Yes, Honor is dead. But I’ll see what I can do. @tanoraqui - Tumblr Blog

so devestated about tumblr crashing in the middle of my fic. my found family multi chapter 200k ficcccc i need to know what HAPPENS

#tumblr #ao3

theonion

Finding himself unable to tolerate the continuing stubborn refusal to address the real issues at hand, apartment dweller Jordan Stills has declared himself “sick and tired” Wednesday of hearing his upstairs neighbors skirt around the core conflict of their long-running argument. “Christ! Stop screaming about the dishes and start screaming about how his mother is the problem!” Stills said to his ceiling, adding in a personal aside that he could barely hear his own thoughts over the petty bickering that masks the male partner’s growing inability to be vulnerable around his romantic companion.

Full Story

morayofsunshine

interview with the masquerade

vampire: the vampire

Use your PTO

Description: [A video of a woman riding a galloping horse bareback while holding a large rainbow flag.]

nattousan

i felt like these tags really added to the experience, thanks @cynderxdustypaws for your knowledge

thetrashbagswasteland

TikTok - Make Your Day

Oh hey this is Gemma and here’s her updated version with the progress pride flag. She’s a wonderful person (and this is the same horse, Gage, because roans are WILD).

akaanir-of-starfleet

#I cannot emphasize enough that this is what modern eowyn is doing #POST canon when she’s gotten over much of her depression #god I would love to watch modern au eowyn experience the joys of breaking out of heteronormativity to explore gender and sexuality #I DO NOT and REFUSE TO have hard headcanons about what she’d conclude #(that’s a lie…she’d be pretty butch. but def still a woman. and a Kinsey…I can never remember which direction the scale goes but imo she’s #genuinely mostly straight #eowyn’s story concludes w her happily marrying a wonderful man and taking up a position of rule much as she was raised to do #and she becomes a healer which IS feminine-coded irl and in canon or at least in rohan #if only bc in contrast war is very masculine #but also is presented as a on a totally different axis to gender #…I lost the thread or at least the sentence structure there #my point is eowyn isn’t opposed to her own womenhood & etc #and she’s not even wholly opposed to the social expectations which bind her #she’s opposed to the point of glory-seeking suicidal depression by the fact that they BIND her #any bindings would be equally cruel #when she breaks these boundaries entirely and eschews also the rohirric masculine ideal of death in battle is when she ultimately finds joy #in the freedom to pick and choose what parts of her identity SHE will define for HERSELF #tldr: imo ideal modern queer eowyn is in her mid 20s and she’s beaten the metaphorical witch-king & gotten aragorn’s athelas pickmeup #and come around to making out with faramir on the city wall in full view of literally everyone (THIS IS CANON) #and she still has bad days #but mostly she’s just a background character in someone ELSE’s fic #and every time she appears she has a different hair color/hairstyle/piercings/tattoos/gender presentation/pronouns/any and all of the above #she identifies as a horse for 2 weeks though that’s mostly to prank Eonwë #she’s dating faramir throughout this except kinda they’re on hold while she figures herself out #except they do also keep meeting and kissing and more. so. #she has a secondary crisis when she kisses a hot girl in a club and is into it and questions if she’s really gay and even faramir is just #her clinging to the heterosexuality to whcih she’s accustomed? #but she gets over this p quick bc a) she knows about bisexuality; b) she takes her antidepressants the next morning #and c) she and faramir go riding a couple days later and she’s like ‘nvm def do still want to jump him’ #…closing parentheses) (via @tanoraqui)

#reblogging for Pride

manicpixiedckgirl

theaudientvoid

There are multiple chapters that are set in hospitals where the characters are attempting to recover from injuries that never fully heal. I must once again stress that my experience in WWI was perfectly normal.

aro-ace-from-outer-space22

There is a giant horrible mudplain full of unrecoverable and perfectly preserved dead bodies that the characters have to walk through in a land where the air is poisoned gas, and on a compLETELY UNRELATED NOTE: WWI WAS TOTALLY FINE AND NORMAL!!

kingercainedaddyissues

Uh??? Tolkien did not claim that???

