An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
wayward sons of man (ffxiv)
wol-centric, wol/zenos
6 chapters, 11k words (ONGOING)
! post-endwalker (spoilers up to 6.0), canon divergence
on death, the demands of fate, and ineluctable intimacy.
“Tell me, then,” Zenos said. “What is the foremost quality of a hunter, if not ferocity to match that of his prey?”
“Patience,” Sairsel replied stiffly. Oh, at least he could muster up some condescension, if not a real rejoinder to separate the righteousness of his killings from Zenos’s. It would’ve been pale reassurance, anyroad; death was death.
“I waited for you,” Zenos pointed out, almost like a confession.
this was my first time participating in the challenge, and i'm so glad i did; at a total of 32,145 words, this was my best month writing through a funk that's lasted so much of the year.
i got to expand on already established stuff, like my blood-thirsting carrion birds series; elaborate on newer stories like my multi-decade queensglaive series; and introduce new characters that have been at the back of my mind for a while, like lebreau and bastian valendia. all in all, i'm so proud of what i wrote in september, and will cherish many of those pieces for a long time.
i had a hard time categorizing the entries because i wrote about so many characters across inter-connected series; in any case, you can find the full list below. but first, my personal favourites! ⬇
AFTER ― 1: foster / 10: heady / 15: thunderous / 19: [extra credit] / 26: extra credit
CITY OF SHADE ― 6: avatar / 18: devil's advocate / 24: illustrious / 31: [extra credit]
OTHER
NPC ― 5: [extra credit]
WHAT IF ― 13: oneirophrenia / 25: silver lining
THE STRAY ― 27: benthos / 29: debonair
thanks to everyone who read, liked, and commented on my work during the month. it was incredible fun getting to share these characters and snippets of their stories, and i'm looking forward to continuing these projects in the future! ✨
(for more information about my ffxiv work, you can check out the handy carrd i made about my characters and series. you can also view the list of entries categorized by lead/pov character below the cut)
SIHTRIC SELSSON
8: adroit / 11: preaching to the choir / 17: destruct / 22: fluster / 30: abstracted
wol-centric, wol/raubahn aldynn, wol & ilberd feare, raubahn & ilberd
60k words, 20 chapters
! spoilers up to patch 4.5, rated m for violence
For once, Morgana had let her own anger lull her into believing that the fates had reached the height of their depravity—and she had been wrong.
In another world, the drowning man does not die, and redemption is not absolution. An "antagonist lives" AU set throughout A Realm Reborn and subsequent patches, all the way to the aftermath of Ala Mhigo's liberation.
many deaths i’ll sing (assassin’s creed: syndicate)
novembre 2018: a character study of jacob frye throughout the events of sequences 8 and 9. spoilers, obviously. 4,232 words. read on ao3
I. bedfellows
The bravest man in London, he said.
Maxwell Roth was easy enough to read, from the start: a grandiose egomaniac of a dandy whose theatricality came as a surprise, when juxtaposed with the knowledge that he was one of the most dangerous men of London’s criminal underworld. It was enough to throw Jacob off-balance, like a discordant chord being struck midway through a dance he thought he knew—Roth was too bright, too lively, too familiar by half. Jacob had expected a lot of things when he made up his mind to meet with the head of the Blighters, and Roth was, by and large, very few of them.
London had been a sea of red when Jacob and Evie stepped off the train from Croydon; since then, he’d made it his own personal mission to remedy it, and he’d built the Rooks from the ground up to make it happen. There was an irony in knowing that it was a sort of forceful bloodletting that would lessen the Blighters’—and, by extension, the Templars’—hold on the city and make it so that Jacob’s life was less full of that red, and then he walked right into the lion's den. There was red everywhere he looked: the outside of the Alhambra, the thugs who surrounded it, the curtains, the velvet carpet. The splash of red around Roth’s neck.
It was like stepping into hellfire and taking a drink with the devil, and the devil poured the spirits himself and called his efforts the heroics of the bravest man in London.
Not reckless, not misguided, not sloppy. Brave. Such a small, unassuming word, yet Jacob struggled to remember whether he’d ever earned it from anyone else in his life, even once, and came up utterly empty.
Roth called him many things after that, but it was not so much the words as the faith and the pure delight at the trouble they stirred up together that left their mark. It made Jacob breathless, like he was racing to keep up rather than always running in headfirst, with Father or Evie behind him yelling to slow down and think, for once. He did think, and that had always been his problem: too fast, too restless. Roth, however, seemed to think exactly the same as he did in so many ways. Instead of coming head-to-head, they worked in tandem, the Rook and the Blighter opposed in the streets but united against Starrick.
