#wooden beetles

[strawberyz]

Guys...I sillied ,,,,, ( AU BY @solazu1 ‼️‼️ IM SOO NOT NORMAL💥 )

[solazu1]

wooden beetle jam posting is the same as canon jam except they’re a little more special..

[rattfreakk]

Some More Art Of @solazu1 s Swap Au!

[frogbea]

HEYYYYY YALLL (tucks hair behind ear) NEW JAM FIC

ty @solazu1 for letting me write ab wooden beetles they r my faves

[corrodedparadox]

Shaker charms and pins are now available for preorder!

Get them here!

[ownencyclopedia]

☀ work of art of Bark Beetles

[red-eft]

creature corner, featuring my art wall and trinket shelf.. i ended up swapping everything between the 20gal long aquarium and quemada's 10gal. everyone's settled in and looking good <3

rambling about this under the readmore bc i think my animals are fascinating and i've learned a lot about their behavior + needs from this pfft

ok so first off- quemada! she's going into a growth spurt and is almost the length of her old 10gal. she was restless and seemed cramped, so i decided to upgrade her to a bigger terrarium. she's settling in nicely. depending on how big she gets, this could be her permanent adult enclosure, or i'll eventually shift her to echo's 40galB and then put him in a 4x2x2.

the fish weren't doing so well in the 20gal long- they never used the full extent of the tank and were very shy with how open and empty it was. no matter how i arranged it or how many plants i bought/propagated, i could never get it to fill in properly.

my fish had been passing away due to old age over the past few months- opal (betta), mango (honey gourami)... and now most of the corydoras catfish. i've had these fish for years so it sucks a lot. i feel helpless because no matter how i maintain the tank, they still wither away and pass.. ;-;

i don't want to get any more fish, so downsizing makes sense right now. i'll let my fish live out their lives and then keep it as a shrimp-only tank.

the 10gal has some harlequin rasboras, 2 bronze corys (the last ones left;;), and worminator, my yellowtail spiny eel.

i feel weird having wormie in what feels like such a small tank, but i've gotten to know her body language over the past year and a half. i know what she looks like when she's stressed- she's comfortable now. she has so many more places to hide than in the 20gal, which helps a lot. her size is maxed out at ~4", which would normally be too large for a 10gal- but she doesn't swim around like a regular fish. she's an ambush predator that hides in one spot and sticks her head out to watch for prey.

i also found one single shrimp when taking down the 20gal long. i have no idea where the fuck she came from or how long she'd been in there. here she is in the 10gal:

i'm honestly not worried about the 10gal being overstocked- the filter is rated for a 20gal and there are tons of live plants in there. there's a cleanup crew of pond/bladder snails, too, and i plan on getting more shrimp. their bioload is negligible + they help break down waste over time. add regular water changes like usual and it's gonna be just fine.

[pandapalzarts]

Forgot to share here as well! My new Kickstarter for wooden pins, art prints, washi tape and stationery is live!

Click here to find out more!

[robthepensioner]

In Anchorsholme Park, Blackpool, a wooden post celebrates the number 2 beetle.

[not-your-lifeline]

Just saw a tiny spider(smaller than the pinky nail) trying to drop down into a soapy water while I was taking a bath.

So I was like: 'NO, idiot. You'll die if you drop from there.' And moved it between pipes under washstand, and it crawled up there and started to build a nest. Hope you catch lot of fruitflies and mosquitoes.

When I first moved into this house 2 years ago, it was so filthy and full of cockroaches and moths and expired foods and trash from previous tenants(which was a old woman with dementia), but since I began ignoring spiders and only moving them into dark, narrow places without killing them, cockroaches and moths completely disappeared after about a year.

I haven't even seen a single carcass since then, and I've only encountered live house centipedes(scutigeridae) and spiders in this house. No other pests. And guess what? They BOTH eat cockroaches and moths.

And the fact the tiny spider I just moved was a baby and a offspring from other bigger spider, means they're doing well in some places I can't reach in this house somewhere.

They're literally keeping this house clean and I'm grateful for it. I've always been fond of arthropods since I was little. Thanks to them, I don't have to stress over trying to convince the landlord to call the extermination service.

I don't know the exact species of them, but sometimes there are transparent or light green colored spiders instead of usual dark, furry ones. I think it's really cute.

