There’s a cherry tree in the middle of the redwood forest.
False isn’t sure what to make of that. She shifts her grip on the staff in her hand, its pale glow reflecting faintly off the fresh snow. She’s come out here for resources—the vault altar is demanding logs, and these giant trees are an easy source—but the incongruous sight of an enormous, blossoming cherry tree sending pink petals wafting on the frozen wind…
She wonders if this is what fish feel like, when they see a lure.
“Hello?” she calls, her voice echoing off the trees. The world stands in permanent semi-twilight here, and the deeper shadows hide the mobs that will venture out come nightfall. A sneak of creepers is bedded down in a sweetberry bramble just on the other side of the clearing, and False tenses when the lead boar lifts his head, but he apparently doesn’t deem her worth stalking so early in the day.
There is no other reaction to her call.
False is of half a mind just to head back home and farm her own dang trees. It’s not like the vaultar is picky about the kinds of logs—she could just as easily grow up a bunch of birch and throw those in there. But that will take so much longer… not to mention she’s not sure if there are even enough saplings in her storage.
She unhooks her enchantment-glittered axe from her belt and pauses to mentally poke at her mana reserves. Plenty high. Whatever’s lingering near this tree, it can hardly be worse than what she deals with on the daily in the vaults. Overworld dangers are barely a challenge anymore.
The logic of that doesn’t change the uneasy feeling that buzzes over her skin though.
Venturing further into the clearing. False’s gaze traces up the trunk of the cherry tree, following its branches to where they terminate in lush bursts of pink and white blooms. A sweet smell drifts on the wind. She wrinkles her nose, reminded of compost piles and fermented spiders’ eyes.
The tree’s branches stretch long and low—a canopy of their own, heavy with flowers and dark, glossy leaves. The space underneath is filled with falling flowers and a fog of pollen, the air moisture-thick like a lush cave.
Lifting one hand, False catches a falling petal on her fingertip.
It sizzles as it touches her skin, stinging and buzzing like live redstone.
She hisses through her teeth, shaking her hand and letting the petal fall to the forest floor. “What the heck?”
Another petal tumbles past her face, and she watches it with narrowed eyes—right until it fizzles out of existence a few pixels above the forest floor.
“Glitch,” she mutters. “That’s… not good.”
Iskall needs to know about this—it could be a bug from one of the new updates, or it could be something deeper in the code, but either way: this glitched tree is a problem. She’s probably lucky it just stung her.
She reaches for her communicator, raising it to take a pic of the cherry tree.
“Oh, hi there, False!”
False yelps, spinning around with her axe ready to swing.
Gem is standing behind her, a wreath of cherry blossoms tangled in her hair and antlers, leaning casually on a tall staff of blooming cherry wood. Her smile is wide, and sap flows over her fingers, pale golden, dripping down her arms to leave dark spots on the faded denim of her overalls.
“Gem!” False lowers her axe. “Oh my gosh, you scared me. I didn’t know you were doing Vault Hunters.”
“Hm?” Gem raises one eyebrow, and for a moment her eyes flicker to red and then purple before settling back on green. “Oh—I’m not doing Vault Hunters, False.” Her voice is amused, almost chiding.
“Oh.” False feels unexpectedly small—which is impressive, considering she’s nearly half a block taller than Gem.
More of the glitched petals fall, resting on Gem’s hair and slowly melting into it like snowflakes. The brief moment of relief when False had seen Gem’s familiar grin is fading into something like the sensation of freefall.
“What’cha up to?” Gem asks, and her face blinks from one expression to the next like a bad video message. Her clothes are blue—no, green—no, bloodstained and grey—no, blue. They’ve always been blue.
False takes a step back.
“Uh, not much…” she glances up at the redwoods. “Just doing some… resource gathering. You know.”
“Cool!” Gem giggles, and stands up straight. False tenses, but Gem only spins around her staff and waves a hand at the glitched tree. “I didn’t realize this was an occupied server—are there many people here?”
There’s a buzzing in False’s skull, and she blinks rapidly. A muscle twitches under her eye.
“Um…”
“I guess it doesn’t really matter.” Gem lifts one hand and grabs one of the lowest branches of the cherry tree. She really should not have been able to reach that.
Swinging herself up with the lithe, effortless strength of a cat, she perches on the limb and stares down at False. The grin is gone from her face now, and she looks down at False with bright eyes.
“Etho’s not here, is he?”
False opens her mouth to answer, the words yes, of course he is, I can take you to him heavy on her lips… And with effort, she swallows them back.
They taste of sweet rot.
“Why... why doesn’t what matter?” she asks instead.
Gem stares at her for a long moment, expressionless. The flowers woven through her antlers are growing of their own accord, twining up to caress their brethren in the branches overhead.
