#also he locks whelk away to forever endlessly wander the space between spaces as punishment for the bs he was put through

[happikattwuzheere]

ok i was gonna try and actually draw out noah’s first time meeting gansey in this au but then i realized idk how to do that without like actually scripting/drawing out basically a whole actual comic complete w/ background and everything and like, i might do that someday but not today so we’re just gonna do this in text BUT 

more deer boy au, this time feat: Its My AU And I Want Noah To Get To Be Happy And Safe So He’s A Fey This Time 

SO. out somewhere in a forest in eastern europe/western russia possibly, the nearby people know that the forest is ruled by a powerful entity that they call Czerny. he’s a leshy--the old man of the woods, a king within their own lands, mischevious and capricious with travelers, but Czerny in particular is known to despise humans. Most leshy just mess with them, trapping them in their forests to wander in pranks that are harmful but in a very fey-dont-know-how-fragile-people-are way and which can be subverted by turning your clothes inside out which is frankly very fun but ANYWAY. Czerny will do that too but he’s also just in general far more likely to be unkind to humans who pass through. people aren’t sure why, it’s suspected some personal grudges may be in play; he’s a very old entity with a long memory.

there’s one sort of exception to this, though--leshy are known to guide children cursed by their parents to a group of people called the forest people, but czerny in particular is known to take a very direct interest in the lives of the castaways; he’s more or less outright adopted some before and at the very least checks in. any kids who choose to leave and rejoin civilization are warned that, while the forest will always be kind to them, they will never see him again if they do so. 

anyway so the point of all this is to say that barrington “certified asshole” whelk manages to get his hands on czerny’s true name, which is unfortunately still written down somewhere despite his best efforts to wipe all those out, this is why he hates humans, but the point is, whelk manages to trap and imprison czerny and drag him back to england with him, use his power for some nefarious purposes for a while, czerny is DEEPLY unhappy. 

meanwhile ronan and gansey are just setting out on the road to head toward the village most of the story takes place at, and they run into All This Nonsense, and gansey catches on to Whelk having forcibly bent some powerful magic entity to his will and, being gansey, is like, well that’s not nice at all let me just set you free

and the moment he does all the candles in the room snuff out and the air gets very heavy and ronans like “gansey that may have been very stupid” 

czerny won’t even physically manifest at first. he is VERY grumpy and absolutely planning on screwing the person who freed him over. he doesnt like owing ANYONE a life debt, but that’s what this is now, and he’s had a VERY bad time being forced to work for whelk, let’s get this over with

so his booming terrible voice echoes through the room all “state your request, what favor would you ask?” 

and ganseys like oh gee i wouldnt dream of asking anything of you, i just felt bad with you trapped in there 

and czerny pauses. and goes. “you. you know im a fey right”  gansey: the possibility had occurred, yes? oh wait shoot thats a thing with fey, isnt it, uh. cant we. cant we call this one a gift? 

czerny: 

czerny: ok i will give you some credit here i haven’t laughed that hard in ages 

gansey: i didn’t....hear anything?? 

the conversation basically continues like that and czerny slowly realizes that this guy really is seriously trying to get out of being owed a life debt, which has czerny utterly flabbergasted and very quickly revising his opinion on the guy. at the very least he’s fascinated and curious enough that hes like. well now i have to see what happens. so he ends up agreeing to travel with them, since, no, the life debt is non negotiable--he does, however, leave out the bit where he doesn’t actually have to stick around, he could very easily just go home and gansey could come and call on him whenever he DOES think of a favor for czerny to pay him back in kind--gives them the name “noah” when they ask what to call him, because, hey, that guy with the boat and the animals was pretty cool, it works, and disguises himself as a boy about ronan and gansey’s age 

but there’s a bit of a joke in his disguise; a dual-layer glamor, basically--the primary glamor is making him look like, you know, human sized, instead of a giant man with moss for a beard and huge horns like gnarled branches and so on and so on, but he gives himself pointed ears as a private joke and places an additional, very minor glamor over those so that it’s not that people don’t see them so much as people don’t notice. basically whitelists gansey though so that minor glamor doesn’t work on him. 

he does not, however, whitelist ronan.

ronan notices the pointed ears anyway, because he’s a cambion, not that gansey knows that yet, and nor does noah. 

ronan does point them out and say “hey those might be a problem” and noah, now immediately VERY suspicious, goes, “oh sure i’ll put a glamor on them” but doesn’t actually change anything about his setup, and, upon figuring out that ronan hasn’t told gansey what he is/that gansey seems to be under the impression that ronan’s human, decides, “well ok now it’s a game” 

so noah’s playing a game of “we’ll see who gives the game away on what we REALLY are first” with ronan that ronan doesn’t know about at all

ronan, as a result of this exchange, assumes noah must be a really weak fey to have made that kind of rookie mistake. like, a brownie or something. noah’s happy to leave it that way indefinitely but noah’s p terrifyingly powerful and kept in check only by the force of fairy law and also his desire to continue using the life debt as an excuse to hang out in england as long as he wants and watch this very interesting human and the also extremely interesting people he seems to be able to keep finding while slowly revising his very old very set in opinions on humanity as a whole 

bonus pic for reading all that which was gonna be part of me drawing out the scene before i realized that wasnt gonna work: 

#trc #the raven cycle #noah czerny #deer boy au #lolsketch #longpost #noah out here living his best life: the au #he rly is just having a blast out here #also he locks whelk away to forever endlessly wander the space between spaces as punishment for the bs he was put through #he did not enjoy getting kidnapped! #very undignified and also a hassle. #>:(