The Horrors Persist But My Friends Write Beautiful Fanfic

I'll never drop my sword.

scenes from my recent animation.

Observances

Merlin/Arthur | Mature | No Archive Warnings Apply | Word Count: 373

Historical AU | Festivals | Prophecies | Second Person POV (Merlin)

For the @merlinmicrofic prompts "feast" and "new year."

Will post to Ao3 once it's back up.

Arthur's halls are decorated for the birth of the sun, Saturnalia was a sennight ago, and you saw an ominous sign this morning in the movement of the birds.

small tw: for animal (bird) death

☾ ☾ ☾

Arthur’s hall is decorated with yew branches. Up and down the benches there is elaborate food upon decorated plates of a dull silver that he told you was called pewter. His hounds whine and beg for scraps from the revellers, having grown bored of the swan wing that had been tossed to them. Now it lay on the straw strewn floor, gnarled and upsetting. 

Your eyes are on him, but everyone’s eyes are on him, they always are. Warlord, lord, king. Tonight he wears an abolla that is a red as rich as blood (and you’ve seen plenty of blood, by now). His hair and eyes are pale against the colour but not diminished by them. 

But his eyes are on you. They shouldn't be on you, not as much as they are, they need not ever be on you, but they are. You’re a servant, what’s more you are of the Silures, reviled by his father, yet his eyes have been on you since you were crowned with oak leaves for saving his life.

What a strange mix of observances that he claims as his own. 

On Saturnalia he said that you could do anything, so you sat in his lap and had him feed you figs and almonds with his fingers.

But that was a sennight ago, now above his chair there is a bower of willow and ivy, now he raises his cup and you go to his side to pour him grape wine from across the sea. 

He would put you to death for your aurgury this morning. It was the flight of the hedge sparrows that alerted you just a breath before it happened; a peregrine claimed an ouzel, too slow to retreat to the coppice, right before your eyes. There are signs in everything, you are finding, even the strange prognostications of the Romans. Ouzel cock, black druid, guide to the otherworld. Your people go unmarked in death as they do in life. There are few left, even, to cry your name. Fewer still will survive to see the spring.  

The fire is making you sweat, causing the woad staining your arms to run. 

His cup goes up, the room stills.

“The sun is reborn,” Arthur says. 

one thing the show doesn't care about enough: the dragonlords and the dragons themselves. they were hunted to extinction. merlin is the last of his kind. and he'll never know anything about being a dragonlord because his entire family and anyone who might've known about them is gone. how do you fix that? you can't. there's nothing you can ever do to make up for something like that. absolutely nothing.

and i love fics that explore arthur surviving and struggling through the realisation of just what kind of monster his father was for everyone else but also. they rarely focus on that bit of history, on the fact that uther actually managed to destroy that part of magic completely as merlin is the very last of his kin and there are only two dragons left (the first one won't live much longer and he has no knowledge on how to help the second). uther actually did eradicate something, it wasn't magic as a whole maybe but an entire branch of it is just gone.

sure, i'll drink the pink swirly potion that released a little heart shaped cloud when you uncorked it. what's the worst that could happen

Irish megalithic sites illustrated by Paul Blades.

Are there any poems that inspired TSV? I know I asked a similar question about plays, and I really loved the ones listen!

Well, there's a huge amount of Seamus Heaney in the landscape and vibes of TSV (particularly the bog-sacrifice poems for obvious reasons, the early Death of a Naturalist work trying to make sense of his childhood and parents, and his Buile Suibhne translations), and generally speaking we're sort of riffing off symbolist knight-errant narratives which includes poems like Faerie Queene.

They're almost too obvious and famous to be called influences, but I don't think you can write anything about religious and apocalyptic dread without feeling the looming shadow of The Waste Land, The Hollow Men and The Second Coming, and I think there's a lot of buried Rime of the Ancient Mariner homages in Carpenter's story (like one who on a lonesome road, etc) and Kubla Khan in Faulkner's.

Reblog if you think it’s okay to platonically say “I Love You” to your friends

Armored whump

- The heavy clunk of a Whumpee in armor brought to their knees.

- A sword slammed into the ground in an attempt to keep themself from falling right over.

- Arms trembling as they try to keep themself up, the weight of their armor pushing them further down, bearing on their bruises.

- They're already succumbing to gravity. They're panting, barely holding on, leaning heavily on their sword, or their staff, their lance.

- Making the effort to use it to push themself to their feet again, pulling the sword back out of the ground, swooshing their lance as they find the strength for another round.

- The sound of a sword clanking against stone when it's twirled out of their grip or when they no longer have the strength to hold it.

- A sword kicked away. Or worse, a heavy boot crunching down on it just as Whumpee manages to close a hand around the hilt.

- The soft clinking sounds of defeat drawing nearer when the enemy approaches slowly, fully aware Whumpee is already defeated. Metal crunches with each step. Armor jingles with his soft movements, when he crouches down in front of Whumpee.

- The tip of a sword scratching along over metal, teasing over their chest plates until it finally finds the weak spot of the armor and slowly pushes through.

- Also, armor is heavy :) Give me exhausted armored characters, dragging themself along. They are supposed to stay ahead of the rest, be their shield... but every battle and by now every step has been wearing on them. And it won't take long before they'll just collapse.

alas, poor knight