"One has indeed personally to come under the shadow of war to feel fully its oppression; but as the years go by it seems now often forgotten that to be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years. By 1918, all but one of my close friends were dead."

He talked about how WWI affected his writing all the time, he was not in denial for how it affected??? Am I missing something????

alexseanchai

https://www.tolkiensociety.org/blog/2017/09/tolkien-as-war-novelist-another-way-of-dealing-with-trauma-through-writing/

what Tolkien was adamant about, which has been confusing people for several decades now, is that he wasn't writing about World War Two

beatrice-otter

He was also very clear that he was not writing allegory. Now, some people are not very clear on what allegory means. "Allegory" and "symbols" are not the same thing. Allegory is a type of symbolism, but there are a lot of ways of doing symbolism that aren't allegory ... and a lot of people are kind of fuzzy on that. The way allegory is most commonly used in literary and religious analysis is that there is a direct, almost 1:1 correspondence between the literary figure and what it is standing in for.

So, for example, Pilgrim's Progress is an allegory of Christian salvation. It's sort of a novel? There are characters who do stuff? but also they are very one-dimensional. The main character is a guy named Christian--yes, really!--who is journeying from his hometown ("the city of destruction") to the Celestial City (heaven). There is not much subtlety to it. It is pretty much what it is. There is no slippage, no playing around with the theme, no places where the symbolism is ambiguous. John Bunyan, the author, is hitting you over the head every step of the way with the Meaning That You Are Supposed To Be Getting From The Story.

Not all allegories are that crude or simplistic; the Narnia books are also allegory for Christianity. They have a lot more subtlety to them and a lot more nuance, and there's a lot of stuff in there that isn't allegorical, but on the crucial matters there is still a 1:1 correspondence. Aslan is Jesus. He's not like Jesus, he's not a character that has some similarities to Jesus or takes themes from the stories of Jesus, he is Jesus.

Tolkien is not doing allegory. Tolkien is taking the material of his life--his faith, his experiences in WWI, his linguistic and historical knowledge, his favorite books--and using them as the building blocks of his story. The themes and imagery and symbols draw heavily from all of that, the characters and settings draw heavily from all of that, but they are too complex to be allegorical. There's a lot of symbolism! It's not allegory.

So, for example, let's take the Dead Marshes referenced above. Does the experience of walking through this muddy wasteland with corpses all around that are rotting but still look like people draw from Tolkien's WWI battlefield experience of dead bodies in the trenches? Of course it does! but there are also a lot of differences. These dead are not from the current war, they are from a previous one--they are a reminder of old conflicts, of the ways the systems and powers of the current war have not come out of nowhere, there is history here. There is meaning that is not drawn from the Somme. And they are also drawing from literary references Tolkien was familiar with--primarily William Morris. Modern readers don't get the references because we have generally not read The House of the Wolflings, but that doesn't mean that the references aren't there.

So people read Tolkien's insistence that he didn't write allegory, and take that to mean that he's saying there isn't symbolic and thematic references. And that isn't what he meant! And also, we focus so much on the thematic references to WWI and Christianity, and we miss most of the other references, which makes it seem like Tolkien's only drawing on WWI, when he's actually doing something more complex.

#lotr #jrr tolkien

z-a-d-i-e

from Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession, by Anne Rice

surrenderdorothea

I’ve been very frustrated by the gender discourse in this fandom, which often seems far too rigid. But these passages reminded me of why I loved these books so much when I read them, so many years ago, and why they still remain important. The show is also playing with gender, and I’d love to see more of that play in the fandom.

some-punishment-deactivated2025

@vampire-scripture

vampire-scripture

That was part of what bled into the characterization of Claudia, the idea of being less worthy of respect just because of your body or how you are perceived by society.