Jacob wasn’t used to this sort of partnership; he and Evie worked well together—they always had—but they challenged each other. Everything she would have said no to, Roth met with an eager why not?
Those times were full of wonder and bewildered fascination and philosophizing, even, and once—just once—Jacob found himself thinking of how staunchly Father would have disapproved of this. He would have disapproved of Roth, he would have disapproved of their ends and their means; he would have disapproved of Jacob himself because it had become reflexive by the end of his life. For once, it did not matter. Jacob was his own man—and, for once, someone saw it.
II. games
The factory did not feel like bravery. It felt like a sickness, one that left violent nausea in his belly and a taste of poison on his tongue, sharp and choking—though perhaps that was from the smoke. The smoke seemed as though it would never leave his lungs.
Jacob stood watching the flames for what felt like half an age, so bright they danced in his eyes and so hot he could feel the air on his skin like he was still in there. He hadn’t hesitated, because he never hesitated. Headfirst. No time to dwell on his disgust, his disappointment, the sickening pull of betrayal. The children were all that mattered, then, the innocent lives he was meant to protect; Roth’s rage, and his own, were secondary.
He could not tell whether he was already shaking when he was handed the box, or it was the box that made him shake. Roth’s hand on the paper was like a voice in his head, like the claws of a raptor around his throat, and it gripped him tighter and screamed when he peered inside the box and met the lifeless black eye of that young crow. Once free, then caged; now dead.
His horror was quiet, but his rage, driven by sorrow and fear he wouldn’t admit to, was not so. Stormy steps took him up that alley, the rhythm of them a fatal chorus of one of us will die, one of us will die, one of us will die before I’m the one in that cage. He all but stumbled through the door of the fight club hiding in plain sight nearby, and today he had no cordial words for Topping as he began to take off his gear unprompted.
“Put me in that ring,” he said, forming the words around the taste of smoke, his voice raw. From the coughing, he told himself. It was the coughing.
Topping saw the intensity that clung to him and it translated to sterling in his mind, as it always did, and so he was happy to oblige. Jacob let the rumble of the fighting quiet everything inside him that he didn’t want to hear and did the one thing he was truly good at: he fought and fought and fought, fingers digging into muscle, knuckles cracking bones, until the sweat washed the soot off his face and he couldn’t smell the smoke on him anymore. The tang of blood replaced what lingered of the flames; red, always red, like the faded crimson of a Blighter flag hanging from the rafters, looming over him.
He fought some more and thought, distantly, that he would have that flag taken down if it meant burning the place—
No. That wasn’t him.
He stopped. The fighting went on without him.
Jacob sat on a bench amidst the dizzying sea of noise and sniffed, wiping the blood under his nose with the back of his hand. Looking down at his chest, he saw drops of red splattered across the outstretched wing of the bird on his skin, flying free. He wiped his hand across it, too, and thought of the baby crow in the box.
He knew what he was going to have to do, tomorrow—but for now, he let the rush take him until he realized his entire body ached.
***
Evie was asleep in her armchair when he stepped onto the train from the near-empty platform at St. Pancras, so weary his muscles shook as he moved. The book in her hand was still half-open and dangerously close to falling; he took the book, kept her page with a loose pressed flower lying forgotten on the table beside her, and set it down. His own gentleness surprised him, as though he’d forgotten he was even capable of it after a night like this. Evie did not stir, and he did not linger.
He hopped over to the next car and stood before the board Henry had helped him set up at the very beginning, his gaze passing over every thread that connected to Starrick. Nearly all of them, he had broken, but for one: the Blighters, with their hold over every part of London, still too strong over the Rooks to his taste when this began. Roth had almost made him forget that. He looked at the letter he’d pinned beside the map: that very first dinner invitation that he and Evie had both scoffed at before he went ahead and decided to go anyway, because he was reckless and impulsive and so intent on charging towards his goals that he didn’t think of the consequences.
The chance to have a little fun with the bravest man in London.
Jacob gritted his teeth and pointedly did not reach into the pocket inside his jacket for the new note—the one Roth had sent with the box containing his invitation—even though it would have gone on the board, had it come from any other target. But it hadn’t. He couldn’t leave it there, my dearest Jacob and all, for Evie and Henry and every passing Rook to see, so instead he rummaged around his things until he found a photograph of Roth he remembered seeing among the various files Henry had sent over. He pinned it to the board so mechanically it was almost as though it were only some prick like Twopenny or Cardigan he was only too happy to remove from Starrick’s power.
Tomorrow, he would be crossing it out in red, as he did all the others—or it would give Evie a path to Roth, if he somehow didn’t come out of this alive. If he managed to bungle this up, too, she would clean up his mess with her eyes closed, he knew.
