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#and probably others as well since she is down to earth enough to form more normal helathy relationships with ppl

lbcreations-blog · 2 months

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Holy Mother Of Many

Summary: You are the wife of God himself. You both made many amazing angelic children such as Lucifer and Sera, one day in many of the galaxys and cosmos problems occurred, so you set out to fix the problems while intrusting your husband with your children. But what you didn't know was when leaving many bad things would happen, making hardly any good come out of it.

Female mother reader

All plotonic

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Words: 1121

Masterlist

You had a relationship with the holy father God himself. You were his devine wife, the holy mother of all creations. You were together since the start of everything.

You had many devine children, one of your favorites being little Lucifer. Just seeing him when he was a baby, you knew he would have a similar personality to you. Sadly, you never got to find out due to you having to leave to do other things like glaxeys and cosmos to look after. Before you left, you instructed your husband to look after both of your creations. You then left the home you loved.

Oh, how would you regret that decision.

??? Years later

You were now working on a glaxey in your main form (which is like atleast 300ft tall) when you realized you should really take a vacay and see your husband again and all your angelic children, I mean it has been many many many many many many many years.

A few mins later, you arrived in front of heavens gates in your smol form (7 ft tall). About to walk in, you saw a blonde male at a podium. "Oh greetings, mister!" You said to the man. "Welcome to heaven ma'am! May I please get your name." The man said to you.

"Name? Why do you need my name?" You asked. "Well-" "St Peter, let me deal with this," Sera interrupted Peter and told him so while flying down from somewhere. "Yes, Sera," St Peter said, then flying away. "Wait, Sera?" You said, "Hello mother, " Sera said softly, smiling. You quickly hugged her. "Oh, Sera, my darling daughter!" You said.

You moved slightly backward so you can have eye contact with her. "Oh, sweety, you're all grown up! Im so sorry that i haven't been here!" You told Sera. "It's alright, mother," she told you. "Anyway, what's up with the whole name thing? And where's Luci? And all my other beautiful children?" You asked her.

"Let's go and talk about this somewhere else," Sera said as she telaported you both into what you assumed was her office. "Take a seat, mother," Sera told you. You listened to your daughter and sat down on the comfortable seat.

"You see Mother when you left. Father decided to sleep once i and some of the others were old enough, and he is still sleeping. When he first fell asleep, some of the oldest ones and I made a project called Earth, and we made these creatures called humans. And well... Lucifer destroyed it with childish actions. He brought evil into earth, and in turn, he created his own doman fill of that evil. He lives there, ruling the doman of evil." Sera told you.

"WHAT⁉️"

TIME SKIP

"You know what, I'm going down there to check on him," you told Sera. "But mother," Sera began "no don't even think about it, Sera," you said, getting up. "Yes, mother," Sera said, making a portal in front of the hotel for you. "I'll talk to you more once i return," you said, entering the portal. "Yes, mother," she said not trying to upset you anymore.

"I wonder why Sera telaported me in front of a hotel." You sighed. "Oh well, he's probably in there. I can sense my boy," you said, walking up to the door.

You knocked on the door, and a few minutes later, a pink and white spider looking guy opened it and looked at you in shock. "Hey uh Vaggie there is an angel at the door!" The guy said toward what you saw to be an ex angel, going by her aura, wings, and lack of halo, at least.

"Oh shoot, I'll go get Charlie you let her get comfy," Vaggie said to the pink and white spider guy. "But isn't she busy with something important with Alastor?" The guy asked. "Oh, right! I guess I'll get Lucifer and be nice to her Angel!" Vaggie said, running up the hotel stairs. You smiled at the mention of Lucifer, You were so excited to see your son.

You now sat on the couch, which the man named Angel kindly led you to sit on and wait. While waiting, who you now learned was named Angel dust tried making small talk with you. But it did not really end up well he seemed to be nervous for some reason, but you decided not to overlook it in some way.

After a few minutes of waiting, a portal finally opened. Lucifer walked into the hotel lobby and made eye contact with you. You immediately telaported to him and tightly hugged him. "Oh Luci, my son. I'm so happy to see you again!" You told him.

"Mom? What are you doing here?" Lucifer asked you. "To see you ofcourse" You told him, holding his rosy cheeks and looking down at him. "I would have came much much earlier if I knew what happened to you all those years ago, but I intrusted your now excuse of a father to you and your siblings."

"Are you alright, though? I'm aware the... Fall. Was, alot," "Of course im alright Mom, i have a daughter now. " Your smile increased at that information. "I have a granddaughter?!" You asked Lucifer, squishing his rosy cheeks even more. "Indeed you do, mom," Lucifer told you. "Oh my word, im a grandmother! That's crazy so where is she?" You asked him.

"Well... she just walked through the doors right now. " You looked behind you seeing the splitting image of your son in a female form. You smiled cheek to cheek upon seeing this just seeing her. You knew the both had at least a similar personality.

"Dad, why is there an angel here?" His daughter asked. "Charlie, this is your grandmother." "It's nice to meet you, my granddaughter." "It's nice to meet you too. My name is Charlie, but you already know that, i have one question, though: how come i did not see you in heaven?" Charlie asked.

"Well, i was busy with a lot of work at that moment," you told her. "Oh! uhm! Can I tell you about this project im working on!?" Charlie asked you. "Sure ofcourse go ahead. I'd love to hear of such" Charlie bounced up upon hearing that and started walking you through the hotel with your son that Vaggie girl and what you sensed to be a smiling fellow behind he did not speak yet though.

You needed to wake up your husband and scoled him for his passed actions and Sera as well, but for now, you would enjoy the company of the Hazbin Hotel.

Taglist: @fatherlesschild2 @whitewingsh @iheartpieck @i-yuki @ilovemyths2003

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-L.B Creations

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intrinsicepiphany · 3 months

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Okay tumblr lets talk theories again.

(my brain rot + knowledge of religion has me all up in Hazbin Hotel right now.)

Today I want to talk Biology! Mostly because I made the poor choice of going to Twitter's chaggie tag and looking at the comments...

So can we discuss Why do so many people keep trying to apply HUMAN biology to the Half-Demon Nephillim daughter of an Arch-Angel?!

Okay I'll start at the begining and work my way to the reasons why if Charlie really wants a kid with Vaggie both of them being assigned female at creation probably isn't going to matter.

Let's start with Lucifer!

So as far as has been shown in the show Lucifer is an original Archangel even down to his lovely 6 red wings. This makes him one of the most powerful beings in heaven.

(If we go by bible text he was actually a favorite until his dreams of free will led him astray and depending on the text he merely has to admit he was wrong and ask for forgiveness to return)

Now looking at everything after this fall he has never lost his Angelic Abilities. His default powers are still angelic gold.

We do see he also has a Full Demon form when he is pissed. Interestingly enough his crown also doubles as a halo in this form. Also note for later just how much Charlie resembles him in both forms.

This suggest that at root biology Lucifer is still an archangel with demon traits. This combination is most likely what makes him the strongest being in hell by a long shot. The only reason others even have power is purely because he doesnt care enough to flex his power and has no desire to actually rule.

Now on to Lilith!

What do we know about Lilith?

Well we know she was a created human not born.

She was Adam's equal

And she left and got with Lucifer before the fall.

So here is the deal... I dont think Lilith can be classified as a sinner. She didnt die to end up in hell and in fact she fell before hell was really a thing. she helped create it after all. (Plus you know Charlie exsists)

So what IS Lilith? I think Lilith as one of a few Actual Demons. And if we have to classify her she'd be closer to a Sin. I actually think of Lilith as the Sin of Pride in Hazbin Hotel not Lucifer. We are even told that She created pentagram city and developed hell while lucifer kept to his workshop in depression.

Now let's talk about this scene for a second. Lilith fell from heaven/earth Alive and possibly even immortal since human kind was immortal before Eve took the apple.

Lilith gains power from her fall into hell. She develops demon like attributes and seems to have musical based magic. She also seems to retain or get immortality. So what does this fall mean? It means that Lilith was NOT HUMAN by the time Charlie was born.

So what does this mean for Charlie?

Well for one Charlie is NOT just some Hellborn. She is by Definition a Nephilim but she is not half-human. She would most likely be considered a Half-Demon, Half-Angel Nephilim.

This would explain her expansive (if never used) power base. The official power ranking has her tied with Lilith with only Lucifer being more powerful. Which makes complete sense. She is the Heir to the entire thing after all. (I actually think this is why Alastor couldnt make a deal for her soul and settled for a favor instead)

She also inheirited Angelic powers from her father. As seen by the fact that her default magic is gold. Which means she has angel blood in her veins. Lets be honest i wouldnt be surprised if she ended up bleeding gold in the future.

In fact she seems to have inherited most of her abilities from dear old dad.

Im pretty sure that just by shear ability and magic if Charlie wanted a kid she could probably create/magic one into exsistance no matter who her partner was.

But lets review Vaggie just for fun! Because I have thoughts

What do we actually know about Vaggie?

Well we know she is an angel. I say is because I dont think Lute or Adam actually have the power to cast an angel out of heaven AND she gets her wings back. This would mean she is not actually a sinner she would be closer to a fallen angel like lucifer.

We know she speaks Spanish and seems to be of Hispanic nature. BUT! Do we know if she was ever really human?!

We know Adam claims to have named her Vaggie. This could suggest three things

1) exorcist take on a new name when they join. But if this was true why wouldnt she leave this name behind and return to her human name once in hell? It would have kept her secret better and you'd figure she would want to leave behind the negative feelings that would come with her exorcist name.

2) Adam in his self-centered ways misheard her real name (maybe something like Aggie from Agatha or Maggie) and thought she said Vaggie or actively chose to misinterpret her name and she never cared to correct him. BUT Once more why would she not just return to her real name once with Charlie in hell?

Or 3) And this one is the real kicker. Vaggie is a Heaven-born Angel.

If the answer is 3 than it would imply that she was never human which brings her closer to lucifers biology.

Some other interesting things to consider about this last theory. Lute and Vaggie resemble each other a great deal. In fact, all the exorcist seem to have a similar body type. (I mean you could argue its the uniform but even without the uniform the resembalance between lute and vaggie is uncanny) and if I remember correctly at one point the exterminators are refered to as sister? I mean this could mean sisters-in-arms BUT What if ALL exorcist were heaven-born?

If they were never human this could explain both their ability and their desire to slay sinners. Much like Sera they wouldn't have any sympathy for the dammed because they wouldn't have any possible family that could end up down there. They would also have Very little connection to or concern for former humans. After all like Adam said they had their chance and they screwed up.

So in the end what does this all mean?

Well I actually already kind of said it

1) Fandom really needs to stop applying human biology to Charlie. She is a half demon half archangel Nephilim with incredible magic.

If charlie wants a kid she can probably magic one up no matter the obsticles please stop asking artist and writers how it is possible for her and vaggie to have a kid/get pregnant if they are both women - the answer is Charlie Magic.

2) all 4 of the above have the potential to be way stronger than they have been shown in the show.

And

3) Charlie is a potential BadAss and is just too nice to go full tactical nuke - this will be covered in my next ted talk.

#hazbin hotel theory #hazbin hotel spoilers #hazbin hotel #charlie morningstar #lucifer morningstar #lilith morningstar #vaggie #chaggie

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dorianbrightmusic · 6 months

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i'm seeing a lot of Pokémon SV DLC analyses where people say 'Oh, Kieran's fixation on Ogrepon is because he sees it as a path to strength; Carmine's bullied him long enough that his shield against admitting his weakness to himself is adoring a legendary creature'. And don't get me wrong – these interpretations certainly hold water – but I've actually been working from basically the opposite angle for all this time.

By all means, Kieran idolises strength, but he inhabits Carmine's shadow – he's the weak sibling, and probably has been for a long time. Yet, rather than fixate on the fantastical power of the Loyal Three, he identifies himself with Ogrepon – the downtrodden, ostracised creature cast out to eke out a subsistence. A terrible demon that wasn't quite terrible enough to cause anyone any lasting harm. The creature defeated by heroes, rather than the perfect, heroic figureheads themselves. He's enamoured with the downtrodden; he sees himself in its grief, in its being cast out and excluded. He's been cast out and excluded all his life (and he can't be a bad person, right? It's not fair – he's hated senselessly, surely, rather than for some reason?) – he sees himself as harmless; so the ogre, too, must be harmless, mis-blamed. Strength is thus in resistance; in growing a shell to tolerate others' inexplicable cruelty. So Kieran looks to Ogerpon, and he thinks that the meek shall inherit the earth, and it gives him the strength to tolerate long nights with poor company. Others are villains – not him, not this creature – and he's safe in the knowledge that at the end of the day, at least an ogre can go down in mythology as the putative sole survivor of its trials.

In this sense, Kieran's like Penny – he finds himself in a position of weakness, of being victimised, and forms himself an armour of being an underdog, of being the thing that bites back. Yet while Penny's position is that the underdog might muster the strength to bite back and restore justice, Kieran's view is that at least the underdog was worth loving. He's inert and preoccupied with his inertia. He can't understand that maybe he could be a human, with the capacity to grow, the capacity to sin. And when Carmine is cruel to him, he reaffirms his own contrarian mindset more – she says I am worth little for my weakness, so my weakness is all I am worth; my weakness is my strength.

And yet he chases strength, because he has to to survive. So when the player comes by, and supports him, maybe he has the safety to walk away from his preoccupation with being an underdog, to enjoy strength for strength's sake. And then, he starts losing, but this time, there are stakes, since he can't just withdraw and be consoled by the fact that withdrawing is right, is right, is right. Thus, he must get stronger. And then, when Ogerpon turns out to favour Juliana, who's become Kieran's idol for all that strength means, rather than Kieran, who's Kieran's selfsame designated weaklingpatheticscumidiot——well, what can Kieran do but fracture, since his whole ideology, his whole premonition that he might have the right to inherit the earth, has been fractured? And, under stress, he pivots from one extreme to the other. All he knows is that weakness is now unbearable. He must get stronger. Must get stronger. Must get stronger—because otherwise he's doomed, he's nothing. He has no myth to dissolve his identity in any longer, so he reshapes himself around the only other standard he's ever known. And it twists him and it breaks him into tiny pieces, because suddenly, the last thing he can bear to be is Kieran: Kieran, the downtrodden and meek boy. He has to flip on his axis; he must become the designated villain of his story by popular imagination, or else be subsumed in the fact that he's going to die someday without any place in the world. He has to play a part, because he's been consigned to one so long, and he can't think of anything other than heroes and villains, enemies and martyrs. He can't be the bad guy. Strength is now goodness; weakness is now evil. And he can't reconcile who he thought he was with who he must become, and as a result, all he can do is try to destroy the person who's destroyed his ideology.

#ngl the more i dive into kieran's character the more i worry about his mental health.#i do have a specific diagnosis in mind but it's not one i have and it's a stigmatised one so i wanna be really really careful here #still: let's just say 'black and white thinking' 'mutable identity' 'abandonment phobia' 'very rash when angry' 'emptiness'#and 'very verrrry reactive mood' – well if you know you know #anyway. he's my blorbo and he breaks my heart #pokemon sv #teal mask #the teal mask #kieran #pokemon kieran #pokémon #scarvio #scarvi #SV #scarlet and violet #pokémon scarlet #pokémon violet #pokemon scarlet #pokemon violet

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komitomi · 1 year

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Fateful Encounter. // Chapter i.

Neteyam x F!reader

prologue || chapter ii || chapter iii || chapter iv || chapter v English will be in italics from this chapter onwards! word count: 2.8k

A/N: neteyam is refered to as blue boy or just boy when he is directly interacting with the reader, however he will be refered by his name when he's not, writing in this narration is kind of difficult so it's confusing but I'll try my best to clear them up in authors notes.

After 3 months of training on Pandora, Aria decided that you were good enough to be sent out, she told you that you had to go further than your peers, towards the sun's direction, where there will be water Na'vi, and look for Jake sully there, if he isn't there, then you should form good connections with the people there.

Individual but small aircrafts have been built for you guys to travel in, you were expecting to be assigned a partner but since the number of avatars were odd you were left out to be the only one, but that didn't discourage you, you just felt alone that's all.

The aircraft was spacious, easy to control (you have received training for this too), and it didn't emit any sounds to which you were surprised with, apparently the engine was made from a material native to pandora which cancels noise, they did this so the loud sounds of engine turning doesn't scare the animals or the Na'vi.

You just packed all your stuff and threw it in your aircraft which was parked outside before heading on inside the lab, removing your oxygen mask and going towards the link units, you looked at Aria before questioning.

“Won't I be too far away from my host body? Will I still be able to move?” you ask and she immediately answers “Yes, there will only be delay in consciousness transfer, what takes 15 seconds might turn into a minute or two, however you'll be just fine considering eywa connects all things together, which means you will be able to move just as fine.” she finishes off making you nod.

One thing that you noticed was how the scientists here actually believe in the existence of eywa and acknowledge it, you thought it was just another religion like back on earth, but for the last 3 months you trained here, you saw extensive research and connection between the life of pandora, it seemed like a neural network of roots which connected all beings together, it was like a system, actual proof of an entity made you quickly change your views as well. You snapped out of your thoughts and quickly got into the link unit.

You open your eyes in the avatar body and got up, you were inside a camp, you look around and see few others waking up too, the sound of the gates opening takes your attention before you making your way to your own aircraft, it was perfectly sized for a singular avatar body to travel, it was more spacious for humans though. You get inside quickly wasting no time, you notice Miss Aria looking at you and you smile at her which she returns, you start the engine and the aircraft lifts itself off the ground, swirling the surrounding air, once you are decently far away in the sky you look down at the scientist camp before breathing deeply, “I got this.” you mutter to yourself before pressing the accelerator and setting off.

You were told to follow the sun's direction to which you obeyed and did, and after a few hours of travelling the sun started disappearing behind the big planet, you panicked until you realised you were probably close to the water civilization, after 30 minutes the sun had set completely, your aircraft turned on its automatic camouflage mode, hiding in the dark sky, you looked down and saw hundreds of islands and noticed few dim lights coming from what looked like camps on at the edge of an island.

Bingo, it seems you have reached the water Na'vi area, as you heard from others, they live on water, building tents around the flow of it rather than living on the land, you noticed how the tents are on water but they have been tied to those strong root-looking branches stabilizing them. “if I land now at night they will definitely panic and start attacking.” you mutter to yourself, you caught the forest behind the island and decided you were going to land there and show yourself in the morning when the sun is up again.

You thought you landed safely unnoticed, but a certain person had noticed your aircraft from afar and decided to follow it, even though the camouflage made it difficult for him to spot the random stars disappearing and reappearing behind your space ship made it easier for him to follow. He didn't want to alert the other navi cause it looked like there would be no more than 4 people, he can take them on easily, he took his bow ready to go but was stopped by his father, Jake.

“Where are you going son?” he asked looking at his son holding a bow, neteyam didn't want to cause panic so he simply lied “Oh, it's just nothing, I was missing the forest way of living and wanted to check the forest behind this island.” he said and Jake simply nodded, “Don't cause any trouble alright?” he said and neteyam nodded before answering “Yes sir.” He then proceeded to make his way into the forest, he had lost track of you but luckily for him you were stupid enough to make a loud thump noise.

Noise travels further at eclipse than it does during the daytime, and with his heightened senses he was able to pinpoint where you exactly were, he was currently standing on a branch of tree, above you, studying you, it seemed that it was only you alone, he didn't knew RDA would be this stupid, mentally scoffing, he lined up his arrow and bow and aimed it to shoot towards you.

You were out of the aircraft looking around and taking in the scenery, you jumping down from it was what caused neteyam to follow your noise, but other than that, you were pretty careful with your step, trying to not make much noise, neteyam watched as you walked around, changing his aim to perfectly aim at your fatal point, when you finally stopped moving he took that as an opportunity and was about to release the arrow.

That was until an atokirina (woodsprite) rested on his arrow, he was shocked was an understatement, he had no idea where it even came from, their habitat was originally in dense forests, but what was it doing in a lesser dense forest behind the reefs? Heck, this was unknown and completely new.

He lowered his bow, taking his aim away from you and watched as the seed left the arrow it was resting on and towards your direction, he watched closely, the seed was floating around you, and when you noticed it, you immediately smiled, his heart fluttered at the sight, you knew what they were, they were seeds of the spirit tree, you encountered a few back in the forest you were training in but were confused to see one here, you quickly opened your hands so it can rest there.

“Hello there, it's surprising to see you here.” you spoke to it in Na'vi, he was surprised you knew how to speak it, of course RDA did train their troops to speak Na'vi to "communicate" with them. “What are you doing here? did you follow me? this isn't a usual habitat for you guys you know.” you spoke, he was so shocked at how you were speaking so casually, do you not know what they are? they carry eywa's energy in them and they are usually interpreted as a good sign, he notices how the seed dances around in your hands before you blow it away.

Neteyam decides to stop hiding himself and jumps down from the tree he was standing on, this causes a loud thud sound making you shriek as you turn to face the blue boy, he quickly rushes over to you and covers you mouth with his hand, “you shouldnt be here” he says with a hiss, and you gulp, scared by his demeanor, your heart was beating rapidly, that noise scared the hell out of you, you thought you were dead for sure.

“m-mmph—” you try to speak but you can't because his hand was covering your mouth, he notices and retreats his hand back, you pant, trying to calm your heartbeat and breathe normally, when you finally regain your composure you look at him, his face holding a stoic expression.

“You're out here alone eh? RDA must be stupid.” he scoffs at the end, “I- i am not from RDA” you say while maintaining eye-contact with him, he looks at you confused, you take a deep breathe before explaining. “I do not work for the RDA or anything associated with it, I work for another organization called Space and Earth Resources Organization, SERO, for short,” you take a break to look at his reaction, he doesn't seem to show any kind of emotion though, just looking at you bored, before you could speak he cuts you off. “You still belong to the sky demons.” he says with a scowl, “Ouch.” you say out loud, hurt by the word demon.

“Listen, we're here to prevent RDA from destroying this planet, we are trying out very best to make RDA drop their Pandora project back on Earth, we care, which is why we established a seperate organization, to help pandora, help the life here.” you finish what you were trying to say earlier.

“Don't make me laugh, that's actually so pathetic and entitled how you sky people decide when to play a hero or the villain, we do not need your help.” he says before turning around to leave when you stop him, “Please, the planet is in danger.” you say in a desperate voice, you grabbing his arm, he turned to look at you, your sad face.

“Ugh.” he lets out a huff before glaring at you, you look up to him, “fine, come then.” he says and grabs you by your arm and starts dragging you but you start resisting and pull away, “no! I can't, it is eclipse, it will cause panic, later at daytime I will appear.” you say, you were right, although he hates to admit it, he scoffs at you and just shrugs his shoulder.

“Fine, stay here.” he says and leaves before you could say anything, confused by this encounter you make your way back to your aircraft and get inside, you open a medium sized box which was given to you by your dad before you left to Pandora, you open it and look at the contents inside it, some polaroid pictures and your deceased mom's necklace, you quickly take the necklace and tie it around your neck, the pendant falls right between your collarbones, you take the polaroids out and graze your fingers over them, the family pictures bring a smile to your face.

You slowly drift off to sleep in your avatar body, tired from the journey, but you wake up in your human body, it took longer than it usually does since the body was far away from your location, you push the lid away and get down, noticing that you were the last one to wake up.

“Did you finally reach your location?” you hear someone ask and you turn around to see Miss Aria and you simply nod, “I didn't seek out to the people yet since it is dark, didn't want them to start panicking.” you say and Aria gives you a gentle smile “Good decision.” she says.

“Come let's go eat.” she says and you smile before following her, you have to keep this body energized for you to stay longer in your avatar, you follow Aria to the dining hall located in the camp, after getting your food, you sit down to eat.

Unbeknownst to you, your avatar body was slowly being surrounded by reef forest predators, luckily you were in your aircraft which acted as a shield for you and you were safe, however one launched suddenly making the glass crack but not break.

Neteyam watched down from the tree, he never left, he just pretended to, he was actually worried for you, he wasn't sure why he was saving you either, in fact he was really annoyed.

