Still a lot of speculation going on and it's only 3am in China as of right now but someone said this
The LaDS posters have been removed from the paper games building as well. With government involvement it could still go either way. Now we're waiting on the fate of all our boys not just Valko.
According to our Chinese friend in discord we're doing this the right way, the emails, the petitions, the hashtags.
We are Not going to freak out and we are Not going to resort to bullying. Rn all we can do is what we've been doing and wait.
Most importantly take care of yourselves! Drink some water, maybe log off the internet for a bit, rest. It's late in China and we won't know anything more for at least a few hours.
It deeply saddens me that Infold has decided to cancel Valko's debut. They have already deleted his stuff off many platforms, so I've download them all and put them on a drive folder so that other fans can access it.
Tech billionaires want to force data centers on us with little to no regard for water usage, energy price spikes, environmental harms, or basic democratic decision-making. We must rein in AI before it's too late.
What did Bryke say about Katara and ships? Sorry, I’m relatively new to the ATLA fandom so I don’t know much about the discourse.
No need to apologize! There are a lot of new fans and a lot of people who simply wouldn’t have been aware of things like videos showed at cons over a decade ago, so it’s a very valid question!
If you go to youtube and search ‘avatar book 4 air sdcc’ (I say this bc tumblr is shitty with links in posts), what will come up is a video that Bryke (the atla showrunners, Michael and Bryan) showed at San Diego Comic Con in 2008, after book 3 aired. The video is made up of a bunch of fanart they were sent over the years by fans who loved their show--a lot of those fans being pre-teen and teenage girls--and they used this fanart to relentlessly mock a huge chunk of their own fanbase for nearly three minutes, in particular the ones who sent them that fanart in the first place. They not only mocked Zuko and Katara as characters and the relationship they would have (nothing they had the characters say in the video was remotely in character, given their relationship at the end of the show), but they mocked everyone who shipped it.
Specifically, they had ‘Sokka’ (aka someone’s fanart of Sokka) say ‘Women who ship zutara will forever have doomed relationships.’ And then they had a word graphic that said ‘Thanks for all the fanart over the years!’ Except then ‘all’ was crossed out and replaced with ‘some’, and then ‘some’ crossed out and replaced with ‘most’, to raucous laughter and applause. Because of course, they were thankful for art that hadn’t come from girls who dared to ship something they didn’t like lmfao.
(They also threw in a slut-shaming potshot at Tokka shippers for good measure. Because the video wasn’t gross enough.)
These grown men decided to take fanart sent to them by young fans of their show and use it to mock and belittle them, and then claim that everyone, specifically women, who shipped something they didn’t like would have ‘doomed relationships’. Four years later, Bryan shared this video on his tumblr, along with a transcript of the definition of the word ‘joke’, as if being a joke somehow takes away from the fact that he was mocking his own fanbase with grossly misogynistic rhetoric and expecting other people to laugh along with him.
So yeah. That’s why a lot of us hate Bryke as people, quite apart from being pissed at their crappy writing decisions. Not only did they laugh at a big portion of their fanbase, they encouraged the rest of the fandom to join in, essentially declaring open season on zutara shippers by the entire rest of the fanbase. I won’t say this is single-handedly the reason for the atla fandom’s overall toxicity, but it was definitely a contributing factor.
Text of tweet under the cut because it is loooong.
But... Stochastic Parrots.
Timnit Gebru was fired from Google in December 2020 for refusing to retract a research paper, and every single warning that paper made about large language models has now happened at a scale the industry spent 4 years trying to make people forget about.
Her name is Timnit Gebru.
She co-led the Ethical AI team at Google. She co-wrote a paper called "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots" with Emily Bender at the University of Washington and two other researchers. The paper was 14 pages long. It was submitted to a top AI ethics conference. And it was the reason Google decided that one of the most senior Black women in AI research could no longer work there.
The story Google told publicly was that she resigned. The story she told, confirmed by 2,695 of her colleagues in an open letter, was that she was fired by email while on vacation because she refused to either retract the paper or remove her name from it.
The paper had not even been published yet.
Here is what she actually wrote, and why every prediction inside it has now come true.
The first warning was about scale itself. Bender and Gebru argued that training ever-larger models on ever-larger scrapes of the internet would produce systems that appeared fluent but had no actual understanding of language. They called these systems stochastic parrots because they would repeat patterns from training data with statistical confidence and zero comprehension. The paper predicted that this apparent intelligence would fool both users and developers into trusting outputs that were structurally incapable of being reliable.
This was 2020. GPT-3 had just come out. The paper predicted the hallucination problem before anyone had a word for it.
