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thehistoriangirl · 1 year

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These Heavy Legacies

Sooo... When I said I wanted to write for Mel... I wasn’t joking HJSJHSJHD 😳 😳

Mel x gn!Reader---1.2K---SFW

Summary: Nightmares always haunted Mel’s dreams. But today it’s different, because you’re there for her—for good or for worse.

Her dreams were not always drenched in blood, but every time they were, it was only normal for Mel to wake up in the middle of the night soaked in sweat, bedsheets tossed away on the floor like ghosts coming to haunt her.

Death was as restless as war, she supposed.

The window over her bedroom barely illuminated her way into finding the nightgown neatly folded over the bedside table. She usually would sleep dressed, but today was an exception because she knew you wouldn’t be too far away.

With that thought in mind, Mel tiptoed into the hallway that spread into the living room, white walls reflecting the dancing orange flames of the hearth, a soft essence of burned laurel made her stomach drop.

Even when she was sure no major noise was caused, bare feet barely echoing against the cold rock, you got your eyes darting from the fire to her silhouette half-drowned in the shadows.

You didn’t say anything as the flames ate up a letter from her mother, eyes settling into them drained of energy.

“You’re back early," she commented, striding gracefully until she could sit on the first couch.

You were made of a mere group of shadows playing against the tall marble walls, looking more like a shadow monster than a human figure.

“There weren’t many impediments.” Mel could identify the dry, isolated tone in your voice from the past. Those also haunted her in dreams filled with twin fortresses’ towers surrounding one another like amorph circles, a monumental bastion looming on the horizon, its shadow casting more than darkness. "You can't sleep?"

Mel shifted on the couch, a cold wind sneaking from the balcony into the heart of the residence, goosebumps covering her skin when she remembered vaguely. "And I suppose the unsophistication made it worse, isn’t it?” She didn’t want to reveal herself so quickly, howbeit you could read her just fine.

“It always is no matter what,” you commented, lost inside the labyrinth of your mind. “Hopelessness only makes it worse. So, nightmares?” Because it couldn’t be something else. Because you didn’t want to talk about your problems either—your whole purpose of existence. Mel barely nodded, her hair waving slightly with the movement. It was strange seeing her hair down hueing like a dark cloud. “I suppose that’s something I can’t protect you against.”

“Do you have them, too?”

The air inside was beginning to clear, the laurel essence traveling away with the night, but not so the crimson-stained fingers that were shyly hurdling in fists against the cozy fabric of the couch. Despite the flicking light, Mel could see it, she could smell it. And yet, her first instinct wasn’t to look away, to run into her bedroom because the smell was the very same that haunted her nightmares. She was a Noxii after all, a Medarda, even if her own family doubted it; she used to meet death in the eye since she could recall in every memory locked carefully while the sun was up when other people were looking.

But she did feel rage because the power she struck to have over the years couldn’t spare you from this grim destiny.

You still lingered within the power of those househeads pulling the string from Noxus.

“Yes, but it’s alright. They help to remind me of the cost of strength, don't they say so?”

Mel bit her thumb, how many times her mother could have told you that? She could only imagine, but it didn’t make it any better. “It shouldn’t be the price for our happiness— for your happiness. I never wanted this for you.” No. You were always happier helping to sort out letters and old leather books, laughing quietly over the library’s corners. With each swing of your blades, every hour wasted on the training grounds, Mel could see you longed for something more.

But then she was cast away, and Mel lose sight of you. Until now… and, sadly, you were completely different from the sweet person she used to meet around the Medarda’s gardens after your lessons were both finished.

“I won’t commit the same mistake, Mel. I couldn’t save your brother, I’m not going to fail you, too.” The flames made your trapped tears noticeable, like magma trying to keep down from spilling, from the core of your heart. But they remained in the corner of your eyes.

Trapped, like you. Caught in a cumbersome spiderweb that spread its threads further Noxus.

She wanted to wipe them down, her hands remaining tucked in her lap instead. Mel wouldn’t stand to think about you shoving her away.

“It was impossible to know what would happen next. You were obeying following orders—”

Your laugh was dry, more a weeping sound than mocking. Heavy-lidded eyes focused on the city at your feet, windows reflecting the flaming hearth. “Sometimes, I wonder why your mother sent me,” you muttered, lips barely moving. “I thought it was some punishment. Seeing you every day and recalling the moment I failed your family. A reminder too, of what I could lose if I ever slack off again.” You looked at her now, a sad smile with a lonely tear sliding down your cheek.

Piltover was still sleeping, and the shining buildings were now pale and grim, the shade of gray reminiscing to Noxus. Though you knew, in some building someone would find your deed and scream, sooner or later. Would you be able to hear it?

Your fingers traced the leather stitches of the couch, and Mel couldn’t help but follow the patterns. “But no. I’m just a message sent to you.” Turning to face her, your eyes reflected the flames like sparkles of gunpowder before they exploded into a searing fire. Mel could see them enthralled for hours. She did so, years ago, after all. “That no matter what cost, you have to always honor your family.”

Mel smiled sadly, reaching one of her hands to touch the strands of hair that were covering part of your face, fingers lingering over your cheekbone, drying the rebel tear off.

“Perhaps we can forget about who we are supposed to be and begin to be who we want instead. Just for tonight.” Please. “When you’re here, the nightmares disappear.”

She wanted to revive the past, a cost too high she was willing to confront when the sunrise again when you would have to keep on being Mel Medarda’s guard and one the fearsome Medarda’s lieutenants.

You nodded, cheek resting against the fleeting touch of her fingertips. Now, you were just you, with no names, no legacy, and no ghosts behind. The time was frozen, reversed. It came back to the past years of political and intellectual discussions in a lonely library, laying behind some rosebushes, backs less stiffen than they were now. "Yes, I think we can."

She stood up and took your hand, guiding you towards her bedroom. The flames in the hearth were dying, only ashes would remain of the letter Ambessa sent you to complete a mission.

Tomorrow seemed far away, and both were used to use the shadows like sanctuaries from the monstrosities you had to strive for in the name of prosperity and security—no place for power or glory, those were for the too reckless ones, the ones who didn’t have something precious to lose.

Albeit the long shadows you both cast over the horizon, over the past, present, and future. There were still flicking moments in which they didn’t exist.

Laying on the comfy bed, you held onto her as she cradled you with the same care, eyes shining into a twin, silent promise as you fell asleep.

I will do everything to keep you safe.

#mel medarda x reader #mel x reader #arcane x reader #arcane mel #arcane mel x reader #mel medarda #arcane mel medarda #arcane fanfiction #arcane fanfic #my thingies :)

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pinkafropuff · 8 months

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"no more heroes"

They loved heroes. They loved to hear tales of triumph with crowds cheering in the background, loved the indomitable fortress of justice and truth. Love the fun sounding stuff. The lies, mostly. The embellishments, often.

The truth? Almost never.

She could have said that they vanquished the Ascian on the First, that his cruel plan had come to an end with one final, dying grasp. She could say he deserved it. Aye, that was true. Technically. But she couldn’t say what she really thought about it, about the grief he carried with him, the life he lived, the city filled to the brim with ghosts, built and rebuilt by his very hands.

Dear mom and dad,

It was stiff. It always felt stiff when she started, considering which parts to keep and which to omit, but this time she just sat there, quill hovering over parchment as all of her thoughts drew a complete blank.

“...they’ll worry…” Soft and secret. A reminder to temper herself. They would anyway, if she didn’t send another letter soon. When was the last time? The Steppe, probably. She’d sent back some fresh herbs too, with blessings from the mothers in that community, during her time as the Khatun. ‘Cousins’, her people called them, the Au Ra that were not dragons, as they were all from the same ancestors, anyway, so what use was fighting?

With difficulty, she tried again. Dear mom and dad, did you know I’m a big deal now?

No, that wasn’t…that wasn’t right. It was too impersonal. It felt like snapping back at them for all the years she’d been under their tender care, carefully gathering strength until she struck out into the world on her own.

What about something simple? Like, ‘I have a lover now’? Ugh, but her parents wouldn’t let her hear the end of it. Or worse, think she was lying! Besides, telling them about that, when her dad would read it…ew! She scribbled all over the paper in frustration and tossed it on the ground.

“Figuring out what lies to tell, eh?”

Aran’s head snapped up- though not before her shoulders shook in distress. A hiss escaped her, hackles raised. “Ugh, Stinny! Stop reading my letters!”

The dragoon did not laugh or smile as she expected him to. Instead he shrugged. “I don’t.”

Something within her roiled in discomfort. Instead of thinking of a snappy rebuttal, she turned her head, sighing as she laid it on the table. “...sorry.” Teeth clenched to nearly grind against one another, she closed her eyes in thought. The word hung there for a long while, neither of them saying any others, before Estinien crossed the threshold into the room and stood over her, as though waiting for something. With some effort, she was able to ignore him looming over her for exactly two minutes- after which her head flopped over to the other side so she could see him better, horn knocking on the wood of the table like the world’s saddest drum.

“You need not write a novel on your endeavors,” he offered. “‘I yet live’ would suffice.”

Somehow, that made her feel more sickly than before. A thousand thoughts flew into her head, each with less sense within them than the last- then her answer was the softest sigh, before a low and crackling, “No.”

He gave a half shrug, as though he’d given it his best shot and would try no more, then pulled up a chair. In the silence she found it best not to do anything but lay there, letting regret wash over her.

“I’m sorry.”

She understood Raha now. The words did little to soothe, but took the place of many more pressing matters, any deeper issues that they barely scratched the surface with. What was there to be sorry for when there were no wrongs? What wasn’t there, when the wrongs were also the rights?

“Tried.” She continued. “But can only be one thing.” Pitifully, she picked her head up, then the quill and parchment, an offering of desperation. “Write for me?”

He shook his head, the spill of white hair only making his disapproval more evident. Arms draped over the back of his chair, he took a deep breath, eyes searching the ceiling of the little cabin for a moment before then settled on her. “I would not take such a pleasure from you. ‘Tis a rare thing among the Scions.”

A low blow. She wouldn’t soon forget that he’d lost his own birth parents and brother to the Dragonsong War. To the Calamity. On the contrary, her family was relatively safe- as far as she knew. Her parents, clan, and six siblings were none the worse for wear, according to the letters Tataru had delivered to her herself. Still, it was good to remember that. To remember those loved and lost, and those who had no idea of what she’d been through.

Remember us. Remember that we lived.

She closed her eyes. Were she waiting on her eldest to send word of her travels, what would she want to hear? Eyelashes fluttering, she put quill to parchment again and began to write.

After a little while, Estinien stood from where he sat, pushing the chair back into its place at the table. On his way out he carelessly waved a hand on his departure, footsteps slow as he headed out the door. Hearing them, she lifted her head, tongue sticking out as her thoughts were stuck mid-sentence.

“Will you take it for me?” It was mostly gibberish to her, but she said it anyway. It was harder now, to just say things outright. Like ‘thank you’ or ‘you’re my family too’ or ‘I’ll make you something for this later’.

“You need not ask.” Was his response, and he left her to her thoughts.

Dear mom and dad,

Stinny told me to keep this letter simple. It’s hard for me. I remember when you wouldn’t let me go play with the other kids, for fear of me breaking something, ‘cuz I played too rough and I didn’t have enough strength to bear the weight of it. I get it now. I know why you did that.

Maybe you went through things like this too. Where you go through something that everyone says is heroic, or do something everyone makes speeches about and gives you medals for. But you come up empty. You don’t say anything about the way your horns burn near your face because you got poisoned, or how your knee hurts sometimes just by standing for too long now. You just kind of smile and let them cheer. They don’t know the strain and they shouldn’t. Not until they’re ready to.

I have both of my hands and feet, both my legs and arms. I have both of my eyes and horns and tail, and all of my fingers and toes. I have friends who love me and I love them, and my clothes are really nice and expensive. I have a lover now (soon my mate, if he says yes this time!) and he’s the kindest, strongest man I’ve ever met. I think you’ll both like him. He really wants to taste our traditional foods, and I think that’s a good sign. There’s this thing called Archon Loaf and it sucks. Apparently all of my friends have had it before to survive their studies at the place they're from. I tried some. I can’t believe they put that in their bodies! By Nhaama if I never taste it again, it’ll be too soon!

The twins are fine. Alphinaud (blue!) has grown up well and even protected me once on our adventures. Isn’t that crazy? Alisaie (red!) has grown into such a lady that she offered to buy me deserts at a shop she knows in Sharlayan. Thancred and Urianger are the same as always, as is Y’shtola. I think Thancred and Urianger are married? But Thancred keeps dancing around it. Whatever. That’s their business. Y’shtola tried to sacrifice herself again. I’m still angry about it, but I won’t tell her. She’s strong, but I know what kind of strong now. I’ll be around for her to lean on soon enough.

I’m sorry this is late. I’ve had a rough time, but I don’t want you to think

I yet live. Are you proud? I miss you all.

Aran ✨

#ffxiv #aran utar #estinien wyrmblood #a midpoint. just after shadowbringers #partially into endwalker #fic

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the-pinstriped-hood · 1 year

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"THE ROOT OF THE PROBLEM"

Her routine was like clockwork everyday. Getup, get dressed, get coffee, kiss Bo goodbye as he headed down to his shop and then head to her computer.

Percy opened her eyes to find where her Silver laptop had been sitting was now barren. In its place, a note:

'Bo told me about your little problem, Sis! You won't solve it by banging your head against a wall over and over. Come find me and I can help you work it out.' - Ellie

The Novelist sat her cup of coffee down in it's usual spot and rubbed her eyes. "Is this a fucking intervention?" She muttered to herself. Of course it was. If Ava and Bo couldn't get through to the Eldest Sister, Ellie was the only girl for the job. She stared at the ceiling, shaking her head. "Fine…I'll play your games, guys."

Percy transferred her mug of coffee to a travel cup and stretched her back,still feeling good from all the attention Bo had given her last night. She locked up and found that the Benatar, too, had been taken.

"You are fucking kidding."

Walking down the wooden steps of the Sinclair home she started to walk down the warm streets of Ambrose. Into town, past the Garage where she had found the Benatar. Percy grinned. "Perhaps…"

The Novelist grinned wickedly as she snuck around her lover's fortress looking for her keys to her car. She found them hanging inside the store supply closet with Bo's coffee mug and his jacket. Plucking them off the raised nail used as a key holder, she snuck her way back out only to be spotted.

"Drop 'em." Bo commanded behind her.

Percy froze, teeth clenched in anguish air escaping in a hiss as the keys were taken once again. The audible sound of boots tapping on the concrete as she turned to face Bo, arms crossed and brow furrowed disappointedly. "Now I get it, I didn't tell you that this was gonna happen…but the least you could do is go along with it."

She bit her lip. He was right. "Ellie wants you to go take a walk over to her place. It ain't far and your legs work. Fresh air'll do ya good."

She was quiet as she passed him. "I worry for you, Percy. We all do." He left her with a kiss on her cheek as she walked out of the shop.

The longer the walk became the more woodsy the town seemed to get. She stared at her phone and found the picket fence that guarded the Sinclair-Mason home. A pair of yellow eyes followed her as she entered the gate to the front door. Salem. The midnight black cat had been watching the girl walk up the sidewalk from the window. The cat disappeared from the window and as if by magic the backyard gate opened to reveal the second youngest sister herself. "Percy? You're here!"

Eleonora swept out to greet her sister, paint and dirt stained having splotched on the stark white fairy tail dress she was wearing.

Percy hugged Ellie. "It's soo good to see you out and about! You look as pale as a ghost!" She smiled. "Sorry I'm late…."

"Oh no you're not late at all! There's to be no rush today."

Ellie led Percy inside where Vincent was sketching on the couch with Salem on his shoulder.

Vincent nodded and signed to their guest. "Let me guess, you tried taking your car?"

Percy blushed. "Yeah, Vin. You caught me and so did Bo. Well done." She rolled her eyes.

Ellie smiled. "Phone please!" She held her hand out to the young woman.

"I don't even get my phone?!" Percy asked incredulously. Ellie wavered for a moment as Vincent signed behind Percy. "Be. Firm."

Ellie straightened up her back. "Yes. phone please."

The Novelist's fingers slipped into her back pocket, producing her phone and placing it in Ellie's palm, who tossed it to Vincent. "For safekeeping of course. You can get it back when we're done."

Percy removed her shoes and socks, and rolled up her pants. Following Ellie out to their garden. Stopping short on their patio, the entire garden was filled with life and greenery like a fae based fairytale.

She had never been out this far only to the confined spaces of a handful of places.

Ellie beamed with pride watching her sisters mutely awestruck reaction. She left her side and went back to pulling the carrots from her garden. The rain had been a blessing for them allowing them to be pulled out of the ground much easier.

"Kinda leaves you speechless, doesn't it?" She asked over her shoulder. Percy nodded. "You….planted all this, Ellie Belle?"

"Well not all of it. Vincent likes to help me in the garden when he isn't off doing his own thing. Ava was here not too long ago. Is there anything you fancy?"

Percy took her first tentative barefoot steps off the cold stone patio and onto the rain kissed earth. Ellie couldn't help but watch as her work oriented city born sister took her first steps on to the grass in bare feet. Like a baby deer walking for the first time.

It chilled the bottoms of her feet, toes sinking slightly into the earth. "See? Now was that so hard?"

Percy shivered and Ellie dusted her hands on her dress, gently linking arms with her. "You act like you've never ran barefoot in the grass before…"

"Because I never got to. I was always piled on by schoolwork, debate classes, church, chores ...."

The pair continued to walk around the garden to get Percy accustomed to the feeling. "You never got to be a kid either…"

"What?"

"Nothing, anyways we're here because you need to get out more. You can't be confined to a desk all your life." Ellie held Percy's hands. She noticed Percy's eyes wander as her eyes grew wide. "Is….that a Raspberry bush?"

Ellie got on her tiptoes. "Yes it is! Would you like some?" She whispered to Percy. She nodded and the pair made their way over, plucking one from the bush. She nearly buckled and popped it in her mouth. Ellie giggled at her reaction, already watching the waves of stress roll off her back like a harsh tidal wave. Percy closed her eyes, revealing in the flavor of the wild berries heaving a deep relaxed sigh. "That was really good."

The maiden of the garden gathered up her dress, sitting criss-cross next to her sprawled out friend and sprinkled grass on her face. "What are you doing?" Percy chuckled, opening one of her eyes. "Dunno. But you're still relaxed aren't you?"

"Yeah. I feel pretty good."

A gentle breeze waved through the garden, tickling the wind chimes that hung throughout the sprawling backyard. Percy felt at peace. Forgetting about deadlines, emails and any other care she had, mentally and emotionally throwing them to the mercy of the wind. The silence was nice, the air was plenty and Ellie was watching her relax. There was no need to disturb her as she returned back to pulling her potatoes, carrots and leeks from her garden.

"You're just going to leave her out there?"

Vincent signed. "Not forever. Besides the sun's coming out soon, it'll be her wake up call. There's no need to rush, Vinny." Ellie kissed his cheek.

When the sun did finally peek out from behind the clouds, Percy's brow furrowed. "Mmmmm….?"

Eyes fluttering open, she yawned stretched and checked her pockets. No phone. "Oh, right…"

The grass was warm and had left a slight grass stain on the back of her cream top. For some reason, Percy didn't seem to care. She got to her feet, looking around the garden and stretched again, her back popping audibly. She smacked her lips and spotted a Peach tree. Inside, Ellie couldn't help but keep watching while prepping the oven with a playful smile.

Percy took the fruit and sat down taking a tentative bite into it. "Hey!"

Percy jumped, looking around. "Sissy! When you're done enjoying that, grab a few more and bring them inside! We're gonna start baking soon!"

She nodded and finished her peach, picking a few more good sized ones and carrying them inside.

Ellie was adored in an adorable apron as she rolled some dough out onto a floured workspace. "What are we making, sis?"

Ellie grinned. "Peach Cobbler. I remember you talking about how you were craving some a few nights ago. You know, before the whole Uno night debacle…"

Both girls grimaced at that disaster of a game night.

"That was not one of your best ideas, El."

Percy went to wash her hands as she began cutting and prepping the fruit.

Both girls then broke into howls of laughter. "Bo-bear and Vinny were ready to kill eachother!"

"I had such a fucking migraine on the way home…"

"And Poor Lester!" They both howled.