He could just let you die, let the reef forest predators eat your avatar body and you will die but the words you told him earlier sounded promising, he hated the sky people, the only ones he tolerated were the ones who stayed behind after the first war, he wasn't particularly close with them, just on neutral terms, but still he wasn't sure why he was helping you.

Could you really help them? Is your organization really different from RDA? Or will you turn out the same and kill his people? All types of questions flooded his brain, he was too occupied with his thoughts until he heard a muffled scream and looked down, it seemed you had woken up finally realised the danger you were in.

You didn't really expect to wake up in a life threatening situation, you got jump-scared by the predator launching at you as soon as you opened your eyes in your avatar body.

You let out a scream of course, because honestly, no matter how rational of a person you are, being scared like that will rip one out but you were able to muffle it with your hand, suddenly you see an arrow hit the predator, which causes the other predators to panic, shriek and growl, until you see another arrow flying in, hitting another one, you see the blue guy from earlier jump in and growl at them, the predators realised they were powerless and scurried off in different directions, you open the aircraft and made your way down carefully.

You looked at the animals that were shot before noticing how he was chanting something, you figured out he was apologizing and asking them to rest in peace, you go up to him and clear your throat, making him turn to look at you,

“Uh thank you so—” before you can finish off thanking him he growls “This is nothing to be thankful about, it is sad, very sad, you are stupid, so stupid, poor souls had to die.” he looks down on the predator before taking it's life to end the misery.

“I am sorry, I didn't know.” you say and look down, feeling guilty but he just stares at you, “you should be, you're stupid and ignorant, like a child!” he hisses, this makes you frown, you watch him get up and make his way to the other one, “well then why did you save me? should've just let me die, the glass would've broken and they could've had a feast.” you ask annoyed, he stops midway and turns to look at you. He stares at you for a while before letting out a sigh, “Why did I save you?” he repeats your question, you nod and he gets lost in his thought process before looking up at you again.

“Because, you have a kind heart.” he says, taking you by surprise, “a kind heart?” you ask and he nods, “Yes, a kind and strong heart, wanting to care for others, like you said earlier.” he finishes off.

Before you could say anything you hear rustling around you and you notice that the people from the village had come, having heard the commotion earlier, the sun finally starts showing again, basking everything in light once again, you notice how the people here are different, they have more greenish skin and blueish eyes, they surround you and the blue boy you were with. Until you notice another blue person standing out from the rest, your heart starts beating frantically, it was jake sully, so he was here? what are you going to do now?

“What is the meaning of this?” you hear jake sully speak, and shivers run down your spine, god you were intimidated by the aura of him and the people, before you can speak the blue boy cuts you off, “Dad, I can explain.” he says you were shocked, 'dad'? he is the son of jake sully?

“You better, boy.” he says with a stern voice you watch as you watch the younger boy keep his head down, he lifts it up before looking at you and takes a deep breath.

“There has been a sign.” that's all he said before jake understood what he meant, “And what exactly was the sign?” he asks, raising his eyebrow.

“An utokirina (woodsprite).” he says making jake confused, “But their habitat is in dense forests.” he says and the boy nods, “That is what was confusing, it landed on my arrow before I was about to shoot it at her, and then floated towards her, I would never lie about this.” he says, jake is taken aback by that revelation.

You were shocked on the other hand, ‘‘he was trying to kill me? what the hell’ you have never been more thankful for that woodsprite, it legit saved you from death, otherwise you would've ended up with an arrow to your heart.

“I see.” you hear another voice say, you turn to look at him, he was much bigger with tattoos covering him.

“Take her to the tsahik.”

TAGLIST ;

@violet-19999 @siriuslysmoking @sweetirilly @neteyamforlife @boilingpots !!!

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duhragonball · 9 months

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Dragon Ball Super Movie 1: Broly (2/3)

Well, enough of that flashback stuff. Let's move on to the present.

So after the destruction of Planet Vegeta, uh all of Dragon Ball, Dragon Ball Z, and Dragon Ball Super happened. This is kind of a weak point for this movie, because it's story is rooted in Goku's origin tale, but the climax takes place when Goku's a middle-aged man, so a lot of lore has happened in between. There's a similar thing going on when Raditz and Frieza show up in DBZ, and when Broly made his debut in the 1993 film, but Goku was 24-30 in those stories, so it wasn't quite as big a strain.

The thing is, the stuff we had to skip over was extremely important, and the movie simply can't go over all of it. If someone who knew nothing about Dragon Ball watched this thing, they would probably think that this is a story about Goku and Vegeta trying to avenge their people by defeating Frieza, except that already got dealt with in 1991. Goku, Vegeta, and Frieza have each been killed and resurrected... twice. This movie doesn't have time to explain all their baggage, much less how Goku and Vegeta became pals. So no one even tries to fill in the audience on who this big purple cat man is. You either saw Battle of Gods or you just have to roll with it.

And you know what? Good. No one was there to explain Ox King or Mr. Popo to me when I first got into this thing. I've been watching this stuff for a quarter century, and I still don't know what the fuck Tien's third eye is all about. Context is for the weak.

Anyway, this scene takes place on a private island Bulma bought some time ago. She had a resort built here so Goku and Vegeta could spar without damaging West City. And the food is good, so Beerus and Whis tagged along, although neither of them really have any impact on the plot at all. Whis asks Goku why he wants to get stronger, and Goku explains that he's feeling inspired after the recent Tournament of Power arc from the tail end of the DBS anime. Vegeta, on the other hand, is only concerned with Frieza, who was restored to life during that storyline. Frieza's more powerful than ever before, and Vegeta expects him to get even stronger and menace the Earth again.

Sure enough, Bulma gets a call from Trunks as Capsule Corp, who informs them that Bulma's collection of Dragon Balls and the Dragon Radar have been stolen by goons wearing Frieza Force uniforms. But the joke's on them, because Bulma only had six of the Dragon Balls collected. The seventh is on the Ice Continent, so they know exactly where to go to intercept the thieves. Beerus doesn't want to tag along for the trip, so Bulma leaves her infant daughter Bulla with Beerus.

So what was Bulma planning to wish for? She admits that she was going to ask Shenron to make her look five years younger. Why only five? Because if she got too young all at once, people would think she had work done.

So what does Frieza plan to wish for? Immortality was what he wanted on Namek, but not this time. No he only wants to grow about five centimeters taller. Why not just use his second or third forms to be tall? Because he wants to be taller in any of his forms. Why only five centimeters? Because he wants it to seem like he's still growing.

I've never been too happy about this gag. I mean, it's a good gag, but I liked it better the first time, when Commander Red planned to use the Dragon Balls to make himself taller. It does add some complexity to Frieza's character, though, since he's not just stubbornly trying the exact same routine that got him wrecked on Namek, and then killed on Earth, and then re-killed on Earth again.

This time, he's not trying to take the Dragon Balls by force, because he knows Goku and Vegeta are too powerful to challenge head-on. So he's using stealth instead. The minions he sent to Earth are weaker guys, which mean Goku and Vegeta wouldn't sense their ki. And it seems like Frieza's plan is to just sneak down to Earth, make the wish, and head out before anyone can stop them.

And he's not pursuing the same wish he had twenty-odd years ago. Really, Frieza was never that interested in immortality in the first place. He only decided to wish for that because it was the one thing he didn't already have. But now he's been dead twice over, and that's given him a new perspective on life and death, and he seems to think being unable to die would be similar to the unending torment he experienced in hell. Neither does he seek an invincible body. I'm not sure Shenron could give him greater strength, but Frieza feels that would take all the fun out of "the game". If nothing else, it's interesting to see Frieza consider this at all. Back in the Namek Saga, he never thought about wishing for greater power, because he believed he already was the strongest in the universe. Now that he knows otherwise, he seems fairly content with that.

Meanwhile, we meet the last two players in this drama, Leemo and Cheelai. They're operatives in the Frieza Force, but they're not warriors. Leemo's been with the Frieza Force from the beginning, and Cheelai's a recent recruit, having joined up to avoid the consequences of stealing a Galactic Patrol ship. Their orders are to find more warriors to join the Frieza Force, since their ranks are pretty threadbare. Remember, when Frieza destroyed the Saiyans, they made up half of his fighting force. The other half was still quite formidable, but all of his best troops ended up getting killed during Frieza's disastrous invasion of Namek. Then Frieza came back and tried to attach Earth in Resurrection F, and he brought like a thousand soldiers with him, and those guys all got killed as well.

As Cheelai observes, Frieza is down to women and old men like herself and Leemo. There just aren't many warriors available in the universe these days, because all the good talent got killed off a long time ago. As they discuss this, Leemo picks up a distress signal from Planet Vampa. Thinking their might be a reward for it, they head over to answer the call, and find...

Paragus! Also a bunch of alien monsters. Fortunately, Paragus isn't alone...

They also find Broly on Vampa, and he's all grown up and stronger than ever. Their scouters measure Paragus' power level at 4200, which isn't too impressive these days, but it's way better than anything the Frieza Force has at the moment. And Broly's power is too high for the scouters to measure, so they definitely want him to come along. On the way to Frieza's ship, Cheelai feeds Broly rations and takes a liking to the big guy.

When the four of them report to Frieza, Paragus explains that he had to cut off Broly's tail because of the frequent full moons on Vampa, which cause Broly to lose control of himself as a giant ape. Occasionally, Broly still loses control of himself anyway, but Paragus can rein him in using...

... a shock collar, which he can activate with a remote control. Leemo and Cheelai are horrified to learn of this, but not so horrified that they turn down the generous reward Frieza gives them for their discovery.

Now, one thing that always bugged me about this movie is that Frieza immediately starts making plans to use Broly against Goku and Vegeta. He wasn't planning to attack them this time around, but now that he has Broly on his team, it seems much more favorable. Later, when the fighting starts, Frieza is disappointed to find that Broly can't transform into a Super Saiyan, but why would he expect Broly to be able to do any of that? Sure he's a Saiyan, but Goku and Vegeta have mastered power levels far, far beyond what other Saiyans have ever dreamed possible.

But I keep forgetting that Frieza can sense ki these days, the same way Goku can. Back in the Namek Saga, Frieza had to rely on scouters like the rest of his goons, but when he trained to become Golden Frieza in Res F, he learned to sense energy. So when he sizes up Broly, he's not just guessing at how strong this guy is. He can actually perceive the untapped potential in Broly's body, and he seems to recognize that Broly would be capable of giving Goku and Vegeta a hard time. So it makes sense.

Anyway, Paragus is happy to cooperate, since he still despises King Vegeta for what happened, and he's down to attack Prince Vegeta to even the score. And Broly has to do whatever Paragus wants or he gets another shock.

Later, Cheelai tries to get to know Broly better, but Paragus forbids Broly from speaking. While they argue over this, another henchman tries to drunkenly hit on Cheelai. I really like how Leemo tries to defuse the situation here. He's not a fighter, so it suits his character that he'd try to employ a nonviolent solution, like offering to buy this guy a drink. Being a noncombatant in the Frieza Force, he's probably grown accustomed to swimming with the sharks like this. But it doesn't work, and then Broly steps up to use a non-nonviolent solution, which is violence.

But Paragus doesn't want to offend his host, so he gives Broly another shock. Cheelai confronts him over this, and while she chews him out, she swipes his remote control. Then Paragus gets summoned to talk with Frieza. While he's gone, Cheelai destroys the remote, and they listen to Broly tell the story of his green fur wrap.

It's a pretty simple story. The closest thing Broly had to a friend on Vampa was one of the large green creatures on the planet. Paragus used the creature to train Broly, goading it to attack, and then having Broly dodge it. But over time, the creature became accustomed to Broly, and they became pals. But Paragus wanted the creature to be hostile, so he shot its ear off with a laser pistol to piss it off. Ever since, Broly has kept the ear and wears it as a memento of their friendship.

I like how easily Cheelai and Leemo sympathize with Broly in this movie. They're not good guys at all. Cheelai's an opportunistic thief, and Leemo's a cog in Frieza's evil empire. But they're not heartless, and Broly's story is so tragic and innocent that you can't help but feel for the guy. Leemo compares Paragus to his own rotten father, so you can tell that he can relate to what Broly is going through. And Cheelai can tell when someone's being used. Paragus can dress it up all he likes, but he's just using Broly's power to serve his own selfish interests.

Moving on, Frieza's team on Earth have located the seventh Dragon Ball, and Frieza's fleet moves in to join them for the wish-making. But Bulma, Goku, and Vegeta get their first. They probably would have arrived sooner, but Bulma wanted to stop somewhere to buy cold-weather gear. Let's just take a moment to admire her safety-yellow snowsuit. She looks like a baby duck in this thing and it's great.

Frieza confronts Goku and Vegeta and introduces Paragus and Broly. I never really noticed these guardsmen who stand by while Frieza steps out of the ship. Paragus should have gotten one of those uniforms, since that pink shower curtain he's wearing looks dumb as hell.

I mean, look at Goku. Bulma got him a sweet blue coat and he looks like a million bucks. He tries to convince Paragus and Broly to get along as fellow Saiyans, but that doesn't get him anywhere. You'd think he'd know better by now.

So Broly's rarin' to go, and Frieza sees no reason to make him wait, and it's on. Broly attacks Vegeta, and that brings us to the final leg of this movie, which we'll cover next time.

#dragon ball #2023dbapocryphaliveblog #dragon ball super #dragon ball super: broly #broly #goku #vegeta #frieza #paragus #cheelai #leemo #bulma #whis #beerus #bulla

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imhereformysciencefriends · 9 months

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@loturaweek2023 day 2: Earth Culture!

“But it’s Shiro and Keith’s wedding,” Allura reminded with something of a whine, tapping on her screen like it’d make the intergalactic internet load faster. They really needed to get Earth on the same network that the rest of the universe used, which was admittedly run and structured primarily by the Galra, since they’d been so dominant on the universal scale for so long. But at least she didn’t have to wait longer than a dobosh for one page to load.

“And we are their guests,” Lotor reminded, far gentler. “They’re not going to hold it against us if we don’t have every little detail memorized.”

“That is extraordinarily rich, coming from you,” she muttered. Lotor did that charming little thing he did where he snorted, then caught himself halfway through and hid the noise and his smile behind the back of his hand.

“I suppose you have a point,” he admitted, settling himself in against her and pulling her hair away to kiss the crook of her shoulder, hairs on the back of her neck prickling pleasantly.

“And maybe I want to have every detail memorized. Maybe I like these Earth customs. What they have planned is much shorter than any Altean wedding ceremony.”

Lotor hummed. “Longer than Galran,” he remarked.

Earth was, in terms of size, absolutely massive. Most planets that could support life were large enough to form unique ecosystems and usually only one or two centralized bodies of power and authority. Altea and Daibazaal had been fairly large, compared to most of their neighbors, large enough to cause some variation in genetics and cultures, but not so large as Earth’s. Earth, with hundreds of cultures and ethnicities and customs that changed with each.

Shiro was very attached to his Japanese heritage, and the wedding bore marks of that all the way up and back down. Keith had insisted on a few “southern customs,” but Allura admittedly was hard pressed to tell what came from Keith and what came from Shiro. It was all so foreign to her, so unique and thrilling and… lovely.

Royal weddings were, of course, a little stuffier than most. More formal. With the understanding of the politics that surrounded them. By comparison, this was almost entirely and holistically… sweet.

Purple fingers skimmed over her arm, eliciting an electric little shiver out of her, and she turned her eyes away from the article on what to expect at a wedding to observe her own lover.

“It’s pleasant,” he remarked, “An endless war, brought to an end. And at that end: a wedding.”

“It is rather romantic,” she agreed, turning entirely from the tablet to face him, skirts sliding against the blanket they both sat on. He smiled at her, a quiet, private thing, and she basked in its glow.

He threaded fingers through hers atop the bedding. “And they love each other so much.”

Allura was familiar with this type of conversation. A metaphor all through it, meaning both hidden and yet quite plain.

“They do,” she agreed, leaning in. He leaned in as well.

“It’s only natural they should be wed,” he said, and she might’ve imagined it, but she could feel his breath against her lips.

“Of course. It would be rather expected, at this juncture,” she agreed softly, tilting her head to the side, her silver-white curls tumbling off her shoulder.

He kissed her. She kissed back, slow and sweet and gentle, like they had all the time in the universe now fully at their fingertips.

Altean proposals were, like their weddings, far lengthier and more complicated than Earth’s, so Allura was hardly disappointed when that trail of conversation ended there. But He was open to the idea, and she’d given voice to the fact that she was more than ready.

If Lotor didn’t have the first stage of a proposal ready for her by the next week, she would… probably begin planning to do so, herself. She doubted he would propose to her in Galran fashion, and she wouldn’t even know how to do the same for him.

She picked her tablet back up, returning to her research. Maybe she could look into Galran proposals. Find something to integrate. There was something quite lovely about meshed cultures in a marriage, after all.

#vld #lotura #lotor #allura #vt #sheith #background sheith #loturaweek2023 #i think they deserve to be dopey and sappy about weddings actually #my writing #haro writes

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tc-doherty · 6 months

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Book One | Chapter One

Index | Next Chapter

Tag List: @bloodlessheirbyjacques @magefaery @did-i-do-this-write @marrowwife @rainbow-snow-writes @muddshadow @outpost51 @full-on-sam @bluberimufim @unclear-contributions @talesfromtheunknowable @guessillcallitart @flowerprose

(Ask to be added or removed)

Knights all looked the same.

It had been years beyond counting since the last knight had dared Dragon's Keep, but from her place in the castle's tallest remaining tower she could tell that this one was no different from the others who had tried and failed over the years.

Her eyesight was better than a human's. Even from this height she could see that the steel armor encasing his arms and legs, well shined by some probably overworked squire, was scratched and dented. His surcoat was plain, with no heraldry in sight. The sword at his hip was gaudy, but the hilt was only gold leaf and glass gems, the latter cracked and the former beginning to flake. His destrier was red roan under its bulky iron barding, rather than the preferred white or black of older days.

He was a knight, but not a wealthy one. That was certainly why he was here.

Scattered bits of gold and silver lay around her feet. The hoard itself was behind her, the coins and gems, jewelry and weapons, crowns and idols and assorted other treasures that her mother had collected formed an untidy pile against the far wall. Coins clinked and chimed under her feet as she moved closer to the window. Slender brown fingers curled around the edge of the granite windowsill as she leaned forward and peered down at the knight below.

He had come to a stop. The horse shuddered and stamped one large hoof onto the dirt. The knight patted it idly on the neck to quiet it and lifted his visor – just enough to show pale skin, blue eyes, and a shock of golden hair.

From his point of view, the place must look abandoned. He had already passed the outer wall with its ivy-covered stones and the broken wrought iron gate hanging at an angle from busted hinges. The scene inside the walls was not any more welcoming.

She could picture what he was seeing, having played on these grounds her whole life. No carts had been by in so long that it took a dragon's eye to see the rutted dirt roads under encroaching grass and wildflowers. The bushes here and there stood large and untrimmed. Huge weathered chunks of stone lay scattered around the base of the tower where bits of wall had crumbled and gone unrepaired. The rest of the castle beyond the tower was in worse shape still. Most of the walls had toppled centuries ago and only the foundations remained.

All that only accounted for natural decay. There were also unmistakable signs of dragons. The air smelled slightly of smoke, copper, and the dry, cool scent of scales. Claw marks as deep as a man's hand adorned the trees and remaining walls. The ground at the tower's base was scorched black and had been artistically decorated with the bones of other foolish knights.

She smiled. That had been her touch, and she had sent many knights running with those bones alone.

Her work did not go unnoticed. The destrier saw the bones, smelled the air, and fidgeted. The knight, intentionally or otherwise, ignored the signs. He urged his mount forward. The horse moved with visible reluctance. It shook its head, nostrils flaring, ears flicking back and forth at the smallest noise. She couldn't see its eyes, but she knew they would be ringed with white. Its hooves pawed at the blackened ground.

Her mother descended right on time.

The dragon plummeted towards the earth with a roar that shook the tower and caused even more items to slide off the hoard and roll around the room. The girl in the tower ignored this interruption, keen as ever to watch her mother fight.

Her mother's obsidian scales glinted in a riot of ghostly colors as she fell through the sunlight. It might look careless, but her dive was as carefully controlled as any falcon's. Just as it seemed she would surely crash into the ground and save the knight the trouble of fighting her, black wings opened with a snap and she landed lightly on all fours. The girl thought, not for the first time, that dragons truly were the most graceful of creatures.

The warhorse screamed and reared but did not run. The dragon was three times its size, but it bellowed its defiance and stood firm. Perhaps it was not such a cheap horse as she had assumed, it had clearly had some actual training. But she knew it would make no difference in the end. She had seen this exact farce a hundred times.

The black dragon reared too, swinging back like a snake about to bite – except she produced fire rather than venom.

With a tug at the reins and a tap of his heels, the knight directed his horse aside just in time to avoid the jet of golden flame. He was not so lucky with the whiplike tail that followed after. It slammed into the horse's armor-covered side with a noise like a bell ringing. The force of the blow toppled the horse and sent it and its rider down in a tangled heap of armor and thrashing legs.

Before he had even regained his feet, the knight managed to unhook a painted steel shield from his saddle just in time to block her mother's second burst of fire. The horse screamed as sparks made contact, but the shield held back most of the flames and both were able to stand to challenge her mother once again.

High above the fight, she frowned. In the past her mother had been able to melt through shields in an instant. In the past, the knight would never have been able to stand again. But dragon's fire cooled over the years until it flickered out altogether, and her mother was no longer young. But age did not affect her cunning, nor her will to fight.

The dragon reared again. This time rather than fire she lashed out with her front feet. One foot hit the knight and sent him flying into a cluster of bushes. The other smacked down on the destrier's rump. Her claws slipped off the polished iron barding.

The horse's ears were flat back and his limbs trembled with fear but he did as he had been trained. He kicked out with both strong back legs and was rewarded by the sharp sound of bones cracking.

The girl frowned again. That was foolish. Like any other flying creature, dragons' bones were hollow, and broke easily. In the past her mother would have been fast enough to avoid that, but here too her age was showing.

Down below her mother hissed in pain and pulled back her injured foot. She directed a short spurt of fire at the offending horse, who still refused to bolt. It turned and cantered over to where the knight was chopping his way out of the bush into which he had fallen.

The dragon followed, ready to continue.

She reared up again as she neared the bush, certainly preparing for the final blow.

The knight stood up in a shower of cut branches, tossed aside his shield, and lunged.

The black dragon screamed, a cross between the call of a hunting hawk and a wolf's howl.

She wrenched herself free from the knight and his blade, which had already begun to melt. The dragon sprang for the sky. Her tail caught the knight across the chest and knocked him back into the smoldering remains of the foliage.

The effort of flying only widened the ugly gash in her belly. No longer predator, but wounded prey, she half crawled and half flew up the side of the tower. She let herself fall through a dragon sized hole in the roof and collapsed in a heap at her daughter's feet.

"Mother!" The girl cried. In the language of dragons, even that distressed cry was full of fang and fire. She waded through the trickles of blood and melting gold to put her hands against the gash and try to push the sundered flesh together again.

The dragon shuddered, and with a peculiar shrugging motion, began to shrink.

"Mother, you can't shapeshift right now!" said the girl. "You'll heal faster in your true form."

Even in this condition, her mother managed to laugh. She stopped transforming and pressed her snout to her daughter's forehead, speaking with gentle practicality. "It's time for my fire to go out, dear one. And truly, I could not wish for a better exit. Would you have me stay here and perish of boredom and old age?"

"Mother!"

"All things change around us, that is the knowledge of dragons as you are well aware. But I would gift you my cloak of scales so that it might protect you, even though I no longer can."

When the dragon began transforming again, the girl did not try to stop her, even as the shifting skin and muscle ripped the gash wider and spilled her mother's lifeblood onto the stone floor. Tears rolled down her face, far hotter than any dragon's blood or breath could be. She wished they were hot enough to burn her, so that she would not have to leave. All things might change, but that did not mean that she wanted them to. Unfortunately dragons were never harmed by fire, least of all their own.

She held onto her mother's body, so much smaller and sadder than she remembered. The brown skin was wrinkled, the once brilliant amber eyes no longer sparkled, the hair that had once fallen like a spill of shining night was matted with blood and sweat. Only a small smile which consistently hovered around her mother's lips was the same. She wrapped her mother’s scaled cloak around her own shoulders, wept over the frail, lifeless body, and waited for the knight to arrive.

