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lacrymatoryao3 · 2 months ago

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Redemption Was Just The Beginning

Chapter 12: February, 1900

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To the world, Arthur Morgan is dead. As he tries to face the idea, in a lush valley in Ambarino he comes face to face with a woman from his past, and they must reckon with an era long gone. Especially when she has secrets of her own.

(Rated explicit simply because eventually there’s smut in this.)

Tag: @photo1030

2,468 Words (AO3 Link)

The weekend that Ana’s birthday fell on was ironically the coldest days of the winter. She made it clear, more than once, she didn’t want anything special. It didn’t matter to her. It was just the day she became another year older. Arthur could relate. He hadn’t paid much attention to his own in many years, He didn’t even really know the day any longer. Sometime in July, from what Ana had told him. He supposed the trip up to the mountains for Arthur Francisco to get his moose, though he was willing to settle for an elk if they couldn’t track the former, was special enough for her.

Every breath Arthur took while outside burned, as if the air was turning his lungs into ice. He trudged to the shelter attached to the stables where the wagon was stored, missing the West more and more with every step. The deserts there were just as unforgiving, sometimes with the dust storms that were as terrible as the blizzards, but there he wouldn’t be freezing his balls off. Worse, it was going to be several more hours dealing with the weather once they were on the trails.

The radiant heat from the stable stoves made his work bearable. The wagon needed its cover put back on before he loaded it so their cargo wouldn’t freeze quite as fast or be blanketed by snow kicked up from the wheels. He started by taking the hoops off the wall, five strong but thin wood arches bent into a U shape. He inserted them deeply into the slots along the edges of the wagon’s walls on both sides. He then drug a large and heavy canvas into the wagon, draping it over each hoop until the wagon bed was completely enclosed. He jumped out and tied the canvas in place on nails pounded into the outside walls until it was tight and unmoving.

He went into the stable and brought out two strong Dark Bay Shires. He put on their collars and myriad of straps before finally attaching them by the neck to the wagon’s yoke. Then, he went back in to tack Josefina, Delfina, and a Bay Frame Overo Criollo yearling that was Ana’s substitute for Enrique – he was too old to handle the long and arduous journey. He hitched them to rings on the sides of the wagon, climbing into the seat and slowly maneuvering to the front of the house.

Arthur Francisco had carried the crates of provisions they needed to survive only a few days in a remote hunting cabin. The boy seemed immune to the cold, just sitting there making sure his gun was ready. Arthur envied him as he shivered taking the crates one after another and shoving them into the back. There was enough food to last longer than they intended to be there, and utensils for cooking and eating. There was good, thick bedrolls and pillows and blankets. There was also various tools the cabin didn’t provide. It made him question how they were even going to fit a large animal with them, but he tried to arrange them in a way so there was enough room.

“Has your mama come back yet?” Arthur asked the boy. He hadn’t seen Ana all morning after breakfast. She had to speak with Mr. Liang to make sure everything was perfectly arranged for him to take over while they were gone.

“She’s in the kitchen.” Arthur Francisco replied.

Arthur sighed with relief going into the house. He took a moment to warm himself up by the fire, then going to the kitchen and get another hot cup of coffee.

Ana had her back turned at the counter of the Hoosier cabinet counter, making sandwiches for the ride. Arthur stopped dead in his tracks in the entryway. He blinked hard. The way she was dressed was something he had never witnessed her in before. Wrapped around her head and shoulders partially covering a dark green, cable knit Donegal sweater was one of her colorful shawls. That wasn’t what stunned him. Instead of a skirt she wearing a pair of pants, decorated on the outward sides of the legs with silver, bow shaped conchos. It wasn’t the fact she was wearing them. He had seen plenty of women in various styles of them before. What changed his demeanor was how tight they were. They hugged her form, accentuating her thighs and backside that had become wider and larger than what they used to be. His eyes traced every curve up and down. It triggered a spark in his brain, rekindling a long dormant flame that burned through him and settled in his lower abdomen.

It took all he had to restrain himself, to control his more primal impulses. His instinct was to walk up to her and grab her, knead her fabric covered flesh. He imagined how soft she felt. It made the heat travel a little lower than he was comfortable with. He shut his eyes for a moment, shaking his head rapidly to knock the thought of molesting her out of his brain. It was wrong to be looking at her the way he was, like a piece of meat and he was a starved dog. He averted his gaze the best he could, going to the kettle and getting the coffee he wanted. Holding the cup, he found he was trembling slightly. He didn’t like that either, the smallest thing working him up.

“I… Don’t think I’ve ever seen you like that.” Arthur managed to mumble.

Ana turned and held their lunches bundled in warmed cloths, “Oh! You’re right! I learned the hard way trudging through snow in a skirt is a terrible idea.”

Arthur swallowed to keep his voice steady, “Think you’ll be warm enough?”

“They’re fur lined.” Ana said, “So I should be fine. Is everything ready?”

“Yes, ma’am. Waitin’ on you.”

Ana gave him the bundles, “I just need to get my coat and hat on. I won’t be long.”

Arthur went back outside to wait for her. Being re-shocked by the cold helped him calm down some. He shoved the bundles through the small hole in the canvas at the back, which Arthur Francisco had closed up when he climbed in. Arthur got into the driver’s seat when Ana joined, climbing up beside him with a quilt that covered both of their legs.

The wheels started to go deeper into the snow as they started to descend upwards into the mountain. Arthur allowed himself to go deeper into distracting thoughts, but they weren’t pleasant ones. He kept being reminded of the mad dash after the disaster at Blackwater. They had taken a long and confusing route. It was an attempt to throw lawmen, bounty hunter, and the Pinkertons off their trail. It succeeded until the spring blizzard hit them, slowing them down. Arthur had barely slept when that happened, being constantly on guard until it was too much for his injured Boadicea. He had to leave the poor, beloved horse’s body somewhere around Tempest Rim.

Then they suffered when young Jenny Kirk died and they had to stop to give her a proper burial near where Spider Gorge flowed from the glacier. All the while Davey Callander was fading faster and faster. At first it appeared he would possibly live when Dutch sent him ahead to find somewhere to rest for a while, and maybe find John and Micah along the way who went some time before him, with Charles’s horse Taima he let Arthur borrow.

If he had been a religious man he’d have said the discovery of the abandoned mining town of Colter was a Godsend. Being in those slowly rotting, drafty, and creaking structures was much better than being battered out in the open. Arthur didn’t expect where they were going to was going to be like that, but he still felt a twinge of those ghosts coming to meet him.

Halfway up the mountain there was a large board nailed to a tree with a message painted by hand in black. It was so weather beaten Arthur had to stop and get down to read it. The sign was just a large slab of untreated plywood. What it once said was something along the lines of: ‘TOWN – ABOUT 8 MILES BEHIND. CABIN – ABOUT 8 MILES AHEAD. APPROVED GUESTS ONLY! OWNER LIVES 3 MILES NORTHWEST OF CABIN’.

It was a good place to rest anyway. From there on the path was only getting steeper upwards for another 2 hours. There everyone answered the calls of nature. When they finished and washed their hands with the snow they gathered back into the wagon and ate their sandwiches. Despite the hours in the chill they were still semi-warm, just two thin slices of bread filled with a thick mixture of shredded chicken and hard boiled egg seasoned with curry powder and a paste made of spiced stewed tomatoes.

It was enough to keep them going the rest of the way, which became considerably slower as the snow piled up higher and higher. The wheels creaked threateningly and the horses – even the ones that weren’t hauling the wagon – complained loudly every few minutes. Arthur looked around, hoping he was going the right direction. In the forest be found a billow of smoke rising above the trees. As he drove closer, the trail led them into a clearing next to a mostly frozen river. Sitting on a high stone foundation to avoid snow piling up against it was the cabin. It was small and primitive, but looked sufficient for a weary traveler. It had the outhouse not too far, connected by a covered walkway, and a stable to shelter the horses and wagon from the harsh elements.

Arthur got as close to the recently cleared stairs as he could. They could finally stretch their legs more while carrying everything inside. It was a small space. There was only enough room for a dining table, a dry sink, a table counter and a single cabinet above it on the wall. To cook Ana would need to use the fireplace. The only place to sleep was a loft, only accessible by a narrow ladder. Everything was for necessity, not for comfort.

Ana started adding more logs to the fire. She pulled out some cans from one of the crates and picking out what type of pot to cook with. Arthur Francisco was tasked with putting their bedrolls into the loft, giving Ana and Arthur a moment alone, which was to be a rare occasion with the trip.

She motioned to him to come closer to her, “Do you feel up to taking Arthur Francisco fishing in the river? There’s good salmon in there.”

“I suppose.” Arthur replied.

Ana reached into a hidden pocket in her coat. He didn’t realize she had brought the two photos from her desk with her. When she gave them to him, he knew what she wanted him to do.

“I think it’s time.” She said, “However you feel like doing it.”

Arthur took a deep breath. He climbed halfway up the ladder to call for Arthur Francisco, who came down and eagerly grabbed the fishing equipment. He went out ahead to look for a good spot along the river that had visible flowing water. When Arthur joined him, he made a fire to keep at least some of the cold away.

Arthur Francisco baited both rods. He crouched in the snow, casting his. In the ice he could see fish swimming around. He set his sights on the large salmon. There were other species who also became interested in the bait, and interesting thing Arthur Francisco did was flick the line a few times to scare them away.

Arthur didn’t have a system like the boy did. He didn’t see himself as a good fisherman, but he also wasn’t terrible at it. He managed to be more successful with it the year before. He managed to start teaching Isaac many years ago. He taught Jack Marston, though the little boy wasn’t old enough to have the attention span for very long. Arthur simply cast the line as far as it would go, making a quick jolt of the line and waited.

Either way, it took a little while until one of them got a bite. Arthur Francisco’s method was more successful, or he had more patience than Arthur. From the clear icy water they watched a Sockeye nibble at his line, before taking a bite that hooked him. Arthur Francisco stood, pulling the rod upward and pulling it in the opposite direction of the struggling fish. When it became exhausted, he reeled it in. Inspecting it the salmon was a good weight and maturity, at least 5 pounds. The head was a green and gray with orange eyes, and the rest of its body a bright red.

Arthur patted the boy on the back, “Good job! Your mama will be very happy with that!”

Arthur Francisco laid the fish in the snow and went over to warm himself by the fire. Putting his rod away, Arthur decided it was now or never to talk to him. He sat down on a tree stump and took out the photos from Ana.

“Hey, Arthur…” He said gently, “Come here for a minute. I need to tell you somethin’.”

