You reach up...

Call me Patch. (Ace, She/They) I reblog a lot of stuff (Icon by @its-jjay & header by @aenor-llelo)

[hoarding-stories]

Stories I will write one day:

An Understanding Of Change: A wizard, through an experimental teleportation mishap, is torn from her universe and forced into another and another, and another, and another... This is a story about her fight to get home.

An Understanding Of Grief: A deity and a dead man are waiting in an in-between. The dead man is offered a chance to make a choice. This is a story about that choice and all of the lives tangled up in it.

An Understanding of Time: An anthology of stories regarding the people introduced in An Understanding of Grief. Told in two parts (or perhaps four...), the Before and the After.

An Understanding of Faith: The wizard in An Understanding of Change left someone behind with no recourse or sign. This is the story of how she held on.

An Understanding of Desire: An ascension is nigh, all that remains is to summon the guest of honor. But it's all much too late in the only way that matters. An echo of a person spoken anew and a kid who is choosing this must endure the reckoning that comes with the realization that no goal is met unchanged. This is a story where everyone gets what they want.

An Understanding of Life: TBD [I'll figure it out]

[kerosene-in-a-blender]

Dot choosing to feel means choosing to feel all of it. Being able to feel affection for Cleo comes packaged in the same box (to use the narrators' metaphor) as the fear of no longer being able to be a Mother, the despair that all their efforts were for nothing, and the sheer bone-deep horror at the nature of their existence now. Which is why it feels very significant that, even when some part of them says to put all that away back in the mental attic they got it out of, they choose not to.

Dot has been trying for so long to achieve a state such as the one they're in now, where they don't feel, they don't worry, they are simply tranquil, constantly. They expressed envy for Steve being able to simply not think, and now they too, can simply choose to not think. Feeling too, is a choice, and one which means embracing everything they spent so many years trying to get away from if they also want to feel the joyous parts. And they do, they left themself keep feeling so they can be in the moment with Cleo and share the dream she painted for them, where it might not matter if they can't become a Mother, life (kind of) continues on anyway. And there's things to be found in that life that are worth it, even if they come with a promise of struggling to figure out who they are now.

[hello-eeveev]

They want to be alive for this, and so, here and now, they are.

I have been deeply unwell about this episode for the last two weeks, and I don’t see it stopping anytime soon. My heart is so full. I am overjoyed, delighted. I will never be the same 💕

[lyril]

[cornedbeefhashtags]

[battletoads]

[midstpodcast]

It's not over yet… 🚪 🚪 🚪

Sometimes it's easier to talk after hitting something with a sword. #UNEND S3, Episode 10 - “Afterlife”, is now available on YouTube and podcast platforms! ✨

LISTEN ON YouTube ⬇️

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVFJKqg8Njc

FIND THE PODCAST ⬇️

https://bit.ly/4nfd6c2

[ Art by @erewile 🧡 ]

[hoarding-stories]

Absolutely nothing had better happen to these two....

[hoarding-stories]

Yesss Dot not being able to become a mother wouldn't be the end of the world, things could come after

Cleo's vision of what that future could look like is gonna give me cavities

[hoarding-stories]

Oh good, Dot's experiences are technically very unique but Cleo does in fact know generally what it all feels like

[hoarding-stories]

M: Suddenly they reel back, recoiling like they’re covered in bugs. 

X: But the dead body wearing their skin staggers with them, following their every move. (Dot) “No! Get it away from me!” S: They fall, slipping on the rain-slick tree bark.  X: (Dot) “Get me out! Get me out!” M: But they can’t get out. They are stitched into a corpse, their body a clammy ill-fitting suit that clings to them, cold and alien, like wet clothes. 

Fascinating

Any sensation they have isn't tied intrinsically to their body any more, so it's no longer really a part of them

[hoarding-stories]

Oh boy oh boy they can turn on and off their emotions!

That's a lot all at once

[hello-eeveev]

I LOVE BEING CORRECT

[storybook-souls]

chapter 5 is going to end with the most devastating cliffhanger known to man i feel it in my bones.

[hoarding-stories]

X: Even in their deadly cool state, some instinct stops Dot from describing exactly what they went through – that burst of insight, the way they had turned their inner light on their inner fold, the way they set off a reaction that devoured some crucial part of themself. In hindsight, it was so simple, so obvious. Anyone could do it – if, of course, they understood that it was possible.

Still so so so fascinating, plus the fact that whatever they did it is only somewhat related to the Mothers' whole deal

[hoarding-stories]

Ooof full "hey I'm dead" reveal with the proof that they can just Stop.

[hoarding-stories]

Yay! Cleo and Dot episode!

It's time for that conversation

[masterqwertster]

Was thinking about Sylandri's sterilizing of the elves so that they have to get her consent to have a baby, and do you know what else that means?

Aramán is a world without half-elves.

Well, at least since the last 4,000 years or so.

Because the thing is, I don't think Aramán had mixed ancestry kids, at least in the open, during the Shapers' reign. It would have been a conflict of interest between the Shapers, trying to decide who gets to claim the kid who's half of one's people and half of another's people.

But with groups like the druids who were already in hiding, you get the potential for mixing out of the Shapers' sight. And/or a place to send mixed kids that happen otherwise if you can spirit them away in time.

However, neutered as they were, the elves could not participate in secret mixed children simply because they couldn't beget kids without Sylandri's blessing.

Which, this also makes Hero an interesting case in that she's probably the first mixed ancestry in her bloodlines in a long while. Half-orcs and the like are probably only just starting to happen in bigger numbers now that there's been some generations of mixed cohabitation since the Shapers' fall.

I dunno. It's just any interesting demographics thing probably going on in Aramán.

[revvethasmythh]

I think she hated us. I think—I think when you love a version of a person that isn't real, it makes you hate the version of them that exists in the real. Their truth. We said "flower doll" not because that's how we say you, but because it's what we knew she saw you as. An eternity to have all of your complexity, all of your possibility, all of your dreams folded into an idyllic paradise where you would be punished for the most minor infraction. Where you had to supplicate yourself and pray to have a child? Our immoral lives given to us, and in exchange, we gave up the ability to have freedom, to make our own families, our own lives, our own cities, our own stories. Everything was hers. What is that other than hate dressed in flowers, sparkling light, blossoming vines, wrapped like garlands around the body of a being that loathed what we might be without her? It feels awful to hear, but I think you're right.