#aeide

tagged by @aeide, you Bitch. stop trying to make writing happen it's not going to happen!!

Rules: Post your current WIPs with an emoji, people can then send you an ask with the emoji and ask for a fresh snippet.

all i got are valhalla wips. sorryyyyyyy.

⚔️ honor bound | my three-year long ongoing passion project/obsession about eivor and leofrith being forced to confront their differences/similarities as they groom ceolbert for the throne, kill all the zealots that leofrith somewhat accidentally sicced on eivor, deal with their respective traumas and hang-ups, and fall in love. among other things. really really trying to finish chapter two of this by the end of january for the love of fuck.

🫂 a different kind of sorrow | sequel fic to a different kind of solace, in which eivor and leofrith . . . no i shan't say it. leofrith had a wee mental breakdown in the first one, and now it's eivor's turn. 🤪

🍷 loving thy enemy | tentative name for the fic that i'll most likely never publish (and honestly could probably just cannibalize for an original story idea because who give a shit) about leofrith and cordelia (of daughters of lerion fame)'s arranged marriage. inspired by the note you can find that mentions marrying off the three sisters to allies in mercia and leofrith being well. a mercian noble. i think that it's pretty fucked up that so many of my story ideas for this game come from notes that probably 60% of players will never read. if none of this makes sense to you, just tune it out.

❄️ the near dawn | previously named "indigo skies". hytham and eivor have a little heart to heart about their shared feelings of aimlessness due to his new disability and her life's goal of revenge finally being fulfilled, the night before they set sail for England.

i have a few other wips but they're either not suited for public consumption or just honestly not a priority right now

💾 Most Disliked Assassin’s Creed Game

AC Rogue! The idea of an Assassin becoming a Templar is really interesting but I think they botched the execution. Instead of showcasing the morally grey side of the brotherhood, they just made the Assassins comically evil (toxic gas bombs in NY?? gangs terrorizing civilians???) and the Templars look like innocent victims who've never done anything wrong or have any nefarious plans. I'm also not a fan of Shay as a character, he leaves the brotherhood after what happened in Portugal but he never stops to think that the exact same thing would've happened if the Templars got there first? Never mind the awful miscommunication between him and Achilles, he just assumed the Assassins' were cool with killing people just to get to the artifacts instead of talking things trough and reporting back on what happened. Plus he kills Adéwalé and I just can't get over that. Gameplay wise, it just felt like a reskin of Black Flag (which I can understand since they didn't have a lot of time to develop the game).

✌ Favourite Companion

I'm assuming this means the bird companions, right? Never thought about it actually, but I'd say Enkidu. That last scene in Mirage where it scratches Basim's face is just so good.

📚 Favourite Historical Figure Met In-Game

BRASIDAS! I don't think I need to explain much. 🥺🥺🥺

And I also need to mention Leonardo Da Vinci, because he's just the best. 🥰

'departures' is the working title for my kasseivor/valhalla last chapter fix-it wip! it was borne out of my disdain for how utterly underwhelming the last chapter was, as well as just me using any excuse to shove kassandra into any scenario. my hope is that, although i don't plan on it being a very happy fic, and i still want it to end geographically in the same place as the last chapter, the emotional and narrative payoff feels much more earned.

the premise is that eivor convinces kassandra to join her raiders and come live in ravensthorpe for as long as she wants. kassandra knows she shouldn't stay long (and aletheia is in her head doubling down on this thought) but ultimately as a big fuck-you to aletheia and also because she has the biggest gayest crush on eivor, she does accept the offer.

the fic opens with kass arriving in ravensthorpe, and the general idea is kass and eivor growing closer as in the background other characters come and go. vili returns to snotinghamscire to finally accept his position as jarl. gunnar and brigid have a child. randvi finds her calling in joining the hidden ones (under both kass and hytham's tutelage) and accompanies hytham back east. rollo goes to france. the raven clan kids' trio are growing up. "dreams" by the cranberries is playing in the background despite not debuting for another thousand years and i'm crying my eyes out just thinking about it etc etc.

eventually aelfred comes knocking and eivor and sigurd clash over what to do; sigurd wants to resist aelfred's army by any means necessary (aka all-out war), but eivor (from her own experience fighting in the south, and advised by kass who has already observed the spread of christianity through her travels and feels this is a force that cannot be resisted outright the way sigurd thinks it can) is inclined to follow in her father's footsteps and surrender/come to some kind of compromise in order to spare her people.

and that's kind of where the details end. i've got maybe the first couple thousand words written and everything else vaguely outlined up to this point. i have some ideas/inspiration for how i want certain plot/character beats to go, but a lot of it is heavily influenced by the final season of black sails, so for the sake of @milfeivor who is still watching that for the first time, i will keep my mouth shut for now :)

the main issue is that i feel like in order to do justice to any of the characters i would either have to re-play the game (which is too fucking long and i don't want to do it), watch clips of character interactions and cutscenes on youtube (which i could do but am lazy), or read fics featuring the characters i want to write about (which i don't feel comfortable considering "research" because i don't want to mistake authorial interpretation for canon fact or unintentionally pass off somebody else's ideas as my own). so for all those reasons, this one is on the backburner. i do hope to come back to it one day, but for now i don't feel any real urgency to work on it.

Odyssey 19.149–150. Emily Wilson translation.

a weaving based on Dora Wheeler's "Penelope Unraveling Her Work at Night", which is one of my favorite works that looks woven but is actually embroidered. I wanted to try out deborah silver's split-shed weaving technique, so I chose polychrome taqueté with linen and cashmere. I maybe should have chosen an easier technique with fewer colors to start, but here we are! on the right side, I left the uppermost warp threads bare to show the unraveling.

reference below the cut: