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goose-books · 3 months

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goose-books productions: a 2023 review

only [checks watch] two months late! view the image in higher quality here; read past years-in-review here; and thank you as always to my beloved @yvesdot for the template!

i shan't be dishonest; 2023 was not exactly the year of max. but i still got a lot of good writing done! transcripts + commentary under the cut, and, uh, take the godsong character roster again.

cws: animal death (february), pregnancy/miscarriage + body image issues (july), addiction (september), self-harm-as-metaphor (october)

january

what’s that? godsong ran away with me for another year? well, it does that. in the second of a plotted trilogy, anna (roughly: what if aeneas were a very sad lesbian?) and her lieutenants visit a soothsayer. ichari wants to kill for her, btw. anna please let them kill for you,

“Have we got to sacrifice an animal?” Sascha said, tilting his head. “Let you dig around in the entrails?” “If you’d like,” the Sibyl said, upper lip wrinkling. “But I’m haughty enough to believe I can make do with a bit of holy blood. Not you. Annadrijanna, if you would give me your hand.” Anna didn’t move. Her eyes widened, very slightly, as she stared at the hand the Sibyl had extended to her, palm up. Ichari’s hand was on their knife again before they could blink. Damn the gods and Avender’s Sibyl, and damn Anna’s quest, the moment she needed it they could have their blade in the prophet’s throat no matter what holy punishment tumbled down on their heels— “It won’t be like the other,” the Sibyl said, nodding to Anna’s right hand. “I keep my tools clean. Far less messy than entrails.” From their cloak pocket they drew a glinting silver pin, topped with a bead of pearl. “Just a prick, that’s all.” Ichari couldn’t tell if Anna’s chest was rising and falling beneath the robes, or if she had calcified entirely. “Anna,” they said, soft, warning. Almost pleading. Just give me the word, Anna. Just say the word. “You’ve a lot of ghosts clinging to your robes, Annadrijanna,” the Sibyl said softly. “I need a bit of life.”

february

while anna’s doing that, ambergris is causing problems. raised in regency patriarchyville, she recently befriended a dragon and received Powers; now she’s working toward 1. making it seem like her family’s manor is haunted 2. killing her parents and 3. having gay sex. not necessarily in that order.

Blood and yolk still stuck to her hands, gumming the webbing between thumb and forefinger. But it was a pretty picture, the mews desecrated, the falcons gone mad and tearing open their eggs. The duchy would whisper that Pyranimia had forsaken even the birds, that the Armindale fortune was suffocating in broken shells, and no one would consider that it was only nature, that rabbits and snakes and stable cats would swallow down their young if they got hungry. But not here, Ambergris thought, serene, picturing what her mother would say when she learned of the mews—the slight twitch of her mouth before her face settled back into glacial calm. Not you. You wish you could. You’re starving for it. But you won’t be rid of me now. You don’t know that yet. But I hold you in my hands now. If I were really a sorceress, I could twist up your body, ruin the organs that made me, the ones that hurt you. Or I could take them out and let you go free. She could sympathize. Abandoned by the goddess, she too might have withered and waned, and come to loathe the children sapping her strength as they grew inside her body. But her mother had made Ambergris too well for that—too cold to love a child or a husband, too cold to shrink from blood. You took the knife from your chest and put it in mine, Ambergris thought. But the gods have been watching. My god has been watching. The storm is building. And before I ever let you eat me, Mother, I will finish a daughter’s work and drain you dry. She raised her hand to her mouth, where her thumb met her forefinger, and licked away the blood.

march

in the spring i wrote a very long paper about antony and cleopatra (the shakespeare play, and also the people, and also the echoes of their story in the aeneid). which got me thinking about the deliberate narrative parallels between dido and cleopatra, which got me writing a ten-minute play where they have a one-night stand. happens to the best of us. i’m very proud of how this one came out, actually, but i have no idea what to do with it. target audience of weird lesbian classicists?

D: I want to be someone they don’t write tragedies about. C: (to the audience) Well. How charmingly ironic. D: If I could just—have—if I could just—just a life. Just someone who loves me. Just someone who won’t go away. Something boring. Something monotone. I don’t care how good I look burning. I want to stop being on fire. C: You have absolutely no sense of flair. D: I miss my sister. (A pause. She looks to C.) C: Can’t help you there. I had mine killed. D: (exhausted) Happens.

april

fans of the aeneid, please enjoy The Scene In Which The Protag Loses To A Tree. if godsong ever drops i will accept a 10-page double-spaced essay about how it is in conversation with the jason & medea myth.

Anna set his jaw. He braced his wooden hand against the trunk, then stepped up onto the coil and reached for the golden branch. It was slick and cold under his fingers, closer to stone than wood; Anna took hold and yanked. The branch slid from his fingers. Anna grabbed the trunk so he didn’t fall backward, ice jolting up his spine. The serpent hadn’t moved. Again he tried to snap the branch. A whisper of leaves as it bent, but there was no give; again his sweat-damp hand fell away. The word that slipped from his mouth startled him, because it was the sort of word no one used in a temple, something Caradorra had been scolded for saying in front of their mother. Another glance at Sascha. The serpent hadn’t stirred. Anna wiped his hand on his robes, straining up on his toes, and wrapped his hand around the base of the branch. If he could saw at it—but his sword lay gleaming and useless in the grass, his calves starting to ache, the branch warming under his touch. Please, Iv, please, please, please— He ignored the flicker in the corner of his eye: movement from the lakeside. But then came the hiss, rising like steam from the water thrown at the charred walls of a burning city, and his blood ran cold. Breaking from the lake, wet and shimmering, came an enormous frilled head. The second serpent, awake and alert, slitted yellow eyes fixed on Anna. It moved faster than thought—legs bunching, coils rippling, launching itself for the tree. “Sascha, down!” Ichari shouted from the treeline, and the gun went off, louder than godly thunder, and the branch beside Anna burst into splinters, and as he gave a last desperate yank the golden branch snapped cleanly into his hand.

may

while working on the actual plot of godsong, i was also fleshing out the backstory, and ended up stumbling into the personalities of anna’s parents (a t4t4t throuple! let’s go gay people). so here’s a bit of anna backstory from the perspective of his mother, who is wonderful and nervous. did you know anna was chosen for priesthood at age 11? probably had no long-term psychological effect on her at all.

It was a celebration for Eli’s records: three days and three nights of festival feasting, of singing and dancing and hymns, of the temple bells ringing a clangorous echo from dawn until dusk. In past years, after past Ivtouchings, the celebrations had been citywide but quieter, briefer—the ceremonial anointment before the temple doors, to mark the new priest as a new melody in Iv’s living voice, and then a song. But it had been three hundred years since Iv had plucked a child from the rings of Ivander to holiness. No simple ceremony would suffice. On the first day, the older Ivtouched helped Anna atop an oxcart, the horns of each ox wrapped in gold ribbon, and led him in cheering parade through the city’s spiraling roads to the temple. In the street, in the surging shouting crowds that followed on foot, Radi cheered her voice hoarse and tried to etch the picture into her memory: the brilliant blue of the sky, the loose tail of ribbon flapping from one oxhorn, the glint of the sun off the bronze-painted spokes of the cart’s wheels. All of those details she might have set to canvas, with a small enough brush and a steady enough hand. But she knew even then that she wouldn’t try. There was no replicating her son’s smile, so broad it must have ached, or the dazed look of joy in his eyes. As if he were dreaming and praying not to wake. As if some curtain had unveiled before him to show him the heavens in shining vivid color, the world created for him anew. Someone else’s hands would mark him holy; someone else’s hands had dressed him in the dark Ivtouched robes, billowing out behind him in the breeze. He wasn’t quite tall enough. The hem was pinned up so it didn’t drag. Every few minutes atop the cart, Anna’s hand drifted down to hike the fabric up, more twitchy than deliberate, each yank a quiet spear through Radi’s heart.

june

please refer to my february comments on that list of ambergris’s.

Ambergris regarded them coolly. She had pulled them around the back of the orchestra into a corner: curtained from the rest of the room by a clot of musicians, the strings near too loud to speak over, the lanterns throwing warped shadows over the floor. “I apologize,” she said, slow, “if I startled you, Captain. I’d like a word.” Ichari’s heart still pattered at their ribs. Again they forced down the shaking need to wipe that faint smirk from her face. “You’ve had a few. You satisfied yet?” “Y-you’ve met my husband,” Ambergris said, “twice now.” So she had been watching, then, probably sunken into the shadows like a grotesque. “Twice too many times,” they said, curling their lip. “You aren’t impressed.” “Don’t let me offend your wifely sensibilities.” Ichari flashed their wickedest grin to see if she would squirm. “But you’re too pretty to go to waste on an ill-dressed fool’s limp cock.” Ambergris didn’t flinch, but her eyes widened slightly. Big innocent eyes, Sascha’s eyes, with all the guilelessness of a kitten. “Am I?” “Too good for him? I’m sorry you had to find out this way, duchess.” “Not duchess,” Ambergris said, “yet. I find—I know I’m too good. Am I pretty.”

july

more backstory, this time in second person about ambergris’s mother, who gets a POV in the book proper. not a very fun POV, but there's generational trauma to explore. creusa is the doctor that's been called in to help jonquilla through a miscarriage; she is gnc as fuck (jonquilla voice: you're insane).

Four weeks Creusa tends your bedside—four fuzzy weeks drifting in and out of fever, your thoughts racing like loosed horses, as you bleed out the last of your hoped-for heir. You loathe her for it, with a bright-hot intensity you can only grasp for moments at a time between unconsciousnesses. You loathe her for daring to pity you, for helping you sit up to drink down your pain relief; you loathe her for doing it well. You loathe her because she is fresh and young and rosy-cheeked and you are soft and lumpy and pathetic. You loathe her because she is beautiful despite all she does to destroy it, despite the way she prowls the manor in trousers, despite the fact that you have never once seen her suck in her stomach. Beautiful the way you were mere years ago. Beautiful enough to make breath catch when those worn fingers tuck her shorn hair behind her ears. What gives her the right to see you like this? What gives her the right to sprawl out in your home, in your chambers, in all her impropriety? What gives her the right to choose to be—this? Does she have a husband somewhere who lets her run free? Children she tends to with the same slight curve of a smile she gives you? Sisters? Brothers? Who does she fall into bed with at night? You want to step inside her skin, to pry it up, to take her apart and see how her heart beats. She’s had her hands in enough of your blood. You want to hold her organs. Your dreams come in tatters. Your stomach swollen to bursting again. The endless hallways. Dittany soaring away from you. Children squirming in your gut. Creusa stroking your hair. Sometimes those are not dreams, you think; sometimes your eyes flutter open and she is there, patient, quiet, calm. As she always is, except for the crease in her soft rose-petal lips, because when you are asleep she does not smile at you. She watches you as if she is afraid for you. She watches you as if she is guilty of something. There are other dreams, too. Dreams you refuse to remember.

august

in august i had a Medical Experience. but first i finished the draft of godsong2, because i never fucking lose. this bit is from the very last scene, where no one is doing well.