He strutted into the room proud and shining, like he thought of himself as a ray of sun touching a land long shrouded by clouds. His step faltered slightly as he took in the incongruities of the scene. Despite what the stories said, this was no lady's chamber, and she was no delicate, doe-eyed princess in need of rescuing. She clung to her mother's body like a lifeline, wearing nothing but dragon's blood and a cloak of shimmering black scales. It was a testament to his personality that these facts did not stop him for long. He spoke, and she understood his strange, soft words, for all dragons have the gift of tongues.

"You're safe now, my lady," he told her as he picked his way around the worst of the still hot pools of blood and melted gold. "I've come to take you to court where you belong." He grabbed her wrist and tried to pull her to her feet.

Anger replaced grief in her heart, turning her blood to fire. She screamed at him, no word in any language, just a cry of frustration and loss and rage. She thrashed in his grip and pried at the steel gauntlets, trying to get free. Where skin touched armor the metal bubbled and melted. The knight winced as drops of hot steel began to burn their way through his gambeson into vulnerable flesh, but he held on.

She hissed and spat at him, and cursed him in the language of dragons, and wished it could be smoke and fire pouring from her lips instead of words.

The heat was enough to melt his armor, but not enough to shake his heart, for he was a knight, as foolhardy as he was brave. The strength he had gained through training well matched the strength she had been born with, and he held on.

He picked her up and held her until her fire fizzled out under the weight of grief and she collapsed into a dead weight, cool to the touch again. Only then did he set her gently on the ground.

She did not move.

She sat mute as he retrieved the saddlebags he had dropped outside the door and began filling them with treasure – the gold and gems that had not been damaged in her mother's death. He was robbing the dead, robbing her, and she couldn't make herself care. He spoke more words in his strange, soft tongue, and she refused to hear them.

Her mother, constant, proud, undefeatable; was dead. That was all that mattered. As for her future, she could not guess. She knew much of knights but little of human customs. She had never wanted to know. She didn't want to know now. So she sat and tried not to think, tried not to feel, as her life fell apart around her.

The knight took no notice. He filled his bags with stolen goods, and slipped the sword of another, less lucky, knight into the empty scabbard at his left hip. He slung the saddlebags over one shoulder, picked her up as if she weighed nothing at all, and left the tower.

For three weeks she did not eat, drink, or speak.

Except on her mother's back, she had never been far from the estate of Dragon's Keep. She had never traveled at length through the wild, creature infested lands outside, nor had she ever seen the dilapidated wall that separated their land from the lands of humans.

She did not see it now.

She noticed nothing of the journey back to the court this knight called home. She slept often, and tried to dream even while awake. To the knight she was a statue, neither resisting him nor responding to him.

She did not fight him when he dressed her in...well, some sort of human fashion, she assumed.

She closed her ears to the words he spoke, first bragging, then angry, then pleading, until he ceased to speak to her altogether and the rest of their journey passed in silence.

But there was no ignoring the court, not really. It was loud, full of people who talked about anything and everything. They talked about her too, making plans for her life without even asking her – not that she cared what they thought, not that she had any intention of responding.

She had never had any interest in humans, and she still didn't.

That did not stop them from being interested in her.

If she had listened to those conversations, she might have understood their actions. But she did not want to listen and she did not want to understand.

For reasons which made sense to them, they gave her back the gold and silver the knight had stolen. They called her lady, and gave her a room in the palace, a trunk full of donated clothing, and sent along three young women who flocked around her, twittering ceaselessly like little birds. Their presence irritated her as they pulled her this way and that way, trying to dress her up like one of them. They succeeded in removing the clothing the knight had given her and replacing it with a single garment before she ran them off with claw and fang and cast the rest of the clothing aside.

She slammed the door behind them.

She just wanted to be left alone, but here she was never alone. The sturdy stone walls pressed in on her, nothing like the decrepit castle she was used to. The sounds of wind, birdsong, and animal life had been replaced with a seemingly never-ending wave of sounds. She drowned in them, the talk and laughter, the thud of boots and the soft switch of fabric as humans moved, the rustle of brooms against rough stone, all of them. She had never been in a place so loud. She had never been exposed to her gift of tongues, which told her the basic meaning of everything said, whether or not she wanted to know.

A particularly abrasive laugh – the laugh of that knight – grated on her ears. During the journey back to court he had been subdued, but here, surrounded by people, he had regained his courage. He was coming to see her, she was certain of it, coming to see what his princess looked like now that she was civilized. But she didn't want to see him. Not him, not the young women, not any of the people here. With a cry like that of a wounded animal she pushed herself out of her seated position, grabbed her mother's cloak, fled through the nearest door, and found herself outside.

She stood for a moment, surprised. The noise of a door opening brought her back to herself. She gathered her wits and ran.

It was not wilderness, this place she found herself in, but it was not stone walls either. She followed stone paths laid neatly on the ground, the clothing she had been pushed into tangling around her legs. There was nowhere to stop, nothing but stone paths and stone fountains with the occasional bush or row of flowers. Even here there were people, people who scattered out of her way and stared after her as she passed. She paid them scant attention.

Dragons were predators by nature, and she had never wondered what a deer might feel while being pursued by her mother. Now though, she did not have to wonder. She thought she had a pretty good idea.

In some ways this fake wilderness was even worse than being inside.

She ran and ran and did not stop until she felt grass under her feet and then she stopped all at once, collapsing onto the ground in a heap. She fought back the sobs that wanted to come out although a few tears escaped to scorch the ground beneath her. She didn't want to be here, but she wasn't about to let these humans see her grieve.

She knew that her mother would not be pleased with this. Dragons were not so emotional. The world changed around them and they adapted to it. They were calm and practical, rational. She never had been good at that. Still, she tried.

Only when she got herself back under control did she look around to see where she had landed.

It was a small grove surrounded by cypress trees. From here, the castle was not even visible. Nor were any people. She breathed, letting the familiar openness chase out the lingering claustrophobia of too much stone and too much metal and too much noise. The muttered conversation from the grounds behind her faded, masked by the sound of branches moving in the wind. Eventually, a few of the braver birds even began to chirp and the area around her sprang to life again, her wild interruption forgotten.

It could almost be one of the courtyards she was used to, save for the fact that someone clearly maintained the area. The grass was too short, too free of wildflowers and fallen branches and leaves. The trees too were too neat. It was still better than where she had been.

She curled in on herself, and began to dream.

She did not return to the room which had been forced upon her. The cypress grove, quiet and solemn, became her retreat. She did not leave it for several days, except to hide deeper in the fake woods when others came looking for her.

The rest of the time she dreamed of the past. Any moment, she thought, her mother could fly overhead – strong as ever, with her black scales glittering like gems in the sun. She would dance in the sky as she always had done. She would shower her beloved daughter with gold she had stolen, scoop her up to go flying, or drop a kill at her feet for them to share.

Nothing would've changed, they would still be together as they should be. Her mother would never have left her on her own to travel to someplace she could not follow. She would, as she had always done, tell her daughter wildly exaggerated stories of the hunt while they ate.

These visions were so strong to her that she did not realize at first that the smell of blood was real. She came back to herself with a start.

A platter of freshly killed venison hovered half a foot from her face. She frowned.

Dragons did not have much of a sense of smell, but the smell of blood was sharp and distinctive. She should have noticed it, or the sound of someone approaching. She would have, if she had not been so determined not to.

Because the meat, naturally, had not made its way there on its own. It was held lightly in the hands of a woman who held herself with the confidence of a knight. Until that moment, she had not known that women could be knights. It certainly had seemed from her mother’s stories that humans were only divided into knights and ladies. But she had seen enough knights in her life to recognize one, even without the armor and sword.

"Don't turn away," the knight said before she even had a chance to do so. "Even dragons have a need to eat eventually." She set the ceramic platter down on the grass and backed off a few paces before dropping into an easy sit.

Three weeks was a long time, even for a dragon. With the smell of fresh meat in front of her, she could no longer pretend not to be hungry. She grabbed a piece from the top and ripped into it, heedless of the mess she caused.

The knight continued to talk, undeterred. "Here I am, on a short visit to my family, and I miss it all," she said. "The whole court is abuzz about Leroy and his Lady Dragon. Tell me, why not just transform and fly away?"

The knight gave her ample time to respond, which she did not do.

"Nothing, hm?" The knight shrugged. "Well, you are a dragon. You of all people ought to know that mourning has to end eventually. I'm surprised you were distraught enough to let it go on this long."

She paused again, and still received no response. "Such a show can only mean you are named after an emotion. Which one is it?"

The bit of meat she was holding slipped her numb fingers to the grass below.

"How-" the dragon hardly even realized she had spoken until after the word was out. This human language was unfamiliar in her mouth and she snapped her fangs shut around the rest of the sentence. It did not matter. One word was enough.

The knight smiled. "Dragons are not unfamiliar to my home country. It pays to know about them. So, your name?"

"It does not translate easily," the dragon said, and felt anger at herself for giving in. She had not wanted to speak to these humans at all, and had even entertained the thought of living in silence until her own flame ran out. But the will to live and thrive runs as strongly in dragons as in humans, and she could no more keep herself from speaking than from eating the meal in front of her.

"I don't mind."

For the first time, the dragon heard the flavor of foreign speech in the words the knight spoke, and recognized them as being different from the things she had half heard over the last few days. This knight, then, was a stranger here too. Still the dragon hesitated, groping for words in a language she understood but had not yet spoken.

"It is the sense of belonging between two or more people who consider themselves family," she finally said, hating how she stumbled over the words. Dragon names came in two flavors: concepts or feelings. Concept names were strong and feeling names were graceful. In the language of dragons her name was beautiful. As sharp as new grown scales and as delicate as a butterfly's wings. In this human language it was long and clumsy, without sense or rhyme.

The knight nodded. "It is a bit long. A sense of belonging between people, hm? In my language we call this 'patrisjie'. As a name here, it would probably be Patrice. And in my home, we would call you Patya."

The dragon growled. "I do not want these human words or this human name," she said.

The knight nodded again. Her hair, brilliant red and cut to be even with her jaw, bobbed in time with the motion. "Soon they will become tired of calling you 'dragon girl' and someone is going to name you. Better it be something close to what you’re used to."

“And it is so easy to lose your true name!" The dragon said. She heard the snap of fangs and crackle of flame in her words, but the knight did not lose her relaxed posture as a wiser person would have done. Then again, that seemed to be the way with knights. She merely plucked a violet out of the grass and turned the flower round and round in her fingers.

"You aren't alone. My name is Felisjyta, but no one here can say it. They just all call me Felicity."

"And why should I care what they call you?" asked the dragon. Suddenly the rest of her meal was no longer appealing. She pushed the tray away, across the grass. "I do not want that name either. I am no friend to knights." She stood and began to walk away.

The knight made no move to follow her, but did speak again. "You know, Felisjyta is just like a dragon name. You would probably say 'the happiness of someone who has experienced recent good fortune'."

It was a very dragon like name, and she knew exactly how they would say such a thing. In the language of dragons, that name was warm and comforting, like curling up next to her mother on a chilly evening. It didn't suit her current mood at all. She shook her head. "Why should I need this feeling of yours? I have not experienced good fortune in a long time."

She left the garden and the meddling knight behind.

Index | Next Chapter

#writeblr #Writing #Dragon's Daughter #femslash #queer fantasy #fantasy novels #authors on tumblr #TC's Writing

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thewertsearch · 2 years

Text

Let’s also take a look at Hussie’s Blogspot. It’s been available on the collection for a while, but I haven’t got round to reading it until now.

The blog is a loose collection of personal posts, many unrelated to Homestuck. Let’s take a look!

Interrogative remarks followed by statements that involve various forms of punctuation: A lengthy Q&A about the making of Homestuck. I won’t dissect it piece-by-piece, but it’s a very interesting peek behind the curtain.

With this sort of thing, there will always be tension between the author and the suggestors, whose main purpose is to leave their distinctive personal stamp on the story, and as a result, often resort to the outlandish, the overly elaborate, or the non sequitur. These are fine to embrace in small doses, but they are poison to a cohesive story if resorted to regularly. [...]

But probably more often than not, I select commands on a whim, without any such narrative agendas.

There’s some discussion about how user commands really worked, back when they were still being taken.

Hussie talks about what makes a good command, pointing out that their sheer number meant that it was easy to go where the story was going to go anyway. This isn’t to say that they always took the most ‘obvious’ command, though - Hussie was careful to leave some space for the idiosyncratic commands to get through, to maintain the rather whimsical tone of early Homestuck.

It sounds like a bit of a tightrope act, honestly. I’m impressed it worked out as well as it did.

The long and short is, some very big picture stuff is planned in advance, and has been since page 1. In particular, various SYSTEMS were planned. Systems related to how the game works, how items are manufactured, how the environment is manipulated, aspects of the virtual universe they enter, and the ultimate purpose of the game. [...] When it comes to plot elements, very little planning is done, and practically none at all before page 1. A good example of the story taking an unanticipated turn is the post-apocalyptic elements, which I really had no idea I'd be getting into from the start.

Hussie designs the comic’s systems in advance of their appearance in the story, but the actual beats of the story - how the characters interact with those systems - is mostly improvised. It seems the D&D/DMing comparison I made early on is rather apt.

The kids’ entry to the the Medium was planned, but the post-apocalyptic stuff, interestingly enough, was not. This implies an alternate version of Homestuck where the kids are in Sburb, but civilization on Earth is fully intact.

Would these alt versions of the kids still be in contact with Earth, then? This sounds like a version of Homestuck that is, ironically, about going home.

For example, there was a time when Jade (then known as "GG") made casual reference to having a pet, and a grandfather. These simple facts become a lock in the story, and it would be months until those details were elaborated upon. In the passing months, while I attend to other parts of the story, I have no choice but to dwell on those things she casually mentioned, and think about who they are, and how they fit into the bigger picture.

This ‘plant the seeds’ approach to plotting is a classic Hussie move, and I suspect we’re seeing it a lot.

I like it. It encourages author creativity, and is a clever way to make your world feel like a rich tapestry of interconnected details. In the hands of a good improvisational writer - which Hussie clearly is - it can consistently deliver ‘wow’ moments, more or less for free.

The story, ultimately, can only go down the path it goes down. But before it does, the reader can understand these game mechanics, and speculate on all the possibilities. What sort of objects would you combine if you were playing the game? What would you prototype with? What kind of villains would that create? There are millions of different versions of the game that could be played, a unique instance for each player.

It seems like Hussie really gets it, in a way that only an extremely online author can. Homestuck was designed to be fertile soil for fandom and original content, and it’s working.

There have been a few times where I've read theories people are throwing around, and I'll just run with it in the story.

Some people might think this is cheap, or in some way ‘cheating’, but I disagree.

The best fan theories are crowdsourced from the fandom as a whole, with thousands of minds working on them, ironing out the details. Theories like that are often better than anything the author themselves can come up with, and I think just going for it can be a good move.

At the very least, it’s better than purposefully avoiding all popular fan theories in order to ‘subvert the audience’s expectations’, which... let’s not even get into it.

What I'm thinking now is, 04/13/10 will still be a key date. The story will build to something critical on that date. But then it will keep going for a while longer, to allow it to wrap up more naturally. Whether this is for another year, or less, I can't say. But I'd rather it not be more.

For reference, this date was when Jack: Ascend was posted.

I think it’s safe to say that the comic did, in fact, ‘keep going for a while longer’.

I also designed all four characters shortly before I started HS. I didn't know much about these characters at the time, other than some really vague personality profiles.

I am impressed that the kids haven’t changed in the slightest since their original, pre-Homestuck concept art.

Hussie really drew them once, said ‘that’s fine’, and was correct.

If I remember correctly, the designs we have for the kids were your second attempt. If so, can we see the first designs? I don't know if I still have the sketch. Probably not. Basically, picture the kids as they are now, but with squarer heads. Like the thugs from PS. It didn't look right.

Sorry, Hussie drew them twice. The Newtonverse has, sadly, been lost to time.

The age never mattered. There's a tradition in cartooning of ignoring the age of a child when considering his/her demeanor and degree of sophistication. See: Calvin and Hobbes. Cartoon kids will act according to their age when it feels relevant. Other times, they won't.

The kids are the the cartoon equivalent of thirteen, where they’re often as intelligent as adults. They can still be emotionally immature, but only when it serves the story.

How do you deal with the inability to go back and change details from earlier in the story? [...] [...] It's a non-issue. Once it's cemented in the story, that's it.

I’m reminded of the one change that was made, which still confuses me.

Clearly, something changed Hussie’s mind here. I still don’t have a clue what’s up with this.

The oil, chalk, amber and uranium were stuck in [WV’s] room strictly as parallels to the four types of known grist.

Oh, what? I didn’t catch that!

We haven’t seen uranium yet, so it must be Jade’s green grist - the one that I guessed to be emerald.

On April 10th, I launched the new story, "Homestuck", made entirely in Flash. My plan was to complete the whole story in Flash, adding interactivity, music, and stuff like that. I completed 8 pages. This turned out to be way too much work. To put this in perspective, doing these 8 relatively simple pages was MORE DIFFICULT AND TIME CONSUMING THAN ALL THE SEPULCHRITUDE ANIMATIONS COMBINED. I am not joking about that!

Flash must be hard as fuck - those Beta panels weren’t that elaborate. I guess that does tend to happen when you’re getting to grips with a new technology.

I was wondering what sort of story to make, so I drew a detective on a blank canvas. Then I thought he should be in a room, of course. Probably a detective's office, because that's where detectives usually are. He needed a phone and a gun. Clearly those two items would alone suffice, I thought. The wall over there looked a little blank so I drew a safe. A window for ambience. A door for exit, which may or may not have been locked; I wasn't sure yet.

Problem Sleuth was really improvised to that degree? That explains a lot, and I honestly kind of love it.

Hussie posts some childhood art. This looks an awful lot like a Problem Sleuth dungeon - and Hussie agrees. I used to do stuff like this too, as a kid, and now I’m wondering if I missed my calling.

Everything about this painting is fucking amazing. Oakland Raiders linebacker Bill Romanowski fending off a wild, flaming black steed, in a mystical snowcapped mountain setting. I don’t know if it’s the concept alone, which itself is obviously mind-blowing. Maybe it’s also the curious, vaguely-humanoid musculature of the horse. It has a man’s bicep and triceps, and some very suspiciously man-like back muscles.

I can see this was a formative experience for the younger Hussie.

There’s quite a lot more on the blog, but I think I’ve talked about most of what’s directly relevant to Homestuck. I feel like I understand Hussie a little better now, for better and/or for worse. I definitely buy that this is exactly the person who’d write Homestuck.

#homestuck liveblog #full liveblog #act 5

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mandu-17 · 2 years

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TWICE reaction to their S/O wiping their kisses as a prank

Requested by: Anonymous

Request: can u do twice reaction to their s/o wiping their kisses as a prank??? btw i love ur fics <3

A/N: have a good day y'all < 3

Nayeon

She’d definitely act offended. Nayeon would scold you for not receiving her love properly. At the same time she’s up for the challenge. She’d only continue on giving you even more kisses in order to make you whine louder. Your girlfriend wants to test how much longer you’re willing to deny her kisses. Teasing you like that made her giggle a lot. In the end, Nayeon was the one who won this battle. Her cocky smile shining bright as she held you close, satisfied with your flustered reaction.

“You should’ve accepted my love in the first place!”

Jeongyeon

When Jeongyeon saw you wipe her kisses, she was dumbfonded. 'What went wrong?' She thought with a frown while analyzing your past interactions. If it weren't for that playful look spread all over your face, she'd seriously feel hurt. It was now your job to let Jeongyeon know that it was only a prank. Chuckling, she simply shook her head at your odd antics. Partly, she couldn't believe that you straight up dismissed her affection like that. Luckily, your girl forgives you easily and it's only a matter of minutes before you're happily cuddling again.

"For a moment I was really worried that I did something wrond."

Momo

Since you acted like a brat, she'll also have a role to play. She'd be the mad girlfriend and your obligation is to make it up to her. Otherwise Momo won't forgive you. So be sure to shower her with compliments next or maybe even order some of her favourite food. Obviously, you have to pay her back with the kisses as well. Only then Momo will trust you and eventually become your sweet girl again. She'll have a hard time fighting the smile forming on her lips, but sooner or later she'll be back with you.

"I didn't deserve this one, did I?"

Sana

Why did you even go there? For Sana it's just another opportunity to tease you and prove that you can't really deny her. After one particular glance from her, you know she's up to something. Mischevious glint in her eyes and three seconds later, she'd start giggling before attacking you more. She makes sure her kisses leave you breathless. Both of you end up laughing at the top of your lungs. Sana would probably climb on your laps in order to trap and dominate you. You've definitely lost this one, sorry.

"The more you're against it, the more I'll be kissing you, baby."

Jihyo

It was quite a tiring day for Jihyo. She was hoping to find some comfort in you, although after seeing your reaction to her kisses, she simply shakes her head at you. Of course, your girlfriend saw right through you, she knew you were messing with her, just like her members. Sometimes she truly felt like she was the only one normal. When she had enough, she wouldn't even hesitate to jokingly choke you and shake your shoulders, as if to wake you up. She needed her baby right now, it wasn't time for pranks.

"You too, Brutus?"

Mina

Mina was honestly lowkey sad. Since it took her a lot of time to freely express her feelings to you, she was thinking hard why on Earth would you be wiping her kisses. Once you noticed the look on her face, you immediately stopped and embraced her, while repeating that it was only a prank. Finally, Mina starts lauging about it later on, although at first it really made her feel uncertain. You ended up apologizing for like a hundred times, only for her to also calm you down and apologize for reacting that way.

"I'm also sorry. I shouldn't have had reacted like that."

Dahyun

Eyes wide, your girlfriend scoffed at your behaviour. Don't think she'll just leave it be. You won't get away with it. Dahyun will definitely take her revenge. Probably tickle you or smack your arm a lot. She wants to remind you that it's usually her pranking other people - it's literally her profession. She also just can't stand the fact that you're treating your own lover like that. It was unaccaptable and she had to punish you. Satisfied with your reaction, she was sure that next time, you'll think twice before pulling another prank on her.

"You just can't ignore my love like that!"

Chaeyoung

It didn't go as planned. Chaeyoung was scared that she did something wrong and it took you some time to finally convince her that it was simply just a prank. She scolded you for making her question everything. Truth be told, you were a bit scared upon seeing her so serious. After a moment of silence between the two of you, she closed her eyes and began giggling at the situatiion you've found yourselves in. You hesitantly joined her and moments later wrapped your arms around her small waist.

"I just totally didn't expect you to act like that."

Tzuyu

Tzuyu’d be so shocked. She kind of doesn't understand your actions at first, but when she noticed the teasing smile in your eyes, she smacked your arm hard. How could you do that to her? Don’t ever make her doubt herself again. Tzuyu feels shy afterwards, it was so easy for you to make her feel like you didn’t want her affection anymore. She’d refuse to meet your eyes for a while, but after some convincing from your side, she once again believes that you are head over heels for her.

“Y/N, don’t be like that!”

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cyclone-rachel · 5 months

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@73759746782253

MERRY CRISIS

When Clark activated the Time Bubble that would take him to the thirty-first century, he arrived in a quiet room.

A quiet lab, to be more specific, one that had been in progress during the months that had passed between when he’d first dropped Kara off there and now. He’d seen it, in the background of their various communications, but it was even more impressive in person, full of inventions he couldn’t even guess the uses for. Things that were in progress, hanging from the ceiling and strewn across the floor and draped over tables, all shapes and sizes.

And in the middle of it all, seeming to be working on several projects at once, was the person he intended to meet- although when he caught sight of Clark, the look in his eyes made Clark not want to be there at all. He wished there were someone else to deliver this news and take his burden, some way to reverse time so he never left the twenty-first century and make him forget he was ever here. He could go on and keep hoping things would be different than what was about to be revealed to him.

But there was nobody to stand in his place, and no way to change the past, and so Clark met Brainiac 5 with Kara Zor-El’s body in his arms.

