Ozma have seen each other only twice—in the apocalyptic final battle for Ruakh, and in Atlas when she captured Oscar.

Salem has largely done her best to avoid them, not caring what they did so long as she knew they didn’t have all four relics. She never wanted to see them again, after Ruakh. Ozma, meanwhile, has never stopped hating themself for sacrificing her for the sake of the divine plan… but the divine plan is all they have left, and they do not believe she could ever forgive them, so they keep stumbling through the motions of trying. Their paranoia, their tendency to see her in the shadows of every conflict and every grimm, arises from a mixture of intense guilt and twisted longing.

Salem is not aware that they do not have a choice about coming back, and nearly all her hatred in the present is founded upon her belief that they have spent the last three or four thousand years making a deliberate choice to murder an innocent person each time they return, either out of sheer zealotry or an obsessive desire to punish her. The instant she learns this is not so, her rage will rebound tenfold on the God of Light.

The girls did not, in fact, die that night. Ozma’s semblance—once they’re free, once it manifests in its fully-realized form—will reach back four thousand years to the moment the fight began and simply bring them forward. Or it has already done so, depending upon one’s perspective, and they just haven’t arrived at the right moment yet. Either way, to the children it is as if no time passes at all.

(The girls disappear from the scene right before the fight begins, and V9 gave me time travel shenanigans. I am in constant misery. Let me have this.)

[jabbage]

Possums Book of Practical Cats/ Sherlock Holmes references

Further to my post where I described how Arthur Conan Doyle is entirely to blame for Cats (2019) by first inspiring TS Eliot who then inspired Andrew Lloyd Webber, here are some Sherlock Holmes references from Old Possom's Book of Practical Cats.

Firstly, everything about Macavity.

And they say that all the Cats whose wicked deeds are widely known (I might mention Mungojerrie, I might mention Griddlebone) Are nothing more than agents for the Cat who all the time Just controls their operations: the Napoleon of Crime! -Macavity the Mystery Cat

“He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson. He is the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city.He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order. He sits motionless, like a spider in the center of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them. He does little himself. He only plans. But his agents are numerous and splendidly organized. - The Final Problem

Macavity’s a ginger cat, he’s very tall and thin; You would know him if you saw him, for his eyes are sunken in. His brow is deeply lined with thought, his head is highly domed; His coat is dusty from neglect, his whiskers are uncombed. He sways his head from side to side, with movements like a snake; And when you think he’s half asleep, he’s always wide awake. -Macavity the Mystery Cat

He is extremely tall and thin, his forehead domes out in a white curve, and his two eyes are deeply sunken in his head. He is clean-shaven, pale, and ascetic-looking, retaining something of the professor in his features. His shoulders are rounded from much study, and his face protrudes forward, and is forever slowly oscillating from side to side in a curiously reptilian fashion - The Final Problem

We also get a few references to the plots of The Naval Treaty and The Bruce-Partington Plans:

And when the Foreign Office find a Treaty’s gone astray, Or the Admiralty lose some plans and drawings by the way, There may be a scrap of paper in the hall or on the stair— But it’s useless to investigate—Macavity’s not there!

And from Gus the Theatre Cat:

He once played a Tiger--could do it again-- Which an Indian Colonel purused down a drain.

“It is true,” Holmes answered. “Up to a certain point he did well. He was always a man of iron nerve, and the story is still told in India how he crawled down a drain after a wounded man-eating tiger. (From The Empty House)

[dukeofdogs]

Price of Power

Chest 1: If absolute power corrupts absolutely, then reason can be found in the anxiety surrounding the subject of magic. For thousands of years, those craving power have used the mystical energy as a core component to their dastardly deeds. From Nilfgaard's abuse of outlawed necromancy and alchemical warfare to the twisted sacrificial rites of the Skellige Isles, Chaos has constantly been exploited without constraint. Indeed, one need only look briefly at the dark side of magic's history to understand the contempt held by many toward it.

Chest 2: It was long before Radovid V's reign when the prejudice toward mages first reared its ugly head. Wanting to paint the whole practice in a negative light, a clutch of iconoclasts started to refer to magic as witchcraft, drawing particular attention to the deeds of the corrupt few. Soon, stories of wicked witches and their sinister schemes spread far and wide, vilifying all those who used sorcery⁠—both good and bad⁠—and stoking the flames of widespread persecution. From commoners to aristocrats, folk started regarding magic as a defilement of the natural order, with all those wielding it seen as conceited wretches, deviant and depraved. Soon after, the general perception of magic shifted quite violently, witch hunts became commonplace, and pyres began to burn brightly across the Continent, consuming the guilty and innocent alike.

Chest 3: Over the years, the persecution of mages gave birth to many independent contractors specialized in rooting out and punishing all magic users. Radovid's army of Witch Hunters aside, none were known to have been more successful than Octavia Hale—the self-proclaimed "Witchfinder"⁠—and her steadfast sons, Fabian and Ignatius. The Hales were said to have an unparalleled knack for tracking the scent of witchcraft and tallied up an impressive number of profitable hunts during their active years. In fact, their methods became so dependable that, in taverns across the Northern Realms, it was often jested: if there's yet to be a witch burned in your town, ‘tis only because the Hales have yet to visit.

[crypticbogfairy]

Macavity: The Mystery Cat

-T.S. Eliot

Macavity’s a Mystery Cat: he’s called the Hidden Paw— For he’s the master criminal who can defy the Law. He’s the bafflement of Scotland Yard, the Flying Squad’s despair: For when they reach the scene of crime—Macavity’s not there!

Macavity, Macavity, there’s no one like Macavity, He’s broken every human law, he breaks the law of gravity. His powers of levitation would make a fakir stare, And when you reach the scene of crime—Macavity’s not there! You may seek him in the basement, you may look up in the air— But I tell you once and once again, Macavity’s not there!

Macavity’s a ginger cat, he’s very tall and thin; You would know him if you saw him, for his eyes are sunken in. His brow is deeply lined with thought, his head is highly domed; His coat is dusty from neglect, his whiskers are uncombed. He sways his head from side to side, with movements like a snake; And when you think he’s half asleep, he’s always wide awake.

Macavity, Macavity, there’s no one like Macavity, For he’s a fiend in feline shape, a monster of depravity. You may meet him in a by-street, you may see him in the square— But when a crime’s discovered, then Macavity’s not there!

He’s outwardly respectable. (They say he cheats at cards.) And his footprints are not found in any file of Scotland Yard’s. And when the larder’s looted, or the jewel-case is rifled, Or when the milk is missing, or another Peke’s been stifled, Or the greenhouse glass is broken, and the trellis past repair— Ay, there’s the wonder of the thing! Macavity’s not there!

And when the Foreign Office find a Treaty’s gone astray, Or the Admiralty lose some plans and drawings by the way, There may be a scrap of paper in the hall or on the stair— But it’s useless to investigate—Macavity’s not there! And when the loss has been disclosed, the Secret Service say: ‘It must have been Macavity!’—but he’s a mile away. You’ll be sure to find him resting, or a-licking of his thumbs; Or engaged in doing complicated long division sums.

Macavity, Macavity, there’s no one like Macavity, There never was a Cat of such deceitfulness and suavity. He always has an alibi, and one or two to spare: At whatever time the deed took place—MACAVITY WASN’T THERE! And they say that all the Cats whose wicked deeds are widely known (I might mention Mungojerrie, I might mention Griddlebone) Are nothing more than agents for the Cat who all the time Just controls their operations: the Napoleon of Crime!

[papilio-anima]

“No rest for the wicked, I see.”

𝐁𝐆𝟑 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐚𝐧𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐛𝐚𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐬. @windsfavored / Ren

The  work  of  a  funeral  director  was  never  done.  Not  only  did  it  mean  conducting  burial  services  and  cleansing  rituals,  but  it  meant  guiding  souls  (both  living  and  dead)  to  her  place  of  business.  So  why  stop  only  in  her  home  region  of  Liyue.  After  all,  it  had  been  suggested  to  take  a  trip  to  Sumeru  in  order  to  learn  about  their  particular  customs.

This  evening  Hu  Tao  would  be  found  at  the  Adventurer's  Guild  board.  Already  one  of  its  members  was  caught  in  her  promotion  cross  fire.  At  least  the  branch  in  Liyue  were  the  lucky  ones  to  get  a  break  this  time.

"No  rest  for  the  wicked,  I  see"

This  had  definitely  caught  her  her  attention  as  she  turned  to  see  a  young  man  wearing  a  wide-brimmed  hat.  He  seem  out  of  place,  though  she  did  wonder  if  she  should  have  known  him?  Regardless  one  of  her  hands  went  up  rubbing  at  the  back  of  her  head.

"Aiyaaa...wicked??  Death  is  certainly  unpredictable  and  inevitable  but  I  assure  you  there  is  nothing  purposely  devious  going  on  here.  In  fact,"  she  paused  to  show  the  coupon  slip  she  had  attempted  to  give  the  guild  member 

"I  was  trying  to  give  them  a  special  offer  Wangsheng  Funeral  Parlor's  cadaver  collection  services.  Quite  a  fair  deal  I  think~"

With  that  she  did  make  a  thoughtful  hum  studying  over  Ren.  "Certainly  you  are  not  here  to  do  some  'wicked'  deed?"

[haggiswhisky]

Once upon a time, in a dark and ancient forest, there was a knight named Seraphina. She was known far and wide for her unparalleled skill in combat and her unyielding sense of justice. Seraphina's armor, as black as the deepest night, was adorned with spikes and intricate designs, marking her as a warrior who had faced countless battles. Her hair, white as freshly fallen snow, framed her face, giving her an ethereal, almost ghostly appearance.

One day, as Seraphina ventured deeper into the forest, she came upon a clearing bathed in a crimson light. At the center of the clearing stood an enormous, ancient tree with bark as dark as her armor. A blood-red sun hung low in the sky, casting an eerie glow over the scene. The tree's gnarled branches reached out like skeletal fingers, and from its trunk, a faint, mournful wail could be heard.

