#theironflower

[0watermelona0]

Imma blow out

The Black Witch Chronicles deserves better. I mean, it’s got two amazing books and two spinoffs that are just hot as hell (which are, may I add, in one book; available now on Amazon). The third one is about to come out, anD WHERE IS THE HYPE?

[lisa-lostinlit]

💬 What is the last book/series you added to your TBR after seeing it on Bookstagram? . I’ve seen The Black Witch Chronicles series by @laurieannforest over on @morrighanrose’s page multiple times. She’s loving it, which means I definitely needed to add it to my TBR! Thanks for the rec, Morrighan! 💕 . Thank you to @inkyardpress for gifting me copies of this series! . . . s u m m a r y ⇣ A new Black Witch will rise…her powers vast beyond imagining. Elloren Gardner is the granddaughter of the last prophesied Black Witch, Carnissa Gardner, who drove back the enemy forces and saved the Gardnerian people during the Realm War. But while she is the absolute spitting image of her famous grandmother, Elloren is utterly devoid of power in a society that prizes magical ability above all else. When she is granted the opportunity to pursue her lifelong dream of becoming an apothecary, Elloren joins her brothers at the prestigious Verpax University to embrace a destiny of her own, free from the shadow of her grandmother’s legacy. But she soon realizes that the university, which admits all manner of people—including the fire-wielding, winged Icarals, the sworn enemies of all Gardnerians—is a treacherous place for the granddaughter of the Black Witch. As evil looms on the horizon and the pressure to live up to her heritage builds, everything Elloren thought she knew will be challenged and torn away. Her best hope of survival may be among the most unlikely band of rebels…if only she can find the courage to trust those she’s been taught to fear. . . . h a s h t a g s ⇣ #theblackwitch #theironflower #theshadowwand #laurieforest #yafantasy #aquietmoment #livelifebeautifully #morningslikethis #cornerofmyhome #momentsofmine #bookaholic #bookstagramit #blissfulday #stillography #lovelysquares #nestandflourish #yabooks #bibliofeature #booknerdigan #bookster #bookcommunity #booksbooksbooks #bookstagrammademedoit https://www.instagram.com/p/CEWskgwnZvG/?igshid=97z84d1mj8dn

[lilelvenwitch]

Have one more piece of trash for the night

[jennblogsbooks]

Happy Sock Sunday! This weekend has been filled with 2 days of back-to-back soccer games so I haven’t had much time to read 😢 Hopefully I can sneak some reading time in tonight! . 🧦 . { #partner } Thank you to @tlcbooktours for sending me a free copy of THE IRON FLOWER by @laurieannforest This is Book 2 in The Black Witch Chronicles, and it releases this Tuesday! . 🧦 . Goodreads blurb: . Elloren Gardner and her friends were only seeking to right a few wrongs, but their actions have propelled them straight into the ranks of the realm-wide Resistance against Gardnerian encroachment. As the Resistance struggles against the harsh rulings of High Priest Marcus Vogel and the Mage Council, Elloren begins to realize that none of the people she cares about will be safe if Gardneria seizes control of the Western Realm. With tensions heating up in Verpacia, more and more Gardnerian soldiers continue to descend upon the university…led by none other than Lukas Grey, now commander of the newly rebuilt Fourth Division base. Though Elloren tries to keep him at arm’s length, Lukas is determined to wandfast to her, convinced that she has inherited her grandmother’s magic—the prophesied power of the Black Witch. As his very nearness seems to awaken a darkness inside her, Elloren finds it more and more difficult to believe that she’s truly powerless, as her uncle always claimed. Caught between her growing feelings for the rebellious Yvan Guriel and the seductive power offered by Lukas Grey, Elloren must find a way to stay true to what she knows is right and protect everyone she loves…even if that means protecting them from herself. . . #socksunday #laurieforest #harlequinteen #epicbooks #fiercereads #booksinbed #socksofinstagram #sockstagram #tlcbooktours #jennblogsbooks #theironflower #theblackwitchchronicles #booktour #newrelease https://www.instagram.com/p/BnzJgeyhsEI/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1pwfkxpti2fqc