[solazu1]

Some more Jay and Tim from my role swap Au, wooden beetles :33

[lesbianralzarek]

baby wyll headcanons

pretended to be a mimic and hid in containers to jump out and scare housekeepers

no way he rogued his way into the counting house. the guards saw Supreme Marshall of the Flaming Fist Ulder Ravengard's cute lil 8yo son trying to crouch past them all in plain sight with a wooden sword and just pretended to not see him

canonically didnt get to play outside with other kids his age that often, so i think he replicated the crucial "making potions with your friends" weird kid experience with straight up eating the potted plants in nobles' manors. convinced himself gardenias give you temporary darkvision

was told kids who got into their fathers wine cabinets were exiled to the sewers. later learned that withdrawals were a thing. tearfully poured wine down the grate so the alcoholic sewer children could drink it. he got through, like, 5 bottles before anyone caught him

went through a remorhaz phase where he burrowed under rugs and blankets and wouldnt respond to anyone (except his dad, of course) because remorhazes dont speak common. ulder finally intervened when wyll choked trying to swallow a whole apple and it stopped being funny real quick

shared a bed with his dad until he was 6. when ulder finally forced his son to sleep in his own room, wyll cried so hard he threw up on the rug

left out food on his window sill for random wildlife. named the birds and squirrels who showed up most often. very invested in the personal lives he imagined for them all

made beetles get married

[emacrow]

Siren song of Space by emacrow/the og prompt creator

The assignment has gone all type of wrong for the justice league.

They were investigating a mass sudden disappears of a town called Amity Park after finding out a neglectful person(*cough cough* flash*cough*) thought they were prank calling about ghosts and some group called GIW until John Constantine heard one of the voicemails.

The area where Amity Park was now a Mass ocean that looked like galaxy was dipped into it even if it was daytime and fog covered the greenish tint sky inside the Barrier.

This was deep world ending shit, but unfortunately, none of the adults could even enter at all nor high tech ships not even John constantine could pass through, but old wooden ships with food supples can easily slipped through, along with the except J'onn.

Who tried float a foot deeper in without gripping his head from the pure mass empathetic overload and pushed back out by an unknown force, going through an internal shock until one curious Robin tried stepping a foot in and successfully went through, stepping on the ship easily.

Seeing that only kids and teenagers could go leads to mass arguments between the Justice league until John cut in that the abnormal sea space dome is expanding, sucking in more ground until the very earth itself is swallowed whole.

Grumbly, internally, Batman called in the young justice league, teen titans, and a few robins to find what had happened and come back in 1 hour.

Now, the entire young justice league, main teen titans, and robins were on a wooden ship sail into the space like sea.

Cyborg and blue beetle had to stay behind due to being mostly technology along with miss Martian who might also had the dame reaction as J'onn earlier as Red Robins pulled the sail with a compass, Starfire, Raven, Super girl, Super boy and Tranformed eagle Beastboy flies around as the scout.

Aqualad couldn't get in the water the moment he tried to stick his head only to immediately pull away gasping for air. This water was too dense yet suffocating like space itself submerged in it.

Kid flash helps around with arrangements, tying up knots and untying when the wind blown hard with the help of bat girl, robin, and Artemis

The only sound they could hear was the sea roaring, the ship creaking with each wave they sail over, and an odd electric sound buzzing around, as the ominous greenish fog seemed to roll in.

Starfire, Super Boy, Super girl, Raven, and Beastboy flies back onto the ship the moment their vision was blurring by the Fogs. Super boy and girl couldn't detect any other elses' heartbeats others than their group, and that alone sent chills of what could have happened to the Amity Park residents.

The sense of danger was shivering up everyone's backs as they could hear a voice, low and quiet, that began to grow louder.

Beautiful like yet haunting young male voice that nearly pulled their attention towards as Raven yelled at them to cover their ears with ears plugs from one of the wooden boxes now.

Something massive white was swimming in the star filled sea near their ship.

There couldn't be anything alive in this sea, but their eyes couldn't betray what they have saw.

It was humanoid, with multiple arms with webbed fingers with white massive hair longer then foot ball station, a large slender body that had thousands upon thousands of green spots and hundreds scars too neat and professional align to be normal cut and a very long tail with shredded fins.

Super boy and Girl eyes widen seeing that the green spot weren't for show as they were bubbles with people sleeping, encased, young and old, most of them were green colored or off color humaniod while the rest were living human people asleep.

They all kept their ears shut with the ear plugs, But super boy and Girl could still hear the most beautiful yet haunting voice that sound like a Siren enchanting his next victim.

Red Robin could see Super boy swaying in a dazed like state while Super girl looking enchanted nearly floating, motion the others to help tied the two to the pole with lightly laced Kyptonite rope to stop them from going over board toward the Entity.

Raven could see that this was likely the Entity that trapped the Residents of Amity parks, but the questions remains as how it got here and why this space dome was here.

Bat girl was signing that this creature seemed desperate, hurt, confused, traumatized, hopelessly scared, yet dazed in some typed of trance like over protective like state.

