#department of creation and destruction

[yuelun]

This young man displayed the true prowess of alchemy to all, bringing with him a massive corpus of wisdom that even the Sumeru Akademiya did not possess. "The universe is heaven reversed, and the earth is a dream lost to time. This is dust, the most basic form of complex life." As if to provide evidence for this claim, Albedo lifted the burnt ash of the flower that once grew atop a Dendro Slime's head. Seconds later, a Cecilia sprouted forth from the ash in his hand. "And this… is new birth." (Albedo: Character Story)

When I've been wrecking my brain over whether or not Genshin draws the correlation between dust and ashes, and I happen to look into Albedo because of his tie (we can... call it that) to alchemy, and even the art of Khemia specifically which is the much more ancient form of it, and there it is. Now excuse me as I go ramble in my tags a little incoherently...

#[ mini study. ] she always sought to make everyone happy and one must say: she had quite the gift for it. #[ i've been mentally keeling over when it comes to creating a verse in which she's alive in present day. ] #[ because i don't like the idea of her surviving because i think the tragedy of her passing and then the destruction of the... ] #[ guili assembly is absolutely paramount to the creation and rebuilding of liyue harbor. ] #[ and also incredibly important to numerous characters; aka morax and all the adepti that she socialised with. ] #[ liyue's heart became intricately linked in its tragedy and loss. and it's from that-- that they built the most flourishing region. ] #[ or at least in my opinion. and it's why it's the region that speaks loudest to me. nothing hits quite as hard. ] #[ and nothing is quite as... touching. ] #[ nor do i find anything as incredible as all the adepti (gods included). but even the more 'minor' ones are so intertwined with... ] #[ liyue. and i just cannot deal. any way-- that isn't what this rambling was about. it was about bringing her into this... ] #[ embodiment of hope. of /life/. liyue. liyue harbour. ] #[ i just. i don't just want her in it for dynamics-- i mean yes i do. ten thousand times over i do. but also for /her/. ] #[ god i hear madame ping's words-- ] #[ of 'perhaps she will look at the liyue of today and steal a smile when she sees the prosperous land that it has become'... ] #[ because i need her to see-- no. not /see/ it. but experience it. feel it. /hear/ it. this little goddess who's always fallen in love... ] #[ with life itself through experiencing it in every way you can-- i need her to see liyue harbour. i need her to see... ] #[ what morax/rex lapis has created along with the adepti. what they've protected and continue to protect. but also /believe/ in. ] #[ i need her to see /that/. that on a level-- even if it wasn't done /for her/. i need her to see that something dear to her; her wishes. ] #[ those commandments. they're there. in the hearts of all of them. ] #[ i just.] #[ i also need to think about how she'd reform-- how she'd regain the corporeal form. is it something she's slowly gathering the power for- #[ throughout so long and she's able to again? would dottore/the gnosis/zhongli realistically be involved by for example... ] #[ using the gnosis as a battery-- something to collect/gather up elemental energy to allow her to reform faster? ] #[ as a... 'side' contract of sorts while it's given over? ] #[ would it not be needed? i just. lIFE COMES FROM DUST. I'M FINE. ] #[ god. this also ties into so many other hcs of her love /for/ humanity and /how/ she interacts within the concept of life as a whole. ] #[ it's fine. ] #[ ooc. ] wherever her spirit may be among the countless grains of sand and specks of dust between the harbor and the mountains…

[beekerosene]

ngl i was kinda let down by Roots I think Ninjago deserved a stronger end

#ninjago #ninjago roots episode #ninjago end #it really highlighted one of my big problems with ninjago #that being that they always talk about balance but its never practiced #the first spinjitzu master was considered the embodiment of creation for seasons 1-8 to contrast the overlords destruction and that worked #well but then season 9 had the whole thing about him being a dragon/oni hybrid which kinda undermines that whole thing #and personally im kinda sick of fake deaths #like in march of the oni i think Cole should have actually died and at least they have to follow the oni into the departed realm to save him #or something but i was not a fan of the general lack of consequences this ending had #ninjago spoilers

[carionto]

The Equality Games

Once every now and then, the Galactic Coalition's Cultural Exchange department holds a large digital competitive event.

Anyone can participate, and to level the playing field, contestants aren't the ones who actually compete, but instead an advanced deep brain scan (or equivalent body part) and an unbiased AI create a digital avatar that represents the individual and autonomously acts within the digital space.

The cognitive capacity of each is analyzed to a near perfect level and a highly complicated algorithm that, honestly, nobody understands, even the AI that built it, then creates this avatar with traits and weaknesses based on an even more incomprehensible set of criteria and internal points system.

To put it simply - the scan identifies nearly every calculable aspect of a person and assigns a point value for each, then uses those points to "buy" the most relevant and appropriate traits from within its list to give the avatar. There are changing costs, negative value "flaws", and prerequisites based on other information from the scan, but basically it is the most convoluted TTRPG character creation ruleset ever devised.

Given the enormous complexity and diversity that individuals from across thousands of races exhibit, until this system was invented, it was thought impossible to have a sort of intergalactic Olympic Games. There were many attempts over the eons, of course, but one factor or another always made it so that someone did not accept the results.

The Equality Games, however, earned respect and acceptance as a valid alternative once the underlying system was demonstrated and people started to play with it. The avatars were made to act autonomously due to how some species had a distinct advantage when manipulating a digital interface, thus bringing up the old arguments yet again.

One curious result of the AI algorithm avatar generator is that it quite frequently created multiple avatars for each person, only the more hive-mind-like species tended to be represented by a singular avatar within the Games. It is theorized, again because nobody can understand how it really works, that most intelligent beings have multiple "personas" i.e. distinct behavior and personalities in certain common situations, primarily a "public" and "private" persona.

In fact, it is most common for everyone to generate about a three to five avatar "team" that represents the one individual. In comparison, if an ant were to get scanned and put in the games, its avatar would be a single incredibly powerful avatar with many deficiencies, but an overwhelming advantage in several disciplines.

When Humans first entered the Games, as expected, they too had teams as avatars. What was not expected, was that these avatars would sometimes work alone instead of together as a team, deliberately not help one another, and even engage in infighting and the sabotage of another "self".

The Humans suggested that it is perhaps because hypocrisy is not uncommon among them. Self destructive tendencies also appear rather frequently. These Humans almost always are themselves surprised by how contradictory their avatar team composition ends up being.

While the Games themselves happened as normal, the Humans overall placed in the top 20% brackets of most competitive challenges, and scattered roughly evenly everywhere else, they then approached us with a most unusual request.

"Give us a copy of this AI algorithm scanner thing. We think this is the most revolutionary therapy and psychological diagnosis device we've come across."

Of course we obliged and helped set up centers in a number of stations and on Earth itself.

Last we heard, some Humans have avatars that are singular nigh-nightmarish monstrosities, while a very tiny fraction have minds so splintered that their avatars are teams of dozens, one time even over a hundred distinct versions of themselves. Then there are even some seemingly regular Humans who broke the scanner - it gave the error: "Only one individual can be scanned at a time."

Upon "fixing" it with a hack, the results for those were unheard of. Two distinct avatars. Not a team of two, but by all accounts, the AI algorithm identified two separate individuals within one mind, each with very little in common with the other. Sometimes there was nothing in common, even their digital visual representation.

The mind is incredibly complex and hard to comprehend. The Human mind, while biologically quite peculiar but not outside the realms of understood evolution, neurologically it seems to hold near limitless diversity, both complimentary, contradictory, and beyond.

#humans are space orcs #humans are space australians #humans are space oddities #humans are deathworlders #humanity fuck yeah #carionto

[bright-side20]

HOFAS SPOILER (concerning the Cauldron)

_First let's go back to Rhys's explanation of the mating bonds:

“What decides it? Who decides it?” Rhys straightened his lapels before plucking an invisible piece of lint from them. “Fate, the Mother, the Cauldron’s swirling eddies …”

It is clearly stated that the bond can be decided by fate, the mother, or the cauldron.

“There is choice. And sometimes, yes—the bond picks poorly. Sometimes, the bond is nothing more than some … preordained guesswork at who will provide the strongest offspring. At its basest level, it’s perhaps only that. Some natural function, not an indication of true, paired souls.” A smile at me—at the rareness, perhaps, of what we had'.…' Many mated pairs will try to make it work, believing the Cauldron selected them for a reason. Only years later will they realize that perhaps the pairing was not ideal in spirit.”

There are bonds only to provide the strongest offspring, like Rhys's parents or Tamlin's parents bond and there are rare bonds of true paired souls like Feysand and Nessian bond.

HOFAS:

The Cauldron was of our world, our heritage. But upon arriving here, the daglan captured it and used their power to twist it. To turn it into something more lethal. No longer a tool of creation, but of destruction.

An explanation by a Daglan:

We gathered our power and imbued these gifts in the Cauldron, so that it would work our will. With this, the treasures were made. And then we connected the essence of the Cauldron to the soul of this world. Destroy the Cauldron and you destroy this world. One cannot exists without another.

The Cauldron was turned by the Daglan to serve their agenda, and they connected it to Prythian in a way that if anyone tries to destroy it, Prythian will be destroyed as well.

_Now, let's get an idea about the Asteri's aka Daglan breeding system:

Celestina only said, “He departs tomorrow. I shall visit his keep next month if there is not … a change in my situation by then.”If she hadn’t gotten pregnant.

Hunt nodded, even as disgust and rage curled through him. The Asteri had ordered this, done this. They’d make Celestina keep going to Ephraim until she was pregnant with the child they wanted her to bear. Another little Archangel for them to mold into a monster.

Doesn't it sound like 'producing strong' offspring, 'natural function'?

What if the Asteri back in Prythian manipulated the cauldron to create mating bonds, knowing the importance of it for the Fae, so they could benefit from their children and manipulate them?

I don't know why antis kept accusing Elriels of spreading misinformation, considering our conclusions are based on what's written in the books.

The Cauldron literally operates under Daglan's system, so it can't be trusted; indeed, it is not a perfect matching system.

_Let's get back to these important scenes:

"If anyone can sense if something is amiss, it’s a mate.”.... “The mating bond. It is a bridge between souls.”

Madja here is clearly addressing the real meeting bond—the one of paired souls.

Lucien:

“There’s a bond—it’s a real thread,” he said, more to himself than us. .... “And I got to Elain’s end of it when she ran off.” “Did you sense anything?” “No—I didn’t have time. I felt her, but …” A blush stained his cheek. Whatever he’d felt, it wasn’t what we were looking for. Even if we had no idea what, precisely, that was.

Lucien murmured to me, eye still fixed on Elain, “Should we—does she need …?”

Azriel :

“She doesn’t need anything,” Azriel answered without so much as looking at Lucien. Elain was staring at the spymaster now—unblinkingly. “We’re the ones who need …” Azriel trailed off. “A seer,” he said, more to himself than us. “The Cauldron made you a seer.”

I think this was foreshadowing. Even though a bond exists between them, Lucien wasn't able to sense the change in Elain, while Azriel managed to discern it.

What if the Cauldron's bond between Lucien and Elain, described as 'a thread tied to a rib,' is what was considered a 'natural function'? Yet, there exists another bond between her and Azriel, 'a bridge between souls,' and they are the true paired souls by the mother or the fate . What if the Cauldron was wrong?

I know the antis argument of that means Lucien is stronger than Az, which is why the Cauldron chose him for Elain. When the bond snapped between them, Azriel was out of power, literally dying. It's another reason the Cauldron might be wrong.

Also, the argument: if the Cauldron is corrupted and loves Elain, then she's a villain.