Most days she shaved her face each day after morningsong, when she had the strength and a passable mirror. In Ivander she had not needed to, but she liked the look of it, the cleanness; in Armindale Manor she had been particularly careful. Sascha must have noticed, or picked it up from her face, because he scrambled wobbling back to his feet. “I’ll fetch a razor, eh?” “Sascha—” Ichari started, but Sascha waved a hand. “I’ll do it, Anna,” he said, earnest. Her twinge of warmth was faint; she inclined her head slightly. They had done something like this before, Sascha scrunching up next to her to wind his fingers through her hair—hair, Anna realized distantly, that was soot-choked and tangled now. He had spun her waves into a thick braid, then a number of tiny ones, chattering all the while; she had repaid him for it once with a spiraling swirl of mehndi across each of his fluttery hands. Now, though, when he held the razor up to her face, there was a new trepidation in the set of his lips. It took Anna too many sticky seconds to realize he was trying and failing to settle the terrible shake in his hands. “Sorry,” he said, blanching, when Anna looked at him. “Ah, I’m sorry, I…” “Armindale,” Ichari said, soft. Gentler than she had ever heard his name in their voice. They held out a palm. “S’okay.” Anna tilted her face toward them. Sascha scooted back to wrap his arms around his knees and watch Ichari sliver the hair from her chin, one hand braced against her cheek, their hands callused and cold and kind.

september

and we've reached the part of the year where school hit me like a Fucking Train. here's some carronash. that is, MILF julius caesar x neopronouns mark antony, in an extremely uneven borderline-religious-worship dynamic that has swallowed the latter's entire life (more about their deal here). you know, out of context here, they almost look sweet.

Ash shut xir eyes so xe wouldn’t see her hear it, and xe croaked, “I need a drink.” Her chest rose and fell beneath xim in silence. Somewhere beyond xir walls, a cart rattled over the streets. “I know,” Ash said, panic starting to rise cold in xir throat. “I know—I know, but it hurts, I need a drink, Julienne, it hurts, I think I’m going to die. I think I might fucking die.” I know you do, she had said the last time xe’d told her xe needed a drink. I know you do. I know you know why it’s a bad idea. And she had kissed xir forehead like an anointment and held xim when xe shook with frustrated sobs. Nothing now. Just her hand combing through xir curls. “Julienne,” Ash said, near a whine, the craving a spidery itch beneath xir skin. “Ash,” Julienne said. “Am I asking too much of you?” It didn’t sound like a condemnation. Xir insides curled anyway. “No,” xe said, small as a scolded child. “No, I just—I just…” “If it’s too much,” she said, soft. “If you can’t bear it. There’s no shame in that.”

october

i posted this poem here, but we’ll see it again! i think it’s kind of heavy-handed, but that's what happens when you try to articulate an insanity.

2:35 grindstone // max franciscovich there is a knife in my hand. there is a knife i am holding in the palm of my hand. i hold it by the blade. when i squeeze the blood runs down through the webbings of my fingers and the sting is hot. if i uncurl my fingers i will let go of the knife and it will not hurt. if i let go of the knife i will forget pain. suffering and fear will dull and scab over and my eyes will close. when i squeeze i remember it hurts. i remember i am dangerous. my eyes can close. i can cut with a touch. if i let go of the knife it will not hurt to make a fist. if i let go of the knife i will make a fist. if i let go of the knife in my hand i will forget there is a knife in my hand. when i squeeze the sting whets my thoughts and i see the world in all its brutal glory and i touch nothing i could ruin. there is a knife in my hand. there is a knife i am holding in the palm of my hand.

november

no nano this year :( i was being crushed by school and mentals, unfortunately. which sucks, because i've had a streak since 2018! but alas. next year. i did write a little more godsongverse backstory, set in anna's old city and starring the book's hector and andromache figures (ira and lucia, respectively; imi and nia are their twin toddlers).

Here was a part of the war that would not be told: that sometimes it would be late, very late, the sun sunken into the earth and the children in bed, before Ira came home. That Imi and Nia were asleep, Lucia suspected, was not an effect but a reason, because sometimes her heart-knit lover was nigh unrecognizable in the doorway, hunched and haggard, bathed in gore, and the twins would have been terrified. Blasphemous, maybe, for Lucia to see the dried blood cracking in rivulets on Ira’s skin and think of Iv’s shattered face. But even blasphemy was better than the other reason she shied from the thought—that likening Ira to the holiest of martyrs felt like giving up. Giving into what she suspected everyone else already thought inevitable. After the first night she had stopped fearing the worst. There would have been no missing the uproar in the city. Her fears were simpler: how much blood there might be, how many times Ira would wake in the night. But unless the wailing rose high enough to shake the temple down, the sixth wall of Ivander stood, and Lucia sat at home with the spinning and waited.

december

and… would you look at that, more godsong. i did write non-godsong things this year! but most of them are short stories i'm hoping to send out for publication, so i'm not keen on sharing yet. this, however, is literally a godsong x hadestown AU that i’ve been calling spadestown, and if i ever finish it i Will be posting it here. in a beautiful alternate world, godsong is an annaspades romcom. (it's not even that in this AU.)

Lying on the bed watching Anna write, Spades said, “You know xim. The queen.” Not an accusation, exactly. But a search for solid ground, an escape from the ice shifting under her. At the desk, Anna tapped the end of his pen against his lips. Distracting lips, unfairly plush. “Yes,” he said after an absent moment. “It is—natural. Xe returns every summer.” “Only here?” “As far back as I remember.” Anna blinked; Spades watched it sink in. “But not where you come from.” Spades shrugged. There were gods where she had come from, too. Not the sort one poured drinks for. “I suppose we can’t all be holy,” she said, reaching out across the narrow span of the room to his chair. Anna took her hand, his skin warm against hers, his pen calluses already familiar—the tip of his second finger, the inside of his third. When she closed her eyes, Ash’s grin flashed behind her lids. Xe must have known who she was. Gods always knew. “Sing it again,” she said, patting the bed beside her. Anna was staring at the page. He hummed another bar under his breath. Spades thought she might have to get up, to close the journal for him, to slip the pen from his hands and kiss him and hope he kissed back instead of dreaming louder. Then Anna said, “Sing what?” Spades tipped his chair back to hear him yelp. “What do you think, dipshit?” “My song?” Anna said, and there was his little winking smile. “Or our wedding hymn?” There was only one bed in the attic room, so they slept curled together. Invariably Spades woke with silky hair in her mouth. Not bad, she figured, for a night always warm.

and that's a wrap! i know i didn't post much this year, but i'm still hard at work at various odds and ends. thank you for sticking around, and i hope everyone reading this has a wonderful 2024!

#max.txt #max actually writes #year in review #okay tags time innit.#godsong tag #anna ivtouched #ichari felidore #sascha armindale #ambergris armindale #jonquilla armindale #julienne carron #ash pyrris #hellenira ivtouched #lucia tag #< poor girl doesn't have a last name yet. that's on me #cinquedea spades

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enionline · 6 years

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#cinquedea #sword #kunsthistorischesmuseum #wien #16thcentury #italianart #spade #dagona #dagger #lama #incisione #acquaforte

#acquaforte #spade #lama #wien #dagger #italianart #kunsthistorischesmuseum #incisione #16thcentury #sword #dagona #cinquedea

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berufewelt · 6 years

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Der Schwertner gehört zu den Klingenschmieden und ist heute nicht nur in unseren Breiten ein sehr seltener Beruf.

Er stellte sog. blanke Hieb- und Stichwaffen her, d.h. er schmiedet sowohl Schwerter als auch Degen, Säbel und Dolche, sowie Hellebarden-, Lanzen- und Speerspitzen.

“altgermanisch”

Rußland

Berufsbezeichnungen

Schwertner, Schwertschmied, Schwertmacher, Schwertfeger, Schwertfurbe, Schwertfürbel (veraltet) Swerterer, Swertfäger, Swertfeger, Swertueger, Schwerdtfeger, Schwerthfeger, Zweertvager

Bulgarisch: Dänisch: Englisch: Finnisch: Französisch: Italienisch: Niederländisch: Norwegisch: Polnisch: ковач меч sværdsmed swordsmith, sword maker miekkaseppä armurier fabbro di spade zwaardsmid, zweertfegher sverdsmed kowal mieczy Portugiesisch: Russisch: Schwedisch: Slowakisch: Slowenisch: Spanisch: Tschechisch: Türkisch: Ungarisch: ferreiro de espadas кузнец мечей svärdsmed kováč meč kovač mečev herrero de espadas kovář meč demirci kılıç kovács kard

verwandte Berufe: andere Schmiede und Waffenschmied, Metallarbeiter

Zunft- und Berufszeichen

Schwertschmied / Schwertfeger

Vor dem Hochmittelalter schliffen die Schwertschmiede die Klingen ihrer Schwerter selbst. Ab dem 12. Jahrhundert findet man dann spezialisierte Schwertfeger. Diese – auch Schleifer genannt – arbeiteten, wie die Scherenschleifer, an einem rund umlaufenden Schleifstein; kleinere wurden mit einem Fußbrett, größere durch Kurbeln angetrieben. Seit dem 14. Jahrhundert wurden Schleifsteine von bis zu zwei Metern Durchmesser durch Wasserkraft angetrieben.

Die ursprüngliche Arbeit der Schwertfeger begann nachdem das Schmieden und Härten getan war. Seine Aufgabe war es, die Klinge und die ggf. eingearbeiteten Hohlkehlen (fälschlicherweise oft ‘Blutrinnen’ oder ‘Blutbahnen’ genannt) zu reinigen, sie auf einem Schleifstein blank zu schleifen und zu polieren. Zum Polieren setzte er Polierstähle, Polierachate, Schmirgelpulver und Polierhölzer ein.

1698 – [Christoph Weigel]

Der Schwerdt-Feger Dem Schaf, das dulden kan, steht keine Wollfsklau an.

