#sionid

[blackwoolncrown]

16 & 27?

Wait uh is this for the game thing? Or the character thing? And if the latter which trashbaby?

[blackwoolncrown]

But when do I get to learn about your 50 OCs? The link on your blog doesn't go anywhere D: D: D:

Ahhgghhhg because I haven’t reset the link !!! but also because I haven’t even put them all on there. someone asked me once and I had to list them all off the top of my head, lol. I fixed it, thanks for reminding me! As of yet however I don’t have like, proper bios for my mainly played characters :(

[blackwoolncrown]

Fairy & gnome?

hello new fren :3

Fairy: what would you call your aesthetic?

Hoo. A yin and yang. One half is charred earth, blackened iron, red red wine and polished crocodile and snakeskin as far as the eye can see. Victorian fashion and armageddon that looks the way Florence + The Machine’s Seven Devils feels. Everything is dim and uncomfortable. 

 The other half is a fairy glade full of ferns, will o wisps, and mushrooms. Herds of ponies that might be unicorns in disguise. Pagan rites. Crystals. Pastel chiffon dresses and weed smoked through dichro pipes. Old Irish taverns and antiques out the ass.

The first one describes my head and the second describes my house, tbh.

Gnome: what's your favorite plant or flower?

Ummm SUCCULENTS! Or Hydrangeas. They are such beautiful children and I love them. Sweet pretty babies. I love plants. I also have a huge soft spot for venus flytraps and pitcher plants <3

Thanks for asking!

[sunderlorn]

sionid replied to your post “If I can’t participate physically in any of the classes or eponymous...”

Hecklefest 2015

Featuring headline acts with smash-hits like...

“YOUR FOOTWORK IS SUB-OPTIMAL.”

“THAT LAST HIT WAS NOT DELIVERED WITH SUFFICIENT FORCE OR WITH A PRACTICAL PART OF THE BLADE.”

“IS THERE ANY VERIFIABLE HISTORICAL SOURCE FOR THAT TECHNIQUE? YEAH, DIDN’T THINK SO. IT WOULD BE REALLY HARD TO ACCURATELY ILLUSTRATE HOW STUPID YOU JUST LOOKED WITHIN THE LIMITATIONS OF MEDIEVAL CONCEPTIONS OF PERSPECTIVE.”

“HE’S WEARING A BOX, FUCKING KICK HIM IN IT.”

and many more!

[dunmerofskyrim]