Seraphina approached the tree cautiously, her hand resting on the hilt of her sword. As she drew nearer, she saw that the tree was covered in strange, crimson runes that seemed to pulse with an otherworldly energy. Suddenly, the wailing grew louder, and from behind the tree stepped an old woman, her eyes hollow and her skin pale as death.

"Who dares to disturb the cursed tree of the Crimson Sun?" the old woman croaked, her voice like the rustling of dry leaves.

"I am Seraphina, the Knight of the Dark Forest," Seraphina replied. "I seek to rid this land of any curse that plagues it."

The old woman cackled, a sound that sent shivers down Seraphina's spine. "Many have tried, brave knight, but none have succeeded. This tree holds the spirit of an ancient and vengeful sorcerer. He was condemned to this form for his wicked deeds, and now he seeks a soul to take his place."

Seraphina's grip tightened on her sword. "I will not allow such darkness to spread. Tell me how to break this curse."

The old woman’s eyes glinted with a mix of sorrow and malice. "To break the curse, you must cut down the tree. But beware, brave knight, for the sorcerer's spirit will not go quietly. He will fight to the last breath, and only the purest of hearts can withstand his fury."

Without hesitation, Seraphina drew her sword, its blade shining with an inner light. She struck the tree with all her might, and with each blow, the wailing grew louder and more agonized. The crimson runes flared, and dark shadows began to pour from the tree, forming into a monstrous figure with eyes like burning coals.

The sorcerer roared in rage and lunged at Seraphina, his claws raking through the air. But Seraphina stood firm, her sword blazing with righteous fury. She fought with all her strength, her pure heart guiding each strike. The battle was fierce, and the forest seemed to tremble with the power of their clash.

At last, with a final, mighty blow, Seraphina's sword struck the sorcerer's heart. He let out a terrible scream and dissolved into a cloud of black smoke, which was swiftly carried away by the wind. The tree shuddered and then split in two, releasing a brilliant, blinding light that banished the crimson hue from the clearing.

The old woman stepped forward, her hollow eyes now filled with a glimmer of hope. "You have done it, brave knight. The curse is broken, and the sorcerer's spirit is no more."

Seraphina sheathed her sword, her heart heavy but resolute. "May this forest know peace once more," she said quietly.

And so, the tale of Seraphina, the Knight of the Dark Forest, spread far and wide. Her bravery and pure heart became a legend, a beacon of hope for all who faced darkness and despair. And in the heart of the forest, where the cursed tree once stood, new life began to bloom, a testament to the enduring power of courage and light.

[duran-duran-less-official]

I dunno man, I reckon Macavity gets a really bad rap, the true scapegoat of Andrew Lloyd Weber's Cats. Just listen to those lyrics.

Like, the only thing the other cats know for sure about him is that he's NOT at the scene of a crime. That doesn't sound particularly sinister to me. You can't fault someone for not being around when crimes are happening!

And they play it up all suspicious-like every time he's NOT apparently guilty of something, it's insane! Oooh, you can't even find his paw-prints in Scotland Yard's files! So, what, you're telling me he DOESN'T have a criminal record? Hasn't even been arrested for anything, ever? Sounds like a completely innocent cat who's done nothing wrong to me.

"He's broken every human law, he breaks the law of gravity!" That's entirely normal for a cat!

"You would know him if you saw him, for his eyes are sunken in. His brow is deeply lined with thought, his head is highly domed, his coat is dusty from neglect, his whiskers are uncombed." Okay, so you're telling me that if he DID show up at the scene of a crime, ever, in his life, you have an instantly recognisable mental picture of him that you can use to identify him, but you STILL can't place him at the scene of a crime? Like this guy isn't some sort of anonymous Guy Fawkes mask-wearing shadow, you know EXACTLY what he looks like. Basically what you're describing is a slob, perhaps, or a lout. And to be honest, I probably wouldn't find the time to groom myself properly if I was constantly being treated as a social pariah.

"You may meet him in a by-street, you may see him in the square, but when a crime's discovered, then Macavity's not there!" Ah okay, so you see plenty of him when there AREN'T crimes occurring? How did you come to the conclusion that this is the guilty party then?

So much of this damn song is just people listing hypothetical crimes that Macavity hasn't been seen doing! And then, and then, they go on to blame him for everyone else's crimes too! "And they say that all the cats whose wicked deeds are widely known... are nothing more than agents" Like, do you not know a smear campaign when you hear it?

Oh but he's been lurking around our Jellicle Ball! Have you considered that he probably wants to join in, since he's also a cat?

Oh but he cat-napped Old Deuteronomy! And what happened then? You say that all the cats called on a Stage-Magician cat who conjured Deuteronomy out of thin air? So everyone ended up blaming Macavity and praising this "Mr. Mistoffelees"? How very convenient. Let me ask you: how did he know where to conjure Deuteronomy from? I reckon we've all been hoodwinked. Macavity is just some socially awkward cat who everyone hates, and the REAL villain is Mr. Mistoffelees, the cat who has a history of cat-napping ("and not long ago, this phenomenal cat produced seven kittens right out of a hat!" - where did those kittens come from??), and even has an illegal monopoly on certain kinds of magic ("for performing surprising illusions, and creating eccentric confusions"), but he gets all the accolades because he's charismatic and makes flashy lights.

Macavity did nothing wrong.

[bloodredx]

Canticle 57

All were put to this, but what of the one who enacted the deed? The most tricked and befuddled priest of the Beginning, Dominic, to stand results of his own misdeeds. Despite innocence in the matter, he felt the worst pain, for his hands were the ones marred by that slice. Should gods have anything akin to blood, certainly those divine crimes stained his hands, twisted beyond recognition. The gods found no need to compound the cursed laid deep, for there was suffering enough by notion of that taint. The Beginning had left her mark on him in more ways than one. Mind, blemished in subtle ways, for the guilt that consumed him was mighty.

To destroy, even unintentionally, what one was sworn to serve, act in the name of. It is jarring beyond measure. For his eyes connected with her single, sapphire one, in that last moment. And she whispered many things, that last connection before the oblivion of the crime took her in. She told him the follies of magic, the suffering that is due from its users, but more importantly, she took from him everything she might have given. Perhaps in an effort to restore herself, perhaps in a punishment of her own. The last stand the slain goddess could give off before vanishing with the End.

What truly mattered was that she pulled from him all capacity for magic, no mage gifts were inside. No Vestige even offered to him, for he was left in a stupor long being thrown from the force of his nefarious act. And even so, he beyond some affinity to Ice, he never made much use of the gifts of the Vestiges, once focused on the Beginning preferring to understand her as she was. And so she granted him the story of the Song. And when he awoke, he knew it was the duty of those left, those that refused the Vestiges’ wicked offer to record history, hold true to the Beginning and everything she had. For even gone, the memory of a god was enough to worship alone, that she knew intrinsically. The Beginning asked of him one last order before vanishing entirely. That he might Sing and record the Song, so that it would continue in perpetuity.

It was as if she knew exactly what she was doing. Yes, there seemed to be more purpose than just simple love of her godly sibling. But what destiny was written into her own eye that might have led her to making that sacrificial choice? How many years would be spent pondering that before Dominic, in his misery and solitude understood exactly what that meant?

Regardless, knowing all would give him wide berth for such condemned actions and hands, he took the goddess’s final request to heart, turning his mind to the better chance of keeping new things on the rise, and remembering the past. For he took the trainings of the Song seriously, and made it known that any who would go along with him too would be granted the same rites and privileges. All these lessons should be taught through the instruments of Mankind, their own feeble attempts at making sense of the Divine Notes of the Song itself. These people, marked the Bards began their own group in much the same way The Order had arranged the Mages, but they had the luxury of already being held in some strings of organization. Dominic and the Bards had to find their own path.

[britishsass]

Act II, let's go.

Revolt Song: I'm so obvious. Revolting Children from Matilda.

Unchained Soul: I imagine something that feels like a relaxing song after what happens with Kochamera. I can't think of any off the top of my head other than Words Fail from Dear Evan Hansen, sorry.

Beware of Cows: Trouble from The Music Man. Every time I see "patter song" I go "OH WE GOT TROUBLE!" and it's a perfect example.

I'd just recommend referencing Phantom of the Opera overall for Gloria's Theatre. It's an obvious one but c'mon. Just go for it.

Crispin and Fred: Your Fault from Into the Woods. The whole vibe of arguing between Napoleon and Fred until Crispin just yells at them to shut up for a minute.

Me Again: I just know that it starts off soft, gets really loud and excited, and then dies down again because "Aaand I'm going to take a break for the first time in... years. War is h-ll, Razputin, and I am sleepy." Maybe something like Michael in the Bathroom from Be More Chill-- just for the starting off sad, getting really loud, and then dying back down.

I don't really have anything for House of Cards or Pathetic, sorry.

And since I'm still ready to keep going-- Act III in the same post, right now.

To The Top: definitely rising tension. As such, I'm gonna say On The Edge from Come From Away for the idea of it just getting tenser and tenser.

Sheegor's Song: A lament. I don't know one off the top of my head that's actually sad-- the only one I've got is more... angry.

(You Guys) Wanna Split a Cab: Wrapping up the thorney towers storyline. I'm begging to call it that or something else about that line, it's too perfect. I'm not sure what to say other than that, though.

Pick Your Brain: A more chaotic evil moment for Morry. I'd probably say to go with H-ll To Your Doorstep from Count of Monte Cristo. One of the more well-known villain songs, real angry, also the first line is funny as heck in isolation. ("The world is a place" is a joke I've repeated at least five times)

Protect the Bunnies: No Good Deed from Wicked, especially the start of it. It's panicking, desperate to save someone.

Daddy's Gonna Kill Ya: I can't come up with anything here, sorry.