The second warning was about bias amplification. The paper documented in detail that internet-scale training data contains systematic overrepresentation of dominant viewpoints and underrepresentation of marginalized ones. The models would not just absorb this bias. They would amplify it, because the optimization process rewards confident outputs, and confidence in language patterns tracks frequency in the training set.
The prediction was that hiring tools built on these models would discriminate against women. That healthcare triage tools would underperform on Black patients. That loan approval systems would entrench inequality while presenting their decisions as neutral algorithmic judgment.
Every one of those things has now been documented in deployment.
Amazon's hiring algorithm penalized resumes that contained the word "women" in any context. Healthcare risk scoring algorithms used by major US hospitals were found to systematically underestimate the medical needs of Black patients. Apple Card's credit algorithm gave wives credit lines 10x lower than their husbands for the same financial profile.
The third warning was about environmental cost. The paper calculated that training a single large language model produced emissions equivalent to the lifetime output of 5 cars. The prediction was that the race to scale would create an environmental footprint that would eventually rival entire industries.
In 2024, Google's emissions were up 48% from 2019, and the company explicitly blamed AI infrastructure. Microsoft's were up 29%, same reason. Both companies have now quietly abandoned the climate commitments they were publicly celebrating the year Gebru was fired.
The fourth warning was about documentation. The paper argued that the training datasets being assembled were too large for anyone to actually audit. Nobody at Google, OpenAI, Meta, or any other lab could tell you with confidence what was in the data their models were trained on. This was not a temporary problem to be solved later. It was a permanent feature of the approach.
In 2023, researchers discovered that the LAION-5B dataset, used to train Stable Diffusion and other major image models, contained thousands of images of child sexual abuse material. The companies that had trained on the dataset had no way of knowing. The paper predicted that category of failure 3 years before it was found.
The fifth warning was the one Google cared about most.
Bender and Gebru argued that the deployment of these systems would centralize linguistic and cultural power in the hands of the small number of companies that could afford to train them. The internet would become a place where the dominant voice was a statistical average of dominant voices, presented as a neutral assistant. Languages underrepresented in the training data would degrade over time as more web content was generated by these systems and fed back into the next training run.
This is now happening in real time. A 2024 study found that 57% of new web content in English is AI-generated or AI-assisted. Researchers studying low-resource languages have documented active degradation in translation quality, because the synthetic content fed back into training is itself worse in those languages.
The paper Google fired her for predicted the model collapse problem before model collapse had a name.
The mechanism behind why this all happened is the part of her work that nobody quotes.
Gebru's argument was not that AI is dangerous in some abstract sci-fi sense. Her argument was that AI is dangerous in a very specific structural sense. The technology was being built by a small group of researchers who shared similar backgrounds, worked at similar companies, and were rewarded for shipping products faster than competitors. The incentive structure made it impossible for safety, ethics, and bias concerns to slow anything down. Anyone inside the system who raised those concerns was either ignored, sidelined, or removed.
She was making that argument from inside Google.
Then Google proved her right by removing her.
The team Google had built to make sure their AI was safe was dismantled in 90 days because they did the job they had been hired to do. Margaret Mitchell, the other co-lead of the Ethical AI team, was fired two months after Gebru for searching through her own emails for evidence of how Gebru had been treated.
Gebru did not stop. She founded DAIR, the Distributed AI Research Institute, in 2021. The mission is to do AI research outside the control of the companies that have a financial interest in not hearing the answers.
Every prediction in the Stochastic Parrots paper has now been validated by deployment. Hallucinations are an industry-wide problem the largest labs cannot solve. Bias amplification has been documented in hiring, healthcare, lending, and criminal justice. Environmental costs are larger than entire small countries. Training data audits remain impossible. Model collapse is an active research crisis at every major lab.
The question worth sitting with is the one almost no one in the industry will say out loud.
Every researcher with the technical credibility to call out these problems watched what happened to her in December 2020 and made a calculation about their own career. The number of people willing to speak publicly about safety and ethics issues inside the major AI labs collapsed after that firing and has not recovered.
The researcher Google fired for warning about exactly what is now happening was right.
The company that fired her is now the second-largest deployer of the technology she warned about.
And the people inside that company who agree with her are not allowed to say so.
