What if you were reading a fantasy novel and there was some king or nobleman whose coat of arms seems to appear everywhere and is constantly noted in the narration, but it’s not until the dude appears in person that the coat of arms is actually described.
Only it’s not a house symbol or anything pretentious like that. Dude’s wearing a literal cloak made out human arms. How fucked up would that be?
It was that mark again. His mark. That same damned coat of arms stamped on every disaster the Duke left in his wake.
There were stories about the coat of arms – dozens of them – and if even one of them turned out to be true I don’t think I’d do much sleeping anymore. Some said it was a gift from the devil, already fashioned from parts unknown. Others say they were taken at the point of a sword, either from brave men who died standing up to him, or gentle villagers who would never have raised a hand against him. A few say the arms were given willingly by noble patriots who gave their bodies over to the Duke’s cause. The ones who say that don’t tend to have a lot of self-respect
The story of where it came from was never very relevant, it’s always what the coat was that mattered. It was more a shawl than a coat – a waist length piece of oilcloth only visible at the neckline where it was buckled with a rune-inscribed clasp. The rest of it was hidden of course by layers upon layers of human arms.
There were a hundred of them, each of them grey as a corpse yet prehensile as if their owners were still using them. They were skillful hands – every one of them remembered their trade and needed no instruction, only that the Duke demanded their service. Among them were the arms great warriors, with ten men’s strength and flawless skill with the sword, spear and longbow. There were the hands of clever tinkers, ever busy with their craft and never ceasing to produce enchanted items fro the Duke even as he slept. There were pickpockets and surgeons, shield-men and knife throwers, and among them even a number of wizards whose wizened arms still carried the wards and spells of ancient days.
Among all there was but one mismatched pair unlike any of the others. A man’s right arm dangled to the duke’s left, and a woman’s left hand tightly clasped his right. One would think that a hundred-strong man would have nothing to fear in life, but the wicked old Duke held his mother and father’s hands for courage all the same
Something that’s almost never covered in fantasy mediums is common names.
Like we all know fantasy names are unusual, but any name to a foreign culture is considered unusual English names to Indian people are very unusual for example. But naturally, given that it’s an entire culture, there will be some common names, it’d be refreshing to at one point here this exchange.
“So I was talking to Vicnae and-”
“Wait which Vicnae? You can’t just say Vicnae. There are ten Vicnae’s in my village alone.”
This has 100 notes yesterday and 300 this morning what the fuck happened.
People understand the truly important things.
DSA (a German fantasy P&P RPG) actually has the name Alrik, which is hugely popular in the universe. Everyone is Alrik.
This is also a great excuse to use “X the Y” or “X of Y” type names without being pretentious. Calling someone “Thognor The Stout” goes from pomposity to practicality if he lives down the road from Thognor The Small.
my family is from a town in Ireland where everyone has the last name Ryan. literally like everyone. so they differentiated families by calling them by their professions, right?
Out of curiosity, if these were book titles, which would you be more inclined to read?
A Home of Aquamarine and Sun
A Store of Bloodstone and Sweltering Humidity
A Store of Bloodstone and Sweltering Humidity
(Based on the YA joke-prompt from twitter)
Crystal Results Day was always intense.
It wasn’t like your chosen gem would actually dictate the rest of your life. No one was restricted to just one stone. Even if you got something lame, like Pyrite, you still had your lesser affinities, other stones you could use as substitutes. And then there were the universals. But the professors made Results Day into such a huge deal that fifteen-year-olds weren’t about to question it.
“…so I’m sure to get Ruby,” Jax was telling everyone. “I even fudged all my answers on the personality quizzes.”
“Those?” scoffed someone from a different class. “Nobody even reads those; they’re just a way to let you pretend to have any control over what stone you get.”
Jax gasped, then whirled on me.
“Is that true, Jaspin?!”
