You Have Built Your Dwellings Upon The Bones Of Those You Damned, Your Cities Upon The Mass Graves Of

Messing around with some words, me and one of the Formid characters called Handra Kisund

Finally finished the most widely used Formid writing system. Be been working on the numbers for months now, and the alphabet for the past couple days.

At some point I’d like to make a conlang for it, but if I did that rn I would genuinely explode

(Also sorry the formatting is a tad shite, this has all been transcribed from a very messy stack of paper)

Some say magic died when a hail of shellfire tore an ancient god asunder. Others say it died when the whistle of engines dragged an old world kicking and screaming into a new one. Yet more say it died when the wheels of progress ground the very building blocks of the universe apart into ordered lists and categories. It has been said it died when some long lost soul first harnessed the all consuming light of fire to keep away greater evils that haunted the shadows.

But magic is not dead.

If you venture long enough into the wild lands you can find it, scorched and scarred, battered but not broken. Ancient beings who’s rattling voices sing ballads of fall and fallow; Good People who ask for your name and offer you a deal; silent colossi passing beneath trees that reach to the heavens; beasts that stalked the flickering borders of ancient campfires, and kind travellers who no longer know how long they have wandered these lands.

If you follow the coast you can find it, hear it in faint songs barely distinguishable above the breaking of the waves; see it in the dark shapes that glide over the reefs and shoals; be told of it in epic tales as sailors boast of their victories, and if you stay you might overhear whispers of awe and dread of the rage and might of what dwells within pelagic storms, those spirits who never returned from the sea, and the unfathomable might of leviathans known only to the cachalot and those rare few glimpsing a shadow in the depths.

If you travel through the country you can find it, temples of corrugated metal and bricks; archaic machines held together with welds, duct tape and dimly glowing runes; laughing farmhands heaving clods of soil from the earth to lob at eachother; faerie rocks jeering from the centre of a plowed field; forgotten gods standing motionless amongst the wheat; long abandoned churches that never fall into disrepair; half forgotten sigils carved into fence posts to ward off the Things in the night, and the eyes that yet still burn like red moons between the stalks of corn.

In the cities you can find it, in the prophecies etched and sprayed upon the subway walls by robed sages and masked youths; in the pig iron shrines to gods of the forge tucked in every nook and cranny of a foundry; in the clubs and bars that you can only find when you are shown them or when a full moon looms above; in the figures kneeled in the light of the street lamps and the shapes that lurk beyond their reach; in the graffiti that can race and dance or slowly shift upon the faces of buildings older than countries and refuse to be removed; in the timeworn temples that had the city built around them; in the druids of lawns and weeds; in the mages that carve their baseball bats with symbols of power and fill their trench coat pockets with glador brewed in basements and lifted from stores; in the bards that busk at the city crossroads and send ballads streaking across the globe in a crackle of sparks and binary; and in the warlocks both of new gods with bones of steel, veins of fire and skin a tough as concrete, and of the old gods that seep out like moss from the pavement as they refuse to be forgotten.

So as you go about your busy days, give a swift greeting to the magpies that watch and wait from the roofs and branches; pass a murmur of respect to the faerie oak that stands like an island in a sea of concrete; ignore the shapes glimpsed from the windows at night but draw the blinds and lock the doors. And always remember. That magic is not dead.

on endlings, and despair

Hey, y'all. It's...been a rough couple of weeks. So, I thought--better to light a single candle, right?

If you're familiar with wildlife conservation success stories, then you're likely also familiar with their exact polar opposite. The Northern White Rhino. Conservation's poster child for despair. Our greatest and most high-profile utter failure. We slaughtered them for wealth and status, and applied the brakes too slow. Changed course too late.

We poured everything we had into trying to save them, and we failed.

We lost them. They died. The last surviving male was named Sudan. He died in 2018, elderly and sick. His genetic material is preserved, along with frozen semen from other long-dead males, but only as an exercise in futility. Only two females survive--a mother and daughter, Najin and Fatu.

