The Aurelian Cycle, Flamefall, pages 430-432

Power's Character arch is my favorite in this series. And this is one (of many) of my favorite power moments.

This is also good practice for me because I hate drawing people 🙃 so trying to draw the same person over and over was interesting.

My Rough interpretation of the three main dragon breeds from the Aurelian Cycle Trilogy. I might mess with the designs more in sketches later as I reread the series. I feel like I especially struggled to nail down a color I was happy with for the Aurelian in the middle. For a first go at their designs without roughing out thumbnail ideas first I'm pretty happy with them. I gave up a little on coloring towards the end 😅. I need help finding a way to increase my love for the coloring process. I like to sketch and line and then I start to lose interest.

hello i have written a little aurelian cycle fic about crissa!

I’ve drawn a lot of Antigones since reading the Aurelian cycle, I just never posted any of them 🫠

finally wrote and posted the Rock and Lotus fic i've been wanting to write literally since Furysong came out, so uhhhh if you want some bittersweet post-canon Rock and Lotus you should read it here

(here's a little teaser if you want <3)

"You came back to me." "And you came back to me."

I bring to you some AnnieLee because if I don't see fanart of them then I'LL make fanart of them

I posted this on my instagram (@/risaru.draws) but thought I'd post it here too

Little compilation of some of my favorite Griff moments:

It's been years, but I'm pretty sure "the true gift of freedom is to act with this civility" was the moment I fell in love with the character. It is such a powerful quote in Griff's specific context because no, the true gift of freedom should be choosing your own path in life and being able to provide for your family, and that's what he should be focusing on. But even with everything going on, Griff is thinking about all that is wrong with the world and doing what he can to make it a little more right, even at great risk for himself. Same thing that happens when he is honest with Freyda. He is jeopardizing his life and all he worked for because he refuses to stoop to the dragonborn's level, ironically while literally crouching on the floor like a dog because that's what they think he is.

To think that for all his swagger, in Furysong he's so unsure of what kind of person he's going to be now that he has power. Like, my man, how did you ever doubt? He's got more integrity and selflessness than all the Pythians squeezed together. He cares so much about his friends and their happiness, even when the circumstances could justify a "every man for himself" mentality. Another contrast with the dragonborn who have no loyalty for one another except when it can improve their status. And he is just so kind and sensitive.

It just goes to show how much of his arrogance was an act to survive the dragonborn's dehumanization, and still he must have internalized it a bit. I'm thinking specifically of all the poetry scenes with Delo in Flamefall, when he thinks he doesn't belong to the story because he is a peasant.

I just know that he's going to make an amazing king. I wish we had a "ten years later" sort of epilogue, to see what everyone is up to. I'm sure he'll have pulled Norcia out of poverty and made it a global power in the Medean. With Delo taking care of all the paperwork, there's nothing to stop him!

Delo's love language is acts of service, Griff's is touch.

Annie and Lee's is probably quality time, which explains why they are so miserable for two books and half of the third. But then Farhall!

I was reading some Aurelian Cycle reviews, as one does, and I have to say I am loving how the fandom has collectively decided that Griff is the hottest human being in existence even if it's never explicitly said. Like, Delo refers to him as "beautiful" once but he's biased ofc, and any other description of him is just physical with no opinion added. I'm not sure if it's because of the eyes (blue eyes are always considered attractive, everybody comments on how bright they are and how they contrast with his olive skin) or if it's assumed because charismatic, capable male character, but I'm all for it

griff not trusting himself to not have hurt delo while he was drunk makes me so insane because everyone except for him knows he never could

This is such a small thing, but in Furysong in their last scene together after the League meeting, the bed they are lying in is described as an "olive-tree bed" a couple of times. In the Odyssey, Odysseus built a bed out of an olive tree for himself and Penelope at the start of their marriage, which she later uses to test if he really is her husband, back after so many years away. The bed is generally thought to symbolize the strength and stability of their marriage even when they are forced apart by the war and the circumstances that follow it, and I thought it was interesting that it was referenced at that point in the story, when Delo and Griff are about to be separated! It's just a detail, but I love that Munda included it, and it's another small our-world reference specifically for the two of them!