People were always asking me to confirm things they heard about the gemstone matching process. My dad had worked as one of the people who tested aspiring mages, watching the magic they performed and how they used it, drawing a sample of magic from their casting, and reading teacher reports on personality traits. At the end, he’d send all the data he gathered and a handful of suggested gemstones to the relevant lapidary, who would then run simulations using the magic samples to see which stone best fit the user.
He’d done that up until they’d killed that job and kicked him off.
Our school’s Head Lapidary had teamed up with the Chair of Geology and the Chair of Precisely Bound Magery to come up with an algorithm that would do all of that work for them. They’d enchanted a machine to run the algorithm and spit out a piece of paper with the appropriate gemstone written on it – choosing one at random of two or more seemed good – and automated the job that had kept a couple dozen people in business.
My dad had been demoted back to guidance counselor for the mages. He’d been one of the lucky ones – the rest had been let go.
But back to the present.
“Kinda,” I told Jax. His face fell.
“I mean, they do look at the personality quiz if it looks like you have multiple affinities. Or if they feel like they need more information, I think? It’s sort of optional, though.”
“Oh,” he said, disappointed.
“Hey, don’t worry,” I tried to reassure him. “If anyone can handle getting Ruby, it’s you.”
That wasn’t entirely true.
Ruby was a temperamental gemstone. You needed to be even-keeled, with intense self-control, to channel your magic through it. Let go of your discipline for a second and it would overwhelm you. It was a passionate gem, prone to turning saints into hot-blooded warlords and singing a siren’s song of power and glory and courage and rage.
Not that it was bad or anything. Gems couldn’t be good or bad; they just pushed you one way or another, and sometimes that was for the better. Other times, it was for the worse.
Jax would have been pushed for the worst. He was already way too impulsive, in magic and in life. No one in their right mind would give him Ruby. Though maybe a machine would be fooled.
I checked the time crystal on my wrist. It was Obsidian, a truth stone. Not that it mattered. Time crystals were made in advance by gemcutters who weren’t mages, but could shape magic inside a stone, and distribute the stones to whoever wanted one. Which was everyone. It was the height of fashion to wear a few gemstones around, visible but not gaudy. Take cufflinks – everyone was wearing gemstones on their sleeves. Even the lower-classes were wearing Pyrite crystals loosely tied to their shirtsleeves.
“Time check?” whispered Cathy. Her hands were twisting in her lap.
She had reason to be nervous. As magical ability went, she didn’t have much of it. Not that she wasn’t smart about using it. But if magic was water, there was only so much you could do with a thimbleful.
Forget the seven deadly sins – the Seven Virtues are here to pick a Chosen One and get him to save the world from an ancient evil and untold destruction. Unfortunately, they want different Chosen Ones, and they can’t agree on a hero in time. So now they’re stuck trying to save the world themselves.
The problem? Enemies have Lord of the Rings-style monster armies that attack through Brute-force, not any kind of anthropomorphication of sins; and the Virtues only have power in the forms of (a) being able to demonstrate almost superhuman levels of the virtue they represent, and (b) giving any ordinary human who’s still uninvolved in the conflict the same level of that virtue. (They would have been able to give virtues to an extraordinary human, but unfortunately whatever time window they had for doing that ran out.) (Now, “ordinary” doesn’t just mean unpowered – it also means you can’t be too far from average in any direction! Being too good at chess or a famous singer disqualifies you, but so does being more lazy than literally everyone else, or being able to lick your elbow.) How do the Virtues end up coordinating an effort against the forces of evil?
For reference, here is a list of the Virtues:
Virtue Charity
Virtue Chastity
Virtue Humility
Virtue Kindness
Virtue Temprance
Virtue Diligence
Virtue Patience
For further character prompting, try having two virtues be male and two be nonbinary.
They dined at the castle that night, feasting upon fresh-caught river trout, cooked to crackly perfection over open flames, and served with lemon from the gardens. There was roasted boar as well, from a mighty beast the hunters had slain, the huge chops basted in their own glistening fat. They drank sweet summerwine, staining their lips red, and making their songs more merry as the night drew on. And then the servants brought out platters of berries and cream and cakes, each one sweeter and more succulent than the last.