He couldn’t tell what was worse about that thought, between Evie ending Roth’s life—it has to be me, he thought bitterly—or Roth doing so much as laying eyes or a finger on his sister. Not after all of this. Would he call her dear, too, or was that a privilege and a curse reserved only for him?
He’d get no answers tonight, and likely not tomorrow, either. Moving heavily, his limbs as though through molasses, he grabbed a thick wool blanket off of his sofa and went back into the next car to lay it over Evie, tucking it around her shoulders snugly. Maybe she’d think it was Henry who had done it, when she woke; maybe it was better that she did, to bring her closer to him. She would need him if the rift between she and Jacob were to grow.
As he fell onto the sofa, Jacob almost wished Agnes was around to ask if they had a bottle of laudanum on hand. He hurt like the devil.
III. stage
The Alhambra was burning, and Jacob felt numb. Yet his lungs were raw from the smoke and every inch of him ached from the tension and the fighting—he knew that, distantly, as though there was a wall of flame between his mind and his body.
For a moment, through the horror and the anger and the twisting, crippling, slithering sorrow, he had truly thought Roth and his thrice-damned theatre were going to take him with them. Hellfire and damnation, all sealed with a bloody kiss.
How could you do this how could you do this howcouldyoudothis—
Jacob forced himself to breathe as he watched the flames shatter the windows, the lights bursting in the letters that spelled the Alhambra’s name on its façade. Chaos and destruction: that was Roth’s legacy. Jacob thought that it would come to be his, too; it already was. He’d done so much wrong, too much, and the only thing that had kept the whole city from crashing down because of him was Evie.
The bravest man in London, indeed.
Around him, Leicester Square was still spinning out of control, but Jacob stood frozen in the cool night air that the fire slowly corrupted with smoke and heat. Darling, what a night!
He couldn’t be sure what it was that made him want to be ill; he couldn’t even tell whether he was most furious and disgusted at Roth or himself. At long last, he made himself turn away from the flames and walked shakily to the fountain to dip his hands in the water. He made no effort to wash the blood off of his hands, but he splashed his face until he felt like it was his own again and his eyes stopped watering from the smoke. He passed the edge of his sleeve over his nose and mouth, still so tender from the fight club, and he didn’t want to think of being kissed and tasting the metal of his own blade.
He made to sit on the edge of the fountain; instead, he slid down until he was on the ground, his knees folded towards his chest and his back against cold stone. He took off his hat and ran his hands through his hair, his whole body fidgeting restlessly as he sniffed and fought back pointless, childish tears. He pressed his fingers into his eyelids and struggled for breath. The last time he’d been like this, it had been after Father died, but Evie had been next to him, her legs stretched out and her shoulders slumping from the shock and the grief. She had reached for his hand and held it so tightly he’d thought she was going to break his fingers.
Jacob didn’t know how to be alone in this, but he didn’t know how to be with her anymore, either, and certainly not with the ghost of Maxwell Roth filling every little space he’d left open inside himself to linger between them.
***
It wasn’t until nearly dawn that Jacob returned to the train—in the blue hour of twilight, as the painters called it. He sat on the empty platform at St. Pancras again for the better part of an hour before the familiar locomotive came in, and by then he could barely feel his own legs as they stretched out before him. There was a pinkish line of sunlight hugging the horizon. He watched it reach higher, inch by inch, so weary that his gaze was distant and his mind blank; he didn’t have it in him to find it pretty.
He could only be glad that it wasn’t red, but then he was standing in front of his board and dipping a brush into the red ink to smear a cross over the photograph of Roth, the leader of the Blighters, the last line of defense Crawford Starrick had that wasn’t himself. In the end, it hadn’t been much of a defense—Roth was, to his last, in it only for chaos and for Maxwell Roth. Jacob had learned that the hard way.
Defeated, Jacob went to bury his left hand in his pocket, only to find that it wasn’t empty. He pulled out a mask, gilded and glimmering, hard and blank. He didn't remember picking it up. Part of him wanted to walk out of the car and toss it out onto the rails, but instead he cut a new length of twine—red, red, always more red—and wrapped it around the nose, through the eyes, to pin beside the map of London. The curtain had fallen. So, too, would the Blighters.
Jacob breathed, again and again, and wondered if he would ever feel once more what it was to breathe without agony burning through his chest. Sleeping was hell, too, even though he’d come to find the train’s vibrations and stops comforting. He lay unmoving on his back and slipped in and out of the fog. So many times that he lost count, he woke with flames in his mind and the lingering resistance in his hand of his blade slicing through flesh and a cold, bloodied mouth against his. Dawn had barely passed him by, pale and grim behind a grey-white sky, but it still felt as though he’d been restless through a night-long fever.
