Current mood:	accomplished
Current music:	May it Be - Enya

A Fearful Hope Was All The World Contained . . .
I have never felt so alive.
Not ever.
I'm so driven.
So filled with love and life and passion. It consumes me every waking minute.
And I love it.
I love it so much.
I finally finished my story for LB's little competition and I'm really, really proud of it. I'm proud of it in a way I haven't been proud of anything in a long, long time.
And I'm drawing . . . And I'm . . . I'm . . .
I'm just infinately, infinately happy.
Niccie and I are finally working things out.
I missed Natasha's wedding, and that still bites, but I'm going to write her a long, long email explaining everything. I hope she'll understand. I know she will. She's wonderful like that.
Anyway, I want to put all the stuff I've been doing in here. So, here's a piece from the story I've just finished. It still needs checking for grammar and spelling, after that I'll send it out to the people that need to see it. But for now . . .

Summer's Gone

By the time the water reached my waist, I couldn't see her any more. I knew then that there was no going back. That this was really how it was going to end and that the whole life I'd lived, the whole world I'd left behind me to come to her side, would shiver with my passing, then trudge on inexorably without me, lumbering slowly down the winding winter path towards the end. I let the water rise around me, let my body drift out across it, my clothes weighing heavy all around me. I swam towards the centre of the lake, the water forming soft, silver ripples all around me, the thick, white mist my death-shroud, the pale winter-dawn light the last thing I'd ever know. There was something beneath me in the water. Something massive and unfathomable. A huge city swept away under the thick, white water. It's highest spires catching at my clothes as I forced my way through it. Unknown and unseen below me as my feet brushed the ragged tops of churches giving me the horrifying feeling of falling, the wild panic of something huge and unseen drifting and unrolling beneath me. Something crumbling and great and furious. The dark heart of the whole world. I let myself drift onto my back, and I stared at the sky. Somewhere, I could hear her voice, the voice of who she had been, soaking into be, consuming me, flickering through the mist and running across the surface of the lake. And I knew what I was doing, not just remembering, but letting the past consume me, not just feeling, but letting those that I had been overwhelm me . . . Not just dying, but ceasing to exist . . .

Claire Clairmont c.1816 Claire Clairmont sat on the end of the jetti in the blazing summer sunshine and stared out across Lake Leman to where Geneva lay low and pale on the other side. The dark, dusky shape of Castle Chillion loomed low over the hazy water and despite the heat that prickled against her pale skin, she shivered. The water was cool about her feet, lapping like the touch of a lover or the affections of one of the massive, pale dogs in the massive, pale house behind her. The hem of her skirt brushed over surface of the water making it shiver with a thousand tiny ripples that shimmered slickly in the sunlight. Behind her, she could here the voices of her lovers, and her sister. The carried eerily across the still and silent air and she shivered involutarily. Somewhere beneath the water, she knew that it was there, this thing that they had awakened with their words and their hopes, with their dreams and their fears. Beneath the lake, their nightmares were waiting, and it wouldn't be long now before they were forced to confront them . . . As a footnote to any smartass that fancies a pop at me, yes, I do know Claire Clairmont didn't have blonde hair. I know and I don't care. I felt right. And that's good enough for me. Suck it up.

O Fortuna Andreas was aware of the pain first as a dull throbbing sensation across his chest and stomach, and only leter as a sharp pain that rain through every nerve in his body. He felt the world spinning around him, felt everthing give way as everything he'd ever known and loved gave way into darkness around him. "Andreas!" he heard his lover cry out, felt his arm around him, warm and safe and reassuring. He could feel the warmth of his blood running in rivulets down the front of his costume, soaking the sequins and feathers from charcoal grey to sickly black. "Carl," he whispered absently, his hands slick and sticky with his own blood. "Carl, I love you." "I love you too, Andrei," his apprentice sobbed in his ear as he reached down and tiled his head up stared in his glassing eyes and kissed him. Kissed in despite the hundreds of people all around them, staring and screaming as the great Andreas Tirmanov had the life wrung from his body in slow, gurgling gasps of blood. Andreas smiled bitterly and ran his bloody fingers through his lovers hair. "Everything will be alright, Carl. I promise. Now everything can finally be alright." And with that, he sighed out his final breath, and let the world claim him, let the darkness have him and hold him, let it overwhelm him, let it become him once and for all. He didn't live to see his apprentice, his lover, his soulmate gasp with the strike of the bullets against his skin. Didn't live to see it as Carl took his dead mentor in his arms and wept and the life faded away from him. Didn't live to see as a grand great era drew finally to a close under the spotlights, in blood and in tears. He didn't see it . . . And perhaps that was just as well . . . The death of my longest running PC ever, Andreas Tirmanov. Ballet dancer, Impresario and all around asshole. Run on White Wolf's New Bremen. Not much to say about it really. The picture is a few months old, but I felt like including it. I miss him, but I refuse to take him somewhere else, best to let it die with the chat I guess. I cried my eyes out when I ran this scene.

That's all for now, really.
Yep, that's really about it.