Vis Ravenslove - Tumblr Posts
Vis Ravenslove in a hanfu. Im aware of what right over left means aswell
Soft Vis time, Its also the cover to his spotify playlist and my discord pfp
The Future
“I know,” Fadir softly assures. “Gettin’ better hurts. But it is better. I swear it.”
Content: Divination moment, a child, references to anxiety/general trauma, characters using sign language/machines to speak, something about parenthood
TW: medical consequences to past child neglect
Screen reader's note: Use of Hokkien English.
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If you were to ask Vis Ravenslove what one of his earliest memories was, chances are he’d wax something poetic about falling Pando leaves, his aunt’s summer home, saying his father’s name.
Truth be told, his infancy tended to be more full of mistaking Fadir’s imp roommate Kibble for a fluffy kitten, with a side of attempting to eat avocado pits and bones while no one was looking, but that’s not exactly the kind of cool thing you say on a first date.
Ravenslove Tower had a lot of visitors when he was a kid. That’s just how Slovenguard was- everyone visits, no one stays. Weirdly enough, it’s not the regulars that Vis remembers from these early days. Carlisle, Cofi, Aelrys, Laelia, Mycena, they all blend together like a simulated omnipresence. At the end of the day, Vis remembers the weird visitors. The people who show up once or twice and never again.
Besides, Kaynan the Chained Mind would give anyone nightmares.
An axolomeh, or he must have been a long, long time ago. Godhood turned his body tall and gaunt, gills thickly branched- branched like hands splayed along his face, like the countless hands hidden under his chain embroidered cloak.
But none of that was scary, not really. Vis’ oldest brother was a dragon, there weren’t many things that could top that. It was something in Kaynan’s eyes. Greedy, grasping.
Bugs caught in amber.
Not even his trio of diminutive attendants could do anything to lessen that.
“I thought your flock would be raised better, Sunraven,” one of them dares from the safety of a mechanical voicebox. “Why does this one still fear the gods?”
Fadir’s wing envelops Vis like a blanket, pulling them close to its side. “Be-cause they should.”
And while Kaynan’s attendants would balk at the disrespect, the man himself would only tilt his head between Fadir and Vis, like the two of them were some new, shiny puzzle he’d like to pick apart. (Bugs caught in amber.) An older Vis would recognize sign language, but at this age, Kaynan’s cloak murmurs and hisses as his rows of hands crawl from underneath the cloth like an army of spiders, fingers babbling over themselves around Fadir’s head.
Fadir breathes in a strained sigh. “I don’t like these mech-an-ized shortcuts you’re tryin’ t’ pull, I’ll have you know. Y’ can only come up with so many cages for th’ Flame of Creation.”
The army of hands only becomes more insistent.
“You know Kaynan respects your insight, Sunraven,” another attendant insists.
“And you know full well his works always begin flawed.”
Fadir hums, the sustained note bouncing around unevenly in its closed smile. It looks Vis in the eyes for a brief, piercing moment- sunlight creeping through curtains after long nights, present and yet not, dancing along its child’s past and future for any threat born of letting a stranger into its nest.
Nothing seems to come to mind. It steps aside, freeing Kaynan’s path further into the house, but its arm shoots out in front of his attendants, large black sleeves blocking their path. “Not for you to see. Paisei.”
“Ahba.” Vis quietly tugs on Fadir’s clothes. “Do I have to go?”
“You can stay,” Fadir whispers. It raises its head towards Kaynan as it moves past the hearth. “It might take a long time, le. Lookin’ for all the things you want. I left somethin’ to drink.”
It takes off its big black coat, curls up by a pillow on Corvo’s big draconis chair, and closes its eyes like it’s about to take a nap. But it doesn’t slow down the way it does when it really falls asleep- it stays still, but its eyes and fingers twitch, like when its looking at something very far away.
Vis must have been told about this as soon as he was old enough to understand. His father’s brain catches on things far away, things that haven’t happened yet, things people can’t see normally. And sometimes it uses that to make really nice lunchboxes and find really nice food, but other people use it too, for… things.
Vis never likes when Kaynan uses ahba for Things. Kaynan never leaves Fadir alone when he comes over, not even to do the thing he’s asking for. Even now, sat waiting at the table, his hands loudly fidget with clocks and books and little mechanical things, counting the seconds as Fadir’s mind wanders.