He waited until Arthur Francisco sat next to him and continued, “Now, I ain’t good with all this, but your mother and I were talkin’ about it for a while. We decided it was time for you to know about your father.”

He showed Arthur Francisco the pictures and explained them the best he could.

“You mother and I lost our parents when we were pretty young. So, to get by we ended up doin’ some pretty bad things. It took me longer to get out of them than her. Durin’ the time these were taken we had been in a relationship of sorts. A couple of years later she got pregnant with you and decided to leave to give you a better life than we had. She did a damn fine job of it too.”

He braced himself for whatever reaction the boy could have. He could see the gears turning in Arthur Francisco’s mind through his eyes as he gazed at the photos, piecing together that the man in them with Ana and the man sitting with him was indeed his father.

Arthur Francisco looked at him, “Really?”

Arthur nodded, “I’m sorry that I wasn’t there for you growin’ up. I want to make up for it… Do better… If you want that.”

Arthur Francisco jumped up and threw his arms around Arthur. He took it as an acceptance from the boy.

#rdr2 #arthur morgan #red dead redemption 2 #rdr2 posting #rdr #red dead redemption #arthur morgan fanfiction #rdr2 arthur #rdr2 fandom #rdr2 fanfiction #red dead redemption 2 fanfiction #rdr2 community #red dead 2 #red dead redemption arthur #red dead redemption community #arthur morgan rdr2

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eufoniaradio · 3 years ago

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S23.E12: Amigos

¿Qué ha pasado con las bandas amigas que nos enviaron en algún momento su material? Exploramos algunas de ellas...

Episodio 12 de la temporada 23, al aire el 18 de Abril de 2022. Les acompañamos Ciro y Charly con Jairo en controles. Les recordamos suscribirse a nuestra página y grupo de facebook en eufoniaradio todo seguido y seguirnos en twitter en @eufonia. En los eventos de Facebook encontrarán la información de programas y las listas de tracks de los mismos para que hagan stream. Busca a TecSounds Radio…

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#city weezle #eternal wanderers #house of not #jamie barnes #ozone player #william gray #yoke shire

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joyousspiritfealasse · 2 years ago

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@tolkienocweek // day seven // the children of eomer and fealasse // fastred

Firm Counsel

Fastred was the seventh child and youngest son. He came to his majority in Edoras and was a Marshal of the Riddermark. He carried word to the Shire when his father requested the company of Master Holdwine, and escorted Merry and Pippin back to Edoras.

Afterwards little is known, for he took to wandering the wilds, drifting between the hearths of his kith and kin. It is said that he chose to accompany his mother in her path following her departure from Imladris when his siblings came of age. However, this is all mere rumor and no one who knows of his whereabouts spoke of them.

The last confirmed sighting of Fastred, wherein he had the visage of an elderly man, was shortly after the departure of his siblings to Valinor. He had a loud argument with his brother, Ethelfrith, where he was heard to curse the Valar for abandoning them and the grief they had caused his family due to their favoritism of Luthien and the lack of choice for the rest. He rode away from Gondor to the South and passed through his sister Laywyn’s lands.

It is unknown where Fastred met his end, or if he did, for there was no more news of him. It is generally accepted that, while Fastred had inherited the longevity of the elves, he was as mortal as the Dunedain, due to the age he showed last. In recent years, however, there have been murmurings of a revered immortal in distant lands, who freed the people from the yoke of tyranny. And that there flies a banner with a horse running on a green field.

For the rest of this AU, click here.

#tolkienocweek #dayseven #freeform #the children of eomer and fealasse #fastred #AU #tolkienocs

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morgulscribe · 2 years ago

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"You are the one who attacked me on Weathertop," Frodo stated coldly.

"Yes, my Lord," the wraith nodded, his face expressionless. "If Thou hadst claimed the Ring then, I would have knelt before Thee and called Thee Lord. But Thou didst not know the great Power that Thou held, nor how easily Thou couldst have had the mastery."

"And now you are at my mercy."

"Ever am I at the mercy of the Lord of the Rings." A sardonic chuckle escaped the lips of the Morgul Lord, and Frodo felt himself shiver at the mirthless sound. "Thou couldst command me to jump into the fire, and I would have no choice but jump; but I perceive that Thou wishest to be a just ruler, and wouldst not commit murder upon the first day of Thy rule. Indeed, the fact that my brethren and I still stand is proof of Thy abundant mercy. A king of less compassion would surely execute us, for all the grief and hurts that we caused Thee when Thou wert our enemy."

"I wish to be a good ruler," Frodo admitted proudly, puffed up with a newfound sense of self-righteous nobility. "I would grant mercy to my enemies, and ensure that all are treated justly."

"Thy rightful place is upon the throne of Barad-dûr, my Lord," the King told him. "Wilt Thou not go now and claim the seat of power for Thyself? Only Thou canst save Middle-earth from the Tyrant. For thousands of long and weary years, my brethren and I have suffered under His yoke, toiling in eternal slavery with no hope of release. But now one has arisen who would challenge His power. I sense that Thou wilt prove to be a much kinder master, Frodo of the Shire."

Frodo looked up into the Nazgûl King's steely gray eyes, and perceived that there was no guile there, only the sorrow and bitterness of long, unending ages. Although the wraith was the Dark Lord's most powerful servant, he deeply resented his thralldom, hating his Master for all of the broken promises and unjust punishments he had endured over the years, and ever desiring freedom and release from his bondage. For a moment, the Pale King reminded Frodo of Aragorn, both in nobility and appearance. The hobbit's heart swelled with pity, and pride -- for he, Emperor Frodo, would liberate these nine tormented men from their evil Overlord.

Read more at https://archiveofourown.org/works/33248188/chapters/103715523

#frodo #witch-king #nazgul #lotr au #lotr fanfiction #all hail emperor frodo #but there is only one lord of the rings #and he does not share his power....

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elizabeethan · 4 years ago

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Spaces Between Us- 1/12

The hardships of real life separated them six years ago, and Emma has been struggling to put that fact behind her ever since. But then, only after she’s convinced herself that she’s moved on and that her new life is enough, Killian Jones comes back.

A Captain Swan Modern AU

A/N: first, the chapter count is a big fat probably, definitely not definite! I’m really really excited to share this story! i’ve got four chapter pre-written so far, so i’m planning on posting on a consistent weekly basis.

More tags will apply to later chapters and i’ll put warnings where they're necessary, but if you have any concerns or questions feel free to message me!

Thank you, as usual, to my beta and friend @the-darkdragonfly, and to @donteattheappleshook and @xhookswenchx for listening to my ramblings and helping me figure out the plot to this <3

(also bonus points if you can guess what the title is based on :) it’s a hint)

This story will be rated M

This chapter: ~3200 words

Read on Ao3

Read my Other Stuff

If you’re interested in being tagged or want me to remove you from the list please let me know!

Tagging: @courtorderedcake @kmomof4 @stahlop @klynn-stormz @laschatzi @emelizabeth88 @lfh1226-linda @kday426 @elisethewritingbeast @timeless-love-story @captain-emmajones @gingerpolyglot @ebcaver @ilovemesomekillianjones @teamhook @superchocovian @itsfabianadocarmo @tiganasummertree @gingerchangeling @jrob64 @onceratheart18 @xhookswenchx @winterbaby89 @swampmedusa @ultraluckycatnd @dancingnancyy @love-with-you-i-have-everything @shireness-says @snowbellewells @hollyethecurious @ouatpost @daxx04 @the-darkdragonfly @donteattheappleshook @therooksshiningknight @eeteeaytay @xsajx @itsfridaysomewhere @alexa-fangirl-forever @jonesfandomfanatic @wefoundloveunderthelight @qualitycoffeethings @rapunzelsghosts

~~~~

She wakes before the sun as she does most mornings, with a start and a jump as she springs her head from her pillow and clutches her hand to her pounding chest. Glancing to her right, she sees her still sleeping husband and breathes a sigh of relief, letting her shoulders sag and her eyes flutter shut slightly. He’s fast asleep, just like he is each time she has one of her horrifying nightmares, never noticing her fearful thrashing. Rolling her eyes, she removes the blankets and lets her bare feet hit the hardwood floor and stands to make her way to the bathroom. After her shower, Emma dresses silently, applies minimal makeup, and sneaks out of their bedroom, still successful in not disturbing her husband.

Her son is already on the couch downstairs waiting for her, of course. If there’s one thing the two of them are equally bad at, it’s sleeping. She smiles when she sees him curled up with his picture book, his orange tabby, Abby, purring away beside him. “Morning, bub,” she greets once she’s downstairs, and he grins up at her happily.

“Hi, mommy.”

Crossing the room to the couch, she leans down and presses a kiss to his cheek and asks, “do you want some breakfast? We’ve got to get you ready for the library soon.”

“Is dad coming?”

She shakes her head. “No, bub. Dad has to work today, so it’s just you and mommy. I’m sorry.”

“Okay!” he says happily, jumping from the couch and disturbing Abby. “Me and mommy day!”

She giggles softly and grins, following as he bounds for the kitchen and trying to ignore the ache in her chest that accompanies his complete lack of concern over his father being absent for something he enjoys, again.

“What do you want for breakfast, bub? Eggs?”

“Eggies!” he calls, crawling up onto his dining chair. “Scrambied.”

“Scrambled,” she corrects gently. “With cheese?”

“Yes! Cheese please!”

“Very good manners, Henry,” she praises happily as she takes out a bowl, a whisk, and a pan before heading towards the fridge. “Aren’t you going to help me crack the eggs?”

His eyes widen and he drops his jaw dramatically, jumping off the chair with enthusiasm and running towards her. “I can crack the eggies?!”

She smiles down at him, taken by his excitement and his refusal to say real words, and says, “yes, my love.”

Choking on her words, she wants to kick herself. Six year and she still finds herself using his stupid phrasing. It sends a jolt of discomfort and a twinge of longing pain through her entire being, the ability to remember small details at the most inopportune times having always haunted her. It tells her how she feels. It tells her she’ll never forget. It tells her how she’ll never feel again.

Her husband grumbles as he enters the kitchen, grabbing a banana from the fruit bowl and grabbing Emma’s ass in full view of her son, which makes her stiffen and glare ahead out the window, grinding her teeth. “Morning,” he says.

“Do you have to do that, Walsh?” she asks quietly through clenched teeth.

She doesn’t need to be facing him to know that he rolls his eyes.

Taking a deep, grounding breath in, she bends towards Henry and scoops him up easily, placing him on the counter and handing him an egg. “Remember how I showed you?”

“What are you doing, teaching him to cook?” Walsh asks in an incredulous tone.

“I don’t know, giving him life skills? Just tap gently against the counter, bub,” she instructs, and he does just that. Well, almost that.

He smashes the egg against the counter and she quickly helps him to drag it over the bowl, splitting it open messily and letting the yoke fall in. “I did it!”

“No shells; excellent job!”

“Dad, look!”

Walsh makes no effort to turn from his damn phone, instead nodding once and grunting in false acknowledgment.

He cracks another egg, this time getting a bit of shell in the bowl but able to fish it out with help, and Emma begins beating them with just a bit too much force. “What exactly are we doing today?” she asks.

“Swearing in ceremony. The new sheriff starts.”

She nods. The new sheriff was appointed by the state, so no one but Walsh knows who they are or what their deal is. Why they’re in Storybrooke to begin with. What kind of town they think they’re going to be protecting and serving. It shouldn’t be as exciting as it is, greeting a new citizen, but Storybrooke is a sleepy little town with very little excitement.

She has no idea how she got here.

“That’s why you can’t come to the library, dad?” Henry asks sadly, and his father nods without making eye contact.

“Yeah,” he confirms. “I have important work to do.”

Emma rolls her eyes, then smiles softly at Henry and says, “it’s alright. It’s just Henry and mommy day, remember?”

His face lights up again and he nods, grabbing for the cheese and stealing a slice for himself. She glares at him playfully and he giggles, squirming to the edge of the counter before she assists him down and he runs for the living room. “Food in the kitchen!” Emma calls after him. Walsh looks up from his phone for a moment, then straight back down.

Henry returns quickly, holding a small piece of cheese down towards the floor and taunting poor Abby with it as she chases after him. “She wants some!”

“Henry, we don’t give Abby human food, remember? Why don’t you eat your cheese and give her some of her food?”

He nods, gobbling his snack and then tossing a small piece onto the floor for the cat when he thinks she’s stopped paying attention. God dammit.

“Hey, dress nice today,” Walsh commands from behind his emails. “After the library, come to the town hall. There’ll be photo ops for the paper.”

“Okay,” she mumbles.

“Make sure he doesn’t make a mess of himself.”

She can’t respond with words without shouting, so she stays quiet. God forbid a child have a little fun and get a little dirty. “Henry, come get your breakfast. Did you feed Abby?”

“Okay!”

“Did you?”

“Coming!”

She signs and rolls her eyes, plating his eggies and tossing the pan into the sink too loudly before feeding the cat and heading upstairs, hoping her child’s father can watch him for the five minutes it will take for her to pick out a newspaper-worthy outfit for the two of them.

