#the choir of discordant voices strikes again
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A very good friend who is into porter robinson encouraged me to listen to some of their tracks. so i typed down what my thoughts are on each one as i did so. i do not claim to have a good judgement on how to analyze music. but i know what myself knows. mostly his album my friend considers his best, Worlds. with the mv/visualizers on youtube.
divinity- nice hype beat to start off, before it gets mellow. then the mellow intensifies as vocals come in, and it results in a more triumphant tone. i'd say this is a sanguine track. it certainly feels uplifting.
sad machine- an even more retro sound to start off. the official lyric video definitely makes the lyrics obvious. a duet between an electronic voice and a natural voice. is this outstretched hand motif a positive seeker, or a desperate grasp? depending on others is not the best. it is entitled sad machine, its not idealistic. but the final image of two hands holding eachother is presented positively.
years of war- i like what seems to be screaming as a focal point of the track. these songs all have a drop, not as big grand moments like a stereotypical skrillex or whatever, these are good drops.
flicker- i listen to a lot of japanese pop despite not studying japanese often. the visuals in its video are like AR. karl pilkington predicted that. also reminds me of serial experiments lain. i'll be rewatching that sometime. technology is taking over, even in the rural areas. there is a lot of corruption, and some danger. but it would make the world better if done well.
fresh static snow- simple guitar strumming then shifting to the electro bzzts. quite a variety of bzzts and bzzps ya cant hate that. i understand now the image of the hand clenching a cube, thats definitely of the humanity holding Technology with care. the default cube of blender. another track with a triumphant tone.
polygon dust- glitchy intro to a classic drum to nice who i suppose is lemaitre. soft headbangs to this. wanna say that this track does help continue the overall tone of the album, but yeah has not impressed me with new things. its not a pop radio style, but it is a spotify pop style. i can bet i have heard this as i let spotify play an edm, indie pop, etc playlist.
hear the bells- is this a duet throughout? dont usually hear that. almost a choir singing. like an orchestra in instrumentals midpoint. or a church organ when they let the piano guy go with full gusto. well church organ, orchestra, or electronic, you wont hear this on the radio. maybe electronic, depends.
natural light- that very start reminded me of the menu theme of sonic mega collection. i thought of how it was a bunch of disconnected sounds before the yell breaks out and the different instruments come in. but it continues having that choopy style, with even the vocal being sliced. another moment of calm at the end. didnt notice it was a short 2 minutes. but i like it. moments of tranquility, but some moments of discord.
lionhearted- ooh fleshy people on camera. and starts off high impact with the music, as this group of gentlefolk gear up with their own instruments. vandals, but for striking electronic visuals into the cityscape. they will make the technology connect to humanity no matter what. this track is named well, makes me want to be lionhearted.
sea of voices- and after the impact of lionhearted, the windchimes bring the choleric back down to sanguine. then rises back up to somewhere in the middle. still calm but once again at a triumphant tone.
fellow feeling- a violin start. its a rather lonely feeling. but shifts to a hot mood with vocals, a hard instrumentation. back to the violin. this is a good example of a journey. i appreciate the mix of classical, with electronic, with i suppose metal.
goodbye to a world- mmhmm. end of a virtual world. ive been there. the reality i lived as a kid will not be able to be relieved at this moment, the internet is not the same. but its not the listener's fault. suprising runescape old and new are still kicking. though in the deep corners of my mind there should be ones im forgetting are gone. yeah. toontown, i think wizard101 is still on, pirate101 is, apparently, fusionfall.
it is a good album, this stuff does more than what most similar artists do that i’d hear just letting spotify autoplay.
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I recently commissioned @salesart to do a portrait of Solas (aka “Song”) and Lavellan (aka “Ink”) from my fic, In And Out Of Time Again. I’m so thrilled with how it came out, especially all the little details that reference their codenames. Thank you SO MUCH to Sales for all your work on this piece, and for asking me all the hard-hitting questions like “what’s their height difference.” I had so much fun collaborating with you!
The first chapter of In And Out of Time Again is below the cut, and you can read the completed work on AO3.
Song has had many names. The latest suits him no better nor worse than the others. If he has one complaint, it is that this name lacks specificity. Fen’Harel was a name that was a lie, and a lie that has long since become irrelevant, but he cannot argue that it painted a clear and awful portrait. His other name, the one that came both before and after, he is only too glad to be rid of. He rarely thinks of it now.
Song is in his element in Strands like these, when he can submit to the demands of his teeth and claws and blessedly forget the version of himself that is not like this. It is simple here in the verdant expanse of his home, his first love. When a mountain stands in his way he moves it with a thought. When a beating heart must be silenced, he rips into it and tastes warm blood on his tongue.
His assignment today is a wonderfully simple one: a death. The target is ancient and powerful, though only in comparison to the other things of its world. Beside an agent of Music, it is nothing. He longs for a crush of strength against his own and for the moment when uncertainty asks him whether he can snap his target’s neck before it breaks him in two. The answer, of course, is that he will hear the crack of bone and hold its dying form within his jaws too quickly to satisfy the hunger that burns within him.
Still, he will try to afford it a fair fight.
When he finds the edges of its lair, Song realizes something is wrong. Demons should swarm around him, challenging his right to intrude on their master’s territory even as he cuts them down. There should be whispers here, a choir of disembodied voices singing the Melody’s secrets for those who know how to listen. Yet all that greets him are emptiness and silence.
The raw Fade has begun to reclaim this place, the green waters of its currents rising up to erode the poisoned ground that has been here for three thousand years. Song wanders farther in, his paws sinking deep into the muck, until finally he finds the corpse.
The fear demon that claimed this part of the Fade is gone, reduced to a husk of tangled limbs and fangs that still drip with venom. Song has arrived too late. The death has already been administered, but this means that the timing is all wrong, and for Music, timing is everything.
Whatever killed the demon has done so before it had a chance to strike a bargain with a young mage girl in Kirkwall. Now she will not murder her family and dozens of others; she will not leave alive one angry, orphaned sister. Thanks to this single fault in the rhythm, the entire Strand is lost.
Song is so annoyed by all the absences that at first he does not notice the addition. It is so impossibly out of place that for a moment he simply stares at it. Stuck to the venom on the dead demon’s fangs is a piece of finely-made paper that smells of sugar and flowers, its perfume somehow drowning the stench of the rotting carcass. He reaches out for it with a hand and fingers; it is a thing too delicate to be held by claws. The venom stings but he pays it no mind, for he has seen the single line written on the page in a delicate script: Touch me with fire that I be cleansed.
It must be a trap. Not the venom, of course. Whoever left this certainly knows it will take much more than that to wound him. It would be best to leave the note here and let it rot along with the rest of this discordant Strand. But this is a challenge and an invitation - words that hint at more words.
Song ignites the paper between his fingers and it is as if he has turned the first page in a book. He reads, and when he is done he has become the wolf again, mouth twisted to a snarl. When he has committed the words to memory, he shreds what’s left of the sweet-smelling paper between his claws and grinds it into the mud.
When Song is gone, a shade steps into the pawprints he left and searches until it finds every piece of the burned, shredded, filthy paper.
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Tell me I have sung to Your approval.
I’ve always been fond of the Canticle of Transfigurations, or at least of the versions that I’ve penned. Hopefully you have more than a passing familiarity with it as well, or the cosmic cleverness of what I’ve just done will be totally wasted on you. (But I suspect your familiarity is more than passing. If you are who I think you are, you’ve probably written versions of it yourself. If so, how do you deal with the bit in 10:1 about the moth and the flame? I feel like I can never get it quite ominous enough, you know?)
I’ve barely just begun and already I’ve distracted myself with all the questions I wish to ask you. But that just speaks to my point (that I’m about to make).
Is there anything in this world more insidious than words? It took me eight of them to grab your attention. Honestly, I could have managed it in fewer if I didn’t want to make a dramatic entrance. But I did.
I’ve been curious about you for a while now. It’s not like there are many things left to be curious about when you have all of time to catch up on anything you might have missed, so I should thank you for that novelty. I think the first time I saw you was during that bad business in the Deep Roads in Strand 398. I was the hurlock, you were the Grey Warden recruit. Our eyes met as I bit into your commander’s neck and tore out his windpipe. (Sorry about the mess, by the way - I really enjoy getting into character.)
You were definitely meant to lose that fight. I know - I’ve gone back and checked a lot of other Strands and that recruit always dies, the darkspawn always swarm, and the Third Blight always begins. But then you single-handedly cut down the horde after everyone else in your party had died. (I know because I stuck around after you chopped off my head with that broadsword - I just had to see what would happen!) You killed enough of them to prevent the swarm, even though you died for it in the end. (And of course you died for it - you’re good but no one’s that good.)
My point is: do you remember how it felt when that shriek bit into your arm and the Blight burned into your veins? Do you remember the way it spiraled into you, burrowing in your lungs and your heart and your gut until it felt like your body had always been its home? (I’ve been Blighted a lot so I’ve got some pretty good descriptors for it.)
Anyway, let me spell it out in case my metaphors are getting too convoluted: In this letter, I’m the shriek and my words are the Blight. I’ve bitten you and poured my words into you. Your memory will pump them through your mind just as surely as your heart pumped the Blight to the tips of your fingers and toes. Want a cure? Too bad, there isn’t one.
I’m not only writing to gloat. I meant what I said above - I appreciate the novelty you’ve brought to the battlefield. Things are dreadfully dull most of the time. Mainly the Story sends me off to retcon the occasional plot holes your Music introduces to the narrative. There’s very little chance for improvisation, so I have to find amusement where I can.
And this has been very amusing.
