The Cozy Kirin

A writer with a love for World of Warcraft, The Walking Dead, and creating worlds https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheCozyKirin

[thecozykirin]

DWC June 2026 Day 4: Inadequate

@daily-writing-challenge

The sunlight in Quel'Thalas was wrong.

Not wrong in any way Ridley could properly explain. It was warm, golden, and honeyed through the canopy of red-leafed trees that arched over the estate's courtyard like the ribs of some enormous living cathedral. Boralus’s light was gray, and Dampwick’s in particular had been the brown of old puddles and lamp-smoke. This was something else entirely, and standing in it made Ridley feel like a stain on clean linen. He leaned against the stone balustrade of the upper terrace, arms folded while he watched Sybil and Agatha far below in the paddock yard. Agatha's shriek of delight carried clear up—she'd found the hawkstriders. One of the juveniles, its plumage still mottled with the dull fawn of adolescence, had lowered its ridiculous feathered head to inspect her, and Agatha had seized its beak in both chubby hands with the fearlessness of a child who assumed all animals were secretly her mother's friends. Sybil stood beside her, one hand resting on Agatha's shoulder, her sandy hair catching the golden light. Even from up here, Ridley could see the tilt of her head—that particular sideways listening she did when something only she could hear was talking to her. "She has a way with them," Jilene said from behind him.

Ridley grunted. He didn't turn around, but he shifted his weight to make room at the railing, and after a moment Jilene drifted up beside him. She moved the way she always moved—careful and peripheral, as though she were trying to take up as little space as possible in a world that had already told her she took up too much. His aunt was tall—or maybe she only seemed tall because she was so narrow, built like a candle that had been left to collect dust. Her snow-white hair was pinned in a half-up braided style that looked meticulous and slightly outdated, as though she'd learned it once and never found reason to change. Her robes were fine but faded, the embroidery at the cuffs picked loose in places by nervous fingers. She held a cup of tea she wasn't drinking, both hands wrapped around it like a ward. "Aggie's got no bloody sense of self-preservation," Ridley said. "Gets that from 'er mum."

"Or from you."

He cut her a look and Jilene's mouth twitched into something that wasn’t quite a smile, more the ghost of one that had died on its way to her lips. They watched the paddock in silence for a while. Below, Agatha had somehow convinced the juvenile hawkstrider to sit down, and was now attempting to climb onto its back while Sybil steadied her with both hands, murmuring something in that lilting way of hers. "Place looks good," Ridley offered, because he wasn't sure what else to say. The estate did look good—immaculate, even. The hawkstriders were in magnificent condition: glossy-feathered, bright-eyed, and their legs clean and strong. He'd noticed the way every bird in the yard moved with an alertness and ease that spoke of careful handling, good feed, and someone who knew what they were doing. But he'd also noticed the empty stalls in the lower barn. The paddocks could hold three times as many birds as they currently did. The staff he'd seen numbered two, maybe three.

"It's...quieter than it used to be," Jilene said. "Father kept forty breeding pairs at the height of things. I have eleven now. Well, Nine hens and two cocks, so eleven feels generous." She gave a small, fluttering laugh that didn't reach her eyes. "The Farstriders used to place orders a year in advance. Now they go to the Dawnsong ranch in the south. Bigger operation. Better bloodlines, they say, though I—" She stopped herself and smoothed the front of her robe out of habit. "Well."

Ridley said nothing. He recognized the shape of that sentence. Better bloodlines. “Jil.”

"Mm?"

"You ain't gotta perform for me. Yeah?" He looked at her properly then, with the flat directness that made most people flinch. Jilene didn't flinch, but her fingers tightened on the cup. "I know what it looks like when someone's holdin' the whole fing togevver wif spit and prayer. I grew up doin' it."

Her chin trembled, just once, before she set her jaw. For a moment she looked almost like Merrick—not in cruelty, but in the stubborn refusal to crack where anyone could see. "I manage," she said.

"Yeah, I know you do."

The hawkstrider below let out a warbling trill as Agatha finally got both legs over its back and she threw her arms up in triumph. "Do you remember your father at all?" Jilene asked softly, not looking at him.

Ridley's jaw worked as he stared at the treeline—focusing on those perfect red-gold leaves, every one of them exactly the right shade, not a single one brown or curled or rotting. "Bits," he said. "'Is 'ands, e’had long fingers. He smelled like, I dunno—somefing floral. Couldn't tell you what. Merrick remembers more, or says 'e does." He paused. "Don't fink Merrick remembers 'im so much as remembers bein' angry at 'im. Two different fings, innit." 

