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✨⚔ The Veilguard 🛡✨

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Hello detective Neve!

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DRAGON AGE: THE VEILGUARD (2024) | neve gallus [1/∞]

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Most beautiful woman on my screen in 2024

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Want to learn something new in 2022??

Absolute beginner adult ballet series (fabulous beginning teacher)

40 piano lessons for beginners (some of the best explanations for piano I’ve ever seen)

Excellent basic crochet video series

Basic knitting (probably the best how to knit video out there)

Pre-Free Figure Skate Levels A-D guides and practice activities (each video builds up with exercises to the actual moves!)

How to draw character faces video (very funny, surprisingly instructive?)

Another drawing character faces video

Literally my favorite art pose hack

Tutorial of how to make a whole ass Stardew Valley esque farming game in Gamemaker Studios 2??

Introduction to flying small aircrafts

French/Dutch/Fishtail braiding

Playing the guitar for beginners (well paced and excellent instructor)

Playing the violin for beginners (really good practical tips mixed in)

Color theory in digital art (not of the children’s hospital variety)

Retake classes you hated but now there’s zero stakes:

Calculus 1 (full semester class)

Learn basic statistics (free textbook)

Introduction to college physics (free textbook)

Introduction to accounting (free textbook)

Learn a language:

Ancient Greek

Latin

Spanish

German

Japanese (grammar guide) (for dummies)

French

Russian (pretty good cyrillic guide!)

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Mongolian uniform for Olympics is the most beautiful thing i’ve ever seen

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Kitty stomp

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plz reblog for science

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Please return us to a world where Notp and squick are used for a ship you don’t like instead of just making up a load of bullshit about how immoral it is or w/e lol 

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Have created a new novel-writing approach for myself that I am calling Very Gentle Writing. Very Gentle Writing is an approach for people who live nearly every waking second in self-castigation and actually need peaceful slowness to unleash their creativity. 

Very Gentle Writing does not set staggering word count goals and then feel bad about it. No! Very Gentle Writing for me sets an extremely low word count and then feels magnificently productive when the low bar is exceeded (which is easy…it’s a low bar, I mean really low). 

Very Gentle Writing is about saying hey yo maybe I just want to listen to a chill playlist for a while and feel one sentence spill out. Go me! 

Very Gentle Writing is kind of about realizing I have a really limited amount of time to write in between work, and adulting, and taking care of a thousand life responsibilities, and trying to heal&deal from trauma in 2020. So I want that writing time to be….just…..nice. 

Very Gentle Writing means I have a goal of enjoying every single time I sit down to write. Really. I use all the fun words first. 

Very Gentle Writing came to me as an idea when I started to think about how as someone actively trying to recover from a lot of lifelong trauma, the usual word harder!! Work harder!! mantras in the world of “people doing hard things” didn’t motivate me at all, they only hurt me. I truly need a voice saying work less hard, personally.

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Mood study sketch for @/dustydabean on Instagram. Just a regular dog hangin’ out with their buddy 🐯

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it all begins with a rebellion

This is inspired from a drawing made by the lovely lesbina in the moraghid discord server.

Pre-relationship, fusion fic. Maybe I’ll write more someday.

It’s strange how easy your life might change in just under a day.

It all begins with a rebellion.

It’s one that’s been brewing for a while now, ever since the young Emperor refused to go to war with the Gormotti for a piece of their land. They had underestimated how unhappy the civilians of Mor Ardain were. With the Senators stirring unrest, and the military fractured underneath its various generals, it was only a matter of time before the tide of dissatisfaction turned against them.

Mòrag had been paranoid in the final days leading to the collapse of the Empire. She had studied maps of Mor Ardain and its many trade routes. She had befriended friendly ship captains where she could and squirrelled away coin and physical assets in foreign banks under the guise of long-forgotten Ladair relatives. When the opportunity to audit the Royal Treasury had presented itself to her, she had quickly taken two of Mor Ardain’s most precious Core Crystals, knowing how easily such things could be turned into weapons.

She had not anticipated using one of them herself.

They’re helping Senator Stulc and his wife board the small salvaging vessel Mòrag’s second had acquired when a contingent of soldiers close in, having been alerted to the location of the smugglers’ cove.

Niall, running on nothing but worry and adrenaline, stumbles in front of them, throwing his arms up defiantly. “It’s me you want!” he shouts. “Let the others go. Please.”

He’s brave—braver than Mòrag who is all too happy to throw some other stuffy, well-meaning Senator under the line of fire.

“Get back inside, Niall!”

“These are my people, Mòrag! I won’t let them die.”

“Who the fuck cares?” she all but screams. “Idiot brother!” This is all for you, don’t you understand?