“I saw Claudia as a woman in a child’s body,” says Rice. “There are women who are eternally called girls - cute, sweet, adorable pinchable, and soft- when in fact they have a strong mind that’s very threatening” - The Vampire Companion

‘Let tears gather in your eyes. You haven’t tears enough for what you’ve done to me. (...) Monsters! To give me immortality in this hopeless guise. - Claudia, Interview with the Vampire

Claudia is brilliant and dangerous. Yet her fathers treat her as a "doll", a child. Part of her character arc is fueled by rage, caused by this constant paternalism.

Of course, Lestat gave me a doll as usual, the replica of me, which as always wears a duplicate of my newest dress. (...) And what should I do with it? Play with it as if I were really a child? "Is there a message here, my beloved father?" I asked him this evening. "That I shall be a doll forever myself?" - Claudia's Diary, The Queen of the Damned

There is a great interview in which Anne talks about the rage in the character of Claudia, I'll try to make a gifset of it for this week ^^.

Still, it is wild to see some interviews (old interviews) of a bestselling author, in which the host asks things like: "what does your husband think about you writing "x"?".

Which, you know, sometimes can be pertinent (e.g. what does your husband think of you featuring his poems in your books), but in some other cases...

apoptoses

Something I think gets lost in the discussion of gender in Anne's work/her view of self is the context of the time in which IWTV was written and published.

IWTV wasn't published until 1976.

Women in the United States were not legally allowed to have a credit card or get a home loan in their own name, without their husband's approval, until 1974. Laws were just being put into place regarding discriminating against women in hiring and discriminating in pay for women. Most women still couldn't get birth control without their husband's approval. There was no such thing as no fault divorce, or even the concept of marital rape.

While there was no law against a woman getting a driver's license on her own, in the 60s and 70s it could still depend on where you lived and who was working the DMV that day. Anne herself did not have a driver's license and did not drive because Stan would not permit her to drive.

I wish I could remember the exact interview, because she did talk extensively about how in her early days of writing their mutual friends would just refer to her as 'Stan's wife'. 'Stan's wife' wrote a book. 'Stan's wife' is getting published. 'Stan, how is your wife getting on with her book?' being asked while she's in the room. No matter how libertine we view the 1970s, socially women still weren't really looked at outside their roles as wives.

Interview with the Vampire was published right on the cusp of women getting important financial rights, labor rights and marital rights (many of which didn't even come until decades later). So I think Claudia's pent up rage at being a woman trapped in a child's body and Anne's desire to make vampires something that are not male or female but something other is so, so timely and we don't really consider that context enough.

#iwtv #writers

blumineck

When your blacksmith buddy says “hey man do you want a bardiche?”, the answer is always yes!

I have a website now!

#swords

dizzyhslightlyvoided

"Men Aren't Better Than Women: Both Genders Are Inferior To Me" is a 1991 book by Dr. Ivo Robotnik (better known for other work). Though its primary purpose is clearly to stroke the author's own ego, it is generally regarded as a comprehensive, well-constructed, and accessible work of contemporary feminist theory, and is still commonly-cited to this day.

Most of the critical complaints have been about the tone; in a review from 2005, Professor Victoria of Spagonia University said, "The constant self-aggrandizement undercuts the idea that its subject ought to be taken seriously. Also, wasn't the 'feminist' line from the Sonic Heroes manual a mistranslation of 'womanizer'?"

In 2026, Dr. Robotnik released a new edition updated for the preceding 35 years of developments in feminism, with the subtitle changed from "Both Genders" to "All Genders."

#sonic the hedgehog

totallynotalich

I think knowing that Robert Jordan was a Vietnam veteran and had the nickname Iceman really puts a lot of the Wheel of time in new context. He was reportedly cool under pressure and didn't show much emotion so I wonder if he was like Rand just trying to make himself hard to the horrors that he witnessed there. How much of the internal turmoil is from personal experience.

graysedai

I had two nicknames in 'Nam. First up was Ganesha, after the Hindu god called the Remover of Obstacles. He's the one with the elephant head. That one stuck with me, but I gained another that I didn't like so much. The Iceman.

