#ALM Records
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Morton Feldman: Triadic Memories, Aki Takahashi (高橋 アキ) (piano), ALCD-33, ALM Records, Kojima Recordings, 1989
Cover Design: Shuhei Tsuji
Cover Photograph: Koji Kobayashi
#graphic design#art#music#music album#cd#cover#back cover#morton feldman#aki takahashi#shuhei tsuji#koji kobayashi#alm records#kojima recordings#1980s
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The Circle | Of Awakening | 18th August, 2023
German Symphonic Black Metal
Artwork by Awinita Alm
https://thecirclemetal.bandcamp.com/album/of-awakening
#The Circle#Of Awakening#Germany#German Black Metal#Black Metal#Symphonic Black Metal#music#band#art#artwork#artist#Awinita Alm#AOP Records#Art of Propaganda
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Oh... oh no it's all coming together ( o.o)
Ya'll remember my Danny haunts Space Games post?
That but MORE SO. Harder. Like... ZONE GAME DEVELOPER PASSION PROJECT harder. Because? Special Interest chemicals go brrrrr~☆
And you KNOW... you absolutely FUCKING KNOW! That Danny was minding his business, going about his life, hyped as FUCK for the new Space Game 5 (a niche game but so what? It has REALISTIC physics! It's set on THE MOON!).
Has NOT stopped rambling on about it.
Been driving everyone insane, because it won't be out for MONTHS.
When~?
Youngblood, probably, goes "So what? That sound BORING. There barely anything to DO in that! Not like one of OUR Super Cool ZONE Video Games™. OURS are way better! And we gave LOADS more options then THAT! Now can we get back to-"
Freeze frame, record scratch.
Wait. WHAT!?
Danny is violently answers out of that eternal child faster then you can say "Dude! Chill!" Got them manic Obsession Eyes. Oops. Youngblood forgot Danny is Space Obsessed. But also PROTECTION Obsessed. Meaning he can't LEAVE where he is protecting.
You know.... FOR SPACE.
He needs a work around to feed his Obsession. Video games do it. Since he can go INTO them, but leave at a moments notice, if trouble happens. It's like being both IN SPACE but also AT HIS POST! Double Obsession Feeding! Happy chemicals! Mmmmm, content ecto-goo~
But now? NOW?! He's learning there is BETTER Space?!
WHERE IS THE BETTER SPACE?! *kicks open the portal*
It? Is a terrifying time for everybody. Thanks A LOT, Youngblood. It takes like... five Amazons and Pandora herself tackling the little menace, to get him still long enough to get a semi-coherent answer out of him. Stop him trying to shake down random ghosts for answers they can't GIVE.
Youngblood is grounded.
DANNY has an Obsession-crash headache, is really embarrassed, but honestly no one blames him. No one acts their best when they're Obsession gets suddenly triggered that hard. It was a poor man offered El Dorado, a scholar all the secrets in the world. He got swept up in it.
That SAID, yes, there IS a video game shop near here. There are, of course, countless such shops. It's the Zone. There are countless EVERYTHING. It's the nature of the Zone. Just don't harrass any of the developers and all will be well, Phantom. They're not afraid to put YOU in time out as well.
Deal! ( /☆.☆)/ *grabby hands*
There? Are so, SO many games. For systems Danny's never even HEARD off. Alien ones, new ones, long dead ones. Zone exclusives. It's less a shop and more a sprawling maze.
His grin is FERAL.
Space. Gaaaaaaames!!!
The more realistic the BETTER. Give him that living vicariously like an Astronaut DREAM. But fantasy maybe! Or in the future! Or deep space! Alien mayhaps! There are a few. The blended Obsessions that are kinda like his. Space and video-games instead of Space and Protection.
And? Oh~
Oh they are so SO realistic.
Impossible to play on any Earth computer, too. Not a single chance. Wouldn't even TRY and run. But! He is a Fenton! And he WILL have his Space Games! If his parents can make a portal in their basement? HE can make a Bank of Ectoplasmic Supercomputers in his spare room! Or Bedroom! Depends on renting prices!
He GUTS every landfill for MILES for usable parts.
"Liberates" parts from Rogues, left and right. Fuck their evil plans! He has computers to build! The Justice League? Baffled. Alarmed. Nooooot his problem!!!
He completes his works and? Oh~ the smile is both terrifying and fangy.
Spaaaaaaaace~☆
He starts College. On line, of course, he refuses to leave Amity. And Online can be done at his pace, at his hours. So? For once? He's actually doing WELL. Even BETTER? It helps him remember to leave them games every once and a while. Eat something. Be human.
But... well... it's like a slow flip of his Obsession starving. Now that he has all the Space he could ever want? He... suddenly finds Amity... peaceful? Which is GOOD! It's... it's GOOD.
.........just not for him.
He can almost physically FEEL him mind unclenching it's death grip on the town. Finger by finger. Hands releasing, letting go, as they... reach for something. As he starts taking NOTE of crime rates in major cities. Alien attacks and Rogues, Heros spread too thin, people getting HURT.
In need of PROTECTION.
He... he doesn't WANT to be that fickle. He LOVES Amity! It's his HOME. He wasn't protecting it just because he craved something to protect! In the end, he drags it out longer then he probably should, argues with himself, ignores the problem. Is STUBBORN.
It's only after Dani starts talking about coming back to Amity to stay with him, do the college thing like he did, that he realizes...
Amity's not his Haunt anymore.
They talk. She's excited to help him find a nice shit hole of a city to protect, but also worried because he looks really gaunt. He may LOVE Space... but...
It's the GHOST in him that loves Space. The Astronaut. The Kid who refused to die, who ate a PORTAL TO THE EVERYTHING and crawled out still exsistant, who told Death not only "not today" but "not EVER"? That kid had something to protect. Was and is and always will BE, protection. Himself, his friends, his family or the town. Doesn't matter WHAT it is.
He refused to go, so he could protect them.
The part that DID, though, was starlight. And yeah, he needs it. Feeds it desperately. But it... doesn't exactly support his human half, you know? Doesn't anchor him. Make him want to eat and sleep, be human and alive, connect with people.
Space makes him ghosty.
Dani ultimately convinces him, after spraying him down with a hose and shoving a cheeseburger down his face, to move to Metropolis with her. They get ALIENS! Have Aliens HEROS! BIG DESTRUCTIVE FIGHTS. With lots and LOTS of people who need help! Plus? Gotham is within a day trip!
And UNLIKE Gotham, the Ecto isn't RANK AF in Metropolis.
Seriously, it smells like a burst sewer pipe over there.
Danny agrees. Can totally afford a modest lil place thanks to some patents. Makes one HELL OF A SCENE moving in. With his giant, ominous, futuristic, weirdly day glow green glowing bank of super computers... in this, "we love our Alien Blorbo" Metropolis.
Cause Green and Glowing sure ain't welcome round these parts! No SIR! Somebody call the COPS!
Danny isn't even half way through, when Superman lightly touchs down, a forced grin plastered to his face. The "please, God, not another Rogue. Not a new one. Please!" all but RADIATING off him.
Hmmmmm....
Danny... kiiiinda forgot not everyone was as "I see fuckin NOTHING, man" as Amity natives. Awkward. Welp! Fenton Oblivious Gene's, ACTIVATE!
"Oh, HIIIIIII~☆ Superman! What brings you round these parts? Gosh, it's an honor! Dani! Come meet SUPERMAN!"
Clark knows what he's doing. Danny knows, Clark knows what he's doing. They are both from the Midwest. They ain't gonna break first! You kidding? Clark still has to ask. Inserts himself by INSISTING on helping. A welcome to Metropolis! Ha ha! (How long we gonna lie for, kid? How long? I can do this all day.)
Clark? Learns that Danny has become ABSURDLY knowledgeable about terraforming, spacecraft, aerospace engineering and anything else related to Space Survival. Thanks to... his "games".
Which Clark is PRETTY sure? Are creatively set up, alien, training programs. Cause both of the Fentons are DEFINITELY at least partially non-human. But, eh. Who is he to judge? The "mad scientist" vibe, though... THAT is his to judge. Which he does.
Routine check ins!
And pasta bakes. Because good lord, Fenton, you are skin and bones! And? If it helps with both Watchtower maintenance AND some killer articles? Because Danny is a fountain of Space related knowledge who loves to share it? That's between Clark and the weird, semi-feral, gremlin he's adopted! (Yes, honey, he KNOWS Danny is a grown man. But I did it with BRUCE-)
@hdgnj @babbling-babull @legitimatesatanspawn @hypewinter @mutable-manifestation @the-witchhunter
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trinkets on tour — H.S.
hi angel pies this one is very self indulgent!!! i hope you enjoy <3
🎀 warnings/cw: none, fluff, swearing maybe?, kisses, harry being a sweetheart tbh
🐇 pairing: famous!bf!harry styles x fem!reader
💐 wc: 1.3k (short cute little baby!!!)
summary: a few different occasions with harry and your trinkets.
“Ow, fuck,” Harry muttered under his breath, something sharp poking in the skin of his foot. Moving his leg, he finds a small bunny figurine, the ears animated and floppy, wearing a pink dress with a small basket full of strawberries in its arm. “Y/n? Is this yours?”
The girl comes walking around the corner, seemingly doing her skincare in the hotel bathroom if the headband and glowy face had anything to go by. “Oh! Yeah, it is!” A small smile covered her face.
“It’s you, bun! I found it at a small corner store in Horsens and meant to give it to you. I thought I’d lost it since it wasn’t in my purse when I checked for it last night, but you found it! Isn’t it so cute?” She grins, walking over to her boyfriend to slip it from his fingers and roll it around in hers.
Harry had just about melted. She went to a shop and found something that reminded her of him, and just because of that, she bought it? God, was he in love.
“That’s s’ sweet, m’heart,” Harry pulls her into his side, pecking a few kisses to the top of her head, “thank you, sweet girl.”
She looks up from where her head is tucked into this side, wearing a pretty smile and bright gleam in her eyes. Harry looks on at her in awe, entranced by her beauty.
“Of course, H. Think about you always, all the time. Think I’d be broke by now if I bought you everything that reminds me of you that i’ve seen.”
—
“Harry! Harry, look!” His girl comes running to the stage, interrupting his phone time as he waits for soundcheck to start.
“What, wha’ is it?” Harry’s brows furrowed, locking his phone and placing it next to his legs that swung over the edge of the stage.
“I found this in the green room, you haven’t even fully looked in there yet! It’s you!” She carefully tosses a small item onto the stage, not being able to reach up and place it due to how much shorter she was compared to the stage.
“‘S a— strawberry? ‘M a strawberry?” He says confusedly.
“I mean- okay its not you, but it reminded me of you! It’s a gold strawberry ring, and I have a gold strawberry ring too! Look, I’m wearing it right now,” She brings her left hand up to rest on his knee, showing a small dainty ring on her pinky finger, “We can match!”
He looks down at where her hand was placed on her knee and smiles. “Okay, m’love, we can match.”
Hearing her soft giggles, he knew he just couldn’t say no now. There was absolutely no way he could say no.
“C’mere lovie, there’s stairs right there,” With a soft gleam in his eyes, he points to a different area on the floor, “Jus’ wanna hold y’for a bit before the show.”
She squeaks out a little ‘okay!’ and runs over to the stairs, taking longer strides to get to her love faster. Plopping down next to him, she twists in her spot and scooches forward a bit, laying her head on his lap. She plucks the small ring from his hands, pointing at details in it that he hadn’t— and probably wouldn’t have noticed otherwise.
Despite not looking at the ring, and staring at her instead, he memorizes every detail of the ring, while engraving every small peep and barely noticeable rasp in her voice into his brain.
Come showtime, the fans immediately notice a new addition to his ring collection, a small strawberry ring that adorns his right pinky finger.
—
“Oh shit!” A shout followed by a small crash catches Harry’s attention, raising him to his feet in record speed as he nearly flies out of the bedroom and to the living area of the hotel.
“Honey, y’okay?” He says hurriedly, rushing over to where his sweet girl was.
She spins on her heel immediately, a broken wooden box in her hand, a small light purple unicorn in the other. Behind her near her heels laid almost a dozen other little trinkets, some scattered farther away from her feet than others. A sad look glazes over her features as she nods softly.
“Yeah, I’m okay, I accidentally dropped my Love On Tour trinket box, and now I’m a little sad,” She places the box and tiny unicorn onto the table, taking small steps to get to him, resting the side of her head on his chest, “I even decorated it! I’ve been getting small things from every stop on tour and the box I’ve been putting everything in broke!”
Harry’s heart ached for her, knowing how sweet and sentimental his girl was and knowing how much the box probably meant to her. Not saying anything for a few beats, he wraps his arms around the girl and runs his hand up and down the length of her arm. “Hm, m’heart. ‘M so sorry, can I see it?”
She nods, stepping back to go retrieve the box from the table, going back to Harry with it in her hands.
“M’kay, I think I can fix this up for you just right, want me to?” He says, assessing the damage, handling it carefully.
Her eyes light up as soon as the words leave his lips, a soft gasp falling from her lips. “You can?”
“Of course I can, y’gotta give me a couple of days though, Lovie. ‘M sorry.”
“It’s okay!” She chirps. “‘S okay even if you can’t, but if you can, that would make me so happy, thank you, H.”
“I’d do anything f’you, but for now, I think I have a small jewelry box y’can put it in until I fix it. Sounds good?” He smiles, pressing a soft kiss to her forehead at her graciousness.
“Sounds amazing, thank you, Baby.”
—
“Lovie? C’mere for a sec, baby.” Harry calls from yet another hotel bedroom, smiling softly as he heard a sweet ‘coming!’ followed by small steps on the floor.
“Yes?” Her head popped into the doorframe, a small furrow in her brow.
“Got a surprise f’you,” He smiles, hands behind his back.
“For me?” She walks over to him slowly, a suspicious look on her face.
“It’s nothing bad! Jus’ a quick something before we leave for the venue.” From behind his back, he pulls out her (now fixed!) box, placing it in front of her on the white duvet.
A gasp falls from her lips, followed by an excited squeal. In gratitude, she cautiously jumps onto his lap, wrapping her arms around his neck, placing her lips onto his. She places small ones on his lips first, before pressing them together in an elongated, sweet kiss.
“Wait, wait Lovie, there’s another surprise inside the box.” Harry laughs, muttering the words against her lips to keep her close.
“Another?! You’re spoiling me now,” Grabbing the box, she opens it before gasping in shock.
“Always spoil you, don’t I?” He chastises, plucking the trinket out of the box.
A small, red convertible keychain lay flat in his palm, another small charm of a white daisy on it.
“Harry-“ She starts, pulling his hand closer to her face to look at it in closer detail. “Thank you, s’much.”
She turns her head to him, now teary eyed. She knew the sentiment behind both items, making the experience all the more emotional.
“The car, from our fifth date, where I asked y’to be m’girlfriend, and then the daisy from-“ He drawls, a soft and sleepy lull in his voice.
“From the field in Holmes Chapel, where you first told me you loved me.” She giggles breathily, sniffling to contain her emotion. “They’re perfect, baby. Thank you, thank you s’much.”
Twisting around in his lap, she wraps her arms around his shoulders, burrowing her face into his neck. He reciprocates the hug, wrapping his arms around her waist as he lays soft kisses on the side of her head.
“‘S perfect, you’re perfect.”