But of course he doesn’t. Because he’s never had to face his mortality as intimately as she had faced hers.

She picks him up by the scruff of his shirt and shoves him into the direction of her second-in-command. “Don’t let him out of your sight.”

“Sir!”

With her back towards her brother, she takes a deep breath and rushes for the swarm of advancing soldiers. She doesn’t notice the soft blue light that begins to emanate from her brother’s haversack, which had fallen in the chaos.

"Mòrag!"

She's a whirlwind of death, her rapier snaking into joints and cracks with pinpoint accuracy. The buckler that she had taken from her second-in-command slams into a nearby foot soldier, redirecting a spray of bullets away from the ship. She's careful to stay within melee range, their eagerness an advantage: with too many bodies between her and the Ardanian gunners, getting a clear shot on her would take skill and a lot of luck. She only hopes that she can prove to be adequate distraction for her fleeing countrymen.

Blue light begins to trace the outline of her figure, curling along her arms and across her torso. Some of the soldiers scramble back, alarmed at the ghostly aura that begins to manifest around her. It's a short respite, however. A brace of gunners take advantage of the clear field, emptying a clip at her general direction.

Mòrag grimaces and braces herself against the small buckler, barely large enough to cover her sword arm. Pain drowns her other senses as she falls to her knees, darkness slowly consuming her vision. The last thing she sees is the Ardanian salvaging vessel flying westward towards freedom before everything goes dark.

- - -

It's a different woman who steps out of the steaming body of Mòrag Ladair.

She is made brilliant by the bright blue flames that outline her body. A wingtip steel visor hides much of her face beyond the curl of smug lips, emphasizing the eerie flicker of blue along her black stresses. Though she wears the uniform of an Ardanian officer, there’s a provocative quality to the sway of her hips and the transparent cloth that covers her lower torso. Behind her, a long wisp of a man falls to his knees, offering a double-bladed katana with easy reverence. “We’ve work to do, it seems.”

“Pity,” the woman says, adjusting her grip on the katana, watching her brother-in-arms dissipate into her form. “A full body resonance—and I get to spend what time I’ve been given fighting against impossible odds.”

She cracks an exultant smile. “So be it.”

Death follows her wake like a wildfire left unchecked. She cleaves into the soldiers with frightening speed, revelling in the body that she has been gifted. It’s not often that a human succeeds in awakening the Jewel of Mor Ardain, let alone one that has had a taste of battle.

In a matter of minutes, she has decimated the incoming force of foot soldiers.

Aegaeon reappears by her elbow, the exertion of maintaining a form evident from the sweat of his brow and his fading smile. “She won’t have the energy to keep both of us.”

“I’ll send her your regards.”

“My thanks.” He returns to his Core Crystal which the woman quickly scoops up and pockets.

She heads to the wharf in search of a vessel.

- - -

Mòrag wakes to the gentle press of heat against her skin, the warmth of the morning sun like a heavy blanket. She aches all over and feels the world around her teeter when she tries to move.

The creak of wood and easy sway of the ground underneath her startles her. If not for the sudden arm that wraps around her, she would have fallen on her side, just below the crude cot from where she rests.

“Easy there,” a mellifluous voice murmurs from beside her. “I’d hate for you to undo all the hard work that I’ve done so far.”

Her senses sharpen, pinpricks of light fading into dark, muddy browns that hint at her whereabouts. “Let go of me,” she demands, straining against her captor’s hold.

“Will you behave?”

She grits her teeth. No, she wants to say, but knows that she will have a better chance of escaping if some slack is given. So she relaxes her limbs, focusing on her breathing to stabilize her senses.

"Good girl," the woman murmurs, leaning into her space to reveal strands of bluish purple hair escaping a pair of braided buns. “I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. My Drivers tend to be feisty little things.”

“I’m not little,” Mòrag sputters.

“I’ve had taller Drivers.”

It’s an awkward conversation: one that starts out accusatory before meandering into the territory of expository with a dash of flirtatious. Mòrag knows about Crystal Cores, Blades, and Drivers, but she had never been interested in the specifics until now.

Because it isn’t every day that you get to awaken a Crystal Core, one that’s so attuned to your soul that you get a fully-formed Blade instead of the less visible spectres that Mòrag is familiar with. Brighid is shockingly solid—a presence that Mòrag cannot so easily ignore—and it unsettles and invigorates her in equal measure.

She’s in a strange boat with an even stranger woman by her side, an empire crumbling behind her, and a brother, lost, waiting to be found again.

It feels like the beginning of something good, something exhilarating: a promise whispered in the dead of night, the thrill of numerous possibilities racing along her spine.

It feels like a start.

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