...

[relicshamecircle]

Thirst

Diarmuid is aware of anatomy, of sinew and muscle, of the way God crafted man, but now he is aware in a completely different way. He thinks, So, this is how a man should look, and cannot stop looking at the Mute, whose naked chest and arms are thick and defined and covered in scars and with hair that is dark and curly and just as damp from sweat as the rest of him.

---

Hello! Here with a new Diarmute fic! Please enjoy!

[knitepercival]

Fournier, my beloved <3

[knitepercival]

Diarmute Week Day 4: Genuflect

[relicshamecircle]

Diarmute Week Day 2: Holy Ghost

Diarmuid sees a familiar specter.

[relicshamecircle]

Hello! Happy Diarmute Week! :) Day 1: Forbidden Fruit

Please enjoy!

[pilgrimagesource]

We are now approaching the seventh year of Diarmute Week! It will run from March 15–21 and make sure to use the hashtag #diarmute week so I can find and reblog your post.

How does a fan week work?  For the whole week, each day will have a new theme for you to center a fanwork around. Fic, art, gifsets, moodboards, all are welcome! You can participate as much or as little as you like. Do all seven days, or just one day if you don’t have the time! Every submission is appreciated. Post your prompt fills on the corresponding day and join in on the fun! I will be reblogging all submissions.

Reblog this post to spread the word and let me know if you plan on participating! I’m really looking forward to see what everyone comes up with!

The Themes:

Sunday, 15th: Forbidden Fruit

Monday, 16th: Holy Ghost

Tuesday, 17th: Deadly Sins

Wednesday, 18th: Genuflect

Thursday, 19th: Good Samaritan

Friday, 20th: Repent

Saturday, 21st: Paradise

[nekronalya]

The Witch of Kilmannán: Ch. 1

In the end, despite his fear, the knight did give an answer. He never heard his words, but he must have spoken, for the crow replied.

“You have slain my enemy and offered me a feast of his flesh. Therefore, I offer in turn: no one but the witch of Kilmannán can make you well again"

[relicshamecircle]

auroch

The Mute sets the axe down and pulls his tunic over his head, leaving him bare-chested in the bright winter morning. Diarmuid has seen him like this before, but something about this day, this moment, is striking. It's the difference between seeing the ocean from the distance of the monastery and seeing the ocean standing in the tide under the glow of the moon—something familiar made new, and strange, and lovely. --- Pre-Canon. Diarmuid sees the Mute in a new light.

Hello, Pilgrimage folks! My last fic of this year is a Diarmute fic! :) Here's to next year!

[n1kc1rk]

[n1kc1rk]

[iamstuckinthevoid]

good things about small fandoms

less notorious people

no drama

pretty tight knit

bad things about small fandoms

Where Is Everyone

[greenskyotter]

[peacevine]

You Are Not Immune To fanart of characters who die in canon that has them alive and well, with scars from the wound that originally killed them

[peacevine]

[relicshamecircle]

painter's palette

Autumn comes in the turn of the leaves, the transformation from deep green to the bright, vibrant reds, yellows, oranges, as though doused with Brother Ciarán's inks in preparation to border a manuscript. It comes in the harvest, the onion stalks dry and yellow and leaning on the soil, the purple and white of the carrots peeking out of the ground, the hard, brown, gleaming shells of the hazelnuts and acorns. The passing of time, rendered in change, in color. The beauty of another season on this world. How many seasons has the Mute seen? How many wonders? Diarmuid leans against the monastery's stone all, head tucked in his arms, watching his friend watch the animals.

Hello, folks! A Pilgrimage fic for you all!

[keinkei]

[andaniellight]

I’ll go anywhere you want,

anywhere you want,

anywhere you want me.

[relicshamecircle]

My fics were plagiarized! A timeline and update

Hello Pilgrimage folks and non-Pilgrimage folks,

It's been less than week since I learned that someone plagiarized my Pilgrimage fanfics and published them as their own, but that's an eternity in Internet time and quite a lot has happened since Sunday, so I figured I should post an update of some sort.

How did you learn about this in the first place?

On Sunday, a very kind reader commented on my fic An Invitation to Happiness asking if I'd published it as an original novel, because, if not, an ebook they were reading, The Beauty and His Beast by Layla Moran, was extremely similar. I went to the ebook's Goodreads page, read the summary, and thought, "Well, there are similarities, but--" and then I scrolled down to look at the reviews and saw that people were describing exact scenes from my fic.

