as i'm sure you already know, israel has resumed aggressive bombardment of gaza as of march 18th. at least 400 people have already been killed, with hundreds more wounded or buried under the rubble. on top of this, israel has also been almost completely obstructing the entry of aid for the past several weeks, and cut off power to the last functioning water desalination plant on march 9th.
it is more important than ever that those of us outside gaza do not attempt to ignore the ongoing genocide in favor of the illusion of security. any small thing you can do is better than complacency.
if you need a place to start:
help Suad get urgent medical treatment for her baby and mother-in-law - @tinyheartbeat (#279 on @/el-shab-hussein, @/MoyAyesh, and @/nabulsi's spreadsheet)
help Mahmoud reunite with his family in a safe place - @supportgaza (#151 on @/el-shab-hussein, @/MohAyesh and @/nabulsi's spreadsheet)
help Amal take care of her daughter, get prenatal care, and provide for 20+ family members - @mariam-ashour (#175 on @/el-shab-hussein, @/MohAyesh, and @/nabulsi's spreadsheet)
help Firas and Nisreen continue their education and support their family - @firasmuhaisenn, @nisreenameen, @helphashemfamily (verified by @/90-ghost)
you can find more campaigns to support here, here, or here, or a big (nonexhaustive) list of gazan organizations and mutual aid initiatives here. if you have the fortune of disposable income, i highly encourage you to contribute something in any of these directions. it can truly help save lives.
Hello everyone! My engraved style diptych requests are once again open- perfect for ocs who are best friends, partners, lovers, or worse.. divorcees. InshAllah in the future I can do triptychs as well.
I would absolutely love to work for you!
You can purchase one here:
https://ko-fi.com/c/9cffb6b2d6
Written Instructions under the cut:
Instructions
PLEASE SPECIFY WHICH FRAME YOU WOULD PREFER, OPTION 1-6
PLEASE PROVIDE
VISUAL REFERENCES: If you don't have ref, please provide a written description!
• 2 passes of edits free. -hairstyle -expression -bust up outfit -jewelry-special features like a mole or a scar -hand jewelry or prop if paying for extra
BEYOND MY CAPABILITY: helmed / faceless characters,
My children are sick and hungry. They need food and milk, and I have nothing left to give them.
My husband is also sick and injured and needs surgery, but I cannot afford his operation. I’m struggling to provide even the most basic things my family needs.
I’m not asking you to save the world. I’m asking you to help one family survive today.
If you can donate, even $5 or $10 could help us buy food or milk. If you cannot donate, please reblog this post. Your reblog could reach someone who can help.
Please don’t let our story disappear into the feed. Donate if you can. Reblog if you can’t. Please help us be seen. 🤍🍉🇵🇸
tagged by passel of darlings @tobermoriansass, @starshadeemilyart, and @balrogballs to join the joyous wippy mob for my first tag game of my new big age and dawn of the new decade! i'm primarily a one active WIP at a time guy, since i like to get into the groove and atmosphere of a work and it can be disruptive to my goggling literary third eye to be switching back and forth between times and places, so i've marked some (most) of the titles here with a pencil (✎) to denote works whose sandpits i'm currently only in psychologically. passing along with my deep and abiding affection to @ulmondil, @outofangband, @gaydhros, @melians-griddle, @angamaite-der-ritter, @antlered-vixen, @seaemberthesecond, and @ecofutural if you're in the mood 💖
Rules: Make a new post with the names of all the files in your WIP folder, regardless of how non-descriptive or ridiculous. Tag as many people as you have WIPs. People can send an ask with the title(s) that most intrigues them, then you post a snippet/tell them about it!
making sword happen
A devout kiss, the saber's hilt chapter 3 ✎
fuck them kids gondolin edition ✎
exorcising the bug ✎
finrod and barahir jiggity jig ✎
iri's mom has got it going on ✎
and as yet only in the ideating stage, but next on my list:
Another gentle ping for anyone interested or fomenting interest that Tolkien Siblings Week will run November 23rd-29th, 2026! With three months still left for creation, we hope you'll join us for a second year of chewing over the many sibling relationships—harmonious, fraught, and otherwise—that litter Tolkien's worlds. If you're thinking of submitting any work, check out our complete event guidelines (they shouldn't be too burdensome) for instructions on how to participate and other important info, and head over to our list of optional daily prompts if you're in need of any thematic inspiration.
