🐁 south downs founder🩸talamasca husbands

If you're looking for my Interview With the Vampire stories, you can find those here. If you're looking for Crown of Thorns 'Verse and the rest of my Good Omens stories, you can find them here. If you make art based on my writing, podfic my stories, or do anything else you want me to see, feel free to message me. I try to answer most comments and messages I get, although some may slip through the cracks. Pronouns: they/them. Header image is an illustration by fighto-art for this IWTV story.

[irisbleufic]

CALDERA (VOL. 1 & VOL. 2)

Above, below the banner (Villa of the Mysteries griffin fresco, Pompeii), is the collection-level AO3 link to the two halves of my Devil's Minion series, Caldera. The following links are the individual stories to date, plus ratings, word counts, and numbers of chapters:

Caldera: Mise-en-Abîme (Vol. 1)

Not the Good Guys (Rating: E; 20,000 words; 7 chapters; can be read as a stand-alone, but all stories beyond this one begin to serve a much farther-reaching plot)

Maker, Martyr, Mirror (Rating: M; 2,100 words; 1 chapter)

Still Life With Sunken Treasure (Rating: E; 2,400 words; 1 chapter)

It's Not the Louvre, But It'll Do (Rating: E; 2,600 words; 1 chapter)

Time Has Opened Back Up to Us (Rating: E; 3,000 words; 1 chapter)

Gold and Tempera on Panel (Rating: E; 20,000 words; 7 chapters)

Calamity Comes to Your Door (Rating: E; 3,200 words; 1 chapter)

We Need Not Be a Tragedy (Rating: E; 3,900 words; 1 chapter)

Death to Welcome With Open Arms (Rating: E; 11,600 words; 3 chapters)

The Responsible Ones (Rating: E; 11,000 words; 4 chapters)

It’s a Goddamn Trip (Rating: E; 20,000 words; 7 chapters)

The Walls of This Villa Remember (Rating: E; 4,000 words; 2 chapters)

As Only My Hands Can Deliver (Rating: E; 10,000 words; 5 chapters)

Vampire Family, Human Family (Rating: M; 11,000 words; 4 chapters)

Full House, But It Could Be Fun (Rating: E; 9,600 words; 4 chapters)

Just Watch the Stars (Rating: E; 20,000 words; 7 chapters)

It's a Slippery Slope to Stand-Up Comedy (Rating: M; 1,400 words; 1 chapter)

Difficult All the Way Down (Rating: E; 4,000 words; 3 chapters)

Don't Include This in Your Next Backup (Rating: E; 10,000 words; 5 chapters)

From This World into Another (Rating: E; 14,000 words; 6 chapters)

Caldera: Mise-en-Scène (Vol. 2)

The Quick Ones (Rating: E; 53,000 words; 22 chapters)

Bizarre and Breathless Pause (Rating: E; 20,000 words; 9 chapters)

Avant-Garde and Unsustainable (Rating: M; 2,000 words; 1 chapter)

Cross-Genre Awareness (Rating: M; 2,000 words; 1 chapter)

Fucking Professionals (Rating: E; 20,000 words; 9 chapters)

Fractured and Flickering Gold (Rating: M; 2,000 words; 1 chapter)

Talismans for the Eve of War (Rating: M; 4,300 words; 3 chapters)

Something Still Sleeps Below the Earth (Rating: E; 20,000 words; 10 chapters)

Stealing Gold from a Griffin (Rating: E; 6,000 words; 4 chapters)

Bear It Now That It Burns (NEW as of 2026-05-29, series now complete; Rating: E; 6,900 words; 1 chapter)

[userarmand]

“That's the most contact I've had from him in a while.” [via tvinsider]

[blackdykegirlblogger]

ik pride is all ppl think of when june hits but i also wanna say HAPPY CARIBBEAN AMERICAN HERITAGE MONTH BITCHES ‼️‼️‼️

[lexdelioncourt]

SOURCE TV INSIDER ON IG

IT'S NEVER BEEN MORE SERIOUS

[irisbleufic]

I just want to say, thank you for always being so reassuring to everyone! I've been thinking about what other reviewers and screeners were saying about Daniel's eyes and what they think might happen to him at the end of season 3 and all the death/body swap theories concerning multiple characters and I've been stressing 😭😭 Your answers are always very down-to-earth and thoughtful, which is nice

Anon, thanks; you're incredibly kind! For the most part, folks writing in have extended me the same kindness and patience that I'm doing my best to offer in these answers (in truth, the bizarre, impatient, and mean-spirited asks have tilted more into the minority at this stage), and I'm grateful for that. These past couple weeks have been a whirlwind: challenging at times, but rewarding when I realize that most people want to cut through the nonsense and the rumors and enjoy S3 with as little stress as they can manage.