Querl had not been trying to forget that a crisis was happening.

Of course not- it was a part of history, and he knew Kara was going to be part of that history since the Monitor had arrived in their room and told her she was needed. Querl, then, just intended to do everything he could to help her, come up with any invention that could assist her and the rest of the Legion, raising their chances of surviving this event. He didn’t know everything that was going on, as he couldn’t stay in contact with Kara forever, but if he had any trust in anyone, it would be in her. He wanted to hope that she would be among the survivors, and be able to rewrite what he’d seen before she left to join the fight.

I should have known better, he thought, as Superman stepped through the Time Bubble.

Kara had once told him, when they’d first met, that his “grandfather”, the first Brainiac, had tried to kill her cousin. It had been a colder, distant version of him, who’d only seen her as a threat, that had told her if he wanted to kill Superman, he would have succeeded.

Even now, he still believed it, because he did.

Superman only had enough time to lay Kara down before Querl surged toward him, lifting him up in the air.

“What happened to her?” he asked, hand twisting around the fabric of his super-suit, as he formed an energy construct with his other hand that he pointed at Clark’s throat. “I need to know!”

Clark wasn’t fighting him. He wasn’t even trying to make Querl let him go. He just hung there, in Querl’s grip, as though he had expected this.

“She… she saved me.” He said, and that was all it took for Querl to dissolve the construct and release him, letting him recover and tell his story in full. “The Anti-Monitor was trying to kill me. I had just gotten to the machine he was using to merge and destroy the infinite Earths across the multiverse, and I figured that if I could blow the machine up, we’d have a chance to save the Earths. Obviously, he wasn’t about to let that happen, and Kara came to my rescue without any hesitation. She fought as hard as she could, driving the Anti-Monitor into his own machine- at the cost of her life.”

There were tears in Clark’s eyes, then, as he reached for Kara, gathering her into his arms. She was shrouded in her own cape, and when Clark uncovered her face, Querl kneeling down to see her, he began to cry as well.

“She told me she knew what she was doing.” He said. “She only wanted me to be safe- for everyone to be safe. That didn’t make it any easier.”

He reached for Querl’s hand, then, and Querl let him take it.

“I wanted to kill the Anti-Monitor as much as you probably wanted to kill me, just now- but I couldn’t let that stop me from finishing the job, making sure she didn’t sacrifice herself for nothing.”

“And you finished it.” Querl said. “We are safe.”

“We couldn’t have done it without her.” Clark answered.

“I could say the same, about different circumstances. Did Kara tell you about… how we became a couple?”

Clark smiled. “She told me enough. I’m just glad you were able to find common ground- and that you were happy, at least for a little while.”

“We were.” Querl confirmed, and as he looked down at Kara, his thoughts drifted to how they met- namely, to the Miracle Machine. Kara had wanted, so badly, to use it to bring Krypton and her mother back to life… and even though it was a catastrophically bad idea, he would have done anything to make sure she felt more at home in the thirty-first century.

She didn’t, though. She, and Querl, put those ideas aside in order to keep their world safe, and make sure there was no chance the Dark Circle could get their hands on the machine again.

He knew, if he were to think about using the machine to bring her back, even she would tell him not to.

“I know she loved you.” Clark said. “She felt at home with you- and she would have wanted you to have this.”

He reached into a pocket on his super-suit, and pulled out Kara’s Military Guild badge, the one she would have worn as a proud member of the guild had Krypton not exploded- the one she did wear, after her final goodbye with her mother.

Querl took it, and fastened it to his uniform.

“Thank you.” He said. “And… I am sorry, for how I acted earlier. That was not logical.”

“I understand it, though.” Clark answered. “And I forgive you.”

Querl kissed Kara’s forehead, one last goodbye, before covering her back up again and letting her cousin take her body.

“I do as well.” He said.

Clark nodded, holding Kara closer.

“I… I thought her funeral should be here.” He said. “In the thirty-first century. I have to go back home, eventually, but I’ll be here as long as you need me, as will any member of the Justice League. Okay?”

“Okay.” Querl finally said. “I will speak with the Legion, and we can make the arrangements.”

“We will.” Clark answered. “I promise.”

#karadox #tomorrowverse #fanfics #brainiac 5 #legion of superheroes #clark kent #superman #ship: believe in all the possibilities #YO NERD HOPE YOU LIKE SADS #I do have a couple fanfic ideas that are less sad? maybe i will write them soon #but for now here's this

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sankttealeaf · 7 months

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blessed are the merciful (for they shall obtain mercy)

it's here, cowboys! my fic for @grishaversebigbang 2023!

Materialki (artists):

@mitraavrs [art]

@maxe-murderer [art]

@polekands [art]

@beani-ed [art]

Corporalki (beta):

@gimmedafood

Summary: The law is hot on the coattails of the Dregs, an infamous gang cruising through the countryside of Kerch. With each heist and robbery lining their pockets with more than enough money, Kaz Brekker has his eyes set on one place in particular - The Exchange. Taking down the hub of trade would cement his gang’s place in the city and history, as well as causing a lot of chaos to the merchants that trade there. But Kaz has underestimated how much manpower he will need for this feat - so he calls upon other outlaws in society to help him pull it off.

Or: A western/cowboy AU featuring the Crows as various outlaws, all teaming up to tear down the new world that is forming around them (and to make a lot of money in the process).

READ ON AO3!

chapters will be out pretty regularly over there!

CHAPTER ONE: LAYING LOW IN PLAIN SIGHT

It amused Kaz at how out in the open they were.

When hiding from the law one usually would lay low, stuffed away in the darkest corner of the earth, but Kaz found that approach boring - it simply wasn’t his style. The Dregs were situated a short walk from Ketterdam, up on an overlook that gave him a perfect view of the road leading in and out of the city. Plumes of smoke rose up into the sky and the gentle chatter of the other gang members carried on the wind and Kaz was honestly surprised at how they had yet to be caught by the law. If Inej were here, she would tell him not to tempt fate. Fate was a fool’s wish - he believed in himself and his crew, not some higher force driving him through each heist and scheme.

Which brought him back to his original train of thought. Scattered across a large table in the middle of his tent were various maps and writings on guard rotations. Marked in the centre was his next target: the Exchange. He had been eyeing up the place ever since he was a boy, wondering what it would be like to claim the place as his own and pocket a portion of the money that gets passed around there; and now he was planning on fulfilling that dream. The plan was vague in his mind, a mess of ideas and what he would need to pull it off. One thought kept occurring - he needed more hands. The Dregs had their own talents and he had utilised all of them at some point in the long history of this gang, yet he couldn’t trust anyone but himself to get others involved in this. Jesper and Inej were to be included, there was no doubt about that. He wanted a few others…

A clash of pots falling and a cacophony of yells in jest made him audibly sigh. Could they not even get through dinner without something going wrong? Kaz held his head in his hands, eyes darting over the map and forcing out the rising sounds of complaints coming from those cooking. The streets were riddled with guards, they would need to be exterminated somehow. What he really needed was a full list of the guards rotations, that way he can make use of any periods of time where roads weren’t being watched. Inej could probably get that information for him, but if she was caught… No. He couldn’t risk losing Inej before the plan had even started. Jesper would make too much noise and if things started looking sour Kaz knew he would gladly shoot now and ask questions later. Connections. Insider knowledge. That’s what he needed. No one in the Dregs had any useful knowledge about the Exchange or even the Merchant Council unless he started asking someone to dig around. Digging around was too risky.

This wasn’t a routine train or carriage heist for goods and money. This was the Exchange. Masks on and guns out wouldn't cut it. Everything needed to be planned right down to the last second or else the law would be hot on their tails, again. He had survived this long without being caught for his long list of crimes, and he wasn’t about to swing for them now.

“Who let Muzzen cook tonight?” Jesper was heard before Kaz could see him. Voices overlapped one another, some in complaint and some in defence of Muzzen’s cooking but ultimately they fell on deaf ears as Kaz saw Jesper approach his tent, a grin on his face. “Picture this - I’m sitting in a bar, two shots of whiskey down and I overhear some loud-mouthed guy rambling on about how much money he’s made this past week. He’s blowing it all on booze and drinks are on him.” He took a seat opposite Kaz, kicking his feet up on the table and narrowly missing anything important. He rummaged through his jacket pocket for a moment and dumped a handful of cash on top of Kaz’s notes. “So I robbed him of it all.”

Kaz counted at least twenty kruge, and gave Jesper a nod. “And is that for your own personal bank or are you finally contributing to camp?”

Jesper feigned shock. “Hey, I got that lead last week! The one about the boat-”

“Which turned out to be two hours late. Pim spent the night in a cell and I recall you injured your ankle so badly you couldn’t walk for a few days.” Kaz had no malice in his voice as he spoke, there had been worse heists that took place, everyone knew that. The boat plan was a simple misunderstanding, but it was amusing to push Jesper’s buttons about it.

Jesper kicked his feet off the table and began counting out his share of the money he had rightfully earned, pushing the rest to Kaz with an overly dramatic pout. “I didn't know the boat was going to be late. You can’t blame me for that.”

“Resources were put to waste and the horses got tired riding away from the law. I’m not blaming you, just reminding you of what happened,” Kaz replied with a shrug, taking the bills from the table and checking to see how much was left. Fifteen kruge. That would go towards food supplies - he recalled Anika mentioning how they were running low on good quality food and people were starting to complain. He'd send her down into the city tomorrow to restock.

“It sounds like you’re blaming me. Where’s Inej? She’ll have my back.” He looked past Kaz to see if she was lurking in the shadows. She wasn’t, Kaz would’ve felt her presence already.

“Inej is out following a lead she found. She should be back soon.” Not that Kaz was waiting for her or keeping track of the time. Inej was her own person, part of his gang. He knew she could handle herself if she happened to be out later than anticipated.

“Speaking of leads…” Jesper leaned closer to him to keep prying ears out. “I may have something.”

“Oh?”

“Something good.” There was a glimmer in his eye as he spoke, a sparkle Kaz had learned to mean that this was information Jesper was not supposed to know.

Kaz raised an eyebrow. “You said the boat was good.”

He frowned in response, arms folded over his chest. "Maybe I won't tell you about this, then."

Kaz knew that was a lie. In all his years of knowing Jesper he knew how much the other enjoyed telling him about leads he'd picked up or gossip he had heard. As much as Kaz pretended to be disinterested in the rumours and scandals of those he didn't know, the way Jesper crafted the stories was intriguing. He shrugged. "I'll find out eventually. I always do."

"Fine. I'll tell you." He took out a small scrap of paper that had been marked with a hastily drawn out map. "Heard that there's some precious cargo passin' by the main highway leading to Belendt tomorrow."

"By train?" Kaz took the map from Jesper, adding it to his larger collection of notes on the table to see if it lined up with anything he had collected before. It didn't. No one else had heard of anything travelling down to Belendt, which meant this lead was either a trap or it was top secret.

"By stagecoach. Which is weird considering if it's important, going by train is safer." Jesper leaned back in the chair. "Said it would be passing through there around midday. Heavily guarded, too."

"Something's not right about that," Kaz replied, setting the note down. "Why transport something by stagecoach if it needs to be guarded by many people? Why waste the manpower when you can get there quicker by train? And why Belendt? Did you hear who was involved?"

Jesper shook his head. "Just that it was important to keep it on the down low. Didn't do too good of a job if I heard it, though."

Kaz was drawn into this mysterious cargo, there was no doubt about it. Whatever was being transported was important to somebody and that meant it had value. They could use another big payout, especially after how high the morale got after the last heist.

"Best stock up on ammo," Kaz said, sticking a pin into the map. The road wasn't too far of a journey out from camp - he was certain he, Jesper and Inej could travel out there by midday, see what it was all about and come back richer. Jesper grinned at the confirmation that they were going to explore this lead, giving him a mock salute as he stood up.

A choir of cawing sung overhead as Kaz felt another presence approach the tent. He knew of the rumours that his Wraith had the crows working for her and the timing of the crows only fuelled the tales, but they were just stories. Everyone with a criminal past had some scary story that followed him - Dirtyhands lingered behind him in dark alleys and everyone knew that. Kaz kept his gaze down at the map as he caught her walking in from the corner of his eye.

"Five times he stopped outside the Kaelish Prince. You were right, Kaz - something's up." Inej appeared behind Jesper, causing him to flinch and curse loudly.

"Where did you come from?" he asked, a hand over his chest in shock.

She stood next to him, shrugging in response. "Outside. Where else?" Inej took a moment to look over the maps and notes, pointing out where the Kaelish Prince was located in Ketterdam. “I followed him along the main street and he kept stopping off there at every half bell.”

“Who are you following?” Jesper asked, leaning over Inej’s shoulder to get a better look at what she was doing. Kaz gave him a look, and considered keeping this lead to him and Inej. He knew that if the plan went well he would need to bring Jesper on board, perhaps it was easier to let him in now. Jesper waited patiently for any follow up, and Kaz gave a small sigh.

“I want to know who’s in the pocket of Pekka Rollins,” he began, leaning against the table and pointing out a few places. “I want to know who’s loyal to him and who’s being threatened by him.”

“And you’re doing this for fun, or…?” Jesper rested his hands on his gun belt, giving Inej a look. Kaz knew that his vengeance towards Rollins had been kept secret from them for the longest time, so it made sense for Jesper to question why he was suddenly going after him.

“I’m doing it because Rollins needs to be brought down a few pegs.” A half truth, Kaz had no intention of telling them his entire life story right now. There wasn’t time and he heard Muzzen call that dinner was ready. He began to tidy up the table, hiding away any important notes and plans to keep any prying eyes from seeing what they were up to.

“We have a few other plans in the works, Jesper heard of something travelling down to Belendt tomorrow,” Kaz explained, and Jesper took this time to catch Inej up to speed on the lead he found.

“I want to go back to the city to see if any of my other connections have anything,” Inej said once Jesper had finished hyping himself up. “They may have heard something pass through the cracks.”

“Good. Anything you can find out will be useful. I want to know how many guards are protecting this, and what it is they are transporting. Something about it doesn’t make sense,” Kaz replied, following the road from Ketterdam to Belendt and making note of where they could stake out the road. He had yet to dismiss them both, Jesper and Inej stood across from him and waited for the closure of the conversation. With the lead on Rollins and the strange cargo that was passing by tomorrow it only felt right for Kaz to let them in on his next plan. It was still in the early stages, he had yet to scout out the areas and get intel on guard rotations and what is stored there, but now felt like the best time.

“My next plan is to take down the Exchange.” He had no need to coat it in flowery language, it was easier to keep it simple and tell it how it is.

"You want to hit the Exchange?" Jesper and Inej spoke at the same time, eyes widening at Kaz's reveal of the plan he had been brewing over for the past few days. It was unexpected, the both of them hoping that the target would be smaller, maybe another train or perhaps a boat. But the centre hub of all trade in Ketterdam?

"It's a death sentence, Kaz. Surely you know that?" Inej tried to scan Kaz's face for a hint of emotion, but there was nothing. Just the face she had grown used to, the one that told her he was not backing away from this plan.

"We’ll have several distractions taking place at the same time to drive the law out from there." Kaz pointed to several marked locations on the map all in close range to the target area, but far enough away that it would take someone a good few minutes to walk between them. "With enough chaos, we can get in and out before the law even notices."

"You're relying on chaos?" Inej questioned, eyes darting over the marked locations and mentally walking the rooftops of the streets. It worked, in theory.

"I'm relying on getting more hands involved. The three of us aren't enough.” Kaz looked past them both at the rest of the Dregs. They were lacking in a few areas, he had known that for a while. "Keep an eye out."

It was a risky plan, but everything he had been building was leading to this. All the narrow escapes, all the hiding out in awful places for months away from the law, all the bad food the camp made - it would all be worth it.

He made a promise to his family that he would see to it that Rollins would crumble, and Saints be damned, he was going to bury him alive.

#gvbb23 #gvbbfic23 #gang 15 #six of crows #kaz brekker #inej ghafa #jesper fahey #wylan van eck #nina zenik #matthias helvar #western au #soc #six of crows fic #grishaverse #grishaverse fic

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wixelt · 9 months

Note

The way actualization works needs to have some established rules behind it, since as it stands there are possibly two components laid out, one established and one somewhat assumed but left unsaid. You said for sure that learning player things from players is required, presumably continued study over a long period. although this alone would apply to anyone from Hop Pop to The Core. Grime, Tritonio, Valeriana, Andrias probably, Gary. The odds of half the population of Wartwood becoming Players exponentially as time passes and the concentration of Hermits increases. At the very least, this includes the IT gals, Dr. Jan, and Terry. At some extreme end, this could mean the US Military starts training unaging magic super soldiers.

But the second component limits this a good amount. It's kind of implied that a genuine, deep, probably pointedly positive, connection to a player is required for actualization. This cuts the numbers down quite a bit, we likely won't get a missive influx of super powered side characters, no matter how hilarious as that image is and how much it may fit Wartwood's canonical status of army of cryptid country bumpkins, as well as removing Gary, The Military, and The Core for sure. The IT gals come down to how ride or die Xisuma is to them, but they may not have long enough for it to set in. The same applies to the other earth squad characters.

I have only really thought of one more setting rule but I may also have a potential narrative rule.

The first setting rule would state that only 'mature' Players can transmit their power. Player Maturity takes a long ass time. I'm leaving it up to you but I was considering anywhere between a lifetime and their first few centuries. this avoids both the plot hole of why Players aren't exponential in number and by extension the retconning of the backstory of this setting's Amphibia.

The narrative rule, that I will only be proposing, is one I call 'The Hop Pop Standard.' It is a rule that, for the purposes of maintaining thematic coherency with Amphibia and imposing a hard limit on where the line for who becomes a player in-story. This rule may need to be reevaluated later down the line depending on how the AU develops because if things change it has a high chance to stop functioning.

Simply, this rule would state that Actualization would have to maintain rules and caveats that insure that Hop Pop becoming a Player would be breaking the established world building. More broadly, a line should be drawn to prevent parental figures of Amphibia's main cast members from becoming players, for the purpose of keeping the rules strict enough that the number of characters capable of Actualization is appropriately small, as well as keeping a tangibly permanent reflection of Amphibia's themes present in-story.

As interesting as exploring Andrias eventually achieving a true form of immortality as a reward for his redemption and recompense would be, succeeding with kindness where his ancestors failed with cruelty, I'm willing to give it up if doing so ended up giving precedent for an ever expanding list of characters becoming Players. He himself is not a parental figure for any of the girls but allowing him in may bring up questions of why him and not people closer to the girls.

I am opposed to blocking Ivy from eventually Actualizing, mostly for Sprig related reasons, but that does mean she needs a bonded hermit, and this ask is already long so I'll put my nomination in another ask.

(Sorry for the wait, but I wanted to be in the right mindset first. :D)

I don't know for sure that player-to-player knowledge is an absolute requirement of actualisation, but its for sure one of the most common components. And - more importantly - its likely the only common component available for prospective players in our AU.

The need for player "maturity" - I'd say it takes a human lifetime on average, but varies based on a player coming into their own - helps keep the numbers down. Retcon averted.

It makes sense a "newborn" player lacks the experience to help another on their way.

As you say, though, this could apply to most characters if that was all it took, & there'd be exponential growth with how populous Amphibia & Earth are. Also, villains - from as of-the-week as Gary to as terrifying as the Core - aren't folks you want acquiring immortal power just by doing the reading of False's mind.

There's got to be more to it.

But that's where the inferred 2nd component of at least this method (as noted, there are others - the multiverse is big) comes in: the positive relationship. It wasn't something I'd consciously decided, but it does make sense that you don't attune to a new existence just by understanding the theory. It takes deep bonds with those already of that ilk.

Ivy has Joe. Maddie has Cub. Polly has Cleo.

Sprig has Grian/Stress/Ren/Doc.

Ally & Jess might have Xisuma (X likes them but this would be based on how much he interacts with the IT Gals post-Invasion).

Marcy has Mumbo.

Sasha has Scar.

And Anne has False.

So it tracks. And while the lack of a superpowered Wartwood resistance is a missed glory, I think its worth it to deprive the villain side of things - and Mr. X, as much as I love him - of easy power.

Besides, have you seen Wartwood? They're already OP as is!

And the 'Hop Pop Standard' works as a starting baseline for eligibilty, even if we have to change it later. It wouldn't feel right for his character for Hop Pop to be a "Player", so using him as a benchmark for someone not qualifying to keep numbers down & Amphibia's themes intact is sensible.

For him - & other primary parental figures, as mentioned - I imagine its not because he lacks the bonds, but more because he's fine where he is in his life & chooses not to advance despite his intelligence.

And yeah, even accepting his eventual redemption, I don't see Andrias getting actualisation as a karmic reward. I wouldn't give him this even if the rules were more relaxed, as it feels more in his nature to shy away from such ideas now he's free of his family burden.

If Hop Pop isn't going to wake up one morning with a suddenly there inventory full of light grey glass, neither is the former King.

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a-mad-scientists-writing · 5 months

Text

A New Era (5)

Chapter 5: The Dark Spirit

AO3 1 2 3 4 5 6

P1 P2 P3 P4

Rumours of a new airbender are percolating through the Earth Kingdom. Again.

At first, they pass right by the arbiters, who are more concerned with trying to outswim the giant sea serpent attacking them en route to Ba Sing Se. Survive they do though, and head on home, Valkyrie nodding off on Skulduggery’s shoulder as the monorail glides through the city rings.

Once a week, during the ‘stay’ part of the leave-stay rota, Valkyrie and her parents have Skulduggery over for a meal at their house. It’s become a tradition for the first of these to take place the night of their return, if their return isn’t at an unreasonable hour. It is at this dinner, specifically right as Valkyrie cools the pot of tea with a small whirlwind, that the arbiters hear about the new airbender from Desmond and Melissa.

Valkyrie and Skulduggery usually spend their time off in the city assisting law enforcement or training, but this news is more important. While heeding Skulduggery’s warnings that it may not turn out the way they hope, Valkyrie can’t stop thinking- what if there is another airbender? She could learn from an actual airbending master- not that Skulduggery isn’t a great teacher, she adds hastily, but it would be good to learn techniques not derived from firebending or other bending moves. Skulduggery is the first to agree.

They do need some kind of official permission to investigate, though.

Mr Bliss visits the Earth King a lot, Valkyrie notes as they approach the palace. On most occasions she wonders whether it’s really necessary, but not this time. Mr Bliss can provide the closest thing to an official license to investigate they are likely to get in the Earth Kingdom. Ever since Skulduggery accused King Thurid of treason last year, things have been decidedly frosty between the arbiters and the palace.

They explain to Bliss that there are no other matters that require their attention; the only reports of disturbance the local city police have thus been unable to contain are that of some sort of acrobatic thief. Skulduggery cheerfully decides not to involve himself. Mr Bliss acquiesces.

‘Why is Mr Bliss here all the time now?’ Valkyrie asks as they head down the palace steps. ‘He’s got his own kingdom to run.’

‘Interesting question. Why do you think that is?’ Skulduggery’s been turning questions back around on her like this more and more often lately.

She sighs. ‘Because Guild’s asking him. He probably needs help.’ She snorts. ‘Shows how much of a king he is.’

‘Doesn’t it just,’ says Skulduggery enigmatically, with a slight tilt of his head that she knows means he wants her to think on that more.

‘Guild might be the ruler of the most powerful nation in the world, but Mr Bliss is the strongest earthbender in the world. He should be in charge.’

‘Who says he won’t be someday?’ Skulduggery muses.

‘Are you… are you implying that Mr Bliss is trying to make a move for the throne of Ba Sing Se?’

‘No, of course not. He barely wanted the throne of Omashu. He has no desire to rule.’

‘Oh.’

‘Which is why it’s so interesting that he’s making a move for the throne of Ba Sing Se.’

‘He is?’

‘Of course he is.’

‘Shut up.’ Valkyrie thinks for a moment. ‘Well if we know, Guild definitely knows, right? And he can’t just be sitting around, letting it happen.’

‘No. I suspect there’s a lot going on behind the scenes that we aren’t privy to anymore.’

‘Were we ever?’ Valkyrie mutters.

‘If we were nosy enough. My guess is Guild is trying to turn this to his advantage.’