Duh? Why not consider that even though it's corrupted, it recognized Elain's pure heart and her power, the different kind of strength concentrated in her kindness? If she influenced it, maybe she has the ability to fix the Cauldron, turning it back to its original purpose, a tool of creation, not destruction.

#hofas spoilers #pro elain #pro elriel #elriel supremacy #elriel #elain archeron

[penvisions]

return the favor {chapter 21}

Pairing: Post-Outbreak! Joel Miller x Smuggler! Reader

Summary: After an explosive fight the night before, your trio gets ready to depart from Jackson. Finding yourself back on outside the gates, everything seems different. But then again so are you, so are your circumstances.

Word Count: 5k

Warnings: canon typical language, canon typical angst, canon typical violence, use of weapons, use of guns, use of machete, fighting, violence, reference to previous injuries, reference to past traumas, ptsd symptoms in both joel and bean, self-depreciation, super fucking sad moment in scene two of this one, MAJOR ANGST, yelling, conflict, emotional baggage, talk of outbreak day, medical jargon, reader has a lot of thoughts on a cure for the virus, existentialism

A/N: inspiration for this chapter was 'let it burn' by shaboozy. these two have grabbed a hold of my thoughts and i am writing pages like a mad woman. bean and joel mean so so much to me. hopefully it's all coherent, please let me know what y'all are thinking! i know it's a mess for these two right now an the content is angsty and may be triggering in this part of the story. my inbox is always open, love y'all ♡

ao3 link || series masterlist || main masterlist || ko-fi

The morning came quickly, no sleep having been found under the cover of night.

You couldn’t have dosed off for more than a few minutes at a time, an hour at the most spent on the cusp of awareness. That in-between state where you were immobile, and your mind tried it’s hardest to let you slip under but just shy of lying about. It was warm, that was the only consolation of the house offered to you for the night. It wasn’t another night sleeping on the frozen ground and hoping the temperature didn’t drop or the windchill robbed you of breath and feeling. Of constantly waking to check if the other sleeping bags were still rising and falling with the even breaths of those inside.

Sighing, you reached out across the empty bed to stretch out your arms from the curled up position you had adopted. But you sat up suddenly when the spot your hand had reached was warm. As if someone had been sitting on the edge of the bed. As you did so, a thick blanket you didn’t recall seeing when pulling the covers back pooled around your waist.

You heard the front door open and close, but no footsteps came further into the house. Not Tommy coming over to begin the day, but his brother departing on his own.

He must’ve returned after you hid away for the night, biding his time until things calmed down enough for him to enter the house undisturbed. Tears pricked at the corners of your eyes as you pictured him laying the blanket over you, sitting on the edge of the bed and watching as you slept.

Of him setting on the edge of his own bed, consumed by his thoughts and feelings that had to be so overwhelming he had decided to self-destruct and tear everything around him down in the process.

It hurt. It hurt to picture him alone by his own creation, but still feeling the desire to make sure you were comfortable in wake of that.

 But it didn’t mean anything, it couldn’t. He had made it his mission to find the words that would hurt you the most and use them against you. To use your own insecurities against you, point them out and use them as a way to rationalize this course of action. Rationalize abandoning you, you and Ellie.  

Joel.

Joel was standing beside one of the horses, the stall gate open as he fastened a saddle to the tall creature, tightening the buckle to make sure it was secure. The horse snickered, signaling to him that you were approaching if your footsteps hadn’t reached him quite yet. When he turned to look over his shoulder, you felt your body twitch, fight or flight activated in a visceral way.

You immediately dropped Ellie’s hand. She reached for it even as her own emotions fluttered up and became overwhelming. But you stepped away, nearly knocking into Tommy in the process.

When he looked up from his task completely, his eyes met yours and you turned on your feet and walked away without a second thought. Your name followed, but you didn’t turn back. A chorus of your name sounded all around as you fled the stables on shaky legs, face hot and heart thudding painfully hard in your chest. Head dizzy with the brief encounter of a man who you hadn’t expected to see ever again too much after a fitful night.

A hand closed around your arm and you thrashed against it, whipping around and landing a punch on whoever it was right in the middle of their chest.

“Get off of me!” Terror colored the air, the pure feeling of being trapped. Of being touched by someone who you didn’t give permission to. But the person moved toward you, grunting from the force of the hit you had landed on them, breath being drawn back in to recover. Their arms came around you, cradling you to their chest and hands holding the back of your head as you lost the feeling in your limbs. Body going slack in a last-ditch effort of self-preservation.

The person didn’t expect that, and they lost their footing, knees hitting the ground hard when you jostled along with them. But they tried their best to not let you land on your own numb limbs. You could barely hear anything over the sound of your blood rushing in your ears, your own name being called out softly not breaking through. Eye blinking rapidly, you tried to clear your blurring vision, though it wasn’t from tears. You had exhausted all of those last night.

“We gotta stop, darlin’.” Joel’s somber tone finally broke through, his voice thick with tears he wasn’t letting fall. They were a shine in his beautiful eyes when you looked up at him with an unfocused gaze. Vision blurring and sharpening in a rapid succession. His own softening when he realized you were barely there, barely present under the direct attention he was giving to you now. You watched the wrinkles around his brow furrow, deepening as he tried to coax something, anything out of you.

But you were unable to comply, unable to give him anything else. He had taken everything already, burned down what he didn’t like with vicious words that had festered all night. Taken ahold of you and ruined the rest. You had nothing for him anymore.

“I-I can’t keep feeling like my chest is gonna cave in every time I lose sight of you.” He murmured into your hair, leaning down to speak only to you. Distantly, you were aware of the watching eyes of Ellie and Tommy, just inside the threshold of the stables. Both uncertain of what to do, if they should separate you from each other or let this play out. Joel was holding you with such care, such caution and it made them both pause. “My breathing gets stuck, it hurts, darlin’. Feels like knives when you get hurt, spreads all over my body, it numbs me. When I can’t help you, when I can’t see you or reach you, call you back to the present. And that’s not good, we both know that.”

“Joel…” You cautiously treaded, voice sounding foreign and so unlike your own even to your own ears as they steadily cleared. Unsure why he was doing this. Now, of all times. He had already made his case, tore you down as he self-destructed. But he was trying to explain now the reason he had done so in such a catastrophic way. Just like how he was trying to make amends with Ellie, giving her the choice he had so selfishly stolen from her on the same path of destruction just the night before.

“It’s not…it’s not easy. And the further we’ve traveled, the more time we spend out here. It’s just…it’s not something that can last. And for that, I am sorry. I-I didn’t mean any of the bullshit I fired at you yesterday, you have to know that was all projection. You are strong, you are capable, you are so god damn smart, darlin’. But…it’s not…” His gloved hands were strong on the back of your head, on the small of your back despite the way they ached in the cold of the early morning. One last hold on you before he let you go. You knew him, you could read him, and it was too real of an understanding that he was trying to spell out for you now, even through the fog taken over your entire being.

You had known, deep down. That the feelings didn’t mean anything, even if you acknowledged them. They didn’t change anything, didn’t alter the dynamic, only gave it a depth that was dangerous.

“I’m the one who isn’t strong enough, can’t move fast enough. Can’t keep up with everything thrown our way to get here or what’s to come. But I would try until my last breath, darlin’, please believe that. And that’s the problem.”

“Because you do feel something for me.” You didn’t argue, didn’t try to call him out. You simply wanted to understand, the hurt of his words still rooted deep in your mind and heart.

“…yes.” He finally admitted, finally decided to be honest with you about what had begun to develop over the journey here. But it didn’t bring you any joy now, to know that the man felt for you the way you had begun to felt for him. It was damnation, he had been correct in his description. Because you both knew that clinging to that spark was far more dangerous than trying to cultivate it into a fully grown tangible thing. It would prompt the most resilient of things from you both, violent in their tendencies and ugly in the worst ways if picked up upon by others. Leverage to use against one or both of you, something that would bring about death.

“Okay.” Was all you could say, face calm despite the storm raging inside of you. It was breaking, beginning to wane and soon it would disappear. It would leave you empty, a gaping hole in the thick plaster you had slathered and smoothed over yourself in order to make it in the world as it was today. Having already been torn down once by a man with careful words and hands, capable of helping you to create something when nothing seemed to matter.

He had given you hope, but the man standing in front of you now was different. Joel wasn’t feeding into the same notion, instead adding his own layer of solution over the walls he had stumbled through in clumsy motions. He wouldn’t be helping you to dismantle it, too afraid of what it would mean. Too afraid of what it would symbolize in this world. So unlike the man before him, but so similar in the ways that he had nestled himself into the confines of your heart.

Your arms didn’t feel like your own as they reached up and snaked around his neck, your legs didn’t feel like your own as they moved to straddle one of his own and give you purchase to embrace him back. Your lips didn’t feel like your own as they met his in a chaste kiss. A goodbye that wasn’t bittersweet, but venomous. His tears finally fell, dampening the skin of your neck.

Overcoming the disastrous events of yesterday would take time, something of a luxury neither of you had. He was trying to make amends, trying to make you understand. That’s all he could do, was try. And all you could do in return was take the heavy stones he had tied around his limbs and loosen them. Let them fall away and take them on yourself so he wouldn’t have to carry them. You had before and you could do it again.

“I can’t go with you.” You whispered, lips brushing against his as the words sprouted from you. The truth too painful to admit at full volume, too painful to say at all. But you had to. You had to tell him you understood it was the right thing, that he understood it was the right thing. Distance. Perhaps long-lasting separation that turned into only once knowing each other.

“I know.” 

He helped you to stand back up, putting distance between you both as he walked back into the stables. Tommy trailed after him, both men giving you a moment with a confused and concerned Ellie. She was too young to understand that despite the apology, the bridge had been burned and it was only one of you who would take her to where she needed to go.

You turned to her, not wanting to do this, not wanting her to see how hurt you were but knowing that whatever she did glimpse, it was absolutely not aimed at her. “I’m not mad at you, Ellie. I just…I’m not good enough to get you where you need to go if he’s there. And he’s not good enough to do it if I’m there. He made it clear as crystal he has one care he’s allowing himself in the world and it’s you.”

“You’re being selfish! I know he’s an ass. He yelled at me too, but look! I’m trying, I’m giving him a second chance. Why can’t you?” Her words were sharp, cutting into you like the blade you wielded and you took each one without a grimace.

"Ellie, that man is your future. He will protect you until his last breath. But we can’t all travel together again.” Your eyes moved from her deep frown and her hands gripped tight on the second bag that dangled by her legs to the figure of Joel leading a singular horse out of the stables. “I have so much care and love for you, but it’s not a good fit. All three of us, it was always supposed to be him, Ellie.

I’m not able to protect you, I’ve been out of it most of our trip, unable to do anything without his help. He’s the one who can get you there, he’s the one who is capable. I’m so sorry for making you feel like you could count on me, I’m not the one to place your bets on. He is.”

"So what, it all meant nothing? The whole fucking journey here didn't mean anything to you?"

"Ellie, please listen to me and hear me, it meant everything to me. but it's past and there are some things I have to take care of."

“You’re just gonna leave me? Like he tried to, like he regrets trying to do. But you’re actually gonna fucking do it, huh? You’re a real piece of work. So much for sticking with me. Fucking liar.” She stalked off, refusing to hear anything else you had to say. “Go, get the fuck away from me! I never want to see you again!”

Joel’s hand curling around her shoulder as she crossed the threshold of the stables made them the perfect wounded pair and you turned your back on them as they began to walk away, hoping that this was all for the best. That you were making the right move.