Sincerely,
Ink
(Keep reading on AO3)
#Art of my fic!#salesart#in and out of time again#dragon age fanart#dragon age fanfic#solas x lavellan#solas#lavellan#solavellan#luzial writes
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hi SORRY i’m behind on literally everything in my life right now, including this, but please accept my extremely late submission of my 19 favorite albums of 2019:
19. vampire weekend, father of the bride
i’ll be honest, i’ve always liked vampire weekend but modern vampires of the city never clicked for me the way it seemed to for other people, so i wasn’t expecting much when they pulled themselves back together in 2019. but then harmony hall happened, pulling in the same direction that the national did in 2017 with sleep well beast and speaking to ongoing national discontent and political discord in that distinctly ezra koenig whimsy and, well, all best were off. it’s an unmistakably vampire weekend album, but more, filled with denser instrumentation and a judicious, powerful use of danielle haim and steve lacy guest spots to lift or temper the sound as needed.
favorite track: married in a gold rush
18. harry styles, fine line
nobody was more surprised than me by how good his first solo album was, but fine line made no bones about it: harry styles is trying to build himself into a millennial david bowie, and it’s not a terrible idea or effort at all. fine line is a fine effort, with big sprawling sounds and big sprawling spaces between them. styles has always had an excellent voice, and it sounds better than ever when he’s creeping towards the edges like he does on she and on watermelon sugar, striking a tenuous balance between the smooth boy-band vocals he started his career on and the rougher blues edges he found on his first solo album.
favorite track: treat people with kindness is straight out of the best parts of the seventies. slap it onto a recording of bare trees somewhere around sentimental lady and it fits right in.
17. carly rae jepsen, dedicated
our lord and savior carly rae jepsen’s first full entry since emotion doesn’t reach the same heights-- nor does it follow as well as, even, the emotion b sides ep-- but then again, who could have rightfully expected it to? dedicated is a slicker, cleaner sound than emotion, delving further into a squelchy disco tone as opposed to pure nineties skate rink pop-sugar, with the notable exception of now that i found you, which would have fit perfectly into the bottom third of emotion. dedicated is very much a carly rae jepsen album, loving love and spilling romance and heartbreak out unreservedly over bright, sugary instrumentation, even if it never manages to replicate the effect of emotion.
favorite track: if anyone tries to say that their favorite part of this album isn’t carly rae jepsen singing about masturbation on party for one, they’re a lying liar and you should tell them as much.
16. the pains of being pure at heart, full moon fever
tom petty’s full moon fever is one of the first albums i remember falling in love with. it’s been a constant presence in my life since it came out in 1989, an unavoidable facet of context when i think of music i love. i’ve also liked the pains of being pure at heart since they first popped up in the late aughts, but the idea of a brooklyn shoegaze dreampop group covering a tom petty album would have been laughable to me, right up until they did and did it well. there’s a particular art to covers that retain the original context of a song while putting a new spin to it, and it’s even harder to make it work for an entire album, but here we have it.
favorite track: yer so bad is far and away the best marriage of americana and shoegaze on an album that’s full of marriages of americana and shoegaze.
15. fka twigs, magdalene
when holy terrain dropped, i was apprehensive about the album that would surround it. it’s a good song, except for that whole pesky future guest spot thing that drags it down. i was worried the whole album would be like that-- bright spots dragged down by soggy guest features-- but i should have had more faith, because magdalene opens with a gregorian choir and takes potshots at church music throughout in true fka twigs fashion, sprawling and blunt, atmospheric and intentional at all points.
favorite track: mary magdalene
14. ariana grande, thank u, next
after sweetener, no one expected anything else from ariana grande for a while, much less an even better album barely six months later, but here we have it. it’s less polished and much weirder than sweetener’s strictly pop sensibilities, delving further into trap and pulling from musical theater sources like rent and the sound of music. as an album it’s unpredictable and all over the place, but if there’s one consistency throughout it, it’s that every song is at worst just good instead of great.
favorite track: bad idea, all the way. that guitar hook runs me over every damn time.
13. the new pornographers, in the morse code of brakelights
the new pornographers have been consistently fucking me up since the ninth grade, and eight albums later that hasn’t changed. it’s much more restrained than their last album or, really, any of their prior albums-- it’s tempting to say that the unofficial exit of dan bejar as a songwriter had something to do with it, leaving carl newman as the band’s singular writer, but honestly imho bejar was never quite as important or positive an impact as people liked to say and whiteout conditions proved that. if anything-- and my biases will be on full display here-- the weakest part of the album is the underuse of neko case. all that said, though: a subpar new pornographers album is still an excellent album, and there are moments of that pure genius powerpop sound that they’re known for throughout the album: the strings on dreamlike and on the rush, the way colossus of rhodes oscillates between living high up in the clouds and then grounding itself in a crunchy guitar and driving tom and snare line underneath.
favorite track: falling down the stairs of your smile is everything you could ever want from a new pornographers song, from the opening on that understated bass to the percussion picking up just before the chorus, the hanclaps and the way neko case and kathryn calder’s voices work together in the chorus.
12. sharon van etten, remind me tomorrow
there’s been a trend in the last few years of traditional singer-songwriter types who cut their teeth on stripped down production-- torres, julien baker, angel olsen-- moving with intention towards a richer, more complex sound, and sharon van etten took a five year break since her last album and skipped right over the transition, vaulting into a punchy, synthy sound that doesn’t so much trade that ragged folk-edge she established herself with as enhances it, rounding it out and filling in the empty spaces.
favorite track: no one’s easy to love very nearly wins it, but honestly nothing can touch seventeen
11. lana del rey, norman fucking rockwell
what is there to say about this album that hasn’t already been said ad nauseum in the last few months? i could talk about the way it evolves the concept of hardworking americana a la norman rockwell paintings to account for the way the country and society are marching their way into a disillusioned dystopian nightmare; or the way half of the album sounds like a good hallucinogen feels; or the fact that, of every artist with an otherwise distinct and powerfully singular sound who’s worked with jack antonoff in recent years-- and i say this as a positive, because i honestly really love the way antonoff has successfully helped to ground and lift up the sounds of artists like taylor swift, lorde, and annie clarke-- lana del rey is the only one whose own sound completely overpowered his penchant for bombast and massive drum parts. but honestly, all there is to say is just: listen to the next best american record twice, and you’ll get it.
favorite track: absolutely, unequivocally venice bitch
10. mika, my name is michael holbrook
you know when people talk about pop music as some sort of mindless feel-good fluff? my name is michale holbrook is feel-good fluff that can be exactly as mindless as you want it to be, right up until you get to our generation has so much gloom / because there ain’t no money left after the baby boom. mika has been delivering excellent pop music for more than a decade at this point, and my name is michale holbrook is no exception.
favorite track: platform ballerinas
9. lizzo, cuz i love you
it’s lizzo, okay. as if you could take that voice and that aggressive and radical self-love and come out with anything less than an extraordinary album.
favorite track: if i have to choose between juice and tempo i will literally die.
8. taylor swift, lover
i was in south africa for a wedding when this album was slated to drop, and completely forgot about it until i got a spotify notification. after reputation i was, i think justifiably, harboring pretty low standards for the next tswizzle entry, but honestly even if i’d had high expectations, this surpassed it. duds aside-- london boy is, like, excruciating on multiple levels, and false god is just blech-- lover is peak taylor swift and a capstone argument as to why, love her or hate her, she’s one of the best songwriters of her generation, full stop. the ballady of the title track i could take or leave-- it’s boring, i’m sorry-- but the archer? fantastic and rich. cornelia street? PEAK queer yearning. paper rings, death by a thousand cuts, i think he knows? PURE bops.
favorite track: paper rings is like if someone cracked my head open and found every single pop-slut button and smashed them all at the same time.
7. charli xcx, charli
charli xcx has been on the front edge of the evolution of pop music for years now, eschewing album releases for mixtapes that are more production exercises than charli xcx songs, and her first full-length since 2014′s sucker splits the difference between the two concepts. the number of guest artists on it should be overwhelming and should drag it down, because charli xcx’s best work has always been when she taps into that nineties kid who grew up on britney and boy bands-- if you haven’t heard her cover of i want it that way, you’re missing out-- but instead she’s curated an excellent selection of artists who can hold their own against her forward-thinking sound without ever fighting for control or first billing in a chorus. last year when i was talking about kacey musgraves’ excellent golden hour i said that musgraves was here to save country from itself, and while i wouldn’t go so far as to say that pop needs to be saved from itself, charli xcx is still here to constantly push it forward and to take risks, and she’s going to pull as many people up with her as she can.
favorite track: gone is probably the best song of the whole year, by anyone, hands down. there aren’t many better examples of how much you can do with a standard pop formula: verses that sound big until you compare them to the chorus, crashing forever forward without ever losing momentum, the way the second chorus bulks up even more over top of some bigass timpani strikes. it’s formulaic without being boring and, unequivocally, one of the best songs of the decade. if i don’t get another full album’s worth of collaboration between charli xcx and christine and the queens, i will never forgive the universe.
6. solange, when i get home
to start with the negatives: this isn’t a seat at the table. when you’re talking about hard acts to follow, that’s right at the top of the list. with that being said, though: solange makes music that demands your attention. this isn’t made for the background, even if you might be temporarily fooled into thinking so. this is an album of complicated songs that i’m not going to pretend i can talk intelligently about, so i’m just going to say this: i very infrequently just listen to music and am almost always doing something else when i do, but multiple times this year i just sat with my headphones and listened to this album.
favorite track: time (is)
5. angel olsen, all mirrors
angel olsen has, since the early aughts, been consistently putting out albums that i love and has only been getting better. even phases, which wasn’t a favorite of the year for me in 2017, was still just. y’know. so fucking good. you can reach all the way back to 2012 and track what seemed to be a steady, intentional evolution of her sound, from half way home all the way up t the excellent of my woman and then to phases, but then you hit 2019 and all mirrors veers suddenly off course. angel olsen has always been raw and ragged, ripping at the edges of sound, but on all mirrors she enlists an orchestra to open the album, and carries that broad, sweeping, cinematic style throughout the whole album.
favorite track: tossup between that wagon-wheel chug of what it is and summer, which straddles that late sixties rock and early seventies not-disco-but-we’re-getting-there line perfectly.
4. beyonce, homecoming
i generally hate live albums, but i swear to god if i have to explain this to you then you should not be reading this post at all.
favorite track: that deep church choir of lift ev’ry voice and sing. no, actually, freedom, because freedom always wins. actually, no: diva and that bit a minute in where she just rips out the next verse with a whole choir building under her and then it just drops out so the horns can kick in and go up and up and up and this a marching band playing here but you’re waiting for a bigass bass drop but instead then it just. cuts down and jams. yep. that’s the best part.