Wer auff deß Lamms bedornten Wegen, Ihm folgen will zur Krom und Segen, der steiget durch Gedult empor. Der Feinde unverdientes Tchelten, muß er mit segnen so vergelten, wie ihm sein Heyland gienge vor.

1505, Krakau

Rathaus Wernigerode

1903, Suhl

1950, Wien

1523

1603

1649

1669

Seit der maschinellen Schwertfertigung bezeichnete man als Schwertfeger einen Schmied, der die Endmontage von Schwertern, Degen, Säbeln, Dolchen und ähnlichen Waffen vornahm. Er setzte Klinge und Gefäß (=Griff) zusammen, schützte sie mit Fett gegen Korrosion und fügte sie in ihre Scheide.

‘Sword Maker Manufactory in Philadelphia’ – um 1910, USA

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Erzeugnisse der Schwertner

Frankreich, 1565

1880

um 1940

Schwerter

Ein S c h w e r t ist eine Hieb- und Stichwaffe mit gerader oder gebogener, ein- oder zweischneidiger Klinge. Das Schwertende – sog. ‘Ort’ – kann stumpf (Schwert zum Hauen) oder spitz (Schwert zum Stechen) sein. Neben vielfältigen individuellen Benennungen unterscheidet man allgemein

um 1300

Reichsschwert, Zermeonien-schwert und Zepter – 1755

. nach Länge:

Kurzschwert

Langschwert

nach Gebrauch:

Kampfschwert

Richtschwert

Reichsschwert

Zeremonienschwert

Verschiedene Schwerter von der Antike bis zum Mittelalter

um 1570, Österreich

Griffe mittelalterlicher Schwerter

Die Konstruktion und Teile eines mittelalterlichen Schwertes

1 – Der Griff oder auch das Gefäß 2 – Der Knauf dient als Abschluss des Schwertes und soll das Abrutschen des Schwertes aus der Hand verhindern. Zudem bildet der Knauf ein Gegengewicht zur Klinge, was die Schwerpunktlage verändert und die Schwertführung verbessert. 3 – Die Angel (auch ‘Erl’ genannt) bildet den Teil der Klinge, der durch die Parierstange, Griff und den Knauf führt und den Niet für den Knauf bildet. 4 – Das Heft dient der Handhabung des Schwertes und besteht meist aus Hartholz, welches die Angel umschließt und mit einem Geflecht aus Leder, Stoff oder Metall umwickelt ist. 5 – Die Parierstange soll Schläge des Gegners abfangen und verhindern, dass die Hand auf die Klinge rutscht. 6 – Die Klinge 7 – Die Chappe (sog. ‘Regenleder’) 8 – Die Fehlschärfe ist der Bereich (am Anfang der Klinge kurz vor der Parierstange), der nicht geschliffen wurde. Bei großen, zweihändigen Schwertern kann die Fehlschärfe einen großen Bereich der Klinge einnehmen und wird dann bei verschiedenen Schlagversionen zeitweise mit der zweiten Hand gegriffen. Bei einigen Spätrenaissance-Zweihändern wurde dieser Bereich daher durch eine zweite Parierstange (sog. ‘Parierhaken’) geschützt, die im Gegensatz zur Parierstange immer ein ausgeschmiedeter Teil der Klinge ist. 9 – Die Hohlkehle dient der Gewichtsreduzierung der Klinge, ist aber keine Abflussrille für das Blut des Gegners. Oft wurden darin Markenbezeichnung, Namen oder Segenssprüche eingearbeitet. 10 – Die Schneide ist der scharf geschliffene Teil der Klinge und bestand oft aus in die Klinge eingelassenen ‘Schneideleisten’ aus besonders hartem und schneidhaltigem Stahl. 11 – Der Mittelgrat einer Klinge dient der Versteifung derselben. 12 – Der Ort ist die Klingenspitze. 13 – Die Schwertscheide soll die Klinge und den Träger schützen; besteht aus Holz, Leder, Fell oder Metall. Die Scheiden mittelalterlicher Schwerter wurde wohl auch mit Fell gefüttert, in dem sich auch Pflegeöle gut hielten. 14 – Das Scheidenmundblech soll das Leder vor der Schneide des Schwertes schützen und das Eingleiten der Klinge erleichtern. Daran befinden sich meistens diverse Tragebügel oder Schlaufen, um sie zu befestigen. 15 – Das Ortband schließt die Schwertscheide schützend nach unten ab.

Degen

Ein Degen ist eine vorwiegend auf den Stich ausgelegte zweischneidige Klingenwaffe (Stichdegen). Eine Ausnahme stellt eine im 16. Jahrhundert in Spanien und Italien für die berittenen Truppen eingeführt Abart mit einschneidiger Klinge und zweischneidiger Spitze dar (Haudegen).

1, 2, 12 – jüngere preußische Degen (19. Jh) 3, 4 – Degen Philipps II. von Spanien (16. Jh) 5 – Degen Friedrichs d.Gr. (18. Jh) 6 – Degen des Herzogs Friedrich Heinrich von Nassau (19. Jh) 7 – Degen Napoleons I. (19. Jh) 8 – Klinge der Colada des Cid mit Gefäß (16. Jh) 9 – Degen aus Toledo (17. Jh) 10, 11 – ältere preußische Degen (18. Jh) Mitte – Schild mit Degenbrecher

Je nach historischem Kontext wurden im Deutschen allerdings auch eine Reihe von anderen Waffen als Degen bezeichnet. Demnach konnte/kann Degen bedeuten:

Offiziersdegen um 1850

Sportdegen mit frz. Griff

– im 14. bis 17. Jahrhundert: ein Dolch – im 16. bis 17. Jahrhundert: ein allgemeines Synonym für Schwert (Rapier)

– im 18. bis Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts: ein Bestandteil der vollständigen Garderobe von Offizieren und Adligen (Offiziersdegen, Uniformdegen, Paradedegen, Galadegen, Galanteriedegen, Trauerdegen, Ehrendegen etc.)

Ehrendegen von 1850

– im 18. bis 19. Jahrhundert: eine Fechtwaffe, u.a. im sog. ‘Akademischen Fechten’ (Fechtdegen, Raufdegen, Stoßdegen) – im 20. Jahrhundert: eine dreikantige, elastische Stichwaffe des modernen Degen-fechtens (Sportdegen)

Dolche

Ein Dolch ist eine kurze ein- bis mehrschneidige Stichwaffe mit meist symmetrischem Griff. Allgemein spricht man bei einer Klingenlänge bis 40 cm von Dolchen, darüber hinaus bis etwa 80 cm bereits von Kurzschwertern.

‘Historische Dolche’ [Walter Hough]

2. Jahrhundert v. Chr, Österreich

um 1575

Scheibndolch 14. Jh

Nierendolch 1450–1500

Cinquedea um 1500

It. Cinquedea um 1500

Parierdolch um 1565

Parierdolch um 1580

Parierdolch 16. Jh

Landsknecht 16. Jh

Frz. Poignard 16. Jh

Osman. Dolch 17. Jh

Sard. Dolch 18. Jh

Vierkantstilett um 1850

18.-19. Jahrhundert

Hawaii

Indisch. Dolch 18. Jh

Ind. Chilanum 18. Jh

Ind. Jambiya 18. Jh

Jemen. Jambiya 18. Jh

diverse Hieb-und Stichwaffen

altägyptisch

Mittelalter

um 1900, Afghanistan

Das Schmieden von Schwertern

… ist eine langwieriger, hochkomplizierter Prozess – eine hohe Kunst, die insbesondere in Japan kultiviert wurde.

Korehira Watanabe ist einer der letzten verbliebenen japanischen Schwertschmiede. Er hat 40 Jahre damit verbracht, sein Handwerk zu verfeinern, um Koto, eine Art Schwert, das aus der Heian- und Kamakura-Zeit stammt, nachzubilden.

Prähistorisches

Urzeit

‘Urzeitliche Klingen’ [Walter Hough]

340000-300000 v. Chr., England

Papua-Neuguinea

Frankreich, 22.000-18.000 v. Chr. (Solutréenzeit)

um 2900 v. Chr.

Dänemark, um 1600 v. Chr.

Bronzezeit

Die bis dato ältesten Schwerter, datiert in die Mitte des 4. vorchristlichen Jahrtausends, wurden auf dem Gebiet der heutigen Türkei in Arslantepe geborgen. Ebenda wurde durch dem Kupfer beigemischtes Arsen die sog. ‘Arsenbronze’ erzeugt, was schon so früh das Gießen von Schwertern ermöglichte. Mit großem Abstand zu jenen Funden treten um 2500 v. Chr. erneut bronzene Schwerter in Kleinasien auf; diese nun v.a. mit Zinnbeimischungen. Ab Beginn des 2. vorchristlichen Jahrtausends datierte Funde belegen Bronzeschwerter im gesamten ägäischen Kulturraum. Nur wenig später finden sich Bronzedolche auch in Mittel- und Nordeuropa – um ca. 1.600 v. Chr. entwickeln sich daraus dann lange Schwerter.

Türkei, um 3500 v. Chr.

ca. 1900–1700 v. Chr.

Österreich, um 1500 v. Chr.

Der Schwertner

Der Schwertner gehört zu den Klingenschmieden und ist heute nicht nur in unseren Breiten ein sehr seltener Beruf.

Der Schwertner Der Schwertner gehört zu den Klingenschmieden und ist heute nicht nur in unseren Breiten ein sehr seltener Beruf.

#Degen #Dolch #Hellebarde #Klingenschmied #Säbel #Schwert #Schwertfeger #Schwertner #Schwertschmied

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berufedieserwelt · 6 years

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Der Schwertner gehört zu den Klingenschmieden und ist heute nicht nur in unseren Breiten ein sehr seltener Beruf.

Er stellte sog. blanke Hieb- und Stichwaffen her, d.h. er schmiedet sowohl Schwerter als auch Degen, Säbel und Dolche, sowie Hellebarden-, Lanzen- und Speerspitzen.

“altgermanisch”

Rußland

Berufsbezeichnungen

Schwertner, Schwertschmied, Schwertmacher, Schwertfeger, Schwertfurbe, Schwertfürbel (veraltet) Swerterer, Swertfäger, Swertfeger, Swertueger, Schwerdtfeger, Schwerthfeger, Zweertvager

verwandte Berufe: andere Schmiede und Waffenschmied, Metallarbeiter

Zunft- und Berufszeichen

Schwertschmied / Schwertfeger

1698 – [Christoph Weigel]

Der Schwerdt-Feger Dem Schaf, das dulden kan, steht keine Wollfsklau an.

