Cover Art!
Just because you’re transported to another world, doesn’t mean you’ll escape from your pain.
Abused by her parents, thirteen-year-old Frances only wants to be safe and for her life not to hurt so much. And when she and her class are transported to the magical world of Durannon to fight the monsters invading the human kingdoms and defeat the self-titled Demon King, Frances is presented with a golden opportunity. If she succeeds, Frances will have the home she never had. If she fails, Frances will be summoned back to the home she escaped.
Yet, despite her newfound magic and friends, Frances finds that trauma is not so easily lost. She is dogged by her abuse and its physical and invisible scars. Not only does she have to learn magic, she has to survive the nightmares of her past, and wrestle with her feelings of doubt and self-loathing.
If she can heal from her trauma, though, she might be able to defeat the Demon King and maybe, just maybe, she can find a home for herself.
Teaser: The fall of the Traditionalists
[The Beginning] [<=Chapter 189] [Chapter Index and Blurb] [Chapter 191 on June 12 or now on patreon]
The Fractured Song Index
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The flares had gone up, but the gates remained shut. Martin hadn’t stopped staring at them since the troops had moved into position. He’d only paused to blink.
It was unlikely they’d been betrayed. The Water Tower had fallen to their forces after all. That being said, there were always delays in military operations—
Martin blinked. The gates were swinging open.
“Alright everybody! Up and at them. Mages, smoke us up! Musketeers suppressing fire!”
Cheers rang out along the line as puffs and clouds of mist and smoke began to shroud the Lightning Battalion. Horns blared as the wave of soldiers charged.
Martin was at the head of them, shield raised. He knew his kit was a little archaic, but frankly he could use the extra protection at the moment.
As they neared the gatehouse, Martin could hear sounds of battle within. As he made it over the drawbridge and into the building he could see a ring of soldiers marked with blue and red armbands trying to defend the opened second gate against a flood of soldiers coming from the main castle building.
“For Erisdale!” Martin bellowed.
He and the Lightning Battalion plunged into the melee with troops flooding through the gatehouse,.. Martin managed to slam his shield into one of Darius’s soldiers and stab them, before stepping back to look around.
Already he had teams of soldiers rushing up to help with those fighting in the gatehouse proper. Musketeers were taking position and the mages they had were casting spells at the incoming reinforcements.
There were a lot of Darius’s troops coming, though. They were rushing out of every door, and from every tower to concentrate on the breach.
Martin grimaced. He was sure that he was going to break through at some point, but it would take time. The rest would have to be up to Jessica’s team.
“Come on! We’re nearly there,” said Elizabeth.
Leaning heavily on her, Leila limped as fast as she could. They’d healed her as much as they could but she was still exhausted from the ordeal she’d suffered.
“Why don’t you just carry me—” Leila cut herself off with a Word of Power. Several soldiers were running down road leading to the Citadel, trying to intercept the pair. A fireball erupted from in front of them and smashed into the unfortunate enemies, blasting them off their feet. Leila waved Elizabeth’s arched eyebrow off. “Nevermind. Give me a moment.”
“Yeah, hard to cast if you’re being carried.” Elizabeth paushed to look behind, down toward the city. The way the Traditionalist defense line had been structured was that it left a protected section of the city between the Citadel and the Water Tower.
Before her eyes, Erlenbergian ships were pulling into the harbour, disgorging hundreds of marines and mages that stormed into the city. The Traditionalist forces that had been attempting to retake the Water Tower were now flanked. It would take time however, until they could take control of the area and make their way to the Citadel.
But at least at this moment, the gate that led up to the Citadel proper was unguarded, the drawbridge down. The soldiers having been stripped to defend the city and the main gatehouse or try to secure the harbour.
“You ready?” Elizabeth asked, glancing at Leila.
The Otherworlder shook her head. “Nope, but I need to be at Janize’s side,” she croaked out.
Elizabeth giggled. “Well, since you are hopelessly in love with her. Let’s get you there.”
Leila rolled her eyes. “Fuck you,” she stammered, but she was unable to help herself from smiling.
Scarlet was damn good and tricky to fight against. The head of the Red Order had stored a number of spells into her magical rings, which she used to vary up her arsenal. Fireballs would be followed by vines sprouting from the ground. The earth would suddenly ice up, followed by gusts of wind that would try to knock Ayax off her feet. She was also very fast, and Ayax found herself dancing around Darius’s garden, using whatever cover she could and shields to keep herself safe.
The problem was that as the fight drew on and Scarlet continued to keep throwing spells, the outcome of the fight became clearer and clearer.
Ayax was not the head of a mage order. She didn’t quite have the extensive magical equipment that Scarlet had in her possession. Scarlet also had a powerful magical gift and the cost of it was not a mobility impairment. Leila had told Ayax that Scarlet was missing an eyeball, having replaced her missing eye with a glass replica.
That pupil-less eyeball now glimmered at Ayax as the troll returned Scarlet’s fireball with a larger fireball of her own, forcing the mage to take cover behind a statue of a knight that was blasted apart. Scarlet stepped out to cast, but Ayax was faster, she had already thrown several magical cards. They slammed into the red-robed mage, crackling and popping, smoke and sparks blinding the woman. She barely managed to get a shield up but instead of hitting her again, Ayax paused for a split second before throwing more cards.
These hit Scarlet clean again and she screamed as she staggered, firing magical bolts wildly. Ayax practically just sidled behind a tree and watched the mage pant as she gathered her own power.
No, Ayax had none of Scarlet’s money or ability, but she did have years of seeing the most intense frontline combat of the Great War. She had trained against the most powerful mages of her time, Edana and Frances Windwhistler. She was a gifted mage in her own right with unparalleled athleticism and grace. And to top it all off, she had read Scarlet’s rhythm of casting and was now very much in it and messing with her.
Oh and she’d exhausted Scarlet by making her cast all the spells she had.
So when Ayax threw Frances’s lightning spell over her shoulder, Scarlet only barely blocked it. The woman was knocked backwards and slammed into the perimeter wall of the mansion.
Ayax was soon charging after her. Scarlet managed to fire a torrent of water at her, but the troll sang, drawing up a wind that lent speed to her step and pulling up a mound of earth that blocked the jet. She ducked under the woman’s clumsy attempt to cast a slashing spell at her, and slammed her staff into Scarlet’s head.
Blood poured from the cut across her skull, and the woman crumpled to the ground. Her glass eyeball popped out from the force of the blow, rolling onto the glass. For good measure, Ayax grabbed Scarlet’s wand and pocketed it. She also cast a binding spell that would stick the woman’s arms and legs together so she couldn’t get up.
Then she stared.
One of her parent’s killers was lying in front of her, unconscious and helpless. Scarlet wouldn’t even know if Ayax cut her throat with a dagger. It was more mercy than she deserved.
Biting her lip so hard Ayax thought she was going to cut herself, she turned on her heel. The troll forced marched herself away, thinking of her dear Elizabeth and how she needed help.
Step after step turned into a run and soon Ayax was racing down the city streets for the gate leading to the Citadel.
As she rounded a corner, she saw a column of soldiers fast-marching, also towards the main castle.
“Ayax!” called out a very filthy red-haired woman.
The troll ran up to her friend. “Ginger, oh dear, that was a horrible trip wasn’t it?” Ayax asked as she took in Ginger’s odor.
“Yes. I strongly advise you don’t touch me,” said Ginger. She tilted her head to another approaching mage, whose orange dress quickly gave up her identity.
“Ophelia Voidsailor, good to see you in person!” Ayax exclaimed, clasping her fellow Erlenbergian’s deformed hand.
“Ayax Windwhistler. We never settled who won the Winter Tournament did we?” Ophelia asked.
“I conceded to you if I recall.”
“Bah! That doesn’t count! I want a rematch once this is all over!” Ophelia giggled. She coughed into her fist. “We’ve secured the harbour and the Water Tower. The Traditionalist’s remaining forces are running to the Citadel.”
“Excellent, lets hope Janize holds out long enough for us to get there,” said Ginger, starting to jog again.
It was terribly un-queenly behaviour and perhaps didn’t do the best for the morale of her soldiers, but Janize decided not to sit in her throne. Rather, she was using the very large chair as cover and had opted to sit on a simple wooden chair.
Even then she wasn’t entirely safe and despite herself, she couldn’t help but hold onto a bunch of her crimson hair, as she desperately attempted to keep her breathing level.
Erisdale’s throne room featured the standard long hallway leading up to an upraised dais and two thrones. It also had a second-level gallery meant for nobles to be able to gather and watch the proceedings. This gallery comprised of two large rooms open to the throne room itself. Sculpted stone railings kept the onlookers safe. Underneath the upper galleries were two covered hallways which functioned as ways for people to go up and down the the throneroom without just walking through the main hall.
Normally, there were ways to get to the upper galleries, but the soldiers loyal to Janize had barricaded these entrances. They could not however, barricade the stairways to the entrances that were near the throne room’s main entrance and led up to the galleries. Their defense relied on them holding the throne room’s main front.
Naturally, that had been the focus of the assault by Darius and his soldiers.
“Master George, I distinctly recall you informing me the Throne room was the safest in the Citadel?” Janize mused ass stray bullets whizzed over their heads.
Crouched down beside her behind an upturned table, George smiled wanly. “Yes. It has enough space to hold the soldiers loyal to you, and the entrances can easily be blocked off. The other barricaded entrances can also be opened if we want to make a break for it. So yes, this is the safest place when you consider the other option is your personal chambers which can’t hold all your guards.” Fluidly rising to his feet, George fired a musket down and reloaded. “Hang tight, I’m going to check on the other barricades.”
