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It is only a gossamer veil.
I see your eyes shine through.
Show your face, play your tune, shout your name, light your fire,
And I shall paint your portrait, fair lady.
—
Me!
From the digital booklet I wrote for my album which stoopid iTunes have deleted! Wtf. So if you’ve downloaded the album and want to know about the cinematic context of the music I recorded in appropriate amounts of detail, you can find it here
(via sillywhatwell)
A Faint Taste of Bitter Almonds: lilajanet: megaupload I know we had some rough timesAnd I know I...
megaupload
I know we had some rough times
And I know I shouted sometimes
And I know you probably thought I didn’t careoh oh
But we, we had a bond
Something I came to depend on
And the way this ended really isn’t fairMegaupload, don’t you know
We never wanted you to go
It’s…
ODE TO ASYLUMS
this fragile air
isn’t enough.
this is known,
which is why you need to exist,
to reinstall hope
into those who are covered
in ripped bandages.
mummies in second-hand,
arms out,
moaning,
the truth is this fragile air
is the perfect set for
monster movies.
so thank you, for saving
my bleeding friend,
my brave rigger.
thank you for keeping
her ferocious while she
breathes this fragile air.
NaNoWriMo excerpt, Chapter 14: Memories
After all, there must have been a reason why he was showing her all of that. She had even felt sympathy for him; sympathy for Lorenz and his fate. He was probably about forty now that Nastasya looked at him calming himself down from the irritation he felt for his new assistant, and all it meant was that he was going to die soon.
I could sing if you asked me to, with cracking voice and broken tune.
I could sing of the snowblind, rime-ridden banks of the River Iving
Where I grew up, each morning crisp as hoarfrost.
But I was alone, and I couldn’t sing.I could draw if you wanted me to, with a pen carved of alicorn.
I could sketch the dappled light on green shoots, foam on the river,
The sound of fierce wildness, beyond a taming hand.
But I was lonely, and couldn’t draw.I could write if you wished me to, with a curving monstrous claw.
Gentle words to belie a vicious face, a growling voice. I would
Write the names of the stars for you, trace our lines back to the past.
But I was wounded, and couldn’t write.But now I chase Polaris –
And the song comes without shattering,
And the pen moves without burning,
And the words come without bleeding.And I will follow you, my Pollux, my Castor,
With the rising of the moon.
~nearly swooning~
Mermaid political crime drama? Sweet.
There was a young mermaid queen-to-be fleeing the Pacific after assassination attempts. She had two months before she reached mer-adulthood and her three aunts, who had ruled jointly in her stead as queen regents, were intent on seeing her killed.
Each aunt had a distinct personality and style. The first aunt had the lower half of a shark and was vicious and cruel; her assassins were armed with knives to rend and tear. The second aunt had the lower half of a lionfish; her assassins were armed with poisonous darts. The third aunt had the lower half of an octopus; her assassins were merely masters of deception and disguise.
Anyway, the queen and three or four of her subjects went into hiding in Puget Sound. I had apparently decided to spend reading period at Point Defiance, climbing trees and swimming near the beach rather than studying. I was sitting on a rock about fifty feet from the shore when I noticed that several seals were loitering nearby. I don’t particularly trust seals - their teeth are very sharp - so I slid into the water and attempted to swim parallel to the shore before arcing back in so that I didn’t disturb them. The seals, not being seals at all, apparently thought I was a spy and went after me, dragging me underwater and thrashing me against rocks until I stopped struggling.
I don’t know how long it took them before they realized that I was not an aquatic creature at all, but they didn’t kill me, and I somehow managed to communicate that I was a hoopy frood and no good for drowning, though they had picked an excellent time to try it right before final exams. They also decided that I was a clear choice for chief terrestrial liason.
Anyway, a lot of stuff happened, including one of the mermaids getting really annoyed that I was pretty much immobile and helpless underwater and deciding to kiss me (At World’s End?). Took me completely by surprise, but the worst part was that she was parasitised by cymotha exigua and her tongue had been eaten away by and replaced by this horrifying white louse. I ended up breathing in seawater and then throwing up trying to avoid her kisses - afterwards, when it didn’t work and I wasn’t able to breathe underwater, she was convinced that it was because we hadn’t made out for long enough.
The dream culminated at some point when we were examining the barnacles on the bottom of a ship one night, looking for some sort of clue that the owner was working for the regents. I don’t recall the precise details, but if the barnacles were all of a specific species and still alive, that meant the ship had only recently left its home waters because that species needed very specific water chemistry to survive which was only available in a narrow area very far away. We were trying to determine the ratio of live to dead barnacles in order to determine whether the ship had been pursuing us or anticipating us. (I love my brain, fabricating semi-sensible forensics for the occasion! Fantastic.)
Anyway, turns out it was a trap. We were ambushed by servants of the shark regent. They mistook one of the mermaids for the queen and ripped her in half before they realized their mistake. They were about to capture the rest of us, circling around and forcing us towards the surface, but we managed to catch the attention of the people on the ship. Turns out they were working for the second regent - there was enough sibling rivalry between the three aunts that they weren’t about to see the queen killed by either of the others. So there was a terrific fight, and we managed to escape in the heat of it - only to find ourselves beneath the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, which is like a world octopus hotspot.