Hi Mor! Do Delo and Griff have IRL poem parallels too?

hi! i'm not sure if you mean parallels within the text to an in-world poem or to an our-world poem, but for delo and griff i'd say it's about the same thing. as far as i can tell, they don't have an overarching, not explicitly acknowledged meta-connection to any of it like annie and lee do (ie the aurelian cycle as a whole), but the in-world poetry delo and griff are compared to explicitly are uriel and his lover sebastion, the two dragonborn in the aurelian cycle who had a tragic end but were buried together. and then for the our-world aspect, the lines about uriel and his lover are adapted from lines about achilles and patroclus in the iliad (the "let a single urn contain our ashes" section delo and griff read in flamefall ch 21) (flamefall ch 21 is where the most explicit discussion of the comparisons between delo/griff and the doomed lovers are, and briefly furysong ch 25).

and then in furysong annie and lee and delo and griff all get the odyssey homecoming themes :)

You two always have the best analyses!

I want to add, it's easy to see how even someone like Delo bought into this worldview, besides of course the fact that it had been drilled into him since birth. He sees Griff as special and so deserving of special treatment because he's the only one in Norcia who can afford to have a personality that's not completely subservient, because no matter how much the Pythians tell themselves that peasants can't ride, they need Griff's skills in the air to win the war and they know it. As Delo puts it, "The Pythian fleet can't afford to drop Griff Gareson", not as they could afford to drop Mabalena who was a weaker rider. The other Norcians don't have the privilege of being able to push the dragonborn's buttons or to rebel in small ways like Griff does, because any attention on them may mean immediate death. Delo perceives Griff as charismatic and self-confident (and equates that to worth) but assumes that all the other humble-riders, and servants in general, are meek and uninteresting, because that's the only side of them he is allowed to see, while we know a little from Griff's POV how their actual personalities differ when dragonborns are around vs only Norcians. When during the Liberation he sees Moira attack his sister he is shocked that the girl he perceived as gentle and quiet is ferocious and bloodthirsty, because he just assumed that what he saw was all there was, even if we know he is smart enough to know otherwise.

Same in Callipolis, even the patricians that are more sympathetic have limited contact with the peasants except as numbers and percentages on their papers, and those percentages often are about illiteracy rates or production value, so it's easy to perpetuate the dragonborn's worldview even unconsciously, and believe that the few that they see in privileged positions are the exceptions. Tyndale takes Megara under his wing, despite him being a bigot and her being from a poor working class family, because her interest in dragontongue poetry elevates her in his eyes, but that somehow doesn't translate in recognizing the personhood of others of her birth. And Megara herself does the same, fighting for the rights of the urban working class she belonged to, while disparaging serfs in her writing.

I know that was not the focus of that part of Flamefall, but it struck me how much easier it is to see somebody as deserving if that somebody has a voice to protest, while the people who more than any other need someone to stick up for them are often the ones that can't even express the need. Even Lee who, like Delo, has the emotional intelligence to develop his ideas of equality early on, only does so after people he is emotionally connected to (Annie and the Sutters) suffer, and it takes Crissa to make him realize how much his protests have been hurting Annie. And Annie herself in Flamefall is the most disconnected she's ever been from the masses (emotionally if not physically), and so it's easier for her to focus on the war than it is to face the repercussions of Atreus' policies.

now i'm thinking about how annie was the new regime's token serf girl and was treated as different from all the other lower-class people. "well, the other peasants wouldn't be able to understand the nuances, but YOU can, annie." and then how delo is willing to help griff but not the rest of the norcians because griff doesn't deserve, say, punishment or oppression, because he's different.

it's the same! it's happening again and it's happening across regimes and across time. they're made to represent their class and/or gender (annie being the token marginalization) and looked down on for it, but at the same time they are treated as apart or different from it. and it comes from both angles - people who don't want to acknowledge that annie and griff are talented or (at the least) fully people (ie most of the patricians or dragonborn) and people who do (ie delo) but don't understand that it isn't just about annie and griff. annie and griff only represent their class insofar as they indicate that all people have worth.