Quality of the Heart: Feels like an ending in a way. The World Was Wide Enough from Hamilton, but specifically after Hamilton gets shot.

Best Summer of My Life: Yeah, I got nothing. I've thought about other finales I recall but it's not the right vibe in those ones, sorry.

I'd include something from Newsies, but none of them felt fitting throughout. Even so, hope this helps, at least a little.

Here, I shoved all the info from those posts into a spreadsheet. Why? Because I need to sort my thoughts into columns and rows. There also may be a few extra things that weren't in the posts. 😜 I allowed comments so you can put in your thoughts if you'd like.

[unusual-ly]

1. Favourite background moments in CATS? 2. A while ago, you mentioned Macavity having a Scar vibe. Are there other character counterparts you can think of for the Jellicles?

1. let’s see... virtually anything Pouncival does, like when he’s messing about as a beetle in Gumbie Cat or miming shooting a gun/playing bagpipes in Pekes And Pollicles, Munkustrap and the elders being Shocked And Appalled during Rum Tum Tugger, Victoria perking up and stretching when Gus mentions Queen Victoria in his song and all the kittens copying Skimbleshanks throughout his whole song

2. oooohh... I haven’t thought about this much tbh... I think my version of Griddlebone is kind of like Tempest Shadow from the My Little Pony movie, I even chose Emily Blunt for my dream cast because of that. Jemima has a general Disney Princess Vibe(tm) I think. And Old Deuteronomy is basically every version of Santa Claus in any kids’ movie... Oh! I just thought of Jessica Rabbit for Bombalurina *^*

[the-cat-at-the-theatre-door]

im throwing my life away because i didnt think of "shockingly intelligent and observant mungojerrie" first. that is such a good idea jemi. it would make so much sense, how else did that dumbass not get killed by now pulling the shenanigans they pull.

You could argue that it's sheer dumb luck (And some of the time, you would say it was luck), but also, I mean:

We're highly efficient cat burglars as well

And remarkably smart at a smash and grab

One of Mungojerrie's words is Streetwise - I feel like that says alot as is. If he’s not necessarily numbers or book smart, he is pretty deadly street smart. 

A surefire way to throw people off your scent is playing dumb and being charmingly dense and obtuse - how could this foolish thing possibly be a thief, look at him. Not a single thought going on in that head, it couldn’t have possibly been him. And meanwhile he’s snatching the jewels directly from under your nose and he already has your coin purse. Meanwhile he’s charmed the police officer into letting him and his accomplice go scot free. How could I have gotten through that window? Broken it? Have you seen the state of my arms? I couldn’t lift a feather never mind a brick (meanwhile he’s got one in paw behind his back).  

Jerrie blinks and licks his jaw eagerly and suddenly uh oh, there *are* lights on back there and they’ve been on the whole time - you just didn’t notice. He’s always several steps ahead - not, perhaps, as many steps ahead as somecat like Macavity would be, but he’s already got an escape plan, and if he doesn’t have one, he’ll come up with a strangely brilliant one on the fly. 

He stirs his tea languidly and studies you intently and he knows everything about you - which buttons he can press if necessary - by the time he taps the teaspoon on the rim of the cup. Doesn’t always do the best things with this information, but he knows. He knows and he keeps it close, just in case. 

[viperbarnes]

Longer Than Forever – One of Four

[B. Barnes]

Medieval/Fantasy AU

Summary: You’d heard rumours of him. Terrible stories of horror and brutality, of merciless bloodshed. The Winter Knight was a demon in every way imaginable, and you expect your arranged marriage to him to be no different. However, the truth is far more complicated, and the man you anticipate fearing the most may just be your only solace.

Warnings: Major warnings for a scene with dubious consent, smut, talk of depression, attempted suicide, and attempted assault.

Note: This story was previously posted on another platform!

You keep your eyes down and your head lowered as you’re guided through the Imperial Palace. You’re led by a severe-looking man who tips his nose high as he moves, as if despite his role as a steward, he thought this task beneath him. At your side, your father’s hand is curled gently around your arm, and you’re thankful for the small amount of comfort it lends. In a castle as large and cold as Palais de la Hiver, you would need every comfort you could find.

You already know it would be a hard task, the stoney walls, large echoing rooms and passages, finely furnished, but not enough to hide the sheer level of discomfort the Palace was built to offer. It was entirely different from your family’s cozy manor. Entirely different from anything you’d ever known.

Your family was wealthy, your father owned great stretches of land near the border of the kingdom, but you’d earnt that wealth and land through generations of hard work. Your ancestor’s had been allies with the former ruling empire, they had worked the lands they’d been gifted to sell crops, and their children had made it into a business.

But the former royals had been deposed of many years ago, when you were still a child. Your kingdom had been conquered and now the lands your father owned were the reason you were in your current situation.

Lord Pierce may have extended the offer of an allying marriage between you and one of his loyal knights, but it was never really an offer at all. Lord Pierce was not a man known for his leniency or tolerance of discord. Outwardly, he may never lift a hand himself, but he had spies and agents everywhere and it would only take one misspoken word and entire families would disappear, their land ceased.

Any pretence of choice or power your father held in this situation was just that; pretence.

You’re led into a drawing room of sorts, though it lacked any real amount of recreation, discounting the small chess set in the corner and the bookshelves lining the walls. A fireplace crackles away on the far side, and in the centre of the room two chaise lounges sit opposite one another, a small table between them.

The servant waits for you to be seated before he bows low.

“Lord Pierce shall be with you soon.” He tells you, though you hardly listen. You sit numbly with your hands in your lap, staring across the room at the fire. Your father paces, occasionally stopping to stand behind you with his hand resting on your shoulder briefly, before nerves take him again and he paces once more.

Under any other circumstances you might’ve been at least a little excited to meet your future husband. You wouldn’t have picked him yourself, but you were hardly expected to anyway. Any excitement was quelled by rumour. Lord Pierce’s most loyal and trusted men, those knighted were all ruthless soldiers.

Although natives to your lands had lived with your conquerors for many years now, there was still an air of mystery, a divide between the two cultures. The Hydran’s kept to themselves in the castle, dishing out edicts and enforcing the law where necessary, but never fully integrating themselves into society.

It didn’t help that the knights were all universally feared. It didn’t matter that you were no longer at war, Pierce ruled with an iron fist and his men had total authority when they deigned to visit the towns or villages. They acted with complete impunity, and their known violence and unforgiving nature only served to further the peoples’ fear.

And you were to marry one of these men.

You had done your best over the past days to remain positive, but the reality of your situation was setting in. You could only hope now that your future husband’s reputation was reserved for the battlefield.

The door opens suddenly and both you and your father jump in your places, standing immediately as Lord Pierce comes sweeping into the room. Perhaps in his heyday he might’ve been a handsome man, but his features had since shrivelled, giving away his age, though he still looked spry, still moved with ease.

His warm smile is almost convincing as he approaches, holding his hand out for your father to shake in greeting.

“Sir, how good to see you well.” Pierce firmly shakes your father’s hand, before his eyes turn on you. You curtsy, just in time for his time-ripened fingers to take your hand, and he tuts at your formality. You pause, uncertain of what to do when he does a slight bow of his own, bringing your hand to his lips.

“As lovely as you described.” He compliments, standing straight once more and you duck your head in gratitude. He releases your hand and holds his arms wide for a moment.

“Well, let us not stand around, please, sit!”

You do as asked, eyes traveling to where Pierce now gestures to a man who had entered behind him, though you’d been far too involved with the feared ruler to pay him mind previously.

The man steps around the couches, not to sit, simply to stand at the end between both, his gloved hands clasped before him. It takes you a moment to see beyond the dark mass of clothing he wears and make out the individual parts of his pitch black armour, the cape that is swung around his neck and over his shoulders, billowing out behind him. Details of silver stand out to you as you look closer, spying several belt buckles and—

You swallow at the sight of the large sword hung on his hip, and your gaze flickers up to take in the man again, this time as a whole.

Tall, broad, and dark. Despite his pale skin, dark is the only word that comes to mind to describe him. His hair was long and hangs about his face, perhaps neat at some point prior to now, but had since been windswept. His eyes are directed to the floor, so you can’t see them, but dark shadows linger underneath, making his complexion rather sallow in the dim lighting of the sitting room.

His face is rather handsome, you can’t help but think, a thick but shortly trimmed beard covering the lower portion of it. It’s then however, your eyes catch upon something shiny at his shoulder, a pin that holds his cloak in place and you freeze, blood running cold.

A skull, six curling tentacles reaching out from underneath it.

You look away from the knight and lace your shaking fingers together in your lap. Your father and Lord Pierce had been speaking all this time about your marriage, and your dowry of at least half your family’s land. That was Lord Pierce’s ploy all along, there had been no denying it.

He could care less about forming alliances with local families, it was the border land he wanted most. You don’t doubt that your husband would only act as a proxy for Pierce’s control, carrying out whatever the warlord wished for it, no questions asked.

You swallow thickly as at last Lord Pierce and your father stand, stepping toward the Knight, but you find yourself frozen to the spot. They don’t immediately notice, Pierce holding a hand out to gesture at his knight.

“This is my Winter Knight, Sir James. I’m sure you’ll have heard of him,” He speaks to your father, still ignoring how you haven't moved yet. You had heard of him. You weren’t sure of anybody who hadn’t.

Among Lord Pierce’s Knights, The Winter Knight was perhaps one of the most storied. The man had never lost a fight, and was obedient to Lord Pierce as if he were a hound. When talk of Lord Pierce’s Knights came about, the whispered deeds of The Winter Knight were among the most feared.

All of them awful.

All of them horrific.

You feel your stomach drop to your knees, but you have no more time to dwell as suddenly all eyes are on you, and you blink up at the men, Lord Pierce giving you an unsettlingly encouraging look, and you follow to where his hand is still held out in gesture to his knight.

