#*kirsi

i cannot even tell you how fuckin CHEESED i was to get this wow thank you so much for asking :D<3

iphigenia as the lovers upright — guidance of the heart, taking a risk rather than remaining with a safe choice, ultimately finding her own garden of eden, fertile and rich with possibility. desires setting the self free. divisions being resolved and integrated. a quote i really liked from lisa freinkel tishman's mindful tarot: "Notably, what attracts Eve is not her spouse, but the Angel. Her eyes are cast upward, while the Angel benevolently gazes down. Adam's eyes are still on the ground, because his moment of choice is still to come. If he chooses Eve, choosing the flesh and the pull of earthly desire, he will nonetheless be choosing the path to Heaven." which is just . extremely the vibes of tamgenia in renascence. salvation through each other but both of them have to take great chances to achieve it. bonus: lovers reversed fits her verrry well in non-tamlin verses. relationships and self out of balance. values feel corrupted. aspected with the devil, which indicates heightened lust, materialism, and addiction to negative patterns. bonus bonus: in the verse where she dies, i think i'd go eight of swords.

vera as the three of cups upright — again straight from tishman's mindful tarot because she puts it way better than i could: "The Two of Cups showed us the seamless mirroring of two friends, lovers, comrades. Their entwined alliance is greater than the sum of two individuals. Winding together like the two snakes of the caduceus, they suggest that we can't make sense of the human soul from the isolated standpoint of the individual. How can love be something that 'I' have for 'you'? What flows between us is collective, flowing underground like the great aquifers." she literally descends from an ancient peoples with a hive-mind-esque emotional connection to one another. she has more than one mate, azriel and eris, for this reason. she values community and communion with her loved ones, and if her mates manage to come together with her, there is great cause for celebration and gladness. if not... three of cups reversed indicates affairs and heated emotions, as well as distance and a lack of cohesion and understanding—someone might be overly opinionated or egotistical in the relationships and the dynamics become skewed :•)

adonia as the queen of wands reversed — tishman says of this card upright: "In particular, the Queen of Wands reminds us that fire is a living current. It ripples and flows, gathers and pools, and floods into our lives. Water of Fire, she keeps vitality itself alive. When we meet her in a reading, we might ask ourselves whether we're holding on too tightly to the fires burning in our heart, our belly, our loins. Is it time to loosen things up, like the Queen? Is it time to let the currents flow?" if she weren't hampered by emile, she would be vivacious and fiery and loose and alive. but she is, and she can't admit how much it restricts her personhood. she avoids being who she is due to her fear of rejection, but there's no way for her to please him, and if she could only accept that, she could be free. (also briefly tossed around the three of swords upright.)

kirsi as the seven of wands upright — an advocate for her court and her people. she exercises her unflappable will to keep her people safe. she stands her ground, alone after the death of her parents utm and outnumbered by the threat of the autumn court, but she maintains the high ground and thus the upper hand. tishman says: "Is this a world of sisters and brothers? A world full of rivals? A world full of enemies? Where am I in relationship to this world?" this is what kirsi has to figure out—because, for her, it's a world of all of these things, and she needs to work out how she interacts with the world because of its nuance.

dagonet as the high priestess upright — making the seer of the group be the major arcana card for the unknown and secrets and intuition and spirituality feels like cheating LMAO i'm sure there are other minor arcana cards that better represent the faith they have in their abilities and how that guides them through their life and helps them navigates their losses buttt i'm going to stick with the high priestess for now. secret relationship. literally crossed an ocean to discover truths about themselves. literally passed through a tear in the veil (the wall) to get into prythian from the mortal lands. they entrust themselves wholly to the unknown because they know it's the backdrop to everything that is known in the world. they have faith in their visions and how they can apply to the future.

emile as the hanged man reversed — earliest decks called this card the traitor and it is associated still with judas iscariot. emile who betrays himself and his family, but most importantly is also betrayed by them. these betrayals upright might be considered something of a sacrifice, but reversed, emile is prone to rigid thinking and perpetual martyrdom. he can never get ahead Because Of Eris, but he will always try to, and he thinks if he can get rid of eris, he can succeed. he cannot. what he thinks he wants (beron's approval and respect) isn't possible to achieve no matter what he does. he hangs onto a fantasy that perpetuates him constantly as a victim, but this is of his own making. if he could perceive things differently, he might be able to liberate himself from his fate, but he'll never be able to do that—so he'll die hated and hateful, and his betrayals will ever be in vain.