~~~~

“There it is!” Henry calls as he runs into the children’s section of the library, dodging other kids and parents and beelining towards his favorite. “Mommy! Come on!”

She apologizes to the people he bumped into and finds him with his book already open to his favorite page. “Henry,” she says seriously. “Bub, you’ve got to slow down. You ran into some people and you have to be careful.”

“Sorry,” he says, not looking up from the dog in the illustration.

She sighs and sits beside him, nudging him over and taking a spot on the oversized bean bag chair. “What is Mudge getting up to today?” she asks him, using the skills Belle taught her to get him to engage with the words and the pictures.

He’s quiet for a while, pointing out details to her and trying his hand at a few words. He’s starting to get good at reading since starting kindergarten, and she couldn’t be prouder when he sounds out family without much help, beaming at him and stroking her fingers through his chestnut hair.

“Mommy?” he asks after taking in an illustration of Henry and Mudge going up a hill. She hums in response to urge him to go on and he asks, “why doesn’t dad like to read with me?”

She can feel her heart plunging to her stomach, dropping like an anvil and sending a cold sweat across her body. Walsh has always been distant. When they first met, he seemed so sweet, and when he proposed as soon as they found out she was pregnant, she thought she had hit the jackpot. But as soon as their son was born, she saw a change in him. He became a different person, never around, never helping much, never showing either of them any affection. She blamed it on his new role as the Mayor of Storybrooke; he couldn’t have had a scandalous extramarital pregnancy on his docket and being a family man helped his chances for election. But knowing that doesn’t make it any easier to know that the man she’s stuck spending the rest of her life with isn’t shy about how little he regards her.

She can deal with a lack of love from her husband. What she can’t deal with is his lack of love for his son.

Through her anger, she responds calmly, telling Henry, “dad’s just so busy, bub. He has an important job and it’s hard for him to focus on other things sometimes, because he’s so tired.”

Henry nods softly and turns the page. “So he doesn’t like me?”

The tears that spring to her eyes are instant and unstoppable, and she’s grateful that they're sitting side by side so that he can’t see her reaction. Clearing her throat, she says, “no, Henry, of course he does. I think sometimes he’s just… stressed.”

“You’re stressed, but you love me,” he points out.

With a gulp, she says, “and I always will, more than anything. But your dad… he… Well, he just isn’t the type of person to say that like mommy is. That’s why I say it so much,” she smiles.

Her son looks up at her and smiles, his enigmatic gray eyes shining despite the sunlight not reaching this secluded back corner of the library. “I love you, mommy,” he tells her, and he gives her a hug that makes her feel more love than she’s ever felt with her husband.

She’s always been able to compartmentalize the fact that her husband doesn’t love her. That he never once told her that he does. That he married her out of obligation after knocking her up. But she can’t ignore the fact that he shows no love for their son, either.

What’s worse, is that he’s noticed.

~~~~

The town hall is nothing special, the cinderblock walls and the tile floors enough to keep the cold, fall air inside and make Emma shiver when she takes her coat off. Her husband, miserable as he is, gives her a quick smile and a curt nod that tells her she’s only welcome here because of the cameras and their need to portray a happy, loving family. It’s true, he’s always provided for them and made sure that they want for nothing, but it’s limited only to basic needs and material things.

“Hi,” he greets quickly, leaning in to press a kiss to her cheek as a camera flashes. She forces herself to smile. “Hi, son.”

Henry grunts up at his father, not making eye contact and not letting go of Emma’s hand. “Hi,” he mumbles.

Emma knows, as much as she hates to admit it, that Henry should give his dad a hug so that Sydney Glass can snap a photo of the wholesome moment. But after their conversation earlier, she isn’t inclined to make him. So, she bends at the knees and gives him a smile, asking, “bub, do you want to give your dad a hug hello?”

He shrugs, looking down at his feet, and reluctantly reaches for Walsh. He laughs happily as he picks Henry up, giving him a squeeze and successfully tricking the few townsfolk here into believing his show. “How was the library, buddy?”

Henry says nothing in return, shrugging and then squirming until Walsh puts him down. He runs back to Emma and takes her hand again, holding on tight, and she paints on a smile and runs her fingers through his hair. “Let’s find a seat, Henry,” she suggests.

“There's seats here for you,” Walsh tells her, gesturing for the first row where there are three folding chairs, each with a placard on them. Mayor Walsh Oswald is first, with Mrs. Walsh Oswald to the right and Mr. Henry Oswald in the center of the two.

Emma takes a seat and has Henry do the same, and after a few more handshakes and photo ops, Walsh sits as well and the ceremony begins. Sydney Glass continues to snap pictures of the crows and of the stage, until the lights dim and the state’s police chief walks on stage.

A speech is made, as if this event is anything more than mundane, and then the mayor is called on stage to complete the induction of the town’s new sheriff. Walsh graces the stage excitedly, earning applause from the small crowd as he waves, and takes the microphone. He says a few words about the town’s safety being the number one priority, and assures everyone that the state police chief surely couldn't have made a better decision when he hired their new sheriff.

And then he calls him onto the stage.

And Emma’s world goes dark.

Killian Jones.

Her eyes must be three times their normal size as he walks onto the stage, and she’s grateful for the dramatic lights because they mean he likely can’t see her. But she can see him.

For the first time in six years, she can see him.

Her breathing quickens and her vision feels blurry, and she realizes that in her haste to get ready this morning, she had barely anything but coffee. She takes a deep breath and clings to the seat of her folding chair with white knuckles, gnawing on her bottom lip until it bleeds as she watches the one that got away place his hand on the bible and repeat a vow of servitude to her husband. She wants to die.

“Mommy?” Henry whispers in the darkness. “Are you okay?”

She swallows against her bone dry throat and nods, giving him a shaky smile, which only serves to worry him some more, likely due to her sudden paleness. “Yes,” she whispers. “Hush, bub. It’s almost done.”

The heart in her chest, the one she gave away to the man on the stage years ago, slams against her ribs almost painfully, until Walsh announces the new sheriff and the crowd begins to cheer. Through panting breaths, she claps, and then grabs Henry’s hand and pulls him as subtly as she can towards the exit and into the chilly November air. “Where are we going?” he asks in confusion.

“Mommy just needs some air,” she explains, gulping in a breath as she throws herself through the double doors.

She squats down and presses her back to the brick wall, burying her face in her hands and trying to steady her breathing before she feels Henry's small hand on her head. He does what she always does to him when he’s upset and begins scratching his fingers against her scalp, and the thoughtful notion brings tears to her eyes. “It’s okay, mommy,” he consoles, and she’s sure he has no idea what’s going on, although he shows her endless compassion either way. She wonders how she got so lucky with such a thoughtful son when he was basically doomed by genetics.

“I’m sorry, bub,” she says softly. “I’m fine, really.”

She hears the doors open to her right and assumes the ceremony must be over, so she turns her head away from the crowd. She hears someone ask Henry if he’s alright and starts wiping at her tears, intent on interrupting the exchange, but when Henry says, “my mommy is sick,” she laughs and shakes her head.

“Shall we get her some help, lad?” he asks, and Emma’s certain that if she had eaten breakfast, she would lose it.

“I don’t need help,” she mumbles, breathing heavily and hiding her face in her hands.

“It’s no problem,” he insists. Then he makes a joke, his tone light and flirty and exactly like she remembers it. “I don't know if you noticed, but I'm here to protect and serve.”

It’s impossible for her to hold in a soft chuckle, cut off by a surprising and breathless sob, and she can’t help but to look up at him. She watches as his jaw drops and his eyes widen; he falters backwards as he takes in the sight of her, denial and shock ever present on his face. He looks like he wants to say something, but words die on his lips and he remains still before he snaps his mouth shut.

“Aren’t you gonna help my mom?” Henry asks in disgust, staring up at Killian in a way that makes Emma want to throw up. She never did think that these two worlds would collide, as much as she may have wanted them to.

He hasn’t broken his gaze from her until he looks at her son and gulps before staring back down at her. “Uh, aye,” he says to Henry. “Do you need some help, miss?”

Without waiting for her answer, he offers her his hand and she takes it. There’s a shock that rushes through her entire body at the feeling of his skin touching hers, and it feels like she’s coming home and losing her sanity all at once. The pains in her chest are overwhelming and she can feel more tears stinging her eyes as he pulls her up from the ground. She nearly topples into his chest once she’s finally standing, because she’s so unsteady that her legs feel like they’re made of the noodles Henry likes in his soup, and he catches her before she can stumble.

He asks, “alright?” with such soft concern that she thinks she would smoothe out his brow and kiss him if not for Henry standing beside them.

She’s about to answer before she hears, “sheriff,” coming from her husband to her right. Her husband. Right.

They spring apart and she looks down at Henry, who is staring up at her with his brows drawn close together and his lips set in a straight, thin line. She gives him a small smile before looking at Walsh and blinking rapidly. “Hi, honey,” she greets. “I just met the sheriff; he was just helping me up. What a great addition to the town.”

Walsh glares at her with a look on his face that tells her she’ll be hearing about this later and then turns to Killian and offers his hand. “I look forward to meeting with you, Mr. Jones,” he says as they shake hands stiffly.

“Pleasure,” he responds. “It was nice to meet you and your family. I’ll see you next week.”

Her husband places a stiff hand on her back, calling for Henry to follow them without bothering to make sure that he actually is, before hissing, “let’s go,” into her ear.

Her heart races for an entirely different reason than it had when she saw Killian Jones.