So, relax, stay sane out there, and just remember: even screeners don't have 100% of the information. They didn't give us everything-everything. We're not even sure exactly how close to the Episode 7 airdate we're going to get Episode 7, which to me is hilarious and fitting. I love it that even we're left with this one massive piece of the mystery pending in advance. Keep those media reviewers and other miscellaneous journalists humble 🤣

[irisbleufic]

No, you get me exactly. Do I think they would have the courage to piss off their fans by killing Daniel? No. Am I suddenly very aware that Sam and Rashid are fun additions to the show? Yes I am!

*grins* Very, very glad we’re on the same wavelength here in more ways than one. And yes, I get you completely, re: the IWTV team’s lack of grit and their lack of desire to piss people off, in this case, being a desirable state of affairs 💯

[irisbleufic]

Wait a minute. Did I miss something? I read something about this earlier, and someone said Daniel was going to die.

*sighs, realizes it’s going to be a long day, but that is okay*

All right, let’s get you caught up. We don’t actually know that any such thing is definite, for Daniel or any other major character, just yet. Please read this post; in it, I explain what’s going on, especially in that first episode that was screened last night, re: what’s making people anxious on suspected-character-death-vibes front.

[irisbleufic]

This is going to sound like a diss and I don’t mean it disrespectfully but IWTV/TVL doesn’t have the grit to actually kill off any of the main characters that don’t already die in the books. They have OCs and a roster of minor characters (Antoine/Antoinette) that they can bump off but I’m having a difficult time seeing them even doing that for even Gabrielle/a or Marius, not to even approach loustat or DM

Hey, and I salute them for not having that grit, if that’s how you want to phrase it 👌🏼 Sometimes, a backhanded compliment is what it takes to get your point across. Now would not be the time to suddenly decide to develop that grit. Narratively, it would feel incredibly jarring. This just isn’t the kind of story in which killing off major characters makes sense, and that’s fine. The audience wouldn’t like it, either. There’s a time and place for everything; now isn’t the time, and IWTV/TVL isn’t the place. You’re on the right track with this crit, anon, and you should say it.

(Indulgent personal remarks, though, re: killing off minor characters: if they touch Real Rashid and Sam Barclay, I will be kind of furious. They’ve both proved they’re clever survivors several times over, though, so I’m trying not to worry any harder than I already have. I’ve worried more about these two than I’ve worried about anyone else; that’s not even an understatement. Meta plot-twist for all you total strangers out there, not so much for my closest friends: everyone thinks Devil’s Minion is my #1 priority, but that’s not quite true. I care about these two Talamasca guys in the background more than I care about everything else, nearly. Although, if you’re reading my fic, it’s likely starting to dawn on you 🤣)

[irisbleufic]

First of all, thank you very much for your responses and for finding time for so many people, dealing with the waiting is very hard and you are incredibly helpful! ❤️

I would like to ask about that thing with Daniel's eye color change. The answers from other screeners just left me a bit confused. Will this topic be mentioned or at least this ability of his shown again? Or did they just decide to ignore this point and not continue developing it?

You’re very welcome, anon. It’s been my pleasure to respond and to help out with the anxiety and the curiosity wherever I can 💙 Thank you for reading!

I’ve already addressed the eye-color issue in a couple of asks, because you’re far from the first person to inquire. You can find the relevant responses here and here.

[irisbleufic]

Should the absence of a few characters in the first scene of the season, described differently in some articles, be something that we should be concerned about? 😭

This answer is going to sound cryptic, but it’s meant to be reassuring: not necessarily. Please bear with me in this conversation, because it’s a delicate one, all right? It is so hard to answer this in any kind of definitive way without Episode 7 in hand, and even if those of us with screening access did have it in hand, we still wouldn’t be able to spoil it down to fine details. I’ll say that there are a couple of points in the narrative where the writers have done their level best to make us feel kind of nervous about the who-survives-the-Akasha-disaster-and-who-doesn’t question. Because it’s being told to us in retrospective, we’re holding our breath, waiting. That’s the most nail-biting suspense they could’ve chosen to give us.

