Lego Swimming Pool Layout

Song of Achilles, Madeline Miller

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My demon (2023)

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Tiny Navajo Reads: Troubled Waters, Royal Airs, Jeweled Fire, and Unquiet Land by Sharon Shinn. 

I have always loved Sharon Shinn’s books and I love fantasy series especially. Her Elemental Blessings is definitely one of my favorite series now.

Troubled Waters follows the story of Zoe Ardelay. She loses her father to death and is immediately whisked away to marry the king. But once they reach the city, Zoe escapes and returns to the river where she feels most safe and protected. As life continues for Zoe, she starts to realize little things and connects these to her mother’s side of the family, the Lalinders, who are a prominent family within society. When it gets out the House Prime had chosen Zoe to be her successor, Zoe starts to wend her way back to her mother’s family, to take up the mantle and to figure out how to be a House Prime and what her place in society is, now that her own position has changed.

Royal Airs takes place 5 years after the end of Troubled Waters, following Josetta and Corene. They have become entangled with a minor blood feud from a neighboring kingdom, one that didn’t even register he was in line for the throne till he realized that he was royalty, by someone trying to kill him. But as things continue for Josetta, Corene, and Rafe, our entangled blood feudee, they become even more precarious as more things about Rafe’s life are discovered…things even he didn’t know about himself.

Jeweled Fire takes place immediately after Royal Airs with Corene making her way to Malinqua with Foley, along with Steff, a long-lost grandson of the empress of Malinqua. Once there, things seem harmless enough, but Corene being Corene, she starts to see that should she try to leave the inner court without a guard, things start to go downhill. And there seems to be more to the deaths in the family then are originally thought to be. Will Corene be able to figure things out and be able to get out, or will Foley need to be more than just a guard?

The last book in the series, Unquiet Land, deals with someone who we have seen very little of, Leah Frothen, a spy for Darien in Malinqua and mother to Mally. When Leah returns to Welce, we start to see that her life is not quite where she wants it to be. Mally, her daughter who used to be a princess, is no longer a princess and doesn’t have a mother. Leah learns what she wants in her life and how to start including everyone in her life, from her estranged daughter to the merchant from Malinqua. But when a small country comes to broker a treaty, strange things start to happen and danger starts to rise. 

All in all, I loved this book series. The idea that someone is assigned blessings from birth and then they align themselves with an element is fascinating. The one thing that I would have to say with each book is that each ended a little too easily. The conflict was easily solved in each book, and this made it not seem as important as it was supposed to be. But the overall plot of the books was easily understood, you don’t necessarily need to read the other books to understand what’s going on in the books themselves. Overall, this is a good series and a good introduction to Sharon Shinn.

The Bird. 1879. Book cover.

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Raphaela Fuchs

My dream autumn cabin🤎

Crowley didn’t get the holy water ‘insurance’ from aziraphale yet for their next meeting he still risked life and limb and hell’s wrath just to rescue aziraphale from the paperwork of discorporation in a literal church. Feeling normal about this

If you would like to feel even more normal, consider that Aziraphale even offers him straight-out after the rescue, "There must be something I can do for you," when not five minutes previous Crowley was like "Oh hey look at all that unguarded holy water," so we know Crowley's got holy water on the brain. But Crowley doesn't answer Aziraphale's offer with "Bitch you know perfectly well I want holy water"; he answers, "Forget it." He makes it unmistakably clear that the church rescue was not about hope of quid pro quo: it was just an act of friendship.

So with the font of holy water, I think Crowley is definitely taking note of how available it is for anyone who comes into a church. But I think there's also a layer of coded language going on with pointing it out ala "it would take a *real miracle* for my friend and I to survive." Because this scene has the risk of discorporation for Aziraphale, but the risk of true destruction for Crowley.

I think he is also pointing the font out to Aziraphale at a moment where Aziraphale might be too stressed to register its presence (I mean, a font of holy water is a given in a church, while having a gun pointed at him in a church is presumably out or the ordinary), just before stating a bomb is about to fall on the church.

So he is trusting (1) that Aziraphale picked up on what he was saying and (2) that Aziraphale would make sure he is not splashed by holy water in the blast.

And Crowley trusts this so much that he shields the books with a demonic miracle instead of protecting himself.

So I understand that there are Good Omens show fans who have never read Good Omens the book, and that makes me deeply sad because--

Like, there's so much depth to the story being told about humans and humanity and the choice between good and evil -- and how that's actually a false dichotomy whoooops -- WHILE ALSO not really being about Aziraphale and Crowley at all (who are, imo, basically there as embodiments of "Impressive Failures" for the purposes of Theme and also Plot).

BUT IF you want to know why I've shipped them since the book-- here's the moment it happened for wee teenage me:

Wednesday (before the end of the world)

So it's Warlock's birthday party. And there are all these children and security guards and also an angel doing magic tricks while a demon is disguised as a caterer. This bit is basically the same as the show, so hooray.

But as wee me understood the characters up to this point, they were still basically enemies who had been in the field together for way too long and knew each other's moves well enough for the same tempting/thwarting of one another to become kind of boring and repetitive and generally pointless-- particularly once they realized that they could, for instance, just live their (separate!) lives watching humans being weird (Crowley) and seeking various sensory stuff (Aziraphale) while doing the least work necessary to keep their respective bosses off their backs.

The Arrangement was borne not out of hiding a friendship or anything, but instead the realization that sometimes covering for one another would just... cut down on their total overall workload. They were, at best, employees of two different, competitive companies-- though in same kind of department, doing the same kind of work-- who discovered they liked to have lunch at the same deli and that their jobs were sometimes distressingly more similar than either was comfortable with.

SO ANYWAY. BACK TO THAT WEDNESDAY. They're not covering for one another with this whole Antichrist thing-- they're now actively collaborating, and they've acknowledged (mostly) that it's not to cut down on their individual workloads, but rather to preserve their identical-- but not shared (not yet)-- goals of Getting To Continue The Lives On Earth They've Grown To Enjoy.

But like-- still not friends. Not really.

Until Aziraphale fucks up a bit, Warlock accidentally gets hold of a security guard's weapon and starts waving it around, and:

My teenage brain exploded at this moment.

BECAUSE: there is no reason for Aziraphale to do that.

Work-wise: If he got shot, Crowley would get discorporated, but not die-- and anyway, it would happen in such a way that both of them could explain it away easily to their respective sides (and possibly even be commended for it!).

Collaboration-wise: If Crowley had been watching Aziraphale, and if he'd seen Aziraphale have the chance to change the gun but not do it-- then yeah, probably that would've been annoying enough to have warranted some chilly conversations once he came back topside, and therefore, Aziraphale choosing to save Crowley could've been a reasonable, logical choice to keep their working relationship on an even keel until they'd sorted out this Doomsday thing.

But Crowley was looking the other way.

Work-wise, it doesn't make sense-- and secret-collaboration-wise, it doesn't make sense-- and so it is, overall, really weird that Aziraphale saved him.

But his automatic reaction-- in a blink-- is to stop Crowley from getting shot. And he knows it's weird-- he feels embarrassed that his sudden, unthinking reaction is to save his "enemy".

And the final bit is just a couple paragraphs later:

SO LOOK: He changed only the pistol about to shoot Crowley. His automatic reaction had nothing to do with saving a party full of humans, many of them children-- nothing to do with Heaven or Hell-- nothing to do with preserving the coworker he needs to stop Armageddon--

It was all to do with saving Crowley. Who may be the enemy, but he's Aziraphale's enemy. And another part of his life on Earth that he's doing all of this just to preserve.

Which may also be, for the first time, the moment he lets himself realize how important Crowley in particular is to him.

...and so anyway, that's how I started shipping these two immortal idiots, and one of many reasons why everyone should read the book.