~~~~

#spaces between us #modern au #cs modern au #cs ff #captain swan fanfic #spaces ff #cs angst #cs fluff #cs smut #eventual smut #adultery fic

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endexe · 3 years ago

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> CHARACTER INSPIRATION // :

repost and list 5 songs that inspire you to write your muse :

Cracknight - Lauren Bousfield

Fireflies - Owl City

& - Tally Hall

I / Me / Myself - Will Wood

Always Breaking, Always Healing - Alexander Panos

& list 5 quotes that inspire you to write your muse :

❝ My God, my God, whose performance am I watching? How many people am I? Who am I? What is this space between myself and myself? ❞ — The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa

❝ God said: GOD MADE YOU. GOD DOES NOT CARE IF YOU ARE “GUILTY” OR NOT. I said: I CARE IF I AM GUILTY! I CARE IF I AM GUILTY!… God was silent. Everything was SILENT. ❞ — The War of Vaslav Nijinsky, Frank Bidart

❝ I’ll rewrite this whole life and this time there’ll be so much love, you won’t be able to see beyond it. ❞ — Backwards, Warsan Shire

❝ I worried a lot. Will the garden grow, will the rivers flow in the right direction, will the Earth turn as it was taught, and if not, how shall I correct it? Was I right, was I wrong, will I be forgiven, can I do better? Will I ever be able to sing, even the sparrows can do it and I am, well, hopeless. Is my eyesight fading or am I just imagining it, am I going to get rheumatism, lockjaw, dementia? Finally, I saw that worrying had come to nothing. And I gave it up. And took my old body and went out into the morning, and sang. ❞ — Devotions, Mary Oliver

❝ Of course there’s something wrong with me. I am the smallest matryoshka doll. I ask God to free me and it stares back with eyes brown like graveyard dirt. Of course there’s something wrong when the living is already dead and every godforsaken word out of your stained-glass mouth is a eulogy. When you ought to be sky-wide and you dwell within the broken nail of a pinkie finger. They built my chariot upside-down, reversed like a tarot card: Horses in the backseat, wheels riding shotgun, yoke between my teeth. What part of this is right? I need the sun to sear my skin like parchment in a fireplace, mapmake new lines into my palms - charcoal black, roasted-pig scented. If I tear every page off the book, surely I can fill the cover with a rainforest. Rewrite the three-line poetry into a roads-long epic. I need to grow tall enough to throw the world off Atlas’s shoulders. “This is mine,” I tell him, fingers wound around his throat. Voice like a dragon before its gold. Eyes like a supplicant at the altar. “This is mine. This is me.” ❞ — Blue Whale in a Goldfish Tank, Tumblr user linkedsoul x

TAGGED : @weirdmoon , thank you so much ! <:) <3 TAGGING : @soughtjustice , @massoccurs , @chaosvice , @scrunchie ( anyone ! ) , @sainthey ( anyone ! ) , you !

#( it's the way my love and care for [ redacted ] is deep and endless despite constantly wanna punt them to the void.. <3 )#› ˚ ༘ .˚₊· ͟͟͞➳❥ 5TUDY .#› ˚ ༘ .˚₊· ͟͟͞➳❥ 1N5P1R4710N .#› ˚ ༘ .˚₊· ͟͟͞➳❥ G4M3 .

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thisonesatellite · 5 years ago

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Wouldn’t You Like To Know - 1/1

SUMMARY: This is my take on How And When Emma And Killian Got Together.

Three moments in time inside S3, three turning points on their road to each other.

Also known as my entry for @csjanuaryjoy, and my very first foray into canon.

AO3

A/N: Well. i used to say i can’t write fluff. Or smut. Or canon. @profdanglaisstuff has disabused me of 2/3 of these notions, and is working hard on eradicating the last one. (So, yes, @kmomof4, i might write smut someday. i said SOMEDAY!)

Honey, i owe you everything, but never more than this fic, i swear. ❤

THANK YOU @csjanuaryjoy and the discord for the event and the support and the everything! And @ohmightydevviepuu & @shardminds for being the amazing people you are. Especially when you do not laugh at me when i go and have crazy notions.

And most importantly: love and hugs to ALL OF YOU reading The Stories, yes, ALL OF YOU, because you are the wonderfullest and i still cannot believe i was lucky enough to stumble into this fandom. i love you lots, you know.

If you want on or off this tag list, let me know! (And seriously - if it’s ‘off’ please don’t worry. Absolutely no hard feelings.)

@mariakov81 @stahlop @thejollyroger-writer @snowbellewells @captainsjedi @toomanyfandomstochoosefrom @xarandomdreamx @tiganasummertree @mayquita @ohmightydevviepuu @sals86 @karenfrommisthaven @kmomof4 @kday426 @superchocovian @jennjenn615 @facesiousbutton82 @suwya @spartanguard @capnjay21 @shardminds @carpedzem @girl-in-a-tiny-box @ilovemesomekillianjones @shireness-says

In the end, it’s a tree that gets her.

Yes. A tree.

There are many ‘nevers’ in Neverland. They have to do with the fact that time passes without being spent, the fact that things always stay the same, indefinitely, eternally.

The madness in the eyes of the Lost Boys is not just the madness of the disenfranchised. It is also the madness of lessons not learned, of experience not gained, of lives lived on repeat, lives which never move forward.

He has that look in his eyes sometimes, she has seen it. The look that both guides and enslaves the Lost Boys under the yoke, under the tyranny of the everlasting present. The power of youth is the unquestioning knowledge that life is eternal and you are invincible, and it is the fact that neither is true which gives youth its power.

But in Neverland life is eternal, and it turns this power into oppression, into subjugation, into the iron choke-hold of infinity.

She has seen it in his eyes, now that they are back here in this cursed land; flashes of fear in the face of this fantasy. He is no longer under its spell, but he is afraid.

There is the ‘never’ of A One Time Thing. (We will never do this again.)

The ‘never’ of I Never Thought I’d Be Capable Of Letting Go Of My First Love. (I have never been so wrong.)

And the ‘never’ of I Have Yet To See You Fail. (You will never be found lacking.)

She holds on to that last one with both hands.

Until she gets to that tree.

Neverland is never quiet. It’s not so noticeable during the day, but at night the jungle explodes into the cacophony of creaking branches and calling nocturnals and chirping crickets. Millions of crickets.

It’s a wall of noise.

She climbs up to a bluff above their clearing, away from the people sleeping below her, because doubt and confusion and despair are playing on a loop inside her head, and the wall of noise just amplifies her worry, and the crickets are deafening, and she is losing her mind .

She looks out over the edge of the cliff, down into the endless valley below, black and pulsing with wildlife and danger, and when she turns around, she sees a tree in the clearing,

just a tree,

and she simply steps forward and starts to punch it.

Hard.

With both fists, like it’s a heavybag, like it’s a Lost Boy, like it’s Pan.

It’s excruciating and liberating and immensely satisfying and then suddenly a voice from behind her says, “Swan. Stop.”

It’s not loud, his voice. It’s not horrified or startled or accusatory. It’s quiet and soft. “Please, Swan. Stop.”

The moment she drops her hands the pain becomes nearly debilitating. Her hands are bloody and he catches her wrist with his hook and leads her away, makes her sit down at the edge of the bluff. Sits down next to her, and gently takes her other hand.

Puts it on his thigh and then carefully inspects it with the slightest of touches. And then looks up.

“Swan,” he says. “This is serious. Can your magic heal this?”

She shrugs.

“Because otherwise I think I have to go and fetch Regina.”

She’s in pain now, real pain, but somehow the soft touch of his fingertips on her abraded skin and the honest worry in his eyes come together, unlock something inside her, and golden light erupts past agony and doubt and uncertainty. It is so effortless, the way her magic flows when he is near, all warmth and energy and perfect balance, and she has to force herself not to lean into his touch.

When the light fades the pain is gone, and her hands are undamaged.

He smiles. “Well done, love.”

And then he falls silent.

He does not ask whether she is all right. He does not ask what this was all about. He doesn’t pry and he doesn’t intrude.

Just nods and then looks back out into the dark valley below. Still holding her hand.

She looks at his profile and he smiles again, and then turns back to her.

“I know it seems daunting,” he says. “But you will prevail. I know it.”

How does he do that? How does he know her so well that he can just sit here and say the perfect thing, the only thing worth saying; at the edge of this cliff, surrounded by jungle and wilderness and Lost Boys and dark magic and and a tree smeared with her blood behind them?

How?

Something inside her clicks into place, a realization of how they fit together, of how he somehow always gives what is missing, a knowledge that cannot be put into words.

Yet.

But it can be put into action.

She leans forward, presses her lips to his, pulls him closer by the lapels, just like the last time, just like the first time, but this time he doesn’t respond, stays rigid before her.

She pulls back and his eyes are wide, and unhappy.

He very gently pulls her hands off his coat.

“No, love,” he says. “Not like this.”

Tears spring to her eyes, whether of sadness or frustration she cannot tell. Probably both.

“Emma,” he says, and wipes her cheek. “Please don’t cry.”

She shakes her head.

“You must know that I do not mean I don’t want you , love. Surely you know by now that nothing could be further from the truth.”