carmine as the knight of cups reversed — per tishman, this card is considered the "fire of water" and is considered the least effective of all the knights, the least able to engage the will in a quest, since water has no shape of its own :•) but simply adapts to the will of its container :•) the infinite passivity of water seems at odds with the purposeful and fiery activity of a knight :•) transformed by each and every encounter he has in his desperate attempt to find the love his family never gave him through sex :•) if he was upright, the water might result in something reflective for him, but since the card is reversed, it suggests he is ever hooked on the chase of romantic and sexual ideal with no intention of going any deeper. always looking for the thrill of a new romance elsewhere and thus extremely manipulative. (briefly considered three of swords upright for him too.)

silas as the chariot reversed — silas is all about will, about ambition, about moving forward towards his goals. but he is ultimately unable to reconcile his darkness with any sense of lightness—he cannot reconcile his desires with any true nobility. his determination could have led him to victory. he was favored of beron and a promising leader, if a selfish and ruthless one, but he was prone to arrogance and self-indulgence. his ego and his selfishness were ultimately the death of him. his attempt to have lucien killed over jesminda spiraled out of control; he was tipped off of a road that should have brought him to new horizons, and with his death, he led the only brother he loved to ruin as well.

marius as the five of cups upright — this is a card of loss, remorse, and regret. marius is ever too focused on the damage of his past and losing silas to ever turn towards the potentials of the future, which would be plentiful for him if only let it. he is in a perpetual sense of stasis without his brother; he is half alive and begrudging of it. he's fixed in his rumination over grief despite that adonia is there for him and there for him and there for him.

silas: have there been any horrible consequences to well-intentioned choices your oc made? how did they cope with that? (I know emile hasn't done SHIT for good intentions so I won't even ask)

iphigenia: what fills your oc with envy? alternatively who does your oc envy and why? (in tamgenia verse please)

kirsi: who hates your oc? why?

hey ana banana love of my life and fire of my loins remember one year ago when you sent me this from an ask game i could not possibly find anymore well i am finally answering<3

adonia — adonia adonia adonia....... probably accidentallly getting pregnant with marius' child instead of emile's. i'm steadily becoming more and more partial towards this outcome, mostly for how it creates a helion-loa-beron dynamic between the brothers. also for how it becomes the catalyst for at least one of their deaths—best(?) case emile's, worst case adonia's. alt: how it strains her and marius' relationship if emile never clocks it and he raises marius' kid as his own, which is to say with a flippant and terrible cruelty learned from his father and warped in his own mind. a bad time all around

silas — most well-intentioned choices silas made were on behalf of marius, and this mostly looked like shielding him from external threats. beron, knowing they were both prone to accepting punishments in place of each other, would periodically alternate how he punished them—sometimes he would punish one for what they themselves claimed they had done, but sometimes he would choose to punish the other for what one claimed he had done. this was both to keep them on their toes and because it was a far worse punishment for one to see the other punished when they were truly the ones at fault. (this was often how beron could tell which twin was actually culpable if they weren't both involved. if he punished the innocent twin without that twin nobly accepting it on behalf of their brother, the perpetrator would be much more visibly distressed. would often even do something to intercede and take punishment back unto themselves. big win for beron!) anyway i think a situation like this, wherein silas confessed to [insert transgression] under the assumption beron would punish him and instead had marius whipped within an inch of his life, falls into this category. he copes by trying to kill eris about it :•)