"Lanril was..." Jilene began, then seemed to lose the thread. She turned her teacup in her hands. "He was the talented one. The heir. Everything came easily to him—magic, combat, society. Mother adored him, and Father staked everything on him. And I was just..." She made a vague, diminishing gesture at herself. "The spare." Ridley looked at her. "I couldn't do what he could," she said, and her voice had gone thin. "Not with magic. I was thirteen before I could manage a basic illusion, and even then it flickered so badly the tutor asked me if I was doing it on purpose as a joke. "Father used to make me practice in front of him. I had to stand in the study and cast what I learned in front of him." Her voice dropped. "I would shake so badly the spells fell apart and he would just...sit there. He didn’t even look angry or disappointed, he just looked—bored. As if watching me fail wasn't even worth the energy of being upset about." She shifted her jaw slightly. “I was in the paddock at dawn one evening, sitting in the mud with a skittish yearling that wouldn't let anyone else near her, doing the slow patient work that no one wanted to do and Father said I handled them like a human." The word came out as though she were quoting someone else's disgust. "He meant it as the worst thing he could say." 

Something cold and old shifted in Ridley's chest. He knew that feeling, he knew it like he knew the taste of dock water and the weight of a too-thin coat in winter. "Merrick can do it," he said, low. "The magic, took to it like breavvin'. Me—" He stopped, clearing his throat before he started again, rougher. "I got th’ears, but the one fing that actually matters?" He held up his hand and turned it over. "Nuffin. Can’t light a candle wif it without gettin’ a headache. Not wivout a rune or a glyph or some bit of kit to do the work for me." He dropped his hand, grasping the railing with it. "So I got guns, I got traps, and I got fings I built wif my 'ands because my blood didn't give me what it was s'posed to." He swallowed. "An' every time I walk through this place, every time I see the spires and the enchantments and I fink: you don't belong. Not in Boralus, not 'ere, not anywhere."

Jilene set down her tea and her hand found his forearm, light and tentative, the touch of someone who expected to be shaken off but he didn't shake her off. "I think that too," she whispered. "Every day in my own home. In the house I grew up in, with the birds I raised from eggs, in the country that's supposed to be mine—I feel like a guest who's overstayed."

Ridley's throat ached and he looked down at her hand on his arm. Her fingers were long and pale and ink-stained while his were tanned, thick, and as rough as old rope. Same blood in both, and same in their insufficiency. "'S a right pair, ain't we," he muttered.

Jilene let out a breath that was almost a laugh. "Lanril got all the magic," she said. "And then he died, and the magic left with him, and what was left behind was...me. Trying to do what he did with half the gift and none of the confidence. And you and Merrick—" Her voice caught. "You got the hardest part of him, the absence. And I couldn't even—I should have done more, Ridley. I should have come to Boralus and brought you both here. I should’ve fought Father on it—" 

"Don't." His voice was gruff but not unkind. "You 'ad your own weight, but y’tried. You sent parcels when we was kids. Books, clothes, dried fruit—wrapped in that blue paper wif the hawkstrider stamp." He paused and worked his jaw. "Merrick pretended 'e didn't care, but I kept every one."

"I was afraid," she corrected, very quietly. "That's different from having weight. I was afraid of my family, I was afraid of them finding out I cared and I couldn't afford to be diminished any further. So I let two boys grow up hungry in a slum and told myself sending parcels was enough because I was a coward." 

Ridley stared at her for a long moment. He stood there, rigid and uncomfortable and utterly useless with this kind of thing, until something in him, the part that Sybil had pried open, overrode the rest. He put his arm around Jilene's narrow shoulders. Stiff and awkward, like a man who had learned tenderness the way some people learn a second language: late, clumsily, and with an accent that never quite smoothed out. "Yeah, well," he said. “You wanna talk 'bout bein' a coward? I sat next to Merrick for years watchin' 'im do fings that made me sick and told meself it's just business, it's just 'ow it is, 'e's family, what else am I gonna do." His gaze drifted back to the paddock. Sybil was lifting Agatha down from the hawkstrider now, pressing a kiss to the girl's wild dark curls. "Took a girl 'alf my size wif witch eyes to make me see I 'ad a choice. An' even then I nearly chose wrong." 

Jilene followed his gaze and watched Sybil settle Agatha on her hip, the child's arms looping around her mother's neck with the absolute trust of someone who had never once doubted she would be caught. "She's extraordinary," Jilene said.

"She's mad as a bag of cats, is what she is," Ridley said, but his voice had gone soft. "Talks to trees n’bones, and answers questions no one's asked yet. She told me last week that the bread wouldn't rise ‘cause the house was sad." He paused, before adding "Th’bread didn’t rise."