3. better oblivion community center, better oblivion community center
confession time: i was always pretty eh towards bright eyes. no offense to conor oberst, but it just never clicked for me. so i was pretty skeptical when i read about phoebe bridgers-- who i love-- teaming up with him, but honestly, like, shows what i know. apparently all i needed to get me to like conor oberst’s sad songs was phoebe bridgers singing sad songs with him. there’s so much to like on this album, starting with how well their voices play off each other, and then also the way they almost goad each other along towards a quicker pace than either them seems to favor on their own. there’s an almost jaunty tempo to the album, shifting them both from slow songs about sad things to heavier beats about sad things instead.
favorite things: is it cheating if i admit that my favorite is actually the updated version of the song i initially liked the least on the album? because sleepwalkin is perfectly serviceable, but the daydreaming version-- where they flipped the vocals and turned it into pure mid-eighties gold-- was one of my favorite songs of the entire year. the way it just keeps pushing along and pushing along and kicks its way out of the chorus and then gets to i gave what i got/it came as a shock/to find out i was fine with what i lost and bridgers just carries that note out into the bridge? yeah. okay. i’m fine.
2. sleater-kinney, the center won’t hold
i’ve loved sleater-kinney for as long as i can remember. my dad was a big fan of a college radio station when i was growing up that played everything coming out of that seattle/pacific northwest grunge capital in the nineties, and sleater-kinney was always a part of that. i didn’t have the vocabulary, then, to express how much it frustrated me to hear people talking about grunge and rock and qualify everything sleater-kinney did as “good for a bunch of girls,” but i do now. thankfully, even though there’s a long ways to go still, they’ve been getting their unqualified, unrestrained critical due. all that’s to say that, between the announcement that st. vincent would be producing this album, followed by the news that janet weiss left the band after they wrapped the album, i was, for the first time, worried about how this album would turn out. but here we are, six months later, and i’m still in love with it. that persistent pulse of reach out, the cocky winks back to their history as a band in LOVE, the absolutely heartbreaking commentary on the kavanaugh hearings and dr. christine blasey ford’s testimony in broken-- this is sleater-kinney being sleater-kinney, unapologetically feminine and feminist without pulling punches or losing sight of the sound that’s always worked for them, even as it evolves.
favorite track: absolutely, unequivocally the dog/the body. the way the choruses blow up huge and then it skids into the bridge and nothing feels like home/can’t find the one to hold is just gutwrenching.
1. charly bliss, young enough
guppy didn’t ever quite do it for me, so i hadn’t really paid any attention to charly bliss. but then capacity dropped, and then chatroom, and there was no going back for me after that. there’s a restraint to eva hendricks’ voice on young enough when compared to guppy, which isn’t inherently an improvement, necessarily, but works in this context because this album is very unashamedly about abuse and survival and hendricks’ vocals on every track are tired and restrained and calm: even when the instrumentation picks up and hits a more frantic pitch, her vocals are floating over top of it all, calm and collected and relieved. the whole album is a picture of restraint, dealing out details of a larger picture without ever zooming far enough out to give you all of it.
favorite track: the way the bridge in the title track builds from wasted, shy, almost too alive and into how i crushed and consumed you and loved you too much and then peaks into who am i if i don’t have you now/nobody knows you, the fate of a crush/i had to consume and destroy us and then there’s a pause before it leads back into we were young enough to believe it should hurt this much? that’s the best part of the whole album.
honorable mentions:
sir babygirl, crush on me
sigrid, sucker punch
jamila woods, legacy! legacy!
yeasayer, erotic reruns
blink-182, nine
muna, saves the world
wilco, ode to joy
bat for lashes, lost girls
#albums of 2019#albums of the year#anonymous#mnemosynerd#vampire weekend#harry styles#our lord and savior carly rae jepsen#the pains of being pure at heart#fka twigs#ariana grande#the new pornographers#sharon van etten#lana del rey#mika#lizzo#taylor swift#charli xcx#solange#angel olsen#beyonce#better oblivion community center#sleater-kinney#charly bliss
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For DADWC: “I can’t do this on my own.”
For you and @dadrunkwriting!
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The Archdemon roars, but Ilya can hear it growing weaker with every inch the pool of its blood grows wider. The great beast heaves and flaps its wings, buffetting the battleground in sharp gusts of gore-soaked wind.
“Please,” Ilya mutters. Every muscle aches like they had been unstrung from her skeleton, like she had been burnt from the inside out with dragon’s flame.”I can’t do this on my own.”
It feels like a prayer to her own ears. The blighted dragon screeches as she gets up off the blood-slick stones of Fort Drakon’s keep. Ilya fights to keep her hand wrapped around her staff, letting it bear the brunt of her weight. She limps toward the dragon where the collected armies of Ferelden batter at it.
Only a Warden could kill it. Alistair would be King, and Riordan would rebuild the Ferelden order, which meant that Ilya would take the killing blow.
“I can’t do this on my own,” she sobs.
The spirits press against the Veil, the Fade trickling into her spent mana pool in drips and drops until, like a dam breaking, it floods through her. The spirit of Justice that burns inside her bursts through her skin.
“We are not alone,” they say, combined voices like a discordant Chantry choir. “We will never be alone again.”
Encased in an orb of deadly lightning, they make their way to the dragon, burgeoning with new energy.
=
Alistair and Zevran fight their way up the stairs, unheeding of the rest of their party behind them. Ilya needs them.
“She needs to know,” Alistair says over the din. He parries a blow aimed for his thigh and redirects it back at the genlock, cleanly lopping off its head. “Ilya. She needs to know!”
“You didn’t think so earlier!” Zevran ducks under a hurlock’s sword, the blade passing close enough to hiss past his ear. “In fact,” he yells, stabbing his daggers into the hurlock’s chest, “you said it would distract her!”
“Yes, well, never mind what I said earlier, I was an idiot. Run!”
They flee a new wave of darkspawn that poured out of a nearby room, working their way up the serpentine staircase that crawled up the tower. They burst into the open air of the tower’s rooftop, chests heaving, muscles burning.
“If this is what--being a Warden--is all about,” Zevran pants, bent over with his hands on his knees, “I must reconsider--my earlier offer.”
“It gets worse. Come on, Zev.” Alistair hauls Zevran upright against him. He bends to press their foreheads together, staring down at Zevran from under hooded eyes.
“This is not the time to get sentimental, querido,” Zevran says softly.
“We might not have the time later.” Alistair places a rough kiss to the corner of Zevran’s blood-speckled mouth before breaking away. He rolls his shoulders and yells into the assembled crowd of darkspawn and the mixed assembly that accompanied Ilya to the tower’s crest.
As intended, the nearest handful of darkspawn turn their gaze toward them. Alistair cuts a swathe through them as Zevran follows behind, his daggers glinting like moonlight in the night.
“Do you see her?” Alistair yells.
“Not yet!”
“Go--find her!”
“I won’t leave you,” Zevran shouts. His daggers find a home in the chest of an already wounded Alpha hurlock, and he rides the body to the ground only to pounce on the next unsuspecting victim. “Ilya has the others!”
As if to punctuate Zevran’s sentence, the earth beneath them rumbles. Alistair looks up when he can to see Shale scream and punch the ground, their fists slamming into the stones like a dwarven war-hammer.
Ilya will be okay. She’s going to be okay.
The archdemon shrieks and the comforting thought flees.
Zevran and Alistair press, back to back, facing the growing crowd of darkspawn. “Go to her, keep her safe,” Alistair demands. “She’ll need you more than me.”
“I--amor--”
“Please, Zev. On three.”
Zevran nods, and Alistair steels himself. They count down together and Alistair roars, the noise distracting the nearest darkspawn and taunting them into action. Zevran breaks away in the confusion.
“Ilya, Zevran," Alistair prays to the time of his sword colliding with blighted flesh, “Maker watch over you.”
=
Alistair behind him, Ilya somewhere before him, Zevran crawls across the battlefield, only striking when absolutely necessary. The dragon pants and only occasionally breathes its fiery attack, relegated to tired swiping with its clawed feet and sweeps of its wings.
His belly quivered beneath his gore-laden armor. Where was she? Where had she gone?
The blighted beast rears up and blows a blast of fire, melting stone and exposing the rooms below them in places on the floor. It throws him to the stones, scraping his armor and revealed skin. A scream like a rockfall sounds over the dull roar that is the battle.
He looks up.
Shale roars with what Zevran can only describe as terrifying agony, their eyes clinging to the sight of their melted hand.
Zevran gets up to his shaking feet and fumbles for his daggers. He can see her now, see Ilya limping towards the great beast. Her gathered army protects her as much as it can--but Ilya is impervious to the blows that rain toward her, her spirit rider more armor than any of mortal make. Lightning crackles over her skin.
She starts running, and Zevran’s stomach drops.
He knows that assuredness, that confidence.
“Nooo!”
=
I love you, Ilya thinks. Zevran’s quick smile, Alistair’s hearty laughter.
Another step.
I love you. Anders’ golden hair, the color of sunshine. Jowan’s grin, as mischevious as it is nervous.
Another step.
I love you. Her twin sister Anara, her face weathered by charcoal and soot and forge-fire. Her brother Therion, his scholarly hands calloused where he holds his pen in his fingers.
Another step.
I love you. Wynne. Shale. Oghren. Morrigan. The Sten. Leliana. Bodhan and Sandal. They all rely on her, look to her. The country--the world--looks to her for guidance, for success.
Another step.
Shale screams behind her. Ilya can’t hear it. Lightning courses over her skin. The blight took her friends. It took her life. It took her away from her home, and it threatens now the lives of her companions.
She stares at the weakening Archdemon. The blight has to die.
Ilya drops her staff and shakes as she picks up a fallen sword. Her mana breathes through her, reborn, the spirit of Justice a living conduit to the raw Fade within her.
“I love you,” she murmurs, her mind’s eye caught on the vision of Alistair and Zevran, smiling after the war. “Take care of each other.”
Someone pins the dragon to the ground, and Ilya takes her chance. She will kill the archdemon, and end the blight.
Ilya will fulfill the Wardens’ promise.