[redemptioninterlude]

[  INTERRUPT  ]  for  your  muse  to  interrupt  my  muse  talking  by  kissing  them

for the mood meme ( accepting ) + @theironflower // damian

Humanity loves to talk when given the chance - it’s a misunderstanding, she thinks, when they stay quiet and hold it all in. Emotional constipation, Alice teasingly calls it, the truth is, people are just waiting for the right thing to get them unstopped. And from that moment on, it’s a FLOOD OF IT, words, endless, they trail on and on and on until they’ve gotten it all out, they’ll sit exhausted in their own proverbial shit, and then start to think. For this in particular, Alice considers herself an expert in the affairs of unblocking humans, their good and their bad. She’s sure she too is waiting for the same at some point, but who knows? How do you describe a life like this, and, besides, hasn’t she done her own, and been trouble enough, considering all her starts, and stops, and pauses?

                        This exchange goes one way, and ONE WAY ONLY!

Silly, darling, she doesn’t expect to meet him for real. Her own personal holiday, how she takes dips in his dreams, and swims in his misery, she helps him, finally, and with that strength he finds it in him to run away. And after that... it’s been hard, hasn’t it? Going back fills her with a feeling of GUILT, it measures and weighs itself, and she knows she ought to be better, know better. Meeting him is a happy accident, paved with her poor behaviour, and clumsy hands, and she only knows how to patch that up with a teasing grin, an attitude that holds as if she couldn’t really care either way - walk a tightrope, and pray you don’t fall. That’s always been the best for her. Or perhaps, it’s all she’s deserving of?

Self pity holds no foothold in her heart, she sits patient as he talks to her, asks her what happened. The dreams he has of her now, she doesn’t spy on, they’re not her, just, the her he’s gone and painted himself, the effigy, blue eyes fixed on him over drinks, the liquor loosens his tongue, makes him WILLING TO TALK about the fact that they shouldn’t know each other, not really. How none of it makes sense, how it makes her doubt herself and the clear definitions and walls she puts up between, that madness, and her reality, he’s banging at the walls, he’s cracking up all her hard work. How cheap she is, a hand sliding down his arm, she remembers the way he likes this from his dreams, her own intrusions. The right kind of smile, blue eyes drifting upwards to meet his own to cut off that long-stream of conscious about impossibility with a kiss, lips parted because tasting him, well, that’s more real than anything, isn’t it? 

                                                        Am I real now? Do I EXIST to you? 

Her head comes back, coming up for oxygen with a lazy grin, smudged lipgloss from her mouth, to his. “They’ve always called me an IMPOSSIBLE GIRL. But I think impossible is far more interesting than if I had nothing. Now. Do you want to keep saying, I couldn’t have done it, or do you want to finish that drink, and come along with me instead?”

[redemptioninterlude]

[  MOUTH  ]  for  your  muse  to  put  their  hand  over  my  muse’s  mouth

for the mood meme ( accepting ) + @theironflower // damian

She’s heard before that she talks too much. Digs too deep, finds her way beneath a person’s skin. Scratching at that itch of hers, looking for a mystery, seeking out where those bruises bloom out in blood, the wounds track deeper, deeper, down. It’s how she helps, she rationalizes, how can you help someone without knowing what the ROOT OF THE PROBLEM is? So there she goes, cheerfully ready to dig til she’s excised the worst of it, though, often without the sort of care that one might expect, even if she is equipped with the empathy to work through it all.

Damian’s always been a SPECIAL CASE though. The boy that she’s always known, or at least that’s how it feels. The boy that felt like she’d made him up, a friend to keep herself from being lonely, on nights where she felt as if she really, truly was insane. A soothing balm, they comfort each other the way that children know how, they play, they laugh, they talk, they sulk. Sometimes there are even fits, but that’s how it is, when you’re suffering and carrying that weight with you. His horror happens to be a throne sat upon a mountain of bones. Hers is all in her head.

                          There’s comfort in knowing he’s there.

             There’s terror not knowing if he’s actually real.