Both of them are infertile. They still live; but the Northern White Rhinoceros is extinct. Gone forever.

In 2023, an experimental procedure was attempted, a hail-mary desperation play to extract healthy eggs from the surviving females.

It worked.

The extracted eggs were flown to a genetics lab, and artificially fertilized using the sperm of lost Northern males. The frozen semen that we kept, all this time, even after we knew that the only living females were incapable of becoming pregnant.

It worked.

Thirty northern white rhino embryos were created and cryogenically preserved, but with no ability to do anything with them, it was a thin hope at best. In 2024, for the first time, an extremely experimental IVF treatment was attempted on a SOUTHERN white rhino--a related subspecies.

It worked.

The embryo transplanted as part of the experiment had no northern blood--but the pregnancy took. The surgery was safe for the mother. The fetus was healthy. The procedure is viable. Surrogate Southern candidates have already been identified to carry the Northern embryos. Rhinoceros pregnancies are sixteen months long, and the implantation hasn't happened yet. It will take time, before we know. Despair is fast and loud. Hope is slower, softer. Stronger, in the end.

The first round may not take. We'll learn from it. It's what we do. We'll try again. Do better, the next time. Fail again, maybe. Learn more. Try harder.

This will not save the species. Not overnight. The numbers will be very low, with no genetic diversity to speak of. It's a holding action, nothing more.

Nothing less.

One generation won't save a species. But even a single calf will buy us time. Not quite gone, not yet. One more generation. One more endling. One more chance. And if we seize it, we might just get another after that. We're getting damn good at gene editing. At stem-cell research. In the length of a single rhino lifetime, we'll get even better.

For decades, we have been in a holding action with no hope in sight. Researchers, geneticists, environmentalists, wildlife rehabbers. Dedicated and heroic Kenyan rangers have kept the last surviving NWRs under 24/7 armed guard, line-of-sight, eyes-on, never resting, never relaxing their guard. Knowing, all the while, that their vigilance was for nothing. Would save nothing. This is a dead species--an elderly male, two females so closely related that their offspring couldn't interbreed even if they could produce any--and they can't.

Northern white rhino conservation was the most devastatingly hopeless cause in the world.

Two years from now, that dead species may welcome a whole new generation.

It's a holding action, just a holding action, but not "just". There is a monument, at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy, where the last white rhinos have lived and will die. It was created at the point where we knew--not believed, knew--that the species was past all hope. It memorializes, by name there were so few, the last of the northern white rhinos. Most of the markers have brief descriptions--where the endling rhino lived, how it was rescued, how it died.

One marker bears only these words: SUDAN | Last male Northern White Rhino.

If even a single surrogate someday bears a son, we have erased the writing on that plaque forever.

All we can manage is a holding action? Then we hold. We hold hard and fast and long, use our fingernails if we have to. But hold. Even and perhaps especially when we are past all hope.

We never know what miracle we might be buying time for.

Absolutely speedran this one (how the hell are feathers less of a pain in the neck than a front-facing perspective?)

Here’s Alyssia’s twin Elliot, the token cishet of the group.

First regular human character

Diagrams of formid anatomy. First is external anatomy, red and orange is skeleton, blue is respiratory system and green is digestive system.

@dragoninaki @spicy-rat-2 @cloudberry-candy @gingerjaydraws @unexpecteddinolesson @trans-fem-menace @gayoticbeing @lesbianhouseplant @paluboligo @sashathegirliepop , y’all are chill, and cheers for being moots

rb to tell ur mutuals ur fond of them

Dino time

Meep morp (moots and whoever feel free to join)

ALL MY FELLAS!!! 🗣️🗣️🗣️‼️🦅🦅🗣️🗣️🗣️

Make YOU using THIS PICREW and tag 5 people!!!!

Yep, it's a chain!!!

@eyesofrhodochrosite @taaaaaaawnyfrogmouth @mikebeanz @ofthefrogs @kredena-dark