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@karls_revenge on twt

[nicki-de-lenfent]

Nickistat chibis!!!

These are based off of a rp that me and @leliodevalois are doing right now with their Lestat being part of a monastery and my Nicki as a practicing folk catholic !

Reblogs okay!

🚫🚫🚫DO NOT REPOST🚫🚫🚫

This is art done by GrieveGarden on twit

[kmcgeijyutsuka]

Nicolas de Lenfent

Vampire Chronicles Inktober Day 3 - Musician

Prompt List: https://asssamuraikoujaku.tumblr.com/post/187841809337/inktober-vampire-chronicles-edition-i-decided-to

[souryam]

He was with his family watching the bonfire. And as soon as he saw me, he threw his arm around my neck, and I hooked my arm around his waist and I dragged him away from the crowds and the blaze, and towards the end of the meadow.

[leslutdepointedulac]

Just had the thought of Nicki catching sight of himself in a mirror during his TdV years and suddenly being hit with this feeling that he doesn't recognise the thing in the reflection staring back at him.

The hair is mussed and doesn't seem to want to stay in its ribbon. It's unruly, untamed, unkempt, neglected in its tangled state which refuses to let itself be held back in a loose, frail bow.

The eyes appear more amber than brown, wolfish almost and too bright when they catch the light, revealing something that borders on animalistic in their intense, predatory stare, and always, always tinged with an edge of something so deeply troubled, haunted almost, and hopelessly lost.

The skin is too pale, the colour drained, leaving behind a tight sheet pulled over this deadened form. The bones make the jaw and cheekbones look more angular than normal and the eyes seem slightly sunken and tired. Startling blue veins stand out garishly against the cold, hardened skin, though there's no life running hot beneath the surface, no steady pulse thrumming in those heightened ears, only a skipping thud every so often to serve as a chilling reminder that this body isn't as lifeless as it would appear.

The clothes are skewed and rumpled after several nights of wear, the cuffs stained with black blotches of ink and a patch of deep, crusted red tarnishes the white collar, spilt down onto the shirt in scarlet drops.

As he stares at this thing in the reflection, the lips pull back in a vicious sneer to reveal the two small, though undoubtedly deadly sharpened canines. It's a final reminder of something unnatural, this unholy creature in the mirror baring its teeth in a threatening expression, as if daring him to take a step closer.

The image suddenly shifts to something panicked and Nicki finds himself reeling back, the creature mirroring his action and retreating further away until the wall behind them stops them dead in their tracks.

He realises it looks just as afraid as he feels, suddenly overcome with a rush of fear with the questioning of where this thing has come from. How long has it lurked in his reflection, watching him with only a sheet of glass to separate them?

With his back against the wall, Nicki stares at the mirror, taking in the wide eyes full of panic and terror, how it presses itself back into the stone surface with its chest heaving in shortened breaths, pulse skipping frantically beneath the dirtied shirt.

As they watch each other fearfully, something begins to slowly reveal itself in the reflection; a boy, scared of monsters prowling in the dark, scared of what might come out and take him. What did take him.

Gone is the boy who abandoned his father's dream of becoming a successful lawyer, so he could instead follow a life of passion and creativity. Gone is the boy who left it all behind with his dream in one hand and his light in the other. Gone is the boy who loved and lost, hated and grieved. That boy is dead, his father's favourite son is no more and in his place stands this shell, an empty reminder of what was and what could have been.

Nicki looks at his reflection as it blurs and a pinkish-tinted film covers his eyes. He stares at himself despairingly, trying to understand how long he's been living as a ghost in his own life.

A dreadful doubt comes over him and an ugly expression twists the face of his mirror-image, as he snarls at himself hatefully. The light of the nearby candles show the painful loathing that flashes in his gaze and he reveals his fangs once more, as if forcing himself to confront the reality of his existence.

He pushes himself away from the wall and lunges at the mirror, grabbing it and pulling it from where it hangs on the wall, before throwing it to the ground with a cry.

The broken pieces lay shattered at his feet, reflecting his fractured image back at him. He stands there, unable to look away as he trembles, the mirror, at last, showing him his true-self.

Blood drips down onto the glass fragments, finally bringing some colour to his lifeless skin as it slips down his cheeks. He sinks down to the ground, kneeling in the shards with no care for the sharp pain biting at his knees.

The room is still and silent, the only sound coming from somewhere in the theatre – the dull thud of footsteps making their way to Nicki's room. He pays no mind to it, though, doesn't even hear the frantic voices approaching from down the corridor, just stays kneeling and staring blankly at his broken image with red tinged eyes.

