★ 【雨宿里-】 「 Tītania (FFXIV) 」 ☆ ✔ Republished W/permission ⊳ ⊳ Follow Me On Twitter

One of my fav things about Zenos is that despite his overwhelming apathy for anything that isn’t The Hunt, his appearance is clearly so, SO important to him. Even when he had to wear that stupid-huge Legatus armor, he gussied it up with some lovely fabric and jewelry. 

Gotta respect a dude who won’t light the world ablaze in the name of his transcendent moment looking anything less than immaculate.

bartender: i wanted to tell you that-

me, crying into my drink: people say zenos is boring and flat when he's a perfect prime example of the culmination of the efforts of a horrific empire built on the suffering of thousands upon thousands of people, a literal weapon in human form, a political pawn that was constantly treated as such by the people around him and never experienced love or affection or even a proper childhood, who is considered "spoiled" even though material things and a king's education could ever be a replacement for simply being treated as a human being, whose skills were many but was made to kill even though he had no genuine love or joy for it at all, and only found some semblance of value in his own life by treating it as something to be put on the line in a game of death in the throes of a grand epic battle like the stories and legends he idolized in his childhood. people say zenos is one-note when that's what he was meant to be before he experienced the pure joy of something close to being a human for the first time which was so profound to him that he threw away the empire that raised him into a tool without any hesitation whatsoever, because he never had any love for that empire or its people or its ideals and was only ever a figurehead to begin with. zenos is a horrible man who has killed so many others and even started the end of the world for his own desperate desire and acknowledges that completely and utterly without any pretenses or attempt for sympathy, because he is a weapon, he is a being that is able to look upon evil and say that there IS no good reason for it, evil is evil, violence is violence, death is death, and not a single excuse in the world can ever justify it. zenos is a character that is not just defined by the wol, but is defined by the entire context of his existence, and that makes him a much more complicated character than people realize.

bartender:

bartender: i wanted to tell you that you have been here for five hours now

Winter Woods - Hasselblad X1D II 50C Photographed by Freddie Ardley

“Grief and rage - you need to contain that, to put a frame around it, where it can play itself out without you or your kin having to die. There is a theory that watching unbearable stories about other people lost in grief and rage is good for you - may cleanse you of your darkness.”

Anne Carson, Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides

“Give me blood and rage and / a heart for horror; teach me to be / tough enough to face this world / still standing. Make a Fury of me.”

Elizabeth Hewer, from “Finding Ariadne” in Wishing for Birds

“Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.”

Anne Carson, Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides

Mumford & Sons, “Lover’s Eyes”

“A wild longing for strong emotions and sensations seethes in me, a rage against this toneless, flat, normal and sterile life. I have a mad impulse to smash something, a warehouse, perhaps, or a cathedral, or myself,”

Herman Hesse, Steppenwolf

“…is it better to throw yourself head first and laughing into the holy rage calling your name?”

Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“There is love in me the likes of which you’ve never seen. There is rage in me the likes of which should never escape.”

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“We, hurt by ourselves, keen / to be hurters and keen / to be hurt back deep inside. / We, like weapons laid / beside anger asleep.”

Rainer Maria Rilke, The Poetry of Rilke; “Antistrophes” (tr. Edward Snow)

“…she did not allow herself tears. When she did cry, she would explain her tears in this way: ‘I am not weeping, I am bursting with rage.’”

Gabriella Fiori, from Simone Weil: An Intellectual Biography

“Isn’t all that rage so ugly? / And isn’t it mine, still? / Good god, isn’t it mine?”

Ashe Vernon, from “Buried,” Not a Girl

Ada Limón, from “The Good Fight”

“What are we made of but hunger and rage?”

Anne Carson, excerpt of To Compostela

Another Adventure 

Suddenly, he is seized by the urge to travel. To soar. Perhaps he cannot compass the realm as once he did─not with these aging bones─but a jaunt to the far shore of the lake should not be beyond him.

Been wanting to draw a scene like this for awhile now ever since I read his story. So here’s Seto, exploring Lakeland and chancing upon a dwarf from Watt’s Anvil.

A Knight’s Calling

Iris van Herpen ‘Roots and Rebirth’ Spring 2021 Haute Couture Collection