Janize nodded slowly. She was getting a bit better at not wincing at every crack and whine from the spells and bullets that were sailing through the throne room door. That had been the first to fall and followed by a charge from the Traditionalists. However, the numerous barricades of tables and furniture that had been stacked to form several lines had checked the enemy’s advance.
So a vicious melee had developed at the entrance, with both sides firing guns and spells over the tops of each other’s heads. Janize was no military tactician, but she knew that if Darius’s soldiers gained the galleries, they were in deep trouble. They were also losing those galleries.
Elizabeth arched an eyebrow at Leila. They were now in the castle proper which was unsurprisingly deserted. The non-combatants having fled or hid. “Leila, where are we going. The throne room’s front door is not this way.”
“Yes, but unless you want to get completely fucked by the mass of troops probably fighting there, we’re going to have to break in to help them—” Leila stopped so quickly, Elizabeth nearly dragged her forward.
A column of soldiers were spilling out from one of the corridors into the hall. Their boots were caked in indescribable brown stuff and from this distance, Leila and Elizabeth could smell where they had come from.
At the head of the group of soldiers was a blonde woman with a cat mask. Thier were both Alavari and human and they all had light-blue armbands or hauberks emblazoned with a silver lightning symbol.
“Jessica?” Leila whispered.
“Leila, it’s been a long time.” The masked Otherworlder’s reply was cool. Elizabeth did notice a tremor in her voice.
“Jess, I’m so sorry. I was an idiot and I—”
Tearing off her mask, Jessica took several long steps to Leila and seized her in an embrace. “I missed you.”
Leila couldn’t help but cry. “I missed you too—OW!”
Jessica had flicked Leila’s forehead with a finger. Smiling, crying and scowling at the same time. “Also, fuck you for trying to blast me, several times.”
“Sorry,” Leila croaked.
Jessica gently stroked Leila’s hair. “And I’m sorry for calling you a monster.”
Leila managed a watery giggle. “I deserved it.”
The pair laughed and let go of one another. “Right, which way to save your queen? Also, you alright? You look like a wreck,” said Jessica.
“This way.” Leila said, leaning on Jessica’s shoulder for support. “Oh wow you really did crawl through a sewer.”
“Eat shit, or did you already?”
Jessica snorted. “Fuck you.”
“Glad to see you getting along, but how are we going to make sure we take down a barricade without getting shot at?” Elizabeth asked.
“You’ll see!” warbled Leila.
After dispatching a band of Traditionalist soldiers, they’d come to a doorway that looked fairly ordinary but as Leila laid her hands on the wall it shimmered. “Yo, George! Don’t shoot! Reinforcements are here!”
A slot in the door opened up and there was quick peek. From the other side they heard a great sigh of relief.
“Thank God, get in here.” Their was some scrabbling and the door swung open to reveal the blonde-haired Otherworlder warrior. “They’re making another push. Good thing you remembered the designated escape hatch.”
“Ah, you left an emergency exit, a sally port. Good idea,” said Elizabeth. “Musketeers to the galleries and check your powder before you start shoting. Jessica, Leila, get to the queen. I want a section to guard the sally.”
There was a thunderous bellow from the outside of the throne room. Then another louder one.
“They’re hyping themselves up. This is it!” George bellowed. “Leila get to the queen!”
“Holdup.” Jessica picked Leila up and leapt off the railing. Her friend screamed as they dropped down, only slowing at the last minute due to Jessica’s spell.
George stared at the pair for a moment, but Elizabeth had grabbed onto him and was dragging him. “Let’s get to the front, hurry!”
Janize peaked behind her throne. “Leila!”
The queen was soon embraced by the shaking Otherworlder. “I’m sorry. This is um, Jessica.”
“A pleasure I’m sure, but we are in a dicey spot.” Jessica ushered the pair behind the throne and began casting. Leila soon joining her.
A flood of armored knights had forced the throne room’s entrance. The sheer mass of the column was overwhelming the defenders at the entrance. Leila could see George and Elizabeth fighting furiously back to back against the tide. Elizabeth’s war hammer taking out a knight with every swing, whilst George’s spear flickered into weakspots and gaps in enemy armor like a snake. Far above on the right gallery, the Lightning Battalion’s musketeers were raining musket and magefire down on them.
Yet Darius’s troops were forcing themselves up the staircase to the left side gallery, which didn’t have the additional Lightning Battalion troops.
“Jess! Left side!” Leila hissed.
“I know, shit!” The pair turned their attention to the gallery on the left, unleashing fireballs and bolts of magic. That kept any attackers and musketeers who wanted to shoot back pinned down, but they had a mage on the left gallery that kept shielding their attacks.
It also meant the flood of attackers pouring through the throne room doors only increased.
“Elizabeth where the fuck are your troops!” Leila screamed.
Ayax knew she wasn’t going through the front door, but after running around the throne room’s upper galleries she was wondering if there was any other way in.
As she hammered on a final door, a familiar human face peeked through the slot.
“Captain!”
“Helen, good to see you!”
“Get in here and duck!” Ayax’s adjutant opened the door and lead the troll into the throne room. She instantly could see that things were not going well. Musketeers filled the gallery opposing them they were ducking behind a black-haired mage’s shield due to Leila and Jessica shooting at them. However, that meant Jessica and Leila weren’t casting at the knights charging through the throne room.
Ayax could glimpsed Elizabeth locked in a duel with another knight that she dispatched, another Otherworlder protecting her flanks. The pair were pulling back, though and the Lightning Battalion soldiers trying to come down the gallery stairs were forced to come in single line
And Traditionalist forces kept pushing. No matter how many were shot dead, the armored men and women were storming forward, stepping over the bodies of dead comrades with a desperate, furious pace. At the centre of the column was a man surrounded by the biggest and burliest knights Ayax had ever seen and with gold-trimmed armour.
It was Darius and he was in her sight. Ayax blinked, started forward and shook her head. He wasn’t the priority. He couldn’t be the priority. She could see black magic leaking out from her hand, but she forcefully kept her gaze on the gallery.
Taking a deep breath Ayax bellowed, “Clear the way!” Running forward, Words of Power pouring from her lips, she leapt over the railing.
Elizabeth was very nearly distracted by a glimpse of her girlfriend doing a superhero impression as she flew across the top of the Throne Room, carried by her magic. Ayax, her staff punched forward like a spear, slammed into the first musketeer she saw. The Traditonalists ran, trying to make space but that also gave space for Ayax to run after the panicked looking black haired mage.
Whirling her staff around, she slammed him so hard he crashed into the wall with a sickening thud. Then she was hitting the musketeers, sending them flying with her strikes. Even so, musket balls screeched by her, nearly missing her. More musketeers were pointing their weapons at her.
A massive fireball slammed into the railing, setting enemy uniforms aflame. Ayax glanced over the railing to see Leila give her a brief wave before turning back to keep firing at Earl Darisus’s guards. The troll blinked, but there was no time to contemplate, she had to keep fighting. Leaping forward, she sent another human soldier flying. Torquing around, she ducked under a bayonet stab and punted a human woman into a wall.
When she turned around to look for another opponent, Ayax froze. The remaining musketeers were fleeing, retrating down the gallery stairs and away from her. However, there was a blonde haired woman on the gallery with a fox-fur lined coat. She was aiming a musket, but not at Ayax. Instead, she was pointing it toward the dais of the throne.
Ayax’s eyes immediately took in the trajectory of the musket and the scowling dark-haired Otherworlder she was pointing it at. Leila, while taking cover from the bullets and bolts of magic from the main entrance’s direction, was exposed to the woman’s shot.
I could let her. It wouldn’t be me. It’d be an accident. Janize can’t blame us for a battle. We’d still have her surrender.
Besides, Leila doesn’t deserve to live. Why should she live after all the wrongs she’s committed? Why shouldn’t I just let her die.
Nobody would know. Few would care.
Ayax glanced down at her hands and at her staff. There was no black magic pooling around her. It was just her. Her decision to save or let die, the woman who killed her mother.
This was a woman who’d apologized and promised to let her do whatever she wanted to her. Who sought not her own safety but to protect the life and the child of the one she loved.
Ayax bit her lip and charged the enemy musketeer. However, her hesitation had cost her. She could see the musketeer pulling the trigger. There was no time for a Word of Power. Ayax slammed into her the musketeer. The weapon cracked, the bullet whizzing off course as Ayax pushed the woman over the railing.
But the screaming woman now grabbed onto Ayax and the troll found herself tumbling over.
Acting on instinct, the troll seized her enemy with both hands, her cat-like tail twisting to try to direct their momentum. The pair fell down, but Ayax was managing to get her legs atop the woman. Acting more on instinct, Ayax leapt off the musketeer, slammed into a Traditionalist knight and rolled clumsily over the ground.
Dazed by the impact, her sides and wrists screaming with pain, Ayax could just hear a stomach-churning thud. She chanced a glance and immediately looked away. The woman was very clearly dead, having hint the stone floor headfirst.
It was then she saw that standing over her was the heavily armoured Earl Darius halted dead in his tracks. He lifed his visor, and Ayax could see that despite the sweat that trickled down his face, his eyes remained wide with horror and rage.
“You killed her. You killed my daughter!” Roaring like a wounded animal, Darius swung down at Ayax with his sword. She managed to get her staff up, the metal chomping into the wood. Again and again the Earl brought his weapon down. Aching, exhausted and far far too close for comfort, Ayax scrabbled back, trying to escape. But the earl was possessed with grief and fury and the desperation of a cornered animal.
“Die! Die! Die and join your father and mother!”
Author’s Note: Oh dear, so Ayax has gotten over her anger, but… she pissed off Darius anyway!

