Reblog To Give Your Mutuals A BLÅHAJ

"During the 70s, some priests were becoming rather casual with the liturgy. One afternoon, a priest came into the soup kitchen that Dorothy Day was working at. He wanted to offer a liturgy for the homeless. He went into the kitchen and grabbed a mug to use for the chalice.

Dorothy, although frustrated at the irreverent use of houseware for the liturgy, prayed throughout the mass with the priest. After the liturgy ended, she quietly got up and started to cleanse the vessels. Then, she walked outside with the mug and a shovel.

A man followed her and asked her what she was doing. It is said she kissed the mug and then buried it. She told him that it was no longer a mug, but a chalice. It was no longer suited for coffee- it had held the Blood of Christ. She didn’t want anyone to mistake it for a mug again. Once something holds the Body of Christ, it is no longer what it was. When the mug held the Blood of Christ, it changed its vocation forever. It could no longer hold anything less than Christ again.

We were common mugs. Simple, functional, practical, and good people. We had a capacity to hold good things. But when Christ entered our lives, we became more. We became Chalices. We started to hold divinity Himself within our hearts. Now that we have held the Body of Christ within our bodies, we are no longer common, but rather extraordinary.

May you know the transformation God has placed in your heart. May you trust that you are truly made new and be extraordinary today."

Also apparently Galileo didn’t get put on trial by the Catholic Church just because of heliocentrism, apparently he got put on trial because he was an asshole about heliocentrism, didn’t have all of the evidence he needed to actually really prove heliocentrism (apparently one of the big hangups at the time was “why are the stars so small if the heliocentric math says they should be big?”, and they didn’t have the tech yet to explain “it’s because the stars are really goddamn far away”). Apparently one of the Popes at the time, who was actually Galileo’s friend, actually did let him write about heliocentrism on the condition that he talked about the pros and cons of the theory instead of the aggressive “this is real and you’re all dumb!!!!” he’d been doing. And Galileo, high intelligence/negative wisdom/negative charisma dumbass he was, doubled down on his arguments and also insulted his friend the Pope by representing the Pope’s arguments via a character named “the Simpleton”. And it was this idiot move of shittalking his now ex-friend the Pope that got him on the big bad trial we all know now, not helped by the fact that he apparently burned all his fucking bridges with everybody else who could’ve saved his bacon too (apparently one of the people in charge of his trial was a guy he plagiarized too). It was never about actual religious faith or heresy, it was always just. The stupidest, pettiest politics fight.

✩ Spy x Family 2nd Cour Key Visual ✩

Glass and bronze flask, Roman Syria, 1st-2nd century AD

from The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

Reading fantasy again, I've started thinking about how odd it is how in books like that, the non-human races invariably scoff at human frailty and vulnerability, even those that they'll call friends. Like that's mean?? Why would you be a dick to your friend who you know is not capable of as much as you are, and it's not their fault they were born like that. That's mean.

Like consider the opposite: Characters of non-human races treating their human companions like frail little old dogs. Worrying about small wounds being fatal - humans die of small injuries all the time - or being surprised that humans can actually eat salt, even if they can't stomach other spicy rocks. Being amazed that a human friend they haven't seen in 10 years still looks so young, they've hardly aged at all! And when the human tries to explain that they weren't going to just unexpectedly shrivel into a raisin in 10 years, the longer-lifespan friend dismisses this like no, he's seen it happen, you don't see a human for 10 or 20 years and they've shriveled in a blink.

Elves arguing with each other like "you can't take her out there, she will die!" and when the human gets there to ask what they're talking about, they explain to her that the journey will take them through a passage where it's going to be sunny out there. Humans burn in the sun. And she will have to clarify that no, actually, she'll be fine. They fight her about it, until she manages to convince them that it's not like vampires - humans only burn a little bit in the sun, not all the way through. She'll be fine if she just wears a hat.

Meanwhile dwarves are reluctant to allow humans in their mines and cities, not just out of being secretive, but because they know that you cannot bring humans underground, they will go insane if they go too long without seeing the sun. Nobody is entirely sure how long that is, but the general consensus is three days. One time a human tries to explain their dwarf companion that this is not true, there are humans that endure much longer darkness than that. As a matter of fact, in the furthest habited corners of the lands of the Northmen, the winter sun barely rises at all. Humans can survive three weeks of darkness, and not just once, but every single year.

"Then how do they sane?" Asks the dwarf, and just as he does, the conversation gets interrupted by the northland human, who had been eavesdropping, and turns to look at them with an unnerving glint in her colourless grey eyes, grinning while saying

"That's the neat part, we don't."

