A necromancer falls in love with a healer. Describe their lives together.
Their house is odd, people say. That it’s both warm and cold all at once. People whisper about the garden out back, where some of the plants are black. Sometimes they whisper about the inside, about the table that holds both a mortar and pestle, and a complete set of bones. One of their cats is dead, they say. People fear a lot of things about their house, but nearly all of them have been inside.
They have four shelves in their house, for their books and jars and things they need for spells.
One of these shelves is stuffed full of books. The books are thick, fat, heavy. If the wood had a voice, it would speak in a groan. Half of them are soft, brown leather, with gold traced in plantlike designs on the spine. Half of them are black, heavy and cracked, with bookmark ribbons the color of blood and pentagrams on the covers. There are plants tucked into the corners. Some trail green fingers across the ledges. Some reach with thorns.
Another of the shelves is full of jars and bottles. Some of these jars are filled with potions that glow a dim yellow, or swirl a cheerful green. Some of the jars are filled with blood or crushed bits of bone. Some of the smaller bottles are full of dried clippings of rare plants. Some of the bottles hold things that move. But each jar has a neat little label, with the same gentle writing.
The third shelf is by a window, and it holds plants of various sizes. Most of them are small and green, meticulously watered and trimmed. But there are a few, scattered amongst the green, that have thorns longer than thorns should be, or leaves a bit too dark, too shiny.
The last shelf is full of bones. Cat bones. Dog bones. Bird bones. A skull. Fish bones. Wishbones. Snake’s fangs. Sometimes the bones move. Sometimes they don’t.
They have two tables. One holds a mortar and pestle, a small cauldron, bandages, some crystals. One of them has bones perched on the corners and a pentagram etched in the middle.
Dried herbs hang from the ceiling, and there is a box of litter on the floor.
They have two hearths; one for cooking, one for magic.
The walls are a deep green, the floor a wooden brown. The windows are large and lined with plants. The rooms are lit with floating crystals.
Everyone fears their house, but nearly everyone has gone inside. What is it, the healer asks, and her eyes are kind. What do you need?
A pain reliever. A bone set. An illness cured. A child delivered.
What do you need, she asks, but sometimes the answer is nothing. There isn’t anything to heal. So the healer nods, steps aside, and gestures to her wife, the necromancer.
And the necromancer looks at you, with her dark eyes and dark robes stitched with blood-red runes, and for a moment you are afraid. But then her eyes clear, and she smiles, and she asks. What do you need?
scott lang, completely misunderstanding peter parker’s power: hey if u want man we could get tiny and just like hang out, i don’t know if you’ve ever been in a lego castle but it’s pretty sweet
peter parker: u have no idea how much physical pain having to turn this offer down is causing me but,
when u know the way ur dad acts is because of his own unresolved issues/trauma but at the same time u know u dont deserve to be treated the way ur being treated but u cant do anything abt it
I introduced a friend to ATLA a few nights ago, and they had only
known two things about the entire show: the cabbage meme, and that Aang
apparently wants to ride every large and dangerous animal he can
possibly find. We got through the first five or so episodes, and my
friend noted that Aang is exactly what a 12-year-old would be like if
given godlike powers, and that this is literally just what he
could do with airbending. He can’t even wield any of the other elements,
and he’s one of the most powerful people on the planet, because he’s an
airbender.
And that got me thinking.
This snippet from Bitter Work is one of the few pieces of concrete information we get about the airbenders, at least in ATLA. Iroh is explaining to Zuko how all four of the elements connect to the world and to each other.
Fire is the element of power, of desire and will, of ambition and the ability to see it through. Power is crucial to the world; without it, there’s no drive, no momentum, no push. But fire can easily grow out of control and become dangerous; it can become unpredictable, unless it is nurtured and watched and structured.
Earth is the element of substance, persistence, and enduring. Earth is strong, consistent, and blunt. It can construct things with a sense of permanence; a house, a town, a walled city. But earth is also stubborn; it’s liable to get stuck, dig in, and stay put even when it’s best to move on.
Water is the element of change, of adaptation, of movement. Water is incredibly powerful both as a liquid and a solid; it will flow and redirect. But it also will change, even when you don’t want it to; ice will melt, liquid will evaporate. A life dedicated to change necessarily involves constant movement, never putting down roots, never letting yourself become too comfortable.