1st of First Seed

I fixed breakfast. I remembered Narit’s insistence when we travelled together: the only proper way to to start or end a journey is by eating, and eating ravenously. I remember agreeing with her then. I am less hungry now than I usually am, but I think I still agree today, though time has heaped up on both of us since then. So I prepared the last of my coffee. I’d saved the final handful of dark little beans for her return. I charred a little oat-crusted rye bread, and picked out two smoked trout to flake and scrape over the toast. I found in her larder a ring of smoked blood sausage. From town no doubt — Narit cures and smokes and salts and dries meats in her own right, but none of them are very fine things; they do for harsh Winters and fallow times, and minutes upon minutes of laboured chewing. I made ready to fry it with the rest. I made ready my complaints about the lack of vegetables — how I’d turn so pale without them she’d wake one morning and mistake me for a Nord. I prepared wistful panegyrics in honour of fine absent things: tomatoes whose skins I could blister over the fire, if they were in season; fresh Nibenay olives; halved Autumn squash, formed into golden bowls and filled with butter or fragrant rosemary-scented oil… But I realised I didn’t know what time Narit might wake for breakfast. Usually by the time I rose, she was already up and about. Or else, usually, she might not even have slept at all. But instead she was still all wrapped up in the previous night’s miracle: a deep sleep. So I took a stolen moment to wash hastily, and re-dress in trousers, shirt, scarf draped shawlish around my shoulders, and bandages on my mutilated foot. And then set about small things outside, sat about the perch where we cook in the clearing, under the windmill’s creaking arms and tattered sails. I mended rents and holes in my long tunic. Being that it was a gift from Falanu I’m sure she would tut and hiss over the shoddiness of my handiwork. But until I can tempt her here, or find a better tailor or seamstress, it will have to do. I waxed and re-treated my leathers – my deerskin over-leggings, and my shoes – to keep them healthy and happy. I took a whetstone to Foyatra… “Expecting trouble?” asked Narit from her windmill’s threshold. Her hair was wilder than ever from the press of a pillow. Her eyes were bleary but bright. “That depends,” I said, grinning but not looking up till the task at hand was done. “Should I be?” “Looks like you were mostly just expecting me for breakfast.” “Guilty as charged. Sit.” My cookfire was reduced to white embers by then. Enough to keep the coffee warm, but not so much to fry anything. Seeing this I kissed my teeth and set down my spear with an exaggerated sigh. “You’re late, speaking of guilt. Which means none of this till dinner,” I held up the blood sausage like an article of evidence in accusation. “Mm. I’m a layabout and a lig-in-bed. The worst kind of good-for-nothing,” she said as I poured us both a bowl of black steaming coffee, and added a scrape of sugar — one for me and two for her. “But you would be too if you’d just run your way back from Riften with all Oblivion on your tail.” I paused in my pottering. Narit continued. “No. Now I think about it, you’d be much worse. I’ve seen how you run. Or lurch – mmh – that’s a better word for it.” “All Oblivion?” I asked slowly, eyebrows raised. “What sort of daedra did you rub the wrong way?” I tried to joke but the humour came out thin and forced. I’d had an inkling the night before that something might have gone wrong — that she’d had trouble of some kind on her journey. Seems I was right. “No daedra, no atronachs, no—…Screw the rest. Just a man. He took an – uhm – dim view of the business I was tending to down in the Rift.” Narit’s expression was drawn now too. She didn’t meet my eye, and snatched at a slice of toast, a piece of trout. She set to wolfing it down. I ate more slowly and listened, gaze fixed on her, expectant. “Finished the business,” she said between mouthfuls, swallowing more often than she chewed. She slurped her coffee. “All fine, mostly. Half my share up front and the rest pending. Just left off with one little hitch and I think maybe I was followed.” “Followed here?” She nodded, finally looking up. Her eyes were wide but she looked more mischievous than worried. I wish I could say the same. “Followed by?” “Just a man.” “A dangerous one, no doubt.” “No doubt,” she echoed.

[dunmerofskyrim]