‘Which he would do how?’

‘I don’t know. How do you think?’

Rolling her eyes, Valkyrie makes an effort. ‘I suppose… he could try and bring Mr Bliss under his influence. Which would mean… he’s trying to bring Omashu under his rule.’

‘Most likely under a lot of language like “forming closer ties” and “bridging interstate gaps,” but yes, essentially.’

‘Huh. Wow. So what’s for lunch?’

‘You are fascinating. I tell you a major shift in the Earth Kingdom powers is brewing that would surely make the city explode into monarchist riots if it was common knowledge, and that’s your response?’

‘Well it’s not our job to play pai sho with kings. We’re arbiters. We just have to keep people safe.’

At this, Skulduggery does, unexpectedly, give her a smile. ‘Hah. Yes. You’re wise beyond your years, you know that?’

‘Yes. Yes I do.’

The sheer vastness of the Earth Kingdom means that while the Earth King does technically have dominion over all of it, he cannot be as effective a ruler for the areas too far from Ba Sing Se. As such, there are several other kings and state leaders with their own semi-autonomous rule.

Omashu and the surrounding villages is one such subsidiary. Guild’s attempt at ‘forming closer ties’- whether by stretching his power and attempting to diminish Mr Bliss and Omashu further, or by granting Mr Bliss further autonomy to appease him- is risky, but Guild is not a popular king. Especially not since his actions after the previous year’s incident at the North Pole.

Communication between Guild’s palace and the two arbiters has all but ceased since Skulduggery accused the king of treason. This leaves only people who are personally loyal to Skulduggery willing to help him in Ba Sing Se. It is not an official policy that no assistance be given to him and Valkyrie- that would be a spectacularly bad look for Guild, and would upset relations with the Fire Nation significantly- but things have certainly turned frigid towards the arbiters. And while not as bad for Guild as it could have been, this is still not good for his image: he is practically exiling the First Airbender and her teacher.

One of the consequences Skulduggery and Valkyrie now face has been a great lack of cooperation from Ba Sing Se’s law enforcement. Chief of Police Remus Crux acts in the way that Guild wishes he could: with hostility and borderline threatening behaviour towards them. Needless to say, Valkyrie and Skulduggery do not spend a second more of their time in Ba Sing Se than necessary.

‘On the bright side,’ Desmond is prone to saying, ‘no more being peer pressured into climbing the social ladder!’

It is true. Valkyrie’s parents are no longer bombarded with party and dinner invitations from socialites. Skulduggery, on the other hand, never seemed to have that problem in the first place. Valkyrie gathers that high society generally disapproves of people who dress like they do (with style), talk like they do (with class), and are respected war heroes with the favour of the Fire Lord, but who nevertheless persist in speaking their mind regardless of the company they keep, especially when that mind has such differing world views.

It seems like a really good example to follow, Valkyrie decides.

Following the whispers, she and Skulduggery travel to a village in the far east, along a peninsula between the Eastern Sea and the open ocean. At their arrival, the arbiters are met by the head of the village. He informs them that yes, the rumours are true. Several airbenders did escape the genocide at the Eastern Air Temple, much like Valkyrie’s great-grandfather escaped from the Southern Air Temple. The village hid them, and over the years the culture and teachings of those air nomads were secretly passed down to their children, and their children’s children.

At hearing news that another had deemed it safe to resurface, the last airbending descendent revealed herself. She had heard about Valkyrie’s inability to learn airbending in its original form, and was ready to train her.

Just as Valkyrie is thinking that this is the best news she could have hoped for, the ‘was’ registers. The community confirms that the airbending master died two months ago, succumbing to an illness she had long battled. This is the worst news Valkyrie could have heard.

But! The airbending master had a son- and he too is an airbender!

‘That’s great!’ Valkyrie exclaims.

Unfortunately, he ran away after his mother’s death.

‘Oh.’

The village knows that he ran away to Ba Sing Se, however!

‘Well, I suppose that’s okay-’

But they don’t have any information more specific than that.

She waits expectantly, but that seems to be it.

Back to Ba Sing Se it is. As they are walking back to their ostrich-horses, Valkyrie mid-moan about the five-day journey they took to get here, Skulduggery receives a message. It isn’t from one of the usual Earth Kingdom birds, nor from a Fire Nation messenger hawk: instead the little scroll is carried by an arctic kite fox. Apparently, they must make a stopover at Chameleon Bay, by the site of an old battlefield.

The man who wants to meet with Skulduggery is unsettling, and dresses strangely. He wears clothing reminiscent of that of the Water Tribe, but adapted for warmer climes, and in much darker colours than is traditional. Blue so deep as to be almost black. No fur or bead adornments. His name is Solomon Wreath, and Valkyrie gets the impression that Skulduggery doesn’t like him; it may have been the way he punched him.

Skulduggery says he’s a bloodbender.

Wreath starts the conversation off casually enough- talking about the way blood has soaked through the earth here, the power it brings this place. You know, normal stuff like that. In the face of Skulduggery’s distinct waspishness however, he moves on.

‘I take it you’ve been to the airbender’s village?’

From the ensuing back-and-forth, Valkyrie surmises that Wreath is an investigator for the bloodbenders. He tells them that this business with the new airbender is mixed up in his own case at the moment: the Diablerie.

‘You’re saying the Diablerie are after the boy?’ Skulduggery said.

‘Oh, they’re doing much more than chasing after him. I examined his mother’s body a few days after she died. It wasn’t illness that took her life. Tea made of a poison root, not native to this area. Unsurprising the village didn’t recognise it.’

‘And why are you telling us this?’

‘Because this is the Diablerie. I’d like to pool our resources. Whatever they are planning will be far easier to stop if more people than just myself are involved. In fact, I’ve already reached out to a friend of yours, I believe: Tanith Low. She is investigating reports of Jaron Gallow’s presence in the west.’

A thousand or so kilometres away, Murder Rose stabs Tanith through the hand. Apparently there are more members of the Diablerie in town than just Gallow.

‘You’ve put something together about what Wreath said,’ Valkyrie states as they head off again, Skulduggery in a thoughtful silence.

‘I might have, yes.’

‘Do you know what the Diablerie’s plan is?’

‘Perhaps. Do you remember Billy-Ray Sanguine? Or more to the point, do you remember his unexpected disappearance from the North Pole last year?’

‘Vaguely,’ Valkyrie replies, glancing at the scar on her hand.

‘About three months ago I got a tip he’d been seen moving east, with friends.’

‘The Diablerie?’

‘Maybe.’

‘So whatever the Diablerie’s planning is why he abandoned Vengeous?’

‘Possibly.’

‘You just fill me with confidence, you do.’

The only reason Skulduggery can think of as to why the Diablerie (Vengeous’ old war unit) in collaboration with Sanguine (Vengeous’ hired hitman) would want an airbender is for the same reason that Vengeous wanted Valkyrie last year. Someone wants to awaken the Grotesquery and reopen a spirit portal.

Unfortunately, three months ago there were only three airbenders in existence: Valkyrie, the now-deceased airbending master, and her son. Valkyrie was not a viable option to go after, not with Skulduggery alert to the danger she could be in every lunar eclipse from people who might want to awaken the Grotesquery. An airbending master would have been too risky as well, especially with a far easier target available: her son. The Diablerie would have killed her to stop her coming after them. Obviously, they weren’t counting on the boy simply running away before they found him.

On the journey back, Valkyrie wonders how they are going to find this airbender boy when they have no location more precise than ‘somewhere in the giant city encompassing the vast majority of the North-East Earth Kingdom.’ She does brighten up at the thought of the missing boy perhaps being able to teach her some pure airbending. Skulduggery speculates that it will probably involve a lot more flipping about the place, utilising air currents and whatnot. Valkyrie agrees; her attempts to pick up some inspiration for new moves from Tanith’s fighting style have only been moderately successful. Acrobatics don’t come that naturally to her.

Skulduggery pauses, tilting his head.

As soon as they arrive back in Ba Sing Se, they go to China’s library and ask for all the information she has on the acrobat who’s been causing trouble for the police. China obligingly presents them with several sightings’ locations, all situated around one of the classiest hotels in the city.

They walk in. They walk up. They walk along a hall. They walk into Billy-Ray Sanguine.

Punching ensues, rather horrifying the boy with the carefully tended bald head who comes out to investigate. Valkyrie shoves him back into his room, locking the door behind them.

Sanguine comes through the wall at speed, obviously having been thrown. He stands, angrily wiping blood from his nose, his tinted glasses missing to reveal the scarring around his blinded eyes, and pauses. Valkyrie glances down. The floor they’re standing on is stone.

In a matter of seconds has his razor on her throat. Skulduggery strides in from the blackened and smouldering hallway, fire blazing in his fists, but stops upon seeing the tableau.

The bald airbending son of a monk who is, of course, Fletcher Renn, is even more horrified. He and his bald head aren’t convinced at all by either man’s attempts to persuade him to come with them. The blind guy with the knife does not at all appear to be a better option than the firebender.

When Valkyrie employs a new airbending move she’s been practising, whipping up a spherical gale around her to force Sanguine’s blade away and send him stumbling, it is officially too much for Fletcher. He grabs a staff sitting by the window, jumps out and swoops away on the extendable glider wings, his bald head shining briefly in the sun.

‘I really hate you guys,’ mutters Sanguine.

Once Sanguine has skedaddled, they find Fletcher dazed in the alley below. He crashed his glider into the building opposite about three seconds after launch.

Not long into conversation with Fletcher, Valkyrie decides that she doesn’t need another airbending teacher after all. Fletcher is a dismissive, arrogant teenage boy who is not dealing well, or at all, with his mother’s passing. He is extremely resistant to the idea of teaching anyone anything about his mother’s culture. The emphasis is made plain for Valkyrie and Skulduggery. He does not consider himself an air nomad. He does not want to be involved with any monk business.

As Skulduggery points out, this stance is at odds with the traditional yellow and orange robes Fletcher continues to wear, and the staff he continues to carry, not to mention the shaved head he has kept in preparation for an arrow tattoo. His mother would have made him a master, if she had lived. She wanted to train Valkyrie next.

‘Yeah, well. Look what that got her,’ Fletcher responds in a dead sort of voice.

Fletcher knows his mother didn’t die of her illness. She’d been getting better, not worse. The fact that she was murdered doesn’t seem to really hit him until that moment, though. It might not even have occurred to him until Skulduggery said so. Valkyrie is suddenly reminded that even if he is disrespectful and uncooperative, he’s not that much older than her.

It is still pretty satisfying to watch Skulduggery intimidate him into coming with them, though.

They drop Fletcher off at the Sangian, a private research facility in the Lower Ring. It is also a hospital for those who have some desire to keep out of the Earth Kingdom’s official way. After the events at the North Pole, Kenspeckle Grouse was entrusted with supervising the delivery of the Grotesquery to Ba Sing Se, where it was placed in the Earth King’s palace for safe keeping.

Planning to egress the freezing tundras of the Northern Water Tribe anyway, which despite taking great strides in recent years was nevertheless limiting his ability to practice healing with its rigid cultural gender divide, Kenspeckle decided to stay in Ba Sing Se. He has a number of people frequently in his care, most often Valkyrie, who it is always a pleasure to see, and Skulduggery, who it is not. They find the healer treating Ghastly Bespoke, who has not woken from his coma since Serpine’s attempted coup.

Lying in a pool of water a few inches deep, Ghastly’s body is surrounded by the blue glow of curative energy. He remains motionless. With a sigh, Kenspeckle suspends the session for the day, and the arbiters eventually get him to agree to house Fletcher for the time being.

Valkyrie goes home. She tells her parents all about Fletcher, and Skulduggery’s idea about the Diablerie possibly trying to open one of the portals again. Her parents react… unexpectedly.

She distinctly sees the blood drain from her mother’s face, and her father stops dead in his aimless wandering about the house. What comes next is almost twenty minutes of Desmond and Melissa grilling her for answers about what Skulduggery is doing to keep her safe, what the Earth King’s stance on all this is, and how much danger she is in. A bit blindsided, Valkyrie nonetheless recovers quickly. Despite being more than a little unsettled, she reassures them that no one is after her, that she’s better than ever at airbending and hand-to-hand combat, and, when they press, that Skulduggery is, yes, always nearby.

‘Fletcher’s the only one who’s really in danger and he’s safe with Kenspeckle-’

‘But you always have to get involved, Val! Meanwhile, where are your father and I? Stashed away somewhere else while you inevitably go off into danger with Skulduggery.’

She thinks about that a lot, later that night.

It takes some doing, and her parents exchange looks when they think she won’t notice, but they’re eventually a bit calmer. With their wedding anniversary coming up, Valkyrie suggests that they take a vacation to Gordon’s mansion. Even her dad picks up on that blatant attempt at deflection. Neither think it’s a good idea while this situation is going on. Valkyrie is frustrated, which is more than probably just a reflection of her parents’ same feelings at her apparent nonchalance, but she keeps it off her face. She doesn’t want them to worry about her, and she doesn’t want to have to worry about them worrying about her. It’s a ball of unpleasantness, and it sits in her stomach.

Then she thinks of Fletcher. It’s good if the worst thing she can say is that her parents are too protective.

The next morning, Skulduggery comes to pick her up. Walking their usual route to the Upper Ring, he says their first stop is to get the Grotesquery out of the Palace.

‘Steal it, you mean?’

‘Pre-emptively steal it,’ he corrects. ‘If we’re correct, the Diablerie are going to make a play for it.’

Skulduggery doesn’t trust Guild, and suspects he may be colluding with whoever has hired Sanguine, be it the Diablerie or someone behind the scenes. He doesn’t want to be caught off-guard like last year, especially if they end up needing to make a sudden dash to one of the poles before the lunar eclipse this month. As such, he sent a message to the Sun Warriors the previous night, requesting Bentley.

Entering the palace will be easy, but keeping out of sight of the Dai Li so they don’t alert Guild to their presence will be impossible. Therefore, the plan is to nonchalantly but rapidly make their way down to the lower levels, where there will be less eyes watching them.

The Grotesquery is kept under the Palace, locked away and under guard in a maze of stone corridors dimly lit by guttering flames. Skulduggery extinguishes them with a gesture.

As they enter the tunnels, with no alarms having been sounded so far, Skulduggery leaves her at the base of the stairs and disappears into the darkness.

When Valkyrie ventures forwards, heart thumping, she almost trips over something. Light flares again, this time in Skulduggery’s hand ahead of her, and she sees the obstacles are several palace guards sprawled on the floor, out cold.

They enter the doorway they were guarding, and find a chamber containing a cage. The ancient slumbering spirit is inside. Skulduggery tosses flames into the torch brackets, and they approach.

The floor opens in front of the cage and Billy-Ray Sanguine tunnels up with Gruesome Krav, the largest and strongest member of the Diablerie, by his side.

Krav launches himself straight at Skulduggery, swinging punches fast and hard, relying on pure strength to keep the firebender busy.

Sanguine pulls out his razor and once again tries to settle the grudge he’s formed against Valkyrie.

She switches into a mindset that’s becoming familiar: he can sense her movements through the earth, so she softens the impact of her motions with the air. He sends lumps of rock flying but can only half-sense her as she evades each one, right up until the moment she gets in close and breaks his nose.

Swearing and bloody, he sinks through the ground. There’s a breathless moment. Then the floor under Valkyrie tilts dramatically, sending her sliding right to where Sanguine wants her. He plunges out of the wall. She twists away. As such, he only breaks her wrist.

The pain blocks out everything for a moment, leaving her helpless to stop the blow to the head. Suddenly Valkyrie is dazedly staring at the ceiling, seeing the glint of Sanguine’s razor in the half-light, his snarl as he reaches down- and the blinding wash of fire that sends him stumbling back. Looking back, she sees Skulduggery take a solid hit for the lapse in concentration during his own fight.

Beating out smouldering clothes and swearing, Sanguine refocuses on the mission and stomps on the ground. A square of dust flies up around the cage, and the section sinks. Sanguine jumps into the hole, on top of the cage, shouting out to Krav, who shoves Skulduggery away and follows. The floor closes up behind them.

The room is revolving for Valkyrie, but she still hears a whirring and clicking in the walls. The chamber was booby trapped, and something has been triggered by the Grotesquery’s removal. There’s shouting, running footsteps. She hears Skulduggery curse, and the slam of the chamber’s reinforced metal door being closed. Then thumping, and a hideous screech. Skulduggery must have sealed it somehow, and the Dai Li are struggling to get in.

Valkyrie feels hands helping her up and gasps as more white-hot shards of agony flicker up her arm. She jerks away from Skulduggery as he tries to examine her wrist, teeth clenched hard to stop herself from crying, throat and eyes burning, shaking her head to stop him from checking, asking.

Bang. Bang. Skulduggery looks past her to the door, his expression hard and tense, the way he gets when he’s calculating and throwing out plan after plan because options and time are running out. Coming to a decision, he leads her to the back of the room, telling her to keep an eye on the door while he finds the secret exit.

‘There’s a secret exit?’ Valkyrie mumbles.

‘There’s always a secret exit.’

The door flies off its hinges, a battering ram following through. Remus Crux is the first person inside.

‘Get them!’

Everything goes black as the torches go out.

‘Secret exit time!’ she shouts over her shoulder.

The passage Skulduggery pulls her into has a mechanism that Valkyrie would have sworn was actually earthbending, if either of them had been an earthbender.

Rock gives way before them and fills in behind them, the sensation very like Sanguine’s burrowing technique. It sets her heart beating faster and faster and her legs pound their way to sunlight ahead of Skulduggery, spurred on until she has to stop running or collapse. They surface in a park in the Middle Ring. It seems strange that the Earth King would have a secret passage leading from his palace to a random park that isn’t even in the Upper Ring, but the throbbing in Valkyrie’s wrist has reached new heights after the run and she can’t bring herself to care about anything but making the pain stop. She’s never been this badly hurt before.

A great mass of ruddy vines, covered in purple flowers, unfurls itself and lopes happily towards them in the deserted park. It’s Bentley. They are in the meeting place. He happily shows off his florid new ornamentation, the vines swinging cheerfully, the flowers rustling, the sleek, beautiful black of his scales utterly concealed under the garish arrangement. The sight is enough to knock Valkyrie out of her pain for a moment.

She finds enough breath to groan in dismay. Skulduggery laughs, guiding her over with a hand on her shoulder. As they get close, Ben sniffs at her worriedly. She flinches. The pain comes back full force.

Ben accepts Skulduggery’s deterring words and draws back before lowering himself as much as he can to let Valkyrie climb on as easily as possible. He rumbles soothingly. He keeps carefully level upon rising into the air, far above the city but with all the security of being a few feet aboveground. Something about his gentleness makes Valkyrie’s throat close up. And then suddenly she’s sobbing, and her body won’t let her stop. Skulduggery tangibly stiffens behind her, all but rearing back.

The thing is, they are flying a couple hundred metres above the city. Even if Valkyrie does want nothing to do with Skulduggery, there’s nowhere else for him to go. Even if it is his fault, which is not an inconceivable stretch of the imagination, what’s done is done and now the most important thing is what to do next. Skulduggery has seen her eager, miserable, playful, homesick, cheerful, scared, shocked, sarcastic, giddy, and damn near dead, but somehow her crying has passed him by, and he’s not fool enough to think that after two years of sticking to him like glue this is the first time she’s had cause.

The thing is, she shouldn’t have to feel like she needs to prove anything to him; by the spirits, he knows how tough she is (it’s a fact that is particularly hard to escape when she’s constantly throwing herself into danger rather than listening to him).

There’s no one else at hand. And there’s nowhere for him to give her space. And there’s two other things he knows.

How to deal with injuries (so what if he risks exposure? He’s already done that today too).

How to deal with a child’s tears (so what if it’s been longer than Valkyrie’s been alive since he’s had to? Those are the kind of skills that tend to stick).

In the space of a few seconds, Valkyrie has decided that maybe holding her breath will teach her body who’s boss and force her to start calming down. The unsuccessful idea is put on hold, however, when Skulduggery starts talking. He’s rooting around in Ben’s decorations for one of the bags usually saddled onto him.

‘Do you know, Ghastly once threw a rock at me so hard it split in two? Hit me right on the shoulder and shattered. I can assure you, nothing quite compares to the pain of your best friend suddenly turning on you in the middle of a battle like that. I mean, nothing other than the pain of a broken collarbone, that is.’

There’s a pause in which Valkyrie hears a watery, drizzling sound.

‘It was completely out of the blue, too. Honestly, it was mostly shock that made me break down.’

At his gesture, Valkyrie hesitantly extends her arm to him a little. Skulduggery carefully wraps a freezing wet cloth around her wrist. The cold bites and she looks away but Skulduggery’s story provides a distraction.

‘Yes, I suppose I did betray him first. Turned on him just when he needed my help. Left him to the soldiers’ mercy. And yet, I don’t think I’m wrong in thinking he went a little overboard in his reaction.’

The cold is almost hurting her skin, but as Valkyrie concentrates on Ben’s flowers waving in the wind, she finds that the pain is dulling more and more, and the cold becomes more soothing than not.

‘You and Ghastly forgave each other eventually, didn’t you? It was just a ruse, right?’ she asks.

‘Oh yes. Forgiveness took a while. Almost the whole afternoon. And we both had to stop panicking first, of course. Luckily it didn’t take long for the healer to fix me up, and then we were both back to playing Bandits and Soldiers in no time.’

Valkyrie pauses. ‘What?’

‘We were eleven. How’s the wrist feeling?’

‘What?’

‘Looks like the trembling’s stopped, so I’d say the shock’s worn off.’ He whistled suddenly and Ben took a downturn. ‘We’ll be at Kenspeckle’s in no time, even so.’

‘You’re unbelievable.’

‘I know. My medical acumen astonishes even me sometimes.’

When Fletcher, aimlessly wandering the halls of the Sangian, sees them enter, he is not (hypothetically) shut up thunderstruck at the sight of a seriously injured, shocked, pained girl. Instead, he does not even realise Valkyrie’s wrist is broken as he follows her and Skulduggery to Kenspeckle, making comments neither of them listen to.

To Valkyrie, all she can feel of her wrist is the relief of soothing cold. There’s even some ice formed on the outside of the rag from the altitude. Skulduggery keeps a hand on her shoulder all the way in, talking idly to her as if they aren’t probably the Earth King’s Most Wanted by now. Kenspeckle has just finished treating an impaled hand belonging to one Tanith Low by the time they show up, and Valkyrie’s calmness and her happiness to see her friend do a lot to mitigate Kenspeckle’s reaction to Skulduggery’s latest escapade with her.

‘Who’s that bald kid?’ Tanith asks.

Fletcher leans against a wall and grins cockily at her. ‘Fletcher Renn. You may have heard of me. The Last-’

‘New airbender,’ Valkyrie says as Kenspeckle sits her down beside Tanith on a bed, before fetching a long wooden tray, bound and waterproofed. It looks specially designed for resting limbs in.

The wards of Kenspeckle’s clinic are quite different to most other Earth Kingdom hospitals, because most other Earth Kingdom hospitals do not have waterbender healers working in them. Each room contains several beds around the border. The mattresses are covered in oilskin, which is not porous, and a cloth sheet is tucked firmly over the top for the patient’s comfort. The oilskin lessens the difficulty of bending water out of the mattresses later. Each bed can be separated into its own curtained-off area, but the curtains are all drawn back in this room, exposing the central feature of the ward: a wide and shallow circular pool, large enough for a tall adult to lie in comfortably and a healer to tend to them without difficulty.

With smooth fluid motions, Kenspeckle bends water from the circular pool into the wooden tray. Carefully, he guides Valkyrie to rest her arm in it and soon a blue glow and a strong soothing sensation surrounds her wrist, although most of the pain had already waned.

Tanith frowns, resuming the conversation once the process has started. ‘He’s the reason I was stabbed?’

‘Yeah,’ said Valkyrie, adding irritably, ‘And I still don’t like this “Last Airbender” business.’

The issue of the epithet bothers Valkyrie. Practically everything about the situation does, now. She maintains that the rumours calling Fletcher ‘The Last Airbender’ sound too similar to her legendary ancestor’s title. Actually, it was her legendary ancestor’s title. Skulduggery agrees that yes, while Fletcher holding the mantle does seem to be a significant step down from her indeed legendary ancestor-

‘Right here,’ Fletcher says grumpily.