“how to recognize AI in fanfic” — hey so this is another not-gentle reminder that AI stole from us. it’s using OUR words and OUR sentences and OUR styles.
writing “long” paragraphs is not a sign of AI — it’s a common narrative choice many writers make both in fanfiction and in traditionally published novels, and AI stole it from us.
using an em dash is not a sign of AI. it’s a stylistic sentence choice that’s been an option in place of commas and semicolons for a very long time, and AI stole it from us.
long sentence structures are not a sign of AI, but are yet another stylistic choice writers often make to create a cadence and tone that mimics the flow of poetry, and AI stole it from us.
“YA narrative breaks”? i don’t even know what the fuck this means, but i can guarantee that AI stole it from us.
italics are once again a stylistic choice that many writers love to use to create emphasis, and it’s a more stylistically acceptable and traditional form of emphasis than bold or underline text. oh, and just to be extra clear: AI STOLE IT FROM US.
stop creating fandom witch hunts over AI when you know fuck all about what it means to sit and write a story, and to spend hours fiddling with sentence structure and dialogue to get the exact right tone. writers will stop writing out of fear that their work “sounds like AI” — IT DOESNT! AI STOLE FROM US! AI SOUNDS LIKE US! — and after a while, all that will be available on AO3 is shitty AI-generated fanfiction.
because yeah, people are going to continue to use AI to write fanfiction whether you “call them out” or not. but making a laughable thread on X that uses asinine criteria is not going to fix that problem. it will just push the real writers out because people will accuse them of using AI when they haven’t, and they will (rightfully) stop writing for spaces that attack them.
[ID: "Cold weather reminder. Do NOT plug space heaters into power strips or extension cords. Plug space heaters directly into the wall outlet. Power strips are not designed to handle the high current flow required by a space heater and can overheat causing a fire."
A photo is attached of a power strip with an extremely charred end. Part of the power strip's wire is also charred. End ID]
For clarification's sake, is this true everywhere? I ask because I know that different countries have different quality home electricity provision; American home electricity Ain't Great compared with most of Europe, for example. In Wales I have never heard of this being a Thing, but our electricity comes in 240V flavour, so possibly the higher current naturally avoids this issue?
My British husband (not an electrician but electrician-adjacent) says yes this is true in the UK as well - anything that uses a lot of power should be plugged directly into the wall rather than an extension lead
⚠️CN girls are advising the rest of the global lads server to not upload any parts of the card, ESPECIALLY THE KINDLED SCENES.⚠️
Seeing as this banner is definitely going to be steps bolder than Nightly Rendezvous, the minute you pull all the cards you want, immediately screen record them and keep those to yourselves. Share it with your mutuals the old fashioned way through DMs if needed but please do not upload the uncensored kindled parts to social media. There are incels who will use this as an excuse to get this content reported and censorship to be even tighter on this game, if it already hasn’t with the fact that even the abstract word animations and stick figures have already gotten striked with sensitive content warnings.
Tumblr is no stranger to this behavior either. After the nsfw purge of 2018, I’ve seen people I follow and mutuals get hit with sensitive content warnings on things posted or even reblogged. It’s understandable that the lads fandom has their own differences and opinions and that’s fine. But for the sake of getting the chance to see more future content like this, I just hope everyone can agree on this one thing.
(I don’t want to start any discourse either, it’s just a reminder before the multibanner is unlocked for the NA and EU servers.)
It's a variant of the all so infamous I reported your account scam that's been around for a while.
What you should do?
Report them and block them. Make sure to also spread awareness.
Do not waste your time messing with them as it makes it easier for them to still find potential victims. The more people who are aware of this and report these users, the better.
For the sake of spreading awareness I am tagging @scam-alerts and @ai-art-thieves
You can prevent scams from spreading and claiming new victims.
So not only did [tumblr] put up that big image 3 weeks ago:
I'd assume they would hope and expect that people would go looking to make sure that something is/isn't real or a scam or not before they fall for it.
I've been seeing "why isn't staff addressing this issue" related comments in various posts in communities, as well as more posts in various tags like #scam and #scams with people getting hacked.
Staff has done all they can I'd say to make people aware of this on a public level. There should be (and I stress should) some amount of common sense that you should never change your email or password for anyone, no matter who they say they are, or what popular company they claim to be from if they tell you to use a off platform chat program.
Even online you need to treat your usernames, emails, and passwords no different than you'd treat your bank details. If you wouldn't give it to a stranger who calls you saying "there was a problem with your bank and I need your card number and the 3 digits", why would you change your email and password for a stranger online?
I can't stress this enough:
[tumblr] staff will only contact you via their official email. They will not tell another user to contact you, and then have you contact a "staff member" via a website, email, or discord.
That is a huge red flag that it is a scam.
[tumblr] staff will not threaten you that your account will be terminated within x hours if you don't follow their instructions aka change your email or password to one they give you.