“Oh shut it, Lovie. Jus’ can’t believe I’m now contributing to your trinket collection.”
#harry styles#harry styles fanfiction#harry styles fluff#harry edward styles#harry styles fanfictions#harry styles x reader#harry styles x fem!reader#harry styles x you#harry styles x y/n
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update:
- i think the rats are immortal
- we are out of pizza sauce please buy more or im gonna start using strawberry jam
- whoever keeps coming in and eating alm the shredded cheese is going to become my next knife holder
- only one fire has happened in the past six months! and i didn't get burnt!
- nobody tell afton but i may or may not have left rotting meat in his office. not that he'd notice he smells like it anyways.
- good for them!!! good for you!!!
- why do we even have jam lying around in the first place? and if it's there, might as well use it
- not saying i saw mr. afton snack on shredded cheese the other day but i might have seen mr. afton snack on shredded cheese the other day
- only one?? we have a record to hold, get me some matches??
- yeah i give him a solid 3 months to notice it's not him smelling like that
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Imperial Domesticity: New Year’s Festivities
Penelope’s first new year’s celebration as the Empress meant that everyone would have their eyes on her. But she also wanted her New Year’s Kiss. Thankfully, her husband was willing to figure out a way to do it.
There was much to be done for the New Years ball, this was Penelope’s first new years as the empress, before that, she’d helped with the preparations as the Emperor’s paramour and fiancée, as well as the highest ranking woman in the empire. Now though, all eyes would be on her and they would be picking through the entire event, eyeing each detail to see what could be criticized and what parts of the traditions and rituals had she messed up.
Callisto tried to get Penelope to rest, trying to reassure her that he could take care of everything. Whenever such a thing would be brought up, Penelope would turn to him with a fierce look on her face.
“No! I’ve always handled this, even before we were married and now that we are, I am not going to give it up!” She said furiously.
Callisto tried to calm her down, subtly moving to soothe her by catching her hand and rubbing the back of her hand. He entwined their fingers together and kissed the back of her hand. The effects were instantaneous. Penelope’s shoulders relaxed, her breathing calmed.
“I’m sorry, I know you’re worried but it’s just…” so much of the tradition had been cut away by the late and unlamented former Queen that when Penelope had begun reinstating them, there were some push backs. The woman had been truly vain and lazy, discarding some of the more solemn traditions that had been the empresses and queens traditional roles, things of solemnity, and turned it into a mockery, a spectacle, of excessive extravagances, indulgences, and vice.
Part of the tradition had been to honour the fallen soldiers and others who had sacrificed for the good of the Empire, instead they toasted the fat purses of those which had managed to ingratiate themselves with her and her son, she had also done away with the new years alms and winter charities where the poorest within the city, the orphanages, and those who were the sickest were able to receive a meal.
The Queen’s excuse? There wasn’t any budget or funding for it. But of course there wouldn’t be, not when she and her son threw balls every other day, served only the finest wines and purchased gowns with money they’d taken from the coffers and funds set aside for such charity works. The empires worst state of finances was recorded during her tenure as the reigning lady of the empire.
And Penelope had no wish to leave the empire in such a state for her child. So she worked hard to set an example, to make sure that her babe and all other children they would have in the future would be beloved by the masses and would have their support. Because she knew one thing, there were far more commoners than there were nobles, and far more commoner knights than landed and enobled ones, and among them, quite a bit of the titled knights had relations still among the commoners.
And so, Callisto knew Penelope was trying her hardest to set things to right. He kissed her forehead and drew her close. “I know, love. But you don’t have to work so hard, let me share your burden.” He said. “Let me carry this weight for you so that you don’t have to be alone.”
“Alright.” She said as she hugged him back.
-
-
Callisto could see Penelope with her eyes out on the time. As they danced around the room, their eyes on one another, she would frequently call out the time under her breath.
“Is there something special that’s going to happen at midnight?” He asked.
“Oh, it’s just that I wanted to make sure I got the midnight kiss right for our first new year as a married couple.” She said.
“Hmm? A midnight kiss? Come to think of it, you did always pull me away in to the balcony just before midnight.” Callisto said, recalling the last few years.
“It’s meant to be good luck. If mistletoe kisses meant you’d stay with that person, then midnight kisses means a deepened bond and good luck, especially in our relationship.”
“Is that so?” Callisto said thoughtfully, an idea beginning to form in his mind.
-
-
After his speech honouring the soldiers, the scholars, mages, and the artists, and every other person who had worked hard to ensure the continued prosperity of the empire, it became increasingly clear that they wouldn’t be able to sneak away for their midnight kiss.
Callisto didn’t mind. He pulled Penelope up, a glass of wine in his hand. Everybody stared at him in confusion, the first half of the rituals had been performed to close out the old year, the speeches were done, so why were they suddenly to raise their glasses in a toast? He could see their looks.
But he took a sip and swallowed before he pulled Penelope into his arms, dipped her, and then kissed her full on the lips as the clock struck midnight marking a new year and then fireworks lit up the skies simultaneously in their first public kiss since their wedding.
Throughout the empire, the people celebrated the new year, magic used to broadcast to the people throughout the empire showed the observation of the rituals, a broadcast that allowed the people to familiarize themselves with their rulers, also showed the kiss.
In the aftermath of what would become a tradition of its own to see the Emperor and Empress mark the turn of the year with a kiss before they returned to the rituals of peace and prosperity for a new year and then to the festivities of the day, many couples would begin their own tradition of a midnight kiss, though none would get it quite as right in timing as the Emperor.
My idea is that the traditions would herald back to the time of the golden dragon and the old religion, i.e. the ancient mages, and despite the people not remembering the ancient mages for a long time, they still kept those traditions and held them sacred. The fact that some of the nobles and the Queen in particular, moved away from them left a bitter taste in their mouth. Especially when the war began shortly after the Queen began to do away with it. While it was never mentioned what had begun the war, the people still saw it as a bad omen and thought that the fact that they had taken away those rituals, many of which had to be done by the Queen or Empress, had a part to play in it, and let’s not forget the fact that a lot of the funding for the charities were cut by the Queen while she threw large celebrations and feasts, it was like a slap in the face to the people who had laboured hard but had no food to eat, and their husbands, brothers, and sons were dying on the battlefield.
So when Penelope brought back those traditions, gradually at first, until that year when she became the empress, they saw it as a good sign. And then Penelope gave birth to what people saw as the golden dragon’s second coming and they were convinced. Also, Penelope was the one who came up with the idea of broadcasting the wedding, well, technically, Callisto did, she just mentioned watching the royal weddings back when she was in Korea and he was so enthralled with the idea of showing his new wife off that he made the mages figure out how to do it. And when they had succeeded in that, Penelope thought about broadcasting just the ritual parts. And it did work and it became a tradition as ingrained as the midnight kiss.
Anyway, that’s it for now. Happy New Year! Stay healthy and safe!
#villains are destined to die#death is the only ending for a villainess#vadd#callisto regulus#death is the only ending for the villainess#fanfic#death is the only ending for the villain#penelope eckhart x callisto regulus#penelope x callisto#penelope eckhart#Imperial domesticity
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FE2 Novelization Translation - Cover and Book Intro Pages
If you would like to start from the beginning, read a missed part, etc., click here!
FE Game Script Translations - FE Novel Translations - Original FE Support Conversations
If you are interested in donating to support my work, please check out my Ko-fi here. Thank you!
———————————
New year, time for another new FE novelization translation!
2024's novel of focus is that of FE2, the original game Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia was a remake of. Enjoy reading this take on the same exact plot, ~25 years prior!
Cover
Fire Emblem Gaiden
The Zofian Liberation War
Book 1
STORY
The continent of Valentia is divided between the north and the south, as well as their beliefs in War Father Duma and Earth Mother Mila. While the Kingdom of Zofia is ruled with kindness and compassion, the Rigelian Empire believes in raising its citizens to be prepared for war. Their hostility towards each other has finally pulled them into a vicious war. Units from both sides spill each other’s blood, fighting for their god and loyalty to their homeland each and every day, with no end in sight…
The protagonists of this tale are Alm, Celica, and countless other young units. They all wish for Valentia to be unified, but differ in how they want that outcome to be reached. And so, a grand tale of love and hate is about to unfold!
-
Written by Katsuyuki Ozaki
Cover Illustration by Ichiro ?*
Cover Design by Kazuo Hiroi (WIDE)**
*T/N: I cannot find the Kanji character in this person’s last name anywhere to confirm its reading.
**T/N: First name could also be ‘Ichio’ or ‘Itsuo.’ I cannot find any record of this person online, so I cannot confirm the correct reading of their name. Their nickname is ‘WIDE’ because their last name, ‘hiroi,’ is the Japanese word for wide.
Published by Futabasha
Author’s Profile
Katsuyuki Ozaki
An up-and-coming author also working as a copywriter. His major works include “Valkyrie no Densetsu,” “F-Zero,” “Zelda II: The Adventure of Link,” and many more, all published by Futabasha. He has also written for other strategy guide series. His hobbies include golf, cars, and computer games. He is of course also passionate about Fire Emblem, and has completed all of the games so far. He poured all of his love for the series into writing these two books without rest!
Front:
Alm and Celica each set out on their own journey to forge!
This is the epic adventure of this young man and woman!!
The stage unfolds on a Valentia in chaos in this epic tale of love, blood, and war!
-
Back:
Ad for Book 2.
Ad for a Shin Megami Tensei novelization.
Color Art
A necrodragon was here. In Zofia. When she realized exactly what that meant, Celica was petrified in horror. Earth Mother Mila had lost all power over Zofia.
Title Page
Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1: The Deliverance
The Six Resurrection Pills
Alm’s Awakening
The Mysterious Girl Silque
Chapter 2: Mila’s Restoration Army
Celica Embarks on Her Journey
The Ruffian Saber
The Necrodragon’s Trial
Chapter 3: To Zofia Castle
Rescuing Clair
The Night Before Storming Zofia Castle
Cliff’s Gambit
Chapter 4: The Red Haired Woman
The Port Town Tavern
Differing Paths
Chapter 5: To Mila’s Shrine
The Sisters from Archanea
Blake, Wielder of the Shadow Sword
Royal Bloodline
Desert Army
Princess Anthiese
Chapter 6: The Newly Reborn Kingdom of Zofia
His name is Zeke
Cross-Shaped Birthmark
Collapse and Liberation
The Throne Bathed in Light
Epilogue
-
Illustrations: Ichiro ?* & Kazuo Hiroi (WIDE)**
*T/N: I cannot find the Kanji character in this person’s last name anywhere to confirm its reading.
**T/N: First name could also be ‘Ichio’ or ‘Itsuo.’ I cannot find any record of this person online, so I cannot confirm the correct reading of their name. Their nickname is ‘WIDE’ because their last name, ‘hiroi,’ is the Japanese word for wide.
Book design: Yusuke Matsuoka (NEXT)
Editing & printing: Rekkasha
Character Introductions
Alm’s Army
Robin: A Villager who grew up with Alm in Ram Village. He later transcends to become an Archer.
Silque / Shilk: A Cleric in service to the goddess Mila. She specializes in healing magic.
Cliff / Klihs: A Villager from Ram Village. He later transcends to become a Mage, specializing in long range combat magic.
Delthea: A female Mage who has fallen into Rigel’s hands by Tatarrah’s magic. She wields the Aura tome.
Luthier: He decides to join forces with Alm to lead his younger sister Delthea’s fate down a righteous path. A mage with a tragic past.
Mycen: A former unit of the Knights of Zofia, transcended to one of the highest level classes, Gold Knight.
Python: An Archer prodigy whose short-temper is as great as his skills with a bow.
Clair: A Pegasus Knight who was granted the ability to fly a pegasus by the two gods. Clive’s younger sister.
Forsyth: A soldier who’s greatest skill is his ability to calmly make decisions in the heat of battle.
Mathilda: An exceptionally talented female Cavalier. She possesses both a brave soul and bewitching beauty.
Tatiana: A Saint captured by Nuibaba. Zeke’s beloved.
Clive: A Cavalier and the leader of the young surviving units of the Knights of Zofia.
Zeke: A mysterious Gold Knight who has lost his memory. He serves Alm under Emperor Rudolf’s orders.
Lukas: A hot-blooded soldier who wields his lance like lightning.
Alm: A fighter raised by Zofia’s hero Mycen, and the protagonist of this story. He is a boy with a grand fate!
Gray: A Villager from Ram Village. He later transcends into a Cavalier.
#fire emblem#fe#fire emblem 2#fe2#gaiden#fe gaiden#fire emblem gaiden#fe15#fire emblem 15#shadows of valentia#fire emblem echoes#alm#celica#japan#japanese#translation#novel#light novel#fe2 novelization translation
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Definitive “Feelings On 3H” Post
So I’m making one big post on my feelings on major things worth discussing about 3H and how I feel about it. Don’t feel obligated to really interact with this one much, it’s mostly just for my sake, as something I can just link to and say “go to section X about how I feel about Y”.
The reason behind this is I just don’t really want to actively engage in 3H discourse anymore. I feel as if I’m a broken record at this point. If I have new things to say about it somehow, I’ll say it, but for the most part, I’ll refer people to this if they wanna know how I feel about general 3H talk.
Story
Story Section 1- General narrative feelings on each route.
Azure Moon is, in my opinion, the most solidly constructed route in terms of writing, character development, and storytelling. It knows what it wants to accomplish and, aside from a few gripes, I will always applaud it for that. Verdant Wind and Silver Snow meanwhile, aren’t bad and I certainly didn’t have a terrible time playing through them. However, the unique story bits in each route don’t justify the gameplay experience you have to work through in order to get to them. Still, the big reveals in each route were nice to hear for the first time, and specifically for VW I enjoy Claude very much. Crimson Flower I don’t enjoy that much at all. Its story is what I can only describe as a static, eye-roll inducing victory march, which makes up for its lack of length with its seemingly intentional negative character development; everyone is ignorant, an asshole, or sad as fuck aside from the CF exlcusive cast. I would give the route props had the game bothered to stand in its foundation rather than flounder and make numerous attempts to depict every perspective as absolutely equally valid and righteous.
Story Section 2- In trying to appeal to every perspective, the game lacks focus, foundation, and respect for itself.
It should be expected that a game with multiple routes tackle different specific subjects. However, in Fire Emblem, there always, always manages to be a unifying theme or foundational story philosophy-an Aesopian type moral if you will-no matter the route. Alm and Celica learn that their one individual philosophies can’t exist on their own, and that leadership requires strength and compassion of equal measure. Eirika and Ephraim learn that personal wishes must take a backseat for the good of Renais and Magvel as a whole, as their routes in FE8 use their own weaknesses to develop them as leaders and royalty. Corrin’s one constant in the Fates games is that conflict is inherently meaningless and does nothing but perpetuate a brutal cycle of hatred, vengeance, and violence.
Even in games like FE7 and FE10, where the technical ‘route splits’ are more unconventional, there’s still unifying themes that manage to wrap back around at the end (7′s ‘single-minded pursuit of justice and strength/power to protect can actively hurt you and those around you, especially if you are ignorant to the pain others are going through’ and 10′s ‘people have as much capacity to be good as they have to be evil, they will hurt each other due to petty misunderstandings and bigoted views, however, they are worthy of living as they are because of the ability to grow, change, and aspire to something better’).