Credit for the original story goes to u/spacepaladin15. This is the final chapter of NoP 2177, although I personally consider it more of an epilogue. Either way, I hope you enjoy!
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Memory transcript subject: Tressa, Venlil outlaw
Date [Standardized Human Time]: January 5th, 2178
Location: USS Washington, dark side of Venlil Prime
A bloodcurdling shriek echoed through the hall, followed by the sound of claws scrabbling against the metal floor. A frantic chase ensued, a blur of fur and scales flying down the corridor at breakneck pace. But it was over before it began. A connecting door slid shut with a quiet hiss which silenced all hope of escape, leaving the terrified predator at the mercy of an increasingly impatient prey.
“Hy, we’ve been over this. You need to take baths, or your scales will get all yucky and stop growing. You don’t want that, do you?”
Hyacii was still frantically searching over the door for some way to open it. Her lovely gray coat, matted in oil from some ill-advised exploration through the ship, left streaks of iridescent sludge across the polished floor which would need to be cleaned up. But that could wait.
“Hy…”
Finding no escape from her grim fate, the young Arxur finally turned around to face her captor. “N-no! I don’t wanna!”
“Hyacii, I’m giving you ‘till the count of five. If you don’t come with me when I hit zero, I’ll go get Sasha and she’ll bathe you instead. Fiiiiiive…”
“NO!”
“Fourrrrrrr…”
“I’ll tell Mama! I’ll tell her you’re being mean to me!”
“We’ve talked about this with her, remember? Little Arxur need to keep their scales clean to grow up big and strong. You want to grow up all big and strong like she is, right?”
“She wouldn’t say that! I want to see! I want to see what she said!”
“Sweetie… you’re just stalling. You can’t read big Venlang words yet like she uses.”
She cast her head to the side in a pout. “Yes. I. could! I’ve been practicing with Trish, this much!” To emphasize her point, she stretched her little arms out as far as they’d go.
“Threeeeeee…”
Hyacii swept her tail across the floor in frustration, further smearing oil everywhere.
“Twoooooo…”
With time running out, she employed her final weapon, an expression which Sasha referred to as ‘Puppy dog eyes’. While normally adorable, it now only served to highlight the dark smears across her face.
“One and a half…”
Her full arsenal depleted, Hyacii finally capitulated and stormed over to Tressa’s side with exaggerated stomps. She allowed herself to be picked up, trying and failing to suppress an adorable noise of comfort as Tressa rubbed the scales around her shoulders. He’d need to shower later anyway, so the sludge staining his ragged fur was hardly a concern.
—
The little Arxur squirmed playfully in his arms, kicking up splashes which cut through the layer of bubbles to soak his bedraggled wool as he tried to dislodge more of the thick oil.
“Are you enjoying your bath, sweetie?”
“Yes!”
“I thought you hated baths.” He took a moment to stop scrubbing, and stretched his arms out wide. “This much, right? Isn't that what you said?”
“N— Yes! I do, they take so long, and they’re so… I hate them!”
“That so? What are you doing enjoying one, then?”
Hyacii had no response, which he took as his cue to get back to washing. He carefully cleansed the iridescent sludge, revealing a dense pattern of gray scales which shimmered like a rippling pond. She giggled as he washed around her snout, swishing her tail in a motion which was normally adorable but now only served to push more water out of the bathtub and onto the floor.
“Oh, I forgot to tell you earlier…” He started, pointedly ignoring the irritating feeling of water soaking into his fur and pooling at his ankles, “...but James’ll be out for the next couple paws. He took Beast with him, so no checking on the garden for a little while, OK?”
She grumbled for a moment, before a curious look flickered past her eyes. “Why does he and Sassa keep leaving?”
“Why do he and Sasha keep leaving, not ‘does’. Anyway… you know how we can’t eat the same food you eat?”
“Right! That’s why you’re build— uh, growing the garden!”
“Yeah, but the garden isn’t all grown yet. Until then, we still need to get food from the city. Once our garden grows, we can stay here all the time for you. Remember how we talked about patience?”
“But I don’t wanna be patient! I want him to be back now!”
“So do I, but everybody needs to wait for things. If you keep busy, he’ll be back before you know it!”
Hyacii pouted. “You’re just trying to trick me into practicing more words, aren’t you?”
“I might be. But you want to talk to your mom all on your own, right? If you keep learning with Trish, you can tell her all about the horrible baths we make you take. Speaking of… here, ready?”
After getting a human-like nod of affirmation, Tressa lifted her from the tub and onto a towel. They weren’t sure if the heat of an air dryer would harm her scales, so getting her dry was almost as laborious as getting her clean. It was worth it, though; she enjoyed the feeling of being towel-dried almost as much as she enjoyed tearing around the halls at Mach two. A muffled peal of delight issued from the heap of towel that used to be an Arxur, as he set to work wiping the water from her scales.
—
The USS Washington was once a proud human starship, one of several hundred which had so briefly encircled Venlil Prime to act as defense. Sasha talked about that brief period sometimes, usually when she was drunk; though it lasted only months, enough history was made in that span that it felt like a full decade.
Long, beautiful months for some; the ones who talked reverently about Tarva as though she was still Governor, who made dumb jokes about the Venlil’s behavior on first contact when they still regarded humanity as violent and strange creatures. Sasha, naturally, was one of these people. She’d go on and on about what a magical time it was when they realized the universe was far bigger than they ever knew, and how incredible it was to make friends among aliens. Her closed-lipped smile, a habitual remnant of a time when most Venlil froze in terror at a human’s teeth, spoke of how much humanity was willing to give up for the chance at intergalactic acceptance.
Miserable, chaotic months for others; those who talked about it as a time of strife and mistrust, when Venlil lived in fear of predation and humans suffered the agony of constant rejection and hate. Only following the first bombing of Earth did things begin to change in earnest, and even then it was hardly a clean transition. Refugee shelters and human-friendly businesses went up in flames in a grim foreshadowing of the fate that would befall Venlil Prime as a whole, the planet condemned to burn for sheltering uncured and unpacified humans. Of course, the fact that they were sheltered instead of willingly led to slaughter painted a somewhat softer view of the time period than many would admit.
Both narratives ended the same way. There was no debate over the justice of the Federation’s rule for the generation that remembered a time before; those city-scorching flames still burned fresh in everyone’s mind. Nor was there any debate over the trustworthiness of humanity, not among the Venlil who remembered the invasion.
When an exterminator fleet descended upon Venlil Prime, the UN pulled back the resources it desperately needed elsewhere to defend the planet. Earth itself was left all but unguarded in the effort to save a species that humanity had been allied with for less than a year, a task they set to with a desperate fury that hinged on madness. Hundreds of ships flung themselves at the enemy in suicidal charges once vital systems were crippled, targeting bombers and ensuring that the Venlil could not simply be annihilated from orbit.
​
The USS Washington was not one of those brave kamikaze vessels. It was one of the ships in orbit as a passive defense, knocked out of the fight with relatively minimal damage and able to make a hasty emergency landing on the dark side of Venlil Prime.
In the time Tressa had spent getting systems up and running, he’d never come across a single skeleton; the ship had been thoroughly picked clean by shadestalkers, or perhaps the crew had managed to evacuate without casualties. Or at least had the time and people needed to move the dead off the ship and hold proper burials. Whatever the reason, it made the difficult work of repairing the ship much less gruesome.
They’d fried any records for obvious security reasons, but left the backup power operational. They’d left a number of vital systems operational; if they had evacuated, they’d done so in a rush. Or perhaps they expected victory, and didn’t anticipate the need to scuttle the ship. Either way, Tressa’s job was a hell of a lot easier for it.
Restoring water had been a far simpler job than he anticipated. He’d been dreading the prospect of digging a well, but equipment scavenged from the ship itself had made that process far easier, and the onboard supply alone was enough to last months. With this abundance, they could even afford such extravagant luxuries as baths. Hyacii really didn’t know how good she had it.
—
Once he’d gotten the little Arxur all cleaned up and given her a stern talk about not crawling around the ship’s filthier corners, she was free to ignore his advice and go straight back to sprinting around the labyrinthian behemoth they called home.
He often wondered, watching her stalk around the ship, if this exploration of territory and practice sneaking through shadows was as vital to her development as physical contact was for Venlil children. Sometimes he wondered if so much affection was even natural for her species, or if they were smothering her every time they pulled her in for a hug.
She did enjoy it, but… not everything enjoyable was good for her. When she was younger and had no concept of restraint, they’d have to physically hold her back from gorging herself on berries which would make her violently ill, which she’d keep eating anyway because she loved the taste too much. Maybe it was the same thing with their parental love. Maybe they’d have to teach her how to be more independent for her own good, however difficult that change would be for all of them.
Ultimately, the idea was speculation. Depriving her of warmth would be cruel unless they were absolutely certain it would aid in her development. And the fact was, they had no idea. Despite their best search efforts, records concerning Arxur child rearing were nonexistent.
The Dominion actively suppressed any behavior seen as ‘weak’, so growing up under their reign was a harsh and loveless process; at least, that was what they’d been told by an Arxur who lived through the process, and they had no reason to doubt her. There wasn’t a way they could verify the fact, though. The Federation didn’t want anyone thinking of predators as people, so any records that might’ve existed were long since turned to ash.
As cruel as the Dominion could be, they had an interest in keeping their subjects healthy enough to fight. Without those records, and with only someone else’s faint memories to go by, they were largely on their own in regards to physical development.
Was their little Hyacii eating right? They’d been feeding her using an organ printer they’d managed to repair, but perhaps there were nutrients in bones and skin that she wasn’t getting. Her scales were getting slowly lighter; maybe malnutrition, or maybe that was a natural part of her development. Was she sleeping right? Lately, she’d been complaining about grogginess, though it didn’t seem to stop her from tearing around the halls.
And psychologically? There, they were completely in the dark. All species had different needs, especially at a young age. Venlil cubs needed a level of attention that most humans would find smothering. Human children required forms of play that reflected long-obsolete hunting instincts, games which involved chasing and manipulating projectiles. What types of play did a growing Arxur need? They played hide-and-seek with her (as best they could, though it was rapidly approaching the point where she could neither be caught nor hidden from), but that was hardly a replacement for hunting. Was she languishing without prey to chase?
A hundred different worries, a thousand different questions, and not a single easy, reassuring answer. On that fateful night, Tressa had assumed that living alongside a “true predator” would be the hardest part. In fact, that had come easy; how could anyone feel threatened by such a sweet little star?
No, the most difficult part was coming to terms with the fact that they would make mistakes. In their lack of knowledge, trial and error was the only way to gain ground. And “error” meant hurting Hyacii. No matter how much they loved her, they couldn’t help but hurt her. It was a difficult truth to swallow.
But it was a truth they had to accept. Ultimately, all they could do was try. Try, and love her, and hope that was enough to cover for their failures. Hope that one day, someone else would be insane enough to learn from their mistakes. Hope that their little Hyacii wouldn’t be both the first and last Arxur of her generation. Hope that one day, they wouldn’t have to hide. She wouldn’t have to hide.
​
In the cold shadow of Venlil Prime, it wasn’t enough to have power and heat. Plenty had fled to the frigid wasteland in search of respite, only to die cold and alone despite their physical needs being met. They’d simply lay in bed with no will to survive, waiting as their body gave up on life. It was once believed that the dark side was haunted by vengeful spirits, though modern science put the blame on Herdless Depressive Disorder combined with the harsh physical toll of living in such an inhospitable environment.
Someone with a herd could stave off death’s embrace for quite a while longer, up to months. Many on the twilight edge lived this way, dipping in and out of the darkness as their job demanded. However, they knew not to stay for too long; even with the warmth of companionship, the dark side of Venlil prime claimed all eventually. Life was impossible without light.
​
How fortunate then, that the USS Washington was flooded with light. A light like a ghostly lantern, darting through the hallways and crawling through obscure corners of the ship to come back covered in sludge. A light like a burning star, which filled their hearts with warmth every time it closed in for an embrace. The light of hope; what a strange twist of fate that it would take the form of an Arxur.
---
[First] [Previous]