Two things to keep in mind, one for holding out hope and one for if you’d like me to be frank about all possible eventualities since everything is up in the air right now (no matter what any screener says, no single one of us knows any more than any other):

1) Certain people, certain vampires, really are too important to this narrative to do away with even if there are dialogue shenanigans and visual absences in play to make you fear for them. Remember that we don’t have tension, we don’t have a story, if there isn’t a sense of high stakes. So, I genuinely wouldn’t put it past the writers to make us think we’re losing somebody, or somebodies, only for that to turn out not to be the case. I cannot count the number of times I’ve gone into a story convinced by foreshadowing that I was going to lose someone, only to find out the foreshadowing was a fucking red herring/some kind of fake-out. We are point-blank going into a season that starts on the opposite side of a catastrophe in which a lot of humans and vampires died. Mentally and emotionally square with it (believe me, I had to, and fast); understand they will be messing with our heads around that and constructing twists around that through the lens of retrospection all season.

2) So, all right, what if the worst does happen for the character or characters you’re worried about? Sometimes that’s how stories go. Now, sometimes stories do it for shitty, unjustified reasons—just for shock value, just as an afterthought, just as a throw-away with no due respect. That’s always the worst, and it’s careless, terrible writing. However, my consolation here would be that we’re not dealing with terrible writers. I don’t think that they’d go in for a kill (or even kills, plural) amongst the core characters unless they were to give those deaths the weight and respect that they’re due. For a host of reasons, I’m still not convinced they’re going to do that, but let’s face the theoretical and say that they do. They’re better at their jobs than most playwrights/screenwriters than I’ve seen handling TV. I’m more willing to let them break me than I’d be willing to let most, and I’d trust them to frame the loss(es) in such a way that they didn’t occur entirely in vain (or, you know, fuck it: this is still Anne Rice’s world they’re adapting, and certain infamous deaths got retconned in the books).

In summary: we don’t know anything for certain about those absences, and the narrative is playing silly buggers with your fears around some characters’ fates. You have to be prepared for all of that. However, we don’t have enough information about what it all means. It’s an excellent season so far; I’m not going to let the anxiety and the suspense chase me away. The true tragedy would be failing to give it a chance to show me what’s happening with all of the disparate parts I can’t quite click together yet. I’m still here to let the tale seduce me, and, as usual, I’m advising you to let it do the same.

[sillystigmata]

Party Boy

[irisbleufic]

(I’m just so pleased that Christopher Geary turned up in a photo with Assad for once. Somebody get Bally Gill with them next time, and I’ll be even happier.)

[oysters-aint-for-me]

there’s a used bookstore in rural western massachusetts (the montague book mill) whose motto is “books you don’t need in a place you can’t find” and i just feel like that summarizes tumblr too

[oysters-aint-for-me]

posts you don’t need on a site you can’t search

[irisbleufic]

can you sell me on sam barclay? I want to read your fics because real rashid is my #1 goat of all time, but I just don't care about the vampire sam. probably gonna read anyways, but if you want to then please talk to me about your little guy, and thank you for all that you do for the real rashid community 🫡

What would you say if I used Rashid as my pitch here, as a leap of faith for you to take? When I effectively built Sam as a character from the ground up, just like I did with Rashid (since we know next to nothing about either of them from canon), I built him as someone Rashid grew to care about (and eventually love) in the process of working with him in the line of Talamasca work. Give Sam a chance through Rashid’s eyes within the framework of my stories. That’s the challenge I’d issue to you, I think. Does that work as a starting point? Let your fondness for Rashid be part of your willingness to give Sam a chance 💙

Sam is a writer, which endeared me to him right away. He’s observant, he’s resourceful, and he’s a survivor. He’s not popular with the rest of the Paris coven at all, and there are a lot of not-so-subtle cues pointing in that direction if you watch closely. He and Armand have an oddly adorable rapport with each other in the past, around the theater, not unlike Armand and Rashid do, present day, around the penthouse. There are parallels between Sam and Rashid, as people who have survived working with and under Armand, that clued me into what fantastic potential they had not only as co-workers, but as friends (and as an eventual couple in my stories). I also have a massive soft spot for spies and secret agents, period.

From a reading standpoint, I’d strongly suggest starting with either “The Quick Ones,” which can be read as a stand-alone even though it’s part of Caldera, or with “Rules Agreed Upon,” which is a stand-alone story that is not part of any series I’ve written.

[irisbleufic]

CALDERA (VOL. 1 & VOL. 2)

Above, below the banner (Villa of the Mysteries griffin fresco, Pompeii), is the collection-level AO3 link to the two halves of my Devil's Minion series, Caldera. The following links are the individual stories to date, plus ratings, word counts, and numbers of chapters:

Caldera: Mise-en-Abîme (Vol. 1)

Not the Good Guys (Rating: E; 20,000 words; 7 chapters; can be read as a stand-alone, but all stories beyond this one begin to serve a much farther-reaching plot)

Maker, Martyr, Mirror (Rating: M; 2,100 words; 1 chapter)

Still Life With Sunken Treasure (Rating: E; 2,400 words; 1 chapter)

