I Sit Alone In The Dark And I Try To Remember The Words You Spoke When You Summoned The Ender You Chained

listening to strange trails is not enough. i need all that shit to happen to me.

The ache will go away, eventually. 

That was what the Professor told them, the day they got back. When they tumbled from the wardrobe in a heap of tangled limbs, and found that the world had been torn from under their feet with all the kindness of a serpent. 

They picked themselves off of the floorboards with smiles plastered on child faces, and sat with the Professor in his study drinking cup after cup of tea. 

But the smiles were fake. The tea was like ash on their tongues. And when they went to bed that night, none of them could sleep in beds that were too foreign, in bodies that had not been their own for years. Instead they grouped into one room and sat on the floor and whispered, late into the night. 

When morning came, Mrs. Macready discovered the four of them asleep in Peter and Edmund’s bedroom, tangled in a heap of pillows and blankets with their arms looped across one another. They woke a few moments after her entry and seemed confused, lost even, staring around the room with pale faces, eyes raking over each framed painting on the wall and across every bit of furniture as if it was foreign to them. “Come to breakfast,” Mrs. Macready said as she turned to go, but inside she wondered. 

For the children’s faces had held the same sadness that she saw sometimes in the Professor’s. A yearning, a shock, a numbness, as if their very hearts had been ripped from their chests.

At breakfast Lucy sat huddled between her brothers, wrapped in a shawl that was much too big for her as she warmed her hands around a mug of hot chocolate. Edmund fidgeted in his seat and kept reaching up to his hair as if to feel for something that was no longer there. Susan pushed her food idly around on her plate with her fork and hummed a strange melody under her breath. And Peter folded his hands beneath his chin and stared at the wall with eyes that seemed much too old for his face. 

It chilled Mrs. Macready to see their silence, their strangeness, when only yesterday they had been running all over the house, pounding through the halls, shouting and laughing in the bedrooms. It was as if something, something terrible and mysterious and lengthy, had occurred yesterday, but surely that could not be. 

She remarked upon it to the Professor, but he only smiled sadly at her and shook his head. “They’ll be all right,” he said, but she wasn’t so sure. 

They seemed so lost. 

Lucy disappeared into one of the rooms later that day, a room that Mrs. Macready knew was bare save for an old wardrobe of the professor’s. She couldn’t imagine what the child would want to go in there for, but children were strange and perhaps she was just playing some game. When Lucy came out again a few minutes later, sobbing and stumbling back down the hall with her hair askew, Mrs. Macready tried to console her, but Lucy found no comfort in her arms. “It wasn’t there,” she kept saying, inconsolable, and wouldn’t stop crying until her siblings came and gathered her in their arms and said in soothing voices, “Perhaps we’ll go back someday, Lu.” 

Go back where, Mrs. Macready wondered? She stepped into the room Lucy had been in later on in the evening and looked around, but there was nothing but dust and an empty space where coats used to hang in the wardrobe. The children must have taken them recently and forgotten to return them, not that it really mattered. They were so old and musty and the Professor had probably forgotten them long ago. But what could have made the child cry so? Try as she might, Mrs. Macready could find no answer, and she left the room dissatisfied and covered in dust. 

Lucy and Edmund and Peter and Susan took tea in the Professor’s room again that night, and the next, and the next, and the next. They slept in Peter and Edmund’s room, then Susan and Lucy’s, then Peter and Edmund’s again and so on, swapping every night till Mrs. Macready wondered how they could possibly get any sleep. The floor couldn’t be comfortable, but it was where she found them, morning after morning. 

Each morning they looked sadder than before, and breakfast was silent. Each afternoon Lucy went into the room with the wardrobe, carrying a little lion figurine Edmund had carved her, and came out crying a little while later. And then one day she didn’t, and went wandering in the woods and fields around the Professor’s house instead. She came back with grassy fingers and a scratch on one cheek and a crown of flowers on her head, but she seemed content. Happy, even. Mrs. Macready heard her singing to herself in a language she’d never heard before as Lucy skipped past her in the hall, leaving flower petals on the floor in her wake. Mrs. Macready couldn’t bring herself to tell the child to pick them up, and instead just left them where they were. 

More days and nights went by. One day it was Peter who went into the room with the wardrobe, bringing with him an old cloak of the Professor’s, and he was gone for quite a while. Thirty or forty minutes, Mrs. Macready would guess. When he came out, his shoulders were straighter and his chin lifted higher, but tears were dried upon his cheeks and his eyes were frightening. Noble and fierce, like the eyes of a king. The cloak still hung about his shoulders and made him seem almost like an adult. 