Vinny heard the pair and quietly chuckled, leaning against the doorway. The girls saw him. "I honestly doubt Ava is ever going to let me or Bo forget it…" he signed.

"Nor should she! You made Lester cry man!" Percy sassed him.

The three laughed and were interrupted by the beeping of the oven.

Ellie finally put the cobbler in as Vincent snacked on the remaining peach peels.

"How long was I asleep out there for?"

"About two hours…" Vincent signed.

"How do you feel?"

"You mean just getting to lay down in the grass and not worry about anything today?"

"Yep." Ellie smiled.

Percy smiled genuinely for the first time in a long time. "Feels pretty damn good."

Tag: @rottent33th @slaasherslut @cries-in-latino @allthingsblood @coppasulfate

#bo sinclair #house of wax #house of wax 2005 #slashers #vincent sinclair #lester sinclair #percy jones oc #house of wax oc #friends oc #the angels of ambrose au #eleonora mason

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books-of-the-great-leviathan · 2 years

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Chapter 37- Isabella

***

"Hey. Not fair. You were hiding the piece-"

"I was not."

"Yes, you were. I saw you shove it down your pants."

"No, I didn't."

"Enough, Elias. Give it here."

"After it's been down my pants?"

Isabella hunched at the gunwale, listening to Alois and Elias bicker over catsbones. She wasn't in a mood to join them. She faced the sea, scanning the waves from atop an upturned bucket. The night was a clouded one, moons obscured. Good- their vessel, a single-masted fishing boat, became nearly invisible on the dark waves. All the same, the waters of Bellana's Arm ever set her on edge. These were battlefields, grave-waters, full of the bones of dead soldiers who'd never be consecrated, never be burned, never return home.

Stars shone through the clouds, giving the expanse of Bellana's Arm enough light to navigate by. They had long since left Lapide's sea border and sailed beyond, into the no-man's-land of the Arm's passage, dotted with islets and sea-stacks inhabited by none but smugglers and seabirds.

Their ship was a battered little sloop, its triangular sail clay-red and daubed with Estaran luck symbols. Ren had taken the wheel, and around him, the deck seemed aglow with captured starlight- baskets of phosphorescent night-fish, goggle-eyed with teeth like broken glass, leaking glowing blood over the decks. Ren wore shirtsleeves and breeches, bone fishhooks dangling from a cord around his neck. Isabella was dressed in drab, too, rough linen and sailcloth, an old wool blanket pulled round her shoulders like a cloak. They looked like Estaran fishermen out hooking night-fish from the reefs, simple folk making their living before the next battle began.

Alois and Elias had dug some battered catsbones board from the bowels of the ship. Alois had lost a straight run of four games, and a stack of fish bones on Elias's side of the board grew steadily higher.

"Trust me, you don't want it now," Elias said.

Alois made a frustrated noise. "Just give it here!"

"Quiet," Isabella snapped.

Alois shut up. Elias nibbled his lip, then replaced the piece on the board, a little grubbier than before. Silence fell, broken only by the creak of the sail, the slap and knock of waves against the hull, the faint hiss of their keel parting the inky waters. A single gull floated over the swells some yards off, but otherwise there was no sound of birds, no cries, no calls.

Isabella hated silence on the battlefield. A good day was full of sea shanties and the snap of tossed ropes, orders called and drills performed, amiable chatter to distract one's self and everyone from the reality that at any moment, the war might come to call. Even a bad day- cannons, gunshot, screams and commands and the choking haze of alchemic smoke- was full of something. Silence meant waiting, meant nothing, meant anything.

Isabella was still not ready for anything.

I'm not ready for a world without you, she'd told her mother that evening in the gardens. Cedars, and heartlain, and her sister's laughter below. Peace, so close it almost felt certain. What a dream that had been, and how spectacularly shattered.

She supposed her tides had changed. She'd been well enough trained to be queen, to live without her mother's guidance. But what about a world where she no longer believed in her mother? Was she ready for that?

Is this the Lapide you wanted? A fortress with a grave-vault full of shadows. A man chained to a legion of ghosts, who'd drown the world for vengeance. A friendship poisoned by betrayal. Daval Belmont had sacrificed his own son for Estara, and Isabella had hated him for it. But Sofia Valere had murdered her sister for Lapide, and all Isabella felt was cold. The hate waited like a cresting wave frozen mid-arc, never to fall. She couldn't hate her mother, no matter how hard she tried, no matter the terrible things she had done.

King Daval had inherited a broken nation, and had himself broken what little family he had left.

Is this to be my inheritance?

Isabella shivered, at once cold. She rose, pulling her blanket around her shoulders, and crossed to the bow. Ren leaned against the wheel, tapping at the sun-bleached wood, his gaze set on the swells. He glanced at Isabella as she settled on an upturned bucket by his side.

"Anything?" she asked.

He shook his head. "Calm seas and clear skies, Highness. See those?"

He pointed to a smear on the horizon: a dark crag of rock rising from the waves. Another fainter crag beyond was a mere shadow in the mist. "Kern and Treg. Old pirate nests. Estaran sailors think these waters are unlucky. Full of ghosts from the fine soldiers of the Estaran navy the pirates hanged from the cliffs for their comrades to see. Now, they fear the war dead sunk to the deeps, seeking souls to harangue. This is one of the old smuggling routes folk I was once acquainted with would run back in the day. "

"And you were only ever acquainted with smugglers, I'm sure."

Ren smiled. "Estaran patrols are scarce through here. A superstitious bunch, and tonight it's in our favor. I'd blow them a kiss if I felt more kindly toward them."

"Steady, Ren."

"Don't worry, Majesty. I'm not about to start kissing Estarans." His tone was easy, but he reached inside his uniform and brought out the pack of old cards he carried around like a sailor's charm. Isabella knew he'd been some kind of circus brat in his childhood, telling phony fortunes for marks, picking pockets when the coins didn't add up. Isabella didn't believe the cards actually told fortunes, but everyone needed their talismans, even if they pretended otherwise.

Ren fanned the cards and flipped one. A vast fish swallowed the world, swimming on a field of stars.

"Interesting," he said.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Why don't you pick one?"

Isabella tapped a card. Ren turned it over. His expression darkened.

"Show me."

He turned the card. A young woman stood, arms outthrust, her golden hair streaming around her. Stars rained around her, like they were falling, extinguishing themselves on the surface of the ocean.

"It doesn't look so bad," Isabella said.

"She can mean a whole host of things. Resurrection. Destruction. Both. All. It's a card of tumult, mark me."

Isabella shook her head, settling her eyes on the faraway islets. She clenched the fist of her maimed arm, opening and closing it, keeping it limber. "I don't like this, Ren. This whole sea feels full of ghosts."

It felt like night her father died. It felt like the night Luca had come home, covered in blood, eyes hollow. Nothing had been wrong with him bodily, but Isabella had worried the Estarans had done something to him inside, where it counted.

She'd called him a coward for it.

She'd mocked him for it.

Triune, she hoped he was alive.

"Spooking on me, Isabella?" Ren asked.

She gave him a tight smile. "After what I've seen, you can hardly blame me."

Ren flicked through his cards again, staring not at them, but into the mist. Isabella followed his gaze, but saw nothing. Her arm throbbed, a cold, splintering ache. She grit her teeth.

"Sparrow?" she said.

"Look. There."

Light flickered on the horizon. Isabella started up, but Ren gestured for her to stay where she was.

"Is that a warship?" Isabella whispered.

"Yes. Far off."

"Will they see us?"

He shook his head. "Not through the mist." He glanced at her. "You should get some rest, Highness."

Isabella knew she wouldn't, but she nodded anyway, and gripped Ren's shoulder for a moment before returning to her place by the mast. The light from the distant warship faded, and the horizon became dark once again.

"I saw you that time," Alois started up as she settled herself. "Seriously, stop, you're ruining the game."

"Maybe I don't want to play stupid catsbones anymore."

"You suggested we play it!"

"Only because you're no good at it and I thought you needed the practice."

"Stop being such a child, Elias-" Catsbones pieces clattered as Alois swiped for the piece in Elias's hand. Elias sprang back, upsetting the board, dangling the piece out of reach. "Give that here. I said, give that here."

"You get it yourself." Elias whirled and flung the piece overboard. It cut through the fog. A dull, metallic boom echoed across the water, and Isabella shot to her feet.

"Elias," she snarled, and the boy shut up. Ren straightened from the wheel, eyes narrowed, posture rigid.

Shapes loomed out of the fog, jutting from the water. Ships, Isabella realized. The hulls of downed warships, balanced on-end or capsized like vast dead sea-beasts, jagged holes eaten into their sides or blasted open, crumbling into rust. Exposed girders curved from the water, bare as ribs, and waves hissed and boomed through empty holds, echoes amplified so Isabella felt the rhythmic shudder of impact in her gut.

Some of the wrecks were skeletal, eaten away by wind and waves, crusted with colonies of barnacles exposed by the tide. Others were newer, paint still scabbing their hulls, like they'd just been sunk. A forest of broken masts held scraps of flags, though whether blue or red, Isabella couldn't tell. She made out the rippling, melted evidence of spellfire, warping the wrecks out of shape like wax models thrust against coals.

"Whose are they?" Alois asked.

Isabella shook her head. "Does it matter."

They drifted through the graveyard, silent, watching the wrecks pass by. There were no signs of skeletons nor corpses, and for that Isabella was grateful. She'd seen what the sea did to the dead, what the battlefield left behind. She had her memories. She didn't need more reminder of what she stood to lose.

"Where's the honey whiskey?" she asked. Alois handed her a flask, and she drank until her eyes watered, until she began to feel warm again. The chill from her arm had infected the rest of her, an icy pall deep in her bones.

"Are you all right?" Alois asked her as she handed the flask back.

"Fine," Isabella said curtly. "You?"

Fear flickered through his eyes, but he nodded. "Fine."

"Liar. You're going back to the man who condemned you to die."

"My father-"

"If you bloody say he was doing it for the good of Estara one more damn time, I'm going to tip you into the sea."

"I wasn't going to say that," Alois said. "I was going to say he's going to listen to me this time. I'm not the same scared boy I was when I came to Lapide. I know the truth now. He'll listen to me. Because if he doesn't, I'm never going to stop fighting him. Never."

His amber eyes shone vivid in the lamplight. "He's right in one respect. Estara could be great again. But there's no going back to the past, not the way he wants. Estara has to be good, not just great."

Isabella was quiet, watching him as he spoke. He was going back to the father that had engineered his death. He was going back to the man who had tried to kill him. Isabella couldn't fathom a father like that. Her own had been a massive man, slabs of muscle and shoulders so broad Isabella could sit on one like she might a tree branch. Claudio Valere had a heart as big as his stature. He'd loved Lapide, its people, its songs. He'd loved the gardens, the birds and the flowers and the ancient cedars creaking in the wind.

He always plucked a stalk of heartlain to tuck in his armor, and another to present, with a magician's flourish, to his queen. Her mother had acted coy, but Isabella knew her too well. She'd seen, in quiet times before the war, the way her mother's fingertips lingered on the back of her consort's hand, the honey flush across her face. The way she'd kissed his cheek, sweet as a young girl courting her first suitor.

And how he'd loved them, too, her and Luca and Cereza. He'd brought back such gifts for them- animals of clockwork and ooshka tusk and painted porcelain from Buyan. The pelts of mistfoxes from the moors of north Lapide, who could vanish and reappear with the fog. Strange sweets from across the sea, bursting with unfamiliar sugars and spices. More than that, he gave them his love. Counseling Isabella's frustrations, her fears. Telling Luca stories as he listened, open-mouthed, sweets forgotten. Braiding Cereza's hair with flowers.

Both of them gone, now.

Perhaps he was naive, a man who'd tried to save his country and died for it instead. But he'd been kind as much as anything else, and Isabella knew that if he and her mother had not loved her, had not let that love be known, she did not know what she might have become.

"Daval was right to attack," she muttered. "To demand reparations for the help we denied Estara."

"What?"

"Maybe-" She shook her head. "Maybe not- right. But Lapide isn't like Estara. It's easy for me to sit in my tower, just and true, and condemn his hatred. But Lapide has never suffered plague after plague. It's never known famines like Estara has. It's never known death like Estara has."

"No," Alois said softly. "It hasn't."

He fell silent again. Isabella held out the flask of honey whiskey. Alois took it and swigged, then made a face.

"I don't actually much like this stuff," he admitted.

A smile curved across Isabella's face. "I could find you some milk if you'd prefer."

"There's actually a fermented milk spirit from my mother's island, Belamere, that I hear can knock a man dead with a single swig."

"Your mother was from Belamere?" The island was the smallest of Estara's three. Unlike its sisters, its volcanic soil supported lush life, jungles dense with greenery and strange animals unlike any found across the rest of the archipelago. "I shouldn't think a Belameri woman would submit herself to the king in such a way."

"Her father rebelled against my grandfather and failed. The Three-Day War, they called it. As punishment, Etain Belmont demanded his wealth, and his daughter." Alois stared over the side of the boat. "But she held onto her freedom as best she could. She believed in the Leviathan, in witch-gods like your Triune. I- I don't mean to insult-"

"I'll forgive you. Triune might not."

He stared at her as if alarmed before he realized she was joking. "Oh. Well, that'd be a miracle, wouldn't it?"

"That is rather their field."

He laughed, picking at a scab on his wrist. "You'd have liked her, I think. She did what she wanted, even under my father's eye. She worshipped what she wanted, in secret. She loved what she loved, who she loved. She and Captain Azare were always..."

He trailed away, then shook his head.

"She was friends with the Royal Witchhunter?" Isabella said.

"He's not what you think," Alois said quickly. He shook his head. "Maybe...maybe he is. I don't know. I don't know much anymore."

The Witchhunter was something of a legend, the Bloodmonger's knife, the shadow to his burning sun. Isabella had never seen him, but she'd heard tales of his cold ferocity, the organized butchery of his legion of Witchhunters. She'd fantasized of meeting him on the battlefield, of killing him in single combat, of sending his head to Daval Belmont on a silver platter. She'd never heard of anyone speak of him as a man, with respect, even love, in their eyes.

"Your mother died when you were young," Isabella said. "Didn't she?"

He nodded.

"I'm sorry."

He looked up at her. Daval didn't have those amber eyes. Were those his mother's too, a piece of her that had gone on living in her son? They weren't a conqueror's eyes. For all his revolutionary talk, he was no Bloodmonger. Alois was a dreamer. A builder. Respect, reverence, and above all: kindness. A good man, maybe, which was a dangerous thing to be, and be king.

"I'm sorry, too," Alois said. "For Acier. For the queen. For everything."

Isabella smiled at him. It was the first time since her mother's death a smile felt real. "Thank you," she told him, and he smiled at her, too.

He lifted his head, the breeze ruffling his curls.

"Smell that?" he said. "That heat in the air? I can always tell when I'm approaching Estara. I love catching that first scent of home."

Isabella faced the sea, the coming horizon, like him. Maybe Enzo was right. Maybe Estara and Lapide would never be more than a pair of rabid beasts tearing at each other, doomed in their making. But this, here, now, Estara's prince and Lapide's queen sitting knee to knee and speaking of peace: this felt like a beginning.

This could be the beginning.

Another jolt crackled up her arm. Isabella's teeth snapped together and ground; she grabbed her own wrist as her arm spasmed beneath the blanket.

Alois blinked. "Are you all right?"

"Stay here." She stood, trying not to stumble.

"Isabella?"

She hurried belowdecks, down the step and into the muggy darkness of the tiny hold. It smelled of rotting fish and moth-poison, slats of starlight filtering down from the deck above. Pain crackled through Isabella and she collapsed against the wall, barely biting back a scream. She ripped the blanket from her arm.

Silver light coursed through her arm, just beneath the surface of its crystallized skin.

Isabella's breathing was overloud in the confines. She stared. Her hand trembled; She clenched it, and the light brightened: the same light Enzo had commanded, the same light that her mother's ghost had spun from.

Impossible. How could Enzo's power have done this? How could his ghostlight be in her? The light illuminated her arm from the inside, and in its radiance, the crystal flared, prismatic as whaleglass.

Isabella lifted her shaking hand, watching the flash and glimmer of colors under her skin. Enzo hadn't just wounded her.

He'd changed her.

Isabella.

The whisper was faint, almost drowned by her ragged breathing. The air rippled; she tensed, at once rigid.

Isabella?

Presence swelled into being: the heat of another person, inches from her.

The world rippled. Isabella's vision heaved, and rushed, like wind in the dark, like a hand reaching for her, from the darkness, from inside, through all things, the matter that surrounded her, the air, the sea, her own blood roaring in her head-

All at once he was there. Fast as a lightning strike: a vision of him, of a metal cabin with rivet-seamed walls, of the deep bass thunder of an engine.

"Enzo," she gasped.

The rush left her. She collapsed against the hull, shaking, frigid, clutching her crystal arm. The ghostlight was gone. Enzo was gone, but she still felt him, still saw him, his face, his weary slump, his bruised eyes wide with shock. He'd seen her too.

He'd seen them.

Isabella scrambled to her feet. Her head ached and throbbed, but she managed to haul herself up the stairs and onto the deck.

"Ren," she gasped. "We have to find another route."

"What happened?"

He caught her as she crumpled again. He was stronger than he looked. Isabella gripped his shirt with her good hand, the other still clenched to her chest. "Acier. I- I don't know how, but- he saw me, through this, through- through his power-"

Ren's eyes narrowed. "How is that possible?"

"I think, when his ghost soldier wounded me, it-" She cut off. Acid burned in her throat. She tasted the bitter tang of magic on her tongue, like smoke off a battlefield. Her hand no longer quivered, but gleamed darkly in the starlight, black as obsidian.

Miracles, she thought, and a chill coursed through her.

"It scarred me," Isabella went on. "Changed me."

Ren took her wrist and turned her palm toward the sky. Its whaleglass sheen returned, colors flickering in and out of focus.

"There's so much we don't know," Ren muttered. "Ancient power. Whale-magic. The fire that lit the stars."

He met her eyes again. "You said you saw Acier?"

"Like I'm seeing you."

"And he saw you? Your surroundings?"

Isabella nodded.

"Then we don't have much time." He let her go and swung back to the wheel. The sails groaned and tightened as he spun it hard to starboard. Around them, the ship graveyard loomed from the mist, a deadly garden of rust and beached hulls. "At your command, Highness, we should head for Lapide's southern point, take refuge in the barrier islands-"

"We have a mission, Irio. I don't intend to relinquish it that easily."

"And Acier won't relinquish you-"

"At my command, was it?" Isabella said. "My command is we continue on to Estara. If Acier comes, mark me, I'll finish what we started beneath Valeris. I'll finish it bloody."

She looked to Alois. "And you?"

"Me?"

"What do you say?"

He blinked at her. "I..." he began. He blinked again, then straightened, his hands clenched at his sides. "She's right," he told Ren. "We don't back down now. Daval wouldn't, and nor will I."

"Hey. Hey!"

Isabella faced Elias. He stared out through the graveyard, through the mist. "Do you hear that?" he whispered.

Silence fell. Wind whispered through the wrecks. Far in the distance, Isabella made out the crash of surf against Kern and Treg's shores, the boom of waves on empty hulls.

Not waves.

Ice gripped her heart. "Engines," she whispered.

They echoed through the night: the bass pulse of warship engines, audible over leagues of open water. In this mist she couldn't tell how far out; the warship could be miles off or right on top of them. The same one they'd seen on the horizon? Had it seen them after all?

"Douse the lamps," she commanded, and Ren obeyed, covering the baskets of glowing night-fish and tugging loose the lantern lines. The shutters fell; the lamplight died. The only light came from the stars, half-shrouded by ragged cloud, silver as Enzo's ghosts.

Ren tensed. "Get below," he said. "All of you. Now."

Isabella heaved up the compartment under the mast; hidden hinges squealed with rust, and dust billowed into the night air. Elias scrambled in, and Alois after him. He held out his hand to help Isabella down, and she pulled the hatch over them again, sealing it in place. Slats of light filtered into the cramped, muggy compartment. The reek of rotting fish was worse here than in the cabin, but from above the seams in the deck were invisible. Isabella could just make out Ren as he kicked baskets of night-fish and nets over the hatch.

Elias's breathing was jagged in Isabella's ears. The throb of engines grew stronger, closer, louder than her heartbeat.

She slipped her fingers to her stiletto, hidden under her sailcloth vest.