And meeting him feels like something surreal, his fingers wrapped about her wrist, the way the words just spill and spill and spill over and outwards and on and on, it’s a nervous reaction, she can’t help herself, is she mad or is this the madness, nobody’s ever, ever, breached the dams of her mind to find themselves rooted in reality. SO WHO IS HE? What is this? Alice, who’s stomach ties itself in knots, can’t help but ask, “Does that mean you’ll stay?” with all the imploring fear of someone who’s watched it all come apart like wet sand, he, covers her mouth as if to stop the simple deluge of it all, her muffled words quieting down as he takes what seems like his first breath. All eyes on him; Alice’s narrowing ever so slightly, knowing that what he says, this, will be the difference between dreams, and reality.

[redemptioninterlude]

🖐️ - Alice :)

5 times touched meme ( selectively accepting ) + @theironflower // damian

cut for length ♡

001. only in dreams Can you really see me? That’s the question that always lingers, so rare is it that she’s a repeat visitor save for those who are the walking dead, the truly lonely. Those all pent up with no place else to go, she meets him, a boy and a soldier both, the one who sits upon his throne that rests upon a pile of bones, his legacy, his grief, and his burden with which he’s decided he must bear. SHE IS HERE to bear witness to that, she supposes, is that what he wants? More than anything, she thinks he’s lonely, looking for a slice of what normalcy might look like in some great perhaps, and what unfortunate fortune that he’d end with someone as odd as herself instead, delivered.

They sit, children perched at the edge of a hill, legs left dangling over the edge in some rebellious form of daring, as they watch the idea of the sun that rises. Their time is short, it feels as long as, they allow for it. That’s the power of dreams, isn’t it? Living lifetimes and adventures in a single night that might or might not resound from within, but for them, it’s all they’ve really got to connect by. “YOU’LL NEED TO WAKE SOON, Damian.” Alice’s words, flirting on the edge of cautiousness, with a laugh that rings truer. “Call me again when you need the company, okay? I’ll know!”

Alice, without the unsure pause, she hums alive and shifts closer to the edge - as if testing the weight of it, the potential, the thrill. A hand reaches out, and grasps onto his. “Wanna come with me this time?” There’s a smile and a promise, who knows what will happen? ALICE IS WILLING to try something different for this once, it’d be, so reassuring, wouldn’t it? To know if he were real and actualized, and not some madness within her head, breathing in deep, for once, twice... the countdown that trips her tongue, 3... 2... 1...

                                JUMP!

She wakes within her bed, a cold sweat, and GASPING BREATH, fingers coil within her hair with an anxiousness that claws from the back of her throat, looking for a way out. A pause... looking down at the open emptiness of her palm. Real? Not real? God only knows.

002. terror in renaissance                         Through bone, through flesh - he cuts, and he eats.

Alice should be above this judgement - above the fear, the feeling, that hits deep within her stomach, she’s not human the way that others are human. But he is fragilely so, and so, he suffers beneath the terror with which he’s been made to live and inflict, eat to live, eat your loved ones, watch as you march on, another day of living. They’re always quiet when they watch, with Damian unable to think of anything else, the nightmares consume him, as he has a friend, his head in her lap, fists made against the looseness of her skirts. Fingers in his hair, she’ll scratch, and knows that even as his face turns inwards against her thigh, he can still hear it all in front of them, the sound, the scrape, that turning of his stomach.

            Others that vomit, that cry, that try to go without.

His words that encourage them, he reflects on it all, the weight, the depth of it. Sorrow that drenches through him now, like sweat, she is soft and quiet as she watches, without a word, even if she looks at him and wonders too, HOW COULD YOU, but she knows the answer there in him. That he must, just to live. That there is little other option, without hurting all those that are still there. “Will you run?” she asks him, a quiet prompt, she wonders if she can rouse him to the occasion, her head dips, her hair a veil to separate him from those ghostly memories, the way he walks through his reality, both awake, and in dreams.

