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 (i’ll 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 it’s 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 Winter’s 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 ~ Shadow’s Waiting ~ A Place of Safety ~ The Dragon Reborn
Wicander visits a small, rural chapel with a Lux who has only recently taken orders, hoping to share a belated Candlefest. Wick is going through a crisis of faith, much needed, and is struggling with the idea that in order to do the right thing, he's going to have to go against his family. "How do you exist in a world all by yourself with [your family]?"
The Lux had the Bellow's Fever, was 'saved by the Light', and then took the vows to become a Lux. Wick notices that his breath doesn't mist in the cold air and that there's an odd magical sheen to his holy orders (which he discreetly steals). We do have the information, from future knowledge, that the Luxes are all warlocks who are bound to a demon contract that is hidden in their holy orders, but all Wick knows right now is that Something Is Strange.
Okay, we get a LOT of information from Pascard of the Drowned Men.
The Drowned Men worked with Thjazi but on a need-to-know basis, so there's still an information gap. Pascard is one of the people who passed on the coffin to Thaisha and Occtis so that it would go along to Thjazi, but they never opened the coffin themselves (so never knew about the mask). This is when we learn that the Tachonis were also trying to get their hands on the coffin, so they have been chasing many of the same artifacts as Thjazi/the Cloak, though with different motivations.
After the coffin had passed out of their hands, Mara the Wing came to them in a panic. She has an ability to cross over between the veil of life and the Tenebral Reaches (specifically at "the tear", which is the place where the Barrowdell of the Stormwrack meets the Barrowdell of the Eternal Night, and which also happens to be exactly where the Tachonis ancestral home was/is). She told them that they needed to come and secure this site, telling them that Tachonis forces would be coming.
The Barrowguard were an unexpected addition and not a foe that the Drowned Men were expecting to fight. They were taken prisoner (by Alogar, who Pascard did not know was Thaisha's son) and worked to try to convince Alogar to flip sides, essentially, and work against the Tachonis and, most importantly, to destroy the obelisk (which is further into Tannesar).
They convinced Alogar that something was wrong, and Alogar went with a handful of other Barrowguard to try to do something to destroy the Obelisk while the majority of the Barrowguard stayed on the side of the Tachonis and this battle broke out, which killed many (we don't get an exact number). Pascard believes that the Drowned Men might be destroyed as a society by this.
Thaisha and Vaelus learn about "the scar" that the Tachonis use in order to mark people so that they can claim and compel them after death, and Thaisha puts that together with the cut that was made on Occtis in order to put the Stone of Nightsong in him. "The Tachonis have a way of compelling servitude even after you die" but "me and the other Drowned Men have our way out."
Julien is invited into the Speak With Dead (so only Occtis is left out) in order to provide a translation of the Sylvan that Pascard's warlock contract is written in, as a tattoo on his body. A fey contract on his soul.
Julien is VERY impatient about all of this and just wants to hurry up and try to see if they can find Alogar and the surviving Barrowguard. He thinks this whole convo is wasting time, while Thaisha and Vaelus argue that they're getting valuable information (which is interesting, because Thaisha is placed in Julien's position in her convo with Occtis just a few minutes from now, where she is arguing that they need to move on while Occtis is trying to argue that getting more information first is vaulable).
Once the conversation is done, Pascard steps onto the Path and we see the Tachonis forces attempt to grab his spirit but before they get a chance, he is swept up and away by a giant wave into an endless dark sea. His soul was already spoken for. Thaisha is a bit shaken by this, saying, "Seems like there's a lot of ways through the fucking woods."
So, now Thaisha is wary about Occtis. Two things can be true at the same time: she can absolutely see Occtis as a victim of his family while also worrying that his family can compel his servitude. And that's kinda the crux of her fears and their upcoming argument (which I feel like some places on the internet made a WAY bigger deal of than it actually was).
Julien continues to be exceedingly impatient throughout the next scenes - he really does need someone to rein him in sometimes (as Matt says -- "If you guys want a short rest, you'll have to convince Julien" -- he wants the other characters/players to challenge Julien and not just let Julien ride roughshod all over them). He gets impatient with Occtis wanting to harvest the scorpion tail, just hacking the whole thing off so that he can deal with it later.
Brennan must have been so worried about a TPK when the rest of the group decided it wasn't worth it to try to talk Julien into a short rest.
Thaisha and Occtis's argument is interesting because they're both under so much stress and it makes them snap at each other. A lot of the points that Thaisha makes here are similar to things that Julien has alluded to thinking in the past but now Thaisha feels like she has evidence to back that up (the Tachonis scar potentially compelling service), while Occtis kinda takes a bit of the anger that he's been feeling about other people out on Thaisha (which I think he also kinda does with Julien in the Obrimus manor argument in 4x031). But the argument is honestly pretty short-lived and Occtis and Thaisha mutually affirm that they don't want to be unkind to each other.