You stand, like you’re supposed to, and step closer to the knight, like you’re supposed to. Your shaky hands gather your skirts and you curtsy like you’re supposed to, offering out your hand, like you’re supposed to.

You nearly gasp when black-gloved fingers take your own, far lighter than you might have thought, his fingers certainly holding yours, however the touch feels as soft as a feather.

The knight bows deep, bringing your hand to his lips gently. You keep your eyes firmly on the floor, afraid you might begin shaking worse than you already were, afraid that your future husband may feel the tremble in your fingers. The brief glance you do steal does nothing to settle your growing anxiety or nerves, his features seemingly devoid of any emotion at all, and the dark, imposing man only becoming darker, more imposing in your mind with his complete lack of reaction.

His movements were swift and smooth enough to appear natural, but something tells you diplomacy was not his calling. No, in your mind's eye you conjure wicked images of the man in the midst of a heated battle, blood marring his still emotionless features.

You’re thankful when he drops your hand at last and you take an involuntary step backwards, toward your father. The knight’s eyes remain downturned. Lord Pierce claps his hands.

“A handsome couple I should say!”

Your father hums along feebly, agreeing.

“The wedding shall be tomorrow. A servant will escort the Lady to her temporary rooms for tonight, and I will act as her guardian at tomorrow's nuptials.” Lord Pierce informs you both, making your heart begin to thump wildly in your chest, and your head snaps to your father with wide eyes.

“B-but Sire, I—” Your father begins, stepping forward, but he’s swiftly cut off.

“—I understand your people have your wedding traditions, but we are in the midst of important siege planning, it would be unwise for me to allow you to stay. As it is, nobody enters the Palais and nobody leaves it until we are finished. Your arrival and departure are the only exceptions, of course.” Lord Pierce tells him with a wave of his hand. There was no room for argument, a sternness now to his words.

Your father sputters, but turns to look at you, eyes brimming with unshed tears and apologies. You silently beg him not to leave, but somewhat reluctantly, his gaze hardens, and he looks away, bowing to Lord Pierce.

“Very well, My Lord. I shall depart with haste…”

You force fight the urge to throw yourself at him, beg him to stay, but instead curl your fists tightly into your palms, remaining rooted to the spot as your father leans in to kiss your forehead.

“I… I love you. I’m so—” Before he can finish his apology, he shuts his mouth, lips forming into a thin line. He nods at you firmly, finally.

You watch as the same man who had escorted you inside the palace leads your father from the room, the door shutting loudly behind them. A few tears escape your eyes and trail down your cheeks.

You jump when a hand lands on your shoulder.

“I know it is unfortunate, but you will be just fine. Before you know it, Palais de la Hiver will be home.” Lord Pierce tells you, and if you hadn’t heard all the stories about his cruelty, his sympathetic smile and warm eyes might have fooled you.

You swallow and let your eyes fall to the stone floor.

Home?

This would never be your home.

—-

You feel numb.

Everything about your wedding was already planned and organised, and you float through the day like a fog in a valley. The ladies that were clearly assigned to help you prepare hardly speak to you, and while they aren’t outright unkind, the room is filled with tension. You can tell they wished to be elsewhere.

They don’t know you. They don’t trust you. You aren’t one of them.

You see nothing of Lord Pierce or the man you’re set to marry right up until the ruler appears and takes your arm to lead you to the altar. The whole ceremony plays out unfamiliar to you, Hydran traditions and weddings vastly different from your own native ones, but that hardly seemed to matter.

The ceremonial room isn’t large or particularly grand. A few other knights, ladies and officials seem to have gathered to pay witness, and in the few moments you lift your eyes from the floor as you’re led forward, it seems as though all watch on with fascinated boredom.

When you finally reach the officiant, Lord Pierce releases your arm, taking your hand and transferring it into the clutches of a dark glove. For a moment you peek up at your soon-to-be husband, only to find him once more with that blank expression. You cast your eyes back to the ground and try to keep your lip from wobbling.

You must disassociate, your mind travelling elsewhere, because the ceremony is over before you know it, the Hydran officiant untying your wrists from where you and Sir James’ hands had been symbolically bound together. There is a polite clapping as you both turn, presented to the bored audience as man and wife and Lord Pierce announces a feast.

The feast has far more guests than your wedding did, and although you and Sir James sit at a long table joined by other apparently important figures, you feel as though the celebration has more to do with the acquisition of your father’s lands than your union.

You sit quietly and watch the festivities, the whole room loud and laughing, music playing raucously as couples drink and dance. Nobody approaches either you or your new husband. Nobody seems to care at all. You can’t even bring yourself to cry, as numb as you are now.

Throughout the meal, you briefly steal glances at your husband, and part of you feels almost angry for his impassiveness, the way his eyes flick slowly around the room. You can’t help but wonder what he’s thinking.

You do think it odd that for a knight he seemed to have no colleagues willing to come congratulate him. In fact, it’s odd to you that nobody seems to address him at all. The only person who does is Lord Pierce, and even then he only ever seems to command him. Did the tales of your husband’s brutality isolate him from those within his own circles as well?

Were you truly now married to a man feared even by his own people?

You swallow, and smooth your hands over your lap for the hundredth time since the meal had begun. At any moment now you would retire to your new rooms, the chambers you will share with your new husband, and you will find out how much of a monster he really is. The thought should have made you scared, at the very least nervous, but you felt too numb for that, one small blessing.

It only takes another twenty minutes, and you notice Lord Pierce lean into Sir James, speaking quietly into the man’s ear. Predictably, the knight’s face doesn’t change, he only nods shortly. You feel your heartbeat jump when Sir James stands, and he doesn’t even speak, simply holds his hand out for you expectantly.

For the first time ever his eyes fall upon you and you realise with some amount of surprise, that they’re a stunning bright blue.

You take the hand offered, and keep your head low as you’re led from the table. You might’ve thought the feasting crowd would have noticed the bride and groom leaving, dreaded the whistles and cheering on from the men, but there’s nothing, not a soul seems moved by your exit from the evening.

The hallways are cold and empty as you move through them, doubly so with your company, and you attempt to distract yourself by keeping track of which hall led where and what staircases you climbed and which you didn’t, but the palace is a maze.

You do stop eventually, at a large wooden door Sir James pushes open with one hand. Unfortunately, your numbness takes leave of you then, your heart thumping and you feel as if you’ve been dropped in frozen water.

Your blood pumps loudly in your ears as you are guided inside, and you distract yourself once more by taking an inventory of the chambers before you.

They were large enough, though not particularly lavish, and the furnishings that were present seemed like they might have been put there by someone else. A fireplace with a seat and table by it, a tall bookcase nearby. On the other side of the room, opposite the fireplace was an armoured figure, and it takes you a moment to realise that it is only a mannequin, with your husband’s armour placed upon it.

The back of the room holds the bed, and directly to the left of it, curtained doors that you suppose lead to a balcony. On the right side of the bed is another door, a washroom you suppose.

There are few cupboards and trunks for things, and you wonder how suddenly this marriage was thrust upon Sir James if he had not yet found time to acquire more furniture for your own possessions. It matters not, you spy your own trunk by the wall, a maid clearly having collected it from the room you’d occupied last night.

Your husband closes the door and immediately moves to the fire, stoking it. You take several deep breaths before moving toward the table, where you spy a bottle of something and two glasses, clearly placed there in anticipation of your return to the chamber. You wonder by who, though. You hardly think your husband the sort.

You don’t speak or offer him a drink, you simply pour a good amount into each glass and take a hefty swig of your own before you look up again, nearly jumping when you find Sir James stood, just watching you. He doesn’t move, he just stares at you and for a moment you think perhaps you should have waited, but then he does something that catches you completely by surprise;

His head cocks the tiniest amount, and his eyes narrow in interest.

It’s the first sort-of expression you’ve ever seen cross his face, the first acknowledgement of you being in the same room as him at all, and you wonder what on earth it meant. You see his eyes flick down to your glass, and then back to your face.

You swallow thickly before taking a final drink, finishing the remaining wine and placing the glass back down on the table.

This was it, whether you liked it or not. You look down at yourself, not even really sure of what your gown looked like, or how it came undone. You knew what was required of you, you wouldn’t struggle or fight. Perhaps if he knew this, he’d be kinder. You decide to voice as much, but spare yourself the embarrassment by turning away, moving toward the bed.

“I know what is expected from me. I will yield.” Your hands shake almost violently when you begin pulling apart the fastenings of your dress, but you push down the fear and the worry, focusing instead on undressing. If you could be quick, perhaps he would be too, and you would be left to sleep sooner.

You don’t look back at your husband as you do this, but you know he watches, the prickle of skin on the back of your neck alerting you to his attention. It feels wrong, and yet, this man was your husband. This was the only right way for a man to see you like this.

By the time you’re fully nude, and you’ve gathered the courage to look back at him, you find him exactly where he was the last time you’d looked at him, but now, his eyes seem to be averted, cast downwards.

A moment of panic fills you. What if he did not like what he saw?! You had no desire to be married to this man, but you were now, and his approval of you was important!

You lie down quickly, unwilling to entertain the crazed, panicked thoughts rushing through your mind. No man could be truly displeased with a woman lying ready for them, yes? All you had to do was be a good wife and perhaps your life would not become completely miserable. You could take joy in that, at the very least.

Hours seem to pass in the time it takes his footsteps to near, and you steal a look to where your husband appears in the corner of your vision. You watch him pull his coat and doublet off, each being placed neatly back into a drawer, and the sight almost makes you laugh.

This strange, fearsome man would prioritise cleanliness on his wedding night?

You stay silent however, and turn your eyes away as he continues to undress. He nears at one point, and you tense up, readying yourself, only to stop when he bends low, takes your own clothes from the floor, and sets them tidily inside the same drawer. Your mind spins and whirs and you can’t decide if it's an act of kindness or of his own desire to have his chambers clean.