Then she smiles broadly, flashing teeth that nearly glow white in the dappled shadows. “Oh!” she exclaims. “No reason! I’m only passing through, is all.”
“You’re not… you’re not sticking around?” False tries—and mostly fails—to sound disappointed.
“Naaaaah…” Gem stands and walks along the branch, as secure and balanced as if it were a stone floor. The flowers in her hair flow along behind her, sliding from the branches and falling like a cape down her back. “Worldhopping is easy. Staying in one spot is way harder.”
False watches the flowers move and swirl, their smooth, strange motion ensnaring her attention. The buzzing is back, too. Like bees, drunk on honey and sleepy in their hive.
“World hopping…?” she manages. “With admin commands?”
Gem’s laugh is as brilliant as a knife and as sharp as a spark. “False!” she crows. “You say the funniest things.”
False laughs. It seems appropriate. She isn’t sure why.
“Anyway,” Gem continues, fading into one patch of blossoms and reappearing on the other side of it. Her eyes are sprays of cherry flowers now. Her antlers are branches. “Anyway, cherry trees are all the same. They make it easy to get around.”
“That…” doesn’t make sense, False wants to say. But her lips are heavy, and coated in sticky sap. Maybe it doesn’t really matter.
“Oops! Behind you, False!”
Gem’s chirped warning is flaked in glee, and False turns around, as slow as if her feet are buried in soul sand.
The creepers she had seen—the entire sneak—are standing behind her, pink flowers blooming from their eyes.
“Oh no.”
The boar’s blinded head snaps toward her voice, hissing. He starts to aggro, bioluminescent streaks flashing from his snout to flanks in increasingly-swift pulses of light.
“See ya in season ten, False!” Gem cries out cheerfully.
The axe drops from False’s nerveless fingers, trailing strings of sap. She smells the inescapable stench of burning gunpowder, overlaid with rot.
“...Dangit.”
[FalseSymmetry was blown up by a creeper]
~*~
Jerking upright in her own bed, False swipes wildly at her face, trying to smear away tree sap that isn’t there.
“What the heck, Gem?” she exclaims at her empty base. Her voice falls flat, swallowed up by the sky that surrounds her builds. The clock above her head ticks impatiently, and she huffs in frustration, pushing up out of her bed. All her tools, gone—her levels, gone... and after all that she still needs those logs for the vault.
Grumbling, she starts pulling backup gear from various chests, trying to cobble together something that can get her back to the redwood grove before her items despawn—assuming they hadn’t all been obliterated by a second or third creeper explosion. She glances at the vaulter, and freezes.
It’s been completed. The crystal floats gently atop the stone pedestal, gleaming with an inner light.
And, tumbled at the base of the vaulter—abandoned, more than was needed to fill the crystal’s requirements:
Half a stack of cherry logs.
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The LAYERS needed in a modern/human Dreamling au. Some level of Endless family dysfunction, obviously. Hob's family can be be dead or not, it's all good. Are they old enough to have individually gained the awareness they are off-puttingly intense and should hide it a bit at first, or still in that "no, why would I need to Elsa this" stage?
Option A is both of them trying to play it cool, like "don't scare him off" except they so badly want to go from zero to sixty.
(Death and Desire have ruthlessly drilled Dream with flashcards about how to react appropriately in situations.
Desire: it's your one-month anniversary, what do you do?
Dream: [hesitantly] NOT propose?
Desire and Death, conferring, because that's technically correct but the delivery was suspect.
Death, encouragingly: Good start. And?
Dream: a nice dinner and maybe a walk?
Desire: well done!
Death: and for a three-month anniversary?
Dream: give them a key to my flat.
Desire: [airhorn] NO. RED CARD.)
Option B makes them the classic anecdotal "my grandparents got engaged within seven days of meeting each other and still are happy together".
(Death, rubbing her temples: so you met this guy--
Dream: Hob
Death: -- Hob, and within 1 day you gave notice to the Registrar's Office and figured out the best day to get married. And Hob agreed to this?
Dream: NO.
Death: oh thank go-
Dream: Hob SUGGESTED this.
Death: . . .
Dream: are you going to be a witness or not?
Death, 29 days later in the Registrar's Office, to Hob's witness: Is he sane?
Johanna Constantine, drinking heavily from a large flask: unfortunately yes, by all legal definitions.
Death: fuck
Johanna: [passing the flask over] if your brother's even a tenth as intense as Hob, they'll be fine. Probably.
Death, brightening: Is Hob that bad?
Johanna: You know how sometimes you meet somebody and think "oof, they're a bit much, best give them a wide berth"?
Death: yeah.
