It's Black Friday and I refuse to leave the house. Here, take my incredibly and unrepentantly self-indulgent Eldritch Damas au.
Premise: Damas death scene but close to a light eco vent and Jak tries to heal him.
Well Tumblr won't let me fix the formatting it donked up, guys, so there's a copy of this post that's actually readable on dark theme up now.
Damas has never been exposed to that much at once, unfiltered. Jak can't control how much he's channeling from the vent, he's too distraught. And he ends up changing Damas in the way the Dark Warrior Program changed him.
Damas can't control the light eco transformation. He looks like some kind of ascended being, trapped in a more powerful form and unable to utilize his new powers in a way that would deplete the eco and let him de-transform.
Do people consider him dead? A changeling? A Precursor-king? Jak would feel so guilty, having put this on Damas's shoulders without him having a say in it.
He's guilt stricken, he's horrified, he's so sorry, Damas please-
He doesn't know he's Damas's son, Damas doesn't know he was always Jak's father and not just recently his father.
Jak thinks of the Arena, thinks he knows what Damas's wrath looks like (he doesn't, he's seen only the strongest commingling of worry and frustration)
His war amulet feels meaningless. He has betrayed his leader, after all. The one ruler he chose to serve willingly. The only adult in his life to see his darkness and embrace it as simply part of him. And look what Jak's done to him. He thinks he deserves what is surely coming, but he's still just a boy and he can't help pleading for forgiveness.
And Damas sees a child, stripped of his tough protective shell, terrified beyond words -- is he so horrible to look upon? -- pleading incoherently for either forgiveness or mercy, he can't tell which. Tears stream down his face, making him look disturbingly young.
"I didn't mean to- I didn't mean to, Damas, please-! Please forgive me! I-I-I lost control of it, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry!"
Jak doesn't beg. Jak never pleads.
This is profoundly wrong and he knows this in his heart although he cannot quite fathom the depths of the wrongness he feels. He only recognizes that he does not want this boy to kneel before him. He has never been so formal before, it feels unnatural for him to be so now.
(Veger arrives late, does not recognize the cosmic horror as the king he willingly betrayed. He sees the dark eco freak humbled, on his knees before what he believes is a Precursor. He thinks that at last the thorn in his side will be struck down)
This is it! At last! Veger thinks
And then this thing that was their king bends
Jak grieves, believing Damas no longer knows him; he wonders if this is worse than Damas being angry. Everything they've been through, every memory, just gone? As beyond reach as Jak’s own childhood? And he did this to him.
- this is it. I won't fight him, Jak thinks -
And the great tendrils of its -- his -- wings wrap around Jak. On that too calm face, artificially peaceful, something quizzical appears in the tilt of a mouth swirling with stars. Wings draw close around them, dragging Jak up to collide with a broad chest thrumming with energy both alien and familiar. Light eco begins to seep into Jak, whispering beneath his thoughts "ours, ours, ours"
He traces a glowing hand along Jak's cheek, cocks his head and twists Jak's face back and forth with an innocently curious expression as though he's never seen him before.
Something sparks in Damas's eyes, some thought or impulse, and he seizes Jak by the upper arms. The words that pour from his mouth are ancient, a dialect lost long ago to all but the monks and those who once called Sandover their home.
"Mine…? You are! You are mine.”
It is a declaration, a discovery. A revelation. A promise.
With a flick of his wrists, he sends Jak tumbling into the light eco vent. Light flares and Jak transforms with a choked cry. Daxter panics, but he can't get past Damas's wings to get to his best friend. He watches Jak stand on shaky legs, wings curled tightly around himself as though he is trying to hide. Hide from his shame, hide from his friend, hide from his king. Light eco usually calms him, soothes his nerves, but not this time. It is frenzied, yet it is rejoicing, singing through his veins like a homecoming and Jak is left disoriented. Dazed.
Ours, ours, ours-!