We hope to see you in three months! Asks, messages, and replies are open in perpetuity for any questions you come up with in the meantime; please don't hesitate to reach out if anything is plaguing you, or if there's something you'd like to see on the modly end.
Wishing you gouts of creativity and oodles of time as those idea seeds begin to sprout!
THANK YOU for asking this one. The only context I can give you for this is that it happens in Nobody’s Son, Gondolin is an underground gay bar, and Fingon is busy doing gender so he told Maedhros to go get his dick sucked and not bother him. NSFW and I guess content warning for Maedhros not being a good lay for anyone except Fingon.
“That Legolas keeps flashing his tight little ass in those tight little shorts in my direction. On purpose. And my flesh is unfortunately weakened by grief. My son is dead. I have never been hornier,” Maedhros said dolefully, adjusting himself in his boxers.
I nodded, peering at the programme to see when Lúthien’s entry was. “Russo, people here respect me. Please stop being so cheap and drooling at the shiniest hole. Legolas will lose interest in you the minute he learns you live in a feudal house. The boy only wants to fuck you because his Brahmin daddy is a cabinet minister, you dress like a koya and are wearing a literal turban like a mullah, and in his mind this is the closest he will come to making his daddy proud by fucking the Muslim proletariat.”
“We all have dreams. Not even when we were fifteen and one exam day you kept bending over to pick up your pencil because you were so stressed and I also failed an exam for the first and last time because your arse kept turning up in my field of vision so often that I lost it in my pants. Not even on that day was I this pent up. Just like that I feel right now, except now I have too much dignity to blow in my pants. That, and I’ll kill myself if I do. Let’s go to the toilets, Finnu. I think my balls are literally speaking in tongues and frothing at the mouth.”
“I’m not sucking your dick on the eve of my father’s funeral, Maedhros. I am in mourning. I’m going to be watching Beren and Lúthien playing Laila-Majnu on the eve of my father’s funeral because I cannot handle my life right now without watching a man prance around the stage in a dress. Go ask Legolas to suck your dick, I’m busy. Or just fuck him, he’s clearly willing enough. Although please go do it by the stairs or something, not the toilets. Have a crumb of class, this is my brother’s establishment.”
“You’ll let Legolas suck it?” Maedhros perked up all of a sudden, his depressed attitude to arousal disappearing in a second. “Him? The prettiest little houri in this den of iniquity who just swore to me he can take a slap better than the stubbornest ox?”
“He’s less than half your age, you degenerate old pervert,” I hissed back, half-amused and half-annoyed. “And give it a rest with the houris: Legolas is the furthest thing from a virgin in this room. But yes. Go wild. This is why Gondolin exists. But think about him even for a second outside these halls and I’ll cut it off.”
Maedhros nodded obediently, already folding up his mundu in anticipation. The famed monogamist, who once beat up his Party undersecretary for winking at a married woman, undone entirely by the Transport minister’s college dropout son in a tight little American miniskirt. I felt vindicated, both for Maedhros’ prudish morals being as flimsy as those of most men, and also because I didn’t really like that little skank of a Legolas and Maedhros’ next words reminded me that he was insane and inflicting him upon Legolas would be a fantastic punishment.
“Eh, give me a minute. He’s so pretty and so dolled up, oof, I might lose it in a minute and then I’ll have to fucking die. Wait a second, let me depress myself a little first. Fuck, it’s been only three months since my Elros passed on. Fuck, Finnu. My son is dead.”
“Yes, yes, do that. Our poor Elros is dead indeed. Monè, Legolas, can you keep Maedhros occupied for the hour? Be gentle with him, he’s never been with anyone but me,” I called out sweetly, and Legolas shot me a thumbs-up from across the room, pretending to wolf-whistle again at the sight of Maedhros. Who preened like a cockerel, drawing himself to his full height and swaggering over to the boy, who looked like all his dreams had come true.
Little did he know.
