Oh Yeah I Forgot That Was A Thing That Existed. Quite Understandable, Considering I’ve Only Read The

At first hearing that Duane was at any point in his life anything other than a bookish, pedantic wizard nerd caught me off guard, but then you think of all the times he ends up punching people and begin to wonder if there’s more ‘bully’ left in him than he’d care to admit

Wait, what was the divine revelation that made Duane pursue priesthood? Or will it come up in the comic later?

I don’t know if it’ll ever come up in the comic, and Duane’s always been kind of embarrassed to speak of it aloud because it makes him feel like one of those backwoods zealots that preaches anecdotes from a stump, but yeah, he had an Experience when he was a kid. Ssaelism is a very rational faith. It doesn’t encourage you to go around saying Ssael appeared to you in a vision and told you where you left your lucky kedis foot. If you tell your priest that Ssael speaks to you he’ll roll his eyes and suggest you stop mixing beer and wine.

Anyway, Duane was badly injured in a street accident (it was totally Lemuel’s fault, he was being a little shit) and very nearly didn’t make it. Duane was a very rambunctious kid - some might say a bully - and though his grandfather was teaching him pymary Duane tended to use it like, well, Sette might. To make his brother and their peers miserable. After he was hurt he was bedbound for a few months and his interests abruptly turned bookish. At the same time, frigging Sonum Ssael started talking to him in the back of his head, saying he needed to straighten the hell up.

Even after he recovered Duane was hobbling for a year and never took up his old role of neighbourhood bully. Instead he began studying his grandfather’s books, reading everything Ssael ever wrote, and spending way too much time in the ghers library. He shocked his grandfather by beginning to beat him in their play-duels, and shocked his dad by humbly requesting to attend seminary and become a cleric instead of becoming his apprentice in their family print shop.

Duane always heard Ssael with startling clarity in his prayers. That voice went away after his bad night in the snow.

My prank for today is I drew this. YOU SHOULD SEE THE LOOK ON YOUR FACE.

What's the difference in pronunciations between the Ss in Ssael and the S in Soud? Are they, perhaps, pronounced the same, but spelled so as an artefact from Old Tainish? What about the Mm in Mmatont- how's that pronounced?

Double S is a z. Double m is an m with a stop after, treat the mm like its own syllable. So it’s mm-atont. Like, yum, delicious traitors. Mm-atont.

Double n works the same. ssh- is the same. Double L I borrowed from Spanish, and is an english y, with the interesting New Tainish tweak of becoming a separate syllable if it’s at the end of a word. So sshupall (friend) is pronounced probably nothing like you’d imagine! It’s four syllables. ssh-oo-pah-yeh.

Originally I considered using more apostrophes and diacritics in Tainish but fantasy languages are always tattooed up with marks like eighty year old bikers. If French can have utterly unintuitive orthography, so can Tainish, by gum.

this test of the mountain

cytherea tarot i did as a commission for @powerbottomblake <3

Re: Vienne, the world tends to be very forgiving of brilliant yet neglectful geniuses who spend their days buried productively in their Great Works and leave the care of their children and families largely to others, provided that they are male. The female ones, not so much. Kasslyne isn't all that different from our own universe in that sense.

Yep.

One thing I wish I’d stressed more in her story and hadn’t left presumed, was the marriage itself. Vienne didn’t particularly *want* to be married to anyone, but that’s not a choice she was allowed. She was happy enough with Mathis but would have been content to remain alone with her work and her business.

Likewise she never particularly wanted children. When she actually became pregnant, she was assaulted by almost overwhelming approval from everyone around her. All of a sudden they stopped making her feel like a freak, and she felt like she’d become the woman that the entire village had all her life expected her to become. This resulted in a lot of emotional pressure to keep the baby. That’s not something Mathis could ever understand. He had his own pressures for sure and she did all she could to help him with those, but he never gave a second thought to hers.

I relate a lot to Vienne. I knew by the age of ten that I never wanted kids or a spouse because nothing was more important to me than art. But even as a relatively privileged girl Vienne didn’t get to make that same decision. Still, she made it work as best she could. And while she was not a superhero able to be a perfect wife and perfect mother and a perfectly self-actualised human being making her art and fighting for her country, she never gave up the dream.

When a physicist falls in love :)

Richard Feynman's love letter to his deceased wife, 1946.

painted peaks; death valley, california

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