3rd of Sun's Dawn -- Part II

Narit works hard to maintain her privacy out here. The solitude that I shattered. She showed me how — or rather, she went on with the day as she would have without me, but let me tag along, with curious eyes and questions. Funny that those are usually the traits her whole being is built on – in memory for me until now – but now it’s my turn to wonder with wide eyes. She led me out into the woods with her. The path was winding and would have lost me quickly if I didn’t have her for a guide. But she trod it with a well-practised step. There were small carved things, hung in the trees along our way: wind-chimes fluted out of reeds and fallen deadwood; little pyramidal cages of bone, twisted together with dried up nettles, weeds, hair. “This might not be how it’s done,” she said as we walked and she worked. “It’s almost definitely not how the Mages’ Guild would do it, or even the College. If they could do it all, I mean. But it’s how I do it.” She paused now and then to realign or fix one of her little hanging trinkets. Sometimes she would stop by a tree – appearing like any other tree on our route – and draw a little single-edged skinning knife, and use its point to scrape away the bark, and beneath it carve her mark: nonsense things, looking almost like Aldmeris but deviating into spirals and lazy meanders. “They’re ways to pin it down,” she said, slowly, as if the words – the explanation – came with some effort. “The Magicka, I mean. Like sticking a butterfly so it stays. I let a little bit go into all this lot, so the forest’s full of it. It’s not one big spell. That’d be hard — I wouldn’t know where to start — Would you? It’s just lots of little ones…” “Can I help?” I asked. She didn’t seem too strained by all these small spells, but if I could offer a pinch of the Magicka that lives in me then it was the least I could do. “I’m…not sure. Maybe one day. Probably not yet.” J’adra trotted along behind us, not riding in my pocket as usual. Sometimes I’d look around to find her gone. Anywhere else, I’d say she was chasing a bird, or squirrel, or butterfly or somesuch. But here there is no birdsong, and no animals scurry as they should. “Your cat doesn’t seem too bothered by it all?” Narit asked, after a time. “Why’s that Sim? You enchanted her? No. She seems…She looks familiar. She is a she, yes? She’s the one you picked up in Haafingar? Same coat, same eyes, but better fed than she was before.” She turned about and squatted on her bare haunches in front of J’adra, reaching out a hand for her to sniff. “Hello hello, little one. D’you remember me?” “Memorable as you are, I think it’s more that she wouldn’t forget. She’s – uhm – not a cat.” Narit looked up at me, with those same burning curious eyes as ever. No words needed — only that look. “You’re talking to an Alfiq. And a damn good mage, though you never really see her do any magic. You just know notice it when it’s happened, not when it’s happening. She’s a friend, I think, after all this while. And her name is J’adra.” “A Khajiit?” said Narit, in froggish open-mouthed disbelief that quickly twisted into a grin. “That Khajiit!” “That one indeed. We found what we were looking for after all.” Narit checked her traps meanwhile, as we travelled the roundabout way back windmillwards. Little snares she’d set for the skittish local rabbits and hares. She found a brace of them, each on different sides of her forest: one caught around the back foot, one around the neck. The latter was already dead when found, but not unfresh. The former was writhing in the leather thong that held its foot. Narit drew her knife again, and, with blade-press and thumb, half-cut and half-tore the head off — her precision was casual and clean, like I might slice an apple. They hung upsidedown from her left hand as we wandered back home. “You can skin a rabbit, can’t you?” she asked as we sat out amongst the eaves of her scaffolds. “Gut one?” “I can cook one…” I said, quietly, almost embarrassed. “I’ll teach you. Then you can cook two.” She demonstrated on the first: a large hare. She took off the feet as she had the head. A small cut up the belly and then a pulling motion, wrenching the hide away quickly, then gently setting it aside. “Might use it. D’you want a pair of gloves? Hm. Or I might not…” She opened the cut a little further, from ribcage to between its hind legs and pulled away its viscera. I’ve killed people, but any fascination I felt was tempered with a grim feeling, watching her at work. “Keep the liver, heart, those bits. All good. Throw the rest wherever you’re not sleeping. The green wobbly bit in particular. Don’t eat the green wobbly bit, whatever you do.” I followed suit, fumbling a little with the hide. She took my hands and guided me, sitting behind me in silent concentration, fingers over my fingers, as my shoulders stiffened and the tendons in my neck thrummed tight at the touch… Narit only has one pot. A little black iron kettle. She gathered kindling and fuel as I added ingredients to the pot: a little of a nondescript red wine bought in Ivarstead; a couple of bay leaves; thick rounds of carrot; water and a few scrapes of the sugar cone I’d brought with me, purchased in Darkwater Crossing. I cut the meat into joints and added them, knowing that there couldn’t be any frying here first. The fire was ready then, and I lit it with a gesture, and set the pot hanging above it. “Stick some of these in too,” Narit said, coming back with another armful of deadwood. She held out a handful of little black berries, dried already, looking like black pepper. “No idea what they’re called, but they’re good. Like liquorice or—…I don’t know what. Put them in.” She was right. The stew was good. Narit’s manners, not so much. But from her, I never expected more. “There’s only one bed,” she said, matter-of-fact after dinner, and not-quite-serious after a few swigs of the wine. “It’s yours. For tonight anyway.” I tried to object. She objected too. “No, Sim. Are you a dog? Is your cat a dog too? Simra? No. You’re a guest and you’re sleeping in the bed. I’ll be fine.” So I slept in the bed. Or rather I tried to. It was small, even for Narit’s frame I imagine, and I had to crook up my legs and curl in on myself to fit. And I slept clothed, like I would in the wilds, under sheets I think might well have been sewn together from sackcloth, amidst the creaking timbers and shifting bones of this long-dead windmill — and the sound of Narit’s footsteps, even light as they are, coming and going all through the night…