[tumblr] staff will not threaten to contact law enforcement or the FBI on you for 'fraudulent transactions/scamming/violations/ect' that happened on your account if you don't do as they say.
[tumblr] staff will not ask you for money to resolve issues or to return your account to you after it was taken from you. That is blackmail. Do not pay this money.
Anyone and everyone who tells you to do those things is a scammer.
Report these accounts to tumblr and report them to discord.
Please stay safe and try to avoid getting scams.
The people who contact you saying these things have had their own accounts stolen by these scammers and extorters.
Here is an example of how this scam looks and starts.
Here is another example of how this scam looks.
Here is a general idea of what the discord interaction looks like.
This scam is the same scam that started on Steam, check it out!
Nearly everything with it is identical.
Out of the blue, a Steam user tells you they've reported you for something you didn’t do, and your account is being suspended...
you know what, fuck it be free, keep reading that bad fan fiction, keep writing that bad fanfiction, keep using y/n, keep staying up to 4 a.m reading x reader, to be cringe is too be free
Summary: After ruling solo, the council asks her to find a consort. Invoking an ancient decree, she agrees to the "Long Season", a few months long vetting process where the most distinguished men in their lands are summoned to the palace by the queen herself after much deliberation.
Rules are set in place, so the events retain its purity, as well as for protection, rules designed to keep her suitors as a distance.Enter the suitors, Caleb, Zayne, Xavier, Rafayel who play by the rules as best they can and then, Sylus, who moves in his own, particular way.
As the lines blur, she must decide if she wants a King who will stand guard over her cage, or a monster who will help her break the bars she hates.
AU Sylus/MC story with Sylus's usual bantering behavior and snark as well as the others. It's a fun game of trying to keep the queen contained and away from the shadows they mistakenly keep pushing her toward.
Will have 14 chapters total (posted two per post), all fully written already, just waiting for posts.
English is not my main language, so I apologize if mistakes remained after I edited a chapter, sometimes I miss some stuff no matter how hard I try.
There's really not gonna be any full angst on this one, just a lot of defiance, secrets, banter and scheming
Prev chapters
1&2
Chapters 3&4 below
Chapter 3-Dying of thirst on a fountain
The routine of the Long Season settled over the palace like a suffocating velvet shroud. It was a masterpiece of organized boredom, a symphony of "protection" that treated me like a fragile porcelain doll rather than the woman who had tasted salt and iron on the battlefield. The Council was delighted; I was dying, because I was the Queen, but I was also a woman.
Every morning, at the stroke of six, the heavy oak doors of my bedchamber would groan open, not for my ladies, but for Colonel Caleb. He took his role as the "Primary Shield" with a grim, agonizing devotion that was as impressive as it was exhausting.
"The perimeter is secure. But the heart of the palace is too soft," he’d say, his voice a gravelly warmth that reminded me of summer rains and childhood scraped knees.
He was fascinating, a man of iron will who could command a thousand men with a single look. In the field, I had seen him fierce and untamed, but here, he was a statue of decorum. As we spent hours walking the Western Ramparts, the wind whipping off the sea and tugging at my robes, his focus was a cage of etiquette. He stayed exactly six inches to my left, his hand never leaving the hilt of his broadsword. He didn't ask what I dreamt of or if I was happy. Instead, he talked of the frontier with a weary, noble weight.
"The Southern Lords are complaining about the tax on iron. We need to reinforce the garrison at Highpoint," he’d say, his eyes scanning the horizon for threats that weren't there. "I’ve seen the reports. The men are tired, but they’ll hold the line for you. They know you’re the only thing keeping the chaos at bay."
He talked about the kingdom as if it were a machine that needed constant oiling, and I was merely the most important gear. He spoke of the simple life we once dreamed of when we were children, a life of "safety", but his version of safety felt like a sarcophagus.
"You're drifting" he whispered one afternoon as the wind whipped his cloak around us. He looked at me with those eyes, so full of a pained, protective heat that it made my chest ache. "I see you looking at the dark corners of the map. Don't go searching for storms when I’ve spent my life building you a harbor. It is my honor to ensure you never have to feel the spray of the salt again."
"I want to fight, Colonel Caleb. I am not just a queen. I don't want to be safe. I want to feel alive"
He stayed silent and reached out to steady me as the wind gusted, his fingers ghosting over my elbow but never making contact. He pulled back instantly, bowing his head in a display of perfect, maddening chivalry. He was following that cursed rule of distance with a discipline that made me want to scream. He wanted to ground me, to bury me in the soil of "duty" until I forgot I had wings. He was the perfect protector, but he was protecting the crown, while the woman beneath it was starving for a real connection.
