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♥You'll never guess who's back in town,♥ Maddie had sent.
♥Okay, then I won't try! What now, nerd.♥ That had been Yhelm's response.
♥Okay, but it's Satrijal.♥
Jeez, though.
Satrijal had always been a weird girl. She'd been born in Flyhhnemonia, but her ancestors--great grandparents, maybe--had come from somewhere deep in the Sclera. She'd grown up in a half-forgotten tradition of alien gods born in a land where Ardent's sun didn't even reach. She'd grown up in the fading echo of traditions whose meanings had been lost to generations but whose motions had been committed to strict memory. It was an unenviable position, Yhelm had always thought.
Expected to inherit a poorly-maintained culture, to keep it going, having never known the original shape.
She'd gotten along well with Satrijal over the similarities. An adversary in a freeperson family wasn't as alone, conceptually, maybe, but they had both been odd-ones-out in their own ways.
But she'd gone off years ago, back around the same time Yhelm had gone to the Cazirizahd. To where? Why?
No clue.
Satrijal had always been weird.
But she was back in town.
And Madrigal and Yhelm had come out to meet her.
Some things had been the same! She still wore her native dress, faintly evocative of a gussied-up moth. She was stilly tiny. She had wings now, like great, elongated hands clunked up with webbing. She was--well, she was dead. There was really no way around that, that was new.
No more breathing. But unlike Lils, a mummy, a replica of someone who'd passed, Satrijal was something else.
"So," Madrigal stumbled, which had to be a unique experience for them, to be on the other side of this, to be the one awkwardly asking in ignorance and forcing someone to become the ambassador of their identity, "when did you become a vampire?"
"A few years ago," Satrijal said. Her voice, it was normally this tiny little squeak, an adorable thing, and it remained that at its core, but it had new layers of vibration and half of it was sound, and the rest was something Yhelm felt deep in her chest in a color similar to panic.
"Is it, uh," Yhelm said, just as lost for words as Maddie. "So was this something you did, or..."
Satrijal laughed. It was a little tinny giggle, but the sound flexed with unseen daggers at its corners now. "It's always the question! Was I dumb enough to offend Calamity, or was I dumb enough to propitiate him? It's neither, I'm not dumb. I spent a long time figuring myself out. I went back to the Redajhat, did you know? It didn't feel like home. I guess, I'd never been there, neither'd my parents, so I don't know why I thought I'd find myself there. I was just even more lost. I always thought if I went back, I could find these missing pieces to my culture and it'd all click, but it was alien. What I was raised in wasn't just missing pieces, they'd been handled into new shapes! Nothing of the old fit into any slot at all. Nope. Waste. Of. Time!"
"That sucks, man," Yhelm commiserated in the sacred words of comfort as old as the world. "You always were talking about how you wanted to do that too."
"I was! But then I thought, well. What if I was being dumb looking for answers anywhere else? And you know who I thought of? Maddie!"
"Ah!" Maddie said. They were gliding along on the coils of their scarf, a modified form of their narramorphic style. "Where I went with Encore, you went with Calamity?"
"Well... not a first!" As Satrijal walked Yhelm noticed the ancient tilework beneath her little hooves crack. Not under weight, Yhelm thought. Not a physical one. Calamity, the God of Curses, assigned by Figments to dole out punishments to the truly deserving. Vampirism was one of the nexus of curses' great inventions, most of the stories said. Vampirism was a curse. Satrijal was oozing with curses, that's what it was. It was distorting the ground she walked on. It was soaked through her. It burned in the air.
"Oh!" Madrigal said. "You started with Regent."
"Correct! You remembered! Oh, that's so sweet of you, Maddie."
Maddie smiled in that way you do when bits of trivia about people that stick in you become the way you show you still cared about them years after they were gone. "You always said you felt between a lot of things, and that Regent reminded you of Atee, so it was a familiar idea to start with."
"The Might-Be God. Well, they were nice, but worshiping might-bes when you want something solid to cling to, well. You can imagine. That ended up being unsatisfying."
