Cave_Creature

gab's art makes me want to die

I support having more detail in the areas you've mentioned, but I think that the specifics should be different. Probably something that should be discussed among all the Naelurir. Aspectists tend to adopt their own customs and beliefs as far as ritual and afterlife go, but some basis should be established for consistency.

Faeinn was once again confronted with a scrap of tree bark. It had found itself at the doorstep of her home by some means that she had a couple of guesses at. Her tiny fingers curled around it and held it to the light, allowing her to make out the shapes of carefully-made letters against the crude bark. She had read it once and then over again, and spelled out many of the sentences quietly to herself. This time, the missive made some sense. Not entirely, of course - who is GOD? And yet the concepts came through, in simplistic ways. She touched her cool cheek, eyes of ember falling on the firepit as it crackled just by the porch staircase. She saw the cleansing in it; she saw what the mysterious author had meant. She clutched the sheaf to her chest as she ran inside, to add it to her collection inside of her pillow-case. One day, she promised herself again, it would all be clear. The teachings held within the obscure ideas would become important, she knew.

I feel like it should be a Descendant problem that sends the Descendants seeking greener pastures. Corrupted leaders or over-cultivation of the land, radical groups causing chaos (read: not cultists) or overcrowding. That, or a natural disaster such as a volcano erupts and the blackened sky causes animals and plants to die, prompting us to find somewhere the sun breaks through, or a hurricane, tsunami, earthquake ruptures the daily life here badly enough that we can't live here anymore. Either way, I'm sick to death of magical, deific apocalypses.

She heard the whispering. The silent echoes in her head of another person's will. The words were senseless, but as they brushed her mind and her thoughts she could feel the intent within them, pushing her and pushing her toward the gate. Go outside. It wanted her outside. She put her small weight against the door and obediently wandered down the forest path, at the behest of the cool, misty touch on her spine, on the back of her legs. She didn't stop moving until she heard the soft cry in her head, firm and almost distressed although not violent. She paused, and she glanced down as she felt the rough bark touching her bare toes. The girl reached down and picked it up in slightly dirty fingers. Read it, the meaningless and formless words meant to say. Read it, they seethed. She turned it over to find the crimson letters, blinking. She could make out the sentences, and the mentioned names, but they made little sense. She frowned and set it into her deep pocket, which was full of other things like collected bugs and neat little rocks. She took it home to hide the large sheet of birch bark inside her pillow case - one day she would understand it. It seemed...important for her to know. The gentle breeze intentionally caressing her cheek seemed to say so.

Love you too, baby.

I sent mine in to Nalatac, that okay?

Faeinn laughed with delight upon hearing the news. She stole one of her fathers' arrows, and grasping her child-sized bow scampered off to a nearby hilltop to watch for the passing of the rumored creature. Salhassan, however, watched the ephemeral apparition of the stag with an un-amused look in her vacant and gently glowing eye sockets. Cernunnos is a white stag, in her mind anyhow - and what a disrespect to her previous totem as well. The spirit sat in the shadow of a tree and eyed her daughter silently as she roamed around the woods.

This server is about people, not villains or heroes. People are people, evil is subjective, and hurting others doesn't make you a bad person automatically. And role play between anyone should be equal, not done in favor of one party or the other.

*Peers up Jtheo's a** * Hello? I think you got your head stuck in there. Not a fan of the deigning tone, content or attempts at humor in this one.

