"Good morning you beautifully gorgeous creature, you are a goddess of such fine proportions that I can't get you out of my mind.. I love you so much, this is true."
When I think of you, I can't stop thinking about you - eUë
Man I’m just trying to look at pictures of doves to reblog why is some freak’s creepy fanfic abt a real ass K Pop band in a Tag for old religious paintings of birds
Inktober scans - Day 1-7(10) Challenge #russianwitches_inktober
Kinda really like the idea that the entirety of Arda and Tolkien’s Legendarium is a reimagined history of the world we’re all currently living in, except Men survived but the other races simply went extinct as the continents broke up and formed what we know today as our modern world.
That would roughly put us in Seventh Age Arda today.
Gives a whole new meaning to the “time of Men” being on the rise in Lord of the Rings.
I love reimagined historical figments like this, like how some can still imagine dragons were once real, but went extinct, falling into legend among Elves and more.
It reminds me of the end of How to Train Your Dragon, specifically the book series.
I don’t know, I think it’s kind of cool to plant in kids’ heads that magic definitely existed once upon a time, though it doesn’t now, but who’s to say someone can’t rediscover it?
EST. APRIL 2015
Nestled away on a beautiful island in the Caribbean is a school like no other. The Institute for Advanced Learning, more commonly called, The Institute. The school promises the education of a lifetime, but there are deeply held secrets associated with the school. Do you have what it takes to succeed at The Institute?
CURRENT BAN: NONE
Main - Plot - Rules - Ask - Apply
I wrote this exclusively for Patreon in 2017 so I hope you all enjoy and please feel free to leave feedback on it or on any other pieces I've written! Thank you again and enjoy!
-Brittany xo
CURSED
Victor Frankenstein is cursed.
He wasn’t always. As a young man he was incredibly blessed.
It is those circumstances that draw evil towards them. Many say good triumphs over evil; is stronger than evil. This is however not the end all be all. Some evil thrives on the energy of goodness and taking that away; poisoning it until it dissipates into nothing. Some evil is drawn towards happiness and goodness and some evil is so strong its very presence leeches the blessings away. Whatever the method, the evil is a curse bound to a person or family or place like it was to Victor Frankenstein.
How do I know this? Because it is I who has been his curse taking away all that he has ever cared about.
Years from now people shall speak about the story of young Frankenstein and call it a story about science and a story about the ethics of creating life. But truly the story is a theological one relating to demonological elements. This is truly a story about a curse; one that tore apart the life of a promising young soul. This curse could not touch the soul of its intended Victor Frankenstein but it could take everything else in hopes he’d deliver himself willingly into my embrace. The most valuable souls to take are those who started out pure and light and have been punctured by tragedy then offered willingly and tossed away against The Almighty’s rule. Good intentions pave the road to Hell. Oh do they ever...
Victor Frankenstein had a wonderful childhood; wonderful parents; a wonderful home and even the blessing of a wonderful foster sister Elizabeth. He was even to have his very own brother a mere year before he was to set off to University. Blessings abounded in The Family Frankenstein.
Make no mistake the death of Mrs. Frankenstein was not my doing or the doing of any dark agent. Sometimes The Almighty calls souls home. It is up to the mortals left to decide the path to pursue whilst they still live.
It is easiest for evil to creep its way into the heart and mind where grief dwells. Upon the death of his mother, Victor Frankenstein’s very soul cried out in pain. And I heard it. And it summoned me. And I answered him.
Never again... I whispered into his ear that day. My whisper a seed that planted its roots firmly in Victor’s heart and slowly infested his mind.
He set off to university with the idea that he would find a way to conquer death. No one can conquer death. To do so means you harness the power of life. No one has the power of life save for God The Almighty. None of the angels or saints or especially any mere mortal man has the power to create life. Not pure and true life anyway. That is why Victor was doomed to fail. And this is perhaps why so many will argue his story was about the ethics of life and its creation.
What Victor Frankenstein created did not live. To live, you need a soul. No one can grant such a thing except for God and Victor Frankenstein assuredly is not God.
But that desire to be is what makes mortals so corruptible.
Although I hung over Victor after his mother’s death and all through his university days I had no power to act. I am a demon that feeds upon corruption and is nurtured by fulfillment of my terms of death. I could not act any further until Victor fed me with his own deformed deeds. His curse and the form it would take would be his choice whenever he chose to act.
Had he become a drunk and vile, corrupted man, my powers over his life would have taken a much different manifestation. Perhaps his family would have all abandoned him slowly and perhaps his health would also slowly leech away until both his physical and spiritual well-being was reduced to next to nothing and his depraved soul would have been mine only then.