Henry came aboard and found him staring blankly at the board from the couch; it turned his gaze to the new photograph. “The leader of the Blighters is dead, then?” he asked, his surprise passing smoothly over his face. Jacob didn’t blame him for having missed it, with how fast it had all happened.
“Do you know me to get ahead of myself, Greenie?” Jacob said. It was meant to be sarcasm, to point out that he had no reason to mark a target as dead before the fact, but he was so, so tired and it came out all wrong. Henry could all too easily answer in the affirmative, especially if he’d been basing his impressions of him on Evie’s word as much as what he saw for himself.
Henry opened his mouth. Before he could speak, Jacob rolled over onto his side, so painfully he almost wanted to scream, and faced the window. “Don’t answer that,” he said.
“Good work,” Henry said uncertainly to his back. His steps were quiet on the plush carpet Agnes had bought as he walked to the next car.
It had been too personal to be work—too strangely, uncomfortably intimate—and it certainly hadn’t been good, but Henry was probably more concerned with what mess Jacob’s actions had unleashed this time, anyhow.
IV. jokes
Jacob had liked the songs, before. It might have been that he liked the drinking, mostly: the laughing with his Rooks, arms around each other’s shoulders as they swayed happily to the music, the triumphant brandishing of their bottles and tankards as they sang along. He liked being a part of something that wasn’t the Frye name or the Brotherhood, and this was something he had built himself; he was a part of London as London had become a part of him.
If London’s way of toasting him for ridding it of the people who poisoned its streets was a lively ditty to help send them to Hell where they belonged, it was only fair that Jacob should sing along.
The one about Pearl had felt a little distasteful, perhaps, but he’d sung anyway. He didn’t feel so inclined towards being a proper and respectful young gentleman for the sake of a woman who had manipulated and used him and delighted in it to Starrick. It had hurt Jacob’s pride, certainly, but his disdain for her felt righteous because he had needed to make it up to the Brotherhood for his carelessness. If he had his way, no one would ever know of it—not Henry, not George, and certainly not Evie—but for Father, if he was looking down on him and clicking his tongue the way he did when his footing was too heavy.
Still, it felt like a lesson: delight in the poetic nature of an Assassin aiding the Templars by some underhanded machinations, and meet your end at the point of the Assassin’s blade.
So he sang along and welcomed that the people should use Pearl’s death for their amusement like she had used him for hers, and it did not keep him from sleeping at night by any means. It was a good, properly cheeky song, besides.
They wrote one for Roth, too, but to this one, he did not sing along. He’d been doing his damnedest to be himself again since that cursed nightmare of an evening, to find the same satisfied irreverence in his advancement as with everyone else—it almost worked. Still, there was always something empty, and yet so heavy, that stubbornly kept a semblance of normalcy just out of his reach.
As he drank, he half expected Evie to burst in and tell him some institution or other had fallen apart because of him again, but the only thing that was crumbling without Roth was the Blighters. The Blighters, and the part of Jacob Frye he’d built up with admiration and terms of endearment. It was to their advantage, this time, that the Blighters should be crippled like this. And Jacob wouldn't let anyone see him bleed.
The folks at the pub, they sang of Maxwell Roth as they had everyone else before him, because they didn’t know and they couldn’t know what it cost the man who had cut the rope and put the blade through his neck. Jacob listened, tense and queasy, but he couldn’t sit through it. The piano felt like an erratic heartbeat, the words drenched in overly chipper poison, and then—
“—and Maxwell Roth, he then received a very bad review!”
Jacob snatched his hat up, slammed a banknote—not counterfeit, thanks to Evie and none to him—down on the table, and left.
***
“And I am sorry this doesn’t involve something you can destroy,” Evie said.
For a moment Jacob’s ears filled with the thundering roar of fire, again. Like it wasn’t enough, or perhaps because she didn’t know her words drove home something too painful that he already knew, she cut deeper: Father.
Of course Father had never approved of his methods or much of him; that wasn’t new information. But Father was dead, and so was the only man who’d ever shown him approval. Evie was what remained.
Father was right, she said.
It hurt worse than it did whenever their father called him reckless, and it hurt worse than it had when he finally opened his eyes and saw the sort of man Roth truly was. Evie was still here, but she would soon be gone.
Jacob couldn’t even resent her for it; he had only himself to blame.
V. rook and queen
The mission did not wait for him to stop feeling miserable; perhaps that was his saving grace.
When Abberline met up with him in the royal guard’s uniform, the ridiculous bearskin hat in his hands, there was something in Jacob that leapt for joy for the first time since the Alhambra. No matter everything he said, all the necessary chastising that his position demanded of him, Freddy seemed to trust him—and Jacob had never, for one second, thought to distrust him.