Aurelian Cycle Dragon Breeds

Stormscourge (this is Eater to me)

Annie to Lee, Furysong ch. 29 // Andromache to Hector, Iliad b. 6 Delo to Griff, Flamefall ch. 21 // Patroclus to Achilles, Iliad b. 23

The series has so many great foils and parallels, but Julia and Freyda have been on my mind lately. They are good contrasts to Antigone as well, but while she’s a dragonrider in a society that at least nominally recognizes gender equality, Julia and Freyda live and ride in a society that’s patriarchal to the core. And the different ways they react to it are so interesting.

Julia survives by fitting in. Dragonlords abuse their authority by forcing peasants to their beds? She will as well. Why not? If men do it, why shouldn’t she, who’s just as worthy? Those same men then slut-shame their victims for laughs and giggles? She does the same. Revenge aside, her main preoccupation is winning glory for herself. She rages against prejudice, but only because she thinks she should be exempt from it, and she has no qualms about upholding it when it benefits her.

Freyda doesn’t, despite her standing and her stakes being much higher. The worst that can happen to Julia is that she doesn’t regain her country, but still keeps living in luxury in the place that has been her home for more than half her life. Freyda? Her dragon will be killed and she will be forced to wed her brother and lose all freedom. And yet she always puts herself at risk to help others. The unfairness of her situation just makes it easier for her to see the injustice in others’ plights. She repays Griff’s honesty in warning her about Ixion with honesty of her own and informs him about his arrest, even if it may have jeopardized her plan had things happened differently. She antagonizes Ixion to protect Annie when she thinks she’s only a maid and demands a fair trial even after discovering that she misled and spied on her, tells Lee that she’ll give rights back to Callipolis and even silently approves of his commitment to Annie, instead of being disgusted by it like Julia was. She uses what little authority she has to support the powerless, while Julia walks all over them to get on the same ground as the men that look down on her.

They never met in person, but I don't think Freyda would've liked Julia as much as she thought she would.

(Though rereading the carriage scene with Lee, I wonder if I’m imagining a romantic subtext? She says that Julia was the reason she defied her fate and then she tells Lee that once married they can have their own affairs to the side, which makes me think she may not be straight.)

(Spoilers from Furysong below)

I was rereading Power's speech yesterday and I have sooo many thoughts about healing and being oneself and how important role models are for that, so I thought I'd share some of the ones about our three tragic dragonborn figures:

For most of the series, Lee struggles to reconcile the trauma of his family’s death with the acceptance of the regime that caused it. He has to hide his identity and grief, because in the new Callipolis that’s tantamount to approving of the old regime. Atreus shows this in Fireborne: he tries to kill him because he can’t see the loyal Firstrider and the dragonborn’s son in the same person; as soon as he finds out that Lee is Leo, the latter cancels the former. Lee sur Pallor is Leo Stormscourge is the Revolution’s Son, yet society only sees him as three separate figures. Even when the Passi leverage his legacy for their own propaganda they do so as if Leo Stormscourge were a closed chapter of his life. Only Annie understands how his identities intersect, because she knows him so well. She was able to recognize that the wrongness that had been done to her family didn’t justify the wrongness that had been done to his, long before he allowed himself to (thinking of that scene in Fireborne during Atreus’ lesson when Annie argues against Palace Day and Lee excuses it). She lets him talk about his family, sees the boy who shared his food in the man who argues for rations to be fairly distributed, and even gives him his father’s knife.

Sty is the Lee of the new generation: same origin story but with a slight deviation that’s enough to change everything. While Lee only had Atreus as a role model, Sty will grow up with two: Griff, quite literally Sty’s Atreus, who rebelled in the name of a better future and caused the death of his family, except Griff was able to see beyond what Sty was to who he was and spared him, and later became family (to contrast with the scene in Flamefall where Lee ironically calls Atreus a father figure, when he was anything but); and Delo, a dragonborn who rejected the imperatives of blood to follow his heart, proving that birth doesn’t determine who we are.

