hating is fun but sometimes you see someone only ever be a hater and never a lover and it's like. ok well do you like anything at all or do you only see the world in shades of bad to worse
Cursed to be stuck inside this ancient amulet for years but you know I was kind of getting used to it. The solitude had eaten away just enough of my sanity that I'm pretty sure it only would've been a few more days before I started hallucinating some really neat shit.
But then. THEN. This fuckass twink descendant of my mortal enemies picks up my amulet. Takes right out of the sacred chamber. I guess it was finally a ruin now? Worse timing possible, too late to stop me going insane and right before the insanity could pay off.
So some clueless idiot is actually wearing me for the first time in centuries. I'm gonna wreck this dude's shit, I don't care if he is weirdly nice and kind of pretty in the face department. The second I accumulate enough power I'm breaking out of here and making him regret being born.
Okay so I did accumulate enough energy that I might have been able to break out, maybe, but also probably not quite just yet. Which is why I had to use it to stop that dragon from killing Captain Fuckwit.
Like I had to do it. If the dragon kills him how am I supposed to be the one to do it? I didn't rot in that sealed chamber for centuries just so that the last living descendant of my most hated enemies could get offed by something that wasn't me. There's no poetic justice in that and also I am NOT owing any dragons any favors.
I've been thinking about how I'm going to kill this guy. I mean there's not a lot else to do, I'm still stuck in the amulet so mostly I'm limited to being spooky in his dreams until I suck up some more power. But it's going to happen. I'm out of the sealed chamber now there's so many opportunities and also I'm patient. I've learned to be extremely patient. Would be weird if I hadn't.
Anyway I'm not going to kill him right away. Where's the satisfaction in that? He's the last descendant of my enemies (pretty sure) so of course I gotta drag it out. This is the only revenge I might ever get. I'll have to capture him. Keep him sealed away for a long time, see how he likes it. But like. In a nicer placed than that fucking chamber because unlike some long dead assholes, I have standards. Plus I'm also going to spending a lot of my time there too, menacing him and shit, so it better be nice for me.
I'm thinking summer house on an otherwise uninhabited island. I keep him there where there are no dragons or ogres or demon kings to interrupt, and I tell him all about the shitty things his ancestors did, to like. Demoralize him. So that he knows that even though I'm a scary evil creature that's going to be his ending, he doesn't get as much moral high ground as he'd probably like. I make him eat meals with me just to draw out the tension, and then I give him nightmares, making him twist and writhe in his sweat-soaked sheets while his heart hammers against his ribs and he wonders if this will finally be the night I finish him.
Listen. Giving him command of the remnants of my dark army is just practical right now. I don't have the energy to communicate extensively with them myself, and they'll keep him alive long enough for me to take my elaborate revenge without me constantly having to intervene and sacrifice my own energy to do it. And anyway I have ceremonies to plan, it's going to be amazing, I'm going to round up every last remnant from the old days so that they can witness my final triumph when I claim his life and soul forever.
Also, he used them to humiliate that other fuckass descendant guy. Even I can begrudgingly admit it was pretty well done. Corrupting influence gain! I'm kind of surprised his allies haven't all abandoned him for using dark and sinister forces to save their lives, though, but I guess it's fine if they don't. Sure why not. We can be cool with raising cursed armies in this day and age apparently. Yeah that thing I was sealed away for for centuries is just not a big deal now. Cool cool cool.
You know what, I'm going to make his friends come to the ceremony too. So they can also witness my triumph and his utter defeat and subjugation at my hands.
Maybe I'll even let them visit him in his woeful imprisonment afterwards as well. Just to really hammer the point home. They're not the worst company, at least. Not as annoying as heroes used to be. We can have them over for dinner while I lord my victory above their helplessness. Real power move to just let them come and see the guy that they are nevertheless unable to free from my dark clutches.
I guess I better make sure they also don't all die either, if that's the case. It's a good thing I'm patient. So many fucking setbacks!
