rymenhild

Hello, everyone. I'm in Philadelphia now, with access to a computer whose monitor blinks horribly and constantly. This will not be a long post.

I do, however, have to point any fanfic readers on my friendslist to the following perfect stories from the Yuletide challenge, both still anonymous:

To Remember for Always, fandom The Dark is Rising, PG, mild Will/Bran. It has alder trees, foxes, Owen Davies, enough really obscure references to make me extremely happy, an excellently portrayed Will and a Bran who... is absolutely and completely and perfectly Bran.

Paolo and Francesca, fandom His Dark Materials

I cannot summarize this story. You simply have to read it.
Lyra thought suddenly of a passage she had read in a book by a long-dead Florentine, a book she was supposed to have read last winter term, but that in truth she had only skimmed between alethiometry lessons. The general story had appealed to her, though, as incorrect as it was about worlds beyond: the poet, lost in a dark wood, became separated from his daemon, Beatrice, and had to search through the kingdoms of the afterlife for her. In the first kingdom, in a hell where Beatrice, pure, could not step, the poet had encountered marvels of torment, layer upon layer of suffering ringing down into an abyss that would have haunted Lyra with its familiarity had she read that far. Not long into the poet's journey, though, he had encountered the sight of two lovers he had known in life, now set adrift forever on a fierce wind, their daemonless bodies forever aloft, forever entwined. Lyra had thought that this was not a terrible fate, to drift like that, forever connected, never apart. The riders of this strange world, their tails trailing against one another in the air, made her think of these lovers, united in their flight.