Tag: Acolyte

“Shatter the Earth” Cassandra Palmer 10 Karen Chance

Yeah. I scratched something that had imbedded itself near my hairline, and a couple bits of rubble fell out and hit the white tiled floor, making little clattering sounds. The attendant didn’t say anything, so I didn’t, either. I guessed we were both going to agree that hadn’t happened.


It was funny how you couldn’t tell now, I thought, staring. Like you couldn’t tell if a lot of the bodies around Vlad’s city of the dead were male or female, after a while. They just turned into corpses, blackened and split open, with ropes of trailing entrails festooned with maggots and dripping with unknown liquids. Mothers, fathers, lovers, friends; they were all the same in death, rotting under a cheerful blue sky . ..


Somebody had told me that war was a lot of serious tedium interspersed with moments of sheer terror, however. Which I thought described my job perfectly.


…liberated my new cat. Who looked in disbelief at my bed, which was round and so oversized that they needed a new designation for it. Orgy-sized maybe, because it could have fit ten, maybe twelve in a pinch.


You got it, I gritted out, after half a freaking hour. I had been awake for going on a day, under less than ideal conditions. My body ached, my brain was fried, and my eyes actually burned. I was going to sleep right now, damn it! Only I didn’t. I tossed and turned and tried every conceivable position. I plumped my pillow, changed it out for a different one, and then pounded that one into submission, too, before giving up and going back to the first one again. I put on a sleep mask. I took off a sleep mask, because I had black out curtains that my vamp bodyguards almost always kept closed even when they weren’t in here. I didn’t need a sleep mask, goddamnit! The problem was, I didn’t know what I needed.


Somebody had told me that warm milk helped insomnia. It sounded nasty, but I was willing to give it a try. Right now, I was willing to try anything. Of course, that required that I play the fun and exciting game of Hunt the Milk, which was no mean feat. The penthouse’s kitchen had been designed to feed a horde, with three fridges—two regular ones and a shorty under the counter—a standalone freezer, two wine coolers, another wine cooler that was used only for beer, and God knew what else. I didn’t, because I couldn’t find half of it! And what I could find, I often didn’t want


Tami, my friend and self-appointed life manager, and I had sat around one night shortly after we moved in playing “guess the item” with a couple drawers full of weird, one-use-only gadgets. We’d managed to correctly identify an avocado slicer, a carrot peeler, a pair of herb scissors, a strawberry stem remover (okay, we cheated with Google on that one) and a vertical egg cooker. Plus some stuff that even the search engine of the gods hadn’t been able to help us out with.  Tami’s go-to greeting for visitors to the kitchen these days was to drag them over to the mystery item drawer and try to make them identify something.


I didn’t have an answer for her. It was one of a whole host of things I didn’t know, because this job didn’t get easier as you went along, like I’d expected. It actually seemed to be getting harder, which was a problem since I was already giving a hundred and fifty percent. Literally. I turned around and went back to bed.


Only you can’t. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.” She leaned forward and put a hand on my arm. “Everybody wants a piece of you, all the time, but you can’t give it to them. They’ll take and take, until there’s nothing left. That’s how people are—”


I seriously contemplating just sleeping where I lay. The bed had one of those down-filled mattresses that grabs your ass like it’s trying to get handsy, and then draws you down into enveloping softness. 


I groaned and put a hand to my head, where it felt like I had the mother of all hangovers. And the grandmother and great-grandmother as well, I thought, trying to take stock.

Now, if you please.” Damn it, Gertie! I thought. But I stomped over anyway. “What?” “Pear?” She offered me one. I looked at it blankly. It was fat and yellow, with a blushing bottom. It was a nice pear. It also made no sense at all. “What?” “Yes, I have an apple,” Gertie said, and jerked me inside. “What are you doing?” I demanded, because this was bizarre, even for her. But she just shushed me and turned me toward the crack in the door. It was still open maybe a quarter of the way, giving us a sliver of a view, although why we needed one, I didn’t know. I needed to get back—“Watch,” Gertie said, and ate pear. I didn’t know what she was talking about, but I watched anyway. Don’t argue with teacher, I thought. Only I didn’t know what I was supposed to be watching. The little girls were the easiest to see, still facing their wall. Or most of them were. One was playing with a doll she’d smuggled out, hidden in a fold of her dress, and another had squatted down to examine a fat green caterpillar. But most of the rest were dutifully reciting something, I didn’t know what, because it was in some other language. “A test,” Gertie said, her voice low. “For what?” “To see if they can age a flower.” I looked back at her. “How? They don’t have access to the Pythian power yet.” “No, they don’t,” she agreed. “The question is, can any of them get its attention?”