(Not that it was a mark of his good judgement, all things like Pearl Attaway and Maxwell Roth considered, but Freddy was the better man. Of that, Jacob was certain.)
Like the Rooks, it felt like he had finally built something that was meant to last. Even amidst the chaos and the destruction left in his wake, he had a few things that were solid and steady and that he didn’t owe to Evie or Henry or his father or even George. All this was his, and he wasn't about to lose them like he was to lose Evie.
There was a moment—once, suddenly, one fleeting impression—where that delighted something made him want to grab Freddy’s face and kiss him. What stopped him wasn’t shame: it was that he didn’t want to force it the way Roth had forced his blood onto his lips. If it were to come to pass, better it happen by meeting halfway, somewhere between words of charming sarcasm and reprimands made out of habit, so steeped in familiarity that they only came as half-hearted.
Shame wasn’t for irreverent fools like him. For once, it felt comforting to be so.
***
Jacob was tired of choking because of Roth’s smoke, and now Starrick’s hands. As he dragged himself back to his feet shaking, knowing that Evie would need him to fight in her stead like she fought in his, he heard Starrick speak: “The rook falls, and now the queen.”
Those disdainful words echoed through the vault. They broke through the clamour of the unrelenting battle between Starrick and Evie, rang in Jacob's ears in the spaces between his coughing and his ragged breathing. Starrick's voice was so smooth, so soft even when it was so sharp, and so utterly pretentious.
Jacob almost wanted to laugh, and he wondered if Evie did, too. Had the situation been any other, Evie may very well have primly informed Starrick that it was no use making any sort of reference to chess where her brother was concerned.
When they cut the Shroud free from his shoulders, Evie's blade buried itself deep in Starrick’s chest. “Queen takes knight,” Jacob hissed. His own blade followed—a mere four seconds later—and Evie said, low and dark, before Jacob was even finished speaking: “Rook takes knight.”
They looked at each other and wrenched their blades out in tandem; Evie stepped away, and Jacob caught Starrick to lower him down on the ground. They stood over him and heard his dying words together. It was done.
When they were outside again, eyes squinting in the bright early morning light, Jacob was smiling as though everything had washed away with a tide that had seemed like it might never come. He’d meant it when he told Evie he’d missed her, more than anything he had ever said in his life—and now they were at each other's side again, as it always had been. Evie had Henry at her arm and Jacob was without smoke in his lungs.
He could breathe.
The knighting was secondary in his mind when he glanced sideways, still kneeling, and saw Evie gazing not at Henry but past him. She was looking at him, her little brother, with a smile and a light in her eyes so bright she didn’t even need to speak for him to feel it to the bottom of his spirit.
But she still spoke, coming to his side again as the queen's carriage rolled away.
“Father would be proud of you,” Evie said, her hand steady on his shoulder and her smile gentle. She meant it, too.
Jacob smiled back, but said nothing. Perhaps he would be; perhaps not; perhaps any pride Father might have felt would only be a product of that which he had for Evie, not for him. As he stood beside his sister, Jacob found that it didn’t matter so much to him anymore what their father would have thought; he was dead and gone and Jacob had tortured himself overmuch with the dead, by now.
He heard the pride in Evie’s voice, saw it in her eyes. That was more than enough.
septembre 2018: pavane and sairsel, the now. 1,524 words.
🎧 shrike - hozier
As the adventurers left, Sairsel rose from his bench with plate in hand and returned with another steaming serving of stew. He laid a hand on Pavane’s shoulder under the guise of steadying himself as he sat back down, though it was more of an excuse to keep close at the sight of his concerned look. It was an unusual sight, but the time they’d spent together had been enough to understand that Pavane worried about much more than he let on. Sairsel was only of the lucky few who got to see it.
“Is that your third helping?” Pavane asked, glancing over at him as Sairsel picked up his spoon to shovel stew into his mouth.
“Yeah,” Sairsel said through a mouthful. “Been flying for hours to get here. I’m starving.”
“You didn’t have to rush over.”
Sairsel shrugged and ate a few more bites before speaking up, tearing a chunk of bread as he did. “They’re going to be fine, you know. The kids. I’ve seen stupider Striders live longer than they should, and my nain thinks they show promise and she’s—”
“An Immortal. I know. They know it, too.”
“That’s what you meant when you said they might come looking for her,” Sairsel said. He paused for a moment, running a hand over the stubble at his jaw. “Well, they’re not going to be doing that in Vinean, so it’ll be a fortnight or three before they’re going to be bothering her about it. We can keep going during that time, can’t we? You and me, our business.”