I went to Layla Moran's author page on Goodreads and immediately recognized two more titles, The Rancher's Mail-Order Husband and The Warrior and the Monk, as my two other multi-chapter Pilgrimage fics, Bluebells, Daylillies, and Wild Roses Running Rampant, and how rich the earth, how bright the stars. My heart dropped--those three ebooks were some of her most recent "works" and they'd been published over the course of the last few months. The Warrior and the Monk was the first of mine she took; its publication date was listed as December 1, 2024.

What did you do next?

I panicked, and proceeded to tell my friends and fellow Pilgrimage fans what I'd found, and, while I floundered, they all immediately rallied around me. We started reporting the plagiarized works and stating that they were plagiarized in reviews. Someone found Layla Moran's Reddit username and posts that she made on the subreddit MM_RomanceBooks, which prompted me to start writing my own post with the thought that, whether or not we could get the ebooks removed, I could at least show readers in the community that her works were plagiarized so the word would get out and others would be dissuaded from buying them.

How did that work out?

Great, eventually. As stated in the eventual Reddit post, I don't have much social media at all. I write fic, I post it on AO3, and I'm here on Tumblr, mostly reblogging stuff but occasionally letting Pilgrimage fans know when I've posted another Pilgrimage fic. I tried to make a Reddit account and kept getting error messages, which only made me more frustrated and stressed. I was really certain that if I could just show a wider audience these example comparisons of Layla Moran's "books" to my fics, then things would be okay! My friend @pilgrimagesource, who had by that time already made a Tumblr post about the situation, also made a Reddit account so that she could share the post I'd written on my behalf.

Except that new Reddit users need a certain amount of karma before they can start creating posts of their own! More frustration and stress ensued! Pilgrimagesource proceeded to comment on any Layla Moran-related topic she could find and promptly got her comments deleted as spam because, well. It was the definition of spamming. But, the mods were extremely kind and had looked at the evidence and allowed her to finally make the post.

What happened next?

It gained a lot of traction very, very fast, and while I had been focused on my own works, people quickly realized that Layla Moran also published works under the name Rey Luca, and that nearly all of the ebooks from Layla Moran/Rey Luca were plagiarized from other fanfic authors from a wide variety of fandoms.

Other Pilgrimage folks informed their writing and fandom communities to spread the word. Another friend of mine created a spreadsheet to keep track of the ebooks, their corresponding fics and their real authors and fandoms, and whether or not the ebooks had been removed or not. The situation was extremely shitty, but I can honestly say I found it very heart-warming to see everyone working together to make sure that the real authors were identified and informed as well as leaving reviews and submitting reports.

And?

And that was my entire Sunday, essentially. I went to bed exhausted. The next morning I took a walk with a friend before heading to work--because writing is currently a hobby for me, and I don't make any money from it, and I have a full-time job to pay the bills! However, just before my shift started, I saw that books were disappearing from Layla Moran's Amazon and Goodreads pages, that the Reddit and Tumblr post had gotten huge, and that more people had found out their works had been stolen and were just as shocked and disheartened as I was. But it'd only been one day! Progress was being made!

Alright, so what now?

Now it's Friday and--well. I'm not really sure. On my end, Audible still has the audiobook for The Warrior and the Monk up for preorder (and it's set to be released on July 1), but I know that Tantor Media, the publisher, does not seem to have it listed on their site anymore. The page for the audiobook is now blank, and searching for Layla Moran's name on the site brings up no results. Her author bio page can still be found with some extra digging, but The Warrior and the Monk is not listed. The ebooks were all self-published on Kindle Unlimited; I suspect because the audiobook involved an actual publisher and involved a contract of some sort, it will take longer for everything to get taken down across all websites. I will be keeping an eye on it, though.

Currently, there are still some books on Layla Moran's Amazon page, perhaps because they were printed instead of just ebooks? I'm unsure how that works. On the other hand, Rey Luca's Amazon page seems to have been taken down, but there are quite a few more books still listed on the Goodreads page, though most of the reviews now state that they are based on stolen works and list the Reddit or Tumblr post or link the original fic.

What are you going to do about your own fics?

Nothing.

All of my fics were and are written for my own enjoyment, and for the enjoyment of those who read them. In the past few years there's been a lot of discussion about AI scraping and locking fics to prevent them from being used to train AI, but, from what it seems here, that doesn't stop someone from joining AO3, copy-pasting an entire work into a document, using the find/replace tool, and then using AI to rearrange some of words or add a few more paragraphs and then publishing it and passing it off as their own.

So, that sucks, and will always be in the back of my mind now. But at the same time, I think the reason I found all this out, and what might have been a factor in how those three initial ebooks were pulled so quickly, is because my fics are posted publicly for anyone to read. The evidence was really obvious when the ebooks were compared with my fics.

