Santa is on strike due to global warming. All presents this year will be delivered by Sasha the Christmas Tiger. Milk and cookies may not be sufficient.
“May you have a life of safety and peace”, said the witch, cursing the bloodthirsty warrior.
The words of the slain hold tremendous power.
It’s why any sensible warrior is a master of swift endings. Such as an arrow through the eye or a clean separation of head from shoulders. In a pinch, a slit throat will do. Though it really is best to avoid giving your enemy the chance to make even garbled curses out of their last bloody breaths. For even those without the slightest touch of magic have been known to make a curse stick if it’s uttered on the cold brink of death.
Eindred the Bloody collected curses in the same way that other warriors collected scars. Even in the wild chaos of battle, he was known to take a knee, pressing his ear to a felled enemy’s laboring lips.
May your every loved one die screaming in pain.
I hope you die with your eyes stabbed out and your heart in your hands.
You will never know happiness.
Your existence will be suffering.
May your greatest enemy rise from the grave and never leave you alone.
The last was his most recent curse, and Eindred wondered if it meant some great murdered brute was tracing his steps, waiting to catch him while he slept.
Eindred crossed the peninsula with a company of barbaric warriors, gaining a new curse from every enemy he felled. Not all of them would stick, he knew. But some undoubtedly would. And he would deserve every one.
Others in his company treated him with to wary, sidelong glances, because surely it was dangerous to travel with one so cursed as he. But Eindred was a force in battle, relentless and unstoppable as an icy winter gale, and so they swallowed their complaints, and contented themselves with leaving a wide berth on either side of his scarred, patchwork arms.
Eindred was marching at the back of the company when they came upon the village. It was a collection of squat, wooden homes tucked beneath a snow capped mountainside. From thatched rooftops, wisps of smoke from cooking fires rose, painting the blue sky in pale, meandering strokes.
This company tended to leave such settlements alone, and Eindred was glad for it. No warriors would be found in tiny mountainside villages, and though he might live to fight, he had no interest in wholesale slaughter.
This time, however, the company leader – a silent, brutish man, held up a hand.
Their company was running low on food, it turned out, and even from a distance, the warriors could see the village’s sheep – a trail of white spots on the green hillside.
Eindred was disappointed when, ultimately, violence erupted in the quiet village, though he did not lay down his thick handled blade.
The shepherd boy had refused to give up his master’s sheep, and when he shouted, a blacksmith had burst from his home, wielding a great hammer in his hand.
The battle was short.
When all was done, four lay dead. The shepherd, the blacksmith, and two young men who’d foolishly taken up crude wooden spears. The rest of the villagers huddled, terrified in their homes. The warriors expected to slaughter the sheep with no further trouble, but when they turned back to the field, an individual stood blocking their way.
His hair was dark – as the hair in these parts tended to be, and his face was sharp, both nose and cheeks splattered with freckles. Golden eyes beheld the warriors, and he watched them with a steady, measured gaze. Without the slightest hint of fear, he stood before them, his simple robe fluttering in the icy mountain’s breath, and said: “These are simple people. They have little in way of money or goods. It wasn’t for nothing that the shepherd, blacksmith, and teenagers died. They need these sheep. And I cannot allow you to take them.”
The other warriors in the company laughed at the young man’s foolishness – for that was what it looked like to them. Eindred did not laugh, however. Though the stranger’s voice was light, the air stirred around him.
It was rare to encounter one who commanded magics. Rare – but not impossible. And so Eindred alone was unsurprised when the young man turned his golden eyes to the heavens and summoned great branches of lightning which cleaved the skies above them. The world erupted and the men around Eindred screamed.
Eindred, who’d expected something like this, had already begun running.
Later, he would think it odd that the witch hadn’t bothered to move. But in the heat of battle, with lightning splitting the field at his back, Eindred’s attention had narrowed to the rough point of his blade – and then, the crimson place where it pierced the witch’s chest.
The skies silenced as Eindred pulled the wet, crimson blade free of its target.
It took just a moment for the witch to fall, but in that single, infinite moment, Eindred was subjected to the full weight of that golden gaze.