“Yeah,” Pavane said distantly. “Yeah, we can keep going.”
Sairsel noticed, but said nothing. He could feel something simmering from within Pavane, something quiet and more vulnerable than he liked to admit; Sairsel knew there was no point in reaching for it before it came to the surface. Once he’d cleaned off his plate, he put his hand on Pavane’s shoulder again.
“You still have a room here?”
“I do.”
Sairsel nodded and pushed himself up off the bench with a weary groan, then leaned down close to his ear. “I’m going to rest up for an hour, then I’ll stay in bed a bit longer. Join me whenever you'd like.”
“I could use a nap, too. Long night.”
Pavane followed Sairsel out of the inn's common room, and when they were both within the relative intimacy of the staircase, Sairsel reached back blindly and found his hand.
They were less than an hour gone from Blackhart when Pavane stopped in the middle of the road, walked off the path with a few curt words about wanting a moment’s rest, and stood staring at the trees with his arms crossed over his chest until Sairsel came to stand near him. He’d been uncharacteristically quiet since they had left, which made sense—Sairsel had seen how dulled those waking nightmares made him, the toll it took on both his body and mind. But this time, there was something heavy about the weariness that he hadn’t known in Pavane yet.
“Why are you here, Sairsel?” he asked at last.
“Why am I here?” Sairsel repeated, frowning. “Is your memory playing tricks? You’re the one who sent for me, saying we should meet up again.”
“I know what I did. Why did you come?”
Sairsel found himself at a loss for words—not because he had no answer, but because he did not know how to speak the one that came to him out loud. It could have been simple, no more than four words, but they stayed caught in his throat; somehow, telling him he missed him seemed like words in a foreign language he’d never learned to speak.
“Because you asked,” he said after a moment.
Pavane shook his head, dark and stormy. It was not an answer he could accept. “So much for your freedom. You’d think that after what happened you’d have the sense to get away and stay away and not come back just because I whistled for you like a pet.”
“Are you trying to insult me, or are you just that much of a prick?” Sairsel asked, taking a step back. He exhaled hard through his nose and shook his head, too, looking past Pavane at the line of the horizon. “No. That’s not it. You sent that message thinking I wouldn’t be coming back, did you? And I proved you wrong.”
“It’s not about me being right.”
“No. It’s about driving me away.”
Sairsel didn’t know why he was angry, but he could feel it rising from within him, burning in his lungs and driving his words out of him. His voice and tongue were sharp and quick in ways he hardly knew.
However Pavane felt, he wore it with a bitter smile. “You could barely look at me after it happened.”
“Yeah, because it was fucking weird, Pavane! If I’d had a mirror, I wouldn’t have wanted to look at myself, either,” Sairsel said, raising both arms before dropping them by his sides. He took a step forward again, closer to Pavane, who stayed rooted to the ground but seemed to want to move away. “I stayed behind because I needed to think about all of it, aye, but it gave me a clear head. I thought about you. About us. And I came back because I wanted to.”
Pavane shook his head quietly and wouldn’t meet his gaze. Say something, Sairsel thought desperately, say fucking anything so that I know it isn’t just me. But he said nothing. Sairsel let out a sharp exhale, frustration pushing at the words that wouldn’t come. If he was already lost, then what was the point of holding back?
“I came back because I care about you, but you just can’t fathom that, can you? Because everything is temporary or disposable to you, isn’t it? I was just an entertaining fuck, some exotic wild thing to warm your bed because it’s different to have someone who doesn’t worship the ground you walk on.” Sairsel shook his head again, running a hand over the lower half of his face as he put a hand on his hip and angled his body away. “Gods, I’m a fucking fool.”
It was strange, to know a shame of this sort. Sairsel had let himself be ashamed of much in his life, but never this, never men; and it wasn't Pavane being a man that made him so. It was that he'd lost his grip on himself so thoroughly that Pavane could hurt him.
When Pavane made to speak, a gust of wind rose, as though to wrap itself around Sairsel protectively, like the shadows that made Pavane strong but threatened to swallow him whole. So he waited, let it quiet down to a rustle in the trees, and when he did speak his voice was small and quiet.
“If you’re a fool,” he said gently, moving towards Sairsel the same way he spoke, “then so am I, and an utter arse to boot.”
Sairsel glanced over his shoulder at him, all too aware of how strange it was to see and hear him so restrained, so diminished. Pavane touched his shoulder and waited until he had turned around to face him again, the other hand hovering near his jaw, before cupping his face and leaning in to kiss him. When Sairsel didn’t kiss back, he began to pull away; Sairsel grabbed a fistful of his collar and pulled him back in. They kissed softly, gently, and the breeze fluttered in the leaves around them with the same sort of unhurried reverence.
