hey star I saw the tags on that post abt brenneth's pockets and I would love a rundown of several more times brenneth was Unimpressed on earth bc that shit's hilarious
Things That Brenneth Likes On Earth:
1) Cars. She doesn’t own one but she appreciates that they exist. Better than walking. Bicycles, which she does own one of, are also better than walking, so honorary mention.
2) Cell phones. Convenient.
Things That Brenneth Does Not Like On Earth, In No Particular Order:
1) Small pockets. Bad for carrying things.
2) No magic. She keeps burning herself on hot stuff. It sucks to not be fireproof.
3) Racism. Alleirat’s prejudicial problems are mostly class-based, which Brenneth finds a little easier to handle.
4) Waitstaff/customer service reps not allowed to be rude to customers. Call Her Sweetheart One More Time, She Dares You. (Ask Crispin why Brenneth has been fired from more jobs than he’s ever had, he dares you.)
5) Planes. Less nauseating than portal travel, also way more expensive and obnoxious.
6) No magic???? Brenneth’s stove pilot light broke and she spent an hour wondering how people handled that before she remembered that matches and lighters existed.
7) Funerals. Absolutely stiflingly miserable, and this coming from someone who used to officiate mass pyres.
8) Lots of languages. Impractical and prone to causing problems with #3. Pretty to listen to, though.
9) Swords not acceptable to own in a dinky projects apartment, apparently.
10) Global warming. You know what would help with that? Magic.
11) No magic!!!!! Honestly how do people handle getting banged up if they have to just…wait for it to go away.
12) Weddings. Boring.
13) High school disciplinary procedures. Brenneth was Not Well Liked by teachers and administrators.
14) Uncomfortable repressed vibe about sex. Brenneth sure would have loved to be able to use that as a coping mechanism once she was of age on Earth again! Too bad she learned to flirt in a dimension where people were chill!
A snippet of Brenneth and Crispin’s first time in Alleirat, age 20.
It had been four days since Brenneth left the gothkenla of Dase, sword in hand and dread in her heart, for the forest.
It had been four and a half days since she had seen Crispin, walking out of her smithy without looking back while she stared after him in something that surpassed shock and horror into a numbness she didn’t have words for. She had stood there, frozen, feeling the memory of his hands in hers, for what felt like a small eternity. It had been, she learned later, nearly an hour of precious time.
When she had been able to move without crumpling onto the floor, she had grabbed up her sword and a lantern and sprinted for the scholar’s quarter as the clear night began to cloud over with thunderheads.
Brenneth was not, and had never been, strictly speaking allowed in the scholar’s quarter, as far as Crispin’s teachers were concerned. She was a bad influence, combative and impulsive and undiplomatic. But she knew her way around, because, until she had her own smithy, she had broken in more than once.
She didn’t have to go any farther than the great hall on the bottom floor of the teachers’ tower. The room was ruined, cracked scars writhing up the walls with marks of char where tapestries and other ornamentation had burst into flames, the glowglasses dark and shattered with glass littering the floor. The air still tasted like ozone—ozone and something else, something heavy and acrid that left something slick on Brenneth’s lips.
The bodies on the floor were badly burned, one of them charred almost to the bone in places, but recognizable.
Brenneth licked her lips automatically, waiting for the roll of nausea to break through the numb layer of fog cloaking her mind, but it never came.
“All right,” she said, and her voice was a stranger’s, the vibration in her throat so far away she couldn’t even feel it. Somewhere, locked carefully into the farthest back of her mind, a child was screaming, the hollow tearful wail of a little girl lost in a wide and frightening new world, all alone. “All right.”
Then she had turned and raised the alarm. Murder, in the scholar’s quarter, call the lathan, send for the gothed, summon the death workers. She had not been able to say he came to me, he came to me and begged me to join him, he came to me and all but confessed and I did not stop him, and no one asked.
The rest of the night was a blur of questions. How had she found the bodies? She was coming to see Crispin, she had a bad feeling. Had she known he could do something like this? He had seemed happy. Why had he killed his teachers? He didn’t tell her.