Legs folding beneath him, the witch crumpled, collapsing back onto the wild, wet grass. Eindred knelt beside him, grimly eager to hear the curse and be done with it. Surely a curse at the lips of one so powerful as this would finally bring an end to things?
To take one’s own life was an unspeakably shameful end for a warrior such as he. But a curse? Well, one couldn’t help how the wrong curse might speed things along.
The witch’s black hair was damp from the dew in the grass, and when he turned, it stuck to the side of his face and neck. His mouth opened and closed. Holding his breath, Eindred leaned in.
“-my hut…it’s just past…the next hill over,” the witch whispered. “In it, I keep medicines and herbs. For the villagers. And travelers who pass.”
Eindred shook his head. He didn’t understand.
Impossibly, the witch smiled. When he lifted a hand, Eindred twitched, expecting to be struck.
The witch’s bloodied finger, however, did nothing more than tap his chest. And then, in a wet, rattling breath, the witch, with his great power finally spoke his curse.
“May you live a life of safety and peace.”
Eindred sat, his thick, scarred knuckles braced in the dirt as the cold mountain wind whistled down the hillside at his back.
“What?” he whispered.
But the young man’s golden eyes were blank and empty, and the other warriors lay dead in the field. Only the relentless wind snapped and whistled in answer.
Eindred left.
Within a month, he’d joined up with another company. And it soon became clear the witch’s death rattle had been a curse of great power indeed. For wherever Eindred traveled, peace inevitably followed. Enemy warriors surrendered and when they didn’t, members within Eindred’s own company had sudden changes of heart. As for Eindred himself, not a single person would raise a blade against him, and Eindred had never been the sort who could raise his own blade against one who had no wish to fight.
And so for another month he wandered, hapless, without even the dark purpose of collecting curses which had driven him for the last several years.
He’d been raised with a sword in his hand, brought up knowing full well that his job in life would be to cut short the existence of any who stood against him. Not even thirty, and his soul was exhausted, worn ragged by such an life. And so, he’d sought a way out if it. Eindred had accumulated a terrifying number of curses – curses which would surely have felled lesser men than he. Before everything had gone wrong in the tiny village, he’d been sure it was only a matter of time before they overcame him.
But now, the witch’s single curse had overpowered them all.
Eindred was safer than he’d ever been in his life. He’d never known such a quiet, terrible peace.
After another month, he returned to the mountainside village. He didn’t have any good reason to return – other than perhaps the distant hope that a villager’s rage might be enough to overcome the curse. As he climbed the grassy hillside, he resigned himself to potential death by club or rake.
I still want to write the fic where an outsider has all these preconceptions about what the Force is and then goes into a room with a bunch of Jedi who are tearing into each other like bitchy old academics.
“Ooh, look at Master Structuralist over here with his ever-so-deep ‘everything is attachment actually’ reading”
“I don’t want to hear that from someone who calls every new opinion ‘new depths of their relationship with the Force’”
“The Jedi Order is a social construct–”
“Could you stuff the po-mo and pick up a book once in a while? These aren’t new ideas! You are not a pioneer because you asked one question!”
“I think you could all benefit on more reflection on how our rooting in the Force is actually deeply sexual–”
“If I have to hear one more word about lightsabers being penis envy you are going to be one with the Force immediately.”
yes please I need more jedi symposiums with knights who had different views than consulars who have different views than shadows. Temple-centered jedi versus those who lead frequent diplomatic or medical missions versus exploratory and research jedi who spend most of their time in uninhabited wild space and the outer rim.
There is absolutely no way an organization that large doesn’t have factions that understand the force differently–my 15-person philosophy class couldn’t agree on a single thing we read all term.