A lot of people commented that, at the very least, this proves that my writing could get published. That was also a sort of silver lining because--I think like many fic writers--one day I would like to be a published author. However, if I ever get something published it will be an original work. I will never edit and republish any of my long-form fics as novels because they weren't written with that goal in mind.

I write fics because I love the source material so much that I want to play around with the characters and the themes and create alternate universes and--just have fun. And I like sharing that with others; if someone reads one of my fics and likes it and it makes their day a little better, then I'm happy. And that's why my fics will continue to be available for anyone to read for free!

I have updated my AO3 profile to basically say all this, with the addition that I allow translations and podfics so long as you as ask and send me a link when you're finished.

And I think that covers everything so far! Thanks for reading, as always!

[pilgrimagesource]

🚨 E-BOOK "AUTHOR" IS PLAGIARIZING PILGRIMAGE FICS 🚨

Buckle up, folks, this is gonna be a long one.

Our prolific author, @relicshamecircle (aka EnduringParadox on ao3) has been made aware of an e-book "author" named Layla Moran who has been blatantly plagiarizing her Diarmute fanfics and just changing the names and a few words around. This is absolutely unacceptable. I always like to think of this fandom as a safe haven and an accepting, kind community. But this is disgusting.

These are the three specific works listed on Layla's account that have been plagiarized from EnduringParadox:

This seems to be the work of someone within the fandom, because how else would she have found these fics and read them and decided to pass them as her own? So Layla Moran, if you follow me and you're reading this, you have made Pilgrimage fanfic authors, who are already so few and far between, feel unsafe to post without you getting your greedy hands on them and trying to take advantage of a small fandom for your own profit. Did you think you would never get caught? My advice to you would be to take down the works yourself before this has to get nasty.

To everyone else, I urge you to report and/or leave one-star reviews stating that they're plagiarized from fanfic. Links and proof below the cut:

The summary of The Beauty and His Beast:

Which is CLEARLY An Invitation to Happiness:

Ugh, Everild and Camdyn... what ugly names. But I digress. Here's the link to the GoodReads page if you feel so inclined to leave a one-star review and report.

An excerpt from An Invitation to Happiness, EnduringParadox:

"David hadn’t fought for glory or gold. At the time, he thought he’d stood for God—that the king’s cause, which he so readily made his own, was not only legitimate but justified both on earth and in the eyes of Heaven. More than five years later, carved into adulthood by the sword’s blade, his body a hardened knot of scarred skin, his throat ravaged by his own roars of rage and anguish, David knows better. That he had gone to war simply because he had been foolish. Because he’d been a young man but had still looked at war with a boy’s eyes—half a solemn duty, half a game. Something that would be done and done with satisfaction."

An excerpt from The Beauty and His Beast, Layla Moran:

"Everild Reed hadn't fought for glory or gold. At the time, he thought he'd stood for God--that the king's cause, which he eagerly made his own, was not only legitimate but justified both on earth and in the eyes of Heaven. More than five years later, carved into adulthood by the sword's blade and burdened with the weight of his choices, his body a hardened knot of muscle and scarred skin, Everild knows better now."

--

The summary of The Rancher's Mail-Order Husband:

Which, obviously, is Bluebells and Daylillies and Wild Roses Running Rampant:

Come ON, even naming Diarmuid's character "Ciarán"???? (And misspelling it Ciarian in the summary??) Here's a link to the GoodReads page. You know what to do.

And THIS ONE she's making money off of. You can buy it for $2.99 on Amazon.

Here's a link to the Amazon page, please report.

An excerpt from Bluebells and Daylillies and Wild Roses Running Rampant, EnduringParadox:

"David had almost joined their company. He’d gone nearly the entire war without being shot and damned if near the end of it all someone hadn’t gotten him right in the leg. The surgeon had told him they needed to take the entire limb. David had grabbed his collar, pulled him close until they were nose-to-nose, and gritted out that he’d break every one of his fingers if he tried it. He kept the leg, earned a limp, and found later, when he was beset by memories and the scent of blood and gunpowder, dizzy, pulse racing, that he’d gotten what they called the soldier’s heart, too."

An excerpt from The Rancher's Mail-Order Husband, Layla Moran:

"Graham had come close to joining the dead himself, narrowing surviving a gunshot wound to the leg near the warn's end. The surgeon wanted to amputate, and Graham, fueled by desperation, had snarled at him through gritted teeth, threatening to break his fingers if he so much as tried. He kept the leg but earn a limp that followed him everywhere, along with something the doctors called 'soldier's heart'--a condition that left him shaking, sleepless, and burdened with memories of blood and gunpowder."

--

And, finally, a summary of The Warrior and The Monk:

Which is just Temu how rich the earth, how bright the stars:

Here's a link to the GoodReads. Rate, report.

