Record shop Liu Sang my beloved!! But I’m actually here to ask you about Tenebrae Eternae, the name is intriguing. What’s it about? What’s fun about writing it?
Hello and thank you for the ask @momosandlemonsoda! I just posted an answer about the Records shop AU and I'm very Normal about it, clearly. I do hope to write out a short Tumblr ficlet about it one day, and exorcise the demons from my head.
Coming to Tenebrae Aeternae, it's a DMBJ case fic that I started writing with @merinnan and @xantissa about Xiaoge who has come back from the Gate with no memories of himself, but also years before the scheduled ten-year mark. The abiding theme is that things are not what they seem.
The first chapter is already posted on AO3, but here's a snippet from one of the later chapters that we haven't posted yet:
The man that appeared in the open door was both familiar and not at all. It was the man from the pictures - that was clear enough - the same shape, the same face - but he was the man from the pictures at the same time. The one in the pictures was young, had a bright smile, eyes that reflected his smile easily. There was lightness and youth to him, a sort on innocence, faith, that could be seen clear as day in the pictures he saw. This one was older. Not only by years - and that too was strange. Why did Wu Xie look older when Zhang Qiling looked the same still? How did one of them get older while the other didn't? Age wasn't the only thing that was different. While the young man in the pictures seemed fit enough, the man that came into Wushanju was on a whole other level. He was clearly trained too, Zhang Qling could see the way he rolled his weight, keeping his center of gravity low, his feet spread out just enough to make keeping balance easier and his knees weren't locked. He was a fighter and an experienced one, for whom keeping always ready became second nature. But maybe the biggest difference were his eyes. Still large and lovely, but now harder and no longer expressing his emotions. He stood there, looking at Zhang Qiling, his eyes shuttered and hard to read, his mouth turned down in a hard to read expression. Emotion, definitely, but Zhang Qiling wasn't quite sure what kind.
