E N T E R T H E L A B Y R I N T H

In the Labyrinth, they talk of gods.

They whisper between their fingers and sweeten their breath with the tales of titans of old who once stood so tall that a single breath would cause earth-tremors, their steps reshaping the ground trod beneath them. Their fingers were the tools that smoothed the mountains into points, shaped and carved the ridges and valleys in between. If you hike far enough, one woman claims, if you travel to a point where the oxygen is thin and your vision blacks, you can make out a partial print against the mountainside. You can run your own fingers along its length and still feel the titan’s warmth as if his palm were pressed right against yours.

The woman says, It is a thing of worship. It is a thing of devotion.

In the Labyrinth, they ask you to make you make your body anew before the King of the High Hills. They say that you are alive because you must suffer for the life and love of the Lord, that you must open your body and let him lick along your flesh so that he may taste the endlessness of his perpetual reign.

In the Labyrinth, there is no escape from his touch.

“You have a heavy burden upon you,” the headmaster was saying, teeth and eyes all a glitter under the amber cast candles. “I am not unsympathetic to the arduous path ahead of you—but please understand that this suffering must be experienced for the longevity of the king, for the beautiful life ahead of him. Only he is the one who can shed mortality and raise to the gods, because he is the only one strong enough, courageous enough, to count the cost of living forever. You must succeed where others have failed. You, this class, this is our last chance to mend what has been made broken. You must. You must.”

The Mouths of Elysium is a dark-academia fantasy created with Twine where your choices matter to the story. You live inside the Labyrinth, a maze that hates to become known with walls and paths that change every hour. The center of the Labyrinth sits a university that has been there since the beginning of time; its only purpose is to recruit students who can solve the puzzle of life, who can create an elixir that would allow the King of the High Hills to live past the length of forever. Failure means a fate worse than death.

You are one of those students.

Althea Callaghan - You know her in death. She has been the taste of rot against your tongue, the anger and hurt in your palms. You see the nice, beautiful lines of her teeth and become a creature of grief unfolding unto yourself. Debase yourself with the fervent want of her. Bend at your waist and beg for forgiveness.

You hate her. You want to watch her bleed. She feels the exact same about you, but what she doesn't know is that every waking moment of your life is dedicated to her.

The Princess/Prince - The forgotten child of the throne. The 405th child of His glorious reign. Divinity runs through their veins, the heir to so much power, but they will never see themselves rule the unforgiving landscape of the Labyrinth. Their fate is to die and be buried amongst the endless graves of their dead brothers and sisters. They must do this so the King may live forever.

A fully customizable MC including gender, appearance, and sexuality

A landscape of horror. A landscape that hates you and everyone who might try to understand it. Go beyond the walls and be witness to a reality worse than death

Key choices that will influence your game and experience. Will you succeed or fail?

Learn what it means to be forgiven. Learn what it means to suffer. Become devotion. Become loyalty. Make your body anew before the King of the High Hills

DEMO : TBA (coming soon)

Draco Black and the Prisoner of Nurmengard || ch6 Amaranthium || by Starbrigid

He had scarcely ever looked more like something out of a fairytale, even with the bloodied sword of Gryffindor in his hand. "Everyone will see," Draco breathed. "They'll talk..." "Let them," Harry said without a second's hesitation, and it was impossible to say no to him then. It sent a hush around the party when they got up to slow dance together. The silence was so profound that Draco had to recognize, maybe fewer DA members had known about them than Draco had given credit for.

I had this scene in my head from the moment I read it. Harry and Draco finally giving in to being seen together and how affectionate they are with each other. I started drawing this probably a year ago, and it was hard to keep coming back to because I was so dissatisfied with the mid ground. I am not good at drawing background people, but it's time I posted it instead of lingering, especially because I do love how other parts came together.