Jilene smiled, small and wobbly, but genuine. "You love her very much."

Ridley's ears went pink and he cleared his throat, adjusted his gloves, and looked at the trees, the sky, the distant spire of a magisters' tower catching the sunlight, anywhere but at his aunt. "She sees me," he said finally. "Not th’ears or what I can or can't do wif magic. Just me. Ain't no one ever done that before." He hesitated. "Cept maybe you.” At that, Jilene bowed her head and leaned into him without another word.

Below, Agatha's bright voice rang up through the golden air: "Mummy, mummy, the bird likes me, tell Da the bird likes me!" Sybil tilted her face up toward the terrace and even from that distance, Ridley could see the knowing curve of her mouth. She lifted Agatha's hand and helped her wave. Ridley raised two fingers from the railing in return, his aunt still tucked under his arm.

[oakrootdonottrip]

Zuko book 2 character growth

[thecozykirin]

DWC June 2026 Day 3: Reflect

( Minor trigger warning for mentions of violence and abuse ) @daily-writing-challenge The floorboards creaked like they were trying to wake the whole house. Ridley shifted his weight to the balls of his feet, rolling heel-to-toe the way he used to move through back alleys in Boralus when being quiet meant the difference between a heavy pocket and a broken jaw. Old habits, the kind that lived in muscle and bone long after the reasons for them had gone. He adjusted the bundle against his chest carefully, and kept walking the slow circuit from the window to the hearth and back again. Giddeon was four days old and had opinions about sleeping, loud ones. Not now, though. Now the boy had finally gone quiet, his damp little mouth pressed against Ridley's collarbone with one fist curled into the open collar of his shirt. The weight of him was almost nothing. A bag of flour weighed more. His pistol weighed more. Hell, Ridley's arm alone probably weighed more, and yet this scrap of warmth and breath and angry red skin had him moving through the dark like a man carrying a crate of Azerite—terrified to jar, to jostle, to breathe wrong. Sybil was fast asleep, finally. She'd wanted to keep the boy in the crook of her arm all night, murmuring those strange little half-rhymes she does when she's too tired to filter them: thin night, thin night, mind the light, mind the light. 

He'd kissed her forehead and pried the babe out of her grip the way you'd pry a bottle from a drunkard, slow and careful, as he reassured her. Sleep, love. I got 'im. I got 'im. 

Ridley stopped by the window, the glass cold near his cheek.

Westfall stretched out below the homestead in silver and black, the grass pale as ash under a fat autumn moon. The sea was a dark line at the horizon, restless and glinting where the moonlight caught the chop. He could hear it from here if the wind was right, and tonight it was. A low, rhythmic shush that sounded nothing like Boralus—there was no creak of rigging, no drunk singing, no slap of bilge against hull. Just open water and open sky and the dry rustle of wheat. Their homestead wasn't much, just a stone cottage with a patched roof, a chicken coop Ridley had built twice because the first one leaned, and a garden where Sybil grew things he couldn't name that smelled of rain and old bark. But the land was theirs and it was bought honestly, or as close to honestly as a man like him could manage. 

It was quiet here, quiet enough to make a man's thoughts too loud. 

Ridley shifted the baby's weight again and let himself look at his own reflection in the dark pane. His shaggy hair had fallen over one eye as always. His beard was untrimmed and his shirt rumpled from being slept in for three days running. He looked like a man who'd been dragged backwards through a hedge and then handed an infant. Which, near enough, was the truth of it. Ridley had never known what to do with peace. He understood noise, because to him noise made sense. Noise told you where trouble was coming from, like a bottle shattering in an alley, a woman shrieking three streets over, or boot steps behind you that were too measured to be drunk and too slow to be harmless. Merrick’s laugh booming through a room before someone else’s teeth hit the floor, gunpowder cracking in the damp air, coin clinking, men cursing, and the ugly wet sound of a knife finding somewhere soft. Peace was different, because peace had both space and time to it. Peace let a man hear the blood moving in his own ears and wonder what, exactly, had been left behind in him after all the shouting stopped. 

Merrick's face came to him unbidden, the way it always did in quiet moments. That was the bastard of it. Not the shouting, not the ugly words or the uglier blows—those he could handle, those were the language of Dampwick, the grammar of brothers who'd been built on the same broken foundation. What haunted Ridley was the look on Merrick's face the moment he'd understood that Ridley was actually leaving.

Not threatening.

Not posturing.

Leaving.

