thestarkinwinterfell:

My mother read me a story when I was a child, about a woman who was married to a fisherman. Together they lived by the sea with their son. His had been a difficult birth, and after it the woman had not been the same. She was tired and worn, confined to bed day and night. One day, while the fisherman and his son were pulling their nets up along the shore, the woman walked out of the house and into the sea. They never saw her again. Of course they thought that she had died, but my mother said that they were wrong. The woman had simply been living the wrong life. When she cast herself into the sea, she became a thing from the ocean, with fins and gills and she lived there for the rest of her days.

You could say that’s what I did. I gave myself to the sea. You can run forever if you can stay afloat. But I was not content. And look at me now. Salt beneath my fingernails and dead beneath my feet. They call me a dirty pirate queen: I’ve been living the wrong for far too long.

Do you know what a girl is given in this world? Nothing. But she can buy anything. With a smile, or a touch. With her hips, or with her pretty mouth. A lonely girl on a ship can buy men to steer it and men to kill her enemies and men to warm her bed. A girl girl can buy herself all the time in the world.

Someone tried to tell me once, how easy men are. I didn’t believe a word of it. But I know now. I’ve seen it for myself. I stepped on all their soft, stupid hearts and brittle bones and they paved my way to this place and this throne and these kingdoms.

My homecoming will be spectacular. When I stepped onto dry land again, I stumbled, but not any longer. Winterfell is mine.

Fourteen-year-old Celile shares a room at summer camp with the confident and beautiful Lora, and over the span of three weeks the two become fast friends, Celile even going so far as to develop romantic feelings. At the end of three weeks Lora reveals, however, that she has been a teenage girls for hundreds of years, and that monthly she needs to eat a human boy in order to retain her youth, beauty, and life. The twist is that she can’t lure the boys in herself, and instead needs the help of a human girl to snare them and deliver them to her.

Fast forward three years. The two are now entering their senior year of high school, and Celile has found it impossible to eject Lora from her life. Nor, it seems, does she want to, since she has fallen deeply in love and it seems that Lora returns her affections, as the two have entered into a romantic/sexual relationship that functions normally on the twenty-nine days a month that the two are not orchestrating a man’s murder. This, however, Celile has become accordingly adept at, and can even put it out of her mind most of the time. While she is not at all adverse to killing on Lora’s behalf, it would seem, she is adverse to what has happened to every other girl that has assisted Lora over her lifetime, as each have eventually worn out their usefulness and been eaten up themselves, an act that Lora needs no help to perform. Celile recognizes the reality of this, as she feels that she has already been too tightly snared to ever escape, that she has already walked willingly into the arms of death.

She has put this possibility into the back of her mind until her parents send her away to a girl’s boarding school, concerned about the nature of her relationship with Lora, which they think is closer than two girls should be. True to form, however, Lora follows Celile there like a shadow, and they face the reality of their complete seclusion from society and the male population. As the first month wanes on, Lora becomes weaker and hungrier, and Celile becomes more panicked about what will happen to her if she cannot supply Lora with a meal. The tension mounts until Lora kills a teacher, bringing a full-fledged police investigation down on their heads.

Now, certain that her time is running out, Celile seeks the help of a new friend to rid herself of Lora forever. She tells herself that it can only be one of them let, when all is said and done, and tries to convince herself that she doesn’t still wish it could be both.

and the monster was me/the bogy’s sister - an original wip that gets renamed twice a day

I watched her undress in silence. She flung her clothes to the floor beside mine, kicked her shoes off against the wall so hard that they made a mark. And then she climbed into bed beside me, spooning up against my back, and whispered in my ear so quietly that I barely heard her.

‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t matter.’ But it did. It was all awful, and it all mattered.

thestarkinwinterfell:

That night, she slipped back into our room, wet from the shower, and let her towel drop to the floor. She stood and looked at me as though I was a full length mirror, and she could see herself in me, spread out on my bed with my Chemistry textbook in my lap. I finished the homework an hour ago, but there wasn’t anything else for me to do.

I looked at her and she looked at me, until finally she reached out and took my book away. She turned out the lights and turned away from her unmade bed, slipped into mine instead, and I felt her curl herself around me with her limbs like vines. I could feel her breath against my neck and every smooth inch of her body through my pajamas. We lay like that for a long time before I tilted my head and touched my lips to hers.

I asked her once, forever ago, if she ever felt bad about killing the girl at the end, for using her up and throwing her away. That, I imagined, was the worst of her life’s promises, not the boys but the girls, the ones who she needed to help her keep on living, forever, and who eventually wore out their usefulness and had to go. ‘No,’ she had told me, unequivocally, like she knew what I was thinking, that maybe if I could win her heart, it wouldn’t have to end that way for me. And that was the truth: I would kill a boy for her every night until I was doddering and old if she would just keep kissing me like that.

the bogy’s sister - an original work

Amara Karan as Celile
Eliza Bennett as Lora

thestarkinwinterfell:

When you’re fourteen-years-old, and the beautiful girl who shares a room with you at summer camp tells you that she has to eat boys in order to live, and that you have to help her, you’re not supposed to do it. A normal person tells an adult. And yet three years ago I found myself standing over the body of a boy who just a few moments ago had been hoping to press his hand up underneath my shirt. I, who was by all counts terribly squeamish, who was terrified of the needles they use at the doctor’s office and the uncooked red meat that my mother told me to slice into cubes while she was making dinner, sat on Lora’s bunk and watched her eat him.

When she held his liver out to me I reached for it and held it and let her eat it out of my palm.