One day, we had what the Aussies called a bit of a brass-up. Just our ship alone, but we caught an NVA battalion crossing a river, and wonder of wonders, we got permission to fire before they finished. The gunner had a round explode in the chamber, jamming his 60, and the fool had left his barrel bag, with spares, back in the revetment.

So while he was frantically rummaging under my seat for my barrel bag, it was over to me, young and crazy, standing on the skid, singing something by the Stones at the of my lungs with the mike keyed so the others could listen in, and Lord, Lord, I rode that 60. 3000 rounds, an empty ammo box, and a smoking barrel that I had burned out because I didn't want to take the time to change. We got ordered out right after I went dry, so the artillery could open up, and of course, the arty took credit for every body recovered, but we could count how many bodies were floating in the river when we pulled out.

The next day in the orderly room an officer with a literary bent announced my entrance with "Behold, the Iceman cometh." For those of you unfamiliar with Eugene O'Neil, the Iceman was Death. I hated that name, but I couldn't shake it. And, to tell you the truth, by that time maybe it fit.

I have, or used to have, a photo of a young man sitting on a log eating C-rations with a pair of chopsticks. There are three dead NVA laid out in a line just beside him. He didn't kill them. He didn't choose to sit there because of the bodies. It was just the most convenient place to sit. The bodies don't bother him. He doesn't care. They're just part of the landscape.

The young man is glancing at the camera, and you know in one look that you aren't going to take this guy home to meet your parents. Back in the world, you wouldn't want him in your neighborhood, because he is cold, cold, cold. I strangled that SOB, drove a stake through his heart, and buried him face down under a crossroad outside Saigon before coming home, because I knew that guy wasn't made to survive in a civilian environment.

I think he's gone. All of him. I hope so. I much prefer being remembered as Ganesha, the Remover of Obstacles.

Robert Jordan via Theoryland, 2001

takiki16

#the things that most explain WoT are that its author 1) killed a lot of people in a very traumatic colonial war#and 2) went to a rigidly hierarchical single-sex military academy FULL of men sleeping with each other#and then was like. what if I write a book where women are in charge because men are cursed to destroy things and go mad#like...yeah#the author is dead but sometimes the author's trauma is not so much (via @sixth-light)

#writers #wheel of time

bob-artist

Crimetober 1-9

Because birds are criminals.

bob-artist

Crimetober 10-21

When will they be held accountable

bob-artist

Crimetober 22-31

Justice will never be served.

#birds #art

centrally-unplanned

Discourse about US universities admissions essentially boils down to "Americans long for the Gaokao exam but the individual, mainly-private institutions that make up US higher ed really, really don't".

femmenietzsche

#and tbc the institutions are more right here - if Americans actually *got* the Gaokao they think they want they would hate it

My probably-not-well-thought-out proposal - at least this is what my brain always generates when thinking about this problem - is to let universities use only a limited set of several meritocratic criteria when handling admissions. For example, universities could pick from a blend of four options: SAT (or similar) scores, SAT scores relative to their high school, high school grades, or high school grades relative to their high school (the way Texas colleges guarantee entry to the best X% of students from a given school). By skillfully blending these requirements, I bet that universities could pick cohorts that came close enough to matching their desires, while prospective students would face a less opaque system that would feel fairer (since all of the metrics reward academic skill) and less demanding (no essay bullshit and fewer extracurricular red queen races, your fate is not entirely determined by a single test). A de facto (but not de jure!) affirmative action policy that broadly applied to people coming from poorer areas (who aren't in private schools at least) wouldn't be perfect but I could imagine it at least getting majority support.

centrally-unplanned

If I could centrally coordinate (or plan, one might say!) the university system, I think that this could function perfectly well as a system for a country to use. And the majority of Americans would - on paper - support it; particularly with the caveats & options allowing schools to sort of fudge a bit and give families a sense of agency in the whole process. It would sort merit well and keep solid academic incentives in place while recognizing regional disparities.