Betrayal, raw as a wound, and underneath it had been something worse—confusion. Like Merrick genuinely could not fathom that his brother, his brother, the boy he'd fed and taught and dragged through every gutter in Boralus for over two centuries, would choose someone else over him.

The split had not been clean.

Nothing with Merrick was ever clean. The fight started over Sybil because of a vision. She'd told him the deal in Freehold would go sideways, that the man he was meeting would bring iron instead of coin. Merrick heard the man will betray you and acted on it, he put a knife through the man's hand before the meeting even started, torched the arrangement, and lost the cargo and two contacts in one evening. When the dust settled it turned out the man had brought coin after all, the iron Sybil had seen was the Watch, three officers who'd been tailing the deal for weeks, Merrick didn't blame himself for misreading it, he never did, he blamed her.

The shouting had been bad, but the rest had been worse. Ridley remembered the exact moment his loyalty snapped, not bent, not frayed, but snapped—the sound Merrick's open hand made against Sybil's face, the way her head turned with the blow, the collar at her throat buzzing like a hornet. Ridley, who had spent his whole life standing at his brother's shoulder, stepped between them and said that was enough. The beating Merrick gave him was thorough, professional even. Merrick knew how to hurt a man without killing him, and he knew how to hurt Ridley specifically, because he knew every old break, every scar, every spot where the body remembered pain the most. His brother had cracked two of his ribs, split his eyebrow to the bone, and dislocated his left shoulder with a move he'd taught Ridley when Ridley was fifteen. But Ridley had gotten up. That was the part Merrick hadn't expected. Ridley always got up, because he'd been getting up his whole life every time something or someone knocked him down. But this time, he got up and he didn't come back to heel. 

Merrick had called after him. Not with rage, at first, but with something much worse. "Ridley. Rid. Come on, bruv. Where you gonna go, eh? Where you gonna go that ain't with me?" That facade of familial warmth fell apart quickly when Ridley hadn't stopped: "You're nothin' without me, you stupid bastard. You know that, right? You've always known that. You don't walk away from me, little brother.”

“Watch me.” The scar above Ridley's eyebrow itched sometimes, in the cold. He had others from that night—a white line along his forearm where he'd blocked a bottle, a burn on his back from where Merrick had unleashed a blast of arcane fire, and a crooked knuckle on his right hand from when he'd finally hit back and broken Merrick's nose. The first time in his life he'd ever raised a fist to his brother, and it had felt like cutting off his own arm. Some nights he still dreamed about Dampwick. Not the bad parts, or rather, not only the bad parts. He often dreamed of the early parts during those nights. Merrick boosting him up through a bakery window to steal day-old rolls, Merrick showing him how to tuck a blade flat against his wrist so it didn't print through his sleeve, Merrick sitting on the edge of his cot after their mother passed, not saying anything, just sitting there, hand on the back of Ridley's neck, heavy and warm. And now it all meant nothing, or it meant too much. It was hard to tell the difference on some nights. He exhaled through his nose, and Giddeon made a sound. A small wet mnnh against his chest, and Ridley's hand came up to cup the back of the boy's skull before he'd even thought about it, his palm swallowing the whole of it. He wondered if Giddeon would have magic. Real magic, not Ridley's patchwork rune carving and the jury-rigged traps and inscriptions he'd cobbled together because his blood wouldn't cooperate—but the arcane that had come easy to Merrick, liquid and obedient, proof of their Elven inheritance that Ridley had always reached for and never quite caught. Sybil's gift was something else entirely, older and wilder, tangled with antler and root. Between the two bloodlines, Giddeon might carry something. Or he might carry nothing. He might be like Ridley, reaching for a fire that he cannot light. 

Then I'll teach him runes, Ridley thought, with a stubbornness that felt like pressing a bruise. I'll teach him to shoot. I'll teach him to build. He won't need it to come easy. He'll have hands and a head and that'll be enough because I'll make bloody sure it's enough. 

Somewhere in the dark, a nightjar called. Westfall was louder at night than people expected, with crickets and frogs in the creek down the hill, and the occasional far-off bark of a coyote out in the dust plains. It wasn't the forest sounds Sybil grew up with, the deep dark forests of Drustvar that were full of rustling undergrowth and stag-calls. But she'd planted things from that home already. They had herbs along the windowsills, lavender by the front step, and a hawthorn sapling near the fence that she talked to when she thought Ridley wasn't listening, murmuring in that lilting half-rhyme of hers, blessings or prayers or whatever the old Drust words were that she carried like seeds in her pockets. The whole homestead smelled like her now—dried rosemary, wool, beeswax, and the faintly sweet earthiness of whatever she brewed in the kettle that wasn't quite tea.