Peter never went into the wardrobe room again, but Susan did, a few weeks later. She took a dried flower crown inside with her and sat in there at least an hour, and when she came out her hair was so elaborately braided that Mrs. Macready wondered where on earth she had learned it. The flower crown was perched atop her head as she went back down the hall, and she walked so gracefully that she seemed to be floating on the air itself. In spite of her red eyes, she smiled, and seemed content to wander the mansion afterwards, reading or sketching or making delicate jewelry out of little pebbles and dried flowers Lucy brought her from the woods. 

More weeks went by. The children still took tea in the Professor’s study on occasion, but not as often as before. Lucy now went on her daily walks outdoors, and sometimes Peter or Susan, or both of them at once, accompanied her. Edmund stayed upstairs for the most part, reading or writing, keeping quiet and looking paler and sadder by the day. 

Finally he, too, went into the wardrobe room. 

He stayed for hours, hours upon hours. He took nothing in save for a wooden sword he had carved from a stick Lucy brought him from outside, and he didn’t come out again. The shadows lengthened across the hall and the sun sank lower in the sky and finally Mrs. Macready made herself speak quietly to Peter as the boy came out of the Professor’s study. “Your brother has been gone for hours,” she told him crisply, but she was privately alarmed, because Peter’s face shifted into panic and he disappeared upstairs without a word. 

Mrs. Macready followed him silently after around thirty minutes and pressed an ear to the door of the wardrobe room. Voices drifted from beyond. Edmund’s and Peter’s, yes, but she could also hear the soft tones of Lucy and Susan. 

“Why did he send us back?” Edmund was saying. It sounded as if he had been crying.  

Mrs. Macready couldn’t catch the answer, but when the siblings trickled out of the room an hour later, Edmund’s wooden sword was missing, and the flower crown Susan had been wearing lately was gone, and Peter no longer had his old cloak, and Lucy wasn’t carrying her lion figurine, and the four of them had clasped hands and sad, but smiling, faces. 

Mrs. Macready slipped into the room once they were gone and opened the wardrobe, and there at the bottom were the sword and the crown and the cloak and the lion. An offering of sorts, almost, or perhaps just items left there for future use, for whenever they next went into the wardrobe room.  

But they never did, and one day they were gone for good, off home, and the mansion was silent again. And it had been a long time since that morning that Mrs. Macready had found them all piled together in one bedroom, but ever since then they hadn’t quite been children, and she wanted to know why.

She climbed the steps again to the floor of the house where the old wardrobe was, and then went into the room and crossed the floor to the opposite wall. 

When she pulled the wardrobe door open, the four items the Pevensie children had left inside of it were missing. 

And just for a moment, it seemed to her that a cool gust of air brushed her face, coming from the darkness beyond where the missing coats used to hang.

lucy talks to rabadash before aslan judges him.

she never knew him well—she's never been very interested in any of her sister's suitors, not unless she's certain she'll need to step in, and he seemed reasonable enough, if smug and rather small in personality when he visited cair paravel. she didn't understand why susan wanted to go to calormen, but she'd never stop her sister from something that might make her happy, and edmund was going with her, so it's not like anything could go wrong. and anyway, someone needed to stay at cair paravel while peter went to the north. lucy would rather have gone with peter, but she'd also rather susan not be alone in the south. susan's alone all too often while the rest of them venture out across narnia. it's only fair she gets to spread her own wings a little.

they never thought anything could go wrong, no matter what the reputation of the tisroc. but then suddenly the splendour hyaline is spotted at the mouth of the harbor, and the raven is bringing her news both joyous and grievous in turn of her siblings' northern flight, and now there's a stag come to tell her that rabadash and a company two hundred strong have come to lay siege to anvard. lucy has an idea what he's crawled out of calormen for, and it's nothing to do with archenland. judging by the sick look on her sister's pale face, susan can guess well enough herself.

it's that look that has lucy mounting up beside edmund and riding out to anvard at double time. there is very little she wouldn't do for her family, and the lion help anyone who is the cause of her sister's distress. in the end, it's probably better it was edmund who fought rabadash in battle, because lucy's not so sure she'd have spared him.

the morning before he is to be judged, she escorts herself to the chambers where he is confined, a knife in each hand, and locks the door behind her. he is unbound, but the look in her eye keeps him seated in the chair where she finds him.