1505, Krakau

Rathaus Wernigerode

1903, Suhl

1950, Wien

1523

1603

1649

1669

‘Sword Maker Manufactory in Philadelphia’ – um 1910, USA

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Erzeugnisse der Schwertner

Frankreich, 1565

1880

um 1940

Schwerter

um 1300

Reichsschwert, Zermeonien-schwert und Zepter – 1755

. nach Länge:

Kurzschwert

Langschwert

nach Gebrauch:

Kampfschwert

Richtschwert

Reichsschwert

Zeremonienschwert

Verschiedene Schwerter von der Antike bis zum Mittelalter

um 1570, Österreich

Griffe mittelalterlicher Schwerter

Die Konstruktion und Teile eines mittelalterlichen Schwertes

Degen

Je nach historischem Kontext wurden im Deutschen allerdings auch eine Reihe von anderen Waffen als Degen bezeichnet. Demnach konnte/kann Degen bedeuten:

Offiziersdegen um 1850

Sportdegen mit frz. Griff

– im 14. bis 17. Jahrhundert: ein Dolch – im 16. bis 17. Jahrhundert: ein allgemeines Synonym für Schwert (Rapier)

Ehrendegen von 1850

Dolche

‘Historische Dolche’ [Walter Hough]

2. Jahrhundert v. Chr, Österreich

um 1575

Scheibndolch 14. Jh

Nierendolch 1450–1500

Cinquedea um 1500

It. Cinquedea um 1500

Parierdolch um 1565

Parierdolch um 1580

Parierdolch 16. Jh

Landsknecht 16. Jh

Frz. Poignard 16. Jh

Osman. Dolch 17. Jh

Sard. Dolch 18. Jh

Vierkantstilett um 1850

18.-19. Jahrhundert

Hawaii

Indisch. Dolch 18. Jh

Ind. Chilanum 18. Jh

Ind. Jambiya 18. Jh

Jemen. Jambiya 18. Jh

diverse Hieb-und Stichwaffen

altägyptisch

Mittelalter

um 1900, Afghanistan

Das Schmieden von Schwertern

… ist eine langwieriger, hochkomplizierter Prozess – eine hohe Kunst, die insbesondere in Japan kultiviert wurde.

Prähistorisches

Urzeit

‘Urzeitliche Klingen’ [Walter Hough]

340000-300000 v. Chr., England

Papua-Neuguinea

Frankreich, 22.000-18.000 v. Chr. (Solutréenzeit)

um 2900 v. Chr.

Dänemark, um 1600 v. Chr.

Bronzezeit

Türkei, um 3500 v. Chr.

ca. 1900–1700 v. Chr.

Österreich, um 1500 v. Chr.

Der Schwertner Der Schwertner gehört zu den Klingenschmieden und ist heute nicht nur in unseren Breiten ein sehr seltener Beruf.

#Degen #Dolch #Hellebarde #Klingenschmied #Säbel #Schwert #Schwertfeger #Schwertner #Schwertschmied

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goose-books · 1 year

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view the image in higher quality here; thank you as always to my beloved @yvesdot for the template! last year’s year in review can be found here.

this was the year of godsong eating my brain forever and ever amen. and a good year for writing overall; i wrote a lot of very silly for-fun-to-share-with-friends stuff, and that felt very nice, particularly when i was in the Productivity Torment Labyrinth with school. transcripts and month-by-month details under the cut! (take the godsong character roster; you might need it.)

cws: alcohol (february), pregnancy (april)

january

i started the first draft of the first book of godsong for nanowrimo 2021; in january, i wrapped up the draft with the last plotline. godsong is split into three plotlines, each driven by a major character (our friends from the intro post!). though these plotlines will be integrated in the final draft, i wrote each of them separately, for coherency reasons; last to go was ambergris’s, which i think of, affectionately, as the HTTYD movie for dykes on mood stabilizers. interspecies pack bond except both members hate everybody else in the world. [forbidden friendship playing]

Vaska let her reapply the paste to injuries slick with saliva. Ambergris was aware of his gaze on her, his head tilted at the very corner of her vision, but she kept her focus on her unsteady hands, until she had finished dressing the wounds and she turned to find Vaska’s head right next to her own.

Her breath caught. This close, so near he could have pressed his snout against her nose, his eye was brilliantly bright, gold in the sunlight, shot through with darker rays. There were no whites, and a slit pupil rather than a round one, and yet Ambergris couldn’t shake the thought that he looked unnervingly human.

The other side of his face reeked with infection, so swollen she could barely see the empty eye socket. Long-dried blood trailed down his neck. The medicine was cold in her hand. She watched his gaze move, slow and deliberate, to the vial, before he raised his stare back to hers.

Slowly, tremblingly, Ambergris shuffled her crutches beneath her arms and held her hand out. Not reaching for his snout, nor straight for his injuries, but to open her palm beneath his head, just under his chin.

For a moment they stood in silence. Both of them frozen. Both of them, Ambergris realized with a quiver, afraid.

“Vaska,” she said softly, barely a breath, and the dragon laid his great head down in her palm.

february

2022 was the year of ash pyrris, aka godsong’s neopronouns-user marc antony expy, aka a bona-fide no-asterisk war criminal and the lapdog lover of the most popular butch milf in town. (can you imagine making an ancient roman read all of those words.) i spent the first three months of the year working on an extended second-person ash story (er. novella. it’s twenty-two thousand words) detailing xir backstory (referred to, inventively, as “ashbackstory”), and it remains perhaps my favorite thing i’ve written this year.

“Ash,” Julienne says, soft, calm. Not Captain. Your name, and when you look up she’s looking at you. And there’s something you have to say to her, and her face is hazy and huge as the moon—what were you going to say to her? Her eyes glitter coin-flip gold. Fuck, she’s beautiful. Like a saint. Like a god.

Your eyes fall on her lips, stained blossom-red with wine. And it comes back. “Julienne,” you blurt, voice too thick, too clumsy, “you’re drunk, you shouldn’t—”

“Ash,” Julienne says, low enough to stop your heart, and you fall silent. She’s gazing up into the stars again, and suddenly you want her to look at you again so badly it hurts like a kick to the ribs.

“I think my fate is coming together at last,” she says, voice breathy with wonder. “This city needs more than a high judge, Ash. This city needs a god.”

When you reach for your words, you have none. How can you argue with her? When you’d follow her anywhere? When you’d fall to your knees to kiss holy wine off her fingers?

You can’t.

You don’t.

That’s the horrific part, later. You don’t.

march

in march i read gideon the ninth, which is to say that in march i became a changed man. someday i’m going to get called out for the similarities between godsong and TLT, and to that i’ll only be able to say that the first draft of godsong came before i’d read GTN and i guess catholic lesbians just write the same shit about religion and devotion and grief and redheaded butches. anyway, lots of the character dynamics in godsong slot very interestingly into TLT necro/cav dynamics, so i wrote a scene from a godsong canaan house au. which then inspired my dearly beloved @lazarusemma to proceed to dream up and write an entire godsong/TLT au that i think is topping 20k words. if you’re thinking, “wow, i know stuff about TLT, i’d like to read the godsong edition!” then shoot me a message and brother, i will hook you up. (lines as featured in yves’s parallels post; in which ichari is felidore and spades is the ninth cavalier.)

“This ought to be good,” Sascha said, in a voice he certainly thought was a whisper. Ambergris did not answer; her gaze had slid past the Eighths.

The Ninth cavalier stalked to the middle of the room with the steady grace of a great cat. Though the skull paint muddled her features, Ambergris could pick out a square jaw, narrow eyes, dark hair chopped off blade-straight just above her chin. She was broader than Felidore, limbs taut with muscle; she stood steady and poised, statue-still in a breathlessly anticipatory way. She did not speak. She bent her rapier blade, as though loosening it like a ligament, and stood at ready position.

Behind her, Vanya Nonavulpa leaned back against the wall, and beneath the paint Ambergris saw its lips twitch into a smirk.

Felidore had disarmed Anemone in moments. They had disarmed the Second House girl in minutes, and even the Fourth House soldier had drawn them to a sweat but not a standstill. The Ninth House cavalier, Ambergris realized within the first breath, was a different sort of creature. The two of them crashed together with the elegant violence of a dance. Ambergris didn’t have the knowledge or reflexes to make sense of the flashing rapiers, or even follow their blurring arcs through the air. What she could recognize: the new speed at which both combatants moved, and the new intensity to Felidore’s dodging as they barely kept their ribs from the delicate touch of the Ninth’s black blade.

april

re: writing a lot of noncanon stuff for fun: thinking really hard about neopronouns marc antony led to an extended au where xe accidentally knocks up xir boringass coworker (stella errans), whom xe hates. this is colloquially known as “erranspreg” and i feel like i need to at least mention it in here because i can’t go fucking anywhere without one of my bastard friends bringing up the bland pregnant man. look, HE WANTS TO BE A DAD! his DANGEROUS AND MORALLY QUESTIONABLE POLITICAL POSITION shouldn’t get in the way! (say hi to the godsong roman triumvirate, btw, in which the role of octavius caesar is played by a teenage girl.)

“You are not pregnant,” Sisyphania clarified.

Stella blinked. He blinked again. “Well,” he said, rather uselessly, “I am.”

Which broke some sort of spell. Ash exhaled, hard, and reached expressionless for xir bottle. Leanna said, “Are you—really?,” and Sisyphania said, “Because that would be—”

“Inconvenient,” Stella allowed, shifting his weight from foot to foot and wishing she would look away. “Strategically. I know.” With a stiff shrug: “But the gods work in arcane ways. Better to take our blessings when they come.”

“You are being serious,” Sisyphania said, still very calmly.

Leanna whistled. They were making eye contact, which unnerved him; usually they spoke without glancing up from their papers. Not unkindly, they said, “Who’s the lucky parent?”

Stella watched Ash’s hand tighten around the stem of xir goblet.