It was Torei who came to find her, and who quietly turned away her interrogator. Her white-blonde hair was tied back in a rumpled braid rather than her familiar knot and her armor betrayed being pulled on hastily, her pauldrons slightly crooked, and her bright green briatai eyes were piercing and steady on Brenneth’s brown.
“Brenneth,” Torei said. Soft and apologetic. Brenneth could hear the apology, but couldn’t quite grasp it. “The gothed wants to speak to you.”
Brenneth nodded. She couldn’t imagine what they would want from her, but Torei’s hands were steady and kind on her shoulders, and she stood up under the weight of them, feeling the oaken strength in Torei’s arms when she had to clutch at them in order to steady herself.
“I can go with you, amater,” Torei offered, quietly. She wasn’t given to affectionate names, and it was, in all technicality, verboten in amuniasa for one party to use a pet name if the other didn’t. But the love was gentle, offered as freely as the supporting hands, and there was trust there.
Brenneth nodded again.
The walk to the gothkenla felt like a mere blink of an eye, as Brenneth rubbed distracted fingers across the places where that strange substance had settled, the odd heavy smell that lay under the ozone in the tower. It was slick under her fingers on her lips and cheekbones, on the bridge of her nose, and clung where it touched, almost tasteless when her tongue flicked out absently.
“It’s fat,” Torei said when Brenneth came to a stop altogether, scrubbing a sleeve over her face to get the last of it off. Brenneth paused and stared at her. “It’s human fat, vaporized by the lightning strike.”
There was the nausea. Brenneth bit back the need to vomit and took a deep breath through her nose, lowering her arm from her face with a convulsive swallow. Torei’s hand touched between her shoulder blades, and she had to quell the urge to twitch away, or crumple onto the cobblestones where she stood.
Torei wouldn’t hold any of it against her, and that was worse.
The meeting with the gothed was blurrier still than the walk, a long unending dream of repeating her story and hearing the council speak, an eternity of voices laced between the storm beginning to break like a tidal wave crashing down on them. She would never remember how it had come down to the issue of hunting Crispin down, never recall when the burden of the ranater’s prophecy—a curse, she thought dimly—was formally handed onto her. Brenneth stood still and silent in the audience chamber, her eyes wandering up to the crest of Dase before returning to the gothed, and tried not to think.
She knew that after the meeting, she had been given fresh clothes and a chance to bathe, privately, to wash the soot and—the rest from her skin, but that was lost entirely to the fog. But she knew that her hair had hung loose and half-dry when she left the gothkenla and found Portin on the steps, crying for his lost pesaruld under the overhang of the roof, sheltered from the raging storm outside. He had buried his face in her curls while he wept, and Brenneth had knelt there with a street urchin in her arms and eyes so dry they ached, sword at her side and thinking, for the first time in a long time, about the myths of Earth, about Atlas and being handed the sky.
Hold this, world walker, they had said, and Brenneth had put her hands up instantly, thoughtlessly, because she had no choice. And now she was here, sitting on the forest floor four days later, feeling her bones crack.
She had managed to build a fire, and to lay out food from her back as if she was planning to do something with it, but she had come to a stop before she got any farther. It was logistically difficult to get comfortable on the ground in armor, even just the one-arm kaogo, breastplate, and greaves Brenneth had managed to find in her forge before she left, but that was fine. Comfort was not the highest priority. Legs crossed, elbows braced on her knees and hands clutched together so hard they hurt, she focused all her energy on her breathing, and tried to keep it steady.
Breathing hurt. It hurt like she had swallowed blades, or sharp stones, and they tore at her throat with every exhale. She stared into the fire she had lit with a snap of her fingers and tried to forget the way her lungs ached.
There was a story, about the Wanderer and the Lady of Stars when they were new to Alleirat, when they had fought. They had destroyed the lost god of the sea in their struggle, the Chained Lord turned to foam and jetsam under the Lady’s storms, and the Wanderer had hunted her across the western continent, until it sank under the weight of them and took all its people with it save for the refugees who reached the unpopulated Outrigger Islands in time. The Lady had been swept west on the tidal wave and the Wanderer had escaped to the east, and when he reached solid land again on the cliffs of Dase, he built a fire on the stone and looked into it. He saw the world they had destroyed in their rage and the people hidden in caves where the spirits of the stone could protect them or in forests where the spirits of the trees could hide them, the people struggling to learn a new life on the Outrigger Islands and watching the ocean with fear when they prayed to a god that did not answer them anymore, and he felt remorse. And when he stepped into the fire to find the Lady of Stars, he found her kneeling on the highest mountain top and looking down at the clouds and he knelt beside her and they made peace, and swore that they would not risk their new world again.