3H, to put it simply, does not have any grand unifying theme unique to itself. The closest examples I can think of is ‘It’s worth it to reach out to those around you to share your pain so you don’t become engulfed in it’ and ‘no matter what side you fight for, war makes everyday life a living hell for everyone’.
But to me, both of those things are just... basic truths and story elements present in every dialogue heavy FE game. War has been showcased as being terrible since FE1, where characters were held hostage, threatened to fight for a cause they didn’t believe in, innocent villages were destroyed, there was a literal child slave market, etc. And sharing your pain with those close to you in order to bear life’s challenges has been a constant trope with many FE characters, story significant or otherwise, since at least FE6 with Guninivere (probably earlier if I’m missing something from FE4 or 5). The only difference is that 3H has a fun little song to go with it.
That leaves the specific themes of each route and perspective, but because each leading character is so different from the other, and the writers didn’t want to overtly favor one over the rest, every dialogue regarding these things feels compromised; half baked, or lacking a point.
‘Crests are symbolic of a harmful power structure but also are a symbol of justice used to ward away threats but also are a tool used to gain social and political capital in order to change the world but also are an ancient power obtained through destruction that must be used with wisdom.’ Four different perspectives from four different routes that the game attempts to depict in a balance in almost every single dialogue regarding them. And this same process is applicable to the game’s attempts at discussing race/ethnicity, xenophobia, classism, religious views, mental health, etc. There always has to be two, three, four, or five sides to every story in 3H, and that results in an exhuasting and stretched thin narrative that, in its attempts to appeal to everyone, ends up lacking substance in every point it tries to make.
Now, that itself would make for a fascinating and meta theme for the game to uphold, where ‘attempts at trying to balance and accept every perspective leads to an ineffective world that desperately needs unwavering, unconditional, and compassionate leadership’ but 1) that would require the game to play up the need for ‘seeing every side’ as something to be deconstructed, and the game doesn’t do that, it’s played painfully straight, and 2) when it’s one major power (Edelgard) vs. three major powers (Dimitri, Claude, and Rhea), the attempt at balance fails no matter what you do. This lack of focus reads to me that there was lack of respect for the game’s story itself.
Story Section 3- “It insists upon itself, Lois.”
Every time I think about the finer details of story bits in 3H I don’t care for, my brain always comes back to that Family Guy scene where Peter talks about not caring for The Godfather and saying that it’s because the movie insists upon itself. Now, that was done for comedy, but for 3H I must say that it’s a perfect sentence to use. 3H insists upon itself. This is in spite of the fact that there’s no one unifying point that it’s trying to convey to the player, beyond what any other FE games was able to do. So to make up for that, each small instance reads like the game beating the player over the head with whatever minute moral or lesson it’s trying to convey.
Crests are bad? Roll out the Edelgard, Sylvain, or Lysithea dialogue saying so. Church is sus? Get Edelgard or occasionally Claude. Nobles are pretentious? Get the sad NPCs or the few actual commoner characters to imply it. War is bad and cruel? Fire the next “Sad Dorothea” dialogue at the player’s face. Interactions feel artificial, ostentatious even. Part of that is because there’s no other way to get these points across due to Byleth being a silent avatar, the other part though? Feels as if the writers were overtly proud of themselves. “Wow, the war means Bernadetta leaves her room more often, isn’t that a sign that it really changes people?” Yeah, no shit.
Perhaps the most egregious example is the endless instances of the game pushing the idea that there’s “no good side” in war or that “war is a battle of ideals and no one is fully correct” or other moments that want the player to know how deep and Morally Gray the narrative is. It’s cheap and inauthentic, especially when you have a faction like the Slithers. You can’t prop up Gray Morality and have an inarguably evil underground terrorist group.
To be crude, this game explains things to you like you’re five despite being rated T for teens in a series catered mostly to young adults. I get the point you’re trying to make, you did it poorly, now stop repeating yourself, your final grade is a D+.
Story Section 4- 3H likes spectacle over substance.
3H revels in being showy over being constructive. There’s great moments, but there’s not a great plot.
For example, Byleth has many flashy moments that show how awesome they are! They’re connected to a goddess, they can wind back time, they have a super cool historical sword, they’re a top tier mercenary, they’re a great teacher, they’re next in line for Archbishop or the throne for all of Fodlan, their Crest is the game’s version of the Fire Emblem!
Cool! What’s the significance behind all these choices in the writing room? Seemingly next to nothing other than it sounded cool. That’s how it feels anyway.
The SotC doesn’t do anything in the story beyond be Sothis’ bones, likewise the Crest of Flames is nothing other than symbolic since it lacks gameplay or story significance beyond “main characters have it”, Divine Pulse has weak narrative justification for what should be a simple gameplay exclusive rewind, the goddess in question is an underutilized character who checks out before part 1 ends, there’s no gameplay basis showcasing that they’re any better at fighting than their students, and every high level position Byleth is granted makes no sense for them to have given what little established character we get.
That’s 3H in a nutshell. Crests don’t matter other than to be a story device. Being noble or commoner doesn’t matter. The hidden technology doesn’t matter. Abyss is a joke. And on and on and on. 3H profits off of being enticing and cool looking for the sake of it, without actually utilizing or explaining any of this flashy stuff that matters for a video game medium. It makes for underwhelming gameplay and artificial characters. Example, for as much as I love Yuri, take a few minutes to read his backstory; it’s batshit and nigh unbelievable. And it’s indicative of the fact that 3H cares more about including things that sound cool than it does about making sense of anything. We see the impact, but never any material significance, which is the opposite of what you want in a detail oriented narrative like this.
Story Section 5- 3H has very gross tropes.
During 3H’s first year of being out, I desperately wanted to stay true to a view that “hey now, just because it’s depicted like this, doesn’t mean we should blast it, it’s just a video game” but, y’know. I grew up. And part of growing up is recognizing the nuanced parts of these kinds of things.
I won’t accuse the writers of being actively ignorant or bigoted, cuz I don’t know anything about them. But fuck. Fuck, does this game read worse and worse over the years in terms of how utterly terribly it handles sensitive issues.
Multiple brown characters treated like trash by the white/pale majority, with countries said brown characters hail from described as savage and animalistic. Rampant misogynistic tropes, most notably selling women off to be married. Strange, and incessant sympathy for the character starting a war that upends the lives of common people, said character also allowing human experimentation to occur. The offensive and archaic handling of mental illnesses, specifically anxiety disorders, personality disorders, and PTSD in certain instances (IMO only Dimitri and Marianne are done with any sort of grace). And that’s just the explicit stuff! Just the other day I was talking about how there’s incredibly disturbing anti-Semitic undertones regarding the Empire (confirmed to be based on Germany btw) and the Nabateans, something that’s, at times, uncritically repeated by people in this game’s community. This game is mired in terrible allegories and metaphors, which make me cringe the more I think about the real world implications that these lines of thought can have on people in volatile corners of the Internet.
And the kicker is that the writers are so committed to making these things relate to Crests or nobility, as if either of those things are strictly the reason why oppression or discrimination occurs.
The game employs drastic harmful stereotypes, and undercuts all of them by foisting its half-baked unique gameplay/lore toy onto the conversations. It fumbles the ball and didn’t even clean up the mess well.
Characters
I have a tier list of how much I enjoy the characters right here.
Long story short, when the characters are good, they’re good. Like, holy fuck, love them. But when they’re bad? Throw them away. Can’t stand them. And sometimes characters fall in the middle where I see the good but they’re at times written in ways that piss me off.
Worldbuilding/Setting - More is not always better
First off, when you make a character tell the player “Go read in the library for lore”, you’ve lost me. There’s nothing fun and interesting in 3H as a game for you to read in the library.
Fire Emblem’s gameplay cycle doesn’t mesh too well with the typical JRPG standard of storytelling, so the common solutions to building the world and crafting the stories was 1) make as much use as possible of cutscenes, art/cgs, and narrations to communicate the important details before and after battles and/or 2) make an intuitive inclusion to ‘break the pace’ between maps, such as a home base, in order to supplement what’s already present. Alongside this, support conversations were an ingenious tool to develop the characters and the world at the same time, as your varied and quirky cast can help you infer what their place of origin is like. Plus, the game actively rewards the player for seeking this auxiliary information out, granting extra stat bonuses when you purposefully put characters next to each other.
3H, on paper, understands this well. However, the game has too many minute details for a typical FE game structure to handle. The devs themselves even said the game became a “living creature on its own” and claimed no one on the team knows everything about 3H’s story or world. Ignoring how that’s a serious flaw for a video game narrative, what this ultimately means is that since cutscnes and a standard base can’t cut it, we need more and more and more. Libraries, side quests, tea time, ally notes, gifts, NPCs that exposit at you, etc. The DLC even added another damn library for you to sift through, as if the first one wasn’t a pain already.
And though these little flavor texts, landmarks, and set pieces are fun to read about... that’s it. The game hardly uses any of it. It’s flavor without substance, once again. It’s why half the fucking fandom is confused every other day when you bring up these tertiary details as evidence to prove a point, since the active story is too busy trying to weave the other 600 plot threads together to use any of it. That means, for all of this supposed great details regarding each nation and the important territories, we hardly see a damn thing that’s actually different. More is not always better, and in this case, it’s actively worse for both the game experience and the community experience. Not a good look for a game that the devs explicitly wanted people to talk to each other about.
As a fan of FE ever since 2013, who has gone back to play several of the games to see how they tick, 3H’s methods of describing its setting are just so antithetical to what makes the series enjoyable, and for so little reward. It sounds hypocritical given that I love Fates and Engage, but those games actively set up their glorified bases to be as unintrusive as you want them to be. 3H, however, has its gameplay built around a boring and unintuitive cycle.
Gameplay- Fire Emblem but half the time you’re not playing Fire Emblem
Gameplay Section 1-Monastery
The monastery is the most debated gameplay aspect of 3H, and IMO, for good reason.
It sucks.
Worldbuilding wise, while it makes sense that an important location is the hub for the game, that doesn’t account for how dull it is. 12 months and 4 seasons pass and does the place ever look different? No. A shame, since an improved aesthetic would drastically help ignoring the fact that the place is a bitch to traverse. For as fast as Byleth can run, they can’t outspeed the load times. Quick travel only makes the issue more apparent, as well. From door to door, and from week to week, you’ll endure more load times in one in-game month than an entire playthrough of a GBA FE game.
The other aspects of the monastery gameplay, such as teaching, activities, professor level, and motivation, while freshly fun in a first playthrough, become a repetitive slog in subsequent playthroughs. Giving gifts and lost items, eating meals, planting the right things for the garden, optimizing support point gains, using the sauna, taking care of the statues, etc. This cycle is not something I enjoy in an FE game, and unlike Fates or Engage, I can’t actively ignore it without huge penalty.
You can skip right to each main mission, but you’d be giving yourself a huge handicap by doing so; not actively teaching students at max motivation in order to maximize skill point gain is a huge detriment in the long term. It means longer wait for better weapons, longer wait for better spells, longer wait for class change, and longer wait for better skills and battalions. Now on Normal you can get away with this, not as much on Hard, and sure the fuck not on Maddening. To me, it feels like sloppy balancing on top of an already exhausting and dull game cycle. Why let the player skip months if you didn’t bother to carefully balance the game so that the players who do skip months could have even a small chance to clear the game? Honestly, it just feels as if they thought “people might find it annoying so let’s just tack on a skip feature”, and that’s disappointing and lazy.
Overall, I hope nothing similar to the monastery’s implementation is included in any future Fire Emblem game. It’s too antithetical to FE’s main gameplay structure, IMO.
Gameplay Section 2-Battles
To be honest, Fire Emblem has never been the pinnacle of balanced gameplay, and frankly I don’t want it to be. It’s a single player game with fun anime sword guys, magic powers, and dragons. So long as it’s not dreadfully easy or overly complicated, I have no qualms about certain classes or characters being better or worse than others.
3H though is a mess. A fun mess, but still a mess. Movement decrease to foot units means you want a mount cuz the game’s maps are big, and the speed penalty for cav classes means you want a wyvern or a pegasus. Physical units do just that (or maybe War Master for Quick Riposte), you get your dancer, have a Stride unit, have your Magic units and warpers where you need them, and congrats! You solved the 3H meta.
Half-joking, honestly. The game is extremely easy to break, the hardest part is getting to that point (after all, slugging through the monastery is a bigger test of your patience than anything else). Maddening mode, of course, you have be extra careful in the beginning (cuz they probably didn’t play test it cough cough) and utilize your combat arts and gambits effectively, and being extremely conscious of positioning. But, much like Awakening before it, 3H is very easy to snowball. Especially on NG+. That doesn’t mean it’s not fun, but it can get mindless. I don’t personally play that way, but even still, tools such as weapons mostly not being class restricted, Crests, combat arts, gambits, and accessories make the game incredibly simple. It’s a breeze, and only gets harder when certain things are stripped away from you or your debilitated somehow. Again, it’s still fun, because FE is always fun, but challenging? No. Not in a way that I find meaningful, anyway.
The maps themselves? Meh. They look pretty! Lots of small missable details that you wouldn’t see if not for the zoomed in view, that was a neat feature. Not at all useable for actually playing the game, of course, but fun to mess with and to sight see. It does make me resentful, cuz again, we could’ve potentially seen lots of rich, detailed, and varied locations bustling with townsfolk and entering villages to really feel each location. But alas, this is as good as we get.
Anyway, the maps are...fine-ish? Part 1′s maps are seared into my brain, for better and for worse (mostly worse) cuz you have to play them at least 3 different times for all the routes. Prologue through Chapter 5 are either boring, terrible, or both. Chapter 6 is the first map on my most recent playthrough that I say I had fun with in Part 1, then it continues for 7 and 8, then nosedives for 9 and 10, before picking back up for 11 and 12. In short, more than half the story maps for part 1 I find are either unexceptional or plain bad.
Now Part 2? Hunting By Daybreak is atrocious, Garreg Mach defense is pretty fun, Ailell is boring as fuck, Myrddin Bridge and Deirdru are good, Gronder Part 2 ebbs and flows between being awesome and awful, Merceus, Enbarr, and Fhirdiad are okay but tend to drag, Tailtean is alright, Shambhala is hot garbage, CF endgame is pretty fun, AM endgame is okay, VW endgame is awesome, Snow endgame is terrible. I think all routes’ part 2 is better than part 1, but not by much.
All of Cindered Shadows is peak, every map was good IMO.
Paralogue maps I have no opinions on, they are recycled maps with nothing meaningfully interesting about them that I remember aside from Dedue’s, Ashe’s, and Petra’s.
In short, the battle maps in 3H are okay for FE standards. It’s just pretty fucking insane how many times they get reused, so I got tired of them very quickly.
Fandom
Last but not least, just a shoutout to a very unpleasant community experience. Though it might be the best selling FE game as of now, it comes with the price of having some incredibly disrespectful, vicious, and ignorant fans.
Never have I been witness to or been the target of as much harassment on the internet as I have with certain 3H fans. Entire discord servers made to make fun of groups of people with differing opinions, taking over old blog domains to mock people, deliberately seeking out people who want nothing to do with you just so you can defend your favs, etc. And that’s just on this site! There’s editing wars on TV tropes and the wikis, mods on various sites having to do deleting sprees of 3H discourse, artists being harassed on Twitter, and in general just... inserting yourselves into places and spaces where you were not invited nor encouraged to comment. Some of these people lack basic human deceny, respect, and boundaries, and it’s not cool.