Or a fight, I thought, catching sight of the rest of the courtyard. “I told you I needed to get out there!” I said to Gertie, as my acolyte faced off with her own mother. I started forward, but Gertie pulled me back, and she was surprisingly strong for an old woman


Why London had what was essentially a petri dish of plague running through the city was beyond me, but it wasn’t my main concern


He’d come back for me, all right, but to capture not to kill. He’d started grafting souls onto his body, like adding apps onto a phone, and I was supposed to be his next upgrade. There to add to his power, but with none of my own, and no say in what mine was used for. Or any way to stop the process or even to die and make the torture end.


Throughout history, the number three has been fundamental to how we understand the world. The space we inhabit is measured in length, width, and height. Time is measured in past, present, and future.” He paused, and I just sat there, expectant. Until I realized that he was smiling slightly. “What?” I asked. “What are you waiting for?” “For the rest—” I stopped, realizing that I had unconsciously been waiting—for another example. I frowned. “The third instance would be body, mind, and spirit,” he continued, “which is how we understand ourselves. But the fact that you knew—instinctively—that there was a third example indicates how our minds classify things…People have always seen the world in threes. Look at religion: Christianity is fundamentally based on the Trinity—the father, son and holy spirit. The magi gave Christ three gifts, the devil tempted him three times, and he rose from the dead after three days. Even the Christian universe is traditionally seen as having three expressions: the upper world of heaven, the middle world of Earth, and the underworld of hell…The Greeks were also particularly fond of the number: there were three Fates, three Graces, three Gorgons and three Furies. There were three brothers who ruled over three realms: Zeus, Hades and Poseidon. Artemis…is often seen as a triple goddess, a unity of the divine huntress, the Moon goddess and the goddess of the underworld… the rest of the world’s religions follow a similar pattern: the Sumerian Goddess Inanna is remembered for having spent three days and nights in the underworld. There are three main gods in Hinduism: Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the Preserver, and Shiva the Destroyer. Yggdrasil, the sacred tree of life in the Norse religion, has three roots under which are three sacred wells——not to mention how often the number shows up in the world’s imagery. The triskelion, a three-legged spiral, can be found on items dating back more than six thousand years. The Borromean rings are a centuries-old symbol of unity made up of three interlacing circles. The Valknut rune of Odin——consisting of three interlocking triangles, stood for his power. Even the old superstition of not walking underneath a ladder stems from an ancient Egyptian belief that one should not “break a triangle’. The geometry of the number three was seen as being complete and perfect, and therefore not to be disturbed—”


“When shall we three meet again?” he quoted. “In thunder, lightning, or in rain? When the hurly-burly’s done, when the battle’s lost and won.”

Re: Hunt the Moon Chapter 26 & 27

freespeechfandom:

@bestbooklover
Once he is healed enough to actually take control of the sex he is still not willing to let Cassie in at all. Cassie trusts him to not kill her but he doesn’t and he doesn’t want to get any more vulnerable to Cassie and so he limits it to oral sex and her orgasm.

Yeah good point. While Rosier’s prohibition was still in effect, that applies to demon sex, so he was held back more by his own figurative demons I think. It also highlights that Cassie and Pritkin never really make a conscious decision (about being intimate) that they commit to. Without external pressure, neither of them would initiate it.

@windsurfingthroughhell said:

Idk, I just have weird and particular ideas about consent and autonomy. I don’t like people making choices for Cassie, especially as regards her body, but this particular instance of it bothers me less than say, that Mircass scene in TtD, because Pritkin didn’t compromise her ability to consent, Rosier did, and he also apologised for it later

As @bestbooklover mentions, Cassie consented to the process at the start. What I’m curious about is why we’re all focusing on Cassie, when she was a deliberate, initiative-taking active party in the whole ordeal. It was Pritkin who was unconscious, who had his body intimately handled without his awareness or prior consent. He didn’t ask Cassie for sexual help, even though he could have; he would have never touched her in any of the scenes if not for Cassie’s demands/actions to ensure that he does.

And even when he does yield to her, he is clearly very conflicted. He is torn and upset, more so than Cassie ever was about any of her sexual encounters. It is him, not Cassie, who is broken and guilt-ridden and angry and catatonically traumatized in the shower, it’s not Cassie who needs comfort, it’s Pritkin. And Cassie has just forced him to relive his worst nightmare and do things he hates and shuns on his own volition.

I did make a satire post about this around April to illustrate double standards and biases, but since nobody addressed Pritkin’s consent, it proves that this topic might be worth a more serious post. I’m not sure whether it’s actually the books or the fandom that focuses so much on Cassie’s more minor experiences and ignores far more traumatic events for other characters, but consent should be a non-gendered topic, just like physical violence (the trivialization of which Cassie also does in the books).