You were still at the stables when Tommy returned, his pack still over his shoulders but his rifle was missing. He was silent as he entered the stall you were readying a horse in. It was a beautiful animal, with white and brown patches all over. You figured the coloring would help you to blend into the landscape easily, having a long journey ahead of you.

“Where will you go?” Tone so unlike his brother, though the twang of a Texan accent curled around his words all the same.

“Home.” You grunted as you tightened a bag to hang from the saddle, the pack holding a small collection of camp kitchen supplies. Maria had tried to give you as much to work with as possible, not wanting you to starve or be without a source of heat should more storms greet you outside the gates.

“And where is that?”

“California. Should’ve gone back a long time ago, but…things never worked out.” You could sense the curiosity in him, so unlike his brother who hid his emotions. He had been nothing but kind to you, even if you hadn’t directly interacted with him. But if he was related to Joel, he was a good man. Indulging him, you found yourself opening up to him with more directness than you had with anyone before. Wanting a lifeline here in Jackson should you find your way back here. “Tennessee was home when the Outbreak happened, stuck around there for a while….then found myself in Boston. I remember catching glimpses of you with Joel, every so often. And then suddenly you disappeared. Wasn’t ever sure what happened, but I figured a loss is a loss.”

“Yesterday was such a hectic day. With falling on your arm and everything…will you be okay?” He followed you out of the stall, out of the stables, the horse letting you lead it leisurely along. Two shadows waiting close by, a horse already saddled and ready beside them.

“I hope so.” You offered him a soft smile, grateful for his concern.

“Will you be okay?” His inflection changed, eyes looking between both of your own as he moved closer and placed a hand on your shoulder. You sighed, trying to shake the thoughts of what happened today from your mind, knowing they would be revisited tonight when you try to rest.

“I’ve done pretty good so far, think I can manage to get over your big brother.” You knocked his shoulder with your own. His arms suddenly came around you in a hug, his chin hooking over one of them and nearly knocking your hat from atop your head. But you didn’t flinch, too worn out to fight against comfort if someone wanted to offer it to you. With warmth blossoming in your chest, you let your head lean into his own and closed your eyes.

“Thank you.” His low voice was strong, emotions strong as you hesitantly returned the sudden embrace. “Thank you for helping get him here.”

“Thank you for being alive,” You whispered back, the worry of how this all could’ve turned out weighing heavily on you even in of luck and chance. Of the sheer determination Tommy must’ve exhibited to not only leave with the Fireflies all those years ago, but to actually leave the organization and not find himself on a hit list. That he found refuge here in Jackson, a life here in Jackson, it was all so overwhelmingly wonderful. For a man who had been down so many wrong paths to find a good one to travel on after so long. That it allowed him to not only survive but live, given him the opportunity to reconnect with his brother.

Given him the chance to make something out of the wreckage of this world that would last.

“You have a home here.” He leaned back, arms still around you as he looked down at you, trying to find the right words for a goodbye that wouldn’t add weight to the events since arriving. “Maria likes you, sees you. I like ya just based on the fact that you’re not afraid to holler back if someone comes at ya. Can throw a hell of a right hook too. We’ll be here for you, whenever you decide to return.”

You nodded once, allowing him to help you mount the horse and followed that morning’s patrol through the town and toward the gate.

The railroad was easiest, so you stuck close to it when you could. The open land setting your nerves on high alert, there was no coverage out here on the plains. But you were hoping that the advantage of having a horse now would allow you a good head start if someone tried you, the rifle on your shoulder too. Maria did well, giving you everything you might need. More help than you could have ever hoped for, including the map you had found in the pocket of your new coat, detailing the route Joel and Ellie would be taking.

You had stood still for a long while, beside the horse you had let loose to get a drink from a small creek. The map tight in your gloved hand as you stared out toward the expanse of Colorado. The state line between Wyoming and Idaho close by, only a few minutes travel. Torn between moving in the opposite direction of them, worried for them and the possible threats that awaited them. But they were strong, stronger without you. They would be okay, you had to hope they would be okay. Tucking the map back into your pocket, you clicked your tongue to get the horse to come back to you.

Mounting it easily, you made your way west and crossed the state line.

Night fell and with it you hunkered down in the mild protection of the woods. The horse laying down and allowing you to lean up against their warm body, one blanket thrown over his neck to help stave off some of the cold. You had your sleeping bag curled over your shoulders, unzipped to make a small shield against the biting chill, but even with all the supplies and advice and kind words Maria had offered you, you were still utterly and completely alone. The fire crackling in front of you did nothing to warm the cold that had taken root in your chest, not born of the weather. It would only defrost with the snickering laughter of a sarcastic teenager, in the rumbling chuckle of a stoic man, in the lightness they both inspired in you despite the endless circumstances that decided to rain down upon you all.

Your heart ached for the gruff grunts Joel would make when settling down for the night, either in front of the fire for an imitation of a family dinner or for the attempt at getting some sleep for the evening. But it was a thing of the past, something you wouldn’t hear again. Alone. Completely and wholly alone. A sentence of your own making, a reality brought on by your foolish naivety that you were now subject to. Journey now shrouded in the selfish need to seek answers to questions that had plagued you for far too long.  No longer intertwined with that of a brooding older man who had space in his heart enough for a girl who hid her pain behind terrible jokes. No longer a part of that dynamic, unsure if you ever were supposed to even be a part of it in the first place but having forced yourself into the fold when faced with returning behind the walls of the quarantine zone.

Spit back out in such a damning way.

Sighing, you stretched a boot out to stamp the small fire out. Shrugging tighter against the horse behind you, prompting them to turn their head and snuff against your hat in a teasing way. He was a good animal, easy to direct, willing to follow, gentle. But still, you were alone. Surrounded only by the bare trees of the wilderness you had to cross.

It was the fifth day after departing from Jackson when the universe decided you were ready for it to pick back up the punches. Tracking your progress on the map as you tried to calculate how many hours or steps it would take to trek through the dense woods that would get you through the state of Idaho and into the desert landscape of Nevada. It had been a discussion, between you and Maria, which route would be the most logical.

Either to gear up impossibly so in order to endure the remaining time of winter through the pacific northwest and make your way south through the long state of California to your hometown. Or to put up with the snow and ice for the duration of traveling through a corner of one state before finding relative refuge in the desert landscape that made up most of the south west part of the country. It would mean more exposure through the desert, but it would also mean lesser chances of running into people or Infected. More reliance on supplies and rationing.

After admitting that you weren’t very fond of the cold, of winter in general, maps of different states had been brought out from where they were collected in the council’s meeting place. She had allowed you to look them over, wanting to give you the best chance she could at accomplishing what you were set out to do. To help you, to help you find what you needed to in order to move on and begin to heal on your own terms. A journey she did not envy, but one she would do whatever she could to give you the best chance of returning to Jackson someday.

She liked you, came her admittance over a cup of coffee. You had sought her out in the early morning before Tommy had awoken to ready himself for the task his brother had desperately asked him to take over. Maria had been awake, her kitchen light visible from the house you were in across the street. Not having the courage to bother her otherwise in the wake of being torn down so completely by someone who you thought had accepted you. Hesitant to reach out and force a connection with the woman who had a literal commune’s worth of worries on her shoulder, paired with the ups and downs of pregnancy in a time where every aspect of it was washed in uncertainty.

But she saw you. Most likely told of the disastrous confrontation that had happened by her husband. Perhaps seeing you more then than she had previously.

You had initially planned to take Ellie to where she needed to go, staying with her for however long it would require hearing the Fireflies out. To apply logic and statistics to their case of proposed action with Ellie now in their hands. With her blood and tissue at their relative disposal in order to run tests, to assuage that she truly was immune in tests and medical procedures that would warrant a solid base to work off of. You weren’t being honest though, with either Joel or Ellie. You didn’t think it was possible. You didn’t think the creation of something so expansive that it would eradicate the very real and adaptive being of cordyceps would be easy, if at all possible. In this lifetime or the next.

The world had shifted. And there was no way to turn back the hand of time on something so complete and expansive. The world had decided what the new order was, the best way to endure it was to adapt. Alter ways of thinking to align with it, accept it. Hell, cordyceps had found a way to adapt in a relatively short twenty years. Evolution almost fast tracking in order to preserve itself for a longer duration. Another thing to consider when thinking about overcoming it. Adaptability meant survival, and if it was fast acting then surely it would find a way to take on elements of a vaccine or cure and circumvent the attempt.

The issue didn’t lie solely in the science and medical proficiency of the staff, but in the resources that it would take to even jumpstart such research. Ellie was only one person, so young and developed into her own mindset, she would’ve listened to them. Turned to you for your opinion, your guidance.

And you would’ve been honest with her then. In the face of whatever plan the Fireflies had concocted up while playing the waiting game. Playing the hoping game. That she would have to most likely remain at their facilities, if they even had any up and operating on the level they would require for such an egotistical task of altering the shift the world had deemed to make. That she would have to give herself over wholly to them, to their ministrations. That she could weaken her immune system in the process, fall victim to some other illness or virus in the efforts to find one for the outbreak. That it would be a shadow of a life, with no guarantee that it would make a difference, let alone a universal one.

That you believed it was hopeless.

And then you would’ve told her of your hometown, beginning the journey in that direction with the determination to show her the other coastline. To help her find another meaning for her life to have worth. Even if it was simply being alive. It meant so much these days, to simply be alive.

Though your thoughts were zoned out on an endless play of ‘what if’ ‘then what’ that didn’t matter anymore, you were on alert as you continued on. The sun trying to break through the cloud coverage in the last dredges of the day.

Just as your foot came down in another, countless step you swooped down to cloak yourself behind the fallen trunk of a pine tree. Ears straining and chest hurting with the effort to quiet your breathing, you could hear the distant sound of branches crunching, people walking among the wooded area just like you were. One voice sounded feminine, the other masculine. It was an easy conversation between them, a simple request to gather kindling for a fire since night would fall within the hour.

They weren’t speaking English, as least not completely, the voices sounding in a mixture of it and Spanish. Familiar but yet so wedged into the crevices of your mind after years of not using your household language. Such a tantalizing siren song that would allow for easier connection with the people you otherwise knew nothing about. Closing your eyes, you felt more than the pull of a weak desire to announce yourself, take a risk of introducing yourself in much the same way.

As soon as their voices seemed to move away, you pushed yourself up from where you were hidden and turned the other way. Not wanting to be around people after the disastrous attempt of connecting with someone so fresh and painful, a weight that you’re not sure would ever lift from your mind and heart. Resigned to be a singular soul wandering around the desolate landscape of what was once the world.

You were about to turn away when you heard a shuffle far too close for comfort. Followed by the hesitant call of something you hadn’t heard in over two decades. Your name. Your full name.

Head jerking around, rifle aimed at the ready; you gazed into a pair of eyes so similar to your own.

previous chapter || next chapter

dividers by the lovely @saradika-graphics

taglist: @sawymredfox @ayamenimthiriel @bookloverkat @rosaaeles @narcissa-anastasia @littlemisspascal @oscarissac2099 @ghostwritesthings @76bookworm76

#dev writes #fic: return the favor #tlou #tlou fic #tlou fanfic #the last of us #the last of us fanfiction #joel miller #joel miller series #joel miller fanfic #joel miller fic #joel miller fanfiction #joel miller x reader #joel miller x you #ellie williams #platonic ellie williams #tommy miller #maria miller #jackson era #season one events #canon compliant #angst #joel miller smut #smut #hurt and comfort #ao3 #ao3 link #ao3 fic #archive of our own

[alastair-1205]

NINJAGO INKTOBER 2023 LIST

Click for better quality.