[fighto-art]

Had a crying session working on Nickistat for the Six of Swords card

Take a look over on Instagram @ iwtvtarot for more amazing cards

[only-the-impossible]

nicki’s a messy eater. someone get this guy a bib, my god.

accidentally got carried away with the shading and such on what was supposed to just be a little warm up doodle whoops

[lourocarmim]

The bird sailing on through the darkness over the barren shore, the seamless sea.

HUGE thanks to @yun-lii for helping me design the stained glass (te amo minha flor) + alt version under the cut!

[movermort]

reference

[dxxtruction]

light and beauty come together in you in a thousand different patterns

[savagewilderness]

So much joy even in misery, even in the misery-the real eternity, the real forever-the mortal mystery of that…

I was chatting with @itiireae about how joy and pain are entwined for Nicolas de Lenfent, and I thought… maybe let’s make a little post chatting about it?

Caveat that all this is only as I understand/interpret it!  If you feel differently, I’m really curious to hear your thoughts.

A little bit of context of a few examples from Anne Rice’s words before we begin…

Just before Lestat turns Nicolas in The Vampire Lestat, he sees in Nicki’s mind… “…There had been the eternity of growing up and growing old before us, and so much joy even in misery, even in the misery-the real eternity, the real forever-the mortal mystery of that…”

Lestat says to Louis in Blood Communion, “Seemed all the little victories of life and life after death were so hard for him, happiness was so hard for him [Nicolas]… joy was an agony I think…”

After Nicki’s death, Lestat imagines Nicolas saying to him, "I am beyond all pain and sin…”

So, for Nicolas, how are joy and pain entwined?

I think, for Nicki, to feel joy at all is to sin.  Everything that brings him happiness is bound up with guilt and unworthiness and he feels he doesn’t deserve it in the first place.  To feel loved by Lestat is to sin, to play violin is to sin, to actively seek his own desires is sin.  All of it feels like transgression.  Even his body’s delight is, to him, proof of his own corruption.

Lestat also thinks upon what Nicolas might believe, which I presume links to Anne Rice’s thinking regarding Nicki’s psychology… “Beauty was a Savage Garden. So why must it wound him that the most despairing music is full of beauty? Why must it hurt him and make him cynical and sad and untrusting? Good and evil, those are concepts man has made. And man is better, really, than the Savage Garden. But maybe deep inside Nicki had always dreamed of a harmony among all things that I had always known was impossible. Nicki had dreamed not of goodness, but of justice.”

I think Nicolas’ experience of joy and pain is sewn into how he seeks justice and truth as well.  He sees his own evil not as question, but fact.  But there is still objective honesty and justice.  The closest Nicki can get to goodness is that he clings to absolute truth and justice.  However, rather than offering a path to goodness, this belief only provides a lens through which Nicki is forced to condemn himself even more thoroughly.  He already knows he cannot be good, as he sins against God, against his family… but now truth and justice are absolute and so the sin of his desire, his joy is also an absolute certainty.  Justice is the only “goodness” left to him.  But he refuses to lie, even to himself, and when he judges himself on a scale of absolute justice, he is always guilty.

That’s why he can’t ever feel joy simply for what it is.  It’s always shadowed by the conviction that it’s wrong for him to have it.  And that belief threads through him, right to his core.  Part of its origin is his religious upbringing, and his family’s expectations… and then also - his nature, and his own self-perception.  Because when we take it further, Nicki is a thinker, and yet in the eyes of family and religion, to be good is not to think, but to obey.  Nicki does not obey, therefore he sins.  (Lestat on the other hand never believed that to obey was good, and he can’t really conceive of this deep-seated truth as Nicolas knows it.  To Lestat, this perception is simply false.  But to Nicolas, it is true.)

For Nicki, to feel joy or pleasure is to transgress.  So his heart, or his body feeling joy is confirmation of his own damnation.  And he feels he ought to be indicted for it, struck down by the cosmic hand of Absolute Justice.

Now, I don’t think Nicki cares at all about being good.  But that’s because he feels inherently he is evil and he’s accepted that.  I think Nicki doesn’t feel he could be good.  Or, at least, the only way Nicolas feels he could be good would be a complete negation of the self.  Nicki feels he would be good if he followed exactly what God and his family tell him he should be, if he denied his desires and did exactly what God, his family and society expected of him.  And Nicki rejects that, he doesn’t even want to do it.  To him, he isn’t just bad, he is actively evil, intentionally rejecting the only possibilities he had to be good.

