Mcd Travis - Tumblr Posts
The Valkrums gives me such Bo burnham vibes
Why are my favorite characters always green pathetic boys(Travis and Jimmy)and why do they always have blue love interests???
Mother called him zvanyalken, demonblood. She called him enkyaiken, Enki’s blood. She calls them livyahken, frostblood.
“You are Travis, son of Elsbeth,” Mother told him when he was young. “You are a son of Gal’ruk, and one day you will protect its people from the forces of the Warlock Valkrum as I have been, and you will be one of a long line of warriors.”
Travis ran his hand over his mother’s embroidery project. This one was a new quilt for his bed. His old one didn’t cover him completely anymore and blizzard season was coming. He liked the blizzard season. Mother didn’t go out imp hunting as often, so she didn’t get hurt as often. He liked watching her work, her stitches were so neat and straight.
“Was he always bad, Mother?”
She added another stitch to the arctic fox running across the hem. “I’ve never known him to be, but there was a time before I knew him,” she said. “I thought he was a sweet man when we first met, but that wasn’t really him.”
Travis was zvanyalken. He was a shape-changer, a skin-shifter. He was born with horns, with fangs and claws. He spent most days squishing his insides into human-shapes. He spent most days trying to look like Mother for as long as he could.
He did not look like Mother that day. That day, he had horns and fangs and claws. The points of his teeth caught on his lip when he spoke, his nails tore through his mother’s beautiful stitches like a knife if he wasn’t careful, if he didn’t dull them down.
“Was he a different person in the skin you knew?” Travis asked.
“No, no. I don’t think he was a different person at all. He was only pretending to be someone else.”
Mother set down her needle and embroidery. She tipped his chin up and ran a hand over his hair. Over one of his horns.
“You’re not a different person when you shift skins either, Travis,” she said. “No matter what form you take, snowflake, you are still Travis, son of Elsbeth. You always will be.”
His lip bled when he smiled, caught on a fang. It was healed by the time he licked the blood away.
“Come sit with me, snowflake. I’ll teach you how to make a fox.”
She guided his hands through embroidering a smaller, much worse fox trailing after the first. The conversation drifted from his mind, and when he woke up one day soon after in the skin of an arctic fox, she brushed his coat until it shined and made him a nest in front of the hearth until he shifted back because he wasn’t big enough to reach his bed.