iphigenia — ykw i could go with the easy route of other spring ladies making her envious, but we have been there and also ☝️ done that. we'll do it again too but for now ... imagine beron in tamgenia verse arranging some sort of event where he can flaunt and dote on his new favorite sex slave in front of her. because it was never about her and never has been. it was only the insult of her being taken that lingers for him. so look, now, how immediately he was able to replace her, and how treasured his new pet is. imagine, if you will, iphigenia seeing this and feeling a fresh, acidic wave of nausea overcome her as she realizes she is indeed envious of this female. even safe now. even perfectly in love. there is still a terrible shameful little part of her that feels so thoroughly abandoned by beron, who was meant to be her high lord, who was meant to be as a manner of father, a manner of god, and who hurt her so terribly that she feels heartsick to see how gentle his touch is on another, who misses the bodily pleasure of earning that from him, who is envious, just for that time, of this female boasting his claim. just like beron wanted. (but then of course tamlin is in front of her, blurred through her tears, and he knows her, and he knows beron's games, and he understands something of the conflict she feels now—doesn't he feel it when it comes to rhysandlucienfeyre?—and his presence alone reminds her that she is beron's no longer. she is his<3)

oh this is such a lovely thought-invoking question. let me map post-eris ascension out a little … i think amalia probably waits on helion to seek her out because—if after all this time he does not want her, if after all this time his affections have waned, if after all this time he has found another, for she has of course heard of his dalliances, if after all this time he turns her away, then what does that leave her? but of course it doesn’t take very long for him to seek her out. probably at eris’s ceremony. which is time enough for eris to spin it as a calculated move on both of their parts. to make him a shrewd heir to the throne rather than an abandoned son; to make her into a wily and cunning politician to have leveraged herself as lady of another court so readily, that way the betrayed hearts of the people won’t bring any lords to prompt eris to seek vengeance against her and helion.

there’s never any hope for her and emile, and she knows it. he is her biggest disappointment, biggest failure. he immediately ingratiates himself with the beron loyalists and begins an intense downward spiral; he died without his father’s acceptance, the one thing he wanted above all, and so he mythologizes beron—is the most potent threat to all of his family. emile, by necessity, has to die soon after beron dies. she and carmine have a cordial but distant relationship, the way you might have with a friend you once loved dearly but fell out with and things can now never be the same but neither of you can address the rift because that would be to acknowledge a problem at all. she would favor marius most of all the non-lucien sons she has left, if only because his grief is the most potent and least generally violent—but he makes it very clear that he would kill lucien in less than a heartbeat and she can’t countenance that. he’s also most loyal to eris, if only because of complacency, which strains them further. so left to her after emile dies are eris, carmine and kirsi, and marius and adonia.

i think carmine and kirsi would probably bring her the biggest sense of indignation; they have three children together and carmine, despite still being charming and silver-tongued, is unlike amalia has ever known him to be now that he’s married to kirsi. proof to her of how different her sons could have been if they ever even just got free of beron, which means proof to her of how she failed her sons in letting beron sire them at all. kirsi is very hypervigilant of her kids and doesn’t let any vanserra close knowing How They Are, so i could see a lot of strain between kirsi and amalia at social gatherings, especially because kirsi doesn’t have time for autumn pleasantries and that would offend amalia. they are kin of my kin; i have a right to know them, amalia might say if sufficiently offended. you know not even your own kin; you may claim no right to mine, kirsi might say back. and carmine who has never (and will never) acknowledge that his deep-rooted sense of unlovability comes from his mother feels a keen satisfaction at hearing kirsi do so, which strains everything even more.

i’d say marius and adonia are most gracious with her in the aftermath, once adonia heals enough from losing her mate to regain her sense of self and her sense of propriety. but i think amalia disdains adonia for all she sees of herself in adonia—adonia who was in love with a male who was not her husband yet stayed with her husband until his end at the expense of herself and those around her, then immediately found solace in the arms of her love once her husband died. the parallels are Very Much There. so if adonia eventually gives birth to any of marius’ children, i think amalia might try to overstep with them. maybe try to make amends for her own failings as a mother by criticizing adonia. gently, of course. they are both autumn ladies. but marius wouldn’t stand for it, not after so long of adonia doubting herself with emile. he’s a bit more of his old self now, which is to say he takes on the silas role in his relationship with adonia—happy to be bark and bite on both of their behalves because she is him as he is her. this fills in the loss of a mating bond well for adonia; she basks in it.