[corrodedparadox]

All leftover charms and pins have been listed in my shop

[harridansibyl]

Personal associations/interpretations of the dark/mystical houses (4th, 6th, 8th, 12th)

4th house

twisted tree roots, cultural practices, heirlooms, photo albums, inherited features, traditions, the mother, past lives, generational trauma, picture books, garden beds, childhood homes, ancestor altars, hand written recipe books, hearth, squeaky wooden floorboards, genealogy archives, caves, oak trees, baby wrap carriers, emotional security, cultural heritage, building foundations, photo albums, genetics, laundry lines, swing sets, property, mines, crops, sanctuaries, the chest and heart, home steads, fields, farms, root cellars, harvests, pots on stoves, brooms, backyards, agriculture, vines on trellises, handmade blankets, grandparents house, laundry baskets, attachment styles, singing lullabies, history, deep emotions, instincts, the unconscious, summer, waxing moon, vase of flowers, bath time, picking berries, celebrating holidays, chicken coops, older sisters, family gatherings, stone paths, forest walks, ancient structures/buildings, ancestral languages, cupboards, staying in

6th house

vitamins and supplements, morning routines, pharmacies, tasks and lists, doctors offices, health food stores, stomach medicine, hygiene practices, journals and planners, schedules, herbal teas, personal rituals, emergency kits, dog walks, lymphatic drainage, caregiving, donating blood, examinations and checkups, meditation, colour coordination, sticky notes, gastrointestinal problems, folded laundry, labels on everything, retirement homes, hand washing, braided hair, herb gardens, filing cabinets, face masks, kombucha, detailed diagrams, volunteer work, medicine cabinets, cleaning supplies, shelves, acts of service, skin care, organic linen, gauze and stitches, stress-induced illnesses, essential oil/herb baths, house plants, instructions, repetition, holistic medicine, giving advice, yoga studios, "gut feeling," bone broth

8th house

altars, divination, near death experiences, candle wax, feeling crushed by a heavy weight, grave dirt, red/dim lighting, funerals, double income, control, the underworld, cheques, insurance, heirlooms, ghost sightings, power imbalances, crime documentaries, ouroboros, bank accounts, grief and loss, shadow work, the womb, manipulation, scrying mirrors, Russian nesting dolls, keys, mortuaries, tests from the universe, pendulums, crime scene tape, the phoenix, projections, credit scores, animal bones on a forest floor, blood stained sheets, metaphysical shops, spiritual attacks, deep emotions, snakes, dead flowers, late autumn, wedding veils, envelopes, full moon, muddy boots, shadows at the corners of your vision, scarab beetles, inner processing, experiencing crisis, inherited possessions, natural disasters, sexual trauma, psychological studies, ancestral connections, cracked dolls, veil between realms, mental illnesses, deep connections, intimacy, reincarnation, torture devices, keys, whirlpools, the sound of sirens, unconscious fears, intense first impressions, pushing limits, feeling bound, scratches on walls, ten of swords

12th house

abandoned places, liminal spaces, long winters, shadowy figures, reoccurring dreams, repeated patterns, fog-filled forests, self analysation, inner worlds, cave systems, unfinished basements, hallucinations, solitary confinement, empty parking garages, spiral staircases, substance abuse, trapped in purgatory, hidden beneath the surface, maladaptive daydreaming, hospital hallways, confines of society, waning moon, moths, wandering aimlessly, disconnection from the world, psych wards, healing others, tired eyes or dark circles, chronic mental illness, suppression, addictions, hiding places, overnight shifts, unexplainable experiences, past life karma, exhaustion, cobwebs, others projections, catacombs, bird cages, premonitions in dreams, prescription bottles, self destructive patterns, late night walks, misty lakes, the feeling of walking out of the movie theater at night, identity crises, blurred faces, empty public transport, astral projection, comas, diary entries, dissociative episodes, shape shifting, generational trauma, observing people, mirrors, padded rooms, the afterlife, chain link fences, paradoxes, feeling misunderstood, repression or memory loss, hikikomori, the freeze response, disappearance, waiting rooms

[wowcatboys]

trinkets for a magpie.

♡ Lucanis/AFAB Crow Rook ♡

♡TW's: Lucanis's PTSD, implied violence/torture, Lucanis is a little bit of a nasty freak ahhh, Masturbation♡

♡NSFW♡

♡Divider by @cafekitsune ♡

It begins with something small, and almost entirely innocent.

Lucanis awakes to find that Spite has packed them tightly into a previously-unmaterialized closet of the Lighthouse. He’s surrounded by ordinary things—a broom, a large wooden bucket, a fat-bottomed coffee mug stuffed full of paintbrushes. The air tingles with tin and dust. Spite, angry at having control snatched away, snarls in his ear. Give. it. Back! A headache prickles at his temples and the back of his eyes. 

Damn this demon. How long has he been out?

