#the immortals

[minuiko]

Childhood - Tortall protags before the start of each series

[70sscifiart]

Mitchell Hooks' 1962 cover art for The Immortals, by James Gunn

[ionlylikemycat]

daine really was the first person to say you kill my boyfriend i topple your empire with dinosaur necromancy and a horde of rats

and she was right

[sailor-v]

you ever think about how when kitten finally gains the ability to talk to daine and numair she immediately calls them mama and papa

[theroguequeenaniki]

Turn a man into an apple tree for her.

Tear down a whole palace for him.

Kill her attackers and leave them in a fountain.

You know.

Simple showcases of love that anyone can do.

[initiala]

So in The Immortals quartet (and Daine’s subsequent appearances in later books) she always happens to have the right treats on hand for whichever animals she’s talking to at that moment. I declare that Daine has invented the photographer’s vest, many pockets for many treats, and it’s just not mentioned.

The less funny option is that Numair created a Bag of Holding, but it’s just a pouch of infinite treats that Daine keeps seeds/carrots/apples/nuts/sugar cubes/dried cherries in.

[whisperthatruns]

The Immortals

When I was old I became close to my death. He slept next to me snoring like a freight train, his bony elbows digging into my ribs; once he left a filament of saliva on my wrist. We ate together, equally voracious: he snatched a strand of clam linguine from my open mouth. Evenings we walked side by side in Flatbush lost in our symptoms, reciting them like prayers, my kneecap my shoulder the small of my back, each determined to be the one who suffers. Still we were not immune to a crocus pushing up through a sidewalk crack—in fact that beauty seared us like flame; a child’s voice thrilled us singing the alphabet forwards and backwards. We both felt like exiles among those tenements, both of us had stopped calling friends, we wrote only the briefest of notes to our remaining families— we’d each entered silence. Still, when he was gone to the bathroom or to the lobby to pick up mail I felt a surge of panic: Am I immortal? Will I have to live forever, alone in this vast city?

D. Nurkse (New York Review of Books, 6/25/26)