Stranger Things
One Nice Bug Per Day
oozey mess
ojovivo
Love Begins
Claire Keane
No title available
h
Not today Justin
noise dept.
we're not kids anymore.
ellievsbear
Game of Thrones Daily
The Bowery Presents
Show & Tell
★
taylor price
cherry valley forever
No title available
shark vs the universe
seen from United States
seen from China
seen from Malaysia
seen from Venezuela
seen from Mexico
seen from United States
seen from Mexico
seen from Mexico
seen from Mexico
seen from Mexico
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Germany
seen from United States
@wyrmst
Hi, I'm Novem (they/them), and this is a blog for my fantasy romance (romantasy?) "monsterfucker lite" stories.
This blog is 18+ only, do not interact if you are a minor.
✨MASTERLIST HERE✨
Last Updated: 2/23/25 Out in the Cold (Part Eleven)
(More info under the cut)
The Forgotten Valley.
Your drider boyfriend has the most interesting stories.
You, on other hand, are staring at a hauntingly blank piece of parchment- the bane of any bard's existence.
You've been idly tapping your quill into the page, leaving a small ink-filled gouges.
You toss it all to the ground, careful not to throw it directly in the small, but growing, campfire. Then, you let out an overblown sigh and limply slide down your bedroll, draping an arm over your eyes.
The drider has been gathering wood for the campfire- and as usual, told you to sit still and watch it- but he's still nearby. You can hear him scuttling around now, even when he's trying to be silent.
Clearly he didn't hear you, so you let out another, more audible sigh, this one dry, long and much more withering.
"What's the matter?" He asks, clearly stoically dreading the answer, but compelled to ask, nonetheless.
"I'm a hack," You stage whisper, dramatically, without moving your arm. "That's what's wrong."
"Ah."
You can't help but notice he doesn't refute that point.
"I've been trying to finish this ballad for months now and the words just aren't coming," You gripe, now fully wallowing. "I'll never be able to show my face at the symposium again at this rate. This would've never happened to Theodoris of Avondale!"
"So, the problem is…"
"Everything is just so… dull! Usually I love the adventuring lifestyle, but things just seem the same lately. Oh, another dirt road. Another cursed artifact. Another near death experience-"
"If you would take my advice, that last part would happen less."
"There's just nothing I can do about it," You continue, ignoring the interjection. "The spirit of inspiration has left me forever. I'll never finish another ballad or song or, or- nothing as much as a couplet."
The drider prods at the campfire in thought, multiple eyes blinking in order.
"Usually not being possessed is a good thing."
"Yes but… in this instance it's essential to-" You start your statement strong, but quickly run out of interest in explaining the creative process to the most violently practical person you've ever met. "Oh, never mind."
"If I tell you a story, will you stop doing…" He gestures with one hand to where you are still dramatically languishing. "This?"
You pause in consideration, the tears forming in the corners your eyes instantly welling up.
It's not often he treats you to a recounted tale of his life as a mercenary, but you've never been disappointed by one.
"…I could be convinced."
That is how you ended up sitting huddled by the fire, listening in rapt wonder. The drider uses his multiple legs as shadow puppets in the cast glow of the fire to illustrate. It starts slowly, but it soon reaches the pinch point of the climax.
He has one leg tip as a sword blade pointed at the hero, then another, and another, until it's nearly all of them.
He was trapped and surrounded, with no way out and no hope.
You'd be on the edge of your seat, if you weren't sitting on a thin and uncomfortable pad on the ground in the middle of the woods.
"However did you escape?"
Both the parchment and the quill have found their way back into your hand. The story you're hearing is filtering through the sieve of your mind, being remade and coming back out as refined words on the page.
A different story, maybe, but the same spirit.
"Not without great cost."
Your wild pen scratching stalls for a moment, your stomach dropping.
You know better than to prod, given the tone of his answer, even though you are dying to know what that could even mean.
"…How tragic." You say in a hushed tone. "How compelling."
But you recover quickly, writing twice as fast now.
"That is what happens when you make foolish decisions." The drider says, matter of fact.
Despite traveling together for some time, there is still so much you don't know about him.
But not being told may be more of a gift, you realize, as your mind frantically grasps at fantastical threads to fill in the blank space.
