Jude Duarte Aesthetic

Вау, яка прегарна Джуд!

"Be welcome on the Isle of Insmire. Seelie and Unseelie, Wild Folk and Shy Folk, I am glad to have you march under my banner, glad of your loyalty, grateful for your honor. To you, I offer honey wine and the hospitality of my table. But to traitors and oath breakers, I offer my queen's hospitality instead. The hospitality of knives."

"Вітаю на острові Інсмайр. Благі та неблагі, Дикий народе й Несміливий Народе, я радий, що ви йдете під моїм знаменом, радий вашій відданості, вдячний за вашу честь. Вам я пропоную медове вино й гостинність свого столу. А зрадникам і кривоприсяжникам натомість пропоную гостинність своєї королеви. Гостинність ножів."

His most ostentatious decoration, however, is his soft, sullen mouth.

It makes him look every bit the jerk that he is.

👑 The Wicked King Quote Thread 🌊

go!

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.

Wow, such beauty!!!

The tail, the dagger, holding each other at waist!!!

Cardan and Jude - The Cruel Prince

Artist: @/moon_rabbit__

so I got into grad school today with my shitty 2.8 gpa and the moral of the story is reblog those good luck posts for the love of god

The neurodivergent urge to do this

сьогодні в мене настрій намалюю кардана, бо я кілька днів тому почала читати the wicked king

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!

A Cherry Orchard by the House… by Oleksandr Ivakhnenko, 1982

There is this kind of Western narration that pisses me off, major time.

The Russian-angle narration.

I listen to some US news in the morning, and what do I hear?

There is a win for Ukraine? Yes. Is it because Ukrainian Army kicks ass? NO. It's because Russian Army is old and badly organised.

A village gets recovered by UA? Yes.

Do we get even a sentence that's NOT related to Russians? NO.

What we DO get? "Put yourself into the shoes of these Russian soldiers, poorly armed, abandoned by the command, running away..."

NO.

There is no fucking way I'm putting myself into some rashist's shoes. I absolutely decline to commiserate, to empathise or to even consider how much their life sucks.

Because you know whose life sucks more? Their victims. The people they klilled, raped, tortured, starved. And yes, maybe someone will shoot one Rusek or another. But it's not like the Ukrainians went to their neighbourhood too look for trouble - the rashists came over to conquer and colonise. It is their fate to get their asses kicked in retaliation.

Why is this narration persistent? Is it because people from the US can only commiserate with an invading army who is on enemy territory, and gets they arses handed to them, but not to someone who is actually DEFENDING THEIR MOTHERLAND?

Is it because all the wars that US of A has waged in the recent memory were fought on someone else's land? And never touched the continental states? Is it why you are unable to form a meaningful empathic connection to a civilian population whose lives have been upended so completely - because this never happened to anyone you know, or to any place that's close enough to home, for you to understand what it means to be INVADED, instead of being the INVADER?