He let xim feel it for a moment. Then he exhaled and said, “I’m the parent. I’m the child’s father. That’s all.”

may

...and on the note of teenage girl octavius caesar. yves once described me as having “never worked on canon in my life,” and i would like to declare that that isn’t true. i wrote SO much canon this year! i just happened to write so much more stupid AU stuff. this one comes from a document known as “getalong au” because the premise is that every character is aged down about thirteen years and they’re NICE to each other, goddamnit! (no one is nice to each other in canon.) specifically, the plot of this is “ash and carron raise carron’s five-year-old adopted daughter,” which makes this technically the octavius-caesar-kindergarten-AU, i guess??? i love to say words

Still, Ash maintained the brief and futile hope that it might go well, that whatever poor little Dickensian orphan Julienne was taking pity on might actually be tolerable. This illusion lasted until xe saw her: a tiny round-faced thing with big goggly eyes and a puff of blonde hair, half-hidden behind Julienne’s leg. She looked way younger than five. She looked like a stuffed animal. She looked like xe could have punted her easily into the sun.

And she was staring. Unblinking. Owl-eyed. Ash’s stomach curdled. It was one of the (many, many) reasons xe didn’t like kids. At least adults tried to be subtle. Maybe they startled a little when they saw xim, maybe their eyes lingered too long on the scarred half of xir face while they stumbled over xir pronouns, but they did most of their gawking out of the corner of their eyes, sideways glances they thought xe didn’t catch. Little kids had no such instinct. Little kids stared.

The kid stared. Ash lifted xir chin and stared back.

“This is Mx. Ash,” Julienne said, and her voice, though not the babying tone in which people talked to cats, was lowered, softened. Rare for her. She let one hand slip down to tousle the girl’s unkempt hair. “I promise xe’s very nice.” Which was paired with a biting look that told xim xe had better be. “Ash, this is Sisyphania. Sisyphania, you want to say hi?”

june

OKAY WE’RE BACK TO CANON STUFF. godsong has an achilles character and i gave her narrative awareness. i really enjoy playing with POV and i really enjoy writing second person; you may have noticed that ashbackstory, from february, is also second person! godsong’s character backstories usually are: you are [NAME], they say, and here is your story, and you are whoever the narrative says you are. only one godsong character has been granted first-person arguing-with-the-narrative privilege and by god is she going to use it. (and by god, was this a fun exercise in POV.)

This story starts with a sacrifice. It ends that way, too.

Your legend begins before you are born. Your father is a wise man and a great king, ruler of the seaside kingdom of Pyrrinth, devotee of Orinaea famed across the land and seas for his piety. When his queen dies, when he is left bereft of the only woman he ever loved without a child to carry on her memory, he kneels before the ocean for forty days and forty nights and prays for an heir. Then he lines six hundred bulls along the beach, a row that stretches a lowing dappled half-mile, and his servants slash their throats into the sea. The legends will say the terrible cry of six hundred broken throats still echoes off the cliffs. The legends will say the shallows washed red over the beach for years. The legends will say your father cut his hand and let three drops of blood fall over the water, and when the tide washed out, you lay, tiny and red-faced and screaming, in the sand.

The legends will call you Blood of the Sea, Blade of Shysha, Hand of Death. They will call you the swift-footed lioness of Pyrrinth, the flashing-eyed daughter of Orinaea’s salt foam, she who outraced the winds and wielded the war god’s sword. Your body is the pyre that burns Ivander-in-the-West. You are the last true hero called great.

My name is Atelanta Anankares. I am born angry. I am born great.

july

briefly leaving godsongland--over the summer, i tried my hand at writing horror for the first time, for submission to a shakespearean horror anthology! i think my piece (based off twelfth night) turned out, um, not very horror-genre. and i didn’t get into the anthology, which i’m not bothered about because i didn’t expect to (sometimes you submit things as a total crapshot in the dark). as a result, i’ll be posting this piece to my ao3 account on twelfth night itself; tune in this january 5th to see me do gender to another malvolio.

“Go to my lady,” you begged her. “Do not say that I am mad.” And again, a hoarse cracking scream: “I am not mad!”

Perhaps it is a lie. You would not know; you do not know if the cell is dark, though you cannot see your own bleeding hands, because the priest and the fool swore they could see as if wreathed in the light of God. If you are mad it is not your fault. If you are mad you are something to be cared for, something to be wrapped in woolen blankets with someone else stroking your hair, something that no longer has to fight and claw and cry out against the rest of the world. If you are mad it is not your fault. If you are mad she may feel sorry for you. How easy it would be. How simple. The price, of course, is being wrong. You play with the cuff of your sleeve, twisting it back and forth though it chafes against your wrist. You are not sure if you fear being wrong less than you fear knowing this. Than knowing she is in danger. Than knowing she is alone.

You are alone. Your shoulders have stopped shaking with sobs; your voice has given way. You are as sane as any man in Illyria, unless you are mad, unless you are wrong, and in truth you are not sure you know the difference anymore.

august

and we’re back in godsongville. in july, i started working on the first draft of the second godsong book. maybe i ought to edit the first one first, but i hate editing and i didn’t want to get bogged down. godsong1 is split into three plotlines, as mentioned; godsong2 (godspark) has just two, so i started with the shorter one, a continuation of the shakespeare’s-julius-caesar-themed plotline. in godsong1, this was narrated by local traumatized gladiator spades; in godsong2, her weird little roadkill-looking bestie has the reins, and they were biting my fingers the entire fucking time. yes, they have the same name as their patron god (a two-faced fox); they did this on purpose; i apologize on their behalf.

As Vulpa eased their box of matches from their belt, they thought fleetingly of the old story: their god and the sun. Sometimes it was both faces, in the story; usually it was only the younger half, pup-soft and arrogant. Leandros had crafted the sun between his hands like pottery, breathing a glow into its mouth to hang it in the sky and light the earth. One by one the other gods came to him to gaze at it; one by one they departed. Only the younger face—the one whose name they had taken—paused.

“I should like,” it said, “to hold it.”

When Leandros narrowed his eyes, the god Vulpa swore to the stars on his cloak that it should only hold and never take—“for if I flee with it,” it added, “I shall call Vasha, and you may have our shared eye.” And this concept made Leandros hungry, for the stories said that the eye the faces shared could see into past and future alike, and with that the art god might create divine things indeed. And so he drew back his cloak and stepped aside and allowed them to hold the sun.

Yet as soon as he moved aside, Vulpa cried out, “Our eye I promised, but not our blood, and there is no bloodless blinding! And the stars we swore to only stretch as far as the hem of your robes, and we can leap that distance in a moment—” and so saying, it snatched the sun and leapt the moon and fled across the sky, light bleeding from between its teeth. But Vulpa had spoken too quickly; the sun in its mouth seared hot as a fresh coal, and halfway through the sky it dropped its prize, smoke spilling from its jaws. No matter—it left Leandros to gather up the burning coin and fled laughing to the cave that it called home.

september

see above. i finished the vulpa POV plotline this month, and yeah, it gave me hell the whole way through. spades is relatively easy to write because she thinks like a normal person. vulpa can have thought spirals you’ve never even IMAGINED, babygirl. this is one of its only chill moments.

Spades sat still as marble, elbows on the bench, hands beneath her chin, staring at the far wall. Vulpa let itself gaze at her profile: the scar slitting over the low bridge of her flat nose, the hair chopped off knife-straight at her square jaw. Sometimes it recalled the way she had looked when they met, that very first moment with her hair falling past her shoulders, but it could never quite reconcile that with how she looked now. This was Spades, in front of them; the hapless half-gladiator with the grabbable silken mane was Cinquedea.

“Is there something on my face,” Spades said, without moving.

“Stoic heroic torment,” Vulpa said.

For which it won the smallest of eye rolls.

october

this was the month i wrote the least; i was recovering from finishing vulpaplot and preparing to dive into the next plotline for nanowrimo! so take this scrap from a noncanon piece i wrote where vulpa (horrible little rat creature, hates rich people, eats cigarettes off the floor) and sascha (rich people, resident airheaded prettyboygirl) hook up. neither of them are having all that much fun. neither is anna, who walks in on it.

Their teeth knocked together. Vulpa hissed; Sascha cursed. Then his hands were on its shoulders, fingers digging in hard enough to bruise, and they clutched at each other, Vulpa like it could pull him off the desk and Sascha dragging it forward until it stood between his knees up on its toes crumpling his coat in its hands mashing its mouth against his thinking Here fucking taste it then get my blood in your mouth get my hideous heathengod filth all over you is this what you asked for—

“I—am sorry,” came a low voice from the doorway.

Oh mother fuck, Vulpa thought, and bit him.

Hard, judging by his shriek and the sudden burst of blood on its tongue. Vulpa shoved him away and staggered back, cold with horror, tinted glasses hanging off its face.

In the doorway, Annadrijanna Ivtouched stood silent and still, face betraying no touch of emotion except, perhaps, a deep and fantastic exhaustion.

november

set to work on the other plotline of the second godsong book! in which anna’s plot and ambergris’s plot intertwine, because everybody ends up in the same place: ambergris’s fucked-up family home with her horrible horrible parents who breed birds. “why not this,” anna thinks, “life as the chosen one is already so goddamn weird.”

“The man who drove us up the hill,” Anna said. “He said there has been… a god wronged.”

“Yes.”

One word, and an answer she had already surmised from Iv’s messages. Even so, it was a stone to the chest. “Which one?”

Ambergris shrugged. “Eggs have gone missing,” she said. “My father thinks it’s thief.” Her frown was a barely-there twitch. “Um—theft. He’s put guards around the mews.”

It took Anna a moment. “The—falcons’ eggs.”

“The falcons,” Ambergris repeated. “You must understand—” Another slight smile. “They’ve made us very rich.”

She looked remarkably unbothered. No bird perched on her shoulder or wheeled about her head, and Anna realized she had ascribed it in the back of her mind to the crutches, as if a falcon small enough to hold in two hands could unbalance her further. “And do you think it’s theft?”

Ambergris blinked at her, slow, almost feline. “I think if this house is cursed,” she said, “it’s a curse that’s been a long time coming.”

december

trying to do nano and school at the same time beat my ass, so i took a little break in december. i haven’t finished godsong2 yet, but i’m hoping to pick it up again in january! in the meantime, i went back and fleshed out some bits of godsong1 now that i have more lore. +10 trauma points for anna.

At some point they lay back on the gauze-soft blankets, just as they had in the cave: Anna’s arm under Cairo’s shoulders; Cairo curved into his side with her head on his flat chest; Anna running his hand up her stretch-marked thighs, her soft stomach, her small breasts—over her nightgown, not pushing for more, just marveling at her. Just to say with his touch a thing he couldn’t quite fit in words. When she reached out, fingers kiss-light, to trail her fingers over his shoulder and down his side, he wondered how long it had been since anyone had touched him this gently.

