When Aesop Told The Story Of The Boy Who Cried Wolf To Pinocchio, It Really Got To Me How Everyone Immediately

Our ragged, bloodstained girl in red. Flesh stained teeth, earth crusted nails. An animal-girl.

Girlhood knows red. She knows of blood and the hollowing hunger that resides in the pit of stomachs. She knows her way around organs and the fresh scent of danger. Girlhood knows of red eyes, red hands, red tongue licking a full, satisfied smile.

Red waits with the Creature resting on her grandmother’s bed. It lies with one paw over the other. It yawns and sleeps and bares its neck. It waits for inevitability. Fear wears the clothes of love.

“If you cannot eat, you will die. This is the Law.”

Tears swell at the corners of the girl’s eyes. Who are these tears for, my child? Humanity lays at the corners of her eyes. She wipes them with the back of her hand.

Hunger and hunger and hunger grips the girls stomach. Starvation. Instincts. Animal.

She lays the iron weapon into the Creature’s skull.

Red Riding Hood devours her shadow. She rips apart fur, finds the critical spot where the meat comes apart the easiest, where the heart pounds and fades the quickest.

She splits the skull apart, pulling the strings that have tormented her Story many times told. She strays the path and follows her instincts. Animal.

She eats. She eats and drinks and swallows. Bright red. Raw meat. She picks the fur and guts out of her teeth. She wipes her mouth on the collar of her white dress and her hands at her thighs. “My teeth were made to eat you”.

Unrecognisable child. People fear you the way they feared the Big Bad Wolf. What have you done? Predator claws and ears grow from her body. Alien, familiar. Maturity, mortality, humanity, innocence— the blood at the end of girlhood.

“I met death, and Death wants me to live.”

Oh there is so so much to say about the ending of Burrow’s End but Tula’s lined up a shot right into the core of my being so;

She’s back in the fields where she found her husband, dead, lifeless, cold. It’s winter and the snow has piled up so high and she runs around after the terrifying sounds of lightning in a clear nights sky.

It’s Blue and icy when she falls asleep, oh so tired and she hadn’t even begun to process the grief. Her mother’s response: “Where were you?” to a “Geoffrey’s dead”. She‘s a mother of two. She gives into her exhaustion. She sleeps. Everything is so quiet in the cold, the Blue.

And a few years later, neither dead nor alive but with a renewed sense of hope and peace, things Tula has never given herself space to feel after her husband’s death, she walks to his resting place and talks about their children. She talks about accomplishments, hopes, about dreams.

“I can’t wait to find out what’s gonna happen tomorrow”, she says. She means it.

(and Brennan as the player breaks just the tiniest bit)

Tula finds softness, she finds comfort. The cold, the Blue melts under spring’s warmth and the grass below finally drinks. She is happy.

bishop takes queen

Not me absolutely bawling my eyes out at 3am after a very unproductive day listening to the first 10 minutes of Worlds Beyond Number, The Wizard preview

Podcasts are my least favourite form of content cause purely auditory concentration is my weakest but this is so so good for me and my mental health

Thinking about Evan Kelmp and Raphaniel

Ame is a child when she first wonders through Grandmother Wren’s cottage. She wakes to the stomps of a fierce rooster, the smell of juk, the chorus of small sounds that builds the cottage.

Ame is a child when she falls in love with magic, the scent of it, the purity and the heart that lives at the core of it. Magic, the ability to connect with the earth, to provide for the animals and the trees, for the Spirits and honour their works. To help humans with sickness and mending.

The humanity in magic, the spinning of life to vow service to all that breathes on Umora.

Yet Ame is still a child as other children scowl at her, throw piercing gazes and words, “you’re a witch!” and see nothing but body, a little girl disconnected from the flesh of their own, a witch, nothing but a witch, an orphan, a stranger, a child. All but human.

But Ame had never thought herself anything other than human.

Ame, a child that never was, never could be, and forever will be.

She is a child when she is given to Grandmother Wren. Unwanted, strange child. She is a child when she is othered by the other children. Witch and apprentice, and still a child.