Ridley still didn’t know if he'd earned all of this, and a part of him suspects he hasn’t and never will and that's a thing he was going to have to carry. But Sybil told him once, back when he'd said something close to that out loud, drunk on bad wine and ashamed of himself for being drunk. She had just touched his jaw and said, Earnin' is just doin' it again tomorrow, love. Just doin' it again tomorrow. That's the whole of it.

And he’ll do it again tomorrow, and every tomorrow after.

[cupidsquilll]

[rosiewitchescottage]

The Beauty of Love

[thecozykirin]

DWC June 2026 Day 2: Vibrant

@daily-writing-challenge She'd mentioned it once, just once, while sitting on the windowsill at Chuck's with her knees drawn up and her shawl wrapped tight as she watched the last of the gray light drain out of the Boralus sky. She hadn't been talking to Ridley, not really. She'd been talking to the air, or the gulls, or whatever invisible thing she was always half-listening to. "Back home," Sybil murmured, her voice carrying the weight of a forest she might never see again, "when autumn turned, the sky would sing. Colors, like—like someone spilled dye across wet cloth. Green an’violet and sometimes a pink so pale ye'd think ye dreamed it. Me mam used t' say it was th’hidden folk shakin' out their skirts after th' harvest, lettin' the hem trail through the stars." She paused, her fingers had moved on the sill, tracing slow arcs. "I miss that. Th’way it moved like it were breathin'. Like the whole sky was alive and it wanted ye t' know." Then she'd gone quiet, and Ridley had grunted something about drafts and shut the window, and that had been the end of it. 

Except it hadn't. Because the words had lodged in him the way a splinter lodges under a nail—small, invisible, and impossible to stop feeling. He'd lain awake that night on the floor of the room they shared at Chuck's, staring at the water-stained ceiling while Sybil slept curled on the cot with her shawl pulled over her head, and he'd thought about a sky full of breathing colors, and he'd thought I ain't never seen anyfin' like that, and then he'd thought she ain't gonna see it again eivver, not 'ere, not wiv that collar on 'er, and then he'd rolled over and pressed his face into his arm and told himself to go to sleep.

He didn't go to sleep.

He started collecting bottles two days later. Not obviously, of course, Or in any way that could be traced or questioned or, Mother forbid, explained. Ridley would sooner swallow his own tongue than explain. He simply started noticing them. The green ones first—wine bottles, mostly, thick glass with that particular murky sea-color that taverns threw out by the crate. Then blue, which was harder to find. Apothecary vials, the odd flask from the Tradewinds Market, and a chipped perfume bottle he fished out of the gutter behind the Ashvane Company Yards while pretending to check a dead drop. Purple was the worst. He found exactly one, and it was a slim, elegant thing that had probably held something expensive once. It was in a bin in Upton Borough, just being there long enough to fish it out made him sweat through his coat, but once he had it in his hands he wrapped it in his handkerchief and tucked it inside his coat with the care of a man handling a grenade.

It was Pebbles who caught him at it. "Wha' the fuck are you doin'?"

Ridley froze, crouched behind a stack of fish crates on the wharf, one hand closed around the neck of a red glass bottle he'd spotted glinting between the slats. Pebbles stood three feet away, arms crossed, blonde hair spiking in the harbour wind, wearing the expression of a boy who has just witnessed an adult doing something profoundly stupid and wants a full accounting. "Nuffin'," Ridley said.

"Yer nickin' bottles."

"I ain't nickin' 'em. They're rubbish."

"Yer nickin' rubbish bottles an' puttin' 'em in yer coat like they're gold." Pebbles' eyes narrowed. "You gone soft in the 'ead?"

Ridley straightened up, drawing himself to his full height—which was considerable, and usually enough to end conversations with teenage boys. "Drop it." 

Pebbles did not drop it, because Pebbles had never dropped anything in his life except other people's coin. "Is it fer 'er?"

The silence that followed was so sharp you could have cut a sailcloth with it. "Wha'," Ridley said flatly.

"Sybil." Pebbles tilted his head, foxish and knowing. "It's fer 'er, innit."

"It ain't fer anyone. I told you, it's—"

"Rubbish, yeah." Pebbles looked at the red bottle in Ridley's fist, then back at his face, and something shifted behind the boy's sharp eyes. Not mockery, or rather, not only mockery. Something softer and more careful flickered briefly in his gaze. "Right. You want 'elp, or wha'?" Ridley stared at him. "Don't just stand there gawpin',” Pebbled snapped. “I got places t' be. You want 'elp collectin' yer not-fer-anyone rubbish bottles or not?"