Unnaturally strong hands lift him up under the arms, leave his feet dangling like a child's. Jak doesn't remember ever being held like this, outside of the secondhand memories of holding his own childhood self. When he finally works up his courage and looks into the Precursor King's eyes, looking through the filter of light eco himself, there is no anger. Neither is there a lack of recognition. Damas still knows him, that's becoming obvious. Jak looks into his eyes and sees pain and acceptance and a naked, boundless joy.
And Jak is so stunned that he forgets in that moment that he was trying to hide. He almost forgets why he feels squirming guilt -- albeit muted -- under his skin. He knew that Damas liked him. That Damas was comfortable expressing pride in him, even in front of the whole Arena. This is something else. Something Jak has never been bold enough to hope for outside of his own lonely imaginings: that Damas might see him with a kind of fatherly affection. That the closest thing he had to a real father figure might see him as a son as well.
"Child,"
Damas echoes, proud and warm and earthshaking,
"My child."
And what Veger sees, what he thinks he sees, is the child he ripped away from Damas, the tainted heir, receiving the blessing that should have been his: to ascend to Precursorhood. Welcomed into this evolved form as though the dark eco meant nothing.
He can't fathom it.
His worldview is cracking at the edges.
Oblivious to his crisis, Damas -- now closer in nature to his ancestors than he knows -- is content. This is his child. His. The eco in their blood harmonizes, dark with light, in one melody. He knows this weary warrior. He knows the blood that flows in his veins. His subject, his best warrior, his impudent rascal, his Jak: his son.
Vaguely he knows there's something they were supposed to do, something quite important. But it doesn't seem as important as stopping time just so that he can hold his child in his arms again.
Jak would like to get down, he really would. His wings flail in an ultimately futile bid for freedom. He has a world to save. But Damas won't let him go. He's smiling -- it's a relief, but the guilt still eats at him and he doesn't understand, what is the eco doin? Why is it harmonizing? Does the light eco in Damas recognize his own eco? Is that why he's calling him "My own. My little one."?
Jak has had enough experience with the Light Form that the Precurian instincts don't overwhelm him, and he still thinks on a very human level. But Damas doesn't know how to separate human instincts from Precurian instincts. They're all one to him.
His memories run against the swell of light and life and love and absolute otherworldliness coursing through him, too strong to control.
"Why aren't you angry?" Jak whispers as he tries to find somewhere for all that light eco to go.
Tendrils of living eco brush across his cheek in a loving caress and lift his chin. Jak finds himself leaning into the touch without thinking as he watches the stars shift and swirl across Damas's face. This Light Form of Damas croons comfortingly, a subsonic rumble that is both calming and Alarming to Daxter and even Veger as they watch.
"Angry?" The word lilts oddly in the old language. "Why, little one?"
"I...I did this to you! You didn't choose this!"
"But now I am neither dead nor dying. And I know who you are."
Jak twists up his face in confusion, refracting light across his cheeks.
He's not afraid, but he's hesitant to ask. "Who...who am I?"
In olden times the people were afraid of many things which they are not afraid of now. This was one of the fears of the people of Moville long ago.
On Christmas Eve the men all got off from work one or two hours before they got off any other night. The reason was because it was believed by the people that the dead wandered about on Christmas Eve night and if they caught anybody they would carry them away.
A very merry #FolkloreFriday to everyone who celebrates -- In keeping with the season, today I’ll talk a little bit about traditional Irish Christmas customs. To start off: We have basically no idea about how people in pre-Christian Ireland would have spent this time of year -- it seems likely they did *something* for the solstice, but there’s even less documentation than usual.
As my friend @marzipanandminutiae enjoys pointing out, Christmas was, traditionally, spooky season, before it became a cornucopia of candy cane coated capitalism. Ireland was not so different, as you can see from the example here, where the dead were believed to wander about on Christmas Eve night, ready to take unwary travelers. (Perhaps, in keeping with Irish tradition, we can also assume some link between the fairies and the dead here, given the propensity of the fairies in Irish tradition to kidnap people.) One of my personal favorite international folktales, which ironically never gained much currency in Ireland but was very popular throughout medieval Europe and had a strong survival in the folklore of the Scandinavian countries, is The Midnight Mass, also known as The Mass of the Dead (E492 on the Stith Thompson Motif Index, for anyone curious.) This tale, as it’s usually told, features a woman who, accidentally believing that she overslept on Christmas Day, tries to attend the morning Christmas Mass, only to realize, when she sees a dead friend or family member, that it is in fact the midnight mass on *Christmas Eve*, which is populated by the dead, that she has unknowingly attempted, breaching the boundary between the world of the living and the dead. She is warned by a friend or a family member, and makes her escape before the Benediction, though her coat is torn to pieces by the grasping, skeletal hands of the undead. (In at least one Norwegian variant, the protagonist, who is a man, is sick for some time after.)