A spotlamp flared, its powerful beam shattering the fog and blazing across the fishing boat. Isabella squinted as light poured into the smugglers' compartment.

A command rang across the water, metallic and amplified. Isabella glimpsed Ren lift his hands from the wheel as he replied in coastal Estaran. She craned her head, trying to get a better look. The Estaran vessel loomed above, a massive armored warship, ironsided and twin-masted, the fellfox maws of cannons aimed down toward the little fishing boat.

The sound of the engines pulsed in the backs of her teeth; it hummed through the water, through her fingertips poised on her stiletto hilt.

"I'm just pulling night-fish!" Ren called. He knocked the lid off a basket and gestured to the catch inside. "They like nibbling drowned Lapidaeans on the seafloor 'round here."

"And there's none else on board?"

"None but me and the fish, sir."

Isabella-

Her breathing caught, rasping like a sob. Alois shifted toward her, his eyes wide in the spotlight glare. "What's wrong?" he whispered.

"Be that as it may," called the Estaran commander, "King Daval's orders were clear. All ships stopped and searched."

Ren's hands tightened on the wheel. "Is His Majesty afraid of fishermen now?"

It doesn't have to be this way, Bell.

"I suggest you don't resist." The commander's amplified voice echoed across the water. Waves sloshed against the hull, kicked up by the Estaran ship's engines. "There's no honor in protecting the enemy."

"Maybe," Ren said. "No honor in betraying them, either."

He twisted the wheel. The sails snapped taut, wood groaning, wind flattening the canvas; shouts erupted from the Estaran ship, orders and commands, as the fishing boat banked hard to the side. The spotlamp beam swooped and dived, trying to find them again, light splintering off the waves and turning them to shards of blue-white glass. Shots cracked through the night. Ren ducked as bullets stitched holes across the deck.

Isabella flung open the hatch, scattering baskets, spilling night-fish over the deck. "No!" Alois protested, yanking at her arm, but she shook him off and pulled herself onboard, swinging from line to line, trimming the sails.

The ship surged forward, wind bringing tears to her eyes. A wreck reared from the mist: a dead warship, Lapidaean, the Valere hawk barely visible on its side. Isabella tensed, but the fishing boat's nose slid past it with a scarce hand's span of air.

Behind them, an alarm blared from the Estaran ship. Isabella glanced back. Lanterns floodlit its deck, dyeing the waves scarlet. Shadows flickered on sails, commands mingling with gunsmoke.

The wreck slid past, and mist closed over their path like curtains, the Estaran ship reduced to a diffuse glow through fog.

"Ren," Isabella said, looking back. "Can we outstrip them?"

He hung onto the wheel, knuckles white. "On open seas? No. Here? Might be able to lose them. Might...might be able to get to Kern before...before..."

His voice shook; his eyes shone with pain. Seawater slicked his side. No, not water: blood. The bullet wound glistened just below his ribs. As Isabella watched, a new gush of blood spattered the deck at his feet.

"Ren," Isabella said. "Triune-"

"It's...it's all right. I've had worse."

Another wreck loomed, a half-submerged bow like a cresting sea-ork, ramming spike standing ready to impale the sky. The Estaran engines throbbed behind them. Isabella's arm ached, spikes of cold in her blood, in the very core of her.

How had Enzo's magic changed her? Warped her?

She remembered Cereza's pale face, the black veins radiating from her heart. Miracles come with a price.

Cannons boomed; the sea geysered some hundred yards off, an eruption of spume and flame and rusted metal.

"Trying to smoke us out," Isabella muttered. "Bloody Estarans." She glanced at Alois and Elias, crouching in the open hatch. "Sorry."

Another cannon fired. Isabella glimpsed the Estaran ship as it cruised by, its running lights turning a nearby wreck to a harsh silhouette. They were using ordinary bolts in their artillery. Too close for spellfire; they wouldn't risk setting themselves ablaze, not in such tight quarters. That little mattered if they were hit.

"Thought you said this was a safe route," she said.

"Sorry, Highness." Ren's face was blanched with strain.

"This is my fault. This arm- this- I don't know-"

"Save it, Isabella." He shuddered, then slumped against the wheel with a gasp. Isabella caught him before he fell.

"Sparrow," she told him. "Is that any way to talk to your princess?"

He gave her a small smile. "Queen, I hope. One day." His eyes flicked upward, toward the dark shape of Kern through the mist. "Almost there. Keep her steady and we'll be-"

Isabella heard the high, keening shriek all too late. The world erupted with light; Isabella slammed, hard, against the wheel, blown forward by the explosion. Her face struck wood, and stars burst in her eyes; embers rained, particles of burning matter from the wreck the bolt had struck. The embers caught their sail and caught flame, scarlet and vivid orange blooming like flowers across the canvas.

She heard Alois call out to Elias, glimpsed lanterns flaring bright. Bloody light haloed the mist, ploughing the wreck aside and crushing it into the waves. The warship.

The warship, its ship-breaking bow cutting through the sea, coming for them.

"Alois!" Isabella cried. "Get down! Down!"

She seized the wheel and cranked it, hard, felt the small ship respond, felt the burning sails catch the cold sea wind.

They didn't move.

She looked up. Her heart twisted. The sails blazed, more hole than canvas. Pennants of flame illuminated the sky, drowning out the stars. They wouldn't move again.

The alarm blared; the ship thundered closer. No time. It would shear them in half. No time. Isabella stumbled back. There wasn't even enough time to reach for a handhold before the warship hit them.

The sound of breaking wood was like a monster wave, bearing down, drowning all else. The Estaran ship had swung round at the last instant, bow shearing across their hull and splintering from it a great, hungry gash. Isabella was flung to the deck, in a tangle of ropes and rigging, night-fish baskets dripping with glow.

Pain split through her. Her consciousness wavered.

-Isabella-

A flutter of silver. Fingertips, light on her face. Fire burned somewhere above her, sparks like stars. A heartbeat, huge and pounding.

Not a heartbeat. Engines. Voices.

Enzo-

-no, Estaran voices, accents liquid as music-

Force hit her in the gut. Her vision went white, went red. She staggered, balance shot. A kick sent her down again. Two men, not one. The first stood over her, grinning, while the second planted his boot in the small of her back. Alois cried out behind her. She heard the snap of metal against flesh, felt weight strike the deck.

"Kill this one, sir?"

Isabella looked up, through rolling clouds of gunsmoke. A soldier held Elias by the hair. He struggled like a hooked fish, eyes wide and terrified.

A man in the spellforged breastplate of a commander shook his head. "His Majesty wants the three of them alive."

The three of them? Isabella cast a glance around the ship. Renard Irio was gone: nothing remained of him but bloodsmears on the deck.

Triune's winds to you, Sparrow, she prayed. Whatever his game, she was sure he hadn't simply turned tail and swam. She had to have faith he had schemes of his own.

The commander strode over and looked down at her: a big man, close-cropped gray-streaked beard and hair lit garish in the firelight, dark eyes impassive.

"Saints alive," he said. "Isabella Valere herself. Look alive, men. We find ourselves in fine company tonight."

Isabella stared up at him. She felt blood on her teeth. She'd bitten her tongue. She spat onto the deck and said nothing.

"No words, then." The commander nodded at the soldier holding Elias, who cocked a gun and set it to the boy's head. "Would you rather I shot the lad?"

"I thought His Majesty wanted your prisoners alive."

"I doubt a rigging spider will matter to him," the commander said. Elias bowed his head and closed his eyes.

"Don't." Alois struggled to his feet. "Don't. Take me. Let them go unharmed. That's an order." He looked from man to man, locking eyes with each. "You wouldn't dare disobey your prince, would you?"

The commander stared, then gave a disbelieving laugh. "Alois Belmont, witches pluck out my eyes," he said. "What a homecoming this is."

"We don't come to fight," Isabella rasped. Blood ran down her chin, spattering the deck as she lifted her head. "We come to discuss peace."

"Peace," the commander scoffed. He signaled to one of his soldiers. "Enough from this Lapidaean witch. Put her out."

The last thing Isabella saw was the butt of a rifle swinging for her face. The last she felt was pain, hot as spellfire.

Her head snapped to the side, and then there was nothing at all.

#togl #tales of the great leviathan #fantasy fiction #original fiction #serial novel #chapter 37

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empxsvpernova · 2 years

Text

“Wanna know what I think? I think thinkin' this place is some fortress is kiddin' ourselves.” Daryl mutters, squinting as his eyes scan along the fences and watching a couple of biters limping along the chain links, docile and seemingly unaware of their presence.

Roman’s gaze lifts to the sky, teething the stale cigarette up and down dangling from his mouth. “Yeh.” He sighs gruffly, smoke filtering from his nose as he lowers his gaze back ahead of them.

“How’s Maggie doin'?” Daryl questions after a beat causing Roman to shift in his boots, glancing at him.

He nods and drops his dark orbs to the pavement of the rec yard, his cigarette glowing in the darkness as he takes another drag into his lungs. “She’s comin' out it.. y'kno..” he shrugs and tries dismissing the discussion.

He hadn’t realized that in stepping up a dynamic shift had been realized. Or maybe it hadn’t at all, and he was just reading too far into the simple question. Daryl didn’t neccesarily look up to Roman, it was more a mutual understanding that they all had to shoulder the burden of taking charge in Rick’s stead while he worked through things. It had caught him more off guard having Hershel of all people coming to him in concern over his daughter. Hershel and he hadn’t exactly got off on the right foot.. first impressions and all.

‘Let me be clear. Rick's convinced me to let you all stay, but that doesn’t mean I care much for the decision. Now I’ve been more than lenient and patient on just about everything, including letting you in my home.. Andrea and some of the others are callin' you the delinquent like it’s a term of endearment, but I find nothing endearing about a young man who’s already found himself behind bars. You stay away from my daughters.. and hopefully we won’t have to have another conversation. Do we have an understanding?'

'Yes sir..'

'Good.'

But things had changed from the time Hershel had been forced to stitch him up. They’d at least fallen into a mutual agreement that Shane was and had always been a threat. He couldn’t even imagine how Hershel had to have felt siding with a criminal over a cop.. siding with the criminal he saw as sniffing around his daughter, at that.

'You know what Shane was before all of this–he was a cop. Supposed to – to be the embodiment of morality and yet every decision he makes is based off of his own selfishness.' Dale’s voice echoes in his mind. 'And yet you, a degenerate by your own standard, have a better moral standing than a man who swore an oath to serve and protect others. How’s that for irony.. I don’t trust him.. Roman. But I trust you, and- and I barely even know you. And you know why? Because it’s clear.. that your conscious.. is still in the driver’s seat. This world didn’t change you did it, it just showed who you really are. What you choose to be.'

'Sorry brother.' Daryl’s voice suddenly echoes back from that night the biter got ahold of Dale, the gunshot following and Roman finally exhales and tosses his cigarette to the pavement, stepping on the ember to snuff it out. His brows furrow.

“Been missin' Dale these days..” he mumbles and sniffs again faintly, glancing to Daryl at his side. “..miss all em– it’s just.. mean it felt like he was one holdin' shit together half the time. Voice of reason.” He shrugs and glances off, scanning the fences. “Shane.. mofucker was always barkin' at him cause he known Dale saw right through him. Couldn’t fool him for shit.. hell none of us could.” He muses.

“I’ve tried reason with Rick.. he's gone right now. Ain’t all there.” Daryl shrugs and shakes his head a bit.

“Yeh.. wouldn’t expect no different.” Roman nods, his jaws tensing through his cheeks. “He'll come around.” He repeats, his gaze lowering to the ground again as the conversation with Lori crosses his mind.

There was no forgetting any of it. Daryl had been right, the prison wasn’t a fortress.. it was a tomb. And they were living with ghosts. Lori's, Tdogg’s, the inmates and guards who’d all died within the walls of it. It seemed like everyone they’d lost were just as trapped.

He still remembered Amy, and Jim, Jaquis.. still somewhat blamed himself for not throwing her over his shoulder and toting her out the CDC kicking and screaming if he had to.. but who was he to decide how she’d die. Maybe she just didn’t want to end up like Amy, or Jim... maybe they were all on bought time and the prison was just a fluke sitting on a pipe dream.

“Maybe..” Daryl finally mutters dragging Roman from his thoughts. Realizing it was a response to his flimsy attempt at a reassurance.

“Well.. whether he do or don’t.. Carol, Maggie, Beth, the baby, Hershel.. they lookin' to us to hold shit down. Gotta do what we gotta do to make that happen–ain’t got no choice.”

“Yeah..” Daryl grunts and readjusts his crossbow slung over his shoulder, shifting to turn toward the steel door of the prison. “You comin'?”

Roman shifts halfway and glances up toward the windows of the guard tower, watching the dim light of the lantern flickering against the walls. He glances back down at Daryl and shakes his head a bit. “Gon’ go check on Mags.. relieve her an' let her get some sleep if she’s needin'.. hell knows I ain’t gettin' none.”

“Know that’s right.” Daryl sniffs with faint amusement and nods, the steel door groaning as he opens it to step inside. “See ya.”

“Yeh..” Roman nods before he turns to start toward the door to the tower, hearing the other close behind him as Daryl heads inside for the night.

He doubted Maggie would be getting any sleep either, even if he offered it to her.. stubborn as she was. Truthfully, they just hadn’t spoken much throughout the day and the questioning of her state on Daryl’s end had prompted him to want to do a wellness check.. that’s what he told himself anyway.

He tugs the door open, the steel hinges squeaking against years of weathered rust and use before he steps inside the narrow staircase. He ascends them slowly, worn combats thudding and turning to pass the threshold into the dimly lit control room.

He finds her sitting on the guard’s desk littered with papers, her knees tugged up against her chest with her arms wrapped around her legs as she gazes out at the prison yard. His mouth presses as he adjusts the strap to his rifle slung over his shoulder, his dark gaze wandering over her form.

“Ay cowgirl.. why don’t ya head on down an' get ya some sleep hm.. can take over here.” he says gently and slips the rifle off, gripping the barrel and setting it down gently propped against the wall next to him.

It had started becoming a force of habit by now. Even when she was in her cell it seemed like he’d find reasons to just .. check in. Roman had been grappling with it, acting as though he was trying to gain a sense of what was stirring in him but he knew the feeling and what he understood it to be. Denial was a strong emotion– one he was also quite familiar with.

It was easy to dismiss when the entire focus had to be set on survival. But at night when it got quiet; when there were no biters to stab, no ditches to dig, no runs to make, no discussions to be had and he was laying awake in his cell or sitting up in this same tower with his thoughts running..

He could grapple with it, deny it, dismiss it. But it would still be there, unmistakable and persistent.

Tonight was one of dismissal though. He believed he was past the point of denial.. that had gone out the window the moment she’d laid her hand on his chest and found his gaze with a fear in them he hadn’t seen from her just yet, in all the forms it had taken so far. Maybe that unmistakable and persistent feeling had crept it’s way into her, maybe she was grappling with what it was too.. or maybe he was just tired and reading too far into things. It seemed he often did.

#*insert 'maybe so' meme gif*#me every 5 seconds: this slow burn is TRASH #her: ok well what if maggie touches him then serves some awkwardness for days :)#me: ...i am once again asking for the sanity to survive this slowburn #*silently screeches*#i hate the investment in this pairing i literally love them more than rig and skylar and they're not even like.. there yet #otp: { west coast & cowgirl }#*rig #*mags #i love them your honor #{ - *twd - canon divergent* - }#the walking dead #twd #writing tings #excerpts

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mrs-bartowski · 3 years

Text

Brace for impact y'all cuz my brain is being Extra Rude this fine Sunday. OKAY, so...

What with Lena's new unemployment status, obviously we have all these hcs about her being unable to afford the penthouse and moving in with Kara.

Then of course we have all the accompanying hcs about Lena's time in the apartment between now and when Kara gets back (blanket sniffing, inability to sleep in Kara's bed, ready-to-pack corner of belongings so as to not alter Kara's home, and all those other super fun things that make me wanna cry).

I see all of those (and love them) and I raise you one: the Mxy tapes.

So, we see right after Mxy leaves when Kara picks up "The One Where Lena Decided To Work With Lex" which is what, in combination with her realization that telling Lena the truth always has "huge" consequences, motivates her to make that super OOC decision to absolve herself entirely of her guilt and tell Lena she'll treat her like a villain if she works with Lex, yes?

Now, what if that wasn't the only tape Mxy left behind? What if he left a recording of each of those alternate timelines because, after seeing Kara twist what she learned to fit her frustration over Lena's continued cold shoulder and hearing what she said to Lena, Mxy decided she might want to watch them again at some point to remember the real takeaway: she's fighting for the relationship that saves the world...

Kara found the tapes stacked on the coffee table when she got home, with a note that said "You found the magic. Now don't lose it." She wanted to get angry, but instead she just put the tapes in a box on the shelf under the TV and tried to forget about them.

----------

Lena's hand shakes slightly as she slides the key into the lock, feeling the ghost of Alex’s hand rest gently on her shoulder as it had when she’d pressed the cold metal into her palm a few hours earlier with a silent offer and an encouraging nod. The door swings open slowly, and Lena is hit by a sudden wave of cold. Not temperature, but energy. It’s too quiet - no NSYNC on the speaker or Bachelorette on the TV. It’s too empty - no smell of fresh (slightly burnt) bread or yarn strewn all over the counter from Kara’s various crochet projects. It’s too...Kara-less.

Lena shakes off the feeling and slides her bag off her shoulder in the corner by the bookcase, careful not to knock Kara’s favorite cinnamon candle off the stool beside her, as she tells Alexa to play Nina Simone. She zips open her bag to pull out her favorite copy of Mrs. Dalloway and finds it missing. Realizing she must have left it in her desk drawer at LexCorp, Lena makes a mental note to send Brainy in after it tomorrow with the promise that he can change all of Lex’s passwords one more time before they leave the game for good.

Lena stares at the blank TV screen for a moment, dreading the thought of watching anything in this room without Kara’s head on her shoulder or in her lap. So, she crouches to look at the shelves of the TV stand, hoping to find at least one of the books she’d gotten Kara for her birthday last year wedged between the latest issues of CatCo Magazine and the recipe books Alex had gotten her in the hopes of spending less money on pot stickers every week.

She’s just zeroed in on The Color Purple when she notices a box she doesn’t recognize laying across the tops of the books on the other shelf. She reaches for it on instinct, then hesitates. She hasn’t touched anything of Kara’s since their falling out, and what if Kara’s “what’s mine is yours” rule no longer applies to her now? She considers leaving it alone and waiting for Kara to get back and explain, sliding The Color Purple toward her without taking her eyes off the box, before her curiosity gets the better of her and she caves, tossing the book onto the coffee table.

She opens the lid and starts at the sight of VHS tapes. Hasn't she taught Kara better than this? They'd converted all her old tapes to DVDs months into their friendship ("Kara, these things deteriorate so easily and the picture quality becomes awful, don't you want something that will last?"). She picks up the first tape and reads the label on the side: "The One Where Lena Doesn't Make It Back In Time." Her brows furrow as she stares, unblinking, at the title - demanding answers she knows only one person can give her.

She glances around, but doesn't see a VHS player anywhere, so she sets the tape on the floor beside her and picks up the next one. "The One Where Lena Can't Save Sam Or Herself." Lena shoves down her growing horror and discards the tape, hoping the next one will be less ominous. She picks it up and chokes back a sob as she reads: "The One Where There Are No Survivors."

Lena can't wait for answers anymore, so she gathers the tapes back into the box, grabs her purse and Kara's key, and heads to the closest library. Lena finds the old CRT sitting on a rolling cart in the back corner of the library, tucked between the stacks of kids' books. She pulls the first tape out of the box and slides it carefully into the slot.

30 minutes later, with tears and too-cheap eyeliner streaming down her face, Lena picks up the last tape. "The One Where Lena Was Never Your Friend." And here she'd thought things couldn't get worse. Lena takes a deep breath as she inserts the tape.

At the sight of the ruin that meets Kara and Mxy, Lena stifles the urge to laugh. Of course this is what a world without her best friend looks like. This exactly how it feels now, and she's only been gone a few weeks.

Lena's breath catches as she hears herself ask "who's Kara?," the mere thought of a world where the reporter had never believed in her, never cared enough to love her, almost too much to bear. Her hand drifts absent-mindedly to her chest as she watches herself reveal a kryptonite heart, and for a moment she can hear the sounds of her own screams as her mother's experiments rob her of the last of her humanity.