Lucanis scrapes his palm against the Lighthouse’s rough walls, grounding himself. Not in the Ossuary. Not in a cell. Back in control. And then he begins to filter through the mental checklist he keeps for when he comes to, in the middle of Spite’s ‘outings’.

He scans the fronts and backs of his arms, feels for broken ribs, gingerly puts all his weight on one foot and then the other. No new scrapes, sprains, or—Maker forbid—tattoos. (Spite had asked a lot of questions after they’d passed by an abysmally drunk pirate in the Hall of Fortune, getting a beetle inked into the fold of their asscheeks. The implication there fills Lucanis with cold dread.)

When he wiggles his toes in his boots, Lucanis realizes he’s missing his left sock. But before he can ask Spite about it, his attention pulls away. There’s a small weight in his breast pocket that wasn’t there before. It’s round and light, and it presses into him gently but insistently.

He fishes it out. It’s cool, fragile. When he opens his hand he sees it’s a dainty glass bottle, no bigger than one of his fingers. It catches the light and bends it softly, shining like spilled lamp oil. A crystal stopper plugs the top. In the bottom, a few drops of clear liquid make a shallow pond. Lucanis recognizes the bottle. He knows immediately where it’s from. 

He knows the merchant that sells this. He bought shaving cream from her once, and he remembers the dry soft leather of her hands as she carefully pressed his change into his palm. One of the last kind touches he felt, before he was dragged into the Ossuary and almost forgot such a thing existed. 

It’s why he remembers the encounter so well. For a time, before Spite, he unspooled that memory through his brain to soothe himself. To remind himself there really was a world above, beyond the pain and screaming and all that dark, dark water.

The perfume. He blocks his thoughts from revisiting the Ossuary, and focuses on the perfume. He knows it costs thirty four gold pieces and is supposed  to smell like sea breeze. 

Gingerly, Lucanis twists the glass stopper and holds the bottle to his nose. He inhales.

Sure, there is a bit of sea foam there. But also, underneath, something else. Some kind of spice? Lucanis’s eyes flutter closed. His mind fills as he takes another deep sniff. A hint of patchouli. Post-combat sweat. A kind smile. The color of her hair…

Rook.

 Of course it’s Rook’s. Who else would have Antivan perfume?

Panic squeezes his chest as he realizes Spite must’ve stolen it from her. His eyes fly open, and he sends the demon an accusing look. 

“You cannot take peoples’ things, Spite,” he rebukes. “Where did you get this? Why did you take it?”

Spite mirrors Lucanis, scowling. His lips curl back from his teeth, and he snarls his response. 

“She. Threw it out—we did not. STEAL. It!” 

Lucanis hmm’s, at that. The anger on his face softens. The bottle is almost empty, and Spite, for all his terribly annoying and vexingly mischievous tendencies, is not usually a thief. He sniffs the perfume again, considering. If she’s done with it anyway, would it really be so bad to just…keep it? 

His secret. Nobody needs to know he has this.

Lucanis remembers that once, when they weren’t quite boys anymore but certainly weren’t men yet, Illario stumbled across a gloriously detailed picture of a naked woman in a book. He remembers how Illario sliced the page free from the book’s spine with assassin’s precision. For months, his cousin kept the paper tightly rolled up and hidden in an empty dagger sheath. He would quietly unfurl it when he was alone in his bedroom, and if he was feeling generous, he would let Lucanis look over his shoulder, too.

He wonders if Illario ever felt this rush of —what was this, tingling down his spine and spreading through his fingertips? Nerves? Adrenaline? Something else entirely?—when he held that picture in his hands, when he rubbed his thumbs reverently over a pair of sketched tits. Did his secret ever feel this precious?

Lucanis feels a twinge guilty. Perhaps even slightly desperate. But as he rewards himself with one last, deep, mouthwatering sniff, one thing is certain—he doesn’t feel regret.

Lucanis empties a small leather sheath and, with careful hands, stows the bottle within. He doubts that Rook will poke inside his weapons stash. But if she ever finds it— he will pretend he hasn’t held it up to his nose every night for months, and blame it on the wisps.

The ring, at least, makes sense. When Lucanis comes back to himself in the middle of a screaming migraine, he understands why Spite took it. 

He sits up on his cot, groaning, and reaches to grab it off the shelf his klepto-demon left it on. It’s a thick band, gold flecked throughout with something that looks like little bits of charcoal. The pantry candles flicker lazily in its reflection. As Lucanis holds it between his fingers, he realizes it’s still warm. Like someone left it sitting in the sun. 

A shiver races down his back. Did Rook just take this off? Lucanis imagines it. His mind paints her meditation room, and he sees her sink wearily down onto that gem-green settee. He thinks that she would rip her boots off first, maybe, and then flex her toes and groan while she works at the fastenings of her armor. 