-it is still of value. Skulduggery insists that it’s symbolic of there still being a remnant of the Air Nomads’ culture left, not just an airbender, which is why Valkyrie on the other hand is called the First Airbender: Fletcher is carrying on a legacy, whereas she is not.

The conversation moves on, but Valkyrie notices Fletcher leave the room.

With rumours of the Last Airbender’s reappearance circulating, there was the possibility that Valkyrie would no longer have to be the Earth Kingdom’s and Air Nomad’s prodigal daughter of sorts, or the Fire Nation’s poster-child of peace (‘Look! It’s one of us teaching her! We’ve taken such great strides since that whole trying-to-conquer-the-world thing!’).

Reluctant to begin with, Valkyrie quickly grew fed up with having to be present for all sorts of official occasions, of having to sit through talks from Earth Kingdom and Fire Nation officials about matters of state that really had nothing to do with her. The officials were just interested in the self-congratulations that came of interacting with the only representative of the new Air Nation. The symbol of her was important, but she wasn’t. She hadn’t even gotten to meet the Fire Lord.

Her and Skulduggery’s continuous excursions around the world helped detract attention from her, but now with her maturing age, and now that she has saved the world, more and more attention is coming her way. What direction is rebuilding the Air Nomads going to take? How is she going to manage it? Has she got a ‘special someone’ in her life yet? Valkyrie has become quite good at speaking up for herself (better to be blunt and plainspoken rather than subjected to hour-long discussions regarding policy change in Shu Jing, or inappropriate prying into her personal life). She had also been hoping, though, that this could all be passed on to Fletcher. After meeting him, it doesn’t look likely.

‘I think the Water Tribe’s my favourite nation at the moment,’ she tells Tanith and Skulduggery. ‘They don’t expect anything from me.’

‘What about the Air Nomads?’ Skulduggery asks.

‘The only other air nomad on this earth is a moody, bald, seventeen-year-old boy who wants an arrow tattooed on his forehead. No thanks.’

Tanith snorts.

The boy in question is wandering without paying attention where, as his head and heart fill with dark clouds like they are wont to do these days.

He finds himself in the room with that scarred sleeping guy. He’d been taken out of his private ward’s pool after his healing session for the day, and was lying on the only bed in the room. What was his name? Horrible Spokes? The one who’d been comatose for like two years. It was impressive the old healer had managed to keep him alive, really. Fletcher doubted he’d be waking anytime soon. Probably for the best. What a world to come back to. Plus, he might not want to, what with… like… all those scars. Fletcher wouldn’t, that was for sure.

Fletcher is looking morosely right down at the man when his eyes flick open.

The first thing Ghastly hears is a very loud scream. He sees a yellow and orange blur shoot into the ceiling, hears a thump, a second thump as the blur returns to earth, a lot of groaning, and some swearing.

Soon after, the commotion brings several familiar faces running into the ward. To the consternation of the old healer, Valkyrie throws herself at Ghastly in joy, and the expression on Tanith’s face makes him feel like he’s floating for a moment. Skulduggery of course initially projects indifference, and Ghastly plays along until they’ve both had enough of winding up the others. The hug his friend gives him is the warmest Ghastly can remember.

Feeling just a little tense at the idea of being wanted for questioning by the Earth King while the Grotesquery is in the hands of Mevolent’s remnant Fire Nation, Ghastly’s reawakening is just the good news Valkyrie needs. Ghastly is relieved to see her alive and well too: the last thing he remembers is the White Cleaver’s sights locked onto her like a canyon crawler onto food. While he is still uneasy about Skulduggery making Valkyrie his partner/apprentice, he acknowledges that they weren’t much older than her when they went off to fight in a war.

‘We were a couple of desperate teenagers, Skul. And Valkyrie isn’t in the middle of a war,’ Ghastly argues once they have a moment alone.

‘Granted. But I ask you this: if you’d had all the perspective you do now when we were that age, would you have made a different choice?’

‘No,’Ghastly admits.

Coupled with Valkyrie’s determination not to sit on the sidelines, this is enough to appease him.

Tanith confirms that all four living members of the Diablerie are involved in the brewing situation. She recounts how Solomon Wreath tracked her down (and it occurs to Valkyrie to wonder what Tanith actually does when she isn’t helping Skulduggery and herself) and recruited her, knowing she fought alongside the arbiters at the North Pole and would be interested in hearing about the splinter Fire Nation’s activities. Now, with the Grotesquery in their hands…

‘They’re definitely planning to open a spirit portal,’ Tanith concludes.

Another lunar eclipse is due to occur within the month, so the conclusion is a sound one, and it will probably be for the same reasons as Vengeous: to summon Vaatu and attempt to make a Dark Avatar. The fact that such a plan has failed twice before- once with Vengeous the previous year and once with Avatar Vile himself- doesn’t seem to bother them. They are fanatics, after all.

‘We need a weapon,’ Skulduggery decides.

Fortunately, they know someone even better than an arms dealer.

China took possession of the Sceptre of the Spirit World soon after Serpine’s attempted coup d’état. It has been inactive ever since he tried to use it on Valkyrie, and the best China can figure is it shorted out from the sheer incompatibility of what Serpine was demanding of it. The Sceptre, designed not to harm spirits, was being used to target an airbender, the most spiritual culture to ever exist. China suspects that it could work again if the focusing crystal was replaced, however. But where to find a Spirit World crystal?

Surprisingly, it’s Fletcher who knows. The North and South Air Temples had most of them, he confides. The airbenders collected them from the ground surrounding the spirit portals in the poles, the creation of which scattered them everywhere, apparently.

Under cover of darkness, Ben takes off from his concealed place in Kenspeckle’s grounds and Skulduggery and Valkyrie spend that night flying to the Northern Air Temple.

‘Are you sure you want to come?’ Skulduggery asks suddenly, some way into their flight.

‘Hm? What?’

‘Are you sure you want to come to the air temple?’

‘Yes? Wait, you’re not worried about it being dangerous, are you?’ Valkyrie says, dismayed and impatient. ‘We’ve been there before, it was fine.’

‘That’s not what I mean. Kenspeckle and Ghastly may be right, you know. It is rather irresponsible of me to keep bringing you into situations like this. You’re allowed to say no.’

‘What? No! I mean- I bring myself into all this. This is what I want to be doing, and you’ll have a harder time from me than Kenspeckle and Ghastly if you try to stop me from coming. I’m meant to do this. Is this about my arm? It’s fine, look. Completely healed. You don’t have to go easy on me, it’s all back to normal. Okay?’ She’s obviously blabbering, but her discomposure is a secondary consideration compared to Skulduggery deciding she can’t handle being an Arbiter of All Nations.

‘Okay. Just thought I’d check.’

‘Okay.’ Valkyrie relaxed slightly.

That night, Desmond and Melissa receive a message via hawk from Valkyrie that she is fine, but lying low with Skulduggery. They don’t have to worry about her, she says, but in fact they do.

They have a visitor.

Chief of Police Remus Crux stops by to inform them that their daughter and Skulduggery Pleasant broke into the Palace Vaults that morning and stole the Grotesquery. The Earth King has branded both arbiters traitors to the crown and issued warrants for their arrest. As such, keeping any information from Crux about the whereabouts of their daughter is at best impeding an investigation, and at worst, treason.

Deciding not to tolerate the incompetent accusations of Remus Crux as to their airbending daughter’s collusion with rogue Fire Nation elements, the Edgleys eject him from their house with as much politeness as they can muster. In return, he offers a warning that their daughter’s age will not deter the swiftness of the law’s punishment. Desmond punches him.

They start packing half an hour later. Their anniversary is coming up, after all, and they feel like a vacation back to their hometown- not visiting Fergus and Beryl (as some cover stories truly would be unbelievable) but instead staying in Gordon’s mansion near the Cave of Two Lovers. Coincidentally, this is also the same place they picked with Skulduggery and Valkyrie a few months ago as a rendezvous point in the event of a crisis.

Valkyrie and Skulduggery didn’t notice this on their last visit to the Northern Air Temple, but now they do: it is not uninhabited. Upon scouring the place for spirit world crystals, they find a real piece of work, a creepy old man named Anathem Mire. He was an inventor who built weapons for the Fire Nation once upon a time before escaping the fall of the capital and using his devices to maroon him at the furthest, most inaccessible reaches of the world. Absently, Mire directs them to the crystals, not taking his eyes off Valkyrie. He is seemingly fascinated with the new airbender, unable to stop drinking her in.

When they try to leave with the crystal, things go about as well as expected. Steel doors with old but functional mechanisms lock Skulduggery out of Mire’s wing of the temple, trapping Valkyrie. Mire is insane, twisted, and saying all sorts of stuff along the lines of how he’ll keep her with him forever, how he can sense such power within her, how yadda yadda yadda. Valkyrie hits him with a gale so strong it blasts him through two walls of thousand-year-old masonry. Incredibly, he gets back up, but Skulduggery has melted through the door by then and they take off, Mire’s screams of how he’ll find her following them far out of range of his voice.

But aside from All That, the recovery operation goes smoothly.

China receives a visit from two tired-looking arbiters a few hours later. Valkyrie is happy to see her, as always, and recently China has been finding, rather exasperatedly, that she also looks forward to their sporadic appearances. China agrees that they will need the Sceptre to beat the Diablerie- and as the Sceptre’s owner, that must mean she’ll fight with them this time.

Once Valkyrie revives the Sceptre however, comes a certain amount of disappointment- China’s help will not be necessary.

‘Hm,’ China says as she sights along the Sceptre’s length to no avail. The crystal remains dark and unresponsive, and its heavy wooden case, which she was aiming at, remains intact.

‘I killed Serpine. Maybe I’m the owner,’ Skulduggery volunteers. China hands the weapon over, but he too manages nothing.

‘It seems I was wrong,’ smiles China ruefully. ‘Changing the crystal didn’t revive it.’

‘It has a semi-sentience,’ Skulduggery said, examining it. ‘Perhaps Kenspeckle can heal it.’

‘Do you really believe that?’

‘No. But the world, especially the Spirit World, refuses to comply with what I believe of it quite often. It’s worth a shot.’ Skulduggery shrugs and passes the Sceptre to Valkyrie while he collects his hat and coat from China’s couch.

As soon as it touches Valkyrie’s hands, the crystal lights up and a purple blast is unleashed, giving everyone, particularly Valkyrie, a fright.

Skulduggery looks at the hole in the floor. ‘Well,’ he concludes, ‘it works.’

And then it happens again, striking a bookcase.

‘My books!’ China rages. Valkyrie swears violently.

‘Calm down! Stop firing!’ Skulduggery shouts, and then pulls China out of the way of the next blast. Valkyrie gives a shriek and shoves the Sceptre into his hands as he darts towards her. It has claimed her as its owner.

‘I can’t use it! Skulduggery, I can’t use it! I tried not thinking about it firing but it just kept coming into my head!’

‘It’s alright, no one was hurt,’ Skulduggery says in a soothing tone somewhat undercut as he catches his breath.

‘My books!’

Valkyrie gets as far as, ‘China, I am so sorry…’ before words fail her.

Well, it’s not like China is capable of, or willing to, hold a grudge against a fourteen-year-old. Still speechless, she turns to her other target instead.

‘I’ll pay for the damages,’ Skulduggery says quickly.

‘The damages?! Some of those volumes were irreplaceable!’ She spins away, the heels of her hands pressed into her eyes, and counts to ten in her head. When she feels less ready to crumple the walls of the apartment into scrap metal, she turns back to the arbiters. With an exhale, she hitches a slightly strained smile onto her face. Sweeping away dismay and irritation and the dust of her recently-vaporised bookshelf courtesy of a mortified Valkyrie, China wishes them luck, as they are no longer required to trust her- a difficult task, she knows.

‘We could still do with your help,’ Skulduggery says unexpectedly. She meets his eyes and smiles.

‘Nonsense. You’ll do fine without me.’

After they leave, with the sun edging up over the horizon, she receives another visitor. The only thing less welcome than Remus Crux’s face is the secret he tells her he knows.

‘Where are they, China?’

She answers.

There is a rather… bad… confrontation at the Sangian.

Earth King Thurid is not as confined to the Palace as many of his predecessors preferred to be. He was a soldier and an officer, not born into a sheltered royal life as he was never actually expected to take the throne. But then Serpine murdered King Eachan, along with all the other members of the royal family residing in the palace, and take the throne he did. He maintains his hands-on approach to situations, as if running a kingdom was only a larger and more complicated battlefield with the added satisfaction of actually being able to remove Skulduggery Pleasant from his list of problems.

Once Crux informs Guild of the arbiters’ whereabouts, the Earth King himself takes the Dai Li to arrest them at Kenspeckle’s facility. Aside from a few key problems, this confrontation goes well.

The problems:

The Diablerie capture the Earth King

Kenspeckle refuses to allow his hospital to be used as HQ

Remus Crux becomes certain that Skulduggery and Valkyrie are working with the Diablerie and helped to kidnap King Thurid

So really, the only part that went well was when no one captured Fletcher. Ghastly suggests they make a new base of operations at his tailoring shop.

The Sangian is in Ba Sing Se’s Lower Ring, right up next to the Inner Wall- built onto it, in fact. It’s an area where there is no concept of a common ground level. Some people’s roofs are level with other people’s patios, and there is a complicated network of trestles and steps to reach the stone pavement below. If you step outside on a good day, you can see all the way to the Middle Ring wall and over the cramped, crowded arms of streets that embrace it. On a great day, which, despite the feeling, this day actually is, you can even see into the Middle Ring itself. Fletcher asks where Bespoke Tailor’s is, and Ghastly’s points towards it.

Fletcher nods brightly. ‘Alright. Meet you there.’

Then he wraps an arm around Valkyrie and steps off the terrace into open space.

The only reason Valkyrie doesn’t scream is because the rush forces all air back into her lungs. Fletcher’s glider snaps open though and the downward drop becomes an upward swoop in a split second. Fletcher loses his grip on her and she drops abruptly until his hand catches hers. Then she screams. With rage.

They barely clear the wall. Valkyrie kicks a banner and she distinctly sees sentries and officials gawking as they shamble lopsidedly through the air. The flimsy glider is not meant for passengers, but as the flight is sustained, Valkyrie begins to laugh as much as she swears.

When they touch down outside Ghastly’s, Fletcher does his fancy look-at-me-I’m-an-airbender staff-spin to fold the glider wings. Valkyrie punches him.

‘Ow! Why’d you do that?!’

‘Shock, mostly!

‘I thought you’d enjoy it.’

Now that her feet are back on the ground and she isn’t on the verge of plummeting into the paved streets of Ba Sing Se, she realises she did. But she won’t tell him that.

‘It’s okay,’ Fletcher says compassionately. ‘Flying can be scary, the first time.’

Narrowing her eyes, Valkyrie replies, ‘My transport of choice is a dragon, Fletcher. I’m not exactly inexperienced.’

He shrugs and grins. ‘Still better when you can do it yourself. For airbenders, the sky’s literally the limit. It’ll take a few years, but you’ll get there. Probably.’

She rolls her eyes and sends a blast of air his way, which he swerves away from, and comments that she airbends like she’s trying to sling rocks. This earns him another blast. He ends up behind her this time.

She steps smartly on his foot and he stumbles, to his surprise. Fletcher’s not used to people being quick enough to trip him up. Although, he can’t be sure if she managed it because she sensed the air shift, or because she’s just better at fighting close-quarters than he is. Or both.

Either way, it’s… good. It’s good to have another airbender around, even if she isn’t anything like the Air Nomads.

Valkyrie regards him stiffly with her arms crossed, prepared for more comments about how improper an airbender she is. If there’s one thing that’s become abundantly, and infuriatingly, clear to her in the limited amount of time she’s known Fletcher, it’s that she is definitely not as good an airbender as him. He opens his mouth, she prepares a retort, and he gives her some advice.

She should try moving in the breeze, following it around. Her new style’s not bad exactly, Fletcher says, just different, and ‘living in the air more’ will help refine it.

When the others arrive, she and Fletcher are having a mock sparring session- essentially just showing each other what they can do (she has some moves he doesn’t, Valkyrie notices). Then Skulduggery arrives. His actions are thus:

Grimly stalking up the street.

A cursory glance over Valkyrie to check she’s alright.

Advancing on Fletcher like the almighty harbinger of the world’s darkest thunderstorms and looming over the boy as such.

‘Never. Do that. Again.’ (Fletcher nods quickly, terrified.)

Abruptly pausing at the sound of movement from within Ghastly’s supposedly deserted shop.

Restraining Ghastly and Tanith from launching themselves at Solomon Wreath, the two other bloodbenders he’s brought along, and the White Cleaver. It’s impolite to attack your allies.

Ba Sing Se may have fallen to Avatar Vile’s siege during the war, but it would have surely held out longer if it weren’t for the Dai Li’s betrayal. The sway the organisation held over the city’s population through hypnotism and fear ensured that the kingdom was brought down just as much from the inside as the outside in the end.

When the city was liberated once more, the secret, brainwashed prisoners of the Dai Li that most people didn’t even know existed were at the bottom of the priority list. The White Cleaver was one such prisoner who slipped through chinks in the chaos, who was never rescued but somehow escaped; whose conditioning was never broken; who, somehow, found himself at the bloodbenders’ doorstep and was pieced back together by them, a phrase which sounds much gentler and more wholesome than the process was.

Returning to them for the same reason (albeit a far more literal piecing together) two years ago after Serpine’s command of him almost got him killed, the bloodbenders regained the White Cleaver’s services. Wreath assures Skulduggery that he is on their side- or at least, under their control.

Meanwhile, frantically searching for a lead that will get him the Earth King back and the arbiters in chains, Remus Crux returns to the Library barely half a day later to extort more information from China Sorrows, only for the Diablerie to show up at the same time looking to recruit her.

Crux does not take this well. He does not take this well at all.

The burgeoning cracks in his mind are accentuated by the breaks in his legs when he throws himself out the window to escape.

As the day dwindles and the sky darkens, Valkyrie flies Bentley to Gordon’s house. She has gone long enough in a highly tense situation without letting her parents know in person that she’s safe. The plan is to spend maybe an hour there and then fly to the Serpent’s Pass, where the exchange of Guild for Fletcher is scheduled to take place the next morning. Skulduggery, Ghastly, Tanith, and Wreath remain at Bespoke Tailors’ to work out the exact details of how they will come out of the exchange with both targets safe and the Diablerie in custody.

Bentley is flying low between the rocky crags of the mountains when there’s a distant shout. A second later a boulder the size of Valkyrie’s house in Léi slams into Ben and knocks him out of the air.

Valkyrie is flung off his back. It’s pitch black. The only things she can sense are the rush of the air, the pull of gravity, her own terror, and the pained shrieks of Ben echoing throughout the mountains.

A second before she hits the ground head first, Valkyrie flings out her hands and funnels the air into a cushion. She flips, feet catching the ground, but slips. Her recently-healed arm jars on impact. A massive crunch as of the snapping of fifty tree trunks seems to vibrate straight through the earth. The dragon cries out again.

‘Ben!’

Torches send shadows scurrying back through the rocks and trees. Desperately trying to reorient herself, find her feet, find her focus, Valkyrie sees an empty catapult, sees Earth Kingdom soldiers- no, policemen, Ba Sing Se guards near Omashu- and a hurry-up wagon with an iron door, bars on the single window.

She lurches up and blasts the whole thing onto its side. The reins snap, the ostrich-horses rearing and providing even more of a problem for Crux’s men than a scared, angry airbender. There are thrashing sounds from beyond the ambush. Bentley.

Valkyrie charges right towards the men, sliding on her knees and bending over backwards as one of them takes a swing at her with a baton. The heavy wood passes over her and she comes up, firing an elbow into another man’s belly, following the air currents into dodging between the narrow space left by two more men and sprinting as hard as she can towards the darkened trees.

A fifth man steps out of nowhere. Suddenly she’s sprawled on the ground, her head ringing, blood in her mouth from her bitten tongue. Muzzily, she tries pushing herself up, the world swaying under her good hand…

She couldn’t have passed out for long, but when she wakes up, being dragged across the ground, her hands are shackled behind her back and the wagon is righted, door gaping ahead of her like an open mouth complete with metal teeth. She’s tossed unceremoniously inside. Inside, she’s not alone.

Vaurien Scapegrace was being transferred to a low security jail in the outlying Earth Kingdom regions when his (one-man) security detail received instructions to wait for further instructions. These came in the form of four more guards and a catapult, the Earth King having obviously realised what a credible threat he was. But no. Of course, it had to be the Cain girl who would steal his glory yet again. He harbours a great deal of resentment to her by this point, especially after she flipped the damn wagon with him inside.

He is not, however, suicidal. Beyond being her usual degree of pain in his backside, he is not incensed enough to incur Skulduggery Pleasant’s wrath by attempting to kill her. He is, however, a little stupid, and a lot unlucky, and not above trying to scare her.

The world is still spinning and lines of light are flashing across Valkyrie’s retinas and she feels like she’s going to be sick and she can’t tell what’s going on except she’s been locked in a cage with the dark shadow of yet another man standing up and snarling her name-

-she twists her hands. The air pressure drops, then bursts outwards in a brutal wave of force from the little space cupped in the centre of her palms. Valkyrie shoots off the floor, Scapegrace flies back, hits the wall, and then her knee catches him on the side of head for good measure, knocking him out cold instantly. Valkyrie lands on her feet, her knees go weak, and she falls yet again.

Unable to process so many things, least of all how she did that, she allows the static in her brain to take over once more, and slips into blackness.

It is well past dawn on the rocky ridge jutting out over the Serpent’s Pass. The water far below is brilliant in the light, only serving to remind Fletcher that they can’t wait any longer. Time is up, and that blind guy is already on his way over to start negotiations for the exchange. Tanith’s pacing makes him feel even sicker, and Ghastly’s urgings are the only ones thus far that have managed to get Skulduggery to calm down enough such that the air stops sizzling around him. None of them know where Valkyrie is.

Ben is not a happy dragon. He has been shot down, crash-landed, injured, and now his charge has been hit and locked in a box. Ben is not a happy dragon.

Crux’s men are even less happy. They did not expect a fourteen-year-old girl to almost beat them in a fight. Wasn’t air supposed to be a soft element? She wasn’t even supposed to be properly trained. But at least she’s locked in the wagon now. Sure, the walls did buckle and splinter a while ago, but the private went and looked, and both prisoners were unconscious, so no harm done. All they have to do is get back to Ba Sing Se and hand her over to Crux, and that would be th-

The ground drops away, and the bolts between the cage and the cart snap. The guards plummet back down in the smithereens of their cart, and Bentley breathes a plume of fire at them to discourage any attempts to get back up. He hefts the cage in his claws, snarls at the aches in his body, and soars for the horizon as fast as he can, the scent of the big city drawing him on.

Dragons are intelligent, but do not think like humans or spirits. Now that a human he cares about is in danger he elects to take her to the extremely fortified safe place he knows she often inhabits: Ba Sing Se.

The population of which Remus Crux has by now convinced she helped kidnap the Earth King.

Tanith watches Sanguine come over to greet them. The waters far below the knife-edge cliffside reflect in his dark glasses and the grin he flashes at her is as sunny as the cloudless sky. At least, right up until Skulduggery, his own expression as stony and sharp as the ridges of the Pass, puts him in cuffs and hands him over to Ghastly, telling him to break Sanguine’s arms if he even thinks the ground shifts. Then his attention is back on Fletcher.

The boy is pale and jittery. When Skulduggery promises that he won’t let anything happen to him, Tanith thinks treacherously of Valkyrie. Then she pushes those thoughts away. She should know better than to let her fears overcome her before a fight.

‘Funny, the girl not bein’ here,’ Sanguine muses, as if following her train of thought. ‘Didn’t want to risk us gettin’ two airbenders, did you?’

Tanith ignores his prying and the building tension in her body, only meeting Ghastly’s eyes briefly. They watch Fletcher walk shakily out onto the narrow ridge.

