Windup-gwen - Thou Must Live, Die And Know

Shadowbringers is all about the juxtaposition of Emet-Selch and Feo Ul.

Emet-Selch, a timeless immortal that lives for the past he lost, seeing you and feeling disgust, revulsion, and contempt all for your grand crime of being mortal, seeing you and those you love as not even being truly alive solely because you were not born into his definition of perfect.

Compare him to Feo Ul, a timeless immortal that lives only for happiness in the present, seeing you and instantly falling helplessly in love because you are mortal, full of fleeting passion and ambition that eclipses anything a fae like them could ever achieve all due to your transient ephemeral life; the courage, drive, and hope for the future that only someone with a finite lifespan could ever have.

alpha my beloved

“Beyond these difficulties, there’s a wonderful world waiting for you. There, you will find the happiness you’re owed. I’m sure of it.”

febhyurary (2022) | day 6 | footfalls

Art by Matthew Arnone

I have a request if you would for Amnesia Zenos (best boi, 10/10) What if his lover was a xaela (she/her) from the Oronir tribe, and he somehow managed to find out about how the tribe members have their own Nhaama/Azim?

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Today had been a day. A day and half, or several, all stuffed into the hours of one. She felt as if she had worked several suns and moons without stopping, and surely she had. Perhaps longer than merely that for how tired her body felt. The energy she possessed almost entirely burnt out.

Here, in the safety of her home, she could finally relax. The soft sound of the flickering flames and crackling logs in the hearth. The warming air of the fire creeping over her stretched out legs, from her flexing toes to the top of her head.

The warm weight of his body laid over her thighs, his heavy head nestled in her lap as she drew a brush through his hair. The even softer sound of his hair pulled through the bristles of the moving brush soothing her.

"Am I your Azim?" Zenos asks her apropos of nothing.

She pauses, blinking down at him and meeting his lazy, blue eyed stare. His gaze was so much softer like this. There was still hunger, aye, but there was also contentment. Aught that she had given him, for it had not been there when she had first stumbled upon him wandering, confused and without his memory of who he truly was.

She hums, lowering her brush for a moment and sinking her hands into the mass of his hair. Allowing it to spill over her fingers and catch the light of the flickering fire like spun gold. "Your hair reminds me of the rays of the sun," she tells him. "Bright and gleaming."

Zenos blinks languidly, watching her as she ran her hands through his hair. Mussing the work she has just done to smooth and de-tangle it. It was no matter, as they both enjoyed the time she spent brushing out his hair. They could do so again once she had her full of playing with it.

"That is not an answer," Zenos huffs, his lips pouting a little as he gazed at her under the fan of his eyelashes. She glances at him, her lips quirking in a grin. He may have forgotten who he was, but there were still parts of him that came across as knowing he was garlean royalty. Though she highly doubted he had been spoiled for how he had turned out. It was far more likely that Zenos had been neglected, and for the most part left to his own devices. Taught how to be a prince and a weapon, but not how to be a human being.

She smooths his hair back away from his face, leaning forward to kiss at his third eye. Zenos breathing in deep and exhaling long and lazily as she did so. "Where did you learn of such a thing?" She asks him, stroking her hands along his jaw. Zenos humming and pressing his face into her hands with slitted eyes like a pleased, oversized jungle cat that had been waiting so very impatiently to be petted.

Zenos pauses at her question, his eyebrows furrowing. "...I do not know," he murmurs.

Ah. Another thing he remembered, then, but not from where he had learned it. She sighed, rubbing her thumb over the wrinkle in his brow and kissing his nose. Laughing as he crinkles it at her. "Well, it does not matter. This is not the Steppe."

Zenos sighs at her. "So, I am not your Azim?" Hmph. He was simply not letting this go, or the subject drop, was he? Bratty, spoiled prince. Well, she had made him that way, hadn't she?

She smiles at him, poking the hardened pearl of his third eye. The amnesiac prince grumbling and grasping at her wrist, only to draw her hand to his mouth to kiss over her palm. Hmm. A sweet, bratty prince, then.

"Have you not considered that perhaps you are my Nhaama?" She says, only partially teasing. The idea of being someone's Nhaama had never sat well with her. The title ill-fitting. Azim, however... Something about it... felt right. Better, at least.

Zenos blinks at her, head titling as he truly considered it without balking at the mere suggestion.

"Well, what am I to you?" She asks him after a stretch of quiet with him only gazing at her and mulling over her words.

Zenos gave a rumbling hum, sighing soft as she resumed her petting of his hair. Her fingers tucking the golden strands behind his ear, tracing the rounded shell, rubbing his soft earlobe between her pointer finger and thumb.

"You are not my sun, nor are you my moon," he says, and...

Well, that was a little disappointing.

But before she can do more than frown at him, Zenos settles a large hand on the back of her neck and tugs her closer. Stroking at her nape and squeezing as he murmurs throatily, "You are far more than merely that. You are my world, and everything outside of it. You are more than every star that glimmers in the black of night. More than the moon and the sun and the land under our feet."

Well, that was a bit much. Far more than she had been expecting. Too much, maybe. Yet it was true to his character. Who he truly was.

And she, fool that she was, had made the decision to accept him. To embrace him as he was now and who he might become. To only hope that he would still want her when he remembered all that he was.

She allows herself a moment to be a bit taken aback, a little worried, before she smiles at him. Tugging his earlobe and sinking her hands again into his hair to scratch at his scalp. "Hah. You're so obsessed with me," she says, meaning to tease but coming off sort of satisfied and smug as her lips brush over his with the words she spoke.

Zenos meets her eyes intensely, and for a moment it steals her breath with the thought that he remembered everything. And yes, he was still here, still wanting her. But no, no, surely not.

"Yes," he says with a rumbly, growling sigh. Minding her horns as he pulled her down to soundly kiss him. His hold on her possessive, greedy.

She smiles against his lips and allows herself to sink into his kiss.

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❤️

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“But I want to be better than the lessons they taught me. I want my love to be greater than my hate, my mercy to be stronger than my vengeance.”

— Amy Engel, The Book of Ivy (via themotivationjournals)