Palms that frame his face, angle his gaze upwards, to meet her own, blue and piercing, she feels it roll within her stomach, find me, she wants to tell him, but how can she even know that he is real, that THIS IS REAL? “Run. Please... there’s so much that you can do, so much you can be if not here. Take those that you can. Those willing. And step into an uncertain future. While you might not know what is coming...” a catch, she worries; what comes next? “... you will at least be safe. You deserve that. And so do they.”

003. careless endeavour  They’re seated now within the place he calls ‘home’... it’s beautiful and ragged and torn at all edges, but Alice sits amongst it all, her knees pressed together, her back left straight. It’s interesting.... this place, this world, he speaks at her with all these words and phrases and places that she’s meant to know, and all she can do is nod back, solemn. HE WON’T UNDERSTAND what business he has here, he only assumes he’ll be apart of it, which is helpful after all she’s seen him do. Demon. That’s what he calls himself, she thinks. And she remembers what those words mean back home, what that might mean for him, too, though he thinks of her as something similar.                                               

                                    Maybe it’s the dream walking.

Here he REGALES HER with stories about his come up, this place, she’s leaned in and asked him squarely, “Why are you the king of this place?” but not the King, per say. He doesn’t have a lot to say, but it all fits together like puzzle pieces with the snippets she’s picked up, the crumbs she’s been dropped. Hansel and Gretel would be proud of her right now, as she slowly eats the food he’s left her, praying she hasn’t encountered some Hades and she remade to play Persephone. You never know, even as her fingers dip, pomegranate staining her fingers, red on her lips.

“Is this really where you want to be?” Alice interjects, a blinking blue left studying him from across the table, as she stands, then, a sudden movement that makes Damian THINK TWICE, as she walks over to his position, his rounded end. “You’re... not lost like me. You’re helping a stranger find their way. But who knows.... I could still be make believe. I’d like to think that your presence, though, is its own kind of blessing.” a hand, there, to gently squeeze at a shoulder before she slips off to grab a little more food, returning to the table, a bowl held up to him this time. “Hungry?”

004. fleeting glances It’s almost like a coincidence, isn’t it? Alice, with a headache - a hand on her head, scrunched through impossible blonde, an ache that feels like something’s piercing through the eye, something’s dying to get out. Still dressed for work, clutching to the edge of the counter, a coworker asks after her, and she tries to BRUSH IT OFF. “I just need a pain killer~” a sing song voice, with a false note of cheer, a tiredness that’s sticking to her insides, souring her stomach. A sickness that threatens to crawl out her mouth and seeps through her brain, yes, that is what is sick, she’s never been quite well with that, has she?

Troubled dreams, then troubled nightmares, Alice who skips through them all, telling her that she is nothing, just the recycled ends of someone else’s heart and soul, she is but drawn on strings for GLORIOUS PURPOSE, none of which she dreamed herself. That which did and did not work, she’ll take a pill, and then another, anything, anything as a distraction! But none of it is enough, is it, it all comes down, persistent, consistent... and Alice, well, ahhh, she lives on, tries on, because after all, she must. A glance upwards; a face that stares back at her in mirrored surprise through it, the looking glass between them, but a memory that pulls on something that she thought not to be real.

              It’s him, it’s him!

Lips part in a shock, but he’s already inside, closing the gap before her mouth knows what to summon out to speak, his hand on her arm, he pushes her back with a shock - as if sensing the need in her, FIGHT OR FLIGHT. He chooses to fight, head on, tells her it’s silly to think that he’d just let her go, but, where else could she? Blue eyes that squint, a face so familiar that she’s know ever dip, every curve, every part of him, but that couldn’t be real, and neither could he. Had she taken a pill for this? Knees that feel weak, this is her dreams bleeding out into reality, now, she can’t, they can’t, he is... beneath the warmth, that pain of his grip, real. Then what is she? A crack, that threatens to shatter. “Alice.” the name slips easily, as does his when she doesn’t think about it too hard. “And you’re Damian. We’re not supposed to meet like this, oh...” the worrying, nervous, twitching of a girl that’s never quite believed in her own power.

