she/her I reblog many things related to shows I've watched in the past, collected under the 'fandom queue' tag. Found on livejournal, dreamwidth, pinboard, & AO3. Icon created by taibhrigh from livejournal.
voice in the back of my head: Rand/Mat; Rand/Mat/Elayne/Aviendha+. Splits off from canon in the middle of S1E6: The Flame of Tar Valon. Spoilers through book 12: The Gathering Storm. Show and book mix. In progress.
One-Shots:
pocketful of sunshine: Mat/Elayne. Show-based, set in s3.
a place in your house of memories: Rand/Mat. Post-s3. Show-based.
pull my pin (trip my wire): Rand/Mat; Rand/Mat/Elayne/Aviendha. Canon divergence during Lord of Chaos, with spoilers through A Memory of Light. Book-based.
after the fires die out: Rand/Mat; hints of Rand/Elayne/Mat potentially in the future. Set directly after the s2 finale; show-based.
AU Roulette ficlets: A little bit of Rand/Elayne; all AUs so no extensive spoilers for actual canon. Dystopia (ch1); Secret Agent (ch2); Museum/Archives (ch3).
wishing on the same bright star: Rand/Mat; Mat/Elayne; canon polycule. Post-canon fix-it fic that picks up directly from the epilogue.
(more fic and meta links under the 'read more')
bootleg gin: post s2 Mat/Elayne; with spoilers through The Shadow Rising and with some unverified spoilers for s3. Mommy kink. Show-based.
feels something like summertime: pre-series Rand/Mat, kissing practice.
the shadow of history: post-canon Rand-focused ficlet with spoilers through A Memory of Light. Book-based.
not in the stars, but in ourselves: Rand/Mat; Rand/Mat/Elayne/Aviendha. Splits off during The Path of Daggers, with spoilers through A Memory of Light. Book-based.
Randfear Trilogy: Rand/Selene; show canon with spoilers through 2x5.
past is prologue: Rand/Mat; Rand/Mat/Lanfear. Show canon with spoilers through 2x8; uses the Randfear trilogy as optional backstory.
give me your trust (said the love of your life): Rand/Mat/Elayne; book canon. Spoilers through AMoL (including the epilogue).
Seia Ascar: Rand/Mat; book canon. Spoilers through AMoL (including the epilogue)
stars fading (but I linger on): Rand/Mat. Splits off after S1E8 of the show. Show and book mix.
maybe this time (iâll be lucky): Rand/Mat/Elayne/Aviendha. Splits off from chapter 42 of TFoH. Book-based. I am eventually planning to write a sequel for this, but itâs been on the backburner a while.
Skipping Stones: Rand/Mat. Pre-canon. Show-based.
share one more drink (with me): Egwene/Rand/Mat. Pre-canon. Show-based.
like roses and clover: Rand/Mat/Elayne. Splits off from Chapter 49 in The Dragon Reborn. Book-based.
negotiating with the truth: Rand/Mat. Splits off in between The Dragon Reborn and The Shadow Rising. Book-based.
lean on me: Rand/Mat/Elayne. This fic is based on one way that negotiating with the truth could have gone; written for polyship week 2023.
soul of fire, heart of stone: Rand/Mat/Talmanes. Set roughly in the early parts of LoC, but with an alternate Rand/Mat backstory. Book canon.
where the lightning splits the sea: Rand/Mat; fix-it fic for Winterâs Heart. Written for WoT 2022 Big Bang. Book canon.
trackless domain: Mat/Elayne; Rand/Mat/Elayne/Aviendha. AU for ACoS. Book canon.
Meta & Reread posts:
General meta posts sadly under two different tags
WoT!Prime speculation and specifically WoT s3 speculation (obviously wrong a lot but speculating is fun)
Series Reread in chronological order (COMPLETED)
reverse order
Initial Show Reactions/Meta
reverse order
Initial thoughts on the Dark Along the Ways (post refuses to be retagged for some reason)
Show Rewatch
reverse order
Worldbuilding notes (all of these have spoilers from the books):
Leavetaking ~ Shadowâs Waiting ~ A Place of Safety ~ The Dragon Reborn
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Critical Role: AramĂĄn (Web Series)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Julien Davinos/Occtis Tachonis, Occtis Tachonis & Thimble, Julien Davinos & Thimble
Characters: Thimble (Critical Role), Occtis Tachonis, Julien Davinos, Vaelus (Critical Role), Bolaire Lathalia, Kattigan Vale
Additional Tags: written after 4x031 - trick of the light, unintended voyeurism, Discussion of Past Child Abuse, knight and liege kink, POV Outsider, POV Thimble
Summary: Thimble uncovers a secret of Julienâs, and has reason to regret it.
