#the keeper scriptures

Everything lingers, everything haunts you. You can run only about 10 miles before you hit a wall of lightning. Flight isn't a reliable option. To resolve a conflict you have but two options, reconciliation or violence. One is hard, requires trust, requires good faith, commitment and all the things humans struggle with the most. The other is simpler, but lethally risky, and often still doesn't resolve things either because of the way it drags in third parties, or ghosts.

Ghosts further this so much. Even if you kill those who hurt you, or those you hurt, they just come back, more dangerous than before. Now they can be anywhere, harm you in new ways you didn't think were possible.

You can't just get over it and move on. The city won't let you. Figure out how to live with it, with it still right on your doorstep, or perish (and remain ever stuck as a ghost). That's horrible, but it's also just... what it's like to be alive and experience grief. You can't run from your own head. Some part of you can't quite move on, you just have to fill your life with other experiences to make it smaller.

This is reflected in the characters I and my partner write. Sonia fled House Kellis, but she can never be rid of Roslyn, who in turn cannot let Sonia go because Sonia is still at large in the city. Cirroc escaped a cult but its members infest the upper echelons of society, escaped his family but they're the law here.

You never get to be safe. You have to live with it.

Lady is pathologically obsessed with her maid and thinks she's in control of her, but the maid is secretly a con artist and radical desperately trying to undermine her lady at every turn. They are both utterly in denial about any sexual or romantic feelings for each other.

It's wonderful, because it has fundamentally eliminated the deepest parts of my dysphoria.

I used to do so much to compensate. Shaved my body hair. Atrophied my arm muscles. Dressed extra feminine, suppressed my voice. Now that I have it pinned down I don't need to do any of that.

I like being strong, I like having tits and chest hair at the same time. I like my voice. I don't need to change these things anymore. My body is happy with its hormones. I'm happy with its basic shape.

And it's weird and it makes me rethink some of the ways I've presented but I'm so damn *happy* now.

Writing about my OCs because I can! Here's Violette de Camille, aka Thorne.

She was my character in Brinkwood, and though that game has paused I do still consider her very dear to me. I have a couple ongoing projects involving her and her story! Violette grew up in a world where blood was mixed with silver to create a new currency. This has resulted in a direct link between wealth and vampirism - the richer you are, the more blood you can get, the more vampiric you are. If you can't keep drinking blood, you go back to being mortal. Her parents were aristocrats. She grew up in the lap of luxury. Yet, eventually, she decided to leave, abandon blood sterling, and become a mortal woman. Most people would do this out of conscience, but she doesn't exactly have a typical one. Instead, following early intervention after she was caught murdering and feeding on peasants aged fourteen, she dedicated her life to academic pursuits. Wanting to prove that the world was more broken than she was, she slowly came around to the idea that blood capitalism was a losers' game and rejected it.

Violette joined up with a burgeoning anarchist/socialist revolution and never looked back. Now she's committed to building what she considers the ideal world out of stubborn pride, and the chance to take down vampires like her beloathed family.

As a companion to her fellow brigands she... was difficult to trust, given her behaviour. Over time she somewhat tamed her worst tendencies, though remains detatched, impulsive and deceitful. Despite her selfishness, she (initially out of a mix of boredom and wanting to prove she could) formed a genuine if unusual connection with her partner Fen.

Plus, no one else can so effortlessly pass as a vampire, or understands the ins and outs of their world. She's also one of the few in her group who was fully literate. She's the one who wrote the equivalent of the Communist Manifesto in this world.