There wasn't a list for Ninjago before and now there is! This is the list I'll be using this year and hopefully some other people can have some fun using it as well.

If you do use this list, please use the tag! I'd love to see what other people create!

There are no rules other than to have fun (though this post will be updated if that changes lol). Feel free to use this for art or writing or to only vaguely adhere to it or skip days. Go nuts yall.

Other than that, a typed list of the prompts will be below the cut in case you can't read the calendar. Happy Inktober!

PROMPT LIST:

1- Prophecy 2- Companion 3- Green 4- Samurai 5- Realms 6- Creation 7- Fire 8- Villain 9- Teamwork 10- Stealth 11- Destruction 12- Ice 13- Ghost 14- Sacrifice 15- Movie/Alternate Universe 16- Lightning 17- Citizen 18- Dragon 19- Conflict 20- Legacy 21- Family 22- Water 23- Peace 24- Oni 25- Elemental 26- Fun 27- Nindroid 28- Earth 29- Hero 30- Memory 31- Day of the Departed/Halloween

#ninjagotober 2023 #if I had a better tag I would have used it lmao #ninjago #lego ninjago #my art #ninjago dragons rising #dragons rising #ninjago fanart #lego ninjago fanart #dragons rising fanart #ninjago dragons rising fanart

[riptide0602]

Theory about realms,involves spoilers about Source Dragons:

Source Dragons embody concepts,not just powers,right?Like life,motion,energy,strength and etc.They're also heavily involved with realms:

FSM,someone who created several realms,is a descendant of the Life Source Dragon

They helped FSM stabilize the realms with the Dragon cores

Capture of the Energy Source Dragon is the reason Merge and mergequakes happened

So what if the realms are based on concepts as well?For example,Realm of Madness is based on concept of Chaos.

Now,there is nothing that supports this take( except the previously mentioned points), but I still find it interesting.

Cloud Kingdom could be based on belief,as writers of Destiny believed that their writing affected the world.

Djinjago is a realm of djinns,who fulfill wishes,so the realm could be based on desire.

Cursed realm could be about bitterness and unfulfilled desires(either yours or wronging someone) and other similar things(I'm trying to connect it to Djinjago while also keeping the concept of the realm itself).To add to this,the ghosts whose backstories we know,do fit this: Morro wanted to be the Green ninja,Yang wanted immortality,Garmadon wanted to be a good and present father,Chen wanted power, Anacondrai generals wanted peace.None of those desires were fulfilled(or not fulfilled the way the person wanted).

Underworld is a place for fallen warriors,who couldn't come to terms with their death.So maybe the opposite of acceptance,failure to move on(rejection?stagnation?).

Realm of Madness is probably based on chaos.

Never-realm.A realm that is hard to reach and even harder to leave.A realm of snow and ice.So isolation or maybe solitude.

Departed Realm is an afterlife and as far as we know,the only good one.A place where departed rest and find peace,so that's what I think it's based on:Peace.

Imperium.Could be order for obvious reasons but the Land of Lost Things is also there and it's not really what comes to mind when you think of order(but it's also implied that LoLT was a garbage dump made by Imperium,so the order thing could still fit)

Wyldness.That's a hard one since chaos is already taken and Wyldness doesn't seem as chaotic as the Realm/Kingdom of Madness.I don't know enough about Chima(which is a part of the realm) and nothing in the show is giving me ideas on that one except maybe warmth bc element of heat seemed to have appeared there and Wyldfyre having a family of dragons.

Mysterium.It's in the name:mystery.Could also be magic or wonder.

The First realm.It's the beginning of everything and the realm of Dragons.But there are Oni as well,so creation and destruction.Not balance, because those two were in constant conflict. Birth and death if you may.

Ninjago.Balance,coexistence.That makes sense, since the show is all about balance and the realm is too:balance of creation and destruction, of light and dark and at it's core it very well could be balance and coexistence of wind and water/sky and sea/storm and wave.

#ninjago #ninjago spoilers #ninjago dr spoilers #dr spoilers #ninjago theory #ninjago dragons rising #dragons rising

[honestmouse20]

my working theory for dragons rising is that Wu is dead, but will continue to sorta guide the ninja on occassion from the departed realm or whatever. And so, since he’s gone, Sora isn’t actually the master of tecnology, she’s the master of creation.  Because she has a natrual affinity towards tech, everyone Thinks it’s her power. but she isn’t really doing much but creating a new design or fixing thigns. Both things that I think the power of creation would be able to do.

And the reason Sora only gets her power from Ryu is because dragons are literally the powers of creation, right? like the Oni were destruction and dragons were the elements of creation. So what if Ryu is a baby source dragon and has the literal powers of creation to give to Sora, unlocking her true potential super early

#it makes sense to me #and i really hope that's the case #bc then either garm is dead too #which i really hope not bc he;s my favorite' #but if he Is #then there'd be a new master of destruction too #d rambles #ninjago #dragons rising spoilers

[ideas-scattered-dreams]

/ / Your grace? my grace.

Fandom: Genshin impact

AU: Robot Reader + REVERSED AU + IMPOSTER AU

(the creator being the character of your choice)

Devourer: I came back and played genshin again.

Imagine that....

You were a creation that was made by their grace, a perfect robot. A robot that was perfect for battle, made by the creators tears and feelings, A perfect human robot. Yet the creator didn't treat you like a robot that was made for battle... But a lover?

It seems that their grace was to lonely and created you as a lover rather than a robot for battle. Why should they even make you as a robot for battle when there isn't a war going on?

The creator and you ventured teyvats lands far and wide, to the windy land to the icy lands. Their grace always holding your hand, never letting you go and out of their sight once.

Your face always remained stoic, whenever you and the creator went from each land and where their creation resided in, the people thinks that you both were the moon and sun, the creator always smiling and you... Just there. You merely shine when the creator introduces you or adds you in the conversations. Yet you were content and that didn't seem to bother you. Do you even understand the feeling of content, or not?

Their grace always looked at you with strong emotions, that truly confuse you. a human emotion you always felt whenever you were with them. asking their grace questions such as "am i worthy for your love?", "you have hundreds of creations yet why do you choose me?"

and such questions was always answered with a soft voice and a tender kiss right after. the answer always being "i adore you." such an answer that you never really understood.

Then a cataclysm happened. the archon war.

The creator looked down at the view, gazing at the destruction of the war that is currently happening between their creations. they knew this was gonna happen soon. they knew everything, that's why they had a plan to stop this before things goes out of hand.

You stood behind them, not moving a single muscle like a statue, waiting for their orders. you eventually knew what's gonna happen and was prepared. yet.

they looked at you with warm eyes, holding your face and kissing you like there is no tomorrow. they held you tightly never letting you go as you gently held their waist. this wasn't the place and time to be... intimate with eachother. You pulled away, gasping slightly as their grace smiled.

"(name), i adore you..." Their grace looking a bit lost as they chuckled at your confused head tilt.

"I'm sure you already understand what i'm gonna do." You nodded, as they pulled you close to them again. "Are you sure this is the only way your grace?"

"Are you truly worried for me darling?" their grace chuckled as you slowly nodded, "Will you come back?" now that made them silent. they looked away, gazing out the view.

"I... will come back. in another body, in another world. but i will come back in your arms." Their grace chuckled as they looked back at you. You weren't truly sure what you saw that day after their claim. But you were sure, you saw such a beautiful view of their grace, as they shined so brightly.

"hey! (name)! wake up!" a sudden shake snapped you back to reality. you looked besides you as a familiar white haired fairy greeted your vision. "Why are you dozing out in an important occasion!"

you tilt your head in confusion. what did she mean?

"Their is an imposter on the loose. their grace has ordered everyone in teyvat to capture them." Oh. You looked at the traveler as they were getting ready to depart, "I see... i shall capture the imposter then." you turned around, to head back to the direction of the imposter.

"Um (name), that's where their grace is. the imposter was last sighted in sumeru" You stopped in your tracks, looking at paimon in confusion. "But they are. the imposter."

paimon and the traveler looked at you with wariness, paimon looked around and pulled your ear. "hey! stop with your nonsense! i know you don't like their grace much. but you should stop that before someone hears you!" The action didn't faze you as much as you nodded.

"enough. let us just go and capture this so called imposter. they must have answers to our questions." the traveler reasoned as they stood up and began to walk away with paimon following behind.

you slightly stayed behind, still looking at the direction where "their grace" currently resided in. "imposter huh... sumeru..."

"hey! (name)! come on! hurry up" paimon called out to you as you robotically turned your head around as you walked towards them with a smile.

"let us go and see their grace."

#➥🌙dreamer.ideas #genshin impact #reversed au #robot reader #reader x genshin #gn reader #imposter au genshin #gender neutral reader #gender neutral x genshin impact #genshin

[strqyr]

a dragon splits himself into two.

creation, destruction, choice, and knowledge were the ideals upon which humanity was made. the god of light leaves them behind with the hope that humanity will learn to remake itself.

ozma gives his four gifts to the maidens.

jinn is a being created by the god of light to aid humanity in its pursuit of knowledge. both jinn and ambrosius are blue with golden chains; blue and gold, like light's realm. the two known relics follow this pattern as well, both the lamp and the staff have something blue held by gold.

...except when light first shows them to ozma, at which point they're only black, before combining into an orb of light:

to bring the four relics together is to summon the gods back to remnant after they chose to "depart this world" (a phrase often used to say someone has passed away), to judge humanity either worthy of being made whole again or not.

the brothers embody the four gifts as well; they learned them in the ever after.

creation, destruction, choice, and knowledge were the ideals humanity was made upon. without them, humanity is only a fraction what they used to be; they are needed to make humanity "whole" again.

creation, destruction, choice, and knowledge are what is needed to summon the brothers. a dragon splits himself into two. the relics are showcased to combine into an orb of light.

is. is bringing the relics together—literally or symbolically—about making the brothers whole again. "our creation rests within your hands," light tells ozma before he leaves, "destroying" himself, braking into dust:

"depart this world" did you light. for real, not like just "we left lol" but like. really. did you depart this world.

#“we will learn from this failure” how #how were you planning to do this #why does light keep disappearing / leaving in a similar manner as we've seen people die #explain yourself #at least dark yeets himself through the moon and leaves a trail #meanwhile light stays a cryptid

[lightwise]

Clone Trooper X

Okay, since there’s been a lot of discussion around CX-1 from the season 3 trailer, I want to give us all a little refresher on how the original Clone X was revealed to us in season 2, the similarities they’re showing between him and CX-1, and what purpose they might be serving in the story.

This is not meant to engage discussion on whether the helmeted CX paratrooper in the trailer is Tech. We don’t know yet if the helmeted clone and the helmetless, deep-voiced clone are the same, or two different CX troopers. All we know is that the helmetless one who has spoken lines in the trailer, is named CX-1 in the subtitles.

Season 2:

We are introduced to the assassin clone known as Clone X in the beginning of episode 7, The Clone Conspiracy, as he is tracking and firing on two clones who were there during the destruction of Kamino and had been contemplating revealing Rampart’s deceptions. Many people thought this could be Crosshair, but based on his less skillful shooting ability and the faint glimpses of his unusual armor, I didn’t think it was.

We then see him fully via a holocall to Rampart, where the garble of his helmet (again, very different than a regular helmet modulator) conceals his identity as he is told to hunt down Slip and Chuchi. Later he finds and kills Slip and several of Chuchi’s guards, attempting to kill her during a prolonged chase (for an assassin, his shots are noticeably not as precise as Crosshair’s or many bounty hunters are), and Captain Rex as well, who appears out of the fog and saves her. He had been in the area to help Slip get to safety, and ended up stunning CX and bringing him into the Martez sisters’ garage for interrogation.