Brenneth looked into the fire she had built on the dirt and saw nothing. Crispin wasn’t there, and she couldn’t find him on a mountain and come to a truce, and—
She lurched to her feet and stumbled a few steps away before she threw up. The acid burned sour on her tongue as she choked on it, coughing raggedly and spitting bile onto the dirt. It was more than bringing up the minimal food she’d been able to eat over the last few days, it was vomiting up all the nightmare hours since she had gone to bed in a world that made sense and woken up in the worst case scenario. Brenneth was heartsick, soul-sick, and now, after four and a half days of numbness, she couldn’t stop retching, trying to purge even the memory.
Once there was nothing left to throw up, she sat back on her heels and sucked in a few hitching breaths as her gut twisted again. Scraping a hand over her cheeks and forehead, Brenneth pulled her hair away from the sweat-damp skin as she rose and took shaky steps back to her fire, with the canteen beside it. She rinsed her mouth, then swallowed a gulp of water that stuck in her throat like stone.
When she let out a breath, it wrenched itself free of her chest in a sob.
With how difficult the first was to get out, Brenneth expected a pause before the next. There wasn’t one.
She cried herself out of tears well before she finally fell asleep.
When she woke the next morning, Brenneth lay where she was for a moment, breathing slowly and trying to distinguish what was different. The dancing red light of the fire was gone, replaced by the steady sun, and the edge of her armor where she’d forgotten to take it off was digging into the skin of her neck.
She needed to get up. Something was off and she needed to get up and investigate, needed to grab her sword.
Just sitting up felt like trying to bend a steel bar with her bare hands, an effort so far beyond what a human being could achieve that it was pointless to even try.
Brenneth blinked at the sky where the blue was visible between treetops, still lying on her back on the dirt. A broken branch was digging into her shoulder through the gap in her armor, and it should bother her, she knew that. Her breath came slowly, as if she was lifting a great weight on her chest with each steady inrushing of air, but it didn’t hurt. She felt numb, like the distant memory of breaking her wrist when she was five and being put under anaesthesia so that the bone could be set—waking up in a body that didn’t feel pain, or thirst, or even fear.
The peace of it was fragile, so fragile she didn’t dare move and risk letting it shatter, to let reality come rushing in through all her cracks.
Thoughts drifted up slowly, rising through the cotton-filled silence of her brain like bubbles through water. It was so quiet. She was so tired. Her fire had gone out during the night, burned down to embers. It was so quiet. She didn’t know where she was going. If she didn’t get up and leave soon, she might lose the trail.
Why was it so quiet?
Three times was probably an indicator that some part of her mind, the part on the other side of the numbness and the cotton, wanted her to pay attention to that thought. Brenneth took a deep breath and forced her hands under her, pushing herself up to kneel on the ground, and tried to follow the thought to its logical conclusion. She was in the forest, outside Dase. It was early autumn, still warm enough to sleep rough without much in the way of preparation, and that meant—
That meant that things should be alive, around her. Birds were starting to migrate or build winter nests, everything from mice to bears was preparing to hibernate, the leaves were beginning to fall and leave a carpet on the ground. The forest had been a steady seethe of noise yesterday, a background rattle of birdsong and crunching leaves. Now, it was silent, except for the sound of Brenneth’s heart beating in her ears and distant voices.
“Wonderful,” Brenneth said aloud in bitter English.
Her voice sent fractures racing through the numb calm. The aching grief in her chest opened again like someone carving out her heart, and Brenneth dragged in a shaky breath before letting it out. It didn’t ease the sharp, lonely pain, but it made her feel steadier, let her think clearly.