She woke with a start. A sudden rush shot through her veins, emanating from the center of her chest where shards of red broke on her skin and dissipated into the air. The pain was brief and she was unharmed, but the shock had opened her eyes, filled her blood with adrenaline. She felt bark against her back, mud underneath her, her bare soles and limp hands in the dirt. As she lifted her head from where it lolled, her eyelids parted. The brightness of the sky struck her first - and then the dark figure, the masculine shape obscuring the sun behind him. The silhouette stood silently, a long robe hanging from his shoulders that reached the mud. He watched her, tall and unmoving, and she searched for something to make clear her surroundings. She saw the city’s wall to her left; there was a small swamp all around - and then she saw Hiylu. The woman, her hair both ivory white and charcoal black, always found in her misty-green gown, stood a few yards away, her soft eyes on her. Her concern was hardly on her, who she considered her friend, but on the infant in her arms. The dark-skinned, red-haired little babe squirmed in her grasp, as she nervously rocked and cooed to calm it. Faeinn. She tried to form a question; she tried to ask what was going on. But her muscles felt so heavy, her body was slow and unresponsive, her throat thick and tongue undulating as she attempted to speak. She had taken the herb many times before, she knew what it felt like to awaken from nightsap-induced sleep. It became so clear in her mind. Hiylu, she’d trusted her. She was her friend, she tried to take care of her since they’d met, she cared for her. And she had her baby. She would not have awoken here if she’d not been betrayed somehow. Her baby! She struggled against the slumber that still gripped every muscle in her limbs, a cry of anger coming out as a fragmented gargle that caused Hiylu to step back, wide-eyed, wincing at the fury and hatred that must be in her eyes. She felt a murderous rage in her being, a desire and a certainty that she would kill her if there was no explanation, if her baby was not safe. But the wrath filling her soul was quickly replaced with a stunned confusion, as the figure swooped down on her and gripped the sides of her head. She felt his fingers pushing into her hair and skin, his thumbs on either side of the bridge of her nose. His palms obscured his face, but she felt the hot breath on her face as he spoke. It was fuzzy, his words hazy in her ears - all she heard clearly was what he said with the most venom, and the most reverence. “Leyuperith.” She wasn’t thinking. There was nothing but alarm and animalistic instinct in her mind, as his thumbs drove themselves into her eyes. They put up a resistance, pressure building in them and pain blooming in the depths of her skull. The longer he pressed, the more she was able to squirm, the more control of her muscles she had; she writhed, her hands came up to claw at his sleeve-covered wrists, any ounce of the fight she had going into her furious hands. As the pain grew, a groan formed in her throat - his thumbs tore into the flesh of her eyes, sinking into the sockets and mangling them, and her groan became a piercing scream, crying out in desperation and torment. As soon as it came the pressure of his thumbs disappeared - her eyes were wide open, and she saw nothing. She only felt the agony, and the hot blood sliding down her cheeks, steaming tears and the visceral gore mixing with the ochre she had painted on, her claret washing away the symbol of her family she had held so dearly. Her head was swimming, the wailing of an infant and the confused cry of a woman heard only distantly as she slumped over, her head held up by the man’s hands. He was speaking to her. She could barely understand it, his words sounding garbled and slow, the vibrations in the air pounding against her skull in the deep, deep darkness of the world. It was all black, as black as the void, and she felt disconnected from even her own body. The feeling of cold mud on her skin and rough palms on her face, they were the feelings of a body she didn’t own, something outside of her consciousness. “Say her name,” he seethed, the cold anger dripping from his words as blood sliding off the edge of a blade after its fatal swing. She could feel the life seeping out of her with each ragged breath she drew, and her only thought was to beg him - beg for any sort of mercy such a man could offer. “Plea-hea-hease,” she sobbed, her shuddering, dry cries scratching her throat. His hands tightened on her head, the pressure building again in her bones, and he growled something; she searched in her foggy mind. “Leyuperith.” It was her last bid for life - what help he could give her, or why he would, she didn’t know, and she wasn’t thinking. She didn’t have the will to resist command. His hands disappeared, and she was carelessly tossed back against the tree. She leaned into the mud, her face growing numb and the pain of the air against her open sockets fading into an icy coldness. She breathed in uneven gasps, the darkness sinking into her muscle and bone. Whatever thoughts she could form varied wildly. She thought of him first and foremost, thought of crimson hair and scarred dark skin and she thought of the way his jaw clenched and his knuckles turned white when his soul was being reaved. She had ached with his aches, whatever happinesses that had come to him would bring her joy. She’d broken her promise. She wouldn’t be the one to lay him in his grave; nor be at his side forever; nor would she be the one mother of his children that would stay. She couldn’t ever say sorry, and sorry she was - the fading scraps of her being throbbed with regret, resentfulness, hopelessness. She wanted a better life for him. It was her fault that now, it’d be worse than ever - how bitterly the memories and the blood tasted in her mouth. He wouldn’t let go. Whatever comfort and solace she could find resided in her knowledge that if he had his daughter, if he had his people, she would not be his downfall. If she could have stayed in the forest, stayed with her brother in the relative safety and calm of the Aspect’s world, all would have been well. Everything would have been fine… The druid’s last thought was of herself, a selfish thought of a dying woman. She merely, with her final wisps of consciousness, could hope that for all the love that she had had for them - for Laurelin, her friends, students, and for her family, and those that may as well have been her family, all the people whose faces moved across her memory, although their names were quickly fading - that in the end, perhaps, they had loved her back.