[sunderlorn]

A few things which are Actual Things in the wonderful world of Olm

Out in the open skied western reaches of the Brokenside, where the sea rushes into and over the land, and the land lies in tatters laid over the sea. Beyond the tangled swamps and briar groves of that land, where it flattens beneath a huge and weather-filled emptiness. In the midst of those lands a tradition of hunters has grown. Hunters who pluck prey from the sky, and from all that lies beneath it, all alike. Who hunt with enchanted kites, strings knotted with broken glass, shards of iron and steel and bronze, flint and black bog-glass mined from the veins that stripe those swamps and reaches. ... In the depths of the earth, in the combed caverns under all of Olm. The Underway. Where the Dokka make their homes, and mine and crawl, and carve causeways for those that would travel away from the sun’s seeing eye, and make from all these their business. In great open lightless spaces, dusk-wasps make their nests. Long as a man’s arm and with eight spindly sharp-tipped legs and eyeless heads like arrow-points. They scavenge and hunt for meat among the lightless life that grows in the Underway. What they cannot digest they use to build the stiff leathery geometries of their nests. What they metabolise becomes duskhoney. A thick black sweet ooze they use to feed their larvae, and to live upon in sparse times. The sting of a dusk-wasp is all but a death-sentence, oozing the moisture from a body — from eyes, ears, mouth, pores. But the Dokka and rare others from outside the Underway brave dusk-wasp nests to secure their share of duskhoney. It can be eaten, or boiled to hard sweets, or diluted and distilled into Dokkash black mead. The effect on all but the wasps themselves is the same, though in varying degrees of intensity. A euphoric sense of detachment; rippling layered hallucinations; slackened muscles; intense thirst. And with overuse: addiction, starvation or parching as the dusker forgets what sustains life, too preoccupied with what seems, now, to make it worth living. ... Among the gorges and dustways and sunbaked roofs of Tolomi. Its balconies and buttressed walkways, and terraces open to the air and to the rain that comes once a year. An ever-expanding clan of cats, half-feral, interbreeding constantly, has lived for an age and longer still. None know their true numbers, but they live amongst the Tolomaics as part of their day-to-day lives. Whether cared for like pilgrims whenever a citizen and a cat cross paths; or shooed from refuse piles or the warmth of one’s roof-garden on sight. Some are larger than others, and it is rumoured, perhaps, that these are the result of cross-breeding with the larger long-haired wild-cats of the Accord in the North. ... In Western Olm’s wild places. In the northern highlands and hills and mountains, beyond Sapcross and around the Arling, and towards the remote port of Stornlas. That is where you will find the few dragons this world has left. That is the way the tall stories run. In truth they are another species: wyverns, descended perhaps from the dragons of old, but nothing compared to their supposed grandeur. They are serpentine things, quadrupedal with powerful bird-jointed hind-legs, venomous spurs at their ankles. Their heads are long in the jaw, and their teeth overlap, growing and growing and competing, like a shark’s. Young wyverns may be the size of dogs, but many grow larger even than stallions. They have their own majesty, in their speed, strength, and their ability to jump and pounce. They have their own glory too, in their colourful feathery plumage, that grows in crests about their heads, and down their backs, and long whiplike tails, and upon their limbs. But theirs is not the glory of the old dragons, who remain now only as bones half-turned to stone, petrified beneath the ground and living only in stories where still they fly, and spit fire, and – so some stories go – speak in the tongue of Old Omor.

[sunderlorn]