He approaches you for good then, to the side of the bed and you shift slightly to make more room if he needs it. A tiny peek at his body tells you the man had survived more injuries than you can count with the number of scars that cover his muscled body.

You hold your breath when he gracefully climbs atop you, and you stare up at the ceiling of the four-poster bed, begging your nerves to calm down. You jump when a warm hand grasps your ankle, you gaze snapping to the touch. Sir James seems to pause with your movement, his eyes locked onto yours and your heartbeat quadruples. He dips his chin just slightly, still looking at you, and then continues to move your leg, slowly, perhaps even gently.

You can’t help but watch him as he settles between your legs. You swallow, and with his eyes now moving elsewhere, you look back to the ceiling, your jaw beginning to shake some as you feel him shuffle forwards. He doesn’t lie atop you, instead he places his hands on your hips and carefully tugs you down the bed.

You talk yourself down through each movement he makes, staring upwards even when your vision becomes blurry and you’re forced to close your eyes. One of his hands keeps your body against his while you guess the other guides his length to your entrance. You force yourself to swallow the gasp that climbs up your throat when a hand, a finger prods there instead.

Confusion fills you, and you gasp when the finger pushes into you, dragging and a little painful, but it’s pulled away again in a few seconds, and you keep your eyes closed, too embarrassed now to open them, too scared to move as more fingers glide up your core, settling at the place just above. You wonder what he’s doing, but as he slowly moves his fingers in small circles, you feel the muscles in your core twitch.

It takes you a moment to realise that the ministrations aren’t unpleasant. It’s an odd sensation, warmth crawling over your skin like you were sinking into a hot bath. It doesn’t calm your nerves, but you do feel your body begin to relax.

After a few minutes, the movement stops, and you feel his fingers travel down again, back to your entrance where, just like before, one digit presses in. It doesn’t drag or hurt this time, aided by a wetness you had not realised had spread there. A second finger joins a moment later, and this time he pumps them slowly, sending a slight thrill though you involuntarily.

The fingers stop then, and the hand seems to be pulled away completely. For a moment you debate opening your eyes, but then you feel something warm and hard press against your entrance, and before you can even think a second more, you’re gasping sharply as he sinks inside.

He doesn’t stop or pause like he had with your ankle, but his press forward slows some, both his hands moving back to your hips. You take shallow, hurried breaths as you feel his cock stretch you out, your muscles screaming in discomfort, but you force yourself to be quiet, even when your eyes begin leaking again, and you shake uncontrollably as the tears drip down your cheeks and onto the bed below.

He’s sheathed all the way inside you when a hand leaves your hip. You yelp softly, not expecting the fingers that clutch gently at your chin, holding it still from your shaking. His hold is so soft and gentle, you can’t help but open your eyes, half expecting to find another man.

Sir James leans forward slightly, his expression almost entirely the same as it always is, except for a tiny furrow in his brow. Looking at him almost distracts you some, and you can only stare in mild surprise as he then lifts his hand from your chin, and uses the rough, calloused pad of his thumb to wipe at the wetness on your cheeks, one, and then the other.

Your breathing stutters at the tenderness of it, and even though he speaks no words, the message is clear: He did not intend on hurting you, on making this more painful than it had to be.

Shock only makes you shake more, but the pit of anxiety in your chest seems to dissipate.

He pulls his hand away, and back to your hip.

His first thrust hurts, and you wince. The second does too, but less so and soon he seems to have carved out a place in you that feels somewhat comfortable, and you manage to relax. You keep your eyes fixated on the ceiling, your tears drying.

At last his hips stutter and his breathing gets heavier, and finally with a deep exhale and juddering last thrust forward, you feel the fruits of his labour pool inside you, the feeling of which surprises you for. You swallow thick at the thought of bearing a child to this man, but decide to consider such subjects later.

He pulls out of you quickly, and in seconds is on his feet, moving away from the bed. You watch him as he goes for a new drawer, and he pulls several items from it. He dresses himself in breeches made for sleeping, but steps back toward the bed with a rag and a plain tunic held out.

You blink in surprise, and gingerly take the items from him, using the rag to wipe at the mess between your legs, and then slipping the shirt over your head, taking comfort in the warmth of no longer lying nude. Your husband takes back the rag, disappearing into the washroom before stalking out of it once more. You watch him as he moves about the room, putting out any candles until the chamber is cast in only the small light from the fireplace.

When he returns to the bed, he keeps to the opposite side, but pulls back the blankets and furs and allows you to climb beneath them before he himself follows. He does not touch you further, or bid you goodnight, and you are left with your own dizzying thoughts.

You were confused, and grateful, and in slight disbelief, but you fall asleep with more hope for your future than you had woken up with.

—-

Life in Palais de la Hiver is different in every way than what you knew.

You were a Lady now, and as such had no chores to do, no work, no schedule to keep you busy. In fact, as long as you stayed out of the way of any private business, nobody seemed to notice you at all. Every morning your husband was gone before you awoke, returning only near midday to wash and change from his training, before he left again to do who knows what.

In the evenings he would return and quietly eat whatever meal had been delivered to you by the servants, before climbing into bed and the cycle would repeat. Day after day. Week after week. Month after month.

You had begun imposing your own schedule. When you rose in the morning, you would dress and eat, before taking a stroll in the castle grounds. You’d given yourself the task of memorising the layout of the areas you were allowed, and in the process, you’d discovered the training ring where the knights would spar.

The ring was overlooked by a balcony that was often occupied by many ladies of the court, clearly vying for the attention of various men. Eventually you make a habit out of watching the knights too, though you keep to yourself, all too aware that you were unwelcome.

You observe your husband more than any of the others, seeing his skill and prowess for yourself. Unlike the other knights, who appeared to take pleasure in violence even within a training scenario, there was never any rage behind your husband’s movements. Much as he was outside of the ring, he always appeared to be indifferent, his actions almost effortless.

If any one thing had become clear to you over the past several months, however, it was the fact that your husband was… different. Aside from the fact he never spoke a word to you, and appeared to hold zero capacity for emotion, the other knights treated him as though he were a dog.

Snide comments and barked orders, your husband obeyed every one of them, even if they, the orders or the man, were below him. The other knights didn’t treat each other the same way, they seemed to have camaraderie, if not friendship.

It makes you confused, and almost angry, but it’s not your place to address.

So you continue on.

After you watch the training for a while, you return to your chambers. You had taken up embroidery and knitting, but you weren’t particularly good at either, so you usually end up reading. When your husband returns at noon to clean up, you always stand to greet him, though he never gives you more than a polite nod as he passes to the washroom, eyes downturned.

You’d begun a ritual of cleaning off his boots and armour when he hung it up. You’d seen him do it every so often, when it was well and truly caked on, and so once he’d left again to oversee his other duties, you’d take a cloth and water and wipe down each piece, before placing it back on it's mantle.

You don’t know if he’d noticed or not, as usual, he never said anything.

You observe one morning while watching the men train, the winter chill in the air requiring you to wrap yourself in a thick shawl, that your husband’s long hair appears to bother him. You’d seen him flick it out of his eyes on many occasions, but for some reason this morning with the wind whipping around the ring non-stop, he appears to be truly frustrated.

Well, as frustrated as he could manage. Nobody else would have noticed, and if you weren’t so used to him by now, you wouldn’t have either, but his hand clenches by his side before he tucks the hair behind his ear, his brow furrowing deeper, and slightly more telling, his nostrils flare. You briefly wonder about offering to cut his hair, before you realise that you had no talent for the art.

It isn’t until you’ve returned to the warmth of your chambers, your embroidery in your hands, that you get an idea.

You make him a ribbon.

It takes you two whole months, and even though your design was fairly simple, your talent was truly non-existent. You also had to contend with the cold that makes your fingers and hands ache after short periods of time, but eventually you sit with a completed ribbon.

It’s black, like the rest of the clothes he wore, but with a dark blue thread you’d created a row of flowers along it, connected by thin white diamonds. You aren’t quite sure what he might think, but you were rather proud.

You’re inspecting it one last time, sitting in the chair by the fireplace when the door swings swiftly open. You jump slightly, ribbon falling to your lap as your husband stalks inside, closing the door gently behind him.

You stand quickly, as you always do, clutching your gift tightly in your hand now as you step toward where he already moves toward the washroom.

“Wait! Please… if you might…?” You realise rather suddenly, that you have no idea how you should address him, but you see him stop anyway. He turns to look at you slowly, brow creased barely noticeably, and you quickly take several more steps toward him.

“I noticed that your hair keeps bothering you while you train… I made this for you, to keep it back…” You hold out the ribbon, trying to keep your hand from shaking too much. Your husband’s eyes drop from your face to your hand.

You see his brow furrow deeper, and hesitantly he takes the gift from you, holding it’s length with both hands as he inspects it closely. You think your heart might burst from your chest in anticipation. When his eyes meet yours once more, and he bows his head deep and low, you have to suppress the urge to jump up and down.

You let out your held air and watch as he stands straight again, turning on his heel and continuing on toward the washroom. It was more of a reaction than you had expected, and even with his silence, his mostly-blank expression, the acknowledgement makes you feel as though you float through clouds.

The next morning when you come to watch the knights train, you hardly recognise Sir James, his face on full display for perhaps the first time you’ve ever seen, his dark hair pulled back from his face, held together by a dark blue and black ribbon.

In a moment between spars, when he rights himself and rolls his shoulders, his eyes cast upwards toward the balcony. Your breath catches in your throat when his eyes lock with yours, staring for just a moment longer than necessary.

—-

Despite the steps forward you make in turning Palais de la Hiver into your home, you’re possessed continually by a pervasive loneliness and depression that refuses to leave you. Some days you were alright, you’d read and walk and find things to fill your time. On other days, you’d stand on your balcony and stare at the massive drop below, wondering if it would be enough to send you away for good, to release you.

