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philosophors · 3 days

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“I learned that it is the weak who are cruel, and that gentleness is to be expected only from the strong.”

— Leo Rosten

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quillscales · 2 days

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Astarion Ancunín.

A lawyer who went missing two hundred years ago at the age of thirty-nine.

Gale tapped the edge of his glasses' frame against the file he was examining. A faded, wafer-thin parchment detailing the missing person's report on Mr. Ancunín. Beside it was the inch-thick report on fresh paper detailing just exactly how he was found.

'At approximately 21:34 PM on the 14th of Flamerule, a call to the police was made detailing a strange pale elf walking the streets covered in what looked to be blood…'

'The subject was encountered exhibiting violent behaviour, resulting in multiple casualties among the responding officers. Fourteen were injured, three in critical condition.'

'Suspect is believed to be a feral Sanguinarian.'

A Sanguinarian. A vampire.

Gale sighed and leaned back in his high-backed leather chair, tipping his head back to gaze at the slowly rotating ceiling fan above. He would have his work cut out for him with this one. A feral Sanguinarian meant a sire who was rouge. A bad thing for the public, though that wasn't Gale's main concern.

His concern was Astarion and the steps it would take to reintegrate him back into society—or whether it would even be possible.

#fanfiction #fanfic #wip #bloodweave #blurb #bg3 #bg3 fanfiction #excerpt #gale dekarios #astarion ancunin

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kadeasi · 2 days

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"Machiavellian" | a. ancunin

Perhaps she had misread the situation entirely. Perhaps her interpretation of things had turned so sour that now her judgment was clouded and dimmed by tainted glasses of animosity. Either way, she should have taken heed when she was afforded a glimpse into the blackened soul that had spawned from the union of these two beings.

Instead, she allowed her pride and trust in him to blind her vision and to twist her love and affection into something dirty, twisted, and base. It was why she was standing here now, crying and berating herself forgiving him any kind of emotional attachment.

'I thought that when we slayed Cazador that his will was all but dead--that he had only marked you in flesh and any other wounds inflicted would heal with time, so long as we were together.'

His features hardened with displeasure, grip tightening on her face so much that she felt his nails dig into her cheeks. 'Choose your next works very carefully or they may be the last ones I allow you to speak.'

'I should have never let you ascend--you only picked up where he left off in his work. You aren't even a shadow of the man I knew anymore.'

It pained her to say these things to him, and she prayed silently that he could forgive her—that she could take them back, no matter how hollow and empty they seemed without him. It took all her strength to force the words out—to fight the compulsion to keep the venomous thoughts within—but her spirit could not remain tethered to this man forever, despite how much she wished that it could.

Suddenly, it seemed as if all the air immediately left the room. It was a mere blink before Astarion had a hand wrapped around her throat, his eyes burning with murderous intent as she wriggled under his grasp. It only took a couple seconds for him to squeeze her throat so tightly that she began to feel faint. Her breathing was shallow and fast—too fast to be considered human.

A red haze fell over her vision as Astarion's glare burned holes into her body. ‘P-please…I can’t breathe.’

Blood trickled down her throat, dancing down his fingers.

‘Astarion, please!

He stared blankly ahead as he breathed heavily through his nostrils. Finally, after nearly a minute, he released her, allowing her to gasp for breath. Her lungs heaved violently against her rib-cage as she struggled to regain control of her weakened state. The first few steps of her recovery were marred by sharp gasps for air. When she finally found enough of herself to stand on her own, she slowly backed away from him, hands clutched to her throat and lips parted as though she was trying to force the air inside of her back up to her diaphragm.

When her breathing stabilized, her blue-green eyes met his and his anger vanished from them—now replaced by an intense desire to ease the pain. However, when he took a step towards her and Durge took a cautious step back, the same blank expression took hold of his face once more, only this time, something within it seemed to stir, like a calm lake turning tumultuous with the wind picking up—the realization dawning upon him and slowly creeping up on him.

