artistsfuneral

🌿✨.

With a loud crash and a bang, Lambert comes running down the hallway like young bison that’s being chased by bees. He throws the door to Vesemir’s room open with just as much grace and elegance, knocking over a stack of books through sheer, unintentional force. He’s looking a bit crazy, eyes wide, face flushed, his chest visibly moving up and down with each panting breath. 

Vesemir, who is entirely too used to the younger wolves’ dramatic episodes, doesn’t bother looking up from the book he’s reading. Doesn’t react at all when Lambert darts forward and places his hands left and right of the book that’s lying on his lap, pointedly invading his personal space. “Vesemir, what the fuck!?” The youngest wolf demands to know way too loudly. 

Not deeming it a question that warrants an immediate answer, Vesemir turns the page of his book and continues reading. “Vesemir!” Lambert’s voice grows even louder, his fingers digging into the man’s thighs. “Your birthday was a few days ago!?” 

Lambert’s voice cracks, as if that simple fact has somehow unearthed his entire world view. The old wolf slowly blinks at the page in front of him before letting out a long sigh and putting the book to the side. “Yes, Lambert, it was. You sound surprised.” 

“Because I didn’t know!” 

Vesemir sends him a deadpan look. “Pup, as far as I am aware my birthday has been on the same day for my entire life. It is neither a surprise, nor has it ever before mattered to you.” He watches quietly as Lambert’s face falls and the young man’s eyes dart away.  

“Well, it should have mattered. Especially this one,” he mumbles guiltily and suddenly it dawns on Vesemir. Before he can react, the older witcher has taken hold of Lambert’s thighs and successfully pulled him onto his lap. “If I had known,” he drawls out full of mirth, “that all it took for you to care about my birthday, was a little bit of kissing, I might have done it years ago.” 

Heat rises into Lambert’s cheeks, flushes them oh so prettily. Not quite used to their new dynamic yet, Lambert squirms on his lap, trying to find a place for his hands before taking hold of Vesemir’s sweather. A dark chuckle rumbles through Vesemir’s body. “’s not fair,” the young wolf protests quietly. 

“Hmh, and how is it not fair, sweet pup?” 

Lambert the absolute sweetheart is staring at his own hands as he answers. His scent; nervous and embarrassed, drifts through the air and does nothing to hide the pup's feelings. “It’s different now. I want to- Wanted to do something nice, because-  because-” 

“Because you’re Daddy’s good little boy?” 

Lambert falls against his chest, hides his burning face in the crook of Vesemir’s neck and silently nods. “Oh well,” Vesemir hums as his fingers dig into the softness of his ass, “guess we will just have to find a way for you to make it up to me, right sweetheart?” 

You see, fresh out of Oxenfurt he needed somebody to sing about, a hero that was worth his tales! He had to be strong, of course, with a good heart, but not social enough for people to expect him at parties and events. If he were to fight monsters, save princesses and travel with bards, he needed to be just fantastical enough to be believable. And everyone knew that Witchers existed, people just preferred to avoid them. There were enough rumors about them that it wouldn't be suspicious if a few things here and there didn't match up. Geralt, with his white hair and pitch black armor was mysterious, his tales made maidens swoon and his appearance was easily enough replicated with a bit of.... stage magic.

Jaskier was great at playing the wistful friend, who dreamily sang about Geralt's heroics, who defended his honor and joked and laughed about him like the good man he was.

Everything went great. For years Jaskier earned coin, traveled the world under Geralt's protection, met people and sang songs of heroics and heartbreak like he had always dreamed. Everything. Went. Great.

Healing takes time but he's lucky enough to make it back to Kaer Morhen just before winter sets in. The only problem is that it's become quite a habit for him to mimic the Griffins' mannerisms. He's too polite for the Wolves.