By sunset, every day, that time with Colonel Caleb was replaced by moments with Prince Xavier would wait for me at the base of the Spiral Staircase, his light illuminating the damp stone like a fallen star.He was beauty and serenity personified, a sanctuary where the blood-stained history of Bloomshore felt like a distant, bad dream.
"The world is too loud, isn't it?" he’d ask, his voice a soft melody that seemed to hum in the very marrow of my bones.
In the High Observatory, we sat amidst brass telescopes and ancient star-charts. He didn't talk of iron taxes or garrison fatigue. He talked of the "Weaver," the constellation that supposedly dictated the fates of queens. He would sit on the floor at my feet, a position of total submission that felt, paradoxically, like a throne.
He was a genius of the spheres, his mind moving through dimensions I couldn't grasp, yet he stayed strictly within the bounds of the "Chaste Law."
"They want to cage you in the past," he murmured, his azure eyes reflecting the nebula we were tracking. "But you were made of light. You belong to the infinite. A Queen’s true duty is to the harmony of the spheres, not the squabbles of men."
He was so pure, so holy, that I felt like a sinner just sitting beside him. He offered a love that was a prayer, a sanctuary where I could pretend the crown didn't exist. He was safe. So incredibly, perfectly safe. But every time I looked at his serene face, a part of me felt... heavy.
"I'm not a delicate flower, Prince Xavier, I am neither perfect nor gentle, the squabbles of men do not scare me."
Prince Xavier was brilliant, but he treated me with such reverence that it felt like he was worshipping a ghost. He never reached for my hand; he only gestured to the stars. I wanted to feel the friction of the world, not just the cold, distant glow of it.
Days into of this routine, I was suffocating. Between Colonel Caleb’s walls and Prince Xavier’s clouds, there was no room for me, ever. No room to actually get to know them, they stayed in their perfectly crafted and planned circles, and it was exhausting.
I feigned fatigue and left for my chambers, and when the clock struck midnight, I fled my chambers, my bare feet silent on the cold marble, seeking the scent of old ink and the comfort of shadows in the Great Library.
The library was a labyrinth of mahogany stacks and ancient secrets. I was reaching for a text on Ancient Transmutation, hoping to find some intellectual fire to warm my numb soul, when a hand, larger, rougher, and radiating a heat that made the air shimmer reached over my head and plucked the book from the shelf.
"Looking for a way to change lead into gold, or just a way to change your life into something that doesn't put you to sleep?"
Lord Sylus.
He was leaning against the shelves, his black leather vest half unzipped to reveal the hard, scarred planes of his chest. The scent of cherries and expensive leather hit me like a physical blow. He wasn't supposed to be here. He was supposed to be in the guest wing, under Doctor Zayne’s "watchful" clinical eye.
"The stars didn't tell you I was here, My Queen?" he purred, his voice a low, vibrating rasp that made my stomach do a slow, dizzying flip.
"You’re trespassing, Lord Sylus," I breathed, trying to ignore how his presence seemed to suck all the air out of the room. "Colonel Caleb has guards on every floor."
"Caleb has children in tin suits," Lord Sylus mocked, tossing the heavy book into the air and catching it with a rhythmic thud. He didn't follow the six-inch rule. He followed the rule of the predator. He stepped so close that the heat of his body began to melt the chill in my bones. "I’ve been watching you all week. Watching the soldier bore you with his dirt and the prince preach at you with his stars. You look like you’re dying of thirst on a fountain."
I should have called the guards. I should have been outraged. Instead, I found myself leaning against the shelves, my heart dancing a frantic fandango, betraying me.
"And I suppose the Lord that's known also as a mercenary has a better alternative? More war? More chaos?"
He barked out a laugh, a low, vibrating rasp that was the most honest thing I’d heard in days.
"Chaos is just what the boring people call a good time. Tell me, My Queen, does the soldier boy ever tell you that your scent is delightful and intoxicating, that your hair looks like silk in the moonlight, or does he only talk about how many bushels of grain the Southern Lords are hoarding?"
I felt a treacherous tug of amusement at my lips.
"He... cares about the stability of the realm."
"He's boring," he countered, stepping even closer, his crimson eyes glowing with a wicked mirth. "And the twinkle star? Does he ever stop talking about the 'Weaver' long enough to notice that you're clenching your jaw so hard you're likely to crack a tooth?"
He started imitating Prince Xavier’s soft, airy voice: "'Oh, the nebula is so vast, almost as vast as my lack of a personality...'"