My brothers boyfriend works at a funeral home. They are satanists and keep a large amount of cremated human remains in a closet behind a clock. Is this legal? Also even if it is should I tell the people of the town who live there whats going on?

My (24f) boyfriend’s (26m) grandmother recently passed away. He is currently out of town, and wasn’t supposed to come back to where I live until the middle of the month. Since she passed away he decided to stay with his family for even longer, and will be missing my birthday to stay with family. I’m not upset about my birthday really, since it’s Father’s Day weekend, and understand that completely. I told him before his grandma passed that I was wanting to move closer to him at the end of the month, and asked if he could help me move, which would have been fine since originally he would have been back in town by that time. Now he’s saying he doesn’t think he’ll come back to help, and is telling me I should just hire movers. He left quite a bit of stuff at my home, as well as our 3 dogs that I would have to move all by myself. The move would be after the funeral, and would only take a weekend to do. I also miss him a lot since he’s been gone since mid-May, and from what he’s saying, I probably won’t see him again until beginning/ mid-July.
TLDR: Am I being selfish/ inconsiderate for being upset? I’ve talked to some friends and family about it, and they say I’m not, but I haven’t mentioned anything to him about it. Not really sure what to do.

Crownlands

In an act of justice, Aerea Targaryen partakes in the burning of the Carons and the sell swords, only to see Urrax rise from dragonstone, leading to her anger and displeasure.
Amongst the Red Keep, the brothers Bracken duel knights to show their skills. However, they went too far, prompting the Grand Maester, in his mercy, to tend to the maimed Knights before the still standing Brackens.
Following the removal of Aerys Targaryen, Ryman Caron attempts to flee the Crownlands with his sellswords and sell sails. However, the fleet of the Targaryen dynasty had moved to prevent such, with the Queen herself joining the fray. In the turmoil, both Joffrey Caron and Ryman Caron are pushed overboard resulting in their deaths.
Following her flight from the North, Princess Gaelyn Targaryen, Heir to the Iron Throne, encounters her father and engages him in combat, and eventually, her mother. This would result in the death of Princess Gaelyn
Following his duel with his daughter, the dragons dance once more, as Prince-Consort Aerys Targaryen clashes with his sister wife, Queen Aerea Targaryen. This results in the death of Aerys Targaryen.

North

Dale Whitehill and Domeric Bolton plot to bring their men to Winterfell and gauge the Princess' demeanor, seeking to bring about an end to Corin Stark's rule of the North with her help.
Corin Stark and Harmond Umber return to Winterfell and the news they receive upon their return is staggering. Royals are dead, armies are warring, and everything seems to be spiraling. Corin convenes the assembled nobility to take their counsel but also to make his course of action known to them all.
At Winterfell, Lord Ryswell meets with Lord Stark. He is troubled by the foreboding vision that his wife, Lady Sarra, had seen.
On the voyage to scout Crowtown once again, Magnar Sweyn and his sister Saga discuss matters of family and the coming winter. All the while, the men have begun to go mad. Be it from stress, a curse, or something other, it's not clear. But that matters not when survival is on the line. And the Crowls seek to survive. As Sweyn of Crowl discusses with his sister her time away from home, a strange madness spreads among the Skagosi of Deepdown on their way to Crowtown.

Vale

Joffrey and Jonquil Arryn arrive at Gulltown, ready to make allies in the South for the upcoming conflict. They have their sights set on Starfall and are eager to set sail as soon as possible.
Lady Vanya puts a bounty on the head of Lord Harwin Manderly. Vanya and Harwin then exchange letters.
Luceon Lipps meets a beautiful but unfortunate girl and decides to give her money. \
Gretchel Waxley has adopted a puppy, the runt of the litter, Clover.

Stormlands

At Storm’s End, in the wake of the deaths of the King, the Princess and both their dragons, the Stormlords gather to discuss the future of their lands. Unwilling to support a kinslayer for a Queen, or recognise the authority of any regent who may replace her, the Stormlords opted to declare themselves independent, with Aelinor Baratheon crowned as their Storm Queen.

Reach

In the wake of Dayne's accident, Lord Daven is summoned by lady Aurola to Highgarden for the trial of three. With his lady wife under house arrest at Highgarden, Lord Daven agrees to meet with Lady Paramount at Oldtown, asking to bring his wife Fiona there.
At Highgarden, Ser Olyvar Hightower enjoys a lunch after the spar, chatting with lords and ladies of the Reach. Meanwhile, Lady Aurola orders her cooks to bake the cakes, which she wants to share with Ser Lucantine Redwyne. But it's not why she asked him to be in her solar, where she asked him for a favor in return for stopping taxation of Arbor.
Ser Victor Hightower passes through the gates of Highgarden, requesting an audience with Lady Aurola.
At nightfall, lady Leona Roxton wanders outside, enjoying the night.
Elayna Banefort arrives at Highgarden, seeking a meeting with the lady of Horn Hill.
At Old Oak, Eden Oakheart remembers the last years with his mother, singing her a song and promising to never stop being himself.
After being asked by Lord Gynir Greyjoy to join forces , Lyla Mullendore writes to the Hightower and is given permission to wage war against the West. Later, Lyla seeks an audience with Lady Greyjoy to join up with the Ironborn.
Ser Steffon Marbrand is called back to West by his sister, breaking off his match with lady Agnes Cuy.
At Ashford, Lord Aladore ponders the need for a wife.
By the end of the moon, the news of Queen Aerea's kinslaying, murder of her husband-brother and a daughter, has reached Highgarden. Lady Aurola holds a meeting to discuss this matter with her lords.

Riverlands

The forces of House Lannister are engaged by Alysanne Velaryon and her dragon Morning. Hundreds of Lannister men burn to death beneath the walls of Pinkmaiden, however the dragon and its rider were driven off by Tygren Lannister, the Dragonbane, as one of his arrows managed to wound the Lady of Driftmark… Though, the young Lannister’s skill with the bow couldn’t spare him from Morning’s flames.

Iron Islands

Through the combined efforts of Baela Celtigar, Zhoe Myre, Roryk Volmark, and the crew of the Dog’s Revenge, a giant squid is successfully caught and brought under the ownership of Sigfryd Farwynd.
Gyrnir Greyjoy toasts the fall of House Targaryen and beseeches his liege lady to attack the Westerlands soon.

Westerlands

Rohanne Banefort reveals Mina Marbrand's murderous betrayals to Lady Ella while Forley Banefort is captured at Seagard. Fearing the war and Lord Tywald’s retribution, Rohanne and Ella Marbrand flee to the Banefort.
Lord Lefford arrives at his home only to find it full to bursting with Lord Tywald Lannister’s great host. He throws a feast for his noble guests which Tywald announces will be the site of his wedding with Lady Arwen Arryn.
At the Battle of Pinkmaiden, Ser Tygren Lannister successfully beats back the Piper army, Lady Alysanne Velaryon, and her dragon Morning. Most of Tyg’s force is engulfed in dragonflame, killing everyone on his own flank but himself. Though he survives, he suffers horrific burns.
Later, at Deep Den, Tyg begs for death that his men do not grant him, and proves to have become both physically and mentally changed by the ordeal.

Dorne

All is quiet in Dorne this moon.

Faith

The Faithful lie in wait this moon.

Essos

Across the sea, all appears quiet in Essos…

The Wall and Beyond

From the Wall, Lord Corin Stark writes to Driftmark, offering his support and marriage of his son Theon to Laena Velaryon.
Beyond the wall, Magnar Corpse of Milkwater tribe arrives at Crowtown, where he is met by its commander, Torrhen.
Igrin, healer of Thenns, manages to tame a beaver named Cheddar in the wake of her being separated from most of her family. Igrin has tamed a beaver name Cheddar in the wake of being separated from most of her family. Meanwhile, Jenny faces the King of Winter and the Dark Prince as she reports what has happened to her people and that Winter comes for Westeros.
Torrhen, commander of Crowntown, relays the orders of Lord Commander that Crowtown is to be abandoned. He is set to return to Castle Black and wishes to let the wildling through the Wall.
It is at this time, when Others arrive, surrounding the Crowtown.
Magnar Sweyn of Crowl set sail from Crowtow but as the time passes, the more of his people turn mad. They dispose of the bodies by eating them.

Awakening from cryosleep was about as glamorous as my training had suggested; which is to say: miserable. Muscle and bone ground together like rusted gears in a medley of complaint as my body twitched itself back to life. I was awake, but my senses clearly weren’t convinced. Strange noises almost resembling speech drifted around me; probably an auditory hallucination caused by the long hibernating period I’d just undergone
What wasn’t entirely familiar to me, however, was the strange piercing sensation in the middle of my chest.
Slowly prying open my crusted-shut eyes, the first thing I noticed was a powerful, stinging white light boring into them. For a moment, my sleep-addled mind entertained with delirium that I’d somehow crashed into a star, and this light was its core. Naturally, this was an absurd conclusion to draw for more reasons than my logical mind was able to count having just woken up.
As my vision began to clear, another, more pressing detail made itself evident. Looking down upon me from the center of that sickening light was a shadowy silhouette, seemingly mere inches from my face. Straining myself to look down at my body, I quickly was able to pinpoint the source of that strange sensation. Whoever this figure was, I seemed to caught them in the middle of digging some sort of knife into my chest.
Under better circumstances, I may have paused to consider what this stranger might be doing: perhaps implanting something, or maybe something went wrong on my journey and I’d been retrieved to be taken back to Earth for emergency surgery. That didn’t make much sense either, though. This trip was one-way for a reason. The Trappist System isn’t exactly a hop, skip, and a jump away. Unless, of course, that jump happened to involve wormholes. Those thoughts, however, were little more than secondary blips in my consciousness. My biggest concern at that moment was If var ObjectInChest==Knife; RemoveFromChest(Knife)
During my crash course on cryosleep, the biggest warning I was given waking up was not to overexert myself immediately. The Human body isn’t exactly built to withstand that kind of whiplash, so I was instructed on a 10 minute breathing exercise to help me get moving again once I awoke. That being said, the Human body also isn’t well-equipped to handle disembowelment with sharp objects, so that particular piece of advice went… unheeded. Feeling a few droplets of antique adrenaline dribbling into my bloodstream, I reeled back my leg and kicked forward with all the force I could muster—which wasn’t much.
To my surprise, I seemed to stagger the stranger, as they immediately recoiled back, still staring at me with their vaguely-Human shape as I tried to sit myself up. However, as it turned out, that advice on not going full-throttle so early after waking up was much more important than you’d think. Instantly, my senses flickered and faded as I felt consciousness lurching once more into nothingness, leaving me entirely at my attacker’s mercy.
…
Waking up on the floor of my exploration pod, right next to the cryosleep bay and completely unaware of how I got there, was a strange feeling to say the least. Looking down, I was relieved to find that there was no knife in my chest, and I certainly didn’t see any shadowy figures around me. What I did feel was an intense pang of unbridled hunger—cryogenics slows down metabolism, but doesn’t completely eliminate it, so most of my muscle and fat was gone. All just hallucinations, I concluded bluntly to myself. “Time to get to work!”
Soft, gentle glowing illuminated my familiar surroundings. Beside my cryobay was a short hall leading to the other three rooms of the ship: the engine room, my bedroom, and the storage unit. Those, in conjunction with the bridge where I lay, composed a total area no larger than an okay-ish apartment.
Staggering down the hall to the storage unit, I pushed open its door to find lining the shelves a generous quantity of nutrient packets—essentially little applesauce pouches chock-full of calories, designed to sustain me for a day on just one. So, after greedily sucking down three of those (I may not have looked it at that point, but I was a tad chubby before hibernating, and my body missed having available fat stores) and chugging a nice six bottles of water, I began my triumphant limping (for whatever reason, my leg was sorta hurt) back to the main bridge, where I retrieved from a smaller cold storage locker an almost comically large syringe.
I always hated needles, but that was just one more fear I’d had to get over to do this mission. NASA needed someone who could not only work this ship, but also take readings on the exoplanets here. They also needed someone who wouldn’t go batshit insane after a long period of isolation. Fortunately for them, I never valued sanity all that highly in the first place, so they were able to get their candidate. Placing the needle into my arm and pressing down the plunger, I almost immediately felt the specialized CRISPR viruses getting to work on my genome—rewriting those pesky hibernation genes that would surely slow me down if left to fester and replacing them with the usual Human ones... Or maybe that feeling was the copious amounts of stimulant meant to shock my body into operating properly.
​
Finally regaining my full, lucid state, I slowly walked into the bedroom and from its miniature closet retrieved a simple set of nondescript black pants, a grey t-shirt, and a labcoat to top off the look. Assuming my most faux-confident stride to the bridge computer, I briefly sifted past the psychological evaluation portion required to turn on the instruments and began accessing the recorded database.
​
*These records... They don't make any sense...* The Trappist system is under 50 light years away. My exploration vessel is design to move at a top speed of 0.77C (77% the speed of light). As such, It was expected that I would reach my destination and begin recording in only about 65 years. However, looking at the most recent radio signals from Earth, which was my sole indicator of distance, the most recent one was over a century ago. The cogs in my head turned sluggishly as I struggled to comprehend just how badly we'd messed up. *This radio message was sent by our broadcasting satellite 114 years ago... That means I'm 114 lightyears away and we overshot it by over twice the planned distance*...
​
Feeling the nerves beginning to build up within myself, I reluctantly clicked upon the message to see what it said.
​
*"We are gathered here today to celebrate and mourn the loss of Andrew Malix; the brilliant mind forever lost to space when 60 years ago today, an unknown navigation failure resulted in his transport, the UNS-Destiny, going drastically off-course. We at UNSA will never forget the bravery and spirit of our past explorers. From our beloved home planet Earth to the sprouting colony in Proxima Centauri, we owe our thanks to those who always seek to take the next step, even at their own risk... Thank you"*
​
174 years... That was how long I'd been frozen for. The notion echoed endlessly through my mind as I contemplated what the speaker had said. *UNSA... United Nation Space Agency, I'd bet... Guess we finally did a merger.* Hearing about a colony in Proxima Centauri was a relief, at the very least. It meant that even if something happened to Earth and Mars, I didn't have to trouble myself much with the idea of Humanity having somehow wiped itself out.
​
No amount of petty hoping, however, could override the new sense of dread I felt. Lost in space as the result of a failed exploration. Sure, the hydroponics bay and oxygen recyclers would ensure my survival, but without anything to do out in space, I was little more than debris. Mere cosmic junk floating through an endless void.
​
Morbid curiosity soon took over as I found myself inexplicably drawn to the opaque black window in front of the computer. Typing in a few commands, I watched as the obscuring haze intended to protect me from harsh starlight faded away to reveal behind it the endless void in which I'd found myself.
​
However, what I saw through the window was not some endless black void of space. In fact, looking down over the rows upon rows of strange-looking craft, it almost looked like I was in some sort of hanger bay.