She presses her hand closer to her heart, sure that it's stopped beating at the sight of Kara on the ground, in pain at her hands but still refusing to fight her. Feels it shatter when her worst self says exactly the same words she'd said to Kara in the Fortress when asked why she had pretended to be Kara's friend for so long.

And she thinks it might kill her, this agony that's filling her body like acid. She wonders for a moment if this is what kryptonite feels like to Kara. Because it sure feels like her skin is getting seared off her bones and there are nails in her blood and it sure seems like she won't survive watching herself kill her best friend as she lies helpless and desperate on the floor.

And when Mxy pulls them out, Lena's breath returns full force until she's hyperventilating because Kara is gone and she doesn't know how long it will be until they get her back; and she was terrified of what she'd become when she lost Jack but she survived because of Kara; and if this is what losing Kara without ever having her in the first place looks like, Lena has never been more afraid than she is as she realizes what will happen to the world if she doesn't get Kara back. What she'll do to the world if it dares to take Kara from her.

So, when she gathers the tapes and goes to return them to the box and finds a note at the bottom that says "You found the magic. Now don't lose it," Lena promises herself that, for as long as she lives, she will do everything in her power to keep the magic that is Kara Danvers in her life.

----------

Alex knocks on the apartment door three days later and finds it unlocked. She pushes the door open and her hand drifts to her gun, but relaxes as she sees Lena's sleeping form curled up on the couch. Alex approaches a box she knows the contents of all too well and finds it open and empty on the table before she notices the VCR player and tapes strewn across the floor. She smiles softly as she recalls the image of Kara in the exact same position months earlier. And, as she carefully plucks the handwritten note from Lena's clutched fist, she smiles at the knowledge that, once Kara returns, no force in the world will be able to keep them apart again.

UPDATE: Ask and ye shall receive

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

#supergirl #supercorp #supercorp headcanon #lena luthor #kara danvers #alex danvers #this got so much more elaborate than I planned #but oh well #have fun suffering with me

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robininthelabyrinth · 3 years

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🧿🤠🐇🍲🍯: Lan Wangji does not think it’s safe to raise A-Yuan in Cloud Recesses after the Lans participated in the killing of his zhiji and the entire Burial Mounds community (or more accurately that it’s not safe while he himself is in seclusion and can’t watch over A-Yuan, at least) so he delivers A-Yuan to the one person who he knows did not stand against Wei Wuxian (and got away with it, bc this person has never stood against anything, since standing takes effort): Nie Huaisang.

Little Side Door - ao3

Nie Huaisang’s rooms in the Unclean Realm had a little side door that no one but him ever used.

They hadn’t originally. The Unclean Realm was a fortress, designed to maximize protection and defense; there was no better place for keeping things safe by locking them away. While it had its fair share of boltholes and escape routes, they were not common and universally difficult to access lest the enemy learn of them and use them to their advantage. Even the layout of their open spaces were carefully planned lest the attack come from the sky, a concern that only cultivators had, and not about how they themselves could escape – after all, weren’t they all Nie, ready to die rather than endure dishonor?

The little side door that led to Nie Huaisang’s room opened onto a small rock garden, left to grow wild with weeds rather than reveal its presence to more people. It existed only because his brother had ordered it constructed by those he trusted most, all in secret in the dark of the night. He had never explained why he had gone to such lengths to create such an unwelcome and inauspicious place, but then, he hadn’t needed to – Nie Huaisang had been there, too, when his father had descended into madness and they had been trapped in the familial quarters with no way out that did not take them through him. If his brother had been the one to brave his father’s rage directly, Nie Huaisang had been the one stuck in a small space that was only not claustrophobic because it was so painfully familiar.

Now, though his father was long dead and gone, Nie Huaisang had a little side door.

A little side door, and a little garden that almost no one knew about; in combination with the saber that his brother forced him to learn and the golden core he had so begrudgingly formed, he now had a way to reach the sky and the illusive freedom it represented – the freedom to flee and leave his home behind.

If it ever happens again – his brother had said once, the closest he had ever come to speaking of it.

He did not finish his sentence, as Nie Huaisang had thrown his plate into his face and stormed off, steaming mad and close to tears. He did not raise the subject a second time.

Nie Huaisang did not often use his little side door.

Although he enjoyed gardens, he preferred the aviary he’d constructed, or one of the myriad of well-tended gardens in the main part of the sect; even the vegetable gardens out back beside the kitchens were far more welcoming than that sparse straggle of land. He’d only ever spent time there when he was a child and in desperate need of some quiet, wanting to avoid adults with their arguments and their miseries; he’d taken some friends there because he thought it might impress them, but it hadn’t, and anyway his brother had put a stop to that soon enough.

He didn’t even think about the little side door, most days. It was just a part of the room, a small tucked away corner with nothing in it. Nothing to think about.

And then, of course, years after he’d put it out of his mind entirely, there came a terrible banging noise at that little side door, like someone was kicking at it furiously from the outside.

Nie Huaisang nearly fell over sideways in his scramble to get up, and then once again when he realized where the noise was coming from – almost no one knew about his side door and its little garden, and so no one had ever come to him through it. Who would be knocking now…?

He opened it.

Lan Wangji, white robes stained with blood and cheeks bright with fever, shoved something into his arms. “You have a child now,” he said through bitten lips. “Congratulations. He is called A-Yuan. I entrust you with his care, for my sect cannot be trusted with it.”

And then he turned and staggered away, mounting up on Bichen and flying off before Nie Huaisang could say anything – before he could even finish searching his memories and recalling that yes, in fact, Lan Wangji had been one of the friends he had shown the side door to, years and years before, and thus knew how to find it. Before he could even start processing the thousands of thoughts that had spring to life, fully formed, at all the information he’d just received: the bloody robes, the desperation, the reference to the Lan sect – the Lan sect! – being somehow untrustworthy…

He looked down at his arms.

“Congratulations,” he echoed blankly. “I have a child now.”

The child blinked up at him, and then smiled.

“Da-ge!” Nie Husiang howled, rushing into the sect leader’s study where his brother was doing work – luckily it wasn’t receiving hours and he wasn’t in the main hall, as that would have been unfortunate. “Da-ge, you have to help me! I have a child now!”

His brother stared at him, expression blank and mouth slightly agape. The brush in his hand dripping ink onto a now-wasted piece of paper.

“Huaisang,” he said after a moment. “What the fuck.”

Nie Huaisang nodded furiously.

“Where did you get – how – who – what did you do?!”

“I am currently unable to disclose any details,” Nie Huaisang said promptly even as his brother tossed aside the brush and got up, striding over with a storm brewing in his face. “All I can say is that I have to raise this child now. By which I mean, you have to help me raise this child now; I can’t raise children! I’m not mature enough to raise a child!”

“No kidding! Why would someone entrust – to you…” Nie Mingjue trailed off, looking down at the child with a frown that shifted from disbelieving irritation to concern. He pressed his hand to the child’s forehead. “Huaisang, this child has a high fever. We need to get him to the medical wing at once – is that blood?”

“Not his, I don’t think?”

“I don’t want to know,” his brother decided. “Move.”

Some time later, they were both sitting next to the bed in one of the spare rooms in the family quarters; Nie Huaisang thought it might even have been the same one that he’d used when he was very young. A-Yuan was sleeping, and Nie Mingjue was still holding his little hand in his own, having been clocked as the oversize comfort animal that he not-so-secretly was from the very first moment A-Yuan laid eyes on him.

The doctors had declared A-Yuan’s fever to be very severe, but they had applied plenty of medicine – the Lan sect might have more esoteric healing techniques, but there wasn’t anything like the Nie sect when it came to standard medicine for injuries and illnesses associated with the battlefield, and despite A-Yuan’s tender age Nie Huaisang would be willing to bet that his injuries were from a battlefield. They were confident that A-Yuan would make a full recovery, body and mind both intact, although they warned that his memory of the past might be impacted.

Nie Huaisang had thought about all that blood that wasn’t his, of Lan Wangji pale-faced and wild-eyed, and decided that a little bit of forgetting might not be so bad after all.

“Are you going to tell me anything more,” his brother said after a while. “Or should I just give up now?”

Nie Huaisang leaned over and patted his knee. “It’s good that you know your limitations.”

His brother rolled his eyes.

“I can’t believe this is my life,” he remarked.

“What part?” Nie Huaisang asked, curious. “The fact that we have a kid now, because obviously we’re keeping him? Or the fact that someone gave a kid to me?”

“Both,” his brother decided. “Definitely both.”

“His name’s A-Yuan,” Nie Huaisang said. “Apparently.”

“Well,” his brother said. “Obviously that won’t do.”

Nie Huaisang had the ability to be sneaky when he wanted to be. It wasn’t a matter of stealth, he had explained to his brother, but sneakiness– a completely different concept. Stealth suggested that he was doing something to conceal himself and required skills and talent, or else a lot of practice, and obviously Nie Huaisang was not going to go in for either of those.

Sneakiness, though…

He didn’t need people not to be able to see him in order to be sneaky. He just needed them not to care about him, or wonder where he was.

“Psst,” he said, knocking on the window to the rooms where Lan Wangji was purportedly practicing seclusion. “Psst! Lan Zhan!”

Lan Wangji had given him a child. They were definitely past the ‘Lan-er-gongzi’ stage.

“Lan Zhan!” he rapped at the window with his fan. “We need a courtesy name!”

There was some sounds from within the jingshi, mostly stumbling around. Nie Huaisang waited patiently, and after a few moments the window opened and Lan Wangji stared out at him. He was as pale as a ghost with lips as red as blood, and very clearly not in seclusion at all, but rather in the midst of healing whatever wounds had left him bloody – he probably shouldn’t have gotten out of bed to answer.

Oh, well. Too late for regret now.

“You shouldn’t be here,” Lan Wangji said, voice dull and eyes blank as he stared at Nie Huaisang. It was unclear if he meant in the Cloud Recesses generally, or here in particular, interrupting his ‘seclusion’.

“Didn’t you hear me?” Nie Huaisang said, scowling at him. “We need a courtesy name! A courtesy name for the child, you hear me? You know, of course, that Qinghe Nie don’t use personal names, not even for children – certainlynot for children older than their first year. It’d be a complete giveaway that he’s not organically ours if we call him something like A-Yuan.”

Lan Wangji raised a hand to pinch his nose. “Please go away.”

“Courtesy name, Lan Zhan. I mean, I may be the one who’ll be raising him, but please think carefully: do you really want meto be the one naming him?”

“…call him Sizhui.”

“Sizhui,” Nie Huaisang repeated. “With the characters…?”

Lan Wangji nodded.

“Uh, no,” Nie Huaisang said. “I need a bettercourtesy name. Are you joking?”

“Nie Huaisang. Go away.”

“But –”

Lan Wangji slammed the window shut.

“…fine,” Nie Huaisang said to the closed window. “Be that way, see if I care. Not like we don’t need to build up a decent coparenting relationship or anything eventually.”

He thought he heard a choking sound from behind the door and smirked.

“Don’t you think you can baby-trap me and just walk away, Lan Zhan,” he said in his best ominous tone. “If you wanted someone to raise your kid without ever consulting you again, you should’ve dropped him off in the Lotus Pier with Jiang Cheng, who’d probably be too busy being confused to even question where he came frome – but no. You came to me. I don’t make decisions in the best of times, least of all good. I have questions. A lot of questions.”

He thought about it for a moment.

“Not about how you got him or anything like that,” he said. “I’m not stupid, I can tell a secret when I see one. But, you know, other types of questions. Parenting stuff. Are you a ‘go sit and think about what you’ve done’ sort of parent? Or more traditional discipline, with copying lines and occasionally strikes when they’re naughty? Do you want him to learn the Lan sect rules along with the Nie sect principles –”

There was a muffled sound from inside the house.

It sounded angry.

“…we can talk about it later,” Nie Huaisang decided. He might’ve pushed his luck a bit too much. “Talk later!”

“You have a…what?” Lan Xichen asked, his smile a little fixed and stare a little wilder than normal.

“A nephew!” Nie Mingjue gushed. “Isn’t he wonderful?”

“Nephew.”

“He’s so well behaved, too! He plays quietly by himself most of the time, drawing and even writing a little, and Huaisang’s already teaching him how to play the dizi –”

“When you say nephew, do you mean Nie Huaisang’s child?”

“Do I have other brothers?” Nie Mingjue rolled his eyes at him. “He’s obviously not yours. Anyway, I know Meng Yao is expecting one, too, but he wouldn’t be dressed in Nie colors if it was his, would it?”

“Yes, but…are you telling me that…that Nie Huaisang…”

“It’s a battlefield child, Xichen,” Nie Mingjue said patiently. “Obviously. Someone entrusted him to Huaisang.”

“Oh,” Lan Xichen said, looking relieved. “Yes, that makes more sense…wait.”

Nie Mingjue waited.

“Someone entrusted him to Nie Huaisang?”

“I know, right?” Nie Mingjue said, and Lan Xichen didn’t notice how strained his grin had suddenly become, or how thoughtful his eyes were as he surveyed Lan Xichen as if trying to find an answer to a question. “I would’ve assumed they’d go for someone more responsible, like you. Guess you never know…”

“I guess you don’t,” Lan Xichen agreed, looking down at the child with a bemused expression. A battlefield child, entrusted to Nie Huaisang… “They must have been truly driven to desperation.”

“Perhaps,” Nie Mingjue said, and then changed the subject to little Nie Sizhui’s accomplishments, of which he could list many at great length and very great enthusiasm. By the time he was done with that, Ln Xichen was so overwhelmed that he didn’t ask a single other question.

“So I’ve got an idea on how to do this whole co-parenting thing,” Nie Huaisang said, cracking nuts to eat. He was sitting next to Lan Wangji’s bedside, and dropping the shells straight on the floor, too, staring dead-eyed at Lan Wangji as if daring him to say something – which he wouldn’t, of course. “Since with Sizhui starting classes soon it’s become much more urgent, on account of me needing you to attend meetings with his teachers and discuss his progress.”

Lan Wangji looked deeply long-suffering. He’d only invited Nie Huaisang inside because Nie Huaisang had threatened to start shouting out his business loudly on account of oh but Lan Zhan, how was I to know if you could hear me in there, I just had to raise my voice just in case because I wouldn’t want you to miss any of the extremelyimportant news –

It was all Lan Wangji’s fault for being born earlier than Nie Huaisang, Nie Huaisang thought virtuously. It was merely Nie Huaisang’s lot in life to fulfill the role of annoying younger brother to everyone.

“See, it’s the music,” Nie Huaisang continued. “You do music, right?”

Lan Wangji’s ice-cold glare suggested that he did, in fact, ‘do music’.

“So your brother has been playing this song for da-ge on a regular basis,” Nie Huaisang explained, ignoring the glare entirely. “And when he’s not available, which is most of the time nowadays, he’s been sending san-ge instead. Even though, of course, poor san-ge’s so busy back at Lanling all the time…ughh, it’s so unfair, you know! Poor san-ge has to do all the work of being the heir and gets none of the benefits, and they pile even more work on him on top of that – really, he gets no respect.”

Lan Wangji’s expression suggested he didn’t care.

“And think about the inconvenience to us!” Nie Huaisang sallied forth, undeterred. “People coming and going all the time, da-ge having to interrupt his schedule of spending quality time with me and Sizhui – and sect leader work, of course, though that’s less important – in order to march over to greet them and host them and listen to them…what a pain it is!”

Lan Wangji appeared on the verge of suggesting that Nie Huaisang consider getting to the point.

“So you should come do it instead.”

Lan Wangji’s expression cracked, suggesting that Nie Huaisang had actually managed to make an impact.

“You remember,” he said, voice low and a little hoarse from all that refusing to speak he’d been doing. Really, if Nie Huaisang wasn’t around to goad him into it, he might’ve lost the voice entirely – he didn’t even have little Sizhui around to force him to speak! “That I’m in seclusion. Right?”

“You’re horribly lonely is what you are,” Nie Huisang said briskly. “You require company. Therefore, coming to take up a semi-permanent posting in the Unclean Realm to play the Song of Clarity for my brother morning, noon, and night is clearly the finest way to solve all of our problems, and for you to see little Sizhui as often as you like.”

Lan Wangji visibly wavered. “My brother,” he said, then coughed. “My brother will never believe it.”

“That’s your problem,” Nie Huaisang said. “Find a way to sell it.”

He stood, shaking the remaining shells onto the chair.

“See you in Qinghe soon, Lan Zhan..!”

Lan Wangji was trying to kill him with his mind, Nie Huaisang thought happily as he wandered off with a whistle and a vaguely silly expression. Good – he’d been inside for too long. He needed the stimulation.

“Truly,” Nie Mingjue remarked, strolling around their gardens without any apparent notice of the small child perched on his shoulders, giggling wildly at the feeling of being tall, “I feel far better than I did before! One can scarcely compare it – night and day, really. Your Lan sect’s Song of Clarity is a marvel, even if it does take a while before it kicks in.”

“Mm,” Lan Wangji said, walking slowly with his hands behind his back. He was still unsteady on his feet on account of the absolutely horrific injuries he’d incurred – but if the Lan sect’s response to everything was seclusion, seclusion, seclusion, then the Nie sect’s equivalent response was exercise. These little excursions through the gardens were the result.

Thus far, they were still only doing laps around the main gardens, but Nie Huaisang had plans to eventually force Lan Wangji to go even as far as his own little side garden. He’d made it through his side door once, after all; why not a second time..?

At any rate, Nie Huaisang still wasn’t quite sure how Lan Wangji had talked Lan Xichen into allowing him to come to the Unclean Realm, but it really did make the whole co-parenting business a lot more convenient. And his brother had had so much fun making Lan Wangji stiff and awkward over all his thanks and praise for his decision to come ‘help out’ with Nie Sizhui’s raising until finally, at last, Nie Huaisang had taken pity and revealed that Nie Mingjue knew perfectly well whose battlefield child this was.

Both in terms of who had gifted him to Nie Huaisang, and who’d adopted him originally, and of course even his original surname – The little tot’s been through enough adoptions to make anyone’s head spin, his brother had said, his voice gruff as always. There’s no point in thinking back too far, is there?

Lan Wangji had been very relieved.

“Run, bobo!” Nie Sizhui cried, pointing over at a bird. “We need to get it for Sang-gege!”

Nie Mingjue snorted like a bull but obediently quickened his feet and left the rest of them behind, heading in full charge straight at the wild pheasant that was far more likely to end up on Nie Huaisang’s plate than in his aviary. It was about even odds which one Nie Sizhui meant, anyway.

“Nie Huaisang,” Lan Wangji said, his voice low, and Nie Huaisang looked at him. “The Song of Clarity does not take time to work. These effects should have happened at once.”

Nie Huaisang opened his fan, hiding his face as he frowned. “How odd,” he said. “And after san-ge put in all that hard work.”

“Perhaps he played it wrong.”

“Odd,” Nie Huaisang said again. “When san-ge gets so very little wrong…has your brother sent any word on the Xue Yang issue?”

“…he has not.”

“He’s going to need to pick a side eventually.”

“He does not want to make things difficult for his sworn brother.”

“Does he have only the one?” Nie Huaisang asked archly, and Lan Wangji averted his gaze. “It’s awkward for us if he doesn’t back us, and is a bad look besides…truly, it’s a wonder that san-ge managed to squeeze out the time to come here.”

Lan Wangji’s frown deepened. “Indeed,” he said. “One would think his father might be tempted to stop him.”

“Wouldn’t you just?” Nie Huaisang said. “Wouldn’t you just…you know, maybe when you’re feeling better, we should go visit Lanling ourselves.”

Lan Wangji glanced at him, arching an eyebrow, and Nie Huaisang smiled, fanning himself casually.

“I’m not the only one with a little side door,” he said. “Let’s go knocking and see what we find, shall we?”