Guild is on his way from the opposite direction. She doesn’t allow her focus to falter even for a moment, attention fixed on the party on the other side of the natural bridge. As yet, the Diablerie have not made any moves. Sanguine, on the other hand, seems happy to talk, relaxed as it is possible for a prisoner to be.

‘You seem awfully keen to get your hands on another airbender,’ Skulduggery comments, ‘considering you didn’t even stick around to see whether she could open a portal for you last year.’

‘Well, you know how it is,’ shrugs Sanguine. ‘It’s cold, you’re tired, and your boss is a fanatic who didn’t bring enough backup and is bent on getting himself killed when there’s another perfectly reasonable, higher-paying offer just waiting for you to take it.’ He grins. ‘And what’s even better is, these people do know how to arrange backup.’

Skulduggery lunges but Sanguine has already jerked his head sideways. A spray of dust and rock from the cliff-side pelt Ghastly and instinctively making him recoil. Cuffs dangling from one hand, Sanguine pulls something out of his pocket just before Skulduggery reaches him-

BANG.

The light flares everywhere, searing Tanith’s eyes before she can look away. Everything burns white. Her ears ring. Disoriented, she doesn’t dare move, very aware of her position on a cliff-edge a hundred feet above the water. Scuffling. The sound of a fight. She blinks furiously, her sword out, her senses coming back far too slowly. She can make out blurry figures in the distance. Fletcher. Guild. And something huge, looming out of the water…

Yelling at Ben to turn around proves fruitless. It’s apparently too hard to get a message across to a dragon when you’re shouting through the bars of a box and hurtling through the sky faster than wind. Valkyrie is instead condemned to watch as not only Ba Sing Se, but the palace itself, looms closer and closer.

The cage is set down carefully. Palace guards rush in. Valkyrie tries to ignore her throbbing head and aching body, and readies herself for another fight as the guards prise off the door and see who is inside.

The fight is very short. Nonexistent, really. The guards are on red alert, they suspect her of aiding in the kidnap of their king, and a dragon has just landed on their doorstep. There’s a lot of them out there, and her hands are still bound. She is seized immediately.

‘No, no, Ben STOP!’

The dragon does, exhaling a waft of superheated steam instead of flame, glaring menacingly at the guards holding her and Scapegrace.

‘Go get Skulduggery!’ Valkyrie yells as the guards haul her away, weapons still aimed at the dragon. She’s trying not to resist, but Bentley isn’t moving and she needs him to go.

‘I swear I didn’t do it!’ Scapegrace gabbles in the back. ‘I’ve never met Valkyrie Cain in my life!’

‘Skulduggery! Get Skulduggery!’ Valkyrie screams. Bentley stays planted on the stone tiles of the massive pavilion, getting further and further away, luminescent yellow eyes fixed on the retreating group. The lack of flowers or any other kind of decoration on his sleek black scales only enunciate his sharp bared teeth and reptilian presence.

‘Do you understand? SKULDUGGERY, Ben!’

Just as the great palace doors are about to close, Bentley takes off.

In summary, the exchange did not go well. The giant sea serpent was an ample distraction for Sanguine to snatch Fletcher away and escape with the Diablerie. Ghastly’s quick thinking sped Guild and the patch of earth he was standing on out of their (and the serpent’s) reach, however.

After retreating into the cliffs where the serpent can’t chase them, it seems as though Skulduggery’s temper, on a simmer all day, has reached boiling point. That is, until Bentley arrives, late, sans Valkyrie.

Then Tanith understands what boiling really looks like.

‘Let’s go,’ he says shortly. Flames flicker in his teeth. Likewise, Bentley blows a fiery plume before take-off.

The guards lead Valkyrie and Scapegrace, despite his protestations, down to the cells. Vaguely, Valkyrie wonders who’s giving the orders with Guild missing.

Walls suddenly slide down in the hall, blocking it off section by section, effectively trapping them. By the guards’ reactions, this is unexpected for them as well. Moments later, Dai Li agents drop down. They are informed that the Palace has gone into lockdown. No personnel in or out.

The guards begin to tell the Dai Li their business, when one of the newly shut walls spirals open- much more forcefully and roughly, without the smooth grinding of stone on stone characteristic of the Dai Li.

Mr Bliss steps through. He locks eyes with Valkyrie immediately.

‘I wasn’t informed that Arbiter Cain had been arrested.’

‘Sorry sir, must be an administration error. We were just taking her to the cells for deten-’

‘We found the airbender,’ Valkyrie blurts, managing to make her voice work. While it is a bit of a relief to see a familiar face, she has no idea whether or not Bliss believes she and Skulduggery were involved with Guild’s kidnapping.

The guards are silent though, and Bliss’s attention is on her, so Valkyrie quickly relates the information about the hostage swap and the Diablerie’s plan to open a portal.

Bliss regards her. Eventually, he decides, ‘I’ll take custody of her.’

‘The palace is in lockdown, my lord-’ begins a Dai Li agent.

‘I know,’says Bliss coldly. ‘And I didn’t order it. Find out who did.’

The agents nod and melt away into the shadows. The walls are lifted, and the guards move on, which Scapegrace is happy about until they take him with them.

Bliss turns to Valkyrie and reduces the earthen restraints on her wrists to rubble with a gesture. ‘This way.’

She doesn’t argue.

The palace seems much darker and quieter without people bustling through its corridors. The halls they travel dwarf Valkyrie. The journey is awfully reminiscent of Serpine’s coup. She doesn’t know where they’re going, but she doesn’t ask either. She wonders what it means that Mr Bliss, the Earth King’s advisor and the man making a move for the throne, was not informed about either her arrest or the lockdown.

Bliss stops in a dark corridor just like all the other dark corridors they have passed through, looking around. He motions her towards a shadow. She steps into it silently.

A section of wall opens, revealing the Administrator, who Dai Li agents wave through before closing it again.

‘You asked for me, my lord?’

‘Did you order the lockdown?’

‘I did,’ the Administrator answers, looking around the corridor and missing Valkyrie’s hiding place.

‘Why?’

‘I was informed that Skulduggery Pleasant’s dragon had arrived at the Palace entrance. I assumed that it was a threat to the personnel stationed inside, including yourself sir.’

‘Were you aware that Valkyrie Cain was brought into this palace a short while ago?’

‘Yes sir. I sent my assistant to inform you immediately. I don’t know why you wouldn’t have been notified.’

‘Where is your assistant now?’

‘All staff should be headed to the East Wing, sir.’

‘Then let’s see if he’s there.’ Bliss turns and a burst of lightning from the Administrator’s fingers hits him in the back.

Valkyrie manages to stifle her gasp. The Administrator moves around Bliss’s prone, smoking, groaning form, her eyes cold as she readies more lightning.

Valkyrie takes a running leap out of the shadows and pushes both hands at the Administrator, the torrent of air nearly bowling the woman head over heels. She sprawls but rolls to her feet, lightning ready impossibly fast. Time seems to slow down as she watches the Administrator’s fingers extend towards her in a very familiar fashion.

Valkyrie jerks to the side. Lightning sizzles past her cheek. She kicks her leg straight up like a door latch, unlocking a gale of wind from ground level that blasts the Administrator into the ceiling. She falls to the ground on her knees, dazed but still able to get back up.

Heart thundering, Valkyrie readies another fistful of air and-

‘Stand down!’

Skulduggery’s shout echoes from behind her. He’s at the end of the corridor, his hand full of warning flames. ‘Stand down, Administrator,’ he repeats.

Tanith and Ghastly run in behind him, fighting stances also ready. Valkyrie grins widely and turns back: the traitor sways, and slumps unconscious.

‘Good enough,’ Skulduggery says, and extinguishes his flames. ‘Sorry I’m late,’ he adds casually.

‘I had it covered,’ Valkyrie shrugs.

The presence of a self-admitted member of Mevolent’s rogue Fire Nation in the Earth Kingdom’s palace, a trusted member of the court no less, is a shocking one. Even Thurid Guild doesn’t try and chalk this up to somehow being Skulduggery’s fault. Finally, the Earth King is willing to listen to what they tell him.

If there was only one portal, located a moderately close distance to these events, the pressure would be on to rush to it straight away. As it is, two spirit portals are possible targets. The closer one in the North is the least likely option: the Northern Water Tribe has increased security around it tenfold since the events of the Grotesquery’s awakening the previous year. That leaves the Southern Spirit Portal as the Diablerie’s most viable choice, all the way on the other side of the world.

Unlike the previous year’s attempt to summon Vaatu, there is some leeway with time. The lunar eclipse is a week away, and with the help of Solomon Wreath and the other bloodbenders who volunteer, the ships that go to battle can be assured of a speedy passage across the ocean.

After a rather angry Kenspeckle, as the only waterbender healer in the city, has been summoned to the palace to get Mr Bliss back on his feet, the Earth King’s war room fills with people.

Guild, lesson learned from his last excursion outside the realms of his immediate control, hands over command of a contingent of soldiers to Mr Bliss for the duration of the emergency. Their orders are to travel to the South Pole, apprehend the Diablerie by any means necessary, and stop the portal from being opened- also by any means necessary.

‘If possible, retrieve Fletcher Renn alive,’ Guild adds. Valkyrie thinks scathingly that it sounds like an afterthought. Mr Bliss however, accepts these terms without question.

Valkyrie watches them closely as this handover of power between kings occurs, but neither Bliss nor Guild exhibit any trepidation, satisfaction, or notable behaviour. They are both good politicians: moreover, they are both good commanders.

Skulduggery, Tanith, and Ghastly also volunteer for the mission.

‘Accepted,’ Guild nods. ‘However, your student will remain here, Arbiter Pleasant.’

‘What?’ exclaims Valkyrie.

‘Airbender blood is needed to awaken the Grotesquery, as was discovered last year. If two airbenders are present at the South Pole then that is double the likelihood of Jaron Gallow and whoever he is working for being able to open the spirit portal. Arbiter Cain, you will remain here in Ba Sing Se for the duration of this mission.’

‘In the dungeon?’ Valkyrie narrows her eyes.

‘Under the protection of the Dai Li,’ Guild snaps.

‘Respectfully, Thurid, you’ve spent the past few days hunting us from one end of the Earth Kingdom to the other,’ Skulduggery says bluntly. ‘I don’t have any reason to think you won’t arrest my student as soon as I’m on a ship out of here.’

‘The warrants for you and your companions’ arrest have been rescinded,’ says Guild stiffly.

‘Oh good. I’m sure the Fire Lord will be very glad to hear that.’

‘I couldn’t give less of a damn what the Fire Lord thinks of the policies I enact in my own kingdom against-’

‘Against a special envoy of another nation?’

‘Yes! Particularly when that envoy commits crimes of espionage, theft and endangerment of the populace, and especially when that envoy may well be acting on the orders of the Fire Lord! The head of a rival nation in possession of a particularly reprehensible history!’

‘A history that ended fourteen years ago. You were there, you should remember.’ At this, Skulduggery’s voice becomes hard, and seems to knock some rationale back into Guild. Valkyrie knows the look that passes across his face- she’s seen it on other soldiers, ones who fought with Skulduggery at the Fall of the Capital.

‘Yes. I do remember,’ he says tightly. ‘But thankfully this isn’t fourteen years ago. Today no governments are in need of toppling, so I wouldn’t think there is any reason for you to recruit an exiled prince and form an army this time. Wouldn’t you agree?’

‘Thurid, Caisson had nothing to do with my actions in the catacombs and you know it.’

‘What I do and do not know is not up to you to decide, special envoy. Regardless of your intentions, you have perpetuated an international incident, and the brewing situation between our nations will be resolved between the Fire Lord and myself.’

‘Resolved or escalated,’ Skulduggery says. ‘You don’t seem to be trying very hard to avoid a war. As I recall, Meritorious also found it to be quite the unifying force, having a kingdom focused on a common external enemy- instead of its leader.’

Valkyrie, and everyone else in the room, has been totally silent for the whole exchange. Had anyone dared to speak to the Earth King, any Earth King like that before? She knows Skulduggery doesn’t hold a particular regard for people in positions of power, and doesn’t have a problem telling them when he thinks they’re wrong, but this borders on dangerous behaviour. If things really are as tense between the Fire Nation and the Earth Kingdom as Guild is saying (and how had she missed that? Skulduggery hadn’t said anything, but he didn’t seem surprised now, so he must have known the possible consequences for breaking into the catacombs), then Valkyrie half-expects Guild to throw Skulduggery into prison right now without a trial.

When the Earth King finally speaks, he is as cold as the icy waters in the North.

‘After this mission is complete, the Earth Kingdom’s borders are closed to you, arbiter. Set foot here again and you will face consequences.’

At this moment, Remus Crux bursts into the chamber as fast as a manic, hobbling man can. Ignoring his protestations of Valkyrie Cain and Skulduggery Pleasant’s collusion with the enemy, Guild sends Crux away and dismisses them all.

The forces head to the Southern Water Tribe as fast as possible. Solomon Wreath, his White Cleaver in tow, volunteers along with several other bloodbenders to help speed the ships on their way. Valkyrie, Skulduggery, Ghastly, and Tanith fly ahead on Ben.

For the entire week it takes to travel to the South Pole, Valkyrie thinks of Fletcher. Regardless of what awaits her and Skulduggery after the mission (what with the possible war, Skulduggery’s ban from the country, and what that means for her) and the confrontation that is coming at the end of this journey, Fletcher is alone. Last year, she was only in Vengeous’ hands for the greater part of a day, and that was horrible enough.

She hopes he is okay.

The cold in the South is just as biting as in the North, Valkyrie finds, but disembarking onto the crunchy snow is far more bearable. This time, she is dressed for the weather- and nor is she a prisoner. Still, the wind finds every opening it can in her clothes, and the sun reflects blindingly off the white landscape all around her.

‘I see tents,’ she announces, and stamps off towards the village with her arms wrapped tightly around herself, face buried in her collar under her hood. Tanith laughs.

The Southern Water Tribe is far less grand than the Northern Water Tribe. The settlements, decimated by decades of Fire Nation raids, have only just begun to rebuild and expand, but after years of living as they have, the chance for recovery has made the people stronger, and ready for war should it come to them again.

‘We haven’t finished unloading,’ Skulduggery calls, and sighs when she continues stubbornly onwards. He shoulders two packs and catches up quickly.

‘It’s too cold,’ says Valkyrie.

‘Stop complaining. You’ve been to the Northern Water Tribe.’

‘It’s too cold there too.’

‘You’re just tired from the flight,’ Skulduggery dismisses cheerfully. ‘You’ve got dragon-lag.’

‘How are you so chipper?’ Valkyrie complains. ‘You’ve got less layers on than me. Why aren’t you suffering?’

‘I’ve got more fortitude.’

‘Hmph.’

‘Take a deep breath! Can’t you feel it refreshing you?’

‘Oh yeah. Yeah, it’s definitely keeping me fresh. Like meat in an icebox.’

‘Feel that breeze!’

‘Oh, I feel it.’

‘This is where you should be coming alive! It should be energising you! I grew up here, you know, I know what I’m talking about.’

‘What?’

‘I know what I’m talking about.’

‘What? You grew up here?’

‘Oh yes. I’ve told you before.’

‘You definitely haven’t.’

‘You just don’t pay attention.’

‘Of course I don’t, because you’re always going on about fresh air and feeling the freezing wind.’

‘Maybe if you’d hitched a ride on Ben you wouldn’t be so freezing.’

‘What?’

Behind them, Bentley lumbers along, carrying Tanith and Ghastly. They have rearranged all his packs, saddles and cushions so they can sit on him bareback, and look far less chilly.

‘Ben’s warm?’

‘Of course he’s warm, he’s a dragon,’ said Skulduggery.

‘And you didn’t tell me?!’

‘Well I thought you would have noticed.’

‘I can’t feel him through all these layers! Wait. Stop. Wait. You’re a firebender. Is that why you’re not as cold? Are you doing some sort of firebending thing?’

‘Do you see any fire?’

‘You’re such a cheater!’

‘As an airbender, you should be able to change the air currents to keep yourself warm.’

‘Oh I should, should I?’

The Earth Kingdom soldiers and bloodbenders will not arrive in their warships for several hours, so the intervening time is filled up making preparations for the trek to the portal and coordinating with the Chief of the Southern Water Tribe.

The Chief, Renato Bisahalani, knows Ghastly and Skulduggery from the war. He is a charismatic, forceful man who has already organised most of the required preparations for the Earth Kingdom contingent’s arrival. He has gathered warriors and waterbenders from every settlement that has some to spare, and messages by polar dog come in often bearing reports of the Diablerie’s movements, but very little sightings have been made, and their current whereabouts is unknown. It is guaranteed that they will be heading to the spirit portal however, and so Bisahalani has alerted Aranmore, the portal’s closest settlement, to be on guard.

Ghastly and Skulduggery take all the activity in their stride, appearing completely in their element as they tour the bustling encampment bivouacked outside the main coastal settlement. Unfazed, they survey the herds of arctic camels and snow leopard caribou that will be used by the troops for rapid transport. It is the sight of this that brings home to Valkyrie the magnitude of force that has been mobilised for this mission. This isn’t even the full extent; the Earth Kingdom’s own soldiers are only just now beginning to filter in.

‘Isn’t the Diablerie only four people?’ Valkyrie dimly hears herself ask.

Bisahalani overhears her. ‘According to King Thurid’s reports, there have been sightings of the rogue Fire Nation moving across the Earth Kingdom ever since Fletcher Renn’s capture. We expect they’ll have boarded ships and reached the South by now. We’ve been patrolling the waters, but there are many that are too dangerous to risk losing ships. If the enemy has landed or is going to land, it’ll be in those places that only the crazy and desperate go.’

‘You have ships modified specifically for waterbender use. They can’t navigate these areas?’ Skulduggery says.

‘You overestimate the number of fully trained waterbenders we have. They can’t be everywhere at once,’ Bisahalani replies dryly.

‘What about the king tides?’ Tanith says unexpectedly. Bisahalani and Skulduggery look at her, surprised. ‘I saw the ocean patterns as we were flying over. The king tides are due now, aren’t they? They could be used for passing over rapids and ice shelves.’

A grin tugs at Ghastly. ‘I’m glad someone can keep up with the sailing jargon. These two enjoy confounding the rest of us far too much.’ He nods at Skulduggery and Bisahalani.

‘You grew up by the water?’ Bisahalani inquires.

‘Kyoshi Island,’ Tanith nods, smiling briefly back at Ghastly.

‘Ah. Well again, the problem comes down to our waterbender numbers…’

The discussion goes back and forth. Valkyrie keeps up as best she can, but mostly she is distracted. Looking around at the preparations being made, she can’t help a trickle of fear that shivers down her spine. The White Cleaver, blank-faced as ever, sharpens his scythe with a whetstone.

It looks like everyone is expecting a pitched battle.

The combined Earth and Water forces reach Aranmore by nightfall. The lunar eclipse is due in a few hours.

Aranmore is a tiny village, mostly empty as all the civilians were evacuated as soon as word came that the Diablerie and Mevolent’s Fire Nation were on their way. The landscape is more ice than snow, rising and dipping erratically, strewn with great twisting glacial mounds which on one hand provide good cover and on the other are great for concealing ambushes. Somewhere in the centre of these warped ice structures jutting out of the snow lies the Southern spirit portal.

The head of the village, a crabby old man named Batu, greets them upon arrival and reports no activity. Bisahalani and Bliss set to work organising scouting parties and perimeter patrols, dividing up the troops as efficiently as possible. Skulduggery takes Valkyrie aside to talk with Batu.

Despite the man’s age, he refuses to be evacuated, insisting that no one knows the area like he does and that they’d be fools not to use him. Skulduggery subsides, but manages to wrangle a promise out of him that he’ll stay under cover and away from most of the fighting.

He does this by saying, ‘I’ll need someone to keep an eye on Valkyrie for me.’

Before Valkyrie can object, Batu seems to notice her for the first time. ‘‘Ere, what’s your kid doing out here?’

‘Student.’

‘Partner,’ says Valkyrie.

‘Partner,’ corrects Skulduggery.

‘I don’t need to be looked after,’ Valkyrie protests.

‘This place is about to become a battlefield,’ Skulduggery points out. ‘I won’t be able to make sure you’re safe out there.’

‘You think I can’t handle myself? I told you, you’re not making me do anything I don’t want to do-’

‘I don’t think that at all, I just know what being in a battle is like, and whether or not you want to accept this fact, it is my job as your partner and your teacher to see that you stay as safe as I can keep you. There’s not much I can do if you don’t want to listen to me, and spirits know I’d rather have you by my side than not, but you need to understand that this is not like we’re on our usual travels.

‘Nineteen years ago I lost my family to war. I’d rather not have to explain to your parents that I didn’t learn from my mistakes the first time around. So please, think about them before rushing in after me.’

Valkyrie falls silent at the tone of his voice. ‘Alright,’ she says eventually. ‘I’ll keep it in mind.’

Skulduggery nods, acknowledging that’s the best he’s going to get out of her. ‘There’s another reason we need you to stay in reserve.’

‘Because I can open the portal,’ Valkyrie guesses.

‘You can what?’ Batu interrupts. They both look around, having mostly forgotten about him. ‘You’re an airbender too?’

At Valkyrie’s nod, Batu says reflectively, ‘Popping up all over the place now, aren’t you? Good thing the firebenders aren’t here yet. Saving your presence, of course,’ he adds to Skulduggery.

This is precisely the moment at which known very unfriendly firebender Jaron Gallow tries to fry them all.

Skulduggery blocks the incoming fire blast. Through the sudden rush of people, Valkyrie can see Gallow leaping into their midst, whipping up fire all around him. Like ants out of a hill, more firebenders come pouring from the icy structures all around.

‘They’re already here!’ someone shouts.

Valkyrie takes off running as Skulduggery orders her and Batu to get to cover. The ambush overtakes everyone in sight within moments.

Valkyrie has never been involved in a battle so fierce- or, she’s starting to realise, been present on any kind of battlefield. By comparison, the Northern confrontation last year was a small skirmish.

Dodging through the maze of ice and fighting, clearing hillocks and sliding down snowy embankments, Valkyrie glimpses people she recognises. She leaves Skulduggery behind as he heads for Gallow. Firebenders twist and contort where they stand, screaming like an orchestra as Solomon Wreath conducts them with his hands. Ghastly is fist fighting Gruesome Krav, Bliss coming in to back him up. Bisahalani directs waterbenders from an elevated position to send an avalanche down on a group of Mevolent’s forces. The White Cleaver, a blur of movement in the midst of an overwhelming number of foes.

Batu pulls her into a secluded hollow out of the way of the fighting. Heart pounding, Valkyrie tries to calm down by fixating on the icy structure providing them cover instead of the battle. It looks like a tree encased in centuries worth of ice. There’s a blue glow beyond it.

Instead of running towards the village, they’d been headed towards the spirit portal, Valkyrie realises.

The closed Southern portal is almost identical to the one in the North, except it emits blue light instead of red. Not far from it lies the slumbering form of the Grotesquery, and with it, a struggling Fletcher Renn. Sanguine is holding him down while a woman who Valkyrie assumes is Murder Rose leans over him, about to cut his throat.

Batu pulls Valkyrie back before she can intervene. As Rose brings down the knife, Tanith pelts out of the frozen trees and tackles her to the ground. Fletcher yells in pain.

Sanguine mustn’t be able to see any better here than in the North, but he snarls and draws his straight razor nevertheless. Valkyrie shoves Batu off and blasts Sanguine onto his back with a burst of wind, running into the open. She grabs Sanguine’s arm as he blindly swings the razor at her, then twists under it and uses his own momentum to drive it into his stomach.

Sanguine roars, an expression of utter fury and disbelief on his face. He wrenches the blade out, blood spattering the snow, and with a few parting promises of vengeance upon her, disappears into the frozen depths of the forest. Another enemy for life made, she guesses.

Valkyrie crouches by Fletcher, who is shaking and groaning, and notices that there is too much blood on the snow just to have come from Sanguine.

Rose opened up Fletcher’s shoulder and upper arm before Tanith pulled her off him.

Fletcher’s own scared eyes meet hers, then slide past in horror. The blood splatter has landed on the Grotesquery, and its shrouded, injured form is rising to its feet behind her.