Part of the reason why I’m breaking away from 3H now is because this behavior is something I got wrapped up in too, and I’m deeply ashamed of it. It’s toxic, and not at all something I want associated with one of my favorite video game series anymore. I got real life things to worry about and other games to play.
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Anyway, that’s pretty much it. All of my general thoughts on 3H, localized on one post. Sayonara, Fodlan Discourse, you won’t be missed. 🤗
#fire emblem discourse#edelgardiscourse#three houses discourse#rant#definitive 3h post#seriously though this stuff gives me metaphorical hives#and this will save me headaches and brain power in the long run
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One of the diversionary tactics employed by the eminent historians in order to shield Islamic iconoclasm from the public eye is to allege that Hinduism itself is the guilty religion, of persecuting minority religions such as Buddhism. So much is this accusation now taken for granted, that any attempt to stick to the historical record fills the secularists with exasperation at such Hindu fanatical blindness.
Sadly, some Buddhists have taken the bait and interiorized this line of anti-Hindu polemic, which also ties in neatly with the pro-Buddhist bias in Nehruvian and Western Indology. How painfully ungrateful. While Hinduism has received from Islam nothing but murder and destruction, Buddhism owes a lot to Hinduism. Apart from its very existence, it has received from Hinduism toleration, alms by Hindu laymen, sons and daughters of Hindus to fill its monasteries and nunneries, land grants and funding by Hindu rulers, protection by Hindu rulers against lawlessness and against the Islamic invaders between the mid-7th and the late 12th century. In many cases, Buddhist temples formed part of large pluralist temple-complexes, and Hindu codes of art and architecture dealt with Buddha on a par with Shiva and other objects of depiction and worship.
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In addition to the many agendas he had to deal with day in and day out for Elisabeth, Bayer [her secretary] of course also administered the most important task the empress had to perform beyond representation: charity. From time immemorial, the wife of the sovereign took on the task of being charitable and giving alms, donations and gifts to the needy. In the mid-19th century, municipalities and churches were responsible for social policies in the modern sense. In case of difficulties, one turned directly to the sovereign. As in how much the state and the imperial house still went hand in hand in this context can be seen in Elisabeth's secretariat: of the 100,000 ducats that Elisabeth received annually from the court treasury, a large part was immediately forwarded to various charitable organisations. From today's point of view, the Ministry of Finance could have forwarded the aid money directly to the recipients, but in those days the thinking was different: it was not the anonymous state that was responsible for the charity, but the imperial house itself. The needy thus did not turn to an official, but to the emperor. It is therefore not surprising that Elisabeth's largest outgoings were always for charitable purposes.
Most of the money went to established aid institutions. Shortly after taking office, Leopold Bayer informed the minister of the interior that the governors of the individual crown lands were to make the payments. The entire spectrum of charitable institutions was considered: orphanages, kindergartens, associations for the blind, educational institutions, boarding houses, pension institutions, schools, hospitals, homes for the poor and infirm, as well as churches and parishes. The most frequent entries in the books, however, are charges recorded as “to the poor in Vienna” or “to the poor in the provinces”. These were not subsidies, but classic alms distributed on a large scale in the name of the empress.
In addition to charities, individuals who approached Sisi as supplicants also received financial assistance. In general, requests for support, especially from the very poor, were accepted without difficulty. However, before any amount was granted to them, supplicants were checked. The secretariat or the office of the court grand master [Oberhofmeister] then asked the authorities for information on their material situation and reputation.
These were mostly widows and orphans. They asked the empress for financial help for various reasons: because they could not live on their pension, because their salary was not sufficient to maintain a decent standard of living, because they could not work because of a relative in need of care, or because they themselves were chronically ill. From the notes in Bayer's file and his correspondence with the court grand master, it is clear that all pleas were presented to Elisabeth.
In addition to the poor, members of the lower nobility in distress and so-called “high-ranking women” were the second large group who turned to the empress for help. Here the story was always the same: the ladies were unmarried or widowed and therefore without a supporter, a situation in which even women of the lower nobility and non-wealthy could easily fall into. The donations Elisabeth made to them were as varied as the fates of the applicants. The empress paid the impoverished Marie d'Ellevaux a hundred guilders so that she could travel to Vienna to visit her daughter who was about to give birth; the daughters of the second lieutenants in a precarious situation, on the other hand, she usually gave twenty guilders.
Winkelhofer, Martina (2022). Sissi. La vera storia. Il camino della giovane imperatrice (Translation done by DeepL. Please keep in mind that in a machine translation a lot of nuance may/will be lost)
#this is why i don't like when elisabeth's charity work is painted as something unique that came from her alone#in order to present her as a sort of 19th century princess diana#doing charity was one the traditional roles of a consort! empress maria anna was also known for being very charitable!!#empress elisabeth of austria#historian: martina winkelhofer#historicwomendaily
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Please
Among the continent of the Shattered Planes, as has been increasingly obvious in my correspondence, the most abundant religious force is the Pantheon of Isosa. This is because, for a multitude of reasons, it is an objective fact. There is no mystery in its worship, no interrogation of why people believe it to be true. They simply have to open their eyes, see the shattered moon that hangs like a watchful eye over their homes. They simply have to look at the tears in the firmament, the stars and constellations that entropy has wrought. They simply have to speak to one of the many spirits or angels that were there at the dawn of time, who fought on either side of the Celestial Civil War. They have to just look at the smile on an old man’s face, or eat a warm meal, or share a laugh to know, somewhere, of the impermanence that The Wolf crept into reality.
The days pass, and it is all her fault. There is no need to wonder if it is true.
However, this is where I disagree with my contemporaries. Dr. Sutioni or Dr. Mya argues that this blatant fact has led to the dominance of the Isosian religion among the various, pious nations of the Askaven Continent. From the Western Wastes, where Wolf Apostates roam under their godhunter’s watchful eyes, to the forests of the Coalition of the Eastern Kingdoms. Even the Empire of Night, with their Adherence to the Everyman, is a form of Isosian anti-theism. They both argue in a cohesive faith, shared by each of these groups.
But look at the worshipers of the Eastern Kingdoms, who’s faith is so commingled with the state that even their kings claim a divine right to rule. Look even further, to the sects and mystery cults of the different divines within the forests of the kingdoms. The Friends of the Lady of Hounds, the Handmaidens of the Winter Queen, Qoonla’s Lovers. The Wolf Apostates border on atavism, more akin to relic-worship of whatever shards left over from the Celestial Civil War they can find buried among the snow of the Western Wastes. The nomadic orcs of the hinterlands have no structured religion, aside from whatever paladin covens they host, instead focusing on a stronger sort of familiar Lare. Even the strongest sense of a state religion focusing solely on the Isosian pantheon places itself as its opposite, the Adherence to the Everyman. More a philosophical guideline in the Empire of Night, the Adherence is a set of strictures and rules to tradition. To list them all would bore even me, but a common throughline throughout all of them is a form of disgust so obsessive that it borders on reverence. A preoccupation with the wrongs of the gods and their followers that were committed on the ‘every man.’ Humanity becomes divine and perfect, and the tools made by them become even moreso.
These are not the hallmarks of an organized religious force. Each of them are about Isosa and her coven in one way or another, but few are informed by her. The dedicated Isosian faithful are demonstrably fewer than the combined adherents of the other doctrines or philosophies. They keep to the wilds or to select, divided neighborhoods. The cities and outposts that Isosa has dominion over tend to be smaller, isolated affairs, who strive to be self-sufficient in all things. It is demonstrably harder to have the same sort of order and communal understanding that these adherents claim in larger settings.
There were few, if any, Isosian enclaves in the lawless monarchy that is Mariposa. Records indicate that a few neighborhoods banded together under the goddess of order during the reign of Queen Mariposa the Maddened. However, due to citysickness and general apathy towards growth by the faithful, those dissipated within one generation. Their temple, nestled deep within the Upper Wards, still stands.
The House of Swinging Trees was a tall, granite building, with a relief of alms being given by Isosa to humanity. It was all harsh edges and awkward lines, each converging towards the sky at slants. Made from holy geometry and mathematical precision. It sat in the center of a large and meticulous garden, with stones lining the center of a massive Babylon Willow. The grass that lay between the stones was some of the only for miles, an enclave of natural beauty in the iron and stone city of Mariposa. As if someone had raised the building from the ground, as if someone had hewn this place from the world itself.
This was what Remiel had been looking for.
He stood in front of the House of Swinging Trees for what felt like too long. It was just before night time, at the edge of winter. On his back, his loaned greatsword rubbed against a heavy bookbag. A gift, stuffed with knowledge, all of it leading him here. It dug into his shoulders, made his neck strain and hurt. If he wore one or the other, perhaps the awkward pain would not be here. But Remiel felt unsure whether he’d need knowledge or the blade and, one to loath uncertainty, brought both.
At the gate, made of pyrite shined to look like gold, stood an ashen orc. He was wearing no clothes of the scholar or theologian, no bag or book of hours. Under his arm on a single point sling was a shotgun. Remiel could hear its bullet singing to him, feel its call on the back of his neck. The orc was young, then. And the blade looked so large in the child’s eyes. The man in front of him wore a bruise under his eye, and several scratches across his face. From his neck, a single, silver broken fang. He glared at the paladin, rolling his eyes in displeasure.
“Need something, sir?” The orc grunted, words escaping from beyond his silver capped tusks. Between his lips and between his teeth, a cigarette. It smelt of sawdust and datura. “Temple’s closed, if that’s what you’re looking for. Healer is out sick, if you can believe it.”
“Oh um,” Remiel grips the strap of his book bag a bit tighter, as if that might protect him. “Are they alright?”
“Huh?” The orc raised an eyebrow. “How would I know?”
“You work, um, here, right?”
The orc narrows his eyes a bit. “Aye.”
“Well-” Remiel pauses for a second, and then thinks better of pressing the matter. “I guess, yeah, I guess it really doesn't matter. I just heard that you guys have a really good library.”
“We aren’t a charity case, kid. You want books, go to Sans Bernadine University.”
Remiel raised an eyebrow in shock. “Didn’t you hear about it?”
The orc chuckles to himself, shaking his head and crossing his arms. “Yeah, I did. Smelt it too.”
“Yeah, real pity about it.” Remiel frowned, knuckles white on his bookbag.
“Real pity.” The orc states dryly. “So, sorry, guess you’ll have to come back some other day.”
The paladin took a step forward, puffing out his chest in a show of strength. “No, I don’t think I will.”
He was face to face with the orc now, each standing heads taller than an average man. The orc scowled and took his cigarette from out of his mouth. “Yea? And why’s that, tough guy?”
“I am a paladin of Isosa.” Remiel continued, hand moving towards his sword like his rector had taught him. Words fail you, Remiel hears on the shivers of his neck, sense fail you, faith in steel. Remiel bites back the thoughts and hopes, beyond hope, that they are wrong. He speaks again. “And I need to know everything you know.”
The orc looks back at the sword on his back, and then back at the almost soft face in front of him. “Huh, real paladin.” This is all the orc can say.
“Can you please just let me in.” Remiel narrows his eyes. “Please.”
The orc smiles, drops the cigarette from his lips, and snuffs the flame out with his heel. “Sorrow is going to want to hear from you.”
The inside of the House of Swinging Trees was just as cold as the exterior. Granite floors and more pyrite light fixtures. It was lit entirely by candle and by wick, none of the halogen lights of most of the Mariposian homes of the day. Most of the electricity in the city came from large, crystalline bullets in power-factories along the coast. The bullet technology, the trapping of emotions and memories into physical, powerful forms, were considered anathema by the most militant of Isosian followers. They did, however, make an exception for weaponry. There were few arms more effective than the bullet powered firearm, and there were always causes for their use.
On the table next to Remiel were at least half a dozen of these firearms. Their handles and stocks were made from pure alder wood. Harvested in the depth of summer, the season supposedly closest to what the Fractal Fields of Isosa were. These weapons, they are true. They seem more real than the table around them, more situated in their place. Shotguns, pistols, small arms adept in the city style close quarters fighting that one would be familiar with here in Mariposa. There were no long rifles, no things of distance. Remiel had, at one point or another, thought of trading in his long, curving blade for such weapons. He had gotten into a scrape or two here in Mariposa, and while his sword is an effective mark of his station within the paladin’s of Isosa, it did not suit itself for the alleyways that Mariposian combat, often getting caught on the walls and bars that made up the city. He would rely on his words and, when those failed, the gifts his faith and birth had given him. And, throughout this, he felt loath to give up the sword.
The pistol besides his hand did seem all that more alluring, however.
On the table, next to these weapons of war, were books. The very thing that Remiel had been seeking. The dust covers were still on them, and it had been clear that they had never been opened by the inhabitants of the House of Swinging Trees. The room he was sat in had a window on the far side of it. Through it, he could see the courtyard with the Babylon Willow. He saw a small cambion man, blue with tall, straight horns, pruning a hibiscus bush. His clothing was a white skirt, with the little laces on the edge of it. On his head, tucking in his braided, brown hair, was a large sun hat, keeping the dusk sun from his eyes. The area of the city they were in was not as tall and grand as some of the others, as ambassadors and other men of power tended to like this neighborhood for its simplicity and safety. In the distance, one could see the whole of Queen’s Court, with its titanic skyscrapers covered in equally as mighty rose petals. One could see the sun setting behind the Concordat of Miracles, see the feral angel straining in vain against the iron nails driven through its wings. Out there, that is Mariposa. Towering and true. Above it, Imperial Warballoons cover the city like a dense haze, with little mechanized men flying between them. Green and gold banners hang from the edge of the balloons, each denoting a crescent moon with a sword driven through them, lest Mariposa forget who now rules it.
But here, in this temple, this could not be Mariposa, not really. The House of Swinging Trees was grand, certainly, but did not extend as far as the buildings around it. The gardens were manicured and delightful, each fit to burst with fruit that did not taste like sickly sweet perfume. Each of the blades of grass are the same length. Each of the doors are the same size, just a bit too short for Remiel to comfortably fit in. Each of the people housed here are all the same amount of driven, keen and sharp in their direction.
They’re all so like his home growing up. A little cabin in the fields somewhere in the Eastern Kingdoms. Always with three logs burning in the fireplace and small bushes in front of the windows. There was a scent of aspen on the breeze, despite there being no such forest near by the rolling fields of barley and grain. His father had described it as paradise after the hell of the Ibi-Vujčić Conflict. Where that was fire, this was calm, where that was storm, this was peace. He would sit in the dirt for hours, marveling at the sapphire beatles sitting on the leaves. Remiel once, and only once, saw Ferdinand, his father, reach his hand towards one of them, as to join them in their commiseration before his mother placed her hand on his shoulder. The beatles flew away, the moment over. They even had a babylon willow shadowing the house. Remiel would sit under its branches, trace his hands along its weeping branchlets like parting water. The leaves were always dryer, like it was a land of always autumn. A secret, private little enclave, just before the winter made them hunker in. Remiel never remembered the winter ever arriving, or the sweltering heat of summer. It was always in that secret liminal space, incapable of moving beyond or backwards.