I don’t remember what happened next, but I discovered that I had missed all of my finals and decided “Fuck it” and decided to run away with the mermaids to the Caribbean.
They had no idea. That little fluffy haired boy and his sister had no idea what it would be like if they ever ended up in mortal danger like he’d faced in the arena, like he’d seen children die in for the past 30 or more years. And they never would. He’d stopped counting consciously, but each pair of eyes he’d met and learned about at each games he’d mentored flashed before him.
The boy stabbed the girl and the entire family laughed because the sword was plastic, the injuries were only faked, and they would sit on their couches with sweets and food and watch 23 more children—just a few years older than their own—die, watch their blood splatter across the grass or in the ocean or on the snow.
They would never know, could never know the terror, the feeling that anything and everything could kill you at any second. The worst they had to worry about was getting food stains on their clothes. They would never understand that these children had families, too. That back at home in each of the districts, two families were watching in terror every second of every day, waiting for that announcement that their son or daughter wasn’t going to be coming home. And they didn’t get any compensation like the Victors, either. They simply had to move on. That was it. Almost none of them could afford funerals, especially in the outlying districts, they had to settle for burying them in a shallow grave. At least the Capitol was gracious enough to provide caskets.
He hated them, their pretentious over-manufactured looks, their skin dyed unnatural colors. It made him sick to sit here year after year and pretend that he didn’t hate them. That’s what the alcohol was for. If he drank enough, he could forget that these people, these fucking people, thought it was fun to watch poor children and teenagers mutilate each other. Now, seventy-four years later, no one even remembered the Dark Days, not what they were taught about them, but what had actually happened. No one was still alive from those days, and who was to say the Capitol hadn’t made up the story they told anyway?
This year, he was putting up with this, even though watching that child stab his sister with no remorse—laughing even—felt like he was being stabbed, too. There was no longer a scar across his middle where he’d nearly been gutted, but his stomach still hurt, phantom pains from 25 years ago, every time he thought of these people watching the games with laughter on their lips, rooting for the tributes, no, the CHILDREN, like they were little more than computer simulated people.
He would persevere because this year, he had fighters, this year, something different was happening. Haymitch didn’t know how, but he knew this year something was going to change the face of The Games as these Capitol scumbags knew it. So he stood, put on his Sponsor Winning Smile, and walked through the throng to find some rich bastards to fleece for every cent he could get from them.
They had to make it, to show the Capitol they didn’t own the Districts anymore. And Haymitch would fight for them. Every single ounce of strength he had in him would go into helping Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark. He’d even stopped drinking to help them, and he would keep it up until one of them came home. He would endure the pain of watching the childrens’ deaths treated like sport, of imagining how these cretins must have clamored over his Games. He’d ignore it as best as he could; He had to, there was no choice.
He would bring them home.
Katerick, you are marvelous. <3
(via dasdeutschtard)
The shadows scrabble at the corners of her eyes, fingers long and thin and pale, too much knuckle and bone, “Let us in,” and their voices rustle and crack like kindling, a burning notebook with too much horror between its covers, “We’re here, we’re here, you can only ignore us for so long, we’re real, we’ll be here until you stop pretending, we have starved for so long, we can wait a little longer,” and there is the wet gnashing of teeth, the hungry slobberings of sodden tongues as they snap and laugh and cajole, and she will slip and look one day and they will snap her right up, gobble gobble like so many table scraps and she will gibber and thrash and fade into nothing, slide into the shadows and never resurface except to scrabble at the corners of eyes, and beg to be let in.
eeeeeeee help
I Accidentally a Poem About Neil Gaiman’s Hair
Neil’s Hair
by Lyndsay Faye
Whorls of dark matter
Create echoes without sound
Your follicles
Contain universes
Sharp and dangerous as
Benedict Cumberbatch’s cheekbones
If I owned
A mirror
Possess’d of a strong enough alchemy
I would hold it up and
Within your hair see
Entire worlds
Like Caprica
And Alderaan
And that one Picard landed on where they spoke
Only metaphor
As your hair is a metaphor
For beautiful endlessness
Had you but hair enough
And time
You could weave a bridge
Between dreaming and waking
That curl there
Yes
That one
No, that one
Right
Reflects starshine with the empyreal glory
Of John Watson’s soul
Your hair
Is a silver-leafed illumination
From a holy book
Yet to be writtenLyndsay Faye is magical.
When I was young, the world was bright
I saw things in black and white
There were good people, and the bad
Being happy or being sad
And everything was clear
Living in a world without fear
And then there came a foggy mist
Changed my brain and did insist
That the world was not so split
And that I had to cope with it
As the edges of the world began to fray
I saw the world in shades of gray.
And now I realize that’s ok.
I like that! —The Gray Manichean
She sits, and lets herself feel it lay there like a dog in the sun, heavy and slow, wheezing softly against the cadence of her own breath, feel it plant itself firmly in the fertile loam of her chest.
It is a lazy sadness, a small, irksome thing, the grain of sand in an oyster, a stubbed toe, a splinter, a weed that refuses to be cut away.
It spreads in her chest, through her veins, her lungs, down to her cold fingertips and rough toes, and settles, a dull ache, old bones in damp weather. It blooms, slowly. A flower hesitant to open, but hardy. Stubborn, like she is.
It is beautiful, in the most awful way.
She can feel its vines around her heart.
She wonders what will shrivel away first.