​
https://youtu.be/ZHkjFpRjAmc
This is the interview of Matt Francis. He was SWs theater teacher at Pinecrest High School. There were rumors regarding the friendship between Mr Francis and young SW. The school administration stepped in and asked that the teacher and his student to refrain from continuing their friendship as it wasn't appropriate. When SW explained that he was someone that she could talk to about her troubled home life, the administration suggested she speak to a school counselor instead. Mr Francis would leave Pinecrest abruptly mid year of 2002. He would later explain that he left his teaching job in order to move away and marry his girlfriend. His stint as theater teacher at Pinecrest would be his one and only teaching job. He went onto do other things throughout the years while still being active in community theaters etc. He started his own acting class called The Acting Project, that he still runs today.
What do you think about Mr Francis' interview with Ashleigh Banfield? I find him to be disingenuous and seeking a glimmer of the limelight that came from knowing SW. His story about "coming across" the card that SW gave to him sounds like a complete line of BS. His motives seem suspect.
Here is his post on the day of SWs funeral. He claims that after the funeral, he went home and was going through boxes that he was moving and found the card from SW. He felt that it was some sort of sign as he wasn't even looking for it. Nevermind the sensational way that he posted about attending the funeral as though it were a social event. Weirdo.
https://i.imgur.com/2WaPZcc.png

I am so thankful to be alive but it wasn't always this way. I felt it deep down, the gratitude for living but it just didn't feel right. It didn't sit well with me so I challenged myself. Not to see how wrong it was but to challenge my belief. It crept up on me when the light would shine just right in an unperfect moment I would recognize and store years down the line, how unperfect this moment was in time. It was always perfect or I made it perfect. I was the light and life in it's stillness and slow beauty, not moving but always changing was always so perfect. Such peace and joy, serenity and love by just existing. How could this be when my mind convinced me otherwise? I have such a love for life and in any moment I could taste freedom if I wanted, I could feel love, I could be fearless. There was no end to what I could create. It felt real but, I was made to believe it was all fake and that it wasn't real. What I could see in front of me, what my mind perceived in the world was nothing of worth so I internalized these structures. My mind could not register anything that would cause me to feel the way I created so in it's unfathomably methodology it refuted it's truthfulness, it's realness. What I would them perceive in front of me would be all the things that made me sad and sorrowful. The distaste it gave me from what it could perceive, for how it was able to comprehend the world. I saw my friends hurt me, saw my family neglect me, saw the people around me living in lies and continuing cycles making the same mistakes over again. I was suddenly so filled with pain. I picked up on their energies. Pain never bothered me but the intention to hurt me, killed me inside, I could never understand why, it was the worst kind of betrayal. My brain could suddenly see all the things around me that would hurt me. I was thrown into a state of survival. My gorgeous brain only seeing the things that harm and hurt. Reminding me that the world is dangerous and a not so good place. I abandoned my state of being. I could no longer take the alarms ringing in my head, the panic in my body if I did not live my life and accept it in a certain way that would allow me to function better. I use to be so hopeful, so extroverted. Slowly overtime I reassessed myself. I no longer claimed to be an extrovert, I then claimed ambivert and overtime I accepted my role as an introvert. I accepted my place as a lonely soul, not lost, not confused but hurt inside. I fulfilled my hermit role one day believing I would be a Sage or a Shaman, anything to explain and lead me on, anything to subside the guilt to what I was doing to myself. Anything. Their had to be a reason for my separateness, if I was not allowed to be in the world then maybe it was because I was never meant to be, we had to reason it out, reason all of it out. Find out what happened to us, why we felt the way we did, what went wrong. Where we went wrong, what I did wrong. I had to not only know I had to make it make sense because there was this ticking time-bomb in my stomach trying to speak out the truth. Trying to claw it's way out, trying to make me believe again. All this time hiding and fighting. Knowledge was my control. I began digging. Tearing everything apart like a rabid animal. Snarling in a trap, ripping up it's bedsheets, I was vicious and this was dangerous. It harmed me in the end and it hurt like hell. I broke everything, I demolished and destroyed everything I had. The tension built up with the help of external influences, I couldn't breathe, I couldn't be, I couldn't see. I had somewhere to go. Something I held tight to and refused to let go of, I bled the way I gripped it so tight. It was mine if only I could break myself better. Break who I was, I could get it. I broke my mind. Crumbled to pieces, shattered like a mirror, I was surrounded by broken glass. The shards, the pointy ends. What have I done? WHAT HAVE I DONE? I can't pick this up, I can't fix this. The glass shards cut my hands, as I desperately tried to collect all the pieces of my mental. "Why would you do this?" I thought to myself. Oh, the blame I felt, the guilt, the self hatred and loathing. I destroyed myself, the damage I had caused myself that could never be reversed. I was my own monster, my own demon. The break of bond between my spirit and myself. I had destroyed it all. I did not like it so I went scavenging and I hit something that seemed made to collapse. A shaky hut poorly built, doomed to fall that I was living in. My own mind was poorly built on shaking foundations that faltered on me and I thought it was my fault. It was doomed to fail. My mind now in pieces, my world collapsing all around me, I lived in doomsday. It was my apocalypse. I built from the ground up again. This time with say in the matter for how I wanted to see life again. From what I knew deep down, my own truth to living. I got it half right sometimes but it was better then nothing. We had no money after all so on some spots I had to plaster the walls with what I could find, maybe some mud and straw until I could find a suitable material. Maybe some bricks like the little piggies in that story book. My mind was enmeshed, intertwined, and confused. I had pieces that didn't fit together and pieces that didn't fit at all. My mind was fractured and split. Utterly in pieces. Sides of myself combated the other. I lived in a time where there was no compromise. No decision that could be formulated on any action taken in my life. Everything was at a halt. I couldn't decide what I wanted to eat, how I wanted to dress, I couldn't formulate view points and make statements. I didn't know who I was. I was in constant distress from being pulled in a tug of war by two extremes of myself. I was absolutely distraught. All the while I had to not only keep a calm demeanor and put on a brave face for the world. I had to keep grasping and holding on tight to something that kept floating away from me, kept being just out of my reach, my grounded purpose for why I did what I did. I had to succeed, I came too far, gave up too many things, I sacrificed myself for it, I couldn't let it go, I was told not to let it go. I had to keep fighting, keep pushing. There were times where I didn't eat, other times I overate, times I couldn't sleep, and times where I only slept. My whole life was flipped upside down and I did not know balance. I did not operate out of a place of harmony. I met my shadows that crept in the night. They taunted me and did not let me sleep. I went on medication and my demons haunted me in the waking world. This isn't an empowering speech about what a force I am to be reckoned with after coming through the flames such as these. The pits of fire I embodied, the deep levels of hell that melted me. My hands calloused from trying to climb out of the well I had fallen in. At the bottom of that well it wasn't water, it was fire and I didn't make it out of there, I burned. I burned alive. I died. There was no coming back, there was no surviving that. I was ashes, but my soul burned like hot coals. Still surviving, still managing. How heavy the world was, how tired I was. How dark and suffocating, everything closed up on me. I wanted to die. My physical body wanted to die. I almost tried to. I saw it as a mercy until a voice said No. Finally, everything was quiet so I listened to it. For a second the voice that said No gave me something I was looking for, a definitive answer, a taste of consciousness on settled ground. The voice so strong and stern, sure of itself. The peace in its absolute. How all the other voices were silenced. I never understood my true intent so my mind kept gripping to what I was originally chasing after. I knew there was hope again, that voice gave me hope so I attached it to my manifestation. I knew there was something more out there. I dug through my past. Searching, trying to reason, trying to find something that might be contributing to my pain, in order to move forward to my goal in sight that I was desperately reaching for, my purpose for shattering my mental, I crawled out again. I must succeed, so I took a detour. The fastest route wasn't straight at that point, I couldn't see straight. I accumulated knowledge at an exceeded rate, gaining expert level knowledge on structures of being, finding tools to build my new home. Building up again, my mind. They say if you spend all your time in your head you might as well make it a nice place to be. My head was not a nice place to be. I had a lot of neuron pathways that lead me to dark places. It was a labyrinth outside the boundaries of space and time, all consuming, a monstrous black hole where light didn't exist. I found my beasts, my demons, and dragons that ought to be slain. One by one, I went to war. Winning and sometimes losing battles and like a Viking not afraid of death just awaiting Valhalla, I was ruthless. I had nothing to lose and all to gain so I slayed, I became murderous in the end, killing parts of me left and right to find a holy grail perhaps out of pure luck. I didn't know I would find a jackpot within myself, pure gold. I have a heart of gold. I unearthed diamonds within my being. I came back to myself. In the end it was all worth it, though my hands still murderous, remembering the bloodshed I was made to do. I never felt victorious, the thing I held on so tight to in my outside world, the manifestation I was working on and fighting my way to had finally arrived and I felt nothing towards it. I felt less than dead inside holding it in my hands. It was worthless to me and what people saw I had accomplished in the external, praising me and congratulating me, being so proud that I had finally succeed. Somehow that taunted me because they couldn't see my insides, all that I had done. What I have in my hands means nothing! Why lace my eyes once more? I feel no happiness in my success, no satisfaction, no glam or pride but look inside me now, see how I have risen. See the garden I have planted in my mind. Can you finally see my soul like I can now? Come visit and see inside, my holy grail, my light.