Remiel placed his hand on the cold stone of the windowsill. There was no insulation between the walls and the outside, as it was made entirely out of stone and faith. The building was drafty and inhospitable to any of those not touched by Isosa’s constant contentment. Remiel felt a shiver fall down his spine. There was a biting, and blood in the mouth, and a shattering. And then it was over.
“It is quite a view.” A voice came from behind him. It was not a cold voice, but distant. Authoritative. It sounded, for only a moment, like his mother’s. He spun around, half convinced it was her. It was not, dear reader. She was shorter, first of all. Her skin was green and from her this infernal heat arose. Her tail curled around her right leg like a snake, a sign of piety and respect. Her horns were backswept and her hair was in a bun with a silver spear through the back of it. She smiled plainly, leaving dimples in her cheeks and no creases in her eyes. A cambion. Remiel fought the urge to look disappointed, a battle he did not win.
The woman winced in a sort of ego-pain at the paladin’s face, quickly dropping the smile. Remiel noticed her discomfort and brought his hands in front of him, fingers splayed in some sort of deference. “Oh my god, I am so sorry, miss. I j- I just thought you were someone. Someone I knew, someone else.”
“Ah,” The woman regained her smile, placing her hands behind her back. “No offense taken, paladin. I would, too, be disappointed if I thought I knew someone in this city, only for the truth to rip such comfort away from me.”
Remiel let out a sigh of relief, clearly believing whatever this woman was saying. She stood tall, with an impeccably straight back. Her hooves clopped against the floor, her gait was measured and disarming in its grace. “Your doorman, Clovis. He said you were the Abbess.”
The cambion nodded. “Mother Superior Brightwind, but please, Sorrow will suffice.”
“Brightwind?” Remiel repeats. “I know of a Vera Brightwind in Varak, I met pilgrims traveling to her abbey.”
Sorrow sucks air in between her teeth. They are sharp and the air tastes like holding onto a rosebush so hard you bleed. She exhales such violence and looks towards the floor. “My half sister. When my father remarried, he moved to the hinterlands.”
“Is religious leadership in your family then?” Remiel asked with a genuine curiosity.
Sorrow blinked once, and then twice. She was not used to personal, prying questions. It was not in the nature of her order to truly care. “My mother ran a paladin school in Karnata, before it's fall.”
Remiel smiled. “I see, you come by it honestly, then.”
“Truthfully,” Sorrow responds in a moment of un-vigilance, looking out towards the city. She stares at the space where the Sans Bernadine tower once stood, now a smoldering ruin. “This is a relatively new position.”
“I heard stories of the House of Swinging Trees from my rector. I thought it was abandoned years ago.” Remiel follows her eyeline, looking at the Concordat of Miracles. Both think they are looking at the same thing. “I’m really impressed by how you rebuilt it.”
“I’m.” Sorrow’s breath caught in her mouth. “Thank you, Ser Fey.”
Remiel looks back at her. “Remiel.” He pauses again. “Please.”
“I’m not too used to a paladin complimenting me, is all.”
“Yeah,” Remiel looks back out the window, this time looking at the now setting sun. “I don’t think a lot of people get compliments from us."
“That is my experience too.”Sorrow looks back at him with a face unreadable to me. “Why are you here, Ser Fey?” Sorrow asks what should be a question, but the words in her mouth can’t help but form a demand.
Remiel looks at her and frowns. He paces back towards the table and begins to flip through a book awkwardly. “Have, um, you heard from Isosa. At all, in the last couple years?”
Sorrow looks at the pages he is flipping through, unable to tell what he is looking at, if anything at all. Her fists ball in absent flame for just a moment. Is it a challenge? Is this an inquisition? Has someone questioned her faith? The air lionized with truth, she can feel Remiel’s magic begin to worm it's way into her mouth. It tastes like apricots and, somewhere distant, Remiel’s eyes glow.
“No.” Is all Sorrow ever could have said. She is not strong enough to lie.
The aura of truth fades, and so does the light in Remiel’s eyes. “None of the leadership I’ve talked to. It's been about twelve years since anyone mortal has heard from her. Same for the angels.” Remiel lets out a sigh. He hates using that. It is like holding a breath in his stomach, in his veins. To force a compulsion, it is like having air in your blood, or a dagger at your neck. “That's why I’m here, in Mariposa. It’s like she’s just gone.”
Sorrow blinks again. She fights the rising feeling of relief in her. Her mother always told her of hearing their goddess’s voice, guiding her, showing her the Grand Weft. Sorrow had never heard such things, not even in her childhood. When Sorrow looked to the sky, pleaded for some sort of guidance, she heard nothing. Only sweet, mortal silence. How lonely, how dreadfully lonely, Sorrow thought. She felt the bile of anger, or maybe resentment, rise in the back of her throat. Remiel stood before her, gleaming and resplendent in Isosa’s light, locs braided so tightly that it must have been divine. There must not have been a moment in his life that he had ever felt so alone, where the comfort of Isosa’s voice was not there to guide him.
Sorrow clenched her fingers a bit tighter, the room got just a bit hotter, and a bead of sweat began to roll down Remiel’s brow. He was everything she had ought to be. Servile and guided, never left in the abyss of having to make his own choices, or live with his own mistakes. To choose between a daughter and husband would have been no choice to him, even as the flames of The Wolf licked the back of his neck. He would not look at his daughter's eyes and wonder if he made the right choice. He would simply know, and that would be all he could ever need.
And then, she remembered.
He was just as lost as she was. He heard no divine choir or voice. Isosa had condemned them all, the powers of the church, to that cruel silence. His hands gripped the table, he had sought Sorrow out on his own, just as unsure as she was. There was no guidance here, no path to follow. A commiseration of grasping in the dark. A concordat of loneliness. And then her hands relaxed in un-vigilance. But the room still felt just as warm, burning in absent flame.
“Sorrow?” Remiel asks in genuine concern. He takes a step towards her, hands out in front of him like she was a wild animal. The room is spinning, the world is spinning. “Hey, hey, are- hey are you ok?”
“Huh?” Sorrow responds uncharmingly. She grasps the bookshelf next to her. “No, I'm ok.” She sucks in air. “Why?”
“You look like you just saw a ghost.” The paladin responds, stepping towards her again. And, on the back of his neck, he sees her for how she really is. Knees are bowed, the wind blows through her, her hands shake and try to find purchase. A cruel part of Remiel knows she is weak, and a voice that sounds like his mother almost commands him to excise the weakness from his church. These voices are ghosts, dear readers, shivers of a dying world. Remiel sucks air in through his teeth and forces these ghosts back into the past. “I just wanted. To make sure.” His voice is similarly shaky.
“Citysickness gets the best of us, I’m afraid.” Sorrow lies. Does he know? That she, for a moment, doubted him? Resented him? Had that moment of unvigilance disguised his aura of truth from probing her mind yet again? Did he feel her call on that absent flame? She sees the bead of sweat on Remiel’s brow. “Please, for my own sake, pay it no mind.”
Remiel nods, and the perspiration falls from his brow. “Then I will, Miss Brightwind.”
Sorrow lets her borrowed breath out, centers herself, and is relieved. “You mentioned Mariposa. Why here?”
Remiel takes the sword from off of his back, rolls his aching shoulders, and then places a heavy book on the table next to him. His bookbag swings lightly against his hip. It is a worn, orange covered text, with gold lettering just barely starting to fade. It is a worn copy of Contemporaneous Reports of the Celestial Civil War from its Veterans by Dr. Blair Allcott. “This text, it guided me here.”
Sorrow walks to the table, footfalls more sure now, and places her hand on the cover of the text. It was… academic. There were no other words that Sorrow knew on how to describe it. And she was equally unsure of why a Paladin of Isosa would care for it. “What… did you find in it?”
“Truthfully, not much. An interesting read, but most of the discussions were, um, really dry. And not at all really relevant to Isosa’s disappearance.” Remiel flips the book open, skimming through the well worn pages. A faint smile on his face, a wind from the west. His father has it open on one knee, Remiel on the other. Better times. “I couldn’t use any of the techniques in the book, but it led me to Dr. Mya.”
“The author?”
“Yes! I met her, she’s a delightful woman.” Remiel beamed this smile so warm it almost made Sorrow blush. He flipped through the pages again, until the book was back on its front. He frowns, and the room goes cold. “Unfortunately, her research has been destroyed.”
“The Sans Bernadine riots.” Sorrow blinks. “I’ve… heard about them.”
“Yea, she told me they were all in the spire when it went up in flames.” Remiel sighed. “All that knowledge lost, all that work destroyed. Centuries of books. It’s a shame.”
Sorrow stares blankly. Does he know? If he does, the only way to survive is to strike now. Strike true, Sorrow. Trust not your senses, trust not your eyes, faith in steel. These are the words her mother taught her. The maxim of the Paladin’s of Isosa. She could get one, maybe two shots in before he would be on her. But, ultimately, he would break her, dash her on his sword. And he would be right to. She was there, at the burning of the spire. She tasted his work turn to ash on her tongue. He smiles at her, and she did nothing to stop them. Kill him, he threatens Order. Past the window, she sees the feral angel, and thinks she hears her voice. Anathema, he is as lost as you are.
“It is a shame.” Sorrow responds blankly. Her hand trembles. Her fingers reach for her trigger. He knows.
“Yeah,” Remiel sighs, not even noticing his companion’s trembling, doesn’t even feel the knife at his throat. “But, it wasn’t all fruitless.” He looks up at her, beaming smile. It is radiant and scouring and even Sorrow could not interpret it as something it was not. “I spoke to her, I think I have an idea of what we need to do.” All Sorrow can do is look at him, her eyes squinting against his radiance. He hurt to look at but there was nothing else she could have done. He was resplendent, she knows this. Next to him, she is dim. Behind him, the sun halos his hair. In her mouth, all she can taste is apricots and pride.
She fights the urge to retch.
“What do you need of me, Ser Fey?”
“The first step is to get a relic of Isosa’s, something she personally touched.” Remiel produces a small journal from his bookbag. Green leather cover, with a small, segmented chrysanthemum embossed on the front in gold. It is new, there is no crease in the hardened leather from use. It cost thirty-six Imperial Thalers, from a small hawking stand somewhere in the Upper Wards of the city. Remiel produces a small pen from his pocket and flips the book open to one of the first pages. His speech becomes clear, his eyes dart between the illustrations on the pages. He is focus, assurity. “And something that had met her before. An angel, maybe. A construct from the war. Something sentient, but not mortal.” He looks down at his own hand, at the pores in his skin. His light fades, just a moment. “I’m, uh, not sure why, but it can’t be mortal.”
Sorrow narrows her eyes and takes a step closer to Remiel’s field notes. There are two sets of handwriting. One is in cursive, with long, connected continents that make the words flow together. It is nigh unreadable at its face, but Sorrow is sure of the contents of every stroke, almost as if the words are laced with some sort of acausal magicks. Meaning is imprinted on the lines of the text, imparting knowledge through observation, but not recognition. It could have been written in celestial script, and Sorrow would have always known what it had said. The other is in shorthand, with scratchy acronyms and unsure handwriting. It is shaky, and doesn’t follow the lining of the paper well. Despite being written, ostensibly, in print, it is much harder to interpret content or meaning. The two texts weave together, adding on and commenting on various different drawings, both equally made in each style. Dissections that look as if they were pulled right from the air, and cosmology that is so convoluted that even a religious woman like Sorrow can not understand them. They are, somehow, in synch at every moment.
Remiel brings his pen down to the page and adds more shorthand script, describing, what Sorrow can only imagine, is whatever content he will glean from this meeting. He dates the top of his notes, sixty-third day of the Third Year of Queen Mariposa the Negligent, and looks back up at Sorrow. It is an expectant look, a look of directionlessness. It is a look familiar to Sorrow, every time she looks in the mirror. He needs her guidance, her grace. Sorrow smiles a bit. It is a litigious grin. A grin made famous by the first queen of Mariposa. A grin dotted on every mural of Queen Mariposa the Litigious, right as she tricks Isosa into letting her guard down. It is the grin of the knife up your sleeve, it is ‘fucking the other guy before he fucks you,’ it is knowing beyond all knowing that the man in front of you must die.
Remiel looks up from his page and does not know. The smile in front of him is genuine, it is guiding. It is all teeth. He smiles back. He thinks of a joke his classmate had once told him, about the smiling abbess. It’s a common joke shared among the orders of paladins. About a ruler with fangs being the only thing that could make an abbess smile. “Everything ok?” He responds, half in jest
“You said it can’t be a mortal.” Sorrow leans forward, eyes shadowed and glowing. “What about a hound?”
And Remiel understands.
Autumn is the season of treachery.
It is the season of guile and of luck. A cantankerous superstition that is held by almost every society on the Shattered Planes. During the Celestial Civil War, the Autumn Court of the Wyld joined with the Wolf in rebellion against a court structure that had long reviled them. It was a simple choice, really. Before the Wolf’s Rebelion, there was only one option. Calm servility under the boot of the fey queens. When war broke out, there was something inviting in the flames of The Wolf. It is only fitting, then, that the element most associated with the Autumn Fey was the treacherous fire. The Summer Court had crackling lightning, the Winter Court’s ensnaring frost, and the Spring Court with their regressive amber. But the Autumn Court, they were hoisted the element of change, forced to mantle a raw, possessive magick even before it was associated with the Wolf.
This is why I balk when scholars attribute the hatred of the autumn season with its fey counterpart. Even before that rapturous flame consumed the Autumn Court, before the cruel hands of the clock had started to tick, the queens and regents of the Wyld had long reviled the autumn season. They were the tricksters in the fairy tales, hucksters and gamblers with stolen names and currency. Their Alder King was shrouded in mystery and in myth, with no face nor identity whatsoever. They were the boogeyman that scared the fey children who were never supposed to grow up. Their fall was predicated on that history, not the other way around.
This fear of the autumn, of the dying of the light, replicated itself across the survivors of the Celestial Civil War. In the Eastern Kingdoms, autumn was a time where no work was supposed to be conducted. Harvest is to be conducted late in the summer and then you are not to leave your doors until the first snowfall. To such an end, social philosophers skilled in accelerationist magicks spend countless days channeling power into the land. Either to keep them from falling or to hasten their fall. They do not allow them to change from green to orange and the sky is filled with stars or snow. And, in the autumn of the 89th year of Queen Mariposa the Licentious, the Economic District burned to the ground. I saw it light up the horizon, flames stretching far and wide into the pillaring skyscrapers that once dotted its land.
This is where Callan knew he could find her.
This is a place once kissed by the Alder King’s treacherous season; it is known that tricksters follow tricksters. The ruined buildings and burned out homes smelled familiar to the outrider knight. The moon hung low in the sky and the air was still, somehow after five years, laden with smoke. If a witch could not be found here, out of all places in Mariposa, then she could not be found anywhere. Callan ran his hand through his hair, shaking the soot from it. It was longer, now, than when his queen had shaped it for him. He had grown it out absentmindedly over the last few months. Let it run wild and fallow. It was a mistake, something that had simply slipped his mind. If he had cared to will it to not grow, he could have. He balled his fist in the flaming scarlet hair, fingers interwoven in his braid. He’d have to cut it before he saw his queen again. Make it more in line with what she wanted it to be. She had given him that hair, it was not Callan’s to change. But he wouldn’t have to change it yet. He could grow it longer. Or shave it all off. He grips the hair a bit tighter, as if his hand was engulfed in a heatless flame.