Vis puts on Fadir’s coat and watches the sleeves dangle against the ground. He giggles and flaps his arms. He loves his ahba’s giant coat sleeves. It hides everything in there. Candies. Snacks. Coins. Live birds. Kibble, but only sometimes.
Kibble does, in fact, fall out of Fadir’s sleeves while Vis shakes them around. He ricochets off the ground and into the rafters, squeaks echoing in the hollow space as tiny lollipops fall out of his leather jacket.
This is normal.
[I’m absolutely positive that one’s tried to bite my hands off every time I visit.]
Vis jumps at the new voice. Kaynan’s voice.
[You’re hardly old enough to know much sign language,] Kaynan types into a machine. [Not in this part of the server. I doubt you’re even in school yet.]
Vis pulls Fadir’s jacket around himself.
Kaynan’s speckled eyes blink slowly. [Don’t trouble yourself. I don’t expect you to respond. I have simply decided I need to fill the silence.] A pause. [I can’t stand it. I thought you might have been loud enough to fill it. Perhaps not.]
A wheezing sigh. A half-hearted chirping sound. The axolomeh never had the voice to do much more than that.
[Ravenslove is the only one truly able to envision my errors like this,] Kaynan admits. [The rest of the world sees nothing but our services. The driven nature of our minds. The profits derived thereof.] He looks down at Vis, amber eyes cold like stone. [Even you could never know better. A child, a child, a child. Your own father would be more vast than Ortet itself through such eyes.]
Vis can’t have been older than five at the time. What a terrible thing to say.
“No face, le!” Vis shouts, waving his oversized sleeves in the air above him. “You break the rules every time you come over! Go away!”
[I still need the divination results.]
Vis opens his mouth and starts screaming. Kaynan’s gills rear back with the uncomfortable scrunch of his face. He huffs loudly and produces a small piece of paper from within his cloak, placing it on the desk. He taps the paper as he stares at Vis one last time, and leaves.
(Jerk.)
Vis climbs up Corvo’s chair, sleeves scrunching as his hooves scrabble for purchase against the cushions. Mostly because he wants to nap with ahba for a little bit, but also, also, if he looks sleepy enough Fadir won’t steal its jacket back. Definitely. Maybe. Probably. Besides, it’s funny to watch it breathe with its round chest. So much bigger than Lynel’s. Fadir said it’s shaped like that so it’s strong enough to fly.
There’s this clicky-clicky-clicky rattle when it breathes and Vis sits close enough. Like there’s something trapped in its bones. Vis wonders if that’s just what happens when people grow up. Having rattling bones.
Maybe one day he’ll have big enough lungs to fly. That would be nice.
Fadir comes back to life the way an old creaky radio does. A face that spasms and eyes that blink out of sync as it looks around the room. Vis is already pretending to close his eyes when it looks down at what’s become of its stolen clothes, and it lets out an amused sound.
The two of them go back to sleep swaddled in gilded wings and a lullaby of rattling bones.
=[]=
“You don’t divine your children,” Kazimir the Pale King whispers when the gods next meet.
Herald of mountains and winter, ice and snow. He is human for a god, almost strangely so. Even his lanky frame and gaunt face could have almost been mortal. It’s the eyes that betray him. Slit like a cat’s and almost stark white, the barest splash of color bleeding at his iris edges.
This is the first time he’s tried to talk to Fadir Ravenslove.
Cold, but not calculating. He is too primal to have conniving intentions.
“Liho,” Fadir hesitantly starts.
“I know you don’t,” Kazimir presses. “I can see it on your face, every time you look at them. Why don’t you use your power for them? Wouldn’t you want to give them a life as free of suffering as possible?”
Fadir had never really considered it. No, that’s not quite right. It had never put the same weight to its divinity as much as other gods might have. Lynel and Vis are mortal. There is no plan to change this. It does not want this legacy of omen and prophecy to pass down to its children.
But that was never Kazimir’s question in the first place.
“I use it sometimes,” Fadir concedes. “Just for little things, or to plan. But if I were to re-move every possible pain they could ex-perience, that’d be a cruelty unto itself, ne? I think it is.” It tilts its head back. “If nothing bad ever happened, it wouldn’t really be livin’. An’ they’d know it. Ah-”
It stutters over what word it could say next, and finds nothing.