A happier ending for your version of this story, maybe.
Maksim design update for @gargoylegirlcock // Thank you so much again//
Your drider boyfriend has the most interesting stories.
You, on other hand, are staring at a hauntingly blank piece of parchment- the bane of any bard's existence.
You've been idly tapping your quill into the page, leaving a small ink-filled gouges.
You toss it all to the ground, careful not to throw it directly in the small, but growing, campfire. Then, you let out an overblown sigh and limply slide down your bedroll, draping an arm over your eyes.
The drider has been gathering wood for the campfire- and as usual, told you to sit still and watch it- but he's still nearby. You can hear him scuttling around now, even when he's trying to be silent.
Clearly he didn't hear you, so you let out another, more audible sigh, this one dry, long and much more withering.
"What's the matter?" He asks, clearly stoically dreading the answer, but compelled to ask, nonetheless.
"I'm a hack," You stage whisper, dramatically, without moving your arm. "That's what's wrong."
"Ah."
You can't help but notice he doesn't refute that point.
"I've been trying to finish this ballad for months now and the words just aren't coming," You gripe, now fully wallowing. "I'll never be able to show my face at the symposium again at this rate. This would've never happened to Theodoris of Avondale!"
"So, the problem is…"
"Everything is just so… dull! Usually I love the adventuring lifestyle, but things just seem the same lately. Oh, another dirt road. Another cursed artifact. Another near death experience-"
"If you would take my advice, that last part would happen less."
"There's just nothing I can do about it," You continue, ignoring the interjection. "The spirit of inspiration has left me forever. I'll never finish another ballad or song or, or- nothing as much as a couplet."
The drider prods at the campfire in thought, multiple eyes blinking in order.
"Usually not being possessed is a good thing."
"Yes but… in this instance it's essential to-" You start your statement strong, but quickly run out of interest in explaining the creative process to the most violently practical person you've ever met. "Oh, never mind."
"If I tell you a story, will you stop doing…" He gestures with one hand to where you are still dramatically languishing. "This?"
You pause in consideration, the tears forming in the corners your eyes instantly welling up.
It's not often he treats you to a recounted tale of his life as a mercenary, but you've never been disappointed by one.
"…I could be convinced."
That is how you ended up sitting huddled by the fire, listening in rapt wonder. The drider uses his multiple legs as shadow puppets in the cast glow of the fire to illustrate. It starts slowly, but it soon reaches the pinch point of the climax.
He has one leg tip as a sword blade pointed at the hero, then another, and another, until it's nearly all of them.
He was trapped and surrounded, with no way out and no hope.
You'd be on the edge of your seat, if you weren't sitting on a thin and uncomfortable pad on the ground in the middle of the woods.
"However did you escape?"
Both the parchment and the quill have found their way back into your hand. The story you're hearing is filtering through the sieve of your mind, being remade and coming back out as refined words on the page.
A different story, maybe, but the same spirit.
"Not without great cost."
Your wild pen scratching stalls for a moment, your stomach dropping.
You know better than to prod, given the tone of his answer, even though you are dying to know what that could even mean.
"…How tragic." You say in a hushed tone. "How compelling."
But you recover quickly, writing twice as fast now.
"That is what happens when you make foolish decisions." The drider says, matter of fact.
Despite traveling together for some time, there is still so much you don't know about him.
But not being told may be more of a gift, you realize, as your mind frantically grasps at fantastical threads to fill in the blank space.
A happier ending for your version of this story, maybe.
Knights with body modifications, please.
Knight with a house crest carved into their backs. An order where all members have their tongues pierced with a jewel that burns should they lie. Body modifications that are not even possible outside of fantasy.