There was someone in the forest—multiple someones, actually, calling back and forth and moving closer. She couldn’t make out words, or even recognize the voices, but they sounded like they were still close to the road, at the bottom of the foothill she’d climbed. If they were travelers, they would continue down the road. If they weren’t, if they were looking for something…well. There was a lightning struck ash just a few minutes’ walk from her camp. The furious storm over Dase had blown itself out, finally, two days after—two days after Brenneth left the city, but it had left destruction in its wake, trees destroyed by lightning and torn down by wind. This tree had been struck more recently, the exposed inner wood still mostly dry rather than soaked by two days of rain. It was a landmark, a careless fingerprint of passage by a weather worker too powerful to be controlled and too angry to bother.
If the people in the forest were looking for her, or for him, that’s where they would go.
Brenneth didn’t have much of a camp to pack up. She returned the rations she hadn’t eaten the night before to her bag, checked the laces on her boots and the buckles of her armor and sword belt, and scattered the hot embers and ashes of her fire with her hand, brushing the charcoal marks off as she stood to leave. The voices were still moving, calling back and forth like a pack of hunting hounds baying among itself, but they were growing clearer, closer.
The blasted ash was peeled back from itself, the slender trunk cleaved down the middle and half of it still standing while the rest bent and bowed in tatters. Splinters of wood, some charred and some pale, littered the ground around the base, the gold-touched green leaves ripped from the branches as if by the passage of a terrible wind that had left the surrounding forest untouched. Brenneth took a deep breath through her nose, like she had when she first found the ruins of the tree, but the smell of ozone, the metallic taste of lightning, was long gone.
It didn’t take long, waiting beside the ash, for it to become clear that the voices were moving closer, with intent. There were a number of them, Brenneth could tell now, and there was the noisy rustle-crunch of a group of people on a path meant for one or two. It was quieter than she would have thought, based on the number of voices, but still more than enough to have silenced the forest around them.
There was a voice in the lead—lower and softer than the rest, but given pride of place, the space to talk without calling over the others.
“Here,” the lead voice said, sure and impossible to question, and Brenneth put out a shaking hand to brace herself on the ruined tree as a tall figure in armor pushed through the edge of the ash’s small clearing. Torei came to a halt and smiled, small and private, and said again, “Here.”
“I—Torei?” Brenneth said faintly.
“Good morning, amater,” Torei said, and her briatai green eyes glinted hard and wild and dangerous, her hair pulled up and away in a warrior’s knot and making her look taller than ever. The endearment was sharply at odds with the challenge in her voice, and the way her hand rested on the hilt of her sword. “I believe you forgot something in the city.”
“I did?” Brenneth asked. She felt dazed, struck off-balance, and very much in need of the broken ash to support her weight.
“Yes, you did,” Torei said, and made a tidy gesture with her left hand, summoning her companions forward to form up a cramped but passable array beside her.
Brenneth looked at them, disoriented, and tried to place their faces in her memory—there were nine of them, all armed and armored and looking energetic despite having been dragged on, presumably, a four day hike in her wake. Two were women, the others all men, and most were only dimly familiar, the way someone she might have seen once or twice and then dismissed were familiar. The only one Brenneth recognized was the one who took pride of place at the left front corner of their formation, a relatively young man for his rank, with skin nearly as dark as her own and curly black hair above a mouth made for smiling. He sketched Brenneth a salute when he noticed her looking at him.
“Fireheart,” he said cheerfully. He said the name of her smithy like a title, somewhere between friendly and respectful, as if he had to call her something other than just Brenneth, simple as it was. The gothed and the advisers had been the same, suddenly in a rush to call her sena when she’d always been nothing more than a craftsman. At least Fireheart was hers, something she’d chosen rather than something forced on her along with the weight of the sky. The latha pressed a hand to his chest over his leather breastplate and said, “Rada Laisar, in case you’ve forgotten.”
“I remember,” Brenneth said automatically, and turned away from him. “Torei, what are you doing here?”
“The gothed said that you could bring anyone you felt you needed,” Torei said, and the glittering hardness in her eyes was like it had been the day she swore herself to Brenneth, heart and soul. Unmoveable, invincible. “You left too fast for me to catch up outside the city, so I thought another hour or two to collect a few reliable lathan wouldn’t hurt.”