He looked upon her for several moments, feeling lost in the sadness and confusion that flooded her beautiful blue eyes. Astarion realized that she had not backed away from him because she was still being stubborn, no, she had backed away because she feared him. Afraid of what he might do to her. What he might inflict upon her. What she was afraid he would do to her.

Her fear ripped at his already injured soul.

'I wish to see you removed from my sight. Leave me. Now.'

His words were soft, almost unheard.

Astarion watched her as she moved toward the door, and when she reached for the knob, he turned to look back at her. In that moment, she saw the hint of agony on his features—felt the remorse that churned inside of him, threatening to consume his entire being. She remembered all too well the voids and caverns that resided within him—voids that he filled with wine, women and men; holes that were once lined with gold and rainbows but have become buried under the darkness of his past deeds. Yet it was this darkness that kept him warm during the coldest nights and gave him warmth when the sun beat down upon his skin.

And when none of that worked, it was her that had kept him grounded and sane throughout the rest.

Astarion's clenched his fist tightly and with one last look, he turned his back to her, listening as the door closed behind her and the sounds of her foots steps were engulfed in the silence that remained in the room. With his thoughts consumed with pain and suffering, Astarion stood alone and listened to the steady rhythm of his cold, beating heart.

This was not how he pictured their future to be.

Link to full story on AO3:

https://archiveofourown.org/works/55386466/chapters/140525068

#astarion x durge #astarion x reader #the dark urge #baldur's gate 3 #baldur's gate oc #ao3 fanfic #angst with a happy ending #series #excerpt #bg3 #bg3 astario #astarion ancunin

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forcesung · 3 days

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Barriss rose to her feet-just how, Jos could not have said. She seemed to levitate-one moment she was sprawled on the ground, and the next she stood upright. Impressive as that was, however, it was nothing compared to her next action. As Jos watched in astonishment, the Padawan leapt across the bota field, covering a distance of at least ten meters in a single bound. As she arced through the air toward the droid, Jos saw another flash of light. At first he thought the droid had fired again, but then he realized the glow came from Barriss’s hand. She had drawn her lightsaber. Jos had seen images and holos of the Jedi weapon in use, but he had never before seen one in real life. Barriss’s energy blade was an azure streak about a meter in length. It made a sound like a nest of angry wing-stingers, and, even over the noisome stenches borne on the breeze from the nearby swamp, he could smell the acrid scent of ozone it produced. He watched, openmouthed, as Barriss landed next to the battle droid. Before it could fire again, she struck a single blow with the energy weapon that sheared halfway through the droid’s torso. Sparks erupted, and the droid collapsed.

—Medstar I: Battle Surgeons, Michael Reaves

#excerpt #barriss offee #medstar i battle surgeons #michael reaves #jos vondar

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reality-inflicted · 22 hours

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A little walksie where I've never walksied before. Found wall.

#photographers on tumblr #original photographers #original photography #artists on tumblr #realityinflicted #photography #art #excerpt #someone else's art

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shisasan · 11 months

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Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own [originally published 1929]

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lucidloving · 4 months

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Ruth Madievsky, All-Night Pharmacy // Suzanne Scanlon, Promising Young Women // Robin Roe, A List of Cages // Hayao Miyazaki, Kiki's Delivery Service // Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980 // D. H. Lawrence, The Plumbed Serpent // Jennifer S. Cheng, "So We Must Meet Apart" // Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart // Alice Oseman, Radio Silence // Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice

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maybuds · 9 months

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from “Brian and Roger Eno: ‘Capitalists want you to be constantly stimulated’”

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#brian eno #roger eno #the i #interview #excerpt

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mournfulroses · 4 months

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T. S. Eliot, from The Complete Works of T. S. Eliot; "The Confidential Clerk,"

#lit #t. s. eliot #drama #fragments #words #drama collection #excerpts #selections #quotes #writings #the confidential clerk #excerpt #p

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sprachgitter · 9 months

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on storytelling and repetition

“...the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don’t. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won’t. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again.”

