My favorite coffee mug.
Young Wizards Appreciation Life
If time has a heart, it is because all others stop
“We seem to have pulled it off again,” she said.
“Yeah.”
He said it almost a little too easily. “You notice,” she said, “that our reward for hard jobs seems to be that we get given even harder jobs? “
Kit thought, then nodded. “Problem is,” he said, “that we like the hard jobs.”
—Deep Wizardry by Diane Duane
The opening epigram from Games Wizards Play.
…OK, done trolling the fandom for today. We now return you to our previously scheduled reblogging of Sherlock posts.
:)
(Source: thesearethethingsoflife)
In the desktop/wallpaper department:
A Problem at Gusev Crater: A view from above the crater De Vaucouleurs
as alien wizardry breaks loose in Gusev, from chapter 9 of A Wizard of Mars
And speaking of problems, y’all, I’m going on a super-quick hiatus from updating this blog while I’m moving (as you … probably didn’t already notice, the queue has been empty for a few days). Normal service should resume next week sometime, or whenever the internet gets switched on in my new place.
In Life’s name and for Life’s sake, I assert that I will employ the Art which is its gift in Life’s service alone, rejecting all other usages. I will guard growth and ease pain. I will fight to preserve what grows and lives well in its own way; and I will change no object or creature unless its growth and life, or that of the system of which it is part, are threatened. To these ends, in the practice of my Art, I will put aside fear for courage, and death for life, when it is right to do so, looking always toward the Heart of Time, where all our sundered times are one, and all our myriad worlds lie whole, in That from Which They Proceeded…
- Diane Duane
Here’s Fey enacting the following scene from Diane Duane’s The Book of Night with Moon, while I was trying to annotate a bunch of studies for my doctor — also the name of this tumblr comes from it:
Rhiow had a long drink, then strolled back to jump up on the couch and have a proper wash this time. She had finished with her head and ears when Hhuha got up, went to the dining room, and came back with still more papers. Rhiow looked at them with distaste.
As Hhuha sighed and put the new load down on the couch, Rhiow got up, stretched again, and carefully sat herself down on the papers; then she put her left rear leg up past her left ear and began to wash her back end. It was body language that even humans seemed sometimes to understand.
Rhiow was pretty sure that Hhuha understood it, but right now she just breathed out wearily. She picked Rhiow up off the pile and put her on the couch next to it, saying, “Oh, come on, you, why do you always have to sit on my paperwork?”
“I’m sitting on it because you hate it,” Rhiow said. She sat down on it again, then hunkered down and began kneading her claws into the paperwork, punching holes in the top sheet and wrinkling it and all the others under it.
“Hey, don’t do that, I need those!”
“No, you don’t. They make you crazy. You shouldn’t do this stuff on the weekend: it’s bad enough that they make you do it all day during the week.” Rhiow rolled over off the paper-pile, grabbing some of the papers as she went, and throwing them in the air.
“Oh, kitty, don’t!” Hhuha began picking the papers up. “Not that I wouldn’t like to myself,” she added under her breath.
“See? And why you should pay attention to that stuff when I’m here, I can’t understand,” Rhiow muttered, as Hhuha picked her up and put her in her lap. “See, isn’t that better? You don’t need this junk. You need a cat.”
“You know the name,” her aunt said. “We don’t usually say it; it’s considered impolite. Like yelling at someone, ‘Hey, human!’”
The Sidhe, Nita thought. The people of the hills … the not-so-little people. “You see them often?” Nita said.
“Often enough. ‘Good fences make good neighbors,’ as the poet says. However, every now and then, when you share common ground, you need to have a long chat over the fence.”
It’s a humanoid, Nita thought, as the figure came toward them through the smoke. What’s that hanging off its head? Humanoids don’t usually have tentacles there. And it doesn’t look like it’s armed.
It wasn’t a very big humanoid, either. It was only a little taller than Nita. As it came through the smoke, she could have sworn that it was actually human—the skin color was one of the possible ones, the eyes and other features seemed all to be in the right places, and the clothes—Jeez, will you look at those, Nita thought at the sight of the cropped black T-shirt, the cargo pants in a truly eye-jangling hot-pink-and-green floral print, and the strappy, high pink boots. And the “tentacle” wasn’t a tentacle at all, but, hanging down in front of one shoulder, a single long, thick, dark—
—braid?
Nita’s mouth dropped open as the girl came all the way out of the smoke. She had a light backpack-purse on her back, some kind of holster hanging at one hip, and a wicked grin on her face.
Nita shut her mouth, and opened it again. “Carmela?” she said, in sort of a strangled squeak. “Carmela?”
A small human shape came ducking underneath S’reee’s floating broad, barnacled belly: a little dark-skinned kid, slender and slight in jeans and T-shirt, maybe about eleven years old, with a short afro and quick, bright eyes. “Hey,” he said, “dai stihó, everybody!” And then he saw Kit, and laughed that peculiarly joyous laugh of his, and went to throw his arms around Kit in a big hug.