"I grew up in a definition I hated," Madrigal agreed. "So I fell in with the Goddess of Lies, to never be defined again. You were always stuck without definition. But then why Calamity? I'm not really an expert, but this doesn't look like simple vampirism? This looks pretty intense?"
"Ohohoho!" Satrijal said, laughing and skipping. "I am full of curse, no! You take on more curse you become more powerful and more cursed. I even have the wings. How cool are they! But no! Imagine me, feeling lost and unsure. I thought to myself, well, it might take me my whole life to figure this out. And that made me sad. Now, I had other things going for me, of course, this wasn't my entire life, we can't act like I did it all because of some--some thing with my culture, yeah?"
"Yeah," Yhelm agreed. "Even something with a single cause can accrete with other motives into the same conclusion."
Satrijal stopped, spinning on a dainty hooftip, nearly knocking Yhelm and Madrigal both with her wing. "Okay wait! Yhelm did you become an academage I gotta know!"
"Oh. Uh, yeah. Kinda. Yeah."
Madrigal wriggled hungrily on their floating scarf like a silk snake. "You aren't getting out of telling us why you're a vampire, Satrijal, c'mon! I don't know if I--if we need to be supportive or concerned or--it's a lot that I'm not sure the most helpful way to process it for you?"
"Welllllll! Okay. I bummed around a while. Did this-and-that. And I heard about Calamity, and vampires, and that vampires can live forever and get cool powers. And I thought, well, that's something neat. Why don't I do something neat! So I started worshiping Calamity until I got his attention, and bam! I died! I watched Ardent close one last time and then I felt my heart! Cramp! I fell over dead!"
She smiled so terribly proudly with her bone-white fangs.
"That's it?" Madrigal asked.
"Pfft, you can swap your naughty parts out at will," Satrijal said. "I can live forever and have like a billion cool powers. It doesn't gotta be some big, meaningful answer, you know? I just wanted an answer. Now I got it."
Madrigal and Yhelm exchanged a quick look, and sent mental shrugs to one another across their Love line. "Well, so, I'm glad you found something that made you happy--"
"Oh, it's utterly awful!" Satrijal said in delight. "Just utterly terrible! It's so much worse than I thought, I miss the day so much, and having to treat people as food makes it hard to have friends anymore! I'm a nexus of curse now! Fate bends to disaster just under my gaze! I am a roaming tragedy! I love it! Isn't that so cool!"
Madrigal broke into a little fit of ferret giggles. "Well! You're still very much you."
♥Okay, then I won't try! What now, nerd.♥ That had been Yhelm's response.
♥Okay, but it's Satrijal.♥
Jeez, though.
Satrijal had always been a weird girl. She'd been born in Flyhhnemonia, but her ancestors--great grandparents, maybe--had come from somewhere deep in the Sclera. She'd grown up in a half-forgotten tradition of alien gods born in a land where Ardent's sun didn't even reach. She'd grown up in the fading echo of traditions whose meanings had been lost to generations but whose motions had been committed to strict memory. It was an unenviable position, Yhelm had always thought.
Expected to inherit a poorly-maintained culture, to keep it going, having never known the original shape.
She'd gotten along well with Satrijal over the similarities. An adversary in a freeperson family wasn't as alone, conceptually, maybe, but they had both been odd-ones-out in their own ways.
But she'd gone off years ago, back around the same time Yhelm had gone to the Cazirizahd. To where? Why?
No clue.
Satrijal had always been weird.
But she was back in town.
And Madrigal and Yhelm had come out to meet her.
Some things had been the same! She still wore her native dress, faintly evocative of a gussied-up moth. She was stilly tiny. She had wings now, like great, elongated hands clunked up with webbing. She was--well, she was dead. There was really no way around that, that was new.
No more breathing. But unlike Lils, a mummy, a replica of someone who'd passed, Satrijal was something else.
"So," Madrigal stumbled, which had to be a unique experience for them, to be on the other side of this, to be the one awkwardly asking in ignorance and forcing someone to become the ambassador of their identity, "when did you become a vampire?"