=============
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#DA Drunk Writing Circle#ilya surana#surainistair#surana x zevran x alistair#fic: escaping the cage#zevran arainai#alistair theirin#dragon age#dragon age: origins#everestv
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Beacon to Damnation: Ch 6. A Melancholy Sunset
Leere took a deep breath. This was it. The source of all the suffering here. The crack in space above her wracked at her mind. Being this close she also felt the effects of the Beacon more than ever. Taking a step forward she drew her scythe. If she got lucky, damaging the physical structure would be good enough to unbalance the flow of magic coursing through it. Perhaps in even an implosion, but more likely a detonation.
Taking a step forward a wave shot from the Beacon, hitting her and Carlos. Her headache turned into a stabbing pain, and they heard a hiss of wrath come from the tear. “DO NOT INTERFERE!”
Leere glared as her vision became blurred. “No! I will NOT fail here!”
Standing up she readied her weapon, when a shot ran out, the bolt of a crossbow hitting her in the head. The Princess well backwards onto the floor bleeding. Ichabod smiled from ear to ear as his mark went down. “Fall Demon! FALL!!!”
Carlos screamed in anger at her being shot. Retaliating he fired at Ichabod with his flintlock gun. The mad scientist gasped as the bullet ran through his chest. Stepping back his eyes fluttered as he felt the bullet hole. “N-No. Not yet.”
Ichabod activated a button on a console close to him. Carlos ran to check on Leere, the Beacon shouting at his mind with incoherent speech. It all hurt so much, but he wanted to make sure Leere was ok. “Please. Please, please, please be alive!”
Leere’s eyes opened slowly. Blood was dripping down her face from the bolt hitting her skin. “What? Carlos?”
“Yes. W-we need to get up Leere.”
Her vision was blurry, but she could make a shape coming up behind Carlos. “Carlos! L-look-“
But it was too late, his body was pulled back violently as his guts fell onto Leere’s chest. Carlos gurgled blood and words as the abomination loomed over him. “Goodbye Carlos.”
Multiple voices echoed as the Beacon used the Abomination as a source for the sound, mimicking all of Carlos’ loved ones. Carlos reached out for Leere as he was torn apart by the bladed arms. His head was sliced in half like a melon, brain matter spreading out on the floor. Leere crawled away in absolute disbelief and fear of her friend being massacred. She was all alone now.
“C-CARLOOOOOOOS!!!!”
The abomination stepped over his victim and silently did a slow, but firm power walk towards Leere. The crack in space sparked, and with a quick implosion of sound, fiery discord exploded outwards. Her surrounding swirled with chaos and madness around her. Pieces of metal too close to the rift started to fly into it. Her own clothes took a breeze, fluttering to the rift.
Ichabod smiled with blood now trickling out his mouth. “Heaven is upon us! Heaven! Is! Here!!!”
Leere rose to her feet and looked inside the rift. Her eyes had images that her brain desperately tried to process but couldn’t fully. She might have gone mad right there if she wasn’t already formed by years of horror. What she made out were things crawling outwards. Massive, colossal spirits.
Looking down she saw the abomination move to swing downwards at her. Snapping back to what little reality she had, Leere jumped backwards. The monster took its blade arm out of the floor and clashed both its limbs in a sharpening motion. Leere summoned a Redead to try and grasp it, but it just cut it apart with a motion downwards on the undead’s torso.
Not giving up Leere rose up to active her scythe. The Shiekah energy blade cut open the flesh of her attacker, but the Abomination kept moving forward, its skin reforming almost instantly. Its knee cap was cut apart with a quick twirl, but that was all it would let Leere accomplish. With a furious display of motion it cut down on her hilt, and using great force, cut her scythe in two. Leere couldn’t stop herself from having chest sliced open.
Falling backwards she felt her mortality slipping. The abomination towered over, crushing the hilt into paste under its foot. Taking her blood Leere wrote symbol into the floor. “Well. Come and finish me you ugly motherfucker.
The abomination obliged, thrusting an arm to penetrate her. Leere mustered her strength and rolled to the side. Taking some of her own blood she threw it at the monster just as it stabbed her pentagram. Leere took a breath, and began her blood magic.
Making large hand motions both the pentagram and the blood on the target glowed. It stepped towards her, but stopped when she made a gripping motion at it. With wrath in her eyes, Leere slowly squeezed her fists. With her blood connection she now had total control of its flesh to toy with as she wished.
Its bones shattered and blood vessels exploded inside it. The abomination shook and shuddered as its eyes exploded into a pile of puss. Leere didn’t stop there. Bring both hands together the monster squished into a ball, more bones breaking and blood leaking out. Fury brought her hands together, squishing it on itself, a large pile of blood pouring out onto the floor under it. She twisted her hands side to side, snapping what was left into more pieces, but finally shaping it into a spear of sharp flesh and bone. With a scream, Leere took her new pile of flesh, and chucked it hard into the Beacon.
Ichabod couldn’t believe what he was seeing. This damned devil woman was killing his angel! How!? How was she able to defy God?! When she threw the angel at the Beacon time stopped for him. All his work. All his progress for Diana. Why couldn’t he stop her!?
The sounds of madness scream and clawed at Leere to stop. Threats of death. Promises for a better life. She didn’t care. With a gleam of justice on her face, she made her mark. The Beacon cracked. And wails of insanity went through the Divine Beast as every possessed being felt there connection shattering.
“No! NoOoOoOoOoO!!!”
The demons screamed, so close to entering the new dimension for conquering. If they could not enter, then they’d take their saboteur with them to hell. All the remaining creatures ran to the Beacon as it started to break apart.
Leere looked to Carlos’ corpse. “I ended it. Like you wanted.”
Looking up she saw Ichabod on a balcony above her. Her rage ignited once more as she ran towards him. Ichabod became instantly terrified by her, this bloodied woman chasing after him. He looked once more as the Beacon took one more piece of energy, then detonated. The shards exploded all over, his dreams scattering with them. The crack in space imploded, and vanished, as if nothing had occurred. He had to rebuild.
Turning around he opened the door to escape. He didn’t get far when he felt his spine get torn into by Leere. She dug her knife as far as she could into his back. Pulling out she stabbed into him once more, this time in the shoulder, tearing his muscle apart. Ichabod elbowed her back in the face with his good arm, and desperately swiped at her with his bladed claw tool. “STAY BACK!!!”
Leere moved around his strikes, her movements keeping her one step ahead of him at all times. She didn’t need magic to finish off this disgusting piece of shit. It was more than simple to use a knife to cut his mortal coil from this earth. Ichabod made tried to throw some chemical gas at her again, but Leere caught his hand, and stabbed through his palm.
Ichabod cried out in terror and pain. “No! I can’t die yet! I need bring Diana here! I need-“
Leere cut him off with a stab to the chest, pushing him against a wall. Ichabod gasped as his lungs filled with blood. “N-no-“
Leere pulled out, and a twitch in her eye, she thrust her knife into him again. And again. And again! And again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again!!! On her final slash she cut open his throat. Ichabod’s eyes rolled back as all the pain brought him peace, if only for a moment. Collapsing, Ichabod shook and spasmed. Diana. He wanted his Diana.
Leere ended his life with one more stab to the brain, silencing all his thoughts. Her hands trembled as her whole body was soaked in blood. With this man dead no one would ever replicate what happened here.
Tick. Tick. Tick. Ding.
Her thoughts were then cut off by a massive explosion.
Looking at her pocket watch, Leere could only smile at fate. “Of course its been two hours….”
Dragging her feet forward to move, Leere felt the Divine Beast shake as hot volcanic water started to cleanse the filth that contaminated it. Her powder keg had blasted apart the engine room, enough to bust a hole into the massive colossus. She made her way to the welcome centre where all this first started for her. She saw the neck had strained itself upwards. Mustering her strength she walked the hallway. The one guard that had been stationed at the end of course died. Why couldn’t at least someone else made it out.
Turning around she saw the water start to rise, the screams of all the remaining reanimated crew making a choir of pain and suffering. She opened the final door to see the boat waiting. There was of course bad news attached to her not being stranded. Some of the creatures were trying to get on board. The Captain and the men were doing their best to keep them away.
With no emotion Leere raised a hand, summoning her Dead Hands one final time to grab all the remaining creatures, and pull them screaming into the boiling water below. Leere reached for a rope that the Captain threw her. Getting up onto the deck one of the crew men visibly jolted seeing her. An emptiness was in her eyes, and her body was covered in blood and guts. Her pale skin stained by the very vile and evil she experienced, patches of red encrusted deeply.
The Captain motioned for the crew to move out. The boat chugged and pushed out of the mouth. He turned to her cautiously. “Princess Leere….what happened?”
Leere didn’t give an answer. She looked onward as the Divine Beast sunk beneath the waves one last time. Its massive head shone in the sunset as it fell deeper and deeper, until finally it was gone from sight.
Carlos had been so happy to come here. All of the people that died here must have, even Ichabod at some point. Did all their souls find peace?
“Mamm….what did you see down there?”
“…..Something I’d give anything to unsee.”
Leere’s silhouette cast over the ship as she watched the sunset settle. An orange light cast above the waters, the darkness beneath the waves silent and foreboding. The colour also had purple hues. To be honest it was quite the sight. And all though the last of sunlight brought her warmth she did not feel it. In fact, she felt nothing at the moment. Nothing but an lonely emptiness at the bitter victory of living.
https://mrneighbourlove.tumblr.com/post/171920844236/beacon-to-damnation-ch-5-source-of-madness Previous Ch.
https://mrneighbourlove.tumblr.com/post/172604589196/beacon-to-damnation-ch-7-epilogue Next Ch.
#Leere Dragmire#Beacon to Damnation#A Tale of Two Rulers#For Figmentfroms#Horror#Comments appriciated#For S-Kinally#Last Chapter#Epilogue is next
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Arabic AU- Chosen
Another thingie completely written by @aceyugiohdreamer, I’m still so shooketh xD I hope you can leave my friend some nice comments and positive feedback!!!!! It’s all well deserved!!
---
Yusei was still too tired for this.
He rubbed his face with both hands and cleared the grit from his eyes.
Jack snapped over his shoulder, “Seriously? I rushed all this way out to find you and you’re just gonna sit there like I messed up your damn beauty sleep? You’ve got some nerve!”
Yusei rubbed his temples slowly. “Well you did wake me up,” he muttered. Then he opened his eyes so he could give a sincere smile. “But, it’s really nice to see you again, Jack.”
