Vinguld's blog

Je suis un homme au pied du mur
Comme une erreur de la nature
Sur la terre, sans d'autres raisons
Moi je tourne en rond, je tourne en rond

((Okay, yes, I've been inspired lately. I blame frustrations with Open office. As before, I messed with the setting, but the characters and moment remain as they were during a recent rp. Thoughts on colour scheme chosen and better tactics to have taken are always welcome!

 This is also the first piece for which I've used a photo reference from a google stock image to get the heads right in a loooong time. I'm really happy with how it went!

Sitting target
Sitting waiting
Anticipating
Nothing
Nothing

The fug of the small stable is a pleasant and truly bracing scent. Horses, their shifting hooves a rustling thud. One horse specifically, of course. My Alphonse. He lips at my overcoat, dribbling half masticated alfalfa hay over the lacing. My tailor would have a fit.

The coffee teases my nostrils, whispering of bitter, heady things.

Such things of late.

She rises early from bed
Runs to the mirror
The bruises inflicted in moments of fury
He kneels beside her once more
Whispers a promise:
"Next time I'll break every bone in your body"
And the well-wishers let the devil in...

-David Sylvian

((Since the file was too big to host in the galleries and I'm a noob at figuring out where else to put it... shiny pretty!))

"Shoulder back, Whitedawn. You're leaning off center. STEPHAN! BRING THAT SWORD TIP UP, BOY!"

Lilliana glances at me and her face scrunches slightly in a frown of concentration in the morning light. But she re-adjusts her posture. My grandson at the other pell huffs, squares his jaw and brings his training sword correctly to guard.

((And in the spirit of the CDev post and my week of sitting meeting with students and being intensely bored enough to draw.. here is the final Vinguld piece - at his most wicked. The eye colour is based on the released images of Wrathion in his humanoid guise. ))

The treatise was of passing interest to me after the cases of the day.

The headache pulsed right behind my right eye. The drone of one claimant was like the buzzing of a gnat in the courtroom, and the stuffy air within the opulent marble surrounding served together to act on that headache like a maddened goblin with a barrel of rocket fuel.

You would think that being dead would cure headaches.

Evidently stupidity fights that, for whether or not this headache was due to some physical cause or purely a phantom pain due exclusively to the whining nasal voice of the merchant making his right and proper claim against one of the families designated as a displaced group of Lordaeron origin... well, who can say?

Staring across the table a the inn, they each found what pleased them, and smiles touched eyes or lips. Not kindly smiles - the expressions of the assembled group were a parody of amusement, unless amusement was considered to be expressed in malice's sweet embrace. Only one looked out of place, eyes flicking to his grandfather to see what the old man intended. Taking in the wicked smile and appraising stare at the Sin'dorei informant facing them, flanked by two hired thugs.

A simple meeting, and yet in its souring, true values were made clear for those with eyes to see them. From the undead Kal'dorei's set hard gaze, promising brutal and garish death... to the empty gaze of the warlock bastard son, most chilling of all the pairs of eyes regarding the sweating blood elf spy. The insane and undead Sin'dorei squatting with hair like a moulting bird and a writhing nightcrawler dangling between two blackened fingers was not to be even noticed, lest he shriek with glee at the attention, and the Marquis simply smiled through it all, amused, his knowing smile promising a tainting of soul the nervous informant found increasingly difficult to resist. As for the half grown boy standing among them, his face was not one meant for unholy delights the rest might appreciate. And yet in his oddly golden stare was a coiled beast, awaiting a word to rush baying out.

The cabin smelt of pine shavings, which made more sense than most things seem to. Or more sense than the thing standing abjectly before me did.

"The Most Honourable Ythgar, the Marquis of Vinguld!"

There was a murmur among the seated figures, rustle of heavy velvet robes trimmed with white fur. The House of Nobles, arranged in heavy-breathing rows in a summer heat in which the formal velvet was an unendurable weight and stifling suffocation in this echoing marble chamber.

Her fingers raked through my hair, almost rough in her need.

I fly to her as often as I can. It enrages Svartja, but the feelings of my mount are of very little relative importance to me.

She's exhausted finally.

The sun was only peeping over the horizon when sleep loosed her hold upon my mind, and I came to myself.

Hans plays with Lotte, Lotte plays with Jane
Jane plays with Willi, Willi is happy again
Suki plays with Leo, Sacha plays with Britt
Adolf builds a bonfire, Enrico plays with it
-Whistling tunes we hid in the dunes by the seaside
-Whistling tunes we're kissing baboons in the jungle
It's a knockout
If looks could kill, they probably will
In games without frontiers-war without tears
Games without frontiers-war without tears

-P. Gabriel

The clouds had piled into a bruised mass high over the Throndroril Mountain range, as if increasingly sullen at the continued defiance of the untamed and rugged mountains, which stood in silent majesty for all the battering of the storm upon them. It was one of the strange moments of stillness, where the late afternoon sun shone along the rocks and crags and velvet-dark trees, turning grey into gold, and dark green into emerald. Against that extraordinary beauty, the purple-black looming storm was contrast, comparison - a waiting violence to be unleashed in waves of veiling grey. Nestled by a bend in the river, Marzheim stood in solitary splendour above a huddled village, and bathed in the rich bronzing of the pre-tempest light.

The Marquis regarded his outraged grandson. "Yes, Chaminuka. That was her."

The youth scowled, lips white with fury for a woman he'd been raised by his mother to mistrust. His father's mistress, who had come and gone with a mostly silent guard. The tips of his ears were dark, and he looked up with burning amber eyes.

The carriage juddered its way southward, along the winding road from Light's Hope toward the pass to the mountains of the dwarves. Dangerous travelling even now, but hardly what it had been. Alongside and around it ranged the guardsmen astride their chargers - each one bred of the Vinguld line by their heavy crests and fine pricked ears. They had little fear of the undead horrors lurking in these healing woods; each of the personal guard of the Marquis had willingly chosen to imbibe what their spymaster had offered. Even the fear of madness was nothing to men who had survived the plague and seen what it could do. None of them could become Forsaken now, and each one valued that gift more than the blood heavy in their mouths.

I can learn to compromise
Anything but my desires
I can learn to get along
With all the things I can't explain - Rush

The boys are in the training yard. I in my study, at the great window my father once dominated, watching them practice at weapons. All around me books silently are gathered, lining the shelves, while the mantle clock ticks quietly, measuring off the seconds of lives which are lived as mine can no longer be with four spinning golden balls whirling under the pale face, hands rotating softly. The servants are beyond, but all here is quiet save for the laughter below, muffled by the leaded glass panes, and that tick-tick behind me.

Sumer is icumen in,
Lhude sing cuccu!
Groweþ sed and bloweþ med

The three men did not speak of what had taken place in the high mountain groves as the young summer sun shone down to make their faces glow.

The twisted pines which clung to the granite rocks did not spring to life and dance before the Summer Lord, nor the old lord of Winter, as the three had seen. They were merely trees, adorned with wreaths of spiky green leaves, watching silently as the retinue descended through the pass, brilliant in the warmth. High above, an eagle spiralled on a rising current of hot air. Lining the rocks pass, straight pines defied the memory of winter, reminding watchers of the straight pole wrapped with ribbons which had stood in the square of the larger village beneath the oak grove.