This of course ends up being the most fascinating aspect of this clone’s arc. Rex undoes his helmet and both he and Chuchi are shocked to find a familiar clone face hidden beneath it. Chuchi wonders why a trooper would be doing this and Rex feels like they’re not a trooper at all, but that he doesn’t know what they are. Once CX wakes up from being stunned, Rex tries to get him to talk and find out who sent him and what his mission is, but he stays stubbornly silent.

Once Rex offers to release him if he’ll just talk, he begrudgingly spits out “no you won’t, Captain Rex,” showing that he knows who Rex is and that he doesn’t seem to be surprised that he is alive, even though Rex’s official records state he died. CX then hauntingly says “You’re fighting the wrong battle, brother—you’re limited.” When Rex asks him what that makes him, he responds even more chillingly “a believer” before biting down on a suicide capsule.

None of this terminology or behavior is normal for clones or imperial troops that we have ever seen before. He appears to have been brainwashed in some manner that is very different than any enhancements or conditioning that Crosshair went through or that other imperial clones such as Cody seem to demonstrate. He has become a tool solely at the disposal of Rampart and whoever else in the Empire is putting him to use.

This seems to be confirmed in the next episode, where in examining his body, Rex had determined that all of his original CT identifications implanted by the Kaminoans had been wiped. Perhaps his mind had been too. CX is said to have been born in the first wave of troopers in 32 BBY, which would explain how he knows Rex, and that he is not a new clone creation but an original CT trooper who has been “repurposed” for this program.

Note that in this season we don’t get an answer on who is actually overseeing his training or brainwashing or anything else related to him. He seemed to be taking orders only from Rampart, but with Rampart off the stage after these episodes, it seemed likely that this CX program was bigger than just Rampart’s department or efforts. Sure enough, season 3 seems to be confirming that.

Season 3 (TRAILER SPOILERS AHEAD):

We see at least one, perhaps two new CX troopers in the season 3 trailer. A clone assassin named CX-1 has voiceover that precedes the reveals of an imperial commando, the bounty hunters we’ll see this season, as well as Nala Se with the words “They are coming…” and then it switches to the visual of his face as he finishes “for ALL of you.” And the visuals then show a quick sequence of the majority of our heroes—Wolffe, Hunter, Rex, Echo, Fireball, and Omega, and Wrecker—the “all of you”. This speaking clone has the same generic face and haircut that CX showed in season 2, as well as the same deeper register but with a honeyed smoothness to his voice that is very different from the rest of the regs or the gravelly pitches of the Batch boys. All in all, he seems like a copy (I know I know) of CX in season 2.

In both instances, it appears the X troopers dialogue comes when they are being interrogated by someone they were trying to hunt down. Beyond that, we still don’t know much about their origin and purpose in the broader shift away from CT to TK troopers mingled with Palpatine’s cloning efforts.

Also, I just can’t stop thinking about both troopers’ voices. Why are they so much deeper? And CX-1’s smoothness compared to most of the clones makes me think that the X-number troopers are clones of CX and much younger? Their voices haven’t had as much usage as the clones who have been through the entire war? I don’t know. It’s intriguing though.

I am fascinated to see exactly how much more expansive of a role the X troopers and potentially their program are going to serve in this season. Perhaps they will remain mysterious and simply be yet another way that Palpatine and Hemlock have twisted the clones’ existence to suit their purpose, and to act as a harbinger for what’s to come. Or perhaps they will be a pivotal hinge of this season in more depth this time. We shall see.

Now go forth and speculate 😁

#the bad batch #star wars #rampart #CX-1 #clone trooper x #clone assassin #tbb #tbb season 2 #the bad batch season 2 #tbb season 3 #the bad batch season 3 #bad batch spoilers #tbb spoilers #tbb trailer #tbb season 3 trailer #some light ramblings #somelightramblings

[phoenixrisesoncemore]

Why Eru Didn’t Trip Gollum: Providence, Free Will, and Con-creation in The Lord of the Rings—Part 5 of 5

| PART 1 | PART 2 | PART 3 | PART 4 | PART 5 (this part) |

[Go back to PART 4: Examining the Threads]

Part 5: Re-weaving The Tapestry

Threads of Fate

Peter Jackson was not wrong to be concerned that the implication (true or not) that the Ring was destroyed by accident would not sit well with some portion of his viewers. We yearn for some sense or meaning in the apparent chaos and happenstance of life; that storytelling exists at all may be sufficient evidence of this. Yet it is also true that we shrink in terror at the idea that our actions are not our own, that fate has us in a deterministic grasp. It is such a deterministic force that Plato in his Timaeus called ananke or “material necessity,” a force innate to matter which even his demiurgic God could not overcome.

The characters in The Lord of the Rings seem interested in and aware of some form of mysterious order at work in the world. “Chance,” “luck,” and “happenstance” are repeatedly invoked in the text and often with a wink and a smile: whether it be in Bilbo’s “chance” encounter with the Ring just before the Necromancer is driven from Dol Guldur, “if chance it was” (250), Gandalf’s “chance” meeting with Thorin in Bree which leads to the events of The Hobbit, the “chance” encounter of the three traveling hobbits with Gildor’s elves in the Shire at just such a moment as to save the hobbits from the Black Riders, Tom Bombadil’s fortuitous and life-saving “chance” encounter with the same hobbits in the Old Forest, their “lucky” meeting with Strider in Bree, Boromir and Legolas’s “fortuitous” arrival to Rivendell at just the right time, or the “good fortune” of Gollum’s faulty footing. Yet, amid all this talk of fate and chance and luck we are given constant references to the fate-altering power of free will. 

Choice absolutely does have a real effect on the world of Tolkien’s Middle-earth. Bilbo’s choice to extend pity to Gollum may “rule the fate of many” (59); Frodo realizes that he is “free to choose” (401) on the seat of Amon Hen; Faramir chooses not to follow the summons to Rivendell he hears in his dreams, leaving his brother Boromir to do so instead; most importantly, Frodo’s acts of pity enable the destruction of the Ring. This is no deterministic universe. In Middle-earth free will is absolutely real. So how can forces like “fate” and “choice” interact in a coherent way?

In her paper “Providence, Fate, and Chance: Boethian Philosophy in The Lord of the Rings” Kathleen E. Dubs recalls the words of Galadriel in Lothlorien after she has refused Frodo’s offer of the Ring:

They stood for a long while in silence. At length the Lady spoke again. ‘Let us return!’ she said. ‘In the morning you must depart, for now we have chosen, and the tides of fate are flowing.’” These ideas (free will and fate) are not incompatible if we view them in Boethian terms, for free will operates within the order of the universe, fate being merely the earthly manifestation of that order. And here we can see more clearly than before that free will sets that order in motion; Frodo’s and the Lady’s choices have determined the direction of that order, have set the tides flowing. It has not worked in the reverse direction. For ‘determinism’ to be applicable here, it would have to be defined anew. (40)

Perhaps we might say that in Middle-earth when you choose, you are set on a course to your “doom.” These threads of fate, chosen and redirected by acts of free will, are heading towards something, some destination, some “doom,” and if you’ve been paying attention at all, you’ve likely noticed “doom” appearing a lot among these last several thousand words. It is surely no coincidence that the geographical goal of the quest—the setting for the climax of the action of the plot—is a place called The Cracks of Doom inside a mountain called Mount Doom over a magma pool called The Fire of Doom. It is here that many choices shall finally join together to “produce the situation” that ultimately allows the threat of Sauron to be overcome.

All Rivers Lead to Doom

Perhaps we can also conclude that the climax of The Lord of the Rings is described in passive terms by Tolkien because we are meant to view it as the setting of the revelation and working-out of a long-developing pattern, the outcome of which was clear all along. Tolkien says he “did not ‘arrange’ the deliverance in this case: it again follows the logic of the story” (Letters 251) and that “following the logic of the plot, it was clearly inevitable, as an event” (252). 

The actions that take place when Frodo, Sam, and Gollum finally meet their “Doom” are merely the last in a long row of dominoes: most of the necessary actions that would lead to the overthrow of Sauron are in the past, and most of the consequential choices have already been made. We could speculate about where that line of dominoes started. A reasonable place to point to is the moment when Bilbo puts his hand on the Ring “blindly in the dark” (Tolkien, Lord of the Rings 55). However, we could also push it back further to Gandalf’s meeting with Thorin in Bree, or even further still: there’s a lot of “setting up” that Sauron does to himself. The choice to partly incarnate himself in a destructible object made him far more vulnerable, especially as it is an object that engenders in people such overpowering lust for it that they’d do something as unwise as dancing on the edge of a precipice above boiling magma.

As we can see, an important part of this pattern is evil’s propensity towards creating the circumstances of its own self-destruction, a theme so important that Tolkien includes it in his Legendarium’s creation myth. In “Ainulindale,” the first chapter of The Silmarillion, the Ainur are asked to compose and perform a Great Music together, improvising on Themes supplied by Eru. This Music will later become a blueprint of sorts for the universe. When Melkor, Tolkien’s analog to the Christian Lucifer, attempts to disrupt the Music by overpowering the other Ainur with his own repetitive and loud improvisations, Eru admonishes him and warns him that for all he tries to disrupt the Music and make it solely his own, his Discord shall ultimately work against him: “For he that attempteth this shall prove but mine instrument in the devising of things more wonderful, which he himself hath not imagined” (17).

Gandalf’s proverb “oft Evil will shall evil mar” (Tolkien, Lord of the Rings 594) expresses a reality that is part of the metaphysical foundation of Tolkien’s Secondary World. It is, therefore, metaphysically and thematically appropriate that Gollum’s lust for the Ring and glee at its return leads to his literal fall. The necessary conscious act of good intent—throwing the Ring in the Fire—was one no one was capable of. As Paul Kocher explains in his early piece of literary criticism of Tolkien’s work, Master of Middle-earth, “The irony of evil is consummated by its doing the good which good could not do” (45).

The sudden revelation of a salvific pattern—created via the weaving together of a fate derived from choices both good and bad—at the moment when all hope seems lost, represents perhaps the perfected mode of eucatastrophe. “Eucatastrophe” is a term Tolkien coined to describe “the happy turn” in fairy-stories (as he defines them), and it first appears in his essay, appropriately titled, On Fairy-stories. On Fairy-stories was written during the early years of Tolkien’s work on The Lord of the Rings and may be considered the conceptual background to the kind of narrative story-telling at work in his epic (Tolkien On Fairy-stories 15). In his description of eucatastrophe Tolkien says “[Eucatastrophe] depends on the whole story which is the setting of the turn, and yet it reflects a glory backwards” (76). This glory is the sudden realization, whether in the mind of the reader or the characters, that those events which had seemed to be chance or luck—especially bad luck—when experienced within the flow of the story, have in fact worked together for their deliverance.

In light of the above, I would argue that the “Eru tripping” interpretation contradicts both the dramatic intention of the scene and the very notion of this “backwards reflecting” eucatastrophe by adding a singular, direct, and unilateral cause for the Ring’s destruction in the very moment before this destruction happens—a cause which, because it is performed directly by Eru in the manner of a miracle, needs have no regard to the long line of causes which precedes it. This same undermining of dramatic intention applies to the interpretation that claims a curse tripped Gollum. Would a curse need a long line of causes behind it to function? In both cases, these other causes are superseded and become unnecessary. Additionally, the passive approach sounds much more like using Discord itself to bring the Music back into accord with the Theme. But if Gollum’s fall is passive in this sense—the end result of many, many choices woven together into fate—then what does Tolkien mean by his comments about the “Writer of the Story?”

