Ideas are half the riches I have.

A steampunk Redglare for my darling Ursula inspired by our team’s fic Prometheus and Eurydice! 

Now, Redglare.

It’s not too much of a spoiler to say that P&E's Terezi, or “Pyralspite” as she's called in the fic, is a superhuman with the power to transform herself into a dragon. Nor is it a spoiler to say that in this 'verse, a super's powers are unique to them, like a fingerprint. Even identical twins would have subtly different powers. If Terezi is in any fashion related to this 'verse's Redglare, she would not have inherited her powers in any exact form. By the same token, Redglare does not possess Terezi's power of transformation by virtue of being her “ancestor”.

She does not become a dragon.

She makes dragons.

Look closely at the detail on her cane. The vertebrae just below the dragon’s head are a clue to her powers. Her dragons are remnants of the dead, raised in the service of justice: she draws them out of shale and limestone fossil beds, vast stone skeletons that obey without thought or question. They’re almost like simple AIs; they can provide feedback and make decisions based on input, but they do not, as such, think. They are constructs, not creatures. Unliving, undying, they only possess as much mercy as their creator chooses to give them.

(Which is to say, for the guilty, none.)

Raising dragons in this manner requires sacrifice. White limestone dragons require two pyralspite garnets for eyes, grey shale dragons require two pieces of good quality turquoise. On top of that, each dragon requires a large amount of blood: having no life of their own, they must be given life in order to move and process information. Anyone whose blood is used in the creation of a dragon can sense its presence and command it. She can, therefore, make dragons for people - but given the quantity of blood needed to do so, most normal people would not survive the creation of anything larger than a Shetland pony. In order to raise a very large dragon, several people - often a dozen or more - must die. Her usual method is to exsanguinate a number of captured criminals at the site, then add a few drops of her own blood before raising the dragon. The largest dragon in her arsenal, a white dragon over fifty feet long, required the deaths of more than a hundred people, and was raised in a single night from the limestone cliffs of a deserted island off the coast of her homeland. The hole in the rock where the dragon once lay - and the picked bones of its victims - are still visible today.

When she looks away from her hands, the chamber is not as empty as it seemed before; on the flame-mottled sand of the floor lies the carved skull of a great bird, hook-beaked, its vacant, eyeless gaze strangely knowing. As she watches, smoke rises from the wood, and a tongue of flame licks up the low slope between beak and crown, spilling over the back of the cranial vault to spread over the floor like the cloak of a kneeling queen.

Twin points of orange spark to infernal life in empty wooden sockets. Fire roars, and the skull lurches into the air atop a body of flame, the flapping of burning wings whipping searing wind into Rose’s face.

The creature swoops at her, talons extended, screaming like a man with his vitals out, and that is when she wakes clammy with sweat and the bones of her knuckles showing from how tightly she’s clenching her fists.

Every hundred years, the Firebird rises again. Every hundred years, the Guardian comes to defeat it. But what is a Guardian if she has no Firebird to slay? A cold-skinned, ashen-white girl in a world populated by Grey Ones, Rose goes in search of a destiny that failed to come calling, and discovers a far greater one in its stead.

Team Rose<3Roxy’s collab round entry for the 2013 Homestuck Shipping World Cup.

I also did a lot of really pretty art for it, just saying.