"and i want what you have."

song of the day for every single day ever

True love

…in a profoundly fucked up way

The Melody of Empty Space: A Harmonious Descent Into Madness --- and a student written/directed one-act by Sergio Almonte @seal_mountain @weezerhater69 as Isaac Clarke -- as Olivia Bennett -- as Seth Bradbury -- as James Heinlein -- as Rose Kakfa -- as Emilia Clarke @kosatk_wormwood as The Voice -- as The Navigator @seal_mountain as Failsafe @tbwwyt as The Ragged Man -- as Security Officer @tbwwyt as The Ragged Man It was an honor to work under your direction and an honor to act in the 2022 Spring Play with everyone. Last year I had drawn a piece on the whiteboard to commemorate all our love and hard work put into making this happen. The experience has since then inspired me to engage in @alhsdrama.techclub 's theatre community, and even start writing my own. Thank you for everything. Full names of certain actors are missing, due to confidentiality concerns. Please comment the usernames of anyone who has played the roles and I will replace the blanks with their tags. ••• #dramaclub #theatre #theatrekid #theaterarts #theatreartist #highschooltheatre #highschoolplay #studentdirected #oneactplay #scifitheatre #horrortheatre #tragedy #scifiart #horrorart #horrorartwork #whiteboard #whiteboardart #tmoes (at Abraham Lincoln High School) https://www.instagram.com/p/CndynpVrRZn/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

meandering post about reading Orson Scott Card again

I've been offline starting at 9pm every day (except once. I was drunk at karaoke and asked for anons at 8:30pm) for six weeks, with the result that in befuddled boredom two nights ago I picked up Orson Scott Card's Songmaster from the house bookshelf.

I read Ender's Game and three sequels when I was a teen thought the books were mid. Since those are OSC's best works I assumed he had nothing more interesting to offer me and didn't try more of him for fifteen years, but Songmaster was compelling enough that I immediately afterwards picked up The Memory of Earth, the first book of a pentalogy.

TMoE is extremely my jam: after humanity blows itself up on Earth, AIs monitor thriving human civilizations in the planets that survivors managed to escape to, and suppress any tech that enables large scale violence by exerting low key mind control via satellites. But forty million years pass, many of the satellites break down, and the AI needs help from humans to restore capabilities. Because as its control wanes, people are starting to e.g. conceive of airplanes or bombs again, and override the injunctions against entering military alliances more than two edges of connection away.

The AI is worshipped as a god all over the planet, but the fourteen year old protagonist that becomes one of the AI's agents tells the AI from the beginning that he'll break with it if its morality seems wrong to him. I like the fourteen year old – unlike Ender or Songmaster's protagonist (adult minds piloting ten year old bodies), he's a normal gifted kid who's unpopular 50% due to his ego and big mouth and 50% because he's socially inept and offends people even when he's trying to be nice.

Songmaster is also partly about a permanent solution to large-scale violence, albeit through one guy who establishes a monopoly on violence and sweeps in pax galactica. Both it and TMoE are preoccupied with the eradication of suffering from evil / human violence, which is closer to my resonant frequency than narratives about defeating particular people or ideologies. At the moment I can't think of any other book with such an insistent focus on the matter than T.H. White's The Once and Future King. It's hard to make a compelling story out of, and I don't think Songmaster really succeeds, but TMoE's premise is well suited to explore that. (I'm also enjoying the matriarchal culture where everyone is expected to have multiple serial-monogamous marriages.) After reading 70% of TMoE last night I wrote:

Usually when I read fiction there's a small part of me going, how can I use this as fodder for my own growth, how can I remix or improve or react against this, how do the author and I measure against each other? (If the quality and content are at an anti-sweet spot, the small part becomes quite large and I feel all teeth towards the author.) But on occasion I read something so close that the absence of that measuring-feeling is its own sensation – ego departs, or at least is split across two bodies. There's just amity and recognition

And it's pretty interesting to feel this way about Card for, well, the reasons.