Perpetual Production

Just because the cause of Gollum’s fall is passive, just because Eru didn’t “trip” Gollum, does not mean his fall is truly “accidental,” because Eä—the universe and the entire playing out of the events within in it—is conceived, in-text, as a Story or Drama[8]. In his essay “Over the Chasm of Fire,” Stanford Caldecott notes that Sam’s comments after the climax of The Lord of the Rings have a much more literal meaning than Sam may even realize: “‘What a tale we have been in, Mr Frodo, haven’t we? I wish I could hear it told!’ (…) Sam has bridged the gap, and seen their own lives as part of a great tale full of wonder and meaning, that stretches from the beginning of time to its mysterious end” (32). 

When Tolkien uses the words “Writer of the Story” he makes it clear he is not referring to himself (though the humorous comparison may well be on his mind[9]). In this aspect I think the “tripped” interpretation is absolutely correct: “the Writer of the Story” is a reference to Eru. My disagreement comes in what it means for Eru to “take over” the story.

The world of Middle-earth is a pre-Christian one, far more like the fading pagan backdrop of the world in Beowulf than the Christian allegory of Narnia, but Tolkien was also quite devoutly Catholic, his faith a potent and foundational part of his worldview (though it should be noted that to say this is not the same as to say it was the entirety of his worldview or that he was always of one mind on matters of faith and theology). Just as the characters in The Lord of the Rings appear to be aware of some sense of fate at work in the world, many also attribute to that fate a kind of rational intention outside the bounds of mere determinism. As Gandalf says to Frodo regarding Bilbo’s discovery of the Ring: “Behind that there was something else at work, beyond any design of the Ring-maker. I can put it no plainer than by saying that Bilbo was meant to find the Ring, and not by its maker” (56). This guiding or shepherding—but not controlling—of people and events is Providence. Tolkien repeatedly refers to Providence when describing the events of the climax of The Lord of the Rings.

No account is here taken of ‘grace’ or the enhancement of our powers as instruments of Providence. Frodo was given ‘grace’: first to answer the call (…) and in his endurance of fear and suffering. But grace is not infinite, and for the most part seems in the Divine economy limited to what is sufficient for the accomplishment of the task appointed to one instrument in a pattern of circumstances and other instruments. (454)

Frodo had done what he could and spent himself completely (as an instrument of Providence) and had produced a situation in which the object of his quest could be achieved. (325)

What form Providence takes within Eä is less clear. What or who was “guided” such that Bilbo found the Ring? And in what way? Did Eru “cause” Gandalf to reach Bree at just such a time as to meet Thorin, setting in motion Gandalf’s hunt for a burglar? Or did he “cause” the same for Thorin? Did he make the floor of the goblin tunnels below the mountain crumble under Bilbo, landing him directly in the Ring’s path? Or did he guide Bilbo’s hand “blindly in the dark” until it brushed against cold metal? We cannot say with any certainty. These providential interventions are such that, if they do in fact exist, we do not or cannot see them. We cannot verify them, and in the moment they seem easily attributable to a variety of other causes or merely to “accident.” Unlike The Silmarillion’s explicitly stated and miraculous interventions—the awakening of the Elves or the Drowning of Numenor—we are never told what these providential interventions are or when they take place. We can only, like Gandalf, suspect them, in the way a particularly sharp movie goer might suspect a certain event or turn of phrase was an instance of foreshadowing: we recognize them as making “story-sense.” Thomas Hibbs describes the Eä we are presented with in The Lord of the Rings as a universe in which “individuals can have confidence that there is an order for them to discern and tasks for them to fulfill, since a providential world is one in which human history has the structure of a plot, an intelligible dramatic unity” (178).

Tolkien even wrote an in-universe debate about the very topic of the nature of Eru’s involvement (or lack thereof) in the events of Arda where he makes the nature of Eä as Drama explicit and diegetic. Called “Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth” and appearing in Morgoth’s Ring (the tenth volume of The History of Middle-earth series) this debate between the elven king Finrod and the wise woman Andreth centers around what Tolkien calls “Oinekarmë Eruo (The One’s perpetual production), which might be rendered by ‘God’s management of the Drama’” (329). While nothing in The Lord of the Rings approaches the explicit and diegetic nature of this debate, the early exchange between Gandalf and Frodo mentioned above—Gandalf’s voicing of his suspicion that Bilbo was meant to find the Ring—reproduces to some degree the same opposition of viewpoints. Gandalf ends with the statement “and that may be an encouraging thought,” to which Frodo replies “it is not” (56). Frodo shares Andreth’s cynicism and does not find in the idea the comfort that Gandalf does.[10]

Providence (for Tolkien) is not Miracle

As we have already discussed, some of Eru’s involvements in the Story—the awakening of Elves and Men and the Downfall of Numenor—appear to describe a mode of involvement that is singular, direct, and unilateral and which we might define as “miracle.” In his essay “Conflict and Convergence on Fundamental Matters in C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien,” Ralph Wood notes the attributes of Tolkien’s idea of miracles:

But for Tolkien as not for Lewis, miracles are unique acts of God; they are not special demonstrations of what God always does through the operations of nature. There is, in fact, an implicit Thomism at work in Tolkien’s understanding of miracles. As Brian Davies observes, Aquinas “thinks that miracles come about by virtue of the creative activity of God and nothing else. The whole point about them is that nothing subject to God’s providence, i.e. no cause other than God (no secondary cause), is at work in their occurrence” This is not to say that God does violence to the created order, or that he “intervenes” to disrupt its natural processes. On the contrary, St. Thomas insists that God is totally present to every existing thing, so that all events are always the effect of God’s will. Yet miracles are not worked through secondary causes, not even through their divine compression, as Lewis argues: they are brought about by God alone. (325)

This description of miracles as those events which work through no secondary causes is echoed by Purtill in J.R.R. Tolkien: Myth, Morality, and Religion:

By definition miracles are an intervention from outside of ordinary life that cannot be expected, counted on, or prepared for. Unless you take on the impossible task of writing a story from God’s point of view, there is no way in which you can show a miracle as an event following from the characters and circumstances of the story…. (154)

A “miracle” then is not an event that we could say “follows the logic of the plot,” as Tolkien describes the events of the climax of The Lord of the Rings. For Tolkien, miracles are fundamentally unlike the actions of Providence, which holds free choice among rational creatures as sacrosanct and seems to work within Eä almost as an undetectable force of nature. Christin Ivey uses the image of an “underlying current” to describe this force:

With Providence’s active involvement in guiding Frodo’s free will, Tolkien presents Providence not as stoic ‘clock-work God’ but as an underlying current, flowing together the free will choices that determine the earthy derived plan of fate; ultimately leading into compliance with the thematically cohesive divine design. Helen Lasseter concludes: ‘While guiding all events and actions to an ultimate good, Providence never denies creatures their freedom… [Tolkien] shows that the person is integral to a providential world order; yet the person’s inherent limitations, exposed through personal failure and defeat, reveal the constant presence of a higher and greater authority within the world.’ (196)

For Eru to use a miracle rather than the actions of providence it must be necessary to use a miracle rather than the actions of providence. If Gollum was so near to falling, why not let it be that he fell? What does Eru tripping Gollum say that isn’t better said by allowing Gollum’s own glee to destroy the Ring? Gollum’s madness and lust is a better cause dramatically, thematically, and theologically. And if it were as simple as tripping someone into the Fire, why didn’t Eru do so with Sauron just after he made the Ring? There is no reason for it to happen now rather than then. Alternatively, he could have torn the Ring off Frodo’s finger. He could have prevented Sauron’s fall into evil entirely. Or he could have prevented Melkor from singing at the very start, ending evil before it began. But he doesn’t.

The events in the Cracks of Doom constitute a providential eucatastrophe, not a miraculous deus ex machina. Eru does not “enter” the story to intervene at the last moment—Eru has been present all along. This is consonant with what we know of how Eru deals with concentrated incarnate evils in the world. Eru does not often jump in with miracles, and when he does it is never to stop atrocities from happening. The destruction of Numenor, for example, does not kill Sauron and does not prevent all the harm the Numenoreans have already done.[11] Eru leaves the stopping of evil to others (and to evil itself).

Providence is not a “change of plan.” Providence is the plan. It is not Eru working alone. It is not “miracle.” Eru may not have tripped Gollum, but he gave Gollum, Frodo, Sam and every other rational being opportunities to make choices which, in concert, produced a situation that led to the Ring’s destruction.

Rending the Web of Story

There is one last important point. The universe of Tolkien’s Legendarium is a teleological one. Providence is leading towards… something, some meaningful end, though those who have never been outside of it are at an epistemological disadvantage when it comes to puzzling out what that end is. While Tolkien never completely formulated an entire eschatology for his Legendarium, he did note one important feature of what would come “after” Eä: a Second Music in which the Children of Eru (Elves and Men) would join the Ainur in song. 

This Music, like the first, is not merely ornamental, or a work in and of and for itself. Like the First Music it is a pattern, a blueprint of things to come, things that will be made Real, and it is a work that humanity will participate in. This hopeful view of eternity—one that is echoed in Tolkien’s allegorical short story “Leaf by Niggle” when the protagonist sees his own creation given material reality after his death—is one that Tolkien appeared (at least at times) to believe was active in the real world. As Tolkien says at the end of On Fairy-stories: “All tales may come true…” (79).

Most importantly, however, is this: this communal art making shared among all the human beings in the world is not something that happens only at The End. The Children of Eru are fundamentally sub-creative beings, art-makers, who are made precisely in order to express the infinite variety of Eru’s infinite Being through their own unique creations. These creations are not limited to what we would traditionally call “art works.” As scriptless actors in the Drama, the very choices of the Children of Eru are their art, their sub-creations, and that makes their very choices infinitely important. In The Flame Imperishable, Jonathan McIntosh thoroughly situates the metaphysical underpinnings of Tolkien’s Secondary World in the metaphysics of Thomas Aquinas, including the notion that all human action represents a kind of shared creative activity with the Creator:

In our acts of sub-creation, God has chosen to create through us, as it were, not in the sense that we are made the intermediate agents or instruments of his creation, but in the sense of our sub-creative activity becoming the locus at which God carries on or continues his own work of creation. (…) Human praxis, as it were, is a kind of human poesis, human doing a form of human making, inasmuch as every human action seeks to bring about an alternative state of affairs, and therefore to realize a “secondary world” or reality that is alternative to the one currently realized. (181)

These choices, all adding up to join together as the threads of fate—and more importantly these choices made in fellowship—reflect the Music as it was meant to be: a pluralistic effort of infinite variety. The pity shown to Gollum, for instance, the salvific force which, while not functioning alone, is given special attention in Tolkien’s commentary, is not just pity, but many acts of pity by many different players: pity in fellowship.

So who was responsible for the Ring’s destruction?

In a very real sense, they all were. Everyone whose choices interlocked in order to produce the circumstances at work at the Cracks of Doom, even Sauron, even the Ring, itself, is responsible, to varying degrees, for the Ring’s destruction. It may not be out of line to include in this group even every rational being who had ever lived up to that point. Because that is how The Music, the blueprint of Providence, is meant to work. 