What Ridley wanted was for the dock planks to open up and swallow him into the harbor. What he said, after a long and agonizing pause, was: "...Blue ones. An' green. Nuffin' cracked too bad." Pebbles flashed a smile that was both feral and delighted in the way of a boy being let in on a secret and took off down the wharf at a loping run before Ridley could add conditions. 

By that evening, Pebbles had recruited Oliver. "I found three!" Oliver announced, bursting through the back door of Chuck's with his too-big coat bulging at the front, dock rope straining. He upended the coat onto the table with all the ceremony of a merchant unveiling fine silk, and three bottles rolled out: one green, one brown, and one that might have generously been described as yellow if you squinted and had a forgiving disposition.

"Tha’ one's brown, Ollie," Pebbles said.

"It's amber."

"It's brown."

"Syb says amber's just brown tha's been kissed by th' sun."

"Syb says a lot of fings." But Pebbles set the brown bottle aside rather than throwing it out.

"Wha's it all for?" Oliver asked, bouncing on his toes with the barely contained energy of a child who suspects a secret and would rather die than not be told it.

"It's a fing," Ridley grunted.

"Wha' kind of fing?"

"A fing fing. Don't worry ‘bout it."

"Is it a present? Is it fer Syb? Pebbles said—"

"Pebbles needs t' learn to shut 'is mouf." Ridley shot a glare at Pebbles, who was examining a blue bottle against the lamplight with a facade of practiced innocence. "It ain't—look, it's just somefin' I'm doin'. Wiv lights. An' bottles. An' it don't need explainin', a'right? Just...find more blue ones."

Oliver processed this with his entire body—chin jutting, brow furrowed, and fists clenched at his sides in concentration. Then a grin split across his little face, and his eyes lit up. "Yer makin' 'er somefin' pretty."

"M’endin’ this conversation, Oliver."

"You are! Yer makin' Syb somefin' pretty cos you like 'er—"

"Ollie." Pebbles cuffed the boy lightly on the back of the head. "Shut up an' go find blue bottles." 

_________________________________

The shed took him four nights.

It was an old storage lean-to that had been abandoned since the Ashvane Company had consolidated the nearby yards. It was too small to be useful, and too out of the way for the guard to bother patrolling which is why Ridley had used it once or twice for dead drops. He worked alone, after dark, when Merrick was elsewhere and Sybil was sleeping. The bottles went along the back wall first, arranged on a shelf he'd hammered together from scrap timber. Green ones in a long row at the bottom, ranging from near-black to the pale milky colour of shallow sea glass. Above them were the blue ones—the apothecary vials, the flask, and three squat bottles Pebbles had liberated from a chandler's bin. The single purple bottle was in the center, slim and jewel-dark. And scattered among them, the reds and ambers and that one yellow-brown Oliver had insisted was amber. They were to serve as warm tones to break the cool, the way firelight breaks through fog. The broken pieces went on a second shelf, and this was the harder work. Ridley had taken a hammer to the bottles that were too cracked to stand and broken them into rough shards, and then he'd spent two nights fitting those shards into a wooden frame he'd nailed across the wall—overlapping them and layering the colours until green bled into blue which bled into purple which bled into rose, with gaps between to let the light fracture through. His gloves were ruined by the end of the first night and his fingertips were cut to ribbons by the end of the second but he just wrapped them in scraps of linen and kept going. Ridley didn't know what an aurora looked like. He'd never left Boralus, and he'd never seen the sky do anything more dramatic than rain sideways. But he remembered her words, like someone spilled dye across wet cloth, and he remembered the way her hands had moved when she said it, tracing slow arcs on the windowsill, and he built what her hands had drawn. When he tested the lantern on the third night, the light hit the bottles and the shards and scattered across the opposite wall in a wash of colour—green and blue and violet and rose and the deep warm red of the single red bead Agatha had contributed, all overlapping and rippling where the uneven glass bent the light into soft, trembling bands. It wasn't an aurora, or the sky she had grown up under. It was bottles and broken glass and tar-stained planking. He stood there for a long time, looking at it, and he thought: it ain't enough. And then he thought: nuffin' I do is ever gonna be enough. And so, he adjusted the lantern two inches to the left, because the purple wasn't catching right, and kept working.

_________________________________

"Where are we goin'?"

"Out."

"I can see that, Ridley. Out where?"

"Just out, somewhere. It ain't far."