Those guys were supposed to be dead for centuries! And they're still ruining my life! Fucking. That fuckass other descendant managed to summon them and of course THEY are still not cool with me or my dark forces, although I'm going to be real, they weren't looking too noble and above-aboard themselves when they turned up. That was some hypocritical undead revenant bullshit.
Of course I ended up fighting them. They attacked first! Again! They were even trying to kill their own descendant! And those heinous bitches called me the monster. I've never tried to kill my own descendants. Probably because I don't have any but still. At least try and take over his body first or something!
Well actually they did try it, I think? But that hero of theirs had worn my amulet for so long that he was too corrupted for it to work. Ha!
Small victories.
I'm going to need to hang onto those.
Because now I'm sealed back in the fucking Chamber Eternal again.
FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCKING---!!!!
Okay.
Alright.
I'm not going to lie this isn't looking good. I'm not in the amulet anymore but the seals on the chamber are strong, made with the souls of those fuckdamn ancient heroes. All my power is left with their descendant on the outside now. My plans are thwarted. I'm going to languish in this minimalist hell of a chamber until those ancient souls run out of juice, and currently they're forming a dome of spiritual energy so flush with power that the ghosts on the moon can probably see it.
It... it's going to be... I mean. It'll be fine. Back to getting to the good part of going insane, right?
I was really confused at first because, why would my sworn enemy who I've been plotting vengeance against this entire time free me from the chamber? At great effort and personal risk, no less? That fight was absolutely brutal, I'm not sure I could have even done it myself in his place, and I mean his situation without even bothering was quite good. He had all of my power. His ancestors were likewise distracted with sealing me away. He could have ascended to become the next Dark Lord or, I don't know, ran around doing his Power of Friendship bullshit for the next ten thousand years largely uncontested. Not only does he not have a further use for me but if anything, I present a massive threat to him if I can regain enough strength to take my power back.
But I think that's it! That Power of Friendship bullshit! Somehow, this guy has mistaken me for an ally.
I can work with this.
As long as he doesn't suspect that we're actually enemies, I can bide my time, restore my power, wrestle control of my armies back from his grasp, and then get him back on his knees.
I just need to pretend that I've actually been helping him out this entire time.
I really want him back on his knees. That was a good look on him. He's got like super long eyelashes for a dude. Plus you know that's where he belongs, groveling before my might! Mwahahaha!
Well this is going surprisingly well. Like I don't think it's even occurred to him to be suspicious of me? He hasn't even tried to drug me with truth serum or test me at a holy spring or drag me in front of any tribunals. When I caught one of his little friends passing information to his rivals he just... took my word for it. I could have been lying. I wasn't, because I was actually expecting him to check, but I could have been.
I'm almost starting to wonder if he really is descended from those ancient hero fuckers, he doesn't act like them at all. The apple must have rolled into a goddamn river and been carried off to sea after it fell off that tree.
Just because I'm pretending to be his ally doesn't mean I can't still sabotage him, of course. That one little traitor might have been a real mole, who is... somehow still in the group, and not beheaded or anything(????). But I'm pretty sure the king's son is genuinely devoted to his brother-in-arms, to my hero-enemy, and hasn't committed any convenient betrayals that I can dig out and wave around to get rid of him. If that even would get rid of him (see: traitor mole still in group). More's the pity.
Such a strong political alliance with the ruling family will further cement my hero's power in this region. Potentially, that will make it even harder to extricate him for my own purposes later on. Of course, it's not worth the risk if I do something too extreme and it gets traced back to me, so I can't simply kill the prince.
But I didn't study medicine at my grandmother's knee just to forget all the useful bits in my dark rise to power. That idiot won't be riding out to adventure alongside his 'sworn brother' tomorrow if he has too many embarrassing rashes to get into his saddle.
This might seem like a petty plot that is beneath me but it's tactically sound. I've thought about it a lot.
I take it back these people are abominably over-observant. I'd rather be caught trying to poison the prince again, but the hero's singular suspicious friend, that woman knight, just had to follow me to the abandoned shrine instead.