"i should like you to know," she tells him, not bothering with proper greetings—he does not deserve them, after all—as she leans against the arm of the chair opposite his, "that your cowardly plan would never have succeeded, even without the warning."

rabadash sneers at her, and not for the first time, lucy wonders how he ever conducted himself to be anything more than the ass that he is.

"narnia's high king is a fool and a craven," he scoffs. "he never would have attacked the great land of calormen and my father, the tisroc, may he live forever, over something so trifling as a mere sister."

this is not his first mistake, but he is lucky that it isn't his last. lucy's face goes very still and very stern, and rabadash glimpses for one terrifying moment why the narnians all call her valiant. why she is named for the sea, the harsh and changeable mistress, and the flowers that grow back first after wildfires.

"i wasn't actually talking about peter," she says, her voice chillingly light, all pretense and formality dropped, "though if you think he wouldn't have marched on tashbaan to save our sister, you're a much bigger fool than i thought."

her tone makes it perfectly clear just how much of him she thought, and it certainly wasn't very highly at all.

she strides forward to stand before him, which would be a very foolish thing to do in a company of an unbound and dangerous prisoner if that prisoner were braver than rabadash and lucy were anyone else, and leans down to meet his eye. she's not very tall, queen lucy, and yet to him she seems like a giant—terrible and beautiful in an entirely different way than her sister. she's so close he can see a long white scar on her neck, can smell horse and leather and chainmail and clean sweat, can see how her hair is bound back for convenience and not beauty, and her hands are rough and capable.

he is aware, suddenly, that he is afraid. that perhaps he has been since she entered the room.

"know this, son of tashbaan," says queen lucy the valiant, and the smile on her lips does not at all match her eyes. "if you had laid even the tip of one finger on my sister, the queen, i would have skinned you alive."

she leans back just enough for him to breathe, and he gasps with it.

"and do you know what?" she asks cheerfully.

he doesn't want to know. she tells him anyway.

"i really don't think peter would have stopped me."

This. For the love of goodness you lot need to grow up and chill out. I don't even interact with the fandom because of how much of a shitshow it is out there. Get real. Oh and anyone who harasses actors, writers, producers, etc, or anyone at all involved with a media production because you don't like their choices/don't like them, you should be ashamed of yourselves.

I always say I hate getting into a fandom because of the inevitable discourse. You shippers remain some of the absolute worst part of the fandom. I'm not saying all shippers btw. The shippers who draw art of their favorite couples and “ship” different characters but also respect other people's “ships” cause y'know it's fiction and stuff at the end of the day, y'all are cool people. Just wanna say I love your unproblematic asses. You see the others, please go bite the dust. Why the fuck are you so mean? These people are NOT REAL!!!! The new season of hotd hasn't even started and y'all are already back on your bullshit. Being racist and sending death threats towards the cast and other people in the fandom and just overall being fuckin vile human beings because “your ship doesn't make sense or have chemistry or yadda yadda yadda blah blah blah” STFU!. LEAVE THE ACTORS ALONE, LEAVE THE PRODUCERS AND THE SHOW STAFF ALONE. LEAVE OTHER PEOPLE ALONE!! GO OUTSIDE AND BREATHE THE FRESH AIR, THE SHIT IS NEVER THAT SERIOUS. SEVEN FUCKIN HELLS MAN. Let's use Beth and Harry for an example, the stuff that comes from some of your accounts are absolutely vile and I wish you the fuckin worst. Then y'all love quoting “but they're not following the source material” to justify y'all being racist and nasty towards them. I have some news for you. If you read the books and not just gloss over what you wanna read you'd know that their characters were inevitably endgame had everything went right, there was no such thing as “BROKEBACK WINTERFELL”, as fun as that plot would've been, Jace and Cregan had a brotherly relationship and “Sara Snow” was just Mushroom only account and he wasn't even near or in Winterfell, so it was probably just his “fevered musings” she probably 100% didn't even exist, it was a campaign to slander Rhaenyra and her children and that's canon. Calling Bethany all sorts of vile things cause you're not in the writers room and can't write your headcanons is sick. Sending death threats to Harry is absolutely mental. Seek professional help!! Not just them alone but you get the gist. Please just try to be decent people. You don't have to like something everybody else probably likes but you also don't have to be a CUNT for no apparent reason. IT'S JUST FICTION. LET'S JUST WATCH THE SHITSHOW AND HAVE FUN.

4th of October: Crown / An Ceathramh Latha dhen Dàmhair: Crùn

English Translation:

Unlike his forebears, Thorin wore no crown. The people of Erebor placed their trust in him and he would not lead them astray, but when they came with a crown - forged in the halls they built in the west - as a way to honour his leadership, he refused them.