“And you can’t send us back,” Rada added, as serene and happy as he’d been when he brought a nicked dagger to her for inspection—to meet the smith who’d sent his captain reeling like a ship taking on water, he’d said.
“I think I can, actually,” Brenneth said, still too shocked to do more than stare. “You’re—you’re all risking your lives out here, you should go home.”
“No,” one of the two women said, and didn’t say another word.
“You won’t send us back,” Rada clarified with a sort of comfortable assurance. “Because, even if you really don’t want help, we walked four days to catch up with you—all the way through the night before last except for two hours to sleep. And I don’t think you’re the type to make us walk all the way back.”
Torei stepped forward then, sliding between Brenneth and her companions, and seemed to settle into the world around her. It was an unnerving trick to watch, just like it always was—not magic, not really, just…drawing on something old and powerful, something infinitely bigger than Brenneth, something determined to remind her that she was, after all, only mortal. It was like standing at the edge of the Dase cliffs and looking over the ocean. Torei was briata, and she carried the forest in her heart, ancient as the dirt underfoot and stronger than mountains, and when she wanted to, she looked the part.
“Brenneth,” Torei said, low and private. Brenneth had to crane her neck to see Torei’s eyes at such close quarters—even for one of the briatan, Torei was tall, no less than seven feet and quite possibly an inch or two more, which gave her a curiously stretched, slender look when she was out of her armor.
Then Torei was kneeling, bracing one knee on the ground and her arm on the other thigh so that she was looking up at Brenneth, the sunlight falling on the thistle-blonde of her hair and over the high arch of her cheekbones to gleam off the metal of her armor. Her head was up, eyes still bright, and with her hand still on her sword and the light turning the escaping wisps of her hair into a halo of sleek white-gold, Torei looked like something out of an old Earth fable, Brenneth thought wildly, a knight swearing allegiance to Camelot.
“Don’t go alone,” Torei said, still soft and private, and it sounded like a vow. “Let me help you. Let us help you.”
Brenneth let out a laugh that shook as it fell from her lips. “This isn’t your problem, Torei,” she said, trying to put steel into her voice. “He’s my—he was my best friend. I can’t drag you into it.”
“I’m not being dragged. None of us are. We’re offering.” Torei held out both hands, and Brenneth reached back thoughtlessly, the part of her locked away in the cage of her ribs—the sobbing, lonely little girl—craving the touch like a woman drowning in dark water might crave light and air. Torei’s hands were warm and striped with callouses, strong as they wrapped around Brenneth’s fingers.
“I--”
“Being a hero doesn’t mean doing this alone,” Torei said, beseeching, and—
You and me, Crispin had said, clutching at her hands, just like Torei was now. There had been something terrible and aching in his face, something broken in the adara, the electricity that his magic always sent across her skin harsh and hurting. Just like always, ah?
Brenneth pulled her hands out of Torei’s grip, barely turning the sharp jerk of fear into a gentler slide, and didn’t know if the keening wail in her chest was grief or simple pain at the loss of contact. She took a breath to steady herself before she said, “All right. I’d be glad to have help, I suppose. Are your lathan still up for a forced march? I’m at least five hours behind Cr—behind him, and we need to make time.”
Torei stood, graceful, giving her head a bit of a proud tilt back toward Rada and the others. “Your company,” she said with gentle emphasis on the possessive, “is ready whenever you are.”
“Lead the way, Fireheart,” Rada said.
“All right,” Brenneth said again, more faintly. She swallowed and forced herself to step away from the blasted tree, squaring her shoulders. Hold this.
The sky was so heavy it made her bones ache.
“We can get acquainted while we walk,” she said. “I think he’s headed up the foothills, toward—I’m not really sure what. But keep an eye out for any more lightning strikes. That will let us know we’re on the right path.”