So, first of all, I really enjoyed most of Waybound, having finished it. The epilogue was pretty satisfying -- especially the bits with Mercy, Ziel and Yerin, and their respective approaches to their new jobs. The fights were pretty solid overall. In general, I feel like this was one of Mercy's best books, and that's good news, because I love Mercy. I liked the transformation of the Dreadgods into something more human and yet more grotesque, and I liked the prose, which was another reason I read the series.
There were criticisms I could see being levied at the book that don't really apply to me. The characters advanced extremely fast compared to the rest of the series, but the speed of progression was never as important to me as seeing its effects, seeing the characters face new challenges and view old ones from a new perspective, and Waybound did a good job of that -- great, even, in places.
But it had a low point that I feel was lower than any other book outside of maybe Unsouled or Bloodline, and I felt the need to make a post explaining what that point is and why I feel it's so low.
This is a Waybound spoilers thread, so here's the scene I'm talking about: when Ozriel dies, and only Suriel and Makiel together can bring him back. Not only does Makiel do this, he's willing to sacrifice his own life to do it.
Makiel and Ozriel have been at each other's throats for so long that the two pages of them fighting together didn't do enough for me to buy this. Their conflict spanned books. I don't think it was satisfactorily resolved in a handful of pages, when that resolution decided whether Ozriel, a character whose presence defines the series, lives or dies. I can turn it around in my head again and again, but it just doesn't work for me. I'm going to try to explain why.
If you look at Cradle as wrestling, there's a metaphor I can use here. And in many ways, it is similar. It's about seeing two or more people square up, having them pitted against each other not only in a physical sense but also a narrative sense -- willpower is a literal weapon in the universe, after all. And the success of a wrestling match comes from its leadup: long-standing rivalries sell better than new blood.
This felt like Makiel put his shoulders to the mat for Ozriel when he could have easily, easily gotten what he wanted.
Now, thinking about it myself and browsing Reddit, I've thought of a few things that act as a balm for this. I might never love the reigning champion handing his title and his life over to the beloved face that's been given less than his immense due, but I do want to see the narrative logic behind it. There's only a few things I can think of and agree with, and they don't entirely satisfy me.
One is the idea that Makiel always had a shred of goodness in him all along. Sure, that's true. So did Malice, and Malice went done with her ship. Makiel has shown fewer sympathetic traits than Malice ever did. Malice, at least, had her family. Makiel shows a commitment to the greater good that isn't unique among the Abidan, and is in fact arguably weaker than all of the other Judges. You can't argue that he makes tough choices; even the Phoenix does that. You can't argue that he makes personal sacrifices, as I'll get into shortly.
Second is the idea that Makiel is too proud to allow Ozriel to sacrifice himself as he stands idly by. I can agree with that -- but the problem is that we've never been given any indication that his pride comes before even the possibility of success, let alone his life. We've been given that with many characters, multiple times in Waybound in fact. Shen is the most obvious example, and he gets a deliciously ironic end as he's trapped, dying, with the enslaved ghost of the man he killed, powerless and barely himself.
If we'd seen Makiel make even a small (on the Abidan scale) sacrifice to maintain his pride, even once before, I think that'd help. But I can't think of one. If he was so proud he'd rather let Ozriel take his existence and his influence than be shown up by him once, we should've seen him do something similar, smaller, before.
As it is, he must have been shown up by Ozriel dozens of times throughout history. Everything about Ozriel and about Makiel tells us that.
Third is the idea that Suriel's gesture, giving him the Scythe, touched him, reminded him of who he meant to be, just as Lindon did to Northstrider with his echo.
I'm not at all unhappy that Makiel evaded judgment. That is something I would expect from him. In fact, I'd been led to expect it more than a book ago. But this? This, I don't think I could have expected coming into Waybound at all. And by the time the story tried to ease me into the idea, Ozriel was only pages away from being killed, and then saved by his rival.
What gives me trouble digesting this book is that Makiel evaded judgment by sacrificing something I simply didn't expect him to sacrifice, and that for Ozriel, when he had, on a silver platter, the opportunity to follow his established plan and go home with Suriel to rule forever. It mirrors bits and pieces of other narratives in the book -- Northstrider's resigned ascension, Mercy's appeal to her mother -- but despite its more cosmic scale, it feels like their shadow, not the opposite.
I'm glad the main cast got such a bright ending, but Eithan's, in particular, has a bad aftertaste to me.