Even as he thought it, her hand drifted to his hip. His left hip. Anna stiffened.

“What happened to you?” Cairo murmured. One finger traced a line along the scar slicing over the bone, tissue thick and knotted as mooring rope. Easy to curtain with his robes; impossible to miss in his underclothes. “I mean here.”

Bile in his throat. A flash of memory, scalding sea-gray eyes and blood between white teeth.

“It was a war,” Anna got out, cupping Cairo’s hand to move it away. When she blinked, he managed a soft, “Please—it hurts.” A lie dropped from a holy tongue like prayersong. The scar only ached when it rained. The memory hurt.

i know it’s been a quiet year for this blog, but thank you to everyone who’s stuck around and taken interest in my projects! wishing you a very very peaceful and fulfilling 2023

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goose-books · 2 years

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hmm. so i think everybody should go commission issa @blackcatarts right now. her art is not only insanely good, it is also insanely affordable and she draws like it is the fucking endtimes. i had this drawing in less than 24 hours i think. shower money and affection on her or else [cocking my gun]

anyway if you need me i will be gazing lovingly at this art of godsong’s spades and vulpa, aka my “what if brutus and cassius were lesbians?” pair. POV: you are a few days away from being stabbed on the senate temple floor

#max.txt #all i do is use money to buy commissions. but can you blame me #godsong tag #cinquedea spades #vanya vulpa #smoking /

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goose-books · 2 years

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happy trans day of visibility. godsong might be the most transsexual book i’ve ever written. have some Moments (warning for non-graphic nsfw)

(read about these characters here. transcripts + more details under the cut)

+ one bonus excerpt of spades’ mother figure going in on her best friend, because the city of farria is a fucking nightmare, but at least everyone (even the MILF who hates your guts) will use your pronouns

image transcripts:

1: anna is the main character of godsong & the narrative’s favorite little chew toy. she’s also a nonbinary trans woman (she/he) and god it is cathartic, as a trans person who’s done nothing in the vein of medical transition, to write a trans character who hasn’t either and doesn’t want to.

She had woken with the gold lock perfectly whole, a month’s worth of curl grown overnight — though of course her hair had been shorter then, at eleven, when she had been considered her parents’ elder son. Not that Ivander had ever put much stock in those sorts of things. The Iven language had he, loosely, and she, loosely, and a special word for the priests, one that didn’t exactly translate. In the legends, Iv was he and she and they and elsewhere, too. From the day Anna’s hair had goldened, she had been that way as well. It was half-holy, half-heart. Most of the Ivtouched had stuck to one set of words outside prayer; some, like Ira, had only used the priest’s terms, whether dressed in holy robes or not. But Anna had for many years been he and she both, long-haired and large-handed and low-voiced. A woman more than a man, but, really, not so much of either; not so much a woman as a sister, anyhow.

2: ichari felidore, anna’s sidekick. nonbinary butch lesbian. bastard swag. best quality: can’t keep their shirt on.

Ichari scoffed and shot him a look. They were replacing a shattered plank in the deck, hands smeared black with tar that gleamed in the spring sunlight. Despite the nipping chill, they’d forgone their coat for a shirt they hadn’t bothered to button. The edges of their faded scars nosed out from beneath the fabric — the scars they’d traded for their breasts, as they liked to put it, though that had been near seven years before Anna had met them.

3: sascha armindale, anna’s OTHER (less helpful) sidekick. he/him femme who self-describes as a gentleman. for someone with an absolutely empty head, he has the most to say about gender of anyone in the cast.

He was a woman, after all, ah? And not a woman like Ichari was a woman. Because Ichari was a woman, or at least they only fucked women who fucked women, but they were a particular sort of woman, the sort his parents would have been rather displeased to see him associate with. And they weren’t beautiful, not the way a woman was supposed to be — but gods, were they gorgeous. Bright hair, bright eyes, a fox-narrow face and lithe limber arms. Everything about them was sharpened and scraped clean. Effortlessly slender. Effortlessly strong. Sometimes when they slept together, Sascha dug his nails into their flat toned stomach, pretending it was passion and not bitterness. They only ever laughed, anyway. They liked it when he played rough.

No. He wasn’t like that. Sascha was a woman shaped like a woman, dressed like a woman, silky skirts and petticoats that spun out when he twirled, powders carefully applied to his eyelids and cheeks — but then, he wanted to be a woman shaped like a woman just a little bit wrong, what with the short hair and the he and all. Woman off-kilter. A flatter chest would help with that, surely, same as it did for Ichari — but then, his chest was about the only part of his body he actually liked. His chest and his face and his hair. The places he liked being touched — though he liked being touched in general; he liked when other women liked him pretty.

4: scylla and charybids are the worst butch/femme couple in the world. but their genders are so cool (she/her butch king and he/him femme queen respectively) are so cool that who cares if they do a little murder.

The wolf king did not answer, only turned to face the rest of the hall and raised her free hand high. “I am Scylla God-King of the ice and stone,” she proclaimed. “He is my consort, holy and divine, Charybdis God-Queen of storm and snow. And the north is ours to rule and raise.”

5: sascha, drunk: when you. when you. when . he/him lesbians 😃 charybdis, who considers himself more monster than woman: uh huhhh

“We’re the same sort of woman, ah, aren’t we?”

Charybdis tilted his head. “Are we?”

“Well, you are a woman, ah?” He paused, in case he’d somehow been wrong, and waited for a denial that didn’t come. “And so am I. But — he, and all that, and yet you wear dresses anyhow. You know Ichari doesn’t. Ever.”

“No, Scylla neither. Not anymore.”

“And Anna only wears those drab robes all the time. But I suppose that’s her culture.” He crossed one leg over the other and went on: “And you’ve been with women, of course, the same as I have. We’re not supposed to do that back where I’m from.”

Again Charybdis’s smile was slow and creeping, like he was trying to hold it back. “No. Not at the temple, either. I suppose we are the same, then.”

6: cinquedea spades: the OTHER main character. as a trans woman (she calls herself a “self-made woman”), a bisexual, and a gladiator, she is maybe the coolest person in the world. sorry about the A cups

Spades had been uncomfortable about this part in the beginning, the first few times she’d been hurt bad enough to merit it. The nakedness. Particularly with her chest near-flat as it was. The morning draughts she’d been taking since twelve had smoothed her face, sleeked her limbs, curved her hips ever-so-slightly, let her shift from a small and silent boy to a small and knife-edged girl and then into a woman. But they had done little for her in the way of breasts. At this point, though, she was past caring. She’d been ground into the sand often enough that most of the medics in the arena had seen her shirtless.

7: she’s also long-lost nobility and god she is so traumatized but SO fucking funny about it

“It’s always setting the story straight,” said someone else, leaning forward — Luna, maybe, pale-haired with a scar running over her chin. “Let the rumors run too far and you’ll never catch them back. You know people still say Sun Ru’s boy escaped sixteen years back when they took the whole greedy nest out—”

Spades spread her already-relaxed stance, made eye contact with Vulpa over Ki’s shoulder, and observed, “I’m pretty sure that’s a myth.”

+ then our bonus. the citizens of farria said “can we please have some rights” and the city said “best i can do is everyone uses your pronouns”

“You know how the ones from the lower city are,” Carron said. “Too much time spent scraping for scraps and they get hungry for more than a meal.”

Spades kept her voice measured: “I wouldn’t say that any louder.”

Carron curled her lip. With a hint of scolding reproach: “Am I to hold my tongue for you and not the world, Dea?”

“I fight for my scraps, too. Does my blood make it different?”

“Oh, I’m the last person who can put stock in bloodlines. I was a street brat once, you know, or I wouldn’t speak with such confidence. But you’re a warrior. Your friend looks at the world like they’d sell their soul to stick a knife in its back, never mind if they go down with it.”

#max.txt #godsong is such a trans fucking book. it's sooooooo transgender #so transgender and so wlw and so t4t wlw. and so self indulgent and it has hooks in my head #sorry about the long paragraphs. L + ratio + giant text blocks #godsong tag #anna ivtouched #ichari felidore #sascha armindale #scylla godking #charybdis godqueen #cinquedea spades #vanya vulpa #tdov22

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goose-books · 3 years

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GODSONG CHARACTER ROSTER IS UP sorry for dropping this two days after a valentine segment but if this is gonna be my nano WIP i need to provide some real information about it

godsong intro post here, but the tl;dr is that it’s a high fantasy story about wlw and religion inspired by the classics courses i’m taking! the picrews used are here, here, and here; transcripts/descriptions of the slides are under the cut!

[slide descriptions:

slide 1: background is this photo by maria teneva of a dark blue-green ocean swirling with froth. large white letters read “GODSONG CHARACTER ROSTER”

slide 2: labeled “remind me what this is real quick?” & bordered with cropped versions of this photo by naja bertolt jensen of a dark-gray stormy ocean surface. the text reads:

a loose retelling of virgil's aeneid

(with some other plotlines too)

in a game-of-thrones-esque high fantasy world

with dragons!

and with an entirely wlw main cast ⚢

in this world everyone pledges to one patron god (out of a pantheon) who represents their values

or their family's values. who knows.

i can't make small casts so here's the character list

every character slide from here on out contains 1) a border 2) text about the character 3) the character’s pride flags 4) a screenshot of the spotify listing for a theme song and 5) a picrew of the character.

slide 3: annadrijanna ivtouched pride flags: lesbian, nonbinary, & trans song: sleep alone by two door cinema club border: textured gold fabric text (dark orange):

late 20s, she/her/he/him

pledged to the god of faith, loyalty, duty, & family

the last living priest of this faith

his city. uh. burned to the ground

has been a priest since she was 12 so faith has been her whole life

totally does not have religious ocd.

on a quest to found a new city for his remaining people

don't ask about her brother.

this slide also features a picture of booty shorts that read “god won’t let me die” <3

slide 4: ichari felidore pride flags: lesbian, nonbinary, & butch song: dutch by dessa border: a foggy sky over a sea text (dark gray-green):

late 20s, they/them

in a world where pledging to a god defines your entire life, ichari is a reddit atheist

(you're ALLOWED to be an atheist, it's just, like, uncool so you have to have a fair amount of personal swag to pull it off) (they do)

sharpshooter, pickpocket, & former soldier in their home country but they ditched

