#the god of dreams is also involved in this messy soup but I'm not getting into him the post is packed enough as is

[tired-reader-writer]

Enabled NY @insert-clever-username-1133 here is the AU lore I have come up with for Liminal: The Unstraying.

Put under the cut because I have a suspicion it will get long.

Geduldh as an eldritch goddess of decay right alongside earth, winter, etc. Geduldh being powerful.

In the AU lore, if Ewigeliebe hadn't gone bananas and constantly tried to reduce everything to white sand out of jealousy, dead things would decay and “return to the earth” and in turn enrich it, enrich her. Underground, caves, and such are frequently associated with death and the afterlife in many of our religions and myths, what if the same applied to Geduldh? Or would've applied, if not for Ewigeliebe. Maybe the soul still ascends to the heights but the body returns to her warm embrace, maybe she's supposed to have both. They're her descendants after all. The all-mother.

Let's take a look at Aztec cosmology for instance.

So there were two earthly entities (Coatlicue and Cipactli) both of whom were characterized as ever hungering Lovecraftian horrors. Coatlicue was said to she “feed on corpses, as the earth consumes all that dies”, a goddess of also war and childbirth I believe. On the other hand, Cipactli represented the earth floating in the primeval waters— no idea how the two were related to one another but a source did mention Coatlicue as having originally been a priestess not a goddess so who knows really— who ate anything the four sun gods made because there was no land and so their creations kept falling into the primordial ocean. They had to kill the thing and make it into the earth (even then Cipactli wasn't really dead, so had to be sated with blood sacrifices so it won't go all murder-happy on the rest of the population). Also Cipactli was described as “always hungry, every joint on its body was adorned with an extra mouth”.

Heck, even outside of Aztec cosmology if we look at say Demeter, she's still fucking terrifying? Like, she can withhold her blessings so that nothing would grow? Her sulking/grief over Persephone nearly killed the world? WINTER EXISTS BECAUSE SHE REFUSES TO LET ANYTHING GROW????

And Persephone herself, even if it's debatable whether she actually was a nature goddess or not (sources vary), is still like. Both a nymph and a fuck-off terrifying queen of the underworld.

I'm not sure if it's canon but while fics invoke Geduldh's name in euphemisms to mean passivity... Sure, canon Geduldh may be like that, but what if she was allowed to be angry? The thought that earth goddesses are supposed to be all demure and passive is kinda laughable.

She's compassionate and wants to embrace her children in death but she can't and that makes her fucking angry. And perhaps Geduldh's all-encompassing acceptance is an offshoot of her father's all-devouring hunger/loneliness. She is her father's daughter, after all, and it would be fun if she was more like him than anybody else.

Darkness and earth could be very plausibly linked too, in my opinion, like so:

“Never fear the darkness, Bran. The strongest trees are rooted in the dark places of the earth. Darkness will be your cloak, your shield, your mother's milk. Darkness will make you strong.”

and

“The old that is strong does not wither,

Deep roots are not reached by the frost.”

Also earthquakes are terrifying, let me tell ya, and I haven't even experienced a big one.

On the topic of earthquakes— Remember that Mycenaean Greece's Poseidon was more an earth/underworld god with the “earth-shaker” epithet than a sea god and Hades didn't exist in that era and Zeus wasn't the most important god back then— Poseidon the earth-shaker was.

And on the topic of passivity, it actually made me think of Cinderella, and how Cinderella to me is a tale of an abuse victim persevering and escaping her abusive situation. She remains kind and polite bc you know abusers, they don't take well to being talked back to or anything like that, they see any sign of discontent, they bring down their boot on you ever harder. I know this because I'm in an abusive household at the bottom of the totem pole 🥲 People have talked about and analyzed the Cinderella story from this angle far better than I have, and I hope y'all come across such analyses eventually. I'm not too physically well to do an in-depth dive into this one unfortunately.

Geduldh is trapped in an abusive marriage. Her family doesn't cast Ewigeliebe out or kill him because they (it was the God of Darkness in particular I think) want living things. How does Geduldh feel about any of it? Of her body being used like that? Unclear in canon. But what if in the AU, she's angry?

It's not that she doesn't want children or living beings, far from it, it's just that she wants a say in how Yurgenschmidt is governed. She is also associated with compassion if I recall correctly, and noble society... is the opposite of compassionate.

And to add to the fucked up cake we have... The goddess of Chaos. If I remember correctly she desired the God of Darkness but couldn't obtain him but what if. What if she had a fucked up Petyr Baelish thing going on, like he saw Sansa Stark as the daughter he could've had with Catelyn but also desiring Sansa to be his, same dynamic between the Chaos Goddess and Geduldh, the child most like the God of Darkness.

All of that cumulates in Geduldh making a divine messenger in the form of a Devouring child born mysteriously fatherless in the Adalgisa Palace. Well, twins. But Horaia's is a whole nother thing not many will be stoked to learn about since they're an OC and I've already posted about their backstory on tumblr before, so we're skipping over it.

Bonus round: Geduldh's Monster.

Not the backstory, but the Vibes™ Horaia, especially civil war era Horaia, is supposed to give:

The vibe of blood vessels being exposed and pulsating, even on armor and clothes, like they're a part of Horaia's body itself. Not literal blood vessels but like. Looks close enough to be Creepy™. The armor is them and they're the beast the monster the killing machine on the battlefield, it's just another of the roles they play. Horaia already feels like they're acting out roles in hopes of not sticking out as inhuman among noble society (it's naaaaasty) so this time, why not lean into a role they'll fear out of spite? (In the sense of “oh you preach cruelty to me? you want cruelty? FINE I'LL GIVE YOU CRUELTY.”)

Like Hector who spooks his son because he was wearing a war helmet and it symbolizing how war makes monsters out of them all? Somewhat like that but entirely voluntarily.

Horaia, touching the face of her betrothed Ferdinand, the one whose hand in marriage they won in ditter after Magdalena ditched him (not out of romantic love, it's entirely platonic, both Ferdinand and Horaia in this AU being aroace, but a deep desperate sense of friendship, codependency, attachment, and duty), asking him “If I become something unforgivable, would you still love me?” and afterwards accepting Geduldh's (+chaos') blessings into their body to become That™. Corrosive, devouring magic, if you know the Shadow from Fate/Stay Night: Heaven's Feel? Yeah, that. The same effect that thing has on pretty much everything.

A drawing of Horaia as Zent, disheveled and bitter and resigned, to close this post off.

#ascendance of a bookworm #honzuki no gekokujou #horaia (oc) #horaia (aob oc) #Geduldh #Liminal AU #the god of dreams is also involved in this messy soup but I'm not getting into him the post is packed enough as is #Liminal: The Unstraying