#aethersea

BOOP

I HAVE BEEN BOOPED!

I- I don’t think this is quite working on mobile.

so uh... you know how ladyhawke is a movie about two people who love each other a lot but have to share functionality and cannot speak to each other? you know the plot of the novel harrow the ninth? yeah.

The woman stakes her sword in the ground and runs her other hand through her hair. She’s built like a brick wall, hefting the sword back up as if it weighs nothing. She’s skilled, too -- Jeannemary’s been training with swords her whole life and never seen anyone as good as that.

Isaac leans over. “It’s the same sword. The one Harrow was carrying.”

Jeannemary nods.

The woman hasn’t noticed them. She stands still for a moment, then raises her head towards the sky and whistles.

Anonymous asked:

So...i know you're not writing the avatar au. I know its not happening. Buuuuut.....i would live for animal companion angst with suiban and chenqing with regards to wwx if you would be so obliged. 

I’m NOT writing this, it’s NOT happening, this is a fake post and you’re not reading it!

But.

It is difficult to kill a dragon.  But it is possible.  It is possible, for example, to use chains and threats to force an adolescent dragon, no more than fifteen feet or so, to the ground and muzzle its lethal jaws.  It is best to do this, for example, while the hypothetical dragon’s hypothetical Avatar is out of sight, perhaps while your loyal bodyguard puts his adoptive brother’s life in mortal danger on the battlefield, so that the Avatar’s attention is on keeping his family alive.

It is important, of course, in killing a dragon, to do the deed quickly, before her half-trained Avatar, who doesn’t yet know that your father the Fire Lord ordered him to be left untouched during this battle, can stop you.

Wen Chao draws his sword while she fights, thrashes under the weight of the chains and the fifty soldiers dedicated to the task of bringing her down.  There were more.  They are dead now, under her claws and fire and teeth.  Her russet scales are scarlet with their blood, and the chains wrapped around her jaws are smeared with charred flesh and gore, and Wen Chao--

Wen Chao shouts up the field, as he draws his sword, the sword he brought onto the field for this purpose, and Wen Zhuliu steps back, all of a sudden, from the Water Tribe lines, and takes his soldiers with him.  They clear a path, so that Wei Wuxian can see his friend, his companion, the dragon he found as a child and brought to his mother in ignorance of what it meant, chained to the ground and immobile with a blade at her throat.

“Stop!” Wei Wuxian shouts, fists clenched.  “Don’t hurt her!”

And Wei Wuxian lunges forward with fire in his hands, and Suibian looks to him with wide desperate eyes and thrashes, and soldiers die, and--

It’s sheer blind luck, that Wen Chao survives slashing open her throat as he jumps back.

Wei Wuxian screams, and so does Suibian, a choking, muffled shriek of anguish, and Wei Wuxian bursts into white light as a thousand lifetimes surge forward in grief and rage.

The collateral damage is horrific--monstrous, will be the word later.  Air Nomad and Earth Kingdom, Fire Nation and Water Tribe.  Everyone loses.  Wen Chao dies screaming, with Wei Wuxian’s hand around his throat and his skin burning like tinder.  Wen Zhuliu is struck down by lightning when he tries to reach his master.  The western line of the Earth Kingdom is too close--their soldiers are shattered like so much glass.  Jiang Cheng has the forethought to drive his people back immediately, bellowing down any argument until the Water Tribe forces fall into a rout, retreating at a ragged run to the safety of their own lines--they have the fewest casualties.  It doesn’t take the Air Nomads long to follow their example, with notable exceptions in the Twin Jades.  Lan Wangji won’t leave Wei Wuxian, and once he’s assured that his people are running, Lan Xichen won’t leave his brother.  

The Fire Nation army is little more than a handful of wounded soldiers, by the time the storm begins to die down.

“Wei Ying,” Lan Wangji says, stepping forward into the still-raging wind.  Lan Wangji, Hanguang-jun, has been the spear-point of the Air Nomads’ army since the war began, and he walks into the sphere of power without apparent concern for the hurricane that broke his peoples’ strength so quickly.

