21. "This isn't what it looks like." for beloved disaster Lilith Warriornun and whoever would make her feel the most guilty about her latest crimes? 👀
fic: dads
//
Lilith busies herself with her shirt as the shed door clicks shut behind Mary. She focuses on the rhythm of aligning the buttons, slotting them through the buttonholes, tries desperately not to think about the ache of bruising at her throat, her shoulder. She'd lost the familiarity of it somewhere in the past few months, the pattern of Beatrice's mouth across her skin, and she longs to press her fingertips to the marks, to press firmly into them as she'd only just pressed firmly into–
"You'll go speak to her." It's nowhere in the realm of question, Beatrice's voice hard in her chest. "You'll explain that this isn't what it looks like."
Lilith secures the last button, tucks her shirt tails into her jeans and moves to rebutton them as well. "What would you like me to say, you were helping me with a stain and something slipped, one thing led to another, oh no? She's not stupid."
"I don't know!" A hitch, now, a slide, a crack in the foundation she's been trying to build for herself with Lilith's back turned. "I don't– We shouldn't have done this. It was a–"
"Don't."
"Lilith, we–"
She turns on her heel to find Beatrice leaning back against the workbench. Her shirt's still rucked up above her breasts, but Lilith can't seem to drag her gaze away from the smear of lipstick sitting just above the waistband of Beatrice's khakis. She addresses it, too cowardly to lift her head to meet Beatrice's gaze. "We shouldn't have done this, but don't you dare say it was a mistake. I have never been anything but intentional about this. About you." She jerks her head towards the door, her throat tight with rising sorrow. "I'll tell her it was my fault, if that's–"
Beatrice sniffs once, loud, hands rising from her sides to scrub at her face. Lilith's gaze rises with them. Beatrice's lower lip trembles as their eyes meet. "If there's blame to assign here," she mumbles, rubbing again at her tear-streaked cheeks, "it should be mine."
"No, it's…" Lilith bites back a curse. "We're going to keep going in circles if we carry on like this, Beatrice. The blame is equal, the fault is equal, we shouldn't have done this. All of that is true. Agreed?"
Beatrice nods, the heave of her chest slowing. "Agreed." She touches a hand to her breastbone, startles at the bare skin, and drags her shirt back down, her cheeks burning. "I'm sorry," she begins.
Lilith just smiles at her, crooked and tired. "Nothing I haven't seen before, darling." She winces at the pet name, but Beatrice interrupts her before she can work her way up to an apology.
"No," she sighs, tugging at the collar of her shirt as though starved for air, "I suppose it's not. Could you go talk to Mary, please?"
Lilith nods and turns to the door, the near-rote response of anything for you, Beatrice turning to ashes in her mouth.
it's time for yet another song rec! (if you're still doing those, i mean. no pressure!!)
Non Believer by London Grammar
determined not to let me be normal about star wars au lilitrice huh?
“you chased an idea/ healed an earth behind some broken creature/ maybe she loves you”
because, like, there is no doubt whatsoever in Lilith’s mind that she loves this stupid, half-shattered thing, who might ungenerously be thought of as only a girl.
loved her as the station kept its slow orbit over a pollution-spotted planet, as Crimson stalked out of the interrogation room with unseen stains on her black gloves (but Lilith with her sensitivity to these things, and all the secret hues of red her eyes learned to see, knew that is was blood)
blood and more blood, and Lilith who didn’t fall in love when she scooped Beatrice off that weird crucifix of a chair at the exact centre of a room shaped like a mouth.
Lilith who fell in love before that, watching her appear like an apparition in the street, hidden among the troopers while this wisp of a girl spun a dozen fist-sized stones around her body. and of course no one likes to doom beautiful things, but the galaxy is the galaxy.
Lilith who fell in love when she saw the tiny, dirty palmprint pressed high on Beatrice's neck, who knew in that instant what she was spending herself to protect. the blue of her sabre, which is nothing like the sky or the water to Lilith, for whom all light-eating surfaces will always be naturally red - a long wavelength scattered slowly.
blue, to her, is the sensation of being submerged, drowned, down so deep that the light can’t pierce. blue, to her, just comes to mean Beatrice.
but does she love her? is love the same as any port in a storm?
“give you my all and you’re taking my everything/ all that we are, all that we need/ they’re different things.”
🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹 b/c i am nothing if not a Northern Passage enabler 👀
You let out a pathetic wheeze as you slide to the floor, the stone painfully cold through your clothes. You're still clinging to the statue, and you stare up into the shadows as a person materializes before you, a raised crossbow pointed at your head.
