one day it'll happen to you. you will stay up a bit too late playing a video game and not get to bed on time. I've done it before, you'll think. I'll be fine. but no. you will make it through most of the next day and then at about 2pm you will feel like a reanimated corpse whose sim meters are all completely fucked and nothing hurts exactly but everything does feel very bad. and you'll think oh yeah. I'm not twenty anymore
“Cassandra woke up to the rays of the sun streaming through the slats on her blinds, cascading over her naked chest. She stretched, her breasts lifting with her arms as she greeted the sun. She rolled out of bed and put on a shirt, her nipples prominently showing through the thin fabric. She breasted boobily to the stairs, and titted downwards.”
Hello, how are you doing?😊 Is another primed to fall chapter ever going to see the light of day?🥺 Will Garro and Saul happily reunite? Will Ferrus make sweet love to poor Fulgrim again? So many questions........this fic means so much to me💗anyway, have an amazing day
Hi. I'll never say never because sometimes I get bursts of inspiration to return to old fics. However at the moment it's on indefinite hiatus.
When I get the time I will take a look at it to see if I can get inspired again, maybe rejig the chapter plan. Unfortunately the story got shelved because I hit a big writers block on a Saul POV chapter. If I can overcome that block, it will update again.
I won't go into specifics yet but there are happy endings all around - at least happy from a Warhammer perspective. Everyone lives and gets to be with their love
I promised that I would draw anything for anybody who writes Ahriman/Astraeos so here's Khayon because @bloodmech loves Khayon (btw my offer still stands).
I have a very niche poetic association with Khayon. He reminds me of an anecdote about a dervish, from Haft Awrang, or Seven Thrones by the Persian poet Jami (1414–1492). The story and explanation of why the hell would I even compare Khayon to a dervish is under the cut. This is sort of meta post, bc I talk about symbolism in both Khayon's story and my art.
In that anecdote, an old Sufi dervish attempts to court a beautiful young man inside a hammam. As the young man has his head shaved, the dervish collects every strand of the hair, which falls to the floor. Following this and other courting efforts attempted by the dervish, the youth eventually says: ‘Die before me, so that I may notice you’. The dervish accordingly drops dead, but later appears to the young man in a dream to rebuke him for not noticing him even after death. Shaken by the apparition, the young man casts off his fine clothes and, to amend for his sin, goes on the hajj, or pilgrimage, every year and rubs his face on the grave of the dead dervish.
Khayon is that dervish to me, and the beautiful youth who doesn't care is Abaddon off course. I don't think he would go on a hajj for Khayon, but you get what I mean. Khayon doing whatever he's doing under Inquisition's custody is him dropping dead on the spot for beloved's attention. So, that's why Khayon is holding a red strand of hair in my pic. It's Abaddon's, and it references this story.
Why a dervish? Well, because a dervish is a mystic who renounced the world. A sorcerer is also a mystic, and Khayon did renounce his previous allegiances. A dervish often carries an axe, the tabarzin, and Khayon also carries an axe in canon. A dervish belongs to an order, often a militant one, bound by oaths of loyalty that supersede blood. Khayon's order is the Black Legion, and his oath is to the Warmaster. And a dervish, especially in the Malamatiyya tradition, sometimes does insane and self-destructive things as a form of spiritual practice — acts that look like sin or madness to outsiders, but which are, to the dervish, a stripping-away of ego. Khayon's ego is a strange thing, it is vast and it is absent. He is theatrical and annoying. He is powerful enough to bind daemons and destroy worlds, and he has given all of that power to a man who will never say thank you. He is telling his story from an Inquisition dungeon, and still he speaks of Abaddon with something that sounds like affection.
My choice of clothing for him is off course symbolic. The outer robe is black, inlaid with Arabic calligraphy in gold, those are the colors of the Black Legion, and the official colors of the Abbasid court where a poet survives by pleasing the caliph (you all owe me because I didn't put some sort of a pun with "Abbasid" and "Abaddon" in here lmao). But inside the robe, the fabric is blue, like that of the Legion he left but cannot forget. And beneath that, against his skin, is a shirt of red, the original color of the Thousand Sons before the Heresy, the color they wore when they were still loyal, innocent, whole. Khayon has layered his identities in reverse chronological order: present on the outside, past closest to the heart.
It's very interesting that Khayon's name is Iskandar. It is Alexander, a conqueror's name, but also a name that belongs to many cultures: Greek, Arabic, Persian, Turkic and countless more. It is not an ancient Egyptian name like many of the other Prosperine Thousand Sons. It is cosmopolitan, more modern, unmoored from a single origin. Khayon is not stuck in the past, he has left the 15th. He joined the Black Legion, the most diverse and heterogeneous of the Traitor Legions. He is a man who builds new connections because the old ones are ash, and the name says so before he opens his mouth.