I bit my lip, trying to stay regal, but a short, sharp laugh escaped me. It felt like breaking a fever.
"That is... incredibly disrespectful."
"It's accurate," he grinned, his eyes flashing in the dark. "They're so busy protecting the 'Queen' that they’ve forgotten there’s a woman inside that silk dress who actually wants to live. They treat you like a piece of glass. I’d rather treat you like the storm I know you are."
He was right, of course, but I'd never tell him. The men were all playing right into the role the council wants them to play. They were not showing me their real sides, just the perfect, manicured side they show everyone, none of those sides I saw as I watched them before.
"Come, let's sit" he said, breaking me out of my thoughts.
I could've left, but instead, I followed and sat beside him.
We stayed there for what felt like hours, hidden in the stacks. He told me ridiculous, dark stories of his time in Onychinus, of Luke and Kieran getting into a brawl over a meat pie, of the "terrible" poetry his men tried to write. He made me laugh until my sides ached, a rhythmic, deep laughter that I hadn't felt since before my father died. He didn't talk about my duty. He talked about me.
But as the clock struck three, the mood shifted. As the candles flickered low, his gaze darkened. The banter died, replaced by a heat that made the room feel far too small.
"I suppose Your Majesty really should go to bed now," he murmured, his voice dropping to a seductive growl. "Before I forget that I’m supposed to be an 'ally'."
He didn't move away. Instead, he stepped closer, his first true violation. He reached out, his gloved fingers sliding into my hair to tuck a loose strand behind my ear. But his hand didn't leave. He let his fingers slide down the column of my neck, his thumb grazing the sensitive skin beneath my ear in a slow, deliberate caress.
"Lord Sylus... stop," I whispered, but I didn't move.
"Make me," he challenged, his eyes glowing with a wicked shimmer.
He leaned in until our lips were a hair’s breadth apart, the ultimate tease, a rhythmic torture that made my head swim. Just as I thought he would break the rules fully, he took a deep breath like he was breathing me in and pulled back with a slow, triumphant smirk.
"Truly delightful scent...Now,enjoy your 'protection' tomorrow" he whispered. "I’ll be in your dreams. And trust me... the Chaste Laws don't apply there."
I gasped as He vanished into the stacks just as the heavy tread of Colonel Caleb’s boots echoed in the hallway. I stood there, my skin humming at the mere memory of his closeness before I went back to my chambers and tried my best to get him out of my mind, or this was going to be a very Long Season.
Chapter 4-Make a wish.
The War of the Senses began the very next afternoon, as inexorably as winter turning to spring. If the first half of the Long Season had been a battle waged in the soul, poetry against prophecy, duty against destiny, the second half belonged to the body. To flesh and breath and the dangerous alchemy of want. The men who believed they knew best how to manage it circled me like physicians, artists, and conquerors all at once, each convinced his prescription was the only cure for a queen who refused to remain neatly contained.
Doctor Zayne took over my afternoons in the Royal Conservatory.
The Conservatory itself was a glass-domed sanctuary perched on the southern wing of the palace, where winter sunlight filtered through panes of pale aquamarine crystal and fell in fractured pools across marble floors veined with silver. Exotic plants from every corner of the realm thrived here under controlled conditions: frost orchids that bloomed only at midnight, flame lilies that required precisely calibrated heat, moonvine that wept luminous dew. He treated the entire Long Season like a medical emergency unfolding in slow motion
He would arrive exactly at the second chime after luncheon, white coat pristine, black hair still damp from the baths he insisted on taking before touching anything or anyone, associated with me. He never actually touched me outside of medical reasons,of course. That would have violated the Chaste Laws in a way even he could not rationalize away with science.
"Your cortisol levels are spiking. Your pulse is erratic," he’d note, his green eyes dissecting me with a clinical, terrifying precision.
“Sit,” he would command, gesturing to the low stone table set beneath a canopy of hanging ivy. His voice was always calm, measured, the same tone he used when suturing a wound or diagnosing a fever. I obeyed because arguing with him when he was in diagnostic mode was like arguing with gravity. He served herbal teas that tasted of damp earth and discipline.
He was brilliant and dedicated, but for hours, he spoke of nothing but "kingdom-wide health initiatives" and "hormonal stabilization." He talked about the farmers’ life expectancy and the caloric intake of the infantry. H recited statistics the way other men recite poems. He was a master of the "non-touch." He would move around me, his white coat snapping, adjusting the temperature of the room with a flick of his wrist. He was a cooling balm, a man who believed that love was a form of stability.