Salhassan set her eyes upon an infant as it gurgled and cooed in its basket. She brushed its cheek with the back of two fingers, and lifted her eyes to the window - looking through frosty glass panes, out towards the looming stone and cleanly-cut wood of Laurelin's city walls. This man's words spoke to a part of her that screamed, that clawed at the back of her mind; the part of her that had once dreamed for flame and lightning to engulf the very walls and houses that now protected her child. She knew he was right. If not right, the mystery man held a kernel of truth in his writings, and Salhassan could very well see that he could be the start of something great, something important. The Descendants did abuse the world. Things were not as they should be - the perfect, orderly chaos of the Aspect's nature was shifted and attacked by the people who relied on it short centuries ago. Why was there a shift from the days of old, that her parents and grandparents had told her stories of, that they even had not seen; why couldn't they go back? Why not forgo the pleasures of the life the people had carved into the earth, and return to it its treasures; what but greed kept them - us, me - from accepting how the world is and must be, from knowing that suffering and change and chaos was eternal and necessary? Salhassan was a druid. She understood Cernunnos with the depths of her soul and being. She had seen, felt, tasted the last breaths and the steaming lifeblood of countless creatures, all innocent beasts that she fed off of for her own survival. But she'd fought for the right. She'd suffered along with them, those lives she'd taken, and they had lived the lives they were intended to up until their end. That's how things were - that's how things must be. When she saw animals penned up, wolves and cats with chains, the soil rended like flesh and carefully-bred plants seeded in the wounds, she saw an affront to the Aspects, to the very earth. The Descendants were but parasites, living by the grace of the Aspects off of their gifts, and the growing disrespect and misunderstanding had to end. And yet... The dark-skinned babe shifted in its buckskin wrappings. It had fallen asleep, wisps of red scattered across its fat, freckled cheeks. The carefully crafted walls, though torn from trees and nailed with iron, kept the child warm, protected it from the wind and rain that could so easily sicken it. The walls just outside, though the earth itself had been ripped and marred and gashed wide open to steal its flesh to build that wall, kept dangerous animals and marauders away from the child. The fabric underneath its small body had been woven from dumb, helpless sheep, fated by the people to languish behind pens for the intelligence and speed had been bred out of them. It was a desperately confusing struggle in her mind, for the things she so hated, and wanted to destroy, made life easier for her most precious treasure. Maybe she was lazy and selfish with the rest of them; maybe Salhassan was truly a poor mother, to rely on such twisted conveniences, to choose the simpler route when she could just as well raise the baby without such pleasantries. With a stiff hand and heavy heart, she lifted a torch from a sconce on the wall. She carried it solemnly through the city's paths, out of the gate and around the walls, until she came upon the large pen of sheep to the east. The ewes with their lambs and the bucks tore at the grass, mowing it down to an unrecognizably uniform height, all moving away in a great mass as the light approached through the hazy grey dusk. These things had no use to nature, could not survive without the feeding hands of farmers or the safety of their pen, were naught but food and cloth for Descendants; and so Salhassan lowered the flickering torch's end to the wooden fence holding them in. It took awhile to catch flame, but the week had been dry - soon the sparks caught, and travelled like wind through the limbs of the fence, expanding outwards and then in. The terrified bleating of the dumb beasts rose over the great popping and crackling of the contained flames. Salhassan tossed the torch to the ground and stamped it out with the sole of her moccasin, kicking it away and returning to her child to make certain it was sleeping well.

I ate a slice of Hawaiian today just to spite you and everyone who cares too much about what other people eat.

Salhassan, in a fervor of nostalgic agreement with the insane writings (that she managed to spell out and read), retrieved a lawbook from the Laurelin library and tossed it into her cooking fire. "If only things had stayed the way they were centuries ago. Although, speaking words is rather important," she thought aloud.

I wonder if my tag's beautiful gay sparkles can square if I get two. Double the sparkle, double the gay?

Cave's Surefire Recipe for Great Eggs (Sunny-Side-Up) 1. Heat up a skillet to low-medium heat. Melt a half-tablespoon of butter or spray with cooking spray. 2. Take a room-temperature egg and carefully crack the center of it on the edge of the skillet. Open the egg a few inches above the center of the skillet and let the whole egg fall out. 3. Sprinkle some water onto the bare parts of the skillet (not onto the egg). Cover the skillet with a pot or pan lid so the steam from the sizzling water cooks the top of the egg. 4. Within 2-5 minutes, the egg yolk will be cloudy, indicating the white is cooked through. The egg is ready to be salted, peppered, and eaten (on an English muffin and slab of ham, perhaps?).

Can I perform my solo emotional read of the entire script of Bee Movie?

No need for people to get worked up over something just for the sake of getting worked up. It's not that serious.

I don't expect any more from people our age group, but it'd be nice regardless.

Salhassan ventured out to Fawynn's resting place, in a clearing just beyond the gravel road in the Laureh'lin forest. She looked upon it, the mound of soil that was disturbed having grown over with verdant grass, the seeds she'd planted there during the ceremonial burial having sprouted. They were yet small seedlings, delicate with their cotyledons hanging from tiny leaves. She set the end of an ash staff to the soft ground, a bright green replacing the amber in her eyes. The flowers in the ground lifted and reached upwards, growing and stretching towards the sunlight, new leaves unfurling. Blossoms appeared, the Xan-warded ground exploding with color as the many flowers bloomed. She leaned heavily on her staff, letting out a huff of fatigued breath, and smiled at the growth that marked the resting place of her friend. She need not miss her, now that she could see that Fawynn yet lived; the rainbow of color, the thickness of the new grass, Cerridwen's life was fed by Fawynn's body. Salhassan felt peace again within herself, satisfied that Fawynn's memory will stay with her, and that she will no longer grieve.

I love pixel art. Would do an art trade for one