And that is how I know which parts of how I feel for her are human feelings and which ones aren’t. When I wake up and find her curled underneath me, and I look at the sunlight glinting off of her pale eyelashes, the feeling that I feel is human. When I see that her knuckles are too big for her fingers because her skin is stretched tight across too much bone, and I find myself trying to catch the eye of the boy on the other side of the room, I know that the feeling I feel is not. Stockholm Syndrome is a human condition, and what made me do the things I do for Lora was as simple and inexplicable as a curse.

the bogy’s sister - an original work

Amara Karan as Celile
Eliza Bennett as Lora

I kissed a lot of men like that, darkly and anonymously and with Lora watching, big-eyed and frightened looking in the shadows just over their shoulders, and those were the only times I ever liked it. Their big, coarse man hands on my arms, just before what happened next.

‘Celile, please.’ Lora’s voice, and then her teeth ripping everything.

I used to be worried that people would cop on, but no one ever did. I kept waiting for somebody to find a body, but that was the thing. We never left any body to find.

Sometimes, when she was too tired, I would bring them to her, from wherever I could find one. I would hike out to the edge of the freeway by our house and wait for somebody to stop and help me, and then I’d give them her address and ask they walk me to the door. I’d offer them some money for the ride, or something to drink. These were the only times I ever felt afraid, in those strange men’s cars on the freeway at night, knowing that Lora wasn’t there, that if one of them decided to drive and drive and drive away with me forever, there wasn’t anything I could do. I wasn’t strong, or frightening, I simply travelled in the company of death.

the bogy’s sister - an original work

Amara Karan as Celile
Eliza Bennett as Lora
Mia Maestro as Isidora
Norah Jones as Elizabeth 

thestarkinwinterfell:

The first three pages are up (!!!!!!), and you can follow it here.

The Northward Route is on one level about medieval Norway, a country just hitting the stride of its ‘golden days,’ a country steeped in folklore and magic that, in the case of this comic, mostly happens to be real. The comic is about a ruthless young Queen in power, about how this power corrupts and changes her, about how some kinds of power were never meant for humans with flaws and short lives and weak bodies and bold ambitions. The comic is about growing up and not fitting in, because you were raised by people (or monsters) who were not like you, because you were taught one way of life and then abruptly switched to another. The comic is about war and murders and crowded cities, about friendship and love and having adventures, about being certain that you know exactly what you want only to find out that you had absolutely no idea. It’s about a Queen who makes bad decisions and a husband who doesn’t want to be king and a cult full of killers and a little girl who is lost in the forest and three teenagers in Oslo trying to solve an impossible set of crimes.

It’s about these people (totally weird, messed up people, some of whom aren’t even human), and probably before long it will be about new people, too. So. If you have any questions, lemme know.

thestarkinwinterfell:

I’m too lazy to write an excerpt. I add them because I feel like they excuse my attempts to art. Um, these two assholes hate each other. Insert rhetoric and some tears from Emily. There.

[x]

thestarkinwinterfell:

There were wrinkles between his eyes that she did not remember. He had been stern, and even surly, for as long as she remembered. But he had not been weary. Not like this. She nearly asked what was weighing on him, but he looked up and spotted her then, standing in the door to the training yard. He stood quickly, too quickly, quickly enough for her to see that he was embarrassed, and that drew a line between them so harshly that she turned and ran. He did not follow. Knees covered in sand, eyebrows drawn together, confused, and caught praying, he did not follow.

[x]

thestarkinwinterfell:

it’s physical imitations, down to the very end. his stupid sword and those ruddy roses. she knows that she doesn’t love him, but maybe she could have. chivalry had always rubbed her the wrong way. but as she’s dying, it’s arthur she thinks of, not the choices she made that got her here, and she hopes that when her brother kills him, they’ll melt down his sword. that’s enough. that makes her smile. she can smell metal. soon after, she’s dead. yes, she could have loved him.

happy (belated) birthday, Kimberly!

thestarkinwinterfell:

A woman emerged from the single shadowed corner of the room, to the left of the open doorway where the light from the windows did not reach. Her tunic was wrinkled, but on its breast beamed the same crimson star as on Gavin’s, the four-cornered star of the Knighthood. All about the room, heads turned so that the people could stare at her as she stepped into the light. Her eyes blinked furiously, adjusting to the sun.

[x]

thestarkinwinterfell:

‘Don’t. Ward,’ he growled in her ear as she thrashed against him. She had been waiting for this. It felt like a thousand years that she had been waiting for him to acknowledge her, to push her first, to initiate a fight. She had trained, it seemed, for this; never mind the roaring in her ears or the ash or the screaming. This moment was hers.

Her elbow connected with his stomach, and then her heel with his knee. She heard something crunch, and he released her. Vetessa rounded on him, but he was still standing. He was doubled over with his arms wrapped around his stomach, and she could have knocked him down.

But she didn’t. She took one last look toward the walls, where the winds were rising, and the tree tops were swaying, and the ash had grown too thick for her to see a thing.

‘You’re going to die,’ Gavin gasped. ‘Sooner or later.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘You’re not made right,’ he said. ‘Something broke you, and now you have hardly any working parts left in you. The world is going to drown you, just like the rest of us, and you alone will have nothing to float on.’

The sky cracked. Lightning flashed. ‘You can’t float on something that’s full of holes, Gavin,’ she said quietly. She took a step forward and gripped him by the chin. There was a hole in the index finger of her glove and the small pad of skin rubbed against the stubble on his face.

‘I hate you,’ she said. ‘Captain.’

A FOREST STOOD HERE ONCE
(sho writes high fantasy for emily’s benefit)