Before the Throne: How The Assassin's Blade Reveals the Heart Behind the Legend

This Is Where It Hurts—And This Is Where She Begins

I didn’t expect this book to undo me. I opened it for context, for backstory, for a deeper understanding of a girl I already thought I knew. I was not prepared to meet her here—bloody-knuckled and golden-eyed, standing at the edge of her own undoing, daring the world to come closer.

The Assassin’s Blade is not a prequel. It’s a reckoning.

These five novellas do not orbit the Throne of Glass series—they are its heartbeat, its open wound. They are the story beneath the story, the ghost behind every line Celaena Sardothien ever speaks. I thought I loved her before. But it was here, in these pages of sun-scorched desert and salt-stung shores and bloodstained cobblestones, that I saw her clearly for the first time.

This is the book where the mask cracks.

Where we watch a girl who kills for coin learn what it means to fight for something she’ll never get paid for. Where the sharp edges of her arrogance are dulled by bruised compassion, where her bravado is tested against grief so raw it bleeds straight through the page. She is not softened here. She is tempered.

Her love story with Sam Cortland wrecked me—not because it was tragic (though it is, utterly), but because it was real. No grand declarations. No sweeping gestures. Just quiet defiance and tentative touches. A rivalry melting into alliance. A glance held too long. A boy who didn’t ask to be her hero—but stayed anyway.

And when he’s gone? The silence he leaves behind is the loudest thing in the book.

But this isn’t just a love story. It’s a story about choice. About power.

About what happens when a girl forged into a weapon begins to wonder who she is when she’s not being pointed at someone.

When Celaena walks into Skull’s Bay, she is the blade Arobynn Hamel sharpened for years—obedient, lethal, beautiful. When she leaves, she’s something else entirely. She’s the girl who chose to defy him. Who looked at 200 shackled souls and decided that maybe she didn’t have to be what he made her.

There is no moment more powerful than when she realizes she can choose. That her loyalty was never freely given—it was manipulated, conditioned, beaten into her. That the life she’s been living isn’t the only one available to her.

And it costs her everything.

Arobynn’s shadow stretches long over these novellas.

He is not the loudest villain. But he is the most dangerous. His violence doesn’t scream—it whispers. It gifts. It smiles. He doesn’t break Celaena with blows (though those come too)—he breaks her with belief. He teaches her to confuse control for care, cruelty for closeness. And when she finally sees through it—when she walks away from the Keep, from him, from the man who raised her in a gilded cage—she doesn’t just claim freedom.

She earns it.

Every setting here is symbolic. Every relationship a lesson.

The Red Desert teaches her discipline, the cost of trust, and what it means to be seen as something more than a killer. Ansel offers her friendship, then betrayal, then something stranger: mercy. In Innish, Yrene Towers reminds Celaena that healing and hurting can exist in the same body—and that sometimes, giving away your armor (a ruby brooch, a pouch of gold) can be braver than drawing your blade.

By the time we reach the final novella, the road ahead feels inevitable. And yet, I still hoped. I hoped Sam would survive. I hoped Arobynn’s grip wouldn’t tighten. I hoped, absurdly, that love might be enough to save her.

But this is not a story that spares its heroine. This is the story that forges her.

When Celaena kneels in the King’s court, sentenced not to death but to a life of chains, she doesn’t scream. She doesn’t beg.

She survives.

And on that long, bitter road to Endovier, when the world has been stripped from her and only the memory of love remains, she sees the white stag—the Lord of the North, the symbol of her lost home—and finds something fierce and sacred still flickering inside her.

Not hope. Not yet. But resolve.

“I am Celaena Sardothien, and I will not be afraid.”

Those words hit like thunder. They are not pride. They are not bravado. They are the bones of her future self forming beneath the ash. This line, whispered into darkness, is a prophecy. A promise. And I will never forget the way it made me sit back, breathe deep, and believe in her all over again.

This book didn’t just deepen my love for the series. It reshaped it.

The Assassin’s Blade is not supplemental. It’s essential. It’s the foundation. The soul. The scar tissue. It is the quiet epic of a girl choosing—over and over—not to become the worst thing that ever happened to her.

Reading it felt like remembering something I’d forgotten I knew. Something about survival. About love. About fire.

Rating: ★★★★¾ (4.75/5)

For the ache. For the anger. For the boy who died, and the girl who didn’t. For the blade that became a queen.

reblog if the first musical you listened to was not Hamilton

Cherokee Miku from my home state of North Carolina!

I’m bored and nosy. Please reblog this with the book you’re currently reading.