Darby Lahger (Old Hag)
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Darby Lahger (Old Hag)
“Keeper of the Keys” https://ift.tt/325p5O3 #Watercolor #painting #art #owl #owlsinart #surreal #dream #dreaming #dreamlike #gold #golden #goldleaf #shinystuff https://ift.tt/2w3Hzym
Konstantyn Kopacz
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the stripped faithful stand beneath the wings of the twins, their voices the echoes that you hear when shouting at the abyss, requested by @farsights
Let them bury the side of the story they’ll never learn. It’s our time.
credits . .
sketch from the road
gold
“The fairy-ring mushroom.” Edible. National Geographic. v.37. 1920.
mercysought:
The world around her feels suffocating, looking down on her as if expecting her to yield and to give in to the warmth that bites at her skin. The priestess, the general, the woman that was filled with neatly carved paths, the woman with the blood of her children in her hands flashed her teeth. She had not yielded when the world crashed around her, she had not yielded when she had been treated like nothing but a beast, she would not yield now as the world once again shifted around her once again.
Once she had welcomed such a change, she had embraced it as she felt herself be swooped up from the pain of a world that tried to swallow her whole. The dead oceans and grey skies had become a home that meant she was safe now. It meant that despite the voices that crawled from the edges of the world, that she still held the reins. No voices, no wills other than her own allowed to yield any control other than herself. A prison, but a prison of her own making. And now that world looked down on her, expectantly while singing crept from its edges. It expected her to smile and to single along as she had done once. The irony and familiarity was not lost in her, but now there is no relief, there are no thanks. Now she looks at the young boy in front of her and she feels her teeth sink into her lips, into the inner part of her cheek until blood is drawn.
“You speak as if you know what you speak of, without a shadow of a doubt.” she speaks after a moment; there is nothing but a small smile, a clipped thing that speaks of the grim amusement that is born out of his words. Of the anger that lingers just beneath the surfaces at his heretic words and how he seemed to not even notice “And maybe you do.” she adds looking down at the golden sands before allowing herself to give a single step forward. This was no longer her world, no longer a safe place that she could take refuge in; and she would deal with it accordingly. Black eyes narrow as both hands move slowly to the small curve of her back, short nails holding rough and thin skin “But I am far more tempted to believe that it is just your youth and arrogance babbling about matters that it does not fully understand.”
All things yield to time. Did they? How many like her had remained behind? As far as she knew all were dead, either by the calamity caused by the hands of Fen’harel or from the shem’len’s gluttony. Was that yielding to time or being swept under it? Their voices lost, their bodies thrown at any given place without their proper rites, their spirits thrown into the void without a guide. Out of all the crimes committed against her people, the latter was perhaps the cruelest.
“Not all things.” she finally says, unsure if a bare faced one, so young and foolishness just at his sleeve would understand. Would want to understand. Somehow he knew that she was not like him, perhaps part of his gifts, but he did not know everything that he believed he did. Not even close and to believe that he did was simple folly. Still, still she would teach him, teach him as she was taught once. Regardless of what anger might linger beneath “Some must remain to ensure that no one is left behind,” a pause “that no one is left without a guide.”
There is a kind of tremulousness in the world, a pause in the crash of the waves, catching, snarled, like the teeth of a comb in a knot. It is a breath caught in the throat just before the exhale. It is a fractal silence of infinite ephemerality, and all things fall to stillness around them.
"I was prideful.”
He does not raise his voice, or soften it, or pad the edges until they no longer burn. They burn. His head tilts down at her with owlish eyes as he stands, faintly curious and unexpressive. The sands around them move, touched by an invisible wind they do not feel, grains rippled in dunes of unspun glass, turning dark, and ashy, and coarse against the skin as shark’s teeth ground to dust. And the waters come back slowly, polluted, refractive, a sea of murk and emptied of vitality.
He puts a hand over his heart as he kills the world.
“My life could never be yours,” He says, “And I could never claim to know it as you have.”
He returns the dream as he had found it, a careless boy thinking to replace a broken bauble with a bit of twine. It can never be as it had been found - he is still here, and even in his mending, his will overpowers. And he knows. This time, he knows.
“Please. Teach me. I would learn from you, and not repeat my mistakes.”