I don't think it would let schools really match their desires too well though, nor give the marginal "striving" parents who drive the current admissions system though. Universities work hard to not have a fully academically-merit-focused admission process for valid reasons around their social power in society, and parents really don't like that system for very-apparent reasons around their own kid's future success, and those two forces are meeting in the middle. Not to mention that at the top of the system, the merit rankings bleed out a bit and the distinctions become a bit arbitrary but still need to be sorted out (You can imagine a system where there is zero ranking distinction between Harvard, Stanford, and Cornell - sounds fine to me, right? But it doesn't sound fine to Harvard!). And these dynamics trickle down the chain to all the top schools (admissions at mid-tier schools in the US today are in fact pretty much like the above, and so are not our focus).

I would add too that I think a lot of people essentially believe that if college admissions were simple, the "extracurriculars" & added competitive pressure of high school today would fade away. But I don't think this is true - society demands that complexity-of-sorting, colleges are just the receptacle of how that sorting is executed. If the role of colleges as social-status-certifier declined, other institutions would necessarily rise to take their place. Though this is more speculative and I could be wrong!

(You probably know most of this already, I get you were outlining your own ideal system not solving the coordination problems)

gpuzzle

I did live in a country with a Gaokao-style college entrance exam system, you just pass the buck along on extracurriculars. I studied English (8 years!!) and German as extracurricular stuff, not counting things I did for fun like study bass or participate in my high school's robotics team.

But I also got tutoring on how to write a good argumentative exam for it. There's the thousands of cram schools. There's the way education curves to fit with the expectations of the entrance exam, with kids getting assigned books by the literal dozen under the expectation that these will be the reference points for the literature section of the exam, and how one curveball thrown by the couple of universities that use their own state system makes that part of the high school curriculum for years on end. My high school class hours doubled from just 7:30-13:00 last year of middle school to 7:30-17:30 last year of high school. The last year of high school, the National High School Exam became a vortex. Everything revolved around it.

It doesn't solve anything. It just passes the buck along so upper middle class parents can tell their kids to go to cram schools, or at minimum language schools.

The fundamental issue is that higher education is also intrisically tied with the patronage/golden ticket view. If it's the one direct ticket to a better life, everybody holds on to it for fear of falling behind. Why do you think I'm trying to get to Canada? Because I want a 4x raise, thank you very much.

centrally-unplanned

Yeah, and those slots are (probably) just going to be inherently limited. There are not in fact infinite finance jobs to go around, the same with engineering visas to Canada (even under far more liberal immigration systems, job slots would cap). Fundamentally, in ~1920 or w/e, the vast majority of people never even tried to "socially climb" outside of their station & local community. That has changed dramatically, and systems have emerged to process that intense, far-reaching competitive process. Everything about things like college is structured by that reality (though tbc it isn't the only relevant factor in the system).

argumate

I'm always nonplussed by the ticket to better life side of credentialism because back when I studied computer science the required scores were so low that essentially anyone could do it, and this was during the first tech boom when people actually wanted to! but of course people were still viciously competing for the few spots available at veterinary school or whatever because they were desperate to operate on puppies.

random2908

Seconding what a lot of people have already said here. This is already how it works at the big state universities. For example, California also has a top % admissions guarantee for in-state applicants to the University of California system (prestigious), based on I think a mix of grades and SAT/ACT test scores; and minimum-grades guaranteed admission to the Cal State University system (mid). The UCs I think also require essays in the admissions packet, mainly just to prove your grades and test scores are real--they're purely a formality as far as I know.

I grew up in California, but I went to school in Michigan, and it was similar there. The top two state schools (University of Michigan and Michigan State University) were required to accept everyone who was above a certain % of in-state applicants. The mid-level state schools (with various regional names) had a minimum-grades requirement and you could optionally supplement your grades with SAT/ACT scores.

But the other thing America has is a whole ecosystem of private colleges/universities--which is interesting because America does not have a lot of private high schools (and where they do exist, they're concentrated in a couple of specific regions). The private colleges/universities make up their admissions criteria from whole cloth and wouldn't hesitate to collectively sue if the government tried to regulate them. The private colleges/universities range from very poor academic standards to schools that are universally considered the best in the country. Some of the worse ones are scams, some are just alternate ways of learning (small classes, individual attention) at the same academic level as the (worse among) the much larger public universities.