The stories of Tolkien’s Legendarium are conceived as a kind of mythological history of our own world. Tolkien, in fact, introduces himself to us in the prologue to The Lord of the Rings not as author, but as translator of long lost documents recording the events of pre-history. Tolkien wants us to know that we are living in Eä in an Age long after the fall of Sauron and the fading of the Elves, that we are reading a story about a world that is itself a story—and that story happens to be our own. It’s story all the way down. Which means our choices are inviolable, too; Frodo’s agency is also our agency. The web of story is torn asunder, and suddenly we, like hobbits, are forces that shape the universe. It is our choice-making—our art-making!—that expresses the infinite variety of God just as much as Frodo’s does.

If we allow ourselves to step into Tolkien’s Secondary World we may stop for a moment and take him seriously: one day we will sing the Second Music, but even here and even now we are all—already—con-creators with The One. 

And that (may be) an encouraging thought.

Notes in Part 5

8. It should be noted that my intention here is not to explore the moral and ethical questions present in this interpretation of divine beings and their moral duty, or lack thereof, to intervene in the world for the sake of Good, including whether or not this is consonant with the operations of a loving creator, or produces a satisfying or comforting theology. Whether such a “way of things” is Good is its own worthy question (and has been debated for millennia). It may, however, also be a question for which there is no truly satisfying answer.

9. Tolkien is paralleling himself with the Other Writer when he says that he did not “arrange” the action. Perhaps he’s being cheeky: the Other Writer didn’t “arrange” the action either: it “follows the logic of the Other Writer’s story.”

10. In their debate Andreth is of the mind that Eru, if he exists, has little to do with his Children, since Men have no encounters with him or with his regents (the Valar) as the Elves claim they do. Finrod, on the other hand, argues not only for his continual presence but for the goodness of his plans and intentions, a perspective which Andreth, a mortal woman “doomed to die” points out is molded by Finrod’s privileged position as an immortal Elf. It is tempting to see Tolkien in this debate providing a fictional outlet for his own lifelong struggle with the reality of evil and death and the question of how this reality can coexist with a benevolent Creator—that is, his struggle with the Problem of Evil. One wonders if Tolkien is both Finrod and Andreth in this instance, just as one wonders if he is both Gandalf and Frodo.

11. Eru imposes to stop the armada not because they were evil, but because allowing Men access to Valinor was a catastrophic failure of their nature and future purpose.

Works Cited is listed in [PART 1]

#Why Eru Didn't Trip Gollum #tolkien #lord of the rings #the silmarillion #Con-creation #tolkien metaphysics #eucatastrophe #athrabeth finrod ah andreth #providence #free will #miracle #Eru #Gollum #Frodo

[swanmaids]

original character-focussed fic recs

One of the best feelings for me as a fic writer in this fandom is when somebody tells me that they liked one of my original characters. Character creation can be hard work and nerve-wracking, so it’s really rewarding whenever people tell me that it’s paid off. This fandom has a wealth of fantastic, memorable original characters, so I wanted to make a recommendation list of some of my favourite fics that feature them. The fics in this list are a range of lengths, ratings, warnings, and themes, and I’m hoping everyone will be able to find something to their taste here.

Of course this list is not exhaustive, and I’m always open to more recommendations!

All the splendour they could bear by asterisq; t, 1k, cntw.

The Ar-Pharazôn (& Sauron) regime commissions art for the temple. The artist tries to survive the assignment.

Bitter Heart, Bitter Heart by thegreatpumpkin; f!Galathil/OFC, t, 20k, nawa.

She had loved her brother better once. She had loved them all better once; but too many times she had swallowed bitterness, and now her heart was all sown with ashes and salt. Noble Celeborn, wise Celeborn, shining in his place beside the king! Galathil was reminded at every turn of the ways in which she did not measure up.

The Bread Maker’s Lament by havisham; Morwen & OFC, t, 1k, nawa.

A young woman, living in First Age Hithlum, grapples with grief and loss, and bakes bread.

The Carpenter’s Son by @kareenvorbarra; OFC/OMC, m, 9k, rape/noncon.

An untold story of conquered Dor-lómin, in which an Easterling carpenter has a child by his Hadorian slave.

The Constant Gardner by tehta; OFC & Egalmoth, t, 4k, nawa.

Running Yavanna’s errands in First Age Middle-earth is a tough job, but someone has to do it.

To die in the light by @skyeventide; Maedhros & OFC, m, 6k, violence.

A thrall escapes Angband. This is the journey of what comes after.

Dwell in death’s shadow by @undercat-overdog; Curufin/Wife, g, 3.5k, nawa.

A child eavesdrops on an argument he was never meant to hear.

an ecstatic accident by void and fire by Chestnut_Pod; g, 0.5k, nawa.

Follow the blue roads of Arda.

The Elf Who Circumnavigated Arda in a Ship of Their Own Making by @arofili​; OC & OFC, g, 1k, nawa

Three letters home from a Telerin adventurer.

Far Too Many of You Dying by @starspray; OFC & Teleri, t, 1k, cntw.

After the Noldor depart, Alqualondë is left reeling.

Four Winters by @aipilosse; Celegorm & OFC, t, 6k, nawa.

Four winters in the life of Gwíneth, daughter of Urthel. A rescue, a hunt, a fall, and the abyss.

His Hour Had Come by @polutrope; Saeros & OFC, g, 1k, nawa.

Saeros' daughter reflects on the life and actions of her father.

Lost at Sea by starspray, Uinen & OFC, 0.4k, g, nawa.

An Avarin elf accidentally gets lost at sea and gets stuck halfway onto the Straight Road. Uinen helps out.

These Newborn Shores by @kazaera; t, 14k, nawa.

It's the early Second Age and the Host of the Valar have just departed. The disparate refugees now sitting on the new shores of Lindon, tasked with building the fleet of Númenor even as they are still reeling from Beleriand's destruction, must find a way to move forward despite their losses.

Figuring out where to get their clothes from would be a good place to start.

Not by the Hand of Man by Sath, Tar-Miriel/OFC, e, 7k, nawa.

After his chief priestess is assassinated, Sauron summons his most powerful servant, a woman of Far Harad, to Númenor.

on a long road (miles to go) by Solanaceae, g, 5k, cntw.

Andreth in the House of Adanel.

One Who Holds by @slightnettles Elrond & OFC, g, 4k, nawa.

As the War of Wrath and the breaking of Beleriand approach, a woman of the Easterlings meets a young Elrond.

SeaLight by Anerea; g, 0.3k, nawa.

A Telerin Elf's first experience of the waters of Belegaer, at the end of the Great Journey.

A Seduction by The_Wavesinger; Tar-Miriel/OFC, e, 2k, cntw.

Tar-Míriel attempts to take revenge on her husband by seducing his sister.

Si la mar fuera de leche by Chestnut_Pod, Elros/OFC, Elros & OCs, t, 23k, nawa.

Ten years after the Valar pulled Númenor dripping from the sea, Elros receives a visitor.

Starlit Waves by raiyana; Cirdan/OFC, m, 2k, nawa.

“Congratulations, my love, you have made a plank. Yet again.”   Dry tones teased his ears softly, the silent footsteps of his beloved Ngilith giving him no warning of her approach.

Talathien by maerzkindt; Haleth & OFCs g, 7k, nawa.

Linnoril, a woman from the group later known as House of Hador, returns to her mother's folk of the Haladin and joins the guard. An exploration of reconnecting, forming new bonds and playing fast and loose with First Age Edain lore.

The Thousand Stories by herenortherenearnorfar; OFC/OFC, t, 19k, mcd.

They're important, the myths people tell about themselves, about their histories. You can learn a lot from a tale or seven.

A Traitor’s Issue by herenortherenearnorfar; OFC & OFC,t, 16k, violence.

Ulfang's daughters(in-law) seek aid in the aftermath. Reckoning with their own grief and choices (or lack thereof) they navigate Angband, the nightmare they grew up with, now the only place they can turn for help.

The “Unmarried” Queen - Deficiencies in Numenorean Scholarship by Sath; Tar-Telperien/OFC, g, 1k, nawa.

Rosie Cotton and Samwise Gamgee's granddaughter, a scholar of short stature and lofty goals, finds an earth-shattering document being used to steady a table leg in Minas Tirith.

Willow-Meads by Narya_Flame; g, 5k, nawa.

a willow-spirit, some places she went, and the people she met.

the wind that shakes the mountain by platinum_firebird; OFC/OFC, t, 2k, nawa.

The tale of Mazlav, daughter of Temolv, chieftain of the Uzba clan; and of how she met her lover and companion-in-arms, Aalta of Ishahú.

With the Stars in the Darkness and the Love in the Light by Zdenka; Haleth/OFC, Haleth/Goldberry, Nellas/Goldberry, t, 3k, nawa.

At Nienor's request, the women of Brethil share stories and songs about Haleth, the river's daughter, and those they loved.

#my post #fic rec #the silm

[roundseys]

Finally finished Anu's bio after fiddling around with the aesthetics forever !!

Accessible version of the bio below the cut. Wingdings, zalgo text, binary, morse code are all translated, and the untranslated portions are omitted for screen readers. Caps-locked text is moved to normal sentence case for readability.

[Image description: A circular icon of a simulation of the cosmic web, a sponge-like texture where areas of high density are a warm pinkish orange, and areas of low density are a deep purple.]

[Wingdings text, translated: "Anu, the Universe"]

The Eternal Cosmos, the World of Worlds

[Binary text, translated: creation and destruction and stagnation]

[Wingdings text, translated: boundless]

[Morse code text, translated: recognition reconstruction]

The Cosmos was infinite. The Cosmos was unfeeling. The Cosmos was ambivalent.

The very fabric of spacetime buckled and dipped and bent and curved. Strings of galaxies twisted and wove together to form one great tapestry. Nebulae bloomed and collapsed. Stars shone brightly before winking out. Ravenous black holes tore atoms apart.

Billions of years of this. It was all the same in the end. The Cosmos was infinite. The Cosmos was unfeeling. The Cosmos had seen it all before.

Yet still, a hunger grew deep down. Curled and tugged and churned; itching, burning, blazing. The cosmos became aware. The Cosmos became curious. The Cosmos had not seen this before.

The hunger pointed towards a planet. Nothing more than a small speck of dust. Insignificant, were it not for this novel feeling. The Cosmos watched and saw.

It saw petty wars and bloodshed. Anger, hatred, phobia of the unknown. Haste and desperation. Destruction of the self and mutilation of the other. Dragonkind and beastclans and the ones who came before. Unimportant beings clinging to old ways, trembling in fear of impermanence, blinded by ignorance as they were on that small rock, unable to touch the endless universe beyond. Bound by the limits of space and time, they knew nothing but the violence that their world had been born into.

But the Cosmos also saw great kindness. In this great pool of chaos, life had found its way towards connection and companionship. Parents hugging their children close, lovers embracing after long departed. Friends comforting friends. Strangers saving strangers. Communities congregating and growing together, voices raised in unison, plant roots weaving together, a hand held in another. Each creature connected to the next, each a part of a larger whole: a great web of life, strung together like galaxies in a supercluster.

In this single, small little rock, the Cosmos saw itself.

It made a decision. As this planet's lifeforms reflected the Cosmos, so too shall the Cosmos reflect them.

[Wingdings text, translated: bounded]

[Morse code text, translated: rebirth protector]

It began like how the cliffs of a canyon erode: particles of sand scattering in the breeze, falling away millimeter by millimeter over millions of years. It began like how a new forest grows from barren land: blades of grass reaching for the sun for the first time, giving way to shrubs and saplings, until ages later the grass is overshadowed by the arching bows of ancient trees. It began like how a spider weaves its web: string by string by string until a grand tapestry is born.