Eskel: leaps to his feet while flinging salt at Lambert

Vesemir: instantly yanks out a hip flask of holy water and splashes it in Lambert’s face

Geralt: draws his silver sword

"For decades, wolf researchers believed ravens followed wolf packs to find food. Every biologist who flew aerial surveys over Yellowstone saw the same thing.

Wolves moving across the snow with ravens overhead, black shapes trailing the pack like a shadow with wings. The assumption was simple. The ravens were following the wolves. The wolves would kill. The ravens would eat. A study published in March 2026 using GPS transmitters on wolves, cougars, and ravens in Yellowstone proved the assumption wrong.

The ravens were not following the wolves. They were remembering where kills had happened before and flying over those locations looking for new carcasses. The relationship between the two species is real. The mechanism is not what anyone thought it was.

Bernd Heinrich, a University of Vermont biologist who spent years studying ravens in Maine and Yellowstone, first documented the scale of the association. His data showed ravens present near wolf packs 99.7 percent of the time during winter in Yellowstone. Not occasionally. Not frequently. Essentially always. On Isle Royale, researcher John Vucetich observed the same pattern from the air.

Every wolf pack had ravens with it. The birds were just always there.

The numbers at kill sites are staggering. The average number of ravens documented at a Yellowstone wolf kill is thirty. The maximum recorded at a single carcass is 135.

A wolf pack brings down an elk in the Lamar Valley, and within hours over a hundred ravens have materialized from across the drainage to feed. They do not wait politely. They land on the carcass while the wolves are still eating. They grab chunks of meat and cache them in the snow and in tree crotches for later retrieval. Research estimates that ravens can consume up to forty percent of a carcass, which means a wolf pack that kills a seven-hundred-pound elk may lose nearly three hundred pounds of it to birds.

That loss is so significant that one study proposed a theory that reshapes how we think about wolf pack size entirely. If a pair of wolves can take down an elk, why do wolves hunt in packs of four, six, eight, or more? The per-capita meat return decreases with every additional mouth. A pair gets the most meat per wolf. The answer may be ravens. Two wolves cannot eat fast enough to outpace a hundred ravens stripping the carcass simultaneously. A larger pack can post guards, feed in shifts, and physically dominate the carcass long enough to retain a greater share of the kill. Wolves may hunt in packs not because they need more teeth to bring down prey, but because they need more bodies to defend the kill from birds.

The ravens pay for their meals. Heinrich documented in his book Mind of the Raven that ravens serve as an early warning system at kill sites. Ravens are more vigilant than wolves. They perch in trees overlooking the carcass and scan the horizon in every direction. When a grizzly bear approaches, or a rival wolf pack, or a mountain lion, the ravens see it first. Their alarm calls alert the feeding wolves to the incoming threat before the wolves' own senses detect it. The wolves get airborne sentries. The ravens get an animal with the jaw strength to open a frozen elk carcass that no raven beak can penetrate.

That is the core of the mutualism. The raven cannot open the hide. The wolf can. The wolf cannot see a threat approaching from a mile away while its head is buried in a rib cage. The raven can. Each species fills a gap in the other's capability, and the result is a partnership so consistent that L. David Mech, the most published wolf researcher in the world, wrote that each creature is rewarded in some way by the presence of the other and that each is fully aware of the other's capabilities.

The play behavior is the part that makes biologists uncomfortable because it implies something beyond transactional mutualism. Wolves and ravens play together. Not at kill sites. Not during feeding. During downtime. Yellowstone observers have documented ravens diving at resting wolves, pulling their tails, and flying away. Wolf pups chase ravens across meadows. Ravens steal sticks from pups and hold them just out of reach. The interactions look like the cross-species equivalent of two bored kids messing with each other because there is nothing else to do.

Doug Smith, the retired lead biologist of the Yellowstone Wolf Project, had watched this relationship from the air for decades. Wolf researchers have believed forever that ravens follow wolves, he wrote after the 2026 study was published. Every wolf researcher has seen it. I have seen it routinely from the plane while wolves are chasing an elk in Yellowstone Park, numerous times. Ravens are just always there. This is an age-old observation. But it has never been rigorously tested until now.