Black cat mug, 2026
Writing about vampires will save you, trust
reading a historical romance novel and reflecting on the way these stories often present woke nobility for the contemporary reader. a big thing is servants. you can’t not have servants in those times but many modern readers think “but I would never have servants. it would be so weird to have servants” and in order to make the protagonists of the story more relatable they are actually friends with the servants. but flip your perspective and think of it from the side of the servants. wouldn’t it be so awful if your boss was always trying to be friends with you. a really common thing you’ll see is the woke baronet having tea in the kitchen with the servants bc he’s not like other baronets. but what if your boss wanted to hang out and talk during your lunch break every day. not so charming when you think about it that way
#okay but now what is the optimal way to be a good boss in this situation i genuinely wanna know#its easy to guess what makes a bad boss or a mid boss. but what is a good boss#specifically in such a highly structured hierarchal situation (via @rainbowroach)
HELLO you are asking questions that literature and poetry THROUGHOUT the middle ages has asked, and it is from this questioning that we derive things like the Codes of Chivalry (which is not "how to treat a noble lady really nice" but is actually "how to be an ethical person when you're rich and you own a horse" and includes such things as "don't run people over with your horse")
In fact I daresay you already know instinctively just from cultural osmosis what a good boss -- a good liege lord -- is and does based on the tropes that have survived to the current day and the kinds of things that get Hugely Praised in things like legends of King Arthur.
A good boss (liege lord) is:
Merciful. He is not having his peasants killed for things like poaching rabbits during a famine. In fact, he is working to mitigate famine. During times of individual hardship, he might negotiate with a peasant for a payment plan on their annual rent.
Patient. He is not impulsive, he does not lose his temper.
Prudent. He makes choices that are thoughtful, considered, conservative (in the sense of not needlessly risky--he's not investing his entire fortune in having everyone plant an unproven crop). He is making sure local infrastructure like roads and public buildings are maintained and kept in good nick.
Gentle. He doesn't haul off and slap a servant or a tenant for breaking a dish or making a mistake. He doesn't abuse animals, his wife or children, or his employees. He doesn't rape the servants.
Generous (both in money and in spirit). He is not extorting the peasants for an amount of rent that is beyond their means, he is not raising taxes every year to cover his own lavish lifestyle. He is paying his servants a living wage (or, if wages are low, he's giving them room/board/clothing to make up the difference). If someone in a tenant's family dies, the lord is sending a gift of condolence, or helping to pay for the funeral, or possibly even ATTENDING the funeral and speaking a few kind words about the deceased, ESPECIALLY if they were a really upstanding and important member of the community. If one of his tenants is gravely sick, the lord is sending a basket of food or paying for a doctor. He is giving charitably (generally this will be, like, a bequest to the church so that they can run a hospital or an orphanage or a school for the local village children).
Pious. This classically means "goes to church, submits with humility to God" but to me this quality is subtextually standing in for "maintaining an ongoing sense of Perspective that HE'S not god, that there are higher powers he is Accountable to, that he too can be Judged, etc, so that he doesn't end up going on a weird fucked up power trip"
Humble. One of the most admiring things you hear about a lord doing in literature and epic poetry is, "He ate off of wooden plates while his followers ate off of gold and silver." Humility isn't about being meek, it's just about not thinking so much of yourself that you turn your nose up and sneer at what "lesser" people do. In other words: Don't be a fucking diva. If your carriage gets stuck in the mud, climb out and help everybody else push, you're not gonna die from getting mud on your shoes.
Condescending. This word has changed wildly in meaning/tone over the last couple centuries -- it's now a rude thing to do (because we've done away with legal social hierarchies, so someone acting like they're lowering themselves to your level IS insulting), but in older times, a high-ranking person "condescending" to a servant was worthy of praise and admiration: it means they were setting aside rank and privilege to speak to them with the easygoing, friendly respect and compassion they'd give a peer. This is things like... Treats those beneath him with courtesy and respect (ie: listens soberly and attentively when one of his servants or tenants comes to complain about a problem). Having a sense of humor and kindness about it when the lord and a servant both come around a corner at the same time and run into each other and the servant gets knocked to the ground and starts babbling apologies--the condescending (positive) lord helps them to their feet with his own hands and cracks a joke to show them that it's ok (as opposed to just walking off without a word or insulting/scolding them). This is also things like trusting a farmer, woodcutter, or artisan to speak with expertise about their own livelihood and taking their advice into consideration if they tell the lord that one of his ideas won't work.
Good boundaries. The ethical liege lord knows that it's normal for the staff to probably be softly bitching about him in private (even with a really good boss, we all grumble from time to time). He's not eavesdropping on them, he's not going into the staff areas where they should reasonably expect to have a degree of privacy, etc.