Cats are one of nature's most successful predators. Properly trained, a dark familiar is an excellent spy and helper, and I am in need of every advantage I can get right now. Everyone knows the best way to ingratiate yourself to animals is to get them young. Feeding kittens is a sinister action.
I mean it's good that it helps my cover that these people think otherwise, it's just that they're wrong. Half of my family was executed for feeding cats. Back in those days everyone knew what was up and nobody cooed about it.
Shit, shit, I knew we shouldn't have kept that mole around. Fucking sob story bullshit. The hero's captured. My dark feline army isn't ready! I'm going to have to turn to some other means of regaining him before the enemy steals my power from him. They can't be allowed to do that. It'd kill him but more importantly it would make it that much harder for me to ever reclaim it.
The only one allowed to strip him and put him in chains is me!!! ME!!! He's mine!!! I WAS SUPPOSED TO BE THE FIRST TO DO THAT TO HIM!!!
Bastards! Hacks!
I didn't sell my soul to eight different devils to be upstaged by some fuckers who barely grasps the fundamentals of summoning circles. Fuck the low battery I don't need the dark forces of beyond to take these bitches out, their rituals are shit enough I'm going to end them with a piece of chalk and three drops of blood. Hold my fucking beer.
Hero says he needs to reward me for saving him when we get back. I should probably decline whatever it is, that's what all these people seem to do, but I'll at least see what he's offering first. Just in case it's worth cracking my cover for.
Wormhole, 2026
Digital paint (sketches -- pencil on paper)
Prints
No AI was used in the creation of this image. I've been working on this painting off and on for over two years, and figuring out the composition alone was a serious challenge. I didn't think it'd take this long to complete, but the timing's rather fortuitous with Trek's 60th anniversary right around the corner! 🎉🖖✨
Sketches below the cut.
I want a lined kimono so fucking bad they look unreasonably comfortable and if I don't get one within the next few years I might do something drastic (spend more money than I have)
I think we as a society should bring back brotps. I think we should be weirder about characters being friends the same way people are weird about ships. Make those two characters who interacted once or twice besties. Make it difficult for them to get rid of each other even if they want to. Go nuts
After looking through the evidence, both, but moreso the second.
Ea-Nasir's tablet is dated to 1750 BC, which is coincidentally aligns to the death of Hammurabi. For context, he lived at the end of the Isin-Larsa Period, a time in Babylonia's history where it was a collection of warring city-states. Ur and Larsa were the most powerful of these, since they were farthest south and controlled most of the trade coming up the Persian Gulf. (Isin, near where Hammurabi was from, was in the North and had lost power about 200 years before.)
Right after Hammurabi's death, all the city-states he'd conquered, including Larsa and Ur, decided that they didn't give two squats what the people in the North thought, and started a rebellion.
The tablets in Ea-Nasir's house have been translated. It's very difficult to find them, but the book is called Foreign Trade in the Old Babylonian Period, Leemans 1960, and he makes a series of interpretations that still align with our understanding of the culture today:
Ea-Nasir was hot-headed. 3 tablets note him talking rudely to messengers and traders.
Ea-Nasir sold copper to private merchants AND the temple, which was the government of Ur. The receipt we found is in such a large quantity we can assume the government was likely his primary buyer. The complaint tablets are from notably from private merchants.
Ea-Nasir was an alik-Tilmun; or 'one who travels to Dilmun'.
Where is Dilmun? Good question! Archaeologists spent the next 40 years figuring it out! At this point, they're fairly certain it's in present-day Qatar. The city was used as a midpoint port to bring in copper from Magan and Meluhha (current-day UAE/Oman and India respectively.)
The reason we know this, is because Oman is an old, old copper-producing region. It's an ophiolite (rock from the seafloor that's been uplifted to the surface) that contained a spreading center (think Mid-Atlantic ridge) which forms deposits of copper and other metals as sulfides from the black smoker vents (copper-iron sulfur, lead sulfur, zinc sulfur, etc.)