“What does that mean?” Sairsel asked against his lips.
“What?”
It was hard to stay away from Pavane; Sairsel kissed him again. “I’m going to need you to clarify that. If I have to worry about what you meant, where we stand, I’ll—”
“I meant that I don’t want you to be temporary or disposable in my life,” Pavane said honestly. “But I should be keeping you away, and it makes me be a prick that I can’t bring myself to.”
Sairsel managed to laugh; against the heaviness that lingered inside him, there was something that fluttered upwards, something he couldn’t quiet. “Why try? You said it yourself: I’m a wild thing. I’m going to do as I damn well please.”
“Of course,” Pavane said, finding himself smiling as well. “What a fool was I to think I had a say in whether or not to keep you around.”
“I think you’re going to be stuck with me awhile.” Sairsel gave Pavane’s chest a small shove and kissed him once more, smiling against his lips when he kept him close and lengthened it. “We’re in this together, Viper.”
For the first time, he had a purpose that wasn’t running away or keeping himself away. It felt like the ground was falling away from under his feet, but he was not falling with it. It felt the way he did when his body took the shape of a bird and he beat his wings and soared up into the sky, and instinct alone guided him north.
avril 2018: pavane and the things that begin. 411 words.
He crouched down in the sand and watched the snake.
There was only the hissing wind in his ears, the blue sky above him, and a thin line in the sand touching the tip of the snake’s tail slowly being blown away. Usually, the quiet made his fingers itch for something, anything—a book, preferably. If he wasn’t dizzied by an exhilarating bustle, then he had to have words coming alive before his eyes, pouring the slow rush of knowledge into his veins; it was the only silence he tolerated because, to him, it wasn’t silence. It was a burst of energy he couldn’t explain, for all his eloquence and his clever remarks when it suited him to play the arrogant sage, and one of the only things in the world he allowed himself to be clueless about. He could appreciate mystique as much as the next man.
Something about the snake gave him that same feeling of shadowed fascination, of a question that needed not be answered, which was strange. Every day, on his way to the Chain, he passed by the platinum-plated skeleton of Hiskarath, the Looming Shadow, the great fiendish dragon who could have swallowed the soft gods of the world whole; he walked by her remains and bowed his head and revered her as the rest of his kin did, and yet he found himself captivated by a mere snake no larger than his arm. His father might have said that it was the call of his blood: House Malichar had taken the emblem of the silver viper for its own centuries ago, and as blood prince, it should have been written upon his soul, but the symbol had been little more than a decoration he saw on every seal and every door and the occasional drapery. Until now.
Maybe it was the sort of prophetic moment come to define his destiny as heir to the bloodline of his infernal ancestors; maybe it was just a snake. Pavane was a very stubborn man, however, and exceedingly selfish if his father had it right, and he chose to experience it as something for himself. It was just him and the snake, with its rain cloud grey belly, obsidian scales and golden eyes; with the wind around them and the sand blowing through the air and nothing else.
Slowly, he reached a hand out, fingers slowly uncurling from his palm to stop a hair’s breadth short of the snake’s nose.
[...]
septembre 2018: pavane and the things that break. 966 words.
“I know who sent you,” said Pavane to the mob standing between him and his freedom, struggling to keep his voice level. His blood was bathed in the fires of the Abyss, the Nine Hells, the Barrens; he rarely let much get to him, but when something fanned the flames, he could hardly keep them from burning. “I know why you’re here. No hard feelings; you all have to make a living somehow. But I’d rather not this turn ugly.”
“Ugly for you, maybe, pretty lord,” replied the woman at the front, the one with the chains in her hands that certainly were meant for him.
Pavane set his staff down on the ground and rested the tip of his boot against it, raising his hand just slightly so that the sheath hiding the blade at the end of the staff came loose. “You think so? Because I’m quite convinced that the person who hired you very clearly specified that you were not to hurt me, and in my experience, trying to do no harm to someone who has no qualms with killing you never ends well.”
Something visceral broke inside him at the sound of the woman rattling her chains as she stepped forward, and Pavane lifted his staff just above the ground to free it of the sheath. He whispered words under his breath, locking eyes with her, and felt the familiar reverberation within his skull of the Deep that would turn his voice into twisted dissonance. The woman’s eyes widened; her face paled; she recoiled in pain, dropping the chains; fear filled her expression as she began to step backward, shaking her head in horror. Her allies hesitated a moment, and then they ran for Pavane.
He did not budge, did not even flinch, until they were just in reach. He pulled at the unseen shadows of power that danced around him and lifted a hand: dark tendrils sprouted from the ground, shuddering with flashing colour and twisting shadows, and began battering the thugs before they could touch him. One man broke through, biting back a groan and stumbling, but managed to use his momentum to launch himself at Pavane, backhanding him hard across the face. From the first of the blood he shed, it was a whirlwind.