As the winter joins you in full force you spend more time out there, standing, staring down below you.

If you were to die, nobody aside from your family would care. Your husband would likely hardly notice your absence, and anybody else at the castle would probably be unsure of your name, let alone if you disappeared or not. However, heights scare you, and any time you attempt to climb up onto the bannister, you scramble back again, afraid.

You would have to try something else.

Your husband has many weapons, he keeps them, his swords and daggers, on his person always, but there was one item he owned that he did not bring with him. A small knife that you’d seen him occasionally clean and place under his pillow. Perhaps once it might’ve scared you to know your husband slept with a weapon so near, but at some point you had either stopped caring or realised he wouldn’t use it on you.

So you take it, one cold and drizzly afternoon, after your husband has returned and left once more for the day, and you know you’ll be alone for hours. You think about perhaps leaving a note, but decide against it. Your life intersecting with his would be nothing more than a passing breeze, you imagine. He would find you, alert Lord Pierce, you would be buried, and life would go on.

Still, you don’t want to make a mess on the carpets, or on the chair you’d spend most of your days in. You think you’d like to be in the open air, so that perhaps your soul can fly freely, return home, and escape the castle walls.

You stand on the balcony once again, eyes dipping down briefly before you shakily lift the knife. It’s cold and heavy in your hands, but you weren’t scared of the pain. You’d thought about this for a long time, one whole year in fact, and it would be the easiest conclusion to your tale.

Despite this, your eyes leak warm tears against your cheeks as you finally place the sharp, gleaming tip of the knife against your chest, directly over your heart. You wouldn’t risk a wound you could survive. You swallow and just hold it there for a moment, calming yourself and evening out your breathing.

This is what you wanted.

You don’t hear the door to your chambers open, the wind and your heart too loud in your ears, but you do see the flicker of movement at the corner of your eyes. Your head snaps quickly to the left in fright, and you find your husband standing by the door to the balcony, his hand on the handle as if he were about to close it when he’d seen you.

For the first time in the whole year you’d been married, his expression is no longer blank, his eyes wide and mouth parted in surprise. For a split second you can only stare at one another, before his eyes drop to the knife held to your chest. A frenzy seems to overcome you both then and you cry out as he lunges for you.

You try to escape him, lifting the knife high and attempting to bring it to your chest before he can reach you, but your hands are grabbed tightly. You thrash against his hold, even manage to drive an elbow into his chest, forcing him back. As you try to clamber away from him, you’re grabbed roughly around the middle with one arm, another hand shooting out and wrapping around your wrist tightly, forcing it, and the knife, away from you.

“Let— Let me go! Let me go!” You gasp, struggling and squirming against him, but he doesn’t listen, only forcing your arm back even more, until it almost hurts, before his thumb suddenly presses down against the inside of your wrist, the force and pain of which shocks you. You cry out again, even as your hand is involuntarily forced open at the move, the knife tumbling from your grasp and over the edge of the balcony.

A sob is torn from your throat as you see it fall, and your husband’s hold on you slackens enough for you to shoot forward, hands clutching the ledge as you lean to watch. He doesn’t release you entirely, his arm around your middle still tight, as if he thinks you may try to jump. You don’t however, instead collapsing in a heap against him, allowing him to hold you up as you begin to sob.

Why did he have to try and stop you?! You want to scream and shout and strike him, but you can do nothing but weep pathetically. Your husband makes no move, not until the rain begins again. You’d have been happy to stay right where you are, but the arm around your middle shifts, and your legs are swept out from under you. You droop even more as he carries you out of the wet, deflating completely as you cry.

In the warmth of the room, you realise how cold you are, your body shaking involuntarily now. Your husband sets you on the chair by the fire and walks away, making you wipe at your eyes, sniffling softly. You jump when he steps in front of you again.

His serious and intent expression as he wraps the blanket from your bed around your shoulders might’ve been funny had the circumstances been different. He seems to fuss for several moments, pulling the blanket securely and tucking it up. When he stops, he pauses, before crouching down in front of you.

You blink tearfully at him, unsure of what to say or do. You watch him as he hesitantly raises a hand, and then lays it on your lap, palm up. You’re too upset and shaken to think clearly, and you react instinctively, unfurling your own hand and placing it in his. He’s warm, and even though his hands are rough and calloused, there’s a comfort in the simple touch that makes your cry again.

You realise that it has been a whole year since someone touched you.

Your mouth seems to work unbound then, and you find yourself sobbing once more as you begin to tell him of your unhappiness. His face remains still, though for once you’re thankful that he appears emotionless. You needed that, for just a moment as you bared all.

“And— and I—” You stutter, lip trembling as you finally stop to catch your breath, eyes falling to your lap as your shoulders lose all tension, and you feel yourself all but slump down in the chair.

“I miss my mother… I want to go home,” You whimper, quietly, lip trembling.

Your husband doesn’t speak, but he does squeeze your hand gently, making you look up at him. When you do, he releases his hold on you, and reaches out to wipe your eyes, like he’d done that very first night, first one, and then the other. He nods softly, frowning slightly.

He doesn’t leave again that afternoon, as you might’ve expected him too, like he probably had planned to when he’d first come back for whatever reason in the first place. Instead helps you into bed, and then sits himself in the chair by the fireplace. You drift in and out of sleep as the rain pours outside, exhausted from your outburst.

When you wake briefly after the night has fallen, you find that he has joined you in bed, though he does not sleep. His eyes open when you shift, and he watches you for several moments as you settle again. He moves slowly then, extending his arm to the vast space between you, his hand once again offered, palm up. You breath in shakily as you place your hand in his again, closing your eyes as he takes proper hold.

When you wake the next morning your hand is still outstretched, but your husband is gone.

A sudden knocking on your chamber door startles you, making you jump up in bed. When it continues, you stumble to your feet, wrapping yourself in a gown before meekly pulling the wooden door open. You almost never had visitors, and you always woke after your husband had taken his breakfast, your plates left for you on the table.

A young man in the armour of the castle guards greets you, his bow half-hearted at most.

“Sir James has asked for you to dress and meet him in the stables, my Lady.”

“My husband?” You ask, confused.

“Yes, my Lady. He urges you to hurry, due to the weather.” He bows again before you can reply, and you’re left standing there blinking into the corridor.

You really felt no desire to leave your rooms at all today, not after the stress of yesterday, and you’d rather been hoping to be alone, but you find yourself hurrying to dress anyway. When you’re ready, you step out of your rooms and find your way to the stables.

You arrive to find your husband standing by a large, stocky horse that was tacked up and even lightly armoured in traditional Hyrdan fashion. He appeared to be fiddling with part of a strap when he notices you.

“Good morning,” You greet nervously, his own head nodding slowly before he lifts his hand, holding it out towards you. It was strange how suddenly you had both taken to the touch.

You give your own nod, heart jumping to your throat when he releases your hand, and leans down, taking your waist in his hands and lifting you to the horse's back as though you weighed nothing.

You have to shuffle to sit properly, your skirts quite in the way, but you sit side saddle, holding tightly onto the saddlehorn when Sir James’ hands leave you, and he climbs up easily, situating himself behind you, much closer than you are expecting.

It isn’t that you’re embarrassed for your husband to be so close, but the fact that the two of you had hardly interacted before yesterday, let alone physically, makes you feel as though it’s something taboo. Moreso when his arms come around you on either side, taking the reins in his hands.

You briefly cast a look up at him as he gently nudges the horse into motion, your hand shooting out to grip his arm when you jerk a little off balance, and he glances down at you. Releasing the reins to hold them with only one hand, he wraps his arm around your middle, holding you more secure as he guides the horse from the stable.

You want to ask where exactly he’s taking you, but you keep quiet, knowing you won’t get a reply. Once you’ve ridden out of the Palais gates, you feel his hold on you tighten even more and quickly the horse is galloping fast down the road, mud and dirt flicking up behind you as you go.

You were never one for horseback riding, apparent as it is, and your nerves jitter anxiously at the edges of your vision, held back only by the strong arm around your middle, and the trust you’ve decided to place in the owner.

You ride for two hours, stopping briefly under a tree when the rain passes through, taking the chance to stretch your legs some, before you mount once more and go on your way. You begin to wonder what exactly you’re doing when the land starts becoming more familiar, and when you pass a signpost that leads you toward your hometown, your hand squeezes at your husband’s arm, just as your heart squeezes in your chest.

You’re swallowing thickly, and trying to blink the tears from welling up in your eyes when he slows his horse, bringing her into a light trot as you approach a large manor house. Servants and maids mill about, collecting water, and doing their chores, and when you’ve finally come to a stop, you all but slip from the staddle, your husband’s arm around your middle preventing you from outright falling, but he does lower you gently, only letting go once your feet have found the ground.

You don’t watch him dismount, too focused on running as fast as you can toward your mother, who must have seen you approaching from the window. She comes stumbling down the front steps, skirts held in her hands, her face pulled into a wide, desperate smile as you throw your arms around her.

“Mama!”

“My baby! My baby! You’re home!” She cries into your neck, and you feel the flow of warm tears down your own cheeks as well. You pull back a little, enough for her to kiss your face, and you coo, excitedly giving your father a hug too when he appears, almost dumbfounded behind her.

“You— You’re— You came home?!” he stutters, holding you tightly, a hand stroking down the back of your head and you nod, pulling away to wipe your face.

“F-for the day, I suspect…” You smile, and look over your shoulder, searching for your husband who stands rigid by his horse, face impassive as ever, but he watches you closely.

You look back to your parents, who have both followed your gaze, their faces suddenly nervous by the knight’s presence. They knew the rumours too, but at this point, you had no idea what to believe. Your husband had been kind to you, for the most part, it didn’t make any sense. It wasn’t as if you hadn’t seen him train, it wasn’t as though he wasn’t a seasoned warrior

Letting go of your mother to step back toward your husband, you hold out a hand for him. His shoulders seem to straighten, and you get the feeling he had intended to keep away while you reunited with your family. He steps toward you quickly, his eyes flicking to your parents, then back to you before he places his hand in yours.