Her voice is a whisper. “It feels like it.”

“Emma.” He looks at her and smiles. It looks sad. “Please listen. Please hear me when I tell you that in a perfect world I would take you right now and show you just where 300 years of experience can take you.”

He cups her cheek.

“But not like this.” His voice is now a whisper as well. “Not as an outlet for fear and anger. Not to release pressure.” His shoulders sag and his thumb brushes her jawline so gently she fears she might break from the sheer reverence behind it. “I need it to mean something.”

-/-

It’s not standing at the bow of a ship that brings them together, a league above the choppy waves of an unfamiliar ocean, sailing through thin air on the whim of a shadow, parents and former lovers and a son below deck.

He’s quiet in the moonlight, pensive and silent, just looks to the waters below, black and teeming with wildlife and danger. And then he turns.

“Swan,” he says, and then watches her, studies her, while time grinds to a halt. When he finally speaks, his voice is low. And gentle. “What are you thinking?”

“What am I thinking?” She repeats to herself. And then sighs. “So many things.”

Images rise before her mind’s eye, of Henry, of her parents, of Neal. Of the swirling mess her life has become. Will become.

She exhales a long breath. “I’m thinking about how I don’t like complication. I think I prefer danger, even.”

He looks at her for a long time before he says, “You prevailed, love. You succeeded. You saved your boy, and your friends, and your family. You left no man behind.” He puts his hand on her arm, squeezes it briefly, and then lets it go. “Take comfort in that.”

You left no man behind. She thinks of David. But she is not the reason David is here, on this ship. The man before her is.

He’s also the reason Henry is here, and the reason they have a way home, and the reason she didn’t go stark raving mad in the jungle.

The last one weighs the most.

She looks up, thinks of him on the island, always a hundred percent in her corner, ready to listen and to fight and to die, and for what? The fact that they keep needling him, keep making jokes at his expense, keep calling him a pirate as if it were a character flaw? As if it made him less of a person? When he keeps proving them wrong. When in the end, he is the most decent of them all.

“Hook.” She takes his hand. “I need to----”

It is unsettling, his full attention. His eyes focused on nothing but her, his expression so open, his hand so warm in hers.

“Thank you,” she whispers. “Thank you for my son, and my parents, and-- everything.”

Her eyes are wet, but she blinks it away.

He just looks at her, a small, grateful smile on his lips, and she promises herself to never use the word ‘pirate’ as a denigration again.

-/-

They stumble through brush and brambles, lost in the woods at night again, but this is not Neverland. This is not a humid abyss of dangers unknown, no--- this is the Enchanted Forest inside an epic lapse of history, and if they don’t fix this mistake Emma will never be born.

It has rattled her cage much more than she’s let on, this guillotine over her head. The prospect of losing everything she has never quite had; all these promises made but never fulfilled, all these endless possibilities always just out of reach, and worst of all, best of all, the realization that---

“He wasn’t you.”

He looks up, stops hacking the underbrush for a moment. “Who wasn’t me?”

She plunks down in the middle of the roughly-cleared space and shakes her head. “Hook. The other Hook. He wasn’t you.”

He sits down next to her, puts down his sword. “Of course not, love. I’m here, after all.”

Emma shakes her head.

“That’s not what I mean,” she whispers. “You warned me, even. You told me that that man wasn’t-- wasn’t you.”

He nods slowly. “I know. This--- it was a long time ago.”

“When I looked into his eyes,” she shudders and he simply takes her hand, starts to rub it gently, but it is not the cold that is making her shudder. “When I looked at him, he was--- he was---”

“Broken,” he says. “Full of old pain and new wrath, consumed by vengeance?”

She nods.

The Hook at the tavern could not have been more different from the man before her. The pain in his eyes was still wrapped in fury, the seduction practised and empty, his charm callous and calculating. She had been a conquest and a distraction, something to while away the dead of night when memories threaten and past ghosts roam free. He had looked at her but not seen her at all, and it had nothing to do with drinks taken.

Not like the man before her now.

He has seen her, seen her , from the first moment on, seen all of her and never feared any part of it. Read her like an open book, time and time again, and believed in her, without hesitation, without doubt.

Liked her for who she was, always.

He stepped aside when he sensed his presence caused her pain, he stayed even when there was nothing for him to gain, he fought and bled and nearly perished beside her and for her, over and over, without getting a shred of hope, of validation, of gratitude in return.

He saw her and loved her and asked her for nothing.

He takes her other hand, traces his fingers very gently across where she shredded her skin back in Neverland. There’s nothing to see, not even a shadow of a scar, but his fingers follow the paths of damage from memory.

“Yes, well,” he says quietly, “That man at the tavern, he….”

His voice trails off, and he doesn’t finish. They sit in silence for a long time.

Finally Emma leans forward, catches his eye. “He what?”

She has to know.

Here, in this awful mess she has gotten them into, in this nameless clearing inside a re-forged timeline which might lead her to ruin, she has to know. Her whole life has been building to this point, this point. This one answer.

“He what?” she asks again.

And he looks at her, smiles that small, wistful smile of his, and shrugs. “He hadn’t met you, yet, love.”

And there it is.

She leans forward and presses her lips to his and his frame once again grows rigid under her hands.

She pulls back and looks at him, all iron resolve inside hopeful expectation, and she cannot do this to him again. Never do this to him again.

“Killian,” she whispers, cupping his cheek, and at the sound of his name, his real name, his eyes flutter for a moment. She lets her hand wander to the back of his neck, tangle in his hair, and waits until he’s looking at her again.

It’s still unsettling, his undivided attention.

The way he sees her.

“Killian.” This time a smile spreads across his face, wide and grateful and so, so glad. “It means something now.”

His eyes are storm clouds over a vast ocean, and he slowly runs his hand up her arm, leans his forehead against hers.

“What does it mean?” His voice is shaky and choked and gods help her-- afraid .

She has done this. She has put fear into this man.

But not anymore. It’s time to stop being afraid. For both of them.

“Everything,” she whispers, and she feels the truth of it as she says it. She has never meant anything as much as this one, small, innocuous word, that weighs more than both of their lives put together. “Everything. ”

His mouth comes down on hers, gentle and urgent and desperate and soft and hard and just like the first time, just like the first time,

but better,

but more,

and she feels herself responding and oh god, it’s so perfect.

They fit.

She knew they would.

She has always known.

And it’s not in the way he slowly takes off her clothing, and not in the way she pulls at his; not in the way he enters her and she’s so ready and they come together as if they’ve been waiting for this all of their lives--- no

It’s in the way he curls himself around her afterwards, shaking and spent and with tears in his eyes, the way he wraps them into her cloak and holds on to her and doesn’t let go---

It’s in his soft kisses to her neck, and the way his hand keeps running up and down her side, and the fact that his hook is still untethered next to them, and he lets her hold his stump, shudders as she kisses it softly and then pulls it to her heart---

It’s in all this that she knows,

knows,

that this is her timeline to write, too, and that she wants to write it

with him.

Thank you for reading!!!! ❤❤❤

#CS fic #CS fic rec #cs january joy #cs jj #cs january joy 2020 #thisonesatellite #apparently i write canon now #WHO SAW THAT COMING?#because i DID NOT #fluffy angst #with a happy ending #and canon compliance

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twh-news · 7 years ago

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'Early Man' Review: Nick Park’s Stop-Motion Marvel Is More Advanced Than Its Primitive Protagonists | IndieWire

With all due respect to Pixar and Studio Ghibli, can we start acknowledging Nick Park and Aardman Animations as the innovators they are? Those who’ve seen the “Wallace & Gromit” shorts and 2005 movie tend to love them, but the studio responsible for that iconic duo doesn’t get a fraction of the acclaim. Maybe it’s because the British studio has never been especially prolific, but with “Early Man,” its first feature film since 2015’s delightful “Shaun the Sheep Movie,” Aardman once again reminds viewers that its stop-motion creations are consistently joyous spectacles.

Beginning, as it must, with a primordial prologue about the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs — just as it strikes, two dinos who were fighting moments before embrace in fear — the film concerns a tribe of well-meaning cavemen whose happy existence is disrupted by the arrival of civilization: Bronze Age intruders show up one day, there to turn their communal cave into a mine so that Lord Nooth (Tom Hiddleston) can maintain his lavish lifestyle.

Park, a four-time Oscar winner who created Wallace & Gromit 30 years ago, is stepping into the director’s chair for the first time since 2008’s “A Matter of Loaf and Death” short. He hasn’t lost his step, with his latest fictional world being both a departure from, and continuation of, his usual settings. At the center of it is Dug (Eddie Redmayne), Park’s latest affable protagonist whose good nature can’t stop him from getting into increasingly ridiculous situations.

He and his cohort live in the crater left by the asteroid’s impact, which has grown lush and verdant in the centuries since it struck; the human price of progress was steep even then, as stone gave way to bronze and left the primitives in its wake.

Park fashions this inevitability something akin to Mordor encroaching on the Shire: industry subsuming an old idyllic world. If that setup sounds too Luddite-friendly, it’s also quite funny: Dug is among the smartest of his tribe, which is led by the very old (read: 31) Chief Bobnar (Timothy Spall), includes a rock with a face painted on it and a pig named Hognob (voiced by Park himself). He feels like a Gromit stand-in and, though not as memorable a companion, is still good for some laughs.

Under Nooth’s yoke, warring tribes settle their differences on the soccer pitch rather than the battlefield; England’s national team may be underachievers in the 21st century, but their predecessors in Real Bronzio were a dominant force to be reckoned with. And so it is that “Early Man” turns into a sports comedy of sorts, one in which the motley crew of good guys must somehow overcome an imposing squad that is in every way their better.

That’s especially difficult when Dug’s tribe is exiled to the Badlands, where they’re besieged by giant mallards, harsh conditions, and a paucity of the rabbits they used to depend on. Their temporary home proves the ideal training ground, however, its cruel landscape and craggy formations making formidable obstacles that do a right proper job of preparing the underdogs for their big match.

As ever with Aardman, the cleverest moments are also the most fleeting. Lord Nooth can be spotted reading a newspaper called the Prehistoric Times; a woman seeing sliced bread for the first time exclaims, “Wow! That’s the greatest thing since, well, ever.” The narrative as a whole is familiar, if not overly so, and after the Silent Era gags of “Shaun the Sheep Movie” it sometimes feels like “Early Man” could have gone further and been similarly ambitious.