Part 2
If you travel far enough North on the map, well above where the Civilized Nations stop because no crops grow, you'll find a mountain range. Crossing this range leads to the Monster Kingdom, though for some reason they prefer the name 'TFSU.' Yes, they prefer. The literal forces of anarchy and chaos in the universe have a government. However, ignoring that whole thing, the Monster Kingdom is fine. No armies march on them, mostly because of supply and logistical issues. The Monsters never say how they grow their own food, but given that they don't trade and millions of kobolds worth of food don't go missing every day, it's safe to say they make their own. Now, that doesn't stop the Civilized Nations to send one hero a decade to 'keep them in check.' Four decades ago, the hero closed off a mountain pass, which was supposed to cause a massive flood. Four days later, it was cleared, and the only thing to show for it were the cities that glow like the sun at night. However, yesterday, the Hero returned having burnt one of the bigger cities down. It was empty of all monsters, but the act was the first real damage they had taken in seven hundred years, since their founding. For seven hundred years, the TFSU have taken the beating of seventy heroes and simply moved on. But now. Now, millions of kobolds make up heavy 'machinery' units that march in armored, self-moving caridges that spit fire and metal. Thousands of beastpeople make up scouting and light infantry ranks. The TFSU use hellish 'guns' that hit harder than a catapult from kilometers away, all in a single 'bullet' not the size of a human's thumb. Metal birds and dragonflies join dragons as they assault cities. We poke the very literal sleeping dragon in the eye. Yet the armies don't do much. They march for our capitals and leaders, but on the way our civilians live. Surendees live. People go about their daily lives without too much change. Of course, that fact didn't stop the front line from finally crashing over my small village, located so close to the pass for a while we thought they the monsters had bypassed us entirely. The Civilized Nations had decided to send an entire legion to prevent the Monsters from getting across a nearby canyon pass. We were hit with an air-based assault with only dragons and metal dragonflies, our balista uselessly demolished by pillars of metal and flame thrown out of the metal dragonflies. I blacked out when the legion managed to shoot enough arrows to take down one of the dragonflies. I remember it crashing down onto my house... and then nothing.
-----
The elf stirred as they woke up. I'd been raised in the Terra Firma Sapience Union, so I was... less than familiar with the clothing and lifestyle the Southerners used. The elf groaned again, before their eyes shot open and they looked around, quickly settling on my frame. "A-Are you going to kill me now?" They asked, their voice shaken with fear. I let out a laugh. "If I wanted you dead, you'd already be dead." I decided to transmorph into my secondary form - a cat - to help the conversation go better. In a land where humans lived to forty, elves only lived to a hundred, and that meant that even I was older than this elf, and they were no older than thirty. The elf, to their credit, quickly figured out I wasn't pulling any mindgames. I'd heard tales from my relatives before the Kobolds founded the TFSU. People, especially when panicked, usual acted with more than enough stupidity to make the situation worse. "Where am I?" The elf asked. Their tone told me that they were still suspicious, but it wasn't outright denial of the situation. "My home," I answered bluntly. "Your village tried to fight our ground forces when they moved in, so most of them are currently under house arrest." Still in my cat form, I created a portal into my storage cavern and reached my arm through, while summoning a lab coat around my shoulders and glasses. It was a trick I had only learned to do recently. "Let's see..." I found the clipboard and brought it out, flipping to the elft's page and taping the pen against the paper. "You suffered a collapsed lung, severe burns on the right side of your body, three broken ribs and two fractured ones, shattered three wrist bones, three breaks in your right upper arm and another two in your lower arm, and on the left side you have another fractured rib and three broken fingers. Your left leg was shattered and your left foot was completely torn up. Healing magic stabilized you and surgery did the rest. You've been comatose for the past three days, and was brought to my home yesterday due to a surge in hospital patients from the seige of Trembolorne. "In terms of organ damage, that was also severe. A busted kidney, I already mentioned a collapsed lung, and your entire digestive system was... well, pulverized would be putting it lightly. Also, unrelated to the incident with the helicopter, you had cancer in your liver and kidney. "In terms of medical treatment, you've been given an IV line for the past couple days and several painkillers, and you underwent four separate surgeries. We reconstructed your organs, welded your bones to metal plates, and used a genetic printer to replace your skin. You're lucky to have gotten time with the genetic printer in the first place, you know; those things are expensive, and I mean expensive to run. Though it's all billed on the government anyway, but that just means that they'll only run it if they have to." The elf sat up in bed looking at me as I just stood on two paws on the cave floor. "Right, sorry, you wouldn't understand most of that." I sheepishly scratched the back of my head with my right paw. "Um... put this way, you were crushed by debris and we basically reconstructed your body before you died. So not necromancy, though you did get close to needing more advanced magical treatment." "Oh," The elf replied. The cat thing seemed to have helped, because they were no longer stuttering with their single word response. "Um... do you want anything to drink?" I tried to kickstart a conversation. "Where am I?" The elf asked again. I was silent for a second. "My home? It's right on the edge of TFSU territory, one of the southernmost places you can be while still being with the recognized borders. I chose this place because I like to fly out in the summer over the flowers in the forest at the foot of the mountains. Your village is a couple hour dragon-flight time away." "Mmmhm." The elf commented halfheartedly. "OK, um... who are you?" "My dragonic name isn't something most can pronounce, so my public name is just Vixie Remminie." I answered. "What's yours?"
The elf's eyes narrowed. "Why do you want to know my name." I blinked. "Because... It's a name? I'm not a Fey, you know, it's not like I can tie ancient demons to your soul and call it a prank or something ridiculous like that. Besides, you asked for mine; now I get to ask for yours." "And who says you won't just burn my village to the ground and eat me right now!?!" The elf suddenly burst out. "You monsters ruin everything! You trespass on our land, take our resources, and kill our people! All we did was try to defend ourselv-" I cut him off, and poured just a bit of attention in giving myself an aura. Blue fire licked the bottom of my vision as I rebuttaled his point. "Don't forget, you stole the land from us. We were the ones living in the wild when you razed our forests and grew crops. We couldn't even purchase land to live on! So yes, we stole what we could to survive and those who didn't starved and died! And when all was said and done, you tried to kill us and turned it into a war, one where we had no choice but to kill you back. And when we found someplace to run, a spot to hide and do our own thing with our own land? You blistering idiots sent you 'courageous heroes' to try and kill us! What for? Nothing! Just your stupid, moronic fear making, forcing you to decide to 'kill the big thing over there!' We can't even have freaking farmland, we have to grow it all in hydroponic farms and harvest thousand-year-old vines out of caves because this is all we have!" I realized that my aura was burning fully and scorching the ground around me. I let out a long sigh, and it died down. Several memories flashed through my head, but I pushed them away. "Apologies, my parents are still a... sensitive topic for me. It would be best if we just stayed away from talking about the war until the hospital has room for more patients again." "Yeah?" The elf was still enraged. Even sitting down, they were still trying to construct an argument. "You parents who killed how many? Your family killed how many more? You dragons, you monsters are nothing more than one large grouping of murders that deserve to die! As the gods will!" The elf was spitting in rage, but I recognized his determination to hold onto his worldview. It was the one thing I needed to pry away before it got out of hand. "And you elves killed how many more?" I asked in a low voice. "Can you tell me the number of kobold dens exterminated in caves, the number of beastpeople sent to an early grave in slave camps? Because I can tell you ours. My father's was two, my mother's four, and my extended family including deceased relatives is one hundred and thirty seven. "You declared war against monsters, you child of an elf," I growled. "And death the reality of war. We know. The Unification Wars weren't fought with swords and honor. They were fought with artillery barrages and death. They were fought with miniature suns and political backstabbing, with tanks and guns and submarines and warships and all the more death. "You say the gods don't like us! That's put lightly. They forsook us! Abandoned us in our hour of need. So we learned to live without them. There are no gods we pray to anymore, elfling. Only each other, our creations, and the universe itself. They don't want us, we don't need them. It's more than they deserve." My aura was once again charring the floor and I had transformed back into my dragon form, but this time I refused to cool it down. "You call us creations of death, the primal forces of anarchy? We are you. You are us. We are sapient, we are all mortals, no matter our advantages. We are bound to this dimensional plane, forced to serve our betters, and live out our lives not with earnest but with trepredition for when it ends. We are all death incarnate, because we can all die. That is just the way it is. Besides, you've wondered about my kill count; tell me, can you tell me the gods'? Can you tell me how many souls they have cut from fate for their own entertainment? No? I can tell you." I growled, moving closer until the blue flames enveloping my body threatened to light the elf's cot on fire. "More people than are alive on this planet right now." I pulled back, bottling up my aura and reverting to my cat form. "We can talk all we want about death and destruction, and I won't lie and say you aren't victims of the war; pre-unification dragons we're exactly kind and merciful to those with treasure hoards. But perhaps, I implore you to consider that maybe we both are victims of the war, and maybe we can one day work together instead of fighting each other. "Maybe, one day, we can fight for our rights against the gods." I moved into my dragon form and darted deeper into my cave, moving so fast I could hear the howl of the wind against my ears. Only when I had reached my memorial wall for my parents did I stop and take a breath and think over my conversation with the elf. We had a long way to go, but I hoped I had put a little bit of sense into him. I hoped that the world could change.
-----
When the dragon cat thing sped away, I took a moment to survey my surroundings. Only now did the effects of my first question hit my formerly-groggy head. "My home." He said. Dragons live in caves. Oooooh. I'm screwed. However, there were no treasure hoards visible from my perspective; then again, while the Monsters were stupid, they still had brains to them, and carrying me into a treasure room would probably be something they'd be able to tell was a bad idea. Pops said never underestimate you foe, A voice in the back of my head said, and the dragon even launched in a full conversation with you. You're selling the dragon very, very shor- Shut up I growled internally to the treacherous voice in my head. The cave itself was... a cave. There was a metal slab on one end, it went deeper in the other, and that was that. In a 'corner' of the jagged room there were a number of red, glowing rods attached to some kind of giant mechanism three elfs wide and six deep, but the rods glowed against the cave's light- What light source? My eyes darted around looking for one. Only now was I aware of how unnatural each shadow was, how awkward each shining rock looked, how each stalagmite could hide an entire dragon, and that was before they started transfiguring into cats. How bright the ceiling- I looked up. The bright light burned my eyes, but I needed to know what fiendish magic was in play so I could counter it. But the light didn't flicker like fire - they were far too bright for that anyway - but they also didn't have the magical circles surrounding each spell. They were... lights. As if the universe simply willed brightness into existence. Each far-too-bright-hurts-to-look-ats was placed along a main hallway clear of stalagmites running from the metal slab deeper and around a corner where I couldn't see. The lights were only poised above this one hall, and they just... shone one the rest of the cave. Looking closer, I could see thin black lines, too thin to be mana feeds, running along the walls to both the glowing red rods and to the so-shiny-the-lit-up-the-cave. And... that was that. There was no massive pile of treasure in the hall, though I suspected the dragon kept their hoard deeper than... wherever I was. There was no pile of skull trophies or the banner of cities and armies slain, and I noted that while he had told me his parents', the dragon had never told me his own. Then again, the cat thing could be lying. Dragon transfigured into a cat. Probably has Circle Of Truth around his entire den. Nonsense, dragons can only do elemental magic. Evidently not. Would you just shut up already? No- I moved my attention back to the metal slab, cutting off whatever the voice in my head had to say about my current situation; it wasn't every day one just got kidnapped by a nation of monsters, after all. The slab was truly elegant. It was painted with the monster language, and then was painted with some kind of mural. I could barely make out a blue circle with green splotches on it surrounded by twelve rings in the bottom corner because most of the door was taken up by a ice-blue cat with lighter strips engulfed in blue fire. It was a mural of the dragon cat thing. That didn't stop it from being pretty, and someone had obviously put a lot of effort into it. The flames looked realistic from what I had seen minutes ago, and the cat's details were perfectly engraved. It was... acurrate. Yeah, because I think Vixie was just trying to tell you that they built their civilization for a reason, and it wasn't carnage. You don't know what you're talking about. We both know I do. How else to you think- Listen to me, you treasonous voice of a- No, you listen to me, you pathetic excuse for a brain. The dragon was able to hold and win an argument with you, fixed your wounds that would've been a dead write-off for any other hospital, and then you think SHE barely meets the threshold for sapient? THE ABSOLUTE MORON I'M ARGUING WITH IS THE ONE YOU BARELY MEETS IT!!! You moved to your frontier village because the world was changing, Lazerot the Sixth. Congrats, you were right. It did change. Now shut your OVERSIZED EGO up at being bested by a creature ten times older than you, and go appologies before they decide that saving your life wasn't worth it. I... I... OK- No. I'm in control now. Shut up. I....... yes, sir. Good. With new resolve, I stood up. My head throbbed, and the next thing I knew was my face hitting my cot again.
-----
When I heard the thud of something falling in the entrance cave, I carefully moved back into the entrance cave. The elf was face-down in their cot, unconscious again. It looked like they had tried to stand and just.... fallen over. I sighed and used a claw to nudge the elf back onto his pillow, and then covered him with a blanket. I watched him for a minute, and then returned to the deeper parts of my home. The TFSU was completely overloaded with the number of patients needing treatment. Apparently, the Southener's hospitals just... didn't do anything, so in addition to soldiers, there was a massive influx of civilians to our hospitals too. Of course, this meant that they were absolutely overloaded, and the Civilized Nations strategy of fighting to near-death and then surrendering wasn't helping. So, stable recovering civilians like the elf were just... shipped out. When shelters filled up because the Civilized Nations overpopulation crisis was too bad to do anything, people just had to take them into their homes. Long story short, the government was in way over their head attempting upgrade the standard of care in the Civilized Nations while occupying their territory. My job so close to the border was remote infrastructure maintenance, and my ability to change size while not dissolving made me an expert at it - and that was before my two hundred years of experience. And then I didn't need a vehicle to get on-site, and was fast. The alarm pinging me that one of the space radars was down again gave me an excuse to avoid the elf and do some work. I grabbed a pack of supplies, put on my shapeshift-compatible uniform, and wrote down a note on a piece of paper. On my out past the sleeping elf, I dropped it for him.

Space radar system needs repair, as it's returning a false positive. It's my job to repair all the infrastructure around here, so I need to go fix it. I'll be back soon. If you're hungry, my pantry is the first cave on the right. You can just eat anything that's easily open-able in there. If it has a lock or airtight opening mechanism (anything more than a clip, really) then don't eat it. If your thirsty, there's a stream in the entrance cave near the heaters. When the door mechanism beeps, step back. Sometimes pressure in the cave can get a bit wonky, and I don't want you to get hurt. Other than that, feel free to explore. I've locked all the doors to the rooms I don't want you to enter. For toilet necessities, the second cave on the left has a properly-sized toilet. And running water, but stuff I can explain later means don't drink it. See you soon! - Vixie.

