#castrel

He would have to watch two of the people he was closest with (maybe not at the end, but he names his child after Ash. That counts for something I think.) playing cat and mouse for the years after his death, trapped in similar cycles of grief and pain.

Would he be angry? Would he be sad? Would he be vengeful? (Though I doubt he would)

Do you think Draeke watches his sibling as they mourn him? As she holds on to so much grief and fear and so so so much regret. Watching as Ash tries goes to scrub the blood off of their hands- repeating the same motions after nightmares or certain days when it rains (though those times the blood isn’t there- they see it. They sees it every day after it happened. He can’t *stop seeing it*.)

Do you think Draeke watches his husband -the person he spent so much of his time with. The kind, loving, important, wonderful person he fell in love with- chase and chase (and *hunt* and *track*) and chase Ash down, overwhelmed with grief and so *so* much anger. But in the process watching him leave the child he is hunting Ashril down to protect in a way? (It feels so much to me like a dad who’s off at work all the time. Maybe one who travels for work, who’s not home often so you give him things to take with him so you know he thinks of you. That’s what the letter feels like in my bones.)

Just finished this one!

After nearly a year and a half I only have one illustration left to draw for my fully original AMV project (music, concept, art all by me) so my hope is it will be published in a few weeks (?????)

Mounting the marble steps of Hollow Cathedral, the Ichor looks and feels only inward. The others were as nothing against the agony of emptiness she calls herself.

All that lives and breathes in the Abyssal Plains is enemy to Castrel, the Shade’s Ichor.  As the sky mirrors the surface, so too do her and her enemies mirror each other in bloodshed.  Amid the tempest of blades, Castrel’s eyes are blind to the reflection cast before her, to the echo deafening her.

Keeper Tajsa, too, aspect of Yualis Herself, cannot resist its pull towards the Shade’s Ichor, rejecting Lanio’s agency in service of sating its undying thirst.  Lanio, who knows nothing but to oppose her own death as many times as is asked of her, tries to smother her own horror, being confined to a cage of fangs that feast on the facsimile she refuses to see for what it is.

Castrel does not raise her halberd against Valke, throat scarred with a suffocating halo of light.  The Exsanguinated does not bleed from the eternal wound, for Her blood flows through the chambers of another’s heart.  This god, in Its fading breath, accepted the sacrifice of a dying woman at the end of the world, and together they became something neither of them could ever be.  Yualis is no more. The Incarnadine, devoured.