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Putting my lamb Marcel to good use =)
Talas' eel head is really fun to draw, good shapes.
Uh oh S̸͙̰͌̏ṋ̴́̔a̷̱͕̒̽ḑ̵̹̎r̷̭̓ĩ̵͙̼
@spearxwind
Wu Zetian’s Dragonet had been modified rather far from the original design—the first prototype of the vessel, a one-person submersible, had been controlled by the entire body, including the feet. Given the fact that Zetian could barely walk unaided, and certainly couldn’t exert the downward force she would need to command the standard Dragonet depth controls, her vessel had been altered. Instead of the usual foot pedals, Zetian’s Dragonet answered entirely to her hands, except for an emergency switch that she could hit with a knee in order to send a location ping and call for help.
Help was a pipe dream out here, but that didn’t matter. Help was always a fantasy. Out here, in the ocean, it was Zetian and the submarine that hummed around her like a part of her body, and she liked it that way.
Zetian had joined the crew of the Jiaoren for the same reason she originally joined the Dragonet program. It was the same reason she was now sinking through the photic layer toward the eternal dark of the Mariana Trench.
Seven years ago, the biggest entertainment company in Asia, Xiangxiang Entertainment, had planned to make a documentary that would cement them a place in history. They had rented a ship named the Kulitu, and Gao Qiu, the CEO, had ensured that they recruit as much scientific talent as they could possibly bribe or blackmail into aligning themselves with the project. They had loaded lab equipment, camera equipment, and everyone needed to operate both onto the Kulitu, and set sail to prove the existence of mermaids.
Wu Ruyi, Zetian’s big sister, had been working as the perfectly polished, perfectly shy and earnest, perfectly perfect face of Xiangxiang, at the time. Ruyi had laughed when Zetian snorted at the idea of her latest mission, and she had promised to send her little sister a video every day while they were at sea. She had been on board when they left for the Mariana Trench.
She had also been on board when they found exactly what they were looking for.
Neither Wu Ruyi nor any other living being had been left when the Kulitu was found, bloody and adrift, six weeks later. Not even bodies had been left behind. But video footage—there was plenty of that.
Zetian stopped laughing at the idea of mermaids, after the Kulitu. Everyone else was ready and eager to believe that the surviving footage was edited, Xiangxiang Entertainment trying to take morally bankrupt advantage of the tragedy to legitimize the mission in the first place. Zetian didn’t agree. Zetian knew too much. She knew how the documentary was supposed to have been made, full of near-misses of beautiful women and iridescent scales, artfully designed by a roomful of writers and convincingly delivered by Ruyi’s wide eyes. It wasn’t a plan that matched up with the footage leaked from the Kulitu—footage full of blood and needle teeth, sinuous eel bodies and many-boned claw-tipped fingers.
Zetian had dedicated the last seven years of her life to becoming the most qualified Dragonet pilot to dive into the Mariana Trench, over her family’s objections, and when Xiangxiang decided to prove their innocence with another voyage, they came to Zetian first.
Zetian had signed on without a moment’s hesitation, and now here she was, descending into the dark.
It had taken time, but Zetian had come to like the sea. She wasn’t a natural fanatic like so many of the scientists, some of whom had gotten so rapturous there were actual tears when Yizhi asked them about their work. Zetian had been born on land and had intended to stay there, thank you very much, but she needed answers more than she needed to be landlocked, and—
Well. The Dragonet didn’t care about her shattered feet. She didn’t totter or wobble in the water, and no one rushed to grab her or touch her under the ocean. Here, she was exactly as helpless as any other human, against the uncaring might of the deeps, and that made her as close to all-powerful as she was ever going to be.
A red light blinked on the Dragonet’s primary control panel. Zetian reached out and touched the radio commands, and said, “This is Wu Zetian.”
“Pilot Wu,” Yizhi said, his voice only mildly distorted by the radio link. He said her title with a kind of playful excitement that she found helplessly endearing.
Halfway through her training, Zetian had, entirely by accident, stumbled across one of Gao Qiu’s sons, while Yizhi was effectively in hiding from his family—in the form of his fourth degree, all of them only moderately useful—and Zetian was limping by on dollar-store noodles while her family tried to starve her out of the Dragonet training. She had been as surprised as anyone to board the Jiaoren and find him there. Zetian, who prided herself on having no shame whatsoever when it came to getting what she wanted, was desperately curious to know the extent of the bargain Yizhi had made, in order to get himself appointed as the face of this second expedition.
Yizhi was using his Documentary Persona Voice over the radio, which was how Zetian knew that the cameras must be nearby, probably watching Yizhi watch the feed from the Dragonet’s external cameras. She appreciated the warning.