(If you're familiar with Card drama none of the following will be new to you; I'm coming to it fresh so the rest of this post is me going "uh... wow")

I vaguely knew he was a homophobic Mormon who'd gotten into fights about gay stuff, but I couldn't tell from the Ender books I read. But in Songmaster his issues spring off the page in such a weird way. Every fifth Goodreads review of this book is "Card, u gay?" because, well,

(One review, possibly from a fellow Mormon, that went "Card, it's so sinful of you to be this gay in your novel". Why did he write this book that would predictably make everyone mad...)

it's full of gay male desire. The protagonist (Ansset) is approximately a castrato and characters notice him sexually a lot. The first and only time Ansset has sex it's with a Kinsey 4-5 male character he loves, who's married to a woman but has fallen in love with Ansset. It turns out the drugs Ansset took to prolong his singing career painfully and only-kinda-figuratively explode your balls when you have your first orgasm and you'll never feel sexual desire again. (You'd think his loving teachers would have warned him of that, but, whatever, they didn't.) The other guy is literally castrated in punishment for inadvertently torturing a highly valuable castrato. It's pretty bald: GAY SEX IS ALMOST IRRESISTIBLY TEMPTING BUT YOU SHOULDN'T DO IT.

(Sidenote: both Ansset and the guy's wife are very close and have a "there's enough love to go around" attitude about the gay sex initially, before they go "wait Josif is a SERIAL MONOGAMIST... he can only love one person at a time... the moment he had the gay sex his marriage was destroyed". It's funny in a mildly stupid way that Card would set up this parable of homosexuality destroying lives and a marriage but almost everyone involved is peacefully ready to sail into an open marriage. I guess it makes sense if you want to say very clearly that THE GAY PART IS THE BAD PART)

which is fascinating to me, because... why would you tell on yourself like that

(81k also told me secondhand of an essay? interview? where Card openly says "we have to stand against legalizing gay marriage because everyone will get gay married and society will collapse", so that's informing my read of Songmaster as well)

I am pretty dang open about my personal life online but if I had a lot of feelings I thought were disgusting and immoral I would not write a novel dripping with those feelings before pointedly castrating the leads for them. Especially if it wasn't relevant to the actually highbrow themes of (checks notes) winning over your adversaries with kindness and never relinquishing your monopoly on violence. I would be so so so so embarrassed to let this go to print, it's so psychologically transparent, what was he thinking

(Well, I assume he's a very different person with different social incentives. For all I know, people in his church went "hey Orson we read your book and it's clear that you're gay but signaling strongly that you won't give into the gay feelings, we're here for you, it was really brave of you to publish this".)

Tmoe

the brig takes one look at benton in tmoe pt 6 and just becomes a Pround Dad™

✨Contributor Hightlight of the Day✨

Here is one of our very amazing, very talented and cool writers, TMoe!

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So I want to know is there a choice to you know introduce the king and everybody who is supporting him too a fate worse than death

hmmm maybe!!!

that may be a little hard when the kind himself controls the Labyrinth!

Tomorrow I'm going to start recording the podfic I was working on again. I took a lot of time away from it, and I need to get back into the swing of things

There he was, Draco's wild, adorable little deranged stalker, clumsy nervous Harry, Harry who loved him, Harry who always wanted to protect him, Harry who never knew the right thing to say or do around him, Harry who made him miserable and made him happy- Harry who he had gone a full month without seeing, for the first time in two and a half years. Harry who he should cast away from him. Harry who he could never cast away.

https://archiveofourown.org/series/1765369

Flirting: murderer edition

@storyseekers event 12: from old to new — the monster of elendhaven

“Power was sweeter than apples. It was cheaper than water, and sustained the soul twice as well. If Johann was going to be a Thing with a name, then from now on he would be a Thing with power, too.”

i am not doing entire facetober but if im out of ideas and there’s a neat prompt i’ll do it.. day three was: pattern, long bob, plants so here’s a Cheris!

[image description: a colorful pencil portrait of Kel Cheris from The Machineries of Empire books. She has a round face, full lips, monolid eyes colored with dark blue and purple, and her skin is colored randomly with pink, bright purple, red, and lime green. Her hair’s a bob length just below her chin, and its colored randomly with purple, dark green, brown, dark blue, red and yellow spots which make it creamy over the other colors. She is wearing a Kel uniform, supposed to be black but colored with same dark colors as her hair. Her pin is a shuos eye and wings above it, yellow with gold rims. The background is a flower pattern, petals shaped like blank eyes. The flowers are white, background behind them is soft blue. /end description.]