He forces himself not to think of those strings, those straps, those buckles coming undone under her fingers. Of the skin that swims underneath it all. He has not studied her armor before, while walking behind her in Arlathan Forest and Dock Town and Treviso, he has not mapped it all out in his mind and thought about what he’d need to loosen and unlatch to make it come off. And there is not a rush of heat that comes to his cheeks while he does not think of these things, and it absolutely does not settle low and darkly in his guts. 

Lucanis shakes his head. His mind refocuses, and he blames its wandering on Spite. He knows she sets her jewelry on that bookshelf behind the settee, next to Varric’s mirror—he’s seen it piled there, before. She must’ve gotten back from a mission, shucked her combat gear, and fallen immediately into a dead-sleep. Spite, in his wanderings, could have slipped into her room and stolen the ring then. Still warm from use. Still warm from her.

Or…it could be the enchantments, woven through the metal. It makes sense. The ring’s meant to augment fire spells. Of course it would be warm. The latent magic thrumming through the band would make it so. 

It isn’t from the gentle heat of her naked hand. It isn’t, it isn’t, it isn’t—it’s magic, just magic. And that’s why Spite took it. Because that little bit of the Fade, bound to the ring, called to something in him. It makes sense, and it’s very simple, and there is nothing more to it. 

But this isn’t a discarded perfume bottle. It’s combat gear. It will need to be returned. The realization makes Lucanis’s throat prickle.

Giving it back proves easy enough, though. One doesn’t become a Crow without learning how to lie.

He waits until the next morning, while Rook and Davrin equip their gear. (Lucanis is finished dressing first, as per usual. Even though his armor is the most complex, he’s got the quickest hands.) Lucanis hums Rook’s name behind her as she’s fastening her bootlaces, gently prodding at her attention. 

“Rook?” He asks, and when she turns around with a lifted brow, he simply holds up the prize. “I believe you may have left this at the dinner table? I found it in the kitchen.” It’s a convenient lie, easy to spin, even easier to believe. She got stuck with dish duty last night, after all.

“Oh,” Rook says, “thank you.” When she holds out her hand, Lucanis’s brain floods. He knows what Illario would do, here, and the image almost makes his back stiffen.

 Illario would purr something dripping thick with honeyish double meaning. He would take her soft hand into his, and slide the ring smoothly onto the correct finger. (And Lucanis does know which finger it belongs to. Her left pinky. He’s noticed her trying to fit it on the others, but it’s too small. It won’t go past the second knuckle.) His brain cannot decide how she would react. Would she stare up at him, shocked by his sudden forwardness? Smile shyly, girlishly? Perhaps rub her thumb over his knuckles before taking her hand away, and make his fluttering heart stop dead in his chest?

But really, it doesn’t matter what she’d do. Because he is not Illario, and he isn’t half so charming, and he shouldn’t be flirting with this breathtaking powerhouse of a woman, anyway. Not when there’s traitors in his shadow, and a demon wedged into the crevices of his mind, and gods to kill.

So Lucanis presses the ring tenderly into her outstretched hand. He ignores the pleasant twinge in his gut as her fingers close around it. And with great willpower, he pulls away first.

Spite is angry to see his prize go. He growls and gnashes his teeth and spits that I. took it—for us! 

‘Us’. Lucanis doesn’t like that. So for the afternoon he’s a stone wall to the demon. He lets Spite rage and howl and demand to know why Lucanis gave it back, and he ignores every word. 

His mind is full, anyway. It is busy convincing him that he didn’t notice how the ring felt in his fingertips, before depositing it in Rook’s open, waiting palm. 

By then, it had gone cold to the touch.

Sharing a body with a demon has its quirks. By far the most irritating is Spite’s tendency for escape attempts. Even Lucanis’s coffee pot runs dry sometimes, and the demon lies in wait to take advantage. All he needs is a second—a moment that Lucanis’s tired eyes close too long, that the edges of his mind get too fuzzy. And then Lucanis wakes, confused, usually to one of his companions body-blocking the eluvian. 

On rare occasions, though, something else grabs Spite’s attention. Usually something mundane, some sort of mortal custom that fascinated the demon—Lucanis has come back to himself throwing blank papers into Emmrich’s fireplace, punching a pale lump of bread dough, scraping a dry paintbrush against the Lighthouse’s stucco walls. Odd, to be sure, but Lucanis has learned to roll with it and simply be grateful that at least Spite didn’t try to escape again.

Still. Waking up on top of Harding’s greenhouse with a spoon in his mouth is quite the surprise.