#mdzs #nie huaisang #lan wangji #lan sizhui #nie mingjue #lan xichen #my fic #my fics #little side door

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weareallstardustfallen · 3 years

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Minecraft world building is always interesting!! What are your nether worldbuilding ideas? T

well i do Not feel like giving the entire 4k so i will just talk about my thoughts on the history of the nether bc that is the part that i like best of it

so the nether was canonically not always like that; the soul sand valley might have once been "a habitable paradise full of huge, bygone creatures," the ancient debris is the remains of historical netherite mining by piglins, stuff like that. as such, i decided that i wanted to take what we're given in the game, use that to figure out what the original nether was like, and then go from there to the modern nether.

and me and @bananasofthorns were listening to some of the ambiance tracks for the different nether biomes, and we realized that hey, some of these sound very Hm. like, there's a couple in the basalt deltas that sound a little like laughter, or like war drums. and after listening to literally all of the nether ambiance tracks and tossing ideas back and forth and such, i settled on this idea, under the cut because it's Long:

the nether was originally a much more habitable place, with a lot more biodiversity than exists now. originally, there were four intelligent races, not just piglins, and they were loosely settled into the four biomes which existed at the time- the crimson forests, the nether wastes, the basalt deltas, and the soul sand valleys, though they weren't very wasteland-y or soul sand-y at all, so they were probably called something else.

the soul sand valley was home to a bunch of very powerful mages, as well as the massive beasts which became the fossils. they were probably the most able to use magic of all of the societies, and any overworld enchantments which can be found originated in the nether (like the ones on piglin armor) are actually a completely different form of that enchantment derived from ancient enchanted books from this society; soul speed was essentially reverse-engineered from them. the valleys were probably the most utopian of all the biomes at the time, full of many, many different kinds of flora and fauna.

the basalt deltas, on the other hand, were very hostile even then, with practically nothing living there except for the delta warriors. they were very warlike and probably conquerors, and were the ones who built the nether fortresses for military purposes. they spent decades at war with the valley mages, and while they most definitely had access to some pretty powerful magic it was not to their level of artistry.

there was also a society in the nether wastes, which has been next to forgotten. both the biome and the people were caught in the crossfire between the valley mages and the delta warriors and over a very long period of time, their entire civilization pretty much got wiped out. the land itself is still basically barren, and sometimes unstable.

the fourth, of course, was the piglins of the crimson forests. they didn't get involved with the wars, and managed to avoid getting much damage from the massive amount of fighting. they, and the hoglins, are the only mobs who are still around from this period of time.

the war did, of course, come to a catastrophic end in what i'm calling the cataclysm. the delta warriors gained access to very powerful and very volatile magic. what did they do with it? attempt to smite the valley mages off the face of the earth, of course- a little too effectively.

they did manage to totally wipe out the valley mages, which was their goal! they decimated the mages, as well as literally every other living thing in the biome, their own society, and did a lot of Bad Shit to the environment of the nether as a whole.

because the area and the people were so charged with magic already, the mages weren't just completely killed- instead, they were trapped in the newly-created soul sand, half-alive, with their souls only being released upon the sand being burnt. the valleys are now completely devastated, and you can hear the mages whispering or calling in the distance, sometimes enough to lure an unwary traveler to their death, though this isn't out of malice.

the delta warriors, also killed by the cataclysm, became the wither skeletons and skeletons of the nether. those who were in the valley at the time of the cataclysm became the wither skeletons due to the magic of the area; they spend their eternities protecting the fortresses they built. those who weren't there are the normal skeletons, forever attempting to provide reinforcements for a battle which is long since over.

and the piglins? they were adversely affected by the cataclysm, of course, everything was, and their glory days are past. but they're alive, where the other two are not- despite this extinction-level event, they are still continuing on, essentially the same as they were before. and this continues even through the most major thing that would harm the crimson forests after the cataclysm, that being the introduction of the warped forests.

the warped forests were essentially corruption which crept in just after the cataclysm when the environment was still unsettled; it began to slowly expand, eating away at the crimson forests, and it is also very... weird, as far as the biomes go. it's not really hostile, it won't kill you to enter or anything and there's even some helpful stuff there, but... it is Deeply Wrong. the endermen there are numb and expressionless, like they're sleepwalking. they never really react to stimuli other than being looked in the eye, but sometimes they scream in the distance like they're being tortured.

and, bonus, because i'm not sure whether it's piglin legend or reality but i think it's cool:

each of the biomes has an Entity to it, not quite sentient but enough to have intent, like a manifestation of the ones who used to live there. it's not quite a god, not quite real, but it is there and you can feel it, when you step into its domain.

the basalt delta is a conqueror imprisoned, the warrior who lost. the Entity of the deltas is trapped far beneath the surface, but it is still there, angry and vengeful, straining to get out, and sometimes you can hear it laughing, or the distant echo of the drums of war. the basalt delta is angry. the basalt delta hates you. the basalt delta wants you fucking dead.

the soul sand valleys are asleep. it's not quite dead, nothing with so much power and life could just die like that, but it isn't quite there, either. the valleys are a tragedy of unimaginable scale, and there is murmuring in the distance, never quite close enough to make out.

the nether wastes are dead. they are barren, empty, lifeless; nothing really grows and nothing really lives. the wastes died a long time ago, even before the cataclysm- the only trace of it is in the occasional odd noise, and the way the rock shifts and crumbles at random, unsettled by the fighting which reduced it to nothing.

the crimson forests are the only one left as it was- weaker, tired, but still alive and still awake and still free. the crimson forests do not get involved with wars not their own, do not play with the kind of power that can reduce a civilization to dust. the crimson forest, and its residents, are survivors above all. they will still be there, living, and so will the forests.

the warped forest, on the other hand... the warped forest is not of the nether. the warped forest is a foreigner, come slinking into the gaps left behind and slowly gaining ground, bit by bit. if any of the biomes has a mind, it's this one- the warped forests make odd, terrifying sounds, and the endermen are screaming in the distance or wandering like ghosts, and there is something laughing, low and heavy.

best not to stay too long.

#mc ambiance noises are TERRIFYING and i love them #if anyone wants to know which ones inspired certain stuff just ask #minecraft #minecraft lore #minecraft worldbuilding #minecraft nether #rain chatter

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impyssadobsessions · 3 years

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Danny Phantom Idea

=w=' I'm sure someone done this and I probably should look through fanfics BUT ANYWAYS Time Travel fic Vlad manages to somehow subdue/take over clockwork and reverse time back before Danny got his powers. This time only him and Danny has memories of the future/past. Danny realize this through conversations with his friends, then race back home thinking something terrible happen,(Since he can't go ghost). His mind racing, first thought thinking something bad happened in the future again. His first plan was to go into ghost zone but realizes what day it was. His parents hadn't finished the portal yet. He tries to calm himself down like, its fine, I just gotta go back in there then straight shot to clockwork. Part of him kind of upset not being able to continue living normally, but his anxiety of something terrible happening keeps him from even thinking he could enjoy it for a bit. WELL THEN Jack's old college friend shows up and throws everything out of whack. Danny trying to recreate events that caused him to turn into a halfa, only for it not to work. Vlad standing there, patronizing him about how dangerous that is with the cords unplugged in his hands. Danny getting straight to business asking him what he was up to. Only for Vlad to playfully pretend to be ignorant, before boasting/ranting how he wanted a do over. (Imagine he went into basement after laxatives he puts into jack's food kicked in. Despite being able to freeze time for everyone except him and danny) Vlad basically telling/hinting to Danny his plan. Saying he needs Danny as much alive as possible. Can't have his ghost messing around. Danny tries to fight Vlad, only making Vlad laugh at how helpless he is. Vlad then plugged in the machine once he had his fun, while Danny was still on the ground outside of it. Then called for Jack and Maddie (then realizing they might be preoccupied and sped up time til they could run down there). Vlad convincing them how Danny almost got killed trying to turn on the machine, and that the portal working. Expressing how DANGEROUS it is to have power button on inside and how EASY Danny could of gotten killed. Even helping secure it all later from Danny, to keep him from turning into a ghost. Danny upset he can't find a way to turn into ghost and realized that most inventions that could help him travel, his parents hadn't invented yet. Top that off with a very dangerous ghost calling the shots that want his father dead, and him to suffer. After that night, much to Danny's dismay, Vlad has become their godfather AND is going to be dropping in to help a lot. Keeping in contact with his parents. This adding to Danny's nerves, trying to figure out how the heck he going to reverse this.. or at least protect everyone. Trying to think of all the ghost he fought, worrying about what he going to do now. Jazz knowing something's wrong, and as much as Danny wants to explain to her or his friends, he realized he has absolutely no proof. He can't even go ghost. How and why would they believe him? So instead, he gets the idea if he can't fight ghosts like a ghost then he will like a hunter. Ends up joining in on his parents, trying his best to help jump start ideas of machines he knows they had built in the past, as well as learn how to fight ghosts with just gadgets and skills alone. Becoming a pretty good hunter, and even sneaks down to release ghost into the zone before they can be dissected. But since Jack and Vlad are on "good" terms, unfortunately all his hardwork ends up being destroyed. Vlad congratulating a very tired Danny, who realizing ghost hunting is far more tolling as a human, on his work. Danny gets ready to fight him, only to be beaten, and Vlad teasingly saying such a shame it be all for nothing. Vlad destroys the basement and everything in it with such a ghastly whale or at least whats left of it after having tossed danny around. Danny trying to cover his ears in pain, panicking as everything destroyed around him, to just be tossed onto ground like a ragdoll. Vlad being in his ghost form, making a

large scene to put on a show for Jack and Maddie, when they rush in. Him laughing madly, everything destroyed and Danny beaten and passed out on the ground. Vlad disappearing with words that made it clear that he was after danny because he started hunting ghost, trying to manipulate them into keeping Danny out of the way. Vlad receiving phone call from jack the next day or calling him, only to hear the news, saying how TRAGIC. Luckily he has a portal he just finished at his mansion, (having received plans and help from jack and maddie.) If they ever NEED anything to let him know, offering to help them rebuild and everything. Or offering them to stay with him. Saying how his lab would protect poor Danny. Meanwhile Danny pulling his hair, trying to think, now what do I do?! While his family dotes on him too much. Trying to make sure he's alright. Knowing damn well, Vlad is calling all the shots. I really like Vlad as villain or even as an evil uncle =w= He fun character/antagonist. And thought it be fun if Danny had to fight as fenton and not phantom, as well as how his attitude towards ghost and ppl at school is very much did this done that- to cursing how much easier it was to fight as a ghost. Also imagine he still has a ghost sense in a way. More so he can feel hair on his neck stand and chills, like something's wrong. Can see him finding this out and then getting jump scared by box ghost (meeting him for the "first" time) with a "Boo!". Then him just like I can't believe BOX GHOST just scared me! UGH! Then his attitude ended up him getting caught in a fortress of boxes with said box ghost. Him just unamused and unafraid while Box Ghost keeps trying to spook him. This scenario with his parents breaking in and "saving" him, allows him to pretend this is what made him so interested in fighting ghost with them. : I Also see cute moments of him actually enjoying sitting down with his parents and working with them for once. At least while they're not being over the top. Jack and Maddie getting excited. Jazz knowing something isn't right, but mistakes it as Danny just wanting more time with their parents. Encourages Danny not to forget to spend time with his friends too because of how unhealthy their parents' obsession with ghost hunting can be. Also Also.. I haven't watched the show in a while. =w= b

#danny phantom #danny fenton #vlad plasmius #time travel au #clockwork #Jack fenton #Maddie Fenton #jazz fenton #fan fic idea I guess #I'll never do it because I am terrible at focusing that long on something

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cicada-bones · 3 years

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The Warrior and the Wildfire

Chapter 1: Return to Mistward

Here we go! the first chapter of my rowan POV of Queen of Shadows! Please let me know what you think!

tw for thoughts of self harm, very minor

word count: 3832

Masterlist / Ao3 / Next Chapter

Rowan awoke abruptly, gasping and retching over the side of the bed. Bile pooled in his throat, and it was an effort to keep from vomiting up the meager contents of his stomach onto the cold stone floors of the fortress.

It had been the dream, the same dream. The visions that had tormented him for what now felt like months – though it had barely been a week since they had begun.

Aelin on her knees. Maeve towering before her, darkness wafting in deep pools around her feet. Black iron everywhere, keeping her chained to the floor. Keeping his queen locked in place.

Lorcan and Rowan appeared beside Maeve, whips clutched between their fingers. Aelin looked at him with betrayal in her eyes, and Rowan had to watch as he and Lorcan cut her skin to ribbons. As they cut her just like the men of the salt mines had cut her. As her master had cut her.

Maeve just laughed.

And that was usually when the screaming began. They were Lyria’s screams, but they fell from Aelin’s lips.

Rowan knew they were loud, knew the sounds coming from his queen were enough to echo through the castle, to shake its very foundation. But somehow, in the dream, he felt distant. Removed from them.

The sounds of her agony brushed his face like rose petals. Like a silver mist.

Cool. Soft.

And yet they made his heart pound through his chest, hammer and chisel on stone, splintering it apart. Piece. By. Piece.

Even now, he could still feel those screams radiating through his very being. Rippling through his soul like a rung bell. It felt as though their tender sound would never leave him.

It made Rowan want to tear out his own throat.

But instead, he slowly sat up, taking in slow breath after slow breath. Trying in vain to calm his pounding blood.

Rowan had been in Mistward for eight days now. Eight long days, and eight even longer nights. And he still hadn’t gotten used to sleeping in an empty bed. He wasn’t sure he would ever get used to it again.

It felt wrong to sleep in this bed without Aelin by his side. A bed they had shared for months, long enough for Rowan to get used to balancing himself on the edge of the mattress. Long enough for him to get used to hiding his desire from her, particularly in the mornings.

Her scent still lingered, almost like a friendly ghost haunting the stone alcoves. But soon, even that would be gone. Along with her muddy boots and lent garments.

Rowan had always slept on the side of the bed facing the door, providing Aelin as much protection as he could – even in his sleep. Aelin got the window side, where often, the moonlight would stretch its fingers across her golden hair, marking it with silver.

Now, it felt like an invasion to spread out, to brush against her side of the bed. To touch her moonlight.

So Rowan kept to his edge, and let the moon mark the empty space where his Fireheart used to rest.

For a while Rowan just lay there, letting himself be completely useless. Wallowing. But as the minutes slid past like hours, and Deanna finally slipped below the horizon to allow Mala to stretch her golden fingers over the land, Rowan dragged himself out of bed and prepared to face the day.

Each piece of steel he strapped to his clothes felt heavier than the last.

Rowan wandered down to the kitchens, his boots silent in the fortress corridors. It was still early, and Mistward was quite awake yet. But the kitchens, as usual, had been bustling with energy long before dawn.

From the top of the stairs, Rowan could hear chopping vegetables, the quick opening and closing of the bread ovens, the cursing of burnt fingers. The melody of Luca and Emrys preparing for the breakfast rush.

Rowan slid in as quietly as he could, grabbing a mug of stew and snatching a loaf of bread when Emrys’ eyes were averted, then retreated to a back corner to wolf it down.

“Hurry up with those vegetables, Luca! No time to waste – the stock should have started simmering over 15 minutes ago!”

“I’m sorry Emrys, it’s just that Elentiya used to deal with this.” Luca frantically shoved the mixed vegetables into a pot, and moved on to carving at a mysterious slab of meat. Roast duck, perhaps?

“I know I know.” Emrys said, exasperated. “Just get it done. Malakai will be down in a minute to take you away, and then I’m going to have to finish this all myself.”

As if the old male had summoned him, Malakai appeared in the entranceway, his lined face haggard with missed sleep. He nodded at Rowan, then snuck behind Emrys to embrace him.

“See? What did I say,” Emrys teased, a smile in his voice, “Now I’ll be without both my helpers to get breakfast on the table.” He snuck a kiss on his mate’s cheek, then twisted out of his grip to stir a massive vat of scrambled eggs, grabbing a handful of chopped chives from Luca’s cutting board and tossing them in.

Luca started working more furiously than ever, cutting bread into slices and portioning soup into bowls. Malakai reluctantly let go of his mate, then, surprisingly, looked up at Rowan.

“Prince Whitethorn,” he cleared his throat lightly. “Thrain has asked if I would join him beneath the fortress today, to help install the new iron gate. And Randall is over at the healer’s compound this morning, so – ”

Rowan frowned. He thought he knew where this was going. “ – would it be alright if you took Luca on patrol this morning?”

Rowan sighed. It wasn’t like he had anything more important to do. He gave the male a small nod, then said, “Emrys, if you need him this morning, it can wait until after breakfast is done.”

The old male didn’t even look up from the stove. “Thank you, Prince Rowan. Now Luca – ” Emrys gave the young male a daunting list of instructions, the boy’s face noticeably paling.

Malakai nodded at Rowan once again, kissed his mate, grabbed one of Luca’s slices of bread and cheese, then disappeared out the kitchen door, presumably to head for the tunnels beneath the fortress.

Rowan finished eating just as the demi-Fae began to arrive, told Luca he would be back in an hour, then left out the back door and headed into the forest, his limbs stretching into a slow, loping run.

This wasn’t the first time he had taken charge of Luca’s training since his return to Mistward, and he was starting to realize that he rather liked the young demi-Fae. No matter that he couldn’t keep his mouth shut. He was almost like a very, very young Connall – always full of questions, and going around with that naïve, bright-eyed innocence. So impressionable.

His run slowly transformed into a sprint, his muscles burning with exertion.

It was strange to feel the boy beginning to warm up to him after all these months. Finally opening up, and asking all those questions burning on his lips. And it was nice that Malakai and Emrys seemed to trust Rowan with him, even if it was just to guide him through the basics of sparring, or run with him around the borders of the fortress’ lands.

Rowan knew that Malakai and Emrys were at least a little bit confused as to why Rowan was back, but they hadn’t asked too many questions, for which he was grateful. Malakai and the other leaders wanted an update on the events in Doranelle and to know the Queen’s response to the Adarlanian attack, but all Emrys wanted to know was whether Elentiya was all right.

Rowan told them as little as he could, saying that he had informed Maeve of the details of Adarlan’s attack on the fortress, that she was responding accordingly and would keep them informed through the usual channels. He told them that Elentiya was on her way back to Adarlan, and that he was here on his queen’s orders.

Rowan just didn’t specify exactly which queen had ordered him to return, and they did not ask. But somehow, he thought that Emrys suspected. That male seemed to be able to see through anything.

Rowan felt that Emrys and Malakai were wondering why he hadn’t gone with Aelin, but they didn’t say anything. And for that, Rowan was even more grateful. Because he didn’t have an answer to give them. He barely had an answer to give himself.

Rowan knew that Aelin hadn’t been telling him the whole truth on that pier, but he hadn’t wanted to push. She deserved her space, deserved to go back to Adarlan alone, with a clean slate and without a hulking ass like him hanging on her coattails at every moment. Even if it drove him completely insane.

Rowan’s feet pounded into the earth as he sprinted through the trees. Maybe this morning he would reach as far as the sea.

By the time they said goodbye, the captain’s scent had completely left her own. There was no trace of him left. But that didn’t mean that she didn’t still want him, or that when Rowan saw her again, the scent wouldn’t have returned.

There was also that prince, the Havilliard boy. They were friends, at the very least. And surely a match between their two houses would be politically advantageous. The first daughter of Brannon Galathynius, and the first son of Gavin Havilliard, combining their houses? Certainly something Aelin would be considering.

Rowan ripped past a patch of thorns, their barbs digging into the skin of his forearms. He didn’t pause.

Aelin had only mentioned her cousin a few times, just in passing, but Rowan had heard of Aedion Ashryver. Knew all the stories about the wolf of the north. Even knew about the rumors that had circulated, several times over, that a marriage would be arranged between the two of them.

It could be a smart match, the two cousins. Aedion was respected and admired throughout the western continent, and beloved by his people. It would solidify Aelin’s position within Terrasen, and secure her more support within her nation. He even had his own legion of soldiers he could promise to her cause.

Rowan’s breaths were sharp in his throat. He pushed himself even harder.

Then there was the matter of her former master. Aelin had never been clear about her relationship with Arobynn Hamel, whether he was father, brother, or…lover. The word turned Rowan’s stomach.

He was now practically flying through the trees.

Aelin had told him that she needed to go to Adarlan alone because Rowan would be too much of a distraction, that he would only make things harder for her if he went with her. And that was true, at least in part. But Rowan thought that the real reason she wanted to go alone was because she needed to deal with Chaol and Arobynn without him there to complicate things.

Arobynn… Rowan sighed, gritting his teeth. Rowan wasn’t sure he had ever desired the death of another human being more than he had Arobynn Hamel’s.

Aelin had been so hesitant, so reluctant to say anything about her former master. But those scars spoke volumes.