On a slightly cheerier note, Ireland, like many other European cultures at this time, had a belief that the animals could talk on Christmas Eve -- of particular importance was the donkey, with multiple Irish accounts of donkeys and oxen being seen praying in the stable on Christmas Eve, in commemoration of their role in the Nativity, and sometimes there are accounts of roosters crowing all night to keep away evil spirits. There are a number of stories that feature an unwitting master wandering over to the stable on Christmas Eve night...only to hear the horses gleefully prophecize his death. (And one account that says that, if you bring a black ass to a well with you, not only will it get down on its knees to pray, but it will turn the well into wine!)
Familiar to anyone who has done a bit of work on St. Brigid’s Day customs, it was also common to leave the door unlocked for the Holy Family to take shelter in the house. In one account, from Clonmel, Co. Tipperary, a woman recounted her grandmother leaving baby clothes as well.
Other traditions, which will be very familiar to most cultural Christians, are also recorded -- Decorating the house with holly and mistletoe, hanging up stocking for Santa Claus (though I found at least one account from Co. Carlow where the Christmas gift giver is an old woman, who has a sleigh pulled by dogs) sending Christmas cards, cooking meals of goose or a turkey with stuffing on Christmas Day (though, traditionally, due to the prominence of Catholicism and the prohibitions against eating meat on certain days, fish was very much the dinner to eat on Christmas Eve-- potatoes and butter, sometimes with oat bread, is also common), burning a yule log, lighting candles in the window (sometimes with the specification that the youngest in the family should do it). These are traditions that were recorded in 1938, well after the time when the modern Christmas had started to be established, and so they’re very much reflective of broader norms across the Anglosphere at that time.
The Schnabelperchten are from Austria, and they inspect homes to make sure they're clean. If your house isn't clean, they'll open you up and stuff you full of trash!
Today we will be talking about something enchanting…
Sirens were already known in Greek mythology, and made their way through history ever since. Sirens are dangerous creatures, luring seamen to sail their ships into cliffs and rocks with their singing. The Greek depicted them as creatures part human part bird, and only in medieval times their appearance changed to that of mermaids.
While Roman poets placed them on little islands called Sirenum scopuli, sirens later on also populated other areas. One popular example far from the sea is the Loreley: she’s a beautiful woman sitting on a high cliff along the river Rhine, singing and luring sailors into their death. The place (also called Loreley) is known for its dangerous bends, causing more ship accidents than usual.
In the Odyssey, Circe described the Sirens as, "lolling there in their meadow, round them heaps of corpses rotting away, rags of skin shriveling on their bones."
Homer didn’t give the Sirens in the Odyssey names, but later authors did. Some of these names are:
Aglaophonos (“the one with the beautiful voice”)
Himeropa (“gentle voice”)
Leukosia (“the white”)
Ligeia (“the bright sounding one”)
Molpe (“song”)
Parthenope (“girl voice”)
Peisinoe (“the persuading one”)
Thelxiope (“enchanting voice”)
According to lore, goddess Hera persuaded the Sirens to have a competition with the Muses. The Sirens lost— they plucked their feathers and fell to the sea as white bodies, forming an island.
Since this is about enchanting songs, let us ask: Do you have any favourite songs about myths and legends?
My little #SecondGenerationSwiftie was so excited to get @taylorswift #folklore albums today! She was bummed she couldn’t come with me to target but was so thrilled when I got home !!!! @taylorswift @taylornation