Lucanis sits on the edge, legs dangling over the lip of the roof. His boots and socks are missing, and his pants are messily shoved up to his calves. He regains control of his limbs in the middle of Spite carefully swinging his legs, like he doesn’t quite understand why he’s doing it or what it’s supposed to accomplish. Lucanis’s heels thud against the wall. First the right. Bump. Then the left. Bump. 

Vaguely, Lucanis remembers seeing a little elf girl in Dock Town, sitting on the edge of a pier and breaking apart clumps of seafoam with her toes. Spite had watched for a moment and then asked why nobody came along and pushed her in. Strange, Lucanis thinks. It’s so curious, the things Spite’s mind hoards up to try later.

Like the spoon. He has no idea where Spite got that idea from. Lucanis pulls it from his mouth and stares at it; his reflection stares back, dull and warped. He turns it over, noting the intricate carvings spread across the utensil. Some sort of vine twists around the handle and erupts into a flower bud at the base. 

The Lighthouse boasts an eclectic collection of silverware, as if it reads the minds of those sitting down for dinner and materializes their vision of what a spoon and fork should look like. He recognizes this design, with its delicate leaves and large silver basin. It’s Rook’s. (Because of course it is.)

Lucanis turns to face Spite. He holds the spoon up at him, and raises an eyebrow.

“Why…?”

Spite smirks wickedly.

“Wanted a taste.”

Heat dusts Lucanis’s cheeks. He swallows thickly and looks back down at the spoon, considering. Not long ago, this had been inside of Rook’s mouth. It had known the velvet of her cheeks, felt the caress of her tongue as she cleaned potato soup from it. The flush of heat travels down his face, all through his chest, down into his undergarments. It’s been scrubbed since they ate—very vigorously, considering Bellara did the dishes last—but still…

Lucanis scans the ground below, just in case. And then, when he sees that the courtyard is empty, he slowly lifts the spoon to his mouth. Tenderly, reverently, he slips it past his lips. He drags the cool metal of the basin back across his tongue. Testing. Searching. Yearning.

But whatever he was hoping to find is not there. Lucanis tastes nothing but the faint, sudsy memory of lemon-basil soap. He closes his eyes, sighing through his nose. He’s so disappointed it’s almost painful.

“Her taste!” Spite proclaims proudly. 

“No,” Lucanis corrects. “Just dish soap.”

When Spite spits in frustration and pounds a fist against the greenhouse roof, Lucanis doesn’t chide him. He’s holding back from doing the same damn thing, himself.

Lucanis respects the privacy of others. Really, he does (so long as he’s not been hired to kill them). In normal circumstances, he would’ve put the journal down and walked away. But he regained control of his body about ten seconds ago, and his thoughts are scattered around like the light coming through a suncatcher, and it’s just instinct to examine the book gripped tightly in his hands.

The journal is light. About a hundred pages, he guesses, maybe a little more. It’s leather-bound, dyed to a plummish purple-blue-black. There’s a stub of satin poking out. Unthinking, Lucanis slides his index finger in the journal, right next to the makeshift bookmark, and cracks it open.

And twice as quickly, he snaps it shut. His eyes fall across the handwriting, and he knows immediately that fuck, he just looked inside Rook’s journal. Nobody else writes with such a heavy hand, scraping the pen across the paper like they’re punishing it for something. 

Obviously it’s Rook’s, Lucanis berates himself as he squeezes his eyes shut and pinches the bridge of his nose. If he took a second to think, he would’ve recognized the cover as Crow leather. He would’ve considered the fact that the satin-scrap bookmark looks suspiciously like a shirt Viago wore until it went out of fashion.

He didn’t read anything, not really. Still, it feels like he’s leered through the open curtains of her mind. The thought disturbs him. He thinks of things he was subjected to in the Ossuary. The blood magic leafing through the folds of his brain. Spite raging against the confines of his skull, ransacking his thoughts, tossing them everywhere before the two learned how to uneasily co-exist in one mind and body.

Of course looking inside Rook’s journal is a tame invasion. It’s free of violence. It’s free of blood. But it feels, in some sense, just as perverse, just as horrid, just as deplorable. He’s taken something from her. Broken into the safety and privacy of her room, and searched through pieces and parts of her life. Does it really matter that it was Spite? It was still his hands that turned her doorknob, his feet that carried him into her bedroom, his eyes that stumbled clumsily across her unspoken thoughts. If he’d been more vigilant, if he’d drank another pot of coffee, if he’d told Spite to stop taking Rook’s Maker-cursed things… 

A sudden guilt sits solidly inside him like the pit of a stone fruit. He needs to bring this back. Immediately.

And he needs to stop thinking about the one word he actually read and noticed, the one string of letters that his brain snatched up before he snapped the journal closed. Written in a gentle hand with curling, sloping letters, almost as if Rook eased up on her poor, weary pen, as if she were whispering it into the pages of her journal—

Lucanis. 