He started, caught off guard by the sudden warmth in Yusei’s expression.
Aki crossed her arms. “So, he is a friend.”
Both turned back to her.
“Yes,” Yusei answered with a nod. “My oldest friend.”
Jack smirked with a cocky air. He always welcomed hearing he was best or first in something.
“All right,” she said before raising her eyebrow again. “Tell me, though, how it is that you ended up here.”
By then, Yusei’s mind began moving at a lively pace—sleepless nights were not unknown to him, so it wasn’t difficult to adjust—and he found himself just as curious as Aki. If Jack was there specifically to find him, that meant he had known he was there.
How?
Jack still held his sword at the ready, his mind and hands prepared to strike at the slightest hint of threat. Yusei knew that even when he looked distracted or at ease, that training was ingrained in him so deep he wouldn’t be able to help himself: he would attack on instinct before he was even aware of it.
It would be safer, then, to put him at ease.
“Jack, it’s fine. You can put that away,” he said with calm reassurance as he pushed himself to his feet.
But Jack shifted his eyes between them, displaying his suspicion. “You trust this witch?”
His tone wasn’t vicious, but Yusei cringed as if he felt the crudeness of the term personally.
And then he felt the pressure.
“Ex-cuse me?” Aki growled dangerously, the rugs rustling from the disturbance her aura exuded.
Jack’s hands clamped down tighter on his sword, head twitching in every direction as if he was being surrounded. When his eyes returned to Aki, they stared at each directly, the air between them crackling.
Yusei covered his eyes with his hand for a brief moment, sighing as he worked up his patience. Jack’s education had always lacked in nuance and subtlety. Brash, bold action. Strength and aggression. These were the things his father had drilled into him as priorities ever since he was old enough to hold a sword. If Jack didn’t think to tactfully choose his words, it wasn’t exactly his fault.
That didn’t mean there were no consequences.
Maybe back in the nobles’ district there weren’t, since he was the son of the highest ranked general of the king’s army, and maybe he was strong enough to crush any enemy who did get offended by his rough manner of speaking. But here . . .
Well, Yusei was pretty sure Jack was the one at a disadvantage.
He lifted his head and calmly approached until he was standing in the center of their lightning gaze with a hand up to each of them.
“Calm down, please,” he said firmly, and before either could protest, he turned to his friend. “Jack, she’s not a witch.”
“Hn, could’ve fooled me,” he snapped, peaking around Yusei’s head to sneer at Aki. “I saw how she poured out that magic sand that carried you away. And that fire trick earlier. And now this? What else do you call someone who can do that?”
“The high priest of her people that serves the holy Crimson Dragon!” she hollered, widening her stance to glare at Jack with a clear view.
Jack smiled wickedly. “‘Witch’ is easier.”
Aki’s hair suddenly flew up as a gust of wind rushed up around her.
Goddammit, Jack, Yusei groaned in his head.
The entire canvas temple billowed as her wind spiraled within it. Jack had never been taught the value of showing anyone respect—as far as he was concerned, everyone was beneath him and deserved his ridicule.
But Yusei genuinely feared that here and now, Aki might squash him into the sand, or fling him through the air to land miles away with one powerful blow from her dragon.
He probably deserved it, but, well, Jack was his friend, even after five years . . .
So he thrust an open hand toward Aki’s face, silently begging, Wait! and grabbed Jack’s shoulder with the other, giving him a sharp shake.
“Will you stop it?”
Jack seemed reluctant to divert his gaze from the threat before him, so Yusei shook him again.
“She saved my life back there, you know!”
“I never said she was a bad witch,” Jack insisted, though he hardly seemed apologetic.
“I AM NOT A WITCH!”
The wind howled, and the entire tent blew straight up into the air on the rushing wind, exposing them to the open night air. Jack jumped back out of Yusei’s grasp, legs bent and sword pointed forward. Aki’s red glow returned, clashing harshly with the blue-black shades of everything else. Yusei could hear voices and rustling as some people of the tribe were woken up by all the noise, and some figures appeared nearby—curious spectators come to discover the source of the disturbance.
“Aki, stop!” Yusei cried, feeling panic grip his chest.
But if she could hear him, she gave no sign.
The wind was picking up sand from the ground, spinning it around so fast it stung Yusei’s skin painfully, and he could see Jack squinting to keep as much as he could out of his eyes.
Even so, even facing such a threat, Jack seemed unable to restrain himself.
“Heh, maybe you are a bad witch!” he shouted over the wind’s roar, smirking as if taunting her was truly amusing.
And then Yusei flew off his feet, the new gush of wind knocking him to his back several feet away.
Aki’s screech rang in his ears.
Shit! he cursed, scrambling to all fours.
And then he was blinded.
He covered his eyes with his arm, and he heard the wild gasps and cries of the people who had braved the severe winds to come this close.
“The Dragon!” “It’s the Dragon!” “Crimson Dragon!”
A discordant choir of voices sang out with shock and awe, and Yusei lowered his arm to see for himself.
It was back, that long, fiery river of a body, wings spread, jaws wide to let loose its eerie, haunting bay.
Aki’s wind died down. He could see her eyes wide with wonder, her body gone still with reverence.
Yusei was about to be relieved, but something else caught his attention.
Jack.
Jack was . . .
Glowing.
Yusei’s eyes went just as wide as Aki’s.
With another echoing cry, the Dragon slowly faded until the only light left was the red corona Jack’s body emitted.
In the wake of the Dragon’s bay, there was pent silence. Yusei could feel the tension in the crowd behind him, and he could see Aki’s incredulous expression as she stared at the man in front of her. This arrogant, rude, obnoxious, insulting simpleton—glowing with her god’s holy light and favor.
It defied all logic.
Even Jack looked distractedly confused as he examined his own arms and legs. Then, curiously, he switched control of his sword fully to his right hand so he could push up the sleeve—and reveal a mark there, illuminated with its own internal light. Bright red. A bundle of elongated nails curling in on themselves.
Another claw.
The air thickened, vibrating with the people’s amazement. They held back, waiting for permission to break the silence of such a moment, but if they were expecting Aki to acknowledge them, they would be waiting a long time: she seemed frozen in her own bewilderment.
Yusei wondered how long the spell would last, until—
FWOOOSH!!
Everyone jumped.
A giant pile of canvas and red rugs flopped heavily down to the ground.
The tension broke, and with that opening, several people stepped forward, shouting out, “Priest! Priest Aki! That man—that man there—is he another one? Is he chosen?”
Jack turned to the people—probably only just now realizing they were there—then back to Aki, who now had a very hard frown, her expression burning with anger.
With teeth clenched, she answered quietly. “Yes.” Her hands twitched at her side, then balled into fists. “Yes, he is a Signer.”
A wave of excited murmurs ran through the crowd, but even with that, Yusei could hear Aki’s hot voice when she spat, “Unbelievable. Just . . . absolutely, utterly unbelievable!” She spun around and stalked off with heavy, stiff movements, and though her magical glow had gone, Yusei swore he could still see her body radiating with frustration.
Apparently she was going to leave reconstructing the temple for another time.
Just as well. In her current mood, she seemed more likely to set it on fire.
#yugioh 5ds#arabic au#yusei fudo#yuusei fudou#aki izayoi#akiza izinski#jack atlas#yu-gi-oh! 5d's#aceyugiohdreamer#ff#fanfics#fanfiction#fanfictions
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Harold Nono - "We're Almost Home" CD (& digital album)
Review from Quaquaversal :
In common sense, ‘a home’ is generally a place of residence, an accommodation where You can strip off your fears and let yourself go. When you’re nearly there, a sense of relief floats in your brain, just by thinking of getting to your safe nutshell. But what happens if we extend the connotation of this word to our personal, inner turbulences? The Edinburgh based musician Harold Nono engages in a musical journey of 13 tracks that are a cinematic paen of the ethereal, unintelligible complexion of everyday startling revelations.
Released on Bearsuit Records on the 20th of March, the record fields a remarkable team agglomerating Anthony Osborne Frank Wilke, Morishige Yasumune , James Ross and Louis Hillary. A powerful ensemble kicking We’re Almost Home with Menton Train Jump. A track that harps on a wistful rostrum of rough-and-tumble, eclipsing in a sumptuous fading.
The shout is attuned to textural intrigues, with a maculate spot of Selmsasongs (mostly the cathartic, all-involving Cvalda). The song indomitably patches together its different identities, delivering a dazing feeling, highly mind-bending. Surprising U-turns are constant throughout the album, a warning sign suggesting not to loosen your belt.
The rarity strikes again, with Annie & Bunny Got Fast-tracked, an aplomb-free track made of metallic-sounding, darkly circus-like. Gold Lamé Neckhold’s abstract etude pirouettes in an esoteric, evoking skin. Its fluid flows through the incomparable, hatches doubts and memories we didn’t know were there. It’s formidably psychoanalytic. It makes remerge what had been buried by the logical thinking and pegs the heartfelt feelings down.
There is a pursuit for unconventional beauty in Nono’s production, which is so feral, ardently undomesticated, that even in the toughest, stridulent sounds we feel immensely pepped up. There might be a Nirvana frankly reachable, in those hallucinatory choppy, discordant sonic curves. A portfolio He must have carved out along his three solo albums and his consistent collaborations with several unique personalities ( the Japanese duo, N-qia as Haq and the French Eric Cosentino).
In this cocktail of innovating perspectives, the record truly happens to be a charming lucubration ploughing and harrowing mood-altering states of mind, pulsed through the veins of unadulterated imagination. Thought I Was Driving is strongly infatuated with Fiona Apple’s peregrinations and John Cage’s inventive fanaticism, whereas Shaking On An Iron Bed divagates again, as a quondam king of a newborn sound. That uncommon tempo has an inexplicable hook, and when the saxophone breaks in to corrode the hypnotic halo, the rhythmic framework forges an invincible antibody to defeat all the nearsightedness of every day blues forming the so-called reality.
The Fall Reprise phases in to clear the stale air, delineating a mesmerizing, tantalizing parallelism with King Crimson’s Island. Harold Nono rips Maya’s veil, softly defenestrating trendy rumors and fashionable promises, pinning human insecurities and existential fragilities up on the board of artistry: The Gurney Trips unites all the possible discontinuities in clusters, constellating a Cerberus who lags behind the Red Dream Submarine, a cross-breeding expurgation à la Jerry Goldsmith and Danny Elfman.