It began like all things do. It began slowly, a series of minuscule changes unseen in the larger structure, but changes nonetheless. It began with hydrogen atoms and charged particles ejected into the galactic wind. A slow trickle, molecule by molecule, drawing closer together over time.

Atoms and molecules gave way to gas and dust. Dark clouds of it clustering in the empty space. Instead of collapsing under its own gravity, it stretched its limbs out. Arms, legs, head and tail - a mimicry of what it had witnessed on that small planet. It wiggled its fingers and blinked its eyes and marveled at the sensation of a body.

It took on the form of a dragon. Hydrogen its circulatory system, stars its nervous system. Dust clouds condensed into muscle and bone. Nebulae bloomed into wings. Each heartbeat a supernova, each blink of the eye the spinning of a pulsar. Mathematical physics a mimicry of magic.

The planet was named Sornieth, and it had ensnared the Cosmos itself in its orbit. It had become the center of the Cosmos, the world of worlds. The Cosmos cradled the planet in the palms of its stardusted hands and vowed to protect it.

As long as Sornieth existed, so would Anu.

Cosmic web graphic by the Millennium Simulation Project (Springel et al. 2005)

That voice is the same voice you heard on the same night that everything glowed, took you into the air, and the arms of the Universe kept you from falling.

#my post #flight rising #my dragons #anu #quote in the broadcast message and the lyrics at the end are all from the universe is going to catch you by the antlers :3

[hammerhead-jpg]

More new video spoilr

To expand on the implications of my last post, here's my predictions

From what we've seen, it really seems like it's setting up that Blake will turn into Hush

When I first started seeing people being like "_____ is actually Hush!" I just went "Hush is Hush he could've just been created out of nothing" but now...

People theorized that Avior might be Hush's brother, or that Avior is going to turn into hush, and while the first one was my idea at first based off of nothing but "it might be cool" I don't believe that that's it now

Yeah, a lot of people pointed out how the sounds that Avior is hearing sound like Hush's magic, but Avior said that it sounds like someone is trying to reach out to him and tell him something so it's less likely that the sounds he's hearing are a foreshadow to his foreseeable future, and more likely that at this point in time Hush has already been created and is trying to reach out to him for some reason

Also: Hush says that the first memory he has is his Brother trying to kill him, if Avior somehow for some reason witnesses the creation of Hush (which is already questionable since Hush was most likely created in the river of death), why would his first reaction upon seeing this unknown thing being created be to kill it?

What I think is more likely is: Brachium is Hush's brother.

Blake dies, goes down the river of death, but because Brachium made a deal with the Sovereigns, he must take him to them.

When Blake arrived, he makes a deal with the Sovereigns.

They promise him that they will bring him back to earth and let his lover live as long as he helps them fulfil their goal. Blake agrees right away, but the Sovereigns (because as Brachium literally said they don't have your best interest in mind, BLAKE) hide the fact that when he goes back he'll be different. He'll loose all his memories and his humanity and become nothing more than a tool for the sovereigns, and when his purpose is fulfilled he'll stop existing. The sovereigns use the water of the river of death and the silence in the spell song to create "Hush". Seeing this, Brachium, knowing that he will bring destruction to earth, tries to kill him, but because Hush is way more powerful, Brachium looses and Hush is brought to earth, wether as a new being or directly back into Blake's dead body I don't know.

This might be the crazy part: Doc is actually Bestie.

We know that Bestie is empowered, but we never actually learn what kind of magic user they are so they very well could be a freelancer healer.

I don't know what happens between the creation of Hush and the meeting between Hush and Bestie/Doc

It could be that close knit find Blake's body, somehow separate it from the shade (the shade is fully fed so I'm pretty sure it couldn't have escaped from the room) and descide that they can't tell the police/department that they're keeping a shade in their basement and dump his body into the nearest forest, potentially for him to be found and pronounced dead.

It could also be that Hush is brought to earth back into Blake's body and Hush escapes the close-knit building before the close knit members even realize that Blake is dead.

Whatever it is, Bestie/Doc is probably under the impression that Blake is either missing or dead.

So when Hush meets them, the strange fascination/almost care he has for them could be because of his subconscious memories of loving them and sacrificing everything for them in his past life.

You could say "well how doesn't Bestie/Doc recognize him as Blake?", well, it could be that Blake's appearance has changed enough that he's unrecognizable (and in this universe about 50% of the male population has very similar sounding voices), or you could even say that maybe they do want to believe that Blake somehow came back to them in a different form, but are not sure enough to outwardly go "Blake, what happened?!"

It makes sense that the Sovereigns would need a human vessel to create Hush. Before I thought that they used all the energy from the inversion to create him, which is most likely true, but if all they needed was a lot of energy and the silence of the spell song they could've created him a long time ago using the energy that the shades took over however many years they existed. They couldn't have created Hush before since human souls don't go to the sovereigns, the sovereigns had to make a deal with Brachium so that he could bring a human over to them.

There are a few things that don't match up though

I'm not sure how the timelines go, but Elliott is out of the basement on January first so it is to be assumed that Blake's death and the creation of Hush is at least two days after that. But Avior and Starlight's coffee shop date where he first starts hearing the ringing sound is most likely also probably January first, since Avior goes to Starlight's apartment for the first time after the date I'm assuming that they went to the coffee shop right after the inversion because really where else would they go if not their apartment, unless Avior just fucked off to Aria for a day which I heavily doubt he did.

So it seems like Avior was hearing messages from Hush before Hush was created? I don't know I'm probably wrong about this timeline since, despite the website being only the timeline, the timeline is very unclear

Also, my memory could be wrong but I remember that Hush talks about his brother trying to hunt him down, which is kinda hard to imagine Brachium hunting Hush down when they're in two separate planes of existences

Also also, didn't the Sovereigns say that Bestie needs to die so that it could "break" Blake? They haven't died yet so how can it break Blake when Blake is now Hush who has no memories or emotions? Will it be a dramatic scene where Hush gains the ability to feel grief once Bestie/Doc dies? Or was the Sovereigns original plan that Blake would khs to after Bestie died to try and commune with them and his request would be to bring Bestie back to life?

What has Avior have to do with it? Who knows really

Whatever it is, we might be seeing Scorpius in the next/second to next the Balance series video

Please Erik I need him Good Boy Audios is well and alive it's not like the William situation where the VA disappeared without a trace I need him Erik please don't do this to me

#watch me be completely wrong #my last theory was that Blake would drag Sunshine out ready to kill them as a peice offering to the gods #but getting interrupted by Vega and Warden showing up being like 'suprise you whore' with Scorpius half dead on the floor #so my predictions might not be accurate #redacted audio #redacted asmr #redactedverse #redacted blake #redacted hush #redacted bestie #redacted doc #redacted avior

[benzjr]

The 2024 reboot no one was expecting...

Those of you who have been around for a while might just remember back when I did fanfiction, and if you do, you might remember the story of my Supernoobs OC Josh Carter, the aspiring social butterfly, future superstar and reluctant superhero whose life was getting way more complicated these days...

Back towards the end of 2019, I was really starting to lose steam with him; the inspiration I had for him was really starting to wane, especially given the fandom seemed to peter out and my previous partner-in-angst-crime Pumpkin (@whynotzoidbergdotorg) moved on to other creations. I've definitely missed creating fandom work over the past few years, but between not really finding anything to grab my attention in the same way and a series of setbacks in my life (not to mention the grind of growing my YouTube channel), things just happened to fall by the wayside.

But it seems I wasn't posting into the void after all! Josh and his story left a huge impact on the small but surprisingly resilient Supernoobs fandom, and over the past few months I've been pulled back in, thanks especially to @ghostlyapivorous' @superastral-official and @jaspydunks' @noobs-rewritten. So much so, that I've been re-motivated to return and at least continue (I don't think I should be presumptuous and suggest "finish") Josh's story. In addition to a few unreleased chapters from the original run, I've been working on continuing the story, and I've almost gotten to the end of Dancefest, where we originally left off.

We'll be picking up from there soon, but it didn't seem fully right to go back to using the old 2016 designs of our main cast — my artistic workflow has completely changed since then. So, it was time to give them all a glow-up. The primary goal was mainly to get them looking closer to the show's style, though I've also taken the opportunity to resolve a few longstanding annoyances with some of the characters and change some things up. Despite not being part of the main cast, I also decided to do an image for Zoey, given she's a pretty recurrent character in the series. Just like the first time around, expect to see new art of these kids in the future (though I don't think I'll spin up @joshcartersblog again).

Look out for the continuation of Josh's story very soon, but in the meantime, catch up on how Josh got here:

A Future Super-Something, the first story: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Perfect Disasters, the second story: 1 2 3 4 5 6

Over and Out, the third story: 1 & 2 3 4 5

Diamonds on the Rebound, the fourth story

Reminiscence, the fifth story

A Hero’s Prelude, the sixth story: 1 2 3

Dancefest, the seventh story (so far)

Text versions of everyone's descriptions under the cut.

Josh Carter

Josh Carter has only one goal in mind: becoming one of the popular kids. Enamored with fame and starry-eyed about celebrity, he's chasing the top of the Cornbury Middle School food chain with the help of his friends. Clever, ambitious, and seemingly carefree, he'll stop at nothing in his quest to rise to the top without losing himself, while making plenty of buzz along the way.

…But will something bigger and more destructive than the current popular clique or a mortifying social mishap stop him in his tracks?

Dreams of a social media-perfect lifestyle

Friends with Jock Jockerson despite not being a jock

His "walk-in closet" is practically a department store for one

The Yellow Superdude

As elusive as he is mysterious, the Yellow Superdude is the newest addition to Cornbury's local team of intergalactic virus warriors. But he doesn't seem too happy about having the opportunity of a lifetime; honestly, it seems like he doesn't get along with the other four at all. With the heroes already building local recognition and facing even bigger battles, can he ever become the hero the Earth needs — and does he even want to?

Alias: ???

Powers: Energy blasts, stretchy body, shapeshifting, possibly more if he ever actually went to training

Always has messy hair for some reason

Simon Parker

Josh's best friend since forever, Simon is the realist of the group. As much an inventive strategist as an easygoing wingman, Simon's a true ride-or-die in Josh's popularity adventures, turbocharging their social game while keeping his starstruck bro down-to-earth. They've been there for each other even in their lowest moments, including Simon's brutally public one last year. It's a trust that makes Simon unafraid to be honest with Josh. But despite all this, is Josh keeping a super-sized secret from him?

Enjoys the outdoors with his parents

Still recovering from a 7th-grade incident where he was dubbed "The Whale"

Maintains countless inside jokes and references with Josh

Rebecca Hewitt

Rebecca is a punchy wildcard who's garnered her own notoriety. Since stumbling into Josh's high-flying life in sixth grade, she's been looking to find herself somewhere in the many aesthetics Josh's influencer adventures bring into her world. Rough around the edges but fun at heart, she's not one to mess with, but worth having in your corner.

Recovering horse girl

Still throwing out Mini-Horse Friendship Force merchandise

Best dodgeball player in the class

Zoey Miller

Zoey is the intrepid reporter behind The Cornbury Hound Dog, Cornbury Middle School's unofficial school news blog. Zoey can be eager and persistent to a fault, the perfect attitude for hunting the next big story. She keeps up on all the gossip around the halls — especially Josh's ambitious search for teenage stardom. Totally not because she has a crush on him or anything…

An ace at alliteration

Has a venerable collection of visor hats

Elaborately daydreams of meet-cutes with Josh

#supernoobs #supernoobs oc #josh carter oc #fanart