âI think I need to check on what Julienâs up to,â Thimble told Occtis. âWe shouldnât be separating like this.â
âHeâll be upset if he catches you,â Occtis said.
âSo I wonât let him catch me,â she replied, and darted away.
It was a brothel. Of course it was a fucking brothel. She shouldnât be surprised.
Except that Julien had seemed different since heâd come back from the Eternal Night. More serious about his duties and less⌠everything that heâd been for so many years.
She should just turn back, now that she knew what he was doing.
But Julien left the brothel not long after arriving, certainly too quickly to have accomplished anything of note, and was striding off in a different direction. Not back towards King Gus.
Murray's Cold Open scene takes place in the year 46, twenty-five years ago. Occtis is not yet born. Azune is two. Julien and Wicander are four. The War of Axe & Vine, where Thjazi saved the life of a Davinos cousin and earned the friendship of Raimond Davinos, ended just the year before. Bolaire has not yet 'woken up' as an entity and is still being passed around as a weapon of war.
The Cormoray manor has only just finished construction and is still having decorative elements added -- that's why Murray is in town. She's on her Hucklewind, 'acts of service' by the dwarves to show their generosity, and is frustrated that their 'act of service' is going to end up in a sealed courtyard of a powerful Sundered House, as opposed to being a public good. Jasper, her cousin, is working with her on this project, and that is the same name that we heard as the dwarf who is leading a crew that is building a bridge in Sloak (back during the Soldiers' arc).
This is when Murray's life changes and her new course is set -- she meets Professor Tallbarrow of the newly-formed Penteveral (less than a year old), impressing him both with her magic (she casts "message" at him) and her claims of being able to get the Penteveral the gems and materials that they need to supplement their dwindling supply.
Murray positions this as her being able to get it due to family connections, but in what we've seen and learned in practice, it was actually much more about shady backroom dealings. As we've seen in the present day, Murray has a huge resentment of the Sundered Houses and sorcerers, to the extent of holding a grudge against Occtis for going to 'her' school. We see hints of that resentment here, but it will continue to grow over the next 20+ years.
Fun note about the Hare's Charm is that the activation word is "thank you" in druidic, so Julien is thanking the druids every time that he uses it.
Julien knocks the Stone of Nightsong out of Vaelus's hand as she's being held aloft by the nightingale spirits, and Thaisha picks it up, connecting her spirit with Vaelus's. They each witness a significant death that the other person experienced.
For Thaisha, we learn that the first time that she used any druidic magic was to cast "spare the dying" on Alogar after he'd fallen out of a tree and snapped his neck. So the situation with Occtis in the Overture would have been a re-traumatizing event for her. She experienced the death of her son, even though she was able to keep him from actually dying. And I would say that having this reminder of the time Alogar almost died influences Thaisha's actions and behavior for the rest of the Seekers arc here.
For Vaelus, we learn how tied in the death of her family is with the death of Sylandri. Her sister died on the battlefield at the same time that Sylandri was being killed. So that has been a tight association for Vaelus for the past seventy years.
Vaelus attunes to the Stone of Nightsong in the moment. The nightingales that flew through them registered as both fey and undead to Vaelus's divine sense.
Julien instinctively pulls a sword on Vaelus at this strangeness and questions whether or not she's truly herself (potentially a moment that contributes to Occtis feeling like he has to try to appease Julien in order to keep that reaction from happening to him again, since this is essentially what Julien did to him during the Overture).
Occtis points out how extreme the decomposition of the bodies are, already skeletal after only being dead for maybe a week. They look like they could be a hundred years dead.
Thaisha really really hates being questioned. I imagine this tendency is accentuated by the trauma that she just went through with Vaelus. But (much like it was interesting that Occtis treats wariness as if it were the same as hatred) Thaisha seeing "scared" and translating it to "annoyed with me" is an interesting thing for her to be doing. The translations and projections that characters do to each other can be very telling of where they're coming from inside their own heads.
Tannesar is a desecrated holy site. There's a dull fiendish presence, but that's not what's causing the desecration. That's coming from a "wrong" kind of Celestial presence. "Something has become very sick in this place". There's an ambient necrotic damage in this place, and that's why the bodies are decomposing so quickly.