It's Not the Louvre, But It'll Do (Rating: E; 2,600 words; 1 chapter)

Time Has Opened Back Up to Us (Rating: E; 3,000 words; 1 chapter)

Gold and Tempera on Panel (Rating: E; 20,000 words; 7 chapters)

Calamity Comes to Your Door (Rating: E; 3,200 words; 1 chapter)

We Need Not Be a Tragedy (Rating: E; 3,900 words; 1 chapter)

Death to Welcome With Open Arms (Rating: E; 11,600 words; 3 chapters)

The Responsible Ones (Rating: E; 11,000 words; 4 chapters)

It’s a Goddamn Trip (Rating: E; 20,000 words; 7 chapters)

The Walls of This Villa Remember (Rating: E; 4,000 words; 2 chapters)

As Only My Hands Can Deliver (Rating: E; 10,000 words; 5 chapters)

Vampire Family, Human Family (Rating: M; 11,000 words; 4 chapters)

Full House, But It Could Be Fun (Rating: E; 9,600 words; 4 chapters)

Just Watch the Stars (Rating: E; 20,000 words; 7 chapters)

It's a Slippery Slope to Stand-Up Comedy (Rating: M; 1,400 words; 1 chapter)

Difficult All the Way Down (Rating: E; 4,000 words; 3 chapters)

Don't Include This in Your Next Backup (Rating: E; 10,000 words; 5 chapters)

From This World into Another (Rating: E; 14,000 words; 6 chapters)

Caldera: Mise-en-Scène (Vol. 2)

The Quick Ones (Rating: E; 53,000 words; 22 chapters)

Bizarre and Breathless Pause (Rating: E; 20,000 words; 9 chapters)

Avant-Garde and Unsustainable (Rating: M; 2,000 words; 1 chapter)

Cross-Genre Awareness (Rating: M; 2,000 words; 1 chapter)

Fucking Professionals (Rating: E; 20,000 words; 9 chapters)

Fractured and Flickering Gold (Rating: M; 2,000 words; 1 chapter)

Talismans for the Eve of War (Rating: M; 4,300 words; 3 chapters)

Something Still Sleeps Below the Earth (Rating: E; 20,000 words; 10 chapters)

Stealing Gold from a Griffin (Rating: E; 6,000 words; 4 chapters)

Bear It Now That It Burns (NEW as of 2026-05-29, series now complete; Rating: E; 6,900 words; 1 chapter)

[irisbleufic]

The final Caldera story, "Bear It Now That It Burns," has been posted.

Thank you, readers, for following this series over the past two years 💙

[nanalineni]

I love how varied and universally weird the circumstances for making lifelong friendships are. Here's this guy I accidentally messaged once and I could not imagine my life without them now. Here's this girl I was so scared of when I met her, I would kill for her and remind her to rest on the regular. Here's this other guy we have so much in common we used to joke we were the same person in different timelines. It took us years to meet in person and I attended his wedding. There are also people who entered my life in absolutely unremarkable ways but changed it forever for the better. It's wonderful how easy it is to find people to love.

[yourfaveisintersex]

what if I just made my profile picture a male calico cat or something. hurm

[icewingassasin]

Could I suggest a picture of Dawntreader Texas Calboy? He is a beautiful male calico cat who is a chimera. He's also somewhat controversial among some cat fancy associations since he is a male cat with female colors, and some people are strangely transphobic towards him, despite him being a cat? There was even a rule implemented to keep him from competing in a cat show. If you look up his name, he made a few news articles.

[yourfaveisintersex]

Oh my god?????

Yeah you're right about beautiful I'm squeezing him until he pops!!!!! I love this guy I think I'm going to make an edit real quickly Calboy I love you I'm so sorry people are calling you a freak??????

[yourfaveisintersex]

:)

[irisbleufic]

hello, Iris! what are your general thoughts on cats? would you say that cats are going to keep relevant this year? could you please name a few of your favourite cat moments of tge oast couple weeks?

1) Love them. So much, in fact, that I have three of the little gremlins. I guess if you’re fairly new to this blog, then that may not yet be common knowledge.

2) They’ve always been relevant, and they always will be. I can’t argue with history or with the adorably insistent pestering of my own trio (Zel, Nicky, and Ember).

3) Zel deciding that she hates several of Lestat’s tracks was pretty funny (airplane ears, and then fled the room after making a point of displaying disdain for about a full minute). Otherwise, my favorite online-cat moments, week by week, are usually from amongst the antics of Baby Corn (of Whisks to Whiskers), Elsie (of Elsie Wants), and various cats whose grooming appointments are shown on the YT channel called Girl With the Dogs 2.