— Arundhati Roy on Indian mythology and folklore, in God of Small Things (1997)

“It was only once – once – that an audience went to see Romeo and Juliet, and hoped they might live happily ever after. You can bet that the word soon went around the playhouses: they don’t get out of that tomb alive. But every time it’s been played, every night, every show, we stand with Romeo at the Capulets’ monument. We know: when he breaks into the tomb, he will see Juliet asleep, and believe she is dead. We know he will be dead himself before he knows better. But every time, we are on the edge of our seats, holding out our knowledge like a present we can’t give him.”

— Hilary Mantel on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, in “Can These Bones Live?”, Reith Lecture, 2017

“So what makes this poem mnemonic is not just repetition. Rather, it’s the fact that with repetition, the repeated phrase grows more and more questionable. I’ve remembered “Come on now, boys” because, with every new repetition, it seems to offer more exasperation than encouragement, more doubt than assertion. I remembered this refrain because it kept me wondering about what it meant, which is to say, it kept me wondering about the kind of future it predicted. What is mnemonic about this repetition is not the reader’s ability to remember it, but that the phrase itself remembers something about the people it addresses; it remembers violence. Repetition, then, is not only a demonstration of something that keeps recurring: an endless supply of new generations of cruel boys with sweaty fists. It is also about our inability to stop this repetition: the established cycles of repetition are like spells and there’s no anti-spell to stop them from happening. The more we repeat, the less power we have over the words and the more power the words have over us. Poetic repetition is about the potency of language and the impotence of its speakers. In our care, language is futile and change is impossible.”

— Valzhyna Mort on Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, in “FACE – FACE – FACE: A Poet Under the Spell of Loss”, The Poetry Society Annual Lecture, 2021

#web weaving #quote compilation #shakespeare #romeo and juliet #Hilary Mantel #arundhati roy #valzhyna mort #excerpt #on poetry #on storytelling #god of small things

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aurevives · 10 months

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— Aure Vives, excerpt from ‘Hymnal bite’

#poetry #my poetry #original poetry #poem #my poem #original poem #poems on tumblr #poets on tumblr #vent poem #vent poetry #sad poem #sad poetry #heartbreak poem #heartbreak poetry #love poetry #love poem #lovecore #excerpt #quotes

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philosophors · 3 days

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“The art of life is to know how to enjoy a little and to endure much.”

— William Hazlitt

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quillscales · 2 days

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"Seriously?" Astarion admonished, his voice echoing slightly off the closed walls. Petras shot him a glare.

"You have the grace of a drunken sow," Astarion continued, kicking a stray bearing back toward his brother. "As much as I hate him, I wish I was with Leon right now."

Petras scoffed, bending down to collect the bearings. "At least Leon doesn't whine as much," he muttered under his breath.

Astarion crossed his arms, his gaze shifting to Dal as she helped gather the scattered bearings. Her quiet demeanour starkly contrasted with Petras's abrasiveness, her hands trembling slightly as she picked up each piece.

"This is the last one," Dal said, holding up a ball bearing between her fingers, her voice a mix of hope and uncertainty. Petras shot her a skeptical look before his eyes returned to the bearings still littering the ground. "That’s what he promised us, right? This is the last one."

Astarion rolled his eyes, his frustration boiling over. "You can't seriously believe that?" he snapped, his voice echoing off the alley walls. "Don’t be stupid, Dal. It doesn’t matter what we do or what we steal; he’s never letting us go."

#fanfiction #fanfic #wip #bloodweave #blurb #bg3 #bg3 fanfiction #excerpt #astarion ancunin #astarion #bg3 astarion #rapunzel au #My oh My #sneak peak

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lazyydaisyyy · 7 months

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