But, importantly, going to a top private university opens doors that going to a top public university usually does not. I went to a top private college for undergrad--one most people wouldn't have heard of, but a school that professors from around the country sent their children to. The school I went to semi-OFFICIALLY guaranteed that if you passed their pre-med program you would be accepted into med school somewhere in the US--I have NEVER heard of another college guaranteeing that. The school I went to unofficially guaranteed that, whatever you majored in, you would be accepted into a top-20 doctoral program in that subject, probably top-10. (And I, with mediocre college grades, got into what were at the time the 8th and 11th ranked physics programs; and the 11th-ranked program begged me to go there, literally a professor on the admissions committee told me, during the prospective-students weekend, that their program was excited and honored that I was considering them, and offered me a full fellowship for my first year.) And I went to a college you wouldn't have heard of! (Although the professors on admissions committees obviously had.) Imagine the strings that would have been pulled for me if I'd gone to Harvard or Yale or Princeton--schools that are infamous for this kind of thing. I could have been a senator!

Which is not to say there are no opportunities like that at a place like UC Berkeley or University of Michigan or University of Virginia. If you network just right, join the right frat, or befriend the right professor, sometimes you can get these perks--after all, these are also top schools, there are opportunities there to meet the right people, if you know how. But it's hard and far from guaranteed. There are private schools were any student who doesn't completely fail out or alienate their professors gets all of this--and I know because I went to one and was a mediocre student.

In a country where a large portion of the population doesn't want to raise taxes on the rich because what if they someday become rich, there is no stomach for getting rid of these sorts of programs anyway. These schools reserve a majority of their seats for "merit"* rather than legacy applicants (how much depends on the school, last I remember reading, it was something like 70% merit seats at Harvard, but it can be as much as 99% at some of the smaller schools). Which means you can dream that if your child is perfect enough, they can get a seat. And then once they have a seat at one of these schools, they get all the privilege of having been born rich (I mean... not really, but at least some of it). It's a dream of upward mobility that people will cling to too hard to have much hope of reform.

* (Nevermind that all of these private schools combined only have seats for about ten thousand new students per year, and a lot more than ten thousand kids get perfect grades and perfect test scores each year, especially when grades and test scores effectively be bought by sending kids to test prep and cram schools. A nearly-perfect kid from a poor family will be outmatched by a slightly-above-average kid from a wealthier family that could afford to buy perfection for them, before you even get to the kids who had systemic obstacles to academic success in high school and so whose grades and test scores undersell their potential. And that's not getting into the ineffables that these schools use to distinguish among perfect kids, because there's nowhere near enough room to admit all of them so some ranking of perfection has to be done. The ineffables, of course, are often going to be markers of family privilege; for a simple example, that my parents were both professors, and knew the system, so they could suggest and veto application essay topics; for another simple example, that my parents knew of this college in the first place, that most people have never heard of, that would open doors for me in my next life stage. "Merit" is a very loaded concept in a way that the vast majority of people feel disincentivized to see.)

#long post #America #college #analysis #arguments

modern-politics111

According to the U.S. Census, a record number of LGBTQ+ couples are living their best lives and society hasn't come to an end despite Republ

truth-has-a-liberal-bias

The number of same-sex couples in the United States has more than doubled over the past two decades, even as political opposition to marriage equality shows signs of renewed strength.

According to new data from the U.S. Census Bureau, about 1.7 million households in the country were headed by same-sex couples in 2024, accounting for roughly 1 percent of all U.S. households. That marks a significant increase from about 777,000 households in 2004. [...]