“My husband, Sir James.” You introduce him properly.

“Well…!” You mother blinks in surprise as she takes him in fully, his height and size intimidating without all his armour, let alone with him currently in it.

“I… I will set the tea on…!” She announces, turning away and ushering you all inside.

For a moment before you step through the door, you turn back, unable to keep the grateful smile from your face. Your husband blinks down at you, perhaps startled by your sudden spin. Your sheer happiness spurs on your next movements, and you quickly lean forward and press a kiss to his stubbly cheek.

“Thank you,” You say softly, pulling back and watching his eyes dart around your features for a moment. You see his lips part, and he swallows before closing them again, and nodding.

With his hand still in yours, you lead him into your family home.

[i-am-darth-feanor]

Sword and Arrow: Chapter 3

Fandom: The Lord of the Rings

Pairings: Aragorn/Female OC, Aragorn/Boromir

Chapter warnings: none :)

Fic summary/blurb thing: 🏹⚔️ 👑𝐑𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐞𝐫. 𝐖𝐚𝐫𝐫𝐢𝐨𝐫. 𝙆𝙞𝙣𝙜.👑⚔️ 🏹The Rangers of the North are known far and wide for their skills in battle and secrecy. Of this taciturn group of Dúnedain, two are especially renowned for their deeds in battle: Aragorn, the Lord of the Dúnedain and Commandant of Rangers, and Beruthiel, his second-in-command.When Aragorn receives a dire summons from Rivendell but is wandering the Wild on some business of his, Beruthiel rides with haste from Fornost to find him. Once they reach Rivendell, she is invited to the secretive Council of Elrond and, unwilling to leave her friend's side, she joins the group known as the Fellowship of the Ring.From there, Beruthiel is thrown onto a thrilling ride of adventure, love, death, and heartbreak as she meets -  and loses - people who she would fight with sword and arrow for. [somewhat inspired by Ranger’s Apprentice]

Chapter summary: More character exposition and relationship development in Rivendell!

~🗡️👑🏹~

CHAPTER 3

Beruthiel and Aragorn, along with the three hobbits, arrived at Rivendell a few days later. Aragorn sighed in relief as they came into the view of the narrow stone bridge arching across the River Bruinen. He turned back to Beruthiel, who led Bill the pony. She raised an eyebrow in question, and he nodded exhaustedly.

Beruthiel turned to Merry and Pippin. "We're there," she said. "This is Rivendell."

"Come on," said Aragorn. 

Beruthiel and the hobbits followed him as he carefully walked over the bridge. Beruthiel squinted. At the other end, an elleth sat beside the statue of an elven warrior holding a spear. Her head came up as she heard footsteps, and she turned around. A smile lit up her face. "Estel!" she called, springing to her feet. Beruthiel saw that she was barefoot. Aragorn gave the elleth a tired smile. "Adar sent me to watch for you," she said as they neared. "He wanted me to say that the Ringbearer is awake. I wanted to ride out and search for you, but  Adar explicitly forbade it. And you know how he can be," she said with a shudder. 

"Who's that?" Pippin whispered to Merry.

"I think that's his wife," the other hobbit whispered back. Sam cuffed him around the head.

"But is she?" Pippin pressed. 

Beruthiel sighed audibly. "That is Lady Arwen," she said, raising her voices in finality. "Aragorn's adoptive sister."

"So... not his wife?" Merry said, sounding disappointed.

"Yes," Beruthiel said, sighing again. "He has not had a wife or a girlfriend for the last eighty-seven years, as far as I know."

"But you're going to change that?" Pippin wiggled his eyebrows. 

Beruthiel glanced at Aragorn. Help me, she mouthed. He raised an eyebrow. "Nay, I'm letting you deal with this on your own," he replied, a smile on his lips. 

Beruthiel turned back to the hobbits, exasperated. "Aragorn and I are NOT together, and are NOT going to be!" she exclaimed. "We - are - friends!"

"That's what they all say," Sam said with a wicked smile. Beruthiel glowered at them, then spun on her heel and joined Aragorn and Arwen.

"So," Arwen said. "Are you together?" 

Beruthiel considered glaring at her, then came to the conclusion that she shouldn't glare at an elf, particularly one of such a renowned family. Aragorn chuckled at her strained expression. "How are things here, my lady?" Beruthiel asked Arwen. "And why did Lord Elrond ask me to find Aragorn? Valar only know how to find him when he's away." 

Aragorn snorted with amusement. That was true.

"Kings do not snort, Estel," Arwen gently chided him.

"Ladies do not chide, Arwen," Aragorn mimicked her tone. "And besides, I'm not a king."

"Yet," Beruthiel finished. 

He sighed. "Ruth, you know I don't want to be king..."

"You will have to be, Estel." Arwen sighed. "Adar fears a war is coming... he was visited by Ossë in a dream."

"Ossë?" Aragorn exclaimed. "The Stormfather?"

"That one," Arwen said. "He told Adar, 'Unite them'." Aragorn shook his head.

"Is that why Aragorn's been called here, my lady?" Beruthiel inquired. Arwen nodded. Beruthiel looked back at the hobbits, who were following them, whispering among themselves. Beruthiel nodded. "Then I'll head back to Fornost tomorrow. Or should I take the hobbits back to the Shire first?" 

Arwen looked surprised. "Adar wants you here, too! And never mind about the hobbits..." 

Aragorn shook his head, chuckling. "Has Adar's foresight shown him anything about the havoc they'll wreak in Rivendell?" he teased. "Valar, those two are trouble."

"Do you know what they've done so far?" Beruthiel chimed in. "We had to endure teasing about courting the whole way here."

"Not that that doesn't happen in Fornost," Aragorn added. 

Beruthiel sighed. "Back to important topics," she said. "Frodo is awake?"

"Yes,"  Arwen informed. "Woke this morning. He's better." 

Beruthiel nodded. "Is Acarthor still here?" she asked eagerly. 

Arwen smiled. "Yes, he's with Adar. They are, I believe, discussing healing techniques." Aragorn smiled. Acarthor was the elderly Ranger that had taught them both. "I'll take you to him," Arwen offered. She glanced back at the hobbits. "We'll take you three, too. You can see Frodo." 

Sam's face lit up. Merry and Pippin continued in their conversation. "A game of truth or dare, perhaps?"

"No, she'll choose truth for sure. She looks like the careful sort." Beruthiel glanced at Aragorn. 'Careful?' he mouthed. She shook her head, smiling.

"Strider'll choose dare, though. Then we can get them to..." 

Aragorn sighed, exasperated. "Come on." 

🗡️👑🏹

The evening had fallen. The hobbits had been very excited to see that Frodo was awake, especially Sam. Merry and Pippin had proceeded to fill Frodo in about Beruthiel and Aragorn, while both of them had exasperatedly stomped out.

Aragorn wandered the halls of his childhood, smiling as he remembered various amounts of trouble he had gotten into- knocking over a statue while running from Elladan and Elrohir, climbing a tall pillar, and getting stuck.

A book was tucked under his arm- the history of the Second Age, written by Lord Elrond himself. The Ranger settled down on a chair on a terrace and began to read, immersing himself in the lore.

After some time, he froze, hearing footsteps. His hand went to his sword's hilt, which was not there. He had taken it off in his rooms. There was no need for alarm in the House of Elrond, really, but it was a Ranger instinct.

The source of the footsteps was a man younger than Aragorn, but with the same dark, wavy hair and grey eyes. His gaze roamed over the mosaics set in the vaulted ceiling, then landed on a floor-to-ceiling painting of Isildur standing alone against Sauron, the broken sword in his hand glowing white. Aragorn studied the man closely. He looked like a Dunadan, but Aragorn didn't recognize him as one. He is, in general, too neat to be one, the Ranger thought. This was a man of the South, he decided. Of Gondor.

Gondor. Aragorn's heart ached to go back there. He had been there once, under service of Ecthelion, the Steward at the time. But to him, it had seemed that he had come home after a long journey. The rugged mountains, fertile land, and gushing rivers seemed so familiar to him. And Minas Tirith, the White City. Aragorn didn't want to be King, no, but he wanted to spend more time in his land.

The Gondorian took in the painting. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Aragorn studying him and turned. "You are no elf," he said with surprise. He had seen only elves since he had arrived here this morning, aside from the dwarves that had arrived with him. Aragorn tipped his head to the side.

"Men of the South are welcome here," he said neutrally.

"Who are you?" the Gondorian inquired. 

Aragorn took a breath. No, not a good idea to tell a stranger, even one from Gondor, his name. It was being spoken in the wrong parts these days, and there was a price on it. "A friend of Gandalf the Grey," he eventually said. The other man nodded.

"Then we are here on a common purpose." He paused. "Friend." Slightly confused by Aragorn's reluctance to give his name, the man smiled good-naturedly and looked around again. His eyes fell on the statue of an elleth holding a stand on which a shattered sword was set. The man sharply gasped. Behind him, Aragorn saw a flurry of movement. As his eyes fell on it, it froze. He looked for a few more seconds, then relaxed his gaze, looking over at the other man. Then his eyes snapped back to where he had seen the movement. Nothing.

"The shards of Narsil," the other man said with wonder. "The blade that cut the Ring from Sauron's hand!" He picked up the hilt and tested its weight the way a warrior would. Watching him, Aragorn pursed his lips in dissatisfaction, as that was his forefather's sword, but said nothing. The Gondorian ran a finger along the blade. Blood welled in a cut. "It's still sharp," he said softly. He turned slightly and saw Aragorn still watching him.

"But no more than a broken heirloom," he said hurriedly, mistaking the Ranger's dissatisfaction with his handling of the sword for scorn at his fascination. He carelessly returned to hilt from where he picked it up and turned, hurrying out of the room.

