6 Works by tls1314
Listing Works
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false promises of spilled ink by tls4951 (tls1314)
Fandoms: Realm of the Elderlings - Robin Hobb
20 Jan 2024
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Summary
It is a warm night, typical of the nights of his childhood, when the Servants find his mark.
It is a near thing. He has been careful, kept it bound tight, under the long sleeves he was careful to never take off, and powdered to match the white of his skin with chalk dust. He has made it a routine, gathering the chalk from the cliffs at night, watching the seagulls freewheel above him as he does so, and imagining them to be dragons. He jumps to take any moment of privacy unwillingly given, stealing scraps of solitude in the filmy air of the dusk and the quiet moments before dawn, binding and re- binding his wrist as the fireflies fly around him.
The mark shows his future, but not the future of his dreams. Inked on his pale wrist are the last words his soulmate will ever speak to him. He can never let anyone see it.
If they do, they might see the way it jumps from future to future, and wonder to who it belongs.
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Summary
Hornet visits the statue of the Hollow Knight in the City of Tears, every so often, when the rain is thinnest and she can hear herself think over the roar of water.
Once, her father told her he'd given his child the ability to see the world before he'd imprisoned it, through the eyes of the statue. She's not sure if she believed him, but she talks to the Knight anyway. It's not like the rest of Hallownest is any more responsive. She thinks perhaps, behind those eyes of cold stone, her sibling can hear her. That, despite the fire raging through its mind, it manages to think enough to do so.
She knows there was always life in it, after all.
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Summary
Like sleep, like death, you will wake again.
Five Pebbles does not often dream. Iterators only need to sleep when they enter maintenance mode, and Pebbles was built for a world without the Ancients. His systems will last for eons without adverse intervention, and he will watch as the world is eaten away and the land rises upwards. Because of this, he does not often need to maintain his systems, and he does not often dream.
But he dreams now, and his dreams carry whispers, half remembered fragments of a time he hasn't lived yet, and sorrow for mistakes he hasn't made. As he slowly starts to recall who he was and will be, the cycle turns, and the wheel flower grows in the empty spaces, where second chances come to bloom.
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Summary
It is night, and the clouds are dark . The pearls attached to her mask jangle in the quiet, steady breath of the wind. The rain has stopped, and the world seems to blur into itself, merging metal and flesh and bone.
A ghost is here. It is not like the others.
This one haunts her dreams. She knows what happened to it. Why and where and how it died.
She knows its name.
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Summary
Once upon a time, a slugcat walked with their family in the vast expanse, but the rains carried them away. They were hurled down the pipes in the torrent, and they found the remnants of a familiar story. A rotten machine, a broken god, the acid corroding the bottom of the world. The story ended, the same way it always did. The same way it always must.
This is not that world. This is not that story.
Here, it no longer rains.
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Summary
He finds it huddled in a crevice, high in the wall of his pumps, where the metal has oxidised and the water has swept rust and Rot alike away.
The Rivulet appears in Drainage with the Mark of Communication already present. It is holding a pearl carrying instructions on how to kill Pebbles and save Moon. Now, Pebbles isn't the friendliest of iterators, but even so, it's hard to imagine who would send a creature like that to his can. Who could possibly hate Pebbles that much?
The obvious answer, of course, is...