they do !!! tytti virtanen and urho virtanen. they ruled the sulatta province of winter, which spans the border of the autumn court. both were hardened and wise to beron’s testing of the borderland, and they were trusted counsel of the high lord who preceded kallias because of it. kirsi, kallias, and viviane were friends because of how frequently their parents gathered together. because of how close her parents were to the high lord of winter, they were part of the thorough culling of winter fae utm after the plot against amarantha was exposed. i still go back and forth on whether kirsi was utm—i think she probably would have been killed if she had been, and i think if she actually saw what carmine was up to utm, there’d never be a chance in hell for her to fall for him. so i think she probably was hiding out with viv in whatever the winter equivalent to velaris was when her parents were killed. i doubt word was traveling out of utm and to winter after the quashed rebellion, so i think she probably didn’t find out her parents were dead and that by birthright she was the new lady of the sulatta province until amarantha was felled.

need you to know that i did Not have time to write this today but i couldn't think of anything else after this ask came in so now i have ~1400 words of kirmine on my hands and love in my heart also you literally made me laugh out loud i adore u

Muscles loose and limber, Carmine extricates himself from the down mattress and its overwhelming pile of furs. The perpetual chill of these lands threatens to seep in the moment his feet meet the icebound stone, to unwrite the fire from his body as though its mere existence is an offense. He casts a blister of heat about him to stave it off, pulling on first his trousers, then his silken tunic, both without wrinkle despite how long they have lain on the floor.

"Must you go?" a voice asks as he toes into his boots, high and tuneless and wrong to the ear. He knows from the rustling of fabric at his back that the female in the bed has pushed herself up on an elbow to watch him. "I could arrange for a thrall to bring us our repast. We could make an eve of it."

Carmine turns to her. Indeed, she is propped up amongst the pelts, fair as ivory, except where he marked her pleasure in pinks and reds along the expanse of her breasts. Though she arches her back to entice him with their surfeit, he feels unfulfilled to see them, just as he felt to lay with her at all.

It had not always been so.

Not so long ago, he could have lost himself between her thighs and come up feeling as satiated as if he had eaten a meal course to course. He would have partaken in this offered confection, then stayed for a spot of wine, then to break his fast come the morning, if he felt so inclined. He would have been well-pleased by his efforts and glutted on her adulations of them.

But there is a hollowness to them now.

Leaning forth to take her hand, Carmine presses his lips to the back of her knuckles. "Next time."

She pushes up further as he straightens to his full height, chasing after the lick of his flame. "Then there is to be one?"

"Surely," Carmine lies, smiling back at her in his egress. "Is there a male who could know you the once without wishing to know you all of his days?"

His footsteps echo crisply in the cavernous corridors of this wintry keep, as unlike the Forest House as two places can be: stolid where his home woos, unyielding where his home bends, glacial where his home smolders. If only he could melt this place through until it was malleable to his touch, until it came away wet and dripping on his fingers, until it sighed his name on the wind. Then, perhaps, he might feel full again.

"Lord Carmine," he hears from ahead.

This voice—velvety and smooth, like the slow draw of a bow along string—echoes out richly from its source, reverberating back to him from the small alcoves carved along his chosen path so that, for a moment, it seems she is all around him.

"Lady Kirsi," he greets, inclining his head.

i literally just inked!!! kirsi who really isn't very manipulative and honestly disdains such underhanded tactics but who has that deep sense of duty that draws her to do whatever it is she needs to in order to best steward her people. that same sense of duty that has her accepting her betrothal to carmine in canon verse. she thinks long about it. she already knows so much about the vanserras, about eris. she learns how best to ingratiate herself based on what he likes—a submissive female, of course, and a virgin; a female who will not challenge him in any way, not intellectually, not politically, not socially; a female who will do as he says how he says when he says it. that is what eris vanserra is said to prefer.

so the next banquet they attend together, that is what she is. demure. palatable. submissive. she lowers her eyes. she smiles soft. she laughs when she ought. yes, lord vanserra. of course, lord vanserra. if you think it so, lord vanserra. like eris has never seen her before. like eris doesn't know how much she hates him and his family. (males never pay kirsi any mind; why would she think he knew her?) he's amused! not mad. why would he be mad? this is what he wants, after all. she isn't wrong. it's what his father would want. it's what his father taught him to want. so it doesn't bother him. it doesn't annoy him. it doesn't enrage him, her feigned servility. he's amused.