He had chained her, had abused her, manipulated her, and then beat her bloody. He had tortured and killed her lover. Her Sam. And then he had sent her to the salt mines, where she was whipped and starved and had nearly been destroyed.

Rowan wanted to tear Arobynn limb from limb, wanted to rip out his fingernails and chain him up in the dark and leave him there until he started to lose grip on what was real and what wasn’t. There was no torture too extreme, no punishment that he didn’t deserve.

But if Aelin decided to forgive him, decided to let that monster back into her life, Rowan would have to live with it.

And it killed him.

Killed him to have her headed over that sea, towards enemies who had already nearly succeeded in killing her, and who had tried over and over and over again. And most of all, it killed him because he had no idea when he would see her again. No idea if he would ever see her again.

His legs kept pushing him forwards, his lungs fighting to keep up.

She didn’t want him. Aelin didn’t want him by her side.

Another ragged breath.

He would learn to live with it. Would learn to deal with that burden.

In. Out. Forwards.

Aelin would marry another, be it for love or politics. And Rowan would be there for her no matter what. That was the promise he had made, and that was the promise he would keep.

So he ran, pushing through the undergrowth until he could feel the sea air on his cheeks, until the wind whispered of caves and sand and foam and spray. Rowan sprinted right up to the cliffs, jerking to a stop.

He looked out over the deep blue water with sharp, determined eyes. As if he looked hard enough, he would be able to see her on her little ship, sailing away from him across the blue ocean.

But of course, the sea was as empty as it always was.

His breaths ripped through his chest, but before they calmed, Rowan had already shifted into his hawk and was soaring through the sea-tossed air. Heading back over the trees he had just run between.

This run had become a part of his routine. And while he told himself it was just exercise, he knew that it was really so he could run over the paths he had spent so much time with Aelin on. So he could feel like she was still with him, even fleetingly.

What had taken him nearly an hour to travel on foot took him barely minutes in the air. And soon, he was swooping down over the fortress and shifting to land on his feet outside the kitchen door to collect Luca.

Ever since the battle, the ward stones had been useless and silent, the barriers permanently fallen. Rowan had spent some time examining them, and though he could find no obvious flaw in the ancient stone, he also could find no remedy. Their magic was simply spent, and it would not come back.

As a result, the residents of Mistward had spent a significant amount of time and energy on designing replacements to secure the fortress; higher walls, stronger battlements, sturdier outer gate, larger drawbridge. These improvements were well underway by the time Rowan had returned a week past, and he had gladly thrown himself into the effort.

Even now, as he waited outside the kitchen for Luca to arrive, he could see various workers laying the foundation for the new gate and battlements, and others pulling a large wagon filled with quarried stone for the outer wall. Rowan would likely spend his afternoon among them, either with the men in the small quarry a mile or so away, harvesting stone blocks, or with those who were currently building the scaffolding to contain the stones as they were laid in place.

He wasn’t exactly looking forwards to it. The days were getting hotter as summer grew nearer, and though the day had barely begun, it already was promising to be sweltering.

Luca finally appeared at the door, Emrys’ voice calling from across the room reminding him to be careful, and that he would see him in the evening for the dinner rush, and to stay safe. Rowan disguised a small smile.

Luca glanced up at him briefly, then jerked his eyes away and skittered out of the entrance, making for the fortress gates. Rowan followed without a word.

“Malakai told me I was supposed to run the southern perimeter, and then work on my sparring forms.” Luca’s eyes met his, then flitted away again. Luca’s scent was mellow, buttered toast and apple slices, but right now it was sharp with anxiety and excitement.

Rowan nodded at the boy, and they took off towards the south, passing by sentries who waved and smiled at Luca, but didn’t seem to know how to greet Rowan. Most looked down and away, or raised their hands in half a wave which they quickly gave up on. Rowan ignored them.

Public opinion of him had shifted since the battle, but not by that much.

They ran in silence for a while, Rowan alert and watchful, though they found nothing of interest. Luca was demi-Fae, but since he couldn’t shift, they were confined to a much slower pace than Rowan was used to. Meaning a run that would have taken him minutes, took them over an hour.

By the time they stopped for water, Luca was panting, but determined. Rowan handed the boy the water skin, which he eagerly gulped down. Rowan stripped off his light cotton shirt, now soaked in sweat, and hung it up on a branch at the edge of the clearing.

Luca’s voice floated over to him, “Do you think Elentiya is ever going to come back?”

Rowan paused for a moment. “I don’t know, Luca. But I don’t think so.”

His brow was furrowed. “How long are you going to stay here then?”

“I don’t know that either.”

The boy almost laughed. “I used to think that you knew everything.”

“No one knows everything.”

Luca shook his head slightly, glancing around the forest, his lips curved upwards into a sly grin. “But I still thought you did – well, if not everything, then at least everything important. Bas – ” Luca’s voice stumbled a bit over the other boy’s name, “he tried to tell me different, but I refused to listen to him.”

Rowan’s heart sunk. Bas. He had been so young, only a little bit older than Luca. He hadn’t known any better, had just wanted what everyone did – to be accepted. To be safe.

“I killed him, did you know that?” Luca’s gaze turned to Rowan’s. “I was the one who killed him.”

Rowan nodded. “I guessed.”

His eyes jerked away again, his feet scuffing the earth. “I still forget that he’s gone, sometimes. But it was the right thing – what I did. Wasn’t it?”

Rowan sighed, frowning slightly. Luca looked back up at him, worried. “The world is a complicated place,” Rowan said finally. “Answers are almost never as easy as that. But yes, Luca. I think that you did the right thing.”

The boy’s face darkened, and for a long moment, he didn’t say anything.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay.”

Rowan let the silence continue, just waiting. Knowing that he might be the only person who could soothe this ache for the young demi-Fae. It was a responsibility that he didn’t take lightly.

“Sometimes – ” he broke off, and though his face was turned away, Rowan could see that his eyes were lined with silver. “Sometimes I wonder whether I still want to become a warrior.”

Rowan considered his answer carefully before he responded. “Warriors are many things, Luca, not just soldiers. Malakai has been a warrior all his life, but his days are filled with the duties of a leader, not with violence.”

“That wasn’t really what I meant.”

Rowan waited.

“I meant – I’m not sure why I’m doing this anymore. I mean why do I even want to be let into Doranelle? It doesn’t seem much better over there than it is here.”

“Then let me ask you a question in return,” he said plainly. “Do you think that what you’re learning is worthwhile?”

Another pause. “Yes…” Luca said slowly. “Or at least I think so.”

“Then I would say don’t worry about whether or not you will pass your tests, and be let into Doranelle.” Rowan turned, and began walking through the clearing, scanning it over. “Many demi-Fae come here, and spend all of their time wishing to be somewhere else. Then when they don’t achieve that goal, they end up lost, and angry.” Rowan grabbed a long, sturdy stick from the ground and turned back to the young demi-Fae. “Instead focus on what you are in control of.”

Rowan threw the stick over to Luca, who caught it just before it smacked him in the face. The boy wiped at his eyes, then nodded.

“Are you ready?” Rowan asked.

“Yes.”

“Alright.”

Rowan guided him through the basic sparring forms, grabbing another stick for himself as they staged mock battles. They exchanged choreographed blows until the sun began to pull them into midday, and they returned to Mistward.

Luca traipsed off to join the other young sentries, and Rowan spent the rest of the afternoon toiling over a ten-foot section of the new outer wall, laboriously hauling piles of stone and fitting them into place with smeared vats of pale-grey grout.

It was hard, physical labor. The kind that filled your muscles with a satisfying soreness at the end of the day. But it did not fill his mind.

Instead, Rowan spent the afternoon mulling over his conversation with Luca.

That boy really did have a way of worming through other people’s barriers.

But it was more than just that. It had almost reminded Rowan of living in his uncle’s house, when he was still learning the fighting arts and was recovering from the deaths of his parents. He had been surrounded by cousins, both younger and older. And today with Luca – that is what it had been like back then. Learning and teaching alike, giving comfort and advice when asked.

It was a time so distant, it felt strange in Rowan’s mind. Like they were the memories of another, completely separate person. Someone who didn’t exist anymore.

But this morning, he had reappeared. If only for a moment.

It was like putting on old clothes, made unfamiliar by time. The memory stretched tight over his new frame.

Rowan realized that he missed Sellene and Endymion and all the rest, missed their mess and chaos, and the countless children underfoot. It wasn’t likely he would see them again anytime soon. Nor that their meeting would be under anything resembling decent circumstances.

When they ate dinner that evening, Luca sat at Rowan’s table. They didn’t say anything to each other, but Rowan recognized the gesture for what it was.

And that night, when Rowan finally curled up at the edge of his mattress, his thoughts fell to family. To children. And what they would look like if he shared them with Aelin.

Rowan gritted his teeth at the idea, but he was unable to banish it. And so those thoughts coaxed him slowly to sleep, where he lay in the fortress of stone, surrounded by silver mist.

Just barely out of reach of the moonlight.

···

Masterlist / Ao3 / Next Chapter

···

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#warrior and the wildfire #watw #rowaelin #rowan pov #rpov

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coffintownkids · 3 years

Text

Alrighty! Ch. 32 is done and such brings an end to the 朝露 arc. I’m sure y’all remember the cute scene in The Untamed/CQL when WWX comes across a group of kids playing make-believe about the Sunshot Campaign. This is the chapter where that takes place. However, as previously mentioned, we’ve actually never met pretty much any of the characters involved first-hand. So this is again slowly filling the readers in about how the world perceives all these characters.

I couldn’t decide what part I liked best...So you get the entire scene! Very long post beneath the cut.

*EDITED* @weishenmewwx was nice enough to help me fix a couple of errors. Thank You!!!

The group of children stopped chasing it, then gathered together to start seriously wracking their brains over it, “What do we do since no one shot down the Sun? It fell by itself, so who’s the Leader now?”

One of them raised a hand, “It’s obviously me! I’m Jīn Guāngyáo and I killed the greatest villain from the House of Wēn!”

Wèi Wúxiàn sat on the inn’s front steps and watched on with great pleasure.

In games like this, there was boundless high regard for the Chief Cultivator Liǎnfang-Zūn. Of course, everyone would welcome playing that role the most. Although his background made people too embarrassed to speak of it, it was precisely because of it that him climbing to the highest position made people gasp even more in admiration of his achievements. During the Sunshot Campaign, he had acted as a spy for a number of years and had been a natural at it. He had run around in circles deceiving the entire Wēn Sect of Qíshān both inside and out, having them divulge countless secrets without even realizing it. After the Sunshot Campaign, he was fawned over in every possible way with terrific amounts of cleverness and an extreme variety of methods. Finally, he took the position of Chief Cultivator and became the person fully deserving of ranking first among the multitude of cultivation Houses. Such a life can be called legendary. If was playing, he would also want to try out for the part of Jīn Guāngyáo. Picking this little boy to be the Leader was just common sense!

So JGY is super well-liked by everyone, or so we’re led to believe at this point in the story. It’s mentioned in the novel very early on that he is JGS’s bastard, but it’s definitely pretty much glossed over and this certainly makes it sound like nobody cared about his “embarrassing” history. (We will come to learn this is, in fact, bullshit.) BUT, WWX does seem to think quite well of him.

Fun language bit about the “fawned over in every possible way with terrific amounts of cleverness and an extreme variety of methods.” The sentence uses 百般, 千般, 万般 to show the increase of how much praise got heaped upon him as 百=100, 千=1,000, and 万=10,000.

My other takeaway, which I think the show did a pretty bad job at conveying, was the passage of time and that JGY was actually with the Wēn Sect for years.

Moving on.

Another one of them protested, “I’m Niè Míngjué and I’ve won the most battles and have had the most captives surrender to me. I should be the Leader!”

‘Jīn Guāngyáo’ said, “But I’m the Chief Cultivator.”

‘Niè Míngjué’ raised his fist, “So what if you’re Chief Cultivator. You’re also my sān-dì, so you won’t see me running off with my tail between my legs.”

As expected, ‘Jīn Guāngyáo’ was rather well-suited at getting into character. He hunched his shoulders and ran away.

Sān-dì (三弟) just means third brother. AKA JGY was the youngest within 3zun.

Then another kid said, “You’re the one that died young.”

Since he had chosen to be a certain cultivation head, he naturally had been looking forward to being said cultivation head a little bit. ‘Niè Míngjué’ got mad, “Jīn Zixuān, you died earlier than I did. You had an even shorter life!”

‘Jīn Zixuān’ was unconvinced, “So what if I died younger? I was ranked Number Three!”

“Being ranked Number Three just means your looks were ranked Number Three!”

At that point, one of the little boys seemed tired of both running and standing, so he slowly walked over by the steps and sat down by Wèi Wúxiàn. He waved his hand like he was some sort of mediator and said, “Alright already, there’s no need to fight about it. I’m the Yílíng Lǎozǔ, so I’m the most awesome.”

Wèi Wúxiàn, “……”

He glanced down and, sure enough, the little kid was carrying a little branch at his waist that was probably meant to be Chénqíng.

There was actually a child pure enough to not bother arguing about good and evil. He was only debating the value of combat abilities and had willing taken up the honor of being the Yílíng Lǎozǔ.

Another kid said, “No way. I’m the Sāndú Shèngshǒu and I’m the most awesome.”

The ‘Yílíng Lǎozǔ’ rather understandingly said, “Jiāng Chéng! What can you do that’s better than me? When haven’t you lost to me? How is it a good idea for you to say you’re the most awesome? Aren’t you embarrassed?”

‘Jiāng Chéng’ said, “Hmph! How am I better than you? Do you remember how you died?”

Wèi Wúxiàn’s faint smile got wiped right off his face once his meaning sunk in.

It was like being jabbed with a highly poisonous needle without warning and it sent faint prickling pain throughout his entire body.

Oof. That is a lot.

The ‘Yílíng Lǎozǔ’ next to him clapped, “Look at me! On my left is Chénqíng, on my right is the Tiger Seal. Plus I have the Ghost General. There are none beneath Heaven that are my equal! Hahahaha…” He had a stick in his left hand, a stone in his right, and was laughing hysterically, “Wēn Níng, come out!” A kid in the back of the crowd raised his hand and weakly said, “I’m here…that’s…I want to say…during the Sunshot Campaign, I didn’t die, either...”

Wèi Wúxiàn felt that he couldn’t not interrupt.

He said, “Fellow cultivators, can I ask you a question?”

The children had never had an adult take part when they played this game before, let alone one that didn’t scold them and was completely serious about asking them a question. The ‘Yílíng Lǎozǔ’ was giving him a strange and guarded look as he said, “What do you want to ask?”

Wèi Wúxiàn said, “Why don’t you have any people from the Lán Sect of Gūsū?”

“We do!”

“Where are they?”

The ‘Yílíng Lǎozǔ’ pointed at a kid that hadn’t opened his mouth to say a single word from the start, “That’s him.”

Wèi Wúxiàn looked at him and, sure enough, he was completely fine-featured and looked like a charming child. He had a clean, white string wrapped around his forehead to serve as his head ribbon. He asked, “Who is he?”

The ‘Yílíng Lǎozǔ’ disdainfully curled his lip and said, “Lán Wàngjī!”

…Great. This group of children grasped his essence. If you’re playing the part of Lán Wàngjī you really ought to shut up and not talk!

Then suddenly, the corners of Wèi Wúxiàn’s mouth began to curl again.

That little poisoned needle got pulled out and he didn’t know what cranny it got tossed into, but all the stinging pain had instantly been swept away. Wèi Wúxiàn said to himself, “It’s both wonderful and strange. He’s such a stuffy person. Why does he always make me feel so happy?”

*yelling* Why does he make you so happy, WWX? Any guesses?

I’ve seen this translated as “boring” instead of “stuffy” so I’ll explain a bit. The word used is 闷 (mèn) which can be read as boring, so that’s not wrong. But, it’s a little more nuanced than that. It can also mean something “sealed tight” or “suffocate” or “shut indoors.” Like how a hot room without circulation can be called “stuffy.” But in English, we can use stuffy to mean someone that’s kinda old-fashioned and very stuck on being prim and proper. Which certainly is someone people might consider “boring”! I just didn’t think “boring” alone really captured it though.

Of course, this is when LWJ finally emerges from his Fortress of Solitude (after needing time to get through his Gay Panic.)

When Lán Wàngjī came downstairs, he saw Wèi Wúxiàn sitting on the steps and sharing a steamed bun with a group of children. Wèi Wúxiàn was eating his bun while directing two children that were back-to-back in front of him. “……There are currently countless Wēn cultivators before. They’re all armed and they’ve got you completely surrounded. Keep your eyes sharp. Yes, just like that. OK. Lán Wàngjī, pay attention. This isn’t the current you during peacetime. You’re covered in blood! Your killing intent is so heavy! Your expression is so fierce! Wèi Wúxiàn, get a bit closer to him. Aren’t you going to twirl your flute? Let’s see you twirl it one-handed. Have pizzazz. Do you know what pizzazz is? Come let me teach you.” ‘Wèi Wúxiàn’ made an “oh” sound and handed over the thin stick he was carrying. Wèi Wúxiàn rather skillfully and swiftly twirled ‘Chénqíng’ around between two of his fingers, causing the group of kids to whoop with excitement.

Lán Wàngjī, “……”

He quietly walked over and Wèi Wúxiàn saw him coming, so he brushed off the dust from his backside and called out his goodbyes to the kids. It had been so easy to just stand up and walk along the road with a smile. It was oddly like being drugged.

Lán Wàngjī, “……”

Wèi Wúxiàn, “Hahahahahaha, I’m sorry, Hánguāng-Jūn. I ended up sharing the breakfast I bought for you with them. I’ll buy more for us in a moment.”

Lán Wàngjī, “Okay.”

Wèi Wúxiàn, “How about it? Weren’t those two kids just now cute? Who do you suspect the kid with the string around his head was imitating? Hahahaha…”

He was speechless for a moment, then Lán Wàngjī ultimately couldn’t help saying, “……What exactly did I do last night?”

It definitely couldn’t have been anything simple. Otherwise, why did it make Wèi Wúxiàn keep laughing???

Wèi Wúxiàn kept waving his hand, “No, no, no, no, no. You didn’t do anything. I was just being silly, hahahahahaha…Alright, ahem, Hánguāng-Jūn, I swear I’ll talk business.”

Lán Wàngjī said, “Go ahead.”

Apparently WWX missed his calling and should have gotten into theater!

And poor LWJ is still panicking.

So now they’re off to Shǔdōng and we’ll be starting the Yi City arc next.

#mdzs #ctk reads mdzs #mdzs translation #my translation

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a-skirmish-of-wit-and-lit · 3 years

Text

Book Review: Get A Life, Chloe Brown (The Brown Sisters #1) by Talia Hibbert

SPOILER ALERT : Chloe Brown GETS a life. Plus a sensitive, paint-splotched, motorcycle ridin' cutie named Redford to boot! Can you say SWOON? As someone who has quite a few chronic-somethings herself, I appreciated this book so much for exploring Chloe's life through the guise of pain and sickness. What that means. How it can look or feel. The way it can be for someone who has to consider all the details that go into the fabric of a day with meals, meds, work, exercise, friends, excursions with loved ones, and so on--with the necessity of adjustments or cancellations being made along the way as symptoms start to appear and the agony and exhaustion set in like a plane crash. How life devolves into a surreal Before and After. When it all can get to be a bit too much. Why it's important to have a support system. Not to mention the brutal isolating nature of it all and the fear that arises when anyone new encroaches too close for comfort, setting off radar, the warning bells sounding because you're forever unsure if they're there to gawp, judge, ridicule, or be a soft place for you to land. There's no way to tell at first glance. It's anybody's guess. That's when the question becomes this: who or what is worth taking a risk FOR? Which, whether you suffer from a chronic something or not, is a question we all ask at some point in our lives. At the beginning of the novel, Chloe's still trying to figure that out for herself. Find some answers. Decide what risks are or are not worth taking. So she makes a list to help get her out of her current state of stagnant reluctance. After all, it's time for her to get her butt back out there! Try new things! Meet new people! Be adventurous and maybe - I don't know - hit up a nightclub, dance, or even toss back a few drinks! However, none of that happens until she meets Red. (They literally collide, if you want to get technical.) Though they start off on the wrong foot, both of them laboring under false impressions of the other, Chloe and Red soon come to an arrangement where she will help him create a website for his art in exchange for his help with her "get a life" list. It's sort of a friends-with-benefits arrangement but with life/career goals in mind instead of sex. Of course, it isn't long before attraction rears its head and starts to muddle things between them, which is where the fun, and the emotion, starts to spill in... Personality-wise, Chloe's more of a prickly, cynical, detached person (at least on the surface) and she has a lot of walls to navigate around because of her illness. Having had many people who have left her in the past, who have ghosted, she's built a fortress around herself to keep others from getting too close, to prevent herself from getting hurt. Red, who is sweet, considerate, and sympathetic, is the perfect complement to all this because he's patient as well as observant. He takes time to consider her physical-emotional needs, giving her space when she wants it, concern before she has to ask for it, and accepts her struggles as real and valid without her having to convince him of anything first. (Seems like a small thing, I know, but it's not. It's MONUMENTAL. Feeling validated by another human being is one of the most moving, transformative experiences in the whole world.) As a result of this, especially since Red has his own history with domestic abuse, the two of them are able to sink into this authentic realness with one another. It's understanding at its softest. It's security with woolen sleeves. Chloe and Red can simply strip bare before each other and know they'll be comforted in the arms that await them--no more baggage left unopened, no more scars left unseen, no more hurt that needs to be hidden away. It's beautiful! Ugh! What a sweet, vulnerable love story! It was surprisingly playful and cute, too. If you're in the mood for something adorable, funny, and melt-worthy, then don't wait to get a life just do yourself a favor and Get This Book Already! Go on, now. You heard me!

