RATING & WARNINGS: Mature; Graphic Depictions of Violence; Major Character Death. This fic does not follow Veilguard's established lore for Solas, as it was drafted much earlier than the game's release.
A spirit is called from the world that dreams into the world that wakes. He is given the name Solas, and then he is told to forget he ever was a spirit at all. He grows up as the son of a washerwoman, a servant of Mythal the All-Mother, and knows no life but the life of the incarnated.
Until his brother is kidnapped by Andruil, on the hunt for fresh blood to feed her Champion's vile experiments. Solas attempts to petition Mythal for his brother's release, but is offered an alternative instead: work for the Mother of the Evanuris, rise through the ranks, and gain enough power to free his brother himself.
But unknown to him, and to the other Evanuris, history is being nudged (or perhaps shoved), and Solas will soon find himself in the position to change the course of Elvhenan forever.
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i am notoriously the "unfaithful" adaptation enjoyer but you gotta make it interesting. you gotta make me sit up and go "huh?" so that i can see how you're engaging with the source material in a way that intersts me and is asking questions of the work and the world of the work and the time period it was made and our culture which is receiving it. i do NOT care about the bronze age collapse if you're doing nothing with it. BOOOOOO BORING
anyway everybody go watch the green knight (2021) dir. by david lowery
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High-handled kantharos in the form of two heads, Attic black-figure
ceramic, attributed to the London Class, c. 510–480 BCE. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Panagyurishte treasure depicting concentric circles of African Heads, Thracian, late 4th-early 3rd cent. BCE. Modern day Bulgeria. Getty Musuem.
Caricatured Odysseus and Kirke. Kabirion kantharos, Boeotian BF, London, British Museum. 450-375 BC. Photograph Alexandre G. Mitchel
Skyphos depicting Odysseus at sea and with Circe, Boeotian black-figure ceramic, attributed to the Cabirion Group, c. fourth century BCE. Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford.
During the eighth and seventh centuries B.C., the Greeks renewed contacts with the northern periphery of Africa. They established settlements and trading posts along the Nile River and at Cyrene on the northern coast of Africa. Already at Naukratis, the earliest and most important of the trading posts in Africa, Greeks were certainly in contact with Africans.
All black Africans were known as Ethiopians to the ancient Greeks, as the fifth-century B.C. historian Herodotus tells us, and their iconography was narrowly defined by Greek artists in the Archaic (ca. 700–480 B.C.) and Classical (ca. 480–323 B.C.) periods, black skin color being the primary identifying physical characteristic. It is recorded that Ethiopians were among King Xerxes’ troops when Persia invaded Greece in 480 B.C. Thus, the Greeks would have come into contact with large numbers of Africans at this time.
Nonetheless, most ancient Greeks had only a vague understanding of African geography. They believed that the land of the Ethiopians was located south of Egypt. In Greek mythology, the pygmies were the African race that lived furthest south on the fringes of the known world, where they engaged in mythic battles with cranes.
Ethiopians were considered exotic to the ancient Greeks and their features contrasted markedly with the Greeks’ own well-established perception of themselves. The black glaze central to Athenian vase painting was ideally suited for representing black skin, a consistent feature used to describe Ethiopians in ancient Greek literature as well. Ethiopians were featured in the tragic plays of Aeschylus, Sophokles, and Euripides; and preserved comic masks, as well as a number of vase paintings from this period, indicate that Ethiopians were also often cast in Greek comedies.
Well into the fourth century B.C., Ethiopians were regularly featured in Greek vase painting, especially on the highly decorative red-figure vases produced by the Greek colonies in southern Italy.
-Hemingway, S. and Hemingway, C.. (2008). Africans in Ancient Greek Art. In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/afrg/hd_afrg.htm. More art examples founded on the website.
Do you mind if I add some bits from my own archives?
This pretty Etruscan oinochoe with a head/face of a young African from the 4th century BCE. Photo credit: 🏺
Or my absolute favorite ancient bust of Memnon, a pupil of a Roman statesman! It dates back to the 2nd century CE. Photo credit: 🏺 🏺
Or maybe this book I personally entirely enjoyed written by Frank M. Snowden Jr., "Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman experience". He also wrote "Before Color Prejudice: The Ancient View of Blacks" which I have not yet read but most definitely want to!
Some more sources on Blackness/Race in Classical antiquity:
Classics and Race: A Historical Reader, edited by Sarah Derbew, Daniel Orrells and Phiroze Vasunia (2025)
The Cambridge Companion to Classics and Race, edited by Rosa Andújar, Elena Giusti and Jackie Murray (2026)
“The Roman Roots of Racial Capitalism: What an Ancient Empire Can Teach Us about Diversity,” The Berlin Journal, Vol. 34, 2020-21: 16-20 by one of my heroes, Nandini Pandey!