Before Valkyrie can so much as shout, an arm has wrapped around her neck and pulled her away. Batu is surprisingly strong, and more than a little insane it seems. He’s been working with the Diablerie for years, tracking down possible airbenders to awaken the Grotesquery and summon Vaatu so that he can become not just a bender, but the Dark Avatar, the most powerful bender in the world. He probably would have kept talking, but at this point Valkyrie is losing consciousness and can’t break his grip and Tanith is still fighting and Fletcher can’t get up so she reaches under her heavy layers and blasts Batu with the Sceptre of the Spirit World.

His ashes crumble to the snow. This radiant display of power is nothing compared to the spirit portal opening though.

In the chaos, the Grotesquery made its slow, painful way to the portal, and placed its hand on the cold blue hemispherical surface.

An awe-inspiringly massive blue jet pierces the night sky, casting a blinding light over the whole South Pole. The Grotesquery lets out a piercing cry, deafening everyone on the battlefield. Somehow, Valkyrie knows this is the signal to summon the dark spirit. Purpose fulfilled, it stumbles into the light and does not return.

There’s a shocked moment of silence, and then the sounds of the battle resume even fiercer than before. Valkyrie barely notices.

The sound of the cry bore her to the ground, setting a ringing in her ears that dazes her. She is completely unable to rise. Her eyes fix on the light: shapes coalesce within the spirit portal. There are so many of them, too many to be just the one dark spirit the Grotesquery wanted to bring forth…

The next thing Valkyrie is aware of is Skulduggery trying to get her to focus on him. His sword is bloody. Behind him, Tanith and Rose are lying in the snow, but only Tanith is stirring, red matting her hair. Ghastly is hauling her upright, simultaneously checking over the still-prone Fletcher.

‘Valkyrie! Valkyrie, look at me. I need you with me,’

She manages to, but remains disoriented. ‘I’m with you.’

Something flies out of the vertical strip of light that is the open spirit portal. Something dark with glowing eyes, sharp teeth, and batlike wings. Valkyrie’s heart stops, and cheers echo throughout the dark icy forest as the rogue Fire Nation roars their approval.

But then several other dark spirits fly out, and proceed to attack everything in sight.

The good news is there is no sign of Vaatu. None of the spirits seem to be significantly more powerful than the others, and while violent and vicious, they don’t live up to the tales of soul-destroying terror that describe Vaatu. The summoning is yet again a failure, and three attempts shows it as statistically significant too.

The bad news is, there doesn’t seem to be any attack that works against the dark spirits. Not ice, not fire, not metal or fists, and the Sceptre is useless. They don’t seem to be solid beings, amorphous and even intangible if they so choose. Bentley is the only one able to make any headway, flying overhead breathing fire and clawing at any that stray too close.

Ghastly and Skulduggery manage to get Tanith and Fletcher, both semi-conscious, to a place of relative safety in a hollow beneath an icy overhead canopy. Valkyrie, her head clearing more with every passing minute, keeps her hands pressed firmly to Fletcher’s shoulder, staunching the hot flow of blood. Tanith’s arm is broken, and she is breathing shallowly. Valkyrie doesn’t object when Skulduggery tells her to stay with them, he and Ghastly rejoining the battle as soon as they’re safe.

The battle is now against fleeing rogue Fire Nation soldiers and dark spirits alike. Valkyrie watches it progress, on the edge of panicking. Then something amazing happens.

A glimmering golden coil lights up the night, wrapping around a screeching, struggling spirit with more eyes than legs. As the coil tightens, the spirit changes. It becomes a lighter colour, sharp edges and claws rounding into paws and softness. It ceases struggling, and becomes more docile. When the coil retracts, the spirit flies away.

Beneath is Solomon Wreath, bending streams of water in a way that Valkyrie has never seen before.

Over and over he directs the winding streams around spirits, gold lighting them up once the transformation begins, and dissipating once finished. He shouts directions to the other water- and bloodbenders, who copy him. Soon the chaos begins to die down, the golden pulses lighting up the dark here and there almost soothing.

No spirits return to the portal. They are here to stay, apparently.

Before Valkyrie can breathe a sigh of relief at the winding-down battle, arms yank her backwards and drag her through the icy hollow, which is more of a tunnel as it turns out.

Valkyrie throws her head back and crunches someone’s nose. He yells, and she does it again. The hands release her, and she whips around, using the Sceptre like she’s seen Fletcher use his staff to slam a wall of air into Remus Crux.

He flies out of the tunnel, snow spraying up, but is on his feet again within moments, diving back towards her.

‘You did this!’ he hisses, hands on her throat. ‘You’re part of it! All of it!’

Another guy who has completely lost it, Valkyrie notes distantly. She twists out of his grip, kicks his knee, and runs- straight into three enemy firebenders.

What follows is a blur of movement. The firebenders attack and Valkyrie dodges between, following the air currents to slip inside their movements. She can’t take all three head on, but fortunately airbending is the most useful element for evasion. Fletcher did say she should practice ‘living in the air’ more; well, there’s nothing quite like learning on the job. She ducks under fiery punches, finds herself with her back pressed to someone else’s and follows them whenever they try to turn around and grab her. Coming face to face with another firebender, she sidesteps and they punch her back-to-back partner instead.

She keeps running, and when she realises she’s being chased towards a dead end of glassy ice, speeds up, plants her feet firmly and runs straight up it, flipping over the firebenders’ heads as she comes down behind them in a roll. Flicking the Sceptre, she sends up a torrent of snow and takes off running again, but it doesn’t slow them down for long. Soon enough she has to turn and face them; she can’t both run away and dodge fireballs. She spins the Sceptre to disperse most of the blasts, but now she’s being driven back to somewhere she can’t see.

Valkyrie steps off snow onto sheer ice. She glances down and sees they’re now standing on a dark frozen lake.

A bright flash and a swathe of fire herald Skulduggery’s arrival. He pelts down the bank and enters the fray like she knew he would, and as far as Valkyrie’s concerned, the fight is all but finished at this point.

Then Remus Crux tackles her, still insensible to reason, still convinced she’s working with the Diablerie despite the firebenders visibly trying to kill her. The ice they struggle on cracks, and together they plunge into glacial water.

The bitter cold has her instinctively gasping. Icy water floods her lungs. Her muscles- all of them, it seems- clench up. Crux is having a similar response, dragging her down as he tries to claw his way to the surface. Below the ice it is dark. She cannot see the surface. She cannot breathe. Her limbs are failing her. The cold is within her and without her, and it is fading as she loses consciousness.

And then she can see again. Move again. The water is within her and without her. It bends to her will.

Solomon follows the sounds of the fight in the direction Pleasant ran.

There’s a battle taking place on a frozen lake in the midst of a clearing of twisted ice pillars. A dangerous place for a fight between firebenders, and yes, he can see the ice already thinning and cracking underneath them. There is already a hole where someone went through, in fact. He starts forward to assist Pleasant against the three opponents he’s facing, and the lake explodes.

Solomon is thrown back into the forest. On the other side of the lake he sees Pleasant get struck in the head by icy debris and slump.

The black water surges, a massive, terrifying whirlpool that decimates everything in its path, ice, trees, and people alike. The flood races at Solomon like a tsunami, a wall of water that smashes apart solid objects. With a slash of his hands Solomon diverts it around himself, creating a momentary pocket of safety, but there’s others on the battlefield not so fortunate to be a waterbender.

There’s a finite amount of water in the lake, thankfully. But when the torrent begins to slow, something yanks the current straight back, and this time spears of ice as long as a man fringe the waves. More screams are added to the night over the roar of water, some cut off suddenly, some dissolving into gurgles. Solomon liquifies a spike that drives at his chest, but with his hands full stopping the second flash flood from consuming him he can’t prevent the Earth Kingdom soldiers nearby from being impaled to whatever icy trees still stand. Once it passes, Solomon looks up.

A towering spire of swirling water spins overhead. There is a figure suspended at its tip, hands lowering from where they instructed the flood to expand and withdraw and turn to ice and kill. With swift motions, they direct the spire to lower them to the bank, not twenty feet away. The water coil collapses with a splash.

Solomon looks into the glowing red eyes and snarling teeth of the Avatar.

Like a switch is flipped, the glow winks out and Valkyrie Cain falls to the snow.

Valkyrie opens her eyes and starts shivering. She is soaked to the bone, colder than she’s ever been in her life, but she’s not shaking from the cold. After a brief moment of blissful ignorance, she remembers what happened only a few seconds ago.

It felt like she could do anything, and after she shot out of the water all she wanted to do was destroy. It was like she had one hand on the reins, and something else was guiding her. She did things without knowing how. She’d felt unstoppable and relished it and she can’t stop trembling from the terror.

She’s a waterbender. But she hasn’t been hallucinating her time as an airbender for the past two years either.

This can’t be happening.

Another memory hits her between the eyes like a hammer, and she lurches up with a crackle of ice from the water freezing to her skin and clothes to find Solomon Wreath already crouching over her. His expression is wary and calculating as he asks if she’s alright and tries to help her up. She shoves him off. She needs Skulduggery. Where is Skulduggery. Wreath says he saw him by the bank before the flood.

He’s not there now.

She stumbles up and takes off shakily into the forest. There’s blood and bodies everywhere. She passes several soaking people gathered around a groaning Bisahalani, whose legs are definitely not supposed to bend that way. It’s among one of the better sights. Jaron Gallow, motionless, missing an arm. Mr Bliss, the King of Omashu, her king, impaled on a two-metre jagged spike of ice, eyes open, not breathing. Shouts for help echo all around. She still can’t find Skulduggery.

She hears Ghastly’s voice and runs towards it. He’s near the hollow where she hid with Tanith and Fletcher. They’re okay. They’re all okay. Ghastly grabs her when he sees her, asking if she’s alright, but she can only stammer if he knows where Skulduggery is. He doesn’t. She takes off again, but Tanith and Fletcher are losing blood and consciousness and Ghastly can’t leave them to go after her. Instead she hears Wreath pelting through the slurry and snow at her heels.

Skulduggery isn’t on the battlefield. He isn’t at the healing tents set up in Aranmore. He isn’t among the wounded brought in on stretchers, or the dead brought in on more stretchers. The bloodbenders don’t find him buried in the snow and ice like so many others, or in the lake they dredge by lifting spheres of water into the air, where one of the firebenders who was after her is still alive. In fact, Skulduggery’s not the only person missing in the aftermath.

Dimly, information filters through to Valkyrie about the occasional soldier, or waterbender, or warrior who can’t be accounted for. The firebender prisoner laughs, coughing blood out of battered lungs. He laughs because Mevolent’s Fire Nation still takes prisoners of war. And now they have Skulduggery Pleasant.

#skulduggery pleasant #fanfic #avatar au #fusion #every few years someone reinvents summoning spirits #and it never works #or does it?

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mctwilight-mcd · 2 years

Text

Hey. Heyyyyy. Guess what.

I’m obsessed with Amphibia. You probably already knew that if you pay attention to my blog lol.

I wrote more about the gay frogs. Sashanne this time. This takes place as part of the CMBTY au when Blossom, Sea and Flame are 13/14 during the war in Amphibia. This means I’m referring to them as Anne and Sasha.

So, without further ado, I present to you:

Blueberry and Chocolate

~ ~ ~

Sasha’s eyes are blue. Anne knows this. Logically, it makes sense. Sasha has heterochromia and has been switching eye colours for years now. Even so, Anne still can’t get the thought out of her head. The entire time they have been in Amphibia, or at least for the parts where they’ve met up, Sasha’s eyes have always been brown. Until now.

Ever since coming back, Sasha’s been acting like a whole new person. Sure, Anne doesn’t fully trust her yet, but she’s getting there. Sasha made her co-commander. They get to go on missions together now. Everything about that is great. Except, for Sasha’s eyes. Anne can’t stop staring at them. They remind her of the ocean, of the sky, of her own powers.

They keep pulling Anne into a trance and so far, she’s had very bad luck snapping out of it. Why the sudden colour change? Why can’t Anne keep her eyes off hers? It’s all very confusing. She needs to stop staring, like she’s doing right now, but no matter how hard she tries, she can’t pull herself away. Luckily enough, help comes in the form of a purple menace crashing into her.

“Wow sis. We were all calling you. Are you losing your hearing?” Polly looks up at her expectantly as Anne refocuses on the room around her.

“No. I’m fine. Just zoned out, that’s all. What were we talking about?” Sasha chuckles and Anne keeps her eyes pinned to the map in front of her so she doesn’t zone out again.

“With what we know from mother olm, Andrias is close to being ready to invade earth. At this present time, we need to focus on building a bigger army. We’ve slowed down his plans enough to buy us time, but we still need to act fast.” Sasha stops, then yawns. Grime gives her a look and it takes everything in Anne to not get stuck in a trance again. Grime cuts in.

“It’s late and we should all be getting to bed. We can discuss more in the morning.” Sasha groans and tries to protest but Grime cuts her off. “Especially you Sasha. You haven’t been sleeping enough lately. Bed. Now.”

Sasha glares at the old toad before turning around and gathering her things. Everyone else starts to do the same. Anne sees Grime go over to Sasha and ask her something quietly. She can’t make out what they’re saying, but Sasha gives a slight nod and Grime turns towards the Plantars.

He steps over to Anne just as she’s about to leave, tapping her on the shoulder to gain her attention.

“May I have a word?” Anne looks at him with slight shock. Why would Grime want to talk to her?

“Sure.” She says. The Plantars wait by the door while Grime pulls Anne to the side of the room. She catches a glance from Sasha on the way.

“Sasha has been having nightmares lately. Would it be possible for you to stay with her tonight? Having you around comforts her.” Grime whispers to her. Things make a lot more sense now.

“Of course. As long as Sasha’s ok with it.” Grime nods and throws a thumbs up in Sasha’s direction. She smiles slightly, her eyes crinkling with the movement and oh no Anne’s stuck again. Luckily, Grime snaps her out of it. Leading her to the door.

After a brief explanation of why she won’t be heading back with the Plantars, Anne, Sasha and Grime are off towards Sasha’s room. They walk in silence, catching each other's eyes momentarily every once and a while. Finally, they make it to the cave.

“Well, I’m going to head to my room. Have a good sleep you two.” With that, Grime leaves the two of them alone. Sasha watches him go before opening the door to her room. She holds it for Anne who follows her in. Sasha closes the door and turns to Anne.

“Sorry about this. The nightmares have just been really bad la-“ Anne cuts her off.

“Dude, chill. I don’t mind.” Sasha sighs and leans her forehead on Anne’s shoulder. Anne rubs her back. She looks very tired.

“Come on. Let’s get you to bed.” Anne leads Sasha over to the bed and plops her things down beside it. She pulls out a pair of pajamas and lays them on the bed in front of her. “Do you have anything to change into?” She asks Sasha. Sasha nods her head and goes to rummage through her clothes pile, pulling out a set of pink, silk pajamas. Something she’s probably had since toad tower.

She walks back over to Anne, laying them on the bed beside her set. She then starts taking off her armour. Anne starts to disrobe as well. They’ve done this many times. They’ve bathed together for years. Anne was apprehensive at first, but was fine after she came out to Sasha as Trans.

Anne manages to get her chest plate and shirt off before she hears a grunt from beside her. Sasha is struggling with the lacing on her armour.

“Want some help?” Sasha turns to Anne.

“Yes please.” She asks in a quiet voice. She turns towards Anne and holds her arms out in a T, letting Anne access the lacing on her sides. Anne carefully unties the knots that hold the armour together, helping Sasha get it over her head afterwards. After that, they both slip out of their clothes and into their pajamas easily, but Anne still can’t meet Sasha’s eyes.

Eventually the two climb into Sasha’s bed, leaving space between them. Anne reaches over and turns out the glowshrooms, bathing the room in darkness. They lay there for a few minutes, just listening to each other’s breathing. It’s Sasha who decides to break the silence.

“Can we talk? It can be about anything, I just need to distract myself.” Anne shifts onto her side, now facing Sasha. Sasha turns towards her as well. It’s hard to see in the dim lighting, but trickles of light from outside of the room give just enough visibility that Anne can see the hints of blue in her friends eyes.

“Sure. Want me to start?” Anne replies softly. Sasha nods her head into her pillow and Anne takes a breath.

“When did you change your eyes to blue?” Sasha chuckles into a sigh.

“I knew you would notice. It took Grime a bit.” She smiles and Anne can’t help but smile back. “They were brown in Newtopia as you probably remember. I take them out to sleep usually. Actually,” she sits up and reaches over Anne to the table beside her bed. Anne sees what she’s reaching for and hands over the contact container.

Sasha takes it with a ‘thanks’. She reaches up to her right eye and takes out her contact, and sets it in its container, closing the lid on it after and handing it back to Anne. Anne places it on the table as Sasha flops back down onto her pillow.

“There. Now it won’t get stuck.” They chuckle together before Sasha continues. “The town was wiped out in the middle of the night. I had my brown contact by where I was sleeping. I tried to fight before we got overrun. I grabbed my bag but completely forgot the contact. It got destroyed. I switched to blue afterwards.” Oh. Why hadn’t she thought of that.

“Are you sad that you lost it?” Anne asks. Sasha shakes her head.

“No. It was just another part of me that belonged to my bitch of a mother. Now I get to be like my dad.” Anne can see Sasha smile and she smiles too.

“I’ve always loved your eyes.” She admits. She sees Sasha look at her in surprise. Anne continues.

“Even when we were younger. I was amazed the first time I saw them without contacts on. I know you think they’re weird, but I can’t help but get lost in them. Sorry for staring so much.” She chuckles and looks away.

She feels Sasha take her hand. “You really think so? Most people think they’re strange.”

“Well, I think they’re beautiful.” They turn towards each other. Anne continues, letting her gaze finally fall on Sasha’s eyes again. “I know what it’s like. Having things about your body that you don’t like. If you don’t like them, it’s your choice to change them. Don’t let other people’s opinions make you.” Anne squeezes Sasha’s hand reassuringly.

She sniffles and Anne panics. “Sash! Oh no. Did I say something wron-” She’s cut off as Sasha buries her head in Anne’s chest, tucking just under her neck and crying. Anne hugs her and strokes her hair. Sasha starts to calm eventually. She whispers something into Anne’s skin, just barely loud enough to catch.

“Thank you.” Anne smiles and pulls her closer, throwing a leg over Sasha’s body.

“Any time Sash. Now, get some sleep.” Anne presses a kiss to the top of Sasha’s hair, faintly making out brown roots in the dark. “You need it.”

Anne listens as Sasha’s breathing steadies, signaling that her partner has fallen into sleep at last.

“Damn. She’s cute.” Anne thinks. “...wait. Oh.”

She likes Sasha. Like-likes Sasha. This is awkward. She looks down at her companion.

“That’s a worry for another time. Goodnight Sasha.”

Like Sasha, Anne finds sleep in the arms of her best friend. Her best friend with her shining, blueberry and chocolate eyes.

#twily rambles #twily writes #amphibia #sasha waybright #sea waybright #anne boonchuy #anne boonchuy plantar #blossom boonchuy plantar #sashanne #trans anne boonchuy #tadaaaaa #the gays #also #sasha headcanons #hope u like it

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shadowjax · 2 years

Text

The Dragon’s Blade

Finally at Peace

A03

Nat Romanoff x reader/oc

Summary: Events of Vormir, you were sent to join Natasha and Clint. All of you want to sacrifice yourself but only one is required. Clint and Natasha have family to go back to, unlike you.

Warnings: self harm, death, suicide, (tell me if I miss any)

A/N: So I decided to add more and make some edits. This series will probably be more prompt based and uploads will jump around a bit. Hope you enjoy.

*.·:·.✧ ✦ ✧.·:·.*

Vormir (present day)

“A soul for the sone.” You repeat to make sure you heard everything correctly.

“That is correct, experiment 529. Child born from donors…” You didn’t flinch when the name of your donors was revealed by the stone’s guardian.

“He can’t be serious, right.” Clint looked at the two of you for an answer.

“Thanos retrieved the stone without Gamora.” Nat kneeled down, planning out all possible scenarios.

“Oh shit…” So one of you would have to sacrifice themself for the stone. The two took a glance towards the edge together, hand in hand then faced each other. “I think we both know who it has to be.” The two faced each other, Nat wrapping her other hand on his and the two touched foreheads. “But we’re both thinking different people.”

It didn’t take long for the two to battle it out, forgetting you were here on the mission as well. You used this opportunity to slip past them and assess the most logical conclusion. It didn’t take long for you to find your answer.

“I’ll do it.” Your eyes locked onto the distant skyline, wind freezing the tears you desperately tried to hold back. You broke the two out of their moment and their focus landed on you. A spark form behind broke you out of your trance and you felt something wrap itself around you leg.

“WHAT ON EARTH ARE YOU SAYING!” Nat’s arm was wrapped on the other end of the wire, eyes filled with panic.

“It makes sense.” You placed your right hand over your cybernetic mask and with a simple click and hiss you gently pulled it off your face. You stare at it for a moment and turn it around a few times, then toss it to the ground. The outline of the animal teeth illuminating in the light. The harsh wind piercing your scared mouth, throat freezing to the touch.

“Both of you… have someone left… alive to bring back. Friends and family…” You slowly turn to face your comrades, eyes locking with Nat’s pleading one’s then to Clint. Your eyes softening to address him. The wind pushing back the tears forming. All eyes on you, normally that would terrify you. But this time, you felt confident. “Clint, you have a family.” It took a moment for you to adjust your voice enough to project, it’s been a while since you’ve spoken without the help of your mask.

“You don’t think I’ve thought of them!” You couldn’t let this man die who’s suffered for the past 5 years waiting for his family, they needed him. “I miss them, every SECOND.”

“They need you, you’ve waited this long.” The man fell to his knees at the realization of what will return.

“Natalia~” You turned to focus on the one holding onto you. “We could go back and fourth. You have a sister who will return, a family out there. I have only you.” You’ve both been open towards one another yet haven’t moved forward with anything. She needed space to heal from the disappearance of her comrades.

“What about the rest of the team who disappeared, so they not matter?!” Natalia pressed.

“Blood doesn’t equal family, yes. I love them like family. But I have family too, never to return.”

If this was your last moment, you wanted to open up everything to her. “They didn’t mean to create twins. We became an opportunity for experimentation. The strongest lives while the weaker dies. I loved her. She saw the world before me, I was in isolation. She was injected from birth, I received mine after… The day came where one would live, she sabotaged herself.” Your shoulders slumped and pain surged through your chest. Knees became weak and your hands began to shake.

“I KILLED HER!” Your entire demeanor changed, raged surged through your blood. Hate filled your eyes, your lips twisted. “Became haunted. In mirrors I SAW HER, my voice I could only HEAR HER! I wanted to cut ties, physically! To forget.”

“But I needed to see and hear to survive. So I slit my mouth to lessen resemblance. My voice strained from screaming while they cheered. It worked…mostly.” Your voice became hoarse due to the cold drying it out. You remove a small metal band off your right middle finger and toss it into the snow. Your twin’s name permanently marked on you, it was gifted to you so long ago. “My dreams, haunted. Voices follow. Hallucinations appear in the dark when alone.”

Clint remained on the ground, frozen by the nightmare story you had confessed. Nat held her grip, when she spoke her voice filled with guilt. “I’m so sorry for when I pushed you to open up back then.

“I want to see her again, I’m ready to see her again.” A smile she had never seen before spread across your face, reassurance filled your eyes. “Thank you for opening me up and for allowing me to experience what it means to live. I love you.”

You unsheathed your blade and cut the line and jumped off the edge before the two could move to catch you. The last thing Nat saw was a light in your eyes as if your soul had returned. A great weight had finally been lifted off your shoulders, the wind brushed through your hair with ease. The sight of the purple sky with pink hues made the fall a little more comforting.

“I’m ready, Madeline.”

You left Natasha at the top, wondering where could she have done better. If there was a way for you all to leave unscathed. She spent the last 5 years healing and she was still grieving, now she has to start all over again. She wished for more time. You deserved to be buried somewhere better, warmer. Stone and possessions in hand she moved forward with a part of her soul missing. The memory of you two meeting still fresh in her head. The figure was right, a part of her soul for the stone.

Inspired mask designed