Some of the Egyptian motifs in the piece are drawn from Muslim Egypt, not only the Pharaonic past, and this was a deliberate choice. There is the Egypt of pyramids and gods, and there is the Egypt of mosques and courts, of Sufi orders and caliphal intrigue, of Arabic poetry and Mamluk warriors. And in my humble opinion, Khayon belongs more to the latter. He is a creature of the court, not the temple.
In Islamic tradition, Khayon's familiar, the wolf, carries a double meaning: it is a symbol of tribal loyalty and solidarity, but also a symbol of lies and deception. Gyre is both of these things at once — a companion whose loyalty is absolute, and a creature whose existence is a kind of untruth, because it is a daemon bound into a shape that does not belong to it. Khayon himself is the same: fiercely loyal, yet fundamentally deceptive.
So, yeah, if you pile up all those things together, it makes a lot of sense for him to be both Arabic and Pharaonic. Also, I gave him a darker skintone because I think he has more vitality than other TS and he isn't a loser who sits in the library all day, Khayon may be a theater kid, but he's still a jock. Didn't want to make him look too well dressed either because duh, have you ever seen a jock who's too well dressed? He looks garish on purpose because that's just how Khayon behaves.
Now somebody please tell me I'm not the only person insane enough to think about mad dervishes and Abbasid court when looking at Khayon.
I broke the curse of getting writer-blocked on Saul chapters!
Find the new chapter here
Summary:
After taking Ahriman to hospital, Ferrus finds himself at a loss of what to do with himself. However, tempers other than his are rising within the walls of No.9 Phoenix Roost. And Ferrus finds himself in unlikely company as he tries to give Ahriman a more pleasant place to come back to.
Whilst this definitely is a Saul chapter, it isn't exclusively about him. He is however a very good source for an alternative view on Fulgrim.
Spoilery comments under the cut!
This chapter went through multiple re-writes because I kept changing my mind on the balance of truth, obfuscation and character bias. Mostly in the conversation between Saul and Ferrus before they call Akurduana. However even when Akurduana gets involved, the core of the chapter and its central conversation remains the same.
No one is wholly right. No one is wholly wrong.
There are three different stances on Fulgrim shown here. Ferrus has decided Fulgrim is irredeemably evil. He's wholly sided with the idea that Ahriman is innocent and Fulgrim is a monster. My chapter titles tend to apply to multiple things within the 'episode'. The Innocent in this case is both Saul, who has been kept naive, and Ahriman in Ferrus' eyes. Ferrus has made his mind up to the point that he's not really interested in any positive opinions on Fulgrim. At this stage, if the truth isn't something he likes, he's not very likely to believe it's actually the truth.
Ferrus also lets slip a little bit about himself this chapter. Especially in the line "It didn’t really matter. It wasn’t like anyone needed him right-" Ferrus likes being needed. A lot of it is fuelled by worry, but there's a little bit of a neurosis going on here. He's had a few months now of Ahriman being pretty dependant on him, and being needed by someone feels really good. Having suddenly lost that, Ferrus isn't coping great. Thankfully, Ahriman will continue to need him, and be very willing to be doted on, in future.
Saul meanwhile wants to believe the best of Fulgrim, and is still struggling slightly to think negatively of him. He's appalled by Fulgrim's behaviour towards Ahriman, and angered by his own treatment, but he's still clinging onto the notion that there must be good reasons for all of this. He only really started thinking badly of him, once he was personally inconvenienced, which shows a self-centred side to our supposedly-perfect boy.
Akurduana is not quite the neutral party that Ferrus and Saul want him to be. He still has biases towards the Blood and their reputation. The fact Akurduana would rather have Ahriman explain (and therefore relive) everything the Blood did to him and others, rather than state it himself, is telling. He is also deliberately not mentioning the oath, as Ferrus suspects. Acknowledging all the evil done by the Blood would tarnish Akurduana's own reputation. Whilst he doesn't like the fact that Fulgrim keeps Saul purposefully-naive, he's doing exactly the same thing. Keeping information from Saul, so Saul naively thinks better of him.
Akurduana also has his own stuff going on in London. If you're wondering who "Soph" is, that's an Emperors Children OC of mine called Sophus. He won't be appearing in the fic, that's just a fun easter egg for my own amusement. His "Sugar Situation" is his genderfluid Thousand Son sorcerer 'acquaintance', Malik, who will also get a mention later. Malik and Sophus' relationship could very much be described as a Sugar Parent situation, but is a bit more messy than that. We'll get snippets about Akurduana's set up in London throughout the fic!
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