Julien is the one who thinks to check on Talter & Seremai.
The writing at this temple mentions Halovar and Tachonis as "twin houses united evermore".
Once past the gates, they find the base camp of the excavation site and a lot more bodies plus signs of battle. The red-robed figures attacked the combined forces of the Barrowguard and the Tachonis. We get the delightful note here of the fact that the Tachonis carry around hanging cages wherever they go, because you never know when you might need to display a prisoner. Something that Occtis takes in stride until the reactions of his companions (especially Thaisha) clues him in that This Is Not Normal.
We get the fight against Tertia's giant scorpion, which Occtis recognizes. The last time he saw it (at least five years ago), it was the size of a Corgi. This particular branch of the family is big into scorpions because the vassal house that married into that Tachonis line is from the "we love scorpions" house, like how Seremai are big into snakes.
After the scorpion is killed, the dead around them begin to wake up, and we're straight into the second half of the fight.
In the 'love some character growth' space, Thaisha deliberately makes certain to cast her area of effect spell to avoid hitting Julien, instead of just accepting him as potential collateral damage.
Julien is incredibly reckless in this fight. I think it stands out because of how relatively cautious he was during parts of the Convergence. This is kinda his nadir when it comes to that attitude, and it's fitting that this is when we get him leveling up into his 'daredevil' subclass. "You level up to the taste of blood in your mouth". Power "that seeks to plunge into peril".
I kinda get the implication that the pragmatism is how Julien normally operates -- the recklessness is because of his grief and anger. And once we hit the Convergence, we're seeing a Julien who has learned that not all of his family are dead, and who is pulling himself back from that emotional brink. But right now he's feeling a "wave of violent joy" because of the "intensity of nearing death".
(lol Aabria/Thaisha: "Can I roll to be kinda impressed?")
Aabria notes that Wither & Bloom and Land's Aid are incredibly similar mechanically but almost complete opposites aesthetically, so it stands out when Occtis and Thaisha both use them in the same battle. ("That's just Land's Aid but you said it scary.").
Occtis gets some bad reminders in this fight of how awful his family was to him over his lack of innate sorcery. "You should just already know how." He can feel that rage over the way he was treated, and he acts impulsively, going to attack the crystal that he was nervous about destroying without properly studying. He obliterates it with a Nat 20 firebolt, and we get a painful flashback to when he told his father that he was going to study at the Penteveral and his dad is just completely cutting and dismissive about it. "The highest obligation you have to your family is not to embarrass us further."
"Effortlessness" is how Primus defines magic, and Occtis realizes here what complete bullshit that is ("prizing effortlessness... that's stupid"). Primus is standing on the remnants of the magic left behind by the Shapers and believing that it makes him superior. Using firebolt to destroy the crystal, "fills [Occtis] with this kind of joy because he figured it out".
A frequency is destroyed, so this may have been the crystal that they believed would allow them to sacrifice Occtis in Dol-Makjar while still doing the ritual in Tannesar.
Hmm. "For those who have not followed the path set out for them" is true for Occtis in multiple ways -- he didn't follow the path that his father set out for him, but he also didn't follow the Old Path to reincarnation (which I believe we find out in the next episode is a very good thing).
Occtis and Vaelus investigate the Tachonis tents while Julien and Thaisha take care of putting the bodies to rest. They find tons of information, a lot of which gets sifted through later. One of the interesting things is that they tried and failed to do the "create a celestial" ritual on one of the Halovars.
There's a lovely non-verbal moment here where Thaisha looks to Julien for permission to perform the funeral rites for the bodies here (mostly Barrowguard that he trained and that he is trying not to identify) and he gives her a nod to let her know that he's good with it.
This actually contrasts strongly against when Vaelus comes out of the tent and just grabs one of the skulls to try to use Speak With Dead on it with zero explanation or asking permission. Very disrespectful of her! Thaisha firmly tells her to ask first, but I believe Vaelus is going to do this exact same thing with Thjazi in the Convergence, so there's an interesting conversation there about maybe immortal elves not understanding about respecting the dead?
Once she actually knows what Vaelus is trying to do, Thaisha points out the skull of a man named Pascard, one of the people who gave her the coffin that she and Occtis were meant to deliver to Thjazi, and suggests speaking to him.
And we'll get our Speak With Dead in the next episode.