Aragorn got up and closed his book, putting it on his chair. He walked over to the statue and reverently picked up the blade, which lay at the elleth's feet. He grasped it for a second like a full sword, then carefully returned it with the other shards, sighing.

His hand went back to the hilt as a figure melted from the shadows. It threw back its hood and grinned. Aragorn exhaled in relief. Beruthiel. "You should stop doing that," he told her, still gazing at the sword. "You'll give me a heart attack someday, and then you'll be responsible for the death of the chieftain." 

Beruthiel smiled with some sadness. "You should not fear the past," she said, coming up behind him and resting a hand on his shoulder. "You are Isildur's Heir, not Isildur himself." 

Aragorn sighed again. "The same blood flows in my veins," he said sadly. "The same weakness." Beruthiel cocked an eyebrow.

"Now, that sounds very poetic. What've you been reading?" 

Aragorn smiled a little. "I don't want to be Isildur's Heir, Ruth," he said quietly. "I- I don't want to be tied to this destiny."

"A destiny is something that someone is tied to, Aragorn," she said softly. "And honestly, I couldn't think of a better person for the job." 

Aragorn turned to look at her, then sighed, running a hand through his long hair. "Is it wrong?" he eventually asked, still looking at the shards of Narsil. "That I don't want to be king? Ruth, sometimes- sometimes I don't want to be Isildur's Heir. And then- then I feel bad for it." He looked back at her again. "Storms, Ruth I would make a terrible king." 

Beruthiel raised an eyebrow. "Why?"

"Why?!" Aragorn asked, laughing bitterly. He began counting off on his fingers. "I'm not politically savvy, I can't talk my way out of situations, Valar know if I can keep the best interests of everyone in mind while making decisions, and I'm a storming Ranger!" 

Beruthiel raised both her eyebrows. "I think you would make a great king," she said. Aragorn disbelievingly looked at her. "You're kind, you care about people, you don't care if it's an elf-lord talking to you or a hobbit farmer, you treat them all the same... And because you're a Ranger, you know what problems people face. Real people, Aragorn, not some stuck-up nobleman sitting outside his manor sipping tea. Steward Denethor can't help farmers and workers, Aragorn, because he's never lived among them and experienced their problems. But you... People call on us all the time to help them. You'll know which problems you need to solve." Aragorn opened his mouth to talk, but Beruthiel held up her hand. "You won't be corrupt. You've governed Fornost for sixty-odd years now, and you're good at it. You're a good man, Aragorn."

"Good men can make bad kings," Aragorn said dismissively. 

Beruthiel shook her head. "They can," she agreed. "But bad men make worse kings. At least you're not some stuck-up, self-important idiot, right?" Aragorn smiled, shaking his head. "At least, when you do something, it will be because you want to help, not because you'll get something out of it." 

Aragorn nodded once, then fell silent. "Is there any hope, Ruth?" he whispered after some time. "Can we win?"

"You are Hope, Aragorn!" she said.

Aragorn eyed her. "Now who's being poetic?"

Beruthiel laughed. "But it's true! People look up to you. Even the Elves. You have this... commanding air to you. I- I guess it makes people believe in you. Now," she said half-jokingly. "If we could get you to cut your hair at least once a year, that might be a bit better, too."

"Ruth!" Aragorn protested. "At least- at least I don't cut my hair with my saxe knife!"

"What, you expect me to carry scissors everywhere?" Beruthiel challenged, hand straying to the long saxe in her double scabbard.

"No," he admitted. "But you could, you know, stop at a barber's place in Bree or something." 

Beruthiel visibly shuddered. "I'm not letting any storming Bree-man get near me," she said. "Remember what happened that one time?"

"Oh, yes," he responded, chuckling. "Oh, yes, I remember that." 

She shook her head, placing a hand on his shoulder and looking towards the shattered sword. "You could ask them to put it back together, you know," she said to Aragorn. "They'd do it. The Elves. And Narsil would go back to war again... Imagine the looks on the orcs' faces when they see it." 

Aragorn grinned. "Can't be worse than the time Roheryn walloped a few of them," he said, referring to his horse. "I can't," he said a little softer. "I... I don't know if I can wield such a sword, Ruth. It's a sword of kings. A- a sword of heroes."

"You are a hero."

 Aragorn smiled sadly. "I don't know about that." He turned to look her in the eye. "Thank you, Ruth. Thank you for believing in me."

 She grinned cockily. "That's my job."

 Aragorn eyed her for a moment. "How did you find me, anyway?"

"You weren't at the feast," she explained. "So I guessed you were- Do you hear that?!"

"Yes,"  Aragorn breathed. He had also heard the faint sound of horns in the distance. He tipped his head to the side, listening. "That's Elrohir's silver horn!" he exclaimed. "They're at the gates." With that, he vaulted over the railing of the balcony and softly landed on the roof below.

From above, Beruthiel saw the white of his teeth as he grinned at her. "Coming?" he called. She shook her head, then jumped after him. The two of them ran, light-footed, over the roofs, jumping when they had to. True Rangers, they moved with the light, their mottled green-and-grey cloaks aiding the allusion. And onlooker would've seen only a suspicious shadow, and by the time he looked again, it would've disappeared.

Aragorn stood at the edge of the last roof, the narrow bridge from where they had entered ahead of them. In the circular courtyard ahead, two horsemen- or should I say horselves- were dismounting from their steeds. Aragorn looked back at Beruthiel- she was just behind him- and nodded. He looked below, then lightly jumped down, making no noise. Beruthiel peered over the edge. Aragorn was standing there, holding a hand up to help her. She sniffed, then jumped down herself.

Your loss, he mouthed at her, shrugging. She turned away to conceal her smile. Aragorn peered at the two ahead of them, then silently moved out of the shrubbery.

"Elladan, Elrohir," he called, sliding the deep cowl of his cloak back. "What brings you here at this hour? You look like you're in a hurry..." Both of them had visibly started with surprise at the voice. Then one of them spoke.

"Stop doing that, Estel!" he said. "You nearly gave me a heart attack!" 

The other one sniffed with a superior air. "Well, I heard him coming," he told his twin. Beruthiel squinted at both of them. She had seen them before, but storms, they looked exactly alike.

"Did not," the first twin said. "You jumped, too." 

Aragorn beckoned at Beruthiel, who obligingly came out of the shadows. "Ahh! There's another one!" the second cried in mock terror. 

Beruthiel glanced up at Aragorn. He shrugged. "We, er, heard your horn, my..." Beruthiel couldn't decide which one to look at. She settled on the first one. "My lord?" 

The one she'd looked at grinned. "No, I'm Elladan." He pointed at the other. "He's Elrohir." 

Aragorn sighed. "The one that says he's Elladan is Elrohir," he told his friend. "And vice versa." Beruthiel looked on, bemused. 

Elrohir's face grew serious. "There are orcs in the Misty Mountains, Estel," he said. "Too many of them. We think... we think that they're trying to barricade Eriador from Rhovanion. So that the Rangers can't ride to help Gondor when... when Sauron" - he shuddered when he said the name - "attacks."

"We also went to Mirkwood," Elladan chimed in. "To ask about Gollum." His tone grew somber. "He's escaped, Estel."

"What?!" Beruthiel and Aragorn said in unison. Beruthiel touched a hand to her forehead. 

Elladan nodded. "Apparently, Legolas has come to warn Adar about this..." Beruthiel scrunched up her eyebrows. Storms, she had never liked history... But the only notable Legolas she could think of was Prince Legolas, and it matched with what Elladan had said about Mirkwood. She only just prevented her mouth from gaping open. A prince? Here?

Elrohir looked around. "We should speak to Adar," he said to Aragorn. "He'll be wanting to hear about this." 

Aragorn nodded and moved aside. "He's in..." Aragorn looked at Beruthiel.

"The Hall of Fire, I think," she said, sighing. 

Elladan nodded at her. "Thank you, Ranger..."

"Beruthiel, my lord," she said. She watched with wide eyes as they left.

"I hope you're not fancying my brothers," Aragorn said lightly. 

She shook her head. "They're- they're just so-"

"Handsome? Regal?"

"Elvish," she finished. Aragorn snorted with amusement.

"Let's get to the Hall of Fire now, shall we?" he asked. "There's a hobbit waiting for me so he can revise his song."

"Let's," Beruthiel agreed. "But let us take the door this time, shall we?" 

Aragorn snorted again in the same manner. "Doors are for people with no imagination," he said but did not climb on any roofs. He offered Beruthiel his elbow like a gentleman. The moment was ruined when she shoved him hard enough to send him staggering a few paces. "Women," he muttered.

 🗡️👑🏹

It was past midnight now. Most of the people of assorted races that were present at the Hall of Fire had retired to bed. Aragorn and Arwen, who had cornered him, stood alone on a bridge, lit by the moon and stars.

"Renech i lu i erui govannen? (Do you remember when we first met?)" Arwen asked. 

Aragorn nodded. "Nauthannem i ned ol reniannen (I thought I had wandered into a dream)," he said. 

Arwen smiled, reaching up to touch his rough cheek. "Gwenwin in enninath... U-arnech in naeth i si celich. (Long years have passed. You did not carry the cares you carry now."

Aragorn looked away. Those cares came from his responsibility. His duty.

"Estel," she said in Westron. "I want you to take care of this." Aragorn opened his hand and saw her Evenstar pendant there. She shushed him as he began to object. "I believe in you, Estel. We need you to become what you were meant to become. Remember who you are," she whispered. "Think of it as a token, if you wish. The kind that a lady gives her knight." 

Aragorn looked down at her. "I'm not a knight."

"And I'm not your lady," she said back. "But take it. A message that you will always see." She took it from his hand and fastened it around his neck. Aragorn sighed and embraced her.

Sword and Arrow Masterpost

[A/N] heavy editing has been done on this chapter but it’s still not as good as most of the later ones.