As a king in exile, Thorin would not bear any crown until he sat upon the throne of his fathers'. In the same way he kept his beard short, in memory of those lost to the dragon's fire, he remained unadorned in the traditional garb of his royal line.

Not until the mountain was theirs once more and the loss of their past washed out would he do so. Thorin took the crown made for him and placed it above the seat, hewn from the strong mountain rock, where he spoke to his people.

"Let it there rest," he said, "and every day I will work to reach its honour."

For in his heart, Thorin felt less than worthy to wear any crown, beggar-prince that he had been.

Scottish Gaelic Translation:

Aocoltach ris a sinnsearan, cha robh crùn air Thòrin. Chuir an t-sluaigh Erebor earbs air agus cha robh e ‘s gun cuireadh e iad air seachran. Ach nuair a thàinig iad le crùn, air dèanamh san tallachan a thogadh anns an Iar, mar onarachadh dha, cha ghabh e e.

Mar rìgh fògraich, cha robh Thòrin airson crùn a bhith air mus do sheas e air an rìgh-chathair nan athraichean. Anns an aon dòigh gun robh e a’ cumail na fheòsag goirid, cha bhiodh na aodaich rìoghail traidiseanta air mar chuimhneachan de dhaoine a chaidh a losgadh san teine an nathair-sgiathaich. Cha dèanadh e gus a bha a’ bheinn aca a-rithist.

Chuir Thòrin an crùn a bha air cruthachadh dha agus shuidhe e e air os chionn an rìgh-cathair a rinn an t-sluaigh às na clachan. An àite far am biodh e a’ bhruidhinn riutha.

“Leig an sin e,” thuirt e, “agus gach latha, obraich mi gus an urrainn dhomh an urram sin a’ ruigse.”

Air sgàth, anns a chridhe, cha robh Thòrin a’ faireachdainn gun robh e airidh air crùn sam bith—prionnsa dhìol-dèirce a bha e uaireigin.

Steve's Young Daughter He Left Behind, is Scared by Sam and Bucky's Arguing

(Inspired by^)

Their arguing grew louder, more aggressive. Neither meant to escalate it, but Bucky was stressed and upset, and Sam was frustrated with it all. Their situation got increasingly more complicated the more time went on, and that showed no signs of stopping now Zemo was involved.

Sarah-Grace watched them with big eyes, huddled in a thick coat that had been draped over her by said Sokovian fugitive. The material kept her lovely and warm, almost to the point of lulling the girl to sleep. But she hated noise, especially shouting. Usually, her uncle Bucky spoke softly, avoiding making too much noise for her benefit. Same with Sam.

Hearing it now, Sarah curled into the warmth of the coat, trying to block it all out. She knew they didn't mean to scare her, but it was just too much.

Accidentially, she caught Zemo's eyes, then shyed away from them. He scared her a little, despite being nothing but kind to her so far.

"Guys!" He hissed, stepping towards them.

"What?!" Sam and Bucky snapped simultaneously, glaring daggers at him.

"You're scaring Sarah," Zemo said icily.

Their faces immediately softened, and they exchanged regretful glances. Bucky frowned, quickly moving over to kneel in front of her.

"We're sorry, Gracie," he said, voice returned to its soft hum, "I got too wound up. Are you okay?"

She raised her head, whimpering a little. Bucky's heart clenched, deadly afraid to see her scared of him. The idea had plagued him since the moment he realised what Steve did - once the anger dried up enough for other emotions to come through.

With her curly blonde hair and shining blue eyes, lightly flecked with green, she resembled Steve so much it sometimes hurt. Bucky believed she deserved better than him as a parent, but couldn't bring himself to give her up. If he was honest, this female reincarnation of his best friend gave Bucky the will to wake up every day.

She smiled meekly, reaching out to wrap her fingers around his metal hand. "It's okay. Promise you won't argue anymore?"

Sam nodded, crouching down beside them. "Promise. Sorry, sweetie."

She stood from the coat to hug them, her short arms only able to wrap around their necks. They leaned in to hold her, both making mental notes to keep their disagreements more civil from then on.

Over their shoulders, Sarah saw Zemo watching, and smiled at him. He returned it, misty eyed, still turning over the turkish delight in his hand.

EVERYONE SHUT THE FUCK UP SCIENTISTS AT THE SCHMIDT OCEAN INSTITUTE HAVE FOOTAGE OF A LIVE COLOSSAL SQUID FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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