Linfetto (Detail), 2014 - Agostino Arrivabene
inspired by posts like this one e.e cummings,”i carry your heart with me”// margaret atwood, selected poems (1965-1975) // virginia woolf, “night and day”
“Invoked or not, the Gods will be present.”
— The Oracle of Delphi (via letheane)
mercysought:
The changes are sudden and they rattle within the void of her ribcage; in the spaces between the scars of her ribs.
It is deafening. He remains upright, unmoving in the way that her toes dig into the ashes as they turn into gold. The reflection of them against her skin would have, once in the past, made her feel like she was shinning herself. Shinning eternally. Yet as the gold spread and the roaring of the waves came, beneath her feet there are still ashes. Her skin remains as dull as before; as everything around her is taken from her she refuses to change with it. Short nails dig into soft and frail flesh of her palms. Another bare faced elf, coming as if knowing they know best. In their youth and vanity and their vision that only reaches until the light of their eyes can see.
You will meet me, but not yet. Her frown deepens as she feels the weight of his stare on her. The lively colours around them screaming as the clouds shift and move away. There is no clear source in the sky, no Sun that lights over above them all. But it is not necessary.
The sea kisses the scarred sole of her feet and they feel like bites.
“A shaper of dreams.” she corrects; her eyes now seeking this Child’s. There is something familiar about them, something that is right at the tip of her tongue; dancing above it but refusing to allow her to swallow its meaning. It is unsettling, in a way that she felt that she should not be holding the stare. The priestess does not do so, black eyes narrowing as she releases the pressure against the palm of her hands when she feels that they would give in “There were many like you once.”
Hers is a soul in revolt. He feels the outline of her, inverse space; void where woman should be. He traces the shape, knicked on the edges. She is not worn down by time, tossed and polished as a riparian pebble, buffeted by the will of the stream wider than she. She is the river rock, jagged and too-slick, cutting the flow. She stands against the unstoppable tide, unstilled by time. Fail to course-correct, to steer from her ancient inevitability, and be sliced upon her. Be seared by charcoal eyes, hot as embers. She is the monster at the end of the world.
She has seen it many times over.
“There are none like me.” He says, laughingly, and the world swells as though in greeting, remembering the touch of one who might still its waters with a thought, and as one who brought them back. His hair is dark, dark, some indefinite color between the shades, implacable, but curling, yes, and wild. It is lifted up behind him, messy through its binding, thick enough to be weighted in the hand. Pretty and soft and shiny under this sunless sky. Something rebellious and gentle about it, so loose and unsecured in its long dark tail. Something about the windless breeze that had not been before. So casual the arrogance, spoken more as a thing of fact, some secret he knows but will not share, waiting for the long unfurling of time’s ribbon. All things revealed, all that will be, will be.
“They are not gone,” he says, lifting his head as though to catch the breeze. As though he had not made it. “Only changed from what was. You remember them like they were, and struggle to see them as they are. In the memory of places. Like this. Like others. What you would have them be cannot be. They are something else.”
His eyes slide to her, honey amber resin, something tempered and molten over a flame.
She burns, she seethes, she stokes his glow.
But he looks at her, sees her, feels the unrepentant tug of her unyielding will. Feels the grey ash on her tongue, the battles carrying their weight on her body. The toll of faith in a mad creature that once called itself a thing divine. She is sodden, a sponge too full of other people. She is leaden.
And she looses none of what she carries.
He pities her, and the crash of the waves hushes, baited, waiting with him. The sea softens to a distant, rolling murmur. Above, the cry of wheeling gulls; nowhere in sight.
He hears her chastisement, correction parsed in the sharp angles of her words. He does not unravel - he gives her a thread to pluck, to remake, to weave her own.
“A shaper.” He agrees, because he does not need to make right a thing which is not more or less truer than another. In any given dream, is he not the dreamer? And of the Dreaming beyond, the invisible web of all sleeping higher beings, this space that is and is-not - is the dreamer but one more among the others? Each the dreamer, each the dreamt-of.
“All things yield to time.” And the rest, unspoken, a thought carried in the susurrations of the shore: Why not you?
fire comes down from heaven
My first gouache painting ever, I can already tell this is going to be a long learning process, but I’m completely obsessed already.
All shall know My merciful love.
lavendervcined:
She had been gentler as a child, even if there had still been rage there, simmering, always. She was one with the forests, even though she burned like a wildfire. The one flame that would never harm the green life around her, but that which harmed it, in turn, and He’d seen it. He had seen her and called her His, child of death, child of wrath.