Relevant translations in order of appearance:
gothkenla: central building of a major city-state, a combination of city hall and castle
gothed: city-state leader, elected every ten years
latha/n: city-state guards, a sort of small military force
briata/n: long-lived plant magicians descended from dryads, all extremely tall
amater: “love” as an endearment
amuniasa: a formalized unrequited romantic arrangement
ranater: ghost, literally “day walker”
pesaruld: big brother, for either a relative or an older friend
kaogo: armor covering the sword arm and a pauldron, sometimes including a breastplate
sena: respectful address to a noblewoman
great, i will keep that in mind about the reblogging and whatnot - be prepared for an influx of me-related notes. now, for the questions/prompts that i've been thinking about since atlas was posted: (1) did crispen actually think that brenneth would join him? was murdering done out of spite or a sense of helplessness? when does he realize what he's done? (2) torei is wonderful. what does her name mean? do she or krei have any appellations? and (3) did anyone consider giving b and c alleri names?
YESSSSSS
1) Did Crispin actually think Brenneth would join him?
He was not...strictly speaking sane when he made that request. At the time, yes, he believed she would join him. She was his best friend and he loved her and she was the only person in the world (except for the kids who called him “big brother” but that’s another, equally sad conversation) who loved him for exactly who he was. It seemed reasonable to him, in that state of mind, that she would say yes. When he’s thinking clearly, later, he’s aware that asking was easily the most absurd thing he could have done.
Was the murder done out of spite or helplessness?
It started in column B and moved into column A. Crispin spent a full decade being told he had to save the world. At first, his violence came from a place of “I am destined to save the world, destiny means I have to do it, that means that I am the hero whether I want to be or not and since these people are trying to stop me, clearly they are the bad guys.” And a little bit a place of “in order to save everyone, I need to be in control of the situation.” As things progressed and he realized that, A, he clearly was not the hero of the story and, B, he had dug that hole a bit too deep to climb out, it became increasingly more of an issue of “fine, if I’m the villain I’ll be the most villainous villain you can imagine because fuck you for breaking me and putting me in this position.” It does bear mentioning that, for reasons I can’t really go into, the White Wolf was...not as bad as he could have been? Like, he did a lot of murder but he basically only did murder. The most spectacular thing he did was extremely spectacular (he doubled his body count of two and a half years in two weeks, but spoilers), but neither he nor anyone in his nominal service ever tampered with the bodies of the dead, tortured, whatever. In his cold and merciless way, the Wolf was a very even-handed monster.
When does Crispin realize what he’s done?
It’s a slow thing, and then it’s not. The breaking point is that, through events that will be revealed in the novel, Crispin very nearly kills Brenneth. He puts her own sword through her chest, and buries her alive, and then--
Well, then he’s killed her, hasn’t he? He’s been trying to do it for most of three years, and he’s done it, and she’s dead and he killed her, and...
Then there’s a haze. When he comes out of it, he’s pretty sure he’s had the wrong end of this fairy tale the whole time.
Heroes don’t kill the love of their life, you see.
2) What does Torei’s name mean? Do she or Krei have any appellations?
Torei is a name distantly related to a breed of a small bird like a sparrow, native to the northern forest she’s descended from. It’s because she was born very skinny, which is unusual for briatan. Torei is sometimes called Dedicated or Loyal, in the ballads about her, but it’s a little harder to slap someone with an unwanted epithet when, A, they’re not the central figure of the story (which Torei is very pushy about), and, B, right there to stare down from their seven-foot-two height with a skeptical raised eyebrow and a hand on their sword while they gently say, “Now, you and I both know that I’m just a person caught up in her wake. The Fireheart chose to take me with her.”
Also, Krei hasn’t previously...done anything sufficiently impressive to earn an epithet. She’s captain of a city guard and she does a good job and her civilians love her for her good work, but her only epithet so far is “captain” and honestly she’d be okay with never earning another. (Narrative fitting aside, if I was gonna give her one it would be Oakhand, because her entire left arm from the shoulder is a prosthetic of live wood and I think that’s...pretty cool if I do say so myself.)
3) Did anyone consider giving Brenneth and Crispin Alleirai names?