Besides him, squatters sit in a burned out building. The wall was broken behind them, revealing the rest of the home and, further, the alleyway. Their garb is long and flowing, with their limbs bound in tight fabrics. Their long cloaks were adorned in round bits and bangles that sounded like rumbling thunder when they moved. They made a small, smokeless fire in front of them. They cradled it in their hands like a child and, behind their masked faces, Callan can see an equal amount of glee. They chanted in woeful prayer, litanies against the cold. The flames responded in kind, crackling and breaking in tune. These were the apostates of the Wolf, this Callan is certain of. They were once relegated to the Western Wastes in exile and rarely left it in fear of sectarian reprisal. They are the tricksters of the Isosain, the boogeyman that lurks in the heart of every man. The fall that was the consequence of pride.
Callan looked at them with an unknown feeling in his chest. Pity? Pride? Recognition? He is not sure, and as a consequence neither am I. And both of us revile such uncertainty. If there is a mystery, it must be revealed. If there is a secret, it must be uncovered. We are both cowards in that way. Callan took a step towards them, his figure shadowed in the crumbling doorway. He placed his hand against the ashen wood, flames of autumn reigniting deep in the heartwood for but a brief moment. The apostates, shocked by the sudden intrusion of a stranger, clasped the fire closer to their hearts. Their clothes did not singe, but their skin began to blister and burn from the flame. There were no enemies here in Mariposa, but reflex is reflex.
“Ahoy.” Callan raised a hand in sympathy. A single, lick of flame darted between his fingers. “Friend, not foe.”
One of the apostates lowers his white mask, revealing a stubbly chin and toothy grin. He lowered his hood, his ringed fingers gliding across the fabric with the delicate grace of a dancer. He was, once, back in the Eastern Kingdoms, before one poisoned word drove him west. “You’re a part of no Da’as.” The man motioned to Callan’s clothing, to the large fur coat that hung off his back.
Callan nodded and took a step forward. “I am not.”
“I didn’t know fire was popular outside of our Da’as.” The man’s companion added, visibly relaxing somewhat. “Poor publicity, I suppose.”
“It can be popular in the east, if you look close enough.”
The man with the stubbly chin smiles. “If you go east far enough, you eventually find yourself west.”
Callan narrows his eyes somewhat. “I’ve never been one for the horizon.”
“Could have fooled me.”
“You ever thought about heading to the wastes?” The man’s companion responded, unaware of whatever innuendo was shared between those two. His teeth were blunt, as were his words. His hands were clumsy and unken to fire. But he had kind eyes, and that crease where his smile folds his brow. “I know Isosian’s are not too friendly to fire.”
“I fear only one, and that is not Isosa.” Callan smiles at the man with blunt teeth. “But I will say, I understand the sentiment.”
“Come, sit for a spell.” The man with the stubbly chin slaps the floor next to him, kicking up ash and dust. “I’m Jiro of Da’as Cerena, my forward friend is Martine, of the same.”
“Martine? Mariposian name, no?” Callan sat down across from the fire. “How does it feel to be home again?”
“Ah, I am not home, though.” Martine rubbed his palms together furtively. “I am an outcast even in this place.”
“And yet,” Callan adds his warmth to the fire. “Here you are.”
“You’ve yet to introduce yourself, stranger.” Jiro asks.
“Where are my manners!” Callan smiles. “You may call me Callan.”
Jiro nods. “Pleasure.”
“Charmed!” Martine beams. “What brings you to the Great Butterfly, my friend Callan?”
“I am but a tourist, a visitor here.” Callan gesticulates with his free hand. With it the flames dance and flicker, as if following some sort of conductor. “I could ask the very same of you, my new friends. Mariposa is far from the wastes. I’m sure such a trek was perilous for you.”
“Our wayward brothers, the Isosian’s bothered us very little, actually.” Jiro stares into the fire. He leans against the half broken wall behind him in a show of relaxation. “We had more trouble with the terrain than we did with the lash.”
“Our Da’as moved with us.” Martine reaches inside his cloak and pulls out a smoked peach. He breaks off a piece with grubby fingers and hands it to Callan, across the fire. Callan, unaccustomed to gifts, does not take it. Martine shrugs and brings the dried fruit to his lips. After a moment, he continues. “Cerena values hospitality, if you care to stay with us for a spell.”
“I’ve heard all the wastrals keep such virtues.” Callan nods, closing his eyes slightly and taking in the sweet smoke. This wood had been burnt many times before, by many transients. Its bark was coated white with ash and soot. But yet, it still manages to light just the same. Its heartwood is a deep, burnt orange. Like autumn had seeps deep into its being. It looked like a sky on fire, like a birchwood in the throws of a fall. “If I am to stay with one, I am to stay with all.”
“There are no Isosians here, friend.” Martine sits up a bit tighter, eyes catching sparks like fireflies. “What is there to be afraid of in a hot meal?”
“It is not the heat I fear.” Callan chuffs. “I just do not need such comfort at the moment.”
“Perhaps that is what we seek in Mariposa proper.” Jiro traces his finger along the ashy dirt. The heat of the fire suffused them. Warded them from the cold. It was spring, now, in Mariposa. And yet, after the autumn fires, the Economic District was laden with that sodden chill. The air was thick with that dampness, as if the world itself was attempting to douse the absent flame with tears overflowing. The everburning wood was thick with wet. It was suffused with that lung sticking petrichor and the clouds hung low and dark in the sky.
And yet, even here, transients huddle. Mired in cold and wet rain, they congregate here. Callan looked at his companions, if not in name then in circumstance. Their shoulders were covered in dew, their cloaks were soaked through. But they had traveled miles towards Mariposa on sore feet and a dream. What was Mariposa to them? Callan could not know. To him, Mariposa was an iron cage. A task to be completed and then never thought of ever again. Overhead, the jackboots float their mechanized balloons across the air like lead dandelion seeds. Each with a gun and a will to kill. These facts prevented him from knowing.
“The people who rule this place hate your faith.” Callan grits his teeth. “Hate you. This is not comfort.”
“No.” Jiro smiles, his eyes cast low towards the flame. “But it might be one day.”
“No matter how many times the flames go out.” Martine smiles, too, looking at Callan bright and beaming. “We can always rekindle it.”
Callan brings his knees to his chest. If Lucius could see him, if anyone of the Primrose could see him, would they laugh? Would they chide him? Would they join in? He gritted his teeth, trying to grind the uncertainty out of his fangs. “Would it even be the same fire?” He asks, voice low under the crackle of the flames.
“That doesn’t matter.” Martine leans forward somewhat, as if to hear Callan all the more clearly. Like it was some secret the two needed to share. “As long as the fire burns.”
“Apostasy.” A voice comes from the warped doorway. “I will stand no more of it.”
All three whip their heads towards the voice. It was still, like a nail moving against glass. Each modulation made some deep part of Martine and Jiro flinch. Like a child from a nun’s ruler. They covered their hands, dowering the fire in a moment’s notice. The coals sputter and sizzle, keeping the flame deep in their hearts. The woman in the doorway with the voice that sounded like breaking glass held a gun in her hands. A revolver. A long, fanged barrel, mouth open and dripping with heat. Her finger was over the trigger, thumb on the hammer, both trembling. Her skin was this infernal green and her eyes glowed with a familiar, golden hue. She was an abbess, something about that gun made it eminently clear. It was more real than she was. It was the absence of flame, whereas fire is shifting and impermanent, that gun was sure and true. It was all hard edges and secant lines.
Behind her was a towering man. On his shoulders were a sheath and a bookbag, his hair woven tightly in locs, tight to his scalp and coming up around his shoulders. His dress is plain, for Mariposa at least. A white, billowing shirt. Skin like smooth, polished obsidian. Hair smells strongly of apricot and honey. He looked like he was pulled straight from a bodice ripper. He looked at the woman next to him almost like a lost dog. He looked like a paladin, of this they are all sure. It is in the way the sun seems to halo his head, in the way that the clouds part but the oppressive wet does not. He did not look at the men on the ground in front of him, as if they didn’t even register in his vision. Callan knew, however, that he was under this paladin’s intense scrutiny.
Callan stands up, dusts himself off. This is not his fight. For a moment, he thinks to give Martine a compassionate look. A thanks for the peach, if only in offer. He fights the desire, but it is still there. He continues to look at abbess and smiles a litigious smile. “I was unaware there was a contingent of Isosian’s here.”
“Would that have changed your behavior?” The paladin responds. “We’re a response to the Wolf, not a threat to keep good behavior.”
The abbess glares at the paladin. “Remiel.” Her voice is condescending, barely contained disgust at how wrong he is.
“Is that your name?” Callan interjects. “An odd one.”
“My mother picked it.” Remiel looked at the abbess again, almost bashfully, answering the question implied. “Beyond that, I’m not sure.”
“It's an old name, in an old language.” Callan shrugs. “I’m surprised a learned man does-”
“That is enough, Callan.” The abbess’ voice is steady, authoritative. She speaks and the world needs to listen. “That is enough.”
“Right,” Callan bristles. He motions to the men behind him. They are scared and in their hands are guns. “I take it you’re here for these two.”
“I am not.” The abbess responds. “But I am unsurprised that dogs congregate.”
Callan raises an eyebrow. His hand moves towards the hilt of his sword.
“You two.” Remiel raises a sword at the wastrals behind Callan. They raise their guns in kind, fingers trembling. Their feet are unsteady, the recoil from their shot would knock them to the ground. In another world, if they are to fire, they would certainly miss. “I need you to leave.”
“Remiel?” The abbess snaps her head towards the paladin. The wastrels back towards the broken down wall behind them. In a moment, they are gone.
“I don’t want to fight if I do not have to.” Remiel glares at the abbess but for a moment. Authority. It is pure and boring. For a moment, he is his mother. And order must be restored. Never questioned, never flinched. He has a ruling and he will be listened to. “Do I have to fight?”
“Only if I have to.” Callan responds. In that moment of distraction, of petty un-vigilance, he has drawn his sword. In his other hand, a curved staff topped with a carved, dragon’s head. The abbess curses under her breath. “Two on one doesn’t exactly seem a fair fight.”
“Isosa is not the goddess of fairness.” The abbess sneers. “I am not surprised you fail to grasp such a distinction.”
“Is- is this the one we’re looking for?” Remiel asks. His hands are gripping his twisted greatsword, one hand on the hilt, another choked up on the blade, just below the parrying hooks. A duelist's stance, to control the blade tighter in the close quarters. Callan knew Remiel was no amateur. It was instruction beat into him. “Sorrow, please tell me this is the right person.”
“He’s the hound you need.” Abbess Sorrow responds. “Trust not your eyes, trust not your senses.”
Remiel closes his eyes. He breathes in through his nose. Out through the mouth.“Faith in steel.”
It is Callan that strikes first, while Remiel is busy focusing himself. He brings his curved sword down against the flat of Remiel’s blade. Sparks fly as metal clashes, steel grinds against steel. There is an ear-raking sound and Remiel’s bladepoint heads down. Soot is kicked up in the air. The room grows warm in absent flame. Sorrow takes a step back from Remiel and smiles a litigious smile. Callan rears his other arm back, drawing the staff like a viper. His muscles contract, tighten like a piano wire.
His foot shifts underneath him, twisting backwards in a moment. Soot and ash and flame kick up in its wake, throwing that pyroclastic flow into the air. He thrusts the head of the staff at Remiel’s throat, an attempt to knock him off guard, disarm the paladin before he can retaliate. This is what Callan has on Remiel, surprise and guile. The tools of the autumn fey. Sorrow can not see through the obscuring smoke. She believes that Callan’s blade will find Remiel’s heart. And that would be just. Anathema.
Remiel can see.
His eyes do not follow Callan’s blade, it is not the deadly weapon in this circumstance. It is in how his muscles contract. Remiel can see the strands that make Callan, sees them tighten, sees the way energy flows in his body. He sees the nestle of flame in Callan’s heart, sees how it channels that fire. He knows the sword is to parry. The sword is the distraction, the rattler on the tale. That cane, that is where death is. That is the object that will unmoor him. It will open him up to what actual hatred this Callan has in his mind. The soot obscures his eyes, burns the edges of his retina. Trust not your eyes. The cane is moving faster now, it would be easy to bring his sword to Callan’s feet. This is what his rector would have done. Callan has left himself open to a brazen counter attack. He has no faith his opponent would be bold enough to go on the attack, let alone a paladin of Isosa. This is what would unmake him. Trust not your senses. This is what his mother would have done. Pressed the attack, take that giant greatsword and unmake Callan right now.
Faith in steel.
Remiel breaks his grip from his sword’s ricasso just as Callan’s cane passes it. He can feel the hot wind from the staff, feels it cut the air to ribbons. At the same moment, he twists his other shoulder, following the bladepoint into the ground. It brings Callan’s blade with it, locked in rapturous sound with the parrying hooks of his blade. His hand grabs Callan’s at the same point his blade’s edge hits the soot. He drops the greatsword, the one thing a paladin is never to do, his bookbag hitting his lower back. His hands divert Callan’s cane away from where it would strike. He thinks to throw the man, to continue his momentum and force this man to the ground. But something about how the energy flowed around the pirate, something about that ungodly heat and warmth that leaks from the edges of him, makes him reconsider.
Callan’s hair stands on edge. The trick his mentor had taught him, the trick that had forsaken many other bladesmen, had failed. His cane flies through the air, now shunned from the kill it so desperately needed. His blade knocked loose from his fingers. His eyes lock with Abbess Sorrow, smiling a familiar smile. It is the smile of Queen Mariposa the Litigious and it is a smile that Callan wears well. In her hand that baneful revolver. She is cycling the cylinder with her thumb. Waiting. Expectant. Like these two are carrion. Like these two are meat.
And Callan refuses to be meat.
He does not know it, but that is the only thought that writhes through his head. How much, at that moment, even beyond Remiel or even beyond Maeve or even beyond his target, he wishes to kill this woman smiling his smile back at him. He knows, for a moment, what it is like to hate the autumn The deception, the guile, the backhanded smile. That is all he has known the autumn to be. And, dear reader, he hates how good it makes him feel. It is a feeling that starts in his heart, a feeling that starts in his gut and in his muscles. It radiates to his fingers, to the tip of his nose, something coiled at the base of himself, desperate for release. Remiel’s back is turned towards his abbess and her hungry, hungry eyes. The air catches fire.
“I knew it.” The abbess smiles.
Arcs of flame smolder between Callan’s fingers, following odd lines and trajectories of travel. They are like birch leaves in fall. White spats of superheated air crackle and singe near the heads of his fingers. His hand lets the sword fall to the ground, knuckles white and fingers balled in flame. They are close now and Remiel can see Callan’s face now. The teeth barred, breath hot and heavy. He looks like he needed to bite Remiel, looks like his teeth grow long. His neck, now exposed from the long of his lapel, looked raw and worn, as if it was held by a cold iron choker. Like whoever held the leash held it tight. Callan is rabid, of this Remiel is sure. The paladin’s feet move backwards, kicking up the dusty ash of the floor.
Callan swipes to the left, the paladin slides to the right. Flame barely misses the tip of his nose. Licks of burning air fly off the edge of the fire, illuminating Remiel’s dark skin like starlight. Dusk and embers whorl around the two of them, caught in the updraft of their conflict. Remiel eyes his discarded sword. Callan eyes Sorrow’s gun. She has leveled it at Remiel’s back and at Callan’s heartflame. Her finger is off the trigger, for now.