And oh, how right He’d been.
She had agreed to a devil’s bargain, it seemed- only hours before, because she trusted her friend, even with dark magics, and she did not want to die; nor to allow another to die for her. And now, here she stands, before a ghost that has haunted her for years without ever being seen again. He gentles, almost- like she’s a wild thing that wants to flee, like she’s a horse about to spook or a wolf about to savage, torn between fight and flight.
And He’s right.
And she hates it.
But His voice it not what stuns her, it’s His words. Her mouth opens, to refute, deny- but-
Did she? Unknowingly, perhaps. Unwittingly, certainly.
“I-” she starts, and then stops, because she has never been a liar, and cannot lie to Him of all.
“- I did not know I could,” finally, voice softer. Fragile, in that moment.
He reaches for her, arms unfolding like the wings of an owl; vast, the endless trail of his robes, velvety soft, and silent, silent, silent. The crush of feathers against skin, the hollow bones. A blink and the image is gone, sensation gone, only the God, and His hand touching her cheek. An echo, a begining.
❝ I am Here, ❞ he says, the press of his palm real against her cheek. Something tangible, something known. Something felt before. ❝ You reached for Me, though you did not know it. You reached, and it came to me in the Dreaming. You acted in faith, Da’Ghilan. And you felt it most. ❞
And was not the summoning of the Old God’s soul a thing of singular purpose? Was not her reluctant agreement a thing made in hope, in belief? That it would work. That they needed it to work.
Falon’Din had never truly left her; He Sees through His mark, knows the lives of a hundred-thousand caught in the roots of His tree, the heart of them all. Their blood. Come, he might have said. Let me look at you. But he knows she is a thorny thing, brambled and knotted with the countless tangles of the hurts of mortal life. He will not coddle her. He will not tame this wild thing.
He will show her the path to loving Him once more.
❝ You are heard. ❞
mercysought:
Nothing truly stopped; there was no beginning. No end. All but a cycle that continued, with nothing to stop its motion, nothing to break it. A wheel that kept turning. A snake that ate its tail.
Life to death, and from death new life.
But these were her lands; her sands, her sea that remained still despite the turmoil that erupted within her chest as the boy began to talk. First the sentences do not connect together, but they too connected to the wheel. I am who I am, regardless of how cryptic it might sound, answered her question more than the name that spilled from his voice. His name was just one among the many that were buried beneath the sands, beneath the dark mirror of the clouds above them, their sound wiped clean from existence by the weight of the air around them.
Black eyes follow him, meticulously studying each twist of his face, each movement of his hands. Her lips purse, disapproval pouring from the deep shades of red over the once black eyes; small and large scars dot the bare parts of her skin: arms and legs; lips and ears. Feet. The grey dust is sun kissed by the sickly glow, even as he touches it. Her displeasure is audible, even as the silence settles between them both, the clouds above them seem to swollen, slowly curling into themselves, almost as if reflecting the waves from a rough sea that is no longer present.
The wheel keeps turning “That was not the question asked.”
He tilts his head up to her, and he smiles. He is golden, soft-skinned and heartbreaking, still just a youth, not wholly grown. Tender, untested, unscarred in all the ways that she is scarred. The flesh. The mind. The soul.
His smile is sweet, unassuming. Amused, too, but gently. He knows she will not like seeing it, all the same.
And their world - her world - changes.
It begins with a dull roar, like cotton stuffed in the ears. Something muffled and indistinct, but broad, somehow. Vast. There is no smooth gradation into being; it explodes. Behind him crashes the green foam of the sea, the clear waves rushed into life. He draws patterns in the sands, aimless, and digs his fingers through dry dust.
It is like crushed gemstone when it slips again through his fingers.
The air changes, too - both illusion and not, as real here (as if in reminder; this too is life, this too is a world) as the one before - thick, now, with the smell of the littoral sea and the sweet green, growing things. All of it, here. Everything restored, the verdant foliage and the murmuring shore of another time, another place. All of it, in a heartbeat, in a blink. All of it.
“I come from the south.” He says, simply. It means many things, and one. “You will meet me, but not yet.” Still, those unclouded eyes, focused and steady. He gazes at her with the fixture of an infinite patience, an ancient intelligence.
“I am the shaper of dreams.”