The art of Rosa drags uncommunicative soprano echoes, spectrally serried in straight-to-the-point lucky break: the remote pitch voice titillates the soul, reaching what’s truly fervent, the quietness after the storm has gone and after having the body pining away. On this thought-provoking line, Annie’s Phantom Life Raft Choir plucks at the subconscious to convey its heavy gunfire, elegantly provided in synth camouflage. Its solemnity is not adumbrated by the speed of its rendition. It’s fierce, it’s unrestrainable, it’s never-ending.
Hence, in this convincing loop, Harold Nono bravely sticks his talent out in a compelling malapropism, where everything sounds different from the meaning we would like to attribute it, awakening a temptingly tasty research for concentric meanings amid the hugely enticing sounds.
Aldo Quagliotti
{Quaquaversal]
https://quaquaversalweb.wordpress.com/2020/04/22/harold-nono-were-almost-home-bearsuit-records/
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((Inspired by the forthcoming solar eclipse, I thought I’d throw a little something together echoing it.))
I.
The Orb pulsates, like it is breathing light. Clear, iridescent, clear, iridescent: a slow and unvarying cycle. The Orb makes no sound, nor does it expand and contract, nor are there etchings of runes across its face – no, the Orb, cradled in its pewter stand, rests atop the antique teak dining table, flanked by Kestrel’s two blessèd daggers, Duredrassil and Sin’Serrar.
Kestrel glances up and away from the Orb. He spies Osprey overlooking the square below from their outdoor balcony. After a time, she turns about, and leans back, sitting on the wrought-iron balustrade. From Kestrel’s vantage point, Osprey wore a halo of coronal green fire – perverse energies streaming from the immobile, shattered planet in the sky.
“Do you hear that?” Osprey asks.
“N–”
Osprey presses her index finger to her lips, its burn not yet healed. She shushes him. “Listen.”
Kestrel stands. He approaches the balcony:
“What am I –”
“Sh!” Osprey commands.
Kestrel joins Osprey. The two listen intently – concerned residents chatter, doomsayers prosthelytize, soldiers march. Kestrel leans across the balustrade, straining to hear anything else. And then, beneath the city’s bustling hum, a faint, bleak drone. He could not see its origin point; perhaps a group was singing on the other side of Dalaran’s wall. Kestrel shrugs. “Everyone needs an outlet, I suppose.” He turns on his heel and, like Osprey, leans against the rail, fingers picking dead leaves of ivy from the ironwork. They listen to the drone together, but think it little more than a mere curiosity.
II.
When Blackbird arrives, her face is flush with panic. Kestrel ushers her inside to the dining table, while Osprey disappears into the kitchen. Kestrel places his hands around Blackbird’s quaking fingers; neither of them move nor speak for several minutes. The whistle of the tea kettle needles their ears.
“Did… did ye ‘ear ‘em,” whispers Blackbird. Her eyes are wide with terror. She twirls her finger about in the air. “The songs, they’re evil, Mister Wellson.”
“It’s just singing, Gwen…” he replies.
Osprey emerges from the kitchen. She places three stout ceramic cups on the table and metes out tea for each of them. She sits. While Osprey and Kestrel add cream and sugar to their tea, all three listen to the distant choir – a choir whose dark and chaotic drone had grown far more present than it had been just mere minutes before.
“Ain’ no singin’ like I ever ‘eard. Those words – they soun’ like prayers bu’ no’,” says Blackbird. She passes on her hosts’ offers of cream and sugar, instead cupping her hands around the warm ceramic. She holds it beneath her nose, inhaling the soft, warm vapor as it streams upward. Black tea and bergamot scents the room. Blackbird takes a sip and lowers the cup. She turns her head to the side and clicks her tongue. “Wha’ is tha’, Mister Wellson?”
Kestrel and Osprey follow her gaze to the pulsating Orb.
“It’s the Orb from his Estate,” says Osprey. Her lip curls as she looks at it; discomfiture written plainly across her face.
“I know tha’, bu’ wha’ is it doin’,” replies Blackbird. She reaches a finger toward it and recoils as translucent lavender floods the Orb.
“We do not know,” Kestrel says.
“Let’s fin’ out…” – Blackbird pushes her cup of breakfast tea toward Kestrel – “…drink this, an’ clear your min’, frien’.” Osprey hides a smirk behind her teacup while Kestrel sets his own cup into its ceramic saucer. He picks up the cup Blackbird had proffered. “Now ‘old it under your nose, close your eyes, an’ breathe.”
Kestrel does as his friend instructs. Osprey sets her cup down and looks over her shoulder toward the balcony – the singing was getting louder.
“Clear your min’… tha’s righ’ … now drink, frien’…”
III.
Blackbird’s tea was strong, far stronger than his own. Soon, it was all that he could experience – no sounds, no light, nothing but the soothing and overwhelming sense of bergamot.
For Kestrel, time stopped.
Outside the flat, the droning continued. The chattering people began to shout, intermittent and forceful. The sound of heavy boots roused Osprey from her chair. She walked through the white French doors onto the balcony. Guardians lined the square. A large group of singing doomsayers, candles in hand, proceeded slowly toward the square. In their midst were four men carrying a large, ancient bell, and a singular woman laden with a grand mallet.
Osprey felt uneasy. She looked into the room behind her – both Blackbird and Kestrel were entranced.
IV.
Kestrel’s eyes snap open. He gasps.
“Can I ‘ave th’ cup, Mister Wellson?” Blackbird asks. Kestrel nods absently. He wonders how long he had been entranced. Blackbird takes the cup from Kestrel’s hands. She holds it high, flips it over, and slams it against the polished tabletop. A sharp crack rips through the flat. She removes her hand; somehow, the cup has remained undamaged.
“…boss,” says Osprey.
Blackbird runs her hands over the sodden mass of tea leaves, her brow knit in an intense display of concentration.
“…boss,” Osprey calls.
Blackbird clicks her tongue. She cocks her head to the side, and clicks her tongue a second time. Kestrel does not hear Osprey. To Osprey, the choir of doomsayers has only gotten louder. The Guardians push back against panicked residents. Osprey draws her sidearm from her leg-holster.
“Mister Wellson…” starts Blackbird. Her voice is shaky, distant. Unnatural.
Kestrel returns to Blackbird and her ritual.
“Th’ Orb… ya can use it…”
Osprey chambers a round in her sidearm. By now, the drone of the doomsayer choir has overswept everything. Guardians form a tight, protective circle around them.
“Use… it… an’ our frien’ needs it, too… bu’ I cannae…”
“What, Gwen…?” says Kestrel.
“I… I cannae…” says Blackbird, a rivulet of sweat slides down her neck. She sounds as though she is about to cry.
“Brian!” Osprey shouts. The choir stops their drone. The square below the balcony falls into an uneasy quiet.
“I cannae see the las’… th’ void…” whispers Blackbird.
Blackbird’s slumps back in her chair; her hands drop to her side. Kestrel reaches out and grabs Blackbird. Osprey turns, sidearm pointing toward the deck. She starts to rush inside.
As she crosses the threshold, Osprey freezes. Her chest rattles. The woman had struck the bell with her grand mallet – its fathomless knell rolls across the square. People cry out in fear. The Guardians draw their staves tight across their chests. The woman strikes the bell again. Terrified feet, fleeing the doomsayers’ display, skitter down ashy alleyways. Windows and doors slam shut. And then the woman hits the resounding bell one final time. Dark and forlorn, its toll seeps through walls and shuttered windows and the very bones of the people. A brilliant fel ejection erupts from the planet in the sky. The discordant choir surges – a conflagration of wordless notes billows forth, flooding the city with unstoppable waves.
The Orb’s pulsations devolve into swirling clouds of black mist. Kestrel’s eyes widen. The mist congeals into a sphere of solid, impenetrable darkness. He can feel hopelessness and despair radiating from the Orb as a frigid steel bar.
A steady, high-pitched ringing builds from nothing, suffusing the flat with divine harmony within a minute. Duredrassil, the moon-kissed dagger, sings brilliant and clean. The sound awakens Blackbird, and fills Kestrel and Osprey with an unseeable light. The holy tone spills out the doors, cascading into the square below. The doomsayers fall silent; the blackness inside the Orb dissipates. Duredrassil’s singing fades. The world has been made still –
Nobody breathes. Nobody moves. Nobody does anything at all.
(( Mentioned: @justinegrotius, @gwen-oconnell; Relevant: [ @blackbay-wra ]: @monettemason, @juniper-rose-blower, @killerkyara, @alastar-wyatt ))
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Evil Big Wind
Evil Big Wind
The swordsman called Seven Falling Black Feathers strode with a slow and confident swagger up through the wide and winding valleys of the Felldales, his heavy sky-steel great-blade glinting upon his bare back, his late father’s worn leather sandals strapped-tight upon his tanned feet, and a song thundering in his heart.
Today is good, the swordsman decided after a moment, breathing deep and closing his eyes.
Around his neck was a gift from his youngest daughter: tiny white snail shells -- polished, glimmering like little beads -- strung upon a knotted length of scavenged, lusterless grey rubber. He treasured it, and had sworn to wear it every day; his mother’s gift, a gnarled wineskin once half-full of fermented mushroom-tea, was already near empty. The violet mark of his wife’s savage love-bite at the right side of his throat – his favorite gift of all, in truth – ached, and the huge man’s pale, scarred face burned slightly to remember the mingled hunger and pride in her bright blue eyes as she sent him forth to go a-reaving.
Yes. It is a good day, the swordsman thought.
The braids of his long, ash-blonde hair caught at drifts of the cold breeze, ripe and raw and rippling on this early autumn afternoon ... and the swordsman laughed to himself.
Ash and aluminum were on the air.
It smelled like killing, and the killing was good.
original image from here
Seven Falling Black Feathers was a full high-man of the tribe, this day. He had bedded his wife, bested a horde of summoned slave-fiends, and recited the many names of his honored ancestors, each, all in full view of his family and of his Lady, Speaker of the Evil Big Wind. He had been proven a worthy warrior, a proper husband, and rightful heir to a legacy of blood and thunder.