Johanna: Hob's like a camouflaged hole in the ground of muchness. Except he's done the hole up all nice and he knows that sometimes you just want to be left alone in the hole to sulk and rattle the spikes for a bit, and occasionally get a F&M hamper tossed in.
Death: [hmmmmmmm'ing approvingly]
Johanna, morose: the bastard.
In the background, Hob and Dream are pressing their foreheads together and basking in each other's presence)
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My daughter’s new pet is half deer, half fox.
They tumble over each other, racing through the valley,
their rhythm imperfect, she is human after all.
Half human, half something I can’t quite recall,
I don’t know him well, his fur is soft and smooth.
Little antlers, tiny twigs on his brow.
Hoofs like black pinpricks, needles through fabric.
At night he howls at nothing, he doesn’t quite know why.
His fur is soft and smooth ,
morning snow, untrampled, unbothered.
Black spots speckled by the bane of his tail,
an old scar from something he can’t quite recall.
I don’t know him very well.
He runs an endless trail past the river with my daughter,
in two step tandem, they’ve learned to act as one.
Half human, half deerfox, half nothing at all.
He looks at me, sometimes, with ink black misty eyes.
He licks my hand, leans his head on my palm,
as if the weight of the world is held
by the little twigs on his brow.
I am so far away from home, he says.
I will never see my mother again.
She is so far away, I am here.
I am all that there is, , anywhere, of me.
You understand me, he says.
We’re the same, brothers.
Half deer, half fox.
Half human, half something you can’t quite recall.
We walk in two step tandem,
Two parallel lines that touch without knowing.
We have never met.
We have known each other our whole lives.
We’re the same, like brothers, he says.
You understand , he says,
and I don’t know why
but I do.
I can’t recall.
The ' something I’m missing.
The bridge between me,
and all that there is.
I am all I can’t recall.
I am the tear left unstitched.
Half human,
half nothing, nothing at all.
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Izzy Hands: The Moon.
Re-imagined from the traditional Ride-Waite-Smith tarot, this version of the Moon shows Izzy taking the shape of a lone Lover, longing for what he cannot reach.
Longer exploration of the card's symbolism under the cut.
Symbolism of the card
I initially meant this card to be specifically Izzy's, but he is once again unseparable from Ed. Though the moon itself is depicted as Ed, it is through Izzy that I interpret the journey of the card. Feel free to invent your own interpretation as well!
In the original version of the Moon we see a dog, a wolf, and a crayfish. Izzy takes the place of the wolf, marking him as wild and untameable. He is accompanied by a dog, symbolizing his loyalty. The crayfish has retreated, and we can see a monster lurking in the depths of the water, reminding us of the beasts that lie within.
Rachel Pollack (2011) writes: "The Moon signifies the dangerous time between the end of one world structure and the beginning of another. On the emotional level it can indicate the strange state when something powerful has ended and you find yourself thrown back on your instincts."
In the card Izzy already has his wooden leg. He his stepping into his role as the Unicorn, marking a shift in his loyalty and his place in the world. His reign as Blackbeard's first mate is ending, and a whole new world order is being imagined.
Ed is also seen in a new light. With his short beard, he is at the end of his captaincy, possibly even at the end of his piracy. He as the Moon is illuminated by the light of the Sun, personified by Stede in another card, The Sun.
Izzy bears witness to their combined light, unreachable to him on the ground. He teeters at the edge of the water illuminated by that very light, and is faced with a choice. Will he turn, follow the path and try to reach the unreachable? Or will he explore the unknown waters in front of him?
In tarot, water symbolizes emotions, intuition and subconscious. Pollack writes: "Here in the unknown territory our animal selves take over. We cannot suppress the wild emotions but only travel through them." The message of the Moon beckons Izzy to step into the water and face his emotions.
However, there are also dangers in the murky waters of the subconscious. Pollack continues: "The Moon card calls forth powerful dreams, visions, and the power of the feminine." In tarot water is a feminine element. Izzy, a beacon of masculinity, has in the past confused the feminine with the monstrous. He is now dared to invite the feminine within him to the surface. His posture already mirrors that of the feminine lover from the Lovers-card. It also calls back to the Fool, to someone at the beginning of their self-discovery.
Tl;dr: Izzy, the Fool and the Lover, is on a journey from one world to another. Will he follow the path and try to reach the unreachable, or will he find the courage to plunge into unknown waters?
A comparison between the original Rider-Waite-Smith card from 1909 and the re-imagined version
Izzy's pose mirrors the feminine Lover
Sources
Image source: Pamela Colman Smith, 1909, republished as Tarot of A. E. Waite, 2016, AGM-Urania, Germany
Text source: Rachel Pollack, A Journey of 78 Steps, 2011, as cited in the booklet for instruction and guidance of Tarot of A. E. Waite, 2016, AGM-Urania, Germany
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