Which is significant because Delo himself struggled with the lack of that kind of example in his life, and his arc culminates once he finds it. At the beginning of Furysong, he is still contending with his family’s worldview: when he drops Griff he talks about “the wrong type of courage”, when he’s moved by his pain he’s “crying for the wrong reasons”, when the Norcians treat him badly, despite recognizing his role in their oppression, he “might have thought to regret” saving their children from the fire. What pushes him to switch sides once and for all is witnessing Power’s loyalty to Annie. Another dragonborn, a relative even, who’s not ashamed to act against his lineage or to declare his love for a peasant, and in front of Ixion of all people, something Delo never had the courage to do.

It’s the kind of solidarity of thought that Delo had been needing all of his life, that had to come from another dragonborn to truly matter, that Lee also craved from Atreus and never got and would have made all the difference if he had. But Sty will have it from the start. He won’t have to reject his past or repress his trauma to be accepted into the new world. I imagine him as becoming a well-adjusted version of Lee, someone who embraces his roots even while helping Norcia heal from the damages caused by his family.

Agree with everything here, but I wanted to add, I always saw them as being really driven by personal ambition as well, like in their desire for learning.

When Griff asks Annie to teach him to read, he frames it as helping him spy for her, but we know that the desire runs deeper than that, and Annie guesses it immediately, because she used to feel the same. There’s that throwaway line by Lee when he remembers Annie practicing writing her name in dragontongue when they were children at school together, and it always stuck with me because of how succinctly it showed so many facets of her character.

Despite her knowing so much about dragontongue poetry, enough to rival the native speakers, she never uses it like Lee and Delo do, except in that scene in Furysong when she’s finally the one to quote the Aurelian Cycle at Lee, when it truly matters. And Griff uses it to connect with Delo, because his love for poetry is a part of who Delo is, and so it matters to him (I can read the poems too. Let me share everything with you as those lovers did).

Their interest in dragontongue is not because they agree with the worldview that comes with it, but because it’s the language of power and knowledge, and they want both things for themselves, even if mostly for unselfish reasons. It’s all of Griff’s pov in Flamefall, and in Annie finally admitting to herself that she deserves to make Firstrider. Their ambition is different from Lee and Delo’s, who are just reinforcing their birthright with every action; Griff and Annie need and want to convince the world of what they already know, that they are as worthy of any dragonborn, and deserving of power because of it.

@laku1056 asked this on a post i made about parallels between delo and lee's motives and i had to think about it for a while bc i really wasn't sure if there were many parallels between motives for annie and griff. like there are obviously the parallels between their backgrounds, but they're just not in the same situation currently. griff has a family to protect and annie is an orphan. annie is in a position of power (despite the pushback she receives) and griff is very much not (despite the fact that he has a dragon). annie is trying to put down a rebellion and griff is trying to start one.

i talked on my other motives post about how annie and griff are less driven by emotions than delo and lee (or, they're better able to put their emotions aside for the sake of practical goals); that's a motive-related parallel, but in annie and griff's case it's that it doesn't drive them, not explaining what does.

and then i realized: they're both motivated primarily by wanting to make things better than they had (or have) it. griff wants to liberate norcia because he does not want his people to continue to suffer under dragonborn subjugation. and annie enforces atreus's regime so strongly because to her, it is still better than what she experienced as a child (girls and lowborn children can be educated; even the iron rations are better than her farm during the famine or the orphanage on a bad day), even if it's not (read: far from) perfect. and this is how annie connects to griff, ultimately. he and his people suffer like she and hers have suffered, and she is determined that no one should undergo that again.

and think beginning of furysong: annie compares herself and agga, griff's sister, to annie's parents. they have stepped into this role and they are repeating it, because they want to make the future safer for their children. it doesn't matter if it's callipolis or norcia, ten years ago or now, quelling a revolution or creating one. that's what drives both annie and griff, and it's what drives them to help each other.