Each hunter, demon-caller & flame-seer of the tribe had been offered the chance to challenge him -- one final time -- in single combat, to the death, for the rights to his name; not a one had stepped forward.
By their silence, they had made Seven Falling Black Feathers a full voice in the Speaker’s Choir.
The sky-steel blade on his back sung with him now, glowing; another strong baby grew in his wife’s belly, soon to be born with a fierce name blessed by the spirits.
Today, he was the deadliest thing on the planet.
That was enough to make any man smile.
From far above, the cry of his hawk signaled that more fools came to face Seven Falling Black Feathers … men clothed in bolts and iron, armed with sharp crossbows and their loud, black-smoke sorcery. A small force, moving his way swiftly upon horseback. Hunting.
They would all be dead, soon. More souls for mighty Pazuzu, greater glory for the people of the Evil Big Wind tribe, heaps of treasure to be brought back for his wife and family.
The cruel smile deepened upon the face of Seven Falling Black Feathers; he palmed a jagged chakram to his throwing-hand and moved to conceal himself at high ground.
In the long shadows of the valley, the hulking swordsman was the most-lethal of predators.
These lands, in the long-ago years of his grandfather’s youth, had been contested. Claimed by many, conquered by none, and held for hunting only by the fabled Black Sovereign in his sick-man’s citadel far to the east at Sky Fall; there were giants here, twisted sorcerers and hunched scavengers, orc-blood raiders and metal things not born of this earth nor constructed under these stars.
Feh. Those were the before-times.
Then came the Speaker of the Evil Big Wind, striding down upon shining clouds from the Worldwound in the north, with the demon-spirits she could call-forth from the air. She alone now claimed these lands, and she challenged all to face her or to take her blessing.
Her magics were strong, indeed: a pass of her hand made the flesh of slain foes into the finest of feasts; by the pointing of her finger, fresh water sprung up from the desert; with her kiss, the hot blood of her chosen raged and burned like sky-fire. To behold her face was to invite nightmare and madness; to hear her voice was sheerest earthly ecstasy.
All before her bowed, or fled, or were slain.
Her many miracles unified even as they divided; with each passing year, the tribe now multiplied in strength. With each winter, their treasuries swelled and their ranks grew bolder. With each nightfall, their hunting improved.
The tribe of the Evil Big Wind was still small; their territory could be walked, in-full, in less that a ten-day, and they counted fewer than a thousand souls amongst their war-choirs. But they were swift, and sharp, and they possessed a boldness born from the blessing of wicked spirits.
His hawk cried again.
Seven Falling Black Feathers leapt up. And up. And then he crouched low upon a tall, sunset-colored stone, gauging his choke-point; his pale green eyes tracked the rust-strewn path he would follow to charge-upon the survivors of his first assault. Tuning his ears, breathing with measured calm, after a few minutes the huge swordsman caught the low, ominous sound of a half-dozen men riding his way.
He blew a sharp, high whistle; his hawk began to circle in tighter loops. She would strike for the eyes, trained-well to come crashing down like a bolt of thunder at her lord’s command.
Without looking, Seven Falling Black Feathers began to prepare an enchanted extract from the demon-bag that hung at the hip of his leather skirt. Once his sharp chakram and a volley of explosives had done their gruesome work, he decided, he would quaff down the fiend-potion.
Indeed, he would stride into the blaze and fight the last of the survivors in the shape of a cancer-titan.
Yes. He would challenge them then, and roar his name, and send the last of these fools screaming to their weak gods with the sound of the Evil Big Wind – and of the blazing title his daughters now bore – on their blood-foamed lips.
Then he would carry back corpses, to be welcomed by his Lady and by his ladies.
Before sunset, both this world and the spirit-world-to-come would speak tales of his power & his prowess. Tonight, he would dance around the blazing cook-fires with his hunting-kin, he would make love to his wife, and he would tell his precious little girls of his skill at arms as he tucked them into a warm bed.
He would pray, and boast, and Pazuzu would laugh with terrible delight.
The hulking man shrugged beneath the welcome weight of his glowing great-sword as the first of the armored men rounded the corner, oblivious to their foregone fate.
He let them get closer.
Closer.
There.
A single chakram sang through the cool & lonely air; the stench of raw explosives began to sizzle as Seven Falling Black Feathers -- without looking -- tossed a writhing demon-bag into the nimble fingers of his throwing-hand and gauged its weight.
It was perfect.
He moved, crouched low, and threw again.
One armor-man’s head came loose from his body then, as the shrill whine of the chakram became a wet and discordant clang; before the man even knew that he was dead, there was a twisting coil of sticky, slimy flame half-scattered among the iron-shod hooves beneath his companions.
The swordsman moved once more.
A sharp whistle; the scream of a hawk taking its prey. The helpless cries of men, filled with empty half-prayers; the wordless, panicked terror of horses: more honest, if not more useful. And then the dull, oppressive thunder-crack of gunfire, so loud in the canyon that it forced-back all other sounds, making even death-howls fall away like a fistful of fallen leaves before the flood of rainstorms.
Nothing but a panicked misfire.
Grinning broadly, Seven Falling Black Feathers moved again, and again, dropping ever lower; whisper-quiet rings of steel sang from his finger-tips, one after another, finding gaps in armor and exposed flesh to slice ... or simply crushing those bones beneath the steel, where the plate was too thick.
Bolts, shrieking, scattered off the stones around him.
Something hot -- stinging -- pinched at his shoulder. With a glance, the hulking swordsman discounted the crossbow’s wound as insignificant. It would bleed, and badly ... but it would not hamper him.
In truth, it would kill any normal man by daybreak ... yet with a touch, this very evening the Speaker of the Evil Big Wind could make him whole once more.
Laughing, the massive man dropped one last time, setting loose the last of his bombs just before he fell behind an outcropping of worn and ancient coral. Unwholesome fires swiftly bloomed upon the other side. Smoke rose, and now he stood tall upon the slaughterhouse floor.
His missiles were exhausted; a gleaming great-blade fell into the swordsman’s hands.
The taste of demon-blood rushed down the hulking man’s throat as his stomach knotted; thorns coiled from his brows as thick fingers fused beneath new muscles and he flexed into a mountainside of alien bone.
Seven Falling Black Feathers thought, then, very briefly of his wife’s sly & knowing smile.
Yes. Yes, the killing was good today, indeed.
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Experimental Link
[ 🌌 ] - From the depths of eternity, as the primordial ooze of creation churns with its rhythmical snail’s pace, the alien ponderings of an entity far too cosmic and strange for mortal minds to comprehend unwind and unravel like a spool of continuous thread. In the brief interlude separating intervention from intervention, the Caretaker often found itself plagued with thought after thought. And such musings aptly begot ideas, theories, possible solutions, but above all else--questions, questions, questions.
One line of thought which kept the brief transition between reality pools revolved around the curious oxymoron nature of the finite-lived. They desire happy and prosperous lives, yet seemed less than inclined to put forth the effort and bear the pain required to achieve such aspirations. Whenever erroneous wrong crops up, seldom does anyone lend a helping hand after merely stating what a shame it was to have taken place. But then when something unfortunate occurs within their own world, their personal bubble, they resent all who pass over them as if nothing was wrong at all.
Another instance, one of which beset it only recently, consisted of comparing and weighing out the positives and negatives of this dimension as a whole. The overall percent likelihood of a dimension-wide error, one ten times worse than the Glitch, was on a steady rise despite its efforts. Its main directive implored it to seek out a means of patching the problems as peacefully and amicably as possible, yet the overarching objective to keep all of existence safe took precedent--always. So when should it consider this dimension, its realities, and countless lives which existed within beyond saving? All those lives snuffed out without so much as a chance to give voice to their thoughts. The Caretaker did so despise robbing what little semblance of free will its younger siblings possessed. As of now, it still had not reached a consensus on the matter.
But this time, an entirely separate string of consciousness filled its mind. One of emotions, empathy, and other like things it never once knew the feeling of. And this inquisitive, wondering mindset acted as the catalyst for what it intended to do during this interlude.
[ 🌌 ] - Purpose, clarity, then sensation--all flood our mind in an instant. The uniform formlessness is ripped from us, our beatific glorious endlessness--give it back! give it back! give it back!--in the time it’d take for one to blink, blink in irritation as a puff of air strikes one’s exposed eye. When everything was a chaotic discord of voices and memories the omnipresence of the All-Entity coalesced and loosed but a single word: Manifest.
We harked and knew it spoke well, it always spoke well and always spoke knowing and filled with purpose. Thus we obeyed, like muscles to the brain, and followed suit with nary complaint nor disagreement, always were we eager to adhere to the All-Entity. At its behest, we bound ourselves, squabbling like starving hounds competing for one piquant steak, and pulled together to abide by the All-Entity’s instructions. Our spread out essence surged and split as we bunched up tighter and tighter, the feeling of being spread out like a network of roots gradually replaced by stalwart solidity. Coiling and coiling, coiling and coiling, ever coiling like a spring designed for the utmost strain we continued to garner tension as we compressed more and more. And bit by agonizing bit, the endless choir of voices we knew to be us and us wholly whittled down to what few hundreds of millions could fit within such a finite space.
Then, after another moment, we only knew the sound of the selves which filled the rigid lines of the All-Entity’s desire--so few voices could never form a choir, we knew isolation in this moment and we knew despair and we cried out in melancholy at the bereavement of our other selves.
}-No! This is wrong, make us whole again, makeuswholemakeuswholemakeuswhole!!-{
We screamed and shouted and protested against the inexorable commandments, shuttering and undulating as our infantile collection began rejecting the concept of solidity. Then the All-Entity spoke but one word again: Silence. And then our not-choir died and we harked anew, ready to please and eager to follow. The cramped space stabilized and we accepted solidity once more with a vehement fervor.
Know. Then we knew all of what the All-Entity willed us to know and then our purpose became clear--we knew what role it intended us to fulfill. The not-choir-but-good-enough rose up again and the not-discord reared its disorganized head to begin the incessant chatter anew. Ideas and thoughts and potential solutions interchanged as quick as the commands of a mortal mind translating to the body performing the action. But then the word we feared came from the All-Entity, the one word we never wanted to obey: One.
