everyone is sick of reading everyone else's list of personal problems at the top of their blogs, we've been over all the reasons why this is a bad idea both interpersonally and as an online safety thing, however i think it should also be mentioned that just showing me the big list of what's wrong with you first thing when i click on your blog counts as spoilers and ruins the narrative tension. i clicked on your blog to find out over time, through a series of mysterious flashbacks and delightful subtextual nods, what's wrong with you. youre taking all the fun out of it
if they're gonna remake The Princess Bride, it should open with a kid sick in bed scrolling on his phone. his grandpa arrives with a gift--it's a DVD player with a disc already inside. grandpa hooks it up to the TV and presses play. and we all just watch the original 1987 film again.
many women are excited to get old and weird, but i have great news that it's fully possible to become weird now, before you get old. just imagine the heights of weirdness you will be able to reach in fifty years if you get started now. that's what I think
āImagine,ā she said, ānot merely this stealthy and loathsome feeding on mortals, but something grand as the Tower of Babel was grand before it was brought down by the wrath of God. I mean a leader set up in a Satanic palace who sends out his followers to turn brother against brother, to cause mothers to kill their children, to put all the fine accomplishments of mankind to the torch, to scorch the land itself so that all would die of hunger, innocent and guilty! Make suffering and chaos wherever you turn, and strike down the forces of good so that men despair. Now that is something worthy of being called evil. That is what the work of a devil really is. We are nothing, you and I, except exotica in the Savage Garden, as you told me. And the world of men is no more or less now than what I saw in my books in the Auvergne years ago.ā
Gabrielle to Lestat, The Vampire Lestat by Anne Rice
"Baby Jenks, they know everything, the old European ones," Davis had said. "They know how it started, they know we can go on and on if we hang in there, live to be a thousand years old and turn into white marble."
"Gee, that's just great, Davis," Baby Jenks said. "It's bad enough now not being able to walk into a Seven Eleven under those lights without people looking at you. Who wants to look like white marble?"
"Baby Jenks, you don't need anything anymore from the Seven Eleven," Davis said real calmly.
Small ficlet from the heart for the devotion and delusion prompts! Thank you @deromanuscoven for running the event!
OraĆ§Ć£o
It starts with black.
It starts with black-stained fingertips, smudging ebony in dust and powder that barely sticks to his marble skin and transfers to the paper with every movement.
It starts with blackened coal because, it seems, Marius must always end in fire.
Armandās hand glides across the paper idly, almost blindly. He barely pays attention to what heās doing.Ā
Did I ever buy a sketchpad?
He canāt recall when or who placed the sketchpad before him ā if it was a peacekeeping gift from Gregory after Armand cursed Lestat the other night; or if it was Bianca when she finally turned up screaming and shouting at him for letting Marius out of his sight, for letting Marius step into Rhoshamandesā trap, for letting Marius die protecting him again. Bianca throwing the pad at him and ordering him to honor his fatherās dream that heād paint again even if heāll never see it because Marius died wishing Andrei would be a painter once more; then she collapsed into uncontrollable, teary screams and was dragged away by a sombre, fugue Pandora.
Black glides on the page leaving out the white from the paper showing in odd places.
And where did this coal come from?
Suddenly, he remembers.
Armand had picked up the coal piece heās using from the fireplace while it was burning right after Bianca left. He remembers the horrifying screech of dread and panic that came out of Sybelleās mouth when he came close to the burning hearth. He remembers her begging for him to drop the burning coal and how he stepped away from the fireplace holding the ember until it finally cooled off. She collapsed at her piano stool and just wept silently over her keys, whispering words of sweetness, of being there for him. And Benji cried in the corner while all of this happened, yes, speaking in his mother tongue like he never did since leaving his homeland.Ā Thatās right. Thatās how Armand got his hands on the piece of coal he now draws dumb lines on page with.
He stops and studies the piece of coal for the first time, despite having held it in his hands for nights on end now.
It is a charred, shapeless, black lump. Exactly what his treacherous mind imagined had been made of his master in Venice, and most likely what has been made of him now, after a five or whatever thousand old ancient vampire abducted him.
Marius is dead, he thinks. This time he is truly dead.
Yet the words materialise on the sketchpad show: Lord, I love him so much.
Then, he blinks, noticing the precision of the lines, the richness of tone and value in the numb clouds of black and greys. He realises every mass of white has been masterfully left out to form skin. The lines of black have become wise lines of expression ā they have become a forgiving crinkle by an almost imperceptible smile, and a line between brows that conveys patience.
And much like it had been in the caves, He has come to Armand once more ā through his hands, through his unconscious mind and a medium which translated into paper what he has never been able to convey in words.
Transubstantiated from his deepest devotion onto paper, page after page after page, God smiles at him.
Armand drops the coal and the pad falls from his lap. He covers his mouth with both his hands and feels it. He feels the uncontrollable scream and the deluge of tears which Bianca let out and fights the desire to let it out himself. Women are allowed to mourn like that, but not men, never men.
Armand stands, looking out the window to the snow covering the mountains of Auvergne, then back to the pad. It is as if abandoned in the soft turkish carpet was the ikon he held in his hands when he was taken from God.
He picks it up and neatly, gently places it on the coffee table in front of the sofa he has spent the last weeks sitting upon. He opens on the page where he wrote his first confession in five hundred years and wets the painting of God with tears.
It is a war to silence the voice in his head that insists heās being disillusioned, and which sounds so much like brother Joseph, and Santino, and himself.
But devotion wins over and he silences it.Andrei kneels, and does what Armand might have thought impossible.
He prays.
He prays from his heart that the Lord might forgive him and grant him this one, selfish, request: that Marius might be alive. That he might do the impossible again, and come back to him, even if it takes another five hundred years. Andrei prays that his father might have survived, and that they might meet again, in His grace.
Lord, forgive me for my transgressions and let me see my father once more.