To produce copper, you have to remove the iron and the sulfur. To remove the iron, you add "flux", which essentially bonds iron to silica, because it likes silica more than copper does. And to remove the sulfur, you add oxygen, which burns off the sulfur as gaseous SO2.
The copper is heavier than the iron and silica, and sinks to the bottom of the furnace. The iron and silica, slag, flow out the side. The resulting ingot looks like the bowl below. And a lot of times, holes remained from gas getting trapped at the bottom.
They measured copper by weight though, so this wasn't too much of a problem. However, if there weren't enough flux, or the fire wasn't hot enough, iron would also get trapped in the copper ingot, making "black copper"; if a merchant wanted the 97% pure copper that could be made using this process, a lot of iron would definitely be considered 'bad copper'.
Switching back to the culture!
Around 1800 BC, the same time as this was going on, the culture of Oman underwent a noticeable decline. Many of their coastal mines stopped producing copper and people moved inland. They also stopped making bronze with tin. This is notable, because tin was scarce in the Bronze Age and insinuates they might've been left out of the trade route. At the very least, they had stopped being Mesopotamia's primary supplier and started doing their best to keep up with the times.
(At this point, I'll point a finger to Cyprus, which was firing up its smelters at the same time. Cyprus is very interesting, but it pertains less to Ea-Nasir, so I'll just wave enthusiastically at their oxhide ingot copper and tin trade domination.)
So we can't know if Ea-Nasir wasn't a chronic scammer, but I think all the evidence outlines a different story.
Ur, a powerful city-state rebelling against a conqueror within Ea-Nasir's lifetime. Ea-Nasir, selling large amounts of copper to the government, and smaller sales to private merchants who complained about being given scraps; a man who was still traveling to trade copper in a state that had lost their monopoly on the copper trade and was possibly producing some less-than-ideal quality.
He mostly sounds like a person with strong ties to his city and culture. Maybe not the best copper merchant, but certainly a passionate one.
References below the cut:
Velde, C. (2003). Wadi Suq and Late Bronze Age in the Oman Peninsula. Archaeology of the United Arab Emirates, 102–113.
Bibby, G. (1970). Looking for Dilmun (Second Edi). Alfred A. Knoff, INC.
Olijdam, E. (2014). From rags to riches: three crucial steps in Dilmun’s rise to fame (poster). Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies, 44(July 2013), 277–286.
Forbes, R. J. (1950). Metallurgy in Antiquity. EJB. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.207.4426.50
Leemans, W. F. (1960). Foreign Trade in the Old Babylonia Period. Leiden, E.J. Brill.
Kassianidou, V. (2013). The Production and Trade of Cypriot Copper in the Late Bronze Age. An Analysis of the Evidence. Pasiphae. Rivista Di Filologia e Antichità Egee, VII, 133–146. www.libraweb.net
Khol, P., & Bertille, L. (2008). By Land and By Sea: The Circulation of Materials and Peoples, ca. 3500 - 1800 B.C. Intercultural Relations Between South and Southwest Asia: Studies in Commemoration of E.C.L. During Caspers (1934 - 1996) BAR International Series 1826, 1826, 29–42.
Giardino C., (2019). Magan - The Land of Copper: Prehistoric Metallurgy of Oman. Ministry of Heritage and Culture - Sultanate of Oman (2019).
They closed the Death Wendy's over a year ago and I'm still mad about it. It was a Wendy's located in the middle of a six-way intersection, requiring many pedestrians to cross the street 3 times in a row in order to get to it
It was one of the city's top ten spots for car crashes, multiple people died there, and the service was terrible. I miss it dearly
there’s this extremely kind soul of a woman on instagram that makes accessible recipes that don’t require standing, chopping, or a stove and she might just have a permanent place in my heart
edit: here's her YouTube account, as well as her TikTok and Facebook :)
origamiaround
kianamaiart
theartofmadeline
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