When Lucanis regains himself, his hands are trembling. His chest is sticky with panic, the muscles through his back tight and tense as piano strings. The hair on his arms—the hair everywhere—stands at attention. There’s an aftertaste of tin draped over his tongue. And all along his body, his skin feels the faint but unmistakable streeeeetch of being somehow pushed and pulled at the same time.

Mierda. Shit, shit, fucking shit. Spite went through the eluvian.

Lucanis is back, hunched on his cot in the pantry, but wherever Spite took them—whatever he did—it cannot be good. Lucanis grits his teeth, pushes back rising nausea, and hisses at the demon looking down at him.

“Spite. What. did. you. do?”

The demon licks his tongue over the sharp, canid lines of his top teeth. When he speaks, his voice simmers.

“Stop. Fussing. Just followed—we followed. Her.”

In a better mindstate, Lucanis would’ve wrinkled his nose at being told not to fuss by a demon. But his brain is still stumbling, scrambling. He digs his teeth into his bottom lip, feels his brow knit together sharply, bunches up the pebble-gray fabric in his fists—and only then realizes he’s even holding something.

He loosens his fists and unwads the fabric in quick, jerky motions. When he holds it up to the light, Spite’s chest puffs out. A show of pride. But Lucanis? His heart drops. All the way to his fucking feet. 

It’s underwear. Smalls, specifically. Still deliciously warm from being sandwiched in between skin and layers of clothing and armor. Soft, well-worn, starting to pull loose at those delicate threads that connect the sides. Lucanis’s jaw clenches so tightly his teeth squeak. 

He doesn’t need to ask whose they are. He recognizes the slate gray fabric. An arrow snagged Rook’s pants one time, ripping them across her right hipbone. He touched himself to that shade of gray for three nights in a row and felt pathetic as a teenager. Like some horny boy, pawing and panting in the dark over a flash of underwear and the barest hint of skin. Maker, how she undoes him.

Lucanis’s mind races to answers before he can even ask Spite the questions out loud. They share a body, after all—he knows this demon. He guesses that Spite noticed Rook stumble sleepily towards the eluvian with a towel folded up in her arms. Where she bathes, he doesn’t know, but he’s seen her emerge from the eluvian with wet hair before. 

Lucanis breathes in through his nose, out through his mouth. He does this three times. Then he carefully sets the underwear down over his knee, and shifts on the cot so that his trousers don’t feel so Maker-forsaken tight.

“Spite,” Lucanis asks cautiously. “Tell me she didn’t see you take this.” 

Spite sneers, nose curling like the very thought offends him.

“No! Of course, not!”

“You’re sure?”

“Was cautious. Watched her. Waited. ‘Til she put her hair underneath.”

And ah. Qué pena—that’s too much. The knowledge that Rook was naked. That he saw her naked, that she was close enough and undressed enough for him to map out constellations in her freckles and witness her scars, places where she’d been stabbed but was too strong and too stubborn to die. All that, in his eyes, but not for him. For Spite. He saw her, but the memory isn’t his to keep. 

Lucanis hates masturbating. With Spite lurking, the act is colored with shame. But right now, he can’t stop himself. His skin is burning hotter than Andraste, his mind is all sharp edges, his underwear constricts his cock like a snake that wants to kill. He thinks, he knows, if he doesn’t relieve himself, he’ll surely die or go mad with lust. 

He looks down at the smallclothes on his lap. With a reverent hand, he traces the seam running horizontally across the crotch. Then he sinks his teeth into his bottom lip, and opens his pants with a quiet, slow ziiiiiip. 

“Tell me…what she looked like,” he asks, and his voice has never been so gentle or soft to Spite before, never so pleading. He almost says please. (Almost. He lies to himself as he shimmies his pants down past his hips, and pretends that he still has some dignity left. At least enough that he won’t beg from a demon.) 

Spite’s lips curl up in malevolent glee. Whether he’s pleased from replaying the sight of Rook’s body, or he’s just happy to have the upper hand for once, Lucanis isn’t sure. As he spits on his palm, he cannot bring himself to care. The cool air of the pantry smooths over his thighs, whispers over the ultra-sensitive tip of his penis. There’s already a glistening drop, leaking out from the slit. Lucanis thinks he should feel shame. 

He does not.

“Like a statue,” Spite starts, and Lucanis firmly wraps his hand around the base of his shaft. Not much to go off of, but he doesn’t need much. Lucanis has memorized the cello-curves of her body, the smell of her. He rubs the seam of her smalls and groans. Up, down. He wants to go slow but he burns, and he can’t. 

“Squeaked in the stream. Cold water. She shivered. Made her chest. Jiggle. Like jam. On a spoon!”

