#tenebra

Drew some ponies in lurv for the four ship meme!

@umbreow's Chocolate Armor with my Morning Blaze.

CryptidMech's Sword with my umbrum Tenebra. Classic donor and parasite~

Bre's Lullaby with Mech's Jailer from the heroes and villains RP AU.

Mech's Solitaire and my Haas, oldest RP OTP finally at peace.

RP shenanigans from our closed server, we love and adore all our silly OC's and playing with their love lives.

Enjoy!

Link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/47563792/chapters/119874838

Word count: 246,201

Chapters: 67

First posted: 31st May 2023

Last chapter up: 22nd January 2024

Summary: 

It was highly inconvenient to find myself transformed into a crow in the Imperial Apartments, and somewhat alarming when I discovered that I could not access my magic, and therefore could not turn back.

...

The small room was empty, and dark. A single patch of silvery moonlight picked out a fluffy piece of fabric draped over the back of the long couch.

Cliopher stared for a long moment, then became aware of movement by his feet. He looked down. The large black crow had landed beside him in a splatter of ink, and was regarding him solemnly with one gold-rimmed black eye.

“She’s taken him,” he said, softly.

How and why this came about

The behemoth.

It wasn’t supposed to be. Tenebra started as a collaborative story-making exercise in a discord channel with a number of people feeding in. The premise - that the emperor becomes a crow, and that Cliopher fails to recognise him - led to a rush of ideas about what Cliopher might have done to try to rescue his lord. Most obviously, Cliopher would travel to Sky Ocean and attempt to bring the Sun-on-Earth back from the Sun or the Moon.

The livefic hopped about a bit but mostly consisted of bits of the conversation between Cliopher and the Moon Lady and then a later scene of Cliopher on Loaloa finally recognising what has happened and figuring out how to restore his Radiancy.

With the agreement of the other participants I offered to tidy it up a bit. I thought I’d probably add about three chapters at the start (to get Cliopher and his crow up to Sky Ocean) and then could just stitch together the parts we’d sketched for the second half.

That was not what happened.

First off I realised how many questions we’d left unanswered about what had happened and why. I didn’t want to dwell on it but I did want there to be a sense that there was a reason, so I started with a mishap befalling the Diamond of Gaesion. Then I plunged into the reaction of the Imperial Household to the sudden disappearance of his Radiancy and, well, it was more than three chapters. I skipped the politics almost entirely, and it was still more than three chapters.

Cliopher had to adopt his crow, extract himself from the Palace, and travel to Gorjo City to get his boat. That meant reckoning with his family and friends too. Including sections from Tenebra’s pov added more length and shenanigans, as did working through a properly mythic voyage into Sky Ocean.

All told it took nine chapters to get to the Moon Lady, two for the negotiation, three to get out of Sky Ocean, four to get Cliopher and Tenebra back to the Vangavaye-ve, and another four for Cliopher to put his clues together and break the spell.

I could have stopped there, where the livefic ended. Yes, the world was going up in flames, but Cliopher had his emperor back, that was the important thing.

Only, as that arc of the fic ended, in the immediate reaction to being restored to human form, Fitzroy kissed his rescuer.

I could have left it there, too. But it would have felt cruel. There were so many questions and challenges raised by that one instinctive kiss. I wrote it because it felt natural in the moment and then I sat around wondering what I’d done.

And then I fixed it. Which took another 13 chapters. 

Cliopher is clearly presented in the books as being (a) uninterested in sex unless someone else raises it, (b) strongly longing for a lifelong committed relationship which is deep and bonding and doesn’t involve sex, or doesn’t have to involve sex, because that feels more true and meaningful to him given his personal indifference to sex (c) someone who thinks of himself as only being attracted to women, (d) someone who constantly muses on the physical presence of his beloved lord in terms that certainly sound a great deal like physical attraction.

Fitzroy, by contrast, is famous for his exploits as a lover and unquestionably physically attracted to Cliopher, but has a whole empire’s worth of trauma around asking for the things that he wants.

It felt important to take some time to work through what it would look like for them to talk to one another about all of this and come to an understanding.

The second place I could have left off would have been the end of what became a short recovery break on Loaloa, around chapter 35. Having got that far, however, I sort of wanted to resolve all the other threads left hanging - the politics, the priest-wizards, and so on. And that was another 32 chapters.

What worked and what didn’t

Tenebra was supposed to be a short fic and I thought I’d finish it faster if I just wrote and published as I went. So that’s what I did - I had no buffer at any stage, I dropped a chapter as soon as I finished it and went on to the next one. This led to an erratic posting approach. At times I was uploading chapters every day, or even twice a day. At other times I let it lapse for weeks while I focused on something else. This helped me keep up the illusion that it wasn’t a real fic and I could therefore do what I liked, which I needed so I didn’t run screaming for the hills.

I was pleased with the slow disintegration of Tenebra’s human intellect, and also with the way that Fitzroy kept crow mannerisms when he returned to human form. It was also satisfying, if rather hard work, to bring together all the big politics of the world with the small politics of friends and family.

Navigating Cliopher and Fitzroy into an acknowledged bond and physical relationship was something I approached with a certain amount of fear and trembling. The ace representation in these books is important; the relationship dynamics in canon are interpreted in different ways by different people; I’m not ace myself. I wanted to do the characters justice and I’m pleased with how it came out.

Chapter 35 also included my first ever sex scene which felt like a big deal at the time. I was thrilled to find that depicting sex isn’t materially different from depicting any other part of a relationship - what does this look and feel like to the characters, and what does that mean to them? - but I did go back and tweak it very slightly around the time I finished the fic up, because I think the pacing was too hurried in the first version.

What I learned from writing it

Working on something over such a long time and sharing it in instalments as written gave rise to lots of opportunities to take inspiration from comments. I appreciated them greatly, and was incredibly pleased with the art that some readers made [melts].

There was some fandom drift over the time I was writing, with many of those who had been involved in the early conversations moving on from active involvement in the discord server. The big burst of fic in the summer of 2023 was almost certainly not sustainable given the small size of the fandom. By the time I was uploading the later chapters at the end of 2023/early 2024 the Lays fic conversation had largely dried up and the enthusiasms on the server had shifted focus - which happens, of course - I’m sure things have moved on again in the ten months since then.

It was hard not to read that change as a sign that I was doing something wrong, even though rationally I knew that made no sense. So I definitely learned something about the fragility of ego, the addictiveness of validation, and the way the brain benchmarks automatically to context.