“Is it a gay thing—“ Maedhros panted out, one hand holding the kneeling Legolas’ high ponytail with his other arm braced on his shoulder. It was twenty minutes later, his boxers were down around his ankles, and he was taking his own sweet time because unfortunately Maedhros had a splendid cock and was so delectably domineering with it that Legolas was losing his mind, being unaware of the cost of such pleasure up to this very second. “To think about animals when you have sex? Not all the time, mind you. Only when it’s your second round of the night, or it’s taking a while, or you’re depressed.”
Maedhros yanked harder on his hair and pushed him down further on his cock, extremely casually, like he often held full conversations in the middle of getting blowjobs (which I can unfortunately confirm he regularly did). “No, you depraved little cunt. I’d fucking whip you black and blue for even thinking that, if only you were half as pretty as my Finnu, or half as pretty to even deserve such a thing. How dare you make light of me talking to the first fellow homosexual I have ever spoken to and using the opportunity to clear some doubts. I don’t mean fucking animals. I mean thinking about things like chimpanzees—“
“Is that meant to sound better?”
“—and how much they are misunderstood. Also their internal society politics, how complex it is. And elephants. And fuck. Poaching. One time, a few years back, I was giving Finnu the best fuck of his life in the Admiral’s Folly—that’s just a little building in the town park—and oof. Suddenly—“ here, he paused, shoving the younger man’s face even closer, so as to take all of him in. “Use your fucking tongue, you lazy cunt—fucking hell—not your teeth! Should I knock them out? Suddenly I remembered, half this city used to be the playground of elephants, man. They had the run of it all. And now? Now we have pushed them to the outer reaches, like they are pondscum.”
“What is your pro—“
“Did I fucking say you can speak?” Maedhros pulled himself right out, scoffing as he slapped the youthful cheek so hard his wrist clicked. “I told you to suck my dick, not discuss my problems. Anyway. Elephants. They are treasures, magnificent, remarkable creatures, and we are literally treating them like pondscum. Thought that, and suddenly there were tears on my face and haye allah, Finnu found that so fucking pathetic he lost his erection. And shit, just thought of the ivory trade. What if it reaches Kozhikode? Then what? Then what? What will be the fate of sweet Appu, the Kavil temple elephant? Will they slaughter her like a goat? For some bitch to wear a nice hairclip? Fuck—“ he kneed Legolas in the abdomen, as if it was all his fault. “I’m getting choked up even thinking about it, man. Get off my cock and turn around. I fucking hate poachers.”
"...he had stopped a few feet behind the mayor's chair; and now he just stood there in an almost military pose. He waited, without a word, without a movement, in genuine humility and quiet resignation, until it should please Monsieur le maire to turn around; calm, grave, hat in hand, eyes lowered, with an expression exactly halfway between that of a soldier facing his officer and a guilty party facing his judge."
@deweydecibelsystem, @glintglimmergleam & @riding-with-the-wild-hunt all tagged me at various points to share a wee wip excerpt. not tagging anyone for various reasons, however if YOU are seeing this, YOU should do this :D or not, because I am not the boss of you.
From the Silmerton fic, chapter 3, which is being rewritten a bit:
It was the golden hour in Upper Wystow. A sleepy air hung pervasively and densely over its rolling, green fields, rendered treacly by the late afternoon sunlight. Every leaf, every blade of grass seemed to catch and hold that golden light, illuminating their stalks and stems in bright detail and casting each shadow in profound relief. It rolled gently down these hills and caught twinkling in the deep green waters of the river winding its way in the distance; a glittering ribbon that dipped and ducked until it met the road further ahead. It caught scintillatingly in the slightly swaying leaves of the willow trees that lined the banks of the river. It caught in Galadriel’s hair, turning it into a radiant halo — if Eloise had been more fanciful, she might have thought it was a flaming crown. But Eloise was not fanciful and neither was she an artist and to her uninformed eye, the light could only be described as something in the uncommon way.
“It never rains in Upper Wystow.” Eloise started at her friend’s voice in her ear, jarred once more by her capacity for remarks of an unusually prescient nature — a habit that evidently ran through the whole family and not least in Lord Felagund himself. “Others may boast of fine weather, but few can truly claim the sun smiles benevolently on them all year around.”