Yay!  I love it when we all start talking!

@freespeechfandom has some valid points.  As we move through the books, there are some issues regarding Pritkin’s consent.  However, if we waited for Pritkin to agree to be healed through his incubus side by Cassie-he would have died first.  Pritkin definitely has a hero complex and has consistently maintained that Cassie would be better off letting him go.  I agree that consent is a two sided issue and would love to see a well adjusted Pritkin so we could discuss his consent without his suicidal starving of his incubus and his outright denial of his feelings for Cassie.

As for why I keep talking about Cassie-in my opinion the whole series is about Cassie.  So I am cassie-centric in my thoughts and posts.

I think Cassie supports Pritkin in the shower.  I think she tries as hard as she can to be his friend.  Now admittedly Cassie jumped into the deep end of friend and love interactions from the time she first comes to the Senate against her will.  Cassie has never had a friend or a lover or even a real bodyguard other than Billie Joe and a hell raising, card cheating ghost from the 1800′s isnt exactly the best template for friendship.

I will be the first to admit that within the books there are boundary issues all around and there is more than enough for everyone!

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Hunt the Moon Chapter 26 & 27

windsurfingthroughhell:

slightlybitchyclairvoyant:

I’m doing my review for both chapters (a) because I’m lazy and behind on my posts and (b) because I usually read these two chapters together anyway and I have trouble separating them in my mind.

Chapter 26 is is kind of a strange chapter, because you have such a contrast between what is happening and why it is happening.  Cassie and Pritkin have sex, and it’s very intimate, but the reason for it is because it’s the only way to save Pritkin’s life.  The contrast heightens the tension exponentially.  The whole chapter feels on edge – will this actually save Pritkin?  Will he go too far and kill Cassie by accident?  Will Caleb interfere?

And to make an already awful situation even more difficult, Rosier shows up and puts a compulsion on Cassie.  It’s kind of squicky, and he doesn’t help anything by saying “Let Daddy help”, but I appreciate that he wants to save his son.  It gets the job done, and that’s honestly the focus of both Cassie and Rosier at this point.

Okay, I admit – I am shipper trash enough to squee over Cassie and Pritkin having a sexual encounter.   But Chapter 27 moves us from the hot-but-dangerous sex to the emotional fallout.  And, oh man.  There is some serious fallout.

This is the chapter of emotional intimacy, and KC does not pull her punches.  I’m talking, of course, about the one and only shower hug scene.

*deep breath*

I don’t think there has been another scene with the emotional weight of this one.  KC has written dozens of other scenes that make me feel all the feelings, but this is the one that catches my attention before any of the others.  

Cassie and Pritkin are kind of literally and emotionally naked with each other, and KC shows us this with almost no dialogue.  In a few short paragraphs, we clearly see how much they care about each other and depend on each other, and not just in the saving-each-other way.  The depth of their trust in each other is so obvious here.  Both of them tend to repress a lot, but they don’t tend to hide from each other.  It’s a gorgeous scene, and one that I love to reread often.

Also, if you haven’t seen it, @pritkinsprettydick drew the shower hug and it’s perfect :D.

The whole thing about Caleb being there has always been vaguely squicky to me but a lot of Casskin sex scenes do have this discomforting edge to them? This dubcon element that’s not really either character’s fault, but which makes me uneasy when reading them, no matter how sexy the scene might be – it’s so tragic really, that they never get to be with each other just for the sake of being with each other. Well, so far. 

A side note though – Pritkin is aware that Cassie isn’t in a position to give informed consent and he tries really hard to avoid doing anything that might feel like a violation to her later (it doesn’t but I think Cassie is more okay with having her body used by other people than I would be). I’m not sure whether he could safely have waited for the influence to wear off, but the key thing for me is that he apologises later. Cassie may not feel that he did anything wrong, and he was forced into a situation where he had to make that choice, but I think, and I suspect Pritkin also thinks, that it’s still a choice he didn’t have the right to make. Idk, I just have weird and particular ideas about consent and autonomy. I don’t like people making choices for Cassie, especially as regards her body, but this particular instance of it bothers me less than say, that Mircass scene in TtD, because Pritkin didn’t compromise her ability to consent, Rosier did, and he also apologised for it later – he acknowledged that it wasn’t a good situation, even if it wasn’t his fault. (of course Pritkin isn’t always perfect when it comes to consent – his 18th century self had some Issues in that regard that I wanted to talk about in EtN but then I missed those chapters, so I’ll probably bring it up in RtW when it becomes relevant). 