An excerpt from how rich the earth, how bright the stars, EnduringParadox:

"One morning, strangers in longships stepped onto the shore. Their arrival was no surprise. Along the sea's coast they drifted, slow, languid, in their monstrously large and narrow vessels with their monstrously large, woven sails dyed in bright, garish colors, a beacon to all that saw them, telling them—as their longships loomed like a pack of wolves stalking their prey—that they were coming."

An excerpt from The Warrior and The Monk, Layla Moran:

"One early morning, strangers in longships silently stepped onto the shore, their presence casting a heavy weight upon the land. Their arrival had been anticipated for days, maybe longer, and was no surprise to those who dwelled in the monastery overlooking the coast. The ships had been visible for miles as they drifted slowly, languidly, along the sea's edge, cutting through the waves like beasts with a purpose. They moved in their long, narrow vessels, which seemed both too large and too lean, with sails woven from thick cloth and dyed in bright, garish colors that stood out against the pale sea and sky. The sails themselves were like beacons, drawing attention,"

--

This is all so blatant and egregious. Shame on Layla. EnduringParadox is a kind and dedicated person writing all of these wonderful stories for our small fandom for FREE and Layla has taken advantage of that. We are small but we are mighty and protective of our own. Let's make Layla regret fucking with Pilgrimage.

[pilgrimagesource]

LOL found this review where they accidentally forgot to change Diarmuid's name to Ciarán on one of the pages. Dumbass. Also fairly certain from reading reviews that the author ran EnduringParadox's fics through AI and just published that. Didn't even re-write them herself. Laziness to the nth degree.

[pilgrimagesource]

Here's the link to all the Amazon pages as well where you can report the ebooks and try to get them taken down:

The Beauty and His Beast

The Rancher's Mail-Order Husband

The Warrior and The Monk

[pilgrimagesource]

UPDATE: Lots has happened in the last 24 hours! As some people have already noted, I also posted a thread on the MM-romance subreddit hoping to get more eyes on it. (I've never used Reddit before, made a new account, and promptly got suspended for posting too many links as a new account LOL there goes my Reddit career, I guess!) Check it out for more resources and information. Not only did we discover that ALL of Layla's ebooks are plagiarized from fanfics across multiple fandoms, including The Old Guard, Dragon Age, Supernatural, and others, we ALSO discovered that she posts sapphic fiction under the pseudonym Rey Luca. It also seems like GoodReads is limiting reviews right now because of the influx, but the negative reviews are now showing at the top which is awesome! Hopefully that deters people from reading. And another HUGE win, a lot of her ebooks are being taken down off Amazon! 🥳 So our efforts are working, and that’s awesome! Thank you so much to everyone who’s reblogged, reported Layla’s books, and left one-star reviews! But there’s still more work to do, so here’s some more ways you can help: 

A Pilgrimage friend has compiled this awesome spreadsheet where we’re tracking down the original fanfic for each ebook. People’s keen web sleuthing have so far tracked down TWELVE fanfics and ten authors that she’s ripped off. If you can find any of the ones that haven’t been found yet, let me know and we can add it to the list! Also, if any of these authors are unaware that their fic has been plagiarized, it might be good if people can find them and reach out to them and let them know. I know reiconcorpse and ToBebbanburg have been notified, but I don’t know about anyone else.

Someone has pointed out that Layla is also on Smashwords and Kobo and is still selling the ebooks that have been taken off of Amazon there. Firstly, you can contact Smashwords here and let them know that the ebooks violate their terms of service for copyright and publishing someone else’s work. (The report button on the book's page seems to only be available if you're logged in, so if you have an account, you can also report.) Kobo also has a contact email here. Secondly, if you find any other sites where the books are listed, please let me know and I will add them to the list. 

GoodReads is limiting reviews now, and review-bombing can get your account banned so be careful, but you can still like all the reviews that mention the plagiarism, as that will help boost them. I also recommend leaving one-star reviews on the Amazon pages. Most of the MM romances are now taken off Amazon but the FF romances under Rey Luca are still up, so show them some support too! And mark the reviews that mention plagiarism as helpful to boost. (I don’t think Amazon likes links in reviews so I would abstain from posting links and just tell people where to look if they want proof.)

Layla is also signed with Tantor Media to do an audiobook of The Warrior and The Monk, so I would reach out to them as well to get them to drop her before the audiobook gets published. 

Thanks so much for all the traction this post has been getting! This humble Pilgrimage blog has never seen such engagement. 😅 And for everyone who's never heard of Pilgrimage but reblogged anyways, thank you soooo much! Fandom solidarity! ✊