Eloise caught Lord Felagund’s eye. There was a distinct twinkle in it, though to his credit, he kept his composure and replied with tolerable equanimity.
“Laying it on a bit too strong, aren’t you, dear sister? One must imagine it rains every now and then, for the land to remain so distinctly green and, er, pleasant.”
“Upper Wystow has made such advancements in the science of the land as to put Mr. Coke’s advancements to shame and render such considerations trivial,” Galadriel replied. “For myself, I prefer to consider the dew.”
There was very little that could be said after such a dampening statement and since neither Lord Felagund nor Eloise felt inclined to discourse upon agricultural improvements, they accomplished the rest of the journey to Norborough House in a stiff and elevated silence.
some old art (really not my best but i am too busy with comms to draw anything else atm) with some new writing, in which Elrond watches his daughter dance, and reflects on his mother, Imladris, and the temptation to avert one’s eyes from atrocity and history in pursuit of peace in the present.
Arwen is just past the cusp of her mid-thirties. She’s young, haughty, temperamental, an adolescent heart in an almost-adult body. She pulled a handful of Elladan’s hair right out yesterday, because he said she was thundering down the staircase like an oliphaunt. She nearly wept when he shoved her in turn, and hid his favourite saddle, and it remains hidden, and Elladan had turned her entire room upside down to look for it. Then the boys found and read out her journal (in which she was waxing at length about how lovely Glorfindel’s hair looked that week) to Glorfindel and then she did weep, and slapped them, and oh, his three have never, never known war. His mother had been no older than Arwen when she leapt from the tower. He does not search for this revelation. He has always known how old Elwing of Doriath had been, when she screamed that scream and leapt that leap. Arwen is squabbling with her siblings, and Elrond can no longer look away from thirty five. Thirty five sits in Arwen, and it has nowhere else left to go.
Every child arrives in the world bearing every face its parents haven't quite finished setting down. No matter what shape Arwen actually takes, she is always, in the corner of the eye, some earlier woman Arda has not yet mourned fully. Her father too, does not manage to see her as Arwen alone, not even he who sees her clearest. But he does not see Lúthien, and that is some comfort at least. Elrond has never seen Lúthien in Arwen because he has never seen Lúthien. He sees instead the dances of Doriath, that did not come to his daughter through him but through Celeborn who taught Celebrían who taught Arwen. In her faltering attention to choreography, her unwillingness to abide by the rules of hand-position and neck-tilt, there dances Elwing upon the sand. They are both beautiful and yet they are both awkward, tense almost-swans, both far too conscious about what they’re doing and what the doing means. Neither have seen the dances of Doriath performed by those not rendered near-immobile by grief for the same. Neither will ever truly dance as Lúthien had danced.
Arwen is dancing, and she’s tilling the soil with her feet, paying tithe to long-dead lords for rented lands she has never known. Nobody will ever look at her without looking past her. Nobody will ever look at her dance without feeling, somewhere beneath the pleasure of it, an old itch, or a confusing urge to weep. As long as Arwen dances, peace will never stop interrogating the peaceful. She, who cares so deeply about the shapes she makes, believes so wholly in the existence of beautiful things, who is so certain that the world is good or at least good enough for her. She thinks the sun will never rise again if her flowerbeds aren’t flush with the hedges, she thinks there is only one correct way to ride a horse and thinks her brothers’ table manners are what might lead to the doom of those left upon this shore and she is so steadfast in all her beliefs that she has a very amusing tendency to sweep everyone else up in the urgency of it all.
Arwen lives in Imladris, amidst debris. Everyone who watches her tries very hard to remember being so young and believing in so many things, and they find that old self in themselves as they watch her, like a faint echo of a song someone else sang somewhere else. Thin and fragile as gossamer, a spider-webbed past, all the better to be brushed aside. And though Elrond is its builder, Imladris still feels faintly unreal. He cannot trust its ease, finds himself disbelieving the sanctity of its windswept halls. He watches his daughter spin through sunlight—gossamer-child, spiderweb-child—and holds his breath.