“Anything interesting so far?”
“Some fish,” Zetian said with a touch of humor in her voice. “But nothing I’d call a mermaid yet. I’m just reaching—” she checked her depth readout “—six hundred meters, about halfway through the mesopelagic zone.”
“Impressive,” Yizhi said, enthusiastic as ever. “Your operations team is about to take the radio back, and I won’t bother you for the rest of the drop—is there anything you’d like to say, for posterity?”
Zetian took a huge, deep breath, and then let it out, slow and controlled. “Yes,” she decided in the same moment she spoke. “I’m going to prove what happened to my sister. I’m going to make her proud. Everyone else can choke, for all I care.”
“That’s the spirit,” Yizhi said, and it should have sounded like a platitude, but instead it warmed Zetian to her bones.
Then it was her operations team again, and Zetian was dropping into the deepest part of the dark, with only the lights of her Dragonet and the increasingly sparse fish for company.
The wall of the trench, where it narrowed into the Challenger Deep, was Zetian’s guideline as she descended, using it alongside her depth meter to ensure that she was in the right place. She switched her lights to red as she passed the thousand meter mark, where she was officially in the bathypelagic zone—the midnight sea where sunlight never touched. Most of the creatures here couldn’t even see red light, and didn’t care much about the Dragonet or anything else that wasn’t food.
Something quick, a grey shadow, whipped by the porthole window. Zetian almost jumped, and tried to look after it, but it was gone.
“Wu Zetian to Jiaoren,” she said, still watching the water as she tapped the radio to life. “Did the camera get a better look at that?”
It would take a minute or two for them to get back to her, with the communication delay to the surface, through all that weight of water. Zetian could make a lot of progress in a couple of minutes, if she pushed the Dragonet and her skills.
Zetian concluded that caution was the better part of valor, and dropped as slowly as she could, instead.
Five minutes passed, Zetian creeping downward through the lower range of the bathypelagic and keeping a careful eye on the water.
Then the red light on her console flicked on, and she tapped it to life.
The problem with audio communications, Zetian thought numbly as she listened, was that it took longer. It had to—the data packets had to come through all at once to be coherent, and therefore, it took more time to get the whole message.
Someone should do something about that. It was so, so dangerous, to take that extra time, when the message at hand was:
“Wu Zetian, remain calm. Come back to the surface. Now.”
Zetian only hesitated for a moment. It was a stupid impulse, the impulse to go deeper, to see more, to—what—look for her jiejie’s spirit, haunting the water, maybe turned into a thing of the sea herself. If anyone was going to weep pearls, it would be jiejie.
But, no. Zetian wasn’t an explorer. She wasn’t a scientist. She wasn’t even here to get her name in a history book. All she was here to do was to prove that Wu Ruyi hadn’t been lost at sea, and hadn’t been involved in a hoax. Her sister was a brilliant journalist whose name had been smeared beyond repair by the world’s conviction that mermaids were a fantasy, and Zetian was here to make sure everyone knew it.
She had to be alive, to do that.
The Mariana Trench would always be here. If she wanted to dive again, she had weeks on the Jiaoren to do just that.
Zetian tapped the radio again, pulled up on the controls, and said, “I’m coming up. End depth, just shy of four thousand feet.”
A hand came to rest, feather-light, on the window.
The air froze in Zetian’s lungs. For a moment, she thought, only a little hysterically, of Ruyi, telling her that Xiangxiang had hired a troupe of performers, professional mermaids, to travel on the Kulitu. To be their near-misses, Ruyi had said, with that look of delicate amusement that said she was too nice to roll her eyes, but if Zetian wanted to, Ruyi wouldn’t judge her for it. Maybe somehow, impossibly…?
Logic reasserted itself almost immediately. Zetian was almost four thousand feet below the surface of the ocean. If she wasn’t safe in the pressure vessel of her Dragonet, she would have been crushed underfoot like a lightbulb being shattered on impact. The hand was so delicate, so fragile, the webbing between the many-jointed fingers almost as thick as the digits themselves. There was no way that fragile skin was concealing a pressure suit, let alone one that would get someone here.
When the mermaid pulled itself, hand over hand, up the Dragonet and looked through the window, Zetian didn’t even jump. She thought, distantly, that she was going to be very proud of that, later.
At such close range, it did not look human. But—humanoid. Close enough that some sailor on a dark night, peering through the surf and the fog, could be forgiven for the mistake. Its face was skeletal, with nothing that could be called a nose, but possessed huge, liquid black eyes and startlingly sensual lips. It was framed in a cloud of writhing shadow, spotted here and there with winking blue-white lights. Its hands were so fragile, but apparently strong, clinging to the hull of the Dragonet as Zetian rose.