And the absolutely seminal, groundbreaking book Classicisms and Other Phobias by Dan-el Padilla Peralta (2025)
my minotaur boy!! pls click on the photos for higher res! my thesis is focusing on trans men and creatures (how original ik) and this was last semester's final. i spent a lot of time looking at sculptures of the theseus/minotaur story, and yknow? a LOT of them are erotic! i'm pretty sure i saw some of them on tumblr a decade ago, and that's led to this now!
as you'll notice, the minotaur has a big t-dick! i wanted to give him breasts and an enlarged clitoris to present a very masculine trans figure. the boy on the bottom is also trans because i say so . the piece is about looking up to older, bigger, hairier trans men and seeing something awe-inspiring and beautiful. the minotaur was locked up by a cruel father for being different, and i think modern adaptations tend towards a sympathetic asterion (his name in one version)
making this piece was. so much effort. it took me about 3 months to get it all together - from clay model (plasticine) to 3D print to silicone mold to wax cast, and finally bronze pour into the shell mold. and then a TON of filing, sanding, dremel-ing, and various other metalworking techniques that probably took years off my life.
i started with sketches and made theeeeeee ugliest model ever:
then used a 3D scanner to get it digital, then spent a goooood month or two making him pretty in blender! then i spent an agonizing few weeks trying to get it print-ready, and fiiiiiinally did
^^^ an early resin printed draft of the model - you can see in the final that i added lots to theseus after some feedback, but sadly the nosering broke off every time i cast it so i just. let that be <3
then came the moldmaking, and then the wax dipping!! the yellow stuff is shell mold (ground up ceramic bits and algae soup, sticks to the wax, then silica sand in varying sizes on top) which gets the wax melted out, and bronze poured in!
then it's all metalworking, cutting stuff off, and working with hot metal. they don't tell you about all the bronze dust and how annoying it gets wearing a respirator AND goggles. but it is for me health, me boy. here's him all cleaned up before the patina:
and then i spray him down with various chemicals to make it "patina" (aka rust) in pretty colors. wait a few days, then apply paste wax to seal it and give it that shine!
then we get what you see above!!! the blue was actually unintentional, and i'm still not super sure why it looks that way.. but it's pretty so idc <3
thanks for reading!! if you ever have any bronze/casting questions, don't hesitate to message me! <3
how do you keep the despair at bay? your photographs are always so mesmerising, but seeing the tag "summer as it was before" really did something to the pit of my stomach.
I don't always manage to keep despair at bay, but I've found meaning in it. A lot of things and places that I took pictures of when I started have been destroyed or changed completely now. I wasn't expecting the extent of it. Huge native trees cut down, beautiful landscapes domesticated, lingering patches of native wildflowers wiped out, meandering mountain streams channeled, and at this point all the devastating effects of 3 years of severe drought which turns thriving populations of fish and turtles and waterbirds into sets of a few struggling individuals: It's been hard to watch.
Some things have been destroyed by storms, some by drought, some by new insects, especially spotted lantern flies, but most by people, some by people who just don't care and some by supposed government environmental departments who should know better but who don't think in terms of one small place or ever pay enough attention to that place to really know what would be best for it. They cut down more magnificent old native trees than anyone else.
In the park near my house the decision was made to spray herbicide at the base of every tree, no matter how beautiful, even the specimen trees of special species that people paid to have planted in memory of loved ones. Since they started that about five years ago, maybe more, I have watched gorgeous healthy trees—flowering cherries and beautiful firs, very old pines and many others—deteriorate badly. My favorite cherry's trunk is riddled with fungus. A magnificent Fraser fir is in awful condition and as now has happened with several old and stately trees, will probably be cut down with the excuse that it was sick, never acknowledging that it was caused by spraying the roots with plant killer.
I could go on but won't. I certainly have not helped with your despair, I'm afraid. I suppose what keeps me going at this point is that all of this has made it more obvious to me that I should capture whatever beauty I find and share it because I know without a doubt that it could be gone tomorrow. My town used to have an extraordinary number of breeding bluebirds for example, but three or four different projects by different entities, not related, eliminated all but one or two of the nesting sites so that now I am pleased when I hear any bluebirds at all. Now I always try to get a picture because it's real to me that one year there may not be any bluebirds here at all.
It has given my picture-taking a meaning and urgency it didn't have when I started. I can never capture it all before it's gone but at least some of it won't have disappeared unseen. I don't think most people suspected how beautiful it was here. It isn't a tourist destination or an Instagramer magnet. But to me it is so alive, so graceful and poetic, every species and landform here so heart-achingly beloved, it's unthinkable for it to disappear without at least a few people being shown that here was something simple and wonderful, like the Shire before Saruman came. And yet this is still just a remnant of the life that was here long ago when it was the Lenape people's sacred homeland, and I bear that legacy in mind too.
Despair? Yes, despair is warranted. But if I let myself wallow in it I won't do justice to what's being destroyed before my eyes. When it's finally all gone, then I'll take time to cry. 💙
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