I also appreciate that they get to have some serious fall out from this uncomfortable (albeit sexy) scene? They get to talk about their feelings, reaffirm an emotional connection, and they comfort each other. It’s wonderful. 

Anyway, I 100% agree about The Shower Hug. It’s emotional destruction on an epic scale. And you know what? I never picked up on the symbolism of them being naked (or mostly naked, in Cassie’s case). Pritkin’s at his most vulnerable physically and emotionally. Damn it! 

OK, So standard disclaimers apply…and you all know all of them 🙂 So, yes this is a really uncomfortable scene. You have got Pritkin unconscious and dying, war mages wanting to try magic and Cassie losing her everloving shit. For the first time ever the war mages actually listen to Cassie and let Caleb drive a dying Pritkin and wounded Cassie away. Rossier being there to help out yeah it’s squicky but given the state Pritkin is in and the state Cassie is in I’m glad Rossier stepped in. Yes it adds complications because Cassie’s consent is iffy, but in my opinion Cassie give’s consent when she starts the whole ball of wax arolling, so later consent is not really needed. She wanted to save Pritkin and by g-d she was saving his ass come hell or high water! Caleb’s freak out is annoying as hell but we need Caleb to know about Pritkin later so it works for me.
I’m a little disappointed in Pritkin here. (cue screaming from others on Tumblr) Once he is healed enough to actually take control of the sex he is still not willing to let Cassie in at all. Cassie trusts him to not kill her but he doesn’t and he doesn’t want to get any more vulnerable to Cassie and so he limits it to oral sex and her orgasm.
I love the fact that Karen Chance doesn’t allow Pritkin to withdraw and distance. I love the fact that after the life and death sex or die Cassie is able to be Pritkins’s emotional support in the shower. That’s more important than the sex in some ways. cassie is not letting Pritkin distance himself from her and withdraw or take the fault for this…Cassie is not going to let him make this a reason to withdraw further or add it to his noble reasons to withdraw from the field. I think this whole thing shows Cassie growing into her power. making the war mages do what she wants, making Caleb listen, bossing Rossier and Pritkin around and still declaring her independence from Mircea (don’t forget that all of this started with the rebellion and pizza)…as an aside to that given that Pritkin just told Cassie in their comical conversation over pizza there will be no more sexual healing slip ups leads to the most sexual of their healing slip ups…can anyone say irony?
I am tired and my brain is stalling so this will be my two cents for a while…Please feel free to argue with me, as all of our perspectives make the reread all the more fun

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booksthatbleeds Review : Midnight’s Daughter (Dorina Basarab #1)

booksthatbleed:

Mircea has a daughter! That’s who Cassandra saw in the photos in the “Cassandra Palmer” series.
Dori Basarab is quite the rebel. She drinks beer and smokes weed, in part to quiet down the negative side effects that come with being a Dhamphir. Dhamphir’s are susceptible to blackouts and uncontrollable rage. In the book, her best friend goes missing. Along with a friend of Mircea, she sets out to find that friend and do her father a favor that can cost her, her life.  Another great K.C. novel.

4/5

(review from May 31, 2010)

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Dorina Barasab + Aesthetic

windsurfingthroughhell:

“I’m still a monster.” – Dorina Barasab + Aesthetic 

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Midnight’s Daughter ch3-4

windsurfingthroughhell:

some thoughts:

– I like how LC and Dory just have such instant chemistry. Much and all as I love a slow burn relationship, the immediate connection they have is undeniably fun. The sexy teasing, the fighting, the caring about each other way too much way too quickly, like I said before, it just draws you in right away.

– these chapters introduce us to my favourite location in the entire chanceverse, Uncle Pip’s house. I love enchanted buildings, and the portals, the ley lines, the house with a personality, the incredible hulk cats – they’re so much FUN, so vivid and alive.

– I enjoy Dory’s pragmatism. For all that she’s always ready to fight, she has no problem cutting and running when necessary either.

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Dorina Basarab Appreciation Week – Favorite Quote

slightlybitchyclairvoyant:

Dorina Basarab Appreciation Week – Favorite Quote

I tugged him a little, sending a shiver through that strong frame.

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Favorite Ladies Aesthetic: Dorina Basarab

babyfairybaekhyun:

Favorite Ladies Aesthetic: Dorina Basarab

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Favorite OTP Aesthetic: Dorina Basarab/Louis-Cesare de Bourbon

babyfairybaekhyun:

Favorite OTP Aesthetic: Dorina Basarab/Louis-Cesare de Bourbon

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The Basarab Family

slightlybitchyclairvoyant:

Dorina Basarab Appreciation Week – Free Day

The Basarab Family

Nobody ever said the family didn’t know how to hold a grudge.

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