It happened six hundred years ago so no one knows but theories range from “he ate all the snacks” to “he personally instigated a duel meant to settle whether channeling the force through combat meditation is more effective than through regular meditation but the duel got out of hand and everyone but him lost at least one limb”
the truth is that he was never actually banned, he’s just been saying it so he doesn’t have to go. he started all the rumors himself
After Mortis anakin’s presentation is just standing ahsoka on stage solid 5 minutes and then as she’s rolling her eyes and about to hop off Morai flies past a window and anakin clicks to the next slide and it just says “the bird is the light side and it’s stalking my padawan”
anyway, fantasy universe where reincarnation is real but you keep absolutely none of the memories of your past lives and the only relevance is that your magical power is directly proportional to how old your soul is
secret cabals of wizards fighting over population growth because of their ideological commitments to particular distributions of magical power
“Do you know of Praidib’s law, Firem?” She was standing, talking, as if there was nothing more interesting going in the world
“Praidib…? What does that have to do with anything?!”
“A soul does not grow in power when not in a living body. It was quite ingenious, how Praidib proved it. I’m sure your classes at the university would have covered it eventually”
“If you hadn’t murdered them all? Yeah, maybe I’d have a more complete education.” I had nothing better to do than engage her, I suppose. I could not escape my bindings. “What’s your fucking point, Hillah?”
“Think of the consequences, Firem. The archmage’s soul is ten thousand years old. After the population explosion of the Blue Renaissance, two-thirds of the people in this world have souls less than a hundred years old. Less than one percent of the power that will be wielded by whichever lucky child happens to inherit that soul. And as long as that soul is embodied, it will continue to accumulate power and have a ten thousand year head start on the vast majority of the world. You have seen what people with power do to those without”
“His power certainly didn’t stop you from killing him”
“Nobody should have that kind of power, my dear. Not me, and not him, and not you. But how do you stop it? How do you even begin to slow down a soul’s accumulation of power? Why, Praidib’s law, of course.”
“So you think you’ve solved soulcaging? Is that your big plan?”
“No, of course not. Soulcaging is impossible. If you want a soul unhoused… you deny it a body. There’s a billion souls in the world today. Soon, there won’t be a billion bodies to house them. Or a hundred million. Or even twenty million. I’ve run the numbers. I know how long it took civilization to build up to its current numbers. I have given us time to catch up”
Twenty million. That was what she was planning? That was what her weapon would do? Wipe out hundreds of millions of lives? I could not say anything
“The vast majority of the souls embodied will be, why, the vast majority,” she continued, seeing my lack of reply “The children of the renaissance, with less than a century’s worth of power to them. But they can even out. They can age. The problem will not be solved, not entirely, but…”
“But nothing! In another millennium, those souls will be lucky to have aged another century, and the archmage’s soul will still be ten thousand years old! And every body it has, it will still be an unmatched wizard. You’ve accomplished nothing except mass murder.”
“I told, you dear, I run the numbers. I am well aware. There will still be some great mages being born… but we need not let them live.”
“You… fuck. That device you used earlier. You can track souls by age.”
“Indeed,” she smiled. “I can, and so can my disciples. When our dearest archmage pops up again, he or she will be lucky to make it six months. My organisation will rebuild the world, and for as long as they exist, we will be on even footing. Not me, of course. This is my last life for a while now. But humanity. And when we fail, because we will fail eventually, at least we’d have made the odds closer. I don’t know how many tens of thousands of years it will take, but… best start now”
And saying so, she threw her hands to the sky, and called upon death.
“No, sorry, OK, this just doesn’t make sense”
“Does it really? Or are you just refusing to-”
“No, it really doesn’t. Like, this is not an ethical argument against mass murder, we can hash that out later, just… I can see why you’d want a population below the number of souls, sure. You want a certain number of souls not incarnated and gaining power, and you think you can bias which souls that is with constant selective murder. What makes no sense is dropping the population to, what, two hundredths of the historical maximum? less? The rate at which total human magical power accumulates is proportional to population. If you want new souls catching up to old ones, you want them gaining more power over time, not less. That means a population slightly under a billion, but not much smaller”
“I…what?” She started rifling through some papers in a nearby desk. “I could swear… crap crap crap.”
“Are you sure you didn’t mean you actually wanted to kill twenty million people, rather than leave twenty million survivors?”
“Shut up. Maybe. Look, I outsourced this to Satrean, his notes weren’t super clear, I might’ve… shit.”
“Gods fucking above, Hillah, did it not come up at any point how many people you were going to kill?”