Formalities - Another story from Olm

Three objects perched together at the edge of the roof garden. They were arranged neatly, each in a line along from one another. Two tall and one squat, between them, grouped and precise on a bow-legged wrought iron table. One was an urn filled with steaming dark liquid, copper and conical and pointing downwards, braced in a retort stand. The other was a waterpipe. It was spirelike, with a bulbous green blown-glass bottom, painted with geometries, patterned in burnt orange. From there upwards it was architectural and spirelike: as it rose, so it tapered, and the glass gave way to beaten copper, mottled greenish and stemming in two. At the top of the spire, a small covered brazier breathed smoke, pricked with holes to let out its fragrance, like a censer, or a lantern. From the other stem, a long stalk of ravelled birchbark trailed, coiling around the pipe’s glass bowl — snakelike, it ended not in a maw but a carved wooden mouthpiece. Between them was an earthenware wash-basin. The water inside it was still. It bellied up a surface of plumvine petals and twists of dried lemon rind. The sun had begun to set, and a shimmer-glimpse of fire glimmered in the water, reflected from the sky above. An Amadi sky, deep with its own height, like a pale orange ocean that flushed into pink at the horizon’s corners. No clouds strayed out now. Only the Waiting Moon, in half-phase, beginning to wax as daylight waned. “Friend,” said Vetch. “True friend. Here is all I asked. And just as I asked it.” Save for him, the roof was empty. He spoke to the city, spread out beyond the garden in lowering tiers, and jutting up sheer to the east. Or else he spoke to the doorway behind him: the darkness from which he’d just walked, verged with a fade-painted pattern, in sprawling diamonds of cyan. He was a figure trimmed of fat, amidst the tremble-hanging fronds of the trees. Balmy scented aspa grew beside tangle-branched Amadi lemon. A red-leafed plumvine circled the garden, and Vetch trod softly in its cool shadow. Not tall, not short, but rangy and supple — like a whip, like a dog he was built. But his features were blunt and snubby, at the end of a neck and a back that leaned forwards, though like a searching thing or a hunting thing leans. Bowed but not by age. His ears were round and edged with a short burr of coarse hair. One was torn at in times past, and ragged now with scars and frayed edges. His face had a bearing like an animal’s bearing: eyes heavy-lidded and glossy black; nose flat; mouth wide, darkly thinly lipped and smiling a little. A tufty line of coarse hair fell from his head, like a thin streak of mane, down to mid-back and tied through with small things — reminders; teeth; claws; fragments of bone. First he approached the basin and washed his knot-knuckled tan hands. With careful force he massaged the lemon rind into his palms. The petals followed until ground to deep pink pulp against his skin. Nicks and dapplings of pale colour flecked his wrists and forearms. Tendons whirred and showed and hid once more, just beneath the scant thin flesh. These were strong hands, long fingers, long tough dark grey nails. He wiped his mouth and drank first from the urn. A shudder of laughter crackled up from his throat. The kaveshi was bitter in the plains, but served sweetened always, with complex pale honey from rooftop hives, or the sugar that gathered sometimes in sheens of crystals on the surface of groundwaters, on nights when the Wandering Moon shone bright over the flats. It pleased him. A long tongue smacked out over his lips, tasting dark bittersweet kaveshi, and the delicate pulpy linger of plumvine petals: a perfume he could feel in his dark wet mouth. “Friend,” he said, speaking as he always did, with his lips forming the words over near-gritted teeth. “I know the smell of impatience. But had you been in Tolomi longer than – what? I smell a week or two on you – then you would know there are formalities. All businesses, all of them, have formalities. Like rituals. Observe them, friend.” His nostrils flared as he stepped over to the waterpipe and plucked up its mouthpiece between his fingers. His thick deep brows narrowed and hunkered down. His sloping forehead grew furrowed and he bit down on the mouthpiece. Inhale. The smoke that filled his throat became a low growl. He dropped the mouthpiece and let it fall with a crack to the ground. “I did not say it must be good leem. Only leem.” The growl had ended but its sound still rang tight in his voice. When he spoke now, it was as if two voices strained alongside each other, vying to speak in stereo. Tendons showed harsh in his neck, and hackles prickled up on his back. His teeth were bared. His jaw was slung and filled with fangs like those of a hyena: for biting to break, not sever. This is how Vetch had grown, as an Urshil, learning and hunting in the plains. “The formalities are over. To business. Your impatience reeks, friend.” Vetch’s stride was long and sure now. He stepped back inside, into the dark. Only muffled noise came out after that: snarling and prayers and the sound of flesh turned against itself. Blood swam dark in the basin’s waters. The roof garden’s shadows deepened and the fronds of its trees trembled in the wind.