A Smiling Shadow

The musings of one Athaeda Hartfell. Found on MoonGuard IC/OOC

[athaeda]

hi! you popped up randomly on my dash but i figured i'd throw an ask you're way :)

how about #3 for the OC ask game?

((Hi there! 💜 Thank you so much and welcome to my little corner!

Athaeda's relationship with her childhood is complicated. So I'm going to break this up into a couple parts.~

If she could really, truly change something? Without limitation? She would make her mother a kinder person. Amaryl was a stone of a woman and deeply unforgiving of her daughter's sensitive nature.

If she could tell her younger self something? "Keep going. It won't always be like this. I know you're scared and I can't tell you that it gets easier. But it gets different. And it's worth it."))

[ruvviks]

OC ASK GAME

Where was your OC born, and where did they grow up?

How does your OC remember their childhood? Is this an accurate reflection of what their childhood was actually like?

If your OC could revisit their childhood, what would they want to change about it, if anything at all?

Describe three of the most important photographs your OC owns.

What is your OC's gender identity and sexual orientation? Is this also what they identify as in canon, or are they not (fully) aware?

How comfortable is your OC in their skin? Do they like who they are? What would they want to change about themself?

What is your OC's occupation?

What does your OC's family look like?

Describe a mundane day in your OC's life.

Does your OC have any physical scars? What is the story behind them?

What does your OC carry around in their pockets? What about their bag?

What is the worst thing that has happened to your OC? How has it affected their behavior, their health, and their life in general?

What is something your OC does (to others) that they would not like if others did to them? Are they aware that they do this?

Does your OC hold grudges? How good are they at letting things go? Do they believe in second chances?

What is your OC's fatal flaw?

Is there anyone your OC has lost contact with? What happened?

What are some of your OC's coping mechanisms during stressful or overwhelming periods in their life?

What are your OC's bad habits?

How does your OC handle preparing for and initiating a difficult conversation? How does the conversation itself go?

How quick is your OC to shift blame? Do they own up to their mistakes, or are they prone to start pointing fingers at others?

How does your OC handle criticism?

How good is your OC at apologizing, if they do this at all?

What is your OC like when they're angry?

What is your OC like when they're upset?

What is your OC's deepest desire? Would they ever ask for this?

How quickly does your OC reach their breaking point? What are they like when this point has been reached?

What are some assumptions others make about your OC? Are any of them true?

What does your OC think others are saying about them behind their back? Is any of this true?

What are three traits your OC has that can both have positive as well as negative qualities?

How paranoid is your OC? How does this affect their daily life?

Are there any places or people your OC is avoiding?

How does your OC handle rejection?

How does your OC handle jealousy?

What would be some of the signs your OC is starting to push people away?

If your OC had to kill someone, how would they do it? If killing is a near-daily occurrence to them, what is their preferred method?

Does your OC believe they deserve it when bad things happen to them?

What is the most common feeling or emotion in your OC's life?

What is the most recurring theme in your OC's nightmares?

What is your OC's pain tolerance like? What is the worst pain they have ever felt?

What is your OC afraid of?

Has your OC ever hurt someone, either physically or verbally?

How easily influenced by others is your OC?

What are common things your OC worries about?

Do others consider your OC to be scary or intimidating?

Does your OC keep their promises? Have they ever broken one before?

Does your OC carry any guilt with them?

If your OC had to pick a new identity and skip town, what would they come up with? Where would they go?

What would your OC do if they knew that this was their last day alive?

Does your OC fear death?

How does your OC die, eventually?

[athaeda]

Asks are open.~ 💜

[daily-writing-challenge]

COMING SOON!

For more information, please see our FAQ page —> HERE!

It’s our second challenge of the year, starting a little later than normal due to busy May schedules! We’re looking forward to writing with you all again, learning more about your OCs and reading your stories!

See you with a word list soon!

[athaeda]

Will be participating. 💜 See you all soon!

[athaeda]

Miss Athaeda Hartfell, this time featuring her little buddy Ips'kith. Thank you again to the amazing @Foxy_Trot over on Vgen!