“They have- they need to burn themselves a little when they are small,” Fadir says instead. “While you are still there. So they don’t do it later. An’ worse.”
Kazimir hums with discontent. “There are some things that children should not be left to deal with at all.”
Fadir sees past Kazimir’s present face and sees a human who loved the winter snow and its King. The human lover and their long line of descendants, divinity falling from their trees like overripe apples, bruising and breaking against the harsh ground below.
Fadir suspects, perhaps, that the two of them are imagining slightly different things.
“We can’t control them forever,” it quietly says. “Not even to save them. That’s no way to live.”
Something in Kazimir’s cold face… almost turns gentle. “You can’t really believe that.”
Fadir’s eyes grow tired. “I have raised too many children to believe anythin’ else.”
Kazimir stares at Fadir for a long moment before he finally nods to himself, quietly, and vanishes into the early autumn frost.
Fadir takes a deep drag from its pipe- and promptly chokes halfway, because it had the sudden strong impression that Lynel is about to very very upset about something when they step off the train. It stuffs its pipe in its pockets, the allays swirling nervously around its head as the track begins to rattle. A frame of wooden carriages and metal blades, a light-bearing face painted with warding eyes shrouded by a heraldic cloud of mist and shattered frost particles as it melodically screeches to a halt.
Right on the clock, Lynel is one of the first people to step out, school bag practically clamped over the top of their head, freckled face mottled with red. (The sky was clear when they left.)
Fadir chirps sharply, fingers snapping as it beckons Lynel to where it is. “Zhe yang? Wo kan, le.”
Lynel drops the bag and ducks their head, hair falling over their face. Their choppy, brown, wavy hair- hair that has long streaks of white hidden in the lower layers, the texture wavy and slightly brittle.
“You’ve been tearing these out, le,” Fadir bluntly says. “If this was new, there wouldn’t be so many.”
“I know Dad was plains,” Lynel starts, “and they grey faster than other humans, but- but not this fast. I haven’t even applied to high school yet!”
When Fadir combs its talons over to look at the scalp, it sees uneven white blots growing on the skin. Not dangerous. (Permanent. It’s going to spread.)
That’s not why Lynel is upset. It’s something else. Fadir silently raises its eyebrows.
“I know… that, uh- there’s leftovers. From- from before I was livin’ with you. I know that, the doctors talked about that, the fuckin’ therapist talked about it. I just- they said it was probably all the stress shit when I was little and-” The start of stubborn tears start to well in Lynel’s eyes. “It’s been five years. I’m supposed to be doin’ better. Why does it have to keep coming back?”
I don’t have time to get worse! a Sunraven from a lifetime ago shouted. Corvo shouldn’t have to see me like this, Laelia shouldn’t- I can’t- please, just let me be better, I’m supposed to be better.
“This is doin’ better.” Fadir’s hand presses down on Lynel’s hair, just a bit. “You were hurt a long time ago, an’ sometimes- sometimes that means you’re only strong enough to bleed now.”
“This doesn’t feel strong,” Lynel confesses. “It’s awful.”
“I know,” Fadir softly assures. “Gettin’ better hurts. But it is better. I swear it.”
Lynel lets out a tearful laugh. “You never swear.”
“Just did,” Fadir insists.
“Do it,” Lynel presses. “Do a swear. Say fuck right now.”
A silence passes.
“Fox.” Fadir squints. “Wait- forks- that’s not right either- I- ah- naaaaaaaaa-” It claps its hands in front of its face. “D… ucks. Duck.”
“You failed me, ahba.”
“There was a very good roast duck stand,” Fadir continues. “We should pick it up on the way home.” Fadir hooks its arm around Lynel’s own, cane rapping firmly against the ground. “We go take Vis from Laelia.”
“I’m gonna eat all of ahyi’s macarons,” Lynel dares. “You can’t stop me.”
“Don’t do that, I will cry.” Fadir looks off into the distance. “Pro-ba-bly. I have never cried before.”
“Damn. Can’t have that.” Lynel pats Fadir’s arm. “I’ll save you one. Hope that’s enough.”
“Always.”