Nothing Brings Me More Joy Than Repeatedly Doing A Bit That My Mother Dislikes

Heaven Gaia 盖娅传说 By Xiong Ying 熊英 ➤ Spring Summer 2021 “乾坤 沧渊” Show

one of the biggest man-made environmental disaster in decades!

the Kakhovka HPP is completely destroyed and can’t be restored.

water continues to flood Kherson, Nova Kakhovka and other cities and towns, taking lives and destroying Ukrainian ecology;

over 200,000 residents of surrounding settlements lost access to drinking water;

there is a threat of nuclear disaster due to possible cooling issues at the temporarily occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant;

over 150 tons of machine oil have contaminated the Dnipro River. there is risk of a further 300+ tons leaking;

river water drifts russian mines, they detonate in the flooding zones.

regardless, thousands of animals, both wild and domestic, affected by this flooding. Ukrainians save everyone they can find. the search for animals and people continues for the second day.

the scale of this terrorist act is difficult to predict. it threatens hundreds of thousands of lives — flooding will continue for at least another 4 days.

please do not be indifferent, spread information, reliable information from the Ukrainians who are experiencing this catastrophe in real time. do not believe russian propaganda, support Ukraine and Ukrainians in our battle for life!

what the fuck did I just download

Omg, same!!! Somehow Emilia feels completely powerless in the beginning, and then instantly completely open to everything. Like if she just got Mary Sue'd, but for funny times

I'm around half way in Kingdom of the cursed and I just... nothing will beat the folk of the air series when it comes to lust and holding power against someone like Jude and Cardan. and I'm not sure if it has to do with the fact that they had a tit for tat that slowly escalated in to the "your gonna have to beg for it" energy because chapter 17 of the Kingdom of the cursed is kinda giving me the wrong vibes...

and when I paused the first thing that came to mind was if I read ch15 of TWK(I am fully aware of my obsession) without context will I have the same icky feeling? is it Emilia lacking power or her lack of participation in this game of provocation that I dislike

You guys remember, “I have seen the acorn before the oak”, right? When Madoc came to visit Eva in the prologue of The Cruel Prince?

Apparently one method of tricking a changeling child into revealing their identity is to pretend to cook a meal for many people in an eggshell. The changeling, upon seeing this, will, in astonishment, say

Acorn before oak I knew,

An egg before a hen,

But I never heard of an eggshell brew

A dinner for harvest men.

or something along those lines, thus implicating him.

This is from a Celtic fairytale titled Brewery of Eggshells and is from Thomas Crofton Croker’s first volume of Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland which was published in 1825.

I think Holly Black might have seen this Facebook post because it has the EXACT same words in it and was posted in 2012. 6 years before the publication of The Cruel Prince.

Thoughts?

P.S. I don’t think anyone else has interpreted the quote in this way but @rhysiedarling has written a particularly interesting piece where she refers to it as an example of foreshadowing.

Andrew Kane, "How To Be A Dog"

Has anyone else noticed this about Locke?

In The Stolen Heir, it's revealed that Oak is a Love Talker aka Gancanagh (a faerie who is able to quicken desire in both faeries and mortals and also seduce them just by word of mouth) because his mother, Liriope, was also one. This means that--because Oak and Locke share the same mother--Locke was most definitely also a Love Talker. This could explain why Taryn so easily betrayed Jude, her own twin sister, for Locke. It could also be the reason Nicasia suddenly cheated on Cardan with him. It was so easy for Locke to manipulate and seduce almost everyone around him because of this power of his. It could also explain why Cardan remained friends with him even after what he did.

It is almost five centuries ago, and the girl who will one day be a swordswoman is lying in the red-tinged mud. She can't get up—broken bone? severed tendon? She can't tell. She's yet to cultivate her palate for pain. Her enemy towers over her, a cataphract mailed in screaming steel and poisoned light. His warhammer falls, and it is death, forever death, death unconquered and unconquerable.

"No," says a part of her. She is not even seventeen years old. Her body is mangled and broken, wound piled upon wound piled upon wound. A dull kitchen knife is her only weapon, though she lost that in the mud the second her grip faltered. Her enemy is no thing of this earth. And yet—

"No. It is not death, forever death, death unconquered and unconquerable. It is only a hammer, falling. It is only 'an attack.'"

And the girl understood.

~~~

It is the better part of three centuries ago, as best the swordswoman can reckon, and she is beset on all sides by foes. They are not monsters—just mountain bandits, or highland rebels, as one cares to see it. But they outnumber her by dozens, and even an exceptional swordswoman might struggle against but two opponents of lesser skill.

From in front of her, beside her, behind her they advance, striking from every angle with spears and blades and axes. Others fill the air with arrows, sling stones, firepots. It would be effortless, to parry any single blow. It would be impossible, physically impossible, to defend against them all.

"No," says a part of her.

"You are not outnumbered. You do not face 'multiple' foes. It would be impossible to defend against every attack — but there is no 'every' attack. Only one."

"Oh," the swordswoman said. And it was, in fact, effortless.

~~~

It is eighty years ago, or thereabouts. A coiling spire of stony flesh and verdigrised copper throbs like a tumor on the horizon, coaxed from the earth by spell and sacrifice. It is the tower of a sorcerer-prince, and a birthing place of abominations.

Seven locks of rune-etched metal are opened with her single key. Wretched shapeling beasts, grown by sorcery in vitreous nodules, flee wailing from her, absconding before she even draws her blade. Demons sworn to thousand-year pacts of service find the binding provisions of their agreements unexpectedly severed.

These things dissatisfy the sorcerer-prince. He waxes wroth. He makes signs of power and chants incantations. With a flask of godling's blood, he draws the binding sigil inscribed upon the moon's dark face. With cold fire burning in his eyes, he speaks the secret name of Death. It is a king among curses, all-corrupting, all-consuming, and it falls from his lips upon the swordswoman.

"No," she says, and she turns it aside with her blade.

The sorcerer-prince's brow furrows. How did she even do that?

"Parried it."

But—

"With my sword."

No—

"See, like this."

Stop—

"Well," the swordswoman finally says, "I figured that if I just...looked at it right, and thought about it, and construed your curse as a kind of attack...then I could block it."

That's not how it works at all!

"If you insist," says the swordswoman, shrugging, and decapitates him.

~~~

It is now. It is the end. Death couldn't take the swordswoman, not when she'd spent all her life cutting it up. At times, Death might sidle up to one of her friends, or peer down into a grandchild's crib, and she'd just give it a look. That's all it took, by then.

Heartache couldn't take her, either. Bad things happened to her, and they hurt, and she lived in that hurt, but if it was ever more than she could take...she'd just, move her sword in a way that's difficult to describe. And she'd keep going.

Kingdoms fell, and she kept going. Continents crumbled and sank into the sea. Her planet's star faded and froze. She started carrying a lantern. Universes were torn apart and scattered, until all that had been matter was redistributed in thermodynamic equilibrium. With one exception.

But now it is the end. There is no time left; time is already dead. The swordswoman has outlived reality, but there is simply no further she can go. This is not a thing that can be blocked. This is the absence of anything further to block.

"No," says the girl who will one day be a swordswoman. "This isn't the ending. And even if it was, it's not the ending that matters."

The swordswoman looks back at who she was, at the countless selves she's been between them. She looks forward, at the rapidly contracting point that remains of the future. She grasps the all of linear time in her mind, and sees that it is shaped like a spear.