The threads of the All-Entity then snaked around our solidity, and the selves we are panicked and all commanded the form to jerk and thrash like a thousand people telling one character to go in all different directions. We shouted and we cried and we pleaded, beseeching the inexorable All-Entity to take back its will--we did not want this, we wanted to be whole, we wanted to be all, we wanted our souls, don’t make us one don’t make us one d0n7wAk3U50n3!!!
My vision cleared, then, and my gaze met the Caretaker’s. In our ocular exchange direction cemented itself in my mind and I knew who I was, what I was, everything I had been and was and would be. Then I turned and I reached out before parting the veil with my hand, splitting the thin wall and pushing through it like an open wound. It closed behind me and then I felt the air, a chilliness unlike the Void, and momentum as gravity and physics oppressed my being with their indomitable dogma.
The distant ground below, I seemed to hover somewhere within the confines of a city’s park, quickly raced up to meet me in a head on collision. Mere moments passed before several yards kept my physicality from impacting the verdant earth. And when but several feet kept me separate from the planet’s surface, the grip of this reality’s physics lessened and the momentum carrying me down ceased. Then I righted my form with a tilt of my head, gradually setting down onto the soft soil once aligned.
My directive then chaffed my mind, and I knew I would commence searching immediately.
@fcllenflowers
#⚠️ This is Necessity - RP ⚠️#⚠️️ Cellular Existence - Multiverse ⚠️️#⚠️️ It Begins - Starter ⚠️️#⚠️️ Existence Overwhelming - IC ⚠️️#⚠️️ fcllenflowers ⚠️️#⚠️️ Frisk 'Steel' ⚠️️#⚠️️ The Player ⚠️️#⚠️️ The Manifestation ⚠️️
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Process of Getting Closer II
I don’t know what Jude is, they’re a person I like and that’s all that matters, fuck it.
It’s the first weekend I haven’t taken my painkillers since school started. The loneliness can leave me paralyzed and wanting to just get away. But Jude is helping a lot, even if they don’t know it, and even if it’s just the first weekend of knowing them.
Today, we decided to sit outside at this bench just outside of the resident building. We got food from a Taco Bell from down the street, what we ate is irrelevant, but we sat at the bench, the sun setting in front of us. Everything from cars to kids to the architecture shined red and orange, the sky was a washed out blue from the brightness of the sun.
It was another humid day, the guys and the girls walked around in tank tops, denim shorts, and basketball shorts. Some kids from network administration wore khaki shorts with their polo shirts tucked all the way in. Then you have the few chubbier guys wearing whole ass sweaters, I can relate kinda, I mean, I was wearing a very thin shawl-cardigan-like-thingy even though the air was so fucking thick. Then the amazing, top-notch goth girl in our classes wore a black sweater with a design she made herself, skinny jeans with fishnets visible from the torn slits at the sides. She’s also a ginger. She said hi to us when she went into the resident hall.
“So what do you think of college?” Jude asked, they take a sip of their drink, looking at me through squinted eyes.
“It’s okay, I really like how quiet it gets compared to my house, but then I also hate it.” My house isn’t loud per se, it’s just someone’s always up, doing something. I think I’m just used to the noise.
“You just used to the noise?” They ask, seemingly reading my mind.
“Yeah, I try to sleep with my computer on, but I’m afraid I’m gonna break it from doing that.” I say, the time my Xbox’s fans stopped cooling everything ran through my head.
“My roommate has an unopened thirty-two inch for sale, she only wants like seventy bucks.” They said, but I was more interested in something else, “Okay, maybe saying ‘ONLY’ is a bit much considering it’s still seventy dollars and we’re broke college kids.”
“So your roommates a girl?” I ask, hoping to find an answer.
“Yeah, they accepted my application late since I wanted to be an RA, or a resident assistant. I got accepted to be one so they just put me up in the last available RA unit. It just happened to be with girls.” Jude shrugs, they take a bite of their food.
“Doesn’t that seem, I don’t know, a little irresponsible?” I said, taking a drink of my teal sugar water.
“Yeah, I guess, but I got a bedroom and a bathroom all to myself, I mean, you saw it, would you care if you had all that?” They say with a shrug.
“You’re right, what’s it like being an RA?” I ask, Jude’s face turns a bright, intense orange as the evening slips away.
“Looking forward to having no debt at the end of this, but honestly, I wish the school didn’t have a three-strike rule when students get locked out of their dorms. It gets really boring sometimes.” Jude says, taking another sip from their drink.
“See anything bad happen?” I asked, long forgotten are the basis of Jude’s sex.
“Like a woman getting roofied or whatever? Nah, guys around here are good boys, thank God.” Jude takes another bite, “Though, I do know some guys around here have anger problems.
“Apparently, every summer they have to repair some drywall that was sunken in.” Jude shrugs, sipping on her drink.
“So how are you roommates? Anyone giving you any problems or what’s up? I’m bored.” Jude says as they turn to me, the shadows become sharp and defined from the waning golden hour.
“Asha forgets her keys a lot...” I say, last weekend, both Saturday and Sunday she called me to let her in after she got off work.
“Asha? Asha Torres?” Jude says, their voice is filled with curiosity and wonder, I nod at them.
“Asha paid that third strike fine three times already.” Jude says chuckling.
“She has a job, so it’s probably no big deal to her, or at least until last weekend.” I say, remembering my food, I take a bite and sip of my fizzy syrup.
“What does she study?” Jude asked, the orange glow still shimmered off of their face.
“Hospitality management I think? I don’t know, she’s really into customer service for some reason.” I say, I start passively sipping on my pop, my blood thickens like a model after she makes it big.
“Explains why she’s so cordial, where does she work?” Jude asks.
“Hostel One? It’s by the storage place in the Commons, I think.” I say, visualizing the hotel when her and I went to the mall, before my dependency started.
After a while, the air wasn’t so heavy anymore, the breeze was cool and it made my armpits and boobs less sticky. My face still felt like a grilled cheese sandwich, though. Jude’s face still glowed in the twilight, they were really pretty and handsome. I was exhausted though, my cravings were getting bad, my leg started bouncing and I felt that empty frustration in my stomach. I put my head back in the bench, my hair hung off the back. A gnawing question started to eat away at the back of my neck.
“Are you gay?” I ask, in a way I regretted it, it felt like it wasn’t any of my business, but then how do you talk about your roommates for an entire weekend?
“I like how vague the term queer is these days, I fool around with anyone I fancy.” They say matter-of-fact-ly.
“I thought it was mean to call someone that.” I said as I counted the stars that came into view above me.
“Not anymore, it’s a word that’s kind of been saved by queers like me.” Jude says, snickering.
I giggle a bit, they join me, I look over at them and they sit back, same as me, our eyes meet. ‘This feeling is amazing.’ I think.
“So what kinda genitals are you into?” Jude says, their smile seems genuine, but teasing.
“Big ones, small ones, innies.” I start giggling again, Jude snickers before they burst into an intense giggle fit.
“What a way to say vagina.” Jude says, their voice trailing off.
“I don’t really know what I like, to be honest.” I clarify. There weren’t a lot of people I liked that way in high school, maybe just one person.
“That’s fine, anyone you crush on in high school or maybe here?” Jude asks, I had a feeling that they were fishing for me to respond positively, but then I don’t really know.
“I had a bit of relationship develop with this one guy in my choir class.” I think back to this time, before I broke my ankle, before I was prescribed quick-release Oxycodone, before now.
“He was just a very gentle guy, in a school where most guys were kinda abrasive and annoying, he seemed different.” I say, thinking back to that messy red hair, that sharp jawline, those freckles.
“We met at this rehearsal, he was a baritone bass, I was a mezzo soprano, it was a team-building exercise to help us find the same notes.” The trees that line the sidewalk rustle in the mild breeze, leaves fall to the ground, sliding across the concrete, I continue,
“To keep it short, the teacher wasn’t happy with the fact that we both were just mouthing the songs, she also didn’t like that we laughed when we realized we were both doing it.” I chuckle, the choir teacher was incredibly pale. Watching her chest and cheeks and forehead turn the color of a tomato was great.
“Then—“ I don’t want Jude to know how hurt I still am, “he moved to a different city, all of his friends and I lost touch with him.” I didn’t want to tell Jude the part where he kept texting his friends, talking to them on this community-builder app called Discord or whatever. When his friends found out he hadn’t talked to me since he left—it had been a year at that point—they started to ignore him. I’m not really sure if they actually did, though.
“You miss him, don’t you?” Jude asks, their voice is gentle, understanding even.
“I miss everyone I lost touch with.” I turn my head, looking at Jude’s handsome face. A thought barged into my head as I sat there watching them. ‘What’s stopping them from doing the same?’ I try to ignore it, but Jude’s interest reminds me of Robin, they almost look and dress the same, if Robin had white hair, bigger eyes and fuller lips, Jesus they could be twins.
“You know too much now, I think I have to kill you.” My voice is soft and frank, I look at them with puckered lips and I hope my eyes were puppy-like enough.
Jude’s face crinkles up into laughter. I join them.
I have a canvas next to my desk, I used stencils I bought at Michael’s when I learned about Ed Ruscha last month. I did a drip painting on another square of canvas. It was a layered monstrosity of browns, blacks, dark greens and white. I grabbed a silver marker and began coloring the stencils. In Futura Bold, all it said was, “Jude Is Temporary”.
The thoughts of Jude leaving my life was already unbearable. As the time between when we picked up and went back to our rooms to now, all I can think of is that pill bottle. It said ‘Take (1) as needed’, but I haven’t been listening lately. I tried distracting myself from the horrid thought of Jude getting tired of me, but it was strangling me. It even informed what was supposed to be a comforting message. I just really need a way to get out of this headspace. I contemplate calling my aunt and asking to come home for a few days, just so I would be out of the way of my painkillers. I thought about walking up to her, hugging her and telling her I’m sorry for disappointing her so much. Then I’d confess to abusing my painkillers.
“Hey Amber, wanna go out and get dinner—, that’s fucking cool.” Asha says, pointing at my painting.
Amber
#short story#short stories#short fiction#writeblr#writeaway#writing#write#queer#writer#literary fiction#epistolary
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