kirsi is just so obviously out of her depth with it all. eris pushes her as far as he can for his own amusement, but she doesn't act without dignity even though it's such a thin artifice, and she doesn't ever break. she takes him in stride. she's SO wary of him, too. all he wants is for her to get her father to move his forces up closer to the summer border with winter so eris can have excuse to rearrange his own troops and get more males loyal to his father away from him without his father being suspicious. but oh my god she literally fucking won't. she feigns this submission, but beneath it, she's one of the most stubborn females he's ever met.

which he should hate. but he doesn't. it makes her interesting. it makes her fun to play against. it makes him HORNY. the next game he initiates is one surrounding her virginity. whether she will give it to him. because he 1) doesn't think she's a virgin 2) doesn't think she'll have sex with him besides. but kirsi's been clocking eris, too. kirsi's been monitoring the way he operates and with whom. she thinks: what is my virginity for the preservation of my people? and my god being this close to him feels like an entire bottle of wine is in her belly. his flame is like no other. it muddles her, dizzies her, blurs her and melts her. so hard to think about anything but his pretty face and his hand on her thigh and she wants him but she's so dizzy—

they're both such products of their environments and upbringings. kirsi is very involved with every single part of their lives and probably coddles them to an extreme. their safety, their longevity, their continuing lives are her utmost priority. she knows well how fortunate she is to bear three children to term with no complications—and she would treat them like the miracles they are to her. always in her lap or at her side, and if they aren't, they're in the same room as her almost always. any threats to them—any even potential threats to them—are handled swiftly and exactingly. the first time one of them falls ill/suffers injury sends her into a genuine hand-shaking, hyperventilating spiral that carmine has to try to calm her down from, which does in fact have the potential to make things worse.

because by comparison, carmine is pretty hands-off with his kids. he literally just. never had it modeled for him? he only ever really saw his mom dote on lucien, and by then, he mentally detached himself almost completely from his family and the emotions they elicited in him, so he was probably too busy distracting himself with sex to file any of that in his brain. plus if he thinks to himself that he wants to be unlike his own parents and treat his children more lovingly, then he has to accept that he has been affected by beron and amalia's parenting/lack of attention—and he just is not that emotionally mature, nor is he prepared to reckon with something like that. he's like his eldest brother that way! so carmine really let's his kids do kinda whatever. he plays with them and gives them attention enough, but he'd be just as willing to let a wet nurse/governess care for them—if kirsi would ever part from them.

which leads to a primary point of contention for my darlings once the children are born: kirsi pays much more attention to the children than she does to carmine—and that does not sit well with him. when the first is a baby, he's able to be like, okay, an infant needs to be cared for. but once the first has grown enough to be what he considers "self-sufficient" and kirsi is still all about their child all the time, he definitely gets resentful and snappish. that shitty petulance of like—you love our child more than me; you don't make time for me; you can't separate long enough from them to even have sex with me. which, of course, sex remains a huge thing for carmine, especially now that he's only having it with one person. that old unloved/unlovable wound crops up in a terrible way because this is exactly what he feared in coming to love someone: that they would eventually abandon him/withhold their love the way his parents did.

this blatant resentment hits kirsi hard as well. she understands how he feels, but she can't understand how he doesn't see that the children are the most important thing to her and that they should be to him as well. they should both be united on this, but he seems so disinterested in them. typical autumn court male—he doesn't understand how sacred this life they created is because he's used to such plenty. so she's pretty unforgiving of his attitude and doesn't offer him the reassurance he's after. she also really only sees the sex component of all this since he's never opened up about beron and amalia, so anything she knows of their relationship has been gleaned but never confirmed—which means that to her, this is all because they aren't having as much sex. she gets very paranoid that he's fucking around on her. that makes her more hostile towards him, which makes him more panicked and resentful and seeking of her comfort because it's proof that she doesn't love him.

god i wish i had like face claims for any of my characters or a better visuospatial sketchpad in my head. i picture her and carmine together as very quintessentially ice and fire. she’s slender and a lot of her height is in her legs—long neck, more subtle curves, regal bearing. white hair and blue eyes like kallias. truly an icicle of a fae. here’s a quick little moodboard i compiled because i’m bad at physical descriptions lmao