What really gives our heroes a potential upper hand can be best described by a scene from, of all things, Carlos Reygadas’ “Post Tenebras Lux.” Assembled on a rainy field, a rugby team huddles as their leader explains the key to victory: “They’ve got individuals; we’ve got a team.” That isn’t an uncommon message in an animated movie aimed toward kids, but it is a worthy thematic bedrock.

Grade: B

“Early Man” opens in wide release on February 16.

#tom hiddleston #early man #film review #article #Aardman #Nick Park

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sumikaooba · 4 years ago

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Cox's Bazar is opening for tourists from today

Tourist organizations, as to hold, been closed seeing that March 18 due to the Corona outbreak, are formally reopening of Monday (August 17) afterward a long five months. The country government has devoted leave-in accordance with launch hotels, motels, cottages, restaurants or other organizations associated in accordance with the tourism enterprise over a constrained association subject after the honor of hygiene rules. However, the servitor commissioner referred to up to the expectation that was once 'experimentally opened'. Kamal Hossain. Deputy Commissioner. Kamal Hossain suggested the tourism industry of the shire is worried within the subsistence on countless lakh humans among quite a number of ways. Thinking as regards them, such has been decided in accordance with the launch of a confined scale tourism industry. However, the tourism enterprise has in imitation of remain blooming with the aid of strictly related in conformity with the hygiene guidelines or maintaining bodily yet communal distance. All the policies of technique committed between this regard need to remain followed. He additionally talked about as that has been done colorful into it account with the aid of wearing conferences with entire worried between the tourism industry into Cox's Bazar which includes the stakeholders. DC stated absolutely everyone worried about the tourism industry and oncoming tourists have to be compelled in accordance with be waiting via hygiene in someone's situation. Even then, agreement anyone violates the hygiene rules, it pleasure be brought underneath the law. Deputy Commissioner Kamal Hossain reported to that amount even pleasure keep round the clock inspection under the priesthood over the government Justice of the Peace on Cox's Bazar district administration. Sources said, about August 5, Cox's Bazar District Corona Infection Prevention Committee President or Deputy Commissioner. At the Zoom Conference assembly concerning the committee chaired with the aid of Kamal Hossain, that was decided in conformity with allowing the commencement concerning only the tourism industry between the Cox's Bazar indoor area. In the mild concerning this, the route over-tourism associated organizations is officially starting again beside Monday. Meanwhile, the decision according to launch a confined strip tourism enterprise in Cox's Bazar below a long period over as regards, 5 months has prompted a handle among every involved along with beach coast hotels, motels, cottages, restaurants, baby then floating traders. The recreation is back. Various measures are wight done between the light about hygiene. Coming back, the unique shape concerning the noisy tourism enterprise between Cox’s Bazar. Kalatali Mohammadia Guest House Manager. Shafiqur Rahman pronounced so much even though the tour, as was once besieged fit after Kovid-19 used to be officially reopened about Monday, a variety of media personnel came in imitation of Cox's Bazar and stayed at one of a kind resorts between the amount of Sinha's murder. Many travelers bear started out advent in imitation of Cox's Bazar beside the remaining yoke regarding days afterward as them. If the scenario is normal, the tourism human beings will lie capable according to overmatch the break of some way. Asked then the complete tourism enterprise would remain opened, the Cox's Bazar associate commissioner pronounced a decision would be taken in accordance with further expand yet decrease the start location on the tourism industry by means of gazing the degree or velocity over transmission regarding Kovid-19 while the tourism enterprise into Cox's Bazar indoor region is limited. On the other hand, Cox's Bazar District Tourist Police has also made preparations because the normal security of vacationers or the tourism industry stated SP Zillur Rahman of Cox's Bazar Tourist Police.

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antoniodatsch · 5 years ago

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YOKE SHIRE WITH JETHRO TULL’S MARTIN BARRE! Yoke Shire caught up with Martin Barre after his “50 Years of Jethro Tull” performance in Harvard Square, Cambridge, MA, USA on June 22, 2019. It was great to hear so many Jethro Tull deep tracks, see Martin rocking out on guitar and share a couple of laughs with a legend! Yoke Shire is also celebrating Jethro Tull’s 50th anniversary with their own version of “Locomotive Breath”: https://youtu.be/fZNxBk0yXnA If you love Flute Driven #ClassicRock follow Yoke Shire on Facebook. — comemorando Jethro Tull's 50th Anniversary!

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stitchedbyjessalu · 6 years ago

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iOS 12 has a new "measure" app - this is my first time using it, one more inch to go on the yoke! Pattern is #tincanknits flax - yarn is #madtosh vintage in Shire #sofancy #hightechknitting #knit #knitting #knitstagram https://www.instagram.com/p/BrRQRxPlmyE/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=jrkvg0e35vc8

#tincanknits #madtosh #sofancy #hightechknitting #knit #knitting #knitstagram

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technato · 7 years ago

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Far From Radio Interference, the Square Kilometre Array Takes Root in South Africa and the Australian Outback

The telescope’s first phase, SKA1, blazes the path to radio astronomy’s future discovery machine

Photo: CSIRO

Standing Tall: Dish antennas stand out against the sky at the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory, in Western Australia. They’re part of the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder telescope (ASKAP), which is equipped with special “phased array feeds”—sets of 188 individual receivers that pick up radio signals reflected off the dishes, giving the telescope a wide field of view.

Even in early winter, the sun is harsh in Western Australia’s Murchison shire. In this land of unpaved roads, kangaroo tracks, and low, scrubby vegetation, visitors can and sometimes do get lost. Nevertheless, here I am, a few hundred kilometers from the coast, standing on rusty red dirt, hiding under my sun hat. I am visiting a future site of one of the most ambitious telescopes ever conceived.

With just a hundred or so residents in an area bigger than the Netherlands, this piece of the Australian outback is something precious in a world swamped by wireless signals: an island of unusual calm, a clear window onto the cosmos. Back in the cool of our four-wheel-drive vehicle, one of my guides, Antony Schinckel, is emphatic about the location’s merits. “We really found this one of the best areas on the planet,” he says.

Schinckel, a telescope director with the Australian government’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, and his colleagues have already braved hostile conditions to turn a small portion of this vast territory into one of the world’s leading radio astronomy facilities. Heavy rains can cut deep ruts in roads to the site, making them all but impassible. At one point early on, Schinckel recalls, his car suffered four flat tires in the same day as it ran over one acacia tree stump after another.

But the hard work is now starting to pay off. Over the last eight years, astronomers and engineers have transformed land where cattle once grazed into a kind of astronomical garden: the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory (MRO). Dozens of gleaming-white 12-meter-wide radio dishes, tailor-made for cataloging galaxies, now dot the landscape. They’re joined by thousands of spiderlike antennas, which form a state-of-the-art array capable of picking up electromagnetic waves dating back almost to the start of the universe.

These different kinds of antennas have been used to create two telescopes at MRO that are stretching the capabilities of radio astronomy. The telescopes are also the prelude to a much more ambitious project: the Square Kilometre Array (SKA). Already more than 25 years in the making, the SKA promises to be a radio telescope of immense sensitivity, by virtue of a collecting area equivalent to more than (you guessed it) a square kilometer. When the project is complete, sometime in the early 2030s, it could encompass more than two thousand dishes in Africa and half a million or so antennas in Western Australia, dwarfing the telescopes at the MRO and other such facilities. In the process, the SKA—a collaboration among 10 member countries involving more than 500 engineers—will test the limits not only of telescope design but also of data processing pipelines, international coordination, and the infrastructure of big-science projects.

“Nobody’s ever built anything on the scale we’re attempting,” acknowledges SKA director-general Philip Diamond. But he and many other astronomers think the effort will be well worth it. SKA’s sensitivity, resolution, and ability to scan large areas of the sky quickly will let it probe some of the universe’s most pressing mysteries. By cataloging vast numbers of galaxies through their hydrogen emissions, for example, the SKA is expected to help pin down the identity of dark energy, which is driving the universe to expand at an accelerating rate. The telescope will also be able to measure an unprecedented number of pulsars—spinning stellar remnants that beam electromagnetic radiation out along their magnetic poles. When these cosmic beacons wind up in tight orbits around black holes, they can be used to hunt for evidence of new physics that might finally allow physicists to develop a unified theory of quantum mechanics and gravity.

Given its staggering scale, the SKA is proceeding in stages—beginning with a smaller incarnation called SKA1. Although just a fraction of the size of the SKA, this first iteration will still be the largest radio telescope in the world, Diamond says. Part of it will be built in South Africa and the other portion here in Western Australia, and the two sites will operate—as the full SKA will—as two independent telescopes. The South African component of SKA1 (known as SKA1-mid) will encompass 197 radio dishes with diameters of 13.5 and 15 meters. Data from those dishes will be combined to study a range of targets, including pulsars and radio emissions from hydrogen that sits relatively close to our own Milky Way galaxy.

Australia’s part, known as SKA1-low, aims to pick up lower-frequency radio waves, including ones that originated from a time, billions of years ago, when astronomical objects like stars first lit up the universe. To receive these waves, the telescope won’t use dishes. Instead, it will use many simple, fixed antennas designed to pick up signals over a very wide range of frequencies, including ones in the TV and FM bands that happen to coincide with the frequencies of some of the universe’s oldest light. To yoke those antennas together into a single powerful telescope will require state-of-the-art amplification and signal processing (more on that later).

At the MRO, astronomers are already hard at work testing prototype SKA antennas. A patch of antennas was incomplete during my visit in June, but it already looked crowded. Dozens of the spindly 2-meter-tall structures, which resemble little fir trees, were packed together in a messy steel miniforest.

By 2024, the SKA team expects to install more than 131,000 of these treelike antennas, grouped in clusters and extending into the desert for tens of kilometers along three spiral arms. The result won’t be much more photogenic than the test patch was. But if all goes well, the array could produce truly stunning results: the first detailed images of a universe as it was transforming from a murky sea of neutral hydrogen into something we’d recognize today—a black ocean of space studded with shining stars and galaxies.

Low-Frequency Forest: Australia’s part of the Square Kilometre Array radio telescope, known as SKA1-low, will consist of many fixed triangular-shaped antennas. Prototypes of the antennas, seen here, are now being tested at the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory.

Seeing Back in Time: Technicians connect the prototype fixed antennas being tested at the Murchison site. The system funnels signals from as many as 256 antennas into one optical fiber, for transmission to the next processing stage. Eventually, the site will have more than 100,000 of the low-frequency antennas, which will collectively peer back at a time when the universe was a mere billion years old.

Photos: ICRAR/Curtin University

The icons of radio astronomy are its dishes. New Mexico’s Very Large Array, for example, with its orderly lines of 25-meter-diameter dishes, has shown up in several motion pictures, most notably 1997’s Contact.