Righteous and protective of "the weak". The "weak" here doesn't necessarily mean physically weak, this is often used in the sense of someone politically or socially weak, aka The Marginalized -- the poor, the disabled, women, children, the elderly, etc. If a lord sees someone like this being mistreated or abused, he's supposed to step in and put a stop to that.
Committed to reciprocity. In a highly hierarchical system like feudalism, every person (from the lowest peasant all the way up to the crown prince) legally OWES their liege lord certain things (taxes, labor, service, loyalty, etc). A good liege remembers and takes very seriously the idea that this should be a balanced and reciprocal relationship -- in other words, he owes something BACK. Feudalism is modeled very strongly on the family system: If children owe their parents obedience and service, then parents owe their children care and protection. This still applies when the "child" is a farmer and the "parent" is a local baron. Or when the "child" is a duke and the "parent" is the king.
Basically, we get so caught up in the aesthetics of nobility that we forget that it literally is a managerial position that comes with responsibilities that were... very similar back in the day to the same ones we have now. Humans have not changed all that much. At the end of the day, a really good boss in the 1400s versus in one from the 2020s displays most of the same qualities of personality, even if the details of execution are different.
The next question is, of course, "well, but this theoretical liege lord is HIGHLY idealized -- how often did that actually HAPPEN? Wasn't it more likely that everyone was exploited all the time?" and to that I say: Well, maybe. But again, I don't think humans have changed all that much. Just like the bosses of today, there's a SPECTRUM: A really really good boss is rare and precious and one that you tell stories about for years after you've left that job, but a truly, genuinely, homicidally nightmarish boss is also pretty rare. Most bosses are sort of meh -- they have their good moments, they have their shitty moments, but they're tolerable and you can get along with them well enough to do your job, and then you roll your eyes at them behind their back. Generally, humans don't take outright exploitation lying down. Being a bad boss in the historical period is how you get peasant uprisings and revolts, and you know that to be true because your parents raised you with that knowledge, so unless you are very stupid or inbred or an egomaniac, there is literal personal incentive to at minimum be a Tolerable liege lord. And that means hitting at least SOME of the above bullet points.
TL;DR: In the words of Honore de Balzac, "Everything I have just told you can be summarized by an old word: noblesse oblige!"
(for more discussions of the ethics of fealty and what it means to be a good boss when you are an exquisitely beautiful twink of a prince with a hot beefy bodyguard.... [fingerguns] read A Taste of Gold and Iron)
By the way, for those who are new here, the demon is from a couple panels I drew back in 2024.
The word "succubus" doesn't even imply that they're all female demons, just that they're bottoms, should've read the whole damn thing before summoning instead of complaining.
You can replace [ACTIVITY YOU ENJOY] with [SCROLLING] but watch out. This sucks bad 👍
Some things about this post since getting quite a few notes:
1. If you see this post, highly recommend taking it as an opportunity to set a timer for 15 minutes and switch over to ACTIVITY YOU ENJOY. if after those 15 minutes, you want to go back to scrolling, that's okay!
2. Huge shout out to this popping up in my notifs often, bc I do go back to activity.
3. I think there are times where scrolling is fine. Right now, for example, I'm being connected to a machine for two hours to donate plasma and platelets. Yes this is a brag but it is also a time where scrolling is one of the few things I can do. (Though I will probably also read or watch something on phone lol)
hmmm, this seems to be some kind of curse breaking spell… be free ye reader
Been dreaming about gargoyles lately so i gargoylified my OC
no post tonight but i'm going to try to get it posted by tomorrow or sunday evening. so monster boyfriend saturday or sunday this time
I hate when king arthur has all these fussy little steps in the instructions and you're like "no way do these fussy little steps matter" but you try it and they do. they matter so much.
I thought you meant Camelot quests and I was like "that's fair, 'never pick a four leaf clover on the last Wednesday of the month' IS a fussy little step that shouldn't matter" but then I was like "wait isn't that also a flour company"
nooo I am not a beleaguered knight of the round table I am making elaborate focaccia 😭
my knight can identify sixteen different battle formations but cannot possibly remember where he put his helmet