"The artist is a distraction, a chaotic sensory overload. The mercenary is a toxin, a biological threat to your peace," he said one day, his hand lingering just inches from mine on the table. A thin layer of frost crept across the stone, a physical manifestation of his repressed territorialism. "I am here to ensure you don't break under the heat of their incompetence. You are the heart of this nation, my queen. You must remain in the ice. It’s the only place where you're safe from yourself."
"Does the ice have something underneath it" I challenged, removing my hand from the table just as his frost reached it "or is it merely an unmoving, uncaring, cold, hardened and boring piece of water?"
He looked at me with a pained, desperate hunger that he tried to hide behind "logic." He wanted to heal the parts of me that were starting to crave the fire, never realizing he was freezing me alive in the process.
Prince Rafayel was the antidote to Doctor Zayne’s ice. He dragged me to his ocean side Atelier, a riot of spilled pigments and crashing waves, but even there, the "person" I remained ignored in favor of the "masterpiece" I represented.
"The doctor is a bore! A mechanical man! He wants to turn your blood into slush!" he shouted, pacing like a caged panther. "He wants to turn you into a statue in a museum. I want to turn you into a masterpiece that the world will weep to behold!"
He made me sit for hours as he painted, talking endlessly about "the aesthetic necessity of a Royal Union" and how my face would look on the new coinage. He didn't touch me, but his gaze was a physical weight. He looked at my lips, my throat, the curve of my shoulder with a raw, artistic lust that made the air in the room feel heavy and humid.
"You’re changing," he murmured one afternoon, his eyes flashing. "There’s a new color in your aura. A dark, jagged purple. Someone is bruising your spirit. We need to focus on your 'radiance.' A Queen must be a beacon of color, not a shadow."
He walked over, his paintbrush ghosting over the line of my collarbone, the bristles a teasing, illicit sensation.
"If I can't touch you with my hands, I’ll touch you with the light," he whispered, his face inches from mine, his scent of salt and lilies intoxicating. Yet, even as he leaned in, he was talking about the "visual legacy" of our potential marriage. I wasn't a partner; I was a canvas.
“I wish more than to be immortalized, Prince Rafayel ” I said quietly. “I’d rather live. Make memories. Be messy. Be real.”
He froze. For one suspended second the Atelier was utterly silent except for the distant crash of waves.
Then he smiled “Of course, my Queen,” he said, stepping back. “We’ll capture your real side too.”
Of course he was talking about his art, not understanding what I meant, or maybe he did understand it and chose to pretend he didn't. Either way, it was just exhausting.
The friction between Doctor Zayne and Prince Rafayel peaked one day. It began innocently enough.
Doctor Zayne remarked that excessive stimulation could compromise immune response. Prince Rafayel laughed, a bright, cutting sound and countered that sensory deprivation produced worse long-term damage to the creative centers of the brain.
They began a shouting match in the courtyard about my "optimal stimulation levels". Doctor Zayne arguing for sensory deprivation and Prince Rafayel for a feast of the soul. They were so busy debating my "well-being" that neither noticed when I rose, smoothed my skirts, and walked away.
Seizing the moment, I slipped into the Grand Hedge Maze, seeking the one thing they refused to give me: silence.
The maze had been grown over a century, its walls of dark yew rising twelve feet high, paths twisting like veins. Sunlight barely penetrated; the air smelled of green shadow and earth. I walked faster and faster, letting the green corridors swallow the echoes of their voices.
But I didn't find silence. I found a predator waiting in the green. I turned the central corner, my mind spinning with Prince Rafayel’s colors and Doctor Zayne’s frost, and walked straight into a wall of hard leather and heat. I stumbled, my hands landing on the solid, warm muscle of Lord Sylus’s chest. He was leaning against the sundial, tossing a silver coin.
"The bickering boys sent you straight to me" he purred.
"It wasn't... it was an accident," I stammered, my heart thundering against my ribs.
This time, he didn't pull back. He caught my wrists, his grip firm and possessive.
"Was it?" He pulled my hands up, pressing them flat against his heart. I could feel the rhythmic, powerful thud of it. "You could have gone left toward the exit, but you went right, deeper into the dark. Your body knows where it wants to be, My Queen, even if your head is still listening to the Healer."
My heart slammed so hard I was sure he could hear it.
He didn't let me go. Instead, he led me deeper into the maze.
"Since you're here, let's actually enjoy the walk. Tell me, did the Doctor tell you your soul was out of alignment today? Or did the Painter tell you your nose was 'poetic'?"