The dishes of the Very Large Array work much like an optical telescope does, by focusing incoming radio waves onto receptors. But the radio band is wide, and a telescope design that works well in one swath of frequencies isn’t necessarily the best choice for another. Basic physics dictates that the longer the wavelength to be picked up, the bigger the dish needed to maintain the same resolution. The upshot is that beyond a certain wavelength, common sense suggests a move to antennas that can directly receive the radio waves.

The idea of doing radio astronomy with such antennas is not new. In the early 1930s, the technology enabled Karl Jansky to make the first detection of radio waves from beyond the solar system. Pulsars were discovered serendipitously in 1967, when their clockwork-like signals were detected using an array of dipole antennas outside Cambridge, in the United Kingdom.

But at some point, says astronomer Randall Wayth, the longer wavelengths—the sort that are ideal for such fixed antenna arrays—fell out of vogue in radio astronomy. More recently, renewed interest in that part of the radio band is being spurred by astronomers’ desire to peer far back into the universe’s past. And, conveniently, they can now lean on a range of advances in digital electronics, signal processing, and computing to create a new generation of arrays.

“It’s definitely a renaissance,” says Wayth, an associate professor at Curtin University, in Perth, and a senior research fellow at Western Australia’s International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research. The general approach bears more than a passing resemblance to phased-array radar systems and to the antenna arrays being developed for 5G cellular networks.

Wayth directs one of the telescopes at the leading edge of this revival: the Murchison Widefield Array, or MWA. As one of the official “precursor” telescopes for SKA, the MWA is helping to work out the kinks in combining many passive antennas into a single state-of-the-art telescope.

As with SKA1-low, the Murchison Widefield Array’s antennas are designed to pick up radio waves at the lower end of frequencies used for radio astronomy. SKA1-low’s design calls for antennas that are sensitive from 50 to 350 megahertz. MWA’s antennas detect signals in a somewhat narrower range, from 80 to 300 MHz. In contrast with SKA1-low’s fir-tree antennas, those of the MWA call to mind sunbathing knee-high spiders. They’re on metal grids designed to reflect incoming radio waves back up to them.

Although their antennas look different, the Murchison Widefield Array and SKA1-low share the same basic approach as well as a big scientific ambition: gazing into a still-murky period in the early universe called the Epoch of Reionization. The name refers to a time, roughly 13 billion years ago and about a billion years after the big bang, when early stars and other objects heated neutral hydrogen atoms enough to knock their electrons off, transforming the cosmos from an opaque sea of neutral hydrogen into the transparent universe we see today. Remarkably, it’s still possible to detect radio waves emitted by those neutral hydrogen atoms. The waves were emitted with a wavelength of 21 centimeters, but by the time they reach Earth, billions of years of cosmic expansion will have stretched them to a couple of meters.

The Murchison Widefield Array is racing to be the first telescope to detect those elongated echoes of the far-distant past. Astronomers hope the study of this radiation will help reveal more about how reionization altered and shaped the early universe—for example, how structures like galaxies formed and changed in that pivotal epoch. “It’s one of the major phases during the evolution of the universe which is completely unknown,” says Benedetta Ciardi, an astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, Germany, and a staffer at one of MWA’s competitors, the LOFAR telescope, based in the Netherlands.

Photos: Top: Ben Scandrett/Department of Industry; Bottom: ICRAR/Curtin University

Spider Town: Randall Wayth, an associate professor at Curtin University and director of the Murchison Widefield Array, crouches next to Tile 107 of the telescope [above]. An aerial photo of the MWA [bottom] shows more of the telescope’s tiles, each of which contains 16 of the spiderlike antennas.

To hunt for signals from this epoch—or to perform any of its observations, actually—the Murchison Widefield Array sops up radio waves from many directions at once. Incoming signals are boosted at the center of each spidery antenna by a pair of low-noise amplifiers and then sent to a nearby “beamformer.” There, waveguides of various lengths, printed on circuit boards, impart delays to the antenna signals. With the right selection of delays, the beamformers virtually “tilt” the array, so that radio waves arriving from a particular patch of the sky all seem to reach the antennas at the same time—as they would if they were being received by a single large antenna. SKA1-low will do this entire process digitally, without the waveguides. That approach will enable it to construct multiple beams—as if the array were pointing to multiple spots in the sky simultaneously.

The MWA antennas are divided into groups. Signals from each group are sent to a single receiver that distributes the signals among various frequency channels and then sends them on to the observatory’s central building over fiber. There, a set of field-programmable gate arrays and graphics processing units correlate the data, multiplying the signals from each receiver with those of every other one and integrating over time. This number crunching is the heart of interferometry [PDF], a process that combines the signals from multiple dishes or antennas to create a single strong signal, as though it came from one telescope.

Much like a single dish, the resolution of such a virtual telescope is inversely proportional to its physical size. Bigger is, of course, better. In particular, for a virtual telescope consisting of a set of dishes or fixed antennas, the telescope’s maximum resolution is set by its longest baseline, or distance between a pair of elements. The longer that distance is, the finer the resolution.

Astronomers have used this property to construct virtual telescopes that reach across continents, enabling resolutions so fine that they have been used to home in on the area around the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. But size isn’t the only consideration. A single pair of antennas, however far apart, will give you only a small piece of information about the light emitted from an object. To construct pictures, astronomers must fill out the array. More fixed antennas or dishes yield a combinatorial explosion of different baselines, which can then be used to create a telescope-like image through a process called aperture synthesis. The imaging capabilities of such an array thus depend on several factors, including the total number of antennas, the span of the array, and the details of how the antennas are placed relative to one another.

At the Murchison Widefield Array, the output from the observatory’s servers is sent down hundreds of kilometers of fiber, first to the coastal city of Geraldton and then on for another 400 kilometers or so to a supercomputing center in Perth.

The MWA can ship more than 25 terabytes of data a day to the Perth facility. But in the coming years, that data rate will be dwarfed by the output of SKA1-low. The array’s 131,000 antennas will collectively produce upwards of a terabyte of data every second, says Keith Grainge, an astrophysicist at the University of Manchester, in England, who leads the SKA working group dedicated to signal and data movement. “It’s about an eighth of an Internet that we’ve got to transport,” Grainge says.

Once the data reaches Perth, it must be further processed in order to transform it into sky maps and other scientific products that astronomers can use. This is an exascale problem, says Andreas Wicenec, a professor at the University of Western Australia who is studying the computational needs of the project. Wicenec estimates that SKA1-low will need a supercomputer at least as fast as the current world-record holder, China’s Sunway TaihuLight. The only hitch is that this supercomputer must be significantly cheaper and consume just a fifth as much power as the Sunway TaihuLight, which can eat up 15 megawatts performing computations.

Wicenec isn’t fazed. “If we don’t get such a machine,” he says, “we will still be able to do amazing science, just not the most challenging projects initially. That’s the advantalge of radio astronomy,” he adds. “You can easily scale up and down and just do what’s currently affordable. A few years later we can then ramp up.”

Photos: CSIRO

Gathering Sun: The Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory isn’t on the grid. A new, 1.6-megawatt array of solar panels will help power the two telescopes on site as well as SKA-1 low.

The SKA’s success will depend in part on making sure Murchison’s radio window stays as clear as possible. Cellular signals, electric motors, TV transmitters, arc welding, and many other sources of RF can interfere with observations.

The site itself is protected as much as it can be from outside noise. A “radio-quiet zone” extends out to 260 km around the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory. Mining companies and others that want a new license to operate any sort of transmitter within the zone must first consult with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation. “The intention is to protect the site from 70 MHz to 25.25 gigahertz,” says Carol Wilson, spectrum manager for the MRO and a senior member of the IEEE. Recently, she says, a team using the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder telescope, or ASKAP, which sits not far from the Murchison Widefield Array, found a gas cloud by observing a slight dip in the signal from a galaxy that emitted its light roughly 5 billion years ago. The dip in the signal was over a range of frequencies completely covered by a cellphone band. “It would have been impossible to do that in a more populated area,” Wilson says.

The designers of the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory have gone to great lengths to make sure the telescopes and associated equipment themselves don’t add to the problem. The observatory’s central building—a one-story structure housing workshops, desks, racks of processors, and a maser used to distribute clock signals to the telescopes—is completely wrapped in a continuous steel sheet. Fiber, power lines, and air pass into this Faraday cage through openings that are too narrow and long for a range of radio waves to traverse. The main entrance boasts a double-doored vestibule that acts like an airlock for radio waves; anyone hoping to enter must lever one door closed before opening the other one.

Such precautions help make the site extraordinarily quiet. And the Murchison Widefield Array is taking advantage of that silence to hunt for the first indications of the Epoch of Reionization, which should show up in subtle changes in how neutral hydrogen is distributed over the sky. When SKA1-low arrives, it will be able to map this transition in greater detail, giving astronomers a glimpse of how ancient stars and galaxies brought the universe out of its dark ages and helped shape the cosmos we see today.

Important challenges still must be overcome before workers even begin building SKA1-low, which could start in 2019 and continue for five years. A team of engineers is validating the antenna design, using a combination of simulation and measurements, in preparation for a key review next year. Antennas can interfere with one another, notes MWA director Wayth, and in some cases they can cause signals to cancel out, creating blind spots. “Right now we’re making sure we fully understand the electromagnetics of how the stations work just to make sure nothing unexpected pops up,” says Wayth, who is also part of the design team for the Australian SKA array.

But Wayth says most of the technical challenges have already been worked out. At this point, the biggest issues are logistics and infrastructure, he says. “It’s in the middle of nowhere, [and] it needs to have power and communications and timing and everything distributed to it.”

In South Africa, some of the dishes will be able to tap into local grid power, but in Australia, all the energy must be produced on site. Both observatories aim to keep their carbon footprint to a minimum. Until this year, the MRO had run on diesel generators. It now has 1.6 MW worth of solar panels, and vast packs of lithium-ion batteries that can store 2.6 megawatt-hours—more than half of what SKA1-low will need when it is fully operational. Some of the more far-flung patches of the array will likely get their own solar panels.

Maintenance is another challenge. These days, the Murchison Widefield Array gets hit by lightning about once a year, which might knock out a few sets of antennas and a receiver. But MWA’s antennas are all within a few kilometers of one another. The sheer number of SKA1-low antennas—along with the fact that they will be 2 meters tall and extend tens of kilometers from the center—could tax those maintaining the array.