Satisfied, I left opened the door. There was a puff as the air from inside flowed out to the lower-pressure atmosphere. I could spot a snow squall to the north, and the pressure meant that it was probably coming my way. I moved out onto the ledge and closed the door behind me. At high altitudes this far north, the air was already near-zero and it was still five in the afternoon. I took just a second to confirm with the weather report that the snowstorm was in fact going to arrive on my doorledge using a smartwatch I had strapped around my wrist. When I found that the storm was coming, I opened my wings and flew. Being an Ice Dragon had its advantages, but being a Water-Ice Combined Dragon was much better. The frosty air curled around my wings as the freedom of ignoring gravity filled my brain. Ice and Water dragons both had large wings to deal with the cold air (and lower pressure leading to the requirement for more surface area to achieve the same amount of lift) and incompressable water physics (to let the wings act like a one-way fan blade as they move back and forth, increasing efficient). Dragons might be magestic creatures, but we were still bound to the physics of the mortal plane, after all. Being part of both, my wings were even bigger, making me one of the best high-altitude fliers on the planet. The ability to use both gills and lungs at said altitudes helped with oxygen also helped. Air Dragons were better at flying in normal air, but I liked to think of it like stats from a video game. Air Dragons min-maxed their stats for low-altitude, but I could go anywhere - even underwater - can keep my speed relatively high. I took full advantage of this on my way to the space radar, soaring well above the cloud ceiling and to the point where I could make out the curvature of the planet below me. The ocean spread out to my west, while more land was to my east. Snow covered the north as to the south was the telltale splotchy color of industrialism. My smartwatch beeped, as I crossed the normal altitude limit. I hadn't realized I'd gone so high; I had a radar to repair, after all. I dove down towards the surface, ignoring more beeps as I crossed half the way to the speed of sound. The wind howled angrily in my ears, but I flattened those (thank you, streamlined water genetics) and came out of my death dive right over the radar. The repair itself went relativity smoothly, though I couldn't find a broken component and chalked it up to more space anomalies. They weren't infrequent, and usually marked where the gods decided to look over the planet. For my radars, anyway. Further north, ignoring the north pole, almost no gods came out and wanted to deal with us. Our unspoken agreement was held that way. I flew straight back for my return journey. The storm was definitely closer, but fifteen minutes of flying later and I was entering the opening mechanism for my door. As it swung inwards, I heard the high-pitched scream of an elf.
-----
When I awoke, I found myself tucked into some covers. It took all of seven seconds for reality to catch up with me. Right. I got into a heated argument with a dragon. I instinctively touched the part of my face that had been closest to the dragon's flame. I'd read about Auras in books, but never thought I'd get to see one. They were only ever found in the most powerful and competent individuals of a race in an entire plan of existence. I wondered which skill gave the dragon hers - Vixie, I reminded myself. Either way, given that Auras are technically illusions, I wasn't hurt. The flames didn't get close enough to hurt anyway, but that didn't stop me from checking. This time, I was much more careful when I stood up. I sat up first, then started to kick my legs back and forth. That's when I spotted a paper on the other side of my cot. I stood up without thinking, but managed to keep my consciousness this time and moved towards the note. It was handwritten and contained a lot of jargon that I wasn't familiar with. Space. Radar. False positive. Airtight opening mechanism. Heater. Beep. Pressure. Toilet. Running water. I could deduce some of it. A message had come in requesting the services of the local dragon to repair a thing that has an issue, and that she would return shortly. I could wander around as I pleased, besides eating food that wasn't open or contained in a clip bag. From the tone of the message, I could deduce what a 'toilet' was. The heaters would logically be things that produced heat, so all I had to do was look for those. I wasn't able to tell time, but I supposed at this point it didn't matter. I moved over deeper into the cave, and quickly heard the sound of a stream. It led directly into a forest of stalagmites. After clambering over those, the temperature started to increase, which was all I needed to know that I was getting a drink of water. I was only now catching up to the fact that I had been out for three days, and that meant that I was extremely thirsty. I wasn't sure how I wasn't dead of dehydration at this point. I found the stream next to the glowing metal rods, and with it a clear path to my location. Sighing slightly at the wasted effort on climbing through Rock Forest, I snatched an undersized cup off a rack built into a nearby jut in the cave wall and filled it, before entering the bliss of fresh water. Back in the village, we had some of the best and cleanest water in all the land thanks to snow melt, but this took that to a new level. Cold, crisp water melted in the sun only minutes ago. It was... pure. I spent the next couple minutes simply drinking and processing everything over in my mind. The gods might have willed the monster dead, but if even the monster gods had abandoned them and survived... then how come the Pantheon never told us? Religious issues aside, there were more practical issues regarding my own survival. How did I get out. There was a thud at the metal slab, and I moved back towards it, leaving my cup to dry on the rack I pulled it from. The engraving of the cat on the metal slab was- BEEEP! What was that sound? There was a hiss, and the slab started to peel away. A gust of frigid cold air washed over me as a mage Ice-Water hybrid Aura-capable dragon that I had argued with stared me down. I did the instinctive thing and let out the scream of a human three year old, squeezing my eyes shut and waiting for the final blow. When the end of my life didn't arrive, I reopened my eyes to find the sky-blue cat standing in the hole where the metal slab was supposed to be. Then there was another... sound, and the metal slab started to move back into position. The cat was surprised for a single moment before simply charging the door and jumping through, skidding to a halt right in front of me. Which meant that I got a closer look at her. Ocean-blue strips crossed an ice-blue body fur in a fifty-fifty ratio. Small crystals of ice twinkled, floating here her wings would be. One tail was accompanied by two more made of pure blue-white energy, and the cat even had a halo. Six orbs of blue-white light hovered in lazy circles around her back, and even in a diminutive form the size of a cat the being radiated the power of an aura-capable creature. "Oh, right, sorry," Vixie said, and all the ethirial energy disappeared. Now that I knew what I was looking for, however, I could just barely tell, using my power as a mage, that Vixie was using illusion magic to hide her true energy. "You don't need to hide your reserves," I said. "Though if you're shapeshifting into forms so small that you need to expose yours, then you should just burn yours instead. It's not worth the trouble of people bottling yours." Vixie gave some kind of half-shrug. "They're not reserves, no." She said, emphasizing the word. I looked at Vixie with a sharp look, and for a second I forgot I was talking to a dragon. "Then what are they?" "They're..." The cat blushed, something I wasn't even aware was possible. She let the illusion fall away, and the tails, crystals, orbs and halo returned. "They're my regenerative baseline minimum." I looked her up and down for a second, dumbstruck. She really is a creature of power, huh? "Um.... uh..." I stuttered. "Is... that where you get your aura from?" I asked. Vixie closed her eyes with an expression on her face, and this time green flame started to peel off her. "Part of it, yeah." To control an aura like that... two auras. Just how powerful is she? I was so deep in thought that I didn't realize that the expression on her face was pain. "I... uh... what happened?" I asked, shellshocked. "Why aren't you fighting in the war?" The worldwide-powerful dragon masquerading as a cat sighed. "I... haven't told anyone. It's... personal." "I..." Only now did it hit me that I was talking with a dragon, not another person. Not just a monster, but a... creature with emotions. "You don't have to tell me." I quickly backtracked. "No, no, it's a fair question. It..." The cat let out a chuckle, and it filled the cave with a beautiful sound. "I suppose it's kind of ironic... but it starts with a kobold and a god, back when the Firma kobold tribe decided to travel north to escape the civilized nations, shortly before the amassing of all creatures in these same northern mountains and the Unification War. "Back before the gods forsook us."
Original Prompt: [WP] For as long as all the races have known, Dragons have been seen as violent, destructive creatures. After an attack on your village, you black out and find yourself in the den of a dragon. It's rather annoyed that that is how they're seen, and wants to prove that isn't the case.
u/Lycan_Jedi thank you for the prompt!
Part 2

Going through a divorce and it's ugly. We've been married 5 years, he's 13 years older than me. He has a 26 yr old son and a 15 yr old son and now he and I share a 4 month old son. All of his children have different mothers and there's another woman he was married to also, but they didn't have kids. I don't believe he ever wanted our son. He's said things like, "I'm too old for this shit", "I raised two kids already," "you're the one who wanted a baby." He's been totally detached since he was born. He took 6 weeks off when I did for maternity leave. We could not afford that so he made up a story about why we needed money to get financial help from his mother while neither of us were working. Anyway, if he spent that time bonding with us, it'd be one thing, but he slept in my stepsons room all day (he's only at our house 1 or 2 weekends a month) separate from us, playing on his phone, watching tv, but mostly sleepingand bitching if i asked for help. So, during my 6 week OB appointment, he was left alone with our son for only the 2nd time. The first was so i could attend my gradmas funeral. When I was on my way home from the appointment he called me frantically panicking saying something was wrong with our son. Long story short, we ended up in the children's hospital for 5 days. It was shaken baby syndrome. He has a long winded story about slipping on the stairs but I don't believe him. The social worker at the hospital ruled it an accident. I know I shouldn't accuse him but I just instinctively don't believe him and this platform (anonymously) is the only time I have voiced that belief. So later I find out he has relapsed and he started treating me with such contempt. Truthfully there were always difficult seasons when he'd be completely hateful, go days without speaking to me, and call me too sensitive if i cried or expressed how something made me feel....but this time was 100x worse abd felt like no end in sight. I truly felt unsafe. Toward the end, in absolutely every conversation (because every conversation became a conflict ) he'd tell me to get a divorce and slowly speak out directions to the courthouse. So I listened, and I moved out in March with our baby and filed for divorce. For 2 months he begged, pleaded, swore he would change, go to therapy, see a doc, etc. He's had multiple angry outbursts with slews of hateful messages and threats in between the apologies. Now, he's got a lawyer. They have not submitted their counter to the divorce papers I served him yet but he's threatened to ask for 50/50 custody. He said he wants 50/50 because he can't afford child support, but now of course he denies ever saying that abd acts like its because he wants our son.
He knows how to manipulate a urine screen and mouth swab drug test. He brags about that. I have a voice recording of him admitting to using xanax again that he buys off the street (his drug of choice) and also admitting Marijuana use. The xanax is my concern, obviously. I also have a text of him bragging about stopping the Marijuana use and "dosing down" from the pills. In the same recording we discussed the night he threw the bassinet across the room and all the times he left a loaded shotgun in my stepsons room on his weekends at our house. He's just careless with fire arms. I am not anti gun, but I am anti leaving a gun out, loaded, and so accessible to a child!
I'm terrified of our son being left alone with him. The thought of 50/50 scares me more than anything.
I have never kept our son from him. I let him see him whenever he wants, just not alone. I also wasn't even going to ask for child support. My lawyer and family convinced me to and my lawyer said a judge wouldn't want me having primary custody with no support anyway. I feel like the child support is my biggest road block and it's the only reason he wants 50/50. A while before I moved out and filed, I asked why he's never paid child support for his 15 yr old and he flat told me that when his other sons mother left, he threatened her by telling her if she came after him for child support then he'd take her to court for custody. They were never married, so they didn't have to do all of this and she's just nice letting him see their son without ever getting any help from my husband.
I'm sorry this is such a long story. Believe it or not, I've left a lot out. I just want to know if you guys think my evidence is enough to keep him from get 50/50 or any kind of unsupervised shared parenting for that matter. I'm really heartbroken just thinking of having to allow that. I don't think the judge will care much about the detachment or the verbal and emotional abuse, because that's probably just considered an opinion, but it's a major concern of mine too.
Thank you for reading. Please share anything you think might help.