#ismae

his fair assassin packs

like or reblog🖤

assassins of mortain

You are a blade that has been brutally forged, painfully hammered, and wickedly honed. You are steel, not poison. You are deadly, not depraved

Scrape away every residual scrap of pity that would coat the lining of your lungs, remove the ragged heart you were once proud to own. You do not know that face, you do not care for those words, you have no moral code that clamours to be heard as you hold the whip- swish the hips- strut down the corridors on your way to executions. Do as you're asked with lips parted, chin high, mind blank. Take your reflection and beat it into a stranger, rip away your skin and sculpt a new one of stone.

The second thing to do is to learn to smile. Glittering curls of amusement must grace your face too, like swirling ferns of crackling ice, let your eyes become frozen and ravaged and studded with sickness. Treat the noises of suffering as irksome ambience; smirk at the prisoners and laugh at the anecdotes. Show to your superiors that you mean business, break your bones and fit their mould. Claw for their favour and use it to throttle them.

Be ruthless to your rivals-

(backstab, maim, throw to the wolves)

-but be patient when occasion calls. (then backstab, maim, throw to the wolves)

Learn to punish others for your failures, expect pain. Cocoon yourself in brutality and pretend that you are untouchable.

Fan art for the His Fair Assassin series, by Robin LaFevers! The third book in this series came out so long ago (2014), but Lady LeFevers announced that she was writing a fourth book, to be released in 2018, and my feels for this series have reignited. 

No noise, she has no wish to leave her mark on the world. Let no ear hear her coming, or head shift to follow the lines of her being as it blurs into the sky-

(Jagged, drawn by a hand that knew little of creation. She's a knot, limbs of glass and grinding joints, serrated edges clashing together)

She doesn't want betray herself. Not how broken she must be, to fragment at the sight of the new day. Not when she's vulnerable.

strength/ weakness/ strength

Gingerly, she reaches for the light, cups her hands and catches it between her fingers. It's a dry kiss of warmth that buzzes under her skin, a melody pressing against her discoloured irises. It's a sign that she must be alive, somehow.

disbelieving/ believing/ disbelieving

Cracked down the middle is what she is. Sunlight should stream through her as if it cannot wait to leave, repulsed as everything else is to her presence- 

(Bones jutting, begging for flesh to split. Mind crooning, dark and threaded with a hatred she cannot scrape from her bones)

But it doesn't. She brushes against the sun, and the sun stays. Pressed against her. Wrapped around her. Casting her in gold, until it's almost as if she has a light of her own, until it's almost as if she's worth something.