"A few years ago," Satrijal said. Her voice, it was normally this tiny little squeak, an adorable thing, and it remained that at its core, but it had new layers of vibration and half of it was sound, and the rest was something Yhelm felt deep in her chest in a color similar to panic.
"Is it, uh," Yhelm said, just as lost for words as Maddie. "So was this something you did, or..."
Satrijal laughed. It was a little tinny giggle, but the sound flexed with unseen daggers at its corners now. "It's always the question! Was I dumb enough to offend Calamity, or was I dumb enough to propitiate him? It's neither, I'm not dumb. I spent a long time figuring myself out. I went back to the Redajhat, did you know? It didn't feel like home. I guess, I'd never been there, neither'd my parents, so I don't know why I thought I'd find myself there. I was just even more lost. I always thought if I went back, I could find these missing pieces to my culture and it'd all click, but it was alien. What I was raised in wasn't just missing pieces, they'd been handled into new shapes! Nothing of the old fit into any slot at all. Nope. Waste. Of. Time!"
"That sucks, man," Yhelm commiserated in the sacred words of comfort as old as the world. "You always were talking about how you wanted to do that too."
"I was! But then I thought, well. What if I was being dumb looking for answers anywhere else? And you know who I thought of? Maddie!"
"Ah!" Maddie said. They were gliding along on the coils of their scarf, a modified form of their narramorphic style. "Where I went with Encore, you went with Calamity?"
"Well... not a first!" As Satrijal walked Yhelm noticed the ancient tilework beneath her little hooves crack. Not under weight, Yhelm thought. Not a physical one. Calamity, the God of Curses, assigned by Figments to dole out punishments to the truly deserving. Vampirism was one of the nexus of curses' great inventions, most of the stories said. Vampirism was a curse. Satrijal was oozing with curses, that's what it was. It was distorting the ground she walked on. It was soaked through her. It burned in the air.
"Oh!" Madrigal said. "You started with Regent."
"Correct! You remembered! Oh, that's so sweet of you, Maddie."
Maddie smiled in that way you do when bits of trivia about people that stick in you become the way you show you still cared about them years after they were gone. "You always said you felt between a lot of things, and that Regent reminded you of Atee, so it was a familiar idea to start with."
"The Might-Be God. Well, they were nice, but worshiping might-bes when you want something solid to cling to, well. You can imagine. That ended up being unsatisfying."
"I grew up in a definition I hated," Madrigal agreed. "So I fell in with the Goddess of Lies, to never be defined again. You were always stuck without definition. But then why Calamity? I'm not really an expert, but this doesn't look like simple vampirism? This looks pretty intense?"
"Ohohoho!" Satrijal said, laughing and skipping. "I am full of curse, no! You take on more curse you become more powerful and more cursed. I even have the wings. How cool are they! But no! Imagine me, feeling lost and unsure. I thought to myself, well, it might take me my whole life to figure this out. And that made me sad. Now, I had other things going for me, of course, this wasn't my entire life, we can't act like I did it all because of some--some thing with my culture, yeah?"
"Yeah," Yhelm agreed. "Even something with a single cause can accrete with other motives into the same conclusion."
Satrijal stopped, spinning on a dainty hooftip, nearly knocking Yhelm and Madrigal both with her wing. "Okay wait! Yhelm did you become an academage I gotta know!"
"Oh. Uh, yeah. Kinda. Yeah."
Madrigal wriggled hungrily on their floating scarf like a silk snake. "You aren't getting out of telling us why you're a vampire, Satrijal, c'mon! I don't know if I--if we need to be supportive or concerned or--it's a lot that I'm not sure the most helpful way to process it for you?"
"Welllllll! Okay. I bummed around a while. Did this-and-that. And I heard about Calamity, and vampires, and that vampires can live forever and get cool powers. And I thought, well, that's something neat. Why don't I do something neat! So I started worshiping Calamity until I got his attention, and bam! I died! I watched Ardent close one last time and then I felt my heart! Cramp! I fell over dead!"
She smiled so terribly proudly with her bone-white fangs.