Brenneth and Crispin actually are their Alleirai names! Worldwalkers are not given family names in Alleirat, they’re just called “of Alleirat” since they don’t have relatives there, but Brenneth’s given name at birth was Brenda Gadhafi, and Crispin’s was Christopher Adesso. When they first arrived in Alleirat, the guard who found these two scared lost kids took his best guess at pronouncing the unfamiliar names. Ultimately someone gave them sort of a short list of best guesses and they chose which they preferred. The reason they’re always referred to as Brenneth and Crispin, even on Earth, is because the whole novel is in the first person from Brenneth’s POV, and she thinks of them exclusively by their Alleirai names. For all intents and purposes, she thinks of Brenda and Christopher as “dead”, and they both hate being called by those names. In AU content where Alleirat never happened, I either consider that they legally changed their names at some point (probably after moving out, as they weren’t on great terms with their parents), or that they were always called Brenneth and Crispin in that universe.
so i don't know how much you've been working on it recently, but i am i n l o v e with alleirat and everything you've written about it - it's just so amazingly written and the worldbuilding is so cool and- i think i've sent you an ask about this already so i'm not going to bore you with more adjectives. but i was wondering - when does crispen fall in love with brenneth? is it during their first time on alleirat, or maybe on earth during those long years when they only have each other? (1/2)
i have a lot of feelings about those two and i absolutely love the opposites parts of them and how they’re so different but they’re so, so entwined and there’s no way you’re taking one down without the other. (also - the idea of amuniasa is so, so cool and deserves its own impassioned speech that i don’t have the time for because - so unique and really really interesting to think about) anyway, sorry to clutter your inbox but if you want to talk more about this novel, i am so here for it (2/2)
Also, I found your previous ask amongst the deluge of Civil War asks!
hi! so i just finished (most) of the alleirat tag and i’m just here to say: it’s so amazing. just, wow. i’m not sure if you’ve posted about it recently, but ARGH i wish it was published so i can read the whole thing!! instead i have resorted to ranting about how great it is to my best friend. your writing is wonderful in general, but the world building on alleirat is something else and now i’m off to read the hades and persephone au!! just- thanks so much for putting this story into the world.
Thank you SOOOOOO MUCH, holy shit, I love Alleirat (I’m thinking about getting it an actual title rather than just using a working title, what do you think of ‘Worldwalker’?) and I LOVE TALKING ABOUT IT. I feel like the characters came together really well and honestly I’ve been rereading a novel I wrote a few years back, to edit it, and I’m so, so proud of myself for how much my writing has improved. That might sound arrogant as hell, but my writing was pretty decent four years ago when I slammed out Falls the Shadow in 18 months and it’s a damn sight better now, I wish I could tell myself from a decade ago how good this feels.
ALSO, I think I’ve mentioned this before, but while I’ve written a great many self-indulgent things in my life, Alleirat might be the most thoroughly id-driven thing I’ve ever created and I’m delighted that other people are interested in it. All I ever want to talk about is the aftermath of people being shoved into a conflict they’re completely unprepared for, and about feeling out of place in the world after surviving a conflict, and about how much work redemption is, and about people being in love with people they shouldn’t be–not any star-crossed Romeo and Juliet nonsense, but real genuine any metric says I should not care about you sort of thing. All I EVER want to do is write thousands and thousands of words of introspective character study And somehow, miraculously, y’all fools want to read that nonsense.
ANYWAY. TO ANSWER YOUR VERY GOOD QUESTION. I TOO HAVE A LOT OF FEELINGS ABOUT THESE TWO.
Crispin, as far as he is concerned, has been in love with Brenneth since the first time they stumbled through to Alleirat at the tender age of ten. She was a cranky, shy kid, and he’d spoken to her maybe three times all told, but then they were blundering through a forest they’d never seen, with an early snow falling on the trees, and she grabbed his hand and said “Don’t worry, I’ve got you.” And even though she was just a kind of short, chubby kid who hadn’t grown into her broad shoulders and big hands by a long shot, she hung onto his hand and stomped through the woods like she was going into war.
It helped, of course, that she grew up into a buff, calloused, grinning knockout with a good sense of humor who could swing a sword like a goddess. That helped, to be sure, and Brenneth was breaking hearts for years before shit went badly. But for all that Crispin had a few other brief flings in his time, he’s never fallen for anyone else like he fell for that angry little Indian girl, bristling at guards who spoke a strange language and holding onto his hand like it was the last lifeline of sanity.
Brenneth is probably the last person in Alleirat to figure this out.