“Tired paladin?” Callan asks through ragged breath. Fire takes its toll and the air was laden with ash.
“Maybe.” Remiel’s shoulders heave, the bookbag on his back feeling heavier than usual. His sword is next to Callan’s feet, if he goes for it, Callan can strike him. End him. “You don’t look perfect yourself.”
“The city, it chokes me.” He sneers. “Nothing more.”
Remiel raises an eyebrow. What did he mean by that? Nowhere, not in any scriptures, did Mariposa stand at odds with wolfkin. If anything, this leaden city would embolden agents of chaos. He thinks for a moment to look back at Sorrow, to look for guidance. An unseen fire cracks behind him, the cycling of Sorrow’s gun.
A round wizzes past Remiel’s ear, the air boiling in its wake. The paladin’s skin is warm, almost singing from the momentum of the round. It is like an absent flame, all the oppressive, destructive heat of fire with none of its warmth. None of its purpose. Somewhere, birds fly from their perch. Somewhere, a heart stops. It is the death of all things and it hits Callan square in the shoulder. His eyes grow wild and the force of the shot throws him to the dusty floor, feet tumbling over his torso. The fire, for a moment, dims. Remiel whips his head back towards Sorrow.
“What was that?” He shouts over the ringing in his ears. He stands from his half lurch. In a moment, and without Remiel noticing, his sword is back in his hand. “Sorrow, what did you just do?”
Sorrow canters her wrist, gun tilting at an odd angle. Air sublimates off of its barrel. It is shimmering with that dreadful, baleful heat. Remiel, for the first time, sees it. Sees that gun in her hand. Sees how it catches the light. It is a weapon made of broken glass, dripping with absent flame and refracted light. On the edges of it, rending jagged glass shards stick into the hands of the user. It is a weapon made from the shattering of hope and it is more real than she is. Her hand drips with blood. It is the only thing that is not burning.
“He would strike you again.” She replies. Her feet are shoulder’s width apart, her torso is tilted slightly. It is the stance of a killer. “I would not stand him to do so. Move.”
“You don’t have the authority to tell me that, Sorrow.” His voice is low, furtive. He tries not to sound like a petulant child.
“You waste your time, paladin.” She lilts at the end of her sentence, drawling his title into singsong mockery. She levels her gun towards him again. “Even now, he plots behind you.”
“That’s you, isn’t it.” He motions towards the gun in her hands. “That’s the real you. Whatever’s standing in front of me, that’s just the thing that shepherd's you from place to place.”
“Is it so bad to be something?” She places her free hand under the grip of the revolver. When he moves, that is when she will shoot. Her hands drip with absent flame. She can see it in his eyes, he is lost. He is what will make her lost again. This is just. Anathema. “Remiel, please. I need you to trust me.”
“You burn, Sorrow.” Remiel levels his sword against her, point lining up with the barrel of the pistol. “You’re burning already and you don’t even know it.”
Sorrow sucks air in. Her eyes go wild. Her hands tremble.
The air catches fire.
She is faster than Remiel is. The crack of heat lighting shatters outwards from that gun, gold and amber aurora flashing from where the bullet meets the frame. The air is thick with fire and with heat. The bullet crawls its way into Remiel’s torso, tearing and rending away skin and muscle. Remiel does not feel it. Trust not your senses. He is movement, he is momentum. His sword is in both of his hands and Remiel has broken into a sprint. He will spear her, dash her against his blade. He does not feel it, he can not feel it. He does not feel the bullet rending him, does not feel his muscles separating from each other. His heart beats fast, faster than it has in years. His skin is no longer diseased and he can not feel whatever was clawing at him.
He can not feel it.
The round misses his heart by inches. The recoil of the shot throws Sorrow’s hand into the air, obscuring Remiel in the barrel of the gun. He is fast, but he has momentum. Inertia will kill him. She feints, jerking her body left but moving right. He will move past her, of this she is sure. As sure as the gun in her hand. She cycles the cylinder, rotating the bullet into a stronger position. Energy crackles in her hand. She will have killed a paladin and then a wolfkin. She is strong, and that is purpose enough.
True to her thought, Remiel shoots past her by inches. Her mouth twists and contorts into that litigious grin without her even knowing. She wears, now, the mask of Mariposa. Every bit of hatred and scorn that this city has ever had is in Sorrow. Sorrow wishes she hated this feeling, she wishes it did not feel so good. She levels her gun against Remiel. He is in her sights. He kicked off an errant piece of architecture, forcing his body back towards his murderer. He is fast, but he is not fast enough. Sorrow sees it, sees the glowing amber blood drip from his skin. Sees his heart beating fast in his chest. She knows where she needs to shoot. She moves her finger over the trigger. It cuts her. She bleeds. This is just.
And then, fire.
There is fire between the two of them. Remiel is lost in its conflagration. There is heat and purpose in this flame. It is orange and yellow like birch trees in autumn and Sorrow knows. She looks to her side, her grin leaking from her lips. It is Callan. He is on the ground, shoulder dripping soot from his wound. It leaks out of him like magma, like some great wound in the earth extolling fire as virtue. Hair is in his eyes, and she can see now. See past the soot and the ash, she can see him. His hair is not the color of autumn. It is the color of blood. His hands are wrapt in fire. His face a familiar, Mariposian, grin. An infectious thought crosses her mind. It is luminous. Like a lighthouse at sea. It forces any sense or sensation from her thoughts. It forces her to think how much better it looks on him than on her.
Remiel crests through the flames at a speed that could break bones. Flames dance from off of his skin and off of his clothing, desperate to grab hold of him and tear him down. He hits Sorrow at that speed, the heat of the flames clinging to his skin. She feels a rib crack under the pressure. His breath is hot and damp and smells like rotting fruit. His voice carries that sickly sweet smell of decay and putrefaction. A corruption of the divine. She knows, past the pain and past the violence, what he truly is. He is the death of all things. Of divinity, of peace, of order. In Remiel, she sees what would cause her ruin. Her head is thrown back as they make contact with the wall behind them, and they keep going. Crashing through decaying and burnt wood, the dust and char fills her lungs.
They hit the ground together, his sword run through her shirt and the edges of her stomach. A glancing wound. A goring wound. She looks up at him and sees the auburn hue in his eyes shift from gold to green. His teeth are long and sharp like rows of delicate knives. In him, Sorrow sees a wolf. She grimaces in pain and in disgust, hand grasping for her gun she dropped three feet back. It shakes and rattles, like it tries to return to her.
“Anathema!” She cries out, blood and spit mixing in the back of her throat. “I lay on you anathema!” She tries to spit in his face, but her lips are too dry.
“You can’t do anything to me Sorrow.” Remiel responds in a voice too sure to be his. “I just fucking hate you.”
His blade twists in the dirt, tearing at Sorrow’s skin and muscle. He thinks she is run through, that she will bleed her last out on that blade. That is why it is curved, that is why his blade mimics the stag’s horns. It is not to resemble his goddess, it is to rip and tear and bleed and break. Sorrow grimaces and winces. She feels his own ichor drip out onto her, staining her shirt and mixing his blood with hers. It feels like acid in the veins, like a cruel burning without heat or warmth. She fears, dear reader. In his eyes, Sorrow sees the same hatred she shown him. Revealed, now. He is sharp, razors keened and honed to an edge. Remiel is a blade now, and nothing else. No longer obscured or hidden behind some litigious grin. In his eyes, she sees oblivion, and she would deserve it. It would be her place.
Sorrow refuses to be that subservient ever again.
She rears back her head and strikes Remiel against the nose with her brow. Ichor and sickening bone-crack splatter from Remiel. It drips into his mouth, frothing with spit and rage already. The pain pulls him back, makes him understand that he is a body with meat and with sense, not a weapon. He reels back, hands dropping his sword and gripping his now broken nose. His bookbag slams against the back of his knees. This is when the pain in his shoulder returns to him. Remiel falls to the floor. Sorrow scrambles backwards, brow now covered in blood and gore. It runs into her eyes, staining her verdant green skin a dark, muddy brown. The blood looks duller now, less real, than it did flowing out of the paladin. Like whatever had imbued it with such purpose left it when it had left Remiel.
He glared at her, from his place on the floor. From behind his fingers. Dust and ash mixing with his blood, cascading onto his face like a death mask. That visceral disgust might be gone, but not its purpose. She had attacked a member of Isosa’s holy order with no due purpose. Sorrow Brightwind is a threat, as is her Order of Broken Fang. Remiel bites his lip to stifle his moans. A failure. No steps further. He reaches a hand towards her, towards the hilt of his blade.
“Get out of here.” A voice comes from behind Remiel. It is Callan. He is gripping his shoulder, still leaking magmatic blood. His wound is sizzling, steaming from the wound. As if whatever had shot him was still burning. In his other hand, limp at his side, is his sword.“Before I and my friend find it more fun to hunt you.”
“I will burn you all.” Sorrow scrambles backwards, lurching towards the burned out door behind her. “Anathema. I lay on you all Anathema.”
“It wouldn’t be the first.” Callan smiles. “I will be interested to see if, this time, you succeed.”
Somewhere, overhead. A lighting bolt crackles. For the first time in five years, it rains in the Economic District of Mariposa. Between the moment of lighting and thunder. Sorrow is gone. Squirreled away somewhere into the ash and dust. Remiel sighs and begins to sit up, his shoulder tense and swollen. He brings his free hand to the bridge of his nose, feels the pressure of blood coagulating just underneath the skin. It is building. He is himself again. His disgust smoldered out into mere, and infinitely more harmless, anger. Anger, dear reader, anger is actionable. You can understand what angers you. Change either yourself or the world. Disgust only allows you violence, senseless and all encompassing. In disgust, you must destroy what disgusts you.
Faith in steel.
“Ah, ah.” Callan coos. “Easy, now. Move the wrong way and you might rip something.”
Remiel sighs and keeps his hand pressed tight against his wound. “I’m uh, pretty sturdy.”
“Hells, I can see that.” Callan grins, this time with a genuine smile. His brogue is thick on the tongue. “With how fast you move, I’m quite surprised. Can’t knock you down, can I?”
“Are you going to try to?”
“No, no.” Callan shakes his head. “Something tells me I couldn’t. A gun like that would kill any regular man.”
“You’re, um. Not a wolfkin.” Remiel looks down at the floor, eyes glowered in dejection. “Are you?”
“You’ve been had, I’m afraid. Been the butt of the lark”
“Yeah, that’s what I thought too.”
“Chin up, friend.” Callan sits down on the floor next to Remiel. He twists fire from his wound, drawing it deep from inside of him. Remiel wants to flinch, to run away from such a flame. But, to him, all it feels is warm. “She wore that grin almost as well as I do.”
“I’m uh. Sorry I tried to kill you.”
Callan tuts. “No you didn’t. If what you did to me was trying to kill me, you’d have looked like how you treated the good abbess there.”
“Yeah,” Remiel laughs shallowly, then sucks air in through his teeth. He holds his side tight, clenching some torn muscle used up in whatever magicks Remiel had used to keep himself alive. “Oh, uh. Ow. Don’t- Don’t make me laugh.”
“Noted.” Callan nods. “You did say you needed me for something.”
“I uh.” Remiel removes his hand from his shoulder. The bleeding shouldn’t have stopped yet, Callan thinks. And yet, when he draws his hand back, he is leaking no more. “It's personal business.”
“Far be it from me to pry.” Callan shrugs, reaching into his coat to draw some flask with his good hand. “A man has to keep his own secrets.
There are several moments of silence, as the rain pitters onto the burned out rooftop above them. The wind is not whipping, and the rain is light. A nuisance. Remiel looks over to his companion. “You haven’t talked to Isosa before? Have you?”
Callan blinks twice. “No.”
“Damn.” Remiel sighs as he moves to get up. He winces in pain. Callan looks at the paladin’s shoulder. Healed, already. No more of the sickly sweet ichor that filled Callan’s mind with thoughts of home. His thin, white shirt had been torn open with the bullet, damp with his blood and sticking to his skin. The wound looked closed. Tender, but closed. The flesh around it, however, looked diseased. Thick tendrils of black miasma warped and weaved like roots. Remiel notices Callan’s gaze and moves to cover it with his hand. The pirate looks down at the floor, bashfully.
“You looking for your goddess?” He responds after a slight moment. His own shoulder is not as lucky. The bleeding has stopped, but his arm hangs limp.
“You might not be my target, but that fire doesn’t mean I should trust you.” Remiel mutters. “Sorry.”
“Meant nothing by it, friend.” Callan shrugs with one of his shoulders.
“No, no, eugh.” Remiel pinches the bridge of his nose out of reflex, then flinches away when his hands make contact with the break. “Sorry, I’m just-”
“Worn out?”
“Tired, yeah.”
Callan sits on the floor next to Remiel and starts up his fire, for just a moment. It dances like a friend, flickering shadows cast against the now sodden walls. The fire crackles with moisture and air shimmers with heat, refracting all that is in front of them.
“I’m here, hunting for someone too.” Callan starts back up again. “A witch who’s stolen something from my lady.”
“Not much to go off of.” Remiel shies away from the fire for a moment, his torso turning slightly away, as if a child running from a large dog.
“I’m afraid not.” Callan sighs, his breath shaky. To keep this fire up drains him. But Remiel looks as if he needs the warmth, shuddering in the cold as he is. His grin grows wide, and Remiel does not see.
“I certainly will not stand in your way.”
Callan knows what to do.
“When I was younger,” Callan starts, hands held out in front of him, warm in its embrace. “I understood that was all fire was.”
“Hm?”
“Distortion. When fire, true fire, warms, it distorts the air around it. Refracts it in ways that are untrue.” He pauses for a moment. “Fire was guile, it was trickery.”
“Huh.” Remiel leans forward a bit. Was this the first time he’s been close enough to fire to truly see it? The rector was warmed by steam, his home never needed to keep out the cold. The fireplace had always sat empty and whatever food they needed, his mother had always provided. He had heard stories of it, been taught to fear it. But he had never seen it. He moves his hand to his shoulder again, feels the pulse of his heart in his reforming wound. “Fire was destruction. For- for us.”
“Is that right?”
“Fire marks decay, it marks entropy. The breaking of things down from what they were. A transformation.”
“Do you see that right now?”
Remiel pauses for a second. He knows, somewhere, that there is a transfusion here. Part of whoever Callan is was being destroyed in order to create this fire. He could see, if he looked hard enough, the channels of energy along Callan’s veins. He could see the fire burning in his stomach. Consuming him. A wretched thing. A thing of the abyss, of entropy. These are things he can see.
Trust not your eyes.
Callan can see the fire dancing within them, like a child looking at the stars for the very first time. Remiel’s face is lit up, the shadows grow longer. They are enrapturing, they are obliterating. Upon them, they are the death of all sense. Remiel moves his hands towards them, as if Prometheus grasping for its warmth. Callan’s grin grows just that bit wider, catching the rest of his face ablaze in its glory. A moment, Remiel thinks, a moment could not hurt.
“No.”