Sybil walked beside him through the damp evening streets of Boralus, her shawl pulled tight against the salt breeze, bare feet silent on the wet cobblestones. She never wore shoes if she could help it, as she said she couldn't feel the ground properly through leather, which was the dumbest thing Ridley had ever heard and also, privately, drove him mad with worry about broken glass and nails, but he'd learned that arguing with Sybil about shoes was like arguing with weather. She kept glancing at him, studying the side of his face with patient curiosity. "Yer bein' very strange," she observed. “Yer walkin' like ye've stolen somethin' and haven't decided whether t' run or not."

"I ain't stolen nuffin'."

"Yer hands are in yer pockets."

"So?"

"Ye never put yer hands in yer pockets, ye always keep them free. So eivver ye've stolen somethin', or yer nervous, and I've never once seen ye nervous about anythin' that wasn't—"

"Can you just—" He stopped walking and drew a breath before releasing it through his teeth. "Can you just...come wiv me an' not ask questions fer five bleedin' minutes? Is that somefin' you're capable of?"

Sybil blinked, then her head tilted in that familiar birdlike motion. "Five minutes," she said. "I'll time it."

"You ain't got a clock."

"I've got somethin' better." She tapped her chest, over her heart. "This one keeps perfect time.” 

Ridley made a noise that wasn't quite a groan and started walking again. Sybil followed, quiet for once, or at least as quiet as Sybil got, which still involved her humming under her breath and occasionally murmuring to a stray cat that wound between her ankles. Meanwhile Ridley's pulse was doing something he refused to acknowledge. His hands, stuffed deep in his coat pockets, were clenched into fists around nothing. This is stupid. This is the stupidest fing you've ever done, and you once let Merrick talk you into robbin' a cadet, so the bar weren't exactly 'igh t' begin wiv— The shed loomed dark and shuttered ahead. He turned down the narrow alley beside it, boots splashing through a shallow puddle that reflected the amber glow of a distant street lantern. The lean-to door was right where he'd left it, warped and salt-bleached, the latch held shut with a bit of wire he'd twisted into place.

"...Ridley?"

"Yeah."

"Is this it, then?"

"Yeah."

"It's a shed," Sybil said carefully.

"I know it's a shed."

"A very nice shed, I'm sure—"

"Just—" He turned to face her, and the expression on his face must have been something, because Sybil's teasing died in her throat. Whatever she saw there, whatever mix of terror and defiance and raw, exposed wanting was written across his features made her go still. "Close yer eyes," he said.

"What?"

"Yer eyes. Close 'em."

She studied him for one more heartbeat, then she closed her eyes. Her lashes lay against her freckled cheeks, pale and fine. The collar gleamed at her throat and her lips were slightly parted. Standing there with her eyes closed, trusting him in a dark alley in a city that had given her no reason to trust anyone, she looked so small and so certain that Ridley's chest seized like a fist had closed around it. He turned to the door, and unwound the wire. His cut-up fingers fumbled with it several times and he swore under his breath. "Are ye all right—"

"Fine. Keep 'em shut." The door swung open with a protesting creak. Inside, the shed was dark, the lantern sitting cold on the stool where he'd left it. He crossed the threshold, fumbling for the tinderbox in his pocket. The wick caught on the third try, and the flame crawled up, small and golden. He adjusted the lantern's shutter, angling it toward the rows of bottles and the mosaic of coloured shards in their rough wooden frame. The light hit the glass, and colors bloomed across the opposite wall, rippling, overlapping and shifting with every tiny flicker of the flame. Green bled into blue, deep and cool as winter twilight. Blue dissolved into violet at the edges where the purple bottle caught the light and threw it wide. Rose and amber crept between, warm threads through the cool wash, and at the center, where Agatha's red bead sat, a single point of deep crimson pulsed like a heartbeat. The broken shards fractured the light further, scattering it into soft, trembling bands that wavered and breathed on the rough grey planking. "...A'right," Ridley said, and his voice came out rougher than he liked. "Open 'em."

Ridley heard her step through the doorway, her bare feet shuffling onto the gritty floor. He heard the sharp, soft intake of breath that followed—a sound like someone being struck, except gentler. He didn't look at her, instead he looked at the wall, at the colours, at the imperfect wavering bands of green and blue and violet and rose, and he said nothing because there was nothing to say that wouldn't come out wrong or too much or not enough. "Ridley." Her voice was barely a whisper when it came, and it cracked down the middle like thin ice. "Ridley, what—how did ye—" 

"It's just bottles," he said quickly. "Found 'em around, mostly. Pebbles an' Ollie 'elped. Agatha found that red bit in the middle, dunno where, she just gave it to me. It ain't—I know it ain't the same as wha' you—I know it ain't right, it's just glass an' a lantern an'—"

"Ridley."