We see only a few flashbacks to Aang’s life in the temples, and we get a sense of who he was and what kind of upbringing he had.
This is a preteen with the power to fucking fly. He’s got no fear of falling, and a much reduced fear of death. There’s a reason why the sages avoid telling the new avatar their status until they turn sixteen; could you imagine a firebender, at twelve years old, learning that they were going to be the most powerful person in the whole world? Depending on that child, that could go so badly.
But the thing about Aang, and the thing about the Air Nomads, is that they were part of the world too. They contributed to the balance, and then they were all but wiped out by Sozin. What was lost, there? Was it freedom? Yes, but I think there’s something else too, and it’s just yet another piece of the utter brilliance of the worldbuilding of ATLA.
To recap: we have power to push us forward; we have stability to keep us strong; we have change to keep us moving.
And then we have this guy.
The air nomads brought fun to the world. They brought a very literal sense of lightheartedness.
Sozin saw this as a weakness. I think a lot of the world did, in ATLA. Why do the Air Nomads bother, right? They’re just up there in their temples, playing games, baking pies in order to throw them as a gag. As Iroh said above, they had pretty great senses of humour, and they didn’t take themselves too seriously.
But that’s a huge part of having a world of balance and peace.
It’s not just about power, or might, or the ability to adapt. You can have all of those, but you also need fun. You need the ability to be vulnerable, to have no ambitions beyond just having a good day. You need to be able to embrace silliness, to nurture play, to have that space where a very specific kind of emotional growth can occur. Fun makes a hard life a little easier. Fun makes your own mortality a little less frightening to grasp. Fun is the spaces in between, that can’t be measured by money or military might. Fun is what nurtures imagination, allows you to see a situation in a whole new light, to find new solutions to problems previously considered impossible.
Fun is what makes a stranger into a friend, rather than an enemy.
anyway jeff bezos could eradicate homelessness. he could literally give each homeless person 100k and it would only take less than .5% of his entire wealth. what the actual god giving fuck
Why do you think they deserve it
Well shelter is a basic need, and would at the very least allow them a place where they can get back on their feet. Food water and shelter are necessary for a healthy body and psychology. There’s also the fact that they’re people too, and a little help goes a long way in making a decent community. There’s plenty of reasons
Yeah they need stuff, but why does every homeless person deserve 0.5% of someone’s income
You have five hundred apples, and just one day to eat them all.
You pass by a small crowd of hungry children, and decide you’d rather 455 apples go rotten than give them to some snotty brat who isn’t your problem.
It doesn’t matter how hard you’ve worked for your 500 apples, or that you aren’t the parent of any of those kids. in the moment you decide to walk away, it doesn’t matter why they’re hungry, or who owes who what.
You had the opportunity to help people, you had the ability to help people, you had the resources to help people. You had everything you needed to make a small, tiny little difference in someone’s life, and you decided not to.
What are you going to buy in your lifetime that’s worth more to you than your own humanity?
What are you going to buy in your lifetime that’s worth more to you than your own humanity
Reblogging for the very, very important lesson
Sometimes I wish there were a Hell if only for the visuals of a bunch of rich shit heads wandering around on fire asking “Where’s my money?!”
hi everyone im still pissed we never learnt in school that shakespeare was bi and wrote the sonnets about a dude and a woc he was into
hi everyone im still pissed that we were told emily dickinson was a spinster when she spent her whole life writing love letters to a woman
hi everyone im still pissed about the fact that we never got taught any of the super super gay Greek myths. it seems impossible to think they managed to pick all the hetero myths when Greece was just THAT gay but guess what? they did.
hi everyone virginia woolf was also bi im still pissed that so much of literature is queer and has queer coding within it that deserves to be analysed through that lens in the same way that we don’t ignore the gender of an author, but sexuality is never mentioned in highschool literature classes
hi everyone i’m still pissed that we were never taught that da vinci was gay af and that the ideal the western world has of jesus (white, long straight brown hair) was based on one of his male lovers
hi everyone i’m still pissed that we were told sir isaac newton died a virgin when he had multiple boyfriends over the course of his life one of whom he wrote passionate love letters too and lived with
@ critics: i could not care LESS about the narrative arc of venom. it could’ve been written by a predictive text generator and i still would’ve had a BOPPIN time because ALL i ever wanted from an action movie is a musclebound alien nerd and a dumbass running around fucking up fake elon musk
Dama Cherepaha 