Zetian needed to reach out and tap the radio back to life. She knew this. But she felt caught, trapped in the round pools of the mermaid’s eyes—aware, in the deepest parts of her brain, that she was being observed by a predator, and profoundly unwilling to do anything that might aggravate it.
Slowly, carefully, Zetian raised a hand. She saw the mermaid’s attention shift to it, and considered that she might be about to bet her life on the quality of the dive-graded window of her Dragonet. But the mermaid hung there, watching, as Zetian reached, so slowly it made her muscles tremble, to the panel, and tapped the radio.
“I am remaining calm,” was the first thing out of Zetian’s mouth, and she wanted to slap herself. She inhaled, still staring at the mermaid, entranced, and her voice sounded so neutral it was almost robotic when she spoke again. Its lips had parted a little bit, perhaps in fascination, or in hunger. In a human, it might have been a coy expression. In the mermaid, it only revealed the vast number of needle-sharp teeth. “There is currently a mermaid that has attached itself to the Dragonet. Call security to the launching dock.”
And then Zetian slapped her hand down on the controls for her running lights.
The mermaid recoiled as the Dragonet’s lights blazed white, like midday in comparison to the all-consuming black of the water. Its hands scrabbled, just a little weakened by the shock, and its mouth opened wide, displaying all those teeth. Maybe it was screaming, and she just couldn’t hear it through the water and the metal.
It drew back a hand and punched the window. It was a show of force more than anything, Zetian knew it. It didn’t even wobble the window. The evidence of her Dragonet’s sturdy construction did not make her feel better.
Zetian didn’t wait to see more. She accelerated toward the surface, demanding all that her engine could give, and tried not to gasp herself lightheaded.
She wasn’t a scientist. She wasn’t one of the ocean’s natural lovers. All she was ever going to be, Zetian sometimes thought, was the teenager she had been when word came of the Kulitubeing found, empty. She was always going to be looking for her sister.
But, fuck, she didn’t want to die down here, trapped underwater with nothing but the inhuman faces of the mermaids for company. If she died on this mission, so be it. Her bones would rest easier on the sea floor with her jiejie than on land with the rest of her family. But let her die in the air, where she could at least heave a last breath, rather than alone in the dark, four thousand meters from the world where she belonged.
Zetian rose fast, faster than was wise, probably faster than was safe. She was counting completely on her lights, still turned all the way up, to chase away anything that might be in her path. And for a while, as her depth meter ticked its way upward, toward the mesopelagic, toward the world of sunlight, she thought she was safe. The red light was blinking again, alerting her to her team trying to get through, but she didn’t have time for it right now. She was rising, back to the world where humanity lived in security, and the equipment would tell her operations team as much. They didn’t need to hear from her. They didn’t—
The speaker chimed neutrally to announce that her team had overridden the controls, and then she heard, of all things, Yizhi, sounding like he was maintaining his calm only through sheer force of will.
“Zetian,” he said, “the mermaid is clinging to the stern of the Dragonet. It appears to have wedged itself against the housing of your rudder. Continue back toward the Jiaoren’s dock. Security is here, we’re going to figure out how to get the mermaid off you.” He paused—they were nearly back to real-time now, with Zetian rising so quickly—and then continued, “Good work with the lights.”
Zetian blindly pressed the button to speak and asked the only question that mattered.
“Were there more?”
She had watched the Kulitu footage until she saw it in her nightmares. She knew that mermaids did not prefer to go one-on-one with their prey. They preferred a huge advantage in numbers, to match their advantage in natural weaponry and camoflage. One mermaid probably couldn’t do anything dire to her Dragonet. But enough mermaids?
Well. Her engines could only do so much. And eventually, her air would run out. Or they would crack her hull, and she would die in a swift, sudden flood of water, killed by the pressure before she could drown.
There was a highly suspicious beat before Yizhi responded.
“No,” he said, and then, more honestly, “None that we can confirm. Where are you now?”
“Two thousand and rising fast,” Zetian said.
“Good. I’ll leave you to it.”
Zetian had never been particularly religious, but she prayed to every spirit, god, or ancestor she could remember the name of, as the glimmering light of the surface drew close. She was putting an intolerable amount of pressure on the hull, forcing it to depressurize so quickly, but the sunlight was right there.
Something slammed into the Dragonet from below, moving fast. It jolted her, hard. Another impact, further up the body of the hull. Then a third. Alarms began to scream.
