(This title is in Elvish when you aren't looking)

But here there are paladins.

There are signs that the Church and knightly orders know to watch for in new acolytes and squires, subtle connections to the divine less stable than that of a cleric. Of these identified candidates, only few are offered the special training necessary to become full paladin initiates, and even fewer complete their training. You do not become a paladin by accident. You must choose it, day after day.

As soon as a Damned Innocent is identified, they're paired off with a waiting paladin initiate who has completed their training. A bond begins to form between the two, eventually becoming complete and unbreakable, even by death, when the paladin formally swears their oaths. From that moment onward the paladin is responsible for being guardian, role model, and parole officer to their ward.

The bond is a symbiotic one. The paladin's holy magic cannibalizes some of the Evil infecting their ward, breaking it down and burning it for fuel. In exchange, the Evil's grip on the ward is suspended, allowing their true personality and will to assert itself.

Not every story of this sort ends happily. A paladin's bond gives their ward the chance to choose good, but it cannot make them do so. Sometimes a ward chooses, of their own free will, to embrace the full breadth of their nature. In these cases, the paladin's oaths to protect innocents force them to cross blades with the person closest to their heart in all the world.

Perhaps even more tragic are the Oathbreakers, once-paladins who abandon their oaths and draw on their ward's Evil directly for greater power with less responsibility, damning them both in the process.

It's not a perfect system. Far from it. It is as fallible as the men and women who make it work. But it is hope where there would otherwise be none.

2026 - 2025 - 2024 - 2023

in spite of it all, happy 2026 pride.

you can download current and past hi-res versions of these over at my ko-fi (ok to print for personal use): https://ko-fi.com/mxmorgan/shop/freedownloads

you can also snag shirts here which go to various orgs: https://mxmorgan.threadless.com/collections/pride

these get reposted a whole lot from here to reddit to twitter to tiktok and on and on, and i don't personally care whether or not i'm credited. i made these for everyone to use, enjoy, and find meaning in them. i appreciate folks who do credit me, but if able, please at least link to the threadless shop in the previous post - folks can get an official shirt where 90% of earnings go to trans led orgs focused on mental health (which is an important matter in general, but very personal to me) and not from a scam bot site selling AI-churned maga garbage where you probably won't get one anyway. i also suggest downloading the files from my ko-fi - they are free/PWYW and you can use them to make your own shirt, patch, embroidery project, whatever. tips are always nice, cuz i do like a pizza now and then, but never required for download.

me: no live organism can continue to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality

mermaid megafauna

I don't have any experience with the weirder corners of university campuses – my work in that particular job just never happened to take me there. I did, however, once have to do a cable trace in the basement of a former Christian elementary school. It had haphazardly been subdivided into numerous tiny rooms, some as little as ten feet across, with no central hallways or apparent floor plan. Every single room was, for reasons that were and remain unclear to me, full of broken kitchen appliances. One room in particular contained an enormous industrial freezer unit that was larger in its smallest dimension than any of the doors leading to it. Was it delivered in pieces and assembled on site? Did they build the room around it? That one still bothers me a little bit.

@sagewiththyme You know that's a fascinating point because I figure the two options are a) no one really remembers what happened at the end because of magic bullshit or b) they play it off as a really elaborate but fully planned performance.

And the second one - can you fucking imagine.

Imagine one of the most popular bands in the world have this ongoing lore bit that they're actually demon hunters and they're always referencing it in their songs. And then one day a new boy band pops up and gets wildly popular with an over-the-top-cutesy hit. They're so soft and sweet and respectful. They're called Saja (Lion) Boys and they're all like "join the pride!" How cute!

And then they announce a new concert and you get there and it's fucking this. They're all dressed as demons/grim reapers. Surprise, "Saja" meant Jeoseung Saja all along! They're singing about how they're here for your soul and they relish in your pain, just a stunning 180 from their previous personas.

And then while you're trying to process the emotional whiplash the fucking demon hunter band bursts in and beats the shit out of them with the most insane pyrotechnic show you've ever seen in your life. They "kill" the boy band demons and then you never see them again. The whole band was a fucking psyop for Huntrix to play up the "demon hunters" bit.

Except, uhhhh. We didn't expect them to get so popular so fast? They For Sure weren't supposed to make it to the final round of the Idol Awards. Like, for Legal Reasons. We were almost visibly panicking on stage when they announced that! I mean, do you know how it would look once it eventually came out that Saja Boys were working for us? "Oh, you planted a fake band so you could win the competition!" No joke. I mean, that is a pret-ty clear conflict of interest there. You know?

The Idol Awards are all about the fan's choices, and we just accidentally rigged the game.

The Saja Boys had to win the Idol Awards, now, but there was no chance. They only had two songs, Soda Pop and Your Idol. We couldn't have them push up the debut--I mean, we thought about it, Your Idol's a banger song and it totally would've given us a run for our money--but we'd have to follow it up with This Is What It Sounds Like, first off, and second, 'killing' the Saja Boys onstage would be like. The Media equivalent of announcing we won, like the Fans didn't have a choice in the matter. At the Idol Awards? Ha. Yeah. That's a no-go.

And I mean. Soda Pop is catchy but not that catchy guys, c'mon. We were totally gonna cream them with Golden.

So we were all scrambling. Rumi and Mira and I were trying to write and choreograph a brand new song, Takedown, something good but not Good Enough To Win, to maybe prolong the Rivalry, you know? To make our comeback all the more sweet. But it was all such short notice, and the song wasn't working, and Huntrix never gives a shoddy performance, on principle. We couldn't do it. But it was looking like the only way we were gonna legitimately lose was if something... happened during the competition.

Like, obviously the Saja Boys weren’t a “real” band, so it makes sense they’re not coming out with new music, and since they’re “dead”, of course all their official band accounts have gone quiet, but like… someone would have had to be portraying the band members, right? Even if you wave that off as them being some of the same actors who portray the “demons” at their concerts, someone would definitely have to be lending their voices for the songs. Who were they? They couldn’t have been well-established in the industry, otherwise they’d have been recognized too quickly and the ruse would have been up, and something like this would have been a huge break for new performers.

So why’d they just disappear?

Where are the actors?

Imagine, after decades of your world becoming colder and colder, you are saved. A single Eridian, the only one of twenty three to survive, arrives in an alien ship, accompanied by a creature you can barely conceive.

Everything about the alien is so loud, hinges formed from tissue thumping and stretching in constant movement, even while unconscious. Completely organic, reliant of oxygen and hydrogen. Instead of a protective carapace, it regrows its damaged tissues. It has senses you do not, and technology so unlike your own, both able to utilise a force you have never heard of. The same force that killed almost your entire mission team. Highly adaptable, able to teach itself how to fly its ship in under a week, able to become fluent in the engineer's dialect in less than four years.

And if Erid's best engineer is correct (and there's no reason it wouldn't be), this creature not only managed to breed a predator of the warmth-taker to survive in various atmospheres, including Threeworld's, but also turned around to provide aid when it discovered that the predator could escape xenonite.

And you think: Surely, this creature which protects itself without a carapace, which sleeps so lightly and knows so much and learns so quickly, which saved two planets at the cost of ever returning to its thrum, surely, a creature so extraordinary must have a name to match

And you think: Perhaps it is strength, Mountain-Base or Lonsdaleite-Carapace. Perhaps it is intellect, Diamond-Claw or Lockpick-Mind. Perhaps it is courage, Song-Through-Silence or Path-Carver

And you think: None of these names hold the true weight of what this creature is to them. How do you describe something like that, which aids without expectation of anything in return, which risks its own life for the sake of a species it cannot touch, which performs miracles simply because it was asked.