(they're lying to their mom about it, though)

part of anna's mission via contributing the boat

which they totally didn't steal

imagine the hamlet/horatio dynamic if the horatio character was somehow the worse one

the only god they worship is anna

slide 5: sascha dorian armindale pride flags: lesbian, nonbinary, & femme song: #grownupz by FEiN border: glittering green velvet text (dark green):

late 20s, he/him

debauched heiress ichari keeps around for cash

sascha thinks ichari is his bestie. ichari calls sascha his purse. ichari is not joking but they sound like they are!

female manslut

no thoughts head SOOOO empty

“i think you’re the kind of person who’s pretty susceptible to joining a cult” “aww, you think i’m pretty???”

hiding the increasingly concerning mental illness by externally embodying mambo number 5

pledged to the god of pleasure/hedonism

slide 6: ambergris armindale pride flags: lesbian song: orca by wintersleep border: fire sparking over a dark background text (black):

early 20s, she/her

hates you.

sascha’s slightly-younger sister, except ambergris didn't get away from their parents

uses forearm crutches because of (what would be called in our world) cerebral palsy

raised to be a pretty porcelain doll of a human being. & it worked but like. you know how horror movie dolls want to kill you

pledged to the mother goddess of creation & destruction

an injured dragon went down near her family's estate.

she's got plans about that.

slide 7: scylla god-king pride flags: wlw, nonbinary, & butch song: king by zayde wolf border: glittering gold text (dark gold):

late 20s, she/her

scylla & charybdis grew up in a religious cult

they were supposed to kill each other. they killed all the cultists instead & declared themselves gods

these two are a sidequest for anna, who wishes they weren't

scylla is the self-declared protector of the two

hot & charming & absolutely brutal

"maybe drinking and women and violence will make me feel better" *it doesn't* *rinse & repeat*

ambiguous disorder dot gif

this slide also contains a screenshot of the onion headline “Relationship Definitely Hurtling Toward Something”

slide 8: charybdis god-queen pride flags: wlw, nonbinary, & femme song: modern day cain by IDKHOW border: glittering silver text (dark gray):

late 20s, he/him

scylla will stab you with her massive sword. charybdis will poison your drink

he'll seduce you first, though

very charming & kind & empathetic <3

presents as such because he likes to collect people <3

(not literally, but as allies/friends/lovers)

(very normal behaviors about relationships over here; certainly no desperation for love)

"dear diary, today i performed 3 cartoonish acts of villainy. gay sex slays. goodnight"

scylla and charybdis aren't pledged to gods; their gods of choice are each other.

slide 9: cinquedea spades (though “cinquedea” is crossed out) pride flags: bisexual & trans song: fighting fish by dessa border: folded red velvet text (dark red):

late 20s, she/her

lives in a city that has a new revolution, like, every tuesday

former nobility whose family got robespierre’d when she was a child

now she’s got a new identity and makes her living in the gladiatorial ring

it’s JUST like d*sney’s anastasia!

was pledged to the god of justice; now pledged to the god of war; quietly conflicted about it

“you know how i’m full of rage?”

straddling the line between aristocracy and the simmeringly revolutionary lower class. foot in both worlds. surely this won’t go badly for anyone

slide 10: vanya vulpa pride flags: lesbian & nonbinary song: blood by my chemical romance border: dark green leaves wet with dew text (dark green):

late 20s, any pronouns (defaults to it/they)

what's the gladiator arena version of a pimp. they're that for spades. they do the PR work

it's also her best friend & connection to the revolutionary side of the city. and all plots therefore ensuing.

(murder.) (definitely murder.)

sometimes being generally disliked makes people find themselves but sometimes it just makes them really jealous and bitter

this slide also contains a screenshot of the onion headline “Area Man’s Free Time Monopolized By Friend With No Other Friends,” labeled “spades is area man. vulpa is the friend”

/end description.]

#max.txt #whew! that's a lot.#my terminal inability to write a manageable cast askdfhkshfbdsfbsd. but also. reading game of thrones as a comp title has made me feel--#better about that particular flaw because at least i'm not GRRM.#(GRRM i want your job so bad.)#anyway fun fact for people who read the tags: each* of these characters is vaguely correlated with a deadly sin #not in-universe because this world isn't christian just on a meta level because i read a book that did that idea badly #so i wanted to steal it #*each = there's eight of them so not really but ambergris isn't a sin she's just full of loathing #which is what happens when your parents treat you like a Sim TM #i think some of the sins are easier to guess at than others. it's not really plot relevant it's just again meta for me / vaguely character--#arcish. ANYWAY #godsong tag #anna ivtouched #ichari felidore #sascha armindale #ambergris armindale #scylla godking #charybdis godqueen #cinquedea spades #vanya vulpa #don't ask about the lack of language continuity here man i'm figuring it out #russian sounding names? sure. english sounding names? sure. straight out of greek mythology? hell yeah man.#putting my worldbuilding points in the religion category not the language category.#okay the tags are over.

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goose-books · 2 years

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NANO UPDATE 11/14/21

i know i’ve been a little quiet about my nano progress over here, but i’m working on godsong’s three intertwining plotlines one at a time, and i have officially finished the first -- that being the plotline belonging to a gladiator named spades and the revolution rising in her just-but-merciless city. AKA “spadesplot,” AKA “regicide plotline,” AKA “okay come on it’s just julius caesar if everyone was a woman and caesar was specifically a milf”

spadesplot clocks in at 8 chapters and roughly 36k. tomorrow i embark on annaplot, which... is going to be, like, twice as long. oh well. anyway, celebratory spades & vulpa moodboard. a dream team can be a gladiator with an incredible amount of identity conflict and her misanthropic PR manager / gay lover / ruthless enabler

Vulpa hummed noncommittally. After a beat: “You’re a good person, Spades.”

Spades, eyebrow arched, held up her hand to show the smear of blood still arcing along her thumb.

Vulpa waved smoke out of their eyes. “Oh, don’t make me go on about it, that’s not modest of you. I mean you have a sense of justice. The real sort. Justice and honor.”

“Oh, gods, where’s this headed?”

“Where this is headed,” Vulpa said through their teeth, finally looking her in the eyes, “is that this isn’t right, and I know you agree with me.”

Now that they were looking at her, she found she could have done without their gaze: narrow flinty eyes, sharp as a dagger’s edge. It had been many, many years since the two of them had had to worry about money. Spades had bled for that. But Vulpa had never quite lost the look they’d had those first few years, when they’d both lived with their stomachs scraping their spines, praying away the emptiness, their headaches from squinting for hours at debt calculations, her battered-bone soreness. They still had the hunger about them, the coldness, the cunning. Their stare set people like Carron’s followers on edge; the hard lines of their face reminded people that foxes bit when they were cornered. Spades had met them as a newcomer to Farria, but even then they’d worn gloves — rattier, thinner, uglier gloves — to hide the knobbly bulges of pickpocketing fingers broken many times over. Maybe, Spades thought sometimes, the hunger had been in them long before this city.

Perhaps she didn’t want their opinion on the festival after all.

#max.txt #nano2021 #godsong tag #atlastracking #ask to tag for any of this but mostly #blood /#anyway sometimes retelling shakespeare plays (however loosely) involves playing a mental bingo board of #'which famous lines can i check off but less like i'm stealing the line and more like i am giving the original text a knowing nod'#actually i don't know that the line in question is 'famous' but whatever.#these two have a bizarre dynamic and at least one person dies as a direct result.#cinquedea spades #vanya vulpa

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goose-books · 3 years

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promptober day 9: pressure

Stress was the wrong word for it. Oh, it hung thick as fog in the amphitheater: in the back rooms, in the betting corners, even in the stands, where adrenaline thrummed through a crowd of stomping feet and thrown elbows and wet-breathed anticipation. In fact Vulpa suspected the only moments here void of stress were found in the arena itself — feet shifting on the sinking sands, squinting past the harsh glare of the sun and the chanting crowds. The moment, Spades said, when everything settled. When you couldn’t be afraid anymore. Only calm.

Not that they envied her that. It would have taken a court order and a godly miracle to get Vanya Vulpa scratching for their life down in the sand. Their job was on the outside, in the backdrop, and they weren’t new to it anymore. They had thirteen gladiators under their thumb, thirteen sets of fights to arrange and thirteen betting chips to oversee, thirteen investments still living and breathing and pumping blood out onto the sand (an unlucky number, supposedly, but only to those irritating purveyors of modern faith — whatever that meant). They’d played their hand dozens of times. They’d lost dozens of times, too. They’d watched some guts spill. They weren’t stressed.

It was just that there were twelve young rip-roaring gladiators in their charge, and then there was Spades, and that was different.

She never let them tell her who or what was coming. Spades and her stupid honor, turning down hints like anyone got anywhere in Farria being brave. It made them itch. Down on the sands she was terribly small, double swords flashing with refracted sunlight, and Vulpa wasn’t stressed so much as afflicted with the distinct sense that someone had piled stone slabs onto their lungs. Not fear. A pressure, tangible, choking, in their chest, increasing moment by moment until their breath came short and shallow.

Maybe they did envy her this last moment: the calm before the blood.

In the stands Vulpa strained to breathe, and down below Spades stood cool and unmoving, and at the other end of the arena they threw wide the doors and they let the lion out.

#max.txt #promptober #godsong tag #vanya vulpa #cinquedea spades #this is late at night but i've been in transit all day oops

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goose-books · 3 years

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promptober day 26: connect

Carron had taught Spades how to worship the god of war the way Carron had taught Spades everything, and the way, in general, she spoke: layering a veneer of dramatics over the steely core of the matter. When she told it laughing, the whole concept was almost romantic. “The red string on their hands,” she said, pointing up at Shysha’s mural, her voice ringing off the temple walls with an irreverence that made eleven-year-old Spades flinch, “that’s for the really glorious. The ones who die in combat. Shysha takes their thread—” And here she took Spades’ hand. “—and draws a line—” She pulled her hand through the air, pulling mock string. “—to the hand that’ll strike you down.”

Spades stared at her hands — small, pale, not yet scarred — and tried, with a childishness that embarrassed her, to spot a thread mortals couldn’t see. “How are you supposed to know?” she said softly. Half because her parents had taught her to speak quietly in holy spaces, even though she and Carron were here alone in the evening. Half because she was eleven, and when she was eleven her voice hadn’t quite come back yet. (After the first night in the snow, it had taken Carron three weeks to coax any words out of her at all.) “Who it is, I mean?”