Also someone murdered the king or whatever.
For breakfast they had platters piled high with crisp bacon…
Garnet is a running stone. Feet pounding on wet concrete, laces tied too tightly, soles worn down to slick rubber but, still, never slipping.
He knows it can be a healing stone, a purifying, stone, but has never felt the sort of peace howlite or quartz (rose or otherwise) bring him from its red depths.
Garnet tells him to seize his opportunity between his teeth and run. Run upright, wind in your hair, hands clenched around a phone blasting drums, towards the finish line. Run like the world is being created under your feet. Run like your soul is begging you to, fast and hard and free.
A car horn honks, ripping past screeching guitars, and grabs his attention.
Andy pulls his headphones from his ears, keeping light on the balls of his feet so his legs don’t begin to cramp. His mom is looking at him from the driver’s side of the family’s mini van, one eyebrow raised.
“Do you,” she yells over the roar of the river on his other side, “have any idea how far from home you are?!”
“Seven point two miles,” he says before his teeth can click over the words. He wasn’t keeping track, but he’s always been able to gauge distance like that. He rubs the back of his neck. “I…I lost track of time. Sorry.”
His mom huffs and leans over to open the passenger side door. “I’d worry about you running away if it weren’t for the fact I saw your laptop on the kitchen counter.”
“Mom,” Andy says, ignoring her comment. It’s true anyway. “I can’t get in the car, my legs will cramp–”
“We’re supposed to be over at the Jimenez’s in an hour,” she tells him and pats the seat. “If you were really worried about cramping, you would have remembered that.” At the look on his face, her eyes narrow. “Unless you did remember and that’s why you’re seven point two miles from home.”
“No,” Andy denies and forces himself to laugh. “I love going over to see the Jimenez’. For sure. Unquestionable.”
“Unbelievable,” his mom mutters and waits to pull a u-turn until he shuts the door and puts on his seatbelt.
——————————————————————–
It’s not that he doesn’t like the Jimenez family. He does. It’s just that no one in his family believes that their youngest, Marin, is trying to place a curse on him.
Unlike Lucifer, some angels never fell from heaven willingly – they were pushed.
Baring no sin, these betrayed angels would remain on Earth instead of Hell, becoming dragons; halos broken into horns, feathers charred to scales, and heavenly light breathed out as desperate fire.
This is why stories often depict dragons capturing princesses and hoarding treasure.
Dragons believe that if they act as guardian angels by “protecting” the princesses they capture, and “removing” humanity’s cardinal sin of greed by stealing treasure, then they would become angels again.
This also explains why dragons eat humans.
Because knighthood can only be accomplished with God’s blessing, dragons first assumed that knights were sent to rescue them, not the princess.
Envious that God would ascend these sinful creatures instead of his own angels, dragons soon ate any knights sent to slay them; believing that by trapping enough souls in their Earth-bound body, God would have no choice but to bring the dragon back to heaven just to save the spirits burning within.
Like Hell’s flames, a dragon’s fiery breath are souls trying to escape.
Serious question here guys: would you read a high-fantasy queer, slice-of-life book that centred around the daily lives of queer, non-binary fae students and their teachers in a magic school? The big bad they have to face is the threat of not being able to control their magic, and though there are glimpses and hints at potential future threats, the story focuses on their training and relationships. It also follows one of the founders of the school who’s writing her memoirs in an attempt to deal with traumatic memories that have been suddenly brought back into her mind and which are causing flashbacks and some panic-attacks.
This is essentially the book I’ve written and I’ve got sequels planned and I love these characters and the community I’ve created, but I’m in the middle of heavy editing and revising and I’m at the point where I’m wondering if it’s even worth being read and I need someone to either tell me that no I’m being silly and yes it sounds like something they’d read, or yes I’m right it sounds like a waste of time. I mean, I’m still going to finish it and do something with it regardless of what people say, but it would be nice to know.
NineofShades 