Wei Wuxian turns on him, eyes glowing white, and he’s standing on the ground, unarmed, between the battle and Suibian--Suibian’s corpse, now, her eyes half-lidded and her teeth bloodied from gasping.  He should not look so dangerous, but his robes whip in the wind and his hair flies around his shoulders and Lan Wangji takes a breath to steady himself.

“Go away,” snarls the Avatar, in all his thousand voices.

“Wei Ying,” Lan Wangji says again, pushing forward, further into the wind, a gale full of tattered flame.  His white robes are growing charred in places.  “You must stop--”

“Don’t come any closer!  Don’t touch her!”

“No one will touch her,” Lan Wangji says.  “Wei Ying, please.”

“Don’t touch her,” Wei Wuxian says again, but it sounds--less.  Less many-voiced, less sure.  The wind is fading, slowly, the earth stilling underfoot.  Wei Wuxian turns away from Lan Wangji and strokes a hand over Suibian’s mane, and then gestures.  The blood gathers itself up from Suibian’s scales, from her teeth and mane, and trickles, slowly, back into her gashed throat.  Wei Wuxian kneels down beside her head, closing his blazing white eyes and pressing his forehead to her scales.  They are cold.

The wind dies, and the light fades, and the world counts the cost.  Thousands of lives, for a single dragon?

Wen Chao is dead and gone, and Wen Ruohan does not survive the chaos.  They need a scapegoat.  And Wei Wuxian did run away, after, and no one ever saw him again.  An easy target.

When Wei Wuxian stumbles out of the spirit world nearly two decades later, he ignores the nine-tailed black fox that trails after him as best he can.  If he doesn’t name her, he doesn’t have to keep her.  He won’t take another companion.  He can’t.

Definitely long enough for a read-more. 

In any “everything is okay” timeline, Shiko and Krei DO in factmove in together!  Krei spends all herfree hours for the first month and a half in their new home putting up shelvesand buying pots to fill them, until every room is dripping with greenery andsmells sweetly of growth and fresh soil. They get a place with either big windows or lots ofwindows, so that Krei can grow flowers in the sunlight and weave them intoShiko’s hair.  Shiko picks up books inAlleirai that start to fill their shelves, first children’s books—the Alleiraiversion of Have You Seen My Hat and Hop On Pop or whatever—and then,as her reading improves, books about religion and about history and about the arcane and about traditions of the dead.  She’s fascinated by the idea of dead gods,gods who were and now are not, and by the idea of runic magic, and by the way funerals on Alleirat were shaped by civil war, and Krei is fascinated by the way Shiko tucksher hair irritably behind her ears as she talks about something she loves.

Shiko also picks up a cat, after a couple years.  It is a non-traditional cat.

It’s dead, okay, she has a skeleton cat.  It’s some extraordinarily advanced runicmagic that really wouldn’t work on anything larger or more complex than youraverage housepet, but binding the cat’s—something, Shiko says cats don’thave souls like people do but at that point Krei kind of tuned out—back intoits bones means it can operate a little more on its own impulses and keepmoving while Shiko is asleep.  It takesKrei a little while to stop jumping every time the thing comes into the room,even if Shiko says that it doesn’t mind being alive again.  Shiko did it mostly as a proof-of-concept, away to make her name as an arcane scholar, but once she had the cat,what was she going to do?  Kill it again?  Obviously not.

She did not tell Krei that she was bringing a dead cat home.  This is because Shiko, while not actually a bad person, is a little bit of an asshole.

if half-demon kids are A Problem, or maybe even if they’re just really rare, then you’d probably have separate paperwork, but it could range from a single sheet of paper all the way to seventeen separate forms which must be notarized and signed by witnesses, depending how uptight the society is about half-demon kids and/or bureaucracy

society is basically just ‘21st century britain but there’s demons sometimes’. half demons are rare & are indeed a problem.