Byoldervine

Persephone Foster was a human brought into the angelic realm of Tyrion after discovering her immortality, and since then has studied magic and monsters while trying to maintain connections to her mortal family. But when the god of the fantasy realm of Paracosm falls deathly ill, and his fragmented power sends mythical creatures into the human realm, Persephone must become the masked hero Enigma to protect her old home, with the help of a credit-stealing new hero determined to make this difficult. When an opportunity presents itself to stop this at the source — curing the dying god — can they set aside their differences and work together with new allies to find the cure before it’s too late? Or have they been more involved in this ever-expanding story than they’ve all been allowed to realise?

What Are The Four Realms And Who Are Their Gods?

Aegis Cantor is the God of Order, and rules over the angelic realm of Tyrion

Corrus Acaron is the God of Souls and Fate, and rules the underworld known as Nexus

Nordsvark Attolus is the God of Creation, and watches over the fantasy realm of Paracosm

I think the first time I questioned my sexuality was when I was ten or eleven or so. It wasn’t much of a question for me at the time; I literally just figured I should probably decide, and then I did. I think the exact thought process was genuinely just this near verbatim;

“Would I date a girl? Yeah, okay. Would I date a guy? Yeah, okay. Do I have any interest in dating right now? Not really. Do I have anything against dating? Not really. So I guess that means I’m bi, and when I’m a bit older or I meet the right person I’ll have more of a desire to act on it. Cool, question answered.”

So for pretty much all of my teens I identified as bisexual. I don’t quite remember if I knew about asexuality at the time. I know that I knew about pansexuality, and that I definitely didn’t know about romanticism being a separate spectrum. I just figured that the desire for a partner would really kick in when I was a teenager and ‘started getting hormones’

I do remember a few years later that I heard about the bi-to-ace pipeline, and the saying “You think you’re bi because you have equal attraction to men and women, only to later realise that 0 + 0 is still 0”. I figured that couldn’t be me because I had, and still have, a bit of a preference towards women. Though present me now understands that all of it is still just in theory, and I don’t have any attraction to either gender in practice

I did have an online girlfriend from the ages of fourteen to maybe sixteen or seventeen. She was two years older, and she was very cheesy and cutesy with me. God, looking back at it now is so weird, we were so weird. We met on Wattpad, doing roleplays and discussing stories and stuff, and we talked pretty much exclusively on Wattpad the entire time. She had a girlfriend for the first year I knew her, when we were just friends, and when they broke up I comforted her. Then a while later she expressed an interest in me, and I agreed to it. I was excited because it felt like a normal teenager thing, and I liked talking to her, and it made me excited to have a girlfriend, so I figured that must be love

But, as with many teens, she wanted something more than just childish fandom roleplays. She wanted something sexual. And since we never did anything in real life, and we never sent inappropriate photos (I think she had like one or two normal photos of me, and she never sent me anything except her face or her fit), so I figured that was normal. She did send me a link to a couple of smut stories on Wattpad, saying she wanted me to read them and give her my thoughts. But when I read them, I got very uncomfortable and told her I couldn’t finish them. They had some taboo kinks in them that I didn’t like. She didn’t pressure me to read them again and apologised, so I figured that was that

Now, I’ve said on Tumblr before that I don’t want to discuss anything related to my sex life, or lack of, on here. But for the purpose of accurately sharing my story, I believe I need to clarify this next part, though I want to emphasise that I wish my younger self hadn’t felt the need to do this, even if it’s not really ‘that bad’ in terms of the actions I took and it’s kind of a funny solution to come to in retrospect

I felt guilty that I couldn’t read my girlfriend’s smut, and I felt that not being able to support my girlfriend sexually made me a bad girlfriend. So, being a weird unknowing asexual, I came up with a system; I went through the most poorly-formatted smut stories Wattpad had to offer, and I would read them. I focused so much on the SPAG mistakes and the lack of paragraph breaks and the terrible sentence flow, and as expected, the content was quite bland and non-descriptive too. So I could read it without much fuss

I kept this up until I could advance to better-written smut, and eventually I could sit through much more taboo and good quality stories with a straight face. That was… a learning experience. And I feel like if I’d told my psychiatrist about this system, I’d have gotten my autism diagnosis a lot sooner