How like Elwing she looks. He feels almost guilty in his wonder at her tripping, her giggling, her flushing with embarrassment as her mother teases her mid-twirl, tells her her fingers should be pressed together when they make the swan-pose, not held like claws, like you’re scrabbling for candied nuts after dinner! Elrond feels like he’s sitting in a warm hall while, at some unreachable distance behind the limestone cliffs and roaring falls, a whole Age is still burning. And the feeling is far too shared across the sanctuary for him to call it his grief alone, his singular delusion and his own little emotional catharsis. There is no self-contained narrative curve. Imladris survives because Doriath did not. Arwen lives because Elwing could not.
The falls, the halls, the dancing, all of it rests on lives and deaths nobody in these halls wishes to remember, and Elrond knows, being a historian and having lived through too much history, what will happen to an Imladris which says, the kinslayings and the bloodshed and the razing of the Harad and the sinking of Númenor, none of it need follow us through the doors of this sanctuary. None of it need hurt our hearts. It would become an ice-cold place, a place that has forgotten itself, forgotten that every shelter and every sanctuary is inherently an exclusionary structure. Shelter is prized because shelter is scarce. An Imladris that is too content in its comfort will keep every outward grace and still, underneath, go slowly to bone, the Bruinen running clear over a bed it no longer remembers silting with the orcs that drowned in its depths, the gardens flourishing on ground which has sucked every possible sustenance from the graves beneath it.
This is what he fears most for Imladris, more than siege, more than falling, this gentle, well-lit, complacent forgetting in which the last people who might have carried the tragedies of Beleriand forward, who might have used their time within these cliffs to ensure that such things would never happen again, instead learn to carry only its movements, its songs and dances, over and over, stripped of marrow, until one evening as the world is ending, some child dances upon this very floor and nobody is left to look at her because everyone who could have looked could not bear to look and now there is nobody left to look because the world is ending. The world is ending and Lúthien is dancing and these two facts will be entirely disconnected from each other.
So Elrond keeps his eyes open, watches his daughter dance and in her watches his mother dance.
If the dead of Beleriand and the dying of Middle-Earth are not real in Imladris, he thinks, then we claim that nothing that was done to them was ever really done. And I cannot claim that. I watched my mother jump off a tower before she could ever learn this dance in full.
Arwen trips, clicks her teeth in irritation. Elrond brushes aside the cobwebs, and marvels how important it is, to be here and now, watching this. Elladan boos through cupped hands, Celeborn threatens to box his ears, and Arwen stops dancing for a moment, and does. Elladan’s ear turns pink, and then puce. Elrond understands that he cannot afford to stop feeling the ground beneath his feet. He cannot afford to forget that his daughter is the spit of his mother. Arwen hitches her skirt up before starting again. There are skirmishes east of the Blue Mountains, and three Haradrim villages will not see another dawn, and these facts too press themselves down beneath Arwen’s dancing feet, into the surface of an evening they helplessly enjoy. Where do you dance? Who? Who do you dance upon? Whose neck is it that crunches beneath your feet? Upon whom do you tread?
What kind of world are you building?
What small shift in the story might mean that Arwen Úndomiel goes from dancing in the halls to leaping from a tower? Who is leaping from towers as Arwen Úndomiel dances in the halls? Why? If Imladris is to survive as more than an elaborate centre of forgetting, the ordinary evening and the bloodthirsty war must always be allowed to lie together, kissing and thrusting, each pressing its full weight against the other. The harp and the siege-horn must press close enough that neither’s song can be the only one the beloved daughter of the house dances to.
Is there any clean way to look at a dancing princess while a war simmers down outside the walls? How much of the light Arwen-who-is-Elwing dances in is truly separable from the dark it borrows itself against? Elrond watches his daughter dance, and understands there is no such thing as an innocent glance, no such thing as a painless sight. Every beautiful thing he looks at, he looks at with the same eyes that watched his mother try to kill herself. Perhaps pretending that those are two different pairs of eyes watching two different worlds, is the only way comfort might survive in Imladris at all.
At what cost?