There is also the matter of money. At the moment, the budget for building SKA1 in South Africa and Australia is capped at about €675 million (about US $800 million, or about a billion Australian dollars), an amount set by the project’s 10 member countries: Australia, Canada, China, India, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, South Africa, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. But that funding won’t cover the entire cost of SKA1 with the specifications that astronomers are hoping for. “Even though we’re looking at spending effectively a billion dollars on SKA phase 1,” says director-general Diamond, “you can’t do everything within even a billion.” He’s trying to recruit more countries into the partnership, which could boost funding.

But if all goes well, Wayth says, SKA1-low should give radio astronomers a factor-of-10 boost in telescope sensitivity and other capabilities. “It will be a sensational telescope,” he says. “My old boss once said radio astronomers don’t usually get out of bed for anything less than an order of magnitude. And in this case, there’s lots to get out of bed for.”

This article appears in the December 2017 print issue as “Engineering the World’s Biggest Radio Telescope.”

Far From Radio Interference, the Square Kilometre Array Takes Root in South Africa and the Australian Outback syndicated from http://ift.tt/2Bq2FuP

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eufoniaradio · 3 years ago

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S23.E03: Showstalgia

Del programa del 14 de Febrero, recordando los inicios del show...

Episodio 3 de la temporada 23, al aire hoy, 14 de Febrero de 2022. Les acompañaremos Charly y Ciro, con Jairo en controles. Ya habiendo madurado un poco y pasando las cursilerías del “día del amor” preferimos que sea el día de la amistad: Continuamos la pequeña celebración de nuestros 22 años al aire con un par de programas (éste es el primero) mostrando música programada en la primera década…

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#agent cooper #arnold #house of not #la porkoj #Maximum Indifference #mermaid kiss #roundhead #urusen #vast #ventilader #yoke shire

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christinaepilzauthor-blog · 7 years ago

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Lordship in the Tenth-century – What was its Political and Social Function?

by Annie Whitehead

"No man can make himself king, but the people have the choice to select as king whom they please, but after he is consecrated as king, he then has dominion over the people and they cannot shake his yoke from their neck."

So said Aelfric of Eynsham, (c955-c1010), and he tells us here of the absolute nature of kingship. The king is the lord of all the English, so if we are to discover the function of lordship, we should begin by examining the role of the king.

King Edgar

By the tenth-century ideas about the spiritual role of kingship had developed along Carolingian lines. A well-documented example of this is Edgar's coronation at Bath in 973. One school of thought is that Edgar delayed his coronation until he had reached the canonical age of thirty, but it is unlikely that he could have reigned successfully for so long (he succeeded his brother Eadwig in 959) without having been consecrated earlier in his reign, particularly in view of what Aelfric has to say about consecration. [1] It is more probable that this coronation was based on the Frankish notion of 'imperium', stressing the king's duty before God. Wulfstan, Archbishop of York, expanded this idea in his Institutes of Polity. His view was that a Christian king should be a just shepherd to his Christian flock, he was to help the righteous and to afflict the evil-doers, especially thieves and robbers. His true function was to purify his people before God and the world. [2] The mutual obligation between the king and his subjects is illustrated by an incident in Aethelred the Unready's reign. With the death of Swein Forkbeard, Aethelred was asked to return from exile in Normandy by the Witan (council), who declared that "no lord was dearer to them than their rightful lord, if only he would govern his kingdom more justly than he had done in the past."[3] The king was king, but his subjects would not allow him to neglect his duty to them. Yet neither would they neglect to exalt a praise-worthy monarch. Florence of Worcester* summed up the virtues of King Edgar thus:-

"In the winter and spring, he used to make progress through all the provinces of England and enquire diligently whether the laws of the land and his own ordinances were obeyed, so that the poor might not suffer wrong and be oppressed by the powerful…Thus his enemies on every side were filled with awe, and the love of those who owed him allegiance was secured."

There were, of course, more personal relationships, not only between the king and his subjects, but between the lord and his man. The argument continues among historians as to whether pre-conquest England was feudal; suffice to say that there was an English equivalent to the Frankish oath of vassalage, this being the Hold-Oath. The oath was essentially negative, a promise to do nothing to harm the lord. It included a gesture of bowing to the lord. The lord in his turn had certain obligations to his man.

"By the Lord, before whom this hallowed thing is holy, I will be steadfast and true to X, to love all he loves and shun all that he shuns, and never, by will or by thought or by deed do aught of what is loathsome to him, as long as he upholds me as I am willing to earn and fulfil all that our understanding was, when I bowed to him and took his will."

Naturally, the king could not rule without counsel. The witenagemot, or witan, was the royal council, and had the right, rather than the privilege, to advise the king. The king's thegns owed their status and position to the king and were rewarded for their service (the word thegn originally meant servant.) It was usually the king's thegns who were appointed as reeves, responsible for administration in the localities as a check on the powerful ealdormen.

The king with his witan

The most usual form of reward was that of a land grant. Many charters confirming these land grants still exist, such as King Edgar's grant of land at Kineton to his thegn Aelfwold in 969. These grants, known as bookland, were not the same as the fief of feudal Frankia. They were granted by the king in the form of a book (charter) for services rendered. Aelfwold was granted the land at Kineton for all his life and could leave it to whomever he chose. The estate was free from all service except "fixed military service and the restoration of bridges and fortresses." Many grants were made to the Church, who in turn leased out land in return for service. A good example of this comes from Oswald of Worcester, who lists the service required of the beneficiaries of the land. They should fulfil the law of riding as riding men should, they should pay dues to the Church, swear to be humbly subject to the bishop and lend horses, build bridges, and send hunting spears. Initially these endowments were made to the Church from the king, and only he could turn folkland into bookland. It soon became, however, the most common way for a lord to reward his man. A grant by Aethelred the Unready shows how far he was prepared to support his men. His thegn, Aethelwig, gave Christian burial to men killed fighting in defence of a thief. Rather than censure Aethelwig, as Ealdorman Leofsige advised, Aethelred granted his thegn the forfeited land of the brothers who had been killed. [3] Not all thegns were king's thegns; many of them had another lord to whom they owed their allegiance. When these thegns died, the heriot (war gear) was surrendered to their lord and not to the king.

Aethelred the Unready

There was another aspect to lordship, an extension of the personal bond into the field of law. In the reign of Edward the Elder (899-924) a letter was written to the king explaining the history of an estate at Fonthill, Wiltshire. It describes how a thief, Helmstan, was required to give an oath to clear himself of the charges brought against him. He asked his lord Ordlaf to intercede for him, which Ordlaf did, even though his man was guilty. [4] This illustrates how a lord was bound to protect his man, whether innocent or guilty. Though the law codes might have forbidden the lord from doing this, often it was more beneficial for a man to appeal to his lord in this way than to appeal in the hundred courts. By the middle of the tenth-century it was becoming customary for lords, ecclesiastical or lay, to receive grants of jurisdiction from the king. Usually these grants were laid down in the charters as 'sake and soke'. The term implied jurisdiction and control of a court. It was not granted lightly, and these delegated rights were intended to emphasise rather than undermine royal authority. While the landowner enjoyed immunity from public courts, the court over which he presided was not held for his men, but was attended by men drawn from the neighbourhood. There was also a much more specific form of private jurisdiction. All lords, be they bishops, earls, thegns or abbots, were held responsible for the behaviour of their men. "Such a responsibility involved an exercise in judgement, which would easily be formalised into the giving of judgement." (HR Loyn) Fortunately, the monarchy was strong enough to ensure that the worst abuses were avoided. Along with sake and soke, other judicial rights were specified. 'Toll' gave the lord the right to take toll on goods sold within the estate, and 'team' gave the right to supervise the presentation of convincing evidence that goods for sale actually belonged to the person selling them. 'Infangenetheof' gave the lord the right to hang a thief if he had been caught on the estate with the stolen goods still in his possession. By the end of the period, large numbers of hundred courts were in private hands.

A charter of King Aethelred's to his 'faithful man'

Lords, of course, had always been involved with the public courts. Earls and bishops presided over the shire courts. It was here that arrangements were made for the collection of taxes. It was in the interests of landowners to be represented, as the king always was by his servant the shire-reeve. It was also important for lords to establish a presence at the hundred court, where much money could be lost and won. They were also commanded to give full support to the hundredsmen, whose job it was to supervise legal trading and to discourage cattle theft. King Edgar specifically ordered ealdormen Oslac, Aelfhere, and Aethelwine to give such support. "And they are to send them in all directions, that this measure may be known to both the poor and the rich." [5] Military duties were linked with the social function of lordship. From the time of King Ine (688-725) forfeiture of land and a heavy fine of 120 schillings was the penalty for a lord neglecting military service. After 899, as well as national obligations to fyrd service, and building bridges and fortifications, men were now to group themselves into tithings and hundreds to protect themselves. Ealdormen and thegns not only formed the select body of the king's household retainers, but were, as landlords, responsible for the organisation, the summons and the assembling of the fighting forces. They were also involved in the financial and personal organisation which was essential to ensure that competent levies turned out to perform military duties on behalf of their estate. Lords, then, led their men and were responsible for them in times of peace and war and were at both times high up on the social scale, just beneath the king. Although it was not necessarily a feudal society, a constant theme runs throughout tenth-century English society, that of mutual obligation. At the highest level, the king could demand loyalty and service from his subjects, but in return must rule them justly and protect them. The thegns, earls, and other landowners owed service to the king in judicial, military and personal capacities, for which they were rewarded. They in turn could expect loyalty and service from their men, but they were responsible for them and must protect them. Running though society in this way, the organised system which developed from the simple notion of personal loyalty was an integral part of all areas of central and local administration. [1] DJV Fisher – The Anglo-Saxon Age Ch 12 [2] HR Loyn – The Governance of Anglo-Saxon England Ch4 [3] EHD – i 117 [4] EHD- i 102 [5] IV Edgar 'Wihtbordesstan' Code EHD i 41 * The authorship of the work of Florence is considered to owe more to a fellow monk, John of Worcester

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Annie Whitehead is an historian and novelist who writes about the Anglo-Saxon era. The author of two award-winning novels set in Anglo-Saxon Mercia, she was also a contributor to 1066 Turned Upside Down, a re-imagining of the events leading up to the Battle of Hastings. She is a member of the Royal Historical Society and an editor of the EHFA blog. Currently she is working on a contribution to a non-fiction book to be published by Pen & Sword Books in the summer of 2017. Her novel Alvar the Kingmaker is set in the tenth-century during the reigns of Eadwig, Edgar and Aethelred the Unready and contains many scenes where the above-mentioned laws and charters were put into effect.

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