I never did end up putting my ‘training’ to good use, because to her credit I don’t remember my girlfriend asking me to read smut again. She did find out about my ‘system’ but she didn’t say much on it. I don’t know if she believed me when I explained why I was reading that stuff. I think it was at that point that I was like “Fucking hell I’m reading porn for the grammar — I thought I was failing at being a girlfriend but I’m actually failing at being a teenager”

You can laugh at that, I found it funny typing it out

Anyway, there were a lot of factors in our break up, but it was around the age of sixteen or seventeen that I started to realise that, hey, I’m almost done with being a teenager, I’ve had a girlfriend for the last three years, I’ve been reading erotica… and I still don’t have any desire for an actual, physical relationship. Was what we had even love, at least in the romantic sense? Would I still be with her if this were real life?

And honestly? The answer was no. I couldn’t imagine myself being in a real relationship with anyone, whether that was my girlfriend or not. So we broke up, and I focused on other things for a while. I didn’t really question my sexuality much more, but I was vaguely aware of the possibility of asexuality now, considering I ‘should’ve’ been at the age to experience these things already. I figured I was just a late bloomer, or that I just hadn’t met the right person yet, and I wasn’t particularly bothered by that idea, so I didn’t dwell on it much. I’ve never really been the kind of person who’s afraid to be alone

I don’t remember how old I was when I started to seriously consider if I might be asexual. Maybe eighteen or nineteen? Possibly twenty at the oldest, but I doubt it. But I’d gone back to Wattpad again, and wanted to continue an old fanfic I’d started writing at thirteen and had recently gotten new inspiration for

I mentioned it very briefly in this old post; a trilogy of How To Train Your Dragon fanfics. Was I way out of the age range for it? Yes. Did I care? No. Honestly I may still go back to it one day if I can ever be assed to redownload Wattpad. But anyway, the story involved two OCs of mine; Indigo and Plasma. And the two were growing closer as friends, but I was kinda considering if I wanted to have them end up together since I introduced Plasma in the second fic. I’d been kind of hemming and hawing on it and leaving Indigo disinterested in romance in general anyway, so I didn’t know if it would even make sense for her character even if the big themes of the trilogy and Indigo’s overall arc were about learning to love and let people into your life

These fics were relatively popular at the time, or at least it felt like it since I had a lot of dedicated fans always going crazy the moment I posted any new chapters. And from the moment Plasma was introduced, the comments were curious about the potential for a romance between him and Indigo. As the pair grew closer and closer, this became even more true

But then, a bit of the way into the third fic, I noticed a change; the comments were starting to get divided on whether they wanted this romance after all. Not because people had lost interest in the ship, but because people were debating whether Indigo liked Plasma or if Indigo might be asexual. They were reading Indigo’s considerations of her feelings, and the way she experienced or didn’t experience them, as her being asexual

And the thing is, they were how I felt about romance, too

By this point in time, I’d had the vague notion that asexuality could possibly be on the table, but I hadn’t really given it any actual thought until this. So I decided to conduct an experiment; I kept writing the relationship between Indigo and Plasma, adding slightly more deliberate pseudo-romantic moments, not outright saying Indigo’s thought process on it but intentionally keeping her largely oblivious to the significance of her more friendly actions. And the comments were torn between loving all this ship bait and suspecting Indigo as asexual, and everyone being curious as to how this was gonna go

I ended up researching asexuality a lot, and I started to find things I identify with. I’m still wondering if I’m just too young, but I started to figure that, if this is my experience right now, who cares if that changes later? It doesn’t make it any less real now. And combined with that and the fic comments, I was becoming more and more convinced

The final test was me full-on dumping my feelings on relationships onto Indigo, just having her say everything I feel in the way I feel it. I poured everything into that chapter, and I hit post, and I waited. And once the comments had the chance to roll in, I opened them up, and I scrolled through

Everyone was convinced she was aroace. Every comment said ace or aroace. And every comment was supportive and proud, if a little disappointed about their ship not sailing

I think that’s the point that I accepted it completely. I gave Plasma and Indigo a QPR, I thanked my readers profusely for helping me out, and I kept writing