[rpmemes-galore]

send me a number for my muse to talk about …  could be npc’s from your muse’s canon or other muses! 

1. someone they fear

2. someone they love

3. someone they miss

4. someone they admire

5. someone they’ve forgiven

6. someone they feel dislikes them

7. someone they view as a mentor

8. someone they view as a role model

9. someone they would like to befriend

10. someone they’re holding a grudge against

11. someone they have romantic feelings toward

12. someone who taught them a valuable lesson

13. someone they have conflicted feelings about

14. someone whose choices have drastically impacted their life

15. someone they used to view positively, but now view negatively 

16. someone they used to view negatively, but now view positively 

[athaeda]

((The chess table.))

[athaeda]

((Building a pet wall in the Hartstead. I think it's quite cute! Also, if anyone would like to visit, or be visited, please give me a poke!))

[peonyandbee]

“The wild is an integral part of who we are as children. Without pausing to consider what or where or how, we gather herbs and flowers, old apples and rose hips, shiny pebbles and dead spiders, poems, tears and raindrops, putting each treasured thing into the cauldron of our souls. We stir our bucket of mud as if it were, every one, a bucket of chocolate cake to be mixed for the baking. Little witches, hag children, we dance our wildness, not afraid of not knowing.”

— Emma Restall Orr

[felonous]

Truthful Thursday

~Ask my character anything, they have to answer truthfully! ~Leave my character an honest confession from one of yours! ~Tell my character something on anon you’ve always wanted to say but cannot tell them to their face!

Anon is on!!

Don’t forget your ask/reblog karma: Send a question to whomever you reblog this from! Send a question to whomever sends you a question! Spread the love!

[rylandfalkov]

Will do this for @rylandfalkov and @zenithnightbane

[dicenne]

Will do this for @dicenne, @veilosdaigoa, and @keyalinvendel

[fio-renze]

For @fio-renze & @keranna-zerine!

[nahisummerhold]

For @nahisummerhold @alaedrelleoynorel & @vasandereu

[quotefeeling]

“My life is a struggle between my need for acceptance, my fear of rejection, and a desire to not care at all.”

— Unkown

[athaeda]

The Nature of Mutation

Long speculated, it has been, amongst my newfound kin: The nature of our affliction with regards to its physical manifestations. The variety of visible alterations to the body is greater than that of every other magical suffusion we as a civilization have yet encountered. Which isn't to say that sufficient magical enrichment of other kinds cannot produce physiological changes, only that I have not observed such. Barring, of course, the Lightforged; whose metallic augmentation does not, by my mind, equate to the flesh and blood changes the Ren'dorei display.

So I must question, what is it the makes the void different? How does it interact with the body and mind that creates such violently differential results in those who have been made to harbor it? The answer, insofar as I can see it, must be madness. But madness is not an affliction of magic. Madness isn't something that can be corrected with humble potions, a healers stitch, or even the touch of a priest. Madness is emotional inherently and the void's connection to it, I speculate from observation of myself and my brothers and sisters, suggests that perhaps the nothing that creeps at the edges of reality is not nothing. It is feeling.

Consider, if you will, the stoic nature of the light. The forced peace maintained by the naaru, shattered after millennia in a void born transition of chaos and rage. Does this not reflect the emotional outbursts experienced by many when finally allowed to feel something they have previously been made to swallow? Consider the ways in which genuine emotion is often punished. Silence yourself. Patience, prudence, politeness. Don't be rash, we are often told.

What if the magic in your blood is inherently rash? What if it demands you make manifest the things you run from?

I have observed, in the years since the expedition, a multitude of mutations. In that observation I have begun to draw parallels and now put forward that the void does not, truly, change us. It simply makes us more of whatever we already were. It forces outward that which we kept within. The madness that lives in each of us. Our most extreme natures twisted into something we must contend with bodily.