This is, I think, also where we see Julien turning the corner with Occtis. In 4x016, we had the interrogation, where Julien pressed Occtis on his motivations and thoughts, then I think he's spent the last episode and a half processing Occtis's answers and making a determination on his feelings. And he decides to defend Occtis against Thaisha here, though at first it's in a tentative, almost ignorable way, just saying that Occtis has a point. But then when Occtis gets reflexively defensive again later, Julien more pointedly says, "You do not need to defend yourself any further." Until Occtis actually does something to betray them, Julien has decided that he's willing to trust him.
Now I don't think Occtis has fully processed this change in Julien's attitude (based on the Obrimus manor argument), mostly because Julien tends to couch these things in negative rather than positive terms. But he's now actively taking a position of defending Occtis against other people, which we will see him do again in the Convergence.
We get a look into several chambers here -- the Obelisk chamber was where the priests sacrificed to Tansul, and the Tachonis set up several crystals here, and defaced the parts about Tansul to read as being dedicated to the Tachonis instead. It looks like Alogar and his handful of Barrowguard companions destroyed what they could in here, before leaving to parts unknown (we do know that they didn't end up back at Castle Torch).
After processing the ritual information in this room, Occtis comes to the reassuring conclusion that the ritual to turn him into a celestial has been permanently foiled due to him stepping off the Path and removing the Stone of Nightsong from his chest. And since he knows that traveling the Path is required to complete the ritual, he can simply refuse to do that if his family tries to force him in the future. "If they could compel me, they would have." So that's a nice confirmation to everyone that Occtis is not an active threat.
The other main thing that Occtis figures out is that his family was cutting a lot of corners to do this ritual. If they'd actually followed the steps that Tansul had worked out, it would have been successful, but they wanted to make adjustments to get the celestial to obey them instead following the last desires of Tansul, and so the ritual became much more unstable. And now there are no more Tachonis left living with zero sorcerous powers (that we know of) and so it may be impossible for them to ever create a celestial using this method.
We also have the room of the Guardian Demons, which is a mystery that never quite gets solved. There are four stone bases, with three demons and one shattered statue. What is up with that?
Vaelus having darkvision while the humans don't, so Occtis holds onto her while Julien holds onto him, as they make their way down the stairs.
Everything about the Tertia fight is so sad!
RIP Dame Seremai.
Pretty much everything to do with the well of blood has been dealt with by 4x031, so I'm not gonna really spend any time on it, lol. Thaisha does spot signs of Mara and Thjazi here.
Occtis pulling rank on Tertia (with a boost from Cause Fear) and it working, protecting at least Occtis from her attacks during the fight. Occtis using his power/influence as a Tachonis tends to help him more than it hinders him at this point, which will probably affect his character choices in the future.
Julien is so reckless in this fight! And then he and Vaelus both insisting that they were fine the whole time, even after they both went down to unconscious during the fight.
Tertia asking, "Did I do a good job?" at the end. Heartbreaking. And Brennan telling Occtis that he realizes, "You were both failed experiments."
While Vaelus and Thaisha run up to stop Talter from waking up the demon guardians, Occtis stays down with Tertia's body, with Julien staying behind to watch him. Occtis takes her head, and also the piece of angel bone that was serving as her heart. Julien does nothing to interrupt, and it's Occtis who notices that he's still there.
Occtis immediately starts explaining/defending himself to Julien, but Julien is studying the body and initiates a "what should we do next?" conversation with Occtis, in a very 'tactical advisor' kind of way. He asks Occtis who he would trust with the information gathered here (Murray and Thimble) and agrees on being willing to trust Murray. Julien putting so much weight on Occtis's opinion of who is trustworthy feels very notable. Julien also has the insight that his family's blood was meant to pave the way to turn Occtis into a more powerful version of the monster that they fought down here, and that this was how Primus was planning to wipe out Royce and Davinos.
And it is interesting that it feels like Davinos is synonymous with Royce in a way that it feels like we don't see with the other Sundered Houses and their top vassal. When we hear about the other vassal houses under Royce, it's implied that they are under Davinos as well. It's interesting. I wonder if part of that is because of how Royce was weakened by the doors to Faerie closing, and so they needed the support of their vassals in a way that the other Sundered Houses don't.
After the group reunites, they agree that their path leads back to Castle Torch (to check on news) and then back to Dol-Makjar, to share information with their allies. On the way out, they are going to take all the gems and deface the place as much as possible.
Goodbye for now, my beloved Seekers! I hope Julien continues to bring tension and uncomfortable questions to the Seekers 2.0. <3
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Critical Role: Aramán (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 Julien’s, and has reason to regret it.
“I think I need to check on what Julien’s up to,” Thimble told Occtis. “We shouldn’t be separating like this.”
“He’ll be upset if he catches you,” Occtis said.
“So I won’t let him catch me,” she replied, and darted away.
It was a brothel. Of course it was a fucking brothel. She shouldn’t be surprised.
Except that Julien had seemed different since he’d come back from the Eternal Night. More serious about his duties and less… everything that he’d 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.