Ame never experiences childhood. She knows the wonders of magic and medicine, of healing and earth. But she never experiences the wonders of friendship, of connections in childhood. Ame never experiences the wonders of playing make belief, the warm hug after a heated argument, the small secrets shared in childhood.

But Ame is a child when finds more to her little family. A wizard, a witch and a wild one. Each child with a deep and profound sadness etched into the core of their beings and yet all too young to form the words to it.

Ame is still a child when she waves goodbye to her best and most True Friend. Tears wet her cheeks and the summer falls to her feet in a sweet breeze and a distant memory unforgotten. Ame is a child when she whispers her final goodnight to her brother, her True Friend, without and fully knowing so. She wakes up to the smell of moss and nothing but moss. She finds the cottage all too quiet.

Ame gains more than childhood during one summer and looses more than it when it is over. She finds fellowship and family in two True Friends. A secret and bond in childhood that cannot be simply broken. A thread that stretches across over water and mountains that no matter how far they are, they know they have a piece of themselves, of a simpler yet complicated summer in childhood somewhere across the lands. A small shard of childhood, of their true humanities stuck in memory of the scent of honey and magic and fur, a time long ago.

Something about Adaine saying "Is this justice?" to Ankarna and Crystal saying "What about them? Where's their justice?" to Lilith. Rage as a teenage girl. I don't need your sword. I don't have to believe in a god. You have seven believers right here. You get it.

What if we were both immortal and we knew each other for centuries and hated each other's very bones for just as long? What if we made a pact to spend a date together with the condition we'd both die together afterwards? What if I invited you to my cathedral that I built with my own hands just in front of your castle so that you have to see it at all times? What if we sat and chatted and waited for my government assigned pet to decide when we'd die, saying how good of a time we had and how glad we are to see each other killed? What if the last thing we saw was each other's eyes, the last thing we heard was each other's voice? What if death doesn't mean that much to us other than knowing the other suffered? What if I'd be ready to die a thousand times and lose everything if it meant you'd be slightly weaker?

What if we'd find any and every excuse to kill each other, repeatedly? What if the slightest provocation led to manhunts and bloodsheds? What if your death was my favourite sight, my deepest relief, my preferred past time?

What if you were there to comfort me when my son disappeared, to hold me and say we'd find him with enough reassurance to set me upright? What if you were the only one by my side when I had to say goodbye to my daughter, crying as much as I wanted to? What if we were all that's left at the end of the world, only to move on to another one and meet again, and start this whole dance over again?

What if then? What would that make us?

worlds beyond number is sooo good!

Amethar, a little prince of the House of Rocks, so far away from the throne. Lover and loved. He makes choices as a human, before his position as prince. He has never understood the necessity and restraints of royalty. He marries his lover, a commoner. He is young and innocent, and he does it unabashedly, without hesitation and fear.

Caramelinda, Duchess of Merenge falls in love with the blinding brilliance that is Lazuli Rocks, the powerful Archmage of Candia. She knows power, she knows politics, and she knows the importance of unity of Candia. She marries her lover. She cares and loves with more than her entire existence and she achieves peace for her home too.

The Ravening War. Caramelinda finds the lifeless body of her wife scattered amongst the heroes of the war. The sound of her heartbreak deafens amid the devastation of the field. She cradles the body of her lover close to her heart, thumping and thumping yet Lazuli’s eyes remain vacant. The tragedy of our heroes. Caramelinda watches the Rocks sisters fall at the hands of this hungry, bloody war. She watches the line of crowned dominoes crumble and fall at the feet of young Amethar, warrior and sole survivor of The Ravening War.

Orphaned Amethar, Heartbroken Caramelinda wed, both hearts aligned to another. They wed, hearts broken and lost to a war, torn apart and left to a quiet, empty castle.

“Lazuli I loved with all my heart. And this (pointing at Amethar) is just politics.”

Two children are gifted to this loveless couple and they find solace in it. Twins with the beauty and brilliance of their mother and the determination and bravery of their father. Ruby and Jet hear the quiet arguments between their parents, “Amethar, the delay of conversation has been perhaps your most cardinal sin.” They see that their parents do not share the love-filled eyes they shine onto the sisters.

Caramelinda lost her heart years ago on the battlefield and Amethar, his, even before it.