I found myself letting out a huff of laughter, again.
"Doctor Zayne thinks I’m a fever that needs breaking, and Prince Rafayel thinks I’m a sunset that needs capturing."
"And I think you're a woman who's bored out of her mind," he countered, his thumb grazing my wrist in a way that made my breath hitch.
We spent an hour wandering the winding paths. He didn't talk about "optimal levels" or "protection." He told me about how he tried to train a crow to steal Doctor Zayne’s glasses. How the bird had succeeded exactly once before dropping them into the moat. How Doctor Zayne had fished them out himself at three in the morning, coat dripping, expression murderous.
He made me laugh, real laughter that felt like a rebellion.
When we reached the very center, the Fountain of Wishes waited, a shallow marble basin half-hidden by ancient ivy, water so clear it looked like liquid glass. A weeping nymph statue presided over it, marble tears eternally falling.
"Go on," he mocked, leaning against a statue of a weeping nymph. "Make a wish. Though I suspect you've forgotten how to want anything for yourself."
I looked at the water, then at him, the weight of the "Chaste Laws" feeling like a physical chain. I tossed the silver coin and watched the silver spin against the blue sky.
"I wish for the Bloomshore harvest to be plentiful," I began, my voice practiced and regal. "And for the kingdom to prosper under..."
Snap.
He caught the coin mid-air with a sharp, metallic crack, his hand closing over it before it could hit the water. He stepped into my space, his eyes narrowing with a dangerous spark.
"I said a wish for yourself," he rasped, his voice dropping to a low, vibrating hum. "The kingdom has enough servants. I’m asking the woman hiding under that crown what she hungers for when the lights go out and the Council isn't watching. Something real, just for you"
He held the coin out, balanced on his gloved thumb, waiting.
I paused, the weight of his proposition sinking in. For a moment, I didn't think about the Council, or the borders, or the bloodline. I thought about the girl who used to run until her lungs burned, the woman who liked the sting of salt on her tongue and the weight of a blade in her palm. The woman who still kept a small practice sword hidden under her bed because sometimes holding it was the only thing that reminded her, she had muscles beneath the silk.
A slow, genuine smile tugged at the corners of my lips, the first one in years that didn't feel like a performance, that wasn’t rehearsed for courtiers or diplomats
I looked up at him, my eyes bright with a sudden, illicit spark of mischief.
"I wish for something banned. Not a crown or a treaty. I want a jar of those spiced honey-nuts from the black markets Onychinus control, the ones the Council banned because they’re 'unrefined' and I want to spar. Not a 'demonstration' with Colonel Caleb, but a real fight. I want to feel the weight of a sword again. Sweat. Bruises. The ache of muscles that remember they’re alive. Without anyone worrying if I’ll chip a nail.”
He stayed silent for a long moment. He didn't laugh. He didn't mock the simplicity of it. He just tilted his head, his eyes tracking the pulse jumping in my throat.
"Interesting," he finally drawled, his voice a low, vibrating hum. "I thought you’d ask for something grander. A jewel from the deep, or perhaps for me to burn down the Council chambers for you. But here you are, dreaming of sugar and steel." He stepped closer, the space between us vanishing. "You deserve more than just any King. You deserve one that helps you remember what it's like to have a heartbeat that isn't dictated by a decree. One that helps you want to be a person again; help you be that woman that had dirt on her dress when she worked with the orphans."
"Orphans? How did you..."
He leaned down, interrupting my thoughts, his lips grazing my jawline. He was breaking every rule of the Chaste, every decree of the Elders. He wasn't just touching me; he was claiming the space I breathed.
"I could have you executed for this," I whispered, though I was leaning into him, body tilting toward heat like a flower toward sun.
"You could," he smirked, his teeth grazing the shell of my ear. "But then who would give you the fire you’re so clearly starving for? Zayne? He’d just give you a blanket and a lecture."
He slid his hand down to the small of my back, pulling me flush against his leather-clad chest, his thighs hard against my skirts, chest rising and falling in perfect counterpoint to my own ragged breathing. The friction was a revelation, a sharp, rhythmic heat that made the "Long Season" feel like a death sentence.
"Next time, My Queen," he promised, "I won't be so polite."
He vanished into the hedges just as Doctor Zayne’s cold, panicked voice called my name from the entrance. I stood there in the center of the maze, my skin burning again. For the first time in who knows how long, I didn’t feel like I was adrift, I felt like something waking up.
Chapters 5&6
Masterlist
A/N-Wanna be clear I love all the LIs of course and none of them are boring to me, that is just for this story, and it will happen for a reason.
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