Lucanis, Maker help him, can see it. He hears her voice squeal high and girlish, in a way she never lets the others hear. He sees how the cold water beads up on her skin and how her hair drinks up the stream, then falls in limp wet ropes over her shoulders. He sees the chill curl into her nipples—he sees them pebble, and he swallows thickly. He squeezes his cock tighter, pumps faster. A groan erupts from deep in his chest. It’s not enough. He needs to smell her. 

With his free hand, Lucanis grips Rook’s slate gray underwear and brings it to his face. And he inhales like he’s a man drowning. He just reached the surface—these smallclothes are the air he needs to survive for even a single moment longer. He moans, and it comes out quiet, muffled by the fabric. Mostly he smells sweat, but it’s good because it’s her. But underneath there’s a whiff of her perfume, and deeper still he can detect the salt-cream musk of pussy. 

She’s divine. What did he ever do, to earn the right to even breathe in her presence?

Lucanis’s mind flirts with putting that fucking seam in his mouth, and for a moment, he balks at the desperation. But he’s alone. Who would Spite tell? He’s in the depths of his shame and need already. He pumps, hard and fast, and his muscles coil from his toes all the way up into his neck. Everything everywhere is too tight, too hot, he needs her, fuck it—

Lucanis growls and takes the smalls into his mouth, feels the seam line pressing into his tongue. He bites down with violence and moans around it. Rook’s taste—mierda. There’s no words to describe it. Not in any language he knows. 

He can only think in feelings, in images. How velvety and warm her pussy would be against his tongue; how it would taste just like this. Tang, sweetness, salt, paradise. He would lick and lick and lick until she dripped down his chin like the first bite of summer fruit, ripe and leaking and staining his beard with juice. Her thighs pressing against his head, muffling her whimpering, drowning out the wet suck of his mouth on her clitoris. He would make her cum and cum again. His imagination keeps shifting between giving her pubic hair or shaving it clean; between feeling those course, perfect threads in his mouth or feeling his tongue glide against folds smoother than glass—

Lucanis’s thumbnail brushes the underside of his tip just so, and he imagines it’s Rook’s nail instead, and that’s all it takes. He whimpers into her undergarments, biting down. His body shakes and trembles like he’s just been blasted close-range with an electricity spell—his toes curl so hard, he thinks he feels scraping inside his boots. Warm cum jets from him, splatters his pants and coats his still-pumping hand. He’s on fire, yes, but it’s so fucking satisfying. Lucanis rides the last sweet shocks of his orgasm to their very edge, and he imagines Rook sweeping up a thin stream of white and sucking it off her finger. 

Dios mio. He dares not imagine that she could ever be as obsessed with him as he is with her. Even in post-orgasm bliss, with his fingers around his softening cock and his head pleasantly fuzzy with relief, he won’t let himself think that her fingers might, on some lonely nights, sneak past her waistband with similar thoughts. He won’t let himself consider that she might sneak into the pantry while he makes dinner, might bury her face into the stiff bulge of his pillow, and silently breathe him in. Surely, she does not put her lips to his coffee cups, searching for his taste there in the dark roast.

She’s beautiful, she’s a goddess, she’s a godkiller. What is he to her, other than an adoring weapon, waiting in her shadow to be used? 

But in the afterglow of such an intense orgasm, Lucanis finds it impossible to think of anything too challenging. Feelings, desires. What’s deserved and what isn’t. He allows himself to wallow in the pleasant buzz—not quite happy, but for once, content. The flames lick the candles downwards, and Spite remains thankfully, blissfully quiet. Lucanis stays like that for a long moment. It’s been so long since he’s felt so comfortable in his body. So safe. He dares not dwell on all the implications of that.

When Lucanis finally stirs, it is only because his neck has started to seize at an impossible angle. After wiping himself clean, he turns to Rook’s smallclothes. He cannot imagine how he’s supposed to sneak these back into her wardrobe without her noticing. And what could he even say if she caught him red handed, trying to slip her sex-smelling underclothes into a pile of her dirty laundry? Or even worse, if one of the other companions found him. Emmrich? Davrin? Maker’s breath, Taash? Better not to risk it. 

And perhaps that is an excuse. But it is an excuse that settles comfortably in his stomach, and one that soothes his mind as he pulls the dagger sheath from its hiding place. Lucanis picks Rook’s smallclothes up from his cot with admiring hands. He rubs his thumb affectionately over the smalls’ waistband. Then he folds it up, carefully and tender-fingered as if he were handling a love letter. He slips the roll of fabric into the sheath, fitting it next to her perfume. His prizes, his little trinkets. 

He will never admit it. But Lucanis thinks that maybe, just maybe, these tokens are payment enough to kill any god Rook asks.