And I feel like when Lestat idealises goodness, Nicki internally feels something like, “Yes - you are good Lestat.  You only bring light to others.  You bring light to me.  But I bring only darkness.  I am not good.  I cannot be good.  I do not even want to be good.  So when you bring everything you care about and feel from back to it being about “goodness”, if you knew the truth of me, you would despise me.”  Nicki feels what Lestat says deeply, because it is true of Lestat. He knows Lestat brings light and goodness to the world, just as surely as he is convinced of his own evil.  But if anything, Lestat talking of it only illuminates Nicki’s own darkness and wrongness.

Nicki says, “If goodness does exist, then I'm the opposite of it. I’m evil and I revel in it. I thumb my nose at goodness.  And if you must know, I don't play the violin for the idiots who come to Renaud's to make them happy. I play it for me, for Nicolas.”  Here, Nicki is saying very plainly that if he plays violin for himself, it means he is evil.  That’s what he believes.  That’s what he feels.  He doesn’t call himself self-indulgent, or selfish - he calls himself evil.  It’s an extreme, self-punishing perspective.

And of course, it makes love unbearable.  Because if goodness is what Lestat values more than anything, and Nicki knows himself to be evil, then Lestat’s love also confirms his unworthiness.  Nicki must feel like he cannot be loved.  He is not good like Lestat is always saying he values.  And then Nicki then quantifies that belief even further, insisting not only on deeming himself evil, but on absolute justice and truth… so now, he is, by his own judgment both evil and bad, and it is an immutable, true fact.

Either Lestat doesn’t really know him and he has somehow tricked Lestat into it, or Lestat’s love cannot be “true” because he knows he is not good.  Therefore, Lestat’s love must be either false or mistaken.  Lestat's love becomes painful, because Lestat values goodness above all - and Nicki knows that everything he is stands in opposition to that. To be loved, then, is to be misunderstood; and if Lestat does see him truly, then it means Lestat has joined him in sin.  That’s the only way the love can make sense to him.  

And here we get into thorny territory… because Nicolas has had enough experience of the world to see that all (or almost all) humans are hypocrites, who, if he judges them by his personal unbending scale are sinners too.  So “if goodness does exist”… in Nicolas’ conception, goodness could exist, but it would require being almost saintly, a literal martyr, I think.  Although the extremity of the concept is almost irrelevant to his experience of reality and real people anyway, I’d say…

And, ironically, Nicki then hurts Lestat deeply by stating these beliefs, and so becomes confirmation of the evil he has already condemned himself as… To slip into Lestat’s perspective, of course, Nicolas saying that they are partners in sin, or that what they do is sin, not goodness, feels as though Nicolas is intentionally diminishing something Lestat literally holds to be sacred.

So I think Nicki never feels joy simply for itself.  It is always accompanied by a deep knowledge that his joy is sin that he is utterly unworthy of, and he feels accused (And he is accused!  By himself!) at the same time he is feeling joy.  And so any joy is pain and his body as much as his mind and heart is, I imagine, uncertain whether to feel it or reject it, and so it does both at the same time, like a strange torture.

Nicolas never believed joy belonged to him.  And its transience only confirms what he already knew: joy was never his to keep, he was sinful to allow himself to even feel it for a moment… and so, even in that first instant of joy, pain has already begun.  And when joy fades, he is left with the penance he always knew must be meted out to him.

For Nicolas, joy and pain are never opposites. They are the same sensation, distorted through guilt and fixed by unbending truth. 

To feel joy is to sin; to sin is to suffer; and to suffer is, at last, the only way he can still feel alive.

Is the suffering worth it?

Well… he tries…

I would say, he tries.

So much joy even in misery…

[e-yokai]

Time will pass and you'll forget everything that happened

With you and me…

No, I'm not waiting for you… but know that I loved.

For the last time.

Todas las promesas de mi amor se irán contigo.

Me olvidarás. Me olvidarás.

[ratcarney]

nicolas // icarus

[miraculan-draws]

my dude Nick is really just osculating wildly between The Ennui and The Horrors, can't wait to see more of his miserable French ass on my screen

[miraculan-draws]

that part in TVL where it goes from the horrible alarming kidnap-pervy-vampire-turning to the refreshing discovery of a chill ass horse that is apparently not even a little scared of vampires and is very tolerant of being snuggled by a dude absolutely fuckin ROLLING on New Vamp Juice

[miraculan-draws]

STILL thinking about "The Vampire Lestat" and our young violinist(s)

[miraculan-draws]

When you get kidnapped by vampires and then it turns out the recent strain on your already strained relationship was because your boyfriend got turned into a vampire and didn't want you to know about it, thus leaving you vulnerable to rival vampire kidnappings

[only-the-impossible]

Miss Bush can’t have an album called ‘Hounds of Love’ and expect me to NOT slap Lestat on there, it’s like his destiny💜