The magic roared and hissed around him; he threw blasts of dark energy at them with all his might and called down death from above that sapped the life from them, over and over again. When spells were not enough, he raised his staff and swung: cracking the wood against their jaws in wide arcs, slashing their throats with the blade and plunging it deep into their bodies. Blood sprayed on his face; he could taste it on his breath as he moved, as he flurried and fought and slaughtered until nothing stood between him and the water and his hands shook from the exhaustion.
Still, Pavane clutched his staff and stood tall. He was not surprised when he saw his father on the deck of the boat that was meant to take him far from home; only angry. Angry, and hateful, and disappointed, and ashamed. But in the face of his father standing beside the sailor he’d paid to get him across the Sea of Swords, holding a knife to his throat, Pavane was not afraid.
“Have you your fill of this?” he yelled across the still night air. His voice sounded garbled and twisted in his own ears, as though he spoke with many tongues that were not his. He licked his lips quickly and felt death on his tongue; he could see the shadows around him, winding and warping from his arm upon which the burnt darkness on his arms glowed with countless unblinking eyes.
“Please, my son,” said his father in a fabricated plea. “No more of this violence. No more of this rebellion. Come home.”
“Rebellion? You think this is rebellion?” Pavane shouted in indignation. He stalked up to the ship and climbed up the gangplank without slowing. He looked past the swearing, sweating sailor at his father, as steadily staring as the eyes on his arm. “You think this is a threat to me?”
His father took a step back. “Do not force me to commit this atrocity.”
“Go on. Slit this man’s throat. Get your hands dirty.”
He could see his father’s fingers clutching the knife tighter. Pavane knew his father to be no paragon of morality, but the years of comfort having a blood prince for a son had softened his habits enough that he now loathed to do anything distasteful himself. His son, however, had no such qualms.
“There is no way out of this, Pavane. You will not be sailing away from here with this man.”
“You’re right,” Pavane said, changing his grip on his staff so that he held it upside down. He stepped closer and took the knife from his father’s hand with bloody fingers, watching the dread on his face. Pavane could almost see himself in his father’s eyes, twisted so by some abominable power and fueled by an unrelenting anger years in the making. Still, he laid his gaze upon the sailor and spoke in a calm voice that was colder than he might have wished. “I’m sorry.”
He drove the blade of his staff upwards into the man’s heart, looking into his eyes, and wrenched it free to allow him to slump to the deck from his father’s grip. “Get off this ship, Father.”
“What have you become, my son?” his father asked in a small, emotionless voice.
“Nothing you had no hand in making,” Pavane snapped. “Leave my sight. I’ll return when I’m no longer this thing I am, and then we’ll settle all our debts. I promise you.”
hey y’all i wrote this thread on twitter for myself but i think it bears repeating over here so here it is, unrolled:
as of today i've written every single day for the past year and i'm SO proud of myself! let's carry that streak to day 366 and beyond! ✨
some notes, because i think it's important to clarify:
i do not ascribe to the notion that you have to write every single day of your life to be a good writer or, as some claim, to even deserve to call yourself a writer at all, because that's just bonkers
this did not start as an intentional challenge. i started writing a project a year ago that i was incredibly invested in and for which i had an uninterruptible flow of ideas for. i wrote every day because i needed to tell that story every day.
in the end, i wrote 114k words in just under three months. it was the longest project i'd ever written, the longest to come to completion, the longest i'd spent on a single project uninterrupted, and my longest streak of writing every day.
the streak was just shy of 90 days when i finished it, so i figured, hey, why not keep it going? it was a gamer mindset to get the biggest chain score i could, so i hit 90 days and kept going.
90 days became 120, became 150, became six months, and somewhere in there i realized it was actually possible to do it, and it became a genuine challenge i posed myself because it did me good. i have issues with self-discipline and my art very badly needed this.
there were shitty days. many of my google docs from this past year are just steaming piles of shit because sometimes you're just not feeling it. i've had days where i struggled to hit my self-imposed bare minimum of 150 words and days where i wrote 2,3k without even noticing.
still, i celebrate this because it's an achievement for me to have been able to tell my writing "i stick with you, no matter what." no more not writing for weeks because i had a few uninspired days. no more stagnation.
my writing grew exponentially over those first three months, and this whole year has made me a stronger writer than i ever was. i've tried new things, i've revisited old projects, i've started to write in french again, i've driven some of my most cherished stories forward.
do i think it's necessary, or ideal, or even possible for everyone? fuck no! but it was the best thing i could do for me.