A man who was enthralled with promiscuity, consumed by his lack of impulse control and failures in loyalty, developed additional eyes as a result of the blessing. There's a phrase I've heard spoken, "I only have eyes for you." The truth of his nature, the metaphorical parallel to his peril, made visible to all.

A woman who found her talent as a gossip. Unable to keep a single word of confidence before the affliction. She now possesses many more mouths. Across her limbs and core. They mutter without end. She's had to stitch them closed to keep them quiet. No one tells her secrets anymore.

Another, a social climber. A greed driven hanger-on. Desperate for wealth and renown, now sports more literal suckers across the palms and fingers. Left to much more literally cling to anything so unlucky as to be placed in their hands.

Someone with too much pride baring a musculature so swollen and overblown that no one draws near enough to feed their ego anymore.

This is but one theory. Inconclusive. I will continue to watch.

[athaeda]

Letter To A Dead Man

Rhys was dead. He had been for years now. The mirror of herself. The reflection of her monster. The restless ship for whom she had served as lighthouse, and the lantern that had illuminated her own path forward. The man she had loved.

Athaeda sat in a desk chair, her legs pulled up to sit crisscross in the seat, void-silver orbs scanned the room around her before falling back on the open, blank page in front of her. This wasn't her journal. The ancient book that held not only her own memories but those of her ancestors going back for twelve generations of bastard daughters. This was his. All that was left of him. A book he had left in her possession, half filled with his personal research notes and musings on the void, the other half empty.

It felt as if the book was staring back at her, waiting, listening the way he used to. The pen in her hand felt heavy. She could feel the memory of his eyes on her, the way he used to search her for every hidden truth she wasn't yet prepared to unearth. Invasive, yes, but always gentle. Surgeon's hands. Careful.

The words flowed from her hand just as quiet tears from her eyes.

"Rhys,

You said I wouldn't lose you if I said no. I still believe you. I don't think you knew, when the carriage door closed and I watched you leave, that it was the last time you would ever lay eyes on me. It's a strange thing, isn't it? We decided that night that however much I loved you, and you me, it wasn't right. You wished me luck in finding him; a man whose approval I would seek in equal measure to his quest for my own, because you would never be him.

Light and shadows, forgive me, I wish you had been. I've tried to carry on, you understand. I think you would be pleased with some of the progress I've made. Prouder still that I accomplished it in your absence, without your encouragement, but as I sit alone I wonder what the point of any of it is. I spent my small years dreaming of love. I don't think I ever told you that, although you might've guessed. That I wanted to be different from my mother, and her mother, and her mother. That I wanted someone to stay. I thought love was the problem. Its absence. That I and my mother and back had all been children of passion rather than care.

But then you happened. And I felt love. And with it pain, confusion, fear. But still love. At the end of everything, always love. It still didn't matter. You still had to go.

I speak to others about you in the past tense now. I try to keep you out of my thoughts but sometimes it just doesn't work. Stars help me, I miss you. Even the parts that bothered me. The self righteous tone you would put on when you chastised my self flagellation. The smug little smirk you wore when arguing with your sister. I miss you. I miss you and I've been trying so hard to imagine that I don't because no one wants to deal with a weeping woman.

It's you I'm learning from. Even now. Your notes, your ideas, your experiments. I'm going to keep going. I promise.

-Your lighthouse."

[athaeda]

Miss Athaeda Hartfell

Done by the amazing @Foxy_Trot on VGen. I couldn't be more pleased.

[athaeda]

A Broken Chain; Freedom is Lonely

It had happened. Awake and aware, eyes like stars looked towards the horizon. So much had changed. Memories lost and others found. A chain forged across generations had been sundered much as the world had been at its creation. But this newfound freedom... Is it to be taken alone? To what end? What is the purpose of wings if one takes to the sky in solitude? She had ever been wary of heights. The breaker of binds had done so only to leave her? Perhaps mother was right... All love is temporary. Even the kind which saves you.

[occultophiliac]

[thesorceresstemple]

[athaeda]

The level of freckliness needed to be increased. I have solved the problem.