Chapter Text
And on my back – once proud and straight,
now beaten by indifferent rods to crooked shape –
I'll always wear these wings of mine
The steering column has become my spine.
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lingering over itineraries
Xaidread
Summary:
Some kind of holding pen for a modest herd of metas and doodles.
Chapter 1: The Winged Wheel
Summary:
A truck driver's army tattoo.
Notes:
After deciding on Sverdlovsk/Yekaterinburg for the Granzbros' hometown, I turned to that city's namesake saint in search of applicable attributes: St Catherine of Alexandria and her breaking wheel. The hagiographies say a Roman emperor wanted to marry her, but since Catherine was already in a relationship with Jesus the emperor put her in jail and gave the order to have her tortured unless she relented. Miraculously, angels swooped in and broke the wheels that were meant to crush her. And then she gave consent to be martyred through being beheaded instead.
- Other wheels involving sexual transgression:
- Greek myth of Ixion: this cheapskate dude murdered his in-law to avoid paying up the money he owed, then Zeus invited him to party in Olympus. Guy tried hitting on Zeus's wife there, but what he ends up fucking is just a cloud hologram of Hera. Then the gods throw him out of Olympus like a frisbee: it's to a fiery wheel he's bound, and for all eternity must spend it spinning around.
- The Eurasian wryneck (Jynx torquilla) is involved in a myth where Zeus is the one getting seduced. There's a crafty nymph named Jynx and Hera turns her into a bird. And people made love charms with effigies of the same bird on a wheel.
Hearing a BBC Radio 4 programme about military ink gave me the motivation to put serious consideration into what Yylfordt might get.
It wasn't where he started his tour of duty, but he leaves Afghanistan as part of the 59th Logistics Brigade. The Avtovoisk emblem depicts a steering column + a pair of winged wheels on a single axle.
I actually find more appeal in the railroader variant of the motif with just one wheel. It's also rather fitting since Yylfordt is the son of a railway worker in the AU. My take twists the wings into opposite directions as a way of representing the regions covered in Yylfordt's service record: first Helmand, then Baghlan.
A bit of vanity may also be involved in the way the wings are folded; they're intended to resemble his Cyrillic first initial, «И» (along with «Ї» in place of the wheel). The combined effect looks like the Wolfsangel, which might be provocative in the cultural context.