4/5 stars

**Follow me on Goodreads

#ashlee bree's book reviews #get a life chloe brown #the brown sisters #talia hibbert #contemporary #romance #chick lit #recs: ashlee approved!#read september 2021 #bookblr #book reviews

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echo-three-one · 3 years

Text

Whatever It Takes

Sequel to A Forgotted Memory

Somewhere out there

Beneath the pale moonlight

Someone's thinking of me

And loving me tonight…

Chapter 14 to another story made by Ray (echo-three-one) Comments and Reviews appreciated! I hope you enjoy! Love you all ❤️

Previous Chapter : Alex and Augustus

Meet Me Halfway

John "Soap" MacTavish

Task Force 141

Location Unknown

18 hours ago

He thought he was dead. He thought they were going to kill him. He wished they would, just to end the suffering. But he also wished they wouldn't. He had greater plans, he still wanted to enjoy his life. And it looked like Nero granted half his wish, while depriving him of the other half. He's going to live the rest of his years in hell.

He couldn't stop thinking about that song, he lay flat on the ground, feeling weak, powerless and defeated.

If I lay here… Would you lie with me and just forget the world?

He couldn't feel a thing but he knew he was being transported somewhere. Red flashes filled his eyes as he slowly slipped away from the conscious world.

2 Seconds.

A single drop of water plopped on the cold floor where he laid every 2 seconds. It was getting annoying, but he thanked it for actually waking him up.

Soap struggled to get up and forced himself to do so, grunting in pain as the muscles and bones of his body reacted to his sudden movements. Enduring all the pain, he gasped and got up, moving to the direction of the only ray of light from a crack in the ceiling.

He limped but he had hope, exhaling with excitement as the light got closer every step he took. Then clang! He hit his head on an iron bar. He's in a prison cell, deep underground.

"Shite." he cursed, dropping his knees on the ground, his energy already ran out and he felt thirsty.

"That's freshwater dripping down there." An unknown voice emerged from the darkness, Soap wanted to believe he's hallucinating, but an old figure emerged from the shadows. His hair mostly greyed out and it was long enough that Soap believed he'd been here for far too long.

"The name's Jack. And I suggest you rehydrate. I've been here long enough that you could trust that it's safe." he suggested. His tone was strict but helpful and Soap knew he's trustworthy. They're both prisoners and as the saying goes: "The enemy of my enemy is my friend"

"So… uh Jake. What brings you to this dark and gloomy place?" Soap asked, his voice was barely audible but he was heading straight to the dripping freshwater.

"Turns out our friend Nero doesn't want me dead yet. He couldn't pry any information from me. I'm CIA, literally trained half my life to keep information away. He should've just killed me when he got the chance." He replied.

"So, that means he's going to get something out of you too…" he added, Soap looked worried, he didn't undergo some torture training and hes afraid of what Nero wants from him.

"Look kid, I know you're worried. That's why we won't let that happen. Okay? I have a plan." Jake patted Soap's shoulder, it still hurts from all the stomping and the tossing around but he knew he didn't mean it.

"So… CIA. Guess you crossed paths with Alex." Soap asked, his low accent echoed across the dark cage.

"Yeah. Alex. He was like my son, trained him and assisted him all throughout his CIA Career."

"He kinda disobeyed orders by joining the good side which looked bad in the eyes of the higher ups." Soap reported.

"Hm… It's very unusual of him to not follow orders, unless he believes it's for a better cause." Jack supplied to which Soap nodded, agreeing Jack's assumption.

"It was a good cause. Sacrificed himself for the greater good. Miraculously made it out, but lost his leg in the process." Soap continued, updating the old man about his protege, he's actually glad he did as he could feel the man's mood rising from grumpy prisoner to someone a little less grumpy.

"He had good morals, that kid. He could go far with that attitude… I just hoped that falling in love would not be his downfall… just like what happened to me…" he muttered. Soap didn't make out the last sentence so he assumed it was his own thoughts leaking out of his head. He didn't bother asking again.

The iron doors opened and a new patch of light opened. Jack looked at Soap with determination and nodded.

"Looks like it's showtime, sharkbait." Soap nodded noting the Finding Nemo reference at these trying times.

Jack was right. They had a practice of how to handle prisoners for interrogation. A few stomps, handcuffs, sack on the head and push you if you don't cooperate. Soap had to go through the whole thing, and as far as he knows, Jack must have gotten the key.

He limped his way to the interrogation room, buying enough time for Jack to blindly find the keyhole from the cell. He tried fighting back but the taser sticks were already giving him a bad time.

Just as Jack described, the interrogation room consisted of a dentist chair and a television, his captors were beside him preparing orders from Nero on the screen.

Soap squirmed his way out of the chair, trying to be convincing that he had no idea what's going on.

"Stop squirming! Tell us where the girl is… or I'll take a wild guess and destroy your base instead." Nero yelled. His voice was low, like it ran through a voice changer.

"Sod off…" Soap spat and squirmed again, receiving a shock from the taser. He groaned as tendrils of electricity ran through his body shaking him almost unconscious.

"Lower the voltage or he won't respond! Dumbasses! We need something from him!" Nero yelled at his henchmen.

"So… MacTavish…22nd Parachute Regiment, S.A.S., Now Task Force 141… Skilled in combat, Sniper and Demolitions… You know a proper brainwash would help me get the code from you right?" he mused.

"FOUR!" Soap roared from the top of his lungs, panting after he yelled.

"Four? What the fuck are you talking about?" Nero asked, looking confused. Addition to that, the ground shook and made everyone else in the room wonder.

"What's going on?" Nero asked.

"What? we're under attack? By who? How?" Soap's ears could hear the distress from their leader and from the looks of it, 141 already found him making it easier for him and Jack to get out of this hell hole.

"Augustus is gone? They're going to pay! Okay boys kill this man now. We have to send them a message!" Nero yelled angrily and the tv turned to static.

Meet me Halfway

Francine "France" Winters

Task Force 141

Task Force 141 Base - Briefing Room

"We're being pressured to capture Nero. With our base compromised, the Board would now decide for our force's future. Simon Riley is now researching Augustus' burner phone, if we're lucky enough, it could lead us to our next clue." Shepherd calmly informed the force about the status. He looked in distress but he had to keep pushing forward, to end this warfare.

"Some of Nero's forces are already in New York. It turns out he could command the brainwashed civilians to deploy EMP blasts but recon noticed that he could only command a few at a time. This means without the IP address, he is still powerless and trying hard." Shepherd added.

"I want you all to always be ready for an all out attack on Nero. Let's prove to the board that we're the best one for the job." He muttered and dismissed everyone. France decided to stay in the briefing room and let the quiet consume her thoughts.

"You okay?" A reassuring hand held her shoulder. She knew it was Gary and tears started to fall from her eyes.

"I… I can't stop worrying about him, Roach." She croaked and gave Roach a very pained stare. She actually missed John's presence even after being together for a short while, she felt that they shared a lot of common things together, the strive to become better, the response to danger even off duty and the determination to achieve a goal. Those were her traits that he also had, these same traits that made him like her despite his cocky first impression.

"Let's help out Ghost track that son of a bitch Nero down. And maybe it'll lead us to him." Roach assured them as they both stood up and went to Research.

"How… how can you still be so sure that he's okay?" she sobbed.

"The dogtags." Ghost interjected while typing furiously on the computer.

"If Soap was dead, he should've shown us his tag. That would cripple some of our Force's focus and would lead to his success in invading and capturing Samantha." Ghost continued, he made sense and France almost smiled with the two's support. Instead, she just breathed out and helped Ghost.

"So, have you traced each source?" France asked Ghost as she also started furiously typing codes and strings of data input.

"Yes, they're really sneaky with the encryption, but I keep on getting pings at one location before it spreads in different places." he explained.

"The nearest signal tower. Every packet almost goes through there. You see that?" France pointed at the screen.

"Yeah I do. Let's start tracing that source." Ghost muttered and the map already pinged the tower's location.

"Bingo." they both whispered and cheered, hugging each other as a sign of success. France felt Ghost's tight hug and felt something off about the guy, then he actually removes half of his mask and pouts his cheek close to hers.

"I…. uh… I'm sorry" Ghost shyly said as France pushed him away and felt awkward at the situation. Gary just stood there in shock as Price entered the room.

"What's the news?" he asked, looking at the three.

"We found him, Sir." Ghost cleared his throat and put back his mask.

"Well, bloody hell. Let's go then!" he said as they all ran towards the exit and prepared themselves. France didn't have the time to think about the events earlier as she was still worried about Soap's safety. She hopes that whatever lies in that place would give her an answer.

"FIRE!" Captain Price yelled as snipers quickly shot the guards surrounding the icy fortress. The gulag housed people that the world didn't want but couldn't kill, and she hoped that John MacTavish was on that list.

Danger close explosions crippled both attacking and defending forces as Price roared at Shepherd to be careful. France gulped as she saw a very open field that they're dropping in on and knew for a fact that she's very open and weak at these positions.

Her mind raced, looking at every angle. Tangos were everywhere carrying different kinds of weapons. With minimal angles to hide on, the force, led by Roach aggressively advanced to the Gulag, dodging heavy fire, grenades and RPG Rockets. As soon as they found the tunnel leading deep into the Gulag, France already felt comfortable. This was her playing zone and no one's going to stop her from getting into Nero.

The way in was almost clear, no enemies were against them but instead they ran further into the Gulag. Something was off.

Gunfire was heard deep into the Gulag and as soon as the team reached the control room, Ghost already did his magic. Opening gates, looking at the cameras and defending their six. The masked man helped them further advance into the Gulag.

"Nero's not here…" Ghost said.

"How so?" Price angrily muttered.

"He never set foot in this place. He only uses a television to communicate."

"Bloody hell. Now what?"

" I see two heat signatures behind that wall."

Roach quickly planted a c4 breach and as soon as it exploded Francine pounced at the closest person, raising her fist and looking at its eyes to see the punch go through.

Blue eyes. Those shades of blue. France stopped his fist as tears started to well from her eyes, dropping some on his bare chest.

"John…" she whimpered and smiled.

"Fra.." she didn't let him finish, she kissed him. She didn't care what everyone else thought. The gunfire and explosions suddenly felt nothing to her. She didn't care how John's lips tasted, all she cared about was that he's alive and she's on his arms.

Extraction quickly followed as Shepherd's forces already did a lot of damage on the old fortress. They barely got out just in time for the building's inevitable collapse but they're safe.

Next Chapter : Secret Alliances

Notification Squad my beloved

@samatedeansbroccoli @enderio @smokeywhalee @beemybee @whimsywispsblog @ricinbach

#horRAYfic #whateverittakes #john soap mactavish #john price #gary roach sanderson #simon ghost riley #alex echo 3 1

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kitaychan · 3 years

Text

White flame

Chapter 18

Rating: M

Warnings: Blood, Psychological horror

General Summary: As their two Kingdoms get closer to a war, the past keeps on hovering around their choices. Prince Ivan has a hard time controlling his magical powers while being tormented by a mysterious ghost and Prince Alfred embarcs in seeking a revenge that might cost more than it’s worth it.

Preview: A fire started, the coals turning bright red, the flame was white, dancing rapidly. Chun Yan gasped, grasping his shoulders and shoving him back.

Ivan’s hands trembled, his heart hammering on his chest. “I’m sorry, are you hurt?”

“I’m fine,” she said, retrieving her hands. “I think I've just ruined your coat.”

Ivan paused, shaking his head, there were black fingertips imprinted on the fabric. A chuckle escaped him. “I can’t believe you’re worried about the coat.”

“I’ve only seen blue flames,” She said, observing the fire and reaching out her hand, pausing. “What did you think about to make it white?”

Chapter 18: Family

The sunlight emanating from the window was warm, strange, though she would not complain about the weather, this year the winter seemed to be kinder to them. Yekaterina smiled as she observed her penmanship, the soft traces of ink were perfect, she was proud of her doing, Maddeline had praised her writing before and Katya was happy to provide her with a poem so she could keep it as a gift.

Looking over the desk, she saw that old looking silver clock, holding it lightly, she observed the hour, 2 o´clock, it couldn’t be that late, she woke up early in order to finish the letter, it couldn’t be possible. A soft chuckle escaped her as she noticed the clock was still, maybe that’s why her brother had left it there, the window opened harshly, a cold breeze moving the curtains.

She straightened her posture, her back aching from slouching over the desk, her feet were cold and her hands were messy, splotches of ink on her fingers. She approached the window, the gardens were vibrant green, a bit wet from the early coldness, she could see her brother fooling around by the fountain, dragging along Tolys.

Some days, she wished she could have been born a boy, she would have been happier like that, her father would have probably taught her how to ride a horse properly, she wouldn’t have to wear heavy dresses on the ceremonies and she would tag along with her brother, perhaps he’d listen to her.

Other days, she was happy with who she was, there was peacefulness in knowing she wouldn’t partake in conflicts, likewise, she couldn’t picture how she’d look if she were a male, it was beyond her thoughts, maybe she’d be taller but what was the appeal of that, she already struggled with it when the tailors took her measurements. Why would she wish for her life to be different?

“You would be the one ruling.”

Katya shook her head, those couldn’t be her thoughts, it was almost like a whisper, the voice was familiar too, not her own, it couldn’t be, it was probably her tiredness.

She turned around slowly, holding the clock in her hands, her lips quivering slightly. Her eyes widened at the sight in front of her, on the chair where she was a few seconds ago, a figure sat, lifting the letter and examining it.

Yekaterina faltered, her voice shaking. “Father?”

The man turned to her, leaving the letter on the desk. “Ah yes, Katya, Vanya and Natasha, this youth has not yet chosen a path, I wonder who will take the lead.”

“I don’t understand, what lead?” she asked, stepping back.

“How naive. You look like someone I knew, but younger.” The figure loomed around her, a cold hand caressing her cheek, a wide smile spread on his face. “Yekaterina, you want to rule but there’s a nuance on your way, there has always been someone eclipsing you.”

“That’s not true!” Yekaterina gasped, moving the hand away from her, letting the clock fall from her hands and stumbling to the door. She gripped the door frame tightly as if that could prevent her from listening to that voice whispering in her ear.

“Selfless, naive Yekaterina sent the crown to greedy, obedient Natalya, I haven’t spoken to any of you as I should. Svetlana was a good listener, diligent, if only she were braver, but neither are you Katya, I’m afraid you'll end up being another pawn.”

The window closed with a thud, Katya opened her eyes slowly, a sigh escaping her as she found herself alone, she retrieved the clock from the floor, a crack had formed on the glass, her hands were shaking. Was she going mad?

---

Natalya tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, layer by layer of heavy covers embraced her, the stone walls didn’t keep the warmth, she huffed, shifting another page from the old book as she squinted her eyes, the penmanship was messier now, she had to observe the words carefully to understand what they said.

She tossed the book aside, rubbing her eyes, a headache was starting to nag her. What if this wasn’t the information Ivan wanted? She was wasting her time, reading this nonsensical book, requesting that scholar Feliks recommended and freezing on this awful fortress.

Natalya stood up, making her way to her dresser, her feet cold, the wood shrieking as she opened the delicate box, the silver glint of the crown greeting her, she placed it on her head, heavy, cold, soothing.

The light from her candle ran out, darkness surrounding her, she reached for the night stand dropping the crown with a thud. Sighing, she lit the candle, only for it to die out again. She stumbled on the dark, reaching the wall, following it until she felt the soft fabric, she opened the curtains, the dim moonlight illuminating softly the inside of her room.

She gasped at the sight of someone observing her, the door was opened, a figure stood there, holding a bundle of white fur, Natalya let out a breath. “Mother, what are you doing here?”

“I thought you were cold.” she said, entering her room slowly and lifting the crown from the floor.

“Thank you” Natalya nodded, approaching, her mother smiled as she enveloped her with the coat.

“Why aren’t you asleep?” she said, her eyes focusing on the book on the bed as a small smile settled on her face. “My father used to read me that tale.”

“What tale?” Natalya asked, retrieving the book swiftly in her drawer. “You should be resting.”

“General winter was my friend until our mother died,” she said, sitting on Natalya’s bed, tracing the crown with her fingers. “I never understood...he didn't choose me, he just stopped talking to me, but I know my brother could see it too.”

“There is no general winter in that book,” Natalya said, taking a seat beside her. “It’s father frost, remember? the children’s tale.”

“It’s not a tale, how else do you think my brother could freeze those armies, didn’t you see? Our father used to drop us into the forest, said we had to pass a test, and we always managed to find the way back.” She held the crown closer to her chest, chuckling. “I mentioned the dare to my mother and she followed us once, my father was so mad that day.”

“I don’t understand.” Natalya said, pursuing her lips.

Her mother frowned, placing the crown on Natalya’s head. “You should have seen him, all he could say was Svetlana! Svetlana! What have you done? how could you!” She laughed, clenching her hands on the skirt of her dress. “That’s what the clock is for, I was not the one to blame, my brother was mean to the general, it wasn’t my fault.”

Natalya knitted her eyebrows, taking her hand lightly. "Mother, what are you talking about?"

"The forest, the hare, isn't that what you are reading?" Her grip on Natalya’s hand was tight, she shook her head. " My brother said Ivan was cursed too, the poor child, but if you stay close to him, you will be..." She gasped, running her hand through the white fur enveloping Natalya. "You'll have to… to…”

Snatching the crown from her, Natalya flinched, her mother pulled her into the hallway walking hastily. “Natasha, my dear, we have to leave, this place is cursed, we can't stay, I don't want you to be the hare."

"Hare?" she asked, trying to keep up with her pace, she whined. “Mother, you are hurting my wrist.”

"My brother killed a hare, I cried for days, he chose to kill it because he knew I loved her. He knew our father loved her. He loved her." Svetlana’s voice grew frantic, she stopped, throwing the crown away and embracing Natalya tightly. "We have to leave, you said that Ivan liked to hunt. Natalya, the hare!"

Natalya struggled on her hold until hurried steps echoed on the hallway, she merely observed as her father took her mother away, she was shaking her head, tears running down her face as she repeated. “Natalya, the hare!”

The words echoed in her mind for the rest of the night, it was nonsense, she couldn't help but feel uneasy. Natalya pried herself on being brave, braver than most girls but there was always a shadow casted upon her family, looming over them in the form of whispers, madness ran in her family but it always seemed far, in the form of that faceless grandfather nobody talked about, yet everyone knew somehow. In the form of her dying uncle, though Yekaterina made sure of hiding it from others.

Tonight, Natalya had encountered said shadow, grasping on her shoulders and nailing nonsensical words on her mind, the forest, the clock, the hare. She stood up, making her way on the empty hallway, her feet cold, the wood shrieking as she kneeled to retrieve the silver crown, placing it on her head again, heavy, cold, soothing.

“Poor Svetlana, she never got to wear the crown.”