#creative writing#cup of trembling#fantasy#writing#dnd writing#dnd#mariposa#fantasy horror#Callan#Remiel Fey#Sorrow Brightwind#dnd 5e
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“Poor travelers could rely on monastic hospitality, and the records indicate that even well-to-do travelers were often made welcome as well, in conformity with Saint Benedict's instruction in his Rule that the visitor was to be received as the monks would receive Christ. But the monks did not merely wait for the poor to come their way in the course of their travels. They sought out the poor who lived in the surrounding area. Lanfranc, for example, gave the almoner (the distributor of alms) the responsibility of discovering the sick and the poor near the monastery and providing them with monastic alms. In some cases, we read of the poor being given lodging, at times even indefinitely, in the monastic almonry.1”
- Thomas E. Woods Jr., Ph.D., “How Catholic Charity Changed the World,” How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization
—
1. Barbara Harvey, Living and Dying in England, 1100-1540: The Monastic Experience (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 18
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answer your 30 questions please and thank you!!!
WOO. HERE WE GO, YA'LL:
ao3 wrapped [writers edition]
How many words have you written this year?
Published? 22,685. Unpublished? A loooooot ahaha.
How many works did you publish this year?
Currently, 3. Hoping to have 4-5 by christmas though. 👀
What work are you most proud of (regardless of kudos/hits)? definitely cause i'm lovesick. That thing was a labor of love. My first fanfic baby in a loooong time.
What work of yours has the most hits?
currently cause i'm lovesick (I ain't even ashamed), which is at 735 hits. But it's kind of biased, considering I only came back to fic writing in like october.
What work of yours got more feedback than you expected? nothing in particular - I'm just happy to have any engagement!
Favorite title you used
honestly, no favorite as of yet. All the titles I've used come from song lyrics that are super royai coded/important to me, so I like them all. That answer could definitely change in the future though!
If you use song lyrics, which artist’s songs did you pull from the most?
most recently, taylor swift (hopeless, breathless, burning slow), but also banks (cause i'm lovesick and you're all that matters to me anyway - she's SO GOOD for angsty love songs). Lyrics are so, so important to me. I have a ~300 song royai playlist (which I'm going to slim down and post here at some point) that I listen to constantly, lol, and a huge notes file on my phone filled with potential song lyric titles. I have a music degree and it's literally so important to my writing process aajsaksjljasjl.
Pairing you wrote the most for this year?
Royai. lol. That's not going to change any time soon. The extreme hyperfixation is REAL.
Favorite pairing you wrote for this year?
Again royai. They're the best. My babies. 💖
What work was the quickest to write?
Surprising, chapter 2 of hopeless, breathless, burning slow. started it last night and i'm already nearly done the first draft. That thing flew out of me, especially considering chapter 1 was much more of a journey lol.
What work took you the longest to write?
definitely chapter 1 of hopeless, breathless, burning slow. it wasn't the writing that was the issue - it was the editing. I really dragged my feet on it, and could have had that thing out like 2 weeks ago. 🤦♀️
How many WIP’s do you have in your docs for next year?
oh god. my wip's currently include:
- chapter 2 of hopeless, breathless, burning slow
- sequel to cause i'm lovesick (I ain't even ashamed)
- a christmas fic
- angsty, hurt/comfort, character exploration, ishval restoration multi-chaptered fic (I'm REALLY excited to work on this!!! yay angst)
- roy and riza returning to her old father's house post-cannon and STUFF HAPPENS, fluff, hurt/comfort, etc (also really excited for this one! i've been daydreaming about it for MONTHS. Even just thinking about this fic feels like sinking into a warm bath. That's the vibes I want it to give)
- ANOTHER post-promised day fic, because I'm a broken record, but this time more humorous/cute.
- aaaand yet another post-promised day fic, but one where Riza REALLY ISN'T DOING WELL/almost dies like a million times at the hospital and roy is sad (!!!).
- briggs angst/sick fic - does that make sense? no? it will.
Yeah. yeahhh. That list is only going to get bigger. 🤷♀️ Some of these will also, shockingly, not have smut lol.
What’s your longest work of the year?
So far, ch. 1 of hopeless, breathless, burning slow at a whopping 9, 792 words. It really ran away from me.
What’s your shortest work of the year?
mmm, you're all that matters to me anyway at 5,954 words. apparently I can't write anything below 5k lol. 🤷♀️
What WIP are you taking into next year with you?
Oof, I mean probably most of what I had listed above. I aim to have some of it done - but it's already December 7th, so yeah.
What’s your most common “Additional Tags” tag?
Smut. lol.
Your favorite character to write this year?
Surprisingly, Roy. I almost find him easier to write than Riza. Normally I don't enjoy writing from the male perspective. But Roy Mustang is just 🔥. I was so surprised lol.
The character that gave you the most trouble writing this year?
No one, as of yet. But we'll see what I say once I start working more on the multi chaptered fics. 😬
What’s one pairing you want to explore next year?
More Royai, maybe with a dash of Roy/Maes. Maybe I'll try a bit of Ed/Winry? Who knows!
Which work of yours have you reread the most?
chapter 1 of hopeless, breathless, burning slow. I am so fucking sick of it ahaha helppp.
How many kudos in total did you get this year?
Currently at 142! You are all so sweet. 😭
Which work has the most comments?
I think cause i'm lovesick at the moment!
Did you do any collaborative works this year?
nope! Definitely something I'd consider doing in the future though!
Did you write any gifts this year?
maybe! 👀 we shall see
Did you receive any gifts this year?
nope!
What’s your most common category?
...Smut. lol. 🤷♀️
What do you listen to while writing?
ahhhh I love talking about music with my ships!
like I said, my ridiculously huge royai playlist. also all of my top songs on spotify were from it, which includes:
1. Say Yes to Heaven - Lana Del Ray (i've got my eye on you / i've got my mind on you)
2. Work Song - Hozier (no grave could hold my body down / i'll crawl home to her)
3. I Wanna Be Yours - Artic Monkeys (secrets i have held in my heart / are harder to hide then i thought / maybe i just wanna be yours)
4. Night We Met - Lord Horan feat. Pheobe Bridges (i had all and then most of you / some and now none of you / take me back to the night we met / i don't know what i'm supposed to do / haunted by the ghost of you) - that ishval restoration fic is definitely going to use a lyric from this song SOMEWHERE
Honorable mentions:
Die First - Nessa Barrett (someone dies or someone gets hurt / but if one of us dies / i hope i die first)
Ya'aburnee - Halsey (i'll never know / if there's danger in confession / or it's memory that presses / like a blade against my throat / another word and i could choke / but what's worst? / tellin' you my feelings / or to die without revealing / that you got inside my head / and set a fire there instead?)
Dress - Taylor Swift (there is an indentation in the shape of you / made your mark on me, a golden tattoo / all of this silence and patience / pining and anticipation / my hands are shaking from holding back from you) 10000/10, would play at royai's wedding.
Favorite work you wrote this year?
cause i'm lovesick. Again, it was my baby. I loved writing it so much.
Favorite line/passage you wrote this year?
mmmm, probably: "She'd planned to stay angry at Mustang for longer, but then he'd surprised her by sauntering into her apartment basically the second his train had arrived, eyes blazing with desire as he collected her in his warm embrace, murmuring you have no idea how much I've been craving to taste you against the soft skin of her throat." (I tried to find one that was mostly sfw lol).
Biggest surprise while writing this year?
Just being able to write, in general! It's been so much fun. 💖
#bless you i love answering asks#💕#ask#answered#writing#ilyanairvine#answered asks#royai#royai fanfic#royai fanfiction#my fics#my stuff
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Three Clerks
Last week I tweaked my back. It hurt. A lot. As I recovered, I found that sketching with pen and pencil was less strenuous than writing on keyboard. So that's what I did.
Sketched characters from an adventure I am currently writing for Colin Le Sueur's We Deal In Lead. It began as a homage to Wisit Sasanatieng's tomyamgong western Fa Thalai Chon / Tears Of The Black Tiger.
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SHIN SUL SHAP, SHRINE CLERK
4 Grit 10 STR 10 DEX 10 HRT
Switch (d4)
Face hidden by a broad-brimmed bonnet and veil. Patrols the lines of pilgrims; like a schoolmarm she thwacks anybody chit-chatting. Piety should be silent!
A waif snatches a lead token from her pouch, and bolts. A chase ensues. He begs your help. If Sul Shap finds him, she will sell him to captive takers.
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Sul Shap is a clerk at the Shrine To The Headless Sun: a bare plaza; a marble pavilion; a golden man, with an ever-burning flame where his head should be.
The Headless Sun is patron saint of the Admiralty, whose laws now govern both Ocean and Sea. He was its founder. The kings of old captured and beheaded him. He overthrew them anyway.
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References for Sul Shap were basically Buddhist nun robes (mainly for the volume of fabric), plus an European bonnet.
Initially I'd imagined a conventional broad-brim hat---ie: her veil would be a cylinder around her whole head. But as I sketched I thought the bonnet made a more interesting shape? Also its rear was an opportunity to create a crest / halo of sun-rays. Religious iconography!
Alms bowl, because giving is a virtue. But the Headless Sun values ego-death, not asceticism---so colourful beads and gold amulets and pouches full of lead tokens (money).
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RIS SHAY NAM, RECORDS CLERK
2 Grit 10 STR 10 DEX 10 HRT
Swung typewriter (d4)
In a wheelbarrow, pulled by a servitor, typewriter balanced on her belly, pockets filled with banana fritters. Greasy fingerprints on any document she works on.
Shay Nam thinks herself a moral soul. Will side with abolitionists and revolutionaries, with justice—until her own skin is at risk.
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Shay Nam works at the Hibiscus Court. Princess Khur San, distancing herself from the old order, surrendered this palace to bureaucrats.
Clerks have filled its once-airy halls with shelves. By sympathetic sorcery, all contracts in the province manifest copies here. Rumour has it that this magic works both ways.
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This was my first sketch. In pain and bored I just started drawing.
No references, and it shows? Skirt and stockings and boots because these were the easiest for me to do. In my mind Shay Nam was an archetypal overweight NEET. Here she looks to be a sassy layabout. I like her better, now!
Also: a servitor is an empty body. Created when you ritually touch a shrine-stone to the Headless Sun---your soul is obliterated. What is left behind is mindless, hence the harness and reins.
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KHAN YUL MIN, COURT CLERK
4 Grit 1 DEF 10 STR 10 DEX 10 HRT
Sabre (d8)
A university grad and former marine. But his townhouse sits below Rose Hill, on Merchant’s Row, beneath the old families' notice.
Yul Min means to change this. He has his eye on the Widow Gon. He will hire ruffians to waylay her palanquin—then swoop in, to rescue her. Elaborate theatre.
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Yul Min, like all these characters, live on the Sea of Sorrows, whose waters are literally the souls of the dead.
Roses always bleach within sight of it; to retain their colour they must be shipped in glass, then kept in arboreta—never once sharing air with the Sea.
Those who can afford red-rose gardens tend them on the south end of the city, where streets begin to climb Mount Go, in compounds walled like fortresses.
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Drew Yul Min last night. Had tabs open for "Thai traditional clothing" & "military uniforms 18th century" & "krabi" & "Vajiralongkorn".
Given my inspiration, I think the referencing of Mainland Southeast Asian material culture is appropriate. Maybe a little to obvious, though? Ie: the visual forms haven't been composted well, into new and more imaginative shapes ...
Still: very pleased with the proportions and details.
I liked how the hamsa-esque icon of the Headless Sun developed over the course of these sketches. I would not have discovered it, otherwise; it's one of those details, too small for words.
Drawing is an intrinsic part of the writing process, I guess!
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#writing#art#illustration#sea of sorrows#ttrpgs#characters#clerks#process notes#we deal in lead#fantasies#adventures#settings
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released on ALM records in 1985.
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WIP tag game!!
@dwarfsized tagged me! thank u miss leetle!! i know you've always got me fr fr
a little for @aevallare and auri, because two can play at that game:
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The show starts at sundown! That was what the performer, Auri, had called out to the crowd. Neve never seriously considered going, of course. But the sun had set well over an hour ago now, and the darkness outside the shop window leaves a sour feeling in her stomach at odds with that more logical part of her brain.
Stupid, she thinks. Stupid, stupid, stupid. And that makes her even more angry, because she doesn’t have time to be stupid. Not with the cards she’s been dealt.
“Master?” Neve calls, rapping her knuckles on the wood a little more firmly than she had before. She had knocked to announce the meal earlier, but perhaps he had dozed off at his bench again. “Norry? Hello?”
When no response comes—not even the faint sounds of tinkering or papers shuffling inside—Neve heaves a sigh with a few choice words mixed into the breath. “I’m coming in,” she says, continuing to knock as she eases the door open so she can’t be accused of surprising him. “You need to take a break. Your dinner has been sitting—”
But once glance inside makes her stop short as she pokes her head in.
He isn’t. Fucking. There.
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and ok you know what i'll post a couple, let's go:
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She smiles for them, laughs with them, shares meals with her friends. But when there is no more work for the day, she uncorks the bottle and drinks herself stupid enough to pass out—just for a few hours, before she inevitably wakes to stare at the ceiling again. It’s the best approximation of a good night’s rest she’s able to manage. Her drinks are free at the Elfsong until time immemorial, but taking a bottle up to her room spares her the concerned looks.
“They’re setting out today, you know,” Shadowheart tells her one morning. She keeps her voice casual, but she doesn’t have to say who they are, either.
Camina knows. She’s known the hour they’re scheduled to leave almost since the moment it was set.
That afternoon, she climbs to the belfry of the Open Hand Temple and watches the wagons depart. It wouldn’t take long to catch up; she’s always been fast, and it’s a slow-moving caravan, weighed down by cartloads of food and supplies, by families, by livestock and herds of unattended children underfoot. But she only watches as they slowly trundle away from the city, crawling into the distance until they disappear into the hills. She stands up there until the sun sets, when it’s dark enough that no one will see her knuckles bloodied from pummeling the stone balustrade before she has a chance to clean herself up.
A couple of gold coins into the alms box ought to cover the damages.
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There is no denying the words etched right there on the page, the record sunk into the parchment in black ink.
The council waited nine hours to tell Gwyn that her sister was dead.
She knows because the bells for assembly rang at dawn, and a person doesn’t forget that sort of noise in the early morning, even when they’re accustomed to rising with the sun as she does.
Gatherings of the council sometimes lasted for hours, certainly. But there is no chance that the news only came to them late into their assembly, handed off by some breathless courier hours into the discussion. It's the first item transcribed to the record of the proceedings. The first letters are even smeared, as though the scribe had dipped his pen with more haste than usual. And dawn was not their usual time to convene.
Nine hours. Gwyn had wondered at the sound of the bells as she splashed her face at the washbasin in her quarters, and again when she passed the closed doors of the meeting hall on her way down to breakfast. What had she eaten? She couldn’t remember anymore. The rest of her day had been spent restoring the records shipped to them from the ashes of the western archives, and she had been angry at the legibility of the handwriting on even the least damaged pages—really angry, because how hard could it be to take the time to train a steady hand when writing was the most important part of your job? She must have ranted about it to Maksim for half the morning.
For nine hours, that had been her greatest concern in this life. Penmanship.
Until they had finally deigned to summon her.
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one of those things is not like the others.
i'll be so real: i think i have seen almost everyone else i know get tagged in this already lmao. but please please consider yourself tagged if you would like to share!
#wip....tuesday#tag game#the auri prequel is gonna be the mercurial world update this month lmao#sorry not sorry
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