so i did not explain why the sunset turns red

whatever was left, that was ours for a while.

sunrise - louise glück

Shadow and Bone Fan Edit [ V ]

An admiral, four years later, informing T’pel of the news: Lieutenant Tuvok is trapped in the Delta Quadrant. It is a harrowing situation, but he is alive and has Captain Janeway’s leadership. I am sure they will return.

T'Pel, keeping it together but secretly worried: "I see."

Admiral: "He has Janeway with him."

T'Pel:

Here's an amazing story about him that I read years ago and never forgot.

I'd hoped to meet him at a convention, myself, one day.

Anyway, the next night we watched a thing about some pig man who is supposed to live in Vermont. People said it had claws and a pig nose but walked upright like a man. Now, I happen to know that sideshows used to shave bears and present them as pig men. So every piece of evidence they gave of this monster sounds to me like a bear with mange.

So now the running joke in our house is that everything is bears. Aliens? Bears. Loch Ness monster? Bear. Every cryptozoological mystery is just a very crafty bear.

iukhimov was ukrainian by the way, possibly from odesa though there’s very little info on him i can find in english. his now-dead website exists on the internet archive but text only sadly. someone on the tolkien collector site i’ll link below at one point compiled a bunch of his illustrations on weibo though that link seems to be defunct now unfortunately

The figures look like, say, the illustrations in Old English Genesis A. There might be a little Eastern Orthodox icon style creeping in, or it might just be that that style has a lot in common with early medieval British and Irish manuscript illustration (ca. 600-1100 AD). These are great, and an extremely clever nod to the texts Tolkien was drawing from, and even the literal manuscripts in which he was imagining his work (or at minimum Bilbo’s work, in-universe) to be written:

As Tolkien says, “Further information will also be found in the selection from the Red Book of Westmarch that has already been published, under the title of The Hobbit.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, “Prologue: Concerning Hobbits”). Or, perhaps, in the Red Book of Hergest (Welsh, Llyfr Coch Hergest) — another Red Book of the West (or Wales, that is). Obviously The Hobbit does not actually show up in one of the most important medieval Welsh manuscripts (currently housed at Oxford), but from the very first page of lotr, Tolkien was playing with an incredibly specific manuscript history!

What if there was a ghost in the opera house that was killing people?

Requires you to accept the existence of ghosts, but otherwise is a straightforward story.

What if the chief contractor who built the opera house was a deformed circus freak who used his experience building palaces and torture chambers for sultans to keep building secret passageways and torture chambers in the basement when construction halted during the Franco-Prussian War, and then kept living down there working on an opera and killing and blackmailing people who crossed him and also training a pretty opera singer that he wants to marry?

My father sent me a guardian angel from Heaven to guide and comfort me in his absence: "Okay, not something that happens every day, but that is what guardian angels are supposed to do and Dad did indicate something like this would happen."

During a performance, two counterweights from the chandelier crashed through the ceiling of the auditorium into the crowd, injuring several and killing one woman

(I know this isn't the most even way to represent animal groups but I tried to go off of what I saw mentioned most in the notes)