#pride month #ce #society

thesadpuffin

Zelda Reacts Part 8

shoutout to that one person who said something about Link in knights armour and being extra chivalrous - it never left my head and here we are XD

Part 7: Dark Link <<< >>> Part 9: Tingle

#these are all SO GREAT #legend of zelda #video games #ship

mintmatcha

love arranged marriage unfortunately. the idea of being married to a knight who's not even in the city, but away on the front lines. it's a benefit for your family, so they dont even question sending you to his home to await his return...

mintmatcha

you meet him three months into the arrangement. He arrives after the sun has already set, his features set strong in the candlelight. His body is heavy with exhaustion and tension, his eyes dull and tired.

you've grown to hate this place, this castle gifted to him for war victories. The halls are barren, the garden yet to bloom. The maids are pleasant, but they keep their distance, as if you'll strike. Maybe your husband is the kind to hit. You wouldn't know.

When he looks at you, it's only in short bursts, his eyes suddenly low. There's a long stretch of silence between you and you consider introducing yourself, but decide against it. He knows who you are.

"The maid is drawing me a bath," he says suddenly and a sick feeling pours over you. This day was always coming, but you aren't sure you're ready to lay under a stranger.

"Am I expected to join?" you ask and his nose crinkles.

"No." He steps back and away. His departure is brisk and driven. You retire for the night by yourself and awake alone. Your husband is set to leave again in a few hours; a few soldiers have already gathered in the front garden.

"Don't you wish to give your new wife a goodbye?" one asks, unaware of your open window. "One night and you've already had your fill? Or has she been filled too much?"

"I refuse to believe she is real!" says another. "What kind of woman has worn down our brute and turned him into a family man? Should we expect a gaggle of children in the upcoming year?"

Your husband growls. "You will leave the poor lamb alone. She suffers enough."

That softens you. Just a bit. You rise from you bed and go to the window, leaning out enough to catch the men's attention.

"Until next time."

He watches you, expression caught between more emotions that you can count, then turns his gaze back to his mount. The two men share a look, wide, wide grins on their faces.

"Until next time," he repeats back.

mintmatcha

In his absence, he sends gifts. They are tiny things, sweets and oiled combs and scented oils and a porcelain figure of a cat, aimless in their direction towards you. Just simple niceties he could give to any woman in the world. You imagine he sends one to the lovers he has in every city as well.

(he must have lovers, you imagine. He hasn't touched you; he must be getting his fill with women in other cities, maybe women he actually loves. these are trinkets to keep his wife amused while she wastes away.)

none of the gifts come with a note.

one day a bolt of fabric arrives, yellow and ornate. It's only a small amount, not enough to make a dress, but enough for you to unravel and admire. It's beautiful and clearly expensive, golden threads woven into flowers and vines. Your father was a silk merchant; while you never wore the silks, you can recognize their quality.

the following week, the delicious man rides up on his steeds and presents a letter. The handwriting is rough. Knights that come from the lower class do not have the schooling of highborns; as fair as you know, your husband was born a street rat and worked his way theough the ranks to glory.

-I have been told by my secund that I did not send you enuf fabric for a gown. I do not no these things.

The spelling mistakes screw a smile out of you.

"Wait a moment." You stop the boy before he can leave. "I wish to send something back."

You take your time and use your finest calligraphy, tucking your note in with a handkerchief you had spent the week on. It's fine work-- one that would please even the hardest of hearts.

-Dearest husband,

Please take this handkerchief as a sign of my thoughts.

Your patient and thoughtful wife

A second letter arrives within the week.

-are you cros with me? A scrap of fabric for a scrap of fabric?

The response is what makes you cross. The poor messenger boy has to stay the night while you percolate over a response.

-Dearest, sweetest husband,

A handkerchief is a traditional gesture of affection. I have embroidered the edges by hand, with your last name and your roses, and it smells of my perfume. It is a piece of me for you to carry. If you do not appreciate my kindness or if you think it will turn away your lovers, you may return it. I do not wish it wasted on you.

Your less than patient and less than adoring wife

The poor boy scatters off in the morning and returns a few days later.

tortured wife,

I wil cherish it. I am sory, pour lam. I wil do better.

your loving husband

#ficlet #ship