You grab for the sword on the floor, heavy in your hand as you push yourself back up onto your feet.
what makes vestige!Raz different from bog standard Raz? 👀 i am 100% here for heartbroken heroes who Came Back Wrong and Can't Go Home Again
Oohhhhhh okay okay WELL I made Raz as just sort of a blank slate because I thought it'd be like Skyrim and I wouldn't really get any sort of attachment to the player character. The original Raz - Rashieka - was my Sunspear in Guild Wars Nightfall a good 16 years so I thought she'd be a good stand in and it wouldn't matter that I wasn't planning on giving her much of a backstory or personality
SHE HAD OTHER PLANS
She started as just a plain goody two shoes because I struggle to make the bad choices in games unless I set out to do it, and the only thing that really stuck out hard was that she HATED necromancy. I thought it was just because she was a Redguard, but it seemed like more than that, and then I thought it was the whole being sacrificed by necromancers thing, but it still felt like more than that
And then I got to Alik'r, and Sentinel was under attack from Suturah's sons and I went... oh, oh she's Suturah's daughter. It made so much sense, this powerful necromancer sorceress who had outshone her brothers and had drawn the attention of evil across the realms, heir to her father's power and cut down in an act of rancid sibling rivalry when her brothers traded her to Mannimarco for more power and prestige in his future coup, and I was like, that's it, that's why she hates necromancy
BUT THEN HE HAD A DAUGHTER CANONICALLY AND I CRIED WHEN I FOUGHT HER AND SUTURAH because it felt like she was actually killing her sister and her father and her past but none of that is what the question was but it WAS a lead up to it because
Razieka al-Suturah was a vain, powerful, arrogant, gorgeous woman who knew that she had the power to topple kingdoms and wanted more of it. She was vain enough to consider herself Mannimarco's equal
Raz the Vestige is quiet. Still. Sometimes if you aren't paying attention to her and forget that she's there, it's easy to be surprised by her because she just. Doesn't move. Doesn't emote. Does she laugh? No one has seen it, although god knows Jakarn and Darien and others took it as a challenge. When she sleeps, it's hard to tell if she's breathing, and she's scared the shit out of people more than once who thought she was a corpse
She's fucking powerful, but she just doesn't care. She wants to help everyone she meets, and she hates necromancy with everything in her, the only time where she comes close to emoting
Alik'r was hard for her, because people recognised her when she didn't even know who she was herself. She was spat on, had curses hurled at her, because her face was one that stalked the nightmares of the Redguard people even if the woman wearing that face wasn't the same person anymore
Is she dead? She's sort of the opposite, isn't she? What's the opposite of death if it isn't life? And if she gets her soul back... who is she going to be on the other side?
🐟: She has an elegant voice, and tends to use a lot of big words. I've been waffling between choosing Paula Burrows and Xanthe Elbrick for a voice claim.
💍: A grimoire that she dug up with her Nymian fairy familiar.
💎: The biggest one was not being more direct with Ysayle about her feelings. Needless to say, there's no second chances there.
if the Rejuvenator does add years to someone's lifespan, do you think it could be used to bring back the dead? at first i thought it just accelerated the user's personal recovery time, but if it can actually add years to someone's life then there could be a way to reverse death and decomposition, right? 👀 (assuming that the roll wasn't just for something like percentage failure chance)
Ooh, you could be onto something! I mean, the Aeorians weren't exactly fond of divine magic, so it makes sense that they might want a way to resurrect people without relying on clerics. And for an Aeorian device, is it a huge step from regrowing hair, healing wounds and replenishing spell slots to restarting a heart?
I guess the question is, how does dunamancy power the Rejuvenator anyway? What's within its capabilities? Could it Rejuvenator not just speed up someone's time to give them a free long rest, but reverse time to undo fatal damage? If a conseuted soul can be returned to existence via dunamancy, can something like the Rejuvenator return a body, too? If magic like Resonant Echo can pull potential from discarded timelines, could the Rejuvenator literally pull time from those timelines, and restore it to a body to return it to life? Could it literally manifest a timeline in which a dead person is alive again?
And if my 'Fjord got an extended lifespan' theory is right, would that indicate that the Rejuvenator can just... give someone more time, the way the statue circle took it from Jester? Or would it slow down and stretch out Fjord's presence in time? We just don't know!
Honestly, I have no idea - but it's interesting to think about how often dunamancy magic interacts with the physical body, whether to help it or harm it. Haste is a transmutation spell that speeds up the body - but Matt's choice to describe Essek's Haste as slowing time around Yasha indicates that it's dunamancy-adjacent in this setting. The dunamantic spell Tether Essence, that syncs two people's healing and injury? Necromancy, ie, the 'bringing things back from the dead' school. Halas, who was trying to extend his lifespan? Messing around with time magic.
So... maybe the Rejuvenator really is the Aeorians' solution to needing physical healing and maybe resurrection for a war with the gods, but not wanting to rely on clerics. Heck, maybe the Nein will find that they can res people without components while Caleb's carrying that mini beacon around! All I know for sure is my overwhelming desire to beg Matt to tell me what the heck even is dunamancy and what are the beacons, oh my god -
i like cassandra. i also have a lot of criticism for cassandra. in my fic, she’s one of ellinor and cullen’s closest friends. i love writing her. i think she’s super interesting. but i do not want her as divine.