Such cruel words, Natalya thought. That wasn’t her, it couldn’t be. She didn’t sound like that, she wouldn’t talk like that about her own mother. A sob escaped her and she snatched the crown from her head, glaring at the object, hidden, in the silver glint there was a dark spot, burnt, the opaque shadow on it seemed to mock her.

“Poor Svetlana, she never got to wear the crown.”

---

The neighing from the horses was visible as the exalations of the animal disturbed the otherwise cold air. Ivan smiled as soft laughter emanated from the boys, though it was a bit unfair of him to call them that, they were probably twelve, thirteen, perhaps fourteen, he was sure Kiku was the youngest.

Yekaterina was late, strange, the neat line of children had broken their formation long ago, some were chatting, others sat on the grass and pointed at the palace, he spotted Feliciano caressing one of the horses’ crests while Kiku observed, boredom showing on his face.

It was odd, Kiku seemed so distant from the place, he was accustomed to the palace hallways and the ornamental gardens. Instead of awe as in the other children’s faces, Kiku displayed apathy, Ivan dared to say a bit of hatred towards the whole situation.

He approached Kiku and Feliciano, the latter stiffening his posture and smiling politely, Kiku greeted him, lowering his head.

“Is there something wrong?”

Feliciano shook his head quickly, giving a sheepish smile. “Everything’s fine, your majesty, we were admiring the horses.”

Kiku nodded, shifting his feet and patting the horse lightly.

“He’s scared of going alone.” Feliciano blurted, gaining a glare from Kiku.

“You are not going alone, Feliciano will go with you,” Ivan chuckled but Kiku didn’t meet his gaze. “Part of the appeal of this exchange is for you to make new friends. If you see Ludwig around, talk to him about the star chart, or rather ask him about it, he knows a lot.”

“Feliciano has an uncle in the middle kingdom, Elizabetha’s father is going to meet her there and a lot of the others will travel with their parents.” Kiku frowned, lowering his voice. “I don’t even know how I will contact my sister while I’m there.”

“You’ll have to write her some letters.” Ivan hummed.

Kiku raised his head, a slight trace of a glare appearing on his face before vanishing, he sighed. “Of course, why didn’t I think of that.” he said, it was almost a grumble, the boy turned away.

“I’m sorry,” Feliciano laughed nervously, taking a step back. “He’s like that sometimes, it was the same when the teacher told him that he was a slow reader but just like with that, I’m sure Kiku will go past that, he just needs a bit of time.”

Ivan nodded, Feliciano trailed after Kiku with hurried steps. A slow reader? that had to be a lie, with the quantity of books he had seen in their small house. Ivan wanted to slap himself, Kiku had read to him in that foreign language, that’s why he used the dictionaries and that’s why Chun Yan struggled with letters. No wonder why Kiku was frustrated with his suggestion.

When Katya arrived she was pale, stumbling over her words during the speech and looking around as if looking for someone, Ivan took over her speech in an attempt to ease her nerves, though she seemed to grow restless. As the scholars were dispatched, and the horses started their run, Katya enveloped him in a tight hug. “I am a horrible sister, a bewitched woman.” she said, burying her head on his shoulder.

“Don’t say that, Katya. What has gotten into you?”

She shook her head, reaching for her pocket. “I broke it, I saw…. I... I was dumb and I broke it.” she said, handing him the clock. “I sent Natalya the crown, I shouldn’t have done that.”

“It’s fine, I don’t like that clock anyways. Katya, our father said it was bad luck to have that crown around,” Ivan said, pushing her away a bit, giving her a small smile. “but he said a lot of things, I’m sure Natalya’s happy.”

Yekaterina nodded. “I’m sure she liked it. She made it clear in her letter. Why don’t you write to her? She wrote a couple of.... interesting things” She took a deep breath. “I will hand you her letters.”

Ivan nodded absentmindedly, a prickle of anger was nagging at him to reprimand Katya for going through his correspondence, for acting without asking him but her nervous demeanour kept him from doing so.

When the sky grew darker, Ivan approached the gardens again, fumbling with the clock, the crack it had before had turned into several, he frowned, that glass was about to break.He walked around for a bit, rubbing his hands together, his fingers were growing numb, perhaps he should have brought gloves, the sunny weather of the morning had deceived him.

He glanced around, there was smoke coming out of one of the chimneys, probably from the kitchen, a bit of whatever they were cooking would surely provide him some warmth.

Approaching the kitchen, heat emanating from the place, he ducked his head, on one side of the room there was a large cauldron, boiling, probably water, as the meal had been served about an hour ago, he could see Sadik, the cook, slicing the meat and seasoning it.

On the other side of the kitchen, the chimney had a lower flame, Chun Yan was retrieving the heated coal with a ladle. Ivan stayed silent, observing her as she finished her task, her gaze focused on the oven, reaching out her hand as if testing the heat, she smiled, rubbing her hands, stained with the black powder of the coal.

Her smile faltered as she turned around, she took swift steps towards him, her voice hushed. “What are you doing here?”

“I grew bored of waiting and I want to eat something.” Ivan hummed. “I thought you’d be there to bid goodbye to your brother.”

“No, if I bid him goodbye, he won’t come back.” She frowned, fidgeting with the hem of her apron. “You shouldn’t ask for more food, the meal was served not long ago.”

“He will come back, he was doubting as he left, thinking on how to contact you once he arrived.” Ivan placed a hand on her shoulder. “Please, I am starving.”

“No” She shook her head, moving his hand away, she paused, sighing, returning to the kitchen, retrieving some water and washing her hands. “Sadik, can I leave? I finished my tasks.”

Sadik spared Ivan a glance, giving her a slight nod before chuckling. “Of course, every day I grow more convinced that you are your father’s daughter, Chun Yan. He managed to boss around a few royals too.”

“I’m going to need a couple of those coals.” She hummed, taking off the apron.

“You just washed your hands, I don’t think you should touch that again.” Ivan said, standing in the entrance awkwardly, shifting on his feet as Chun Yan and Sadik stared at him, a small smile forming on her face.

“Very well, Ivan, could you retrieve them for me?”

He nodded, approaching them hesitantly, why were they staring at him? He reached out his hand but she pulled it away, chuckling. “I thought you would refuse.” she said, scooping a handful of coals swiftly with a small bucket. “I can’t believe you almost burned your hand.”

Outside, the air was colder, the way to the small forest was not as long as it seemed before, Ivan could easily walk around without tripping, he glanced at the sky, there were few stars on it but the moon was full, providing a soft light.

They neared the pond, the water was still, even though the fishes swirling. Chun Yan stopped, touching lightly the cinders, she took one, presenting it to him. “They’re still warm, so lighting one shouldn’t be so hard.”

“Lighting?”

She nodded, “Yes, the idea is to focus on the warmth, fire is very tricky because sometimes it has a life on it’s own, but I find it easier when you use something that’s supposed to catch fire.”

“I don’t know, why don’t we just talk? I don’t feel like doing much tonight.”

“It’s coal, the worst that can happen is that it turns into ashes.” She said, dropping the bucket. “Give it a try, I’ll help you.”

Ivan sighed, sitting beside her, poking the coal, his finger caught the black powder as he touched it. She seemed to notice his hesitation, taking a hold of his wrist and placing on his hand a piece of coal. “Don’t be so picky.”

She mirrored him, closing her hand on a fist. “I normally think about the flames of an oven, a bit lame, but it’s the kind of fire that I see everyday.” she chuckled, opening her hand, the coal was lit by a small flame. “It’s predictable, try it.”

He nodded, closing his hand, the lingering warmth from the fire was barely there. Warm, a candle was warm, the sunlight was warm, the fire on the chimney was warm. He opened his hand, the flame mirrored the one on her hand.

“I told you it was easy.” She beamed, closing her hand, the fire dissipated as well as the coal, leaving her hand stained with black.

Ivan mimicked her but the fire did not die out. He gave her a concerned gaze.

“That happens… sometimes.” She laughed, enclosing her hands around his. “Try again.”

He did so, several times, growing more confident until she asked him to start a small campfire with the cinders left. He hesitantly obliged, reaching out both of his hands above the small pile of coal. A small fire, like the one from the chimney, like, like...

"like the knight."

Before he could stop himself, Ivan's thoughts led his mind to the horrid cries of the knight and the blinding flames that engulfed him.

A fire started, the coals turning bright red, the flame was white, dancing rapidly. Chun Yan gasped, grasping his shoulders and shoving him back.

Ivan’s hands trembled, his heart hammering on his chest. “I’m sorry, are you hurt?”

“I’m fine,” she said, retrieving her hands. “I think I've just ruined your coat.”

Ivan paused, shaking his head, there were black fingertips imprinted on the fabric. A chuckle escaped him. “I can’t believe you’re worried about the coat.”

“I’ve only seen blue flames,” She said, observing the fire and reaching out her hand, pausing. “What did you think about to make the flame white?”

“Why don’t you tell her?”

Ivan flinched, that voice again, murmuring in his ear, he reached for his pocket, frowning. “I don’t know.”

A weight settled on his shoulders, the silvery voice resounded. “Tell her how you killed the knight.”

He retrieved the clock with a trembling hand, the silver reflecting the light from the fire. Ivan reached out his hand, placing the clock against hers and holding their hands together lightly. "I'm sorry, could you fix it again?”

"What 's wrong?" She asked, a concerned expression crossing her face, she observed the clock, opening it and running her fingers through the cracked glass.

“Tell her how you killed the knight.” The silvery voice repeated with a thunderous chuckle, Ivan’s heart sped up as the laughter increased. "Perhaps instead of telling her, you should show her."

Ivan tightened his hold on her hand. He could hear the glass break and she gasped, swiftly freeing their hands, the clock fell into the floor, blood staining the silver engravings. The smell of smoke, the feeling of blood in his hands and the sight of the horrid ghost overwhelmed him.

Ivan shook his head, lowering his gaze, stumbling over his words as he told her about the forest, the knight, the ghost, the wolf. He found himself shaking, his voice faltering until a sob escaped him.

He tried to take a deep breath, to stop his sobbing, but the tears kept on falling, covering his face with his hands, he tried to soothe his outburst. The thunderous laugh echoed in his mind.

She pulled away his hands with a firm grip, Ivan was enveloped in warmth, he was ashamed, ashamed that instead of pushing her away, he was clinging to her, wanting to be hugged. She ran a hand through his hair, Ivan managed to stop his sobbing, glad that there was silence.

Though it didn't last long as the horrid laugh resumed, Ivan felt shivers, nailing coldness into his bones, he buried his head on her shoulder, trying to keep whatever little warmth that lingered from her embrace.

Chun Yan sighed, loosening her hold until her body grew limp, her weight resting on him. Ivan drew out a shaky breath, laying her down gently, she held a serene expression, as if she were sleeping peacefully.

“There it is, well done Vanya." The ghostly figure grew visible, the cold hand grasped her wrist, humming. "Her magic is familiar, way too familiar."

Ivan observed her hand, stained with blood, his own hand smeared with the scarlet liquid but he felt no pain. Prying the cold bluish hand from her, he asked. "What have you done to her?"

"Me? Nothing, I was not the one holding her." A dry chuckle came after those words, the pale hand hovered above the campfire, the flame turned blue, growing smaller until it died out.

In the darkness, Ivan could see the ghostly figure tossing him the clock. Ivan made no move to catch it, a devious smile formed on the spirit’s face. "Now, it’s my turn to tell you a secret." The silvery voice said, "The wolf was not a wolf, it was a knight and the knight was not a knight, it was a magician. Can you guess what else the magician was, Ivan?”

The ghost hovered behind him, reaching out a pale hand and caressing Chun Yan’s head. “The magician was a father.”

#hetalia fanfiction #hws russia #hws nyo china #hws ukraine #hws belarus #hws japan #rochu #hws rochu #aph fanfic #hetalia #my writing #aph russia #aph nyo china

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dragonrajafanfiction · 3 years

Text

The Serpent’s Tomb

Many miles off the coast of the Netherlands

The restless sea tossed its waves against the sheer cliffs rising out it, fanning out and foaming, like hands reaching up towards the top of rock walls that were shrouded in mist. The fortress stood strong against its thundering force, as it had for nearly a millennium, shielding its dark secrets from both the waves and the world. Within the walls of this natural crater, an atmospheric inversion capped the caldera with a thick blanket of clouds. Even flying over it in a jet would only let you see this strange cloud mass floating right over the sea. Walls form a dark ring and in each of the cardinal directions, an ancient stone carving of a woman was a sentry looking out into a vast ocean. The women were dressed in long robes, each one about 12 feet tall, their hair sweeping back, as though facing into the gale. They were covered in lichen, their sightless eyes peering endlessly towards the horizon. The cloud cover hid a crystalline lake of water, forever hidden from the sun by the constant cloud cover. It stretched 40 miles across and in the center was an island where a granite stone monastery was the only sign of human habitation. The lights were on in this monastery, the single point of light, in a world that hadn't seen the sun, moon and stars for a thousand years.

In the central worship chamber a man in a hooded cloak knelt in front of an image of a serpent climbing up a long pole. In the Bible, there is such an image. A copper serpent that cured the snake poisoning of those who could gaze upon it, only to be destroyed when people began worshiping it like a god as this man was doing. However, this image was not of that curative snake. Nor was it the medical serpent, the staff of Hermes or the rod of Asclepias.

This was something far more ancient, yet far more grounded in reality than any of those.

The man raised his eyes to the great serpent. The staff was painted blood red and the snake was painted black. It’s eyes were solid gold and peered down with a cold, judgemental gaze from a height of five meters. The carved scales glittered in the light of the candles, the flickering of the fire granting a sense of motion to those mighty coils. Yet it must have paled in comparison to the true serpent, the Midgaardslang, a snake so big, it could circle the whole world and grasp its own tail. The worship of the Midgaardslang was born out of fear of forces too great to understand. But because of the reality of this snake, the culture that revered it held out to the end against the forces of Christianization. Once you had seen the god with your own eyes, there was no longer room for doubt, no longer any need for faith, and no true conversion to anything else. There was only one true religion. The dragon.

The man finished his prayer and stood to his feet. “Your great gift has finally returned to us. We are eternally grateful. Eternally.” He drew back his hood, revealing salt and pepper hair and steel grey eyes. His skin was transparent from not seeing the sun all these years. He looked aged but the cords of his neck and the set of his jaw bore no wrinkles or sagging. He turned away, walking with the firm and confident step of a warrior. His cape fanned out and swept up whirls of dust in his wake. He was alone in this room, this man always worshipped alone. But as he walked, the candles all extinguished behind him. The golden-eyed serpent was swallowed by darkness.

Outside the entrance to this central room is a hall full of doors and staircases. The Monastery was built like the ancient pyramids, to guard against looters and thieves, there were many false entrances, trap doors, and misdirecting signage, a labyrinth of stairways and halls. The man descended the spiral staircase without hesitation. Monastery’s true form was hidden underground, under the lake. It served as both a tomb, and a vast city hidden below the obsidian water. The water was kept at bay by pumps that worked with the tides, an example of how the ancient knowledge of the dragon was passed down to these people. Who could imagine in the age of fossil fuel and solar electricity that people in the middle ages could harness the power of gravity to create a self perpetuating pump system and use the heavy waters of the lake and the mist above to hide from the world? As he descended further down, the sound of water could be heard, a deep sucking sound, like a giant’s heartbeat. That water ran through pipes like veins and arteries. The intake and the outflow of the water reached an equilibrium and the water level in the lake never rose or fell.

Pinpoints of light came into view and revealed a hall as wide as a highway. All the inhabitants of the Monastery City had come out for this occasion. They stood on either side of the way, dressed in dark cloaks, with black sheer veils covering their faces. They murmured in hushed voices as he walked through, a single man, dwarfed by the size of his own domain. As he passed, they all bowed their heads. The highway led to a dead end, a circular room with a ceiling too high to see. At the center of the circle, Dominic lay on an altar. His eyes stared up into the ceiling, burning golden. He was still dressed in the clothes from the soccer game, save his shirt that was removed. His skin was pale save the purple bruises on his chest and face where he’d been struck hours earlier.

This area was cool and damp. Even with the cloak, the man couldn’t help but shiver slightly.

Five other people stood around him, their voices murmuring low and steady without pausing, deep and guttural noises like snarling. This Yanling was unique to this area. It was not something that affected Dominic but it called to the dragon technology embedded in the room and that was acting on Dominic’s body. So long as they chanted, Dominic could not move, staring up, transfixed by something no one else could see. Every few seconds he would blink slowly. His pupils were thin and needle-like slits in the golden irises.

“How long do you think it will take?” The woman’s voice was a soft whisper, so as not to interrupt the concentration of the five hybrids standing around the stone altar. They were the high priests of this place, aged with little energy to come here and chant. If they were interrupted now they might just faint and perish.

“It shouldn’t be much longer. This is not only his home, but his birthplace. The tomb… and the womb. Where he was buried, and where he was born. He will naturally return here. Mind, body and spirit.” He looked on Dominic with a quiet reverence of someone regarding a holy relic.

“Though… the body… What is it?” Her eyes gazed upon him in both curiosity and fear. After leaving the Netherlands by boat, they flew the rest of the way here by helicopter. The only real way to reach this place any more. Dominic had kept fighting the whole way, unaware of his heritage or his fate. He was in terrible pain and kept asking for medicine. She couldn’t tell him anything of course, but just reassured him that he would heal just fine once they reached their destination. Once his dragonblood awakened, he would recover in days from wounds it took weeks for a normal human to recover from.

“What he is is something beyond our comprehension now. The building… The whole city was built under the direction of the writings of those now dead. And the Midgaardslang left this place hundreds of years ago. It’s just a husk. And all we have left are the myths that say that the Midgarslaang called forth an army of giants that cast down hail, while it climbed up the oak tree to spew poison from the air. The great hero Donar struck the serpent in the head so hard that he crushed it and the ground beneath it. The land sank seven miles deep under his hammer. But Donar was poisoned by the serpent and died. The crater filled with water, becoming his grave and the grave of the Midgardslaang.”

Such feats were impossible for a man to do, but for a hybrid, it wasn’t that hard to believe. This great god of a serpent and the man that slew it, dying together deep beneath the earth was one of many events in the history of Dragonslaying around the world. Donar’s pyrrhic victory ran true in the hearts of those who battled dragons. Killing one at the sacrifice of one’s own life was normal. What wasn’t normal, was the end of the tale. Unlike most myths, the end of this myth has a specific date, 1222 AD. A great fire came from the grave of the Midgaardslang and the ghost of the serpent ascended into the sky, fleeing north. Such specific references at the end of what should have been the annals of fantasy was a jarring reminder that this did happen.

“Once the door opens, we will finally have access to the last of the documents and our work will begin.” He turned to her with eyes that showed a burning excitement. “Sylke, our journey is beginning now. Like the dragon we have slept and now…”

Sylke was the woman who held the phone to Dominic’s ear. She was his guard and was therefore permitted into this space, watching over him. She saw that his breathing was coming a little faster as though being tired out by a great effort or, perhaps, being frightened by something. But those eyes didn’t stop staring into the depths of that ceiling. He suddenly cried out arching his back in pain. A great rumble came from above, followed by a sudden downdraft of frigid cold air that carried with it a heavy rain. Tons of water cascaded from an opening that came from that vast ceiling. It crashed down with the force of Donar’s great hammer. Like most great dragon knowledge, what was hidden in this shrine came designed to be obtained with a price, a sacrifice of human life. However, just before the torrent could rush in and obliterate everyone in the room, it congealed above their heads and rose back up again, forming a conveyor belt.

Yanling - Vortex.

Sylke’s eyes were bright gold. She held her hands above her head. The wind from the moving water blew her hood from her hair. She held back a water pressure great enough to stop a tank. This Yanling could be used as a barrier, but also as a way to move through water. man wrapped his arm around her waist. A thick blue coil of water separated from the flow and lifted them from the floor, sweeping them up into the tower. The water carried them up towards the ceiling into the thick darkness. Much to the man’s surprise, Sylke leaped from the water into an open air space. They were once again standing on solid ground, wet and shivering in the pitch dark.

Sylke had to continue her water control. “You have 3 minutes a most. That’s the best I can handle!” She was straining against the force of the water now. Even if the old monks got out with Dominic, the whole chamber could be permanently flooded. But he came prepared, lifting up a bright waterproof flashlight. When he flicked it on he gasped in shock.

It wasn’t just a few paintings or obscure ruins or relics. Bookcases lined an entire wall around the central cascade of water.

#Dragon Raja

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