Embrace 39: Choked By Your Embrace

cw: betrayal, death, violence, arrest  

“Boctive Deign, Xenarus Crow, Neah nim Gorse – they’d fill the air with blood and smoke. Their treachery had already claimed Boleth and Serrivomer, they came for us next.

There are those that rightly call the Lodge a sanctuary, but I will never step foot there again. For me that place is nowt but a tomb, in its halls our revolution is buried.”

Embrace 38: I Know Everything Must Die

c/w body horror, family conflict, betrayal

“Embrace is a hole. A rip in the heart of the world. It’s like the gardens of Crown’s Ait – petal and green cloistered by wall from the world around. Ordered sweeps of fragrant colour and soft, useless lawn. Beautiful, I’m sure, but that beauty belies the effort put into maintaining it”

Embrace 33: Look The Bastards In The Eye

c/w intense peril, kettling, implied death

“From Crown’s Ait, three columns of nim Shif soldiers marched on us, followed by Ministers and the Lanterns and the fucking Swifts. And at their head Valour and Vigor themselves, armour gleaming and spears in hand, come to remove the last bit of grit from the shine of their ambition.

The second siege of Tail’s End were upon us and we welcomed it.”

Embrace 32: Schemes and Senseless Lies

c/w mindreading, manipulation, surveillance, betrayal, break-ups

“But then our triumph broke, torn asunder not by those whose noses we’d bloodied to build it, but those who’d helped us fight for it. Boctive Deign, Xenarus Crow. They’d always held fear in their hearts. That fear would poison our fragile course.”