They were trying to bring her down, Zetian realized. She was so close—barely a hundred meters left, back into the clear sunlit waters, where she could see the vast shadow of the ship overhead. She just had to keep them from damaging anything beyond repair until she could surface.
The last hundred meters were the worst twenty seconds of her life. She was guessing, half-wishing, that there were only a handful of mermaids on her—three, or maybe four if one was still hanging onto her hull. They were hitting her in a calculated, staggered series of impacts, trying to throw her off-balance, maybe trying to roll her clear over like someone trying to flip a shark upside down to make it docile. It was an alarmingly good strategy, even if her metal hull was more resistent than an average ocean-going target might be. It suggested a level of intelligence that she was, frankly, extremely uncomfortable with.
Later assessment of the Dragonet would prove two things. First, whatever her reasons for getting into a Dragonet in the first place, Wu Zetian had earned her place on the Jiaoren with nothing but skill and talent. Her engineer swore that she must have been keeping the engines online through sheer willpower, because there was certainly nothing mechanical to explain it. Second, mermaids were smart. More than smart, they were clever. They had targeted the riveted joins in the metal, trying to crack them. They had targeted the porthole, trying to find a weakness. They had even tried, with a disturbing success rate, to hit the engines and shut them down. It should have occurred to them, everyone said, after seeing how many boats went missing around the Mariana Trench, but…
Zetian wasn’t thinking about that as she set her sights on the Jiaoren’s launch, though. She wasn’t doing any calculations, wasn’t thinking about strategy, wasn’t even thinking about Ruyi. Her mind was a blank white shriek of determination, a single atavistic impulse that every creature shared—I will not die here.
The last impact on the Dragonet was a shuddering blow to the port hull that sent water trickling in around Zetian’s feet.
She chose not to notice it. Instead, she chose to notice the launch, and to notice the sunlight above her, and to notice that she was—
In.
The launching dock closed behind her, and Zetian sat there, clutching her controls and shaking in every bone, staring out at the clustered crowd as they stared back at her.
Zetian reached out a trembling hand and pointed backward, doing her best to convey the vital question of is there anything on my hull. She recognized the big security officer nearest her, the one with a scar on his face and thick glasses. He had been the one assigned to help her bring the Dragonet onboard. She had told him to fuck off. He had ducked his head and muttered something about his job, and she’d been bitter about having to let him stand there, even if he wasn’t allowed to touch her Dragonet.
Now, he was gesturing to her, and she was too wired on adrenaline to even understand what he was trying to get across.
Finally, a thought connected and Zetian fumbled for her controls. Her radio crackled to life, sounding worse than it had at the bottom of the ocean, and she rasped out, “Am I good to open the hatch?”
“You are,” one of her operations team said, sounding almost as shaky as she felt. “The impacts appear to have shaken off your, uh. Passenger.”
“Amazing,” Zetian said, and popped open the hatch without another word. She did not want to be in her Dragonet anymore. Actually, she was not certain she wanted to be in her Dragonet ever again.
She tried to heave herself out of the Dragonet with her arms, and slipped on a thick layer of silvery slime. Before she could crack her jaw on the metal and knock herself ignominiously unconscious, after surviving arguably the worst conceivable deep-sea scenario without a scratch, a hand caught her, and lifted her like she weighed nothing at all. The security officer begain to set her on her feet, and Zetian’s body tried to crumple under her own weight.
It was not dignified to have a security officer she had already established a feud with catch her, much less hoist her up into a bridal carry, but Zetian was frankly too much in shock—and probably feeling too pressure-sick, now that she thought about it—to do anything.
“Security officer,” Zetian said, or thought she said, over the ringing in her ears, “I think I am going to pass out now.”
The last thing she saw was the security officer’s dark eyes blinking at her in alarm, and she heard his voice rumble through her like an earthquake. She thought he was saying her name. She thought to herself that she hadn’t known he knew her name.
And then she wasn’t thinking anything at all.
Artist: Vincent Proce TCG Player Link Scryfall Link EDHREC Link
@oc-growth-and-development
Limping from the snowy blizzard into the sheltered cave, Oster dragged it's hind leg, the clicking of it's front legs as it dragged itself deep in the cave.
As it leaned against the back wall, it sat down, it's segmented tail sweeping to rest against it's cracked hoof.
Oster looked back at it's wings. Fluttering them slightly, it winced. The rear left one had a jagged tear in it, and that along with the fierce cold wind meant that it couldn't fly home.
Giving a whine, it carefully laid down, arranging it's four front legs to fold properly so it could lay on them. It's injured leg sticking out, Oster rested it's head on the cold stone floor, and waited till morning.
maybe im just tired but this is the funniest thing anyone has said abt my header i think im going to die .