“Oh, you don’t,” Carron said easily, as if it didn’t bother her. As if anyone could be unbothered by something like that. “But me, I’ve got high expectations, myself.” She straightened her jacket (dark military blue; in the next week she’d be off for a half-year campaign and Spades would be alone in a cutthroat city) and tossed Spades the winningly sharp smirk that would, in the years to come, become Farria’s best-known face. “Whoever strikes me down had better be worthy. Imagine the indignation if some thoughtless bastard just got lucky.”

For the really glorious. Spades wondered if that meant her parents had been such, or if it had been a slipshod thoughtless thing. Someone getting lucky. The great god Shysha tugging her parents like cattle to the slaughter. She frowned at her hands and then, looking up, she frowned at Carron, biting down on her lower lip to stop it trembling.

Carron’s smirk softened. She wrapped a muscled arm around Spades’ shoulders and pulled her in close. “You haven’t got to look at me like that. I’m not planning on going anywhere soon.” And of course she was, of course she would be gone next week, but in that moment, looking up into her ichor-gold eyes, Spades believed her, mostly because there was nothing else to do.

She would grow up, of course, to recognize that not every death was violent, that if Shysha spelled out every fate they’d be the god of death and not of glory. That sometimes it came upon you slow and peaceful, or completely accidentally in a short sharp lopping-off. But at eleven Spades had no such hopes for herself. She had escaped a death at strange hands once, and in the nights following the temple, lying in bed staring at her mold-spattered ceiling praying for Carron on the battlefield faraway, she vowed it to herself: when they came for her, she wouldn’t go easy.

#max.txt #godsong tag #promptober #cinquedea spades #julienne carron #in my daydream universe where godsong has a fandom ppl are on this website like 'omg guys her initials... christ figure'#anyway the fact that spades went through all that shit and STILL grew up to be one of the relatively more normal well-adjusted characters #in this book. incredible

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goose-books · 3 years

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promptober day 24: extinct

Once upon a time there was a city with walls as high as heaven, founded on duty and faith. (Once upon a time there was a family who killed kings.) The streets were spiraling, the temples were gold, and on the holy days every voice rose in harmony. As a child you clung to your parents’ hands and let your voice rise, too, soaring on aureate wings. (The old portraits showed silver flashes of swords, toppled tyrants, cut-off crowns, and as a child you would stare up at the faces of your ancestors and wonder what kind of bravery it took to rise in the name of right.)

You’re the only one left now. (You’re the only one left now.) Your city has burned, is burning, will burn forever in the notes of every song that spells out the destruction of Ivander, a chorus that never ends, a destruction that never stops even when the walls and the temples and your home and your parents are all ashes. (They came for your family in the dead of winter, with the river almost frozen over, bearing firebrands and cold steel.) You carried your brother from the city in your arms and — how many times will you have to tell this story? As many times as it takes. As many times as your city requires, because you carried that from the ashes, too. (You ran and the ice cracked beneath your feet and you won’t ever tell this story.) You are the only child of your parents left. (You are the only child of your parents left.) You carry your history in your chest. (You carry your history in your chest.) Sometimes at night you stare up at the stars and wish to join them, a wanting so fierce it feels like blades in your stomach, but you can’t because it’s very simple, really. You can’t stop breathing. Not when you know what will die with you. (You’re a different person now, but you dream about it sometimes: the snow and the river and the toppled crowns.)

#I FEEL LIKE ALL OF THESE PROMPTS READ THE SAME SO I TRIED TO AT LEAST BE META ABOUT IT THIS TIME :SOB:#max.txt #godsong tag #promptober #anna ivtouched #cinquedea spades

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goose-books · 3 years

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promptober day 13: roof

Shysha’s temple was violent on the eyes: rivers of red cloth pouring across the floor, gaudy gold ceilings, an altar black as soot and the glory god’s visage smirking down from above. The two-faced god of cunning was a different sort. The temples of Vulpa-Vaska were small and cramped, cropping up like weeds in various dark and sticky corners all over Farria.

Spades had nothing against Vulpa-Vaska. No one got far in this sort of city without a healthy respect for cunning and wisdom, and she’d offered plenty of split-second prayers to the trickster god. It was the temples themselves she disliked — the roofs too low, the interiors too dark, the constant-burning incense strong enough to make her head hurt. But she knew where to find the temple nearest her quarters, and when she arrived there was a small squat candle flickering in its glass case beside the door: occupied.

Spades pushed the door open and slipped inside.

The space was barely larger than her room, hazy with candle-smoke. She was close enough to strike out at them, especially with their back turned, but they didn’t startle, just raised their last candle to the final cleft in the wall — each flame nestled in its own sconce, where it was less liable, Spades presumed, to catch on the tassels fringing any orthodox worshipper’s floor-length fur cloak, which would have gone up in a remarkably quick puff of smoke.

She leaned back against the door, as not to interrupt their prayers, and counted the candles. There were meanings to the number — seven for luck, four for love, eleven to live long and rich. Something like that. She wasn’t sure what to make of the eight she counted now. The bobbing flames threw strange ghastly shadows across the now-kneeling votary, murmuring in Vyrgian, and across the statue suspended from the wall: Vulpa-Vaska in the form of a two-faced fox, one face pup-young, the other’s muzzle grizzled with age. Each had one gleaming eye; the third, shared between them, shone milky-white. Youth and age; quickness and experience; cunning and wisdom.

The prayers trailed off. A beat of silence while the flames bobbed.

“You’d better not have come in here without a mask again,” Vulpa said from the floor. “You’re supposed to cover your face.”

“I must have missed the free masks at the door,” Spades muttered, tugging up the hood of her cloak. She’d have worn a mask if she had one; this place always made her bared skin crawl. Vulpa rose, spun, and appraised her from behind their visor, a two-faced fox like the statue. They tsked and moved to the sconces.

“I didn’t mean to stop you,” Spades said, but Vulpa was already blowing the candles out.

They shook their head. “I’m done. It hasn’t got to be long.” Only regular. They were here every morning, and had been as long as she had known them, regardless of weather and work. They would have scoffed to know she envied them, when it was so often the other way around, but Spades could only half-imagine what it must have felt like — being so close to one’s god, close enough to take their name and let their teachings rattle off your tongue like muscle memory.

#wow that doesn't have anything to do with the prompt word. oh well #i tried to keep this short to avoid spilling all of my newfound fox god worldbuilding onto my blog because it has to go in the book #but like. 'tried' to keep this 'short'. anyway #max.txt #promptober #godsong tag #vanya vulpa #cinquedea spades #they're friends! they're friends. they're buddies :)

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goose-books · 3 years

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promptober day 23: leak

“I’m not happy about it either,” Spades said tightly, “but what you’re proposing is—”

“I haven’t proposed anything,” Vulpa said, leaning against the creaking table to take a long drag from their cigarette. “But if I did, it’d be nothing worse than this city does every full moon.” They arched their eyebrows and added, “On that note, think how long we’re overdue.”

“The longer overdue, the more blood spills,” Spades snapped, whirling on them.

Pain tore through her back, white-hot as godly lightning. For a moment the world burned black, writhing at the seams. When her vision cleared, her hand was clapped over her mouth, and she barely recognized the animal sound stringing from between her teeth.

Vulpa dropped their cigarette holder on the table and stepped closer. All persuasion and argument had fallen from their face; their eyes were wide. “You’re still…”

“I’m sure it’s fine,” Spades gritted, but she looked over her shoulder as they moved around her. A dark patch the size of a spread hand bled through the back of her shirt. Vulpa let their fingers linger gingerly at her waist for a moment, giving her a chance to move away, before they carefully lifted the fabric. The bandages beneath were soaked through.

Vulpa dropped her shirt and swore in Vyrgian. “Don’t move,” they said, edging around her to the shelves crowding the wall. Spades moved as soon as they’d turned their back, stepping over to lean heavily on the table and clench her teeth as pain clawed up through her side.

“Do I pay extra for this?” she asked as they returned, pointing at the bottle of salve and the bandages. Vulpa batted her hand away with a roll of their eyes.

She winced when they peeled off the bandages, gripping the table tighter. Vulpa swore again, an equally unfamiliar but slightly more vehement word.

“That bad?”

A rip as they tore a stretch from the roll of fresh bandages. “Not the worst you’ve ever had. Better your back than your belly.”

She’d almost had her guts opened a few years back by a particularly nasty wolf whose pelt now lined the insides of her coat. Not the worst meant very little. “Pretty bad, then.”

“Too bad for you to be walking about making social calls. This might sting.”

Both of them were silent as Vulpa uncorked the salve. Spades swallowed a hiss as it burned into her back. She tried to swallow her flinch, too, but didn’t do quite as well, judging by the cold fingers alighting gently on her side, holding her in place.

She forced herself to inhale until her lungs ached and her thoughts steadied; then she exhaled and said, “I’d rather we didn’t talk about this right now. What… you said earlier.”

Vulpa didn’t answer. Spades twisted around, despite the pain, to look them in the eyes. “I’ve been thinking about it just as much as you. But I’m asking you to leave it alone. I have to think alone.”

She expected them to scoff or scowl, but Vulpa’s lips curled up. They flicked her nose, more gently than they needed to, seeing as Spades had taken too many punches to count. “That’s what you do.”

“Yeah, that’s what everyone respects about me.” Spades spun back to the table and lifted her arms so they could wrap bandages around her waist. The pressure helped a little, even though it still hurt enough to make her grind her teeth. She focused again on her breathing. Their fingers had left a smudge of salve on her nose, a scent so sharp it burned on the inhale. “That I’m such a talented thinker.”

“Don’t cringe for compliments.” Vulpa spread the last bandage over her back, clucking their tongue. They gathered the bandages and salve and went back to the cabinet. “You know you’re smart. It’s unbecoming.”

“That’s how I killed that lion. With my massive pulsating mind.”

“Unbecoming!” Vulpa stretched up to replace the bottle on the highest shelf. Then they clung to the shelves a moment longer, gazing at the wall instead of looking back at her, and added softly, “But you aren’t — upset with me.”

“No,” Spades said, staring down at her hands. Despite her best efforts, blood still flecked the edges of her nails and the spaces underneath. No. Just upset.

#722 words and not one of them is 'leak.' it's implied.#max.txt #promptober #cinquedea spades #vanya vulpa #once again: three guesses about the shakespeare play and the first two guesses don't count #not pictured: i imagine this scene opening like that one vine #vulpa: did you hang out with carron last night?#spades: you know... yeah. i did #vulpa: oh. i love carron #spades: you hate c-#vulpa: YEAH NO SHIT HONEY #godsong tag

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