Arwen finishes in a flourish, and takes a bow. Cel claps, Elrohir has a hand over Elladan’s mouth, and everything within Elrond goes suddenly, unbearably clear and he’s whistling through his fingers, clapping so fiercely that the boys decide it would probably be better for their near future if they joined in the enthusiasm. The sun bobs on Arwen’s head as it sinks, and her hair is all a mess, gauzy against the cliffs, filtering the reds and golds of dusk before it can touch the limestone. There’s no valley quite like Imladris. There’s no girl quite like Arwen. Nobody is born untroubled and nobody will ever live untroubled as long as atrocity continues to exist. Elladan cannot control himself and he calls out a rating, six out of ten for his sister’s attempt, and she flies at him, furious. It is the happiest Elrond has ever been, possibly as happy as the boy whose Sirion did not burn might have been every day.
This is what a person is, he realises, underneath all that is done to them. This—his strapping, scrapping youths, his grinning Cel egging them on and throwing Arwen a minor weapon, the twins attempting to hide their horror at how hard their little sister is walloping them and whose side their mother appeared to be on, whose side Glorfindel, their friend Glorfindel, seemed to be on—this is what people are. This is how life should be. This is what was always meant to be the ordinary, the neutral existence, the comfortable. And this is possible, here in Imladris. Because it is sheltered by walls, and because the war is elsewhere now and because Doriath had fallen and his uncles had died. But if this is what it is to be alive, then it must be possible everywhere, this delight, for everyone all over the world. And if it is possible, then…
The possibility is what breaks Elrond's heart more than any one grief ever could. Not the possibility of Arwen’s joy, or his valley’s, or his own, but the thought that brightness and delight have become commodities doled out to themselves and others by the valleys spared by victory. He cannot watch Arwen dance without counting these sums, and the counting never comes out even. For nowhere does the ledger declare that Imladris deserves starlight whilst Umbar does not, that Elrond’s children deserve to dance whilst villages east of the Anduin must pay tithe to Gondor and send away their firstborn sons. The world was not built so that joy would be scarce. It was made scarce, deliberately, by the razing of cities and the building of sanctuaries. By the encircling of light, over and over and over, on every shore, in every Age.
The knowledge breaks Elrond’s heart. It stings, itching beneath his laughter always, the only balm being an acknowledgement. He decides to know it, to keep knowing. The world inches a step closer to being saved.
[transmasc feanor anon] you’re so right………….. forgive me transfem feanor i was unaware of your game. baller interpretations from riding-with-the-wild-hunt as always
thank you dear!! <333 blows you a kiss and with it my favored transmasc fëanorian take (celegorm) to ease you on your way
a nolofinwe-finwe-feanor dynamic for your consideration:
nolofinwe, FULLY aware that at any moment feanor could threaten to join miriel in mandos and finwe would instantly fold on the issue at hand like wet toilet paper, and increasingly suspicious about why feanor isn't playing what appears to be the strongest card in his hand
finwe, likewise TERRIFIED that feanor is going to join miriel in mandos if he pushes too hard, even just for a "visit" and then, like miriel, never return
feanor, EXCRUCIATINGLY aware of what happened when miriel went to mandos, and never allowing the thought to cross his mind let alone risk using it as a threat and have finwe confirm once and for all that if feanor died, finwe would just turn all of his love and attention to his second family
These are elven words for light including poetic and archaic words
More in the linguistic resources and word of the day (wotd) tags! Let me know if there are any topics you would like to see covered
Cala is the most common Quenya word for light. It derives from kal meaning light or shine. Calima is the adjective form meaning bright or luminous.
Calad and galad, also derived from kal are both Sindarin words for light. Unlike in Quenya, many Sindarin words for light are also associated with fire. Galad also meant radiance.
Síla in Sindarin means to shine. Sil in Quenya specifically meant to shine white.
Nalta means radiance or brilliance in Quenya. Most notably it appears in naltalma, the word for heliograph
Tilu from Quenya means to shine blue, derived from tili meaning the same
Glavarië in Telerin means golden light. It derives from glawar meaning sheen of gold.
Faina is an older Quenya word meaning to emit light. It derives from phay meaning radiate, send out rays of light
Gelion is a word in Ilkorin, the Sindarin language of Doriath meaning bright.
Linquë is a rarely used Quenya word for liquid light or light as a substance. It derives from linkwē meaning light substance and further derives from lik meaning glide or drip. Later writings of Tolkien related to linquë reference fine rain in sunlight 🫧🌦️