"That's it?" Madrigal asked.
"Pfft, you can swap your naughty parts out at will," Satrijal said. "I can live forever and have like a billion cool powers. It doesn't gotta be some big, meaningful answer, you know? I just wanted an answer. Now I got it."
Madrigal and Yhelm exchanged a quick look, and sent mental shrugs to one another across their Love line. "Well, so, I'm glad you found something that made you happy--"
"Oh, it's utterly awful!" Satrijal said in delight. "Just utterly terrible! It's so much worse than I thought, I miss the day so much, and having to treat people as food makes it hard to have friends anymore! I'm a nexus of curse now! Fate bends to disaster just under my gaze! I am a roaming tragedy! I love it! Isn't that so cool!"
Madrigal broke into a little fit of ferret giggles. "Well! You're still very much you."
Category All / All
Species Unspecified / Any
Size 1232 x 843px
File Size 579.2 kB
I love the illustration, the animation in their movements and features, the floating scarf and expressiveness. It has a very... cultural feel to it, for lack of a better word. And I love the uniqueness, in both their design and their clothing. It really makes them all the more interesting, really accents what you tell in your narrative about their different places, their different cultures, where they came from and who they are. I love that.
I really enjoy the dialogue, too. The way you tell stories through it, and how it all comes together. It's really fascinating, to say the least, and beautiful. They tell you about their lives but you also learn so much more of the gods and culture, about these three, what's natural to them and what's not.
And I enjoy the answer. Because it doesn't ever have to be something big and fancy, no; most of the dumb decisions that reshape our lives aren't., as much as we'd like to pretend we think everything through. You do a good job explaining that, and moreover, the why.
Fantastic work, as always.
I really enjoy the dialogue, too. The way you tell stories through it, and how it all comes together. It's really fascinating, to say the least, and beautiful. They tell you about their lives but you also learn so much more of the gods and culture, about these three, what's natural to them and what's not.
And I enjoy the answer. Because it doesn't ever have to be something big and fancy, no; most of the dumb decisions that reshape our lives aren't., as much as we'd like to pretend we think everything through. You do a good job explaining that, and moreover, the why.
Fantastic work, as always.
the fun part is that of all of them, yhelm is the one wearing what's the earth equivalent of, say, a niqab wrt the religious nature of the clothing
the leather jacket with patches on it isn't a fashion statement, it's a religious choice
maddie and satrijal just dressed in their cultural niceties yhelm wearing culture-independent holy robes
the leather jacket with patches on it isn't a fashion statement, it's a religious choice
maddie and satrijal just dressed in their cultural niceties yhelm wearing culture-independent holy robes
during day the rose marble and brass-gold is much shinier, https://www.furaffinity.net/view/31608239/
but ardent and argent both paint their respective days with different palletes
night is considered essentially just night-day, a full 12 hour sequence consisting of a dim beginning, a brightly if softly lit middle, and a taper out into a darkness that then turns into the much more golden brightness of day-day
but ardent and argent both paint their respective days with different palletes
night is considered essentially just night-day, a full 12 hour sequence consisting of a dim beginning, a brightly if softly lit middle, and a taper out into a darkness that then turns into the much more golden brightness of day-day
i was going to say my vampires are all also from different settings but i do have two uwi vampires, don't i
tsnnry went super deep into the alienation it causes right away with "oh, fuck, i'm immortal, people are food, it's a conscious choice to engage with them on equal terms" while satrijal is all "this is so cool i'm some kind of horrible monster and i've ruined my life doing it, how romantically tragic! this is fun!"
janet, a non-uwi vampire, meanwhile, is just
how long can she pretend to be human until she forgets and just becomes Predator
tsnnry went super deep into the alienation it causes right away with "oh, fuck, i'm immortal, people are food, it's a conscious choice to engage with them on equal terms" while satrijal is all "this is so cool i'm some kind of horrible monster and i've ruined my life doing it, how romantically tragic! this is fun!"
janet, a non-uwi vampire, meanwhile, is just
how long can she pretend to be human until she forgets and just becomes Predator
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