artisticdrifter

[artisticdrifter]

*sits back and patiently waits for the 'why make everything gay' comments*

[artisticdrifter]

hello xiaolin fandom

[artisticdrifter]

Among other things, I miss fall!! It’s the only season where I can wear 80% of my closet bc all I have is long sleeved shirts and button ups 😭🍁🍂

[artisticdrifter]

“There’s comfort to be found in a rat’s ways. They know the right order of things. Clean up after themselves, each other even!” The youth rolled his eyes. Three weeks prior, when the kind but sharp-tongued Argonian woman next door had beckoned him over and dropped a smattering of coins into his palm (with more to be had so long as he offered his help to her “eccentric neighbor” each week) he’d expected to have the run of the house, performing some light chores for an ailing old crone. The rat lady, however, was a constant and overwhelming presence whenever he visited, buzzing about the dusty rooms, grinning at him eagerly at every turn.

She spoke with an odd, tumbling affectation. When he was older, he would recognize it as the voice of someone perpetually dismissed—cautious but overjoyed to have an audience, stories and comments and long-captive thoughts pouring forth endlessly. While there was indeed work to be done about the place, his foremost job was to listen to her, and he made an effort to do so, if only in the surly and halfhearted manner to be expected of his age.  

On his first visit, she insisted he meet the rats. Scampering down into her basement faster than her bent spine and crooked legs should have allowed, she emerged moments later with her four cherished friends in tow, calm and heavy-bodied from her years of doting, gazing serenely at the boy as she hefted them in her arms like bizarre infants.

“Before you ask, no, they don’t have names. I know these cute little faces by heart though …” He tuned her lecture out as he watched the largest, covered in glossy black fur, climb across her shoulders, draped like a twitching winter shawl. When she reached forward, clasped his wrist in her wrinkled hand, and guided him to scratch behind the smaller gray rat’s delicate ears, he was shocked by the warmth pulsing under the rodent’s pale skin. “Rats carry away our leftovers, the dirty stuff that would make us all ill. They keep to themselves; they don’t bother anyone. People can say I’m crazy all they like. But my babies have carried away my sorrow and loneliness, too. All my life. I have to repay them with my love. It’s only right.” She looked past him as she said this, weary but with a firmness in her voice. He shrugged and pretended to only half listen, as always, but years later he would still hear her words as he watched vermin snatching refuse from heaps in the streets, stealing it away over the city walls.  

As she snored hoarsely upstairs, he crept as silently as he could through the gloomy basement doorway. Four pairs of beady eyes and four pointed pink noses greeted him, staring out of the darkness from atop old crates and shelves. They dropped to the floor, dense like sacks of heavy flour yet still graceful as cats, tail tips twining loosely around necks as they stepped single file towards him like a crawling serpent, one body slithering across the packed dirt. A craning neck took shape as they melded together in the shadows, a massive head towering over him as he fell to his knees, reptilian, faintly-glowing streaks in its oily fur. “The young ease the burden of the old, inherit all that has pained them, as pus draws filth away from the wound.” The voice, thick like humid air, rumbled inside his skull. “Sickness covers all, life bursts from the rot, withers as its children flow from its pores and dirty the world, only to make it clean again as they pass.” The dragon’s eye met his, and he could see forever downward into its swirling blue pit. A forked tongue with a rat’s head at each tip flicked across his sweat-covered face, and he woke in his bed at home.  

Years later, Arvena the rat lady drew her last labored breaths, smiling calmly up at him as he held her hand. He smiled back through silent tears while the two of them watched the rats teeming the city streets beneath her window, stealing away bits of debris in the dead of the summer night.

[artisticdrifter]

Some friends just understand your introverted ways so well.

[artisticdrifter]

[artisticdrifter]

undertale but papyrus sticks with you after becoming bffs in snowdin :,)

[artisticdrifter]

shiny gastly for a friend 😈✨

[artisticdrifter]

Treebeard with Merry and Pippin  by https://www.instagram.com/alvaroramirez_art/

[artisticdrifter]

Been working on this sketchpage while juggling commissions, dice, and migraines because, and this bears repeating, Hawke and Varric are a Good Ship. I mean, pining after your best friend for six years and sharing a kiss after a near-death experience? *chef kiss*

[artisticdrifter]

Grew some ugly but apparently delicious tomatoes this year. Gonna draw some ugly but apparently delicious tomatoes.

[artisticdrifter]

inquisition stuff again 

[artisticdrifter]

Intertwined

#art #my art #drawing #sketch #drawgust #allthatyoucandrawgust #all that you can drawgust

[artisticdrifter]

Smile

#my art #art #drawing #drawgust #sketch #allthatyoucandrawgust

[artisticdrifter]

Quarantine with @ianjq 🥺❤️

[artisticdrifter]

🌞

[artisticdrifter]

🎶back in the noughties, I was in a very famous cartoon band🎶