The 2026 study, which used 2.5 years of GPS data from transmitters on wolves, cougars, and ravens simultaneously, revealed that ravens were not tracking wolf movements in real time. They were patrolling known kill sites. A raven that fed at a wolf kill in a specific drainage in November would return to that drainage repeatedly over the following weeks and months, flying over the exact location where the carcass had been, checking whether a new kill had appeared. The ravens were not following the wolves. They were following the memory of where wolves had killed before.

That distinction matters because it changes the raven from a passive follower into an active strategist. A bird that follows a wolf pack is reacting. A bird that memorizes kill locations across an entire landscape and patrols them systematically is planning. The raven is not tagging along. It is running a surveillance network across hundreds of square miles of Yellowstone, checking sites where food has appeared before, and showing up fast enough when it appears again that every observer since the 1995 reintroduction assumed it had been following the wolves the whole time.

The wolf and the raven share almost identical geographic range across the Northern Hemisphere. Everywhere wolves live, ravens live. The association is not a Yellowstone novelty. It is a continental relationship between two of the most intelligent species in North American wildlife, running continuously across boreal forest, tundra, mountain, and prairie, built on meat, memory, and a mutual awareness that neither species has ever needed to be taught."

The prodigal son of house Pavus…

YES. the way this hasn’t left my mind….Like okay they’re still Victorians. They’re still sexist and homophobic. My thought for this alternate history is third gender people are expected to only marry into already married couples. And they’d probably throw in a lot of Christian Holy Trinity and Mary Joseph God imagery to religiously validate triads.

Or three people (of all different genders of course bc again. They’re Victorian) could marry all at once but the courting situation would be a nightmare.

This is why it was so important for women to marry well: even if you worked as a married woman (and many women did), your money wasn't actually yours. It's one thing to have to live with a drunk asshole; it's worse to have that drunk asshole be the sole person who decides if that paycheck goes towards rent or more booze.

So, having a trinity/three parts of one whole entity would totally fit Victorian ideas of coverture. I think you'd still have it be men > everyone else, because they'd expect some kind of hierarchy, and even within the Trinity, God is still the leader.

Second thought: separate spheres. The Victorian era was very heavily focused on men being involved in the "dirty" business of work/politics/etc., and women being more morally pure and better suited to the domestic sphere (the whole "angel of the house" thing). Obviously this wasn't actually or practically true a lot of the time, but it was the aspired-to standard, the thing you'd measure people against to say if they were acting appropriately as members of their gender or not.

So you'd need a third sphere for Honorables to inhabit that is completely separate from the work/domestic dichotomy, or create an entirely different three-way dichotomy. Basically, you'd need a thing to point to, like "X is very ladylike" or "Y is not manly," but for Honorables.

So, extrapolating:

You'd still have "Mr. and Mrs. Robert Smith," it'd just be, "Mr., Mrs., and Mx. Robert Smith" (differentiating by title, not by first name). I could actually see there being a different title for unmarried vs. married Honorables, like Master vs. Mister or Miss vs. Madam/Missus. Mix vs. Max, maybe?

I think Honorables would definitely need to have some kind of dowry. It actually might be even more necessary, because unless the guy is insanely wealthy on his own, you're going to need enough money to support three people, not just two.

The idea of who should be in charge of household accounting has always waffled between a man’s job and a woman’s job. Is teaching the realm of governesses and school mistresses or lecturers and professors. Academics are too weak and frail to be masculine but too logical and rigorous to be feminine.

Thus, men, even if they're unqualified on whatever area of knowledge they're dealing with, and even if they have no understanding of their or other people's feelings whatsoever, still possess an inherent and intangible quality that makes them the only part truly suited for decision making.

Woman: Caretaker

Honorable: Assistant/Advisor