"—it don't move proper, like you said, the real ones move different, I know that, but the flame sort of—if you leave the shutter cracked just a bit it flickers an' the colours shift, see, an'—"

"Ridley."

He stopped, swallowed, and forced himself to turn and look at her. Sybil stood three paces inside the door with both hands pressed over her mouth. Her mismatched eyes were wide and luminous, catching the reflected colour—green on one cheek, violet on the other, her sandy hair lit rose and blue where the scattered light fell across it. Tears tracked down her face and over her fingers, silent and steady. She was weeping the way rain falls—quietly and inevitably, as though something had simply opened inside her that could not be closed again. "It's just bottles," he said again, helplessly.

She shook her head, dropping her hands from her mouth, and her lips were trembling. The smile that broke through the tears was the most devastating thing Ridley had ever seen—it wasn’t the crooked and careful half-smile she typically wore, but wide open and radiant with grief and gratitude so tangled together he couldn't tell where one ended and the other began. "It's home," she whispered. "Oh, Ridley. It's home, it's—”

"I didn't, it's not—" She crossed the space between them in two steps and her arms went around his middle, her face pressing into his chest and she held on like the floor was tilting. Sybil was shaking, he could feel it through his coat, through the leather and the layers, the fine tremor running through her like a plucked string. She made a sound against his chest. A hiccupping little "hhh—" that dissolved into a wet, shuddering breath. Ridley broke then, his arms coming down around her, heavy and uncertain. One hand cupped the back of her head, his fingers sliding into the loose braid at her nape. She was so small against him, the top of her head barely reaching his collarbone. He could feel the ridge of the collar against his wrist where it circled her throat, cold bronze against warm skin, and the hatred he felt for that strip of metal in that moment was so vast and so quiet it didn't even feel like anger anymore, but a black mark on his soul. "I can't give you Drustvar," he said into her hair, low and wrecked. "I can't. I ain't got—I don't know 'ow to fix anyfin', Sybil. I don't know 'ow to make it right. Any of it. But you said—you said you missed the colours, an' I fought maybe—I dunno. I just fought maybe you shouldn't 'ave to miss everyfin' all the time." 

She pulled back just enough to look up at him, and her face was wet and flushed and blotched with crying, and the coloured light played across her skin. "In all me life," Sybil said, very quietly, her voice thick and cracked and musical even in breaking, "no one has ever tried t’give me the sky." She curled her fingers into the fabric of his coat and pressed her forehead against his collarbone, the heat of her tears soaking through to his skin.

"Don't—" Ridley’s voice cracked and he cleared his throat viciously. "Don't read nuffin' into it."

Sybil laughed, the sound wet and ragged and warm against his chest. "Wouldn't dream of it," she whispered, and her fingers tightened in his coat. He held very still with her warmth against his chest and the lights pooling around them both. The stone he'd been carrying inside of him shifted—not dissolving, not yet, but settling somewhere deeper, somewhere it could put down roots and grow into whatever terrifying thing it was becoming.

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Hell, I need to practice these too!🤷‍♂️

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Devotion

Saw this news and I had to make a rough sketch about it. 🥹 We humans always underestimate the empathy and care of other animals..

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Married the woman of his dreams.

One of the three Hobbits allowed into Elf Heaven.

The only working class member of the Fellowship.

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An Endling is the last known member of a species or subspecies. The death of an endling means the end of the species as a whole. The word was supposedly coined by Robert Webster in the mid 1990s. The term is used by museums and in writing, however, it still does not have an entry in The Merriam-Webster Dictionary. Robert Webster tried his best to get the word into the dictionary before his death in 2004.

One of the most famous endlings was Benjamin, the last known thylacine, who died in the Hobart Zoo on September 7th, 1936. It is actually not known if the animal's true name was Benjamin, but that is what is usually used. Some stories state that Benjamin died from neglect rather than old age, having been left in its outside enclosure in the cold overnight. While others disregard this, as the last known thylacine would have been incredibly valuable and important to the zoo.

Other notable endlings are:

- Martha, the last passenger pigeon, who died on September 1st, 1914.

- Lonesome George, the last Pinta Island tortoise, who died on June 24th, 2012.

- Booming Ben, the last Heath Hen, who was last seen on March 11th, 1932.

- Turgi, the last known Partula turgida, a type of Polynesian tree snail, who died on January 31st, 1996.

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Fabien Conti (French Artist, born 1997)

"Red Sun", 2025.

Oil on Canvas, 200 × 180 cm.

Private Collection.