“Oh, I’m sorry, have you ever run a secretive organisation of assassins that’s trying to upend the world order? You compartmentalise information! You don’t have an all-hands meeting every Fireday to talk about your doomsday plans!”
“Well, I apologise for implying you should put your ability to figure out what actually are your goals and how you achieve them above your cloak and dagger roleplaying. I’m sure it’d ruin your fun to double-check.”
“Shit, shit, shit… look, yeah, OK, it makes more sense the other way, you’re right. Do you mind staying tied up to that chair a couple hours more, I need to recalibrate this whole thing”
“Are you going to let me go if I say I do mind?”
“No”
“Worth a try. Anyway, going back to that argument we tabled about the ethics of mass murder…”
Tags:
#reincarnation #storytime #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #fun with statistics #fun with loopholes #death tw #amnesia cw #murder cw
Every so often, I remember that like 80% of Tumblr (myself included) was completely enraptured by a show where the big twist was that the main character forgot his childhood friend was murdered by his sister, and for some reason only remembers his childhood friend ever existing as a dog.
And in that same episode it’s revealed that the same sister…..like…..hypnotized (?) the main character’s arch rival into hating him by, like, staring at him for a few minutes.
series 3 of sherlock: john marries mary morstan off-camera, the show mocks all the fans who kept the hype up during a two year hiatus, mary turns out to be an assassin who shoots sherlock, during which time he has a near-death-experience dream about his dog redbeard who was put down. also there’s a weird scene where john is revealed to be attracted to danger and so he dated mary because he was subconsciously picking up the fact that she used to be an assassin. also the series ends with sherlock committing murder in front of witnesses to save john and mary.
christmas special: sherlock goes on a bender where he hallucinates a victorian-era case, the episode ends with moriarty seemingly returning via social media and mycroft making a cryptic reference to “the other one.” oh, also any consequences from sherlock committing murder are immediately negated.
series 4: HOO BOY.
episode 1: mary is killed due to her assassin past, but no one really cares since she’s only been in the show for all of four episodes. she keeps coming back as a recorded voice/hallucination.
episode 2: john goes to a new grief counseler. also he keeps hallucinating mary. sherlock is told to solve a murder by the murderer’s daughter, but it turns out that while the murderer has a daughter, it’s not the woman who gave him the case to solve! eurus, sherlock and mycroft’s sister, has simultaneously masqueraded as john’s grief counseler and the murderer’s daughter and a random woman who keeps following sherlock because she’s a master of disguise! (to be fair, this is a legitimately cool reveal and I genuinely didn’t see it coming)
episode 3: HOO. FUCKING. BOY. eurus is sherlock and mycroft’s sister who’s been in a prison for the criminally insane for decades. mycroft has withheld this knowledge from both sherlock and their parents by claiming she died in a fire she started. turns out she’s able to hypnotize people with ???? her superior intellect ???????? and so even talking to her makes people want to do things for her like commit murder ????????? and so she’s somehow able to do things like escape from her scary island prison and then take herself back, blow up baker street, kidnap multiple people, and then pull Saw-esque morality problems on Mycroft and Sherlock and John where she just murders people for funsies with no apparent motive. IT IS DURING THIS SEQUENCE THAT IT IS REVEALED THAT SHERLOCK HAD A HUMAN BEST FRIEND THAT EURUS MURDERED BUT REWROTE HIS OWN MEMORIES TO IMAGINE IT WAS A PET DOG WHO DIED.
Y’ALL. IT IS SO DUMB. IT IS SO DUMB THAT THE FANDOM GENUINELY HAD A CONSPIRACY THEORY GOING FOR A WHILE THAT THERE HAD TO BE A SECRET FOURTH EPISODE – OF A SHOW THAT ONLY EVER HAD THREE EPISODES PER SERIES – BECAUSE THERE WAS NO WAY THAT SOMETHING THAT BAD COULD BE THE FUCKING FINAL EPISODE.
