Imagine You Are Palamedes Sextus. You Spend Twelve Years Exchanging Letters With A Woman Who Is Seven

imagine you are palamedes sextus. you spend twelve years exchanging letters with a woman who is seven years your senior. you become the heir to your house just to meet her as an equal. you love her to the point of invention. you both know that her time spent alive has an expiration date sooner than most, and so one day you decide to propose to her - even though you know that she can spend the rest of her life with you but you can’t with her, even though there are imperial rules forbidding interhouse marriages between necromancers, even though you’re here and she’s there and you’ve never even met in person - but you want her to spend her days with someone who cares about her. but you’re so young, only nineteen, and there are still all of those reasons listed above, and so she turns you down. but it isn’t because she doesn’t want to say yes. and then over the next year the letters come fewer and farther apart. and then you’re both invited to the emperor’s house - both of you, together, physically in the same place for the first time - and you show up and she’s here. and it’s like she doesn’t know you. she doesn’t spare you a glance. and you’re still so tender with her - you can’t help it, there’s care baked into you, and you can’t resist helping her, loving her, going so far as to kiss her knuckles in front of company - but still. she doesn’t acknowledge anything that happened between you. she’s moved on. she must have, because she’s spending all this time with the cavalier from the ninth - who is, by the way, two years younger than you, and that doesn’t escape your notice because nothing does - and what can you do? what are you supposed to do?

you tell your cavalier that you’re glad she’s spending time with someone who makes her laugh.

Still thinking about none houses left grief, and while I understand where people are coming from, "it took me out of the world" is just... Really not a relevant criticism here. Like, that line is SUPPOSED to be jarring. It is supposed to be kind of darkly funny, but the point isnt for you to laugh. Its not trying to be a punchline. The point of that line IS to "take you out of the world" because the point is that *this world isn't what you thought it was.*

but seriously i do find it so funny that ford was like OH GOD MY PRECIOUS REPUTATION after bill possessed him around other people for all of one night

and then he gets back to this dimension after thirty years and this is now the photo the press associates with his name

i don't know how many people know the existence of it, but this is genuinely:

a) one of the best covers of take me to church i've heard

b) made for the LOCKED TOMB??? like it is the entire animated sequence of gideon the ninth scenes that fit the cover so fucking well

THIS SONG WAS MADE FOR THIS ARE U KIDDING ME

THANK YOU REINAEIRY (AND HOZIER OF COURSE!!) FOR GRACING US WITH THIS MASTERPIECE

tazmuir could simply rerelease gideon the ninth over and over again but from the perspective of all of the different characters at canaan house and i would be tuned the fuck in. like the drama of all of their different expectations and relationships…. coronabeth living her hot girl summer… judith experiencing Sapphic Hell…. isaac and jeannemary on the world’s weirdest family vacation…. palamedes living out a deeply repressed regency era romance…. silas filled with loathing for every single person there…. delightful. canaan house drives me crazy. it’s like if love island was survivor

happy valentine's day who wants to throw themselves on a fence spike for me while reciting biblical wedding vows as your last words so i can consume your soul and gain immortality but after confronting god who says he cannot bring you back i become so overtaken with grief that i lobotomize myself to erase my ability to conceive of you in any capacity to prevent my body from absorbing and using you as an eternal battery after which i send myself to a purgatory dream state and you surface in control of my body and defend it from the alien bug soldiers of a murdered ghost planet that are trying to kill me for the sins of the emperor i worship and then i stay sleeping in hell while you end up back in your own body and then my body kisses your body but it's while being inhabited by the soul of the earth and eventually you try to sacrifice yourself for me again but you can't because you're dead now and then i wake up in my own body finally in the same room as you but i faint and get carried off by eldritch barbie before i can hear you assert your devotion to me by calling her a slut. either that or we could get coffee