005. 1-2-3 shot! This time, she thinks, it’s him inside of her dreams. How things have changed, as they do too, they meet for real, THIS IS REAL. And yet, she feels absolutely mad, this is, madness, isn’t it? He slips her a number, that look on his face enough to tell her that he too remembers, both the comfort, and, oh, those other things too. Like she could forget, that slip, that taste, his mouth against hers and the feeling when he watches her like temporary relief, she thinks, does he know? What it’s like to pull and find that there’s no magic trick at the end of the rope, it’s him, and her, and he asks her out for a drink.

                                         Alice simply couldn’t say no.

There’s shots lined up, her face lit up, or was that the neon, of this beautiful place? All dosed, soaked through, this is the Wonderland of her choosing, and it’s easier to talk, isn’t it? Without feeling as if her skin were itching, her heart was bleeding, that she wants to touch him to confirm what’s truth, BUT THEN AGAIN, those dreams had always felt so real too, hadn’t they? One, two three... another round. He orders too, as if he doesn’t know the answer around the edge of his tongue, the worry that lingers, she wants to catch him at it, Alice with bright eyes and a smile to match, red cheeks that burn the way that the liquor does, in her veins.

He asks her if she’s flirting with him, in a dress like that, crowded in a booth like this, and she can only say maybe, because that’s the truth. “Haven’t we already done it before?” with a laugh that almost makes him spit in his beer, but she takes the glass from him instead to drink, blonde hair dripping, over pale flesh. She is not real, not like him. But then neither is he, and if that’s the case, why the reservation? Leaning inwards, a hand that slides across his thigh, her voice is honey, her smile like a knife’s edge. “DO YOU WANT ME TO?” asking as if it were innocent, when her hand suggests anything but. “Flirt with you, that is.”

[redemptioninterlude]

❛ choke . intimately wrap your hands around my muse’s throat .

loud and deafening silence meme ( accepting ) + @theironflower // damian

nfsw-ish, so under a cut!

A dream within a dream; things change. Few things don’t. But he’s always there, some strange bedfellow, a comrade, it felt like, in shared distaste with their realities. Alice isn’t even sure what to make of hers, half the time, only finding herself FULLY back in control as she rests, in theory. It’s always in theory with her, for someone who can’t tell what’s upside, downside, inside out! But as they get older, does that feeling of comfort get all twisted sometimes? Maybe it does. Maybe she even ought to feel some sense of guilt for this, but why? They suffer enough, they’re dragged through enough, Alice likes to think sometimes that there’s no shame in the comfort that they can unspool from one another. Pull on this thread now ; what will you find?

“You’re have terrible kinds of dreams about me, don’t you?” Alice leans forwards over him, that ready laugh, as if she caught him in the act. “I can read it all almost as soon as I get here. I mean, some of them at least.” that flustered expression’s met with a palm pressed against his chest, she sends him flat, her long fingers used to catch at a wrist. “Should I feel HAPPY ABOUT THAT? There are nicer ways to let a girl know, outside of pulling me up, and out, into your space when you’re having a dream like that.” tender; she see-saws through a complicated tumble of emotions, her blonde hair a vail about her pale-cut features, palms used to frame his face, the only thing that ever feels as if it’s in sharp relief against her madness. And she doesn’t even know if he’s real - at least right now, he certainly feels that much.

A noisy sigh; but her touch is gentle. “Don’t you know by now? If you’re lonely, and you call me... here I’ll be.” she’s figured out that much, but it works for her too. Who’s to say who’s the culprit this time? But with her knees sinking into either side of his hips, she’s settled, a kiss pressed to his cheek, his jawline. “Damian... don’t you think you could be a little bit THANKFUL at least?” Saccharine sweet, her hand at his throat to test where she can feel him struggling to draw in a gasp of surprise, another kiss where her fingers angle his chin upwards, to allow her room. “Who knew this was what you were into~ I can’t help but feel I’m getting to know you a little bit better each time. Now.” a shiver traces down her spine, she loves this part, doesn’t she? “Can I see how much you’ve missed me?” squeeze. Tight enough where words won’t make the difference here, he’ll feel her smile, hear her laugh before she gives him that sharp relief of a breath. “Is that a yes?”