There is one thing in the final episode of Sherlock season 4 that I remember fondly: the moment where Mrs Holmes states, in front of her two sons – and in a tone of voice that suggests it’s an obvious fact – that of the two of them Sherlock has always been the grown-up one. I’m not convinced Sherlock had earned that, but Mycroft absolutely had.
(I stopped watching Sherlock after season 2, when I realised that the show I had hoped it would be and believed it had the potential to become was in no way the show its creators were interested in making, but I’ve seen the final episode of season 4 because I happened to be at a friend’s house when they were watching it. Everything about it confirmed that I’d made the right choice.)
…until I got to pedanther’s reblog (he is the sort of person who reliably snopeses things and points out when you are reading a satire piece, which I appreciate), I was about 90% convinced this was one of those facts-i-just-made-up types of performance art you get on tumblr dot com. what the entire fuck. i hadn’t even heard sherlock was *having* a series four, apparently because all my friends have better taste than to bother with… whatever the fuck that was.
we talk about shows jumping a shark, but i think this is the first time i have heard about one that not only jumped its own shark but jumped *every conceivable shark*. i am very glad i gave up after the orientalism episode, whichever season that was.
(let us say, the first orientalism episode, the one that opened with a girl sensually stroking a teapot. there was probably more than one orientalism episode, just based on how thoroughly moffat seems to keep showing his whole ass in the belief that it’s art.)
Watching the opening scene of BBC Sherlock 3×01 was the first time I had ever seriously wondered whether I was dreaming and had the answer turn out to be “no”.
I gave up about twenty minutes in.
(My mom kept going, and I saw some bits and pieces of that when I was in the same room; the stuff I saw corroborates the above thread.)
Tags:
#reply via reblog #BBC Sherlock #death tw #murder cw #amnesia cw #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what
i would never work as a gothic heroine which is a shame because i’ve got the looks for it but the firm presence of mind to gtfo from anything unpleasant
ruined aristocrat who has a dark reputation spoken about only in whispers: May we speak alone for a moment?
me, Aware of things: No thank you, we’ve only just met. My aunt is my chaperone and a lovely conversationalist. Please do come and discuss her seventeen dogs
he keeps trying to grab my waist but everytime he leans over me my enormous hat knocks him right in the jaw
he keeps struggling to pull me up but he steps on my dress every two seconds
he lifts my arms over my head and tries to jiggle me into sitting up on my knees but i just looked like a squashed horse stuffed into a dress like :p
he tries to take me by my leg but i just flop back down and my petticoats are silk and therefore very slippery
eventually he gets fed up and calls a stableboy over and the stableboy tries to take me up by my head, yanking at me at the neck, and then my passionate possessive lover is like “no you little idiot! here take one of her feet” and dashes over to take me by the arms but as he leans over my enormous hat knocks him in the jaw
they’re trying to slowly drag me over to his carriage but all of the townspeople have stepped out of their houses and shops
people are slowly looking out of their carriages like “what the fuck?”
meanwhile the stableboy has his grip on my leg and the passionate possessive lover is carrying me by my arms like a ragdoll with his head thrown back so he doesn’t get knocked in the jaw again by my enormous hat and my derrière is skidding against the dirt making a lady-shaped line from one end of the street to the next
“This is not very elegant,” my possessive ex-lover pants. With his head tilted back, I can’t see his face, but I can see the bead of sweat rolling its way down his jaw.
“If you sweat on me,” I say. pointing my toe so that my foot runs the risk of slipping out of the shoe the stable boy is clinging to, “I’ll use the hat.”
My possessive ex-lover swears and digs his nails into my arm when my derriere catches on a cobblestone. “Aren’t you already using the hat?”
A boy standing just outside his front door, close enough to have heard my threat, whoops. “She says she’s going to use the hat!”
The ensuing cheer from our onlookers puts the first hint of unease in my ex-lover’s eyes.
The crowd begins to chant. “Use the hat!” they cry in unison, “use the hat!” I grin wickedly, looking my possessive ex-lover dead in the eyes. “Whatever the people want.” His eyes are huge with panic now. I only grin wider, glare more fiercely. I am going to use the hat. This is a grand spectacle now, and he will not see the finale.
Brinens and Things 